Incommensurate Mode Research Articles

Towards a Noncompliant Pedagogy of the Image: Reading Negentropic Bifurcatory Potentials in Video Images

Abstract The authors explore the noncompliant pedagogy of the image based on their video Autopoietic Veering: Schizo Socius of Tokyo and Vancouver (2021). It is not the kind of trendy modelized video abstract or kinetic presentation eagerly promoted by international publishers; it is a cross-cultural collaborative work intended to generate affirmative temporal ruptures of entropic habitual modes of seeing, memorizing, and thinking of human and nonhuman life in the cities of Tokyo (Japan) and Vancouver (Canada). The authors elucidate Stiegler’s (2015b) concept of a “global mnemotechnical system” that stores and produces human memories in vast digital archives and databases (tertiary retentions) through “mnemonic control” (Parisi & Goodman, 2011). The authors repurpose video images to interrupt and recontrol human perception and memories as “living engines” (Lazzarato, 2006). They foreground the philosophical work of Deleuze, Heidegger, and Virilio to rethink and revive the creative act of “critique” (Foucault, 1997) through “metamodelization” (Guattari, 1995; Manning, 2020); therefore, they plug these apparently incommensurable modes of thinking into their readings of the video’s images. They read the images as “time-images” and focus on their five dimensions that possibly activate “spiritual automation” (Deleuze, 1989), which they assess as “negentropic bifurcatory” potentials (Bradley & Kennedy, 2019).

Quasiperiodic Floquet-Thouless Energy Pump.

We study a disordered one-dimensional fermionic system subject to quasiperiodic driving by two modes with incommensurate frequencies. We show that the system supports a topological phase in which energy is transferred between the two driving modes at a quantized rate. The phase is protected by a combination of disorder-induced spatial localization and frequency localization, a mechanism unique to quasiperiodically driven systems. We demonstrate that an analogue of the phase can be realized in a cavity-qubit system driven by two incommensurate modes.

Confronting Climate Change: The Uneasy Alliance of Scientists and Nonscientists in a Neoliberal World

Confronting Climate Change: The Uneasy Alliance of Scientists and Nonscientists in a Neoliberal World

An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: On the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese

Words and phrases may differ in the extent to which they are susceptible to prosodic foregrounding and expressive morphology: their expressiveness. They may also differ in the degree to which they are integrated in the morphosyntactic structure of the utterance: their grammatical integration. We describe an inverse relation that holds across widely varied languages, such that more expressiveness goes together with less grammatical integration, and vice versa. We review typological evidence for this inverse relation in ten spoken languages, then quantify and explain it using Japanese corpus data. We do this by tracking ideophones – vivid sensory words also known as mimetics or expressives – across different morphosyntactic contexts and measuring their expressiveness in terms of intonation, phonation and expressive morphology. We find that as expressiveness increases, grammatical integration decreases. Using gesture as a measure independent of the speech signal, we find that the most expressive ideophones are most likely to come together with iconic gestures. We argue that the ultimate cause is the encounter of two distinct and partly incommensurable modes of representation: the gradient, iconic, depictive system represented by ideophones and iconic gestures, and the discrete, arbitrary, descriptive system represented by ordinary words. The study shows how people combine modes of representation in speech and demonstrates the value of integrating description and depiction into the scientific vision of language.

Cancer self-health programmes: an ethos for negotiating multiplicities of healthcare

ABSTRACTCancer self-health programmes are a popular form of healthcare in the UK, Australia, and North America. This article explores how they bring together heterogeneous and possibly incommensurable modes of healthcare (including complementary and alternative medicine, self-help, psychotherapy, and systems theory from bioscience) to form programmes of self-health. Through a discourse analysis of four programmes – The Bristol Approach; Health Creation Programme; CANCERactive; and The Healing Journey – this article explore how these programmes promote: (1) Strategies to delineate spheres of living, such as mind, body, and spirit; (2) Relational practices such as holism, connectedness, listening, and healing; (3) Empirically pragmatic attitudes that individualise techniques and practices; and (4) Purposes to life that emphasise a dialogical movement between dichotomised positions. Significantly, through these strategies, techniques and practices cancer self-health programmes are able to promote an ethos that seeks to affect the user, without determining an individual's specific needs or choices.

Crystallographic Aspects of the CDW Instabilities in NbSe3

Charge-density waves (CDW) in some quasi one-dimensional compounds can be depinned from the lattice by an external electric field. In the case of NbSe3, two CDW transitions have been reported with onset temperatures of 144 K and 59 K. From an analysis of the published low-temperature (LT) scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images, which inherently allow the resolution of domain structures on the atomic scale, an alternative model of the CDW modulated structures in NbSe3 is proposed. In contrast to the existing model, where two incommensurate (IC) modes, q1 = (0,0.241,0) and q2 = (0.5,0.260,0.5) are selectively confined to two of three available structurally distinguished types of bi-capped trigonal prismatic columns, the alternative model [1,2] proceeds from the assumption that both columns of the same pair are alternatively modulated by the two modes, whose IC components add within experimental error into a commensurate value. The observed domains are formed as a result of the different bonding within and between the structural layers, separated by Van der Waals gaps, and of the ability of the two modes to be easily interchanged between two symmetry-related columns of the same type. This assumption is in accord with the published LT STM results, which confirm i.a. the presence of both IC modes above 59 K, where according to the previous model only the q1 contribution should be expected. A pair of two alternatively modulated columns of the same type represents the basic structural unit of the CDW ground state. The two modes can formally be replaced by a single inharmonic modulation, obtained by "beating" between the two IC modes.

Nanostructured and Modulated Low-Dimensional Systems

Charge density wave (CDW) ordering in NbSe3 and the structurally related quasi one-dimensional compounds is reconsidered. Since the modulated ground state is characterized by unstable nano-domains, the structural information obtained from diffraction experiments is to be supplemented by some additional information from a method, able to reveal details on a unit cell level. Low-temperature (LT) scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) can resolve both, the local atomic structure and the superimposed charge density modulation. It is shown that the established model for NbSe3 with two incommensurate (IC) modes, q1 = (0,0.241,0) and q2 = (0.5,0.260,0.5), locked in at T1=144K and T2=59K and separately confined to two of the three available types of bi-capped trigonal prismatic (BCTP) columns, must be modified. The alternative explanation is based on the existence of modulated layered nano-domains and is in good accord with the available LT STM results. These confirm i.a. the presence of both IC modes above the lower CDW transition temperature. Two BCTP columns, belonging to a symmetry-related pair, are as a rule alternatively modulated by the two modes. Such pairs of columns are ordered into unstable layered nano-domains, whose q1 and q2 sub-layers are easily interchanged. The mutually interchangeable sections of the two unstable IC modes keep a temperature dependent long-range ordering. Both modes can formally be replaced by a single highly inharmonic long-period commensurate CDW.

Tibetan Peregri-nations: Mobility, Incommensurable Nationalisms and (Un)belonging Athwart the Himalayas

Putting into context the sentiment expressed by Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayas that true Tibet is located elsewhere, this essay focuses on an under-commented-upon consequence of Tibetan trans-Himalayan mobilities since 1959: the creation of two incommensurable modes of nationalism. One of these is territorial, the other embodied in the form of the Dalai Lama himself. The result of this dual nationalism has not been mutual compatibility and an increase in potential modes of Tibetan belonging, but mutual interference and a broadened scope for unbelonging. As such, the dispersed spatiality of community it enacts is reminiscent not so much of the romantic, organic unity of Herderian modes of (methodological) nationalism as it is of Heine's experiences of manifold unbelonging and contemporary German-Jewish articulations of a ‘portable homeland’. Ultimately, to reckon with such originary unbelonging, theories of diaspora and mobility must treat concepts of both home and mobility as mixtures of stability and instability, movement and stasis.

Narrative as Inquiry

ABSTRACT The author suggests that all research is narrative. Resituating all research as narrative, as opposed to characterizing narrative as one particular form of inquiry, provides a critical space for rethinking research beyond current dualisms and bifurcations that create boundaries that limit the capacity for dialogue across diverse epistemologies. The contemporary bifurcation of research as either quantitative or qualitative, or as scientific or nonscientific, has resulted in a master narrative of research which assumes incommensurability across paradigms. The author weaves 3 questions through this research: (a) What is lost when narrative and science are constructed as opposing and incommensurable modes of inquiry? (b) How might scholars reconceptualize inquiry outside a binary framework that privileges science? and (c) In what ways can resituating all narrative as inquiry open spaces for dialogue across multiple epistemologies that is the heart of democratic inquiry? The author concludes by suggesting that narrative is not a method, but rather a process of meaning making that encompasses 3 major spheres of inquiry: the scientific (physical), the symbolic (human experience) and the sacred (metaphysical).

Weitwinkel – Nahaufnahme: Zeitperspektiven in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte

AbstractClose‐Ups and Long Shots: Perspectives on Time in the History of Science. In the last decade, historians of science have shown a growing interest in the question of time. Especially when looking at the huge amount of valuable work performed within the methodological frames of microhistory, experimental and social history of science, the question has come up how to re‐integrate ‘longue‐durée‐perspectives’ into historiography of science. The Society for History of Science has dedicated its 45th symposion (1 to 3 Mai 2008) in Halle to this question. This introduction deals with the problems of different and may be incommensurable modes of ‘being‐in‐time’. How can different perspectives on time be combined, how can “close‐ups”, together with “long shots” (Gianna Pomata) make sense in the history of science? The quest for a narrative transporting the simultaneity of the non‐simultaneous, or, as Koselleck's “Zeitschichten” could be translated, of different layers of time, may start with a criticism of the homogeneous and empty time (Benjamin) and its colonizing connotations, or, with re‐examining historiographical concepts of discontinuity (e.g. scientific revolutions, breaks, eras and epochs) and their relationship to concepts of continuity. Recent accounts in the history of science have insisted on the non‐disposability (Unverfügbarkeit) of historical events, on their contingency. And this is possibly an effect of the different time‐structures of the objects of historiography.

Two Masquerades and their Spec(tac)ular Effects in Mary Robinson’s Walsingham

This article examines Mary Robinson’s novel Walsingham (1797) from a Lacanian perspective. By offering readings of the novel’s two masquerade scenes from its narrator’s perspective within the imaginary order, and then tracing his confusion into the symbolic, this essay will seek to explain how (and why) Walsingham makes a spectacle of himself as he enters the very scene of social spectacle. We will find that Walsingham’s lingering in the imaginary—a product of his having made a series of specular identifications—establishes the conditions of his further humiliation even as it establishes the conditions for his eventual entry into the symbolic order. In attempting to forestall sexuation and even derive a certain enjoyment from its forestallment, Walsingham in effect reinforces the phallus and eventually bows to its demands. I argue that Walsingham dramatizes a transition between incommensurate modes of experience, that much of the novel’s plot stems from Walsingham’s entrapment in the imaginary, and that the novel is more invested in establishing characters within normative sexuated positions than enacting any sort of destabilizing gender trouble. Robinson’s novel reveals the force of the patriarchy (despite its unnaturalness) and suggests that sexual, gendered, and economic experience are interlaced through desire. The novel especially suggests that the subject is formed through the experience of the spectacle, and it deploys the entanglements of spectacle so that subjective experience can be seen to reorganize itself in the face of pressures political and social.

Quantum spin excitations in Yb 4As 3 under magnetic field

Inelastic neutron scattering experiments under magnetic field were performed on the one-dimensional quantum antiferromagnet Yb 4As 3. When a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the Yb 3 + chain, the material exhibits a gap-opening phenomenon due to the induced staggered field originated from the Dzyaloshinsky–Moriya interaction. It was confirmed that the spectrum remains gapless when a magnetic field is applied parallel to the Yb 3 + chain. Clear evidence for the incommensurate mode which is predicted by the theories was found.

The field-induced soliton phase of CuGeO 3

The quasi-1D S=1/2 antiferromagnet CuGeO 3 undergoes a spin–Peierls transition to a dimerised singlet quantum ground state, with S=1 carrying pairs of domain walls as elementary excitations. Applying a large magnetic field, the domain walls—solitons—can be condensed into the ground state, forming a static incommensurate soliton lattice, which has been investigated by neutron scattering. The static soliton structure was found to be in good accordance to field theoretical and numerical calculations, while a low energy incommensurate mode is interpreted as a gapped phason. We anticipate that theoretical description of this and higher energy excitations will provide general insight to the effect of structural fluctuations on correlated electron systems.

Georg Simmel and the Masculinity of Modernity

Current evaluations of Simmel’s theoretical writings on men, women and modernity have read these too generously, relying on a curate’s egg motif culling the good parts from the bad parts. The good parts are judged insightful and prescient, revealing the workings of a sociological imagination and even anticipating elements of contemporary feminist epistemology. The bad parts reveal the unfortunate incursion of ideological baggage or blinkered romanticism that periodically surface and impede the productive workings of the sociological imagination. A more astute reading is proposed here: one which recuperates the bad parts as symptomatic of the workings of Simmel’s philosophical imagination where he crafts a deep ontology of gender, in the form of an a priori, absolute duality of incommensurate modes of male and female being. This deep ontology of gender fatefully consigns woman to the wastelands of his philosophical imagination, whilst releasing man, and man alone, into the more fertile and productive workings of his sociological imagination. Hence, Simmel constructs a masculine ontology of the social. This is induced by Simmel’s ontological grounding of the objective in the male and by the ‘radical dualism’ he recommends as a more women-friendly alternative to ‘relative dualism’.

Generalized instability of periodic traveling waves in anharmonic monatomic chains

We study the stability of periodic traveling waves in the quadratic-quartic (Fermi-Pasta-Ulam), the Lennard-Jones and the Morse monatomic chains. We have found that, with the only exception of zone boundary modes in the two last chains, all traveling commensurate modes are unstable. For zone boundary modes we study their stability spectra and the scaling behavior at the instability threshold. From the stability of many other commensurate modes we find that the stability eigenvalues behave continuously as a function of wavelength, indicating that stability is not recovered for incommensurate modes.

Frustration and absence of long range order on the corner sharing-tetrahedron lattice within mean field theory (abstract)

The metal atoms in the pyrochlore system of compounds (A2B2O7, where A and B are metals) form an infinite 3D network of corner sharing tetrahedra with cubic symmetry. For antiferromagnetic nearest neighbor interactions and only B atoms magnetic, there is a very high degree of frustration, and no long range order is predicted in the absence of further neighbor interactions. Mean field calculations for n-component classical vector spins, show that the wave vector dependent susceptibility diverges, at the same temperature Tc, for 2N normal modes of the system where N is the number of unit cells. In some cases further neighbor interactions will stabilize the q=0 or incommensurate modes. A comparison will be made with long range order known to exist in the pyrochlore form of FeF3.

Mean-field approach to magnetic ordering in highly frustrated pyrochlores.

The metal atoms in the pyrochlore system of compounds (${\mathit{A}}_{2}$${\mathit{B}}_{2}$${\mathrm{O}}_{7}$, where A and B are metals) form an infinite three-dimensional network of corner-sharing tetrahedra with cubic symmetry. For antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor interactions and only B atoms magnetic, there is a very high degree of frustration, and no long-range order is predicted in the absence of further neighbor interactions. A general form of the mean-field theory is developed for dealing with n-component classical vector spins on any lattice. Calculations for the pyrochlore problem show that the Fourier modes of the system are completely degenerate for all wave vectors in the first Brillouin zone. In some cases further neighbor interactions will select the q=0 or incommensurate modes. A comparison is made with long-range order known to exist in the pyrochlore form of ${\mathrm{FeF}}_{3}$. The highly degenerate ordered phases of more complicated systems, where both A and B atoms are magnetic, will also be discussed. A comparison is made of the corner-sharing tetrahedral lattice and the more familiar stacked triangular antiferromagnets, with regard to the degree of frustration in both systems. Results for the Kagom\'e lattice and the square lattice with crossings, which are the two-dimensional analogs of the corner-sharing tetrahedral lattice, are also briefly discussed.