Understand Ted Chiang Pdf 57
Klara Claridge
My argument in this essay is that the postracial indeed offers an appropriate framework for understanding the racial dimensions of Chiang's fiction, because it forces us to think about race as inevident. Not absent, as Yoonmee Chang's definition of postracial Asian American fiction entails, but operating beneath the surface of our language and institutions, structuring them. The challenge, again, is to identify the specifically Asian American racial relation undergirding Chiang's postracial aesthetics.
As Louise builds fluency in Heptapod B, she discovers that it is transforming her own consciousness. Her thoughts become "graphically coded," and she begins experiencing "trance-like moments" in which she experiences "past and future all at once." Via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, she undergoes a racial transformation from human to human-heptapod hybrid that proceeds by language learning, not biology: in other words, a postracial racialization. We now understand that what we have thus far been reading as Louise's prosopopoeic address to her daughter has in fact been taking place in the tenseless, performative address of Heptapod B. The story's narration becomes, from the standpoint of this realization, a representation of Heptapod B, and thus of Louise's racial difference. This racialized mode of narration correlates to postrace aesthetics in its movement away from a mimetic economy of racial representation to a narrative one.
This paper offers a basis for how to think about the role of emotions in military strategy. Drawing on the core precepts of classical strategic theory, it delineates three main areas that deserve further investigation. The first area concerns understanding the character of war through the exploration of emotional stimuli. The main purpose of strategy is to understand the character of war. That character is predominantly shaped by what people in a given war care about and emotional stimuli are, by definition, issues that people care about. Emotional stimuli are thus key to understanding the character of war.
Military strategy is the pursuit of victory through military power. There are multiple models for visualizing and analyzing strategy, but for the purpose of this paper, it is both necessary and sufficient to focus on the main functions that strategy is supposed to serve. Three such functions stand out as particularly prominent in the writings of strategic theorists: strategy serves to understand the character of the war at hand, strategy is supposed to direct the course of war, and strategy is about the achievement of victory. Emotions play an important role in the fulfillment of all these functions.
Emotions are at the core of strategic practice. War, the environment in which strategy takes place, is fertile ground for emotional stimuli because it is full of uncertainty and it impacts the well-being of individuals and collectives. In general, people in war have emotional reactions to violence, chance and friction, and politics. It is imperative to know what it is that people feel emotional about because that reveals what they care about, and people shape the character of each war based on what they care about. Therefore, if we wish to understand the character of any specific war, it is useful to focus on the issues that people in war find particularly emotional.
One key advantage of conducting research in these areas is that the insights derived from this research can be immediately useful in strategic practice. Based on this research, strategic practitioners can better grasp the complex character of a given war and thus avoid taking actions that may have little effect or that may even be counter-productive. They can also better understand their own emotional motivations for the choices they make and hence reflect on whether these choices are really appropriate to the situation. Similarly, strategists can better anticipate the choices that their adversaries may make. Finally, by being aware of the emotional aspects of military strategy, those responsible for its conduct can be more successful in the pursuit of victory.
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