The Editors of Oppositional Conversations offer their thoughts on an elusive concept.

by Glenn Holtzman

There is scholarship on this subject, but it is deeply unsatisfying. It confines its definition of “musical orgasm” to “skin orgasms” meaning the “goosebump” or “shiver down the spine” effect. Instead I believe we should explore the potential of the idea of musical orgasm through the musical idea of "appassionata." “Appassionata” is a musical term that refers to passion and/or to a performance with deep feeling that mirrors and sometimes constitutes transcendental rapture. Doesn’t transcendental rapture mirror the sexual climax? Do passionate moments in music imitate and extend this relation?

by Zine Magubane

If joy is so elusive, how do we know that it is there?

by Thomas Ross

In this current epoch of the globalized colonialism of internationally mobile capital, the transactions of the marketplace usurp cultural continuity and persistence by creative destruction, producing an endless succession of ultimately ephemeral commodities serving ultimately as substrates for prices, and an abstracted, increasingly dehumanized culture in which everything is valued and identified above all by its price.

The subtle human interconnections inherent in social knowing are reduced to ownership and networked transmission of information, and truth itself is reduced to a game-theoretic margin.

by Ashley N. Patterson

The reason I do the job I do as an academician—and why I choose it, continually choose and re-choose it—is that I continually find myself giving to the complicated collection of feels my profession evokes in me the name “joy.” Joy. I have come to realize that I now experience joy as a necessity which allows me to practice my profession as a way of life.

by Cally Waite

I was surprised to find joy during a period marked by social isolation and personal fear that ranged from the micro to the meta—from existential crises to the blues to inaction to basic boredom. The challenges of living life during the height of the pandemic, before a vaccine was even a possibility, were tough. Was it wrong, in the context of people dying in huge numbers and the overt cruelty and fecklessness of government leaders, to feel joy?