Difficulties In Beginning Research Articles

Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning

Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning

History Improvised

MC: We are attempting a dialogue about history. No shortage of difficulties becomes apparent, but above all the difficulty of beginning. How to begin such a dialogue? To go back over all that has been said about history, about the distinction between the ancient and the modern; about idealism and historical materialism; about the idea of history, about its materiality-or indeed its immateriality; about the difference between history and historicity, the difference between the broad narrative of ?history? and the minor narratives, the stories; about the difference between the discourses about the end of history-which have themselves become a grand narrative of the lack of grand narratives-and history as finite, as you yourself have suggested. We could indeed retrace all of this thinking, but this retracing would not in any way relieve the feeling that there is nothing more to be said about history, or even that the question of history has itself become a historical object. To think history today is to expose ourselves to a today that is estranged from this question, as if the time, the place of the question of history seemed to have become estranged from or even indifferent to itself. It seems to me that the only possibility of beginning this dialogue would be by remaining within this difficulty of beginning. The difficulty of beginning is set against the disillusionment about the possibility of beginning. From whence does the question of history arise today? Does it arise from a disillusionment of beginning, from the feeling of no longer being able to begin, from a feeling that beginning has no power, that power has left all beginning bereft? The question of beginning is the dark shadow-line of the modern thinking of history-beginning understood as the event that interrupts the flow of events, beginning as re-birth, as reform-in other words as revolution. To have nothing more to say about history mirrors the no-longer-being-able-to-begin of history. To think history today, then: would this not mean thinking this 'no-longer, today, being-able-to begin,' or thinking today as a not-being-able-to-begin? And, following this same path, thinking the question of beginning beyond every idea of revolution, of novelty-in other words of a teleological or messianic relation to the past?JLN: To be sure, we do not know where to begin: history as a thematic, or as an object of reflection seems finished, in the sense of a 'termination,' the sense of it having become very difficult-close to impossible-to relate oneself to a process or to a meaning with which we could be engaged and on behalf of which we might also engage ourselves. This means, in other words: a history which would be ours of which we would in certain respects be the subjects, or which indeed might be the genesis or production of a we-subject. History as 'subjectivation,' as people are fond of saying, following Foucault. But precisely this neologism, even used in an undisciplined manner, rests on the idea that there is no subject prior to its historical constitution. Neither 'personal' subject nor subject of history. Foucault forged this word in order to place emphasis on the discontinuities, ruptures, configurational changes in knowledge, power and relations throughout the length of a 'history' entirely separate from any continuous programmatic or teleological process. To such an extent, indeed, that my sense of it is that 'subjectivation' is only a somewhat feeble way of trying to conserve a minimum-and perhaps the illusion-of mastery and of autonomy, precisely there where everything tends toward the perception of practices that are not under control, toward a mutual heteronomy of process, of mechanisms and machinations that assume no project, and hence no subject.In large part, indeed, it is from out of this transformation from the image of process or project into a cartography of indefinite interdependencies of power and knowledge that the profound transformation in the idea of history has come. …

Evaluación de los síntomas prefrontales: propiedades psicométricas y datos normativos del cuestionario disejecutivo (DEX) en una muestra de población española

Research on the deficits derived from alterations in the prefrontal circuits has been conducted almost exclusively from a categorical perspective, which differentiates normal from pathological functioning. The functioning of the prefrontal cortex, however, can be seen as a continuous dimension. The Dysexecutive Questionnaire (DEX) was created with the intention of being useful as a qualitative measure of the symptoms of 'dysexecutive syndrome' in day-to-day life. AIM. To explore the psychometric properties of the self-reported DEX in a broad sample of the non-clinical population with a view to providing interpretations that can be of use in clinical practice. The Spanish version of the DEX was administered to 1013 non-clinical individuals living in Madrid, Saragossa, Asturias, Navarre and Seville (380 males and 633 females). The factorial study conducted in parallel reveals the existence of two factors with adequate consistency and internal validity indices: items that explore difficulties in beginning, maintaining and organising behaviour (disorganisation/apathy) and items related with the interruption of behaviour in situations where it is inappropriate (disinhibition/impulsivity). The distribution according to age matches the developmental premises. The following cut-off points are proposed: < 10, optimal functioning; 10-18, sub-optimal functioning within normality; 19-28, moderately dysexecutive functioning that requires identification of the possible causes, and > 28, important degree of dysexecutive disorder that would include severe pathologies. The DEX may be useful as an instrument for detecting subjects with demonstrable brain disorders and those with deficient executive functioning without the presence of any known or identifiable pathology.

Beginnings and the Representation of Time in Jacques le fataliste

The present essay attempts to throw new light on the question of time in Jacques le fataliste by studying this aspect as a structure, rather than as a theme, and the way this principle is encoded in, as well as influenced by, the various incipit the reader encounters on the way.Two categories of beginnings in this novel are analyzed as to their temporal structure and its relation to meaning. The first contains narratives that experience difficulties in beginning, and are, therefore, considered “reflexive,” in that they turn back on themselves. The second are considered “projective” in that they reach beyond toward what follows. The reflexive beginning is further distinguished from a real or “radical” beginning which has no example in literature; it is a concept, and not a reality.The mixture of reflexive and projective beginnings in Jacques le fataliste reveals a narrative that is aware of its status as fiction, and questions itself and its relation to those arbitrary rules that implicitly govern fictions. The relation between the two types of beginnings and their representation of time is only one example of how the narrative consciously creates itself as an entity freed from the reality of chronological time.

The Figure in the Carpet

Images of filaments, ficelles, lines, figures drawn with lines, woven or embroidered cloth, thread themselves through dense metaphorical texture of Henry James's prefaces.' These prefaces taken together no doubt form most important treatise on novel in English. A passage in preface to Roderick Hudson is an appropriate place to begin, since it bears not only on difficulty of beginning but on even greater difficulty of stopping once one has begun. In passage I cite, issue is a double one: first, how, in writing a novel, to draw a line around material to be treated, to give it an edge or border which appears as a natural stopping place in all directions beyond which there is nothing relevant to subject, and, second, how, within those limits, to treat what is left inside charmed circle totally and with total continuity, omitting nothing and establishing or articulating all connections, all of what Tolstoj, in a splendid phrase, called the labyrinth of linkages.2 Continuity and completeness, on one hand, and finite form, on other, this is double necessity:

Where Babylon Ends: Nathaniel Tarn's Poetic Development

A severe will to form runs through the first three volumes of Nathaniel Tarn's poetry: Old Savage/Young City (1964), Selection: Penguin Modern Poets No. 7 (1965), and Where Babylon Ends (1968). Here a poetic consciousness has determined to constitute itself in forms exactiy adequate to itself, to open the algebraic eyes of paradise. The poetry recounts the conditions of its making, noting the absence of a source, the difficulty of beginning and the difficulty of proceeding. It inscribes the journey past unacceptable mediations, kinds of pseudo-immediacy. It implies its future, the prospect of the