Psycho-Social Assemblages: Virtuality, Multiplicity & Intensity in the Evolving Public Library Sphere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper engages and extends Deleuze’s philosophical project of difference in Difference and Repetition and Deleuze and Guattari’s thematic-complex in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia in order to develop a social ontology that weaves the emergence of online spaces, differentiating information systems, the public sphere and emerging forms of social action. Supplanting the metaphysics of identity and representation with the actualization of the virtual, the paper mobilizes the conceptual framework of transcendental empiricism and assemblage theory to analyze a dynamically evolving social sphere that bifurcates between online and physical interaction and has transformed the subject, social relations, and their enveloping matrix of signifiers. Against this theoretical background, the paper takes public libraries as aberrant physical spaces that materialize social problems otherwise invisible or attenuated in public life. Increasingly spaces of spectacle, public libraries juxtapose the extrema of the social tapestry with the normal, a symptom of dynamic shifts within psycho-social assemblages caused by computational distribution, transmission, and amplification of information-affective flows. To explain this new terrain of social materiality, the paper develops the concept of the psycho-social as virtual-physical spaces that extremize the affective-affordance complex by integrating Deleuze’s notion of intensive fields, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desiring machines, and the Gibbsonian concept of affordance. The paper analyzes social breakdown in public library spaces through unstructured phenomenological analysis of the author’s first person testimony of Toronto Reference Library incidents, where incidents denote violations of rules of conduct as grounds for exclusion by a marginalized underclass spanning the homeless, drug addicted, mentally unstable, disturbed, destitute, and socially outcast. Belying system-symptomatic schizophrenic breakdowns of social cohesion, the explosive behaviour of the other, the deviant, the outcast reverberates through the collective field of intensity as a symptom of a virulent political economy exacerbated by control systems that order the body through production and direct affective-information flows into coercive computational affordances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".