Melville’s Motley Crew: History and Constituent Power in Billy Budd
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay reads Herman Melville’s final novel Billy Budd (written 1886–1891) in light of recent scholarly interventions into "oceanic studies." Melville’s parable of authority and resistance reveals how oceanic forms of power are contained and appropriated by national discourse. Focusing especially on the vexed relationship between the eponymous "Handsome Sailor" and Captain Vere, the essay claims that Billy Budd depicts the conflict between the transformative potential of what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker term "hydrarchy" and the "formed, measured forms" favored by Vere and the nation-state he represents. In narrating Billy Budd’s incorporation into the machinery of state power on board the Bellipotent, Melville’s novella reveals the complicity between official accounts of history and the counterinsurgent project of colonial power. Even as Melville depicts this process of historical fashioning, however, he also points to ways in which such a logic might be resisted by a canny reader who looks to the "ragged edges" of narrative.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".