Two Fingas and James T. Kirk: "Sound so perfect and clear in its intensity it captures my breath and robs me of coherent thought, making me nothing but a vessel for emotion as I spin twelve inches of magnificence between my fingers."
Rainald Goetz: “You walk into a place like this, and the effect hits you there and then: Euphoria. As if you had NEVER felt this before. As if there were no such thing as the history of happiness.”
McKenzie Wark: "Time becomes stringently horizontal. Neither rising nor falling, just sideways swelling and slimming. The body slots in, to time, finding itself stranded through itself, through losing the form of its being in time."
When I wrote about Rainald Goetz’s Rave, I said the book is less interested in plot than it is in presenting a phenomenology of the 1990s German club scene. In Junglist, Two Fingas and James T. Kirk achieve something vaguely similar – the story is about giving the reader a taste of what it was like when jungle was massive. McKenzie Wark’s new book, Raving, sits comfortably among this set. She takes us raving and invites us to learn about the practice and its associated feelings along the way. She talks about the ‘rave continuum’ – the universal that all raves partake in. Her book reaches for it much like Rave and Junglist have, much like every good rave does. Raving is a practice that eludes simple definitions. It isn’t just about techno and popping pills in dark industrial sites, it’s about the feeling the music produces, it’s about the euphoria and about getting lost in all of it, it’s about scratching an itch to be outside oneself, to become one with something universal, to be free, if just for a short while.
Wark offers her perspective on the phenomenon. Works about raves tend to focus on a particular demographic. Rave and Junglist are both bildungsromans told from the perspective of young men. The music scenes they’re set in nurture them and we can see their transformation reflected in their relationship to the music and culture. Films on the topic tend to skew similarly – Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden (2014) and Hannes Stöhr’s Berlin Calling (2008) also focus on men. These works all present their young male protagonists as either discovering themselves through going to raves (Rave, Junglist, Eden) or re-discovering what’s good about themselves and the world by reconnecting with the music (Berlin Calling). Wark’s Raving turns the genre around. Here, we have the perspective of an established adult, someone who isn’t in need to discover herself by realizing how raves give meaning to life, but who knows what she’s looking for.
Wark describes that prior to transitioning, dancing to techno as one of the few times her body felt at home with itself. Techno, she writes, is “more like a sonic technology, made for aliens. Being made for aliens, it’s a sound in which no human body is more welcome than any other.” For Wark, this addresses an important need to get away from the concern about her body. That for some time, she isn’t there. Instead, there’s just “happy flesh, pumping and swaying, tethered only by gravity. A trans body homing in on its own estrangement…”
Raving qua practice is always about satisfying a need to escape. It’s about exploring the possibility of being outside of yourself. It was true for the young men in Junglist, it was true for the young Rainald Goetz, it’s true for McKenzie Wark. She is upfront about this need for herself. Wark writes:
"Trans people are not the only ones who dissociate--but we tend to be good at it. We're a kind of people who need to not be in body or world. The body feels wrong. The world treats us as wrong. Dissociation can be debilitating. And also sometimes not. I used to write a lot, in dissociated states. Then I transitioned, and couldn't write at all. And yet still needed to dissociate. I felt better about being embodied, but the world didn't. So--raves. And out of raves, the writing came back, slowly."
Despite raving satisfying the need for dissociation, Wark is still constantly reminded of her body in these situations. Late in the night, in the toilets, she notices herself: “The face in the mirror clocking me is that of just another ageing, nonpassing transsexual… I’m confronted with the gap between a core confidence ... and a rather shaky self-image.” But the issue with one’s self-image is only one part of this. There’s also the guardedness that comes from living in a trans body in an increasingly hostile world. When a drunk woman bumps into Wark and her friends, the thought that the crowd could easily think it is they who are the problem is quick to appear on her mind. Wark writes that for queer and trans people, the nightlife is an opportunity to escape the real world, into the shadows. But even then, “There’s still cops. There’s still potential violence, on the street, even in the venue. It just feels more like the surround. But safety is relative.”
There is therefore a tension that never goes away in the experience Wark describes. At best, it seems, one can lose oneself just for a brief moment. As she says, raves aren’t a utopia, they’re just a situation that’s more conducive to satisfying the need. They’re still part of the outside world, dominated by two political paradigms – “the one the wants to kill us and the one that will let us die.” This, however, underlines another part of the need to dissociate, it is to disappear from history itself, even if just for the night.
All good things come to an end. People age out of the scene, or other concerns take their place, or they simply leave. Goetz’s protagonist lamented that eventually people started worrying about “posts and positions. The Academy. Applying for posts and taking positions. Pay grades for adjunct, assistant, full.” Wark is more realistic, perhaps more experienced in life than Goetz’s was when writing his book. She writes:
"A rave is temporary. A passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time. Some things about it as a practice happen in the time of the situation and maybe belong there rather than in writing. So I left them there. And while a rave is temporary, raving is outside of time. The rave continuum goes sideways in k-time, until it mutates into something else. Until the end of the world."
Wark is past all of the bullshit Goetz worried about; different life stages, I suppose. But what she shows is that the need that raves satisfy don’t go away on its own. She describes herself as a coworker, a raver who has a day job, for whom raving is the thing that happens outside of work, something they can tell their coworkers about on Monday morning. But she has the needs that can only be satisfied by raving all the same. “I have a day job and the times I can dance through from doors to closing are rare. Besides freeing me from gender dysphoria, raves also free me from alienated labor -- or appear to. Techno pounds the living shit out of my brain, freeing it from nagging worries about emails unsent. The psychic damage of certain kind of cognitive and affective labor can be temporarily healed on the dance floor."
Goetz worries that this takes away something from the experience. For him, when concerns about things outside of raves appeared, the scene began its descent. Wark shows that this isn’t the case. She reminds us that a rave is always temporary. It’s a passage of people through time, things happen and then they stop. It mutates, becomes something different. We can trace multiple origins to techno – we can look at it as an expression of Black creativity in Detroit, or we can look at it as an expression of a need that people of a certain temperament have. Wark says “Techno began as the sound of blackness giving itself a future in the ruins.” No wonder it took off in Berlin in the wake of the fall of the Wall.
I’m reminded of a passage in Junglist:
“Jungle is and always will be a multi-cultural thing, but it is also about a Black identity, Black attitude, Black style and outlook. It's about giving a voice to the urban generation left to rot in council estates, ghettoised neighbourhoods and schools that ain't providing an education for shit. Jungle kickin ass and taking names."
Ultimately, I take raving to be an emancipatory practice. Casting off the baggage of one’s body, one’s anxieties, society’s perceptions and hang ups, all to grasp at the universal joy of existence is just a way of finding happiness in a world where every facet of our lives is impacted by capital. In a rave, none of that is important. There is only the beat, drawing us into the rave continuum.
Works cited:
Rainald Goetz (2020), Rave (trans. Adrian Nathan West), Fitzcarraldo Editions
McKenzie Wark (2023), Raving, Duke University Press
Two Fingas and James T. Kirk (2021), Junglist, Repeater Books
Eden (2014), dir. Mia Hansen-Løve
Berlin Calling (2008), dir. Hannes Stöhr