Negotiating the inhuman: Bakhtin, materiality and the instrumentalization of climate change

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness

THE SANDIA X-RAY LASER PROGRAM

Le laser au rayon X en train d'être développé aux Laboratoires Sandia utilise un rayonnement keV intense, produit par la compression cylindrique ("Z-pinch") d'une bouffée de gaz, pour obtenir les ions de la série isoélectronique F par la photoionisation des ions Ne. Les populations des niveaux de la configuration (2p)5(3p) et de la configuration (2p)5(3s) sont inverties par des processus de recombinaison des ions. Une enveloppe annulaire de stagnation maintient la séparation entre la source du rayonnement et le plasma étant lasé. Une couche mince d'aluminium ou sodium sert pour changer la longueur d'onde du rayonnement. La méthode pour arriver aux dimensions et à la densité du laser au rayon X est décrite.The Sandia X-ray Laser Program is based on the use of intense keV radiation produced by gas puff, Z-pinch implosions to photoionize Ne-like ions to F-like ions. A 3p-3s population inversion is generated via recombination processes. An annular stagnation shell is used to separate the imploding pump source from the lasant. We are also developing a converter technology for examining the Na-Ne line matching scheme. Design considerations and some computational results are presented

Z-PINCH IMPLOSION DRIVEN X-RAY LASER RESEARCH

In experiments performed during the past two years on Proto II (a 10-TW pulsed-power accelerator), we imploded annular plasmas onto thin-walled annular x-ray laser targets in order to create a radiation pump source for x-ray laser physics studies. This Z-pinch must be axially uniform and must efficiently produce the pump radiation without destroying the laser medium on the cylindrical axis of symmetry. To characterize the pump source x-rays and lasant conditions, we regularly field a large number of x-ray diagnostics. In recent experiments, we produced over 15 kJ of ≥1-keV pump radiation with an imploding neon gas-puff load. We are considering both recombination and resonance-pumped x-ray laser schemes