I’m writing something about the ontology of “independence” in popular music, and if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time you know it’s where I make my first drafts of whatever I’m writing. So this is rough and maybe a little sloppy, but that’s the point - I’m spitting out ideas here for refinement down the road.

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.

May 7, 2026 Jacobin published a piece titled “Liberal Poptimists Tried to Kill Rock. They Failed” and one of the 2020’s “pop girlies” Charli XCX announced a new album and single titled “Rock Music.” Charli’s song takes the mocumentary tone of her recent A42 film THE MOMENT and applies it to an updated version of the Max Martin/Kelly Clarkson pop-rock sound of the aughts. With some literal and figurative winks throughout the track, “Rock Music” feels like the British club kid version of Shop Boyz’ 2007 “Party Like A Rockstar,” a crunk-adjacent rap track that makes fun of the white rock culture of the peak Linkin Park era. Lyrically and conceptually, there’s also a sly echo of a guy in a dance-punk band who joked about selling his turntables and buying guitars. On “Rock Music,” Charli notably continues to use the same sort of autotuned vocals that defined her sound on her club-oriented album brat; this puts her right in line with the latest Strokes record “Going Shopping,” which processes frontman Julian Casablancas’s vocals in exactly the same way.

“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.

As someone who (1) has written a whole book about the structural conditions compelling people to perform spectacles of damage and vulnerability and their overcoming and (2) tends to think that the rise of Massumian affect theory in the 90s was a way to appear to rejuvenate white Western theory with a new methodology while keeping theorists focused exclusively on the white Western canon (why center Deleuze and Spinoza when The Souls of Black Folk and its sorrow is right there showing you how to theorize and theorize with extra-propositional knowledges), I thought I might be receptive to Lisa Downing’s Against Affect, which centers on affect theory and what she calls its “Tyranny of Vulnerability.” Though we may have some similar inclinations, we follow through on them in very different ways.

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.

As The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka has discussed in one of his recent columns, the AI bros are really into the idea of aesthetic taste. In the extreme information overload that generative AI provides, taste is the capacity to discern, and thus, to lead. Sari Azout, writing on the company blog for her upmarket Pinterest platform Sublime, argues that

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.

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.

In 2026, any take that uncritically treats “pop” as the low or mass culture term in a high/low or art/craft binary is a red herring designed to divert attention away from the fact that the political ontology that makes that aesthetic binary possible is obsolete. Structured by political and fiscal privatization, algorithmic personalization, and the like, present reality in so-called Western liberal democracies no longer reflects the enlightenment public/private binary that has long shaped Western modernity.

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.