Nothing but a Pack of Cards: Semi-fictitious Persons and Flopping Jellyfish in Elizabeth Bowen

Taking the wildly conflicting critical evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen\u27s final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969) as its starting-point, this essay argues against \u27interpreting\u27 both the novel and its \u27monstrous\u27 heroine in conventional representational terms, to argue, instead, for an appreciation, or experience, of both novel and protagonist as instantiations of a process of becoming along Deleuzian lines. Rather than seeing Bowen\u27s final novel as a (failed) attempt to do what the Anglo-Irish writer\u27s previous work would have suggested this text to do as well, the novel and its eponymous heroine are approached as Bowen\u27s rigorously ethical effort to, first, obviate the opposition between living and writing, and second, to show, rather than claim, that art and life are indissolubly connected. Drawing on both Gilles Deleuze\u27s notion of the \u27traitor-prophet\u27, whose function is to call both the world of dominant signification and the established order into question, and on Deleuze\u27s counterpart Flix Guattari\u27s concept of the work of art as an activity of \u27unframing\u27, the article ultimately suggests that the novel\u27s effect, beyond representation and, indeed, through its own and its protagonist\u27s language, is the \u27undoing\u27 of the reader, opening up a realm of virtual becoming that is neither reassuring nor to be captured in the chains of signification

Unreason, Love, and Un-Becoming Queer

Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory by Lynne Huffer. Gender and Culture series. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 376, 10 illustrations. $84.50 cloth,$27.50 paper

Technicity and Aesthetics in the Photographic Image

Since its emergence as theoretical object, photography has been defined by the loss of its identity as a historical and aesthetic object. Rosalind Krauss maintains that, “in becoming a theoretical object, photography loses its specificity as a medium,” so that “now photography can only be viewed through the undeniable fact of its own obsolescence.” Digitization further complicates the ontology of photography. Today, Geoffrey Batchen submits, the “suggestion is that a diminution of our collective faith in the photograph\u27s indexical relationship to the real will inevitably lead to the death of photography as an autonomous medium.” In contrast to such ambivalent assessments, Vilém Flusser argues that photographs are technical images, surfaces enabled and determined by the apparatus that open up an unanticipated power of invention, a hallucinatory power springing from the absence of a point of reference. The universe of technical images, he suggests, produces a “mutation of experiences, perceptions, values, and modes of behavior, a mutation of our being-in-the-world.” Inspired by Flusser’s alternative account, this panel reconsiders the relation between the technicity and the aesthetics of photographic images. What aesthetic effects might photographs have in the “absence of a point of reference”? Or, must we re-imagine what the organization by reference means? Can we still think photography as medium, when every photograph is, in Flusser’s words, a ”realization of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera”? Can we re-conceive photography, in its very technicity, as a power to organize emergent, differing aesthetics

Monte Carlo Renormalization of the 3-D Ising model: Analyticity and Convergence

We review the assumptions on which the Monte Carlo renormalization technique is based, in particular the analyticity of the block spin transformations. On this basis, we select an optimized Kadanoff blocking rule in combination with the simulation of a d=3 Ising model with reduced corrections to scaling. This is achieved by including interactions with second and third neighbors. As a consequence of the improved analyticity properties, this Monte Carlo renormalization method yields a fast convergence and a high accuracy. The results for the critical exponents are y_H=2.481(1) and y_T=1.585(3).Comment: RevTeX, 4 PostScript file

Glycated platelets proteome

Comunicaciones a congreso

SUE: A Special Purpose Computer for Spin Glass Models

The use of last generation Programmable Electronic Components makes possible the construction of very powerful and competitive special purpose computers. We have designed, constructed and tested a three-dimensional Spin Glass model dedicated machine, which consists of 12 identical boards. Each single board can simulate 8 different systems, updating all the systems at every clock cycle. The update speed of the whole machine is 217ps/spin with 48 MHz clock frequency. A device devoted to fast random number generation has been developed and included in every board. The on-board reprogrammability permits us to change easily the lattice size, or even the update algorithm or the action. We present here a detailed description of the machine and the first runs using the Heat Bath algorithm.Comment: Submitted to Computer Physics Communications, 19 pages, 5 figures, references adde