insertion in a way of life and a whole system of beliefs and meaning. Mysticism and
the rave rift nevertheless share abandon in an indefinite present—except in rave
this spending in immediateness is made possible by the presence of others. Bataille
(1986) held that the individual body could not be kept indefinitely to the
‘minuscule fold’ of private life: it must be opened, shared and delivered, made
collective. Participating in the social body’s need for the festive and the individual
body’s need for orgiastic sharing, rave’s body-in-motion satisfies itself, thwarting the
rules of the profane. The techno trance, therefore, is not mystical, although it
perhaps contains the possibility of some kind of mysticism, if the potential for
transformation is seized. The individual, then, as if partly domesticating this
instituancy, becomes his or her own pontiff.
If this scenario holds interesting potential for promoting personal responsibility it
is also tragic since it falls short of making it into a large-scale collective cosmology.
If this experience is understood as festive in nature and thereby immediate and
ephemeral, the rave experience can still become a manner of being-in-the-world by
providing a differential point of view from which to construct meaning and
identity. If it is interpreted as highly spiritual or explicitly religious by the individual
(and possibly his or her surroundings), then, the rave experience and its rift-like
peak might approximate ‘savage mysticism’, to keep with Bastide’s terminology. On
the other hand, the particularly fulfilling and fleeting nature of this trance-with-
others can become an easy escape route in which communion and openness dissolve
into autism—meaning essentially shunning the depths of its own religiosity.
ConclusionIn the instituant rave experience, rupture and excess lead to abandon. And in
abandon’s consumption, in this rapture brought by the heat of rupture, communion
is found: the dissolution of the individual in sharing, the union of the separate. On
the anthropological level, we find the recognition of the need for others in an altered
environment as a structuring limit of human experience. On the sociological level,
this ‘rift’, the state of rave, is a paroxysmal state, both collective and individual, that
answers how sociality is effected through ‘reliance’ (Ménard 1991). Deriving from
the Latin ‘to bind’, ‘religare’, the etymology of reliance pinpoints an essential
function of religion, and demonstrates how sociology bridges into—and could even
be said to stem from—religiology.^27 Far from dying out, religion can be found
thriving in contemporary quests for meaning and ritual, although in a more
instituant and fragmented manner (and thus shunning dogmas, credos and
institutions). Hence the importance of challenging our traditional understanding of
religion (and its science) in order to better—and more fully—apprehend the
effervescence of contemporary youth phenomena such as rave.
THE ‘INSTITUANT’ RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF RAVE 77