festival’s population—‘the Party’ may thus effect a Rapture corresponding to the
New Age ‘eschatology’ of self-realization.
Implying that raves, as extra-ordinary ‘scenes’, may be proto-religious sources of
‘salvation’ for participants, Corsten (1999) begins to distinguish between two types
of salvation useful in the study of the global party: that raving may orchestrate a
release from social routine or possess salvation values in itself. On the one hand,
‘these rituals liberate the individual from modern rational demands and provide
salvation; on the other, they offer experiences that may be interpreted as values in
themselves’ (Corsten 1999:27). On the one hand, they orchestrate a freedom from
everyday anxieties and relations—the nuclear family, your boss, TV, quotidian
subjectivity. On the other, they contextualize a freedom to experiment with and
explore new social and psychological territory. If we want to pursue extremes, the
former mode of experience begins with the festal or party as release valve, paroxysms
programmed to periodically revivify, wherein festival populations enjoy the state-
sanctioned lifting of social taboos or the pleasures of corporate-sponsored utopia. At
the other extreme, we have the party as crusade, staging the launch of proto-cultural
‘memes’ into the global system.
Yet there is more than one way to elucidate these modes of ‘salvation’. Or at least
they provide us with the opportunity to explain a range of experiences. We might
initially suggest that they are implicit in the design of event providers. Increasingly
subject to management by the ‘new merchants of leisure’ (Hannigan 1998:7), clubs
and large commercial raves are probable sites of the former experience. Literally
getting ‘out of it’, ‘’avin it large’ on weekend vacation, patrons are delivered from
the world of classrooms and toil, politics and parents, to a state of amnesia
(inspiration for the famous club by the same name in Ibiza). While it had been
suggested that vacating day-to-day reality for the Living Dream where ‘everything
starts with an E’ (Rietveld 1993:43–4) indicated a kind of tourism whereby youth
‘disaccumulate culture’ to ‘disappear’ into ‘the unculture of the hyperreal’ (Melechi
1993:37–8), today such disappearance can be carefully engineered within new
‘branded playscapes’ (Chatterton and Hollands 2002:112), from super-clubs like
London’s Ministry of Sound to other night-time leisure corporations concentrated
within the liminal zones of the post-industrial city (see Hobbs et al. 2000).
Momentarily absconding from the demands and contingencies of ‘growing up’,
dancing to the rhythm of chart music, big-label DJs, under the watchful gaze of
bouncers and alcohol niche marketers, the clubbed inhabit a sanitized world of
administered pleasure, regulated ‘oceanic’ experiences and ‘E’-fuelled salvation,
before ‘transportation’ home again—in Schechner’s (1985:125) sense of performers
returning to their place of origin.
I do not want to suggest that the packaged and routinized communitas of club
spaces are a priori remote from religiosity (for instance, see Chapters 5 and 8 ). But
while large commercial raves and clubs may potentiate ‘religious experiences’,
perhaps as they contextualize moments of ‘extreme flow’ (Malbon 1999:141–3),^22 it
nevertheless appears that smaller scale DIY parties are more likely conversion
thresholds than refuelling depots—more likely liberatory (in the second sense) than
LIBERATION AND THE RAVE IMAGINARY 35