Journal articles on the topic 'Disperse Red 73'

The level dyeing index (LDI) is a measure of dye performance influenced by the dye migration process, ensuring the maximum uniformity of dye redistribution onto the fabric surface. The current study evaluates the level dyeing performance on polyester according to the energy level (low and high) and chemical classes (azo and anthraquinone based) of the three disperse dyes studied. The best levelness was obtained using C.I. Disperse Red 73 (an azo-based, low-energy level disperse dye), which exhibited the highest migration index (MI%) value. LDI results were obtained from the ratio of the exhaustion at the critical dyeing temperature (ECDT% and the final exhaustion Ef%), and the migration index (MI%). Each dye's LDI can be used to determine the compatibility of disperse dyes for combination dyeing.

Invasion by weeds and other undesirable plants threatens global biodiversity. However, the role of mammals in maintaining and spreading weeds is often overlooked. Here we confirm that two widely distributed and abundant Australian mammalian pests, the European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and the Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes), can spread viable seed. Our assessment mainly involved determining the number and viability of seeds recovered from faeces of free-ranging individuals inhabiting several areas within the Mediterranean region of south-western Australia, an internationally recognized biodiversity hotspot. In summer, viable seeds were recovered from 3?4% of the rabbit faecal pellets (n = 190) compared to 21?40% of pellets in autumn (n = 235). Ten (77%) of the 13 species of seed identified were weeds. Of the 1,136 seeds recovered, 16% germinated. In all, 13-30% of rabbits passed viable seeds in summer, increasing to 44?73% of rabbits in autumn. In captive wild rabbits, mean passage time of marked seed through the intestinal tract ranged from 4?7 h. This, together with the small home ranges of Australian European rabbits, suggests that they may generally disperse seeds over 1?2 km. Nine to 27% of foxes passed viable seed. Although 48% of scats (n = 62) contained whole seed, only 12.9% of all scats contained viable seed (range 9.1%?19.0%). Viable seeds (4/8) were also recovered from the hides of some shot foxes. In all, 63% (12/19) of seed species identified in the scats and pelts of foxes were weeds. Rabbits (primary dispersal) and foxes (primary, and secondary dispersal via seeds ingested with prey) may be important dispersers of viable seed, and may be essential for less common, but important, long-distance plant dispersal, particularly by some invasive species. Thus, suppression of weeds can be added to the benefits of reducing the abundance of rabbits and foxes to protect the unique biota and agricultural production in southwestern Australia.

AbstractIn view of promising efficiency of advanced oxidation process (AOP), gamma radiation in combination with H2O2 was employed for the degradation of disperse red 73 (DR73) dye. Cs-137 gamma radiation source was used for dye aqueous solution irradiation. The process variables such as pH (3–9), H2O2 concentration (0.3–0.9 mL), gamma radiation absorbed dose (1–20 kGy) and DR73 initial concentration (50–150 mg/L) were optimized for maximum degradation of dye. The efficiency of AOP was evaluated on the basis of dye degradation, water quality parameters and toxicity reduction. Degradation of DR73 was achieved 69% using gamma radiation absorbed dose of 20 kGy and at the same dose 96.3% degradation was achieved in the presence of 0.9 mL/L H2O2. The dye degradation found to be dependent on dye initial concentration and pH of the medium. The radiolytic progress of DR73 was monitored by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and UV-Visible spectroscopy. The chemical oxygen demand (COD) and biological oxygen demand (BOD) were reduced significantly in response of treatment of dye at optimum conditions of process variables. The toxicity of treated and un-treated dye solution was monitored by haemolytic and Ames assays. Results revealed that the toxicity of DR73 dye was also reduced significantly after treatment. Findings revealed that the gamma radiation based AOPs are promising and could possibly be used for the remediation of textile wastewater contains toxic dyes.

A total of 85 brush-tailed bettongs (Bettongia penicillata) from Western Australia and two sites in South Australia were translocated to Yathong Nature Reserve (YNR) in western New South Wales in October 2001. Aerial baiting to control the introduced red fox (Vulpes vulpes) had been undertaken on YNR since 1996. Thirty-one bettongs were fitted with radio-transmitters at the time of release, and two subsequently. Trapping took place at irregular intervals after the translocation. In all, 73% of telemetered bettongs died within the first six months; all were dead within 13 months. Eight bettongs died within the first eight days immediately following their release, due to causes other than predation. These eight all originated from St Peter Island (SPI), South Australia. A low incidence of breeding on SPI supports the belief that this source population was in poor condition and unsuited for translocation. Overall, 19 of the 33 telemetered bettongs were killed by predators: 14 (74%) by feral house cats (Felis catus), two (11%) by birds, and three (16%) by predators, which, although they could not be fully identified, were not foxes. One month after release, surviving bettongs weighed less than they did at the time of their release (mean decrease in mass = 9.7%, range 2.6–22.4%, n = 11). Within two months of their release most had regained any lost mass (mean change in mass since release = –0.3%, range –5.9 to 10.5%). Food resources on YNR appeared sufficient to sustain adult brush-tailed bettongs, despite a period of severe drought. Small pouch young present at the time of release were subsequently lost. Females gave birth and carried small pouch young (up to 50 mm), but no young-at-foot were recorded. Bettongs did not disperse further than 10 km from their release site. Overall, 50% of aerial-tracking locations were no further than 3.2 km from the release site, and 92% no further than 7.0 km. This experimental translocation of brush-tailed bettongs failed due to predation by cats. It demonstrated that foxes were no longer a threat to wildlife on YNR and identified cats as the major impediment to the restoration of locally extinct fauna.

Asian hornbills are primarily frugivorous. We studied the characteristics of fruits consumed by four sympatric hornbill species in Thailand: Great Hornbill (Buceros bicornis), Wreathed Hornbill (Aceros undulatus), Austin's Brown Hornbill (Anorrhinus austeni) and Oriental Pied Hornbill (Anthracoceros albirostris). We compared the frequency of distribution of 11 variables for all fruit species collected in the study area (n = 259) and fruit species consumed by hornbills (n = 73). Our analysis revealed that fruits consumed by hornbills are: (1) large, (2) easily accessible within the canopy, (3) red, purple or black and (4) dehiscent or indehiscent with a thin husk. The range of fruit sizes eaten by hornbills in our study is comparable to that reported from other sites in Southeast Asia and Africa. The large gape width of hornbills enables them to consume large fruits that small frugivores would find difficult to consume.

Due to rare earth doping, phosphates and vanadates are the leading materials for the synthesis of phosphors due to their thermal stability, low sintering temperature, and chemical stability. Phosphors in the nanoscale state are of particular interest. The simple, fast, and scalable synthesis of nanophosphors with high chemical homogeneity is a priority task. The purpose of this work was to synthesize powders of mixed yttrium vanadate-phosphate crystals of various compositions by coprecipitation under the action of microwave radiation and spray pyrolysis, as well as to compare the characteristics ofthe obtained samples. Samples of YVхP1–хO4 of different compositions were synthesized by coprecipitation under the action of microwave radiation and spray pyrolysis in different modes. In the case of the synthesis of yttrium vanadate-phosphate YVхP1–хO4 by spray pyrolysis followed by annealing, according to the X-ray phase analysis data, single-phase nanopowders were formed. The morphological characteristics of the samples were revealed by the methods of transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Depending on the annealing conditions, the samples were either faceted or spherical particlesless than 100 nm in size. The composition of the YVхP1–хO4 , samples synthesized by the coprecipitation method under the action of microwave radiation strongly depended on the pH of the precursor solution. The minimum content of impurity phases was reached at pH 9.Spray pyrolysis allows the synthesis of yttrium vanadate phosphate YVхP1–хO4 nanopowders of high chemical homogeneity with a particle size of less than 100 nm. The maximum chemical homogeneity of yttrium vanadate-phosphate powders was achieved at pH = 9 during the synthesis of YVхP1–хO4 by coprecipitation under the action of microwave radiation. However, the particle size dispersion was large, within the range of 2–60 μm. References 1. Wu C., Wang Y., Jie W. 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<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves /> <w:TrackFormatting /> <w:HyphenationZone>21</w:HyphenationZone> <w:PunctuationKerning /> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas /> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF /> <w:LidThemeOther>PT-BR</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables /> <w:SnapToGridInCell /> <w:WrapTextWithPunct /> <w:UseAsianBreakRules /> <w:DontGrowAutofit /> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark /> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp /> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables /> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx /> <w:Word11KerningPairs /> <w:CachedColBalance /> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math" /> <m:brkBin m:val="before" /> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--" /> <m:smallFrac m:val="off" /> <m:dispDef /> <m:lMargin m:val="0" /> <m:rMargin m:val="0" /> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup" /> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440" /> <m:intLim m:val="subSup" /> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr" /> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 22.7pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-left: 22.7pt; text-align: justify; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><strong><span style="font-size: 8.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Introdução:</span></strong><span style="font-size: 8.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"> A dispensação de medicamentos encontra-se no intermédio do sistema de medicação, podendo interceptar os erros de prescrição e prevenir os erros de administração. Os erros de dispensação são responsáveis por pelo menos 11% do total dos erros médicos, porém estudos sobre esse tipo de erro não são frequentes no Brasil. <strong>Objetivo: </strong>Avaliar os erros de dispensação de um hospital filantrópico no município de Salvador, comparando dados obtidos nos anos de 2009 e 2012, a fim de observar como as mudanças realizadas no sistema de medicação interferiram na prevalência dos erros de dispensação. <strong>Metodologia: </strong>Foi realizado um estudo de corte transversal, no hospital Santa Izabel, Santa Casa de Misericórdia do Salvador, num período de 15 dias, nos anos de 2009 e 2012, conferindo os medicamentos dispensados com o que foi solicitado na prescrição. <strong>Resultados: </strong>O erro mais prevalente foi o de omissão, 29% (2009), 41,66% (2012), os erros de concentração mantiveram-se entre os três mais prevalentes nas duas análises. Houve uma redução de pelo menos 50% no total de prescrições atendidas com erros e de itens dispensados com erro. <strong>Conclusão: </strong>As mudanças realizadas no sistema de distribuição foram benéficas para reduzir a quantidade de erros de dispensação.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 22.7pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-left: 22.7pt; text-align: justify; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><strong><span style="font-size: 8.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; color: red; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US"> </span></strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 22.7pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-left: 22.7pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><strong><span style="font-size: 8.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">Abstract</span></strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 22.7pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-left: 22.7pt; text-align: justify; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><strong><span style="font-size: 8.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US">Background:</span></strong><span style="font-size: 8.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US"> The dispensation of medicines lies in an intermediate level of the medication system, being able to intercept prescribing errors and prevent administration mistakes. Medication errors are responsible at least for 11% of all medical error, nevertheless, these studies are incipient in Brazil. <strong>Aim:</strong> Assess dispensing errors in a charity hospital in the city of Salvador, comparing data obtained in 2009 and 2012, in order to clarify how changes performed in the system can interfere in the prevalence of dispensing errors. <strong>Methods: </strong>A cross-sectional study was conducted at Santa Izabel Hospital, in a period of consecutive 15 days, in the years of 2009 and 2012, conferring the medicines dispened with the prescription requested. <strong>Results:</strong> Omission was the most prevalent error 29% (2009) and 41.66% (2012), concentration errors remained among the most prevalent in both analyzes. There was a reduction of at least 50% on the total prescriptions met with errors and items dispensed with error. <strong>Conclusion: </strong>The changes made in the distribution system were beneficial to reduce the amount of dispensing errors.</span></p> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true" DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99" LatentStyleCount="267"> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" SemiHidden="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal" /> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1" /> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2" /> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3" /> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4" /> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5" /> <w:LsdException 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Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masochistic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. The oscillations between the sexual and textual body in Wilmot’s poetry, and in our assessments of her life and writings, should help us approach her works (like the works of Rochester) as possessing a three-dimensionality that they have long been denied. ReferencesBartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 129-54.Behn, Aphra. “Song. Love Arm’d.” The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 1: Poetry. Ed. Janet Todd. London: William Pickering, 1992. 53.Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005). ‹http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bsl159›. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Doctor Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Diamond, Irene, Ed. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.Farley-Hill, David. Rochester’s Poetry. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester’s Monkey. New York: Penguin, 1974. Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, Ed. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. New York: Noonday Press, 1988. Kemp, Theresa D. “Early Women Writers.” Feminist Teacher 18.3 (2008): 234-39.King, Kathryn. “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text.” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. "Manuscript Transmission and Circulation." The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 55-80. Love, Harold. "Systemizing Sigla." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. 11 (2002): 217-230. Marotti, Arthur F. "Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England." A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 185-203.McNay, Lois. Foucault And Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern, 1992.Moody, Ellen. “Elizabeth Wilmot (neé Mallet), Countess of Rochester, Another Woman Poet.” Blog entry 16 March 2006. 11 Nov. 2008 ‹http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=400›. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 23 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/28/index.php›. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 392-413. New York: Norton, 2007.Russell, Anne. “Aphra Behn, Textual Communities, and Pastoral Sobriquets.” English Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 41-50.———. “'Public' and 'Private' in Aphra Behn's Miscellanies: Women Writers, Print, and Manuscript.” Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 29-48. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Seal, Jill. "The Perdita Project—A Winter's Report." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 10.1-14. ‹http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/perdita.htm›.Wilders, John. “Rochester and the Metaphysicals.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Hamden: Archon, 1982. 42-57.Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. “Song” (“Nothing Ades to Love's Fond Fire”) and “Song” (“Cloris Misfortunes That Can Be Exprest”) in Kissing the Rod. 230-32.

This paper is about the relationships between infrastructural, interzonal spaces and the communities and individuals that interact with them. It attempts to describe the politics of their aesthetics and their legitimation as two aspects of the same process of semiological warfare and its governance. For example, think about a street-corner, preferably one in a big city. Consider the processes and operations that occur there, who creates them, legitimates them, and what they mean. For the sake of this paper, the road, the sidewalk, the streetlights with their cabling and electrical grid, the sewers and their gutters, are all infrastructural zones, and they come together and intermix to form the interzone. That is, the complex assemblage of meanings, things, and peoples, that is at once the street-corner and beyond it. Zones are inscribed through codes and conventions to form pragmatic regimes through which we enact our lives and our roles (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9-15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Though these zones are integral to our lives, the deterritorialisation of these zones has dispersed them throughout our world, splintering and disintegrating the meanings we can assign to them, thus forcing the perpetual re-creation of new zones and interzones across spaces and times. Through this dispersal, the integrated world capitalism in which we live, allows us to be ignorant of their processes as the experience of the zones are removed from our subjective experiences (Guattari, The Three Ecologies 137). Because our ignorance of and alienation from our infrastructural zones, a subpolitics forms and spawns semiologic warfare for our attention and disattention that causes us to be “zoned out” about the zones in which we live (Beck 35). Instead of zoning out, this paper zones in on infrastructure zones and interzones. An interzone is an interstitial zone of extraterratoriality governed by a broader set of rules, as with international zones such as the infamous Green Zone in Iraq or the international zone of Tangiers made famous by William Burroughs (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Interzones are the territories between zones that we project our subjectivities through. They cut or splinter the empty spaces of the dispersed and fragmented zones of our capitalist realities. Our subjective projection of these interzones creates and requires modes of interpretation and governance that comes into being as we share our knowledge of them. As interzones become reified through our shared interpretations and governance, they become zones themselves, forming a pragmatic regime of codes and conventions that eventually is alienated from our experience. This perpetual passage from zone to interzone based on our spatial subjectivities, requires significant amounts of work—intellectual and other. Without this work, interzones are entropic and temporary; fading from our shared memories. But even as they fade, interzones have changed the zones around them, transforming the necessities of their governance through the vacating of the semiological and social spaces the interzone once occupied with its own processes.This paper confronts these interzones that are frequently within a five-minute walk from anywhere humans inhabit. These interzones contain infrastructures such as sidewalks, roads, sewers, passageways, or in the digital world web servers, routers, and fibre optic cabling. As we pass through these zones and have the opportunity to interact with them, we occasionally intermix them, creating new possibilities of understanding and operating; this is the creation of an interzone. The interzone exists when we make it and share it from the zones we inhabit, transforming their infrastructures through our interaction with them. However, our actions tend to be vitalist and pluralist in that our interactions with infrastructures tend to create a multiplicity of livable interzones existing between the zones as new spaces of autonomy, occupation, and legitimising politics. This plurality combined with our immersion within infrastructural zones provides the living semiological space of self-legitimation in which we deny the existence of the very infrastructural zones it requires: In the “private,” in the “domestic” sphere (and so also in the environment of objects) in which the individual lives as a refuge zone, as an autonomous field of needs and satisfactions, below or beyond social constraints, the individual nevertheless always continues to evince or to claim a legitimacy and to assure it by signs. In the least of behaviors, through the least of objects, he or she translates the immanence of a jurisdiction which in appearance is rejected. (Baudrillard 40) Our objects; our actions within this domestic environment constitute elements of several zones and provide our own subjective system of legitimation within them, and our autonomy within that space is guaranteed by our ignorance of the operation of that system of legitimation. It is only our situatedness through our inscriptions and actions within these spaces that gives us the ability to read the codes that we co-construct through these spaces. (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5) This situatedness allows us this sense of refuge, safety, and in the end as Baudrillard claims, this refuge zone allows for us to exist socially, if ignorantly within the infrastructures we require. (Baudrillard 40, 49) But even in our ignorance, infrastructural zones still provide us with the background necessities of our everyday lives; eliminating dangers and constituting a significant part of our artifactual world (Star 377-90; Star and Ruhleder 253-64; Hunsinger 277-79). As Paul Edwards says: Infrastructures constitute an artificial environment, channeling and/or reproducing those properties of the natural environment that we find most useful and comfortable; providing others that the natural environment cannot; and eliminating features we find dangerous, uncomfortable, or merely inconvenient. In doing so, they simultaneously constitute our experience of the natural environment, as commodity, object of romantic or pastoralist emotions and aesthetic sensibilities, or occasional impediment. (189) Zones too are artificial environments, performing the same sort of functions as described by Edwards above. Zones operate through their semiological form as desire/seduction and they operate through their borders where their aesthetization is at play. More specifically how we imagine and react to zones and interzones, and who and what occupies their border spaces, defines the interoperation of their interpretation, their aesthetisation, and their governance. Edges and borders define the relations of zones; the screen of the monitor is like a wall with a window that defines our access to cyberinfrastructures beyond, much like the curb or ditch defines the edge of the street or road. These borders and edges are more than spaces of interoperation, they are spaces of politics. It is through these borders, and the actions we can pursue through them, where the operations of legitimacy will be most tested and transgressed. Infrastructural zones operate in and across those borders both as real and phantasmal aesthetics that operate as a becoming system of governance and interpretation. They operate as a cross-ecologic, semiological, and pragmatic regime that is established in relation to production of subjectivity in their cultural milieu. The zones and interzones articulate a form of alienated subjectivity in all cultural milieus. This is an articulation of our acted environment that is assembled through our distributed cognition of zones and interzones, which as part of the politics of legitimation, we inscribe, erase, and re-inscribe in perpetual semiological warfare until the zones fade into the background losing their salience. Edwards agrees with this lack of salience, “The most salient characteristic of technology in the modern (industrial and postindustrial) world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most people, most of the time” (184). Even without particular salience to most people, infrastructural zones are spaces and aggregations of perceived fixity or normality demarcated by their transgression. The modes of transgression that demarcate them can occur in any part of our experience. Normally the boundaries are constructed in the forms of visibility and knowability centered on questions of expertise and/or professionalism amongst other boundary processes (Star and Griesemer 387–420; Star and Ruhleder 253–64 ; Gieryn 791–2). Plumbers, for instance, confront a reality of certain infrastructures on a daily basis, as do other professionals such as those that work at Internet service providers. As outsiders to these epistemic communities, we are made aware of zones when we transgress in or through them as we are breaking rules or borders that define these communities define and in part communicate to us. It is through our actions and transgressions that we enact and inscribe interzones in our subjective world, but it is through our reactions and transgressions also that they are territorialized and deterritorialized in our social world. Zones, then are constructs of our purported, construed, and communicated phantasmal objectivities and beyond that they are the aesthetization of our shared needs and satisfactions. By recognizing them, we transform them in to actants in our social world, and by communicating our experience of them, we construct them as codes and conventions that add meaning to that social world. One way to imagine these infrastructural manifestations is through thinking about them as substrates. People commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates—railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires. It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand. This image holds up well enough for many purposes—turn on the faucet for a drink of water and you use a vast infrastructure of plumbing and water regulation without usually thinking much about it. (Star 380) As substrates, these infrastructures form a pragmatic regime, or zone through which we pass, which exists underneath the strata that is our everyday life. The faucet is part of the strata of our everyday lives, like the sidewalk, while the pipes and the standards of plumbing form a space of expertise as they do with sidewalks. The operations of expertise cultures on specific sets of infrastructures helps to disperse and fragment the knowledge of the various strata involved, especially the substrates. Experts knowledgeable of these substrates will have come to their knowledge by transgressing the borders, by witnessing and inscribing the objects, the aestheticisations, and the other border processes with meanings that the community of experts share amongst themselves and isolate from the public at large (Illich et al. 15–20). Expertise becomes complicit in the processes of the zone and its interzones. This complicity, if reflexive, will come to question the system of integrated world capitalism in which this zone is established as a form of semiological warfare against other zones and regimes (Guattari, “The Three Ecologies” 1989 137). In other words, experts on infrastructural zones have to come to terms not only with the knowing of the previously unknown, but also the know-how that the unknown plays into the broader culture and capitalist system in which it operates. However, while experts might zone in on infrastructural zones and their contexts, most people continue to be zoned out. Even for experts in infrastructures, some infrastructures get far less investigation than others, and like all zones, they eventually are forgotten and experts become ignorant of them (Hunsinger 277–79). The challenge of knowing or bringing attention to the infrastructural zones and their interzones is a challenge of territorialisation and thus of subjective awareness. Knowingly operating with subjective awareness within them is a form of semiological warfare that we can perpetrate, because by establishing the semiological subjective space, we reconstruct a system of interpreting and governing the territory and thus establishing political importance and awareness of our techno-semiological existence. For the territory to be won, the war and its strategies have to be taken to the public arena and brought forth in political discourse as a purposive politics. We must resist the temptation to forget and remain ignorant, which as Ulrich Beck points out, relegates this political space to corporations and other non-public entities as a form of subpolitics. We need to take back the politics and subpolitics of infrastructure and recognize the choices or lack thereof that we are making across all ecological systems (Beck 38; Beck, Giddens and Lash 24–36). In conclusion, this exposition on zones, interzones, and infrastructures is meant to challenge us to rethink our subjective positions in relation to zones, their aesthetics, and their legitimation as functions of semiological warfare. We need to find new opportunities to make a mess of these spaces, to transgress, and create new spaces of autonomy for ourselves and future participants in the zones. We have to move beyond the appreciation of “this is a street-corner” and into the realm of “this is our street-corner and we know how it works.” This act will create a new interzone, which will be a new space of possibility for our lives. We cannot rely on our everyday experiences to guide us through these zones or the construction of interzones, because they will certainly only reflect our normal, accepted behaviors within the established pragmatic regimes and as such, lead to an ongoing ignorance of the operation of these interzones and infrastructures. Our challenge is to transgress and thus deterritorialise these semiological zones, and perhaps through this transgression transform the interzones into zones better reflecting our aesthetics, our desires, and our satisfactions. References Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, Missouri: Telos Press, 1981. Beck, Ulrich. Democracy without Enemies. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 1998. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Edwards, Paul. N. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” Modernity and Technology. Eds. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. Gieryn, Thomas F. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48.6 (1983): 781–95. Guattari, Felix. “The Three Ecologies.” New Formations 8 (Summer 1989): 131–47. ———. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Gary Genosko. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Hunsinger, Jeremy. “Toward a Transdisciplinary Internet Research.” The Information Society 21.4 (2005): 277–79. Illich, Ivan, et al. Disabling Professions. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1977. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43.3 (1999): 377-91. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387–420. Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps towards an Ecology of Infrastructure: Complex Problems in Design and Access for Large-Scale Collaborative Systems.” Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work. North Carolina, 1994. 253–64. Thévenot, Laurent. “Rules and Implements: Investment in Forms.” Social Science Information 23.1 (1984): 1–45. ———. “Pragmatic Regimes Governing the Engagement with the World.” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Eds. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny. New York: Routledge, 2001. 56–73.

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. 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