Season 4: Ep. 8-10 Together Somehow: Belonging, Intimacy, and Cohesion
In this three part series, we explore Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s book, Together Somehow. This conversation is about dancefloors, nightlife, dance culture, electronic dance music, house music, and queer theory and affect theory. AND this conversation is about how belonging, social cohesion, utopianism, migration, and intimacy can be studied through the metaphors produced by ethnomusicology.
In part one, we look at managements of diversity and politics of belonging, In part two we look at metaphors as pathways to understanding and new understandings of intimacy. And finally in part three, we look at utopianism, an unfolding of the self, and a thickening of the we into forms of belonging.
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta is Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a particular focus on affect, intimacy, stranger-sociability, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries and musical migration. His book, Together Somehow: Music Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor is published by Duke University Press
Transcript Quick Jump:
Discussion Questions
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Part 1 (questions taken directly from the narrations)
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What is this dialogue between place and translocal space?
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How does a place and space construct the boundaries of belonging?
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When do we form optimistic attachments to a sense that this is the space that will accept us? When does this optimism become cruel by structures of restriction?
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How are our senses of belonging found within embeddedness and intimacy?
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When and how do we feel the stability of our belonging to a space and place?
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In the “stages” where I perform my life, how do we stage manage inclusion, and the forms of inconvenient difference that are cleared from the frames of structured diversity?
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Mechanisms of door apparatus serve as useful analytic metaphors to study thresholds of belonging. How do door apparati operate at thresholds of nation-state borders, college entrance requirements, classroom spaces, and communities. What are the unwritten rules that guide performances of successful entry?
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How do unwritten rules build spaces for affiliation, safety, and belonging for those who enter? AND How do unwritten rules morph diversity into illusionary performances and bias-informed judgments?
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The seeds of violence are grown in contexts of fragmentation, isolation, and unjust difference. When does a metaphorical door close to fragment communities or perpetuate unjust difference? When does it close to offer safety and belonging? When does a door open in gestures of belonging and hospitality?
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How do our own cultures vary structures of tightness and looseness for diversity, safety, and freedom?
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When might we seek to ‘create an impasse,’ challenging the norms that structure the tight and loose?
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PART 2 QUESTIONS
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Describe how complex feelings like envy, anxiety, paranoia, and irritation extend beyond the moment and seem to have ambiguous origins.
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Berlant writes that “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.”Describe Berlant’s construction of cruel optimism.
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How do we project our hopes and desires onto objects that stand in for the real thing? (Like money for happiness)
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Describe the notion of ambivalent bargains.
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As we improvise simpler versions of ourselves in vague contexts, how might this till soil for relational reciprocity?
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How do the arts, like a dance floor, lubricate space for this dance among strangers who may soon feel like a relation?
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When does perpetual vagueness become problematic, “making relations feel fragile, conditional, and temporary.”
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Describe and define an intimate public.
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Pennebaker names that many organizations use the language of “we” to build the conformity needed for violence. When does “we” prepare us for violence and when does “we” imagine interdependence and connection?
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How do we feel our way into bonds of relation? How is belonging a felt experience?
How does music lubricate spaces for the feeling of belonging?
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How do Gillian Howell and others imagine small steps of peace through the rewriting of “normal” in musical rehearsals?
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Describe normative definitions of intimacy.
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How do dancefloor experiences of intimacy challenge normative understandings of intimacy as a stable, transparent, and enduring relationship?
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How do we explain moments on a dance floor, in a singular glance, or in an experience with strangers that feels intimate?
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PART 3 QUESTIONS
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Using Dyer’s language, define the nature of entertainment and utopian experiences?
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How can utopian visions be helpful, proactive, and harmful?
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How do we build good utopias?
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How do we build artistic spaces that animate imaginations, offer reprieves for the weary, and propel us to better forms of living?
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The episode notes that artistic experience offers a kind of vision living, where imagination is transformed into concrete experience. Reflect on how the arts have awakened vision-living within your own life.
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Describe the unfolding and the unraveling of the self within artistic experience.
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Describe how transitions of roughness to smoothness operate within aesthetics and the stories we tell about the experiences that bind us together.
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When are roughness, conflict and tension productive? How do we build the stories that set the framework for cohesion and transformation? How do stories transform the self and the us?
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Describe Garcia-Mispireta’s notion of the “thickening of the we.” How is this understanding similar to and different from constructs of synchrony and entrainment?
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I love the metaphor of a thickening of the we, that is heated and stirred by the culinary talents of artistic experience. What are the elements of movement and heat that offer a thickening of a continuously reforming we?
Timecodes
Part 1:
1:45 Dancefloors as a Whole World
4:50 Backgrounds
6:06 Translocal Subculture
8:58 Place, Space, and Belonging
10:29 Migration, Tourism, and Alienation
12:33 Door Apparatus
17:18 Inconvenient Difference
18:47 Filtering Difference, Performing Diversity
21:36 Doors as Metaphors
23:53 Performing to Belong
27:19 Tight and Loose Cultures
29:09 Dancefloors Tight and Loose
30:14 Freedom, Cohesion, and Curations of Belonging
Part 2:
0:34 Introduction
1:30 Methodology of Juxtaposition
4:10 Complex Feelings
6:14 Magical Realism and Juxtapositions
8:56 EDM Track 1
9:29 Cruel Optimism
11:03 Vague Belonging
16:55 Vagueness
18:12 Intimate Public
21:17 EDM Track 2
21:40 Projections of We
23:13 Projections of Motherhood
23:51 Normative Beliefs and Pronouns
25:44 Feeling Belonging
29:11 Rock Bands in Conflict
30:53 Intimacy
36:58 Challenging Normative Intimacy
37:56 Challenging Intimacy
40:02 Final Reflections
Part 3:
1:50 Utopias
6:41 Ugly and Complex Feelings
8:35 Utopian Visions
10:58 Utopias as Embodied
13:05 Artistic Vision-Living
13:53 Coming Undone
16:05 Bjork
17:02 Roughness in Story Structure
19:04 Stories and Cohesion
20:41 Thickening in France
21:08 Thickening of the We
24:50 Thickening Reflections
25:53 Paradoxes of Liquidity
27:24 Final Series Reflections
29:19 Credits
Resources
Averill, G. (1997). A day for the hunter; A day for the prey: Popular music and power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. (2008). The female complaint. Duke University Press.
Dyer, R. (2002). Entertainment and utopia. In Only entertainment (pp. 19-35). Taylor & Francis.
Garcia-Mispireta, L. M. (2016). Techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in Berlin’s electronic dance music scenes. Tourist Studies, 16(3), 276-295. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037
Garcia-Mispireta, L. M. (2023). Together, somehow: Music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. Duke University Press.
Gelfand, M. (2018). Rule makers, rule breakers: Tight and loose cultures and the secret signals that direct our lives. Scribner.
Howell, G., Bartleet, B. L., & Davidson, J. (2024). Building social connection and inclusion through rock music in the Western Balkans: Fostering the art of small changes. Research Studies in Music Education, 0(0), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1321103X241242731
Ngai, S. (2005). Introduction. In Ugly feelings (pp. 1-37). Harvard University Press.
Pennebaker, J. W. (2013). Using computer analyses to identify language style and aggressive intent: The secret life of function words. In Allison G. Smith (Ed.), *The relationship between rhetoric and terrorist violence* (pp. 8-18). Routledge.
Together Somehow with Garcia-Mispireta
Lauren Berlant on Cruel Optimism
Sound of Berlin Documentary
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
belonging, space, door, dance floor, clubs, apparatus, culture, berlin, diversity, book, scene, communities, peacebuilding, garcia, metaphors, structures, german, subculture, tightness, city
SPEAKERS
Kevin Shorner-Johnson, Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 00:00
You are listening to season four of the music and peacebuilding podcast. A podcast season focused on multifaceted textures of belonging. Our podcast explores intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta is associate professor in ethnomusicology and popular music studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a particular focus on effect, intimacy, Stranger sociability, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries, and musical migration. His book, together somehow, music effect and intimacy on the dance floor, is published by Duke University Press. In this three part series, we explore Garcia-Mispireta's book together somehow. This is about worlds of nightlife and the belonging found within dance floor communities. This podcast is also not about dance floors, using dance floors has analytical metaphors that allow us to examine peacebuilding belonging, conflicted harm, and music in every corner of modern life. In part one, we look at managements of diversity and politics of belonging. In part two, we look at metaphors as pathways to understanding and new understandings of intimacy. And finally, in part three, we look at utopianism an unfolding of the self, and a thickening of the we into forms of belonging.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 01:45
I want to open the interview, to ask you to paint a picture for my audience about what a dance floor is. And as I noted in your book that you wrote, you know, that it's its audience, venue community, and you write that it's not just a space, but it's a whole world. So what is a whole world as a dance floor? And why is it worthy of study,
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 02:09
one of the first sets of feedback that I got when this book manuscript was going through the whole review process, and so on, for one reviewer, who shall remain nameless, was, you know, dance floors in the title, you keep on talking about dance floors, except you include stories from like, waiting in the queue for the toilets, stories from queuing outside, right? Like, that's not a dance floor. And, you know, after I sort of got over my initial kind of emotional response to that feedback, I then realized, yes, they have a point, I have to explain that. So yeah, you know, a dance floor, in this community, especially, you know, in the world of electronic music, people will talk about the floor, the room, the crowd, these are all terms that are often used interchangeably, right? To mean, the space where dance is happening, but that includes also the spaces around it. That includes, you know, all of the bar service area that includes the the intersocial spaces that you move through the dance floor itself, the thing where people go and actually dance, which is important, and I think it remains, it remains symbolically important if that's the right word for this scene, right? Like, that's, I think, why people will use the word dance floor to refer to not just that specific space, but a whole club, the crowd that's on it, and also sometimes the the social space itself, right? So yes, you've got the fact the physical space itself, and that's Central. But then beyond that, because it is so important for this, this subculture, it carries with it associations with the whole world that's attached to it, right. So it comes to stand in for kind of metaphorically, or metonymically, it comes to stand in for the crowds that gather on it, it comes to stand in for the kind of experiences you can have on it, that kind of vibe and moods that attached to it. It's a place of work for some people as well. It's a place of escape, but it's also a place of labor. It's a place of production. And for many, many, many people, especially a lot of the folks that were really central to my research, including myself, you know, as a queer person of color, these are also refuges, you know, and there are these these spaces of kind of ambivalent refuge where you go to escape sometimes, you know, the strictures and the pressures of the real world you go there to maybe be a different kind of person or to try on a different way of being and looking. And those are also spaces where you experience oppression anyways, right? Those are also still spaces where sometimes racism, you know, racism will happen to you sometimes queer phobia, transphobia will happen to you. You know, again, that's why I think the dance floor as a as a kind of a concept for me, kind of an anchoring concept was so important because for me, at least coming out of this, this subculture, it carries all of that ambivalence and all of that complexity, so it's a really layered space for me.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 04:49
Garcia-Mispireta's experiences with the layered spaces of the dance floor were born out of a background in Toronto and Detroit with extensions to Indiana and Chicago. As he worked in the UK and the Netherlands, Garcia-Mispireta entered a trans national frame as a researcher spending time in England, Paris and Berlin. Garcia-Mispireta notes that in the 1990s Rave scenes were regional, and were organized by listservs in Western New York, Ontario, Midwest, and the 313 listserv in Detroit. Individuals also entered through different genres from disco, early house, and more recently through EDM, these listservs tethered cultures together, offering a connective subculture that crossed the boundaries of the local, forming a trans local set of practices, knowledge and connection. I asked Garcia-Mispireta about how he encountered felt and experienced the trends, local and local nature of clubs scenes in Chicago, Paris and Berlin.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 06:06
Every city yes has its own scene with its own kind of vibe, its own set of clubs, and also even like its own set of kind of preferred sub genres of music and styles and so on. Sure. But there is a way in which once you've really become in like enculturated once you really had a chance to kind of soak in the subculture of one specific city, it does give you a set of kind of sub cultural knowledge and skills and expertise and competencies, that allows you to then go to other cities and make your way into those scenes, it doesn't mean that you can just like waltz, right in right and be welcomed, like a local No, right, you know, but nonetheless, it does teach you certain sets of skills. Like for me, for example, when I first arrived to Paris, to do fieldwork, and I had no prior connection to the city's techno scene before that, unlike with Chicago, where I had been living and studying for several years before I started doing focused work. In Paris, I arrived there, and I did speak French. So like, I did speak pretty good French, that was not a barrier, per se. But nonetheless, I needed to know how to get into this into the scene, and this would have been in 2006-07, this is before really, you could rely on social media to find these sorts of spaces. So what do you do? You know, I knew that I had to go, I had to find out, where are the vinyl shops, I have to go to those vinyl shops, I have to look for the flyers that are sitting by the entrance, I should probably be talking to the folks who work at the vinyl shop, you know, be a customer, but also talk them up a little bit, ask them, Where are the clubs? Where are the parties? And that sort of thing? Yes, the Internet was also a resource even before social media, you'd be going to mailing lists, forums, these sorts of things, right? These are all competencies and skills, right? These are ways to learn how to integrate yourself into the scene. But also there are other kinds of things, there are certain kinds of norms. So you know, when there's a whole chapter in the book on touch and touch norms, right, and the way that we relate to each other, tact-, you know, through tactility is, of course, really, really culturally specific, right? And I comment on that in the book, right? That like the way that people touch or don't touch each other. In France versus Germany versus Chicago versus how I grew up as a Latino in North America, like these are all different than some of the people I was talking to experience that and really marked ways themselves, right, these sort of contrasts, but in every place that I did research, when I would talk to people about tactility, they would always comment on how the touch norms whatever they were, were always loosened in clubs spaces. This way in which as you move from city to city, you'll still see similarities in the way that the subculture kind of works and how it compares to its surrounding daytime culture if you if you think of it this way, you know, the wider wider society that it's based in. There's there's a set of kind of practices, norms, relationships to everyday normal life or contrasts from you know, that're from... that are kind of transposable you can take some of that knowledge with you, you can use that to integrate yourself into other scenes. And as you do you move between the scenes also then you become the interesting person who for this other scene.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 08:58
Modern life and predictions of significant forthcoming increases in human migration offer challenges of identity and belonging. And this notion of translocal helps us look at how sub cultural communities from Kpop to diasporic communities are held across space and time. What is this dialogue between place and translocal space? How does a place and space construct the boundaries of belonging? When do we form optimistic attachments, to a sense that this is the place that will accept us? When does this optimism become cruel by structures of restriction? Garcia-Mispireta's article on techno tourism offers a fascinating examination of how some respondents identified as tourists or outsiders who are connected to a place by visiting interest. And then some respondents denied the identity of a tourist, stating that in their knowledge and connections to Berlin, they had become, quote, a part of the furniture, or felt as if they belonged at a deeper and more authentic level. How are our senses of belonging found within embeddedness and intimacy? When and how do we feel the stability of our belonging to a space and place?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 10:29
You know, I've got another piece that I wrote not as part of this book, but as a kind of a spin off article of postdoc research where I was looking at techno tourism in Berlin specifically, right, and also the leader of techno migration, people who are relocating like just pulling up sticks and moving their entire lives to Berlin, to be closer to the techno scene there. And a lot of them will talk about the kind of deep cultural alienation of living in Berlin, like, they'll talk about how much they loved the city, specifically, and loved and felt really deep kind of emotional, affective resonances, with the built environment of the city, the way people sort of carry themselves in everyday life. Like there'll be all these ways in which they would identify and maybe even over identify with the city. But then at the same time, they would talk about how they would try to go to like the Burgeramt, one of these sort of civil offices, to like, get registered with their new address or try to open a bank account or whatever, and then find it profoundly alienating mostly around language barriers, but also around the way that German society itself is very unwelcoming to migrants, right, you know, whether they are like relatively privileged, white, European presenting, or whether they are, you know, darker skinned and coming from the Global South, obviously, those factors really do impact also how you are welcomed in that space or not, but even when you look a lot like a white, German, and so on. Nonetheless, there are all these ways that it can be really deeply alienating to try to integrate into that city. But yet, you can go to the techno scene, to the local, you know, you know, techno clubs in Berlin, where a lot is done in German, but you can also survive an English, you'll probably find other expats and migrants there who maybe are from where you're from, you know, there are all these ways in which folks are able to experience a kind of belonging to the city and to the city's civic life, through the music scene and through specifically electronic music scene. And sometimes that actually stands in for belonging to the city in the more kind of legal and also national slash ethnic way. When that's not easily accessible as a form of civic belonging, sometimes the way that people can stamp or feel that sense of connection to the city is actually, through the nightlife.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 12:33
Fascinating, And so to build off that that's a great transition to the whole idea of door apparatus, and the politics of belonging. And I think my favorite, my favorite story in your book, was the, it was the cringe worthy story. And I think we've maybe have all had the experience somewhat like this, where you're in Berlin, and you're standing in the line, and you're about to get in, and then these people who are less cool behind you, or less integrated right behind you are trying to.. are too loud. They're they're not fitting the cultural norms, and you're trying to make this decision about do I help this group and possibly take myself down? Or do I, you know, I loved that story. So could could you open up that story about like, what does the door mean and dance floors? And how does this connect to dance.. to the politics of belonging?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 13:20
Yeah, that that is that is like a favorite anecdote of mine as well. And it's one that even when I was preparing this as a, as a PhD project, before this became a book, this is something that, you know, my supervisors would, you know, commented on, as well as, like, this is a great story. And I should be clear, like full transparency, for those who haven't yet read the book, you know, of course, in parentheses go buy the book, but in that story, pretty much from the outset, you know, as soon as I assessed them as like, oh, wow, this group of five British lads, you know, who are clearly a little drunk are not getting in. I, from the beginning, was doing my very best to pretend that I didn't even speak English, right? I was, I was not initially, I wasn't asking the question of like, should I help them? Should I not? I was like, Oh, no. How do I pretend to not even under.. like, not even be able to engage with them, right? Until they were just so relentlessly affable and social that I kind of, you know, it just triggered some of my sort of, I don't know, like, polite Canadianess or whatever. And then I had to, I had to engage, right? You know, and you'll have to read folks will have to read the book to get the end of that story. But yeah, you know, so that is kind of an encapsulating or crystallizing story for this whole door apparatus, right. And that the term that I use, like I developed this term, the door apparatus, just as another way to talk about all the folks at the door who manage your entry, because it's sometimes in some clubs, there's just one person at the door and it's both that person is playing the role of like, bouncer guestlist management, you know, and maybe even taking, taking payment at the door, but much, much more often, especially at the bigger clubs in, you know, cities like Berlin and Paris, and to some degree Chicago. Chicago is a different city, at least at the time of my research for these things, but you'll have yes The muscle at the door you'll have a person, the person who has been designated with kind of the the right to use force, physical force on behalf of the business, right? That's the bouncer. But you might have a person who's sort of like the box office person who's actually taking payment for entry, that might be the same person as the guestlist person, but those could be separate. And in many scenes, especially in Berlin, you also have the the door kind of host or selector. There's some other terms for it from the queer underground scene that I'm not going to repeat, repeat here. But you know, there's there's another role as well of the person who's sort of the face of the party, they might be somebody who's connected to who's organizing the party as well. Sometimes the host will be somebody who represents the community that they're trying to welcome in. So for example, for a lot of queer parties, they might have a well known local drag performer, for example, being the host, and so on. And often, it's the host, who is also doing selection in cities where door selection is kind of possible, right? Like, in some cities, municipal laws are such that essentially, you, you kind of can't just tell somebody, no, you're not getting in, you need to give them a particular reason, it often has to be boiled down to a dress code. And that's how we get especially in North America, for example, a lot of these essentially low key racist dress codes, right? You know, where there are these all these seemingly arbitrary yeses and nos as far as what can be worn inside, it really just has to it just maps to race and class and so on. And it gets selectively enforced, right? In Berlin, in particular, Berlin, especially as a city is one where there's like, no required transparency around the decision making at the door. And so, you know, like a bouncer doesn't need to tell you why you're not allowed in, right? They sometimes will. But the the relationship there is very different between like the person trying to get in and the bouncer, you know, and again, it might sometimes be the bouncer who's making the decision, it might sometimes be the desk, the host, right? But I guess across all of that, for me, that's that's all the the door apparatus, right? That's this whole sort of setup that you know, it's an apparatus in the sense that it is, you know, I'm sort of here quoting from like kind of French theory especially like Dispositif you know, ala Foucault, right, this idea of a whole kind of set of like actors and technologies and so on, that are all webbed together to serve a function
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 17:14
Garcia-Mispireta writes of the clearing of inconvenient difference. dance floors appeared to manage diversity within larger frames of a leading culture, or leitsubkultur. Garcia-Mispireta writes, this embedded diversity sustains a space of safe and mostly harmonious cosmopolitanism, by first passing everyone through a process of selection that filters out differently different people. That is, those whose difference poses a threat to a club's, leitsubkultur, the door apparatus in which this diversity is embedded, rejects certain unintegrated or unassimilable bodies, primarily on the basis of a visual and interactive assessment, close quote, of who belongs and who does not. As the structures of a club, clear dance floors of inconvenient difference. They stage social space performances of radical inclusivity. I wonder, in the stages where I perform my life, how do we stage manage inclusion, and the forms of inconvenient difference that are cleared from the frames of structured diversity?
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 17:14
I thought it was really fascinating to think about this idea of filtering inconvenient difference. If I sense it right, in your book, you're trying to look at the dance floor specifically. But then you also look at much larger structures. Right, right. Right, right immigration policies in the countries and stuff like that, and the ways in which we perform diversity in these inside spaces thinking that we have diversity when we have already actually filtered inconvenient difference on the outside, right.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 19:14
Yeah, absolutely. And that's where I get to. So that's in the, you know, the last major chapter right before the epilogue. So in many ways, this is sort of a closing thought for the whole book, you know, I'm looking at the door apparatus. That's where I'm thinking about the whole process of door selection, door policies, you know, inclusion and exclusion, essentially, right, and how they happen at the door. But yeah, I'm also zooming out to the way in which there's like National discourses of cultural integration, immigration policy, and so on, and how some of the ways that people talk about that then get reproduced, reproduced at the door, and that all gets me to this idea of embedded diversity, right? Like there's sort of two big ideas that come out of that chapter. Or at least that's how I remember it. You know, one is this idea of embedded diversity and the other one is this kind of a riff on a German term. So leitsubkultur, right? And so this comes from leitkultur which is this concept that was advanced, you know, it's like an ideological concept, right? It's a concept that was developed predominantly in conservative circles in German political discourse. It translates more or less directly, or literally, it translates into English as leading culture. And the idea here was that for immigration policy at the time, it was supposed to be this way of requiring immigrants to demonstrate cultural competency in German culture, right. But then the question is, what is German culture? Right? You know, in other, especially in European countries, especially countries that have been, or continue to be centers of empire, and colonization and so on, you know, the question of what counts like, what is the content of French culture, German culture, British culture, et cetera? Is this really fraught question especially when you're supposed to be welcoming migrants, especially from your former colonies, right? So in Germany, the way that they sort of square that circle was to say, all right, yes, there are multiple cultures that come with these migrants. Yes, yes. Yes, I guess we have to put up with them. Right. But how will we welcome or like, how will we get them to integrate without just sort of forcefully assimilating them into into sort of dominant German culture? And so the the framework that they eventually landed on, at least on the on the political right was this idea of a leading culture that yes, there can be many cultures in Germany, but there is one leading culture and other minority groups need to nonetheless sort of swear fealty to or demonstrate a competency and a fluency in this leading culture, if they want to have access to the welfare state, to citizenship, to residency.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 21:36
A door apparatus includes all the people, structures, and technologies that make up decisions about who gets in and who does not. As nightclub participants stand in line for entrance, they engage in performances of a hope for acceptance, he writes. In Paris or London, for example, men could increase their likelihood of accessing most nightclubs by dressing in mid range, pret a porter fashion, collared shirt, designer jeans, chinos, no sneakers, and appearing in the company of at least one woman. The door apparatus seeks to create inside communities of managed diversity, safety, and the right vibe of party. Members perform and costume their imagings of assimilation and differentiation. Mechanisms of door apparatus serve as useful analytic metaphors to study thresholds of belonging. How do door apparati operate at thresholds of nation state borders, college entrance requirements, classroom spaces and communities? What are the unwritten rules that guide performances for successful entry? How do these unwritten rules build spaces for affiliation, safety and belonging for those who enter? And how do these unwritten rules morph diversity into illusionary performances and bias informed judgments? The seeds of violence are grown in contexts of fragmentation, isolation and unjust difference. When does a metaphorical door close to fragment communities or perpetuate unjust difference? When does it close to offer safety and belonging? When does a door open in gestures of belonging and hospitality? Returning to the conversation, Garcia-Mispireta speaks to the management of inconvenient difference
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 23:53
how you sort of convince the door person that you should get in right and by should I mean that you will go in and contribute to the the ambiance, you'll contribute to the vibe, you won't cause trouble, you'll get along with everybody else. Right? You won't be inconvenient, right? Like, how will you not be inconvenient? How will they know? They know or they think they know by making a bunch of assessments visually, but also based on how you present yourself how you talk, how you respond to the way that they talk to you all sorts of you know, there's all these sort of signals and there's, there's a lot of deep reading that happens in that moment at the door. It's very kind of high stakes in a way. And a lot of that, you know, my analysis of it is that a lot of that has to do with how well you perform your familiarity and your kind of fluency with whatever they as an institution represent at that particular club. And so then we get to embedded diversity is this idea that yes, the comparison to the metaphor that I make here is similar to like a vintage shop, right that like there's that inside of a lot of these clubs spaces, especially ones that you know, in Berlin that would often kind of pride themselves on this kind of mixity right and that like we're, you know, we're anti glam. We're not like an elite upscale Club. We're like a gritty and mixed in everybody can come. And of course, all of this rhymes or this resonates with a much older longer kind of ethos in nightlife and club culture of open inclusiveness, and especially the inclusiveness of those who've been marginalized elsewhere, right, like that goes right back to disco if not earlier. And a lot of this also picks up or has echoes of the kind of 60s 70s counterculture, you know, hippie era, these sorts of things like those also, you know, there's a lineage there, right. So, it is sub culturally important to these scenes to be seen as and to the they themselves believe that they are doing, that they are creating inclusive spaces, they are creating spaces where, you know, everybody in principle can come right, even if at the same time practically some filtration needs to needs to happen in order to keep the space safe in order to keep the space welcoming, especially for certain folks in certain identities in order to maybe hold space that would otherwise get automatically filled by folks of a dominant majority, right? All of these, you know, like, that's sort of the ambivalence that needs to be held, kind of, you know, held together. And yet, you know, on the one hand, when you go into some of these spaces, at least, this is my experience you would go with, and you'd see kind of anecdotally or visibly, yeah, there's, you know, it isn't purely whitespace there are some folks of color here, not a lot, but there's some, you know, certainly there are some queer folks in this non queer club party or, you know, yes, there's, you know, there's there will always be a bit of representation. But for me, my read on that is that this ends up being a kind of a carefully curated performance of diversity, especially a kind of harmonious, diverse dance floor. Right. And that's, that's, you know, they're delivering what a lot of folks want in that, from their experience, even the people who might be critical of the door apparatus, and might themselves experience oppression at the door. Yes, part of the the pleasure of getting into these spaces is that once you're in Yes, it mostly goes really well you mostly get along with this crowd. You know, that for some folks, this might be the only or one of very few spaces where they get to kind of just freely float about in a social space and not, you know, encounter, you know, conflict, right. But the way that you get there, or at least the way that these institutions get there is by doing a whole bunch of filtering at the door and even before people get to the door right through all sorts of forms of kind of passive and active filtration.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 27:19
I layer here a reflection on intersections between Garcia-Mispireta's, it does work and the work of renowned cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. Her book, Rule Makers Rule Breakers explores how cultures lean toward tight and loose orientations. Tight cultures are often rule bound, offer strong social norms and moral codes, and often operate to restrict or keep out threat. Loose cultures are often accepting of diversity, have looser social norms and moral codes and map to locations with greater creativity and innovation. Drawing upon anthropological historical and geographic data Gelfand notes that tight and loose cultural structures map to environmental conditions, population density and historical dangers. Cultural tightness is often a response to threat. As I sat with this conversation, I became fascinated by how dance culture creates systems of external tightness and internal looseness. The looseness offers affective experiences of expressive freedom and unfolding whilst the tightness of the door protects that fantasy from unwanted intrusions. How do our own cultures vary structures of tightness and looseness for diversity, safety, and freedom? When might we seek to create an impasse, challenging the norm is that structure the tight and loose?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 29:10
for clubs that are businesses that need to make money and need to attract a stable crowd stable audience, they will embed these these spaces of you know kind of free hedonism and so on in these technologies of pretty strict discipline, right? Like you know, the the door apparatus is one of them, right? These like that, yeah, there's this way in which you get you get the hard exclusion and the hard filtering at the door or just before the door, you often will have to go through a pretty, like strict or pretty, pretty forceful display of kind of control and discipline and surveillance as you go through the door. You know, your body gets checked, depending on what club you're going into. They can be really invasive. The door people particularly the bouncers might be instructed to be quite gruff and like curt with you and a little bit menacing. You know, others in other clubs will have a very different approach. But nonetheless, yeah, you go through a lot of this kind of implied or threatened violence, control surveillance whatever at the door in order to then have this space where you can really run amok inside, right or at least run free and feel like there's like, less at stake.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 30:15
Our sense of belonging may be structured by the apparatus by which we gain entry, and how we navigate cultural structures of tightness and looseness. The experiences of freedom so profoundly felt on the dance floor are in some way built by the bounded structures of a dance floor, and the apparatus of entry. This opening conversation provides an important metaphor and reflection that leads us to examine tightness, looseness, and the curation of belonging, and also how cultures orient themselves to histories of threat. It may be the role of the peacebuilder to ask how and why assisting communities in examining the door apparati that produce political structures of belonging and exclusion.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 31:10
In the next part two of this series, we will examine provocative metaphors, intimacy, and the notion of an intimate public. This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson. At Elizabethtown college we host a Master of Music Education, with an emphasis on peacebuilding. thinking deeply, we reclaim space for connection and care. Join us at music peacebuilding.com
Transcript Part 2
Mispireta_Part2 - 8424 5.48 AM
Sun, Aug 04, 2024 6:02AM • 42:17
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
intimacy, belonging, dance floor, normative, music, experience, vagueness, intimate, identity, space, book, form, queer, feeling, lubricated, people, explores, magical realism, idea, garcia
SPEAKERS
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, Hoda Jenna and Today Show, Kevin Shorner-Johnson
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 00:00
That loosen people up that that kind of that loosening up in a sense, makes it possible then for people to experience a kind of an intimacy based mostly on physical proximity on just sharing.. being bodies in a room, but also going through a particularly intense experience together.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 00:15
You are listening to season four of the music and peacebuilding podcast, a podcast season focused on multifaceted textures of belonging. Our podcast explores intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. Luis Manuel Garcia Mispereta is associate professor in ethno musicology and popular music studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a focus on effect, intimacy, Stranger socio ability, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries and musical migration. His book together somehow, music affect and intimacy on the dance floor, is published by Duke University Press. In this three part series, we explore Garcia Mispereta's book together somehow, in the first episode, we looked at the politics of diversity. continuing this dialogue, we examined juxtapositions of metaphors as forms of sensemaking conflicted feelings, the experience of intimacy, and the notion of an intimate public.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 01:31
So, yeah, as I was building the next few questions, I just want to name to that I really struggled about how to build questions that would allow paradox to exist, I think, I think that's one of the beautiful parts of your writing is that you're trying to present each one, but trying to give space to allow paradox to live. But when we talk about ethnography as magical realism, you say, together somehow palpitates the contour of the real world searching for cracks, it can pry open to release the strange and wondrous. And then you talk about how it also uses disjunctive alignment, to juxtapose different items side by side looking for similarities that unlock new unforeseen ways of understanding them. How did you come about this idea of searching for cracks that open the strange and wondrous, as a form of ethnography?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 02:25
You know, that's, that is a great question. For you know, in a lot of ways, there's there's a few ways that I got to that. One was some reading that I had been doing, just as part of a class I was teaching for, for students. It's a music festivals class that I teach. And one of the when one week I get them to read some, like very early performance studies, literature, in particular I get them to read Schechner, they're Schechner's performance studies. And I get them to read a section one of the chapters where he's kind of just theorizing, he's doing that sort of, hey, I'm developing a new discipline or a new area of study, let's just like throw in a bunch of ideas and see what sticks right. And somewhere in there, he, he starts, he's moving from talking about performance spaces and urban environments, and so on, he suddenly starts talking about creases, creases in the urban environment and like, folds and creases and talking... his point is that like, you know, up until then, he'd been talking about the structure of theater spaces, performance theaters, particularly comparing like Athenian, you know, and broadly kind of classical Greek approaches to theater, open in the round, etcetera, etcetera, where you can see the whole city as you see these performances, versus the early modern, proscenium stage, camera obscura kind of theater where you're in a dark little box, right? And you're supposed to forget the rest of the world and just see what's on the stage, right? But he goes from there to then talking about alleyways and creases and like how performance can happen there and you know, and so on. So he's, that already sort of did something for me, I found that tickled something for me or I found something really interesting in this idea of folds and creases as a different way of thinking kind of spatially and conceptually. Also, at the same time, around the same time I had been reading I think it was the introduction to Sianne Ngai's ugly feelings.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 04:10
Ngai's text ugly feelings, explores subtle states of complex feelings. complex feelings, like envy, anxiety, paranoia and irritation extend beyond the boundaries of a moment, as subtle tones or moods. Complex feelings also produce a kind of confusion about whether the feeling is produced inside the person or by the environment. When I feel anxiety, it is hard to know where that feeling is coming from and why I feel that way. And feelings are juxtaposed in the layered messiness of our lives. We may feel the paradox of feeling happy and sad at the same time, or feeling anxious and bored. In our lives, we are often feel juxtapositions of different feelings. And in this layered experience lives paradox. The creases and paradoxical folds of our lives are beautifully explored through the arts, including the literature genre of magical realism. In a 1973 interview, the writer Garcia Marquez spoke about improbable juxtapositions of the real and surreal. Magical realism opens quote, improbable juxtaposition and marvelous mixtures. These improbable juxtapositions draw out the textures of conflicted experience. As a peacebuilder I reflect on juxtapositions of... serene landscapes amidst violence, the past amidst the present as within trauma, or imaginings of a future amidst a desolate present. Juxtapositions are painful and hopeful, oppressive and creative. Garcia Mispereta talks about the influence of magical realism and juxtapositions within his approach to ethnomusicology.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 06:14
Even if these things weren't meant to be next to each other, that nonetheless, there is analytic value right there, there's there's conceptual value and enforcing that kind of analysis, you know, but it is a different kind of analysis, right? You're not doing you're, you're, you're being sort of deliberately if not provocative than at least, let's say creative right, you know, you're trying to sort of, in a sense, trying to productively break the way that we've been taught to do cultural analysis and social analysis, right, by again, applying tools where that, you know, applying tools to situations for which they were not designed, putting together things that were not meant to go together. And in that way, maybe also breaking some of the rules, not quite rules, but the kind of cultural boundaries we have around for example, high culture and low culture, around women's culture and men's culture around you know, what is straight and what is queer, etc, etc. Right. So yeah, and that's, that gets me eventually to this idea of ethnography as a form of magical realism, you know, and there, again, full transparency, if you like, I have to give some transparency here that like I am of partially Colombian ancestry, you know, and my father is who's who's the Colombian side of the family, he is from the same region where Garcia Marquez is from they're distantly related. So magical realism. And specifically, the kind of magical realism that comes out of the coastal region of Colombia and from Latin American literature, Hispanic literature is deeply important to me, right? Like, and that has always been important to me. So that's where I landed with that section in the in the intro of the book where I am talking about ethnography as a form of magical realism. That was my way of sort of legitimizing and valorizing, the kind of approach I'm taking where, yes, this is an ethnography, you know, this is ethnographic writing about kind of a real world space and scene and so on. But I'm also interested in the the weird and the wonderful, and the the, the unusual and the bizarre. I mean, I think maybe that's where I land with all of this, in a way is that my approach also as somebody who is queer, and who's really deeply who is really deeply imbibed in queer theory, I am from the beginning, skeptical or weary of shaping my my ethnographic work and my kind of anthropological work along lines of what's normal and what is meant to be, you know, what is expected? What is normative, what is, you know, what is supposed to be according to a kind of hegemonic cultural or social framework, right. So, you know, much in the same way that there can be, you know, like much of the same way that a lot of queer culture and a lot of queer creativity gets its energy and its ability and also its critical capacities, its critical edge from pushing things together that aren't that don't belong, by forms of drag of forms of parody, forms of caricature, all these sorts of things, these are all kinds of queer arts of provocative juxtaposition.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 08:58
Interspersed through this episode, our tracks designed and performed by Bilal studio, these tracks were designed for this podcast.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 09:29
In their profound text, Berlant describes cruel optimism. Berlant notes that we make conflicted bargains as we form optimistic attachments to things about how an object will make our life better. However, our projections sometimes become cruel, creating a mirage that never quite delivers. We experienced questions like, Does money buy happiness? If I make a certain salary will I finally be happy? If I prove myself with this next accomplishment, will I finally belong? Will I be enough? Berlant notes that we form attachments because we want something to endure to survive and this is what quote magnetizes an attachment to it. The questions of our lives are ripe with the vagueness of the ambivalent bargains of our desires and hopes. Garcia Mispereta explores the vagueness and ambivalent bargains on the dance floor. A dance floor often contains a roomful of strangers, who in synchrony and movement, propelled by music feel a sense of vague togetherness, a sense of belonging, somehow. Darkened dance floors may smooth over the edges of complicated identities, allowing us to belong for a while, in an intertwined sense of time.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 11:03
So I want to ask about vague belonging, and let them lead into to the next question on intimacy. To do that, I want to use this this tactic of juxtaposition. So if I layer some of your quotes side by side, and I want to hear what you hear, as we... so, you write that vague belonging enables surprisingly intimate encounters. You also write it as expressed an action a kind of, quote, social cohesion, in which constituents avoided talk about what made them cohere. Right. That's fascinating about avoidance of talk, you right vagueness is not a loss of coherence, but quote, a condition of cohesion, cohesion, imaginative possibility. I love your language, all the way through the book about possibility. Thank you. You write that queer nightlife worlds, quote, offer an ambivalent bargain between belonging and identity, solace and struggle. So what did you learn about vague belonging, or this idea of liquidarity as action possibility, burgeoning intimacy, or an ambivalent bargain?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 12:08
What fascinates me about Stranger intimacy at electronic music events and rave culture, club culture, and so on from the beginning, was, you know, how folks manage to get along, quote, unquote, you know, be intimate, you know, in this way, that is meaningful.. Yes, sometimes maybe superficial, but also sometimes deeply profound. But across stranger hood, right, like, without requiring deep intimate knowledge of the person that you're that you're engaging with, or the persons that you're engaging with, right, and in ways that would normally be socially really awkward or unexpected, or, or would really violate boundaries if you were doing this in like everyday, kind of daytime life. Right. So that, you know, really, the question of the whole book is like, how does that happen? What's what's the role of music in that? What's the role of emotions, bodies, sexuality, etc. And, you know, and so then vagueness for me was a really key idea, you know, or at least the, if not an idea that at least kind of an argument of sorts, right? Or an explanation, right, that, like, part of how this works, is by relying on and actually cultivating and to some degree that vagueness, right that like, you know, and in some ways, you could think of this kind of metaphorically like the, you know, a bit of of, you know, the kind of smoke that you get from a smoke machine, you know, on a dance floor, something that makes things kind of hazy in a way that shortens your field, your your, your field of vision, or you're not the field division, but yeah, the field of vision that, you know, sort of shortens the distance, right. But you can see, softens edges, blurs some things out that might be distracting and overwhelming, but also allows you to then kind of imagine and project what's behind what's behind that smoke, right? Like it sort of allows for maybe a more kind of expansive imagination of what's going on. And so similarly, what I kind of landed with or landed at, with with chapter three, and really, the whole book is how, how, like kind of powerful and productive and socially productive it is, in a way for folks to be able to sort of act on an imagined belonging and imagine sociability and imagined connection with others. And that it because of that, actually, it sometimes is, for the best in a sense, or at least it serves those desires best to not prod too much into exactly who are the people that you're engaging with? What do they believe in? Do they have the same? Are they aligned in the same way politically as I am? You know, do they even have the same connection to the music that I have? You know, like, do we really share the same taste in music is everybody here on the dance floor really, as committed to the genre as I am or some of these people just sort of randomly hear because their friend brought them? right. And again, rather than trying to you know, rather rather than trying to engage in what you might describe as a paranoid reading of the situation, right of the kind of like, I must know, I must ascertain who in this space I can trust and who in this space is probably is my people. And part of my community what have you, and instead melting into this space and and, you know, allowing yourself to feel a connection to this larger crowd. All of that for, you know, to my analysis, all of that is is is profoundly enabled, it's deeply enabled by this vagueness it by, you know, like not knowing nothing but knowing just a little bit, you know, or knowing enough, or having enough of a sense of, of what is shared, to allow you to project a whole lot more about what can be shared or what is likely to be shared. So, for me, in that chapter, I'm talking a lot about shared musical tastes, on the one hand, you know, as like a way in which a lot of people that I interviewed would imagine and kind of project a larger community, a larger set of a larger scene of belonging in... at these parties is like, Well, look, if everybody turned up for this music, and they're all we're sharing the dance floor, we're sharing this music, and we're enjoying it, and I can see other people responding to this music in ways that are similar to me, I can see other people getting off on it the way that I am, then clearly, you must have more in common, clearly, we must also have compatible, you know, a similar or compatible personality, similar vibe, you know, whatever that might mean, and maybe even deeper things, right? And as long as it remains that that horizon of possible, maybe, you know, maybe yes, kind of thing, rather than going to try to confirm it, and then maybe sometimes being spectacular, does spectacularly disappointed by that, right? You know, that seems to be where it operates the best. So this kind of liquidarity, this sort of fluid solidarity that I'm trying to describe, seems to operate optimally. In these environments where you don't know people much beyond maybe a familiar face. Or maybe you might know somebody by first name. You might have seen them at parties for months now, but you don't know their last name. You don't know what they do for a living. Like it's that it's at that kind of level of vagueness of interpersonal vagueness, that this sort of thing seems to work to operate optimally.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 16:55
In most of my circles, I belong without being fully known. I may attend a family holiday gathering, without bringing the fullness of my political beliefs and identity. I may curate a presence at a dinner party, introducing just enough of myself to mingle. Vagueness may cross relational boundaries that we may not have willingly crossed., tilling the soil for experiences of belonging that extend beyond the fleeting moment. And also PERPETUAL vagueness may hide unwanted parts of ourselves, making relations feel fragile conditional and temporary. As we improvised simpler versions of ourselves in vague contexts, how might this till soil for relational reciprocity? How do the arts like a dance floor lubricate space for this dance among strangers who may soon feel like a relation?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 18:11
A thing I really got from from Lauren's previous books before cruel optimism, there was the female complaint, the unfinished business of sentimentality in, gosh, now I'm forgetting the rest of the title. But nonetheless, as a book in the intro there, Lauren sets up this idea of the intimate public. And that, for me was like, deeply important to the it was not just important, it was formative to this project right there, you know, I get this idea. Even before the book, per se, I got this idea from taking a PhD seminar called the intimate public sphere, where we were talking about intimacy in public spheres and that kind of thing. So from early on, right? This is really, really shaped how it was coming at this whole project. But within that book, they theorize this idea of the intimate public, like in the sense of here, a reading audience so the public here, meaning something like an an audience who receives a set of films or a set of texts, a magazine, that kind of a thing, right? And they make the argument within that intro chapter that intimate publics thrive on incoherence about what makes them cohere. Right. So like that, a part of that point comes quite directly from Lauren and comes from from conversations I was having with Lauren, right around, like, Isn't it fascinating how an intimate public and here you know, their definition of an intimate public is a kind of a space of belonging, for their cases, this is always a space of belonging, marked by or shaped through consumerism, consumption, capitalism, etc. Like the you know, they were very much reading through that lens, right, or their attention was there. But you know, the example that they gave in that entire chapter was the whole concept of women's culture, right? They'd like you know, magazines from the 19th century, forms of literature, forms of kind of entertainment, consumer culture, dedicated and devoted to an imagined audience of woman. But then what, you know, how do you define what that identity is in a way that can really capture the huge breadth of experience that falls under the category of woman right? and Yeah, so you know, their point is, well, yeah, it has to be deliberately very vague. It has to instead, rather than relying on very specific definitions, you know, or, for example, in our current moment, right now we're in the middle of a moral panic about trans identity and so on trans, you know, transgender identities and so on. So, you know, rather than trying to go down highly biological routes to define what a woman is, or racialized ones, or whatever, instead, it would be well look, if you've lived through the experience of being a woman, and we won't say exactly what that means. But if you've, if you've had the affective experience, the lived experience of living in that category, then you must be part of this community. Part of what allows a, this kind of imagined community of partygoers and dance, you know, dance music lovers, to instantiate themselves once in a while in physical space as this kind of larger community and successfully pull that off night after night is by remaining at this level of vagueness and incoherence, incoherence about why they're there and what it means to be there, right and like leaving it at this very general, not empty, but just very generally defined or very vaguely defined, kind of level, rather than trying to be really specific and prescriptive about like we're here because of this. We you know, we are specifically into these things, we specifically believe these things and everybody who's who is here belongs to these specific identity categories. [music]
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 21:40
Reading Garcia Mispereta and then Berlant's introduction to the female complaint. I am fascinated by how we construct a language about our imagined we. Berlant names that we have a desire to mean something moving from our singular story to become part of a larger story. In our desire for a larger story, we project a we to which we might belong, named in this writing as an intimate public. An intimate public is a construction of intimacy where individuals imagine a we based on shared characteristics like identification with a musical genre or some other projected identity. In the context of womanhood Berlant names how market forces create imaginaries of a universality of womanhood, that can increase the normative pressure of what a woman is, and can be. Berlant notes that an illusion of shared experience is often manufactured to create an audience of consumers. They write, quote, an intimate public operates when a market opens up to a block of consumers . . . claiming to circulate texts and things that expressed those people's particular core interests and desires." Listen here to clips from Hoda and Jenna, and the Today show, as they imagine the normative of motherhood.
Hoda Jenna and Today Show 23:14
I just wonder how How did moms do it all? How do they give every one Yeah, the attention they need? Yes. And we do like we fall short because I was even thinking this too, when you know, Hope's, has been, you know, hasn't been feeling great. And all the attentions is on on Hope and Haley wonders to like, I'm here. Yeah, here I am. See me. I need something to carry me do what you're doing for Hope. You know, I feel like that there is a lot of that. How do we do it? And me being a mom and me sitting at this table with you guys, quite frankly, just this because I'm having a few out of bodies. Like am I supposed to be at this table? Yeah, it feels a little weird, but I have to
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 23:51
Our imaginary constructions of intimacy are often based upon normative beliefs about what it means to be a mother, a teacher, a Taylor Swift Fan or some other projection, we build belonging from an archetype of the normal. Oftentimes that normal is a barrier to more diverse ways of living. Pennebaker's research on pronouns has taught me about the imaginative power, and the oppressiveness of pronouns, like the word "we," in projecting a we, I imagine a web of reciprocity, but without steps of concrete relation, a we remains an anxious vision of belonging. Pennebaker's research also illuminates that humans use the language of we to build conformity as a preparation for violence. A 2013 study found that as terrorist organizations prepared for violence, their communications increased a projection of "we" that hardened adherence to the boundaries of Us and Them. Or, as Berlant suggests, in the female complaint, the projections of we can also be a tool of mass market commodification, using an intimate public to market a desire for more, that simultaneously pacifies political voice. Berlant names that these ambivalent bargains are felt and experienced within normative power structures of what it means to be a woman. I turned to ask about Berlant's exploration of feeling and effect. And the ways in which Garcia Mispereta has explored how we feel a sense of belonging?
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 25:44
Well, one of the things that struck me early on was the challenge to the name Think Tank and instead turning into feel tank, right, which would seems to like continue that idea about, there are some things in which we don't name but we feel, and I'm fascinated that we, we so often ignore that part of our existence.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 26:04
Absolutely. And that is, for sure. An important part of the analysis for me as well through through the whole book, but especially in those sort of chapters, three, four, you know, run liquidarity, and then around sort of affects, kind of the thickening of affect on the dance floor into into something that feels like a community, right, or feels like a something, that through that whole through those chapters, in particular, I'm thinking a lot about how people are making decisions. Well, I don't know if decision is quite the right word, but people are acting on a sense, a felt belonging, even when there's not that much kind of empirical evidence of it, right? You know, that, you know, in the absence of kind of empirical or kind of systematic confirmation of belonging, right, or of, of, you know, of parity with the people on the dance floor, in the absence of that kind of evidence, under certain conditions, people can nonetheless act as if they are already intimate, act as if they already belong, even though they've just arrived to the dance floor, that sort of thing, right. And that is enabled by, by effect by feeling right or rather, it's enabled by folks going with a feeling before or without necessarily thinking it through, in a in a more kind of explicit way. Right? And I don't necessarily want to come out here as somebody who, you know, like, I didn't want to be like the sort of hand wavy, vitalist person who's like, it's all about feeling and nothing else. And you know, like, Forget collaboration. Right? Right. You know, because that can also send us in some, like, alarming directions philosophically, but, but more just that, you know, I think we don't pay enough attention to the ways that we, as social animals, make decisions about how we socialize and how we behave, and how we interact with each other, on things that are affective, rather than directly cognitive, although, again, I don't want to separate those two things. There are neuroscientists out there, including one of my colleagues back at back at the university Birmingham, who would who would strenuously disagree with that, with that separation of spheres. But nonetheless, yeah, there's there's there is, you know, there's something going on there, there's something there, at least, you know, we've paid a lot of attention. Or we have tended to assume that humans are these, like rational decision makers, who make, you know, who make these kind of very kind of calculated decisions about how they, how we move through the world. And part of what I want to pay attention to is how that's not how we operate. And in fact, because we don't operate that way, all the time, because we can operate on a feeling, on a vibe, on a hunch, and so on, we are sometimes able to do this kind of socializing in a way that really shouldn't be possible. Or at least it should be really hard to do this kind of a thing on a dance floor. That should be it shouldn't be so easy. I mean, easy is not the right word, either. I think it is sometimes a minor feat of minor miracle that these things happen at all. But these sorts of events can come together and happen at all, but nonetheless, you know, I yeah, there's there's something I want to attest to their as far as how unlikely this sort of thing would be, were it not for vagueness, were it not for affect, were it not for the way that we could work, that that humans can connect and interact just through emotion or primarily through an emotion or a feeling or an affect?
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 26:27
How do we feel our way into bonds of relation? How does music lubricate spaces for the feeling of belonging? Gillian Howell, a scholar in the field of music and peacebuilding published a 2024 article with Bartlett and Davidson, on how music opens small changes in conflict. Their article on building social connection and inclusion through rock music in the Western Balkans, followed teenagers who transgressed ethnic boundaries to participate in Rock Band rehearsals. This Music Connects program created, quote, "rehearsal space for the navigation of differences" were new kinds of relations, cohesion and identity might be felt and experienced. Drawing on the study's language, this project seemed to create a "bubble" or "incubator" where participants expanded what was normal. Rock band participants expanded the normal as they played their way into new social norms, groupings and identities. In the liminal space of musical rehearsal, participants rewrote the lived experience of their ethnic identities, and social worlds in subtle ways of small, intimate changes. These changes may build lasting, small step architectures for repair and reconciliation.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 30:44
So if we talk about intimacy, which we've been talking about, but I want to go a little deeper. So it's really important that in your book, you set up that traditionally, we've defined intimacy as relationships that are lasting, stable, vulnerable, warm and mutual, right. And yet, this study is going to turn that on its head just a little bit. You write that a dance floor undoes some of these assumptions and raises the importance of touch in all its form, and that also sound might be a form of touch with the granular touch of sound, which is so important. So here's a few quotes. You write touch both threatens and promises to rearrange our bodily boundaries. In other words, touch connects bodies, while also revealing and reshaping their boundaries. Another quote, intimacy is a perpetually emergent quality of bodily proximity and contact, quote that sustains a sense of entanglement beyond the encounter. I love that part. Intimacy is something that quote unfolds between bodies through proximity, contact and impact, which can be registered as a sense of both closeness and expansiveness. So talk to me about intimacy, physical and sonic touch, and how it reshapes bodies and sustains that entanglement beyond the encounter. Just I would love to hear your take on that.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 32:17
Sure, of course. And first of all, I should say I should, before I even go into that I should, I should, thank you for like, now, this is the second or third time that you've done this, where you've pulled together quotes from a few different places in the book, and kind of presented them side by side, it's a real pleasure to kind of hear that, hear that. And I love the juxtaposition, too. Thank you. I like it. And also, for me, it's a pleasure, just in the sense of like, Ah, I wrote that, you know, and also being somewhat relieved that like, oh, that's I'm more or less coherent across a few different places in the book, you kind of lose sight of that, when you're when you're, you know, finishing the when you're trying to wrap up the book and so on. But getting back to things. Intimacy, yeah, the, well for, for me, I guess, part of what was my initial intervention around intimacy, like when I was first kind of prepping this project, in a way, even just pitching it to my supervisors. That like, that was the the opening, like value statement, or whatever the word would be for this project was like, Look, there is this really different approach to intimacy that's in this sub cultural space, and probably in a lot of other cultural, sub cultural spaces? And we're not, we haven't, you know, nobody seems to theorized this yet, or talked about this yet, like, or at least tried to explain why it's like this, like, why is there this very different approach to intimacy? And I guess another way of framing that and that this is certainly how I was first approaching it. When I was prepping like my literature review. As a grad student for this around intimacy specifically, it was like, there's a lot of normative discourse around intimacy, right? Like, if you actually look at academic writing around intimacy, and certainly like pop, pop, psychological writing about intimacy, so much of it is normative so much, is about like how to have good intimacy, what is good intimacy? And more importantly, I guess or more urgently, what if the intimacy you feel is not really intimate? Like, uh, you know, there's a real kind of paranoia concern thing that is cultivated, of course, like, you know, that, that sells products, right, that sells, you know, like it sells, right, it always sells to kind of take advantage of anxieties that we have as humans, right. And so one of those is like, what if your, your intimacy is not as deep as it could be? What if the intimacy that you think you're experiencing is actually false or cynical, or what have you, right? So in this kind of a field of writing, where it's really normative, and it's usually connected to very kind of, like heteronormative ideas of like, what, you know, what intimacy is supposed to entail and also how it develops, how it unfolds, right. So like, most of the readings that I was, I was coming across around intimacy would be talking about romantic partners and like in the couple form. Right, dyadic, one on one couple form, almost always, you know, hetero pairing, at least presumably, right like or at least presumed, if not explicitly outlined that way, sometimes familial intimacies, perhaps, and then beyond that maybe larger things like belonging to a particular ethnic group and so on, right, but like, the, across all of these, the definition of intimacy was based on or founded on the presumption that the person you were being intimate with, or having intimacy with was somebody you knew for a long time, had a stable relationship with, had a kind of a clear social kind of link to like, in like, there's some kind of a clear hierarchy, or some sense of parody, that there was this presumption from the beginning that what makes intimacy intimate what makes you feel intimacy is proximity, yes, but also kind of transparency, a kind of interpersonal transparency where like, you know, each other's deepest, darkest secrets, you know, everything about each other, you know, each other inside and out, like a book, that's kind of like interpersonal knowledge, right? And so this is also this is what gets me to vagueness, right, a couple chapters later in this in this book is, as a way to explain the intimacy that seems to be happening, paradoxically, and counter intuitively in spaces where those factors are missing, right? These these factors that are supposed to be like prerequisites for intimacy, right, you know, that like, long, you know, long stable relationship, deep interpersonal knowledge, you know, proximity, et cetera, et cetera, right. A lot of those factors are missing on a dance floor. And, and yet people behave intimately and not just behave intimately. But, you know, express, having experienced that, right. And I don't want to, like I always want to take people at their word when they say that, right? Like, I don't, I definitely did not want to also end up being going into one of these sort of false consciousness analyses, you know, the like, well, people think they're having intimacy, but they don't know, you know, like, that's not real intimacy. Like, yeah, folks are feeling it folks are experiencing and acting on it, you know, in the spaces as a form of intimacy. So let's figure out how that's possible. How that works. And I guess more importantly, what are the factors that make that intimacy possible if it's a different kind, a different flavor of intimacy, so to speak, than the kind where that the conditions of possibility are based on stable relationships, family forms, you know, romantic love, etc.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 36:56
A queer approach to analysis names and questions, the normative, that which is performed again and again in daily lives. Drawing upon this tradition, Garcia Mispereta questions normative understandings of intimacy, that have little room for variation. How do dance Floor experiences of intimacy challenged normative understandings of intimacy as a stable, transparent and enduring relationship? How do we explain moments on a dance floor in a singular glance, or in an experience with strangers that feels intimate? Manuel Garcia went on to speak of how states like proximity, warmth, intensity, and alterations from the normative, propel a loosening an experience and vague feeling of togetherness.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 37:56
What I note here is that some of those some of those same factors attributed to normative intimacy are still present, proximity and warmth are still there, right. But it's more like physical proximity rather than social proximity, right. But that physical proximity, kind of lubricated by a non anonymity, the fact that it's usually a nighttime context, where people are maybe, you know, intoxicated, or at least their sleep cycles are flipped, you know, like, there's all these ways in which people are in altered states, right? lubricated by the music lubricated, you know, by all these other sort of factors that loosen people up, but that kind of that loosening up in a sense, makes it possible then for people to experience a kind of an intimacy based mostly on physical proximity on just sharing, you know, being bodies in a room, but also going through a particularly intense experience together. And that's where I think I kind of landed with not so much the special sauce of this kind of intimacy, but like, what makes this intimacy possible and what makes it work in these spaces, you know, despite this lack of, of, of interpersonal knowledge and stable relationships, and some of that is warmth in general. Some of that is physical proximity. And also an important part of that is intensity, it's kind of intense experiences, you know, that are that are experienced together in a social way, right, you know, so the intensity of partying the intensity of maybe being high the intensity of really pushing your bodily limits maybe if you go for like a marathon, night out right, you know, the the adventure of it all so to speak. And even sometimes illicitness and the the transgression like these are all things that also lay groundwork for a certain kind of intimacy that you might find comparable to the kind of like, esprit de corps Brother in Arms sort of intimacy that folks sometimes might cultivate it, you know, when like, getting up to mischief together, you know, when, you know, getting into scrapes together, having adventures together, you know, maybe also doing illicit or illegal activities together like those all also cultivate the sense of kind of intimacy, you know, through shared risk, shared, shared, intense experience, shared ordeal right now, these are all kind of ways that intimacy can also.. can also grow beyond just the family form and the romantic couple form
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 40:03
This podcast has explored complex paradoxes of lived experience, and notions of vague belonging, intimate publics, intimacy, and the lived and felt experience of belonging. Belonging is a felt experience, propelled by our imaginations of we, and in the company of strangers this may be felt as vague belonging, where we reveal just enough of ourselves on dance floors, workplaces and in classrooms for a feeling of togetherness. For peacebuilders these lessons have implications on the messiness of lived reality, where complex feelings and identities are juxtaposed within complex spaces. What are the conditions that lubricates space, where we might experience the feeling of together, somehow? When do these momentary encounters become the small steps of peace? The next episode explores utopias, a thickening of the we, and an unfolding of the self in this continuing exploration of the complexity of belonging.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 41:20
This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson. At Elizabethtown college we host a Master of Music Education, with an emphasis in peacebuilding. Thinking deeply. We reclaim space for connection and care. Join us at music peacebuilding.com
Part 3 Transcript
Garcia_Part3 - Auphonic 11.57 AM
Tue, Aug 20, 2024 5:47AM • 30:40
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
dance floor, spaces, thickening, utopian, experience, nightlife, utopias, talking, unfolding, imagination, roughness, offer, belonging, literatures, podcast, people, music, peacebuilding, ways, life
SPEAKERS
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, Kevin Shorner-Johnson
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 00:00
But what emboldens them so right? What makes them feel like there's secure enough footing to then try to have these kinds of warm interactions with a random stranger? How does this messy, volatile thing still coalesce and at least hold still long enough for people to act on it as if it were something comparable to like a solid, structured community or family or nation
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 00:22
You are listening to season four of the music and peacebuilding podcast, a podcast season focused on multifaceted textures of belonging. Our podcast explores intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 00:40
Luis Manuel Garcia. Mispi is associate professor in ethnomusicology and popular music studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes with a particular focus on affect, intimacy, stranger, sociability, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries and musical migration, his book together somehow, music, affect and intimacy on the dance floor is published by Duke University Press. In this three part series, we explore Garcia Mispireta's book together somehow. In the first episode, we looked at the politics of diversity and the door apparatus of belonging. In the second episode, we looked at improbable juxtapositions vague belonging, intimate publics and the felt experience of belonging. And in this third and final episode of this series, we look at constructions of utopias, an unfolding of the self and the thickening of the we as bodies move together.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 01:50
So my peace and conflict scholar self now is really interested in how, in how you talk about utopias, you know, because utopias can be, you know, they can be very productive, because they allow you to imagine a better now or a better tomorrow. They can be harmful and that they can be avoidant. And then you also name that they can also be maybe productive too, in that they're sites of protection, in some ways, for marginalized communities. So I'm interested in all the textures of utopias that you talk about. So once again, let me read some quotes to you. You write that, that quote, dance floors can serve as spaces for air, for experimentation with ways of living together that are better, more just, more caring, more fulfilling or simply less harmful. Next quote, electronic dance music stages the dawning of a better tomorrow. It's a very optimistic quote. Dance Music is an eroticized nowness. I love that that hovers near the dawning horizon spanning present and future, neither tomorrow nor today, but tonight. And then finally, dance floors provide spaces where queers of color could collectively imagine, play out and feel a world less toxic than this one. So reflect with me on the diverse ways in which you experience utopias with participants in these dance floor spaces.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 03:17
Sure you know again, I should note again, I should note, again, another moment of full transparency that, you know, some, some of the quotes that you're just reading out there are very much me riffing off of Ernst Bloch, the you know, what is, I think, characteristic of this subculture, and I think part of what it gets from its origins in queer of color, and, You know, in very trans, also transforward communities, is this, this sense that a you know, that a world better than this one is possible and has to be possible if we're going to continue going on right, like if we're going to survive, we need to imagine a world that's better than the one we're currently in, which is profoundly hostile To our existence, right? And a really kind of practical, applied, concrete approach to utopianism, in the sense of like, we need to create spaces and experiences that that provide us a taste of what a better world could be like, even if we know full well that that's not what we're in right now, and we know full well that it's very like unlikely that we're going to see the fulfillment of that in our lifetimes, right? You know that we can hope for improvements, but we're not probably going to see the end destination, right? You know, in whatever sense of that term, right? So, yeah, I mean, again, this kind of comes back even to, you know, ambivalent bargains earlier, you know, in our conversation here, right, that this is a kind of an ambivalent bargain that I think nightlife folks in general, and especially queer and trans and of color folks strike with nightlife, right? That, yes, this is, these are still spaces where oppression happens. Dance floors are spaces where sexual assault happens. There's, you know. Spaces where you know racism, transphobia, you know all sorts of violence still occur in those spaces, right? And at the same time, the cruel ironies of those roles of the spaces where we often go to escape right, or go to have a brief moment of reprieve, right? And so that whole, that whole kind of totality, for me, with all of its complexity and all of its kind of contradictions, right? Or tensions, for me, that is that sort of, that limbs the contours of something that is utopian, right? So again, not utopian in the sense that it is a utopia, right, not in the sense that it has it's it satisfies a set of criteria, right, a set of criteria, or whatever, for being a utopia. But rather that, that for me, all of those sort of tensions are the, you know, they're the kind of, like the the cloud, or the kind of the halo that is cast from genuine efforts that are utopian, right, like an orientation towards a Better Life, A Better World with the full recognition that we're not going to get there, or we're not going to get there completely, and it's not going to be perfect, and it's, you know, and it's not everybody's going to be happy necessarily, with, with the direction we're taking, right? But there's, nonetheless, there is a lot of discourse around things like community and community building. There are, there's discourse that you'll get in and around this music around, you know, things like getting your life, survival, improving your life, you know, learning to, you know, learning to feel better about yourself, right? Like these are all things that attach in an indirect way, or approach asymptotically something like utopia, but don't necessarily get there.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 06:41
In Richard Dyer's seminal article on entertainment and utopias, Dyer notes that entertainment offers quote "the image of something better set against the realities of day to day existence," a utopian experience can feel quote, "ideals about how human life could be organized and lived." These forms of utopias interrupt the normative and can propel us into better forms of living, loving and being. A utopian experience can also offer rest and reprieve from daily spaces, particularly for communities that routinely experience repression. And utopian visions, can also be harmful when they act as a sedative, offering an escape that domesticates space and removes the possibility of challenging what is wrong. In Gage Averill's studies. Averill documented how Haitian dictators used alcohol fueled music festivals or Koudyays to keep a people domesticated enough that they avoided a reckoning with repression. How do we build good utopias? How do we build artistic spaces that animate imaginations, offer reprieves for the weary and propel us to better forms of living? Utopian questions are at the heart of peace work, where better tomorrows may be animating forces of peace and reconciliation.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 08:35
Again, I, you know, I think, where, I guess, where I finish with this thought is that a lot of the folks in these nightlife scenes, especially the folks who've experienced a lot of oppression right, who are minoritized and marginalized in a lot of these ways, most of these folks, when I'm in conversation with them, are under no pretenses that the spaces that they're in and that they're moving through are the antidote right to what they suffer in everyday life, you know, but that they are a relief, right? And that I you know, where this maybe brings me back is to an argument that, that I know, again, Berlant, Lauren Berlant, has made a couple times, including, especially in Cruel Optimism, that book. That you know, for folks who've experienced a great deal of oppression, sometimes just experiencing a little bit less oppression is already utopian, right? There's, I can't remember now, there's one chapter in that, in the cool optimism book, I think it's on the film La Poulnez?, about, like, utopian enough, right? This kind of phrasing of utopian enough, right, where, you know, Berlant is, like really reflecting in a really lovely way, but in a kind of a heart rending way about, you know, this movie where the main character is living this, like really brutal life, right? Just kind of everyday routine that just really brutalizing. But they have this, like one object that they keep hidden away. I think it's a pair of shoes, if I remember correctly. But. Of, like, nice shoes that they never get to use, but they kind of just opened up once in a while and look at it and just kind of imagine a life where they could wear those shoes, right? I might be misrepresenting or misremembering this. This the specifics of this case, but there's that whole idea like that. The argument that that Lauren builds around this is that, like, yeah, that that's a that's a moment, like, that's a utopian moment, but that's, you know, but we might not recognize it as utopianism, because our frame of reference is really different, right, that we're, you know, but, but in, you know, in that context where you're experiencing all that level of kind of brutality and oppression and that that that level of kind of stuckness and of in..., you know, inability to escape, then even a small little improvement, or an imagined improvement, is already utopian, even if that would not look like a utopia to anybody else, right? And so I think that's also, that's that's a thing that that very much stayed with me and that I carried with me through this project as well.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 10:58
Yeah, and I would reflect back to you to I think one of the things that came to my mind as I was reading, it feels pretty obvious, but I just need to be reminded of it, is that we so often think of imagination as this cognitive capacity. You know, imagination powers utopias, and yet sometimes imagination needs to be experienced as well as instead of just dreamed.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 11:19
Absolutely and that's where I get, I get a lot of from, from performance studies, from this, you know, so Munoz, but also Jill Dolan and a few other folks who I kind of cite here and there in the early parts of the book around I think it's Jill Dolan who theorizes the idea the utopian performative, right? And this idea that performances, you know, particularly, you know, sort of art performances, and then, you know, those sorts of things have a kind of utopian thrust to them as well, just in the sense of trying to briefly force into existence an alternate world, right, even if it's just through make believe, right? But like, still, that itself is could be recognized as a kind of a utopian thing, right? That's sort of an extension of that argument, but nonetheless, or it's an extension of that look, that perspective on things, but nonetheless, it brings us back to this, this, I think, the this point that you're highlighting really, really helpfully, that, that, yeah, the imagination, I guess you know, for me that this goes also back to some aspects of affect theory, where people talk about the virtual and the actual, right? That, like you, the virtual, the possible, the potential, the imagined, still can exist for us in a kind of very concrete, physical sense in the world, right? And it can exist for us just in the sense that it impacts our material and concrete action. So it has a kind of real existence just in its effects on real, real behavior. But also, there can be times where we can experience some of that truly in a kind of a physical and direct way. And we can get at that through performance. We can get at that through ritual. We can get at that through nightlife and clubbing and so on. So there's all these forms of kind of heightened activity, or like aesthetically heightened and ritualized activity, that can sometimes give us access to the realm of imagination in ways that we can't get elsewhere.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 13:05
The heightened activity found in the arts requires a continuous revisioning and maybe vision-living of what is and what could be. This vision-living may hold a special place within the work of conflict, transformation and peacebuilding. Different visions force an interruption of lived experience, feeling out the possibility of a different way of being. In the pace of busyness and commodification, it seems that we don't have time to imagine differently. This work of imagining differently may be deliberately suppressed because it is a dangerous challenge to systems of normative power.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 13:53
So this leads beautifully to the whole notion of the unfolding of the self that happens within dance floors, and I'm, well, first, I want to say that I was really fascinated by your dialog, about Villa Lobos and the construction of sounds that are just on the horizon of being able to understand what's happening, right, right? And I, I, after I read your book, I went and found VillaLobos on on Apple Music, and started listening. And I want to really understand why you chose this word unfolding, because that seems to be really prominent. You write that coming undone entails an unfolding of the self with an expectation of eventual refolding, albeit perhaps incompletely or differently. So what is this expectation? Maybe it's an expectation that people enter a dance floor with to come undone and then be folded back together?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 14:47
Well, you know, so one, so I'll tell you one little story that I didn't think I've told anywhere else actually about coming undone, and that is that the the first. The first time that occurred to me as kind of a phrase or metaphor, it was in the context of me listening and listening back kind of nostalgically to a song by Bjork from from the album homogenic. This will only matter to the Bjork nerds in the in the room, right? But it's from homogenic, and it's a song called unravel, and it's this beautiful. It's an acapella song, like in contrast to the rest of the album, which is this really interesting mix of like, mix of, like electronic music, kind of synths and drums and strings, you know, like this real break away from what she had been producing before. And then in the midst of all of these tracks that are more noisy and more kind of industrial and in the kind of electronic tinge, there's this one that's just almost entirely a cappella. I think there is, later on, there are some strings that come in, but at the opening, it's just her singing. And so that was part of what occurred to me when I was trying to think of a way, or a phrase, a term, to describe what was going on in these nightlife spaces, right, especially around intense experience, around kind of Yeah, folks really kind of going for it when they go out
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 16:05
In the unfolding of her music video. Bjork intones, a coming undone as bodies unravel in threads of yarn, while copyright restrictions prevent me from inserting that track. I sought and explored soundscapes of roughness that open To smoothness. [music]
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 17:02
The movement between roughness and smoothness hold interpretive value in examining how participants tell stories of the obstacles or the roughness of a memorable night out
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 17:16
the the the actual recollection of the night would just be a series of crises, right? Like, that's how, that's how most people would remember the night, right? Was, like, it was great. I had such a good time. I went here and, like, I ran into this person, and they were an absolute mess. I had to take care of them for an hour, and then I lost my wallet. And then, you know, this happened, and then the police came and they busted the party. It was the best night, right? Like, you know this, there are all these stories where it would just be like, crisis, crisis, crisis, crisis, but also the story of how we dealt with the crisis, right, or how we survived it, right? And so like, but that was the narrative, right? That's what, what was interesting to me, and that that's part of how this one chapter, where I'm also dealing with Villalobos, you know, that chapter is kind of sticks out from the other chapters in being moving away from kind of analysis of the dance floor per se, and more into just the whole nightlife, or the whole night out. And it's also a spot where I lean into almost kind of literary analysis, where I'm thinking about narrative and plot, like the way that people plot out the night, right? And what they remember afterwards, and how that becomes a cohesive narrative, right? Because otherwise, yeah, you you're not going to get a play by play exactly how the night goes. That's boring. So what do you get? And what you get as a kind of a memorable story, and as a narrative that people tell to each other is these highs, right? Like, not the lows, but the highs. And the highs can include both ecstatic, euphoric, fantastic, positive moments, you know, like, wow, you know, this DJ played this one song, and it really blew my mind, you know. Or I just had the best time with so and so, and we really hit it off, and, you know, and then maybe we fooled around later, like you can have those positive experiences, but then also you'll have these positive, kind of rough experiences. It would all be valorized and memorable. [music]
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 19:04
Our shared stories of roughness and transcendence are memories of an experience that propels a feeling of togetherness, When are roughness, conflict and tension, productive? How do we build the stories that set the framework for cohesion and transformation? How do stories transform the self and the us? Nightlife may offer a stretching, an increasing of intensity that leads to undoing, unraveling, untangling and unfolding, offering openings of change [music]
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 19:49
Part of what people get out of this is maybe a slow, kind of iterative transformation, that over time, they become a different person through these practices of regularly stretching themselves apart and then snapping back together again, you know. But it also isn't the kind of rarely, you know, like, rarely would people have a story of a night out where they go out and they are radically transformed, right? In the sense of, like, you know, go out party and then come home with a completely different identity, quit their job, you know, do something drastic with their life, or what have you, right? So it's much less that, but it is still possible for people to experience a form of transformation and growth by going up regularly and undergoing these sort of processes of stretching, unraveling, untangling themselves and then and then folding back together again, but maybe folding back together in a slightly different way.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 20:41
As I was building the segment on stretching and unraveling, I traveled with my family to walk the streets of Strasbourg, France. This recording captures the thickening of crowds in Strasbourg as people gathered on a rain soaked night near the Strasbourg cathedral. People moved closer, thickening into crowds of musical fans. I asked Garcia Mispireta about why he chose to use thickening to describe social cohesion.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 21:08
I think on one hand, talking about thickening allowed me to talk about this phenomenon without having to be quite so indebted if that's the right word, or without having to pay constant fealty if that's right word, to already existing literatures around entrainment, around synchronicity and synchronization, around and so on. So like I I wanted to pull from that literature, but I didn't want necessarily the whole chapter to be answerable to that particular framework, that particular kind of set of literatures and analytical, analytic frameworks, because that wasn't, I wasn't trying to do the same thing as a lot of those authors were, like, notably, you know, I was, I'm being a bit of a magpie in this chapter, and I'm pulling, rather, you know, opportunistically from different scholarly streams, right? That often aren't put together normally, you know so I'm talking about rhythmic entrainment. I'm talking about, you know, affect theory, but I'm also talking about behavioral, you know, like cognitivist and behaviorist studies of group behavior, right? And trying to find connections. And so I felt like picking a specific, a specific, already defined technical term would maybe tie me too closely to one of these specific academic streams, whereas I wanted to be sort of not so much floating above them, but I wanted to be adjacent to them, and doing my own thing in a way. So thickening, I think, as well, allowed me to do that. Allowed me to think, think along those lines.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 22:33
I mean, I think I would reflect back to you, I really love the term, because I feel like it, it does something that entrainment doesn't do, which it also talks about moving bodies closer together, which gets to your intimacy. So I really like that idea thickening what it does for you.
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 22:47
Thank you for validating me. You know, Also I agree that, like, at least part of how I got there was thinking about, yeah, like, how, you know, how does, how does a floor in, by floor, I mean, like, a crowded dance floor, right? And it's, again, sort of adopting the the way that, like a, I might, if I'm having a conversation with another DJ, or from talking to somebody who's sort of from the in the business, they might talk about, like, how does a floor gel? How does it cohere? How does it coalesce, right? You know. And in all of these, you know, exactly, and in all of those situations, you know, we are already talking about... a, you know, a, you know... a fluid, you know a fluid situation where you're talking about like a bunch of little molecules on the dance floor eventually coming together, right? And setting in some way, right? And whether that's like just coming together on the dance floor in the sense of, you know, the crowd cohering, you know, or whether that means we're thinking about how a dance floor is sometimes also a community, right? But at least for a moment, or it can feel like one, right? Like in all of those contexts, there's a solidification that I think is important to pay attention to, and that I want to pay attention to. And so then thickening helped me again, as as a way to think about that movement from a liquid state, from a, you know, a state of social you know, what's the right word that like that, you know, in in chapter three, I'm mostly thinking about crowds, right, as these kind of messy, fluid things that you know, don't, that that are volatile, that are unstable, and that that, in some ways, is a problem, right? And that certainly is would be perceived as a problem from the perspective of somebody who is maybe thinking, maybe thinking only in really normative ways about social structure, right? Like that. This is the antithesis of that, right? That this is a threat, that things are volatile, unpredictable, messy and so on, but also more capacious, more able to like, more nimble, more agile, right? That's part of what makes liquidarity as a form of being together work in contexts where a more classic normative definition of solidarity would not work right in these sort of Stranger sociability situations.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 24:50
From our shared love of cooking, I see how this metaphor of thickening is descriptive of what might happen in social situations. As I made this podcast, I thickened a mixture of milk and flour, watching as the pressure of heat and a mixing brought elements into a singular but continuously reforming substance, Our lived experiences of belonging are in states of continuous reformation. Good relationships leave space for an ongoing liquidarity. Toxic relations block movement and objectify attachments. I love the metaphor of a thickening of the We that is heated and stirred by the culinary talents of artistic experience. What are the elements of movement and heat that offer a thickening of a continuously reforming we?
Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta 25:53
But also people do go to these spaces and do get into these these situations and experience cohesion and experience connection, and experience things coming together and feeling solid, right? And if anything, that's part of what I found kind of paradoxical and fascinating about liquidarity In the previous, you know, in those previous chapters, is that people would act on liquidarity as if it were solid, right? That, you know, that people would be would feel comfortable, or at least would feel bold enough maybe to like, you know, reach out and speak to somebody that they haven't spoken to or had never met before on the dance floor, you know, have a very warm exchange with a random person in a way that they would never try elsewhere, right? And they would never risk elsewhere, because otherwise this would be, you know, kind of a risky thing to do. But what emboldens them so, right? What makes them feel like there's secure enough footing, right socially to then try to have these kinds of warm interactions with a random stranger, right? So, like, how does the fluidity of the crowd situation nonetheless provide a solid enough platform for a person to then venture this kind of a social interaction? And so then for me to get there, I then had to find some way to talk about solidifying, right or thickening that. How the how does this messy, volatile thing still coalesce and at least hold still long enough for people to to act on it as if it were something comparable, maybe to like a solid, structured, you know, community or family or nation or what have you.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 27:24
Our lives and relations are continuously reforming. With reformation, we pivot, we unravel, stretch, hold and let go as we move through the affective experience of being a self within diverse combinations of we. As I close this series, I conclude with what I have learned. This podcast has made me aware of the conflicted bargains that we make and the projections that we hold in grasping for a life well lived. It has made me aware of the ways we perform our potential for belonging to the door apparatus of acceptance. The podcast has made me aware of how our imaginations limit and enliven better ways of living within the sphere of an intimate public we imagine our role within a larger story, one that may limit our sense of self or embolden it. And challenging the normative discourse on intimacy, a dance floor points to a way of being momentarily together, offering the space for liquidarity and change. And finally, we live belonging as a feeling. We may use artistic experience to feel out a better way, a more connective way, a more expansive way of being together. These are some lessons of a dance floor as a whole world that opens visions for caring, relating and peacebuilding in the continuous steps of us together, somehow.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 29:19
Music used in this episode was produced by Bilal studios and purchased through Pond 5 audio. My deepest thanks to Luis Manuel, Garcia-Mispireta for his outstanding scholarship and the gift of his time and thoughtfulness. His book together somehow music, affect and intimacy on the dance floor is published by Duke University Press. This three part series took me over a year to build. I took the time because few books on this podcasting journey have challenged and inspired me more than this book. The next podcast in this series is the final one for this season, focusing on intersections of migration and belonging. Join me in a few months for this final episode series.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson 30:10
This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin shorner Johnson at Elizabethtown College. We host a master of music education with an emphasis in peacebuilding, thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care. Join us@musicpeacebuilding.com