<i>Noli Me Tangere</i>: Haptic Certitude in Beckett’s <i>Eh Joe</i> and <i>Nacht und Träume</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article will examine the act of touch, real or imagined, in Beckett’s television plays Eh Joe and Nacht und Träume. The kinesis and soundscape of Eh Joe are structured around an absent (female) figure. The solitary body of this play is touched by the (absent) presence of an exterior, ghostly figure. In Nacht und Träume, there is a significant moment of touch: hands emerge from the darkness in the image dreamed by the lone figure. These hands also withdraw, and the dream fades. I argue that this reaching toward – and oftentimes failure to make – contact with the other is a key “haptic” element of Beckett’s aesthetic in these plays. Using the work of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, I connect the act of touch as presented in these plays with its meaning in culture as a verifier of presence, human or divine. Touch, while it signifies an attempt to verify presence (one thinks of Doubting Thomas) also, in Nancy’s thinking, reveals an anxiety over presence, thus enabling a discussion of these plays in relation to their medium and the ghostly or ‘virtual’ bodies presented therein.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".