sore, and my ears were ringing...it was just such an opportunity to just let out...just
like any frustrations or anything you havejust go crazy in a mass of sweaty people
going crazy too.Eve’s commentary, which catalogues the capacity of punk shows to endure
in embodied experience in this case, a banged up body, attendant
soreness, and ringing earsspeaks to how emotional/physical cultural
meanings, unlike those grounded in cognitive sense-making and discourse,
possess staying power.
Although rituals could not produce permanent effervescence with which
to stabilize personal identity, the unification of the participant’s self-
concept remained even after concerts ended for three reasons. First, the
ritual nature of the show charged the participant’s identityas well as the
symbols that represented itwith meaning, which transported the concert
experience, with all of its sentiments of self-realization, into everyday life.
Second, the concert tied the participant’s self-concept to tactile, physical
sensations. In a word, the show-going experience physicallyembodiedthe
self by depositing individuals into an environment governed by pure carnal-
ity. Its tactile remnants encoded the participant’s punk identity into mem-
ory and bodily sensation, ensuring that it remained active as a coordinate
within their systems of sensory knowledge after the concert rituals con-
cluded. And third, due to the “mystified” nature of showsthat is to say,
the special, awe-inspiring intersubjective space that is generated between
participantsthe concert experience remained undiminished by time and
within “restorable reach” to those who had attended (Katovich &
Longhofer, 2009).
DISCUSSION: CONFIRMING THE POSTMODERN SELF
The above sections illuminate the social processes through which partici-
pants in the Southeastern City punk scene formed and stabilized meaning-
ful self-concepts. Accomplishing this task required cultural work through
the ritual process of punk shows. My findings describe a complex process
of identity formation whereby five factors converge in order to stabilize
identity:
- First, cognitive awareness affixes to the immediate spatial-temporal con-
text and loses the capacity to move beyond it, which eases reflexive
doubt.
182 PHILIP LEWIN