beginning here and now’ (1997:155). Attending to the millennialist trope in post-
rave, it is surmized that while commonly holding status as a portal to the utopic, as
a means to the Millennium, it is hyper-millennial in character, possessing variant
salvific trajectories. As a zone of outrageous difference, a difference engine, the dance
party is found to be a substantial node of indeterminacy for its inhabitants—
providing youth with an uncertain passage experience typical of contemporary life.
The spiritual ‘rave-o-lution’Rave is no mere event, a temporal gathering of ravers. We would be unwise to
overlook the global parameters of ‘techno-tribalism’ and its accelerating culture
industry if our intention is a comprehensive investigation of rave’s religiosity.^1 In
digital art, screen-based animations and 3D projections, alongside computer-
generated music itself; in the ‘conceptechnics’ of ‘sonic fiction’ (Eshun 1998)
inscribed in voice samples, event themes, artist names and on flyers, CD covers and
a labyrinth of websites; in proliferating CD-ROMS, novels, zines, street press,
galleries, video texts and online discussion forums; in films and documentaries; in
fashion accessories from streetwear to ultra-violet-reactive art tapestries; in
figureheads like Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna and Ray Castle. The whole chain
inflects a congruent imaginary which, as we shall see, hosts an alternative or
‘expressive spirituality’. By contrast to Christianity (which divides creator from
created), in what Heelas (2000:243) calls an expressive spirituality (typically
manifest in ‘New Age’ and sometimes ‘Neo-Paganism’), the divine Self serves as the
font of authority, wisdom and judgement. With expressive spirituality one is driven
to:
seek liberation from the contaminating effects of society and culture; seek
genuine experience; seek to express all that one truly is as a spiritual being; and
—for many—seek to experience and nurture all that is embedded within
nature, beyond the reach of the artificial, the power games of the lower self,
the destructive implementation of the technological.
(Heelas 2000:243)Yet, as technology is essential to the cultural business of rave, and is integral to the
quest for ‘genuine experience’, for vitality, wholeness and connection, for love, our
approach must disassociate from that which would dismiss or abandon technologies
or, indeed, psychotechnologies, as ‘inauthentic’. Amplifying a sampladelic sensibility
conveying a relativistic faith in the ‘truth’ of multiple paths, in options cut ‘n’ pasted
in the ongoing process of identity formation, and in the conceptual architecture of
events, digital and cyber technologies are accomplices to an expressive humanism.
And, as ravers circulate amongst a growing milieu of spiritual seekers who ‘select,
synthesize and exchange amongst an increasing diversity of religious and secular
options and perspectives’ (Sutcliffe 1997:105), rave becomes a provisional node in
an emergent network of ‘seeking’.
18 GRAHAM ST JOHN