Escape Lines Research Articles

The Murmuring-In-Between: Eco-centric Politics in The Girl Who Swam Forever

Viewing one of Clements’s earliest plays through an eco-critical lens reveals how this playwright manages to situate her postcolonial politics within a vision of the world that is unequivocally eco-centric. After detailing how Clements incorporated three primary sources in the conception and development of The Girl Who Swam Forever, this paper (employing Tim Ingold, Christopher Manes, Val Plumwood, Akira Lippit, Thomas King, and Jeanette Armstrong ) shows how the animist assumptions that inform the play’s action are fundamentally distinct from conventional Western ways of seeing. The paper then concludes by arguing that it is precisely this animist sensibility that provides Clements’s female protagonist with what Deleuze and Guattari have called “a line of escape” from the repressive constraints of human-centred thought, enabling her to imagine a world beyond the racist one that threatens to undermine her agency, well-being and self-respect.

Molecular Evolution of Lepidopteran Silk Proteins: Insights from the Ghost Moth, Hepialus californicus

Silk production has independently evolved in numerous arthropod lineages, such as Lepidoptera, the moths and butterflies. Lepidopteran larvae (caterpillars) synthesize silk proteins in modified salivary glands and spin silk fibers into protective tunnels, escape lines, and pupation cocoons. Molecular sequence data for these proteins are necessary to determine critical features of their function and evolution. To this end, we constructed an expression library from the silk glands of the ghost moth, Hepialus californicus, and characterized light chain fibroin and heavy chain fibroin gene transcripts. The predicted H. californicus silk fibroins share many elements with other lepidopteran and trichopteran fibroins, such as conserved placements of cysteine, aromatic, and polar amino acid residues. Further comparative analyses were performed to determine site-specific signatures of selection and to assess whether fibroin genes are informative as phylogenetic markers. We found that purifying selection has constrained mutation within the fibroins and that light chain fibroin is a promising molecular marker. Thus, by characterizing the H. californicus fibroins, we identified key functional amino acids and gained insight into the evolutionary processes that have shaped these adaptive molecules.

Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion

'Mutant' workers in 'veritable wars of subjectivity'; for Felix Guattari, this is what constitutes the history of the workers' movement. (1) He has in mind the events of revolutionary upheaval, the Paris Commune, October 1917, May 1968. But the problematic of revolutionary subjectivity--in its affective, semiotic, organisational, and imaginary registers--is one that pervades modern socialist, communist and anarchist politics. This problematic is that of the 'militant', of 'militancy', a persistent marker--indeed, often the self-declared guarantor--of radical subjectivity across the spectrum of extra-parliamentary politics. One can think of militancy as a technology of the self, an expression of the working on the self in the service of revolutionary change. However, unlike the subjective correlates of the great revolutionary events, for Guattari this more prosaic aspect of radical practice is not altogether joyful. This paper is a critique of the militant. (2) In particular it seeks to understand the ways militancy effectuates political passions and a certain unworking or deterritorialisation of the self in relation to political organisations and the wvider social environment within which militants would enact change. To this end the paper traces a 'diagram' or 'abstract machine' of militancy, and considers a particular animation of this diagram in the Weatherman organisation in the United States at the turn of the 1970s. Returning to Marx's concept of the party, the paper then sketches the principle outlines of a counter figure--an 'a-militant diagram', or dispersive ecology of political composition--that suggests a rather different process of subjective unworking. MILITANT PASSION Guattari locates the emergence of the modern militant formation in what he calls the 'Leninist breakthrough' during the 1903 Second Congress of the All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, from where--following certain procedural and organisational disputes--emerged a set of affective, semiotic, tactical, and organisational traits that constitute a kind of Leninist diagram or abstract machine. (3) For Deleuze and Guattari, the diagram or abstract machine is that which governs the articulation and distribution of matter and function in concrete assemblages (where a concrete assemblage may be a carcereal institution, an aesthetic practice, a military technology, an architectural school, and so on). The diagram is not an ideal type, infrastructure or transcendent idea, but a non-unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the concrete assemblages that express it. These assemblages, in their divergent manifestations and unexpected conjunctions, in turn feedback into the diagram, both consolidating and modifying its abstract imperatives. As such, even as one sees a regularity of function across its iterations, the diagram is in principle a force of undetermined change, and one existent in a state of disequilibrium. As a tool of analysis, the concept of the diagram enables one to attend to continuities or resonances across superficially divergent phenomena, and to approach an understanding of the dynamic consistency of arrangements of heterogeneous materials (bodies, signs, images, technologies, affects ...), whilst requiring attention to be paid both to abstract functions and to concrete manifestations as they exist in mutual presupposition. Insofar as the diagram is an abstract entity that is only perceivable through diverse concrete manifestations, the mapping of any diagram is an inexact, tentative, and experimental procedure. It is something like a 'working hypothesis that must be examined with care, re-worked, perhaps even ousted altogether', (4) and is useful only insofar as it brings an appreciation of consistencies, creative processes, points of tension, knots of power, lines of escape, that aid intervention in its field. Of course, any concrete assemblage--including a political grouping--will be governed by more than one diagram. …

En busca del ADN de la escritura en Historia de una absolución familiar de Germán Marín

We understand the writing in Historia de una absolucion familiar by German Marin as a metaphor of the DNA spiral, while the reflection about itself in search of its origin and the escape line of the literary speech towards the life of the author himself and in whose narrative proposal the imagination and memory link each other.

A "geração podcasting" e os novos usos do rádio na sociedade do espetáculo e do entretenimento

Buscou-se repensar a importância da espetacularização e da alta visibilidade como fatores que permitiriam aos atores sociais “negociar” sentidos e significados na sociedade contemporânea. Considera-se as apropriações das novas tecnologias um estudo de caso que permite avaliar as possibilidades de construção de linhas de fuga na sociedade atual, marcada por uma forte presença dos media e do entretenimento. Analisou-se o novo nicho de produção e consumo midiático viabilizado pela convergência tecnológica – especificamente o podcasting, modalidade de rádio sob demanda –, repensando a atuação dos usuários no estabelecimento de formas inovadoras de sociabilidade e mediação socioculturais.

Sustaining Jouissance: Commercial and Heian Modes of Intertextuality in Tanka by Tawara Machi

This essay argues that Tawara Machi's poetry both sustains the intertextual bias of classical court poetry and uses it to incorporate some of the most ubiquitous texts of our age: advertising and other consumer discourse. Tawara's reinvention of contemporary tanka is based on the application of the conventional matrices of associations in classical poetic language to contemporary consumer-oriented intertexts. Foregrounding intertextuality provides a means of gauging premodern and modern texts in terms of multiple modes of textuality, canons, and cultural assumptions in Japanese verse. Roland Barthes's analysis of fashion discourse provides a specific critical apparatus for situating Heian poetics and consumer discourse on common ground. I borrow his insights on how classes of commodities and language concerning their uses enter into creative cross-referencing, in a way that resembles how premodern tanka attributed qualities according to seasonal and other (formally and informally) classifiable associations. While the Heian mode forms the template, Tawara's poetics is shown to operate in precisely this ahistorical consumer mode, passively absorbing and reflecting dominant media-projected attitudes. While thematically arranged, usually in sequences more or less centered on romantic entanglements, these poems reflect the rational, national, industrial capitalist environment and its totalizing effects. Critical lines of escape are left only in the force of fresh juxtaposition of words and consumer items, thus providing a contained sandbox for aesthetic play without endangering corporate decorum and sponsorship. A running theme in her tanka is the ever-elusive partner in love, a motif providing the basis for the building up toward an always-deferred satisfaction, jouissance. By alluding to Heian serial relationships, she aestheticizes alienation from her partners on her dates. By echoing classical matrices of seasonal words, poetic places, and conventional associations in all stages of romance, her accounts of consumer objects carry their own advertised associations as well as a reified canonical force. Thus her verses expand the intertextual modality in premodern Japanese poetry seamlessly into consumer culture, and one must examine the subject being reproduced here. Slavoj Žižek is helpful in understanding the appearance of passivity in her positioning. Jouissance, in Žižek's Lacanian usage, is used to understand the mechanism by which Tawara personally and socially excuses herself from having to engage her material in a more critical way that would alter rather than simply reflect her media- and advertising-defined environment. Jouissance is the key to her postponement of personal intimacy as well as public involvement and, ultimately, to understanding her ahistorical poetics.

An American Heroine in the French Resistance: The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d'Albert-Lake (review)

Reviewed by: An American Heroine in the French Resistance: The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake M. R. D. Foot An American Heroine in the French Resistance: The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake. Edited by Judy Barrett Litoff. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8232-2581-X. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Index. Pp. xxxviii, 270. $29.95. This is a tale of quiet heroism, most of it in the heroine's own words, of [End Page 260] an American girl, a doctor's daughter born in Ohio and brought up in Florida. She married a Frenchman whose mother was English; was with him in Paris when the world war against Hitler began; and stayed with him when he started to help the "Comet" escape line, in which she became a courier. By mere bad luck, she was arrested by the Germans in western Normandy in mid-June 1944 in the company of an evading American airman; and just managed to survive Fresnes and Ravensbrueck. She kept a diary, till she was arrested, which is here reprinted. In the winter after her rescue, she wrote a long account of her prison and concentration camp experiences, in the form of a letter to her recently dead mother. The original memoir seems to have vanished; this too is reprinted, from a typescript in the family's hands. More than sixty years on, both documents have a ghastly immediacy: they bring back Hitler's war at its worst. The diary has been neatly edited by Professor Litoff, who also writes a long introduction; she footnotes events, well known at the time, which may not be readily remembered by today's readership. It presents a straightforward picture of life under Vichy France for someone who disliked it. The male SS guards left most of the immediate care of the prisoners to kapos, who were prisoners themselves. Woman's inhumanity to woman has seldom been as well described: witness the Polish woman kapo, without whose say-so no captive could reach the camp hospital, who kept an iron bar to hand with which she used to strike every other prisoner who came within arm's reach, as she did not want to catch their lice. In the closing stages, several hundred captives were crammed together in a vast marquee, most of them suffering from dysentery and many of them unable to stir to the latrine to relieve themselves. The stench alone must have been all but unbearable—yet they bore it. Virginia Lake's private motto was "never give in": she hung on. Efforts by her American family eventually got through to her, just in time. She and General de Gaulle's niece, Genevieve Anthonioz, were removed from Ravensbrueck to Liebenau near Lake Constance, in a six-day nightmare journey through ruins, late in February 1945. There she slept in sheets, was decently fed, was out of earshot of gunfire, and was liberated late in April. She was reunited with her husband in Paris after the war's end; she recovered her health, they had a son and settled near Dinard. The British gave her an MBE, the Belgians the Medal of King Leopold, and the French the Liberation Medal of Honor, a croix de guerre, and, eventually, the Legion of Honour. She died in 1997 aged eighty-seven. She had simply done what she thought she ought to do. Her story, movingly well told, was well worth putting into print. M. R. D. Foot Nuthampstead, England Copyright © 2007 Society for Military History

A pulse-height spectrum from a Mössbauer 57Co source registered with a superconducting tunnel detector

Pulse-height spectra from irradiation of superconducting tunnel detectors of an original design with quanta emitted by a Mossbauer 57 Co source were recorded in the energy range 1-15 keV. The detectors have a layer structure of Ti/Nb/Al,Al O x /Al/Nb/NbN (with thicknesses of 30, 100, 8, 13, 150, and 30 nm, respectively), one active electrode, and one passive electrode (the signal of which is suppressed owing to the presence of a titanium sublayer). Thanks to the high activity of the source, a 14.4-keV γ line has been detected. The spectra obtained with 57 Co and 55 Fe sources are compared. The energy dependence of the detector response is deter- mined using the positions of the fluorescence lines from construction materials and specially selected shields. The Mg, Al, Si K α , and Ag, In L α lines, along with the Mn K α , β , Fe K α , β , 14.4-keV γ lines and niobium escape lines, were used for this purpose. The possible reasons for a strong nonlinearity of this dependence are pointed out.

THEORETICAL INVESTIGATION OF PULSE SHAPES OF DOUBLE BETA EVENTS IN A 76Ge DETECTOR, THEIR DEPENDENCE ON PARTICLE PHYSICS PARAMETERS, AND THEIR SEPARABILITY FROM BACKGROUND GAMMA EVENTS

For the first time the expected pulse shapes to be observed for neutrinoless double beta events in a big 76 Ge detector have been calculated starting from their Monte Carlo calculated time history and spatial energy distribution. It is shown that with the spatial resolution of a large size Ge detector for the majority of 0νββ events it is not possible to differentiate between the contributions of different particle physics parameters entering into the 0νββ decay process — in the mass mechanism the effective neutrino mass and the right-handed weak current parameters λ, η. It is shown that on the other hand it is possible in a 76 Ge double beta decay experiment to reject a background of larger sizes (high multiplicity) gamma events by selecting low size (low multiplicity) events. First comparison of the theoretical ββ pulses to events from the line observed at3,4Qββ shows very good agreement. It is shown further that a rather good radial position determination of ββ events in the detector is possible. By the same type of calculation it is shown that use of the pulse shapes of the 1592 keV double escape line of the 2614 keV γ-transition from 228 Th for calibrating a neuronal net for search of events of neutrinoless double beta decay should be helpful.

A Creole Line of Escape: A Story of Becoming-Dog

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Page references to works for which there is a published translation listed in the Works Cited are to the translations. Translations of works without published translations are my own with page references to the French originals. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBénédicte BoisseronWith an introduction by Jarrod Hayes

Microscopic calculations of signals of double beta decay in a 76Ge detector and first application to the Heidelberg–Moscow experiment

The identification of signals of neutrinoless double beta decay is a question of extreme interest. Starting from the Monte Carlo calculated time history and spatial energy distribution of neutrinoless double beta events, for the first time the expected pulse shapes to be observed in a big 76Ge detector have been calculated ‘microscopically’, by using the Poisson Superfish code for determination of the field distribution in the detector. It is shown, that for the majority of 0νββ events it is not possible to differentiate between the contributions of different particle physics parameters entering into the 0νββ decay process—in the mass mechanism the effective neutrino mass and the right-handed weak current parameters 〈λ〉, 〈η〉. It is shown, that on the other hand it is possible in a 76Ge double beta decay experiment to reject a background of larger sizes (high multiplicity) gamma events by selecting low size (low multiplicity) events. First application of the theoretical ββ pulses to events from the line observed at Qββ [H.V. Klapdor-Kleingrothaus, I.V. Krivosheina, A. Dietz, et al., Phys. Lett. B 586 (2004) 198; H.V. Klapdor-Kleingrothaus, A. Dietz, I.V. Krivosheina, et al., Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 522 (2004) 371] shows very good agreement. It is shown further, and confirmed by measurements with a collimated source, that a rather good radial position determination of ββ events in the detector is possible. By the same type of calculation it is shown that use of the pulse shapes of the 1592 keV double escape line of the 2614 keV γ-transition from 228Th for calibrating a neuronal net for search of events of neutrinoless double beta decay can be helpful.

Lyman radiative transfer in a multiphase medium

Hydrogen Lyman a (Lya) is our primary emission-line window into high-redshift galaxies. Despite an extensive literature, Lya radiative transfer in the most realistic case of a dusty, multiphase medium has received surprisingly little detailed theoretical attention. We investigate Lya resonant scattering through an ensemble of dusty, moving, optically thick gas clumps. We treat each clump as a scattering particle and use Monte Carlo simulations of surface scattering to quantify continuum and Lya surface scattering angles, absorption probabilities, and frequency redistribution, as a function of the gas dust content. This atomistic approach speeds up the simulations by many orders of magnitude, making possible calculations which are otherwise intractable. Our fitting formulae can be readily adapted for fast radiative transfer in numerical simulations. With these surface scattering results, we develop an analytic framework for estimating escape fractions and line widths as a function of gas geometry, motion, and dust content. Our simple analytic model shows good agreement with full Monte Carlo simulations. We show that the key geometric parameter is the average number of surface scatters for escape in the absence of absorption, N 0 , and we provide fitting formulae for several geometries of astrophysical interest. We consider the following two interesting applications. (i) Equivalent widths (EWs). Lya can preferentially escape from a dusty multiphase interstellar medium if most of the dust lies in cold neutral clouds, which Lya photons cannot penetrate. This might explain the anomalously high EWs sometimes seen in high-redshift/submillimetre sources. (ii) Multiphase galactic outflows. We show the characteristic profile is asymmetric with a broad red tail, and relate the profile features to the outflow speed and gas geometry. Many future applications are envisaged.

Hong Sangsoo's Lines of Inquiry, Communication, Defense, and Escape

Abstract This article looks at the first four films of contemporary Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo. It seeks in particular to explore Hong's use of “lines” as geographical and behavioral figures that chart the contemporary landscape of South Korea at a complex moment in its history. The lines that traverse Hong's world produce a cinema of tangled webs and knotted relations.

Mrs. Dalloway como máquina de guerra. Una introducción

The purpose of this article is to show why and how Virginia Woolf´s novel is a powerful agency of social intervention which disrupts our programmed capacity to read and to look. Manuel Asensi discusses four elements of the context in which it was written; The period of writing and publishing, between 1922 and 1925, a time of vanguardisms; the influence of the Bloomsbury group; the outbreak of the First World War, which situated this pacifist group in a marginal position; and the biological condition of Woolf, being not only a woman, but one who suffered from a psychological disorder. Secondly, the article proposes an analysis of the novel´s characters in three groups; those who delimit the territory; others who represent lines of escape and, finally, Clarissa, who finds herself somewhere in between. A difficult position, since she does not know where she belongs; at the same time he is both inside an outside of the order.

Novela y poder: El panóptico. La ciudad apestada. El lugar de la confesión

We propose that the realist novel, especially the so called coming-of-age novel, is equal on a fictive plane to a disciplinary device similar to the panopticon invented by Bentham. If, architecturally speaking, the panopticon gives an idea of the narrative structure, cartographically, the realist novel is organized as a city, whose model is that of the plague-infested city (described by Foucault), defined by vigilance, difference, hierarchy, and the necessity to write everything. The relationship of the plague to carnival fiction and celebration perturbs the panoptic narrator who feels attracted to this transgressive desire, developing lines of escape in search of it. Discursively, the coming-of-age novel is the public confession of infamous men. In the realist text the character becomes a confessional animal. He confesses, via the narrator, his most hidden and secret sins, crimes, thoughts and desires.

Das essências às multiplicidades: especialismo psi e produções de subjetividades

O presente artigo pretende colocar em análise a divisão social do trabalho no capitalismo, a emergência dos especialismos - em especial o psi - algumas produções de subjetividades e parte de seus efeitos. Para tal, serão inicialmente apontadas algumas ''formas'' que vão sendo forjadas para o Homem, para a Sociedade, para a Psicologia e para Política através da crença de que possuem uma essência, uma existência em si. Tal crença tem instituído uma psicologia essencialista, privatista/intimizante e familiarista. Outro aspecto priorizado é a produção do ''modo-de-ser-indivíduo' e alguns de seus efeitos: a meritocracia e a psicologização da vida social. Finalizando, serão apontados escapes, derivas e linhas de fuga que permitem pensar o homem e a sociedade, a psicologia e a política não como territórios excludentes, mas como campos conectados que se atravessam e se constituem.

L'Éthique de Spinoza dans l'œuvre de Gilles Deleuze

AbstractDeleuze calls Spinoza the “Prince” of philosophers. He devotes two books to him, Spinoza et le probleme de l'expression and Spinoza. Philosophie pratique But Deleuze's entire body of work also gives him an opportunity to work on Spinoza's conceptuality. Deleuze does not arrive at Spinoza by making a leap from the principle of reason to reconquer an original and forgotten past. The immanence of Spinoza is more like an arrow found inadvertently and shot again into the immensity of the universe. We propose to define this timelessness by highlighting the main points of convergence between Deleuze's thought and that of Spinoza. These convergences will be examined using excerpts selected from the five parts of the Ethics in which the following themes will be broached: the principle of reason, panpsychism, experimentation of the body, notion of power, and liberty. We will see how Deleuze gives a new and yet strangely faithful spin to Spinozist thought on which he establishes his notions of pluricosmism, non-human becomings, ethology, deterritorialization, and escape lines.

Silent heroes: downed airmen and the French underground

In the early years of World War II, it was an amazing feat for an Allied airman shot down over occupied Europe to make it back to England. By 1943, however, pilots and crewmembers, supplied with kits, knew they had a 50 percent chance of evading capture and returning home. An estimated 12,000 French civilians helped make this possible. More than 5,000 airmen, many of them American, successfully traveled along escape lines organized much like those of the U.S. Underground Railroad, using secret codes and stopping in safe houses. If caught, they risked internment in a POW camp. But the French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians who aided them risked torture and even death. Sherri Ottis writes candidly about the pilots and crewmen who walked out of occupied Europe, as well as the British intelligence agency in charge of Escape and Evasion. But her main focus is on the helpers, those patriots who have been all but ignored in English-language books and journals. To research their stories, Ottis hiked the Pyrenees and interviewed many of the survivors. She tells of the extreme difficulty they had in avoiding Nazi infiltration by double agents; of their creativity in hiding evaders in their homes, sometimes in the midst of unexpected searches; of their generosity in sharing their meager food supplies during wartime; and of their unflagging spirit and courage in the face of a war fought on a very personal level.

On the Line Formation in Stellar Magnetized Atmospheres

The line formation process in stellar magnetized atmospheres is studied by observing the wavelength-dependence of Stokes contribution functions. The influence of magnetic field on the escape line photon distribution and line absorption is obtained by comparing with the null magnetic field case. Two models are adopted. One assumes limited distributions of both the line absorption and magnetic field where a hypothetical magneto-sensitive line is formed. The other is a model atmosphere of sunspot umbra in which Mg I 5172.7 forms. It is found that the magnetic field influences the formation region of Stokes I at wavelengths sufficient close to the Zeeman splitting points +/- Delta lambda (H). The formation regions at wavelengths far away from the Zeeman splitting points generally show a non-magnetic behaviour. Further, if the line core is split by the Zeeman effect, the line formation core introduced in the previous paper disappears. On the other hand, Stokes Q, U, V at each wavelength within the line form in the same layers where both the line absorption and magnetic field are present in the models accepted for the lines used. When the line absorption and magnetic field ubiquitously exist, the formation regions of the pi peaks or valleys of Stokes Q, U and those of sigma of Stokes V generally cover the widest depth range. It is pointed out that such a study is instructive in the explanation of solar polarized filtergrams. It can tell us at each observation point where the received line photons of wavelengths within the bandpass come from and where their polarization states are formed or give us the distributions of these photons as well as their polarization intensities. Thus a three-dimensional image can be constructed for a morphologic study of the observed area from serial filtergrams.

Identification of single-site events in germanium detectors by digital pulse shape analysis

A method that discriminates between single- and multiple-site interactions in germanium detectors was developed. For this purpose the output of customary charge-sensitive preamplifiers was differentiated with 10–20 ns sampled with 250 MHz and analyzed off-line. Multiple-site interactions were measured in the 1621 keV photo peak and single-site events in the 1592 keV double escape line of 208Tl. One single parameter describing the broadness of the charge pulse maximum is sufficient to achieve 80% detection efficiencies for both the interaction types, over a wide energy range. As examples, employment of the method in the Heidelberg–Moscow experiment resulted in the consistent half-life of two neutrino double beta decay and the reduction of the background by a factor of three in searches for the neutrinoless double beta decay. Identification of single Compton scattered events improved the minimal detectable activity of a 25% efficiency detector by a factor of two.