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Record W3163181323 · doi:10.20415/rhiz/037.e03

The Treachery of Materiality: On what it’s like to be a thing

2021· article· en· W3163181323 on OpenAlexaff
Rachel Horst

Bibliographic record

VenueRhizomes Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicArt, Politics, and Modernism
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMateriality (auditing)ArtLiteratureAestheticsArt history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This experimental narrative essay explores the confluence of writing, theorizing, and driving towards an intra-agential accounting of matter.In this practice of writing-as-(un)becoming, the narrator/scholar/subject is always already inhibited by her limited human subjectivity in comprehending materiality.Through a combination of genre and form (i.e.theatre, academic essay, confessional narrative) the novice scholar performs a playful engagement with new materialist and posthumanist concepts towards a kinship with her vehicle.In reaching towards posthuman materiality, the author/subject begins to lose grasp of her own subjectivity."It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories" (Haraway, 2016, p. 12).The world in the becoming of these sentences is an ever-shifting assemblage, most of it beyond my ken, but which I will nevertheless attempt to describe here without getting tripped up too much upon the trouble: the trouble of language and representation and my own lack of knowledge, the trouble of knowing in the folds of my human mind/brain within the constant, relentlessly churning movement of time and the churning in my stomach, the limited parking on the curb and the cooling of coffee and my problematic though keenly felt love affair withDonna Haraway and how I pick and choose among her words those I will continue to become-with and those I will leave behind.She writes: "Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude" (Haraway, 2016, p. 4).Well, Donna, I have never been sensible.Mine is a hopeful despair, or a despairing hope.Although I agree that these binaries of affective relationality with the trouble constitute the trouble, or some of it anyway."Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence" (Haraway, 2016, p. 4).So, I will neither hope nor despair in my mortal mattering within the thick copresencing of these paragraphs.Donna's trouble, of course, is loftier than mine -it is fate-of-the-world trouble.It is existential-threat trouble.It is end-of-times trouble.Mine is modest, though perhaps entangled with the fate of the world.It is the trouble of my car and how to think it.There is no way in to what it is like for the car to matter, and yet, if we are to take on New Materialism for real, and not just as a metaphor for caring about the physical world, or as an admission that the assemblage of the moment is far more complex and commingled than is possible, let alone realistical, to describe (even if I had all the time and all the words in the world)-if I am to truly allow for a relational and agential realism (right down to the jar of flowers upon the table top and their meating in

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.012
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.011
Threshold uncertainty score0.025

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.012
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0090.047
Scholarly communication0.0110.012
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0020.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.212
GPT teacher head0.383
Teacher spread0.172 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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