Violent (Non-)Labour: On the Social Reproduction of the Clone in Carola Dibbell’s <i>The Only Ones</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a reading of Carola Dibbell’s debut novel The Only Ones (2015), this article deploys the term “(non-)labour” in two senses: one is a cheeky description of cloning as the activity of reproducing human beings without the traditional sense of labour as delivery of an infant, and the other draws on Marxist-feminist accounts of care work as the remunerated or unremunerated, though structurally necessary, labour required to reproduce the workforce. Dibbell’s novel presents a version of the human as a worker always already embedded in social relations and reveals the violence that thoroughly saturates the biomedical industry. Yet, as this article argues, violent labour is most evident when characters do work that has too long been imagined outside the sphere of value production. The Only Ones illustrates the impossibility of producing value without labour, violent or otherwise; it directs readers to consider the unlikely places where we already give away our work for free.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".