The Social Imaginary of Ruination: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Disaster Mediation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Although the popularity of ruins has accompanied Western modernity in waves since the eighteenth century, the post-9/11 decade marks a notable resurgence of the imagery, aesthetics, and rhetoric of ruins, especially in American culture. This article was completed a few months prior to the global COVID-19 crisis. Analysis While many scholars dismiss contemporary forms of ruin gazing as a mindless fascination with disaster and destruction in its virtual circulation, the author contends that this contemporary imaginary has significant political and social implications. Conclusion and implications Although each geographic site of ruination has its own social, political, and historical specificity, the author draws from Cornelius Castoriadis’ psychosocial extension of Lacanian theory to designate a broader iconographic and discursive trend in American culture whereby the imagery and rhetoric of destruction contributes to what he calls the “social imaginary of ruination.”
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.092 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| 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".