What are they raving on about?

Luckman, Susan 2001, ‘'What are they raving on about?': Temporary Autonomous Zones and Reclaiming the Streets’, Perfect Beat, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 49-68.

What are they raving on about?: Temporary Autonomous Zones and Reclaiming the Streets.

One of the more interesting and contentious claims to have been made from within dance music cultures (in particular those involved in raving per se as a personal and collective practice), is that it functions as a model of positive political action, opening up new spaces for joyous and non-oppressive experiences of both self and community. While such claims should not be taken on face value, there certainly remain clear instances where dance music, dance and the spirit of 'carnivale' have been employed strategically by diverse groups of activists. As a vehicle for oppositional political movements, raving (or more specifically its music and dance), as a claiming of space - both physical and metaphysical - has provided a locus for creative oppositional activism in the nineties and beyond. Such activism is perhaps best exemplified by the free parties and frequently overtly illegal actions of political dance collectives, but less widely noticed is the connection with the 'Reclaim The Streets' movement. This paper explores the relationship between ‘Reclaim The Streets’ and dance music cultures by considering the role of such modes of action for counter-hegemonic political movements at the beginning of a new century, within a politico-economic system which can and does easily accommodate (often through commercial appropriation) both the symbols and affects of critique, difference and resistance

It is important to emphasise that this paper is not trying to find or magically uncover resistance where it may well not exist, but rather it sets out to examine actions which have been positioned by their participants as explicitly oppositional. With its origins in Marxist literary studies and sociology, Birmingham-based cultural studies has always been interested in the potential oppositionality of subcultures. Such a concern, however, has all too frequently manifested itself as the unsustainable claim that subcultural practice is inherently oppositional. Such claims have been rightly critiqued for overly privileging the supposed challenge to hegemonic structures posed by subcultural participants, and have probably been more a reflection of the antihegemonic aspirations of the researcher than of the various subcultures' raisons d'etre. A legacy of such critiques within the body of British scholarly writing on dance music cultures1 is that while the scholars retain an awareness of class, not to mention a respect for the proclamations made by the punters they study, they are less likely to propose to find the oppositionality once considered virtually implicit in subcultural practice. It would seem that the criticisms of the original Birmingham inspired subcultural studies have been heeded. Perhaps also, and more contentiously, there is less concern for such issues in post-Thatcher Britain with scholars being informed not only by their formative experiences either growing up or as young adults during the 'Thatcher years' (for most of these researchers are relatively young), but also by the prevalence of critical postmodernism which holds as a truism the fact that subcultural signifiers are available for exploitation by capitalism, a thesis which has obvious resonances with Hebdige's early formative work.

1. For example: the anthologies which have been published out of the Manchester Institute for Popular Cultural Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University (Redhead, S (Ed.) (1993) Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, Aldershot and Brookfield: Avebury; O'Connor, J and Wynne D (Eds.) (1996) From the Margins to the Centre: Cultural Production and Consumption in the Post-Industrial City, Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate (Arena); and Redhead, S, Wynne D and O'Connor, J (Eds.) (1997) The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell); Redhead, S (1997) Subculture to Clubcultures: An Introduction to Popular Cultural Studies, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell; Rietveld, H (1998) This Is Our House, Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate; Thornton, S (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity Press; and Malbon, B (1999) Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, London and New York: Routledge.

Consequently dance music practices within this recent British cultural studies tradition are presented in a more appropriately nuanced fashion. This is reflected in their (generally) slightly more disinterested account of this subculture. That the DJs, promoters and other luminaries of the 'original' rave scene were often budding capitalists, interested not only in the crafting of the moment but also in the money to be made despite their illegal means of securing it, is neither questioned nor seen as surprising. Ironically, given the British government's desire to crackdown on illegal parties, some of these early rave pioneers were exemplary entrepreneurs in the classic mould of self-motivated Thatcherite economics. Similarly, at the consumption end of the equation, scholars have been concerned with what may be termed a more 'audience-centred' approach to their analysis, albeit sometimes in a pejorative sense as in Thornton's rather dismissive discussion of 'Sharon and Tracy dancing around their handbags' (Thornton, 1995). However, in Australia, the situation has been quite different with more concern being directed toward what may be termed the more 'credible' or 'alternative' ends of the scene's spectrum of practice running alongside a focus on mainstream moral panic discourses surrounding the drug ecstasy. 2 Possible reasons for this focus are myriad. It

2. For example: Bollen, J (1996) 'Sexing the Dance at Sleaze Ball 1994', The Drama Review v40 n3; Chan, S (1999) 'Bubbling Acid: Sydney's Techno Underground', in Australian Youth Subcultures: On the Margins and in the Mainstream, Ed. White R, Hobart: ACYS; Cole, F and Hannan, M (1997) 'Goa Trance', Perfect Beat v3 n3, July, and S Chan's (1998) response to the piece: 'Music(ology) Needs a Context - Re-interpreting Goa Trance', Perfect Beat v3 n4, January; D'Souza, M and Iveson, K (1999) 'Homies and Homebrewz: Hip Hop in Sydney', in Australian Youth Subcultures: On the Margins and in the Mainstream, Ed. White R, Hobart: ACYS; Fitzgerald, J (1998) 'An Assemblage of Desire, Drugs and Techno', Angelaki v3 n2, August; Gibson, C (2000) 'Antipodean Beats: A Spatial Politics of Electronic Music in Australia' Changing Sounds: New Directions and Configurations in Popular Music IASPM 1999 Conference proceedings, Ed. Mitchell T and Doyle P, Sydney: Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Technology; Homan, S (1998) 'After the Law: Sydney's Phoenician Club, the New South Wales Premier and the Death of Anna Wood', Perfect Beat v4 n1, July; Iveson, K (1997) 'Partying, Politics and Getting Paid - Hip Hop and National Identity in Australia', Overland n147, winter; Lewis, L and Ross, M (1995) 'The Gay Dance Party Culture in Sydney: A Qualitative Analysis', Journal of Homosexuality v29 n1; Luckman, S (2000) ''Sorted'?: Mapping the Regulation of Dance Parties in Australia', Journal of Australian Studies n64; Maxwell, I and Bambrick, N (1994) 'Discourses of Culture and Nationalism in Sydney Hip Hop', Perfect Beat v2 n1, July; Maxwell, I (1997) 'On The Flow: Dancefloor Grooves, Rapping 'Freestylee' and 'the Real Thing'', Perfect Beat v3 n3, July; Mitchell T (1996) Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania, London and New York: Leicester University Press; Mitchell, T (1999) 'Another Root: Australian Hip Hop as a 'Glocal' Subculture', The UTS Review v5 n1, May; Murphie, A and Scheer, E (1992) 'Dance Parties: Capital,

may simply be a reflection of the fact that raving itself was initially imported into Australia explicitly as a subcultural practice3, rather than organically arising out of local music genres and wider consumer practice (namely, the Ibizan holiday experience). That said, raving was not without its local parallels in the Australian experience. Sydney's Pride dance parties at the Hordern Pavilion throughout the late eighties and into the early-nineties are now the stuff of legend in Australian dance party circles. Additionally, Australia also has its own vibrant hip hop scene, especially within migrant and indigenous communities in major urban centres. Australian academic interest in the more cutting edge of electronic music cultures is arguably thus a reflection of these more explicitly subcultural origins, plus any of a number of other factors such as a scholar's own interests and involvements or a desire to acknowledge Australia's own unique dance music genres, which are unlikely to be acknowledged elsewhere. Before moving on into the discussion of Reclaim The Streets per se, a necessarily expeditious overview of the ways in which theorists have sought to conceptualise the esprit de corps ideally found within contemporary dance music practices needs to be undertaken in order to provide a context for the specific use of dance and music as political tools in this instance. In examining dance music cultures, the researcher is examining a set of practices which for the vast majority of participants are an important outlet for weekend or holiday release, and not a great deal more. As such, they fall far short of composing

Culture and Simulation', in From Pop to Punk to Postmodernism: Popular Music and Australian Culture from the 1960s to the 1990s, Ed. P Hayward, North Sydney: Allen & Unwin; St John, G (1997) 'Going Feral: Authentica on the Edge of Australian Culture', The Australian Journal of Anthropology v8 n2; also, the papers archived at the YSS (Youth/Sound/Space) website ; and the pending anthology Free NRG: The Activist and Esoteric Fringe of Australian Dance Culture, Ed. St John, G. 3. In saying this I certainly do not want to give the impression that Australia has not given rise to its own unique local dance music genres or spaces, nor do I wish to convey the impression that dance parties were not already a part of various local scenes in the eighties. I would contend, however, that the wider popularisation in Australia of dance music and events in the early 1990s was fuelled, and hence participant's expectations and styles informed, in large part by the European, especially British, experience. Whether it was through fashion mags, the growing celebrity status of overseas DJs, the accessibility at a recorded level of overseas material, or people's own travel abroad, the mythic ethos of the increasingly mainstream British scene loomed large over many Australian's consumer expectations.

what could be defined as ongoing subcultural identity. Therefore, it would not only be short-sightedly dismissive for researchers to reject those deemed insufficiently committed and with them the bulk of your research subject, but such an approach would moreover miss the valuable lessons to be learnt regarding the ways in which large cohorts of people in the industrialised world seek to either find pleasure within and/or evade the parameters of their lives. In listening to the voices of participants, no matter the sites or levels of their involvement, one thing is clear: for most participants, dance music aurally marks a space set aside for escape and pleasure. At its best, raving is said to be, with or without pharmaceutical intervention, an ecstatic liminoid experience comparable to being in a joyous trance state; it is claimed that it allows one to turn inward to examine and explore aspects of the self while at the same time surrounding each individual with a supportive, friendly community to which they know they belong and in which they feel welcome. To elaborate, one popular theoretical way to think about this Gestalt has been to conceptualise it in terms of the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. For example, John L. Fitzgerald writes of how in order to talk about techno music he needs to "speak about how a bit of sound can become something other than itself" (Fitzgerald, 1998: 41). Therefore he speaks of how "techno is one part of the rave assemblage, a piece of a desiring machine" (Fitzgerald, 1998: 41). Expositions which locate raving as a practice that exemplifies many of the key tropes contained in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, also tend to connect their ideas to another common motif within rave discourses - 'disappearance' of the self. It is Tim Jordan's contention that within the celebratory space of the rave or dance party, participants gradually lose subjective belief in their self and merge into a collective body, whose nature is best captured by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Body Without Organs. (Jordon, 1995:125) He continues:

The key elements of raving are dance, lights, drugs, clothes, music and time and the possible combinations of these elements in a particular rave-event create a collective delirium so that people 'rave'. What can be recognized as raving's production, or what is desired by ravers through constructing a rave-event, is an ongoing inducement into a desubjectified state of something like rapture. (Jordon, 1995:129) Deleuze and Guattari's work represents just one specific framework within which to examine the experiences and subjectivities realised through dance music cultures. However, such analyses do capture well the ritual sense of raving practice and the transcendent subjectivities possibly thus realised through the experience of such rites. In a similar vein, the rave or dance party has more commonly been associated with the spirit of 'carnivale', or as a sort of Bacchanalian festival. Thus, it is to the work of Bakhtin that some people - both punters and thinkers (not mutually exclusive categories by any means) - have been more popularly drawn. Writing in the specific context of the European night-time experience of the club, academic and DJ Hillegonda Rietveld compares raving to holidays, arguing that "nightlife is a moment in which the established order is undone, where one can relax" (Rietveld, 1993:64). Rietveld firmly locates clubbing within consumer society. At the same time, however, she does not undervalue the practices within which she herself is heavily invested not only as a scholar but additionally as a practitioner. She proposes that those who live the life of dance music as nocturnal release do not seek to criticise the status quo, but rather they wish to escape it. Further, in so doing they are acknowledging that "official culture" cannot provide all the cultural identities the citizenry may require (Rietveld, 1993: 65). Therefore people seek to fill this void themselves: In this way, a 'double-language situation' occurs, the formal and the informal, the public and the private self. Mikhail Bakhtin once pointed out that popular culture, as opposed to 'serious culture', is a model of life that

has been repressed with the rise of class society. He labels it as being a Carnival, the culture of laughter and reversal and of cyclical time, where like in the season of spring, death and rebirth are confused. Spring can give a feeling of hope, a sense of future, which was expressed in the names of rave-events such as Sunrise and Future. (Rietveld, 1993: 64) Talking in a more general sense about Bakhtin's elaboration of the carnivalesque, Mary Russo too invokes this sense of doubling, reiterating Bakhtin's contention that the space of the carnival is both a part of, as well as set apart from, the everyday life of dominant cultures (Russo, 1986). Marked by its heterogeneity, in Bakhtin's carnivalesque she writes: [t]he masks and voices of carnival resist, exaggerate, and destabilize the distinctions and boundaries that mark and maintain high culture and organized society. It is as if the carnivalesque body politic had ingested the entire corpus of high culture and, in its bloated and irrepressible state, released it in fits and starts in all manner of recombination, inversion, mockery, and degradation. The political implications of this heterogeneity are obvious: it sets carnival apart from the merely oppositional or reactive; carnival

and

the

carnivalesque

suggest

a

redeployment

or

counterproduction of culture, knowledge, and pleasure. In its multivalent oppositional play, carnival refuses to surrender the critical and cultural tools of the dominant class, and in this sense, carnival can be seen above all as a site of insurgency, and not merely withdrawal. (Russo, 1986: 218) It is this more self-consciously oppositional and playfully postmodern spirit of carnival which has been seized upon by the 'Reclaim The Streets' movement. Unlike Rietveld's ravers who seek to temporarily flee into hedonistic abandonment, those involved in reclaiming the streets as a militant practice seek explicitly and deliberately to employ

feelings of unfettered pleasure in the service of an oppositional critique of global capitalism. Drawing upon the long tradition of environmental protest and opposition to lifestyles and identities based upon the distraction of compulsory consumption, 'Reclaim The Streets' (RTS) actions are unrehearsed, informal, illegal 'guerrilla' street festivals. They are designed, amongst other things, to draw attention to how local communities are broken down through the individuating privatised space of the car, not to mention the attendant prioritising of roads over other forms of public amenity, and how these roads represent dangerous and polluting arteries ironically dividing people from one another. Further, RTS actions are also a response to the increasing privatisation of public space in the industrialised world, where even such previously accessible civil amenities as shopping strips, public seating and parklands are being sold into private hands. A shift in ownership, from public to private, brings with it an attendant shift in focus away from the provision of community amenity, towards an emphasis on attracting a desirable, consuming clientele, and moving on all others. 4 As 4. In Australia, young people are being particularly targeted and music is being employed by some organisations as the means by which to dissuade their 'loitering'. In 2000 the example of the Sydney shopping strip piping Bing Crosby through its public address system captured media attention and in the wake of this pioneering move others have followed their lead. For example,

Adelaide City Council is using the music of Kenny G and Richard Clayderman to drive loiterers and drug dealers from the city's Rundle Mall. "We haven't changed the CDs very much because we're trying to retain that boring situation, trying to get the monotony happening," said Mall general manager David West. Clayderman, who is in Australia on tour, wasn't offended. "Oh that's funny," laughs the pianist. "You cannot be accepted by 100% of the population." The idea is based on two other Australian situations - a Sydney shopping centre played Bing Crosby and Sydney's CitiRail played classical music at five railway stations to deter teenagers seeing them as chill-out lounges.

(Eliezer,

C,

In

Music

and

Media

Weekly

http://www.immedia.com.au/im_m/archive/000418-204/eliezer.html)

Music

Ezine:

has been hinted at, RTS protests seek to challenge and question the ordering of society's priorities by presenting what for the participants at least is one possibility of a more pleasurable alternative: a society which embodies the freedom and shared sense of community of the festival. Participant Stephen Dixon offers the following explanation on his web site where he provides a report on a Melbourne action in 1998: Reclaim the Streets is a party with a purpose, a celebratory taking back of the street space, normally off limits to anyone who values their safety. Dominated by inefficient, noisy, polluting and dangerous machines, one third of our cities is devoted to cars. Unlike demonstrations or rallies, RTS is all about having fun, it is an experiment in what the world would be like without the omnipresent automobile that fills the air with fumes, noise, fills our media with its image, warps our economy with its hunger for resources, and which is responsible for a quarter of a million deaths annually. (Dixon, accessed 2000) The 'party' is usually centred around a sound system and thumping techno beats, hence the movement's overt connection to the practice of raving. But more subtly, it taps into what, after Turner and Grimes, we can call a liminoid sense of 'transient communitas' united superficially around the music and dance, but grounded more fundamentally in the overlapping of shared ideological concerns. RTS has its origins as a movement in the United Kingdom with the first group being

formed

in

London

in

19915

(RTS

London,

1997:

http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/evol.htm 6). In the UK, it has grown and expanded

5. While the first group to use this name did emerge around 1991, other writers cite 1995 (in the wake of the ultimately unsuccessful occupation of resumed houses on Claremont Road in London which marked for demolition in order to make way for an M11link road), as a more accurate date from which to trace the origins of the current incarnation of RTS. article 'The Evolution of Reclaim The Streets' available from 6. The http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/evol.htm provides an excellent overview of the origins of RTS in England during the 1990s.

alongside the high-profile anti-motorway protests which had begun to come to the British public's attention and attract broad-based support at around the same time. Opposition by ravers to the British Conservative government's introduction of the controversial Criminal Justice Act and Public Order Act in 1994 further aided in facilitating the merging of contemporary dance music cultures and political action. RTS also has conceptual and ideological similarities with 'critical mass', a movement which seeks to draw attention to the value of bikes as modes of transport (especially as compared with cars). Since the early 1990s the idea has spread with RTS interventions having taken place in different cities and regions around the industrialised world. Actions have occurred in locations such as London, Bristol, East Sussex, North Wales, Norfolk, Tottenham, Brixton, Brighton, Birmingham, Nottingham, Hackney, Ljubljana, Lyon, Utrecht, Berlin, Prague, Stockholm, Turku, Vancouver 7, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. RTS actions have also been organised in solidarity with other groups, such as was the case with London's Trafalgar Square street party in April 1997 where around 10,000 people participated in solidarity with the striking Liverpool dockers. Generically, RTS actions share a number of key features. While there is clearly no formal membership system or 'party line', RTS events are not totally spontaneous events. At some point a group of people have to take it upon themselves to become a necessarily clandestine organising collective in order to undertake such tasks as deciding on a date, time, and location at which to meet. In a strategically necessary move akin to the system for getting to the now mythic original illegal raves in the UK, the final destination is not identified. Rather a gathering place is advertised and people in the know are told to be cued in one way or another to connect with others there for the party: provided there's a reasonable turnup, this is not really much of a problem. From here the group moves out onto a road

7. A media release issued via internet discussion groups from the Direct Action Media Network (DAMN) list and available from http://aspin.asu.edu/hpn/archives/Apr98/0305.html states the party which occurred in Charles Street, Vancouver on April 18, 1998 was the first RTS event to be staged in North America.

and marches on towards the final party site. Once the road site has been secured, the party begins. Attention turns now to getting music happening. This may involve getting a sound system and generator into the street and working or, and this is important for those times when the amplified system is either confiscated or otherwise ineffectual, may be provided acoustically by the participants themselves (for through either fate or design, RTS events do not compulsorily involve amplified music). Drums and other percussive instruments (dedicated or improvised) were present at the three Brisbane events I have attended. Eyewitness reports and other forms of textual evidence point to their significance at other actions also. For example, the April 18, 1998 in Vancouver was aurally accompanied by drums, guitars and a trumpet (Direct Action Media Network (DAMN) list report). Drums can pound out a uniting dance beat both in the absence of, or alongside, electronically generated aural stimuli, further the types used tend to be highly portable as such provide an accompaniment which can confound event the most committed police attempts to close the party down; they are also cheaper to replace than a sound system to replace should the police impound them. Local dance crews and DJs are the key source of the non-acoustic vibes; with a big party, in a relatively secure space, events can even branch out to become substantial dance events in their own right. Sydney has seen a number of such events including one on Sunday, February 22 in 1998, whose scale is described by a first-time RTSer: Pretty soon the whole street was grooving to the funky sounds of the main PA, while the smaller "chill" PA pumped out some very danceable hop-hop & dancehall reggae. The third PA was for live acts, & being on a hill it was ideal for sitting under the shadecloth to watch. The music was varied, a bit of everything to keep the diverse gatherinG [sic] happy. (Ferguson, 1998: Ausrave-Digest)

Clearly, not all sites can support an event on this scale. Brisbane's three RTS actions have been centred around a more modest single sound system (as well as impromptu acoustic support). At the second event (May 16, 1998), even this single system did not really get to do its stuff with the police moving in on the relatively small crowd fairly early on in the event, their energies focussed on confiscating the equipment which was eventually removed - supporting car trailer and all - on the back of a RACQ tray tow truck - it is at times such as these that the back-up option of percussive beats really comes into its own. Ultimately, while the evolution of RTS actions is unmistakably entwined with that of the rave scene (or more accurately in the case of Australia the doof scene, for want of a better term), the music generated at the events is in no way obliged to be electronic dance inspired. 8 Returning to a discussion of the more generic features of RTS actions, people, clearly manifesting divergent levels of preparation set about 'beautifying' and 'reclaiming' the street for the use of people (as distinct from vehicles). Some may bring whistles, cushions, rugs, paint and food, others games to play (frisbees and hackysacks being popular choices) or trees to plant. Events held around the world all follow a similar sort of trajectory. For example, the following is a description of a Toronto RTS event in 1998: Orange traffic cones, signs, car bumpers specially decorated for the event, sofas, barrels, drums, and boxes of free food magically appeared on the street, drawing the crowd that had gathered in the park onto the street. All the energy that was flowing around in the park crystallized into a mass

8. To the degree that it disrupted my generic expectations of the sorts of sounds I typically associate with RTS events, I was struck by the inclusion of tracks from the early 1990s US expressly antiestablishment act 'The Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy' at the most recent Brisbane RTS (June 6, 2000) event. This more overtly polemic choice of soundtrack may be linked to the fact that this RTS action was undertaken at this time to coincide with the presence in Brisbane of large numbers of environmentally active students who were attending the annual 'Students and Sustainability Conference'. Although, this Brisbane example is certainly not just a lone aberration from an otherwise strictly techno RTS menu: Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World' signalled the beginning of London's May 1995 Camden High Street party (Jordan, 'The Art of Necessity': 142).

movement to reclaim public space from the enclosed private arena and challenge the centers of power and wealth. Free food, music, laughter, play and colors replaced the sterility and uniformity of corporate consumer culture. The street, usually a mere metal conduit driven by greed and speed, was turned into a dance floor, a dining room, a theater, a play ground for people to enjoy life and assert the beauty of community. (DAMN list report 1998) Police responses are perhaps the greatest variable in the whole equation; they vary depending on the location, the degree of disruption caused by the event, the seniority and predisposition of the police personnel involved, and the attitudes exhibited by those involved in the protest action. Music and dance are an essential element in RTS actions. This is hardly a new thing. Street theatre, music (particularly drumming) and singing are established and valued vehicles for oppositional action alongside, and generally subservient to, the more conventional protest march and speaker list. However RTS uses music and dance as its primary focus; no (or few) speeches are made, and the actions ideally seek to claim positive space, only being oppositional or negative to the degree that they hope to draw attention to society's deficits through positive example. There are exceptions to this. RTS protests/festivals are linked, through their participants and aims, to wider political struggles, in particular, activism in the industrialised world specifically directed at meetings of global trade organisations. RTS protesters were active at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle and will be later this year at the next meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Melbourne. It is also important to note that the RTS movement is not only an umbrella concept under which to organise and loosely connect mass actions. If it were a 'dot.com' company, RTS's name would be a valuable commodity in a market were product awareness is everything. As an anti-capitalist vehicle the name is patently without copyright, free to be used by

anyone seeking a focus for their actions. To this end, an unquantifiable number of smaller scale protests are also conducted in its name; these may simply be graffiti runs, or, more practically and innovatively, the professional quality painting up of new bikepaths on roadways overnight. Thus it can be clearly seen that RTS actions set out to use the pleasures generated by dance, music and the spirit of carnival as on oppositional tool seeking to inspire through example, but how useful is this as an oppositional strategy? While the specific vehicle of the festival may mark RTS's difference from other forms of direct action politics, the question needs to be asked: in what ways and to what degree is it useful as a contemporary model for oppositional action in industrialised nations such as Australia? The thesis posited by Daniel Martin in his article 'Power Play and Party Politics' exemplifies the sort of arguments made in support of raving as a resistant strategy. Commenting on the early scene in the United Kingdom, he argues that dance parties resist 'the very possibility of being incorporated into the realm of governmentality as we know it'. (Martin, 1999: 95) For: While generating profit, its hedonism denies the side of capitalism that stresses the deferral of gratification and, at its best (when raves are thrown in order to throw a good party, as opposed to opening a club to make money), it denies the basis of exploitation upon which capitalism is built. (Martin, 1999: 85) A bold claim, but one that is frequently made from within, and on behalf of, the 'rave' community. It is precisely this spirit of the rave/dance party that RTS aspires to bring out into the harsh light of day. Methodologically, the 'spontaneous' urban guerilla-style tactics informing RTS and other road protest practice are often compared to the ideas espoused by the Situationiste Internationale (SI), and this is a connection acknowledged by some

punters and commentators. 9 The SI are perhaps best known for their involvement in the events in France preceding and of May 1968 when a student uprising provided the trigger for wider political unrest including a general strike, but the SI were active over a far greater period than this. Formed in 1957, the SI brought together a number of likeminded artists and intellectuals excited by such avant garde movements as those inspired by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The Lettrist International, lead by Guy Debord, merged at this time with another group, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (MIBI), and it is from this union that the SI rose. Underlying all SI action and thought was a commitment to the basic premise that the everyday and art should not be two mutually exclusive spheres of social life, hence the 'situationist' call for artists to: to break down the divisions between individual art forms and to create situations, constructed encounters and creatively lived moments in specific urban settings, instances of a critically transformed everyday life. They were to produce settings for situations and experimental models of possible modes of transformation of the city, as well as to agitate and polemicize

9. For example, Klein, N (2000) in her popularly received book No Logo, London: Flamingo (HarperCollins), declares RTS "the most vibrant and fastest-growing political movement since Paris '68" (312). Later, the comparison is demonstrated explicitly in a discussion of the RTS event held on the M41 in London: "Two people dressed in elaborate carnival costumes sat thirty feet above the roadway, perched on scaffolding contraptions that were covered by huge hoop skirts ...... . The police standing by had no idea that underneath the skirts were guerilla gardeners with jackhammers, drilling holes in the highway and planting saplings in the asphalt. The RTSers--die-hard Situationist fans--had made their point: "Beneath the tarmac...a forest," a reference to the Paris '68 slogan, "Beneath the cobblestones...a beach." "(313) Additionally, the SI have emerged as a point of reference in informal conversations I have had with people both at and about RTS actions (sometimes in connection with Bey's idea of the TAZ), and a quick search of internet sites where RTS is discussed will reveal a similar trend. A further example of an overt published instance of such a linkage is Newman, S (1999) "Temporary Autonomous Zone", American Book Review v.21 n.1, November-December. More tangential links also occur in relation to the closely related anti-capitalist technique of 'culture jamming' (as détournement) in Plant, S (1992) The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, London and New York: Routledge, and with regard to the frequently utopian imagery around raves in Reynolds, S (1997) 'Rave Culture: Living Dream or Living Death?', in The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies, Ed. Redhead, S, Wynne, D and O'Connor, J, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell.

against the sterility and oppression of the actual environments and ruling economic and political system. (Wollen, 1989: 22, drawing on Debord, 'Rapport sur la construction des situations et les conditions de l'organisation et de l'action de la tendance situationniste internationale') 10 Peter Marshall, in his extended history of anarchism, offers the following summary of the key premise underpinning the SI: Under capitalism, the creativity of most people had become diverted and stifled, and society had been divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers. The Situationists therefore wanted a different kind of revolution: they wanted the imagination, not a group of men, to seize power, and poetry and art to be made by all. Enough! they declared. To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Create and construct the eternal festival. (Marshall, 1993: 550) To these ends, such artistic 'actions' or 'moments' would "take place in quotidian, everyday uses of the city and its buildings" (Sussman, 1989: 4); an idea which has clear resonances with the methodologies of contemporary 'Reclaim The Streets' activists, thus explaining at least in part the appeal of the SI and its ideas to this later cohort of urban critics. However, if RTS were to unquestioningly employ the SI's model for action as its chosen modus operandi it would remain open to the same criticisms which can be made of the former. Most problematically, SI strategies fall into that classic trap of being underscored by the idea of false consciousness. Conducting his own summation of the value of the SI and their ideas, the increasingly cynical Christopher Gray (who

10. Much of the disparate body of SI writing remains untranslated into English. I am therefore dependent upon, and grateful for, the translations and interpretations of some of the more obscure of the SI's textual output offered by others in their own English language publications, especially, in this section, that offered by Peter Wollen in his overview 'Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of the Situationist International'.

was himself involved in the SI) still concedes the value of the movement in articulating the ways in which the twentieth century consumer remained as alienated from the power to direct their own life as the nineteenth century worker had been. Further, in a statement which resonates with prevalent contemporary discourses which talk of skyrocketing stress levels and ambivalent experiences of personal satisfaction, he rather categorically states: [t]he S.I. showed exactly how loneliness and anxiety and aimlessness have replaced the nineteenth century struggle for material survival, though they are still generated by the same class society. They focussed on immediate experience, everyday life as the area most people wanted to transform. (Gray, 1981: 24) However as he is keen to point out, such sentiments patently reek of the accusation of 'false consciousness'; thus the SI appear to take for granted an idea of the public as some sort of indistinguishable, homogeneous mass, clearly requiring the intervention of elite, avant garde intellectuals to set it straight on what it really wants, and herein lies the main problem with the SI and its ideas. Gray continues: What was basically wrong with the S.I. was that it focused exclusively on an intellectual critique of society. There was no concern whatsoever with either the emotions or the body. The S.I. thought that you just had to show how the nightmare worked and everyone would wake up. Their quest was for the perfect formula, the magic charm that would disperse the evil spell. This pursuit of the perfect intellectual formula meant inevitably that situationist groups were based on a hierarchy of intellectual ability--and thus on disciples and followers, on fears and exhibitionism, the whole political horror trip. After their initial period, creativity, apart from its intellectual forms, was denied expression--and in this lies the basic instability and sterility of their own organisations. (Gray, 1981: 24)

Or to put it more simply: "they thought that everyone was plain thick" (Gray, 1981: 24). It would be easy to dismiss the RTS movement by tarring it with the same brush. Certainly the vast majority of the participants have at least a cursory level of higher educational experience and uphold elements, at least on some level, of a classic leftist platform. But as we have seen, the RTS's 'artistic' eruptions foreground embodiment and sensory pleasure, pushing side for the moment at least an intellectual or theoretical approach to oppositional consciousness raising. Furthermore, while the intent may fall far short of being realised in practice, RTS events - like the ideal rave upon which they are based - aim to be inclusive and to embrace all-comers. Not everyone is interpellated by this particular manifestation of the spirit of carnivale, nor do they feel able to approach a group of people who do tend to be young, welleducated, largely (but certainly not exclusively) white, generally dressed in at least a moderately non-conformist manner and claiming space by means of thumping techno beats. But many are, including many people I have been surprised to see 'come to the party' as it were, having made the sort of glib assessment we make everyday on the basis of highly problematic stereotypes. Ironically, commercial appropriation of subcultural styles by mainstream culture industries, such as the current fashion for the marks of the 'urban primitive' (piercings, tattoos, dreadlocks, et cetera), works to familiarise and hence render less threatening such markers, consequently widening out the possible audience open to RTS actions. Exemplified in the British scene's early mantra of 'PLUR': Peace, Love, Unity and Respect, raving ideally, involves everyone in a community which looks after its own and which welcomes into itself anyone who comes in good faith. Still today at those events, where those with some experience of this sense of mythic community go, the possibility exists that a sense of responsibility towards one another may be present. At the most recent Brisbane RTS event, the marshals charged with securing free passage out of the area for those whose Land Rovers and Jaguars (and I am not exaggerating here) had become corralled by the

party, went about the task with the specific purpose of neither alienating nor unduly inconveniencing these people who arguably metonymically represented the very constructions of self the movement seeks for us to seek out and banish within ourselves. Another way in which the raving-based RTS may avoid the pitfalls of Situationist tactics as espoused by the SI is that for many of the dance music scene's participants interested in such ideas, their understanding of the SI and its raison d'etre comes filtered through the writings of 'ontological anarchist' Hakim Bey. Bey, and his musings on what he coins the Temporary Autonomous Zone' (or TAZ for short), have themselves achieved something of a mythic status in rave circles (Bey, 1991). First performed and broadcast as a spoken word performance in 1990, Bey's prose espouses a call for people to seek out and occupy those spaces which have fallen through the 'net' of governmental or corporate systems of regulation. Romantically drawing inspiration from the 'mini-societies', positioned physically outside of the control of nation states, which functioned as home bases for the "sea-rovers and corsairs" or, as they are more commonly referred to, pirates of the eighteenth century, Bey hopes that is possible for people in this day and age where everything appears to be mapped and 'discovered', to find, at least temporarily, "free enclaves" (Bey, 1991: 97-99). Bey refuses to tie down the idea of the TAZ to a contained definition, although he does posit [t]he sixties-style "tribal gathering," the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles . . . Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, oldtime libertarian picnics as just a few examples of the sorts of "rootless cosmopolitan" spaces he envisages (Bey, 1991: 106). Bey further offers the ideas of the party or festival as key models for the sort of revolution of the self and community he wishes to evoke:

Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always "open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial. The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss .....(Bey, 1991: 106)

Drawing as he does on the ideas of key figures in critical theory and other intellectual fields (Saussurian semiotics, Hegel, Fourier, the SI, Bataille, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Thoreau, Bakunin, Nietzsche, McLuhan, Virilio, the Surrealists, Baudrillard, Foucault, Kropotkin, and Chomskyan linguistics are all invoked in the essay), Bey's prose is perhaps a classic example of the sort of thing Russo had in mind when she expressed reservations regarding the fact that what "has come to be called "theory" has constituted [itself] a kind of carnival space" taking licenses stylistically (Russo, 1986: 221). It certainly says something about the community of people involved in such things as RTS that significant numbers of them are able to make any sense of such a intellectually intertextual document in the first case. I do not have the space here to do justice to his writings. Nor do I want to leave you with the idea that I uncritically accept them and the utopia they theoretically offer, but in terms of the object under discussion in this paper - the RTS movement - Bey's words resonate with a group on the whole marked by its cultural capital, which is arguably actively attempting to find a praxis informed by their exposure to ideas and skills at university. To put it in Harawayian terms: that many RTS participants wish to explore in practice the theoretical possibilities they have encountered as theory could be construed as a

form of situated knowledge; the use, rather than denial, of the tools at hand, imperfect though they may be. Reflecting over a decade later on his famous tract Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord in his typically witty aphoristic manner comments in regard to the role of knowledge within consumer societies, where he argues everything is reduced to glorious - but empty - spectacle, that "spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon" (Debord, 1991: 10). Appealing as such a metaphor may be, it can easily be inverted such that it is Debord and other leftist intellectuals who have long employed knowledge as a club with which to beat others about the head. There are a number of issues which I have only been able to briefly touch upon here but which need to be followed up further. For instance, ultimately how useful are RTS actions as part of a wider political agenda? Linked to this: to what degree are RTS actions for most of the participants their only foray into activist politics and one they will eventually tire of as a trend? Certainly at the second RTS event I attended in Brisbane when push came to shove - so to speak - the people present to simply be 'part of the scene' were soon separated from the more committed rave activists. As previously mentioned, the vast majority of dance music culture researchers eschew traditional subcultural studies approaches as they pertain to subcultures and resistance. Nonetheless, there are still those who wish to explore the potential value of 'stylistic' resistance. Martin's article typifies such a position while additionally bringing to the fore the question: at what point, or to what degree, is 'escape' a useful political strategy given resistance qua resistance is still inherently contained within the very same dominant paradigm which it seeks to overturn? While, as one friend cynically commented to me, a TAZ is only briefly the thing you have before the police arrive, a successful RTS action enthuses and re-energises those present. Given that this is just one small part of people's lives and praxis, this has hidden personal and social

benefits as people perform their other roles, other jobs, in other networks of influence in society. As Hetherington writes in relation to Britain's New Age Travellers, People sometimes seek to express their moral opposition to some aspect of society through some form of event, be it a march, a demonstration or a festival. In doing so they also affirm their own opposition to society, their belonging with others who feel the same way, and help to reproduce the identity that they have chosen. (Hetherington, 2000: 46) A similar point is posited by Shields in his discussion of the beach as a liminal site of pleasure, were he comments that: [a]gainst the reigning theoretical dichotomy of production spacesconsumption spaces, the case of Brighton suggests that we must also take into consideration the contention that the erotic release of the carnival on the beach is productive in the sense that it reunites, recreates and rejuventates the person. (Shields, 'The 'System of Pleasure': 67). It is within such a framework that I would therefore contend that a successful RTS action provides for the activists present a carnivalesque sense of release. However, I do not believe that this is necessarily one which empties participants of all oppositional energies, in the sense in which festival spaces have been frequently posited as 'safety valves', providing a contained space within the dominant culture from which to 'let off steam', for two primary reasons. Firstly, the release offered by fun and/or festive political actions can serve (to employ yet more pseudo-electronic metaphors), a circuit breaker in the cycles of 'burn-out' commonly identified among communities of activists. Secondly, and significantly, RTS actions do not operate within the logic of the dominant ordering of space and time: they are not a sanctioned event, and therefore do mark a site at which the dominance of the prevailing temporal social ordering is questioned, if not challenged.

Within such a context, I believe that the use of 'fun' as a political strategy is a valuable tactic. Further, the stylish appeal of such actions is not inherently a negative for RTS, indeed it is something to be explicitly exploited in the service of a desire to build a wider movement. To quote from the London RTS online information site: importantly, RTS is about encouraging more people to take part in direct action. Everyone knows the destruction which roads and cars are causing, yet the politicians still take no notice. Hardly surprising - they only care about staying in power and maintaining their 'authority' over the majority of people. Direct action is about destroying that power and authority, and people taking responsibility for themselves. Direct action is not just a tactic; it is an end in itself. (RTS London, 1997: http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/ evol.htm) There is no pure position 'outside' ideology; to claim that there is, and to indiscriminately deride those who engage with what they find around them is to seek a naive and impossible 'high moral ground'. RTS actions allow people to express positively what is a rather hard core (r)evolutionary politics by juxtaposing it with plain good old-fashioned fun. Or, to borrow an aphorism from Naomi Klein, "RTS is just playful and ironic enough to finally make earnestness possible" (317). Such ludic modus operandi have revitalised direct action politics at a time when discourses proclaiming widespread political apathy, the 'death of socialism' and the so-called 'crisis in the left', not to mention the meme of 'political correctness' which has been successfully employed to marginalise or simply deride progressive voices in the industrialised world, have been repeated so often they have become naturalised. Reclaim The Streets and similar actions mark a return to visibility and, indeed, popularity for direct action (witness the present frequency and scale of protests against undemocratic International Economic Organisations, such as the WTO and WEF), which never actually went away, but which in the 1990s in countries such as

Australia, had mainly been identified as the sole province of 'extremist' environmental and/or anti-militarist - single-issue' - campaigns.

Susan Luckman Media and Cultural Studies Centre School of English, Media Studies and Art History University of Queensland

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