Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

How do singers cast spells on listeners? And why does singing carrying special powers to cause deliriums and entrancements, even beyond preaching, acting, or rallying the masses? This essay looks at the circuitry that operates between singers-as-spell-casters and target listeners. It finds provocative evidence for causing deliriums in listeners in accounts of falling in love, especially as they relate to self-loss, longing, memory, and feelings of bittersweetness, or what the Greeks call feelings of “sweetbitter.” The evidence adduced comes from Stendhal as well as a cluster of writers circa 1870–1914 who enlarged on their experiences of hearing otherworldly and divine sounds in the transporting voices of bel canto singers and late Vatican castrati.

This article provides a critical account of work currently being done at the intersections of bioacoustics, computer science, and ecology, in which machine-listening systems are being turned on the environment for the purposes of conservation. What is being imagined, I argue, is the full planetization of audio AI: the automated monitoring, analysis, governance, and modulation of both human and nonhuman planetary systems by means of computational renderings of the soundscape. I suggest, first, that the continued expansion of machine listening for ecology is extremely likely. This argument is partly empirical, based on current directions and incentives in the field. Machine listening is already dependent on big tech for much of its basic infrastructure, and already an excellent candidate for greenwashing. But if the current push towards biodiversity markets is successful, then capital would suddenly have a direct material interest in machine listening’s planetization. This empirical argument is bolstered by a media-theoretical one, about the “bias of automation” towards total information capture, operationalism, and environmentality. The ambition to automate listening, I suggest, is self-reinforcing, so that, under capitalism, it will tend to expand: to planetize. In the second part of the argument, I argue that what will be planetized with machine listening is a form of decision-making and environmental governance in conflict with certain basic assumptions about democratic accountability and with a definite imperial flavor. In the article’s final section, therefore, I offer some notes towards a less “hungry,” more plural and “situated” form of machine listening.

Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) is newly relevant in all kinds of ways, as even a cursory glance at recent scholarship in philosophy or literature will indicate. However, with few exceptions, we have not acknowledged Cavendish as an aesthetic thinker. Here, I elucidate how her later works, especially Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) and Blazing World (1666), respond to the materialist problem of creaturely dissolution in a way that showcases her most advanced aesthetic contributions. First, I look at her material imagination, which generates forms—real, material structures—faster and more fluently than the rest of our bodies can, bending time to our advantage. Next, I examine Blazing World’s testing of the limits of embodiment—humans, minds, literary forms—both in its topical play with physical trasformation and its innovative stylistic techniques. Finally, I turn to Grounds of Natural Philosophy’s “restoring-beds, or wombs,” which constitute her final attempt to slip free of bodily time and, simultaneously, embody yearning itself.

This article restores Thomas Hobbes’s work for the Virginia Company of London (VCL)—a historically singular formation chartered by King James I in 1606 to undertake the commodity plantation of North America via private enterprise—into an arc of his development as a thinker and writer. I closely read three pieces of business Hobbes authored for the territorially sovereign VCL in 1622–23, then suggest how that business practice inflected the beginnings of his mature political philosophy as he laid it out in Elements of Law (1640), the forerunner of Leviathan (1651). My premise: the new kind of plantation business pursued by a new kind of sovereign corporation required new ways of thinking and knowing. The day-to-day operations of the VCL raised broader moral and political questions that could not satisfactorily be addressed via the Western philosophical paradigms available in the 1620s. In order to do his job, therefore, young Hobbes had to improvise novel rhetorical strategies and conceptual schemes in real time. These innovations required by his plantation practice later reemerged, in abstracted form, as bases of his political philosophy. The new form of business led him to a new theory of sovereignty—an argument for a new totality of absolutism over human beings—in which the state of nature presents as the initial (invasion) phase of the Virginia plantation project, and Atlantic capitalist enslavement furnishes the model of the political subject.

Before graphics addressed pixels, they addressed oceans. This essay offers a genealogy of computable graphics in maritime navigation and visual media including sea charts, ephemerides, baroque painting, literature, and video games. From Johannes Vermeer’s The Geographer to Herman Melville’s whale charts, it reconstructs a history graphics as planetary technologies of calculating, addressing, and navigating worlds. The digital interface isn’t a window onto the world; it’s a helm.

This article concerns the practice of hatred, drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s theory of countertransference, D. W. Harding’s model of Jane Austen’s “regulated hatred,” and the history of Consent Lab at New York University. It treats the psychoanalytic environment of the classroom, the playroom, and the text (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Austen’s Emma) to offer a theory of consent as the capacity to keep paying attention while you are in something with someone. Finally, it takes up R. D. Laing’s concept of the false position to analyze structural compromises to the faculty of consent and proposes risky interaction as one way to preserve it.