To soothe or remove? Affect, revanchism and the weaponized use of classical music

Over the past 30 years, in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, classical music has come to function as a sonic weapon. It is used a means of dispelling and deterring ‘loiterers’ by making particular public and privately owned public spaces – such as shopping malls, bus stations, shop fronts and car parks – undesirable to occupy. In this article, I present weaponized classical music as a ‘revanchist’, audio-affective deterrent. Drawing upon Neil Smith’s description of the revanchist city, I examine how weaponized classical music works to affectively police neoliberal ‘public’ space. While credited with the capacity to ‘soothe away’ deviant behaviour through its calming influence, weaponized classical music ultimately aims to ‘remove’ the figure of the threatening and menacing ‘loiterer’ insofar as it is heard as repellent. Although affect has often been understood in contradistinction to social determinisms, weaponized classical music exemplifies the capacity of musical affects to function as a technology of social reproduction

The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices

© 2020 The Authors. Reading Research Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Literacy Association The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution-focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co-opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures

Not Belonging to one’s Self: Affect on Facebook’s Site Governance page

This article makes a contribution to a growing number of works that discuss affect and social media. I use Freudian affect theory to analyse user posts on the public Site Governance Facebook page. Freud’s work may help us to explore the affectivity within the user narratives and I suggest that they are expressions of alienation, dispossession and powerlessness that relate to the users’ relations with Facebook as well as to their internal and wider social relations. The article thus introduces a new angle on studies of negative user experiences that draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory

Villain Stardom in Socialist China: Chen Qiang and the Cultural Politics of Affect

Despite playing various kinds of roles across genres from 1949 to 1965, Chen Qiang acquired stardom mainly due to his remarkable screen performance as villainous landlords in socialist China. His villain stardom is an aberrant case, compared to the majority of film stars in Chinese socialist cinema who encouraged identification and emulation and helped propagate socialist ideology to reform Chinese citizens. Paying special attention to socio-historically specific film exhibition practices and the actor's own reflections on his villain performance, this article argues that Chen's stardom functioned as an important affective technology within a wider and complex Communist propaganda enterprise in that it helped cultivate class hatred necessary for the Communist revolution and socialist land reform campaigns. Through this case study, the article suggests that close engagement with both cultural–historical specificities of cinema and recent critical theories of affect open up a space for researching the diversified star phenomena in contemporary China

Adorno?s Grey, Taussig?s Blue: Colour, Organization and Critical Affect

In this article we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory, and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of ?critical affect?. We then trace colour?s affect in conditioning the unfolding of organization in two particular ?colour/spaces? ? Adorno?s grey and Taussig?s blue of our title ? and discuss both its ambiguity and critical potential. Finally, we ponder what colour might do to the style of an organizational scholarship attuned to affect, where sentences blur with things and forces more than they seek to represent them

The Refrain of the A-grammatical Child: Finding Another Language in/for Qualitative Research

The article critically interrogates the figure of the child in Deleuze and its relation to language as an entry point to the question of what a materialist theory of language might involve and how it might be put to work in qualitative methodology. The Deleuzian child is a figure of destratification and resistance to dominant narratives—a resistance that is inextricably bound up with the materiality of the child’s body and its relation to language. Not yet fully striated by the rules of grammar that order and subjugate the world, children challenge “the hegemony of the signifier” by remaining open to multiple semiotic connections. What would it mean for qualitative methodology to engage its own “becoming-child”

Affective Virtuosity : Challenges for Governance Feminism in the Context of the Economic Crisis

This article explores the possibilities and constraints for feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and its influence over policy making and public debate in the context of austerity and neoliberal governance. By analysing the process in which a group of Finnish academic feminists used their expert position to influence government policy in 2015–2017, the article illustrates the strategies they adopted to engage in political debates and how they negotiated the new political landscape. The research material was derived from two years of action research and participant observation and is considered through the theoretical lens of governance feminism. The article makes a distinctive contribution to extant theories of governance feminism, by drawing upon theories of affects and ambivalence as a complement to governance feminism's focus on discourses and co‐optation. We coin the term affective virtuosity to highlight the importance of affect in feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and in shaping the various perspectives available to feminist scholars in encounters with politicians and policymakers.Peer reviewe