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A PROPOS

The pandemic, with its imposed lockdowns and curfews, has contributed to a greater awareness of the social importance of nightlife (Gwiazdzinski, 2020). The research field of night studies, initiated by Pr. Will Straw, has been the object of renewed interest since the particular context of the health crisis that forced the night into silence. The resurgence of clandestine raves during lockdowns has confirmed the vitality of the electronic scenes in a context where the future of clubs and festivals appeared strongly compromised, as they were shut down or cancelled for eighteen months due to sanitary restrictions. Nightlife became clandestine as soon as the states, for health reasons, decided they had to control it. Beyond the circumvention of health regulations, these underground techno parties highlighted a collective demand: the right to nightlife and dancing in a society suddenly deprived of “dancing festivities” (Tanzlustbarkeiten), as they are legally called in Germany. As a condition for their reopening, the clubs had to impose draconian health measures, forcing them to organize night parties during the day and to impose social distancing, face masks on the dance floor, reduced audiences, party prohibition at night, QR codes and health passes, etc. These restrictions considerably modified the landscape of 'legal' parties, while underground parties took ravers back to the habits of pre-pandemic techno parties. Practices have changed and, as it used to be in the free parties in the 1990s, “clubbers” had turned back to “ravers” for two years. The late reopening of nightclubs from the summer of 2021 has had dramatic consequences for some clubs, such as Dehors Brut in Paris and De School in Amsterdam, which had to face bankruptcy, in addition to an overdose case for the first and allegations of sexual misconduct and racism for the second. Nightlife and club culture are emerging from the health crisis more fragile than ever. Gentrification, rising rents and the financial consequences of COVID-19 have forced some clubs in Berlin to move further and further from the city to its outskirts, like RSO (former Griessmühle) or to increase their entrance fee by ten euros.

 From Tbilisi to Berlin, manifestations of “resist-dance” have multiplied recently to denounce, as in 2018, the police intervention in the Bassiani club and the repressive policies of the Georgian state, or to alert the public opinion against the rise of the German far-right (AfD Wegbassen). Techno cultures have seen the emergence of a particular form of activism, which is not politically affiliated but politically conscious. By taking over the public space, techno parties sometimes become a platform for political protest. The lively discussions provoked by the events that occurred in Paris and Berlin this year witness to reveal a growing politicization of the techno scene. For instance, the party collective of La Toilette sparked a heated debate within the Parisian techno community after it decided to organize a queer techno party in the migrant camp of Vitry-sur-Seine and to donate profits to the United Migrants association. The Berlin club Revier Südost was forced to close temporarily because of alleged homophobic and racist accusations made by Canadian contemporary dancer Nicholas Isaiah King Rose against the security staff. Finally, the question of public health and the danger posed by certain drugs such as GHB resurfaces regularly when patrons die, as it happened in London (Fabric), Paris (Dehors Brut) or more recently in Berlin (Suicide Circus), thus raising the question of the risks associated with drug use in a festive environment. Finally, the closure of the clubs has drawn new cultural dynamics between the scenes of Berlin and Kyiv, after Berlin clubbers in need of nightlife went regularly t K41 for clubbing during the lockdown. Since then, the war in Ukraine has led to a massive exodus and the nightlife sector, in Berlin as well as Paris, has largely mobilized to help refugees from Ukraine, especially BIPOC and Ukrainians from the LGBT+ community.

The goal of the discussion panels will be to establish a state of the art on night studies and electronic scenes from a Franco-German perspective, by crossing the academic contributions of cultural history and gender studies, ethnology and ethnomusicology, sociology, body anthropology and urban geography. 

Research in electronic cultures is nothing new. The first research works devoted to techno culture were published at the end of the 1990s, following the emergence of the techno movement as a form of “youth culture.” This movement, which grew out of the confidential underground clubbing scene of Chicago and Detroit, expanded in the 1990s in reunified Germany or in the free parties in England, and then in France. 

Generalist publications first appeared, dealing with the techno phenomenon from the point of view of its actors (testimonies of DJs, club managers or party organizers), but rarely from the perspective of its audience. However, these works have helped forge a myth of techno’s origins, from Chicago’s house music and Detroit’s techno (Techno Rebels, 1999) to the UK’s acid house movement, the so-called 1987 “summer of love” or the rise of techno music/of a techno movement carried by an enthusiastic German youth after the country reunited (Der Klang der Familie, 2012). 

In the field of research, one of the pioneering works on 'club culture' (in German: Clubkultur) is from British sociologist Sarah Thornton, who built on the work of the Birmingham School. In her book Club Cultures (1995), Thornton first introduced the notion of 'subcultural authenticity' and explained the social logic of 'subcultural capital' referring to Bourdieu (1970). In Germany and France, research took different directions, primarily because the techno phenomenon was different on both sides of the Rhine. In England and France, governments reacted to the free party phenomenon with police repression and legal measures. Not in Germany. 

An academic discourse on techno culture, devoted mainly to the study of free parties, began to emerge in France in the second half of the 1990s, under the impetus of sociologist Michel Maffesoli, and relayed by the Cultures et mouvement journal and the creation of two research sub-laboratories, the CEAQ (Centre d'Etudes sur l'Actuel et le Quotidien) and the GRMES (Groupe de Recherche et d'Etude sur la Musique et la Socialité), both devoted to techno parties. Tessier (2003) summarizes the Maffesolian contribution to the study of the techno movement as follows: "A series of concepts more or less directly associated with Maffesoli's theories, and more generally with postmodern theories, has thus since been associated in the common sense with free parties: “trance”, “festive hedonism”, “orgy”, “tribe”, “return to communitarianism”, or “annihilation of the individual”… so many terms applied today to free parties as if they were self-evident, both in the press, which has often taken them up and in the field of sociology. “ Among the research that is part of this line of thought, we can also quote the works of Pourtau (2009), of Mabillon-Bonfis (2004) and Kosmicki (2010) devoted to the study of free parties as an expression of a “return to the time of tribes/a tribal time?”. At the same time, journalistic work has long contributed to the construction of knowledge and studies on the techno club scene, driven by actors in the field and crystallized around the electronic music press such as Trax, a magazine created in 1997.

In Germany, on the other hand, within the context of reunification, the spaces that had been left vacant in East Berlin were used to develop a dynamic and permissive party culture and led to the creation of a night topography. With few repressive measures, techno clubs and raves blossomed in Germany, especially in Berlin. Unlike free parties in the UK and France, they became sponsored and legal, and soon took a commercial turn. 

One of the first studies of the techno movement (Hitzler/Pfadenhauer, 2001) as an expression of youth culture (Meyer, 1999) emerged in Germany in the wake of pop music studies and the sociological thought known as “PTV” that appeared in the early 2000s. This concept of ‘post-traditionnelle Vergemeinschaftung’ refers to new, more fluid and individual forms of membership in a social group. The contributions of this sociological school of thought complement the concept of 'scenes' as defined by Will Straw (Mc Gill University) whose work revealed the importance of 'night studies'. Straw defined the scene as a differentiated model of musical circulation in urban space, a notion closely linked to the question of the visibility of cultural life in cities. Influenced by these research topics, particularly on the Anglo-Saxon side, research on the techno movement in Germany seems to have developed a greater variety of approaches and themes. Thus, techno cultures have been studied from the perspective of dance theory (G. Klein, 2004), scene ethnography (Schwannhäußer, 2010) and communities (Jori, 2021) and/or night economy (Kühn, 2017). Since 2015, and especially since the pandemic, there has been a revival of research fields devoted to the study of nightlife and techno cultures, thanks to the contributions of urban sociology (Garcia Ruiz), ethnomusicology and gender studies (L.M.Garcia, Kakaire, Quere), aesthetics (Koliulis, 2018), ethnography (Robin, 2021), or urban geography (Gwiazdzinski, Guérin). Recently, urban nightlife and the preservation of party venues have become electoral issues in large cities, some of which have appointed a nightlife mayor or a person in charge of setting up better governance of night events. Meanwhile, in other cities such as Berlin, clubs have been working on advocating for their interests to the authorities through lobbying activities, and thanks to organizations that advise and assist them, such as the Club Commission. 

As evidenced by the creation of a transdisciplinary network of night studies researchers, such as The urban night, or by the annual International Conference on night studies (ICNS), it is clear that club culture has become an ever-growing interdisciplinary research field (Jori, Lücke, 2020; Damm, Drevenstedt 2020) at the crossroads of several fields of social sciences. 

For the 4th time, the Stadt nach Acht conference is taking place in Berlin from the 25th to the 27th of November 2021, and it is set to be one of the most important international conferences on nightlife. 

This French-German study day will aim to establish a state of the art of research on night studies in France and Germany and the techno scene from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.

Three main areas will be explored:

I. Scenes and communities 

II. Nightlife governance & self-governance during and after the pandemic

III. Gender, diversity, and safe spaces

A propos: À propos
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