The Anathattractive s/State: A Marxist-Semiotic Analysis of the Discourse, Ideology and Practice of Neoliberal Workfare
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the complex semiotic entanglement between discourse, ideology and practical application surrounding the neoliberal welfare policy known as workfare. It focuses particularly on the Flexible New Deal - the version of workfare trialled in the UK from 2009 to 2010 under New Labour. The Flexible New Deal was a privately administered, for-profit, payment-by-results scheme which made receipt of welfare benefits conditional upon reciprocal activity – in particular, attendance at workfare centres for “re-training”. This paper provides a Marxist-semiotic analysis of an actual Flexible New Deal centre, based on participant observation in 2010. This is framed within a wider analysis which proposes that an economic undercode dialectically interacts with class-racist ideology to semiotically sculpt the victims of structural unemployment into an apparent culture of pathological dysfunction – a theatrical illusion which nevertheless renders each unemployed person victim to a mendacious “rhyming up” with media folk-devils. In conclusion, this paper argues that via the term “underclass”, individual states of poverty are transformed into the perception of a socially-cancerous, welfare funded, expanding state (i.e. nation) within the State. This elision of personal and plural, and transubstantiation of the processes of poverty into people, is marked by the novel signifier “s/State”.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".