[Dancecult-l] violence

[Graham St John]

I take extreme machismo to mean chauvanism, and oppression, and thus 
holding the potential for violence towards women which in many 
cultures is prolific, though not necessarily associated with physical 
violence.

"Original rave vibe". OK, with that slightly unsophisticated and 
unscholarly phrase (scold me!) I was referring to rave's emergence as 
acid house in the UK 1987/1988 where the term "rave" was first used 
to refer to a dance movement (i think the term came later - though it 
was used as early as the 1950s to refer to jazz events in the UK and 
appears to have Jamaican derivations), and where among other things, 
on an unprecedented scale females would experience an environment in 
which they were safe to parade their bodies or lose themselves 
without the previous threats of predation and worse. This was not 
without exception of course and things would soon change, and this 
was downstream from the disco and house scenes offering havens for 
oppressed ethnic and sexual minorities.

As a vibe scribe I dont use the word 'vibe' lightly. I just produced 
a book where this theme is a central trope. The easiest conceptual 
parallel is 'communitas' which I think is a driving force in the 
commitment to reproduce and relive the party, time and again, but i 
dont believe it is founded on violence, but on a desire for 
difference and manifold freedoms,  temporary as they may be. Perhaps 
some of these trajectories can be read as "violent" under the 
particular definition of violence you appear to be employing, and 
certainly the levels of violence (if by which you mean exclusion) may 
escalate as warehouse ravers are coralled into corporate clubland 
under the threat of fines and nightsticks, but would you extend this 
then to the entirety of EDMC? Im not quite down with you logic but 
you appear to be saying that raving is exlusionary and thus violent. 
This would be a new perspective on dancing, on the social dance 
experience, as far as i can tell, and perhaps one readily 
appropriated by those zealots who wage brutal campaigns to repress 
these social dance forms, but I would need some convincing.

What is intriguing is that where you use 'violence', others may use 
'liberating' or other such terms, which i guess is why these themes 
really should be defined by anyone undertaking research with a 
question like "Are raves violent or peaceful"? This has wider 
implications. What about aesthetics? Is the motivation to produce a 
music and dance culture which differs from the conventional or 
popular felt by protagonists to be out-dated, "cheesy" or "boring", a 
violent motivation? Is sampling (selecting some sonic artifacts and 
excluding others) an act of violence? Are ambient and chillout 
artists, for instance,  advocates of violence? Is the avant-garde 
violent in its pursuit of the progression? What about the desire to 
escape the routine, the everyday, the mundane, through dance - have 
these kids been waving their glow sticks in anger all this time? And 
what of those who enter and foment dance scenes in response to a 
rampant materialism and spiritual emptiness they preceive prevalent 
in the wider society? These and other scenes orchestrate themselves 
partly on the basis of what they are not, thus defining themselves 
against the values and aesthetics from which they seek to be removed. 
Are these acts of freedom (from) to be reduced to acts of violence?

I dont expect you to answer these questions. Perhaps this returns us 
to the anthropology of violence, and more to the point, the 
philosophy of desire and transgression, but definitions of violence 
are helpful, and possibly fruitful.

On the deferal of body change, sexuality or perhaps maturation, in 
raving - i think that is a very interesting take on some forms of 
dance culture where perhaps the desire to re-live this moment 
constitutes also a deferal of that which Van Gennep called 
re-aggregation, the final phase of the rite of passage where the 
liminar is transported back into society, changed in some way (e.g 
having become and adult). It is possible that EDM cultural events, 
from raves to festivals, which are returned to time and again, are 
actually transitional worlds, rather than transitional rites, a 
liminality which is squatted by its habitues by virtue of their 
return to these experiences week in, week out? The implications of 
this are fascinating. 

Graham

>  > 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
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