Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor
University of California, Riverside (USA)
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor adds an essential contribution to a limited yet gradually expanding body of ethnomusicological scholarship on electronic dance music cultures. Through a multi-sited ethnography of house, techno and minimal dance music scenes in Chicago, Paris and Berlin, the author evaluates the utopian potential of the dancefloor, illustrating the affective dimensions that generate its feelings of social cohesion as well as the ambivalence and exclusions that surround its possibility. In making its arguments, this book draws not only from interviews conducted with partygoers across these scenes, but also auto-ethnographic anecdotes and analytical frameworks from sound and affect studies. A primary focus of this book centers on how the dancefloor enables forms of intimacy between strangers that would otherwise be inappropriate in other spaces, a point illustrated early on with a memorable anecdote in which the author’s face was briefly caressed by a stranger while dancing at Panorama Bar in Berlin, “an exchange of surprising warmth between strangers” (3). Garcia-Mispireta builds empirically from a range of anecdotes to make potent claims about these forms of “stranger-sociability” (5), including how conventions of touch in nightlife cultures serve the multiple functions of “communicating sociability, transmitting affect, and both sensing and navigating a crowded environment” (53).
The author incorporates an extensive amount of musical analysis to argue that the affective qualities of corporeal exchanges on the dancefloor meet further intensification through the haptic qualities of electronic dance music. Specifically, the distribution of frequencies in electronic dance music composition results in a type of material impact, described as “sonic spikes [that] strike the body in a very concrete way, eliciting sensations not only in the ear but also in the body’s skin, flesh, viscera, and bones” (70). Electronic dance music genres often utilize sounds that index tactile experience, such as clapping or breathing, a practice which “rel[ies] on the ability of listener-dancers to associate certain sounds with an enfleshed sound source” (73). Garcia-Mispireta also provides a close analysis of musical texture to argue that electronic dance music makes use of granular sounds that likewise evoke tactile experience. This combination of vibrational impact, bodily indexicality and granular texture ultimately “invites an engagement with sound that is alive to texture, touch, and other fleshy excitations” (87). The book’s larger theories of togetherness are predicated on these affects as devices through which crowd solidarity is enacted or imagined.
The author details these affective encounters of sonic and embodied proximities to theorize the vague sense of togetherness that the dancefloor produces. These affective encounters (articulated corporeally and musically) intensify in a process that the author calls the “thickening of the social” (124). Thickening is a process whereby the imbrication of dancefloor affect gives initial coherence to a type of crowd solidarity. Thickening results in a vague feeling of togetherness that the author explains through the concept of liquidarity, defined as “a form of fluid solidarity in which vagueness is a crucial condition of its emergence” (32). Liquidarity is necessarily vague because in order to coalesce it must also obfuscate the power differentials that would deny its possibility. “Vagueness” is thus used by the author as an analytic to effectively describe the contradictions that allow nightlife spaces to simultaneously contain forms of inclusion and exclusion, and which threaten to dissolve these “vague” feelings of social cohesion as they are inevitably problematized by the presence of partygoers with differential access to this solidarity, including, for example, partygoers who are disproportionately targeted by unsolicited touching or have differing cultural expectations for intimacy. The duality of this vagueness is most apparent in the final chapter, in which the author details door policies and the regulation of diversity as a “dissonance between a utopian desire for unproblematically inclusive collectivity and the practices of exclusion that help to make the experience of cosmopolitan conviviality possible” (215). For these reasons, liquidarity is a phenomenon that can only take fragile shape. As the author writes, it “sustains an intimate world on the merest whiff of sociability” (104). The ultimate objective of this intimate world and its utopian aspirations—the “something” as noted in the title of the book—are likewise vague. Garcia-Mispireta writes that they “provide a sense of what a utopia of postidentitarian belonging might feel like, rather than a coherent model of how it would function” (223).
This book offers a novel contribution to ethnomusicological scholarship and will surely lend itself as an important resource for scholars and other readers interested in the global phenomenon of electronic dance music culture or studies on music and affect more generally. However, it is important to note the structural challenges that nearly made such a project impossible. This book is prefaced with a description of the obstacles the author met as a first-generation, queer scholar of color working on topics deemed “disciplinarily unconventional and low-prestige” (xv) by the institutions of ethnomusicology. As it offers a series of theories pertinent to understanding the ubiquitous communities of the “dancefloor”, this book thus also serves as a reminder to current and future ethnomusicologists of the structural changes required to ensure similarly profound work continues to reach fruition.