La fiction réparatrice

Writing on Raving is the definitive mix of voices from the Brooklyn underground rave scene and beyond, providing fresh language for the shared and infinitely varied experience of dancing through the night until the morning.

New York rave culture is having a moment. The music, mostly, is techno, certain flavors of which became the soundtrack to a dancefloor culture that is queer in a different way to house music centered gay nightlife. Wark, Mak and Beery want to document and annotate and celebrate, but also critique, this world in the making. Writing on Raving centers the New York scene, but isn't limited to it.

This is a book for all of those who need the rave. Who need to dance. Who have at some point needed that beat in their lives. This is a book for all those who have journeyed through the night, through sound, through movement, through chemistry, into other places, other times, other encounters.

This seeking gives us hours, years, on the dance floor to think about why we rave, to locate these reasons in our bodies and the space around us. But the rave is not the place to articulate them. It is too loud; our friends are too distracted, or too high. At the afters, tired and drained and covered in schmutz, we think some more. We look around at our raver friends, and wonder: How did we get here? What happened to us? What is this tentacular, thrashing, swelling thing that we all made together? That thing that is now slumped and aching and coming down now into our fragmentary, singular lives

Between all of us, there are many answers to such questions. Wark, Mak and Beery have gathered their favorite ones to share in this first-ever anthology of writing on raving.

McKenzie Wark is a writer and scholar based in New York City. She is the author, among other things, of Raving (2023) and Life Story (2024).

Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys: A Personal History (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Zoë Beery is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, and a nightlife harm reduction organizer at parties and festivals in the U.S. and Europe.

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

Edited and introduced by Michael Cross, this book features an interview Cross conducted with Leslie Scalapino from 2007-2010, as well as Scalapino’s “Poetics” essay, both published here for the first time. 62 pages, side stapled. Cover art by Amy Evans McClure. Covers RISO printed by Aaron Cohick.

From Michael Cross’s introduction to this volume:

"I first worked up the courage to propose a long-form interview to Leslie Scalapino in September of 2006. By then, I had spent most of my early writing life obsessed with her project. Her work was the first to genuinely illustrate for me what poetry is and what it can ultimately do, and ever since that first glance into that they were at the beach—which I discovered by chance as an undergraduate—I spent much of my free time attempting to apprentice myself to her. As a graduate student at Mills College in the early aughts, I spent hours obsessively scanning the shelves of an all-but-forgotten warehouse in San Leandro called Gray Wolf Books, which I’d discovered was a treasure-trove of Bay Area Language writing, including shelves of abandoned and out-of-print O Books. I sent a letter to the publisher’s address on the back of those books, and incredibly, Scalapino herself answered with the generosity that defined her among younger poets."

This text begins with the mishearing of a word. It starts from the place of inconvenience and unravels a hearing not contained within one fixed conversation. A hearing that has been expanded into a writing that begins in your bank and extends to your throat when its language heard writes itself into and onto the muscles.

It begins in your bank and extends to your throat ruminates on how digital algorithms turn words into capital, disciplining language and the body. Its writing explores how search engines link profitability to vocabularies and how productivity dictates posture, raising whether we can separate language and our bodies from economic structures.

Published in conjunction with the first major U.S. museum show of Joan Jonas’s art in nearly fifteen years, this monograph features new scholarship on her multimedia installations and performance practice from the early 1970s to the present. Inspired by the format of a reader, it breaks new ground by contextualizing and expanding understandings of Jonas’s body of work through three thematic approaches: the critical notions of gender, being and otherness; the politics of landscape and ecology; and new conceptions of medium specificity and un-specificity. Richly illustrated, with never-before-published sketches and drawings, the volume includes an interview with the late Douglas Crimp and Jonas’s personal reflection on their enduring friendship.

Edited by Barbara Clausen and Kristin Poor with Kelly Kivland, with an introduction by Clausen; essays by Clausen, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Poor, and Jeannine Tang; interview with Douglas Crimp; writings by Joan Jonas; conversation between Heather Davis, Joan Jonas, and Zoe Todd; and coda by Kivland