Art, Memory, and the Absent Ones: What Hannah Arendt, Doris Salcedo, and The OA Tell Us About Homelessness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper maps Hannah Arendt’s (1958) phenomenological categories of the private, public, and the social onto the experience of homelessness under neoliberalism. Amidst what is better expressed as contemporary practices of “dehousing” (Hulchanski et al., 2009, p. 3), we require contestations of the political malaise that perpetuates this violence; we are in need of new things. I argue that a revitalizing of the political can be found within forms of artistic practice. The work of Doris Salcedo engages the recovery of absent citizens, memory, and publicness, while strategically blurring Arendtian public/private distinctions. Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s (2016) TV show, The OA, offers a way to imagine a world outside the ‘false public’ and its inversion, the ‘false private’ realm of contemporary homelessness. In borrowing from theorists like Wendy Brown (2006, 2011, 2015), Bonnie Honig (1992, 2013, 2017), and others, I argue that Salcedo and The OA illustrate the role of aesthetic practice in restoring the private realm, which in turn can open up venues of encounter. Such a work of recovery is necessary in imagining — and pursuing — an alternative future, one in which citizens have a shelter from which to emerge, be heard and seen in public.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".