5,788 research outputs found
Not Belonging to oneâs Self: Affect on Facebookâs Site Governance page
This article makes a contribution to a growing number of works that discuss affect and social media. I use Freudian affect theory to analyse user posts on the public Site Governance Facebook page. Freudâs work may help us to explore the affectivity within the user narratives and I suggest that they are expressions of alienation, dispossession and powerlessness that relate to the usersâ relations with Facebook as well as to their internal and wider social relations. The article thus introduces a new angle on studies of negative user experiences that draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory
Uniqueness of the mass in the radiating regime
The usual approaches to the definition of energy give an ambiguous result for
the energy of fields in the radiating regime. We show that for a massless
scalar field in Minkowski space-time the definition may be rendered unambiguous
by adding the requirement that the energy cannot increase in retarded time. We
present a similar theorem for the gravitational field, proved elsewhere, which
establishes that the Trautman-Bondi energy is the unique (up to a
multiplicative factor) functional, within a natural class, which is monotonic
in time for all solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations admitting a smooth
``piece'' of conformal null infinity Scri.Comment: 8 pages, revte
Capturing Desire: Rhetorical Strategies and the Affectivity of Discourse
In this article I argue that psychoanalytical theory can help us understand the emotional force of political rhetoric. I undertake a theoretical enquiry into the method of interpreting political speeches as strategies of affective persuasion. Both rhetorical and psychoanalytical studies converge in their concern with the production of âplausible storiesâ that aim to fold psychic investments into political judgements. To capture desire, I claim, political rhetoric must articulate âsymptomatic beliefsâ in relation to wider situational exigencies. I sketch three distinct psychoanalytical approaches, each of which emphasises a different scenario of unconscious organisation where rhetorical strategies are pertinent: namely Freudian, Kleinian, and Lacanian approaches. These are then applied to the example of a controversial rhetorical intervention â Enoch Powellâs infamous Birmingham speech of 1968 â to demonstrate the various potential focii when undertaking analysis
Love, artificiality and mass identification
How are we to understand the phenomenon of mass identification, epitomized in recent exhibitions of national feeling such as that of South Africaâs 2010 Football World Cup celebrations? Rather than focussing on the concepts of discourse and nationalism, or advancing an analysis of empirical data, this paper outlines a conceptual response to the challenge at hand, drawing on the tools of psychoanalytic theory. Three explanatory perspectives come to the fore. Firstly, such exhibitions of mass emotion might be understood as demonstrations of love, as examples of the libidinal ties that constitute and consolidate mass identification. Secondly, the marked artificiality of such displays of emotion and the fact of the âexternalityâ they entail might be seen, paradoxically, to be essential rather than inauthentic or secondary features of the displays in question. Thirdly, we might advance, via Lacan, that many of our most powerful emotions require not only recourse to the field of the inter-subjective, but reference also to the anonymous, âfictionalâ framework of available symbolic forms
Regression and the Maternal in the History of Psychoanalysis, 1900-1957
This paper examines the history of the concept of âregressionâ as it was perceived by Sandor Ferenczi and some of his followers in the first half of the twentieth century. The first part provides a short history of the notion of âregressionâ from the late nineteenth century to Ferenczi's work in the 1920s and 1930s. The second and third parts of the paper focus on two other thinkers on regression, who worked in Britain, under the influence of the Ferenczian paradigmâââthe interwar Scottish psychiatrist, Ian D. Suttie; and the British-Hungarian psychoanalyst, and Ferenczi's most important pupil, Michael Balint. Rather than a descriptive term which comes to designate a pathological mental stage, Ferenczi understood âregressionâ as a much more literal phenomenon. For him, the mental desire to go backwards in time is a universal one, and a consequence of an inevitable traumatic separation from the mother in early childhood, which has some deep personal and cultural implications. The paper aims to show some close affinities between the preoccupation of some psychoanalysts with âregressionâ, and the growing interest in social and cultural aspects of âmotherhoodâ and âthe maternal roleâ in mid-twentieth-century British society
Endogenous fantasy and learning in digital games.
Many people believe that educational games are effective because they motivate children to actively engage in a learning activity as part of playing the game. However, seminal work by Malone (1981), exploring the motivational aspects of digital games, concluded that the educational effectiveness of a digital game depends on the way in which learning content is integrated into the fantasy context of the game. In particular, he claimed that content which is intrinsically related to the fantasy will produce better learning than that which is merely extrinsically related. However, this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic (or endogenous and exogenous) fantasy is a concept that has developed a confused standing over the following years. This paper will address this confusion by providing a review and critique of the empirical and theoretical foundations of endogenous fantasy, and its relevance to creating educational digital games. Substantial concerns are raised about the empirical basis of this work and a theoretical critique of endogenous fantasy is offered, concluding that endogenous fantasy is a misnomer, in so far as the "integral and continuing relationship" of fantasy cannot be justified as a critical means of improving the effectiveness of educational digital games. An alternative perspective on the intrinsic integration of learning content is described, incorporating game mechanics, flow and representations
A Convergent Method for Calculating the Properties of Many Interacting Electrons
A method is presented for calculating binding energies and other properties
of extended interacting systems using the projected density of transitions
(PDoT) which is the probability distribution for transitions of different
energies induced by a given localized operator, the operator on which the
transitions are projected. It is shown that the transition contributing to the
PDoT at each energy is the one which disturbs the system least, and so, by
projecting on appropriate operators, the binding energies of equilibrium
electronic states and the energies of their elementary excitations can be
calculated. The PDoT may be expanded as a continued fraction by the recursion
method, and as in other cases the continued fraction converges exponentially
with the number of arithmetic operations, independent of the size of the
system, in contrast to other numerical methods for which the number of
operations increases with system size to maintain a given accuracy. These
properties are illustrated with a calculation of the binding energies and
zone-boundary spin- wave energies for an infinite spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain,
which is compared with analytic results for this system and extrapolations from
finite rings of spins.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, corrected pd
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