E is for Ekstasis

Drew Hemment. Published in New Formations, Spring/Summer 97.

Dance culture is interesting for its journeys through sound and explorations into bodily expression, but also for the numerous sites of cultural activity that have grown up with it or been inspired by its example. Debate all too often focuses on the question of its association with the drug ‘ecstasy’, however. In what follows I seek to shift the terrain away from pharmacology by investigating ecstatic dimensions that do not come in tablet form. This has required an extensive philosophical discussion to develop terms adequate to the task, although I try to balance this with a consideration of concrete events, wherever possible discussing events I have experienced at first hand.

Traditional cultural critique has drawn on the notion of authenticity to oppose the tendency of capitalism to reduce all social interaction to commodity relations of universal equivalence. This, it is claimed, drives all experience towards the meaningless exchange of commodities, and renders the genuine expression of the actors’ social conditions impossible. Any attempt to subvert this order quickly gets ‘recuperated’, resulting only in a strengthening of the capitalist machine.

This strategy then would have us protect culture from capitalism’s tendency to subvert its codes and undermine its points of reference. But in doing so it only serves to provide the support that capitalism needs to progress. Capitalism needs a continual supply of new markets, and it is through developing new sites of meaning that new markets are opened up. It is the practices of knowing and naming with which we deal with culture that create these spectacular sites of cultural meaning. And, apart from certain sections of the media, no-one does this so well as those academics who build careers out of searching out and naming new sites of resistance or authentic culture in the name of a politics of liberation.

An alternative strategy that is perhaps more appropriate to an age of nihilism is to work from within so as to ‘push that which wants to fall’. Rather than clutch at the elusive straws offered by a past we never had, seek points of departure within the potentials of the present. Instead of placing hope in a future liberation, exploit folds or fissures within the machine where new autonomies can flourish today.

A term that may be articulated against the technologies of the present without drawing us into a dialectical, and so ultimately self-defeating, opposition is ekstasis. This is the original Greek word for ‘ecstasy’. It was reanimated by Martin Heidegger, in whose philosophy it stands for a difference or a standing out from the surface of life’s contingencies that allows a more profound contemplation of Being. Heidegger considered this to be the fundamental ontological principle of human Being, the most essential dimension or dynamic of human existence, and yet to be compromised by the technologised existence of modern life, which does not give people the chance to stand apart from the discourses and practices in which they are ensnared.

This may seem an inappropriate term for a cultural site edified for its hermeneutic depthlessness. House is the dark side of critical theory’s dystopic moon. It has flowered on the barren ground consequent upon the death of aura and authenticity: house is not art in the age of mechanical reproduction, it is the art of the age of mechanical reproduction. It is a celebration of the texture of expression, a manipulation of sounds and a soliciting of distortions: the medium is the message, and its mutation the mode. But here I want both to place under question the easy assumption of an insipid postmodernism and to depart from the heights of Heideggarian philosophy and rearticulate a theorisation of ekstasis in accordance with the concerns and considerations of dance culture itself.

In this paper I shall be using ‘house’ as an inclusive term for what has come to be termed ‘dance music’ and ‘dance culture’. In doing so I am following the use of the term prevalent in the UK between roughly 1988 and 1991, the period which provides most of the inspiration to this paper. I shall thereby depart from an understanding of house as one specific genre of dance music. This creates some strain in the text when I discuss the evolution (or involution) of the various genres, but this is a strain that is already present in the cultural field.

House Without a Home

To understand the kind of escape that ekstasis offers, we first need to understand the general predicament of the modern individual.

It is revealing to consider the genealogy of the meaning of the word ‘ecstasy’: it has changed from denoting religious revelation to signifying a mixture of intense pleasure and loss of control (usually sexual or drug induced). What is important is not the religious aspect, but that it has degenerated from a life affirming experience fundamental to one’s orientation to the world to a casual and inconsequential psychological state. Indeed, the meaning has strayed even further from that of any significant lived experience with the word coming to denote a means by which this state is achieved, namely the drug methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). To say that this amounts to a degeneration is not to criticise a particular technology (MDMA), but to criticise the general technologisation of modern life.

Whilst we might be dissatisfied with the condition of modernity, it would be a mistake to call for a return to a pre-modern form of life. The ecstatic mode is less of a lost past than a potential which lies dormant in the present, blocked both by modernity and by the hallucinogenic visions of the Good Life with which modernity is opposed. To turn to ekstasis is to (re)turn to a mode of existence which we have forgotten - which we have written off as mere pleasure, not worthy to be treated as a serious concern, and as an exception or extreme, as something extraneous to day to day existence.

But a turn to ekstasis is not intended to rescue our humanity - quite the reverse. For it is our humanity, and specifically the puritan self, that holds our desire in suspense, and which would be undone by a resurgence of ekstasis. 2000 years of Christian history has burnt DEBT into our flesh. Under capitalism this heritage is reanimated such that the same expenditure is seen not as atonement or penance for an original or prior sin, but as the price of the pleasures and securities which we naturally lack. Under the cover of the seemingly benign discourse of needs and wants, desire is driven towards a negative determination.

The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organising wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied.

Lack actively structures the subjectivity of the modern individual, resulting in Nietzschean terms in a reactive, slave mentality, where action is guided not by its own propensities, but by a resentful reaction against its environment. This is not just a matter of individual angst, however, but of the determination of desire by social codes: blocked up and hemmed in, desire is channelled down prescribed routes, unable to follow the trajectory of its own potential.

This is a dilemma which will not be answered by political means, which operate at the level of calculative rationality. This itself drives desire towards stasis and only serves to reproduce the dominant mode of organisation and investment of desire. As opposed to introducing an extra level of codification - as a political intervention would do - it is only through scrambling the social codes that desire can be let loose.

But to say that politics is inadequate to this task and call for an intervention in the structuring of desire is not to invoke a naive politics of self-expression. It is rather to confront questions of unconscious desire that are effaced or ignored by standard modes of political action. This is thus what Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari refer to as micropolitics. This involves a thinking of desire as a positive and primary field of forces which underlies subjectivity and the derivative determinations of need, and which is not restricted to the internality of the human subject, but directly invests the social field. These forces are a conjunction of intensity of desire and direction of desire. The rationalist ego represents a sedimentation of these forces in which they are pinned down and secured against their own tendency to divert.

In dance the body stands forth and becomes ecstatic. If the self is a sedimentation of a certain stable alignment of forces, the ecstatic body sets those forces loose. To lose the self, then, is not just an abandonment of rational thought, but a positive freeing of the forces that traverse the body. Ekstasis exposes the body to its own finitude, by taking emphasis away from the body as an object and placing it on the body as the unstable intersection of these forces. The ecstatic body is constantly unfolding: completed only by death, a body’s inner most nature is to differ from itself, to break with the present, to stand out from the norm.

Much is made of such a ‘loss of self’ on the dancefloor. But it should be noted that we are witnessing a generalised loss of self both on and off the dancefloor. The self that is ‘lost’ on the dancefloor is neither abstract nor eternal, but the historical product of a puritan heritage - and this heritage is in crisis. Amidst a generalised loss of meaning, the modern subject is cut adrift, disorientated and unsure.

But while some shift the features of the cultural landscape around in a postmodern pastiche, for others irony doesn’t signal detachment. On the other side of nihilism new formations are emerging, this time exploiting the faultlines in the cultural landscape by slipping through the gaps. Ecstatic dance offers one such line of flight. Dance culture exploits the power of music to build a future on the desolate terrain of the present.

it may be that the sound molecules of pop music are at this very moment implanting here and there a people of a new type.

This autonomy exacerbates the insecurity of traditional power centres - from international corporations to local politicians - and thus invites reprisals. Steering a course between flight (‘dreams are not enough’) and protectionism (‘don’t protect it, let it loose’), house builds a space which functions by an independent logic - and which is thus hidden by virtue of being incommensurable and protected by virtue of being unassimilable. This explains its enigmatic relation to the postmodern world of which it is a part: at the same time as being a method of escape, house has provided many with their only home, a source of meaning in a meaningless world.

Music is a force of making mobile. It carries an unrivalled force of breaking the restraints imposed by an environment, of uprooting and setting things in motion. But at the same time the practices of taking up the music and making it one’s own (listening, dancing, playing, producing, promoting/organising) yield a sense of belonging and a space in which to dwell. This is more than metaphorical excess when it comes to house music. The history of house can be seen as an answer to the command to turn this house into a home.

The present privileges enjoyed by club culture had to be fought for. It was only through the struggles of the early pioneers that a space was created within the socius for a nondenumerable cultural site: the relaxation in the licensing of night clubs took place only to ‘defuse the acid bomb.’ I do not wish to fetishise the efforts of any one set of ‘pioneers’, however. It is only retrospectively that their actions seem heroic, and the greatest pioneers are not necessarily those who do it first.

In my case even the possibility of fighting these battles presupposed prior struggles. I was the DJ at the first regular house club in Leeds, the ‘acid blues’ Twilight Zone. This gave house the chance to establish itself and develop the strength needed to take on the establishment. But it managed this by inserting itself into the space created by the West Indian sound-system culture of all night parties (‘blues’), and was wholly parasitical on the prior efforts of the West Indian community in Chapeltown to persuade the police to back off. This space has now effectively been closed down - although this is more a result of the ravages of crack-cocaine on the inner city than of police action.

In addition to such concrete ways in which house has built a home, dance itself is an articulation of belonging in the sense of an existential projection, the negotiation of Being through the expression of individual style (in the sense of the playing out of one’s being-in-the-world). The music is an environment, a house in which one can dwell. And it is through the dance that this house may be turned into a home:

This mutation [of secondary production - the dance] makes the text [the music] habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person’s property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient.

In moving with the music the dancer becomes a transient, a nomad. Just as Australian aborigines sing up the ancestral territory as they travel the songlines, so ecstatic bodies create their own world through the dance. The change is from a sedentary structure of desire, determined through a negative reaction to a hostile outside, to a nomadic structure wherein desire is guided by the features of the landscape themselves. The difference is in the relation between the site of belonging (‘house’) and the belonging pertaining to it (‘dwelling’). A nomad is never without a house - for he takes it wherever he goes - but that house is constantly driven on, never reaching the stasis of a final resting point. And this continual slippage means that the nomad is constantly faced with the task of turning the house into a home. Only for a nomad is the question of dwelling so immediate.

Nomadic mobility cannot be taken for granted, however. Modernity suppresses the potential for ekstasis through the insistence of its time of continuity. If there is to be any actualisation of the potential for ekstasis in the present the temporal structuring of experience must be contested. Walter Benjamin noted that a general prerequisite for an action-event to affect the world rather than just perpetuate its constrictions is that it must be wrested from the present of historical continuity by a ‘blasting apart’ of the ‘empty, homogeneous time’ (calendrical or clock time) that serves only to mask and prolong injustices. Benjamin’s primary concern was with the possibility for political action, but the same temporal considerations apply in the case of ekstasis. The ecstatic dance is not in itself political, but it is a micropolitical event - an intervention in the structuring of desire. This requires that the chains of the rationalist ego be broken, and these chains are linked by time.

It is in the resolute encounter of entering the dance that the individual is blasted apart and given anew. Time is given a shock, shattering the coincidence of past-present-future and opening up the crack of time from which dancing bodies issue forth. This is the moment of the present’s differentiation from itself: the crack of time is the fracture between past and future that is the condition of creativity and change.

This moment is that of the dancer confronting the limit of pure possibility; the point of indiscernibility at which intensity reaches a vanishing point amongst its background conditions. The disappearance into the singular field of the music is articulated within a general becoming-unlimited, by which the identities and hierarchies of the ego are abandoned. At this point both self and others disappear together. Indeed, the categorical distinction between Self and Other itself disappears, releasing a profound sense of unity.

In entering the dance bodies are lifted out of themselves and onto a plateau at which they confront the externality of the potentials and directionalities of the music. In this collective moment bodies become one with the music, each distinct gesture the fractal-expression of the singular sonic algorithm. This convergence is not-yet an identity; it is rather that music and body enter into a zone of proximity with each other, such that each term becomes indiscernible from the other. This is a reciprocal relation wherein the musical flow is actualised as body-music: music becoming embodied in dance, dancers becoming disembodied as music. These are the two sides of a singular symbiotic relation or block of becoming: ‘block is formed, essentially mobile, never in equilibrium.’ This doubled structure of becoming ensures that this is an unnatural participation rather than a return to either a primitive-tribal or natural-infantile state. The externality of the field of music opens up experience to the contingency of the world, thus supplying a vehicle for a becoming-other of the body.

House functions by taking a simple melody or unit of sound (a refrain), setting it in motion, weaving it through a rhythm: ‘what is necessary is a simple figure in motion and a plane that is itself mobile.’ This mobility ensures that the refrain is always in excess of the structure, able to stand out from its environment. It is out of this ecstatic distance that its affects are produced: set loose from any determining context, the refrain is able to assert itself all the more forcefully in the instant of its recurrence, its power amplified by its simplicity and space. It draws a zone of consistency, a territory, but only in the ambiguity of a territory unsure of itself, perpetually in motion. It is a nomadic block of space-time, a house without a home (HWH).

Swept up and carried off, dancing bodies move with the drift, across peaks and plateaus, in a journey with no destination, just the intensity of the musical moment. The musical energy solicits a floatation of the senses: all determination, ‘everything that roots each of us in ourselves, in our morality’ is abandoned as the body enters this zone of proximity with the music. ‘By process of elimination one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract.’

House music has no ‘message’ and does not ‘represent’ the social conditions of the participants. Words do not feature in house - or, at least, not as themselves. What lyrics there are have invariably been converted into musical elements which carry no epistemological content. In general we may say ‘house music makes no sense.’ And yet that does not mean that it is meaningless. If we challenge the view which sees meaning as exclusively propositional and accept a wider definition of meaning as ‘a relationality between subtle patterns of matter ... and the faculties of constitution,’ we see that the dancefloor is a space filled with meaning:

The different processes of perception and interpretation that go into hearing music generate an experience which repeatedly must be seen as one of meaning - as more than just raw gusts of emotion - even though the meaning is not capable of being translated into propositions.

On the dancefloor there is a disappearance of language, and a disappearance from language: the subject of enunciation becomes inoperative, and hence so does the force of objectification that it carries. Neither subject nor object exist in music. This adds to music’s effect of displacing the primacy of vision and rendering the objectifying gaze redundant. This is not to deny that the floors of many night clubs are filled with spectacular glamour. But this usually represents a recolonisation of the dancefloor by the male gaze and is not an inherent tendency of acoustic space, itself ‘boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark side of the mind.’

The unnatural participations are intensified by the inhuman sounds of electronic music. The tonalities and structures of traditional music are limited by the parameters of the instruments on which it is played. Electronic music on the other hand sets tonality loose (releasing creativity from the discipline - and exclusivity - of musicianship). The alien aesthetic of techno in particular operates explicitly through the deterritorialisation of sonic matter, creating unsettling sonic profiles that defy any easy emotional response. And, pushing contemporary sound technologies to their extremes, drum’n’bass (or ‘jungle’) predicates its aesthetic upon the infinite extension, decomposition and recontextualisation of the sonic instant. A sample is ‘time-stretched’ (lengthened without change in pitch, robbed of its temperality) and then broken down into the sonic shards from which the rhythmic shapes and proliferating textures are built.

Here music is an environment. Form and content implode to leave a flat intensive surface, with musicality more a matter of texture (the grain of the machine) than of progression or tonal harmonics. In a similar way to which Brian Eno’s Ambient music presents compositions which work on and with a particular location, musicianship becomes a craft of sculpting sounds to engage with the energetic surface of the crowd - the aim not intellectual refinement, so much as bodily mobility. Under the impersonal address of the PA it is no longer necessary to strain the ears and focus the mind. Instead one can feel the musical energy traverse the body, and surrender to its flow.

As architecture is ‘frozen music’ (Schelling), so the soundscape is fluid. Though house is an affirmation of the instant, it is not a collection of separate moments but a continuous flow. Whilst many affects result directly from the intensities and textures of the sounds, others follow from the dynamics of the overlapping and intertwined plateaus, which are placed one over the other in the mix to create a singular dynamic field. In the studio different elements are layered and juxtaposed, whilst the basic frontline unit of two record decks and a mixer allows the DJ to seamlessly blend sounds in a running mix, or contrast and disrupt in a cut and paste pastiche - refusing the art work any unity or completion, submerging the art ‘object’ within the process of ‘working’ the floor (DJ terminology).

Since the first time Kraftwerk left the stage and let the drum machine do its thing, repetition has been central to electronic music. Building on the minimalist beats aesthetic developed by the early deck pioneers (who played drum breaks back to back using two copies of the same record), machines which failed in their representational function of simulating real instruments were used to construct a new paradigm characterised by intensive, insistent rhythms. This has resonated with a beats philosophy that traces its origin to tribal ritual and which has marked both the cultural impact and aesthetic of dance music. In this, rhythm is not restricted to a descrete realm of aesthetic contemplation or pleasure, but directly invests the field of lived experience. All action-events have rhythm, a ‘way of flowing’, just as the body has its own ingrained, ‘natural’ rhythms (breathing, walking). By creating a sphere of play and experimentation that is fundamentally rhythmic, the music can set up interference patterns that excite the body at the same time as instilling a zen-receptivity free from the inhibition of the mind.