Perpetual Oscillation Research Articles

“A Temporality of Imminent, Never-Consummated Arrival”: Contemporary German Documentaries on North Korea

This article investigates two contemporary German documentaries that attempt to look beyond negative stereotypes of North Korea: Eine Postkarte aus Pjöngjang (Gregor Möllers and Anne Lewald, 2019) and Meine Brüder und Schwestern im Norden (Cho Sung-hyung, 2016). I argue that the films put forward “a temporality of imminent, never-consummated arrival” by projecting multifaceted imagination onto the natural and urban landscapes of North Korea. In Postcard, the future of transnational solidarity has remained forestalled from the GDR era to the present; in Cho’s film, the affect of ethnic unity is suspended in a perpetual oscillation between identification and non-belonging.

Mortality and Finiteness

Using Money‐Kyrle's concept of the facts of life, the author takes up the difficulty for a therapist in accepting his mortality and the finiteness of things. He reports two cases of once‐weekly psychotherapy during which he had to take a three‐month period of sick leave. In the first case, the patient created a timeless prison where the therapist and the patient were fused to avoid separation, which meant, to the patient, violent death. The author describes how his own acceptance of the fear of death helped them to face the patient's murderous hatred. The second case is of a patient with a huge and strong body who denied his own need and dependency. The therapist was at first unaware of being caught up in narcissistic competition with the patient. However, the realization that he was envious of the patient enabled him to accept his own weakness, which in turn helped the patient to show his vulnerability. Finally, the author argues that although it is human nature to deny death, we need to face death if we are to face life. He argues that there is perpetual oscillation between acceptance and denial of our mortality and the finiteness of things.

Coupled Modeling and Advanced Control for Smooth Operation of a Grid-Connected Linear Electric Generator Based Wave-to-Wire System

The perpetual oscillations of ocean waves produce potential energy, which can be converted to electrical energy with the help of direct-drive linear generators. The fluctuating generated power poses a major challenge when it is supplied to the power grid. In this article, a supercapacitor provides the short-term energy storage to buffer and smooth out the power fluctuations. A new coupled model of a wave energy converter and a linear generator is proposed for its response characterization under varying system conditions. The developed model and an advanced control strategy are used to exhibit a smooth and stable operation of the wave-to-wire system. The generator-side converter is controlled to extract the maximum power from the waves and to minimize the generator losses by controlling its d -axis and q -axis currents. The grid-side converter is controlled to keep the dc-link voltage constant and to generate the required voltage waveforms at the point of common coupling. The performance of the proposed control strategy for the wave-to-wire system is investigated under different applied diffraction forces. The simulation results show that with the use of the proposed control scheme and the supercapacitor, the wave-to-wire system can operate in a smooth and stable operation under normal and fault conditions.

Modelling the reciprocal dynamics of dialogical communication: On the communication-philosophical undercurrent of radical constructivism and second-order cybernetics

Even though both Ernst von Glasersfeld, the founding father of radical constructivism, and his epistemological alter ego, Heinz von Foerster, one of the principal architects of second-order cybernetics, would both repeatedly stress the formative importance of communication, neither would ever model communication as a phenomenon per se. I will propose a first modelling of communication as seen through the stereoscopic lens of these two schools of thought. I will first present, discuss and evaluate how communication is traditionally modelled. This will serve as an informed backdrop when I proceed to integrate the common denominators pertaining to communication from relevant works of both scholars. In addition to the fact that both would willingly profess to the ‘Linguolaxis’ of Maturana and Varela, i.e., that humans exist suspended in communication, two basic assumptions have proven formative. Firstly, that communication is perceived as a flux, as an almost William-James-like ‘stream of communication’. Secondly, and this is more in the vein of Heraclitus, that both communicators and communication alike undergo transformations in the process of immersion. This implies favouring a view of communication in which communication is a perpetual oscillation between ongoing reciprocal perturbations (Glasersfeld), that occur over time, and the endeavours to re-establish (cognitive) homeostasis (Foerster). The latter must not be reduced to either mere compliance, as it were, i.e., that the ‘other’ does as s/he is told, or to the mutual understanding of a dominance-free communication of a Habermasian persuasion, but rather in the pragmatic notion of ‘compatibility’ (Glasersfeld). For illustrative purposes I will end this paper by translating these notions into a model depicting what I have labelled co-actional communication, in effect forging an exemplar.

Relaxation, chaos, and thermalization in a three-mode model of a Bose–Einstein condensate

We study the complex quantum dynamics of a system of many interacting atoms in an elongated anharmonic trap. The system is initially in a Bose–Einstein condensed state, well described by Thomas–Fermi profile in the elongated direction and the ground state in the transverse directions. After a sudden quench to a coherent superposition of the ground and lowest energy transverse modes, quantum dynamics starts. We describe this process employing a three-mode many-body model. The experimental realization of this system displays decaying oscillations of the atomic density distribution. While a mean-field description predicts perpetual oscillations of the atomic density distribution, our quantum many-body model exhibits a decay of the oscillations for sufficiently strong atomic interactions. We associate this decay with the fragmentation of the condensate during the evolution. The decay and fragmentation are also linked with the approach of the many-body model to the chaotic regime. The approach to chaos lifts degeneracies and increases the complexity of the eigenstates, enabling the relaxation to equilibrium and the onset of thermalization. We verify that the damping time and quantum signatures of chaos show similar dependences on the interaction strength and on the number of atoms.

I Regret the Death of the Swahili Esoteric Novel: Is it Real, Evolving or in a Perpetual Oscillation?

This article is motivated by recent debates regarding the place of the Swahili esoteric novel. The debates provoked a position which I take, and attempt to clarify here. Some scholars view the Swahili esoteric novel, referred elsewhere as ‘experimental’, ‘new’, ‘polymorphic’ (Bertoncini, 2001, p.125,) as dead. Dead in the sense that experimentators of this genre, have halted writing it altogether. I argue in this paper by presenting two presuppositions. Firstly, that the esoteric novel is indeed evolving. Secondly, that the Swahili esoteric novel is in perpetual oscillation. In this paper, ‘esoteric’ and ‘experimental’ are used interchangeably.

Autonomous oscillation in supramolecular assemblies: Role of free energy landscape and fluctuations

Molecular dynamics studies demonstrated that a supramolecular assembly can express autonomous structural oscillations about equilibrium. It is demonstrated here that for nanosystems such oscillations can result from the interplay of free energy landscape and structural fluctuations. Furthermore, these oscillations have intermittent character, reflecting the conflict between a tendency to oscillate due to features in the free energy landscape, and the Second Law’s repression of perpetual oscillation in an isothermal, equilibrium system. The demonstration system is a T=1 icosahedral structure constituted of 12 protein pentamers in contact with a bath at fixed temperature. The oscillations are explained in terms of a Langevin model accounting for interactions among neighboring pentamers. The model is based on a postulated free energy landscape in the 24-dimensional space of variables describing the centrifugal and rotational motion of each pentamer. The model includes features such as basins of attraction and low free energy corridors. When the system is driven slightly out of equilibrium, the oscillations are transformed into a limit cycle, as expressed in terms of power spectrum narrowing.

L’anthropologie de la croyance et la théorie de l’homo religiosus

This article examines the modalities of belief on the basis of an ethnographic study of French Catholics. The author distinguishes the nature of religious statements, the modes of discourse people use to express their beliefs, and the personal modalities of acts of believing, which are isolated moments followed by various shifts into other activities, characterised by irony, doubt or detachment with regard to beliefs. The article concludes with a depiction of religious activity as a displacement, a hesitation, a perpetual oscillation between fiction and reality, believing and not believing, presence and absence.

Emergence of chaos in interacting communities

We introduce a simple dynamical model of two interacting communities whose elements are subject to stochastic discrete-time updates governed by only bilinear interactions. When the intra- and inter-couplings are cooperative, the two communities reach asymptotically an equilibrium state. However, when the intra- or inter-couplings are anti-cooperative, the system may remain in perpetual oscillations and, when the coupling values belong to certain intervals, two possible scenarios arise, characterized either by erratic aperiodic trajectories and high sensitiveness to small changes of the couplings, or by chaotic trajectories and bifurcation cascades. Quite interestingly, we find out that even a moderate consensus in one single community can remove the chaos. Connections of the model with interacting stock markets are discussed.

Malthus: the life and legacies of an untimely prophet

Thomas Robert Malthus's An on the Principle of Population was an immediate succes de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, he found himself attacked on all sides--by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus's ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus's preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus's collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. then pursues Malthus's many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus's arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.

Anxiety: A Short History By Allan V. Horwitz. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2013. £24.95 (pb). 208 pp. ISBN: 9781421410807

Anxiety: A Short History By Allan V. Horwitz. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2013. £24.95 (pb). 208 pp. ISBN: 9781421410807 This interesting book charts the development of the concept of anxiety from Classical Greece to the era of DSM-5. Throughout history, one observes a perpetual oscillation

A dynamical model of tumour immunotherapy

A coupled ordinary differential equation model of tumour-immune dynamics is presented and analysed. The model accounts for biological and clinical factors which regulate the interaction rates of cytotoxic T lymphocytes on the surface of the tumour mass. A phase plane analysis demonstrates that competition between tumour cells and lymphocytes can result in tumour eradication, perpetual oscillations, or unbounded solutions. To investigate the dependence of the dynamic behaviour on model parameters, the equations are solved analytically and conditions for unbounded versus bounded solutions are discussed. An analytic characterisation of the basin of attraction for oscillatory orbits is given. It is also shown that the tumour shape, characterised by a surface area to volume scaling factor, influences the size of the basin, with significant consequences for therapy design. The findings reveal that the tumour volume must surpass a threshold size that depends on lymphocyte parameters for the cancer to be completely eliminated. A semi-analytic procedure to calculate oscillation periods and determine their sensitivity to model parameters is also presented. Numerical results show that the period of oscillations exhibits notable nonlinear dependence on biologically relevant conditions.

What Becomes of the Subject?

More than twenty-five years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy posed question, Who comes subject?1 Nancy's formulation sought to encourage responses to or of that went beyond terms of reductive proclamation of the subject's simple liquidation (Cadava, Connor, and Nancy 1991,4-5). Crucially, who in Nancy's question signaled that critique of subject does not imply abnegation of questions of subjectivity, but in coming after temporality of questioning would be opened to futurity: we continue to ask who? but answer is no longer prescribed (as the subject). In these terms, crisis of subject so remarked by contemporary philosophy would not be understood as marking a theoretical stasis or as closing down questioning; rather, question of subjectivity (who?) would become a site of inquiry and opening.Although posed a quarter of a century ago, Nancy's question is worth recalling now as a gauge to measure contemporary critical discourse. What is particularly striking in this light is absence of kind of plural and dynamic inquiry that Nancy's question promised, a mode of inquiry that would be sensitive to historicity of subjectivity and multiple trajectories to which it might give rise. Instead, we witness stubborn persistence of the frozen in instant (Augenblick) of its perennial deconstruction. How many times does analysis of a text unearth or discover claim to presence of the only to show how text disrupts, unravels, or deconstructs it? And how many times do we trace operation of power through disciplinary production of the in social practices and institutions, only to chart multiple nodes of resistance that transgress and subvert its terms? This is not to denigrate or disallow subversion, or disruption, or resistance, or any other of these terms; nor is it in any way to call for an affirmative intellectual culture. It is rather to point to a curious temporal structuring which appears to be remarkably prevalent within contemporary theory. Where Nancy's question envisages or critique as a moving beyond subject (who comes after?), we inhabit a theoretical Groundhog Day that is perpetually suspended at moment of subject's deconstruction-which means that subject endures and becomes oddly durable in its perpetual deconstruction.One way of understanding this predicament is to identify a failure in thinking historicity of subjectivity. This failure becomes apparent when we recall near-ubiquity of expression the Enlightenment and role that it often plays in contemporary theory.2 Despite being nominally tied to a historical moment and a geographical region, the Enlightenment appears as an unchanging configuration of subjectivity which endures today exactly as it was in its initial formulation some three centuries ago. Perennially recurring and perennially same, the Enlightenment must be deconstructed over and over again. But, crucially, its has no issue or outcomes, and so cannot generate different possible configurations of subjectivity. Instead, there is only perpetual oscillation between subject's claim to full presence and its dispersal, fragmentation, disruption, and subversion. For all claims for deconstruction and subversion of subject, it would appear that it remains resolutely and implacably in place, pristinely awaiting its next and subversion.A sense of this failure to think historicity of subjectivity becomes palpable if we set it against an alternative approach, namely Gillian Rose's account of post-Reformation subjectivity. For Rose, Enlightenment subject has not remained perpetually frozen but carries potential to develop and mutate in unexpected ways. Indeed, it is itself recognized as a moment within a larger set of histories that she characterizes in terms of the unintended psychological and political consequences of Protestant Innerlichkeit (inwardness) and worldly asceticism (Rose 1998, 87; emphasis in original). …

What is the ‘world’ in world politics? Heidegger, Badiou and void universalism

This article addresses the ontological presuppositions of the discourse on world politics in political and international relations theory. We argue that the ambivalent status of world politics is due to the understanding of its central concept, that is, the world, in terms of totality or ‘the whole’. Drawing on Alain Badiou's set-theoretical ontology, this article demonstrates that such a concept is logically inconsistent, which leads the discourse on world politics to a perpetual oscillation between the presupposition of a universal totality and the unmasking of its impossibility. We then proceed to the particularistic concept of the world as a limited totality with no pretense to universality, as developed in Heidegger's phenomenological ontology and Badiou's objective phenomenology. Although this approach affirming the existence of the infinity of infinite worlds appears of little use to the universalist problematic of world politics, it provides us with a pathway to the third concept of the world as the void, in which a plurality of positive worlds coexist and which is their ontological condition of possibility. We argue that only this concept of the world enables a logically consistent notion of universality as non-totalizable and immediate. The final section addresses the implications of this concept for rethinking world politics as a practice of transformation of particular worlds in accordance with the universal principles derived from the disclosure of the world as void.

Direct reciprocity in structured populations.

Reciprocity and repeated games have been at the center of attention when studying the evolution of human cooperation. Direct reciprocity is considered to be a powerful mechanism for the evolution of cooperation, and it is generally assumed that it can lead to high levels of cooperation. Here we explore an open-ended, infinite strategy space, where every strategy that can be encoded by a finite state automaton is a possible mutant. Surprisingly, we find that direct reciprocity alone does not lead to high levels of cooperation. Instead we observe perpetual oscillations between cooperation and defection, with defection being substantially more frequent than cooperation. The reason for this is that "indirect invasions" remove equilibrium strategies: every strategy has neutral mutants, which in turn can be invaded by other strategies. However, reciprocity is not the only way to promote cooperation. Another mechanism for the evolution of cooperation, which has received as much attention, is assortment because of population structure. Here we develop a theory that allows us to study the synergistic interaction between direct reciprocity and assortment. This framework is particularly well suited for understanding human interactions, which are typically repeated and occur in relatively fluid but not unstructured populations. We show that if repeated games are combined with only a small amount of assortment, then natural selection favors the behavior typically observed among humans: high levels of cooperation implemented using conditional strategies.

THE STRUCTURES OF STATE SPACE CONCERNING QUANTUM DYNAMICAL SEMIGROUPS

Each semigroup describing time evolution of an open quantum system on a finite dimensional Hilbert space is related to a special structure of this space. It is shown how the space can be decomposed into orthogonal subspaces: One part is related to decay, some subspaces of the other subspace are ranges of the stationary states. Specialities are highlighted where the complete positivity of evolutions is actually needed for analysis, mainly for evolution of coherence. Decompositions are done the same way for discrete as for continuous time evolutions, but they may show differences: Only for discrete semigroups there may appear cases of sudden decay and of perpetual oscillation. Concluding the analysis, we identify the relation of the state space structure to the processes of decay, decoherence, dissipation and dephasing.

Chaotic Red Queen coevolution in three-species food chains

Coevolution between two antagonistic species follows the so-called 'Red Queen dynamics' when reciprocal selection results in an endless series of adaptation by one species and counteradaptation by the other. Red Queen dynamics are 'genetically driven' when selective sweeps involving new beneficial mutations result in perpetual oscillations of the coevolving traits on the slow evolutionary time scale. Mathematical models have shown that a prey and a predator can coevolve along a genetically driven Red Queen cycle. We found that embedding the prey-predator interaction into a three-species food chain that includes a coevolving superpredator often turns the genetically driven Red Queen cycle into chaos. A key condition is that the prey evolves fast enough. Red Queen chaos implies that the direction and strength of selection are intrinsically unpredictable beyond a short evolutionary time, with greatest evolutionary unpredictability in the superpredator. We hypothesize that genetically driven Red Queen chaos could explain why many natural populations are poised at the edge of ecological chaos. Over space, genetically driven chaos is expected to cause the evolutionary divergence of local populations, even under homogenizing environmental fluctuations, and thus to promote genetic diversity among ecological communities over long evolutionary time.

Orbitally but not asymptotically stable ground states for the discrete NLS

We consider examples of discrete nonlinear Schrödinger equations in $\Z$ admitting ground states which are orbitally but not asymptotically stable in <I>l </I>$^2(\Z )$. The ground states contain internal modes which decouple from the continuous modes. The absence of leaking of energy from discrete to continues modes leads to an almost conservation and perpetual oscillation of the discrete modes. This is quite different from what is known for nonlinear Schrödinger equations in $\R ^d$. To achieve our goal we prove a Siegel normal form theorem, prove dispersive estimates for the linearized operators and prove some nonlinear estimates.

Violently Oscillating: Science, Repetition and Affective Transmutation in Fassbinder'sBerlin Alexanderplatz

This essay looks at Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz to trace the film's transformation of a mechanistic scientific discourse into affective indeterminacy. Through patterns of repetition of a key event, the film considers its protagonist as a complex web of constantly shifting forces – a network of biological, social, political and semiotic flows coalescing in a body that exists in a state of perpetual oscillation between force and mutilation, ecstasy and pain. The role of physics and other materialist discourses in the film is thus not to fixate subjectivity, but rather to provide a passage into its affective transformations and the intense desubjectification that results.

On Sociological Writing*

It is widely thought, both inside and outside our profession, that sociologists do not express themselves very well. The critic Malcolm Cowley complained years ago that the wisdoms of sociology, such as they are, tend to be conveyed "in a language that has to be learned almost like Esperanto." And Edmund Wilson, who once toyed with the idea that the writing of every specialist in the university should be reviewed by professors of English, doubted that sociologists would ever be able to survive such a test. Exposing the defects of sociological writing is a literary sport of long standing.