Robin James > Quotes

“In the neoliberal episteme, probabilistic statistics are the rules used to define objects of knowledge, form concepts, and build theories. That’s why Winnubst defines the neoliberal episteme as a calculative rationality.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“ideas are more real than physical things, so the part of the line that represents ideas is bigger than the part that represents physical things.44 So the issue here isn’t just the transformation of social relations into ratios but the specific way those ratios are calculated. Plato’s ratios are geometric; they compare relative size or reality (e.g., the length of segments on the divided line is proportional to the “reality” of what that line represents: thoughts, Forms, images, etc.). The biopolitical ratios Mader describes above are frequential: they compare the relative frequency of a phenomenon in a group. For example, the normal curve (the “bell curve”) “is a graphic representation of the distribution of frequencies of values for a given measured property, with the most frequent values being those in the distribution that cluster around a mean or average in a single peak.”45 Normal curves measure a property’s pattern of intensity within a given population—this is what infant height/weight charts do, as do percentile scores on standardized tests. Statistical norms are ratios of ratios: they take individual measurements of the rate at which a given property x appears in a population (this is the first set of ratios) and then aggregates these and finds the most common or “normal” rate, the average rate y at which x rate occurs—again, this is measuring a pattern of intensity. “The”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“According to Spence, “neoliberalism relies on three populations, institutions, and spaces: those perfectly formed according to market logic, those able to be re-formed according to that logic, and the exceptions unable to be re-formed.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Music … first connected the senses to the invisible realm of mathematical theory.… Music harmonized experience with mathematics. — Peter Pesic, Music and the Making of Modern Science”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“In-the-red frequencies are outside the spectrum of frequencies that accurately reproduce and transmit white aesthetic values. Focusing our attention on dimensions of verbal, visual, and musical practices that conventional methods of abstraction dispose of, phonographies are “nondisciplinary”26 or “undisciplined”27 practices that avoid reinvesting in white supremacist patriarchal models for transmitting knowledge, privilege, personhood, and property, such as the academic discipline.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“These appeals to music and sound don’t just dumb down math for nonexperts; they also capture aspects of reality mathematics cannot. As much as states, corporations, and even artistic and academic practices try to quantify everything, people will continue to experience things in qualitative ways, like with their senses or their emotions.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“purity (which takes a lot of resources), laws and institutions include deregulated differences, often under the banner of “diversity.” I call this move the domestication of noise because it turns what was formerly a problem (in the Du Boisian “how does it feel to be a problem?” sense) into a resource.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Sound, and even resonance, can be a productive model for theorizing if and only if it models intellectual and social practices that are designed to avoid and/or oppose the systemic relations of domination that classical liberalism and neoliberalism create.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Including everyone on the same quantitative, statistically measured spectrum kills two birds with one stone: (1) it serves as evidence that identity-based social exclusion is over, obsolete, a thing we “neo-”s are “post-” because we’re all on the same playing field, and (2) it provides the mechanism for producing white supremacist patriarchy without relying explicitly on identity-based social exclusion.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Compression brings the distribution of amplitudes within a “normalized” (in Foucault’s sense) range. “Compressors … reduce dynamic range—the span between the softest and loudest sounds.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Normalization is the mode of governmentality Foucault attributes to biopolitics: it’s not the juridical punishment of offenders (i.e., taking something away from those who transgress), nor is it the disciplinary normation of subjects (compelling adherence to a prescribed archetype, rendering docile); rather, it’s the normalization of frequencies (remember: the object of this kind of power isn’t people or groups but numbers). Normalization involves (1) determining the range of “normal” distribution of x, and then (2) bringing frequencies outside that normal distribution back in line with it. As”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Foucauldian theories of biopolitics study “aleatory events that occur within a population that exists over a period of time”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“The early twenty-first-century U.S. education program No Child Left Behind is another example of the politics of exception. Instead of segregating public schools explicitly on the basis of race and policing the purity of white schools, NCLB uses nominally inclusive performance-based measures like test scores to dole out both resources and penalties on what are effectively racial lines.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Phonographies articulate ideas, aesthetics, and relationships that exist in the frequencies perceptually coded out of the sonic episteme’s spectrum because the cost of laboring to domesticate them into something that contributes to elite status isn’t worth the benefit.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“The sonic episteme creates qualitative versions of the same relationships that the neoliberal episteme crafts quantitatively, bringing nonquantitative phenomena in line with the same upgrades to classical liberalism that the neoliberal episteme performs quantitatively.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Resonance, in other words, is a phase relationship. When patterns are in phase, they align at regular intervals; an example of this would be a song sung in “in the round.” Composer Steve Reich describes these type of phase relationships as “rational”: they align at intervals we are habituated to recognizing, like 1/2, 1/4, 1/3, 2/3, 180 degrees, 90 degrees, etc.33 Patterns that do not align at regular intervals are “irrational” and out of phase. In Western music theory, overtones that are integer (whole-number) multiples of the fundamental frequency (the main pitch we hear) are called “harmonics,” whereas overtones that are noninteger (i.e., fractions) multiples of the fundamental frequency are called “inharmonics” because harmonic frequencies fall in phase with the fundamental frequency and inharmonic ones don’t.34 In this sense, “rational” relationships among patterns are rational when they are proportional and thus expressible as ratios; such relationships are “irrational” when they aren’t consistently proportional enough to be expressible as a ratio. The sonic episteme thinks sound is acoustic resonance—the patterned intensity of a flow, expressed as a rate or a frequency ratio. And it’s this ratio that makes acoustic resonance a qualitative corollary for the math behind neoliberalism and biopolitics.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“For example, the discontinuities produced by patriarchy as a political system are re-aggregated as gender becomes one variable in a multifactor statistical model. As variables, gender and race are disarticulated from the power relationships (patriarchy and white supremacy) that produce social discontinuities. As Mader puts it, “a gradational ontology replaces one of opposition.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“In the sonic episteme, those upgrades appear not as the shift from juridical to calculative rationality but as a shift from verbal or visual representation to sound and resonance.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“As I discuss in chapter 4, this same concept of sophrosyne appears in pop culture as an ethical ideal for individuals, corporations, and the state, often implicitly as narratives about personal responsibility. Comparing”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“This process of producing and quarantining abnormals is how this configuration of neoliberalism and biopolitics upgrades classically liberal forms of social exclusion so that they can work without explicitly relying on social identities, so that they can be, in other words, post-identity.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics

“Designed to optimize the enclosure of signal bandwidth, perceptual coding is a kind of compression that uses normalization for explicitly capitalist purposes and highlights the role of white supremacist patriarchal property relations in determining the range of what counts as normal.”
― Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics