Department of Music

The McIntire Department of Music presents a colloquium by Robin James on Friday, November 21st, 2014 at 3:30pm in 107 Old Cabell Hall.  This event is free and open to the public.

Robin James is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC-Charlotte. She is also a classically trained musician, a DJ, and a member of the band citation:obsolete. She blogs about feminism, critical race theory, continental philosophy, pop music, punk, post-punk, hip-hop, disco, mutant disco, techno, posthuman soul music.  Her blog can be found at http://www.its-her-factory.blogspot.com/

She has written The Conjectural Body: gender, race, and the philosophy of music. Lanham: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

Perhaps unwittingly, Veit Erlmann’s claim that “the acoustic and physiological phenomenon of resonance...was, for all intents and purposes, modernity’s second science” (Reason & Resonance 11; emphasis mine) echoes the title of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This resonance between sound and femininity also emerges in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze & Guattari argue that modernity’s becoming-music is also a becoming-woman. As these examples suggest, European modernity feminizes sound, music, and resonance: resonance is the (male) gaze’s feminized other, the constitutive outside of the classical episteme. 

Neoliberalism upgrades the classical episteme. One of the most significant of these upgrades is its re-valuation of (some kinds of femininity): from Tiqqun’s Young Girl to Sandberg’s Leaners In, to the more fundamental “feminization” of labor, neoliberalism’s ideal subject is not stereotypically masculine, but feminine. Post-feminist politics echoes the post-visual and post-discursive turns in contemporary theory: new materialism and sound studies are increasingly prominent and influential. 

This echo is no mere coincidence. Through readings of Elizabeth Grosz’s and Jane Bennett’s theoretical work, Beyonce’s “Video Phone” and MIT’s “visual microphone,” I show that the sonic turn in feminist new materialism is a neoliberal reorientation of the classical episteme. In each of these instances, algorithmic processing (or something strongly analogous to it) recovers and amplifies the voices silenced by modernity’s (male) gaze. If such envoicement is just a more efficient form of subjection, how should we approach these theoretical, auditory, and musical practices?

This event is co-sponsored by the University of Virginia Office of Women, Gender & Sexuality.