Page 67 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

58 Cultural change and ordinary life

sources for the idea of scene (the work of Straw and Shank) discussed earlier are
very different, if not incompatible. Thus:
Whereas Straw shows a Bourdieu-ian concern with processes of legitim-
ation and the competition for cultural prestige, and looks upon musical
practices from a distance, so to speak, Shank is working within a frame-
work that draws a contrast between these transformative practices and
the dominant or mainstream culture. More fundamentally still, Straw
seems to be advocating scene as a word that questions the notion of
local community that Shank celebrates, and which Straw associates
specifically with the rock genre.
(Hesmondhalgh 2005: 28)
Indeed, Shank’s formulation is influenced by forms of psychoanalysis
that do not figure in Straw’s account at all. Hesmondhalgh recognizes that these
differences can be seen as part of a productive contradiction in the idea of
scene, but ultimately sees that this makes the idea unstable, especially when it
is used to replace the idea of subculture. To advance this discussion Hesmond-
halgh considers some further work on scene by Straw (2001). He argues that for
Straw the benefit of scene is it can capture some of the fuzziness of boundaries
and that it can detach practices in place from too rigid ideas of subculture and
class, while offering the promise that it can be reconnected to these variables.
Most significantly Hesmondhalgh argues as follows in quoting Straw:
Finally, Straw observes that ‘“scene” seems able to evoke both the cozy
intimacy of community and the fluid cosmopolitanism of urban life. To
the former, it adds a sense of dynamism: to the latter, a recognition of the
inner circles and weighty histories which give each seemingly fluid sur-
face a secret order’ (Straw 2001, p. 248). But how does the term achieve
this metaphorical work? Of course, analytical concepts work via meta-
phor and association (think of Bourdieu’s field, or Habermas’s public
sphere) but in my view scene has gone beyond the point where such
metaphorical associations can aid in the analysis of spatial dimensions of
popular music. The term has been used for too long in too many different
and imprecise ways for those involved in popular music studies to be
sure that it can register the ambivalences that Straw hopes that it will.
(Hesmondhalgh 2005: 30)
I am not convinced, ultimately, by Hesmondhalgh’s critique, as I tend to
agree that scene can encompass ideas of intimacy and cosmopolitanism via
the more precise theorizations of elective belonging and that the theoriza-
tion of performance and audiencing actually does the theoretical work that
Hesmondhalgh suggests is necessary. In this way, Hesmondhalgh’s points
suggest not so much the abandonment of the idea of scene as its further
theorization in a different context, which is my most important overall point.

Scene, performing, audiencing and elective belonging
My argument is that the spaces of elective belonging can be conceptualized
as scenes. I suggest that there are a number of potential benefits of such a