Sometime between the death of the communist horizon and the end of the world, we had raving: a subcultural form made of beats, lights and fog, with one foot in the political avant-garde and another in the manufacturing of cool consent. With billions in revenue for cities that know how to turn the underground into a location faction (see Berlin), raving has confidently replaced punk and outshined hip-hop as the dominant counter-cultural style the world over. Books like Raving by notable political theorist McKenzie Wark, and Artforum essays like Hannah Baer’s «Dance Until the World Ends», not to mention countless graduate dissertations, video essays, art books and gallery shows devoted to it, suggest that raving has become iconic, literally part of the cultural canon. Half-jokingly, I previously wrote that «the rave is an instrument of oblivion that must be repeated at regular intervals, maybe precisely because it cannot be accurately remembered».¹ Its ephemeral restlessness, ideological slipperiness and, above all, the sensation of immediacy all seem to lure intellectuals into trying to nail down a theory of the rave.

The cultural form that the reviewed authors try to theorize is not the DIY rave of the disaffected factory, which still exists, though much reduced, at the margins of nightlife visibility, but the club experience with rave characteristics. To use raving and clubbing interchangeably – how blasphemous of me! But in a rentier economy where real Freiraum is hard to come by or live off, even raving gets reduced to a portable aesthetics that can be applied anywhere—the club, the museum, the abandoned work site. It becomes a broadly disseminated way of sharing space, relations and psychoactive substances to facilitate boundary dissolution and temporal dissociation.

Exhaust Yourself!

McKenzie Wark and Hannah Baer, both raving and writing in New York during the pandemic, define the rave as a «constructed situation» comparable to anarchist organizing and political protest culture. Like anarchy and resistance, the rave is durational and exhausting. You have to prep properly (water, sunglasses, harm reduction tools) and be ready to act fast and think on your feet when faced with power or conflict. The enemy can come in many forms at the rave (from public authorities to club security, the party elite or the proverbial «straight white man») since «the problems that arise in nightlife spaces are as real as [those arising] in gentrifying neighborhoods, workplaces with sexist bosses, cities with brutal police forces», Baer writes. «Party spaces aren’t intrinsically revolutionary spaces, but some parties are like revolutionary spaces. Part of it is the way alienation cracks open and people are confronted with one another», she continues. Thanks to the many micro-gestures of property-less solidarity and unbounded carefulness, raving becomes the communist moment of the day: «This is part of the utopian shimmer of these spaces», Baer writes. «People share resources, take turns using sunglasses, phones, poppers, jackets; people call one another cars, bring one another water, sneak one another in, babysit one another’s friends. People literally hold one another, tuck one another’s hair behind ears, wrap one another in outer garments, dab crumbs.»

It is «an avant-garde that people actually like», writes Wark who believes that the desire for communism was rendered obsolete by the transition to a far worse mode of value extraction.¹ Whether the present is most accurately described as techno-feudalism or «capitalism with feudal characteristics»² is better discussed in a Marxist political economy publication. But Wark, once the post-Marxist author of A Hacker Manifesto or Molecular Red, is a communist no more and has renounced the critique of totality in exchange for first-person confessional writing of the flesh. «There’s something too retro about the desire for communism…it’s a God that dies, whom I still mourn. What can still be shared—femmunism [sic!].»

Wark explains that she—like many others—needs the rave, and by that she means specifically the «global queer drug rave» to tap into «distraction, entertainment, dating, cruising». Through the elongation of time and the biochemical expansion of what our bodies can do and perceive, there is a vague promise here that we can become more than atomized individuals, forever anxious, separate and hyper-vigilant. At the rave, we can maybe come into contact with that slightly utopian quality Wark calls «femmunism», a kind of communism of flesh and sensation, or what we colloquially call the vibe. «We are the ones», writes Wark, «who had not just a theory but an art of happy flesh. Of how situations could be constructed, to stylize chance encounters of flesh, tech, sound, chemistry. We are the ones hacking our bodies, each according to their needs, refusing the alibi of nature as the mask of a mere arbitrary norm. We are the femmunists.»

Dance to Dissociate

Kids these days flock to raves as if they were the latest incarnation of transcendence—no matter how temporary or chemically altered—because, as Wark writes, «some people don’t do well without something like a communism of the flesh». Of course, only if it’s a good rave, meaning one where the water is free, the DJ spends more time paying homage to the tracks they spin than on the media spectacle they capitalize on, where the organizers are hosts performing a labor of love, not the glamour elite hiding out in the backstage, and everyone acts like guardians of a spirit of care and awareness that make the space into a veritable suspension of disbelief. Baer: «We are all struggling to survive and make sense in white-supremacist homophobic transphobic sexist capitalism. By entering into this space, you are agreeing to enter into struggle against this system. Even as you give us money […], you agree to nurture the seed of liberated reality that exists in your imagination and has a germ of possibility in every moment […]. You want to get free and you want everyone else to get free, and for better or for worse, that is why you came here tonight.»

For Wark, who was into raving in 1990s Berlin and gets back to in now in her fifties, as a trans woman in search of community, communion of the flesh and exodus from the complicated now, the rave is what «makes it possible to endure this life». Whether it is by hacking and recombining the body on more self-determined terms or by taking leave from world-historical events, «this is the need: that for a few beats, or thousands, I’m not. Not here. Not anywhere». But here’s the catch: while «being fucked» by sound, light and chemical intensity can help to conceive a more self-determined and mutable sense of self and a lightness of being that is essential for those denied full political membership, exodus from world-historical events breeds no comparable utopia. Wark knows: «Dysphoric planet, metabolic rift. This was not how the story was supposed to go. Now it seems we take refuge in the rave, a fragment of spectacle, refuge from history.» And a bit later: «There is merit in sharing the pessimism. Everyone is experiencing it. […] It makes it okay not to pretend that some big hope is going to save us. It’s about how a person saves herself, inside of this darkness, at the end of the world, by finding some way to exist in it.»

There is something truly dispiriting about a present where democratic rights are shrinking, genocidal wars are allowed to unfold with impunity, and young people need to dissociate from the present because the last time they experienced revolutionary hope was during a global pandemic (when some thought the health crisis would inaugurate a new political consciousness). As «bleak is becoming the new red» (to use the tagline of the communist magazine Salvage), many on the Left feel imprisoned in a world marching towards the dystopian prophecies of Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy instead of the luxury communist salvos that Aaron Bastani or Jodi Dean issued a decade ago.¹ I look at my raver friends, most of them slightly younger than me, and think about how the years stretching between the Occupy movement and the potential genocide in Gaza have truly cemented the view that «we’re on our own, but on our own together, trying to find the ways we can endure the end of this world.»

And yet, Baer writes, the «whole process [of raving] gets narrated as ‹subversive›.» Not because we resist or even refuse capitalism while doing it, rather because this one-night-stand communism works like a magic wand (yes, the Hitachi kind of wand) that can momentarily offset the misery and alienation of wage labor and waste our surplus energies «in the least harmful way we can make together». If we are indeed becoming surplus labor, then why not let the rave be our potlatch where we disburse our energies and make a mockery of capitalist time, health advice and normative ideals? Yes, drugs do work—to the point where we can hardly tell the difference between optimism, confidence and delusion.

Laboratory of Cool

Wark may no longer believes in revolution in her lifetime (what self-respecting leftist would at this point) but she can hardly leave her Marxism completely at the door. Raving is at its sharpest when it delivers a materialist critique of the practice it investigates. The queer rave—for all the talk of marginalization, oppression and liberation, and much more so than its square double—is a privileged site for style extraction and gentrification. Part global youth culture, part subversive underground, according to Baer «the rave can never escape the extraction of styles and of rents» by global brands, pop culture, and «rich men, johns, benefactors, and ‹investors› who long for respect in the underground», who want to be somebody and need to «ask the marginalized to prop up their images and stories […], hoping to also be set free».

The rave—we should never get too intoxicated to forget—is a laboratory of cool. Capital cannot manufacture its own critical subversion. It has to mine the cultures and styles of those groups it marginalizes in order to provide the shine of individual freedom and the variety of consumer choice. Post-industrial capitalism, with its reliance on immaterial production, multicultural social networks and the self as commodity, is not shy about uplifting the stories of Black, indigenous and trans folks as long as they speak of pride, resilience and economic aspiration, and not of anger, protest or collective organization. The problem with «reparative discrimination», as Wark refers to the various gestures of affirmative action happening at the rave, is that when placed in the service of conspicuous consumption—«party-as-commodity, self-as-commodity, outfit-as-commodity, everything to be bought and sold and compared»—they end up fattening the pockets of the same demographic of cis-white-male and certainly not socialist-minded owners, investors and gatekeepers.

Not everyone raves the same way and not all raves are alike, is what we take away from reading McKenzie Wark and Hannah Baer. The rave is cut up by lines of hierarchy, separation and antagonism, not just from the outside world but also inside the rave. There are complex systems of social and cultural distinction that shape it and make up the social choreography of the «queer drama». The queer raver constantly needs to be on the lookout for «coworkers» (tech bros), «punishers» (toxic bros), newbie ravers, newbie promoters and «cishet men who don’t want to be sonically fucked by techno». While a good rave (probably) should have policies to keep (and kick) out bad behavior, it is interesting to observe how a cultural form so invested in «getting free» is so riddled with hierarchies and paranoid readings of difference. Baer: «There are clichés in how people talk down to and thereby differentiate themselves from one another in rave space. Some people are corny. Some people are ‹G demons› or clout chasers. Some people like the music too slow, others like it too fast. Some people don’t care about the music or only care about getting fucked up—or just getting fucked. People are straight, cis, vanilla, too old, too young, too horny, not horny enough. People’s bad feelings about themselves get projected outward […]. People make enemies with people they’ve barely spoken with; people fuck each other without speaking at all.» It is above all at the queer rave that such distinctions seem to be a matter not only of style, but of politics. «We are of the party that knows this world is out to kill us», Wark writes, at the same time as she’s providing us with a rave ethnography layered with claims of authority and prestige.

The Politics of Protagonism

In her seminal Club Culture, sociologist Sarah Thornton explains how youth cultures (and queer subculture) have always used cultural and social capital (what and whom you know) to set themselves apart from the undifferentiated masses and make hipness look like the hard-earned right of some, but not others.¹ «How else», Thornton asks, «might youthful leisure be turned into revolt, lifestyle into social upheaval, difference into defiance?» Just as manners and personal connections used to be key for aristocratic circles, the raver must demonstrate their competence in terms of style, dosage and lingo, if they want to gain access to the guest list or the DJ booth. And nothing will deplete this mystical quality faster «than the sight of someone trying too hard». Cultural capital is crucial for subcultures to prove to its actors «that they are not anonymous members of an undifferentiated mass». It is as a gateway to economic capital while mimicking a language of revolt and subversion.

Queer and racialized minorities most likely deserve the «reparative discrimination» of the free guest list. At the same time, their rave subcultures are likely to inspire the next Berlin Fashion Week, attracting further «coworkers» and investors to the city and the club. Hannah Baer, who raves through the eyes of an anarchist letting loose during the hot summer of the pandemic, is much more candid (and forgiving) about this double-sidedness of the rave than Wark, who seems at times too infatuated with the glamour economy of the guest list.

What we for sure don’t want, writes Baer, is a rave that «gets narrated as ‹subversive›, as a way of being part of a ‹community›, when in reality people’s dominant emotion in the space is around inclusion/exclusion». If a good rave is about «getting free» and if that promise of liberation is to be worth something, it needs to come with a healthy dose of egalitarian protagonism. The politics of protagonism, Baer argues, is key to the subversive potential of the rave. We should ask: «Who gets to be a main character in capitalism, in white supremacy, during climate apocalypse?»

Liberatory protagonism would mean centering and humanizing everyone, across «structural divides like race and class but also age». It means for older people to listen to the young and for youngsters to learn from the elders. It means people not falling for and in love with themselves or their marks of distinction. It means leaving your moral investments at the door and encountering the unfamiliar with slightly more humility and curiosity. The main question is: «Do you want everyone to be seen and felt and to feel themselves? Do you want everyone to transcend? And if you do, how are you going to support and connect with them?» Or do you think rave protagonism is only for the characters in the DJ booth, on the guest list or in the vanguard lodge?

As ravers or radicals, we should keep in mind that any gospel of liberation structured around pre-determined ladders of distinction and persecutory otherness is just domination by a more gilded name. «Perhaps one of the sweetest parts of the rave is the part where anyone gets to be a queen, everyone gets to debut their look, everyone gets to experiment with being seen, with feeling themselves», Baer goes on. For all the smoke and mirrors, big expectations and passionate projections, the rave is but a microcosm of the many contradictions and struggles already making up our complicated present. It maybe is indeed, to give the last words to Wark, «a pocket in time in which there’s more time. But the pocket closes, and spills us out, and then that was all there was.»