A Cancelled Lesson in Plurality: Hannah Arendt and <i>The Situation</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s military retaliation, the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin cancelled its performance of Yael Ronen’s play The Situation. First performed in 2015, this celebrated play explores, among other things, diverse perspectives on the Israel–Palestine conflict through rousing discussions, provocations, and even humour. This essay returns to The Situation and invites a reading with Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of plurality. In my analysis, the play unfolds thus as a critical staging of difference but also of shared humanity through appearance, encounter, and communication. Beyond the theatre, too, a pursuit of Arendtian plurality reveals striking insights into the current politics in Germany. Finally, I discuss how the cancellation of The Situation presents a troubling submission to the mechanisms of silence and censorship that negate plurality.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".