Rave Culture and Religion

Graham St John

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134379712
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The collection provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and millennialist predispositions of dance culture, and investigations of transnational digital-art countercultures manifesting at geographic locations as diverse as Goa, India, and Nevada's Burning Man festival. Contributors examine raving as a new religious or revitalization movement; a powerful locus of sacrifice and transgression; a lived bodily experience; a practice comparable with world entheogenic rituals; and as evidencing a new Orientalism. Rave Culture and Religion will be essential reading for advanced students and academics in the fields of sociology, cultural studies and religious studies.

Part I

Techno culture spirituality

1 The difference engine

Liberation and the rave imaginary

Graham St John

[The] insurrectionary ‘noise’ or chaos of TAZs, uprisings, refusals and epiphanies…will release a hundred blooming flowers, a thousand, a million memes of resistance, of difference, of non-ordinary consciousness – the will to power as ‘strangeness’.

(Bey 1995)

The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the growth of non-traditional desires for ‘religious experience’, for liberation in the sense Heelas (1998: 7) identified as the postmodern quest for personal freedoms, for difference, without seeking essential, or fundamental, difference. With a rich inheritance from earlier explorations, saturated with the tinctures of Eastern religion and Western psychotherapy, contemporary self-othering is textured by a farrago of beliefs and practices transparent in communications with the Otherworld, and in the transcendence devices of psychoactives, new technologies and consumer experiences agglomerated in public events – those ‘privileged point[s] of penetration’ (Handelman 1990: 9) and theatres for the performance of ‘ultimate’ or ‘implicit’ concerns (Bailey 1997: 9). In recent times, a growing corpus of work has introduced sites accommodating alternative spiritualities, gathering places for those ‘hypersyncretic’ seekers of self and enchantment that Sutcliffe calls a ‘virtuosic avant-garde’ (2000: 30). Mike Niman’s People of the Rainbow (1997), Adrian Ivakhiv’s Claiming Sacred Ground (2001) and Sarah Pike’s Earthly Bodies, Magic Selves (2001a), for example, document the appearance of festivals and gatherings ‘exemplifying the migration of religious meaning-making activities out of…temples and churches into otherspaces’ (Pike 2001a: 5). Here the proliferating culture of rave and its expressive otherspaces will receive such attention.

Navigating a vast body of material and research, this chapter explores the significance of liberation and freedom in the rave imaginary, in the process offering signposts to the subsequent chapters. Rave demonstrates signs of that which Bozeman calls a ‘technological millenarianism’ pervading popular culture which, in nations like the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Australia, boils down to a faith in technological innovation to ‘bring forth a better future beginning here and now’ (1997: 155). Attending to the millennialist trope in post-rave, it is surmized that while commonly holding status as a portal to the utopic, as a means to the Millennium, it is hyper-millennial in character, possessing variant salvific trajectories. As a zone of outrageous difference, a difference engine, the dance party is found to be a substantial node of indeterminacy for its inhabitants – providing youth with an uncertain passage experience typical of contemporary life.

The spiritual ‘rave-o-lution’

Rave is no mere event, a temporal gathering of ravers. We would be unwise to overlook the global parameters of ‘techno-tribalism’ and its accelerating culture industry if our intention is a comprehensive investigation of rave’s religiosity.¹ In digital art, screen-based animations and 3D projections, alongside computer-generated music itself; in the ‘conceptechnics’ of ‘sonic fiction’ (Eshun 1998) inscribed in voice samples, event themes, artist names and on flyers, CD covers and a labyrinth of websites; in proliferating CD-ROMS, novels, zines, street press, galleries, video texts and online discussion forums; in films and documentaries; in fashion accessories from streetwear to ultra-violet-reactive art tapestries; in figureheads like Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna and Ray Castle. The whole chain inflects a congruent imaginary which, as we shall see, hosts an alternative or ‘expressive spirituality’. By contrast to Christianity (which divides creator from created), in what Heelas (2000: 243) calls an expressive spirituality (typically manifest in ‘New Age’ and sometimes ‘Neo-Paganism’), the divine Self serves as the font of authority, wisdom and judgement. With expressive spirituality, one is driven to:

seek liberation from the contaminating effects of society and culture; seek genuine experience; seek to express all that one truly is as a spiritual being; and – for many – seek to experience and nurture all that is embedded within nature, beyond the reach of the artificial, the power games of the lower self, the destructive implementation of the technological.

(Heelas 2000: 243)

Yet, as technology is essential to the cultural business of rave, and is integral to the quest for ‘genuine experience’, for vitality, wholeness and connection, for love, our approach must disassociate from that which would dismiss or abandon technologies or, indeed, psychotechnologies, as ‘inauthentic’. Amplifying a sampladelic sensibility conveying a relativistic faith in the ‘truth’ of multiple paths, in options cut ’n’ pasted in the ongoing process of identity formation, and in the conceptual architecture of events, digital and cyber technologies are accomplices to an expressive humanism. And, as ravers circulate amongst a growing milieu of spiritual seekers who ‘select, synthesize and exchange amongst an increasing diversity of religious and secular options and perspectives’ (Sutcliffe 1997: 105), rave becomes a provisional node in an emergent network of ‘seeking’.

An unmistakable rapture resounds through rave’s cultural accretion – its technological assemblage long underwritten by an evidential gnostic drive. The rave ‘techgnosis’ manifests as a kind of ‘occult mechanics’ capable of liberating the self through esoteric gnosis: ‘a mystical breakthrough of total liberation, an influx of knowing oneself to be part of the genuine godhead, of knowing oneself to be free’ (Davis 1998: 94). In his Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), Erik Davis documents how the techno-liberationist flame, reignited throughout Western history, has conflagrated with the advent of the digital age. I suggest that the flame gutters yet glows in techno-rave, which is often felt to communicate, or potentiate, a profound sense of freedom, of recognition, often glossed as ‘the gnosis’. With rave, this direct familiarity is associated with the collective experience of ecstatic dance. Ekstasis has often been considered to rupture gender-identity boundaries by liberating, or ‘disarticulating’, dominant feminine/masculine subjectivities (Gilbert and Pearson 1999: 104–5; see also Pini 2001), or more broadly, attending to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘micropolitics of desire’, through a sensuous intervention in the regulation of desire (Hemment 1996: 26–7; Jordan 1995) – processes which can be tracked through house music’s gay underground (see Apollo 2001) to various post-rave trajectories. Yet, while rave licenses a carnal knowing evident in the night-long intimacy of the dance floor, the gnostic ‘knowing’ may be catalysed by an ekstasis which, as Hemment reminds us, citing Heidegger and not wanting to deny rave its ‘hermeneutic depth’, means ‘a difference or a standing out from the surface of life’s contingencies…[enabling] a more profound contemplation of being’ (Hemment 1996: 23).

According to psychotherapist and rave proselytizer Richard Spurgeon, the ‘quickening has begun’. But ‘are you willing to become all you have the potential to be?’ ‘The truth is’, he states, ‘YOU, like Neo in The Matrix, are the One. Your very self is the doorway to the Infinite and the eternal’.² When Spurgeon moves on to postulate that rave is the space of ‘awakening’, that the edge of the dance floor is ‘the edge of a vast remembering’ upon which the physical earthly realm merges with the heavenly, and that to be a party to this experience amounts to rapture, he’s articulating a strong gnostic theme. The theme of illumination is even stronger in a piece inspired by goings-on in the Arizona desert, and is worth quoting at length:

Remember 2001 A Space Odyssey? When a tribe of Neanderthals woke up to the giant monolith planted in their midst? Raves remind me a lot of that scene. When I watch a group of sweaty dancers rest their heads on the metallic grill of a giant, black speaker and attach their trembling chests to the gaping mouth of a pulsating woofer, I instantly remember the same ape, 2 million years ago, touching, sniffing and kissing the unfamiliar and fascinating dark object. Raves are about our future. They inspire us to become aware of our selves, our surroundings and our humanity. They are about how we will come together as a species and how we will treat each other. They are about how we will communicate and express our thoughts and emotions to one another. We only need to remember that raves are NOT a way of life. They are a ritual. An exercise for the soul as well as the body. We need to realize that the monolith we climbed the night before was only there to inspire us. We cannot take it to work with us for moral support and we cannot hide behind it to avoid life’s strict requirements. We also need to accept that not everyone can, or wishes, to be a part of our ritual. We need to respect others for choosing different paths and not be disappointed if we are not accepted by them. Despite the overwhelming strength we draw from raving, we have to be the first to admit that we’re no better than anyone else. If we are to promote peace, love, unity and respect we need to accept all others before we expect them to accept us.

(Ramy 1999)

In this extraordinary statement, rave is made synonymous with the black stone, the ‘prima materia’ or Philosopher’s Stone which, in alchemical lore, is capable of transmuting humankind and which, according to interpretation (see Weidner 2000), inspired Stanley Kubrick’s black monolith in 2001. While Spurgeon’s rhetoric may be obscure, and Ramy’s statement relatively unknown, an awakening thesis reappears in the web-saturated ‘Raver’s Manifesto’, where it is stated that ‘in the heat, dampness, and darkness’ of the womb-like party,

we came to accept that we are all equal. Not only to the darkness, and to ourselves, but to the very music slamming into us and passing through our souls: we are all equal. And somewhere around 35Hz we could feel the hand of God at our backs, pushing us forward, pushing us to push ourselves to strengthen our minds, our bodies, and our spirits. Pushing us to turn to the person beside us to join hands and uplift them by sharing the uncontrollable joy we felt from creating this magical bubble that can, for one evening, protect us from the horrors, atrocities, and pollution of the outside world. It is in that very instant, with these initial realizations that each of us was truly born.³

A dawning, a new beginning, rebirth? It seems pertinent to note at this juncture that the party is more than a pre-linguistic womb, that rave, as Pini (2001: 157) remarks, speaks, and that, while it is pregnant with possibility, what it communicates is not uniform or predictable, and that what is delivered may be mutant. It is also apparent that, if rave speaks, if it reveals information, then it often speaks in tongues evincing bricolage à la carte (Possamai 2002: 203), an effusion consistent with its syncretic digestion of existing symbol systems, philosophies and theologies. Nevertheless, while its message may be scrambled, postures and micro-narratives can be read from the texts, praxis and detritus of techno-rave youth culture, the gnosis transparent in moods decidedly ascensionist and/or re-enchanting.

Rave ascension

Rave is redolent with anticipation and promise. An assemblage of electronic, computer and audio-visual technologies that has descended amidst contemporary youth, techno-rave anticipates a posthumanist awakening. Remastering the inward turn of expressive spirituality, post-rave is pitched to potentiate the evolution of the self and, more broadly, human consciousness. According to Adrian Ivakhiv,

[the] evolutionary potential of humanity is often modeled on the motif of ‘ascension’ to higher levels or dimensions of existence, and ascensionist literature makes frequent use of quasi-scientific language to describe the ‘higher frequencies’, ‘vibrations’, ‘light quotients’ and ‘energy bodies’, energy shifts and DNA changes, that are said to be associated with this epochal shift.

(Ivakhiv 2001: 8)

From its emergence in the UK and subsequent export to North America and elsewhere, adopting out-of-body science futurisms like Fraser Clark’s Megatripolitans (see Chapter 11), ‘the Singularity’, or promising a digitized dawning, rave culture – its literature, films, flyers, websites, etc. – is replete with ascensionism.

Nineties confidence in a tech-triggered consciousness evolution had a champion in Douglas Rushkoff, whose pop-anthropology of denizens of the early 1990s ‘datasphere’, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (1994), possessed the cartological premise of charting new youth cultures whose appropriation of cyber, chemical and audio-visual technologies was enabling them to ‘explore unmapped realms of consciousness…to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully’ (Rushkoff 1994: 19). In a gush of technophilia, Rushkoff observed that, in collusion with psychedelics, computers, chaos mathematics and feedback loops, the house/rave was facilitating ‘the hardwiring of a global brain’, an interconnected virtualized Otherworld: ‘Cyberia’. Exemplifying the celebrated ‘posthuman lift-off from biology, gravity and the twentieth century’ Dery admonishes as a ‘theology of the ejector seat’ (1996: 17), in Cyberia, ‘the age upon us now might take the form of categorical upscaling of the human experience onto uncharted, hyperdimensional turf (ibid.: 18). As a strong cultural ‘meme’, itself resembling groupmind-like cyberspatial networks, such that dancing might be like surfing a transpersonal horizon, rave is heavily implicated in this ‘cyberian paradigm’.

With an enthusiasm for ‘designer reality’, where humans ‘alter their consciousness intentionally through technology’ (Rushkoff 1994: 289), Rushkoff combines Extropian teleology with New Age ‘Self-spirituality’ (Heelas 1996) – a fusion redolent in a great deal of rave discourse and practice. Inheriting the idealism of the 1960s, the business acumen of the 1980s and adopting the techno-perfectionism of the 1990s, those operating within post-rave culture industries have sought to catalyse individuation through the rave machine. Guiding initiates along new paths of self-discovery, DJs are often heralded, or self-identify, as shamanic (Hutson 1999), a status earlier conferred upon disco and house legends like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles, or are perhaps more accurately master drummers who, as in Santeria, keep the beat for the dancers while always remaining sober, never possessed (Twist 1999: 107). The contemporary technicians of the self (including VJs and multimedia installation artists), manipulate an assemblage of ‘psychotechnologies’ (Ross 1992: 539–40), sampling art like that of visionary transformational artist Alex Grey, facilitating vision quests and self-revelations, opening crown chakras and portals to the transcendent, enabling collective consciousness. To take one example, for self-styled ‘trancetheologian’ Ray Castle, ‘it’s like psychic surgery’: the party raises ‘the kundalini serpent energy in the body’s chakra system’, and with the right setting and sonic progression ‘you rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Techno culture spirituality
• Part II Dance, rapture and communion
• Part III Music: the techniques of sound and ecstasy
• Part IV Global tribes: the technomadic counterculture
• Index