requires it be worked. Supporting the participation thesis, ravers generally
acknowledge that the ecstasy trip is not a passive thing: ‘You have to dance to it,
dance it until it’s no longer an intruder, until it has become one with the flesh’ (Joos
1997:11). Everything boils down to the acceptance of an altered state, which the
raver must resist resisting.^22
The state of surrender to body, crowd and sound that is typical of rave has widely
been called a ‘trance’, although the expression is seldom given any definition or
granted further analysis. A trance, understood in the wide anthropological sense, is
simply an altered state of consciousness, a significantly differed rapport with the
world, with the self and with others. In this respect, it is not thoroughly uncommon.
The question arises then as to the specific nature of the rave-borne trance. This will
be the focus of the remainder of this chapter.
In our culture, where trance states are often understood as sharing an acute
proximity with folly, the only accepted state of trance is hypnosis. Rather than
collective, the hypnotic trance is defined as being necessarily individual (Fontaine
and Fontana 1996:23). Considering that other cultures recognize many different
states of consciousness (Suissa 1997), the lack of subtlety here is disarming.
Nonetheless, Joos translates this into the techno sphere:
As such, the rave state is precisely one of hypnosis. Hypnosis occurs when,
after one stares at a point until it becomes invisible, one’s attention is
decentralised. And that is exactly what happens at raves: all visual, auditory
and tactile sensation is only peripheral, diffuse, like an immense and
unfocused opening.
(Joos 1997:12)The religious fête involves some sort of trance, a transgression of the self in a wider
ensemble, an ekstasis (Duvignaud 1977). In normal life, individuality is understood
as difference, and this difference, in turn, translates into divergence. In the midst of
the festive consumption, this difference becomes a foundation for convergence: the
presence of the self affirmed by the presence of others. It is, in other words,
participating in an inflated social body and, both intimately and ultimately, the
recognition of the need for others (Boutin 1976).
This reveals that lying deep beneath the impulse to consume is the call for
abandon. Letting go in the festive arena of rave further recalls the parallel drawn
with sacrifice. For Bataille, sacrifice, widely held by scholars to be ‘the religious rite
par excellence’, is defined as violence—meaning dis-order. rupture and excess—
consuming an offering.^23 The most important gesture in sacrifice is the gift of the
ritual offering (abandon), which fire or blade seals as definite and irretrievable
(Mauss 1968; Bataille 1988, 1989). Through its destruction, its own consumption
in the sacrificial scheme, the offering is irrevocably torn away from any use, any
determined productive end or value.
In a sacrificial scheme, abandon in the festive ritual of rave could be understood
as holding subjectivity as an offering (and we can stress the radical vulnerability that
74 FRANÇOIS GAUTHIER