world that subtend self-reflective consciousness. It is ultimately these subconscious
knowledges that are thematized to produce the corporeal schema, the interface
between the mind and body
Therefore, if the self is delineated from the world by the corporeal schema, if the
subject is indeed dependent on its body image for existence, then the dissolution of
the self during ecstasy would require a concomitant transformation in the corporeal
schema, which would seriously affect not only the raver’s sense of self and body, but
also their mobility. For in removing the psychosocial limitations on movement and
posture imposed by culture, ecstasy allows ravers to attain the oft-proclaimed state
of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), in which liquid movements undulate across a
body open to a much wider field of possibilities, of ‘I-cans’. Central to the ecstatic
‘experience’, dancing is reframed here as the release from routine movement.
Cinnamon Twist iterates that:
this kind of dance...is FREEING MOTION. Not just moving to the beat but
letting the beat help you throw off all the restricted robotic movements that
have been imprinted in your heart, your eyes, your ears, your arms, your ass,
your dreams, by all the tricks, traumas, and seductions of society...dancing
with the world, but dancing off the consensus-trance.
(Twist 1992)Significantly, the corporeal schema possesses one other bodily knowledge worth
mentioning before finally turning to the ontology of flesh: that of perception’s
reflexivity Stemming from the body’s simultaneous immanence and transcendence,
perception can only occur because the body exists in the world: ‘pure consciousness
cannot touch anything. The body can touch things, but it can touch things only to
the extent that it is touched by things’ (Dillon 1997:155). A necessarily reflexive act,
perception occurs in what Merleau-Ponty originally called the tacit cogito, which is
opposed to the thematic, or Cartesian, cogito. ‘The tacit cogito is silent: it sees the
world and does not thematize its seeing. The [Cartesian] cogito speaks: it thematizes
its relations with things and posits itself in the statement, “I think” ’ (ibid.:108).
Reflecting Merleau-Ponty’s wish to return to ‘prediscursive experience, experience
before the overlay of reflection, the imposition of a meta-experiential organization,
[and] its codification by reason, language or knowledge’ (Grosz 1999:151), the tacit
cogito is pure perception, an anonymous perceptual field antecedent to the thematic
ego, the cognitive structure that inculcates the subject into an experiential matrix of
language, culture and identity. Accordingly, if ecstatic raving is indeed an
unravelling of the thematic, Cartesian cogito, then in phenomenological terms it can
be read as a return to the tacit cogito, a prediscursive awareness ‘unaware of itself in
its fascination with the world’ (Dillon 1997: 105). As Catherine explains:
When I dance at a rave I feel very...close to, if not at, this non-thinking state.
I hardly notice the passage of time and I am free of the tensions and worries
of daily life.... I notice the things around me in a closer way: the lights, the116 JAMES LANDAU