regarding their life strategies. Certainly material contexts introduce powerful
conditions, but, as this study has sought to demonstrate, away from the alienation
and routine of modern life, alternative subjects seek to rearticulate labor, leisure, and
spirituality in an exquisitely meaningful way, irreducible to economic explanation.
Above all, global nomads attempt to engender holistic charisma in a fragmented and
disenchanted world.
By assembling nomadic, digital, and spiritual apparatuses, New Age and Techno
constitute a common semiotic space of subjectivity formation and social critique.
Their practical strategies may diverge, as New Agers cultivate the Romantic shaping
of the self as an unfolding inner substance, while techno-freaks celebrate the self-
shattering shamanism of “machines for freedom.” Nevertheless, both movements
congeal in the deployment of material-symbolic devices to foster alternative forms
of self-identity, life strategy, and post-community. Such life experiments seek to
drift away from the Western regimenting apparatuses of the nation-state and
sexuality; and as long as their lines of flight— desire and creativity—are kept,
Techno and New Age will remain as sites for such life experiments, notably
cosmopolitan post-identities and holistic post-sexualities.
Notes1 It is in this context that “subculture,” “counterculture,” and “alternative culture” are
differentiated. A subculture refers to the shared values, symbols, and practices of a
group whose members also adhere to and function in wider societies. The notion of
“alternative” implies subcultures that seek autonomy from or replacement of such
major social models. “Alternative” is broader and looser than “counterculture,” which
is marked by high levels of dissatisfaction, critical stance, and refusal of Western major
institutions and values, and the cultivation of transgressive practices and lifestyles. A
counterculture thus is a type of radicalized subculture, and analytically operates as a
powerful ideological referent for practices of resistance in times of cultural crisis. In the
scope of this study, my interest lies in alternative formations with countercultural
drives and background, i.e. those relating genealogically to the 1960s upheaval and,
further back, to 19th-century Romanticism. In this chapter, “alternative” and
“countercultural” are used interchangeably unless noted otherwise.
2 In this chapter, “Techno” is employed as a broad umbrella term for the whole
movement and history of digital music. It refers to all dance styles born from the new
technologies and forms of musical production, diffusion, and consumption that
emerged during the late 1980s: house, techno, jungle, trance, ambient, etc.
3 “Sexuality” is a sociocultural apparatus of practices, institutions, and knowledge
(scientia sexualis) that constitutes the modern subject. It reflects control mechanisms of
the nation-state and related institutions (science, family, church, workplace) in
controlling populations and individuals (biopower). “Sexuality” is thus constructed as a
category and a domain of obscure causalities, pathologies, external intervention, and
deciphering of the subject, to whom categories of “sin” or “desire” are rendered central
in the formation of modern self-identities (Foucault 1976; Davidson 1988; Dreyfus et
al. 1983).ANTHONY D’ANDREA 249