An unmistakable rapture resounds through rave’s cultural accretion—its
technological assemblage long underwritten by an evidential gnostic drive. The rave
‘techgnosis’ manifests as a kind of ‘occult mechanics’ capable of liberating the self
through esoteric gnosis: ‘a mystical breakthrough of total liberation, an influx of
knowing oneself to be part of the genuine godhead, of knowing oneself to be free’
(Davis 1998:94). In his Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of
Information (1998), Erik Davis documents how the techno-liberationist flame,
reignited throughout Western history has conflagrated with the advent of the digital
age. I suggest that the flame gutters yet glows in techno-rave, which is often felt to
communicate, or potentiate, a profound sense of freedom, of recognition, often
glossed as ‘the gnosis’. With rave, this direct familiarity is associated with the
collective experience of ecstatic dance. Ekstasis has often been considered to rupture
gender-identity boundaries by liberating, or ‘disarticulating’, dominant feminine/
masculine subjectivities (Gilbert and Pearson 1999:104–5; see also Pini 2001), or
more broadly, attending to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘micropolitics of desire’, through
a sensuous intervention in the regulation of desire (Hemment 1996:26–7; Jordan
1995)—processes which can be tracked through house music’s gay underground
(see Apollo 2001) to various post-rave trajectories. Yet, while rave licenses a carnal
knowing evident in the night-long intimacy of the dance floor, the gnostic
‘knowing’ may be catalysed by an ekstasis which, as Hemment reminds us, citing
Heidegger and not wanting to deny rave its ‘hermeneutic depth’, means ‘a
difference or a standing out from the surface of life’s contingencies...[enabling] a
more profound contemplation of being’ (Hemment 1996:23).
According to psychotherapist and rave proselytizer Richard Spurgeon, the
‘quickening has begun’. But ‘are you willing to become all you have the potential to
be?’ The truth is’, he states, ‘YOU, like Neo in The Matrix, are the One. Your very
self is the doorway to the Infinite and the eternal’.^2 When Spurgeon moves on to
postulate that rave is the space of ‘awakening’, that the edge of the dance floor is
‘the edge of a vast remembering’ upon which the physical earthly realm merges with
the heavenly, and that to be a party to this experience amounts to rapture, he’s
articulating a strong gnostic theme. The theme of illumination is even stronger in a
piece inspired by goings-on in the Arizona desert, and is worth quoting at length:
Remember 2001 A Space Odyssey? When a tribe of Neanderthals woke up to
the giant monolith planted in their midst? Raves remind me a lot of that
scene. When I watch a group of sweaty dancers rest their heads on the
metallic grill of a giant, black speaker and attach their trembling chests to the
gaping mouth of a pulsating woofer, I instantly remember the same ape, 2
million years ago, touching, sniffing and kissing the unfamiliar and
fascinating dark object. Raves are about our future. They inspire us to become
aware of our selves, our surroundings and our humanity. They are about how
we will come together as a species and how we will treat each other. They are
about how we will communicate and express our thoughts and emotions to
one another. We only need to remember that raves are NOT a way of life. TheyLIBERATION AND THE RAVE IMAGINARY 19