Page 69 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

60 Cultural change and ordinary life

truisms about such fluidity of identity (usually derived from readings of
authors such as Bauman and Giddens) are problematic when not backed up by
evidence from empirical and substantive research, they have been shown to
have validity in complex ways in such study. Aspects of this have already been
considered, but the next chapter will address some of the key issues, primarily
through discussion of contemporary class identities. The fact that scenes
involve people as characters means that identities have mask-like qualities.
This has been an issue much discussed in the literature that derives from the
work on Butler, where ideas of performance and drag have been considered in
some detail. While, on the one hand, there is a danger that some of the discus-
sion here is both constrained by the paradigm of incorporation and resistance
or, on the other, implying that the process of identity construction is com-
pletely voluntaristic, it is my contention that such processes are increasing
sedimenting into a range of aspects of ordinary life.
It possible to say that some scenes are livelier than others. Thus,
for example, based on interviews with young people, Laughey contrasts the
music scene in Carlisle, often seen as a relatively isolated town in the
north-west of England close to the border with Scotland, with that in the city
of Manchester. He describes Carlisle as a ‘community’ in contrast to the
‘scene’ of Manchester: ‘Although Carlisle might still be conceived to have a
music scene, it is a homogeneous and static scene compared to the fluid,
transient scene or scenes that interact and vie for supremacy in Manchester’
(Laughey 2006: 191). However, in contrast to this distinction, I argue
that Carlisle is just as scenic as Manchester in the terms that I have discussed
here. It may be that Carlisle is thought by some to be less interesting than
Manchester, but this is open to debate. In the same way that an experimental
play is still a play, as is one by, say, Noël Coward, a place will have scenic
processes of elective belonging, as will another. They are simply different.
This can be illustrated by the differences between the places that we
studied in the research that forms the basis for Globalization and Belonging
(Savage et al. 2005). While they are all areas of broadly middle-class culture that
has a degree of ordinariness, they exhibit many cultural and social differences.
This is not the place to repeat those differences (see Savage et al. 2004a, 2004b
in addition), but it can be recognized that different processes (as well as in
some cases similar) processes of elective belonging are performed in each
place. In all cases the media are playing a significant role. As we argued in that
book:

Compared to people’s concerns with their choice of residence, their
schooling, and the kinds of places which they aspired to, there is no
doubt that media use allows significantly more spatial and social diver-
sity for our audiences . . . We have emphasised the way that it permits
the elaboration of an ordinary culture which has widely shared cultural
referents in all places.
(Savage et al. 2005: 179)
It is possible to add to this that the conceptualization of these places
as scenes allows further understanding of the processes of audiencing and
performing that take place in the processes of elective belonging.