A response to The Harper Review’s Winter 2026 proposition, “The party is over.”
Dear editors,
Partying is a radical act. It negates formality, breaks down barriers, and facilitates inhibition. It lifts social rules by peeling away the corset of manners, taste, and class. Some parties define themselves through exclusivity, but that fundamentally betrays what a party is. Parties are supposed to make conventions more elastic, not tighten them.
Because of their unique character as public outlets of personal tension, festivals are an essential part of life which causes them to be reluctantly accepted by polite society. Still, this acceptance is not absolute. In order for these parties to be accepted they must first be assimilated, stripped of their radical nature and forced to fit in with convention. Take, for example, how most of the stuffier celebrations we know today originate from fringe or pagan feasts. Christmas has roots in winter solstice festivals, such as Saturnalia; Easter has ties to the Vernal Equinox; Carnival was preceded by Lupercales, Bacchanales, and other such radical festivals.
Behind this lies a mechanism of sublimation: the dominant culture forces regulations onto radical gatherings, effectively neutering them. The sublimation retraces interpersonal distinctions, reinforcing the cult of individualism. Radical gatherings are only tolerated so long as they don’t threaten the established order. Once the party begins to present itself as a threat, it gets domesticated and appropriated in order to build a national or state identity. I think of Carnival, stolen by the Catholic Church away from its indulgent Greco-Roman origins to turn troublemakers into repenting Catholics. Carnival today now functions more as a tourist attraction than a radical act. This hollowing out of the party is something we must vigilantly avoid in order to conserve authenticity.
What to make of today, then? Everywhere on the internet I see a push towards raving, clubbing, and the substance abuse that often follows. Younger generations are disillusioned with the cult of individual success. Partying presents an alternative by forming a collective ego in a much shorter time than “building a village” ever could. Sweating side by side with equally inebriated strangers has a way of bonding you to them, if only for a moment. Erasing borders between individuals challenges class differences because it forgets otherness, real or artificial. Radical.
The aestheticization of subcultures ad nauseam shows the suffocating pressure younger generations are under to box themselves in. The party’s disassembling of these boxes gives it power to resist within a system that tranquilizes any means of revolution. The informality of parties allows them to evade the constraining narrative of consumerist individualism through their fractal nature. Parties create community, which creates change contrary to the individualistic dogma—a dogma which is demonstrably untenable.
The only tenable option now left is to resist participation in such a climate of individualism. Humans simply must party and skirt inevitable evisceration. Go out, go dance, sweat on people, meet people in the bathroom, meet people outside, meet people inside, feel the beat of your generation rising from the thrum of the bass. The party’s far from over.
Importunately,
Jacqueline Oury
Image: Charles Gleyre, La danse des bacchantes, oil on canvas, 1849 (Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland).