Ambience and Biopolitics

Author:

Griffin, Justin

Graduate Program:

English (PHD)

Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

Document Type:

Dissertation

Date of Defense:

June 15, 2021

Committee Members:

David Loewenstein, Program Head/Chair
Claire Colebrook, Major Field Member
Richard Doyle, Major Field Member
Jonathan Eburne, Outside Unit & Field Member
Jeffrey Nealon, Chair & Dissertation Advisor

Keywords:

biopolitics
ambience
sound studies
attention economy
listening

Abstract:

In recent years, a widespread sense of media overflow has prompted many cultural theorists, educators, and popular commentators to declare an erosion of cultural attentiveness. In this view, our present attachment to an array of technologies, devices, and distractions (from smartphones to video games to social media) threatens to displace the deep attention required for essential aesthetic engagements like reading a dense novel or contemplating a painting. Rather than joining these lamentations or prescribing ways for the individual to refocus, Ambience and Biopolitics examines the social and historical conditions whereby paying attention has become such a central concern and cultural value in the present (even in its perceived lack). I ask how the social organization of perception has changed in the recent historical passage from what Michel Foucault calls mass-industrial “disciplinary” societies to the neoliberal societies of “biopower” that have come to shape the late 20th and early 21st centuries. What I call the attentive ideal emerges at the nexus of neoliberal attention economies and biopolitical discourses of self-management. In effect, the attentive ideal sutures the capacity for deep focus to intimate concerns of subjective identity, meaning, and autonomy. The current discursive dominance of the attentive ideal tends to preclude other kinds of aesthetic reception. This book explores the modality of ambient reception, which involves a series of affective and collective aesthetic engagements that fall outside the purview of subjective focus. I delve into everyday modes of ambient listening, where music and sound function as aspects of our environs rather than discrete objects of focus. Operating both below and beyond the threshold of attentiveness, ambient reception affirms an alternate set of values and practices, including easy listening, reparative pleasure, and even sonic distraction. The concept of ambience traverses a historical terrain marked by rapid transformations in sound technologies—from midcentury Muzak all the way to contemporary MP3 downloading and music streaming—with palpable effects on social listening habits and practices. I theorize ambience by considering a wide range of experimental sound projects, including the “Sonic Meditations” of composer Pauline Oliveros, Lee Perry’s Afrofuturist dub reggae, and the rise of “turntablism” launched by hip-hop DJs like Grandmaster Flash. This study also includes a series of critically maligned musical genres such as midcentury “mood music” records and easy-listening R&B radio, genres that have played pivotal yet underexamined roles in shaping everyday soundscapes and modes of listening. The attentive ideal revolves around a single strategy for dealing with overflow—shut out the distractions, focus the self, and attend to the task at hand. By contrast, ambience asks what happens if we make room for sonic distraction, if we allow it as a potentially relaxing or reparative response to the contemporary ocean of sound and information. Ambience invites us to reconsider our intimate yet undeniably collective encounters with sound, not so much by paying attention, but rather by rechanneling sonic flows across the vast and various environments in which we find ourselves listening.