Difference-within-identity: the gnosis of ecstatic fleshRave...allows us to access a space (within ourselves) completely outside
the realm of subjective vs. objective. I think that space represents a state
of being rather than thinking.... Suppose for a moment that I stopped
‘thinking’, that I just ‘AM’.... I would just perceive...which leads to an
awareness of being ‘one’ with everything.
(Tanya 1994)Speaking to ‘the motif of communality [that] has been one of the more recurrent
elements in discourses about psychedelic parties’ (Tramacchi 2001:174), Tanya
expresses above an ‘experience’ of ‘being one with everything’ that is often echoed
by other practitioners. Eric Stiens, for example, recounts the tale of one participant
who testified that ‘for one night, I was one with the universe, I was one with my
neighbor, and I was one with the music’ (Stiens 1997:2). Frequently catalysed by
the empathetic qualities of MDMA, this transpersonal blending of the self with the
other has been one of the primary areas of inquiry throughout this chapter. Often
linked to feelings of being ‘connected to everyone around me, like we are one
organism in synch with the music’ (Fogel 1994), this sense of unity and
interconnectedness has led to the invocation by many of a ‘super-organism’
composed of the crowd’s ecstatic bodies. Flying in the face of modernity’s rigid
individualism, this sense of unity resonates, I feel, with one of the major goals of
religion—namely the production of solidarity and community—thus partially
explaining the discourse of ecstatic raving’s frequent deployment of religious
rhetoric.
For example, incorporated into the full-moon rave rituals of the Moontribe, this
transgressive unity occurs, according to Ralph Perring, when ‘by by-passing the
conscious mind and plugging into a deeper level of the psyche, the short-sighted
understanding of ourselves as separate individuals is ruthlessly blown apart to make
way for a higher consciousness’ (Perring 1997), a ‘consciousness’ intrinsic to the
Moontribe’s sense of spiritual interconnectedness.
For some, though, this ‘consciousness’ is never quite complete. For running
perpendicularly to the rhetoric of unity that permeates ecstatic discourses is a
contrary thread of continued identity. Ravers, even as their egos melt, even as their
bodies dissolve into a larger ‘organism’, still speak of something apart, of some
undefinable ‘thing’ distinct from the crowd. Ask them if they completely disappear
into this unity while ecstatic, and they will often vacillate, equivocally answering
both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as they search for the terminology to describe, to produce, their
‘experience’.
While this alternation between unity and identity could be explained simply in
terms of functionality, as a matter of the particular rave-assemblage’s efficiency or the
individual’s psychological disposition, these answers shy away from confronting the
matter head on. Therefore, having already elaborated various models of
desubjectification that situate the raver’s apprehension of unity as the result of an
118 JAMES LANDAU