The Exhaustion of Authenticity: Biopolitical Aural Regimes and American Popular Music

Abstract

AbstractJeffrey T. Nealon proposes that “twenty-first-century American biopolitical subjectivity” has as its “overarching logic” an arrangement in which being for something signifies a content-less affirmation: “I’m not like everyone else.” For Nealon, this “excorporative” logic grows out of, coincides with, and exhausts rock music’s discourses of authenticity from the second half of the twentieth century. Today, an endlessly interconnected network emerges in which old forms of cultural “individualism” become ever-interchangeable modes of “hip commodity consumption,” indexing a neoliberal regime that renders “everybody” into “prosumers” (producers-consumers). This review-essay considers the extent and limits of this proposal, querying Nealon’s understanding of listening and aurality and indicating the challenges presented by bypassing the mesopolitical in an effort to outline the macropolitics of consumption and the micropolitics of individuality.