both ‘the other’ and ‘the self’ (Rietveld 1998a: 194) within the process of dance. As
the party makes possible a kind of collective ego-loss, a sense of communal
singularity—a sensation of at-one-ness—is potentiated. Hemment explains:
The disappearance into the singular field of the music is articulated within a
general becoming-unlimited, by which the identities and hierarchies of the
ego are abandoned as the dancer confronts the limits of pure possibility At
this point both self and others disappear together, releasing a profound sense
of unity.... In this collective moment bodies become one with the rhythm,
each distinct gesture the fractal-expression of the singular sonic algorithm.
(Hemment 1996:28)For the raving habitué, nothing matters more than being together or, perhaps more
accurately, being ‘alone together’ (Moore 1995:207). As a ‘seizure of presence’, the
experience is in concert with Hakim Bey, whose ‘temporary autonomous zone’
(TAZ) became a universal archetype of liberation eagerly adopted by the rave
massive:
Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never
to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we
reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we
wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us
can claim to know freedom?
(Bey 1991:98)Not representing any greater ‘Truth’, rave came to answer Bey’s call (and that of
Blake, Fourier and Deleuze and Guattari, whose ideas he adapted) for the ‘total
liberation’ of desire. In the rave,
one cannot help being struck by the primacy of the demand for a shared
present, as if...in it were a whole epoch, ours, expressing an imperative not to
give in to the future, some ‘radiant future’, rather to somehow be caught up
by and in the present, lived or experienced collectively...the being-together
exists only in the actuality of the dancing bodies, and is not based on any
community of fact or appearance except the fête being shared at the moment.
(Gaillot 1999:24–5)The rave is a synaesthetic community wherein ‘each dancer in the crowd becomes a
medium transmitting sensory current’ (Eshun 1998:099). And it is organized
through a Dionysian logic, which Maffesoli (1993, 1996) defines as a certain kind
of sociality, sensuous, orgiastic and transgressive of imposed morality Yet while
young women, for instance, may feel like they are ‘flirting with the crowd’ (Jane, in
Pini 2001:164), the experience is not organized around sexual gratification. With
attention cast towards rave’s jouissance, recent commentators diverge markedly from
LIBERATION AND THE RAVE IMAGINARY 29