This essay responds to the perception that later twentieth-century experience underwent a shallowing of intensity – what Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed as a ‘waning of Affect’.

The essay reads this shallowing, as it is represented in the novel of the period, and as it reflects the logic of late capitalism, and of neoliberal culture. But while it examines the ways in which the novel partakes of this logic, it suggests at the same time that the experience of shallowness itself yields a particular kind of intensity, one which is at odds with its affective weakening. If we are to understand the relation between late capitalism, neoliberalism and waning of affect, we have to address the ways in which shallowness become its own kind of intensity – in which shallowness and intensity enter into a shifted relation with one another.

Reading the later twentieth-century novel from Philip Roth to Muriel Spark to Margaret Atwood to James Kelman, the essay argues that we can see a form of fictional expression emerging at this time, in which the novel does not abandon its commitment to forms of political intensity, but in which it rewrites the given relations between the weighty and the trivial, between weakening and intensifying, between fiction and reality.

This chapter discusses the classification of armed conflcits into international armed conflicts (IACs) and non-international armed conflicts ( NIACs) by examining the relevant criteria. WIth regard to NIACs it disusses the criteria of organisation and intensity. The chapter also considers the geographical and temporal scope of armed conflicts. It then goes on to consider occupation, wars of self-determination, terrorism and cyber war, as well the character of conflicts when international forces are involved.

The pandemic has settled work and management situations in which collaborators more rarely meet. Beyond issues of maintaining a sense of co-presence, what seems to be more and more at stake is the dramatization and intensification of encounters on site but also the dramatization of remote narrative events in the future or the past. Collaborators, customers, need to meet physically at some point in a meeting room, and something need more than ever to happen at this moment. But beyond that, organizing needs also to have an intensity. Discussions around projects, problems, opportunities, happen in the flow of an open life, in a decentered way. Organizing events of the past and the future thus need to call each other, to intensively call each other in time. Managers need to build dispersed narrative events likely to intensively elaborate this dramatic resonance for people continuously coming in and out of ephemeral projects. This Intense Decentered Organizing (IDO) based on intense moments of co-presence and intensification of past and future events is a huge stake of our time. And more than ever, dramatization and theatralization appear as very important new regimes of historicity and eventfulness.

The behavior of fluids is complicated. One approximate solution is that of sinusoidal traveling waves. Those waves traveling in air are what we hear. The amplitude of sound waves is very small compared to 1 atmosphere, and the range of amplitudes we experience is very large. A logarithmic scale—in particular, decibels—is used to compress that range. The contrast is made between loudness, a perceived quantity, and intensity, a measurable quantity. For human hearing, a change of intensity of approximately 10 dB corresponds to a perceived change in loudness of approximately a factor of 2. Several examples are presented that show how multiple sound levels, expressed using decibels, can be compared and combined.

This chapter argues that the later twentieth-century novel can be read as an expression and a critique of the economic and political logic of neoliberalism. In works from Muriel Spark’s The Takeover, to James Kelman’s How Late it Was How Late, to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the novel form registers a certain shallowness of perception and of affect, that can be seen as a corollary to the dematerialising effects of late capitalism. But if this is so, the chapter argues that we should not read the novel of the period as simply symptomatic of the corrosive influence of late capital on our forms of realism. Rather, the shallow intensities that we find in Spark, Roth, and Kelman are the marks of a new form of fictional critique that is developing in the period, one that attends to a shift in the way that culture is reproduced under twentieth-century neoliberal conditions.

This chapter applies the demarcation-explanation cycle to emotion theories. In Stage 1, theories propose working definitions of emotion listing (a) properties of emotions (intensional format) and/or (b) prototypical emotions (divisio format). Typical and apparent properties of emotions are that they have ontogenetic and phylogenetic continuity, are caused by important events, have mental aspects (Intentionality, phenomenality) and bodily aspects (somatic responses, subtle and coarse motor responses), and are characterized by heat (valence, intensity), automaticity, control precedence, and irrationality. Prototypical emotions are fear, anger, sadness, joy, and so on. In Stage 2, theories offer constitutive and/or causal-mechanistic explanations for emotions. In Stage 3, the explanations are validated in empirical research. In Stage 4, they form the basis for the eventual scientific definitions of emotions that allows (a) demarcating the set of emotions from other sets (intensional format) and (b) partitioning the set of emotions into subsets (divisio format). The demarcation-explanation cycle forms the basis for a novel typology of emotion theories in which the theories are placed on several axes. The axes correspond to questions that arise at various stages in the demarcation-explanation cycle and the positions of theories on these axes correspond to the answers they formulate to these questions.

Our final chapter begins by returning to Hölderlin’s account of the relationship between being and judgement. It argues that central to Deleuze’s philosophy is the introduction of an account of determination that operates differently from the subject-predicate determination discovered in judgement. The chapter draws on Chapter 4’s account of depth to show how Deleuze takes up and then expands Merleau-Ponty’s account of our perspectival relationship to the world. It further develops Kant’s notions of transcendental illusion to show why we tend to misunderstand the nature of thinking and the transcendental ideas to illuminate Deleuze’s account of how thinking produces sense prior to the introduction of judging.

This chapter provides an introduction to the acoustic and perceptual measurement of vowels. The measurable acoustic properties of vowels are formants, duration, pitch and intensity. Perceptual measurements include identification and discrimination of natural or synthesised vowels. After a brief review of the historical representation of the vowel space, technical details are given on measuring the acoustic properties of vowels, including perceptual measurements and speaker normalisation. This last plays a pivotal role in vowel space comparison among various language and gender groups. A few normalisation methods, along with the transformation of acoustic formant frequency values into auditory scales, are reviewed to provide a foundation for a cross-linguistic and curvilinear comparison of vowels. In addition, we describe competing models and theories and discuss correlations between vowel height and pitch, followed by practical scenarios and future studies on these measurements using software and internet resources.

We introduce counting processes, and we discuss the Poisson process and its intensity in some detail.

The theory is here generalized to include marked point processes (MPP) on the real line with ageneral mark space. We define and interpret MPP differentials and integrals The compensator and intensity of an MPP is discussed carefully. We present the relevant predictability concept for MPP integrands, andthe connection between MPP integrals and martingales is discussed in detail.

In our everyday experience, there is another way we sometimes infer distance, namely by the change in apparent brightness for objects that emit their own light, with some known power or luminosity. For example, a hundred watt light bulb at close distance appears a lot brighter than the same bulb from far away. Similarly, for a star, what we observe as apparent brightness is really a measure of the flux of light, i.e. energy emitted per unit time per unit area.

Our initial introduction of surface brightness characterized it as a flux confined within an observed solid angle. But actually the surface brightness is directly related to a more general and fundamental quantity known as the “specific intensity.” The light we see from a star is the result of competition between thermal emission and absorption by material within the star.

Measuring behaviour means assigning numbers to observations of behaviour according to specified rules. Converting a stream of behaviour into behavioural metrics involves choosing and defining specific categories of behaviour that can be measured. Behavioural categories can be described in terms of their physical structure or their consequences. An ethogram is a catalogue of the species-typical behavioural categories displayed by a species in a specified environment. Descriptions of behavioural categories should be unambiguous and written down before data collection starts. Behavioural categories can be designated as either events (short duration) or states (longer duration). Behavioural categories are used to generate metrics such as latencies, frequencies, durations and intensities. Two or more metrics can be combined to form a composite metric. Metrics can be at different levels of measurement, ranging from nominal (weakest) to ratio (strongest).

Chapter 3 is a general, rather short and partly descriptive introduction to general wave theory, without application of any differential equation. The emphasis is on mechanical waves, e.g., acoustic waves.