Raving at the Confluence of Musical Space, Headspace, Temporal Space, and Cultural Space
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What Moves You? Raving at the Confluence of Musical Space, Headspace, Temporal Space, and Cultural Space Alexander D. Gage A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN MUSIC YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO DECEMBER 2017 © ALEXANDER D. GAGE, 2017 ii ABSTRACT This study is an ethnographic investigation of rave and its culture, focusing on the motivational structures of individuals within the community. The aim of the study is to better understand the nature and form of raves as event, in terms of art-form/genre, and as a subculture (and as subcultural phenomenon) by a deeper understanding of what it means to and for the individuals who choose to participate and often make it a large component of their lives and identity. Relying heavily on primary observation and interview data, the study questions the interactivity of how ravers construct their experiences raving as desirable and significantly meaningful, how the processes of performance and reception/interpretation collaborate in creation of the “artistic content” of a rave, and how the prevalent interactions entangle emergent shifts in cognition, social formation, and behaviours within and extending beyond the primary rave environment. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks to all those who contributed to my efforts in completing this undertaking. I would like to thank my supervisor, Matt Vander Woude, and the rest of my committee, Rob van der Bliek and Doug Van Nort, for their suggestions and assistance in making my arguments as tight as possible and editing this unwieldy thing into coherence. Thank you to all my research participants for sharing your world with me, inviting me into your community, taking it upon yourselves to help progress my research by advertising and introducing my study to your fellows, and for allowing me to conduct my research in your space. Thanks to my family for their continued support and for letting me write at so many different kitchen tables (that includes yours, Todd!). Many thanks to my friends for the conversations along the way, when I would hurl my inchoate theories at them; those were instrumental to my process of ordering the information and ideas that would eventually coalesce and form this thesis. I would be remiss not to recognize Georgia and the contribution made during the period it took me to write this thesis, and to my academic career as a whole, by Her – though she would probably prefer I didn’t. Finally, it would be criminal to not specially thank Tere Tilban-Rios, the person at York University who made it her job to be in my corner from the beginning of my first term straight to the end – and without whom I doubt many of us would make it to the other side of a degree. iv CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….……...iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………….……...iv SECTION I: CHAPTER ONE: Introduction………………………………………………….………...1 CHAPTER TWO: Overview of Content……………………………….……....................8 2.1. Phenomenology……………………….……………………………........…...8 2.2. Fieldwork…………………………………………….……………....……….9 2.3. Rave values…………………………………………….…………..…..........10 2.4. Provisional conclusions…………………………………………….........….14 2.5. Choices and the question of motivation……………….…………….............15 CHAPTER THREE: Literature Review…………………………..……………………..19 3.1. On Rave..........................................................................................................19 3.2. Phenomenology………………………………………………………..........31 3.3. Motivational psychology…………………………........................................35 3.4. Altered states of consciousness in music………………………....................41 3.5. Music and the brain……………………………………….............................44 SECTION II: CHAPTER FOUR: Method……………………………………………………………...51 CHAPTER FIVE: The Emphasis on New, Novel, Unique Experiences………………...53 CHAPTER SIX: Drugs are Consumed Foremost as a Means for Reordering Social and Behavioural Norms…………………………………………………..58 CHAPTER SEVEN: Music is an Environmental Factor, a Shaper of Both the Inner And Outer Environments, a Defining Conditioner of Social Activity…….73 CHAPTER EIGHT: The Primary Concern is for the Health of the Social Body………100 CHAPTER NINE: The Unique Intentional Experience in Question is Characterized by The Subjective Creation of Meaningful Experience and Interaction in Both Consumption and Production Roles, Optimally while Accessing a Flow State………………………………………………..…….….118 v CHAPTER TEN: The “Raver’s Consciousness” Fostered has Lasting Ramifications Beyond the Boundaries of the Temporary Autonomous Zone and the Primary Optimal Experience………………………………...…...129 SECTION III: CHAPTER ELEVEN: Conclusion(s)………………………………………..................143 CHAPTER TWELVE: Further Research Directions……………………………..........149 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………154 Appendices……………………………………………………………………………...............159 Appendix A: Field Report………………………………………………………………159 A1.Dance To The End Of The Technotribal Night: An Observation……..……159 Set one…………………………………………………………………..166 Set two........................................................…....…................….............172 Set three………………………………………………........…………...176 Set four…………………….........………...…………………….………179 A2. Collective Diptych Painting From “Technoturnal,” May 7, 2016……...….182 Appendix B: Interviews……………………........………………………………….......184 B1. Participants…………………………………………………………………184 B2. Transcripts………………………………………………………………….187 B2a. Tal………………………………………………………………....187 B2b. Gaston……………………………………………………………..222 B2c. Marika……………………………………………………………..234 B2d. Laura………………………………………………………………251 B2e. Erika............................................................................................…275 B2f. Emile……………………………………………....……………....291 Appendix C: Additional Glossary of Terms…………………………………………….322 1 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Characterizing the “escapist” impulse in contemporary popular culture as simple escapism qua escape – escape into a negative space, obeying an entropic urge: a drive that impels one to dissipate their energies of attention through inert distractions as a means to a supposed respite from the worldly pressures of “reality” – is a still-common and dismissive, sometimes alarmist, castigation; however, this reductionism makes for weak theory. It is true, the totalitarian conception of popular culture as conceived by Theodor Adorno as pure form, as a mere standardized consumption model limited to meaningless entertainment “product,” a hegemonic enforcer with the function of a conformist release valve for the tensions of industrialized living, ultimately fanatical and dissociative from one’s personal reality,1 has been quite extensively challenged. The problem of escapism remains still: once escapism is invoked, the tendency is to defer to something very akin to the Adornian model – whether one considers this escapism a negative thing or a useful thing. It is necessary to problematize our understanding of escapism when we talk about popular culture. Adorno was correct about quite a lot. But, despite how penetrating his arguments could be, when it came to observing popular culture dispassionately and in its entirety, his acuity was forever in want of recognizing one core axis of nuance: while Adorno was deftly skilled at identifying oppression – particularly that oppression of the intellect and of the spirit of the autonomous individual, something that it has been suggested makes him a product of his times – in his ostensibly justifiable concern and fear over populist, even fascist strains in pop-culture and especially the pop-culture industry, he habitually failed to recognize subversion and innovation 1 The thrust of his much reprinted 1941 essay “On Popular Music.” A view he elaborated but never modified in any noteworthy way thenceforth. 2 within the popular domain. These noble things he reserved for “serious” art forms (like a symphony or a string quartet). There was, for him, nothing radical about radical pop-culture, just a bunch of alienated slaves, forgetting themselves in pointless pleasure. One of the concepts central to Adornian escapism through popular culture is a process adapted from Freud known as identification. On the surface it may sound similar to integration, something I will discuss later, but the implications and end-results could not be more antithetical. While integration leads to a more complex personhood, healthy and robust, Adorno argues that what pop culture offers is an opportunity for identification that simplifies, dumbs-down, or otherwise reduces or impoverishes the individual. To paraphrase the concept: identification is a subhuman process of surface-level aping.2 The identifying person replicates gestures and recognizes simulations or “allegorical representations” of modes of genuine behaviors – such as the real sensual pleasure of dancing.3 He invokes the image of donning magic culture-masks to don and disappear into the personae of some archetype or idol in a ritual performance, a practice encouraged so that disenfranchised subjects form an “identification with the aggressor”4 – a sort of Stockholm syndrome; a vicarious illusion of sharing powers of authorship and agency commanded by those who dictate and distribute cultural product and ideology.5 Identification hypostatizes the collective order with near-cosmic authority.6 This identification further perverts the idea of individual potency – be