In this phase, the only part of your thinking time we’d like to bid for systematically is that which you spend shaving: we’d like you to pass on to us any ideas that come to you while so engaged. We would send you all working papers and reports of RAND which we think would interest you, expecting you to react (with frown, hint, or suggestion) when you had a reaction. In practice I would hope that members of the Project with problems in your line (i.e., the wide world) could discuss them with you, by mail and in person.
In late 1947, John Williams, recruiting for what was then called Project RAND, sent the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann a letter offering him two hundred dollars a month in exchange for just a little slice of his time: Taking in the many writings and frankly odd intellectual styles of nuclear war planners working at the RAND Corporation, the essay examines the unexpected play between the material facts of intellectual history, the obscure but nonetheless real force of narrative desire, and the unthinkable costs of nuclear war. This penetrating essay by Representations ‘ own Kent Puckett looks at the unlikely historical and aesthetic overlap between narrative theory and strategic defense thinking in the middle part of the twentieth century. Roger Mathew Grant is Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University and the author of Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era (Oxford, 2014), which won the 2016 Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Award. Grant’s work on affect theory’s antecedents in eighteenth-century music theory appears in Representations 144, in the article “ Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects.” Struggling to explain how music could move its listeners without imitation (as a painting might), theorists of that period developed a “materialist theory of vibrational attunement.” Carolyn Abbate describes Peculiar Attunements as a “tour-de-force” that provides “a formidable and extraordinarily clear-headed critique of affect theory, while at the same time identifying and then demystifying its strange affinities with eighteenth-century theories about music’s power.”
In his second book, Roger Mathew Grant offers a new way of thinking through affect historically and dialectically, placing contemporary affect theory in relation to an overlooked historical precursor-European music theory of the eighteenth century. Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical