Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following essay is a work of Recombinant Theory. To write this essay, I have performed an elaborate cut-up and montage of Steve McCaffery’s poetic and critical writing, producing over 4,000 recombinant aphorisms that extend from McCaffery’s own poetics, while also refracting his theoretical concepts. Of these 4,000+ aphorisms, I have compiled several in the linear sequence that follows. This essay is an original work of narrative and theory, and it is also fully indebted to McCaffery’s own work. Recombinant Theory is constraint theory, producing critical writing by means of poetic technique. This strategy resonates with the first mandate of the Toronto Research Group Manifesto (written by McCaffery and bpNichol), which states that “all theory is transient & after the fact of writing.” In Recombinant Theory, the essay’s ideas minimally precede the writing process; the cut-up and montage techniques are predetermined, but the process itself determines what recombinant aphorisms will emerge, and what theoretical arc will be produced through the sequencing of these aphorisms. Recombinant Theory chooses not to assess a text at arm’s length, not to summarize any part of a text, not to paraphrase, not to speak on a text’s behalf. Instead, Recombinant Theory speaks with the text, geomantically realigning its energy patterns, infecting the text’s energy while also being infected by it, foregrounding the direct physical impact of material language, waging an attack on the categories of author and reader.
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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
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".