Edgework
Steven Lyng
Why do people jump out of airplanes? Bungee jump? Engage in other “extreme sports?
What constitutes edgework? Lyng makes use of Thompson’s concept of edgework to explore voluntary risk taking.
All of these activities involve a clearly observable threat to ones physical well-being or one’s sense of ordered existence. It negotiates the boundary between sanity and insanity, order and disorder, form and formlessness. Tests the limits of mind or body.
All involve the use of specific capacities or skills. This unique skill is the ability to maintain control over a situation that verges on complete chaos. Avoid being paralyzed with fear and focus ones attention.
Some could argue these folks are buying into the illusion of control.
They do not like placing themselves in situations they do not have control over- Gambling, carnival rides.
SENSATIONS REPORTED-
1. Self actualization, realization, determination
2. Fear- short, gives way to a sense of exhilaration and omnipotence. Having survived the challenge, one feels able to deal with any threatening situation.
3. Altered perception and consciousness- highly focused as they approach the edge. Time can slow down or speed up.
4. Feeling of oneness with objects.
5. Hyper-reality- freefall is much more “real” than everyday existence.
6. Ineffable.
Your author draws on two theorists to get the job done explaining this, Mead and Marx.
With Marx, he talks about how work life has become boring and meaningless. We are estranged from work as a creative activity. The workplace has become a site of over socialization- a process where the social world has become reified. The work world is over determined.
Learned helplessness.
Absence of Control.
Spontaneity and meeting unmet needs must be found in leisure. Edgework serves to maintain illusion of control, mastery, and spontaneity.
As a form of experiential anarchy, edgework involves circumstances that simply cannot be negotiated by relying on internalized institutional routines.
In a social world in which large numbers of people perform their day-to-day routines either through forced concentration or mental detachment from the task at hand, the automatic innate character of forced attention in edgework is unique.
Mead- The immediacy of the danger makes the roles, the mes drop away, all is left is the experience of I. Not in the future nor the past, living intensely in the body in the present. Not worried about identity.
“A type of experiential anarchy where the individual moves beyond the realm of established social patterns to the very fringes of ordered reality.”
The mes are the ordered reality where we experience our selves as objects. Removing the mes is to remove the culturally bound reference points for evaluating experience.