Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay considers two artists and a writer: one Canadian, Stan Douglas, and two British, Steve McQueen and Simon Okotie. All three are Black and all three have acknowledged Beckett's influence as essential. More importantly, in the works I discuss, each explicitly drawing on Beckett in some way, there is a common concern with expression and its opposite, whether we think of the latter as withdrawal, formal structure or, simply, inexpression. The latter term is Tina Post's. In her 2022 book Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, Post convincingly tracks a tendency towards blankness, reserve and inscrutability in Black aesthetics and representation. Arguing that this strategy marks a consistent reaction to the association of Blackness with emotion, affect and the gestural, interpreted body, she assembles a tradition dating back to nineteenth-century vaudeville, where the term deadpan originates. It is in the context of this tradition that I suggest our three subjects appropriate Beckett's work, in opposition to the Late Modernist paradigm through which his work has recently been understood.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".