possessing a performative quality perhaps more carnival than rite. As parties are
carnivalesque stages for the performance of individual freedoms, for self-
experimentation with the most intense sensations and most outrageous expressions
of difference, from which a host of outcomes ensue, it may be wiser to suggest that,
as theatres of expression, parties oscillate between difference and communion. As
such, these sociocultural thresholds harbour an obdurate indeterminacy. Though
precipitating states that may be likened to Confucianism’s ‘jen’ (‘love, goodness,
benevolence, humaneness and man-to-man-ness’) or Zen Buddhism’s ‘prajna’
(intuition)—which Turner (1974:283, 46) imagined might approximate the socio-
liminal experience of communitas—with rave there is no collective Omega point,
no guaranteed access to ‘the Universal Mind’. While approximating that which
Castle calls a ‘chiros satori experience (time outside of regular time), where one can gain
a bright light bulb-like...illumination and understanding’ (in ENRG 2001:169),
dance parties are a sea of sparkling and guttering flames.
While sometimes manifesting themselves as popular sympathetic magic—as in
the ‘critical mass'-like ‘global prayer for peace’ performed before live images of
Gyoto monks at Earthdance, or in anti-fascist/racist celebrations like the World
Peace Party in South Africa in 1991, or creative-resistance movements like Reclaim
the Streets and Earthdream—it is not usual that post-rave events become
‘platforms’ for representation, or for ‘resistance’, as this is conventionally known.
Nevertheless, while often cultural realms occasioning a ‘politics of the moment’
(Gilbert and Pearson 1999:172) or fields of ‘playful vitality’ (Malbon 1999:101),
events dramatize ultimate concerns around which reveller-participants rally: freedom,
self-growth, intercultural reconciliation, the environment, world peace. A party is no
more a field of micro-politics than a carnival of narratives, no more utopia than a
heterotopia, a concept which, in its application to large alternative gatherings and
performance-art festivals like those at Stonehenge (Hetherington 2000), ConFest
(St John 2001b) and Burning Man (Pike 2001b: 160), defines counterspatial
‘laboratories’ accommodating people, performances, language and objects,
multitudinous and juxtaposed. This complex utopian model thus approximates the
‘kaleidoscope conceptual space’ of the TAZ, a project of ‘indiscriminate syncretism’,
‘ “broad-minded” enough to entertain more than two, or even six, impossible ideas
“before breakfast” ’(Bey 1995).
As sites where multiple narratives intersect and compete, the post-rave event is a
maelstrom of significations, contextualizing a conflagration of meanings. Thus, as
Pini (2001:54) argues, post-rave cannot be reduced to ‘meaning structures’ such as
‘meaninglessness’, a ‘body-without-organs’, ‘escape’ or ‘autonomy’. Nor can it be
adequately circumscribed through commitment to independent agenda or narrative:
futurist, primitivist, pharmacological, gendered or otherwise. Thus, events indicate
that while particular micro-narratives may rise to consciousness within the rave
imaginary, they are intertextual.^18 Especially in its larger festive manifestations, the
techno-rave becomes a dynamic community featuring a conurbation of zones,
ramified narratives and a diverse constituency —a carnivalesque acceleration of the
difference engine. Neither ‘religious festivals’ unifying ‘worshippers’ under divine
32 GRAHAM ST JOHN