Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta's 2023 book, Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor grapples with the ways in which strangers come together and bond across and through electronic music dancefloors, sound, and space. Drawing on ethnographic work undertaken at sites across Chicago, Paris, and Berlin between the years 2006 and 2010, this book offers scholars of Performance Studies a rich interdisciplinary framework that brings threads of cultural studies, ethnomusicology, music analysis, corporeality and embodiment, gender and sexuality, and affect theory together to investigate electronic dance music worlds and how they connect to broader political and ideological realms of belonging.

Across six chapters, Together, Somehow, aims to explain how moments of fleeting contact — within vaguely defined worlds of sociality — have the power to unfold with deep and surprising levels of intimacy, which Garcia-Mispireta calls "stranger-intimacy" (pp. 38). He suggests that stranger-intimacy is a mode of being that enables those involved to live in worlds better or otherwise to this current one. Intimacies can be tactile, resonant, collective, personal, non-verbal, aesthetic, and without much information exchanged.

Stranger-intimacies afford club goers a sense of what he calls "vague belonging," an attuned sense of feeling that removes the need for exchanges of knowledge and identity, that creates the right conditions for bonding and community (pp. 5). A core question for Garcia-Mispireta is "what gives rise to this sense of warm conviviality among strangers?" (pp. 128). The answer, as we discover, is, for the most part, music. Music acts as the foundation upon which all other encounters and interactions take place — whether it's a specific recording, niche genre, or broader aesthetics, musical taste becomes public and collective, negating the need for other forms of sharing.

Garcia-Mispireta argues that it is the lack of exchange of personal knowledge that allows social encounters to remain fluid and convivial, and thus forms the basis of his concept of "liquidarity" — a portmanteau of liquid and solidarity (pp. 91). Liquidarity's intensity and energy becomes affective in moments of togetherness that remain perpetually vague. Liquidarity, while fluid and smooth, has the potential to erase or ignore differences, risks, and the possible rough experiences of nightclubs. Partygoers do not typically seek out only smooth experiences, and frequently desire roughness, the experiences that involve risk and the potential to go wrong. Partygoers seek rough events through which they can potentially unravel and become undone. These moments of coming undone allow real world struggles to dissipate, and a self-reforming to occur, and it is in these brief — and most importantly, temporary moments — where utopian openings are experienced for partygoers (pp. 156). This is especially important for marginalised communities who attempt to grapple with difference and imagine new futures.

Liquidarity is thus aided by music, which acts — through sonic grain, and texture — to embolden the smooth and rough worlds of night-time experience. In addition to music's contribution to vibe and atmosphere, it plays a significant corporeal role in tactility itself — bodies become affected through the low frequency pulsations that vibrate corporeal structures and the textural grains of sound can be understood as "haptic aurality" (his play on Laura U. Marks' "haptic visuality") — and thus the dancefloor is intensified aurally, and physically; music makes the rough and smooth textures of nightlife audible and felt (pp. 87).

Garcia-Mispireta's interviewees frequently used the word "vibe," to describe the sociality and intimacies of dancefloor experiences, but he extends this to also circulate as an affective feeling or concept that connects the myriad complexities of becoming, engendered from dance floors: sound, tactility, attunement, resonance, and movement all configure into the affective feeling that is essential to understanding how crowds of dancers come together (pp. 129). These realms of belonging are not so random, insofar that the crowd is often curated by numerous external factors: social filtration; economics; underground and networks of advertising; subcultural mentorship; and bouncers and doormen who in seconds navigate intricate selection processes of who is and is not admissible to clubs. Such modes of filtration have broader cultural and national implications and analogues that inform selection processes. The resultant crowds are thus not exactly typically diverse but are what Garcia-Mispireta calls "embedded diversity" (pp. 208) — a heterogeneous crowd embedded with modes of exclusion that remove tensions and risks. Being admitted to the club, he argues is also a way of having one's belonging to the space confirmed, and thus contributes to the liquidarity of strangers.

Garcia-Mispireta concludes the book by opening the work to broader narratives of belonging vis-à-vis the massacre at the Pulse gay club in Orlando, where many queer people, mostly Latinx, were violently attacked and murdered in a place that they usually thought of as fun and safe, a place to dance, to hook-up, and to celebrate life. Through this horrific event he notes how a huge network of queers, people of color and allies came together to share, support, and care. In the public outpouring following this event queer leaders connected the massacre to much longer histories of homophobic mass violence and made salient the contemporary political struggles of queer life, and points to what is now at stake (pp. 228). Linking his ethnographic work with the Orlando massacre, Garcia-Mispireta opens to a new queer intimate publics which point to a renewed awareness that even in spaces that are considered sacrosanct for queers, women, and people of color, safety is not guaranteed and that life for those groups continues to be precarious.

Issues of power, belonging, and risk, become salient on the dancefloor when related to tactility and stranger-intimacy, especially with regards to sexual harassment and coercion. A significant factor to this is in his exploration of privilege or "the right to touch" (pp. 53), where he examines the complexity and risks of intimacy for women, — trans, cis, and otherwise — as well as queer and trans people of color, and people with disabilities. It is in this work I think this book has significant potential for application into the realms of public scholarship and activist work within electronic dance music and nightclub settings, especially regarding finding ways to allow marginalised or at-risk groups to navigate risks and dangers and feel safe to have fun. While deeply theoretical, Garcia-Mispireta's analyses and exploration create a window into very real issues of inclusion and safety across multiple sites.

Where Together, Somehow shines as a beacon and is perhaps most useful for the field of Performance Studies is in its pathbreaking approach to considering electronic dancefloor crowds via the framework of affect theory. Drawing on a substantive world of scholars, from thinking with and applying the theories of his own teacher Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, foundational thinkers like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Brian Massumi, as well as the early work of Spinoza, Garcia-Mispireta successfully applies affect theory to make sense of how a crowd of strangers experience belonging across the dancefloor. Starting with modes of touch, Garcia-Mispireta's application of affect spirals from the first chapter, accumulating momentum and broad application as the book goes on. Eventually the intersection of identity, vagueness, music, tactility, and sociality are analyzed through modes of attunement and resonant relations that are at the core of affectual thought. Garcia-Mispireta's book is one of the first to successfully bridge and apply the linguistic and analytical parallels that music and affect theory use — I was especially impressed with his application of resonance as being both an important musical element, but also — via Massumi — that which makes bodies resonate in feeling, resulting in some kind of affective sympathetic resonance. Not only does Garcia-Mispireta's writing engender affective resonant feeling — his Epilogue, especially, is so deeply moving that this reader may have shed a tear or two — his application of affect theory contributes to the ongoing affective turn in the humanities, is exemplary in its approach, and offers a model for scholarship to attend to the more complex, ineffable, and ephemeral substances of the cultural modes of becoming, betweenness, and ongoingness.

In continuing states of ongoingness, Together, Somehow offers an ontological opening for thinking through how utopian possibilities are created through embedded diversity, liquidarity, stranger-intimacy, and the night itself. In the introduction, Garcia-Mispireta offers a rich and complex way of thinking of utopia, yet as the book unfolds, the reader may find themselves searching for more explicit connections with how dancefloors and utopia relate; while he does make connections between 'coming undone', as a way to reform the self in the face of difference and adversity, as well as making connections with the diversity of crowds as utopic, and is explicit insofar that any utopian connection is momentary, if not fleeting, and never actualized, it seems curious to offer so much theoretical underpinning in the opening, yet only touch upon the connections thereafter. James Clifford suggests that ethnographies should be written to embrace and engender the very worlds that are being interpreted, analyzed, and worked with [James Clifford, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. 1986., pp. 6-7], and I would suggest that the vague nature of Garcia-Mispireta's connections with utopia is perhaps a reason for this. By introducing utopia, he offers an opaque throughline to think with while reading. His work, I would argue, creates an opening for thinking through the intersection of music, dancefloors, and affect theory vis-à-vis utopia, yet — and perhaps in the very essence of utopia itself — this throughline does not become transparent, remains vague, and in a state of ongoingness. The reader is left to make utopian connections that can never quite be.




     — Reviewed by Max Gibson, University of California, Davis