French underground raves of the nineties. Aesthetic politics of affect and autonomy

International audience ; This chapter deals with the aesthetic politics of French underground raves in the nineties. It examines theoretical conditions required to address the aesthetic politics of raves. More precisely I criticize the common reductive analysis and the oscillations between celebration and denunciation of techno as a form of stimulation for some passive individuals suffering its effects and being led into the collective trance. Here, I refer not to “aesthetic” in terms of judgment of taste exercised over the music but in terms of a relationship between music and its players and listeners within the process of aesthetic experience. In the same way, what I call “politics” is not related first to the content of the music, or some criticism of the established order that music could express, but to the type of space-time which is created in raves and how it is configured, involving another distribution of the sensible than that of the dominant order. I focus on underground raves, more commonly called “free-parties” in France, and I characterize their aesthetic politics through the articulation of two axes, supplying the momentum of this musical movement: the axis of “potentiation”, related to the power of affective mobilization of the music, and the axis of the “alternative”, where free-parties appear as autonomous organizations corresponding to a process of political subjectivation.