Sonic encounters and intensive politics: The immanent emergence and structuration of affective publics at a live music event,and beyond

Abstract

The article concerns the ways sound can afford the formation and recomposition of affective publics by acting directly on bodies, prior to the discursive framing of acoustic experience. In particular, it focuses on a violent altercation that broke out during a live hip hop concert in Poland in 2009, arguing that the deployment of sound might have affectively primed the audience to participate in the incident. In this sense, sound is conceived as a complex of intensive forces that pass across and in-between bodies triggering immanent processes of emergence and structuration, thus affording incipient and fragmentary publics to come into being.

Introduction

Across cultures music is often employed as a means of bringing people together: establishing or consolidating social bonds by participating in and sharing of sonic experience. Music, then, can be said to afford publics to come into being by serving as an “organizing material” for collective attention, feeling, thought, and behavior (DeNora, 2003). In other words, music—as a sonic event—has the capacity to act as a resource for reconfiguring bodily conduct and modes of thinking in ways that facilitate a sense of togetherness and belonging among a particular population. Musical publics, therefore, always inhabit a double inscription: in bodies as well as in structures of representation.

The most evident instance of this double inscription occurs at live music events when people assemble in a shared physical space and directly participate in a collective acoustic experience. However, contrary to idealized notions of music as a unifying force that overcomes all divisions, the socio-spatialities of performance, in fact, comprise a differential field of activity replete with incongruent or event antagonistic tendencies. Georgina Born (2013), for instance, distinguishes between three types of “co-present musical or sonic publics” at this kind of events. First is the “agentive, solidary, and politicized” public which is forged with the aim of initiating a larger social transformation with implications beyond the musical sphere (p. 37). Second, there is the “intimate” public intended to facilitate either an integration or transformation of participant’s social identities. This may entail a collective withdrawal from the larger world outside of the performance space and drawing a sense of togetherness directly from participation in the musical or sonic event. And third, it is possible to identify the “minimal type of musical public” that results from “synchronous participation in performance or acoustic space” (p. 38). This kind of public is precipitated by bodies moving together and does not amount to affiliation. Therefore, in most accounts, it is considered as politically and socially inconsequential. As Born notes, only the first two types “are held to matter: they are credited with powers either to reaffirm existing boundaries of political affiliation or social identity formation, or to initiate or catalyze their reconfiguration—although no such change can be assured” (p. 38). The third one, in turn, is rendered negligible.

This assessment reflects a prevalent tenet of cultural theory according to which musical or sonic experience needs to be cognitively processed and invested with meaning in order to become politically relevant and induce transformative effects in the social. Underlying this framework is a hegemonic political imaginary that conceives power only in terms of coercion or consent. In other words, both preservation and alteration of the social order are presumed to take place either by imposition from above or through agreement from below (Beasley-Murray, 2010). Consequently, in reference to musical experience, the felt intensity of sound is reduced to a symbolic struggle over its meaning. And while the reception of music, unlike many other cultural forms, has always been considered to be inherently embodied, it usually concerns a discursively mediated body. Put differently, the corporeal dimension of musical and sonic experience is always derived as a secondary residue to the meaningful structure in which it is embedded in. This, in turn, obscures the material dimension of sound and, in consequence, diminishes its social and political effects.

In the course of this article, I want to argue for the constitutive role of the third type of musical public, one that comes together in a sonic encounter, connected by the intensities of listening. Consequently, my approach posits that music must be felt in order to be invested with meaning, focusing primarily on the processes of attunement and resonance with sound and how they afford the emergence of incipient, fragmentary publics prior to the discursive framing of collective experience. These publics are affective, meaning that they are afforded by intensive relations that are sensed, but not yet processed as intersubjective emotions or thoughts (Papacharissi, 2015). And since sound has the capacity to engage bodies on sensory and pre-cognitive level, it can play a crucial part in bringing this kind of publics into being.

In order to elucidate the sonic processes that can coalesce or dissipate affective publics, I will examine an incident that took place at a live music event in Poland in 2009. It involved a prominent rapper, Ryszard “Peja” Andrzejewski, ¹ who was provoked by an offensive gesture from one of the audience members in the course of performance and, in consequence, incited people to assault him. The rapper’s hateful address and its violent aftermath were caught on cameras by other participants and, on the next day, these recordings proliferated in the media causing a public outcry. While most of the coverage focused on Peja’s words, claiming that it was the content of his speech that caused violence, I will attempt to demonstrate that the response was, in fact, contingent on the emergence of affective publics afforded, to a large extent, by the circulation of sonic intensities.

My analysis hinges on what can be called “secondhand data documenting experiences of bodily affectivity” (Knudsen and Stage, 2015, p. 8). In other words, I will attempt to grasp the affective dimension of the event from audiovisual and textual materials, including recordings made by participants during the incident in question, footage from the monitoring cameras installed within the venue, and subsequent media reports, mostly in television and newspapers. However, affect—conceptualized according to the post-Spinozist ontology developed by Deleuze (1988) and Massumi (2002)—refers not to tangible entities that populate the actual world, but to virtual potentialities that facilitate their emergence. Consequently, affects cannot be accessed directly, but only through the qualities that arise from them. This entails, as Blackman and Venn (2010) argue, new ways of being attentive to the empirical materials, in order to account for the non-linear dynamics of emergence inherent in each event. Therefore, the mediated registrations of collective bodily activity will serve me to retroductively retrace the rhythms of resonance or interference of affective forces that informed the violent outburst during Peja’s concert. Accordingly, I will start from ideological representations and gradually move “backwards,” making my way to the underlying structures of powers and their antecedent affective encounters (Massumi, 2015, p. 93).

In what follows, then, I will, first of all, describe the event, specifying its setting, course of action, and consequences. This reconstruction will primarily rely on the discursive framing that ensued in both audiovisual and print media. I will argue, however, that this framing constituted a regulatory intervention aimed at restoring institutional authority. By focusing on the linguistic dimension of the event, it reaffirmed authorized set of relations between already-constituted terms—a sovereign performer and susceptible publics—indicting Peja as a direct originator of violence. The coverage and resulting disciplinary action, however, were predicated on excluding multiple affective relations that traversed these fixed categories. Therefore, in subsequent sections, I will attempt to retroduce these affective processes by focusing on sound as material, vibrational force that passes across and in-between bodies, intensifying or deintensifying their potential encounters. This will allow me to account for the immanent emergence and ongoing structuration of affective publics that contributed to the unfortunate outcome. Finally, I will show how the media acted as conduits for affect generated in the sonic encounter, redistributing it across different layers of connections and engagements. In this way, the residue of the incipient musical publics is carried on and resonates throughout the social, indicating a significant political potential of sound.

Framing the event: words that incite violence

During his performance at a large music festival in 2009, the veteran rapper Peja became increasingly annoyed by one of the audience members. “You immediately notice such person, because he is standing still while everybody else is moving,” he confessed in an interview in the aftermath of the incident (tvn24.pl, 2009). However, what really enraged Peja was not the demonstrative indifference per se, but the fact that the individual kept flipping his middle finger directly toward the performer. Provoked by the gesture, Peja responded with a series of expletives aimed at the offender and then addressed the crowd by saying, “You know what to do, eh? You know what to do with him, eh? Fuck him up!” Some of the participants followed his call, leading to a violent altercation among the assembled concertgoers. As the security attempted to break the fight, Peja kept on shouting, “This is how losers end up,” and refused to call off the assailants when admonished by his crew. “Everything on my cost,” he exclaimed, apparently satisfied with the outcome (Waldemar951, 2009). Little did he know at the time that he would be compelled to deliver on this promise.

Things escalated quickly henceforth, as the video recording of the incident, captured by other concertgoers on their mobile phones, made it to the mass media. The coverage mostly hinged on exaggerated and clichéd ideas about hip hop that were aimed at stirring up the public. For instance, TVN, one of the most prominent commercial television channels in Poland, run a special feature highlighting Peja’s troubled childhood, as he experienced deaths of both his parents and lived in severe poverty, struggling with substance abuse and propensity to violence (uwaga.tvn.pl, 2010). This kind of depictions, reiterated in press and other media, reinforced the link between hip hop and the subaltern classes—portrayed as vulgar and dangerous, posing a threat to the established values that maintain the social order.

The moral panics were further exacerbated when Liroy, ² one of the pioneers of hip hop in Poland, attempted to justify Peja’s reaction within a subcultural code of behavior. When asked to comment on the incident for TVN, he simply stated that the offender got what he deserved because, according to the “code of the street,” aggression should always be met with aggression. “We are the guys from the hood and the response was adequate,” he concluded (Policyjni.pl, 2009). This statement effectively forced other performers to take a stance, either in favor or against Peja, introducing a series of divisions within the hip hop community in Poland. Furthermore, it prompted a discussion on the norms of behavior of public figures, with media personalities and invited experts expressing their concerns about Peja’s behavior. Ultimately, the controversy faded with the ruling of the court 6 months later. The rapper was found guilty of incitement to violence and fined with approximately 17,000 PLN, ³ including a donation for a local Centre for Social Integration and a compensation for a teenager who accidentally found himself among the enraged crowd and suffered minor injuries.

In their accounts of the incident, both the media and the judiciary focused predominantly on the content of Peja’s speech. In the validation of the sentence, the judge particularly stressed that “if it was not for the words he uttered on stage, the battery and the resulting bodily harm would not have happened” (GazetaLubuska, 2010). Similarly, the media often framed the incident in terms of encouraging or impelling people to perform a “lynch on a teenager.” Peja, therefore, was viewed as the originator of violent behavior which seemed to result directly from his speech and the way his words affected the listeners.

Underlying this line of thinking is a presupposition of spontaneous consent given by the crowd to the general direction of action suggested by the rapper. This consent is purportedly predicated either on Peja’s notability as a rapper and, by extension, his position as role model for young people that afforded him powerful influence over the audience or on the stereotypical view of hip hop as a lifestyle coincident with anti-social behavior, including the glorification of violence. In other words, Peja’s speech was thought to invoke a particular set of ideas, beliefs, and values, inherent in the concept of “street life,” thereby persuading some of the assembled to violate accepted norms of conduct. His words, therefore, initiated a process that afforded a counterpublic to come into being (Warner, 2005). The heterogeneous and, to a certain extent, accidental aggregation of participants was transformed into a collectivity in the moment of being addressed by Peja. However, his manner of speaking, characterized by the influx of expletives and aggressive expression, socially marked this emergent collectivity, delineating it from a larger public. This tension was further reproduced when the video recording of the incident leaked to the media, prompting public discussion proper. The exchange of opinions, however, proceeded within the dominant mode of address which reinstated social hierarchy, ultimately legitimized by the court ruling.

What is striking in this account is that causality is predicated on the circulation of meaning within a symbolic sphere, abstracted from the embodied and embedded experience of live music event. Privileging the discursive effects over the sonic ones allows to create an illusion of sovereignty. In Brian Massumi’s (2002) terms, the “field of immanence is interrupted by an operation of transcendence that institutes a regime of intrinsic-extrinsic relationality,” enabling the execution of disciplinary action (p. 79). Specifically, multiple and complex affective feedback loops between bodies implicated in the sonic encounter are confined into a linear sequence of emotions and represented as causal relations between identifiable parties. Immanent variation is thus captured into a pre-established set of positions, like the performer and the audience and the perpetrator and the victim. While, according to Massumi, this act of codification is purely fictional, predicated on the stoppage and retroactive ordering of the event, it is, nevertheless, “an effectively regulating fiction” (p. 78). For it allows to attribute blame and, in consequence, confirms the authority of state institutions that decide and execute disciplinary action.

Offering an analysis of the event that is not limited to reproducing the structures of power, then, would require acknowledging the underlying intensive forces that produce hierarchical forms of social organization. Instead of preconceiving a sovereign subject commanding docile public, such an approach would put emphasis on how collectivities emerge out of a differential field of affective encounters. This can be accomplished by giving primacy to the materiality of sound, as it directly affects bodies’ movements and intensities of feeling, affording an incipient public to come into being. That does not mean, however, that it was the music, and not Peja’s words, that precipitated the violent outburst. In fact, no music in itself can be said to directly cause violence (Johnson & Cloonan, 2009). Rather, my claim is that the effects of Peja’s speech were contingent on a series of corporeal processes catalyzed by the sonic intensity of the event. This kind of explanation precludes linear causality and, instead, focuses on the multiplicity of affective resonances, operating beneath the level of discourse, which contributed to varying extents and to the emergence of the final outcome.

Sonic encounters: listening, sensation and transduction

Within the dominant account of the incident, professed by the media and the judiciary, agency is imagined exclusively in terms of conveying a message and, therefore, conferred upon the speaker alone. The emergent public, in turn, is rendered reactive, its capacities reduced to giving consent and inertly enacting Peja’s will. Consequently, their collective agency is dismissed because it falls outside the preconceived modes of public engagement, which are thought to almost exclusively consist in reading and its corollaries (Warner, 2005, p. 123). This issue is taken up by Kate Lacey (2013) who, in turn, argues for recognizing listening as collective activity that affords a public to come into being. Conceived as attentive and anticipatory communicative disposition, listening entails connectivity and openness in relation to others, facilitating collective accord via a state of cognitive readiness to participate in the discursive address. In this sense, listening can be considered as a basic precondition for political action. Lacey’s account, therefore, allows us to rethink the relationship between the speaker and listener in terms of resonance, that is, as involving mutual implication and co-constitution, rather than unidirectional transmission of signal from the source to the receiver. In this sense, for Peja’s speech to induce any effect, people had to exhibit attentiveness and openness to being affected, enabling his words to resonate with their collective dispositions. Therefore, the violent altercation was dependent on a double activity of attending and being attended to that created the space of intersubjectivity from which collective action emerged.

Despite expanding the notion of agency to include non-linear resonances, Lacey (2013) insists on the primacy of representation in the constitution of the public. In her account, listening entails being attentive specifically in relation to discursive address, thus neglecting the material contingency of sound. However, the activity of listening includes and, in fact, is dependent on sensing changes in the pressure of molecules in the surrounding environment. In other words, what it is primarily attentive to are vibrations. To understand how listening affords the formation of publics, then, we need to approach sound as vibrational force that passes across bodies triggering a series of effects within and modulations in-between them (Cox, 2011; Eidsheim, 2015; Gallagher, 2016; Goodman, 2010). Such an approach considers sounds not as external, knowable objects in the world to be decoded and interpreted, but in terms of dynamic vibrational events that arise through complex material interactions within particular spatial, temporal and interactional contexts.

As vibrations result from interactions of matter and energy, sounds are emitted by almost anything in the environment that comes into contact with anything else, and once emitted they are affected by almost anything in that environment (Horwitz, 2012). These changes in the degree of sonic intensity can trigger effects on the surface and within our bodies—from galvanic skin responses, to changes in the heart rate or blood pressure, to altering our attention and feelings—as well as induce a variety of behavioral responses to other bodies, human and non-human alike. Therefore, vibrational events can by analyzed as arrangements of sonic intensities that immanently modulate affective relationships traversing boundaries that delineate both individual and collective bodies.

In other words, sounds do not just bring together an already existing set of bodies; rather, they pass through them, allowing for movements and connections within and in-between bodies and across the environment. As Greg Goodale (2011) puts it, “Sounds enter into and disturb our wholeness. To be permeated by sound is to lose one’s sense of unity and to be unable to differentiate one’s self from the outside world and from the others” (p. 55). Therefore, sound addresses the listener not as a whole, but primarily through the body’s sensory channels that are able to detect vibration. These sensations accumulated in the body are integrated not into a full-fledged reflective subjectivity, but into a nascent “state of intensive readiness for reflex response” (Massumi, 2002, p. 74). It can be called a sonic mode of address, one that activates embodied dispositions prior to the imposition of meaning.

This is particularly evident during a popular music performance which entails immersion and surrendering oneself to the flow of sonic intensities on the part of the listener. Self-consciousness is a negative condition of the experience of live music, creating an interference that inhibits seamless participation in the unfolding event. Consequently, the possibilities for thoughtful consideration are minimized during a live music concert due to the application of high volume of sound and the stress on its rhythmic qualities. As Seth Horwitz (2012) indicates, immersing ourselves in loudness activates our sympathetic nervous system, providing a temporary rush of excitatory neurotransmitters that results in a heightened level of arousal in our brains. The regular timing of sounds, in turn, can set certain parts of our brains in sync, entraining us to a single rhythm in a way that intensifies pleasure and creates a sense of togetherness. Furthermore, every movement produces a vibration, and every vibration has a sound which, even if inaudible to the human ear, transforms the sensory environment we inhabit (Kapchan, 2015, p. 34). Both the emission and reception of sound are thus integrated, embodied, and interactive practices that co-jointly afford what Jocelyne Guilbaut (2010) calls “public intimacies,” that is, affective relationships and spatial proximities that develop between the performing artists, the artists and their audience, and the audience members themselves.

According to the vibrational account of sound, then, by listening we partake in the propagation and exchange of energy through and across matter, which includes, but is not limited to, the interactions between human bodies. Therefore, listening can be reconceived as a shared activity of moving and being moved by sonic intensities. This does not entail passivity. On the contrary, by becoming a listener, we actively participate in the detection and transfer of acoustic energy in the environment (Horwitz, 2012). In other words, agency is directly relational, it involves a certain “margin of maneuverability” as we navigate the unfolding event acting with, alongside, and against a multiplicity of forces that enter into complex patterns of resonance and interference (Massumi, 2015). This approach cuts across many persistent divisions. For example, it precludes separating passivity from activity and, consequently, collapses the division of hearing and listening; it also problematizes the distinction between audiences and publics. In this sense, the acts of listening are contingent on the bodies’ capacities to affect and be affected which always go together. Therefore, as Deborah Kapchan (2015) notes, listening acts are always performative: “they do not simply represent sound, as waves reach the ears and are relayed to the brain, but they transduce these sound waves, changing the waves, the body and the environment in the process” (p. 36).

The notion of transduction refers to “the movement from one energy state to another, either within or between larger classes of energy” (Kahn, 2013, p. 7). As such, it can describe the transformations that the sound undergoes as it traverses media, adapting to and taking on various material qualities (Helmreich, 2015). Within sound studies, the concept of transduction was employed by Jonathan Sterne (2003) to account for the history of sound-reproduction technologies which, in his own words, “turn sound into something else and that something else back into sound” (p. 22). For instance, telephone turns voice into electricity and then back to voice; radio does the same, but uses waves instead of wires; and the phonograph changes sound through a process of inscription in tinfoil, wax, or some other surface, and afterward converts those inscriptions back into sounds. However, Sterne begins his examination with an ear phonautograph, the earliest known device for recording sound, that “used an excised human middle ear as a mechanism to transduce sound” (p. 31). Consequently, he claims that the functioning of the tympanic membrane provided a point of departure for all subsequent sound-reproduction technologies, acting as an exemplary process of transduction in itself.

Following on these recognitions, Julian Henriques (2003) argues that the human body can be considered as a “sensory transducer” which converts sonic energy into bodily currents of affective and kinetic energy. In other words, Henriques extends the concept of transduction to point to the connections between “physical and social circuits, flows and fields” generated by the circulation of sonic intensities: with ourselves through the sensation itself, with other people through the shared activity, with the sensory modalities of the event, and with the multiple times, spaces, and sonic traditions that comprise the acoustic experience (pp. 467–468).

Consequently, it is possible to envision live music performance in similar terms, as transducing the sonic intensities that comprise the ambience of the event into a variety of corporeal modes of attention and affective relations that co-jointly afford publics to emerge. The concept of transduction, therefore, can be adopted to inform an alternative analytical framework for elaborating social and political potential of popular music, one that centers on non-linear sonic resonances between bodies.

Performing the refrain

In contrast to the private intimacies of listening to recorded music which—more often than not—pertain to individual experience, the public intimacies of live music performance are inherently collective, conditioned by the presence and mutual interaction with others (Guilbaut, 2010). Participation in such events involves a variety of affective and sensual contacts between people, as they jump or dance together in close physical proximity, sing and scream their lungs out, and give in to the spontaneous synchronicity of bodies in motion. These emergent forms of “muscular bonding” (McNeill, 1995) can induce a state of arousal that facilitates feelings of pleasure, comfort, and joy. Additionally, they engender a strong feeling of togetherness, what Guilbaut (2010) calls a “visceral sense of belonging” (p. 23), resulting not from the circulation of discourse, but directly from concerted action. Therefore, the very presence of bodies in a shared acoustic space induces the processes of affective attunement which initiate the first stirrings of a public coming into being. A heterogeneous mass of singularities starts to coalesce and act together without forming a unified subject per se. This incipient and fragmentary public forms prior to the cognitive framing of the event via the sheer intensity of connections, as the participating bodies pass from one intensive state to the next. In this sense, sound acts as the catalyzer, intensifying and deintensifying potential encounters within the physical environment in which it is emitted and propagated.

At a live music event, sound orients everyone’s attention and drives every gesture. Hip hop’s sonic capacities in particular—its rhythmicity and bass-heavy sound—foster visceral responses and embodied modes of engagement that afford the formation of affective publics (Rose, 1994). The footage from security cameras provides a glimpse into its emergence at Peja’s concert, before the violent incident occurred (tvn24.pl, 2009). People were syncing with the music: most held their arms in the air and moved them up and down to the loud beat; some jumped rhythmically. There is a clear pattern to their collective motion, suggesting connectedness and resonance. In a sense, they have already formed a listening public by the virtue of moving and being moved together, as their bodies responded to and transduced the flow of sonic intensities.

However, the security camera also captured one person who did not move in harmony with the rest. Instead, he was just standing motionless, with his hands raised high in the air. The quality of the image makes it impossible to verify whether he was, in fact, making offensive gestures, but the very lack of motion creates a disturbance among the waves of concerted movement. This already marked him as an “outsider,” someone out of tune with the music and, by extension, with other participants. Introducing an interference in the sync, he impeded the flow of energy posing a threat to the visceral sense of belonging to a larger collectivity that results from sonically afforded interactions.

When Peja’s address occurred, therefore, a public was already affectively urged into being and primed for passionate participation in the event. As Richard Elliott (2013) notes, people come to listen to live music performance already fired up, in a state of heightened receptivity, and ready to give themselves over to affect and to engage in its modulation. This propensity is unlocked in a sonic encounter with music via a combination of loudness and rhythmicity that ushers bodies into sync. The unfolding of the event, then, has less to do with music’s formal properties and more with its affective capacities which are always relational, contingent on its deployment in particular spatiotemporal and interactional contexts.

In this sense, Peja’s power to command this incipient public hinged on the affective feedback loops that generated the ongoing structuration of collective corporeal dispositions. However, each body also brings differing capacities into the encounter, conditioned both by the presence of other bodies and by the history of previous interactions. Affective traces accrue in reflex, habit, memory, and so on (Massumi, 2002, 2015). In other words, as participating bodies transduce the flow of energy, different zones of intensity emerge. Consequently, people reacted to Peja’s speech with a wide range of expressions: some gave in to violence; some limited their support to the encouraging shouts and chants; some remained indifferent; and some became frightened by the unfolding of the event. The final outcome, therefore, was conditioned by a combination of entrainment afforded by the transduction of sonic intensities and the composition of emergent publics. That is to say, there never was any unified collective subject that acted violently; rather, incipient and fragmentary affective publics comprised of differentially habituated bodies involved in mutual becoming.

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the “refrain” can further elaborate this process. It refers to a specifically sonorous mode of organization that is neither symbolic nor representational, but primarily concerns the way movement occurs. In this view, a body—be it human or non-human, individual, or collective—is conceived as a composition of habitually patterned forces that sustains itself via its capacities to affect and be affected by the forces in its immediate environment. In other words, a body is always a multiplicity and, consequently, possesses both interior and exterior milieus. What is important is that for Deleuze and Guattari, milieus are not spatial but vibratory. They define them as heterogeneous blocks of space–time formed by “the periodic repetition of the component” (p. 313). In other words, it is the rhythm that imparts the milieu with its only form of organization, producing difference that sets it apart from other milieus.

All milieus have their own rhythms that interact with each other creating complex patterns of resonance and interference. The refrain, in turn, allows for the “territorialization” of milieus and rhythms. It marks out a territory by looping affective forces into a variable temporal pattern of entrainment that affords them consistency. However, as a dynamic arrangement of forces, the territory does not establish fixed borders between inside and outside; rather, it exists in unceasing motion, continually passing into something else while also maintaining an internal organization. All territories, therefore, will exhibit two opposed tendencies: one toward stasis and one toward change.

The concept of the refrain provides another way to grasp how affective publics are continually territorialized and deterritorialized by the flow of sonic intensities. Before he explicitly instructed people what to do with the offender, Peja attempted to humiliate him with a series of profanities, and then intoned a derogatory song to the melody of a well-known football chant. The crowd joyfully joined in. Singing together in unison is a perfect example of how the refrain works via channeling and transduction of energy in a sonic encounter. By initiating the chant Peja looped the affective relation between him and the offender back onto the audience to assert entrainment, as his body passed from one affective state to another. The rhythms organizing the event became expressive of Peja’s growing anger and, therefore, territorialized. Various milieus locked in to a common periodicity creating resonance that exhorted the rapper to deliver his call to violence.

The power of his address, however, was contingent on the differential of forces comprising the event. In other words, to induce the desired effect, it necessitated a level of intensity that would pass the threshold at which collective patterns of behavior change (Protevi, 2009). This virtual threshold, in turn, encompasses all present and past interactions that informed the event. For instance, previous affiliations with football fandom might have affectively primed selected individuals and collectives to engage in the chanting and violence. However, with over 10,000 people attending the festival at which Peja performed, the composition of bodies—each bringing its own set of habitual dispositions to the event, corresponding to various degrees of engagement and readiness to participate in its unfolding—had to be quite diverse, creating frictions between different milieus. Ultimately, only a handful of participants joined in on the refrain.

Thus, the sound’s capacity to territorialize or deterritorialize affective publics is always materially and relationally contingent (Eidsheim, 2015). That is to say, the violent outcome of the event was not determined by Peja’s words alone, but afforded by how listeners connected with his music, his voice, and verbal expression, and with the sonic ambience generated by themselves in that particular spatial, temporal, and interactional context. To account for the event’s further unfolding, therefore, it is crucial to examine how the affective feedback loops extend beyond the direct embodied encounters between participants at the concert, to encompass the media as well as other social formations and institutions.

Media, affect, and the ongoing structuration of publics

An unfolding event never really comes to an end; rather, its residue is carried on via encounters with different bodies, informing subsequent occurrences. According to Richard Elliott (2013), the corollary of any musical event, then, is that “something sticks: a memory in the bodies of those present; reports in the media; a sound recording which carries the residue of the event forward to other unfolding in the bodies of future listeners” (p. 82). In other words, the intensity of the event is sustained and passed on as sensory traces accrete in bodies and afford future affective responses. As we have seen, the outbreak of violence at Peja’s concert engendered a multiplicity of such traces that perpetuated affective flows and marked bodies in different ways, informing the event’s reception and, concurrently, expanding and recomposing its publics. Much of this work has been done by the media in their endless replaying of the footage from the concert, circulated as a means to comment on Peja’s behavior during that night, usually in a decrying manner. The repetitive pace of these broadcasts created a refrain that reterritorialized affective relationships around a new pattern. The rhythm of the event was no longer expressive of Peja’s anger; rather, it conveyed public resentment. In this sense, the media acted as conduits for intensive forces, picking up on the affective traces of the event and looping them back, amplified by the arrangement of images and sounds (Massumi, 2015). The emergence and recomposition of subsequent publics was, therefore, afforded not by means of media representations, but—as Zizi Papacharissi (2015) argues—by their ability to “sustain affective feedback loops that generate and reproduce affective patterns of relating to others that are further reproduced as affect—that is, intensity that has not yet been cognitively processed as feeling, emotion, or thought” (p. 23).

It is impossible to trace the entirety of affective flows following Peja’s fateful concert, as they proliferate through multiple channels in an increasingly vast and complex relational field. However, following Georgina Born (2011), music’s affective capacities to afford publics to come into being can be mapped onto four imbricated yet distinct layers of connection and engagement with others. She argues that music, first of all, engenders its own social relations by enabling a variety of contacts between bodies that comprise the microsocialities of performance or site. Second, music can also assemble people together into imagined communities based on a variety of identifications, giving rise to fandoms, scenes, subcultures, neotribes, and the like. Furthermore, music’s effects are traversed by other, already existing social formations, incorporating and refracting the relations of class, gender, race, and so on, which comprise a third layer of sociality. And finally, music is also affiliated with a variety of institutional arrangements that condition and facilitate its production, reproduction, and transformation.

Each layer comprises an incredibly complex network of relations on its own, and there are a lot of works within popular music studies that deal specifically with these different forms of sociality. However, a thorough analysis of each layer is certainly beyond the scope of this article. What I would like to do instead is to signal some ways in which the intensity of the live music event disseminated into other layers, articulating them together via affective feedback loops. For this would be indicative of the continuous process of immanent restructuring of publics as the event unfolded beyond its immediate context.

We have already seen how the sonic dimension of Peja’s performance afforded the emergence of public intimacies, creating a visceral sense of belonging between participating bodies. However, throughout the interviews following the incident, Peja repeatedly insisted that his actions stemmed from him being faithful to his fans and attempting to earn their respect. From adopting exceptionally strong language, to intonating a chant used at football stadiums to offend the adversaries, to resorting to violence as an appropriate response to provocative behavior, Peja acted as he thought his own audience was expecting him to act. When asked during the trial why he didn’t let the security deal with the offender, he answered that “there is a certain hip hop ethos, and calling security could have been interpreted as snitching” (as cited in Sałwacka, 2010, p. 2). The imagined communities of hip hop and, to a certain extent, also football fandom, therefore, serve as vital points of reference in attempts to channel the flow of affect in the aftermath of the event.

Furthermore, both of these identifications involve explicit class and gender distinctions. The emergence of hip hop in Poland coincided with a transition to free-market economy, after the fall of communism in 1989. With its vulgar language and bleak accounts of post-transitional reality that stressed poverty, unemployment, and lack of opportunities, the genre soon came to be associated with frustrated youth who suffered economic and social exclusion under the new capitalist order (Pasternak-Mazur, 2009). Peja, in particular, has been known to employ and capitalize on these associations, making his own background into an integral part of his musical career. Hailing from a poor urban neighborhood in Poznań, he never forgot his working class roots and in the popular imaginary figured primarily as the voice of the marginalized poor, articulating their values and sentiments. This style of hip hop, moreover, is often associated with excessive expressions of masculinity. Depicting everyday struggles and challenges of urban life, it mostly focuses on specifically male forms of camaraderie and rivalry, endorsing an ideal of manhood based on such values as physical strength, toughness, aggression, thrill-seeking, and a sense of superiority. Peja’s expression during the live performance thus indicates a hegemonic form of masculinity that articulates together strands from working class as well as male dominated hip hop and football cultures, including embodied knowledges and habitual patterns of behavior. Consequently, the occasional support he received in the aftermath of the incident almost exclusively hinged on affiliations with these social categories, indicating that the flow of affect was modified by class and gender divisions.

Finally, the dissemination of affect into the institutional context can be seen, for instance, in the response from the local authorities. The live music event was part of the annual festival in celebration of the city of Zielona Góra, held under auspices of its mayor. The violent incident has, therefore, cast a shadow on the public image of the city, prompting its officials to accuse the organizer of failing to properly secure the event (gazetalubuska.pl, 2009). Furthermore, the mayor of Zielona Góra issued a formal letter to other authorities informing them of the incident and warning against organizing Peja’s concerts in their municipalities. In light of this, some rappers expressed concerns that this could affect the entire hip hop community, preventing other artist from performing at public events in the future (wp.pl, 2009). The extent to which the authorities went in order to shift the blame, therefore, might suggest that their response was affectively primed by the intensity of media coverage and the concomitant public outcry.

Consequently, the rapper’s management published an apology addressed to all concerned parties. Peja admitted that he acted irresponsibly, on the spur of the moment, and took responsibility for the outcome of the event. In the end, then, he also joined in the popular refrain. Therefore, despite few sympathetic voices that defended Peja on the grounds of strong anti-establishment sentiment, the intensity that the media refrain acquired by repeated broadcasts only increased as it got to and across subsequent publics, passing through all four layers of social connection and engagement.

The affective capacities of sound pertain, most obviously, to the first layer of sociality associated with music: the very moment of live performance which affords direct sensual encounters between bodies, entrained in their movements via immersion in the shared vibratory field. These budding relations afford a pre-cognitive sense of togetherness, forming an incipient public inherent in a series of reflex responses to sound that affects the performers and the audience alike. However, it would be a mistake to reduce affect to the purely physical; rather, it involves a “thinking-feeling” that takes place not in the interiority of the psychological subject, but in the “co-motion of relational encounter” (Massumi, 2015, pp. 210–211). And this always entails a sonic dimension.

Sound, then, can be thought of as facilitating sociality across all layers of connection and engagement by affording sensory and relational field of encounters, posing a sine qua non condition for the emergence of affective publics (LaBelle, 2010). It informs various identifications by leaving a residue in the bodies, affording shared corporeal knowledges that underlie collective patterns of attentiveness and attunement. It also pertains to social formations like class and gender, for instance, through forms of verbal expression and vocalization patterns that afforded Peja to perform his working class masculinity, altering the affective atmosphere of the event and, subsequently, introducing a rift into the hip hop community. Finally, it informs institutional responses, even though its diffusion at this layer is more difficult to trace. However, it could be argued that the chilling screams at the end of the video recording of the incident contributed to the redistribution of the intensity of the event into emerging publics, including institutional ones, as they coalesced in their condemnation of Peja, and hip hop music in general.

Sound, therefore, infolds different layers of connection and engagement, bringing them into non-linear relations with one another. While it causes nothing in itself, being relationally contingent on the environment in which it is emitted and propagated, as a vibratory force that transmits energy it leaves a material trace on the bodies involved in the encounter. In other words, sound partakes in the immanent modulation of interactional dynamics via its power to intensify and dissipate collective affects (Goodman, 2010). This process is dynamic and open ended, carrying the event into multiple directions, as subsequent individuals and collectivities enter into complex interactions with each other.

Conclusion

Sound is often approached as a discernible external object in the world with a set of fixed qualities that can be perceived and invested with meaning by an active, knowledgeable subject. This reification, however, fails to account for the dynamic and multidimensional experience of sound which informs every moment of our lives, affecting the ways we interact with our environment and other people on a largely unconscious level. No interpretative effort can, in fact, encompass the extent and complexity of affective interactions afforded by sound. Consequently, drawing on the non-representational ontologies adopted in some strands of sound studies (Cox, 2011; Goodman, 2010), as well as materialist approaches to popular music (Eidsheim, 2015), this article have posited sound as an intensity—a vibrational force that passes across and in-between bodies, in the process undergoing a series of transformations of its own. Acknowledging the relational contingency of sound, this approach, therefore, shifts the focus of inquiry to the processes of transmission and transduction of energy across matter that, in turn, produce extensive entities by maintaining or dissolving boundaries between them.

This provides a way to challenge the prevalent narrative which designates the discursive construction of a shared frame of reference as a necessary condition for the formation of publics. By according primacy to the felt intensity of sonic vibrations over the symbolic framing of acoustic experience, we can properly account for the non-cognitive dimensions of collective action and embodied modes of social organization afforded by the sensory attunement with and through sound. In this view, sound acts on bodies not separately but in their interrelatedness, by virtue of its capacity to permeate all matter. The publics emerging in a sonic encounter, then, are felt but not yet articulated, constituted by a visceral sense of belonging in becoming together. And while a common frame of reference can be negotiated once the affective connections and modes of engagement have been processed cognitively and translated into subsequent emotions and thoughts, it is not guaranteed. This is because intensive forces traverse extensive boundaries, leaving affective publics open to constant recomposition. In other words, sound is involved in the ongoing immanent restructuring of material relations, affording listening as relational activity that underlies the emergence of incipient and fragmentary publics out of a shared vibrational field.