First, folks, I’m taking a bit of a break from active blogging until the end of the Queensland election campaign, as covering it for Crikey eats up a bit of time and I need to rationalise somewhere because my other work and writing commitments can’t be put on the backburner. So I’ll still be reposting my commentary on the campaign here, but aside from that I won’t be posting, commenting, or taking part in blog moderation or administration matters. Fortunately, of course, with a group blog, that doesn’t mean that your normal LP feed will be in any way disrupted!
But before I go, I’m writing an article on what I’m calling “spaces of utopia”. I’ve been thinking about festivals, dance parties, raves, protests, political marches/parties like Mardis Gras as the sorts of spaces that have a certain potential to embody the lived experience of a different social order. I think time has a lot to do with this, because like sacralised time, the experience of time at events like this is somewhat out of the ordinary, and their effects are felt throughout ordinary time as well. To some degree, I’m picking up on some of the literature in subcultural studies from the last decade or so, and in particular Sarah Thornton’s work where she argues that early 90s rave culture sought to break down social hierarchies and categories (with a liberal dose of party drugs to help it along!). She doesn’t think the attempt entirely succeeds, but I don’t think that’s the only way to look at it. Anyway, there’s some interest in publishing the article, but I’d love to have some input from people who might have experienced and/or reflected on some or any of these subcultural events.
Over the fold, I’ve posted a photo [NSFW warning] from the Berlin Love Parade, which is an interesting example of this rather intriguing phenomenon.
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/parade1_280.jpg"
The current number of Arena is about utopian / dystopian futures – came out of a conference at Monash on this theme in December – and has two articles on utopias and the anti-globalisation movement.
Off on a tangent, perhaps, but I had a very interesting talk at a party a few weeks ago with the person who is in charge of making sure protesters don’t get run over by cars and trams for the City of Melbourne. It seems that protest and rally organisers don’t ask for nor receive permits for their events (as do all other types of public space event organisers, or else they get into very big trouble) but the council and the police still try to make sure rallies are safe and orderly and necessary street closures take place, etc.
That’s Arena journal, not Arena mag.
We will all be a lot closer to utopia with the states police not only out of our polyamorous bedrooms*, but our living rooms and kitchens as well.
The well fed middle-class may not suffer much from the second failed prohibition but the opressed masses sure do.
The war on some drugs has created the most brutal corrupt police Mafias in the world and all this has to end. The state has no right to boss adult people around. Psychedelic drugs have great potential in getting people off far more harmful drugs such as red wine. Imo there should be a large bounty paid for all police sniffer dogs and the permanent retirement of all corrupt police, ie most of them.
These bounties could be paid over the net at sites similar to the rotten dead pool or cash for cadavers. Sear also http://www.stiffs.com
A strong people don’t need leaders. We’ll settle for free markets and free internets which is not utopia but to maximize the chances for a milk and orgy honey land we have to practise revolutionary triage – we have to get rid of God and the State …later for capitalism.
*I used to attend orgies in the seventies…these days I need brothel vouchers.
sarah thornton!?!?!?!
The best stuff in her book is the final chapter on different levels of the media and the cultural industry.
A less ‘utopian’ and more critical reading of so-called ‘rave culture’ can be extracted from her work. That it fufils the necessary requirements of postindustrial capital to provide new experience-commodities. In fact the ‘rave’ is a perfect example of new forms of captialsim involving cultural entrepreneurs producing niche markets where the cultural formation is driven by the free productive labour of enthusiasts (‘ravers’) subsumed by the (utopian) image of the rave-event. There is no implicit ‘structural’ critique of society within ‘rave culture’ that would warrant reading the image of utopia as the desire to produce an actual utopia, compared to appreciating the image as a tool for collectively individuating a given population of ravers. Everyone knows that you have to ‘come down’ eventually…
Witness the transformation of various mardis gras into massive tourist spectacles. Capital conditions the event, there is no breakout of transformative potential (utopian interest) from the event itself, it becomes subsumed by commercial interests.
Wash your mouth out with soap, Professor Rat. While the West Germans were scoffing ecstasy tablets like smarties and free-lovin’ in the moonlight in the nineteen-eighties, the youth of the East swilled the beer and the red wine you so patronisingly put down. One group gained their liberation, you’ll notice. It’s a bit pathetic to remember the ‘free love’ West culture that rather ignored the sanctions on even owning a Led Zeppelin or Bruce Springsteen record on the other side of the River Spree—unemployment, an interview with the Staatssicherheit and maybe a bit of clink.
I think history has answered the question of which kind of intoxicant has spurred more glorious revolutions.
Mark,
Here’s an interesting essay by Kane Race, a social researcher at UNSW, entitled “Death of the Dance Party”
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-October-2003/race.html
Mr. Drink, you are fast becoming one of my favourite commenters.
Mark
I’d refer you to Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. The basic idea of having just a night watchman state (as opposed to what we currently have) is that third party issues are minimised (e.g. like how under our current system people who damage their health have implications for our healthcare system) and as long as people can buy their own property, they can set whatever rules they want on it, attract followers or members or whatever you choose to call them with complete freedom of entry and exit (subject of course to whatever contracts they sign and how a court of law in such a society would interpret them) – therefore you have whatever number of experiments in living is limited by peoples’ imaginations. And the idea is that it’s supposed to involved no coercion of people who don’t want to follow the utopia involved – simply self-selection.
As a moderate libertarian, I think there are limits on the extent to which we can reach this ideal (for instance if one country were to go it alone in a world of non-libertarian states, it would probably open itself up to invasion and then there are all those pesky UN restrictions on the drug trade) but basically I find it appealing. My sympathies and hopes would be for a ‘withering away of the State’ in all countries over time so we would reach the logical conclusion of private polycentric law
http://www.againstpolitics.com/polycentric_law/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law
But this is all utopian dreamin’ at this stage.
I’ve been to one of the Berlin Love Parades. Wow.
blog hiatus sounds like a very nasty skin disease.
Perhaps a semi-hiatus is less nasty?
Hakim Bey on TAZ (Tempoary Autonomous Zones) has been widely discussed amongst more politically conscious elements of rave / dance party culture. As have other social ideas such as potlatch. (Critiques of) these ideas also resonate in more recent discussions of networked (sub)cultures. You could also look at the Autonomist movement, Agamben on community, etc. You could do a PhD on this topic (and someone probably has).
My position is that these supposedly utopian or autonomous (contrived) spaces are never free of context or hierarchy. I’m interested in more contingent and fluid forms of relations. My recent experiences have suggested that we mustn’t lose site of the local and the physical, ie bodies in space. Which suggests that maybe the dance parties are onto something after all, if they could get over their naive utopianism.
I could go on about the political role of sound (especially through the ritual of music) in connecting bodies to space and each other, but I should just send this before this dodgy borrowed wireless connection in London cuts out again…
Nice frock that lass is wearing.
Dare I mention a hiatus hernia?
Shannon isn’t Ben Byrne doing some work on the spaces of the 1980s/1990s warehouse scene in Sydney, the musics they produced and the social mileu they came from / created? Or at least I read something on that topic on his blog (recherche) … here.
Ben’s honours research went on to deal more with ‘post-digital’ aesthetics (and ontology & epistemology) but that essay you refer to is relevant, I agree.
Another phenomenon that comes to mind is the PLUR slogan (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) – often trotted out as a mantra throughout the 90s by the most shifty, selfish ppl in the scene(s).
Also, an obvious point, but however inclusive the rhetoric around dance parties and related events, they are also (usually) quite clearly exclusive, along subcultural & aesthetic lines. How to engage with difference is, as usual, a key question.
But Shannon, you got to “do it for the community” by playing for free while I make a small fortune selling dodgy drugs to the kids. I’ll tell you what. Will you play for five pills? PLUR.
That said, of the rave era, I did always like the bush doofs best — and the ones in Sydney Park — despite the dodgy promoter aspects. The aesthetic was a little worn out though. But then I like hard acid (music) and preferred acid (drugs) to the big E. And there were a couple of promoters who didn’t try to screw you royally and were actually nice people to work with (e.g. somewhat professional, aware of the environmental and health and safety consequences, etc). I think that brings up something in relation to the idea of the utopia that Mark raises, using that criteria the most ‘successful’ events were made by people versed in the practical, not the ideal.
Club promoters were often just as bad or worse the only difference was they’d tell you they were screwing you instead of begging poverty or communitarian ideals. I thought the warehouse parties (as opposed to say the experimental music events) had sorta tapered off by the early 90s.
Sorry for the delayed response, but thanks very much indeed for the comments here which will be very helpful to me in progressing the argument of the article.