Goya's grotesque : abjection in los Caprichos, Desastres de la Guerra, and los Disparates

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Arts Faculty (Fine Arts), 1999My basic premise in this study is, if abjection is a psychosocial phenomenon, even a kind of waste category and mechanism, it should be discernible and analysable as an underlying structure in the form, iconography and purpose of works of art. Certain modes of art will manifest or express it more lucidly and abundantly than others. Satire and the Grotesque, which Goya adopts in his graphic Work, are especially fruitful in this regard. In both, one can find processes and states of degradation and vitiation that accord with the two facets of abjection Hal Foster (1996) so pragmatically terms the operation to abject and the condition to be abject. Satire, with its inclination to criticise political, social and ecclesiastical figures, can chiefly be interpreted in terms of the operation to abject (to lower, cast down, depose, sideline), while the Grotesque, displaying the distorted, monstrous, 'freakish', hybrid, impossible, relates more to tire condition to be abject. This conjunction between satire/the Grotesque and abjection guides my interpretation of Los Caprichos and Los Disparates. Los Caprichos, in which Goya took it upon himself to "censure" and "ridicule" "human errors and vices", are marked by a quite strict use of satire to criticise, mock and marginalise certain social groups (prostitutes, nobles and corrupt clerics, in particular). Since society, or the Symbolic that undergirds it, cannot do without the abject, either in its role as midden or as oppositional determinant or defining other, the satirical project cannot banish or destroy the abject; it can, however, bid and lobby for some degree of social reclamation and rejuvenation. The satirist depicts the grotesque, sordid, obscene, deviant, abandoned and licentious to indicate to the viewer/reader what s/h e must laugh off to live a decent, obedient, constructive and law-fearing life. Goya takes this aapproach in Los Caprichos. After all, in at least one letter to his friend Martin Zapater he hinted that he feared the "witches, goblins, phantoms, arrogant giants, knaves" and "scoundrels" of his society, and evidently felt a need to part from them. How deep this need ran one cannot say; many of his images suggest a degree of equivocation (he vacillates between being on the side of the law and on the side of Ms own more incorruptible conscience, from which he upbraids the law) and ambivalence (on the one hand, he scolds his objects of attack and appears to be repelled by them; on the other, he seems to relish depicting them in grotesque and blighted shapes, as if the satirical purpose is secondary to the opportunity his art provides to invent forms and get close to the forbidden, the anti-social, the rotten, the abject). In Los Disparates equivocation and ambivalence come more to the fore. Goya often appears most aggressively satirical in the Disparates when he questions corruption in social institutions such as tire Church and the law. Some images, notably Folhj of the Mass, juxtapose a wrathful figure with a mass of social ills, foibles and depravities, and seem characteristically satirical, but the majority of the etchings are striking in their lack of closure, as if a "state of unresolved tension", to quote Michael Steig, adequately rewarded Goya for the labour of production. Man xoandering among Phantoms, for example, is ambiguous and seems to sum up Goya's relationsMp to the abject toward the end of his life: through the surrogate of an old man, Goya appears to have struck a deal with the abject; submerged in it, corrupted by it, impure, but nevertheless sufficiently single-minded to find an identity separate from it. Complicit, but differentiated: all subjects stand in this way to the abject. In Los Desastres, especially given that I do not deal with the Caprichos Enfdticos section of the series, my interpretation is determined less by satire than by the question of how an antagonistic nation uses war as a mechanism of conclusive abjection to extend military, political and, ultimately. Symbolic influence - by means of sanctioned murder, execution, even rape - over another nation, w ith the aim of making that nation succumb to the abjection of surrender and the imposition of a foreign Symbolic. War also produces heaps of corpses and, in the occupied cities, ill and starving destitutes: those reduced to conditions of permanent or near-permanent abjection by war's ballistic exacerbation of the operation to abject. Contact with abjection through art strengthens, weakens and expands the self. It carries the threat of immersion in the repressed and the promise of risque pleasure - both from the diminution of unpleasure through the making or viewing of art, and the more positive pleasure of jouissance. Contact with abjection allows, further, for the complicated experience of being liminal, grotesque and abject oneself while caught between the poles of the Symbolic and tire abject. Whether we, as makers an d /o r viewers, criticise or joy in it, abjection holds out the alluring prospect of catharsis and temporary relief both from its own hazards and the rigours and inhibitions of social life. Goya, it would appear, found this intervenient condition compelling enough to return to it - if he ever truly left it - over a period of almost three decades through the medium of the three graphic series I explore in this dissertation

Towards quantum-chemical method development for arbitrary basis functions

We present the design of a flexible quantum-chemical method development framework, which supports employing any type of basis function. This design has been implemented in the light-weight program package molsturm, yielding a basis-function-independent self-consistent field scheme. Versatile interfaces, making use of open standards like python, mediate the integration of molsturm with existing third-party packages. In this way both rapid extension of the present set of methods for electronic structure calculations as well as adding new basis function types can be readily achieved. This makes molsturm well-suitable for testing novel approaches for discretising the electronic wave function and allows comparing them to existing methods using the same software stack. This is illustrated by two examples, an implementation of coupled-cluster doubles as well as a gradient-free geometry optimisation, where in both cases, an arbitrary basis functions could be used. molsturm is open-source and can be obtained from https://molsturm.org.Comment: 15 pages and 7 figure

The cAMP-Dependent Protein Kinase Inhibitor H-89 Attenuates the Bioluminescence Signal Produced by Renilla Luciferase

Investigations into the regulation and functional roles of kinases such as cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) increasingly rely on cellular assays. Currently, there are a number of bioluminescence-based assays, for example reporter gene assays, that allow the study of the regulation, activity, and functional effects of PKA in the cellular context. Additionally there are continuing efforts to engineer improved biosensors that are capable of detecting real-time PKA signaling dynamics in cells. These cell-based assays are often utilized to test the involvement of PKA-dependent processes by using H-89, a reversible competitive inhibitor of PKA.We present here data to show that H-89, in addition to being a competitive PKA inhibitor, attenuates the bioluminescence signal produced by Renilla luciferase (RLuc) variants in a population of cells and also in single cells. Using 10 microM of luciferase substrate and 10 microM H-89, we observed that the signal from RLuc and RLuc8, an eight-point mutation variant of RLuc, in cells was reduced to 50% (+/-15%) and 54% (+/-14%) of controls exposed to the vehicle alone, respectively. In vitro, we showed that H-89 decreased the RLuc8 bioluminescence signal but did not compete with coelenterazine-h for the RLuc8 active site, and also did not affect the activity of Firefly luciferase. By contrast, another competitive inhibitor of PKA, KT5720, did not affect the activity of RLuc8.The identification and characterization of the adverse effect of H-89 on RLuc signal will help deconvolute data previously generated from RLuc-based assays looking at the functional effects of PKA signaling. In addition, for the current application and future development of bioluminscence assays, KT5720 is identified as a more suitable PKA inhibitor to be used in conjunction with RLuc-based assays. These principal findings also provide an important lesson to fully consider all of the potential effects of experimental conditions on a cell-based assay readout before drawing conclusions from the data

Quantum chemistry with Coulomb Sturmians:Construction and convergence of Coulomb Sturmian basis sets at the Hartree-Fock level

The first discussion of basis sets consisting of exponentially decaying Coulomb Sturmian functions for modelling electronic structures is presented. The proposed basis set construction selects Coulomb Sturmian functions using separate upper limits to their principle, angular momentum and magnetic quantum numbers. Their common Coulomb Sturmian exponent is taken as a fourth parameter. The convergence properties of such basis sets are investigated for second and third row atoms at the Hartree-Fock level. Thereby important relations between the values of the basis set parameters and the physical properties of the electronic structure are recognised. For example, an unusually large limit for the angular momentum quantum number in unrestricted Hartree-Fock calculations can be linked to the breaking of spherical symmetry in such cases. Furthermore, a connection between the optimal, i.e. minimum-energy, Coulomb Sturmian exponent and the average Slater exponents values obtained by Clementi and Raimondi (E. Clementi and D. L. Raimondi, J. Chem. Phys. 38, 2686 (1963)) is made. These features of Coulomb Sturmian basis sets emphasise their ability to correctly reproduce the physical features of Hartree-Fock wave functions.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, supporting inf