ConsumptionRave’s most important innovation is its break from the spectacle format of the rock
show while blowing the club dance floor up to overwhelming proportions. In a way,
the rock show is the result of an exacerbated individualism: the stage is the altar,
where stands the deified figure of the band leader. Incidentally the sociality of a rock
show differs radically from that of a rave. The spectacle is a transfer of the self
towards an incarnated Ideal, a live representation permitting an ekstasis of the self
through identification. In rave, the uniform orientation towards the stage is short-
circuited, freeing ravers from dogmatic spatial determinations while opening new
possibilities for interaction. The result, were we to view a snapshot of the dance
floor from above, would be something between a laboratory for Maffesoli’s (1988)
soft-core open-edge ‘tribal’ sociality and a portrayal of the Brownian particle dance:
many interconnected and ever-shifting circles of oscillating individuals. This
sociality facilitates contact and abandon, as no focus or adoration is sought from a
stage.
In opposition to the more or less passive (but highly determined) reception
involved in a spectacle, rave promotes participation. The investment required for
rave differs significantly from that for leisure or spectacle, and even more so from
the passive role of the consumer in the contemporary profane. Participation is
creation and expression, and calls upon the whole of being. It is based on
investment and commitment (on a more or less short-term basis in this case but in a
highly intense manner), as well as on all the gratuitous, puerile and excessive
behaviours that make up rave’s experience. Following Bataille, ravers enter a world of
ruptures in which they consume in excess, and where they do not merely ‘border’ on
the religious, but are deeply and wildly religious. Thus we could say that a profane
‘logic of consumerism’ is transcended into a fuller, more vivid ‘logic of sacrificial
consumption’.^21
Through this consumption, rave recalls archaic and ecstatic manifestations of
religion more than contemplative Christian piety. Of all the expensive and excessive
behaviours in rave, dancing frenetically or in utter abandonment for hours on end is
the most blatant and significant. In the rave context, with impressive stacks of
speakers gushing out giga-levels of sound, techno comes into actual being (Boulé
2001), making it imperative to dance. Techno becomes a presence that cannot be
ignored—more, it is a shock whose intensity is only matched by the body’s urge to
give in to it, an aggression made positive through the festive context (Métais 2001).
Compared to rock and pop’s ‘sentimental’ listening mode, techno music’s
‘sensitivity’ bypasses verbal recognition and blurs subject/object division.
Dancing also modifies one’s consciousness of space, time and body, and is readily
judged to be therapeutic (Fontaine and Fontana 1996; Schott-Bilmann 2001).
Benefits from dance can also be understood as resulting from its gratuitousness, its
essentially religious and erotic narrative, allowing for intimacy and contact with
others outside usual social behavioural codes. This dance, various in styles, is an
abstract, impulsive, desexualized body-in-motion that opens up to non-verbal
72 FRANÇOIS GAUTHIER