Rave Culture and Religion

turning this house into a home’ (Hemment 1996:26). With occupants inhabiting
and reinscribing space with an embodied collective significance, raves and post-raves
are notorious reclaiming practices. Rushing on an heroic dose of familiarity
inhabitants join or reunite with ‘family’, recognizing their belonging, and
identifying with place, in a fashion unparalleled in the lives of many young people.

Conclusion

An exploration of the rave imaginary provides useful insights on developments in
post-traditional religiosity, expressive spirituality and global youth techno
culture. The ungoverned dance floor is a topos charged with the possibility of
becoming. Partly inspired by Davis’s Techngnosis (1998), this chapter has tracked the
gnostic becoming manifest in the micro-narrative threads of ascensionism and
reenchantment. Within the prevailing circumstances of consumer-based identity
production and the advent of new digital and body technologies, rave arrived as a
super-sensory experience which, in its concatenation of meaning, offers insights on
the possibility of postmodern religion and/or alternative spirituality. While the
accelerating global dance party commonly stakes a claim to the utopic,
accommodating inhabitants, narratives, zones and practices diverse and ramified,
rave’s space is no more utopian than heterotopian, no more solid communitas than
hyper-millennialist. Far from unifying the ‘massive’ under divine Truth, in the
techno-carnival hybrid utopias are (re)configured from divined futures and putative
pasts in the multitudinous present. As a difference engine, the post-rave party
facilitates becoming, yet possesses little telos. While salvific modes are detected—
they are modulated by the event-space and participant motivation. Licensing escape
from day-to-day experience or permitting the exploration of new pathways,
revitalizing routinized cultural patterns or catalysing new self and social fictions,
from metropolitan warehouse parties to international trance festivals, the hyper-
liminal party contextualizes the contemporary youth riot of passage.

Notes

1 Much will come from an exploration of developments in ‘rave-tourism’ which

facilitate a ‘neo-tribal’ (Maffesoli 1996) or, more pertinently, techno-tribal (see St John

2003) ‘massive’, where the nodes in metropolitan, regional and global circuits represent

many possible sites of identification and signs of difference for contemporary

technomads.

2 http://www.raveistherapture.com (accessed 12 November 2001). Also see http://www.rave-

theawakening.com/awakening/awakening.html.

3 http://www.neverworldmusic.com/ravers.html (accessed 10 June 2002).

4 As they did in Melbourne in 2002 at the ‘Shangri-la Healing Oasis’.

5 From Tranc.ition 2001 Industry Directory, p. 15.

6 It should be noted that the efficacy of ingestion waned throughout the 1990s as the

quality and reliability of E diminished for the majority of users.

38 GRAHAM ST JOHN