The Future and the Commodity: Walter Benjamin and Eric Overmyer’s <i>On the Verge</i>
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
Influenced by Frankfurt School thought, Eric Overmyer prefers Walter Benjamin’s hope for the future to pessimism like Theodor Adorno’s about capitalism’s control of the imagination. In Overmyer’s 1985 play, On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning, hope is already mixed with despair – as it is in Benjamin’s thought – because the things of this world can no longer embody Paradise; they may, however, gesture toward a lost whole which may yet be regained. As “commodities,” these things (the play’s objects, bodies, and words) gesture toward the human relationships elided in capitalist meanings, enlivening hope that utopia may yet be achieved. For Benjamin, apprehending utopia in the commodity becomes possible in the age of mechanical reproduction, with its accompanying “mass perspective” less in thrall to the cults of the past. It is a perspective the play’s women share with their audience, liberating an imagination that is always directed toward the future. But in addition to the provocation to the imagination offered by the commodity, the play effects and stages what Benjamin calls the “dialectical image”: the audience confronts these figures from the past looking forward toward them. It also registers the trope of the photograph, which brings the past forward in time. Benjamin thinks that looking toward both the future and the past renders the spectator a historical subject, one who apprehends the recurrent imperative – in the face of catastrophic failure – to regain Paradise. In On the Verge, as in Benjamin’s thought, the commodity becomes the ambivalent basis of a political poetics.
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 | 0.002 | 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) | 0.000 | 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