of ‘ancestral wisdom and new science’ has been manifested, for example, in the
Australian-based Chaos Magick-informed Labyrinth installations developed by
Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule,^11 or even in new liturgical developments such as
California’s deconstructionist Techno Cosmic Mass which, according to
Episcopalian priest and Mass founder Matthew Fox, integrates ‘ecstatic live music,
urban shamanism, multi-media imagery and eastern and indigenous spiritual
elements’ to build a new form of ‘worship’ and ‘reawaken...the sacred’.^12
The ‘eternal return’ of dance, of the ‘Mass’, supposes other layers of experience
and narrative. As a return to ‘the tacit cogito’ from the Cartesian cogito, ecstasy is a
flight to the foundation of consciousness (see Landau, Chapter 5). According to
Castle, the reconnective therapy or ‘psychodrama’ of dance lies in its ability to revive
‘a free-form play space, which we had as children’ (ENRG 2001:159). For Fox, to
dance is to return to our origins, ‘since we all expressed ourselves...in the womb by
stretching our limbs, i.e. by dancing’.^13 In womb-like Warmth (the name of a San
Francisco rave), where machine music predominates and low bass frequencies are
said to resemble mother’s heartbeat, the dance space facilitates the re-enlivening of
‘the mystical child’. In this collective age regression, a prelapsarian Land of Oz
(London rave, 1989) or Toon Town (the early San Francisco rave) is built, where the
sucking of Chubba-Chupps, the wearing of fluffy animal rucksacks and hair in
pigtails and the toting of super-soakers and bubble wands mark the intentional
stripping away of worldly (adult) concerns and responsibilities. But Castle warns
against squatting the womb, emphasizing the need to emerge at the light of a new
day, to face the ‘pain of having to become a separate entity’ (ENRG 2001:163–4).
Here, in rave’s quest to return, to remember that which is perceived to have been
lost or forgotten (in either our collective heritage or personal development), we find
the desire for ego-death, implying rebirth, a new awakening.
Techno-communitas and the body electricWhile such micro-narratives are accentuated within the rave imaginary, a meta-
narrative of process, the possibility of psycho-cultural (re)production, wrought by
sheer indeterminacy, becomes apparent. And the possibility engine is the rave itself
—the party—which has been variously identified as: synchronistic ‘phase-locking’
(Rushkoff 1994:155–7); ‘a desubjectified state of...rapture’, a collective and
singular body approximating Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Body-without-Organs’
(Jordan 1995:129; see also Schütze 2001); a feeling of ‘an indissoluble bond, of
being one with the external world as a whole’, which Malbon, drawing on Freud,
calls an ‘oceanic experience’ (Malbon 1999:107); a ‘deconstructive jouissance’ where
the ‘dissolution of certainty and identity is experienced as pleasure’ (Gilbert and
Pearson 1999:181); or a festive continuity resembling the Bataillian sacrifice of
individuality (Tramacchi 2001:181; see also Chapters 2 and 3 ).^14 Yet, drawing on
the work of ritual and performance theorist Victor Turner, the immediate
dancescape can perhaps be most likened to a techno-communitas. The present
LIBERATION AND THE RAVE IMAGINARY 27