“The conclusion of my Master’s thesis, all those years ago, was that rave culture was never intrinsically subversive; it was contingently subversive. As an extension of this, the same had to be said about tripping. There is nothing intrinsically meaningful or restorative or subversive about dropping acid, whether such a thing can save someone or condemn them is contingent. That is not to say there is nothing special about raving or tripping, but simply that there is a lot more going on here, and that no practices under the sun are innately meaningful, or intrinsically ethical. In the bigger picture, what you do is not what really matters, but why you do it, or at what future you aim your actions. This applies to taking acid and raving, as much as it does to violence.
       When we think about the conditions that gave way to the free party movement and sound system culture, it was primarily an act of resisting black exclusion from private clubs and venues. If no one was really allowing black people into the clubs (which were primarily playing black music), it is no wonder that all of these rejected people would assemble around DIY sound systems in the backstreets together. This is exactly what would have made raves anti-hegemonic, as they were an act of resistance that actively created an alternative reality that sought to undermine the systemic structures that ostracized them in the first place.
        The arguments of the thesis included the example of Yoga. Within Buddhism, the practice of Yoga absolutely must be accompanied by rigorous practice of ethics and philosophy. It is a 1:1:1 ratio between Sila, Panna, Samadhi, and even children’s stories teach that too much of any of those three leads to imbalance. Imbalance in Ayur Vedic philosophy is to be understood as sickness. Relatively famous teachers like Kakuin or KamalaShima have said outright that practicing Yoga or Meditation without a deep and passionate embrace of Buddhist ethics and philosophy produces zombies. Isn’t that the same word you sometimes hear about raves? All those zombies at 10am. “Do you know what you are dancing for?”.
       This is quite a different concept entirely to a modern consumer rave or club night, yet, the problem is that they appear very similar on the surface. From a certain perspective, it all looks like people gathering around a DJ and a soundsystem, dancing together, but this surface image betrays the complex difference below the surface. The only conclusion I could draw from this was that there is nothing intrinsically revolutionary about raving, and that subversiveness is entirely contingent upon the particular future you are trying to bring about. The radical afrofuturist imaginary behind the early practices of rave culture is what made the practices subversive.
        One thing that unites us as neoliberal subjects is a sense of feeling lost in the noise of the information age, being overwhelmed by hyperreality, a universe of endless derivative representations that never seem to lead to any reality. It is hard to know what is real anymore, or what to believe in, if anything. Capitalism is ultimately nihilistic, and to dwell in capital is to become lost in meaninglessness. The sign, “do you know what you’re dancing for?”, perhaps better written as “we”, is really asking this question about nihilism — do you think this needs to mean anything?
        This might be worth remembering the next time someone talks about the end of the future, as all it takes for the future to disappear is for people to stop aiming at it. The end of the future is the consequence of the nihilism of capital, and the consequence of capitalist subjects losing sight of philosophy and ethics, either in the form of mindless raving or mindless yoga.
        Some critics go so far as to say that Neoliberalism died in 2008, but it lives on in a zombie form because no new ideology has risen up to usurp it. I might suggest that Neoliberalism completed itself through death, having created a meaningless world where its own death would not mean its end.”