Feeling the feels: Spinozist ethics and musical feeling in an American jail

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I employ a Spinozist concept of affect to explain accounts of musical feeling in a jail music programme. Residents of the jail regularly described two affectively opposed ‘atmospheres’ in the institution, which I term carceral and liberatory atmospheres. I argue that atmospheres emerge from affective fields, conditioned by the probability space of a situation. The capacity (or incapacity) to act, affect and be affected (Spinoza’s affectus) is dependent upon what is probable for people, as members of particular social groups, in a situation. I describe how carceral and liberatory atmospheres emerge from the interaction of sonic and affective fields in the jail. Following Spinoza’s Ethics, I argue that these atmospheres are ethically opposed, implying alternate ontologies of the human. In carceral atmospheres prisoners are objectified as static things whose behaviour jail administrators seek to control and determine; in liberatory atmospheres prisoners imagine themselves as open-ended processes infused with potential. Liberatory atmospheres were marked by a comparatively open probability space in which the unexpected might happen and new possibilities might emerge. For many of the jail’s residents, it was in music that choice could be exercised and the new could emerge.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• incarceration
• affect

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Modern contagion theories of affect include Brennan (2004), Ahmed (2004), Clough (2007), and Wetherell (2012). The concept of affect as a kind of substance that can be socially circulated is historically and culturally widespread. Hume (1751) provides an enlightenment example.

2 See Richmond City Justice Center (2015) for statistics on the institution’s population. Only a small percentage of the total jail population could take part in the music programme. These were primarily those who had demonstrated ‘good behavior’ and a willingness to participate in its recovery programmes. As such, my perspective of the overall population may be biased.

3 In this sense, the classic analyses by Goffman (1960), Gresham M. Sykes (1958) and Sykes and Messinger (1960) of prison life as deterministic remain relevant for an understanding of contemporary carceral contexts.

4 The ‘missing-half second’ between neural stimulus and conscious awareness suggested in cognitive experiments pioneered by Libet et al. (1985) was interpreted by Massumi (1995, 2002) and other early adopters of the affective turn as the proper realm of affective experience. Such affective experience is often described as biological and non-discursive, beyond the reach of representation.

5 However, Decartes’ position on affect and feeling was more nuanced than is typically recognised in contemporary rejections of ‘Cartesian dualism'. See Riedel (2020).

6 Note here the strong similarity to Whitehead’s relational ontology (1925).

7 The musicological concept of affektenlehre emerged later and is distinct from Spinoza’s affektenlehre. First theorised by Kirchner in the mid seventeenth century, musical affects were thought to have their own objective existence in the world and could be communicated, encountered, and manipulated. Their motion in the external world could be transduced across the skin or the eardrum to stimulate the motion of bodily humors or fluids. For an intellectual history of the concept of musical affects see Riedel (2020).

8 For those readers unfamiliar with the musical concept of timbre and the acoustical definitions of fundamental tone, partial, and overtone, see Sethares (2005). My comparison of affective and acoustic partials is resonant with one of Helmholtz’ definitions from On the Sensations of Tone (1954: 28).

9 Two hundred years before Kant, Descartes recognised the power of affect in ethical and political life, but he believed we can and should exercise complete control over our affects through reason. Spinoza would also have us guided only by reasoned thought, but he recognised, as did many Greek and Roman philosophers and rhetoricians, that this is ‘not humanly possible’ (1996: 161). As demonstrated by contemporary politics, affect often overrides reason at both an individual and collective level. In his Ethics, Spinoza proposed ways to use our affects toward the common good. The same concept is outlined in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), in which music functions as the master metaphor for ethical shared affect. Spinoza’s association of the political with the affective resonates also with Audre Lorde’s recent advocacy for a ‘passionate politics’ (2007).

10 Stewart (2011) describes affective ‘force-fields’ but does not theorise the term. In her usage affective forces are ‘atmospheres', a term that I describe below as ‘field interactions’ between sensory and affective fields.

11 In this sense an affective field, which requires consciousness and memory to be perceived, does not have the same epistemological status as the fields described by physics.

12 This model eschews Massumi’s description of affect as ‘fluidifying’ (2002: 6), Brennan’s (2004) description of its flowing transmission between humans and Navaro-Yashin’s (2012) description of it as a substance discharged from things. Spinoza’s affectus encompasses modern senses of ‘affect', ‘feeling', and ‘emotion', sometimes treated as distinct categories in contemporary affect theory. (His model was also constructivist: we learn our emotions over time and in particular cultures.) While I do not attend to the theoretical division between these terms in this essay, I agree that emotion is comparatively more distinct than affect or feeling. According to Thonhauser (2019: 52) feeling is the ‘bodily experience dimension of affect, in contrast to emotion, which points to culturally shaped conceptualization'. According to Slaby and von Scheve: ‘Whereas ‘affect’ stands for pre-categorical relational dynamics and ‘feeling’ for the subjective-experiential dimensions of these affective relations, ‘emotion’ signifies consolidated and categorically circumscribed sequences of affective world-relations’ (2019: 43). I don’t subscribe to a hard distinction partly because our experience of our body is also partly cultural.

13 This shares a certain resonance with Plato’s concept of the khora which he describes as a receptacle or a ‘third kind’, neither being nor nonbeing but the interval between in which things emerge, such as a womb, matrix or fold. Kristeva (1984) uses the concept of the khora to describe the difference between semiotic and symbolic realms, as a presignifying state between sensible and intelligible. My description of the affective field also recalls Langer’s ‘feeling tone’ of a situation (1967).

14 ‘Since affect is about affectus, about being affected and affecting, and therefore about relationality and reciprocity as such, affect theory is inevitably concerned with the analysis of collective atmospheres’ (Berlant 2011, emphasis added).

15 Cox (2018), Scrimshaw (2013), and Thompson and Biddle (2013) tend to treat sound as synonymous with affects. But affect clearly exists independently of sound.

16 The texture of the strange attractor recalls Guattari’s description of affect as ‘haziness and atmospheric’ (see Navaro-Yashin 2012: 169). This is similar to what Guattari called ‘ritornellos’ (1996).

17 ‘Even as we approach such atmospherically charged situations from the perspective of individual perception, those who are repelled by it or remain unaffected by it may nevertheless recognize the way in which a situation coheres in a distributed feeling, or sense its grip as a modulating force’ (2019: 92).

18 This maps the distinction in Max Scheler’s ethics between the perception of emotion (Fühlen) and actually feeling it (Gefuhle) (1973).

19 My description of liberatory atmospheres in this context recalls both Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’ (1995 [1912]) and Turner’s communitas (1995).

20 Compare this to Tarde’s description of affective contagiousness and suggestibility (1903).

Additional information

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Andy McGraw

Andy McGraw is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Richmond, Virginia. He has published extensively on music in Southeast Asia, microtiming in Balinese and Cuban percussion music, and music's relationship to ethics. In Richmond, he facilitates string-band and gamelan ensembles for the community, and a studio recording program at the city jail.