experience. This can be a techno-pagan post-historic or a more refined spiritual
feeling, abstract and indefinable, Zen-like.
In techno mutations of trance and gabba, the 4/4 beat of house and disco takes
on a Teutonic ‘motorik’ (Reynolds 2000:31), a metronome piston noise of
industrial machines, reinstating a nostalgic masculinity of an imagined industrial
modernity. This rigid machine beat was developed, according to Reynolds, by
German bands like Neu! in the 1970s:
Krautrock brought into focus an idea that had been latent in rock...that the
rhythmic essence of rock—what made it different from jazz—was a kind of
machine like compulsion.... There was a spiritual aspect to all this, sort of
Zen and the Art of Motorik Maintenance: the idea that true joy isn’t liberation
from work, but exertion and fixation, a trance-like state of immersion in the
process, regardless of outcome.
(Reynolds 2000:32–3)It is in combination with this industrial rock aesthetic that techno has gained its
global popularity. The ‘protestant’ North European work ethic, arguably underlying
the first industrial revolution, is here translated into music and leisure. At dance
events featuring trance, techno-house and rave-inspired dance gatherings, one sees
this hard work taken to an extreme, in order to reach a peak-experience: the
complex demanding logistics of a night out (requiring travel and sometimes
complex information-retrieval skills), the pushing of the body beyond endurance in
physical exercise, sleep deprivation and drug use. Malbon (1999) and especially Pini
(2001) provide detailed descriptions of how their interviewees work hard to reach a
drug-induced peak-experience and to maintain that experience.
Various dance scenes seem to display a ‘macho’ atmosphere around drug use,
where it can be important to show off how much battering the (imagined once-
warrior) body can endure. Dance drugs aid a dancing cyborg identity, as the
chemicals enhance the ability of the nervous system to mesh with the technological
sensibilities that techno offers. Dance drugs are body technologies, with a profound
effect on the mind, on subjectivity. Yet, the body is disregarded in this process, just
as ‘[t]he denial of the body...is but symptomatic of the lack of mind body
integration within society at large’ (McNiff, in Barrett 2002:119). Like legal drugs
in our post-industrial society, dance drugs work to abolish an awareness of the
body, or, rather, to unmake an awareness of its limitations. Mind-altering drugs
temporarily enhance required mental faculties, at the cost of the organism that
supports them. Not only is the self tampered with subjectively; in some social
environments (such as the post-industrial North of the UK) one can also see a
tendency towards (an almost) physical self-annihilation.
As body technologies, dance drugs help the user to plug in, jack into or merge
with a matrix of aural, tactile and visual whilst losing self-consciousness. The
experience of the matrix is ‘pre-historic’ on an individual level, a vaguely
remembered feeling that came before the conscious formation of the subject.
HILLEGONDA C.RIETVELD 53