Powered by Affect
Music flows as process. What is the nature of this process? How does it relate to space? When we think space, we generally consider it as a pre-existent container that we can fill with objects. But, in this Whiteheadian perspective, space is not pre-existent like an empty house that we furnish. Space emerges, qualitatively alive, with experience. To experience music is always to experience spatiality, even though this spatiality is abstract. The rhythm carries us with proprioceptive feelings of movement, the bassline can be spatially perceived below, grounding the feet, and high notes are spatially felt above, reaching toward the sky and beyond. When we attend to the molecular level of the actual entity, we understand that, although its coming to being is a process, there is no physical time involved in its concrescence. It happens all at once, all the time, intensively. The counterpart of this intensive experienced time is the expression of its satisfaction as extension. This relates precisely to what Whitehead means by saying that “the world can be conceived as a medium for the transmission of influences” (Whitehead 1978: 286). The influences are the feelings crystallized into one single complex unity: the satisfaction arising out of the concrescence process. Every single actual entity becomes what it is meant to be through its own process of subjectivity; then it perishes while becoming data for other actual entities in becoming. It goes on and on. The nature of this process is affective. If for “Descartes the primary attribute of physical bodies is extension; for the philosophy of organism the primary relationship of physical occasions is extensive connection” (Whitehead 1978: 288).[6] When Whitehead replaces attribute with relationship, what he does is focus on relation instead of substance: “concrete fact is process” (Whitehead 1967b: 70). Here, relationship is precisely the action of the emergence and transmission of the single complex unity of feeling arising as satisfaction. What is transmitted is feeling; in other words, the transmission is necessarily a transmission of qualitative difference – it spreads as affect. Affect travels as influence and, in its extensive connection, through expansion, spatiality takes form. This is the relation between the affective nature of the sonic object and space. They are two sides of the same action: emergence of novelty.
The spatiality that forms with affect, that affect in-forms, participates in the possible three hundred and thirty-three dimensions of space. Again, in-formation implies form taking place, subjectivity experiencing relevant data. In is related to data-feeding. Formation is relevant to form. There is an impersonal level of ongoing autonomous processes that underlies this in-formation, and this “impersonal” is highly subjective. The emergence of actual novelty is in-formed by the subjective experience of the generative conditions. These conditions are given as data (feelings) available for experience (think subjectivities-without-a-subject). The verb to in-form points to the actual entity’s active role. This differs from the receptive connotation of something or somebody informing another (in a linear sense of communication). It means that the actual entity’s role is one of catalyzing affective difference, emerging as a “surplus-value” (Massumi 2018) of its process of subjective experience. Again, “concrete fact is process” (Whitehead 1967b: 70). This virtual dimension of experience is abstract although real in its effects (Massumi 2002). The logic of affect defies normative sets of knowledge because it is “unformed and unstructured” despite being “highly organized and effectively analyzable (it is not entirely containable in knowledge but is analyzable in effect, as effect)” (Massumi 2002: 260).
Affect challenges our anthropocentric brains to conceive of the idea that there is a different kind of subjectivity – other than human – at play here. As previously mentioned, Whitehead calls the operating subjective vector of the event a subjective aim. Sound materiality moves with the event’s experience as it becomes (according to its subjective aim), thus gliding its experience forth. This spreading (extensive connection) of qualitative yield constitutes a “region” in Whiteheadian terms (1978; 1967a). It is in this sense that the sound event is truly material: an occasion of sonic experience moves powered by affect, and snowballs into other occasions. According to the process philosophy orientation outlined here, material can be defined in the same way Deleuze and Guattari define a body: “We may take the word ‘body’ in its broadest sense (there are mental bodies, souls are bodies, etc.). We must, however, distinguish between the actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only noncorporeal attributes or the ‘expressed’ of a statement” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 80). In other words, anything that has feeling and produces effects is a body. Whenever there is an effect acting, incorporeal materiality emerges. If sound takes place as a dynamic and relational process, subjectivity is at play. Going back to Cox, if the sonic flux is contracted as music, then this subjectivity can be called a society in Whitehead’s terminology. But any society exists within a larger environment. Pink Floyd’s album The Wall, for instance, is iconic because its larger environment, closely related to its popularity, spreads wide. This larger environment, although incorporeal, has a poignant effect. First, it is such a popular album that any song may bring to the foreground not only strong feelings of one’s initial encounter with it but also a general teenage feeling that is constitutive of the album’s message. Second, it may also have the effect of referencing certain cultural or historical aspects of the late seventies, hippie culture, progressive rock, and psychedelic rock music. It is in this sense that (again, in Whitehead’s terms) “the processes of the past, in their perishing, are themselves energizing as the complex origin of each novel occasion” (Whitehead 1967a: 276). The spatiality that affect in-forms does not coincide with location; it is an emergent quality in movement. This is not new materialism but speculative pragmatism.