Dancing in the Technoculture

Abstract

This chapter will address a transnational network of relationships within electronic dance music in the context of the machine aesthetic of techno. It will be shown that a sense of a global music scene is nevertheless possible. Beyond historically shaped post-colonial and socio-economic links that underpin a range of global popular cultural forms, the techno aesthetic arguably responds to, and inoculates against, a sense of post-human alienation and a dominance of electronic communication and information technologies of the technoculture. Accompanied by a form of futurism, techno scenes embrace the radical potential of information technologies in a seemingly deterritorialised manner, producing locally specific responses to the global technoculture that can differ in aesthetics and identity politics. In this sense, the electronic dance music floor embodies a plurality of competing “technocracies”.