A Few Unfinished Thoughts On Usher’s “Numb”

I was originally going to include this as part of an article I’m working for the premier issue of a really awesome Australian journal called Creature. And by really awesome, I mean it’s going to include stuff by Nina Power…

From Bay to Brostep: Neoliberalism from post-cinematic affect to EDM

Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect addresses the way the shift between classically liberal and neoliberal systems of social/artistic organization plays out in film and 4D visual media (And, I’m working with the version printed in Film-Philosophy, because that’s what I taught…

Neoliberalism and Contemporary Pop Music: An Overview

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the logic of biopolitical neoliberalism as it manifests in contemporary pop music (and a little bit in 20th c avant-garde art music). In the same way that classical liberalism and tonal harmony…

The Pleasure Principle Meets the Performance Principle: Gary Numan, Marcuse, and Neoliberalism

So I think Gary Numan’s work—I’m thinking Tubeway Army & Pleasure Principle stuff—is a really helpful example of the ways neoliberalism and “global/info” capital reworks the structuring binaries of classical liberalism and commodity capitalism. Binaries like public/private, authentic/alienated, use/exchange—these all…

My Life Would Suck Without You/Where Have You Been All My Life: Tension-and-Release Structures In Tonal Rock and Non-Tonal EDM-Pop

In this post, I contrast the formal elements in the song and video for Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” with the formal elements in the song and video for Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been All My Life.”…

How To Subvert Biopolitical Administration/Big Data/Neoliberal Superpanopticism?

This post follows up, but doesn’t complete or come to any final conclusions about, some issues that were discussed in my Spring 2012 graduate feminist theory class. This past semester in my graduate feminist theory course, we read Foucault and…

From “No Future” to “Delete Yourself (You Have No Chance To Win)”: Hearing the difference between classical and neo- liberalism

This is all rather rough, and because I’m thinking of reworking this to submit here, I really appreciate any constructive feedback you may have. The Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen,” with its refrain, “no future,” has been central to…

Contract Theory, Intersectionality, Neoliberalism, and Absolute Music

Contract Theory, Intersectionality, Neoliberalism, and Absolute Music

I’m working on a manuscript that, among other things, ties classical liberalism to a specific “aesthetic”—what I call “liberal realism”—and neoliberalism to another sort of aesthetic—what I might call “neoliberal formalism” (I’m not entirely decided on this latter term). While…

Sovereign Harmony and Biopolitical Frequency: Or, what Attali and LMFAO can teach us about neoliberalism

“Every major social rupture has been preceded by an essential mutation in the codes of music, in its mode of audition, and in its economy” (Attali, Noise 10).[1] So I’ve been thinking more about this idea of “transmission,” and I’ve…