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.