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Collectivity and Affect in Crisis Times: Dancing in Berlin, 1989-2020 (Crowds, Affects, Cities Seminar Series)

Wednesday 16th December, 2020

20:00-21:00, Zoom (registration required)

The Fall of the Berlin Wall launched a wave of ecstatic raving and clubbing across Berlin. That wave’s force has carried the city’s clubbing scene right through to today—although it has met an unforeseen break in this year of Covid restrictions. For thirty years, the thump of bass has never gone so silent. In this paper, I’ll put my previous work on ecstasy and melancholy in Berlin around 1989 in dialogue with recent developments, as clubbers, DJs and producers contend with a moment in which collectives and crowds have become sites of anxiety. I’ll consider the attempts to replicate the clubbing experience online, as well as the irrepressible raving energies that have seen illegal parties take place against stringent public health measures.

Ben Gook is lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. He was previously an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin and an associate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion in Melbourne. Relevant publications includeDivided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) and “Ecstatic Melancholic: Ambivalence, Electronic Music and Social Change around the Fall of the Berlin Wall” in Emotions: History, Culture, Society (2017). He also has a forthcoming book, Feeling Alienated: How Alienation Returned in Contemporary Capitalism, which will be available in the Histories of Emotions and the Senses series with Cambridge University Press in 2021.