Everything in rave is oriented towards producing a confusional space where
references are blurred through indistinctiveness or sensorial overkill. The first thing
to notice in the typical hangar or warehouse rave, for example, is the absence of
chairs, tables or any other objects which could define, structure and condition
space. Apart from the chillout room lined with sofas and mattresses, where one can
take part in orgiastic and organic sprawling, the space is what the raving bodies
make of it. The rave environment stresses this disorganization of space and deters
any attempt at resisting abandonment to the flow of bodies and sound. The vastness
of the main rooms, the stroboscopic lighting, the colour hazes and smoke induce a
confusional state, discouraging any attempt at seizing continuity or organizing
information.
Techno music, stretched across high-frequency oscillations, waves, bleeps and low-
end incessant thumping, also modulates consciousness in a specific fashion. Techno
proves to be a truly efficient sculptor and architect of time, while space becomes
thick or aerial in accordance. Through its insistent and repetitive beat structure,
techno constantly reiterates a present, a new foundation, a Nietzschean eternal
differential return, a new event of meaning—as though it were some sort of
relentless immediacy machine. As Jean-Ernest Joos writes:
Once the needle touches vinyl, there is no future—repetition has made it
obsolete. The revolution of techno has been the creation of music that
develops itself in its own interstices, the interstices of the present. The
parasites of chronology narrative, beginning, middle and end are all gone.
Listening is pure, pure opening.
(Joos 1997:11–12)Finally, drugs are another—truly radical—means of heightening rupture.
Consciousness-altering and energy-liberating substances such as ecstasy, LSD and
amphetamine (speed) are effective ways of catalysing and inducing a response to all
other ruptures. To be truly effective in this economy, the drug must be
accompanied by a context and a disposition enabling ritual consumption: the
substance must therefore be acknowledged—and this can prove no small task —as a
ritual tool, and not an end in itself.^20
Drugs induce a significant rupture by affecting the apprehension of reality.
Although they are not necessary for the rave experience to be instituant, a variety of
alterants are used in the rave context as in various traditional festive contexts,
exacerbating a feeling of otherness. If the festive is an ‘inflation’ of both the
individual and social body (Caillois 1980), then subjective expansion through ritual
drug use is an effective catalyst. As reverting to carnivalesque vestments had
displayed a first outer disposition for a new subjectivity, drugs like ecstasy enable this
exploration on an inner—Bataille would say ‘intimate’—level.
THE ‘INSTITUANT’ RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF RAVE 71