Ontological Crystallization of the Sustainable in Culture

The article analyses crystallization as a mechanism for the formation of cultural phenomena and types. The crystal metaphorically symbolizes the simplest mode of stability of all objects of existence. The characteristics of a crystal include a symmetrical, equilibrium, regular arrangement of elements in the structure of a solid. The essence, the identity of a crystalline body is determined by this structure, and not by the elements themselves, which in some cases can be arranged in a different order with the same elementary composition of matter, forming a different body. The crystallization of cultural traced the stages of Genesis (formation of identical culture) and further existence (repetition of the existing form in the process of growth) of the cultural system. The preservation of the cultural type can be traced in various sections of the space-time continuum: at the level of the people or nation, at the level of social stratification, at the level of ontogenesis.

Boring Holes: The Crystalline Body of Beckett's The Lost Ones

In a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett describes the mark of modern literary ambition as an inexhaustible drive to ‘drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.’ Much is made of this little line by readers of Beckett from Gilles Deleuze and Mladen Dolar to, more recently, Alenka Zupançiç. As its title teases, this essay takes up Beckett's directive to read for, with, and through the holes bored into language alongside the bodies—narrated and narrating—captured by it as so many boring, banal holes into which meaning, form, and other bodies can be pushed. In The Lost Ones, Beckett's short prose piece from 1971, bodies abound: lost, scurrying, shivering, defeated, sweaty, aroused, pained, aging, nauseated, desiring bodies. Beckett's ‘most anthropological work,’ as C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski have dubbed it, The Lost Ones proposes a series of fundamental contradictions or antagonisms between the narrating ‘anthropological’ voice concerned with quantitatively capturing a neutralized (and neutered, disembodied) totality—and the titular ‘lost’ bodies that inhabit the world of the text, for whom embodiment wholly determines both the potentialities and limitations of life, movement, and feeling. The ‘bore’ of a cylinder—the shape of the contained world of The Lost Ones—incidentally also names the diameter of empty space, the hole, around which its form wraps. This essay explores the antagonistic relationship between the circumscribing forces that envelop and contain life in the cylindrical space of narration, and its bore: the ‘something or nothing,’ as Beckett might put it, into which a substance can drill, enter, flood, leak, or fall. The objectifying impulses of the affectively eviscerating, abstracted narrator of The Lost Ones short-circuit throughout the text in special moments, when the bodies the voice describes erupt into what this essay will call a ‘crystal image.’ Taken from Deleuze's Cinema books, the crystal image and its transmission through ‘crystalline description’ name a set of aesthetic operations through which antagonisms can coexist. In other words: where otherwise mutually exclusive contradictions appear simultaneously as imbricated conditions of possibility for a single image. While the voice gazes, god-like, from above the cylinder, the bodies it describes explode its forms of containment with a kind of qualitative surplus that over and again impedes the narrator's attempts to totalize, circumscribe, and define the limits of embodied and affective life. I argue that the eruption of affect within the scientistic descriptive mode not only forms a crystal image out of an otherwise contained realm of quantifications, but that by pinning oppositional forms of aesthetic capture and representation against one another, the text reveals fundamental contradictions at play within narration and description more broadly. These contradictions and equivocations are not to be resolved or reconciled, I argue, but animated, sparked, and put into play through the process of reading.

Style, controls, and timing of fold-and-thrust deformation of the Jago stock, northeastern Brooks Range, Alaska

Involvement of the Devonian Jago stock in Cenozoic fold-and-thrust deformation of the northeastern Brooks Range illustrates the influence of a relatively small, isolated crystalline body on the mechanical stratigraphy and subsequent deformational behavior of an otherwise layered sedimentary package. The small size of the stock allowed it and the structurally coupled overlying Mississippian Kekiktuk Conglomerate to deform nonpenetratively as a horse in a regional duplex, in contrast to the semiductile behavior of the nearby but much larger Okpilak batholith. Shear was localized in the upper part of the stock and the conglomerate due to partial detachment of the overlying Carboniferous Lisburne Group. North-vergent thrust-related folds formed in the mechanically layered Lisburne Group carbonates instead of the symmetrical, unfaulted detachment folds more typical of the region because an underlying regional detachment horizon in the Mississippian Kayak Shale is depositionally absent over the stock. Unusually competent contact-metamorphosed pre-Mississippian metasedimentary rocks were thrust over the stock and its cover because a ramp formed at the edge of the stock and cut upsection through the Lisburne Group due to the absence of Kayak Shale. A 40Ar/39Ar age of foliated white mica indicates thrusting of the stock by 61 Ma; fission-track ages indicate cooling at ~44 and ~28 Ma. These ages indicate a cooling history that implies ~11 km of unroofing since ~61 Ma, only ~1.5 km of which can be explained by the inferred duplex structure. The remaining ~9.5 km of unroofing is most likely due to subduplex structural thickening above a deep regional detachment.

The Spermatozoon of Arthropoda

The spermatozoa of some species of Diptera belonging to the Psychodidae are described. In the 4 species examined, they appear needle-shaped, non-motile, anteriorly flattened, posteriorly bifid. Flagella, and any microtubule system, are lacking, and the only organelles encountered are an extremely elongated nucleus, a prominent acrosome, a well developed subacrosomal body, a slender, somewhat elongated mitochondrial derivative and a conspicuous multilayered membrane wall, produced by the superimposition of the plasma membrane and the acrosomal membrane. The mitochondrion is devoid of a crystalline axis, while the acrosome contains a longitudinal, cross-striated para-crystalline body. Centrioles are absent throughout the spermatid stage. Sperms and spermatids are organized in syncytia of 210 elements.