Community and Ecstatic Embodiment in Underground Dance Music Culture (original) (raw)

Abstract

Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of community challenges the notion of communion, which he argues is Christian in origin. Rejecting the idea that a group of individuals can, or should be fused into a unified collective body, Nancy proposes that community names an originary experience of “sociality” which precedes the formation of subjectivity. This placing of social experience as ontologically prior to the individuated subject has implications for the way in which the embodied “self” is understood. Nancy follows Georges Bataille in claiming that community is constituted through an ecstatic relation to death, which reveals the essential incompleteness of singular beings. Bataille links death to eroticism through a dialectic of transgression, in which communal relations are conceived in terms of the interpenetration of bodies. However, Nancy identifies an impasse in this logic, claiming that the essentially subjective basis of Bataille's thinking is incommensurable with the problematics of sociality. Nancy opens up the interiority of the subject, figuring corporeality as a topological surface which is constituted as it touches the outside. This paper explores the relations between community, death and embodiment through an examination of ecstatic collective experiences in two adjacent buildings in East London: firstly, the consecrated space of a church; secondly, the abject space of a disused abattoir which was occupied by squatters and used as a venue for “raves”. Drawing on Bataille's ideas about the ambiguity of the sacred, two contrasting “religious” experiences are identified which operate according to different temporal logics, and different relations to death. These divergent temporalities engender distinct libidinal economies, thereby generating differential experiences of embodiment. It is argued that underground dance music culture creates an environment in which bodies in movement constitute an experience of ecstatic sociality that escapes the closure of collective hypostasis that Nancy critiques in the Christian tradition.

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