The Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination

Security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. This article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. To do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? But then a far more interesting question emerges: what happens to our understanding of security if we view it through the lens of fascism? Out of these questions it is suggested that the central issue might be less a question of “security and exclusion” and much more a question of “security and extermination.

Is mereology empirical? Composition for fermions

How best to think about quantum systems under permutation invariance is a question that has received a great deal of attention in the literature. But very little attention has been paid to taking seriously the proposal that permutation invariance reflects a representational redundancy in the formalism. Under such a proposal, it is far from obvious how a constituent quantum system is represented. Consequently, it is also far from obvious how quantum systems compose to form assemblies, i.e. what is the formal structure of their relations of parthood, overlap and fusion. In this paper, I explore one proposal for the case of fermions and their assemblies. According to this proposal, fermionic assemblies which are not entangled -- in some heterodox, but natural sense of 'entangled' -- provide a prima facie counterexample to classical mereology. This result is puzzling; but, I argue, no more intolerable than any other available interpretative option.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figur

Types of quantum information

Quantum, in contrast to classical, information theory, allows for different incompatible types (or species) of information which cannot be combined with each other. Distinguishing these incompatible types is useful in understanding the role of the two classical bits in teleportation (or one bit in one-bit teleportation), for discussing decoherence in information-theoretic terms, and for giving a proper definition, in quantum terms, of ``classical information.'' Various examples (some updating earlier work) are given of theorems which relate different incompatible kinds of information, and thus have no counterparts in classical information theory.Comment: Minor changes so as to agree with published versio

Putting time into proof outlines

A logic for reasoning about timing of concurrent programs is presented. The logic is based on proof outlines and can handle maximal parallelism as well as resource-constrained execution environments. The correctness proof for a mutual exclusion protocol that uses execution timings in a subtle way illustrates the logic in action

Agri-food qualification and certification process as an interface between exchange marketing and reciprocity

Ce texte mobilise la théorie de la réciprocité en anthropologie économique pour analyser les processus de qualification des produits de l'agriculture familiale au Brésil. Tout processus de qualification qui garantit l'origine, la spécificité, la qualité d'un produit peut réduire les effets de concurrence et de spéculation spécifiques à l'échange capitaliste. Je fais l'hypothèse que les processus de qualification peuvent contribuer à établir une relation de réciprocité symétrique entre producteur et consommateur. Ils peuvent également concourir à engendrer une structure de partage (de la qualité) au sein d'un groupe de producteurs. Mais, les mécanismes de qualification et certification peuvent également introduire l'exclusion, car en dehors du groupe et des produits certifiés ce sont les lois de l'échange qui régulent le marché. C'est pourquoi on a besoin d'une forme d'interface ou d'articulation entre production et marché. L'interface offerte par les mécanismes de certification de la qualification permet de réintroduire la dimension de la réciprocité économique dans le système du marché d'échange capitaliste. Ce texte repose sur la comparaison de trois systèmes de certification de produits agro-écologiques au Brésil : la certification externe de groupes, la certification participative et la cocertification. (Résumé d'auteur

Detecting Determinacy in Prolog Programs: 22nd International Conference, ICLP 2006, Seattle, WA, USA, August 17-20, 2006. Proceedings

In program development it is useful to know that a call to a Prolog program will not inadvertently leave a choice-point on the stack. Determinacy inference has been proposed for solving this problem yet the analysis was found to be wanting in that it could not infer determinacy conditions for programs that contained cuts or applied certain tests to select a clause. This paper shows how to remedy these serious deficiencies. It also addresses the problem of identifying those predicates which can be rewritten in a more deterministic fashion. To this end, a radically new form of determinacy inference is introduced, which is founded on ideas in ccp, that is capable of reasoning about the way bindings imposed by a rightmost goal can make a leftmost goal deterministic

Citizenship and belonging in a women's immigration detention centre

This chapter draws on six months of fieldwork in IRC Yarl’s Wood, Britain’s primary immigration removal centre for women, to explore the racialised logic of citizenship and nationality that underpin border control. Using women’s testimonies, it seeks to ‘give voice’ to an otherwise ilenced custodial population. In doing so, it seeks to enrich the predominantly theoretical literature on border control and challenge its pessimistic view of such places merely as ‘zones of exclusion.’ A second and related goal is to demonstrate the salience of detention centres – and migration - for criminological research on race/ethnicity. Detention centres are complex and nuanced sites where issues of race and nationality are under constant debate. While the government restricts migration, such places play an increasingly important role both in determining and managing populations who are unwelcome and in setting out a British national identity