This dissertation examines electronic dance music: its transnational production and dissemination, its techno-universalist rhetoric, its racial and sexual politics, its Eurocentric mythologies and liberal humanist ideologies.
Furthermore, I will argue that the countercultural phenomenon of UK Rave is thus less a question of social escapism and rather a positive drive towards this new ecognosis. Moving beyond straightforward environmentalism to the corollary proposition of an 'Ecology without Nature', I will look to the work of Morton, supported by further engagement and comparison with the writings Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to argue that the heyday of UK Rave culture is in many aspects better understood through the concept of Dark Ecology: as the dismantling of post-Kantian correlationism and the opening up of human experience to a truly symbiotic ecological awareness. Faced with objects so far beyond the limits of human epistemology, the primary task of this new ecognosis is the ontological restructuring of human and non-human relations, or the radicalisation of post-Kantian philosophy toward a weird metaphysical realism. Published in 2016 by philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology is a bold manifesto for a new form of ecological awareness-or ecognosis-heralded by the urgency of our contemporary geological era – The Anthropocene. Attuned to these brief and emphatic years (1988 – 1994), the purpose of this dissertation will be to critically analyse the social and experiential history of UK Rave through the current ecological discourse of Dark Ecology. Yet, despite its pre-88 genealogy and current state of techno-globalism, it was specifically the UK Rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s which fuelled the tsunami of electronic dance music that soon swept the world. Born in colloquial terms in the United Kingdom during the Second Summer of Love (1988 – 1989), the cultural significance of rave has oscillated from counter-cultural ekstasis to humdrum corporate leisure-activity. Rave, its enfant terrible, now stands as a global phenomenon. It has inspired competing and collaborating worlds of gadgets, gizmos and garments circuit boards, synthesisers and electronic drum patterns. Since its inception in the underground house, garage and disco scenes of Chicago and New York, it has developed an ever-increasing matrix of techno-tools and cultural manifestos. The history of electronic dance music is a long and colourful continuum.
0 kommentar(er)
