Fringe festivals, cultural politics, and the negotiation of subjectivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social theory, influenced most recently by poststructuralism, has found renewed interest in questions concerning the subject, representation, ideology, and social formations. Rejecting earlier structuralist attempts to theorize the subject as ultimately tied to essentialist conceptualizations of society, it is suggested, rather, that individual subjects and social formations are constituted within a plurality of contesting discourses which form no totalizing logic, and in which no necessary relations can be defined. Attention has thus shifted to culture - its products, practices and representations - as sites where subjectivity (including gender, race, and class identities) and social formations are constructed, challenged and transformed. Social formations are viewed as mutable, their elements always able to be articulated within alternate formations. It is at the level of representation and dissemination, then, that a "politics of culture" emerges. This thesis examines Canada's Fringe Festivals as sites where subjectivity is negotiated and social formations constituted and transformed. These festivals are shown to provide possibilities for diversity and plurality - providing room for the production and consumption of cultural products which would otherwise remain invisible within the rationalized structures of Canadian society. This occurs through their accessibility (both to artists and patrons), their inversion of the wage relations of traditional theatre, their subversion of criticism (excellence and universality) and their transformation of rationalized urban spaces into spaces of "festivity." The festivals encourage interaction between patrons, artists and "representations" thereby moderating the influence of traditional evaluative media and positioning the negotiation of "meaning" in an intersubjective, "public" context. While an emerging literature on festivals has emphasized their "liminality" - considering them spaces of pure possibility where the structures of everyday life are suspended and transformed - the present work argues that such events should be understood as "situated" - inseparable from the social relations of the city. Whether examining characteristics of the Fringe "public," the selective images used in promotional literature, the production of "taste" across social groups, or the instrumental rationality behind state support of the festivals, the Fringe Festivals, their products and participants, are found to be constituted within multiple (often contradictory) discourses which simultaneously subvert and reproduce existing social formations.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".