The Future and the Commodity: Walter Benjamin and Eric Overmyer’s <i>On the Verge</i>
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.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".