Identity, Consciousness, and Sensation
EDM CULTURE
Abstract:
An anthropocentric-experiential analysis of the mystical, tribal culture of Electronic Dance Music and a discussion on its potential to illustrate the power of the creative mind within the limitless abstract. The piece is a perspective referenced in theories of phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethnographic studies, and subjective recounts of understanding.
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Perception cannot be fully contextualized by any construct of quality or quantity – it is a matter of making the unknown known. It is fabrication of the creative mind. The dialogue of the creative mind is consciousness. Subjective perception of the mind is a product of consciousness. To ‘perceive’ is to think and attempt understanding with external reference. In order to transcend cultural-normative standards, an inclusive community must deconstruct institutions of impersonal referencing. Altering consciousness, by stimulating biologically innate sensory input systems, empowers the mind of the individual and the objectified collective to ‘feel’ or ‘emote’. With the desire to be experientially aware of the ‘consciousness phenomena’, modern youth culture flocks to a once “underground” realm of this ‘lifeworld’. The abstract realm is fabricated by innovative art, symbolic technology and creative linguistic minds. It is hermeneutically referenced as the culture and experience of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). The cultural realm of EDM deconstructs the barriers built by categorical imperatives of the subjective and objective intellectual truth. The experience of EDM makes the instantaneously organized community aware of objective truth and the identity of the creative self through destabilizing traditionally impersonal limits of emotive understanding and fabricates a universal experience in aesthetically pleasing awareness of unity.
The term ‘lifeworld’, coined by Edmund Husserl in his work The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), is referenced as the network of intersubjective categorical understandings that gives meaning to scientific objectifying knowledge [Husserl 1936]. The meaning of both subject and object (of the focused matter) are categorized by shared experience. In hopes of finding truth in shared experience, we must overcome the self-opposing worlds of the subjective. In the 20th century, the ‘lifeworld’ concept transformed into:
The world of everyday communicative interaction, which gradually differentiates over the course of processes of social evolution into distinct rationally, articulated spheres of ‘cultural validity’. When the spheres of moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive communications start to become narrowed down by the sphere of science and technology under conditions of advanced capitalist administration, the lifeworld is threatened with ‘colonization by the system’.
(Harrington, 1)
The “threat” of colonization means that the lifeworld is transcendent of objective categorical definitions. Everyday human interaction is the exchange of information that creates awareness. The information shared is based on the individual’s experience and perceived by the subjective. As a result of the exchange in information, there is objective meaning to the conversation – the collective purpose and meaning of the exchange.
To find an objective world on which we can all collaborate, we must overcome the worlds of subjective experience. Husserl sites Galileo’s use of geometry as a means of intellectual categorizing. This categorizing is a referential mathematical construct, a linguistic framework, made to absolve the enigma of subjective relativity.
Starting with the practically understandable manner in which geometry, in an old traditional sphere, aids in bringing the sensible surrounding world to univocal determination, Galileo said to himself:
Wherever such a methodology is developed, there we have also overcome the relativity of subjective interpretations which is, after all, essential to the empirically intuited world.
For in this manner we attain an identical, nonrelative truth of which everyone who can understand and use this method can convince himself.
Here, then, we recognize something that truly is—though only in the form of a constantly increasing approximation, beginning with what is empirically given, to the geometrical ideal shape which functions as a guiding pole. (Husserl, 29)
The objectively discovered truth is a referential fact: a ‘guiding pole’. These impersonal understandings of the geometric world are objectively valid, but limit perception. Contextualizing matter for objectified truth is useful in communicating scientific interpretation of the world, but disregards the validity of the subjective and objective ‘experience’ of the lifeworld.
The term ‘lifeworld’ localizes inquiry within the traditions of phenomenology and its related hermeneutic origins; however, these traditions are not simply identical. Phenomenology, in an initial and over-simple sense, may be characterized as a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity [Ihde 1990]. Hermeneutics came of the disciplines of textual interpretation and linguistic analysis. The joining of these philosophical concepts proposes a descriptive analyzes of art technology in the lifeworld and its socio-cultural manifestations. It must be noted that phenomenology of human-technology relations is not purely “subjective”. Nevertheless, the validity or truth of subjective perception is not even a question of mathematical understanding.
The variability of subjectivity is occluded by replacing the “mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable – our everyday lifeworld” (Husserl 48-49). Husserl is stating the fundamental basis of this lifeworld is, and must be, the sensory experience rooted in the matter of relations between active humans and bodily concretes. It is understood that everyone is intuitively capable of perceiving such sensory stimuli. This is the framework of the interactive world. It is the known network of shared experiences, with the potential to transform and rewrite the objective truths of present day.
The Galilean revolution exemplifies the intuitive capability of communal and cultural experiential understanding. It is already proven that combinations of practically attained perspectives, or awareness, can transform the world by fostering a cultural acquisition like science or musical genres.
Such an acquisition, however, is also ambiguous, because what is gained by the very means of mathematization, Husserl argues, loses an essential sense of concreteness by overlooking the fundamental lifeworld. The acquisition of the new paradigm conceals the fundament of the ordinary dimensions of the lifeworld. Husserl’s Galileo thus stands caught between a prescientific but perceived lifeworld and scientific but unperceived world of ideality. (Ihde, 37)
Husserl’s theories of the material-sensory world are constructed on his own interpretation of the origin of science. This anomaly makes the world both prescientific and sensory foundational, as well as, scientifically ‘empty’ and perceptually derived. This view of science focuses upon ‘thinking’ or the strictly theoretical aspect of perception, rather than the experience.
Today, a modern dimension of experience within the lifeworld is focused on the art and culture of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). The world is referenced as a ‘Rave…Festival…Parade….Club…Celebration’ within the lifeworld. This EDM-world bridges the gap of thought and experience with the objective truth of shared experience in abstract sensory stimulation and the solidarity of collective altered states of consciousness.
The EDM cultural realm of the lifeworld is transcendent of subjective separation. The shared experience is abstract sensory stimulation fabricated by Electronic Dance Music, aesthetically pleasing art, and positive interactions with other individuals. As Gauthier (2004) suggests in his comparative analysis of religious structures and the ‘electronic dance music culture’:
It is the festival that implicitly seeks forgetfulness, selflessness and oblivions. What this implies is that the prompted effervescence is south after for itself and in itself. In other words, it is its own purpose and reason. By opening up to creativity, by staging an otherly, unlicensed temporary world, the festive need only contain itself. Disengaging from temporality, the festive bursts in an ‘eternal’—or, to be more precise, ‘indefinite’—present. (Gauthier 69).
Using the linguistic schema of dance, global participants discover spirituality and understanding through the shared experience promoted as a ‘Rave’ or ‘Festival’. EDM culture is characterized by the essence of human existence as revolving around ‘world-openness’ – a 20th century German anthropological term. It is believed that an open individual is an innately rational ‘ex-centric’ animal, who’s cognizant of that which it is physically absent. This requires the mind to be made aware of the philosophical concept of ‘logos’:
Logos implied consciousness, memory, imagination, creativity, linguistic inventiveness, freedom from simple stimulus-and-response – all of what Wilhelm von Humboldt called energeia or what Chomsky used to call ‘generative grammar’: the child’s ability to understand and to produce syntactic strings never previously registered or uttered. (Harrington, 3)
To be open enables awareness of the implications of energeia. To enable awareness is to experience the spiritual stability of universal truth. Contemporary thought process has been conditioned to question such essentialism after the scientific revolution and boom in technological intellect.
Cultural linguistic constructs limit creativity by avoiding the unknown and dictating the “appropriate” response of skepticism. EDM culture does not limit, it only encourages. The culture fosters ‘creative linguistic inventiveness’ with the emotionally expressive communication median of movement, known as dance.
Dance is a universally understood language that expresses emotional liminality. Raw movement is the true aesthetic of the sensate life – as understood through the body. Aesthetics refer to the non-utilitarian, the corporeal and sensate as well as to the collective postmodern ‘tribal’ condition of EDM events. To quote Eagleton (1990):
Aesthetics in born as a discourse of the body. In its original [eighteenth century] formulation…the term refers not in the first place to art, but as the Greek aisthesis would suggest, to the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought….That territory is nothing less that the whole of our sensate life together – the business of affections and versions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all the arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world….It is thus the first stirrings of primitive materialism – of the body’s long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical (Eagleton, 1990. P. 13)
Eagleton is illustrating how understanding through the bodie’s sensory systems is innate and a healthy response in questioning the theoretical.
Expressive movement of the body is innately perceived. It has an emotional objective value that is universal innate in visceral experience. Science and theory only references the anatomy and spatial-temporal mapping of movement, but they do not understand the meaning or dialogue of dance – only the mind can. It is evident that science limits creativity by claiming disconnect between the mind and body. Edmund Husserl, in his late phenomenology, stressed that the physical body (Korper) and the living/lived body (Leib) are essentially different:
The living body is given to me in perception as my own body, not as a thing, but a “phenomenon.” The physical body is a corporeal entity, properly defined as a complex of brain waves, neural pathways, circulation, and muscular fibers. The physical body and the living body are on different incommunicable levels of being; they cannot be reduced to one another. (Husserl, 107)
The body is a phenomenon that joins the living consciousness with the physical world. It is limiting to claim the living and physical bodies are incommunicable. Dance is communication of the Korper and Leib and awareness of the body can unlock the mind of the individual. This enables him or her to integrate the physical body with the emotive living ‘self’, and one’s own consciousness, to exhibit pure self-expressive creative communication. In this raw organic state of the collective festival, composed of natural ex-centric individuals, EDM culture is universally understood as an abstract celebration of life. Thus, the collective expression of the culture is a universal truth.
Limitless innovation and collaboration is central to EDM culture and the acquisition of movement-linguistics. It is experientially understood that the world is related to the ‘self’ through the living body. “This means that I am related to them neither as a pure ego nor as one physical object is related to another; rather, the expression "being related via the living body" refers to the body's motility and kinesthetic sense [Bell 1990, 205-215]. This contact based understanding is referred to, by Husserl, as “the phenomenological-kinetic method” [Husserl 1970]. The method focuses on how the human tactile-kinesthetic sense is directive of the perceptual whole. The innate epistemic sensitivity to tactile stimuli evokes movement that has the potential to be shaped by external stimuli through abstract directives, guiding our interpretation of sensation because our knowledge is synthesized by “our bodily negotiations” with the world [O’Donovan-Anderson 1997]. This lays the foundational framework of dance:
Dancing means becoming bodily sensitive in the respect of the kinesthetic sense and one’s own motility. Thus, bodily knowledge is not about correctly performing a movement skill, such as a pirouette, but the ability to find proper movements through bodily negotiation. (Parviainen, 212)
For movement to be proper, it has to be in collaboration with the present environment. Dance is purely experiential, authentic and unreferenced. This linguistic articulation of awareness cannot translate bodily knowledge to a literal form; it can only indicate the existence of bodily knowledge.
Dance is, what British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884 – 1942) calls, a substitute activity that unites the minds and bodies of those in collaboration. An overload of emotional passion in response to the experiential phenomena of Electronic Dance Music can evoke a subconscious drive that catalyzes the substitute activity of dance. Malowinski comments on the reasoning of substitute activities in his work Cognitive Translation:
These reactions to overwhelming emotion or obsessive desire are natural responses of man to such a situation, based on a universal psycho-physiological mechanism… When passion reaches the breaking point at which man loses control over himself, the words which he utters, his blind behavior, allow the pent-up physiological tension to flow over. But over all this outburst presides the image of the end. It supplies the motive-force of the reaction; it apparently organizes and directs words and acts towards a definite purpose. The substitute action in which the passion finds its vent, and which is due to impotence, has subjectively all the value of a real action, to which emotion would, if not impeded, naturally have led. (Malinowski, Cognitive Translation)
Dance is an emotionally innate floodgate of internal tension. A release transforms the individual and the environment through the exchange of energy. This transformation of the individual can be objectively understood because of the universal experience of emotion. It is now understood by the phenomenological-kinetic method what an emotion is: it is a transformation of the world.
Objective knowledge abstracted by emotional truth is not a scientific definitive of the spatiotemporal plane. It is an understanding, or approximation, of experience. The subconscious communicates with the conscious-self through biological manifestations of emotions and interpretation of a symbolic spiritual experience. Dancers experience ekstasis (ecstasy), which has been identified by Hemment [Turner, 153] as the condition of “standing out from the surface of life’s contingencies…(enabling) a more profound contemplation of being.” This personal restructuring experience is raw with self-dissolution and spiritual enlightenment. – a key component of the EDM cultural experience.
Post-modernism has led to a secularized world, leading many to seek this spiritual experience. MIT Press Journal 2002 claims:
There is the much reported and sometimes overhyped rise of the phenomenon of “spirituality.” Emerging as a set of discourses and practices that are often presented in distinction from “religion”—and certainly as being more inclusive than traditional religious affiliations and identities—interest in spirituality has become more pervasive over the past 20 years. This is evident partly in the growing market for books, magazines, and other media and services that explore different approaches to personal spirituality, and that typically (in the United Kingdom and many other Western European societies) draw on alternative, mystical, or esoteric religious sources in preference to traditional, doctrinal Christianity. (Neill, Ben)
The mystical and ritualistic experience of EDM culture deconstructs categorical identities that inhibit creative fabrication of universal truths. It is an experience of liminality – transcendence to a higher state of consciousness. It is not limitation. Since the culture has an optimal basic-level emotion concept of pleasure, the positive schema of emotion transforms one’s judgment and essence, and therefore the ‘lifeworld’ of that individual.
The lifeworld is fundamentally understood through shared experience and therefore is reflexive of the EDM experience. One example of a collaborative art community is Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. This annual community of over 50,000 individuals exists for one week in an inclusive world of creativity and radical self-expression. There is no governance or categorical references with social structures. There is no right or wrong, no good nor evil. Belief in consciousness gives light to the community norms. These norms of the Burning Man community are governed by ten principles: radical inclusion, gifting exchange, decommodification, radical self-reliance, free expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leave-no-trace, participation, and immediacy [Gilmore].
Mark Proyen of AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man, he comments on the culture as a temporally manifesting world distanced from the current culture of commodity. He writes:
We could say that Burning Man inherently promotes a critically distance, self-reflexive understanding of both the individual self and the cultre of signification within which interpretations and actions take place. The idea of “distancing” has been identified as a fundamental aspect of cultural “reflexivity” by many postmodern theorists, which basically entails the ability to distance oneself from what is give as “normal” or “natural” in order to examine the structures within which one lives and acts. (Gilmore, 67)
Unfortunately, reflecting is not of cultural priority and therefore this normal and natural process is overlooked. EDM cultures such as Burning Man are “reflexive ethnographic experiences.” These reflexive questions that cause transformative realizations foster spirituality and intellectual freedom. The ethnography of moments beyond the fixed, the defined, and the predictable, sheds light on lifeworld culture in its moments of (re)constitutions. These emergent performance art experiences and festivals provide the “freedom from” institutional obligations “prescribed by the basic forms of social, particularly technological and bureaucratic organization,” and from “the chronologically regulated rhythms of factory and office”, and the “freedom to” generate “new symbolic worlds,” to transcend social structural limitations, to play with ideas, with fantasies, with words, and with social relationships (Turner 1982a:36). Media commentators have grown excited about an apparent “electronic re-tribaliztion of society” whereby electronic music (and other advanced technology) is implicated in the achievement of a desired “reconnection with the primitive in us all “ (Amoeba 1994: 1; Faton 2004: 204).
One categorically taboo component of ‘popular’ EDM culture is chemical enhancement of experience. The transformative spiritual experience of the mind is aided by using chemical compounds that are broken down by the body. This ingestion enhances the sensory stimulation and the emotional experience of Electronic Dance Music. The chemicals trigger neurons to release dopamine and serotonin to induce greater states of euphoria. The emotional schema of positivity during the EDM experience is not strictly due to chemical enhancement, it is simply personal choice to chemically alter one’s mind. It is important to note that; “work conducted in the field of cultural studies contends that while rave participants engage in drug use, it is by no means the exclusive source of solidarity” (Kavanaugh, Anderson 1). The individual’s psychotropic experience enables neural plasticity in identity. This destabilizes preconditioned cognitive schemas of categorical reference, allowing creative molding of a constructive and emotionally positive identity and collaborator.
The act of ritual dancing “synchronizes” the emotional and mental states of collective members, as they are exposed to the same “driving stimuli” (Wedenoja 1990). The resulting exhilaration is theorized as reinforcing solidarity at EDM events, and further highlights the emotionally loaded experiences of rave and EDM participants. The corresponding feelings of connectedness and spirituality are the result of collective participation in these rituals, not simply drug use (Hutson 2000; Sylvan 2002, 2005; Takahashi and Olaveson 2003; Lynch and Badger 2006; Partridge 2006). This transformative connection is shared, and therefore it can be interpreted by the universal.
Biological neural plasticity has the potential to transform the emotional identity of the individual and collective. The transformation is focused by the linguistic schema of dance and fostered by Electronic Dance Music culture – a physical and objective cultural movement towards the deconstruction of categorical identities. It is liminality, the central aesthetic feature of underground dance music that evokes “resacralization” of the contemporary.
There is no limitation of consciousness in the realm created by EDM culture, in fact ‘dance culture’ is fluid, multifarious formations which will always exceed any attempt to map it.. Objective organizational categories that separate the individual from the collective are reconstructed by the transformative power of the mind. To be conscious, is to be able to think. Thinking leads to an emotional response. Having an emotional response is to believe. To believe in the realm of EDM is to experience it within the lifeworld as an emotive transformation that regards and utilizes objective deconstructions of religion, science and magic to expand the objective truth of consciousness through collective altering of the individual’s states of mind with abstract sensory stimulation.
Out there is a magical community, an intellectual tribe, who transforms their lifeworld with emotive universal truth, discovered through collective altering of consciousness. It is inclusive and welcomes any individual to collaborate and grow spiritually, intellectually and consciously with a self-sustaining source of energeia.
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