“The Poetry of the Manufacturers…and their Imitators”: Keller’s Speculative Realism <sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay takes as its point of departure the dilemma articulated in Barthes’ “The Reality Effect” between the true-to-life and the intelligible, or the representation of material objects versus their readability and significance. Central to his theory is the resulting opacity of the ‘referential plenitude’ in the absence of the signified: the real, material world weakly connotes itself as a category rather than referring to a specific thing or prescribed reading. Gottfried Keller’s novella “Clothes Make the Man”/“Kleider machen Leute” examines this slippage between material and readability on the level of the plot, and the way its negotiation by the text-internal readers is ultimately productive of reality within the text. Semiotic or ontological indeterminacy associated with markers of the real renders a straightforward model of mimesis/Nachahmung into forms of iteration and performativity. These texts themselves seem concerned with formulating a theory of realism that does not reflect the world “as it is” but rather speculates on “how it could be” along with the literary and hermeneutic means of production that realize these possibilities.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".