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ABSTRACT
This essay attends to select affective politics of theoretical practices in the study of music and affect. Concentrating on EuroAmerican theoretical frames, I address how assumptions generating key theories in affect studies complicate ethnographic analyses of musics emanating from various historical, social and cultural locations. I attend to challenges that object-oriented approaches provide ethnomusicologists in particular, arguing that a focus on practice affords opportunities to avoid the reifications of ‘music’ and ‘affect’ as potentially agentive. In considering strategies of presentation and publication, I call citational practices into question, elucidating inequities in distinct processes of legitimation. This essay stands as an invitation for increased transparency and personal accountability in theorising, with special attention to affective entanglements and attachments.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
During revisions, I had the serendipitous experience of reading the newly released edition of SEM Student News; the contributors’ work replaced some of my earlier writing. I thank editor Eugenia Siegel Conte for engaging a final draft of this essay, and for considering a request. With joy, I humbly dedicate this essay to SEM Student News. I thank the editors of this Special Issue – Dr Nicole Reisnour and Dr Anaar Desai-Stephens – for their work here and for the frames they have created in their individual research, which teach and inspire me. I am especially grateful to Dr Reisnour for her time, patience and thoughtful feedback. Dr Lillie S. Gordon enriched this essay with her insight, Dr Theresa Allison joined me for a crucial moment of ‘thinking with’ and Dr Xochitl Marsili-Vargas sustained me with critical dialogue during revisions. Two anonymous reviewers made me revisit an earlier version of this essay with productive diffidence. I thank them for their extraordinary generosity. This essay stands as an epistemological invitation ultimately made possible by musicians in western Turkey’s largest urban centres. I thank the artists who have shared their far-reaching philosophies with me. I take full responsibility for all shortcomings in this essay. I look forward to rereading this essay at a future moment in my career; I write these words with a keen understanding of all that I do not know.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In an earlier iteration of this essay, I was focused on the efficacy of liberal humanism at the intersection of affect studies and music studies. I attended to revisions during upheaval and unrest – specifically, renewed attention and protest addressing the ubiquity of anti-Black violence in the U.S., as well as a global pandemic that, by August 2020, had taken the lives of seven Turkish classical musicians whose philosophies emanate in my ethnographies. This essay invites dialogue about inequity in theoretical practices. It departs from my familiar modes of writing. I seek to raise concerns as clearly and accessibly as possible. None of these words is meant to be the last word. Please feel welcome to reach out.
2 In Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians, I did not prioritize longstanding debates about ontologies of ‘affect’. Rather, I addressed musicians’ cultivation of multiple melancholies by asking, ‘what is affect for?’ (Gill Citation2017: 16, 24–25, 188–89).
3 Specifically, Melancholic Modalities offers a form of ‘rhizomatic listening’ for affective practices, which I derived with musicians’ investment in a particular Mevlevi Islamic epistemology that utilizes the botanical rhizome arundo donax for explanatory power (Gill Citation2017: 1–6, 61–67, 192). I also created an analytical frame for attending to and listening for affective practices emerging in non-teleological time, which I named ‘bi-aurality’ (Gill Citation2017: xvii, 97–100, 126–27).
4 The erasures involved in the privileging of EuroAmerican theoretical frames are at the center of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept ‘epistemicide’ – the delegitimisation and ultimate rejection of ‘non-Western’ forms of knowing (Citation2014, Citation2018). Santos dismantles methodological processes in which diverse epistemologies become ‘disqualified and rendered invisible, unintelligible or irreversibly discardable’ (Citation2006: 15–16).
5 Scrutinising repetition and domination is a foundation of deconstruction. As Gayatri Spivak notes in the afterword of her recent retranslation, the word ‘ethnocentrism’ appears on the first page of Jacques Derrida’s 1967 book Of Grammatology (Spivak Citation2016: 345). Derrida offers that reorientation is made possible only by fully inhabiting structures one wishes to reorient. He argues that ‘[t]he movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it’ (Citation2016 [Citation1967]: 25). Here, I aspire to inhabit structures in a way that invites productive ‘destruction’ while also welcoming suspicion.
6 Obviously, I do not advocate that all music scholarship should centralize practice. How we do scholarship is dependent on our materials. Thus an object-oriented approach may be the most appropriate beginning for theoretical work because of one’s topic. This is the case for Roger Matthew Grant, who convincingly argues for a return to objects in discussions of affect in music studies (Citation2018).
7 We can think of habitus as ‘socialized subjectivity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant Citation1992: 126). Several ethnomusicologists have broadened ‘practice theory’ by examining the roles of sound, music and music-making in shaping and reflecting the relationships between structure and agency, domination and exploitation (Sugarman Citation1997, Becker Citation2004, Berger Citation2009, Mahon Citation2004).
8 A primary Turkish verb for ‘to feel’ – duymak – simultaneously connotes ‘to hear’, ‘to feel’, ‘to learn (of)’ and ‘to perceive’ (Redhouse Citation1997: 315–16; on the verb hissetmek, see Gill Citation2017: 14). The English terms ‘feeling’, ‘hearing’ and ‘knowing’ are validly inseparable in the everyday term duymak, which situates feeling as hearing as perceiving as knowing. These semantics are a simple reminder that impactful and difficult-to-translate ontologies operate in vocabularies outside of English and apart from affect theory.
9 I prefer ‘walking’ with theorists over ‘joining’ or ‘inhabiting’ an intellectual tradition – ‘walking with’ points to proximity rather than sublimation.
10 I use ‘citational practices’ rather than the concept ‘citationality’, as the latter implies a broader debate in literary studies about quotation and performativity (see Hollywood Citation2002, Nakassis Citation2013).
11 Reworking theoretical practices allows for the amplification of epistemologies valued by the individuals from whom ethnographers extract research. For an example of exceptional scholarship that models active participation with consultants, see the work of Jocelyne Guilbault, especially her co-authored book with soca musician Roy Cape (Citation2014).
12 As should be clear, I am not advocating for the discounting of white male scholars. On white men strategically marking racial difference for social justice, see D. Soyini Madison’s essay ‘“Is Dwight, White?!”’ (Citation2013) about the work of performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood, and George Lipsitz’s case studies of white musicians who sit outside of his conceptualisation of ‘strategic anti-essentialism’ (Citation1994).
13 It is my sense that ethnomusicology – disciplinarily speaking – does not necessarily need to re/turn to ‘affect theory’: research in our field already expands epistemologies of the experiential efficacies of affect/emotion/feeling/sentiment through close attention to the relationality of bodies, voice and the senses in different, and often dissident, ways (Garcia Citation2015, Hahn Citation2007, Meintjes Citation2017, Meizel Citation2020, Ochoa Gautier Citation2014, Wong Citation2017). Furthermore, ethnomusicological theorisations of ‘resonance’ offer profound interventions which can impact affect studies. Marié Abe retheorises resonance for an interdisciplinary readership beginning from a consideration of public space and social fragmentation in Japan (Citation2018). Dylan Robinson examines the ‘tin ear’ of settler colonialism that silenced epistemological foundations of indigenous communities; he offers a ‘resonant theory’ that, among other things, attends to the import of accountability (Citation2020).
14 Engagement with particular forms of EuroAmerican affect studies may be more generative when one’s topic maps more closely onto site-specific institutions of knowledge production. For instance, the scholars in Graber and Sumera’s special issue of Ethnomusicology Forum are conducting ethnographic and historical research in disparate locations within Europe and North America. This demonstrates the insight and usefulness of Luis-Manuel Garcia's call to foreground an emic affect theory in ethnomusicology (2020: 6).
15 Naming practices also inscribe specific forms of prestige and authority. I read the wording ‘Brian Massumi and his followers’ in publications, phraseology that animates other forms of signification, such as ‘Sigmund Freud and his disciples’. I have yet to witness a similar frame for theorists of colour or women (e.g., ‘José Esteban Muñoz and his disciples’). Furthermore, locating Massumi as originator may ignore the import of his engagement with earlier theories of ‘becoming’ that influence his work (see footnote 16).
16 A Thousand Plateaus was translated by Brian Massumi. His exceptional work in rendering Deleuze and Guattari’s writing in English, and his reflections on this process in his ‘Notes on the Translation’ (Citation1987), are essential to recall when thinking through intellectual lineages of affect theory.
17 A short list of scholars who reframed dominant epistemological discourses must include Chen (Citation2012), Cheng (Citation2000), Lutz (Citation1988), Muñoz (Citation2006), Ngai (Citation2005), Rosaldo (Citation1984) and Sedgwick (Citation2003).
18 Academia is, after all, a ‘field’. A broader consideration of gatekeeping requires a Marxist perspective of how economic command is a core component of agency within capitalism, from which intellectual genealogies are in no way immune. Bourdieu offers a robust accounting of fields, which work like markets in that actors accumulate symbolic capital in the competition for resources and benefits (Citation1993, Citation1999). See also works on field theory in sociology (Cattani, Ferriani and Allison Citation2014, Fligstein Citation2001).
19 Scholars also grapple with how affective politics shape disciplines. Jennifer C. Nash argues that as intersectionality became an established part of U.S. feminism, Black feminism became ‘marked’ by affect and ‘defensiveness’ (Citation2019). Nash’s work charts new epistemological territories for understanding Black feminism as ‘felt’ experience.
20 I am drawn to Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s call to attend to ‘transmission failure’, such as how ‘an emphasis on theoretical frames and conclusions can push the ethnomusicologist to omit seemingly mundane details that may provide nuanced insights as to how they arrived at an interpretation of their materials’ (Citation2020: 10).
21 In making this claim, I realise that I foreclose productive discussion on the body in dialogue with physics, biology, neuroscience and biomedicine. While I have considered the link between affects and bodily liquids (bleeding and lacrimation) as well as Ottoman philosophies of sound and the ‘universal’ body (Citation2017: 146–51, 157–64), I look forward to learning from ethnomusicologists who will engage affect/emotion/feeling/sentiment to both unmoor a circumscribed reification of ‘body’ while also considering difference in embodiment via habitus.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Denise Gill
Denise Gill is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Stanford University in the Department of Music, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of the book Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians (Oxford University Press, 2017), which received the 2019 Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. As a kanun musician invested in continuing to learn Ottoman art, Turkish classical, and Mevlevi (Sufi) musics, Gill has performed professionally in concert halls in Turkey, North America, and throughout Europe. Her current book project is on Muslim sonic and tactile rituals for washing the dead (deathwork). Gill is certified to ritually cleanse and shroud the deceased for janazah.