In opposition to this unyielding empiricism, the religious overbeliefs of ravers
describe the experience of ecstasy as a ‘transcendent’ or ‘spiritual’ moment occurring
within the ritual context of the rave, which is itself often conceived as a
contemporary religious practice possessed of numerous historical and crosscultural
correlates (see Chapter 6). Similarly, an anonymous contributor to the Hyperreal
web archives has contended that rave’s religious influences include ‘Taoism (Tai
Chi), Sufism, Hinduism (Yoga), Buddhism (Meditation), Cabalism (the tree of
life), Shamanism (navigating consciousness), [as well as the] Mysticism of all
religions and tribes of aboriginal people’ (see Anonymous n.d.). Unfortunately
overshadowed by the media’s prolific drug scare, this noteworthy bricolage has gone
largely unnoticed by both mainstream and academic communities—its religious
neomorphisms, when acknowledged, often being mocked, ridiculed or dismissed in
much the same manner as those of the New Age movement.
With this in mind, it is the purpose of this chapter to produce a theory of ecstatic
raving that avoids spiritual formulations even as it maintains a high degree of
respect for them. Drawing on first-person accounts that are frequently laced with
religious motifs, I will be constructing an ecstatic ‘overbelief’ grounded in
contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytic theory. Myself a one-time
practitioner of these ‘techniques of ecstasy’, of these ‘technologies of pleasure’, I am
writing this piece out of a desire to understand my own ‘experiences’ without
resorting to the disembodied articulations frequent to religious rhetoric, which
tends to emphasize spirit and mind over body and perception. Wary of the mind/
body hierarchy inherent in conceptions of ecstasy where the self transcends its
immanent reality in order to commune with an incorporeal godhead, supernatural
reality, or spiritual energy I will be beginning from the premise that ecstatic raving
is first and foremost an embodied activity. Especially interested in what one raver
describes as the ‘profound sense of connectedness with people’ (Alissa 1995) that
raving confers, I will be developing an approach that conceives of ecstatic raving,
when fully achieved, as a momentary glimpse of ideological autonomy
It is my ultimate hope to show that the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
can especially clarify and make sense of ecstasy’s effects, including its disruption of
binary thought, exactly because his philosophy—as epitomized in his ‘ontology of
the flesh’—is already a non-dualistic framework. Emphasizing the lived body, this
framework actively undermines the series of mind/body lateral associations (e.g.
masculine/feminine, active/passive and reason/emotion) that have had far-reaching
and often detrimental consequences for not only Western thought but also
individuals of non-dominant race, gender and sexuality.
Resolving binary oppositions through a ‘thesis of reversibility’ that emphasizes
interconnectedness and ambiguity via a subtending logic of difference-within-
identity Merleau-Ponty contends that the perceived world not only predates
consciousness, but is also its foundation—a foundation, I argue, to which we ‘return’
during ecstatic raving.
THE FLESH OF RAVING 107