ABSTRACT
In this chapter I have tried to indicate how what is commonly thought of as a moment of ‘freedom’ and ‘self-expression’ is far more complex than is usually acknowledged by academic commentators on rave. I have indicated how, for Sally and Jean, their ‘free’ moment is in actuality one that is carefully managed, regulated and monitored. Far from being about the ‘loss’ or ‘undoing’ of the self, this moment is clearly about the production of a particular ecstatic self. It is about a rigorous working on the self rather than a relaxation of selfconsciousness. For these women, their moment of ‘pure’ self-expression is not about presenting some naked essence (as self-expression implies), but about projecting a very particular image of themselves. Indeed, both agree that in rave you do not see people as they ‘really’ are. On the one hand then, the ‘ecstatic’ or ‘peak’ state is experienced as a moment within which one simply ‘lets go’ and by implication, somehow returns to some more ‘natural’ state. On the other it is seen as a moment of not being oneself; a moment wherein one is ‘hidden’ by drugs, dark lighting and the general ‘unreality’ of an event. I have also indicated the strict classifications that mark and inform the production of particular sought-after experiential states for Sally and Jean which underlie these women’s experiences. To reiterate, it is by no means my intention to dismiss or undermine the pleasures of raving: the real sense of release it can be seen to afford, the often incomparably pleasurable intensities it can produce, or the central importance it can have in one’s life. Instead, I would suggest that interpretations of these experiences and pleasures be dislodged from the language of the ‘natural’ and the essential which so commonly frames them and reconsidered as particular and embodied manifestations of the wider technology/chemical/physical assemblage that constitutes rave.
