Neo-liberalism and the Western: HBO’s <i>Deadwood</i> as National Allegory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The western usually seems to be a nostalgic genre with a conservative political message. However, one of the most prominent westerns of recent years, HBO’s Deadwood television series, offers a sustained and complex meditation on life within a world ordered entirely around the marketplace. Using the work of theorists Wendy Brown, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson, I argue that Deadwood allegorizes life within neo-liberalism, and in so doing, the television show dramatizes how neo-liberal affects and desires differ from more traditional liberal notions of the individual in society. In a town built outside of the United States, the characters in Deadwood struggle to form a society that both operates according to the free market, yet protects each individual's right to pursue her own self-interest. Deadwood represents a violent past that is both a vision of our neo-liberal present and a possible future.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".