Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
to certain styles of tambura performance to circumvent or supersede cultural representations (e.g., these styles’ indexing to Cigani or “Croatian tradition”); and (2) the capacity for these responses to amount to something of significance (in secondary sense making, manifesting for example as a recognition of “danger”) through their distancing from overcoded meanings. Such is the duality intended in invoking the two senses of the word “block”: affect blocks, or aggregates as a block of intensity, in the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari use the French noun bloc (as in “a block of becoming”; [1980] 1987, 293), and it also blocks, or keeps at a remove (the related French term would be the verb bloquer).
The corollary to the dual attention to the blocking and blocking of affect called for here is the recognition of how this limits the autonomy of signification and discourse. This requires accounting for musicians’ practices, intentional or otherwise, of constraining their affective investments (e.g., in the shared intensities of racialized Others) through discursive gambits yet also of retaining a resilience (e.g., for a feeling of Otherness) that aggregates as a remainder, a strangeness that is still part of their becoming. This feeling of strangeness is an affective relation to an Other, to what Deleuze and Guattari term the “something else” with which you “make your organism enter into composition” in becoming ([1980] 1987, 274). Thus this is not a neatly symmetrical corollary; at stake here is the blocking of discourse in the sense of bloquer (how it blocks/is blocked by affect) but not the additional blocking of discourse in the sense of bloc (see figure I.1, upper right cell). That is, the additional block (the aggregation) is not of discourse but again of affect—hence the term affective block.
In other words, affective block is a notion of how intensities aggregate in the processes of becoming, one that also accounts for the dialectic dynamics between affect and discourse when musicians’ feelings conflict with their thoughts. In their contradictory differences, affects and discourses can be excessive rather than purely oppositional, generating feelings of Otherness to varying intensities when affect blocks or is blocked by discourse. This is my primary premise: that blocking in aggregation is simultaneous and complementary to blocking in delimitation, and thus that people can be affected residually even when their discursive strategies effectively flatten or forestall undesirably intense reactions to musical performance. Such discursive blocks to affect (lower left cell of figure I.1) and residual accumulation (upper left cell) occur, for example, when musicians use humor to prevent socially dangerous indulgences in racially improper depths of musical enjoyment. Equally important are instances in which these strategies fail: when a block of affect (upper left cell) comes in as a blockage against strategically mobilized discourse (lower right cell) and accrues as the intensity proper to its negation (such as when musicians’ progressive rhetoric of inclusion falls to contradictory discourses of racial difference due to the intervention of feelings of Otherness embodied in musical performance). It is easy to recognize the importance of strong feelings when they arise in contexts of musical abandon, and this book also follows previous scholarship in exploring what happens when affective and discursive responses align (without the negation of either). My aim, however, is to demonstrate that affective restraint, whether realized or merely attempted, is just as central to the interplay of discourse and feeling in music. That such restraint moves people in other ways makes it especially worthy of ethnographic and affect theoretical attention.
FIGURE I.1 The blocking of affect and discourse
The two directions of the dynamic of blocking detailed in the bottom cells of figure I.1 speak to the social usefulness of affective manipulation and map more or less neatly onto Deleuze and Guattari’s and Massumi’s different conceptions of the potential for representation in becoming. The former’s notion that “double becoming” (or becoming-animal) is “affect in itself, […] and represents nothing” suggests the autonomy from higher-level meaning systems of the lower right cell ([1980] 1987, 259). Massumi, meanwhile, has theorized a possible alternative, an intermediary between absolute null affect and double becoming that he calls “limitative becoming”; this happens when “one of the terms is an abstract identity and the body in question must curtail its potentials in order to fit into the grid,” a process suggestive of the affective restraint and residual redirection of the lower left cell of the figure (1987, 94). Thus affective block explains the commonly residual, but differently aggregated, affects of double and limitative becoming. It demonstrates how musicians’ strategic imposition or subversion of discursive and other significations comes to bear on residual feelings of Otherness in their affective labor.
It is in the residual intensities, in their welling beyond representation (a relation of the symbol, or thirdness, in the Peircean schema), but also in affect’s secondary entrance into iconic or indexical signification beyond its primary and forceful physical impact, that intimacy comes into being. Intimacy is not a closeness built solely on positive feelings, though this is certainly a part of it (in much of the former Yugoslavia, getting along with someone is parsed as “being good” [biti dobar] with one another). It is also about the sharing of threats and apprehensions, of strange affects. Intimacy, as colleagues of mine and I have argued, “is itself already a kind of violence, a touching that makes definite demands of the touched in its very tenderness” (MacMillen, Steingo, and Stirr 2011). The co-delimitation of discursive and affective responses to musical style embeds this violence in a plane of rich significatory and embodied capacities for dealing with social and physical dangers. Approaching this co-delimitation at three levels of discursive scale, in sections devoted respectively to narrative, discourse, and ideology, I examine the intimate, assimilating work that musical affect performs on rational(izing) understanding in the name of race and nation. I demonstrate, ultimately, how dialectical dynamics of co-delimitation between discursive and affective responses to differences in musical style privilege understandings of tambura players as heroic Croatian men, even as the music engenders diverse ethnic and gendered becomings.
DEPTH IN THE SHALLOWS: TAMBURA MUSIC’S PAST IN THE “SOUTH SLAVIC” LANDS
The tambura has been caught up in struggles for territory, security, danger, and national becoming in Southeast Europe for centuries, though that period has been relatively shallow in comparison to the deeper history of the Slavs’ habitation in the region since their arrival in the early Middle Ages. In order to contextualize the book’s case studies and the broader claims that I make in this introduction, I offer a brief history of tambura music’s spread as an ensemble tradition in Austria-Hungary and Yugoslavia.8 A central premise of this book holds that feeling intimately Croatian and affectively transgressing certain racialized ideals often supersede (block) official narratives and discourses, and I next examine the music’s more recent history as a spatializing and nationalizing force countering official Yugoslav rhetoric as Croatia pursued independence and its own sovereign public sphere. This was the time when Kosovec was just learning to play; when Grcevich was just making his mark on the transnational tambura scene; and when Croatia, as these musicians’ nominal homeland but also a constituent republic of Yugoslavia, was a territory whose national status many intensely desired and even sensed, but only a few would risk constructing apart from the Yugoslav ideal, whether physically or figuratively.
For several centuries, tambura chordophone-type instruments moved throughout Southeast Europe with Ottoman forces during their occupation of the region. The solo tambura (which took a wide variety of shapes and names) became common throughout much of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia by the eighteenth century. Research on the early years of the tambura’s diversification into a family of instruments and on its combination in ensemble settings typically cites the small orchestra that the musician Pajo Kolarić founded in Osijek in 1847 as the first documented tambura ensemble (March 1983). Josip Andrić, however, has argued that groups performing on multiple tamburas have existed since the late eighteenth century among the Bunjevci (a group of Catholic Slavs who generally identify as Croats and live predominantly in the northern Serbian