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Mobilities
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Enacting Music Scenes: Mobility, Locality and Cultural Production

Manuel Tironi
a a

Department of Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Published online: 08 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Manuel Tironi (2012) Enacting Music Scenes: Mobility, Locality and Cultural Production, Mobilities, 7:2, 185-210, DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2012.654993 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2012.654993

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Mobilities Vol. 7, No. 2, 185210, May 2012

Enacting Music Scenes: Mobility, Locality and Cultural Production

MANUEL TIRONI
Department of Sociology, Ponticia Universidad Catolica de Chile,

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ABSTRACT Cluster theories assume locality to be a bounded and xed spatiality characterized by shared worlds-of-life, strong ties and co-presence. This paper contests the immobility of such a denition. Drawing on the case of Santiagos experimental music scene, in Chile, I argue for a mobile, transient and uid approach to localized (cultural) economies. The empirical evidence indicates that Santiagos experimental music scene an innovative and productive de facto cluster performs (and unrolls) a decentered, episodic and itinerant geography enacted by porous, technologically mediated and contingent projects. These results call for new perspectives when thinking about economic innovation in general and cultural clusters within transitional cities in particular. KEY WORDS: Experimental music, clustering, spatial enactment, Santiago

Introduction The last three decades have witnessed the proliferation of territorial innovation models thought to explain the stubborn resistance and the increasing importance of the local in the creation, distribution and absorption of knowledge in the global economy (Moulaert and Sekia 2003). As cultural industries and the creative economy grew in importance, these models have been also applied to the cultural sector (Bell and Jayne 2004, Cooke and Lazzeretti 2008, Lazzeretti 2003, Mommaas 2004). However, there are still few critical reections on the spatial denitions mobilized by these models. This is not to say that they dont propose their own spatial conguration to understand the clustering of economic activities. Some debate whether localized economies conform to urban or regional scales (Cooke 1998, Morgan and Nauwelaers 1998), while others if the spatialities of localized economies should be assumed to be populated not only by rms but also by institutions and local features (Camagni and Maillat 2006). But these debates dont tackle a critical question: what is the denition of the local mobilized by these accounts? On the contrary, locality remains in cluster theories as an unproblematized notion. More specically, it tends to be constructed as an immutable, xed and bounded spatiality.

Correspondence Address: Department of Sociology, Ponticia Universidad Catlica de Chile.Av. Vicua Mackenna 4860, Campus San Joaqun, Macul, Santiago. Email: metironi@uc.cl 1745-0101 Print/1745-011X Online/12/02018526 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2012.654993

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This paper critiques the concept of the local utilized in cluster theories, proposing a mobile, transient and eventual approach. And it does so empirically, presenting the results of an ethnographic research on the experimental music scene in Santiago, Chile. It will be argued that cluster theories rest on conceptual platforms that are not fully able to grasp the complexities of localized cultural economies in contemporary cities, especially in the global south. The case here presented indicates that uidity, temporality and mobility do not operate against the local but, on the contrary, in certain circumstances they constitute it. To craft this argument, in the rst section I summarize the generalized denition of the local in cluster theories. I specically focus on the notion of tacit knowledge as the epitome of an immobile denition of the local. In this section I also present the emergent critiques of these accounts coming from geography, management and science and technology studies. In the next section I introduce the case study and in the third and fourth sections I present the empirical results. The conclusion is that Santiagos EMS is a highly innovative local (cultural) economy that not only unfolds in a uid spatiality, but that is congured by uctuating actors as well. Finally, the concluding remarks signal to the necessity of rethinking the ontology of the local when analyzing local economies in developing countries. Locality, Fixity and Tacit Knowledge Within the elds of economic geography, urban sociology and innovation studies, it has become a commonplace to situate the features of the local at the heart of contemporary economic development (Gertler 2003, Howells 2000). To be sure, this hasnt been always the case. Rather the contrary, early modernization sociologists usually saw industrialization and bureaucratization for example in the work of Marx, Weber and Simmel as the processes by which traditional and parochial communities were being eroded in the hands of mechanization and anonymization. In the same vein, one century later globalization theorists argued that in an ever-growing planetary economic, cultural and political system (Wallerstein 2004), the particularities of specic territories would lose economic importance. The informational society based on ubiquitous and immaterial knowledge, nancial and symbolic networks would transform localities into functional connection hubs. Or as Kelly indicated (1998, p. 945), the New Economy operates in a space rather that a place, and over time more and more economic transactions will migrate to this new space (emphasis added). The specic features of cities, then, seemed of no relevance explaining the form and function of the global economy. Castells, for example, argued that even so-called global cities were being surpassed by the emergence of a: transterritorial city, a space built by the linkage of many different spaces in one network of quasi-simultaneous interaction that brings together processes, people, buildings, and bits and pieces of local areas, in a global space of interaction. This global city is not a city, it is a new spatial form, the space of ows, characterizing the information age. Susser 2002, p. 372. Emphasis added But after a century of apocalyptic prognoses predicting the disappearance of locality rst by the hands of modernity, then by the homogenizing forces of globalization the local proved to be alive and playing a key role in the new

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global economic order (Amin and Thrift 2002, Smith 2000). The local was not anymore a generic space of ows but appeared as a Gemeinschaft, a territorial and institutional bounded space characterized by shared worlds-of-life, strong ties and co-presence. The (recovered) importance of locality as a xed and circumscribed territoriality in the context of a uid and planetary economy was epitomized in the concept of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966). Indeed, economic geographers realized that the force of agglomeration [remained] strong even though transportation and communication costs [continued] to decline (Storper and Venables 2004). The answer was, they discovered, in the buzz that special something in the air produced by informal, dialogic, temporary and non-articulated interactions. After the seminal insight of Michael Polanyi we can know more than we can tell (1966, p. 4) economic geography and management studies then recognized that the competitive base of rms did not rely solely on codied, formal and explicit knowledge, but also on tacit, experienced and practical knowledge: The idea is that, in a competitive era in which success depends increasingly upon de ability to produce new or improved products and services, tacit knowledge constitutes the most important basis for innovation-based value creation when everyone has relatively easy access to explicit/codied knowledge, the creation of unique capabilities and products depends on the production and use of tacit knowledge. Gertler 2003, pp. 789 Tacit knowledge, moreover, is intrinsically spatial: it has strong agglomerating effects. The scholarship on the subject has elaborated three interrelated arguments in this respect. First, since tacit knowledge dees codication and is acquired and produced in practice by interacting or doing (Maskell and Malmberg 1999, Howells 2000), it is difcult to exchange over long distance: tacit knowledge is produced in co-presence. Second, tacit knowledge is spatially sticky, since two parties can only exchange such knowledge effectively if they share a common social context [and] important elements of this social context are dened locally (Gertler 2003). And third, innovation itself is increasingly supported by socially organized learning (Gertler 2003, Lundvall and Johnson 1994, Camagni and Maillat 2006); that is, through a network of interactions between economic entities, research institutions and public agencies operating locally or regionally (Morgan 1997). Locality propinquity, interpersonal interactions and xity became, in sum, the locus of innovation and economic development in the new global era. This line of research grew in popularity. Alfred Marshalls ideas about industrial districts and the industrial atmosphere were revived, originating a new breed of concepts clusters, milieus, quarters, districts thought to capture the benets of the being there (Gertler 2003) for innovation-driven rms and competitive regions. The success of place-specic, knowledge-intensive economies such as Silicon Valley reinforced this new localism (Amin and Thrift 2003). Cultural Production, Musical Scenes and the City The newly discovered features of proximity and boundedness were especially relevant for cultural industries (Castillo and Haarich 2004), a key sector in the

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knowledge economy for its increasing economic size (Hesmondhalgh 2002, Pratt 1997, Scott 2000), but also for its symbolic relevance as an image-making catalyst (Evans 2003). If cultural entrepreneurs clustered in urban spaces, it was not due to the gentrifying forces of real-estate developers (Deutshe and Ryan 1989, Mele 2000, Podmore 1998, Shaw 2006, Zukin 1989), but to the need of rms and agents in their quest for innovation and creativity (Florida 2002a) to produce and absorb tacit knowledge (Scott 2000, 2004) and tap into the untraded interdependencies created in tight production networks (Storper 1997). The reason behind the notable tendency towards clustering of creative industries was, then: [i]n the cultural industries, we typically nd relatively small companies which are very dependent on extremely specic high-quality knowledge and which, in addition, have to deal with rapidly uctuating demand [and on] the development of dedicated suppliers and the creation of an atmosphere. Kloosterman and Stegmeijer 2004, p. 2 Moreover, the locational logic of creative industries is highly sensible to urban features, it is argued. For example, Florida (2002a, 2002b and 2005) suggests the creative class the engine of the new creative economy is attracted to bohemian, authentic and culturally dense places (Clark, Lloyd, Wong and Jain 2002, Florida 2002b, Lloyd 2004, 2006, Markusen 2006, Sabat and Tironi 2008). In other words, cultural entrepreneurs are pushed into proximity by the new forces of the knowledge-intense economy, while driven into enclosed and xed spatialities by the attraction of site-specic, embedded and topographic elements of (creative) neighborhoods. The scholarship on localized cultural production, then, has reproduced without contestation a version of the local as a static, bounded and representational entity. The local appears as the site of informal and primary relations, use values and community; the local is the place of propinquity and parochial, face-to-face interactions. It is the place of the immobile. Not surprisingly, eld research on creative industries has heavily focuses on the (inner-city) neighborhood as the primary object of study (see for example Crewe 1996, Crewe and Beaverstock 1998, Hutton 2006, Indergaard 2003, Sabat and Tironi 2008). Paradoxically, then, artistic milieus, creative clusters and bohemian districts are simultaneously the epitomes of creativity, owing ideas and dynamic knowledge, and the last resorts for traditional xity, motionlessness and closeness. Students of music scenes, although more aware of the complexities of the local, have also mobilized a rather immobile and bounded notion of localities. For example, Bennett and Peterson (2004) dene three types of music scenes: local, translocal and virtual. A local music scene is a: social activity that takes place in a delimited space and over a specic span of time in which clusters of producers, musicians and fans realize their common musical taste, collectively distinguishing themselves from others by using music and cultural signs often appropriated from other places, but recombined and developed in ways that come to represent the local scene. Bennett and Peterson 2004, p. 8

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Then local scenes either correspond to particularized local features and sensibilities, or construct particular narratives of the local via global networks. Either way, they refer to specic and geographically bounded localities, to a certain location or set of locations that are understood to be where members of the scene hang out and are welcome (Haunss and Leach 2004, p. 3). This understanding of the local can be observed in most of the literature on music scenes, for example in Cohens (1991) study of rock music in Liverpool, in Bennetts (2000) analyses of youth culture and pop music and in Crossleys (2009) analysis of Manchester s post-punk music scene. However, Bennett and Peterson argue that in many cases scenes are in contact with similar local scenes in distant places, interacting through the exchange of recordings, bands, fans, and fanzines (2004, p. 8). These are what Bennett and Peterson call translocal scenes because, while they are local, they are also connected with groups of kindred spirits many miles away (2004, p. 8). Finally, Bennett and Peterson indentify virtual scenes in which participants, like those in translocal scenes, are widely separated geographically, but unlike them, virtual scene participants around the world come together in a single scene-making conversation via the Internet (2004, p. 11). With this threefold denition of music scenes, Bennett and Peterson acknowledge the spatial and sociocultural heterogeneity of these entities. However, their denitions dont disturb at least substantially the epistemological principles of the local mobilized by conventional analyses of cultural production. First, Bennett and Peterson recognize that localities may exchange information and knowledge with one another and across latitudes, but this exchange is always done from the spatial and cultural xity of locality. Local scenes interact, and even globally, but this interaction doesnt affect the internal constitution of these scenes. The notion of the translocal speaks precisely of this conguration: localities that communicate with distantiated localities, but without losing their local nature. Similarly, Bennett and Peterson acknowledge the relevance of new technologies shaping music scenes. But instead of describing how these new technological mediations might be reconguring the local dening new spatial hybrids and crafting new forms of situated networks in the city they view these technologies as building a separated virtual, online scene altogether. In short, it would seem as if local scenes were about placeness, face-to-face contacts and community bonds and about the exchange of fanzines and other objects when they reach distant kindred spirits. If these parochial elements are replaced by sociotechnical mediations, the constitution of the local doesnt mutate, it stays untouched, but a new form of scene emerges, a virtual scene that operates in a totally different spatiality,although reproducing the very same parochial characteristics that has surpassed. Contesting Fixities These arguments have not gone without criticism. The turn to practice theories (Reckwitz 2002), relational perspectives (Savage at al. 2005) and mobility paradigms (Sheller and Urry 2006) has evidenced that the local cannot be reduced to monolithic and static denitions (Appadurai 1996). It has been argued that the ontology of the local has to be revisited and be (re)understood as an event that cannot be xed in time and space. In this vein, traditional communities of practice (Brown and Duguid 1991) are complemented by epistemic communities (Knorr Cetina 1999) and heterarchic organizations (Stark 2000, Grabher 2001) in which

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knowledge is created and distributed across distanciated nodes. Moreover, local knowledge-creation seems to be increasingly structured not around xed institutional arrangements, but on temporary organizations (Lundin and Sderholm 1995, Maskell, Bathelt and Malmberg 2004). Building on these insights, Amin and Cohendet (2004, see also Savage et al. 2005) have claimed for a relational understanding of locality in which heterogeneous networks and relations enact spaces of learning, collaboration and sharing without resting necessarily on face-to-face interactions. Evidence suggests, say Amin and Cohendet (2004, p. 96), that corporate organizational architectures: through complex network formation and network management devices [have managed to] nd ways of being there through regular and frequent contact between distributed communities, the formation of task forces and projects teams dislocated from their sites of regular work, the travels of tacit knowledge carried by executives, scientists, and technicians, the movement and transmissions of knowledge embodied in varied technologies, the insights generated during occasional meetings, teleconferences, and telephone conversations, or in e-mail messages sent in transit. Co-presence, in short, far from being a measure of topographic proximity is a knowledge-creation situation that admits multiple spatial levels and relational connections. Co-presence and the production of locality, then, have to be explained and not assumed in the order of things. Locality is done, and this doing has to be reconstructed following situationally the network of agents, users, institutions and materialities constituting it (Amin and Thrift 2002, Law 2000). And if locality is a network and heterogeneous effect, then it is better appraised as a performation (Thrift 1997, Tironi 2009b); that is, as an entity that does not preexist its enactment put forward by the agents populating it. Locality encompasses corporeal practical activities (Ibert 2010, 201); that is, it is produced in practice. In sum, the local as a closed spatiality and a face-to-face relational construction is being contested. But then, is a cluster possible if we assume a different transient, mobile, mutable ontology of the local? And if so, what exactly would a cluster look like? Some elements can be derived from the critiques above summarized. But to date there isnt a comprehensive answer to these questions. This paper tries to tackle the gap by describing the organizing principles and the spatial characteristics of a local (cultural) economy, namely the experimental music scene in Santiago, Chile. Being a cultural industry and, moreover, in a developing country this case study does not intend to reach generalized conclusions. However, this case is successful in unveiling the tensions between the emergence of an innovative learning/production network on the one hand, and the problematic constitution of the local as expected in cluster theory on the other. Santiagos Experimental Music Scene1 Between January 2007 and March 2008, I conducted an ethnographic-based research on Santiagos experimental music scene (EMS). Besides participant observations (Spradley 1980) of the scenes practices (rehearsals, public performances, production of events, socializing activities), 25 in-depth interviews and an online survey (n=24) were conducted. The aim was to identify the organizing principles

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and the spatial arrangements of Santiagos EMS. The challenge was to disentangle an apparent paradox: on the one hand, Santiagos EMS is a highly innovative and productive cultural industry. On the other, its organizing including both the spaces and the actors-networks that create and populate it does not conform to the conventional (bounded) denitions of locality utilized by the mainstream research on urban cultural clusters. For, when analyzing the ontological nature of its agents, there is nothing that can be nearly called a rm. There is nothing, either, that can be called a cluster or a district when studying the geography of the scene. Or there is, but only if we accept a mobile and eventual denition of the local, in lieu of the conventional static perspective. Santiagos alternative music scene has grown signicantly since the 1990s, but it was only in the early 2000s that an innovative and independent sub-scene emerged and expanded beyond national borders. In contrast with the mainstream alternative scene in Santiago, this sub-scene embraced more avant-garde paths of musical exploration. The scene gathers a variety of musical projects from electronica to folk, from musique concrete to hiphop but they all share, rst, a hybrid approach to musical styles, mixing and remixing different types of musical categories. Second, all projects are engaged in the exploration of non-conventional procedures of creation (eld recording, circuit bending, plunderphonics, instrument recycling) and diffusion (netlabels, art performances, concept installations). And third, for the above characteristics, Santiagos EMS has little (or no) access to mainstream, commercial markets and audiences. This commercial marginalization is, often, self-inected: artistic production is done for the love of art (Bourdieu 1993, Ley 2003). The last point reverberates with the institutional precariousness of Santiagos EMS. Cultural policy in Chile is still weak and partial. The main policy instrument for the promotion of cultural production is the National Fund for the Arts (Fondart in Spanish). This fund supports cultural and art projects in several categories (including music). However, the priority is still focused on relatively consolidated authors belonging to the art scene, especially when it comes to experimental projects. Unknown and unconnected artists outside the established art circuit doing avant-garde music are not likely to benet from Fondart subsidies. But in spite of this nancial and material precariousness, Santiagos EMS is highly dynamic. As a matter of fact, the scene functionally operates as a de facto cluster, for it complies with at least three features of Marshall-like districts. First, the scene is productive and innovative: the scene produces value-added. The scene gathers around 40 projects ranging from one-member sonic projects to more conventional rock-like bands that pivot around a (semi)continuous circuit of live gigs, performances and festivals. The vitality of this circuit has been praised by the international media for its quality and creativity. The scene has been featured in newspapers and magazines in New York, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires. Cumshot Records, a collective project of noise music has been invited to perform at So Paulo art biennial, and Pueblo Nuevo, a netlabel specializing in avant-garde electronic music, has recently won an important French award. An Australian newspaper commented in its music section that one of the nicest surprises of 2006 was discovering an incredibly exciting, self-contained scene in Santiago Gepe, Javiera Mena, Prissa, Julia Rose, World Music that may just make Chile the New Sweden (Carew and 29 Dec 2006).2 Thus Santiagos EMS, despite its marginal economic position, has entered the global circuit of cultural production, a highly sophisticated and valued niche-oriented sector key in the new knowledge economy (Scott 2004).

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Second, the effervescence of the scene has produced economic and industry spillovers. The capacity of a localized economy to generate multiplier effects on lateral industries is a key indicator of cluster performance (Feldman 2000). Santiagos EMS has triggered the emergence of a quasi-commercial, semi-informal music industry that organizes the events, designs yers and posters, and deals with promotion. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the scene is sustained by a number of music labels, most of them on-line. Today there are at least 10 netlabels, housed in Santiago, dedicated to the promotion of avant-garde music. Some of them Jacobino Discos, Pueblo Nuevo and Quemasucabeza have even enlisted international projects. Moreover, Santiagos EMS is supported by several Internet-based music magazines and information resources. These weblogs not only promote live gigs and other events of the scene, but also connects the Chilean experimental music community with connoisseur international information. Finally, in the third place, Santiagos EMS has developed and is constituted by the interaction between vertical and horizontal linkages, a requirement for cluster formation (Richardson 1972, Bathelt, Malmberg and Maskell 2004). In Santiagos EMS, vertical linkages cooperation and collaboration are developed around the interactions between music projects and at least three economic nodes: netlabels, venues and media devices. With the three of them, the scene has established relatively cohesive productive links in which music projects benet from support given by these nodes, while these nodes depend on the success of the scene and its artistic production. Horizontal linkages relations of competition, copying and monitoring between projects are deployed around the relation between musical projects. In sum, Santiagos EMS performs as a cluster; it is productive and innovative, it has produced economic spillovers and it has developed vertical and horizontal linkages. But the EMS lacks a fundamental cluster element: a xed spatiality. In the next section, I demonstrate that neither the geography underpinning the scene nor the nature of the actor-networks performing it comply with the conventional wisdom on cluster formation and local economic development. Decentering the Spaces of (Cultural) Production When the productive and everyday spaces of Santiagos EMS are reconstructed, one immediate conclusion can be made: they seem to be dened more by the movement of people, artifacts and places and by the transient, eventual and boundless nature of its activities than by closed territories and embedded behaviors. Contesting the Marshallean notion of cultural production in contemporary cities as a locally xed phenomenon, the scenes cluster seems to be on the move (Sheller and Urry 2006, Urry 2000 and 2002). To be sure, Santiagos EMS is local, it unfolds in Santiago, but it does so in an entanglement of networked and ever-changing spatialities and projects that make it difcult to dene local as a delimited and immobile time-space. Specically, the spaces of Santiagos EMS are (a) not aligned in a coherent territory, (b) temporary and (c) mobile. Dislocation The activities and agents of Santiagos EMS are not concentrated in space. There is nothing like a neighborhood, quarter , district or milieu that might characterize the physical relation between the different nodes comprising the scene. On the contrary, the scene is distributed throughout the city.

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Figure 1. EMS project ecology. Source: the author.

Figure 2 depicts four key spaces for the scene: socialization spaces (pubs, discotheques, restaurants and live music venues where the scene meets usually over drinks to informally share information, talk and gaze each other); performance spaces (where the scene musically display itself and enacts its publicness); rehearsal spaces (where the bands and project design and manufacture their products); and residential spaces (where members of the scene live). These four spaces comprise the scenes physical spatiality, and each one of them plays a key role in the enactment of the scene. They are what Maillat and Camagni (2006) call the support spaces of a milieu, and cluster theory assumes that these should create an integrated and geographically tight relational meso-space (Giuliani and Bell 2004). The central hypothesis is that the clustering of these support spaces facilitates the ow of information and cooperation, creates an intangible industrial atmosphere that propels creativity and enhances (symbolic and material) economies of scale (OConnor 2004). And indeed, Santiagos EMS shows signs of agglomeration around a broadly dened downtown Santiago. But only for socialization and performance spaces. Rehearsal and residential spaces, far from being concentrated in downtown Santiago, are distributed throughout the city. So another way to put it is that production is dislocated from consumption: the spaces where the stuff of the scene is made does not conform to a coherent and relational geography with the spaces where the scene shows and recreates itself.

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Figure 2. The spaces of Santiagos EMS: socialization, performance, rehearsal and residential. Source: the author.

The reason for this asynchrony has to be found in two fundamental and interrelated facts. First, most of the scenes members are still living and rehearsing in their parents places. Here, then, we are at the antipode of the conventional wisdom on cultural entrepreneurs. We face an avant-garde movement that instead of breaking with the petit bourgeois way of life by colonizing and recreating an alternative cultural realm in transitional urban spaces (Deutsche and Ryan 1989, Ley 2003, Lloyd 2006), embeds itself in its opposite, in the space of the family. There is no demarcation: the everyday spaces of working-class families are entangled with those making experimental sonic explorations. Dadalu, a member of Colectivo Etereo, explains how their production space is entwined with the spaces of everyday life:

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Now we rehearse at [Colectivo Etereos] CO2s place, in Las Condes, because his turntables are there, and we rehearse in the dining room. He used to live only with his dad and he had an independent room with his turntables to rehearse. But now a brother arrived to live with them, so now we have to rehearse in the dining room. It is not that the members of the scene want to stay or rehearse at their parents, but that they cant afford otherwise. So, secondly, we confront a highly precarious scene that doesnt have the purchasing power or the institutional support to create a creative milieu. The scene hasnt spatialized in a site like Hackney and Shorditch in London; the Quartier Latin in Paris; Prenzlauer Berg and Wedding in Berlin; Poblenou in Barcelona; Williamsburg (and Greenwich Village and SoHo) in New York; Palermo Hollywood in Buenos Aires in which the aesthetical disposition of artists is performed and their work/live, production/consumption spaces are integrated (Lloyd 2004). Here, then, images of SoHoization processes in inner-cities (Zukin 1986, Podmore 1998) driven by artists and middle-class young professionals are not well suited to represent the work/live strategy unfold by the scene. The specicity of Santiagos EMS is, then, its multipivotality, its decenteredness: the physical spatiality of the scene is not aligned, with one spatial layer centered on Santiagos ofcial and relatively clusterized cultural space, and with the other dispersed throughout the city, without any focal center. Temporality But the spaces of Santiagos EMS are not only dislocated and decentered: they are also temporal. Indeed, the scene is deployed by and actualized in a network of sites, places and venues that are in constant movement. So even when some activities of the scene those related to consumption, publicity and socialization may agglomerate in a specic city location, within this (extra-) boundedness the scene ows through a (intra-) temporary and contingent physical spatiality. As shown in Figure 3, the scene hasnt created spatial xes to balance the inherent volatility of cultural economies. The scene reports to have utilized 45 live music venues in the last three years. Of those, 19 are not anymore functioning, and 12 are only occasionally used (less than twice over a 12-month period). And out of the 14 venues in actual use at the time of the research, only two have been in functioning for more than one year. From those, only Bar Uno a small and unequipped bar in Bellavista has been symbolically and functionally appropriated as the scenes place, a site that is exclusively devoted to the scene. The scene doesnt have, in other words, a spatial obligatory point of passage (Callon 1986, Law and Hetherington 2000), a central node which stabilizes the network, aligning other nodes in the same network, while becoming a mandatory means of access for all actors in the network. Obligatory points of passage permit accumulation, or what Law (2000, p. 9) calls a logic of strategic aggrandisement, a place able to accumulate resources and surpluses which might then be redeployed to increase its location as an obligatory point of passage, a location of capitalization. Santiagos EMS doesnt have a strategic point of accumulation, a single location which by its capacity to amass and re-distribute the surpluses of the scene orders the network both spatially and organizationally. This deciency contradicts, moreover, the evidence gathered in global cities: cultural innovation is always anchored in and

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Figure 3. The spaces of Santiagos EMS: socialization, performance and rehearsal. Source: the author.

propelled by specic spatial and knowledge hubs whether the Factory in Warhols Greenwich Village (Currid 2007), Can Felipa in Poblenou, Barcelona (Tironi 2009b), or Caf Orbis Mundi in Wicker Park, Chicago (Lloyd 2006) that order the network around a centripetal focal point and an institutional, political or social agenda. The result is a liquid spatiality: a geography in which places change, emerging and extinguishing without a bounded framing. A static map of the scenes performance spaces shows a distribution of sites that hides, however, a much richer history of intermittent enacting that characterizes the scene.

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Figure 4. Daily mobilities of Fakuta, Nawito, Mika Martini, Namm and Onda Bidn. Source: the author.

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Displacement The decenteredness of the scenes spatialities has to be related to the Santiagos urban form. As Chiles capital city, Santiago is the countrys largest metropolitan region with six million inhabitants. And although some commentators dene Santiago as a compact city (Galetovic 2005), most scholars agree on the opposite: Santiago is a sprawling and extended metropolis (Figueroa 2005) that is rapidly eaten the regions rural land (Reyes 2005). As an indicator of the citys suburban growth, Soler and Greene (2005) count 32 functional urban centers in Santiago. The main point is that in a decentered and extended urban context, mobility is the fundamental everyday activity of most Santiaguinos. And it is, as well, the dening urban activity for the scenes members. Five of them living in different sectors of the city were asked to ll a space-time diary for one week (Latham 2003 and 2004, Oyn 2008). In these diaries they had to register (a) the places where they went, (b) the time of the travel, and (c) the mode of transportation. And the results depicted three main conclusions. Firstly, that the members are constantly on the move. Indeed, they moved more than the average Santiaguino: while the average inhabitant of the city moves 2.1 times per day (SECTRA 2008), the scenes members make 3.2 journeys per day. But the members of the scene are not only constantly on the move, they also enact large routines of mobility. This is the second conclusion. Of all travels made (58), 76% were for more than seven kilometers, and most of them done via public transit, which increases travel times. Indeed, while the average Santiaguino spends 104 minutes per day in travel (SECTRA 2008), it can be estimated that members of the scene spend 195 minutes (three hours and 15 minutes) every day moving though Santiago. In other words, the experience of travel of moving, usually on a bus, from one distant place to the other is a central feature in the lives of the members of Santiagos EMS. Finally, the third conclusion is that the routines of movement enacted by the scenes members are polynuclear. Movements are not structured around a single pivot. Rather the opposite, they are ordered in a distributed fashion: the mobility patterns (see Figure 5) show that members especially Fakuta, Nawito and Namm have different departure/arrival nodes, creating rhizomes that do not conform to a delimited territoriality. These patterns of daily mobilities match the larger histories of movement shown by the scenes projects. Being on the move is not only a characteristic of the EMS everyday life; switching between places is also a key practice for understanding the production spatialities of the scene. Indeed, out of 16 projects, eight have changed their rehearsal space four times or more. In total, 13 projects have done so three times or more. In average, then, EMS projects switched their rehearsal studio 3.5 times during their productive life. If an average project is 2.5 years old, then a project of Santiagos EMS changes its rehearsal space every eight months. Moreover, and echoing the patterns of daily mobility shown by the scenes members, transferals are not constricted to bounded territories. On the contrary, they stretch over large distances. The (mobile) history of DiAblo represents these situations: We used to rehearse in the place of a dude in the corner of Agricola and Macul. Then that house was sold, so we had to rent studios for the hour for some time and then Daniel [DiAblos newest member] came in and we went

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Figure 5. Temporal evolution of rehearsal spaces. Source: the author.

to Espaa Av. [a famous squatted house]. We stayed there until it was demolished then we moved to Taller Sol, in Agustinas Av and after that we arrived here [actual rehearsal place]. Polijah, from DiAblo. In sum, Santiagos EMS is structured around an extensive and multifocal mobility pattern. And this pattern unfolds both in the everyday practices of the scenes members and in the histories of the projects comprising the scene. Moving and over large distances to connect socialization and performance spaces with rehearsing and residential spaces is a the central spatial mark of the scene. There are no spatial xities tying down the scene productive organization: it moves, over large stretches, from one place to the other. Multiple Agents Space is not given in the order of things. Rather the opposite: space, as actor-network theorists remind us, is performed (Law 2000). Objects do not move in space, they create it; but since objects are networked entities whose elements include

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Figure 6. Multiple militancy, the case of Nawito, Dadal and Fakuta. Source: the author.

spatiality, spaces create, too, what an object is. Spaces, then, are being made along with the objects it contains (Law 2000, p. 6). In other words, spaces and objects are co-constructed. Or put in our terms, a cluster node (commonly a rm or, for us, a project) and the territoriality in which this node establishes its relational network, are simultaneously enacted. Santiagos EMS indicates, in fact, that the decenteredness, volatility and mobility of the scenes spatiality is co-determined by the multiple, contingent and virtual nature of the scene. If objects (actors) and spaces are co-constitutive, and if in spite of its spatial instability the scene manages to survive, then there has to be something about the actors of the scene in the making of such multiple although functionally coherent spatiality. Analyzing Santiagos EMS, it is possible to say that one answer is, attuned with the multiplicity of the scenes spatiality, that the units of this localized economy arent, in fact, unitary. Indeed, the agents of the scene are not rms properly but projects: the unit of economic action in Santiagos EMS, rather than a self-contained, enduring and institutionally rooted unity usually assumed by cluster theory (cf. Moulaert and Sekia 2003) are task-oriented, market-responsive, transient and exible actor-networks (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, DeFillipi and Arthur 1998, Grabher 2001 2002a and 2002b). In this section I turn to the different ways in which the ontology of the rm is being liqueed by Santiagos EMS. Multiplicity/Multidimensionality Cluster theory assumes that rms have xed and distinct economic identities. One of the key conditions of possibility for cluster formation is that rms have to be

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complementary and range from large to medium and small units (Marshall 2005, Mouleart and Seskia 2003). Firms, in other words, establish clear-cut identity frontiers differentiating each unit from the other, both in functional and dimensional terms. This assumption, however, doesnt apply for Santiagos EMS. On the contrary, the (economic and aesthetical) identity of the scenes projects is always being enacted, discussed and challenged. Indeed, projects are porous: they are permeable entities that admit more than one functional and aesthetical identity. First, the members of the scene participate in more than one project, thus the borders from one project to the other are highly permeable. Reecting on the effervescence of the scene, Walter Roblero member of Congelador, one of the oldest projects of the scene states: One thing that has helped [to the emergence of new projects] is this capacity [of younger people] to split themselves up so many times its like with this guy the projects name is that, and my solo project is that other , and they nally end up with, like, ve different bands. An important incentive for such rapid project incubation has been the increasing access to cheap music and recording technologies, with the concomitant shift from rock and roll to electroacoustics. We dont have the money to buy a drum set and to rent a rehearsal room to play it, says Fakuta from electronic duo Banco Mundial. The arrival of the computer, in this context, was liberatory and allowed for the free-ow development of sonic projects. Talking about Namms origins in 2003, Pablo says: At that time [2003] we began exploring different stuff because Sebastin [Namms partner] had a computer and he knew a bit about music software. Then I got a computer and we started recording stuff at my place we began improvising, looping, mixing and making tracks. We realized that we could make music without having a band, that sometimes a computer was way more interesting. In addition, web-based social networking platforms with streaming applications like MySpace, widely use by the scene, minimized diffusion costs. Then, without major material/technological barriers to entry, the possibilities to form a band multiplied. We made, like, a pajama party [with band mate Daniela] and smoked a joint, and we were high and we began recording stuff. Thats World Musik. And I dont know, people liked it, remembers Fakuta about the origins of World Musik, her side project together with Daniela, also a member of Julia Rose, Colectivo Etreo and Iris. The result, then, is a highly complex and interlinked ecology of mergers, alliances and temporary collaborations in which the boundaries of each emergent project are constantly redened. What counts as a project or as a band is the performative effect of a momentary association that has gelled (White 1992; see also Sheller 2004) into a unitary agent. The porosity of the scene is also evidenced in the multifunctionality if its agents. Rather than performing a specialized division of labor, each actor in the scene has internalized the functions and operations needed for the systems reproduction. There are not bands on the one hand, and promoters, technicians and designers on the other: in order to exist, the members of the scene have

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dislocated their identity locus to permit, without losing their practical coherence, multiple tasking. Namm, besides it musical act, runs netlabel Jacobino Discos and functions as event organizer; Ervo Perez, member of DiAblo, Colectivo NO, Fake Daddy and La Golden Acapulco, is also the head of Productora Mutante, an organization that promotes noise projects and organizes gigs and festivals; Hector, aka Asa de Lippes and member of Mega Toy, runs Cumshot Records, both a netlabel and semi-formal ofce for audiovisual services; Rodrigo from Olas Romer and Montaa Extendida designs posters and yers, as does Diego from La Bandas; Mika Martini runs netlabel Pueblo Nuevo; Carlos from Mostro and Come Perro Fuma Gato does the art for several projects and runs netlabel Horrible Registros; Daniel from DiAblo, Colectivo No and La Golden Acapulco, and Nicols from Innombrable are sound engineers and, together, have recorded several bands. The entrepreneurial capability of cultural agents has been studied elsewhere (Lloyd 2004, 2006). Moreover, it reverberates with the Do It Yourself ideology inaugurated by punk and post-punk cultural vanguards in the 1970s. However, these approaches are usually framed in the context of a creative milieu in which collaboration and cooperation are part of a larger aesthetical disposition and referred to the artists relative position in the (cultural) eld (Lloyd 2006). In Santiagos EMS, on the contrary, this impulse is strategic: its a means of survival in the face of a highly precarious environment. Pablo, member of Namm and director of Jacobino Discos, addresses this issue directly: to organize a gig requires sending emails, talking to people, talking to the media, distributing yers, designing a nice poster, cutting tickets. Its hard for me to be cutting tickets the night of the gig, but I do it anyways. Virtuality Santiagos EMS lacks a dened territory and stable economic actors in which to center its activities and practices. But it has managed, nonetheless, to create a local buzz (Storper and Venables 2004), the intangible, spontaneous and informal information and communication ecology produced by spatial propinquity of industries: the idea that a certain milieu can be vibrant in the sense that there are lots of piquant and useful things going on simultaneously and therefore lots of inspiration and information (Bathelt et al. 2004, p. 38). Yet in the case of Santiagos EMS, this buzz is not created by face-to-face contacts, co-presence and co-location of people and rms within the same industry and place or region (Bathelt et al. 2004, p. 38). On the contrary, it is the effect of a web of distanciated relations catalyzed by the Internet, or more specically, by MySpace. MySpace3 is a social networking platform that allows for audio reproduction, streaming and downloading. These capabilities have made MySpace the preferred on-line communication medium for local music scenes in Chile and elsewhere (Noble 2008). For Santiagos EMS, MySpace is entangled in so many and diverse ways with the organizing and productive practices of the scene that is not possible to separate both elements. First, MySpace is where the scenes horizontal linkages are enacted: it brings into being the possibilities of competition and imitation within the scene. For example, Nicols from Innombrable says:

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Out of the eight tracks of our record, six are there [in MySpace] to be downloaded. In that sense, our entire work is at everybodys disposition you know, sometimes I also walk around4 MySpace to listen to new music, to see what people is doing and what project people is involved in. To walk around MySpace. MySpace has become the scenes place of publicness. In absence of a geographical realm in which competing agents can map out the industrys innovations, MySpace has become the site where the members of the scene can gaze each other, check their innovations and hear their new products either to defy, emulate or transubstantiate them. To be sure, MySpace is not just a promotional platform, a social network upon which the scene can observe itself. MySpace, more radically, is a condition of possibility for the scene. There is no second opinion,, says songwriter Calostro, reecting on the projects of the scene that dont have an account in MySpace, [having a prole on MySpace] thats what generates a band status. In other words, to be a band you have to be available in public space, and that place, for Santiagos EMS is MySpace. We then have a non-human actor (MySpace) that not only operates as an agglutinating device, a distributed and relational panopticon, but also as the realm in which the being there is enacted and performed. So Santiagos EMS contests one of the most basic assumptions of clusters: that the buzz is the only competitive advantage that cannot be formally traded by rms because it is the result of human and therefore unpredictable and elusive interactions in localized settings. The scenes buzz is, indeed, unpredictable and elusive, but not because of its human and spatially bounded nature. On the contrary, it is precisely because the scene doesnt have a single, bounded spatiality in which to unfold face-to-face interactions that a nonhuman mediator recreates such network of connections. But it does so changing the relational conditions assumed in cluster theory: embodied co-presence is replaced by distanciated, global and virtual communications. Or in the terms of Rodrigo from Dizzlecciko: Perhaps the scene exists more on the Internet that in Santiago. There are people that have known us through Fotolog or MySpace and that like a lot our music but that has never gone to a gig. Locality is not anymore a function of proximity but an effect of relational distance (Ibert 2010): being close or far from a collaborator or peer is not a matter of metric space but of network and relational robustness. Eventuality In sum, projects are not stable entities. They are, as the spaces they use, mobile: they perform an ameba-like identity whose limits are being constantly redened. But how can a productive scene in the face of this exibility be successful? The answer has to be found in the eventual and contingent nature of the scene. The role played by Bar Uno and Ervo Prez is an illustrative example. Bar Uno, once the epicenter of the scene, had lost its prominent position within the scenes network at the time of our eldwork. On the one hand, the venue was going through management restructuring and live gigs were being restricted. On the other, and more signicantly, Ervo Prez, the head of Productora Mutante, a key actor in the

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organization of the scene and the contact person between Bar Uno and the projects, was out of the country. As a member of DiAblo explains: Ervo left and the pace [of live gigs] slowed down a lot, even though he left [the contact with] Bar Uno opened. This year we had signicantly less activity than last year. Dizzlekzico arent playing anymore, Innombrable neither, Neurotransmisor hasnt played since a long time, Cumshot is organizing gigs in their own places, so its like people isnt [sic] really motivated to organize things by their own Ive talked to some other bands, which have being around the same time than us, and they dont want [to] organize shit. This example not only indicates that the enactment of the scene hinges on the entrepreneurial abilities of one single individual, but that the scene is inherently unstable: it is not only that the places of the scene are constantly on the move, but that the organizational logics of the scene are characterized by contingency. Or put differently, the scene is eventful: without any sort of nancial, spatial or institutional support, Santiagos EMS depends on the ever-changing and always unpredictable ow of events that, even for the members of the scene, seem always beyond control. Rodrigo, from electronic project Olas Romer, makes explicit the contingent nature of the scene: Ive tried to organize [events], but I dont know why I have bad luck. For example, Ive organized gigs in which everything is set; I have the promotional poster printed and then the venue stepped down. There are no substantial (organizing) pivots which recur in case of diversion; the scene is never blackboxed: it can always change nothing secures stability. The enactment of the scene is the result of the conjunction of a variety of contingencies that are glued together for that specic moment only and everything can always be, until the very last minute, different. Nelson from Neurotransmisor links this contingency to the practice common in the scene of looking for a venue. Recalling Neurotransmisor s live appearances, he says that: the rst gig took place in Cerrillos, in a very well-known venue that was usually lent without cost. Then we played in Casa Usher, just because that was our rehearsal place. The other gig was because a friend saw a venue; he liked it and talked to the owner to do something there. It can be extracted from Nelsons words that Neurotransmisor s live presentations have almost being anomalies, impossibilities, fortuitous exceptions that have somehow materialized. The scene couples and decouples (White 1992) intermittently depending on emerging circumstances, obstacles and possibilities. And it seems that this exibility is precisely what allows the scene to survive. The scene seems to be a uid object (Law 2002), an entity that in order to cope with volatility and risk, changes shape. Or better put, in order to move (from one context to the next, from one place to the next, to one identity to the other), the organization of the scene has to mutate as well, creating a shifting, provisional and circumstantial although highly effective knowledge and organizational architecture.

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Summarizing, Santiagos EMS does not have one spatiality, but multiple. And this multiplicity is not aligned: there is spatial overlapping between the spaces of the scene but no grouping among them. Moreover, the spaces comprising the scenes geography are mobile: they emerge and die, they change location and members are constantly on the move. This spatial conguration is explained and propelled by the transient and porous identity of the scenes projects. First, projects are exible: their identity is constantly being made and remade. Second, the buzz of the scene, far from being enacted through the immediacy and closeness of face-to-face interactions, is performed virtually via decentered, distanciated, technologically-mediated and global communications. And third, the knowledge and productive organization of the scene is contingent and eventual: its functioning depends on the capacity of the scene to couple and decouple depending on the contextual and always unforeseen circumstances. To be sure, the uidness of Santiagos EMS is also a story of xities. The scenes liquidity is performed and stabilized in and by the work of myriad physicalities, objects and obdurate materialities. The displacements and spatial dislocations of the scene have to be understood in the light of Santiagos urban sprawl; the utilization of electronic means of music production are related to economic depravations; the spaces of the scene are in a constant state of mutation, but the scene does operate in concrete and all-too-material venues, rehearsal studios and houses. The results dont aim at undermining the relevance of things, infrastructures and institutions in the construction of (mobile) music scenes. On the contrary, they aim at unveiling how these xities help enact complex situated although dynamic cultural economies. The results also indicate that the spatial assumptions of cluster theories have to be revisited and, more specically, that the denition of music scenes and how the local plays out in their constitution has to be reevaluated. The results depict a situated economy that does not conform to the xed notion of the local usually mobilized. On the contrary, Santiagos EMS is based on and puts forward a uid, mobile and eventual geography. More investigation has to be done on how this localized economy, in spite of its precariousness, exibility and instability, survives and creates a dynamic and innovative productive local economy. But the results here exposed give us some clues. It would seem that, like de Laet and Mols bush pump (2002), the scene is successful because it has the ability to ow transform, adapt, mutate with the changing environment it has to confront. In the face of a uctuating context, a more effective survival strategy, the scene seems to demonstrate, is to become a uctuating organization as well. We could say that while conventional perspectives understand clusters as an immutable mobile an economy that in order to deal with and move along the shakiness of globalization has embedded itself in the immutability of the local Santiagos EMS appears as a mutable mobile: as an organization that prefers to isomorphically mutate with its environment. How to think, along these lines, about a new ontology of the local? This is not the place to develop a full-blown hypothesis. However, the results here presented indicate that whatever the response may be, the notion of co-enactment might be of use. Mol (2002) has developed the notion of enactment to think about how things objects, diseases, technologies, spaces are done. Mols proposal is a distantiation from Goffmans (1959) denition of performance and, also, from the idea of performativity emerged in economic sociology to indicate the capacity of calculative devices to produce what they are calculating (Callon 1998, MacKenzie 2008). For

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Mol neither approaches deal with the generative constitution of things and how they are made, sometimes, in multiple ways and in a variety of practices. Thus Mols enactments are well suited to think about space. However, Mols proposal might be still anchored in a dualistic model in which there is an enacting practice and an enacted object. Our results indicate that locality is made through the practices of the scenes members. But they also show that, in turn, those members and their practices are an effect of the particular spatiality in which they set out their productive networks. We have, then, an iterative process of co-enactments: spaces (or localities) and practices (or scene members) that are constantly and mutually done and re-done. And perhaps in these co-enactments lies the key to thinking about locality at large: not as an a priori given space, nor as a thing made, performed or enacted, but as a network of objects, spaces and practices that has gelled into an stabilized entity due to the (always precarious) closure produced by the constant co-enactment of its elements. These insights are especially important when thinking about music scenes and localized economies in developing countries. The volatility, precariousness, dislocation and eventfulness here studied may not be the monopoly of Santiagos EMS, but the characteristics of cultural scenes and industries in transitional cities in the global south. But perhaps these results might be also indicating the need for a new approach to cluster theories and (local) music production at large. It would be tempting to say that these results unveil a new type of music scene one different from Euro- and Anglo-centric understandings. But maybe what these results indicate is that instead of demarcating types of scenes according to which spatial forms they actualize local, translocal or virtual (Bennett and Peterson 2004) we should approach any music scene as an entity that assembles different spatialities, sociotechnical mediators, productive networks and actors. Understood this way, it would not be any more necessary to refer music scenes to pre-existent and bounded territorialities and actors, nor to invoke the notion of the local to make sense of them: music scenes would emerge as networks in which spatialities and practices, localities and its scenes members, would mutually enact each other in specic and situated practices. Notes
1. The term scene refers to a network of producers related to a particular music style or aesthetic disposition. The consumption side is not explicit, mainly because as in most niche-specic artistic scenes, its difcult not to say unnecessary to separate between producers and consumers (Lloyd 2005). The independent scene in Sweden generated international attention in the early 2000s with artists such as Jos Gonzlez, The Knife, Peter, Bjorn and John, and The Radio Dept for the mix between a peripheral music market and a highly innovative scene it represent. MySpace launched in 2003 and Rupert Murdochs News Corp bought the site in 2005 for $580 million. A July 2006 estimate noted membership approaching 100 million in total (,Stefanie Olson. MySpace blurs line between friends and acks on CNETs News.com.http://news.com. com/MySpace+blurs+line+between+friends+and+acks/2009-1025_3-6100176.html) .Doy vueltas in Spanish, literally I spin around, an expression that indicates to walk or browse around without a denite objective.

2.

3.

4.

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