Gerry Coulter, Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert, or the Poetics of Radicality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
4-4)M any readers of Jean Baudrillard forget that he began his career teaching German and was a prolific translator into French of Weiss, Brecht, and Marx and Engels among others.Gerry Coulter has not forgotten the vocation of this "prehistoric" Baudrillard.The most provocative insight of Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert, or the Poetics of Radicality, is that while teaching high-school German he was "chosen to translate Hölderlin" (p.36).While Coulter has not written an intellectual biography, his use of understudied incidents and contexts aid his interpretation of Baudrillard's greatest insights.Coulter then gathers together Baudrillard's scattered references to Hölderlin in his works and from them builds a case for a shared poetic sensibility.This does not entail that Baudrillard is a romantic.Rather, in Baudrillard's case this sensibility is linked to his theory of the resolution of the world in the reversibility of events, whose germinal form is found in Hölderlin.However, the Hölderlin that Baudrillard produces is "anagrammatized" Coulter explains (p.49), referring to the gathering of scattered traces of partial signs to constitute a counter-message that undermines the obvious message.Coulter provides a new route into Hölderlin beyond the beaten path of Heidegger.His efforts are an advance on the suggestive clues about Baudrillard's beginnings dropped by Mike Gane in the early 1990s.Another figure whose influence on Baudrillard -though Coulter dislikes this term -looms large is Roland Barthes.This is a complex relationship that began with Barthes' role as academic advisor to Baudrillard, but is worked through in terms of how Barthes' views on writing as transgressive, pleasurable, and gamemanship, dovetailed with those of Baudrillard.Coulter does not dwell on the obvious correspondence between the early semio-structural books of Baudrillard which are heirs to Barthes' own theoretical statements on semiology, fashion, and narrative.Instead, he focuses on the relationship between language and meaning.Both thinkers struggle to escape from meaning but in different ways.In a probing section dealing with this issue, Coulter shows how they brush shoulders on meaning's frightening terroristic dimension (p.22), with Barthes pursuing unique concepts like signifiers without signifieds,
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".