The Anathattractive s/State: A Marxist-Semiotic Analysis of the Discourse, Ideology and Practice of Neoliberal Workfare
Why this work is in the frame
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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”.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it