Music & Peacebuilding
Music & Peacebuilding
Together Somehow pt3: Unfoldings, Thickenings, and Utopian visions
The conclusion of this series on dancefloors, electronic dance music, and house music examines how dancefloors offer space to imagine differently. The episode looks at how the synchronous movement and entrainment of bodies propels bodies to move closer, creating a sense of “thickening” that moves toward social cohesion. We look at the importance of utopian visions to peace and reconciliation work and how these visions may be both helpful and harmful. Finally, using a case study of Bjork, we look at how dancefloors offer an unraveling and unfolding that offers space for new ways of being.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
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: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. 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. 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: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: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: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: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: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: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. 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: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: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] 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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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 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 being momentarily together, offering the space for gift of his time and thoughtfulness. His book liquidarity and change. And finally, we live belonging as a together somehow music, affect and intimacy on the dance floor is published by Duke University Press. This three part series feeling. We may use artistic experience to feel out a better took me over a year to build. I took the time because few books on this podcasting journey have challenged and inspired me more way, a more connective way, a more expansive way of being than this book. The next podcast in this series is the final one for this season, focusing on intersections of migration and together. These are some lessons of a dance floor as a whole belonging. Join me in a few months for this final episode series. This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by world that opens visions for caring, relating and Kevin shorner Johnson at Elizabethtown College. We host a master of music education with an emphasis in peacebuilding, peacebuilding in the continuous steps of us together, somehow. thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care. Join us@musicpeacebuilding.com