Dominant Positions: John Coltrane, Michel Foucault, and the Politics of Representation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a 1979 essay on the principles of a contemporary movement in literature, écriture, Michel Foucault quotes approvingly a rhetorical question posed by minimalist author Samuel Beckett: “what does it matter who is speaking?” (“What Is an Author?” 205). My purpose in this paper is to argue that endorsing such critical-theoretical inattention to speakers’ identities actually promotes some of the abuses of power that Foucault and the theorists he has inspired most object to. Notably, inattention to identity forecloses analysis of the speaker’s position within the discourse and, in so doing, permits both the continued dominance of socially-legitimated points of view and continued marginalization of social commentaries and critiques that oppose themselves to these dominant threads of discourse. My critique of this curious blind-spot in Foucault’s theorizing is worked out through an analysis of critical attention to John Coltrane’s ‘free jazz’ experimentations of the 1960s. One of the central points I am concerned to make in discussing Coltrane is that how artistic projects are represented depends at least in part upon the willingness of critics to take notice of issues of identity and social positioning (both their own, and that of the artists they evaluate). I choose to engage with evaluations of Coltrane, specifically, because there are certain features of his relation to his audience and his critics that demand of us an especially nuanced and complex analysis of the power jazz journalism can exert.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it