Böcker av Jeffrey T. Nealon

Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop's music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else.Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant "disciplinary" mode of power to a "biopolitical" mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical "resistance" need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning--saying "no" to the mainstream--is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain.Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the "attention capitalism" that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between "keepin' it real" and "sellin' out." 

The first chapter is an overview of the current "e;crisis"e; of literary study, brought about by downsizings following the crash of 2008 (from which literary studies never really recovered), compounded by the Covid pandemic, and rocked by the bedrock questions put to the academic study of literature by the Black Lives Matter protests. This chapter also looks at why theory matters in the present - as an introduction to modes of questioning and ways of life, which the author opposes to the English department's understanding of literature as a series of disciplinary objects to be understood or appreciated.The second chapter is a specific exploration of the novel, the current reigning form of literature and literary study in both popular and academic contexts, and the novel's relation to the present (of new materialism) and the past (the European history of the novel as the official form for warehousing bourgeois subjective experience). If new materialism (including anti-racist critiques) questions the world-view of bourgeois Eurocentric humanism, it also brings into question the centrality of that world view's primary artistic form, the novel.

This book joins the growing philosophical literature on vegetable life to ask what changes in our present humanities debates about biopower and Animal Studies if we take plants as a linchpin for thinking about biopolitics.

In conventional identity politics subjective differences are understood negatively, as gaps to be overcome, as lacks of sameness, as evidence of failed or incomplete unity. The author argues that ethics is constituted as inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalise the other.