Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity

Being in the Zone

Tim Jordan, Brigid McClure, Kath Woodward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367875114
• eBook ISBN: 9781317288152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Being in the zone' means performing in a distinctive, unusual, pleasurable and highly competent way at something you already regularly do: dancing or playing a viola, computer programming, tennis and much more. What makes the zone special? This volume offers groundbreaking research that brings sociological and cultural studies to bear on the idea of being in the zone. There is original research on musicians, dancers and surfers which shows that being in the zone far from being exclusively individualised and private but must be understood as social and collective and possibly accessible to all. The zone is not just for elite performers.

Being in the zone is not just the province of the athlete who suddenly and seemingly without extra effort swims faster or jumps higher or the musician who suddenly plays more than perfectly, but also of the doctor working under intense pressure or the computer programmer staying up all night. The meaning of such experiences for convincing people to work in intense conditions, often with short term contracts, is explored to show how being in the zone can have problematic effects and have negative and constraining as well as creative and productive implications.

Often being in the zone is understood from a psychological viewpoint but this can limit our understanding. This volume provides the first in-depth analysis of being in the zone from social and cultural viewpoints drawing on a range of theories and novel evidence.

Written in a stimulating and accessible style, Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity: Being in the Zone will strongly appeal to students and researchers who aim to understand the experience of work, creativity, musicianship and sport. Issues of the body are also central to being in the zone and will make this book relevant to anyone studying bodies and embodiment . This collection will establish being in the zone as an important area of enquiry for social science and the humanities.

Part I
The social and cultural inside the zone

1
Introduction

Brigid McClure, Tim Jordan and Kath Woodward

What is ‘being in the zone’ and why is it important?

A conversation about this question started in a corridor, as friends and now co-editors discussed how experiencing a period of ‘being in the zone’ in a particular activity was a recurring anecdote told by salsa dancers, boxers and computer gamers – who they had respectively researched and/or been. It quickly became evident that a common feature across these anecdotes was an inability to articulate the experience; as people spoke about their own experiences or recounted stories they had read or heard, it was clear that they knew how ‘being in the zone’ felt yet, crucially, struggled to specify or describe what it was – asking them to explain further nearly always led to vague responses or simply more stories. There were other features in common across these stories, such as a sense of extraordinary competence and effortlessness, often accompanied by strong feelings of surprise, pleasure and a strong desire to repeat the experience. There were also many references to a shift in awareness, although in contradictory terms, of both intense awareness and a lack of awareness.

Pursuing the idea of ‘being in the zone’ further, it became apparent that it is only extensively analysed in two types of literature, one academic and the other popular, and both these types are focused primarily on psychological and individualized interpretations. The academic literature derives almost entirely from Csikszentmihályi’s concept of flow, which has had a profound effect on how the idea of ‘being in the zone’ is understood. His concepts will be covered in more detail in subsequent chapters (see Stenner’s chapter in particular). However, for the purposes of this introduction we can understand flow as a state in which an activity – which could be sport, music or indeed any kind of activity – is conducted with an intense focus, in which awareness and activity are connected and a sense of self-consciousness is lost, control seems easy, time feels altered and the activity is its own reward (Csikszentmihályi 2002). Even in such a condensed rendering of Csikszentmihályi’s idea of flow it is clear that his focus is on the individual consciousness within the zone. In this paradigm, ‘being in the zone’ is understood as a psychological rather than psychosocial, and an individual, rather than social, phenomenon. It was clear early on in our conversations as sociological and cultural analysts that this psychological focus on the self and its experiences was worth questioning.

The second, more popular, type of literature is somewhat parasitic on the idea of flow but has developed in the form of ‘how to’ guides to ‘being in the zone’, particularly focused on achieving high performance in sport. Again the ideas here are focused on how to elevate the individual into a particular state of performance whilst undertaking an activity. The narrow focus on an individually-based understanding of ‘being in the zone’ in this more practical context seemed odd to us. After all, dancers, boxers and gamers are inconceivable without their relations to others, to social settings and to the cultures of their activities, so how can such a social and cultural phenomenon be understood primarily as an individualized and essentially psychic experience?

An initial note at this point is needed; writing and reading ‘being in the zone’ becomes repetitive and from this point on in this introduction and in the following chapters we will generally use the shorthand of bitz. Sometimes as we define concepts and ideas further this will need to be expanded and explored but from now on the term bitz should be read as the experience of ‘being in the zone’.

Among the many anecdotal accounts we heard about bitz across different activities and settings, there was frequently a sense of the extraordinary, where a familiar practice such as playing tennis or dancing is experienced at an unexpected and previously unimagined level of performance. One of the dancers quoted by McClure in Chapter 8 describes this as ‘existing in the envelope that pushes at the edge of capability’. There are instances where bitz seems to be spontaneous and what distinguishes the experience is a feeling that everything, and everyone, comes together; we heard such stories about the creativity of improvised jazz performances when musicians play off each other as well as together in memorable moments. Here, unexpected but nonetheless perfectly synchronized sounds are produced which become iconic and unforgettable, such as in the case of the Bill Evans Trio at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1968, as described by Hagberg in Chapter 10. These moments can be described as magical and unforgettable and, although they take place in the present moment, leave traces which inform future experiences and influence what is possible.

These examples illustrate both a sense of surprise or unplanned-ness, and the feeling of ultra-competence. But there are also other features of the experience which seem common yet oddly contradictory across different stories of bitz. For example, a sense of effortlessness might be described in terms of feeling powerful or relaxed, or a sense of transformation in both environment and self might be described in terms of intense awareness, or a distinct lack of awareness by filtering out surrounding activity from one’s perception. This sense of transformation frequently seems to involve a radical shift in sound perception, such as the experience of silence despite the roar of a crowd, or the ability to pick out intricate details from a complex musical landscape. Different sensory capacities may be in play depending on the specific activity but, in general, experiences of bitz are thoroughly embodied and feature heightened sensation. People often describe simultaneously experiencing an intense awareness of their physical self – of individual muscles or the quality of each breath – and a strong sense of connection to others in the same environment, whether an audience or co-producers of the experience such as team-mates and opponents in a sporting context. Finally, the unexpectedness of bitz was often matched by a sense of surprise when returning to a more normal state of awareness; for example, computer programmers who suddenly realize a whole night has passed and the sun has come up while they have been intensely writing computer code, or a sportsperson who is amazed at what they have just achieved.

The stories we were hearing reaffirmed our belief that bitz is a compelling experience, which offers intense pleasure and leaves in its wake a trace or memory of something ineffable and a strong desire to repeat the experience. Understanding that bitz is both a deeply felt experience and a highly motivating one is crucial to understanding many other things, from the bleeding feet of ballet dancers, to the intense immersion of boxers, to a cultural worker’s sacrifice of economic security for excitement or creativity, and more, all of which are discussed in this volume. As we became aware of the recurring themes of surprise, competence, transformation and desire to repeat, we again felt strongly that these could not be understood simply as individual or internal psychological experiences. Ideas such as competence can only be understood by the social and cultural norms of the practice; a world record that is measured in time gains meaning from wide cultural norms of time and from the specific criteria of each sport. Even a moment of silence in a musical performance gains its meaning from the environment it appears within, pointing outside the self to the surrounding context. Bitz is a hinge between an intensity of affect, which is often recounted as being deeply interior to someone’s subjectivity, and social structures of work and play that are increasingly intermingled. It is through bitz that many people are often working harder and more intensely for less financial reward.

The present collection of analyses, arguments and reflections on bitz was born from these early discussions and a growing conviction that current analyses are too narrow, and that experiences of bitz are important enough to warrant a deep and critical engagement from scholars across the breadth of the social sciences and humanities. We do not mean to deny or reject outright existing psychological accounts; rather we are asserting that these analyses fail to incorporate social and cultural forces which, we argue, are crucial to understanding the phenomenon of bitz. Some of the chapters in this book explicitly make the case for theorizing the relationship between the psychological and the social by offering psychosocial accounts of bitz. Personal experiences can be collective and are always set within a context in which social, economic and other similar forces are in play: just as identity connects individuals and their perception of self to wider society, bitz is always relational, involving connections between people, places and things, and social as well as individual capacities.

Boxing, for example (see Woodward’s chapter), is not an arbitrary set of practices, but is subject to careful and detailed guidelines about the acceptability of some punches and the unacceptability of others. It promises excitement for the spectator but demands discipline from the participants, who must comply with regulatory and cultural demands, even during an experience of bitz. Fans and participants often rehearse boxing’s heroic narratives, yet contemporary debates often centre around whether or not the sport is too violent. After fights in which there are disputes about damage experienced by individual boxers, the rules are invoked and we are reminded of which practices are deemed legitimate and which are not, such as hitting below the belt, or the referee failing to stop the fight, as, for example, in the Chris Eubank Jnr versus Nick Blackwell fight in March 2016 when Blackwell suffered a bleed on the brain. The bodily practices of boxing which enable experiences of bitz are acquired through rigorous training regimes, and even those features that seem distinctive to an individual, such as Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope technique made famous in his Rumble in the Jungle defeat of George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, are also culturally situated. The sport is also situated in a wider social context, in that boxing is often associated with migrant and impoverished people, especially men, who seek self-respect through boxing and a route out of social exclusion and poverty. This example of boxing illustrates how meanings are made and experiences shaped in particular contexts and at particular times, and how experiences of bitz are similarly spatially and temporally situated and sited in specific sets of body practices, all of which are subject to social and cultural forces.

From network to book

This book is not created just from corridor conversations between friends, however high a value we give those. The Open University funded two exploratory meetings which enabled us to identify the questions we felt needed addressing and the importance of those questions, as outlined above. This led to the formation of a research network funded by the British Arts & Humanities Research Council. The network held four meetings which drew a wide range of scholars together, with many different areas of expertise, but all of whom were for the first time directly addressing the issue of bitz in their particular domain of work. Each meeting was themed, with the first on cultural labour, the second on sport and the third on music, while the final meeting drew these threads together and confirmed the intention to collaborate on a book which would seek to engage scholars across a range of disciplines.¹

While not all participants in the meetings have been able to contribute to this volume, all contributing authors attended at least some of the meetings. We have since discussed, argued about and changed our ideas through ongoing dialogue with each other. This is important as all those involved had expert knowledge of particular kinds of practices, from surfing to waitressing, but at the start none of us were primarily bitz researchers. We all brought expertise and then re-examined what we knew to help understand bitz and to further understand our own domains of thought. We began the volume with the common starting point of exploring the cultural and social dimensions of bitz, along with a recognition of the importance of bitz because of its intense and compelling nature. We hope you will find the individual chapters that follow important in their own right, but there are also interesting themes which emerge and weave throughout the volume, and we now draw your attention to three of these themes in particular: pleasure and pain; action, actors and actants; and methods.

The experience of bitz often involves pleasure and pain and yet, at the same time, it seems to complicate or transcend this dualism. Wellard and Pickard’s chapter conjures the image of the bleeding toes of trainee ballet dancers, describing how dancers subject themselves to the pain of formal dancing styles and intense practice in order to achieve what appears to be – yet is anything but – effortless grace of movement. Here bitz incites the transcendence of this pain, because of the desire for the transformational experience when physical factors such as tiredness or pain are felt to disappear. Many of the following chapters will examine the intensity of bitz which transcends in a fundamental way what pleasure and pain mean. What are usually distinct and clear experiences of pleasure and pain – such as the burning in the lungs of high physical effort or the pain of contorting the body to be creative, through to the delight felt in smoothly achieving success – are rendered indistinct. Bitz may involve both pleasure and pain at the same time, but in such intermingled and highly intense ways that the feelings of ‘pleasure and pain’ lose their original meanings and are replaced by something else.

Some experiences of bitz are more about being on a roll, when everything just seems to work, such as the examples in Pettinger’s chapter, which are taken from the restaurant business. Paid work can provide some of the harmonious qualities of bitz, for example when the tiredness and pain of working in a restaurant disappears during a good shift when the equipment works well and the team cooperates in such a way that everything goes smoothly. Other examples in this book emphasize the contradictory experience of pleasure in pain, as in the experience of dancers or of boxers. Boxers sometim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• PART I The social and cultural inside the zone
• PART II The zone in the social and cultural
• Index