Fashion designer Vanessa Bruno is a master of modern femininity (her fans include Charlotte Gainsbourg and Vanessa Paradis)—and we're not just talking about her clothing line. Bruno, born in France and of Danish descent, has blended her two cultural influences in her own Parisian flat—and added notes of exotica from her travels (Asian silk pillows and rice paper lanterns included).

Read more at Interior Magasinet and get the look with our sources below.

Photography by Birgitta Wolfgang Dreyer for Interior Magasinet.

Above: Gauzy linen curtains and white walls stand out against walnut wood floors and and exposed original beams. A red beaded installation from Italian artist Paola Piva hangs over the sofa.

Above: Fresh tulip magnolia and a stem of purple lilac accent the living room next to a 1910 sofa reupholstered in bright green cotton.

Above: A painting by Finnish artist Marie Sanaa hangs near the stacked rice paper lanterns. For more on her DIY lamp configuration, see Vanessa Bruno's Stacked Paper Lanterns.

Above: A vintage Tubular Chrome Bachelor Chair by Verner Panton from the 1950s is available through Nickey Kehoe on 1st Dibs.

Above: Bruno sourced her Danish midcentury coffee table from a Parisian antiques dealer, but a similar option is the Wegner Coffee Table in oiled oak for $2,490 from Design Within Reach.

Above: The George Sherlock Extended Two-Seater Sofa is made with a beech wood frame and a mixed filing (felt, canvas, webbing, hair lock, and coil springs). Available through Ruby Beets with a variety of upholstery options.

Above: e15's CP03 Kavir Carpet by Farah Ebrahimi features a single-toned surface with contrasting fringe detail at either end. The carpets are available in Antique Pink with Luminous Red (shown) and eight other color combinations. Visit e15 for dealer information and read more at CP03 Kavir Carpets from e15 in Germany.

Above: Ikea's Dignitet Curtain Wire is made of stainless steel for $12.99 each. For similar curtains, consider Crate & Barrel's Linen Sheer White Curtain Panels; $59.95 for the 108-inch length panel. The Deka Curtain Clips are $6.99 for a box of 12 from Ikea. Photograph by Alexa Hotz.

Above: The Mies van der Rohe Side Chair is available in black, light brown, or white beige for $1,419 each from Design Within Reach. A Set of Eight MR Side Chairs is currently available for $6,800 from March on 1st Dibs.

Above: A trio of different George Nelson pendant lights hang over the dining room table. The Saucer Pendant Lamp is $435 from Design Within Reach.

N.B.: Looking for more ideas to steal? See all 221 of our Steal This Look posts in our archive. Partial to a pink color palette? Sift through 267 Rosy Rooms in our Gallery of rooms and spaces.

It's not easy being the new creative director of BlackBerry. One thing you must remember is to always use it for public communication systems. Like Twitter. [Read more]

The research objective of this project is to find out how and in what specific ways the experience of listening to radio transmission is connected to a specific sound (in the material sense of the sound studies) of the radio ...

We hear it all the time in travel advice: do what the locals do. It's fantastic advice, but if you're in an unfamiliar city it's a lot easier said than done. Thankfully, with a little preparation (or on-the-fly Google skills), it's entirely possible to experience a city just like the locals. More »

IMAGE: Acoustic tribology diagram via NIZO.

First, drink some black coffee. Next, rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It should feel a little rough, like very fine sandpaper: the tiny bumps on your tongue, called papillae, are raised just enough to create friction against your palate.

If you now add cream to your coffee and try again, the sensation should be much smoother — almost velvety. A layer of fat and mucous is now coating your tongue, providing lubrication and preventing friction.

What you have just done was, until very recently, the most accurate method for evaluating the oral perception of fat — the precise degree of tongue-coating creaminess in milk, mayonnaise, or chocolate pudding.

IMAGE: Diagram showing the effect of fatty emulsions on the touch receptors in the tongue’s papillae, via NIZO.

In the worlds of both taste research and product development, fat is an unsolved problem. Scientists are still trying to determine exactly how the human sensory system perceives fat; last year, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis were the first to find a specific taste receptor for fat, but most experts agree that people identify high-fat foods in large part by texture.

Meanwhile, for food giants such as Nestle and Unilever, formulating low fat or fat-free yogurts, cheese spreads, and ice creams that somehow still seem creamy and rich is something of a holy grail.

Until now, however, a company seeking to test the mouthfeel of its new fat-free cheesecake dessert has had two not very satisfactory options: hiring humans to repeat the rubbing experiment you undertook at the start of this post, except with cheesecake dessert, and then comparing their reported perceptions, or else simulating that experiment in a friction-measuring device that uses an analogue human tongue (often from a pig, though a bumpy, moulded silicone surface is sometimes used instead).

IMAGE: Tribometers measure the amount of friction as two surfaces rub together. The photograph on the right (via NIZO) shows a close-up of a pig’s tongue in the tribometer head. The schematic diagram on the left comes from a paper authored by scientists at a Nestlé Research Centre in Switzerland.

The problems with both methods are several and obvious. Human beings are expensive, time-consuming, variable, and imprecise — oral sensory perception can be affected by mood, previous meals, humidity levels, and even the earlier application of lotions and moisturizer to other parts of the body.

Meanwhile, measurements made using a machine that rubs cheesecake against a pig’s tongue are microscopically detailed, quantitative rather than qualitative, and much more easily controlled against external factors — yet, unsurprisingly, they frequently do not end up correlating very well to human sensory perception. Given these limitations on innovation, it is perhaps no wonder that fat-free products still generally disappoint.

However, in a paper to be published in June 2013 in the journal Food Hydrocolloids, scientist George A. Van Aken of NIZO, a Dutch food research company, reveals a new method of measuring mouthfeel: the wonderfully named “acoustic tribology.” Van Aken took a tiny contact microphone, packed it in polyethylene to keep it dry, and secured it behind a test subject’s upper front incisor teeth in order to record the acoustic signal produced by the varying vibrations of their papillae as their tongue rubbed against their palate.

IMAGE: Diagram showing Van Aken’s experimental acoustic tribology set up, from his forthcoming paper “Acoustic emission measurement of rubbing and tapping contacts of skin and tongue surfaces in relation to tactile perception.”

In short, Van Aken’s device means that we can now listen to what our tongues feel.

The process works by picking up vibrations within tongue tissue, which vary depending on the amount of deformation the papillae experience when rubbing against the palate. To return to our initial experiment, you can actually listen to a recording of the feel of black coffee (mp3), and then compare it to the softer sound of the feel of coffee with cream (mp3) or hear them both back-to-back in this NIZO video (wmv) — from sawing wood to depilling a sweater, and back again, interrupted by an occasional higher-pitched pop (apparently, these are caused by the “snapping of salivary films and air bubbles at the papilla surfaces”).

IMAGE: Fat-free black coffee offers the papillae no protective coating, resulting in greater friction, more oscillation within the tissue, and hence a louder acoustic signal. The addition of cream deposits a lubricating layer of fat on the tongue, dampening the friction and thus the vibration-causing movement of the papillae, and resulting in a much softer recording.

Using his new acoustic tribometer, Van Aken tests milk of varying fat content, cream, yogurt, quark, and even “cheese systems,” achieving a much higher resolution picture of mouthfeel than could ever have been achieved using human tissue before. In particular, he finds some intriguing patterns in the acoustic signatures of mouthfeel over time: for example, although skimmed milk initially produces a loud signal (it actually “cleans” fat off the tongue), eventually the sound tapers off, leading Van Aken to speculate that “the tongue surface is smoothened by wear.”

In other words, it’s possible that everything tastes creamy when your tongue is worn out — which perhaps lends weight to the Victorian advice to chew each mouthful one hundred times before swallowing.

IMAGE: Acoustic signals of milk samples with increasing fat content, potentially suggesting that optimum creaminess occurs at 3% fat content. Diagram from Van Aken’s forthcoming paper “Acoustic emission measurement of rubbing and tapping contacts of skin and tongue surfaces in relation to tactile perception.”

Van Aken is, no doubt correctly, excited at the opportunities his system offers to food scientists trying to engineer creamy fat-free versions of everything. For me, however, the synaesthetic pleasures of hearing mouthfeel remind me of psychologist Charles Spence’s fascinating work on crossmodal interactions between the senses, including the IgNobel award-winning finding that Pringles actually taste crispier when your consumption is accompanied by an amplified recording of in-mouth Pringle crunching. Perhaps Van Aken’s device will enable us to bypass the food scientists and their fat-free alternatives altogether, and instead add the sensory equivalent of cream to a skim latte through a smooth mouthfeel recording, available for 99p on iTunes…

“You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100bn a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc – How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30bn a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include sub-prime credit cards, sub-prime auto loans, and sub-prime mortgages.”

- How the poor are made to pay for their poverty | Barbara Ehrenreich | Society | guardian.co.uk

“OK, just so I get this right: You’re arguing that most Americans have a mental illness. Exactly. That’s definitely correct. But — if that’s true — wouldn’t that mean “mental illness” is just a normative condition? That it’s just how people are? That doesn’t make it normal. This is based on science. If there was a flu epidemic, and 60 percent of the country had the flu, it wouldn’t make it normal … the problem is growing, and it’s growing because there’s a subtle war — in America, and in the world — between business and health. It’s no secret that 2 percent of the human population controls all the wealth and the resources, and the other 98 percent struggle their whole life to try and attain it. Right? And what ends up happening is that the 2 percent leave the 98 percent to struggle and struggle and struggle, and they eventually build up these stresses and conditions. So … this is about late capitalism? Definitely. Definitely.”

- Chuck Klosterman on Royce White - Grantland

Tuesday the 12th of February Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) will give the first talk in the sixth series of Research Seminars at Coventry University  on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.

Underneath the full program for this term. All be welcome!

- OPEN MEDIA -

A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.

For more information see: http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/

Programme: February— March 2013

—————————————————————————————————————————

February 12^th:

Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) – ‘We Are Open: Openness in a new public art gallery and social space.’ (Read More)

February 25^th: (note: on a Monday in ETB10)

Helen Keegan (University of Salford) – ‘alt.media: Create to Engage’

March 5^th:

Joss Hands (Anglia Ruskin University) – ‘Platform Communism’

March 19^th:

Matthew Hawkins (Coventry University) – ‘Film Art in the Body of the City: Moving Image Practice as Performance’

March 26^th:

Paolo Ruffino (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Narratives of Independent Production in Video Game Culture’ (Read More)

————————————————————————————————————————

When: 12:15-1:15pm on selected Tuesdays in February and March

Where: ETG34 (Ellen Terry Building)

Coventry University

Jordan Well
Coventry
CV1 5FB

All seminars are free to attend and open to all

For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx

All enquiries please contact:

Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections

—————————————————————————————————————————

Digital Media have become ubiquitous. Our experiences are on the verge of being mediated and augmented non-stop via mobile and web-based recording devices which offer the possibility to merge, mix, and mash up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we seem to be no longer confined by the boundaries that have governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are being challenged by the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia applications. People can produce and publish their own books via Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their music via Myspace and Youtube. They can follow an education via iTunesU, call friends abroad via Skype for free, connect and update the world via Facebook and Twitter and fund projects via Kickstarter.

These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media offer unprecedented democratizing options for media producers, consumers and critics. However, reality is more complicated. Many (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed via commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Music mash-ups are sued for copyright infringement and fears for ebook piracy rule the literary world.

The concept of openness forms a radical critique against the closed-off worlds of what we might call the ‘traditional media’. It urges for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. However, openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who pays the producers? Do open data pose security risks and who gets to control these data? Who governs our creative output? In what way can we control and keep check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media or are these notions explicitly being challenged? In which way can media be open, and can they really be truly open? Where does openness end or should we focus on aspects of openness? How can we compose a media critique when media are constantly updated and changed, including our critique itself?

In this lecture series various examples of aspects of openness in media will be explored. Special attention will be given to what the benefits and drawbacks of openness are and what kind of possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

Filed under: Art, Information and knowledge, Lectures and Conferences, Open Access, Open Education, Remix Tagged: Art, Communism, Coventry University, Film, Furtherfield, Helen Keegan, Joss Hands, Matthew Hawkins, Media, Moving Image, Networks, Open Education, Open Media, Open Source, Openness, Paolo Ruffino, Platforms, podcasts, Practice, Publishing, Ruth Catlow, Seminar series, seminars, Social Media, Video Games

Where's the human connection anymore? Teens these days, with their texting and what not. In my day--

1906 Punch comic, meet 2013 Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.

(via @kiptw)

““Wait, is that a spelling error?” chorused some, while others jaws dropped to floor as they pondered the unheard of “talents” exhibited by the reality star.”

- Kim Kashkashian’s Grammy win prompts confusion backstage | Fox News

Jeopardy! - Teen Tournament Three-Way $0 Finish (Feb. 7, 2013) (by thechadmosher)

David Beckham / Nick Wooster Inspired Hairstyle - New 2013 Men’s Short Haircut (by DanielAlfonsotv)

“A young person with a university degree can’t sing, but a minister with a 6th grade education can legislate?,” Dama do Bling sang in her 2007 song “Sai,” a musical response to inquiries why, in spite of her law degree, she chose a career in the music industry. This statement is exemplary of Dama do Bling’s provocative personality that has sparked much debate, at least in the early years of her music career in her native Mozambique, where she’s a big star.

Called a lusophone Queen Latifah and Mozambican Lil Kim, Dama do Bling (“lady of bling”) has become the Queen of Mozambican hip-hop, and through her collaboration with Pan-African superstars like Nigeria’s Sasha P, Kenya’s Yvonne, and Bleksem from South Africa she has become well-known all over the continent. Currently recording her fifth studio album and writing her third book, she is “one of the female voices to watch in 2013.” Her latest music video “Bad Girl” features her own fashion designs, some of which she presented at Mozambique’s fashion week in December last year.

Dama do Bling, born as Ivannea Mudanisse in 1979, started her career featuring on two tracks of the second album of Mozambique’s Queen of Reggae, Lizha James, in 2005. In 2006, she launched her first self-titled album, produced by Bang Entretenimento, with participation of other Mozambican stars, including Lizha James. Her first big hit was “Dança do Remexe,” which won two of South Africa’s Channel O Music Video Awards in the category “Best Female Video” and “Best African Southern” in 2007.

Before she became Mozambique’s queen of hip-hop, though, Dama do Bling was the queen of scandal. Standing for a new, younger generation of Mozambican musicians, she offended the “old guard” in several ways. Her sexy clothing and provocative moves on stage became the target of fierce critique, in particular when, despite being pregnant and starting to show, she continued to perform. One commentator in the country’s independent newspaper O País called Dama do Bling’s shows an “attack on moral decency and a crime” since she disrespected moral values of proper female public conduct and violated the dignity of the child in her womb. In another article, the same journalist called Dama do Bling’s way of exposing her body “anti-African” and a consequence of non-African influences that don’t value the female body. He called on the government to devise rules for musicians’ proper behavior on stage.

Dama do Bling’s law degree from Mozambique’s national university in Maputo, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM), made some commentators ask why she preferred appearing scantily clad in public, if she could help solve the country’s problems. Her music was accused of lacking a message. The need for well-educated people in Mozambican society and the fact that Dama do Bling received her education at a publicly financed institution made people strongly criticize her choice of pursuing a career in the music industry.

Although this debate didn’t go as far as the debate on Lady Gaga in the US, Dama do Bling challenged previous views on the role of women in society. It was clear that this critique was especially about Mozambican women, since (as far as I know) there was no criticism of the fact that you could watch South African music channels featuring similar performances to Dama do Bling’s in many of Maputo’s restaurants and bars.

Maputo-based sociologists therefore discussed the “phenomenon Dama do Bling” widely as a symptom of change in Mozambican society (e.g., Carlos Serra from UEM on his blog). The sociologist Patricio Langa spoke of a “silent revolution”—a change of social values, disguised in a debate about what Mozambican music should look like. Carlos Serra, sociologist at the UEM’s African Studies Center, ridiculed the debate about Dama do Bling’s “untraditional” style by posting pictures of traditional dances featuring women in short skirts with uncovered breasts. Serra argued that behind the discourse on what is (and should be) Mozambican was a deep concern over men’s loss of control over the female body. Langa called out for diversity in Mozambican music: “Just let people be!”

This was also Dama do Bling’s reaction to the whole polemic. Asked for her response to the wide-spread accusations, she pointed out that she wasn’t scandalous, but “irreverent” and just said and did whatever she liked. “People tend not to receive new things well since it’s something that they have never seen,” she explained in response to the public outcry. Justifying doing things differently, she said: “We the young can’t build on those things from 20 years ago, because [if we did so], we would die.” Her first book, hence, was an autobiography with the title O Diário de Uma Irreverente (The diary of an irreverent woman). Beyond acting as she likes and defending the young’s inventiveness, though, her attitude didn’t seem to have much of a political or feminist message.

But all this seems forgotten now. Dama do Bling’s comparison to Lil Kim belongs to the past: “That was when I was young heheheheh. I’m a grown woman now… I must behave,” she said in an interview in 2010. And other Mozambican artists, like Ziqo, have taken over as targets of moral outrage. However, this doesn’t mean that Dama do Bling said goodbye to sexy moves or stopped standing up for herself. In a recent interview with Afroziky she explained the idea behind her newest video, “Bad Girl,” “A bad girl is a woman who fights for her ideas, a woman who is not intimidated by the opinion of other people. She does what her heart tells her to do. A bad girl owns her life.” And that is what many Mozambicans have become to admire her for. For her daughter (the first baby she lost in a miscarriage), with whom she was featured on the cover of the April/May 2012 edition of the journal MozCeleb she wishes that “she will be as irreverent as I am.”

Length: 2 years
Deadline: March 27, 2013
Comments: “The program will place 20 recent Ph.D.s from the humanities and humanistic social sciences in two-year staff positions at partnering organizations in government and the nonprofit sector”; “Prospective applicants should read through all the positions listed below and be ready to choose one when beginning the online application process”; applicants must have received PhD between January 2010 and deadline (March 27, 2013); must not have applied to any other ACLS fellowship programs in the 2012-13 application year;  applications accepted only through the ACLS Online Fellowship Application system (ofa.acls.org).
URL: http://www.acls.org/programs/publicfellows/

This didn't feel like 8 minutes at all, which I guess, at my age, is the whole point.

(via @mrgan)

Tags: video

Sound Clip: The Cloud by Mendel Kaelen

This work is an electro-acoustic experimentation, with all tracks composed out of studio-recordings of one single instrument: An old and dusty Indian harmonium. The intent was to explore all the unconventional and uncanny sounds the old acoustic instrument was capable of producing, while presenting this in a composition format that is challenging, yet captivating enough to attend to with care.

More on this artist

 

 

Liberalism has often been criticized (rightly, in my opinion) for for its unwavering emphasis upon means rather than ends, procedures rather than goals. As Carl Freedman puts it, in his great account of Richard Nixon:

Liberalism begins by abjuring positive social policy in favor of a formal proceduralism, pragmatically trusting that the application of a certain set of rules will “work” in the sense of yielding the fairest attainable results. But such results are absolutely precluded by the initial liberal move of waiving the question of justice: for justice is a social goal with positive, determinate content…

In other words, liberal proceduralism is concerned that actions must be conducted “fairly,” and not at all concerned with the question of whether the outcome of the action is actually fair. If fairness or justice is a Kantian regulative ideal, then 20th and 21st century liberalism is obsessed with the “regulative” aspect in and of itself, to the point of entirely forgetting the “ideal” which is what really matters.

Liberal proceduralism is one aspect of the “instrumental reason” whose annihilation of true rationality Horkheimer and Adorno warned us of two thirds of a century ago. And if anything, this proceduralism has become even more pronounced today than it was in the mid-20th-century. It has become the nearly unquestioned basis of all aspects of government and social life. Everything from the “reforms” that are currently decimating the US educational system, to the way that American foreign and military policy is conducted, adheres to a strictly procedural logic. (In a full social analysis, we would have to say that there is in fact an end in sight: the further accumulation of capital by the tiny minority that already “owns” it, and the exacerbated dispossession of the “99%” in the US itself, not to mention the much more severely disadvantaged global poor. But of course, this “end” is not publically avowable. And as Marx long ago pointed out, the “end” of capital accumulation isn’t really an end or an aim, since it has no goal in view aside from its continuing exacerbated expansion. On the largest scale, capitalism is itself a “liberal” process of proceduralism without any additional or external aim).

I think that it is because we live in such an overwhelmingly “proceduralist” society that the genre of the *procedural* has become so ubiquitous in television and film. This genre used to be known as the “police procedural,” exemplified today by (for example) the ever-popular CSI group of TV shows. But procedurals have also become the staple genre for some of our most interesting film directors. Thus Olivier Assayas gives us a procedural of terrorism (Carlos), and David Fincher gives us procedurals of detective work beyond the police department (Zodiac) and of corporate strategy in the age of the Internet (The Social Network).

And this, to me, is the genius of Zero Dark Thirty. When I wrote before about Kathryn Bigelow, I noted that her characteristic techinque as a director is to immerse herself, and us, in the element, or environment, in which the story takes place (night in Near Dark; the seashore and the waves in Point Break; the realm of inner-psychic-life-as-virtual-reality in Strange Days; and the desert in The Hurt Locker). I also noted that The Hurt Locker marked her move to the genre of the procedural, in order to convey this elemental reality (which seems not to be “political” only because it is, in fact,the necessary precondition and container of the political).

Well, perhaps this is because I am such an unregenerate auteurist, but I find the same principles at work in Zero Dark Thirty as well.

Zero Dark Thirty is the ne plus ultra of proceduralism, its ultimate expansion and reductio ad absurdum. It’s all about the well-nigh interminable process of searching for, and then eliminating, Osama Bin Laden. The premise and initial impetus of this process is of course the mythological demonization of Bin Laden, as the ultimate culprit responsible for Nine Eleven. But in the relentless proceduralism that the film presents to us, this goal or rationale is abraded away. The torture which the film has become controversial for depicting is of course part of this. But so is the process of painstakingly correlating irrelevant information, the accidental discovery of leads in years-old records, the repetitive tracking of the vehicle of the suspected courier, the endless bureaucratic meetings at which officials seek to decide if the information is valid and what should be done about it, and above all the military operation in the last thirty minutes of the film (has military action ever been depicted in the movies with such relentless a focus on operational techniques, in a manner that is utterly devoid alike of the horror of war and of the glory and heroism that are so often invoked to justify it?). The goal has been so absorbed into procedural routine that the ostensible climax of the film, the actual killing of Bin Laden, occurs offscreen; and we barely even get a glimpse of the corpse, zipped as it is into a body bag, which is to say treated entirely (and literally) according to Standard Operating Procedure.

The film makes a sort of feint by implying that its real subject is the passion of its protagonist Maya (Jessica Chastain), who continues to pursue the search for Osama when everyone else has given up on it. But her obsession is itself entirely contained within, and articulated by, the proceduralism which is her job as a CIA analyst, and which seems to be the only world she knows. Every potentially dramatic action in which she finds herself (bombings and armed ambushes included) is drained of drama, and subsumed within proceduralist routine. Every affect, and every reason for doing what one does, is sucked into a black hole. This is why Maya is so emptied out at the end of the film.

We are immersed into an overwhelming environment in Zero Dark Thirty, just as we are in all of Bigelow’s films. But in this case, the environment is the numbingly anonymous one of Big Data, of the numbingly repetitious accumulation of “information” (whether by torture, surveillance, physical search, or collation of records), and of instantaneity (the annihilation of duration) mediated through video screens and telecommunications technologies.

As I was watching Zero Dark Thirty, I found the relentlessness with which all this was depicted almost unbearably intense. I’ve never seen (or heard) so powerful a depiction (or better, I should say,so powerful an enactment) of entropic dissolution and decay. All meaning, and all feeling, was draining away before my eyes and ears, without even the prospect of any sort of negative finality or conclusion. I realize that this weird inverted intensity won’t appeal to everyone; it’s the reason, I think, that many people I know simply found the movie tedious and boring. (But such differences of response are of course, as Kant knew, beyond argument).

In any case, Zero Dark Thirty embodies the truth of liberal proceduralism as an organizing principle of all governmentality and all social life today. Embodying and testifying to a truth in this manner is not the same as offering a “critique.” In this sense, it is perfectly true that the movie does not offer any critique of our government’s systematic use of torture. It is also perfectly true, at least in a literal and banal sense, that (as the filmmakers have themselves defensively claimed) the movie doesn’t “endorse” torture either. But I think that to have an argument on this level is to miss the point. Critique is important, but it isn’t everything. It might well be argued that, at this late date, even the most accurate critique doesn’t accomplish very much; it is itself too much part of an all-too-predictable procedure. Embodying the truth of a situation, as I think Zero Dark Thirty does, has important aesthetic and political consequences, more important perhaps than those that come from making an accurate and moral judgment. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t show us a way out from the nightmare of liberal proceduralism, but it makes this nightmare visible at a time when its sheer ubiquity might otherwise leave us to take it for granted and thereby ignore it.

At school, when I was 4 or 5, there would be huge lines of girls linking arms and skipping around the playground chanting “No boys allowed!”, and vice versa. I’d imagine that if a teacher had said “Can’t we all get along?”, they would have received confused stares. Sadly, although I’ve left school, I still see this situation all around me.

In the kyriarchy, gender is binary. In the kyriarchy, we’re all supposed to live as two teams and compete in the “battle of the sexes”. In the kyriarchy, so it seems, there can be only one winner. Throughout history, this “winner” has been men, although rigid gender stereotypes have been created for both sexes. That’s why the feminist movement developed. Feminism is the struggle for an alien concept to the kyriarchy - equality. And we’re not done yet. The patriarchy continues to cause so many problems, as demonstrated this week by OUSU WomCam’s “Who Needs Feminism?” campaign, in which over 470 pictures were taken, in various Oxford locations, highlighting why feminism is still relevant.

However, this is the kyriarchy, and the kyriarchy doesn’t know what “equality” means, and it certainly doesn’t know what feminism means. According the the kyriarchy, such a campaign must be misandric (even though at least 1/3 of the pictures are of men) because that’s what the kyriarchy does; it uses divide-and-rule. The kyriarchy thinks feminists are incapable of seeing how stereotypes affect men. The kyriachy sees feminist campaigns as “girls are better than booooooys!” playground chants, and the kyriarchy chants back.

Enter the #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag. Thankfully, it quickly filled up with parody tweets, but there were some genuine tweets in there, which have been listed and responded to in this brilliant post by Flightrisker. Most of the arguments are either statistically incorrect or just plain wrong (I’ve never seen a feminist campaign for all men to pay on dates. Ever.), and all are based on the typical right-wing media view that feminism is about female superiority. Just to clarify, it isn’t.

Here’s an example; the one true problem that kept cropping up in the hashtag was that mothers disproportionately gain custody of children in divorce cases. Think about this:

• Mothers disproportionately gain custody of children because childcare is still seen as a woman’s job.
• Childcare is seen as a woman’s job because of gender stereotypes.
• Gender stereotypes are enforced by the patriarchy.
• Therefore, mothers disproportionately gain custody of children due to the patriarchy.
• The struggle against the patriarchy is feminism.
• The #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag is a struggle against feminism, and therefore takes the side of the patriarchy.
• Therefore, this hashtag is part of the problem.

The same could also apply to the idea that men always have to pay for dates.

As for the idea that feminists want special treatment for women – as I’ve already said, that’s not how it works. Contrary to what the media would have you believe, women and men are not two alien tribes who constantly play tug-of-war to see who’s better. However, many aspects of society gives special treatment to men; how many all-male speaking panels do you see or hear about compared to all-female panels? All-male bands and all-female bands? How many films and TV shows pass the Bechedel Test, and how many would do so if the sexes were reversed? It’s gone on for so long that most people, regardless of gender, just don’t notice anymore. This is the norm. So, when any attempt at equality is made, or at least campaigned for, suddenly it’s SPECIAL TREATMENT and WHAT ABOUT THE MEN and MISANDRY and all sorts of myths about feminism.

I am proud to call myself a feminist, because feminists have always fought for equality; the whole “battle of the sexes” thing is just plain immature, and oppressive to everyone. People are not just pawns in a huge sexist game where everyone thinks that their team is best. To quote my school days again: It’s not faaaaaaaaaiiir, and I’m not playing anymooooooooore!

Tagged: divide and rule, equality, everyday sexism, feminism, i need feminism, kyriarchy, mras, patriarchy, sexism, who needs feminism

"Ostwald Helgason" is a bit of a mouthful. But you might as well get used to saying it, because this London-based line is going places, fast. Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason's clothes are confirmed street-style favorites, and since their brand made its New York fashion week debut last season, it has been picked up by several pacesetting stores, including Louis Boston and Ikram. That momentum should only increase with this collection. The theme here was a hilarious one: a punning juxtaposition of French Symbolist poets, notably Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du Mal, and the campy Little Shop of Horrors, a musical about a bad flower. The latter reference served as fodder for the designers' spirited riff on Americana; the poetry, meanwhile, they parlayed into an homage to the textile designer William Morris, a contemporary of the Symbolists.

It also inspired the duo's first forays into tailoring, for which they have a knack. A neat suit of Morris-esque gold brocade, with neoprene lapels on the jacket, was a collection highlight. So too the board shorts in Morris-inspired silk floral prints—a minor quibble, here, was that these looks didn't seem particularly appropriate to Fall. But then, it seems mean-spirited, and perhaps even unwise, to quibble with any item of clothing featuring a cannibal flower. The board short print had one, and the joke was sophisticated and funny. Which is a pretty good way of summing up the Ostwald Helgason modus operandi; they seem to work from the position that having a good time needn't come at the expense of intelligence and refinement.
—Maya Singer

I thought BahngBoyer just wanted to listen to music or watch a DVD. Turns out he was there to game. With a gamer score of 9,405, I should have known that was the case. He played Borderlands 2, and after we were done, BahngBoyer hugged me with his eyes. It was one of those platonic hugs... you know...

Dialogue between myself and Mark Fisher at Frieze online:

 

Capitalist Realism: Is Art the Alternative? | Blog | Frieze Publishing

 

Rhode Island Public Radio has a six-minute interview with "Brown University and Trinity Rep.'s master of dialects Thom Jones" about how people speak in various parts of Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, ending with the infamous Cranston accent (in which "Cranston" sounds like "Cvanston"). Unfortunately, Jones talks about language in an entirely impressionistic way, using incomprehensible terms like "round" as if they meant something clear and obvious, but it's still fun to hear him imitate the various dialects. Thanks, Sven!

Unrelated, but does anyone know what happened to Gilliland? I mean, what happened is clear enough—if you go there, there's a notice "This journal has been deleted. All posts in this journal will be permanently deleted from the server 30 days after the account owner deleted it"—but I'm curious why such a dependably good read was suddenly axed.

by

Image: Copyright (c) 2011 by Thomas Good.

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The latest installment of the n+1 podcast looks back to December 11, to a daylong conference about the ongoing Occupy movement, Occupy Onwards. This, the first of the four panels, was called  “The Banks: What Can Be Done?” It featured panelists Julia Ott of The New School, Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer, and Carne Ross of the OWS Alternative Banking Group, and was moderated by n+1 and Occupy Gazette editor Keith Gessen. Stay tuned for the next episode, based on the  Occupy Onwards panel “Lessons From The Past/Possible Futures.” 

Hosted by Mark Greif
Taped by Hethre Contant
Produced and Edited by Hethre Contant and Malcolm Donaldson

 

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I’ve been away from this blog for a while because basically I’m sick of all of you, a bit disgusted with humanity and academics at the moment, and have been busy as hell (more the third thing than the other two).  Anyway, I’m pleased to have completed the first draft of Onto-Cartography and to have sent it off to the editors (I like this book, always a bad sign as no one else ever seems to like the things I write that I like) and just finished an article for a special issue of Speculations devoted to “Speculative Realism” entitled “Speculative Realism and Politics”.  I suspect– hope –a lot of people will be surprised by this article, and also hope that it will be a productive contribution to the controversies and debates that SR, the new feminist materialism, ANT, and so on have generated in recent years.

All of this makes me reflect on the power of naming.  Those who have read this blog for some time now are familiar with how fraught my relationship is with my name.  I didn’t know my birth or legal name until I was about 8 or 9 years old and was told by a teacher.  Apparently my legal name is “Paul R. Bryant”– which is also my father’s name –whereas my family had called me “Levi” throughout my entire life.  The discovery of my real name was both traumatic and, I believe, had all sorts of bizarre effects at the level of my unconscious and with respect to how my desire is structured.  That discovery effectively erased me– from the perspective of that acephalous subject that is my unconscious –from the symbolic order and, I think, generated all sorts of nasty desires.  Don’t ask.  At any rate, I took my name back– “Levi” –towards the end of graduate school, when I was having trouble finishing my dissertation (Difference and Givenness), despite the fact that I’d had it sitting on top of a bookshelf for two years gathering dust and only needed to edit it.  Folks thought I was nuts for wanting to change my name from “Paul” to “Levi”– some actually got irate –but I found that when I returned to the name I’d grown up with I suddenly began writing like a maniac, laughed a lot more, and no longer had trouble editing my dissertation.  I guess my unconscious figured that completing my dissertation under the name of “Paul”, I’d be giving my father all the credit and that it just couldn’t have that.  Yeah, my unconscious is anarchistic or anti-patriarchal.  And I know this all sounds nuts, but sometimes– despite what we might consciously think –that’s how it is.  Read Fink’s Lacanian Subject and attend to the mathematics.

So naming, I think, is a powerful thing.  The Lacanians have two expressions.  First, Lacan in the Rome Discourse said “the word kills the thing”.  By this he meant that an abstract kind denoted by the signifier can never capture the singularity of a thing.  As Hegel joked in a way that only psychoanalysts and philosophers can appreciate, “you can’t eat ‘fruit’”.  You’ll never get the object of your desire because the object of your desire is an abstract type delineated by the signifier, not a singular thing.  That’s the tragedy of desire (there are other tragedies of desire as well; not least of which is that it’s never about what you want).  But the psychoanalysts also like to say that “to name it is to own it.”  I won’t get into all of the Freudian “thermodynamics” on this thesis, but the idea is that by narrating these things we dissipate their power and begin to take some control over them.  We negate the power of the thing in the name of the signifier.  This is why Lacan, in one of his early seminars, handed out elephant (memory) figurines at the end of one of the years.

All of this relates somehow.  I guess I’m pleased by this article where I feel I do some naming.  I don’t think I really say anything new here, but I do think I name some things.  I coin the terms “semiopolitics”, “geopolitics”, “infrapolitics”, “thermopolitics”, and “chronopolitics”.  In naming these different politics I don’t think I name anything that hasn’t been explored in various orientations of cultural studies and the humanities.  I do think, however, that the naming of these different forms of politics– yeah I’m plugging the article –makes a difference.  I think it makes the difference of simultaneously preserving the strengths of what I call “semiopolitics”, while also revealing its shortcomings, and that naming these other four forms of politics opens other domains for strategic intervention and the theorization of power.  That’s the power of a name.  It allows us to discern our blind spots, consolidate trends of thought and practice that haven’t been named, and to intensify those other possibilities.  I see this as the promise of speculative realism.  Who cares about rarified issues like the critique of correlationism and the reality of things?  I don’t.  If there’s a promise to SR it’s in helping us to recognize unrecognized ways in which power functions, devising new political strategies, and in discerning sites of the political that we might have before thought were apolitical.

As I discussed in a previous post, the blogosphere is atwitter (pun intended) about Jared Diamond’s new book The World before Yesterday.  It seems his press agent got him some good publicity on NPR and National Geographic, both outlets which Anthropology PhDs apparently pay attention to.  And guess what: Anthropologists don’t like The World Before Yesterday; check out the comment streams at SavageMinds.Org, anthropologyreport.com, or any number of other anthropology blogs.  As many of the anthropological critiques point out, there are big problems with the way Diamond uses anthropological data.  My opinion: So what?  Lots of people use and misuse anthropology data–the Bush administration even used some of it it to invade Iraq and other countries.  More importantly though, anthropology has many better books about anthropology.  In fact, as something of a mental exercise, this sociologist tried to imagine the books he would use in an Introductory Anthropology (Four Fields) course.  Guess what again?  Jared Diamond didn’t make the list because, well, he is a Geographer and Ecologist.  These are great fields, but they are not anthropology, so out he goes.

 

Fair warning: I avoid textbooks.  In my view, anthropology is best understood through real books.  Real books, in which 19 years olds are asked to read the whole thing. Not textbooks, and not books with chapters, but books in which one (or maybe two) authors flesh out an important intellectual idea.

 

Anyway, here are the books I would use in my Intro to Anthropology (Four Fields) course.

 

1) Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist.  This book goes first in the class, and will hook the students in.  It is an empathetic take on fieldwork, bureaucracy, and the differences between academic life, rural Cameroon, and the delights/frustrations of learning a new language.  It is also easy to read, and an outstanding introduction to what ethnographers do in the field.  Once they get started on the book, students tend to finish it, too; it is a page-turner which they will read through to the end without much prompting from annoying little quizzes.

 

2) Carol Stack, All Our Kin.  This book is a field work classic (not “dated”) about public housing policies, kinship patterns, race, and family in 1960s Chicago.  Again, it is easy to read.  And although it is not a knee slapper like The Innocent Anthropologist, my experience with Stack’s book is that students find it thought provoking, and have little trouble pushing through to the final pages.  It also has the advantage that it is about a US American culture which many middle class students are aware of only via stereotypes.  Stack dispose of these stereotypes in a nuanced description of how poverty and family looks from the inside.  Hers is a classical empathetic ethnographic view which resonates today.  Usually it gets a lot of “Oh, now I see what poverty does about…” moments from students who before reading the book were stuck in stereotypes..

 

3) Stephen Le Blanc, Constant Battles.  This book is written by an archaeologist, and like takes a “big picture” view of anthropology and culture, and why the archaeological record says that violence is an important part of the human past. LeBlanc also writes about how anthropologists understand the built environment, which in LeBlanc’s view has involved a lot more fighting, fear, and fortresses than students are accustomed to.  Likewise, LeBlanc’s description of the ecology of the pre-historic Southwest USA is excellent, and students will be attracted to his descriptions of excavations done in the cliff dwellings there.  Constant Battles is a little more difficult to read than the first two books, but still very accessible to a 19 year old who shows up to class to hear an anthropologist’s background lectures.

 

4) Jonathan Marks, What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee.  Molecular Anthropology at its best! The answer to Marks’ answer to the question posed by the title of this book is of course: “not much;” Marks’ book is about culture rather than molecules, and especially it is about the culture of science which worships at the altar of biological reductionism.  Thus this book is about DNA, the philosophy of science, and the misuses of evolutionary theory in popular (and not so popular) science. The book challenges received wisdom on the relationships between evolution and culture, and the methods of the natural scientists who, Marks bluntly points out, are nasty reductionists with cultural and political blinders.  Marks also has a great discussion about Kennewick man, and other ethical controversies which the better students will appreciate.  This book is above the heads of the average 19 year olds unversed in the vagaries of DNA and the philosophy of science. But this should just meant that the professor works a little harder to keep things as relevant as possible.  Notably, it is also a good challenge for the better students.

 

5) Mischa Berzinski, Field Work: A Novel.  Ok, it’s a novel, but it’s a good novel, and the main character is an anthropologist.  It’s also about an area of the world (Thailand) that I know well, and provides a good description of the power of animism and Christianity in Buddhist Thailand from an anthropological viewpoint.  (Lots of chances to discuss Durkheim on religion here!)  Field Work also has the strength that it critiques the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and the world of the Grateful Dead.  Still the best parts are about Thailand, Southeastern Asia, the difficulties of field work, and language.  There are also long descriptions of highland agricultural cycles, marriage, sexuality, crime, modern Thailand, and a wide range of subjects that engage students.  You can also point out that Thailand has cheap Study Abroad programs for anyone you’ve infected with the anthropological bug.  Finally, the book is a “whodunit?” and you don’t find out who did the murder until the very end.  The mystery will keep the 19 year olds reading through the more dense descriptions of highland life, even at the end of a long semester.

 

Notice that 4/5 of these books are by anthropologists, and the other one is a novel about—an anthropologist.  The hole in this syllabus for a “four fields” course is in Linguistic Anthropology, and the importance of language learning.  These subjects though are found in both Barley’s and Berlinski’s book.  Plus the instructor (that’s you Dr. Anthropology) is there to relate their own fantastic tales about language learning troubles, and the vagaries of language change.

 

So, to return to my main point, which is about the irrelevancy of Jared Diamond for Anthropology.  Like I said in the introduction to this essay, anthropology has plenty of good books to present, without worrying too much about other fields.  So what if NPR and National Geographic don’t feature anthropology’s books—that’s their problem not anthropology’s.  Look at what great books they are missing!  Wouldn’t a sit-down with Nigel Barley work at least as good on NPR as with Jared Diamond?

 

Ok, I know, you say that there is no overview to tie the whole thing together, like an Intro text.  And I say yes there is—the professor ties it together.  That’s what anthropology professors do, and they do so in a way that let’s the students know that real live practicing anthropologist are engaged and interesting people.  And of course how anthropologists do this is by pointing out the underlying theories of culture, etc., which unite the field.  You, Dr. Anthropologist are what make great anthropology like that described here come alive for those Intro to Anthro students who frankly have never heard of Jared Diamond unless they have somehow landed in cultural geography class.

 

Hey, I don’t know about your students, but my sociology students don’t listen to NPR or watch National Geographic cultures—those are your hobbies you latte sipping, Volvo driving, middle aged New York Times reading anthropology PhD.  And remember, in addition to the recreational time you spend with NPR and National Geographic anthropology is what you really do, and what give your life and those of your students meaning, in ways that no mass produced textbook (12^th edition) ever will.  Or even Jared Diamond.

 

So suck up the fact that Jared Diamond likes anthropology enough to cite it in his tomes, and go out and give ‘em anthropology books.  It is an exciting and engaging field which stands on its own.  In fact I’m so excited about it, that I am hoping to hear from some Dean from a small liberal arts college will read this, ignore my PhD in Sociology, and recruit me to come teach introductory to Anthropology course.

 

So Dr. Dean, I’m waiting, and if you are interested in my Cultural Anthro class, email me at twaters@csuchico.edu.

After 2010, with "recovery" underway for them following bailouts for them, large private capitalist interests focused on three key interests. First, they wanted to ensure that the bailouts' costs were not paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the rich. By stressing government spending cuts and broad-based tax increases, austerity policies serve that interest. Second, they worried about crisis-heightened government economic intervention and power and wanted to reduce them back to pre-crisis levels. Austerity's focus on reduced government spending lessens the government's economic footprint. Third, because big banks and other large capitalists are among the major creditors of the US government, they wanted signs that their crisis-increased holdings of US debt were safe investments for them. Austerity policies provide just those signs, as we shall show.

Austerity in the US, unlike in Europe, is renamed and packaged for the public as "deficit reduction programs" or "fiscal responsibility." Distractions such as "fiscal cliffs" and "debt ceilings" focus public attention on mere secondary details of austerity. Politicians, media and academics use such distractions to wrangle over whose taxes will go up how much and which recipients of government spending will suffer what size cuts. They do not debate austerity itself; that is, they do not debate very idea of raising mass taxes and cutting spending in a deep and long economic downturn. They do not explore the interests served and undermined by any austerity policy. So we will.

Austerity promoters repeatedly insist that the dominant economic problem today is government budget deficits. They ignore why those deficits occurred (the crisis plus bailouts). They demand that both parties and the media endorse austerity because cuts in government spending and increased taxes will reduce deficits. They hype austerity as the solution all must embrace. Otherwise, they fear, a different and dangerous logic might win popular support. In that logic, since capitalism regularly causes crises that cause deficits, another solution for deficits would be changing from capitalism to another economic system not beset by regular crises.

Austerity policies, we are told, will reduce deficits and thereby meet what "the credit market" demands. In other words, those who have lent to the US government (by buying its debt securities) want guarantees of interest and repayment. By cutting government spending and raising taxes, austerity policies redirect government funds to the government's creditors, thereby reassuring them.

Distracting references to an anonymous "market" avoid identifying the government's creditors. However, major creditors holding US public debt are easy to list: large banks, insurance companies, large corporations, wealthy individuals and central banks around the world. Austerity justified as satisfying "the market" in fact serves those US creditors first and foremost.

Austerity is thus the policy preferred by the private capitalist interests that (1) brought on the crisis, (2) secured the government bailouts almost exclusively for themselves, and (3) are that government's chief creditors. Led by major banks, those interests now threaten the government (that just bailed them out) with higher interest rates or no more credit unless it imposes higher taxes (mostly on others) and reduced spending (mostly on others) to lower its deficits. Distracting struggles over "fiscal cliffs" and "debt ceilings" serve nicely to disguise the reality that both parties' austerity policies represent and illustrate gross government subservience to large capitalists.

via truth-out.org

I'm presenting a talk next Wednesday afternoon at the College Art Association meeting in NYC. The title is "Re-Viewing Neoliberalism." I'll be talking through the paper (because this is a talk), which you can find in full-on prose form here. 


I would love to see you at the talk and, uh, talk (maybe over a beer or a coffee) afterwords. I'll also take any and all electronically-delivered feedback I can get. This paper is the core of a manuscript I'm working on, so I would very, very much appreciate comments, suggestions, etc.

Here's the introduction:


Philosopher Jacques Ranciere argues that biopolitical neoliberalism is the “perfect realization” of Plato’s Republic: the “managerial state’s…science of simulations of opinion is the perfect realization of the empty virtue Plato called sophrusune: the fact of each person’s being in their place” (Disagreement, 106). In Plato, a harmonics of proportion determined what places there were and who belonged in which ones (e.g., the myth of the metals); in neoliberalism, a harmonics of frequency and amplitude (i.e., the statistical modeling of a sine wave) determines what places there are and who belongs where. Plato’s geometricconcept of harmony organizes societyspatially, while neoliberal sine waves organize society temporally (space is a function of time). As Michel Foucault explains, the neoliberal state uses biopolitical statistics to monitor “phenomena that occur over a period of time, which have to be studied over a certain period of time” so that it can control for “aleatory events that occur within a population that exists over a period of time (Michel Foucault, SMBD 246). Note Foucault’s language here: it’s not just “time,” but the frequency (quantity) and amplitude (quality) of occurrences within “a period of time” that matters. Given the importance of time in biopolitical neoliberalism, how might the art-historical concept of 4D time-based media help us understand and critique neoliberal hegemonies? Might thinking about time in or as 4-dimensional be a distinctively neoliberal understanding of time? (For example, 2D timelines seem to differ in important ways from 4D frequencies and amplitudes; the sine wave as 2D model of 4D phenomenon of intensity/vibration/radiation.)

The difference between classically liberal and neoliberal regimes of visuality is widely discussed. Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect is an excellent account of ways neoliberalism manifests as strategies and tactics for visual/cinematic composition, and his work has certainly informed my thinking. I argue that sound studies and transational feminisms are productive, and, actually, necessary resources for theorizing neoliberalism and visuality. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Guyatri Spivak explains, via Marx, how liberalism turns on the slippage between concepts of Darstellung—artistic representation—and Vertretung—political representation. I argue that classically liberal “representation” is 2D and Cartesian, while neoliberal “representation” is 4D and sonic. It is no coincidence that many transnational feminist theorists use sonic concepts to describe 4D, often explicitly neoliberal configurations of gender/race/sexuality. I will examine two such accounts: Alia Al-Saji’s phenomenology of “critical-ethical vision,” and Jasbir Puar’s Deleuzian/Foucaultian account of “superpanopticism.” First, I explain classical liberalism’s 2D Cartesian episteme—what Alia Al-Saji calls “objectifying” visuality. I then contrast this to Jasbir Puar’s concept of superpanopticism, which I argue is 4D in the art-historical sense. After establishing the two-dimensionality of classically liberal Darstellung and the four-dimensionality of neoliberal Darstellung, I then, in the third section, argue that 4D Darstellung is most productively theorized through sonic epistemologies. Neoliberalism works like a sine wave; mathematically, sine waves can do the statistical, probabilistic work that characterizes neoliberal biopolitics. Thus, in the final section, I use the concept of “transmission” to explain how sine waves manifest politically, as neoliberal Vertretung. I also consider what sorts of art practices could potentially challenge or frustrate neoliberal Vertretung/Darstellung. If neoliberalism produces macro-level stability through micro-level flexibility (overall regulation through ‘deregulation’), then what is the critical potential of a practice in which there is no flexibility at all, e.g., total serialism?