Good Vibes Only with Robin James

BCNM is proud to support this talk from the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

The event is a talk by scholar Dr Robin James, who was a professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte before joining Palgrave Macmillan as a senior editor for Media & Communication, Rhetoric, & Music.

This talk addresses the main argument of their forthcoming book Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology, Algorithms, and the Politics of Legitimation (Duke, fall 2026). There, Dr. James argues that the mathematical vector and density models behind things like recommender or machine learning systems and vernacular "vibes" together form a new form of biopower. Whereas Foucault says that “a normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life” (HSv1, 144), this new form of biopower centers on speculative probabilities and their alignment with existing orders of patriarchal, racial, and capitalist property and personhood. No meat, just vibes, so to speak.

Like normalizing biopower, this new form of biopower has both a quantitative and a qualitative dimension, each of which is a different way of modeling a phenomenological orientation. This form of governance is neither a disciplinary nor a regulatory norm; taking Ahmed's analysis of the role of debt in the heritability of orientation, Dr. James shows that it is a practice of lineage and legitimation: anything goes as long as it facilitates the transfer of patriarchal racial capitalist distributions of private property into speculative, counterfactual realities.

To conclude, Dr. James will briefly discuss how the "TESCREAL bundle" philosophies are a form of corporate phenomenology that implements qualitative philosophical models of the math driving the technologies at the center of those schools of thought, and then argue that Simone de Beauvoir's existential phenomenology offers a productive critical framework for thinking orientation in a more ethical and politically just manner.