REFLEXIVE SELF-TALK AND SITUATED FREEDOM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIABILITY: An analysis of transgressive drinking in the diaries of young Finnish adults

This paper analyses narratives in drinking and pub diaries written by young Finns aged 23–35. Drinking occasions in Finland are highly sociable gatherings in which one is oriented towards intensive interaction with one's friends. Thus, in the diaries the writers also reflect upon their expectations, descriptions and evaluations of these gatherings and the sociability they offer. In the analysis we focus on how during these occasions the writers adapt themselves to the perceived expectations of others, integrate these expectations with their own aspirations, or are sometimes compelled to change their aspirations. On this basis, we also pay attention to how this work of reflexive orientation functions to strengthen the expected course of one's own life, or as implying fateful moments, that is, transitions or turning points in the life course. In the analysis we apply G.H. Mead's concepts of ‘I’ and ‘me’. The paper identifies three different kinds of ‘I–me dialogues’. First, loosening oneself momentarily from reflexivity to the collective body of friends; second, binding oneself reflexively to the common will of the group; and third, loosening oneself from group commitments, that is moving towards individual reflexivity and desires. Of these dialogues, the last mentioned contributes most often to fateful activity in which the writers’ life course is at stake. By contrast, the other two more collectively oriented self-talks rather refer to positive peak experiences that give emotional momentum to continue with one's existing life plans.

Finnish media and research usually create an image of intoxication as an uncontrolled condition, increasing an inclination to accidents, violence and disturbing behaviour. In everyday life intoxication is usually seen from a wider perspective. Intoxication is often experienced as an activity that is oriented to sociability by increasing communication and by bringing people closer together. Hence drinking occasions serve as an arena to maintain social relationships, and as instances of evaluation and potential transitions of those relationships.

The article analyses narratives of drinking and pub diaries written by young Finns aged 23–35. The analysis focuses on narratives describing transgressive drinking, by which is meant intoxication-oriented drinking that takes distance to or even violates everyday life's customs and orders. Because transgressive drinking habits accelerate or shake the habitualised orders, they bring out situational preconditions and reflexivity of social action and their routines. As they consolidate or upset the everyday routines of community life, they make social action more reflexive by a kind of exposition. They bring expressively into light the ways that agents reflect on their environments’ expectations of decent sociable behaviour.

Transgressive drinking can be seen as an intersubjective activity needing to be reflexively co-ordinated to make it happen. Transgression as a process can be separated analytically into three phases: an orientation towards action, the realised action, and an evaluation of the realised action. Each phase involves situated freedom, that is, limited freedom to make choices in relation to situational circumstances. From this perspective, the choices the agent makes when acting are not viewed as absolute, but rather as intentions related to the conditions, expectations of action, and as situational resources (Crossley 2001).

Pub and drinking diaries describing transgressive drinking habits offer valuable material for analysing situated freedom and reflexivity of action in social contexts. First of all, drinking in Finland is a social activity in which one orientates to communicate sociably with others (Mäkelä 1982). Secondly, as a data genre, diaries encourage writers towards reflexive ‘self-talk’, both in relation to one's own action and in relation to expectations of others, and the environment (cf. Jokinen 2004). They thereby reveal how an individual makes choices about actions and reflects the situational determinations and cultural expectations around it.

In analysing the situated freedom articulated in transgressive drinking narratives we are, firstly, interested in how the writers reflexively adapt themselves to the expectations of others, challenge these expectations with their own aspirations, or are compelled to change their expectations when something unexpected happens. Secondly, we pay attention to how the reflexivity articulated in the narratives functions so as to strengthen the expected course of events of one's own life-direction or as implying transitions or turning points in it, which, as fateful moments (Giddens 1991), come to signify alteration or rupture.

Diaries constitute important qualitative data based on introspection (Symes 1999). As a subcategory of autobiographies, diaries concretise how the writers double as, on the one hand, an agent conforming to the situation, and, on the other as an agent shaping the situation (cf. Czarniawska 1997: 44). This is apparent when writers look at themselves, or the protagonists of their narratives, from the perspective of others or their reference groups, and evaluate whether the narrated persons (with their communal extensions – friends) are acting morally or not. Makkonen (1993) utters this pithily: ‘In the situation of writing there are two figures, the one that is looking at the mirror and the other that watches from the mirror; the narrator and the object of narration’ (ibid.: 15).

The point at issue is outlined by applying Mead's (1967 [1934]) division between ‘I’ and ‘me’. ‘I’ looks in the mirror and ‘me’ watches from the mirror. ‘I’ is the private and implicit side of the self, its continuity; and ‘me’ are the externally observable social elements of the self, the changing social roles.

The ability of agents to engage in dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘me’ provides them with resources to reflexively change their habits. An agent may, for example, feel embarrassed (I) about having drunk too much in the last months (me) and reflexively decides (I) to change her/his drinking habits (me) by replacing the habitual evening beers with evening jogging (me).

This ability for reflexive dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is based on adopting the viewpoint of the ‘generalized other’, that is, the common expectations of (significant) others that agents internalise during socialisation (Mead 1967 [1934]). The generalised other can be defined as the norms and criteria through which ‘I’ evaluates ‘me’. In the above example the writer's generalised other consequently gives more weight to jogging and other healthy or goal-oriented activities than to drinking.

However, the dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is not based solely on conscious and rational reasoning. Because the self is not wholly transparent to itself, or the generalised other is not fully in consciousness, the reflexive self-dialogue is rather rooted in embodied habits or embodied habitus. By taking influences from Bourdieu's theory on habitus (1984), the agent's behaviour can be seen as routinised in three senses. First, the subject has internalised habits from the environment by actively imitating and cultivating them as competences competences that can also be understood as capital (Bourdieu 1984). Through internalisation, habits become the bodily extensions of a socially acting ‘me’, whereby ‘I’ can act spontaneously and express itself in various social arenas. Secondly, as habits have been ossified as durable routines they become the subject's ‘second nature’. When entangled closely in everyday life, they guide the perceptions, actions and interpretations of ‘I’, as a subconscious and compelling generalised other. Thirdly, habits appear differently in different concrete practices and situations, or fields (ibid.).

By completing Mead's theory of ‘I’ and ‘me’ with Bourdieu's theory of habitus, habits can be seen as resources, part of agents’ practical knowledge, whereby ‘I’ navigates in the world, makes discretionary choices and seeks recognition from reference groups through the action of ‘me’, guided by the generalised other (Crossley 2001: 127).

Furthermore, it should be noted that the subject's habits, life-trajectories and the sense of self as generalised other are in a continual state of dissolution and reconstruction (Crossley 2001). Clearly, agents do not act in a situation solely by following prior made plans or some deterministic dispositions. The diaries show abundant descriptions of writer-protagonists or their drinking company changing their plans or agreeing decisions ex tempore. The diaries make concrete the pragmatists’ theory that in the flow of action, agents need to continuously correct and specify the direction and purpose of their action, and, vice versa, to work upon the habits making up the self (Joas 1996).

Our data consists of 60 diaries, 39 written by women and 21 by men aged 23–35. The diary writers were recruited from the trade union registers of the information technology industry and its service branch employees in the Helsinki metropolitan area. In recruiting middle-class, culturally ‘average’ writers we assumed their diaries would be indicative of more general trends in Finnish drinking habits.

The diary-writer candidates were sent a letter introducing the study and then telephoned to directly invite participation. The participants were interviewed (Törrönen and Maunu 2007a) and informed about the general guidelines for writing the diary. We emphasised that it is good to write the diary in one's own style by using familiar language. We also encouraged them to write in a narrative form, including expectations for the evening out or drinking occasion, the actual course of events, and an evaluation of the evening's progress. Likewise, we told them to write about things related to the evening's main events, such as their and their friends’ feelings, and how their hopes and choices were realised in the course of the evening. Thereby, they take the role of an ethnographer, detailing their own life circles and styles.

It became clear that some writers felt unable to fulfil the commitments necessary to complete the diaries. Men in particular had great difficulty writing the diaries. Therefore, to achieve the target of 60 diaries, we conducted 117 interviews, although the gender balance remained unbalanced. The final material comprised 39 women's diaries and 21 men's, which contrasts with the fact that earlier research gives only scant attention to women's drinking. Completed in 2003 and 2004, the diaries describe all the pub visits and drinking occasions of the diary writers over at least 8 weeks. The shortest diary was 4 pages, the longest 40 pages, with single line-spacing. There were 1,022 narratives (663 written by women and 359 written by men) and their events covered all seasons.

The writing of a diary is a material work that shapes the self and reality through the practices of language. A diary does not reflect the lived life. Rather, with the help of language one organises the lived life, transforms it, and solves its problems (see Todorov 1984: 55).

The diaries’ narrations on the lived life are directed and regulated by so-called ‘autobiographic contract’ (Lejeune 1975). Thereby, the writer tells about their life such that the reader trusts that the narrating self (I) and the main character in the text's social world (me) are one and the same person, whose action, behaviour and experiences the narrator describes as truthfully as possible (see Vilkko 1990: 83). The writer cannot write about everything that occurs, and so chooses the material significant to them. This process of subjective selection and typification is, however, guided by cultural values, classifications and schemas on what is valuable to narrate and the cultural conventions on narrating (ibid.: 84).

The subjective selection process of diary writing was also guided by the fact the diaries were written for the researchers, effectively strangers. We can therefore characterise them as public documents that handle private experiences (Bloom 1996). This circumstance, rather than making diaries feigned or otherwise inauthentic, helps ensure that the writers’ normative expectations become more fully articulated: we assume that the diary-writers have emphasised the expectations and behavioural norms of their culture and their significant others more clearly than in completely private documents. This expectation to present oneself in a positive light to a ‘generalised other’ makes the diaries fertile research material.

A previous analysis of pub and drinking diaries outlined three different drinking habits as being transgressive: heroic drinking, sociable partying and individual partying (Törrönen and Maunu 2007b). Because these drinking habits, as argued above, involve elements of transcending everyday customs and are in this sense transgressive, they require reflexivity from drinkers. In the following, we ask what kind of reflexive ‘I–me dialogues’ they require and promote: how do writers reflect the motives and choices of their action in the course of drinking? How is their action guided by internal and external expectations, and what is their relation? How and when does the ‘I’ interfere with the accomplishments of ‘me’, and when does it recede into the background and merge into the expectations of others?

Furthermore, we ask how different I–me dialogues contribute to the writers’ course of life more generally, either as strengthening the expected way of life or as implying transitions or turning points.

The next narrative by Väinö (a 29-year-old man) depicts a special kind of ‘I–me dialogue’ where one aims to get strongly intoxicated and so experience strong collectiveness (Partanen 1992: 381). We may name this action as heroic drinking (ibid.).

The heavy, transgressive action depicted in the excerpt requires heavy reflexive planning. As Väinö says, it is a traditional event of a group of friends arranged already months before. Although this kind of heavy, heroic drinking is a culturally strong tradition in Finland, Väinö and his friends do not take it as an externally forcing structure but a unique and freely formed tradition. Practically every diary narrative on transgressive drinking displays this kind of personalisation or particularisation of general conventions.

In the action itself, Väinö aspires away from individual reflexivity, a state in which his individual ‘I’ experientially monitors the behaviours of his ‘me’. A salient point in heroic intoxication is the strong transgression from the ordinary and discrete individual experience towards a mutual ecstatic experience. In heroic intoxication, one's own closed body is opened up and melts into a collective bodily unity (Falk 1994). Likewise, the behaviour takes on carnivalistic and excessive features that transgress the boundaries and order of everyday life. This is experienced as a carefree, harmonic and cosmic confluence of the self, community and nature.

The heroic journey towards intoxication may be characterised as mythical. In it, food and drinks are felt strongly as the collective property of the community, a part of the collective body, and they are circulated a lot. Similarly, the stumblings and wiltings that are harmful to the individual, goal-oriented experience are felt as shared, communal experiences. Because the stumblings and wiltings happen beyond the individual's consciousness, it is necessary to reflect on them afterwards. However, this reflection is also more communally oriented than individual. As Väinö says, ‘it is part of the tradition to sit down and discuss the weekend’ before anyone leaves the scene.

At the communal level, reflection is not judging nor aims to change the tradition, but rather is strengthening. The messing around together seems to reinforce the collective togetherness of one's own circle of acquaintances. It adds stories to experiences shared together. Although Väinö loses his memory of many events, the next day the community gives them back, as well as making them part of the group's common collective memory.

In this sense the heroic drinking of the diaries is a collectively organised and ritualistic action, where transgression is finally tempered as part of the culture. Heavy drinking and loss of bodily control occur in strictly defined situations, in the care and arms of close friends. In this sense the loss of control is a reflexive, controlled loss of control.

In the diaries, heroic drinking is practised only by five diary-writers, three men and two women. They write that they drink in a heroic way only seldom, a few times a year. The more common drinking habit is so-called sociable partying, dealt with in the next chapter.

From the viewpoint of male-writers’ lives and identities, freeing oneself momentarily from reflexivity by heavy drinking seemed to strengthen the masculine bonds among significant male others by giving immemorial moments for their communion. Although women may be in the situation also, their role as written up would seem to be to facilitate and take care of men's drinking, as Väinö's narrative implies.

For women-writers’ lives and identities, the climaxes of heroic drinking appear more ambivalent and fateful. For example, Jutta (a 25-year-old woman) says in her diary that she likes to get really drunk a few times a year during public holidays, because ‘you don't have to try to behave but can mess around as the person you really are’. In practice, however, Jutta does not reach this objective. For example, at a Midsummer's party Jutta's partying ends with vomiting: ‘everything consumed during the evening came flying out onto the table in the bedroom upstairs’. For the men who drink heroically, such losses of bodily control can glorify their manhood or are laughed about the next day. Women's ‘I's do not feel the same cultural affinity to their ‘me’ freaking out and heavy drinking. For their ‘I's, the messing around appears the next day not as admirable but as morally dubious. Jutta in her narrative negotiates with her reference groups about the shameful deed of her ‘me’. She reproaches herself for carelessly having too many drinks and being unable to clean up her vomit. In addition, she moralises about her friends who also puked up and categorises this year's Midsummer party as tolerable by naming it a ‘Midsummer of teenagers’ (Törrönen 2008). By this categorisation, we interpret that Jutta wishes to see overly uncontrolled intoxication as part of an outdated adolescence, against which she expects to drink more sophisticatedly in future.

The following narrative of Kaisa (a 25-year-old woman) describes a special kind of ‘I–me dialogue’ where transgression aims not to freeing oneself momentarily from reflexivity but is directed towards intensification and maintaining of the group's common will; a joint state of intentions with a shared and agreed direction, which is the main objective of sociable party drinking.

In her story, Kaisa puts great expectations on partying after a trek, which is legitimated by the theme ‘return to civilisation’. The great expectations are visible especially in the evaluation of the evening. In the same context she also brings out the typical goal of a drinking situation of sociable partying. In her action, Kaisa aspires to the group's common will, a condition in which ‘we are going to have a stupendous good time the whole night, we are all going to be just drunk enough, and everyone's going to chat, say funny gags endlessly’. However, the group is not able to maintain this state, for which reason Kaisa's narrative reflects on what went wrong. Kaisa's narrative exemplifies the pragmatists’ theory that the role of the ‘I’ in action is to monitor the situated activities and serves to reconstruct them if they do not run as anticipated (Joas 1996). However, what is interesting here is that the monitoring function of the ‘I’ in sociable partying seems to be functional to the collective action, and not the individual's private ends.

In her narrative Kaisa conversely expresses what sociable partying and generating of a common will requires of the group. In Finnish partying, the creation of the common will begins typically with friends or intimates meeting at home, in a pub, in a terrace or in the park. After that the group normally moves over to another pub or nightclub. Kaisa's group succeeded well in these early phases. Nevertheless, the common will gained begins to flag as the partygoers wilt one after another. Second, the spontaneous and laid-back atmosphere of the bar is ruined by ‘teenagers’, who make noise, stumble, and behave crudely. In addition, the partygoers do not gain an appropriately shared state of intoxication. These three factors narrow the partygoers’ situated freedom for experiencing collective communion.

These three factors – the energy level of the group, the settings of action and the level of intoxication – also differentiate the ‘I–me dialogues’ of sociable partying from the ‘I–me dialogues’ of heroic drinking. First, in sociable partying, the ‘I’ does not melt into the group's ecstatic experience, but its reflexive capacity to monitor the individual's deeds in relation to the group's shared activities remains in force.

Second, the settings of sociable partying are usually public and not private places, as in heroic drinking. This, too, encourages the ‘I’ to be reflexive since you cannot stumble and lose bodily control as in private drinking settings.

Third, an important dimension of the reflexivity between the individual and the group is to control intoxication. Creating, intensifying and maintaining of the common will requires controlled drinking. To preserve the cohesiveness and flow of the common will as well as its energy and unidirectionality, bodily control cannot be surrendered to the community, as with heroic drinking. If in heroic drinking the ‘I’ fuses with the collective body, by temporarily trespassing beyond societal norms and the monitoring ‘I’, in sociable partying the ‘I’ remains in the sphere of shared mood and intentions (cf. Mäkelä and Virtanen 1987).

Sociable partying facilitates climactic moments that revitalise and reinforce social bonds among friends. Therein, proceeding from individual moods and status-oriented competition to a common cyclic and well-matched time takes place progressively. During the evening the group will also try to do things together, following the same rhythm, by respecting the dynamics of present company.

Sociable partying is the most basic transgressive drinking habit among young adults. About one-third of the diary narratives represent sociable partying, forming part of all diary-writers’ life practices. Both men and women experience sociable partying usually as unproblematic. The ease of sociable partying is due to the distinct type of sociability it embodies. In sociable drinking, the patterns of everyday life are not broken, but concentrated. As this concentration takes place around easily accessible activities such as dancing, talking or playing party games, the experience of togetherness is a reward not requiring excessive effort.

There appears, however, some differences in men's and women's reflexive ‘I–me dialogues’. Men's reflexivity tends to focus on overcoming the immediate setting of interaction by anticipating later events. Men seem to imagine drinking as a journey with a specific goal. Women's ‘I–me dialogues’, in turn, tend to foreground the immediate interaction with the environment by completing the settings or by being completed by the settings (see Irigaray 1996; Välipakka 2003). The proper sort of drinks, music style and successful cooking and eating all act as essential ingredients in tuning women-writers to a party feeling. Men's pursuit of comprehensive experience by transcending the situations encourages risky behaviour moderated by the charm of intoxication. Among women the transformation of everyday life into a party happens more flexibly, less by drinking and more by a stronger interaction with the present social texture (Törrönen and Maunu 2007b).

Furthermore, in sociable partying, women-writers reflect more than men on the group's composition and their friends’ emotions. They may ponder intently the question of who must be invited to the party and who should stay away to allow the group to smoothly enter the common will. They may be concerned in advance about someone coming to the party and who often behaves indiscreetly when drunk. And if a friend seemed to be lonely during the evening, they may express a sense of guilt in their evaluating stories about excluding them (Törrönen 2008).

These examples and Kaisa's narrative above illustrate typical troubles in sociable partying, which are related to problems in the dynamics of the group's common will. Sometimes the troubles lead to fateful moments, as the diary-writers, for example, understand that they cannot have fun with the group any more. This encourages the writers to reflect on their social relationships, and, consequently, to change their social circles.

The next excerpt from Ilkka's (a 30-year-old man) diary describes a special kind of ‘I–me dialogue’ where a partying person does not bind oneself to the group's common will:

Ilkka's narrative exemplifies the drinking habit of individual partying. In individual partying the reflexivity of ‘I’ is emphatic and is sometimes entangled in severe contradictions. Because activity is powerfully guided by individual desires and aspirations, there appear no clear rituals for starting and ending, as in heroic drinking and sociable partying.

Ilkka's ‘I’ is in the narrative haunted by two kinds of tensions. First, Ilkka would like to be a good father to his son Panu, and not take him to the bar. However, Ilkka is not able to keep up this role model but takes the son into the bar in the company of his vermin friends. Ilkka feels ashamed for being a bad example, for drinking himself and letting his son see the boozing of the riff-raff. Second, Ilkka feels bad for having been dumped by Krisse. He wants to drown this bad feeling defiantly by getting heavily drunk, a desire that he, however, manages to stave off. He goes to the training drunk, and continues drinking in the bar. Though he would like to and his friends entice him, he does not stay in the bar into the small hours. In addition, at home he decides to have sober days to get himself back in shape.

The later stories of Ilkka's diary show that he has difficulties solving these life riddles. Although he decides to abstain from drinking for longer periods and to find a woman, by reflecting on his action, he cannot reach these ends. He still feels confused. He tries to correct his state of affairs by sipping homemade wine alone at home weeknights and gradually he realises that he is continuing the boozing in the pubs on the taboo days on weekdays. He continues to reflect on his action with an increasingly gnawing moral hangover, but he cannot find a way for his reflections to lead into agreeable action. This keeps him nomadic, though he manages to spend several days without drinking.

However, individual partying can be positive and captivating. There are diary writers who take pleasure in being able to change their company on the move, by following their own fancies and feelings. In this case their sociability turns out to be more sporadic, fragmentary and light compared to sociable partying, which is distinctive for consolidating established friendships.

For men, following desires often manifests as a hunger for sexual experiences. For example, for Teuvo (a 27-year-old man) the pubs and parties appear as hunting grounds where he can prey on a drunken woman who he can persuade to have a one-night stand. The women, in turn, may be out for feedback on their uniqueness through their appearance. For example, for Inkeri (a 28-year-old woman) the pub life offers a reflection on whether she is sexually attractive or not. She changes her company during the evening according to whichever company offers the most interesting single men. After a successful pub evening she looks at herself in the mirror the next day and notices: ‘I am happy with what I see. Yesterday I got a lot of compliments concerning my appearance which was fairly cheerful. The feeling is nice when you are satisfied with your looks. [It also] significantly influences the success of the evening’.

These examples show that individual partygoers do indeed reflect on their action a lot. The reflection is ongoing and most anticipations and real-time activities are subsumed to it. And since their reflection is highly motivated by individual desires, with flexible and light bonds with collective ties, the action of individual partygoers appears as drifting and irregular. In individual partying, the private ‘I’ dominates various expressions of the social ‘me’, or, the private I rewrites anew the narrative of the ‘me’ each time its private intentions change. If the ‘I’ is satisfied with the action of his/her ‘me’, this produces the journey of a Maffesolian, postmodern hero-subject (e.g., Maffesoli 1995). But the hero can also become a lonesome cowboy, if the flux of intentions is cut loose from the protective connections with social conventions, shared rhythms and a collective time of communal life. This may produce a vicious circle that draws the individual ever deeper into a private world of imaginary and fantasies, and may degenerate into addictive behaviour (Törrönen and Maunu 2007b; Törrönen 2008).

Among diary-writers there are three men and five women who practice individual partying. For about a half of them, the individual partying gives pleasure and strength to their lives and identities. But for the other half, of which Ilkka's narrative is an example, individual partying changes gradually or slides from climactic moments to fateful moments, whereby drinking brings complications to the fore and if the individual does not take the complication seriously and does not start to change course, their drinking may take on more and more addictive features.

It is interesting that diary-writers participate reflexively in all the above-described drinking occasions and master them as a second nature or – if they do not practice them by themselves – identify and understand their logic with their cultural competence. Thus, different drinking habits cannot be explained solely by their practitioners’ class, nationality, gender or other structural identity category as is typical of previous studies on drinking cultures (see Maunu and Millar 2005).

Our analysis reveals interesting variations between the ‘I–me dialogues’ and the different drinking habits matching the expectations of the forthcoming action, in the action itself and in the evaluations of the realised action. Before the action, the agents’ ‘I’ anticipates the expected sociability reflexively, in each drinking habit. In heroic drinking and sociable partying reflexivity is directed towards reconciling the expectations and aims of ‘I’ and the social group. When orienting themselves towards these drinking situations, agents reflexively consider aspects like time, company, quantity and settings of drinking. In individual partying, reflexivity probes the individual's own wishes, hopes, and aspirations. Therefore, the agents’ expected bonds with the festive company can become either fragile or flexible.

Within action itself, there appear interesting differences in reflexivity, too, that give space for different kinds of situated freedom in drinking habits. In heroic drinking, the reflexivity of the ‘I’ is momentarily weakened to the extreme as the drinker drinks to go beyond consciousness. This legitimises the drinker to do things that would be improper in the context of everyday sociability, such as crawl, vomit, or kiss the same sex. In sociable partying, the same kind of situated freedom is not possible. The agent does not have the freedom to drink ceaselessly but the ‘I’ is expected to be present to ensure the individual stays on the same social wavelength as the others and is able to talk, play board games, dance, etc. In individual partying, the situated freedom is focused on personal desires or private problems, with the reflexive ‘I’ occupying front stage in social situations as the individual devotes him- or herself spontaneously or painfully to seeking different possibilities for action. Reflexivity may be highlighted by a desire for a partner, a wish to role-play or contradictions of the personal life.

In post-evaluations of drinking episodes, there appear significant variations in reflexivity, as well. In heroic drinking, as the action has carried the agent beyond consciousness, reflexivity has a collective character and it serves as a vehicle for returning and tempering the action back to a part of the memory of the agents and the collective. On the other hand, if the individual is dissatisfied with his or her being unconscious in the first place, as in our diaries heroically drinking women tend to be, reflection can become more individualistic and lead to changes in one's drinking habits.

In sociable partying, post-evaluations often remain implicit. When the activities run as anticipated, there will be no need for the ‘I’ to reflect the celebration of the ‘me’. But in cases in which the expectations are not fulfilled, or there appear problems in celebrating, reflection afterwards gets an important renovating function. This may have several purposes. The agent may, for example, aim to reconstruct the unrealised expectations for forthcoming festive situations; seek to change her/his social circles; or to learn from his/her mistakes and grow up to his/her personalised ideals.

In individual partying, post-evaluation has important personal functions. Because the agent's reflection does not follow in individual partying the externally observable time the of group and the shared sociability it embodies, but rather is defined by the internal, associative time of the individual mind, it is difficult to differentiate the evaluations from the anticipations and choices-in-action of the ‘I’. In other words, in individual partying expectations, action itself and their evaluation blend together.

We may characterise the sociability of heroic drinking as masculine and archaic. The sociability of sociable partying, in turn, resembles Simmel's ideal of pure sociability (1949) with some elements from Durkheimian theory of sociability (1965 [1915]). While partying together with friends, it is important to carry out the collective ritual together by focusing on common will and avoiding personal issues and status-competition. The sociability of individual partying, in turn, comes close to what Maffesoli (1996) calls tribal collective bonds which may be characterised as sporadic, flexible and temporary. According to our diaries, one does not experience them always as ecstatic. Sometimes they appear highly confusing and depressing.

It is also quite intriguing that in different drinking habits and logics of sociability the agents take different advantage of cultural, everyday life and group conventions. In heroic drinking the agents’ intentionally break everyday life conventions, overturning them in a transgressive and carnevalistic manner (Bakhtin 1968). Because heroic drinking has been a long legitimised tradition in Finland, this overturning of everyday life conventions is culturally accepted, and in many groups of men even recommended, as Väinö's narrative illustrates. In sociable partying, the conventions or everyday life sociability are not meant to break. Rather, they are followed and even condensed so that they would ease the best the individuals’ transition to the common will of their intimates. We can say that sociable partying is transgressive in the sense of transgressing the pursuit of individual ends but not in the sense of transgressing the conventions of everyday life sociability that mediate action. Thus, as there is always a need in heroic drinking to reflect on drinking before and after the actual drinking session, the same does not hold for sociable partying. When sociable partying goes well there is no need to reflect on its social logic and conventions, but rather on the individual's adjustment to them.

In individual partying, the agent leans on her/his own individual habits instead of collective customs. Because of this, in individual partying the reflexivity of ‘I’ is emphatic. The agent may experience action as unchained from social ties and thus feeding her/his own choices of desire and interests. The diary narratives of individual partying provide for the interpretation that the individual's freedom from group responsibilities may appear as an attempt at transgression. But because the individual self does not want or is not able to bond with shared socio-cultural realities through the ‘me’ (and through the shared conventions it carries), the reflexive ‘I’ is in a constant threat to only chase its own tail. As this kind of action is in danger of drifting outside the society and its common social and cultural conventions, it may obtain features of obsessive neurosis and open up space for addictive behaviour if not taken into serious reconsideration (cf. Giddens 1991).

Regarding fateful moments in individuals’ life-trajectories, heroic drinking and sociable drinking in general seem to offer peak moments and far lasting emotional energy to carry on with one's ‘chosen’ life path. These ways of drinking are habitual not only for the individual but also for the group that has a shared history. If these kinds of drinking occasions fail, the individuals usually aim to improve the conditions of sociability so that future sociable occasions would generate more confident peak experiences. Individual partying, instead, appears in the diaries as a more ambivalent activity. For some diary-writers individual partying serves individualistic peak moments. It strengthens their self-identity as they reflexively seek attention for their uniqueness from others. For some diary-writers individual partying changes from peak moments into fateful moments. Individual partying may give them temporary pleasure but in overall it starts to threaten to destroy their self-identity by loosening their social bonds to others, whereby their practices for sociable partying or heroic partying also become difficult to maintain and pursue. Then, the individual partying that first appears as willingly chosen turns into a fate which is hard to reclaim.

The text is part of the project ‘Changes in the cultural position of drinking’ (project no. 118426), funded by the Academy of Finland, Research Programme on Substance Use and Addictions 2007–2010.

Jukka Törrönen, with a PhD in sociology, has a chair as professor at SoRAD on social alcohol and drug research. He has had a long-term interest in alcohol and drug research, in theoretical sociology and in qualitative methods. His recent and ongoing work has been focused on (a) disorderly public drinking, moral regulation and the new social and political control programs, on (b) the restaurant/pub, social control and young adults’ drinking cultures, as well as on (c) changes in the cultural position of drinking. Recent publications include: Törrönen, J. (2001) ‘The concept of subject position in empirical social research’, The Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 31(3): 313–30; Törrönen, J. (2002) ‘Semiotic theory on qualitative interviewing with stimulus texts’, Qualitative Research 2(3): 343–62; Törrönen, J. (2003) ‘On the road to serfdom? An analysis of Friedrich Hayek's socio-political manifesto as a pending narrative’, Social Semiotics 13(3): 305–20; Törrönen, J. (2004) ‘Zero-tolerance policing, the media and a local community’, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 5(1): 27–47; Törrönen, J. and Korander, T. (2005) ‘Preventive policing and security plans. The reception of new crime prevention strategies in three Finnish cities’, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 6(2): 106–27; Törrönen, J. and Maunu, A. (2007) ‘Light transgressions and heavy sociability: Alcohol in young adult Finns’ narratives of a night out’, Addiction Research and Theory 15(4): 365–81.

Antti Maunu is doing a PhD in sociology in the University of Helsinki. His study analyses nightclub partying as interplay between individual experiences, small group dynamics and general cultural conventions. His fields of specialisation are intersubjectivity, individualism, theory and history of sociology, and qualitative methods. He is co-author of several articles on drinking cultures and motivation and regulation of drinking. These include: Törrönen, J. and Maunu, A. (2005) ‘Going out, sociability, and cultural distinctions’, Nordisk alkohol- & narkotikatidskrift 22 (English Supplement): 25–43; Törrönen, J. and Maunu, A. (2007) ‘Whilst it's red wine with beef, it's booze with a cruise! Genres and gendered regulation of drinking situations in diaries’, Nordisk Alkohol- och narkotikatidskrift 24(2): 177–99.