Club Cultures

Boundaries, Identities and Otherness

Silvia Rief

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135214142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Danza

This book explores contemporary club and dance cultures as a manifestation of aesthetic and prosthetic forms of life. Rief addresses the questions of how practices of clubbing help cultivate particular forms of reflexivity and modes of experience, and how these shape new devices for reconfiguring the boundaries around youth cultural and other social identities. She contributes empirical analyses of how such forms of experience are mediated by the particular structures of night-clubbing economies, the organizational regulation and the local organization of experience in club spaces, the media discourses and imageries, the technologies intervening into the sense system of the body (e.g. music, visuals, drugs) and the academic discourses on dance culture. Although the book draws from local club scenes in London and elsewhere in the UK, it also reflects on similarities and differences between nightclubbing cultures across geographical contexts.

1 Introduction

The homo aestheticus is a virtuoso of the ‘sense of possibility’ and virtualisation. (Welsch 1997: 15)

SCENERIES OF CLUBBING CULTURE

Back in 1995, Franco Bianchini spoke of the ‘relative underdevelopment of urban night-life in Britain’ compared to other European cities (1995: 123). According to Bianchini, the development of night-life culture was inhibited by the monofunctional British town centres dominated by shops, offices and physical structures not particularly conducive to walking the city; by poor public transport provision at night; by the temporal constraints of the licensing hours and a leisure lifestyle that was predominantly home-based (ibid.). More than a decade later the landscape of night life in many British town and city centres hardly matches this dire picture of the past.

Although the oldest club of the Mediterranean island Ibiza goes back to the early 1970s,¹ it was only in the late 1980s, when British DJs who had visited the island tried to recreate the atmosphere of all-night clubbing and dancing on the drug ecstasy (MDMA) in their home country. The so-called ‘Summer of Love’ in Ibiza 1988 laid the grounds for the acid-house and rave culture movement in Britain. Rave’s popularity and notoriety grew with the moral panics spun around the drug ecstasy in the early 1990s. Furthermore, technological advancements allowed an ever-wider group of people to engage in music production and DJing. For a couple of years underground rave scenes staged unlicensed parties in disused warehouses and squats, open-air sites like airport hangars or in countryside locations. These scenes thrived outside the established bars and discotheques and circumvented the usual standards of regulation. After the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) however, which clamped down on the rave scene, dance culture in Britain returned to licensed venues in the cities.² Since then it has evolved into a significant sector of the cultural and entertainment economy. Led by new high-capacity and well-equipped super-clubs, the bar and club scene expanded in nearly all major UK cities throughout and beyond the 1990s. Apart from London, cities such as Brighton, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol and Sheffield all have vibrant night-life and music cultures. What once was mainly regarded as an object of regulation and containment was promoted in cultural strategies of urban renewal. The number of studies focusing on nightclubbing in Britain probably is another indicator of the changed status of night-life culture there. The British acid-house and rave culture movement is often mentioned next to Detroit techno, Chicago house music, and the famous New York nightclubs of the 1970s and 1980s as one of the most influential centres from which dance music and club culture spread out to the globe. In general, however, the discourses on nightclubbing culture are still very UK-centred. This contrasts with the fact that over the past decade, ‘clubbing’ has become an international, if not global signifier of ‘going out dancing’. Instead of being shaped by one or a few centres, global dance culture is more like a polycentral network. Although clubbing is somewhat less central to youth and adolescent life in North America than in the UK (Saego 2004, Thornton 1995), night-life and clubbing scenes exist, for example, in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver and Montréal. In Europe (outside the UK), Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Dublin, Reykjavik, St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Belgrade, Istanbul and Vienna, amongst others, have built up a reputation for their music and club cultures. Belgrade has become known for its own pop and underground club scene as well as its homemade ‘hardcore techno’ music (Saego 2004). The Middle East (e.g. Lebanon, Israel), Australia (e.g. Sydney), Asia (e.g. Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Bombay) and Latin America (e.g. Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Sao Paolo) all have seen a remarkable growth of night-life and club culture, too. In China, the development of these scenes set in with the arrival of Western expatriates in the late 1980s and 1990s. Sanlitun, a once-staid district of embassies in Beijing, has become the city’s night life ‘Mecca’, mainly for the wealthy urban middle classes (Eimer 2006). Apart from these well-known metropoles, many partly smaller cities have also seen a considerable expansion of music and night-life culture (e.g. Leipzig and Zurich).

Club culture has truly become a global cultural phenomenon, even if significant parts of the world still remain untouched by it. Influences and cross-fertilizations can no longer be pinned down so easily. The club scenes in various locations are interlinked through global multimedia companies, international business ventures, prominent DJ(ane)s touring internationally, personal links between agents and, last but not least, the Internet. Despite the ongoing significance of established centres of club cultural production such as the UK, international exchanges often bypass these. Whereas British companies and brands have a strong presence on the international clubbing markets, for example, in Turkey, specifically Istanbul, Istanbul music and club cultures also thrive on influences and exchanges with many other places.

While nightclubbing is very much an urban form of leisure, it has also been heavily promoted as part of the time-out experience of holiday-making predominantly in warmer regions of the world. Between 1998 and 2002 the clubbing holiday market increased in value by a third to £1.8 billion or 5 per cent of the total holiday market in Britain. Fostered by the connections to DJs and club promoters in the UK, Ibiza has been at the forefront of the clubbing holiday business hosting some of the biggest nightclubs, with capacities up to 10,000. Clubbers in their early thirties, mainly frequenting Ibiza Town and the East Coast, sometimes spend around £2,000 a week partying. In the late 1990s Ayia Napa in Cyprus became the new ‘Club Capital’. At the height of its popularity it attracted more than 250,000 clubbers a season mainly from Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Israel and Italy. Major clubbing holiday destinations have emerged on other Spanish islands (Majorca, Gran Canaria, Tenerife), in Goa (India), Falaraki (Rhodes) and Malia (Crete; see Mintel 2003).

In addition to the clubbing holidays, street parades and music festivals, often staging a range of music acts besides dance music, have also grown substantially since the 1990s, both in terms of quantity and economic significance. The well-known Berlin Love Parade, which was launched in 1989 with 150 visitors, reached its peak with 1.5 million visitors in 1999. Visitor numbers fell considerably in the following years, but when re-launched in the Ruhr city Essen in 2007, it drew 1.2 million people; in Dortmund in 2008 a staggering 1.6 million people were reported in attendance. Many other festivals have emerged in cities or holiday resorts, such as the Kazantip Republic on Crim Island or the Sziget Festival in Budapest.

Even though certain elements may be common to dance and club cultures across the globe (e.g. music, fashion and drugs), nightclubbing has not become a homogeneous global culture. Despite shaping similar outlooks, lifestyles and fashions across national boundaries, club cultures remain inflected by local histories, traditions, social, political and economic circumstances; for example, local modes of night-life governance or specificities of the cultural sector, musical and dance traditions, and class and gender relations. One and the same club concept may work out differently in each context. As the London-based promoter of the queer, alternative club Wotever reflected (Ingo 2007),³ when they hosted their event in Warsaw, where queer sexualities are a highly contentious political issue, it became a ‘freedom act’, whereas in Stockholm, where freedom of expression is guaranteed, it appeared as an act of ‘anti-capitalism’.

The kind of practices, experiences and dance spaces that clubbing signifies in different countries, cities or social contexts varies enormously. Clubbing may refer to dance and music events in nightclubs of variable sizes and capacities (up to several thousand); to going out in smaller, hybrid venues that integrate eating, drinking, socializing and dancing in one place; to dances in venues previously designated as discotheques; or to open-air parties and festivals in the open countryside, on beaches or in the mountains. In the attempt to recreate the original ‘underground’ feel of the rave and warehouse parties, boats, car parks, train stations and even aircrafts have been used as clubbing sceneries (Manson 2006, Randeria 2002). Recent years have seen the invention of new types of clubbing, where people gather in underground and train stations or other public places and then dance to the tunes of their MP3-players. With the emergence of new technologies, spatial contexts of clubbing have multiplied. But also the time frame for going out dancing has been uncoupled from the core weekend nights. Clubbing events may stretch out over whole weekends and more or start on early weekday evenings as after-work clubbings. However, this is not necessarily new, thinking of Tom Wolfe’s depiction (1968) of the mods who escaped their offices and jobs and danced away their lunch break in central London’s basement clubs back in the early 1960s (the so-called noonday underground). Raving and clubbing have often been marked off from the dance and music cultures of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, as this example shows, there may be more continuity to previous youth dance spaces than is commonly assumed. Night-life spaces come and go, but some also stay and regularly accommodate new trends and fashions.

In the light of the plurality of forms sketched so far, a rather wide and open definition was therefore chosen for this study: ‘clubbing’ denotes a cultural and social practice and a particular ambience that combines (mainly) electronic, beat-centred music of various genres, dance, fashion, drugs and sexuality in various temporal and spatial contexts of co-presence. This book does not focus on a particular musical genre or type of scenery. Nevertheless, it builds on empirical analyses of specific contexts of the production and consumption of clubbing that shall be set out below.

THE POLITICS OF CLUBBINGS’ OTHERNESS

Clubbing spaces and experiences are inscribed with images of transgression, freedom and liberation. As spaces commonly associated with fun, enjoyment and leisure, they are frequently described as an other reality or an ‘otherworldly environment’ (Thornton 1995: 21) whose absorbing atmosphere facilitates the distantiation from routines of everyday life; paradoxically, whilst reproducing routines quite similar to everyday contexts. As Andy Lovatt expounded,

the night-time is a liminal time in which the world of work is seen to lose its hold. A time for and of transgression, a time for spending, a time for trying to be something the daytime may not let you be, a time for meeting people you shouldn’t, for doing things your parents told you not to, that your children are too young to understand. This is now being promoted as vibrancy. But this invitation to transgression, marginal in the Fordist city of work is now central to contemporary consumerism. (Lovatt 1996: 162)

Indeed, club cultures can be seen as contemporary versions of the sacred (see Chapter 4). They are not only connoted with transgression but even promoted as liminal spaces, thriving on the promise of communitas (Hobbs, Lister, Hadfield, Winslow, and Hall 2000: 712, Talbot 2007: 1–2). For the audiences, as other studies suggest, clubbing usually assumes positive notions of transgression into liminal states, in which ‘other’ modes of being, acting and living can be explored. By contrast, for the agents and institutions of regulation, especially the local authorities, night life cultures—despite the economic benefits they bring—often carry notions of problematic transgression that is to be contained and regulated: youthful rebellion, binge drinking or ‘anti-social behaviour’. Such ambivalent views on otherness are also weaved through academic studies and theoretical perspectives on the topic. Research in the first half of the 1990s was very much shaped and propelled by the media outrage over the popularization of drug taking, particularly of ecstasy, within rave contexts. As a consequence, academic research too tended to concentrate on drugs and drug consumption. On the one hand, rave culture was dismissed as either illegal and semi-criminal, or as hedonist and depoliticized youth culture. On the other hand, such images provoked critique and, to some extent, led to the opposite extreme, the academic fetishization of rave culture. From this perspective, attention was drawn to its socially and culturally progressive elements. Raving, dancing and consuming illicit drugs came to be seen as a mystery (see also Gibson and Pagan 1998: 16). Similar to other societal reactions to youth culture, interpretations of rave culture ranged from the condemnation of delinquency to the celebration of progressiveness (Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995: 7).

The academic discourse on rave and dance culture also pressed ahead with the critique of subcultural theory and increasingly adopted postmodern terminology. In the light of postmodern epistemological strategies, rave culture itself appeared as subversive aesthetic-political strategy. This advanced and partly reshaped the subcultural vocabulary of resistance and opposition to dominant ideology (see also Frith 2004: 176). More specifically, rave came to be imagined as an aesthetic of deconstruction, and the ‘raving subject’ seemingly embodied a postmodern, ‘deconstructed self’. This emphasized the undoing of the logic of identity. Rave was hailed for its liberating qualities of putting the subject at or over the limits of meaning and rationality. Various theoretical metaphors were employed to illustrate such subjectivity-at-its-limits: simulation (Baudrillard 1983), body-without-organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1996), neo-tribal sociality (Maffesoli 1995), liminality and communitas (Turner 1969), other space and heterotopia (Foucault 1986). Simulation evoked a dramaturgical metaphor of role-play, posing and performing, mediated through images, models and codes. Clubbing and dance cultural practices were taken as the illustration of a postmodern, eclectic use of styles, as a ‘disappearance of a culture of meaning’ (Baudrillard, Krauss, and Michelson 1982: 5, as quoted in Thornton 1995: 1) and the loss of cultural and self identity in the unculture of the hyperreal (Melechi 1993: 32–33). Similarly, rave culture was interpreted (and criticized) as a politically indifferent desiring machine (Jordan 1995) that deconstructed temporality, narrative and history into a series of perpetual presents or schizophrenic intensities (Jameson 1991: 25–28). Maffesoli’s notion of neo-tribal sociality had by far the most significant impact on the development of post-subcultural theoretical perspectives in recent years (see especially A. Bennett 1999, A. Bennett and Harris 2004, Muggleton, and Weinzierl 2003b). Focus shifted to transient, multiple identifications and affiliations; shared sentiments, the release from the burden of individuality and from the pressures of forced self-construction and self-perfection in a highly individualized society (Malbon 1999). The co-presence of dance clubs was thought to foster identifications ‘in the presence of differences that might normally preclude this sharing of emotional space’ such as age, ethnicity, gender or class (ibid. 83). Overall, however, these strands of research tended to overemphasize the ‘sacred’ dimensions at the expense of the profane and routine aspects of dance and club culture, celebrating nightclubs as spaces of ecstasy, bliss and transgression. Attention tended to be directed primarily to consumption, while the production and institutional regulation of nightclubbing was neglected. In the last few years, however, this tendency was inverted, and the focus of attention shifted to the mundane aspects of night-time entertainment. The growth of the nightclubbing sector and the emergence of technically well-equipped, large-capacity clubs spotlighted the routine modes of operation and the logistic management and control of crowds within night-time entertainment. Institutional and governance dimensions of night life came to the fore. As several legal changes pertaining to the night-time economy were introduced in the UK between 2001 and 2006 (e.g. the reform of the licensing legislation, the professionalization of the private security industry), researchers began to investigate the impact of these changes. As aforementioned, for a certain period, night-time economies in Britain were heavily promoted within projects of urban renewal and regeneration; yet, the ambivalent attitude towards it continues and has led, in the context of the media outrage against binge drinking, anti-social behaviour, disorder and violence, gang wars and gun crime, to a re-problematization of nighttime entertainment. In some respects, as is the case with drug taking, legal norms clash with the widespread practices and values within clubbing culture, provoking ambivalent responses from the authorities. Their modes of governing night life oscillate between law and order discourses of containment and liberal discourses of economic development and laissez-faire. Nightclubbing cultures contribute to a vibrant social and cultural life of a city. But, as was found in the UK, they also add—especially at an aggregate level—to public order problems, triggering knock-on effects on late-night street crime, particularly in saturated night-life areas. They can be culturally innovative, allowing for artistic and creative practices; but they are also subject to standardization and corporate power. Attempts to contain and regulate will always provoke unpredictable transgressions. The night-time economy raises contentious political and social issues, in big metropoles with large clusters of night-life entertainment just as well as in smaller cities. It raises questions as to where and how the boundaries shall be drawn between tolerating and containing certain kinds of practices or cultures of night life, and questions as to what scale of night-time entertainment and what forms of governance are most reasonable and most appropriate. They are ambivalent spaces. However, from this it does not follow that sociocultural analyses should partake in these debates over the value of clubbing cultures. They can neither be simply appraised as oppositional nor can they wholly be dismissed as consumerist or escapist. Socio-cultural analysis needs to avoid both a romantic, sentimental glorification and a moralistic disapproval of these practices.

REVISITING AUTHENTICITY

Postmodern metaphors of ‘subjectivity-at-its-limits’ in clubbing culture (such as the concepts of simulation or neo-tribal sociality) alluded to the changing understandings of authenticity in youth and postmodern culture. Youth and popular culture studies have a long history of engaging with the theme of authenticity. Subcultural theory, for example, tended to distinguish between the authentic, resistant youth cultural styles on the one hand, and the commercialized, media-saturated youth cultures on the other hand. Later works in the 1990s addressed authenticity in relation to the legitimation and validation of cultural practices in processes of social distinction. For example, Sarah Thornton (1995) investigated the subcultural classifiers for claiming or disclaiming authenticity and value. Her historical account of popular music and dance cultures drew attention to the changing conventions of authenticity regarding live performance and recorded music. Sue Widdicombe and Robin Wooffitt (e.g. 1995, 1990, 1993) as well as David Muggleton (2000) dealt with authenticity mainly in relation to the construction of youth cultural membership, identity and style. They investigated as to how authenticity figured as a theme in discourses about the way of life of a group and as a measure of (non)correspondence between ‘being’ and ‘doing’, between ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’. In his work on rock culture, Lawrence Grossberg (1992) took a broader perspective and described the awareness of inauthenticity as a postmodern sensibility or structure of feeling. He coined the term ‘authentic inauthenticity’ to point to the blurring boundary between the real and the artificial in cynicism, irony and play. More recent debates about youth post-subcultures explored how postmodern depthlessness, simulation and style eclecticism led to the weakening of subcultural group and style boundaries and undermined notions of youth cultural authenticity (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003b, Muggleton 2000, A. Bennett 1999, A. Bennett and Harris 2004). The new forms of association and sociability (e.g. ‘neo-tribes’, ‘sub-streams’, ‘scenes’) formed a central subject matter of post-subcultural debates on youth dance cultures in Britain.⁴

However, the relative dominance of this theme somewhat blinded researchers to other lines of enquiry including different theoretical perspectives. Authenticity was discussed mainly with respect to style, membership and distinction, but the types of practices fostered in club cultures and their effects on the experience and understanding of selfhood and identity remained relatively unexplored. The various techniques of self that are invented and cultivated in youth cultural spaces received surprisingly little attention or, in the case of debates on clubbing, were described in rather vague concepts such as ‘playful vitality’, ‘oceanic’ and ‘ecstatic’ experiences or ‘self-fashioning’ (Malbon 1999, Buckland 2002). These terms touched upon, and tried to capture, particular modes of being and experience, but the implications for the shaping of cultural and social identities and for particular interpretiv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Graphs
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Urban Renewal and Night-Life Governance: London and Istanbul
• 3 Club Cultural Production and the Night-Time Economy Market in the UK
• 4 Sensing and Meaning the Body: The Local Organization of Clubbing Practices
• 5 Thresholds of Reality: Clubbing, Drugs and Agency
• 6 Identity Projects and Spectacular Selves
• 7 Between Style and Desire: Sexual Scenarios in Clubbing Magazines
• 8 Allegorical Anarchy, Symbolic Hierarchy: Sexual Boundaries in Two London Dance Clubs
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography