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. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and author of Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism and The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. Neoliberal Noise and the Biopolitics of (Un)Cool: Acoustic Resonance as Political Economy  23
2. Universal Envoicement: Acoustic Resonance as Political Ontology  51
3. Vibration and Diffraction: Acoustic Resonance as Materialist Ontology  87
4. Neoliberal Sophrosyne: Acoustic Resonance as Subjectivity and Personhood  126
5. Social Physics and Quantum Physics: Acoustic Resonance as the Model for a "Harmonious" World  158
Conclusion  181
Notes  185
Bibliography  227
Index  239