Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku: diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than one and less than many, has become a refrain to depict the notion of multiplicity. Borrowed from Mariyln Strathern, Annemarie Mol mobilized the refrain to succinctly capture the complex result of a series of operations that make a variety of practices hold together as a singular thing. In this article, I seek to explore some consequences of the proposition that multiplicity can be figured in, at least, two different ways: as diffraction, where the operations of singularization explored by Mol are more easily carried out, and as divergence, where singularization is not necessarily an option. The exploration is part of a larger project to rework the notion of cosmopolitics first proposed by Isabelle Stengers and later taken by Bruno Latour. Elsewhere I have argued that their conception of cosmopolitics as a project oriented towards the composition of a common world is predominantly informed by the figuration of multiplicity as diffraction, and thus it very much resembles a process of singularization writ large. In this context, foregrounding multiplicity as divergence opens a path to probe the limits of this conception of cosmopolitics, inquire into the different ways in which multiplicity holds together, and envision alternative forms of cosmopolitics. I organize my exploration around two entities caribou and atîku that, so to speak, occupy the same space at the same time in terms of bodily presence, albeit dominant common sense would have it that atîku and caribou are two words for the same entity.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.090 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".