“Performing Euphoric Cosmopolitanism: Public Space and Nomadism in Electronic Dance Music Culture”

Summary of the Research Proposal

During summers, the European continent vibrates with festivals of all kinds of art and music genres. Such tradition follows a strong genealogy of many of the 1960s movements’ desire for a utopia, even a temporary one, of an alternative aesthetic and affective community. Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC) festivals are prominent within this map of European events precisely because they embody a powerful cultural imagination of traveling and nomadism, aesthetic difference and individual transcendence. EDM techno-culture attracts people to participate in its nomadic routes and phantasmagoric practices, in ways that are akin to ‘alternative’ or ‘other’ ways of life. This fact coincides with the aesthetic and affective over-determination of the EDM event due to the audio-visual technologies and chemical-drug consumption of the participants (especially MDMA and LSD).
This research draws on the extensive fieldwork I have conducted for my Ph.D. thesis concerning Psychedelic Trance (psytrance) festivals – a music genre that belongs to EDMC. More specifically, it is based on a multi-year ethnography of traveling practices and carnivalesque recreation, in the rave fashion, as performed by my Greek informants: Festivals and parties in Greece, Hungary, Morocco and the Netherlands have been sites I visited in order to follow my informants’ imagination for discovering the world and liberating the self through euphoric nomadism and phantasmagoric experiences. Hence, I wish to expand questions regarding EDMC by incorporating contemporary literature on affect, citizenship and cosmopolitanism to examine the relationship between urban nomadism and recreational practices as a performative production of an aestheticized public space. Namely, I wish to ponder on the questions of how public space is performed, how it is borderline and how it is inhabited in terms of aesthetic inclusion.
Thus, what I imply is that the euphoric mobility in transient remote ‘dream worlds’, which has gained great popularity after the turn of the 21st century, is the paradigmatic indication of techno-aesthetic forms of cosmopolitan belonging, cross-border engagement and contemporary affective conceptions of citizenship. Contrary to most academic literature that read in the EDM event a ‘liminal experience’ and a ‘heterotopic’ setup – a supposedly evidence of the possibility for an out-of-the-ordinary or utopian site against the everyday normativity – I propose to investigate nomadism and aesthetics as cultural effects of the quest of utopia in modernity; and the EDM event as a product made possible due to the value that recreation practices and self discovery and experimentation hold within the post-1960s era.

This research project was funded by the Research Centre for the Humanities (RCH), with the support of the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation.

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Research: “Performing Euphoric Cosmopolitanism: Public Space and Aesthetics in Electronic Dance Music Culture”

Researcher: Dr. Leandros Kyriakopoulos

How can we think about the opening of postwar western societies toward traveling, encounters with alien cultures, and experimenting with the self at a  moment of global imposition of neoliberal reforms and revival of conservative values? Indeed, how can we conceive the cosmopolitan ideal so much embraced by “countercultural” positions as it is aestheticized into spatialized (sub)cultural practices?

This research explores the network of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festivals – a quintessential cultural product of the carnivalesque celebration, drug consumption (for the most part LSD and MDMA) and euphoric traveling of the 1960s – as a transient topography for performing contemporary global urban nomadism, with a special emphasis on aesthetics, current forms of cosmopolitan citizenship and affective belonging. Its prime ethnographic concern is specifically the massive phantasmagoric events of the distinct genre of Psychedelic Trance (psytrance), which acquired great momentum since the late 1990s in Europe. Indeed, during summers, the European continent vibrates with festivals of all kinds of art and music genres. Such tradition follows a strong genealogy of many of the 1960s movements’ desire for a utopia, even a temporary one, of an alternative aesthetic and affective community. EDM festivals are prominent within this map of European events precisely because they embody a powerful cultural imagination of traveling and nomadism, aesthetic difference and individual transcendence. Even more, EDM techno-culture attracts people to participate in its nomadic routes and phantasmagoric practices, in ways that are akin to “alternative”, “spiritual” or “other” ways of life. This fact coincides with the aesthetic and affective over-determination of the EDM event due to the audio-visual technologies and chemical-drug consumption of the participants.

Due to this strong affiliation with “alternative spiritualities,” EDMC became prominent ground for research in the British Cultural Studies of the 1990s, and it led to the theoretical evaluation and renewal of the study of subcultures. In short, it was claimed that to participate in the consumption culture of the EDM was a paradoxical act of escapism, which nonetheless disrupted social normality by bringing forth fluid subjectivities and new aesthetic public spaces. Nevertheless, the question this study dwells on does not juxtapose alternative lifestyles against a supposed normalized everyday life. Neither does it highlight the possibility of a transcendental subject that may intentionally go beyond normal affective formations (due to drug consumption); or even rescue the ideal of a world-citizen as presented in the psytrance figure of the traveler who is open to meeting alien cultures.

By examining the euphoric mobility in transient remote “dream worlds”, which has gained great popularity after the turn of the 21^st century, this study focuses on the relationship between urban nomadism and recreational practices as a performative production of an aestheticized public space. Namely, it ponders on the questions of how public space is performed, how it is borderline and how it is inhabited in terms of aesthetic inclusion. Indeed, contrary to most academic literature that read in the EDM event a “liminal experience” and a “heterotopic” setup – a supposedly evidence of the possibility for an out-of-the-ordinary or utopian site against the everyday normativity – it investigates nomadism and aesthetics as cultural effects of the quest of utopia in modernity; and the EDM event as a product made possible due to the value that recreation practices and self discovery and experimentation hold within the post-1960s era.

In that sense, the very set up of the festival can be seen as an intensive investment in the reorganization of the sensible according to the psychedelic imagination and utopia of a colorful, re-enchanted world: the massive crystal-clear sound systems that create an ambience of carnivalesque, dystopic, liquid or harsh musical journeys, the dreamy landscapes of the verdant European meadows, forest clearings or beaches that embody the fantasy of escaping urban life and the demand for a different way of life; the state-of-the-art kaleidoscopic installations that correspond to and, for that reason, trigger the physiognomic impressions of the visual from psychotropic consumption. Indeed, even the physiognomic aspects of the psychedelic impressions cannot be seen apart from the memory of the collective enterprises of the westerners to recover the lost knowledge of the Other, to build a political utopia wherein life is art, to realize the subject’s enlightment and ascension. The psytrance techno-aesthetics acquires its capacity to introduce the phantasmagoric psychedelic dream world because it manipulates the intake of stimuli on the basis of the chemical reorganization of the senses made possible upon the imaginary of modernity’s ghosts.

In the psytrance event, spirituality is thematized and spectacularized, defining the aesthetic zone of the psychedelic phantasmagoria. At the same time, the desiring-image of the colorful bubble festive world of knowledge and transcendence encourages the subject to initiate the euphoric nomadism of psytrance culture and be engaged with the cosmopolitan ideal of adventure, learning, acceptance and tolerance. As the body enacts the specter-image of transcendence, it acknowledges the image of “universal life” – a memory-image fabricated within the technological horizon where the bodies are permeable and interconnected to form a coherent web. The affects of proximity as well as physiognomic intimacy become an aesthetic endeavor and a claim towards a techno aesthetically mediated citizenship. In the psytrance dream world, subjects do not experience an “alternate world” yet they are exposed to the promise of an alternate world and the infinity of its versions. Indeed, as a recreational technology that weaves the mythological world of psychedelic reality, the psytrance event is simultaneously a technology of perception and since it brings an addition to the perceptual unconscious, it registers the body with the metaphysics of the multiple (and potentially infinite) worlds.

 

 

Leandros Kyriakopoulos is a fellow of the Research Center for the Humanities, Athens, Greece, and a lecturer in the department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University. His academic concerns include the study of aesthetics, new media and visual culture. Specifically, his areas of interests are the cultures of entertainment and consumption, urban nomadism and cosmopolitanism, politics of place, affects and the senses, new technologies and subjectivity.

 

 

 

 

 

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