Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay challenges Bruno Latour’s elegiac pronouncement of the sublime’s death in the Anthropocene, proposing instead a “Gaian sublime” emerging from Lynn Margulis’s radical reconceptualization of planetary life. Analysis of Margulis’s scientific nonfiction reveals how her work on microbial agency and symbiosis disrupts traditional sublime theory’s emphasis on human transcendence and geological spectacle. The essay traces how sublime aesthetics, from Longinus through Burke and Kant to contemporary environmental thought, has historically reinforced racial hierarchies, gender binaries, and human exceptionalism. Margulis’s perspective offers a crucial corrective by revealing Earth’s smallest inhabitants as its most profound transformers, generating sublime experience not through nature’s brute force but through recognition of life’s collaborative creativity across scales and through deep time. This reframing moves beyond both conventional sublime theory and contemporary Anthropocene discourse, demonstrating how scientific understanding might enhance rather than diminish the capacity for awe and wonder. The Gaian sublime thus emerges as both aesthetic category and mode of attention, potentially enabling more ethically attuned relationships with our living planet.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".