the observing ego, except the series of sensations which happened—not to
me, but just happened—moment by moment, one after another.
(Watts 1960:138)It is striking to see how many points connect Watts’ philosophy to that of Deleuze
and Guattari: against duality against representation, against social conditioning, and
for the pure “eventness” of the event.
When, therefore, our selection of sense-impression is not organized with
respect to any particular purpose, all the surrounding details of the world must
appear to be equally meaningful or equally meaningless. Logically, these are
two ways of saying the same thing, but the overwhelming feeling of my own
LSD experiences is that all aspects of the world become meaningful rather
than meaningless. This is not to say that they acquire meaning in the sense of
signs, by virtue of pointing to something else, but that all things appear to be
their own point.... A chicken is one egg’s way of producing others. In our
normal experience something of the same kind takes place in music and the
dance, where the point of the action is each moment of its unfolding and not
just the temporal end of the performance.
(Watts 1960:135)Timothy Leary (1980) famously researched the psychedelic experience and
concludes not only that it meets all requirements of a truly religious revelation, but
that revelation is also comparable to any scientific discovery of cosmic, biological,
and sociological order. Slightly more sober than Leary’s is Dan Merkur’s Freudian
view (1998) of the self-actualization process through the intake of psychoactive
drugs. Gilbert Rouget (1980) provides a survey of the anthropology of shamanism
and ecstasy It does seem that rock concerts and raves share certain musical,
psychical, technical, and social aspects with trance situations in non-Western
cultures. And Régis Airault (2000) uses Jung’s concept of “oceanic feeling” to
explain why young people wish to “lose it” and prolong their infancy in Goa’s
“never-neverland.”
The dance floor, the LSD trip, globetrotting, trance, and meditation then acquire
the characteristics of what Deleuze and Guattari call “smooth space,” the space of
truly creative connections, fractalization, and flight. The space of faciality is by
contrast “striated,” the quantified and segregated spaces of capitalism, colonialism,
the city and the state (see Plateau 14). Following Watts, Leary, Merkur, and Airault,
we’d think Goa trance and trance in Goa a particularly intense instantiation of
smooth space. Well, it is. As said, I do not question the existence of smooth spaces
and the truly religious aspect of rave, but their ontological primacy and
oppositionality to domination, faciality, striation. Tim Jordan warns that “[t]here is
nothing in the BwO of raving that would prevent rave-events incorporating, for
example, sexism or racism” (1995:139), and Maria Pini (1998) is one of the few
who have empirically shown that ravers can be inconsiderate, feel pain, feel fear, be
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