BwO than others (provided they go about their experimentation in a careful
manner). Witness the blend of spiritualism and anarchism in the following passage:
To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape face, to
dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become
clandestine, not by returning to animality nor even returning to the head [of
“primitive” society], but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by
strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes,
that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face
—freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you
traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face
encounters between signifying subjectivities...BwO. Yes, the face has a great
future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifiying
and asubjective.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:171)The bodies which are freed from faciality are called “probe-heads” (ibid.:190).
Probe-heads then exist in spaces where bodies intermingle but the faciality machine
does not operate, as is claimed about dance floors. A concept sometimes used in rave
and club culture discourse is PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect), self-consciously
tapping into the legacy of 1960s ideologies (see Chaishop 2002). Tim Jordan writes:
The BwO of raving is the undifferentiated state that supports the connections
that the rave-machine makes between its different elements. This
undifferentiated state is a collective delirium produced by thousands of people
jointly making the connections of drugs to dance, music to dance, dance to
drugs, drugs to time, time to music and so on, and thereby gradually
constructing the state of raving and so the BwO of raving. The delirium is
non-subjective and smooth, as all the connections and functions of the
machine give way to simple intensities of feeling.
(Jordan 1995:130)In Anjuna, participants are often exuberant about how nationality, skin color, class,
and language cease to matter once everyone is dancing in unison to the forces of
music and psychotropic drugs; all are in trance, become one with music, beach,
ocean, palm trees, moon, stars, and sun.
Of course, Goa freaks aren’t the first to decry the mystical force of music
(especially repetitious music) and drugs (especially LSD). Alan Watts has described
his experiences on LSD as properly Zen-Buddhist—on LSD, he understood that he
and his surroundings were essentially made of the same stuff:
I was no longer a detached observer, a little man inside my own head,
sensations. I was the sensations, so much so that there was nothing left of me,GOA TRANCE AND TRANCE IN GOA 275