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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Theory and the Problem of Context -- 1. The Modern versus the Postmodern -- 2. Sartre' s Concept of the Intellectual -- 3. Foucault and the Problem of Self-Constitution -- 4. Foucault , the Present I and History -- 5. Foucault and the Tyranny of Greece -- 6. Foucault, Poststructuralism, and the Mode of Information -- 7. The Mode of Information -- 8. The Family and the Mode of Information -- Index

This book is intended as a set of essays examining the value of the recent works of Michel Foucault for social theory and social history. Foucault's works written since 1968 (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and numerous shorter pieces) contain some important advances in social theory and in the writing of social history. My purpose is to separate out those advances from other features of Foucault's thought which I find less beneficial. I am not attempting to give an assessment of Foucault's work as a whole but to focus on and analyze certain features of it.

Hardt and Negri's Empire contains dystopian gestures toward information technology. In this essay I examine these aspects of their important work, without ignoring their more positive understandings of the topic. I hope to sustain three arguments about networked digital information humachines that counter the dystopian thesis: (1) They are an evolving, unavoidable and central aspect of globalization; (2) they contain countless dangers and afford considerable resources for highly dangerous prevailing agglomerations of power; (3) they offer serious points of resistance to those powers and may serve as a base for developing auspicious, decentralized, multicultural global networks. These theses are mutually related, sustainable only together.