No love without conflict: rights to the city, cultural activism, and the ‘irony of affect’ in São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses how love arose as a political ethos in São Paulo, Brazil. The meaning and feeling of love emerged as middle-class artists sought to do what they love as work; activists demanded rights to the city through cultural intervention; and a hit song by an obscure rapper lamented that ‘love doesn’t exist in São Paulo’. Cultural activists tied love’s affective resonance to the mayoral campaign of politician Fernando Haddad, who likewise framed his transit policy in loving terms. The article describes how middle-class musical aesthetics stemming from the idea of ‘racial democracy’, as well as artists’ and activists’ desire to ‘do what you love’ as work, eschewed the racialised class conflict that produced an unloving city, leading to a politically impotent articulation of love. The article advances a materialist approach to affect through social reproduction theory, suggesting that the concept of affect is useful only if it takes account of the social politics that shape affective resonance, particularly the central conflict between human life and the generation of capital. It argues that affects brought forth through cultural products like music only serve political change if overtly connected to a larger programme of structural transformation which incorporates class conflict.