Rave Culture and Religion

Rave ascension

Rave is redolent with anticipation and promise. An assemblage of electronic,
computer and audio-visual technologies that has descended amidst contemporary
youth, techno-rave anticipates a posthumanist awakening. Remastering the inward
turn of expressive spirituality, post-rave is pitched to potentiate the evolution of the
self and, more broadly, human consciousness. According to Adrian Ivakhiv,

[the] evolutionary potential of humanity is often modeled on the motif of

‘ascension’ to higher levels or dimensions of existence, and ascensionist

literature makes frequent use of quasi-scientific language to describe the

‘higher frequencies’, ‘vibrations’, ‘light quotients’ and ‘energy bodies’, energy

shifts and DNA changes, that are said to be associated with this epochal shift.

(Ivakhiv 2001:8)

From its emergence in the UK and subsequent export to North America and
elsewhere, adopting out-of-body science futurisms like Fraser Clark’s
Megatripolitans (see Chapter 11), ‘the Singularity’, or promising a digitized
dawning, rave culture—its literature, films, flyers, websites, etc.—is replete with
ascensionism.
Nineties confidence in a tech-triggered consciousness evolution had a champion
in Douglas Rushkoff, whose pop-anthropology of denizens of the early 1990s
‘datasphere’, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (1994), possessed the
cartological premise of charting new youth cultures whose appropriation of cyber,
chemical and audio-visual technologies was enabling them to ‘explore unmapped
realms of consciousness...to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully’
(Rushkoff 1994:19). In a gush of technophilia, Rushkoff observed that, in collusion
with psychedelics, computers, chaos mathematics and feedback loops, the house/
rave was facilitating ‘the hardwiring of a global brain’, an interconnected virtualized
Otherworld: ‘Cyberia’. Exemplifying the celebrated ‘posthuman lift-off from
biology, gravity and the twentieth century’ Dery admonishes as a ‘theology of the
ejector seat’ (1996:17), in Cyberia, ‘the age upon us now might take the form of
categorical upscaling of the human experience onto uncharted, hyperdimensional
turf’ (ibid.:18). As a strong cultural ‘meme’, itself resembling groupmind-like
cyberspatial networks, such that dancing might be like surfing a transpersonal
horizon, rave is heavily implicated in this ‘cyberian paradigm’.
With an enthusiasm for ‘designer reality’, where humans ‘alter their
consciousness intentionally through technology’ (Rushkoff 1994:289), Rushkoff
combines Extropian teleology with New Age ‘Self-spirituality’ (Heelas 1996)—a
fusion redolent in a great deal of rave discourse and practice. Inheriting the idealism
of the 1960s, the business acumen of the 1980s and adopting the techno-
perfectionism of the 1990s, those operating within post-rave culture industries have
sought to catalyse individuation through the rave machine. Guiding initiates along
new paths of self-discovery, DJs are often heralded, or self-identify, as shamanic

LIBERATION AND THE RAVE IMAGINARY 21