Raving as Revolution: The Renouncing of Self
Shed who I was on the dance floor and met who I might be
You are a name etched in government records. A biography of tax forms and medical files, stitched together with childhood nicknames and the weight of your ancestors' expectations. You wear this self like wet cement, heavy and drying with every passing year, until it hardens into something fixed.
And then the music plays. Something unnames you.
Under the strobe’s seizure, beneath the bass line’s gravity, the borders of you begin to blur. The body moves before thought. The mind unspools like a reel of film catching fire, memory curling into smoke. And for the first time, you are not a person. You are a phenomenon, an unshackled pulse in the mouth of the night.
This is the undoing of identity itself—a revolution not against the system, but against the self. We spend our lives learning who we are, collecting labels, fulfilling roles, and repeating the story until it sticks. Yet identity is fluid, strangely and unsettlingly so, slipping from our grasp just when we think we’ve anchored it. It is a performance, brittle and provisional, cobbled together by expectation and repetition. What if the self isn’t something to hold onto but something to be shed?
I first began to understand all this at Printworks London, at the Tale of Us’ Afterlife 2022 show, an eleven-hour odyssey through engineered darkness and sound, from afternoon sunlight to late-night surrender. A relic of industrial London, Printworks became the city’s most disruptive and radical cultural destination, a space that unsettled the line between club culture and experiential art. Once home to the printing presses of The Daily Mail, it now stood as an architectural sanctuary, resurrected into a cavernous expanse: the most revered venues in electronic music.
Stepping inside felt like being devoured. The sheer scale of it swallowed me whole as steel columns loomed overhead, and the air became thick with anticipation. The crowd was faceless in the dark, bound only by the beat. Tale of Us curated the night like a descent into another world, melodic waves swelling and crashing, and the Afterlife sigil flickering above, suspended like an omen.
Time melted into sensation. Hours folded into a continuum.
When I finally surfaced into the prickly London air outside, the streets felt eerily static, the real world outside too alien and contoured, the silence too foreign. It was like arising from the belly of Printworks had woken me up from something subterranean, something dreamlike and beyond sleep. What followed was not clarity in the rational sense, but a subtler knowing: not acquired, but absorbed. Something in me had unfastened. Whatever had shifted was not to be named or held onto; it was to be passed through. An epiphany overcame me: raving was not a practice of understanding, but of unravelling. A release shaped by a framework, and made sacred by abdication.
There are thresholds where this becomes not an idea, but a reality. Spaces where time softens, language fractures, and the scaffolding of self gives way.
Where nothing remains but motion. But sound. But a body at last unburdened, open, permeable, alive to everything.
This is a ravespace, a paradox of total chaos and absolute order. A suspension of ordinary logic, where music dictates the body but liberates the mind. It’s the only place where disappearing feels like becoming.
Raving isn’t just a party; it is an act of unmaking. At once, escape and return, rebellion and surrender. A place where people vanish, only to find themselves more vividly than ever. From the outside, it appears chaotic: lights, bodies, sound, madness, but inside the storm, there's a strange order: a rhythm that doesn’t just move you but dissolves you. That rhythm has been studied, named, and theorised. What I felt on the dancefloor wasn’t strange. Turns out, it belonged to a lineage of thought that understood raving as more than spectacle.
Beyond subculture, it's a response to our uncertain times. McKenzie Wark describes raving as an art form, a survival tactic amid collapsing futures. In a disoriented world, Wark writes, the rave is where “a future leaks into the present.” Anthropologist Victor Turner called it liminality: the state of being betwixt and between, where fixed identities are suspended and new, collective ones emerge. Mircea Eliade traced this impulse even further back, seeing in ritual and ecstasy a human need to transcend the linear, the labelled. It is this—the erosion of ego in the face of the persistent beat and the synchronised coalescence of bodies into something collective and formless, that renders raving sacred: an exodus from the structured self and a re-entry into something primal.
And in that yielding, the loop transcends sound and becomes a threshold the body slips into, again and again.
Nietzsche wrote about this in his conception of Dionysian ecstasy, the cusp where rational thought fractures and something raw, something instinctual, takes over. Raving is a modern manifestation of this rupture. Hours of continuous dancing dismantle the distance between breath and rhythm, between singular and shared. The moment resistance falls away, movement becomes involuntary, effortless, as if animated by something beyond will. The body doesn’t move, it is moved.
Make no mistake, for this is not escape. It is immersion. Willing, and total.
The erasure of identity through rave culture has deep historical roots, far beyond hedonistic impulse. In the late 1980s, as Thatcherite politics fragmented communities and recast people as consumers, Britain’s youth began slipping into the cracks. The UK’s acid house explosion—later dubbed the Second Summer of Love—rose not just in defiance, but in hunger: for collectivity, for intensity, for meaning. Researcher Ben Malbon observed how ravers described their experiences not as pleasure-seeking but as oceanic—states of total boundary dissolution. The music, relentless and hypnotic, was engineered for trance. Its loops didn’t just fill time—they emptied it. In the warehouses and fields, something feral stirred. People didn’t just dance. They met themselves.
What happens on the dancefloor is first and foremost felt in the body—immediate and impossible to ignore. Beneath the sociological currents and the intellectual edifice built around it, raving firmly resists abstraction. Theories may engulf it, but the raw truth lives in sensation: in breath, in pulse, in the quiet undoing of self.
Even now, the memory returns to me not in images but in sensations. A flicker of light on the skin, the deep tremor of bass behind the ribs, the strange weightlessness that came after hours of movement.
That night at Printworks was the beginning of a new life. In the months that followed, raving wove itself into my life in London—not just as an escape, but as a centering force. I saw Camelphat headline a 12-hour set at Drumsheds, the former IKEA warehouse transfigured into a thundering temple of light and smoke. I surrendered to the high-voltage pulse of Innellea’s set at Electric Brixton, and lost all sense of time at Village Underground, where Fideles played deep into the night, and my friends and I were among the last still dancing, still delirious.
One of the most electric nights of all was watching Argy play at Outernet—his set was a visceral storm of visuals and sound that made the walls breathe. Raving had become so embedded in my life that when my parents finally visited me after three years in London, I had to take them with me to Studio 338. We danced together in that dim, enclosed space to the earthy, melodic world of Nora En Pure.
Each rave was different. Each one, the same. The details shifted, but the return was always to that same suspended state, somewhere between body and sound, self and other.
And yet, for all its intensity—ego death, transcendence and sensory overwhelm, raving never demanded permanence. It left with me something subtler, a residue that lived not just in memory, but in the way my body began to move through the world. A shift that trailed me like a shadow, resurfacing in the smallest moments, long after the music had stopped.
What happens after the self disappears? The answer, perhaps, lies in the dance itself. That is all I’m here to say. The rest? You’ll have to find in the dark, under the lights.
Because no theory can fully explain what it means to step outside your name, your body, your history, and feel, in that unmaking, not absence but arrival. No language can capture the moment you come undone, when the self you thought you were begins to unravel and something else, something more cellular, takes its place. It must be danced. Lived. Felt. Survived.
The hardest part is coming back from a rave. The world doesn’t know what you’ve seen. It doesn’t care who you became in the dark. It only wants the version of you it already understands. So I come back, quieter. I nod. I smile. But something in me has changed shape. I hear silence differently now. It hums with a memory no one else can feel. And maybe that’s the loneliest part—how you can be cracked open by something, and still walk through the world like nothing’s missing.
And so, just like that, when the sun returns and the world regains its edges, you reclaim your name, collect your jacket, and step back into the categorical world. But the light no longer signals morning; it arrives as an accidental revelation. The self steadily reconstitutes like a sediment drifting back into place, but is never quite the same again. But you carry that unspoken truth like a secret burn beneath the skin: that the self is a rehearsal, not a fact.
You were named before you knew yourself, etched blindly into government records as if identity were preordained. But now you know: that is not all you are.