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…
2016 In Review
2016 sucked, both in general and personally (for example, I lost two pets in three months of one another). But I also did a lot of work, in large part because I need to keep my job, and I’m the…
Good and Interesting Things in Music in 2016
This isn’t a “best of”–ranking is boring. This is a collection of things I liked to listen to and things worth thinking more about wrt music in 2016. Things I Liked: Bangers: Ansome, “Stowaway”. My favorite hard-driving techno banger of…
Counting it out differently: back music aesthetics in the era of financialization & biopolitics
I’m speaking as part of Connecticut College’s Afrofuturism & Social Justice symposium on Nov. 4, 2016. Here’s the full text of my talk. It’s mostly chunks of the current manuscript I’m writing, so it’s a nice preview of some of…
Robert Gooding-Williams Scholar Session SPEP 2016: On aesthetics as a method for the critical philosophy of race
I’ve been invited to contribute a talk to the Robert Gooding-Williams Scholar Session at the 2016 SPEP meeting next week. The talk argues that Gooding-Williams uses aesthetics as a method for practicing the critical philosophy of race, and then uses his…
Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema” Without All the Psychoanalytic Theory
I’m writing this to use in my lower-level classes where I want to talk about the main argument in Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema,” but I don’t want to have to teach the students three years of Freud…
My 2010 Paper on Race, Breed Specific Legislation, & Policing
Back in 2010 I wrote a conference paper that argued breed specific legislation used dog breed as a proxy for human race, and was (a) an attempt to put back into the law the explicitly race-based discrimination outlawed by the 14th Amendment, such…
Thinking about dash- and body-cam videos with Robert Gooding-Williams
This October I’m speaking as part of the Robert Gooding-Williams Scholar Session at SPEP. Part of my talk discusses his work on the Rodney King video. Given the current and extremely local-to-me debates about whether and to whom police do…
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