In 2011 Urbanomic published Fanged Noumena - a collection of writings from
influential British philosopher turn NRx posterboy Nick Land. Along with
writers such as Sadie Plant and Kodwo Eshun, Land had spent the 90s in Britain
traversing a hysteria of alienating forces, from the further onslaught of
neoliberal capital to the emergent roles of algorithmic technologies and
cyberspace. Given this climate he was no stranger to the ruthless affectivity
of electronic music and rave culture in expressing these social tendencies,
following its descent into the darker techno derivatives of what Simon
Reynolds called the 90s ‘hardcore continuum’ - a sonic wormhole stretching from
Doomcore to Jungle to Gabber.
For
Land, raving was a lucid expression of our nascent posthumanism, a place where
identity fractured as we came to embody new cybernetic pleasures. It is for
this reason that in one of two epigraphs introducing Land’s texts, the
late Mark Fisher quotes his little known essay, ‘No Future’ - an ode to the
intensities of 90s techno-culture. Along with Land, Fisher recognised rave
music’s inherent necro-libidinal charge; its ability to express wider cultural
forces. He quotes, rave was our “impending human extinction becoming accessible
as a dancefloor.”[1]
Cover Image for The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore
Continuum #1: Hardcore Rave (1992)
For
the past 5 years or so I have watched this psychic extinction play out. Every
weekend thousands continue to cram into derelict warehouses, mildew archways
and fetid cauldrons. All hellbent on chemical highs and loops of acidic bass.
Bodies are carved out of the dark terrain by schizophrenic lasers, their
movements pulsing through dense smoke like military optics laced with
amphetamine. Catatonic stares and abject grins aligned toward the fortified DJ
booth, its messianic presence enfusing each dancer with a sermonic frenzy.
Given its darker side it isn’t hard to see the apocalyptic edge of raving.
Crowds of half-vacant minds and wonky irises; anaemic thoughts chewed up like
pulp.
Raves
and rave culture are for many a pristine example of contemporary escapism.
Where the young go to ‘get away’ from the responsibilities of daily life or the
onslaught of social alienation; burying their heads in the warm bosom of
synthetic drum kits and modular FX. A collective orgasm mixed with wild
entropy. For some this is just another sordid example of a generation gone
completely wrong: ‘Living for the weekend’ - albeit with a uniquely dystopian
edge; the latest wave of youth to be sucked into the hypnotic prism of low
frequencies, dry mouths and euphoric highs. In this case, raves are not simply
a dystopia in waiting but a real time eschatology; a hyperstition of full-blown
planetary meltdown.
None
of this is new of course. Raves are the latest in a long history of Dionysiac
spaces. From the Epicurean Garden to the salons and clubs of French libertines.
In aesthetics too, from Athenian tragedies to Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of
Medieval carnival, even Nietzsche’s Wagner before he ‘crept back to the cross’.
These were and still are spaces where social codes dissolve under the dual glow
of moral skepticism and hedonistic pleasure. Places where mutual trust and
collective anonymity help engender joyful acts of social transgression. ‘Losing
oneself’ in a swarm of like-minded clubbers, the prosaic gestures of shared
water and gum establishing a subtle aura of communistic good will from which to
freely express one’s self.
What’s
interesting to me, however, is the assumption of escape. That raves and rave
music are about experiencing something exterior. Something outside of
the banal platitudes of humdrum ‘reality’. For in this sense, is it not
antithetical then to assert the ‘accessibility’ of posthuman dissolution,
through what could be translated as a mode of experiential withdrawal? To
withdraw and access in the same movement?
This
could have been true of rock. In so far as the gig or the stadium concert was
an imaginary experience filtered through autobiographical or social realist
criticism; pre-defined stories waiting to be interpreted by the listener.
Particular to the 90s, Fisher was a keen critic of the “reactionary pantomime
of Britpop”,[2]
which by establishing a monolithic identity of white British culture ignored
what was new and exciting about the decade: cultural pluralism, accelerating technology
and genre hybridity. As Reynolds attests, the anxiety-curing swagger of faux
British chauvinism - whether or not to see Oasis or Blur at Glastonbury ‘94 -
was not translatable to the basic principles of rave’s enthralled dancefloors.
Instead of receding into the carceral identities of monoethnic Britain, raving
was a process of creating something new.
For
its followers, the appeal of rave’s lucent strobes, dark atmospheres and
crystal drips was not to be found in typical forms of aesthetic consumption.
For those on the inside, the revolutionary potential lied in the fact that
“rave constructs an experience.”[3]
In
this sense raves are in fact machines; or what Deleuze and Guattari would call
a ‘desiring-machine’. They are an integrated system of technology and labour
which produces experience. Rave’s dancefloor is an assemblage of
psychological, chemical, electronic and corporeal software, rigged up through
neurons, electrons, chemicals and sound waves. A decentralised and
nonhierarchical cybernetic system, melding technology, matter and affect into a
horizontal flow of collective acceleration. It’s function as an experience is
like that of a factory, constructing intensities that each component plugs in
and responds to: lights/wavelengths, drugs/hormones, clothes/textures,
mixers/frequencies, dancers/bodies, “a continuous, self-vibrating region of
intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point
or external end.”[4
In
a rave set acid synths are left to gargle into obscurity whilst relentless
break-cuts fold endlessly back into themselves. Tracks evolve without narrative
and emotions surge forth without aim; crescendos ascend to infinity and
micro-sonic blips dissolve as quickly as they first appeared. Devoid of any clear
determination each element is connected to a real-time feedback loop of
continuous matter-energy, substituting a progressive and linear perception of
time with a cyclic repetition of singular events; what Nietzsche would call the
‘eternal return’. A series of techno-somatic events that flows through
you and into the next.
Raves
are sex without genitals, pleasure without climax. Dial in, jack up and get
loose.
So
where’s the escape? If anything, to me raving is about plugging into something
extra. Something that is always more than one. The contemporary
philosopher Timothy Morton would call this mode of perception ‘ecology’. The
disintegration of anthropocentric boundaries between human and non-human,
nature and culture; or the auxiliary dualisms of mind/body, inside/outside.
Ontologically speaking, in our day-to-day experience of phenomena we usually
run on this default setting: the banal plateau of Kantian epistemology. That
there is something fundamentally different about us ‘in here’ and the world
‘out there’ - and that we will never access the world ‘in itself’. Being part
of rave shatters this assumption.
Fully
immersed on the dancefloor, every raver comes to see themself less as an
isolated subject and more like a desiring-machine; a blend of human and
non-human intensities, plugged into the different material registers of the
rave. Bodies are no longer fleshy lumps of tissue and bone detached from the mind,
they are portals. Wormholes to the prepersonal continuum of what Deleuze and
Guattari call ‘The Body without Organs’ - an immanent plane of proto-subjective
soup that connects a hand cocked liked a pistol to a Kenwood subwoofer, a rush
of serotonin to the neon glow of a UV blacklight.
CXEMA Rave – Kiev, Ukraine
Even
the most personal sensations are deindividuated, the almost telepathic level of
empathy felt on Ecstasy are akin to what Richard Smith calls ‘a communism of
the emotions.’ Piece by piece, mix by mix ravers are dissolved into an orgiastic
sense of connectivity. To the sound, the space, the electricity. To each other.
Soon it is hard to discern where ‘you’ start and where ‘they’ or ‘it’ ends.
Electro-libidinal wires are crisscrossed and welded together. Currents of sonic
energy and dopamine rerouted through neighbouring bodies and technical
apparatus. “An oozy yearn, a bliss-ache, a trembley effervescence that makes
you feel like you’ve got champagne for blood.”[5]
Raving
is a spectral game. Objects of desire are replaced by liminal intensities;
tempos devoured by pure speed. Whilst to some degree our ‘access’ to the
experience of raving remains similar to other musical or quotidian events -
after all, no one is denying Kant’s metaphysics of sense, albeit filtered
through a Nietzschean body that is both eternal and different. The
point is, it’s not really a question of our access at all. The beauty of
raving, and the ecological aspect of its experience, is that you come to sense
how you yourself are accessed. The neatly shrink-wrapped subjectivity that we
all covet and protect almost floats around outside of you, endlessly warped and
permeable to the collective flows of rave’s electro-chemical highs. For ravers,
it becomes less a question of escaping reality, and more a drive to be
accessed by reality. Frightened as we all are of the insidious poverty of
our day-to-day sensations, a mode of being which is always-already once removed
from the inherent multiplicity of posthuman becoming.
[1] Nick Land, ‘No
Future,’ in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 398.
[2] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression,
Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014) pp. 40.
[3] Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (London: Picador, 1998) pp.
xix.
[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005) pp. 2.
[5] Renyolds, xxv.
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