Bibliographic record
Abstract
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
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".