Musical feelings and affective politics

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to offer their sincere thanks to Shannon Garland, Ana Hofman, Ellen Gray, and Darci Sprengel, who have been part of this project since its inception and whose conversations and work have been very influential on our thinking. We would also like to thank the many anonymous reviewers who wrote their reviews in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and whose comments helped to hone the articles in this issue. Finally, we extend our deep appreciation to Greg Hainge for his editorial support and oversight.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For overviews of these various lineages, see (Garcia 2020: 4, Rutherford 2016: 286, Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 5–9).

2 In ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, for example, Massumi writes that ‘The relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification … is one of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening’, suggesting the possibility of interplay between affect and signification (1995: 86).

3 The turn to atmospheres as a framework for analyzing collective feelings is one response to the mind/body distinction implied by certain theorizations of affect (Eisenlohr 2018, McGraw 2016 and this issue, Riedel 2019, Sprengel this issue).

4 Feminist scholars have crucially pointed out that the claim of a stark separation between affect and emotion is a gendered one, for the framework of an ‘affective turn’ as conceptually separate from earlier scholarship has served to erase a much longer legacy of feminist writing on emotion, feelings, and sentiments (see Ahmed 2015, Cvetkovich 2012, Martin 2013, Warner 2008).

5 There are multiple scholarly traditions that theorize the relationship between music and the affective-emotional responses it produces, both within and beyond western artistic and intellectual traditions. In western aesthetic philosophy, theoreticians have predominantly worked from the assumption that it is ‘the music itself’, as a sonic-material phenomenon, that produces affective effects. The primarily ethnographic literature that we draw on might be understood as a ‘culturalist’ response to this assumption, wherein ethnomusicology and other fields of comparative music study have worked to demonstrate that the affective potential of any given set of musical sounds is always cultural, socially and historically contingent. Our thanks to Shannon Garland for this excellent observation. On early antecedents to this culturalist approach to the study of musical affect, see Gray, this issue, and Martin (2013). For useful overviews of historical approaches to music and the affects in western aesthetics, see Goehr et al. (2001), Randel (2004) and Taylor (2017); this lineage is also briefly discussed in Hofman (2015). Steingo (2016) offers a provocative re-thinking of aesthetic autonomy and its political utility.

6 Rather than understand ‘music’ as a delimited set of sonic phenomena, we conceive of it as encompassing practices, experiences and sounds, where the latter includes the spectrum from silence to ‘noise’ to speech to tuneful sonic output. Indeed, such shifting distinctions themselves are categorized and monitored as part of broader political and ideological projects (Attali 1985 [1977], Cruz 1999, Novak 2013, Ochoa Gautier 2014). Sprengel and García Molina explore these boundaries and their concomitant political and disciplinary implications (this issue).

7 Gill makes a similar point in critiquing affect theorists’ use of musical and sonic metaphors (2017: 188).

8 Our use of feelings is in line with scholars such as Ahmed and Cvetkovich who embrace ‘the undifferentiated “stuff” of feeling’ as well as the vernacular and integrative connotations of the term (Cvetkovich 2012: 4). In this way, our usage differs from that proposed by Eric Shouse, in which ‘feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal’ (2005: 1). See also Garcia’s emphasis on the productive polyvalence of ‘feeling’ and their discussion of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorisation of ‘feeling’ as tactile and textural (Garcia 2015, Sedgwick 2003).

9 For example, anthropologists have shown how the production, circulation and management of affect lend support to a broad range of social and political projects, from the creation of piously productive laborers (Rudnyckyj 2009) and compassionate volunteer-citizens (Muehlebach 2011), to the shaping of modern mass publics (Kunreuther 2014, Mazzarella 2013, Strassler 2020) and religious counterpublics (Hirschkind 2006).

10 This is a reminder, as Daniel White has argued, that affect theory itself is ‘ … an effect of the world as much as a frame for viewing it’ (White 2017: 176). It must accordingly be contextualized, its historical, political and social inheritances emplaced in relation to the world it sought to understand. See Hofman (this issue) for a related investigation of scholarly engagement with affect as a ‘quest’ for new forms of political potential and action.

11 As Luis-Manuel Garcia has written in a recent article, experiences of musical affective attunement are shaped by shared sensory experiences as well as shared forms of cultural knowledge (Garcia 2020: 14).

12 In investigating music’s affective sociality, scholars have demonstrated how the realm of the social goes beyond human relations to encompass the more-than-human, as beautifully illuminated in Steven Feld’s classic Sound and Sentiment (2012 [1982]) (see also Ochoa Gautier 2014).

13 In this vein, some recent music scholarship provides rich analyses of the ‘terrain’ of affect (Mazzarella 2009), but without foregrounding this term and its particular theoretical genealogies. For example, Louise Meintjes’ ethnographic study of ngoma performance aesthetics draws attention to affective embodied phenomena that circulate with and become political realities (Meintjes 2017). Similarly, Gavin Steingo claims that the political significance of kwaito music lies in the ways it ‘suspends ordinary forms of sensory experience’, enabling participants to ‘experience a world that does not yet exist’ (Steingo 2016: 9).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anaar Desai-Stephens

Anaar Desai-Stephens is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Her current book project focuses on Bollywood songs and the production of aspiration in (neo)liberalising India. For this research, she has received support from Cornell University's Randel Dissertation and Teaching Fellowship and the American Musicological Society's Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship. Other research interests include the emergence of YouTube in India, speculation as a cultural practice, and the circulation of musical media in American prisons.

Nicole Reisnour

Nicole Reisnour is an ethnomusicologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her current book project focuses on oral literary performance, Hindu subjectivities, and the sensory politics of religious pluralism in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Research for this project has been supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a CAORC Research Grant from the American Institute for Indonesian Studies. Additional research interests include Indonesian Islamic popular music and the digital circulation of religious ways of listening and feeling. She has taught at Reed College, Binghamton University, and Cornell University.