Uneasiness in culture, or negotiating the sublime distances towards the big Other
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper engages Slavoj Žižek's thesis that people's integration into a dominant culture requires successfully negotiating certain “distances” towards what Jacques Lacan called the “big Other,” that is, a nonexistent locus that subtly guides symbolic rules, conventions, and mandates. My main goal here is to illustrate how Žižek's conceptualizations of distance and the big Other can further our geographical theorizations of culture, especially in terms of Sigmund Freud's notion of the “uneasiness in culture.” I explore Žižek's identification of three modes of distanciation towards the big Other—“inherent transgression”, “empty gesture,” and “fetishistic disavowal,” which abound in uneasiness because they are sublime, that is, demarcated by virtuality and unfathomability. I also discuss how the demise of the big Other's authority has produced new spaces of cultural uneasiness that can be usefully understood in terms of increased interactions between everyday microcultures.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.081 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".