Notion Of Containment Research Articles

Containment and beneficence in psychoanalytically informed social work research

This article adds to literature addressing research beneficence from a psychoanalytic perspective, providing reflections focussing on notions of containment and container-contained dynamics as derived from the Kleinian/post-Kleinian tradition of psychoanalysis. It does so by reference to the accounts of participants in a study which explored how professionals working in local authority children’s services in England experience the suffering of parents. In this research, a psychoanalytically informed interview approach was used, and space was provided for participants to reflect on the experience of participation. The variable representation of this experience is considered along with the experience of the researcher carrying out the interviews. Questions are raised about using the language of containment in the context of this research approach and whether this may say more about a researcher’s desire to be helpful to participants and less about participants’ actual experiences (and a genuinely psychoanalytically based understanding of them).

Racialized Technics and the Black Virtual in "Random Acts of Flyness"

By defining race according to its “speed of change” and “sliding value,” Beth Coleman’s relational approach powerfully re-conceptualized race as a topological object rather than biologically essential. In a topological model race is a continuum characterized by folds and involutions, which is to say, the experience of racialization is marked by elastic and unpredictable spatial and temporal proximities that may prove to be sustaining or fatal. Reviewing the influence of Coleman’s essay, and the theme “Art and the Technicity of Race” more broadly, I examine how recent iterations of care by Christina Sharpe and Tiffany Lethabo King depart from Coleman’s emphasis upon the disruptive potential of speed by advocating for phenomenological practices of “listening for, feeling for, and noticing,” “Black livingness” amidst the social death of anti-Blackness. Sharpe and King advocate for down-tempo techniques serving an attuned a readied perception, a phenomenology of Black proximity, geared toward feeling out the present carefully. In this paper I register hesitations about aspirations for becoming pure mobility by asking, instead, how a phenomenology of attending engenders “care as force” and how this force is formalized in Black visual art aesthetics.
 In Random Acts of Flyness Terence Nance and a host of collaborators mobilize the minimally determined form of sketch comedy to model acts of attending, listening, and noticing Black livingness across a plurality of perspectives in ever-shifting scenes that blend social realism, musical fantasies, and science fiction. As tonally disparate as individual scenes may be, Nance folds his world together with joints and swerves positing a capacious and intersectional topology of Blackness replete with temporal collapses and shifting feelings of intimacy and alienation. Contrary to Coleman’s claim that agency for racialized subjects is akin to the “precious” assemblage of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Nance’s capacious Blackness challenges notions of containment and austerity. Random Acts of Flyness presents songs, interviews, and scenes from Black and Brown, cis gendered, queer, and feminist perspectives, to create mutable proximities of Blacknesses through the sketch form.
 Building on Aria Dean’s work, I examine how Random Acts of Flyness aestheticizes Blackness in/as circulation to illustrate how Nance helps us think about technics in terms of collectivity rather than valorizing individual becomings and pure, technicized mobility. Random Acts speculates about how and what Blackness connects; what is transmitted in the circulation of collective being. In the process, it fabulates a capacious, intersectional image of black plurality that exists in excess of a hegemonic Black subject and stands in critical opposition to anti-Blackness. Nance’s aim is not to render “Black collective being” fixed and legible for non- Black audiences but, following Dean, Random Acts of Flyness, “points toward the extra- ontological black (non)subject,” inquiring into the ways in which individual racialized subjects situate themselves in “circulating representations [of Blackness]: a network that includes all the bodies that bear its markers.” Rather than locate emancipatory agency in becoming-mobile, Nance’s project models “Black care” by attending, listening, and noticing Black livingness through a capacious aesthetic.

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage other.
 The shell of the captivity story is as old as America and relates closely to the Western and to the frontier myth, from which the Western emerged. What inexorably links the Western and all zombie films is the notion of containment. Whereas the Western sought to contain the American Other, all zombie films ask, instead, what happens if the other breaks through the proverbial gates. In other words, what if containment fails?

The Roots of the Notion of Containment in Theories of Consequence

Abstract In medieval theories of consequence, we encounter several criteria of validity. One of these is known as the containment criterion: a consequence is valid when the consequent is contained or understood in the antecedent. The containment criterion was formulated most frequently in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but it can be found in earlier writings as well. In The Tradition of the Topics in the Middle Ages, N.J. Green-Pedersen claimed that this criterion originated with Boethius. In this article, the author shows that a notion of containment is indeed present in Boethius, but is not used to define or describe the relation between antecedent and consequent, i.e., the relation of consequence, as Green-Pedersen asserted. The author then offers two interpretations of the notion of containment that are present in Boethius – a metaphysical and a semantic interpretation – and shows how these relate to the containment criterion.

“Containing” tuberculosis, perpetuating stigma: the materiality of N95 respirator masks

This paper analyses the role of the N95 respirator mask distributed by state-funded treatment programmes to patients who are undergoing treatment for different forms of tuberculosis (TB). Although mask-wearing protocol aims to physically “contain” TB, and thus stem the airborne spread of disease, this paper looks at the other properties N95 masks possess as social and material objects. Drawing upon ethnographic research undertaken in Khayelitsha — the largest township in Cape Town, South Africa — the materiality of the masks provides insight into patient behaviour towards mask wearing and stigma. Using the theoretical construct of “containment,” I show that N95 masks contain far more than just TB bacilli, saliva and warm breath. Data evidenced different notions of containment associated with masks, and mask wearing produced unintended effects that had significant consequences for TB patients outside of clinical spaces. By capturing the unintended social properties of these masks, this paper lends valuable insight not only into global health efforts to prevent TB but also into the often significant implications for TB-affected individuals.

Complexity bounds for container functors and comonads

Abbott et al.'s notion of containers characterises a subset of parametric data types which can be described by a set of shapes and set of positions for each shape. This captures common data types such as tuples, lists, trees, arrays, and graphs. Various useful categorical structures can be derived for containers given additional information. For example, directed containers give rise to container comonads (Ahman et al.). Containers provide a useful reasoning principle and asbtraction mechanism for programming. This paper studies the performance characteristics of traversal schemes over containers, modelled by functor and comonad structures. A cost model for container transformations is defined from which complexity bounds for the operations of container functors and comonads are derived. These bounds suggest optimisations for programs structured using these idioms. The abstract interface provided by the syntax of containers and category theory provides complexity bounds and subsequent optimisations that are implementation agnostic (machine free).

Morphological length and prosodically defective morphemes by Eva Zimmermann

Reviewed by: Morphological length and prosodically defective morphemes by Eva Zimmermann Anthi Revithiadou Morphological length and prosodically defective morphemes. By Eva Zimmermann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 350. ISBN 9780198747321. $99 (Hb). Eva Zimmermann offers an elegant and meticulous monograph on morphological length-manipulation (MLM) phenomena, that is, length alternations bound to morphological contexts. The work is based on the general claim that all nonconcatenative processes—additive and subtractive alike—arise from an ‘enriched notion of affix’ (1) that involves prosodic nodes as primitives. The main argumentation in the book aims at establishing that all morphology is additive, a claim that is empirically supported by an impressively broad typological survey that includes representative data sets for attested morphological length-manipulating patterns culled from sixty-two languages. Furthermore, the author argues that MLM operations are best analyzed in a theoretical framework named prosodically defective morphemes (PDM), which, in addition to morphemic prosodic nodes, includes a rather rich representational apparatus, a constraint-based computational component that regulates the integration of such prosodic nodes into larger structures, and a handful of conditions that impose restrictions on gen. PDM not only succeeds in predicting all attested patterns and systematically excluding imaginable yet unattested ones, but also circumvents several problems encountered by alternative accounts. More importantly, it makes some insightful predictions about, for instance, the possible interaction and coexistence of additive and subtractive operations within the same language. Z sets an ambitious goal: to show that ‘all kinds of subtractive MLM can be derived if one takes into account the full range of prosodic nodes and their possible (defective) integration into a base’ (34). This way she challenges the shared assumption that subtractive phenomena have a processual character and delivers a model that is consistent with an item-and-arrangement (Hockett 1954) morphology framework and the basic tenets of its more sophisticated version, namely distributed morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993). The core idea, defended throughout the book, is that nonconcatenative morphology (i.e. addition and subtraction) is epiphenomenal [End Page 475] and results from the affixation of morphemic prosodic nodes. In order to achieve this goal, Z develops an extended version of generalized nonlinear affixation (Bermúdez-Otero 2012), in which prosodic nodes (μ, σ, Φ) are treated as independent phonological objects related to each other via association lines and not by projection, as standardly assumed in the prosodic hierarchy (Nespor & Vogel 1986). A representative example of additive suffixation is presented in 1a. In Wolof, the reversive suffix /-i/ is lexically specified to trigger gemination (pp. 5–6). Under the PDM framework, gemination is caused by a floating morphemic mora that escorts /-i/ and, more specifically, by its integration into the structure through association to the final root consonant. Subtraction, attested with the causative suffix /-al/ (1b) in the same language (p. 8), is taken to be the surface result of the integration of an underlyingly mora-less vowel. That is, the vowel of the suffix /-al/, which lacks its own mora, takes over the mora of the preceding moraic consonant, yielding the surface effect of degemination. (1) Based on Prince and Smolensky’s (1993) notion of containment (‘every element of the input must be contained in the output’) and following previous work on the topic (e.g. van Oostendorp 2006, Revithiadou 2007), Z develops a comprehensive theory that consists of three key components: colored phonological objects, association relations, and the constraints that regulate their mapping. First, she argues that all phonological objects that are part of the underlying representation of a morpheme share the same information about morphological affiliation: that is, they have the same color (indicated as a subscribed symbol, e.g. V○, C●, μ□, etc.). A phonological object’s morphological color cannot be deleted or changed, although it can be enriched (as explained below in the discussion of color reflection and fusion). Second, remaining faithful to an extended version of containment that requires the whole input (e.g. segments, features, prosodic nodes, and their association relations) to be reconstructable from the output at any time, Z identifies four different types of association relations between phonological objects. Morphological association lines (2a) are underlyingly present and can never be erased; they may...

Containment and ‘rational health’: Moran and psychoanalysis

AbstractThe paper focuses on Richard Moran's account (in Authority and Estrangement) of the distinction between attitudes that meet, and alternatively fail to meet, his transparency criterion for what he calls rational health, and compare this with the psychoanalytic distinction between contained and uncontained states of mind. On the face of it, Moran's distinction appears to be a useful theoretical deepening of the psychoanalytic distinction. On closer examination, however, it appears that (a) rational health is a more demanding standard than containment, so the rationally unhealthy contains much that is mentally (quite) healthy; and (b) more seriously, some states that meet the “transparency” condition are manifestly mentally unhealthy. So transparency needs to be supplemented by an independently understood notion of containment to approach a realistic norm of mental health/ill health.

Hypergraph containers

We develop a notion of containment for independent sets in hypergraphs. For every \(r\)-uniform hypergraph \(G\), we find a relatively small collection \({\mathcal C}\) of vertex subsets, such that every independent set of \(G\) is contained within a member of \({\mathcal C}\), and no member of \({\mathcal C}\) is large; the collection, which is in various respects optimal, reveals an underlying structure to the independent sets. The containers offer a straightforward and unified approach to many combinatorial questions concerned (usually implicitly) with independence. With regard to colouring, it follows that simple \(r\)-uniform hypergraphs of average degree \(d\) have list chromatic number at least \((1/(r-1)^2+o(1))\log _r d\). For \(r=2\) this improves a bound due to Alon and is tight. For \(r\ge 3\), previous bounds were weak but the present inequality is close to optimal. In the context of extremal graph theory, it follows that, for each \(\ell \)-uniform hypergraph \(H\) of order \(k\), there is a collection \({\mathcal C}\) of \(\ell \)-uniform hypergraphs of order \(n\) each with \(o(n^k)\) copies of \(H\), such that every \(H\)-free \(\ell \)-uniform hypergraph of order \(n\) is a subgraph of a hypergraph in \({\mathcal C}\), and \(\log |{\mathcal C}|\le c n^{\ell -1/m(H)}\log n\) where \(m(H)\) is a standard parameter (there is a similar statement for induced subgraphs). This yields simple proofs, for example, for the number of \(H\)-free hypergraphs, and for the sparsity theorems of Conlon–Gowers and Schacht. A slight variant yields a counting version of the KŁR conjecture. Likewise, for systems of linear equations the containers supply, for example, bounds on the number of solution-free sets, and the existence of solutions in sparse random subsets. Balogh, Morris and Samotij have independently obtained related results.

Great circles: the analysis of a concept in mathematics and poetry

This article looks at analysis of concepts as a search for conditions of intelligibility, where intelligibility is recognized to be a value. Choosing the circle as an exemplary concept, we trace the discovery of a quadratic polynomial equation, the sine and cosine functions, and the nth roots of unity ‘inside’ the circle, as mathematicians discover new conditions of intelligibility for the abstract notion of a circle. Then we trace the uses of circles in poems by Marlowe, Shakespeare and Keats. What we discover ‘inside’ the circle there is of course quite different (a devil, a planet, a sleeping girl), for what the poet seeks are really conditions of the meaningfulness (intelligibility) of human life. The notion of containment and of intelligibility changes as we move from the investigation of mathematical problems to that of problematic human beings. Still, the circle remains as part of experience and part of our best conceptualization of the natural world.

The Spaces of Containment: Valérie Jouve's Urban Portraits

This article analyses the complex dynamics between the human body and the urban environment in the work of French photographer Valérie Jouve. Focussing on a number of works drawn from the series Les Personnages and Les Façades, I propose the notion of containment to be crucial to the study of Jouve's urban portraits. I first approach it as a matter of containment of the human body by the civic and architectural structures of the city, arguing that Jouve renders visible the usually hidden mechanisms of such containment. This leads me to consider the question of boundaries and the relationship of the urban centre to its periphery, which, in the context of France, is bound up with narratives of social stratification. In the final part of the article I consider Jouve's photography as the space of representation, contained by the photographic frame, with theoretical discourse on the tableau providing the main analytical framework.

The (Social) Construction of Information Security

While the philosophical foundations of information security have been unexamined, there is an implicit philosophy of what protection of information is. This philosophy is based on the notion of containment, taken from analogies with things that offer physical security (e.g., buildings, safes, fences). I argue that this implicit philosophy is unsatisfactory in the current age of increased connectivity, and provide an alternative foundation. I do so from a constructionist point of view, where the coevolution of social and technical mechanisms is seen as the source of the security of an information system, rather than rational design choices only. I employ the concept of causal insulation from system theory in order to give an account of the fundamental characteristics of information security research. This generates definitions that can be used for philosophically informed discussions on the protection of information in new systems.

A repair of Frege’s theory of thoughts

Frege’s writings contain arguments for the thesis (i) that a thought expressed by a sentence S is a structured object whose composition pictures the composition of S, and for the thesis (ii) that a thought is an unstructured object. I will argue that Frege’s reasons for both (i) and (ii) are strong. Frege’s explanation of the difference in sense between logically equivalent sentences rests on assumption (i), while Frege’s claim that the same thought can be decomposed differently makes (ii) plausible. Thoughts are supposed to do work that requires that they be structured and work that requires that they be unstructured. But this cannot be! While the standard response to this problem is to reject either (i) or (ii), I propose a charitable repair in the spirit of Frege’s theory that accepts both. The key idea can be found in Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic(BL, GGA). Frege argues that the thought expressed by a sentence is determined by the truth-conditions that can be derived from the semantic axioms for the sentence constituents. The fact that the same axiomatic truth-condition can be derived in different ways from different semantic axioms suggests a Fregean solution of the dilemma: A thought is a type that is instantiated by all sequences of senses (decomposed thoughts) that have the same axiomatic truth-conditions. This allows for multiple decomposability of the same thought (for different decomposed thoughts can have the same axiomatic truth-conditions) and for a notion of containment (the decomposed thought contains those senses whose semantic axioms are needed in the derivation of the truth-conditions). My proposal combines the virtues of (i) and (ii) without inheriting their vices.

What may words say, or what may words not say. A corpus-based approach to linguistic action

In this paper I present an empirical approach to the analysis of the way English speakers conceptualize the communicative process in English. Most linguistic expressions about language in English are surface manifestations of what Reddy termed the "conduit metaphor". Reddy's model implies several interrelated cognitive associations: words are conceived as containers in which speakers introduce their ideas and send them to listeners, who will take these ideas out of these containers. Central to this model is the metaphor words are containers. It has also been claimed that there are other ways of perspectivizing the language process apart from the notion of containment (Vanparys 1995). In fact, Reddy himself notes that there is approximately a 30% of metalanguage not based on the conduit metaphor. The pervasiveness of the container metaphor would reasonably be most directly tested in expressions with the lexeme word. In order to measure what falls inside and outside these containers I carry out a corpus analysis of the lexeme word excerpted from the British National Corpus (BNC). The systematic evidence obtained from a large but delimited corpus gives us more reliable information about the frequency and use of this metaphor than an intuition based analysis or an arbitrary search in multi-source corpora.

THE SHAPING OF EXPERIENCE

ABSTRACT This paper explores how we sometimes manage, and often fail, to communicate the ‘feel’ of live experience. Since poetry makes a craft and vocation of this pursuit, the writings of poets are brought to bear on the process. I introduce the idea of containing forms, using the term containment in its everyday sense. My argument, however, owes much to Winnicott, Stern and Bion, Winnicott's transitional object exemplifying an early containing structure, and Stern's ‘attunement’ suggesting ways that later containing structures might arise out of mother-infant dialogue. Bion's more specific notions of containment and transformation are not explored. Following Langer, I suggest that feeling is better communicated through presentational rather than discursive symbols, such forms being concrete, sensory, and isomorphic in some way to that which is being shared. With such presentational symbols, resonance and dialogue between forms are more important than explanatory meaning and some implications of this for therapeutic discourse are discussed.

When down is not bad, and up not good enough: A usage-based assessment of the plus–minus parameter in image-schema theory

Abstract Preceding research in cognitive linguistics has advanced the claim that evaluative components form an integral part of image schemas (cf. Krzeszowski 1993, 1997; Cienki 1997: 3–6). This so-called “plus–minus” (or “axiological”) parameter has primarily been discussed with regard to opposing dimensions within a range of image-schematic contexts. In the paired particles in–out, up–down, and on–off, for instance, the meaning of which is based on the image-schematic notions of CONTAINMENT, VERTICALITY, and CONTACT, respectively, the second elements are assumed to carry negative default evaluations. Additionally, the Axiological Invariance Principle (Krzeszowski 1997) claims that these evaluative components are generally retained in metaphorical extensions. This study applies the plus–minus hypothesis in image-schema theory to the analysis of semantically highly redundant verb-particle constructions in English. The hypotheses derived from this application are tested against the real usage of such constructions as documented in the British National Corpus and the Collins Online. Though the presentation of a full-blown alternative to the plus–minus assumption is beyond the scope of this empirical investigation, an important implication of this study is that the isolated, “primitive” (noncompound) image schemas traditionally dealt with in cognitive linguistic research should not be considered as the locus of evaluative defaults. It is suggested instead that axiological components are dimensions of richer, contextualized cognitive models, in which image schemas appear as complex superimpositions, i.e., image-schema groupings or compounds.

COSTING NESTED ARRAY CODES

We discuss a language-based cost model for array programs built on the notions of work complexity and parallel depth. The programs operate over data structures comprising nested arrays and recursive product-sum types. In a purely functional setting, such programs can be implemented by way of the flattening transformation that converts codes over nested arrays into vectorised code over flat arrays. Flat arrays lend themselves to a particularly efficient implementation on standard hardware, but the overall efficiency of the approach depends on the flattening transformation preserving the asymptotic complexity of the nested array codes. Blelloch has characterised a class of first-order array programs, called contained programs, for which flattening preserves the asymptotic depth complexity. However, his result is restricted to programs processing only arrays and tuples. In the present paper, we extend Blelloch's result to array programs processing data structures containing arrays as well as arbitrary recursive product-sum types. Moreover, we replace the notion of containment by the more general concept of fold programs.

Conservation, Participation, and Power: Protected-Area Planning in the Coastal Zone of Belize

Drawing on debates over social impacts of biodiversity conservation and the role of power relations in community participation, this paper reports on field research examining community involvement in protected area planning in Belize. The research takes an actor-oriented approach to analyze the social, political, and technical processes involved in initiating and planning of two protected-area projects. Discussion focuses on the scope of public involvement, the power differentials among actors in the planning process, and the mechanisms through which power was exercised. The pattern that emerged showed planning officials endeavoring to mitigate or circumvent social and political dissent rather than foster an active, broad-based form of community participation. The paper suggests that the notion of containment may have a general applicability wherever protected areas are planned by external agencies that aim to engage local participation.

Uncertain deductive databases: A hybrid approach

Uncertainty in deductive databases and logic programming has been modeled using a variety of (numeric and non-numeric) formalisms in the past, including probabilistic, possibilistic, and fuzzy set-theoretic approaches, and many valued logic programming. In this paper, we consider a hybrid approach to the modeling of uncertainty in deductive databases. Our model, called deductive IST (DIST) is based on an extension of the Information Source Tracking (IST) model, recently proposed for relational databases. The DIST model permits uncertainty to be modeled and manipulated in essentially qualitative terms with an option to convert qualitative expressions of uncertainty into numeric form (e.g., probabilities). An uncertain deductive database is modeled as a Horn clause program in the DIST framework, where each fact and rule is annotated with an expression indicating the “sources” contributing to this information and their nature of contribution. (1) We show that positive DIST programs enjoy the least model/least fixpoint semantics analogous to classical logic programs. (2) We show that top-down (e.g., SLD-resolution) and bottom-up (e.g., magic sets rewriting followed by semi-naive evaluation) query processing strategies developed for datalog can be easily extended to DIST programs. (3) Results and techniques for handling negation as failure in classical logic programming can be easily extended to DIST. As an illustration of this, we show how stratified negation can be so extended. We next study the problem of query optimization in such databases and establish the following results. (4) We formulate query containment in qualitative as well as quantitative terms. Intuitively, our qualitative sense of containment would say a query Q 1 is contained in a query Q 2 provided for every input database D, for every tuple t, t ϵ Q 2( D) holds in every “situation” in which t ϵ Q 1( D) is true. The quantitative notion of containment would say Q 1 is contained in Q 2 provided on every input, the certainty associated with any tuple computed by Q 1 is no more than the certainty associated with the same tuple by Q 2 on the given input. We also prove that qualitative and quantitative notions of containment (both absolute and uniform versions) coincide. (5) We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the qualitative containment of conjunctive queries. (6) We extend the well-known chase technique to develop a test for uniform containment and equivalence of positive DIST programs. (7) Finally, we prove that the complexity of testing containment of conjunctive DIST queries remains the same as in the classical case when number of information sources is regarded as a constant (so, it's NP-complete in the size of the queries). We also show that testing containment of conjunctive queries is co-NP-complete in the number of information sources.

A walk on the wild side: a critical geography of domestication

Against a backdrop of growing interest in animal geographies and the genetic engineering of species, this article critically examines the process of animal domestication. To date, the social selection and breeding of animals have received little deconstructive effort from human scientists. The article begins by reviewing earlier schools of geographic thought on domestication, including the work of Carl Sauer, for whom domestication was a transhistorical process of evolution's unfolding. In working away from that perspective, I historicize animal domestication within a narrative politics of ideas about human uniqueness, savagery and civilization through which the process was conceived and conducted from at least classical times. The article thus develops a cultural critique of technologies that have been fundamental to the transformation of landscapes. Integral to the story are concepts of ‘domus’ and ‘agrios’, the ‘bringing in’ of ‘the wild’, and associated notions of containment, fixity, settling and improvement. These ideas, I argue, became threaded into the relations of not only humans and certain animals but also raced and gendered relations in European-derived societies. The article concludes with appeals to the imagining of more animal-inclusive models of social relations; the relaxation of rigid oppositions of civility and wildness; and a ‘human’ Self more conversant with its own wild side, dedomesticated and unbound.