Bibliographic record
Abstract
GRAMMAR & NOT-GRAMMAR: SELECTED SCRIPTS AND ESSAYS Gary Kibbins (Edited by Andrew J. Paterson) Toronto: YYZ Books, 2006, 256 pp. Reviewed by Kenneth White Throughout Grammar and Not-Grammar Gary Kibbins emphasizes the value of good writing, and indeed this vital anthology presents Kibbins's incredible command of text. Kibbins nimbly sculpts language with a refreshing and accessible sense of play. Grammar and Not-Grammar exhibits the rich diversity of Kibbins's writing and provides an opportunity to investigate his film and video texts as well as appreciate his timely engagement with the crises of articulation in the political and critical fields of art. Texts are arranged in alphabetical order, resulting in a commingling of forms (a poem followed by a script, followed by a critical essay, followed by a script, and so forth). Each text presents exciting and complimentary perspectives that showcase Kibbins's versatility as a provocative cultural theorist and brilliant contributor to the media arts. Kibbins's passion for the generative possibilities of nonsense, Alfred Jarry's 'pataphysics, and experimental production, guides all his writing in this collection. Belief in the alphanumeric alongside suspicion of images is at the root of Kibbins's engagement. The resilience of language encourages self-reflexive critique while images are docile...unreliable. Images are signification on drugs, but bad drugs and have no mystery. They are not to be trusted. Nonsense is a fluid and paradoxical framework, offering multiple points of creative interrogation beyond institutionally sanctioned modes of exploration and evaluation. It is generative, active, potential endowed with the utmost precision and clarity of revision, limiting neither text nor image. In his essay Ass Bowl Comedy: Nonsense and Experimental Film, appearing for the first time in Grammar and Not-Grammar, Kibbins writes, Once in the field of nonsense, one has permission to ignore the customary pressures to interpret, setting the boundaries of nonsense by its endless distinctions in opposition to dream, magic, and metaphor and their characteristic synthesis and fusion. Kibbins provides entry to his argument via Sailboat by Joyce Wieland, a three-minute continuous shot of a sailboat. The word appears for the duration of the work in the top third of the frame. Kibbins addresses previous studies of nonsense, specifically The Field of Nonsense (Elizabeth Sewell), Nonsense (Susan Stewart), The Logic of Sense (Gilles Deleuze), and The Philosophy of Nonsense (Jean-Jacques Lecercle), and their focus on the limits of language, independence from images, and the seductiveness of abstraction. Kibbins argues that rather than relegating text to descriptors in the service of images, the very discrepancy between the semantic values of an image of a sailboat and the word is the most fertile ground for exploration. Kibbins is suspicious of images, but he is excited by their underappreciated links with language. He recontextualizes Rene Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images and Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack as prototypical nonsense works, and then focuses the second half of his essay on Zorn's Lemma, Hollis Frampton's film of intimidating semantic weight. Continuously frustrating logical investigation even by its namesake mathematical theorem, Zorn's Lemma, Kibbins states, is the definition of a nonsense work. It is a film of Uncertain relevance...of form without meaning, intellectual nonsense, or perhaps nonsense for intellectuals. In the first of the film's three sections a female voice reads the Bay State Primer grammar textbook. The twenty-four-character Roman alphabet orders the second section. Each letter is photographed in one-second shots as it appears in street signs, advertisements, and the like. The series repeats again and again over forty-seven minutes. In each subsequent cycle the letters are replaced by images, then the images by others. …
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 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".