Interconnectedness : affect, media theory, and the subject of emotion in nineteenth century nature poetry (Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Keats)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My focus in reading William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson is on the links among sensation, emotion, and subjectivity. I argue that nineteenth century nature poets challenged ideologically bounded agency, as constructed in political and religious discourses, in an experiential turn to affect that shifted the weight of attention from intellect to sensation. This modulation, from discursive to somatic attention, shifted the terms of political agency and the contexts for imagining individual freedom. Though both nineteenth century nature poets and current media theorists share a common source thread in the affective philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, they address opposite sides of the spectrum of the potential of affect. Where the nineteenth century nature poet sees an opportunity to “counteract” the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” and “extend the domain of the sensible,” the media theorist forewarns of an infiltration of information into biological life (‘bioinformatics’) by affective rather than discursive strategies, and of the “real subsumption” of biological subjects. In both turns to affect, the bounded agent proves either more inter-relational or more serial than in received conceptions of the liberal enlightened humanist subject. For the Romantic nature poet, bounded agency proves relational in the relaxation of the discursive center into sensation. For the media theorist, bounded agency proves serial (a product of “machinic assemblage” ) in the breakdown of categorical divisions between life and information. Pivotal to my argument is that in the Wordsworthian view, the turn to affect (exposure to the sensory impingements of natural phenomena and bodily emotion) has deconditioning effects, in stark contrast to current media theory, which notes affect’s creative potential but stresses its availability for biomediation and bioinformatics: Foucauldian “biopower.” Reading key texts by Wordsworth, including Preface to Lyrical Ballads (PLB), Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, and The Excursion, I consider the philosophical exploration of affect theory and political agency in Massumi, Sedgwick, Noonan, Braidotti, Agamben, Clough, Deleuze and Latour; the cognitive theories of Verela, Johnson, and Damasio; the radical science of Sheldrake and Bohm; and the commentary of literary critics, notably M.H. Abrams and John Beer, on Wordsworth’s sense of Being and consciousness.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".