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.