Journal articles on the topic 'Chaos motif'

The article examines the representation of chaos motif, which is the most general one among archetypal motifs, in A. P. Chekhov’s The Murder (1895). Chaos motif arranges the plot structure, being represented in its variants, such as misbelief and nature and space disorder. In The Murder, the central event is determined by mental disorders of characters. Each of them stands on their unique religious outlook. Matvei Terekhov teaches his cousin Yakov to accept the fundamental rules of Church, but he is not always true to his beliefs, too. The true reason of murder is hate towards each other, including Yakov’s sister Aglaya – it is a hate crime, which represents total moral destruction. Matvei’s death awakens new feelings in Yakov’s perception. Now he understands what suffering is. As he looks at prisoners, he gains his faith. All he wants to ask is why it was so hard to reveal the truth. Besides chaotic existence problems, three other types of archetypical motifs are realized. These are the following: natural chaos, spatial chaos, and unsafe home. Nature stands between winter and spring, and it is time for spring to arrive. This causes disorder all around, and makes Matvei feel anxious and frustrated. Space semantics also explicate chaos, especially in the final scene, in which Yakov tries to extrapolate his actual Sakhalin experience on his previous life. The narrative is based on spatial concepts here. And, finally, the symbol of home loses its meaning of safety in the semantic structure of the story. It turns out to be somebody’s else but not the family’s. And it causes panic fears among its habitants. Fear is one of basic reflexes on chaos extension. We conclude that the archetypal motif of chaos connects the plot levels, such as the murder event, lack of faith in the main characters, nature, space, and disorder at home. Thus, it is proven to be the motif core of the story.

In the article there is carried out a structural-semantic analysis of Mandelstam’s poem “Tell me, Desert Draftsman…”. Interpretation of a number of mysterious fragments is suggested. In particular, this concerns “Judaic troubles”. We argue that in this context they are connected with the motif of scattering because of the wind activity. We also find interlingual interference between Russian and French. Its meaning is related to the motifs of mutual metamorphosis and inseparability of entities typical of primary chaos. The key feature of the world embodied in the poem consists in the impossibility of unambiguous separation to opposite entities such as creator and destroyer, creation and annihilation, linear and cyclic processes, etc. In this case, no cosmos creates from chaos, the world remains “not embodied”.

The plot structure of the epic folklore samples consists of the logical order of the different motifs so that there the travel motif is characterized with its domination and serves to certain purposes. At the article the dream, the almond-shaped pattern that attracted to reach as myfogeographical location and conditioned it getting direction “cosmos and chaos travel motive was exlained at the context. Folklore expressions created by each nation are unique and they inform about national psychology being rooted in the mythical mind of that nation as a code. And it is not secret that although there is uniqueness, there is the plot that makes nation closer to each-other, its components and motives.

Using a typology of urban symbolism, the identity of Belgrade is reconstructed on the basis of accounts by a sample of city residents, foreigners and locals, who work in international companies and organizations. The component of behavioral symbolism is found to prevail, referring to the place?s atmosphere, mood, spirit, or energy. Next comes material symbolism, particularly in relation to Belgrade?s location at the confluence of two rivers, and the Kalemegdan complex overlooking it. All other types of symbolism are much less prominent. Belgrade is described as having a comparatively low global visibility and lacking a readily recognizable landmark. What emerges as a pervasive motif in the different symbolic codes is the attribute of contradiction, and the related qualities of hybridity, liminality, and incompleteness.

Using a typology of urban symbolism, the identity of Belgrade is reconstructed on the basis of accounts by a sample of city residents, foreigners and locals, who work in international companies and organizations. The component of behavioral symbolism is found to prevail, referring to the place?s atmosphere, mood, spirit, or energy. Next comes material symbolism, particularly in relation to Belgrade?s location at the confluence of two rivers, and the Kalemegdan complex overlooking it. All other types of symbolism are much less prominent. Belgrade is described as having a comparatively low global visibility and lacking a readily recognizable landmark. What emerges as a pervasive motif in the different symbolic codes is the attribute of contradiction, and the related qualities of hybridity, liminality, and incompleteness.

The article explores the leitmotif narration in cinema, i.e. the one based on transitions from one leitmotif to another as exemplified by Artavazd Peleshians short non-fiction film Seasons of the Year. The peculiarity of Peleshians artistic method is that he does not proceed by relations between adjoining images but between the disjoint ones which results in their repetition. The dramaturgy of Seasons of the Year is based on transitions from one leit-motif to another. The main ones here, as well as in other Peleshians films, are the themes of cosmos and chaos.

Derrida's public struggle with the spectre of Artaud began in the 1960s ‘La parole Soufflée’ and ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ and continued forcener le subjectile (1986) and Artaud le Moma (2002). The texts are read as attempts to break with the dominant critical/clinical readings of Artaud inaugurated by Jacques Rivière and as beginnings for a search to secure Artaud-immunity, protection for and against his words and works. It argues that Derrida's readings of Artaud systematically underestimate the power of his deliberate perversion of Platonism and his intimations of an affirmative metaphysics issuing from the replacement of the idea of the One by that of Chaos. The underestimation of the affirmative drive underwriting Artaud's work led Derrida to uncover a suicidal motif in Artaud-immunity that would eventually compromise his own understanding of auto-immunity.

Abstract This essay explores the river battle of Iliad 21 in terms of the Near Eastern mythological motif known as the Chaoskampf, wherein an order-promoting storm deity prevails over a water deity associated with chaos. The first section outlines four notable features of the protean Chaoskampf traditions in ancient Near Eastern literature, from Mesopotamia to the Levant to Anatolia. The second section traces these four features into the Iliad’s river battle and explains their presence by proposing cross-traditional mythopoesis, confluent with other cultural exchanges as established in recent decades. Understanding this part of the Iliad as influenced by West Asian traditions will help to explain why it is Hephaistos, not storm god Zeus, who unleashes his fire upon the menacing river god. The role of Hephaistos is examined against the roles of Ugaritic Kothar-wa-Hasis and Hittite-Hurrian Ea in their respective Chaoskampf myths.

In stanza XLI of Upon Appleton House, Andrew Marvell strikes a nostalgic note regretting his country’s loss of peace and stability in the chaos of civil wars. In the eyes of the poet, the insular nature of Britain is a blessing and a sign of God’s Providence. Calling Britain a “happy isle”, he combines the classical motif of the Fortunate Islands with the biblical account of the Garden of Eden – a common tendency in the Renaissance poetry. Yet Marvell’s images of insularity as well as his presentation of the effects of political or mental isolation that the quest for a secluded “happy isle” may lead to seem more complex and ambivalent than a mere repetition of a poetic cliché. His extensive panegyric seems to be a laboratory in which the poet tests various models of solitary happiness and geographical insularity known from literature and myth, the results of these experiments often leading to disillusionment brought about by the realisation of man’s irreparably fallen condition.

This paper explores one aspect of the way in which cult-iconography of the later Iron Age and Roman periods in non-Classical Europe broke the rules of mimetic (life-copying) representation, with, reference to a particular motif: the triple horn. The presence of three-horned images within the iconographic repertoire of western Europe during this period clearly illustrates two aspects of such rule-breaking. On the one hand, the image of the triple-horned bull – well-known in the archaeological record, particularly of Roman Gaul – exemplifies a recurrent Gallo-Roman and Romano-British tradition in which realism was suppressed in favour of emphasis to the power of three. On the other hand, the triple-horned emblem is not confined to the adornment of bulls but may, on occasion, be transferred to ‘inappropriate’ images, both of animals which are naturally hornless and of humans. Such emblematic transference, with its consequence of dissonance and contradiction in the visual message, on the one hand, and the presence of symbolism associated with boundaries and transition, on the other, suggests the manipulation of motifs in order to endow certain images with a particular symbolic energy, born of paradox, the deliberate introduction of disorder or chaos and the expression of liminality. The precise meaning conveyed by such iconographic ‘anarchy’ is impossible to grasp fully but – at the least – appears to convey an expression of ‘otherness’ in which order imposed by empirical observation of earthly ‘reality’ is deemed irrelevant to other states of being and to the supernatural world.

The temple of motif in the Book of Haggai offers timeless truths that remain relevant to every generation of its readers. Coming from their exile, the Jews initially did fairly well in rebuilding their city and their temple in Jerusalem. However, things turned from good to bad when the experience of perennial hardships, economic considerations, and self-centeredness affected the lives of the Jewish returnees. Not only did the Jews lost their interest in rebuilding the temple, but their theocentric perspective had been lost and was replaced by misdirected priorities. It was in this setting that Haggai delivered his message. Similarly the contemporary period that is characterized by moral, political, and economic chaos seems to diminish Christian’s sense of the sovereignty and presence of God who is able to provide during difficult times. On the other side is the continuous resurgence of post modernism, secularism, human-centered ideology, and rapid advance in technology that leads the present generation to a paradigm shift from God-centered way of life to self-centeredness. Generations belonging to the “Millennials,” “Generation X,” and “Generation Z,” that dominate the present era appear to share some basic commonalities - they are digital natives, immersed in technology , internet enthusiasts, and rigorously preoccupied by personal achievements. These mindset appear to place religion at the backseat. The temple motif in the Book of Haggai assures every Christians that God does not leave His people during difficult time. However there is a call for decisive action to make God the center of their life and their priorities. Positive response to the message of Haggai has a far reaching repercussion - God’s blessings in the present life and the eschatological hope in the coming Kingdom of God.

This article is dedicated to the analysis of peculiarities of space arrangement in the “Divine Comedy” by Alighieri and the novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale” by Herman Melville. On the examples of structural mythologemes “journey inside yourself” and “path towards the center of a circle”, present in both works, the author notes the impact of Dante upon Melville and determines the differences in their poetics of space. Structural, semantic and comparative-historical analysis of the texts in question allows speaking of the transformation of symbolism of the images of circle and its center, circular, vertical and horizontal movement, as well as reconsideration of meaning of the category of chaos and order, opposition “internal-external” from Dante’s works to worldview of the authors of the era of Romanticism. The novelty of this work consists in simultaneous analysis of the impact of Dante’s poetry upon Melville and comparison of peculiarities of the poetics of space of both authors for determining fundamental changes in representations of the structure of world space and space of the inner world of a person. In artistic realm of H. Melville, symbolic point of the center of a circle – “center of the world” –is no longer static, it becomes unreliable, depicting heads of madman characters and the images of the objects, which semantics does not resemble the concept of emptiness. The motif of the loss of structuredness along with the motif of mutual reciprocity of spatial dimensions and characteristics distinguish Melville’s poetics of space, delineated in the dialogue with distinct features of space arrangement in Dante’s works.

The article shows the place of the sovereign's image in Shakespeare's artistic universe. The aim of this study is to analyse the place and role of the monarch in Shakespeare's artistic universe in the metaphysical context of the Renaissance worldview. The study is based on the texts of Shakespeare' s tragedies, comedies and «romantic» plays. The paper regards the figure of the ruler in comparison with his marginal antagonist, the fool, in terms of antinomianism of Christian culture. The narrative and motif-based analysis establishes the places of the sovereign and the fool (and his invariants) in the metaphysical space of Shakespeare's 'theatre of the world' and reveals the set of their specific external and internal characteristics. Cultural studies of Shakespeare's representations of this antinomian couple reveals the tragic guilt of the ruler who gives in to passions (ambition, lust, anger), as a result of which the monarch's ability to maintain order is lost. The disruption of world harmony in the space of Shakespeare's plays is considered in three aspects: spatial, family and existential. This, in turn, is reflected at the metaphysical level, causing natural anomalies and cataclysms. In accordance with this, the article highlights the specificity of the motifs related to this antinomic pair: harmony, sanity, honour (the king); disharmony, madness, sensuality and death (the fool). The authors identify how the king and the fool interact in the context of marginalisation of the ruler's persona. The metaphysical chaos of existence, the result of the power crisis, leads to the fact that the fool and the king swap places in Shakespeare's artistic universe following the game of elements, the game of costumes, the game of words. The paper concludes that the image of the king, occupies one of the key places in Shakespeare's artistic universe. In the gallery of sovereigns created by Shakespeare, the Renaissance image of the ideal ruler is presented in the context of the tendencies of the next historical and cultural epoch – the Baroque.

L’artiste contemporain et le chercheur en sciences humaines partagent un même objectif : offrir une meilleure compréhension du monde dans lequel nous prenons place. Tous deux veillent à proposer des perspectives capables de donner sens au chaos d’informations, à la réalité qui nous entoure. Aussi n’est-il pas étonnant qu’ils partagent des méthodes communes. L’une d’elles, objet de cet article, consiste à proposer des images étonnantes qui, par leur originalité même, offrent un éclairage singulier sur la réalité. Nous suivrons ainsi la piste de la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze et de Félix Guattari et nous analyserons leur recours à des images botaniques et animalières pour réfléchir sur la pensée occidentale et la question du désir. Nous approcherons la pensée de Giorgio Agamben et tenterons de comprendre son usage d’images fortes, souvent choquantes comme propositions d’analyses historiques et sociales. Ces deux approches philosophiques pourraient nous inciter à croire que cet usage d’images, de métaphores – à donner à ce terme un sens cognitif –, est le propre de disciplines abstraites. Il n’en est rien ; le rôle du corail comme dessin et comme motif chez Charles Darwin, dans sa compréhension de l’évolution des espèces, montre bien que ce dernier n’a pu faire émerger sa nouvelle théorie qu’en prenant un objet, une image singulière comme levier. Dans le champ de l’art, nous recourons à deux exemples. Celui d’abord de l’exposition Intrus, présentée au Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec du 24 avril 2008 au 8 février 2009, qui permit, par la rencontre entre des oeuvres d’art contemporain et des oeuvres du passé, d’éclairer celles-ci d’une lumière nouvelle. Celui ensuite de l’oeuvre Lovers (2004) de David Altmejd, qui, si elle semble visuellement commenter le titre qui l’accompagne, ouvre plus profondément à une relecture de ces amoureux qui s’enlacent, voire des effets de l’amour.

The article introduces and substantiates the concept of «hybrid» science fiction, which combines the elements of science fiction and horror fiction. In «hybrid» fiction, science fiction surroundings cannot rationalize the text, but, on the contrary, they are replaced by motives of supernatural horror. «Hybrid» science fiction, in contrast to «hard» science fiction , develops the idea of ​​ unknowability of the Universe. It is worth mentioning here, that «hard» science fiction has been described well enough, but there is a shortage of research work in relation to its «hybrid» version, so this research can be considered as pioneering. We use E. M. Neyolov’s typology that describes the connection between a fairy tale and «hard» science fiction. Basing on this typology, we analyse «hybrid» fiction, in which science fiction scenery was replaced by the anti-rational principle. The research methodology involves a combination of structural, typological and comparative methods. As a material for the study, we use the works of such Russian and American authors as D. Glukhovsky, S. Lukyanenko, G. R. R. Martin, S. King, C. McCarthy, H. P. Lovecraft and others. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the transformation of fairytale discourse in the works of these authors that leads to the genre transition from science fiction to horror fiction. The texts are being analysed from three points of view: system of characters, the structure of space and the direction of time. It is concluded that in «hybrid» science fiction the typological model of the fairy tale was distorted, reconsidered or destroyed, and it is the aberration of the fairytale motif that opens the gate for the genre transformation from «hard» science fiction to horror fiction. For example, the struggle of the superhero with the supervillain is traditional both for fairy tales and for science fiction, but it is replaced by psychologization of the hero and the extreme complication of the metaphysics of the Good and the Evil in «hybrid» science fiction . Besides that, the well-organized space of fairytale and science fiction as well as a close-cut separation of «ours» and «aliens», and also the mythologem of «threshold» are mixed in «hybrid» fiction and lose their symbolical unambiguity. Finally, science fiction and fairytale time in «hybrid» fiction ceases to exist and gives way to the tragic timelessness of chaos and nightmare. Thus, «hybrid» fiction destroys both the canons of «hard» science fiction and the constructs of the fairy tale genre.

The article introduces and substantiates the concept of «hybrid» science fiction, which combines the elements of science fiction and horror fiction. In «hybrid» fiction, science fiction surroundings cannot rationalize the text, but, on the contrary, they are replaced by motives of supernatural horror. «Hybrid» science fiction, in contrast to «hard» science fiction , develops the idea of ​​ unknowability of the Universe. It is worth mentioning here, that «hard» science fiction has been described well enough, but there is a shortage of research work in relation to its «hybrid» version, so this research can be considered as pioneering. We use E. M. Neyolov’s typology that describes the connection between a fairy tale and «hard» science fiction. Basing on this typology, we analyse «hybrid» fiction, in which science fiction scenery was replaced by the anti-rational principle. The research methodology involves a combination of structural, typological and comparative methods. As a material for the study, we use the works of such Russian and American authors as D. Glukhovsky, S. Lukyanenko, G. R. R. Martin, S. King, C. McCarthy, H. P. Lovecraft and others. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the transformation of fairytale discourse in the works of these authors that leads to the genre transition from science fiction to horror fiction. The texts are being analysed from three points of view: system of characters, the structure of space and the direction of time. It is concluded that in «hybrid» science fiction the typological model of the fairy tale was distorted, reconsidered or destroyed, and it is the aberration of the fairytale motif that opens the gate for the genre transformation from «hard» science fiction to horror fiction. For example, the struggle of the superhero with the supervillain is traditional both for fairy tales and for science fiction, but it is replaced by psychologization of the hero and the extreme complication of the metaphysics of the Good and the Evil in «hybrid» science fiction . Besides that, the well-organized space of fairytale and science fiction as well as a close-cut separation of «ours» and «aliens», and also the mythologem of «threshold» are mixed in «hybrid» fiction and lose their symbolical unambiguity. Finally, science fiction and fairytale time in «hybrid» fiction ceases to exist and gives way to the tragic timelessness of chaos and nightmare. Thus, «hybrid» fiction destroys both the canons of «hard» science fiction and the constructs of the fairy tale genre.

The article constitutes an attempt to interpret the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro The Unconsoled – a work with a complex plot and a multi-threaded structure, typical for a composition stretched on the frame of the rhizome-like labyrinth and the motif of memory imperfections. The labyrinth is a space of strangeness, of being lost. It is a journey of the main character who wanders around various spaces of the city and hotel (which performs a variety of functions), meets many random people and listens to their accounts. The life problems of the city’s inhabitants indicate the eternal truth, according to which a man cannot live without understanding, without talking to someone kind who has the ability to listen. They were looking for someone who would listen and understand them, someone who would kindly respond to their problems. It may also be assumed that living in a world without the feeling of a lack of transcendence, the inhabitants were looking for an authority like a messiah who would indicate the direction of renewal in the world of chaos and who would answer the question: How to live? The novel describes a cultural crisis triggered by the feeling of a fundamental contradiction between the world of scientific truths and the inner world of every human being. Values such as faith, friendship, selflessness, truthfulness or family, to which Ishiguro pays a lot of attention, have been lost. “Toxic parents” are shown in multiple configurations: on the example of Ryder’s parents, or Ryder himself as the father of Boris and Stephan Hoffman. The author shows one of the major causes of the paternity crisis, namely the cult of professional success. Professional success and rivalry connected with it completely absorb Ryder’s life and activities. As a result of the pursuit of professional fulfillment, the role of emotional ties in his life becomes less significant, they almost disappear. It may be assumed that, using the example of the crisis in the described city, Ishiguro presents the contemporary world, which lost the sense of life; however, he did not limit it to the lost past. The world in which all attempts to search for a new form of expression and valorization end in failure. It is a labyrinthine, objectified world which is only given outside, a world of showing off and a “game” of pretending, without honesty and simplicity. It is a place dominated by a pose and culture of narcissism, full of inauthenticity, artificiality and appearance. In addition, The Unconsoled is a poignant novel about human loneliness.

The exomer complex is a putative vesicle coat required for the direct transport of a subset of cargoes from the trans-Golgi network (TGN) to the plasma membrane. Exomer comprises Chs5p and the ChAPs family of proteins (Chs6p, Bud7p, Bch1p, and Bch2p), which are believed to act as cargo receptors. In particular, Chs6p is required for the transport of the chitin synthase Chs3p to the bud neck. However, how the ChAPs associate with Chs5p and recognize cargo is not well understood. Using domain-switch chimeras of Chs6p and Bch2p, we show that four tetratricopeptide repeats (TPRs) are involved in interaction with Chs5p. Because these roles are conserved among the ChAPs, the TPRs are interchangeable among different ChAP proteins. In contrast, the N-terminal and the central parts of the ChAPs contribute to cargo specificity. Although the entire N-terminal domain of Chs6p is required for Chs3p export at all cell cycle stages, the central part seems to predominantly favor Chs3p export in small-budded cells. The cargo Chs3p probably also uses a complex motif for the interaction with Chs6, as the C-terminus of Chs3p interacts with Chs6p and is necessary, but not sufficient, for TGN export.

Abstract Approaches for studying the evolution of globular proteins are now well established yet are unsuitable for disordered sequences. Our understanding of the evolution of proteins containing disordered regions therefore lags that of globular proteins, limiting our capacity to estimate their evolutionary history, classify paralogs, and identify potential sequence–function relationships. Here, we overcome these limitations by using new analytical approaches that project representations of sequence space to dissect the evolution of proteins with both ordered and disordered regions, and the correlated changes between these. We use the fasciclin-like arabinogalactan proteins (FLAs) as a model family, since they contain a variable number of globular fasciclin domains as well as several distinct types of disordered regions: proline (Pro)-rich arabinogalactan (AG) regions and longer Pro-depleted regions. Sequence space projections of fasciclin domains from 2019 FLAs from 78 species identified distinct clusters corresponding to different types of fasciclin domains. Clusters can be similarly identified in the seemingly random Pro-rich AG and Pro-depleted disordered regions. Sequence features of the globular and disordered regions clearly correlate with one another, implying coevolution of these distinct regions, as well as with the N-linked and O-linked glycosylation motifs. We reconstruct the overall evolutionary history of the FLAs, annotated with the changing domain architectures, glycosylation motifs, number and length of AG regions, and disordered region sequence features. Mapping these features onto the functionally characterized FLAs therefore enables their sequence–function relationships to be interrogated. These findings will inform research on the abundant disordered regions in protein families from all kingdoms of life.

Ancient treasuries promoted wealth and prosperity of the donation community. Preserved relief scenes portrayed mythological stories used for expressing certain characteristic reflection of reality (chaos, wilderness, heroism, etc.) By analyzing historical sources is possible to assign events related to the poleis in historical context. This paper shall serve as introduction of hypothetical nature of political program and contribution to the knowledge of political promotion of polis in relief decoration. Figural decoration became a form of political program, or even metaphorical ideology. The main carrier of ideological reference were figure decorated pediments and friezes. Those visualized political agenda of polis even for illiterate observers. In particular mythological stories, those that might have some ideological scheme, were preferred. They can be applied to current events of polis, but only if adequate historical sources or archaeological evidence. Mythological battles were frequent motifs. The story of Gigantomachy allowed various kind of exploitation in political ideology. The main idea was the battle between world full of chaos and world representing stability and certainty. Analogies are identifiable in the whole archaic period. The main inspiration were military confrontations with other Greek or non-Greek cities. From preserved decorative elements is possible to roughly characterize also political significance of mythological heroes. Visual display is closely related to foreign policy and inner political conflict of poleis. It is important that preserved reliefs with motives that do not deal with panhellenic scenes are lessnumerous.

The article analyses the topical motifs of the brickwork, the wall, and the house in the works of Carlo Emilio Gadda, one of the greatest Italian writers of the 20th century. These motifs were part of the writer’s broader writing project, the aim of which was to depict and catalogue the entire material reality. These elements appear as parts of a bigger whole: a safe house and a private impenetrable space, but also as a symbol of limitations, petite bourgeois conventions, and a place of suffering and sacrifice. In utilising architectural elements, Gadda indicated the minutest of details and functions that constitute the whole. By utilising architectural references such as a brickwork or a wall, Gadda made them part of a complex system of metaphorical relations through which he attempted to bridle the chaotic reality. The brickwork and walls of villas, condos, labourers’ flats, rural manors, and towering stone fencings often possessed dual meanings and roles: they separate one from the world and protect them against the chaos of the world, or are the products of the burgher culture – despised by the writer – as well as the marks of its undoubted richness and bad taste. This was why they became the focus of his criticism. In some of his works, they become a symbol of a character’s desire to isolate themselves from the world. At the level of the narrative structure, the motifs of the brickwork and the wall become a pretext for a digressive expanding or a developed pause, which, in turn, produces an effect of a breaking-up of a diegesis, which remains unfinished and fragmented.

AbstractTwo decades of evidence-based exploratory pursuits in heme-flavin enzymology led to the formulation of a new biological electron/moiety transfer paradigm, called murburn concept. Murburn is a novel literary abstraction from “mured burning” or “mild unrestricted burning”. This concept was invoked to explain the longstanding conundrum of maverick physiological dose responses and also applied to remodel the prevailing understanding of drug metabolism and cellular respiration. A conglomeration of simple ideas grounded in the known principles of thermodynamics and reaction chemistry, murburn concept invokes catalytic/functional roles for diffusible reactive species or radicals. Hitherto, diffusible reactive species were primarily seen as toxic agents of chaos, non-conducible to the maintenance of life-order. Since the murburn paradigm offers a distinctly different perspective for several biological phenomena, researchers holding conventional views of cellular metabolism pose a direct conflict of interests to the advancement of murburn concept. Murburn schemes are poised to integrate numerous metabolic motifs with holistic physiological outcomes; redefining pursuits in biology and medicine. To advance this agenda, I present a brief account of murburn concept and point out how redundant ideas are still advocated in some prestigious journals.

Abstract Abstract 2243 Toxicity of venom from the eastern brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis) is related to a prothrombin activator protein complex (pseutarin C) that is homologous to the factor Va/factor Xa complex. A previous study has found that the factor V-homologous subunit of this protein (pt-fV) is constitutively active and does not require anionic membranes to function (Bos et al. 2010, Blood). We have previously found that conservative mutation of the amino acids on the hydrophobic membrane binding regions (called spikes) of factor V (W2063M/W2064F/S2117L) can produce increased prothrombinase activity, increased membrane binding affinity and apparent phospholipid-independent prothrombinase activity. However, the membrane-independent activity is caused by retention of phospholipid by factor V through the purification process. We hypothesized that the P.textilis venom-derived factor V has an increase in lipid affinity due to differences in the membrane-interactive spikes. Sequence alignment of the P.textilis venom-derived factor V with bovine and human factor V revealed 5 amino acids located in the putative membrane-binding region (four on spike 3 and one in a region targeted by a small-molecule inhibitor of membrane binding for both factor VIII and factor V) that differed in the venom-derived factor V versus the consensus sequence of mammalian factor V. A mutant factor V that incorporated these five mutations (L2116M, S2117T, S2118T, E2119S, and S2183Y) (factor VMTTS/Y) was expressed in COS cells. After purification utilizing ion exchange chromatography, factor VMTTS/Y showed phospholipid-independent activity that could be inhibited with phospholipase A2. Subsequently, factor VMTTS/Y was washed extensively with CHAPS during purification to prevent phospholipid from co-purifying. Activity was measured with a prothrombin time assay with plasma lacking factor V. Specific activity was 1183 units/mg vs. 676 units/mg for wild type human factor V. Steady state kinetics of the prothrombinase complex with factor VMTTS/Y were assessed with varying concentrations of phospholipid vesicles. In the presence of membranes containing excess phosphatidylserine (15:20:65 PS:PE:PC), factor VMTTS/Y (5 pM) showed 39% greater Vmax than wild type human factor V and 3-fold higher apparent membrane affinity. With limiting phosphatidylserine (2:20:78 PS:PE:PC), factor VMTTS/Y (10 pM) showed 64% greater Vmax and 2-fold higher apparent membrane affinity. Factor VMTTS/Y, purified with a CHAPS wash, did not show lipid-independent activity but did support prothrombinase activity on membranes lacking PS or other negatively charged lipid (20:80 PE:PC). On these vesicles factor VMTTS/Y (50 pM) had a Vmax that was 8-fold higher than wild type factor V (see figure). These data indicate that the apparent phospholipid-independent activity results from higher membrane affinity or from greater activity on minimal phospholipid retained by factor V during purification. They imply that toxicity of pseutarin C may result, in part, from procoagulant activity on cell membranes that do not support the mammalian prothrombinase complex. Furthermore, they indicate that the precise manner in which the C2 domain of factor V binds to a phospholipid membrane influences the Vmax of the prothrombinase complex. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

By melodic landscape, this paper points to natural milieus such as mountains whose motifs are caught up in contrapuntal relations. With Merleau-Ponty, the structure of the world is a symphony, and the production of life which implicates both organism and environment as unfurling of Umwelt is ‘a melody that sings itself’. For the Chinese culture, mountains have been deemed virtuous in Confucianism, immortal by Daoists, and spiritual for a Buddhist to reach a substrate level of pure stream of a-subjective consciousness. A Chinese painter-poet within the ‘mountain-water’ genre would consider mountains as performance of events, a concert of vibration of light, shape and sound, movement and rest. Insofar as art is to create energy transfer, Chinese artists of mountains aim at concerting with nature as organised by rhythms and conspecifics, unfolding contrapuntal melodies with all kinds of counterpoints. As Deleuze and Guattari's notion of refrains are the three forces or tempos of chaos, earth and world confronting/converging one another, this paper endeavours to find out, first, how Deleuze and Guattari's geological, organic and alloplastic stratifications can be put alongside mountains, animals, plants and arts, and second, how this notion can contribute to our new appreciation of the way Chinese mountains in arts can give out music.

This paper aims at locating complex patterns of ambivalence in the narratology of Daniel Silva’s Second World War thriller, The Unlikely Spy, published in 1996, by contending that it recreates a historically justifiable picture of the 1940s in a manner that highlights the typical historicist episteme of the 1990s. This is because its plot retains an apparent structural wholeness as far as the atmospheric evocation through archival research is concerned in spite of the fact that its narratorial focus is informed by characteristic postulates of postmodernist historiography. The argument's theoretical exposition of the latter depends, through an emphasis on notions of simulations, evasions and self-deconstruction, on Jean Baudrillard's proclamation that history’ is no longer possible. The paper employs techniques of qualitative discourse analysis for studying the novel’s narratological patterns and historicist constructs. It shall be seen how, along with narrativity that combines motifs of linearity and temporal-spatial chaos, the text philosophically problematizes the ‘reality’ of the War through an ambivalent intermingling of confrontation and evasion by metonymically representing the entire War-dynamic – completely dispensing with any first-hand account of the uniformed soldiers’ battlefield – in devious circles of executive offices and spies stalking the streets during the blackout. It is further contended that the novel’s historicist vision draws attention to, and even symbolically represents, the ambivalent nature of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism.

This paper aims at locating complex patterns of ambivalence in the narratology of Daniel Silva’s Second World War thriller, The Unlikely Spy, published in 1996, by contending that it recreates a historically justifiable picture of the 1940s in a manner that highlights the typical historicist episteme of the 1990s. This is because its plot retains an apparent structural wholeness as far as the atmospheric evocation through archival research is concerned in spite of the fact that its narratorial focus is informed by characteristic postulates of postmodernist historiography. The argument's theoretical exposition of the latter depends, through an emphasis on notions of simulations, evasions and self-deconstruction, on Jean Baudrillard's proclamation that history’ is no longer possible. The paper employs techniques of qualitative discourse analysis for studying the novel’s narratological patterns and historicist constructs. It shall be seen how, along with narrativity that combines motifs of linearity and temporal-spatial chaos, the text philosophically problematizes the ‘reality’ of the War through an ambivalent intermingling of confrontation and evasion by metonymically representing the entire War-dynamic – completely dispensing with any first-hand account of the uniformed soldiers’ battlefield – in devious circles of executive offices and spies stalking the streets during the blackout. It is further contended that the novel’s historicist vision draws attention to, and even symbolically represents, the ambivalent nature of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy’s work has become required reading in literary criticism, and yet no syllabus appears to provision for the in-depth discussion his texts, particularly the 1985 novel, Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West, require. The ‘And So the Judge Returns: Blood Meridian Workshop’ at the University of Warwick emerged from the idea to provide a space that facilitates such a discussion. Designed to bring academics and non-academics of all ages together in one space, the workshop quickly developed from a small, Warwick-based event into a live-streamed and recorded international conference with a significant audience based in the United States. The workshop reaffirmed the interest in the novel’s enigmatic antagonist Judge Holden and motifs such as the landscape and violence. Less traditional ideas of the judge were also discussed, such as reading the judge as fraud or as weary of chaos and perpetual violence. The workshop succeeded in creating a space to share thoughts and ideas and continue the academic discourse on the novel. Speakers included Dr Nicholas Monk and Dr David Holloway, both established McCarthy critics; Peter Josyph whose artistic engagement with McCarthy’s work and career his highly respected among critics; and Dr Dan O’Hara, expert in American Studies. Ronan Hatfull and Katja Laug represented the younger generation of McCarthy critics. Live-streaming also afforded insights into the academic discourse to the mostly non-academic online audience. The article provides a summary of the day’s events and the links to the edited recordings.

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

The article attempts to find common ground between the artistic systems divided by a century – the lyrics of the Russian poet and philosopher F. I. Tyutchev and prose of the outstanding Russian-American writer V. V. Nabokov. The first part of the article deals with the ideas of domestic and foreign researchers of the peculiarity of the Nabokov’s aesthetic system. Nabokov did not write a special article and did not publish a single lecture on Tyutchev’s lyrics, although he repeatedly turned to the work of the poet, in particular, while teaching in America, left excellent translations of his poems into English. The authors of the article show the common perception of life of nature and man for both authors. The inner closeness of Nabokov and Tyutchev is manifested not so much in direct statements as indirectly. This is an acknowledgement of the narrator in the General Ledger, Nabokov’s Other shores (“Pushkin and Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Gogol stood at the four corners of my world”); and accented by the intertextuality in the prose of the author with specific Tyutchen’s reminiscences, sometimes shocking-pun (short story “Cloud, lake, tower”); and focusing on the motifs of memory, gift, abyss (in Schellingian understanding); and Nabokov’s use of the key opposition “dream – chaos”, which runs through the entire lyrics of Tyutchev. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of Tyutchev’s poetry in the light of researches conducted by Russian philosophers and literary critics. The article notes the little-known fact that Nabokov and Tyutchev were related in kinship. You can find out at what point the kinship of the two great masters of the word crossed by reading the article.

Histories always deal with the construction of cities, announcements of new eras, and strategies of reformations; human history also shows that the bitter human experience of struggles, disputes and wars involve shifting identities or rivalries over territories. Among Shakespeare’s war plays, The First Part of Henry VI is one of the most significant representations of the war between France and England; the play refers to the Treaty of Troyes, an Anglo- French Treaty in 1420, which recognizes Henry V as heir to the French throne, resulting in internal divisions and tremendous chaos in France. This play by Shakespeare refers to the intrigue, spatial contest, politics of kingship and spatial struggle between England and France. Calais had been an enclave of England in France before Henry V succeeded to the throne; securing Calais, Henry V, the warrior king of England, attempted to build up another enclave at Harfleur. With the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, the Dauphin Charles, and Joan of Arc faced two enemies, England and the Dukedom of Burgundy. England and Burgundy had been allies against France in the Hundred Years’ War since 1415. Burgundy, because of its geographical location, is to play the key role in the tug of war between the two forces. Geopolitics and contesting identities are two intertwining motifs in the First Part of Henry VI. Shakespeare portrays the conquest of France by England and represents diplomatic relations and shifting identities through geography and spatial politics as related to nationhood. This paper by examining the conflicts between France and England, will discuss geopolitics and contesting identities, the territorial disputes as well as spatial politics in an era when boundary politics was in flux.

Amid the complexity of concern of the modernist literary discourse in Britain, the thematic nucleus of James Joyce’s writings is formed by certain basic aspects of life, such as individuality, art, religion, nation, language, and his work shows the two hypostases of the author himself as accomplished artist and Irish citizen. In a troubled period in the history of Europe and of his own country, Joyce grasped the sense and the atmosphere of frustration, alienation, futility, chaos, and confusion. The concerns of Dubliners, his first important book, published in 1914, consist in rendering the political and social life of Dublin, the misery of human condition, the theme of exile, the problems of the individual’s existence in an urban background which Joyce saw as paralyzed and, like Eliot, as an expression of a period of crisis in the history of humanity. Joyce intended “to write a chapter of the moral history” of his country, and he chose Dublin as it seemed to him “the centre of paralysis” on different levels which he presented under four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. All the fifteen stories of the book express life experiences of the characters that are of unpretentious standing, incapable to fulfil inner potentialities and to establish communication with others. At moments they experience relevant epiphanic realisations, seemingly due to some trivial incidents – by which they receive an apparent perspective of accomplishment – and though they attempt to escape the bonds of everyday life and of their trapping circle of existence, all they get is an acute sense of frustration, alienation, and entrapment. To reveal and compare the thematic status of the epiphany in the short stories with regard to various issues of individual existence and to the use of motifs and symbols that create an increasing complexity of ideas and subjective human reactions represents the main purpose and the essence of the content of the present study.

The paper discusses the works of Moscow artist Boris Smotrov. It provides a general analysis of the tools of his artistic style as well as the data on his main vectors of creative activity (painting, poster graphics). The author dwells on the master’s works in the field of painting, focusing on national themes. The study distinguishes dominant blocks of the painter's works (landscape, thematic painting), detects specifics of the artistic language, methods of working with color, his mastering of the line and pays attention to the interaction of painting and graphics in B. Smotrov’s creative baggage and his decorative manner. The paper addressees the main archetypes in the works of Smotrov (firebird, cow, apple, spring, Maslenitsa, etc.). The propensity for allegorical language is explained by his competent use of artistic means of creating a poster. The author analyzes individual features of B. Smotrov’s work with color, the creation of his own author's “patchwork” style as a result of creative transformation and rethinking of the influence of various styles and manners of individual artists, from A. Matisse to K. Petrov-Vodkin. The art of the master acts as an effective tool for debunking myths about the cheap popular character of Russian national motifs, and for combating superficial perceptions of them. The paper highlights worldview universals in culture as well as main problems of the art of the turning periods, one of which includes the creative path of B. Smotrov. The author pays special attention to the works of B. Smotrov as a tool for national self-identification of a creative person in conditions of cultural chaos at the turn of the century since they are on display at personal and collective exhibitions not only in Russia, but also in Austria, China, Korea, the United States and stored not only in Russian museums (Moscow, Perm, Tula), but also in private collections in China, USA, Switzerland. The study comes to the conclusion that “patchwork style” by Boris Smotrov is a quintessence of the Russian in his works.

Abstract Factor V (fV) binds to phospholipid (PL) membranes via a motif localized to the C2 domain. We and others have shown that PL binding is mediated by two pairs of hydrophobic residues, each displayed at the tips of β-hairpin turns. The homologous hydrophobic residues in the C2 domain of factor VIII also contribute to PL binding. We hypothesized that the solvent-exposed hydrophobic residues of the fV C2 domain make specific contacts that influence membrane affinity and activity of fV. To test this hypothesis we have prepared fVIII/fV hybrid mutants in which amino acid(s) of the fV C2 domain were changed to the homologous residues of fVIII (Mutants #1 W/W 2063/2064 M/F, #2 L/S 2116/2117 L/L, and #3 W/W/S 2063/2064/2117 M/F/L). Mutants were expressed in COS-1 cells and purified by FPLC. The specific activity of the fV/FVIII hybrids #2 and #3 exceeded those of wild type factor V by approx. 10-fold and approx. 4-fold, respectively, in a prothrombin time assay with factor V deficient plasma. Apparent PL affinites were evaluated in a prothrombinase complex assay with limiting phospholipid. The apparent affinities are 9.8 and 21-fold higher than wild type factor V for mutants #2 and #3 which contain the S→L change in the second hydrophobic spike. An unexpected result was that mutants 1–3 supported prothrombinase activity in the absence of added phospholipid, in contrast to wild type fV. We hypothesized that this activity resulted from phospholipid that was not dissociated from fV during purification. This hypothesis was supported because activity was eliminated by incubation of the factor V mutants with phospholipase A2 or by incubation with lactadherin. The tenacity of the phospholipid binding was further investigated by washing immobilized wild type fV and fV mutants with CHAPS prior to elution from an FPLC column. fV mutants #2 and #3 retained activity after the CHAPS wash, free of added PL and activity remained inhibitable by lactadherin, further illustrating the tenacious phospholipid affinity. We utilized Mutants #1 & 2 in the absence of added PL to evaluate the mechanism through which soluble phosphatidylserine with 6-carbon acyl chains (C6PS) enhances activity of the prothrombinase complex. In the absence of phospholipid vesicles C6PS enhanced activity of Mutant 1 equivalent to wild type fV (> 20 fold). However, enhancement of mutant 2 activity, which presumably retained phospholipid via residues 2116/2117, was < 3-fold. This suggests that C6PS functions to activate wild type fV, in part, by engaging the free LS 2116/2117 hydrophobic spike. Together, these data indicate that the hydrophobic spikes of factor V influence the specific activity of factor V, that the high affinity reversible binding of fV to phospholipid membranes is readily perturbed by mutations, and that activation of the prothrombinase complex by C6PS and phospholipid membranes likely involves engagement of amino acids 2116/2117.

En México, las selvas bajas caducifolias (SBC) son perturbadas por actividades agrícolas. Su regeneración origina el restablecimiento de vegetación arbórea secundaria que, con menor cobertura vegetal y arraigo, produce suelos termófilos e hidrófobos vulnerables a la erosión, que impiden la regeneración de SBC. Se determinó la estructura, composición y diversidad de la vegetación arbórea en dos SBC en suelos litosoles y regosoles degradados en dos áreas de conservación ubicadas en el municipio de San Pedro Mixtepec (SBC-M) y la segunda en San Pedro Pochutla (SBC-P) de la costa de Oaxaca. En cada área se establecieron cuatro unidades de muestreo de 0.25 ha, divididas en 25 cuadros de 100 m² cada uno, en las que se midieron los individuos arbóreos con diámetro normal > 2.5 cm. Se determinó la composición de especies, la estructura vertical (altura) y horizontal (diámetro), el Índice de Valor de Importancia (IVI) y Valor forestal (IVF). La riqueza registrada se evaluó mediante estimadores paramétricos y no-paramétricos (Chao2), los índices de Simpson (1-Dp) modif icados por Pielou, Shannon-Weaver (H´), la equidad (JH´), dominancia y semejanza (IS) entre SBC. Se colectaron muestras de suelo de la SBC-M y se realizó la caracterización físico‑química. Los resultados indican que la riqueza de especies entre condiciones de desarrollo (SBC-M = 33; SBC-P = 47) tuvo diferencias significativas (P < 0.05). La estructura vertical fue entre 1 - 10 m y la horizontal se mantuvo en la clase diamétrica 5 (2.5 - 7.5 cm), para ambas condiciones. Las especies con mayor IVI e IVF fueron: Ceiba parvifolia, Heliocarpus donnell smithii, Dalbergia congestiflora y Amphipterygium adstringens. La SBC-M y SBC-P presentaron un índice I-Dp = 0.911 y 0.919 para H´ = 2.73 y 3.00, en ambas JH’ = 0.78; la dominancia fue de 0.157 a 0.219. La semejanza de especies entre selvas fue del 60%.

The paper considers gender characteristics of the image of Altai in fiction and publicistic texts by George Grebenstchikoff. The texts under consideration are Grebenstchikoff’s essays Altai Rus’, My Siberia, the fairy tale Khan-Altai in Russian and in English. The paper aims at revealing the relationship between the narrator and the locus of the texts in terms of the category of gender. Imagological characteristics of the image of Altai gender identity in Grebenstchikoff’s texts show the mixture of subjective, emotional, objective, philosophical and analytical narrative traditions in these texts about Altai. Gender identity of the image of Altai is connected to the traditional, patriarchal androcentric worldview, when the way of verbal expression is “controlled by the dominating group”, and the reality of the less influential groups is not represented. The masculine nature of Altai, the Mountain Spirit, is shown in the Altai folklore, which is connected to the embodiment of Altai in the images of White Burkhan and his friend Oyrot. Symbolically, this masculine embodiment of Altai exists in George Grebenstchikoff’s texts as the image of Khan-Altai, the reminiscence to the art and prosaic works of Grigory Choros-Gurkin. This masculine image of Khan-Altai is associated in Grebenstchikoff’s texts with the motifs of running water (a river, a spring) and a song glorifying Altai (a hymn of eternal life). Both the masculine KhanAltai himself as well as Khan-Oirot, the male embodiment of the river (Chulyshmanbogatyr), the shepherd, and the shaman Bakhsa are endowed with a voice, can sing and, thus, participate in the communication with the gods and forces of nature. In selftranslations (My Siberia, Khan-Altai) Grebenstchikoff uses the standard pronoun it while referring to Altai. In the patriarchal, androcentric worldview the masculine image of Khan-Altai is represented with the traditional cognitive metaphors as A MAN IS A WARRIOR, A MAN IS A CREATOR and A MAN IS A SINGER. The narrator in Grebenstchikoff’s texts describes the internal space of Altai semiosphere. Opposite to the “chaos”, strange and dangerous space, this “fairy tale”, “mysterious” semiosphere is separated from the outer world by the line of the Altai Mountains. In his publicistic texts, Grebenstchikoff’s narrator is expressly objective, transferring the folklore metaphor ALTAI – BOGATYR, firstly, with the help of represented speech, and then, with by direct citing from the Altai epic. In the fairy tale Khan-Altai, the narrator is extremely emotional and subjective: he speaks directly to Altai-Bogatyr [Giant Altai], which is related to gaining insight into the spiritual vertical as well as the narrator’s ascending to the female embodiment of Altai – its highest peak, Belukha. The reference to Belukha, the queen of Altai, is made in Grebenstchikoff’s texts with the help of the pronoun ona / Ona [she / She]. The same strategy is used in the self-translations into English: the author uses the pronoun she / She contrary to the rules of the English grammar. Masculine embodiment of Altai, Khan-Altai, is the reminiscent image in Grebenstchikoff’s texts. But the real embodiment of Altai is a strong archaic symbol of the Altai queen, “the queen of Asian mountains”, the Belukha, which creates the spiritual stairs of the world for the narrator and his follow-travelers. The writer follows there the traditions of Russian Romantic montanistics, reconsidered in the context of modernism. The masculine embodiment of the Altai image, Khan-Altai, turns out to be a “reminiscence image” in the reviewed Grebenstchikoff’s journalistic and literary texts. The true embodiment of Altai is the powerful archaic image-symbol of the queen of Altai, the “queen of the Asian mountains” Belukha, who creates for the narrator and his companions the “spiritual vertical” of the world.

AbstractBiological regulatory systems, such as cell signaling networks, nervous systems and ecological webs, consist of complex dynamical interactions among many components. Network motif models focus on small sub-networks to provide quantitative insight into overall behavior. However, such models often overlook time delays either inherent to biological processes or associated with multi-step interactions. Here we systematically examine explicit-delay versions of the most common network motifs via delay differential equation (DDE) models, both analytically and numerically. We find many broadly applicable results, including parameter reduction versus canonical ordinary differential equation (ODE) models, analytical relations for converting between ODE and DDE models, criteria for when delays may be ignored, a complete phase space for autoregulation, universal behaviors of feedforward loops, a unified Hill-function logic framework, and conditions for oscillations and chaos. We conclude that explicit-delay modeling simplifies the phenomenology of many biological networks and may aid in discovering new functional motifs.

ABSTRACT On the basis of bioinformatic evidence, we suspected that proteins with a CYTH (CyaB thiamine triphosphatase) domain and/or a CHAD (conserved histidine α-helical domain) motif might represent polyphosphate (polyP) granule-associated proteins. We found no evidence of polyP targeting by proteins with CYTH domains. In contrast, two CHAD motif-containing proteins from Ralstonia eutropha H16 (A0104 and B1017) that were expressed as fusions with enhanced yellow fluorescent protein (eYFP) colocalized with polyP granules. While the expression of B1017 was not detectable, the A0104 protein was specifically identified in an isolated polyP granule fraction by proteome analysis. Moreover, eYFP fusions with the CHAD motif-containing proteins MGMSRV2-1987 from Magnetospirillum gryphiswaldense and PP2307 from Pseudomonas putida also colocalized with polyP granules in a transspecies-specific manner. These data indicated that CHAD-containing proteins are generally attached to polyP granules. Together with the findings from four previously polyP-attached proteins (polyP kinases), the results of this study raised the number of polyP-associated proteins in R. eutropha to six. We suggest designating polyP granule-bound proteins with CHAD motifs as phosins (phosphate), analogous to phasins and oleosins that are specifically bound to the surface of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) granules in PHA-accumulating bacteria and to oil droplets in oil seed plants, respectively. IMPORTANCE The importance of polyphosphate (polyP) for life is evident from the ubiquitous presence of polyP in all species on earth. In unicellular eukaryotic microorganisms, polyP is located in specific membrane-enclosed organelles, called acidocalcisomes. However, in most prokaryotes, polyP is present as insoluble granules that have been designated previously as volutin granules. Almost nothing is known regarding the macromolecular composition of polyP granules. Particularly, the absence or presence of cellular compounds on the surface of polyP granules has not yet been investigated. In this study, we identified a novel class of proteins that are attached to the surface of polyP granules in three model species of Alphaproteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, and Gammaproteobacteria. These proteins are characterized by the presence of a CHAD (conserved histidine α-helical domain) motif that functions as a polyP granule-targeting signal. We suggest designating CHAD motif-containing proteins as phosins [analogous to phasins for poly(3-hydroxybutyrate)-associated proteins and to oleosins for oil droplet-associated proteins in oil seed plants]. The expression of phosins in different species confirmed their polyP-targeting function in a transspecies-specific manner. We postulate that polyP granules in prokaryotic species generally have a complex surface structure that consists of one to several polyP kinases and phosin proteins. We suggest differentiating polyP granules from acidocalcisomes by designating them as polyphosphatosomes.

International audience Orbits generated by discrete-time dynamical systems have some interesting combinatorial properties. In this paper we address the existence of forbidden order patterns when the dynamics is generated by piecewise monotone maps on one-dimensional closed intervals. This means that the points belonging to a sufficiently long orbit cannot appear in any arbitrary order. The admissible patterns are then (the inverses of) those permutations avoiding the so-called forbidden root patterns in consecutive positions. The last part of the paper studies and enumerates forbidden order patterns in shift systems, which are universal models in information theory, dynamical systems and stochastic processes. In spite of their simple structure, shift systems exhibit all important features of low-dimensional chaos, allowing to export the results to other dynamical systems via order-isomorphisms. This paper summarizes some results from [1] and [11]. Les orbites générées par des systèmes dynamiques à temps discret ont quelques propriétés combinatoires intéressantes. Dans cet article on adresse l’existence de motifs d’ordre exclus quand la dynamique est générée par des applications monotones à parts sur des intervalles fermés en une dimension. Ceci signifie que les points appartenant à une orbite suffisamment longue ne peuvent pas apparaître dans un ordre arbitraire. Les motifs admissibles sont alors (les inverses de) ces permutations qui évitent les motifs exclus fondamentaux en positions consécutives. La dernière partie de l’article étudie et énumère les motifs exclus dans les systèmes de déplacement, qui sont des modèles universels dans la théorie de l’information, les systèmes dynamiques et les processus stochastiques. Malgré leur structure simple, les systèmes de déplacement manifestent toutes les propriétés importantes du chaos en basse dimension, permettant exporter les résultats aux autres systèmes dynamiques via des isomorphismes d’ordre. Cet article résume quelques résultats de [1] et [11].

'The end is here!' Textual strategy and historical understanding in the Letter of Jude. After a brief discussion of the performative functions of persuasive discourse in general, the sociohistorical context of the letter of Jude is constructed. This is followed by a literary analysis of the rhetorical strategies in the letter in order to persuade the intended readers to reject a group of teachers in their midst with conflicting perceptions of reality. In this regard, the author's transtextual reinterpretation and contextual application of well-known motifs, persons and groups from Jewish history, who all serve as types of divine intervention and punishment, receive particular attention. Jude applies the principles of identification and association to villify his opponents. By hermeneutically shifting the emphasis from his present context to the past, Jude, through various textual strategies, identifies the opponents with the notorious 'archetypes of sinners' from history who defined the nature of sin and disobedience to God. But, at the same time, the present 'chaos' caused by these teachers are also related to the final eschatological events in the divine calender.

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

'He did what the cipher could not, he rescued himself.' -- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (23) On many levels, the new Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile is a gritty meditation about different types of End: the eternal relationship cycle of 'fragility, tension, ordeal, fragmentation' (adapted, with apologies to Wilhelm Reich); fin-de-siècle anxiety; post-millennium foreboding; a spectre of the alien discontinuity that heralds an on-rushing future vastly different from the one envisaged by Enlightenment Project architects. In retrospect, it's easy for this perspective to be dismissed as jargon-filled cyber-crit hyperbole. Cyber-crit has always been at its best too when it invents pre-histories and finds hidden connections between different phenomena (like the work of Greil Marcus and early Mark Dery), and not when it is closer to Chinese Water Torture, name-checking the canon's icons (the 'Deleuze/Guattari' tag-team), texts and key terms. "The organization of sound is interpreted historically, politically, socially ... . It subdues music's ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate", comments imagineer Kodwo Eshun (4) on how cyber-crit destroys albums and the innocence of the listening experience. This is how official histories are constructed a priori and freeze-dried according to personal tastes and prior memes: sometimes the most interesting experiments are Darwinian dead-ends that fail to make the canon, or don't register on the radar. Anyone approaching The Fragile must also contend with the music industry's harsh realities. For every 10 000 Goth fans who moshed to the primal 'kill-fuck-dance' rhythms of the hit single "Closer" (heeding its siren-call to fulfil basic physiological needs and build niche-space), maybe 20 noted that the same riff returned with a darker edge in the title track to The Downward Spiral, undermining the glorification of Indulgent hedonism. "The problem with such alternative audiences," notes Disinformation Creative Director Richard Metzger, "is that they are trying to be different -- just like everyone else." According to author Don Webb, "some mature Chaos and Black Magicians reject their earlier Nine Inch Nails-inspired Goth beginnings and are extremely critical towards new adopters because they are uncomfortable with the subculture's growing popularity, which threatens to taint their meticulously constructed 'mysterious' worlds. But by doing so, they are also rejecting their symbolic imprinting and some powerful Keys to unlocking their personal history." It is also difficult to separate Nine Inch Nails from the commercialisation and colossal money-making machine that inevitably ensued on the MTV tour circuit: do we blame Michael Trent Reznor because most of his audience are unlikely to be familiar with 'first-wave' industrial bands including Cabaret Voltaire and the experiments of Genesis P. Orridge in Throbbing Gristle? Do we accuse Reznor of being a plagiarist just because he wears some of his influences -- Dr. Dre, Daft Punk, Atari Teenage Riot, Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979), Tom Waits's Bone Machine (1992), David Bowie's Low (1977) -- on his sleeve? And do we accept no-brain rock critic album reviews who quote lines like 'All the pieces didn't fit/Though I really didn't give a shit' ("Where Is Everybody?") or 'And when I suck you off/Not a drop will go to waste' ("Starfuckers Inc") as representative of his true personality? Reznor evidently has his own thoughts on this subject, but we should let the music speak for itself. The album's epic production and technical complexity turned into a post-modern studio Vision Quest, assisted by producer Alan Moulder, eleventh-hour saviour Bob Ezrin (brought in by Reznor to 'block-out' conceptual and sonic continuity), and a group of assault-technicians. The fruit of these collaborations is an album where Reznor is playing with our organism's time-binding sense, modulating strange emotions through deeply embedded tonal angularities. During his five-year absence, Trent Reznor fought diverse forms of repetitious trauma, from endogenous depression caused by endless touring to the death of his beloved grandmother (who raised him throughout childhood). An end signals a new beginning, a spiral is an open-ended and ever-shifting structure, and so Reznor sought to re-discover the Elder Gods within, a shamanic approach to renewal and secular salvation utilised most effectively by music PR luminary and scientist Howard Bloom. Concerned with healing the human animal through Ordeals that hard-wire the physiological baselines of Love, Hate and Fear, Reznor also focusses on what happens when 'meaning-making' collapses and hope for the future cannot easily be found. He accurately captures the confusion that such dissolution of meaning and decline of social institutions brings to the world -- Francis Fukuyama calls this bifurcation 'The Great Disruption'. For a generation who experienced their late childhood and early adolescence in Reagan's America, Reznor and his influences (Marilyn Manson and Filter) capture the Dark Side of recent history, unleashed at Altamont and mutating into the Apocalyptic style of American politics (evident in the 'Star Wars'/SDI fascination). The personal 'psychotic core' that was crystallised by the collapse of the nuclear family unit and supportive social institutions has returned to haunt us with dystopian fantasies that are played out across Internet streaming media and visceral MTV film-clips. That such cathartic releases are useful -- and even necessary (to those whose lives have been formed by socio-economic 'life conditions') is a point that escapes critics like Roger Scruton, some Christian Evangelists and the New Right. The 'escapist' quality of early 1980s 'Rapture' and 'Cosmocide' (Hal Lindsey) prophecies has yielded strange fruit for the Children of Ezekiel, whom Reznor and Marilyn Manson are unofficial spokes-persons for. From a macro perspective, Reznor's post-human evolutionary nexus lies, like J.G. Ballard's tales, in a mythical near-future built upon past memory-shards. It is the kind of worldview that fuses organic and morphogenetic structures with industrial machines run amok, thus The Fragile is an artefact that captures the subjective contents of the different mind produced by different times. Sonic events are in-synch but out of phase. Samples subtly trigger and then scramble kinaesthetic-visceral and kinaesthetic-tactile memories, suggestive of dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved (van der Kolk 294). Perhaps this is why after a Century of Identity Confusion some fans find it impossible to listen to a 102-minute album in one sitting. No wonder then that the double album is divided into 'left' and 'right' discs (a reference to split-brain research?). The real-time track-by-track interpretation below is necessarily subjective, and is intended to serve as a provisional listener's guide to the aural ur-text of 1999. The Fragile is full of encrypted tones and garbled frequencies that capture a world where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. Turbulent wave-forms fight for the listener's attention with prolonged static lulls. This does not make for comfortable or even 'nice' listening. The music's mind is a snapshot, a critical indicator, of the deep structures brewing within the Weltanschauung that could erupt at any moment. "Somewhat Damaged" opens the album's 'Left' disc with an oscillating acoustic strum that anchor's the listener's attention. Offset by pulsing beats and mallet percussion, Reznor builds up sound layers that contrast with lyrical epitaphs like 'Everything that swore it wouldn't change is different now'. Icarus iconography is invoked, but perhaps a more fitting mythopoeic symbol of the journey that lies ahead would be Nietzsche's pursuit of his Ariadne through the labyrinth of life, during which the hero is steadily consumed by his numbing psychosis. Reznor fittingly comments: 'Didn't quite/Fell Apart/Where were you?' If we consider that Reznor has been repeating the same cycle with different variations throughout all of his music to date, retro-fitting each new album into a seamless tapestry, then this track signals that he has begun to finally climb out of self-imposed exile in the Underworld. "The Day the World Went Away" has a tremendously eerie opening, with plucked mandolin effects entering at 0:40. The main slashing guitar riff was interpreted by some critics as Reznor's attempt to parody himself. For some reason, the eerie backdrop and fragmented acoustic guitar strums recalls to my mind civil defence nuclear war films. Reznor, like William S. Burroughs, has some powerful obsessions. The track builds up in intensity, with a 'Chorus of the Damned' singing 'na na nah' over apocalyptic end-times imagery. At 4:22 the track ends with an echo that loops and repeats. "The Frail" signals a shift to mournful introspectiveness with piano: a soundtrack to faded 8 mm films and dying memories. The piano builds up slowly with background echo, holds and segues into ... "The Wretched", beginning with a savage downbeat that recalls earlier material from Pretty Hate Machine. 'The Far Aways/Forget It' intones Reznor -- it's becoming clear that despite some claims to the contrary, there is redemption in this album, but it is one borne out of a relentless move forward, a strive-drive. 'You're finally free/You could be' suggest Reznor studied Existentialism during his psychotherapy visits. This song contains perhaps the ultimate post-relationship line: 'It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, did it?' It's over, just not the way you wanted; you can always leave the partner you're with, but the ones you have already left will always stain your memories. The lines 'Back at the beginning/Sinking/Spinning' recall the claustrophobic trapped world and 'eternal Now' dislocation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder victims. At 3:44 a plucked cello riff, filtered, segues into a sludge buzz-saw guitar solo. At 5:18 the cello riff loops and repeats. "We're in This Together Now" uses static as percussion, highlighting the influence of electricity flows instead of traditional rock instrument configurations. At 0:34 vocals enter, at 1:15 Reznor wails 'I'm impossible', showing he is the heir to Roger Waters's self-reflective rock-star angst. 'Until the very end of me, until the very end of you' reverts the traditional marriage vow, whilst 'You're the Queen and I'm the King' quotes David Bowie's "Heroes". Unlike earlier tracks like "Reptile", this track is far more positive about relationships, which have previously resembled toxic-dyads. Reznor signals a delta surge (breaking through barriers at any cost), despite a time-line morphing between present-past-future. At 5:30 synths and piano signal a shift, at 5:49 the outgoing piano riff begins. The film-clip is filled with redemptive water imagery. The soundtrack gradually gets more murky and at 7:05 a subterranean note signals closure. "The Fragile" is even more hopeful and life-affirming (some may even interpret it as devotional), but this love -- representative of the End-Times, alludes to the 'Glamour of Evil' (Nico) in the line 'Fragile/She doesn't see her beauty'. The fusion of synths and atonal guitars beginning at 2:13 summons forth film-clip imagery -- mazes, pageants, bald eagles, found sounds, cloaked figures, ruined statues, enveloping darkness. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Pilgrimage" utilises a persistent ostinato and beat, with a driving guitar overlay at 0:18. This is perhaps the most familiar track, using Reznor motifs like the doubling of the riff with acoustic guitars between 1:12-1:20, march cries, and pitch-shift effects on a 3:18 drumbeat/cymbal. Or at least I could claim it was familiar, if it were not that legendary hip-hop producer and 'edge-of-panic' tactilist Dr. Dre helped assemble the final track mix. "No, You Don't" has been interpreted as an attack on Marilyn Manson and Hole's Courntey Love, particularly the 0:47 line 'Got to keep it all on the outside/Because everything is dead on the inside' and the 2:33 final verse 'Just so you know, I did not believe you could sink so low'. The song's structure is familiar: a basic beat at 0:16, guitars building from 0:31 to sneering vocals, a 2:03 counter-riff that merges at 2:19 with vocals and ascending to the final verse and 3:26 final distortion... "La Mer" is the first major surprise, a beautiful and sweeping fusion of piano, keyboard and cello, reminiscent of Symbolist composer Debussy. At 1:07 Denise Milfort whispers, setting the stage for sometime Ministry drummer Bill Reiflin's jazz drumming at 1:22, and a funky 1:32 guitar/bass line. The pulsing synth guitar at 2:04 serves as anchoring percussion for a cinematic electronica mindscape, filtered through new layers of sonic chiaroscuro at 2:51. 3:06 phase shifting, 3:22 layer doubling, 3:37 outgoing solo, 3:50-3:54 more swirling vocal fragments, seguing into a fading cello quartet as shadows creep. David Carson's moody film-clip captures the end more ominously, depicting the beauty of drowning. This track contains the line 'Nothing can stop me now', which appears to be Reznor's personal mantra. This track rivals 'Hurt' and 'A Warm Place' from The Downward Spiral and 'Something I Can Never Have' from Pretty Hate Machine as perhaps the most emotionally revealing and delicate material that Reznor has written. "The Great Below" ends the first disc with more multi-layered textures fusing nostalgia and reverie: a twelve-second cello riff is counter-pointed by a plucked overlay, which builds to a 0:43 washed pulse effect, transformed by six second pulses between 1:04-1:19 and a further effects layer at 1:24. E-bow effects underscore lyrics like 'Currents have their say' (2:33) and 'Washes me away' (2:44), which a 3:33 sitar riff answers. These complexities are further transmuted by seemingly random events -- a 4:06 doubling of the sitar riff which 'glitches' and a 4:32 backbeat echo that drifts for four bars. While Reznor's lyrics suggest that he is unable to control subjective time-states (like The Joker in the Batman: Dark Knight series of Kali-yuga comic-books), the track constructions show that the Key to his hold over the listener is very carefully constructed songs whose spaces resemble Pythagorean mathematical formulas. Misdirecting the audience is the secret of many magicians. "The Way Out Is Through" opens the 'Right' disc with an industrial riff that builds at 0:19 to click-track and rhythm, the equivalent of a weaving spiral. Whispering 'All I've undergone/I will keep on' at 1:24, Reznor is backed at 1:38 by synths and drums coalescing into guitars, which take shape at 1:46 and turn into a torrential electrical current. The models are clearly natural morphogenetic structures. The track twists through inner storms and torments from 2:42 to 2:48, mirrored by vocal shards at 2:59 and soundscapes at 3:45, before piano fades in and out at 4:12. The title references peri-natal theories of development (particularly those of Stanislav Grof), which is the source of much of the album's imagery. "Into the Void" is not the Black Sabbath song of the same name, but a catchy track that uses the same unfolding formula (opening static, cello at 0:18, guitars at 0:31, drums and backbeat at 1:02, trademark industrial vocals and synth at 1:02, verse at 1:23), and would not appear out of place in a Survival Research Laboratories exhibition. At 3:42 Reznor plays with the edge of synth soundscapes, merging vocals at 4:02 and ending the track nicely at 4:44 alone. "Where Is Everybody?" emulates earlier structures, but relies from 2:01 on whirring effects and organic rhythms, including a flurry of eight beat pulses between 2:40-2:46 and a 3:33 spiralling guitar solo. The 4:26 guitar solo is pure Adrian Belew, and is suddenly ended by spluttering static and white noise at 5:13. "The Mark Has Been Made" signals another downshift into introspectiveness with 0:32 ghostly synth shimmers, echoed by cello at 1:04 which is the doubled at 1:55 by guitar. At 2:08 industrial riffs suddenly build up, weaving between 3:28 distorted guitars and the return of the repressed original layer at 4:16. The surprise is a mystery 32 second soundscape at the end with Reznor crooning 'I'm getting closer, all the time' like a zombie devil Elvis. "Please" highlights spacious noise at 0:48, and signals a central album motif at 1:04 with the line 'Time starts slowing down/Sink until I drown'. The psychic mood of the album shifts with the discovery of Imagination as a liberating force against oppression. The synth sound again is remarkably organic for an industrial album. "Starfuckers Inc" is the now infamous sneering attack on rock-stardom, perhaps at Marilyn Manson (at 3:08 Reznor quotes Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'). Jungle beats and pulsing synths open the track, which features the sound-sculpting talent of Pop Will Eat Itself member Clint Mansell. Beginning at 0:26, Reznor's vocals appear to have been sampled, looped and cut up (apologies to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs). The lines 'I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype/I listened to everyone now I know everyone was right' is a very savage and funny exposure of Manson's constant references to Friedrich Nietzsche's Herd-mentality: the Herd needs a bogey-man to whip it into submission, and Manson comes dangerous close to fulfilling this potential, thus becoming trapped by a 'Stacked Deck' paradox. The 4:08 lyric line 'Now I belong I'm one of the Chosen Ones/Now I belong I'm one of the Beautiful Ones' highlights the problem of being Elect and becoming intertwined with institutionalised group-think. The album version ditches the closing sample of Gene Simmons screaming "Thankyou and goodnight!" to an enraptured audience on the single from KISS Alive (1975), which was appropriately over-the-top (the alternate quiet version is worth hearing also). "The danger Marilyn Manson faces", notes Don Webb (current High Priest of the Temple of Set), "is that he may end up in twenty years time on the 'Tonight Show' safely singing our favourite songs like a Goth Frank Sinatra, and will have gradually lost his antinomian power. It's much harder to maintain the enigmatic aura of an Evil villain than it is to play the clown with society". Reznor's superior musicianship and sense of irony should keep him from falling into the same trap. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "The Big Come Down" begins with a four-second synth/static intro that is smashed apart by a hard beat at 0:05 and kaleidoscope guitars at 0:16. Critics refer to the song's lyrics in an attempt to project a narcissistic Reznor personality, but don't comment on stylistic tweaks like the AM radio influenced backing vocals at 1:02 and 1:19, or the use of guitars as a percussion layer at 1:51. A further intriguing element is the return of the fly samples at 2:38, an effect heard on previous releases and a possible post-human sub-text. The alien mythos will eventually reign over the banal and empty human. At 3:07 the synths return with static, a further overlay adds more synths at 3:45 as the track spirals to its peak, before dissipating at 3:1 in a mesh of percussion and guitars. "Underneath It All" opens with a riff that signals we have reached the album's climatic turning point, with the recurring theme of fragmenting body-memories returning at 0:23 with the line 'All I can do/I can still feel you', and being echoed by pulsing static at 0:42 as electric percussion. A 'Messiah Complex' appears at 1:34 with the line 'Crucify/After all I've died/After all I've tried/You are still inside', or at least it appears to be that on the surface. This is the kind of line that typical rock critics will quote, but a careful re-reading suggests that Reznor is pointing to the painful nature of remanifesting. Our past shapes us more than we would like to admit particularly our first relationships. "Ripe (With Decay)" is the album's final statement, a complex weaving of passages over a repetitive mesh of guitars, pulsing echoes, back-beats, soundscapes, and a powerful Mike Garson piano solo (2:26). Earlier motifs including fly samples (3:00), mournful funeral violas (3:36) and slowing time effects (4:28) recur throughout the track. Having finally reached the psychotic core, Reznor is not content to let us rest, mixing funk bass riffs (4:46), vocal snatches (5:23) and oscillating guitars (5:39) that drag the listener forever onwards towards the edge of the abyss (5:58). The final sequence begins at 6:22, loses fidelity at 6:28, and ends abruptly at 6:35. At millennium's end there is a common-held perception that the world is in an irreversible state of decay, and that Culture is just a wafer-thin veneer over anarchy. Music like The Fragile suggests that we are still trying to assimilate into popular culture the 'war-on-Self' worldviews unleashed by the nineteenth-century 'Masters of Suspicion' (Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche). This 'assimilation gap' is evident in industrial music, which in the late 1970s was struggling to capture the mood of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Dickens, so the genre is ripe for further exploration of the scarred psyche. What the self-appointed moral guardians of the Herd fail to appreciate is that as the imprint baseline rises (reflective of socio-political realities), the kind of imagery prevalent throughout The Fragile and in films like Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) is going to get even darker. The solution is not censorship or repression in the name of pleasing an all-saving surrogate god-figure. No, these things have to be faced and embraced somehow. Such a process can only occur if there is space within for the Sadeian aesthetic that Nine Inch Nails embodies, and not a denial of Dark Eros. "We need a second Renaissance", notes Don Webb, "a rejuvenation of Culture on a significant scale". In other words, a global culture-shift of quantum (aeon or epoch-changing) proportions. The tools required will probably not come just from the over-wordy criticism of Cyber-culture and Cultural Studies or the logical-negative feeding frenzy of most Music Journalism. They will come from a dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge -- what socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson has described as 'Consilience'. Liberating tools and ideas will be conveyed to a wider public audience unfamiliar with such principles through predominantly science fiction visual imagery and industrial/electronica music. The Fragile serves as an invaluable model for how such artefacts could transmit their dreams and propagate their messages. For the hyper-alert listener, it will be the first step on a new journey. But sadly for the majority, it will be just another hysterical industrial album promoted as selection of the month. References Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. London: Millennium Books, 1999. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. "Trauma and Memory." Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Eds. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Nine Inch Nails. Downward Spiral. Nothing/Interscope, 1994. ---. The Fragile. Nothing, 1999. ---. Pretty Hate Machine. TVT, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Alex Burns. "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php>. Chicago style: Alex Burns, "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Alex Burns. (1999) 'This machine is obsolete': a listeners' guide to Nine Inch Nails' The fragile. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]).

The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. — Sun TzuWorld War II saw a proliferation of maps. From command posts to the pages of National Geographic to the pages of daily newspapers, they were everywhere (Schulten). The era also saw substantive developments in cartography, especially with respect to the topographical maps that feature in our selected films. This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner’s biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight’s epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. As a rear-view representation of the relative movements of personnel and materiel in particular battle arenas, the map and its accessories (pins, tape, markers, and so forth) trace the broad military dispositions of Patton’s 2nd Corp (Africa), Seventh Army (Italy) and Third Army (Western Europe) and the relative position of American and Japanese fleets in the Pacific. In both Patton and Midway, the map also emerges as a simple mode of narrative plotting: as the various encounters in the two texts play out, the battle-map more or less contemporaneously traces the progress of forces. It also serves as a foreshadowing device, not just narratively, but cinematically: that which is plotted in advance comes to pass (even if as preliminary movements before catastrophe), but the audience is also cued for the cinematic chaos and disjuncture that almost inevitably ensues in the battle scenes proper.On one hand, then, this essay proposes that at the fundamental level of fabula (seen through either the lens of historical hindsight or through the eyes of the novice who knows nothing of World War II), the annotated map is engaged both strategically and cinematically: as a stage upon which commanders attempt to act out (either in anticipation, or retrospectively) the intricate, but grotesque, ballet of warfare — and as a reflection of the broad, sequential, sweeps of conflict. While, in War and Cinema, Paul Virilio offers the phrase ‘the logistics of perception’ (1), in this this essay we, on the other hand, consider that, for those in command, the battle-map is a representation of the perception of logistics: the big picture of war finds rough indexical representation on a map, but (as Clausewitz tells us) chance, the creative agency of individual commanders, and the fog of battle make it far less probable (than is the case in more specific mappings, such as, say, the wedding rehearsal) that what is planned will play out with any degree of close correspondence (On War 19, 21, 77-81). Such mapping is, of course, further problematised by the processes of abstraction themselves: indexicality is necessarily a reduction; a de-realisation or déterritorialisation. ‘For the military commander,’ writes Virilio, ‘every dimension is unstable and presents itself in isolation from its original context’ (War and Cinema 32). Yet rehearsal (on maps, charts, or tableaux) is a keying activity that seeks to presage particular real world patterns (Goffman 45). As suggested above, far from being a rhizomatic activity, the heavily plotted (as opposed to thematic) business of mapping is always out of joint: either a practice of imperfect anticipation or an equally imperfect (pared back and behind-the-times) rendition of activity in the field. As is argued by Tolstoj in War and Peace, the map then presents to the responder a series of tensions and ironies often lost on the masters of conflict themselves. War, as Tostoj proposes, is a stochastic phenomenon while the map is a relatively static, and naive, attempt to impose order upon it. Tolstoj, then, pillories Phull (in the novel, Pfuhl), the aptly-named Prussian general whose lock-stepped obedience to the science of war (of which the map is part) results in the abject humiliation of 1806:Pfuhl was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory - its application in practice. (Vol. 2, Part 1, Ch. 10, 53)In both Patton and Midway, then, the map unfolds not only as an epistemological tool (read, ‘battle plan’) or reflection (read, the near contemporaneous plotting of real world affray) of the war narrative, but as a device of foreshadowing and as an allegory of command and its profound limitations. So, in Deleuzian terms, while emerging as an image of both time and perception, for commanders and filmgoers alike, the map is also something of a seduction: a ‘crystal-image’ situated in the interstices between the virtual and the actual (Deleuze 95). To put it another way, in our films the map emerges as an isomorphism: a studied plotting in which inheres a counter-text (Goffman 26). As a simple device of narrative, and in the conventional terms of latitude and longitude, in both Patton and Midway, the map, chart, or tableau facilitate the plotting of the resources of war in relation to relief (including island land masses), roads, railways, settlements, rivers, and seas. On this syntagmatic plane, in Greimasian terms, the map is likewise received as a canonical sign of command: where there are maps, there are, after all, commanders (Culler 13). On the other hand, as suggested above, the battle-map (hereafter, we use the term to signify the conventional paper map, the maritime chart, or tableau) materialises as a sanitised image of the unknown and the grotesque: as apodictic object that reduces complexity and that incidentally banishes horror and affect. Thus, the map evolves, in the viewer’s perception, as an ironic sign of all that may not be commanded. This is because, as an emblem of the rational order, in Patton and Midway the map belies the ubiquity of battle’s friction: that defined by Clausewitz as ‘the only concept which...distinguishes real war from war on paper’ (73). ‘Friction’ writes Clausewitz, ‘makes that which appears easy in War difficult in reality’ (81).Our work here cannot ignore or side-step the work of others in identifying the core cycles, characteristics of the war film genre. Jeanine Basinger, for instance, offers nothing less than an annotated checklist of sixteen key characteristics for the World War II combat film. Beyond this taxonomy, though, Basinger identifies the crucial role this sub-type of film plays in the corpus of war cinema more broadly. The World War II combat film’s ‘position in the evolutionary process is established, as well as its overall relationship to history and reality. It demonstrates how a primary set of concepts solidifies into a story – and how they can be interpreted for a changing ideology’ (78). Stuart Bender builds on Basinger’s taxonomy and discussion of narrative tropes with a substantial quantitative analysis of the very building blocks of battle sequences. This is due to Bender’s contention that ‘when a critic’s focus [is] on the narrative or ideological components of a combat film [this may] lead them to make assumptions about the style which are untenable’ (8). We seek with this research to add to a rich and detailed body of knowledge by redressing a surprising omission therein: a conscious and focussed analysis of the use of battle-maps in war cinema. In Patton and in Midway — as in War and Peace — the map emerges as an emblem of an intergeneric dialogue: as a simple storytelling device and as a paradigmatic engine of understanding. To put it another way, as viewer-responders with a synoptic perspective we perceive what might be considered a ‘double exposure’: in the map we see what is obviously before us (the collision of represented forces), but an Archimedean positioning facilitates the production of far more revelatory textual isotopies along what Roman Jakobson calls the ‘axis of combination’ (Linguistics and Poetics 358). Here, otherwise unconnected signs (in our case various manifestations and configurations of the battle-map) are brought together in relation to particular settings, situations, and figures. Through this palimpsest of perspective, a crucial binary emerges: via the battle-map we see ‘command’ and the sequence of engagement — and, through Greimasian processes of axiological combination (belonging more to syuzhet than fabula), elucidated for us are the wrenching ironies of warfare (Culler 228). Thus, through the profound and bound motif of the map (Tomashevsky 69), are we empowered to pass judgement on the map bearers who, in both films, present as the larger-than-life heroes of old. Figure 1.While we have scope only to deal with the African theatre, Patton opens with a dramatic wide-shot of the American flag: a ‘map’, if you will, of a national history forged in war (Fig. 1). Against this potent sign of American hegemony, as he slowly climbs up to the stage before it, the general appears a diminutive figure -- until, via a series of matched cuts that culminate in extreme close-ups, he manifests as a giant about to play his part in a great American story (Fig. 2).Figure 2.Some nineteen minutes into a film, having surveyed the carnage of Kasserine Pass (in which, in February 1943, the Germans inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Americans) General Omar Bradley is reunited with his old friend and newly-nominated three-star general, George S. Patton Jr.. Against a backdrop of an indistinct topographical map (that nonetheless appears to show the front line) and the American flag that together denote the men’s authority, the two discuss the Kasserine catastrophe. Bradley’s response to Patton’s question ‘What happened at Kasserine?’ clearly illustrates the tension between strategy and real-world engagement. While the battle-plan was solid, the Americans were outgunned, their tanks were outclassed, and (most importantly) their troops were out-disciplined. Patton’s concludes that Rommel can only be beaten if the American soldiers are fearless and fight as a cohesive unit. Now that he is in command of the American 2nd Corp, the tide of American martial fortune is about to turn.The next time Patton appears in relation to the map is around half an hour into the two-and-three-quarter-hour feature. Here, in the American HQ, the map once more appears as a simple, canonical sign of command. Somewhat carelessly, the map of Europe seems to show post-1945 national divisions and so is ostensibly offered as a straightforward prop. In terms of martial specifics, screenplay writer Francis Ford Coppola apparently did not envisage much close scrutiny of the film’s maps. Highlighted, instead, are the tensions between strategy as a general principle and action on the ground. As British General Sir Arthur Coningham waxes lyrical about allied air supremacy, a German bomber drops its payload on the HQ, causing the map of Europe to (emblematically) collapse forward into the room. Following a few passes by the attacking aircraft, the film then cuts to a one second medium shot as a hail of bullets from a Heinkel He 111 strike a North African battle map (Fig. 3). Still prone, Patton remarks: ‘You were discussing air supremacy, Sir Arthur.’ Dramatising a scene that did take place (although Coningham was not present), Schaffner’s intention is to allow Patton to shoot holes in the British strategy (of which he is contemptuous) but a broader objective is the director’s exposé of the more general disjuncture between strategy and action. As the film progresses, and the battle-map’s allegorical significance is increasingly foregrounded, this critique becomes definitively sharper.Figure 3.Immediately following a scene in which an introspective Patton walks through a cemetery in which are interred the remains of those killed at Kasserine, to further the critique of Allied strategy the camera cuts to Berlin’s high command and a high-tech ensemble of tableaux, projected maps, and walls featuring lights, counters, and clocks. Tasked to research the newly appointed Patton, Captain Steiger walks through the bunker HQ with Hitler’s Chief of Staff, General Jodl, to meet with Rommel — who, suffering nasal diphtheria, is away from the African theatre. In a memorable exchange, Steiger reveals that Patton permanently attacks and never retreats. Rommel, who, following his easy victory at Kasserine, is on the verge of total tactical victory, in turn declares that he will ‘attack and annihilate’ Patton — before the poet-warrior does the same to him. As Clausewitz has argued, and as Schaffner is at pains to point out, it seems that, in part, the outcome of warfare has more to do with the individual consciousness of competing warriors than it does with even the most exquisite of battle-plans.Figure 4.So, even this early in the film’s runtime, as viewer-responders we start to reassess various manifestations of the battle-map. To put it as Michelle Langford does in her assessment of Schroeter’s cinema, ‘fragments of the familiar world [in our case, battle-maps] … become radically unfamiliar’ (Allegorical Images 57). Among the revelations is that from the flag (in the context of close battle, all sense of ‘the national’ dissolves), to the wall map, to the most detailed of tableau, the battle-plan is enveloped in the fog of war: thus, the extended deeply-focussed scenes of the Battle of El Guettar take us from strategic overview (Patton’s field glass perspectives over what will soon become a Valley of Death) to what Boris Eichenbaum has called ‘Stendhalian’ scale (The Young Tolstoi 105) in which, (in Patton) through more closely situated perspectives, we almost palpably experience the Germans’ disarray under heavy fire. As the camera pivots between the general and the particular (and between the omniscient and the nescient) the cinematographer highlights the tension between the strategic and the actual. Inasmuch as it works out (and, as Schaffner shows us, it never works out completely as planned) this is the outcome of modern martial strategy: chaos and unimaginable carnage on the ground that no cartographic representation might capture. As Patton observes the destruction unfold in the valley below and before him, he declares: ‘Hell of a waste of fine infantry.’ Figure 5.An important inclusion, then, is that following the protracted El Guettar battle scenes, Schaffner has the (symbolically flag-draped) casket of Patton’s aide, Captain Richard N. “Dick” Jenson, wheeled away on a horse-drawn cart — with the lonely figure of the mourning general marching behind, his ironic interior monologue audible to the audience: ‘I can't see the reason such fine young men get killed. There are so many battles yet to fight.’ Finally, in terms of this brief and partial assessment of the battle-map in Patton, less than an hour in, we may observe that the map is emerging as something far more than a casual prop; as something more than a plotting of battlelines; as something more than an emblem of command. Along a new and unexpected axis of semantic combination, it is now manifesting as a sign of that which cannot be represented nor commanded.Midway presents the lead-up to the eponymous naval battle of 1942. Smight’s work is of interest primarily because the battle itself plays a relatively small role in the film; what is most important is the prolonged strategising that comprises most of the film’s run time. In Midway, battle-tables and fleet markers become key players in the cinematic action, second almost to the commanders themselves. Two key sequences are discussed here: the moment in which Yamamoto outlines his strategy for the attack on Midway (by way of a decoy attack on the Aleutian Islands), and the scene some moments later where Admiral Nimitz and his assembled fleet commanders (Spruance, Blake, and company) survey their own plan to defend the atoll. In Midway, as is represented by the notion of a fleet-in-being, the oceanic battlefield is presented as a speculative plane on which commanders can test ideas. Here, a fleet in a certain position projects a radius of influence that will deter an enemy fleet from attacking: i.e. ‘a fleet which is able and willing to attack an enemy proposing a descent upon territory which that force has it in charge to protect’ (Colomb viii). The fleet-in-being, it is worth noting, is one that never leaves port and, while it is certainly true that the latter half of Midway is concerned with the execution of strategy, the first half is a prolonged cinematic game of chess, with neither player wanting to move lest the other has thought three moves ahead. Virilio opines that the fleet-in-being is ‘a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency’ (Speed and Politics 62). Here, as in Patton, we begin to read the map as a sign of the subjective as well as the objective. This ‘game of chess’ (or, if you prefer, ‘Battleships’) is presented cinematically through the interaction of command teams with their battle-tables and fleet markers. To be sure, this is to show strategy being developed — but it is also to prepare viewers for the defamiliarised representation of the battle itself.The first sequence opens with a close-up of Admiral Yamamoto declaring: ‘This is how I expect the battle to develop.’ The plan to decoy the Americans with an attack on the Aleutians is shown via close-ups of the conveniently-labelled ‘Northern Force’ (Fig. 6). It is then explained that, twenty-four hours later, a second force will break off and strike south, on the Midway atoll. There is a cut from closeups of the pointer on the map to the wider shot of the Japanese commanders around their battle table (Fig. 7). Interestingly, apart from the opening of the film in the Japanese garden, and the later parts of the film in the operations room, the Japanese commanders are only ever shown in this battle-table area. This canonically positions the Japanese as pure strategists, little concerned with the enmeshing of war with political or social considerations. The sequence ends with Commander Yasimasa showing a photograph of Vice Admiral Halsey, who the Japanese mistakenly believe will be leading the carrier fleet. Despite some bickering among the commanders earlier in the film, this sequence shows the absolute confidence of the Japanese strategists in their plan. The shots are suitably languorous — averaging three to four seconds between cuts — and the body language of the commanders shows a calm determination. The battle-map here is presented as an index of perfect command and inevitable victory: each part of the plan is presented with narration suggesting the Japanese expect to encounter little resistance. While Yasimasa and his clique are confident, the other commanders suggest a reconnaissance flight over Pearl Harbor to ascertain the position of the American fleet; the fear of fleet-in-being is shown here firsthand and on the map, where the reconnaissance planes are placed alongside the ship markers. The battle-map is never shown in full: only sections of the naval landscape are presented. We suggest that this is done in order to prepare the audience for the later stages of the film: as in Patton (from time to time) the battle-map here is filmed abstractly, to prime the audience for the abstract montage of the battle itself in the film’s second half.Figure 6.Figure 7.Having established in the intervening running time that Halsey is out of action, his replacement, Rear Admiral Spruance, is introduced to the rest of the command team. As with all the important American command and strategy meetings in the film, this is done in the operations room. A transparent coordinates board is shown in the foreground as Nimitz, Spruance and Rear Admiral Fletcher move through to the battle table. Behind the men, as they lean over the table, is an enormous map of the world (Fig. 8). In this sequence, Nimitz freely admits that while he knows each Japanese battle group’s origin and heading, he is unsure of their target. He asks Spruance for his advice:‘Ray, assuming what you see here isn’t just an elaborate ruse — Washington thinks it is, but assuming they’re wrong — what kind of move do you suggest?’This querying is followed by Spruance glancing to a particular point on the map (Fig. 9), then a cut to a shot of models representing the aircraft carriers Hornet, Enterprise & Yorktown (Fig. 10). This is one of the few model/map shots unaccompanied by dialogue or exposition. In effect, this shot shows Spruance’s thought process before he responds: strategic thought presented via cinematography. Spruance then suggests situating the American carrier group just northeast of Midway, in case the Japanese target is actually the West Coast of the United States. It is, in effect, a hedging of bets. Spruance’s positioning of the carrier group also projects that group’s sphere of influence around Midway atoll and north to essentially cut off Japanese access to the US. The fleet-in-being is presented graphically — on the map — in order to, once again, cue the audience to match the later (edited) images of the battle to these strategic musings.In summary, in Midway, the map is an element of production design that works alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to present the notion of strategic thought to the audience. In addition, and crucially, it functions as an abstraction of strategy that prepares the audience for the cinematic disorientation that will occur through montage as the actual battle rages later in the film. Figure 8.Figure 9.Figure 10.This essay has argued that the battle-map is a simulacrum of the weakest kind: what Baudrillard would call ‘simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model’ (121). Just as cinema itself offers a distorted view of history (the war film, in particular, tends to hagiography), the battle-map is an over-simplification that fails to capture the physical and psychological realities of conflict. We have also argued that in both Patton and Midway, the map is not a ‘free’ motif (Tomashevsky 69). Rather, it is bound: a central thematic device. In the two films, the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. On the one hand, it features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings. At this syntagmatic level, it functions alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to give audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional ‘reading’ of the map. But on the flip side of what emerges as a classic structuralist binary, is the map as a device of foreshadowing (especially in Midway) and as a depiction of command’s profound limitations. Here, at a paradigmatic level, along a new axis of combination, a new reading of the map in war cinema is proposed: the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as it is the objective.ReferencesBasinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Columbia UP, 1986.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: U of Michigan Press, 1994.Bender, Stuart. Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Vol. 1. London: Kegan Paul, 1908.Colomb, Philip Howard. Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated. 3rd ed. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1899.Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005.Eichenbaum, Boris. The Young Tolstoi. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972.Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976.Jakobson, Roman. "Linguistics and Poetics." Style in Language. Ed. T. Sebebeok. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960. 350—77.Langford, Michelle. Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter. Bristol: Intellect, 2006.Midway. Jack Smight. Universal Pictures, 1976. Film.Patton. Franklin J. Schaffner. 20th Century Fox, 1970. Film.Schulten, Susan. World War II Led to a Revolution in Cartography. New Republic 21 May 2014. 16 June 2017 <https://newrepublic.com/article/117835/richard-edes-harrison-reinvented-mapmaking-world-war-2-americans>.Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Vol. 2. London: Folio, 1997.Tomashevsky, Boris. "Thematics." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Eds. L. Lemon and M. Reis, Lincoln: U. Nebraska Press, 2012. 61—95.Tzu, Sun. The Art of War. San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2014.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Paris: Semiotext(e), 2006.Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989.

The power of culturally-bound controlling images around notions of 'colour' in regard to ethnicity have historically been marked and far-reaching. Most obvious examples of such political power relations can be seen in regard to racism and social domination. Biologically-based assertions that one specific category of people are somehow inherently inferior or superior to another were central and indeed continue to be paramount in (neo) Nazi-style rhetoric. Such political beliefs, most notable of course within the first half of the Twentieth Century, often went hand-in-hand with a right-wing ecologism that eschewed the alienation of urban life for an idealised rural existence (Heywood 283). This paper focusses upon how such assumptions and controlling images have resonated in recent times within the Nordic Black Metal music scene - an encompassing term used to describe a sub-genre of music that exists within a wider Heavy Metal and in particular Extreme Metal scene. Black Metal did not gain a stranglehold on Extreme Metal subculture until the 1990s. It also took socio-politics in Metal a stage further and to an extreme never seen before. Being most prolific in Scandinavia, and in particular Norway, Black Metal tended to focus upon Viking mythology and Odinism as a source of subject matter. Here, Nordic Black Metal based its identity on the virtues associated with its geographical location. As Dyer (21) points out, Northern Europe, with its notions of remoteness and coldness, combined with ideas of the cleanliness of the air, the soul- elevating beauty of mountain vistas, and the pureness of the white snow, could be seen to have formed the distinctiveness of a white identity and its related notions of energy, discipline and spiritual elevation. Such notions have their roots in the National Socialist programme of propaganda films of the 1930s and 1940s. Such films included Ich fur Dich - Du fur Mich (Me for You - You for Me, 1934), (Welch 48), which reinforced Nazi ideals of 'racial purity' and was centred on two interrelated themes; that of Blut und Boden ('blood and soil'), and Volk und Heimat ('a people and a homeland'). Here the strength of the 'master race' was linked to the sacredness of the German soil, usually in the form of some idyllic pastoral setting. Nazi 'revolution' was based upon presumed Germanic traditions and the recapture of a mythical past. Thus urban and industrial life was eschewed in favour of a more Germanic utopian community vision. This led the Nazis to draw an inexorable link between the pureness of the German land and the pureness of the Aryan race. The idea of the German utopian community raised notions of fitness and survival. For example, Walther Darre, the then Minister for Agriculture, drew Darwinistic parallels between animals and humans when he stated that, “We shall gather together the best blood. Just as we are now breeding our Hanover horse from the few remaining pure-blooded male and female stock, so we shall see the same type of breeding over the next generation of the pure type of Nordic German” (Welch 67). Such Nazi ideas of purity and survival of the fittest have been echoed in the Black Metal scene of recent years. This has clearly been illustrated, for example, in the sentiments of musicians such as 'Hellhammer', drummer with Norwegian band Mayhem who, when asked if he had fascist views, revealed that “I'm pretty convinced that there are differences between races as well as anything else. I think that like animals, some races are more... you know, like a cat is much more intelligent than a bird or a cow, or even a dog, and I think that's also the case with different races” (Moynihan and Soderlind 306). The comparison of certain people to animals acts to create controlling images that, in this instance, makes racism appear to be natural and inevitable (Collins 68). As Davis (25) points out, a key belief in racist ideology is the biologically and genetically-based assumption that ethnic minorities share similar patterns of behaviour because it is 'in their blood'. Indeed, it is no accident that some Black Metal musicians have made comparisons between ethnicity and animals. Such comparisons act to not only further this idea of superior 'blood stock' but also serve to dehumanise those who are seen to be inferior. Black Metal musicians saw themselves as being superior both musically as well as 'racially'. Just as Minister for Agriculture Walther Darre suggested that the pure blooded Nordic German was, although few in numbers, a superior racial minority within the human race in general, certain Black Metal musicians have shared a similar view that they are a racially and therefore musically superior group within the wider Extreme and Heavy Metal scene. Such assumptions have manifested themselves in a number of ways. Musicians such as Varg Vikernes, of Norwegian band Burzum, have made direct links between the development of Metal and assumed qualities of 'whiteness' when he argued that “The guitar is a European invention ... However, the music played on the guitar is mostly nigger (sic) music”, (NME n.pag). In such an example there is the assumption that 'white' Metal and Metal musicians are somehow inherently superior, and that this superiority of talent stems from a racial 'purity' lacking in 'non-white' metal scenes which, consequently, are seen as nothing more than a contamination, both racially and therefore musically. As Nazi actions were in part based upon the recapture of a mythical past, so too in Black Metal is there a notion that “We must take this scene to what it was in the past”, (Moynihan and Soderlind 60). Thus, as in National Socialism of the 1930s and 1940s, modern day Nazism within the Black Metal scene takes inspiration, ideology and hope from a romanticised notion of the past. This can be seen in the slogans that adorn much Black Metal band's merchandise, for example the band Darkthrone and their self-confessed “Norsk Arisk Black Metal” (Norwegian Aryan Black Metal) which appeared on the sleeve of their 1994 album Transylvanian Hunger, and in the more elaborate socio-political views of other Black Metal musicians such as Varg Vikernes who has expressed his Utopian visions in the belief that there should be a “return to the life-style of the Middle-Ages” in which “The masses need to live in harmony with nature”, (Vikernes n.pag). The notion that “Black Metal is for white people” (Moynihan and Doderlind 305) was also reflected in other stylistic components of Black Metal iconography. The practice of wearing “corpsepaint” was quickly adopted by nearly all Black Metal bands in the early years of its development, and is still widely used today. The concept of wearing corpsepaint - theatrical black and white makeup that created a gruesome appearance - can be traced as far back as the emergence of rock bands such as KISS and heavier acts such as King Diamond, who became known for their elaborate stage rock shows. However, whilst the adoption of corpsepaint by Black Metal bands may have been to create similar macabre images as more established rock and Heavy Metal bands had before them, the emphasis on 'whiteness' that corpsepaint gives cannot be overlooked. Such images, the pale white face emphasised even further when contrasted with traditional codes of dress - the black denim and leather clothes, can be seen to be emphasising the idea of white being an 'ideal'. That is, the symbolism that is carried by the colour white, its “moral and also aesthetic superiority”, (Dyer 70), has also manifested itself in certain aspects of Extreme Metal and in particular Black Metal. As highlighted earlier, just as 'whiteness' has been linked with notions of power, superiority and purity, so to have some Black Metal bands suggested that whiteness within Metal is inherently superior. The adoption of corpse paint is just one way notions of 'whiteness' have been underlined in the Extreme Metal scene. Such ideas of whiteness in some cases developed into more pronounced aspects of Nationalism and in particular National Socialism. The development of extreme right-wing beliefs, coupled with other more established controversial subject matters, such as Satanism, led to a notoriety that some Black Metal was, in many ways, proud to live up to. Whilst overtly racist or fascist sentiments are far from the norm within the Black Metal and wider Extreme Metal genre and the intolerance of such beliefs within the Metal industry in general has been clearly illustrated on many occasions, it cannot be said that those who are open and committed to extreme right-wing beliefs have not gained attention and some support through the controversial iconography and discourse they have used. A marked example of such attitudes can be found in the music, beliefs and actions of the Norwegian Black Metal band Burzum. Burzum, a solo project of musician Varg Vikernes, was one of the first Black Metal bands to appear in Norway. Although originally gaining inspiration from popular motifs in fantasy literature, Vikernes became increasingly known within the Black Metal scene for his increasingly radical views in regard to racial ideology and is now an outright self-confessed Neo-Nazi. In recent years Vikernes has courted controversy and reinforced a racist and fascist discourse within the Black Metal scene. In 1997, Vikernes was heavily criticised by many within Extreme Metal over the design of a new Burzum t-shirt. Created by Vikernes himself, the front featured the usual Burzum logo but was also adorned with a German World War II SS Death's Head logo. This, combined with a back print which bore the slogan “Support your local Einsatzkommando”, led to problems licensing and printing the shirt. Whilst Tiziana Stupia, Director of the now defunct Suffolk-based Misanthropy Records to which Burzum was signed, highlighted that the term Einsatzkommando was “still used quite uncontroversially to describe police SWAT teams” (Terrorizer 1997:6, no.41), the unambiguous fascist motifs also present on the shirt betray the true intention of the slogan. However, it would be erroneous to suggest that controlling images of 'colour' within the Nordic Black Metal scene are situated merely within a framework of neo-Nazi rhetoric. Indeed, such radical and consequently isolated ideologies and actions of certain Extreme Metal musicians that were very much apparent in the early 1990s have largely given way to more contemporary and in some ways egalitarian aesthetic, thematic and stylistic formations. The pastoral fixations of Black Metal that were very much analogous with right-wing dogmatic beliefs have been replaced by a distinctly 'urban' mindset that now focuses upon a 'commonality of adversity' and problems of modern existence for all peoples. Aesthetically the use of 'corpsepaint' has largely been dropped by many of the more pioneering acts, and this combined with stylistic movements that have seen the adoption of traditionally 'non-white' musical formations, has resulted in the drum 'n' bass/ ambient trip-hop concentrations of bands such as Arcturus and Ulver, and the general focus of 'urban decay' espoused by those such as Satyricon. Yet, even contemporary Black Metal has not completely severed its links with fascist controversy, and consequently constructs of colour, as even merely the names of acts such as Zyklon clearly illustrate. It is clear then that certain oppressive texts in relation to constructs of 'colour' can be highly problematic for many, both within and outside the Extreme metal scene. Powerful and historical discourses that espouse 'natural' assumptions around notions of ethnicity produce crude yet largely unquestioned presentations. Consequently, through its incorporation of such texts, certain aspects of Black Metal can be seen to perpetuate oppressive ideas of 'difference'. Via certain controlling images, some individuals can be subjected to objectification within Extreme Metal subculture which sees them marginalised and relegated. Consequently, dominant discourses within some areas of Black Metal can have the result of portraying ethnic minorities as merely 'non-white' and thus inexorably link such groups with a notion of 'inferiority'. References Collins, P.H. Black Feminist Thought. London: Routledge, 1991. Davis, F.J. Who is Black?. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Dyer, W. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Heywood, A. Political Ideologies. London: MacMillan Press LTD, 1998. Moynihan, M. & Soderlind, D. Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. Venice: Feral House, 1998. NME Magazine. No Title. (September 5 1997) http.http://www.burzum.com. Accessed November 28 2000. Terrorizer Extreme Music Magazine (no.41, 1997:6) EQ Publications LTD. Vikernes, Varg. Civilisation. (no date) http.http://www.burzum.com/library/varg/civil... Accessed December 7 2000. Welch, D. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. London: Routledge, 1993. Discography: Darkthrone, Transylvanian Hunger. Peaceville records, Vile 43, 1994. Links http://www.burzum.com. http://www.burzum.com/library/varg/civilisation.html. CIT Citation reference for this article MLA Style Beckwith., Karl. ""Black Metal is for white people"" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/blackmetal.php>. Chicago Style Beckwith., Karl, ""Black Metal is for white people"" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/blackmetal.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Beckwith., Karl. (2002) "Black Metal is for white people". M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/blackmetal.php> ([your date of access]).