Introduction: from the Screen to the Scene
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1 Introduction: From the Screen to the Scene ‘Tonight God is a DJ. This is my Church, the place where I heal my hurts...’ 1 -Faithless Humanity in the late modern era is hearing the siren call of globalisation. The techno-screens have become the symbolic gates to a new world, a world in which we bring our dreams, hopes and fears, and the question that haunts many of us: will our future be human? This new world, according to Nicholas Negroponte is to be an angelic sphere of Homo Digitalis, in which ‘each generation will become more digital than the preceding one’.2 Charles Leadbeater, one of the leading thinkers behind the British government policy developments in the: ‘Knowledge Driven Economy’, regards the clash between market and community as a dead end. ‘The goal of politics in the 21st century should be to maximise knowledge’, announces Leadbeater.3 Welcome to the new economy, the magical ‘thin-air’ world of: Homo Gnosis. In the search for humanity, we could draw on Sherry Turkle’s multiple‘protean self’,4 in online chatrooms where, ‘virtual communities offer a dramatic new context in which to think about human identity in the age of the internet’5, or other ritual forms of online communication and hyperreality, immersing human identity in a new techno-ontology, in which ‘cyberspace is nothing less than the creation of a new global space of being’6 Perhaps the symbolic meaning of being ‘human’ can be discovered in the spirituality of popular space. Where the converging vortex of mainstream television, film, video, web portals, print media, shopping and fashion now provides our shared religious space; a global cathedral of communication, according to Lynn Schofield Clark, in which traditional religious symbols have become ‘flattened’, and popular media-culture now becomes the ‘source’ and the ‘primary language for meaning’.7 Fears are continuing to surface, however, in our shared search for community, identity and religious meaning. Voices call for the humanization of our techno-spaces. Questions are raised about the loss of the plausability of Christian tradition and its rich heritage of symbolic practices. The world cries out for practices which can bond human communities again ; solidarities which can enable people to engage resolutely with injustice, debt, disease and 1 Faithless, ‘God is a DJ’, Sunday 8PM. Cheeky Records, 1998. 2 Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. London: Coronet Books. p. 231. 3 Leadbeater, Charles. 2000. Living on Thin Air. London: Penguin Books. p. 16. 4 Turkle, Sherry. 1997. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Phoenix. p. 258. 5 Turkle, Ibid. p. 268. 6 Wertheim, Margaret. 2000. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A history of space from Dante to the Internet. London: Virago Press. p. 302. 7 Clark Lynn Schofield, “Building Bridges Between Theology and Media Studies” Plenary Presentation to the Catholic Theological Society of America, 1998. in The International Study Commission on Media, Culture & Religion Web Site. Http://www.jmcommunications.com/english/clark2.htm 2 the multiple poverties faced by the enslaved poor, struggling to live within the corpo- reality of the world’s cities, under the burning sun of a global age. A new era, in which writer and cyber-guru Erik Davis reminds us, ‘economy is god and the enormity of the world’s ills seems matched only by our incapacity to deal with them’, and in the midst of the static and sonics of our electronic world, where ‘the hoary old questions of the human condition--Who am I? Why am I here? How do I face others? How do I face the grave?--sound distant and muffled’.8 Davis, tracing the historical investigation of humanity’s religious identifications with technology, has doubts about the ability of what he calls: ‘the idiot box’ and ‘the media machines’ to deliver these pregnant voids.9 The thirst for spirituality among a growing number of the young, bereft of roots and the old certainties of their forebears, is currently at fever pitch. Davis, near end of his book, signals to his readers that the place to look may be a ‘new network path’; somewhere between the wiring, away from the greedy eyes of our satellite media skies. He warns however, that ‘such clearings lie off-road, off the grid, offline. They are beyond instrumentality. They are holes in the net.’10 Enter Scotland, the Rave.11 In 1994, thousands of young people raced from cities, towns and villages across Northern Britain, to experience: ‘Rezerection’, a ‘rave’ held in a vast auditorium, just outside Edinburgh. While these fears, hopes and questions were clustering around our shared life and communion via the ‘sacred screen’, a generation was emerging out of the despair in the black hole of ‘meaninglessness’ in late 80’s Britain. In urban cities and housing schemes, kids switched off their televisions, unplugged their modems and rushed off to the ‘rave’. They danced together all night, in fields, abandoned aerodromes, industrial complexes, motorway petrol stations, beaches, streets, and forest clearings. Armed with mobile phones, whistles and flyers, and fresh from an experience which has become the ‘rite of passage’, among young people living in Britain today. The baptism into shared experiences of ecstasy-fuelled love, celebration and community, evoked the perfumed and fragmented symbols of a discarded Christendom. The symbolic language, which for many of them, seemed in some way, to name the ‘specialness’ of their experiences and discoveries. 8 Davis, Eric. 1998. Techgnosis: Myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. London: Serpents Tail. p. 335. 9 Davis, ibid. p335. 10 Davis, ibid. p335. 11 A comprehensive history of rave dance culture as a convergence of Ecstasy (MDMA), Music technology and Club P.A. technology, erupting among a socially marginalised generation in Scotland and England, can be found in: Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, London: Picador, 1998. 3 The 12 year journey from rave events to city nightclubs, that has pushed Britain into the centre of worldwide superclub industry, and burgeoning dance festival culture, is shot through with Christian symbols, analogies, and metaphors. A tsunami of clubs, raves, dance festivals and events, swept through towns, villages, warehouses and cities, trumpeting their names, including: The Church, Heaven, Promised Land, Faith, Joy, Salvation, God’s Kitchen, Home, Angel, Communion, Spirit, Religion, Hope, Paradise, Ministry of Sin, The Sunday Service and The Kirk. This dissertation, aims to pull back the curtains; to reveal what it is that they are feeling, hearing and seeing in their world. What is their obsession with physicality, music, beat, dancing, collectives, the world of night-time, illegal substances, boisterous crowds, friends, play and vitality in in urban cities across the country? Why is it so immersed in religious language and practice? Why do they live among a galaxy of symbols that draws, without hint of emarrassment, so heavily from the world of the institutional and evangelical Christianity? Why is it still growing after 12 years? What is it about this spectacular sonic cosmos that has inspired the young across the world, which leaves the marketing mandarins of Coca Cola and McDonalds sputtering with envy? Are they pleasuredomes offering virtual McMonasteries, McCathedrals, and McChurches? DJ priests dispensing drug-fuelled blissed-out masses and virtual salvation - in a more corporeal guise? These questions spill out of a lived involvement with this world; my own searching faith in Christ is soaked in its religiosity and grapples with its dreams and agonies. This is where I live. In a sense, I have no choice; if my faith is to live here, my theology must live here also. At this period of Scotland’s history, two generations are living, for the most part, without any living connection to their Christian roots. The ‘Kirk’ lies somewhere back there in the 20th century with ‘Queen’, ‘2nd world war’, and ‘Empire’. Most of the younger people now coming of age only ever hear of church, bible or Christ when it surfaces in obscure television documentaries, and jaded television productions which endlessly trawl the 20th century for new slants and hidden histories. Generation E12 now growing up and dancing between the spires and the castle of Edinburgh are not against church; it is just that they have no idea what it is, it simply does not exist in this world. They live, breathe and vibrate with one another, among their busy, noisy, buzzing galaxies of cinemas, malls, pubs, dance festivals, cafe-bars, community projects, city streets, neighbourhood collectives, recording studios, pavements and record shops; enfleshed in the beat, soaked to the bone, incarnated in the rhythm of the nightclub.13 12 Generation E is aMedia label for newer British club cultures; a generic umbrella term for all of its local genres, activities and global scenes. E stands for Ecstasy. Channel 4’s new E4 channel, features a regular documentary series called: generation E. 13 For a more detailed background of the rave and dance phenomena in Edinburgh, see: Thomson, Paul. 2000. Club Cultures: 21st Century Churches?Exploring Social, Semiotic and Religious Patterns of Club Culture. p. 1-2. 4 Theological Background to Research: The Altar to the Unknown God ‘the future of humanity depends on culture’ - John Paul II 14 As a preparation for further theological exploration of the incarnational aspects of club culture in Britain, the tradition of the ‘unknown god’ at this stage introduces a critical theme which runs through the body of the research. This stream also fuels the ground of a communication and research approach which has been ongoing for 12 years.15 This theological stream of tradition running through club culture, can be found in Paul’s visit to Athens.