Punctum.

By: Michele Dentico

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates on musical genres oscillate between claims of their disappearance and their persistence. This article reframes the question by shifting from taxonomic classification to the situated pragmatics of collective listening, taking techno music as a case study. Adopting an ethnosemiotic framework and drawing on multi-sited ethnography, the analysis suspends the genre category to observe how meaning emerges on the dancefloor. The analytical operators are borrowed from an unlikely source: the UK’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which defines the music played at raves as sounds ‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.’ Repetition and succession are treated as semiotic operators through which recurrent relations across musical flow and collective bodily movement are formalized. Repetition makes pertinent figurative contagion, rhythmic synchronization, and solidary touch, while succession foregrounds thermokinetic modulation and intersubjective conduction. Together, these dynamics produce a contingent, ethnographically attested suspension of genre/gender matrices – a suspension radically distinct from the neoliberal “fluidity” promoted by streaming platforms. The dancefloor thus appears as a temporary configuration in which a different form of life becomes concretely possible, suspending utilitarian imperatives and enabling a democratic, low-threshold sociality grounded in repetition and bodily co-presence.

 
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