Opacity

This paper examines opaque examples of phrase-level phonology taken from Chilean Spanish under the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory (OT) (Rubach 1997; Bermúdez-Otero 2003, 2019) and Harmonic Serialism (HS) (McCarthy 2008a, b, 2016). The data show an interesting double repair of the coda /s/ taking place at word edges. It is argued that Stratal OT is superior in modelling phonological processes that take place at the interface between morphology and phonology because it embraces cyclicity. Under this model, prosodic structure is built serially, level by level, and in accordance with the morphological structure of the input string. In this way, opacity at constituent edges can be solved. Stratal OT also provides insight into word-internal morphological structure and the domain-specificity of phonological processes. It is demonstrated that a distinction in this model is necessary between the word and the phrase levels, and between the stem and the word levels. As illustrated by the behaviour of Spanish nouns, affixation and the resultant alternations inform us about the domains to which both morphological and phonological processes should be assigned. Against this background, Harmonic Serialism embraces an apparently simpler recursive mechanism in which stepwise prosodic parsing can be incorporated. What is more, it offers insight into the nature of operations in OT, as well as into such problematic issues as structure building and directionality. Nevertheless, despite the model's ability to solve various cases of opacity, the need to distinguish between two competing repairs makes HS fail when confronted with the Chilean data under examination.

By staging an encounter between surveillance studies, art studies and queer theory, this article explores a queerness that disrupts surveillance, a queerness that invests and takes seriously refusals of certain forms of recognition and visibility. For In Between Days (Without You) (1998), Dean Sameshima photographed deserted private rooms of 1350 Club and Hollywood Spa, two former bathhouses in Los Angeles for men* who have sex with men* (MSM), which were, in the 1990s, under increasing conditions of continual surveillance due to conservative political trends and sexual panic fueled by AIDS. By choosing not to show human figures on a visual level and by concealing the locations of the baths linguistically, the artist found a way to convey a resistance to surveillance and cultural critique by showcasing the strengths of commercial cruising venues for men*—what is considered here as counter-surveillance tactics. By operating at the level of managing and subverting rather than avoiding surveillance, the use of tactics such as camouflage and opacity foreground how to (re-)negotiate and queer the visual sphere in this photographic art project.

Foundation Transparency - Opacity: It’s Complicated
Abstract

Private philanthropy has been referred to as one of the least transparent and accountable social institutions in the United States.  Accordingly, private foundations are being challenged to become more transparent.  Like other charitable institutions, private foundations already disclose extensive information about their activities in federal tax returns, which the public can easily access.  Yet, a widely held presumption is that private foundations remain intensely and uniformly opaque.  Research findings confirmed that private foundations are generally opaque, but also found that they selectively engage in situational transparency, which is not generally observed in the literature.  This article makes three contributions.  First, it uses specific indicators to assess the existence private foundation opaque practice, resulting in important insights regarding the contexts in which each may occur.  Second, it reports findings that, under certain circumstances, private foundations have intentionally relaxed their opaqueness in favor of greater transparency with certain grantees in furtherance of philanthropic objectives.  Third, several questions are posed to help guide foundations in deciding for themselves how and with whom they might wish to engage in greater transparency.  Research findings discovered that the matter of transparent/opaque practice in private philanthropy is less than straightforward.  As it turns out, transparent/opaque practice among private foundations is a nuanced and complicated matter.

In 2015, I engaged in research on 33 private foundations. One significant area of focus for this research was dedicated to matters related to transparent and opaque foundation practice. This is a hot topic in the philanthropic community presently. Positions typically divide along philosophical lines between transparency and privacy rights advocacy. This research was purposefully agnostic as to such preconceived orientations and the findings resulted in a discovery that many private foundations are more pragmatic than philosophic when it comes to transparency. Unfortunately, much the present debate on foundation transparency is not supported by empirical evidence. The findings from the research underlying an article just published by The Foundation Review may seem counterintuitive within the context of the ongoing transparency debate.

The common assumption that popular protests are rare under dictatorship as well as the related debate about their disruptive or reactive nature appear to be misleading. In many autocracies and most prominently in contemporary China, citizens seem to be willing and capable of generating contentious challenges on a regular basis; and authoritarian rulers seem to be willing and capable of “normalizing” and absorbing these challenges into their operating routines. Rather than rare, disruptive events that provoke existential crises, or reactive moves that aggravate such crises, recurring popular protests seem to form an integral part of political normality in many authoritarian regimes.

Caspar David Friedrich verfolgt mit seinem Gemälde "Seelandschaft (Der Mönch am Meer)" ein Projekt bildkünstlerischer Selbstreflexion, die durch die Opazität der malerischen Materie erreicht wird. Heinrich von Kleist vollzieht diesen Ansatz in seinem Essay "Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft" nach, profiliert dabei aber die ästhetischen Mittel der Literatur gegenüber jenen der Malerei.

With his painting "Seelandschaft (Der Mönch am Meer)" Caspar David Friedrich pursues a project of iconic autoreflexion which is achieved by the opacity of the pictorial matter. Heinrich von Kleist retraces this approach in his essay Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft, yet emphasizing the aesthetic means of literature opposed to those of painting.

This article discusses a group of Indo-Portuguese ivory sculptures from the 17 th century, as objects of a transcultural negotiation. These igures were produced on the West Coast of India, where European (mainly Portuguese) soldiers, merchants and missionaries met with the indigenous people. Therefore, the ivories will be described from two perspectives: irst in regard to the Christian artistic models that were brought to India by the Europeans, and second from possible indigenous points of view, in comparison to traditional South Indian Hindu iconography. These diferent readings of the same artifacts at irst appear con-licting and even contradictory, because of their origins in diferent religious tenets. Regarding the asymmetry of the political and social power relations in the Portuguese colony, where the indigenous people were often forced to follow the missionaries' policy, it is important to ask whether and how far the Indian craftsmen could actually decide on and inluence the Christian images they carved. 1 However, approaching the ivories from reconstructed historical Christian and Hindu standpoints involves the danger of essentializ-ing both these supposed identities and their diferences. Instead, this article tries to show that the ivories can be fully explained neither from one of the two perspectives alone, nor from their simple addition. Even if the fusion of diferent cultural forms and meanings manifest in the igures seems to build on common iconographies and topoi shared in the diferent artistic and religious traditions, their combination does not simply result in a synthesis of a new balanced »Hindu-Christian« identity. The igures are rather characterized by a general ambiguity that interferes with traditional religious and cultural identiications.

This essay superimposes technical definitions of data compression onto philosophical discussions of aesthetics. Two basic approaches are addressed: abstract compression and generic compression. The first, outlined well in the work of Bernard Stiegler, concerns the classic phenomenological and metaphysical debates around expression, revealing, representation, mimesis, and the “extensions of man.” The second, rather ill-defined thus far, deals with a different set of concerns: encryption, obliteration, unilateral determination, irreversibility, and generic humanity. With the theme of compression in hand, this essay offers an alternative reading of Stiegler's aesthetic theory on the grounds that it is not yet compressive enough.

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, found in the South Pacific and Melanesia, the author compares cultural practices originating in communities in which people think but do not talk publicly about others’ internal states, to those originating in communities in which people both think and talk about them, indeed, in which public speculation about other people’s intentions is (mostly) rewarded. While the immediate analysis centers on a very specific and limited set of case studies from English, Chinese, and Russian novels and Bosavi performance genres, the author’s larger goal is to begin to articulate opportunities and challenges of using research in theory of mind for the comparative study of literature.

Il saggio rilegge alcuni elementi stilistici e strutturali di Petrolio, il grande romanzo postumo di Pier Paolo Pasolini. Riallacciandosi ai più accreditati sforzi ermeneutici sul testo, il lavoro enfatizza il ruolo della contaminazione intermediale all'interno dell'o-pera, in quanto elemento chiave per comprenderne la singolare forma, traendo spunto dai saggi teorici dello stesso Pasolini in Empirismo eretico. È proprio il campo dei media e dell'intermedialità, infatti, a essere storicamente ciò da cui emergono i problemi complessi che Petrolio cerca di interpretare, in netta opposizione ad altri esiti della letteratura postmoderna coeva.

The essay rereads some stylistic and structural elements of Petrolio, the great posthumous novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Referring to the most successful hermeneutic efforts on the text, the work emphasizes the role of contamination between media within the novel, as a key element to understand its singular form, drawing inspiration from Pasolini's theoretical essays in Empirismo Eretico. In fact, it is precisely the field of the media and of intermediality where historically all the complex problems that Petrolio tried to address were emerging, in clear opposition with other outcomes of the contemporary postmodern literature. Parole chiave |

The word final phonology of Lardil was brought to the attention of linguists by Ken Hale in the 1960s and since then certain properties of the data have led it to occupy a privileged position, in a canon of data sets against which new theoretical proposals are frequently tested. Several seminal arguments for new and high-profile phonological theories are now based at least in part upon analyses of Hale’s data set. After reviewing what is of such interest in Lardil, a body of data is assembled which alters our understanding of the empirical facts and theoretical implications of Lardil phonology. Hale’s process of Laminalization is reanalyzed as Apicalization; constrained lexical exceptions are found with respect to Apocope, Apicalization and Truncation; and a process of Raising is identified. A discussion of the systematicity of these new data, and of their demonstrable antiquity leads to the conclusion that future formal analyses of the language must account not only for already well-known properties of the data, but for the existence of multiple, active patterns that apply selectively throughout the lexicon.

What does it mean when one speaks in an opaque language? The construction of 'experience' in art has been closely explored through the concepts of 'rasa', 'sensation', 'affect' etc. in philosophical enquiry across the globe which have given rise to the question that informs my current research-the role of the 'literal' object and the objectified 'letter' in contemporary art practices. The 'literal' somehow finds itself at this strange crossroads of explicit and implicit communication. The Dhvani theory (dhvani can be loosely translated as 'resonance') or the theory of Suggestion, one of the several linguistic theories in Indian aesthetic philosophy, emphasizes on reading and receiving language through multiple levels of interpretation. At the same time it puts emphasis on expressing emotions through material symbolism i.e referring to concrete objects in the world to convey an abstract expression. The landscape poetry in Tamil Sangam Literature is an example of highly charged symbolism where the landscape becomes the expression of the state of mind. Swiss Concrete poet Eugene Gomringer(Constellations, 1953) and artist groups like the Noigandres group of poets in Brazil – Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Augusto de Campos invested entirely in the word, trying to shed its semantic weight and construct new ways of reading materially. Words turn into materials to make visual/sensorial experiences out of them-an inversion of linguistic role-play and a tendency towards a more universal poetry where form and content collapse into each other. What happens when one is confronted by an opaque material? How is meaning constructed out of a literal work. The paper will explore the conditions of the 'literal object' and the 'object letter' in contemporary art practices and engage with the two contrapuntal impulses of clarity and obscurity which frame a contemporary condition where-in art vocabulary takes recourse to the 'material' language once again.

Der Begriff des Kontradispositivs wird in der vorliegenden Studie zur Beschreibung zeichnerischer Verfahren und Diskurse im Zeitraum von 1955 bis 1975 gebraucht. Als Kontradispositive lässt sich eine dekonstruktive Zeichenpraxis beschreiben, die an den Paradigmen ihrer eigenen Geschichte und Technik ansetzt, indem sie die Theorie der Zeichnung zu Ende denkt und sie als eine Kunst der Entgrenzung fortschreibt. Philosophische Exkurse und kunsthistorische Einzelstudien zu Linie und Grund, Geste und Spur, Blindheit, Händigkeit und Aleatorik ›ergrenzen‹ die Möglichkeiten zeichnerischer Medialität und eröffnen gleichzeitig einen kritischen Blick auf Allegorien und Adaptionen ihrer Entgrenzungsgeschichte nach 1975.

Ausgezeichnet mit dem Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis 2018 des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte in München.

Lanthanum carbonate is a new nonaluminium, noncalcium phosphate binder. The drug is well-tolerated its side-effects seem comparable to those of other phosphate binders. The most frequent side-effects are gastrointestinal complications. Cerny [New England Journal ...

Since at least the sixteenth century, individuals who could in today’s terminology be referred to as LGBTQ+ or queer have been creating their own linguistic registers. The “closet,” for one, is a linguistic formation that only dates back to the mid-twentieth century, as we may be aware. What is perhaps less known is how these languages were produced in the context of the secrecy that the proverbial closet provides, and what parallels within that space can be drawn with Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity and the right not to be understood. Furthermore, Jonathan D. Katz’s study on John Cage’s tactic of silence and passivity as a political stance continues into an analysis of the role of camp performativity in the success or failure of getting the (coded) message across.

This paper points to phenomena that are undeniably intrinsic to the datafied society, yet that themselves belie the dream/nightmare of total control through datafication: electronic waste (e-waste) and its recycling. In recycling industries and reverse logistics, invisibility, opacity, and uncertainty persist despite worldwide networks of surveillance, datafication, and algorithmic calculation. Mobilizing different technologies from RFID to big data, data assemblages enact particular regimes of visibility that cohere three “gazes”: security’s gaze, efficiency’s gaze, and speculation’s gaze. Yet along with these gazes come various forms of sightlessness, which I frame respectively as “blind eye,” “blind spot,” and “blindsight.” Looking at datafication through e-waste teaches us that critique should not start from the presumption of increasingly all-encompassing datafication, but instead analyze the (constitutive) limitations and (productive) excesses at stake in data assemblages.

Terahertz (THz) imaging is an emerging technique for non-invasive analysis. Since THz waves can penetrate opaque materials, various imaging systems that use THz waves have been developed to detect, for instance, concealed weapons, illegal drugs, and defects in polymer products. The absorption of THz waves by water is extremely strong, and hence, THz waves can be used to monitor the water content in various objects. THz imaging can be performed either by transmission or by reflection of THz waves. In particular, time domain reflection imaging uses THz pulses that propagate in specimens, and in this technique, pulses reflected from the surface and from the internal boundaries of the specimen are detected. In general, the internal structure is observed in crosssectional images obtained using micro-specimens taken from the work that is being analysed. On the other hand, in THz time-domain imaging, a map of the layer of interest can be easily obtained without collecting any samples. When realtime imaging is required, for example, in the investigation of the effect of a solvent or during the monitoring of water content, a THz camera can be used. The first application of THz time-domain imaging in the analysis of a historical tempera masterpiece was performed on the panel painting Polittico di Badia by Giotto, of the permanent collection of the Uffizi Gallery. The results of that analysis revealed that the work is composed of two layers of gypsum, with a canvas between these layers. In the paint layer, gold foils covered by paint were clearly observed, and the consumption or ageing of gold could be estimated by noting the amount of reflection. These results prove that THz imaging can yield useful information for conservation and restoration purposes.

This essay will critique Peter Lamarque’s claim in The Opacity of Narrative (2014) that reading for ‘opacity’ is the way to read literature as literature. I summarize the idea of ‘opacity’ and consider the plausibility of the claim through an examination of Lamarque’s related comments on translation. The argument for the ‘opacity’, although it insists on the importance of attention to form in the apprehension of its content, involves, at the same time, a certain obliviousness to form, indicated in the first instance by an unpersuasive conflation of lyric poetry and prose fiction. Through a comparison of opposing approaches to the translation of a novel written in verse, and an analysis of why the translation of poetry is generally understood to be more challenging than the translation of prose,  I will argue that reading for ‘opacity’ does not adequately capture what it means to read literature as literature.

Entscheidungen verweisen in einem begrifflichen Sinne auf Gründe. Entscheidungssysteme bieten eine probabilistische Verlässlichkeit als Rechtfertigung von Empfehlungen an. Doch nicht für alle Situationen mögen Verlässlichkeitsgründe auch angemessene Gründe sein. Damit eröffnet sich die Idee, die Güte von Gründen von ihrer Angemessenheit zu unterscheiden. Der Aufsatz betrachtet an einem Beispiel, einem KI-Lügendetektor, die Frage, ob eine (zumindest aktuell nicht gegebene) hohe Verlässlichkeit den Einsatz rechtfertigen kann. Gleicht er nicht einem Richter, der anhand einer Statistik Urteile fällen würde?

The British street artist Banksy has debuted a new work in London, this time to coincide with a Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Barbican Centre. Banksy’s mural depicts British police officers frisking and interrogating a figure from Basquiat’s 1982 painting “Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump.” The work invites us to confront the relation between race, space, and visual technology—a relation so uncontainable, as recent events have shown, that it is quickly coming to the center of global politics.