Planes, Plateaus, and <i>The Faerie Queene</i>: Spenser with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What might Spenser’s allegory be capable of if it were described as a rhizome rather than a tree? Taking its cue from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, this essay attempts a “rhizomatic” reading of The Faerie Queene. At first, the two works appear incompatible: binary, hierarchical signification, which is paramount to Spenser’s allegory and constitutes its vertical dimension, is anathema to Deleuze and Guattari’s leveling methodology. Yet in its horizontal dimension, its narrative, The Faerie Queene—not unlike A Thousand Plateaus—has a rhizomatic structure, which provokes a hermeneutic response and creates a network of connections between distant nodes. This essay reads the Cave of Mammon as a Spenserian “plateau,” or “hyper-allegorical space,” in which the planes of signification multiply, converge, and become flexible and interpermeable. Paradoxically, when the rhizome overtakes allegory, it becomes no less restrictive than the system it challenges, but Spenser also offers a glimpse of a possible escape from the allegorical machine.
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 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".