Reparative Raving
Brock University (Canada)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.14>
What are we doing here, in this mangled mass of throbbing bodies? I think it’s a form of mourning. What if this body-shaking bass operates at the frequency with which grief…. resonates? What if when we breathe in, sucking back the sharp, sweat-soaked air, we are breathing in the grief of those around us? What if we exhale our own grief out into that sharp, sweat-soaked air and it hangs there, suspended, in-between each beat? What if this breathy grief evaporates and condenses on the walls, along with the sweat, and drips back down to us? What if grief literally drips from the walls? What if it penetrates us and opens us up to porous possibilities of a love that is otherwise? And what if that love, too, then evaporates, condenses and drips back down to us?
My experience of raving extends beyond revelry; for me, raving is a reckoning. Raving is a process of unearthing both collective and personal ruins, the affective residues of which are held, like shadows on the psyche, as “unthought knowns” (see Bollas 1987). For me, raving is a kind of spilling out, and over, and around. So, this is a story: a story about raving, and about reparation. This is a survival story: a story of futures lost and mourned and moved through.
Dina Georgis speaks to the utility of story, claiming that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and others, do the work of “symbolically elaborating experience in a way that brings narrative coherence and understanding to our existence” or in other words, “allow us to go on living” (2013: 1).
How, though, do we go on living when the future has been lost? Amidst globalized capitalism and widespread precarity, environmental instability and climate chaos, the bubbling war machine and alienation from the other, “the good life”, as Berlant (2011) would say, that so many of us were urged to strive towards, no longer exists in an accessible way; the myth has frayed. And while for many of us marginalized along lines of sexual orientation, race, gender and (dis)ability, that future was never truly promised, the loss of good life is a heavy inheritance to bear nonetheless.
We grieve our losses but… grief is tricky thing to capture. Cheng speaks to the trouble of “quantifying grief” for the purpose of “proving” damage, suggesting that in doing so the character of grief is lost (2001: 6). Here, Cheng suggests that:
Part of the problem has to do with how we understand social healing and the tendency to rely on exclusively material or quantifiable terms to articulate that injury. The vocabulary of grievance … has ironically deflected attention from a serious look at the more immaterial, unquantifiable repository of public and private grief. (2001: 6)
In other words, the attempt to quantify injury for the purpose of reparation is a turn away from queerness of grief. Indeed, the queer affects of loss or grief are intangible and yet deeply felt—feelings that are not so quantifiable and can never be fully put to rest.
So, to begin my story, I ask how do we mourn and move through “the heaviness we feel in a world that, we’re told, has no future” (Milstein 2017: 7)?
We stumble down a dirt path, illuminated only by the glow of cellphone flashlights. Cicadas form an omnipotent wall of sound, but as we are swallowed the buzzing gives way to bass. Thunderous and enveloping.
Beneath a full moon, beneath forgotten power structures, we generate power of our own, we form a tide that pulls the strays out of the bush and into the heat and into the beat. The deviants cordially invite the discontents to the pity party!
Pushed out of the club and onto the street… there is no “home” for us. No space to call our own. Another club shut down, shuttered up, switched into something shiny… something with mass appeal. Most of us are without a space to call our own: Another ad for a roommate, another real estate agent, another rent cheque cashed… something like modern serfdom. We fight and grind to wiggle out from under someone else’s thumb. So, we must find our freedom elsewhere.
The dance floor is our shelter, from the pressure, from the thumb. A shelter from the fight, from the wiggle… . From the “Grind!” A different kind of grind. We do our work on the dance floor.
Dance floor, now, is a flexible term. More so a concept than a space. A feeling, a vibe. A dance floor can happen anywhere. Tonight, it is an overgrown access road, hidden away by dirt and trees and powerlines. Out of sight from the condo tower that looms overhead. There is little avenue through which to escape the urban sprawl, and our hedonic pursuits are dismissed and disparaged by the old moral safeguards, which bar us from the few spaces not yet repurposed, refurbished and renovated for sensible pleasures.
So, we undertake our own renovations. We repurpose, refurbish and take over forgotten spaces, spaces which once served productive aims. Power generation. Production of matter. We take over and produce anti-matter. Anti-productivity. “Which is sort of the whole deal”, McKenzie Wark says. “Take over space. Take over machines. Take over chemistry” (2023: 2).
We take over ecstasy. We get high while the ship goes down. We dance in the wreckage—the “collapsing capital” crumbles around us. Ruined economies and ruined futures. We toil in the tall grass, labouring to the beat. The lies our parents told us—go to school … get a job … work hard and the world is yours—once bright and shiny, now rusted over.
Judith Butler asks, “is there a loss that cannot be thought, cannot be owned or grieved, which forms the condition of the possibility for the subject?” (1997: 14).
Precarity forms the condition of our existence. I (and maybe you, too) inherited a dream that was always, already in decay. Haunted by uncertainties, the spectres of environmental degradation and economic destruction shadow our path. So we move, and mourn, and maybe make another route. Even the party itself is precarious. It could end at any moment, with the blare of sirens, the blue and red strobe which signals an end to the revelry. Time to run. I’d hoped for more. The moment is lost, tacked on to the list.
I first lost carnality in the interest of security, and much has been lost since.
The immaterial reverberations of these losses hang like spirits overhead and haunt me (and maybe you, too). Dina Georgis refers to these ghosts as queer affects, queer in that they are “unspeakable, hard to name and … disruptive” (2013: 10). These ghosts can’t be exorcized, and so the grief is unending (our histories of damage do not recede). So, what are we to do with all this grief? How are we to reckon with loss when language fails, when what is lost cannot be named or even “recognized as loss, because what is lost never had any entitlement to existence” (Butler 1997: 24)?
I go raving, mad
To be raving is to be mad, wild, irrational, incoherent, unhinged. “Being touched by the queer affects of loss can feel like someone just cut through your skin and left you weeping” (Georgis 2013: 7). And at the rave, on the dance floor, in the beat, it can feel like someone has ripped off my skin and left me screaming; sometimes I find myself thrashing with a violence I didn’t think myself capable of. I lose my composure.
There’s a rhythm to (… three … four) this de-composure. And that rhythm rocks you … two … three … four. The bass penetrates you … two … three … four. The music moves through you … two … three … four. The repetition plays a role here, too … three … four. Ashton Crawley recalls that in church, worshippers would sing a verse and a chorus on repeat for an extended period of time, and “the spirit would fall” (2020: 5). He suggests “the repetition allowed [them] to stay and linger and wait and tarry and imagine”, and that “repetition as a limit becomes also possibility, delimitation, the occasion for meditation and opening and vulnerability” (Crawley 2020: 5).
There’s something about the “repetition”—in the way the past repeats itself, in the way the beat repeats itself, in the way the future folds back on the past, in the way the body folds into the beat. On the dance floor, I meet the same spirits time and time again, and “what returns to haunt … is not only the reality of [my history] but also the reality of the way that its violence has not been fully known” (Caruth 2016: 6). The spirit slips, and falls, and bleeds out into the air.
I emerge, damp, from a dark and spiraling hole. Buried deeply under moss, and dirt, and worms—I dig myself up, and into an ancient world. The air here is liquid, and time is slow and viscose.
In this ancient world, populated by spiders and fish and specters, temples rise and crumble. Temples with the face of my mother . . . with the face of my father … with the face of some long dead ancestor, foreign to me and yet felt so deeply.
Faces of my dead friends. Faces of dead me(s).
My bones, which seem to be so pliant now, bend and vibrate under my skin. The red devil rips through my veins, sending shockwaves of pain until the rushing cold of the saline flush fills me with some spectre of relief.
My body isn’t always mine.
Fleshy extensions to my left and right wiggle and clench into . . . hands, fists—full of rage and tender longing, slightly raised and throbbing.
Diving into the sea. Pounding against rocks. Driving down like nails in a cross.
Fractals, like tiny sea creatures, spin in and out of focus, disappearing between the waves of blue which wash over me and veil my surroundings in light. Pulsating frequencies extend tendrils of hope and shake out sticky memories, penetrating the clammy membrane of … me.
My skin slips off and I spill out: the feeling of being underwater, of breathing underwater. Uncontained.
I’m all around me.
I’m all around me.
I’m all around me.
Craig Jennex (2023) reminds us that the rave is simultaneously individual and collectivizing; it is a personal exercise that necessarily tethers us to others. And this is where the raving becomes reparative; this is where the mourning meets something more. Here, the lost souls and slippery spirits that find themselves pushed under the bridge, out to the forest, into the warehouse bide our time and bind our ties.
In the ruins we re-build, we craft a queer kinship—platforms, connections, rhizomatic networks mutating and burrowing underground. Raving is a queer mode of relation, a private grieving and collective healing. The community found through the rave reaches far beyond the dance floor, for when I was diagnosed with cancer my present ate my future up a second time. I hungered for help, and my successes served me an empty tray. You can’t pay rent with pink ribbons. Feeding on paperwork, Ontario Works … work didn’t help. Productivity only pays off while you’re at it. Another broken promise. But those anti-productive networks, rhizomes grown at the rave, they fed me in ways I can’t even describe. There is this song that sometimes plays in my head: “last night a DJ saved my life”. Well, DJs and dancers really saved my life. The rave saved my life. Mutual aid built out of abjection and what appeared to me then was an apparition, a party at the end of the world, and in the face an annihilation an image of a not-yet-here where we … take care of each other
In spite of what has been lost, we build our own futures. Sometimes immaterial, sometimes solid. Rarely fully realized but real enough to release some grief and rectify some of society’s wrongs. Even if the scale is small, even if the futures imagined are never fully materialized, even if there is no promise of emancipation, the dance floor provides opportunities to commune with ghosts and forge queer relations (see Muñoz 2009). Jennex says, “queerness, as a concept, is at its most promising when it is embodied, collective, and expanding—when it signals something not-yet-here, but something worth reaching for and moving toward” (2023: 8).
The act of raving offers no simple solution for finding what has been lost, but somewhere amidst the sweat and shaking sound, the exhaustion and the ecstasy, I’ve found a way to reckon with my ghosts. And while these ghosts might be private, they can resonate with others. The desire to rave is in some way a desire to unleash, to release; we all have something that knocks to be let out, an unthought known clawing at consciousness. And so, moving through the rave space, then, means moving through a space that is filled with hauntings, that is ripe with queer affects. Though we do not encounter each other’s ghosts in a material way—we are not necessarily confronted with the way that violence is enacted differently across people’s social locations—their shared resonance can be felt, if you are open to being released, and absorbed, or rather, to evaporating (see Brennan 2004 and Crawley 2020).
Crawley thinks, “to evaporate is to be made into that which can be inhaled and exhaled, that which can be breathed. Would we perhaps then evaporate into and be united with it? What then would be our mode of existence?” (2020: 19). Maybe what makes the experience of raving queer is that the bodies here leak and spill and bleed into one another; queer affects are exchanged through the flesh and through the atmosphere. In a spacetime like the rave, where one can linger (in the beat, in the rupture, in the club, in between, in … an otherwise world) for hours … days … seemingly months, years, perhaps what we are offered is a ghostly mode of existence. This is an offering of an evaporative way of being wherein we are confronted with the messy stuff of the past and the impossible future, with primal desires and inarticulate affects, and where grief might find space to breathe (even if only for a moment). And maybe, in that space between (beats … bodies … breath), we can encounter love as a part of grief.
For the family forged on the dance floor.
Emily L. Murphy is a PhD candidate and cultural theorist at Brock University whose work sits at the intersection of psychoanalysis and subcultural studies. Her dissertation research, under the supervision of Dr. Hannah Dyer and Dr. Chelsea Jones, explores affective space of the rave, and the networks of queer-crip kinship formed therein. She is also a dance floor regular and a DJ, playing under the moniker Venus in Foil.
Bollas, Christopher. 1987. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394716>.
Brennan, Thersea. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. <https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801471377>.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Caruth, Cathy. 2016. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. <https://doi.org/10.56021/9781421421650>.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2001. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195134032.001.0001>.
Crawley, Ashton. 2020. The Lonely Letters. Durham: Duke University Press. <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv123x7d8>.
Dyer, Hannah. 2020. The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood: Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development. Chicago: Rutgers University Press. <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxrd5>.
Georgis, Dina. 2013. The Better Story. Albany: SUNY Press.
Jennex, Craig. 2023. “Queer Collectivity in the Echoes of the Dance Floor”. Lingering 14: 6-8. <https://content.blackwoodgallery.ca/media/pages/publications/sduk/lingering/f2c3a21a48-1673446726/blackwood_sduk14_lingering.pdf>, (accessed 17 October 2024).
Milstein, Cindy. 2017. Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief. Chico: AK Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. <https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479868780.001.0001>.
Wark, McKenzie. 2023. Raving. Durham: Duke University Press. <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv33t5gzt>.