social objectivity, personal transcendence, and “feeling alive” with being
punk. These sentiments worked to confirm the subculture as an appropriate
lifestyle choice within the supermarket of style proffered by the postmodern
milieu (Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004).
EMOTIONALLY COMMITTING TO IDENTITY WITHIN
AN INTERSUBJECTIVE COMMUNITY OF TIME
Allan’s (1998)work on contemporary meaning-making suggests that cathar-
tic affective states, such as those experienced by Cooper during the earlier
described show, hold the capacity to “impose facticity” on the fractured life-
world of postmodernity. While acknowledging the saturating and reflexivity-
inducing effects of post-modernization, he asserts that social actors
seek out another level of experience beyond the fragmented, meaning-overturning arena
of macro-cultural productionthe level of increased interaction intensity that pro-
duces higher levels of affect-meaning and reification. (p. 10)Critiquing scholars like Giddens, Gergen, and Baudrillard, Allan contends
that social scientists overemphasize the role of cognitive reason and dis-
course in “world building” and self-making processes. He shows that indi-
viduals validate social constructs through emotions, assigning truth-value
to what they can feel, not what they can reason. His work posits that
affect-meaning serves as the anchor of the social worldthat identity and
reality, in the last instance, are always emotional.
My data suggest that punk shows infuse the identities of participants
with that much-needed emotional validation. They allowed newly identified
punks to solidify emerging self-concepts, while more seasoned participants
used them in order to reaffirm existing ones. Twenty-two-year-old Blake,
for example, explained how shows enabled him to test the validity of his
new found punk self:
Shows were very important to me, experiencing bands was something I needed to prove
to myself that I was a punk. There was no pride here; I had to categorically decide for
myself if I was real and if that is what I wanted to be, and the only way I could do that
was to see if I could experience the same intensity of feeling that I felt others could
feel...in reality,I determined I was a punk, because I lived it. I bled at Face to Face, I
froze at NOFX, I screamed at Bad ReligionI was there, man.Blake attempted to explore and confirm his inchoate punk self by attending
concerts. He did not attempt to discursively work out his identity, make
176 PHILIP LEWIN