12
Global Nomads
Techno and New Age as transnational countercultures in
Ibiza and Goa
Anthony D’Andrea
The nomad does not move.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980:381)The globalization of digital art-religionReflexive change is a leitmotif of Western modernity, progressing, modernists
believe, towards universal happiness and enlightenment. This teleological claim of
infinite progress has, nonetheless, been denounced by “countercultural” movements
as farcical—an Enlightenment ideal of utopia to be replaced by Romantic dys/
utopias. Yet, paradoxically, these cultures of resistance emerge from within
modernity itself. They manifest cosmopolitan, expressive, and reflexive trends
arising from the very modern dynamics they criticize.
Globalization complicates this counter-modern dialectic by speeding up self-
reflexivity in a non-teleological way (Giddens 1989; Wallerstein 1989). Digitalism,
nomadism and the acceleration of transnational flows become constitutive of
emerging countercultures (Featherstone and Burrows 1995). Representative
phenomena, such as Techno and New Age movements, are thus situated at the
intersection of countercultural continuity and postmodernist rupture and, enmeshed
with the technological, political, economic, and cultural realities of global
modernity, their development is crucial for understanding the possibility of
alternative modernities.
What constitutes a “counterculture” in the early 21st century? Can New Age and
Techno movements be seen as “countercultures”? Most scholarship on the matter
provides historical outlooks on 1960s “radicalism,” 1970s “decline” and 1980s
“cooptation” (Frank 1997; McKay 1996; Roszak 1995). However, this presumed
decadence occludes the pluralization of “the 1960s” into a variety of single-issue
movements and academic area studies (queer, ecological, feminist; subcultural, new
religion, popular studies). Nonetheless, within a wider historical perspective all of
these movements express a basic dissatisfaction with the promises, modes, and
rewards of modern life.^1
In any case, Techno and New Age embody powerful living fields of
problematization of Western life. Techno^2 is ritually expressed in multimedia dance