In 1993, Coco Fusco & Gabriel Gomez-Penia performed “Couple In A Cage”–they dressed up in stereotypically “native” attire and displayed their performance of exotic primitiveness for scopophilic consumption. The work interrogates the role of non-whites in liberal multiculturalism: whites prove…
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…
Recently, there have been a few EDM-pop songs about screaming: Usher’s “Scream,” will.i.am & Britney’s “Scream & Shout,” and Kelis’s “Scream” (which is older than these former two, but only by a year or two). I’ve written about “Scream &…
I was in the car this morning running some errands when (unsurprisingly) Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” came on the radio. Stuck in a bit of traffic, I actually listened to the lyrics this time. It had always been obvious to me…
In this post I want to flesh out an idea I suggested in my CAA paper on neoliberalism’s 4D sonic episteme. Neoliberalism produces macro-level stability from micro-level variability/aleatory. So, individual subjects have to be flexible. If flexibility normalizes, then perhaps…
I’m tidying up a paper on Jankelevitch, Abbate, musical ineffability, and implicit understanding. In the course of reading Jankelevitch, I came up with a ton of questions about his relationship to Levinas…questions which are waaaay beyond the scope…
[xposted at christian.ryan’s stardotstudio] Drones are trendy. These days, seems like everybody has some use for and/or opinion about them. They’re the subject of a lot of art and literature, too. What if, instead of making art about drones, we…
Here’s an excerpt from a rough draft of a paper I’m working up for the American Philosophies Forum at Emory in April. The theme of the meeting is “The Ineffable,” so I’m writing on Vladimir Jankelevitch‘s and Carolyn Abbate‘s work…
There’s an idiomatic expression, at least in American English, that goes: “Insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.” I’ve noticed this idiom pop up in a few Top 40 pop songs. First, there’s Olly Murs’s “Troublemaker,”…
In case you were wondering, here is a copy of my most recently updated CV. Thanks to christian.ryan for designing the template.
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