An art of detour

Martin Stokes’ efforts to “bring the issue of migration back into ethnomusicology” (2020) are of a density that challenges us all. He argues that “the current moment is one in which the final vestiges of language about migrant culture as adaptive have been swept away and in which the populist evocation of a migrant crisis at our gates has posed unsettling challenges [and] explores the tensions between an emphasis on migrant creativity and survival, mobility and motility, and identity and citizenship” (Stokes 2020, 1). This position leads us to consider that when Stokes is interested in the Oxford Maqam group (Stokes, This issue), it is not a modest neighborhood group that he is interested in. The musicians here are of a very high level, having joined the band precisely for this excellence. Making music together at such a high level of practice mobilizes the skills of each musician. Doing so, the group enters the contemporary market of musical mobilities, plays all over the world, receives laudatory reviews in mainstream magazines, and makes exceptionality the mark of their commitment. It is therefore a group marked with the seal of exceptionality in a migratory context. And this is a characteristic of many of the cases presented in this issue: many of the musicians we meet are marked by this seal of exceptionality. This brings us back to the dialectical relations mentioned above between the different ways of making our analyses exemplary: how do we construct intelligibility? How do we articulate the singular experience that is the common horizon of our ethnographies and our fieldwork with the broad scale of migration and analyses of diversity on the global level?

Let’s take a little step back. In this context, therefore, what is the relationship between the musical style performed by people in a situation of forced migration, their instrumental or vocal practices, and the modes of writing these repertoires? To put more simply: are migrants condemned to play “their music,” or the idea that we have of this music, which would be “theirs” in the name of an essentialized identity? Or are they invited to play the repertoire of the host country at the risk of reactivating, through music, the codes of cultural domination?

Many musicians are involved in NGOs and work in refugee camps. They make music the driving force of their commitment, pledging themselves in the name of music and its properties of resilience (see above), a music able to help overcome the suffering endured in forced exile because it touches the deepest part of the human soul. At this point, the question of musical analysis which we have just discussed joins the social question.

Let’s compare the Al Kamandjati project, which founded the Ramallah school in 2005 around a project combining instrument-making and the Arab musical repertoire, to the El Sistema project, which radiates throughout the world, including in the refugee camps in Greece, with the Western Symphony Orchestra as its tool and a desirable horizon. With the Western Symphony Orchestra as a model, including its instruments, its conductor, its spatial arrangement, its chairs, its desks, and its scores, the model of the orchestra situates the five-line musical staff in cultural frameworks where the musical traditions that nourish musical practices which are out of step with the probity of militant mobilizations. The five-line musical stave imposes musical rules that play the role of cultural domestication. Two responses are then possible. On the one hand, we can see this musical practice as a way to escape any form of cultural determinism and to prepare forms of social inclusion through musical practices. On the other hand, we can see it as a way of ratifying a cultural domination that does not offer the repertoires of otherness a chance to express themselves. “Music” does not inhabit a decontextualized or dehistoricized existence. To choose an instrumental formation or a repertoire is to make a cultural mark.

This, then, is a question of strategy and tactics. To put it with Clea Hance, “Which cultural diversity will survive such cultural policies?” (Hance 2014). This focus on the use of musical repertoires in refugee camps leads us to examine how the cultural richness of human societies is articulated with the question of agency when human beings are plunged into a situation of anomie in refugee camps (Bohlman 2011a). Of course, it would be futile to assign to each person the marks of his or her own culture of origin or to attribute to him or her the desire to live according to the immutable rules of an inherited culture from which no one should deviate. From this point of view, the confrontation with other musical traditions can be assimilated to a form of opening up to a repairing agency, as Awet Andemicael suggests in her report to the UNHCR entitled Positive energy: a review of the role of artistic activities in refugee camps (Andemicael 2011). I am not trying to say here that the fact that people in a situation of forced migration can “discover” the symphony orchestra in a refugee camp and play in formations that obey the standards of the Western world would be an aporia to be fought in the name of cultural rights! But it is advisable to avoid postulating the symphonic orchestra as the only desirable horizon in disregard of the remarkable richness of the world, which is also a vector of agency. The UNESCO’s preamble to the declaration of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005 Convention) is also relevant in refugee camps, namely “Being aware that cultural diversity creates a rich and varied world, which increases the range of choices and nurtures human capacities and values, and therefore is a mainspring for sustainable development for communities, peoples and nations.” Then are the artistic mobilizations that are expressed in emergency situations tools of resilience, as Awet Andemicael claims in her report, or are they powerful machines of acculturation, or even vicariousness?

How can we not share with many ethnomusicologists today the concern that such questions are not being addressed by today’s ethnomusicology? Or more precisely, that ethnomusicology is rendered inaudible within social-science dialogues? Certainly, we know the contributions of Hugo Zemp and Steven Feld on Rorogwela. This Afunakwa lullaby became Deep Forest’s Grammy-winning Sweet Lullaby without anyone calling this creation or arrangement a plundering (Feld 2000). Yet it is indeed a process of “cultural extractivism” (Ochoa 2014; Serafini 2020). But then, how can we conceive an “art of the detour” that expresses itself in this way?

In his famous preface to Essais critiques (Critical essays), Roland Barthes (1964) notes that, if you want to show sympathy for someone who is mourning, you have to “make sentences” and go through that indirect moment that all forms of writing involve. This recourse to indirect formulation is what he calls the art of the detour. As I conceive it here, the “art of the detour” refers to this capacity to act in a situation. Something can be said that is likely to bypass the coercive hold of social discourse. It is the art of the detour. The question of the detour is a constant in the work of any ethnomusicologist. And here we have our first paradox: ingenuity is the heuristic posture that allows us to grasp the detour as an art, and it does not matter whether it goes in the right or the wrong direction. It is the process that holds my attention.

Many ethnomusicologists have questioned the success of certain artists, while others, with similar artistic proposals, have not managed to make it on the international scene of musical diversity. Sandrine Teixido (2018), studying the case of Jean-Didier Hoareau, or Charlotte Grabli (2019), studying the Katangan artists Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Marenzo, paint them as resourceful artists, which is why they succeeded. They succeeded because they were able to forge what, through his objective of understanding the mind as a creator of meanings, the psychologist Jerome Bruner would have called an “intercultural personality” (1990), i.e., a personality that creates the forms of social exteriority in its context of existence, while allowing itself to be forged in return by this social exteriority. This culturalist orientation of human cognition helps us to better understand the way artists are adulated (by the colonial administration in the case of the Katangese, by the audience of the great Parisian festival of African music Africolor in the case of Houareau). In reality, however the support is not only “found” in the environment of the artists in question, it is also forged as such by the artists themselves in their capacity to set up the frameworks of international cultural cooperation or private financiers, from Coca-Cola to Bata or Aspro, as resources for their creative and dissemination activities. This is what the psychologist James Gibson calls “affordances of action” (Gibson 1979). I have been able to study this mechanism in relation to the improvisation of musicians or spoken word artists who are able to draw resources for their own improvisation directly from the environment in which they improvise (Laborde 2006).

If we are willing to consider that the implementation of a musical creation in a cultural universe that receives it and makes it its own is analogous to the situation of the musician who improvises, why would we not take the risk of analogy by applying to musical implementation the resources of a pragmatist analysis of situated action (on analogy as a heuristic tool, see Hofstadter and Sander, 2013)? This would lead us to consider this skill of creating the external conditions of one’s own fame as a form of competence to turn events that arise or expectations that take shape into resources for an implementing action, i.e., into affordances of action. It is precisely under this description that I consider the agency (or the Handlungsfähigkeit) as referring to the capacity for initiative of everyone, including in situations of anomie. It also refers to the ability to treat situations of musical practice as situations of engagement in diversified forms of social bonding. This is why I place the making of music under this all-encompassing notion of agency as an ability to deal with situations.

By involving the question of affordances of action in the regime of tactics, we treat musicians as authors of their own trajectory and not only as the passive agents of their careers. Here I propose to distinguish between biography, life-course and career, according to the terms presented by Bénédicte Zimmermann (2013). Biography is the story of a life made tragic by the violence of forced migration and constructed for an outsider for the purpose of testimony. Here, the subjective aspect draws the auctorial force of the setting in narrative. The course of life in exile pays attention to the person, to the private spaces that make up the fabric of the migrant’s existence, to life projects, to interactions with the environment (Dewey 1980 [1934]:13), and to life paths. It is here that the forms of affordance are constructed that turn such and such an encounter, such and such an event, into a resource for constructive action. The career is a matter of attribute and of statutory attribution: it incites each musician to claim to be an artist above all and to reject any attribute that sends him back to the sole status of a migrant. The confrontation between these three registers of experience – biography, course of life, and career – should allow us to delimit the key situations that make it possible to identify, and then to study closely, the legal, social, policing, administrative, cultural, and family mechanisms the artists encounter. But in addition, such a confrontation should also allow us to improve understanding of how the musicians themselves confront or circumvent these registers of experience and thus allow us to characterize life in a situation of forced migration. We can then analyze the musician’s action in terms of turning the mechanisms of cultural domination into resources for inventiveness, which brings us back, as I will now explain, to the distinction made by Michel de Certeau (1990) between strategies and tactics.

Strategy is the mark of detachment. It is the calculation of power relations that becomes possible when a subject can be isolated from an “environment.” Tactics are more akin to forms of creative improvisation. They are based on empathy, on this capacity to put oneself in other people’s shoes in order to consider a situation “from their point of view.” This is what enables each person to adjust his or her own action according to how he or she sees the action of others. In so far as they escape nomological powers, tactics offer a game of actors in which each one invests his or her own inventive capacities. As Michel de Certeau states:

I call strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of the relations of power that becomes possible from the moment when a subject of will and power (a company, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be circumscribed as a proper and be the basis for managing relations with an exteriority of targets or threats (clients or competitors, enemies, the countryside around the city, the objectives and objects of research, etc.). As in management, any “strategic” rationalization first sets out to distinguish an “environment” from a “proper,” that is to say, the place of one’s own power and will. A Cartesian gesture, if you like: to circumscribe a proper in a world that is forced by the invisible powers of the Other. A gesture of scientific, political or military modernity (de Certeau, 1990:59).

When, in 2019, A. Aterianus-Owanga, A. Gaulier, J. Menet, C. Navarro, A. Rodriguez and M. Salzbrunn organized an international colloquium at the University of Lausanne entitled Migrating through the Arts: Rethinking worlds of music and dance through the lens of contemporary (im)mobilities, Jean-Christophe Sevin explained very clearly how the Massilia Sound System synthesized the meeting of reggae and chats in Marseilles. Doing so, the group drew a universe of strategy through an interpretative calculus aiming at elucidating “the institutionalized world of rap” in order to circumvent it better. But when Jack Dish joins the Marseilles team in the name of “the Mauritian spirit”, then it is a universe of tactics that takes shape. How can we deal with this dialectic between strategy and tactics? By taking into account the fact that this “art of detour” signals the capacity of each person to act on his history?

This is what Michel de Certeau said on tactics:

I call tactics the calculated action determined by the absence of a proper. Whereas no delimitation of exteriority provides it with the condition of an autonomy. Tactics has for place only that of the other. So it must play with the terrain imposed on it as organized by the law of a foreign force. It does not have the means to stand within itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, of anticipation, and of self-gathering: it is movement “within the enemy’s field of vision”, as Von Bulow said, and in the space controlled by him (ibid.:60-61).

However, we can see that saying this remains unsatisfactory because we have left aside the whole question and the levers of action. The notional pair strategy and tactics leads us here to open a wider perspective on “control relationships” (Chateauraynaud, 2015). This will be the third step in this paper: “What figures or anti­figures do the undisciplinary tactics of the ‘defeated of history’ borrow to persist and resist vis-à-vis the patterns, figures, and paths imposed by the strategies in which they are caught?” (Mboukou, 2015:3).