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A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images

Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast range of mid-twentieth-century theoretical resources—from experimental psychology, cybernetics, and ethology to the phenomenological reflections of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—Imagination and Invention provides a comprehensive account of the mental image and adds a vital new dimension to the theory of psychical individuation in Simondon’s earlier, highly influential work.

Simondon traces the development of the mental image through four phases: first a bundle of motor anticipations, the image becomes a cognitive system that mediates the organism’s relation to its milieu, then a symbolic and abstract integration of motor and affective experience to, finally, invention, a solution to a problem of life that requires the externalization of the mental image and the creation of a technical object. An image cannot be understood from the perspective of one phase alone, he argues, but only within the trajectory of its progressive metamorphosis.

A fascinating tour of all of the ways we have thought about communication, now and in the past. Today, it is the Internet. One hundred years ago, it was the telegraph. And before that? Networks of road, rail, and water. It's all "communication." The Invention of Communication invites us to explore all the multifarious meanings that have made up our age-old attempts to connect. The book offers a heady tour of the multiple usages and systems that each historic period puts forth in the name of communication. A veritable history of the idea of the social, Armand Mattelart's genealogy maps the many means by which humans interact-from carefully cataloguing Others, to asserting power over them, to working together with them to build new forms of community. Studying a vast array of modern forms of social intercourse and control, The Invention of Communication takes up topics such as the elaboration of warfare as a logistic, the rise of professional societies of propaganda and national propagation, the history of universal expositions and world fairs, the birth of documentary film out of physiological investigations in the nineteenth century, the development of the popular press and the popular novel, and the origins of American social science. This history runs from the circuits of exchange to the circulation of goods, people, and messages, from the construction of railroads to the emergence of long-distance communication. Throughout, Mattelart brings a clarifying perspective to the ideologies and theories that accompany these transformations. He shows how Enlightenment and nineteenth­century utopian thinking about communication led to the strategic and geopolitical thinking of the twentieth century, and finally to mass and individual psychosociology, mass culture, and marketing. The Invention of Communication is a remarkable interpretation of the dizzying complex of systems supporting the social world of modernity. "Mattelart has, in a way, produced something of an academic cocktail. A blend of thoughts of some of the greatest scholars over the last two to three hundred years mixed to produce a series of claims about the importance of communication issues at central moments in the emergence of our modern times." Semiotica Armand Mattelart is professor of information and communication sciences at the Université de Haute­Bretagne, France. He is the author of Mapping World Communication (Minnesota, 1994) and coauthor (with Michèle Mattelart) of Rethinking Media Theory (Minnesota, 1992). Susan Emanuel lives in Massachusetts and France. Among her translations are Mapping World Communication (Minnesota, 1994) by Armand Mattelart as well as The Contemplation of the World by Michel Maffesoli (Minnesota, 1996).

Dolores del Río first came to Hollywood from Mexico in 1925 and within a year had become an international star for her role in Raoul Walsh's 1926 film What Price Glory. She would go on to work with Hollywood’s top directors, including John Ford and King Vidor, and star opposite such leading men as Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles (with whom she had a scandalous affair), and Elvis Presley. Voted by Photoplay magazine in 1933 as having "the most perfect feminine figure in Hollywood," del Río was billed as one of cinema’s most "exotic" and "aristocratic" beauties. This image-carefully crafted by her producers, her studio publicists, and by del Río herself-reveals many fascinating insights into Hollywood’s evolving attitudes toward race and femininity.

In The Invention of Dolores del Río, Joanne Hershfield explores the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and stardom in American popular culture through the lens of del Río’s successful and unusually lengthy career, which lasted until the 1960s. Hershfield offers close readings of del Río’s films—discussing in detail the roles she played, her costumes and makeup, the music and mise-en-scène, advertising, publicity, and reviews—that provide a nuanced understanding of how Hollywood constructed del Río as an exotic commodity and blunted the inherent challenge her sexual and ethnic image posed to both prevailing standards of white femininity and widespread injunctions against miscegenation. Throughout this astute and imaginative case study, Hershfield looks at del Río’s Hollywood films in relation to shifting ideologies about nationality, gender, and race between the 1920s and 1960s, offering an important contribution to the debate surrounding Hollywood’s ability to both reflect the nation’s racial and sexual obsessions and influence its perceptions about ethnic and gender identity.