File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1994/avant-garde_21Apr.94, message 40


From: fjackson-AT-diana.cair.du.edu (FLANNON P. JACKSON )
Subject: Re: "Rave" Not an Effective (or Meaningful) Counter-Culture Mov
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 1994 10:12:13 -0600 (MDT)



Steven Roussos wrote:
> I'm not sure who said it (Emma Goldstein?) or even of the exact words, but
> this debate has made me think of the saying:
> 
>    "If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution."
> 
> While I agree with the rather obvious point that Raves (or Parties, or Dance
> Clubs) by their very nature are not serving a direct function of political
> transformation/education/networking ("Lighten up man, we're here to celebrate
> and enjoy Life, not to dismantle the state or commit civil disobedience"),
> such gatherings can play a supporting role in transforming culture:
>
(Stuff deleted)
> 
I couldn't find the exact quote either, but its Emma Goldman who said "If
I can't dance, I don't want your revolution."  

In answer to Micheal Currents question as to why some people get so
uptight in regards to rave culture, maybe its precisely because dancing 
invokes the image of Kropotkin against our puritan sensibilities. This,
anyway, if we follow the link from dance, to Emma Goldman, to the following
suggestion made by her biographer Richard Drinnon:  "The liberal's confidence
that this threat [the increasing concentration of economic and political
power] could be met by a few managerial adjustments and his faith that the
good life could be acheived through the increased application of technology
struck her as dangerous nonsense.  In its stead she offered the anarchism of
Kropotkin, which undertook to replace authoritarian hierarchies, the coercive
political state, and supernaturalistic religion by a warm humanism, a society
of equals, and a polity of small organic organizations in free cooperation
with each other." (from the introdutction to _Anarchism and Other Essays_)

I agree with Steven that raves serve no direct or intentional political/
educational/networking purpose, but rather than seeing this as a failure of
rave culture, as some others in this discussion would have it, wouldn't
it be more useful to suppose that it's the "failing" of the political/
educational system to include dance and not the other way around?  It
seems to me that Goldman's concern with dance can be attributed to a 
reading of Nietzsche.  In her essay _The Modern Drama_ Goldman goes so
far as to say that when social unrest becomes almost universal that
the tranvaluation of existing values becomes a necessity.  In the section
_What the German's Lack_ in _Twilight of the Idols_ Nietzsche announces
that thinking must be danced.  "...there is no longer the remotest recollection
that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery --
that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, _as_ a kind of dancing."(#7)
A bit latter Nietzsche goes on to say:  "...one cannot subtract dancing in 
every form from a noble education -- to be able to dance with one's feet,
with concepts, with words:  need I still add that one must be able to do it 
with the pen too...?"

Shall we dance ?

Flannon 

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