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

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

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

The Importance of Vibrant Materialities in Transforming Affective Dissonance into Affective Solidarity : How the Countess Ablaze Organized the Tits Out Collective

Affective solidarity is important in resisting forms of gender, race and sexual inequalities. Previous research has highlighted the role of affective dissonance in building affective solidarity, yet most of the literature has been anthropocentric in its discussion of affect. This paper contributes by showing the importance of vibrant forms of matter in inspiring and building affective solidarity. Using affective ethnographic method, the article explores how an independent yarn dyer, the Countess Ablaze organized affective dissonance at gender discrimination into an affective solidarity movement called the Tits Out Collective. In doing so, she energised resistance and built a powerful affective atmosphere in the global yarn community. The paper shows how the vibrancy of the materialities accelerated the building of the powerful affective atmosphere. The engagement with different materialities enabled a global community of women to participate in shared resistance while honouring their own subjectivities, something previous work has identified as problematic. The paper also contributes by opening a discussion of the costs of organizing affective solidarity, detailing the intensities of leading such movements, that can be exposing and increase vulnerabilities. Therefore, it may be inevitable that affective solidarity is precarious and ephemeral

Rhythm Returns: Movement and Cultural Theory

This introduction charts several of rhythm's various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside consciousness