The Vanished Child: An inquiry into figures and their modes of appearance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sophie Calle's texts are elaborate devices that facilitate the production of figures, of complex symbolic entities. In fact, her work enables us to better understand how figures emerge and unfold in the imaginary. Thus, we find in her Disparitions (Disappearances), a startling figure, which we can name the "Vanished Child". I will present this figure and explain how it stems from the description of a painting by Rembrandt, stolen at the Gardner Museum in Boston. I will start by identifying some of the essential processes implied in the identification of a figure, and, to do so, I will give two short examples, drawn from Witold Gombrowicz and Don DeLillo. Then, after having described in details the figure of the Vanished Child, I will argue, following the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in his reading of Walter Benjamin, that figures are auratic objects. Dans ses textes, Sophie Calle emploie des techniques détaillées qui facilitent la production de figures, d'entités symboliques complexes. Son œuvre nous permet effectivement de mieux comprendre comment les figures émergent et se déploient dans l'imaginaire. Ainsi, nous trouvons dans ses Disparitions (Disappearances) une figure surprenante que nous pouvons désigner comme « l'enfant disparu ». Je présenterai cette figure en expliquant comment elle découle de la description d'un tableau de Rembrandt volé au musée Gardner à Boston. J'identifierai d'abord quelques-uns des procédés essentiels à l'identification d'une figure, et pour ce faire je donnerai deux exemples, tirés des œuvres de Witold Gombrowicz et Don DeLillo. Puis je décrirai de façon détaillée la figure de l'enfant disparu, avant de démontrer le caractère auratique des figures à partir de la lecture de Walter Benjamin qu'exécute l'historien de l'art français Georges Didi-Huberman.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".