‘Without Contraries There is No Progression’: Cinematic Montage and the Relationship of Illustration to Text in William Blake's <i>The [First] Book of Urizen</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My claim is that Blake's illustrations are not a supplement depicting what happens in the text, but a translation into visual terms of his central tenet, at play throughout The [First] Book of Urizen, that ‘[w]ithout Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3). And I am claiming further that this strategy is comparable to the cinematic technique of montage: whereas the collision of two contrary images in montage creates an explosion famously described by Benjamin as ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second’. Blake, too, creates tension and ‘collision’ in his illustrations in order to depict not the actual image of Los delivering his hammer blows, for example, but rather the hoped for effect of these blows – the breaking apart of Urizen's ‘solid without fluctuation’ (The [First] Book of Urizen, Plate 4). This ‘solid,’ if allowed to stand, imposes a restrictive view of the cosmos that reduces our visionary capacity to that of ‘two little orbs…fixed in two little caves/Hiding carefully from the wind…’ (The [First] Book of Urizen, Plate 12).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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.
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".