Review of Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. 300 pages.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime (FG, 2017) in significant ways represents an ecological application of Latour’s lifelong development of an anthropology of the moderns. Latour tells us in 2008, in an acceptance speech for the Siegfried Unseld Prize, that for more than thirty years he has been working towards the development of a system. This system was the focus of his 2012 An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (AIME). This system aims at providing a metaphysical framework in which moderns, or those who have never been modern, describe the various ways—modes—with which one can and does make sense of the world. Anthropology here can be understood as attempts to describe the peoples of the world, how they situate and make sense of themselves and the worlds of others, whereas metaphysics here is how these worlds are cleaved at the joints. Thus, while FG is not the outline of his system, which was the project of AIME, it relies on the schemes developed there to provide a sustained exploration of the need for a new climatic regime in light of ecological collapse.
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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.012 |
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".