Wild Music. Maria Sonevytsky

       SOVEREIGN IMAGINARIES

      The period investigated in Wild Music is loosely bookended by monumental events—the two revolutions that coincided with Ukraine’s two most prominent spectacles of global pop visibility, its Eurovision Song Contest victories in 2004 and 2016—but I will also attend to the interstices of revolutionary crests and wartime troughs, when hopes for the future took creative form and gained momentum as emergent social imaginaries.⁹ To pursue such hopeful formations, I introduce the analytic of sovereign imaginaries: expressions of citizens’ desires for ways of life that are enabled by particular forms of governance. My notion of sovereign imaginaries is rooted in the anthropological argument that the form of hegemonic power known as sovereignty is constituted through sociocultural practices. By invoking the phrase “ways of life” (life in community according to social norms and practices), I follow Caroline Humphrey’s critique of Giorgio Agamben’s “somewhat pallid” understanding of ways of life as “merely the habitual activities of politically and judicially defined groups.” Humphrey points out that ways of life “have their histories and their modes of governmentality. They do not simply acquiesce to the menace of sovereignty but interpose a solid existence of their own that operates collaterally or against it” (2004, 420).¹⁰ This means that such ways of life—such practices of sovereignty—order how citizens conceive of themselves as subjects (personal sovereignty) who consciously attach to—while leaving space to contest and reimagine—the political sovereignty of the state. In this sense, political sovereignty can be rethought not just “as a set of political capacities but as a formation in society that engages with ways of life that have temporality and their own characteristic aesthetics” (421). What, then, can ways of life that are sensory, acoustic, musical—with their history, temporality, and “characteristic aesthetics”—tell us about emergent conditions of sovereignty?

      Through musical ways of life, citizens negotiate histories of representation, transmuting Wildness from a diminishing term of otherness into a source of power. But these expressions of Wildness are not purely hopeful: they also bear the historical burdens of Ukrainian “backwardness,” and the contemporary fatigue and disappointment with the failures of postmillennial revolutions. The wild music I investigate throughout this book can be roughly classified using the capacious post-Soviet Ukrainian genre term etno-muzyka (ethno-music), which emplaces local sonic markers (etno-) within global popular music styles (rock, hip-hop, and so on).¹¹ The “wild” sounds of etno-muzyka—which typically index an internal Ukrainian etnos—forge solidarities through shared recognition.¹² Within the large and diverse space of the Ukrainian state, “wild” sounds take many forms—the trembita’s signal blurt, the sung cries of elderly babushkas, the modes and ornaments of traditional Crimean Tatar songs, and so on. These “wild” sounds often relate to each other in delicately negotiated patterns of nested otherness. Yet when the heavy, often painful histories of exoticism are refigured and redeemed, citizens bond themselves to each other and to the state in part through the webs of signification spawned through these sounds. Publics are formed through shared interpretations of sounds made meaningful through performance. I understand this process as a branch of sensory citizenship that I call “acoustic citizenship.”¹³ Acoustic citizenship, a term I will elaborate on at the end of this book, naturalizes forms of belonging within the space of the state through shared experiences of listening, sounding, or being listened to. This study therefore explores the various “audible entanglements” (Guilbault 2005) of music with the politics of citizenly attachment to the state, even when the state is weak, corrupt, and fractured.

      The historical and present-day resonances of Wildness, and its representation in various forms of wild music, allow us to consider how Ukrainian musicians and audiences attempt to bring certain ways of life into being. Since these ways of life are mediated through the apparatus of the state, the Wildness of wild music opens the space to rethink sovereignty and citizenship. This is especially critical in a state as fragile as Ukraine, but the ramifications reach well beyond the case study at hand. Ukraine’s present geopolitical conundrum reveals the “fragility of state sovereignty” on a global scale (Wanner 2014, 430),¹⁴ even as far-right nationalist movements that are often predicated on maintaining the state’s unassailable sovereignty have risen to power around the world.

      Arjun Appadurai memorably wrote that the nation and state are locked in “a battle of the imagination” (1990, 14). A sovereign imaginary, as I define it here, holds the potential for broadening this battlefield beyond the nation or state, toward emergent logics of rule. José Muñoz, following Ernst Bloch, might identify the sovereign imaginary as an “anticipatory affective structure” (2009, 3) in its ability to bring to light personal-political desires that are “not-yet conscious.” In Muñoz’s terms, it is a “concrete utopia,” one that may be “daydreamlike, but [represents] the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many” (3).¹⁵ How, for example, do “stateless people” such as the Kurds or Roma appeal to existing logics of the nationstate? How will the new diaspora of Syrian refugees conceive of themselves in the aftermath of the war that ravages Syrian territories? What is the obligation of a state to provide a minority or Indigenous population with the right of self-determination? Ten years after the global financial debt crisis, is the Greek state sovereign, or merely subject to the neoliberal policies of the European Union? The analytic of the sovereign imaginary allows us to observe how sovereignty might be concretely territorialized (that is, “the Palestinian state”), but it also permits the object of sovereignty to be a “hyperreal” abstraction (that is, the “West” or “Europe,” with its hegemonic connotations of order and civil society) (Chakrabarty 2000, 27). These imaginaries may privilege precolonial or nostalgic networks of belonging (Indigenous communities, former empires, diasporas) that can be nested within or stretch beyond a modern state’s borders. Sovereign imaginaries, then, often cull from different sorts of sovereignties, redirecting the disenchantments of the present toward the future. It is in their futurity, in fact, through which sovereign imaginaries develop the potential to collide with the potentiality of Wildness contained in wild music.

      A note of caution: I do not mean to overstate the transformational potential or utopian promise of music with regard to emergent sovereignties. As Lila Ellen Gray has recently written, “For scholars of music, aesthetics, and politics in an era of social media and protest, one challenge is how to investigate imaginative aesthetic practices engendered in globally interlinked processes and technologies of protest and uprising while steering clear of the traps of thinking music, mobility, social media, and politics through the frame of only utopic promise (with ‘democracy’ and ‘aesthetics’ particularly vulnerable in this respect)” (2016, 69). What Gray identifies as these “traps of thinking” in contemporary popular music extend, as I see it, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideologies of Western art music centered on the belief that (elite) music could suspend rationality, transcend the base and worldly constraints of human existence, and universally ennoble all human subjects (see Taylor 2007 for a critique of this narrative). Vladimir Lenin, in fact, reportedly stated that listening to classical music “affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell” (quoted in Nelson 2004, 1). Despite this, portraits of a brooding Lenin listening intently to Beethoven’s “Appasionata” sonata “hung in almost every Soviet music school and conservatory” (Levin 2002, 195; see also Skinner 2003). All of this to say: such utopian ideas about music are potent and entrenched.

      But, as ethnomusicologists have long argued, imaginaries of musical transcendence are, at root, ideological. They fail to account for the varied cross-cultural strategic and quotidian uses of music: to make a livelihood, to facilitate or accompany rituals, or to act as a lubricant that enables specific kinds of socio-musical participation (see, for example, Turino 2008; DeNora 2000). Such ideologies also fail to account for the unstable significations of musical sounds, those obscured by persistent assertions of the universal “language of music,” despite decades of anthropological studies of music that undermine this reductive formulation.¹⁶ Ethnomusicological studies since the 1980s, instead, have asserted the deeply contextual meanings of musical sound, advocating for