WHO IS ‘RAVING’ FOR?

Real freak hours with rave theorist McKenzie Wark

It was a cold winter afternoon in LA when I had my first off-dancefloor hangout with McKenzie Wark, the academic powerhouse and author of The Hacker Manifesto who has recently become somewhat of a rockstar in queer underground rave circles. I was cramping a little from running to the cafe where we’d arranged to have a coffee, arriving late and flustered. She was sitting serenely at a table, reading a book by Kathy Acker, the punky postmodern novelist with whom Wark had a brief affair. Looking up, she announced she had to pee. I offered to ask the restaurant down the street if we could use their bathroom. “Let’s just walk,” Wark said. Around the corner, she pulled us into a construction site, dipping behind a wall to piss in broad daylight in a residential neighborhood. That’s when I knew she was a bad bitch too. 

In February, Wark published Raving, a cute little pink book you might have been seeing all over social media lately. It is, as my homie Emily put it in her New Yorker review, “the most extensive depiction of the renegade party scene that has recently exploded in Brooklyn.” It is also one of the things I love most: a deeply nerdy account of the codes, culture, and customs of raving by someone who truly gets it. So when Interview magazine asked if I’d call Wark and have a quick conversation with her about the book, I knew it was going to be tough to reign it in. We ended up chatting for more than an hour—about everything from the types of people you avoid at the rave (“coworkers” and “punishers,” she calls them), to ketamine’s entropic influence on the dancefloor, and our differing takes on the State of the Scene. Not everything made it to the final cut, so below are some of the juicy bits from our interview that were left on the floor. 

On Tuesday April 18, I will also be supporting the LA launch of Raving at a really cute event! Wark will be joining fellow academic-raver madison moore (with whom she co-edited a must-read edition of e-flux called Black Rave), DJ and co-founder of Hood Kumi James aka Bae Bae, and moi at for a conversation-based kiki at Poetic Research Bureau, one of the sweetest gathering places of the LA lit scene. See you there!

You define “ravers” as “people who really need it.” Why is it that raving feels like such a primal drive? 

McKenzie Wark: I think of techno as a kind of music that lends itself to dissociation really well, in a way that for example, house doesn't quite do as well. Although I definitely got off to house music as well. So like that need, it's interesting. If I go to the rave at four or five in the morning, it's a lot of people who do service work, and are used to being nice to people all day. There’s also sex workers, who similarly are having to use their body, their subjectivity, and their emotions in service of the job. They go to a space to get out of that. 

Then there are people like me—“intellectual workers.” Products of your brain, your ability to talk and all that's for sale. Those kinds of labor just work for someone to be at the rave for hours. On that sound, in the dark. You can barely see anything so your visual senses are tamped down. When I’m in rave spaces, language is going on in my head, but I'm not paying attention to it. It's just there but I'm not in it. That's just one of those states that I need. 

That state that you're talking about, it’s very meditative. You can feel it on a collective level, when everybody's locked in. It doesn't happen all the time. But when it does, that's when you know it's really working.

You can't force it. You can just try to create the conditions where it's likely. Every now and then you pull out and look around you. And you just see people moving un-self-consciously. You're like, oh, here we are. Great. And then just hopefully let it flow into that state again.