In Raving, McKenzie Wark offers a breezy but thought-provoking work that straddles a line between literary and academic writing on electronic music culture. On one level, it can be read as a follow-up to Reverse Cowgirl, her 2020 auto-ethnography about gender and sexuality. Where that work was a look in the rearview at several decades grappling with queer identity, Raving finds Wark settling into the groove of a deeply situated trans identity inseparable from the sociotechnical assemblages of twenty-first-century techno music, with all its musical, visual and chemical components. Yet while it's easy to read Raving as a book about identity, it is also a book about technology. Sound systems, lighting rigs, fog machines and club drugs are positioned within a media ecology that stretches both out into technically constructed collectivity and inwards towards a self that is inseparable from its entanglements with all manner of perceptual alteration technologies. As such, Raving introduces a touch of media studies within the broader and more accessible rave-literature canon.
The book is a very quick read filled with sex, drugs and techno. Its cursory qualities invite contextualisation among secondary literature, or analysis in the company of a class, reading group or seminar. Yet in its 136 pocket-sized pages, Raving introduces several innovations to the rave-literature canon, centring topics previously underexamined. First, it is deeply rooted in twenty-first-century New York City, documenting a recent club-culture renaissance that has followed 20 years of anti-nightlife policy and enforcement spearheaded by the mayoral administrations of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. In contrast, the famous scenes in Europe that are so preeminent, both in the electronic music industry and in related literature, are treated as a distant memory—literally, in the form of four quick paragraphs flashing back on time spent partying in newly reunified Berlin during the 1990s.
Raving's chronological and temporal orientations represent a point of departure from existing works as well. The book is largely autoethnographic, punctuated with many quick references to outside sources. It is acutely situated in New York City during the late 2010s and early 2020s, and yet it still benefits from Wark's historical perspective, informed by lived experiences with the practice of raving running from the 1990s to the 2020s. Raving addresses this temporal framework in part through writings and photos related to the author's 60th birthday party, held at Brooklyn's Bossa Nova Civic Club. The practice of raving has historically been associated with youth, but Wark examines the possibility of intergenerational raving knowledge, shared tacitly rather than explicitly, in everything from one's choice of footwear to their chosen harm reduction practices when consuming drugs.
On the topic of drugs, Wark's Raving also breaks raves away from their historically close association with empathogenic stimulants like MDMA (aka ‘ecstasy’). She devotes considerable space instead to the dissociative drug ketamine's contemporary role in rave practices. In prior works of rave lit, ketamine was often positioned as a sign that any given scene was becoming unsavoury. For Wark, writing during a boom in legal usage of psychiatric ketamine products, the drug shakes users out of entrenched gender roles, reconfigures their relationships to embodiment and thus lubricates the disruption of entrenched social practices. The role of the unsavoury drug, in this case, is played by the sedative GHB, which has become a topic of recent concern and debate among raving populations, and which is implicated in the book's only truly negative drug outcome.
Frank discussions of drug use are not the only criminalised behaviours discussed in Raving. Wark also touches on the role of sex work in some ravers’ lives, as well as a variety of illegal party-throwing practices. The most controversial of these practices, at least at the time they took place, is the throwing of parties during early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. New York City was a major COVID hotspot, with more than 500 New Yorkers dying of the virus daily during its peak in April 2020. With all this in mind, it makes sense that Wark, writing as an (auto-)ethnographer, opts to anonymise most of the locations, promoters and participants discussed. In the future, these records of social practices during the COVID pandemic will be highly valuable despite their anonymous nature. Overall, however, the book's tone toes the line between memoir and theory such that many interested readers seeking the fine details of New York City's reinvigorated 2010s/2020s rave scene may be slightly frustrated. Some details survive, however, and conversations with scene-makers like the DJ Volvox and scholar/DJ Nick Bazzano help considerably to thicken the narrative's description of its social and aesthetic milieu.
Raving makes perhaps its most significant contributions in its treatment of embodiment, which is in turn closely tied to identity and gender. Altough queer identities have been central to dance music for decades, the cisgender gay male always loomed large as a dominant archetype. Raving punctures this hegemony by focusing on Wark's trans femme experiences, while also finding more generalisable insights within those experiences. ‘Trans people are not the only ones who dissociate’, she writes, ‘but we tend to be good at it’ (p. 8). This feeling of alienation is keenly expressed in Wark's anecdotes about her and other trans ravers being denied by cab drivers or followed around a party. The destabilisation of identity, however, is not unique to trans ravers in Wark's framework. Instead, it is a practice of total immersion in the technical environment of a rave, including lights, sound, fog, drugs and proper social behaviour. This immersion is ‘not for the ones who stand around’, she writes, but is open instead to all who can ‘dissociate out of the enclosed shell of their bodies, into the mix’ (p. 33).
As a book-length snapshot of New York City raving in the 2010s and 2020s, Raving is very nearly the first of its kind. As a theoretical text about the practice of raving, it works best as a point of entry, rather than a main destination. References to theoretical concepts are abundant but fleeting, making the book's list of references a comprehensive resource in its own right, all while maintaining an extremely brisk pace.
