5
The flesh of raving
Merleau-Ponty and the ‘experience’ of ecstasy^1
James Landau
The ecstasy of raving is problematic.^2 Often characterized in the same manner as its
more ‘traditional’ cousins—as ineffable, numinous and overwhelming—it is said to
have changed lives, and it is for many the draw, and perhaps even the raison d’être, of
raving itself. Yet no real consensus exists about its shape, manner or form—its
constitution, its ‘essence’, remains remarkably disputed. Caught within a web of
contentious and proliferating discourses—medical, political, academic and
subcultural—the ecstasy of raving is multiply situated and inordinately multi-
layered, a veritable palimpsest of meaning. Making matters worse, ecstasy’s
hermeneutic ambiguity further complicates the picture: for, governed by immediacy
and engagement, ecstasy obviates the analytic authority of detached observers even as
its ineffability opens up an epistemological gap between the actual ‘experience’ and
its subsequent embodiment in discourse.
Beneath this interpretive minefield, though, lies a deeper, more fundamental
concern, namely ecstasy’s transgressive relationship to binary thought. For in
dissolving the mind’s organizational dualisms, including, most profoundly, that of
the self/Other dichotomy, ecstatic raving is an ‘experience’ discursively dominated
by recurring motifs of unity, holism and interconnectedness. In the crucible of the
rave, barriers are said to disintegrate as once disparate entities overlap and
intermingle. Ravers become not only ‘one with the music’ (Stiens 1997:2), but also
one with the crowd, losing ‘subjective belief in their self [as they] merge into a
collective body’ (Jordan 1995:5). As Douglas Rushkoff has noted, ‘there is a magic
moment that can happen at a rave—at 2 or 3 in the morning, when everyone is
dancing, [during which] you experience a feeling of collective organism’ (Eisenberg
1997: D5), of being a part of what another raver describes as a ‘big, coordinated
animal that just moves’ (Pini 1997:120). Melting into the crowd, the raver
participates in an ecstatic collectivity, a unity that challenges the ontological
certainties of Western thought by destabilizing such foundational oppositions as self/
Other and mind/body.
That said, ecstatic practitioners often conceptualize this collectivity in terms of
antinomian spiritualities known for both their frequent disavowal of mainstream
religion^3 and their emphatic deployment of non-traditional concepts. As one rave-
proselyte notes,