Sport and popular culture: The temporary triumph of process over product

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the question of pleasure in popular culture. Specifically it discusses the pleasures involved in the consumption of sport, and the role heroes, as figures for identification, play. The analysis draws on three separate elements; Richard Dyer's concept of Utopian sensibility, Roland Barthe's concept of jouissance and Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque. It is argued that because it is a form of performance rather than an artefact, the sport event, at its best, represents the temporary triumph of process over product, the moment when the spontaneous inspiration of performance escapes, fleetingly, the tendency of capitalist commodity production to transform all such cultural processes into calculated packaged objects for consumption. Sport holds out the possibility of remaining playful, of grasping pleasure and of holding reality at bay.