Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
music absolutely travels through your entire body. It has the power to change my mood
and really take me on an entire journey.”
Emma, on the other hand, is a twenty-four-year-old, white female, who works as a
secretary at a private school in Durban. At the time of her interview, she had recently
ended a long-term romantic relationship, and decided that “the best way to kind of start
moving past that is to just get out … and do something different.” Consequently, she
decided to participate in a night of clubbing at Jacks. Describing herself as “a bit self-
conscious,” she spoke at length about the effects of the vibe on her subjective clubbing
experiences. During her interview, Emma stressed that she “go[es] out to find a happy
vibe—somewherewherepeopleare,umm,automaticallyhavingafuntime.”InEmma's
experience, “if you go out to a club or to a place like Jacks you don't see anyone miser-
able or upset. Everyone there is laughing and chatting and dancing and drinking.” She
constructs these ritualized clubbing practices—and constituents of the vibe—as having
the power to induce a positive emotional state, suggesting that “if you're in a bad mood,
if you've had a breakup like Jane and I've just had, to go out to a place like Jacks or any
club, you'll find a vibe that's very upbeat and happy and automatically you'll be made to
be happy and be put in a good mood.”
Both Claire and Emma's narratives demonstrate the importance of considering how
the various constituents of the vibe—laughing, chatting, dancing, and drink-
ing—combine or“interlock” intotality (St.John2006,11).Thevibeiscoconstituted by
the design of the place and the way it is collectively used to produce a total social and
affectivesituationthat“amountstomuchmorethanthesumofitsparts”(Wu2010,70).
The extracts also lend support to the idea of the vibe as a “repeatable materiality” (Fou-
cault 2002, cited in Ehlers 2008, 336). Although never materializing in quite the same
way, clubbers treat the vibe as a repeatable and familiar situation. Everyone has a role
to play in reproducing the affective routines: the club management that maintains the
space, furnishings, and so on, the waitrons and bar staff, the DJs, and the patrons who
participate in the “same” party week after week.
Clubbing is a site of performativity (Butler 1990, 1993). By sharing and participating
in the vibe, clubbers are produced as subjects. The extracts demonstrate the power of
the vibe to produce and induce particular affective states and forms of subjectivity.
These affective states and processes are familiar ones for clubbers, who downplay per-
sonal agency in attributing emergent forms of subjectivity to the productive powers of
the vibe: Claire's expressions such as “you are carried away” and “you lose yourself,”
and Emma's claim that “automatically you'll be made to be happy” all portray the vibe
as transporting the individual, who has surrendered agency, through various affective
states.Subjectification—“thewayahumanbeingturnshimselfintoasubject”(Foucault
1982, 778)—is achieved both through embodied participation in a form of life and in
