‘how does it work?’ Sidestepping the neurodeterministic reduction of ecstasy to
MDMA, this approach asks by what means, and to what degree, a particular
assemblage of music, bodies, chemicals and lights induces desubjectification
amongst its participants.
It is worth noting, however, that subjectivity in this model is nothing more than
a surface effect. Emphasizing the tangible body over the untenable mind, Deleuze
and Guattari envision the subject as nothing more than a series of cultural
stratifications that transform a BwO into a codified body Fitting well into
postmodern agendas of superficiality, ephemerality and hyperreality, this model
arises from a series of contemporary philosophies that see the body ‘as a purely
surface phenomenon, a complex, multifaceted surface...whose incision or
inscription produces the (illusion or effects) of depth and interiority’ (Grosz 1994:
116). In this view, individuality, consciousness and subjectivity, while experientially
‘real’, are nothing more than fictive illusions, dimensionless holograms on the
surface of the body.
Significantly, while I feel much can be gained from philosophies such as this—
and while I also feel that the Deleuzo—Guattarian approach, with its intensities,
connections and flows, speaks gracefully to the jouissant pleasures of ecstasy—I am
hesitant to invest wholly in such an approach and would rather, for the purposes of
this chapter, explore what traditional philosophies of depth, such as psychoanalysis
and phenomenology, can reveal about the ecstatic ‘experience’.
The disappearing ego: ecstasy and psychoanalysisExamining the rave as a ritual of disappearance in which no meaning could be
found other than pure escape, Rietveld (1993:54) approaches ecstatic subjectivity
from a psychoanalytic viewpoint that presumes the body’s interior to be private,
depthful and libidinally cathected. Drawing on Freudian thought, she argues that E
makes the user return to a pre-Oedipal stage in which libidinous pleasure is not
centred in the genitals—a stage in which sexuality is polymorphous as sensuality
engages the entire body (ibid.:54). Crucially, while she could have easily posited
these sensations in terms of a Deleuzo—Guattarian BwO, she instead conceived of
ecstasy as a developmental retrogression, as an infantilization within the context of
adulthood.
In this model, ecstasy ‘rewinds’ the individual backward into a pre-Oedipal
period of inchoate sensations that play across the body free of patterning, grouping
and organization. This process occurs through a dissolution of the ego, which in
Freudian terms is something akin to a ‘psychical map of the body’s libidinal
intensities...,a kind of bodily tracing, a cartography of the erotogenic intensities of
the body, an internalized image’ (Grosz 1994:33) that provides unity and a sense of
bodily cohesion. With their body’s libidinal impulses emancipated, ecstatics are
awash with the pleasures inherent to sensation.
Yet, for Rietveld, pleasure does not complete the analysis: ineffability must be
addressed. Moving from Freud to his successor Lacan, she adds that ecstasy marks
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