Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
- Points of view
- Making love to my ego
- The pinball project
- Psychopolitical cults
- The wet group
- Interpersonal skills
- Learn and enjoy
- Another language
- English identity, Ireland and violence
- Racing
- Diana's subjects
- Personal response under attack
- In Disney's world
- Looking to the future, and back
- Windows on the mind
- Soap trek
- Clubbing
- E and me
- Garage nightmares
- Helpless in Japan
- Greek chairs
- Open secrets
- Passé
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY
Clubbing
from PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
- Points of view
- Making love to my ego
- The pinball project
- Psychopolitical cults
- The wet group
- Interpersonal skills
- Learn and enjoy
- Another language
- English identity, Ireland and violence
- Racing
- Diana's subjects
- Personal response under attack
- In Disney's world
- Looking to the future, and back
- Windows on the mind
- Soap trek
- Clubbing
- E and me
- Garage nightmares
- Helpless in Japan
- Greek chairs
- Open secrets
- Passé
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY
Summary
The club is a place that condenses everyday life and opens up its contradictions. Here we find distortions of reality in this enclosed space and the production of a different reality. There is concealment and display, but what is concealed is produced as effectively as what is deliberately played out. This is the scene. We are dancing in ‘Sankeys Soap’ in Manchester. We are drinking water. These places are friendlier and safer than the alcohol clubs in north Manchester where people stagger into each other before being sick in the toilets, where meeting someone's eye could mean getting beaten up, where people are uncoordinated and angry. We are coordinated but not regimented. We aren't marching, but we move together fast.
The club is a place of simultaneous anonymity and individualisation. At one and the same moment, it functions as a city site where masses of people are brought together who do not know one another. We go to clubs with friends and we move apart through the course of the evening and encounter each other again from time to time. We may dance in a group, but we cannot speak, and communication is broken and then we become bodies among other bodies. Like much life in the city, there are clusters of distinguishable, recognisable faces amidst a crowd of people who are strangers. Here there is also contact. Some guy pushes past another and their bodies glance against each other. One is rebounding and shouting, and the other shouts back.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Psychoanalytic Mythologies , pp. 69 - 72Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009