Sacrificial cyborgThis experience, artificial and machine-like as it may be, can be perceived as
transparently natural and tribal, somehow acutely pre-historic. The very dancing to
house music at dedicated dance gatherings is ritualistic, in open-air events as well as
in urban settings. This ritual context revolves, in the case of techno, around the
merging, psychedelic, sexual, spiritual relationship with technology, especially ICT,
in a post-industrial society Bataille argues in Theory of Religion (1989) that
humanity defines itself in separation from the non-human, from objects or things.
He then proposes, inspired by the Aztec death cult of human sacrifice, that in death
or in destruction of the object the thing/animal/body releases its spirit. Therefore,
through sacrifice, the object-as-thing becomes intimate to the subject, the self, in a
spiritual sense (Bataille 1989). An adaption of this idea, may be helpful to
understand interface spirituality provided by techno on the dance floor. When we
are conscious of the self, this is an imagined object of our observation. By suspending
that particular object, the subject ceases to be. As the dancer ‘gives up’, as it is said,
their body and soul to the rhythmical music, there is a temporary destruction of the
imaginary self.
As self-consciousness disappears, the dancer enters into a spiritual world filled
with impressions produced through the music and visuals. For example, trance (as a
musical genre) can induce images spiralling psychedelically before our very eyes;
techno can be like a forceful technological cyclone wrapping our beings; in the
excesses of gabba (gabber house, an extreme type of techno), a masochistic serenity
is produced when the pain of industrial pounding noise leads to comforting
numbness; while deep house melts us communally into the dancing crowd. Roused
by sensory over-stimulation, a dancer can be overcome by a state of trance, ranging
from emotional/orgasmic ecstasy to, indeed, a type of spirit possession (Rouget
1985). Although trance seems to be purposefully made for such effect, this can be
achieved by any of such genres.
This peak-experience is a trip into the void: time, space and sensory input
fragmenting and collapsing, yet held together by the repetitive beat; suspended, the
spiritual hedonist is rendered speechless and unable to articulate; being everything
and nothing; part of the all; complete, yet empty. ‘Zero is immense’, notes Land, in
the context of Bataille’s ideas. ‘The nihil of annihilation is the nothing from which
creation brings forth the being’ (Land 1992:101). The techno DJ could, in this
context, function as a type of shaman, taking the congregation on a journey of
speed, in some cases with peaks and lulls, but mostly faster and faster into the void
and to the other side of the night. It is only before and after the nothingness of the
peak-experience that this unbearably ungraspable gap is filled by normalizing
discourse, like domesticating a divine monster. In this case I would like to suggest
that techno and its subgenres, such as trance, act out, or metaphorically articulate,
the very ICT that affects and, for some, threatens to undermine everyday social
identities. Dancers act out their becoming cyborg in their convulsive dance into the
void, filling that void in turn with ways to connect and make sense of this
52 SACRIFICIAL CYBORG AND COMMUNAL SOUL