Susanne Langer, Marshall McLuhan and media ecology: Feminist principles in humanist projects
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In current scholarship, Susanne Langer and her theories of art, perception and connectivity are less well known than McLuhan’s. Comparison brings to the fore that both were concerned with the dulling effects of heavy-handed science and technology unregulated by human hand and heart, and both understood the expressive and liberatory possibilities of language as media and metaphor. By reading ‘diffractively’ – finding new connections and honouring patterns over polemics – this article brings Langer back into the scholarly conversation and reinvigorates our understanding of McLuhan. Langer did not consider her thought as principled by feminism. Yet according to recent critical biographer Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, her work was rooted in feminist ontology for espousing principles of relationality and embodiment. My article argues that McLuhan, too, eschewed dichotomies and linearities of traditional thought for the principle of relationality. Extending this claim further, my article also submits that media ecology – with its emphasis on interconnectivities, on feeling and thinking, on non-linearity – has features in common with feminist thinking.
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it