Extinctathon: Margaret Atwood’s Urge for an Immanent Episteme in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first two novels from Margaret Atwood’s projected MaddAddam eco-trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) depict a corporate capitalism, or corporatism, constantly pushing its limits by privileging unregulated techno-scientific endeavours with palpable results and high financial yield. This lack of regulation—legal, ethical, moral—emerges as the main problem highlighted by the two companion dystopias. This article argues that Atwood critiques the privileging of the techno-scientific epistemology to the detriment of the humanistic one, and emphasizes the need for an integrated episteme in an immanent system. Methodologically, the comparative analysis focuses on close readings of illustrative excerpts from the novels, side by side with Michel Foucault’s theorization of the episteme and Félix Guattari’s concept of the three ecologies, while Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s description of the plane of immanence of capitalism informs the conceptualization of corporatism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".