domination and resistance, regulation and freedom, discipline and trance, habit and
transcendence cannot be so easily disentangled in social reality. Even if there are real
mystical connections through music and drugs, there is a flipside to any “smooth
space.” The point of coining the term “smooth striations” was to show that many
practices and spaces in rave can actually reproduce striations (of capitalism, state
regulation, patriarchy heterosexism, classism, nationalism, and racism) precisely
because they center around music and drugs because they are smooth.
In Goa, the trance state, the Enfield experience, ritual togetherness through
smoking chillums, enjoying loud music, being cool, PLUR on the dance floor, and
reverence for the sun all entailed exclusions or at least some sort of arrogance towards
others. Due to the specific subcultural dynamics of the rave scene, those who feel
they belong least to the rave scene are ultimately the Indian tourists. And, finally,
when moral panics lead the Goan government and police to crack down on the
parties, mainly for electoral or ideological purposes, the tourism-dependent
inhabitants of Anjuna become the dupes. The 2001–2 season was a bad season for
business. While this was connected to the events of September 11, 2001, it had far
more to do with the erosion of Anjuna’s reputation as a party Mecca through word-
of-mouth and email reports about the zero-tolerance noise-pollution policy. The
simple solution—legalize the parties but have them regulated in between villages or
on the beach—is increasingly difficult to realize as corruption becomes more
profound, venue owners and drug dealers greedier, competition fiercer, ravers more
arrogant, and Goans more conservative about their local identity.
My criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari attended to their dichotomizing of the
smooth and the striated. However, their materialist philosophy of social
identification, revolving around the concept of faciality (amongst others), remains
preferable to psychoanalytical, Marxist, or existentialist alternatives. In fact, their
materialism might not be materialist enough: by adding a bit more flesh, a bit more
terracotta, sunlight, exhaust pipes, and sleeplessness to my ethnography, I was able
to argue that spiritual becomings and power relations are not so diametrically
opposed as Deleuze and Guattari’s cybernetic model suggests. If there is something
to be done about things going awry in rave (as is obviously happening in Goa), we
will need quite sophisticated methods of imagining the smooth and the striated.
This will consist of admitting to the spiritual force of music and drugs, but also to
their less benign effects, and, crucially, the empirical relations between the two.
Notes1 See, especially, Steve Redhead’s edited collection Rave Off (1993). See also Collin
(1997), Currid (1995), Gilbert and Pearson (1999), Malbon (1999), McRobbie
(1994), Redhead (1990), Richard and Kruger (1998), Rietveld (1997). Compare the
more nuanced or critical perspectives of Gibson and Pagan (1997), Hesmondhalgh
(1997), Ingham et al. (1999), Pini (1998), Reynolds (1998), and Thornton (1995). I
am here deliberately conflating the categories of “raves,” “dance music,” and “club282 ARUN SALDANHA