Rave Culture and Religion

3

Rapturous ruptures

The ‘instituant’ religious experience of rave

François Gauthier

My personal opinion is that savage religion is not so much something

that is thought as something that is danced.

(R.R.Marett)^1

What does the gathering of many thousands of youth on a regular basis

foretell? Forcibly something.

(Emmanuel Galland 1997:8)

Defining evanescence

This chapter will focus mainly on that which has fuelled the formidable diffusion of
rave and continues to draw non-initiates by the thousands, even today, into the
humidity and heat of all-night techno parties: namely, the nature and characteristics
of the singular and intense moment of release of the techno trance. The hypothesis
can seem uncanny or daring: that rave’s ascension within Western youth subcultures
is due to the religious nature of its experience. But it is also, as will be debated here,
an insightful and fecund viewpoint for understanding the effervescence of rave in
contemporary youth culture.
In order to address some questions raised by the intensity and otherness of the
rave experience—questions which challenge the whole of contemporary social
sciences and humanities—this discussion will call upon the works of two of the
most original French thinkers of the 20th century: Roger Bastide (1898–1974) and
Georges Bataille (1897–1962). If Bastide first enables us better to grasp the
dynamics of rave culture as a whole, Bataille can help approach the more intimate
dimensions of the state of rave. It is under the sign of consumption, abandon and
transgression that we are here to penetrate the rapturous world of rave.
In regard to method, this discussion pursues a certain ideal-type of rave that can
be defined as instituant.^2 I am bidding that it is by grasping the more vivid aspects
of such a phenomenon that one can hope to understand what some have called the
more ‘degraded’, ‘commercial’ or ‘institutionalized’ forms of rave. If the following
analysis can be held to be widely applicable to emergent and clandestine rave scenes,