My new book Contemporary Capitalism and Mental Health: Rhythms of Everyday Life, with Edinburgh University Press, is out now!
In the book I essentially do two things. The first part is devoted to making methodological and philosophical contributions to rhythmanalysis, an approach which tries to analyse phenomena in terms of their rhythms and processes, and the ways in which phenomena both stabilise and transform. I attempt to offer a new approach, drawing on the work of Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler, Henri Lefebvre, and Gilbert Simondon (among others). I call this particular approach to rhythmanalysis scaping.
The second part of the book takes scaping and applies it to the question of “mental health” in contemporary capitalism. I take a non-individualising approach to mental health, which is to say that I prefer to think of a mental environment or mental ecology. Applying scaping to the mental environment is what I call mindscaping.
In mindscaping the rhythms of everyday life in contemporary capitalism, I take three particular areas of inquiry into account. Namely, how we experience attention and distraction in relationship with contemporary digital technology, how we relate to and experience happiness and depression today, as well as political and affective economies of debt.
The book has a wonderful preface from Gary Genosko. It also has a concluding short dialogue between me and Iain MacKenzie.
In May 2024, at the University of Kent, Canterbury, Peter Marshall organised the 2nd Annual Workshops in Political Theory. At the end of this day there was a double-book launch, in which I tried to contextualise this new book alongside my first, Rhythm: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2023), as part of an ongoing set of contributions to the field of rhythmanalysis. Watch below!
For more information on the books, see the “Rhythm” tab above.