Incompatible Positions Research Articles

A question of scale? Lázló Almásy's desert mapping and its postcolonial rewriting

In the wake of postcolonial studies, questions of power and space have gained pivotal significance and geography has become a powerful tool in cultural analysis. However, the simple and metaphorical use of spatial metaphors, such as the cultural appropriation of mapping and cartography, is problematic in so far as it presumes that space is not complex. The understanding of scale in this article thus does not pretend to be either simple or metaphorical, but rather it signifies a ‘circulatory site’, both a ratio used in cartographic practice and a useful tool to discuss the circulation of meaning among imperial and postcolonial discursive practices. Lazlo Almasy was romanticized in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient as a love-driven idealist against the backdrop of the somewhat blurred movement of imperial cartographic practice. By looking at Almasy’s 1930s narratives of desert cartography (Schwimmer in der Wuste [Swimmer in the Desert] and Mit Rommels Armee in Libyen [With Rommel’s Army in Libya]), particularly the quest for the Oasis Zarzura, as well as at the articles published by the Geographical Journal of the Royal Geographical Society from 1933 to 1952, a clear-cut image of a power-driven imperial cartography arises that clashes with Ondaatje’s naive depiction. The article draws on the contradictory constellations of desert cartography to discuss the following themes: 1. the very notion of fluidity in the literary and cultural appropriation of cartography, that allows for a problematic blur between hegemony and emergence; and 2. ‘scale’ as a possible and useful analytical tool for the mediation between these two seemingly incompatible positions.

A question of scale? Lázló Almásy’s desert mapping and its postcolonial rewriting

In the wake of postcolonial studies, questions of power and space have gained pivotal significance and geography has become a powerful tool in cultural analysis. However, the simple and metaphorical use of spatial metaphors, such as the cultural appropriation of mapping and cartography, is problematic in so far as it presumes that space is not complex. The understanding of scale in this article thus does not pretend to be either simple or metaphorical, but rather it signifies a ‘circulatory site’, both a ratio used in cartographic practice and a useful tool to discuss the circulation of meaning among imperial and postcolonial discursive practices. Lázló Almásy was romanticized in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient as a love-driven idealist against the backdrop of the somewhat blurred movement of imperial cartographic practice. By looking at Almásy’s 1930s narratives of desert cartography (Schwimmer in der Wüste [Swimmer in the Desert] and Mit Rommels Armee in Libyen [With Rommel’s Army in Libya]), particularly the quest for the Oasis Zarzura, as well as at the articles published by the Geographical Journal of the Royal Geographical Society from 1933 to 1952, a clear-cut image of a power-driven imperial cartography arises that clashes with Ondaatje’s naive depiction. The article draws on the contradictory constellations of desert cartography to discuss the following themes: 1. the very notion of fluidity in the literary and cultural appropriation of cartography, that allows for a problematic blur between hegemony and emergence; and 2. ‘scale’ as a possible and useful analytical tool for the mediation between these two seemingly incompatible positions.

Negotiate to Get What You Want, So Everybody Wins

Negotiate to Get What You Want, So Everybody Wins

Managing Counterinformings: An Interactional Practice for Soliciting Information that Facilitates Reconciliation of Speakers' Incompatible Positions

This article is a conversation-analytic examination of situations where one speaker responds to another in a way that publicly exposes that the two speakers hold an incompatible position on a same matter, and in a way that claims that the respondent holds epistemic authority over the matter. These types of responsive actions (i.e., counterinformings) solicit accepting or rejecting responses, and normally include information (e.g., an explanation) that facilitates the other speaker’s ability to reconcile the speakers’ positional incompatibility. Withholding such information from a counterinforming can be an interactional control tactic. This article focuses on these types of withholding counterinformings and their management by the other speaker. Specifically, this article describes an interactional practice used to solicit reconciliatory information.

The special safeguard fiasco in the WTO: the perils of inadequate analysis and negotiation

AbstractThe July 2008 attempt by a group of ministers to agree on modalities for the WTO's Doha Round broke down in part because they could not agree on a proposed ‘Special Safeguard Mechanism’ (SSM) for developing countries in agriculture. This paper offers a corrective to the conventional story that the breakdown was due to a simple conflict of interests over the SSM between the United States and India. The term SSM was first used in a Doha Round text in 2004, but neither the principles nor the commercial implications had ever been discussed by ministers before July 2008. The conceptual origins of the SSM go back to proposals in the late 1990s for a ‘Development Box’, but by the time of the ministerial, negotiators had been unable to agree on the purpose of the safeguard, or how it would work, including the agricultural products it would cover, how it would be triggered, the remedies (additional tariffs) allowed, or the transparency requirements for its operation. The SSM was therefore one of the least ‘stabilized’ parts of the text placed before ministers in July 2008. Members were far from reaching a consensual understanding of the SSM, which resulted in a fiasco that might have been avoided. Ministers should not have been asked to engage in a poorly prepared discussion of a sensitive issue, because inevitably they staked out incompatible positions. Members may subsequently find it difficult to back down.

The Special Safeguard Fiasco in the WTO: The Perils of Inadequate Analysis and Negotiation

The July 2008 attempt by a group of ministers to agree on modalities for the WTO's Doha Round broke down in part because they could not agree on a proposed Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) for developing countries in agriculture. This paper offers a corrective to the conventional story that the breakdown was due to a simple conflict of interests over the SSM between the United States and India. The term SSM was first used in a Doha Round text in 2004, but neither the principles nor the commercial implications had ever been discussed by ministers before July 2008. The conceptual origins of the SSM go back to proposals in the late 1990s for a Development Box, but by the time of the ministerial, negotiators had been unable to agree on the purpose of the safeguard, or how it would work, including the agricultural products it would cover, how it would be triggered, the remedies (additional tariffs) allowed, or the transparency requirements for its operation. The SSM was therefore one of the least stabilized parts of the text placed before ministers in July 2008. Members were far from reaching a shared understanding of the SSM, which resulted in a fiasco that might have been avoided. Ministers should not have been asked to engage in a poorly prepared discussion of a sensitive issue, because inevitably they staked out incompatible positions. Members may subsequently find it difficult to back down.

The ontology of conflict

This paper aims at clarifying the ontology of conflict as a preliminary for constructing a conflict mapping guide (Wehr 1979). After recalling the main definitions elaborated in different disciplines, the meaning of conflict is elicited through semantic analysis based on corpus evidence. Two fundamental meanings emerge: conflict as an interpersonal hostility between two or more human subjects, and conflict as a propositional incompatibility. These two states of affairs are significantly related, because the latter tends to generate the former whenever the incompatible positions are embodied by as many parties who feel personally questioned. The semantic analysis allows to sketch the ontology of the conflictual situation that can serve to generate a conflict mapping guide, and to face several crucial aspects that are relevant both to the study and to the management of conflicts. In the former perspective, it allows for a comparison of the situation of interpersonal conflict with the seemingly similar process of controversy.

Generic Rivalry Strategies in Business Networks: Towards a Conceptualization

This paper discusses rivalry as a process of occupying incompatible positions within business networks. Rivalry is linked to different forms of strategizing as they unfold in stable and dynamic business contexts and a framework of four different types of rivalry is suggested. Furthermore, propositions with respect to under what business conditions these types of rivalry are likely to be found are proposed. Implications for management and research are discussed.

中國傳統身體觀與當代墮胎難題

中國傳統身體觀與當代墮胎難題

Retail Productivity and Land-Use Planning: Negotiating ‘Joined-up’ Retail Planning Policy

The author examines some recent changes in government policy in England relating to planning control over new retail development. In so doing, he investigates tensions between the government's overall economic policy and its land-use planning policy, particularly that involving development of large-format stores. The influence of interest groups, through processes of research and lobbying of government departments, is traced. The author then discusses the extent to which seemingly incompatible positions have been resolved in interdepartmental discussion, involving typical ‘British compromises’. One result of this process appears to be the formulation of ambiguous and unclear policies, which may have to be modified again in the near future.

Oscar Wilde’s artificiality and the logic of genuine pluralism

Oscar Wilde’s artificial, nonsensical aesthetic is really a magnificently rigorous and just pluralism. His artificiality of style and wit presents the serious and un‐artificial possibility of things’ being essentially otherwise than they are understood to be in any given standpoint. His aesthetic impact itself consists in a fresh opening of essential or constitutive or ontological spaces or standpoints. But this opening of spaces is thoroughly self‐canceling, and so is also a validation of essential spaces exactly as they are. This validation, then, involves self‐canceling recognition of mutually exclusive “spaces.” The principle at work is that constitutive difference between standpoints involves the meaninglessness of the organizing categories of each position to the others. A position that aims to understand and communicate with incompatible positions must therefore recognize the genuine meaninglessness of its own claims to them, and vice‐versa. In this way, paradoxically, mutually exclusive positions can be related without obscuring their mutual exclusivity. Wilde’s nonsensical aesthetic, as expressed in both his fictional and critical works, is exactly this kind of paradoxical coordination.

Manual asymmetries in bimanual reaching: The influence of spatial compatibility and visuospatial attention

The goal of the present investigation was to explore the possible expression of hemispheric-specific processing during the planning and execution of a bimanual reaching task. Participants (N = 9) completed 80 bimanual reaching movements (requiring simultaneous, bilateral production of arm movements) to peripherally presented targets while selectively attending to either their left or right hand. Further, targets were presented in spatially compatible (ipsilateral to the aiming limb) and incompatible (contralateral to the aiming limb) response contexts. It was found that the left hand exhibited temporal superiority over the right hand in the response planning phase of bimanual reaching, indicating a left hand/right hemisphere advantage in the preparation of a bimanual response. During response execution, and consistent with the view that interhemispheric processing time (Barthelemy & Boulinguez, 2002) or biomechanical constraints (Carey, Hargreaves, & Goodale, 1996) generate temporal delays, longer movement times were observed in response to spatially incompatible target positions. However, no hemisphere-specific benefit was demonstrated for response execution. Based on these findings, we propose lateralized processing is present at the time of response planning (i.e., left hand/right hemisphere processing advantage); however, lateralized specialization appears to be annulled during dynamic execution of a bimanual reaching task.

Britten's Dubious Trysts

Abstract One hypothesis pursued in contemporary queer musicology argues that music provides an arena for reflection on a composer's experience of a marginal sexual identity. The music of Benjamin Britten has furnished material for a recent outpouring of such criticism. Much of this work, however, addresses covert meanings constrained by censorship and directed toward a minority audience of initiates or sympathizers; its impact on Britten reception in general remains unclear. I propose that Britten's music dramatizes a deviant perspective in fundamental ways, resulting in a queer aesthetic whose import extends to all listeners. Britten composes dramas of psychological reorientation from the following elements: the appearance of a stranger, a figure of worldly or spiritual initiation, in opposition to the familiar protagonist; and the setting in a limbo between worlds, making possible uncanny meetings whose vocal exchanges convey erotic knowledge. The confrontation of different perspectives casts the protagonist into disorientation and leads to bonds of identification across incompatible positions. Through the protagonist's perspective, such effects of deviant perception and cross-identification extend to the audience. Britten's queer aesthetic is not so much defiant or antagonistic as Socratic—based on a logic of persuasion and transformative dialogue.

Sex differences in tracking performance in patients with Parkinson's disease

Carey JR, Deskin KA, Josephson KT, Wichmann RL. Sex differences in tracking performance in patients with Parkinson's disease. Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2002;83:972-7. Objective: To examine whether Parkinson's disease affects men and women differently, relative to age-matched controls, in manual tracking. Design: Cross-sectional exploratory study. Setting: Ambulatory activity center. Participants: Ten men and 10 women with Parkinson's disease; 10 men and 10 women age-matched controls. Interventions: Patients tracked a sinewave target on a computer monitor in stimulus-response compatible (finger extension/flexion in vertical) or incompatible (horizontal) conditions. Main Outcome Measure: Accuracy Index (AI) score on finger movement tracking tests. Results: With data collapsed across sexes, AI scores were significantly higher for control subjects compared with subjects with Parkinson's disease in compatible (P<.001) and incompatible (P<.001) positions. With data partitioned out across sexes, control men tracked significantly higher than men with Parkinson's disease in compatible (P=.004) and incompatible (P<.001) positions, but control women did not track significantly different from women with Parkinson's disease in either position. Control men tracked significantly higher than control women in compatible (P=.003) and incompatible (P=.001) positions, but men with Parkinson's disease did not track significantly different from women with Parkinson's disease in either position. Conclusion: Parkinson's disease affects men and women disproportionately in manual tracking. Comparisons between subjects with Parkinson's disease and controls in spatial skill should include sex as a factor. More research is needed to confirm these findings. © 2002 by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Political dialogue in Myanmar

It has been ten months since representatives of Myanmar's military regime – the State Peace and Development Council – and pro–democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi held the first in a series of secret talks. Although contacts have continued, and some 200 of around 2,000 political prisoners have been released, little else has happened. The lack of progress, and the incompatible positions of those involved in the talks, have inevitably reinforced suspicions that the SPDC has merely mounted a tactical response to regional diplomatic pressure and the failings of an economy in dire need of foreign aid and investment.

&lt;b&gt;Estudo das Implicações na Postura Sentada Durante Análise Microscópica em um Laboratório de Universidade&lt;/b&gt;

Work obtains better results, at good environmental conditions. Learning too. This work aimed to analyze the posture discomfort complaints from students of first period of the Nursing course of Universidade Paranaense, in the 2001 year, sat on stools, watching microscopes. It was done two evaluations: about 80 students, using the adapted of Corlett & Manenica (1986) Human Body Diagram, verifying ache points. Qualitatively, it was percept that there is more complains about backache. After it, the neck, the shoulders and the hip was object of complains. The other evaluation analyzed the lumbar and cervical region curve angle of sixteen students: like results, we found 37,5% of the students with curves in their lumbar region up to 20º; 56,25% with 21 to 30º and 6,25% presenting angles above 30º. In the cervical region, 18,5% presented flexibility up to 30º, and 81,25% an inclination (nod) above 30º. In this study, through an ergonomic vision, was possible verify the troubles caused by the discord in the interface between the student and the furniture, justifying the overload on spin and the musculature caused by incompatible positions with the muscle-skeleton system. Keywords: Posture, Discomfort, Forniture

Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism

Moral realismandantirealist-expressivismare of course incompatible positions. They disagree fundamentally about the nature of moral states of mind, the existence of moral states of affairs and properties, and the nature and role of moral discourse. The central realist view is that a person who has or expresses a moral thought is thereby in, or thereby expresses, acognitivestate of mind; she has or expresses abeliefthat represents a moral state of affairs in a way that might be accurate or inaccurate. The view of antirealist-expressivism is that such a person is in, or expresses, aconativestate of mind, one that consists in a certain kind of attitude or motivational stance toward something, such as an action or a person. Realism holds that moral thoughts have truth conditions and that in some cases these truth conditions are satisfied so that our moral thoughts are true. Antirealist-expressivism holds, to a first approximation, that the distinctive moral content of a moral thought does not have truth conditions.

Freeing up the subject: Tension between traditional masculinity and involved fatherhood through communication about sexuality with adolescents

An Australian study of communication among young people aged 12-14 and their parents suggested an explanation for difficulties experienced by fathers in communicating about sexuality with their children: Namely, the positioning of fathers within the discourses of both traditional masculinity and involved fatherhood. These incompatible subject positions frequently led to problems, confusion, or withdrawal from overt communication about sexuality. In-depth interviews were conducted with 51 people (19 adolescents, 18 mothers and 14 fathers) from 19 families. Parents discussed experiences of communicating about sexuality during their childhood as well as in their current families, allowing insight into at least three generations. In spite of the dominance of traditional masculinity, there was evidence that fathers struggled also to position themselves as men who valued relationships and endorsed co-operation between the sexes. This paper highlights barriers to increased connection and intimacy for fathers who appear to desire such relationships with their children.

Self-Reflections on Beyond the Great Story: The Ambivalent Author as Ironic Interlocutor

Self-Reflections on Beyond the Great Story: The Ambivalent Author as Ironic Interlocutor Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. (bio) It is truly flattering to have such thoughtful scholars read so carefully one’s book. Their diverse comments prove once again the basic truth of reader-response or reception theory: the same text is read in varying ways by different scholars. As a corollary of this principle: no text can be all things to all persons and all interpretive communities (in spite of an author’s hopes). The three commentaries individually and collectively raise, and at times exemplify, significant issues and problems common to discussions of modernism and postmodernism in relation to historical practice. My book argues that these complicated issues and their implicated problems in this debate are as important to working, that is practicing, teachers, writers, filmmakers, archivists, and museum exhibitors as they are to those with a general theoretical interest in how to represent the past as (a) history. I propose in this forum to discuss how this mixture of theory and problems of practice apply to Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse as authorial artifact. What is the irony of postmodernist theorizing that inspires Beyond The Great Story? The chief dilemma of postmodernist theorizing for the historian in my opinion is how to do history when all is “nothing but history.” 1 At the heart of postmodernism according to some scholars is the radical historicization of all intellectual categories and disciplinary practices, including those of historical representation itself. Since, as F. R. [End Page 365] Ankersmit argues, postmodernism is not “content to stop halfway” in its historicism, postmodernist theorizing deconstructs all current efforts to construe and represent the past as history at the same time as it privileges, even demands, a thorough-going historicization in and of all disciplines. 2 To assert under these circumstances that all should be historicized does not solve the problem of how to represent the past in a classroom, book, museum exhibit, or film. Does Beyond the Great Story advocate a postmodern approach to historical textualization? Reviewers have differed on whether I have “converted” in my old age to postmodernism or still harbor the high and late modernist orientations exhibited respectively in A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (1969) and The White Man’s Indian (1978). No matter how convoluted the evolution of my book’s text, I always intended the volume as a guide to the controversies over old and new claims of how best to pursue Clio’s promise to record and exhort. Although the book turned out far longer than I ever intended, the general purpose and thrust remain the same: a handbook examining the controversies over modernist and postmodernist approaches to practicing and representing history today. That the issues are complex and the problems resistant to easy solution complicate any simple exposition, especially according to traditional standards of English style which embody an Anglophone common-sense philosophy of language opposed to the basic premises of a self-conscious postmodernism. I did not intend to maintain a unified, consistent position in the book. First, I tried to represent the mutually incompatible positions modernists and postmodernists take on such basic issues as text and context, politics and paradigms, constructionism and historical representation, and authority and objectivity. Second, I am ambivalent on some of the issues myself. Perhaps because I have lived through and tried to understand too many academic fashions, I am sympathetic to aspects of both late and postmodernist positions. Both the inclusion of positions with which I disagree and my ambivalence on some of the most important issues probably accounts for my authorial/rhetorical stance as the ironic interlocutor in the book. I firmly believe, however, that both late modernist self-conscious constructionism and postmodernist reflexive deconstructionism demand new forms of historical representation different from those customary in the discipline. 3 [End Page 366] Is Beyond the Great Story itself a postmodernist history? This is a matter of genre if that word refers to the conventions one or more interpretive communities use to decode an artifact in order to read it as a text and establish its meaning. This is a matter of the relationship between...

Two Incompatible Positions in the Challenge Against the `Individual Subject of Modernity'

This paper discusses the theoretical status of human beings in the therapeutic sciences of modern societies. The concept of the `individual' was shaped, and achieved an unsurpassable status in scientific discourse, during the 17th and 18th centuries. Likewise specialized disciplines have appeared to codify its `normal' and `deviant' conducts. Since the 1960s, there have arisen certain critical accounts challenging the existence of such an individual in social theory. I examine two perspectives questioning the status of the `individual' in administrative practices at institutions of confinement: the anti-psychiatry movement and the post-structuralist critique of `reason'. This paper contrasts these positions through the work of two exemplary thinkers (Goffman and Foucault), and reveals the impossibility of reconciliation, owing in the main to the very definition of the individual subject in theoretical discourse.