‘Media events’ reconsidered: from ritual theory to simulation and performativity

This paper re-examines the long-established notion of ‘media events’ by contrasting and critically appraising three distinct approaches to the question of media events. These are: ritual theory associated with Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, secondly, Jean Baudrillard’s approach rooted in his notions of simulation and ‘non-events’ and, finally, the more recent performative approaches to media and mediation. I take Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s reading of media events presented in Life After New Media (2012) as exemplary of the performative approach. An argument is made that the accounts of media events offered by performative approaches add very little, and, indeed, lack the critical insightfulness of the earlier approaches. Both ritual theory and Baudrillard’s thought are briefly reappraised and, against Nick Couldry, I try to show that these accounts are not characterised by binary and reductive thinking. The major misunderstandings concern the nature of the sacred and profane dualism and the further dualisms developed in Baudrillard’s thought, particularly the figures of implosion and reversibility. Finally, Baudrillard’s position on technology is addressed and the paper concludes with the suggestion that his account is not solely negative, since technological developments are not only at the mercy of ironic reversals they may also enable new rituals of disappearance

Revolution and the end of history: Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest

Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, written and performed very soon after the Romanian revolution in 1990 and performed both in London and Bucharest, is a dynamic, inter-cultural play that represents a variety of perspectives on the revolutionary events, as well as oscillating between English and Romanian cultural and language coordinates. It has a peculiar topicality in its detailed and specific usages of different aspects of the revolutionary narrative, its sketches of family life before and after the revolution, and the inclusion of the revolution as reported in quasi-documentary-style testimony. The perspective in this article is one that places the play within a framework that thinks through Mad Forest’s relationship to the triumphant, neoliberalist heralding of “the end of history,” most famously argued by Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 article of that name. This discourse gained further confidence from the collapse of Eastern Europe, a collapse that was viewed by proponents of the end-of-history argument as signalling the permanent disintegration of communism and a victory for capitalism. However, Mad Forest is considered here as a play that reflects multiple perspectives on the revolutionary period and, while declining to provide political solutions as such, simultaneously refuses to accede to the implications of the end-of-history argument

Modern ‘live’ football: moving from the panoptican gaze to the performative, virtual and carnivalesque

Drawing on Redhead's discussion of Baudrillard as a theorist of hyperreality, the paper considers the different ways in which the mediatized ‘live’ football spectacle is often modelled on the ‘live’ however eventually usurps the ‘live’ forms position in the cultural economy, thus beginning to replicate the mediatized ‘live’. The blurring of the ‘live’ and ‘real’ through an accelerated mediatization of football allows the formation of an imagined community mobilized by the working class whilst mediated through the sanitization, selling of ‘events’ and the middle classing of football, through the re-encoding of sporting spaces and strategic decision-making about broadcasting. A culture of pub supporting then allows potential for working-class supporters to remove themselves from the panoptican gazing systems of late modern hyperreal football stadia and into carnivalesque performative spaces, which in many cases are hyperreal and simulated themselves

Unravelling social constructionism

Social constructionist research is an area of rapidly expanding influence that has brought together theorists from a range of different disciplines. At the same time, however, it has fuelled the development of a new set of divisions. There would appear to be an increasing uneasiness about the implications of a thoroughgoing constructionism, with some regarding it as both theoretically parasitic and politically paralysing. In this paper I review these debates and clarify some of the issues involved. My main argument is that social constructionism is not best understood as a unitary paradigm and that one very important difference is between what Edwards (1997) calls its ontological and epistemic forms. I argue that an appreciation of this distinction not only exhausts many of the disputes that currently divide the constructionist community, but also takes away from the apparent radicalism of much of this work

Terrorism, governmentality and the simulated city: the Boston Marathon bombing and the search for suspect two

This article examines the online circulation of a photograph of the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings taken by David Green, a Boston Marathon runner. The photograph fortuitously captured an image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger Tsarnaev brother, running from the scene. Initially, Tsarnaev went unnoticed by online message board users and FBI investigators – he was just another face in the urban crowd. However, after he was identified as suspect two, he emerged in the photograph as the figure of terror, the condensed embodiment of the spectacular attack, and thus as a spectre, a figure whose appearance in the archive of the past haunts the future. The author examines how this spectral emergence simultaneously reveals the attack terrorism launches against everyday mediations and how everyday mediations respond to terrorist spectacle. He argues that photography sustains vernacular practices that also support the practices of urban governmentality. Understanding urban governmentality thus requires attending to the urban archive of visual mediation in which the relationships between past and present, image and reality, and surveillance and spectacle are always contingent and open to revision

Digital play and the actualisation of the consumer imagination

In this article, the authors consider emerging consumer practices in digital virtual spaces. Building on constructions of consumer behavior as both a sense-making activity and a resource for the construction of daydreams, as well as anthropological readings of performance, the authors speculate that many performances during digital play are products of consumer fantasy. The authors develop an interpretation of the relationship between the real and the virtual that is better equipped to understand the movement between consumer daydreams and those practices actualized in the material and now also in digital virtual reality. The authors argue that digital virtual performances present opportunities for liminoid transformations through inversions, speculations, and playfulness acted out in aesthetic dramas. To illustrate, the authors consider specific examples of the theatrical productions available to consumers in digital spaces, highlighting the consumer imagination that feeds them, the performances they produce, and the potential for transformation in consumer-players

"Oh! What a tangled web we weave": Englishness, communicative leisure, identity work and the cultural web of the English folk morris dance scene

In this paper, we consider the relationship between Englishness and the English folk morris dance scene, considering how the latter draws from and reinforces the former. Englishness is considered within the context of the cultural web; a tool more often applied to business management but linked to a sociological viewpoint here. By doing so, we draw the connections between this structured business model and the cultural identity of Englishness. Then, we use the framework of the cultural web and theories of leisure, culture and identity to understand how morris dancers see their role as dancers and ‘communicative leisure’ agents in consciously defending Englishness, English traditions and inventions, the practices and traditions of folk and morris, and the various symbolic communities they inhabit. We argue that most morris dancers in our research become and maintain their leisured identities as dancers because they are attracted to the idea of tradition – even if that tradition is invented and open to change