Turner’s comparatively sanitary sociality Thus, for Gilbert and Pearson raves
contextualize
waves of undifferentiated physical and emotional pleasure; a sense of
immersion in a communal moment; wherein the parameters of one’s
individuality are broken down by the shared throbbing of the bass drum; an
acute awareness of music in all its sensuality—its shimmering
arpeggios, soaring string-washes, abrasive squelches, crackles and pops; an
incessant movement forward, in all directions, nowhere; the bodily
irresistibility of funk; the inspirational smiles of strangers; the awesome
familiarity of friends; the child-like feeling of perfect safety at the edge of
oblivion; a delicious surrender to cliché.
(Gilbert and Pearson 1999:64)Furthermore, as the ‘community of feeling’ is mediated through that which Schütze
calls ‘the techniques of auditory, visual, kinetic and chemical amplification’ (2001:
162), Dionysus needs Prometheus (Gaillot 1999:33; emphasis mine). As Reynolds
points out, while Nietzche opposed science and technical knowledge to ‘the
orgiastic spirit of Dionysian art’, in the techno-orgiasm ‘the Dionysian paroxysm
becomes part of the program, regularized, looped for infinity’ (1998: 199–200).
Machines have developed a special role in the development of ‘body music’—which
Eshun calls Afrodelic. When Gaillot suggests that ‘Technica and Africa...are the
two essential poles of techno’ (1999: 35 ), he acknowledges electro’s simultaneous
rootedness in the synthetic soul of Kraftwerk and in traditions of performance
(blues and jazz clubs, soul, funk, disco, the Caribbean carnival) where body music is
designed to be danced, not merely listened to, or watched, as in the European
concert tradition (see Till 2000:370).^16 For Eshun, contrary to a critical tradition
which laments technology’s disembodiment of the human, ‘sound machines make
you feel more intensely, along a broader band of the emotional spectra than ever
before in the 20th Century’. Accordingly, ‘the posthuman era is not one of
disembodiment but the exact reverse: it’s a hyperembodiment’ (Eshun 1998: —002).
With Afrodelica, ‘[y]ou are willingly mutated by intimate machines, abducted by
audio into the populations of your bodies. Sound machines throw you onto the
shores of the skin you’re in. The hypersensual cyborg experiences herself as a galaxy
of audiotactile sensations’ (ibid.:—001).
Merging with a wider ‘mind/body/spirit/technology assemblage’ (Pini 2001:
169), ravers readily experience a ‘release...from the rigid limitations of their sexually
marked selves’ (Pini 1997:124–5).^17 With the accelerated ‘erosion of the limits
between the corporeal and the technological’ (ibid.: 169 ), this is the eternal return of
the cyborg, the return to the future, a journey into the transgressive space, pulsating
sounds and immanent possibilities of the carnival. Yet, licensing digital
miscegenation, post-rave constitutes a ‘technophagic’ upgrade on traditional
carnivals which, like the Afro-Brazilian Bahian carnival, are deemed
‘anthropophagic’: an ‘open process of dynamic incorporation in which identity is
30 GRAHAM ST JOHN