I've been reading Robin James' book The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics for another class. An essential part of the book's project is a critique of how neoliberal regimes of statistical measuring flatten structural barriers/inequities or systems of power more broadly by way of their reduction into data. Against this backdrop, James goes on to critique the widespread use of sonic metaphors to describe phenomenon at the level of data, suggesting that these metaphors serve to help normalize the phenomenon that the data describe as organic rather than produced by the systems of power occluded by statistics—this is an interesting argument but one that I have trouble following and cannot recount in better detail than I've done here. What compelled me to post on the blog is James' engagement with post-feminism (and other such post-identity claims), which I found a helpful and incisive way of situating some of the heuristic means by which claims that identity-based structures of power have been, in MacRobbie's words, "taken into account" are able to sustain themselves. I'll copy and paste a lengthy stretch of James' argument below:
What makes statistical normalization suited to the way neoliberalism and bio-
politics manage social inequity?
Neoliberalism manages identity-based difference differently than classical, contractarian liberalism does. Classical liberalism asserts that we’re all equal because we’re universally human, abstract individuals without relevant differences (because differences are only relevant in the private sphere). Neoliberalism asserts that we’re all equal because all (formerly private) differences are included and valued. Instead of strictly regulating 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. Just as statistical distributions can reveal predictable patterns in what otherwise appear like chance occurrences, the domestication of noise finds order in what traditionally seems like irrational or unruly behavior.
By including formerly excluded unruliness, neoliberalism purports to be post-identity. Post-identity is an umbrella term that describes views like “post- feminism” or “postracial.” These views assert that classically liberal identity- based social exclusion (sexism, racism) no longer exist: such exclusion certainly happened in the past, but we have overcome it today. For example, as Angela McRobbie explains, “post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force.” This isn’t the “backlash” of the 1990s, but the idea that people and institutions already value and practice diversity so that white women and people of color really can and do have equal access to political participation and economic success.
The ontology of statistical measurement lets the claim that we’ve overcome sexism and racism and everyone is equal now seem plausible. Unlike the classical social contract, which posits an ontological divide between “humans” and “sub-” or “nonhumans,” biopolitical normalization posits a flat social ontology, in particular, the flat ontology of mathematics in which everything is a number and thus commutable. As Mader argues, “it is the continuity of number itself that renders both the individuals counted and the ratio of group to group comparable objects to which basic and sophisticated mathematical operations can be applied. . . . Social discontinuities are homogenized in the continuity of quantum.”
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.” The continuity among statistical variables or groups is what lets post-identity thinking happen: there are no different social orders for humans and subhumans; we’re all on the same human spectrum. This continuum from normal to abnormal does in fact put everyone on the same playing field. It’s the neoliberal version of classically liberal notions of formal equality before the law or “political emancipation”: treating everyone as though they’re on the same continuum obscures the fact that we still recognize a difference between good abnormal—“disruptors,” geniuses—and bad abnormal—terrorists, thugs. Structural barriers haven’t gone away; they’ve just been remade with different tools and layered on top of the old ones. These new structural barriers are what I call a politics of exception.
The politics of exception is the outcome of neoliberal/biopolitical applications of the ontology of statistical normalization to worlds deeply shaped by centuries of material inequality and domination. This ontology reworks modernity’s inclusion/exclusion binary into a spectrum of flexibility and dynamism. In the former case, domination contracts create social identities (races, genders) as tools to disaggregate and purify society by excluding white women and nonwhites from political, moral, and legal personhood. This model excludes by creating discontinuities, such as the discontinuity between noise and signal. However, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it’s not just audio engineers that domesticate noise, “using and manipulating noise (rather than eliminating it).” Neoliberalism and biopolitics domesticate noise, excluding people from personhood by using and manipulating them via statistical and ideological continuities that incorporate their noise into the big social spectrum. When everyone is on the same statistical continuum or spectrum, everyone seems to have the chance to be or become normal; so, if you’re deficiently normal, it must be due to your lack of effort or inherent pathology. This is where the hidden structural barriers factor in: individuals’ placement on the normal curve isn’t the outcome of just their choices and behaviors but also of the way structural barriers foreclose or facilitate the kinds of choices available to them and the opportunity costs of those choices. Neoliberalism and biopolitics cook the books (the background conditions) so that foreground equity always produces differential levels of success.
Neoliberalism manages identity-based difference differently than classical, contractarian liberalism does. Classical liberalism asserts that we’re all equal because we’re universally human, abstract individuals without relevant differences (because differences are only relevant in the private sphere). Neoliberalism asserts that we’re all equal because all (formerly private) differences are included and valued. Instead of strictly regulating 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. Just as statistical distributions can reveal predictable patterns in what otherwise appear like chance occurrences, the domestication of noise finds order in what traditionally seems like irrational or unruly behavior.
By including formerly excluded unruliness, neoliberalism purports to be post-identity. Post-identity is an umbrella term that describes views like “post- feminism” or “postracial.” These views assert that classically liberal identity- based social exclusion (sexism, racism) no longer exist: such exclusion certainly happened in the past, but we have overcome it today. For example, as Angela McRobbie explains, “post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force.” This isn’t the “backlash” of the 1990s, but the idea that people and institutions already value and practice diversity so that white women and people of color really can and do have equal access to political participation and economic success.
The ontology of statistical measurement lets the claim that we’ve overcome sexism and racism and everyone is equal now seem plausible. Unlike the classical social contract, which posits an ontological divide between “humans” and “sub-” or “nonhumans,” biopolitical normalization posits a flat social ontology, in particular, the flat ontology of mathematics in which everything is a number and thus commutable. As Mader argues, “it is the continuity of number itself that renders both the individuals counted and the ratio of group to group comparable objects to which basic and sophisticated mathematical operations can be applied. . . . Social discontinuities are homogenized in the continuity of quantum.”
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.” The continuity among statistical variables or groups is what lets post-identity thinking happen: there are no different social orders for humans and subhumans; we’re all on the same human spectrum. This continuum from normal to abnormal does in fact put everyone on the same playing field. It’s the neoliberal version of classically liberal notions of formal equality before the law or “political emancipation”: treating everyone as though they’re on the same continuum obscures the fact that we still recognize a difference between good abnormal—“disruptors,” geniuses—and bad abnormal—terrorists, thugs. Structural barriers haven’t gone away; they’ve just been remade with different tools and layered on top of the old ones. These new structural barriers are what I call a politics of exception.
The politics of exception is the outcome of neoliberal/biopolitical applications of the ontology of statistical normalization to worlds deeply shaped by centuries of material inequality and domination. This ontology reworks modernity’s inclusion/exclusion binary into a spectrum of flexibility and dynamism. In the former case, domination contracts create social identities (races, genders) as tools to disaggregate and purify society by excluding white women and nonwhites from political, moral, and legal personhood. This model excludes by creating discontinuities, such as the discontinuity between noise and signal. However, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it’s not just audio engineers that domesticate noise, “using and manipulating noise (rather than eliminating it).” Neoliberalism and biopolitics domesticate noise, excluding people from personhood by using and manipulating them via statistical and ideological continuities that incorporate their noise into the big social spectrum. When everyone is on the same statistical continuum or spectrum, everyone seems to have the chance to be or become normal; so, if you’re deficiently normal, it must be due to your lack of effort or inherent pathology. This is where the hidden structural barriers factor in: individuals’ placement on the normal curve isn’t the outcome of just their choices and behaviors but also of the way structural barriers foreclose or facilitate the kinds of choices available to them and the opportunity costs of those choices. Neoliberalism and biopolitics cook the books (the background conditions) so that foreground equity always produces differential levels of success.
Robin James. The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics. Duke UP, 2019. 12-14.
I have this book in my "to read" shelf so it's nice to know that it's in a syllabus somewhere. Two notes to make. One: could you please share this syllabus with me [insert cheeky emoji here]? Second: similar in kind, perhaps, is LaBelle's new book "Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance." Would be curious to know what you think of it. Cheers!
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