during ritual performances. Yet, despite their clinicality, these passages betray a
resemblance to contemporary descriptions of the effervescent and ritualized
atmosphere of raves and clubs, such as the following: raving is ‘frenzied behaviour,
extreme enthusiasm, psychedelic delirium...instantaneous, high-impact, sensation-
oriented’ (Reynolds 1999:77).
The ‘electricity’ referred to by Durkheim is also captured in a phrase associated
with the rave experience: the vibe. Ravers describe ‘the vibe’ as a kind of energy or
pulse which cannot be expressed or understood in words, but as that which can only
be physically experienced. As an amplified feeling or emotional state, the rave ‘vibe’
mirrors the ‘exaltation’ and ‘enthusiasm’ described by Durkheim:
It’s the feeling that makes 500 people cry when a certain tune is played. It’s
the feeling that you can trust everyone around you, that everyone is sharing in
one experience that somehow touches them deep in their soul and that you all
understand each other.
(Orion, in McCall 2001:59)Ravers are cognizant of the fact that, in addition to the music, it is the people and
the sense of community and connectedness at raves that create and sustain ‘the
vibe’. Further evoking Durkheim’s effervescence, ‘vitality’ is another term used to
describe the energy, electricity and ecstasy of the dance experience. In the
concluding paragraph of Clubbing, Malbon describes vitality (which he derives from
the work of Durkheim, Maffesoli, LeBon and Csikszentmihalyi^6 ) as the experience,
and raison d’ être, of clubbing:
Playful vitality is...partly a celebration of the energy and euphoria that can be
generated through being together, playing together and experiencing ‘others’
together. Yet playful vitality is also partly an escape attempt, a temporary
relief from other facets and identifications of an individual clubber’s own life
—their work, their past, their future, their worries. Playful vitality is found
within a temporary world of the clubber’s own construction in which the
everyday is disrupted, the mundane is forgotten and the ecstatic becomes
possible.
(Malbon 1999:164)Embodied, non-rational, emotionalA hallmark of the rave experience, and another quality of collective effervescence/
communitas, is its quintessentially non-rational, embodied and affectual nature.^7
Simon Reynolds remarks that, at ‘massive volume, knowledge [of rave’s meaning] is
visceral, something your body understands as it’s seduced and ensnared by the
paradoxes of the music’ (1999:349). Ravers often indicate that they don’t attend
raves to listen to music, but rather to feel the music that ‘communicates directly with
the body’ (Poschardt 1998:414). Sense-enhancing drugs such as MDMA further
88 TIM OLAVESON