fused together, producing a temporarily unified self and a powerful antidote
to the “multiphrenia” that participants experienced in their daily lives.
This finding suggests that Gergen’s theory of social saturation, which
posits an obliteration of the self due to the centrifugal pull of competing
reference groups, assigns too much importance to cognitive and discursive
meaning. Gergen neglects to account for the self-forming power of affect-
meaning, bodily sensation, and emotion, which ritual behavior like dance
holds the power to unlock. AsEhrenreich (2006)writes,
to submit, bodily, to music through dance is to be incorporated into the community in
a way far deeper than shared myth or common custom can achieve...synchronous
movement to music...is the biotechnology of group formation. (p. 24)The “muscular bonding” that occurs during dance forges deep emotional
bonds among those who participate. By injecting social situations with
excitement and rhythmic coordination, the “gestural communication” that
ensues precipitates a pervasive sense of well-being and a strange sense of
personal enlargementa feeling of “swelling out” and becoming “bigger
than life” that has the capacity to contain the meaning-overturning arena
of macro-cultural production and thus rescue identity from discursive over-
load and doubt (McNeil, 1995).
CONCLUSIONS: THE EMBODIED NATURE OF
POSTMODERN IDENTITY
Taken together, postmodern theories of the nonself convey a formless,
fragmented, and insecure self that possesses no center and harbors little
stabilitya self that is everywhere, nowhere, and arbitrarily up for grabs
(Glaeser, 2000; Gubrium & Holstein, 2000). While some celebrate its
capacity for experimentation (Bennett, 1999; Bennett & Kahn-Harris,
2004), most criticize its “flatness” and “depthlessness” (Jameson, 1984).
Portending cultural decline, they lament the loss of the deep and internally
coherent self that theoretically inhabited social life prior to postmodernity.
Whatever one’s evaluation of the “play” of identity (Derrida, 1976),the
punks in this study did not present fragmented or superficial self-concepts.
They articulated a strong sense of self that possessed both durability and
depthone that contained aimless drift into disparate values and reference
groups. But the depth and certainty of their self-concepts did not arise
naturally. Most subjects reported precisely the feelings of insecurity that
186 PHILIP LEWIN