29 September 2009: "RAVE OR DIE: 2K9 Edition"

This post is about ecstasy. Carles is concerned about the politics of ecstasy, the class divisions that regulate it and perhaps provide the conditions for its spontaneous irruption. In particular, Carles, in his ethnographer modality, analyzes the popular youth gatherings known as raves to tease out and define the field of ecstasy, its contemporary social milieu, and draw some anthropological analogues that can perhaps guide his readers toward disruptive strategies to upset the parameters that close off large segments of excluded, demonized populations (the Agambenian exceptions?) from the possibility of pleasure in the unrestricted sense. "sometimes it is good to experience ‘lower class’ events," Carles jests drily.

As Carles frames his investigation: "Who are these ppl/teens/Mexicalts in Southern California who attend raves? What do they want out of life? What personal brand are these ‘ravers’ attempting to implement?" Is their pleasure contingent on their assumption of marketing prerogatives inculcated by their culture, or is their adoption of infantilizing tropes ("It seems like ppl are trying to ‘return to their childhoodz’ by utilizing images+products from youth [via bracelets, necklaces, other trinkets, and even backpacks]") an effort to reclaim lalangue, the primitive prelingual expressions of a pleasure unco-opted by sociocultural aims and other hegemonic appropriations?

Ecstasy, in rave circles, refers to the psychoactive drug MDMA, but Carles also deploys it in a metaphoric sense, as any deliberate instrumental means for inducing states of euphoria on command and also as the potential for jouissance. It allows the forbidden to remain protected even while it is performed: Carles ascribes this thought to a inebriated youth: "Got rlly ‘fucked up’ on E and gave DJ 420 a ‘beej.’ Regret it kinda." That "kinda" performs a great deal of semiological work -- regret is help in suspension as the forbidden, possibly homosexual pleasure is remembered, enjoyed and relished. Carles adds, "But srsly… have u ever fucked while on ecstasy? (they say u can never have an orgasm without it 4 the rest of ur life)" -- the concern here is the ideological conditioning that makes for pleasure, that enables it. Without certain constructs, crutches or props, pleasure itself becomes impossible -- there can be no release, orgasmic or otherwise. Carles means to warn us: Once you accept the pleasure that capitalist society offers, your capacity for pleasure is permanently altered by it. "I feel happy knowing that society is getting better and every1 is able to celebrate and be free," Carles notes sardonically, as it is precisely unfreedom that enables celebratory ardor.

In response to a photograph of two youths who appear to have ingested the drug, Carles notes, "I think that it means some1 is ‘mad fucked up’ when their pupils are dilated" -- a deceptively dialogic statement, as fucked up refers both to the state of intoxication and to the ideological conditions that transform intoxication into a phenomenon to be pejoratively dismissed with a ribald reference to coitus.