The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

by Robin James
The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

by Robin James

eBook

$20.99  $27.95 Save 25% Current price is $20.99, Original price is $27.95. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478007371
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 12/02/2019
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and author of Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism and The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Neoliberal Noise and the Biopolitics of (Un)Cool

Acoustic Resonance as Political Economy

Built on samples of English minimalist composer Michael Nyman's 1983 "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds," the (also English) Pet Shop Boys' 2013 single "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" is about Englishness as much as it is about the sonic similarities between seventeenth-century music and contemporary EDM (hint: the similarity is in those arpeggios). It uses early twenty-first-century EDM-pop clichés to comment on the similarly clichéd attitudes of the neoliberal English bourgeoisie. Like the lyrics, which skewer the overeducated middle classes' failed attempts at avant-garde posturing (such as adopting vaguely Marxist critiques of marriage as a property relation), the song's music snarks that then-recent trends toward noisy sonic maximalism are also instances of the mainstream trying and failing to pull off an avant-garde stance. More precisely, the music argues that what was formerly avant-garde is now at the center of neoliberal capitalism.

This is most clearly stated in the song's main climax, which is a twelve-bar soar starting around the 5:15 mark. Soars build tension with a Zeno's-paradox-like intensification of rhythmic events (like drum hits or handclaps) that push the number of events per second either to or implicitly past the threshold of human hearing; maximizing damage makes the return to order on the next downbeat all the more pleasurable. Soars thus mimic neoliberal capitalism's technique of recycling noise and damage into profit and pleasure, which David Harvey calls "creative destruction." The soar for "Love" has three four-bar sections. The first section begins with some stuttered and distorted treble synths, and then in the last two beats of the fourth measure, we hear some lyrics, a stuttered "bourgeoi-bourgeoi?," which carries us over to the "ssssssie" on the downbeat of the next section. In this second four-bar chunk, "bourgeois-bourgeoissssssie" happens on each measure, and there is a snare beating out quarter notes throughout this section; this makes the second section's vocals and percussion more rhythmically intense than the first sections. This intensity builds in the third four-bar section, which is subdivided into two two-bar parts. The first subsection double-times the snare, putting it on eighth notes, and shortens the lyrics to "-sssie," which is further stuttered, fragmented, and glitched. The second subsection continues to distort the lyrics but turns up the snare to sixteenth notes. Then, on the last two beats of the final measure, we get a "bourgeoi-bourgeoi-" as a drop that lands us hard on the "-ssssie" on the downbeat of bridge reprise. All the soar's noisy sonic damage both occurs to and is accompanied by vocals that say "bourgeoisie."

Pet Shop Boys use the correlation between noisy damage and "bourgeoisie" to snarkily comment on the status of aesthetic noise and sonic damage in the early twenty-first century: though this sort of distortion was the heart of twentieth-century avant-garde aesthetics, and though contemporary middlebrow audiences might still like to feel like that sort of noise is challenging and oppositional, that noise is what fuels neoliberal modes of aesthetic and economic production. Nowadays, noisy sonic distortion is the most bourgeois thing ever.

French economist Jacques Attali made this point thirty-six years earlier in his 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music. In a 1983 interview about the book with Fredric Jameson and Brian Massumi, Attali points out the fact that both economists and composers have figured out how to transform statistical and sonic noise from an impediment into a resource. He explains:

A system of representation closely linked to a harmonizing conception of the "invisible hand," a conception of the ensemble of social life as a kind of harmony (and also a certain notion of value as stable and identifiable) — these older notions now begin to recede behind a more properly statistical vision of reality, a macrostatistical and global, aleatory view, in terms of probabilities and statistical groups. This last seems to me organically related to that whole dimension of nonharmonic music (I don't know what else to call this) which involves the introduction of new rules and in particular those of chance; and that in turn relates back to the new conceptions of macrophysics (Boltzmann is after all a rough contemporary of Schoenberg, give or take a few years), and that is in its turn the same kind of theorizing one finds in macroeconomics — namely, statistical and global conceptions of the movement of masses and of mass production.

These two long sentences argue that postwar macroeconomics and avant-garde composition both adopt a "statistical vision of reality" that has something to do with chance ("aleatory") and probabilities. In this vision, noise or error isn't an impediment to be eliminated (e.g., harmonized away by some sort of invisible hand or perfect authentic cadence) but something that can be accounted for and rendered productive. From Schaeffer's musique concrète to Reich's gradual processes, lots of midcentury compositions incorporate literal sonic noise and chance processes. But so does statistics, which uses the Gaussian normal curve, more commonly called a bell curve, to find regular patterns among noisy data. In 1801, astronomer and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss developed the mathematical function we now know as the normal curve. Gauss was trying to predict where in the sky a newly discovered planet would return into view. Building on Galileo's 1632 observation that all measurements have errors, but that "small errors occur more frequently than large errors," Gauss developed a formula for calculating the normal distribution of errors. From this normal distribution, he could then infer that the most "normal" measurement was the one whose accuracy was most probable. So error didn't impede his knowledge but facilitated it — averaging out errors is what helped Gauss guess where the supposed planet would reappear from behind the sun. In 1935, mathematician Adolphe Quetelet demonstrated that the error distributions physicists used to measure astronomical relationships could also be used to measure the presence of a particular variable across a population, thus creating the idea of "social physics." In the 1870s, the Gaussian curve came to be known as the "normal" curve when people like C. S. Peirce and, notably, eugenicist Francis Galton began using this language. Normal curves turned error and imprecise measurement into something knowable and controllable. Attali's point in the long quote above is that in the late twentieth century, both statistics-based sciences like macroeconomics and avant-garde composition turn noise into a feature rather than a bug.

In Noise Attali takes this claim about the commonality between macroeconomic statistics and avant-garde composition further. There, he argues that their similar approaches to noise result from a shared underlying principle or protocol: "non-harmonic music" makes "the laws of acoustics ... the mode of production of a new sound matter" and, in so doing, "displays all of the characteristics of the technocracy managing the great machines of the repetitive [i.e., neoliberal] economy." The basic unit of this technocracy is the normalized statistical distribution, which is a mathematical tool that turns chance occurrences into probabilistic forecasts (e.g., Gauss's forecast of where the planet would appear in the sky). Attali's claim here is that the mathematical principles behind neoliberal models of the market are the same as the basic principles of the physics of sound, which he calls "the laws of acoustics."

Writing in 2016, N. Adriana Knouf makes a similar claim about the relationship between the math behind music and the math behind neoliberal markets. According to Knouf, twenty-first-century musicians and sound artists use algorithmic tools to create pieces "via processes that are similar to those of [neoliberal economist Friedrich] Hayek's market." Benefiting from more than thirty years of advancements in computing and data analytics, postmillennial composers use updated versions of the same math Attali identified as the common root of both acoustics and neoliberal models of the market. This is why Knouf can hear resemblances between generative compositions and one of the foundational theories of neoliberal market logics. And those resemblances, she argues, help sound and music translate those complex quantitative relationships into sensory and affective terms. Knouf is not the only theorist to use sound as a metaphor for the math behind neoliberal political economy. For example, security studies scholar Robert Keohane argues that the ideal of a "harmony of interests" is key to neoliberal approaches to international diplomacy, and the idea of harmony appears throughout Katharyne Mitchell's book Crossing the Neoliberal Line. Drawing analogies between the way sounds work and the way neoliberal markets work, these theories participate in the sonic episteme.

Though Attali is not the only person to compare sounds to neoliberal markets, his account is both the most well-developed and the most well-known. Thus, I use Noise to explain how the sonic episteme manifests in theories of political economy. Attali doesn't use the language of neoliberalism, so the first part of the chapter makes the case that Noise — in particular, the chapter on "repetition" — is about neoliberalism. Though he claims that "repetition appears at the end of the nineteenth century with the advent of recording ... as the herald of a new stage in the organization of capitalism, that of the repetitive mass production of all social relations," I will show that his concept of repetition also accounts for many key features of neoliberalism Michel Foucault identifies in The Birth of Biopolitics, such as deregulation, the systematization of aleatory events through statistical forecasting, human capital, and financialization (MM1 intensification), and at the same time it connects this political economy to the biopolitical management of life. The political economy of repetition is the political economy of neoliberalism, so Attali's aforementioned claim that repetition takes the "laws of acoustics" as its organizing logic means that neoliberal political economy and acoustic resonant sound behave identically — because they're following the same fundamental principle(s). Noise uses acoustic resonance to translate that math into nonquantitative terms. That makes it a constituent of the sonic episteme.

The sonic episteme claims that acoustic resonance fixes the conceptual and political problems with traditional methods of philosophical abstraction. However, applying these mathematical principles to a society already organized by centuries of systemic domination doesn't fix that domination; it updates and intensifies it. Noise illustrates how the sonic episteme doubles down on the problems it claims to solve. In the second part of this chapter, I show that Attali's proposed solution to everything that's wrong with "repetition" — which he calls "composition" — actually makes these problems worse. Attali's notion of composition is an instance of what philosopher Shannon Winnubst calls the biopolitics of cool. A "claim to nonconformity as highly valued, preferred social posture," "cool" makes the avant-garde the new normal where everyone in the bourgeois mainstream (not just elites) is expected to cut a new leading edge. Instead of disrupting hegemonic social structures, noisy transgression feeds them. Neoliberalism domesticates noise and makes it profitable.

In the final part of the chapter, I consider alternatives to composition and the biopolitics of cool. If "cool" is no longer subversive, might blandly regularized averageness be a way to undermine neoliberal imperatives to cultivate and exploit excess? Or is uncool available only to subjects whose inflexibility and nonadaptability will be seen as an individual choice, not a group-based pathology? Is "uncool" a viable option only for white people — and thus not really a counter-hegemonic practice at all? To address these questions, I consider two musical performances of white "uncool": Spandau Ballet's "True" and Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off." Each song performs that uncool in a distinct fashion: "True" via faux-critical inflexibility, and "Shake It Off" through resiliently authentic personal unbranding. Even though both of these practices appear to reject imperatives to entrepreneurial optimization and self-investment, they are both investments in whiteness and white supremacy — producing whiteness maybe not as "property" per se but as financialized capital. The biopolitics of cool turns what would otherwise be bad investments into mechanisms for building whiteness as a kind of human capital. As in the book's subsequent chapters, the last section of this chapter looks to pop music for potential alternatives to the aspects of the sonic episteme elaborated in the first part of the chapter. Whereas those alternatives tune in to what the sonic episteme perceptually codes out of circulation and into the red, these "uncool" practices amplify the relations of domination and subordination that neoliberal biopolitics uses normalized statistical distributions to create and maintain. That's why "True" and "Shake It Off" ultimately fail as alternatives to the sonic episteme.

I. Attali, Foucault, and Acoustic Resonance as Neoliberal Market Logic

Neoliberalism's definitive feature is its assumption that everything, even and especially noneconomic activities like love or parenting, is a private market. Attali also identifies this as a signature feature of the political economy of repetition: "the few aspects of life that still remain noncommercialized now [in 1977] (nationality, love, life, death) will in the future become trapped in exchange." So, what he calls repetition shares this key feature of neoliberalism: the transformation of everything into a private market. However, his use of the word "exchange" here reveals that though the economists Michel Foucault identifies as the primary theorists of neoliberalism are careful to distinguish between industrial mass production and neoliberal financialization, Attali is less careful and uses the term "repetition" to refer to both. Perhaps this is because he understands statistical models of the market as the result of other mathematical models' inability to keep pace with ever-intensifying mass production. According to Attali, the ever-expanding mass production of commodities creates so much stuff that capitalism finally exhausts additive and multiplicative models of expansion. To grow the economy (i.e., extract further surplus value), it must shift to algorithmic models of intensification. "Combinatorics" (his term for modernity's multiplicative model of expansion), Attali argues, "gives way to statistics ... and probability" (Noise 65) or, as Foucault puts it, to "analytics." Because Attali compares the laws of acoustics to the math behind these statistics and probabilities, my analysis here focuses on the instances where Attali uses "repetition" to theorize entrepreneurial markets, forecasting, and financialization. From this perspective, Attali's concept of repetition exhibits the key features Foucault attributes to neoliberal biopolitics: the shift from exchange to competition (or, in Attali's terms, from representation to repetition), a foundation in probabilistic statistics, a concept of life modeled on neoliberal market logic, deregulation, financialization, and human capital.

1. From Exchange to Competition

In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault argues that the difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism is marked by a change in the way markets are understood, namely, "a shift from exchange to competition in the principle of the market." Exchange measures the equivalence among objects that are traded. For example, Marx argues that the exchange value of an object is expressed in money, which is the medium in which equivalences among materially incomparable things can be expressed. Instead of equivalences, competition "measure[s] economic magnitudes": financialization compounds the value of money, making money itself more intensely valuable. Arguing that late twentieth-century "science would no longer be the study of conflicts between representations, but rather the analysis of processes of repetition," Attali notes a similar shift (Noise 89). Equivalence is a conflict between representations — the commodity form, for example, is a representation of exchange value, just as "money" is "a supposedly stable sign of equivalence" (Noise 101). At issue in such conflicts is whether or not representations accurately correspond to one another and to the things they represent. Processes of repetition, on the other hand, are measured by instruments like record charts or the Dow or NASDAQ indices or birth rates — they express relative magnitudes and frequencies, not correspondences. Whether framed as a shift from exchange to competition or from representation to repetition, the underlying idea is the same: the difference between classical and neoliberalism comes down to a difference in the basic mathematical principle one uses to model the market: equivalence or magnitude. Both Attali and Foucault agree that neoliberalism/repetition takes magnitude or frequency as the basic unit of reality. And to calculate relationships among these basic units, you need a specific kind of math: probabilistic statistics.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "The Sonic Episteme"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. Neoliberal Noise and the Biopolitics of (Un)Cool: Acoustic Resonance as Political Economy  23
2. Universal Envoicement: Acoustic Resonance as Political Ontology  51
3. Vibration and Diffraction: Acoustic Resonance as Materialist Ontology  87
4. Neoliberal Sophrosyne: Acoustic Resonance as Subjectivity and Personhood  126
5. Social Physics and Quantum Physics: Acoustic Resonance as the Model for a "Harmonious" World  158
Conclusion  181
Notes  185
Bibliography  227
Index  239

What People are Saying About This

Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism - Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

“Through skillful and perceptive negotiations among diverse theoretical paradigms and material practices, Robin James articulates a bold thesis about the shift from the visual character of modernity articulated by Foucault to the sonic episteme characteristic of twenty-first-century biopolitical neoliberalism. In James’s hands, the sonic episteme becomes a diagnostic tool as well as an all-embracing metaphor of the way the new regime of neoliberal biopower works, its modes of governmentality, and its production of excluded groups. An outstanding book.”

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility - Ashon T. Crawley

The Sonic Episteme is a fascinating exploration of the problems of neoliberalism and the biopolitical that attends to the ways sound has come to be an object of study. Robin James asks readers to refuse the privileging of any one sense experience by examining the ways what she calls the sonic episteme is a part of neoliberal thought, not a break from it. The Sonic Episteme is about the practice of alternatives to the social order in thought and its epistemological possibilities rather than the search for alternatives emerging from the already given epistemological horizon and thrust of Western thought. As such, James offers a way to think sound studies, race, and material cultures together.”

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews