So, spirituality, like sexual joining, can be achieved ritually. However, the
meaning of such experience is variable, depending on context. The encapsulation
into a protocol of the formal aspects of spirituality (that sense of being part of
something larger than one self) could be understood as a formation of religion. Made
predictable, a formalized ritual can be used for political ends. The raver, in a
spiritual moment of peak-experience, is vulnerable, as any person experiencing a
religious ceremony or rite, during complete submission to a belief system. This
vulnerability in a definable social group could work to enhance a sense of
community, which is, for example, powerful when one belongs to a marginalized
social class; hence the intensity of, say, gay dance gatherings. It can also serve other
purposes. By solidifying the rave into a formal predictable ritual, comparable to a
religion, it is easier to exploit this format for both commercial and countercultural
ends. As such in intense cases, the nightclub could be regarded as a secular type of
night-time church and the free open-air party as a post-historic tribal rite.
The ritual which produces this spiritual peak-experience at raves and post-rave
events, and the specifically embodied contexts by which this is informed, will be the
topic of this discussion. I am particularly interested in the machine aesthetic of
techno and trance. I have often wondered why people bother to travel to beautifully
quiet environments to unleash the pounding sounds of what seems like industrial
work and war, and the sounds of urban bleeping office environments. Faraway
beaches and deserts, which offer refuge to the global urbanite from ever-increasing
surveillance, are ecologically disturbed by noise pollution, while the starry sky purrs
on in its own pulses and rhythms. I will attempt to provide an understanding of
what the merging of human and machine means, the spiritual rite of the post-
industrial cyborg. I will do so by inquiring into techno as a spiritual man—machine
interface, and by exploring its machine aesthetic. The discussion will suggest that
the experience of the relationship with new technologies is, perhaps, different for
men and women—a polemical point, no doubt. There seems to be a self-
annihilating urge amongst contemporary men, an identity crisis, which requires an
intense and, for some, often repeated rite of passage, an experience of self-
destruction and redefinition as sacrificial cyborg. This may not be strategically
beneficial for those who are currently engaged in defining their embodied selves and
who could gain more from a sense of communal soul.
Post-industrial spiritAlthough seemingly calming and maturing in the UK, at the time of writing
(2002), (post-)rave dance events have erupted in the USA, Europe, Israel, South
Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South America, India,
China. Such geographical locations are, arguably, characterized as being in various
stages of global urbanization and of (post)-industrial development. Admittedly, the
notion of the post-industrial is problematic. It is based on the acceptance of an
‘information revolution’, which Robins and Webster aptly describe as a ‘cocktail of
scientific aspiration and commercial hype’ (1999:89) that obscures historical and
HILLEGONDA C.RIETVELD 47