Representing the ineffable with affect

Illuminating the Sensational
The elusive feeling of ‘losing yourself’ is something inextricably and often romantically linked to experiencing music, especially forms of engaging with music in ways that involve both the body and mind. One of the most dominant examples of this in action in the current global contemporary age is that of rave culture. Immersivity and flow-like states are both the goal and attraction of raves for their attendees, or perhaps more accurately, their participants. These ‘states’ or ‘feelings’ have been both the topic of, but also recreated by contemporary installation art through combinations of sound, light, image and space. Deleuzian art theory is based around ideas of affects and percepts, it could be said that raves are also environments that are rich in affect, due to their penetrating sensory nature, so it is interesting to place it in conversation with ‘experiential’ and immersive works such as installations or multi-work curations.
Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Anne de Vries’ Critical Mass : Pure Immanence (2015), are two examples of work that fit this description, both video works that deal with rave culture as subject matter that have been curated as parts of multiple larger exhibitions Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is a seminal work, cherished as an ode to 1990s rave culture, inspired by the artist’s own anecdotal experience. The work is evocative of a bygone scene or experience. Yet as will be discussed, there are limitations as to how well it can recreate such ineffable and personal experiences. This is not to say that the piece is not successful in representation, but rather that it is valuable to place more focus on how the piece works and what it does by itself, separate from its purpose in representing rave culture.

[1. In the words of Claire Colebrook, “‘affect’ is what happens to us when we feel an event: fear, depression, laughter, terror or boredom are all possible ‘affects’ of art. Affect is not the meaning of an experience but the response it prompts” however, “Deleuze argues that art creates affects and percepts that are not located in a point of view [...] we may not be depressed or terrified when we view [a work] but it presents the ‘affect’ of depression or terror” (Colebrook 19).]

De Vries’ work explores the plight of ravers’ achievement of self-liberation in the form of a totalised, objective worldview through raves, the title paying homage to Gilles Deleuze’s 1995 essay “Immanence: On a Life” (Deleuze 1995). Particularly, he is interested in the vocals of electronic music and the messages they embed in the minds of attendees. Working at a later date than Leckey, he focuses on a drift away from the quest for freedom, how the scene has been disillusioned and commercialised. His work deals with the notion of anonymity achieved by participating in raves and which subsequently leads to becoming part of a crowd-consciousness and losing a sense of individuality. He questions whether this results in liberation or deindividuation, it’s interesting to also question whether these two concepts are even mutually exclusive or oppositional, as common knowledge seems to dictate.

This idea of freedom, transcending the limits of the socialised body is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the ‘body-without-organs’, a comparison made by Simon Reynolds. Reynold’s pairing of Deleuzian philosophy and rave culture is quite productive for further analysis and given that de Vries himself references Deleuze, it is worthy and relevant to apply these further elements to his work. De Vries’ work does not seek to reproduce rave culture but instead enters a conversation with its workings. This gives the piece a sense of independence, it is not just a vessel for past experiences and ideas to be expressed. In fact, it can be viewed in and of itself and has the capacity to play with the ideas that it is inspired by. As will also be discussed, he simulated an event for which he created an essay, made of snippets of radical texts, to be incorporated into the music to explore whether more ‘freeing’ messages could be communicated in the environment of rave. Playing with past ideas to experiment about the future, rather utopically, is a poignant way in which the piece works by itself.
Through examining art that deals with rave culture as its subject matter, this paper will explore the similarities of both ‘spaces’: raves and artistic installations, to communicate via Deleuze’s concepts of affect, percepts and sensation, ineffable feelings.

In this paper, I will provide an overview of previous scholarly work that attempts to clarify the ineffable experiences of liberation in musical contexts before establishing that it is in itself an extremely elusive concept. With this at the forefront, I will use two works of art as case studies to investigate two key areas of discussion: firstly, how these works enter a conversation with ideas of liberation, and secondly, how they work differently as artistic mediums than their scholarly, written counterparts. In the pursuit of defining the undefinable, and with Deleuzian frameworks of immanence over transcendence liquifying all concreteness, perhaps it is better to analyse the sensational qualities of objects in and of themselves, instead of as representations of past experiences.

The Limitations of Chasing ‘the Ineffable’ with Metaphors
In terms of ‘losing yourself’ to music, metaphors of trance and ecstasy are two ways in which the experience has been previously theorised. Gilbert Rouget’s Music and Trance outlines the various different cultural rites of ‘trancing’. Trancing refers to emotionally expressive reactions to music as a result of holding music in a divine or spiritual light and is commonly experienced in shamanic ritual. Rouget explores the musical triggers for trance states in more thorough detail, questioning whether and how the catalyst lies in “the rhythmic, dynamic, melodic [...] features of the music,” (Rouget 78). By analysing various historical and cultural instances of trance experienced in relation to music, Rouget outlines some possible formal triggers and whether this alone is enough to enter a trance state. Rouget mentions characteristics such as “a swift and insistent rhythm,” as frequently coexisting with trance experiences. This description can be likened towards forms of techno and other electronic music, as Michel Gaillot in Techno: An Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present, writes, “because its repetitive rhythms act directly on the body, drawing it into dance, techno is akin to trance music or at least creates the conditions for triggering it,” (Gaillot 53). Rouget also notes, “rhythmic repetition, as certain and predictable as the orbit of the planet,” and “a regular (and rapid) pulsation for dance music” (Rouget 89-90) as a key factor in tarantism. Furthermore he writes of an interruption of “the flow of the dance,” caused by “breaks against the beats,” and “several violent drum strokes,”(Rouget 81). Rouget states that there is not enough research to conclude that rhythmic irregularities are “one of the universal features of possession [but that they do] recur very frequently,” (Rouget 81). Rouget notes that, “The music does not inevitably lead to trance [the same rhythm which may induce a trance in one context does not in another] it is not the stimulus, it is the entire situation that leads to trance” (Bastide cited in Rouget 177-178). Therefore, although musical formalities do show some correlations among various cultures and genres and could be an empirical means on which to define and delineate ‘trance’ experiences, they fall short in being reliable in this way. Therefore, an alternative method is needed to better understand and gauge these experiences. This paper is proposing a focus on the phenomenological, sensational quality of art as that alternative method.
Furthermore, the meaning of these metaphorical terms lacks objectivity, as various theorists have different definitions. For Judith Becker, ‘trance’ is “a bodily event characterized by a strong emotion, intense focus, the loss of the strong sense of self, usually enveloped by amnesia and a cessation of the inner language” (Becker 43). However for Rouget, ‘trance’ is defined by the following markers: “movement, noise, in company, crisis, sensory overstimulation, amnesia, no hallucinations” (Rouget 11). This is markedly different from his definition of the seemingly similar state of ‘ecstasy,’ which is defined as: “immobility, silence, solitude, no crisis, sensory deprivation, recollection, hallucinations” (ibid). It is interesting to note that the two phenomenons are placed rather in opposition to one another, when their labels are sometimes used interchangeably in common discourse. Yet also, these theorists seem to disagree on one fixed definition which speaks for the concepts’ ability to travel throughout disciplines and meanings. Rouget writes that, despite it being possible for all characteristics of either trance or ecstasy to be present, signalling “the full form of either ecstasy or trance,” it is also possible for “a given state to be composite” (Rouget 11), that is, possessing characteristics from both trance-states and ecstatic states.

To take rave culture as the thematic area of interest is motivated by a combination of personal affinity but also the potential for parallels to be drawn between the chosen theoretical framework and the medium specificities of the lifeblood of rave: electronic music. The nature of techno and ‘DJing’ is to throw into multiplicitous uncertainty, both what it is to be an artist and to produce art. DJing as an art-form is not constituted of novel creation as such, yet more so of a post-modern assemblage of pre-existing fragments that are constantly remixed into something new. “[The artwork’s] uniqueness, completed perfection and lasting quality,” (Gaillot 51) in the case of framing techno as a performance of art is non-existent, it is void, the process of performance and interactivity with the audience constitutes the performance. It is constantly in flux for the duration of the rave. Gaillot continues to say that techno “designates a process that invites participation, a participation through the body,” (Gaillot 52). Therefore this further delineates raving as an experience based in the affective and sensational, performative in its ephemerality -- much like the experience of viewing installation works.

Club culture as being borne out of “the postmodern quest for personal freedoms, for difference, without seeking essential, or fundamental, difference,” (St John 19) is also a key framework of interest. Discussed by Craig Owen in light of feminist art, Postmodernism upsets the power relationship of the subject and object, allowing the subjugated, othered object to be represented. In terms of women’s liberation from patriarchal hegemony, in Generation Ecstasy Simon Reynolds discusses the androgenization of the dance floor as a result of the use of MDMA by participants of the 90s rave scene. This was a refreshing change from the mainstream nightclubs of the time described as “‘drunken cattle markets’” (Thornton 99), of which participants were focused on the potential for sexual encounters with the opposite sex instead of the music and/or dancing. Reynolds includes Harold Bloom’s account of taking MDMA: “ a radical sensation of being without gender, a feeling of docility and angelic gentleness (Reynolds 247). It could be said that the employment of mind-altering substances such as MDMA have the effect of equalising pre-existing modes of domination, “ [silencing the] subliminal hormonal "hum" of masculinity,” (Reynolds 247). Reynolds discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s usage of the ‘body-without-organs’ which is “composed out of all the potentials in the human nervous system for pleasure and sensation without purpose,” (Reynolds 246). Comparing it to Freud’s polymorphous perversity and Zen’s uncarved block, Reynolds describes “a blissful, inchoate flux preceding individuation and gender; the "translucent" or "subtle body," angelic and androgynous,” (Reynolds 246). Through these theoretical models, the purpose of raving is to enact a sense of liberation from binary categories, including gender. Reynolds also compares raves to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the ‘desiring machine’ in that they are, “a decentered, nonhierarchical assemblage of people and technology characterized by flow-without-goal and expression-without-meaning,” (Reynolds 246), that is the goal is the flow, and the meaning is the expression in a holistic cycle of play.

Scholarly work regarding raving with spirituality often takes quite a metaphorical, comparative angle. Scott R. Hutson, explores the term technoshamanism (coined by Rushkoff) to explore “the rave as a form of socially produced spiritual healing,” (Hutson 53). Shamanism refers to “the forging of a close sense of community and, more frequently, reaching a form of spiritual peak-experience which the shaman produces through ritual,” (Rouget 1985; Taylor 1985 cited in Rietveld 2004; 48). If the club is a shamanic ritual, then the DJ assumes the role of the ‘shaman’. Hutson specifies this role, defining the DJ as a "harmonic navigator," "in charge of the group mood/mind" (Rushkoff 116,121 cited in Hutson 1999; 61). The analogy of a technoshaman is grounded in the definition of “the shaman, as keeper of ecstatic techniques, helps his/her followers embark on a mental and emotional adventure that transcends their normal ordinary definition of reality (Harner cited in Hutson 1999; 61). Citing anthropologist Mircea Eliade, Hutson describes a “timeless, undifferentiated, presexual, joyful paradise,” (Hutson 65) to which ravers desire to return to. It seems then that some ‘stylistic’ choices (costume, decorations, terminology) in how some people rave can be attributed partly to this desire to evoke the primordial; a nostalgia for a time that may have come before the strenuous and complicated present day.
A crucial part of the process of research for this paper was a shift in focus upon the realisation of the limitations of the scholarly work surrounding the topic of freedom and rave. Although there is a breadth of writing regarding the topic, there are limitations in making sweeping conclusions about feelings and affective experiences through the medium of scholarly analysis. Claire Colebrook writes of Deleuze’s distaste for the metaphor, “the very idea of metaphor is that there is a literal, present, simply objective world that we then think about through an image or figure,” (Colebrook 67). These metaphors such as technoshamanism, trance and ecstasy are evocative and interesting in their own right and do indeed elucidate quite illustratively the kinds of experiences felt in rave culture. These ideas are not inaccurate or untrue and perhaps served as inspiration as well for the making of Leckey and de Vries’ works regarding rave culture. However, in comparing one concept to another, or concepts to experiences, it rests on the presupposition that one is a given truth. For example in this case, comparing rave experiences to shamanic experiences, presupposes that shamanic experiences are solidly grounded in reality. Additionally these experiences can be idiosyncratic and deeply rooted in the personal mind-frames of ravers, it is difficult to apply metaphors and comparisons such as these. While shamanism and trance are perhaps similar phenomena to experiences of freedom from raving, they are not after all, the same experience. The rapidly changing face of electronic music culture and scenes also gives the applicability and relevance of these metaphors a short shelf life, only serving so much as a stagnant, momentary comparison. Instead, it can be more productive or perhaps creative to analyse purely the affect or sensation experienced itself, in and of itself. The method of consumption of art vs. a literary work such as scholarly articles is very different. In the former, the experience is very much sensational and based in affect. ‘Affect’ is broadly defined as: the “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing that can serve to drive us toward movement, thought and ever changing forms of relation,” (Gregg and Seinworth 1). To proceed with the established assumption now that metaphors are inadequate at portraying such esoteric and personal experiences, artwork is a useful communication and exploration tool, imploring the audience to understand through direct experience and first-hand feeling, in other words -- affect.

Objects as Interlocutors
Taking a ‘cultural analysis’ standpoint, this research will use Leckey and de Vries’ installation works as objects which highlight and work with concepts that are carried through countercultural rave culture. This method of working recalls Mieke Bal’s definition of cultural analysis in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (2002). She posits that if culture is, “the thoughts and feelings, the moods and values of people,” then cultural analysis as a practice is subjective in that it is “bound to a phenomenologically oriented approach that shuns the social that is culture's other” (Bal 9). She continues that ‘culture’, defined as the subjectivities and social interactions of a certain people, is the focus of the social sciences. Whereas in the humanities, the focus is on objects, that “belong to culture but do not, together, constitute it” (ibid) on these grounds she infers that, “'cultural analysis' does not study culture,” because “‘culture’ is not its object” (ibid). Instead, she writes that to ‘culturally’ analyse an object, is to move away from “traditional disciplinary practice within the humanities” (ibid) and consider it “in view of their existence in culture” (ibid). This, meaning that the object is not viewed in a culturally non-descript vacuum or necessarily ‘objectified’ but “as interlocutors, within the larger culture from which they have emerged” (ibid). Giving the objects the status of “‘second persons’” (Bal 44) gives them, “much needed intersubjectivity [...] between the analyst and ‘object’” (Bal 45). Bal also writes that to culturally analyse objects means to consider “issues of cultural relevance” (Bal 9). In the case of this paper, the issue of cultural relevance is the Deluezian feeling of self-liberation felt from rave culture and the objects that act as ‘interlocutors’ are the two works of Mark Leckey and Anne de Vries as well as their curation in various exhibition. It is not enough, or even that relevant, to simply use these objects as mirrors for my chosen area of interest (feelings of freedom experienced in rave culture), but instead appreciate that these objects do work of their own. In their medium as installation pieces, they both represent the ideas of freedom but also act of their own accord, the installation creating something additional which departs beyond the content-based semiotic, representational meaning. In possessing affective qualities as artworks, they can be experienced in and of themselves and they can show rather than tell.
Phenomenological experiences such as freedom, self-liberation, ecstasy are explored in the works, through taking rave culture as their inspiration. To view these words as concepts in light of Bal’s perspective is to grant them a level of intersubjectivity and to recognise the work that they do by themselves. In their mode as concepts, they take many forms in many disciplines. Perceiving concepts as unfixed to certain disciplines or time periods is also key to Bal’s hypotheses in Travelling Concepts. She writes that “concepts are not fixed. They travel -- between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities” (Bal 24). Bal shuns the practice of using ‘concepts,’ “as if their meanings were as clear-cut and common as those of any word in any given language” (Bal 25). Using the term, ‘meaning’ as an example as it is commonly used in the Humanities disciplines, Bal explains the plurality of the word. It can mean “intention, origin, context, or semantic content” (Bal 27) and this is often not defined, but should be in order to pinpoint the methodological approach and intent of the work of the analyst.

After doing extensive research and reading into this topic, it became apparent that defining such intangible, fluid concepts such as freedom, self-liberation, trance and ecstasy via the use of metaphors or lengthy written explanations is endlessly problematic and inconclusive. Due to the nuanced nature of cultural scenes, it is careless to apply one metaphor to explain general ‘feelings’ across the board. Furthermore, in taking a Deleuzian framework of analysis, including his distaste for the use of metaphors, it makes sense to base this research in looking at how these feelings can be better conceptualised and communicated through artistic works. For this reason, the main corpus of my research will consist of conducting case studies to analyse how two artworks: Anne de Vries’ Critical Mass : Pure Immanence and Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore work beyond representational and metaphorical explanations. While it is useful in some disciplines to explain concepts, “art is the creation of ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, cited in Colebrook 19). It is not surprising that there is a pre-existing interest into spiritual experiences with music as music itself “attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous” (Deleuze 1981; 56). Likewise, art is “the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible” (ibid). Deleuze believed that while viewing art, it “engages the body in a “becoming-other” while disembodying sensation and reincarnating it in a world of a-personal “affects and percepts,” therefore making it “the paradigmatic art of sensation, and hence as the medium that most fully discloses the inner dimension of aesthetic experience” (Bogue 2). In other words, such intangible concepts are better communicated through art as it can attempt to recreate or simulate such complex and multifaceted experiences and their affective sensations. However, that is not to say that art is superior to words, in literally recreating previous experiences. Rather, that it has greater affective power to emulate elements, concepts, and feelings from the experience in question. Bogue’s description of Deleuze’s perception of art is distinctly evocative of the purported freeing experiences of ravers on the dancefloor, arguably illuminating the similarities between art and rave in their medium specificities and subsequent affective qualities.
Furthermore, through placing this paper in the Deleuzian framework, the focus is less so on trying to explain what something is, and more so on what the object does, what it produces and how it works. This also aligns with Mieke Bal’s theory of concepts. This research positions the chosen artworks as autonomous interlocutors in their own right, representing and working with concepts independently, in doing so they execute the communication of intangible experiences to the audience with a deeper resonance and capability than other methods of representation. My role in this conversation will be to outline which forces they make visible and how they make them visible, through formal analysis.

In an essay for Flash Art Magazine, titled “Transformation Through Depoliticization” de Vries himself writes about his ideas towards freedom and raving. He discusses the the beginnings of house music as a tool for liberation for black and/or queer communities. He discusses how this aim in electronic music scenes became more and more subliminal, such as in the ‘free party’ scene, where the emphasis on liberation was not placed solely on vocalisation or explicit lyrics. With the rise of music that lacked melody or vocals, the freeing aspect became manifested by a reclamation of space, an implication of freedom instead of outright instructive freedom. The main purpose was “to restructure temporary shared space [...] creating a social body that could behave outside the law” (de Vries). As is often the case with underground culture, it eventually got subsumed by the mainstream. In the words of de Vries, “the groundbreaking, ecstatic revelry of this new movement was transformed into and co-opted by conformist, commercialized mass culture” (de Vries). He discusses how the Dutch hardstyle scene was a progression from the underground and subversive scene of gabber in the 1990s. Yet instead of keeping hold of the same values, it became diluted and its edginess was blunted by the “professional entertainment industry, which made use of the most advanced audio and visual effects, pulling every commercially palatable trick to entertain the huge crowds” (de Vries). He continues to say that the vocals used in the style of music at the events “would make pronouncements in totalitarian fashion to the mass audience, often demanding that they instantly open their minds to reach their full potential, to transcend, or to enter altered states of consciousness” (de Vries). This bred an immense feeling of potentiality in the ecstatic environment, one that made the crowd feel as though anything was possible. However despite this, the lyrics “stayed away from real world problems; what “real world” issues it touched on were about (personal or individual) empowerment” (de Vries) creating a sense of superficiality, transcendence of material happenings, and false togetherness. One that portrayed a facade of spiritual empowerment but in actuality, resulted in more of a bypassing of integrity, commodifying spirituality and using it as a selling point.
In this way, the title of the work is quite satirical, taking the idea that spiritual enlightenment can be achieved from clubbing and questioning the authenticity of such experiences. However, in so doing, , he is not discrediting the fertility of the environment to propagate ideas in the minds of the crowd. De Vries recognises the power of this homogenous, crowd consciousness. It makes the space socially and politically catalytic and makes it a breeding ground for ideas to be nourished into existence. Inspired by this idea, de Vries went on to “rework existing essays into the lyrical manner of HardStyle vocals to be interspersed with the music” (de Vries), he took snippets of radical texts: the XenoFeminism manifesto by Laboria Cuboniks, “Human Thought at Earth Magnitude” by Timothy Morton and the Boris Groys book In the Flow, and created a cohesive essay. The essay regards topics such as totality:

A quest for TOTALITY. Driven by the desire to overcome our own particularity, humans have sought access to a universal worldview — a worldview valid everywhere and for all time. If this totality were achieved, all human individuality would be subsumed and our quest for ultimate freedom would be achieved, [...] To access the flow, we must abandon fixed entities, identities, ownership and personhood. Let structures be liquefied, let our history flow, let our archives flow, embracing the dissolution of our being, our public image and history. All must return to a state of total fluidity.
-- de Vries

This framing of freedom counterposes the Western neoliberal idea of freedom as a state of individualism. To become at one with a mass of people implies a loss of free thought, loss of individuality and distinct identity, things valued in capitalistic societies. However arguably, this sense of unified community and “impersonal singularity” (Deleuze 1995; 8) is perhaps closer to true emancipation from socialised boundaries, or perhaps it is somewhere in the middle such as Jung’s concept of individuation, whereby the process of individual freedom is through making the (collective) unconscious conscious.

With his essay, de Vries then staged an event, Oblivion (2016), where he made a small stage and played out the vocal piece in the environment of a rave. He expressed hope that the vocal piece would be adopted by the real-life hardstyle DJs to be played during raves. With this piece, it is perceptible how artworks can take over concepts themselves and enter into conversation with ideas, beyond just purely mirroring them. It also shows how art can be a tool of potentiality, a method of testing and projecting the future. The end of Anne de Vries’ essay states how the ‘sound of the future’ may be able to “cultivate a platform outside of “normal” socio-political reality, and they could potentially offer a space in which one could experience different views and ideas” (de Vries). This ties into the concept of the affective power of art, in experiencing ideas in certain environments, they have more traction.

A Métissage of Nostalgia: Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

In the second case study, I will transition onto the next artwork, Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) to illustrate how art utilises affect to communicate a sense of nostalgia towards a past time or place. Additionally, it is crucial to acknowledge how this work inevitably evolves beyond the sphere of pure representation and begins to adopt its own sense of subjectivity. Being elevated to the tier of primary experience allows the work to be regarded and experienced in its own right, separate from the culture it is inspired by. I argue that this gives it more credibility in trying to accurately communicate the initial, ineffable experience it sets out to represent.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is a video art piece made in 1999 by British contemporary artist Mark Leckey (1964). It has achieved cult-status due to its nostalgic representation of the hedonistic 1990s rave culture. Leckey’s artistic practice uses the “material documents of the experiences of others to illustrate his own” driven by a fascination of “our affective relationship to things” (Museum Brandhorst). The opening frames of Leckey’s video work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), as the camera pans upwards from the ground to show a sea of platform shoes, provide a visual allegory to the title of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (“Mille Plateaux”). The video work travels through moments in history, visiting various scenes of dance music from Northern rock to 1990s rave. Leckey stitches together fragments of found footage, creating an end product that leaves the viewer as mesmerised as its dancing subjects who appear to be in a trance-like state. The content of the work visually illustrates concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring machine’ explored by Simon Reynolds in his articulation of the unified consciousness of the audience at a rave. He describes “the agitation of bodies broken down into separate components, then reintegrated at the level of the dance floor as a whole. Each sub individual part (a limb, a hand cocked like a pistol) was a cog in a collective "desiring machine”” (Reynolds 5). ‘The desiring machine’ framed in the context of the rave as “a decentered, nonhierarchical assemblage of people and technology characterized by flow-without-goal and expression-without-meaning” (Reynolds 246). The concept of desire here refers to a focus on connections rather than separation, implying a sense of unity. This anti-productiveness refers to a focus on connections themselves rather than focusing on them for the sake of their ‘end’, purpose or product. Hence reiterating a state of nature where non-linearity and collaborative holism is the essence of life, as opposed to a mechanistic, Newtonian worldview that emphasises the reductionism of complex systems into measuring their parts, outputs, cause and effect. Desire in the Deleuzian sense places the focus away from lack or need and more towards a process-based self-enrichment based in the senses (Colebrook 22).

Formally, the work is composed of short clips of footage, edited together to make a conglomeration of places, times, faces and genres. This method of production alludes to the medium of techno itself by mirroring the art of mixing tracks together to create an assemblage of music. This process mirrors Gaillot’s conception of DJing as a progressive form of performance art, questioning the role of the artist. The DJ moves away from the notion of original creation which is traditionally deemed necessary for reputable artists. “[The artwork’s] uniqueness, completed perfection and lasting quality” (Gaillot 51) in the case of framing techno as a performance of art is thrown into uncertainty, which is both progressive and exciting. The production of techno as an art engenders both the DJ and participants in a symbiotic relationship of mutual creation. The metaphor of an assemblage can be then applied to the key driving force behind why clubbing is considered comparable to a spiritual experience -- the transcendence of the individual self in favour of joining a communal body and reaching a sense of harmonious oneness. Michel Gaillot highlights the key principle of techno is the mixing of music, of previous genres and of individual tracks. With that, the technology that makes mixing possible is the essence of the entire genre. Simon Reynolds in Generation Ecstasy discusses “‘Sampladelia’: [an] umbrella term covering a vast range of contemporary hallucinogenres: techno, hip-hop, house, jungle, electronica, swingbeat, post-rock, and more” (Reynolds 50) in light of the move towards the re-used, recycled nature of these genres from the traditional single-authored piece of music. This progression came as a result of new technology allowing the development of techniques such as “multitracking, overdubbing, reversing, echo” (Reynolds 50) to be employed. This unorthodox method was met with criticism from purist musicians who fixated on “the regurgitative, referential nature of the practice, the gleeful disregard for conventional musical skill” (Reynolds 50). Gaillot notes that “the rejection of the machine on the pretext that it is an instrument or weapon of capitalism is a puerile and dangerous behaviour,” (Gaillot 38). Instead, he suggests a reclamation of ‘the machine’, symbolically repurposing the industrialised forces, “to recover our autonomy, diverting it into festive and artistic ends,” (Gaillot 38). Mixing being the essence of techno goes beyond the realm of the musical and applies also to the “mixing of identities,” (ibid). Citing Bernard Stiegler, Gaillot describes how techno is “trans-ethnic,” having the power to spark a “simultaneous conquest and loss of territory” (Stiegler cited in Gaillot 40). In this way, this process of assembly goes beyond the formal qualities of the music and seeps into the experiences of identification in the crowd. The meaning of the music lies not in the formal or technical qualities of the music, but rather in the way it is received and experienced by each member of the crowd.

The work uses formal techniques to elicit a similar sensational quality to that of the participants of rave culture. The repetitivity of the film recalls Deleuze’s concept of the “refrain” a practice that “stakes out territory via rhythm” either a “point of stability” a “circle of property” or an “opening to the outside” or all of these things, or a combination of these things (Bogue 16). Refrains demarcate certain times, spaces, characters, feelings. Leckey’s work moves in a similar fashion as it takes us on a journey through the history of British subculture. The visual aspect of the work depicts entranced individuals while the audio works divergently. The looping music and vocals act as a “refrain” in that they “[act] upon that which surrounds it, sounds it, sound or light, extracting from its various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations” (Deleuze 1987; 348). Furthermore, the voice-over of the film chants the names of brands such as Fiorucci, Fred Perry, Lonsdale, Lacoste, FILA, all markers of the clothing worn during the 90s rave movement. The chanting of the brands can be seen as a refrain in that these brands were a fixture of the cultural milieu of the time. The repurposing of the clothing brands, in that they are first territorialized in the realm of fashion brands, then deterritorialized to become emblems of rave culture (perhaps something not intended by the brands themselves), shows how they can work as refrains -- something familiar brought into an unfamiliar context to create the cultural milieu of rave culture. Furthermore, this act of reappropriation of fashion brands can be seen as an act of reclamation of power and rebellion of capitalist forces on the part of the consumer.

Throughout the work, other vocal audio can be heard such as the ‘football hooligan’ chant: “everywhere we go people wanna know just who we are” (8:45) and also snippets of dialogue layered on top of acid house beats, which together creates a soundscape that is reminiscent of being in a club environment in the 1990s. Stylistically, the work recalls the song “Born Slippy” by British electronic group, Underworld. The song, equally emblematic of 90s UK rave culture, also employs the use of vocal refrains to evoke a certain time or place. Leckey’s use of repetitive editing techniques mirrors that of electronic music’s repetitivity. Francois Gauthier writes that through possessing “insistent and repetitive beat structure, techno constantly reiterates a present, a new foundation” (Gauthier 74), an effect which aligns with Deleuze’s idea of the effect of the refrain. This shows one way in which Leckey’s work evokes similar sensations as being a part of a rave, through using similar formal techniques.

Turning now to how the work exists beyond being a representation of past events, i.e. rave culture and towards how it moves beyond this, the affective quality of nostalgia is something that the artist himself has commented on with regard to Fiorucci. The work was curated as part of an exhibition called “O’ Magic Power of Bleakness” at the Tate Britain in 2019. In the brochure for the exhibition Leckey calls the film, “essentially a ghost film” (Tate Britain) and compares 90s rave cultures as a subject matter to the formal quality of the work. He is quoted saying, “if you try to picture a 90s rave you can’t help but see it on VHS, and in that sense rave has come to embody the end of the analogue age,” (Tate Britain). He also speaks about how the work can make viewers “[overwrite] their memory,” (Tate Britain), in that it is so evocative and symbolic of the era and culture it depicts. In an article in Sight and Sound magazine, Leckey said “I was full of this slightly icky sentimentality that I needed to rid myself of, and this nostalgia. That was part of the drive of making Fiorucci. I found it slightly unbearable having too many memories” (Sight and Sound). Despite this, however he also writes of the boundary between the experiences that inspired the work and the actual final product itself. He said, “You’re fully, sensually engaged with everything, then briefly after that it’s gone. [...] Then you watch these things back to try and recapture them but it doesn’t allow for that, so there’s a frustration of a limit to it” (Sight and Sound). Here he makes the important distinction between the two experiences. Coming back to the idea of the Deleuze’s perceived futility of metaphors, it’s crucial to view the work in and of itself, rather than as a recreation or representation of a separate experience which has already passed. Consolidating this separation of the work (Fiorucci) vs. its ‘muse’ (rave culture), in a comment beneath the video where it is posted on YouTube, Leckey writes, “This was first shown twenty years ago and I'm now nostalgic for when I was making it” (YouTube). Here it is apparent that the work becomes an experience in itself, the artist is not nostalgic for rave culture but now for the work itself. In an interview with The Guardian after winning the Turner prize for Fiorucci, Leckey also spoke of his feeling towards ephemerality and said that “images “seem more authentic than what they represent”” (The Guardian). The artist himself here recognises that the representation of original experiences can be more reliable and more grounded in ‘reality’ than what they are inspired by.

Other exhibitions in which the work has been curated as part of have referenced, perhaps unintentionally, the idea of an artwork holding the role of an interlocutor. In 2011, the Serpentine Gallery in London held a solo exhibition of Leckey’s work. The exhibition presented Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore alongside other works from Leckey’s oeuvre: GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) and BigBoxStatueAction (2003-11). The exhibition aimed to “[explore] the potential of the human imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept, an object or an environment” (Serpentine). BigBoxStatueAction (2003-11) is particularly interesting in the framework of Bal’s Travelling Concepts, the work is composed of a large monolithic speaker. Leckey placed the speaker facing a low pressure steam chest, part of an engine from a working steam mill in Manchester. This merging of non-art objects with the artistic domain equally could be said to mirror the difficulty of DJing, as ‘low-art’ being recognised as an art form, as discussed earlier in the chapter. The installation piece had a performative element to it, in that Leckey held a live session where the speaker would play a loud soundscape at the steam chest. The curator of the gallery, Clare Gannaway, described the role of sound in the exhibition as “an object” that would “fill the space” (Manchester City Gallery). This momentary ephemerality is a formal quality that is common also in raves and perhaps contributes to the lack of concrete understanding of raving as an art form. To mirror this aspect in his work, Leckey furthers his representational similitude of rave culture.
Speaking of his motivation behind the installation in a video for Manchester City Gallery, Leckey stated that he “wanted to find a way of communicating with things in the world that [he] couldn’t quite comprehend, couldn’t quite grasp” (Manchester City Gallery). Although the work does not include human performers, it can be considered a performance in that in an attempt to understand the objects, he is “trying to make something inanimate become animated,” (Manchester City Gallery). To return to the analogy of objects as interlocutors in a conversation, Leckey also said that he believed that “[the speaker] is physically responding to [the steam chest]” in a kind of “feedback loop” (Manchester City Gallery). Again, this also recalls raves in that the rave as an art form does not rely on one creator, i.e. the DJ, but it is a participatory performance including the crowd, the music, the DJ, the space etc. This idea is reminiscent of Michel Gaillot’s framing of raves as “a process that invites participation” (Gaillot 52). Furthermore, Leckey stated his desire for the viewers of the work to “get lost in it, absorbed in it, when the bass comes you can feel it, it’s really visceral” (Manchester City Gallery), a description that could be attributed not only to viewing an art work but also to participating in a rave. This speaks for the affective power of viewing art as a means to understanding ineffable experiences, such as rave. Formally, Leckey’s work is a good example of this and thematically his interest in rave culture helps to illustrate this idea more clearly.

To attempt to explain why these things are hard to understand, Leckey also has his opinion about this. He said that both works, Fiorucci and BigBoxStatueAction, “come from a place which isn’t an institution which isn’t culturally sanctioned, they’re self generated” he goes on to say “dance music and the sound system -- people made these things themselves, they made it happen. So these things become increasingly more estranged from us” (Manchester City Gallery). Perhaps this begins to answer the further question of why these experiences, feelings and concepts are so seemingly ungraspable, as they are not often included as part of the academic canon and do not fit into necessarily fixed, easily-digestible categories. Instead they have a sense of cultural idiosyncrasy and ephemerality that is not easily replicable.

The Ineffability of ‘the Ineffable’?
Where de Vries’ Critical Mass : Pure Immanence seeks to critique the present but also engage with experimentation with future possibilities, Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore finds its purpose in being a nostalgia inducing, time machine of sorts. There is a certain idealistic utopianism about them both, that strives to imagine a future of development, innovation and unity -- but also one which yearns for a hedonistic past. There is a commonality in that both works take the viewer out of the immediate, bodily present, perhaps something similar to the affective quality of being part of rave. Art possesses the potentiality to embody a sense of ‘becoming’, an infinite state of experiential shapeshifting, adjusting and understanding through affect, which goes beyond a prescribed written metaphor, and these case studies show how this can manifest. This mode of communication and representation is necessary when dealing with subject matters grounded in the esoteric, such as those spiritual experiences of self-liberation, unity and crowd-consciousness which pervade rave culture. This paper aimed to provide an alternative method for exploring and understanding these types of organic experiences, implying that they are best left to the realm of affect and sensation -- as can be achieved through art, rather than the clinical dissection of scholarly analysis. As succinctly articulated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “an organic being is so multifaceted in its exterior, so varied and inexhaustible in its interior, that we cannot find enough points of view nor develop in ourselves enough organs of perception to avoid killing it when we analyze it” (Goethe 947). Indeed, the irony of the very writing of this thesis paper as a cultural analysis should not be overlooked.

In keeping with the methodological framework of this research, of Bal’s Travelling Concepts and of Deleuze’s ideas of difference, the concept of the ‘ineffable’ or ‘elusive’ should not be taken as a given. To pose it as the point-of-departure of my research is to assume a concreteness around that idea. However, in “Transformation Through Depoliticization” (2016) citing Theodor Adorno, Anne de Vries writes that “pseudo-individuation, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is wholly intended for them or predigested” (Adorno 1941 cited in de Vries 3). It could also be that this elusiveness is exactly the intent of these events. This could perhaps be a topic of further research, it would certainly be worthwhile to further extend the speculation. Although this idea of ‘the ineffable’ has been used here as the starting point, the backbone of this research -- it also deserves its fair share of analysis as it is itself enveloped in multiplicity.

Freedom En Masse: Anne de Vries’ Critical Mass : Pure Immanence
In this chapter I will outline the first artwork I have chosen to place in conversation with the theoretical framework, Anne de Vries’ Critical Mass: Pure Immanence (2015). More specifically, this chapter aims to address how de Vries firstly communicates ideas of freedom and unity with regard to rave culture but then uses this as a point of departure and uses his artistic practice as a way of experimentation with futurity. In this way, the work begins a life of its own and detaches itself from representational boundaries, granting itself a stronger sense of affect -- therefore making it more akin to the ‘real’ experience of rave that it is first inspired by.

Anne de Vries (1977) is Dutch contemporary artist living and working in Amsterdam and Berlin. The work’s title Critical Mass : Pure Immanence is inspired by the last essay written by Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life” part of the 1995 collection Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. The essay deals with ideas such as the intrinsic interwovenness of everything, of all facets of life -- it is key and summative of his previous works and philosophical writings in general. The essay concerns shedding individuality and in favour of assembling as a cohesive, symbiotic consciousness. In terms of empiricism, Deleuze chooses the concept of ‘life’, “in contrast to what John Locke called “the self”” (Deleuze 1995; 8). Where the self is: “consciousness, memory and personal identity” a life is based on “a logic of impersonal individuation rather than personal identity, of singularities rather than particularities” (Deleuze 1995; 8). The sentiments explored by Deleuze in the essay are similar to the common rhetoric of rave culture in the realm of ‘P.L.U.R.’ (peace, love, unity, and respect), mainly with regard to unity. De Vries’ drawing together of Deleuze and dance music is based on this connection, but then how it has mutated and progressed from the beginnings of dance music.

The other part of the work’s title employs the term ‘critical mass’ referring to the increasing dependence and oneness of not just people with each other, but a dystopian unity of humans with technology. The term critical mass also implies a revolutionary movement, bonding together over a shared idea to a point where innovation becomes autonomous like a ‘chain-reaction’. This term is enveloped in the spirit of futurity and development. Hillegonda C. Rietveld writes how “the interface between technology and humans could be regarded as a spiritual tool,” and that “techno operates as such an interface, demanding an active engagement with the idea of technology” (Rietveld 50). The effect of this merging of technology and humans can potentially provide “a sense of encompassing intimacy with the spirit of the other” (Rietveld 50). Therefore, the title of the work depicts a sense of ‘communitas’, a critical mass of humans and technology geared towards a shared immanent co-existence.

The work itself, Critical Mass : Pure Immanence shows tens of thousands of clubbers dancing in unison with each other while an omniscient voice speaks over the top of them. Also visualised is the overwhelming audio/visual spectacle of lights and lasers characteristic of hardstyle events. The work was made in 2015, significantly later than the initial explosion of 1990s rave culture, after quite some progression had occurred within the scene. De Vries’ scene of focus was a Dutch hardstyle event, Defqon.1, which is the biggest in the world. One of the galleries in which the piece was shown, Cell Project Space in London, wrote that de Vries focuses on “mass audiences and a 'now' generation of online users” and that the work “refers to the human condition that collectively engages, either physically or virtually with this provisional 'high-octane' language and experience” (Pasto). With the progression of technology, particularly social media, it has a fundamental role in the contemporary human experience. This relationship between human and machine is something that is thematically linked to electronic music, the music genre of technology. It has been taken further than the music, with technology now being able to create an “uninterrupted flow of sound, image, light and digital information” (Pasto) in the form of spectacular shows. This, integrated with “the intimate connected world of small mobile devices, headsets and the global portals of the internet” (Pasto) creates an immersive experience where the limits between self and other are blurred -- that ‘other’ being technology.

The incarnation of Critical Mass : Pure Immanence that I personally witnessed was at the foam museum in Amsterdam in 2015. The exhibition was titled ‘E_M E R G E’ and consisted of a variety of medium-spanning works, from film to sculpture. The exhibition was broadly based around the cohesion of humans with technology, using rave culture documented in Critical Mass : Pure Immanence as a prime example of this. This curatorial format of combining mediums, with the contextual point about the convergence of human and technology also mimics that of the raver being part of the bigger whole the ‘rave’ the integral and intrinsic nature of the rave is reliant on every part of it -- without the ravers there is no rave. Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer is faced head on with the expansive projection of the film (Critical Mass : Pure Immanence). There is a certain magnetism towards the screen due to the curatorial decision to place it so centrally, which entrances the viewer, lulling them into a semi-conscious viewing experience. It is almost hypnotic, the 14 minutes elapse without much awareness on the part of the viewer. Due to the size of the screen, the viewer has the feeling that there is little separation between their own body and the tens of thousands of raving bodies depicted in the work, this can also be perceived in the exhibition pictured at the beginning of the chapter, at Nuit Blanche in Paris in 2017. To influence the viewer to enter this kind of mental state, means that the accompanying long worm-like sculptures, Boids (2015), are perceived in the peripheries of their attention. Their pervasiveness mimicking the similar subliminality of crowd consciousness and reliance on technology, together representing unity or ‘critical mass’. The overall impression gained from the exhibition is that of cohesion, of human and machine, but also dissolution of the roles of subject and object.

Works Cited
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