ABSTRACT
I always felt like I was made for clubbing and I was stuck in Norfolk. I feel like I still haven’t done the clubbing that I need to do . . . I still feel like I haven’t got where I wanted to be. (Giselle 2000: 5, 16)
I suppose I was in the place at the right time, when a scene was beginning and part of the things that I did, helped to establish it. (Chuck 2001: 10)
When you’re clubbing, it makes you feel privileged to be young; you feel like you’re living the youth culture where you’re participating and giving to the youth culture, and that’s quite powerful, because there is an awareness of how much of the future lies in our hands. (Clare 2000: 22)
These quotes of clubbing participants portray clubbing as a highly meaningful biographical experience. As the last chapter demonstrated, not all interviewees of this study linked the biographical signifi cance of their clubbing to such notions of self-realization and achievement. Interviewee Yong envisaged his clubbing and drug experiences as a step towards becoming an artist. Sally, another interviewee, mainly evoked meanings of luck and coincidence rather than achievement in accounting for changes in her life through clubbing and drug taking. It is one thing to evaluate certain events and experiences in terms of their relevance for biographical changes; it is another thing to measure them against the ideals and dreams of achievement, or to view them as part of an active accomplishment of what appears to have been a goal all along. By emphasizing self-realization, clubbing experiences came to be framed as what I shall call ‘projects’ of the self. Taking as its starting point four in-depth case studies drawn from the interview data generated in the context of this study (see the introductory chapter), this chapter compares several such examples of how clubbing experiences were narrated as ‘identity projects’. It delves into the question of the signifi - cance of such projects, in particular, whether these can be seen along the
lines of an investment orientation or learning mode to life indicative of the social positioning of certain middle class strata in the UK.
