The idea of a database would be somewhat terrifying, I imagine, for the things that are databased (or archived), if they had the capacity to feel terrified. To be swallowed up by the endless object-pool of the internet is to be flattened out into sameness and obscurity. Gone are the hierarchical or affective qualities that we attribute to our scuffed record sleeves, spattered recipes, tear-stained diary entries and creased love letters — online archival tools such as email, YouTube and Itunes have successfully erased the traces that make objects significant (or even worthy of archiving), yet have also redefined the archive in terms of efficiency and ease of use. Lev Manovich recognizes this shift, writing, “New media does not radically break with the past; rather, it distributes weight differently between the categories that hold culture together, foregrounding what was in the background, and vice versa” (13). Not only does the new media database change the way we think about individual components of the archive, it also affects our conception of the narrative that often accompanies these types of catalogues.

Although it is now nearly fifteen years old (the same age, in fact, as Manovich’s article), Turner prize-winner Mark Leckey’s 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is an interesting art object (or collection of objects) from which to examine the re-distribution of narrative “weight” which Manovich addresses. Fiorucci is composed of a selection of found video footage of Manchester’s underground nightlife and dance scene, from the northern soul movement of the late 1960’s to the football casual scene of the eighties and the rave culture of the late-eighties/early-nineties. Leckey avoids overtly chronological ordering, linking these moments together, rather, with themes of nostalgia, youth culture, performance and anonymity. The film is intentionally jarring in its repetition of images and sounds, and although it may seem ambiguous in its narrative direction, it does have at least one clear trajectory: the movement from the individual dancer as subject to his/her subsumption into the throbbing crowd of the many-bodied dance floor. Passage of time is also emphasized, on the surface of the screen itself, by the near-constant presence of a rolling digital time code common to many early-nineties video cameras. The ascending numbers convey a sense of urgency as time is clearly ticking by, while the numbers’ incongruity between unrelated snippets of film supports Fredric Jameson’s definition of postmodern temporality as “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (73). Manovich offers a similar approach to new media objects, which he explains, “do not tell stories” and in fact have no “beginning or end” nor any “development, thematically, formally, or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence” (1). Leckey juxtaposes an awareness of the temporal progression with sudden freeze-frames of dancers’ faces. During these uncanny moments of frozen time, the “present” can be seen to “suddenly engulf” Leckey’s dancer-subjects with “undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming” (Jameson 73). In this way, the viewer of Leckey’s video is also “engulfed” by the feeling of a constant present, and the “vividness” that Jameson describes can also, presumably, serve as an apt description for the rave experience itself.

Manovich notes that if the internet world “appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database — but it is also appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database” (Manovich 2). He writes that database and narrative are “natural enemies” (8), but Fiorucci seems to straddle the space between the two. In a recent interview about his 1999 work, Leckey explains that he was driven by the nostalgia he felt for his youth to recreate “his own past using other peoples’ footage” and “reassemble his memories” using a “collage”-like, non-narrative method (Vimeo). It is this swapping out of our own memories for other peoples’ that is made possible by the features of the database which Manovich describes. How odd, that something as particular as a personal memory could be approximated through others‘ records of like memories. What becomes clear is that the memory, as an object itself, is less unique than we think, but that even in its interchangeability is still capable of producing the kind of affective response that we usually attribute to those creases, spatters and tear stains that materiality offers. Leckey confirms this, saying “It’s quite a sad movie…Fiorucci is an elegy for a time that’s gone” (Vimeo). He goes on to explain that although the film was made before YouTube, “it came about because of technology, because of computers,” thus tying his work to the capabilities of new media databases (Vimeo).

If the concept behind Leckey’s film is complimented by Manovich’s analysis of databases, so too can the “narrative” that Fiorucci takes on be seen to mirror the trajectory Manovich tracks, from old media to new — from hierarchical, special ordering to flattened, non-ordering — in its portrayal of the growing faceless dance floor. Throughout the film, the music to which the club-goers dance is nondescript yet rhythm-heavy; Leckey overlays his footage, culled from various temporal and spatial realms, with one relentless soundtrack of droning bass. The film’s use of relentless disco rhythms gives way to a “disembodied…eroticism” that divests the subjects’ dancing bodies of individualism (Dyer 104). Scott Hutson calls the specific type of movement inspired by electronic dance music “dance as flow” and he notes that this type of dance “merges the act with the awareness of the act, producing self-forgetfulness, a loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of individuality, and fusion with the world” (Hutson 39). In some ways, when dancing to electronic music, the self no longer operates the body. Instead, the movement of the body becomes involuntary, controlled by music and rhythm alone.

Beatrice Aaronson notes that, over time, the dance floor has indeed erased individuality, writing that “techno and rave dance floors have indeed become a ritualistic space of rhythmic cohesion that enhances togetherness and transgresses all constructs of difference…there is no hierarchy” (231). Reynolds points to an individuation of a different sort in Leckey’s film when he emphasizes that the “materiality” Leckey locates in his dancing subjects is, importantly, “insistent but mute” and not quite human in its “limb-dislocating contortions, foetus-pale flesh,” and “maniacal smiles” (Reynolds). This is exactly the kind of monstrous, “fragmented” subject Jameson predicted in “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”

If, according to Jameson, the postmodern subject is no longer “alienated” but “fragmented,” perhaps our urge to synthesize with the crowd is evidence of our residual alienation, and in fact, it is the actual act of blending that fragments us. Jameson writes that, in postmodernity, the “liberation…of the centered subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” (64). He almost skews this lack of self as positive—he writes that feelings are now “free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (64). Jameson portrays the relief from personal relationships and emotions as “euphoric,” similar to the feeling of the dance floor, where dancers are divested of individuality.

…But we have come a long way from my original linking of Leckey’s film and Manovich’s thoughts on database and narrative. Manovich writes that the “open nature of the Web as medium” contributes to its “anti-narrative logic” and that “If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story” (Manovich 4). I’m interested in how a collection can also be a story — or rather how we always read narrative into collections, despite the disparity of its parts, even before the yawning terror of the endless database. Somehow, a video art collage like Fiorucci can host and inspire intense nostalgia for Leckey’s (and countless others’) personal memories without particularity. Does the fact that the Internet-archive is home to countless swappable objects mean that our pursuits of identity-formation are rendered inconsequential? Though Leckey’s film doesn’t follow Mieke Bal’s definition of a “narrative,” it does portray a “series of connected events caused or experienced by actors” (Manovich 11). It’s just that these actors do not remain constant. In fact, it is essential that they change. It seems to be Leckey’s vision that these people are interchangeable — and that their very presence on the dance floor, lost in movement, subsumed into the throbbing crowd, makes it so. 

Works Cited

Aaronson, Beatrice. “Dancing our way out of Class through Funk, Techno or Rave.” Peace Review 11.2 (1999): 231-36. Project Muse. Web. 19 Nov. 2012.

Dyer, Richard. “In Defence of Disco.” 1979. New Formations 58 (2006): 101-108. Print.

Hutson, Scott R. “The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures.” Anthropological Quarterly 7.1 (2000): 35-49.Academic Search Premier. Web. 22 Nov. 2012.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.

Leckey, Mark, dir. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. 1999. YouTube. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. <http://2012popmusictheory.aburke.ca/2012/11/19/fiorucci-made-me-hardcore/>.

Reynolds, Simon. “They Burn so Bright Whilst You Can Only Wonder Why: Watching Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.”Reynolds Retro. Ed. Simon Reynolds. 14 June 2012. Web. 22 Nov. 2012. <http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.ca/2012_06_01_archive.html>.