book release + video - contemporary capitalism & mental health: rhythms of everyday life

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.

book announcement - rhythm: new trajectories in law

My first monograph Rhythm: New Trajectories in Law is due to be published by Routledge on October 3rd 2022 as part of the “New Trajectories in Law” book series. It is intended to be an entry-point for the budding rhythmanalyst, highlighting its transdisciplinarity, & an attempt to think law rhythmanalytically.

Here is a short description of the book:

This book analyses the conceptual and concrete relationships between rhythm and law.

Rhythm is the unfolding of ordered and regulated movement. Law operates through the ordering and regulation of movement. Adopting a ‘rhythmanalytical’ perspective – which treats natural and social phenomena in terms of their rhythms, repetitions, motions, and movements – this book offers an account of how legal institutions and practices can be theorised and explained in terms of rhythm. It demonstrates how the category of rhythm has jurisprudential significance, from how Plato envisaged the functioning of the city-state, to the operation of the common law, as well as in our relationship to contemporary digital technology. In music, rhythm ‘orders’ the movement of sound, binding together the motions and vibrations of sound in such a way that is neither pure noise nor pure mechanics. In this way, rhythm can be deployed as a concept in the analysis of one of the central purposes of legal institutions and practices: to order the movements of bodies, whether the bodies of citizens in everyday life or of prisoners in rituals of punishment. This book engages with the mutual intersections and points of illumination between rhythm and law, such as ritual, measure, order, and change.

This book is an experimental rhythmanalysis of law, offering conceptual and methodological starting points, as well as proposing directions that could be deployed in future research. It is aimed primarily at legal scholars intrigued by rhythmanalysis and rhythmanalysts more generally. This book will also be of interest to those in the fields of philosophy, political and legal theory, sociology, and other social sciences.

You can now pre-order the book, and if you do so direct via the publisher (link below), using the code ASM08, you can get 20% off.

Find out more details on the book, or to pre-order it, see here.

publications (article & chapter) - tragic rhythms (nietzsche, agamben) / chapter without organisation

I have just had an article published in La Deleuziana as part of a Special Issue entitled Rhythm, Chaos, and the Nonpulsed Man, coedited by Obsolete Capitalism and Stefano Oliva. The article is entitled “Tragic Rhythms: Nietzsche and Agamben on Rhythm and Art”.

Here is the abstract:

This paper explores the question of the relationship between art, rhythm, and life through a mobilisation of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion, first, of Nietzsche and the active nihilist’s relation- ship to art, and second, on his diagnosis of rhythm as pertaining to the “original structure” of the work of art in The Man Without Content. Agamben’s notion of the “rhythmic” and “poietic” encoun- ter is one which situates the experience of rhythm as the experience of the originary dimension of temporality and of the human’s relationship to the world. Turning to Nietzsche, this paper seeks to complicate Agamben’s picture by discussing Nietzsche’s under-discussed explorations of rhythm and its connection to art (focusing primarily on his early works). Three distinct rhythms will be identified: Apollonian, Dionysian, and the tragic or joyful rhythms of the Apollo-Dionysus relation (discussed through Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus and of Deleuze’s reading of Nie- tzsche’s Heraclitus). Reading Agamben through Nietzsche, it will be discussed how Agamben’s no- tion of rhythm (1) blends Apollonian and Dionysian elements; (2) does not through this blending however offer a tragic or joyful notion of rhythm, which, for Nietzsche, follows from their double affirmative rhythmisation. Instead of a rhythmic-poietic encounter opening an originary and au- thentic experience of temporality and dwelling, Nietzsche offers an account of tragic and joyful rhythms which continually create new worlds.

The full reference for the paper is as-follows:

Heaney, Conor, ‘Tragic Rhythms: Nietzsche and Agamben on Rhythm and Art’, La Deleuziana, 10, 2020, 61-78

You can download the paper here, or directly from the journal itself (where you can also check out other ones in the Special Issue) here. (Note - to download the papers from the journal, click the page numbers beside the article titles.)

In addition, a collaborative chapter for which I was a co-author on with Iain MacKenzie, Hollie Mackenzie, and Phil Gaydon, entitled “How Do You Make Yourself a Chapter Without Organisation?” has just been published as part of the edited collection Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by shine choi, Anna Selmeczi, and Erzsébet Strausz. More information about the book can be found here.

The full reference for this chapter is as-follows:

Gaydon, Phil, Heaney, Conor, Mackenzie, Hollie, and MacKenzie, Iain, 'How Do You Make Yourself a Chapter Without Organisation?', in Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi, and Erzsébet Strausz (Oxon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 239-256

publication (article): rhythmic nootechnics

I have just had an article published (Online First) in Educational Philosophy and Theory, which will form part of a soon to be published Special Issue on ‘Bernard Stiegler as Philosopher of Education’. The paper is entitled ‘Rhythmic Nootechnics: Stiegler, Whitehead, and Noetic Life’.

Abstract:
In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler develops an account of the pedagogical responsibilities which follow from rhythmic intergenerational flows, involving the creation of milieus which care for and pay attention to the future, toward the creation of nootechnical milieus. Such milieus are defined by their objects of attention: political life, spiritual life, and political life; taken together: noetic life. Such is the claim Alfred North Whitehead makes when arguing that the sole object of education is life and the creation of an art of life which is itself a rhythmic adventure.

The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, to clarify the importance of Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle’s notion of the noetic soul in our thinking about the role, purpose, and function of educational institutions in relation to intellective, spiritual, and political life. In this paper, I will fuse this discussion with a Whiteheadian approach to rhythm, developing what I call a ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ in the service of ‘nootechnical evolution’ as, I argue, Whitehead’s approach to rhythm allows to clarify and enrich Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle. Second, and as indicated, to explore the relationship between Whitehead and Stiegler, insofar as the former has become an increasing reference point for the latter, but this relationship remains unexplored in the literature. Third, to apply this concept of ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ to think about what transformations at the level of pedagogy and politics are necessary to reinvent the university from this Stieglerian and Whiteheadian perspective.

The full reference is as-follows (updated following the release of the full Special Issue):

Heaney, Conor, 'Rhythmic Nootechnics: Stiegler, Whitehead, and Noetic Life’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52, 4 (2020), 397-408

You can download the paper from the journal's website (as well as access the other articles in this issue) here. Or by clicking here, where the first 50 downloads are free. If anyone wishes to see the paper and has issues with these links, please get in touch.