Good Vibes Only & Resilience and Melancholy Expanded Second Edition AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER

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I have two books coming out in the next six months!

First, GOOD VIBES ONLY: PHENOMENOLOGY & THE BIOPOLITICS OF ALGORITHMIC LEGITIMATION publishes November 17, but you can pre-order it now on the Duke UP website: https://www.dukeupress.edu/good-vibes-only.

This book argues that a new form of biopower has emerged in the 21st century, where new forms of probability used by recommender algorithms, LLMs, and the like work together with vernacular vibes discourse to update regulatory and discursive norms into modes of government that work in the absence of anything like civil society or the public sphere. Instead of norms, we have lineages that govern a phenomenon’s perceived capacity to transmit patriarchal racial capitalist orientations into speculative realities – no meat, just vibes, so to speak. This form of biopower explains what’s going on with stuff like social science research performed with AI rather than human subjects, the attempt to pass off AI hallucinations as “critical fabulation,” and events like NY Gov Hochul sending the National Guard to the NYC subway amid the lowest crime rates of the last 50 years. Lineages are governed by logics of criminalization and demonization; using Tina Chanter’s reading of the role of slavery in Sophocles’ Antigone alongside Eric Stanley’s concept of near life and Marina Peterson’s concept of noise, I show how sexuality is increasingly governed not for its normativity but for its legitimacy (i.e., for its capacity to transmit those aforementioned lineages into speculative realities) and thus policed as a matter of criminalization and demonization.

I am also publishing an expanded second edition of RESILIENCE & MELANCHOLY. It has a new chapter on Taylor, Charli, femininity and the politics of chill and cool, and the asset economy. You can pre-order it on the University of Michigan Press website: https://press.umich.edu/Books/R/Resilience-Melancholy I love how the cover echoes the original (and yes those peonies are from my garden).