Anti-Social Practice Against Communicative Capitalism?

Political philosophers often use terms like “having a voice” or “legibility” to describe an individual’s or group’s relationship to power and to hegemonic institutions. But these terms, “voice” and “legibility,” they’re aesthetic terms used to describe political phenomena. Why, in…

Is the “analytic/continental divide” a politically obsolete concept?

So, this weekend I watched GI Joe 2. For all of the things it doesn’t do–like be aesthetically “good” cinema–one thing it does capture fairly well is the obsolesce of cold-war thinking (which, obviously, was what informed the cartoons on which the…

Ancient Greek & Neoliberal Harmony Pt. 1: Sophrosyne as Proportion

Ancient Greek & Neoliberal Harmony Pt. 1: Sophrosyne as Proportion

It seems like the ancient Greeks are actually kinda neoliberal in some ways. In Disagreement, Ranciere calls consensus democracy “the perfect realization” of Plato’s Republic, and, as Shannon Winnubst notes in her great new article in Foucault Studies(which everyone should…

Ludacris’s “Rest of My Life” and Neoliberalism

On 11/11/12, Ludacris (feat. Usher & David Guetta) posted a video for his single “Rest of My life” to YouTube. Interestingly, and awesomely, this video all but explicitly posits the main claim of my article on EDM and neoliberalism in…

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…

Does a mid-sized city like Charlotte even NEED a professional Symphony Orchestra?

No. As this Observer article explains, the Charlotte Symphony is in serious financial trouble:http://www.charlotteobserver.com/breaking/story/909093.html Clearly the community cannot financially sustain a professional symphony orchestra. Does it need to? Ought it? Nope. Certainly we need to save the great institutions –…

Republicans and the one-drop rule, or “He’s too moderate!”

So, scholars of social identity and oppression have long known that the boundaries of and membership in privileged groups is incredibly tightly controlled. Gay men aren’t fully or properly masculine, just as those with even one drop of non-white blood…