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The Marketplace Management of Illicit Pleasure
CHRISTINA GOULDING
AVI SHANKAR
RICHARD ELLIOTT
ROBIN CANNIFORD*
* Christina Goulding is Professor of Consumer Research, Wolverhampton Business
School, University of Wolverhampton, Compton Park, Wolverhampton, WV3 9DX, UK.
Tel: (+44)1902 323 692. Email: [email protected]. Avi Shankar is Senior Lecturer
in Marketing and Consumer Research, School of Management, University of Bath, BA2
7AY, UK. Email:[email protected] Richard Elliott is Professor of Marketing and
Consumer Research, School of Management, University of Bath, BA2 7AY, UK. Email:
[email protected] Robin Canniford is Lecturer in Marketing and Consumer Culture,
School of Business and Economics, University of Exeter, EX4 4PU, UK. Email:
Abstract
Through pleasure, a foundational concept in consumer behavior, we offer an analysis of
the history, development and experience of clubbing, the post-cursor of rave, the
contextual focus of this paper. Based on a 5 yr. study primarily involving participant
observation and interviewing, we present an analysis of how the clubbing experience is
co-created by promoters, DJs and the clubbers themselves. We develop and demonstrate
a biosocial conceptualization of pleasure and show how the shared experience of music,
dance, the organization of space and the effects of the drug Ecstasy combine to produce a
highly sought-after, calculated, suspension of the rules and norms of everyday life.
Further we suggest that the club, and the pleasurable practices and experiences that it
supports, has become a site of contained illegality. Here, the illicit, subversive practices
of rave have now become shepherded and channelled into more predictable, manageable
and regulated environments facilitated by the „knowing wink‟ of the club promoters, the
police and the State authorities. Implications for consumer research are discussed.
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Pursuing and experiencing pleasure is a fundamental facet of the human condition and an
essential mediator of consumer behavior. Within the consumer research literature
pleasure is foundational for understanding experiential consumption (Holbrook and
Hirschman 1982), extraordinary experiences (Arnould and Price 1993), hedonic
consumption (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982), high-risk forms of consumption (Celsi,
Rose and Leigh 1993), intense affective consumption (Schindler and Holbrook 2003) and
passionate forms of consumption (Belk, Ger and Askegaard 2003).
Clubbing, the focus of this paper, is a manifestation of all these previously studied
forms of consumption. However, the pleasures of clubbing are also grounded in illicit,
recreational drug consumption. This context enables us to explore and develop pleasure
from a biosocial perspective. By this we mean that the pleasures of clubbing are mediated
by the effects of the dance drug Ecstasy and intensified when the experience is shared
with other like-minded people. Additionally, the illicit consumption practices associated
with clubbing, remind us that sources of pleasure can be subject to legal sanction if, for
whatever reason, they are deemed to cross socially acceptable boundaries.
For the uninitiated, clubbing is a hugely popular, multi-billion dollar, global
cultural phenomenon with its influence felt across the music, film, television, advertising,
tourism, leisure, publishing, brewing, and fashion industries (McRobbie1994; Sellars
1998). Like its precursor rave, clubbing is constructed around a particular musical
aesthetic, embodied in a „combination of electronic musical forms, new technologies, the
drug Ecstasy, and dancing spaces‟ (Jowers 1999, p. 381-2). Clubbing is an exemplar of a
marketplace culture. Within Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), marketplace cultures are
conceptualized as transient social spaces where the often alienating and individualizing
effects of everyday modern life in advanced industrialized societies can be temporarily
ameliorated in favor of the effervescent excitement and energy of ritualistic, communal
sociality and solidarity (e.g., Arnould and Thompson 2005; Goulding, Shankar and Elliott
2002; Kozinets 2002; Maffesoli 1996; Malbon 1999; St John 2002; Thornton 1995).
Our paper is structured as follows. We begin with a brief discussion of prior
understandings of pleasure in consumer research, before developing a conceptualization
of pleasure for our study. Having described the methods used in our study, we present a
historical analysis of rave and its development into clubbing. We then proceed to describe
and interpret the clubbing experience in terms of the inter-relationships between the
production and consumption of pleasure.
We find that the effects of the deafening music, the ingestion of Ecstasy, the
energetic dancing and the management and organization of space combine to produce a
calculated, highly sought-after, shared experience and a temporary suspension of the rules
and norms of everyday life. We show how this biosocial effect, what we call losing it,
extends our current understanding of the subjective experience of pleasure.
We also develop our historical analysis of the transformation of rave into clubbing
as an example of contained illegality and demonstrate how illicit pleasures are contained
temporally and organized spatially into more predictable and manageable environments.
It is through the processes and practices of contained illegality that morally contentious
pleasures are rendered more controllable through the marketplace. We end with a
discussion of how our interpretations have broader implications for consumer research.
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PLEASURE: A SELECT REVIEW
In order to situate our conceptualization of pleasure, in this section we offer a
necessarily select review of first, the consumer research literature on pleasure, followed
by a more general review that, together, we use to inform our own framing of pleasure.
Pleasure in Consumer Research and Beyond
Pleasure has been conceptualized as hedonic and experiential consumption,
product use that can be multi-sensorial, fantastical and highly emotional and the pleasures
to be found in forms of consumption where emotional responses to thinking about or
engaging in acts of consumption are prevalent (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982; Holbrook
and Hirschman 1982). Le Bel and Dubé (1998) addressed pleasure through the
construction of a typology – sensorial, social and psychological pleasures – and
determined that pleasure was cyclical in nature – anticipating and experiencing pleasure
and then reflecting on past pleasurable experiences (see also Arnould and Price 1993).
Other significant studies have attempted to account for different manifestations of
hedonic consumption through, for example, the pleasures of extraordinary or peak
experiences (Arnould and Price 1993; Celsi et al. 1993).
Neo-Darwinian discourse has examined the origins and functions of pleasure in
evolutionary psychology and anthropology (Johnston 2003; Tiger 2000). Tiger (2000) for
example, has identified four categories of pleasure two of which are particularly pertinent
to our study: physiopleasures are related to the body‟s sensory experiences and
sociopleasures refer to the pleasures that people get from being together.
A moral perspective on pleasure, that aesthetic or intellectual pleasures were
intrinsically superior to the more carnal, visceral and sensual pleasures of the body (Plato
2006; Russell 2005) has dominated post-Enlightenment Western thought leading to a
variety of different, competing discourses of pleasure. For example, Catholic and
Protestant religious discourses have distinguished between: the natural, sensuous urges of
carnal pleasures of the body; the rationalized, safety of disciplined „civilized‟ pleasures in
moderation; the self-training, self-managing and even total self-denial peculiar to ascetic
pleasures; and the ritualistic, spiritual, communality of ecstatic pleasures (see Coveney
and Bunton 2003).
Pleasure in Club Culture: A Conceptual Framework
In this section we seek to understand and unite a variety of factors that coalesce to
construct the clubbing experience. Our aim is to develop the current understanding of
pleasure in consumer research by combining individual aspects of hedonic or experiential
consumption with biological, social and historical factors. In particular we draw on the
distinction between pleasure as feelings and sources of pleasurable experiences to
consider: the biology of pleasure, the pleasure of sociality or being together and the
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regulation of pleasure. We therefore develop a conceptualization of pleasure as a complex
biosocial phenomenon subject to competing socio-historic discourses.
The Biology of Pleasure; Especially pertinent to our study is an understanding
of the biology of pleasure. Theories of a reward or pleasure centre in the brain, fuelled by
the chemical transmitter dopamine, implicitly underpin Tiger‟s (2000) evolutionary
perspective on pleasure. In this view, pleasure is a reward for actions that ensured
survival thereby increasing the likelihood that environmentally apt genes would be
transmitted to successive generations via natural selection. Other pleasure circuits have
since been identified based on serotonin and opioids such as endorphins. Moreover, for
those whose safety is no longer an issue, the brain‟s pleasure centres are activated by a
whole host of everyday consumer practices, from playing games and sports, to
consuming food and drink high in sugar and, more pertinent to this study, the ingestion of
psychoactive substances (Damasio 2003; Levine, Kotz and Gosnell, 2003). Almost all
human cultures have psychoactive substances that historically were used primarily for
religious or spiritual purposes. In contemporary cultures, the recreational use of mind-
altering drugs enables the interaction with, and artificial stimulation of, the biological
pleasure circuits of the brain. Ecstasy, the drug of choice in rave and club culture,
activates the serotonin pathways and, as its name suggests, produces overwhelming
feelings of pleasure. Ecstasy‟s use and effects (described later) are thus integral to the
experience of pleasure in rave and club culture.
The Pleasure of Sociality; Whilst pleasure can take many forms, some of the
most memorable and anticipated are those that are shared with others: sociopleasures. For
Maffesoli (2007, p.27), „people feeling emotions together‟ is the foundation for
contemporary communities. He talks of the present, exaggerated search for pleasure,
found in, for example, group trances, sporting events and religious gatherings. They often
involve „strange‟ almost magical experiences that supersede individuality (Belk and
Costa1998; Kozinets 2002). These communal, shared pleasures serve a basic, and, as
some have suggested, fundamental need to belong (Baumeister and O‟Leary 1995). Such
shared experiences also allow people to exercise choice by moving in and out of „islands
of consumption‟ that can offer temporary enchantment, magic and mystery (Ritzer 1999).
Whilst such experiences may be enjoyed alone but, when experienced socially, pleasure
is heightened. The pleasure of listening to music alone is a totally different experience to
the communal, contagious atmosphere of attending a live rock concert. Similarly with
clubbing its collective nature transforms the individual‟s experience.
Ecstasy‟s use and effects are integral to the social experience of rave and club
culture. Our understanding of pleasure seeks to situate the biology of pleasure within a
social framework, by contextualizing the brain‟s pleasure circuitry with the social actions
that can mediate and color the experience of pleasure. Understanding the neural circuitry
of a lone passive subject cannot fully account for the socially experienced feelings of
pleasure between active and interactive bodies that we aim to capture in this study.
The Regulation of Pleasure; Talk of illegal recreational drugs as vehicles for and
sources of pleasure is at odds with a Platonic tradition that considers intellectual pleasures
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superior to sensual pleasures. A society‟s attitudes towards vehicles of pleasure illustrates
that considerable power has been exercized to discipline the body, with those pleasures
considered deviant likely to incur repressive and judicial forms of power (Foucault 1980;
1995). The classification of recreational drugs as harmful and illegal demonstrates how a
society tries to regulate sources of pleasure by constructing medical and legal boundaries,
thereby delineating between socially acceptable and unacceptable practices.
Historically for example, the pleasures of lower classes were often seen as a
potential threat to the maintenance of social order and thus were classified as vices rather
than pleasures (O‟Malley and Valverde 2004; Reith 2004). In 18th
century London, a
primary source of pleasure for the poor working classes was gin. Unfortunately for them,
those in authority made and enforced a clear distinction between beer and gin. In contrast
to the pleasurable, healthy and productive properties ascribed to beer, gin was constructed
as a potential agent of social disorder, with excessive consumption corrupting its users
into a life of misery (O‟Malley and Valverde 2004). The production and drinking of gin
was finally regulated and controlled through the Gin Act of 1751, forcing distillers to sell
through licensed outlets only.
Fast-forward a couple of centuries and once acceptable, recreational drugs have
long since been criminalized (see Schlosser 2003). In contrast to the vast literature
describing drugs as potential sources of, or aids to recreational pleasurable experiences
(see Plant 1999), in „official‟ accounts (government, health services, mainstream press
etc.) drug consumers are often indicted as deviant, dishevelled, drug abusers and addicts
(O‟Malley and Valverde 2004). At the height of Ecstasy‟s popularity in the mid 1990s,
alarming stories appeared in the UK media warning of its potential harm but such stories
had little effect in stemming consumption, with literally millions of Ecstasy tablets
„dropped‟ every week. In the UK today, Ecstasy is classified as an illegal Class A drug
with penalties of up to 7 years for possession and a life sentence for supply, yet a recent
House of Commons Select Committee (2006) report ranked Ecstasy 18th
in a list of the
twenty most harmful drugs with alcohol ranked 5th
and tobacco 9th
.
To sum up, our biosocial framing of pleasure facilitates: the exploration of
pleasure as the subjective in collective – the drug-induced, socially enhanced, experience
of pleasure; and the consideration of sources of pleasurable experiences as socio-historic
discourses that can be produced, supplied and subject to legislative actions aimed at
regulation and control, if for whatever reason, they are deemed to cross socially
sanctioned or morally acceptable codes of behavior.
METHOD
As researchers, we already knew that clubbing emerged from the rave scene but
what we did not know was why or how this transformation occurred. To answer these
questions we situated our understanding of the practice of clubbing within its historical
context (Smith and Lux 1993). This involved familiarizing ourselves with literature on
rave (Collin 1997; Garrett 1998; Reynolds 1998), historical analysis of newspaper reports
and interviews with people who had experienced rave.
Concurrently, and for a five-year period, we engaged in participant observation
and immersed ourselves into the experience of clubbing. This was made possible by the
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co-operation of the promoters of club that was our research site who gave us access to
their club on a regular basis. They also introduced us to a number of clubbers who we
recruited to take part in one to one in-depth interviews designed to explore the lived
experience and meaning of clubbing for the clubbers themselves. A total of 34 clubbers
took part, 19 male and 15 female, ranging in age from 20 to 46, and drawn from a range
of occupations from students, to shop workers, to management consultants.
Through this inductive approach a number of themes emerged. First, rave has
undergone a transformation from a largely ungoverned, hedonistic, communal experience
to one that is equally communal yet highly marketized and managed. Second, for
clubbers, the pursuit and experience of pleasure is fundamental to understanding the
appeal of the clubbing experience. And finally, the pleasures associated with clubbing are
carefully orchestrated, contained and controlled through the use of a variety of ordering
technologies. We now proceed to explore and interpret these themes in more detail.
THE SOCIO-HISTORIC CONSTRUCTION OF CLUBBING
Rave
In the UK, the story of clubbing begins with the emergence of rave in the mid
1980s amidst the hedonistic indulgences that attracted thousands of young people from
across Europe to the Spanish island of Ibiza. The „White Isle‟ had become synonymous
with pleasure since the „boho‟ invasion of the 1960s and, with its relaxed attitudes
towards drugs, saw the emergence of a new music and dance based phenomenon, the
„Balearic Beat‟. Rave hit the UK in the late1980s, imported by British pioneers who had
holidayed on Ibiza. It quickly became characterized by impromptu, seemingly
spontaneous gatherings in fields in the open countryside and disused industrial
warehouses. As rave gained in popularity, literally thousands of people would descend on
hastily but well organized and co-ordinated gatherings, often centred on the orbital
motorway network encircling London. Andrew, one of our participants, fondly
remembers his early experiences:
… some of the people I knew suggested that I come along with them to a venue.
They had „gotton the word‟, so I went… I‟d heard about the scene but this was
something else. There were literally thousands of people, thousands of cars
heading in one direction to this point in the middle of nowhere… The sound, the
stage, the music, the lighting, the vibe, it was totally electric. To me it was like
some sort of awakening and after that I was hooked. I couldn‟t wait until the next
one… It was all underground. Someone would receive a flyer and pass the word
on… It was usually last minute because as you can imagine the police hated it.
They couldn‟t control it… Consequently the whole thing had to be kept secret up
until the last minute. But this was also a big part of the attraction, the anticipation,
the being ready to go at the last minute, the mystery and the feeling that you
shared a secret with a group of like-minded individuals.
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For many early ravers, the experience of rave was founded on commitment to
shared values, beliefs, actions and a communal spirit of resistance and protest against the
right wing politics of Thatcherite Britain, and its deleterious effects in terms of social and
economic change (Hill 2002). For other factions of the rave community, such as the „New
Age Travellers‟ and „Eco-Warriors‟ and as rave spread worldwide, it was also an act of
resistance and socio-political protest that stressed the reunification of people with their
natural environment, commitment to ecological sustainability, social justice, human
rights and the reclamation of public space (see St. John 2002).
From the late 1980s through to the early 1990s thousands of raves were held
across Britain, evoking moral panic in the media (Thornton 1995). The emergence of rave
was viewed largely as an anti-social practice and therefore a threat to public order. In
particular, rave became a target for the right wing press such as the The Sun and Daily
Mail. Rave existed in opposition to, and represented the antithesis of, middle-class,
conservative values. A lead editorial pronounced rave as, „A New Threat to British
Youth‟, with a feature story informing its readers that, „…as 11,000 youngsters
descended on a quiet airfield in the middle of the night, drug pushers were waiting for
them to tempt them with an evil concoction of narcotics‟ (Daily Mail 26th
June 1989).
Raves and ravers did not fit in with a Thatcherite view of Britain, and the moral panic
whipped up by the right wing press was an attempt to, „control…these „threatening‟
aspects of popular culture‟ or the „enemy within‟ (Hill 2002, p. 90). As media hype
concerning raves mounted, in 1989 the police forces in and around London set up a
special unit to monitor and control raves. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher‟s Conservative
government responded with legislative amendments to the Entertainment (Increased
Penalties) Act (Hill 2002). By early 1994, part 5 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order
Act, was drafted to specifically target raves and on 3rd
November 1994 the Act was
passed into law and raves were made illegal (Collin 1997; Hill 2002; Reynolds 1998).
Clubbing: The Marketization of Rave
After the 1994 Act, clubbing emerged as the primary vehicle for this combination
of dance, drugs, music and space. Venues were set up in disused warehouses and
eventually in regular nightclubs. Club promoters, ironically demonstrating the
entrepreneurial zeal characteristic of Thatcherism, would hire regular nightclubs for the
night, re-brand them, temporarily re-decorate them, hire DJs and publicize the event
primarily through flyers – promotional devices that are handed out to the “right looking”
people. In this way the club could literally move from location to location.
As the popularity of clubbing continued throughout the 1990s, permanent licenses
were granted and clubs became far easier for the local authorities and the police to
authorize, monitor and control. Increasingly the peripatetic club became replaced with a
permanent venue as, „slowly raves became integrated into the infrastructure of the
entertainment establishment: shepherded back into licensed premises, contained and
commodified‟ (Collin 1997, p.120). In the course of this process, the cultural practices
invoked through clubbing moved away from the counter-cultural, oppositional framings
of rave towards the realm of mass cultural orchestration. Anti-authoritarian political or
ideological resistance has little place in the marketized club scene. Rather than the
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evasive, ephemeral, egalitarian autonomy of rave, consumed predominantly outside in
natural environments, clubbing takes place in legally designated, permanent spaces with
the clubbing experience produced and consumed in carefully managed environments.
THE CLUBBING EXPERIENCE
What is it like to go clubbing? In the following extract from a researcher‟s memo
(written the day after a night out) a typical night‟s clubbing is recollected:
The fifteen-minute walk to the club took us away from the bright lights of the city
center into a dingy, run-down area of derelict buildings and empty warehouses...
As we rounded the last corner we were confronted with a mass of people queuing
to get into the same club as us. Some, we were told later, were even prepared to
queue for up to four hours. Fortunately we had VIP wristbands. Many of our
fellow clubbers were not as fortunate as the club operated a complicated queuing
system for those who just turned up... They were all vying to get noticed by the
fashion police as they patrolled the line, selecting individuals who stood out for
some particular quality – an outrageous dress-sense, good looks or some unique
talent, which many were keen to demonstrate… Some, when picked out, were
happy to leave friends behind while they were ushered to the door leaving the rest
to entertain each other as they waited their turn.
Once inside, there was a welcoming process whereby transvestite
hostesses employed by the club escorted us through the reception to the main
dance room. Here, an ocean of heat and noise engulfed us. My senses were
assaulted and my body literally started vibrating to the beat of the deafening
music. We split up and went our separate ways. The room was dark, lit only by
the strobe lights that darted in time to the music, alternating between beams and
sheets of electrified color. During these flashes, glimpses of silhouettes of the
heaving mass, moving as one, arms raised high, stabbing at the air, were revealed.
Clubbers dance as a whole, in a collective almost tribal enactment of spontaneous
but paradoxically, set moves. Suspended above the mass were dancers in cages,
while others gyrated energetically on top of podiums. The dance floor was
jammed all night.
In addition to the dance floor there were two bars. One served alcohol and
seemed to be empty for most of the night; the other sold bottled water and was
much busier. Clubbers are keen to avoid dehydration, a common problem on the
scene, largely as a result of excessive dancing mixed with Ecstasy. Conversation
was mostly non-existent, way too noisy, but this didn‟t seem to bother anyone.
Only in the toilets did people talk…about the music, the DJ and the effects of the
drugs. It was also here that drugs were openly dealt and taken…
Back in the main club, over the course of the night the music changed
tempo, varying from warm up club „anthems‟, to heavier „hard core‟ house at the
peak of the evening, to the trance like softer sounds that accompany the „chill out‟
period that signals the end of the evening. Hours passed in what felt like minutes.
I‟d danced non-stop – something I don‟t do normally – I was hot, sweaty yet
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exhilarated. As I regained my senses, I drifted off with some other clubbers to the
chill out room... In here, clubbers collapsed, exhausted and, possibly for the first
time during the course of the night, I engaged in conversation.
The themes discussed in this section develop and analyse the preceding
description of a night‟s clubbing. First, we outline the effects of Ecstasy and highlight the
centrality of its use for the experience of clubbing. Then, we identify how the clubbing
experience is negotiated between the club promoters, DJs and the clubbers themselves.
There exists an implicit understanding, a „knowing wink‟, between club promoters and
clubbers to maximize and co-create the possibility for pleasure; clubbers take Ecstasy and
club promoters maximize its effect through the design, organization and manipulation of
the clubbing environment. Whilst we present these findings in terms of the production
and consumption of pleasure this distinction is used rhetorically and does not reflect the
blurred boundaries evident in the co-creation of the clubbing experience. Ecstasy
The consumption of Ecstasy, often taken in combination with other drugs, is
integral to both the clubbing and rave experience and this may account for the similarity
in their experiential nature. In the UK at the height of the drug‟s popularity, it was
estimated that between ¾ and 2 million doses of Ecstasy were consumed each weekend.
Surveys suggest that 4% of UK 16-59 year olds – over two million people – have used
the drug in the general population, with this figure rising to 90% for those involved in the
club and rave scene (Cole and Sumnall 2003).
The maximal effect of the active ingredient in an Ecstasy tablet, MDMA (3,4
methylenedioxymetamphetamine) occurs about 2 hours after ingestion. Clubbers often
take their pills before entry into the club but equally it is not uncommon for seasoned
clubbers to pop pill after pill throughout a night‟s clubbing. Most clubbers we talked to
recounted the loss of their „E-ginity‟ fondly, as a rite of passage. The taking of the first
pill is often ritualized and E-gins are assigned experienced minders for the night whose
duty it is to look after their charges, making sure they enjoy the experience, and drink
enough water to avoid dehydration. The effects of Ecstasy build slowly to alter emotions
and produce the „loved up‟ feeling of closeness and connection with others. Veronica
recounts her story:
The first time I took Ecstasy I was very sceptical… Somebody gave me half a tab
and I remember taking it and wondering what all the fuss was about. There was
no „rush‟, no mind-altering sensation, nothing really. But then somebody
suggested getting on the dance floor and that‟s when the change kicked in… All
of a sudden I felt part of the beat, I couldn‟t stop dancing, yet I was totally in
control, or at least that‟s what I thought. When I‟d finished dancing, and believe
me that was sometime, I remember feeling very hot and sweaty but quite happy to
sit with a group of people that I wouldn‟t normally spend more than five minutes
with…they seemed interesting. I remember feeling affection for them, enjoying
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the closeness… All this time I was saying, „I don‟t know what all the fuss is
about‟ and „it‟s had no effect on me‟ while the rest just grinned.
Ecstasy floods the brain with the neurotransmitter serotonin. On Ecstasy, on the
dance floor and amongst a mass of bodies who co-create and participate in a shared
activity, clubbers enter a temporary, altered state of consciousness that produces
„euphoria, changes in perception, relaxation and a reduction in negative affect and
defensiveness‟ (Cole and Sumnall 2003, p. 42) – all evident in Veronica‟s recollection.
This is a multi-sensual, highly emotional, extra-linguistic, stimulus-response like state
that suggests reflective, cognitive processes are temporarily inactivated (Greenfield
2000). We now turn to analyse how this temporary, drug-induced alteration of
consciousness is produced and socially enhanced.
Producing Pleasure
In this section we demonstrate how clubs are manufactured spaces where
architecture and design help to construct the clubbing experience, ultimately allowing
club promoters to carefully manage and control the production of pleasure for profit.
Similar to Allison‟s (1994) description of the Tokyo hostess bar scene, we show how the
club is constructed as an environment designed to separate work from „night play‟. The
process of separation and producing pleasure starts with promotional material promising
quasi mystical experiences, continues with queuing for entry, is enhanced by the
architecture and layout of the venue, is consummated on the packed dance floor where
the DJ reigns supreme, and concludes in the chill-out room, an interstitial space between
the dance floor, the club and the „real‟ world outside.
Promoting and Queuing for Pleasure; Club promoters, through their
reputation, brand image and club policies shape the clubbing experience from the start.
Before the advent of the Internet, flyers were the most common form of communication.
Promotional appeals set expectations, often drawing on the promise of quasi-spiritual
experiences. The names of club nights also hint at what is to come – Euphoria, Tribal
Gathering, Amnesia, Rezerection, and Renaissance, to name a few.
Queuing is a deliberate strategy to heighten anticipation, whilst concurrently
allowing the requisite time for any pre-ingested Ecstasy to start taking its effect.
Moreover there is no guarantee that even after queuing for hours the clubber will get in.
As we observed, clubbers, entertain themselves in the queue, fuelling a carnival
atmosphere, ensuring that those who gain entry have already embarked on a
transformative experience. Queuing also allows the security staff and the fashion police
to select who gain entry. They wear uniforms bearing the logo of the club and their role
owes much to traditional policing – marshalling the crowd, using equipment like walkie-
talkies, whilst CCTV monitors the queue. But ultimately, their authority lies in the fact
that they have the final say in who gets in and who has to wait outside. They patrol the
queue, teasing and even tormenting the would-be clubbers before selecting the lucky one,
often from a crowd of friends, who is then escorted triumphantly to the entrance, allowed
privileged access and an escort into the club. This process of selection is in stark contrast
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to rave with its ideology of free and open access (so long as you know where to go). The
„chosen ones‟ happily leave their friends in the queue, content to become a member of the
clubbing elite for a night.
Hierarchies of control and authority are thus very evident in clubbing, with
organizers and promoters at the top of the hierarchy. They dictate the venue, set the price,
agree entrance policy with security staff and the fashion police and control behavior
inside the club. The combination of exclusivity and secrecy that they engender, fuels the
excitement and carnival atmosphere. However, their most important roles are to secure
the star attraction – the DJ – and to create an environment for unfettered pleasure.
The Architecture of Pleasure;: Clubs often draw on ecclesiastical
symbolism in their names, such as The Church, The Sanctuary, God’s Kitchen, The
Ministry of Sound, The Mission and The Rectory. The quasi-spiritual nature of clubbing,
alluded to in the promotional flyers, is further produced in the physical design of many
clubs especially those that inhabit former Victorian, neo-Gothic stone built churches, as
we describe in the following extract from field notes:
The Church is renowned as an early meeting place for clubbers… The building
itself is what its name suggests a church that has been converted into a feeder bar
specializing in dance music and exotic light shows. From the outside it remains
unchanged; a 19th century building, complete with stained glass windows and
neo-gothic architecture. The heavy, original oak door leads into the entrance,
which still retains the original thick wooden benches and a holy water font. A
second pair of doors leads into the main place of worship. Here the effect is
striking. The music, which is audible from the street, becomes deafening. Inside,
the sacred is turned into an assault on the senses. The pews where the
congregation would have sat have been removed, and to the left a bar runs the
length of one side. As incongruous as it all seems, it works. Everyone‟s attention
is focused on the pulpit where the DJ, in the guise of charismatic preacher, works
his congregation. The altar is transformed into a heavenly light show, shooting out
lasers that illuminate the stained glass windows whilst at the same time providing
the illusion of an electric rainstorm falling down on the crowd below. People
stand transfixed on the floor and in the galleries and it is hard not to share the
uplifting feeling that stems from the combination of sound, beat, light and
atmosphere.
The analogy between dance culture and religion is at its most obvious in these
converted places of worship, where the congregation (the clubbers) and the minister (the
DJ) are separated by distinct spatial zones and where the DJ metaphorically preaches
from the pulpit. However whilst, the clubbing environment draws on religious cultural
referents, it would be fair to suggest that clubbing is less a religion of the spirit or soul
and more a religion of the senses. Clubbing provides the illusion of spirituality in a
manufactured space with a managed and carefully orchestrated sense of sacredness. In
this sense, the music played in the club, the spatial organization of design and layout are
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devices for social ordering – the behavior of clubbers is „mutually orientated, co-
ordinated, entrained and aligned‟ (DeNora 2000, p.109).
Pleasure on the Dance Floor: “God is a DJ”; On entering the club you do
not just hear the music you feel it vibrate up your feet and through your entire body. The
music bypasses normal cognitive processes of perception and communicates, „directly
with the body… taking us out of ourselves‟ (Jowers 1999, p. 385), and this has a
powerful effect on the crowd. The music alone, though, is not enough to achieve this, the
DJ has to mix, speed up, slow down and time the music in order to „work‟ the crowd.
Jackie:
A really good DJ can send the crowd into a frenzy. They work you up and then
bring you down again gently. They are in control…and they know it.
Many of those we spoke to described how they would travel miles to hear a
particular DJ perform his or her „sets‟. Major DJs are the superstars in the clubbing
system and they earn their place in the hierarchy through their ability to mix and
improvise, to take the audience out of themselves, to elevate them to another plane, all
through the power of the music. The music is mixed to hypnotic effect, aided by the fact
that it is based on beats per minute and not the voice. This adds to the trance-like effect,
„the further dance tracks are removed from the voice, the more likely it is that „trance
like‟ bliss can be achieved‟ (Jowers 1999, p. 387).
The DJ attains shaman-like status, entertaining and controlling the crowd, helping
to heal their anxieties and exorcize their demons and, as such, DJs attract cult like
followings. This analogy between shaman and DJ may be more than simply
metaphorical. The DJ is aware that he/she can lose the crowd or make the crowd „lose it‟.
The DJ is most in control when using repetitive beats to create feelings of total loss and
then using an anthem to facilitate love and togetherness (Jowers 1999; Rietveld 1998).
Chilling Out; Regardless of the venue, there is a set, time related dimension to
the clubbing experience. Towards the end of the night the music in the main dance area
becomes more „chilled out‟, signifying to clubbers that their night of pleasure is drawing
to an end – at least as far as the club is concerned. When clubbers have exhausted
themselves on the dance floor they can either go to the bar areas or chill out rooms:
Ian:
The chill out room is just what it says. You leave the main club area, go to the
chill out area and flop down on deep cushions or beanbags. No more dancing, no
more flashing strobe lights, just huge hypnotic lava lamps with their gentle
floating blobs bumping into each other and changing shape. It‟s a place to get
your head straight, get your mind into a different place. You drink plenty of water
and get your heartbeat back to normal while you let the soothing sounds of
ambient trance wash over you. You get ready to face the real world again.
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Chilling out is highly ritualized and involves rites of separation that commence
either when the music is slowed down to an ambient trance or when clubbers leave the
dance floor for the chill out rooms. The environment of the chill out room is in stark
contrast to the dance floor, and consists of space that is soothing and calming – soft
furnishings, soft lighting and ambient music. The chill out room is an integral part of the
clubbing experience performing a dual function. It is a time and space that prolongs
feelings of pleasure and empathy – touch being the predominant sense – whilst also
acting as an interstitial space between the world of the club and the world outside the
club. Consuming Pleasure
In this section we examine the practices of clubbers that maximize the possibility
for their pleasure as they embark on a night of calculated hedonism – the anticipation,
planning and sharing of a night‟s fun (Measham 2004).
Anticipating and Preparing for Pleasures to Come; A night‟s clubbing is
predicated on preparation and importantly, anticipation of what is to come. As Carol
describes, her ritualized preparation kick-starts her transcendental and transformative
experiences to come:
You get more and more excited as the days go by and then the evening arrives.
Getting ready to go out is a long process. I'll get home from work on a Friday and
start to get my head together for what's ahead. I might drop a pill and put the
music on loud, you have to get yourself ready psychologically. Then I'll have a
bath and when I get out I'm usually starting to come up, this would be around 7
o'clock, then I'll wash my hair and start to think about what to wear… You get
terribly hot dancing, so I usually wear as little as possible, maybe a bikini top and
hot pants, it doesn't look out of place, by the end of the night you're dripping in
sweat so you have to dress down, but it's not sexual, it's just practical and it's fun.
Anyway, I'll get ready and meet up with my friends before we go into the venue,
maybe take another pill and hide the rest for later in the evening.
Carole‟s account involves the slow build up of anticipation and excitement as the
weekend draws nearer. On Friday, the world of work is left behind and a process of
separation from „normal‟ time occurs. Carole undergoes a series of mental and physical
preparation rituals or rituals of transformation (Belk and Costa 1998), symbolically
manifested in the dropping of a pill, physical pampering and the selection of what to
wear. She sheds her weekday identity and literally transforms herself into a clubber.
Clearly for Carole shedding her everyday self, the excitement and adventure of becoming
a different person, in dropping her everyday persona, is a source of much pleasure.
In Mark‟s case, this process of becoming someone else, a desire for otherness
(Belk et al. 2003), is important in terms of managing his work-life balance:
Everything is governed by the clock. You get up, face the traffic, go to work,
work to targets, worry about not meeting them, come home, crash out in front of
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the TV, go to bed knackered and get up and do it all again. There has to be more
to life than that. It‟s a release, a temporary thing that allows you to share
something with others, get away from the rat race and feel that you belong.
For Mark then, anticipating a night‟s clubbing is also about the desire for sociality (Belk
et al. 2003), of looking forward to the pleasure of sharing an experience with others, and
in so doing managing the everyday reality of his rationalized, industrialized, time-space
governed existence. Indeed, just as the process of clubbing is controlled and managed,
clubbers usually have a sense of self-regulation whereby the anticipation and search for
pleasure, the rituals and drugs are based on a calculated predictability. Pleasure is not
only found in the club, but also in anticipating, planning, sharing and, fantasizing about
what is to come based on memories of past experiences – a cycle of pleasure.
Shared Pleasures: Sensual Communication; In the club environment
communication occurs through the senses, without recourse to the spoken word.
Andrew:
You just get on the floor and lose it to the music. You feel euphoric... It‟s like this
feeling of happiness and contentment. You look around and everyone is feeling
the same. You‟re on a different plane; you‟re all feeling it together. You don‟t
have to talk, you just know. You want to dance for hours and hours and make the
feeling last…You can share something without talking about it, you can
communicate on different levels. People are there for the music… for the vibe…
and there‟s the feeling of escape and freedom that comes with dancing and the
love drugs. Also there‟s no threat, no aggression, it‟s just something we‟re all
into together.
Andrew talks about the empathetic bond that exists between clubbers, which is felt and
shared without the need to verbalize the feeling. Ecstasy is an entactogen (Nichols 1986)
that literally means to touch within. Clubbers claim that on Ecstasy they all experience
the same feelings and this is instinctively understood. As we move on to explore,
clubbers communicate through the senses, touching each other, sharing the visual
illuminations whilst dancing collectively to and with the music.
Shared Pleasures: The Ecstatic Gaze; Inside the club the senses are
assaulted by waves of heat, sound and visual plays of light, smoke and space. The visual
impact is dramatic and constantly changing as laser beams freeze dancers in slow motion,
before changing to showers of electric rain and then again to multi-colored strobe lights:
Peter:
You take the Ecstasy for the enjoyment; I couldn't stand to be in a club without it.
It changes you, your way of thinking and feeling. You‟re not the same person,
everything and everyone is beautiful. You feel free and lifted; it makes the music
sound better… And the lighting, really cool ultra violet lights take on a whole new
look, you feel like you're in the light, everything just blends together.
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Ecstasy heightens the senses and Peter describes how he enters an altered state of
consciousness, „losing himself‟ in the merging of light, sound and dancing. The visual
nature of the club constitutes a fantastic spectacle, filling space and time with alluring,
colorful, intricate and complicated surfaces (Handelman 1987).
Clubbers engage in acts of theatre, as both audience and performer, losing their
inhibitions in an orgy of sensation seeking experiences. This spectacle represents a series
of social relations among people, mediated by images, a combination of masquerade and
spectacle held together by a carnival atmosphere. There also exists the narcissistic
pleasure of being looked at. Those clubbers who gyrate on podiums or in cages
suspended above the dance floor, invoke the idea of the obverse panopticon, „a physical
structure designed specifically to enable the consumer‟s desire to be observed‟ (Kozinets
et al. 2004, p. 670). Participants, then, can play at being whatever or whomever they want
to be – juggler, French mime artist, angel or devil – losing themselves on a heaving dance
floor amongst the laser strobes and electric rain, giving in to a state of total abandonment.
Like Kozinets‟ (2002) Burning Man attendees and Belk‟s (1994) Halloween revellers
clubbing represent an inversion of the everyday, a fantastical display that borders on the
magical and paradoxical.
Shared Pleasures: The Tender Touch; One other sensory experience is also
intensified as a consequence of engagement and heightened by taking Ecstasy: touch:
Wayne:
You can‟t help yourself, you touch people on the arm, clasp hands, but there is no
expectation beyond the moment…It‟s like one great, massive group hug.
Feelings are not verbalized within the club – the noise precludes this. As Wayne
describes, people touch each other but not in any predatory or sexual way. Ecstasy in this
regard is an empathogen – a chemical capable of producing feelings of empathy with
others. It produces feelings of empathy, even between complete strangers, yet reduces
sexual drive and capability in both men and women (Cole and Sumnall 2003). Clubbers
stressed the non-sexual aspect of touch, with the touch of a hand simply an act of great
affection that can be reciprocated. The experience of Ecstasy removes the „normal‟ social
protocols surrounding personal space and intimacy and encourages a celebration of
physical contact unfettered by conservative codes of „acceptable‟ behavior.
Shared Pleasures: The Euphoric Clubbing Experience; In sum, clubbing
constitutes a highly euphoric consumption experience. This calculated, involving and
highly sought-after experience is facilitated by the consumption of Ecstasy, physical
exertion in the form of dancing and the sensorial overload facilitated through the
architecture and design of the clubbing environment. It can last between four and twenty
fours hours, is communal, highly sensuous, and consists of feelings of intense pleasure
and empathy that, in combination, produce an altered state of consciousness. By an
altered state of consciousness we mean that there has been a change in the „overall pattern
of mental functioning such that the experiencer feels different‟ (Tart 1972, p. 1203).
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This description of a euphoric consumption experience is similar but different to
other highly emotional or hedonic consumption experiences. There is certainly evidence
of this similarity in, for example, the intense feeling states of Rook‟s (1987) impulse
buyers but by definition such behavior is fleeting and not calculated. Similarities also
exist with the extraordinary experiences of white water rafters (Arnould and Price 1993)
and the flow states of skydivers (Celsi et al. 1993), where communitas or sociopleasure is
also high, but the incidence of an extended altered state of consciousness is less evident.
Strenuous exercise too can also produce feelings of euphoria, as in the runner‟s high, but
this is more of an individual rather than a shared experience. The euphoria of the
clubbing experience is facilitated by popping a pill whereas flow states are achieved
through concentrated attention in developing particular acts of skill – skydiving, rafting
and through other practices like meditation for example – and these take time and effort
to achieve. Recreational drugs are a „quick fix‟ to achieving collective euphoric states and
this perhaps accounts for part of their appeal.
DISCUSSION
Our description and analysis of a typical night‟s clubbing clearly supports prior
understandings of pleasure. The clubbing environment is an orgy of excess where the
normal social protocols surrounding noise, space, physical proximity, light and
communication are exceeded. We now move on to discuss how our study informs our
understanding of pleasure in consumer research. In particular we develop the euphoric
nature of the clubbing experience – what we term „losing it‟ – as an example of a
biosocial understanding of consumer behavior. We then suggest that clubbing has
become a site of contained illegality and demonstrate how this concept contributes to
understanding the operation of marketplace cultures.
Losing It: A Biosocial Pleasure
The emotionally charged clubbing experience is a biosocial phenomenon, shaped
and contingent upon the ingestion of psychoactive drugs and the social nature of the
experience. Previous work has shown how the combination of repetitive electronic music,
extended periods spent dancing, and the use of Ecstasy can act as potent means to induce
a loss of self, a transcendence of the body and an experience of extreme pleasure (Gilbert
and Pearson 1999; Hill 2002). In the vernacular of clubbing, this kind of euphoric
experience is all about „losing it‟. For Greenfield (2000) the „it‟ in „losing it‟ is the mind,
what she calls the personalization of the physical brain through cumulative experience,
learning and memory. She argues that in such states the mind is switched off, returning
people instead to a more fundamental, child like, emotionally driven state of
consciousness.
The most common, legitimate, „switching off‟ agent is alcohol. The morning after
people have drunk too much alcohol, they often have problems recalling the preceding
night‟s events. In contrast to Ecstasy however, alcohol consumption has been shown to
increase aggression, volatility and variability in behavior (Steele and Josephs 1990). This
unpredictability is absent with Ecstasy, where the experience is largely constant for and
between users. Ecstasy is a powerful agent in enabling people to „lose it‟ yet without
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many of the short-term negative social consequences associated with other agents like
alcohol.
Greenfield‟s (2000) account of „losing it‟ is appealing in many regards, however
she fails to recognize any benefits, however transient, of losing it and pejoratively calls
all users of drugs junkies. While we recognize the dangers associated with excessive
Ecstasy consumption, the vast majority of the clubbers we encountered were not junkies,
just as the vast majority of drinkers are not alcoholics. The clubbers we encountered came
from all walks of life and they were able to balance the excesses of the weekend with
their responsibilities. Indeed phrases like „losing your mind‟ or „blowing your mind‟
implicitly reinforce a Platonic ethics, the dominance of the pleasures of the rational mind
over emotional, embodied, experiential, shared, sensual pleasures.
For our participant Mark, the pleasure of losing it existed in relation to the
demands of his working life. Another of our participants, Lisa, talked of being two
different people: the polite, straight, constrained worker during the week, is replaced by
the clubber who goes „as mad‟ as possible at the weekend. In these senses then, we can
suggest that losing it becomes a means for people to rediscover empathetic community
through shared illicit risk taking, sensory stimulation, and ritualized, highly energetic
play. In the case of clubbing, this illicit risk taking is confined, ritualistically, in time and
space.
The club functions as social space in which clubbers can collectively move
beyond mundane subjectivities, and transcend the social categories that normally define
them – class, gender, age, occupation etc. Losing it engenders dissolution of the
individual self, as clubbers enter an extra-linguistic state, a state void of and beyond
words, and merge into the collective consciousness of the crowd. For the duration of the
clubbing experience, the language bound, everyday rules of communication are blurred in
a flood of sensory, shared experiences as perceptions are altered. Image, gaze and touch
replace everyday linguistic modes of communication. Whilst Booth (2004) presents a
powerful argument for the centrality of language, in particular rhetoric and the art of
discourse, as the means to promote social cohesion, our data support an obverse position.
As we observed the formation of clubbing communities occurs with little or no recourse
to the spoken word, yet they are equally cohesive, albeit temporarily. The clubbing
encounter induces a transformative, collective, altered state of consciousness with
clubbers moving and feeling as one. Our data suggest that the power of such
transformative experiences is limited to the duration of the collective experience. In many
cases clubbers have little to do with each other outside of the club. In this sense, clubbing
is „a controlled and enjoyable de-controlling of affect and emotions‟ (Elias and Dunning
1986, p.54) that salves and ameliorates the boring or repressive qualities of everyday life.
Like other extraordinary, high-risk or intensive affective forms of consumption, clubbing
achieves this through the provision of excitement and the possibility of a return to a more
primitive (Canniford and Shankar 2007), child-like (Belk 2000) or „reason-be-damned‟
(Belk, Østergaard and Groves 1998, p. 208) state of being.
Clubbing as Contained Illegality
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Society and the marketplace provide many legitimate forms of pleasure for people
who are also required to exhibit discipline and rationalized restraint in their everyday,
working lives. What we have described and analyzed is a marketplace culture that is
legally sanctioned whilst supporting a range of illegal practices. Through the construct of
contained illegality we add a new dimension to the functioning and management of
pleasure and the operation of marketplace cultures. We have previously highlighted the
„knowing wink‟ that exists between the club promoters and clubbers and, in this section
we extend this complicity to the State authorities that grant licences to clubs.
Our historical analysis demonstrated that clubbing grew in popularity once rave
was made illegal, yet both are predicated on similar, illicit, drug-induced, pleasurable
foundations. Ravers though, as Andrew recollected, also experienced the illicit pleasures
of descending on various unregulated spaces and the „cat and mouse‟ games they played
with the authorities. Through underground networks, ravers sought to evade supervision
and surveillance as forms of organized ideological resistance. In this regard raves may be
considered as Temporary Autonomous Zones (Bey 1991), where people gather together,
temporarily occupy a space and then move on, only to reappear again elsewhere. The
TAZ is a microcosm of „free‟ culture, populated by similar thinking committed people
who collectively share an intense peak experience before parting (see also St John 2002).
Raves constituted untaxable, unstable and unpredictable pleasures that provoked moral
panic in the media and amongst State authorities that ultimately led to the imposition of
repressive, judicial forms of power (Foucault 1980). The identity of the raver was thus
codified, vilified and repressed through various State technologies. As we have seen these
included: legislative action that made the organization and practice of rave illegal; ravers
became the scourge of ideological state apparatus like the media, especially the right-
wing press; and Ecstasy was medicalized as potentially lethal and then criminalized
(Collin 1997; Foucault 1995; Parrott 2001; Reith 2004).
Clubbing subsequently emerged as a more legitimate environment in which to
experience the euphoric consumption experience of rave. Unlike rave, though, it is
orchestrated in predictable, regulated and manageable environments. However, alongside
these pleasurable practices, clubbing also supports criminal practices. At the height of its
popularity in the UK, gangs using intimidation, violence and even murder maintained and
controlled the supply of Ecstasy. At the same time, and before the State authorities would
grant licenses to clubs, promoters had to ensure that water was freely available (some
promoters would cut the water supply to the toilets to ensure clubbers bought water), that
each club had chill out rooms and that paramedics were on site (Collin 1997). In contrast
to ravers, clubbers and their illicit practices are constructed as acceptable and in need of
protection rather than prosecution.
Clubs have emerged as sites where illicit pleasures are reframed as commercial
and highly lucrative forms of restorative leisure (Elias and Dunning 1986; Rojek, 1995).
Clubbing can thus be considered as a form of contained illegality where the „ungoverned
mob‟ of rave is transformed and distributed towards a safer, more sanitized and
domesticated state of ordered multiplicity and productive delinquency (Foucault 1995).
By this we mean that clubbing (and its associated practices) does not eliminate illegality,
rather its effects are limited and its politics renegotiated – away from the ideological
resistance of rave and towards the politics of the market. Clubbing thus supports an
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illegality that is easier to control and manage whilst at the same time is economically
productive.
Our data identify the techniques that localize illicit acts and channel them in the
direction of this ordered multiplicity. From the spatial and architectural organization of
clubs, through to the anticipatory and preparatory rituals, to those of the chill out,
clubbers are subjected to a variety of ordering technologies that reframe and enclose their
illegal practices. Through queuing clubbers are surveyed, selected and controlled with the
organization and management of the queue operating as a productive network, the effect
of which is to enhance the possibilities of anticipatory pleasure and the charismatic
pleasure associated with membership of an elite group (Elias and Scotson 1994). Once
inside the club, the organization of space in combination with the music, lighting and the
mass of bodies creates an obligatory rhythm (Foucault 1995) that unites clubbers, as they
move together as a coherent multiplicity. The club also acts as a site in which illegal drug
use is contained. The restorative aspects of effects of Ecstasy enable clubbers to
transcend their mundane everyday selves, whilst the rituals and learning processes
associated with its use, represent another means through which clubbers bind themselves
into a harmonious, asexual, non-violent, predictable union with other clubbers.
From these insights, we offer an alternative interpretation to the current emphasis
within the marketplace cultures program of CCT, that interprets consumption practices in
opposition to, or liberation from consumer culture‟s alienating and individualizing
effects. As our historical analysis showed, we found little evidence of this. The
marketization of rave into clubbing was founded on a Thatcherite spirit of
entrepreneurialism that is more in keeping with the spirit of capitalism than it is with any
countercultural ideology (see Heath and Potter 2004). In this light, we suggest that the
excesses and illicit practices of the clubbing experience are not oppositional or
reactionary. Rather, these practices can be seen as part of the cycle of everyday life; they
provide for the possibility of agency, excitement and creativity through the containment
of the illicit. Clubbing is a restorative leisure activity, like any other mainstream leisure
activity and unlike rave is not an act of countercultural ideological resistance. On the
contrary, we suggest clubbing is not only economically productive but socially
productive too. As we have noted, the containment of illicit pleasure exists only for a
night before clubbers return to the realm of the routine and the mundane. In a similar
manner to Bakhtin‟s (1984) carnivalesque, Elias and Dunning‟s (1986) folk games,
Foucault‟s Convicts‟ Sabbath (1995) or Gluckman‟s (1956) cohesion through conflict,
our work suggests that the temporary transcendence of normal, mundane life reaffirms
and supports it. To put it another way, rather than fundamentally disrupting society, the
containment of „losing it‟ practices like clubbing help, in the long term, to „establish
cohesion in the wider society‟ (Gluckman 1956, p.109).
To answer some of the questions posed by Kozinets (2002), our data suggest that
any anti-market discourse present in rave was, by and large, eliminated, with clubbing
and clubbers supporting the logic of the market. However, an effect of this marketization
process has been the subsequent re-emergence of rave. Reports in the UK press have
shown that the outdoor, illicit rave is alive and well, as contemporary ravers, too young to
have been part of the first wave of raves resist and reject the manufactured and
commercialized club scene described in this paper (Behr 2006).
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Contained Illegality: Beyond Clubbing.
The application of the construct of contained illegality enables us to look afresh at
pleasure and its relationship with marketplace cultures. We note, for example, that
consumer research into drug consumption, tends to focus on its dark or negative sides,
most notably addiction (Hirschman 1992), and ignores its pleasurable aspects. We also
note that the very practices designed to control, restrain or regulate morally contentious
forms of consumption can have the opposite effect. As Prohibition in America clearly
showed, it would appear that, „the law of transgressing taboos remains a vital form of
consumer desire‟ (Belk 2000, p.117). In this light, the „knowing wink‟ practices,
highlighted in our study, contain rather than eradicate illicit consumption practices.
The Dutch government has pursued a policy of contained illegality in connection
with its drugs policy, designed to break the gateway effect – the progression from drugs
like cannabis to more harmful drugs like heroin. The Dutch have implemented de facto
decriminalization of its cannabis laws – possession of cannabis is still illegal, rather the
law is never implemented for amounts of 5g or less. Their liberalization process began in
the 1980s, when the illegal selling of cannabis was legitimized through regulation and
containment by the formal licensing of cafés in highly specific, designated areas only.
In relation to the containment of pleasure, there is evidence to show that it is not
just illicit behaviors that are subject to systems of containment and regulation but also
socially contentious consumption practices. Legalized prostitution, such as the Nevada
„Chicken Ranches‟, is contained through geographic location – rural rather than urban
locations. In other countries where prostitution is still illegal, there is a tacit
acknowledgement and acceptance that it exists, and it is contained in „red light‟ districts
or soliciting occurs „inside‟ in massage parlors or through escort agencies rather than
„outside‟ on the street (Weitzer 1999). In a similar vein, gambling is illegal in many US
states, however it is contained in geographically limited areas like Las Vegas, Reno or
Atlantic City. Like clubbing, Las Vegas offers an alternative reality, where adults from
all walks of life can collectively but temporarily disengage from their quotidian roles and
responsibilities in an act of transformation to a more infantile state (Belk 2000).
CONCLUSION
Our study of clubbing has enabled us to develop two contributions to the
consumer research literature: our framing of pleasure from a biosocial perspective and the
characterization of clubbing as a form of contained illegality. Pleasure as a construct
allows us to hold both a materialist and idealist ontology as we move along the arc of
explanation from Tiger‟s (2000) physiopleasures to sociopleasures. Through our concept
of biosocial pleasure we also extend out from micro processes through to macro forces, as
we move from, the individual experience of pleasure, to the social experience of pleasure
– losing it and euphoric consumption – whilst situating these pleasures within historical
context – contained illegality.
Over 25 years has elapsed since the seminal articles that put experiential and
hedonic aspects of consumption on the consumer research agenda. Such perspectives
were meant to enhance and enrich rather than supplant its alternative – the dominant
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cognitive, information-processing perspective. We note however, and especially with the
emergence of CCT, a continued bifurcation of these two overarching paradigms. We
suggest that a biosocial perspective is an attempt to integrate parallel ways of
„interviewing‟ the co-creation of human phenomena such as pleasure. We hope that
research continues to develop this perspective in an attempt to bring future behavioral,
cognitive and neuroscientific studies together with social and historical studies.
Through the construct of contained illegality we have demonstrated the carefully
executed techniques of behavior management that can operate through marketplace
cultures. Such spaces and places can provide an alternative to the mundane, and in the
case of clubbing, an environment of seemingly unfettered restorative pleasure.
Concurrently however, such managed environments produce a series of ordering
techniques that contain illegality with the complicit, „knowing wink‟ of the police and
State authorities. In effect, there has been an unwritten domestication or tacit acceptance
of a morally contentious form of illicit pleasure – recreational Ecstasy consumption.
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