French underground raves of the nineties. Aesthetic politics of affect and autonomy

Résumé En

This chapter deals with the aesthetic politics of French underground raves in the nineties. It examines theoretical conditions required to address the aesthetic politics of raves. More precisely I criticize the common reductive analysis and the oscillations between celebration and denunciation of techno as a form of stimulation for some passive individuals suffering its effects and being led into the collective trance. Here, I refer not to “aesthetic” in terms of judgment of taste exercised over the music but in terms of a relationship between music and its players and listeners within the process of aesthetic experience. In the same way, what I call “politics” is not related first to the content of the music, or some criticism of the established order that music could express, but to the type of space-time which is created in raves and how it is configured, involving another distribution of the sensible than that of the dominant order. I focus on underground raves, more commonly called “free-parties” in France, and I characterize their aesthetic politics through the articulation of two axes, supplying the momentum of this musical movement: the axis of “potentiation”, related to the power of affective mobilization of the music, and the axis of the “alternative”, where free-parties appear as autonomous organizations corresponding to a process of political subjectivation.