participating in concerts. These “shows” created physically intense and
emotionally cathartic environments wherein participants experienced trans-
cendent psychological states, describing feelings of “losing themselves.”
However, in the etic sociological sense, those in my study did not lose but
rather foundor, more accurately confirmedtheir self-concepts during
the social experience of the show. The intensity of concerts reduced
conscious awareness to the present moment, which temporarily inhibited
their ability to direct reflexive scrutiny against their identities. In contrast
to the mediated unpredictability of many postmodern institutions, shows
provided participants with a direct portal to “reality.”
In an excerpt from my field notes, which describes the beginnings of one
punk show, I convey how the environment’s intensity precluded reflexive
thoughthow it circumscribed mental activity to the there and now,
eliminating doubt:
Chaos erupts en masse...I’m hurled into the front of the crowd. What feels like thou-
sands of other bodies crush mein suffocating fashionagainst the infinitely dense
wall of those behind the stage...everyone has lost their minds. I can’t really see any-
thing or take notice of my surroundings; all effort is focused on breathing and dislod-
ging myself from the mass of people in which I’m stuck. I struggle in futility for a brief
moment. Movement, at this point, is simply impossible. Bodies crash into me every
second, eradicating my sense of orientation...I can’t even get into it. I can’t even think.
I just need to move someplace...the rest of the show is a blur.Situations like the one described above narrowed the field of stimulus for
those who attended concerts by transforming cognitive awareness into
reflexive lines of action. In order to sustain themselves amid the forceful
bodily interplay of “the pit,” participants were required to restrict their
thoughts to the activity at hand, and to immediately enact physical
responses with which to maintain their safety and composure. Doing so did
not merely protect them from bodily harm, but drove them into a non-
reflexive state of being acted out on the level of pure physicalitya state in
which the “routine contemplation of counterfactuals” became impossible
(Giddens, 1991,p. 29).
While the physical intensity of punk shows confused and even disturbed
somenonparticipants,^11 those who could and did choose to participate
experienced transcendent feelings of self-confirmation while doing so. Using
poetic language that likened the experience of attending one particular show
to weathering the fury of a storm, 22-year-old Cooper discussed how he
“surrendered himself” to the environment’s “wave of sensory immersion,”
which he depicted as “an incredible abyss of sound with the power to
Ecstatic Ritual as a New Mode of Youth Identity Work 173