Journal articles on the topic 'Transference of uncertainty'

Intense projections of love and power regularly occur in the transference relationship. They often objectify archetypal aspects that a client might be struggling to understand. The tale of the Golden Fleece, which stands as a symbol for an inappropriately overvalued attachment, reveals that Jason and Medea were too captivated by their own desires, which they projected onto the Golden Fleece. They failed to appreciate the unattainable – and sacred – nature of the object. The author uses this myth to draw a parallel with certain dynamics of the transference relationship, when the therapist becomes the obscure object of the client's desire or envy. Transference dreaming opens the door to a critical examination of this relationship. The dreamer frequently sees something in the dream that does not add up. This internal uncertainty within the dream indicates that the therapist needs to examine what is happening in the transference or countertransference that heretofore has been accepted uncritically. Three key questions about the analytic relationship are addressed as aspects of what merits further attention in order to be understood and processed collaboratively to make therapeutic space for doubt and illusion.

There is uncertainty concerning what the active ingredients in psychotherapy are. The First Experimental Study of Transference interpretations (FEST) was a randomized controlled trial of the effects of transference work (TW) in psychodynamic psychotherapy. Women with low quality of object relations (QOR) showed a large positive effect of transference work, while men with high QOR showed a slight negative effect. The present study aimed to expand the knowledge from the FEST by investigating the therapeutic atmosphere with Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB). Two-way ANOVAs were conducted to investigate differences between SASB cluster scores between subgroups. The therapeutic atmosphere was characterized by Protect–Trust, Affirm–Disclose and Control–Submit. Multilevel modeling was used to assess the relationship between a therapist variable and outcomes for men and women. Contrary to expectations, no significant differences in therapeutic atmosphere between subgroups (with or without TW in women with low QOR and men with high QOR) were observed using the process measure SASB.

When planning wetland restoration projects, the planting area allocation and the costs of the restoration measures are two major issues faced by decision makers. In this study, a framework based on the interval fuzzy linear programming (IFLP) method is introduced for the first time to plan wetland restoration projects. The proposed framework can not only effectively deal with interval and fuzzy uncertainties that exist in the planning process of wetland restorations but also handle trade-offs between ecological environment benefits and economic cost. This framework was applied to a real-world wetland restoration planning problem in the northeast of China to verify its validity and examine the credibility of the constraints. The optimized results obtained from the framework that we have developed indicate that higher ecological and social benefits can be obtained with optimal restoration costs after using the wetland restoration decision-making framework. The optimal restoration measure allocation schemes obtained by IFLP under different credibility levels can help decision makers generate a range of alternatives, which can also provide decision suggestions to local managers to generate a satisfactory decision-making plan. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the IFLP model and ILP model in this study. The comparison results indicate that the IFLP model provides more information regarding ecological environment and economic trade-offs between the system objective, certainty, and reliability. This framework provides managers with an effective way to plan wetland restoration projects, while transference of the model may help solve similar problems.

The complexity, uncertainty and charged nature of climate change make it a unique stressor that is irreconcilable at an individual level. This experience of impossibility leads to splitting of reactions into polarities, or dialectics, which must be contained to reduce climate distress and held open for generative use towards climate adaptation. We present a dynamic model for addressing climate change material within psychotherapy, wherein these climate dialectics are identified, explored, and held open. Clinical vignettes* illustrate therapeutic work with the particular climate dialectics of Climate Reality–Social Reality, Individual Agency-Collective Agency, Hope-Hopelessness, Certainty-Uncertainty, and Nature as Comfort-Nature as Threat. Situations of climate anxiety, solastalgia, disavowal, and the climate dismissive patient are addressed, as is the therapeutic use of the wordlessness that accompanies our relationship with the natural world. We explore and emphasize how a focus on the containment and transformation of climate anxiety, rather than on its reduction, assists in aligning with new realities and in the reduction of distress. Use of a developmental stage metaphor, attention to climate-specific counter-transference enactments, and emphasis on authentic action are central to this process.

BackgroundSchema-focused therapy (SFT) and transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) for borderline personality disorder were recently compared in a randomised multicentre trial.AimsTo assess the societal cost-effectiveness of SFT v. TFP in treating borderline personality disorder.MethodCosts were assessed by interview. Health-related quality of life was measured using EQ-5D. Outcomes were costs per recovered patient (recovery assessed with the Borderline Personality Disorder Severity Index) and costs per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY).ResultsMean 4-year bootstrapped costs were $37826 for SFT and $46 795 for TFP (95% uncertainty interval for difference −21 775 to 3546); QALYs were 2.15 for SFT and 2.27 for TFP (95% UI −0.51 to 0.28). The percentages of patients who recovered were 52% and 29% respectively. The SFT intervention was less costly and more effective than TFP (dominant), for recovery; it saved $90457 for one QALY loss.ConclusionsDespite the initial slight disadvantage in QALYs, there is a high probability that compared with TFP, SFT is a cost-effective treatment for borderline personality disorder.

The aim of the present study is to develop an apparatus for the measurement of the thermal conductivity of geothermal grouting materials. The apparatus, named MCT, is designed and constructed as a direct application of a mathematical model of heat transference for conduction in an infinite homogeneous isotropic medium using a linear heat source of infinite length, infinitesimal radius and radial heat flow. This application is known as the transient hot wire method. The apparatus mainly consists of a hot wire, a power supply, a temperature sensor and a datalogger. The commissioning of the developed apparatus is carried out by means of the calibration of the temperature sensor, as well as measurements of thermal conductivity using four reference samples whose thermal conductivity is known. Each of the reference samples is formed of two solid rectangular prisms of the same material and of the same dimensions. MCT is precise and accurate. In good experimental conditions the uncertainty of the measurements is within 10%. In addition, the MCT apparatus is light and with reduced dimensions.

This paper presents an analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-fuzzy inference system (FIS) model to aid decision-makers in the risk assessment and mitigation of overseas steel-plant projects. Through a thorough literature review, the authors identified 57 risks associated with international steel construction, operation, and transference of new technologies. Pairwise comparisons of all 57 risks by 14 subject-matter experts resulted in a relative weighting. Furthermore, to mitigate human subjectivity, vagueness, and uncertainty, a fuzzy analysis based on the findings of two case studies was performed. From these combined analyses, weighted individual risk soring resulted in the following top five most impactful international steel project risks: procurement of raw materials; design errors and omissions; conditions of raw materials; technology spill prevention plan; investment cost and poor plant availability and performance. Risk mitigation measures are also presented, and risk scores are re-assessed through the AHP-FIS analysis model depicting an overall project risk score reduction. The model presented is a useful tool for industry performing steel project risk assessments. It also provides decision-makers with a better understanding of the criticality of risks that are likely to occur on international steel projects.

The definition of a “primary method of measurement ” has permitted a full consideration of the definition of primary standards for pH, determined by a primary method (cell without transference, Harned cell), of the definition of secondary standards by secondary methods, and of the question whether pH, as a conventional quantity, can be incorporated within the internationally accepted system of measurement, the International System of Units (SI, Système International d’ Unités). This approach has enabled resolution of the previous compromise IUPAC 1985 Recommendations [Pure Appl. Chem.57, 531 (1985)]. Furthermore, incorporation of the uncertainties for the primary method, and for all subsequent measurements, permits the uncertainties for all procedures to be linked to the primary standards by an unbroken chain of comparisons. Thus, a rational choice can be made by the analyst of the appropriate procedure to achieve the target uncertainty of sample pH. Accordingly, this document explains IUPAC recommended definitions, procedures, and terminology relating to pH measurements in dilute aqueous solutions in the temperature range 5-50 °C. Details are given of the primary and secondary methods for measuring pH and the rationale for the assignment of pH values with appropriate uncertainties to selected primary and secondary substances.

Informed by feminist theory on the one hand and thematic and rhetorical criticism on the other, this article examines the components of discourse in two books by Péter Esterházy that share an emphatic attention to sexuality. The author interprets Esterházy’s discourse of sex as grounded in the figure of the double entendre, with a different function in each work. In Kis magyar pornográfia [‘A Little Hungarian Pornography’], vulgar corporeality and communist politics are shown as commensurate; both have a double meaning, with sex and politics referring both to themselves and to each other. In using one discourse as a cover for another, Esterházy continues the Central European Witz [‘joke’] tradition, giving a particular twist to it by making the transference of meaning two-directional, thereby assigning double meanings to sex and politics alike. In Egy nő [‘She Loves Me’], Esterházy attaches a double meaning to sex in a different manner; here sex is not a cover for something else but is shown to be reduced to itself, with a double meaning attached to its internal power relations. Sex is presented as a power game, in which man is repulsed by women yet is hopelessly attracted to them. Moreover, sex acts as the only tellable story taking the place of the untellable story of love. In this piece of postmodern fiction, the multiple perspectives bring about an interpretational uncertainty on the part of the reader as to whether sexist discourse is legitimized or subverted, and whether this legitimization and/or subversion is carried out by the narrator and/or by the implied author.

AbstractThe aim of this study was to review and organise current literature about the basketball pass and find the main factors that influence its learning skills and performance. Thirty-seven studies were included after the screening process. The documents were classified into main research topics. This review identified the following conclusions: (i) the assessment of passing performance should be made under uncertain and variable conditions to obtain information on players’ responses to competitive scenarios, (ii) it is advisable to incorporate new and random activities to facilitate the transference of learning to the competition, (iii) it is recommended to include overwhelming factors during the practice to minimise the effect of pressure and choking, (iv) optimal physical conditioning is essential to maintain passing performance during a basketball game, (v) small sided games and changing environments stand as the best training situations to improve passing skills. Furthermore, limited information is available about biomechanical aspects and physical conditioning training programs to improve passing skills in basketball. Likewise, there is sparse data on passing skills development in children.

The laws of gear transmission are practically always transformed into rather illustrative and relatively easy programmed in the controller the so called maps of transmission. But the notion of optimality are prone to misunderstanding. To avoid this it is suggested a driver opt for himself for the factored technical possibilities of multiprogrammed automated or automatic control of transmission, or at sole discretion to implement a certain programing compromise that in most cases is not disclosed. Thus the system of automated control is subject to uncertainty. There has been no theory able to recommend an irrefutable compromise.
 It turned out that alongside with insufficiently optimal laws of gear transmission the so called cycle of shift operation occurs, i.e. excessive or irrational changeability of structure and parameters of transmission which cannot be blocked by the criterion of optimality. To contend this phenomenon the optimal laws are considerably distorted and invalidated. So, why do we strive for optimality? Was it really necessary to create a true model of automobile, search for the sense of ultimate transmission? Are there any other issues possible more important than dynamics, energy saving, purely technical factors that determine the efficiency of transmission? Should we prognosticate artificially created chaos in the control system while programming asystemic errors in the operation of the controller? It is obvious that these questions presuppose substantial negative answers that are to be proved.
 However, there are grounds to suggest completely different explanation of gear shift optimality laws: when a driver chosen program of automobile motion is realized we can mention only the energy saving, whereas the requirement of dynamics means “interference” in driver’s actions, “limitation’ of the freedom of choice, decrease in operability within the “drive – automobile” system. This treatment of the sense of transmission automation is firmly grounded. “Dynamics” is based only on the assumption that there exists an indicator of car sensitivity to the driver.
 If both paradigms coexist, undoubtedly, everything related to one of them is absolutely false. It is the traditional paradigm that seems false, for it relies on so called map of shifts. Due to this fact in the theory of automated operation of “engine – transmission – automobile” system there has long been ambiguity in the understanding of automobile transmission operation. And this statement is the fundamental, key one in defining really objective principles for the synthesis of automobile transmission operation laws.
 The aim of this paper is to reveal the content, evaluate the objectivity and credibly validate both paradigms contesting in the theory of automobile stepped ration gear transmission and constituting the basis of synthesis theory of optimal gear shift laws in these transmissions.
 Usually, the problem of gear shift softness is treated outside the general motivation of the gear shift optimization laws. It is considered that the softness of the shift is just a reason of comfort and prevention from harmful dynamic load of transmission. In fact the synchronization of transmission elements rotation under participation of engine is directly connected with transference of energy to automobile’s propulsion units and the accuracy of the desired motion program representation. That is why the effectiveness of synchronization is to be evaluated according to the same criteria as the rationality of the choice of transmissions. It is worth mentioning that in the process of active (with the participation of the engine) operation of synchronization the automobile transmission transforms to the variator that, although it dispels energy in the form of the heat, potentially allows the engine to work longer and under more energy saving modes.
 It is proved that the optimization of the gear shift laws should be considered solely according to the criterion of energy saving. Herewith, the organization of the process of shift from one transmission to another should be submitted solely to the laws of energy saving rather than to the requirements of softness that could hardly be formalized. In this case the algorithms of internal combustion engine operation in the process of automobile transmission shift (in the process of clutches slipping) are of great importance.

Abstract. Assessing change during long-term psychotherapy can be a challenging and uncertain task. Psychological assessments can be a valuable tool and can offer a perspective from outside the therapy dyad, independent of the powerful and distorting influences of transference and countertransference. Subtle structural changes that may not yet have manifested behaviorally can also be assessed. However, it can be difficult to find a balance between a rigorous, systematic approach to data, while also allowing for the richness of the patient’s internal world to emerge. In this article, the authors discuss a primarily qualitative approach to the data and demonstrate the ways in which this kind of approach can deepen the understanding of the more subtle or complex changes a particular patient is undergoing while in treatment, as well as provide more detail about the nature of an individual’s internal world. The authors also outline several developmental frameworks that focus on the ways a patient constructs their reality and can guide the interpretation of qualitative data. The authors then analyze testing data from a patient in long-term psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in order to demonstrate an approach to data analysis and to show an example of how change can unfold over long-term treatments.

ABSTRACTThis work tries to show how autonomy principle can turn ethos of health agent and, with it, of contemporary practices. This principle leave aside paternalistic moral. In that, “professional criterion” decides information to know and it leads to autonomous moral of reasonable person where individuals play an active role in made of social order. However, “autonomy” should be understood in a broader sense than a Kantian one. It shouldn´t be already focused on “autonomous person”, this level deeper and last, but on more peripheral level of “choices” and “autonomous actions”, considering subject competence according to minimum, medium and maximum levels (Drane). If paternalistic model is based on “deterministic and causal logic”, autonomy model is attached to the “probabilistic and statistical logic”. With that, it´s proposed now a “rational decision theory” that learns us how decide in “uncertainty” situations, but without arriving at certainty. Rational decision is the most probable one and nobody can ask more. In that way, the matter of informed consent is opened to new perspectives, which have to make a change not only in logic of health team, but also in logic of patients and of social groups. Lastly, psychodynamic psychology has helped to humanize dyadic relationships where the unconscious plays an important role such as those linking patient to therapist, client to professional and subject to researcher. Thus, the application to them of psychoanalytic mechanisms such as transference and countertransference can illuminate their nature and help to resolve any negative transference that may be obstructing their dialogical space.RESUMENSe intenta mostrar cómo el principio de autonomía puede transformar el ethos de los agentes de salud y con ello las prácticas contemporáneas. Este principio deja de lado una moral paternalista donde el “criterio profesional” decide la información a conocer y da paso a una moral autónoma de la persona razonable donde los individuos juegan un rol activo en la puesta del orden social. Pero la “autonomía”, debe entenderse en un sentido más amplio que el kantiano y no centrado ya en la “persona autónoma”, ese nivel más profundo y último, sino en el más periférico de las “elecciones” o “acciones autónomas”, considerando la competencia del sujeto de acuerdo a sus niveles mínimo, mediano y máximo (Drane). Si el modelo paternalista se basa en un “lógica determinista y causalista”, el modelo de la autonomía se adscribe a una “lógica de la probabilidad y estadística”. Con ello se postula ahora una “teoría de la decisión racional”, que nos enseña a cómo decidir en situaciones de “incertidumbre”, aunque sin llegar a la certeza. La decisión racional es la más probable y nadie puede exigir más. De este modo, la cuestión del consentimiento infor-mado se abre a nuevas perspectivas, que deberá producir un cambio no sólo en la lógica de los equipos de salud, sino también en la de los mismos pacientes y en los conjuntos sociales. Finalmente, los aportes del campo «Psi» han contri-buido a humanizar la relación terapeuta-paciente, profesional–usuario, investigador-investigado, en la medida que se plantea en ella también la dimensión inconsciente. Precisamente la noción de transferencia y contra-transferencia postulada por el psicoanálisis, posibilita evaluar la incidencia de estos vínculos y permiten disolver las transferencias negativas que pueden obstaculizar este espacio dialógico.

The hallmark of being human is to tell stories. The stories told give meaning to the experience, and it is in telling stories about our experience, that we begin the process of meaning-making. Psychotherapy is storytelling, and in our consultation room we, as psychotherapists, listen to the tales told. This paper documents my story in response to some of the stories of my patients’ experience of the impact of the unprecedented impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. While there have been pandemics before, this pandemic is arguable unique because of social media and the number of people across the world who can share their experience. It is said that more than 4 billion people have self-isolated at home together at the same time as a collective humanity in response to their country’s lockdown rules. For psychotherapists, the shift to online therapy has allowed for a continuation of psychotherapy, and the telling of stories of COVID-19. Some of their stories are sad stories of loss and uncertainty. Some of their stories are more positive and inspiring. In this paper, three patients’ stories have been selected that illustrate both the positive and negative reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the conceptual framework is relational psychoanalytic with its focus on the dynamics of the intersubjective relationship, my story, as counter-transference reactions are incorporated.

Design-based research or DBR is a methodology developed by and for educators that aims to improve the impact, transference, and translation of education research to benefit practice. In DBR, the educator is simultaneously the teacher and the researcher (Kuhn & Quigley, 1997). It is a flexible approach that facilitates iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings (Wang & Hannafin, 2005). The collaboration in this design-based study acknowledges that researchers also function as educators to create and measure the impact of design interventions (Collins, 1992). In this instance, the interventions were the strategies required to translate communication designcurricula from an on-campus face-to-face teaching and learning studio model to a distance learning paradigm due to COVID-19.
 This abstract presents the impact COVID-19 had on a first-year curricula revitalization aimed to progress students from a standards-based criterion (often accused of shallow learning) to a tertiary culture predicated on active and experiential inquiry. Two main points will be discussed: firstly, the pedagogical components of design studio practice, its cognizance of materiality and craft and objectives to foster students learning and engagement, appreciative of diverse worldviews and epistemologies. Secondly, it will present the disruption and experience of the academic team having to recalibrate,develop and prototype online content to accommodate the technological parameters and functionality of an obsolescent learning management system.
 A review of the syllabus commenced in 2019 to reenergise an outdated studio course for incoming first-year students, with a new brief, intending to function as a scaffold from the passive behaviour, associated with the secondary sectors NCEA1 model, towards an engaged and autonomous learner that is required at tertiary level. Accordingly, identity and belonging were selected as key themes, aiming to advance aspirations for a reciprocal learning culture, encouraged by the need to establish connections and community; the knowledge of identity and agency for self-actualization (Maslow, 1962), alongside understanding relevant media and communication design conventions.
 Dewey (1937) argued that learning is based on social and interactive processes, and the notion that students accumulatively learn more from their peers alsoacknowledges the requirements of specific interventions to construct the conditions for peer-to-peer learning experiences and relationships.
 March 2020 would, however, present another variable that would alter the trajectory of our two semesters substantially: the advent of a global pandemic and the challenges it imposed, requiring unprecedented recalibration as students and lecturers conjointly faced the sudden onset and pivot to adopt the virtual remote classroom.
 This paper will examine the data and findings collated from this period and reflect on the adaptation of a studio paradigm designed for on-campus in-person delivery into an online undertaking, teaching in a state of flux and uncertainty.
 1 National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA) are national qualifications for senior secondary school students in New Zealand.

Usually, a literature search is a benign phase of the research regime. It was, however, during this phase on my current project where a semi-conscious pique I’d been feeling developed into an obvious rancour. Because I’ve been involved in both electronic production and consumption, and the pedagogy surrounding it, I was interested in how the literate domain was coping with the transformations coming out of the new media communications r/evolution. This concern became clearer with the reading and re-reading of Kathleen Tyner’s book, Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Sometimes, irritation is a camouflage for an emerging and hybridised form of knowledge, so it was necessary to unearth this masquerade of discord that welled-up in the most unexpected of places. Literacy in a Digital World makes all the right noises: it discusses technology; Walter Ong; media literacy; primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling; Plato’s Phaedrus; psychoanalysis; storytelling; networks; aesthetics; even numeracy and multiliteracies, along with a host of other highly appropriate subject matter vis-à-vis its object of analysis. On one reading, it’s a highly illuminating overview. There is, however, a differing interpretation of Literacy in a Digital World, and it’s of a more sombre hue. This other more doleful reading makes Literacy in a Digital World a superior representative of a sometimes largely under-theorised control-complex, and an un.conscious authoritarianism, implicit in the production of any type of knowledge. Of course, in this instance the type of production referenced is literate in orientation. The literate domain, then, is not merely an angel of enlightened debate; under the influence and direction of particular human configurations, literacy has its power struggles with other forms of representation. If the PR machine encourages a more seraphical view of the culture industry, it comes at the expense of the latter’s sometimes-tyrannical underbelly. It is vital, then, to question and investigate these un.conscious forces, specifically in relation to the production of literate forms of culture and the ‘discourse’ it carries on regarding electronic forms of knowledge, a paradigm for which is slowly emerging electracy and a subject I will return to. This assertion is no overstatement. Literacy in a Digital World has concealed within its discourse the assumption that the dominant modes of teaching and learning are literate and will continue to be so. That is, all knowledge is mediated via either typographic or chirographic words on a page, or even on a screen. This is strange given that Tyner admits in the Introduction that “I am an itinerant teacher, reluctant writer, and sometimes media producer” (1, my emphasis). The orientation in Literacy in a Digital World, it seems to me, is a mask for the authoritarianism at the heart of the literate establishment trying to contain and corral the intensifying global flows of electronic information. Ironically, it also seems to be a peculiarly electronic way to present information: that is, the sifting, analysis, and categorisation, along with the representation of phenomena, through the force of one’s un.conscious biases, with the latter making all knowledge production laden with emotional causation. This awkwardness in using the term “literacy” in relation to electronic forms of knowledge surfaces once more in Paul Messaris’s Visual “Literacy”. Again, this is peculiar given that this highly developed and informative text might be a fine introduction to electracy as a possible alternative paradigm to literacy, if only, for instance, it made some mention of sound as a counterpoint to textual and visual symbolisation. The point where Messaris passes over this former contradiction is worth quoting: Strictly speaking, of course, the term “literacy” should be applied only to reading and writing. But it would probably be too pedantic and, in any case, it would surely be futile to resist the increasingly common tendency to apply this term to other kinds of communication skills (mathematical “literacy,” computer “literacy”) as well as to the substantive knowledge that communication rests on (historical, geographic, cultural “literacy”). (2-3) While Messaris might use the term “visual literacy” reluctantly, the assumption that literacy will take over the conceptual reins of electronic communication and remain the pre-eminent form of knowledge production is widespread. This assumption might be happening in the literature on the subject but in the wider population there is a rising electrate sensibility. It is in the work of Gregory Ulmer that electracy is most extensively articulated, and the following brief outline has been heavily influenced by his speculation on the subject. Electracy is a paradigm that requires, in the production and consumption of electronic material, highly developed competencies in both oracy and literacy, and if necessary comes on top of any knowledge of the subject or content of any given work, program, or project. The conceptual frame of electracy is herein tentatively defined as both a well-developed range and depth of communicative competency in oral, literate, and electronic forms, biased from the latter’s point of view. A crucial addition, one sometimes overlooked in earlier communicative forms, is that of the technate, or technacy, a working knowledge of the technological infrastructure underpinning all communication and its in-built ideological assumptions. It is in this context of the various communicative competencies required for electronic production and consumption that the term ‘literacy’ (or for that matter ‘oracy’) is questionable. Furthermore, electracy can spread out to mean the following: it is that domain of knowledge formation whose arrangement, transference, and interpretation rely primarily on electronic networks, systems, codes and apparatuses, for either its production, circulation, or consumption. It could be analogue, in the sense of videotape; digital, in the case of the computer; aurally centred, as in the examples of music, radio or sound-scapes; mathematically configured, in relation to programming code for instance; visually fixated, as in broadcast television; ‘amateur’, as in the home-video or home-studio realm; politically sensitive, in the case of surveillance footage; medically fixated, as in the orbit of tomography; ambiguous, as in the instance of The Sydney Morning Herald made available on the WWW, or of Hollywood blockbusters broadcast on television, or hired/bought in a DVD/video format; this is not to mention Brad Pitt reading a classic novel on audio-tape. Electracy is a strikingly simple, yet highly complex and heterogeneous communicative paradigm. Electracy is also a generic term, one whose very comprehensiveness and dynamic mutability is its defining hallmark, and one in which a whole host of communicative codes and symbolic systems reside. Moreover, almost anyone can comprehend meaning in electronic media because “electric epistemology cannot remain confined to small groups of users, as oral epistemologies have, and cannot remain the property of an educated elite, as literate epistemologies have” (Gozzi and Haynes 224). Furthermore, as Ulmer writes: “To speak of computer literacy or media literacy may be an attempt to remain within the apparatus of alphabetic writing that has organized the Western tradition for nearly the past three millennia” (“Foreword” xii). The catch is that the knowledge forms thus produced through electracy are the abstract epistemological vectors on which the diverse markets of global capitalism thrive. The dynamic nature of these “multimodal” forms of electronic knowledge (Kress, “Visual” 73), then, is increasingly applicable to all of us in the local/global, human/world conglomerate in which any polity is now framed. To continue to emphasise literacy and alphabetic consciousness might then be blinding us to this emerging relationship between electracy and globalisation, possibly even to localisation and regionalisation. It may be possible to trace the dichotomy outlined above between literate and electrate forms of knowledge to larger political/economic and cultural forces. As Saskia Sassen illustrates, sovereignty and territoriality are central aspects in the operation of the still important nation-state, especially in an era of encroaching globalisation. In the past, sovereignty referred to the absolute power of monarchs to control their dominions and is an idea that has been transferred to the nation-state in the long transition to representative democracy. Territoriality refers to the specific physical space that sovereignty is seen as guaranteeing. As Sassen writes, “In the main … rule in the modern world flows from the absolute sovereignty of the state over its national territory” (3). Quite clearly, in the shifting regimes of geo-political power that characterise the global era, sovereign control over territory, and, equally, control over the ideas that might reconfigure our interpretation of concepts such as sovereignty and territoriality, nationalism and literacy, are all in a state of change. Today’s climate of geo-political uncertainty has undoubtedly produced a control complex in relation to these shifting power bases, a condition that arises when psychic, epistemological and political certainties move to a state of unpredictable flux. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities another important examination of nationalism there is an emphasis on how literacy was an essential ingredient in its development as a political structure. Operational levels of literacy also came to be a key component in the development of the idea of the autonomous self that arose with democracy and its use as an organising principle in citizenship rituals like voting in some nation-states. Eric Leed puts it this way: “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Clearly, any conception of sovereignty and territoriality has to be read, after being written constitutionally, by those people who form the basis of a national polity and over whom these two categories operate. The “fundamental anxiety” over literacy that Kress speaks of (Before Writing 1) is a sub-component of this larger control complex in that a quantum increase in the volume and diversity of electronic communication is contributing to declining levels of literacy in the body politic. In the current moment there is a control complex of almost plague proportions in our selves, our systems of knowledge, and our institutions and polities, because it is undoubtedly a key factor at the epicentre of any turf war. Even my own strident anxieties over the dominance of literacy in debates over electronic communication deserve to be laid out on the analyst’s couch, in part because any manifestation of the control complex in a turf war is aimed squarely at the repression of alternative ways of being and becoming. The endgame: it might be wiser to more closely examine this literacy control complex, possible alternative paradigms of knowledge production and consumption such as electracy, and their broader relationship to patterns of political/economic/cultural organisation and control. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Patrice Braun and Ros Mills, respectively, for editorial advice and technical assistance in the preparation of this essay. Note on reading “The Literacy Control Complex” The dot configuration in ‘un.conscious’ is used deliberately as an electronic marker to implicitly indicate the omni-directional nature of the power surges that dif.fuse the conscious and the unconscious in the field of political action where any turf war is conducted. While this justification is not obvious, I do want to create a sense of intrigue in the reader as to why this dot configuration might be used. One of the many things that fascinates me about electronic communication is its considerable ability for condensation; the sound-bite is one epistemological example of this idea, the dot, as an electronic form of conceptual elision, is another. If you are interested in this field, I highly recommend perusal of the MEZ posts that crop up periodically on a number of media related lists. MEZ’s posts have made me more cognisant of electronic forms of written expression. These experiments in electronic writing deserve to be tested. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Gozzi Jr., Raymond, and W. Lance Haynes. “Electric Media and Electric Epistemology: Empathy at a Distance.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9.3 (1992): 217-28. Messaris, Paul. Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Kress, Gunther. “Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text.” Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Ilana Snyder. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. 53-79. ---. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge, 1997. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41-61. Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Tyner, Kathleen. Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge, 1989. ---. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994. ---. “Foreword/Forward (Into Electracy).” Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia U P, 1998. ix-xiii. ---. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Boston: Longman, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Maybury, Terrence. "The Literacy Control Complex" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>. APA Style Maybury, T. (2004, Mar17). The Literacy Control Complex. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/05-literacy.php>

What are the possibilities of a body? This is a question that is answered best by thinking prosthetically. After all, the possibilities of a body extend beyond flesh and bone. Asked another way, one might query: what are the affective capacities of bodies—animal or otherwise? Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari focus on affectivity as capacity, on what the body does or can do; thinking through Baruch Spinoza’s writing on the body, they state, “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects” (257). If bodies are defined by their affective capacities, I wonder: how can prosthetics be used to alter dominant and dominating relationships between the human and the non-human animal, particularly as these relationships bear on questions of race? In this essay, I forward a contemporary media installation, “The Slug Princess”, as a productive site for thinking through the prosthetic possibilities around issues of race, animality, and aesthetics. I contend that the Degenerate Art Ensemble’s installation works through uncommon prosthetics to activate what Deleuze and Guattari describe as becoming-animal. While animality has historically been mobilized to perpetuate Orientalist logics, I argue that DAE’s becoming-slug rethinks the capacities of the body prosthetically, and in so doing dismantles the hierarchy of the body normativity.The Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) is a collective of artists with international showings co-directed by Haruko Crow Nishimura, originally from Japan, and Joshua Kohl, from the United States. The ensemble is based in Seattle, Washington, USA. The group’s name is a reference to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, Germany, organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party. The exhibition staged 650 works from what Nazi officials referred to as “art stutterers”, the pieces were confiscated from German museums and defined as works that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill” (Spotts 163). DAE “selected this politically charged moniker partly in response to the murder in Olympia [Washington] of an Asian American youth by neo-Nazi skinheads” (Frye). DAE’s namesake is thus an embrace of bodies and abilities deemed unworthy by systems of corrupt power. With this in mind, I argue that DAE’s work provides an opportunity to think through intersections of prostheticity, animality, and race.“The Slug Princess” is part of a larger exhibition of their work shown from 19 March to 19 June 2011 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The installation is comprised of two major elements: a crocheted work and a video projection. For me, both are prosthetics.A Crocheted Prosthetic and Orientalist AnimalityThe crocheted garment is not immediately recognizable as a prosthetic. It is displayed on a mannequin that stands mostly erect. The piece, described as a headdress, is however by no means a traditional garment. Yellow spirals and topographies flow and diverge in tangled networks of yarn that sometimes converge into recognizable form. The knit headdress travels in countless directions, somehow assembling as a wearable fibrous entity that covers the mannequin from head to ground, spreading out, away, and behind the figuration of the human. In slumped orbs, green knit “cabbages’ surround the slug princess headdress, exceeding the objects they intend to represent in mass, shape, and affect. In this bustling excess of movement, the headdress hints at how it is more than a costume, but is instead a prosthetic.The video projection makes the prosthetic nature of the crocheted headdress evident. It is a looped performance of Nishimura that runs from ceiling to floor and spans the semi-enclosed space in which it is displayed. In the video, Nishimura walks, then crawls – slowly, awkwardly – through a forest. She also eats whole cabbages, supporting procedure with mouth, foot, and appendage, throwing the function of her body parts into question. The crocheted element is vital to her movement and the perception of her body’s capacities.As Nishimura becomes slug princess, the DAE begins to intervene in complex regimes of racial identification. It is imperative to note that Nishimura’s boy gets caught up in interpretive schemas of Western constructions of Asians as animals. For example, in the early diaspora in the United States, Chinese men were often identified with the figure of the rat in 19th-century political cartoons. Mel Y. Chen points to the ways in which these racialized animalities have long reinforcing the idea of the yellow peril through metaphor (Chen 110-111). These images were instrumental in conjuring fear around the powerfully dehumanizing idea that hordes of rats were infesting national purity. Such fears were significant in leading to the Chinese exclusion acts of the United States and Canada. Western tropes of Asians find traction in animal symbolism. From dragon ladies to butterflies, Asian femininity in both women and men has been captured by simultaneous notions of treachery and passivity. As Nishimura’s body is enabled by prosthetic, it is also caught in a regime of problematic signs. Animal symbolism persists throughout Asian diasporic gender construction and Western fantasies of the East. Rachel C. Lee refers to the “process whereby the human is reduced to the insect, rodent, bird, or microbe” as zoe-ification, which she illustrates as a resolute means of excluding Asian Americans from species-being (Lee Exquisite 48). DAE’s Slug Princess, I argue, joins Lee’s energies herein by providing and performing alternative modes of understanding animality.The stakes of prosthetics in becoming-animal lie in the problem of domination through definition. Orientalist animality functions to devalue Asians as animals, ultimately justifying forms of subordination and exclusion. I want to suggest that becoming-slug, as I will elaborate below, provides a mode of resisting this narrow function of defining bodies by enacting prosthetic process. In doing so, it aligns with the ways in which prosthetics redefine the points of delineation against normativity. As Margarit Shildrick illuminates, “once it is acknowledged that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material technologies constantly disorder our boundaries, either through prosthetic extensions or through the internalization of mechanical parts, it is difficult to maintain that those whose bodies fail to conform to normative standards are less whole or complete than others” (24). DAE’s Slug Princess transmutates how animality functions to Orientalize Asians as the degenerate other, heightening the ways in which prosthetics can resist the racialized ideologies of normative wholeness.Why Prosthetics? Or, a Comparative Case in Aesthetic AnimalityDAE is of course not alone in their animalistic interventions. In order to isolate what I find uniquely productive about DAE’s prosthetic performance, I turn to another artistic alternative to traditional modes of Orientalist animality. Xu Bing’s performance installation “Cultural Animal” (1994) at the Han Mo Art Center in in Beijing, China can serve as a useful foil. “Cultural Animal” featured a live pig and mannequin in positions that evoked queer bestial sexuality. The pig was covered in inked nonsensical Roman letters; the full body of the mannequin was similarly tattooed in jumbled Chinese characters. The piece was a part of a larger project entitled “A Case Study of Transference”. According to Xu’s website, “the intention was both to observe the reaction of the pig toward the mannequin and produce an absurd random drama—an intention that was realized when the pig reacted to the mannequin in an aggressively sexual manner” (Xu). The photographs, which were a component of the piece, indeed evoke the difficulty of the concept of transference, imbricating species, languages, and taboos. The piece more generally enacts the unexpected excesses of performance with non-scripted bodies. The pig at times caresses the cheek of the mannequin. The sensuous experience is inked by the cultural confusion that images the seeming sensibility of each language. Amidst the movement of the pig and the rubbings of the ink, the mannequin is motionless, bearing a look of resigned openness. His eyes are closed, with a slight furrowing of the brow and calm downturned lips. The performance piece enacts crossings that reorient the historical symbolic force of racialization and animality. These forms of species and cultural miscegenation evoke for Mel Y. Chen a form of queer relationality that exemplifies “animalities that live together with race and with queerness, the animalities that we might say have crawled into the woodwork and await recognition, and, concurrently, the racialized animalities already here” (104). As such, Chen does the work of pointing out how Xu destabilizes notions of proper boundaries between human and animal, positing a different form of human-animal relationality. In short, Xu’s Cultural Animal chooses relationality. This relationality does not extend the body’s capacities. I argue that by focusing in on the pivotal nature of prosthesis, DAE’s slug activates a becoming-animal that goes beyond relationship, instead rethinking what a body can do.Becoming-Slug: Prosthetics as InterventionBy way of differentiation, how might “The Slug Princess” function beyond symbolic universalism and in excess of human-animal relations? In an effort to understand this distinction, I forward DAE’s installation as a practice of becoming-animal. Becoming-animal is a theoretical intervention in hierarchy, highlighting a minoritarian tactic to resist domination, akin to Shildrick’s description of prosthetics.DAE’s installation enacts becoming-slug, as illustrated in an elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept they argue: “Becoming-animal always involves a pack” “a multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guatttari 239). The banner of becoming-animal is “I am legion”. DAE is and are a propagation of artists working together. They enact legion. Led by a pack of collaborators, DAE engage a range of artists in continual, ongoing, and fluctuating process. Their current collaborators include (and surpass): architect/designer Alan Maskin, costume designer ALenka Loesch, dancer/singer Dohee Lee, performance artist/expressionist/songwriter/shape-shifter Okanomodé, and sound/installation artist Robb Kunz. For the broader exhibition at the Frye, they listed the biographies of fifteen artists and the names of around 200 artists. Yet, it is not the mere number of collaborators that render DAE a multiplicity – it is the collaborative excess of their process that generates potential at the intersection of performance and prosthetic. Notably, it is important that the wearable prosthetic headpiece used in “Slug Princess” was created in collaboration. “The contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 243). Created by Many Greer but worn by Nishimura, it weighs on Nishimura’s body in ways that steer her performance. She is unable to stand erect as the mannequin in the exhibition. The prosthetic changes her capacities in unpredictable ways. The unexpected headdress causes her to hunch over and crawl, pushing her body into slow contact with the earth. As the flowing garment slows her forward progress, it activates new modes of movement. Snagging, and undulating, Nishimura moves slowly over the uncertain terrain of a forest. As Greer’s creation collides with Nishimura’s body and the practice of the dance, they enact becoming-slug. This is to suggest, then, following Deleuze and Guattari’s affective understanding of becoming-animal, that prosthetics have a productive role to play in disrupting normative modes of embodiment.Further, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, becoming-animal is non-affiliative (Deleuze and Guattari 238). Becoming-animal is that which is “not content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage” (Deleuze and Guattari 233). Likewise, Nishimura’s becoming-slug is neither imitative (305) nor mimetic because it functions in the way of displaced doing through prosthetic process. Deleuze and Guattari describe in the example of Little Hans and his horse, becoming-animal occurs in putting one’s shoes on one’s hands to move, as a dog: “I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy” (258). The headdress engages an active bodily process of moving as a slug, rather than looking like a slug. Nishimura’s body begin as her body human begins, upright, but it is pulled down and made slow by the collaborative force of the wearable piece. As such, DAE enacts “affects that circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse [slug] ‘can do’” (257). This assemblage of affects pushes beyond the limited capacities of the screen, offering new productive entanglements.The Stuplime Loop as ProstheticTo the extent that conceiving of a headdress as a collaborative bodily prosthetic flows from common understandings of prosthetic, the medial interface perhaps stirs up a more foreign example of prosthesis and becoming-animal. The medial performance of DAE’s “The Slug Princess” operates through the video loop, transecting the human, animal, and technological in a way that displaces being in favor of becoming. The looping video creates a spatio-temporal contraction and elongation of the experience of time in relation to viewing. It functions as an experiential prosthetic, reworking the ability to think in a codified manner—altering the capacities of the body. Time play breaks the chronological experience of straight time and time as mastery by turning to the temporal experience as questioning normativity. Specifically, “The Slug Princess” creates productive indeterminacy through what Siane Ngai designates as “stuplimity”. Ngai’s punning contraction of stupidity and sublimity works in relation to Deleuze’s thinking on repetition and difference. Ngai poses the idea of stuplimity as beginning with “the dysphoria of shock and boredom” and culminating “in something like the ‘open feeling’ of ‘resisting being’—an indeterminate affective state that lacks the punctuating ‘point’ of individuated emotion” (284). Ngai characterizes this affecting openness and stupefying: it stops the viewer in their/her/his tracks. This importation of the affective state cannot be overcome through the exercise of reason (270). Departing from Kant’s description of the sublime, Ngai turns to the uglier, less awe-inspiring, and perhaps more debase form of aesthetic encounter. This is the collaboration of the stupid with the sublime. Stuplimity operates outside reason and sublimity but in alliance with their processes. Viewers seem to get “stuck” at “The Slug Princess”, lost in the stuplimity of the loop. Some affect of the looping videos generates not thoughtfulness or reflection, but perhaps cultural stupidity – the relative and temporary cessation or abatement of cultural logics and aesthetic valuations. The video loop comes together with the medial enactment of becoming-slug in such a manner that performs into stuplimity. Stuplimity, in this case, creates an opening of an affectively stupid or illegible (per Xu) space/time alternative being/becoming. The loop is, of course, not unique to the installation and is a common feature of museum pieces. Yet, the performance, the becoming-slug itself, creates sluggishness. Ngai posits that sluggishness works out the boredom of repetition, which I argue is created through the loop of becoming-slug. The slug princess’ slowness, played in the loop creates a “stuplimity [that] reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as totality” (271). That is, the loop, by virtue of its sluggishness, opens up becoming-animal not as a finite thing, but as an ongoing, cycling, and thoughtlessly tedious process. DAE’s installation thus demonstrates an attempt to adopt prosthetics to rethink the logics of control and power. In his writing on contemporary shifts in prosthetic function, Paul Preciado argues that digitalization is a core component of the transition from prosthetics to what emerge as “microprosthetic”, in which “power acts through molecules that incorporate themselves into our [bodies]” (78-79). I would like to consider the stuplime loops of becoming-slug to counter what Preciado describes as an “ensemble of new microprosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols” (33). Emerging in the same fashion as microproesthetics, which function as modes of control, the stuplime loops instead suspend the logics of control and power enabled by dominant modes of microprosthetic technologies. Rather than infesting one’s body with modes of control, the stuplime loops hijack the digital message and present the possibility of thinking otherwise. In her writing on queer cyborgs, Mimi Nguyen argues that “as technologies of the self, prostheses are both literal and discursive in the digital imaginary. They are a means of habitation and transformation, a humanmachine mixture engaged as a site of contest over meanings – of the self and the nonself” (373). Binaries perhaps structure a thinking between human and animal, but prosthetics as process goes beyond the idea of the cyborg as a mixture and maps a new terrain altogether.ReferencesChen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.Frye. “Degenerate Art Ensemble.” Frye Museum. 2017. <http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/3816/>.Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nguyen, Mimi. “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality, and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space.” American Studies: An Anthology. Eds. Janice A. Radway, Kevin K. Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 281-305.Preciado, Beatriz [Paul]. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitis in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Shildrick, Margarit. “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics.” Hypatia 30.1 (2015): 13-29.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. 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