Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Open Theater’s The Serpent (1968) offers a critique of the humanist belief in world-shaping agency that provided a foundation for the counterculture – and by extension, for avant-garde theatre and performance – of the 1960s. Taking as its subject the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, The Serpent offers a new approach to this classic myth of human origins and human nature, rejecting both a romanticized attachment to the story of an idyllic paradise to which humanity might return and a secular dismissal of that story as a counter-revolutionary narrative of human subjection. The myth of Eden becomes the story of an unfulfillable longing for a knowable, reliable human nature that can ground a revolutionary faith. New archival research into the rehearsal process of The Serpent reveals that the company moved slowly, almost reluctantly, toward its discovery that the category of the “human,” whether alienated in modernity or unalienated in the garden, is a political and philosophical dead end. The play the Open Theater collectively created laid the groundwork for the anti-humanist generation of avant-garde theatre artists that followed, even as the play continues to challenge readers and spectators to develop a non-humanist ethics built on intellectual vulnerability and distributed agency.
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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".