Articles : The Topology of Extimacy in Language Poetry: Torus, Borromean Rings, and Klein Bottle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The symposium called “The Politics of the Referent” was published in the Canadian journal Open Letter in 1977 and reprinted by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Supplement Number One in 1980. In the journal, Steve McCaffery declares in his essay, “The Death of the Subject,” that literature has entered “a crisis of the sign,” and that the poet’s task is “to demystify the referential fallacy of language.” McCaffery further defines the concept of “reference” as “that kind of blindness a window makes of the pane, that motoric thrust of the word which takes you out of language into a tenuous world of the other and so prevents you [from] seeing what it is you see” (4). Lyn Hejinian’s “Two Stein Talks” in Temblor #3 (1986) displaces the blind window metaphor into that of “a carafe,” “a blind glass.” Hejinian spots Gertrude Stein’s “A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass” in the first of Tender Buttons, and perceives that “[a] carafe is a container, a glass one, which, if filled with a thick liquid, that is a colored one, might be, so to speak, blind, opaque” (134). In her “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents” in Contemporary Poetics (2007), Marjorie Perloff spotted Steve McCaffery’s and Lyn Hejinian’s points of reference and the issue of opacity/transparency in poetic language, and theorizes that poetic language is not a window to be seen through, a transparent glass pointing to something outside it, but a system of signs with its own semiological interconnectedness which can be articulated in terms of “simultaneously struggling towards, yet refusing to become significations” (18). For the second generation of the language poetry, Perloff further perceptively English Language and Literature Vol. 56 No. 6 (2010) 1295-1310
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".