Afterword

Abstract

In this Afterword, I use the observations from the special issue 'Music, Affect and Politics' to discuss what I see are recurring questions in the studies of music and affect: (1) the tension between new materialism and historical materialism and its implications for theorizing the interrelations between music, sound, politics, and affect; and (2) the affective politics of music and sound as a field of ideological struggles. In doing that, I push further the reflection on affective politics of music in relation to the capitalist mode of production. Employing a Marxist analysis of affect’s circulation, affordances, and dispositions, I reflect on the ways authors in this issue consider the material realities of capitalist consumer society, class-based habitus, and commodified forms of life. I take a historically-informed, process-oriented approach to affect and put into dialogue the theory production and the sociopolitical condition of global capitalism that shape our epistemological approaches. This perspective, I argue, can led us to critical approach to affective politics of music in the interrelation between the micro- and macro-political and the much-needed critical dialogue between historical materialist and new materialist approaches.