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Record W1810636923 · doi:10.1353/vcr.2010.0048

Socialism and Occultism at the Fin de Siècle : Elective Affinities

2010· article· en· W1810636923 on OpenAlex
Matthew Beaumont

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.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueVictorian review · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAlchemyAstrologyMaterialismMAGIC (telescope)Fin de siecleVitalismPhilosophyPositivismArtMysticismLiteratureArt historyTheologyEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

La Bus (1891), J.K. Huysmans's fictional account of occultism in France at fin de siecle, charismatic decadent des Hermies recommends that in order avoid horrors of daily life, his friend Durtal keep his eyes fixed on pavement. When do that, he explains, you see reflections of electric signs which assume all manner of shapes: alchemical symbols, armoral bearings of alchemists on raised plinths, cog-wheels, talismanic characters, bizarre pentacles with suns, hammers and anchors (2^0). As this compendium of material and immaterial images glimpsed in reflective gleam of metropolitan street suggests, for des Hermies, occult is not simply an escape from quotidian; it is indissociable from it. Materialist and spiritualist signs are inseparable. In Oscar Wilde's play LadyWindermere s Fan (1892), Lord Darlington famously declares that we are all in gutter, but some of us are looking at stars (III. 30^). Where Wilde separates supramundane from mundane, Huysmans makes them mutually implicit: des Hermies can see constellations in gutter. In a previous chapter of La Bas, des Hermies had emphasized how interrelationship of positivism and mysticism in contemporary Paris, apparently so incongruous, in fact typified the tail-ends of centuries: Magic flourishes when materialism is rife (219). In febrile atmosphere of late-nineteenth century London, too, magic flourished alongside its old frere ennemi. It is not simply that occultism was a reaction against increasingly discredited materialism of nineteenth century. Their relationship was more dialectical than that. At a collective level, it was perhaps closer to what Freud called a reaction-formation, a compensatory response that represses its complicity with phenomenon that it constitutes as its opposite (93-94). As an exoteric movement, spiritualism had for almost half a century been infatuated with problem of providing empirical evidence for afterlife. In late nineteenth century, esoteric movements such as theosophy, which self-consciously appropriated aspects of spiritualism that it sought to displace, also sought material proof of immaterial. If, therefore, fin de siecle was characterized, as Terry Eagleton

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.693
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.272
Teacher spread0.248 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it