A very tentative overview of the new book project
It's still very rough, but I'm excited about it and think it actually says something
For now, I think the newsletter is going to be for ongoing updates about the two book projects I’m working on: the WOXY one and the one on the aesthetics of post-probabilist neoliberalisms. This post is part of the latter project. I’ve been trying to frame exactly what the project is doing, and this is what I have so far:
Following advances in math and computing and the imperative to bring even nonexistent and counterfactual realities into surplus value production, post-probabilist neoliberalisms upgrade the governance mechanisms and market models used by the probabilist neoliberalisms Foucault theorized in the late 1970s. Supplementing probabilist math with possibilist speculation--i.e., an assessment of phenomena that cannot be quantified because they don’t exist (yet)--post-probabilist neoliberalisms reshape a predominately calculative rationality or regime into an aesthetic-calculative one. In their departure from factual material reality, post-probabilist neoliberalisms co-opt what Herbert Marcuse calls “the aesthetic dimension,” or the part of artworks that stands outside and beyond the material reality of the art object--what makes something “a painting” rather than just paint. For Marcuse, artworks could be resistant and oppositional because their aesthetic qualities transcend the limits of their material construction; for example, pop songs produced in a capitalist industry have been used and received in counterhegemonic ways. Relying on judgments that supplement powerful digital number-crunching with both programmers’ and end-users’ feel for things, post-probabilist neoliberalisms use individuals’ aesthetic sensibilities to do what mere numbers can’t.
For this reason, any full account of the underlying logic and real-world impacts of post-probabilist neoliberalisms must study structures of feeling as political and economic structures. That’s what this book does. Analyzing the aesthetics of contemporary Anglophone popular music alongside critical theories of post-probabilist neoliberalisms, this book studies the qualitative components of post-probabilist neoliberalism’s aesthetic-calculative rationality. Developed and contested in our everyday interactions with pop culture and the arts, these qualitative components of post-probabilist rationalities aren’t hidden in a black box--we’re immersed in them. They inform everything from pop music aesthetics to the ways the music industry ranks and categorizes songs. So, it’s not just that pop music can tell us something about the structures of feeling post-probabilist rationalities cultivate, but also that this account of evolving neoliberalisms and biopolitics helps explain why pop music sounds the way it does at the dawn of the third decade of the 21st century by illuminating the specific kinds of cultural work pop songs do and why people find them meaningful and pleasurable.
These qualitative components shape how post-probabilist neoliberalisms function as both an onto-epistemology (i.e., as theories of what reality is and how we know it) and as a variation on white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Building on my own work in Resilience & Melancholy and Melinda Cooper’s account of “neoliberal biopolitics,” I will show that post-probabilist rationalities model markets on the resiliently asexual reproduction of cellular life; this sort of resilience is distinguished by its ability to overcome any and all limits, up to and including the hard ontological limits of present reality, such as the law of thermodynamics or the chronological passage of time marked by the Earth’s rotations and revolutions. Taking unbounded resilience as the fundamental nature of reality, post-probabilist rationalities are also freed from the epistemic limits of empirical fact: because the limits of present reality should be overcome, data about this reality provides no basis for actionable knowledge. But for neoliberals that’s exactly what the market ought to provide. Neoliberalism treats the market as a site of veridiction: it determines whether something is true and/or justified, such as whether or not the benefits of a risk justify its costs. Post-probabilist rationality liberates the market’s capacity to judge the truth or justification of a choice from the limits of empirical fact. Instead of using facts to assess the truth or justification of a choice, post-probabilist neoliberalisms use feelings. More specifically, they assess the degree of a choice’s dis/orientation from a perceptual horizon. Where probabilist neoliberalism relied on normal curves to arrange its component data points, post-probabilist neoliberalisms rely instead on horizons or orientations. And whereas probabilist biopolitics uses statistical normalization to mark the break on that curve between invested and divested, post-probabilist biopolitics uses legitimacy and legitimation to mark that same break. Orientation and legitimation are the tools and techniques that post-probabilist biopolitics uses to police more or less the same racial, gender, sexual, and class boundaries that probabilist biopolitics polices with norms.
The structures of feeling coded into contemporary pop songs illustrate just what sorts of horizons we’re supposed to use to demonstrate our legitimacy (or our worthiness of continued investment) and to judge the illegitimacy of horizons whose racial, sexual, and/or gendered orientation threaten the full capacity of the market’s resilience unless subject to intense policing and surveillance. Continuing the analysis of soars and drops from Resilience & Melancholy, I’ll show how practices of legitimation distinguish blossoming resilience from ticking-time-bombs of risk, and identify various ways this manifests in pop music, from the emergence of chill as an appropriation and neutralization of black strategies of resistance to neoliberalism in hip hop culture to the role of resilient capacity-value in today’s pop charts. I’ll also use this idea of orientation and horizon to explain what motivates the rise of mood as a substitute for genre.