Editorial

Abstract

Recently, scholars have paid increased attention to affect as a structuring principle of political life, aesthetic engagement, cultural practice, and social formation (Ahmed 2010, Brown et al. 2019, Lutz 2017, Neuman 2007, Papoulias and Callard 2010, Sointu 2016, Thrift 2004, 2016). Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s (1988), Baruch Spinoza’s (2002), and Brian Massumi’s (1995) theoretical focus on how bodies ‘affect and are affected by’ one another (Deleuze 1988) in social and political contexts, a turn to affect affords ways of analyzing feelings and different forms of affective engagements (Ahmed 2004). Instead of viewing these as mediated by already given social structures or forms of active agency, these largely Deleuzean inspirations see affect as a form of material agency in itself (Anderson 2009, McManus 2011) that shapes identities, ways of being together, and new forms of politics in the making. It is in this sense that affect theory offers a conceptual alternative to earlier ‘turns’ that gave shape to thinking about social, cultural, political, and psychological formations such as the linguistic, discursive, and cultural ‘turns’ that took hold at various point in the twentieth century. Thinking under the terms of affective politics grants agency to non-discursive matters, allowing investigation into how affective engagements matter to us in ways that transcend (or preexist) language and consciousness (Thrift, 2008). All of this has vital consequences for music studies. It invites music scholars to take into account affective and political implications of music transcription and analysis (Bøhler 2020, 2021; Stover 2017, 2018), suggests new ways of reading how music enacts social collectives (Schiermer 2021, 2023), and offers new approaches to music ethnography that provide insights into the political force of musical sounds (Bøhler 2017, Gill 2017, Guilbault 2019, Hofman 2020, Hofman and Petrović 2023, Stover 2020), among other points of potential transformation. In short, a broader musicological turn to affect invites us to examine how musical affects shape identities, create (or constrain) communities, and engender forms of political comportments. This special issue takes its cue from these developments, as its contributing authors explore different ways in which music, affect, social formations and political matters interact within cross-disciplinary music studies.

Keywords

• music
• affect
• politics