The Dialectical Image of White Masochism and the Fugitive Spectator: On Claudia Rankine’s <i>The White Card</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on a close reading of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card (2018), in this article I argue that Rankine offers a political view of the theatre as capable of producing a dialectical image of white masochism in service of a critique of the neoliberal present. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images, I further contend that Rankine’s dialectical image intervenes in helpful ways in the famous debate between Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten regarding how to represent the scene of racial/sexual subjection. In that debate, Hartman decides not to focus on the “intolerable image” that spectacularizes Black suffering to defamiliarize the terror of slavery, concentrating instead on the terror of the mundane. Moten questions that move and turns back to that image to unpack a different kind of agency, which he identifies as the resistance of the object. Rankine’s theatre succeeds, I claim, in rendering both mundane and schocking violence visible without replicating it, while also foregrounding the otherwise compromised and often erased agency of the enslaved. In doing this, I conclude, Rankine’s theatre offers us a fugitive rather than emancipated spectator. Here I question the limits of Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator to address the politics of the theatre, when one understands policing not as an abstract logic of power but as a historically changing technology of racial/sexual subjection.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".