Raving Quotes

“This is the need: that for a few beats, or thousands, I'm not. Not here. Not anywhere. In the place where there's usually me, with all her anxieties and racing-racing thoughts and second-second guesses, there's just happy flesh, pumping and swaying, tethered only by gravity.”
― McKenzie Wark, Raving

“In here, in this situation, now that the punishers have left us, now that there's just us who feel this need—is a time we're dancing into being that's aside from the past that birthed us into this nightmare, and from father time waiting by to kill us all.”
― McKenzie Wark, Raving

“First thing I look for at raves: who needs it.”
― McKenzie Wark, Raving

“The rave situation is a temporary, artificial environment made by the combined labors of the promoter, DJs, lighting designers, sound engineers, hosts, and all those paid to make it happen. They construct a situation that confronts the ravers with a set of constraints and possibilities. The ravers bring their freedom: their moves, raw need, and their arts of presence.

For the situationists, the constructed situation had a revolutionary potential, for what the form of life could be after the abolition of the commodity, the spectacle, the whole oppressive totality. I remember some of those intentions still being present in some eighties and nineties rave scenes. Today's raves are hardly a situation that prefigures utopia. They cannot prefigure futures when there may not be any. The constructed situation of the rave may be all some of us have -- even if the revolution comes.”
― McKenzie Wark, Raving