Love, Hate, and Crystal Meth: Abjection and Teacher Narcissism in Breaking Bad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article the author looks at a particular episode of the television show, Breaking Bad, as a means to explore the pedagogical implications of the Kristevan notion of abjection, and its relation to the emotions of love and hate, and the emergence of teacher narcissism as an inevitable offshoot of the antagonisms in learning. This particular episode revolves around the narcissistic crisis experienced by a teacher who comes to recognize that demarcations of knowledge, pedagogy, subject, and object are inescapably contaminated and shot through with terrifying projections of the abject, in which the self and other necessarily collide. The author argues that it is our resistance, and our failure to communicate with the abject reminders of our own narcissism, that shut down the relational possibilities of teaching, and that compel us to ignore the existence of others. Through recognizing the implications of teacher narcissism, we can thus develop the potential to move beyond projecting our own desires as necessarily natural and inherent, and away from claiming for others the lives we would wish them to lead, rather than those they might wish to lead for themselves.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".