of lasers, participants are transported to a perceptual realm of inconstancy, a place
where words are swallowed whole by the darkness and the fog. Add to this the
peculiar ‘meaninglessness’ of electronic music, which Reynolds attributes to the
emphasis on percussion and timbre, ‘the two elements of music that are the hardest
to remember...[i.e.] ineffable, untranscribable elements’ (Reynolds 1999:054), and
you have an ‘experience’ that does not lend itself to memory or communication. A
space where meaning fails, where representation collapses, the rave-assemblage
deconstructs language through the deployment of its materiality.
Yet Pini takes issue with this. Stemming directly from her political desire to
reaffirm and protect the category of ‘woman’ against poststructuralist formulations
of ecstasy that emphasize an ‘undoing of the constructed self within rave’ (Pini 2001:
46), Pini opposes analyses that see rave as mass ‘disappearance’ or postmodern
meaninglessness. Emphatically, she declares that,
although it is true that ravers may well experience a sense of ‘losing’
themselves within an event, this does not mean that identity has been
‘escaped’ from. Body-subjects within rave may well experience a merging into
a larger ‘body’ (such as the ‘body’ of the dancing crowd) but as far as raving
women go, this does not mean that femininity is ever fully ‘escaped’ from.
(Pini 2001:46–7)Denying the classical conception of ecstasy as a ‘transcendental’ movement beyond
the ego and its identities, Pini deploys a textualized approach wherein ‘the lived
practices of rave cannot be separated from the ‘texts’ or ‘fictions’ which make up its
meanings’ (Pini 1997:113). Pini’s model, accordingly, necessitates an immediate
and contemporaneous constitution of every ecstatic moment as meaningful,
enlanguaged experience—her ecstatics are forever the prisoners of ideology, forever
the prisoners of their inscribed skins. Arising from her wish to safeguard rave’s
ability to restructure cultural narratives of sexuality, Pini refuses to accept raving as a
mute, afictional activity—as an ineffable. Instead, it must ‘speak’ (Pini 2001:157), it
must be active in its production of ‘otherwheres’; it must exist dialogically in
relation to oppressive structures.
Because of this, Pini cannot part with subjectivity. She needs it to remain not
only the nexus of fictions, but also the seat of activity and agency. Pini therefore
conceives of ecstasy as resubjectification, not desubjectification. Understanding the
subject as the result of subjectification into the Symbolic (and inherently political)
order of language, Pini feels that all claims of desubjectification abnegate the
political efficacy of rave. For if ecstasy is ‘nothing more’ than a desubjectification, a
movement beyond language into a realm of ineffability, then the dancing body that
was once a self becomes nothing more than an apolitical anonymity, a state of affairs
Pini adamantly denies, arguing that it is ‘naïve and problematic’ to deny that
‘identity classifications do not continue to have very real effects’ (ibid.:49).
Concurring with Pini that hierarchical and thus oppressive identity categories are
at work within rave, I nevertheless feel that her arguments suffer from an inadequate
110 JAMES LANDAU