Events & The Consumer as Performer

Dr Matt Frew

Lecture Format Experiencing Events: a Review The Time of the Neo-Tribe Welcome to Performativity Performing Identities & Events

The Experience Economy - Post-industrial world Experiences are the new 4th offering; Attention is all - experiencing everything

Consumer culture: Driver of experience exonomy; world of affluence; consumersim - an ideology where the consumer is not

king; fulfilment through experiences? Problem of hyper-consumption

Symbolic Meaning A history and world of the sign - events mean something Conspicuous consumption and the erosion of the old

master identities identities of display and domination Events - a cultural field of competing cultural capital

Experiencing Events: a Review

Authenticity: Modernity to postmodernity problem Authentic (true, real and orignial) experience or staged authenticity

Aura to Commercial construct - disneyworld replicas

Enchantment & Alienation: Weber to Ritzer - McDonaldized experience Time of Cathedrals of Consumption - reenchantment and glass cage of gazing frustration

Experiencing Events: a Review

Accelerated Experiences: Technology - modernist utopia or dystopia An MTV’d world - technological dreamscape; distance

and time overcome Tantalized and caught in a distilled vortex of

voyeurs - frustration produces purchase

Resistance: moral panic; deviant, hedonistic and anarchic youth; a case of objectifying and normalising identity or

fluid, shifting, unstable postmodern identity (Bauman, 1996);

from bricolage to detournement’ resistance - a way forward but managed?

Experiencing Events: a Review

Events - point to an increasing prevelence of neo-tribalism Michel Maffesoli - the energies or dynamic of the social world

is ‘imaginal’ interlinked via romaticism, sentimentalism, emotion and imaginary;

Builds on Weber’s disenchanted world and argues for ‘postmodern reenchantment’ via ‘magic, charm, vision, appearance’ (Maffesoli, 1996: 57)

Shift from Promethean values to Dionysian - from logic and values of rational work and progress to logic and values of emotional renewal, collective effervescence and reenchantment (Evans, 1997)

Live in ‘The Time of the Tribes’ (1995): Not a fixed entity, group or organizational whole but a

mind set that congregates around aesthetic taste or lifestyle preferences.

Aesthetics of body and dress, multi-faceted hedonism, ephemeral communities of consumers and fragmented friendship networks - postmodern sociality

Events reflect aesthetic, sensory hedonism an expressive individuality with collective but brief sense of belonging - ‘the resurgence of festivals of a strong orgiastic composition’ (1995: 153)

The Time of the Neo-Tribe

Performativity (Bourdieu, 1991; Butler, 1999) - more than just words and corresponding actions

The ‘illocutionary force’ is ‘not bound to the person or the words themselves’ (Poupeau, 2000: 80) but highlights the power bound to cultural fields, their institutions and representatives

Reflects an individual’s ‘habitus that recognizes and defers authority and legitimacy to those officials, practitioners or experts within the field… A form of historical faith is triggered as the words and institutional authority of the speaker is recognized producing acquiescence of actions or practices’ (Frew, 2007: 65)

Performativity is spatially specific; we magically conform and perform in word and deed - priest/parishoner/church, , teacher/pupil/class room, trainer/client/gym

Welcome to Performativity

Events - places of neo-tribal postmodern sociality and performativity:

Sociality, the sense of being with and part of others in a ‘crowd’, is expressed through performativity, the expressive use of the body to act out learned

practices. (Critcher, 2000: 159)

Not an anything goes process as they imply ‘the legitimate body and the legitimate use of the body’ (Bourdieu cited in Jarvie and Maguire, 1994: 193).

Events - performative spaces that legitimate experience

Experiential new suits - ephemeral magic moments; expressive effervesent hedonism

Performing Identities & Events

Events: sites of contemporary lifestyle identities ‘a freely chosen game’ of ‘active consumers whose choice reflects a self-constructed notion of identity’ (Bennett, 1999: 607)

Neo-tribal, performative opportunities where expressive hedonism is legitimated - a self-regulating and perpetuating experiential spectacle

Externalisation where consumer is also the producer - performative ‘experiential consumption’ as neo-tribal event consumers ‘consume an experience which they help to create’ (Critcher, 2000: 159)

Experiential Events: a future Experience economy is legitimated, contained and

professionalised Challenge is to continue to facilitate orgastic

performative experience While addressing fears over experiential performativity -

tantalizing through the taboo; experiential Frankenstein?

Performing Identities & Events