Pathologizing Subjecthoods: Pop Culture, Habits of Thought, and the Unmaking of Resistance Politics at Guantanamo Bay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning with a recurrent discussion about the choice between two imagined Star Trek technologies, the holodeck and the transporter, this article explores how popular culture can be revealing of ways in which political possibilities are variously made and foreclosed by dint of deeply held but underinterrogated ideational commitments circulating in the mundane and carried forward by what might seem unlikely voices. Tracing a few such commitments as they pertain to the legitimation and delegitimation of political subjecthood, we examine the political stakes of questions of agency and delusion through what were initially reported to have been the June 2006 suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the crisis that emerged with respect to multiple hunger strikes at that same facility some seven years later. Through these we ask whether there might be resistance-enabling possibilities as yet unimagined in agential choices that can so deeply offend prevailing sensibilities that it is sometimes difficult to abide them as valid choices at all. As we struggle with these resurgent security politics, it might seem frivolous to turn to film and television, or pub games at conferences, for guidance. What this article demonstrates is that these popular renderings of the limits of acceptable subjectivity draw on deep currents in our very broadest culture. In a very real sense, we are all very well prepared for our present political rendition.
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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 | 0.004 |
| 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 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".