I love the smell of napalm in the morning: aesthetics against society

The relationship of aesthetics to ethics is explored through a discussion of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese military woodblock prints and recent Daesh (ISIL) media productions. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is praised for its anthropological ‘nearness’ to a ‘dangerous’ local aesthetics and ethics, a ‘proximity’ that philosophers of aesthetics seem reluctant to entertain. Thierry de Duve’s engagement with Kant’s sensus communis (which creates the ‘oughtness’ of art) is invoked to help explain why politics is always inextricably aestheticized and aesthetics always intrinsically political

Prophetic Pictures Or: What Time is the visual?

This chapter attempts to anchor the dialectic between the representation of antecedent signifiers and futurity in the specific context of a corpus of illustrated nineteenth-century astrological almanacs before then striking out to attempt to explore the unlikely prophetic echoes apparent in photography. The Pythoness of the East, and Raphael’s nominalist appropriation of a Jewish identity, points to the Prophetic Messenger’s role as an agent of cultural critique. In fact, Raphael’s usage owed more to the Renaissance fantasy of picture-writing descended from Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili first published by Aldus Manutius in 1499 in Venice. Raphael’s almanacs were striking for the prominence given to a ‘prophetic hieroglyphic’ published as a frontispiece to each annual issue. This nineteenth-century usage echoes Walter Benjamin’s sense of a ‘picture-writing’ descended from the great Renaissance text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. For Benjamin, as for Pierre Bourdieu, photographs are allegories, but they are portents of a future for which there might be a key

Strong geometric frustration in model glassformers

We consider three popular model glassformers, the Kob-Andersen and Wahnstr\"om binary Lennard-Jones models and weakly polydisperse hard spheres. Although these systems exhibit a range of fragilities, all feature a rather similar behaviour in their local structure approaching dynamic arrest. In particular we use the dynamic topological cluster classification to extract a locally favoured structure which is particular to each system. These structures form percolating networks, however in all cases there is a strong decoupling between structural and dynamic lengthscales. We suggest that the lack of growth of the structural lengthscale may be related to strong geometric frustration.Comment: 14 pages, Accepted by J. Non-Crystalline Solids, 7th International Discussion Meeting on Relaxation in Complex Systems Proceeding

Yielding of a Model Glassformer: an Interpretation with an Effective System of Icosahedra

We consider the yielding under simple shear of a binary Lennard-Jones glassformer whose super-Arrhenius dynamics are correlated with the formation of icosahedral structures. We recast this glassformer as an effective system of icosahedra [Pinney et al. J. Chem. Phys. 143 244507 (2015)]. Looking at the small-strain region of sheared simulations, we observe that shear rates affect the shear localisation behavior particularly at temperatures below the glass transition as defined with a fit to the Vogel-Fulcher-Tamman equation. At higher temperature, shear localisation starts immediately upon shearing for all shear rates. At lower temperatures, faster shear rates can result in a delayed start in shear localisation; which begins close to the yield stress. Building from a previous work which considered steady-state shear [Pinney et al. J. Chem. Phys. 143 244507 (2016)], we interpret the response to shear and the shear localisation in terms of a \emph{local} effective temperature with our system of icosahedra. We find that the effective temperatures of the regions undergoing shear localisation increase significantly with increasing strain (before reaching a steady state plateau).Comment: 13 pages, accepted in Phys. Rev.

Structure in sheared supercooled liquids:Dynamical rearrangements of an effective system of icosahedra

We consider a binary Lennard-Jones glassformer whose super-Arrhenius dynamics are correlated with the formation of particles organized into icosahedra under simple steady state shear. We recast this glassformer as an effective system of icosahedra [Pinney et al. J. Chem. Phys. 143 244507 (2015)]. From the observed population of icosahedra in each steady state, we obtain an effective temperature which is linearly dependent on the shear rate in the range considered. Upon shear banding, the system separates into a region of high shear rate and a region of low shear rate. The effective temperatures obtained in each case show that the low shear regions correspond to a significantly lower temperature than the high shear regions. Taking a weighted average of the effective temperature of these regions (weight determined by region size) yields an estimate of the effective temperature which compares well with an effective temperature based on the global mesocluster population of the whole system.Comment: accepted by J. Chehm. Phy

Recasting a model atomistic glassformer as a system of icosahedra

We consider a binary Lennard-Jones glassformer whose super-Arrhenius dynamics are correlated with the formation of icosahedral structures. Upon cooling these icosahedra organize into mesoclusters. We recast this glassformer as an effective system of icosahedra which we describe with a population dynamics model. This model we parameterize with data from the temperature regime accessible to molecular dynamics simulations. We then use the model to determine the population of icosahedra in mesoclusters at arbitrary temperature. Using simulation data to incorporate dynamics into the model we predict relaxation behavior at temperatures inaccessible to conventional approaches. Our model predicts super-Arrhenius dynamics whose relaxation time remains finite for non-zero temperature.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Nonlinearity Management in Higher Dimensions

In the present short communication, we revisit nonlinearity management of the time-periodic nonlinear Schrodinger equation and the related averaging procedure. We prove that the averaged nonlinear Schrodinger equation does not support the blow-up of solutions in higher dimensions, independently of the strength in the nonlinearity coefficient variance. This conclusion agrees with earlier works in the case of strong nonlinearity management but contradicts those in the case of weak nonlinearity management. The apparent discrepancy is explained by the divergence of the averaging procedure in the limit of weak nonlinearity management.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure