McKenzie Wark

Raving

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What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.

Author: McKenzie Wark

Paperback  Published March 2023  136 pages

 

Read and Recommended by Kae:

"Raving speaks to much more than hedonism, partying and drugs- though this too is excavated in a vivid, hallucinatory flurry, making for a really addictive read. Through an autoethnographical lens, complete with photographs and anecdote, Wark testifies to the power of ‘ravespace, ‘xeno-euphoria, and ‘enlustment’: a cocktail of a remedy to the numb dissociation of living in a trans body in a transphobic world: in a world that perpetually situates you as ‘wrong’, and therefore hyperaware of one’s ‘wrongness’ situationally. Wark portrays for us the rave scene as a way of escaping our bodies, melting into a scene, other bodies, teetering with chemistry. And in this simultaneous embodiment/disembodiment, we actually come closer into ourselves. In accepting that we may not be as such concrete, solid entities like we would want to believe, we open ourselves up to the infinite other ways of experiencing ourselves amongst others and amongst spaces. 

Wark encourages us to revel in that gooey-ness, and in reading this, I too felt transported, my body metaphorsised into oozy meltingness, vividly sensory with sweat and drumming and aching legs. Wark is an expert at blending experience with theory, and light with dark, the fantastical and the real. A must read even for the rave virgin."

"McKenzie Wark is one of today’s finest critics on the subject of bodies, sex, gender, and, as of now, the venue that brings them all together: the rave. . . . Few are better than Wark at capturing how it feels to be in a body with so much intelligence and humor. Here, she argues for raving as a vital trans aesthetic, a way to dance — literally — over the crumbling foundations of capitalism." — Isle McElroy, Vulture

"A well-tooled topic on which only a writer as sharp as Wark could induce me to pick up another book. . . . Wark is a master of brevity and precision, and Raving is no exception; her easy prose avoids the self-indulgent nostalgia that often afflicts writing on this subject matter." — Sean Burns, Frieze

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