On Hartmut Rosa’s theory of ‘resonant democracy’ & The Sonic Episteme

Here’s an excerpt from my book/manuscript The Sonic Episteme; it’s in a chapter on acoustic resonance as political ontology and follows a discussion of Ranciere’s Disagreement, Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice, & Fred Evans’s The Multivoiced Body.   German…

On musical metaphors in string theory

This is the first draft of part of the last chapter of my current manuscript-in-process, The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance & post-identity biopolitics. String theory is a subdiscipline within physics that blends general relativity (which focuses on macrocosmic spacetime) with…

Leaning Into The Red: On Beyonce, Nicki, Missy, & Rihanna’s sonic responses to post-feminism

I’m re-upping this post because I’m  giving this talk on Friday 6 January at 9am at the APA Eastern. Hope to see you there, philosophers and Baltimore people! I’m speaking this Friday at Ithaca Music Forum. Here is the text…

On Harmony and Self-Ownership in Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line

I’m teaching Jennifer Stoever’s chapter on Jenny Lind and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield next week, and I have a few thoughts: Analyzing the American reception of 19th century opera singers Jenny Lind and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Jennifer Stover hones in on…

My Talk at Uni Twente's "Security & the Political Turn in the Philosophy of Technologies"

My Talk at Uni Twente’s “Security & the Political Turn in the Philosophy of Technologies”

I’m excited to be talking at this workshop on March 10, 2017. Here’s the full text of my talk.

IASPM-US 2017 Talk: “‘Counting It Out Differently’: Lemonade’s Demonic Calculus”

Here’s the text of my talk for IASPM-US 2017 so that you can follow along Friday afternoon if you’re there, or peek at what I’m doing if you aren’t. The talk uses Katherine McKittrick’s concept of “demonic calculus” as a…

Post-Feminism’s Sexual Contract & Property-In-Person

This is an excerpt from a longer piece, but I thought I’d reproduce this here because it’s an analytic that’s useful beyond the narrow context of that piece.   In general, post-feminism is the idea that feminism is obsolete.  As Angela…

What kind of “harmony” does big-data style social physics design for?

I’m working on the final chapter of my book The Sonic Episteme; it focuses on the ways pop science accounts of “social physics” and the subfield of physics called string theory appeal to concepts of acoustic resonance. Here’s the beginnings of…

On Poptimism, Race, & Biopolitics in the Nietzsche/Wagner Beef

In my Theories of Sound & Music class we studied the Nietzsche/Wagner beef, and there are two themes I want to mark here so we can return to them later when we talk about poptimism, on the one hand, and…

Some thoughts on Goodman’s Sonic Warfare

I’m working on a chapter that critiques a lot of trendy “vibrational ontologies” as a kind of ideal theory that just replaces one old idealized model–representationalism–with a new one–acoustic resonance. Most of the chapter is about Grosz, Bennett, & Barad’s…