Clubbing

The club is a place that condenses everyday life and opens up its contradictions. Here we find distortions of reality in this enclosed space and the production of a different reality. There is concealment and display, but what is concealed is produced as effectively as what is deliberately played out. This is the scene. We are dancing in Sankeys Soap in Manchester. We are drinking water. These places are friendlier and safer than the alcohol clubs in north Manchester, where people stagger into each other before being sick in the toilets, where meeting someone's eye could mean getting beaten up, and where people are uncoordinated and angry. We are coordinated but not regimented. We aren't marching, but we move together fast.

The club is a place of simultaneous anonymity and individualization. At one and the same moment, it functions as a city site where a mass of people are brought together who do not know one another. We go to clubs with friends, and we move apart through the course of the evening and encounter each other again from time to time. We may dance in a group, but we cannot speak; communication is broken, and then we become bodies among other bodies. As with much life in the city, there are clusters of distinguishable recognizable faces amidst a crowd of people who are strangers. Here there is also contact. Some guy pushes past another, and their bodies glance against each other. One is rebounding and shouting, and the other shouts back. They mimic each other shouting for a minute or two, but if this is a conversation, it is one without words, and the facial expressions and gestures are each echoing the laughter of the other.

This is a place of speed, and of calm. Someone comments that the speed they take to keep them up with the beat is bitter, more granular, than last time. Not a smooth white powder, but crystalline, displaying the signs of something manufactured, carrying the traces of technology. Someone suggests that it contains glucose, and someone co