The Socio-Sensual Practices of Clubbing
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Sensual Culture: The Socio-Sensual Practices of Clubbing. Philip Gordon Jackson University College London In Fulfilment of PhD in Social Anthropology Submitted in June 2001 Abstract This study is examines of the world of clubbing when viewed as a holistic field of socio sensual practice. Over the course of this study I observed a consistent form of bodily practice, occurring in clubs, that had initially appeared very different from one another. This practice made these clubs more similar to one another than different and this socio-sensual similarity became the focus of this study. In order to examine this aspect of clubbing I have utilised a number of theoretical frameworks, that arose from a series of disparate fields, but which are still connected. From anthropology and sociology I have drawn upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Marcel Mauss, Michael Foucault, Norbert Elias and Chris Shilling. From Philosophy I have utilised the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. From neuro-cognitive studies I was strongly influenced by the work of Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux. These alternate perspectives consolidate one another's assertions, as to the nature of this experiential encounter, and I have used them to provide a connective thread across the realm of clubbing. Nevertheless the vast bulk of theoretical material in this work is derived from observing and participating in club nights and interviewing clubbers, both at a formal and informal level. This has created a study which explores two aspects of the club scene. The first arises from the actual practice of clubbing: what people experience, how it affects them, what they make of it, and it is grounded in an ethnographic analysis of the space. The second is a theory of sensuality, which is also derived from observations of the club space and is grounded in an examination of the way in which people experience and give meaning to their worlds through the sensual practice of inhabiting that world. 2 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: An Ethnographic Example Chapter 3 : Creating the Club Space Promoters Dls Security Entering Clubland Core Crowds The Aesthetics of Clubbing Chapter 4: Dance Dancing: Before and After Raves The Dynamics of Dance The Experience of Dance Display Sensual Cartography Chapter 5: Music Embodying the Beat Bass Acceleration Chemical Beats Chapter 6: Intoxication "Every fucker and their dog takes drugs" Set and Setting Alcohol From Alcohol to Ecstasy and Beyond Ecstasy Unravelling F ear, Experiencing Trust Energy T ouch, Sex and Socialising Accelerants Psychedelics Marijuana Heroin The Rhythms Of Drug Use: Discovery, Honeymoon, Excess, Reassessm~nt Chemical Literacy Chapter 7: Sex The Sexuality of Clubbing Sex Clubs Sex and Drugs Chapter 8: Dressed to Thrill Putting on the Glitz Uber Drag and Rubber Nurses Sensual Dressing Chapter 9: The Vibe The Social Genesis of The Club Space. Strangers Party Participation Courtesy Attitude Smiles Tolerance Informality: The Script of the Party Adventurc Meeting People The Seducti\"c Gaze Chapter 10: Clubbing as a Bodily Technique. Techniques of the Body Abandonment The Gender Blender Chemical Intimacy Embodied Metaphors Sensual Morality Chapter 11 Sensual Culture Dionysus and Apollo Sensually Creative Identities Ritual Bodies Meaning in a Meaningless W orid Bodies in Minds, Minds in Bodies Conclusion Bibliography Appendices Arc: A Sex Party Notes on the video Glossary The Video Aesthetics Dancing Dressing Up The Vibe 5 Introduction "Born on a dance floor as a natural groove craver." DubWar I was drawn to the club scene for a number of reasons. Firstly, I have a passion for each of the elements that make up a club: the party sociality, the music, the intoxication and the dancing. Each have played important roles in the way I personally have constructed and experienced my own social world. However, I was not a fulltime clubber at the beginning of this study; I have been going to clubs since I was 16, which gives me 18 years experience of clubbing, but this experience had been sporadic. My initial forays into club land took place before the arrival of ecstasy, which played a huge role in revitalising and reconstructing the club space as a social environment. Over the years I have dipped into clubbing at various points in my life, rather than being a hardcore clubber. I had seen enough of clubs to witness the changes that occurred in them over the years, but it was the decision to begin this study which pushed me further into the realm of clubbing and consolidated my passion and attachment to clubs, as important social spaces where you could have big fun. My engagement with the space, although limited, still gave me enough knowledge of clubs to provide a more long term perspective on clubbing, than other studies of the space have utilised. I can still remember when clubs were predominantly late night drinking dens, when the sociality they housed was simply a "pissed up" version of the everyday world, rather than anything radically different. I witnessed the changes that came along with the arrival of ecstasy. I saw the ecstasy comedown after people's initial enthusiasm and belief in the drug waned. I had seen the return of cocaine and booze. I had seen the splintering of clubland from large scale raves to smaller social settings and the gradual commercialisation of the o scene; its incorporation in the realm of capital, which made it a mainstream leisure option. I had witnessed these changes and I brought that knowledge to the contemporary club space, as I found it, when I began my fieldwork in 1997. I must point out that this study was based in London's clubland. From an academic perspective my interest in clubbing was fuelled by an absence of work in anthropology that dealt directly with human social pleasure. Sensual pleasure was treated with disdain or suspicion within anthropology, more often viewed as a problem than an important field of social action which people valued. This perspective mirrored the way in which our own society viewed specific forms of pleasurable activity, particularly the 6 pleasures of the flesh: intoxication, sex, even dancing, all of which play an important role in clubbing, were coated with a balm of suspicion, that arose from the moral and medical discourses through which society attempted to control them. The Christian and especially Protestant view of pleasure treated it with profound mistrust, pleasure was of the devil, it drew people away from god and work and so had to be vigorously controlled. Clubbing is almost the polar opposite of such a perspective and, as such, I will argue that it is a field of practice which has played a role in re-orientating people's perspective upon and experience of pleasure. Pleasure is becoming more significant as a reference point in people's lives and, contrary to the assertions of post modem theorists, the body itself is becoming the most important site for the construction and maintenance of knowledge about the world; a hypothesis I will expand upon throughout this study. The realm of clubbing has been predominantly viewed from within the field of youth studies, but the pathways, I followed, challenged this assumption. My informants were not youths; they ranged in age from their mid 20s to their late 50s; the oldest person I came across in a night-club was 82; the informants with whom I carried out the longest and most in depth interviews were aged between 25 and 55 and had been clubbing for some years. This opened up the process of clubbing to examination, because the way in which my informants clubbed, what they set out to experience and how those experiences were assessed had changed over time. Again this added a more historical dimension to the study, that allowed me to explore the way club novices and older club hands experienced the club space and how those experiences, and the perspective people had upon them, had also changed. My study examines clubs as adult, rather than youth arenas, and it explores the effect that clubbing has had upon these adults outlook on their world and experience of their own lives and the wider social world in which those lives are lived. I have also explored a wider variety of clubbing styles than any other examination of the club space. From Trance clubs to Hip-Hop venues, Dress Up gigs and Fetish clubs, Queer clubs and Straight clubs, Asian clubs, Techno nights, House clubs, Drum n Bass gigs, Soul nights, Funk nights, Tranny clubs, Free parties and Illicit Sexual Soirees. This diversity made the study radically different from any of the other investigations into clubbing, which have focused on younger crowds in mainly dance and ecstasy orientated environments. It allowed me to explore both the differences and similarities between these spaces. Through focusing on the diversity of the club scene I came across a number of different perspectives upon and styles of clubbing, all of which were linked through the actual experiences that the 7 club space housed. These experiences all bore something in common, namely they were grounded in the intensification of people's sensual experience of their world, within a social environment, that was, itself, altered by the presence of this sensual intensity. These social and sensual factors provide the foundation upon which I have set out to construct a theory of sensual practice, that allows me to more fully explore and account for the experiences held in the club arena than any of the theoretical frameworks, which have previously been utilised to examine this social field. This perspective arose from and was then applied back to my clubbing data.