
Originally Posted by
LOKEE
Danny, two brief points of contention:
Progress achieved through nostalgia:
Innovation and progression are necessarily about the transformation of space--be it material or theoretical space. As such, the innovator confronts the temporal, geographical and social needs of any moment and envisions a way to move through the world. Nightlife is no different. Any success requires you to imagine something new, to build out from and expand on the past. As such, the desire to return to a former perfection precludes progress, and, quite often, results in the stale, rigid and irrelevant spaces to which you seem to be objecting.
Sex as corrupt:
First things first, there seems to be some real room for critique here, but I am unsure if your target--sex--is the right place to aim. What you really seem to be talking about is how the economic realities of the nightclub world are currently met through the commodification of desire. Desire, thus, maps onto, becomes slave to, the demands of capital. I am sympathetic to this reading, if, in fact, it is what you mean; however, even this re-aiming is not critical enough of its own position.
This is particularly true when considered in light of your argument that one must "sell the feeling, not the sex." No matter which approach we take--feeling or sex--desire is turned into a commodity, which has the potential to alienate the individual from experience and discovery. The question you pose, then, is not whether the commodity should be confronted, but, rather, what is best reified and sold.
In some ways, your question is helpful, as it presents two inextricable yet contradictory issues. On the one hand, there is the necessity for capital. The nightclub is a business, and one must always meet its economic demands. And, at the same time, any entry into an economy compromises one's ability to "feel" (though, I am dubious as to whether a full expulsion of "feeling" occurs). In other words, desire's reified nature dictates what we want, and experience/discovery is lost. We are, quite literally, unable to discover what we desire because of how overdetermined the commodity has become. How do we reconcile these two things?
That seems to be the catch, doesn't it? I would suggest that the answer should not attempt to discard any manifestation of desire, as you do with sex; rather, one must be both critical of how desire forms and remain open to unfamiliar possibilities, be it sex, feeling, drug or none of the above. In other words, the system is the system, and it is, at least in this moment, a necessary delivery system; but it need not preclude us from experience if we constantly and critically consider how what we want is always shaped by the material and social world around us.
In this spirit, my particular method of interrogation always starts with "tell me why." If i can't answer that, I become suspect. The question doesn't alleviate the problem in total, but, then again, the very nature of the our communities and enclaves seems to evidence that desire is always and necessarily socially conceived. Consequently, I am never going to arrive at a purely formed desire/feeling--not in sex and not in dance--and that fact should not and does not dilute the joys both can bring.
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