Before we can examine this ontology, though, we must follow the lead of Pini’s
apt invocation of Angela McRobbie’s ‘call to lived experience’ (McRobbie 1997:170):
we must attend to the actual experiences of ecstasy, ‘experiences’ that must be
interrogated through the lens of subjectivity. Toward that end, ecstasy must be
understood beyond the empiricist’s context of neurobiology; it must also be
theorized in terms of the subject’s relationship to itself, its body and the world. As
Pini notes, in concordance with most theorists of rave,
one can see a radical reframing of the body within rave and, as a consequence,
the emergence of experiences which many claim are entirely new to them
[such that] participants often refer to rave as constituting a different ‘world’
[within which] the ‘self’ is no longer an individual, boundaried one... [Here,]
subjectivity is restated in terms which do not reproduce traditional distinctions
between mind and body, self and other.
(Pini 1997:118)Interestingly, while Pini both correlates the ‘emergence of new experiences’ to a
refiguring of subjectivity and explicitly references ecstasy’s strange relationship to
binary thought, she at the same time fails to mention, even implicitly, another
significant characteristic of ecstasy: its ineffability.
Strangely absent from Pini’s work, the widely documented ineffability of ecstatic
raving echoes one of the major attributes of classic mystical experiences. As one rave
apologist argues,
the experiential nature of such spiritual moments transcends any beliefs that
we might have...coming into the experience, i.e. what we believe the reasons/
explanations for what is happening are completely irrelevant. All that matters
is that we can have these amazing, undefinable, shareable experiences—
[ultimately,] they are real/valid/meaningful and the beliefs we construct to
help us understand them are secondary and not even important compared to
the experience itself.
(Fogel 1994; italics mine)Echoing Laski, Lee Fogel highlights here the ‘undefinability’ of the ecstatic moment
which, for him, supersedes its intellectual positioning: the experiences are ‘real’ and
‘valid’, while the beliefs constructed to explain them are ‘secondary’ in comparison.
This ineffability, though, does not require a mystical explanation: it is my
contention that the format of raves inherently yields indescribable ‘experiences’.
Taking the phrase ‘It’s so loud I can’t even hear myself think’ to its logical extreme,
the rave event’s volume leaves little space for thought. Overwhelmed by the bass,
‘language’, Hillegonda Rietveld argues, is ‘unable to catch the event;
participants...do not seem to be able to describe their experience as anything else
than “it was wild, absolutely wild”, “unbelievable”, “there wasn’t anything like it”,
or “great”’ (Rietveld 1993:63). With the visual field fracturing beneath the incisions
THE FLESH OF RAVING 109