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Ecstatic Melancholic: , Electronic Music and Social Change around the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Ben Gook

The Cold War’s end infused electronic music in Berlin after 1989 with an ecstatic intensity. Enthused communities came together to live out that energy and experiment in conditions informed by past and for the future. This techno-scene became an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant) within an emergent ‘structure of ’ (Williams). Techno parties held out a promise of freedom while Germany’s re-unification quickly broke into disputes and mutual . Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany, this article adds to accounts of by considering it in conjunction with melancholy, arguing for an ambivalent description of ecstatic experience – and of emotional life more broadly.

Keywords: German re-unification, , structure of feeling, intimate publics, ambivalence.

Everybody was happy Ecstasy shining down on me ... I’m raving, I’m raving But do I really feel the way I feel?1

In Germany around 1989, techno music coursed through a population already energised by the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The years 1989 and 1990 were optimistic for many in Germany and elsewhere. The Cold War’s end heralded a conclusion to various deadlocks. Young Germans acutely felt this release from stasis and rushed to the techno-scene.2 Similar scenes also flourished in neighbouring European countries, the United States and Britain around the

1 ‘Raving I’m Raving,’ Shut up and Dance (UK: Shut Up and Dance Records, 1992), vinyl. Funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Associate Investigator (CE110001011) scheme helped with this work. Many thanks to Katie Barclay for edits and comments, and to two anonymous peer reviewers. 2 For brevity, I largely refer to ‘techno’ throughout. While practical, it also fits the era and location, as ‘techno’ was often used in Germany as a catchall term.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook same time – but the historical events of those years in Berlin gave techno an impetus that attracted disc jockeys (DJs) and producers from elsewhere, building a legacy evident today. As in other revolutionary sequences, participants in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) regime’s collapse and the Wall’s Fall were engrossed in their enthusiasms and disappointed by paths not taken. Ecstasy and melancholy became subjective registrations of an era and its contradictions. The GDR’s revolution – the issuing of people onto the streets, the to overturn and renew what stood in their path – this kernel of disaffection and the hope for something better helped create a moment that broke through the institutional blockages and banal routines of damaged lives. New post-revolutionary subjectivities emerged. Particularly in the socialist East, something happened to people that re-organised their understanding of how works within and against social structures. In Lacanian terms, this recognition took place across: the real (it was an excess, something previously blocked in the rigidified symbolic order of the GDR, felt bodily and in the unsayability of ); the symbolic (people discovered that their consent secured the virtual power of the order – as the Wall fell, people alternately hugged and spat on border guards, who now appeared ridiculous, their power drained away); and the imaginary (enmities broke down, rivalries momentarily dissolved). In a word, people felt unified. The now overfamiliar footage of joyous embraces at the Berlin Wall in November 1989 shows ecstatic people enjoying a longed-for moment of political disintegration and social unification. It heralded individual, cultural and social disintegration too. In the hours, days and months that followed, people unsurprisingly sought, in other forms, the emotional intensity that attended this collapse. For many, the sound and feeling of the Wall falling came to be the sibilant hiss of smoke machines filling concrete rooms, basements booming with kick drums, bodies mixing and moving without regard for Cold War identities. In this essay, I show how techno retained a trace of that era’s lived experience, and that this carried within it an openness towards others, plus a promise of futurity and change. This initial joyful feeling was particularly strong in Berlin, which I foreground here, but was registered across the cities of the former East, including Leipzig, the revolution’s real origin. In late 1989, urban space, psychic life and cultural expression all came together around a new egalitarianism in social transformation – novel positions,

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic opportunities and identifications were available.3 Berlin was a place – or, better, a series of voids, openings, gaps, surpluses – where the intensities of an insurgent musical form could be lived out in the suspended everyday of the Wende (the political interregnum between the Fall and re-unification) and its aftermath. Always the aftermath. The revolution was uneven in its results, which is why we need to think not only about ecstasy but also melancholy. The overthrow of some structures revealed outdated features of German society and other ways of living, but it was followed by the imposition of western structures in the East, and the return of mutual suspicion among the German population. For many Germans, then, 1989 saw that initial openness reverting to rigid identity divisions, loss of autonomy, a waning of eastern German and so on.4 Techno parties held a promise of freedom – spaces of and heightened enjoyment – while re-unification itself quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. The melancholic phase that belatedly broke out within the scene seemed to entail losing a future that promissory moments opened but failed to deliver in a lasting form. An ambivalent history, then. If this is a familiar story of many overwhelming revolutionary outbreaks and the return of a dull everyday life, then what is the attendant relationship between ecstasy and melancholy, two beatific but diametric states? Is it right to assume that ecstasy precedes melancholy – or is that a truncated story of their interrelation? Could we not easily flip the story to see melancholy precede ecstasy? Melancholy would then be the motor that pushes people to seek ecstasy: in this story, the discontents of pre-Fall East Germany would be foregrounded. This too is familiar – and convincing. By keeping ambivalence in mind, we see both/and instead of either/or relations between emotions, thereby suggesting entanglement. Ecstasy and melancholy are commonly endpoints along a continuum of responses: ecstasy is associated with plenitude, melancholy with lack. While that is true, mapping these feelings to good (ecstatic) and bad (melancholic) emotions obscures

3 The scene was not without its tensions: all utopias and collectivities are founded on exclusions. The considerable Turkish-German community in Berlin, for example, seemed actively sidelined from participation – refused entry to clubs – while Regina Baer mentions removing some women who had ‘missed the mark’ by arriving at a club in high heels. Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall, trans. Jenna Krumminga (Norderstedt: BoD, 2014), 110. 4 I make this argument at greater length in: Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany after 1989 (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015).

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook their complexity: ecstasy, as we will see, is a sort of painful , on a knife-edge between pleasure and unpleasure; , as Freud taught us, is pleasure in unpleasure, an enjoyment of self-abjection.5 Univalence would be mistaken here. Ambivalence more accurately tracks emotional life – or the temporality of and as it modulates in experience. As with ‘ambidextrous’, the ambi-prefix of ambivalence implies not a combination, but both. Ambivalence might recognise the dual character of positive and negative feelings. Culture presents us with signals that ambivalence is a degraded form of feeling and thinking, of non-judgement, of indecision. Ideal relationships or beliefs are apparently clear and unambiguous, committed and unwavering. Yet the ability or inability to tolerate ambivalence in the self and other is a fundamental aspect of our psychic life. Our understandings of emotions needs to recognise this and integrate it within our historical accounts. Like other critics interested in ecstasy, I suggest that pure self-presence, as figured by the ecstatic subject’s typical ontology, is impossible, even while appreciating ‘this desire to find a place in which the and of the (speaking) body might be apprehended’.6 Psychoanalytic concepts help elucidate the feeling subject as ambivalent, desiring and protean – caught up in the movements between pleasure and , and . Two key sites of the early techno-scene will be touchstones throughout: Tekknozid raves, begun by easterners, and the UFO Club, begun by westerners. Like their audiences, these were protean and transient, ultimately taking new forms. The analysis that follows is critical and synthetic. It draws on previously published material, including newspapers, documentaries, websites and popular books. As significant anniversaries are reached, current and former scene participants have begun various self-mythologising, memorialising and educational activities. Some material comes from these recent reflections on the early days of the scene. Other material includes the archive that has been made broadly accessible: original TV reports, recordings of club nights and reels of amateur footage from the early 1990s. These have recently been uploaded to YouTube, while Zeitmaschine and technohistory.org continue to collect other documents.7 Whether looking at recent or original documents,

5 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), vol. XIV, 243–59. 6 Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 13. Emphasis mine. 7 For example: Technocity Berlin, a report from the public broadcaster

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I take the scene’s core participants seriously. I am agnostic about their claims to have had ecstatic and melancholic experiences, but I critically interrogate the historical and psychological conditions of the scene. The article’s progression is as follows. First, I explore ‘structures of feeling’ and ‘intimate publics’ to understand how participants believed themselves to be bound in a community. Second, I discuss the discourses of ecstasy around 1989. Third, I propose three aspects of melancholia operative in the scene. I conclude by returning to Tekknozid raves, which were relaunched in 2015.

Belonging: songs, scenes, publics, structures, feelings Rather than affect or emotion, I prefer to use the term feeling. For one, it conjures both mental and physical sensation.8 It also carries an apt semantic ambiguity when discussing music, dancing and parties. After all, techno events ‘engender spaces of heightened tactility and embodied intimacy’, and in turn ‘their musical aesthetics also highlight tactility’.9 In titles, in lyrics, in texts around the genre, feeling’s polysemy bleeds between ‘perception and sensation, contact and impact, encounter and experience’.10 In Raymond Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’ approach, feeling retains this lability between the mental and the material. As Berlant recently put it, a structure of feeling is ‘sensed rather than known’; something ‘shared among strangers’ – ‘a experience that mostly goes without saying’, a familiar if underacknowledged way of belonging to the world. A structure of feeling is beneath the surface, implicit in collective life.11

SFB, broadcast in 1993, https://youtu.be/-OLEyOYC6P4 (uploaded 27 February 2011). The Zeitmaschine Facebook page regularly posts YouTube videos of old footage: www.facebook.com/zeitmaschine. A playlist of live DJ club recordings and mixes from 1990 onwards is available: www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLL0yuimDKsEP64qCivy6ILT16HO4y9zHX. 8 Benno Gammerl, ‘Felt Distances,’ in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 177–200; Benno Gammerl, Jan Simon Hutta, and Monique Scheer, ‘Feeling Differently: Approaches and Their Politics,’Emotion, Space and Society (forthcoming 2017). 9 Luis-Manuel Garcia, ‘Beats, Flesh, and Grain: Sonic Tactility and Affect in Electronic Dance Music,’ Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 60. 10 Ibid. 11 Lauren Berlant, ‘Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin,’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 3 (2015): 194.

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‘Structure of feeling’ helpfully emphasises the join of individual experience and the social formation. The two nouns (structure of feeling) convey an enmeshing of the individual and the social. For Williams, a structure of feeling is ‘as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible part of our activities’.12 It covers ‘all the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts, and uncertainties, [and] intricate forms of unevenness and [that] do not have to await definition, classification or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and action’.13 Emergent change is felt before it is satisfactorily described or represented. New varieties of expression emerge to render sensible what sits at the edge of semantic availability. These new forms help articulate shared experience: ‘a subject can say nothing of its , joys, , except insofar as what it says coincides with a concept and a form ... and therefore require the invention of other concepts, others forms, which is the task of art’.14 Cultural forms such as Williams’ nineteenth-century novel – or, as I claim, the techno- scene – master and absorb new experience. That is, they embody a formal speculative capacity that can go beyond prior determinations.15 Electronic music’s inventiveness in the span from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s is one manifestation of this formal invention. In Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen’s oral history, two Berlin techno-scene participants make clear the productivity of a new cultural form:

Stefan Schvanke: I lived for it. It was cult-like. Everything was right: the music, the people, the parties, my work. It was almost too perfect. I was totally revved up all the time. The whole thing gave me an incredible energy. I was fully charged, even during the week, always looking deliriously forward to the weekend. Clé: Everything revolved around techno. All my friends had some important position somewhere – at EFA or in a club, printing t-shirts or

12 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 64. 13 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 129–30. 14 Andrew Gibson, Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 180. 15 I flag here an interesting, revivified formalist approach: Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017).

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DJing themselves. Life was concentrated around the weekend. On buying records, listening to new stuff, painting tapes, hanging around with people. It was incredibly exciting. I had the feeling of being part of it, part of the whole. Of not just being a consumer, but doing and shaping something.16

Clé, a DJ at the early clubs, and Schvanke, a publisher and promoter, suggest a total engrossment in the moment and its possibilities. This is not ‘merely’ an affective for a style of music, but a fervour with effects on consciousness (senses of time, value, worth) and logics of practice. The weekend became the axis around which all else moved. Temporalities were reordered within everyday life, generating an intoxicating pleasure of collective absorption, anticipation and labour. As with many subcultures, the practices bled out from the key sites and events where the scene gathered. They saturated everyday life, constituting a lifeworld, producing ever new practices (DJing, writing, drug selling, promoting, bartending) and objects (t-shirts, tapes, records, drugs, publications).17 In short, their multifaceted activities underline that we do not find society in music – rather, music is one form of social action.18 The enthusiasms of Schvanke and Clé, among many hundreds of others, recall that something new emerged from the Fall of the Wall: a sense of broken impasses. A shared sense of this, a shared feeling, bound people together as contemporaries, as subjects of an event. The novelty of the moment was registered within subjects – a re-organised sense of self, identifications, relations to others and the symbolic order; or, in different terms, novel relations with temporality, sexuality, bodies, work, cities and so on. People were unabashed in consciously re-orienting their lives around a new identification with the techno-scene, in the psychoanalytic sense. The euphoric enjoyment of musical repetition, a kinetic response to musical innovation, deindividuated ecstasy and will-to-jouissance took on roles as their leading drawcards. Commitments to particular clubs and ‘techno’ became ideals. This identification became a commonality to which everyone was attached, a shared affinity with an aesthetic object that ensured successful social interactions between people

16 Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 139. Emphasis mine. 17 See also John L. Fitzgerald, Framing Drug Use: Bodies, Space, Economy and Crime (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 55–81. 18 Tia DeNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 157.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook who might otherwise have nothing in common. Music entrained people emotionally and physically, forging bonds and offering models for life at various scales.19 The techno-scene was, then, a loose-knit but identifiable group responding to the emergent structure of feeling in ways that generated an intimacy among participants. This was an unconscious and conscious operation. Joining ‘structure of feeling’ with Berlant’s notion of the ‘intimate public’ can help make sense of what holds the techno-scene together at both psychic levels.20 An intimate public is a group of people who believe they ‘already share a and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience’.21 Berlant derived the ‘intimate public sphere’ concept from her study of American popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She focused on ‘sentimental’ narrative fiction marketed to women. Within these markets:

participants in the intimate public feel as though it expresses what is common among them, a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history and their ongoing attachments and emotions. Their participation seems to confirm the sense that even before there was a market addressed to them, there existed a world of strangers who would be emotionally literate in each other’s experience of power, intimacy, desire, and discontent, with all that entails: varieties of suffering and fantasies of transcendence; longing for reciprocity with other humans and the world; irrational and rational attachments to the way things are; special styles of ferocity and refusal; and a creative will to survive that attends to everyday situations while imagining conditions of flourishing within and beyond them.22

Intimate public spheres thus come together around feeling, sensing and imagining. In such intimate publics, in such scenes, a fantasy of mattering

19 Ibid., 57. 20 Luis-Manuel Garcia has shown in greater detail the salience of Berlant’s intimate publics for techno-scenes: ‘“Can You Feel It, Too?”: Intimacy and Affect at Electronic Dance Music Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin’ (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2011), 156. I have made the argument in the context of Ostalgie in the former East Germany: Gook, Divided Subjects, 110–11. 21 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), vii. Original emphasis. 22 Ibid., 5.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic is generated, so participants become somebody to each other (Clé: ‘all my friends had some important position somewhere’). This community of club and rave-goers desired, as Clé says, to be ‘part of it, part of the whole’. Peace, , unity and respect – these four words were the catch-cry of the global electronic music scene in this period.23 These leading ideals resonated with the intimate public sphere’s fantasmatic structure of alienation, which is moderated by an imagined sharing: antagonisms or contradictions may be bracketed, aiding a sense of belonging. In Germany, a group identification with ‘techno’, an immersion in the ‘scene’, was significant because of otherwise intense scrutiny over one’s roots and background – especially one’s status as either an East or West German. ‘At the early techno parties, [eastern German] breakdancers from Alexanderplatz, football hooligans, former East German punks and radio junkies encountered a West Berlin conglomerate of Schöneberg gays, Kreuzberg squatters, students, artists, English soldiers on furlough and American expats in Berlin for the cheap rents’.24 After years of division, the scene enabled Cold War enmities to momentarily fall away.25 Within the intimate public, vagueness is valuable as a form of group cohesion because it allows a belonging that does not depend directly on the mechanics of similarity and difference.26 People can belong, they can identify, without identity. The vague and slippery social bonds of club life resonate with this. They are predominantly affective. Techno events cultivate an atmosphere of ambiguous social warmth and informality. This produces a sense of togetherness despite strangers having no external reason to be in solidarity with each other.27 Their mode of group cohesion is vague, not in the sense of a lack of clarity, but of a social blurring that allows loose tethering to each other.28 One recent clubbing participant told Luis-Manuel Garcia, ‘I find that people come together at night … the barriers really fall at

23 See: Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Michaelangelo Matos, The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (New York: HarperCollins, 2015); Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, 2nd eBook edn. (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2012). 24 Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 10. 25 Gook, Divided Subjects. 26 See Chapter 3 in Garcia, ‘Can You Feel It, Too?’. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook night’.29 This feeling is enhanced by moments of intensity where everything seems to come together: when, for example, DJs craft an arc of tension and release, or play particularly popular songs, or use generic tropes. These provide moments of regulated and modulated affect, of emotional convergence read by party-goers as social convergence.30 The intimate public sphere’s common experiences, Berlant writes, ‘cultivate fantasies of vague belonging as an alleviation of what is hard to manage in the lived real – social antagonisms, exploitation, compromised intimacies, the attrition of life. Utopianism is in the air’.31 Utopianism – and dystopianism, no less a bonding idea – was certainly in the air in the Berlin scene.32 Art photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who documented many parties, picked up these points in a recent interview, while also underlining the scene’s increasingly forgotten queerness:

The inversion and upending of scales and values made it feel as though techno would lead to a new openness and impartiality. Hard is soft. That whole hard look with camo gear and the hard sound, which wasn’t actually meant aggressively or militaristically. This total upending forced you to see everything in a new way. It had a lot to do with and the end of the East-West paradigm. Of course, you didn’t always have the feeling there were no more conflicts – the war in Yugoslavia was very present – but the absence of that longstanding rigid framework really triggered something very deep. The structures that had previously existed were suddenly gone.33

‘Openness’ and ‘absence’ feature among lost ‘structures’ and a ‘rigid framework’ in abeyance – ecstatic qualities, no . The political conjuncture seemed – briefly – to open, offering a range of potentials. The early Berlin scene catalysed wide-ranging hopes (social, political, existential) via a notion that a small but influential cultural core could affect the direction of post-1989 transformations. People within the Berlin scene

29 Ibid., 146. Emphasis mine. 30 Ibid., 210–14. 31 Berlant, Female Complaint, 5. 32 Ben Gook, ‘Berlin and Detroit, an Alien Techno Alliance: Cultural Politics and Social Transformation after the Fall of the Wall,’ Limbus: Australisches Jahrbuch für germanistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft 9 (2016): 171–204. 33 Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 214.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic nevertheless had varied stances on the pertinence of ‘the system’. Some felt as if the scene at bottom instilled an ethos that could question objective and subjective inertia.34 Many imagined such temporary spaces existed for their own sake (transformation for the participants), rather than trying to achieve a broader end (social transformation). A popular idea understood clubs or raves as liberated areas of cultural resistance that would soon dissolve but have a powerful : the partying could happen now, while the messy business of lasting social change would happen later. If something like solidarity existed in the early Berlin events, it was fluid, vague and would evaporate whenever discussed. This pleasurable collectivity could not be readily converted into politics, which is why techno-scene can feel like practices generative of belonging while being criticised as anomic pleasure-seeking. Berlant’s neologism ‘juxtapolitical’ indicates this: these publics are to one side of the political, even as they approach a politics in their concerns and communal gathering. In sum, an intimate public emerged from a structure of feeling, an ecstatic-melancholic historical sequence that generated and elaborated expressive forms. The ecstatic upsurge through electronic dance music is only the most recent instance of ecstasy coming to prominence as a secular cultural mode.35 So this brings us to the question of ecstasy and why it emerges as the ideal feeling amid the ruptures of 1989.

Ecstasy and event: Mauerfall, Wende, rave Katrin Pahl’s description of ‘’, which she explores through Hegel’s Phenomenology, is particularly fitting for accounts of ecstatic-melancholic experiences.36 For her, emotionality is:

a transformational force that carries one out of oneself and to a different self. Such transports pluralize the subject. Subject, in Hegel, means self- mediation or self-relation ... I become other when emotional – ‘beside

34 Ibid., 235. 35 Earlier instances include baroque art, Weimar Germany’s body culture and French intellectual life in the twentieth century. See: Hollywood, Sensible, 162; Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 382; Robert Heynen, Degeneration and Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the Body in Weimar Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 36 Katrin Pahl, Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012).

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myself ’ (e.g., with ) or transported to a new state from which I will never return.37

Pahl says we become other when emotional, we are in motion. The Greek root of the English ‘ecstasy’ and German ‘ekstase’ is Ek-stasis. It signifies a moment of standing (stasis) outside or beyond (ek) oneself, or the putting of something out (ek) of place (stasis). The ancient meaning of the term is apparent today; however this etymology also uncovers the link to stasis, which in Ancient Greece signified civil war.38 The Cold War’s ending was to be a release from an inert internal division, from an entropic holding pattern, a stand-off; a shift from the agonic reality of Cold War geopolitics into a hedonic community of German-German celebration. Stasis is also the etymological root of the word ‘state’, so to be ek-stasis is to be at the edge of the state, a feeling experienced during the Wende by many Germans.39 ‘Ecstasy’ today plays off the word’s multiple roots: the specifics of a pill, the sense of openness and elation – an oceanic feeling – and an intoxicated or trance state. Ecstasy in techno-scenes, in Berlin or elsewhere, names subjects engulfed in the materiality of aesthetic experience. Representation and signification are downplayed, meaning is effaced, and the subject takes on new shapes through the overwhelming of the party. At its most intense, ecstatic experience can shift a subject’s relation to the world, to others and their sense of self: the overlapping notions of limit and edge experiences show this too. In invoking self-estrangement and shapes of the self, I do not want to overstate the radicality of ecstatic experience: for example, in ecstasy the self is not utterly shattered, nor do people generally enter raves and emerge reborn. People typically retain some control over these events of self-estrangement. For instance, the duration of a night at a techno event entails oscillation between what Garcia has called ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’ modes of experience, between overwhelming ecstatic moments and untroubled or effortless moments. For him, ‘coming undone’ names a pleasurable unravelling-and-re-binding cycle:

37 Katrin Pahl, ‘The Logic of Emotionality,’ PMLA 130, no. 5 (2015): 1457–58. 38 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (Homo Sacer II. 2), trans. Nicholas Heron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 39 On ‘stasis’ and ‘the state’: Dimitris Vardoulakis, ‘Stasis: Beyond Political Theology?,’ Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 125–47. I have written in more detail elsewhere about the Wende excitement and its formative role in German culture after 1989: Gook, Divided Subjects.

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‘rough’ experience pulls the self open, without destruction, then passes into ‘smooth’ experience.40 Reference to several selves or a continual estrangement can appear to leave no identity or ‘no one’ at its core. However, as Rahel Jaeggi puts it, there remains a coherent – if momentarily disorganised – subject in intense experiences:

A self that has experiences is in a certain respect always ‘one’, even if it becomes different (or ‘other’) in its experiences with itself and the world. For if there were no subject that could integrate these experiences into its experience and history, thereby making them its own, one could not speak of experience at all.41

The thousands who turn up to party each weekend testify to the fact that these experiences of alienation can be welcomed.42 Ecstasy, like other events (such as falling in love, or political events such as the Arab Spring), necessarily entails risking an encounter with an other. As Jaeggi writes,

there can be degrees of identification with events for which the self is not entirely responsible that depend not on the amount of control one has over them but on the greater or lesser extent to which one is present in them … one is then ‘taken in’ by the situation, absorbed in it; one forgets oneself in it.43

Shortly after the Fall of the Wall, the language of ecstasy circulated to describe a collective loosening of boundaries.44 ‘In total ecstasy, borders are lost between time and space’, announced a flyer from 1990, promoting Tekknozid, a rave two East German brothers began before the revolution. ‘Tekkno Raves aren’t a warm-up of reactionary 60s sounds, but rather the first contact with

40 Garcia, ‘Can You Feel It, Too?,’ 215–73. 41 Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 248. 42 Jaeggi, Alienation, 93. 43 Ibid. 44 The term was already circulating in other electronic music scenes at the time, particularly the UK: Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (London: Routledge, 1999); Drew Hemment, ‘E Is for Ekstasis,’ New Formations 31 (1997): 23–38; Reynolds, Energy Flash.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook music of the future’, it concluded.45 In their call for like-minded ravers, the past – reheated 60s sounds and disco – was denigrated in a commitment to nowness and the future. A desire for immediate redemption (joy, now, here, on the dance floor) demanded aesthetic, bodily and social exploration. The parties were to be futurist in orientation and collective in spirit, ignorant of borders. The revolution seemed to vindicate such a forward-looking approach, and provide a warrant for futurist aesthetics, transcendental experience and utopian longings. Techno and raves were still relatively new in Berlin when the Wall fell. Arguably the founding club dedicated to the techno-scene was UFO, which opened illegally in Kreuzberg (West Berlin) in 1988, then moved around the city over the next few years. It played mostly UK acid house plus some Detroit techno.46 UFO was the destination for many nascent house and techno-scene members from the East: ‘the Wall fell on Thursday, on Saturday we were partying in the UFO Club’, East German-born DJ Paul Van Dyk famously said.47 Easterners in Berlin and other cities heard about UFO and other promising parties on western radio broadcasts. With many records inaccessible in the East, home-recorded tapes circulated of these radio shows, fuelling an imaginary of clubs and parties in the West. Some promoters managed to organise parties in the GDR before the Fall – including the first Tekknozid events.48 These were organised in the cracks of an increasingly desperate state, unsure about how to handle palpable disaffection among its youth. With the Fall, all this built up energy from easterners was released into the West Berlin clubs. Frank, a former East German interviewed in the documentary We Call It Techno, recalls his visit a week after the Wall fell:

I did a small club tour through different discos during the night, and the last one I was inside at six in the morning was the UFO. I went inside and thought, ‘now everything has been said and done, I’ll never want to go to

45 Text from Tekknozid website (www.tekknozid.de), translation mine. Per the web chronicle, the last original Tekknozid rave happened on 21 December 1991. 46 The history of early clubs is recounted in Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang. 47 Theo Lessour, Berlin Sampler: From Cabaret to Techno: 1904–2012, a Century of Berlin Music, trans. Sean Kearney (Berlin: Ollendorff Verlag, 2012), 304. 48 Again, see the first chapters of Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 14–168. Eastern Germans remain ‘overrepresented’ among the ranks of leading DJs and producers in Germany – a fascinating cultural legacy of that moment.

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another club in my life’. To me it was so fulfilling – it was like a blow to the neck. Because you go inside this place, it was insanely loud … The bass was there, the whole place was full of fog, there were all these painted fabrics and screens, colourful, a bit spacey, very funky … No one need talk or spend hours at the bar to meet someone – the people came to dance, long and constantly, to let themselves go. That is what I think was the greatest about it, that everyone felt so free.49

Frank, the only documentary participant introduced solely as a ‘fan’, underlines his felt experience. It was overwhelming and ‘fulfilling’. This has all the hallmarks of jouissance – a sense of enjoyment accompanied by (unconscious) pleasure so great it becomes indistinguishable from (conscious) pain. Such exquisite pleasure threatens to annihilate a sense of self, as if one were paralysed by a violent assault – it felt, he says, ‘like a blow to the neck’. Frank then links this to a sense of freedom (‘everyone felt so free’). If this recalls an ordinary sense of release at nightclubs, then it nevertheless seems heightened by the extraordinary historical context: East and West Germans, together, dancing. Frank and others rushed to club after club in those first weeks, their desire – as ever – insatiable. This fuelled an array of one-off parties, short-term bars and longer-term clubs. After years of loose organisation and periodic events in West Berlin, plus a handful in East Berlin, new electronic music venues were established to serve the growing audience; each club and party would embody slightly different visions of the perfect night and best new music. The divided city’s built landscape and long post-war were a boon: the city had effectively doubled its infrastructure (east + west), while its population had left for more prosperous, less fraught cities. In the East, after the Fall, social and cultural experimentation could flourish in areas with ambiguous property ownership and unclear state authority structures. As DJ Clé summarises:

We played in clubs that belonged to no one, in parts of town for which no one was responsible, in buildings that, according to the land register, didn’t even exist. We lived predominantly during hours of the day when all normal people were sleeping.50

49 We Call It Techno!, directed by Maren Sextro and Holger Wick (Germany: Sense Music, 2008), DVD. 50 Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 247.

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The first generation of Berlin clubs was found along the Clubmeile, with their centre on Leipziger Platz in the former East Berlin district of Mitte, immediately east of Potsdamer Platz and the Berlin Wall – a truly depopulated zone since the Wall’s erection and its added fortifications. The UFO Club closed at the end of 1990 then re-opened as ‘Tresor’ in March 1991, again without paperwork, in a basement near Leipziger Platz. The area quickly became a DIY utopian enclave, operating in a new temporality and distinct from its recent Cold War history. More than a hundred squats – whole apartment buildings and complexes – were active in the East within six months of the Wall falling. Some squats hosted parties, some were home to DJs and artists; above all, the scene was instilled with the ethos of finding space and occupying it.51 Here, in this liminal zone, nighttime sociability (Clé: ‘when all normal people were sleeping’) could see daytime rules partially suspended, social structures destabilised and individual identity and inhibitions slacken. These creative practices took place in a (post)revolutionary imaginary of fallen borders, in which novelty and exploration were occurring across the domains of culture, politics and society. As the Wall fell, subjects reported elation so great the self momentarily dissolved into the crowd. Tropes of porousness, borderlessness, infusion, bodily sensation and so on were common. Frequently reported expressions on the night the Wall fell included: ‘this is insane! I can’t understand it! I can’t grasp it!’.52 People repeatedly uttered the word ‘nonsense’ as the borders were opened.53 Others recall it being ‘sheer madness’.54 These suggest cognitive and affective undoing in the face of unintelligible events. The Fall was characterised by excitement, elation and , which then inaugurated a creative honouring of the ecstatic discovery of democratic will. If a Wall can be toppled, if two nations can be unified, what next, what else can be achieved? Events had rapidly escalated – over just a matter of months in 1989 – from small gatherings of dissidents, to millions on the streets in Leipzig and Berlin, then the Fall, then the strange Wende interlude.

51 Lessour, Berlin Sampler, 304. 52 Hans-Joachim Maaz, Behind the Wall: The Inner Life of Communist Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 164. 53 Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 253. 54 Andreas Glaeser, Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–2.

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During such a period of dislocation, as Sewell puts it in a discussion of the French Revolution,

actors … are beset with insecurity: they are unsure about how to get on with life. This insecurity may produce varying results, sometimes in the same person: , fear, or exhilaration; incessant activity, paralysis, extreme caution, or reckless abandon. But it almost certainly raises the emotional intensity of life, at least for those whose existence is closely tied to the dislocated structures.55

The Wende – the period between the border’s rupture and re-unification’s institutional reconstitituion – ultimately became an ‘open’ situation, a passage from one symbolic order (dictatorial state socialism) to another (liberal democratic capitalism). An intensification of life was notable.56 This era saw a society at its limit, dwelling at the margin – living in the ‘border zone’. Dominic Boyer recounts that during his fieldwork after re-unification, late in the 1990s,

Many responses to questions such as ‘What was the Wende like?’ began with ‘How can I describe it to you?’ and then trailed off through minutes of searching for apt metaphors and similes, false starts, agitated silences, and sighs. One man simply laughed at me and said, ‘Herr Boyer, I would be very happy to explain it to you, but the problem is, we’re not even certain ourselves what it is that happened to us’.57

Such an event is a piece of the Real, namely ‘history that is unassimilable to its meaning-giving and salvific narratives’.58 The revolution unveiled a new social formation – the Wende – a novelty later foreclosed by formal re-unification. Within this emergent structure of feeling, the techno-scene was clustered around specific shapes of emotionality that somehow echoed recent history. A fascinating montage in Maja Classen’s 2006 documentary Feiern (the

55 William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 229. 56 See Gook, Divided Subjects, 191–241. 57 Ibid., 220–21., emphasis mine. 58 Hollywood, Sensible, 21.

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English title is Don’t Forget to Go Home) cuts between people describing their first time visiting techno clubs in Berlin in the early to mid-1990s:

It was the old Planet.59 I clearly remember the woman at the entrance. She had a massive 60s or 70s style hairdo. And then we entered … … and I stepped in a courtyard and I said ‘ohhhhh’, then a small corridor and … … then this heavy iron door opened and I found myself in a huge hall and the bass was pumping … Wow! What is this? What is happening? And I saw all these people dancing. It was dark with lights flashing, and I just loved it! It was three in the afternoon, and the people were dancing and the atmosphere was just so cool. And then we felt, like, this of energy crossing us. People sharing pills here, three guys peeing into the lake there, a fire juggler over there, and everywhere in the sand, literally every other square metre, couples of all combinations of sexes. There was tinsel coming down from the entire ceiling and a really emotional song was playing that almost made me cry. And then the whole place was glittering and everybody went crazy, 7000 people or something. And I just stood there and got goose bumps, and I thought, ‘wow! Crazy! I love it! This is what I want all the time, just parties’. It really gives me goose bumps now because it was so great. We had such an amazing party. We danced hard and enjoyed the music until we were shattered, let our emotions run free. I woke up at home, and on Monday I had pneumonia … I don’t really know what happened to me there. But I got so hooked, I just had to go there again!60

The transcript loses the film’s kinetic effect of people tagging one another’s stories – and we lose their enthusiastic and gesture-filled storytelling. Nevertheless, the narrative crescendo carries across in the text: a sense of total absorption and a desire to enter this scene of communion again and again; a sense of a formative experience. An echo of the Wende comment

59 Planet, opened in April 1991 without a lease, would be disassembled and reassembled each week. It moved several times before closing in 1993. 60 Feiern, directed by Maja Classen (Germany: HFF, 2006), DVD.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic from Boyer’s interviewee also appears in the clubber’s ‘I don’t really know what happened to me there’. This returns us to intimate publics and shared experience. The blurb for SubBerlin: The Story of Tresor, a 2008 documentary, illustrates how clubs and political history are commonly connected:

The Fall of the Berlin Wall was something no one had ever expected to happen so quick and with such intensity, leaving Germany in a state of , upheaval and confusion ... The years that followed were marked by new-found freedom, chaos, change and a rush of collective ecstasy.61

This term, ‘collective ecstasy’, is a loose but resonant phrase for what the intimate public shared and desired. Ecstatic experiences betrayed a twin desire for transcendence and immanence – to be in the moment, to be in the crowd, to be beyond history, to be shaping the future. Wolle XDP, one of the Tekknozid brothers, told the Berliner Zeitung on 19 December 1991, ‘Tekknozid aims to start an ecstatic dance based on the crowd, independent of the person on the dancefloor. Everything essential will be raised to a higher level’.62 Different events competed to provide focused sensual and emotional experiences to reach this transcendental level. In a recent interview, DJ Mijk van Dijk recalled ‘it was the most intense thing back then. Wolle XDP was a total perfectionist. He analysed every party to determine whether it was the ideal setting for ecstasy’.63 Wolle XDP – which stands for Xstasy Dance Party – himself recalls that ‘the goal was to create an ecstatic or trance-like experience. I wanted people to experience a collective feeling through trance and find a way back to a humanity that they can’t find otherwise’.64 The journalist Ralf Niemczyk recalls that for Wolle:

It was simply a democratic ‘sound storm’ that he was propagating, without differentiation, nearly a kind of dance floor socialism – and, maybe, not to

61 SubBerlin: The Story of Tresor, directed by Tilmann Künzel (Germany: Tresor, 2008), DVD. See also Party auf dem Todesstreifen, directed by Rolf Lambert (Germany: Along Mekong Productions, 2014), DVD. 62 Quoted in Lessour, Berlin Sampler, 305. Translation altered. 63 Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 72. 64 Sextro and Wick, We Call It Techno!

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develop an elite attitude, not to put the DJ in the middle, but to just lose yourself in light and sound.65

The collectivity of ‘collective ecstasy’ seems to have two different dimensions – one transhistorical, one embedded in context. Consider the two different meanings of ek-stasis – one about displacement to an outside, another about the displacement within. In many individual accounts of ecstatic experience, an awareness of the external world seems to drop away, replaced by an expanded interior consciousness. In religious and mystical ecstasy, this entails a heightened awareness of God. In musical ecstasy, it entails an intense focus upon aesthetic experience, the feeling of textures and rhythms. Clubs amplified this feeling with elaborate synaesthesiastic experiences of vivid light displays, fog machines and so on. Collective ecstasy, meanwhile, may reinforce and heighten the experience of interiority, but something different emerges too. In collective ecstasy, people seem to describe an extension into a field of others, a transitional third space between self and other, a ‘merging’ with the crowd. In individual ecstasy, people seem to describe an intension within the self, almost a displacement of the subject to a yet deeper internal world. Encountering new shapes of the self is, it seems, the draw of ecstatic experience – yet the most common place to find this alternative self is in connection with others. They could be actual others at Tekknozid, or the religious texts that contributed to Teresa of Ávila’s communion with a higher spirit. As Bataille would put it, these varieties of ecstasy seek to negate the isolated being via plenitude in collectivity.66 Collective ecstasy becomes a locus of fantasy scenes in which total fullfilment will be achieved, plugging being’s constitutive lack, the alienation from self and other. Beyond any straightforward reference to the drug, ecstasy around 1989 could answer to a long-standing human demand. In the end, ecstasy was a cultural dominant in the techno gatherings suggesting a ‘fit’ between musical production, bodily response and shared enjoyment. Wolle described of his Tekknozid raves:

65 Ibid. 66 Quoted in Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), 18. A full account is beyond my scope here, but note that Bataille was strongly averse to fusional fulfilment in something like collective hypostasis, as Nancy called it. See ibid., 6–7, for commentary on this.

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You didn’t have to take drugs to experience a loss of reality … people were totally spaced-out, beyond good and evil. No one was accessible, but hardly anyone was on drugs. They were on the music, and in the music. Some people had to be carried off the pedestals when we stopped around 6am. They were totally gone, space and time forgotten. They’d danced themselves into oblivion.67

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the intensity of these descriptions (‘danced themselves into oblivion’), secular narratives of ecstasy often sound mystical and apophatic. They often eschew cognitive knowledge, as in negative theology, where God transcends definition.68 In describing religious revelation, people reach for elaborate metaphors, or simply claim what happened is ineffable: there is, they suggest, something incommunicable about ecstasy, about its plenitude and engrossment, about its immediacy. This modus loquendi hovers between the articulate and inarticulate. Its elusiveness, however, only propels people towards the search for deeper connection. Rainald Goetz’s Rave, an experimental non-fictional account of the German scene from the late 1980s onwards, captures an aspiration to a cataphatic (positive) naming of experience, before falling short:

There was a time when we had no words for all this. It just happened, and we were in the thick of it, watching, thinking something, anything, but without words. Did this really exist? Perhaps it did, but what about inside our heads? Sure, all the time. It was the ‘wordless time’. In all sorts of situations, we would just look at each other wide-eyed, shaking our heads, unable to say much other than no words - pfft - brutal - madness - no words, really - This was our so-called poem of bliss. It expressed our amazement, our of the overwhelming, the stunning, of the simple and

67 Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 72. 68 Brandy Daniels, ‘Ekstasis as (Beyond?) Jouissance: Sex, Queerness, and Apophaticism in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition,’ Theology & Sexuality 20, no. 2 (2014): 89–107.

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unspectacular but somehow monumental moments we lived, and that pervaded us, the sensation that nothing could possibly be more amazing, that we had never experienced anything similar, and so on and so on.69

Beyond the religious echoes, various other traditions, each with in ecstasy, come through in this text. It has a strong German Romantic echo: music as revealed religion and unsayable.70 It also recalls vitalist philosophy by suggesting conceptual, rational appraisals of reality fail to capture their essence. For the vitalists, this essence ‘must be accessed by some special kind of experience: for instance, in religious, sexual, or aesthetic forms of ecstasy’.71 A profound feeling of disbelief and estrangement from reality is evident too (‘it just happened’), but this brings it, via a vitalist-like fetishisation of immediacy, closer to reality’s essence. Goetz’s description also lacks any negativity, except for the declension of something lost (‘this was’). It offers up a seductive image of freedom and liberation experienced via an absorption in the real without immediacy. Wordless – here the immediacy is beyond the symbolic, even beyond the imaginary. Ecstasy often names technologies and technics of pleasure maximisation, from wine to rituals to music to drugs, which afford or heighten collective experience. While ecstasy should not be collapsed into Ecstasy, the drug’s properties certainly helped reinforce the tenor of 1989. As Joshua Clover writes, ‘rarely has a subculture’s self-identification been so thoroughly indexed to a single drug’.72 Song titles and lyrics referred to ecstatic effects, ‘following the countercultural tradition [of ] barely coded references [becoming] bonds in a knowing collectivity. The music was thus compelled to understand and fashion itself as a drug, as an aid to a shared experience rather than as an end in itself ’.73 The drug was a mediator to intensify the embodied experience of dance music and the sense of togetherness it instilled. This could catalyse in crowds what music critic Simon Reynolds calls ‘a strange and wondrous

69 Rainald Goetz, Rave (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 253. My translation. 70 Andrew Wright Hurley, Into the Groove: Popular Music and Contemporary German Fiction (Rochester: Camden House, 2015), 78–79. 71 Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 88. 72 Clover, 1989, 59. 73 Ibid., 60.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic atmosphere of collective intimacy, an electric sense of connection between complete strangers’.74 A pure dose of MDMA (Ecstasy) – which pharmacological and public health research indicates is difficult to find on the black market – is an empathogen-entactogen. Its entactogen properties signify a ‘touching within’, a shift that can put pill takers in contact with others and themselves. MDMA’s legislated use in the second half of the twentieth century was as a tool for therapeutic sessions, particularly romantic counselling. For some time, it was legal in the United States for this purpose – and it is being trialled again with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder sufferers. Its empathogen properties make it a feeling enhancer, disinhibiting subjects and affording them access to a potentially broader range of experiences. Its properties aid in producing , so these experiences are typically shared experiences. People on the drug actively search out others to enjoy its effects. Race has convincingly argued that drug use is linked to a desired, temporary unravelling of subjectivity, such that intentionality and normativity are released – as in Garcia’s ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’ point above.75 If not every audience member or DJ was on this or any other drug, the affective atmosphere was nevertheless decisively shaped by a drug that increased empathy and inner reflection. With a radically re-organised symbolic order and a release from the Cold War’s stasis, ecstasy offered pleasurable experiences of self-estrangement, of a new shape of the self, in tune with the exploratory ethos of the moment and the liminality of the scene’s venues.

Melancholia and : rituals, pills, ambivalence This final section accounts for melancholia and mourning apparent in the Berlin techno-scene. I outline three related dimensions, even as they emerge at slightly different moments. First, an external referent with creative effects: the way the early techno-scene internalises the Fall of the Wall as a fetish object. The event is incorporated into the scene’s practices to keep its liberating energies alive and present, as in melancholia. Second, an internal dynamic: the diminishing returns of ecstatic experience and the necessary re-emergence of lack. From the start, the scene had to defend against the common post-revolutionary recognition that the ecstasy of beginnings would

74 Reynolds, Energy Flash, 19. 75 Kane Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook be insignificant if it could not carry into something lasting.76 While the scene constructed an enviable infrastructure for an electronic music culture in Berlin that still exists, it failed to reach some of its more radical expectations. As Bataille recognised, an ecstatic community risks entrancing itself, potentially dissolving ‘its constituent members into a heightened unity which would suppress itself at the same time that it would annul itself as a community’.77 The risk, to put it in different terms, is to reify ‘collective ecstasy’ without living it – or to continue seeking it via different means, such as harder drugs. The third is also internal: the consistent univalence of positive (ecstatic) emotional experience, which flipped valence to become negative. The Berlin techno-scene of the early 1990s may be interpreted as a set of mourning rituals for a world that has passed. Establishing new rituals in the no-man’s-land of the former Wall, these ‘bodily practices and the affective work that they perform with and on the body’ were a way to work through loss, traumatic upheaval and elation.78 Mourning has long been a means of ecstatic induction – stretching back to fourteenth century BCE.79 The Cold War’s end was an ecstatic release from an era experienced by many as negative, but it was also an ending, with all the entailed emotions.80 It needed to be worked through in all its complexity. A new ritual was initiated: ‘rather than the ritual inducing the emotional excitement and the sense of communion, [instead] the emotional excitement and sense of communion – what Durkheim would call the collective effervescence – induce those present to express and concretize their feelings in ritual’.81 By massing together in confined spaces – basements, former shops, offices – participants in the techno-scene saw ‘their emotions … excited by the crowding and by the memory of very recent episodes’.82 This became, in desacralised language, a cultural form. As the welcome shock of the Wall’s Fall faded, the scene morphed,

76 Keith Haartman, ‘Religious Ecstasy and Personality Transformation in John Wesley’s Methodism: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations,’ Archive for the Psychology of Religion 29, no. 1 (2007): 23. 77 Blanchot, Unavowable, 8. 78 Hollywood, Sensible, 20. 79 Haartman, ‘Religious,’ 30. 80 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 54–56. 81 Sewell, Logics, 254. Sewell is discussing the French Revolution here. 82 Ibid.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic developing in different directions. Ecstatic experience often traces a rise to a peak, an obliterating elation, then a tapering off into the depressive, or at least euphoric, comedown – a return to humdrum routines.83 This arc – not only pharmacological but also experiential – becomes a suggestive metaphor. Germany had been celebrating its transfiguration. Inevitably, however, a post-revolutionary set in, a declension from the promise. For Freud, melancholia is stuck mourning, mourning grown perversely pleasurable in circling its obsessions. Such pleasures can grow tiresome or damaging. The scene slowly morphed into a less loving, unified and respectful environment – if it were ever purely that. By the late 1990s, the early attraction to egalitarian ideals was fading. The apparently ecstatic openness had broken down, the futurity out of step with a pre-millennial cultural turn towards present pasts. A melancholy sense of lost futures settled in. The music also took a darker turn, its tempo ever- quickening, while different drugs came to the fore and Ecstasy seemed passé. The rifts and shifts away from the early, smaller scene are blamed on forces, both internal (commercially oriented promoters, sell-out DJs and so on) and external (mainstream media coverage and organised crime).84 Whatever the meld of forces, central figures in Berlin burned out and others moved in. Strung out between the ecstatic and the melancholic, the blissful and the baleful, in many cities these techno-scenes have cycled between periods of unity and disunity, looseness and rigidity. As Reynolds writes,

there’s always been a dark side to rave culture; almost from the beginning, the ecstatic experience of dance-and-drugs was shadowed by anxiety … Again and again, the moment of endarkenment recurs in rave subcultures; the latent in its drug-fuelled utopianism is always lurking, waiting to be hatched.85

Fitzgerald underscores this in his notion of a ‘rave assemblage’, which features blissed out ravers as prominently as drug-induced seizures, corrupt club owners and shady bouncers.86 After ten years, rave’s ubiquitous smiley face, which took off in London

83 On euphoric melancholy, see Clover, 1989, 59. 84 Denk and von Thülen, Der Klang, 263–76. 85 Reynolds, Energy Flash, 265. 86 Fitzgerald, Framing Drug Use, 55–81.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ben Gook in about 1987 and came to be printed on drugs as well as t-shirts, became an inadvertent admission of absolute positivity’s drive towards contentlessness. A stamp of , a print inked a million times, a cliché. As Clover writes, ‘for many, [this symbol] became the content itself, symbol for the distinctly unironic communal virtue of being “loved up”’.87 It became the empty, hollowed out, gurning repetition Freud alerted us to in the diagnosis of melancholia. As noted earlier in the discussion of ambivalence, a switching between ecstasy and melancholy may not be a sequence, but coincident, namely, in participants’ ambivalent emotional responses. Participants could hold on to a utopian longing amid a lucid recognition of their contemporary conditions. More commonly, it could mean over-valorising positive (ecstatic) feelings and downplaying negative (melancholic) feelings. This sense recalls Freud’s explanation of ambivalence. His Ur-example was the love/hate opposition. ‘The love has not succeeded in extinguishing the but only in driving it down into the unconscious’, he writes:

And in the unconscious the hatred, safe from the danger of being destroyed by the operations of consciousness, is able to persist and even to grow. In such circumstances the conscious love attains as a rule, by way of reaction, an especially high degree of intensity, so as to be strong enough for the perpetual task of keeping its opponent under repression.88

If, following Freud, we take love to mean a positive feeling and hate a negative feeling towards an object, another or one’s self, then this passage echoes aspects of the ‘intensity’ attached to the ecstasy after 1989. Expressions of negative feeling were elided. No doubt negative feelings existed and eventually surfaced, but the initial period sidelined their open expression. Descriptions of ecstasy often lack the undercurrents and pulls of other emotions – the moment is one of total engrossment or plenitude, even in its painful pleasure. By foregrounding ecstasy, scene participants disavowed melancholy, even as the music traded on it: techno can be punishingly dark, particularly in its more ‘industrial’ subgenres, which flourished in venues like Tresor (the former UFO) around 1993–1994; house music can be bittersweet, with minor chords and ambience washing over the rhythm’s insistent thump. As noted above, there can be pleasure in gathering to acknowledge downcast

87 Clover, 1989, 60. 88 Freud, The Standard Edition, vol. 10, 234–5.

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:44:47PM via free access Ecstatic Melancholic emotions. The notion of this as a moment of pure positivity – which is now the media cliché of the Wende and techno as a redemptive moment in German history – required strong powers of repression. As ever, repression’s victory could only be temporary.

…..

After their closure in late 1991, Tekknozid raves were restarted in 2015. They are hosted a couple of times each year. Wolle still heads the parties but today they bear the tagline ‘Oldschool Rave’. The text I quoted earlier, which promoted the original raves, has been reproduced on the flyers since 2015. Notably, the final line about reheated, reactionary sounds is no longer included. After all, this charge could be levelled at an oldschool rave playing music that approaches the same age as ‘reactionary 60s sounds’ did in 1989, while itself trading in a retro aesthetic (black-and-white flyers, cut-and-paste or early computer layout design that looks as if photocopied). Registering a shift in the Berlin scene’s overwhelmingly international nature, the tagline and the text are now in English – presumably for an audience eager to experience what they missed the first time around. This flyer is a melancholy sight: the 1989 commitment to futurity has been erased and in its place comes ‘oldschool’, a recircling of past glories, reruns of previous nights out, of ‘classic tunes’ heard once more. Indeed, this is not new. Such returns were quick to appear – by the mid-1990s, at the latest.89 Melancholy emerges in an instant. The feeling of something lost, something missing, always lives alongside, maybe even inside, that of ecstasy.

Humboldt University, Berlin The University of Melbourne [email protected]

89 On these dynamics in the UK, see Neil Transpontine, ‘A Loop Da Loop Era: Towards an (Anti-)History of Rave,’ Datacide: Magazine for Noise and Politics 10 (2008), http://datacide-magazine.com/a-loop-da-loop-era/; Reynolds, Energy Flash, 374.

Emotions: History, Culture, Society | Vol. 1 No. 2 (2017) | 37

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