As shopping malls have become increasingly common in urban and suburban landscapes, retail and consumer sciences have made these spaces more affectively intense by targeting the body of the consumer directly. Through a case study of a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, I suggest that non-representational theory offers advantages in studying spaces like malls for two reasons. First, shopping malls offer an opportunity to study the engineering of affect that is central to this emerging literature on materiality, politics and technology. The analysis, then, will lead to a discussion of the mall's capacity to function as a biopolitical technology as well as an economic one. Second, this approach sutures a false binary in the consumption literature between strong theories of producer power and the creativity of consumers. Interviews with mall visitors, participant observation and findings from ethnographic field work inform the figure of malls without stores (MwS), an analytic concept adapted from Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs (BwO) that reconfigures a binary reading of the consumption literature and expands the purview of what is political about these spaces.
Background
Translational errors can result in bypassing of the main viral protein reading frames and the production of alternate reading frame (ARF) or cryptic peptides. Within HIV, there are many such ARFs in both sense and the antisense directions of transcription. These ARFs have the potential to generate immunogenic peptides called cryptic epitopes (CE). Both antiretroviral drug therapy and the immune system exert a mutational pressure on HIV-1. Immune pressure exerted by ARF CD8
+
T cells on the virus has already been observed
in vitro
. HAART has also been described to select HIV-1 variants for drug escape mutations. Since the mutational pressure exerted on one location of the HIV-1 genome can potentially affect the 3 reading frames, we hypothesized that ARF responses would be affected by this drug pressure
in vivo
.
Methodology/Principal findings
In this study we identified new ARFs derived from sense and antisense transcription of HIV-1. Many of these ARFs are detectable in circulating viral proteins. They are predominantly found in the HIV-1 env nucleotide region. We measured T cell responses to 199 HIV-1 CE encoded within 13 sense and 34 antisense HIV-1 ARFs. We were able to observe that these ARF responses are more frequent and of greater magnitude in chronically infected individuals compared to acutely infected patients, and in patients on HAART, the breadth of ARF responses increased.
Conclusions/Significance
These results have implications for vaccine design and unveil the existence of potential new epitopes that could be included as vaccine targets.
This paper builds on recent work on the embodied geopolitics of tourism to investigate the Titan Missile Museum (TMM), a Cold War‐era underground nuclear missile silo and command bunker in the southwest USA. In examining how visitors are not only persuaded to adopt certain attitudes towards the weaponry, but are enrolled in an embodied experience that is active in the formation of subjectivity that emerges from such an encounter, the paper draws on the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard and other non‐representational theorists to argue that this tourism encounter is a negative simulation that can be informed by a better understanding of “hyperreal” spectacle. This spectacle, however, does not simply fall in the realm of representation but is one that engages affect and emotion as important for the emergence of geopolitical subjectivity. While the TMM works to produce what Baudrillard might call a “non‐event” out of nuclear geopolitics, it also takes the risk of getting too close to the bomb by simulating its launch. These dynamics are encapsulated in the highlight of the standard one‐hour tour: the simulation of a missile launch, something that never took place. Drawing on our experience at the TMM and visitor comments left online at Yelp.com, as well as the broader archive of journalism and scholarship on the site, we also sense the possibility of something else emerging out of the embodied and performative materialities that constitute this site of “dark tourism.”
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