music alone within such complex webs of signification and feeling; since Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the less violent but politically and economically turbulent changes of late socialism and postsocialism elsewhere in Southeast Europe, musical performance practices ranging from Bulgarian folk orchestras (Buchanan 2006) to Serbian turbo-folk (Rasmussen 2007) to Croatian rock bands (Baker 2010) have emerged as important sites of ambivalent engagement with state nationalism and majority identity politics. In focusing on affect within and beyond the ubiquitous yet ambiguous role that music has played in this region’s politics (as in others’), I offer new perspectives on the conflicting attachments to nation, state, and bureaucracy that are particularly common during regime change.
MUSIC AND DANGER
Ethnomusicologists have often celebrated music for opposing danger and for its ability to comfort during periods of uncertainty. Alan Lomax claimed that “the primary effect of music is to give the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work” (1959, 29). When scholars have, conversely, considered “the danger of music” (Taruskin 2008, 168), they have typically situated it within the reactionary ideologies of oppressive regimes. They highlight musicians’ resistance to authoritative measures, ranging from “suspicion” and “control” among Western Christian powers (168), to censorship of popular styles in countries such as the Soviet Union (Cushman 1995; Yurchak 2005) and Iran (Hemmasi 2011), to outright bans on anything considered “music” under regimes such as the Taliban (Baily [2001] 2003). Even scholars who illuminate music’s role in physical violence typically read this as misappropriation and extreme manipulation of an otherwise potentially soothing art (Cusick 2013).
This book also calls for serious attention to music’s capacities for an affect of danger that is coded positively within its artistic aesthetic. I argue that feelings of risk and excitement are also primary effects of music and that these may in fact register most intensely during times of relative comfort and security. This is so in part because the aesthetic and affective dimensions of danger often work beyond the sort of territorializing representation of the home that Lomax cites; they constitute part of what Deleuze and Guattari indeed identify as music’s “power of deterritorialization” ([1980] 1987, 309). This power, which Gary Tomlinson glosses as distinguishing musicking from the “refrain” (e.g., birdsong, a national anthem, “a frozen territoriality”; 2016, 167), lies in the fact that “the indexicality of the refrain, its alliance with territoriality, is seen to be subject […] to the transformations of the assemblage”; thus in deterritorialization “the effect of the refrain-as-actual […] is unmade by musicking-as-virtual” (168).
Yet the affect and aesthetic of musical danger may also enter in before territoriality. Their power is not restricted to unmaking the territorial claims of song; rather, musical deterritorialization links forward to the reterritorialization of the refrain (“voices may be reterritorialized on the distribution of the two sexes” or on other coordinates: racial, national, etc.; Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 308). Deleuze and Guattari state that music, in comparison to flags, “seems to have a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once more intense and much more collective, [which] explains the collective fascination exerted by music, and even the potentiality of the ‘fascist’ danger […]: music (drums, trumpets) draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to the abyss” (333). The abyss itself is dangerous, but music’s initial danger lies in its draw, in deterritorializing drives and desires before they are reterritorialized on a land as the object of military strategy.
This danger is simply the promise of change, of becoming. In tambura music, it is the allure of improvisatory freedom, the potential to push beyond the strictures of known refrains and traditional ways of performing; the abyss (both aesthetic and social) into which dangerous players risk falling is complete melodic and rhythmic chaos, “riding the brink of chaos,” in Grcevich’s words. Or, in Tomlinson’s words, musicking “affirms the becoming and change immanent in all repetition and signification” (2016, 168). Importantly, danger and affirmation require meta-affective and meta-significatory levels of awareness: systems of feeling and signifying on affects and significations. It is at these levels that affective block operates by affording a strategic ordering of stimuli and initial processing. While eliminating neither affective nor representational understandings (these are often dynamically dialectic, and the experienced salience of one is part of the internalization of the other), it variously privileges one or the other in ways that allow musickers (musicians, audience members, performance facilitators, etc.; see Small 1998) to make sense of and respond to forms of danger coded as positive or negative and often felt to be both simultaneously.
RACE, NATION, AND AFFECTIVE BLOCK
This book focuses on questions of danger and intimacy in experiences of nation and territory. It thereby traces the varying emergence, solidification, or weakening of social relations through actual sentiments (not just symbols) of closeness and the racialized desires and fears that often accompany them. In examining less the politics of identity than the affect of becoming, the book builds on recent scholarship that criticizes the reifying (Waterman 2002) and racializing (Gelbart 2010) effects of studying a people from the perspective of an assumed authenticity of identity (Jackson 2005) articulated in music. It joins other music studies (Yurchak 2005; Cimini 2010; Kielian-Gilbert 2010; Atanasovski 2015) in eschewing interpreting race and ethnicity as dualistic (subject-object) representations, performances, or imitations of identities by an agent and focuses instead on minoritarian becoming. Such a pursuit, while recognizing national imaginaries, nonetheless moves beyond them to situate racialized desires and anxieties in the intimate materialities of spatial and affective relations that music enables.
Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano have written that music, “as a key signifier of difference […]—in its wonder, in its transcendence, in its affective danger—historically conjures racial meaning” (2000, 1). Yet its “danger,” I argue, lies in its very capacity, through the speed and slowness of becoming, to unmoor its signifiers from ossified, representational narratives and ideologies. Thus, as Bohlman and Radano also suggest, “‘race’ defines not a fixity, but a signification saturated with profound cultural meaning and whose discursive instability heightens its affective power” (5). Within such instability “heavy and threatening materiality” (Foucault 1984, 11) weighs upon its moorings to signification, meaning, and rationality and opens them to the influence of feeling.
Lila Ellen Gray hints at affect’s relationship to discourse in a footnote to her study of fado’s affective politics: “Theorists of affect differ in […] the degree to which they mark affect as non-discursive, as ‘embodied,’ as an ‘intensity,’” but musical studies can perhaps most effectively “use affect here in co-constitutive relation to the discursive” (2014, 245n16). Drawing on the diverse theoretical work on affect of scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), Kathleen Stewart (2007), Lauren Berlant (2008), and Brian Massumi (2010), I argue for a similar relationship between the discursive and the affective as co-delimiting. I demonstrate affect’s partial assimilability to signification, particularly as the latter operates in discourse and other linguistic processes (and thus against affect’s complete autonomy). Yet I also argue for affect’s partial inassimilability, for its blocking (in aggregation) outside of the planes of conscious thought and of referential qualifications of emotion, for a remainder in which dangerous playing registers in a less-than-coded block of scary-exciting feeling. Eschewing affect theorists’ attraction to music “because they think it accommodates their vague ideas of intensities unfettered by sign, meaning, or agency” (Tomlinson 2016, 166), I examine the very fettering that mutually transpires between musical and linguistic signs and the affects that attach to them. Simultaneously, I consider the limits of this mooring and an agency for a resilience of feeling beyond representation.
Tomlinson criticizes Brian Massumi’s early and influential essay on the “autonomy of
