[Dancecult-l] violence

[tobias c. van Veen]

> Some of these scenes are high on the machismo quotient, and some European
> teknivals have become unsafe places for single women, which is contrary to the
> original rave vibe.

Is machismo necessarily associated with violence? I'm just curious on this
one, as I don't live in a machismo culture, and if one been to Spain a few
times [/jk].

+ and I have to ask (with a sly chuckle, heh)... would you hold, Graham, to
"original rave vibe" in a published work?

I get what you mean, but.... .... ... origin is complex: each origin is
founded through exclusion, which is a (originary) violence. Defending and
protecting the "nonviolent" origin of rave would be the first cornerstone of
PLUR as something of an idealist discourse, in the casual sense, an
ideology.

Also on the pragmatic end, the connection with Madchester, as p g-b
mentioned, New Wave, Travelers / Hippies, Punk and anarcho-subcultures seems
to suggest all kinds of originary violence to rave cultures... for example,
rave appears to be marked in most places and times by the general exclusion
-- at least in the ideal form as presented by PLUR -- of 1] the rave as
(hetero)sexual meeting place for sex, and 2] the use of alcohol; these two
exclusions are both, in their own way, violences that excommunicate certain
substances and modes of pleasure.

I've always thought that the candie kid phenomenon -- and its exclusion of
"sexual" sexuality, of the act of sex (which isn't to say
hetero-penetration, but all the various possibilities of the pleasured,
(semi)naked body with another body or many) -- was something of a deferral
of bodily change for teenagers, creating the rave as infantile space, as
playpen. Sure, lots to say here for the Deleuzeans (rave as polysexuality,
Freud freaked out, a big sensory body without organs, e-fest style, cuddle
puddles, etc) but the result is also a scene that is easily seduced, used,
and corrupted, for it marks a certain denial (I'm tempted to say negation:
this would be its violence). Like any infantile state, rave at its candie
extreme lacks a certain ability to differentiate the moment of a sexualized
act, and to act on it, from the e-body (the tactility of sensory pleasure,
body without organs, etc.). One could say that the candie state opens one
awareness -- the possibility of asexual bodies, asexual contact even when in
bodily formations usually considered sexualized, such as cuddle puddles,
backrub orgies -- only to foreclose the awareness of sexual difference and
the pleasures of eros. It's almost a violence to the self, to the teenage
body becoming sexualized, a denial of one's movement into adulthood, which
has its benefits, and yet, so many candie ravers appear to supplement this
violence (which produces a certain loss), with massive consumption of
ecstasy (chemical supplements to override sexualized neurons, to
deprogramme, but also producing burnt-out bodies, bodies no longer capable
of differentiation, in that post-rave state, burnt and blissed, slowed,
junkie).

New Wave presented an alien body that, although it approached candie, I
think managed to sustain something of sexual differentiations (androgynous,
ambiguous) and thus of eros.

tV




tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
McGill Communication & Philosophy