separation of the ecstatic moment from the cultures of clubbing and raving within
which it is embedded. Finding it more useful to examine raving as a continuum of
experiential zones bracketed at one end by ‘everyday life’ and at the other end by
‘ecstasy’, I contend that between these poles of cultural subjectification and
acultural desubjectification can be found a gradient of ‘experiences’ whose trajectory
involves a gradual unfixing and eventual dissolution of normative identity and its
concomitant ideologies. A night of raving can accordingly be read as the experiential
progression from normal everyday life into, first, the oppositional subculture of the
rave, club or doof itself, second, the backdrop-liminality of the rave-as-carnival and,
finally, the embodied intensities of ecstasy itself.
A state ‘beyond’ language, ecstasy opens up a breech, an epistemological gap,
between itself and its subsequent discursive products. Because of this, all
testimonials and other experiential accounts must be seen as retroactive renderings,
as attempts after the fact (perhaps mere seconds after the fact) to make sense of, to
conceptualize, what is inherently ineffable: a desubjectified cognitive state that can
best be understood as a corporeal style of being, i.e. a non-reflective awareness
autonomous in its ‘freedom’ from ideology, language and culture. An ‘experience’
only after the fact, ecstasy is opposed to rationality and higher-order thought.
Ultimately, it is indeed the ‘transcendence’ of the thematic, Cartesian cogito, albeit
in a manner distinct from the idealistic formulations of traditional religion.
The only metaphysical ‘void,’ accordingly, into which the ecstatic escapes is the
‘emptiness’ of direct and unmediated perception. For while there’s still neurological
activity cognition of some form, it’s not that of the subject—the ‘I’ heavy with
preoccupied self-reflection—but rather that of the unbound body, suddenly
weightless in its joyous exploration of itself and the world.
The Body-without-Organs: ecstasy and its pleasuresAs it is discussed here, ecstasy is like a mathematical limit: it is an idealization of an
event not always reached. For not everyone at a party achieves pure ecstasy. Perhaps
they only experience a playful liminality, or maybe just an intense physical pleasure.
An escape from the trap of ecstasy/sobriety, the experiential gradient allows us to
understand raving from a functionalist standpoint, i.e. in terms of efficiency—a
standpoint well addressed by the analyses of Tim Jordan and Simon Reynolds.
Jordan, in employing the conceptual creativity of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, explains that ‘raving’s production, or what is desired by ravers through
constituting a rave-event, is an ongoing inducement into a desubjectified state of
something like rapture’ (Jordan 1995:129). Seeing ecstasy as that which ravers
desire, as the ‘purpose’ of assembling such disparate material elements as music,
bodies, drugs and lights—not to mention temporality and spatiality—Jordan frames
the rave within the context of the BwO, or the Body-without-Organs. Composed of
all ‘the potentials in the human nervous system for pleasure and sensation without
purpose: the sterile bliss of perverse sexuality, drug experiences, play dancing and so
forth’ (Reynolds 1999:246), the BwO, Grosz elaborates,
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