2
Ephemeral spirit
Sacrificial cyborg and communal soul
Hillegonda C.Rietveld
The amplified dance music carries me into another plane of experience; its regular
beat comforting me while a world of musical textures, rhythms and visual
impressions whirls around me. I forget about how I arrived here, about my usual
daily life, myself. My body seems to have shed its burdens of human existence, its
limitations reduced: free at last, free at last. Time is now and always, fragments of
seconds, breaking to a blur of party weekends, then smoothing out into a
transcendental sense of forever. Bodies of fellow dancers brushing, strangers have
gone, we are all friends, in it together; we are as one. Thinking in terms of
differentiation eliminated, I am immersed. Stepping out of this sense of immersion,
walking now around the periphery of the event, I notice the repetitive 4/4 beats of a
house-music-related dance music that is pumped out of a rather oversized set of
speakers, flanking a person wearing headphones, the DJ, playing recordings, mixing
them seamlessly, taking control over the mood of the party. Meanwhile, lights and
smoke are interfering with the visual field, making clear observations cumbersome.
The dancing crowd of people looks like a unified mass, some people more
individuated than others, swayed by musical manipulations, by visual fragmentation
and enhanced by dance drugs.
The above descriptions could suit a range of post-disco and post-rave dance
events, in a variety of geographical locations and adapted spaces. One could perceive
them as contemporary rites of passage, rituals to mend and come to terms with
identity gaps produced in a rapidly changing global urbanity, where one is part of a
mass of a few hundred to a few thousand strangers, with a sprinkle of friends here
and there, and where the abstract machine aesthetic of the music can somehow feel
comforting. The participant, the dancer on the dance floor, can temporarily shed a
sense of alienated self, instead submerging into a world of electronically produced
powerful tactile-acoustic and fragmented visual impressions, held together by an
incessant bass drum, which seems to beat in close proximity to the speed of one’s
heartbeat. Bataille, almost casually, once defined the spirit as ‘subject-object’ (1989:
56), the merging of self with the other. This involves the destruction of the object,
to release its spirit in death, but in the case of rave-styled events almost the opposite
occurs: subjectivity disappears, merges with the surroundings, with what otherwise
would be conceived of as the ‘other’. This other is either the object, such as
presented in technological metaphors of techno, or other subjects, such as occur in a