Reply to ``Comment on `Light scattering study of the phase transition in sym-triazine' ''
Rae’s1 comments on the author’s paper concerning the phase transition in sym‐triazine2 are answered. (AIP)
The structural phase change in s-triazine. I. The crystal structure of the low-temperature phase
The crystal structure of s-triazine at 150K has been determined by X-ray diffraction. The unit cell is monoclinic with a=0.6884 nm, b=0.9569 nm, c=0.7093 nm, beta =126.61 degrees . The low-temperature structure can be generated from the high-temperature hexagonal form by shearing the crystal in the a*c plane and rotating the molecules about the b axis. The shear and rotation angles have been measured at a number of temperatures between 110K and the transition temperature of 198.07K. They are found to be proportional to each other and their variation with temperature is in good agreement with that expected from the order parameter in the case of a quasi-continuous transition.
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.