that participants expressed acknowledged that someone else had experienced
the concert’s profundity, believed in its social importance, and recognized
the individual’s role within the vibrant community of interpretation. In his
ethnography of clubbing, Jackson (2004) makes a similar observation,
arguing that
surface-level communication is incredibly important because it underpinned the shared
nature of the event...the sensual act of communicating is more important than what is
actually said. (pp. 94, 100)Sensual, surface-level communication, in other words, gives form to the
emotional building blocks of identity in a way thatdiscursivecommunica-
tion cannot.
The community of interpretation in which punks exchanged these subtle
cues took the form of emotionally grounded community of time.Schutz’s
(1964)phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity illustrates the nature of
this type of experiential grouping. He argues that
in the face-to-face situation, the conscious life of my fellow man becomes accessible to
me by a maximum of vivid indications. Since he is confronting me in person, the range
of symptoms by which I apprehend his consciousness includes much more than what he
is communicating to me purposefully. I observe his movements, gestures, and facial
expressions. I hear the intonation and the rhythm of his utterances. Each phase of my
consciousness is coordinated with a phase of my partner’s. (p. 29)Schutz’s notion of “temporal coordination” posits that the reciprocal inter-
locking of time dimensions forms the core feature of intersubjectivity. As
Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002) explain, “two persons watching the
same event are brought into a ‘state of intersubjectivity’ by their experience
evidently changing in similar ways, in response to what unfolds” (p. 921).
Human beings become aware of one another and feel a sense of oneness
andcommunion not through “shared content of experience or on any real
understanding of other minds,” but by paying attention to the same event
by “the contemporaneousness of an event, the subject’s experience of it, and
the indication of others’ attentiveness to it” (p. 922). This explains how indi-
viduals in concert settingstemporary communities that arise and dissolve
spontaneously, which are composed of people who have not necessarily
entered into concrete relationships with one anotherdevelop feelings of
unity. Subjects within the community need not possess any subjective under-
standing of one another nor discursively engage one anotherthey need
simply to be engaged, contemporaneously, with a third object/event
(e.g., music).Katovich and Longhofer (2009)have made this observation as
Ecstatic Ritual as a New Mode of Youth Identity Work 179