Not Raving for Raving
Ian Rafael Ramirez on McKenzie Wark
11-ish p.m. Quezon City, Philippines. Pride. June 2023—
Between the periods of visibility and obscurity, before opacity shifts from 0 to 99.9.
My friends and I had just moved from Quezon Memorial Circle where the Pride celebration, I mean the Pride concert, was happening. We had just gotten out of the Grab car that had taken us to Elephant Party, a roving underground club night in Manila. Admittedly, we left Pride because we felt suffocated by the sea of bodies pressed together. And while it was a gathering of queers, we felt like we were only metrics in a numbers game that self-aggrandising corporations and government officials were playing. We were yearning for queer nightlife and the spontaneous community it forms.
At Elephant, techno beats enveloped our bodies and tied us together; we could feel each other’s sweat, movements, heartbeats. While techno is not my usual jam, there was an inviting feeling that radiated across the space. When DJ obese.dogma777 began his set, electric currents surged through my body, raving chaotically in my veins. At this party, he played budots remixes—a style of electronic dance music (EDM) that mixes Filipino novelty songs, catchy soundbites engraved in popular culture and trending TikTok music, which I later realised was true to his style when I learned that he is now a leading figure in championing Filipino worldmaking through budots. Within me, the electric currents transitioned from chaotic raving to swaying motions that saw me pulling my knees lower and thrusting my hips. It felt too as if all our currents were in conversation, syncing our bodies in the space together—a collective dance. I cannot recall exactly when we left. What I do know is that, in that pocket of time, we occupied a dimension of elsewhere, alongside other bodies demanding to be seen and to exist—Pride month notwithstanding.
This was my last rave in the Philippines before returning to Melbourne.
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10:30-ish p.m. Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. October 2024—
Deep in the period of obscurity, when opacity fluctuates between 50 and 99.9.
Accompanied by some friends, a group of queer middle-aged Filipino academics, I plunged into Fitzroy’s queer nightlife. I have been a temporary migrant on unceded Wurundjeri land since 2020, and yet I had not explored its queer nightlife scene until now. Consider it shameful for an academic who writes about queer nightlife in the Philippines. For good reason though: I had always been derailed by stories I had heard from other queer brown friends; N and R also attempted to plunge into Melbourne’s queer nightlife and experienced exclusion instead. But their stories were from the early 2000s, so I thought it might be different now.
That night with my academic friends, I felt it: the residues of N and R’s experiences. My body went still as we were trying to get onto the dance floor. It felt the same as when I was leaving the Pride concert last year. I found that I could not attach my limbs to others, making it challenging to navigate the sea of bodies around me. Disconnected joints in a tangled mass. That night felt odd. The stares were demeaning. Every attempted attachment was unreciprocated. Worse still were the shoves. We did not even last an hour. We escaped, smoked, and dragged our hungry bodies to bed.
I have not returned to the Naarm nightlife scene since.
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1:00-ish p.m. Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. January 2025—
While reading McKenzie Wark’s Raving, thoughts glitch slipping into trance
There was a disconnect between my nightlife experiences in the Philippines and settler-colonial Australia. The club in Fitzroy failed to be folded into what McKenzie Wark calls the ‘rave continuum’ or the continuous spatiotemporal zone where good raves make contact. That electric feeling I felt at Elephant was one of them—the beats that pulsated in my veins felt familiar, taking me back to the days I frequented Today x Future, a now-defunct queer club in Cubao, Quezon City. It was evident that my experience of disconnection—caused by racialisation surely; it is Australia after all—at that Fitzroy club had disrupted my entry into the rave continuum. Instead, it turned into something that I would call, extending from Wark, a rave discontinuum, or raves that disrupt the rave continuum. If For Wark, ‘rave continuum’ is the continuous time ravers feel during a good rave, the ‘rave discontinuum’ is when a rave or party leaves indelible, heavy marks that make one feel the weight of exclusionary tactics. While a privileged few experiences a rave continuum, the dissociation is so strong for others that, rather than build a world, we search for an other otherwise. To be a queer migrant and a person of colour in so-called Australia is to move across spaces with a heightened awareness of one’s difference as you feel the weight of every glance, every subtle exclusion that tells you that certain places are not for you. The irony deepens when they can’t see that their practices, now so commodified, are rooted in queer-of-colour cultures.
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4:00-ish p.m. Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. January 2025—
Still reading Wark, budots raging in my veins, urging me to speak
Published by Duke University as part of their Practices series that engages with how mundane activities inform us of our sociopolitical and cultural landscapes, Raving (2023) is Australian critical theorist McKenzie Wark’s autofictional and autotheoretical account of raving practices, as well as its roots in Black cultures and the implications of gentrification and commodification in New York City through a transfeminist lens. While her style of writing tickles my fancy—especially in how she animates how queer and trans thought engages with the otherwise, where her prose clearly paints these ideas, affectively inciting a pulse, like reverberating techno beats. However, Wark fails to engage with race in ways that obscures rather than makes possible the potentiality of coalitional politics. As I read, I found that it evoked a feeling of fluctuating joy and disjuncture, much like my experiences of rave discontinuum.
Throughout the book, Wark acknowledges that rave, techno and nightlife originated in Black culture, but this recognition often feels cursory. Citations by Black theorists and writers are frequently used, but their words are just as often left as empty block quotes, unexplained. In the first chapter, ‘Rave as Practice’, Wark borrows the concept of ‘surround’ from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, alluding to how nightlife and rave spaces are ‘underlit, undergoverned’ spaces of resistance and worlding. The surround, as conceptualised by Harney and Moten, is a space or social condition which enables fugitive planning for the marginalised, particularly Black communities. The surround represents what is under and around established systems of power—sites that allow for disruptive improvisations.
The next chapter, ‘Xeno-euphoria’, sees Wark discussing the experience of a good rave, equating it as a site where one experiences ‘belonging-in-difference’. She writes of this freeing praxis: ‘we took this configuration of fugitive possibilities—from Black people.’ Towards the end of the final chapter, ‘Excessive Machine’, Wark briefly mentions the relations between Blackness, transness, and techno, framing Black music as a form of sonic freedom that enables trans bodies to enact resistance.
There is an uneasiness that comes with these broad strokes of acknowledgment. Regardless of whether she demands ravers be aware that rave, techno, and nightlife are ‘gifts of Blackness’, as she puts it, the act of spewing an acknowledgment of a ‘stolen’ culture in which she willingly participates in and contributes to, appears to me as rather performatory. It’s giving, to borrow from Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang, ‘settler moves to innocence’, where settlers absolve themselves from guilt by expressing acknowledgments of responsibility without social action. Similarly, Wark acknowledges the aforementioned ‘gifts of Blackness’ without acknowledging how rave spaces can be exclusionary and often violent towards people of colour because of the whiteness that pervades some of these spaces. To start, there is racialised discrimination in rave spaces, similar to the anecdote I mentioned at the beginning, where microaggressions create an unwelcoming atmosphere. Then, there is the all-pervasive gentrification that often pushes people of colour out of our constructed self-environments. What Wark risks, as well, in her attribution of raves to Blackness, is the dismissal of minoritised communities roles’—Latinx, Asians, and Indigenous queer and trans folx—in the worldmaking practices that have shaped contemporary rave spaces in settler-colonial locations. These communities, too, have contributed to rave culture alongside Black communities, engaging in shared acts of fugitivity through practices like the T-parties in Los Angeles and Harlem’s ballroom culture, creating a coalitional praxis of creative resistance; yet, Wark fails to adequately engage with their critical contributions.
Queer scholars of colour have written extensively about the promises and limitations of queer nightlife, especially for lower-class queer folx of colour. As scholars Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani and Ramon H. Rivera-Servera assert, queer nightlife can serve as spaces for refuge, but it is not exempt from ‘normative modes of exclusion’: surveillance, door staff vigilance, expensive entry charges, homophobia, trans/misogyny, and racism. In her solo-authored book Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago, Adeyemi provides a rich ethnographic account of how nightlife can serve as praxis for Black queer women to assert their rights in a city subsumed by gentrification. She begins by narrating a story about someone she calls This Black Girl, who spilled her cocktail on the DJ’s mixer at a club night where the DJ played songs that excessively used the N-word to a majority white room; in her words, she was ‘the only N-word’ in there. While the sudden cut in music stunned the partygoers, This Black Girl, Adeyemi asserts, issued a provocation: ‘Race and feeling are entangled within the geography of the neoliberal city’. In that moment, This Black Girl problematised how white people take pleasure in Black aesthetics within gentrifying neighbourhoods that disproportionately displace minoritised folx.
By failing to address the disjunctures within rave cultures located in settler-colonial contexts, Wark obscures the exclusionary practices that persist in these spaces, particularly those shaped by racialisation. Though she acknowledges the commodification of some raves, capitalist logics are not the only forces critiqued in rave culture; rather, raves are political in the sense that they critique a matrix of power structures as mediated by capital. This highlights the limitations at the heart of Wark’s discussion of raving, particularly as it neglects to mention how experiences around racialisation often disrupt a rave continuum. It is the rationale behind why I am not raving about her raving.
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Unknown time. Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. January 2025—
Days after reading Wark, wondering why communism never came, the beats turn to silent hum…
Wark suggests that raving engenders femmunism (‘the communism of the flesh’), where ravers momentarily live in Warkian k-time—the horizontal time that spreads one’s temporal experience sideways—to live through alternative relationalities albeit on an ephemeral level. This is a space that one can touch through the rave continuum, but I can’t help but wonder: to whom is femmunism afforded? Who can access the rave continuum if it is exclusionary towards racialised others? What Wark further misses is an opening for coalitional politics made possible by the co-evalness of Blackness and transness, and by extension, how their nodes are connected to other minoritarian politics such as anti-racism, Indigenous sovereignty and working-class struggles, among others.
I contend that femmunism can be more capaciously explored by foregrounding the kinship between Blackness and transness. Minoritised practices are committed to the project of the otherwise, of constructing temporal and ephemeral alternative worlds in the here and now amidst the violence of our surround—a praxis shaped by queer-of-colour critique and Black feminist thought, which insists on alternative worldmaking practices beyond normative structures of power. Exploring how both Blackness and transness evade regulatory control, critical theorist and transgender studies scholar Marquis Bey writes that, while transness is ‘a movement away from an imposed starting point to an undisclosed (non) destination’ [italics Bey’s], Blackness, on the other hand, ‘is fundamentally “an anticaptivity project” [that] … oppose the various ways in which [they] are not only captured … but capture [themselves] in logics and frameworks that could never encompass [their] breadth.’ Here, Bey figures the fleshy kinship between Blackness and transness, particularly in how they touch each other and breathe alongside one another towards an alternative lifeworld, an undetermined elsewhere that will allow them to co-exist without bounds. One needn’t steal fugitive possibilities from Black people if their politics form a praxis aimed at building coalitional politics between the different axes of marginalisation. If raving enables the communism of the flesh, as Wark suggests, it should be reconfigured as a praxis of collective solidarity between queerness, transness and racialised minoritarian folx—one that is even more powerful when it intersects with and builds coalitions alongside Indigenous sovereignty and working-class struggles. This is when femmunism can thrive in the fleshy praxis of besideness and alongsideness.
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Unknown time. Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. January 2025—
The hum remains, eerie in its persistence, the opacity fluctuating between 50 and 99.9
For what it’s worth, reading Raving mirrors the experience of raving itself—beats pulsating as it carries your soul to an elsewhere, one dimension at a time. As an autotextual book, which Wark distinguishes from autofiction as a conceptual and not affective way of interpreting ‘the dimensions of what’s perceived’, the text is simultaneously dissociative yet sustained, personal yet theoretical, speculative yet grounded in reality. But there is nonetheless an extent to my raving about this disjointed yet beautiful text on raving. As I have elucidated earlier, the glossing over of Blackness’s relations with raves, techno, and nightlife—and its interrelation with other minoritarian folx and lived experiences—reveals that the ’fluctuating bundles of feelings and thoughts’ scattered throughout Raving remain fundamentally shaped by whiteness. While Wark graciously critiques style extraction and the commodification of stories and knowledge (which includes her book), her whiteness is erected such that it becomes an opaque screen, allowing her to see race obscurely. Writing on the limits of autotheory and autofiction, US writer Teresa Carmody asks her friend, Indian American poetics scholar Vidhu Aggarwal for advice, who notes that autofiction allows some authors to ‘evade structural issues of race’. I do not foreclose that Wark is entirely complicit to this evasion; rather, I critique her autotextual writing with the perspective that, for a scholar who acknowledges Black ontological contributions to raving, techno, and nightlife, there remains a need for more expansive engagement. What might reparate the twin genres of autotheory and autofiction is perhaps to make way for a decolonial option—writing alongside, writing with.
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Hot spring night. Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. November 2024—
Caught in the impulse towards visibility, opacity suddenly dropped to 0, albeit momentarily
As I was scrolling through social media, I came across a flyer for another event that Elephant Party was throwing: ‘RETURN 2 BAYOT ISLAND: DALAGAMBAYOTS’. Memories of my last Elephant party came rushing back, not unlike the surge of waves at La Union, the venue for Elephant’s advertised rave. For a moment, I tuned into the frequency of side-chain time as I leaned forward to touch the rave continuum—if only through memory, if only in passing. My body craved the sweat and heat and electric currents that had once pulsated through my veins. I didn’t need drugs for that.
In ‘Ketamine Femmunism’, the third chapter in Raving, Wark mentions a flyer for a rave she receives on Instagram which says:
Community solidarity. Rave as protest. Techno is Black music. Connecting is vital. Black lives more than matter. Utilizing music as our voice. Chaos can take shape in a new tomorrow. Please use this as a time to redistribute wealth for those who are in need. Masks and social distancing required.
She reacts to it: ‘Pretty words here, we all know they’re not enough. But they’re better than the ugly words, everywhere’. To this I say, the words Wark uses in Raving—‘femmunism’, ‘rave continuum’, ‘surround’, ‘k-time’, and other concepts she writes of as she attempts to sublimate her experiences while raving—are all pretty words. We can say that beautiful words are a symptom of the settler move to innocence: they are not enough; we demand that raving move alongside the incommensurable.
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Works Cited
✷ Adeyemi, Kemi. Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago. Duke University Press, 2022.
✷ Adeyemi, Kemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramon H. Rivera-Servera, eds. Queer Nightlife. University of Michigan Press, 2021.
✷ Bey, Marquis. Black Trans Feminism. Duke University Press, 2022.
✷ Carmody, Teresa. “On Autotheory and Autofiction: Staking Genre.” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 18, 2021.
✷ Celera, Lex. “The Origins of Budots, the Philippines’ Catchiest Viral Dance Craze.” VICE, September 10, 2019.
✷ Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia, 2013.
✷ Ocampo, Anthony C. “Infamous.” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 22, 2022.
✷ Tuck, Eve, and Wayne K. Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012).
Ian Rafael Ramirez (They/Them) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne who writes about queerness and queer performance. Their essays have appeared in Sexualities, eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, Australasian Drama Studies Journal, and Art+Australia, among others. They also works across dramaturgy, performance-making, and curation, and currently serves as the Creative Associate for Naarm/Melbourne-based Tayo-Tayo collective. They lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri land.