Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren
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
What follows, then, needs to be understood as involving an ethical critique of concrete political structures and as not simply concerned with the writing of the text before us because, as I will argue, the city along with every subjectival creation is a product of myth. Delany's text interrogates such monumental myths through a representation of the city (and thereby, the subject) as wounded and open to certain ethical possibilities. In its fragmentation Delany's text represents, internally and externally, subjectivity at its limit, which is to say, a "subjectivity" whose assimilative powers have been overwhelmed by the experience of the death of the other,exposing it to community. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of thinking about how writing can mitigate against the monumentalism of the subject and the subject's myths that obsess after non-relation, eliding that birth or (communal) relation that comes from the outside and others. Dhalgren becomes above all a "novel" which plays at birth, at never getting beyond birth, always coming and never arriving at presence, and, hence, always remaining with others.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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