Page 63 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

54 Cultural change and ordinary life

Examples of this sort of translocal scene given here include alternative rock in
the 1980s, as examined by Kruse (1993) and the way in which hip-hop has
diffused across the world, but taken on specific local forms. Another phen-
omenon discussed under this heading is the so-called ‘music carnival’ that
existed around the American band The Grateful Dead, where ‘a band’s fans
regularly follow their favorite musicians around the country from tour date to
tour date and energize local devotees of the music and lifestyle’ (Peterson and
Bennett 2004: 10).
The virtual scene ‘is a newly emergent formation in which people scat-
tered across great physical spaces create the sense of scene via fanzines and,
increasingly, through the internet’ (pp. 6–7). As such technologies as the
internet develop, it can be expected that there might be more virtual scenes
developing. In their edited collection, Bennett and Peterson (2004) include a
range of studies that they locate under these headings of local, translocal and
virtual.
A problem with this expansion of the conceptualization of the idea of
scene to include translocal and virtual is that it reduces the specificity of the
concept and makes it descriptive rather than analytical. Thus, while it is useful
to point out that scenes have translocal and virtual dimensions, I want to
argue that it important to retain the idea that a scene involves some measure
of potential co-present interaction. In terms initially theorized by Raymond
Williams (1970), a scene involves a ‘knowable community’, even if the people
involved in it can only ‘imagine’ that they can know each other. It seems likely
that those who are enthusiastic about a form of music and a mode of dress will
engage to differential degrees with others that live locally and who are
involved as well as hoping to meet up with others that are involved but live
elsewhere. The discussion of Goth by Hodkinson (2002) illuminates the differ-
ential interaction of these processes very well. In addition, Grazian’s (2004)
study of the blues scene in Chicago discusses the role of tourists in affecting
the continuing existence of blues clubs, and so on.
There is a danger of loss of specificity and purchase once the concept
of scene is generalized unless the particular features to which it draws atten-
tion – the aspect of interaction around some degree of performance, the role of
place in acting as a node of communication – are recognized and retained.
Building on this approach, therefore, I elaborate three general arguments in the
rest of this chapter. First, the idea of scene does not just apply to music-based
connections that are located in space. Given that there are increasing modes of
media convergence, and that music is often related to a range of other activi-
ties and places, I see no argument for suggesting a priori why music should be
the prime way of conceptualizing a scene. Second, I wish to retain a focus on
place as a key determinant of what a scene is. However, I do this in a context
forged by the arguments made concerning ‘elective belonging’ that have been
introduced in this chapter so far. Place is not conceptualized as belonging to a
local community or having a ‘structure of feeling’ but as somewhere where
elective belonging, and the identities that it forges, is lived out via different
modes of performance. Third, I will suggest that a scene in the sense that I will
define it is like a scene in a performed narrative on the stage. The scene is a
short period of a narrative that may involve a number of characters in signifi-