strong sense of community on the dancefloor. In this way, a contemporary sense of
spirituality is achieved. Yet, despite the experience of the spiritual as universal,
disembodied and transcendental, this is an illusion. The subject never exists in a
vacuum; it is embodied. The subject’s relationship with the other is never the same;
it changes through time, discursively. As such, a notion of spirit is unstable,
depending on historical and material contexts.
An overwhelming soundscape can act as a spiritual re-energizer, part and parcel of
what Pratt, in the context of Gospel music, has called ‘a larger strategy of survival’
(1990:49). For those who feel they have been dislocated in a political sense, made
homeless in more ways than one, intense dance parties, such as raves, can provide a
strong sense of community. At times, the cultural output of rave-styled events seems
to take on a cultural logic, comparable to that of migrant and diasporic
communities:
The syncretic popular musics cultivated by such communities often exhibit...
contradictions with particular clarity, combining pre-modern folk elements
with the latest mainstream pop styles in a self-conscious and often deliberately
ironic sort of eclecticism.
(Manuel, cited in Rietveld 1998a:260)There seems to be a need for a deeper, pre-modern, meaning, which is often
invented and constructed to suit the present circumstances. Such understanding of
the pre-historical could be conceived of as, in fact, being post-historical, not unlike
contemporary popular imagery found in science fiction fantasy For example, in the
context of an Australian setting for a trance-music-based rave, one of Cole and
Hannan’s interviewees remarked in 1995:
Like the aborigines, aeons ago, that contemplated the planetsphere, whilst
hitting their sticks, blowing thru a hollowed out pipe [i.e. a didjeridu]. These
open-air, wilderness, tribelic, pagan-like parties (rituals) are along the line of
primordial communion.
(Cole and Hannan 1997:5)This longing for pre-modern roots can partially explain the adoption of a ‘timeless’
or seemingly transcendental shamanism in some of the more countercultural rave
scenes. For example, Mark, from nomadic techno sound system Spiral Tribe, stated
in the UK’s rave days that ‘you can callus techno-pagans, what ever’, and that ‘it is a
shamanic thing’ (Lowe and Shaw 1993:168–9). Shamanism exists in a variety of
forms around the world, and seems to include the forging of a close sense of
community and, more frequently, reaching a form of spiritual peak-experience
which the shaman produces through ritual (Rouget 1985; Taylor 1985). Such ritual
can include an experience of death-rebirth, similar to unselfconsciously losing a
sense of self on the dance floor, by breaking the boundaries of the self through
exhaustion, repetitive beats and the use of dance drugs.
46 SACRIFICIAL CYBORG AND COMMUNAL SOUL