The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (pdf)

Description

In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects.