Death Metal Versus Neoliberalism

Great post here from It’s Her Factory reflecting on the differences between liberalism and neoliberalism as described by thinkers such as Deleuze and Foucault, and the possible ways that ‘hyper-metric’ music such as death metal might ‘subvert neoliberal biopower’:

It’s not about content, but about formal relationships, particularly relationships of rate, frequency, amplitude, meter — what Deleuze and others (like Jeffery Nealon, Jasbir Puar, etc.) call relationships of ‘speed and slowness’…So, for example, while classical liberalism cares about your identity (the ‘content’ of your true inner self), neoliberalism cares only about things like your test scores, your BMI, or population-wide rates of mortality and morbidity, etc. In short: frequency not truth…Death metal is a largely white, largely male genre. Neoliberal biopower is very interested in intensifying their lives, in giving them more and better lives (especially if they’re straight or homonational). So for them subversion involves not intensifying their life, or at least not intensifying it in the appropriate ways. So maybe this metric practice is an inappropriate logic of intensification?

Published on 13 August 2012

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