Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article thinks between two works by the transgender Canadian artist Cassils, Becoming an Image (2012–ongoing) and Inextinguishable Fire (2015), and French poet-philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on touch.Cassils’s work is profoundly empirical and estranges and illuminates the body by working with its extremes and limits. In Becoming an Image, the artist launches an athletic attack on a 2,000 lb lump of clay, in a darkness repeatedly shattered by the arrhythmic flash of a camera. Inextinguishable Fire sees them prepare for their body to be set on fire. Looking first to evoke something of a spectator’s experience of each performance, I propose that both works activate, depend on and open important questions of touch. I elaborate these questions in dialogue with Nancy. Nancy has been described as working at the limits of philosophy, worrying at the problem of philosophy’s relationship with existence, experience and the empirical world it bears on but can never quite touch (Hutchens Citation2005: 19). I draw from the account of touch he offers in Corpus (Nancy Citation2008) and beyond, to develop my claim for the affective power, aesthetic and political stakes of Cassils’ performances. I argue that the two performances invite and inspire something akin to Nancy’s ‘radicalized existentialism’ (Neyrat Citation2013: 26) – calling their audience to a re-sensitized and uncompromisingly embodied attitude, an attitude that entails a confrontation with being as being-exposed and being-in-touch from which no individualist fantasies of neat self-containment can protect us.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.005 |
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".