Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter's <i>Mountain Language</i> as Testamental Text
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical conversation about the work of Samuel Beckett has been immeasurably enriched by the meditations of such thinkers as Alain Badiou and Pascale Casanova, both of whom – for very different reasons – have elevated Beckett's Worstward Ho (1983) to the status of “testamental” or “recapitulatory” text: that is, a text that, in Badiou's phrasing, serves to “take stock of the whole of Samuel Beckett's intellectual enterprise.” This essay on Harold Pinter endeavours to make a similar claim for his short 1988 play Mountain Language. In particular, and through the unique theoretical interventions of Badiou, Bill Brown, and Cary Wolfe, “Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter's Mountain Language as Testamental Text” delineates the myriad strategies of repressive forces in their ongoing project of domination. These prominently include the priority of the voice, the activation of material “things” as psychical weapons, and frequent recourse to a discourse of species to elide boundaries between the human and the animal, all of which provide a means to re-read the canon of Pinter's work.
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 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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".