The Anxiety of Effluence: Resituating Bodily Fluids in Nineteenth-Century Cultural History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the eve of the nineteenth century, William Blake wrote in his contradictory and provocative "Proverbs of Hell" that, while "the cistern contains, the fountain overflows" (199).This conjunction is manifested in few places as aptly as the human body.The body is both cistern and fountain: it holds back as much as it divulges; it is as watertight as it is porous; it admits, circulates, and emits by a series of reflexes that operate at varying degrees of autonomy and mental awareness.While blood, hormones, bile and its related digestive fluids are secretiveonly emerging from containment in the event of sickness or injurytears, sweat, mucus, effluvia, semen, and menses, by their nature, are secreted into the world as an anticipated part of normative life.But, while our skin contains and restrains the motions of the former set of fluids, there is also often a second intangible 'skin' of cultural and social practices and conventions that serve to hide the latter.While we may accept the biological fact that these fluids exist in our species, to explore their cultural and intellectual significance during any particular period is, by contrast, to try to prise open a secret history: it is to attempt to reconstruct, then analyse, the kind of mores that tend not to exist actively in the public arena, and which may even be articulated only euphemistically in private.At first glance, the supposedly squeamish culture of the nineteenth century seems to be more cistern than fountaincontaining more than it let overflow, at least with regard to the seamier examples of such fluids.Alternatively, perhaps the discourse of a specific historical period simply vacillates between withholding and disclosing pertinent information in a manner that we have lost the power to process.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".