ABSTRACT
Of most interest in Sato’s work (at least in terms of the argument set out in this chapter) are the terms used by the bosozoku to describe their activities (eg, the experience of a ‘loss of self-consciousness’; the sense that what they were doing was somehow ‘bracketed off from everyday life’; the feeling that ‘mean-ends relationships were simplified’; and the sense that boso driving involved a different temporal framework than ‘ordinary life’). Sato believes that such feelings can best be accounted for by recourse to Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975) ‘flow concept’. Csikszentmihalyi identified that individuals involved in what he calls ‘autotelic’ activities (eg, enjoyable but highly intense pastimes that can be as diverse as chess and rock climbing) often experience ‘a peculiar dynamic state’, something that he calls the ‘flow experience’. Put simply, this state can be described as a ‘holistic sensation that people feel when they act with complete involvement’:
In the flow state, action follows action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He [sic] experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future. (Csikszentmihalyi, quoted in Sato 1991: 18)
Leaving aside the extent to which this notion of ‘flow experience’ resonates with earlier arguments about the changing nature of postmodern temporality (Jameson’s ‘eternal present’, Wilson’s ‘present orientation’, simultaneity, etc: see Chapter 2), the usefulness of such a framework for explaining crimes rich in excitement and risk is clear. However, might Csikszentmihalyi’s framework have a broader applicability? Consider his ‘six phenomenological characteristics of flow experience’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1975: 38-48):
1 the merging of actions and awareness
2 the centring of attention on limited stimulus field
3 the loss of ego (or transcendence of ego)
4 feeling of competence and control
5 unambiguous goals and immediate feedback
6 autotelic nature.
