sports
Modern sociological theory has explained mega spectacles as amplified frames of consumption. Blending these aspects of sports entertainment and tourism with retail promotion, mega spectacles are connected to several other theoretical frames such as megaevents, new consumption forms Gott Diener, new forms of hyper-consumption, consumption subcultures, and spectacle economies.
Mega spectacles have also been examined as an expression of a larger Bakhtinian societal carnivalization. This literature is underpinned by an assumption concerning the experiential basis of mega spectacles as spaces of pleasure and fun. To use Collins’ words, sports mega-spectator events are interaction rituals in which the participants crave the feeling of attending a successful ritual organized to facilitate the production of strong emotion in an environment that can be amplified by body contact.
Among the crowd. From this vantage point, sports mega spectacles look like markets of spontaneous pleasure. By spontaneous pleasure, we refer to something similar to jouissance, translated as enjoyment or satisfaction that is realized immediately in situ.
Present constructions of mega spectacles sustain a shared ideology that viewers do have heightened jouissance while in these environments, and we had hoped for these dynamics during our multi-decade study of motorsports mega spectacles. We hoped to observe extreme instances of spontaneous enjoyment in the forms of carnivalesque practices, public inebriation, raucous defiance, fighting, intermingling of genders, classes, and generations, and sexually displayed participation.
We also hoped to discover action in Goffman’s sense participants engaged in risky, consequential, and fateful actions that enabled them to demonstrate ‘character’ by voluntarily taking on danger and risk.
Mega Spectacles and the Absence of Spontaneous Enjoyment
The theoretical perspectives on sports mega spectacles based on spontaneous enjoyment most emphatically are those drawn from Bakhtin’s analysis of Rabelais’s writings. Bakhtin constructed the theory of the carnivalesque to analyze transgressive genres, sexual freedom, and celebratory roles of medieval feasts, festivals, and carnivals. Most theorists understand mega spectacles as contemporary expressions of carnivalesque activity that serve the same social purposes as classic carnivals: revitalizing social energies, releasing pent-up sexuality, defusing aggression, and allowing alienated spectators to feel, albeit temporarily, liminality and communities.
We hoped to observe extreme instances of spontaneous enjoyment in the forms of carnivalesque practices, public inebriation, raucous defiance, fighting, intermingling of genders, classes, and generations, and sexually displayed participation. Others speculate mega spectacles as big-scale carnivalesque events that give participants a temporary second life to offer a respite from the repressive strictures of the first life of work, school, and church. Lastly, some theories of the carnivalesque consider it more of a repressive than an emancipatory social force and construct sports mega spectacles as an instrument of elite social control. This darker perspective on carnivalesque spaces replicates Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, wherein spectacles divert spectators with rapidly transitory pleasure while immersing their consciousness in ideology.
Motorsports Mega spectacles as Trophy Markets
To unsophisticated onlookers, NASCAR races, motorcycle rallies, and other motorsports mega spectacles might easily seem like enormous schemes for marketing, distributing, and selling themed merchandise, a grand touring flea market full of transient vendors peddling the motorsports circuit. The built environments of these sports mega spectacles were designed for commerce. At large motorcycle rallies, primary traffic thoroughfares, crossroads, and parking lots were converted into vending areas. Leases on prime commercial space in downtown Sturgis, South Dakota, needed to be vacated for August and repurposed as retail space for Rally vendors since the rental revenue from the ten-day Rally far outweighed that of the remainder of the year.
Large clubs, restaurants, and bars subleased merchandising stalls in front of and within their buildings, stacking vendor upon vendor in a rather disorganized mess. Recent legal battles over the application of the Sturgis registered trademark on clothing have highlighted the massive size of the market in themed T-shirts, motorcycling jackets, and other clothing as low-cost, mass-produced souvenirs of outlaw biker culture. The Rally retail sprawl radiates out from Sturgis to cover the entire western half of South Dakota, and rally-branded gear is available at watering holes for hundreds of miles in every direction.
Trophies and the Sociology of Envy
The sociology of trophies has its roots in Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he posited that trophy hunting and trophy display are the defining economic pursuits of elites. Trophies began as spoil wrested from defeated foes after the battle and represented the ‘prowess’ of combatants as evidence of their exploitative superiority. Since constant exhibitions of excellence in combat, athletics, argument, and combat were hard and expensive to maintain, trophies were desired as long-lasting and transportable indicators of excellence.
Trophies were warehouses of valor, storage batteries of exploitative excellence demonstrated in earlier contests that are exhibited to gain prestige when not engaged in the honorific activity. Trophies relieve pressure on the need to demonstrate prowess, literally permitting possessors to rest on their laurels. In capitalism, Veblen contended, all property acquires trophy value, representing prowess, superiority, and prestige.
The Mediating Role of Legends in Trophy Markets
Here, we detail how mega spectacle trophy markets, replete with disruptive objects imbued with envy potential, connect to their legends. Legendary stories and images of scenes of spontaneous pleasure are the main revenue-generating assets of mega spectacles. Legends are a capital fund that is accumulated when spectacular events are produced and tapped when mass-produced, geographically dispersed trophies are imbued with potential envy.
Trophies are seldom charged directly in the immediate moments of sports mega spectacle. Rather, every successful production of a spectacle contributes to a legend fund, and trophies are indirectly charged as withdrawals from the fund. The jealousy that disrupts observers of trophies stems from their knowledge of the mega spectacle’s capitalized legend – its fund of stories and images of spontaneous enjoyment – rather than from their awareness of the particular event given by the trophy holder. In the co-determination of legends and trophies, trophies are energized by mega spectacles but not always in them.
Conclusion
This piece theorized markets for a unique type of commodity trophies of excess enjoyment. Sociological explanations of sports spectacles have framed them as spaces for experiential consumption of thrilling diversions and amusement but brief moments of bought enjoyment that ideologically trick those who consume them.
We recognize that mega spectacles peddle pleasure that their visitors pay admission to experience a space of mythic pleasure. It is the timing, place, and character of that pleasure that is in question. The mega spectacles we researched had muted in-venue pleasures and unexpected levels of image-making and shopping. Visitors did not merely leave through the gift shop but arrived through endless trophy markets whose commerce suffused their every waking moment. We witnessed so much action shunted from instantaneous gratification to trophy hunting that we had no choice but to approach mega spectacles through this new prism.
To make sense of the patterns we’ve noticed, we studied spectacles as economic circuits of surplus-enjoyment trophy-making instead of sites of ideologically charged consumption. This is a complicated circuit that breaks into some inter-related moments. Mega spectacles yield events that orchestrate envy-worthy legends of effortless enjoyment. Being quasi-rituals, these events generate
moral energy, some of which is not wasted in immediate jouissance but is rather passed on to trophy objects as potential envy. Markets are made available for participants who search for these trophies of status, action, and jouissance. Trophy hunting for what will best symbolize the event’s envy-provoking legend is the main thrust of the activity.