Especially in enclosed environments, such as clubs, the warm, moist bodies of the
crowd within a dark space or distorted visual field produce an environment akin to
the womb, while the amplified pulse of the bass drum, inescapably entering and
embracing the body in a tactile manner, acts like a mother’s heartbeat. In the context
of popular music, Middleton calls this pulse the ‘primal metaphor’ (1990:288). This
regularity, embracing heartbeat and ‘motorik’ at once, provides an androgynous
‘pre-Oedipal’ framework (Rietveld 1993), in which the dancer loses a sense of self,
however temporarily, whilst feeling safe.
Such a repetitive musical structure synchronizes the crowd, affecting the body’s
own pulses, which can produce a profound experience of transcendental universality,
where time seems suspended, a forever here and now (Bradley 2001). The
continuous exercise, sometimes for hours on end, may stop an awareness of the
limited body and self. This is combined with the ritualistic predictability of the DJ-
led dance event. In the context of techno-paganism, Davis observes that ‘ritual passes
the intellect and stimulates...on a more subliminal level’ (1998:183). This is a
powerful cocktail, slotting perfectly together in its effect on a subjectivity similar to
the one found in Baudrillard’s exploration of the disappearing dialectic of
‘alternative strategy’: ‘The sublime has passed into the subliminal’ (Baudrillard 1987:
54).
As the crowd moves in unison, the individual could gain an experience of being
absorbed and becoming part of a larger timeless organism, of bodies, music,
machine aesthetic, clearly tactile and acoustic but blurry in the visual field. As
techno music and post-rave dance gatherings foreground their techno-logical
imagery as an abstraction, this metaphorical ‘womb’ has a machine-like quality, a
matrix in terms of both womb and grid system, making the experience of self-
annihilation and rebirth in the context of a machine aesthetic a deeply spiritual
cyborgian suture. It is at the same time a sacrifice of the body as well as of a sense of
the self. Hooked chemically and sensorially into the machine pulse of techno (Plant
1993), the post-industrial alienated individual sacrifices the self ritually to achieve a
spiritual transition into a cyborg-like subjectivity. This is the peak-experience, one
that does not always materialize, but one that is nevertheless profound and
unspeakable when it occurs.
Man-machineAlthough thousands of girls and women attend rave-related events (Pini 2001;
Rajandran 2000), the ‘man’ in the techno-based man-machine relationship is quite
male. A crisis in masculinity seems to have been produced due to a dread of the
obsolete male body, no longer needed in heavy industries, while at the same time,
arguably, a feminization of the labour force is occurring (Morley 1996; Springer
1996). Almost nostalgic for a futurist past, techno music channels this identity crisis.
Men—black, white, Asian, straight, gay, teenage, middle-aged —energetically dance
to a range of post-human techno versions on a mutated disco dance floor. This may
seem a strange way to reconfirm one’s masculinity. Unlike couple dancing, disco
54 SACRIFICIAL CYBORG AND COMMUNAL SOUL