Techno als spektakel

It is above all because they are a living and present form of the festive, the revival of the Dionysiac in a West coming to its end, that raves are now being demonized. Everything is being done to suppress them, either by simply banning them or by moving them into clubs or discothèques, even into halls intended for traditional spectacles, thus neutralizing them—authorizing them as they are integrated into an economic circuit where they can only be gradually transformed a reified into spectacle and leisure. This is without a doubt where the greatest threat to the techno movement lies, where it risks losing its soul, so to speak, becoming another spectacle just like the other, something we are already seeing. The worst is not being banned, but being turned into spectacle.

This is how something that starts out free and alive, evolving on the edge of a society to which it brings otherness, is always absorbed by that society and reified into commodity, specifically into commodity spectacle. The Situationists showed how spectacle become part of a general economy of representation within which they function like a product meant to be consumed and from which the maximum profit is to be derived. Through its recognition, institutionalization, and integration into traditional festive spaces, techno is becoming commodified by applying to it the same recipes used in rock concerts: a greater centrality or frontality of the stage, a star system or spectaculartity applied to DJs, time limitations, high prices, and so on.

Michel Gaillot – Multiple Meaning Techno: An Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present (1998)

De tekst kwam een beetje moeizaam op gang, maar inmiddels strooit Gaillot met correcte observaties. Dit komt zeer dicht in de buurt van een analyse in De Toekomst Hervonden die gecombineerd wordt met een bepaalde technologische doodsklap die de rave-ervaring pas later heeft moeten incasseren. Maar deze "vergiftiging" zag je, wanneer je oplette, inderdaad gedurende de jaren negentig verspreiden. Ook een van de redenen waarom EDM me zo weinig irriteert, dat is de Disneyland-versie van iets dat allang niet meer echt was. Zullen we dan maar? Hyperrealiteit in het kwadraat.