Becoming-Signiconic: Emergence and Territory in The Familiar

The Familiar is densely structured by divisions and hierarchies in terms of plot, focalization, vocabularies and layout, but it is primarily a book of interconnectedness. This is a principle that propels its narrative and poses the biggest challenge in its execution: is it possible to describe a genuinely new and disruptive entity, a “monster” unreadable in terms of existing codes and concepts, arriving as a series of glitches, a system breach, a breakdown of defenses, an enforced encounter with the Other?The Familiar itself could be conceived as an arena where a new genus comes into being through the corporeality of text, not represented as a character or recounted as an event, but assuming flesh on the page within the suspended temporality of print. A specific signiconic lexicon was devised to blur the borders between the textual and the pictorial, to give a voice to the voiceless (“the waves, the animals, the plants”), and to “surpass or bypass the mind” (Danielewski). Placing this enlarged semiotic spectrum of the sensible and the intelligible within the traditional frame of a multi-volume novel makes its ambition even more radical. Pushing the book-as-archive beyond its historical confines of mimesis and expression, The Familiar envisions literature as a process, a distribution of forces across an ontologically heterogeneous field, suggesting a nonlinear continuum motivated by a “non-subject-centered mode of agency” (Bennett).Starting with notions of the book to come as a locus of futurity and unexplored possibility (Blanchot, Derrida) and assemblage as a multiplicity, a corpus of becoming or a zone of emergence (Deleuze and Guattari), this article attempts to examine the tension between storytelling demands and the very materiality of The Familiar (including its asemic borders or cores) in view of its own signiconic and inherently post-anthropocentric goals.

Nonlinear dynamic analysis of anisotropic fiber-reinforced dielectric elastomers: A mathematical approach

In this paper, the primary purpose is to have a complete understanding of the importance of fibers in dielectric elastomers due to the influence of fiber orientation in decreasing the applied voltage to simulate the structure and improving mechanical performance. Fibers will also reduce the chance of failure like Wrinkling instabilities and increase the response rate under electric displacement. Implementing the dielectric elastomers with anisotropic structure, despite their great potential, has not adequately analyzed in previous researches. Therefore, based on nonlinear continuum mechanics and large inelastic deformations, the constitutive relationships and equations governing the behavior of viscoelastic dielectric elastomers under harmonic electrical loading are extracted and analyzed in different states. The numerical results, such as phase and frequency-amplitude diagrams and the oscillation, illustrate the dynamic behavior of an anisotropic dielectric elastomer with different fiber orientations. To describe the viscoelasticity behavior of the material, hyperelastic models and the rheological model, are used in conjunction with electrical coupling. Using the theory of anisotropic dielectric elastomers, a geometrically nonlinear formulation under finite deformations is developed by the Euler-Lagrange equations and solved mathematically.

Dispersive fractalisation in linear and nonlinear Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou lattices

We investigate, both analytically and numerically, dispersive fractalisation and quantisation of solutions to periodic linear and nonlinear Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou systems. When subject to periodic boundary conditions and discontinuous initial conditions, e.g., a step function, both the linearised and nonlinear continuum models for FPUT exhibit fractal solution profiles at irrational times (as determined by the coefficients and the length of the interval) and quantised profiles (piecewise constant or perturbations thereof) at rational times. We observe a similar effect in the linearised FPUT chain at times t where these models have validity, namely t = O(h−2), where h is proportional to the intermass spacing or, equivalently, the reciprocal of the number of masses. For nonlinear periodic FPUT systems, our numerical results suggest a somewhat similar behaviour in the presence of small nonlinearities, which disappears as the nonlinear force increases in magnitude. However, these phenomena are manifested on very long time intervals, posing a severe challenge for numerical integration as the number of masses increases. Even with the high-order splitting methods used here, our numerical investigations are limited to nonlinear FPUT chains with a smaller number of masses than would be needed to resolve this question unambiguously.