A Servant to Sound: On McKenzie Wark’s “Raving”
McKenzie Wark | Raving | Duke University Press | 2023 | 136 Pages
It was like ginger ale on my skull. It was like Frankenstein’s lab. It was a humid Saturday in February, the night of my [redacted] birthday and — was playing —, the — year anniversary. I’d just gotten the go-ahead to review McKenzie Wark’s new book Raving, and I was ecstatic, manic even; my senses had gone haywire and my brain was frothing over at the prospect of elucidating this book and everything happening around me. My friends and I were strewn about a 17,000-square-foot warehouse, we were spilling our yerba matés, losing each other in the massive crowd, ping-ponging this way and that. Sound was flying at us in waves, swooping at us like a swarm of bats. We weren’t quite communing with it yet, more like we were shadowboxing, dodging it as it slammed against our ears, our chests, our spines. It was acid, it was UKG, it was baile funk. It sounded good.
There was no front left, there was no front right, there was just sound. Thousands of party-goers were dancing around us, forming a viscous, bobbing mass. The warehouse was new to me, and it was taking me longer than usual to settle in, to find a space, a crease, a throughline. Even though I was doing a two-step, even though I was shaking ass, I was struggling to access the rave continuum, which is to say “a time that exists outside of every other time,” in Wark’s words. “Every good rave that has ever happened or will ever happen makes contact with the continuum,” Wark explains in the glossary at the end of Raving, which Duke University Press has published as part of their “Practices” series. With this book, Wark has attempted to do the impossible: that is, to write effectively, lyrically, and accurately about the experience and practice of raving.
Over the weeks leading up to my birthday rave, as I was preparing to read Wark’s book in parallel, I’d spoken with several friends—several ravers—about whether or not anyone could actually sum up such an ephemeral and intuitive “practice.” “Why write something for people who don’t already get it?” A friend of mine asked. But I wanted to see if it was possible for writer-ravers like Wark to put something down on the page that resonated with our peers first and a wider audience second. Unlike my friend, the naysayer, I am not a DJ; I am merely an enthusiast, a dancer, a person under the influence, a servant to sound. The same goes for Wark. As she puts it in the first chapter of Raving: “Some come to serve looks; some come to leave their sweat on the dance floor. I’m the latter kind. I want to be animate and animated on the floor.” Or, as she writes in the book’s opening sentence: “First thing I look for at raves: who needs it.”
There are as many reasons why someone might “need it” as there are dancers on a dance floor or tracks on a DJ’s USB. For me, raving is an outlet for my mania and my anxiety; it is a way for me to momentarily outrun the trauma of emotional abuse. While in the outside world I am a sad little he/they, out on the dance floor, buffeted by flashing lasers and squelching 303s, I am blessedly beyond gender, a gyrating, smiling human being with my usually overactive mind rendered brilliantly blank. A rave—a good one at least—is a rare setting where one’s identity feels both embraced and ignored, where people can simply exist. Wark, who is a trans woman, writes beautifully about this feeling of simultaneously coming into and losing a sense of one’s body while dancing: “In the place where there’s usually me… [while raving] there’s just happy flesh… A trans body homing in on its own estrangement, losing itself, in these alien beats.”
What emerges in Raving, then, is a mode of writing that is deliberate but impressionistic, systematic but dissociative, theoretical but personal. While this approach might seem overly complicated and dichotomous, it proves fluid enough to encapsulate a scene. Like a DJ reigning over a club, Wark maintains a sense of order throughout her book while also remaining open to chance and spontaneity, her “set” containing as many twists, turns, and patterns as that of a master selector. Though she is in many ways driven by a critical impulse, she utilizes a playful, autofictional style, one that allows her to foreground sensorial experience and act as a contemporary Virgil guiding readers through the nine beautiful circles of rave hell (In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dance floor dark, is how Dante begins the Inferno, if I recall correctly.)
There is, of course, some risk involved in assuming this kind of open-ended approach. As Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, put it in his 2004 book, Rhythm Science, “Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out… The uncertainty is what holds the story together.” But as Raving unspools itself, we find a formula amidst all the chance encounters and fleeting observations, one concerned with the states of mind that the habit of raving can induce. These states cluster around the paradox of dance floor dissociation: that feeling of being vacant and yet amenable to epiphanic thought.
Raving is in itself a rave, a constructed situation that aims to induce a general feeling of what Wark calls k-time, named after “the time of the k-hole.” Thanks to the efforts of DJs, lighting designers, hosts, promoters, sound engineers, safe space monitors, and more, “this other time, k-time” settles over a successful rave like a fine mist, drawing “the body into a sideways time, without memory or expectations, without history or desire.” When the mind is open to sideways time, it is also open to other sensations, to finding intimacy amidst a cluster of dancing strangers, to the “intense kernel of expansive lust” that Wark calls enlustment, to the ecstatic emptiness of xeno-euphoria, when the body begins to lose “the form of its being in time.” By coining these terms and lassoing the ineffable with language, Wark has offered ravers a gift of heightened perception, leaving room for discovery while also remaining unafraid of precision.
This desire for exactitude extends to Wark’s historical gaze, to her awareness that the “constructed situation” of a rave is ultimately material. Even when we are amidst ravespace, feeling “free of selfhood,” we are in an actual space, after all. As Wark repeatedly notes, most proper raves, whether illegal or not, transpire within what she calls junkspace zone[s], themselves inside of former “light industrial districts” that “hover between decaying forms of usage and novel potentials.” In an era when urban planning is ultimately dictated by developers, a rave is both refreshing and a harbinger of soon-to-rise rents. Wark describes this commodification of free play, this process of “style extraction,” noting how the very “tactics for temporary release from commodified information” can be captured and then sold to the masses. Bushwick, where Wark and I both live, has become what she calls a “psychogeographic zone.”
Style extraction is also part of American dance music itself, or at least its history. Techno, the genre that Wark writes about most extensively, was born in the 1980s in Detroit, at a time when the falling cost of technology allowed the collapsing automobile industry to start replacing workers with machines. Techno is a counter-imaginary, then, a reclamation, a music made by Black Americans with machines. It isn’t quite utopian, it isn’t quite dystopian, but rather confronts the reality of life in a crumbling, racist America.
Ironic, and depressing then, that it has been “exported, repackaged, and financialized to be assimilated into the British and European post-colonial drug and rave revolution,” as the scholar DeForrest Brown, Jr. puts it. (One of the many strengths of Raving is Wark’s willingness to quote other writers, DJs, and ravers, as well as her inclusion of an extensive bibliography that doubles as a supplementary reading list.) And, as any raver worth their salt would tell you, this extraction isn’t limited to techno, either. In 1988, acid house from Chicago made its way to the United Kingdom and quickly rose to the top of the charts, spawning a rave revolution that was called “The Second Summer of Love.” Chicago producers like DJ Pierre, whose record “Acid Tracks” almost single-handedly launched the genre, only learned of this phenomenon when British magazines started asking for interviews. Of course, this pattern has been repeated time and time again over the ensuing decades, as genres of dance music blend, emerge, and mutate.
“This past haunts the present, unburied, restless, electric,” writes Wark toward the end of Raving. “This future will forever ghost any party that can’t dance to the noise which it surrounds.”
Whatever you think of the present state of dance music or the predatory industry it has been engulfed by, this much seems true: raving, at least in the right circles, has never felt nerdier. On the morning of my birthday, I stepped into the purple-grey dawn to catch some air and nearly collided with a good friend of mine. The party was big enough that we hadn’t seen each other yet. Soon enough, we were talking about the music he’d been making since we’d last crossed paths, about the way he was trying to layer four tracks at once. The layering, he said, would make the techno he was producing feel fully three-dimensional, so that when people danced to it, they would be dancing in the space between sounds.
The temperature had dropped since the evening prior, and neither of us had a coat on, but we hadn’t noticed, as we were intoxicated by the energy of our conversation. We had stumbled into the final form of dissociation that Wark describes in the closing passages of Raving. Moving back toward the dance floor, toward the music that had brought our lives together, toward the skittering breakbeats that would smooth out the wrinkles in our brains, we stepped into sidechain time, a time that is both a “refuge from” and a product of historical awareness, “a time we’re dancing into being.” Like a shaft of light beaming down from an alien’s spaceship, the rave continuum had fully enveloped us. All we could do was dance as history passed over our faces, our feet, and our ears.