The Groovology of White Affect

Abstract

This chapter proposes a sweeping theorization of white affect. Taking as starting point that boeremusiek functions as Trouillot’s “savage slot” in white cultural expression, boeremusiek’s affective modalities (as set out in the preceding chapters) are shown to be indexically linked to each other and to the performance of whiteness to form a “mimetic archive” of racial embodiment available for activation in the present day. The activation of boeremusiek’s affective modalities follows a predictable quasi-liturgical pattern, centered around ideas of boeremusiek’s purported savagery and its white salvage. Drawing on literature that equates whiteness with Protestant religiosity, the repeated (modernist) redemption of boeremusiek through performance and narrativization is framed in terms of Christian soteriology—a theoretical stance borne out in an extensive analysis of soteriological anxiety at a contemporary boeremusiek festival. The book concludes with a reworking of Charles Keil’s “participatory discrepancies” for the study of affect, arguing that the “power” of boeremusiek resides in its selective and patterned unveiling of the racial desires underpinning white pleasure, and that these affective “participatory discrepancies” continue to propel white racial embodiment and prejudice.

Down Below: Boeremusiek and the “Savage Slot” in White Cultural Expression

Once not too long ago, so someone told me, South Africa’s erratic long-distance rail service, the Shosholoza Meyl, ran over an impala somewhere in the middle of the Karoo. Fed up with waiting, the passengers disembarked slaughtered what was left of the animal, and barbecued the meat right there on the railway tracks.

It is 2009. I am back on that train with the boeremusiek people (see ‘The embarrassed white-Afrikaans proto-self’, Chap. 2). Now rambling home on the never-ending track between Cape Town and Johannesburg. My journal contains a bundle of written snapshots of the weekend: two white men in their 50s entertaining the people on the platform in Kimberley with concertina and banjo, their impromptu audience dancing exuberantly; the endless, infantile banter of another who insisted on blowing a conductor’s whistle at every stop with the words: “The next station is the police station”; one of the woman musicians in the dining car typing away furiously on her Blackberry (this was 2009, after all!) to sort out some crisis at the office; a woman listening to the bands, lost in the moment and swaying unselfconsciously to the music, cigarette in hand; a group of 10-year olds playing their instruments with singular energy and vitality; shrieking kids soaked and covered with foam on a water slide. I had no idea what to make of these fragmented impressions. They did not translate into the sort of systematic narrative I had expected to emerge from fieldwork. Yet again, I had had no epiphanies. Certainly nothing enabling an “ethnography.”

My dealings with boeremusiek have been shaped around such disjointed, humdrum images. The “field,” in my case, was constituted by Saturday-evening dances in danky school or community halls, visits to aging aficionados, and weekend gatherings (part church féte, part beer fest) at run-down holiday resorts. This was a world that paralleled but rarely intersected my own. I drove along roads I had known since childhood under that strange highveld clouds one waxes lyrical about out of nostalgia. Past mine dumps. Flatness. Potholes. Past the poverty and faded delusions of grandeur that are the legacy of apartheid in small rural towns. Past decaying, previously middle-class gardens and dilapidated buildings, dead and closed like a Sunday afternoon after church. Endless ugliness. Clichés. Dust. To visit ordinary people in ordinary places at differing degrees south of white affluency. Some owned bakkies and hunting trophies, Sunday bests and grandchildren in Australia. Others—besides sprawling collections of boeremusiek LPs and memorabilia—didn’t own very much at all. This was a landscape that hadn’t managed to shed its apartheid terminology. This was not the North-West province. This was not Gauteng. Over here it was still the Old Transvaal. Die Wes-Transvaal, more specifically.

If not ethnography, then what?

Notice the register of my writing: dystopic nostalgia, loss, decay. Boeremusiek is vanishing before me, a remnant of a white South African world soon to be no more. Rereading my fieldnotes, I am struck by the number of times I have perceived the events to embody this distinctive brand of mournful pastoral inauthenticity. At first, I attributed this recurring theme to the “vanishing savage” trope so often posited as the rationale behind ethnographic research. Renato Rosaldo famously described the tendency of ethnographers to portray a way of life as nearly extinct as a form of “imperialist nostalgia.”¹ The search for “true” or “uncontaminated” natives and the longing felt by “agents of colonialism” for the colonized culture as it was “traditionally” is used to conceal complicity with “often brutal domination,” he argued.² Similarly, James Clifford contended that “salvage” ethnographies, aimed at saving traditions by means of the text or “bringing a culture into writing,” legitimate the power of the ethnographer to represent the Other.³

Though not wholly unrelated to these ideas, my experiences of nostalgic irreality at boeremusiek events have been altogether more intimate. Or perhaps the better word here is “extimate”—Lacan’s term for the boundedness of interiority and exteriority and “how our feelings can be radically externalized on to objects without losing their sincerity and intensity.”⁴ When I’m writing in this fashion, I’m tapping into a well-exercised affective trope of Afrikaner whiteness. Karel Schoeman perfected this mode of white anti-pastoral writing in his apocalyptic 1979 novel Promised Land (Na die geliefde land):

The day was overcast, the earth patchy with sunlight and shadow. The road was uneven, muddy, overgrown with weeds, and on either side of them stretched the bleached desolation of the veld. Sometimes for a while a rusty barbed-wire fence ran alongside the road; sometimes it was possible to make out the remains of long-neglected fields swallowed up by grass, or a clump of overgrown trees, relics of orchards among the thornbushes, and then the veld took over again.⁵

How this fractured arcana of the veld is conjoined with the sound of boeremusiek comes to the fore in a poem by Antjie Krog. It is titled Christmas 1993, the last Christmas before apartheid formally ended in 1994. After the long-awaited summer rain,

the veld gives herself like a slut to the green

of bare plains there is suddenly nothing of

everything sprees everything revels green

among thorn trees and braggard tassels

the karee heaves a vastrap in wilde olive steams.⁶

This “excess of the veld,” the poem warns, though, “attests to a gross insensitivity about us.” A beleaguered “us”; an “us” for whom the strange beauty of the veld is fraught with loss; a white “us” for whom the “vastrap” is a sonic instantiation of a precarious blood-soil connection, pointing—always—to “our” world without “us”:Verse

Verse us to whom the veld belongs belied and belittled we feel we to whom the veld belongs eroded bewildered assaulted we feel we to whom the veld belongs this perhaps our last together like this.

When Rian Malan writes in the Rolling Stone about a journey across “an arid and empty wasteland” into the “Afrikaner heartland” of the Kalahari in search of “the most famous [boeremusiek] band you’ve never heard of,” the anti-pastoral register of emptiness is even more explicit:

We’re crossing what appears to be an ancient seabed, a level plain of blackened rocks and grey grass. Every half hour or so, we pass a wind pump and a flock of dejected sheep, but otherwise, there’s nothing: no trees, no houses, no respite from the glare. Our water ran out hours ago. Now we’re dopping wine, to fight dehydration.⁷

Such descriptions extend a strain of white landscape writing in South Africa that, according to J.M. Coetzee, privileges a “geological” rather than a “botanical” gaze.⁸ As opposed to the prospecting nature of imperial landscape art, this kind of writing claims that “vegetation disguises landscape” and that the meaning of the veld “lies buried or half-buried, beneath the surface.”⁹ Anti-epiphanies of the veld patently serve a white phenomenology. Yet their referent is often an invisible and unnamed black pastoral.¹⁰ This evocation of blackness is not political in any simple sense of the term. Coetzee calls it “crypto-prophetic”; the geological gaze of white writing sees in the veld “an underlying prehistoric form threatening to erupt back into history.”¹¹

Writing about boeremusiek in this geological register of cultural neglect and precarity outlines what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the “Savage slot” in Western discourse: the space reserved for alterity in the articulation of modern selves. In the process of tracing the origins of anthropology as an academic discipline, Trouillot highlights how Western reason has defined itself structurally in relation to “savage” others, noting that in ethnographic accounts, travel writing, and utopian fiction, the savage “functions as evidence” in “a metaphorical argument for or against order.”¹² Importantly, Trouillot shows how the “Savage slot” is a structural placeholder in the West’s “geography of imagination” that can be “filled” in contradictory ways:

[T]he Savage can be noble, wise, barbaric, victim or aggressor, depending on the debate and on the aims of the interlocutors. The space within the slot is not static, and its changing contents are not pre-determined by its structural position. … As long as the slot remains, the Savage is at best a figure of speech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and the universe, about being and existence—in short, an argument about foundational thought.¹³

When Trouillot writes about the Savage as “at best a figure of speech” or “an argument about foundational thought,” he is describing one of the metapragmatic functions of anthropological discourse. In Michael Silverstein’s terms, the “Savage slot” as a “metalanguage” exceeds the “object-language” of anthropological description.¹⁴ Thus, “savage” as a semantic sign in specific examples of ethnographic or travel writing is only a special instance of the more important metapragmatic function of “Savageness” in anthropology, which according to Trouillot, through a higher-order indexicality, points beyond itself to the ideology of “the West.” This means that the metapragmatic meanings of Savageness operate independently of artistic medium, genre, linguistic variables, or specific semantic meanings (hence, Trouillot’s observation that “the space within the slot is not static”) and that the Savage shape-shifts “depending on the debate and on the aims of the interlocutors” while maintaining its structural relationship vis-à-vis “the West.”

Boeremusiek has functioned in a similar way in relation to whiteness in South Africa: by enabling, through ambiguous and contradictory articulations and performances, the creation and instantiation of a “Savage slot” in white cultural expression on which the definition of whiteness depends. If, though, Western modernity has defined itself in relation to a geographically removed alterity, an elsewhere,¹⁵ Afrikaner whiteness has found that alterity lurking in its own affective objects, in geographies of depth, and in a body politics of the down below.

Metapragmatics, Affective Modalities, and Whiteness as n^th-Order Indexicality

I have been suggesting throughout this book that boeremusiek’s relationship with whiteness is not maintained merely on the level of object-language or the semantics of boeremusiek discourse, nor on a plane of musical immediacy that supposedly exceeds language, but in a metalanguage of affect ideologically saturated with racial concerns. Even though judgments about boeremusiek are often contradictory (the music described, like Trouillot’s Savage, as now noble, now wise, now barbaric), music, discourse about music, and affect exist in some sort of unified but unstable language/metalanguage relationship. Michael Silverstein’s distinction between pragmatics and metapragmatics and his “orders of indexicality” are relevant here. According to Silverstein, “indexical order” describes how the indexical meaning people assign to everyday micro interactions come to be connected to macro-sociological categories and concepts; in this case, the minutiae of boeremusiek practice and notions of race and whiteness.¹⁶ “Indexical order” assumes that any sociolinguistic fact is an indexical fact: i.e. that social interactions carry values related to the context in which they occur. Any indexical sign form, like boeremusiek, “hovers between two contractible relationships to its ‘contextual surrounds.’” “Presupposing indexicality” arises from shared assumptions about the context that are taken for granted by practitioners, while “entailing indexicality” is the medium through which context is made to exist anew, through creative, surprising, or forceful reassessments of shared assumptions.¹⁷ The realm of indexical meaning therefore supposes that indexical signs have a pragmatic function that points beyond their “ever-moving here-and-now occurrence” to their presupposed and entailed contextual surrounds. Silverstein’s notions of presupposing and entailing (or creative) indexicality thus imply some higher-order normativity to indexical meaning while suggesting how indexical meanings circulate in the social world (a point to which I shall return).

Additionally, Silverstein argues that indexical orders exist to the n^th and n^th+1 degree. If pragmatics (“the realm of indexical meaning, including both denotational and nondenotational signs”)¹⁸ supposes a first-order indexicality, the identification of a “Savage slot,” in Trouillot’s example above, is of a second order, a metapragmatics. Second-order indexicality thus “frames” or “regiments” first-order indexicality by assigning it some additional ordinal normative order.¹⁹ This does not happen in sequential time, exactly, but in complex and overlapping ways. In Trouillot’s example, for instance, the “Savage slot” further and simultaneously indexes the ideology of the “West.”²⁰ In a similar way, I have been arguing for the indexical normativity or regimentation of musical affect into unstable but distinguishable registers best understood as emerging through the interplay between performatives in music and reflexive language-in-use, and, further to that, that these registers—embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal—presuppose and entail whiteness as a higher-order indexical.

It has been difficult to “name” these metapragmatic affective registers. Not because they are ineffable but precisely because they operate through illocutionary acts and within the indexical, pragmatic, and performative levels of language use where framing is more important than naming. In addition to Trouillot’s idea of “slots” in discourse, Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” and Erving Goffman’s “frame analysis” are useful precedents for thinking about the affective registers that arise through metapragmatic awareness.²¹

In the case of boeremusiek, I have preferred to speak of these registers as modalities not only to signal the importance of language in co-constituting musical affect, but also because modality refers to a particular kind of implicit metalanguage that centers on expressing (un)belief or (un)commitment to actions, feelings, statements, or performances—an aspect of affective enregisterment that is perhaps peculiar to the expression of Afrikaner whiteness.²² Often, affect in boeremusiek has been produced in metalinguistic reflection on the appropriateness of affective responses, thereby situating the white body as the site of its own alterity. This implies that even though affect is not necessarily located in language, it works through language and other symbolic forms by means of metalinguistic modal “shifters.” The blackface mask is the most obvious of these shifters, but others include the “itchy feet” trope, the oft-rehearsed Biblical argument that there is a “time and place” for boeremusiek, the epiphanic narration, and the white, voyeuristic fascination with black people enjoying boeremusiek. When reflexive language skirts around the issue of affect, so to speak, it leaves behind a negative imprint of newly created, altered states of feeling. So, for instance, the urge to dance to boeremusiek is modalized by injunctions against dancing, thereby entailing embarrassment (manifesting as unconsummated desire or transgressive participation); a revulsion to the banality of boeremusiek is modalized by modernist epiphanies to entail the sublime; or the desire for unbridled expression is modalized through lower- or higher-order racial indexicals (like blacking up or more cryptic descriptions of boeremusiek as a racialized grotesque) to entail disavowal in the white body. In each case, boeremusiek’s metalanguage of affect acts as modal shifter enjoining an altered state of feeling.

So far, I have treated these modalities, or “slots” in discourse and practice, historiographically and in relative isolation from each other, paying particular attention to the range of expressions, practices, and diacritics that outline distinctive registers in metapragmatic discourse about affect in boeremusiek. I have also shown how these metapragmatic moves are steeped in centuries of racial thought. These slots have different and contradictory valences and function almost like negative spaces for collective affective moods. So, for instance, although reasons for embarrassment may vary considerably, contradictory sentiments like “Boeremusiek is nothing to be ashamed of” and “I can’t imagine why anyone would listen to boeremusiek” both activate the modality of embarrassment, or why it doesn’t matter whether practitioners strongly affirm or deny boeremusiek’s creole racial history, because either sentiment activates the modality of disavowal. In this final chapter, I argue that boeremusiek’s modalities form a constellation available for activation in performance, and that these modalities are activated in a particular processual way that sustains racial thinking and continues to define whiteness in South Africa today.

Activating Boeremusiek’s “Mimetic Archive” of Affective Modalities

I understand this constellation in terms of what William Mazzarella has proposed as the alternative to the culture concept in social theory: the “mimetic archive.” Mazzarella defines this archive as “the residue, embedded not only in the explicitly articulated forms commonly recognized as cultural discourses but also in built environments and material forms, in the concrete history of the senses, and in the habits of our shared embodiment.”²³ He continues:

By likening these collective forces to an archive, I want to invoke the sense of resources deposited and variably available for excavation and citation—for activation. By calling it a mimetic archive, I am picking up on the suggestion, crucial to both Adorno and Benjamin, that the mana potential that resides in our collective experience-environment is something that we activate and apprehend as much by sensuous, mimetic tactics as by discursively citational means. It is at least as much unconscious as it is conscious. And insofar as we activate it sensuously and mimetically, we operate by way of what Benjamin, in a famously enigmatic passage, identified as the medium of the mimetic faculty: “nonsensuous similarity.”²⁴

Evocative as this definition is, Mazzarella’s framework maintains a binary between the signifying and nonsignifying, discursive and affective aspect of the mimetic archive. He writes, for instance, that, “[s]ome of the archive is of course textual or signifies in other more or less overt ways” but that “by far the largest part of the archive exists virtually yet immanently in the nonsignifying yet palpably sensuous dimensions of collective life.”²⁵

Such distinctions matter less when thinking about metalanguage, music, and affect in the way I (and others) propose and of the signifying aspects of language as primarily pragmatic and indexical. In other words, if one understands signification in the manner suggested by Jakobson or Silverstein, that is, within a conception of language as primarily pragmatic where overt signification (semantics) is but one sub-type of pragmatic language use, and if white affect is modalized in metalinguistic reflection in the way I propose, then it doesn’t go without saying that the “palpably sensuous dimensions of collective life” are “nonsignifying,” nor that the virtuality of these “sensuous dimensions” cannot be located in language. By witnessing the imprints of shared affect in the metapragmatic virtualities of language and musical practice, the sensuous dimensions of collective life can become legible in ways that do not dispel their mystery.

Its archival properties is the first salient aspect of the constellation of white affective modalities; its propensity to be activated in performance across time and space is the second. Mazzarella again leans here on Benjamin:

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation…. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time.. .. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural.²⁶

In more practical terms, Benjamin’s (and Mazzerella’s) explanation of the historicity of the mimetic archive, or how affect “resonates” as presence, may more simply be understood as a form of indexicality. Indexicals signify not only by virtue of association, but through co-occurrence within particular frames of reference. Thus, in any kind of discourse or performance, an index (such as boeremusiek) can become interdiscursively linked with another (such as “itchy feet”) to form some kind of “set.”²⁷ This interdiscursivity occurs through patterns of use and co-occurrence within discursive frames. The same goes for affective modalities. As second-order indexicals, they can form an interdiscursive (or interaffective) constellation within a particular frame of co-occurrence. Genre and performance, as Lila Ellen Gray has shown in her study of fado, can be such frames for uniting and organizing the pasts and presents of musical affect. Extending Williams’s concept, she argues that genre functions as a “structure for feeling,” an organizing principle through which listeners shape and are conditioned into affective modalities, both public and personal.²⁸ In boeremusiek discourse (and practice, as we’ll see) the “constitutive resonance”²⁹ of the now comes about almost formulaically in the way affective modalities co-occur or are made to co-occur within the frame of boeremusiek performance.

This is not to say that listeners and practitioners experience the flash of illumination that makes the present feel like one’s own less acutely or less intimately, or that there is no room for improvisation (think of Silverstein’s presupposing and entailing indexicality). It does mean, however, that the experience of white affect is discursively rigged in demonstrable ways; that the relationship between the what-has-been to the now is not only figural, as Benjamin intuited, but patterned.

Savagery—Redemption—Subjunctive Pleasure: The Metapragmatics of Boeremusiek’s Mimetic Archive

Widely hailed as South Africa’s greatest English short-story writer, Herman Charles Bosman is best known for his sequence of oral-style “Oom Schalk Lourens” stories. These humorous sketches, as noted in Chap. 4, are set in the Marico district—a remote part of the South African bushveld—and make use of a frame structure in which the protagonist, Oom Schalk, tells a story about the curious ways of the Afrikaners around him. One of these stories “The Music Maker” is about Manie Kruger, a concertinist who decides to give up playing at local dances and to focus instead on staging concertina recitals and on becoming a famous musician. In the space of a single paragraph, Bosman’s story sketches out the key moves in the metapragmatics of boeremusiek’s mimetic archive:

No Bushveld dance was complete without Manie’s concertina. When he played a vastrap you couldn’t keep your feet still. But after he had decided to become the sort of musician that gets into history books, it was strange the way that Manie Kruger altered. For one, he said that he would never again play at a dance. We all felt sad about that. It was not easy to think about the Bushveld dances of the future.³⁰

Showcasing his masterful storytelling technique, Bosman places the action of the Bushveld dance not in the fictional present, but in a subjunctive future of nostalgic longing. This frame of unfulfilled possibility is set into motion by a passing reference to the “itchy feet” trope (thereby engaging the modality of embarrassment) followed by Manie’s modernist epiphany that seeks to eclipse the banality of boeremusiek. These are metapragmatic and formulaic affective moves. They create the conditions for the making of white nostalgia.

What follows is a passage that grammatically (by means of a series of subjunctive would/would not verbal phrases) and stylistically (by means of repeated Afrikaans terms) projects the actuality of a boeremusiek dance into a virtual future when the essence of boeremusiek will already have been lost:

We all felt sad about that. It was not easy to think about the Bushveld dances of the future. There would be the peach brandy in the kitchen; in the voorkamer the feet of dancers would go through the steps of the schottische and the waltz and the mazurka, but on the riempies bench in the corner, where the musicians sat, there would be no Manie Kruger. And they would play “Die vaal hare en die blou oge” and “Vat jou goed en trek, Ferreira,” but it would be another’s fingers that swept over the concertina’s keys. And when, with the dancing and the peach brandy, the young men would call “Dagbreek toe!,” it would not be Manie Kruger’s head that bowed down to the applause.³¹

By creating two distinct frames in his narration, the first announcing boeremusiek’s modernist alienation from the music’s captivating qualities, the second setting up the pleasures of boeremusiek subjunctively within this frame, Bosman captures something of the melancholy and the imminent sense of loss that are so closely tied up with the sound of the concertina and the affective connection many South Africans have with the genre. Boeremusiek pleasure, Bosman is suggesting, is by its very definition subjunctive—an unrealizable potential, a desire to hang on to a sensation that is forever receding into a future of loss.

One encounters this sequence of metapragmatic moves activating boeremusiek’s mimetic archive in different guises—textual, visual, and musical.

Consider a cartoon first published in Die Transvaler and reproduced in a newsletter of the Traditional Boeremusiek Club in 1992 (see Fig. 6.1).³² Like Bosman’s story, it presents a fictional present framed within a nostalgic past. The visual equivalent for a narrative frame structure is achieved by the presence of the ancestral portrait on the wall, smiling down at the dancers and musicians in approval. The portrait acts here as a chronotope. It indicates that the party is taking place in the voorkamer—the front room of a traditional Boer homestead—where one usually encountered such portraits. At the same time, the portrait frames present enjoyment in terms of the demands of tradition, as if the portrait is saying: “If our grandparents were here today, they would have approved of our merrymaking.” The party is thereby transformed from a spontaneous expression of fun to a performance of fun-that-has-been, an act of salvage.

Fig. 6.1

Cartoon by Frans Esterhuyze, “Opskommel,” August 1992, 12

There is a second type of framing in this example: between a white center/inside and a black(face) periphery/outside. The first frame suggests what boeremusiek is saved by: tradition. The second indicates what it is saved from: its blackness and threatening descent into savagery. Boeremusiek’s savagery and its salvage are two sides of the same coin, as a letter by an anonymous reader published in 1955 suggests:

The objection against traditional Boeremusiek is often raised: that it is too monotonous and repetitive. The answer to this is simple: listen to something else, but do not try to remodel the original. … If the new generation wants a new kind of music, give it to them, but do not bastardize [verbaster] our traditional Boeremusiek. If it must become a museum piece, let it at least be a true one. Some of us actually like spending the odd hour in the museum to draw from the past the joys that are absent in the present.³³

Again, boeremusiek’s modernist moment, the moment its potential as “museum piece” (epiphany) reveals itself as the flipside of the music’s racialized banality, monotony, and repetition (embarrassment; blackface), performing boeremusiek becomes the work of salvage. This implies not only that liveness poses a threat to authenticity and that live performance continuously puts itself under erasure by “bastardizing” the real, but that the affective power of boeremusiek resides precisely in a failed staging and restaging of primitive savagery and modernist redemption. This happens by means of the particular pattern of co-occurrence of the affective modalities I have identified in this book. The result is a subjunctive pleasure, one enjoyed “as if”—as a performance instrumental to preserving a tradition that has ceased to exist of its own accord. Boeremusiek’s pleasures hover unconsummated in these subjunctive spaces.

Christian Soteriology: The White Side of (Musical) Salvation

It is customary to read the savage/salvage motif in folk music scholarship in terms of the preservation of traditional cultural forms in the modern world. But in keeping with my concern with the aesthetics of Afrikaner whiteness and the idea that the white body carries its own alterity, I want to illuminate it from a related if unexpected angle: Christian soteriology. In doing so, I’m approaching boeremusiek’s staging and restaging of savagery and salvage as the liturgical working out of a quasi-theological problem.

Apart from educing boeremusiek’s aesthetics of impurity from the religious context I sketched in Chap. 2, the underlying assumption—and here I join an increasing number of writers and social critics—is that whiteness functions like a religion.³⁴ This view has been expounded most convincingly by the theologian James Perkinson in his hard-hitting book White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity. His striking argument is that by offering dogmas and modes of embodiment that promise visions of “wholeness” and “purity,” soteriology—the logic or theology of salvation—lies at the basis of how whiteness defines itself in the present day.³⁵ Whiteness, Perkinson argues, functions as a surrogate form of religious salvation and white race privilege “as a modality of ‘lived theology’” that continues to manifest “as a habit of secular embodiment.”³⁶

According to Perkinson, soteriological questions contributed fundamentally to the anxieties of European conquest and the concomitant encounter with difference in Anglo Protestant colonies. In this conquest, black skin not only symbolized a descent into sin, bedevilment, and “a resistance to God so thoroughgoing it had seemingly reproduced its meaning on the surface of the body,” it also “figured a soteriological threshold … beyond which Christian destiny became dangerously uncertain.”³⁷ Perkinson explains:

Projections about the capacity of the other “to be saved” became a crucial qualifier in what quickly emerged as a kind of conundrum of the colonizer, a dilemma of the duty to evangelize and civilize. On the one hand, if comprehended as “save-able,” then the “wild savages” of these new lands were de facto equal to the colonizers as potential spiritual subjects of the Christian message … But if potentially equal in the economy of salvation, then how could such souls legitimately be exploited as slave-labor, or destroyed as heathen?³⁸

The conundrum of the colonizer of which Perkinson writes plays out in the white body’s struggle against itself in its confrontation with boeremusiek. The “Savage slot” outlined by boeremusiek occurs, as I have repeatedly stressed in this book, not only as a projection onto a racial Other, but across an internalized but disjointed economy of taste: If boeremusiek is savage, am I? If boeremusiek can’t be saved, can I? From the overt resonances with blackface minstrelsy, to the discourses of embarrassment and defilement that circle around how the music takes root in the white body and corrupts it from within, to attempts at reclaiming and sanitizing its embarrassments through modernist epiphany, through to the disavowal of the blackness of Nico Carstens’s music in the definition of apartheid whiteness, boeremusiek repeatedly sets up and transgresses a soteriological threshold.

Two aspects of Perkinson’s argument link it to my own: first, the idea that race-thinking is sustained through a set of affective enregisterments—or modalities—that function not only through a symbolism of race rendered in language, but through a complex interplay between corporeal performatives and reflexive language-in-use that, on the face of it, sometimes have little to do with race.³⁹ Second, as a parallel to Paul Gilroy, Perkinson argues that “white corporeality is also rooted in a ‘structure of feeling’ that is socially reproduced.”⁴⁰ That is: whiteness can be understood as a communal or public set of affective enregisterments or modalities that form part of a mimetic archive of whiteness available for activation in the present. For Perkinson, “the history of race [is] codified in the white body as fear and guilt.”⁴¹ In this book, I have shown the gradations of white affect to be much finer than that and have attempted to unmask the metapragmatics of the different forms of white aesthetic displacement and denial that run through South African history.

But the story is not over. Contemporary boeremusiek performance is an arena where whiteness continues to work itself out through the music’s ability to address itself to people and to their bodies in ways that matter but also in ways that are leaky and contradictory and cannot be contained. Whiteness enshrines itself at contemporary boeremusiek events not by proclaiming white bodies “whole” or “pure” but by liturgically staging, through a vital, resonant experience of the music—a re-enactment of boeremusiek’s savagery and salvage—the feeling-states of a salvific process.

By describing the boeremusiek event as liturgical, I hold on to the idea of whiteness as a quasi-religious orientation while capturing something of the processual and patterned nature of white affective enregisterment. The contemporary event—as the photographic visual essay that unfolds throughout this book intimates—acts as a frame for drawing attention to the indexical relationships between boeremusiek’s modalities and to the ritual coordination of those heightened states of arousal by which whiteness constitutes itself.⁴² I also think of the term “liturgical” in a temporal sense, as aligning with Mazzarella’s mimetic archive and as describing a “sacramental,” non-causal historical continuity; something like Benjamin’s “image … wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”⁴³ Such a sacramental take on historical continuity suggests a new purpose for the postapartheid. What has become evident in this book is that the affects of whiteness can diverge substantially from the political rhetoric of whiteness. In George Rawick’s words, racism “feeds on underground streams of sensibilities.”⁴⁴ Thus, instead of viewing the contemporary event as some exemplification of a particular postapartheid white identity, the postapartheid becomes an opportunity to witness—in a kind of redacted form—the aesthetic poses of a whiteness not in service of political ideology, but in service only of itself.

“Who Said Boeremusiek Can’t Be Fun?”—Soteriological Anxiety at a Contemporary Boeremusiek Event

“We’re grateful that we may still get underway with a reading from the Bible and prayer—as befits our Boerevolk,” the secretary of the Boeremusiek Guild—then the largest boeremusiek organization in South Africa, now defunct—opened the two-day festival in celebration of the organization’s 21st anniversary in 2010. From the outset, the location is imbued with special subjunctive significance, when it is declared that “our forefathers would have wanted us to perform boeremusiek here at the Voortrekker Monument.” On the picnic grounds below the granite monolith representing the “foundational myth of exclusive Afrikaner power” when the Boers—after entering into a covenant with God—defeated an army of Zulu warriors at the Battle of Blood River, camping chairs and blankets are being folded out in careful calculation of the trajectory of the sun.

A pastor in a black suit takes to the podium and reads Psalm 150: “Let us praise the Lord with music and dancing!” He had a choice between two passages that inevitably frame boeremusiek events as quasi-religious occasions. The other one is “A time for Everything” from Ecclesiastes 3 (also see Chap. 2) with its incantation that “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” A series of lengthy speeches by boeremusiek dignitaries follows. Rows of chairs, which will be pushed aside once the dancing commences, line the open-sided hall where the sound equipment has been set up on a raised platform. The speakers are struggling to make themselves heard above the din emanating from outside; for many of the attendees, the party had already started the evening before.

The chairman seems nervous. A letter from an honorary president of the organization is read to the increasingly disinterested audience. The salvation of boeremusiek is its concern. “Just as the tree of the Biblical parable carrying no fruit runs the risk of being cut down, so it is our duty to water and fertilize the tree of boeremusiek.” The speaker raises his index finger in emphasis. “Water it!” he chastises. “We must water it!”

One could understand these religious invocations as meditations on the lost prominence of boeremusiek in a postapartheid dispensation or as theological justifications for the pleasures afforded by the music. They are both these things. But they are also reflections on boeremusiek practice of the kind that I have argued create modalized affective states; metalinguistic modal “shifters” that activate boeremusiek’s mimetic archive. What the devotional opening accomplishes is to frame present enjoyment as inevitably shaded by soteriological anxiety. Or, to put it more forcefully, the opening figures such anxiety as boeremusiek’s essential aesthetic disposition. By staging a seemingly unnecessary defense for the music (seeing that everyone present chose to be there and are, in fact, deeply committed to and invested in the music), the event trades in historical injunctions against music and dancing that have little contemporary currency. Even while providing the necessary justification for dancing and fun to continue, the Biblical readings and the chronotopic resonances of the event space wrap boeremusiek back into the premodern religious worldview of impurity, sin, and divine retribution intertwined with racial fear and desire that I sketched in Chap. 2. From the start, the liveness of the event is undercut by the notion that this might very well not be boeremusiek’s appointed time. Or indeed—that there is never a good time for boeremusiek. Hence, salvation is not primarily about the music’s lost prominence in a modernized or a changed political world. In fact, what the discourse of salvation is “about” is of limited concern here—its meanings are labile and responsive to context. What matters is that boeremusiek is more profoundly “lost” to whiteness—indexically so, one might say—and that the subjunctive enjoyment of the music hinges on the affective participatory discrepancies that come about as a result of this fact.

The devotional opening forms part of a broader register within the organization that posits the salvation of boeremusiek’s musical heritage as a moral imperative. The dress and rhetorical style of its officiaries, its name badges, uniforms, constitution, mission and vision, AGM, institutional chains of command, and disciplinary codes are at once attempts to define boeremusiek’s magic as unruly and transgressive, and attempts to reign that magic in. So, for example, the organization’s code of conduct stipulates that “in accordance with the moral standards of our Afrikaner volk” every event shall be opened with prayer, that members shall refrain from any conduct that can bring the organization into disrepute, and that “drunkenness, debauchery, foul language” and “any deed harmful to the reputation of the Boeremusiekgilde” will not be tolerated. Members who fail to adhere to these measures face termination of their membership.⁴⁵

In reality, these measures are not stringently policed. Similar to the inclusion of boeremusiek at the 1938 Great Trek centenary, there are two ubiquitous opposing forces at work at the contemporary event. An elaborate bureaucratic organizational defense for boeremusiek prioritizes seriousness, order, transcendence, economy, chastity, reason, and calculation; an opposing register of throwing-caution-to-the-wind entails laughter, disorder, immediacy, binging, lust, madness, and impulse.⁴⁶ The relationship between the two forces is both dialectical and modal. In other words, purity and impurity not only beget each other dialectically, but the judging aspects of order and duty frame the feeling aspects of abandon in that particular way that renders present enjoyment subjunctive.

As the festival day wears on, mostly older couples line the dance floor in the stale intimacy of long marriages. Except for a few head-turners, these couples are differentiated only by their unique dance-holds. “A man’s thumb is his steering rod,” one woman jokingly observes. Families camp out in the shade outside the hall: mothers butter sandwiches from plastic tubs of margarine; fathers drink beer and lounge in camping chairs, their feet up on cooler boxes. Women members of the organization feed the crowd pancakes and vetkoek. “If you want something done, put a woman in charge,” says an official from the stage. The stalls around the periphery sell stick-on Playboy tattoos, flags of the old Transvaal Boer republic, belly piercings, Bafana Bafana T-shirts, vuvuzelas, and home-made jams. Intemperance is often relegated to the margins or the outside of the official event space. On the festival day, there is a certain tedium to the succession of bands on stage as they perform in different categories. But where musicians and supporters gather in shared dormitory-style accommodation the evening before and after, the music stomps, the drink flows, the braai is stacked, and the dancing is uninhibited.

Boeremusiek’s liturgy reaches its apotheosis in a rhetorical question often delivered from stage after a particularly energetic or well-executed performance: “Who said boeremusiek can’t be fun?!” when no-one had suggested it in the first place. This deflating question (also see Fig. 6.2) achieves several things at once. First, it modally qualifies the affective reality of the participants who had, in fact, been having fun. Second, it demonstrates how the very definition of white pleasure is enmeshed with a metalanguage that puts it under erasure. Far from a casual interjection, it recreates the crisis on which white pleasure depends: not only are you now obliged to have fun for the greater cause of salvaging boeremusiek, obligation and self-castigation are enregistered as an aspect of “fun” itself. Finally, having created the conditions for experiencing boeremusiek’s affect as a loss of immediacy, the future of the music is depicted as balancing precariously on the existence of present enjoyment; “fun” starts depending on this discourse of crisis for its continued existence, and vice versa. Pronouncing the death of fun therefore serves, simultaneously, in creating a simulation of participation and figuring the resulting anxiety and alienation from the affects of music as the very definition of white pleasure.

Fig. 6.2

“Doesn’t that look like fun?,” Program of the Boeremusiek Guild’s 21st anniversary festival, 2010

The affective enregisterment of subjunctive pleasure further manifests in contemporary adaptations to what one could call the “modal logic” of the boeremusiek standard. A boeremusiek number is identified as a mazurka, galop, wals, polka, settees or vastrap solely on account of its rhythm and meter and not its structural features. The two themes of a standard are known as draaie (turns), suggesting different steps or different dance directions at each occurrence of A and B. Although both themes usually have a strict 8-bar periodicity and follow predictable primary chord progressions, the order in which they occur and the number of subsequent repetitions vary widely. In a pragmatic understanding of these conventions, the two 8-bar draaie index nothing other than present musical conditions and the dancing it enables; the music issues an uncomplicated invitation to dance.

In the traditional imagination, structural decisions are taken by gauging the mood of the audience. Should the concertinist deem a number to become too tedious, he will initiate a contrasting middle section, known as “minors”—a short and sudden eight or 16-bar modulation of sorts to the fifth scale degree. “Minors”—pointing to insignificance rather than mode—is characterized by the concertina tremolo figures of an octave or a major sixth so distinctive of boeremusiek. The onomatopoetic term sakkie-sakkie as well as skommel (sway) and wikkel (jiggle) are used to describe this action. Concertinists with exhibitionist tendencies would swing the instrument above their heads in a circle movement while executing these tremolo figures. Minors rarely has a theme or a tune and consists primarily of pitches derived from the tonic chord, its function being the prolongation of musical time rather than melodic elaboration. Sometimes the minors section is used to foreground and showcase the quasi-improvisations of other instruments in the band, usually the banjo, while serving as exhortation for dancers to twirl around more enthusiastically. Minors thus marks a modal shift from indicating dancing to encouraging an intensification of the kinetic force of the dance. It is the equivalent of saying: “Dance!” instead of “We are dancing.” Ostensibly offering an escape from the harmonic dreariness of the boeremusiek standard, minors ironically suggests a new mood of excitement in the form of more harmonic stasis.

The cue for commencing the minors section is usually a rather unsubtle secondary dominant at the beginning of a new phrase. This means that it is possible to insert the minors section after the end of any period and, consequently, that one listens with a sense of anticipation whenever such an ending is approaching. More often than not, however, one’s anticipation is frustrated and the number proceeds with a restatement of the first theme. On a structural level, then, the cadenza-like minors section reserves the possibility of enhanced pleasure or a distinctive shift in the dynamic of movement, which often remains unrealized.

In much contemporary boeremusiek, the two main draaie are significantly eroded and replaced with an overt reference to the minors section at the outset of the piece.⁴⁷ This signposts a fundamental shift in the modal logic of the standard. The modal intensification implied by this gesture means that the piece starts in the modality of the possible, at a level of intensity that exceeds the actual. The “indicative” frame—which traditionally lasted 16 bars—is thus replaced by an 8-bar “theme” devoid of melodic material and with contours suggesting a consequent rather than an antecedent phrase; it is the musical equivalent of a rhetorical question. In such examples, there is nothing minor about the minors section. It no longer serves as musical digression, as a temporary shift in modality; instead, it becomes the main source of musical material. And this is precisely the structural glitch of much contemporary boeremusiek. What little musical material remains is not employed to answer to the prerequisites of actual dancing, but—by trying too hard and foregrounding fun as an imperative—it renders musical pleasure subjunctive.

Where in the traditional form the listener or dancer is led through the kinetic possibilities afforded by the musical structure in an experiential way, contemporary versions short-circuit this process by disrupting the modal logic of the standard. Rather than operating as carriers of musical expression with their own internal logic of participation, aspects of the musical structure are treated as if they were inherently meaningful. It is the indexical and pragmatic meanings of the minors section—its implied affective intensification and exhortation to dance—that become the subject matter of the performance. By deriving the main musical material from the minors section, the music performs its indexical and pragmatic meanings in such a way that participants are led not to the experience of present actuality, but of bygone possibility. It is as if the music insists yet again: “Look here, who said boeremusiek can’t be fun!?” What once served as incitements to pleasure are thereby overturned into commemorations of pleasure, framing the very liveness of the event as an obligatory exercise in nostalgia. Instead of affording the opportunity to groove, one is thereby reminded that white pleasure needs to be “saved”—and in the process limited, bridled, and controlled—if it is to remain white at all.

Although there is a near-complete disavowal of boeremusiek’s creole affective and musical resources at contemporary events, white pleasure continues to hinge on the dramaturgical staging of a soteriological anxiety arising from the conflict between the two poles of its internalized affective economy: its savagery and its salvage. The subjunctive framing of enjoyment is significant because it acts as mechanism for engaging boeremusiek’s “Savage slot”—for encountering in the present day a more primitive former white self. Like polka, boeremusiek presents one of the extant “peasantries of the capitalist world” where “time is suspended in a state of happiness.”⁴⁸ But in the case of boeremusiek, this happiness is tinged—always—with soteriological anxiety: that whiteness implies salvage and that unbridled happiness will drive whiteness to the brink of unraveling.

It is on this point that the history and practices of boeremusiek contradict theories of race formation as the displacement and projection of desire onto Others so as to repress it in oneself. Ultimately, boeremusiek’s racist pathology is one of perversion and not one of neurosis. The savagery of boeremusiek resides not primarily in the projection of musical creativity onto racial Others or the appropriation of black creativity for white self-realization (although there is much of that too); boeremusiek’s savagery (and its salvage) pushes at a soteriological threshold within the white body and results in an aesthetic of provisional enjoyment, self-castigation, and of putting the body under erasure in the very moment it responds to the world of sound. The contemporary white listener thus encounters boeremusiek “as a reformed sinner meets a comrade of his previous debaucheries”; he creates “a pornography of his former self,” as George Rawick has explained the modality of race relations between Englishmen and West African slaves in the early modern period.⁴⁹ But in exercising its claim to whiteness, boeremusiek does not repress this pornography or project it onto others, but indulges it by simultaneously reviving boeremusiek pleasure as a racially charged “inner experience of eroticism” and scoring a victory over it by internally reforming and detaching from its affects; that is, it is disavowed. Whiteness is thus maintained through its repeated affective salvation. It is never a “done deal,” so to speak, but is figured as a destabilizing, quasi-liturgical encounter with the savagery of boeremusiek to form what Mazzarella refers to as a “constitutive crisis.”⁵⁰ As aesthetic liturgies of whiteness, contemporary boeremusiek events thus exploit the “charismatic basis of both the constitutive and the destitutive dimensions of world making.”⁵¹ In this affective endangerment of whiteness and its ritual salvage, this drama is looped on repeat. What boeremusiek affords, then, is a mimetic archive of what one could call, following Charles Keil, a set of affective participatory discrepancies intimately involved in the making of race.

Affective Participatory Discrepancies and the Sacramental Embodiment of Whiteness

Although their early writings are only cursorily referenced in contemporary theorizations of musical affect, the essays and dialogues collected in Charles Keil and Steven Feld’s Music Grooves remain some of the most trenchant observations on the subject.⁵² Their collective reflections situated affect somewhere at the confluence between “participation,” “groove,” and “mediation.” For Keil, this confluence was both causally and phenomenally tied to “participatory discrepancies.” The experience of groove (understood as a verb) was the experience of “participation” in music.⁵³ But, ironically, music’s emergent vital force was presupposed and entailed by discrepancies in this groove (understood as a noun). In Keil’s famous formulation, feelings of being “at one” with music relied on aspects of music being “out of time” and “out of tune.”⁵⁴ Music’s sacramental or consubstantive nature (“the music inside the people and the people inside the music”)⁵⁵ was thus a factor of its “slightly out-of-syncness.”⁵⁶

But why should the pleasure of groove be rooted in discrepancy?

Jason Toynbee, in his analysis of electronic dance music, provides a provisional answer by linking “participation” to “mediation”⁵⁷—a linkage already present in the twofold organization of Music Grooves and Keil and Feld’s repeated pondering of the connection between the two concepts.⁵⁸ Toynbee identifies in electronic dance music “a new kind of structural ambivalence” between instances of immediacy (when the “pulsing representation of the now…induce trance-like states and a dissolution of subjectivity”)⁵⁹ and instances of mediation (when “dissolving bodies rematerialize as muscles pull, and dancers step and turn against the pulse” as producers and DJs use various techniques to subvert the metronome beat).⁶⁰ “Discrepant beats” create disorientation, disrupt the flow of musical bliss, and force bodies to realign and reorient themselves anew. For Toynbee, these are moments of agency, “of thinking through bliss.”⁶¹ But what Keil and Feld’s original texts imply is that the disruption of immediacy by mediation (or, then, “immediation”) constitutes “bliss” in the first place. In this view, “bliss” or “groove” is the result of some sort of short-circuit between immediacy and mediation. This implies that “participatory consciousness” or the pleasure of entrainment comes about, at least partly, through breaks in what one could call the fourth wall of affect. In other words, discrepancies in the groove temporarily lift the veil on the fiction of participation-without-mediation, and therein lies, paradoxically, the precondition for entrainment into the groove. One could state this as a broader principle not limited to “groove.” In its non-technical and “mysterious” sense, this is what the term “participatory discrepancies” describes: the processual embodiment of presence that comes about through immediation—through repeated cycles of entrainment and being made aware of one’s entrainment, and (nevertheless or as a result) succumbing anew to the commandeering force of music.

In the context of my concern with music, race, and affect, this principle is particularly significant. The white aesthetic faculty, as I have argued, takes shape through various registers of (un)commitment to and (un)belief in musical participation that are felt and performed as affective incongruities within the white body. Like textural or processual discrepancies, these affective participatory discrepancies enjoin white bliss by repeatedly breaking through the fourth wall of affect: being “at one” with boeremusiek often means being “at two” with one’s white body. Inferred from boeremusiek’s metalanguage of affect, these disjointed internalized states expose the racially mediated or supposedly “savage” nature of the music’s commandeering force, while providing the means of succumbing to this force subjunctively or provisionally in an act of salvage. The resulting aesthetics of discomfiting pleasure (a perverted pleasure because of the fetishized display of its racist bias) is the affective articulation of whiteness. Boeremusiek’s immediation or its signature discrepancies of affect (what Feld would call its “iconicity of style”)⁶² are thus tied up with deeply embodied processes of racialization.

This sense of “immediation” connects Music Grooves to contemporary affect theory. William Mazzarella has written extensively on how affect (and subjectivity and social life more broadly) relies on occluded processes of mediation, or on what he refers to as the “dream of immediation.” “[T]he deep irony of mediation,” he writes, “is that its constitutive role in social life depends upon its own masking.”⁶³ In other words, the efficacy of mediation (as conceptualized by Mazzarella) relies on its own obscurity to create the sense of presence and transparency that makes highly contingent situations—including, fundamentally, our sense of ourselves as subjects—feel like our own.⁶⁴ Lila Ellen Gray has pointed out that music and listening, likewise, depend on this “dream of immediation” to retain its social efficacy, and that, in their seemingly direct appeal to the body, “music” and “affect” often become shorthand for each other.⁶⁵ In this sense, music is a technology of affect just as much as affect is a technology of music. Whiteness, as we have seen, is a third commandeering force in boeremusiek’s triad of immediacy fantasies. Whiteness’s “dream of immediation,” as Ruth Frankenberg has so persuasively argued, resides in its invisibility or “commonsense” nature that effectively dissimulates its racist underpinnings.⁶⁶ In boeremusiek performance, this commonsensical nature of whiteness is often pierced, allowing a window on the formatted or formulaic patterns of white affect that are nevertheless felt to be prediscursive and subjectively embodied as part of an unraced, authentically lived self.

The question is often posed what music studies can bring to the theorization of affect. This book demonstrates that the musical take on immediation, as derived from the intellectual legacy of Keil and Feld and theorized in this book through boeremusiek’s affective modalities, is an alternative scheme for understanding how affect operates in the world. If affect theory holds that the power of mediation lies in its masking or occlusion, the efficaciousness of musical affect—its sacramental qualities—depends in the case of boeremusiek not only on the masking of its mediated nature but perhaps even more so on its strategic or aesthetic unmasking. In tune with the musical definition of immediation, such moments of unmasking are discrepancies but not anomalies in the affective enregisterment of race. Approaching affect from the perspective of music indicates how race, music, and affect form a triad of interlinked commandeering ontologies. In boeremusiek’s metalanguage, the racist basis of white musical affect is, at times, made shockingly transparent. Similar to how blackface as a performance modality unmasks-by-masking the psychological apparatus of white pleasure, boeremusiek as Afrikaner whiteness’s own “anthropological Other” is an arena where the veil is lifted subjectively and in an embodied way on the invisibility or “commonsense” nature of whiteness, as a means for that whiteness to be asserted afresh.

On this point, too, Keil’s meditations on groove provide an important commentary. In his strange and largely ignored essay “Groovology and the Magic of Other People’s Music,” he asked, controversially, how it is that “lowers/lesser/others…get to make the best grooves every time,” noting that participatory discrepancies often played out as ethnic or class difference.⁶⁷ Although he maintained that “groovology” and the participatory discrepancies paradigm provided the best means of understanding “all that is most interesting in other people’s musicking,” its core assumptions were “confusing” and “discomforting.”⁶⁸ “Music always seems to come from outside us,” he formulated the general rule of (white) groove, “finds its way into us from ‘others’, binds us to the world, [and] constructs the major psychic bridge between our ‘others’ and ourselves.”⁶⁹ All of this, Keil argued, was evidence of the tired but deeply entrenched Cartesian split “that posits whites as the masterminds of culture while blacks provide the muscle” (and by implication, one might add, the music).⁷⁰ There was thus an upsetting slippage between racial stereotypes, prevailing prejudice, and interpretation when it came to describing and experiencing the groove.⁷¹ And while Keil noted that honoring others for their “groundedness” and “grooviness” probably added energy to racism and stereotyping,⁷² he ended the essay with a different concern: a concern for the lost grooviness of the white self as it confronted and uncovered its unconscious, racially mediated groove processes.⁷³

The implications of this book, especially when read in line with Keil’s observations, is that, at least from the perspective of white listening, musical affect is fundamentally racialized and that music, race, and affect are technologies of each other mutually performed into subjective, sacramental embodiment. Keil’s reference to Bateson in considering the commandeering force of music is instructive here.⁷⁴ In one of Bateson’s “metalogues” with his daughter, they discuss the performance of a ballet dancer and the difference between art as metaphor and art as sacrament:

F:[…] The swan figure is not a real swan but a pretend swan. It is also a pretend-not human being. It is also “really” a young lady wearing a white dress. And a real swan would resemble a young lady in certain ways.

D:But which of these is sacramental?

F:Oh Lord, here we go again. I can only say this: that it is not one of these statements but their combination which constitutes a sacrament. The “pretend” and the “pretend-not” and the “really” somehow get fused together into a single meaning.

D:But we ought to keep them separate.

F:Yes. That is what the logicians and the scientists try to do. But they do not create ballets that way – nor sacraments.⁷⁵

Bateson does not exactly provide an explanation of how the performative works, but if we read his words as describing the pragmatics of the affective power of art, part of the answer to what produces that mysterious and powerful thing we call affect lies in a syntagmatic understanding of the relationships between components of discourse with different kinds of ontological claims. This comes close to Owen Barfield’s idea of the poetic experience on which Keil based his theory of participatory discrepancies. “Poetic experience,” Barfield wrote, “depends on a ‘difference of potentials,’ a kind of discrepancy between two moods or modes of consciousness.”⁷⁶ Boeremusiek’s race-based metalanguage of affect does just this: it unmasks the “sacramental” participation in whiteness as modalities of magical thinking premised in racial confusion, of never quite knowing whether one is participating in the “pretend,” the “pretend-not” or the “really” of white musical participation or that of its imagined racial Others. This metapragmatic awareness of the race-based premises of boeremusiek’s groove dents the affects of music while bolstering the affects of race. And in this affective enregisterment of race, losing the groove signals an intolerable loss in the choice to become white.