BLACKOUT: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy's <i>Funnyhouse of a Negro</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the second-to-last episode of Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy asks for the impossible. The oxymoronic effect of "a dark brightness" lies outside the realm of the technically possible. What combinations of lights, gels. and focus techniques might create "a dark brightness"? The requirement of "brightness" eliminates the possibility of "dark." This example is not the first time in her 1964 one-act that Kennedy requires the practically impossible. In her play, bald heads drop from the sky, black ravens fly around stage, walls appear out of nowhere and then characters walk through them. This is not to say that creative theatre professionals can't or won't come up with practical. elegant solutions to these staging problems. Indeed, Kennedy's impossible stage directions incite creative solutions, unique, unanticipated renderings of her imagined play in the material theatre. Nor is it to imply that the central work of theatre is to follow a playwright's stage directions as closely as possible. Creative solutions to impossible requirements include both "faithful" and "unfaithful" renderings. Rather, these impossible requirements highlight an impulse that lies at the core of theatrical representation: the impulse to substantiate or render the ideal. In the possibility that subtends that impulse is, I think, a utopic sensibility — a sense that something different or better could come out of current conditions.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
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".