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

The X Factor Enigma: Simon Cowell and the Marketization of Existential Liminality

In this paper we take a cultural perspective to understand the success of Simon Cowell’s X Factor TV talent show and its various brand extensions which, we suggest, epitomize the new marketing priorities of the media convergence era. We seek insights not from formal theories of marketing management but in the myth and magic of Cowell’s enchanted TV presence as the mystical authority, the trickster figure, conducting a mass-mediated experience of Turner’s (1969) ‘existential liminality’. Detached from formal rites of passage, this simulation of liminal ritual, temporarily and symbolically, subverts formal social barriers and opens up for the contestants the possibility of transformed identity. We suggest that X Factor viewers partake both vicariously and actually in this marketized experience of existential liminality. We review literary as well as anthropological antecedents of the media role Cowell personifies and we critique and extend previous applications of Turner’s work in marketing and consumption to suggest a wider resonance beyond the exemplar of X Factor in a range of ordinary, as well as extraordinary, consumption phenomena

Empty Architecture and Empty Urbanism: the Remaking and Reframing on Contemporary Beijing

The paper discusses a collage and montage understanding of modernity and argues that Beijing offers a contemporary simulacrum of the global system of sign values that is epitomized by the new CCTV headquarters and more directly mirrored in the Beijing World Park. In reading Beijing this way, the paper suggests that the city, as well as the global audience to which its spectacle architecture is addressed, is suffering an identity crisis in which our built environment has been reduced to series of signs. It discusses the architecture of the CCTV headquarters, then Beijing World Park as the miniature of Beijing, and finally how the slogan of Beijing Olympics 2008, “One World! One Dream!”, helps to read the contemporary architecture in Beijing as a symbol of the city's – and through the city, the government's – view of itself as a new world leader. It begins by placing this argument in a particular social, political, and economic framework – the attempts of the current Chinese authorities to position the Chinese economy, and its major cities, at the heart of the contemporary capitalist economy. These attempts, it is suggested, involve a more or less literal attempt to outstrip the city which throughout the twentieth century epitomized that system, New York