Musical Introspection and the Affective Group-en-Fusion: Existential Reckoning with the Political and Climate Crises

Abstract

Music is a vital means of engaging with affect, one that many of us are relying upon to process the unthinkable political realities that confront us. However, insofar as we are doing this serially—for instance, listening alone to pre-recorded music on demand—we are missing out on a critical potential of such affective musical engagement. Jean-Paul Sartre identified seriality as a social formation marked by alterity, one that prevents mutual awareness of similar situatedness. However, whereas Sartre argued that broadcast radio possesses a serial structure, this article argues that it can engender an incipient form of collective, which Sartre calls the group-en-fusion. This argument is made through the example of The Stillness and the Dancing, Joel Cuthbert’s campus and community radio program that plays ambient, experimental, and contemporary classical music on CFRU Radio Gryphon in Guelph, Ontario.