The Uncanny Return of Repressed History in Jonathan Hobin’s <i>In the Playroom</i>: Playing beyond the Pleasure Principle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the motif of repetition in relationship to the pervasive emblem of the child as future. Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the uncanny and from D. W. Winnicott’s theory of playing, the paper proposes that newness rests not on the literal fact of the child but in the play of signification—the life of the signifier—opened up in the haunting encounter with old scenes. When childhood is understood as an uncanny effect, we may encounter the adult’s repressed and quaking insides, an encounter from which typically we flee in the idealization of the child as future. This paper takes as its object of analysis a recent series by Canadian photographer Jonathan Hobin called In the Playroom, which features children as “doubles” who re-enact scenes of historical violence and power plays of the adult world. Hobin’s doubles have uncanny effects that hold the potential for renewed meaning in a world that turns on the compulsion to repeat.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".