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The difference engine
Liberation and the rave imaginary
Graham St John
[The] insurrectionary ‘noise’ or chaos of TAZs, uprisings, refusals and
epiphanies...will release a hundred blooming flowers, a thousand, a
million memes of resistance, of difference, of non-ordinary
consciousness—the will to power as ‘strangeness’.
(Bey 1995)The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the growth of non-traditional desires
for ‘religious experience’, for liberation in the sense Heelas (1998:7) identified as the
postmodern quest for personal freedoms, for difference, without seeking essential, or
fundamental, difference. With a rich inheritance from earlier explorations, saturated
with the tinctures of Eastern religion and Western psychotherapy, contemporary
self-othering is textured by a farrago of beliefs and practices transparent in
communications with the Otherworld, and in the transcendence devices of
psychoactives, new technologies and consumer experiences agglomerated in public
events—those ‘privileged point[s] of penetration’ (Handelman 1990:9) and theatres
for the performance of ‘ultimate’ or ‘implicit’ concerns (Bailey 1997:9). In recent
times, a growing corpus of work has introduced sites accommodating alternative
spiritualities, gathering places for those ‘hypersyncretic’ seekers of self and
enchantment that Sutcliffe calls a ‘virtuosic avant-garde’ (2000:30). Mike Niman’s
People of the Rainbow (1997), Adrian Ivakhiv’s Claiming Sacred Ground (2001) and
Sarah Pike’s Earthly Bodies, Magic Selves (2001a), for example, document the
appearance of festivals and gatherings ‘exemplifying the migration of religious
meaning-making activities out of... temples and churches into otherspaces’ (Pike
2001a:5). Here the proliferating culture of rave and its expressive otherspaces will
receive such attention.
Navigating a vast body of material and research, this chapter explores the
significance of liberation and freedom in the rave imaginary, in the process offering
signposts to the subsequent chapters. Rave demonstrates signs of that which
Bozeman calls a ‘technological millenarianism’ pervading popular culture which, in
nations like the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Australia,
boils down to a faith in technological innovation to ‘bring forth a better future