Listening Not Listening: William Wordsworth and the Radical Materiality of Sound
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay reconsiders the political stakes of William Wordsworth’s 1803 sonnet, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” by reading its representation of the legacy of the imprisoned Haitian military leader, Toussaint Louverture, through a Spinozist conception of the affections. Focusing on sound as a material force, the essay takes inspiration from the Canadian poet Jordan Scott’s Guantánamo project in order to frame its argument in terms of the question, “how is it possible to listen in places of trauma?” Like many of Wordsworth’s poems, the sonnet abstracts and subsumes its subject into the dynamics of the natural world, which here becomes a revolutionary power that continues beyond Louverture’s death. Rather than treating Wordsworth’s effusions as empty bombast, this essay demonstrates that his account of Louverture’s transition from man to force of feeling admits the melancholy possibility that political reinvention’s best hope might be that even those who fail to listen cannot help but be moved.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".