Chloe Young
It all started with shimmering bodies, a sweaty room, and the strobe lights of my favourite club.
The glitter we had meticulously applied in my bedroom, just hours before, had sunk its way down the faces of my friends, the result of our bodies being pressed up against other sweaty strangers. Coming into the club from the street outside, you’d be hit with a nauseating wave of sweat, vodka, and a sickly warmth that’d cling to your hair. Disgusting. And yet… Magical. As I had looked around the room, I’d found myself wondering where else such unfamiliar bodies would collide and become one sweaty blur. Where else would I not only let a stranger’s sweat fall on me but choose to let it in the pursuit of joy, pleasure, and fun. What I didn’t know then, as my body thrashed around in time with the music, was that these questions would set in motion a PhD trying to understand the self we become in the night-time economy.
My passion for nightlife cannot be separated from a youth spent sneaking into pubs and clubs in my small town on the Welsh border. Armed with a fake ID and whatever alcohol I could steal from my mother’s cupboard, I knew even then that there was something unique about the world of nightlife. That it offered me something magical. Something new. Something different.
And, most fascinatingly of all, that I was different.
Even now, I can recall the smell of the first bar I snuck into. With just a whiff of the perfume that I used to wear at that age, something fruity and sweet with a twinge of burnt popcorn, I’m transported back to the sticky aftertaste of spilled booze and sugary beer. See, the club itself that had a certain smell built into its four walls… The synthetic scent of a low budget fog machine and its chemical haze reaching across the room, mingling with the aroma of too many spilled vodka cranberries. No matter how many times the floor must have been cleaned, the sour sugar had etched itself into the floorboards.
Then there were the human smells. Sharp floral undertones fighting against the unescapable stench of sweaty body odour. When you’d first walk in, the smell was a strong and almost unescapable stench. But, over time, the smell would encompass you until it was barely noticeable anymore. You’d become part of the messy throb of bodies until the question of whose sweat was whose was simply impossible to answer. The sweat would bead on brows, soak shirts, and blend into a mix you couldn’t distinguish yourself in. You could smell the heat radiating off our skin as the bodies packed in tighter, the music seemingly louder, and any traces of perfume long gone. Disgusting? Magical? Both.
See, I loved the “Night-Time Economy” (NTE) before I even knew what this term meant. While there is no standard definition for the NTE, this is a label given to a wide range of nightlife sites such as pubs, bars, clubs and their associated services. Despite all the label encompasses, the phrase has most often been used to refer to the economic activity of the night-time city. However, the NTE is so much more than an economy, and I ask whether something is missed when we attempt to bound and define the space through its commercial activity.
Instead, could the sensory elements of nightlife allow us to better understand the NTE and its happenings within? Would we better capture the NTE by understanding it as an affective atmosphere where normal daily life comes to be suspended for a moment of ‘in betweenness’ (Turner, 1967)? Thinking about the NTE in this way, beyond its bounded and regulated zones (Newton, 2015, Philpot et al, 2019) paves the way for an understanding of nightlife as a social arena both made up of and producing embodied experiences evoking shifts in behaviours, identities and relationships with risk. Is nightlife really just made up of disconnections and continuities with our daytime subjectivities?
Nightlife spaces are, to borrow Durkheim’s term, socially and sexually effervescent places. The environment, often loud and electric, offers ‘possibilities of pleasure, excess and gratification” (Measham, 2004, p343). And, most importantly, it primes bodies to behave in certain ways. But how?
This is where affectivity comes in.
Affectivity refers to the realm of the unconscious and of the passions, emotions, and moods that all play a role in shaping our world around us. Conceptualizations of affect allow us to go one step beyond what is merely felt and make sense of the unconscious realm. Vague, and yet often incredibly intense, affect is thus the sensation that a feeling then expresses (McCormack, 2008). McCormack offers us the perfect example of affectivity… we know how a room of dancing bodies feels before we could begin to put the sensation into words or assign it a feeling.
Affects can layer upon each other to create an atmosphere that, “like a haze” (Bohme, 1993) radiates from and through individuals. This haze is contagious and fills a space in a way that spreads and induces moods, relations, and behaviour that align with the atmosphere, rather than any personal morality. As such, the crowd can be brought closer together, both emotionally and in proximity, in the formation of an imagined community (Anderson, 1983). A community built upon the stickiness of sugary mixers and a sticky floor that won’t wash out of your shoes no matter how hard you try. But, also, the stickiness of an affective atmosphere that sticks to, and with, those within it.
‘Getting lost in the crowd’ is a phrase we’ve all heard before and feels apt here. Both for how individuals tune into the affective flows around them in the NTE, but also how a ‘day self’ can be lost in the NTE and replaced with our new ‘night-self’ with a new set of tolerances, desires, and ideas. See, nightlife venues can be vibrant, exciting, and electric – the perfect place to get “lost” in… and this isn’t something that just happens by accident. The deliberate usage of lighting, décor and music contribute to engineering an affective atmosphere (Tan, 2013), which in turn affects rhythmic relationships between bodies and their wider spacings (McCormack, 2008; Tan 2013).
These affective atmospheres don’t exist outside of the bodies experiencing them. Picture walking into an empty club. You’ve timed it wrong. Or maybe you’ve picked the right time but on the wrong night. The music is still loud, the lights still flash… but it’s not the same. This space needs bodies within to ‘warm it up’ (Duff and Moore, 2015) and create the atmosphere that, ironically, those very bodies are craving by going to a nightclub.
The way I write about, and photograph myself and my friends in the NTE, suggests it is a magical place of community, excitement, and affirmed identity. Which it can be… but isn’t always. It is no secret that the space is saturated with reports of violence, sexual assault and drug use. It’s then not surprising that the NTE is commonly thought about as a place of victimisation and violence.
There is no denying the dangers, darkness, and risk of the NTE, and any attempt to diminish this would be naïve but could also risk misunderstanding something incremental about nightlife…For, the pressing question is: why do we still go despite the potential risk and danger? Or…is this risk part of the attraction? Does it hold a seduction because we don’t always find this elsewhere? In suggesting risk becomes part of the allure of the NTE, is worth noting here that there is an important distinction to be made between feeling uncomfortable in a space and being unsafe (Nicholls, 2019).
For example, I’d feel extremely uncomfortable on a bungee jump at a great height- but would not actually unsafe (as long as I’m properly harnessed in that is!) So, despite the great waves of adrenaline pulsing through my body as I’d leap off the edge, I wouldn’t be in any danger. This distinction is important. Even the most reckless of adrenaline junkies who seek the thrill of “living on the edge” take actions to minimise the level of danger they put themselves in through a range of risk mitigation strategies. See… you can’t enjoy the thrill if the thrill kills you. Thus, when thinking about thrill seeking in the NTE, it is crucial that such behaviours involve the night-self losing control – in a controlled manner. Or, losing control but only temporarily (Briggs and Turner, 2011).
The controlled loss of control materialises across nightlife. This is not just in the risk-taking behaviours within, but in the way we let our bodies move, interact and leak. Outside of sports events, there are few places where a body may “leak” like they may in a nightclub, revelling in its sweaty form without becoming out of place. Bodies are typically expected to be bounded and any bodily materials that threaten this (tears, sweat, blood, urine) have come to transgress the edges of acceptability. While there is nothing inherently disgusting about these fluids, the sweaty, smelly, unbounded body has been cast as something inappropriate in our social spaces today. But not necessarily for the night-self…
I always make sure to pack deodorant in my bag when going into the PhD office, scared to get caught out or be “smelly”. Yet, despite much more skin exposed and adrenaline induced sweat, I’d never bother to cram such a thing into my handbag when going clubbing. In the office, deliberate attempts are made to reduce the possibility for sweating through air-conditioning or architectural design (Waitt, 2014), but the NTE offers a unique thermodynamic environment and a very different set of norms about sweat itself. Pennay (2012) suggests that club spaces provide individuals with the chance to be grotesque and ‘occupy an uncivilized body for a night: to grin like a fool; to laugh too loud; to sweat it out on the dance floor; to flirt outrageously; talk well-meaning shite to strangers; feel sexual, carnal and exhilarated” (Jackson, 2004, p. 123 in Pennay, 2012). Crucially, this idea of “sweating it out” and being “sexual” challenges the conditions that people usually face in regulating their bodies to maintain a “professional” image. Perhaps then, people seek out the NTE not in spite of its so-called ‘grossness,’ but because of it; sweaty bodies in the NTE are liberated to leak, sweat, ooze, but most importantly, to interact with other bodies and their fluids outside of gendered bodily structures. So, reflecting on my opening story, maybe that is why I don’t mind other bodies sweating on me as I dance, hair stuck to my face, arms up, and glitter rolling down my cheeks.
Then the lights come on. The air feels heavier, and the smell of danger loiters in the corners of the club as bodies fight their way to pile out onto the street, each on a mission to get a taxi or find a chip shop still open. The music, replaced by a chorus of drunken shouts, rings in your ears as your sweaty clothes cling to you like a second skin you can’t shed. The air outside is like a slap to the face as your body is hit with reality carrying on outside of your night. Someone’s laughing… Someone’s crying… Someone’s throwing up. Sweat begins to dry down your back as your skin still hums from the vibration of dancing bodies, the smell of quickly stagnating and stale clothes. The sound of bare feet slapping along the pavement rings out as shoes are kicked off for the walk home, wet hair dripping with a concoction of spilled drinks, tears, and sweat. The taste of makeup sliding off your faces, leaking its way down onto white tops that had been carefully chosen and spritzed with perfume just hours before. The leaky, messy, dripping body… Free. For tonight at least.
Nightlife offers us something truly unique, and the chance to be unique. The NTE is magical, scary, and extremely messy… but also special. Trying to understand the NTE through a bounded and overly sober approach would be to neglect what makes nightlife what it is and why it plays such a big role in sociality today. As continue to research the “Night-self” and its affective capacity, allure, subjectivity, tolerance, and vulnerability, I hope to make sense of the NTE in a way that speaks to a truth about the space that has been so often overlooked… That the night-time economy is so different to any other space precisely because we’re different within it.
References
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Bohme, G. (1993) ‘Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics’ Thesis Eleven 36: 113-126
Briggs, D., & Turner, T. (2011). Risk, transgression and substance use: An ethnography of young British tourists in Ibiza. Studies of Transition States and Societies, 3(2)
Duff, C., & Moore, D. (2015). Going out, getting about: atmospheres of mobility in Melbourne’s night-time economy. Social & Cultural Geography, 16(3), 299-314.
Jackson, P. (2004). Inside clubbing: Sensual experiments in the art of being human. Oxford: Berg
McCormack, D. P. (2008). Geographies for moving bodies: Thinking, dancing, spaces. Geography Compass, 2(6), 1822-1836.
Measham, F. (2004). Play space: Historical and socio-cultural reflections on drugs, licensed leisure locations, commercialisation and control. International journal of drug policy, 15(5-6), 337-345.
Newton, A. (2015). Crime and the NTE: multi-classification crime (MCC) hot spots in time and space. Crime Science, 4(1), 1-12.
Nicholls, E., & Nicholls, E. (2019). ‘People Don’t See You if You’re a Woman and You’re Not Really Dressed Up’: Visibility and Risk. Negotiating Femininities in the Neoliberal Night-Time Economy: Too Much of a Girl?, 207-252.
Pennay, A. (2012). Carnal pleasures and grotesque bodies: Regulating the body during a “big night out” of alcohol and party drug use. Contemporary Drug Problems, 39(3), 397-428.
Philpot, R., Liebst, L. S., Møller, K. K., Lindegaard, M. R., & Levine, M. (2019). Capturing violence in the night-time economy: A review of established and emerging methodologies. Aggression and violent behavior, 46, 56-65.
Tan, Q. H. (2013). Flirtatious geographies: Clubs as spaces for the performance of affective heterosexualities. Gender, Place & Culture, 20(6), 718-736.
Waitt, G. (2014). Bodies that sweat: the affective responses of young women in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Gender, Place & Culture, 21(6), 666-682.
Sensory Criminology 