Living at Night in Times of Pandemic: Night Studies and Club Culture in France and Germany
University of York (UK)
Discourse around Dance Music Cultures (DMCs) has reached a turning point; a crossroads where underlying tensions, inconsistencies, inequalities and critical questions have begun to simmer to the surface, demanding attention and discussion. Since its inception, themes of utopianism and togetherness have dominated this discourse without questioning such a narrative’s relationship with individual and community actual experiences. Scholars of and participants in DMCs alike will be all too familiar with the assertion that DMCs and their related subcultures report a dominant message: one of unity, togetherness and inclusion. While utopianism and escapism are critical to the creation of the other-worlds of dance music spaces (Garcia-Mispireta 2023; O’Grady 2012), the complex, conflicting and ever-developing politics of the dancefloor demand frank, direct and ongoing consideration.
Living at Night makes a comprehensive attempt at this through the lens of Paris and Berlin’s club scenes after the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic and in the following years global political movements and changes in media discourse shifted both internal and external perceptions of DMCs. Many (although naturally not all) global dance music communities and institutions began to question their practices, policies, interior structures, broader values and relationships with local and international communities. The cities that Living at Night deals with, have undergone this process in recent years. What this text does particularly well is use them as a site to highlight the potentiality for positive change through framing club culture as utopian, while at the same time recognising the complex realities of clubbing communities. It pulls into question narratives that have been broadly, and sometimes uncritically, accepted, highlighting inherent tensions within DMCs. While the focus is on Paris and Berlin, the work could be applied more broadly to DMCs across Europe and, in some cases, globally. Again, this is timely, joining other texts, such as Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s recently published Together Somehow, which go some way in addressing similar issues.
The book is split into three sections. The first, “Scenes and Communities”, looks at questions of urban and community identity in DMCs, questioning some pervasive and oft-repeated discourses in DMCs in detail. Frédéric Trottier-Pistien’s second chapter critically analyses the city-twinning of Detroit and Berlin and its consistencies and inconsistencies, while Sophia Abidi methodically parses some, but not all, subcultural characteristics of participants in Berlin’s DMCs. In the final chapter of the section, Diana Weis considers the tensions between subcultural expression and high fashion surrounding Berlin’s club scene, and Berghain in particular. The second section, “Diversity and Inclusion”, engages in much needed critical discussions around the tension between inclusion, exclusion, awareness and micropolitics in DMCs. xan egger, neo seefried and Mascha Naumann’s chapter exposes some internal tensions in the scene, concomitantly making the case of the potentiality and concrete utopias presented by queer DMCs. Ines Liotard furthers this discussion, shining a light on the historical development of queer club culture in Paris, while Diana Raiselis discusses the potential and problematics of awareness policies and approaches in contemporary club culture post-Covid. The final section, “Social and Ecological Challenges for a Sustainable Culture”, looks at some of the pressing issues facing contemporary DMCs and the role that social and ecological responsibility and action plays. Edna Hernández González writes engagingly about artificial light and the tension between nighttime and its economy. Guillaume Robin’s chapter provides insight on sense of belonging and meaning in DMC communities in Berlin, providing interesting reflections on areas for future work, particularly with “migrant clubbing communities” (a term that Robin sees as problematic). This is followed by Max Eulitz’ thought-provoking personal prose reflecting on a clubbing experience in Kyiv, which, like in many chapters before, presents the potentiality of club spaces in adverse times. The book ends with an insightful and practical conversation between Robin and Katharina Wolf, presenting contemporary work around the social, ecological and financial stability of Berlin’s club scene.
The level of self-reflection and criticality that such a text requires is evident throughout. But this is also a complex task and there are a handful of brief moments in the book that stray into the defensive, engaging with binary suggestions of what might be good or bad for the club scene, including some attempts to “debunk” common myths. There are other moments where arguments of high and low culture are invoked; arguments that often expose the fragility with which studying DMCs comes. But perhaps in a culture where multiplicity and difference form its fabric, positioning DMCs’ value in opposition to what might be considered “mainstream” is not always useful. Nevertheless, it is important to make very clear that such arguments are few and far between, and do not consist full chapters. Indeed, the work in Living at Night is most successful when it embraces the DMCs’ diversity; in the discussions around the otherness of DMCs and their opposition to hegemony, and how actors in the scene might negotiate that, while legitimising its existence without any suggestion of what might perceived as good or bad.
Since the pandemic, European DMCs have seen club closures, thanks to gentrification, and aggressive legislation that makes it more difficult for nightlife to survive (Drevenstedt 2020; Garcia-Mispireta 2016). Criticism is directed at DMCs, where the boundaries between utopianism and permissibility are blurred (Garcia-Mispireta 2023); where hedonism as resistance to hegemony and nightlife as freedom get caught up in complex and often problematic behaviours and attitudes. It is a testament to scholarship in DMCs and Living at Night that researchers and members of its community can hold themselves and their peers accountable; refocus the lens on themselves and use insider and informed perspectives to report on pertinent issues. Living at Night turns the mirror on DMCs in Europe, not to show the fairest of them all, but to reflect on its complexity, on the possibility of what utopia and hedonism have to offer in opposition to and harmony with the every-day, warts and all.
Drevenstedt, Lukas. 2020. “Dimensions of Club Culture: Learning from Berlin”. In The New Age of Electronic Dance Music and Club Culture, ed. Anita Jóri and Martin Lücke, 9–20. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Garcia-Mispireta, Luis Manuel. 2016. “Techno-Tourism and Post-Industrial Neo-Romanticism in Berlin’s Electronic Dance Music Scenes”. Tourist Studies 16(3): 276–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037>.
Garcia-Mispireta, Luis Manuel. 2023. Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor. Durham: Duke University Press.
O’Grady, Alice. 2012. “Spaces of Play: The Spatial Dimensions of Underground Club Culture and Locating the Subjunctive”. Dancecult 4(1): 86–106. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04>.