Techno was invented by a group of Black artists from Detroit in the early nineteen-eighties. The scene and the sound globalized rapidly, but as an American subculture early electronic dance music was characterized by a science-fictional Futurism pursued through experimental sound, social mixing, free-form radio, pride in Blackness and queerness, altered states of consciousness, style, discernment, and technological innovation. The word “rave” to describe a certain style of partying associated with electronic music came into general use in England in the late eighties, after Detroit techno and Chicago house d.j.s began crossing the Atlantic to perform and inspired their British and Continental imitators. There’s no strict definition for what constitutes a rave, but in the past the word connoted an underground gathering, usually at some kind of repurposed space, such as a warehouse, a skate park, or a farmyard. Raves were often illegal in the sense that they violated licensing rules, and because people often used banned substances. Renegade in spirit, they were conceived of in part to engineer an alternative reality for a few hours, a place where ordinary rules of consciousness and comportment would not apply. There was also an expectation of endurance, of a collective experience that would continue through the night and into the morning.

Like many other subcultures, the rave was quickly co-opted. The profits of a denatured, commercially engineered version of the sound enriched a coterie of mostly white male artists who remixed pop hits and played festivals sponsored by corporations. The word “rave” lost meaning, and came to refer to any kind of happening involving a d.j. and a sound system that its organizers wanted to give a frisson of hedonism. Elon Musk threw a nine-thousand-person promotional “rave” at the Tesla factory outside Berlin in 2021. This February, the electronic-pop music producers Fred again.., Skrillex, and Four Tet billed a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden that ended at midnight as a “pop-up rave.”

In dance music, as in many cultural pursuits, the wrong people have tended to make all the money, but subcultures can also be protected by this kind of misunderstanding. The ersatz version of a scene can siphon off the people who don’t require it for a sense of belonging, as McKenzie Wark puts it in her new book, “Raving,” a monograph about the original, more subversive notion of the rave as she experienced it recently in its revival, over the past several years, in certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. As Wark writes in the book’s first chapter, “The first thing I look for at raves: who needs it, and among those who need it, who can handle their habit?” She clarifies what this need might be: “I’m interested in people for whom raving is a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life.”

Wark is a media theorist and public intellectual born in Australia. She is a professor of culture and media and the program director of gender studies at the New School. She has written many books of criticism, the best known of which is probably “A Hacker Manifesto,” published in 2004. In recent years, she has toggled between straightforward academic writing (“Capital Is Dead,” from 2019, explores whether information technology has changed the means of production beyond capitalism) and autofictional writing (“Reverse Cowgirl,” from 2020, which could be described as an autoethnography of sexuality and gender).

In “Raving,” because of all the discussions of appropriation in the scene, Wark is very clear to situate her identity: white, trans, and someone who, in 2021, celebrated her sixtieth birthday at the Bossa Nova Civic Club, a small techno club in Bushwick. (Disclosure that I know Wark casually. We were on a panel together called “Writing on Raving” at Nowadays, a night club in Ridgewood, in January, 2022; we also see each other at parties and have friends in common.) In the acknowledgment of “Raving,” Wark says that she had trouble committing to a book-length project since starting hormones, in 2018. It was around the same time that she began going to what she describes as “queer and trans-friendly raves in Brooklyn, New York.” The experience of all-night parties soundtracked with electronic music wasn’t new to her. She’d had an earlier go-round in the nineteen-nineties, at Tresor in Berlin, when that club was situated in an abandoned bank vault beneath a deserted department store in Mitte; and then at warehouse raves in Sydney; and Tunnel, the club-kid hangout in Manhattan that closed in 2001. But in “Raving” she tells her friends that what she finds in Brooklyn in the years that bookended 2020 was not only just as good but sometimes better, usually because she was having a new experience of her body, “a trans body homing in on its own estrangement, losing itself, in these alien beats, among this xeno-flesh.” The pandemic temporarily halted things—yet when outdoor gatherings began again, in the summer of 2020, Wark resumed dancing, too. “We are not of that party that thinks the only danger to our health is the virus,” she says. “We are of the party that knows this world is already out to kill us.”

In 2021, just as New York’s restrictions on night life lifted, Wark was asked to write a book for a series being published by Duke University Press about practices. Being asked to participate in the series, and to think about what in her life constituted a “practice,” broke her writing curse. “Raving” is the result: small, pink, and a hundred and thirty-six pages long, including footnotes and color photographs. The book has some theorizing, a lot of quoting from others, a little ethnography, and some first-person autofiction written in a rapid present-tense clip. (“These things did not happen,” Wark writes, of the autofiction parts. “The person to whom these things did not happen is me.”)

The reader is invited to join. “I’m going to take you raving,” Wark asserts. She does not spend a lot of descriptive energy on the music itself, instead focussing on the scene: “The dense, hot, wet, beat-stricken air, teaming and teeming with noise, sticks like meniscus, passing perturbations through skin as if skin’s not there. It’s all movement, limbs and heads and tech and light and air bobbing in an analog wave streaming off the glint of digital particles. Getting free.” But documenting the rave is a tricky process. Wark goes to parties that often don’t want to be named or publicized, not because they are restricted to the public but because they want to maintain an openness and freedom that can be ruined if they become too well known. Attention brings legal, social, and logistical risks. Many underground parties and clubs have no-photos policies, and some larger events explicitly request that no journalistic features be written about them without permission. Some might promote themselves with cryptic flyers, start at weird hours, and use other strategies of hiding in plain sight to protect themselves and signal their integrity to those who will know. At the door might be a policy of letting trans women in for free, what a friend of Wark’s, the d.j. Nick Bazzano, calls reparative discrimination. (“You have to water your friends,” he explains to her.)

Wark writes also of the threat that she refers to as style extraction. She defines it: “We play, make moves, gestures repeating, become styles—that are extractable as forms of intellectual property, harvested for the benefit of a ruling class that owns and controls the vectors of information.” On the next page, she admits, “This book, for instance, LOL.” Wark tends to name d.j.s and other people, such as lighting designers, with public profiles, but leaves the events and her friends disguised. Despite these modifiers, “Raving” is still probably the most extensive depiction of the scene that has been growing in Brooklyn over the past several years and has exploded since night clubs reopened after the pandemic lockdowns. Wark’s fears of extraction are in part symptoms of that growth in popularity, and the attendant struggles to preserve the intimacy and freedom that drew her to the parties in the first place.

The book’s charm is in the autofiction, where the reader gets to inhabit Wark’s sense of liberation. It’s an unusually hopeful depiction of late midlife as a phase of discovery. An intellectual prominent enough to be recognized by grad students when she’s out on the town finds a new pursuit that breaks her writer’s block, that allows her to have moments where she can fully inhabit her body and connect to its past. She has unrequited crushes. She falls in love. She gets dressed up with her friends. She engages with a broader public sphere on social media and in private chat groups, a network that is friendly and supportive but that also tries not to be complacent in its politics, especially regarding race, gender, and sexuality. (Wark thanks Trans Twitter in her acknowledgment, adding “No, really.”) She immerses herself in the cacophonous glory of New York City at night. She takes cues and amusement from the people who gather together, their style and their humor. She experiments with non-ordinary states of consciousness. She studies the connection between new technologies and music-making. She considers the continuity of the scene she engages with, where it used to be versus where it is now. She writes in bed with her lover.