rave
Methods
6 weeks, SUMMER 2026
fridays, 7-10PM EST
TBD, new york city
How does one rave? This is a class on methods—-what are we doing and how do we do it, better—-rigorously applying contemporary approaches in aesthetic theory to switch up the game, redefine the coordinates, make it new. From Continental philosophy to queer psychoanalysis, theory can be a new way of articulating ways we have already been raving, but open up radical possibilities of confrontational leisure, strategic resistance, and alien transformation.
This course, mixing lecture and deep conversation, welcomes nightlife workers and producers, and anyone who’s tired of raving on autopilot (or if you just want to understand nightlife with a critical lens and meet the weirdos who would sign up for this kind of thing).
Class
Structure
Each week will feature one or a few essays across critical traditions. Seminar will break down the concepts from the reading in plain language and a cute slideshow (even if you didn’t finish the reading, the seminar will catch you up on all that). Then we’ll discuss what we got out of the reading. We hope to put old arguments to rest—-”Should I do drugs even if they’re bad?” “Does techno belong to Black or queer people?”—-and think-tank about how we can apply these new methodologies to our own practices and lives.
facilitators
GEOFFREY MAK co-edited Writing on Raving with Zoë Beery and McKenzie Wark, an anthology from a reading series of the same name on nightlife writing. He is the author of Mean Boys.
CHRIS SHULTZ is a bookseller, archivist, and DJ who studied philosophy of aesthetics. He is part of the collective that throws Fiber, a party at Light & Sound Design.
Syllabus
Week 1: the rave as BODY POLITIC
The rave isn’t inherently political, but it is always politicized. The rave might not have a political purpose, but it will be used for political purposes. So should we just be more conscious of using it for politics? IMMANUEL KANT would say no. That art and beauty, including dance music or the rave itself, are purposeless give it a “freedom” that Kant said reflected the essence of the human spirit. We rave to be human. And it’s our humanity around which liberal democracy and human rights are formed. Can the rave can be the very thing that constitutes the body politic? Let’s break down how that works and why and where that can be applied practically.
Week 2: THE RAVE AS THERAPY
The concept of “harm reduction” doesn’t pretend that drugs are somehow good for you, but accepts harm as a basic premise, and tries to reduce it wherever it can. As drugs are a center of gravity for raving, we find a kind of pessimism here: if raving is escapism or hedonism, how can we justify centering it in our lives? These contradictions are at the heart of pleasure, which we can’t call good or bad, we just know we like it. By embracing what is harmful, EVE SEDGWICK offers a queer-coded way of thinking through these contradictions by using pleasure as a guide to transforming, repairing, and healing our relationships and our institutions.
Week 3: THE RAVE AS social resistance
The rave is often called a “third space” where there’s a lot of pressure for it to meet certain needs left unfulfilled at work or home. Today, there is a nation-wide collapse of community infrastructure, and the rave remains one of the last spontaneous, vernacular, and physical communities in an age when social media has colonized most of our social interactions. How can the rave respond to this vacuum? If we turn raving into community service, doesn’t it become profoundly unfun? Here, we explore contemporary ways of understanding social problems, and its interventions, through readings by BRUNO LATOUR and TOBY SHORIN and NICOLAS BOURRIARD. We will discuss how the rave can be an alternative to institutions, and the idea of politics not as propaganda but as ways of relating with one another.
Week 4: SADOMASOCHISM AND THE COMMONS
There is a lot of discussion about who belongs at the rave. Throughout the 2010s, movements like marriage equality and Black Lives Matter coincided with landmark efforts to make the rave a space for queer and Black people. Obviously no one’s trying to turn the party into a homo-ethno state, but we need to talk about the muscle gays and the normies at Nowadays because they are a real problem. Tolerance policies don’t seem to be working, and anti-harassment measures can feel anti-queer in places ostensibly for cruising. What if the solution is more exposure, more sex, and not less? AVGI SAKETOPOULOU’S theory of “limit consent” situates the rave as a mega group-BDSM scene, where a degree of consent is waived to open possibilities of transformation by encountering the radical other in friends and lovers and strangers. Maybe you found someone hot that you totally wrote off at first? Isn’t that so much of why we go out?
Sign Up Today
Tuition for the course is $550 for eight weeks. Class fees are non-refundable. No application necessary. Class size will be be capped at around twenty-five. Additional classes may be opened on other days due to demand.