‘Without Contraries There is No Progression’: Cinematic Montage and the Relationship of Illustration to Text in William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My claim is that Blake’s illustrations are not a supplement depicting what happens in the text, but a translation into visual terms of his central tenet, at play throughout The [First] Book of Urizen , that ‘[w]ithout Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ ( The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Plate 3). And I am claiming further that this strategy is comparable to the cinematic technique of montage: whereas the collision of two contrary images in montage creates an explosion famously described by Benjamin as ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second’. Blake, too, creates tension and ‘collision’ in his illustrations in order to depict not the actual image of Los delivering his hammer blows, for example, but rather the hoped for effect of these blows – the breaking apart of Urizen’s ‘solid without fluctuation’ ( The [First] Book of Urizen , Plate 4). This ‘solid,’ if allowed to stand, imposes a restrictive view of the cosmos that reduces our visionary capacity to that of ‘two little orbs. . .fixed in two little caves/Hiding carefully from the wind. . .’ ( The [First] Book of Urizen , Plate 12).
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 it