Rave Culture and Religion

14

Goa trance and trance in Goa

Smooth striations

Arun Saldanha

Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a

republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the

politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of,

say the entire US government?

(Bey 1991:134)

Rave studies, poststructuralism and spirituality

The 1990s witnessed the consolidation of “rave studies” in academia. Research into
electronic dance culture was from the beginning heavily influenced by cultural
studies, as opposed to other possible theoretical trajectories such as symbolic
interactionism or cultural anthropology (see Gilbert and Pearson 1999). Rave
studies then inherited cultural studies’ reliance on poststructuralist and
postmodernist philosophers to formulate not only its objects of inquiry (the deaths
of the subject, the sign, identity, reality, modernity, marketing, memory, and place),
but also its evaluation of rave as a subversive phenomenon.
Generally speaking, this academic evaluation has been on the positive side. For
most commentators, rave and club culture embodies one of the few sites in
contemporary society where the cultural industry, patriarchy, bureaucracy, Oedipal
family, heterosexism, surveillance, and the pettiness of community and traditional
morality are effectively resisted.^1 They then largely reproduce rave culture’s own
discourse of transcendence of social difference, a discourse of absolute newness and
exteriority to both systems of domination and everyday life. Let me call this
transcendence a question of spirituality.
In rave studies, the usual lessons learned from poststructuralist and post-
modernist analyses of Western power relations seem to be, first, that power is quasi-
total and, second, that resistance only exists where power is perfectly absent; that is,
resistance is self-sufficient, related to power only in terms of opposition instead of
reciprocity, circularity, and ambivalence. The take on domination and resistance in
this chapter will attempt to be more complicated than that, following recent work in
critical geography (e.g. Atkinson 2000) to account for the possibility of resistance
breeding power, and power breeding resistance.