consume and ravage everything in its path.” He catalogued these effects in a
journal entry that he offered for analysis:
With a flash of lightening and a deafening clap of thunder the waters surged around us
and Bad Religion pounded out “Generator”...For a brief couple of seconds, everything
was perfect. We surged forward as the waters carried us, all the while feeling the effects
of the sun, as our own exhaustion gave way to the new elements that occupied our
every thought and feeling. No...the exhaustion was still there but it was overwhelmed
now by a new feeling, the feeling of being alive...I felt as though I had lost touch with
reality. My only orientation was the direction taken by the crowd and so I let it move
me. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to escape. Soon, everything became a haze.In the uncertain and contradictory world that Cooper inhabited a
“society laced with rules and regulations and warning labels, filled with
do’s and don’ts, fitted plastic molds and teenage anxiety,” as he put it
the intensity of the show supplanted the cognitive reflexivity that he often
experienced with a “haze” of ecstatic emotion, which served to rescue his
sense of reality from doubt (Kidder, 2006).
The shows that punks like Cooper attended deposited a set of cultural
practicesslam dancing, which allowed for limited but creative action
subordinated to the broader movement of a crowdwithin an institu-
tional context that took the form of a ritualthe concert, wherein live
music generated a common focus of attention, a common emotional mood,
high ecological concentration, and a fast interaction pace (Collins, 2004).^12
The combination produced the “haze” that he described in his journal and
the “blurring” of awareness that I noted in my field observations.
Csikszentmihalyi (1974)refers to this mode of sensory experience as the
state of “flow.” Flow describes
the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement...in which action fol-
lows upon action according to an internal logic which seems to need no conscious inter-
vention on our part. We experience it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next
in which we are in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between
self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and
future. (p. 58)In his study of mountaineers,Mitchell (1983)found that the state of flow
ensued from the performance of difficult, dangerous, and uncertain activ-
ities that require skilled intervention on behalf of the participant. Within
the environments created by these activities, there is no time to reflect on
potential behavior; to escape the precarious situation in which the person
inserted herself, she must reflexively enact “more action [that is] immediate,
unflinching, committed” (p. 165). In so doing, one’s concentration
174 PHILIP LEWIN