The romance with affect: sonic politics in a time of political exhaustion

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay offers a close reading of the promises ingrained in the political potential of aural experience in the recent literature addressing affect. It focuses on why, how and when scholars privilege affect when thinking about the political capacities of music and sound in the current moment of global neoliberalism. The essay reflects on scholarly works that theorise political agency after 2008 and concentrates on affect as a need or a quest for a theoretical framework that proposes new avenues to act politically. It starts from the assumption that scholarly production that employs affect tells us much less about the very political potential of affect, and much more about a desire for a radical reshaping of our understanding of where and how we search for political potentialities. The second part of the essay presents a critical perspective on this desire and the relationship between affective and ideological politics. Using my ethnographic work on activist singing in the area of former Yugoslavia as an example that offers a perspective from the former state-socialist world, I take a critical look at the potential inscribed in affective politics beyond liberal political thought.