No love without conflict: rights to the city, cultural activism, and the ‘irony of affect’ in São Paulo, Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how love arose as a political ethos in São Paulo, Brazil. The meaning and feeling of love emerged as middle-class artists sought to do what they love as work; activists demanded rights to the city through cultural intervention; and a hit song by an obscure rapper lamented that ‘love doesn’t exist in São Paulo’. Cultural activists tied love’s affective resonance to the mayoral campaign of politician Fernando Haddad, who likewise framed his transit policy in loving terms. The article describes how middle-class musical aesthetics stemming from the idea of ‘racial democracy’, as well as artists’ and activists’ desire to ‘do what you love’ as work, eschewed the racialised class conflict that produced an unloving city, leading to a politically impotent articulation of love. The article advances a materialist approach to affect through social reproduction theory, suggesting that the concept of affect is useful only if it takes account of the social politics that shape affective resonance, particularly the central conflict between human life and the generation of capital. It argues that affects brought forth through cultural products like music only serve political change if overtly connected to a larger programme of structural transformation which incorporates class conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• politics
• music
• love
• capitalism

Acknowledgements

I thank the special issue editors, Anaar Desai-Stephens and Nicole Reisnour, for their feedback on several iterations of this piece. I also thank the students and faculty at the Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University; the Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy colloquium series at UCLA; the Music Department at UC Santa Barbara; and those who participated in the GEIST group and conferences in Brazil for contributing to my thinking here. I especially thank Joseph Jay Sosa and Daniel Gough for first spurring me to treat this material. The peer reviewers provoked deep reflection and provided a model of what peer review should be. Finally, I thank the utopian dreamers in São Paulo for their intellectual exchange and for imagining a better world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2013/01/1208896-confira-os-discursos-de-haddad-e-kassab-durante-a-posse-em-sp.shtml.

2 Criolo’s mother, in fact, whom he lauds, was a benzedeira.

3 Military dictatorship: 1964–1985.

4 I thank David Novak for suggesting this phrase.

5 Reber argues that Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ still occurs within the affective episteme of capitalism (2016: 246).

6 Some highly impoverished neighbourhoods sit within central, otherwise wealthy areas, as with parts of the old downtown (Marques 2017).

7 This is the official city limits; greater São Paulo has some twenty-three million inhabitants.

8 Movimento Passe Livre

9 See also Garland (2012), Irisarri (2015), and Whitworth-Smith (2014).

10 A feature of liberal multiculturalism in general.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with the support of the Columbia University Music Department, and Institute for International Education Graduate Fellowship for International Study funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

Notes on contributors

Shannon Garland

Shannon Garland is a Lecturer in Global Arts Studies at the University of California, Merced. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research investigates the production of popular music from an ethnographic, transnational perspective. It is concerned with the types of labour emerging in the music industries, and ties these to affective musical response, social relations, and financial value. This research asks how differential types of value – aesthetic, social, financial – are produced by the arrangement of these elements into particular economies, and traces the symbolic and material effects of these arrangements. She thus approaches music as a key site for understanding not only the social politics by which musical worlds are made and contested, but also the relationship between subjectivity, globalisation, and twenty-first-century capitalism.