Introduction to Good Vibes Only

I have finally finished the full first draft of my fifth book, Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Algorithms, & the Politics of Legitimation (under contract w Duke). That means I’m deep in revisions for at least the remainder of 2024, possibly a bit into 2025. Now that I now exactly what the book will indeed say, I’ve finished the (nearly) final draft of the introduction to the book, which I’ve posted here to give you a sense of what the book is about. Happy reading!

Vibe Check

In late 2021 I was buying concert tickets on the website for the Brooklyn, New York venue elsewhere when I noticed that the interface for the audio playback feature used the phrase “vibe check” in place of “listen.”

Though this use of “vibe check” refers to aesthetic judgment, the idiom typically circulates in popular culture as a way to judge other people. As the Urban Dictionary entry cited in the internet subculture bible Know Your Meme puts it, vibe check is “a process by which a group or individual obtains a subjective assessment of the mental and emotional state of another person, place or thing.” To check someone’s vibe is to judge whether their combination of attitude, mindset, and overall comportment is positively or negatively contributing to the physical and/or social space in which they are present.

As Harvard Crimson contributor Clara V. Nguyen noted in a 2019 piece, a September, 2019 tumblr meme posted by user starion has given rise to a more narrow use of “vibe check” to refer to policing other people’s vibes. The meme is an image of one stick figure hitting the other over the head with a baseball bat while exclaiming “vibe check!” As Nyugen explains, the viral spread of that meme has led “vibe check” to “evolv[e] to represent an unsettling endorsement of physical aggression as a way to eliminate bad vibes.” In this sense, to “vibe check” someone is to punish them for having what you perceive to be the wrong attitude or quality of presence. 

The idiom’s direct connection to policing as an institution is reflected in social media users’ frequent use of “vibe check” to refer to TSA screenings. An October 2021 search of Twitter for “vibe check TSA” pulled up over 50 individual uses of “vibe check” as a metaphor for TSA screening. For example, this user with a colorful handle stated in a November 2019 tweet that “TSA is just a vibe check from national security.”

Despite the ironic feel of the tweet, this Twitter user is actually right: TSA screening IS quite literally a vibe check by federal security agents. As the ACLU reported in 2017, “Thousands of TSA officers use so-called ‘behavior detection’ techniques to scrutinize travelers for…behaviors that the TSA calls signs of deception or “mal-intent” such as yawning, whistling, being distracted, or being late for your flight. Throughout the airport, TSA officers observe passengers for what it claims are behaviors that reveal an otherwise hidden criminal intent and send people with bad vibes for extra screening. Assessing passengers for signs of their attitude, mindset, and overall comportment, TSA officers are literally practicing “vibe check” as a form of police profiling.

This book takes vibe checks and the vibe police as examples of a new regime of power or mode of governing people which blends qualitative practices like those with quantitative technological processes including the mathematical models driving recommendation algorithms and machine learning systems. “Vibe checks” are how we see ourselves in the same way that algorithms see us. 

In his study of the way the algorithms fueling 2010s tech platforms model identity, John Cheney-Lippold has argued that algorithms govern through a “soft biopolitics” of flexible norms where the boundaries around normative categories like gender are continually redefined as new data feeds back into the system. While Cheney-Lippold is correct to note that algorithms aren’t normalizing in the traditional sense, I argue that they aren’t using norms at all and represent a new form of biopower in which discourses of legitimacy function in place of norms to draw patriarchal racial capitalist lines around personhood. A follow-up to The Sonic Episteme, this book attends to the relationship between biopower’s quantitative and qualitative dimensions. My previous book demonstrated the ways sound, as a frequency, was used to translate statistical normalization, or the measurement of the most frequent frequencies in a population, into qualitative terms. This book argues that phenomenological orientation or horizon has a similar function in contexts where probability is modeled (or, as Louise Amoore describes it, “condenses”) as a vector rather than (strictly) as a normal curve. These mathematical vectors have been vernacularized as “vibes”, which are qualitative categories that everyone from 2020s social media users to music streaming services use to define the same sorts of orientations or tendencies that vectors model mathematically. In both its qualitative and quantitative form, the vibe check is assessing something other than a norm.

1. Vibe Checks and Biopower

As an element of contemporary pop culture and the national security state, the vibe police illustrate a form of biopower different from the kind of disciplinary and regulatory norms Michel Foucault talks about across works such as Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality Volume One, and Society Must Be Defended. All of these texts theorize “a normalizing society,” which is “the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life” (HSv1, 144). Unlike sovereign power, which polices the transgression of prohibitions with punishment, biopower addresses the life of both individuals and the species with the aim of maximizing its flourishing, efficiency, capacities, and productivity. As I will explain in more detail in Chapter 1, biopower emerged as a way to both (1) address the rise of mass society and industrial capitalism, and (2) carve out a mode of governing that could maintain hierarchical social and political relations in the private sphere alongside the rise of classically liberal civil society and its commitments to formal equality before the law. In this respect, the turn to the “bio-“ in “biopower” was motivated by a need to efficiently recruit masses of people into industrial capitalist and classically liberal regimes of power. In Focault’s theory of biopower, the object that power governs is the life of both individuals and the species/population.

Norms are the tools that this original form of biopower uses to optimize individual and collective life for industrial capitalism and classically liberal politics. Disciplinary norms are detailed and inflexible standards defined for each station in a hierarchical organization (think the different ranks of the military, or of the colored belt system in martial arts); regulatory norms are grounded in the mathematical model called the “normal” or “bell” curve that charts the “normal” rate at which a variable occurs in a defined population. Chapter 1 explains how disciplinary and regulatory norms advance the ends of industrial capitalism and classical liberalism. 

As the examples above suggest, the vibe police aren’t enforcing norms: elsewhere’s website invites potential patrons to see if an artist’s sound aligns with their tastes and preferences, whatever they may be, while TSA workers are looking for evidence of potential future behavior (rather than present conformity to a norm). As both vernacular social practice and technique of the security state, the “vibe check” is evidence of a new technique or technology of power not captured by Foucault’s theories of norms. Whereas Foucaultian biopower weaves together qualitative and quantitative norms, this book argues that there is a newer form of biopower that weaves together qualitative and quantitative orientations, which are modeled qualitatively as vibes and quantitatively as vectors in mathematical space. 

As scholars such as Justin Joque, John Cheney-Lippold, and Melinda Cooper have shown, the mathematical models used by today’s computational algorithms are different than the bell-curve style population modeling Foucault discusses in his work on regulatory norms. Though they each emphasize slightly different mathematical procedures, these three accounts all focus on techniques that model probability speculatively as a possible future rather than as a rate in past empirical data (which is what a normal curve tracks). As scholars such as Cooper, Louise Amoore, and Lisa Adkins have argued, contemporary tech and finance model reality using calculative methods that push past the limits of mere probability by folding qualitative speculation into quantitative procedures. That folding happens through the interpretation of data modeled as vectors–mathematical objects with a direction and magnitude that represent an orientation in space. As anthropologist Nick Seaver explains, “most machine learning systems parse the entities of the world by first rendering them as vectors…Represented as vectors, objects are defined by their orientation.” Though recommender systems such as those fueling Spotify or TikTok are explicitly vector-based, as I discuss in chapter 5, other algorithmic systems like Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural nets “condense” these orientations by inferring them from clusters of data. Whereas regulatory norms model the average frequency or rate of a variable in a population, these newer mathematical models frame probability as an orientation in space.

Just as Bayesian probabilities and vectors supplement Gaussian probabilities modeled as normal curves, vibes supplement and in some cases replace the work traditionally performed by qualitative social norms and antinormativity. Building on Sara Ahmed’s study of orientation as a structure of racialized sexuality in Queer Phenomenology, this book argues that the qualitative component of this regime of biopower is, as its title suggests, what late 2010s/early 2020s vernacular call “vibes.”  Apart from Peli Grietzer’s 2017 piece “A Theory of Vibe” and some work by cultural critics like Kyle Chayka, not much attention has been paid to theorizing vibes and their relation to contemporary technology. In fact, most of the recent academic literature on “mood” as a musical category conceives of it as an emotion or affect rather than an orientation (briefly: orientations are the perspectives or situations that make some affects or emotions more readily palpable than others). Studying social media, internet culture, and popular music, Good Vibes Only shows that vibes discourse adopts an epistemic and ontological framework that is analogous to the one contemporary computational algorithms use to perceive and model our reality, and then uses that framework to achieve similar ends—ends that the STS and AI Ethics literature have firmly established as furthering new forms of patriarchal racial capitalist oppression and dispossession. Far from a harmless trend or annoying relic of internet culture, vernacular vibes discourses are a method for policing white supremacist capitalist patriarchal personhood without making explicit reference to either identity categories or fixed, inflexible, universal standards. For example, in chapter 2 I discuss how the idiom “no gender, just vibes” misrepresents the policing of white cisheteropatriarchal personhood in terms of racialized private individual/familial responsibility as the overcoming of cisheteropatrichal gender, which it figures as inherently and exclusively normative. In other words, vibes let us both celebrate the end of oppressive norms while simultaneously taking on the policing they traditionally performed. 

Whereas norms facilitate governance through discipline and regulation, orientations govern through speculation and legitimation. Because it is speculative, vibes-based biopower addresses presently-counterfactual realities: those TSA agents, for example, are assessing individuals’ perceived future capacity to contribute positively or negatively to US national security. The “bio-” in vibes-based biopower thus refers to future capacity or debility (to echo Jasbir Puar’s terms), not the flesh-and-blood fact of empirically existing people and populations. As I discuss in the last part of chapter 2 and in chapter 3, “legitimacy” in my sense refers to the officially-sanctioned transfer of property, whether it be the state and/or church-sanctioned marriage legitimating the intergenerational transfer of wealth, or, as in chapter 4, the cisheteropatriarchally-sanctioned intergenerational transfer of intellectual property such as an artistic style. In this regime of biopower, orientations are “checked” or judged for their relative alignment with the cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist distribution of private property. For example, machine learning researcher Janelle Shane’s October 2018 talk “Machine learning failures–for art!” talk highlights some of the paint colors one of her ML algorithms built after being trained on Sherwin Williams’ colors: “Sindis Poop,” “Turdly,” “Suffer,” and “Gray Pubic.” While Shane plays the inappropriateness of these names for laughs (or art), her talk highlights how the complex math behind machine learning algorithms relies on qualitative input grounded in cultural habits and traditions to sift out successful from unsuccessful results. In this example, these paint color names are risible not because they fail to conform to a standard or norm, but because they are associated with objects and experiences that do not make appealing inspiration for house paint, like excrement and genitals. Sending our thoughts in the wrong direction, results like “turdly” are considered failed ML outputs because their sophomoric vibe is out of place in the interior design market. In this context, vectors and vibes work together to model orientations that are judged for their relative capacity for market success. In other words, Shane’s experiment demonstrates how “vibe checks” are speculative judgments about a thing’s relationship to private markets and private property.

Whereas Foucault explicitly situates normative biopower as a private-sphere compliment to the classically liberal discourse of formal equality before the law, the biopolitics of legitimation updates traditional Foucaultian biopower to work in a context (largely) absent any such thing as civil society or the public sphere. “Vibes-based” or “legitimating” biopower has the same ends and overarching strategies that Foucault attributes to normalizing biopower, but it updates the specific tactics and techniques used to achieve those ends to better accord with both technological and cultural advances, on the one hand, and “Family Values”-style privatization, on the other. Legitimating biopower weaves together the qualitative governance of individuals with quantitative governance at scale for the purpose of redistributing life chances along patriarchal racial capitalist lines, but in ways that maximize the efficiency of an informational rather than industrial society.

The best way to situate this book is to understand it as the sequel to The Sonic Episteme. That book argues that frequencies and ratios are the building blocks of normal curves and normalized statistical distributions, and that in the neoliberal era ideas of acoustic resonance are used to translate those mathematical relations into qualitative form. Good Vibes Only argues that vectors, horizons, and orientations are the building blocks of contemporary algorithmic modeling, and that vibes are vernacularizations of those models that people use to perceive themselves the same way those algorithms perceive us. Both The Sonic Episteme and Good Vibes Only study the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of biopower, but the former focuses on normalizing biopower and the latter studies legitimating biopower.

2. Method and Contribution

This book puts continental philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, media studies, and popular music studies into conversation in order to theorize the (mediated) governance of race, gender, and sexuality. Its theoretical foundation is in feminist and queer continental philosophy; my approach to Foucault is informed by the work of scholars such as Darrell Moore, LaDelle McWhorter, Mary Beth Mader, Shannon Winnubst, and Emily Zakin, and my approach to phenomenology is informed by the work of scholars including Linda Alcoff, Sara Ahmed, Alia Al-Saji, Tina Chante, and Elaine Miller. My theoretical framework also draws heavily on work in feminist political economy by Melinda Cooper and Lisa Adkins. Reading Cooper’s theory of “neoliberal biopolitics” from Life as Surplus alongside her discussion of the politics of legitimation in Family Values, I use philosophical scholarship in Foucault studies and critical phenomenology to build out a systematic account of post-normative, neoliberal biopower that Cooper’s work gestures towards but never explicitly thematizes (to be clear: she talks about neoliberal biopolitics, but not the more general regime of biopower, which includes discursive as well as quantitative dimensions). This systematic account of legitimating biopower takes Foucault’s basic framework for what biopower is and updates it for 21st century technologies and vernaculars; I’m not proposing a new kind of power (such as Colin Koopman does in his work on “infopower”) so much as I’m arguing for a neoliberal “upgrade” to Foucault’s original theory, which is explicitly framed as a private-sphere compliment to classically liberal formal equality before the law.

The book’s other philosophical cornerstone is feminist phenomenology and critical phenomenology more generally; it uses work in these areas in a more applied way to articulate both what this new regime of biopower uses in place of norms, how that is connected to the politics of legitimation, and how we might think and act in ways that orient ourselves and our world more toward otherwise horizons. Echoing the sense of “otherwise” used for example in Ashton Crawley’s work, these “otherwise” horizons exist alongside legitimate and legitimating ones while not fully aligning with them. Sara Ahmed’s work on phenomenological orientations, sexuality, and debt helps me connect vibes and vectors as qualitative and quantitative expressions of the same underlying structure—the phenomenological orientation—and show how that structure is governed as a private property relation (i.e., a debt relation). I also use feminist phenomenological approaches to Hegel’s account of the public and the private as competing regimes of legitimation—especially Tina Chanter’s work on the role of slavery—to unpack the intersecting dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality in legitimating biopower. And finally I turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity to think through how orientations can be theorized and practiced otherwise; if legitimating biopower uses orientations to align the world to the ends of patriarchal racial capitalism, Beauvoir’s existential ethics model one way to think and practice orientations in a philosophical system where the only valid ground of legitimacy is human existence and human freedom itself. The book’s contribution to feminist and critical phenomenology is not so much in advancing conceptual research and more in showing how its concepts can be applied to better understand and act in the early 21st century.

From this foundation in continental philosophy and political economy, I use work in media studies and science and technology studies to ground my analysis of 21st century algorithms and algorithmic culture, primarily focusing on the work of Louise Amoore, John Cheney-Lippold, Justin Joque, Kara Keeling, and Nick Seaver. Their scholarship informs my account of how algorithms model probability mathematically, and any misunderstandings of the math are my misreading of their explanations. This book connects their more technically-focused critical work on how exactly these mathematical models and computational systems work on a nuts-and-bolts level with a more cultural-studies oriented approach to internet cultures to show how the underlying form organizing platforms like TikTok or Spotify caches out at the level of content. Vibes are how we see ourselves the way algorithms see us; they are vernacularizations of the epistemic and perceptual protocols fueling technologies like recommender algorithms and machine learning systems. Claiming that vibes are the discursive compliment to the mathematical models studied by these scholars, this book takes Cheney-Lippold, Joque, and Cooper’s claims that the math has advanced beyond statistical norms and posits the existence of a new regime of biopower centered around legitimation rather than norms.

This volume is also informed by my background in popular music studies. Although this is not a book about music, it studies music as a site shaped by both the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of legitimating biopower. Just as vibes-based playlists populate streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, those same platforms use vector-based recommendation algorithms to populate users’ feeds. Popular music is a domain where the workings and impacts of vibes and vectors is readily legible. It is by no means unique in this regard, but it happens to be the medium that my scholarship focuses on. I am absolutely NOT making an Attali-like claim that music is a herald or harbinger of what will later become broader cultural change; it’s just the phenomenon that’s most legible to me because I’ve spent over 20 years studying it. This book studies popular music because that’s where my expertise lies, but the claims I make through the study of popular music are broadly generalizable as features of legitimating biopower as such. I look forward to seeing how readers apply this analysis to their own areas of expertise, both in popular music studies and beyond.

Although Good Vibes Only is not a book about music, it still offers some contribution to popular music studies. First, it shows how the technical affordances of platformed listening cache out aesthetically at the level of musical content: traditional categories like genres and formats wane as newer categories like vibe are on the rise. Building on my past work on post-genre music and post-identity politics, this book shows how vibe as a musical category re-makes traditional identity-based status hierarchies (like rockism) in what Nick Seaver calls “postdemographic” terms. The book also shows how legitimation works as a musical aesthetic in Afriacan-American popular musics of the late 20th and early 201st centuries. Beginning in the 1970s when worries about the influence of disco and fusion (i.e., Afro-Latinx musics) led to the rise of “neoclassical” jazz that could trace a direct and untainted aesthetic lineage back to the patriarchs of bebop, the book tracks how ideologies of private individual responsibility and the patriarchal heritability of aesthetic property emerge in jazz, hip hop, and pop, domesticating Black radical aesthetics into terms compatible with legitimating biopower. I also show how Black femme artists such as Beyoncé and Grace Jones use practices of musical indeterminacy to create ways of relating current creative work to its antecedents and influences that don’t frame creative work as a form of private property. This work builds on scholarship on neoliberalism and Black popular musics, the role of race and intellectual property in the American music industry, and Black radical sonic practices to show how Black musical aesthetics have both been domesticated by legitimating biopower and evolved to work around this newer form of biopower and orient musicking otherwise.

One of scholars who reviewed the proposal for this book suggested that this volume’s multidisciplinary method was itself a contribution to scholarship; I appreciate their suggestion, and their encouragement to thematize this explicitly. My work is deeply engaged with philosophy, music and sound studies, media studies, gender studies, and critical race studies, but it sits mostly on the margins of all these fields except popular music studies. Part of the reason my work is oriented this way is because my career has proceeded through a series of institutional contexts where I have never been forced to do otherwise. I chose to do my Ph.D. in philosophy because the field studies everything: gender, politics, music, history, technology, you name it there’s a subfield in philosophy devoted to it. I wanted that for my graduate education as that is what I had experienced as an undergraduate in a liberal arts program; I wrote a thesis on the influence of Kant’s idea of genius in Schoenberg’s thought, and took a graduate music analysis class where I wrote about deconstruction and 20th century music theory. Natalia Cicere once described my work as “small-c catholic” in the sense that it was broad-minded and non-provincial in its approach to discipline. Even though philosophers tend to read less small-c catholicly than any other field, I have always been institutionally positioned within philosophy — as a continental philosopher, as someone teaching in a non-flagship state school with an emphasis on applied philosophy, as an independent scholar — so that I my work has never had to live up to mainstream expectations for what counts as “elite” philosophy — i.e., analytic philosophy focused primarily on logic, epistemology, metaphysic, and/or mind. In fact, as someone whose career has evolved along with blogging and social media, I have been incentivized by those institutions to do just the opposite and speak both with and to as broad an audience as possible. I have never really been in a position to significantly benefit from conforming to narrow disciplinary boundaries as my work in philosophy was already very marginal to begin with, while at the same time my public-facing work gained traction precisely because it was in conversation with a variety of different fields and topics. In large part my reading and citation habits are the result of my position in my home field and in the academy generally. In this respect, though my methods share affinities and with practices of “undisciplined” scholarship in Black Studies and sometimes engages with that work, that was not the scholarly tradition I was raised in, and I came to my practice in a much less intentional and explicitly thematized way than those who claim that tradition. 

However, I do think this approach has intellectual value beyond the fact of its sociological happenstance. Philosophical problems have stakes beyond the narrow confines of the scholarly literature or the academy, so to study them philosophers need to be exploring beyond the bounds of our one discipline. That means reading and being in conversation with scholars, critics, and journalists who have subject-area expertise in the material I study — here that’s internet studies, political economy, gender and sexuality studies, and so on. And my reading of that work often engages it in a somewhat tangential way that focuses more on what it has to say about how things like algorithms or music scenes or anti-trans violence work concretely in the world and less on the stakes of a project in its home field. In a sense, this is how I as a humanist am collecting qualitative data. Nevertheless, because this book connects these individual projects across several disciplines by situating them in a systematic political ontology, it does offer philosophical contributions to these non-philosophy fields by situating their objects of study in a bigger, meta-level picture.

While it is common across the humanities for broad-reaching theories to be built from analysts of artistic practices like performance, literature, film, and visual culture, it’s extremely rare for popular music scholarship to be of such broad influence. This book can be taken as a model for how scholars can theorize with and through popular music in ways that are broadly accessible and don’t require readers to know much of anything about intervals, harmonies, or Western notation. Popular music studies is a broadly interdisciplinary field crossing literature, sociology, music studies, media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, even business and law. As a former editor of one of The Journal of Popular Music Studies, I can assure scholars from other fields that popular music studies eschews highly technical music theory, notation-reading, and other features that would alienate readers without advanced musical skills. JPMS is over 30 years old and there is a vast literature in popular music studies that scholars across the liberal arts can use in their research and teaching. It is my hope that this book can serve as a model for scholars across the humanities and social sciences that both proves that and suggests some ways how popular music scholarship can be valuable in the theorization of lots more than just music.

3. Chapter Overview

The first chapter reviews Foucault’s theory of biopower to establish the “before” to which the rest of the book discusses the “after.” Readers of The Sonic Episteme will likely be able to move though this chapter fairly quickly, as it covers territory that is familiar to them. The legitimationg biopower upgrades the normalizing biopopwer Foucault theorized for greater compatibility with mid-21st century technology and politics. This chapter explains normalizing biopower in its original form to set up the discussion of legitimating biopower. My account of normalizing biopower is rooted in Foucault’s History of Sexuality v1 and Society Must Be Defended, as well as Mary Beth Mader’s Sleights of Reason. I show how both quantitative norms and qualitative norms are fundamentally temporal: normal distributions measure the frequency of a variable in a population, and qualitative norms are, as Judith Butler famously theorized, fundamentally iterative. Both frequencies and iterative performances are cyclical phenomena that unfold over time. This shared ontology is what allows qualitative and quantitative norms to be so powerfully compatible. Using Erica Fretwell’s account of psychophysical aesthesis and Heinrich Helmholtz’s psychophysical theory of hearing, the chapter illustrates how norms work as a modality of sensation, perception, or feel, and how the normalization of sensation worked to draw gendered, sexual, and braced boundaries around personhood. 

Using Chapter 1’s framework for what biopower is and how it weaves together qualitative and quantitative modalities by granting them an analogous ontological structure, this chapter explains what the biopolitics of legitimation is and how it accomplishes the same work as its predecessor—carving patriarchal racial capitalist boundaries around personhood—in new ways. In place of the statistical and qualitative norm, this form of biopolitics uses an orientation or horizon as object of knowledge and governance. First, the chapter explains what an orientation is by unpacking Sara Ahmed’s concept of phenomenological orientation and Linda Alcoff’s analogous concept of phenomenological horizon. An orientation or horizon is a material and sociohistorical location, and all the affordances and limitations that location offers to facilitate and/or inhibit what one can do, think, or be; to be orientated is to be directed towards some phenomena and away from others. Closely reading Ahmed’s discussion of the heritability of orientations as a debt relationship alongside Melinda Cooper’s theorization of legitimacy, I argue that orientations are governed by logics of legitimacy, or the capacity to reproduce patriarchal racial capitalist property relations.Then, using Justin Joque and Nick Seaver’s analyses of the math behind contemporary algorithms, I argue that the vectoral math they analyze models an orientation. Looking to the way the term/hashtag “vibe” is used in social media and on music streaming platforms, I show how vibe is an orientation in the same sense as a vector, and the discursive complement to that sort of mathematical governance. 

The advantage legitimacy presents over normativity is that the latter’s authority is grounded in an appeal to a public, whereas the former requires no such appeal. As Cooper argues, legitimation appeals to the authority of a law–divine or human–and most often appeals to laws regarding property ownership and transfer, such as marriage law as a vehicle for legitimating the intergenerational transfer of private wealth. Legitimacy can govern patriarchal racial capitalist personhood without appealing to a public, and for this reason is a perfect fit for both neoliberal imperatives to privatization and neoconservative social ontologies that privilege the patriarchal nuclear family above all else. To contrast regimes of sexual normalcy to regimes of sexual legitimacy, this chapter tracks the difference between several moral panics in the 1980s and 90s — the Larry Flynt obscenity trial(s), the “porn rock” moral panic that snowballed into the infamous Parents Music Resource Council, and the obscenity charges the City of Cincinnati brought against The Contemporary Arts Center for their display of a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective — with contemporary moral panics about LGBTQ people as criminalized and demonized figures. Whereas the moral panics of the 80s and 90s targeted sexualities that violated community norms, those of today target sexualities that are purportedly in violation of statutory or religious law. Then, using Lisa Cacho’s work on criminalization and Adam Kotsko’s work on neoliberal practice of demonization, I argue that these are the two techniques the biopolitics of legitimation uses to exclude individuals and groups from full personhood through nominal appeals to the breach of a (human or divine) law. Finally, using Michelle Murphy’s discussion of the affective dimensions of “The Girl” figure, I show how the discourse of sexual legitimation expresses il/legitimacy as a vibe.

This chapter considers how discourses of legitimacy have been and can be negotiated in 20th and 21st century African-American popular music. My aim here is to both show how Black radical and Black feminist aesthetics can be co-opted into logics of legitimation, and how they can offer means of creating, relating, and feeling that are, at least in this moment, beyond the grasp of enclosure and legitimation. This part of the chapter addresses work by Dale Chapman, Lester Spence, Emily Lordi, Kara Keeling, and Kyra Gaunt, as well as neoclassical jazz, rapper Ace Hood, Beyonce, the Tom Tom Club, Mariah Carey, and Chicks on Speed. Unlike late 20th century queer theory, which tended to center antinormativity as a form of resistance to normalizing biopower, these artists and theorists aim not against legitimacy, but beyond or otherwise from it. I argue that there is no practice or technique that is inherently or necessarily illegible to and un-co-potable by the logic of legitimation. What matters is not form but orientation: Black popular music aesthetics have been reoriented towards patriarchal racial capitalist private property relations, but they can also, as we see in the work of many of the artists studied in this chapter, be oriented otherwise. 

If phenomenological orientations are what the biopolitics of legitimation takes its object of knowledge and governance, what role does phenomenology offer in this context as a philosophical method? The first part of the chapter looks to figures of “atmosphere” in work by Marina Peterson, Eric A. Stanley, and Louise Amooreto show how competing regimes of legitimation “condense” illegitimate orientations. Reading their Peterson’s concept of noise and Stanley’s concept of near life alongside Tina Chanter’s discussion of the role of slavery in both Sophoclese’ Antigone and Hegel’s account of the play in his Phenomenology of Spirit, I argue that in legitimating biopower, sophrosyne–a key term in The Sonic Episteme–appears not as harmony but as a vibe or orientation. And it’s the checking of this vibe, one’s perceived capacity to maintain one’s alignment with the legitimate order of ruler and ruled that determines one’s access to the protections offered by the private family and private markets. Then, in the second half of the chapter, though phenomenology is not inherently critical or counter-hegemonic (think of Heidegger’s work, for example), I argue that Beauvoirian existential phenomenology can be the basis for such a theoretical (re)orientation. One of the earliest philosophers to theorize phenomenological orientation in a non-ideal sense, Beauvoir understands each individual subject to be situated in a sociomaterial context that makes some choices more possible than others. However, as an existential phenomenologist, Beauvoir argues that this situation is collectively produced and reproduced through the actions of everyday people. In choosing to whom we orient ourselves toward and from whom we orient ourselves away (and often against), we can contribute to the re-orientation of our situation, either for good or bad. Like neoliberal discourses of legitimacy, existential phenomenology eschews universals; however, unlike such discourses, existential phenomenology centers our collective, shared situation and our role in maintaining and/or altering it. In this way, it offers a model for orienting our thinking and theorizing away from the biopolitics of algorithmic legitimation.