Zone Of Indistinction Research Articles

When Love Meets Drugs: Pharmaceuticalizing Ambivalence in Post-Socialist China

In this article, I examine the interaction between intimacy and psychiatry to explore the ambivalences in the use of pharmaceuticals in psychiatric practice. Of particular interest is how pharmaceuticals come to constitute in multiple ways what pathology is and what form of life needs to be restored, and how psychiatric medications reconfigure the ambivalence of intimacy in post-socialist China. Following the life of Mei, a female psychiatric patient, for two years, I have made a series of discoveries related to medicine and intimacy in China. Specifically, I show that psychopharmaceuticals indicate a diseased body that threatens the intimate bond. They also highlight a socially suffering subject that is in lack of love from the intimate partner who demands the latter's redemption. I discuss how these multiple and contradicting meanings of psychopharmaceuticals and intimacy are socio-historically situated. Thus, while previous research in medical anthropology criticizes pharmaceuticalization for reducing the socio-political life (bios) to a biological body (zoē), I argue that these life forms co-exist in a pharmaceutical "zone of indistinction" (Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998), in which they constitute and contradict each other. This discussion warns researchers against falling back into the usual orientation of either biomedicine or the social sciences.

Zones of indistinction: family life in Danish asylum centres

In Western societies, asylum politics is a highly debated issue, as modern nation states come under increasing pressure from globalization and find it more difficult to remain homogeneous institutions for ruling. In the context of these pressures, asylum-seekers constitute political and constitutional dilemmas deeply embedded in the issue of bordering, securing and sustaining nation state sovereignty. According to Giorgio Agamben, one solution to this dilemma is the creation of ‘camps’ as institutionalized ‘states of exception’, i.e. asylum centres, where asylum-seekers are deprived of not only some of the legal rights accorded citizens but also human rights. In Denmark, while the political focus is on increasingly restrictive asylum policies, studies show that asylum-seeking families suffer from deteriorating psychological and physical health and social life. Drawing on Agamben, this article examines the underlying reasons for and the dynamics of illness and family breakdown in Danish asylum centres, particularly given the claims by some that these problems are self-inflicted. The article analyses illness and family breakdown as individualized manifestations of both the camp's dissolution of normal social and symbolic distinctions, and of the (bio-) politicization of the private lives and bodies of asylum-seekers. Understanding asylum centre life through these concepts clarifies the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of illness and family breakdown in asylum centres, and leads to the article reframing the epistemological question of how one can determine asylum-seekers' social and mental health condition to the ontological question of what kind of existence is possible for people living in asylum centres.

A hell of a life: addiction and marginality in post-industrial Detroit

Drawing on concepts from Foucault and Agamben, we maintain that the lives of daily heroin users provide a prime illustration of bare life in the zone of indistinction that is contemporary Detroit. First, we consider the case of Detroit as a stigmatized and racially segregated city, with concrete consequences for its residents. We then present evidence from in-depth ethnographic and economic interviews to illustrate the various spaces of confinement—that of addiction, that of economic marginality, and that of gender—occupied by these men and women, as well as the indeterminacy of their daily lives, captured through their descriptions of daily routines and interactions. We examine their expressions of worth as expressed in economic, emotional and moral terms. Finally, we draw connections between the sustained marginality of these individuals, as a contemporary category of homo sacer, and the policies and powers that both despise and depend upon them. Heroin, we contend, helps to fill and numb this social void, making bare life bearable, but also cementing one's marginality into semi-permanence.

HPTLC detection: an appropriate preparation of spraying and dipping solutions

In thin-layer chromatography, for the purpose of post-chromatographic derivatization, the specific derivatization reagent solution can be transferred onto the plate by spraying or dipping. This TLC step of detection, or derivatization, was studied with a view to elaborating a standardized approach. The focus was on the solvent used to prepare the derivatization solutions, and also on the concentrations of these reagent solutions. For this purpose, qualitative results from both spraying and dipping experiments were compared. As herbal raw material, four flavonoid-containing drugs were used: ginkgo leaf, birch leaf, passion flower, and hawthorn leaf and flower. The specific derivatization reagent was natural product/macrogol 400; on the one hand dissolved in methanol, and on the other hand dissolved in ethyl acetate/dichlormethane [1]. The spraying as well as dipping procedures were carried out with appropriate automatic devices. Qualitative results showed that, in each case, derivatization reagents dissolved in ethyl acetate/dichlormethane showed concise zones, and weakly pronounced zones were also clearly visible. By contrast, dipping the plate into a derivatization solution containing methanol led partly to indistinct zones. Thus, post-chromatographic derivatization by dipping required an adaptation of the original spraying reagent composition, i.e. specific solvent and concentration, to obtain comparable results between spraying and dipping. Such standardization of TLC steps may be helpful in the goal of harmonizing Ph Eur monographs.

Reframing the Invisible: On the Uses of “Bare Life”” in Art

In his introduction to Documenta 12, Roger Buergel designates “bare life” as a major motif, aligning it with “the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation.” I suggest in this paper that this large-scale international exhibition is a prescriptive framework for Giorgio Agamben’s highly qualified juridical concept, since it may actually help to distort a concept emphasizing an element that resists representation. However, Buergel’s willingness to find a positive aspect of the state of exception is not incompatible with Agamben’s notion of a limit figure that eludes inscription in language. “Bare life” is open to art insofar as both occupy a zone of indistinction: the first designates “a being devoid of any representable identity” that avoids co-optation by the state, while the second is shifting its focus away from the object and towards the elusive spaces that can be documented but never shown. In this paper, I investigate the often ambiguous ways that the concept of “bare life” has been extended in discussions of a new politics based on “irreparable” singularity. I also explore several works of art in seeking possible alternatives to the institutional framing of “bare life,” including a performance that takes on the notion of invisibility in a somewhat literal way by eliminating photographic “evidence” of the event.

Homo Kantius

One of fundamental insights of Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution is discovery of an essentially legislative, law-giving aspect of not only our practical relationship to world, but of our knowing relation to objects. Such legislative dimension, and justification it requires, has recently been highlighted as requiring paradoxical space of illegitimacy in Giorgio Agamben's account of state of exception. In this essay I will argue that by extending Agamben's description of paradoxes of sovereignty to Kant's of Pure Reason, we are able to articulate new understanding of sovereignty of transcendental subject. I do so by showing that there is zone of indistinction between interiority and exteriority that grounds Kant's analytic in such way that paradox of sovereignty is at work at two limits of transcendental project: transcendental unity of apperception and thing in itself. These correlate concepts and dualism they produce are not an evasion of those paradoxes and flight into subjective sovereignty, but rather an explication of state of exception upon which Kantian law is itself erected. I will argue that Kant's attempt to secure legality of Reason's self-critique is only arrived at through detour into careful articulation of paradoxes of limits of law and state of exception. In order to do so, I will first justify extension of Agamben's analysis of law to Kant's first critique, and then turn to way paradoxical space of illegitimacy opens up respectively in Kant's account of transcendental unity of apperception and thing in itself. I conclude by suggesting that Kant's project of self-legislation or self-grounding is an attentive response to such paradoxical and difficult zones of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. This conclusion opens up third option of interpreting sovereign law in Kant against dominant though contradictory criticisms of Kant, namely, that Kantian subject is not sovereign enough and that it is too sovereign and despotic. Quaestio Juris What right (quid juris) could one possibly have in extending juridical concepts of sovereignty and state of exception to analytic of Kant's of Pure Reason! Of course, Agamben himself claims that these concepts are not merely juridical, but extend to very being of politics and its relation to Ufe.1 But it is one thing to extend them to political ontology, and yet another to text that is primarily about relationship between rational finite cognition and its objects of knowledge. One possible justification might be found in fact that main sources of Agamben's analysis, namely, Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence, are themselves engaged with and against Neo-Kantian interpretations of same concepts. Beyond fact that Benjamin's text cites Hermann Cohen's work on ethics of pure will,2 it is also written few years after he claimed that the central task of coming philosophy will be to take deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of great future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them to Kantian system.3 Alternatively, Schmitt's text is an attack on Hans Kelsen's Kantian attempt to base all legal points of ascription on one fundamental Grundnorm.4 These contacts with Neo-Kantianism may well help explain why certain Kantian themes surreptitiously appear in Agamben's analysis, but do they justify their extension to supposed epistemological problems of first Critique? Since we do not want to justify this extension by appealing to facts and possibly mistaking quid facti for quid juris, legitimacy must rest on Kant's own text. That of Pure Reason is teeming with juridical metaphors can hardly be overlooked. In preface, Kant calls book a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims. …

Lawless Sovereignty: Challenging the State of Exception

Giorgio Agamben describes the origins of sovereign power, that power which constitutes the state of exception, as a force that gains its strength in the `unlocalizable' space between fact and law. Terming this space the `zone of indistinction', Agamben illustrates the particular manner in which the state employs law through exception, helping to reveal the paradoxical and omnipotent qualities of sovereign power. While the implications of his analysis hold that this form of power should be confronted and challenged, Agamben does not arrive at how this may be pursued. By reading Agamben's writings alongside selected anti-colonialist texts by Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, it is possible to gain insights regarding both the dangers inherent to this type of sovereign power, and how it can be challenged. It is argued that the type of state that governs by means of exception creates the conditions that lead to its own undoing. Groups whose consent to the state's juridical order was historically tenuous, if not altogether absent, lay claim to a distinct position that is always already external to state sovereignty and law. Challenges from this position gain force by appealing to an extra-state sovereignty that represents universalized justice rooted in lawlessness.

Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics

The category of ‘bare life’ is used to refer to subjects who are denied both political and legal representation. For Giorgio Agamben, the subject who most immediately exemplifies the plight of ‘bare life’ is the stateless refugee. However, this can be extended, the author would suggest, to include political prisoners, the disappeared, victims of torture, and the dispossessed – all of whom are excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation‐state and recourse to international law. The concept of ‘bare life’ also provides a significant way of reflecting on contemporary art practices that take migration, statelessness, diasporic communities, human rights, and zones of conflict as their subject matter; nowhere more so that when they represent the ‘zones of indistinction’ to which ‘bare life’ is consigned.

Uma nova economia (ou a vida como jogo)

This paper attempts to confront Georges Bataille’s reading of life as a game with the contemporary “marginal” novels Cidade de Deus (Paulo Lins) and Capao Pecado (Ferrez). From the “Homo Ludens” to the “Homo sacer”, it pretends to show that the violence exposed in these novels reveal the formation of a new economy, one which reinforces its bonds with sovereignty and deepens even more the zone of in-distinction between executioner and victim, leaving not a single space for redemption.

The Architectural Nervous System

The Architectural Nervous System

Trans-Generational Trauma: The Zone of Indistinction After Auschwitz

Giorgio Agamben talks about the concentration camp as a zone of indistinction where the exception was the rule, the illicit licit, and the extreme normalized. This paper seeks to extend Agamben's theory to understand the trauma of the concentration camp. If the real horror of the camp was indeed this zone of indistinction, then can we understand the trauma as the continued experience of the traces of this zone of indistinction? While the survivors were in the camps, it was a barbaric world built on normality; in their later lives, it was a normal world laced with traces of barbarism. Abraham and Torok's theory of the phantom is applied to discuss how this trauma of indistinction is transferred to the children of Holocaust survivors. Finally, Art Spiegelman's <em>Maus</em> and Melvin Jules Bukiet's <em>After</em> are examined through the lense of these combined theories to discuss the form of second generation Holocaust literature in relation to the trans-generational trauma experienced by its authors.

Zones of Indiscernibility

The concept of a "zone of indiscernibility" plays a significant role in how both Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben conceive of life. Both attend to a level of sub-individual singularities in order to think life beyond, and below, the human, and it is to this level that the concept of a "zone of indiscernibility" pertains.1 Here, I will trace the divergences between their respective formulations of this concept, which in Agamben becomes a zone of indistinction or indifference, by considering the way each treats the relation between humans and animals. This relation will be the point of departure for the present analysis both because our conceptions of humanity and animality are central to how life gets organized and defined, and because both Deleuze and Agamben take the interchange between the human and the animal to be a zone of indistinction and indiscernibility. Loosely defined in a way consistent with both philosophers, a zone of indiscernibility or indistinction is an ontological domain in which the terms of a seemingly clear distinction are seen to overlap. On Deleuze's understanding, zones of indiscernibility are the loci of becoming. Thus, in A Thousand Plateaus, relations between humans and animals can be understood in terms of a process of becominganimal. Agamben devotes his 2002 text, The Open, to problematizing the ways in which the relationship between humans and animals has been articulated. Further, he clearly believes that the decisions shaping this relation are constitutive of the notion of "bare life," which figures so prominently in the rest of his work. Zones of Indistinction and theInclusion/ Exclusion Paradigm In a recent interview, Agamben asserts the need for a logic of zones of indistinction and his desire "to question the interweaving" of categories that have been rendered distinct and oppositional: in order to understand what is really at stake here, we must learn to see these oppositions not as "di-chotomies" but as "di-polarities," not substantial, but tensional. I mean that we need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances.2 On his account, then, zones of indistinction are regions in which there is a coincidence of two seemingly opposed terms. Their separation and distinction creates two poles, but these poles are not, for example, "the animal" as a rigid, pure entity that is completely disconnected from "the human." Instead, the two poles indicate two types of movement with respect to this fundamental indistinction. The zone of indistinction makes possible relational structures in which all inclusions are simultaneously modes of exclusion and all exclusions are simultaneously modes of inclusion. This general paradigm pervades Agamben's work, which he characterizes as offering genealogies of specific instances of this structure of inclusion and exclusion. Indistinction, then, is the persistent and underlying structure, and what is of interest are the ways in which this indistinct zone is carved up and distinctions demarcated and maintained. The structure of the zone of indistinction can be explained briefly with reference to the figure of homo sacer and the sovereign exception that constitutes this limit figure. The state of exception, which is precisely not an exception but a constitutive exercise of power, is-not simply the enclosure of an outside within the domain of the sovereign power of the state for the purposes of controlling and suppressing it.4 Rather, the state of exception is one in which the law suspends itself in order to ground itself: "what is excluded in the exception [a particular case, e.g., homo sacer] maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule's suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it" (Agamben 1998, 170-71). The form of "non-relation" that characterizes the state of exception also characterizes the figure of homo sacer that is constituted on its basis. …

Литургия по Бронзовому солдату: Память и история в формировании кризиса

SUMMARY: The paper is centered around the recent crisis triggered by the Estonian government’s decision to remove from the city’s center the Soviet World War II monument, the “Bronze Soldier.” Since the decision led to the eruption of belligerent rhetoric in Russia and open violence in Tallinn, most of the media coverage, as well as immediate commentary, was in one way or another focused on interstate or interethnic relations. These relations, in turn, were presented as plagued by the insurmountable differences in the interpretations of history. Without denying the importance of the aforementioned aspects of the events, this paper highlights the crisis within Estonian society. It argues that the “Bronze soldier” is best seen as located in the contested zone of indistinction between historical consciousness and memory, while the contestation in question concerns the transformation of the mythical Estonian “nation” into a modern technocratic “society.” By drawing on Pierre Nora’s analysis of lieux de mémoire , the paper outlines the confrontation between Estonian nationalists and increasingly technocratic governments, placing this confrontation within the context of Estonia’s integration into the European Union.

Zones of indistinction: bio-political contestations in the urban arena

This essay explores the idea of ‘bio-politics’ in relation to the modern city. The concept is traced through its original Foucauldian formulation to more recent explorations of the relationship between the body and the city. We explore the idea through the emergence of discourses on hygiene, public health and differing conceptions of ‘urban order’. We find that the bio-political dynamics of urban space encompass both juridical and dispersed sources of power in modern societies. It is concluded that existing conceptions of power in urban space need to take account of those diffuse sources of power that enable the modern city to function in spite of its contradictory dynamics. We also need to contend with those ‘zones of indistinction’ which appear to lie outside conventional urban discourse yet reveal much about the hidden dimensions of urban modernity.

Living Long in Fragile Health: The New Demographics Shape End of Life Care

Not long ago, people generally got sick and died--all one sentence and all a few days or weeks. end of life had religious, cultural, and contractual significance, while paid health care services played only a small part. Now, most Americans will grow old and accumulate diseases for a long time before dying. Our health care system will cleverly supplement body's shortcomings, making it possible to live for years in valley of shadow of death, fearing not only death but also all sorts of evil from regular dysfunctions of our health care and social systems. In a sense, great success of modern medicine has been to transform acute causes of death into illnesses. Mostly, we do not spend much time or money on cures--these are quick and cheap when they are available at all. Instead, health care now involves substituting better conditions and helping people to live with implacable illnesses, a few of which are stable and many of which are progressive but not life-threatening. However, each of us eventually lives with a set of conditions that are, taken together, progressively worsening and eventually fatal. This is a very different way of coming to end of life from that of the old days, when people died childbirth, of occupational hazards, of periodic epidemics, and with first heart attack. In 1897, Sir William Osler's Principles and Practice of Medicine noted that usual adult hospitalized with diabetes would within a month. Things have changed so much that today we don't really have language, categories, and stories to help us make sense of our situation. One hears people say, He's not dying yet, of a person living with fatal lung cancer. Generally, that means he's not yet taking to bed, losing weight, and suffering from pain, as would be expected when dying is all that he can do. But category is used as if one is either temporarily immortal--which is usual state of human beings--or dying, which case person is of a different sort, having different obligations and relationships. The Dying are expected to do little but wrap life up and go. But this dominant myth about dying does not fit many people. Many elderly people are inching toward oblivion with small losses every few weeks or months. If our language does not accommodate new reality, it is not surprising that our shared social life has not yet taken up challenge. characters on evening television are cracking jokes while dealing with Grandma's wandering and incontinence. movies show accommodations needed to live with advanced emphysema. As a patient once told me, No one Bible died like this. People find little guidance when they look to our ancient texts for comfort and advice on how to live while walking a tightrope of serious and frailty, propped up by modern medicine. That lack of social understanding also shows conceptual apparatus we have used trying to bring reform to what happens last part of our lives. Remarkably, we have used language of decision-making and law more often than that of spiritual journey and psychological meaning. In 1970s, issues were framed as the right to die or the right to choose. work of President's Commission on Ethical Problems Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research marks a transition to language of foregoing life-sustaining treatment. At that time, widespread reaction to suffering inflicted on patients by cancer treatments and to mainstream medicine's inattention to physical pain led to only widely adopted change health care delivery last half of twentieth century--hospice programs. Half of Americans use hospice at least briefly before dying. However, most of time spent living with serious illnesses that will end death is spent not hospice care, but indistinct zone of chronic illness that has no specific care delivery system. …

Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 199 pages. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper. For the first time history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect and to authorize a holocaust. -Michel Foucault qtd. Agamben (1998:3) Sacredness is a line of flight still present contemporary politics, a line that is such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sac7i. -Giorgio Agamben (1998:114-15) Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is one of those books that comes along all too infrequently, unsettling conventional answers and inspiring new questions a range of academic disciplines. We understand that this is a large claim with which to begin, but it is our hope this essay to show the immense range and depth of Agamben's insights and the implications of these insights for anthropologists, historians, legal theorists, sociologists, and others. Indeed, if the rapid commission of translations of Agamben's works are any indication, our prediction of his increasing theoretical influence would seem already the process of being fulfilled.1 Our claims for this text are, fact, matched by Agamben's own ambitious-and apocalyptic-declarations. Homo Sacer began, we are told a cryptic aside, as a response to the bloody mystification of a new planetary order; but soon, in the urgency of catastrophe, Agamben felt the need to confront and revise without reserve a range of terms that are central and seemingly self-evident the social sciences (p. 12). Amongst the points of critique, the sacredness of human and the paradox of sovereign power are at the forefront. Between them, Agamben hopes to do nothing less than reveal the originary and true nature of the modern political realm. His argument, succinctly summarized the concluding chapter of the text, is organized around three main points: 1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion). 2. The activity of sovereign power is the production of originary political element and threshold of articulation between nature and culture, xoe and bios. 3. Today it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the biopolitical paradigm of the (p. 181) The precise meaning of these statements will become clearer the course of our exposition. For now we wish to stress that bare life should not be confused with natural life, is what, Agamben's view, is produced the originary (both original and originating) act of sovereignty.2 The production of this thus establishes a relation that defines the political realm and which Agamben calls, following Jean-Luc Nancy (1993), the relation of ban, or abandonment. Bare is produced and through this act of sovereignty the sense of being included the political realm precisely by virtue of being excluded. And it is this same life, once abandoned by the law at the outskirts of the polis, that has today, according to Agamben, fully entered the polls to the point of rendering outside and inside, and law, truly indistinguishable from one another. It is this way that the concentration camp, for Agamben, has become the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. Our primary purpose this essay is to trace the intellectual genealogies of each of the three claims outlined by Agamben his conclusion. Before we turn to this task, however, some initial remarks further clarifying these claims and their relation to one another will be helpful. …

Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp

Like Coleridge's ancient mariner who fixes us with his glittering eye and forces us to hear his tale of horror, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are plagued by demons.2 In the face of the inexpressible horror of the camps, they have a compulsion to bear witness. They have to offer atonement for their survival. To their audience, they are both frightful and compelling. Like the ancient mariner, survivors seize the attention of their unwilling listeners: Primo Levi, for instance, summons those who live safe in their warm houses to consider his words or face his curse.3 And the lis-

Calcrete Profiles and Porosity Development in the Wagon Wheel (Pennsylvanian) Field, Ward County, Texas: ABSTRACT

The Cisco and Canyon formations in the Wagon Wheel field, located on the western edge of the Central Basin platform, contain 10-15 previously unrecognized calcrete profiles, providing excellent evidence of repeated Late Pennsylvanian subaerial exposure. Evidence for calcretes includes (1) rhizoliths, (2) alveolar texture, (3) circumgranular cracking, (4) tangential needle fibers, (5) calcrete glaebules, (6) light shifts in {delta}{sup 13}C profiles, (7) autobrecciation, and (8) laminated crusts. Extreme lateral variability of calcrete profiles makes correlation of subaerial exposure surfaces difficult. Porosity within calcrete profiles is occluded, providing a seal for underlying reservoir facies. Porosity in the Wagon Wheel field is strongly facies dependent. Porous intervals consist of lenticular skeletal grainstone-packstone facies, typically capped by calcrete profiles. Repeated meteoric phreatic lenses established during Late Pennsylvanian exposure events are interpreted to have formed moldic porosity through selective dissolution in strata containing mineralogically metastable allochems. Secondary porosity development, however, is often balanced by precipitation of eogenetic calcite cement. Therefore, meteoric diagenesis associated with Wagon Wheel calcrete development commonly occludes and only rarely enhances primary porosity. Two stages of calcite cementation are recognized: (1) an early pore-rimming nonferroan nonluminescent calcite cement with thin moderate to brightly luminescent microzones, and (2) a later ferroan, dullymore » luminescent calcite cement with broad, indistinct zones. Truncated cements in Cisco- and Canyon-derived lithoclasts indicate nonluminescent cement was precipitated from oxidizing meteoric phreatic waters. Microzones were precipitated during brief periods of stagnation in the phreatic lenses.« less

Law and the general practitioner: appearing in court.

A general practitioner may be called upon to give evidence in a variety of courts for a variety of reasons, but the basic principles are the same. In this article we assume that the doctor's evidence is in relation to his professional activities and not to some non medical happening such as witnessing a road accident, where his standing in court will be the same as any other member of the public. In his professional capacity the general practitioner, unless a police surgeon, will seldom act as an expert witness. This is usually the role of the consultant pathologist or surgeon who appears in court to interpret and give opinions on postmortem findings or the prognosis of a disabled patient. Most of the legal pronouncements of family doctors will concern matters of medical fact arising out of their practice, though there is a somewhat indistinct zone between this aspect and an opinion upon those same facts, which then merges into the purview of the expert witness.

Electron microscopy of susceptible and resistant near-isogenic (sr6/Sr6) lines of wheat infected by Puccinia graminis tritici. I. The host–pathogen interface in the compatible (sr6/P6) interaction

Membrane associations in the interfacial zone between host cytoplasm and haustoria of wheat stem rust are reported. The invaginated host plasmalemma (IPL) adhered tightly to the haustorial neck wall above an indistinct zone at the base of the neck. There was extensive proliferation of host endoplasmic reticulum (ER) near haustoria during the formative growth stages of the haustoria. Most of the proliferation occurred along the neck from the neck ring region to the area at the base of the haustorial body where the extrahaustorial sheath became evident. Closely spaced arrays of ER occurred along the neck and radiated into the host cytoplasm. The ER was closely associated with the IPL in the vicinity of the neck wall, and at points of contact or near contact, the ER was ribosome free and stained more densely. There was luminal continuity between ER cisternae and the extrahaustorial sheath matrix. In the host cytoplasm adjacent to haustoria, ER-derived membranous complexes were found. These complexes consisted of a lattice arrangement of large tubules and small tubules, the latter containing a thread of denser staining material at their centers. The large tubules were bounded by lightly stained membranes, whereas the membranes of the small tubules stained more densely. These complexes were interconnected by rough ER to form networks in host cytoplasm. The complexes formed part of the interface between host and pathogen through connections with the invaginated host plasmalemma.