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Analysing Media Sport • 27

labelling a look ‘girl next door’. However, having a look that catches the eye involves
an immediate impact outside of meaning.
For Massumi (2002: 24), ‘the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap be-
tween content and effect.’ There is no logical connection between the intensity of
an image’s effect and the structural qualities of the image. Affect neither resides in
images and words, nor is it something that an audience brings to them. According to
Grossberg (1992: 82), it is the ‘unrepresentable excess which can only be indicated’.
To focus, therefore, on the level of meaning of images and words is to neglect the
intensity of the event of their expression. We could think of affect as the ‘gratu-

itous amplification’ (Massumi 2002: 27) of the intensity of certain words, images or
sounds for some people.

Analysing the Spectacle of Sport III: the Affective Power
of Media Sport

To consider the affective aspect of media sport, it is necessary to move beyond semi-
otic or discourse analysis to take account of an embodied response to the mediated
spectacle of sport. The approach taken by Kennedy, Pussard and Thornton (2006) in
their study of London’s campaign to host the 2012 Olympic games was to combine
discourse analysis with autoethnography. Ellis and Bochner (2000: 739) defi ne auto-
ethnography as ‘an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays mul-
tiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural’. Kennedy et al.
(2006) collected impressions, images and texts from the campaign, including a series
of representations of athletes leaping over, on or off famous London landmarks, that
can be viewed at http://www.london2012.org.
Kennedy et al. (2006: 8) were surprised by their responses to the spectacle of the
London 2012 bid campaign: ‘despite some of our own criticisms of the Olympic
Games’ overt corporate and elitist practices and values, we were inexorably drawn
into heartfelt conversations regarding the bid.’ By adopting an autoethnographic ap-
proach, the researchers were able to record their experiences of being ‘sucked in’
to the spectacle, a sensation that made it matter to them in spite of their intellectual
reservations. They noted patterns and gaps in the discursive formations that were
being constructed in the ‘Leap for London’ campaign, working in a cycle of observa-
tion, recording, theorisation and retheorisation that is the hallmark of critical (auto)
ethnography (Ellis and Flaherty 1992; Thomas 1993; Van Maanen 1988).
Discourse analysis showed that the images were characterised by the absence of
a fully articulated message. The images brought together incongruent elements—for
example, the black wheelchair basketball player Ade Adepitan appeared to be taking
a shot at an imaginary basket at the top of Nelson’s column (the landmark nineteenth-
century monument to the British naval hero Admiral Nelson in Trafalgar Square,
London). Kennedy et al. (2006) observed that the image drew together discourses