“Closed Place, Open Word”: Locating the Post-Manichean in Recent Black Thought
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, in social and political theory, we have become familiar with using “posts” to describe our world. As someone in favour of these developments, I see this paper as my attempt to add another post to the mix: the post-Manichean. While there are a number of reasons why this is important, I will outline some of them. First, in response to Wahneema Lubiano’s (1998) question, “What’s PoMo got to do with it?”, I recognize the need to locate black thought within the various traditions of postmodernity, post-structuralism, and so on. More specifically, I share Lubiano’s insistence that something is to be gained when “the idea of metanarratives is up for grabs” (206). Moreover, I share her claim that “the collage modality of postmodernism is one way to refuse the dangers and pleasures of coherence by instead demanding constant restructuring” (211). The second reason for the excavation of the post-Manichean is that I share Lubiano’s desire for “elbow room” for black life in contemporary social theory. The elbow room I need is a way of responding to the Eurocentrism and, dare I add, pathetic nature of the Marxism vs. post-structuralism binary, which continually buries and carnivalizes some of the most important black thinkers of the past fifty years, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and C.L.R. James. Such a binary makes it impossible to read thinkers who have been sympathetic or made contributions to both traditions, as well as those who carved out their own aesthetic and political spaces. It is clear that new positions are necessary.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".