The Aesthetic through and beyond Capital: Speculations on Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaḷiya and Virāgaya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the question of how one may historicize aesthetic change, especially in the context of the third-world novel, by conceiving the aesthetic as a historically contingent category that mediates between the singularity of form and the particularity of content. This question is supplemented by a discussion of the aesthetic modes of two Sinhala novels: Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaḷiya (1944) and Virāgaya (1956). The method of historicizing that is proposed involves two interpretative levels that follow the contours of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s categories of History 1, or history posited by capital, and History 2, or histories outside the life processes of capital. While History 1 enables a totalizing interpretation which allows Gamperaḷiya and Virāgaya to be thought of as embodying a narrative/realist aesthetic and affective/modernist aesthetic respectively, History 2 enables a close scrutiny of specific aspects of aesthetic mediation and play which complicate History 1’s totalizing and often Eurocentric thrust.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".