In the Shadowlands of Sovereignty: The Politics of Enclosure in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s <i>Babel</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, sovereignty has become a newly central yet also hotly contested term within political theory, as nation-state territorial jurisdiction is increasingly subordinated to other ambulatory and often piratical networks and flows of people, services, goods, and capital. This essay analyzes Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel for insight into the contemporary formations of sovereignty and its exceptional spaces, enquiring about that term’s currency as a regulatory construct. In so doing, I critique the usual tendency to explain sovereignty – individual and juridical – through the logic of the border and enclosure. Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s work on the immunitary paradigm, I look to Babel to develop an alternate mapping of community that, while refusing to culminate with Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics, approaches individual and collective embodiment alike as sites of flux, porosity, messiness, and vulnerability.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".