Intensive Culture: Social Theory, Religion and Contemporary Capitalism Scott Lash Contemporary culture, today's capitalism - our global information society - is ever expanding, is ever more extensive. And yet we seem to be experiencing a parallel phenomenon which can only be characterised as intensive. This thought provoking, innovative book is dedicated to the study of such intensive culture. Whilst extensive culture is a culture of the same: a culture of fixed equivalence; intensive culture is a culture of difference, of in-equivalence - the singular. Intensities generate what we encounter. They are virtuals or possibilities, always in process and always in movement. We thus live in a culture that is both extensive and intensive. Indeed the more globally stretched and extensive social relations become the more they simultaneously seem to take on this intensity. Ours is a relational world where each intensity - whether human, technological or biological - provides a distinct, specific window onto the whole. Lash carefully defines and distinguishes the intensive from the extensive tracking this change through key areas of social life including • Society • Religion • Philosophy • Language • Politics • Communication In so doing he redefines the work of Leibniz, Benjamin, Simmel, and Durkheim and Marx and introduces the reader into the ontological structures of our contemporary social relations. […] Scott Lash is Professor and Director at the Centre for Cultural Studies Goldsmith's, University of London.