Research Catalog

The contemplation of the world : figures of community style

Title: The contemplation of the world : figures of community style / Michel Maffesoli ; translated by Susan Emanuel.
Author: Maffesoli, Michel.
Publication: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [1996], ©1996.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	BH39 .M3213 1996	Off-site

Description

xvi, 151 pages; 24 cm

Summary

In The Contemplation of the World, eminent French theorist Michel Maffesoli pursues and extends his project of decoding contemporary societies. Here, Maffesoli questions afresh the mundane stuff of contemporary sociality, seeking to discern its primary mode of expression - its forms, style, rules, and principles - its aesthetics.
The advent of postmodernity marks the beginning of "the society of the image." It is as if the fragmentation of the social has gradually and necessarily corresponded to massive crumbling of our representations of the real and resulted in their infinite refraction. Henceforward we are living in the heart of an ever-increasing entanglement of objects, signs, and images.
Located somewhere between dream and reality, we are the unfettered prisoners of a symbolic universe of growing opacity and mysterious meanings.
In The Contemplation of the World, Maffesoli seeks to explore those unobtrusive links that regulate and organize the ensemble of our representations - the raw material refashioned in our imaginary and our fantasies - exploring what it is that is recognizably "postmodern" about them.
Maffesoli proposes a map of "the vast domain of the collective imaginary," allowing us to better understand where today's culture stands and helping us to perceive within its clamorous confines the outlines, still frail, of a "community ideal."

Uniform Title

Contemplation du monde. English

Alternative Title

Contemplation du monde.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Contents

I. Treatise on Style -- II. The Imaginal World -- III. The Communitarian Ideal.

ISBN

LCCN

95041472

OCLC

ocm33162226

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries