The ‘experience’ of ecstasy: subjectivity and the flight from
languagePerhaps indicative of our culture’s unfortunate marginalization of transgressive and
emergent religious forms, it is not uncommon for the more exuberant claims and
testimonials of ravers to be repeatedly dismissed as nothing more than the ramblings
of honeymooners not yet tolerant to MDMA. Mired in the rhetoric of drug use,
experiential accounts of ecstasy, like other drug-related phenomena, are continually
stripped of epistemological value. All too often, these emotionally invested accounts
are disregarded wholesale, their claims ignored as perverse, irrational and irrelevant.
Yet these experiential accounts are all we have. Indicative of the available fictions
about ecstasy circulating within our culture, they reveal not only the term’s
dependency on religious and psychedelic themes, but also important information
about the ideological placement of the authors themselves. Since ‘experience is not
outside social, political, historical and cultural forces, and in this sense, cannot
provide an outside position from which to establish a place for judgment’ (Grosz
1999:148), experiential accounts must be understood as overdetermined narratives
of ideology that can be read in terms of a subject’s ‘making sense’ of the world
through their particular cultural background. Experiential accounts of ecstasy that
make use of appropriated religious concepts must accordingly be recognized as more
than just attempts to illustrate, defend and legitimize ecstatic raving to others; they
must be seen as the very construction, in a sense, of ecstasy’s ‘reality’ through
language usually reserved for traditional religiosity
It must not be forgotten, though, that this ‘reality’ is ever and always a ‘fiction’, a
‘text’ that comes about within a matrix of internal and external discourses
inseparable from language, and thus, by extension, ideology, identity and culture.^5
Born within the symbolic order, experience operates within—and is read through—a
field of culturally situated narratives that can be deployed for political purposes—
which is exactly what Maria Pini, for example, does in her groundbreaking feminist
analyses of rave.
Conceiving of subjectivity, rightfully as a series of fictions, Pini contends that in
rave ‘lies the potential for re-figurations of the here and now, the possibilities for
creating alternative fictions or narratives of being, and the opportunities for the
development of new (albeit temporary, incomplete and constituted partly in
fantasy) “identities” ’ (Pini 2001:3). While Pini’s project boasts an admirable aim,
namely a revolution in feminine subjectivity, it is perhaps an irony that her
interpretive framework is exactly what prevents her from fully recognizing ecstasy
for what it is. For, overly concerned with opposing any conception of the raver ‘as a
non-sexed, non-raced, and otherwise non-specific generality’ (ibid.:46), Pini fails,
because of her interpretive model’s implicit fear of an ‘apolitical’ rave, to truly listen
to the claims of ‘freedom’ made by her interviewees, subsequently foreclosing any
possibility of finding an alternative conceptual model that could explain this
apolitics without sacrificing sexual specificity—a model, it is my argument, that can
be found in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh.
108 JAMES LANDAU