Process Of Erasure Research Articles

The New Criticism and the Nashville Sound: William Faulkner’s The Town and Rock and Roll

The New Criticism and the Nashville Sound:William Faulkner’s The Town and Rock and Roll Florence Dore (bio) We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;As well a well wrought urne becomesThe greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes,And by these hymnes, all shall approveUs Canoniz’d for love. John Donne, “The Canonization” (1633) Although it’s always crowded,you still can find some room.Where broken hearted loversdo cry away their gloom. Tommy Durden and Mae Boren Axton, “Heartbreak Hotel” (1956) Aspeculation: John Donne’s “pretty roomes” give way to the “room” in the 1956 RCA hit, “Heartbreak Hotel.” In the infamous 1930 Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, Andrew Nelson Lytle articulated an opposition between culture and media that New Critics would bring into the postwar moment: Southern farmers should “[t]hrow [End Page 32] out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall” (244). In the decades following World War II, the rock and roll song helped erase Donne sonnets and other literary forms from public consciousness. Or so it must have seemed to the New Critics. Trained by the Fugitives at Vanderbilt a generation earlier, New Critics absorbed their Agrarian mentors’ notions, incorporating an antitechnological point of view into their conception of good literature. In his introduction to the 1962 edition of I’ll Take My Stand, Louis D. Rubin complained that “the suburbs of Nashville, Richmond, Charleston, and Mobile are scarcely distinguishable from those of Buffalo, Trenton, Indianapolis, and Hartford,” adding, “Andrew Lytle’s suggestion . . . has not been followed; instead the radio has been replaced by a television set” (Rubin x). Rubin could not have been unaware that in the intervening years, Elvis Presley had made his way east from Memphis to record “Heartbreak Hotel” at RCA’s Studio B, just blocks away from Vanderbilt. Catherine Jurca has charted the emergence of the suburban whiner in the postwar American novel, but Rubin’s comments suggest that the suburbanization of Nashville warranted a particular sort of lament—one specifically associated with Nashville’s radio presence, a phenomenon that during these years earned it the name “Music City, U.S.A.”1 As rock and roll began to gain in popularity, what came to be known as “The Nashville Sound” developed in response. Created at Studio B by the likes of Chet Atkins and Jim Reeves, “The Nashville Sound” rendered Nashville’s traditional country music slicker, more pop—commensurate, that is, with rock, as music historians Jocelyn R. Neal, Joli Jensen, and Michael Kosser have shown. These changes to country music emerged in the heyday of the New Criticism, and indeed, as Fugitive notions were being translated into formal dicta, the Agrarians’ Nashville was turning into a broadcast town—Music City, a proto-virtual Southern city embracing, not resisting, suburban development. Lytle embellished his call to “throw out the radio,” moreover, with a racial epithet—“That is the nigger in the woodpile . . . keep the machines turning!” (205)—clarifying that the aversion to emerging [End Page 33] media involved more than a concern about what technology would do to the South’s natural beauty. Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked Nashville’s turn to Music City, and in the postwar decades, integration there was well under way. Sit-ins on West End Avenue, protests over the expulsion of James M. Lawson Jr. from Vanderbilt’s divinity school—things in Nashville had changed since the Agrarians took their stand there.2 Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947) was intended to undo the process of cultural erasure that Brooks imagined was taking place in the postwar world, to restore to a technological era what he called the “miracle of which the poet speaks” (xi). In the wide-ranging, national program of reeducation that Brooks created with Robert Penn Warren, Americans would, they hoped, experience the miraculous again by learning to make “the closest possible examination of what the poem says as a poem” (xi).3 It was this hope as well that lay behind Lytle’s directive two decades earlier to “throw out the radio,” and his racial investments belie the apparent neutrality of...

Smooth Effects: The Erasure of Labour and Production of Police as Experts through Augmented Objects

Smooth Effects: The Erasure of Labour and Production of Police as Experts through Augmented Objects

Feeling to see: oversight in knowledge production

Science as a practice is characterised by two types of visibility. On the one hand scientists make nature visible via imaging technologies; on the other hand they make scientific practice visible as relevant and useful to society. The sociology of translation has paved the way for analysing these two types of visibility as intrinsic parts of the same scientific practice but does not take into account the costs of putting science itself under the gaze. Based on ethnographic field work with Nano scientists the paper compares the costs of making nature visible with the costs of making science. Both types of visibility entail a necessary process of manufacturing the object of knowledge in order for it to display 'feelable forces' in relation the gaze through which visibility is obtained. The paper analyses how science acquires double visibility by a process of enhancement and erasure; two operations constitutive of producing visibility.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: The Suicide of the Intellectual in Rabīʿ Jābir’s Rālf Rizqallāh through the Looking Glass

Abstract In the wake of the civil war (1975-1990), Lebanese novelists conceived of the literary text as a means to salvage Lebanese collective memory from the systematic process of erasure that the postwar state began practicing. Writers who voiced their anxieties about erasure and the interrupted work of national mourning celebrated the role of the intellectual as a guardian of collective memory and attributed to the written word the power of rescuing the wounded national community from the perils of oblivion. How was the intellectual’s tragic death commemorated and portrayed in a postwar cultural scene concerned about the erasure of collective memory? What forms of dissent from that dominant literary discourse do we identify in Rabīʿ Jābir’s Rālf Rizqallāh fī al-mirʾāt (Rālf Rizqallāh through the Looking Glass)? This article explores the ways in which Rabīʿ Jābir fictionalizes the suicide of the Lebanese scholar Rālf Rizqallāh and thereby departs from the objectification of the intellectual as the guardian of the nation’s collective memory. Jābir understands Rālf Rizqallāh’s suicide not as an altruistic act of protest against the erasure of collective memory, but as a narcissistic impulse prompted by a severe sense of personal and existential angst. The novel’s depiction of Rālf Rizqallāh, I argue, articulates Jābir’s detachment from the postwar discourse about amnesia and collective memory and ushers us towards an alternative representation of the Lebanese intellectual.

Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes (review)

Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes. By James Joseph Buss. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Pp. 328. Cloth: $35.00.)Reviewed by Edward WattsJames Joseph Buss's Winning the West with Words unabashedly builds upon Richard White's two-decades-old thesis, and rather uncritically. It opens with an epigram from White, and even the Introduction's title, Clearing the Middle Ground for American Pioneers, alludes to White's assertion that the pre-1815 Great Lakes region was a liminal space in which races, trade systems, tribes, politics, and religions interacted on a complex local level with none attempting or achieving regional dominance or dominion. For White, all that changed when Anglo Americans won the War of 1812 and, asserting their rights from the Treaty of Paris, erased the middle ground and imposed a hegemony of Protestantism, private property, raced citizenship, and clear-cut agriculture.Buss tells the story of that erasure, mostly as it occurred in northern Indiana between 1810 and 1840. But erasure - as opposed to annihilation - is by definition a metaphor for incompletion, as anyone who works with a pencil knows. Whether or not you buy in to White's thesis, Buss's work merits serious consideration for redirecting the conversation about precisely how Anglo American culture imposed itself on this region by telling the stories about the vanishing of Indians, squatters, and other nonconforming groups. For Buss, these were enacted through a series of acts of cultural coercion and selective historiography as well as through more direct interventions and removals. As such, Buss's methodology owes very little to White's: Its narrative of erasure is built through the rhetorical analysis of how the story was told. For Buss, the facts of the story were subsumed as an intrinsic part of the process of erasure. He begins from the retrospective perspective of the early twentieth century when the process of erasure, purportedly complete, was in fact ongoing.The cover of Winning the West with Words re-creates a poster from the Decatur County (Indiana) 1916 celebration of Indiana's centennial as a state. It foregrounds an Indian in a canoe being removed by a soldier in back of whom is a Conestoga wagon, and behind whom, up among the clouds and the sunbeams, emerges a clocktower, an implicit narrative sequence Buss re-creates in the book's chapters: Indians, removal, settlers, and then towns. As the book progresses each older symbol is effaced and then replaced by the next, or so went the official narrative of erasure. The book's greatest value, however, is in its tracing of the transgressive, apparently unerasable, middle-ground leftovers whose intractability made the repetition of a narrative that started in 1816 still seem necessary in 1916.Moreover, borrowing from postcolonial theorist Mary Louise Pratt, Buss demonstrates time and again how Anglo American settlers, pioneers, and, finally, townsfolk, impose a narrative of anti-conquest on the region to secure their innocence as the passive agents of an ineluctable historical inevitability: The early nineteenth-century west, by this telling, was not conquered and colonized - as had been the eastern seaboard states and the other dominion settler colonies - but rather was transitioned to appropriate Anglo American control through the careful management of an inevitable process, absolving the tellers of the tale from the messy sins of colonialism and granting the nation exceptionalist absolution.Each of Buss's chapters moves the narrative through an exchange between the erased and the erasers. In each succeeding chapter, those doing the erasing are in turn erased - as the Indian gives way to the squatter, the squatter to the settler, the settler to the townsman, and so on. …

Derivation of male germ cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells: a novel and crucial source for generating male gametes

Derivation of male germ cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells: a novel and crucial source for generating male gametes

The governance of nature as development and the erasure of the Pygmies of Cameroon

The Pygmies are among the remaining ‘savages’ in West and Central Africa. This paper demonstrates how the governance of nature through sedentarization, the creation of national parks as a mechanism of forestry conservation and the failure to endorse standard environmental safeguards in the creation of the Tchad-Cameroon pipeline project have led to the devastation of the livelihood of the indigenous pygmies. Simultaneously, by categorizing the Pygmies as a ‘primitive other’ despite the very dynamism of the concept of culture, the state of Cameroon has excluded them from the benefits of postmodernist development. I demonstrate that projects aimed at modernizing them, and achieving sustainability have instead accentuated their exclusion because of their presumed cultural isolation, led to their deep entrenchment in poverty and resulted in complete erasure. The failure of these projects is due to the clash between global and local perspectives and interests over the Western protectionism and nature aesthetics that underpin conservation and development schemes, and the government’s failure to ensure that developers fulfill their obligations to affected communities, as well as the non-recognition of the multiplex relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers that is based on cultural, historical and political ecology. Against this backdrop, development has thus, become a process of erasure in which the livelihood of the Pygmies has been balkanized and their cultural existence and identity, negated.

United States policy and Palestine: Oslo, the Intifada and erasure

Does the advent of Barack Obama as president of the US signal a change in US policy towards Israel/Palestine? The US has presented itself as the ‘honest broker’ in attempts at settling the crisis from the late 1960s on, as the history narrated here of these initiatives demonstrates, yet all have foundered, not least on the rocks of Israeli intransigence and US partiality. With Israel’s continuing punitive policy towards Gaza, and insistence, despite US caveats, on building settlements in Palestinian areas, and new housing in Arab East Jerusalem, this article argues that the Palestinians are undergoing a second Nakba, subjected to a process of erasure as a legitimate national entity. Whether Obama’s Cairo speech, in its even-handed approach to both Palestinian and Israeli aspirations, marked a new beginning is proving ever more doubtful. It is time for Palestinians to abandon the pseudo-diplomacy of the past and develop a grassroots-based political struggle.

World Heritage and mosaic universalism

This article analyses UNESCO’s project of worldwide cultural heritage preservation. It does so through a double lens, an ethnographic and a textual one. I first look at the ways in which World Heritage works in Palestine/Israel. Second, I analyse the discourse of World Heritage, arguing that recent World Heritage reforms, stimulated by critiques of the Eurocentrism of its approaches, adopt the language of liberal multiculturalism. Building on critical accounts of this political discourse, I show how multicultural heritage policies not only risk affirming and solidifying cultural differences, but also the asymmetries between them. Furthermore, I argue that, paradoxically, World Heritage reinforces nation-states, and particularly state apparatuses’ reach and control over heritage sites and processes, often at the expense of the grassroots. By analysing a series of workshops in Jerusalem and Ramallah, I detail the ways in which highly innovative local Palestinian practices of heritage conservation tend to be silenced by the World Heritage mechanism, and trace a discursive process of erasure of politics and ‘locality’ from UNESCO’s representation of humanity’s heritage. I place this erasure in the context of expert anxieties regarding a contaminated universalism.

Forgetting to HealRemembering the abolition act of 1807

This article investigates the cultural memory of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. It examines official government responses and considers how these were replicated in popular culture, drawing on the film Amazing Grace. The study highlights the rhetoric employed to distance the past of the transatlantic slave trade from the present, thereby contributing to a process of historical erasure rather than tackling the lingering social and political affects of a traumatic past.

Derivation of primordial germ cells from human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells is significantly improved by coculture with human fetal gonadal cells.

The derivation of germ cells from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) or human induced pluripotent stem (hIPS) cells represents a desirable experimental model and potential strategy for treating infertility. In the current study, we developed a triple biomarker assay for identifying and isolating human primordial germ cells (PGCs) by first evaluating human PGC formation during the first trimester in vivo. Next, we applied this technology to characterizing in vitro derived PGCs (iPGCs) from pluripotent cells. Our results show that codifferentiation of hESCs on human fetal gonadal stromal cells significantly improves the efficiency of generating iPGCs. Furthermore, the efficiency was comparable between various pluripotent cell lines regardless of origin from the inner cell mass of human blastocysts (hESCs), or reprogramming of human skin fibroblasts (hIPS). To better characterize the iPGCs, we performed Real-time polymerase chain reaction, microarray, and bisulfite sequencing. Our results show that iPGCs at day 7 of differentiation are transcriptionally distinct from the somatic cells, expressing genes associated with pluripotency and germ cell development while repressing genes associated with somatic differentiation (specifically multiple HOX genes). Using bisulfite sequencing, we show that iPGCs initiate imprint erasure from differentially methylated imprinted regions by day 7 of differentiation. However, iPGCs derived from hIPS cells do not initiate imprint erasure as efficiently. In conclusion, our results indicate that triple positive iPGCs derived from pluripotent cells differentiated on hFGS cells correspond to committed first trimester germ cells (before 9 weeks) that have initiated the process of imprint erasure.

Norah Borges: (Self-)Criticism, (Self-)Censorship, (Self-)Effacement

At present, even in scholarly circles, few are aware of the pioneering role Norah Borges played in the introduction of modern art into Argentina when she returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 after her formation in European vanguardism. More than a critical oversight, this lack of knowledge regarding her role in the Argentinian avant-garde is the result of a process of conscious and unconscious repression or erasure of an individual and collective nature affecting not only the artist's choice of media, subject matter, style, and palette, but also the ways in which contemporary critics and subsequent cultural historians perceived her work. Because of this process of erasure constantly at work in the artist's psyche, oeuvre, and cultural milieu, reconstructing her place in Argentinian vanguard art often requires a peripheral reading of the margins and interlinear spaces of the official discourse of Argentinian cultural history in order to identify distortions, omissions, or even explicit, yet untruthful, denials in regard to the artist and her works. Similarly, an interstitial study of numerous texts by and about her older, more famous brother (Jorge Luis Borges) is often necessary in order to reveal her role in the movement in question.

Anti-Semitism, Surrogacy, and the Invocation of Mohammed in the Play of the Sacrament

Scholars have made little of the strange habit of Jewish characters who invoke Mohammed in early modern drama. Christian playwrights of the period, we have assumed, merely project the common European practice of calling out to Jesus and the saints to Muslims, incorrectly inferring that the Prophet of Islam was the god of the Muslims, and they compound this error by placing the trumped-up blasphemy in the mouths of their fictitious Jews. When seen within the complex history of both the collision and collusion of early modern Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures, however, this phenomenon may indicate a more complicated process of surrogacy and erasure, a cultural practice that strategically blurs certain distinctions among particular groups and exacerbates others to revise fundamental, defining narratives of social origin and unity. Contextualized within a tradition of medieval anti-Semitism, the invocation of Mohammed by Jewish characters in be Play of be Conuersyon of Ser Jonathas be Jewe by Myracle of be Blyssed Sacrament (or the Play of the Sacrament as it is also known) may be evidence that, even in the official absence of actual Jews, distant sources of social tension could cause anti-Jewish feelings to erupt violently. Unique in the corpus of early English drama, the Play of the Sacrament has received much attention from scholars in recent years. Failing to fit neatly into any of the usual categories, the play balks at being placed into a progressive genealogy of Jewish characters in Christian drama. Very little is known for certain about the text: it was almost certainly written sometime between 1461 and 1546; it is probably of East Anglian origin, and it was probably performed by a professional touring troupe. (1) The plot purports to be a re-enactment of an historical event that allegedly occurred in 1461 in the city of Heraclea in Spanish Aragon. A Christian merchant, Aristorius, is bribed by Ser Jonathas, a Jewish merchant from Syria, to steal a consecrated host from a local church. Having obtained the wafer, Jonathas and his Jewish compatriots congregate in his house, where they intend to conduct experiments in order to disprove the doctrine of transubstantiation. At length, Jonathas proposes that thys bred I wold myght be put in a / Whether bis be he that in Bosra of vs had awe. (2) The Jews merrily stab the wafer with their knives, but are much disturbed when the object of their violence miraculously begins to bleed. As he tries to staunch the flow of blood, Jonathas's hand becomes inexplicably affixed to the host. Even when Jonathas and the host are nailed together to a pillar they cannot be separated. Once extricated from the pillar, the miserable Jonathas exits with his cabal to try more extreme measures on the miraculous object. A short interlude ensues, featuring a comic Flemish doctor and his servant Colle. The Jews return, violently rebuff the doctor's offer of help, and reveal that Jonathas has freed himself from the wafer by severing his own hand. The hand is then thrown into a pot of oil, which overflows with boiling blood. Emerging unscathed, the host is thrown into an oven. The oven explodes, streaming blood from every crack, and an image of a child with bloody wounds emerges from the wreckage to speak as Christ to the Jews: Jhesus: Oh ye merveylows Jewys, Why ar ye to yowr kyng onkynd, And [I] so bytterly bowt yow to my blysse? (719-21) Having had their conclusive prefe of the wafer's sacred embodiment of Christ, the Jews immediately repent their violence. Jhesus heals the wounds of Jonathas, witnesses his contrition before a bishop, and transforms himself back into bread. The bishop then informs Aristorius that in penance for his crimes he may no longer operate as a merchant. Finally, the prelate baptizes the Jews, who leave to travel the world expiating their wickedness. Aristorius announces he will return to his country to spread the word of the miracle; possibly the performance itself is meant to be understood as part of his mission. …

Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650-1990 by John J. Bukowczyk, Nora Faires, David R. Smith, Randy William Widdis

136 Michigan Historical Review John J. Bukowczyk, Nora Fakes, David R. Smith, and Randy William Widdis. Permeable Border The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650 1990. Pittsburgh and Calgary: University of Pittsburgh Press and University of Calgary Press, 2005. Pp. 298. Bibliography. Index. Maps. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $34.95. From the Canadian side, in a time when I am now required to carry a passport to attend conferences in the United States and the U.S. Coast Guard has considered conducting live-fire exercises from its cutters on the Great Lakes (in violation of the Rush-Bagot Treaty in my opinion), it requires more than the usual amount of suspension of disbelief to take seriously a book with the tide Permeable Border. From the U.S. side the authors risk the wrath of the Department of Homeland Security for raising unjustified alarms about terrorist incursions and a red-faced Lou Dobbs seizing upon it as further evidence of administrative malingering in the face of a tide of illegal immigration. Yet the authors perform a useful service in a "once upon a time" kind of way by reminding us that once, for all intents and purposes, the border did not exist except as an imaginary line, and that historically free migration back and forth across that linewas the norm. The armed barrier bristling on both sides with security apparatus is the aberration. As recendy as Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States believed that it should be as easy to cross the border between Canada and the U.S. as it was to go from one U.S. state to another. The negotiators of the Free Trade Agreement thought that they had created a huge single market within which almost all goods and services could be freely exchanged without respect to borders. But the once fabled "longest undefended border in the world" is no more. It used to be that North America was the continent without borders. Now it ismuch easier to move between the countries of Europe than it is between the nations of the Americas. I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the 1940s and 1950s. Then almost every family had relatives in "the states." Cross-border trips to see friends and family members were regular occurrences. Paperboys selling the Brantford Expositor won a trip to the fabled Olympia inDetroit to see Gordie Howe and the Red Wings, not to Maple Leaf Gardens. A childhood friend joined theMarines. Yet however much in some sense we inhabited a seemingly continuous space, across the bridge lay a different land defined largely by tempting delights unavailable at home: pizza, watery beer, Italian restaurants, neighborhood bars, shining household appliances, and cheap towels. Add to that the sometimes frightening Book Reviews 137 mysteries of stump justice in the settlement of speeding offences and open, unashamed displays of patriotism. At that time the border was visible in some dimensions and invisible in others, at least on the personal level. Have we perchance in memory exaggerated the integration of this prelapsarian world of transborder migration and exchange or has something fundamentally different happened since 9/11 to reinvent a real border? The answer is likely a litde of both. The multiple authors of this book?historians based inMichigan and a geographer from Saskatchewan?are simultaneously engaged in explaining the juridical act of drawing the boundary within the Great Lakes Basin and the social and economic process of border erasure. They are not much interested in the new reality along the border as the unusual delimiting dates of the subtitle suggest. Rather, they want to use an examination of the old order to construct a new framework for understanding interaction across the Canada-U.S. border as compared with the U.S.-Mexico border?though the comparison ismore suggested than systematically examined. By implication they seem to be saying that the vitality of transnationalism continues to persist even in the era of Homeland Security, and that there is something transcendent about the degree of regional integration in the Great Lakes Basin even as borders are being redrawn. John Bukowczyk opens the book with an essay establishing the concept of a transborder region. There follow two...

In vitro generation of germ cells from murine embryonic stem cells

The demonstration of germ cell and haploid gamete development from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) in vitro has engendered a unique set of possibilities for the study of germ cell development and the associated epigenetic phenomenon. The process of embryoid body (EB) differentiation, like teratoma formation, signifies a spontaneous differentiation of ESCs into cells of all three germ layers, and it is from these differentiating aggregates of cells that putative primordial germ cells (PGCs) and more mature gametes can be identified and isolated. The differentiation system presented here requires the differentiation of murine ESCs into EBs and the subsequent isolation of PGCs as well as haploid male gametes from EBs at various stages of differentiation. It serves as a platform for studying the poorly understood process of germ cell allocation, imprint erasure and gamete formation, with 4-6 weeks being required to isolate PGCs as well as haploid cells.

No-partial erasure of quantum information

In complete erasure any arbitrary pure quantum state is transformed to a fixed pure state by irreversible operation. Here we ask if the process of partial erasure of quantum information is possible by general quantum operations, where partial erasure refers to reducing the dimension of the parameter space that specifies the quantum state. We prove that quantum information stored in qubits and qudits cannot be partially erased, even by irreversible operations. The ‘no-partial erasure’ theorem applies to spin and bosonic coherent states, and continuous variable quantum information schemes as well. Our theorem suggests an integrity principle that quantum information is indivisible.

Post-war Japan in photographs

Through a discourse analysis of news photographs published after the end of the Second World War, this study investigates how Japan’s new position as a defeated and occupied nation was visually negotiated in the two decades following the war in the pages of one major national Japanese English-language newspaper. It addresses, in particular, how symbolic representations of the Japanese nation were (re)defined and reinterpreted in these photographs in the aftermath of the war under the significant influence of occupation leaders eager to reorganize the Japanese press system following American models. It argues that visual representations of Japan and its leaders created shortly after the war illustrate the beginnings of a process of erasure of the past and cultural reinterpretation that scholars of the Japanese cultural environment have identified as a central component of Japanese contemporary (post)modern identity.

Protein phosphatases: a means of forgetting

Is forgetting a passive process of memory loss or an active process of memory erasure? If information simply leaks away from the brain during forgetting, then important memories should be as susceptible to loss as unimportant ones. An optimal storage system seems more likely to employ an active process that selectively discards information, by a mechanism adapted to preventing an overflow of unwanted memory. A recent behavioural study of transgenic mice by Genoux et al. has identified a molecular neural mechanism that is specialized towards such erasure of information [1].

Sporadic randomness, Maxwell's Demon and the Poincaré recurrence times

In the case of fully chaotic systems, the distribution of the Poincaré recurrence times is an exponential whose decay rate is the Kolmogorov–Sinai (KS) entropy. We address the discussion of the same problem, the connection between dynamics and thermodynamics, in the case of sporadic randomness, using the Manneville map as a prototype of this class of processes. We explore the possibility of relating the distribution of Poincaré recurrence times to “thermodynamics”, in the sense of the KS entropy, also in the case of an inverse power-law. This is the dynamic property that Zaslavsky [Physics Today 52 (8) (1999) 39] finds to be responsible for a striking deviation from ordinary statistical mechanics under the form of Maxwell's Demon effect. We show that this way of establishing a connection between thermodynamics and dynamics is valid only in the case of strong chaos, where both the sensitivity to initial conditions and the distribution of the Poincaré recurrence times are exponential. In the case of sporadic randomness, resulting at long times in the Lévy diffusion processes, the sensitivity to initial conditions is initially a power-law, but it becomes exponential again in the long-time scale, whereas the distribution of Poincaré recurrence times keeps, or gets, its inverse power-law nature forever, including the long-time scale where the sensitivity to initial condition becomes exponential. We show that a non-extensive version of thermodynamics would imply the Maxwell's Demon effect to be determined by memory, and thus to be temporary, in conflict with the dynamic approach to Lévy statistics. The adoption of heuristic arguments indicates that this effect is possible, as a form of genuine equilibrium, after completion of the process of memory erasure.

QOHELET AND THE EXIGENCIES OF THE ABSURD

AbstractThis article considers the Book of Qohelet in terms of its concerns and stylistics and with an eye towards the book's modern analogues. In particular, I look at the themes of toil and progress, time and memory, justice, and wisdom and knowledge while endeavouring to maintain the contradictory and self-negating dynamics of the text. Qohelet, I conclude, finds no ultimate good and no foundational principle in the universe. The declaration that all is judgement about the human experience of existence. Ours is not a world that admits human reason or responds to our longing for meaning-it is an absurd existence. Various stylistic strategies are employed in the text to support and sustain this message and these techniques combine to form a poetics of absurdity. The book is cast in an autobiographical voice, plays with the dynamics of aphorism and tautology, and, most significantly, builds itself around the poetics of contradiction. The text is engaged in a continual process of erasure whereby statements are made, explored, and then negated. I conclude by considering two modern analogues to the book of Qohelet, Albert Camus and Lev Shestov. These two thinkers parallel the book of Qohelet in both concern and style. They too find that the universe is infused with contradictions and does not bend to our longing for order and reason. Ultimately, all three sources convey a similar understanding of the human existential condition.