Critical Edge Research Articles

Sociologia cognitia: A note on recent concerns in sociology in South Africa

There are, of recent, expressed concerns, albeit small in number, about the failure of sociology to ‘engage with the wider society’. Implicit and explicit in the concerns is the suggestion that sociology is no longer as exciting as it was during the period of the struggle against apartheid. The period of apartheid was taken as one of the ‘rise’ of sociology because of sociology's engagement with the political issues of the day. This paper argues that the assumed ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ of the discipline in South Africa can better be characterised as the visibility of sociology in the ‘public’. It is argued that the decades 30s, 40s and 50s were decades of success for sociology just like the 60s, 70s and early 80s that some point to as the period of ‘rise’ of the discipline. The earlier decades saw the ascendancy of positivism, and sociology of that period contributed in great measure to the construction of apartheid, which was subsequently dismantled with contributions from sociology, specifically, the Marxist sociology. If there is therefore a ‘fall’ of sociology, it is the ‘fall’ of a theoretical perspective in sociology. However, given the call for a ‘critical edge’ in the discipline, it is suggested that such an edge would need to start from the classroom.

On [formula omitted]-critical edges in König–Egerváry graphs

The stability number of a graph G, denoted by α ( G ) , is the cardinality of a stable set of maximum size in G. If α ( G - e ) > α ( G ) , then e is an α - critical edge, and if μ ( G - e ) < μ ( G ) , then e is a μ - critical edge, where μ ( G ) is the cardinality of a maximum matching in G. G is a König–Egerváry graph if its order equals α ( G ) + μ ( G ) . Beineke, Harary and Plummer have shown that the set of α -critical edges of a bipartite graph forms a matching. In this paper we generalize this statement to König–Egerváry graphs. We also prove that in a König–Egerváry graph α -critical edges are also μ -critical, and that they coincide in bipartite graphs. For König–Egerváry graphs, we characterize μ -critical edges that are also α -critical. Eventually, we deduce that α ( T ) = ξ ( T ) + η ( T ) holds for any tree T, and describe the König–Egerváry graphs enjoying this property, where ξ ( G ) is the number of α -critical vertices and η ( G ) is the number of α -critical edges.

Rearticulating the Case for Micro Language Planning in a Language Ecology Context

Language planning is normally thought of in terms of large-scale, usually national planning, often undertaken by governments and meant to influence, if not change, ways of speaking or literacy practices within a society. It normally encompasses four aspects: status planning (about society), corpus planning (about language), language-in-education (or acquisition) planning (about learning), and (most recently) prestige planning (about image). When thinking about these aspects, both policy (i.e. form) and planning (i.e. function) components need to be considered as well as whether such policy and planning will be overt or covert in terms of the way it is put into action. Language policy and planning on this scale has dominated current work in the field. However, over the past decade language planning has taken on a more critical edge and its ecological context has been given greater emphasis, leading to an increasing acceptance that language planning can (and does) occur at different levels, i.e. the macro, meso and micro. This shift in focus has also led to a rethinking of agency – who has the power to influence change in these micro language policy and planning situations. Given this break with the dominant macro history, the question may be asked, is this developing notion of micro language planning and local agency actually language planning? If so, what are its parameters? Micro language planning studies are examined to illustrate trends in the literature.

Political Economy and Cultural Studies Column: Political Economy, Cultural Studies and Postmodernism

Although some innovators of postmodernist/poststructuralist discourses have envisaged their project as constituting a radical break with the past, and contemporary critical postmodernists undoubtedly intend their work to challenge existing power structures, postmodernist thought can also be easily turned into a paradigm supportive of established power, war, gross inequality and other forms of injustice. Indeed, this evident trend becomes all the more alarming if one accepts political philosopher C. B. Macpherson’s assertion that mainstream discourses in the humanities normally support or “justify” the prevailing political-economic order (Macpherson 1978: 1112). Through his concept of monopolies of knowledge, Harold Innis can also be interpreted as holding to that position (Babe 2000). If Macpherson and Innis are correct, we can expect postmodernist thought to become further domesticated, to further lose its critical edge, as it increasingly permeates many disciplines. Such, at least, is the thesis of this paper.

AFTER LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS

▪ Abstract Legal consciousness as a theoretical concept and topic of empirical research developed to address issues of legal hegemony, particularly how the law sustains its institutional power despite a persistent gap between the law on the books and the law in action. Why do people acquiesce to a legal system that, despite its promises of equal treatment, systematically reproduces inequality? Recent studies have both broadened and narrowed the concept's reach, while sacrificing much of the concept's critical edge and theoretical utility. Rather than explaining how the different experiences of law become synthesized into a set of circulating schemas and habits, the literature tracks what particular individuals think and do. Because the relationships among consciousness and processes of ideology and hegemony often go unexplained, legal consciousness as an analytic concept is domesticated within what appear to be policy projects: making specific laws work better for particular groups or interests.

Theorising Partnerships: Governance, Communicative Action and Sport Policy

Under New Labour, partnerships have emerged to become a central mechanism of service delivery in social policy. In response to this development, a number of papers and texts have appeared that have questioned the claims made for the benefits of partnerships by politicians and policy makers. In particular, the gap between the rhetoric of inclusiveness and the practice of exclusion in partnership working has been highlighted. However, as pertinent as these insights are, it is argued here that extant research into partnerships in social policy remains theoretically undeveloped, characterised by one-sided approaches that either lack critical edge or are dismissive of the potential of partnership working. What is required is an approach that addresses the deeper contradictions of partnerships in social policy and the structuring relations of power underpinning the conceptions of partnerships. Drawing on key concepts in social and political theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework that focuses on the dynamic and contextual nature of partnership. In short, a differentiated theory of partnership is offered as a means of facilitating a more realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities of partnership working. A case study on partnerships in sport policy is used to illustrate the analysis.

Toward a Christological Missiology Today with the Guide-Who-Stands-Aside

In the multifaith, multicultural context of India today, we need a christological missiology that avoids past triumphalism by orienting itself to an understanding of Christ as the guide-who-stands-aside. This missiology would witness in a non-vicious, non-violent, and non-vociferous way and, without loosing its critical edge, would acknowledge and respect, in a spirit of honest openness, the reality of other living religions with their own “missions.”

Application of a hybrid case-based reasoning approach in electroplating industry

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), a well known Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique, has already proven its effectiveness in numerous industries. In this research, we try to adopt CBR technique in electroplating industry where the final products are electroplated accessory of watches. In order to ensure sufficient profit margin for electroplating manufacturer, it is important to grasp the coating weight of electroplating component accurately so that salespersons can make sure their quotation prices cover the precious metal cost. Apart from quotation accuracy, responsiveness is also a critical competitive edge in electroplating industry. In this connection, developing a quick response decision-making system with considerably reliable price is what electroplating industry needs. To cope with this problem, a hybrid CBR system combined with Rule-based Reasoning (RBR) and Fuzzy Logic (FL) concepts is established. Such system is capable to convert knowledge from experienced staff; simulate the ‘mind-set’ of decision maker in solving problem through acquisition of specific knowledge and experience; and build up self-learning characteristics. Moreover, this research interprets cases as some objective selection rules, putting CBR in a position much closer to RBR. This innovative concept differentiates from previous CBR researcher work, and will be explained through a practical example. Further, this research also suggested that it is very difficult and not practical to develop a pure CBR system. Applying some subjective guiding rules in CBR can significantly improve the performance of system in the early learning stage.

Discourse Analysis in Tourism Research A Critical Perspective

Increasing numbers of researchers in the field of tourism studies are using discourse analysis as a means of critical investigation when faced with qualitative or textual forms of data, such as written documents, or visual materials such as photographs and brochures. Such data is often representative of how a group of people have made sense of and reflected on their own world and that of others. However, there are many different types of discourse analysis and many different ways in which discourse analysis has been deployed. This paper reviews the attempts of tourism scholars so far and argues that many researchers have utilized discourse analysis in an eclectic fashion. The paper thus differentiates between content analysis, simple textual analysis, semiotic analysis and post-structuralist forms of discourse analysis in order to provide a framework for other tourism researchers to use. In particular, it is argued that discourse analysis should proceed by recognizing that all texts are produced intertextually in relation to other texts, which are in turn embedded within power relations that give degrees of authority. Discourse analysis should thus treat texts as mediated cultural products which are part of wider systems of knowledge. It is argued that discourse analysis is not just interested in what is within the text itself but also in what has been left out and the ‘secret’ meanings that are not obvious. It is also argued that it is important to note the interruptions and disruptions that occur within the flow of qualitative data. Utilizing discourse analysis should mean the development of a more nuanced reading of the data and thus add a more critical edge to much tourism research.

Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature Linda Hutcheon Ingeborg Hoesterey. Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xiii + 138 pp. $39.95/$18.95. Ingeborg Hoesterey brings her double disciplinary training in literary narratology and art history to bear on the postmodern topic of pastiche—a much maligned form which she aims to salvage from the postmodern scrap heap to which Jamesonian disdain had consigned it. She carefully contextualizes the negative associations that have accrued over the centuries, from the classical "cento" and the sixteenth-century Italian art "pasticcio" onward. The fact that this latter "stylish medley," with its creative but fake identity, was intended for the "mass market" of the time provides Hoesterey with a happy link to contemporary advertising and its pastiche techniques later in the volume. On her way from the early forms to the later, she canvases [End Page 323] a wide range of (mostly contemporary) case studies from the visual, literary and cinematic arts, with brief asides on music and popular culture. What guides her survey is a strong conviction that pastiche plays a crucial role in the postmodern aesthetic of difference and hybridity, especially in its function as a tool of ideological critique that fosters critical thinking. Often considered a low-status form, pastiche has always been defined as an amalgamating mode, an eclectic blending. The inevitable associations with appropriation, copying, and assimilating mean that this form is more likely to be considered acceptable in an age in which imitation signals respect—and cultural capital—and not a lack of originality and authenticity (in other words, before the romantic valorization of the latter). Postmodern challenges to romantic values have made room for pastiche to flourish, of course, as an inherently dialogic and intertextual form. While Arthur Danto's theorizing insights are said to inform the whole study, and Niklas Luhmann's concept of autopoiesis is claimed as a guiding structure for the final chapter, most of the book consists of historical contextualizing and analyses of specific texts, rather than any substantial or new theorizing of pastiche as an aesthetic form. The examples—both extensive and brief—are well chosen, if sometimes obvious. And the format of each chapter is a brief summary introduction of the use of pastiche in literature, film, or visual art (including architecture and design as well) and then a move immediately to specific analyses. The generalizability of the (often only implicit) theoretical insights is obscured somewhat in the process. While insisting in her introductory glossary of "the semantic environment of pastiche"—alphabetically, from adaptation through to travesty—that pastiche is not parody, there is considerable slippage throughout the actual analyses between the two concepts. While it is true that both needed rescuing from Fredric Jameson's infamous dismissal of them in his negative assessment of postmodernism, there are indeed serious differences between the two forms of intertextuality, both historically and currently, that could have been addressed more clearly. One of the problems is that parody too reveals the major characteristic by which she defines pastiche: a powerful personal style that holds everything disparate together—"à un seul goût." The central role of irony in the critical edge of pastiche could also have been explored in more usefully generalizable terms, though the topic does come up in individual textual analyses. The book's strengths lie in the high quality of those analyses of specific works and in the range of works tackled. While the "short takes" are often too short to be more than a catalogue listing, the longer descriptions and [End Page 324] analyses are often insightful and illuminating. The highlight may be the discussion of the three pastiches of film noir (Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, and Lars von Trier's Zentropa) contrasted with that of two more sensuous and extravagant cinematic pastiches of the realm of the visual arts (Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Derek Jarman's Caravaggio). Less successful is the chapter on literary pastiche, because of the decision to eschew theorizing and instead to attempt a kind of "typological listing and description of selected...

Flux structures in mesoscopic YBa2Cu3O7−δ discs

Scanning Hall probe microscopy has been used to study flux structures and dynamics in5 µm × 5 µm YBCO thin film squares, which are mesoscopic with respect to the magnetic penetration depth,λ(T), at temperaturesclose to Tc. A number of unusual vortex phenomena are observed in these microstructures which differqualitatively from the expected behaviour of more macroscopic pieces of film. Infield-cooled (FC) experiments to K a full Meissner state is generated for cooling fields less than Oe, reflecting the relatively small demagnetization factors in our samples. Cooling inhigher fields, however, results in only a very weak diamagnetic response at lowtemperatures whose magnitude is almost independent of the cooling field. In contrast weobserve considerable trapped flux upon field-removal whose magnitude grows monotonicallywith cooling field. Remarkably, all FC flux distributions exhibit almost perfect rotationalsymmetry, and can be nearly completely cancelled in a reversible fashion by tuningthe field applied to the initially FC state. Our field-cooled and zero-field-cooledresults have been analysed in terms of a Bean-like critical state model containingconstant edge and bulk current densities, and most of the observed phenomenacan be explained by considering the relative weight of these two components.Not all flux profiles can be described by our simple model, however, and undercertain circumstances symmetry-breaking ‘dipole’-like flux structures can formin several adjacent YBCO squares. We speculate that these are related to theunidirectional Ar ion milling process which was used to pattern the squares and couldhave broken the expected four-fold symmetry. We note that our results couldhave important implications for the miniaturization of thin film HTS devices.

Presidential Candidates Speak Out on Science Policies

Presidential Candidates Speak Out on Science Policies

Buckling of fiber-reinforced viscoelastic composite plates using various plate theories

This paper studies the quasi-static stability analysis of fiber-reinforced viscoelastic composite plates subjected to in-plane edge load systems. The study is based on a unified shear-deformable plate theory. This theory enables the trial and testing of different through-thickness transverse shear-strain distributions and, among them, strain distributions that do not involve the undesirable implications of the transverse shear correction factors. Using the method of effective moduli solves the equations governing the stability of simply supported fiber-reinforced viscoelastic composite plates. The solution concerns the determination of the critical in-plane edge loads associated with the asymptotic instability of plates. In a study of this problem the general quasi-static stability solutions are compared with those based on the classical, first-order and sinusoidal transverse shear-deformation theories. Numerical applications using higher-order shear-deformation theory are presented and comparisons with the results of other theories are formulated.

Power and Politics in Feminism's History--and Future

exception. My comments focus on two themes raised in this paper. The first is the question of power in Scott's discussion of feminism's history's future. The second is the issue of politics, or more specifically, visionary progres- sive politics. I ask if, in the pursuit of what has not yet been thought, there is a role for imagining the kind of historical practices, theories, and pedagogies, which could lead to more complex imaginings of egalitarian futures. On the issue of power: Scott argues that the last several decades have seen the increasing success of the feminist project in history. All of the trap- pings of success are quite visible: More women (although not all women) have been written into the historical record and as a result that record has been profoundly changed and enriched. Women historians hold impor- tant positions in departments around the country and in the professional organizations. Many of the leading scholars have successfully produced several generations of equally outstanding students. There are several jour- nals devoted to women's history and the leading journals in the profession now give prominent attention to women's history and the role of gender in historical studies. Yet, no one would doubt that this success is uneven and woefully incomplete. Indeed, it is the unevenness of this success that, in part, makes it so curious that the future of feminism's history is being ques- tioned at this particular time and in this place. Scott provides several explanations—aging feminist scholar-activists nostalgic for their lost youth; the institutionalization of women's history; the inevitable let down as the outsiders become well represented among the insiders; the fragmented, dispersed women's movement that no longer provides a visibly coherent ally and audience for feminist history; the dull- ing of a critical edge that came with being on the margins; structural change in the university; and lastly, the domestication of desire that comes with the need to shore up and protect that which has been won. I agree with Scott that these are surely key reasons why questions about the future have arisen. Yet I detect other anxieties in other voices raising this question in the roundtable in the Journal of Women's History to which

Robert Austerlitz

Robert Austerlitz Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, und grün des Lebens goldner Baum. Robert Austerlitz died 9 September 1994. What follows is intended as a concise celebration of his memory; it focuses on his development and activity as a linguist.1 Robert Paul Austerlitz was born 13 December 1923 in Bucharest, of an Austrian father who had moved to Romania from Brünn, Moravia, and an American mother who had Bohemian roots. But he grew up at the intersection of Transylvania and Muntenia, in Braşov (= Kronstadt = Brassó), a city whose names—which he later etymologized (1975b)—reflected its linguistic complexity. The three main layers of its population consisted of Germans (Saxons had settled there in the thirteenth century, as well as Austrians from the seventeenth, and others in the twentieth), Hungarians, and Romanians, and Austerlitz learned German, Hungarian, and Romanian in that order. More significant for his development than the multilingual situation was Braşov’s cultural intricacy: the Hungarian population alone, for example, was fragmented into Roman Catholic, Reformed (Calvinist), Lutheran (Evangelical), and Unitarian confessions. This environment proved an ideal laboratory for observation and taxonomizing, an environment in which his father was able to pass on to him an early appreciation—again, not so much linguistic but general-anthropologic and kinesic—for human diversity. Austerlitz attended German elementary and Romanian (Orthodox) secondary school (Liceul Andrei Şaguna, where his French and Latin teachers were particularly influential). During his four years at the liceu, Austerlitz’s perspective was that of an outsider—he was just beginning to learn Romanian—and this perspective gave him a critical edge, allowing him to admix insight with sympathy. When Austerlitz arrived in New York in 1938 just before his fifteenth birthday, he was thus already equipped with a fusion of what used to be called Western and Eastern European, Old World culture. Within a week of his arrival he was attending Stuyvesant High School, and over the next eight years he rapidly internalized New World, chiefly North American, high and popular culture (making deliveries for a Fifth Avenue chemist, service in the US Army, playing organ in Texas and jazz piano in New Orleans). His undergraduate work, begun at Washington Square College (NYU) and interrupted by the war, was resumed briefly at Loyola before he returned to New York in the summer of 1946. Here he explored philosophy at the New School for Social Research (it is revealing that the title of his B.A. essay was ‘Synchronic and diachronic as linguistic categories’) and simultaneously, at the insistance of Elliot van Kirk Dobbie of the English Department at Columbia University, Austerlitz began the study of linguistics. In May of 1950 he was awarded the B.A. from the New School and, one month later, in June, the M.A. from Columbia. The title of his (unpublished) M.A. thesis is Phonemic analysis of Hungarian (1950). Notice that this is the same year as Alarcos [End Page 142] Llorach 1950, and just one year after Roman Jakobson and János Lotz had published their ‘Notes on the French phonemic pattern’ (1949). The thesis was a little masterpiece. Viewed a half century on, it is a landmark. At Columbia, Austerlitz studied Old English with Dobbie in 1947, then Turkic with Karl Menges and Indo-European, via Gothic, with André Martinet. The turning point came, however, with Austerlitz’s study (primarily of Samoyed and Hungarian) under János Lotz. (Lotz had been lured to New York by Roman Jakobson; they had worked and associated amicably, together with Wolfgang Steinitz, at weekly seminars in Sweden during the war.) In very short order, Lotz communicated to Austerlitz his expertise in, and passion for, a broad spectrum of areas including descriptive grammar of the Uralic languages, Hungarian philology, and metrics. One element in the complex chemistry which allowed such a rapid and broad-banded transmission may well have been the fact that Lotz’s background was in some ways similar, though in the reverse, to Austerlitz’s: born in the US of Hungarian parents, Lotz had been transplanted to Hungary at the age of seven. After 1950, Austerlitz quickened the pace even more. In the summer of 1951...

Chapter 6: H-Mode and Pedestal Physics in ASDEX Upgrade

Studies in ASDEX Upgrade of the phenomenology and scaling of the H-mode transition, of edge-localized modes (ELMs), and characterization of the H-mode edge transport barrier carried out in various experimental campaigns between 1996 and 2001 are described. The H-mode transition is recognized by formation of a radial electrical field at the plasma boundary, which in ASDEX Upgrade is detected by an associated increase of the neutral particle charge exchange flux from ripple trapped particles. A scaling for the critical local edge temperature for the H-mode transition threshold is found. Similarity experiments with ASDEX Upgrade and Joint European Torus plasmas for the H-mode transition indicate that the H-mode transition can be obtained at the same values of dimensionless parameters ρ*, ν*, and β at the plasma edge, indicating that the threshold scaling is normally not dominated by atomic physics processes. Energy losses due to ELMs are examined. Different types of ELMs can be obtained, depending on plasma edge temperature and magnetics configuration. An interesting regime is the type II ELMy H-mode for configurations near double null, where the peak heat flux to the target is much reduced compared to large type I ELMs. High-resolution Thomson scattering measurements show that the edge transport barrier width in ASDEX Upgrade shows only weak variations, while the pedestal top electron pressure and pressure gradient strongly depend on the plasma current, or value of Bt/q95.

The Effects of the Nation: Mexican Art in an Age of Globalization

This collection addresses the idea of the Mexican nation as articulated in twentieth-century visual and literary production. Most of its essays, however, examine art and literary works produced at the borders of the nation and its aesthetic canons. While each essay can be read by itself, the collection achieves cohesion through the authors’ shared concern with disrupting the imagined integrity of “Mexico.”In his introductory essay, Carl Good observes that, although they are focused on the aesthetic production of the nation, the essays problematize the nation as an “organic entity.” This introduction is a dense and thought-provoking meditation on the problem of studying the “nation” within an increasingly globalist poststructural critical discourse. In contrast to the theoretical forays of the introduction, each of the subsequent essays engages closely with visual or literary works, examining them in temporal or spatial juxtapositions. This backward/forward and often transnational gaze brings the disruptive quality of the works examined into relief. The works studied thus resonate both within and against the canonical definitions of the nation, providing the authors a critical distance at a moment when engagement with the nation as a “disciplinary pretext or conceptual framework” (p. 1) is, by most accounts, no longer viable.Olivier Debroise sets the context for the volume with an overview of how curatorial conceptions of Mexican art have contributed, along with the visual arts, to the construction of a notion of “Mexicanness.” He exposes the politics of building national identity “upon the ruins” of indigenous culture (p. 21) and aptly shows the fictitiousness of the perceived “artistic continuity” (p. 32) of Mexican high art, seen as founded on and nurtured by indigenous culture, colonial art, and folk art. While Debroise is pessimistic about the likelihood of a completely new approach to Mexican artistic production, he suggests that even without rejecting such “unfocused continuities” outright (p. 33), artists, curators, and scholars might still achieve a critical understanding of “Mexicanness” by locating works that evoke continuity within deconstructive juxtapositions.Deconstructive juxtaposition, identified by Debroise as a critical tool, is taken up in the essays that follow. Juan Bruce-Novoa examines the career of Swedish-born sculptor Mathias Goeritz, active in Mexico from 1949 to 1990. Bruce-Novoa shows how Goeritz worked simultaneously within the artistic community and against the grain of the “national thematics” of Mexican art (p. 43). Karen Cordero Reiman examines the use of corporeal imagery in the art of Sylvia Gruner and Gerardo Suter, contrasting their articulations of a postmodern body, informed by their status as first- and second-generation immigrants, against the use of the mestizo body in postrevolutionary Mexican muralism. From another angle, Montserrat Cralf Boadella examines transnational migration in the work of the Canadian artist René Derouin, who has engaged in a prolonged creative dialogue with Mexico.Several essays touch upon the construction of gender, and four undertake this analysis directly. Susan C. Schaffer and Rebecca Biron examine the silencing of women’s voices in Mexican literary narration. Schaffer rereads Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, a fictionalized biography of Diego Rivera’s first wife, Russian-born artist Angelina Beloff, against Bertram Wolfe’s misogynist treatment of Beloff in his 1963 hagiography of Rivera. Biron repositions the writer Elena Garro in relation to Mexican literature while investigating how that position was conditioned by Garro’s relationship with Octavio Paz. In a related vein, Danny J. Anderson examines the gender politics of the market-driven Mexican publishing world by interrogating the juxtaposition between “light” (and therefore feminine) literature and that which is considered “serious,” experimental, and masculine. Anderson shows that “light” literature often possesses an incisive formal and feminist critical edge. Debra Castillo’s essay on Tijuana writer Rosina Conde shows that Conde’s use of liminality as a motif is facilitated by her own location on the border of the culturally centralized nation. Identity as hybrid and liminal is also examined by Rolando Romero, who considers the Chicano as alien in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. Finally, Jacobo Sefami challenges the literary and historical center of the nation. His examination of David Huerta’s poetic meditations on the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968 reinvigorates the demythologizing impetus of the collection. Sefami shows Huerta’s work to be as informed by politics as it was by the prevailing cosmopolitan literary aesthetic of his generation.This collection, whose strength lies in the theoretically informed approach of the authors, representing both Mexican and U.S. scholarly perspectives, will be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in grappling with the aesthetic production of the nation from a critical and multidisciplinary approach.

The Use of Specular, Polarized Neutron Reflectivity To Determine Magnetic Density Profiles

The Born and distorted wave Born approximations are used to derive expressions for the specular, reflected intensity of polarized neutrons from magnetic surfaces. Both of these approximations are expected to provide qualitative information on the in-plane magnetic structures. In particular, the spin-flipped component is proportional to the Fourier transform of the in-plane transverse magnetization, while the parallel-spin component is proportional to the Fourier transform of the sum of the in-plane longitudinal magnetization and the nonmagnetic scattering density. The distorted wave Born approximation is more valid near to a critical edge than the Born approximation. Within the distorted wave Born approximation the reflected parallel intensity can also be directly inverted to obtain the sum of the nonmagnetic and in-plane longitudinal magnetization. However, this approximation fails beyond a first-order perturbation in the potential, signified by the violation of flux conservation.

Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory: Toward an Ethics of the Borderland

As the questions posed by this journal indicate, the idea of is easily conflated with a narrative of decline: What is left of theory? Has lost its relevancy and critical edge? Has it lost the self-identity that it once had? The account of what is feared lost delineates (by negation) a nostalgic image of theory's past: relevance, a critical edge, and self-identity. When those things are gone and that golden age is over we are left with ruins and remainders, as other recent titles on the state of theory, which the journal's questions selfconsciously echo, make all too clear: What's Left of Theory? (Butler, Guillory, and Thomas); In Near Ruins (Dirks); The University in Ruins (Readings). This essay too will relate the notion of theory trouble to conceptions of remnants and remainders, but it will do so without a narrative of decline. Consider, rather, how images of ruins and remains appear also in another theoretical text from the past couple of years: Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz (the original Italian title could be rendered more precisely as What remains of Auschwitz). Here the question of what is left has a rather different valence. Agamben does not concern himself with, say, a decline in the interest in or sense of relevance of Auschwitz, but with a task that he believes has barely started: thinking the ethical implications of the events of the Holocaust.

The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)

I SOME political theories die and go to heaven; some, I hope, die and go to hell. But some have a long life in this world, a history most often of service to the powers-that-be, but also, sometimes, an oppositionist history. The theory of just war began in the service of the powers. At least that is how I interpret Augustine’s achievement : he replaced the radical refusal of Christian pacifists with the active ministry of the Christian soldier. Now pious Christians could fight on behalf of the worldly city, for the sake of imperial peace (in this case, literally, pax Romana); but they had to fight justly, only for the sake of peace, and always, Augustine insisted, with a downcast demeanor, without anger or lust.1 Seen from the perspective of primitive Christianity, this account of just war was simply an excuse, a way of making war morally and religiously possible. And that was indeed the function of the theory. But its defenders would have said, and I am inclined to agree, that it made war possible in a world where war was, sometimes, necessary. From the beginning, the theory had a critical edge: soldiers (or, at least, their officers) were supposed to refuse to fight in wars of conquest and to oppose or abstain from the standard military practices of rape and pillage after the battle was won. But just war was a worldly theory, in every sense of that term, and it continued to serve worldly interests against Christian radicalism. It is important to note, though, that Christian radicalism had more than one SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter 2002) The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success) BY MICHAEL WALZER version: it could be expressed in a pacifist rejection of war, but it could also be expressed in war itself, in the religiously driven crusade . Augustine opposed the first of these; the medieval scholastics , following in Aquinas’s footsteps, set themselves against the second. The classic statement is Vitoria’s: “Difference of religion cannot be a cause of just war.” For centuries, from the time of the Crusades to the religious wars of the Reformation years, many of the priests and preachers of Christian Europe, many lords and barons (and even a few kings), had been committed to the legitimacy of using military force against unbelievers: they had their own version of jihad. Vitoria claimed, by contrast, that “the sole and only just cause for waging war is when harm has been inflicted.”2 Just war was an argument of the religious center against pacifists, on the one side, and holy warriors, on the other, and because of its enemies (and even though its proponents were theologians), it took shape as a secular theory—which is simply another way of describing its worldliness. So the rulers of this world embraced the theory, and did not fight a single war without describing it, or hiring intellectuals to describe it, as a war for peace and justice. Most often, of course, this description was hypocritical: the tribute that vice pays to virtue. But the need to pay the tribute opens those who pay it to the criticism of the virtuous—that is, of the brave and virtuous, of whom there have been only a few (but one could also say: at least a few). I will cite one heroic moment, from the history of the academic world: sometime around 1520, the faculty of the University of Salamanca met in solemn assembly and voted that the Spanish conquest of Central America was a violation of natural law and an unjust war.3 I have not been able to learn anything about the subsequent fate of the good professors. Certainly, there were not many moments like that one, but what happened at Salamanca suggests that just war never lost its critical edge. The theory provided worldly reasons for going to war, but the reasons were limited —and they had to be worldly. Converting the Aztecs to 926 SOCIAL RESEARCH Christianity was not a just cause; nor was seizing the gold of the Americas or enslaving its inhabitants. Writers like Grotius and Pufendorf incorporated just...