Introduction: Somewhere between the signifying and the sublime
Perhaps the most everyday understanding that people have of affect comes from both music and from children (especially infants). In an encounter with either there are moments of unspeakable, unlocatable sensation that regularly occur: something outside of (beyond, alongside, before, between, etc.) words […] why do certain pop songs reshape our surroundings, sometimes literally altering our sense of the immediate landscape and of the passage of time itself? (Seigworth 2003: 85)
To think affect is to think the social, and nothing is more important right now. (Gilbert 2004)
The sound and the fury
In 2010–11, the UK broadsheet The Guardian published a number of articles regarding the lack of a contemporary, politically conscious music to accompany the protests, demos and uprisings that occurred in response to the UK Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government’s plans for public spending cuts and university fee increases. John Harris, in particular, lamented the loss of ‘musical protest’: in an article entitled ‘Someone out there, please pick up a guitar and howl’ (2010), he claims that in a time of political dissent and social uprising in the United Kingdom, pop culture’s response has been ‘noncommittal, heavy on irony, essentially apolitical’. ‘By early 2011,’ he continues, ‘we have reached a litmus-test moment: if even the full arrival of austerity sparks nothing, we’ll know we live in truly deadened times’ (Harris 2010). For Harris, part of the problem lies with the nature of pop music:
Perhaps a good deal of the story lies in pop’s own passage into middle-age and the fact that its various incarnations now span not just most of the planet but almost the entire generational range. Ubiquity may have been robbed of its old counter-cultural charge; as it turned out, perhaps what some romantics call the People’s Music is better suited to selling mobile phones than soundtracking revolt. The upshot: if you have seditious thoughts, why would you express them via free-market capitalism’s favourite art form? (Harris 2010)
The lament continued. Billy Bragg and folk musician Johnny Flynn were interviewed, discussing why the politics of the young people who had taken to the streets were absent in their music. Various answers were offered: the rise of the internet and social networking sites such as twitter;1 the youth demographic of the participants; and the political apathy of contemporary artists, which is endorsed and enforced by the mainstream music press (Saner 2011). The King Blues – a ska-punk band that was championed by Billy Bragg as ‘the sound of the kettle’ – also expressed similar sentiments. Frontman Jonny ‘Itch’ Fox was quoted in The Guardian, stating that ‘music hasn’t played such a large role in demos over the years, and that’s a problem because a lot of demos can be so fucking boring, especially now you can get kettled’ (Lynskey 2011).
Yet there is something in these accounts that does not chime right. There was plenty of music at the protests: there is an abundance of footage available on YouTube of protesters dancing, marching and chanting along to a variety of soundtracks. Adam Harper credited the presence of music at the protests with helping to instill a sense of collectivity that was ‘ten times as strong as that whipped up at the very best of raves’ (Harper 2010). However, what is striking, as Mark Fisher (2012) and Dan Hancox (2011) have pointed out, is that the music that was mobilizing the protesters had no overt political content.2 In short, The Guardian and its contributors did not recognize the music of political protest because, to them, it did not sound like (or, more pertinently, speak like) music of political protest.
In his report on the student protests that took place on 9 December 2010, the BBC economics editor Paul Mason identified an ‘unlikely force’ among the protesters: the young, multiracial ‘EMA kids’ from the London estates, who wanted to dance to dubstep rather than enter into skirmishes with the police. His corresponding blog post described the moment when the man in charge of the sound system at Parliament Square, who had been trying to play ‘politically right on reggae’ had the ‘crucial jack plug’ taken off him by this younger crowd. Using their Blackberry phones, they started playing what Mason initially identified as dubstep – a bass-oriented genre of dance music, originating from South London. Mason states that on hearing the music, ‘young men, mainly black, grabbed each other around the head and formed a surging dance to the digital beat, lit, as the light failed, by the distinctly analog light of the bench they had set on fire. Any idea that you are dealing with Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields on this demo is mistaken’ (Mason 2010). Dan Hancox then corrected Mason’s observation, stating that the music that he had heard at the same protest – and what Mason had identified as dubstep – was primarily Grime music.3
In many ways, Grime made sense as the soundtrack for London’s socio-political unrest. It had already been branded an enemy of the state, having been subject to criticism by government officials for its violent lyrical content and imagery. To be sure, Grime’s main protagonists are those frequently demonized by the establishment: the poor, the young and black. Mark Fisher sees Grime as an ‘allegory of class destiny. Just as it’s possible for some to rise from the working class but not with it, so it’s possible to rise out of Grime (as artists such as Professor Green and Tinie Tempah have proven with their many crossover hits), but it’s not yet been possible for anyone to succeed as a Grime artist’ (Fisher 2012: 39). Similarly, Dan Hancox remarks on Grime’s use inside the Parliament Square kettle:
Grime is perfect as a chorus of this oppressed generation, and perfect as a soundtrack to a riot – and to see it celebrated in the iconic home of the establishment, hemmed in by the police, was a bittersweet victory: the music has been de facto banned from London clubs by the very same police force, who over several years lobbied club owners to shun the genre, and frequently shut down events in advance, citing ‘intelligence about an incident.’ (Hancox 2011: 267)
Thus, although Grime may rarely have an explicit political message, it nevertheless remains politicized. Grime, the auditory enemy to the establishment, is a symbolic musical scapegoat, blamed for the ills of society. As such, it exists as the perfect anthem for the disaffected, those social scapegoats who are also branded as a threat to order, condemned as the root of society’s problems.
However, what was more difficult for commentators to reconcile was the role of chart pop music during the protests: Fisher mentions the audible presence of Rhianna and Nicki Minaj, while Adam Harper remarks upon the sing-along to Cee Lo Green’s ‘Fuck You’ – a catchy, upbeat song in the form of a protagonist’s retort to his ‘gold-digging’ ex-girlfriend, who he fails to impress because he cannot afford expensive goods (such as a Ferrari). Beyond Co Lee Green’s ‘fuck you’ chorus, these songs have little semantic or symbolic content that could be appropriated as an expression of political dissent.
Moreover, in stark contrast to Grime’s localized, informal economy4 and do-it-yourself resonances (its distribution via pirate radio, for example), this music is entirely complicit with its status as market commodity. The chart music heard at the protests can in no way be seen as oppositional to the exploitative practices of the culture industry and mainstream musical production. It is not transgressive, subcultural or radical (in the avant-gardist sense). Nor is it ‘difficult’, in the Adornian sense; its materials do not bring to bear a repressed ‘truth-content’, exposing ‘in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to cover over in order to exist in safety’ (Adorno 2002: 131). For the Adornian, these musical exemplars are prime commodities of the Culture Industry, and can be easily identified as ‘passive’, ‘standardized’ and ‘affirmative’ of the status-quo. It is the same music that is heard on the radio, that we work out to in the gym, or is blared out of high street shops. In short, this music is entirely incompatible with traditional or normative understandings of politically conscious or politicized music: it resists nothing. And yet, in spite of its semantic content and its modes of production, this chart pop music was made to facilitate resistance.
What was going on here? When MC Tempz was asked by Dan Hancox about the use of his music during the protests he explained: ‘it’s not about content, it’s about the energy and the aura’ (Hancox 2011: 265). Another word we can use for aura is affect. Instead of providing a message of opposition for people to rally around and to identify with, music mobilized bodies through affective transmission. Sound was used to create a particular ambience or atmosphere, via the induction, modulation and circulation of moods, feelings and intensities, which were felt but, at the same time, belonged to nobody in particular. As Anna Gibbs remarks, ‘bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire’ (Gibbs 2001) and, in this instance, the spark came from the sound system. This is not to suggest that there was some sort of Pavlovian reaction caused by the formal properties of the music; it was not that, on hearing the music, people instantly began to behave in a particular way, as if it contained some kind of subliminal command. While there would have been a degree of crossover, there was no clear, logical correlation between musical form/content and effect. To reiterate: much of what was heard was music that is played in the gym, or on the radio, or in shops. If it automatically caused listeners to partake in social unrest, then presumably it would be played less in such spaces. Rather, the mobilizing capacity of this music, its capacity to transmit an ‘energy’ or an ‘aura’, was unlocked by a more subtle combination of composition and playback: its use within a particular space. And so, just as chart music by Christina Aguilera and Eminem can be – and has been – put to use as a means of torture in Guantanamo Bay,5 chart music by Rhianna, Nicki Minaj and Ce-Lo Green can be, and has been, used to help mobilize social unrest.
What do we mean by affect here? The term has had a certain currency within a range of disciplinary contexts – including queer theory, feminist theory, philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, cultural geography, psychology, biology and neuroscience – for some time now. The question, though, is never really what affect means but what it does. Broadly speaking, the emergence of what Patricia Ticineto Clough (2008) refers to as ‘the affective turn’ marks a (return to) interest in the relationship between bodies (in the broadest sense – including animal bodies, part-bodies and inorganic-bodies) and the fluctuations of feeling that shape the experiential in ways that may impact upon but nevertheless evade conscious knowing. However, beyond this, affect remains stubbornly ungeneralizable, referring to a myriad of approaches: sometimes subtly differentiated, sometimes markedly conflicting in their differences.
In many ways, then, the structure of affect theory mirrors the ambiguity, open-endedness, and messiness of that which we might call affect. As Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg note in the Introduction to The Affect Theory Reader ‘affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation, as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities’ (2010a: 1) For Brian Massumi, affect exists as ‘the excluded middle’,6 the third state between activity and passivity, occupying the gap between content and effect. This intensive level of organization is characterized by a ‘crossing of the semantic wires: on it sadness is pleasant […] when asked to signify itself it can only do so in a paradox’ (Massumi 2002: 24). Affect can be found within sudden and sharp transformations, but it also may be found within banal and everyday encounters. And while much is made of the unpredictable, free-floating circulation of affect, its autonomy from the objects, subjects, and signifiers it flows through and between, its blink-and-you-miss-it fleetingness, affects may also ‘stick’ (Ahmed 2004) or formulate into repetitive cycles (Hemmings 2005).
While it would be dangerous to point to any one moment constituting the ‘birth’ of affect theory, the contemporary resurgence of interest in the affective within the humanities seems to coincide with the publication of two essays in 1995: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s ‘Shame in the cybernetic fold’ (1995) and Brian Massumi’s ‘The autonomy of affect’ (1995). These two essays helpfully demarcate two prominent trajectories of affect: the first headed by the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and the second by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, as it is read and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. While there are some pertinent, irreconcilable differences, there are also some notable similarities between these affective lineages. As Siegworth and Gregg note, there is some sense of reverse flow, ‘a certain inside-out/outside in difference in directionality: affect as the prime ‘interest’ motivator that comes to put the drive in bodily drives (Tomkins); affect as an entire, vital and modulating field of myriad becomings between human and nonhuman (Deleuze)’ (Siegworth and Gregg 2010a: 6). Both lines of enquiry recognize affect as a transformative force, a process of modulation that inevitably goes beyond that which is consciously captured as feeling. Subsequently, in both lineages, affect is intimately involved with, but nevertheless distinct from, feeling and emotion. What remains different, however, is where this line between affect, feeling and emotion is drawn; how these things are differentiated from one another.
With Tomkins, we get a quasi-Darwinian definition of affect, whereby affects give name to neuro-physiological processes and mechanisms that function as a basic and more or less universal ‘primary motivator’.7 Tomkins considers there to be nine affects: enjoyment–joy, interest–excitement, surprise–startle, anger–rage, distress–anguish, and fear–terror, shame–humiliation, disgust and ‘dis-smell’. These are qualitatively differentiated by the gradient and intensity of neural firing: ‘any stimulus with a relatively sudden onset and a steep increase in the rate of neural firing will innately activate a startle response […] if the rate of neural firing is increased less rapidly then fear will be innately activated’ (Tomkins 1995: 46). Affects interact with, but nevertheless remain distinct from, other systems of human functioning, such as motor-systems, the drives, cognition and perception. They can be differentiated from the drives in their freedom of object and duration, since, as Flatley demonstrates, ‘one can be terrified of anything, for any amount of time, but can only breathe air, and cannot do without it for very long’ (2008: 13). Affects may also shape the trajectory of the drives: for example, shame or anxiety may work to diminish a sexual drive. Likewise, when conjoined with thought, these ‘neuro-physiological events’ become feelings, and may be ‘elaborated into the more complex blends of affect which comprise emotion’ (Gibbs 2001). Thus, while affects play a role in the formulation of feeling and emotions, they nevertheless remain distinct: affects are discrete and innate, while emotions can be thought of as more complex and personal.
Although Tomkins’s affects are considered integral to human functioning, this does not mean that they remain contained within the individual human body:
Affects are not private, obscure, internal, intestinal responses, but facial responses that communicate and motivate at once both publically outward to the other and backward and inward to the one who smiles or cries or frowns or sneers or otherwise expresses his affects. (Tomkins 1966: vii)
For Tomkins, the face is the primary site of affective signalling: affective responses registered upon the face are expressive, insofar as they pertain to a particular affective state, but they may also elicit empathetic affective responses in others. So our spontaneous smile at a stranger may be mirrored by his or her responding smile. Moreover, our spontaneous smile will work to evoke more of the same affect within our own body; it will intensify the innate, basic affects of joy. Thus affect does not simply function within the private and personal ‘closed system’ of the body, nor does it function on the plane of unknowable autonomic visceral responses. Rather, these basic affects extend beyond the individual towards the bodies of others, while also folding back in on themselves. Subsequently, for Tomkins, the face is not just expressive of affect, the outcome of affect, but is embedded within the affective process, as a producer and reproducer of feeling.
With the Spinozan notion of affect, as reinterpreted by Deleuze and Guattari (and, after them, Brian Massumi), a distinction is drawn between affect (affectus) and affection (affectio). Neither term, however, refers to affection as emotion, nor as personal feeling. The former refers to affect-as-potential, the continual variation in a body’s capacity to affect and be affected. Affect is ‘a pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act’ (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari 2004: xvii) Affection, or affectio, by contrast, refers to the affective encounter of a body with other bodies, the state of the body as it affects and is affected. In his 1978 lecture on Spinoza, Deleuze gives an example of affection as feeling the sun on one’s body. The affection is the action of the sun, or the effect of the sun on your body: one body as it is impacting upon another. Another example would be the melting of wax or the hardening of clay through exposure to the sun. This melting or hardening, arising from the relation between the wax-body, or the clay-body, and the sun-body, is an affection of the wax or the clay – a particular state of relations. Thus the one affective power flows through the other: the capacity of a body to affect and be affected shapes and is shaped by the ways in which it affects and is affected by other bodies.
What do we mean when we say that the sun, wax and clay are bodies? For Spinoza a body does not simply refer to the flesh and bones of the individual human body. Rather, a body is a dynamic ensemble of relations that is defined by its affective capacity: the power to be affected and the power to affect. So a body may be a human body, but it may also be an animal body or plant body, a crowd, a social body, a linguistic corpus, a collection of sounds or even a mind or idea. Moreover, the difference between the sun-body and the wax-body, or the human-body and the cyborg-body, the flea-body and the rat-body, the language-body and the sound-body is not their generic characteristics, their essential identities as species, but their affective capabilities; their different capacities to affect and be affected. And, given that affective powers are relational, insofar as they arise and are modulated by the encounters between bodies, we can never know the full extent of a body’s affective powers; what a body might be capable of feeling or doing. Hence Spinoza’s oft-cited axiom: ‘no one has yet determined what a body can do’. Spinoza asks how we can possibly know what it means to be a body, when we don’t yet know what a body can do, what affects and affections of which it may be capable.
As such, for Deleuze and Guattari, and for Massumi, affects do not simply belong to a body. Rather, there is always something that goes beyond felt and recognized affection and its ‘capture’ within a body. There is always an excess of affect that is ‘inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective […] if there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death’ (Massumi 2002: 35). For Massumi, this impersonal affect is the ‘connecting thread of experience. It holds the world together. In event’ (ibid.: 217). Moreover, as Will Schrimshaw examines in his chapter, the scission of affect from affected or affecting entities and from its spatio-temporal origins has a central role in Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetic theory. Art, for Deleuze and Guattari, exists as a bloc of sensations, which is to say a compound of affects and percepts that remain independent of both creator and perceiver. Music, for its part, is a compound of sonic affects:
Harmonies are affects. Consonance and dissonance, harmonies of tone or colour, are affects of music and painting […] the artist creates blocs of percepts and affects but the compound must stand up on its own. The artist’s great difficulty is to make it stand up on its own. (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 164)
With Deleuze and Guattari, then, we have a metaphysical, rather than phenomenological notion of affect, which comes with a decentring of the human subject as creator and/or perceiver. Art’s affects do not simply arise in the body of the perceiving subject; they are not read into, or out of, the artwork. Rather, art’s affects persist beyond the experiential, beyond what we perceive of them: ‘affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived’ (ibid.: 164).
While these philosophical and psychological vectors are often treated as the ‘major’ or ‘primary’ sources, the contemporary landscape of affect theory also remains largely indebted to certain intellectual strands coming from feminist theory, queer theory and postcolonial studies. These disciplines have a long-established critical focus on the body and the circulation of power through feeling and emotion. As such, they also provide an important counterforce to celebrations of the affective turn as a radically ‘new’ conceptual framework that allows us to escape from the worn out ideas of structuralist and poststructualist thought that have come to dominate cultural theory. In her influential article, ‘Invoking affect’ (2005), Clare Hemmings critiques presentations of affect theory as the new ‘cutting edge’, specifically in relation to the work of Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She argues that the celebrations of affect’s potential as a means of moving beyond the hegemonic negativity of cultural studies with its ‘paranoid’ theorists towards a more optimistic and productive mode of thought, largely relies on a selective rewriting that ‘flattens out poststructuralist inquiry by ignoring the counter-hegemonic contributions of postcolonial and feminist theorists, only thereby positioning affect as ‘the answer’ to contemporary problems of cultural theory’ (Hemmings 2005: 548) Thus, as Pedwell and Whitehead argue:
While affect theory provides a valuable resource to interrogate long-held assumptions and think social and political life differently, such openings are not framed productively (or accountably) through an elision of the critical and diverse contributions of feminist, postcolonial and queer analysis. (2012: 118)
Not-so-new vibrations
If affect theory seeks to explore the parts of the experiential that are omitted by hermeneutic and/or discursive modes of analysis, then the sonic, as that which is so frequently resistant to semantic or semiotic interpretation, would seem like an obvious place to look for examples of affectivity. For sure, sound has an integral role in shaping the affective contours of our day-to-day lives. There are, for example, those sounds of our domestic spaces that put as at ease, the reassuring and familiar voices of the television and radio in the background. There are also those ominous, out-of-place sounds that call us to alert and make our heart race, filling us with a sense of unease. We also use music affectively to encourage or emphasize a particular mood or create a general ambience: we have our pre-party soundtrack, our romantic-night-in mix tapes, or our chill-out compilations. We have our personal MP3 playlists for the gym that encourage us to run faster and for longer, and our ‘mood-managing’ smartphone apps such as Moodagent (see chapters by Jarman and Kassabian). There are those ‘Utopian’ moments on the dancefloor, where the sound and rhythm becomes an affective glue, bringing together dancing bodies. The DJ and the crowd exist in a feedback loop, whereby the DJ’s track selections shape the mood of the crowd, while the mood of the crowd shapes the DJ’s track selections. Meanwhile, advertisers have been finding more and more effective ways to use sound as a means of getting under our skin and sucking us in before we realize what is happening to us. We may ‘know’ that the advert is manipulative, toying with our feelings for commercial gain, but that doesn’t necessarily prevent it from impacting upon us with its heart-wrenching music and sombre voiceover.
If there are reasons to be cautious about the ‘newness’ of affective thinking (see Pedwell and Whitehead’s argument, for example), then these could be further supported by a careful examination of the history of musical aesthetics. While, as this volume attests, there are some striking consequences to thinking music/sound and affect together, the claims to the newness of this thinking are often somewhat overstated. In some sense, we have always known about the intimate relationship between sound and affectivity, even if we haven’t expressed it in quite the same language. There are, for example, Plato’s notorious anxieties about the dangerous power of certain musical sounds. While ‘simple music’ was commended for encouraging ‘temperance’, other types of music had the capacity to weaken the spirit:
When a person allows the music of culture to charm him and make his ears a channel for his mind to be flooded with the modes we described […] as enchanting and soft and the ones we described as plaintive and spends his whole life humming and entranced by song, then at first he softens his passionate side, like an iron in a forge, and makes it useful, instead of useless and intractable; but if he goes on and on, and never lets up, but is beguiled, then the result is that he dissolves and melts his passionate side, until it becomes completely fluid and he has, so to speak, cut the sinews out of his mind and made himself a ‘feeble fighter’ […] if right from the start he was endowed with a mind which lacked passion […] then it doesn’t take long for this to happen; but if he had a passionate mind, then he weakens the passion and destabilizes it, so that even trivial matters make it quickly blaze up and die down again. People like this have exchanged passion for peevishness and irritability and are seething with discontent. (Plato 1993: 133)
Music derived from complex rhythms and inappropriate modes was seen by Plato as a threat to society, insofar as it harboured the power to corrupt, and inspired meanness and promiscuity. Thus the ‘correct’ musical education was vital to the wellbeing of society ‘due to the fact that rhythm and harmony sink more deeply into the mind than anything else and affect it more powerfully than anything else […] for someone who is given a correct education, their product is grace; but in the opposite situation it is inelegance’ (Plato 1993: 100). Our account of the functioning of music in recent protest, as outlined at the beginning of this introduction, thus has ancient resonances: if music has the capacity to encourage the obedience of citizens, then it also has the capacity to induce civil disobedience – to cause bodies to march for, or against, the state.
Listening with Spinoza
As far back as the early modern origins of music theory, in treatises on musical affect, the passions, and the so-called ‘seconda prattica’, most commentators seemed always already to have recognized the proximity of music and affect. Even Spinoza, for Negri (2004; 1999) the great radical of his age, recognized the persistence of that proximity:
Whatsoever affects our ears is said to give rise to noise, sound, or harmony. In this last case, there are men lunatic enough to believe that even God himself takes pleasure in harmony; and philosophers are not lacking who have persuaded themselves, that the motion of the heavenly bodies gives rise to harmony – all of which instances sufficiently show that everyone judges of things according to the state of his brain, or rather mistakes for things the forms of his imagination. We need no longer wonder that there have arisen all the controversies we have witnessed and finally scepticism: for, although human bodies in many respects agree, yet in very many others they differ; so that what seems good to one seems bad to another; what seems well ordered to one seems confused to another; what is pleasing to one displeases another, and so on. (Spinoza 2006: 24)
Affect thus belongs, we might say, to the Baroque. Or perhaps, to put it another way, it belongs to what Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1994) has termed, rather provocatively, Baroque reason: it is labyrinthine, relational, bound into many worlds, a city with multiple entrances and exits, such as Rome, Vienna, Madrid, Bogotá, Ciudad de Mexico and Lima. It is thus something that has excited animated engagement since well before Spinoza’s Ethics. In the Ethics, affect (affectus) captures for Spinoza what we might be more inclined to name modifications, accidents, misfires, divergences and the flow of causality more broadly. And, for Spinoza, sound, listening, the ear, are all intimately connected to thinking this ‘affect’. It is therefore striking that, from its early modern origins (assuming we recognize in Spinoza a split from earlier Platonic anxieties about affect), a positive affect theory has imagined itself as having something to say about sound and listening bodies. But affect has also been about divesting the body of something, about taking away and abstracting, generalizing, making ‘autonomous’ what the body imagines as its own. In this sense, the world of affect seems contradictory in that, on the one hand, it looks for orders or regimens of feeling (it is something connected, that is, to the bodily) and yet, on the other, seeks to allow for nodes of connectivity that sometimes (often) omit or bypass our bodies. Hence affect and the corporeal have come to occupy not-quite-equivalent territories. If bodies and affect in our new ‘Baroque’ moment are to a certain extent divested of each other, if, that is, we can no longer presume that listening bodies will feel according to a certain Euclidean logic of causation, then affect as a turbulent thematic is profoundly challenging for thinking about music, listening and sound more broadly. This collection of essays thus takes up Spinoza’s challenge to think the relation sound/affect as in some sense incomplete. As Spinoza puts it:
We have now perceived, that all the explanations commonly given of nature are mere modes of imagining, and do not indicate the true nature of anything, but only the constitution of the imagination; and, although they have names, as though they were entities, existing externally to the imagination, I call them entities imaginary rather than real; and, therefore, all arguments against us drawn from such abstractions are easily rebutted. (2006: 25)
This, then, is the demand of affectus, to insist on the overturning of what seems like a natural law, a kind of unmooring of the subject from all the suppositions it has laboured under – this is what is radical in Spinoza. The challenge to think affect radically, as Antonio Negri (2004) has suggested, is thus at the heart of Spinoza’s metaphysics. And it is indeed a challenge since, as we noted above, it shakes up traditional political structures, redraws power relations and insists on the mutability of social relations.
And yet, as this collection also suggests, affect gives no such guarantee, provides no such always-already radicalizing dynamic, since it is equally at home in the mundane as in the epochal. For thinking about sound and affect, then, we should not assume that the post-Euclidean dimension maps onto a coherent political or ideological terrain. Indeed, what affect theory demands, especially with regard to thinking affect in relation to music, is a dislodging of discourses about ‘attachment’, ‘value’ or ‘belonging’ from their Euclidean moorings such that we encounter the raw mutability of any such moorings. In other words, although attention to affect does not guarantee any one kind of political outcome (just as audio-affective forces may mobilize bodies for or against the state), it can, as Hardt and Negri are keen to demonstrate, provide some highly productive ways for rethinking the relation among labour, bodies, political institutions and neoliberal capital.
One way to explore the strategic usefulness of thinking about affect and affection in this regard is to focus on what is particular to our contemporary understanding of affect. For Baroque theorists of the arts after Spinoza, the passions and the affects are intimately related to musical practice: the stuff of music, its very liquid materiality, was evidence for them of the affective. This essentially neo-Aristotelian body of theory, from theorists such as Jean-Baptiste Abbé Du Bos and Johann Christoph Gottsched, called Affektenlehre in German, has been consistently and systematically cordoned off from canonical historiographies of music, relegated to the status of a strange and impermanent aberration, a merely ‘mimetic’ theory of music and sound, that was happily finally and once and for all put to rest by Baumgarten and later the romantics. In seeking to still the Baroque messiness of affect theory, in seeking, that is, to insure music against affective turbulence, musicology’s persistent investment in ‘classical’ social theory, its unswathing attachment to ancient two-dimensional models of musical hermeneutics and its insistence on musical ‘autonomy’ (relative or otherwise) all point to what is problematic in its very disciplinary self-identity as forged in its silencing of the disturbing turbulences that follow in the wake of Baroque affect theory.
It is in the radical mutability of the network of relations among affect, allegiance and attachment, that the turbulence of affect can be felt. The nature of that relation has changed profoundly and requires critical attention. In part, we are interested here in the notion of what Clough et al. (2008) have termed ‘affect-itself’ because in it we encounter a particularly powerful model for thinking attachments and allegiances to ‘authenticity’, identity and their problematization, especially, we suggest, in thinking about music and sound more broadly. Clough et al. propose a theory of affect as in some sense self-regulating, as beholden to a logic that in important ways has done away with its intimate relation to capital, but which nonetheless remains somehow symptomatic of it, if only in an ever more radically distended relation to its original ‘cause’:
… we are proposing that a dynamic, indeterminate matter is presently being configured in capitalism with corresponding techniques of administration and measurement aimed at a level below, above, or perhaps beyond that of the bounded body-as-organism. Therefore, while we are also concerned with the ‘dynamic powers’ to which [Paolo] Virno refers, we conceive them not as a matter of general intellect, a disembodied matter, but as a generalized matter beyond the laborer’s body, a matter of affect-itself. We are proposing that there is an abstracting of affect to affect-itself, which disregards the bounded-ness of the human body, thus troubling the conceptualization of the body as the body-as-organism. (Clough et al. 2008: 64–5)
What consequences for thinking about music and sound does this shift of focus from the labourer’s body(-as-organism) to ‘affect-itself’ enact? Clough et al. are attempting, it would seem, to find ways of making sense of radical neoliberal capital’s propensity to manage and abstract affective labour (labour which seeks an emotional outcome of some kind) to a kind of ubiquitous matter, to a material that exceeds the bounds of the human. Once again, we encounter this tendency, implicit in Spinoza’s (potentially) radicalizing moment, to partially divest bodies of their affective control. Clearly, for Clough et al., this ubiquity is particular to our current predicament. And yet, for us, it could also be suggestive for thinking about music-making in a certain neo-Spinozan manner as unbounded by its adherent, as ubiquitously affective, as marking out a very particular kind of distributive affective political potential.
What is particularly useful in Clough et al.’s theorization of affect-itself is the notion of ‘non-locality’ they take from quantum mechanics, and especially David Bohm’s theorization of it:
… all things affect each other through the quantum potential of the quantum field, even when the elements are separated by long distances, a feature of the implicate order that Bohm refers to as ‘non-locality’. This action at a distance points to a common pool of information belonging to the quantum field as a whole, what Bohm calls ‘active information’. (Clough et al. 2008: 67–8)
Stated briefly, the quantum argument employed by Bohm and Hiley suggests that, in any part of the quantum field, low-energy phenomena, contrary to our ‘intuitive’ Euclidean construal of causality, can affect high-energy consequences: ‘One may think of the electron as moving under its own energy. The quantum potential then acts to put form into its motion, and this form is related to the form of the wave from which the quantum potential is derived’ (Bohm and Hiley 1993: 35). What is difficult in the quantum argument in Clough et al.’s theorization of affect-itself is the notion that non-locality can effect dramatic outcomes or that, as Bohm suggests to us, the causality to which we have been attached for so long is no longer adequate to the task of understanding the complexities of radical neoliberal capital. What perplexes most here, it seems to us, is the collapse of the boundary between organic and the non-organic matter, between that which is agentive and that which is not. And yet, what is suggestive in this quantum move is precisely the freedom it offers to re-conceive the social field as non-localized. In other words, what the quantum argument offers is a challenge to the boundedness of the labourer’s body-as-organism, to the ethnographic fixation on localisation and the spatial logic of classical social theory, and to that stubborn enthrallment to the Euclidean fantasy. In other words, understanding the processes by which radical neoliberal capital abstracts affective labour to affect-itself offers us a way of thinking the relation among musical communities, sounding bodies, musical processes and ‘causes’, and also offers a productive way of theorizing our way through the complexity of the late capitalist investment in music and affect more widely.
Affect-interested sound and music scholarships are thus tasked with trying to understand how different models of agency and non-agency, of the conscious, the pre-conscious and the post-conscious, are thinkable in relation to sound. One way to begin to do this, and certainly one well represented in this volume, is to think sound and music as offering ways of manifesting affect: music is thus imagined in this volume as facilitating acoustic entry into affective fields, as offering a way to both abstract and particularize affective states and as furnishing a reflective medium for imagining affect ‘itself’, if only figuratively or strategically. For others, affect is reflected in new forms of radical distributedness: the distributedness of musical practices; in apps; online stores; on the imaginary street; in multiple distributed media and so on. This distributedness mimics, apes or models the affective field in its non-locality, by calling attention to the structures of affect, affection and affiliation that characterize the work of the sonic.
In the shift from affective labour to affect-itself, then, we note something quite disturbing in the musico-political field, namely the ubiquitization of affect and, perhaps even more important here, a consequent turbulence-effect that shakes up attempts to understand the affective processes by which we attach to musical authenticity. Authenticity, identity formation and other traces of traditional identity politics, we might say, especially as imagined in music-oriented discourses about ‘belonging’, affiliation, attachment and musical value, thereby become (or at least are thinkable as) symptoms of what Clough et al. term affect-itself, subject to a radical ubiquitization that deterritorializes them. Or, to put it another way, affect, when employed strategically, can represent a radically different structure of political and social connectivity and distribution that queries and interrogates those older forms of political allegiance that are taken for granted in the Guardian articles mentioned at the start of this Introduction. Traditional (‘classical’) social theories of, for example, identity politics, subcultural processes or other forms of musical identity-forming are thus thrown into a certain productive disarray whereby, for example, claims to musical authenticity or other kinds of musical attachments become more lumpy or mutable.
Perhaps it is appropriate, therefore, as much recent scholarship has, to side-step the authenticity question altogether and to concentrate efforts on affective fields ‘alone’. We want to suggest, however, that the one can lead us to a better understanding of the other, and that it is precisely the affective field that offers us a way into thinking authenticity, affiliation and identity, without abandoning them altogether. We also want to suggest that paying attention to affect in this context represents a way of getting beyond the true/false binarism that has haunted scholarly attempts to understand the kinds of attachment invariably made in the name of communitarian authenticity: we can begin, that is, to understand authenticity and its cognates (the affective processes of attaching, feeling at home, feeling invested) as a kind of delicate cluster or node in the broader field, and as vulnerable but stubborn.
In numerous musical contexts, of course, authenticity attachments are readily exemplified in a number of affective processes. These include: the discursivization of genre-space (the heat that attends debates about what ‘belongs’ and what does not); the performative enchantment or seduction of the listener by sanctioned virtuosic insider exponents of the style; explicit denigrations of would-be insiders that fall short of perceived communitarian standards; a range of other boundary policing rituals that draw on gender, race, class and other identity formations to ensure that the texture and specificity of belonging, so central to the authenticity, is maintained. In other words, the affective is to be felt in those processes by which the boundary rituals are instantiated, put in place, embedded, ‘somatized’ to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term (Bourdieu 2002: 39). It is that set of processes, in other words, by which, recalling John 1.14 (‘the word made flesh’), the abstractions of discourse are made to feel urgent, real, ‘given’, of us, among us and as in some sense having partaken of what the ‘Greek fathers’ of Catholic and Christian orthodox doctrine termed a henanthropesis, a ‘becoming as like human’ of things which seem distant to us. The affective dimension of these attachments and boundary rituals is that which disciplines and rewards political, ideological and emotional attachments through fear, pain, pleasure, thrill, spasm and shiver. It is a regimen of affects, an order of feelings that springs from the careful repetition of rituals of adherence and it takes root in the behavioural shadows cast by ritual, in what Žižek, paraphrasing Pascal, recognizes as the affective dimension of religious attachment (‘kneel and you shall believe you have knelt because you believe’) (Žižek 2005). We attach, then, as we affect and are affected. We are subject to that libidinal order.
Authenticity, identification, allegiance and attachment, especially in their musical manifestations, is something we can think here, then, as a group of affective instantiations, which do not account for any ‘total’ field, but, rather, cohere delicately and locally (and, in line with Clough et al.’s reading of quantum theory, non-locally). Different affective orders subsist in different communities, different orders of intensity attend different hermeneutic, affiliational and embodiment strategies. In thinking about musical attachments and affect, then, we are thinking at the level of a kind of ‘general’, of things that persist locally, things that stubbornly and resiliently subsist without leave.
Sound, music, affect
Despite the demonstrable richness of thinking affect with music and sound, and while encounters with music are often cited in passing as an example par excellence of affective experience, more rigorous examinations of the affective functions of sound and music have remained strangely absent within the contemporary scholarship of the affective turn, while affect has been barely audible within recent musicology and sound studies. Of course, there have been some more than notable exceptions. Affect has had a central role in Lawrence Grossberg’s (1984) work on popular music and fandom, including his work on the ‘affective alliances’ of rock and roll, whereby music both empowers and is empowered by its audience; Anahid Kassabian’s (2001a; 2013) work on ubiquitous listening, ubiquitous music and distributed subjectivities, which calls into question assumed correlations between listening, consciousness and attentiveness; Suzanne Cusick’s (2006; 2008) examinations of the use of music as weapon and within torture practices; Jeremy Gilbert’s (2004) critique of the conceptual dominance of ‘culture’ and ‘discourse’ within the contemporary humanities, in which he calls on music as an exemplar of a largely asignifying and non-discursive cultural experience; and in Steve Goodman’s (2010) ‘politics of frequency’ and ‘vibrational ecology’, which emerge from an analysis of the ‘bad vibes’ that circulate throughout the military-entertainment complex.
What Grossberg, Kassabian, Cusick, Gilbert and Goodman point to, either implicitly or explicitly, are the limitations of understanding sound and music as a semantic and/or representational text. Grossberg, for example, warns that ‘Rock and roll, whether live or recorded, is a performance whose “significance” cannot simply be read off the “text”. It is not that rock and roll does not produce and manipulate meaning but rather that meaning itself functions in rock and roll affectively’ (Grossberg 1984: 233). Likewise, Kassabian notes the limitations of genre as ‘a primary organizing axis for popular music activities’, specifically in relation to ubiquitous music: ubiquitous music may have some basic generic features, such as the absence of vocals and especially high or low frequencies but ‘the problem is, of course, that ubiquitous music does not depend on texts belonging to its own genre, but rather welcomes all texts in a pluralist levelling of difference and specificity’ (Kassabian 2001a). As such, these four authors seek to move away from hermeneutic strategies, away from issues of representation and cultural meaning, and towards questions regarding the uses and functions of sound and music as an affective force: the question shifts from ‘what does music mean?’ to ‘what does music do?’ Moreover, in focusing on the ‘doing’ rather than the ‘meaning’, the division between music and sound is rendered all the more ambiguous, or, perhaps more accurately, as insignificant, or secondary. What is required is a consideration of sonic cultures more broadly; questions regarding the circulation, modulation and perception of sound as affective vibrational force (Goodman 2010), of which music is one type of compound.
Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience seeks to extend and expand upon these explorations into sound, music and affectivity by considering what is to be gained by viewing sound through the lens of affect, and viewing affect through the lens of sound. The first part, ‘Affective (Re)thinking: Sound as Affect and Affect as Sound’ is comprised of theoretically led engagements that pose questions about and seek new understandings of the relationship between sonority and affectivity. Will Schrimshaw’s chapter begins by using affect as a means of unsettling what Jonathan Sterne (2003) refers to as the ‘audiovisual litany’ – the staging of a binaristic relation between the intimate interiority of hearing and the objective, exteriority of vision. Schrimshaw uses the autonomy of affect as a means of (re)engaging with the notion of sound-itself, positing, in the process, a structural equivalence between sound, intensity and affect. Schrimshaw critically situates this attempt of think about the inaudible and imperceptible of sound in relation to Seth Kim-Cohen’s (2009) discursive theory of a non-cochlear sonic art and Christoph Cox’s (2011) appeal for the establishment of a sonic materialism. In ‘Felt as Thought (or, Musical Abstraction and the Semblance of Affect)’, eldritch Priest seeks to take up an alternative line of flight to the Spinozan–Deleuzian trajectory, by considering the metaphysical implications of Susanne Langer’s philosophy of feeling (which takes musical experience as its basis) for discourses of musical affect. For Langer, art exists as a vehicle for speculation: a speculation not on the status of a truth or fact but rather, ‘what it feels like to feel oneself affecting and being affected by and as an occasion of experience’. Priest also notes that Langer’s contention that abstractions are lived, existing as a mode of feeling, that is integral to the process of perception troubles ‘the now customary gesture for theorists who study music and the organization of feeling to invoke facile notions of ‘embodiment’, which tend to recognize certain types of music as more ‘bodily’ than others ‘by virtue of the overt activities associated with its reception’. Rather, as Priest reminds us, ‘whether dubstep or Morton Feldman, or even an advertising jingle’ there is always a somatic component to musical perception: ‘that some musical practices encourage toe tapping and implicate these activities into the field of (musical) relevance does not make them more embodied, it just makes that dimension of their experience more manifest or actual’. With Patricia Ticineto Clough’s ‘My Mother’s Scream’, we have a shift in key, moving towards a more experimental provocation. With reference to Silverman’s notion of the acoustic mirror, Clough performs Steve Goodman’s ontology of vibrational force in a retelling of a experience of sonic violence, in which a perforated eardrum from violent screaming disturbs the loop ‘the resonance of a return’ that is listening or being heard. ‘Violence’, Clough argues, ‘must be thought anew. It must be thought in terms of a biogovernance that, in its fully mature state, comes so close to life, comes so close to vitality, so close to rhythmicity.’ As such, the open-ended optimism of affect’s ‘power to’ – what is, for so many, its emancipatory potential – is counteracted with exploitations of the affective as a means of ‘power over’.
In the second part, ‘Hearing, Playing, Feeling: Music and the Organization of Affect’ we begin to focus in on the affective functioning of particular musical exemplars. Richard Elliott begins with a recording of Nina Simone’s performance of ‘My Sweet Lord’, which grows into an exploration of the recorded ‘representations’ of Nina Simone’s performances. ‘There is always a gap between affect and representation’ Elliott writes, ‘But representations have their own affects.’ Elliott draws from theories of the eventual, the transformative and the affective as outlined by Alain Badiou, J. L. Austin and Brian Massumi, alongside theories of the everyday, in order to highlight the formative strategies of religious and/or ritualistic affect that can be found in Simone’s work. In doing so, Elliott explores the sometimes conflicting, sometimes complimentary modulations between the event and the everyday that are played out in the (recorded) performances of Nina Simone. In ‘(I Can’t Get No) Affect’, John Mowitt takes up the Chess recordings of the Rolling Stones’ song ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. With reference to the song’s oneiric composition – specifically with regards to ‘that noise’ of the song’s signature three note ostinato – Mowitt poses the question as to whether, and how affect can be thought, as a means of responding to some of Ruth Leys’s criticisms of affect theory and what she sees as the untenable division drawn between affect and emotion. Continuing with the collection’s ‘Freudian’ turn, implicated in the opening of Mowitt’s chapter, Clara Latham’s ‘Listening to the Talking Cure: Sprechstimme, Hypnosis, and the Sonic Organization of Affect’ investigates how Freud and Breuer may have understood hysteria to be expressed in the voice and links this to the Albertine Zehme’s performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Latham demonstrates that, over the course of the nineteenth century, the treatment of hysteria changed from somatic practices to sonic practices, with the emergence of ‘talking cures’, of which the affective sonority of the voice was key. This shift between the haptic and the aural, Latham argues, is a precondition for the piece being heard as hysterical. Thus when the critic Otto Taubman referred to Zehme’s performance as hysterical in October 1912, he was articulating something explicitly modern.
Dean Lockwood’s ‘Spread the Virus: Affective Prophecy in Industrial Music’ opens the third part, ‘Affects of turbulence’, with a critique of Jacques Attali’s reflections on the prophetic power of music, and the potential subversiveness of what Attali sees as a new audio-social order: ‘Composition’. Lockwood argues that Cabaret Voltaire, in line with Attali, exemplify a rendering audible of a new world. However, Lockwood questions the viability of Composition as a means of resistance within the contemporary mechanisms of capitalism, whereby the seedlings of new audio-social orders are necessarily pre-empted. Can resistance come from the ‘new’, when ‘control society, as it has come to exist, must always regenerate productive instability’? Paul Hegarty’s ‘Brace and Embrace: Masochism in the Noise Performance’ utilizes Deleuze’s study of masochism and the work of Georges Bataille as a means of exploring the erotic, affective relations of the Japanese harsh noise performance. This, for Hegarty, exemplified by the becoming–body/becoming–noise performances of Masonna, in which the body’s movement is primary in the creation of noise. For Hegarty, we do not simply ‘commune’ in noise, we do not become an amorphous ‘one’, since ‘it is our separation amid flows that makes it work’. Instead, the (Bataillean) noise performance causes us to recall the body’s solidity amid flow – ‘it is friction, brittleness and a location that is properly subject’. Through this examination, Hegarty also argues for the persistent relevance of transgression as a means of understanding noise, in light of criticisms of such dispositions by Steve Goodman and Simon Reynolds. Marie Thompson’s ‘Three Screams’ proposes three affective ‘lenses’ through which we may think about the scream as a means of exemplifying the affective registers of the sonic. She first considers the scream from the affective standpoint of the emitter: the scream as an expression of affection. If to live is to be affected, then the scream more generally can be thought as an expression of life. Second, is an examination from the affective standpoint of the receiver – the scream as affective or affecting, which is exemplified by its use in both torture practices and horror film soundtracks. Finally, picking up on Schrimshaw’s claims for a structural equivalence between affect, intensity and sound, Thompson considers the scream as an affective-sonorous force that exceeds the affections and perceptions of both emitting and receiving, extruding and impinging bodies.
The first two chapters of the fourth part – ‘Palliative Sounds and the Marketing of Affection’ – draw attention to the ways in which sound and music is marketed according to its capacity to induce particular affective states in the listener. In ‘Music for Sleeping’, Anahid Kassabian examines the recent emergence of Sleep apps for smartphones, linking it to her work on distributed subjectivity. Kassabian sees these apps as exemplary of the need to further consider the relationship between sound and affectivity. She writes:
It is long overdue that scholars of popular culture generally, and most specifically those who write about popular music and audiovisual culture, stop ignoring the power of the sounding materials. We don’t stop talking about visual culture because we aren’t art historians or painters; nor should we eschew discussions of musical sounds because we are not musicologists or members of a band. Affect works in sound – and especially in musical sound – in ways that are far too important to leave on the sidelines of cultural analysis.
In ‘Relax, Feel Good, Chill Out: The Affective Distribution of Classical Music’, Freya Jarman also makes reference Kassabian’s concept of distributed subjectivity in her analysis of Classic FM and its comparative relationship with BBC Radio 3. Jarman critically explores the increased focus of the distribution and organization of classical music along lines of affectivity with reference not only to radio programming, but also Web 2.0 online spaces, such as Facebook, Spotify and Moodagent. Jarman concludes by provocatively speculating that the distribution of music in accordance with affective logics threatens to expose something about the music that has been often denied – its reliance on affective labour. In resonance with Priest’s remarks regarding the necessarily somatic and thus affective component of musical perception, Jarman remarks that, irrespective of the divisions between programmatic and absolute music, the ‘emotive’ or the ‘serious minded’ listener, classical music remains bound to an affective economy: ‘just as affective labor has always produced capital on some level, classical music has always participated in an affective economy, producing emotional responses from listeners and benefiting from those responses, from the emotional attachments listeners make to music’. Ian Biddle’s final chapter ‘Quiet Sounds and Intimate Listening: the Politics of Tiny Seductions’ is also concerned, to a certain extent, with affective labour. Dealing with what he terms the ‘complex and self-contradictory political work of sounds that barely pass beyond the human audibility threshold’, Biddle’s chapter is also an attempt to think about some of the strategic political questions that attend affect and affection, especially with regard to the challenge it represents to so-called ‘classical’ social theory, when thinking about the tiniest, barely audible sounds. For Biddle, the emphasis, in certain corners of sound studies, on high velocity sounds has tended to obscure some of what is specific to sounds that dally at the threshold of audibility. Drawing in particular on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ‘logic of the example’, Biddle shows how attention to affect in thinking about threshold audibility, can make legible some of the ways in which apparently inconsequential or marginal sounds can have profound political consequences. In particular, Biddle’s chapter enacts a critique of ‘pastoral’ imaginations of community, by juxtaposing the quietude implicit in conservative imaginations of the idyllic pastoral community with the disquiet in the ‘raw affect’ of threshold sounds. Such sounds, he suggests, bear witness to the always-already incomplete nature of the social, and the susceptibility of ‘belonging’, in any community, to unravelling.
Of course, this collection is by no means designed to be a comprehensive overview of the ways in which sound and music function affectively. That said, there are a number of limitations with regards to the collection’s scope that it is worth drawing attention to. First is a problem of definition. As we have noted at numerous points, affect has multiple and sometimes conflicting definitions. Where, for example, does one see the difference, if at all, between affect and emotion? Does one centralize or de-centralize the affective encounters of the body-as-subject? Are we following a Freudian or Deleuzian/Guattarian trajectory? In moving through different definitions of affect, unresolved tensions are sometimes generated between and also within different chapters. Although they may be a source of difficulty, or confusion, we hope that these tensions might also generate sparks of interest. That said, while affect theory remains a ‘broad church’, insofar as there are multiple definitions from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, there is only a small cross-section of theoretical perspectives covered here. Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi are names that appear regularly over the course of the book, as is Steve Goodman’s, whose Spinozan–Deleuzian oriented work on sound, vibration and affect has become a key theoretical touchstone for many of our contributors. Yet equally, there are also appropriations of thinkers whose names feature less frequently in work on affect, including Susanne Langer (Priest), Alain Badiou (Elliott), Jean-Paul Sartre (Mowitt) and Giorgio Agamben (Biddle). Likewise, in terms of music, there is a range of generic exemplars covered – Arnold Schoenberg to Nina Simone, Alvin Lucier to Cabaret Voltaire. However, Paul Hegarty’s chapter on Japanese noise music notwithstanding, there seems to be a strong focus on Western (specifically North American and European) sonic cultures and practices. Part of this stems, we would suggest, from the indebtedness of much in contemporary aesthetically-oriented affect theory to Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Freud. Certainly, Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics remain centred on the European avant-gardist tradition. The Eurocentrism of this constellation has been productively tempered by a broader, Western (North American, Australian and European) reception and elaboration of their work. However, in seeking to represent both what is current and what might be taken up in future affect-interested scholarship, this book will inevitably reflect current patterns of production. Despite these important caveats, we hope that this collection raises provocative questions about sound’s relationship to affect that will be met with further explorations of the affective dimensions of sonic experience. It is, after all, in the nature of affect theory, to be persistently incomplete, to remain open-ended, (and open-minded) to new (audio)affective capacities and forces.
The remaining question, then, is not what this book might mean, but what does it do? Our hopes for the collection remain modest, wary of some of the grandiose claims that have been made in the name of affect theory. In short, this book stems from a desire to complement and augment existing theoretical approaches for thinking about sonic encounters, while also trying to unpick some of the persistent limitations that remain from the so-called ‘linguistic’ and ‘cultural’ turns, and without music being consigned ‘to a realm of sublime mystery’ whereby it is ‘impossible to even discuss in any terms, having no purpose beyond its own pristine existence, expressing nothing but its own logic.’ (Gilbert 2004) The hope, then is that in bringing affect theory and sound and music studies into conversation with one another, we will (re)discover the excluded middle and, in doing so, find alternate ways of theorizing sonic experience.
Notes
1 Billy Bragg states that, when he began to make music there were fewer accessible media outlets for someone of his social background: ‘there was no internet, I didn’t have access to the mainstream media. The best way was to pick up a guitar, write songs and do gigs. The internet and social networking sites have replaced that urge – you can make a film, a blog’ (Saner 2011). This sentiment is echoed by Flynn, who claims that ‘it’s confusing to know where to put your energies now. I don’t have a Twitter account because I want to keep it a bit more how you [Bragg] had it, and put my creative energy into writing songs’ (ibid.). Interestingly, this division between a ‘simpler’ time and a more ‘complex’ network of circumstances is mirrored in what Bragg and Flynn see to be the causes or influences of contemporary social unrest. Bragg says to Flynn that he recognizes that his generation ‘don’t have the ideological politics as a backdrop that we had’. Flynn also says that he thinks ‘it was simpler when punk happened. I think young people could more clearly see where right and wrong existed … but there are so many issues around the riots, or the Occupy protest’ (Saner 2011).
2 More generally, the presence of lyrically apolitical music at protests is nothing new per se. Carnivalesque drumming bands and marching bands, for example, have long been a transformative force at protests, featuring as a means of boosting the morale and energy of protesters within the transient space of the street (see McKay 2007). For a consideration of the sonic circulation of affects by protest street bands see Shukatis (2007).
3 Grime emerged as an underground genre from Bow, East London, in the early 2000s. It has a number of stylistic precursors, including hip-hop, UK garage and dancehall. It was primarily distributed by UK pirate stations. The music tends to be characterized as sounding fierce or aggressive. Mark Fisher, for example, argued that the reason that Grime was used during the protests was due to its emotional content; its capacity to transmit anger: ‘while some Grime tracks can be thought of as having a political message, for the most part the political significance lies in the emotions – of rage, frustration and resentment – to which it gives voice’ (Fisher 2012: 38).
4 In an article for the New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones notes that many Grime artists make their debuts on homemade DVDs of MC competitions, which are sold in barbershops and record stores around London (see Frere-Jones 2005).
5 For an insightful analysis of the use of music in torture practices, particularly relating to the Iraq war see Cusick (2006; 2008). Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus that sound’s capacity to mobilize bodies and produce intense, collective experiences may also be its ‘fascist’ danger: ‘music (drums, trumpets) draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to the abyss, (much more so than banners and flags, which are paintings, means of classification and rallying). It may be that musicians are individually more reactionary than painters, more religious, less “social”; they nevertheless wield a collective force infinitely greater than that of painting: “the chorus formed by the assembly of people is a very powerful bond …”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 333).
6 With the term the ‘excluded middle’, Massumi is making reference to Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle, the third of the three classic laws of thought (the first being the law of identity and the second being the law of non-contradiction) and states that either that proposition is true, or its negation is true – the truth of the famous statement ‘Socrates is mortal’, for example, is an either/or selection, it is either true or false – he is either mortal or he is not. In other words, there is no middle ground. In existing in the space between contradiction, the middle of the excluded middle, Massumi’s notion of affect thus troubles such principles, running against the grain of much twentieth-century thought that takes Aristolian principles as its ontological basis. For more on this, see Andrew Murphie’s informative ‘Affect – a basic summary of approaches’ (2010).
7 This is not to say that all cultures have the same affective responses to the same things. For example, the causes of shame or disgust will differ according to cultural background. Similarly, we learn how to suppress or modify these affective expressions differently, in relation to cultural codes. As such, it is not simply the case that affect is somehow pre-cultural or pre-social.