As Dean argues, such limitlessness is a regression from law and superego, the disciplined limits and rules instituted by the psychoanalytic figure of the father (or what I would prefer to think of as society - hence my earlier gesture to libertarianism). I would argue instead that this is less a regression to a less-developed state and more a sign of a broader shift away from the structures, codes, and episteme of European modernity (like psychoanalysis) and towards a newer framework with different stakes and terms. We are exiting the modern paradigm of work, friction, delayed gratification, the Bildungsroman, tonal harmony, etc, toward one that idolizes scale without friction or limit.

Across modernity, theories of the self or subject, political philosophy, literary form, musical form, etc., all centered around the assimilation and overcoming of difference. There’s the labor theory of value/property, which argues that labor transforms raw material into private property by bringing it out of its natural state through work. That’s how you make a coat out of linen and the United States out of supposedly terra nullius. From Lacan’s mirror stage to Levinas’s face of the Other, 20th century French philosophy has numerous ways of theorizing the self/subject as a being defined by its integration of variably knowable difference. As Susan McClary famously argued, tonal harmony, the main structuring device for Western music from the 18th century onwards, is likewise a structure for introducing and then domesticating dissonance. “The sonata and likewise tonality…depend upon the logic that assumes as natural the tonic protagonist’s necessary subjugation (‘resolution,’ ‘grounding’) of whatever ‘large-scale dissonance’ occupies the second narrative position” (Feminine Endings 15-6). Traditionally, pieces from Beethoven symphonies to stadium rock anthems start in one key, go into one or more other keys, and then conclude by going back to the original key. This harmonic journey creates the feeling of tension and release, as increasingly distant or dissonant keys build tension and the return to the original key brings the feeling of release or resolution. The intro to GnR’s “Welcome to the Jungle” does something like this: its chord progression builds and builds harmonic tension and releases it on the downbeat of the first verse. This tension/release structure represents how the integration of difference feels: instead of a self or a piece of private property, it produces a payoff in the form of aesthetic pleasure.

As Melinda Cooper shows, this modern idea of work-as-domestication-of-difference fit the needs of 19th and 20th century industrial capitalism because it was possible standardizeable and regularizeable. In her book Life as Surplus, she explains, there is

A common principle of production or labor—muscles perform mechanical work through the combustion of nutrients, just as the steam engine produces energy by burning carbon. The physico chemical labor of the body was measurable in the same terms as that of heat. There was thus a fundamental equivalence between the labor of the organ and that of the machine—the equivalence of abstract, divisible labor time. And this equivalence meant that the performance of the machine and of the body could be subjected to similar strategies of regularization and even reproduction (107; emphasis mine).

Combustion represents friction as heat, heat that can then be applied as force to do things like move a train or build something on an assembly line. Bodies burning calories or engines burning coal metabolize fuel into abstract equivalent units of force and labor time, which is helpful if you want to figure out how to produce X number of widgets in Y time, or keep the trains running on schedule. Those activities are advantageous in the style of capitalism where companies make money from selling commodities, and in a society that prioritizes discipline and statistical regulation - i.e., in the kind of biopower that Foucault talks about in his work.

But as I argue in Good Vibes Only, that form of biopower is old news as that disciplined regularity is no longer productive enough for either markets or states. That volume builds on Cooper’s claim that something like what I would call a structure of resilience has replaced the old modern calculus of combustion: productivity shouldn’t metabolize at a regular and regulated rate, it should compound and exponentalize, or as the bros say these days, “scale.” Musical gestures like the soar depict such scale by creating the sense of compounding intensity. But the soar is over a decade old and the pop charts have moved on; these days, big tension-release gestures like the soar or like the intro to “Welcome to the Jungle” are out and milquetoast slop is in. “Choosin Texas” has been #1 on the Hot 100 for 20 weeks - longer than only Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” - and it has no real climax to speak of; it’s a twanged up “Spotifycore” song designed to fade into the background just like the music in the first two scenes of its video. Slop scales because it is indeterminate enough to work across a wide range of contexts, like several different radio formats or as a sound to accompany a short-form video of a wide range of life moments. Slop, in other words, is relatively frictionless.

This frictionlessness, or what others might call immediacy, is what Dean is referring to in her analysis of AI discourse about wish-fulfillment without limit. But just as “Choosin Texas” reigns the Hot 100 while millions of working musicians have their songs demonetized on streaming platforms, this frictionlessness is unevenly distributed. AI users may have their wishes fulfilled instantly without the need for the messiness of practice or work, but the remote assistance workers behind Waymo’s supposedly autonomous vehicles and the communities suffering through the myriad negative externalities of data centers certainly experience friction in their relationship with AI. Just as Hegel argued in 1807, masters experience frictionlessness as they outsource the actual work of living to subordinates. In the current AI discourse, frictionless scale is a status marker: owners and bosses experience frictionless gratification whereas the rest of us have to toil away doing labor that is necessary but poorly-paid because its friction-full nature makes it difficult if not impossible to scale. The payoff of frictionless experience isn’t instant enjoyment, but rank.

Whereas modernity framed the master as the one who could conquer and domesticate difference (think of bell hooks’ frame of ‘eating the other,’ how white masculine “cool” is about appropriating Black masculinity, or again of McClary’s analysis of the gendered dynamics of tonal harmony), today’s AI discourse frames elite status in terms of its remove from friction and the things it produces, like subjective interiority, educated expertise, command of the exotic, disinterested remove, discipline, you name it. Slop’s formulaic and indeterminate character represents the lack of depth that defines frictionless experience, just as its dominance on the pop charts represents the scalability such emptiness facilitates.

***

Slop might be dominating the Hot 100, but it’s far from the only thing going on in music these days. Slop might scale most efficiently, but other parts of the industry require a there there for audiences to engage with: you don’t get brat summer without some sort of iconic color, just as trending sounds on TikTok like the intro to Slayyyter’s “Dance” go viral because their structure scripts the pace and arc of the kinds of narratives that drive user engagement. Slop may scale most efficiently, but some markets require music to provide actual content.

Charli and Slayyyter may not be making slop, but they’re not making songs that center around big tension/release structures either.

“Dance” starts out with a tension-release moment as it soars up to the hard-hitting downbeat of the first chorus as Slayyyter’s character in the video shoots her abusive parent. However, the placement of this soar as a prologue and the fact that what would traditionally be the song’s main, biggest soar at the end of the break is actually less intense suggests that the function of this intro soar is somewhat auxiliary to the actual song. Instead of taking three minutes to build to a climax, the song gets it out of the way right away before proceeding on with its main idea. That intro soar is less the song’s main idea and more its abstract or marketing thumbnail, the distilled-down version designed for circulation (and monetization) on short-form video platforms where it is commonly used to accompany user-generated videos of big reveals. The main body of the song traces out a Ke$ha-meets-JUSTICE indie sleaze vibe where the early 2010s-style soar functions more like another reference point used to build the “iPod music” vibe, alongside the sidechained synths and the exclusive Urban Outfitters 7” single. The song collects a set of references to build a vibe, and that, not the narrative introduction and domestication of difference, structures the aesthetic experience it offers - vibing, not climaxing.

Charli’s Music, Fashion, Film also builds vibes. I’ve written a bit about that here. But since we’re talking about musical structures I want to focus in on my favorite track on the album, “Yeah.” This is basically a quite/loud/quiet track built on a single two-measure vamp. Instead of building to a climax, the track decelerates at the end, changing orientation or creating a slightly different vibe by shifting from dance-punk to a little more shoegazey direction. And then there’s “Card Declined”: starting off with an sprechstimme critique of consumerism over some minimal strumming and noisy improv, the song is mainly Kim Gordon vibes, but then halfway through we get a more hyperpop take on that same material as guitars shift to synths and sprechstimme becomes Ariana Grande-like vocals. AND THEN the last 40 or so seconds jump the shark completely and goes power-pop - reminds me of “Girlfriend” era Matthew Sweet, or maybe also Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Talk about “iPod music” - “Card Declined” shuffles through a few different iconic indie rock styles, itself almost like a playlist sketching out a taste profile.

Charli and Slayyyter’s recent songs don’t build climaxes, they create and shift vibes. What’s going on here isn’t desire: there’s not a created sense of lack or difference that feels good when it’s resolved and the lack has been fulfilled. That’s how modernity (as say what Ranciere would call both the aesthetic regime of art and metapolitics) functioned. But we are genuinely seeing something different now, and I am agnostic as to the orientation of this vibe shift: I don’t think we should go back to the law of the father, the split subject, or whatever - these were not great to begin with are mechanisms of a particular configuration of patriarchal racial capitalism. The crucial things IMO are society (a sense that other people matter and our existences are mutually dependent) and mutual accountability, but there are lots of ways of organizing that. And to be honest if you want to hear a big drop just Google your favorite headlining DJ and listen to their most recent big festival set. Or you can go to OMNIA in Las Vegas and see their custom animated light feature that is choreographed to accompany the drop in Benny Benassi’s classic “Satisfaction.” Drops aren’t dead they’re just basic.

I am likewise ambivalent about pop girlie vibes as an alternative to slop.To associate yourself definitively with a specific cultural context prevents you from sloppy crossover and the scale that such crossover brings. In the slop era, claiming a distinctive vibe is not exactly countercultural, but it is a deliberate opting out of the rat race: despite headlining Lollapalooza (Charli) and getting moved to the main stage (Slayyyter), neither Charli nor Slayyyter have any songs in the Hot 100 this week. But it is also not correct to say that Charli and Slayyyter are underground artists or anti capitalists or doing anything to ameliorate the broad demonetization of musical labor. They’re just a different flavor of capitalism, a niche market in the slop era.

None of this has anything to do with what’s happening at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Today the top 10 is:

1. Ella Langley, Choosin Texas

2. Taylor Swift, I Knew It, I Knew You (TS5 OST)

3. Stella Lefty, Boston

4. Ella Langley & Morgan Wallen, I Can’t Love You Anymore

5. Ariana Grande, I Hate That I Made You Love Me

6. Tame Impala & JENNIE, Dracula

7. Olivia Dean, So Easy

8. Ella Langley, Be Her

9. Olivia Dean, Man I Need

10. Bruno Mars, I Just Might

“Choosin Texas” hit its 16th week at the top of this chart, and die-hard music fans such as the users who post on r/popheads take this as, in the words of Riqich, “pop culture recession indicator.” In the thread announcing this chart feat, Reddit users bemoan the chart’s “stagnation,” and generally express the view that the week’s most popular songs are of unusually low quality.

For a song with such record-breaking popularity, one would expect there to be plenty of criticism and journalism about both it and Langley published across the web. However, I, someone whose Google algorithm is trained to surface pop music writing, search Langley’s name and can barely find even tumbleweeds. The only press coverage I can find in my first page of results comes from…Fox News. When I Google for “Choosin Texas,” I can see that once the song broke the record for the longest non-holiday #1 by a solo woman artist mainstream publications like Yahoo!entertainment and CNN covered the feat, but again, the mainstream music press has nothing to say. The Fader published a piece about the track’s chart success, but it’s very very light on anything resembling criticism. On the works cited list for Langley’s Wikipedia page, sources consist only of venues from the country music press and industry/chart reports from Billboard; this huge hit has failed to take off with the mainstream music press, who just seem completely uninterested in either it or the artist behind it.

Stella Lefty, another country-leaning pop ingenue with a long-running Hot 100 single, likewise has little mainstream music press coverage. When I Googled “Stella Lefty,” the top journalistic hits were from “Country Now,” what looks like a PR slop site called “House of Solo Magazine,” a small concert reviews publication, a Just Jared piece on her nepo baby lineage (she’s daughter of a Groupon co-founder), and a Rolling Stone profile from the end of June. Swift’s song from the Toy Story 5 soundtrack got a little more coverage, with pieces in Variety, Billboard, The Guardian, and Elle, but this is a song by the biggest-banking pop star in the game that’s tied to the publicity for a Disney franchise summer movie. The top of the Hot 100 is populated with songs that are unprecedentedly popular per chart metrics but equally unprecedentedly absent from The Discourse.

The music press has been decimated in the last 10-15 years, but the gap between these songs’ chart success and the level of critical attention they are receiving isn’t solely due to industry shrinkage. There are plenty of working critics publishing things across traditional media, new worker-owned collective publications, and good old blogs like this one, and nobody seems to have anything to say about these songs; my TikTok FYP page algorithm is trained to send me music content, and I’m not getting sent any Langley or Lefty explainers.

If the poptimism era of the 2000s and 2010s was defined by critics’ view that even mainstream commercial “pop” music - precisely the kind of pop music that was popular enough to rule the Hot 100 - was worthy of serious critical attention and analysis, we seem to have left that era for one where there’s a new kind of disjunction between the music that is critically acclaimed (or at least analyzed) and the music that succeeds on the charts. To be clear, the professional and amateur music press is still publishing lots of content about popular music — but what they’re writing about is not what what’s sticking around the top of the charts on record-breaking runs.

There’s nothing interesting to say about songs like “Choosin Texas” because there’s nothing in them; they are designed to be so generic that they can accompany anything and fit any context. As The Guardian reports,

Brian Mansfield, managing editor of the trade publication Country Insider, says that the song’s twangy-but-smooth sound makes it appealing to program directors – whether in country, pop or adult contemporary – who tend to avoid songs that would sound jarringly rootsy next to fluffier pop fare. “It’s a song that sounds good next to almost anything you can play, and that is an underrated part of creating the music mix for any format,” he says.

“Choosin Texas” was crafted with ubiquity in mind: lacking in any prominent distinguishing features, it can work across radio formats and streaming playlists, and thus rack up the numbers necessary to top the Hot 100 for months on end. The song is a home-fried version of what I’ve elsewhere called “ordinary slop,” which “has to be flexible enough to adapt and give voice to a wide array of private individual feelings and experiences.” Ordinary slop is a strategy for developing licensable audio IP for use on platforms like Instagram or TikTok - generic sounds optimized for algorithmic personalization. Songs like “Choosin Texas” adopt a similar strategy of being dialectically so generic or indeterminate that they can fit many different determinate contexts, but applies it in a slightly different type of market (one more accommodating to traditional radio and its demographic-based formats). Both approaches are iterations of the idea that “in popular music the style of late capitalism is NOTHING.” Today chart and market success requires incredible flexibility and adaptability from songs: they have to soundtrack anyone and everyone’s short-form video clip, they have to succeed across numerous radio formats, etc. In order to accommodate any and every determinate quality, the songs themselves can have no (strong) determinate qualities. They have to be a sloppy void. And there’s not much meat on those voidy bones for critics to chew. What interesting thoughts can one have about nothing?

This is not a case where musical traditions associated with women, queer people, and non-white people are devalued as having low artistic status - that was poptimism’s critique of the rock mainstream. Instead, this is the direct market vaporization of empty, sloppy nothing as content strategy. Nothing rakes in money in the same moment that musical labor has been largely demonetized. The feminized position here isn’t ‘pop’ as entertainment, but artistic and humanistic labor as demonetized, unremunerated labor. Whereas rockism once devalued pop for its purported vacuity and oversold rock gods’ virtuosity, the reverse is the case here: hard work is worthless and girly (derogatory), whereas the industry and its shareholders love scalable slop, which is girly (complimentary). Complimentary and derogatory lines are not drawn in terms of gender or race, but within them.

Those likes are drawn in terms of friction: devalued things like labor and politics require and generate friction, whereas scalable value must minimize it. As Melinda Cooper shows in Life as Surplus, labor is traditionally understood quite literally as friction in the form of burning calories. In the Industrial Revolution, for example, figures like “horsepower” emerged as measures of machine power because according to the second law of thermodynamics the caloric or metabolic energy a horse burns is mathematically commutable to the energy a steam engine burns:

Underlying these different manifestations of force was a common principle of production or labor—muscles perform mechanical work through the combustion of nutrients, just as the steam engine produces energy by burning carbon. The physico chemical labor of the body was measurable in the same terms as that of heat. (Cooper, Life as Surplus, 107)

Heat and combustion increase friction by making molecules move around and bump into one another more rapidly. Fueled by such combustion, the activity of labor requires the creation of friction. And that friction impedes exponential scalability: due to the second law of thermodynamics, there’s only so much energy you can get from burning a calorie or a lump of coal.

Politics also generates friction socially in the form of what Jacques Ranciere calls “disagreement.”

The structures proper to disagreement are those in which discussion of an argument comes down to a dispute over the object of the discussion and over the capacity of those who are making an object of it.

For Ranciere, disagreement is what emerges when interlocutors negotiate both who counts as a speaker and what it means to speak. Politics is what happens when disagreement reveals some group of people have wrongly not been counted as capable of speaking and thus excluded from personhood. For example, in traditional Western societies such as France, to recognize that women or foreigners are indeed capable of logical speech would require both a shift in what counts as “logical speech” and and what exactly it is that all speakers have in common. This revelation of wrong causes a reconfiguration of what counts as speech and who counts as a speaker. Such shifts involve friction.

Friction impedes scalability. Things that scale include neoliberal feminine resilience and neoreactionary masculine resilience. Musical labor creates friction, whereas sportsbetting and crypto scale. Friction/scale is coming to replace low/high or pop/rock hierarchies; however whereas those latter two hierarchies tied the performance of femininity and masculinity to the structural position of feminized low and masculinized high, the friction/scale hierarchy allows for the performance of any gender on either side of a hierarchy that is nevertheless itself structurally gendered such that friction occupies the structural place of femininity and scale occupies the structural place of masculinity in patriarchal racial capitalism.

In 2026, slop scales. Actual musical labor and the critical labor involved in interpreting music does not scale. Critics dig their teeth into the products of musical labor, where the friction of work creates the open, messy, plurivalent art object ripe for the labor of interpretation (and the social proces of debate). Demonetized, social, and friction-generating, that critical labor occupies the feminine structural position that is coming to define all humanistic labor these days (unless that humanistic labor is appropriated by tech CEOs as “taste,” where the executive authority of the boss re-masculinizes it). Even though the job or profession of the music critic or journalist may be a thing increasingly of the past, people will continue to write and think and debate about music. These things will probably happen outside prestige venues and outlets, just as today’s interesting music is happening outside the Hot 100. For people who think and write about music, one of our tasks is to theorize this new gendered (and racialized, though I haven’t said much about that here) political economy where we find our work alongside the music we think and write about in the structurally feminized position of devaluation and low status. Whereas poptimism-era critics used their position of tastemaking prestige to argue for the cultural value of pop, we don’t have that same leverage today. Perhaps this is a signal to put our energy into the communities that value us rather than trying to chase supposedly elite spaces.

This looking to the past as a way to disidentify with the present mainstream is a gesture that, according to Theo Cateforis, defines the modern rock tradition as such. Traditionally, it’s what made punk and post-punk - and the Strokes - cool: drawing influence from postwar rock, disco, and reggae (or the 70s post-punk that did this the first time around) distinguished “modern” rock from mainstream, blues-oriented rock. At the turn of the millennium, The Strokes looking beyond grunge to garage represented a return to cool itself as alternative rock’s defining aesthetic. (Middlebrow corporate grunge organized itself not around the racial and gender politics of cool, but around white masculine grievance, mainly about women, but also about “PC” culture, affirmative action, etc.). As I argue in my WOXY book, that renewed indie rock cool soon got co-opted into hipster capitalism, where the cultural capital cool granted those who departed from the mainstream was monetized as personal brands and craft businesses. If The Strokes breakthrough was in some ways the last reprise of traditional 20th century rock cool, theirs & Charli’s new records are navigating a very different terrain where the political economy and cultural politics of the 20th century culture industry have become entirely scrambled.

I talk about that scrambling in the new, expanded second edition of Resilience & Melancholy (preorder at the link!). The TL;DR is: musical labor is demonetized, listening and taste are privatized, and the old gendered rock/pop or high/low hierarchies that structured modernity no longer organize social status or aesthetic value. Men have largely left music for ventures that pay better, like crypto or sportsbetting, and taste has become less an expression of a sensus communis and more one of private (patriarchal) mastery. Popular music writ large is populated by a wide range of femininities, though metrics of status are an open question at this point: some like Taylor Swift taut asset ownership, others like Charli build cultural capital, while others like Olivia Rodrigo position themselves as popular feminist curators of hidden histories. At the same time, the pop charts are dominated by songs that, despite their popularity, fail to generate or drive The Discourse, like Stella Lefty, the nepo baby of a Groupon co-founder. The pendulum has swung from the 2000s poptimism debates, when poptimists argued that non-rock music was also worthy of critical attention, to a situation where critics ignore the sloppy but well-vested pop that dominates charts and focus instead on artists with less actual wealth and revenue but more cultural capital. Underneath it all, tech platforms and finance capital are operating with a new, vibes-y political ontology that models reality as profiles or phenomenological orientations.

One lens I use to frame these shifts is the cultural politics of cool. Because cool has always been about racialized, gendered, and classed disidentification, appropriation, and the extraction of cultural capital, it draws together many of the shifting threads into a digestible picture. In 2001, by aligning their racialized gender performance with post-punk iterations of cool, The Strokes could disidentify with what Chris Molanphy calls “the most loathed period for music of the last half-century” simply by virtue of performing their identities as cool xennial white cishet men (look this philosopher is never going to say “by virtue of being who they are”). Their coolness was a signal of their cultural capital, which Fred Durst, Linkin Park, and Daughtry all lacked. White masculine cool has always been about elite white men establishing their difference from and status above regular mainstream white masculinity, and that’s what happened with The Strokes hype of 2001. (If you want all the links and references for this argument, find them here.)

Reality Awaits is about the transition from being an outsider (complimentary) to being an outsider (derogatory). The 9/11 era Strokes stood apart from the mainstream as cool and elite because their style of white masculine performance looked and sounded like a “new wave” of rock innovation. Fast forward a quarter century to the release of Reality Awaits, and they stand apart from whatever the mainstream is today not by virtue of being the next it-boys, but because they are old. (For the record I’m a year older than Julian Casablancas.) Eric Harvey’s (also a xennial) Pitchfork review centers (middle)age as the ground of the “midlife alienation” expressed throughout the album. That alienation, or feeling of distance from the mainstream or center, manifests as “ironic padding” or “tongue-in-cheek radicalism.” The cool distance from the mainstream they are accustomed to performing doesn’t work the same way now as it did in 2001 because nobody expects almost-50somethings to otherwise be at the center of the mainstream. Cool’s disidentificatory politics only mark elite status for people who otherwise clearly fall in the mainstream, like middlebrow corporate grunge once was. The Strokes’ use of irony and tongue-in-cheek-ness doesn’t quite land these days not just because they are old enough to get targeted ads on Insta for Centrum Silver (happened to me this morning), but because their paradigm for coolness is stuck in either of the Bush administrations. They might as well be Bill Clinton playing sax in shades on Arsineo…or, as Reality Awaits’ album cover suggests, the Marlboro Man.

If Reality Awaits expresses the new alienation of white cishet men who are accustomed to being at the center of a world designed around them, Music, Fashion, Film expresses the knowing disidentification of a mixed-raced cishet woman who has repeatedly described her experiences of never fitting in. Since crossing over to the international pop mainstream in 2024, Charli XCX has always been happy to discuss her identity as a mixed-race woman, but she’s never foregrounded it in her self-presentation. With lines like SS26’s “my heritage could give me quite the USP” or unique selling point, you get the sense that she has seen other women’s artistic contributions reduced to the fact of their gender and/or race and/or sexuality (i.e., the original thing she brings is her identity and its difference from white cishet men’s) and she would rather stay focused on the art. She told podcaster Nicky Reardon that “I feel like there is this world where I could really play that up a lot. It doesn’t come natural to me probably because of the way that I engage with being a mixed person.” As someone who felt out of place on either side of her family, Charli didn’t experience her identity as a source of empowerment when she was growing up, and 2026 is well past the moment where resilience discourse was a bankable way for femme pop stars to flip their identity-based damage into viral success. Instead, her experience of never feeling like she fit in on either side of her family become the basis for her cool disidentification with the mainstream. Girl knows how to be an outsider in a way that doesn’t come with praise, and she uses her comfort in that role as a way to take creative risks. That’s what makes her cool.

That cool disidentification is perhaps most iconically audible in the extremely deadpan “wow” on the album’s lead single, “Rock Music.” She’s taking up rock music as something she’s inspired by, but not as an orthodoxy to be followed the way some Jacobin writers might desire. (See Dan DiPiero write about how she ‘deconstructs’ the rock tradition here.) You might say she dis/identifies with rock the way femmes classically dis/identify with stereotypical femininity, thus making this more of a femme cool than the macho cool of the tradition The Strokes follow (and further evidence that another thing that puts The Strokes out of place in today’s women-dominated music industry is precisely the fact that they are men). Music, Fashion, Film also has a whole track titled “Wink Wink” - a well-known signal for irony or sarcasm - where Charli does her best James Murphy/”All My Friends” impersonation. However, this cool distance is not the only vibe she performs on the record; there’s genuine sincerity about her friendship with AG Cook on “Magic Metal Montana” or her creative practice on “No One Lasts Forever.” Cool may be the strongest node in Music, Fashion, Film’s profile, but it’s not the only one.

Responding to a question about who she would pick as the representatives of music, fashion, and film on the women version of the album cover, Charli makes it clear she’s thinking in terms of profiles (or vibes) and not, say, the sorts of universals (like bourgeois good taste) to which cool traditionally frames itself as an (equally universal) alternative. She says that

Everybody has their own, music fashion film…that’s the beauty of being a fan, you can ride for the people that you love and it doesn’t eally matter what anyone else thinks. It’s like the artists, designers, films, whatever it is that make you feel alive are the most important people to be on that cover for you.

Cale, Jacobs, and Scorsese define Charli’s cool profile. If you listen to the record, you will also hear women like Kim Gordon and Poly Styrene, who are clear influences on “Card Declined.” We might even hear a little Liz Phair if not in the sound then in the attitude on “Rock Music.” These references are all nodes on a personal taste profile…exactly like the sort of taste profile Spotify or ad-targeting algorithms maintain for users of digital platforms. Cool originated in mass commodity capitalism, first as a Black radical aesthetic that eluded enclosure, and then as appropriated cultural capital white performers used to distinguish their abstractly identical commodites from one another. Charli is updating cool to work in the era of platform capital, where it’s a profile (or vibe!) that can be applied to any content. That a mixed-race woman is doing this also shows that the racial and gender politics of cool are likewise fungible in the way the occupants of “music, fashion, and film” can be.

The video for The Strokes’ “Going Shopping” likewise points to the shift from commodification to platformization. As Harvey notes in his Pitchfork review, the video riffs on Paul Simon’s 1986 “You Can Call Me Al”; appearing on his album Graceland, which broke UN BDS anti-apartheid sanctions to record in South Africa with traditional South African musicians, the song has a penny whistle solo this former high school marching band piccolo player still remembers how to play (derogatory). That is, Graceland models the music industry’s traditional extraction and appropriation of Black diasporic musics: Simon’s appropriation and commodification of niche African musical traditions made him stand out from say Phil Collins or Robert Palmer as “cool.” “Going Shopping” eschews that sort of direct appropriation-via-commodification and instead gestures towards other forms of extraction: platformization and franchise capitalism. The first time we see a Black person in the video is when an extra appears as an app-worker delivering food. Instead of providing the intellectual property and/or cultural capital for the white music industry to enclose, this character depicts gig-work extraction that preys typically (and especially in NYC) on immigrants. Here, the undocumented status of these laborers pushes them to the lowest-waged app-based work, which floats the stock price of platforms like Uber. In places like LA most of that work is done by robots. The point is to create the semblance of a functioning company - a vibe, you might say - so that shareholders can make real money on the stock market. The performance of dehumanizing labor contributes to a company profile aligned with investors’ expectations of what a good bet looks like.

This sort of vibe or profile is also how “Going Shopping”’s video relates to other IP, like “You Can Call Me Al” or Walton Goggins(™). In the era of franchised media, The Strokes’ reference to Simon’s original is less a remix or riff or interpolation and more like a franchised iteration, where the versioned brand identity is what ensures the intergenerational transfer of wealth and status from original to new iteration remains legitimate. Like Charli’s album cover, “Going Shopping” takes a collection of reference points - the two men in chairs, the comedian lip-synching the vocals, the dance - and turns them into a profile that aligns the new iteration with the original IP. But unlike Charli, who thinks these profiles are personal and can contain whatever individual preference one imagines, this profile traces a line of patrilineal descent: as my wife said last night when watching the video, “there are no women in this.” Framing “Going Shopping” as franchising the “You Can Call Me Al” IP situates The Strokes as the rightful inheritors of a masculine rock tradition. As aging xennials The Strokes may not be cool in today’s terms, but “Going Shopping” positions them as men whose elite status comes less from the surplus of cultural capital they have over other commodified labor and more from their position in a patriarchal property lineage.

Charli and The Strokes are each negotiating cool and status as differently-situated artists, but they’re both adapting to the platformed, financialized, vibes-based reality of the mid 20th century.

I also curate an Apple Music playlist with the mostly current songs I’m playing/loving.

Its Her Factory on Inhailer - June 21 Playlist

Ibibo Sound Machine - Return to Sender

Underworld - Born Slippy

Genesis Owusu - Stampede

Getdown Services - The Radiator

James White & the Blacks - Contort Yourself (August Darnell Remix)

Kneecap - An Ra

Lime Garden - All Bad Parts

SHY FX, King - 100

Fatboy Slim - Satisfaction Skank

Tricky - Black Steel

The Sundays - Summertime

Sleigh Bells - This Summer

TV Girl, George Clanton - Summer 2000

The B-52s - Summer of Love

Suede - The Sound and The Summer

Lykke Li - Lucky Again

Bonobo - Me and You

horsegiirL - Only The Best

New Order - True Faith

Makthaverskan - Pity Party

Sylvan Esso - Hot Slob

R.E.M. - Pretty Persuasion

Gelli Haha - Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep

MUNA - Dancing On The Wall

Adult Leisure - Borderline

Olivia Rodrigo feat. Robert Smith - What’s Wrong With Me?

Charli XCX - Rock Music

The Killers - Mr. Brightside (Thin White Duke remix)

Its Her Factory on Inhailer - July 5

Tofubeats - Don’t You Know My Love

Blood Orange - Essex_Honey.mp3

Charli XCX - Rock Music

Electronic - Getting Away With It

Mandy, Indiana - Cursive

DJ Seinfeld - The Right

KNEECAP - Liar’s Tale

LaTour - People Are Still Having Sex

Rare DM - Complement

Pye Corner Audio - Cycle (feat. Andy Bell)

8485 feat. Danny Brown - G.I.R.L.

Laurie Anderson - National Anthem

Boy Harsher - Jeans

Lime Garden - All Bad Parts

Adult DVD - Cowboy on Aisle Three

Ministry - N.W.O.

The Linda Lindas - Burning Out

Tove Lo - I’m Your Girl, Right?

Sinead O’Connor - Mandinka

The Ramones - Rockaway Beach

Dirty Nice - Shark!

TOKiMONSTA - Joy Without Sound

Fcukers - Getaway

horsegiirL - Only The Best

Bush Tetras - Too Many Creeps

Ill peach - SMALL TALK

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll

Helen Sun - Skinny Kindness

Fatboy Slim - Rockefeller Skank (High Contrast Remix)

Pablo Bozzi - Just Passing

Insofar as demonetized musical labor produces the medium for financial speculation, where the real money is made, then musical labor has effectively become a new kind of feminized reproductive labor. Marxist feminists traditionally understand reproductive labor like cooking, cleaning, and childrearing as unwaged work from which surplus value is not directly extracted, but which produces the conditions for such extraction. This work isn’t “labor” per se, but it reproduces the laborer daily and generationally by taking care of the work of social reproduction so that his time can be spent producing surplus value. Just as wives’ and mothers’ reproductive labor produced the laborer’s means of living, music industry workers produce the means of prediction market users’ speculation.

Structurally, the position of the reproductive laborer is feminized: she works in the domestic sphere performing unwaged work covered by the marriage contract rather than an employment contract. It is not just that the work that she does is stereotypically women’s work, but that she is subordinated within patriarchal racial capitalism in a way that’s different than an employee: only (white) women become wives, so the nature of wives’ subordination as laborers is gendered. As Carole Pateman writes, “the provision of ‘domestic service’ is part of the patriarchal meaning of femininity” (126); as shitposter supreme dril would say, “this whole thing smacks of gender.” According to Pateman,

being a woman (wife) MEANS to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband). In sot, the marriage contract and a wife’s subordination as a (kind of) laborer, cannot be understood in the absence of the sexual contract and the patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres” (128).

The unwaged labor of social reproduction situates one as a feminized subordinate to a patriarch, not a civil subordinate to a boss. That relationship produces both the subordinate and the master as respectively feminine and masculine. To extract this kind of feminized unwaged labor from someone situates one as (white) patriarch, as masculine, as the gendered master over feminine subordinates.

In the second half of the 2020s, popular music has come to be dominated by women. For example, I’m writing this on July 5, 2026, and the Billboard Hot 100’s top ten includes one all-male act: Drake, at #6. “Pop” as a style, genre, or category is traditionally feminine, but I’m talking about popular music broadly as the commercial record industry, which includes pop along with rock, hip hop, EDM, indie, etc. As a space of demonetized labor, men have largely left it both as participants and audiences. There’s more money in influencing or crypto/sportsbetting/etc.

I’ve argued earlier that the traditional gendered rock/pop hierarchy is getting reshuffled as the public/private split collapses amid political privatization and technological personalization. This structure of masculinized mastery and feminized subordination is what it’s getting reshuffled into. And it’s happening across the culture more broadly, assisted largely by AI. The DOGE-assisted mass firings in the federal workforce has put large numbers of professional Black women out of the workforce entirely, removing them from the sphere of waged labor even though their work was largely corporate and administrative rather than creative.

From music to writing to being a college professor, humanistic labor as a whole is getting demonetized. Collapsing media and higher ed sectors makes it nearly impossible to make a living off of things like research and writing, just as huge AI corporations are vacuuming up anything anyone ever wrote, drew, or composed without compensating them. Even the rulings that consider AI training sufficiently transformative to be ‘fair use’ tend to demonetize the humanistic labor that goes into creating the original IP. Just as music industry workers don’t get paid to produce the medium through which investors earn money on betting platforms, creatives/humanities workers generally create more-or-less unwaged content that tech then uses to build an AI narrative that props up their stock price. The fact that AI turns every user into a little boss reflects the broader dynamic at work in mid-21st century late capitalism: the figure of the white patriarch as master of feminized subordinates has jumped from the private-as-domestic over into the private-as-private-sector-business. In 2017 (nearly 10 years ago, yeesh), Melinda Cooper wrote about how neoliberals and neoconservatives both agreed that society should be run according to so-called “family values,” i.e., private family responsibility. In what is nearly 2027, the political economy writ large is being transformed into one big white patriarchal family where everyone’s status is determined by whether they perform “reproductive” labor that builds the media others use for financial speculation (at this point the whole AI industry is just one big sportsbet on stock prices, the whole thing smacks of vibes), or whether one is benefitting and profiting from that speculation. We’ve gone from “family values” to value-as-family.

First, GOOD VIBES ONLY: PHENOMENOLOGY & THE BIOPOLITICS OF ALGORITHMIC LEGITIMATION publishes November 17, but you can pre-order it now on the Duke UP website: https://www.dukeupress.edu/good-vibes-only.

This book argues that a new form of biopower has emerged in the 21st century, where new forms of probability used by recommender algorithms, LLMs, and the like work together with vernacular vibes discourse to update regulatory and discursive norms into modes of government that work in the absence of anything like civil society or the public sphere. Instead of norms, we have lineages that govern a phenomenon’s perceived capacity to transmit patriarchal racial capitalist orientations into speculative realities – no meat, just vibes, so to speak. This form of biopower explains what’s going on with stuff like social science research performed with AI rather than human subjects, the attempt to pass off AI hallucinations as “critical fabulation,” and events like NY Gov Hochul sending the National Guard to the NYC subway amid the lowest crime rates of the last 50 years. Lineages are governed by logics of criminalization and demonization; using Tina Chanter’s reading of the role of slavery in Sophocles’ Antigone alongside Eric Stanley’s concept of near life and Marina Peterson’s concept of noise, I show how sexuality is increasingly governed not for its normativity but for its legitimacy (i.e., for its capacity to transmit those aforementioned lineages into speculative realities) and thus policed as a matter of criminalization and demonization.

I am also publishing an expanded second edition of RESILIENCE & MELANCHOLY. It has a new chapter on Taylor, Charli, femininity and the politics of chill and cool, and the asset economy. You can pre-order it on the University of Michigan Press website: https://press.umich.edu/Books/R/Resilience-Melancholy I love how the cover echoes the original (and yes those peonies are from my garden).

The issue of independence in popular music goes back beyond the emergence of DIY in the 1970s. The relationship between art and some sort of freedom or autonomy tethers modern European ideas of art to classically liberal political philosophy.

Around the end of the 18th century European philosophers reframe renaissance hierarchies of mediums and subject matter into an art/craft hierarchy that maps onto the classically liberal public/private distinction. “Art,” like the public sphere, is marked as the white, masculine realm of formal equality, universality, and freedom-qua-liberty, whereas “craft” is the feminized, sometimes non-white realm of social reproduction and dependence-qua-subordnation. As scholars like musicologist Susan Cook pointed out, fine art’s purported autonomy was itself dependent on its counterposition to the realm of reproduction and subordination. To use Jacques Ranciere’s terms, aesthetic autonomy is itself heteronomous.

According to Ranciere, this play (or, in the case of the more Hegelian side of European aesthetics, dialectic) between autonomy and heteronomy defines what he calls “the aesthetic regime of art” or what we might otherwise call aesthetics in the long modern era (from the mid-18th to late 20th centuries). “In the aesthetic regime of art,” he argues, “art is art to the extent that it is something else than art. It is always ‘aestheticized’, meaning that it is always posed as a ‘form of life’. The key formula of the aesthetic regime of art is that art is an autonomous form of life” (“The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” 137). The art object is autonomous, exists for its own sake, is “free appearance,” but the aesthetic experience is one of the “free play” of the imagination and the understanding, and it is this experience that exists as a “way of life.” The art object’s free appearance depicts or represents the spectator’s experience of free play. Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” frames this same relationship in terms of the analogousness between representation-as-artistic-depiction (Darstellung) and representation-as-political-proxy (Vertreutung): the way a picture stands in for or re-presents the object it indexes is analogous to the way an elected official stands in for or re-presents their constituents. This relationship between free appearance and free experience changes in the late 1990s when statistics - i.e., opinion polls - are used to represent “the public.” (I have a lot to say about that in this book.)

European modernity posits a homology between aesthetic autonomy and political liberty. Just as art’s autonomy exists as the abjection of craft’s subordination to social reproduction/the private sphere, aesthetic autonomy exists as the flip side of political liberty. Because art’s autonomy is always related to and dependent upon something else, it is, in fact, heteronomous.

Ranciere’s article “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes” argues that the idea of artistic autonomy is grounded in a more fundamental heteronomy, and this defines what we might otherwise call artistic and philosophical modernity. The specific contours of this relationship evolve over the 19th and 20th centuries, and as I reread Ranciere’s 2002 recounting of this evolution, I was struck how it provides an interpretive key for some of the major touchpoints of 21st century popular music: the aughts post-punk revival, mid-2010s popular feminism/turn to representational politics, late 2010s Swiftian hermeneutic fever, and possibly hyperpop. Framing these as rearticulations of the aesthetic regime and thus largely modern and within the umbrella of political liberalism helps situate both the KIND of freedom involved and the periodization.

First, thinking of the moment in the 19th century when for example Felix Mendelssohn revives Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Ranciere notes how “‘romanticizing’ the works of the past means…[they] can be considered as forms for new contents or raw materials for new formations. They can be re-viewed, re-framed, re-read, re-made” (143). More than the idea that pop culture runs on 20-year trend cycles where everything old is new again (ask me about my ‘indie sleaze’ outfits from the mid-2000s), Ranciere’s point here is that this romanticization allows old commodities to travel to the other side of the art/craft hierarchy and become re-embodied as fine art. “By becoming obsolete, unavailable for everyday consumption, any commodity or familiar article becomes available for art, as a body ciphering a history and an object of ‘disinterested pleasure’. It is re-aestheticized in a new way” (144). When commodities go far out of fashion, younger audiences have no stake in their original fetishized relations and can (supposedly) treat them with the same “disinterest” with which one approaches an object of “free appearance.” In this way, even commodities can be recycled back into “fine art.” This cycle is exactly what Theo Cateforis locates as the “modern” in “modern rock”: “the modern is also ‘relational,’ rupturing with the immediate past and often turning to a more distant past as an inspiration of rebellion” (Are We Not New Wave?, 3). For example, punk bands from The Ramones to The Clash rejected the elaborate stylings of 70s prog and instead went back to square one with simple blues-rock structures (and in The Ramones’ case, 50s-style outfits). There were then of course the New Romantics, a facet of the post-punk scene that femmed-up punk with lace, ruffles, big hair, and other vaguely neo-Victorial fashions, and The B-52’s ironic take on the 50s and 60s.. And of course there is the aughts post-punk revival, where Interpol tried to be Joy Division and The Rapture tried to disco-up The Cure and Radio 4 named themselves after a PiL song and everyone re-discovered Arthur Russell and James Murphy wrote a song about all the iconic moments in the history of post-punk. In each of these instances, kitschy, “sold-out” commodities that had gone out of style got re-appropriated as elite cultural capital. More than mere nostalgia or retromania, these are all examples of the dynamic between autonomy and heteronomy that Ranciere identifies in modern European aesthetics: time allows for former “craft” objects or commodities to be taken out of their original context and thus exist as examples of something like “free” or at least disinterested appearance. The contents of each category doesn’t really matter and varies over time; the structural dynamic between them is the thing that persists across these variations. Insofar as this “new wave-y” dynamic is central to modern (and I’m being very technical here - by ‘modern’ I mean 17th to late 20th c Western, the 2010s EDM pop I talk about in R&M is definitely not ‘modern’ in this sense but something else) popular music as such, then this is one way that ideas of aesthetic autonomy traditionally associated with high or fine art have shaped popular music.

If we jump ahead to the mid 2010s and the point where liberal representational politics go mainstream, we can see another way that philosophical ideals of autonomy get translated into aesthetic practices in popular music. Looking to the distinction Marx makes in “On he Jewish Question” between “political” or “formal” emancipation (the emancipation one experiences as an abstract individual before the law) and “human” emancipation (the emancipation of private-sphere differences such as religious identity), Ranciere identifies how “the aesthetic revolution assumes the shape of a ‘human’ revolution cancelling the ‘formal’ one.” Here, “free appearance” is not the disinterested, abstracted, content-less ness of something like absolute music; rather, free appearance is “the expression of a certain life” — something like the free speech and free expression of the 1st and 14th amendments to the US constitution. “This embodied truth is opposed to the lie of appearances,” flipping the site of where true freedom or autonomy is supposed to sit: not in abstract formal equality before the law, but the “human” emancipation or expression of private differences like race, gender, religion, and so on. Though Marx’s essay was published in the mid 19th century, this turn to “human” emancipation happens in popular music in the 2010s when multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy goes mainstream and, for example, women artists are evaluated primarily on their performances of feminism. In this moment, civil autonomy gets flipped into the emancipation-qua-representation of private difference as the presence of diverse private differences becomes the gauge of a work’s aesthetic value. The former realm of heteronomy becomes the seat of autonomy.

Bringing us into the late 2010s and early 2020s, popular music exhibits something similar to what Ranciere calls the “metapolitics” of “a hermeneutics of signs” (145). “Metapolitics” here references his concept of metapolitics in Disagreement, which is the politics of things like ideology critique, psychoanalysis, and other “symptomatolo[gies]” that takes all appearance as a sign hiding an underlying signifier. As Ranciere puts it, this metapolitics “leav[es] the noisy stage of political claims and doctrines and sink[s] to the depths of the social, to disclose the enigmas and fantasies hidden in the intimate realities of everyday life” (145). Moving from “the political” to “the social,” this gesture similarly rejects the sphere of formal civil equality to in favor of the plane of private difference, which supposedly contains the concrete truths abstracted away by social appearance. As with the example in the previous paragraph, there’s a move here from the purported autonomy of the abstractly equal civil public sphere to the concrete sphere of private difference, traditionally the realm of heteronomy but remade here as the underlying truth hidden by such abstraction. This symptomological or hermeneutic method can equally well describe the type of contemporary pop music fandom best and most infamously exemplified by the Swifties, who hang on their idol’s every utterance and output, looking for Easter Eggs and other content to decode.

Though the methodis the same as Ranciere’s metapolitics, Swiftie hermeneutics happens in the context of a different political ontology. Here, platforms have enclosed social interaction; Jodi Dean calls this “communicative capitalism,” which occurs when “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production.” If the political-to-human emancipation collapses free appearance into free expression - or the civil liberty of the abstract individual into the liberty to express private opinions - communicative capitalism encloses that private expression into private property. As above in the political-to-human-emancipation move, “politics is understood as not confined to specific institutional fields but as a characteristic of all of life. There is an attunement, in other words, to a micropolitics of the everyday.” But now in the early 21st century that “everyday” is not just the realm of private individual experience, but the “private sector” of non-state organizations like corporations like Meta or Google. In this case, the equivocation between “private experience” and “private property” hides the latter behind the former, making enclosure appear like free expression. This is a remix of the dynamic Carole Pateman has identified in classical liberalism, where “The private sphere is ‘forgotten’ so that the ‘private’ shifts to the civil world and the CLASS division between private and public. The division is then made within the ‘civil’ realm itself, between the private, capitalist economy or private enterprise and the public or political state” (12). In the sort of generally Lockean contractarianism Pateman studies in her landmark book The Sexual Contract, the “public/private” distinction typically refers to the distinction between the state and private business; this hides the more fundamental division between civil society and the “private” qua social reproduction. This allows the public/private split to appear to be the division between civil liberty and free enterprise, rather than what it actually is, the division between civil liberty and domestic subjection. In the context of communicative capitalism, the split between “sign” as abstraction-held-in-common and “signifier” as private-inner-content frames the contrast between public and private as one between traditional modern “free appearance” and the “human” realm of free expression and social reproduction; what escapes from view is the realm of free enterprise - i.e., the Metas and the Googles turning quote-unquote “democratized” free expression into private property that enriches investors rather than digital laborers. Like Ranciere, Pateman’s framework points to the dependence of ideals of autonomy and liberty on heteronomy and dependence: her model offers a more fine-grained account of how white supremacist capitalist patriarchy uses ideas of autonomy and freedom to obscure underlying relations of domination.

Pateman’s point across The Sexual Contract and Contract & Domination (coauthored with Charles Mills) is that classically liberal notions of freedom or autonomy - i.e., civil liberty - are actually misrepresentations of a situation of subordination. She writes, for example, that “Contract is the specifically modern means of creating relationships of subordination, but, because civil subordination originates in contract, it is presented as freedom” (118). Contracts are legal tools that represent the granting of consent: I for example consent to give my employer 40 hours of my week if they pay me an agreed-upon salary, or X university press will pay me a tiny amount of money if I deliver them an 80,000 word manuscript by Y date. Framing civil society as the result of a “social contract” thus makes it appear that everyone has consented to participate, and thus consented to the exchange of some personal liberties in return for civil liberties. Similarly, employment contracts misrepresent the exchange of workers’ labor-time for a wage as a consensual relation, when in fact nobody except the wealthy get to choose not to work. According to Pateman (and Mills), Western modernity’s concept of political autonomy is heteronomous, philosophically and materially tied to and dependent on the realm of social reproduction as a realm of subordination.

So what does all this philosophy help us understand about concepts of independence in popular music? First, if both aesthetic autonomy and civil liberty are misrepresentations of situations of dependence and subordination, then the idea that “fine art” or “rock” or whatever else occupies the top of modern high/low art hierarchies deserves that status because it represents a state of freedom or liberty over and above a state of subordination is, like contract, a device to misrepresent unfreedom as freedom. (More narrowly, these devices misrepresent the purported freedom of the civil individual, i.e., the white bourgeois man, as freedom in contrast to the subordination of those subject to the sexual, racial, and domination contracts.) The West’s traditional high/low art hierarchies are built on an overdrawn opposition between liberty and subordination. This fact reinforces one of the founding principles of popular music studies. As Richard Dyer put it in his 1979 article “In Defense of Disco,” “cultural production under capitalism is necessarily contradictory…the anarchy of capitalism throws up commodities that an oppressed group can take up and use to cobble together its own culture” (21). This observation that commodities - objects subordinate to capitalist exchange-value - can open out into devices for community meaning-making that is not itself subordinate to exchange value or bourgeois capitalist norms is both a variation on the “modern” remaking of old commodities into new art objects and evidence that whatever freedom popular music makes possible is something other than either liberty or subordination (or autonomy or heteronomy).

What is this secret third thing that’s neither liberty nor subordination? That’s the real subject of this piece I’m working on, and something I’ll address in a subsequent post…this one is pushing 3k words and I’ll leave it here for now.

“Rock Music” folds rock, pop, and club music together in a way that post-punk has done for 50 years. Mimi Haddon’s book What Was Post-Punk? argues that that the thing that sets post-punk apart from other rock scenes or styles is not its temporality or “post-”ness, but its incorporation of “alternative” styles of Black music -- disco and reggae -- rather than the blues. Acts like Gang of Four or The Slits are clear examples of this. Before Nevermind’s crossover success promulgated the mistaken view that modern rock/alt rock was mainly guitar-driven music, acts like The B-52s and The Pet Shop Boys routinely had crossover pop hits on both the US and UK charts. Not only are the lines between rock, pop, and club music historically much blurrier than they are presented in the Jacobin article, in the 2020s the main vehicles for rock’s return to the mainstream are two arena-pop megastars: Charli and Olivia Rodrigo, who has collaborated with modern rock icons from David Byrne to Robert Smith and had The Breeders open for her on her 2023 tour (The Breeders also opened for Nirvana on the In Utero tour). Rock has been alive and well in the music of women of color pop stars (Charli is half South Asian Ugandan, Rodrigo is Filipino) for a good part of the 2020s, and before that, the one place that rock thrived amid lamentations of its death was a similarly feminized pop space: emo. Nobody ever remembers that emo was huge, because it was huge largely among teen girls, and nobody ever thinks them or their tastes count. Speaking of girls, scholars like Dan DiPiero and Alyx Vesey have shown that across the 2010s indie rock in particular has been alive and well, but became associated with women artists and listeners.

Rock’s feminization is directly tied to its current market renaissance. The traditional rock/pop hierarchy that poptimism criticizes is a variation on the gendered fine art/craft distinction that goes back to Kant: “fine art” is masculine and “free,” “craft” is feminized and subordinate to social reproduction and, later, commodification. From the late 19th through most of the 20th centuries, pop/craft was devalued as a feminized commodity, whereas rock/fine art was authentic and autonomous. But in the 2020s even commercial music isn’t really a commodity. For example, Spotify no longer pays royalties on songs that have fewer than 1000 streams a month, effectively de-monetizing and de-commodifiying musical labor. The money in today’s music industry is in the licensing of IP assets; music is a leading edge of what Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Koenings call “the asset economy,” where “asset appreciation has been engendered by a specific institutional nexus that has fundamentally redrawn the social structure--such that asset ownership is no becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position” (6). Commodities and commodified labor don’t scale in value the way an asset can. And the most scalable assets are the ones that start low…such as femininity or, in the 2010s, rock music. As I wrote in the summer 2024 issue of The Journal of Popular Music Studies,

Given its trajectory over the 2010s, indie rock’s market position in 2023 is roughly analogous to that of popular feminism’s ideal subject: a traditionally devalued resource capable, with the exercise of sufficient private responsibility, of resilient profitability. Though neoliberal cultural and economic reforms killed the original formulation of punk/post-punk/modern rock/indie as a scene that offered an alternative to the corporate mainstream, from the vantage of 2023 this looks less like a death blow and more like the first move in a cycle of creative destruction.

In the 2020s, the low cultural capital rock music has earned across the past quarter-century perfectly positions it for flipping. And it’s being flipped by people like Charli XCX and Olivia Rodrigo because, as I argued in my 2015 book Resilience & Melancholy, neoliberal resilience is definitively feminine. The asset economy scrambles the traditional gendering of the rock/pop binary such that “rock” gets coded feminine because it too is a devalued asset ripe for flipping into a hugely scalable return.

As I have shown above with my gestures toward emo and the scholarly literature on the feminization of indie rock, rock’s 21st century devaluation coincided with its association with women and girls; rock didn’t go away so much as its narrative ceased to fit the traditional gendered rock:masculine/pop:feminine narrative that we inherited from the 20th century. The music industry slowly caught up to this when in June 2020 Billboard split the Alternative Songs chart, which from its start in 1989 until then was a radio-only chart, into two: there’s “Alternative Airplay,” which tracks radio, and “Hot Alternative,” which tracks everything else including streaming. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act in 1996, alternative rock radio has been intentionally programmed to appeal to white men, and the airplay charts continue to reflect this. But streaming tells a different story more like the one told by scholars like DiPiero and Vesey: rock’s audiences and artists are far more diverse than the old stereotypes suggest. The idea that rock, especially the sort of alternative/indie rock that Ervin gestures to throughout his article, is and has been the domain of white men with guitars is a mistake rooted in Alternative Airplay’s narrow format, which is a legacy of the grunge crossover and the Telecom Act.

And yet, Ervin’s article continually frames “rock” as the post-grunge-influenced guitar music made by and for white men. For example, he says:

• “People are excitedly rediscovering classic rock again, and kids are joking online about the triumphant return of what they’re calling “white boy garage music.” Even butt rock and nu metal are apparently cool again.”

• “Negative sentiment was fueled by artists like Imagine Dragons — who led Billboard’s top rock artists chart in 2017 and 2018 — as well as the popularity of easily hateable über-nostalgic acts like Greta Van Fleet and Mumford & Sons.”

Butt rock, nu metal, Imagine Dragons, Greta Van Fleet, and Mumford & Sons - this is all the bread and butter of Alternative Airplay, and it’s all white guys with guitars doing more or less post-grunge. Later on, in his discussion of the recent list of top songwriters, Ervin singles out “white male rock artists associated with indie or alternative rock, like Julian Casablancas, Will Oldham, Stephen Malkmus, David Byrne, Jack White, Michael Stipe, Jeff Mangum, Conor Oberst, James Murphy, or Jeff Tweedy.” As the article proceeds, it seems that the issue is less about the status of rock and more about the status of white men and rock’s role as a synechdoche for that.

The article’s middle section about the purported evils of poptimism buries its lede: much like so-called DEI and affirmative action, the real issue with poptimism seems to be that it makes white men feel bad about themselves. As Ervin puts it, “There was something telling about commentary like this from the often white men who seemed most anxious about their white maleness….Poptimism’s vibes are very much those of “White Dudes for Harris.”” Eliding work from women and femme journalists and scholars like Susan Cook, Norma Coates, Ann Powers, Elizabeth Keenan-Penagos, and myself, (which I know Ervin knows, or at least knows of), the article presents poptimism as a view purportedly self-hating white men hold. According to this article, the problem with poptimism is that it knocks rock and the white men to which it belongs from their traditional position at the top of philosophical modernity and the music industry’s status hierarchy.

Doubling down on the idea that rock and pop are clearly distinguishable and that the former is masculine while the latter is feminine at a time when the 20th century’s gender and genre relations have been scrambled by things like the asset economy and neoliberalism, Ervin’s article seeks to restore rock, and, by implication, white men, to the status they traditionally occupied in Fordist capitalism (e.g., the era of the family wage). Like a lot of contemporary American alt-right masculinities, Ervin’s article uses anti-feminism, here in the form of anti-poptimism, to create a spectacle of grievance that drives likes, clicks, and other forms of engagement, thus restoring masculinity to high status, but in the terms of platforms and the attention economy. This spectacle of grievance is the masculine, reactionary counterpart to the neoliberal feminine resilience exhibited by femme pop stars like Rodrigo, and like rock itself in the platform era. You can read more about alt rock and neoreactionary masculine grievance in the forthcoming second edition of Resilience & Melancholy.

One of the things I find least satisfying about this book is that for a project that claims to be grounded in Foucault, it lacks any whiff of genealogical spirit or curiosity. Against Affect has a very explicit will-to-truth - reason’s discipline ought to rule over affect’s excessiveness - but it doesn’t ever ask about the will-to-truth behind the “affective turn.” WHY did this specific “affective episteme” arise at the time it did and what will-to-truth did it/does it serve? In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault observes that the genealogical method “will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice.” In other words, genealogy studies the conditions that motivate a phenomenon’s emergence: what motivated people to take it up at that specific time in this specific form? What purpose did it serve, and for whom, and why was that purpose meaningful to those people then? Foucault’s genealogical method comes mainly from a reading of Nietzsche’s claim that “in all events a will to power is operating” (Genealogy, First Essay, section 12). Nietzsche and Foucault’s point is that this will to power/will to truth changes over time, such that the purpose of punishment might change as normative biopower “cuts off the head of the king”. From this perspective, the will-to-reason or will-to-Enlightenment in Downing’s 2026 book could be very different than the one in Kant’s 1784 “What is Enlightenment?” or Foucault’s 1984 reflection on this text of Kant with the same title.

But to get back to my point, Downing’s book doesn’t study affect theory of the affective turn genealogically. This is absolutely a me problem: Downing didn’t write the book I wanted to read, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are any problems with the book itself.

However, the book has other problems.

Though she argues for a “feminist neo-Enlightenment” where reason is not just in theory but in fact universalized or “redistributed,” the text takes a “cool girl” approach to reason that suggests that feminized people can do reason too (just like they can, in classic cool girl fashion, like beer and sports), and that those feminized reasoners are superior to regular, uncool femininity. Treating reason as a concept or practice (unclear which it is for Downing?) that disciplines affect qua-unruly-excess, Against Affect continues to abject figures traditionally associated with femininity, racial non-whiteness, and Black femininity in particular.

Downing defines reason less by its necessary and sufficient features or protocols and more by its effect, namely, “tempering the fashion for emotional outpouring” (25). As anyone who has read The Sonic Episteme (or the History of Sexuality volume 2) would recall, in Western philosophy this idea of “tempering” goes back to ancient Greek concepts of self-mastery or sophrosyne. For Plato especially, sophrosyne was both a form of moderation or tempering and a hierarchical relationship: to be moderate was to exhibit the natural hierarchy of ruler and ruled. Just as Plato thought that self-mastery or “sound-mindedness” (another common translation for sophrosyne) was the capacity to subordinate the unruliness of the visible world to the orderliness of the ideal world, Downing treats “reason” as that which should domesticate and discipline the unruliness that affect theory represents or unleashes. For example, she argues that “the present norm is a glut of idealized feeling” (42), and reason is a solution to that glut - “it is reason that refutes affective excess” (116). The opposition here is less reason vs affect and more disciplined vs unruly. For example, Downing argues that

When fear freezes our ability for clear thought as it did in the pandemic…and dis-ease overwhelms us, it threatens to unmake us. ‘Feeling’ is clammy and contagious; ‘reason’ is crystalline and pure--it stoppers the tide of fear-panic-overwhelm (116).

Clear and unadulterated, Downing argues, reason rescues us from potentially overwhelming phenomena. As scholars like Falguni Sheth and Kara Keeling have shown, “unruliness” (Sheth) and “boundarylessness” are figures for racial non-whiteness generally and Black femininity specifically. Reason domesticates the force of the phenomena which may overcome or undo our disciplined boundaries (and Downing really does mean “disciplined boundaries” in a Foucaultian sense, she connects reason to norms and normativity throughout the text).

To argue that white women and non-white people can exercise the reason necessary to discipline and purify such unboundedness is to argue for their place in multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy - they may have identities that are traditionally objected from the classically liberal public sphere (also the sphere of universality and reason), but now we think some of them can can exhibit behaviors that warrant their inclusion in white supremacist patriarchal privilege, in large part because their self-discipline shows they are able and willing to police unruliness in others like them. In Downing’s account, unruliness and boundarylessness is still abject, it’s just that some women and non-white people can help police that with reason. This isn’t the first thing Downing’s account has in common with the contemporary alt-right, which literally recruits people like former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio to ICE.

Going back to the block quote above, if you read Downing’s account of reason as the antidote to overwhelm and thought “huh, this sounds like Kant’s account of the sublime,” then I’d agree with you. For Kant, one can experience the sublime when you are threatened with things that are so physically or mathematically large (like the Matterhorn or the idea of infinity) that they threaten to overwhelm us. But when we remember that neither the force nor the size of either of these things surpasses the force and size of capital-R-Reason, we experience the feeling of the sublime. Reason rules over mere sensation, and Kant remixes Plato for the 18th century.

For Kant, the sublime is inherently gendered: when their natural irrationality is sufficiently disciplined, women are capable of merely the charming, but they don’t have the fortitude for the sublime. As Christine Battersby writes, “Women (and various racial and ethnic types originating from outside Europe) remain excluded from his account of the ‘universals’ of reason and of taste, of freedom and personhood that are operational in ‘our’ (male and European) enjoyment of the sublime” (9). Though Kant explicitly associates unruliness and unboundedness with women and non-white people, they are only socially productive and evidence of a free, self-legislating subject when they are appropriated by white masculinity. “Instinct, madness, the emotional and the capricious remained ‘feminine’ characteristics and were eulogised; but they were no longer thought of as specifically FEMALE characteristics. Instead, these characteristics were increasingly debarred to women or presented as part of a ‘natural’ condition that women themselves were unable to transcend” (Battersby 8). The performance of domesticating otherwise unruly femininity and/or racial non-whiteness positions the performer as ruling over what cannot rule itself.--i.e., as white and masculine. We are back at Plato’s natural order of ruler and ruled, thought this time through Enlightenment notions of race and gender.

As I have written about before, the racial politics of the sublime are central to a very British wing of the contemporary alt-right, the Landian “Dark Enlightenment.” That piece builds on Christopher Haworth’s study of the Dark Enlightenment’s use of industrial music zines from the 1970s and 80s:

Drawing on industrial musicians like Psychic TV’s use of sublime escoterism and occultism, these Dark Enlightenment figures evoked a “whiteness [that] manifested in the protection from harm it provided to authors and artists to immerse themselves in the anti-rational, abject, and censored-including explorations of right-wing escoterism or the supernatural thinking that informed the Third Reich” (Hayworth 231). This music confronted listeners with all kinds of dis-order that threatened to overwhelm them, but this functioned like a test against which Dark Enlightenment denizens could prove their strength and rationality.

The occultism and escoterism of industrial music zines serves the same role in Dark Enlightenment thought as affect serves in Downing’s book: it is the undisciplined other that evokes the sublime against which reason can demonstrate its disciplining or “tempering” force. In both of these contexts, “reason” is the status and affect of disciplined mastery. The DE is just more explicit about its investments in mastery.

Against Affect spends 116 pages evoking the boogey of unbounded affect before finally spending 22 pages saying more or less that maybe Audre Lorde got it right with her concept of the erotic. As someone who was trained to look at what a text does over and above what it says, my take here is that the book performs disciplined mastery. Much in the same way that resilience discourse requires the performance of damage to set up the spectacle of overcoming, Against Affect evokes the specter of uncontained affect as the prerequisite for its performance of disciplined mastery. In this regard, what is performed is not so much reason as reaction. In the First Essay of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains that “reaction…says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself’; and THIS No is its creative deed.” Though Downing may distance herself from the political reactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment, her method here in this book is nevertheless a technique of reaction, a saying “no” to affect as creative deed.

As I have said many times while teaching philosophy, “critique” doesn’t necessarily mean to find fault: especially entomologically, its emphasis is more on analyzing things and understanding what the parts are and how they work. Against Affect seems to conflate analysis with negation. As someone who is invested in the value of critique for theorizing, I hope this post has communicated several other ways to go about it: I’ve asked what motivates a thing’s uptake and studied what Sara Ahmed call’s theorizing’s “gestures” or maybe what you could call the argument’s rhetorical form. I also don’t think suspicion or the lack of suspicion in and of itself is theoretically valuable: what matters more is that suspicion always is directed up, to those in positions of power, and credence is directed down, to those who have been epistemically underprivileged and oppressed. Which is all to say I think Downing and I mean something different by critique or critical thinking or analysis or whatever it is that it’s philosophy’s job to do.

For Downing, returning to reason is a return to queer anti-normativity; she makes many gestures to this throughout the text. For example, she explains “I would suggest that a method of antinormative redistributive reason is a recuperative strategy that queer theory would do well to tarry with in the current hyperaffective climate in which the episteme of affect is the new normativity” (39). As the author of a forthcoming book arguing that biopower has evolved beyond its original normative form into something new that aligns with the math used in contemporary tech and finance, I am certainly biased when it comes to calls for renewed normativity or antinormativity: the front lines of the battle have moved from discipline and anti/normativity to vibes and legitimation. When Idaho turns being trans in public into a felony, they aren’t treating LGBTQ+ people as abnormal; this Idaho bill criminalizes trans people. I wrote a whole book where I make that argument and you can read it this November from Duke UP. (It also talks about how vibes are different than affect.) If the fight has moved on from norms or antinormativity, doubling down on antinormative disciplined mastery seems to cancel out the efficacy of those first two terms - antinormative discipline - and leave just the performance of mastery. And in the end that’s what I’m most suspicious of in this in Against Affect.

AI is powerful but taste-blind. It can make anything but it has no idea what’s actually worth making. But AI + your taste? That’s the game-changer. The more AI can execute, the more your eye for what’s interesting – your ability to discern and curate what matters and why – becomes everything.

Slop is everywhere, but those with taste can separate the wheat from the chaff and leverage AI to rise above the rest. Similarly, software engineer and strategist Daniel Bentes writes that “AI…cannot create a new taste…Humans, with their flawed, subjective, and deeply emotional nature, are uniquely positioned to lead these shifts.” At bottom AI is a probability generator, and it can only locate the most probable outcome its training data suggests; it cannot point to improbable or “disruptive” options. For Bentes, the human sense of aesthetic taste, with its ability to identify unexpected but pleasurable outcomes, transcends merely machinic probability.

According to former Dean of Harvard Business School Nitin Nohira, taste is also an ability that puts you up and above other people: “For leaders or aspiring leaders of any type, taste is a competitive advantage, even an existential necessity.” Defining taste as “the ability to elevate utility with elegance,” Nohira thinks this je-ne-sais-quoi is what elevates truly great corporate leadership above the merely basic; it’s what “made Apple more than a tech company.” As this example of Apple suggests, Nohira is using “taste” as a proxy for class: long the more expensive and stylish option over its PC competition, Apple is a status symbol, a proxy for upper-class status.

This use of “taste” in the age of AI remakes bourgeois good taste without the bourgeoisie and its pesky commitment to civil society/the public sphere/formal equity/etc. As I have written about before, traditional notions of taste in Western philosophy tie it to the capacity for “subjective universality,” or the ability to individually and subjectively (with feeling or judgment, not reason) arrive at the same, universal conclusions as everyone (or “everyone” in heavy scare quotes, because the whole point is that not everyone counts as someone) else. That is how “we” can all be independent individuals making our own decisions yet all coexist under universals. In this framework, to exhibit taste is to feel that fine art is superior to entertainment, for example. Demonstrations of tasteful judgment proved one’s qualification for participation in civil society, as they were evidence that you belonged to the “we” who was the “everybody” who subjectively arrives at the same universal conclusions (white women, non-white people, the working classes, with all their sentimental, excessive, and lowbrow preferences, did not qualify). Bourgeois good taste was absolutely a mechanism of gender, race, and class stratification, just one that routed through classically liberal notions of the public/private split.

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Today’s discussions of taste and AI take the “we” out of the equation and focus exclusively on the preferences and judgment of private individuals. For Azout, “taste can transcend universal preferences to embrace imperfection,” such as Japanese katsougi or Pollock-ian abstract expressionism. Or, as Nohira puts it,

Taste is born of human discretion—of growing up in particular places, being exposed to particular cultural references, developing a point of view that is inseparable from personality. In other words, taste is the human fingerprint on decision making. It is deeply personal and profoundly social.

Transcending universals and the result of individual idiosyncrasies, taste is as distinctive and personal as a fingerprint. Taste is purely subjective preference, a private interiority developed from living the unique life each of us lives.

Pure subjectivity sans universality, this new sense of aesthetic taste nevertheless shares a number of features with traditional Enlightenment taste. First, it’s an imperative. As Nohira puts it, “taste is the instinct that tells us not just what can be done, but what should be done.” Kant’s idea of beauty is an aesthetic corollary to his theory of the categorical imperative. The first formulation of the categorical imperative holds that one should act in a way such that anyone else in that same situation would act - your action as an individual should be universalizable. Similarly, Kant argues that when one pronounces something to be beautiful, he (it’s explicitly a he, the gendered language here is intentional) claims that everyone else ought to think so too - his judgment is universalizable. In this 21st century context, taste retains its imperative but lacks its universality. For Nohira, taste is “the human fingerprint on decision making” that shapes things like “brand identity” and company “culture” - it is, in other words, the executive choice of a private individual. The imperative comes from his authority as an executive, not an appeal to some, erm, categorical imperative.

Like Kant’s theory of genius, 21st century aesthetic taste exhibits a kind of newness that feels like it’s natural and spontaneous even though it may in practice be the result of hard work. For example, Nohira claims that “Taste is neither algorithmic nor accidental…It has the power to remix elements and bring about plausible and even creative new combinations” - taste is somewhere between rules and randomness. Azout offers a similar thought, that taste is about “know[ing] when to break rules in ways no theory explains.” (Her use of jazz improv as a metaphor for this rule-breaking could use some reading through Dale Chapman’s critique of the way such metaphors individualize and neoliberalize Black radical aesthetics.) Bentes describes taste as “the spark of intuition and serendipity” that is unique to “human creativity.” Taste departs from existing rules, but in a way that feels fitting and pleasurable rather than anarchic and unsettling.

This non-mechanical but nevertheless comprehensible newness and originality is also a feature Kant attributes to fine art (i.e., the thing that taste would judge as beautiful rather than merely charming). As Kant explains, judgments of taste are categorically distinct from scientific reasoning:

There is no science of the beautiful, but only critique; and there is no fine science, but only fine art. For in a science of the beautiful, whether or not something should be considered beautiful would have to be judged scientifically, i.e., through bases of proof, so that if a judgment about beauty belonged to science then it would not be a judgment of taste” (Third Critique, 172).

Claude and Suno were a long ways away back in the 1790s, but Kant like the AI bros thinks taste is the exercise of a capacity that goes beyond mere scientific logic. For Kant, scientific proofs are algorithms of a sort, rule-bound processes that don’t really allow for improvisation or creativity (or what Kant would call the “free play of the imagination and the understanding” - science is just about the understanding). Some art, however, “must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules AS IF it were a product of mere nature” (173). Taste is the ability to discern “free from all constraint of chosen rules” as if you are relying just on some inner je ne sais quois, or your personal nature. Taste looks and feels like the spontaneous exercise of unbounded freedom, even if it has to be the result of lots of practice and cultivation. And for Kant this “unbounded freedom” is crucial: the freedom of fine art and judgments of taste is one and the same with the freedom of the liberal/bourgeois subject in civil society.

AI bros use taste to similarly assert the difference between “freedom” and unfreedom, they just conceive of freedom differently than Kant did. They upgrade the civil freedom of the liberal subject into the frictionless mastery of the executive decision-maker presiding over bots and grunts that do the actual high-friction labor of working and thinking. Nohira highlights how the capacity for taste is “an existential necessity…for leaders or aspiring leaders of any type” because it is “in everyone’s interest, even people who are not at the top of the decision tree, for leaders to be able to make the right choices in the AI era.“ The capacity for judgments of taste is not just what sets humans apart from and above the mere bot, it‘s also what sets some men above others and makes them “leaders”. As Nohira puts it, “When every option is instantly available, when every variation is possible, the person who knows which one to choose becomes even more valuable.” Here, the AI bro analysis of taste leaps over Kant and looks more to Plato, who thinks that freedom is following the best master (in his case, the metaphysical True/Good/Beautiful). To be free, an individual must align himself with and subordinate himself to that metaphysical Truth, and such capacity for self-mastery is the thing that qualifies one to be master over others who supposedly lack that capacity in themselves. Nohira gestures towards a similar structure, but situates it in the context of racial capitalism (he’s talking about CEOs after all) rather than metaphysical idealism. To demonstrate taste is to demonstrate one’s alignment with the patriarchal racial capitalist order (because that is what AI reproduces, in the end - it re-makes speculative realities in the shape of our white supremacist capitalist patriarchal one), and that alignment is what is necessary to rule over others because it’s the thing that allows you to “discern” between, say, AI hallucinations that are aligned with this politics and those that aren’t.

Kant gets closest to this in his discussion of genius, or the ability to produce tasteful works of fine art, as that’s one place where he gestures back towards classical Western thought. The product of freedom,

Genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given…the products of genius must also be models, i.e., they must be exemplary; hence, though they do not themselves arise through imitation, still they must serve others for this, i.e., as a standard or rule by which to judge.

Just as Plato’s free man aligns himself with the metaphysically true, the work of genius is a model for others to use as their guide in their own attempts at reproducing that act. This connection to reproduction is why Kant brings up the classical Latin sense of the term “genius”: “the word genius is derived from [Latin] GENIUS, which means the guardian and guiding spirit that each person is given as his own at birth” (175). As Christine Battersby demonstrated in her 1988 book Gender and Genius, this “guardian or guiding spirit” was explicitly identified with sperm and patrilinearity. The exemplary status of the genius is the same as the exemplary status of the patriarch: he is both model for and authority over his progeny.

AI bros use their idea of taste to grant executive decision-makers the authority of the patriarch by masculinizing stereotypically feminine tasks and traits like emotional labor and aesthetic receptivity. For example, Bentes argues that “AI can analyze metadata, historical context, and user preferences, but it cannot genuinely feel the weight of history or the resonance of cultural significance” (emphasis mine). Taste accesses something below and beyond even vibes, an authentic receptivity to sensory, perhaps embodied perception.

Throughout the modern era, something like this capacity for “genuine feeling” has served as a mark of white masculine superiority because it evinces one’s ability to both (1) master bodily, emotional experiences that white women and non-whites were supposedly unable to control in themselves, an (2) transcend the limits of stereotypical white masculinity and its purportedly rational, intellectual, disembodied nature. As Kyla Schuller argues in The Biopolitics of Feeling, in the 19th century “impressability,” or “the capacity of a substance to receive impressions from external objects that thereby change its characteristics” (7) was thought to be evidence of “civilization” and refined evolutionary development: Impressibility came to prominence as a key measure for racially and sexually differentiating the refined, sensitive, and civilized subject who was embedded in time and capable of progress, and in need of protection, from the coarse, rigid, and savage elements of the population suspended in the eternal state of flesh and lingering on as unwanted remnants of prehistory” (8). White bourgeois people were thought to be able to perceive sensory information more fully and channel that perception into productive outcomes, whereas non-white people were thought to be merely subject to crude sensations.

Similarly, European philosophical aesthetics thought that elite white men could exhibit the capacity for “receptivity” that white masculinity’s stereotypical rationality and universality alienates most white men from, and which white women and non-white people can access but cannot master or control. As Robert Gooding-Williams puts it in his reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

Gendering the putatively suprasensible subject of knowledge as the hero Thesus, Zarathustra announces that this subject can regain his ability to sense, feel, and revalue his passions only if he repudiates his sublime, heroic will to truth and knowledge and acknowledges his Ariadnean power to be sensibly affected by passion and desire” (48).

This capacity to appropriate feminized (and non-white - as I argue here it’s important Ariadne is from Naxos) receptivity is one thing that distinguishes the Nietzschean overman from the rest of us. As Gooding-Williams shows later in that quoted piece, in the 20th century this white masculine capacity for receptivity shifts from an ideal of bourgeois good taste to pop cultural cool as the object of appropriation shifts explicitly to Blackness. White men can’t jump, but some have moves like Jagger, etc etc. For nearly 300 years, this capacity for refined aesthetic discernment has been what distinguished elite white (bourgeois) men from both their merely rational counterparts in civil society and the irrational, subjective white women and non-white people relegated to the private sphere.

AI bros turn to taste to similarly masculinize the kinds of emotional, feel-y labor that automation has gendered feminine in new, tech-specific ways. Musicologist Catherine Provenzano has shown how automation exacerbates gendered differences in the perceived value of musical labor. Pitch correction software like AutoTune automates the technical dimensions of vocal performance by taking the job of staying in tune from the singer and putting it “in the box” (industry jargon for digital audio workstations). As Provenzano argues,

Even, or especially, as the labor of singing is rationalized with digital tools like PCS [pitch-correction software], the work of the body (and implicitly, the woman) is regrounded in expectations of convincingness, realness, and other such attributes that emphasize the necessity of the singer’s emotional, if not technical, labor” (73).

Automated pitch-correction shifts the kind of labor singers to from vocal to emotional performance. Through interviews with producers and analyses of fan discourse, Provenzano finds that in this new automated context, women’ s emotional performances are thought to be unrefined things in need of domestication by (typically men) producers, whereas men’ s emotional performances are praised as innovative:

female voices have been most subject to “taming,”...meanwhile, male voices in pop are tools for fashioning new paradigms of sung emotionality, and often an emotionality that is audibly mediated through pitch correction software” (80).

Whereas Britney Spears is shamed for using Auto-Tune, T-Pain and Future are treated as innovators who use new technology to push musical expression to new, post- or trans-human levels. In this context, automation is a tool that distills feminine things to their fundamental unruliness while also facilitating masculine things’ ability to discern and perform even more refined emotionality.

AI bros’ use the idea of taste to do the same thing: automation relieves us of the technical authorial labor of things like writing an email, chatting up women on a dating site, or texting with our parents, and thus frees men up to focus on the ineffable, highly-refined tone, tenor, or feeling of an output. When people use their aesthetic judgment to criticize the poor quality of AI slop, they are described as “bitching” and “whining” -- two traditionally feminized figures of unruly emotion. But when they use that discernment to make decisions that are aligned with Silicon Valley’s weird hypermasculinity and/or business interests, that’s evidence of their capacity to lead others. In the 2020s, the idea of aesthetic taste is doing what it has always done: legitimate the authority of (mostly white) men from the economic ruling class. This time, that authority is not that of access to civil personhood, enfranchisement, at so on, but of the private-sphere authority of the CEO and the patriarch.

As I have written about elsewhere, the traditional art/craft binary is rooted in the classically liberal distinction between public and private: one is the realm of freedom and universality, the other is the realm of particularity and dependence.

The autonomy that Enlightenment aesthetics grants art is analogous to and philosophically intersects with the autonomy of the liberal subject. Cleaving the public sphere from the private in parallel to the way Kant cleaves fine art from craft, classical liberalism holds that autonomy exists in the civil sphere, whereas the private sphere is the realm of material need and dependence. Just as art’s autonomy comes from its purported ontological separation from everyday life, the liberal subject’s autonomy exists outside the sphere of life’s reproduction.

It’s a simple analogy - art:public::craft:private.

But if the public/fine art was both the realm of autonomy and of universality, this posed a problem: how could free individuals all come to the same, universal ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful? Why wouldn’t free individuals have individual, subjective ideas of truth, ethics, and beauty?

This is the problem Kant’s critical trilogy set out to solve: the first critique is about truth, the second is about ethics/the good, and the third is about aesthetics/beauty. I’m going to focus on the third one because I’m a philosopher of art, but the solution is the same in each case.

For Kant, beauty was both subjective - the judgment of an individual subject - and universal. As Kant puts it, “Taste must be an ability one has in oneself (79), and “a judgment of taste requires everyone to assent; and whoever declares something to be beautiful holds that everyone OUGHT to give his approval to the object at hand and that he too should declare it beautiful” (86). To say that something was beautiful was also to say that everyone else would think so too. This is literally the first formulation of the categorial imperative remade for aesthetics.

Kant has to perform a lot of philosophical gymnastics to make the concept of subjectively universal taste work, and those gymnastics don’t really stick the landing. But the relevant point here is that he was invested enough in the universality of subjective taste that he went to the trouble of doing those gymnastics.

Though he doesn’t frame the project in precisely these terms, Joshua Clover’s 1989 posits that eponymous year as the point where “global, yet American” (5) Western modernity culminates in actually-realized subjective universality. Clover argues that “The logic of ‘the end of history’ is in some degree the logic of pop itself” insofar as they both “imagin[e] a single way of being, one that offers itself equally to everybody, into which all trajectories empty” (12). With the end of the Cold War, classical liberalism’s abstract individual (think of the “Legal Status” section of Hegel’s Phenomenology) understands itself as truly universal, an autonomous free subject that is at the same time without Other, without difference. As Clover put it, “The sudden collapse of the Iron Curtain is made to summon up abstractions like freedom, or democracy” alongside “ the disappearance of the edit, the cut” (13). As Fukyama’s infamous “The End of History” proclaimed, liberal democracy (supposedly) won the Cold War, the latter’s “Two Tribes” reduced to one undifferentiated universality of liberal individualism. For Clover, rave’s PLUR-y ethos of “inclusivity without distinction” (63) exemplifies the triumphant liberal individual, each abstract unit undifferentiated from the other. With the Cold War’s structuring political antagonism newly absent, the apparent absence of geopolitical difference and hegemony of hegemony of “global, yet American” liberalism is understood and experienced as the achievement of a public sphere that is genuinely universal - ‘we’ are all individuals freely choosing on the limitless, borderless global market.

Clover’s analysis of gangsta rap and grunge shows that historically, one consequence of this apparent universality at the civil or public level is the amplification of the private sphere’s traditional role as the locus of difference and inequality. For example, Clover argues that “The shift from Black Power and Black Nationalist to gangsta rap, in and around the year 1989…can be rendered schematically as the turn from inter-group confrontation to intra-group conflict: the emergence of the internalization of struggle’ (34). Whereas 80s Black Power and Black Nationalist hip hop (like Public Enemy) framed white supremacy as its antagonist, gangsta rap adopts instead the “black-on-black violence” frame common in the War-On-Drugs era mainstream media and frames hip hop culture’s structuring antagonism as an internal one. Similarly, Clover claims that grunge turned punk’s political negativity into a personal one: “Grunge constituted itself by doing a very specific thing with punk’s will to confrontation: turning it inward” (80) into “profoundly angry introspection” (81). Going even further than reverting “I’m So Bored With The USA” back to its original, pre-Strummer “I’m So Bored With You,” grunge focuses its rage and disgust only on the inner self, i.e., on “me.” In both the case of gangsta rap and grunge, genres that traditionally targeted their anger at the structures of civil society flip their scripts and channel aggression on the private family/culture or self. Pop culture proclaimed that public agons were a thing of the past while simultaneously glorifying private inter- and intrapersonal conflict. The classically liberal ideal of subjective universality was claimed to have been achieved in civil society, yet the main vernacular representations of masculinity depict a (plural in the case of hip hop, singular in the case of grunge) subject divided within and turned upon itself. Universality had been attained, it and its medium of civil society could thus be shelved - less “there is no such thing as society” and more “society, done and dusted.” Unleashed from its previous imperative to perform universality, subjectivity (here in the sense of bias or non-objectivity) was free to embody purely private difference as such.

Shelving civil society and the public sphere in this “long 1989” moment, “global, yet American” pop culture sets the stage for the wave of privatization and personal responsibilization that we continue to ride today. Policy-wise, that wave is formalized by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. This legislation deregulates private markets and makes them more “free” while using the state to intensify the policing of race, gender, and class differences by, for example, adding work requirements to welfare programs or the 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement to be deputized as federal INS/ICE officers. Instead of civil society as the realm of supposed freedom over and against the realm of private subjection, its now private markets that embody freedom, whereas private differences and identities serve as the grounds of criminalization as figures like “the welfare queen” or the “illegal alien” represent Black and brown people as inherently lacking the personal responsibility necessary to earn the law’s protection. Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Committee and full corporate personhood, here we come.

Culturally, that wave begins to surface in a few different ways. First, though Clover thinks “the question of what exactly allowed Nevermind to surmount both Guns N’ Roses and Michael Jackson--seemingly to banish such music to the outer dark--remains unanswered and perhaps unanswerable” (83), my forthcoming article in American Music finds a clear answer to this question: grunge’s inward turn aligns with the way about 15 years of anti-affirmative backlash has reshaped masculinity into the performance of personal injury. In US law, personal injury is private property claim covered by tort law, not a claim of political wrong or injustice. Critical Race Theorist Cheryl Harris’s 1993 “Whiteness as Property” shows how right-wing propaganda reframed affirmative action not as a redistributive program regarding past injustices but as a judgment on the present responsibility individual white people had in making up for those past harms. As Harris put it, “the property interest in whiteness has skewed the concept of affirmative action by focusing on the sin or innocence of individual white claimants with vested rights, rather than on the broader questions of distribution of benefits and burdens.” In other words, whereas affirmative action was an attempt to redistribute opportunities equally across the entirety of the public, discourses and structures of white entitlement reframed affirmative action as an issue of individual private responsibility wherein specific white men were or were not responsible for holding minorities back in the way negligent drivers are responsible for injuring people they crash into. At the same time, affirmative action’s reparations were framed by both right wing activists and the mainstream media as injuring white men in similar ways, i.e., as personal injuries. 1989 was also the year Claremont McKenna sociologist Friedrick Lynch published his monograph Invisibile Victms: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action. As I explain in the article,

As Jennifer L. Peirce argues, “print media” in the 80s and 90s exhibited an “eagerness to construct sensational headlines about white male injury.” For example, in the November 1990 issue of SPIN, Jefferson Morley’s feature titled “Kulturkampf” stated that “young white males…resent integration, especially affirmative action, as an imposition and a threat.” Similarly, Pierce finds that “A 1994 cover of Businessweek declared, ‘White, Male, and Worried,’ adding ‘White men still dominate corporate America. But in companies with aggressive diversity programs, white males are starting to feel angry and resentful.’”

Forget John-Wayne-style stoic strength, by 1989 pop culture had shifted the vibes around American white masculinity so significantly that it was OK to be vulnerable, hurt, and damaged…so long as that injury reinforced white masculine grievance at gender and racial minorities. Grunge crossed over in the 1989 era because mainstream American white masculinity had made the same shift from public to private grievance--grunge’s once-countercultural performance of injured selfhood had, for entirely nonmusical reasons, become the norm.

The “inward turn” away from the public to the variously-figured private sphere that Clover identified in hip hop and grunge extends far beyond the realm of popular music; these genres are microcosms of a broader shift as the public/private binary collapses and the ideals it valorized - universality, objectivity, autonomy, formal equality before the law, abstract individuality, etc. - lose their purchase…in part because postwar civil rights movements had caused the very people that public/private binary was designed to exclude from accessing those values to begin to meaningfully benefit from them.

Since 1989, the privatization of aesthetic taste has taken many forms: omnivorousness (1996), poptimism (turn-of-the-millennium), algorithmic personalization and Nick-Seaver-style “avidity” (2010s), Kornbluhian “immediacy” (also 2010s), vibes (2010s & 20s), AI slop (2020s), looksmaxxing (2020s), and who knows what will come next. In true Cooperian “Family Values” style, this privatization can lean neoliberal or neoreactionary. The whole point is that there is no singular hegemonic construction of aesthetic taste: universals don’t matter anymore. Taste can be whatever so long as it is a vector for patriarchal racial capitalist accumulation and status. The point is that it is subjective and non-universal.

Before I get to the affect theory, let me set up the terms of my analysis.

In “Can The Subaltern Speak,’ Guyatri Spivak highlights the play between two senses of “representation” in European political philosophy. As Spivak notes in her reading of Deleuze, “two senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for’, as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation’, as in art or philosophy” (70): representation as in symbolizing is conflated with representation as in speaking for (like your Representative does for you in Congress). Or, put differently, representation in the sense of a portrait is being run together with representation in the sense of a proxy; Spivak turns to the difference between the German terms “vertretung…representation within the state or political economy” (a proxy) and “darstellung…representation as in art or philosophy” (a portrait) to clarify the distinction. In both portraits and proxies, there’s a re-presentation of a person/constituent in the form of an image or an elected official.

Liberal representational politics are an example of this conflation between portrait and proxy. This approach takes the depicted presence of, say, white women or people of color on a corporate board or in a movie as evidence of political parity: portraits of diversity are conflated with proportional political enfranchisement. The particular slippage Spivak is concerned with in her analysis is Deleuze’s claim that “a theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier…There is no more representation; there is nothing but action” (cited in Spivak, 70). Deleuze is trying to claim that philosophizing is not abstract, but a concrete practice - it is neither a portrait of or proxy for “real life”, it IS real life. This is of course to some degree true - doing philosophy is a practice with concrete affordances; however, philosophizing is also abstract - it is a practice of abstraction. According to Spivak, Deleuze wants philosophizing to be a concrete, non-abstract practice so he can equate his work as a theorist with the manual labor of the factory worker. If the intellectual’s labor is identical to that of the working classes, then, so the story goes, the intellectual can speak for the silenced working classes. Thus, in depicting the figure of “the working classes” and “valoriz[ing] the concrete experience of the oppressed” (Spivak 70), Deleuze actually functions as a proxy for them. In claiming to move past “representation” and get directly to “action,” Deleuze performs a collapse of the gap between subject and portrait, signified and signifier, constituent and proxy. This collapse then lets him equivocate between portraiture and proxy such that his description of oppressed groups he isn’t a part of can appear to function as their enfranchisement. Spivak’s point is that this just re-centers the Western intellectual and does nothing to enfranchise working class people: “the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor” (69). Rather than leveling the difference between the intellectual class and the working class, Deleuze’s claim to be a proxy for the working class actually reinforces that division of labor it claims to eliminate.

Turning to Marx, Spivak suggests that the way to “develo[p] a transformative class consciousness from a descriptive class position” (72) lies not in valorizing the private “concrete experience” of individual laborers, but “remains within the feeling of community that belongs to national links and political organizations” (72). Class consciousness in the vertreten sense requires a representation/Darstellung of some common interest. This picture of a shared common requires abstraction from concrete individual experience to something like what you could call a “general interest” or “sensus communis” or “distribution of the sensible” or whatever your favorite philosopher has called it. You might even call such abstraction “mediation” by symbols that have a commonly-agreed-upon meaning. I will return to this point later, but here I just want to note that instead of taking this route with representation, the one that points to “the feeling of community”, Deleuze goes instead in the direction of private individual “concrete experience.”

This relationship between political representation and artistic representation that Marx calls on constitutes what Ranciere calls the “metapolitical” regime of political philosophy. As Ranciere argues, “Clearly it was Marx who provided the canonical formula for metapolitical interpretation, especially in The Jewish Question” (Disagreement, 82); that essay marks the difference between “political emancipation,” or the civil freedom of religion, and “human emancipation,” which is the day-to-day equality among people of different religions. While Western liberal democracies like the U.S. and France legally separate church from state and establish a civil freedom of religion, both nations are normatively Christian ones where non-Christians are socially marginalized; there is a disjunction between what the law says and what happens in private life. Ranciere calls that disjunction “the gap between any political process of naming or inscribing in relation to the realities subtending them” (82), and metapolitics is the idea that this “gap between names and things” (82) is a necessary feature of politics, and the job of the political philosopher is to diagnose that gap — a.k.a. “Ideology” - as such. Here, both portraits and proxies are understood in terms of the indexical correspondence (or rather, lack thereof) between names and things, and political philosophy polices that failure of accurate re-presentation. Spivak’s point is that Deleuze’s conflation of portrait and proxy closes that metapolitical gap between names and subtending realities in a way that continues to exclude working-class people from representing themselves.

For Raniere, political philosophy is a reactionary force that distracts us from the actual performance and enactment of politics, which he understands as the radical reconfiguration of an episteme by introducing a perceptible instance of what that regime supposedly constitutively excludes from perception/representation. For example, in focusing on whether the name of a class is an in/accurate representation of its constituents, political philosophers reinforce or “police” rather than revolutionize this particular way of perceiving who counts as a member of society. As Ranciere explains,

Class is the perfect example of one of those homonyms over which the counts of the police order and those of the political demonstration are divided. In the police sense, a class is a grouping of people assigned a particular status and rank according to their origins or their activity…In the political sense, a class is something else entirely: an operator of conflict, a name for counting the uncounted” (83).

Or, in the political sense, “class” names what a particular episteme supposedly cannot name, the part which cannot be represented (either politically or artistically) in that episteme. Metapolitics is one way to “police” the meaning and function of class by framing it as merely a name for a thing. Even though his rejection of so-called “representation” would appear to be a move away from the metapolitical regime, Deleuze’s conflation of portrait and proxy does exactly this: it re-installs the existing hierarchical class order while eliding the formation of a “transformative class consciousness.” Reducing vertreten-style “representation” to the immediate depiction of private “concrete experience”, Deleuze excludes the possibility of working-class people developing a transformative political class consciousness.

Deleuzian-style affect theory from the 1990s does the same thing. Dismissing “representation” as some red herring diverting our attention from the purported ontological truth and immediacy of affect, this style of affect theory redirects attention away from the shared, mediated world of Vertretung-as-transformative-class-consciousness and towards private individual experience. Ruth Leys has already called this out in slightly different terms in a 2011 article in Critical Inquiry. She writes,

The problem is that by adopting [the] separation of the affects from our ideas or beliefs and by treating the affects as nonintentionalist states…affect theorists who share this approach implicitly deflat[e] or eliminat[e] ideological disagreement over what we believe in favor of a pluralistic-ontological emphasis on what we feel or who we are, a position that allows concern with identity to trump disagreements over our beliefs. (466)

Like Deleuze’s valorization of the “concrete experience” of the working classes over the philosophers’s abstractions, the affect theorists Leys studies reject “representational meaning” in favor of immediate affective intensity; just as Spivak notes that this move in Deleuze precludes the formation of Vertreutung-as-transformative-class-consciousness, Leys notes that it focuses on private individual experience (‘what we feel or who we are”) to the exclusion of something approaching what Ranciere would call politics - disagreement, the coming-to-consciousness of the class whose exclusion from representation coheres the current order of representation.

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Reading Leys alongside Spivak and Ranciere suggests that the ideological function of affect theory in the mid-to-late 1990s was to valorize private individual experience over Vertreutung-as-transformational-class-consciousness. This was not a radical recuperation of what philosophy has unjustly ignored; it was a reactionary reorientation of philosophy towards the emerging neoliberal/neconservative “family values” consensus around privatization and private individual responsibility. Leys has done a lot of the initial legwork here, so I’ll summarize her analysis.

First, Leys finds that affect theorists tend to create a false dichotomy between abstraction and immediate bodily experience: “The whole point of the turn to affect by Massumi and like-minded cultural critics is thus to shift attention away from considerations of meaning or “ideology” or indeed representation to the subject’s subpersonal material-affective responses (450). There is intellectual abstraction, or representation, on the one hand, and non-representational bodily affect, on the other. And instead of understanding that there could be forms of non-propositional or embodied abstraction, “it is only by adopting a highly idealized or metaphysical picture of the mind as completely separate from the body and brain to which it freely directs its intentions and decisions that they can reach the skeptical conclusions they do” (455). Just as Deleuze creates a false dichotomy between “abstraction” and “concrete experience” by failing to note that manual labor also involves abstractions, the affect theorists Leys studies fail to account for the fact that the mind can work in non-representational abstractions, just as the body can learn to perform abstractions (such as gender!) as a matter of habit (that’s literally the thesis of Foucaultian feminism from Sandra Bartky to Judith Butler). Leys mentions music at two moments in her article, and they each clarify exactly how affect theory overdraws the distinction between mind and body. First, she explains that “skilled pianists are not consciously aware of the innumerable movements their fingers must make during a performance, but this does not make those movements unintentional or negate the fact that the pianists in-tended to play the music” (455). A scale such as the Bb major or G minor scale is an abstraction: it represents the execution of an algorithm about pitch interval order beginning at a particular pitch and in a particular mode. However, after years of practice I learned to play these scales (and many, many more) without having to rely on anything but muscle memory. I was executing an abstraction without consciously thinking about it. Whereas scales are representations of a proposition not unlike a sentence, classical music is also like the paradigmatic example in the Western philosophical tradition of non-propositional or non-representational abstractions. In the 19th century, the idea of “absolute music” named music that lacked conceptual or representational content. For example, whereas Smetna’s “The Moldau” was explicitly a sonic depiction of the river of that same name, Beethoven’s violin concerto wasn’t about anything other than the music itself. Just because it lacks words or representational content doesn’t mean that music lacks abstraction - like there’s a whole academic discipline of music theory that has a huge and growing way of talking about the kinds of rhythmic, harmonic, timbral, dynamic, and other abstractions that make a piece of music meaningful. However, as Leys finds,

Music is often cited by affect theorists as exemplifying the power of the affects. For example, Shouse suggests that music provides perhaps the clearest example of how the “intensity of the impingement of sensations on the body can ‘mean’ more to people than meaning itself.” He observes in this regard that “‘music has physical effects, which can be identified, described and discussed but which are not the same thing as it having meanings, and any attempt to understand how music works in culture must . . . be able to say something about those effects without trying to collapse them into meanings’” (“FEA,” ¶13). Here Shouse puts everything that is not a question of “meaning,” defined in some highly limited sense, over against the body or affect. What seems wrong or confused about this is the sharpness of the dichotomy, which operates at once with a highly intellectualist or rationalist concept of meaning and an unexamined assumption that everything that is not “meaning” in this limited sense be- longs to the body. This too is a false dichotomy, one that—in spite of a professed hostility to dualism—threads its way throughout much of the new literature on affect (458).

Just because musical abstractions aren’t always the same kinds of abstractions that words are - they don’t indexically refer to a signifier or ‘meaning’ - doesn’t mean they aren’t abstract! The so-called “brown note” is a mythical frequency that supposedly causes your bowls to reflexively release, like when you reflexively kick when the doctor hits your knee with their hammer. But the brown note is NOT music. Music is not an example of affect in the strict Massumian sense Leys critiques in her article. It necessarily works with abstractions (rhythm and meter are abstractions!), just maybe not representational ones.

If this dichotomy is so obviously false, then why are affect theorists like Massumi so committed to it? Why do they WANT it to be true? (Sorry, I’m always a Nietzsche-Foucault girl at heart, what’s the will-to-truth here etc etc) Building on Leys, I think that the will-to-truth here has to do with privatization and the elision of Vertreutung-as-transformative-class-consciousness. For example, Leys suggests in a footnote that William Connolly treats

political views [as] nothing but the expression of purely personal preferences, so that preferring democracy to despotism is like preferring tea to coffee. Connolly, Thrift, and other affect theorists can thus be seen as replacing a concern with disagreement over political beliefs with an appeal to affective differences that they take to be independent of belief or meaning. The result is that when people have different affective responses, they don’t disagree, they just are different. From this (to my mind untenable) pluralist point of view, democracy is not a normative value at all but just a personal taste, and what the political activist is seeking to do is subliminally influence or manipulate others through the use of images and other tactics into sharing his or her likings while remaining pluralistically open to the idea that different persons may simply have different inclinations (452).

According to Leys, affect theorists like Connolly reject ideas of shared standards like norms in favor of private individual preference; these preferences seem to be treated like consumer choices in a market. (It’s also worth noting that the description Leys gives in her last sentence in that block quote of “subliminal influence or manipulation” through “images and other tactics” is basically what surveillance capitalism does today, “nudging” people toward certain behaviors by, for example, recommending them content that they are likely to buy, share, or react to.) As Leys puts it later in the article, “The effect is to replace the idea of one’s intentions with regard to objects or of the meanings those objects might have for one with the idea of the singularity of one’s affective experiences, which is to say with the idea of one’s difference from all other subjects” (465). At the level of affect, one is not a member of a community with shared norms and standards, but a private individual with non-political preferences. For example, Leys’s take on Eve Sedgwick’s work on affect clearly points out how Sedgwick treats affect as a matter of private difference in elision of any sense of transformational class consciousness;

In Sedgwick’s analysis shame emerges as an affect that ensures each person’s absolute difference from the other. According to Sedgwick, following Tomkins’s approach to the affects, what matters in the experience of shame is not your conscious or unconscious wishes or intentions toward some object but your subjective feelings in all their singularity and difference from those of others. Shame thus transforms and produces identity, without any moralism and indeed without giving identity any specific content; it is a means for creating (queer) identity as the experience of pure difference (465)

Shared experiences of shame could be used to build transformational class consciousness - isn’t this kind of what the use of “pride” could at its best be about, countering shared experiences of shame with collective consciousness of queer people as a class? But as Leys reads Sedgwick, that move towards shared experience and transformational class consciousness is foreclosed in a focus and valorization of private difference.

Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” was published in 1995 - one year before the Welfare Reform act, two years before Tony Blair gets elected. Reading Leys, it’s not hard to see affect theory as an academic manifestation of the very sorts of privatization Clinton and Blair enact in American and British policy. If we follow Leys’s analysis and take affect theory’s misreading of some scientific studies alongside an overdrawn dichotomy between mind and body, we can then ask: what motivates these errors? What function do these misreads and missteps serve?

They allow affect to appear, as Massumi puts it, “after ideology” (104), as progressing past the metapolitical structure of the correspondence between symbols and the purported “concrete experience” that they abstract away from and towards something more direct and immediate that purportedly recuperates the baby that such abstraction throws away with the representationalist bathwater. More simply, in claiming to be after ideology, affect theory presents itself as progressing past old-fashioned Modernist metapolitics and towards some new thing. This is not the “postdemocratic” regime of statistics that Ranciere talks about in the next chapter of Disagreement, but something more like a constituent of the Sonic Episteme. For example, Massumi describes an affective media ecology where force transfers through “induction and transduction” (104); I have already written a whole book about how these sorts of metaphors produce the same neoliberal relations that Ranciere attributes to the regime of “postdemocratic” statistical mis/representation.

Coming “after ideology,” affect theory posits a new relationship between vertreten and darstellen. As Hegel notes in the “ethical substance” section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the atomistic individual of liberal civil society can be equal to all others precisely because the move from the realm of private difference to the public sphere abstracts away all the concrete particularities that make one citizen different from another. Metapolitics is precisely the practice of pointing out this gap between public and private, between the conceptual abstraction and “concrete experience.” Following Leys, we could say that for affect theory there is neither portraits nor proxies, just intensities of force that are felt as private ontological difference that operates below the merely ontic plane of politics. This is not a progressive recuperation of what philosophy has unjustly excluded, it’s just a way to update philosophy to make it more compatible with emerging neoliberal epistemes. Work such as Steve Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect explicitly connects affective abstractions to neoliberal market logics.

Leys’s analysis suggests that it’s worth including affect theory along with what Marie Thompson has identified as the “ontological turn” philosophies (OOO, new materialism, speculative realism) whose valorization of “a pre-conscious terra nullius, unmediated by social order…has some troubling resonances with retrograde socio-political tendencies”. In particular (and like Thompson), I am concerned that the move to a pre-social, ontological and not ontic layer of “affect” is a way to elide the operation of whiteness (among other things). For example, at the end of “The Autonomy of Affect,” Massumi turns to Ronald Reagan as an example of a figure who works beyond ideology at the level of affect:

What is astonishing is that Reagan wasn’t laughed and jeered off the campaign podium and was swept into office not once but twice. It wasn’t that people didn’t hear his verbal fumbling or recognize the incoherence of his thoughts. They were the butt of constant jokes and news stories. And it wasn’t that what he lacked on the level of verbal coherence was glossed over by the seductive fluency of his body image. Reagan was more famous for his polyps than his poise, and there was a collective fascination with his faltering health and regular shedding of bits and pieces of himself…His means were affective (102).

From the perspective of 2026, the figure of a fumbling, feeble, and verbally incoherent aging Republican U.S. President is all too familiar. Whereas Massumi claims that public must gloss over Reagan’s representational incoherence because they are working at the level of extra-ideological affect, I have argued that Americans gloss over the current President’s incoherence because his extra-propositional communication is ideological in a very specific way:

He’s not interested in getting people to agree with the propositional content of his claims, but with the implicit knowledges, emotions, habits, and intuitions—what philosophers call an “interpretive horizon”—that make factually incoherent claims appear coherent. And in Trump’s case, it’s white supremacy that makes his empirically false claims feel true.

Representational or “ideological”/metapolitical abstractions aren’t the only kind of abstractions that exist--they are however the dominant way abstractions have been figured in mainstream Western philosophy (i.e., as propositional content). To argue that something extra-representational is extra-ideological naturalizes the way that power relations are transacted through extra-representational abstractions. Eliding the issue of whiteness in Reagan’s performance, Massumi short-circuits his ability to come to transformational class-consciousness about whiteness.

Though this strain of Deleuzian affect theory presents itself as something like the overcoming of metapolitics by moving below or beneath “ideology,” to the extent it denies that extra-propositional abstractions exist and that they can be used to create the “feeling of community” necessary for forming transformational class consciousness, it just reworks classically liberal metapolitics into what Jeffery Nealon has called the neoliberal “empire of intensities.” As such, this strain of affect theory is another front of 90s privatization, like the Telecom Act and the Welfare Reform Act, but operating at the level of epistemology and aesthetics.

British music journalist David Stubbs also agrees that “we’re still living in 1996” (140). However, his book 1996 and the End of History focuses exclusively on the UK context. Instead of grungy, rap-rocky alt rock, there’s Britpop, Oasis in particular. And instead of grievance at gender and racial minorities, there’s nostalgia for purportedly pre-PC times when the monoculture was led by white guys with guitars. “1996, in other words, was the year in which cultural forces gathered, as if in a manifestation of the collective unconscious, to recreate the year 1966, before the slide into hippie decadence and misplaced idealism really began” (7). Oasis was perceived to be like what people in 1996 thought The Beatles were, i.e., a point of national pride and unity, a symbol that gave the British people (well, the white, mainly English, mainly men ones) a sense they shared in a project where the UK was leading the world.

This longing for a sense of cultural unity unperturbed by questions as to who actually constitutes the “we” in the collective whose unconscious that unity manifests is a form of reactionary centrism. As Stubbs explains, this was an attempt to use shared culture as a substitute for something like the common good: “In this era, despite the continued craving for shared experience and the banishment to the peripheries of the remotely experimental or futuristic, the ‘centre’ has nonetheless collapsed: in politics, music, and TV, all victims of various deregulations and disintegrations” (20). As privatization swept across British society, experiences of membership in a common public waned, and Britpop conveniently emerged as an “alternative” (see what I did there) to civil society and its psychological affordances (which, notably, were designed to center precisely the same people the Britpop narrative did).

According to Stubbs, Oasis arrived at a time when the pendulum had already been swinging back from its left swerve in the 80s, a time when “rock was to be considered a pejorative term, a hidebound and reactionary form, the guitar a phallic symbol loaded with the dead weight of rock history and overbearing, hetero maleness” (124). The expansive musical and gender expression in 80s genres like New Romanticism, goth, synthpop, and new wave generally emerged precisely as an alternative to mainstream white cishetero rock masculinity. In my WOXY book I wrote about how 80s music critics framed modern rock as queer. As Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant told Rolling Stone in 1988, “It’s kinda macho nowadays to prove you can CUT IT live. I quite like proving we CAN’T cut it live. We’re a pop group, not a rock and roll group” (Cited in Goodwin, “Sample & Hold”). Highlighting a compilation now well-known as the foundation of indie-pop, Stubbs points to a “mid-Eighties rut of deliberate smallness, as showcased on the NME cassette compilation C86” (124); this “smallness” could be reframed today in the language of “twee,” a heavily feminized term typically applied to women artists like Tiger Trap. Traditional cishet white rock masculinity was far from fashionable in the 80s.

However, when Nirvana broke the American mainstream, the pendulum started to swing hard back to the right, where white guys rocking out to guitars took center stage. Britpop was the UK’s attempt to align with that movement and get their domestic scene swinging in the same direction as the American one. As Stubbs puts it,

Couldn’t it be like the Sixties again, when it was basically just The Beatles, the Stones, groups ‘we’ were all into, and so were all our mates: big white guitar music confidently ruling the roost? Nothing against synths, nothing against ethnic minorities, nothing against women, nothing against gays, but they had their time, back in the Eighties. All those subcultures, subcategories, all that eclecticism and experimentation…blokes, guitars, that’s the essential rock’n’roll experience when it comes down to it, isn’t it? And why aren’t we getting that? (127).

To be clear, Stubbs is snarkily voicing an opinion that is not his, but which was what he claims as the prevailing attitude regarding Britpop in the mid-90s. This is not quite the vehement misogyny and racism of American-style affirmative action backlash, but a slightly more polite version of white masculine chauvinism that thinks white cishetero men and their preferences should drive pop culture.

“None of this was exclusively Oasis’s fault,” Stubbs claims, “the recrudescence of conservatism was a structural phenomenon” (135). Britpop was a beacon of a broader vibe shift not just in British culture, but Global North Anglophone culture more generally. My work on alt rock and the alt right points to some of the structural factors at work in the US, and Stubbs’s account of Tony Blair’s candidacy and administration points to equivalents in the UK. Stubb’s book was published a year before the Brexit vote, but you can see the straight line from 1996’s “why can’t British music be by and for white guys?” to the idea that the UK is only for a certain kind of British person.

Stubb’s book is very helpful in situating what’s going on in the transformation of American commercial alt rock radio into a space of reactionary masculinity and masculine grievance in a broader, trans-Atlantic context where the political and cultural pendulum is swinging in a parallel direction. The forces of deregulation, privatization, and backlash against feminism, immigration, and the like each operate in specific national contexts, but the US and the UK are roughly on the same track and headed in the same direction.

Stubbs notes that this conservative turn in British musical culture led audiences to crave music that’s effectively slop - frictionless music that basic white people can lose themselves in because it affirms all of their preferences and biases. For example, he argues that Pulp’s “Common People” was a hit because

its lumbering anthem [was] precisely what an emotional and fatigued public wanted: simply to fall into each others’ arms and sing along, rather than keep pace with drum’n’bass or trip-hop or Romo or The New Wave of The New Wave or minimal techno or whatever new subcultural permutation was being shouted at them from below’ (129).

AI produces slop because it’s only capable of generating new-to-us versions of the same stuff it’s been fed - it can’t have an original idea and just reheats other peoples’ nachos to deliver an already-familiar experience. Though Stubb’s book was published nearly a decade before generative AI would be widely available to the public, the aesthetic he attributes to Britpop could describe AI slop equally well. Noting that most of Oasis’s lyrics, like the comedy of the era, “say nothing much about anything” (129), Stubbs hits on the fact that this slop mimics the experience of people structurally insulated from the trials and tribulations of history; the frictionlessness of the slop aesthetically represents the frictionless way in which middlebrow straight white men had been able to navigate the postwar era.

I’m still trying to figure out the broader direction for this “alt rock to alt right” project (the article version is forthcoming in American Music, pub date tbd), but thinking about this more trans-Atlantically has been helpful.

Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy is also about this shift: on page one, she notes “the social activity of representation is slackening.” Elsewhere she remarks that corresponding ideals like disinterestedness and fine art - aka “creative distance from ordinary communications or banal functionality” (5) are likewise falling out of fashion. Similarly, the classically liberal ideal of the “abstract equivalent” (4) is on the wane; the subject of the “Ethical Substance” section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the “abstract equivalent” is the civil person who is formally equally to every other civil person by virtue of their separation from private differences (like gender, or more accurately, femininity) - think “one person, one vote.” All of these phenomena are thought to embody objectivity and universality because they exist at the level of civil society, the public sphere, or however you prefer to frame this realm separated out from the world of private difference and social reproduction.

Fine art is likewise universal because it is separate from the private sphere of social reproduction and its pesky tethering to material necessity (you can’t make a cup and saucer with fur and expect people to like drink out of it, but it sure looks good under plexiglass at The Art Institute). As feminist art historians of the 1970s pointed out, the fine art/craft hierarchy is nestled in the public/private distinction of classical liberalism.

In place of subjective universality, disinterestedness, the sensus communis, and all those other aesthetic concepts rooted in the political ontology of the classically liberal public/private divide, Kornbluh locates “immediacy”. For her, immediacy is “affective transfer” (2), “directness and literalness…immersiveness” (5), and “atomistic absorption” (15). Examples include “immersive” art happenings, social practice art, streaming video, and autotheory.

The “immediacy” Kornbluh identifies is a psychoanalytic one. In all cases, lots of mediation happens to produce the subjective experience of psychoanalytic immediacy. For example, Kornbluh argues that “all this [algorithmic] personalization upholds a permalingering mirror stage, a fortress of the imaginary, minimizing the possibility for mediations of the other” (128). My psychoanalytic theory is certainly rusty (I think the last time I published anything in that area was like 2010?), but her basic idea is that there has arisen a class of aesthetic experiences that lack the capacity to demonstrate to a perceiver that their experience is not an unbroken continuous whole with the rest of the universe because they lack a representation of something that is not the self (such as one’s mirror image). “Immediacy’s metaphysics of presence chafes against representation” (11), she writes. Note the use of the phrase “metaphysics of presence” - I’ll come back to this later - immediacy is the experience of being, pure being, unbroken by representations of otherness that might suggest to the perceiver that they are not fully present to or knowledgeable of themselves (e.g., that they might have things in their mind that they’re not conscious of).

As someone not at all invested in the psychoanalytic concept of self or consciousness, the book felt a bit like a top-down application of a concept to popular culture: the psychoanalytic theory was in the driver’s seat and the examples came along for the ride. Methodologically lean toward another kind of analysis: music analysis, where we break down how a musical text or performance or recording works to understand what the parts are and how they all work together (and why we think that works, sounds good, etc.). My work tends to be fairly bottom-up, where I start with an analysis of a cultural object and build a theory up from there. That’s what I did in Resilience & Melancholy with the soar, and that’s what I do in the vibes book, where I look to how things like recommender algorithms “think” (i.e., what kinds of mathematical models of probability they build and how those models are structured) and then found a philosophical model with a similar epistemology (it’s phenomenology). If recommender algorithms are doing phenomenology with math, then the critical phenomenological tradition provides a wealth of resources for both critiquing what’s wrong with that way of thinking and model better, more just was to do it. So while I do agree with Kornbluh that the phenomenon she identifies as “immediacy” exists, but I don’t think it’s a problem for the reason she thinks it’s a problem because I don’t really have a horse in the psychoanalysis race.

In popular music studies, what Kornbluh calls “immediacy” is described more in the same terms that the tech/UX world uses to describe their ideals, namely, “frictionless” experience. In the tech/UX world, “friction is any element that makes users stop and consider their options in experience design.” If something in an interface makes a user step out of the task directly at hand and reflect on themselves and the interface, that’s friction - it impedes the efficient use of the interface by making people stop and think. This is Heidegger’s broken hammer for the age of platform capitalism.

As Liz Pelly explains in her book on Spotify, from about 2017 until very recently, the platform’s main aim was to keep users constantly tuned in so they were continually harvesting data from them. To do that, they had to reduce any friction that might cause someone to press pause, close the app, and stop listening. This quest for frictionless UX led Spotify to something quite different than immediacy, however. As Pelly puts it, “the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music” (40). She interviews many workers in the music industry who all note that Spotify actively promoted (e.g., by putting on popular playlists) “chill inoffensive” music that sounded like “emotional wallpaper” (83). This was music for “soundtracking” one’s day, on in the background as one does other things. Far from immersive immediacy, this so-called “lean-back listening” is more of a void than a plenum. This is most evident in Pelly’s reporting on the platform’s understanding of what constituted “chill”: “Anything can be chilled and repurposed in the economy of passive listening…Another source told me that no one internally could agree on what ‘chill’ meant--that it was so ambiguous, it had ‘no definition that is meaningful’” (53). As I explain in Good Vibes Only, “chill” is a profile that can be applied to any style of music; it has no definitive features, just a signature alignment among whatever set of features one may be working with in a given song. Put differently, chill has no essential determinate properties. Chill’s void of clear and distinct meaning echoes Spotify’s approach to frictionless listening: empty music out and reduce it to more or less nothing.

Lean-back listening is the determinate negation of immediacy: they’re both produced and motivated by political economies of platformed algorithmic recommendation, but in one context (music) we have experiential nothingness and in the other (Kornbluh’s take on streaming video) we have experiential immediacy. Whereas my friend and colleague Dan DiPiero claims that the Spotify sound is “the aural equivalent of the kind of image flattening that Kornbluh writes about, where sounds become meaningless placeholders for our distracted need for noise in the background,” he’s both right and wrong at the same time. Lean-back listening and immediacy are dialectically related: on the one hand, there’s being, pure being, so full and unbroken that it’s…absent specific identifiable features…which makes it identical to nothing, pure nothing.

This same-but-different relation between being, pure being, and nothing, pure nothing is the subject of the first chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic. There’s “being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equally only to itself.” This is being as pure undifferentiated presence. However, lacking differentiation, “it is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is NOTHING to be intuited in it…Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact NOTHING.” Pure being is void of qualification. At the same time, to the extent that “nothing IS (exists) in our thinking” it is “empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought as pure being.” To be so full as to have no differentiation is the same as to have no discernible content - being pure being is nothing pure nothing. As examples of pure being and pure nothing, immediacy and lean-back listening/chill embody the same dialectical relationship Hegel identifies in their exemplars.

So the question of whether Kornbluh’s immediacy thesis applies to popular music is: yes and no. Music is a context where what she theorizes as a plenum and full presence emerged as a void. Platforms and their personalization algorithms absolutely contribute to the erosion of anything like a sensus communis (which, for the record, was not great to begin with and basically a theory of white masculine superiority) or a common distribution of the sensible. But they don’t necessarily or inherently push users towards fast, immersive ~being~. 2025’s biggest song is basically empty slop designed to soundtrack whatever poignant social media moment TikTok or Instagram users want to share at a particular moment. In popular music the style of late capitalism is nothing.

***

There’s a philosophical reason why music can’t exhibit immediacy in the way Kornbluh theorizes it in the 21st century. At least in the Western tradition, music was thought to be an immediate expression of physical reality back in the eighteenth century; as Derrida’s Grammatology sort of intuits, music’s moment with the “metaphysics of presence” was back when people like Rousseau and composer/music theorist Jean-Phillippe Rameau were debating whether harmonic function should be tied to the order of intervals in the overtone series.

I said Derrida sort of intuits this because he gets the stakes of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages correct, but he misunderstands which side of those stakes Rousseau himself comes down on. Tl;dr - Rousseau and Derrida actually agree more than they disagree.

This is the subject of the second chapter of my first book, so I’m going to stick to the main point and let you look there for the details. Before he was known as a philosopher, Rousseau was known for his work in music. His beef with Rameau was the Kendric v Drake of its day, and the substance of that beef was whether the principles of music theory should be derived from the physical properties of sound, or whether they were cultural (or “moral” as Rousseau describes it). Rameau was arguing for what became the model for tonal harmony, which orders the harmonic syntax of Western classical music according to the order of intervals in the overtone series: the octave, the major fifth, the major fourth, etc. Parodying Rameau’s argument Rousseau summarizes: “Gentlemen, he would say to them, if we are to philosophize properly we must go back to the physical causes” (EOL 285). Rameau argued that this system was universal because it was natural and unmediated by culture - it’s based in the (supposedly objective) physics of sound. Rousseau argued that “nature” itself is a cultural construct and all musical perception is learned and cultural - i.e., mediated. Rousseau writes,

Physical observations have occasioned every kind of absurdity in discussions of the fine arts…by itself a sound has no absolute character by which it might be recognized…the power which music exercises over our souls is not the project of sounds…[but] moral effects [which] also have moral causes” (EOL 290/284).

Rameau was arguing for the immediacy of quote-unquote “nature,” and Rousseau countered with cultural mediation. That’s what Derrida gets wrong: in the Essay and all the musical writing that preceded it (Letter on French Music, Examination of Two Principles, etc.) Rousseau is not team presence, he’s team mediation and culture.

Charles Mills calls this era of Rousseau’s writing his “non-ideal” period, where, unlike in his later writing on contractarianism or education, Rousseau is arguing against forms of abstraction that naturalize patriarchal racial capitalist epistemologies (Contract & Domination, 96). So if this early Rousseau feels inconsistent with the later, more famous Rousseau, it is!

Rameau wanted to argue for the unmediated character of tonal harmony because the only way the emerging classically liberal thought of the day permitted the existence of hierarchies was if they were natural. Civil society and the public sphere were supposedly universal, disinterested, and equal; differences and inequities existed, but in the private sphere. For music to be a fine art, it needed to demonstrate fine art’s definitive capacity to be universal, objective, and free of overt bias; any existing biases, inequities, etc., had to be rooted in nature, like for example they thought gender and racial difference was.

So the project of musical immediacy is in fact tied to the 18th century classically liberal public/private distinction, not to its 21st century obsolescence.

As I explain in my forthcoming article in American Music, Cheryl Harris’s 1993 “Whiteness as Property” explicitly addresses affirmative action backlash, which by that time had been in the courts for nearly two decades. Lawsuits such as Bakke vs. The Regents of the University of California treated affirmative action as a kind of personal injury claim, reframing the political distributive issue as a private property infraction. In US tort law, for a plaintiff to be liable for injuries another person suffered, those injuries have to come directly from the plaintiff’s actions or negligence. Anti-affirmative action suits argued that present-day individual white men weren’t directly responsible for historical racism or sexism, so the opportunities affirmative action denied them actually made these men the victims of lost wages and opportunities. THEY were the ‘real’ victims of personal injury here, they claimed. Harris claims that these anti-affirmative action lawsuits remade whiteness-as-property around personal injury.

This legal and cultural milieu re-made mainstream white masculinity around victimhood and personal injury. Modern rock had long been what Lauren Goodlad called a domain of “men who feel and cry.” While that used to be a subcultural alternative to strong, hard, and stoic mainstream white masculinity, affirmative action backlash re-made mainstream white masculinity into terms compatible with modern rock’s typical sadboys. This is why alt rock crossed over when it did - not because of any changes in music or musical taste, but because it suddenly fit with a kind of masculinity mainstream bros identified with.

You can read more about that claim in my article when it comes out next year.

But one thing I didn’t really get to develop is that British neoreactionaries looked to a different part of the post-punk tradition for a different mechanism of performing white identity. Christopher Haworth’s study of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”’s use of British industrial music zines from the 1980s and 1990s suggests that European neoreactionaries like Nick Land similarly were influenced by and shared affinities with alternative rock broadly construed. Drawing on industrial musicians like Psychic TV’s use of sublime escoterism and occultism, these Dark Enlightenment figures evoked a “whiteness [that] manifested in the protection from harm it provided to authors and artists to immerse themselves in the anti-rational, abject, and censored-including explorations of right-wing escoterism or the supernatural thinking that informed the Third Reich” (Hayworth 231). This music confronted listeners with all kinds of dis-order that threatened to overwhelm them, but this functioned like a test against which Dark Enlightenment denizens could prove their strength and rationality.

In enlightenment philosophy, aesthetic sublimity was the experience of being nearly overwhelmed by a stronger physical or intellectual force (like the Matterhorn or the idea of infinity), only to remember that one’s reason (i.e., one’s white masculinity) was an even more formidable force. As Kant (author of “What Is Enlightenment?) explains,

If something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any reasoning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear, in its form, contrapurposive to our power of judgment, incommensurate without power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination (Crit of Judgment, 246).

The feeling of sublimity is tied to the threat of being overwhelmed by something “unbounded,” and thus transgressing the limits of our capacity for thought or reason. Kant is clear that “the sublime must not be sought in things of nature, but must be sought only in our ideas” (250) because natural things are objects of sensation rather than (purely) thought. For example, the idea of infinity is sublime because it transgresses any human idea of number or counting. However, when we realize that the idea of infinity is potentially overwhelming our capacity for reason, we also have proof that our capacity for thinking is more powerful than our capacity for sensation, because we can think and imagine things that are bigger and stronger than anything we could sense. As Kant puts it, “sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (251). The feeling of sublimity is evidence that the human mind is stronger than anything else out there in the world.

In enlightenment aesthetics, discussions of race and gender pervade theories of the sublime. Kant, for example, thinks women and “oriental” men should not be able to experience the sublime. As Christine Battersby explains, for Edmund Burke, “the sublime that threatens to overwhelm the male ego via a form of mental rape that trenders him (temporarily) passive” (7); perhaps unsurprisingly, Burke also claims that the sight of a Black woman is enough to spur an experience of sublimity (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of The Beautiful and Sublime, 144). In both cases, Burke understands the experience of the sublime as an encounter with challenges to white masculinity. As Battersby explains, the point of this encounter, and why it ultimately feels good in the end, is that it’s a chance to prove the strength and resoluteness of one’s white masculinity: “the ego encounter[s] ‘nature’ or a ‘feminine’ other, and then re-establish[es[ control via a return to a self that is confident in its underlying freedom, its mastery of otherness, and in the (male) poet or philosopher’s right to speak and be heard” (16). As theorized in the regular-degular Enlightenment, the sublime is an experience whereby the inner individual conquers feminized, non-white challenges to its white masculine identity and supremacy.

It’s not hard to see why white supremacist Dark Enlightenment figures would jump on this sort of theory of the sublime: it is literally a narrative of white masculine supremacy. Haworth’s article shows how post-punk and industrial music provided fodder for experiences of sublimity, which then feed DE politics: by talking about all this weird disgusting and nominally transgressive stuff, DE writers and their readers get to perform the white masculine supremacy they seek to platform politically.

This is something very different than what’s going on with the American alt-right’s use of alt rock. As my article shows, as the 90s unfolded the explicit politics of bands like Creed and Limp Bizkit - and the Clear Channel stations and DJs that platformed them - are directly aligned with what will be alt-right grievance culture: they perform the exact white masculine personal injury that we will later see echoed, for example, by manosphere influencers. Second, while the DE’s use of the sublime functions mainly at the level of the metaphysical, the alt rock/alt right use of personal injury is directly about private property in a very non-metaphysical and non-metaphorical sense. Instead of demonstrating reason’s incapacity to be transgressed by the irrational, the American alt-right claims that their property entitlement has been transgressed by women, feminists, immigrants, etc. There’s also a class difference: the bands and zines cited by DE figures in Haworth’s article are quite subcultural and typically require a certain amount of cultural and educational capital to be familiar with. 90s alt rock, however, is kind of THE definition of lowbrow. Chris Molanphy calls that period “Possibly the most loathed period for music of the last half-century.” So even though the British Dark Enlightenment and the American alt-right look to the post-punk tradition for aesthetic and political inspiration, they look to very different parts of that tradition for very different narratives and concepts.

We need to be very careful how we frame “human creativity”, because as scholarship in a range of fields has shown, any time you try to define “the human” in terms of essential qualities or capacities, it’s impossible to fully capture all of the actually living persons that we would commonsensically call human, such as disabled and impaired people, intersex people, people practicing non-Western cultures and their values, just to name a few of the most common exclusions. If you say the thing that defines humans is “language use,” then human babies and some disabled people don’t count but non-human primates who can use sign language do. For the same reason, it won’t work to try to find some objective property of human creativity that distinguishes it from AI. Human creativity is so diverse and varied that it even, in for example the case of Thomas Kinkade, basically mirrors AI slop. Compare Kinkade’s “Rosebud Cottage”

To this AI-generated image on Freepik

We can assume that Kinkade’s body of work has been used to train these image generators, but the point is Kinkade came up with this cheesy stuff all on his own! With his human brain and creativity! There is a lot of human-made slop out there, some of it, like Kinkade’s, is even extremely practiced and refined.

When it comes to distinguishing between “humans” and AI, existential phenomenology offers what I think is the most helpful and accurate toolkit. Specifically, I think Beauvoir’s distinction between “being” and “existence” can distinguish between people and artificially intelligent machines: AI has being, but it does not exist because it’s not a mutual participant in the co-creation of existence.

As an existentialist, Beauvoir thinks that humans have no essential being, i.e., that human “being is lack of being” (13); that’s her way of saying something like “existence before essence (aka being).” Because I have no essential being, I can shape my existence in any way my situation facilitates. For example, human bodies can’t fly like birds or swim like fish, but by working together we figured out how to build airplanes and SCUBA diving equipment; we considered the material affordances and limitations of typical human bodies and figured out how to make them fly and dive. Rather than treating the facts of typical human embodiment as an essential, fixed form of being, this perspective understands these facts as contingent situations that can be worked with and through. This is what Beauvoir means by the idea that humans “lack being”: there is no singular, universal, fixed, eternal, unchangeable human reality. However, humans are real: we exist. And our existence’s contingency and malleability is possible because we lack being. As Beauvoir puts it,

this lack has a way of being which is precisely existence. In Hegelian terms it might be said that we have here a negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established. Man makes himself a lack, but he can deny the lack as lack and affirm himself as a positive existence. He then assumes the failure [of being]...However, rather than being a Hegelian act of surpassing it is a matter of a conversion. For in Hegel the surpassed terms are preserved only as abstract moments, whereas we consider that existence still remains a negativity in the positive affirmation of itself. And it does not appear, in its turn, as the term of a further synthesis. The failure is not surpassed, but assumed” (13)

Note the distinction Beauvoir makes between “surpassing” and “assuming” a lack of being. To surpass or sublate (Aufheben) the lack of being is to cancel out the tension between being and nothing by positing another form or level of being. On the other hand, to assume the lack of being is to acknowledge it and not cancel it out; to exist is to have a reality that is not being. Existing (an active process) is not being (a static state). In Beauvoir’s system, existing consists in doing things in the world, changing and re-orienting ourselves and our situations. In so doing, i.e., in existing, we negate a present state of being and create another one. An affirmation of a negative, assuming one’s lack of being consists in acting upon the fact that one has no inherent, immutable reality by changing one’s present situation and creating a (slightly) new reality. Whereas Hegel and most of the Western philosophical tradition take “lack of being” as a bug in need of fixing or resolution in some higher order of reality, Beauvoir considers it to be the defining feature of human existence: existing reorients a present state of being into something else.

In claiming that humans “lack being,” Beauvoir’s model cannot be made to endorse or frame any particular mode of being as more legitimate than another. Being is there to be negated in acts of existing, which reorient the world in new ways. What matters is existing in ways that are oriented toward…existence itself, or the act of negating a present state of being and creating a newly-oriented one. Because individual existences are enmeshed with one another, orienting my actions to the diminishment of others’ existence also diminishes my own, and orienting my actions toward my personal existence also orients them to the existences of others. In the Beauvoir scholarship, this orientation is called “moral freedom.” The language of freedom points to the non-essentialist character of existence: lacking being, existence has no necessary features or determinations limiting its future directions. This freedom is moral, however, because human existence is, in Beauvoir’s ontology, inescapably relational: my own freedom depends on the capacities of others to exercise theirs. As Arp notes, “If one acts to curtail others’s freedom then one cannot achieve moral freedom” (28); a freedom that fails to orient itself to the freedom of others fails to be moral not because it fails to meet some external moral standard, but because it fails to fully orient itself toward freedom/existence. Beauvoirian existence cannot itself be taken as a legitimating ground because it has no being to legitimate. Framing existence as ambiguously both individual and common, Beauvoir’s ontology creates a system of accountability that can operate in the absence of legitimating values such as “the greatest good” or “virtue” or “life.”

Our actions orient the world that we share with other people. Because each action is oriented more positively toward some and more negatively toward others, we are accountable to all in our individual choices. For Beauvoir, oppression prevents people from genuinely assuming their existence, i.e., from being able to negate a present state of being and create a new one. For example, recent attempts by U.S. higher education institutions to criminalize student protest impede these students’ ability to have a say in what sorts of things their institutions invest their money in, such as weapons manufacturers. These protests are an attempted exercise in moral freedom: they are actions in service of negating a present reality (that their school sends money to make weapons of war) and create a new one oriented less towards the military-industrial complex and more towards decoloniality. By criminalizing this protest, U.S. colleges and universities prevent their students from contributing the exercise of their moral freedom to the mutual orientation of humanity’s existence. Oppression diminishes human existence at both the individual and the general scale. Thus, because Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics holds that there are no absolute, universal values beyond the fact of human existence itself, oppression is uniquely condemnable because it is oriented directly against existence.

Human existence is collaborative and mutual: my existence is oriented to and oriented by others’, and we are all responsible to one another for our contributions to our shared reality. AI cannot take responsibility for its outputs. People respond to those outputs, and in this respect AI can impact our shared existence, but only insofar as it inspires someone to do something. AI doesn’t have the moral freedom that humans have. And this moral freedom is rooted in our social and political orientation to one another; the thing that humans have and AI does not is society. In other words, the difference between humans and AI is not biological or cognitive or related to any objective feature or characteristics of either us or them; it’s a political difference rooted in AI’s inability to be responsible and thus be in community. To the extent that people start to rely on things like chatbots rather than on one another, AI is a form of bad faith that actively erodes human existence, i.e., society.

I don’t think AI meets Beauvoir’s other criterion for existence: it is not capable of negating a present reality and creating a new one. First, it can’t do anything actually new or original. It generates probabilities based on patterns in past data. It can recombine its inputs, but it cannot negate those inputs and put out something different from them. For example, I’m sitting here at my laptop writing, but when I get up to let the dogs out I negate my present reality and push my reality along another vector. AI can’t do that: if all it had in its training set was sitting at the laptop writing, it could just come up with iterative variations on that. Unless it had some data about standing up to let the dog out in its set, it’s not going to suddenly generate that as an output.

Because AI can’t convert being into existence by negating its present reality and creating a new one, it lacks the capacity to participate in the mutual creation of existence. Like Beauvoir’s figure of the child, AI-resurrected grandma “escapes the anguish of freedom…her whims and her faults concern only her. They do not weigh upon the earth. They cannot make a dent in the serene order of a world which existed before her, without her, and where she is in a state of security by virtue of her very insignificance. She can do with impunity whatever she likes. She knows that nothing can ever happen through her; everything is already given; her acts engage nothing, not even herself.” Just as children playing house aren’t making decisions or actions that impact anything outside that play scenario, AI-resurrected grandma lives in a playspace separate from the messy real world of human existence. If living people act on her advice, they face the responsibility and consequences for acting on information generated in a play-world.

AI may function in a play world, but the machines that run it have a very real material impact on the world. But that impact is not the result of the AI’s choices - it’s the result of all the companies deciding to build huge server farms that gulp up all our water, much in the same way that cows who fart methane into the atmosphere at quantities to impact greenhouse gasses aren’t responsible for their existence at that scale, agribusiness is.

We are bags of meat stuck here on this rock together - and it’s that together that defines us. That’s a political and social definition, one grounded in moral freedom. AI does not share our reality because it does not exist together with us - it just has being.

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In its original context, Dada used artistic expressions of nonsense to show how the violence of WWI transgressed the norms and boundaries of shared consensus reality so spectacularly as to render them meaningless. For example, nonsense prose is a way to artistically represent literally unspeakable violence; it invokes a formerly shared reality as something that has been illegitimately transgressed or destroyed by state violence.

Though Lavin locates Dada as something that happened over a century ago and has yet to have a revival, there’s a much more recent and local example USians can look to as we figure out how to respond to the secret police disappearing people and National Guard troops deployed across blue cities: the new wave band Devo.

Formed in Akron, Ohio in the late 1970s, Devo was a direct response to Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale’s presence at the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University. Netflix’s new Devo documentary covers this in detail, but the band has been very outspoken about this for a long time. Twenty years ago, Casale gave an interview to the Vermont Review where he said:

All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherfuckers. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks – none of us knew, none of us could have imagined ... They shot into a crowd that was running from them! . I got real, real pissed off.

“Devolution” is the philosophy Casale and Mothersbaugh developed using their art backgrounds to take a lefty and avant-garde riff on fin-de-siecle anti-Darwinism. A kind of Adorno-and-Horkheimer-inspired take on the otherwise conservative idea that the trappings of modern life create degeneracy in society, “the band’s devolutionist philosophy claims that the world is in a downward spiral of decadence, fuelled by moral decline, mechanisation, and overconsumption. Ultimately, mankind will dictate its own demise or devolution.” Parodying things like bourgeois white masculinity, postwar American media, and the like, Devo pointed out the absurdity and repressiveness of mainstream American popular culture. A state that would send in the military to shoot its own unarmed citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights is certainly a devolved one - the fact that these students were all white and at least well on their way to the middle class makes that devolution appear even more strong, as these students come from classes typically subject to both the law’s obligations and its protections.

Devo explicitly connected their playful devolutionary aesthetic to Dada. As Casale tells Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again,

After Kent, it seemed like you could either join a guerrilla group like the Weather

Underground, actually try assassinating some of those evil people - the way THEY had murdered anybody in the sixties who’d tried to make a difference--or you could just make some kind of wacked-out creative Dada art response. Which is what Devo did (76-7).

Casale’s framing of Dada as “wacked-out” points to one key feature that Devo shares with its 20th century precursors: the reference to a prior consensus norm or reality that can then be spectacularly transgressed.

This shared sense of a common reality is being directly attacked by today’s media environment, where recommendation algorithms and AI deliver “personalized” content tailored to each individual’s niche tastes. The technical term for this is a “filter bubble,” which the BBC defines as “a space where our previous online behaviour (search history, likes, shares and shopping habits) influences what we see online and on our social media feeds and in what order.” There are many academic studies about the connection between algorithmic personalization, filter bubbles, and political polarization.

Algorithmic personalization amplifies a much older epistemic problem, one which pre-dates computers and even mass media. Philosopher Charles Mills calls this problem an “epistemology of ignorance”. Systemic oppression and power differentials lead so-called “consensus reality” to be modeled on the experiential reality of society’s most privileged and powerful group(s): their conseusus gets overgeneralized as everyone’s. Mills uses the language of “virtual reality” to describe how white people inhabit a world structured by white supremacy: they “live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland, a ‘consensual hallucination,’ to quote William Gibson’s famous characterization of cyberspace, though this particular hallucination is located in real space” (The Racial Contract, 18). White supremacy organizes white people’s epistemic field such that their mistaken consensus (e.g., that racism is over, that colorblindness creates equity, etc.) counts as “reality” as such. For nearly all of its 300-ish year history, liberal consensus reality has been a white supremacist “consensual hallucination” naturalizing whiteness and white privilege.

It’s precisely that white consensual reality Devo targets. As Theo Cateforis has argued, new wave performers such as Devo used the figure of “nervousness,” traditionally associated with white people and white identity as

a space within which they could both celebrate and critique their cultural backgrounds, and also present a version of whiteness quite different from what had come to typify the societal norms of the 1970s…the appearance of new wave’s nervous front man in the late 1970s offered nothing less than an alternative masculinity, one whose greatest power derived from the ways it diverged from or contradicted what had become rock’s normative performative stance” (Are We Not New Wave? 80-82)

Devo’s nerdy nervousness was a critique of cock-rock style sexuality, which involved the white appropriation of stereotypical Black masculinity. Think of their cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”: it’s all stilted and jerky, not frustrated and horny like the original. In this way, they drew attention to the normative assumptions behind rock star stereotypes of the day.

If Devo was attacking some common shared stereotypes and assumptions for their complicity in the hegemonic and devolutionist American culture, their project is vastly different than the one we face today in 2025. Their target was a mass-mediated white consensus reality; in the era of streaming, algorithmic personalization, filter bubbles, library and public school defunding, and the like, our task is instead to figure out how to build alternative ways of being and knowing in common.

And this time we can improve on old liberal bourgeois consensus reality. The task is to convince people that we depend on one another - that’s the actual reality that we need to get everyone to concede. The only way we can exist is if we do so together, in society. Existential phenomenology holds that the fact of human interdependence is the only “reality” not shaped by human cultural intervention; this is the point of Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, if you want to read about this in more detail. Every aspect of human existence beyond this fact is up for grabs, and existing is the ongoing process of (re)negotiating that grab.

In addition to being just about the very minimum you need to get people to agree on to create a shared sense of reality, the idea that we all depend on one another is precisely the idea that everyone from AI boosters to manosphere influencers to tech platforms to most people in position of power in the US Federal Government are trying to destroy in order to better control and extract money from us.

I don’t think dada-esque nonsense is the thing we need in this specific moment. And the work that the arts can do to help create this minimum sense of shared reality is probably less representational and more practical. No matter what art says or depicts, the meaning it creates unfolds as people share experience of making and receiving it together: a band debates how a song should go, friends at a concert discuss whether the cover in the encore was better than the original, academics give papers at conferences about a painting’s use of color, and so on. Similarly, art only happens when people come together to make and distribute it. Participating in the arts ecosystem we can practice the kinds of interdependence that constitute the fundamental fact of human society. To make, share, and receive art is to participate in society. (Certainly this has been done in more and less equitable ways, but that’s again the whole issue of the continual renegotiation of the underlying fact of interdependence.) Exercising what Anna Kornbluh and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado call our “right to culture” may be one of the most expedient and low-overhead/buy-in ways to start convincing people that we do in fact live in society. And although there are certainly forms of “bad faith” culture that denies our interdependence and sociality (think about that Nazi group chat recently uncovered by Politico, or if you know Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, think of all those personas in chapter 2 who live in bad faith (the child, the nihilist, the adventurer, the serious man)), apart from that it really doesn’t matter WHAT the content of the culture you participate in is: maybe you have a group of friends with monthly progressive dinners, maybe you are in a band, maybe you have a weekly role-playing game session, whatever. Exercising our right to culture is an onramp to the more profound realization that we exist together in society, that fact is inescapable, and we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking otherwise.

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People have had things to say about Warren’s hit. Reddit user TheBatemanFlex described the song as “imagine dragons with vocals like hozier,” and that framing captures the song’s millennial hipster indie stomp-clap vibe as filtered through the kind of contemporary Christian music I heard for example when attending a nondenominational Christmas service with family in the Midwest. Like many, many songs before it, “Ordinary”’s lyrics talk about a love that could be either interpersonal and romantic or metaphysical and divine, and the song’s quite-loud-quiet form gives it a general “uplifty” vibe.

But as Business Insider’s Callie Alghrim observes, these good vibes are “ideal for soundtracking a throwaway emotional moment on reality TV, but devoid of any real personality.” A former resident of TikTok influencer HypeHouse, Warren explicitly wrote the song so that it could be used to accompany media representations of any romantic relationship, from a wedding video to a TikTok montage to a performance on the reality dating show Love is Blind (which Warren made in that show’s 8th season). To succeed as licensable content, “Ordinary” had to be flexible enough to adapt and give voice to a wide array of private individual feelings and experiences; it lacked a strong personality so users could insert their own with audiovisual touches like montages, filters, and the like.

In this respect, “Ordinary” is different from a mass-produced commodity because it produces a different kind of flattening - not the normalizing homogenization of a mass or population, but the evacuation of shared feeling and experience into privatized self-management. This is not the fungibility of commodified of pop acts like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC or Britney and Christina that leads to a single shared standard; this is an adaptable formula that lends itself to infinite personalization. “Ordinary” can soundtrack an Insta story about my wedding anniversary equally well as it could soundtrack a TikTok of a beloved pet. If Adorno and Horkheimber criticized the mass commodified culture industry for making everyone and everything look and sound the same, content like “Ordinary” is about evacuating any shared sense of likes and preferences in favor of private individual experience.

In an earlier post I argued that AI slop and its regime of bad taste turns away from Enlightenment ideas of bourgeois good taste and their grounding in Classically liberal commitments to civil society and the public sphere. To exhibit bad taste is to show that one is not subordinated to emasculating dependence on things like a wife or, more importantly, society. To declare one’s bad taste is to declare that there is no such thing as society, just individual men. Specifically, these individual men adhere to an exceptionally reactionary gender ideology that reframes masculinity in Ancient Greek terms as “Puritanism about virility.” This style of masculinity is popular in right-wing subcultures like the manosphere and Silicon Valley, and it is part of the broader “alt-right” movement of the last decade.

If AI slop is explicitly reactionary, then the phenomenon I’m calling “ordinary slop” is its reactionary centrist counterpart. Just as ordinary slop softens the avowed bad taste of right-wing extremists like Matt Walsh into the merely bland vibes of Warren’s song, it dresses the rejection of sociality and common experience up in less extreme and explicitly reactionary terms. Instead of violently abjecting femininity and the (feminized) trappings of subordination to something like a social contract, ordinary slop offers the pleasures of personalization and platformed engagement while never asking users to open themselves to the possible friction of shared aesthetic experience. That sort of friction could include the tension of sharing aesthetic appreciation of a band or a film with people who have political views that oppose your own. For example, just before the COVID pandemic I went to see legendary Chicago industrial band Ministry open for Slayer (I think? I left after Ministry’s set) in Springfield, MA. Though Ministry’s frontman Al Jourgensen has long been associated with left-wing figures like Jello Biafra and they had a new single with an explicitly anti-Trump video, Slayer’s fans, especially in that part of the country, lean more to the right. While Ministry played the single with their anti-Trump video projected behind the band, a drunk white guy with a buzzcut sitting to my right jumped up, pumped his fist, and yelled “Fuck you Ministry, you queers!” Not only did this guy have zero sense of Ministry’s then 40-year history of baiting exactly that reaction from conservatives (see this episode of Donahue from 1984), but clearly he felt so much dissonance between what was happening onstage and his own political commitments that he couldn’t contain himself. Likewise, I had to deal with the fact of sharing space with this obvious homophobe. After some dirty looks from myself and several other people nearby, the dude sat down and grumbled. Sharing space with people means friction, and slop of both the AI and ordinary sort is designed to deliver Silicon Valley’s ideal of frictionless experience by absolving us of our need and obligation to participate in society.

It’s probably no coincidence that ordinary slop is what the pop music industry delivered us in the wake of the decade-long wave of popular feminist pop that started with Beyonce’s self-titled album drop in December 2013. During this time, the heated debates surrounding #MeToo and the ethics of enjoying art by serial abusers generated lots of friction in taste communities. Just this year the new Arcade Fire record flopped due to its misfired and possibly half-hearted attempt to address allegations that their frontman sexually abused several women. The band was correct that fans and critics expected some kind of accountability from the band and its frontman, but their blundered attempt at it produced an album that was neither socially nor aesthetically satisfying. By eliminating the issue of sociality and social obligation, ordinary slop greases over past sources of friction among artists, fans, and critics.

Ten years ago I wrote about how the reactionary centrists of the day used Adele’s “Hello” as a phenomenon that greased over political differences through the united appreciation of a shared cultural object. Sitting at the top of the Hot 100 for seven weeks at the time of my late-December 2015 writing, “Hello” was in some ways the “Ordinary” of its day. Analyzing fan and critical commentary on the song alongside an SNL skit about it, I argued that then-contemporary reception of the song “eschew[ed] appeals to knowledge in favor of immediate, friction-less emotional and intuitive identification.” In a world structured by patriarchal racial capitalism, such frictionlessness is a feature of gender, class, and especially racial privilege. “Hello”’s musical aesthetics evoked that frictionless through a semiotics of whiteness, and in that respect Adelle’s single was not that different than the Trump campaign and its less-implicit appeals to white racial identity:

In both Trump’s and “Hello”’s case, fans experience an apparently immediate emotional identification with a performance, and assume that everyone does, or at least should, do the same, because everyone ought to share this white interpretive horizon.

The SNL “Hellosgiving” skit is the most widely-known and illustrative example of how the reactionary center used the common appreciation of Adelle’s hit to misrepresent the supposedly universal appeal of white European culture as the supposedly liberal tolerance of difference (“music is another language” discourse strikes a-fucking-gain!). The skit depicts what I described as a “multicultural, quintessentially liberal group that tolerates even your racist (therefore white) Republican relatives” that gathered without division or polarization around the Thanksgiving table. But as I argued in that piece, “Hello” hails these individuals into common appreciation through its appeal to white and whitened musical devices. It’s that appeal to and centering of whiteness that makes this supposedly liberal centrism reactionary at its core.

In the ten years since “Hello,” the reactionary center has abandoned the strategy of common and shared experience; ordinary slop leverages the affordances of algorithmic personalization to produce listeners who engage music entirely privately, e.g. as ways of investing in their human capital. In this way, ordinary slop archives the same ends as “Hello” - misrepresenting white supremacy as liberal tolerance - without the expense or effort of producing a song people feel compelled to connect with. “Hello” worked in its original context because the lady can SING; her performance evokes relatable emotional experiences that draw listeners together in their shared humanness. “Ordinary”...saves everyone the need to invest emotional labor. The difference between “Hello” in 2015 and “Ordinary” in 2025 shows the degree to which the reactionary center has abandoned liberal ideas of the (supposedly) pluralist, multicultural public sphere and adopted “Family Values” and Silicon-Valley style privatization. Ordinary slop is ubiquitous but void of any common, shared experience. Billionaires and fascists want to create that void so they can slip in and subject us to even worse exploitation and subjection.

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Augustine’s post presents a man in a nominally heterosexual marriage as being “turned gay” by joining his wife in implicitly feminine pursuits like “home decor shopping.” White masculine cool traditionally appropriated stereotypically feminine traits like emotional sensitivity (Lauren Goodlad called post-punk the purview of “men who feel and cry”) or big hair and makeup (think New York Dolls, Bowie, 80s hair metal) and made them signs of elite masculinity qua transgression, rebellion, innovation, and the like. In this exchange between Augustine and Walsh, however, femininity is something to be rejected, not appropriated, to the point that it’s not having sex with women that makes a guy straight or “gay,” but his ability to dominate or be dominated by either feminine inclinations like shopping or interior design or women themelves/one’s wife. Walsh and Augustine focus on the appearance of mastery and avoiding any whiff of either femininity or subordination (which are effectively the same to them), as though Walsh’s bad taste in art (a painting of him meeting extraterrestrials) laudable because it shows his fortitude against anything so feminine as a refined sense of aesthetic judgment.

It is perhaps no coincidence that this view of masculinity from a guy who goes by “Alexander Augustine” is basically the same as the ancient Greek one. David Halperin describes ancient Greeks as “puritans about virility…thematized as domination.” In this context, to be a man was to be full master of both oneself and others, top of a supposedly natural hierarchy of ruler and ruled. Anything that threatened to weaken that mastery - such as what Halperin calls the “excessive desire” that cannot be tamed by reason - was to be rejected as feminizing and emasculating. Like Augustine and Walsh, Plato thought the arts (and especially music) were bad precisely to the extent that they mimicked a feminine lack of mastery, specifically, reason’s lack of mastery over the body. To be a “puritan about virility” meant actively policing against incursions that might upset the rigid metaphysical and political hierarchies that structured ancient Greek philosophy and society.

Cool is the product of a modern aesthetic and political project designed to upend these precise hierarchies. Jacques Ranciere calls that modern project “the aesthetic regime of art,” and as he explains, “the aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres.” In the European enlightenment, philosophers like Kant claimed “fine art” was metaphysically different in kind from other forms of creativity (such as craft) because it existed independently and autonomously of the rest of the world - art for art’s sake, etc. For example, if you are throwing a mug for people to use to drink liquid, you can’t put holes in it; the form of the mug is subservient to its material function. However, if you are making a mug for art’s sake, you can build it out of porous material like fur; an artwork’s form is not subservient to its function as anything but a work of art. Herbert Marcuse located art in what he called the “aesthetic dimension,” which was a kind of autonomous zone separate from the vicissitudes of daily reality. From this modern perspective, the thing that made art art was its freedom from the rules and hierarchies that organized the world of lived human experience, especially the rules and hierarchies that permeated Ancient Greek (and Roman, and Scholastic) thought.

Art’s autonomy intersects with the autonomy some of these very same philosophers granted citizens in civil society. Classically liberal political philosophy separated out the civil or public sphere from the private sphere; the US Bill of Rights identifies, for example, a right to privacy beyond which the state has no authority. While we all have our private differences (gender, race, wealth, ability, religion, etc.), we are, from this perspective, at least in theory all formally equal before the law - justice is blind, one citizen one vote, etc etc. Civil society is a sphere free from the particularities or limitations of daily life generally, and social reproduction in particular. Liberal ideals like a colorblind approach to race or France’s policies regarding secularism are examples of how civil society supposedly “frees” people from identities that may limit them in their private lives…just as the aesthetic dimension frees mugs from say the physics of fluids and turns a regular old cup into a work of art.

Liberated from the particularities of the world of social reproduction, civil society and the aesthetic dimension are at least in theory realms of objectivity and universality. Laws are supposed to apply equally to all, just as juries are to assess trial evidence in an unbiased way. Similarly, Kant claimed that aesthetic judgment should be “disinterested,” or removed from any private personal interest that might bias someone. A parallel to his theory of ethical judgment, Kant’s aesthetic judgment must be both unbiased and rational (rather than emotional…because he thinks women make all their judgments based on their emotions rather than their reason).

Universality, objectivity, rationality - even though the aesthetic regime upends Ancient Greek hierarchies and puritanisms, it still makes art and aesthetics a fundamentally intellectual matter far removed from things like feeling or sensation, which are still held in low esteem due to their association with women, indigenous people, and non-White people. As supposedly purely mental phenomena that are universal, objective, and rational, aesthetics thus aligns with the stereotypical features of white masculinity.

But separating out feeling and sensation from the experience of artworks makes that experience…no fun. Like, people still get judgy at the classical music concerts when people clap in the wrong place (like between movements rather than at the end of a work) because the cultural norms in such contexts require bodies and emotions to be rigorously disciplined. Robert Gooding-Williams has called this the problem of “receptivity” in Western philosophical aesthetics: from Kant to Nietzsche and beyond, normatively white male appreciators of art have sought to re-connect to the bodily, emotive receptivity proper aesthetic judgment closes off.

That re-connection to receptivity happens primarily through racial and gender appropriation. For example, Gooding-Williams shows how Nietzsche uses figures of femininity to describe what he finds compelling in musical experience, and I have further shown that he relies on 19th century concepts of whiteness wherein Italians don’t count as fully write to valorize the fun and pretty parts of Italian opera over the more legibly white German opera.

Cool is a 20th century American take on this practice of racial appropriation. Like a bazillion other vernacular terms, “cool” originated in Black vernacular cultures. As bell hooks writes, “once upon a time Black male ‘cool’ was defined by the ways in which Black men confronted the hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged.” Cool was about “the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered.” Cool in this sense is a knowing disidentification with hegemonic authority. hooks distinguishes between what she calls a “serious politics of cool” that’s about “nurtur[ing]the inner life of spirit as a survival strategy” from a kind of fake cool, “a cool pose, to front and fake it, to mask true feelings.” She locates “serious cool” in the blues tradition, where musicians used Black counter-modern aesthetics to address feelings (such as ‘the blues’) directly. If cool was originally about emotional intelligence, white fans, artists, and industry people took it and transformed it into fake cool. Cool became less about using emotional intelligence to navigate oppression and more about adopting the trappings of stereotypical Black masculinity as a way to dis-identify with mainstream white masculinity and prove one’s superiority over basic white dudes who lacked the embodied suave and sexual prowess denoted by performances of white masculine cool. James Dean was cool. Mick Jagger was cool. Even today, Justin Bieber is trying to be cool by appropriating R&B masculinities.

Cool is so strongly identified with white rock masculinity that in 1980 new wave provocateurs Devo positioned themselves as anti-rock stars with a song titled “We’re Through Being Cool.” Framed as the follow-up to their breakout hit “Whip It!,” “We’re Through” tells the story of some “young alien types” who drop their aloof, perhaps ironic detachment (i.e., their cool) and fight back against the square “ninnies and twits” who didn’t get their music. As pop music scholar Theo Cateforis explains, Devo were part of a broader post-punk trend where white musicians (mainly men) performed “nervousness” to “set [themselves] apart form the loose and exuberant African American musicians that surround [them]” (74). In this context, whiteness is uncool because it lacks the embodied ease and pleasure stereotypically attributed to Black music and musicians. Avant-garde musicians like Devo or David Byrne played uncool as a way to stand out from rock’s cool, and to do that they adopted the stereotypical trappings of white masculinity.

If rock’s masculine cool was once so ubiquitous it was ripe for parody, today cool seems to be going the way of rock itself - i.e., it’s primarily the domain of white women and people of color. But that’s not what this piece is about (though it is what the new chapter in the second edition of Resilience & Melancholy is about). The pop culture masculinities circulated by techbros and manosphere influencers is not about appropriating femininity and non-whiteness in order to re-connect with feeling and sensory pleasure, but about domination - of one’s body, one’s self, women, other people, and so on. For example, a 2021 piece by RS Benedict argues that in 2020s cinema “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny”: “A body…is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure…it is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets.” Bodies are to be mastered and shaped into perfect beauty, not enjoyed, because they are stores of wealth or human capital, not, you know, sacks of meat that feel things. Similarly, as I showed above, femininity is not something to be appropriated, but categorically and spectacularly rejected. The vibe has shifted away from modern cool and back to the Ancient Greek “Puritanism about virility” that modern aesthetics was itself built to reject.

This shift in the libidinal economy of pop culture masculinity is rooted in an underlying shift in the political economy of media. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries - i.e., the era of industrial mass culture - media industries from minstrelsy to film musicals used performances of appropriated Blackness to extract value from Black popular culture and put it in the hands of white performers and companies. In this context, “cool” was cultural capital that helped elite white men stand out from the masses. As scholar Matthew Morrison argues, this style of capitalism stripped away "the ephemeral" features of Black performance traditions (like improvised introjections or choreographic gestures) to turn them into legible private property such as notated sheet music. Appropriated cool enclosed on those ephemeralities and turned them into cultural capital for mainly white men. At both the level of intellectual property and cultural status, there was direct motivation for people and institutions coded white and masculine to directly and legibly appropriate Blackness and Black masculine cool.

However, today things like vibes discourse and AI make these “ephemeralities” legible as property. For example, Beyoncé credited Robyn S on ”Break My Soul” because the bass synth riff, though not musically identical at the level of notated rhythms and pitches, shared an overall vibe with the latter’s 90s hit “Show Me Love” similar enough to potentially raise the issue of copyright violation. When NFT and crypto companies hire “vibes managers”NFT and crypto companies hire “vibes managers” to make sure investors feel good about their investment’s future potential and firms like Open AI can stay afloat despite significant unprofitability firms like Open AI can stay afloat despite significant unprofitability by selling the belief in AI’s purportedly revolutionary future, ephemeral speculative realities are the ground zero of capitalist enclosure. Vibes are not just cultural capital, but literal property you can bank on.

At the level of affect, cool's sexual prowess (the stereotypical “moves like Jagger”) has been supplanted by the pursuit of potential virality, memestock/crypto financial windfalls, etc. Recently, crypto founder Jeffery Yu was found to have faked his own death in order to pump the value of his coin $LLJEFFY. This case lends credence to Seamus O’Reilly’s claim that the manosphere is basically a get-rich-quick scheme that promises exponential wealth and viral influence, and offers gamergate-style misogyny as a rain check to compensate for failing to deliver on those promised returns. Selling little more than self-discipline and misogyny as vibes, these influencers turn those vibes into winfalls of wealth like Joe Rogan’s $250 million deal wth Spotify. Though these influencers’ backlash-y politics tend to lean right, their mission to build stockpiles of private wealth through personal responsibility aligns just as cozily with neoliberal ideals as their overt politics do with neoreaction.

These self-mastered, hot but not horny selves are still distant from the kind of creativity that comes with art, art-making, and the like. But instead of appropriating performances of stereotypical white femininity and non-whitneness, today Artificial Intelligence grants people access to creativity in a legibly masculine way centered not so much in self-mastery, but the mastery of others.

Today, humanistic labor like writing, drawing, and communication has been throughly feminized, both by its association with women and by its demonetization. Prompting AI to write, draw, or communicate allows people (men) to do those things in ways that position them not as doing women’s work, but as masters of a subordinate.

In the era of self-mastery vibes, AI functions in place of appropriated white femininity and non-whiteness to masculinize creativity, receptivity, and the general capacity to make and relate to art that the performance of hegemonic white masculinity otherwise prohibits. These bros may be through being cool, but they’re still want what they haven’t got and steal from other people to get it, or at least get what they think it is. In this way, AI compounds the initial enclosure represented for example by Morrison’s concept of Blacksound: all the IP the AI was trained on is full of stolen and appropriated content, and AI-generated writing, drawing, and communication redoubles that theft (if perhaps without the erstwhile ‘love’, to use Lott’s famous formulation). Prompting AI is a way for people to demonstrate their purported mastery over others, at least in the form of the AI agent, and this gender-washes matters of style and creativity and taste into terms acceptable for the Walsh and Augustine crowd. So, even though techbros and manosphere influencers have brought back Ancient Greek masculinity, they use contemporary tech to update cool’s libidinal and political economy into terms compatible with this new/old form of Puritanism about virility.