Power over, power to: affect, music and contestations of social space

In this paper I discuss the intersection and entanglement of music, affect, power and social space. Drawing upon contemporary appropriations of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy of affects, I demonstrate how music can be used as a means of increasing the collectivised body’s ‘power to’, as is the case when chart pop music is used to produce and mobilise protesting bodies. Music can also be used as a means of exerting ‘power over’, as is the case when classical music is deployed as an audio-affective deterrent within privately owned public spaces. Such practices help to reveal the ethico-political ambiguity and contextual specificity of both music and affect. I suggest that the Spinozist notion of affective powers, moreover, facilitates an alternative means of asking how music functions politically: one that begins neither with music’s lyrical content nor its embededness within political economies but with what music does relative to particular bodies, relations and environments.