The Space of Doubt: The Chairs and the aesthetics of failure

This article examines the emergent concept of ‘failure’ in performance with respect to Eugene Ionesco's play The Chairs. It is argued that The Chairs illustrates wider operations of failure in performance, and in particular the specific ways in which an aesthetics of failure connects to a disruption of theatrical deixis. In bringing together notions of stage deixis and failure in performance, this article offers its own perspective on the discourse of failure in performance. While discussions concerning failure in performance tend to assume a disruption and unpicking of form and representation, I suggest that, paradoxically, The Chairs exemplifies an aesthetics of failure while in many ways inhabiting a more conventional dramatic paradigm. In developing this perspective I address a range of discursive concepts, including Hans-Thies Lehmann's conception of ‘postdramatic theatre,’ and Merleau-Ponty's idea that consciousness enacts itself through continual failures to coincide with itself and the world

Description and performance of track and primary-vertex reconstruction with the CMS tracker

A description is provided of the software algorithms developed for the CMS tracker both for reconstructing charged-particle trajectories in proton-proton interactions and for using the resulting tracks to estimate the positions of the LHC luminous region and individual primary-interaction vertices. Despite the very hostile environment at the LHC, the performance obtained with these algorithms is found to be excellent. For tbar t events under typical 2011 pileup conditions, the average track-reconstruction efficiency for promptly-produced charged particles with transverse momenta of p(T) > 0.9GeV is 94% for pseudorapidities of |η| < 0.9 and 85% for 0.9 < |η| < 2.5. The inefficiency is caused mainly by hadrons that undergo nuclear interactions in the tracker material. For isolated muons, the corresponding efficiencies are essentially 100%. For isolated muons of p(T) = 100GeV emitted at |η| < 1.4, the resolutions are approximately 2.8% in p(T), and respectively, 10μm and 30μm in the transverse and longitudinal impact parameters. The position resolution achieved for reconstructed primary vertices that correspond to interesting pp collisions is 10–12μm in each of the three spatial dimensions. The tracking and vertexing software is fast and flexible, and easily adaptable to other functions, such as fast tracking for the trigger, or dedicated tracking for electrons that takes into account bremsstrahlung