Christodoulou, C. 2023. Speed Limits: Accelerationism, Popular Futurism and the Decline of Jungle Drum and Bass. DC23. University of Huddersfield 19 - 20 Oct 2023 Dancecult Research Network.
| Title | Speed Limits: Accelerationism, Popular Futurism and the Decline of Jungle Drum and Bass |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christodoulou, C. |
| Type | Conference paper |
| Abstract | The parallel development in the 1990s of jungle drum and bass as one of the most recognisable electronic dance music (EDM) genres to emphasise speed as a core experience, and the accelerationist movement, whose exponents, such as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), promoted the social, economic, and libidinal forces that constitute the process of acceleration, suggests a coterminous acknowledgment of the desirability and inevitability of speed as a popular technocultural discourse. Indeed, the CCRU claimed in 1996 that jungle was ‘not just music’ but ‘the abstract diagram of planetary inhuman becoming’. While the genre’s time-stretched breakbeats, powerful bass riffs, and accompanying sonic, visual, and lexical references to both speed and a pervasive ‘dark’ thematization, suggesting the potential of acceleration to unleash future states of dehumanisation, the radical futurism of jungle drum and bass has since dissipated, paradoxically revealing that the techno-capitalist driving force behind accelerated culture has succumbed to stasis and inertia. This paper examines the diminished cultural profile of jungle drum and bass – a genre that had previously been considered at the vanguard of sonic futurism based on its articulations of post-human speed – ironically, at a time of intensified cultural acceleration and interest in post-human subjective states. It will address tensions and contractions in accelerationist debates about the future – now signified as a settled set of concepts, affects, and associations that had largely entered the cultural consciousness through film, video games, and other image-based media, rather than specifically through EDM – to suggest that the speeding-up of culture by techno-capitalism is accompanied by a schizophrenic temporality that eliminates the possibility of transcending the past and the human, and, consequently, short-circuiting the ability to forge new futures. |
| Keywords | Keywords: accelerationism; breakbeat; futurism; jungle drum and bass; speed |
| Year | 2023 |
| Conference | DC23 |
| Publisher | Dancecult Research Network |
| Accepted author manuscript | File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Web address (URL) | https://cream.ac.uk/events/dc23-conference/ |