Beyond the Sign. Henri Meschonnic's Poetics of Rhythm and Continuum. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Language

Basing the conception of language on the sign represents also an obstacle to the awareness of certain elements of human life, especially to a full understanding of what language or art do, Henri Meschonnic’s poetics of the continuum and of rhythm criticizes the sign based on Benveniste’s terms of rhythm and discourse, developing an anthropology of language. Rhythm, for Meschonnic, is no formal metrical but a semantic principle, each time unique and unforeseeable. As for Humboldt, his starting point is not the word but the ensemble of speech; language is not ergon but energeia. The poem then is not a literary form but a process of transformation that Meschonnic defines as the invention of a form of life by a form of language and vice versa. Thus a poem is a way of thinking and rhythm is form in movement. The particular subject of art and literature is consequently not the author but a process of subjectivation – this is the contrary of the conception of the sign. By demonstrating the limits of the sign, Meschonnic’s poetics attempts to thematize the intelligibility of presence. Art and literature raise our awareness of this element of human life we cannot grasp conceptually. This poetical thinking is a necessary counterforce against all institutionalization.

The New Political Economy of the Macroprudential Ideational Shift

From late 2008 onwards, in the space of six months, international financial regulatory networks centred around the Swiss city of Basel presided over a startlingly rapid ideational shift, the significance and importance of which remains to be deciphered. From being relatively unpopular and very much on the sidelines, the idea of macroprudential regulation (MPR) moved to the centre of the policy agenda and came to represent a new Basel consensus, as the principal interpretative frame, for financial technocrats and regulators seeking to diagnose and understand the financial crisis and to advance institutional blueprints for regulatory reform. This article sets out to explain how and why that ideational shift occurred. It identifies four scoping conditions of presence, position, promotion, and plausibility, that account for the successful rise to prominence of macroprudential ideas through an insiders' coup d'état. The final section of the article argues that this macroprudential shift is an example of a ‘gestalt flip’ or third order change in Peter Hall's terms, but it is not yet a paradigm shift, because the development of first order policy settings and second order policy instruments is still ongoing, giving the macroprudential ideational shift a highly contested and contingent character.

Convergence/Divergence: Party political discourse in Northern Ireland's transition from conflict

This paper illuminates the role of political language in a peace process through analysing the discourse used by political parties in Northern Ireland. What matters, it seems, is not whether party discourses converge or diverge but rather how, and in what ways, they do so. In the case of Northern Ireland, there remains strong divergence between discourses regarding the ethos of unionist and nationalist parties. As a consequence, core definitions of identity, culture, norms and principle remain common grounds for competition within nationalism and unionism. There has, however, been a significant shift towards convergence between unionist and nationalist parties in their discourses on power and governance, specifically among the now predominant (hardline) and the smaller (moderate) parties. The argument thus elaborated is that political transition from conflict need not necessarily entail the creation of a “shared discourse” between all parties. Indeed, points of divergence between parties’ discourses of power and ethos are as important for a healthy post-conflict democratic environment as the elements of convergence between them.

New insight into mechanisms in water-gas-shift reaction on Au/CeO2(111): A density functional theory and kinetic study

Using density functional theory (DFT) and kinetic analyses, a new carboxyl mechanism for the water-gas-shift reaction (WGSR) on Au/CeO2(111) is proposed. Many elementary steps in the WGSR are studied using an Au cluster supported on CeO2(111). It is found that (i) water can readily dissociate at the interface between Au and CeO2; (ii) CO2 can be produced via two steps: adsorbed CO on the Au cluster reacts with active OH on ceria to form the carboxyl (COOH) species and then COOH reacts with OH to release CO2; and (iii) two adsorbed H atoms recombine to form molecular H-2 on the Au cluster. Our kinetic analyses show that the turnover frequency of the carboxyl mechanism is consistent with the experimental one while the rates of redox and formate mechanisms are much slower than that of carboxyl mechanism. It is suggested that the carboxyl pathway is likely to be responsible for WGSR on Au/CeO2.