The romance with affect: sonic politics in a time of political exhaustion

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a close reading of the promises ingrained in the political potential of aural experience in the recent literature addressing affect. It focuses on why, how and when scholars privilege affect when thinking about the political capacities of music and sound in the current moment of global neoliberalism. The essay reflects on scholarly works that theorise political agency after 2008 and concentrates on affect as a need or a quest for a theoretical framework that proposes new avenues to act politically. It starts from the assumption that scholarly production that employs affect tells us much less about the very political potential of affect, and much more about a desire for a radical reshaping of our understanding of where and how we search for political potentialities. The second part of the essay presents a critical perspective on this desire and the relationship between affective and ideological politics. Using my ethnographic work on activist singing in the area of former Yugoslavia as an example that offers a perspective from the former state-socialist world, I take a critical look at the potential inscribed in affective politics beyond liberal political thought.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• sonic politics
• political exhaustion
• global neoliberalism

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Notes

1 Acknowledgment redacted to preserve anonymity.

2 Brian Massumi's understanding of affective politics stands as a counterpoint or critique of ideology. For him, ideology, which is at the heart of traditional branch of politics, reinscribes and sustains the power structures and mechanisms, and is therefore unable to bring any radically new politics. Instead of focus on a structure, he proposes affect as a concept that emphasises a process and offers a new understanding of politics (2015).

3 Nancy Rose Hunt puts the emergence of affect theory in relation to the decline of gender studies, which points to the long legacy of theorizing of emotion, care, affect and the senses by feminist scholars. (Rose Hunt 2014).

4 An emphasis on the identity politics and the concept of identity has been central to ethnomusicological research throughout the 1990s and the beginning of 2000s and is still one of the most important categories used in examination of musical activities in many ethnomusicological scholarships. Turn to affect also signalizes an exhaustion of this theoretical framework and offers an insight into the social formation and alliances that operate beyond the given identity positioning, what I address in the next section.

5 For the overview of the field of applied ethnomusicology see (Pettan and Titon 2015).

6 The affective turn cannot be seen as separate from ‘sensory’ and ‘material’ turns, as all of them started to occupy an important conceptual space almost simultaneously and should be discussed in their interrelation (Hofman 2015a: 35-36).

7 For a long time, the vast and diverse field of music and politics has been reserved for the exploration of politically restrictive contexts or ‘politically repressive regimes’ while putting an emphasis on cultural politics, censorship and struggles over social and cultural values and meanings (see Street 2012; Johnson and Cloonan 2008; Muršič 2011). An extensive body of work has also been dedicated to the counter-hegemonic political power of music in protests and in social and youth movements (Eyerman and Jamison 1998; McDonald 2013) and in human rights (Peddie 2006; Laurence and Urbain 2011). Focusing on a musical genre, a majority of these studies examine music performing and listening as cultural production that is used to fight repressive structures of ethnicity, gender, class, race, etc. (see Taylor 2015; Hutnyk and Sharma 2000; Qureshi Burckhardt 2002; Bradshaw 2015). For a more general review on the works on music and politics and the predominance of ‘message politics’ see Hutnyk and Sharma (2000) while about the critique of the predominant approach of popular music scholars to concentrate their analyses on lyrics and their semantic meanings, see Guilbault 2019.

8 Steingo draws on Rancière’s claims that aesthetics should lose its bourgeois connotation, which presents it as an artistic practice / object or a theory of the beautiful and its judgment. For him, aesthetics is a particular mode of sensory experience (ibid. 6).

9 On how affective power enables politics limited to ‘the here and now’ to be extended into other aspects of political everydayness, primarily in practicing alternative ways of living, being and doing, see (Hofman 2020).

10 About the reprtoire they sing and the ideological 'baggage' it carries, see (Hofman 2020).

11 The case I present here resonates with the more general / global condition of what Glaser calls the demonization of ideology in global neoliberalism. She argues that in order to revive productive engagement and hope for the future, we need to return to three pillars of political philosophy that have become dirty words: ideology, authority and the state. Glaser puts forward a strong and galvanizing defense of these foundations, showing that however unpopular they may be, they’re necessary for the functioning of a fair society (2018).

12 For more about the critique of the so-called totalitarian paradigm and its relation to the ideologies of nationalism (and revisionism) and neoliberal capitalism in post-Yugoslav societies, see (among others, Buden 2012; Petrović 2012).

13 At this point, I have to note that I do not understand neoliberalism as a universal condition applicable to all cultural contexts, but rather as a multifaceted and continually changing set of processes – both ideological and structural – that takes different forms in different social, political and cultural environments. For this reason, some authors insist on using the term ‘neoliberalization’, rather than neoliberalism (see Peck and Tickell 2002).

14 And also, in the social contexts in which affect and the senses have been used in the colonial constructing of non-western and colonial political subjects. As Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier demonstrates, aural experience has been historically marked by various layers of the political. For centuries, aural knowledge, as an eminent field of affect and relationality, was part of the construction of the subaltern positioned in opposition to the ocularcentrism of the Western elite (2014: 13). Following her deliberation, we can say that the realm of the affective and the sensory as mediated through sound has long been a political question in societies beyond the Western world and has been constitutive of political subjectivities and forms of life on the neoliberal fringe. Due to the limited scope of the article I cannot go into extended examination of this very important aspect that challenges Global North and liberal-centered approach to affective politics.

15 The potential of East European state socialist historical experience in providing a more nuanced understanding of global decolonial struggles is already proposed by some authors, see (Karkov and Valiavicharska 2018).

16 On the critiques of the ‘liberal listening subject’ see (Birenbaum Quintero 2019; Steingo and Sykes 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, the project ‘Music and Politics in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Toward a New Paradigm of Politics of Music at the Turn of the Century’ (ID J6–9365).

Notes on contributors

Ana Hofman

Ana Hofman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts in Ljubljana. She uses both archival and ethnographic methods to examine musical sound during socialism and the present-day conjuncture of neoliberalism and post-socialism in the area of former Yugoslavia. She has published many articles and book chapters, including two monographs: Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (2011) and Music, Politics, Affect: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (2016). She is currently working on the monograph Socialism, Now! Singing Activism after Yugoslavia (OUP).