The rave experience as temporary and utopianAlthough popularly perceived otherwise, Émile Durkheim actually ascribed both a
re-creative (culturally conservative) and a creative (culturally revitalizing) function to
ritual. That which he called ‘effervescence créatrice’ (creative effervescence) is a
phenomenon that can spontaneously produce new moral codes, as well as ideal
conceptions of society (Pickering 1984:387). Nielsen (1999:208) reiterates that new
collective representations (cultural symbols) may, and usually do, result from
collective effervescences (see also Allen 1998:150; Mellor 1998; Shilling and Mellor
1998:203). Also, due to its volatile, destabilizing and even sacred nature, collective
effervescence can only be temporary in its existence; it is a fundamentally transitory
state (Durkheim 1995:228). It is thus akin to spontaneous communitas, ‘the
spontaneity and immediacy [of which]—as opposed to the jural-political character
of structure—can seldom be maintained for very long’ (V.Turner 1969:132). In
fact, liminality, the state in which communitas can emerge, can be both creative and
destructive (V.Turner 1979:44). Communitas is equated with movement and
change (V.Turner 1974:285), and with transient humility or modelessness
(V.Turner 1969:97). Regarded as a timeless condition, the eternal now, a moment
in and out of time (V.Turner 1974:238; 1979:41), communitas-like experiences
depicted by members of religious, millenarian or revivalist groups often portray an
Edenic, paradisiacal or utopian state (V. Turner 1974:231, 237).
Much has been written about the similarly temporary nature of raves—
chronologically, spatially and socially. For example, rave music, characterized by
hyper-extended, repetitively rhythmed tracks and sets, creates a sense of timelessness
echoing the eternal present of collective effervescence/communitas:
Timbre-saturated, repetitive but tilted always toward the next now, techno is
an immediacy machine, stretching time into a continuous present—which is
where the drug-technology interface comes into play. Not just because techno
works well with substances like MDMA, marijuana, LSD, speed, etc., all of
which amplify the sensory intensity of the present moment, but because the
music itself drugs the listener, looping consciousness then derailing it,
stranding it in a nowhere/nowhen, where there is only sensation, ‘where now
lasts longer.’
(Reynolds 1999:55)Raves are timeless places, removed social spaces where utopias are both imagined
and lived: ‘With its dazzling psychotropic lights, its sonic pulses, rave culture is
arguably a form of collective autism. The rave is utopia in its original etymological
sense: a nowhere/nowhen wonderland’ (ibid.:248). The temporary and socially
unstructured character of the rave has been likened to anarcho-mystic writer and
philosopher Hakim Bey’s concept of the ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (TAZ)
(Collin 1997:5; Gibson 1999:22–3; Luckman 2001; Reynolds 1999:169; St John
2001a; Tramacchi 2001). The TAZ, like the rave, is quintessentially liminal or
RAVE AS NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT? 93