David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (Fordham University Press, 2018), 328 pp., $28.00 paper
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his recent book Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics, David Lloyd presents a sweeping argument about the foundational role of the German aesthetic ideal in the formation of race-thinking and the history of racist oppression, summarized in his statement that “aesthetic culture itself constitutes the formal principles of racist discourse… determined by an aesthetic philosophy that founds the idea of a universal common sense and its space of articulation, the public sphere” (p. 91). In the Introduction, Lloyd makes two claims about the originality of his analysis of Kant's aesthetic theory as the foundation for the racial regime of representation in western politics and the aesthetic production of racialized bodies: These claims do not hold up in light of the argument provided by Alfred Frankowski in his book The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning (Lexington, 2015), in which he provides an analysis of the relation between pleasure, representation and race in Kant's aesthetic theory in order to illustrate how it shapes and sanctions the contours of post-racial sensibility essential to the re-production of anti-black violence or, more specifically, essential to the violence inflicted through post-racializing all forms of anti-black violence in the present. Lloyd’s refusal to take Frankowski’s analysis seriously leads to an interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics that is limited in its ability to account for the racial legacy of Kant’s categories for white sensibility. This limitation of Lloyd’s analysis is evident in his insistence that he is the first scholar to tread this territory—a claim that depends upon refusing Frankowski’s account any epistemic authority—and so illustrates the sort of epistemic injustice produced by the terms of white sensibility that he attempts to trace to the German aesthetic ideal.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.066 | 0.020 |
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".