Resonant masculinities: affective co-production of sound, space, and gender in the everyday life of Belgrade, Serbia

ABSTRACT

Space in general is produced through the establishment of certain lines. There are straight lines that enable the affective closeness of certain objects to certain bodies, and there are lines that are aslant – queer lines. Queer lines are considered to be ‘empty’, ‘superfluous’, ‘opaque’, and even ‘deathly’ (in AIDS discourse), and made silent through various social technologies (‘the closet’). Synonyms for resonant include resounding, vibrant, deep, rich, clear, loud, booming, thunderous, deafening, and I would argue that it is exactly these terms that describe the straight line and space, as well as the sounds produced within that space. Indeed, the public (and private) life of heterosexuality is loud and clear, deafening for those who are queer. Analyzing three case studies – sound recordings from the hallway of my building, from Tašmajdan, one of the largest public parks in Belgrade, and ‘the sound of institutions’, such as the church bells in the downtown of Belgrade – I illustrate the complex ways in which straight masculinity and queer subjectivities are being produced in affective relations to the sounds within this space, complicating the boundaries between the private and public in the urban soundscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• sound
• space
• gender
• masculinity
• soundscape

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrija Filipović holds a PhD degree in Art and Media Theory from the University of Belgrade and he is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade. He is an author of monographs on Gilles Deleuze (2015) and Brian Massumi (2016), as well as a co-editor of European Theories in Former Yugoslavia: Trans-theory Relations between the Global and Local Discourses (2015) and The Crisis in the Humanities: Transdisciplinary Solutions (2016). He has written on music (New Sound: International Magazine for Music), contemporary art (Kultura, SAJ: Serbian Architectural Journal), philosophy and aesthetics (AM: Journal for Art and Media Studies, Philosophy and Society), and queer theory (Serbian Political Thought, ProFemina). He is currently working on a number of papers dealing with the aesthetics and politics of queer art in Yugoslavia and Serbia, as well as constructions of queer bodies and identities in various other discourses (medical, juridical, historical, etc.) in Yugoslav and ex-Yugoslav space. He is also working on a book dealing with transindividuation of art assemblages.

Notes

1. The visibility/representation matrix, as I understand it here, is ontologically founded on the quadruple exclusion of difference through identity, similarity, analogy, and opposition (Deleuze, 2001), and I connect it to the liberal thought and activism that argues for recognition of LGBT identities, and their inclusion and assimilation in heterosexually defined society. There are other lines of thinking and doing queerness, spanning from the so-called negative, antisocial queer theory (for concise and critical overview see Bernini, 2017) to the so-called relational, positive line most often connected with Deleuze (for example, see Nigianni & Storr, 2009), that are markedly different in approach to the questions of subjectivization and difference/desire than the liberal representative tradition. I align myself with the latter in this paper.

2. I make the distinction, as problematic as it may be, following Foucault's concepts of biopolitics (2008) and technologies of self (1988), between the concepts of bio-aural-technology and bio-melo-technology, where bio-melo-technology describes the politics of uses of what is perceived as organized sound in the form of music. In contradistinction to bio-melo-technology, bio-aural-technology describes the politics of what is perceived as non-organized sound in the form of background noise of everyday life, or what is known as soundscape in the relatively young field of soundscape studies (García Quiñones, Kassabian, & Boschi, 2013; Pinch & Bijsterveld, 2012; Schafer, 1994).

3. With the concept of affective soundscape, and with a particular emphasis on simultaneity of signification and non-signification of matter, I am trying to ‘part company with the linguistic model at the basis of the most widespread concepts of coding (almost always Saussuian in inspiration, often with Lacanian inflection) and find a semiotics willing to engage with continuity’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 4, emphasis mine). In other words, I am trying to find an approach that would not be founded on a particular linguistic model, as linguistically based models quickly introduce problematic oppositions between discursive and non-discursive and erase any other materiality except the materiality of sign (see Massumi, 2002, p. 2).

4. The most important being nation and tradition, which assume heterosexual reproductive individuals and heterosexual nuclear families as their foundation. For the ways in which the nation and tradition relate to the questions of queerness through the lens of the Serbian Orthodox Church see Pavasović Trošt & Slootmaeckers (2015, pp. 164–167).

5. The dominant position of St. Mark's Church can be clearly seen on the official page of the municipality Tašmajdan Park belongs to, as well as on the Tašmajdan Park Wikipedia page: http://www.palilula.org.rs/o-paliluli/znamenitosti/tasmajdan.html?pismo=lat and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C5%A1majdan_Park, accessed on 20 January 2017.

6. The history of LGBT activism and Pride Parades in Serbia is long and their politics are complex, starting with the first Parade in 2001 when the LGBT community tried to organize one after the fall of Slobodan Milošević and subsequent democratic changes, but which ended in bloody violence for the participants, the hiatus of almost a decade until the next one (including the one I wrote about), until the Parades in the last few years that were either banned by the authorities for fear of violence against the participants or held in more or less relaxed atmosphere under the pressure from European Union. Pride Parade and activist politics are complex in the sense that various organizations which participated in the organization of Parades had their own agendas and outlook in regard to the political and social effects and outcomes of Parades, as well as in the sense of Parades’ and activist organizations’ recognition of the multiplicity of the queer community. See Gočanin (2014); Knežević (2014); Bilić and Dioli (2016); Radoman (2016); Bilić (2016).

7. This coming together or densification of signifying and non-signifying flows of matter at the intersection of violence and masculinity I am trying to describe is close to what Kassabian terms distributed subjectivity, ‘a nonindividual subjectivity, a field, but a field over which power is distributed unevenly and unpredictably, over which differences are not only possible but required, and across which information flows, leading to affective responses’ (2013, p. xxv). More importantly, the concept of distributive subjectivity should be thought of as a sort of rhizome that cuts across various types of beings: ‘Humans, institutions, machines, and molecules are all nodes in the network, nodes of different densities’ (p. xxv).

8. Although not a topic of this paper, the sense of smell can also be a rich source of information regarding the rhythmic lives of a building's inhabitants, especially regarding their social and economic status. For example, the smell of cooking meals that enters my apartment even through the closed front doors points to the fact that some of the tenants are paying very close attention to their budget, as they do their cooking at the times when the price of electricity is lower (after midnight). Also, cooking smells intensify on certain holidays related to the Orthodox Church, leading to the conclusion that a larger number of the building's inhabitants are Orthodox Christian, or at least follow the rhythms of the Orthodox Church calendar.

9. As Canagarajah (2012, p. 260) states, autoethnography is:

the form of research conducted and represented from the point of view of the self, whether studying one's own experiences or those of one's community. Whereas traditional positivistic research traditions perceive anything based on the self as subjective and distorting valid knowledge claims, autoethnography values the self as a rich repository of experiences and perspectives that are not easily available to traditional approaches … It frankly engages with the situatedness of one's experiences, rather than suppressing them.

Canagarajah further notes that while this method has certain shortcomings, especially the danger of ‘unified and knowing subject’, it also has a ‘resistant dimension’ (p. 261) in the sense that allows those subjects that have been an object of study to start speaking in their own name. That is, instead of being an object of representation, subject through autoethnography can regain their own agency. As Canagarajah writes ‘this is especially important for members of marginalized communities who lack the resources and publishing outlets to articulate their knowledge and interests’ (p. 262).

10. According to Massumi an emotion is:

subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. (2002, p. 28)