Rave ‘Til Timewave Zero:
Deconstructing the Strategies of a Transparent Generation
by Brian Comerford
“…Rave is a form of
collective disappearance, an investment in pleasure
that shouldn't be
written off as mere . . . disengagement.
. . . Rave is
neither subversive nor conformist, but more than both..."[i]
Simon Reynolds
"Let us admit
that we have attended parties where 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 U.S. Government?
. . . Is this
something worth imagining, worth fighting for?"[ii]
Hakim Bey
Rave is
in retreat. In the United States
legislators had difficulty passing the R.A.V.E. Act of 2002, only to attempt to
sneak its retro “crackhouse” provisions into numerous other bills, less
successfully battling public response than their U.K. counterparts (who
triumphantly pushed through the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994,
which targeted public performances of repetitive beats, use of drugs,
“trespassory assemblies”, homosexuality, and which advocated “prevention of
terrorism” surely emanating from all the aforementioned unsavory social
activities). But how is it that U.S.
legislators were so far behind their U.K. counterparts? Why is it that Congress must reach back to a
1986 “crackhouse law” in an attempt to redefine the “Justice Enhancement and
Domestic Security Act of 2003”? Are the
British more clever, more despising of youth culture, or more stringent
policy-makers? Or is there a deeper
underlying condition, which has veiled the “heinous, unlawful” activities of
Rave from the scrutiny of U.S. lawmakers?
Perhaps the British are simply more
socially attentive. Or perhaps Rave
manifested differently in England than the U.S., calling attention to itself in
a popular fashion that manifested into a mainstream craze; whereas in America,
with few exceptions, Rave has remained under the radar until only the past few
years. In one consideration, because of
its newness and intrinsic fluidity, no paradigm truly existed for the
organizers of rave events, partygoers, or legislative policing of Rave until
recent years. So the territory has
remained largely unmapped from a social perspective.[iii] In another consideration, perhaps the
intention of Rave from the outset is to recede, like a virus, into a deeper
part of social organization where it may replicate, virtually unnoticed, until
it can fully manifest.
The massive online resource for
“music, chemistry, and rave-culture”, Hyperreal.org, states an agenda to help
preserve Rave in all its variant forms.
Hyperreal doesn’t “want to let the history of electronic music, rave
culture and their related memes disappear.” [iv] But perhaps Rave’s intention is and has
always been aimed on a trajectory towards transparency. Part of its internal strategy is
invisibility.
For this reason as Rave grows older,
only its most superficial elements emerge into the arena of mainstream
attention. VW and Ford have adopted seminal
Techno trax for their auto commercials, every party-goer knows the importance
of glow-stix, and every major mall in the U.S. features baggy jeans and tight
baby-doll tops at shops like Hot Topic and (of course) Rave. The more profound pseudo-spiritual, artistic
and cognitive memes have not been overrun, obliterated or ignored; however they
have receded into a transparent state, as they intended to.
Identifying the movers, shakers,
promoters and music-makers is a task already undertaken by numerous authors and
Rave historians, several of whom are listed in the bibliography. For the purposes of this writing, exploring
the content of Rave is irrelevant in a very McLuhanesque sense. Here, the medium is indeed the message[v],
and what remains important is the transparent behaviors and other ingressive
strategies latent in Rave. Rave, like
the U.S. Freak scene of the 1960s, would never have spread without embracing
technology and using it as fuel for all the various manifestations of artifice
emanating from it. The power of Rave was
in fact borrowed from this inter-penetrating relationship[vi];
just as the uses of software tools and necessities for constant technological
upgrades grew out of the behavior patterns of the subculture. And like the Freak scene, Rave could be
easily replaced with something else; but Rave, the present-day embodiment of
Freak, is a new media unto itself, consisting of specific strategies and
embodying a momentum driving its motivations forward in a transparent manner,
much in the same way the mechanizations of a combustion engine remain
transparent to the automobile user. In
order to survive, Rave does not need the rave scene, nor techno music, just as
Freak did not need hippies, nor rock music; Rave is a medium, and like all media,
its purpose is communication through use.
Even without its respective so-called subculture, Rave will survive into
a new embodiment, just as Freak survived through the advent of Rave.
"In an electric information environment, minority
groups can no longer be contained—ignored.
Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels
commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with,
and responsible for,
each other."[vii]
Marshall McLuhan
In his book The Language of New
Media, Lev Manovich states “I want to record the ‘research paradigm’ of new
media during its first decade, before it slips into invisibility.” Conversely, it is the intention of this paper
to “playback” (not record) an invisibility-oriented movement’s user-patterns
through the past several decades’ periods of attempting to apprehend a new
paradigm. The aspects of that new
paradigm and Rave’s strategies to apprehend it will remain the focus of this
work.
Important to understand is the
differentiation of Rave from “rave subculture” or “a rave”. Typically, in its
subcultural context, the term “rave” is used to denote the underground movement
as a whole which unifies audio production, mixing (or DJing), and distribution
(independent record labels), event producing and promoting (“raves” or rave
events), graphic arts production and design, fashion design, body piercing and
tattooing, and general participation in any or all of these facets—including
pure spectatorship. However, Rave as it
is termed in an analytical context, is a set of cultural, behavioral, and
perceptual strategies which maintains a constancy of acceleration as it
attempts to apprehend a state of awareness necessary to comprehend the point of
information implosion which humanity is fast approaching; while there is always
a tendency of calculated movements to stall, because of its drive towards
transparency, Rave, like a virus, will mutate rather than stagnate—just as
Freak evolved into Rave, Rave will evolve into something else should its more
obvious tendencies plateau. Because of
the interpenetrating relationships between “rave” as it is commonly understood,
and Rave as defined for the analytical purposes of this paper, the
capitalization of the term (i.e., “Rave”) will accompany all discussion where
it is used to identify aspects moving beyond its subcultural context.
In order to better understand Rave
as it employs strategies, the underlying parameters of those strategies must be
examined as givens. These givens include
the ideas that:
1. Obvious
rave subculture has passed, due to mainstream social and legislative pressures
driving it back into formal, legally legitimate nightclub and discotheque
culture
2. Rave
stands on its own as a new cultural aesthetic which is still vibrantly alive
within a veteran post-rave segment of society, as well as embodied within an
intrinsic set of memes imbued in pre-rave-subculture technofied youth, now in
late childhood or entering adolescence
3. Rave
has fulfilled the McLuhanesque conception of the Artist as society’s
best-equipped pioneer surveying the landscape of hypermediated technocultural
change, anticipating its impacts and suggesting modes of immunity to its worst
features[viii]
4. Rave’s
intention is to prepare the perceptual awareness of the techno-present
individual for the inevitable implosion of information fast approaching; this
is being achieved through:
a. the
retribalization (a la McLuhan) of individual into community awareness; a
participatory form of telepresent culture which cherishes optimism and seeks to
fill a spiritual void left in the wake of info-acceleration-alienation and the
increasing banality of mainstream cultural and media content
b. the
use of psychoactive substances (particularly MDMA, LSD and smart drugs) to
bolster perception and heighten the senses
c. the
interpenetrating relationships of new tools, applications and obsolescing
information exchange formats (email, chat rooms, newsgroups, flyers)
With these strategies defined, one
additional proof should be considered:
Rave is an interactive tool, a medium seeking communication
through use, as evidenced by the fact that it stands up to the test set forward
by Marshall and Eric McLuhan when they articulated four central laws intrinsic
to any media. Should the media in
question be capable of fulfilling the roles of catalyzing amplification,
obsolescence, retrieval and reversal, it would then fall in line
will all other agreed-upon media forms.
In this instance, put to the test, Rave:
a. Amplfies: extends the
dancehall, the roles of musicianship and instrumentation, the possibilities of
musical sound, the interactive space, mental/emotional shared space,
(chemically-enhanced) sensory awareness
b. Obsolesces:
the
social club, isolated celebrity, television, radio, liquor (chemically numbing
the senses)
c. Retrieves: tribal gathering,
tribal ritual, archaic community, matriarchy, Eucharistic communion, Beatniks,
Jazz and Disco
d. Reverses: patriarchal
authority-control society, passive Rock 'n' Roll concert, musician as heroic
focal point, passive TV watcher, passive radio listener, passive substance
consumer
If media is to be defined by these
laws, then it is arguable that Rave fulfills them. With these givens and theoretical proofs identified,
next, each possibility will be examined in depth.
Obvious Rave Culture Has Passed
“My dream was to get a roomful of people to take psychedelic
drugs
and to operate samplers and sequencers in front of
them. That seemed like
an impossible goal six or seven years ago. Now it seems rather trivial.”[ix]
Mixmaster Morris
The
failure of the established mainstream commercial industry to ever apprehend the
genuine nature and devotee attraction of rave subculture and Techno music
emerged from multiple establishment assumptions that proved to be incorrect. It is virtually impossible for this
subculture to make any sense to individuals who are not steeped in the
extensions of new media—including psychoactive substances of some sort, even
legal ones like smart drugs. The music
is not a solitary commodity—it is part of a wider cultural process and
perceptual apparatus. One must be
undergoing the changes required by the acceleration of media, and actively
participating in their interactivity while consciously inviting awareness
augmentation. It's not enough to
passively enter into hypermediated awareness as a consumer of commercial
television, pop music downloads and Play Station aesthetics; the awareness of
Rave is not born out of passivity.
Through active engagement, retribalization becomes necessity, because
the new media seeker requires community in order to remain grounded and intact
through the process of technological, individual and social
transformation. The attractions of Rave
are weakened when it is handled through the filters of commodification; even
worse, they are "genetically altered" and perverted into something
outside of Rave’s intentions.
Interlinking
“a taboo to a pariah is not good sociological strategy."[x] And this may be another part of the
underlying failure of rave as a fashionable cultural movement. Part greed, part overdose, part law-dodging,
and part-under-aged, this has undoubtedly been a formula which would eventually
bring the police knocking and the legislators barking. However, because part of Rave’s strategy is
to become transparent, to become something so omnipresent beneath the surface
of how social orders are perceived, can its gradual demise from pop culture be
considered a genuine “failure”? Also,
because psychoactive substances are such an intrinsic part of the
deconditioning process necessary for Rave to take hold, it’s undoubted that
eventually politics would figure into the interpenetrating relationships of
Rave. Psychedelic drugs—even
non-hallucinatory ones, like MDMA—are kept at the highest scheduling possible
by world governments specifically because they “decondition you from the
prevailing myth of whatever culture you're in.
That is a political act, to decondition yourself from a cultural
mythology, and political acts are closely watched and controlled because they
have consequences . . . . It's not whether one in 50,000 people steps out of a
second floor window. No, the issue is
what happens to the other 49,999 people.
How their attitudes toward authority, their own lives, and their ability
to take control of their own lives are subtly altered."[xi]
Where the
psychedelic rock culture of the 1960s gave way to the Disco era, fueled by
“dumb drugs” like cocaine and speed, just as raves became more of a destination
point for Bacchanalian substance ingesting in the late 1990s, the memory of why
this type of perceptual experimentation was happening in the first place began
to recede. The recognition of drugs as
instruments and consciousness-facilitators began to give way to the excessive
high of stimulatory-repetition. On a
purely subcultural level, not only did the money suddenly get very big, but the
scene "generally failed to construct anything like the contexts of meaning
that traditional shamanic or religious cultures have always used to integrate
cognitive ecstasy (and its metaphysical morning-afters) into ordinary
life."[xii] And as its mainstream visibility increased,
ensconced by all its most superficial, banal and predictable formulae for an
excuse to ingest excessively (as good consumers do), the more tender ambition
of Rave to elicit personal and communal awareness-change began to subside into
transparency.
What Rave needed
was a legitimacy of its own cultural aesthetic larger than what rave subculture
could offer: a fulfillment of its
artistic players as visionaries who could see beyond the boundaries—who in fact
could help dissolve boundaries and make way for a shift in awareness as
information accelerated. Rave required
being part of a "paradigm shift, one that would enable us to understand
nature, behavior, communication, and consciousness as holistic elements
interacting within an even broader living system that folded together mind and
matter."[xiii]
Rave
Defines Its Own Aesthetic
"By creating a new interface between the self, the
other, and the world beyond,
media technologies become part of the self, the other, and
the world beyond."[xiv]
Eric Davis
The
human-computer-interface process affects the ways and means by which human
beings relate to whatever consensus reality that they acknowledge as “real” or
“most real”. Rave aligns itself with its
machines, seeking relationship, transmutation, and authentication. In an attempt to legitimize itself, it became
necessary for Rave to create its own aesthetic—one which transcended gathering
for the purposes of listening to music, taking drugs and socializing; one which
undertook an experiment in modulating the culture surrounding it on all
sides. "All sounds to be heard in
techno music reveal their digital origins, and so do the graphics, animations
and logos of the [rave] generation . . . . an aesthetics visibly inspired by
references to the computer as a . . . tool."[xv]
Techno
music does not attempt to emulate real instruments or "real music";
it's striving to achieve something completely artificial which is openly
decorated by media. The computer
obviously can't rival human creativity, but human creativity can rival linear,
computational artificiality—just as the sci-fi thriller Minority Report
strives to make the digital special effects more transparent through use of
sepia tones and grain, Techno strives to mask the artificiality of the sequence
at the same time that it celebrates that structure within its aesthetic.
In fact, at the
same time that Techno “seeks to build a plateau of intensity,”[xvi]
it also seeks to unify its disparate aesthetic elements—partygoers
included. No differently than the pagan
rites of Lupercalia witnessed in the Rif of Morocco in the 1950s by inner and
outward explorer Brion Gysin, ravers come together to gather, as part of a
shared aesthetic. "The Joujoukans didn't simply participate in these
dances because they were obliged by tradition to do so, but because by
combining the magickal elements of music, trance, kif, and the exchange between
male and female sexual energies, a balancing of power was brought into effect
within the community."[xvii] Part of the aesthetic is the
“deterritorialization” of gathering; responding to the “music and the forces it
directs into the space it creates.”[xviii]
Diminishing the
intensity of the music it chooses to showcase, Rave depends on obsolescing
forms of communication to get the word out.
Perhaps because Rave is in a constant state of information acceleration
and its strategies to cope with that speed and urgency, Rave utilizes the
“flyer” as the most important means of getting the word out.[xix] Even though the rave event flyer is typically
a lavish blend of color and design, it’s a toss-away item nonetheless. Second to this form of communication is the
news group, often a Hyperreal post for a geographically-oriented event,
followed by email and word of mouth—all forms which function to communicate
information which quickly obsolesces. Of
course, this is part of what helps keep Rave transparent as it spreads its
message just below the radar of most establishment sources.
In the process of
taking the movement underground—partially as a result of failed mainstream
establishment interest in the U.S., and in part because of a simultaneously
swelling non-mainstream interest—Rave turned itself into a viable economic
entity in its own right, with "its own means of production, distribution,
and promotion, and, above all, an emphasis on integrity over
accessibility."[xx] Here, Rave was free to mutate in a state of
transparency. It could appropriate
sounds, images, and clusters of culture around itself, reprocess them, apply
filters and effects, distort and corrupt everything that it chose to consume,
and then excrete something uniquely original unto itself—in fact, something
like a microcosmic genetic offspring of the whole of Rave. The larger part of this equation had to do
with atmosphere and space, not merely commodities and artifacts.
Rave
causes changes in how one perceives space and how one chooses to deal with
it. Rave embraces technology as
something opposite of an isolating factor—it helps one to redefine a sense of
public space, which in turn helps redefine private perceptions. Group affinity = cooperative individualism.
A
DJ immersed in Rave is aware of these dynamics.
In the process of creating “the third record”[xxi],
the DJ reads the crowd and responds accordingly, seemingly picking up on “the
vibe” carried within the masses. “In the
1990s, the DJ acquired new cultural prestige, becoming a required presence at
art openings and book release parties, in hip restaurants and hotels, in the
pages of Art Forum and Wired.
The rise of this figure can be directly correlated to the rise of
computer culture. . . . the DJ also makes it clear that selection is not an end
in and of itself. The essence of the
DJ's art is the ability to mix selected elements in rich and sophisticated
ways. In contrast to the 'cut and paste'
metaphor of modern GUI that suggest that selected elements can be simply,
almost mechanically, combined, the practice of live electronic music demonstrates
that true art lies in the 'mix'."[xxii]
The aesthetic of
this “mix” functions on many levels: as
noted, it is within the atmosphere, the space, and the combining of multiple
sources to create a never-before-experienced new montage of visuals, place,
sound.[xxiii] This synthesis relies on variability rather
than opposition; mapping and filtering; merging layers and emphasizing the
differences to create something unique to the present moment.[xxiv] Similarly, the “remix” emerges as yet another
attempt to create authenticity, synthesizing a new “true” moment with existing
source materials, and often-times, taking the liberty of obliterating the
existing elements beyond recognition.
Here, the past is not being regurgitated, but something entirely of its
own is being born.[xxv] Lastly, the use of “sampling” gives immediate
historical presence to objects of the past, via a technological variant of
Charles Ives’ “quoting”, as well as manipulating with audio effects to distort
and allude to a mythic sense of some moment existing in history, resurrected
with a new set of sensibilities.[xxvi]
Akin
to the wild, exponential growth of the World Wide Web, Rave has sprung from a
germinating seed nearly two decades ago to being an “integral and inescapable
part”[xxvii]
of everyday life in all the First World nations. Whether or not its intrusion is noticed is
irrelevant: Rave seeks transparency, to
dwell at the deepest levels of culture at large and to propagate there, because
if awareness is to evolve Rave requires hegemony within individual and cultural
responses, regardless of the subculture surrounding it. Rave and all its associative aesthetic forms
have permeated every corner of the increasingly decentralized globe[xxviii],
sometimes taking on geographical idiosyncrasies (like the Goa variant of
Trance), only to eventually pull its tendrils back into itself and recombine
with self-referential ease and an aesthetic strategy of bricolage. But these superficial aspects are ones which
naturally give way to commodification and which are therefore insignificant; it
is Rave’s power as a medium to extend human-community awareness which is core
and will transform with tweaks in the trend as it needs to in order to survive
and manifest.
Rave stands on its
own as a new cultural aesthetic vibrantly alive within a veteran post-rave
segment of society, as well as embodied within a pre-rave social segment of
technofied youth—a segment of society which is in an interpenetrating
relationship with technology in an attempt to generate a new cultural identity. “A segment, it is important to note, that has
as much or more right to the definition of the future as the adults who seem
able to view the argument only from their own current interests."[xxix]
Part of Rave’s
transparency is heightened because this transformation is occurring at a time
when global culture as a whole is undergoing an unprecedented age of identity
crisis.[xxx] Re-mapping territories is almost a daily
event as information and interpenetration accelerate. "Accepting these assumptions or simply
ignoring them means that we accept barriers to cultural transformation, at
least any transformation other than that desired by the established
hierarchy."[xxxi] This is the conflict between Rave and the
mainstream establishment that seeks to squelch it. There must be a middle path taken: Rave must succumb to its media and law
enforcement identifiers as "criminal, unpredictable, corrupting, and
dangerous” while the establishment must come to terms with the fact that it
cannot govern a free people as long as its objective is to continue to generate
laws which are intended to eliminate community freedoms. As Carol Gigliotti states in her article “The
Ethical Life of the Digital Aesthetic”: "the
social nature of our existence offer us possibilities for developing a process
by which ethical digital aesthetic choices may be made. . . . This embodiment
is something we share, and is the primary way we share experiences of the
world."[xxxii] Establishment resistance to this compromise
is exactly why the strategy for Rave has been to retreat into the establishment
confines of the digerati and infiltrate those systems—discreetly, with a
transparency as seemingly benign as that of The Matrix when initially
viewed by Neo. Only in this way has the
aesthetic of Rave pervasively moved “to define the logistics and mechanisms of
a large portion of the culture of which we are a part…”[xxxiii] Gradually nudging shifts in perception which
later gain enough mass in order to flip consensus opinions is part of the
long-term imperative at the heart of Rave’s camouflage. “Ravers”, or those extended by the apparatus
which Rave offers, then become part of the catalyst for such change because
they are the first to manifest the visual clarification of remodeling behavior patterns
and reality-tunnel limitations which block these paradigm shifts. It is the Raver, then, who undertakes the
role as an integrated pioneer exploring the frontiers of new tools and
brain-change.
Rave
Fulfills McLuhanesque Notion of Artist As Integrated Pioneer
"People look at you like you have some big,
preconceived plan,
[but] it's the general public who designated us to be who we
are."[xxxiv]
Juan Atkins
It has
been accepted since McLuhan’s time that newer media remediates older media,
reprocessing an old form and propelling artifice forward as it strives toward
manifesting the elusive concept of “progress”.
Nonetheless, the content remains irrelevant. For instance, Spider-Man is a
contemporary motion picture remediating a 1970s TV series which remediated the
1960s comic book series. In each
instance, there has been a forward-progression in manifesting an existing
narrative. The comic book medium itself
remediates the earlier forms of the novel and the children’s storybook. The most current film version of the
narrative has been remediated yet again into a home video game. At its core, the narrative itself doesn’t
matter; the source of content is irrelevant.
What remains important is that new media forms tend toward showcasing
new technological advancements, despite content. But where is the logic, aesthetic,
personality or genius of the new media? It is still within the relationship of
how humans choose to interact with and utilize tools to accentuate and augment
existing vision. Here, it is within the
realm of the artist.
Lev
Manovich considers that "today, as more artists are turning to new media,
few are willing to undertake systematic, laboratory-like research into its
elements and basic compositional, expressive, and generative strategies."[xxxv] Of course, this is what Rave has already
accomplished. In fact, in a fulfillment
of McLuhan's general prophecies about
how media would be inextricably integrated into the society and culture
of his future, Rave not only undertook a permutation of McLuhan's definition of
the new media artist, immersed in play with omnipresent technocultural
morphing, able to anticipate its forward-momentum and creating a community
generally shielded by the worst features of that widespread change, but it did
so out of a sense of natural necessity not previously experienced in the
calculated fronts of organized movements such as Dada or Bauhaus. Rather, these trends emerged out of a fluid
sense of play with new media tools—from
Cubase and Photoshop to LSD and MDMA.
However, similar to movements like the Russian Constructivists and
Bauhaus, techno producers also tended towards producing objects rather than
works of art[xxxvi],
i.e., "tracks" as opposed to "songs" or
"compositions", "flyers" as opposed to "posters"
or "painting"—art which reactivated a sense of experimentation and
play with new tools. Did Kraftwerk or
Cybotron envision engendering a new widespread cohesive movement that would
transform music the world over?
(Probably less so than their previous influential electronic composers
and art-schoolers, Tangerine Dream.) It
is possible. But as the drummer for
Kraftwerk states in the documentary film Better Living Through Circuitry,
at the time, the integration of synthesized drums offered him an opportunity to
tweak some new sounds at the same time it eliminated his need "to
sweat" when composing or performing.[xxxvii] Hardly the considerations of an art
revolutionary. As Dan Sicko
considers: Techno, "with its
deceptively simple grooves, discourages talk of auteurs, almost never contains
verses and choruses, and, to complicate matters, is rife with musicians who are
continually changing their names."[xxxviii]
Unlike
the de Stijl movement, which, lacking artistic community cohesiveness or any
genuine audience, but with a terrific promotional instrument in place (de Stijl
magazine), Rave practiced little of the necessary efforts required to build and
sustain artistic integrity, production and audience—yet it did so, almost in
spite of how things "should be done".
Here it remains clear that Rave emerged out of an international sense of
play in response to new media tools (including psychedelic drugs).
McLuhan,
like his contemporary Bucky Fuller, considered the artist someone who must be
capable of synthesizing many aspects of culture, history, and technology
simultaneously to be able to interpret what is going on and to reinterpret what
should be done in the best interests of humanity in order to survive and
“progress”. McLuhan made no bones about
the idea that Artist should be capable of looking beyond current trends, observing
where leading edge ideas were converging, and presenting (i.e., making
what is "to be" present in "the now") the future to an
audience in a way that society could more clearly interpret through the haze of
uncertainty interpenetrating existence. Like
the shaman, Artist takes on a role of seer, returning information of the sacred
to those who have fallen out of touch with it.
Rave, as an interactive community, fulfills this ideal, temporarily
infecting the attendee with shamanic empathy, which may later germinate into a
constancy of awareness.
"Many new
media objects are in fact computer programs that follow structural programming
style."[xxxix] Techno, especially the tracks which began to
emerge out of the Atari and Cubase combined tools movement in the U.K. in the
late 1980s, early 1990s, is a clear cut example of this—how the tools defined
the structure of the media object itself.
In turn, the media object defined the psychedelics which would help
"tune" perception to just the sort of focusing power required to
optimize the interpenetration of the relationship between artist, tool, and
artifact—and finally, audience receptivity.
Manovich
asserts that here, in the realm of new media, "the 'culture industry' is
actually ahead of most other industries", in part because the machine is a
place where both showroom and factory exist in simultaneity.[xl] Similarly, the computer as utilized by Rave
is simultaneously musical and performance instrument, sequencer, multi-track
engineering desk, effects processor, mastering stack, paint palette and canvas,
graphics pre-press, photo studio, animator's work station, promotional call
center and mail station, web authoring toolkit, diary, notepad and
sketchbook. It is, in essence, the place
where all necessary extensions converge for the Artist.
Of
course, to consider that these relationships emerged out of a cohesive need for
all of these extensions to work in simultaneity would be wrong-headed. Conversely, the subculture and media
practices of Rave emerged from the simultaneous availability of all of these
media tools. The tools arrived, and
consequently a movement responded. The
info-genetic impetus guiding that response was the medium of Rave (evolved from
Freak, evolved from Beat, evolved from Lost Generation, evolved from Romantics,
etc). Not out of some cold, mechanistic
robot-response, but out of the sensitive, imaginative and utilitarian urges of
creative individuals. On the one hand,
this is an outreach of the menu-driven limitation of choice Manovich is so concerned
about[xli],
but on the other, it reveals the unpredictable and beautiful consequences of
how these relationships may emerge—especially when the users interfacing with
the media tools are under the influence of elative psychedelic drugs which, by
their very nature, influence thinking-outside-of-the-box. Here the HCI (human-computer-interface) has
been elevated to the level where the psychedelic experience introduces the
unpredictable factors generated by Third Mind.[xlii]
The
ubiquity of this situation is what has, in turn, created a unified spread of
the closest emanation of an international language ever known—a comprehended
transmission of such magnitude that millions of computer users the world over
have been seduced by Rave—whether they realize it or not. This viral
incorporation is akin to Rupert Sheldrake's idea of morphogenetic resonance, or
"hundredth monkey syndrome", in which the idea is picked up
simultaneously in many places. In part,
this is probably why the argument of who invented techno music is such an
arbitrary one; because it was a good idea whose time had come, and it's clear
from the history of record releases that the idea was simultaneous in multiple
geographic regions. And of course, the
historical context cannot be forgotten:
it was inevitable that at some point the works of Stockhausen,
Dokstader, and Oliveros would at some point be formally adopted and tweaked by
the tools and artists of the time period from which emerged Tangerine Dream,
Jean-Michel Jarre, and Larry Fast—only once again to be modulated and
transcoded by those who followed:
Kraftwerk, Cybotron, Bambaataa, etc., etc., etc. As Manovich states: "Users are able to
acquire new cultural languages, whether cinema a hundred years ago, or cultural
interfaces today, because these languages are based on previous and already
familiar cultural forms."[xliii]
Further,
Manovich writes: "Given that computer language is implemented in software,
potentially it could keep changing forever. . . . We are witnessing the
emergence of a new cultural metalanguage."[xliv] In response to the first part, this is in
essence why electronic music continues to morph—even if only very slightly
(i.e., as in the minute differences between Speed Garage and 2Step)—because the
possibilities of software continue to vary, opening an opportunity to add a new
flourish to an already existing structure.
But also, this is why the movement has proved to be something more than
the "fad" it was predicted by so many to be at the beginning of the
1990s. Like the Simpsons TV show,
Techno's sustainability and its power to bring on board more and more
critics-turned-advocates, has shocked the movement's one-time detractors. Moreover, the “cultural metalanguage” is
something embodied in Rave. Turntablism
and laptopism as HCI; psy-drugs as meta-HCI; the temporary-autonomous-zone
nature of rave events; the loop-basis of Techno; the post-Hippie fractal
psychedelic light shows and fashion-wear—these are all emblems or artifacts
generated by the human-computer-interface within this supposed "new
cultural metalanguage."
"The
development of . . . techno . . . is linked to the availability of the
technology
necessary for its
production. . . . Electronics . . . were not only, and certainly not
primarily,
developed for the production of tones, sounds and music. . . .
a certain scene
used the computer not only as a musical instrument,
but as a means of
expression for a new and still up-to-date culture.
By this we mean the
point at which the design of record covers,
magazines and fashions—the
design of information for a constantly growing following—
became an adequate
accompaniment to, and a congenial visualization of,
the music to which
it referred."[xlv]
Dan Sicko
The turntable, the
vinyl record, the mixer and the headphone are all extensions of the hand and
the ear. In fact, this
"interchangeability" coupling "technology with physiology"[xlvi]
has given the ear a hand and fingers with which to modulate variable
frequencies—to enable the ear beyond its previous passivity. By incorporating a tactile surface within the
neural auditory grooves of consciousness, these combined tools come to mimic
the holographic nature of the mind and memory, from within the psychedelic
space inside the brain itself."[xlvii]
Because phonography
records the 'real thing' (as opposed to writing, which must rely solely on
representation or symbolic interpretation), and then infiltrates holographic
mind with undisputed memory, the act of DJing apprehends so-called reality and
modulates it into something not previously existent. The DJ brings out that "third
record" from within the mix of the two platters spinning on the decks.
Here, the Artist moves from the ivory tower to the control tower (a reversal, a
la McLuhan, of the previous Rock culture), and the foreground data of the
two disparate sources suddenly shifts into the background as the “third record”
filters the listener’s focus. “The data
hidden in our perceptual 'blind spot' contains worlds waiting to be explored. Today's digital technology enables artists to
explore new territories for content by capturing and examining the area beyond
the boundary of 'normal' functions and uses of software."[xlviii] In this instance, part of the “software” to
consider is the human mind and conscious awareness, especially in relation to
the acceleration of information.
Rave Intends To Change Awareness
". . . (e) we are all evolving into the use of new
neurological circuits, which will make us
superhuman in comparison to our present average state. The activation of these new circuits
creates a great deal of temporary weirdness until we learn
to use them properly."[xlix]
Robert Anton Wilson
"Laissez-faire
evolution or artificial engineering seem to be the sole options: Either manipulate humans to fit technology,
or watch technology bulldoze the population until all that remains is a
techno-humanoid species of mutants."[l] While this may be the fear of the Unabomber
and like-minded naïve realists, it fails to consider that Rave has already
anticipated these grim options and has insulated itself against such unpleasant
mutations—through the practice of chemical augmentation. In a mind-over-matter bent, Rave has
countered the Borg and the viral spread of Solid State by changing its mind,
literally. Shifting perception, through
the use of psychedelic substances, as has been written about extensively by
authors such as Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts and Robert Anton
Wilson, is the surest way to come to terms with frightening new and
disproportionate change. To change the
patterns by which one sees may help to create new models of thinking about
things in the first place.
"Dr. Timothy
Leary theorized that there are 8 neural 'circuits' in the evolutionary
consciousness of the human brain. The
first 4 circuits will be actuated by virtually every wo/man [sic] being
alive on the planet—1) the bio-survival circuit, which derives
individual survival with a will-to-live; 2) the emotional circuit,
which, upon child-birth and breast-feeding, causes specific affectionate bonds
between humans; 3) the dexterity-symbolism circuit, which is activated
by learning speech and the use of tools; and 4) the socio-sexual circuit,
including post-nomadic civilization and socialized sex-roles. How individuals and cultures progress into
the remaining 4 circuits is unpredictable.
Circuit 5, the neurosomatic circuit, requires a 'turn-on', such
as the kind experienced by yogis, Sufis, or millions of pot-smokers world-wide,
especially since the '60s. This includes
sensations of transcendence beyond linear, left-brained 'reality'.
"According
to this model, I propose that . . . the rave scene as a subculture . . . [is]
entering the evolutionary time of the 6th Circuit—the neuroelectric circuit. It's here that the nervous system becomes
aware of itself and can begin to make deliberate choices regarding how it will
allow itself to consciously think and behave.
Dr. John C. Lilly called it 'metaprogramming', i.e., awareness of
programming one's programming. . . . Robert Anton Wilson regards Circuit 6 as
the 'universal translator, often imagined by science fiction writers, already
built into the DNA tape. Just as the
circuits of the future butterfly are already built into the caterpillar.'"[li]
Rave,
its atmosphere of information-overload, its bombardment of loud beats, swirling
psychedelic imagery, combined with flashing lights and fashion textures “has
become our new Nature; it can be diagnosed as a symptom of, but also an attempt
to master and reintegrate, the promiscuous chaos and babbling heteroglossia of
the information society."[lii] As ravers are besieged by items calling out
for attention from all directions, stimulated on a psychedelic high from the
atmosphere augmented with chemicals coursing through the body’s bloodstream, it
is at these moments of seemingly-uncontrollable peak experiences that one’s
consciousness enters a state of active meditation, resolving effervescently in
the moment, free of thought, coming together to gather, celebrating
celebration, one of the ascetics who has chosen re:presence in a place of no
boundary, in a state of beginner’s mind.
This is true of all the permutations (Disco, Freak, Beat, etc.) core to
the apparatus of Rave.
The
memes and behaviors present in Rave actualize McLuhan’s statement that
"electric speed is bringing all social and political functions together in
a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an
intense degree."[liii] In fact, Rave welcomes this condition—it
thrives off of this intensity and requires this multi-faceted
"implosion" to replicate and further itself. In this way Beat gave way to Freak, gave way
to Disco, gave way to Rave, etc.; the setting changed, but the set,
which craved transparency, did not. The
shifts in cultural content contribute, in fact, to the strategy of transparency;
these shifts conceal the underlying pervasive integrity of Rave, or the media
impetus to program variables into perception.
The cultural content itself is largely insignificant; it is the
opportunity to apprehend an entirely new way of thinking that infuses Rave.
Where
the naïve realist condemns these temporary autonomous zones and their seemingly
reckless abandonment of functional reality, Rave counters with a voice of
optimism—as opposed to idealism. Perhaps
Terence McKenna was Rave's greatest spokesperson on optimism, the necessity for
psychedelic augmentation, and the cautionary insight to be prepared for the
inevitable doubling of information that continues to segment society until
humankind evolves into something other than what it already is: "Something is calling us out of Nature
and sculpting us in its own image—it's speaking to us through psychedelics,
visions, and technology. . . . Begin the descent down the birth canal of
collective transformation—this is where the psychedelic shaman comes in—to help
us navigate through Hyperspace from where we look down upon both the past and
the future and we see The End. A shaman
has seen the End—and if you've seen the End, you take your place in the process
of things without anxiety. Thing
fetishism, as you can see, will be eliminated and thus becomes
irrelevant."[liv]
Like
a tripping version of the priest Teilhard de Chardin, McKenna recognizes that
information is driving humankind toward an unstoppable endpoint where all
knowledge converges, and thus, humanity as it is currently enjoyed and
understood, slips into dissipation. Like
Rave, its objective must be to reach a point of transparency within the vaster
inner workings of intelligence convergence. Teilhard de Chardin explains: "Matter eventually converges to form
organisms. The convergence of organic
life in turn produces higher-level complexities. The most complex unities establish a new
qualitative dimension where consciousness emerges. On the conscious level, the mind—and then the
networking of minds—gives birth to a new stage of spirit."[lv] This idea is a very Hegellian, transcendental
dialectic, and at the same time pure Rave in its optimism. Like the flyers that can be found on
OneLove’s extensive rave flyer art archive, which advertise events with names
such as “Spiritual Awakening” (“a revolutionary new form of worship that
welcomes the sacred into body, mind, heart and spirit”); “Cybernaut”
(“Xperience the gifts Nature never intended:
venture into X-citing realms that your brain’s been waiting to X-plore
for hundreds of millions of years“); and “Communion” (“Join in the collective
harmony of Pronoia: the sense that
others are aspiring to help you“)[lvi];
there is a directed sense cultivating these environments which become temporary
autonomous zones for the noosphere where perception (as the active constituent
of mind, the perceptual organ) surrenders to new neurological circuit
imprinting.
While
not without its dark side, Rave still addresses both the painful and brilliant
aspects of information convergence.
Attempting to find the state of balance between accelerating perception
and pragmatism, Rave introduces the concept of Afterglow: the state of still buzzing, high, with a nod
toward impending reality, but so changed from the experience, a permanent
neurological transformation has occurred.
The dialectic Teilhard de Chardin cherishes is happening in Rave; it's
not simply some discussion by critical theorists existing only within some
academic monolith. The fall-out of
Rave’s come-down is still being felt—not only by all those who lived Rave, but
those who touch the edges of its apparatus—but it has not diminished; it has
been undergoing the transformation of Afterglow. It "places the human being at the center
of technology"[lvii]
at the same time that it remembers the co-mutual necessity of surviving an
unstoppable rush of peak experiences throughout The Night. "It strives to enrich the unfolding
future from a personal standpoint by referring to moments when we have been at
our best."[lviii]
In
his essay “The Cyberspace Dialectic,” scholar Michael Heim posits: "If our social developments begin to
manifest outside the mode of material production, what does the mode of
information mean for social change?"[lix] The advent of Rave, to a large degree, answers
this question. In the main, the only
people left asking it are those who didn't make it to the party. "Virtual realism," or Afterglow, as
this paper would contend, "is the middle path between naïve realism and
network idealism. . . . The cyberspace dialectic sustains opposition as the
polarity that continually sparks the dialogue, and the dialogue is the life of
cyberspace."[lx] Rave apprehends a motivation driving toward
acquiring that sense which is akin to both the Hegelian dialectic as well as Teilhard
de Chardin's sense of the "universal network"—a motivation driven by
some underlying need to synthesize universal interactivity into individuated
awareness. Rave provides the apparatus
to change awareness. Change
awareness—perception—and revise the models by which one views experience, or
one’s reality-tunnel. Under the combined
forces of technology and information acceleration, telepresent humankind is
being forced, experientially and intellectually, to accept the world as a
coordinated system of activity which is gradually rising up toward freedom and
consciousness. “The only satisfactory
way of interpreting this process . . . is to regard it as irreversible and
convergent."[lxi]
Inter-connectedness
generates impulses and emotions that tend to create a sense of omnipresence,
and therefore increases the individual’s solitary sense of existence, of
personal validation via a seeming "inter-personal" exchange. As a result, through the process of remediation
and retribalization, the need has surfaced to feel that this convergence of
information is actually helping to bring humankind—as a society and as
individuals—closer to some form of spiritual affirmation. To a degree Rave remediates Hegelian
dialectic, soothing the discomfort of information convergence which feels like
it's stripping away individual consciousness and rendering humankind as
irrelevant as impulses traveling throughout the network.
Again,
Rave as it is termed in an analytical context, is a set of cultural,
behavioral, and perceptual strategies which maintains a constancy of
acceleration as it attempts to apprehend a state of awareness necessary to
comprehend the point of information implosion which humanity is fast
approaching; it disguises itself with various cultural content in order to
become a transparent apparatus underlying evolving awareness, or
brain-change. That point of information
implosion has been mathematically calculated by Terence McKenna in his software
package, Timewave Zero,[lxii]
and also acknowledged by both Robert Anton Wilson in his “Jumping Jesus
Phenomenon” as a calculable period of information-doubling ,[lxiii]
and John Major Jenkins’ Mayan calendar studies.[lxiv]
From 1A.D. to 1500A.D. information made its first doubling, causing the
transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. Next, it took only 250 years to double, and
so on. Until in the 1970s information
was doubling at a rate of every 16 years.[lxv] At the present time—according to McKenna’s
mathematical maps—information is now doubling every 6 months and will be doubling
once every second by the year 2012.[lxvi] Ironically, the Maya also mapped this
end-date over a 26,000-year period as the transferring of accelerating human
consciousness out of its period of gestation into a new-born awareness
culminating on the same date that McKenna's mathematical mapping pinpointed:
December 21, 2012 A.D.[lxvii]
Whether or not the 2012 date is accurate,
the more important thing to consider is that there exists a seeming point of
inevitability "at which the ingression into novelty and the degree of
interconnectedness of the separate elements that comprise the concrescence [of
knowledge] will be such that the ontological nature of time itself will be
transformed."[lxviii]
In
order for consciousness to buffer itself against the increasing volatile demands
of this rapidly accelerating information basis, the human being must undergo a
certain amount of brain-change in order to cope with the psychological, and
indeed, mental, wake of this '”timewave”.
Rave mindset is at the heart of this idea, and is arguably a natural,
organic response to the emergence of information in coincidence with a human
need to absorb it and transform itself into informatic existence.
Here,
it becomes clear that this talk of Rave and psychedelic drugs is a microcosmic
metaphor for larger, looming issues.
Rave Retribalizes & Psycho-Activates Awareness With
Psychedelic Drugs
"Virtual-reality fantasies and the spectacle of the
wired world express
an alienated yearning to leave the biological prison
and transmute into a cyborg state. . . .
[Mondo 2000:] 'What we seek is super reality, or hyper
reality
or altered states of some kind. I think the attractions in this area
that are going to be the most successful will be the most
extreme states
or out of body experience.'"[lxix]
David Toop
If
indeed the brightest people are the ones who are usually self-experimenting[lxx],
then the subcultural strains surrounding Rave was undoubtedly a hot-spot for
their social convergence. The
retribalization of such a community was obviously a necessary response to
civilization’s Third Wave, as Alvin Toffler calls it, which “means the end of
industrial society and the transition to a new era of humanity . . . For this
to succeed, . . . the advance guard of the new man, the 'techno rebels' . . .
environmentally conscious, humanistic and anti-nationalistic,"[lxxi]
are needed to converge so that some aspect of human-ness will survive the
ingression of information systems and inter-relations as they spike into
concrescent novelty. Here, a
retribalization of individual into community awareness is clearly necessary; a
participatory form of telepresent culture that cherishes optimism and seeks to
fill a spiritual void left in the wake of info-acceleration-alienation, and
which uses psychoactive substances (particularly MDMA, LSD and smart drugs) to
bolster perception and heighten the senses.
Further,
technology as an "outering" has lost its sense of touch, which is
partly why Rave chooses to make entire set of senses and body itself an
extension of the eardrum and taking drugs to enhance that state—to regain that
sense of touch that has been displaced as tech/info culture. As McLuhan said in CounterBlast,
fundamentally all technology is psychedelic in nature because every extension
alters your view of the world. Media constantly
disrupts one’s equilibrium in the same way that hypermediated information
exchange overwhelms one’s ability to process.
The
capability of accessing multiple viewpoints is an important part of the
creative and analytical processes, which indicates at least part of the
popularity of mind-altering drugs within Rave.
One step further, however, as Rave creates communal, retribalized space,
its use of psychoactive substances not only helps users contend with hypermediated
space, but Rave’s contextual use of these drugs remediates the Eucharist and
the holy rite of sacrament. In an age
largely devoid of spiritual community, sharing and unity, Rave apprehends the
sacred and re-instills that sense to those who need it most: the outer-most pioneering neuronauts of new
media. Psycho-active substances which
help induce perceptual and brain-change can be considered entheogens, or
substances which apprehend the Divine.[lxxii]
McKenna, lecturing
on McLuhan, says: "Psychedelics are
an extension of these kinds of media that you have to engage with . . . that
you cannot read. And these give back a
much more complex world."[lxxiii] And further:
"Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the Self—to the felt
presence of immediate experience . . . What we contact through the use of
psychedelics is Hyperspace."[lxxiv] And since Hyperspace is a dimension where all
information is currently coalescing, Rave intends to get a head-start on the
inevitable implosion; in fact, Rave could be considered a literal spatial
counterpart to Hyperspace.
For better or for worse, "the concept [of] electronic dance music [is] inseparable from a chemically-altered consciousness," for police, party-goers, the enthusiastic and the uninformed.[lxxv] While this is true, the psychedelic drug apparatuses were both kindred and enhancing substances for artists and participants interfacing with Rave, at the same time that psychoactive substances are a necessary strategy of Rave. Rave intends to change awareness in order to encourage a change in thinking or modeling. Furthermore, simultaneous to the popular explosion of Rave was the smart drug culture, which offered a natural alternative to synthetic chemicals such as MDMA and LSD, but which also would open up doors of perception and enhance audio-tactile awareness in much the same psychoactive way as their psychotropic counterparts, minus the sometimes-uncontrollable bodily side effects. Smart drugs fall into a rare category of thirty or so chemicals that can not only alter perception, but also help improve human/animal intelligence