One: Stage Canvas Field

First, imagine a stage. A dance.

What do dancers show us? We see bodies capable of difficult performances. If we know a little bit we will be impressed when they make it look easy. The choreography that guides the dancers aims to create drama, to portray bodies at work, to pay homage to past performances and choreographic ideas.

When I watch dance I am always a little envious and I always wonder what it must be like. Ballet can frustrate me because it defines beauty in rather strict ways. I tend to enjoy watching dance that disrupts norms (where it can) while still making use of the ideas and images that come to mind when you hear the word “dance”. I am always confronted by a personality that is performed in the work. One can be very surprised to find out that this personality is different off the stage and when no longer dancing. (How could one be like that all the time?)

Sometimes dance is attached to story and sometimes is abstracted from that. In all cases, attention is brought to bear on the body and on personality. Dance often just refers to dance, something we see kids do just to liven things up.

It is a funny thing that I can say “imagine a dance” and it mean something. After all there are an infinite number of images you can turn to. But that is just it. When we communicate, we turn to a common lifeworld and we can anticipate the sorts of images you would conjure.

My bet is that you would imagine a man and woman at some point working together while working with the word “dance”. Unless I steer you, you probably imagined people who are good at dancing. If you danced often, you likely remembered that. 

(Good blogs have lots of pictures but I want you to investigates which images are ready-to-hand.) 

Now, imagine a canvas. A painting.

There are ideas behind a painting that guide our interpretation of it. The artist knows that the viewer will bring her own ideas to the work. Often an art critic will let a viewer know which ideas are being implemented by a work or at least the critic will throw out proposals or situate the work alongside other projects that are interestingly distinct or similar.

A painting could have a very direct message. There is political and religious propaganda but there are also paintings that draw your attention to a very general theme without a particular conclusion in play. A very abstract painting seeks to move away from that. All paintings bring attention to bear on color, vision, and shape. Paint also often refers to paint. We see kids paint just to liven things up.

When I say "painting" you form an image. You might remember a painting you saw in a museum. You might have imagined someone by his or her self moving a brush on a canvas. There are so many possible meanings at work in the word but we draw from a similar enough set of images to be able to communicate. 

Now, finally, make the stage much bigger. Instead of a choreography, two sets of eleven dancers will be given some rules to keep in mind.

Imagine the canvas is now a green field.

Two metaphors are being mixed but that’s the happy accident that is soccer.

  

The pitch is simple. The rules are simple (sort of). Scoring is simple to understand. One could see this whole game as an abstract work of art. The founders of football took kid's game, combined it with a league that promotes and relegates and then watched what happened. 

I have a lot of the same emotional reactions to art, performance, and sport. Competition is one of the differences that sport poses for the viewer. Artists and performers are in competition for positions and funding but that is not what drives the action and the drama for the viewer. With sport, competition changes the situation. It is why we don't know what is going to happen. There are plans but there are opponents with other plans. 

Now and then a player or a team change our understanding of how the game works. Because there is no script, we are sometimes not sure what has happened. Was the offence too aggressive? Is someone in defense injured? 

The beauty of sport is its ability to generate drama as well as beauty and virtue in ways analogous to art and stage. 

In fact, when we learn how athletes are in the rest of their lives, we are a little disappointed to see the drama lapse. 

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Art, Dance, and Sport have included a tension between their purposes (and there is more to debate there) and markets, social prejudice, and normative expectations. They often defy these pressures and call them into question. They often bolster the strength of these forces.

More people visit a museum than a top-level professional sport in the US. But most Americans would not believe that. No one has figured how to put a museum on television outside of a travelogue urging you to go see it. What a strange situation. Most people who go to museums think less people go than do. 

I am glad that museums do not have artists paint on stage with a winner declared on the spot. (I am very surprised that tv show has not happened yet.) They are organizing a different sort of attention for the viewer. 

In Fever Pitch Nick Hornsby points out the event character of a soccer match. In most plays, you would have failed to conduct a play if something entirely different happened the second time. A daunting amount of skill and resources are put into preserving art over long periods of time. But the same rules (and sometimes the same 22 players) are implemented and, even if the score turns out the same, the game would be very different. 

My goal here is to “sell” this game as an arena in which humanity is presented. Features of humanity are made a theme. The game provokes images that we draw from within and from outside the game. We try to explain what we see and refer to ideas about skill and virtue. “Strength” “Bravery” “Guile” “Fortitude”.

When national teams play, I am always struck by a sentence like “Germany and Poland will meet on the field again.” International matches stoke my curiosity. I want to know how the players relate to their country. Soccer has done a good job visually countering stereotypes about countries. The best Swedish player is named “Ibrahimovic”. Many Americans now know that there are Black Germans or Italians. Hollywood would never cast a Black German actor to play a German or Italian. (Unless you can think of an example.) It is precisely because the team is trying to win that it is willing to ask the public to recognize players, even if they have to learn something. 

                                             Erwin Kostedde 1974

It is precisely the evocative force of soccer that makes me worry about it at points. When I say "soccer" you had an image. If you played, you may remember a game but even then, you are likely to imagine a man running and kicking. I remember while in Germany (before the World Cup there) discussing how many women play in the US and in Germany. A woman at my table said she cannot imagine a woman playing. Americans may be surprised to hear that. Soccer in Europe is often the sport used to make working class boys into working class men. We have a different set of images. Later, I will write about how important men's soccer has been in the development of German self-understanding. I would hate to leave this sort of power in the hands of a bastion of sexual exclusion. 

In this blog, I have no plan to write about why this team wins or this team loses. I also have no plan to say much about the celebrity lives of athletes or how happy or unhappy they are with this or that team. There is already a lot of that. And I am starting to find it repetitive. I also doubt some of it. For instance, I really don’t think the winning team usually wanted to win more than the losing team.

I’m interested in the phenomenology and ethics of fandom and spectatorship. There may be a need to distinguish different types of fandom. A pick-up player watches his friends while playing. A player faces the player he admired as a child. Three billion people watch the World Cup. (In June, the viewership may well exceed the population of the earth during the moon landing.)

In fact, I hope over time you will agree with me that there are a lot wasted opportunities when it comes to discussion about soccer. Most mainstream pundits assume that all fans are men affiliated with a single team. They assume the fans only care about winning. At least they seem to believe that fans want players to set it all aside in order to win. The facts hedge against that. There is nothing inconsistent or foolish about wanting a team to win and wanting it to represent something good.

Claims and Questions

This June, 2014, over 3 billion people will watch the World Cup Final in Brazil. This event will be afforded more attention (of a sort) than any previous event.

Does mass attention mean one ought to watch it if convenient? Does this sort of scale offer at least one reason to watch it?

These are the sort of questions I hope to work with on this blog. At the very least, each entry will consist of claims I find convincing and questions I find compelling.

I will not post frequently. (At least I don’t think I will.) I welcome most sorts of comments. We have not developed conventions that would help a blog be recognized as academically rigorous. I have seen a few that deserve to be seen that way. I will attribute and link as best I can.

In the end, this work is meant to help me reach some conclusions. I also see it as an opportunity to present some ideas that I care about. Eventually I hope to have a full document that I can edit and resubmit to a wider public.

The Main Points

The following claims will sometimes work as premises and sometimes as conclusions. In other words, sometimes I will look at the implications of these claims and at other times I will lay out reasons to believe them:

1. Acts and are interpreted by means of the background behind them. This background consists of images, habits, ideas, beliefs, and arguments. When I use the word “norms”, I am speaking about all of these things.

2. Acts and events are interpreted based on norms of truth, rightness, and expression. For a theory of interpretation and social criticism, I draw largely from Jürgen Habermas. I have replaced “sincerity” with “expression” and will explain that someday. But let's not stop... 

3. Sporting acts and events fall under #1 and #2.

4. Sporting acts and events are meaningful. This means they have the capability to shape the background which is used to interpret other acts and events, in and outside of sport.

5. Critics, by which I mean creative interpreters, can make the meaning of sports acts explicit. They can also shine a light on the background that is influencing interpretation now or will in the future.

Here are a few questions that I plan to bring up soon:

What are the consequences of denying recognition to women as capable of sport or as capable of what I will call “sports glory”?

Soccer will be the most frequent source for me. So much writing on “soccer” is only about men’s soccer in Europe and South America even as it is just called “football” or “soccer”. What are some consequences of this?

A lot of very clever soccer and sports writing just will not include women athletes. Hacks who dismiss or mock women outright are easy to dismiss but what are we to do with those for whom women athletes are simply invisible or always off-topic? What is lost? 

What is the purpose of being a fan? What are some types of fan? Which sorts are morally appropriate? When should a fan walk away from a club?

We can be hostage to images and ideas and arguments that we do not even know are in play. What can be done if we see that people are being denied equal respect due to widespread adherence to bad norms?

What needs to happen to make sport good? Is it merely good if it entertains? Must it be interrupted or steered if it is to promote virtue or social goods? 

Why are sport and masculinity so strongly linked? What needs to happen to de-link them and what sort of consequences could we see when we do de-link them?

What effect does a market have on sports acts, events, and organizations? And vice-versa? 

How should we look the effect art, beauty, and drama can have on institutions? (I will use the term “beauty” to signify lots of aesthetic experiences.) What are the relevant differences between sporting institutions and other organzations dedication to the presentation of beauty, like dance companies, museums, and theaters? 

Why do we need to tie sporting acts to narratives? Why are so many of these narratives NOT about a much of athletes just trying to win?

Well that's exhausting! And, to think, I once turned to soccer as a break from just these sort of questions. It turns out the game is ine world and the world is in the game. 

I am inspired by many things I’ve read and by many matches I have seen. Hannah Arendt will come up. So will Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic justice. In my teaching (mostly introductory college philosophy) and here, I presume no background on the readers' part. You should get all the background you need as we go. Call me on that. 

Again, your comments will be very helpful. 

If you want to see how it's done Jennifer Doyle’s blog From a Left Wing, her journalistic work, and her new blog the Sport Spectacle are magisterial. Most people who check out her work end up archive binging. She makes many points but she is a master at showing how meaning changes when big facets of humanity are not recognizes as capable of producing meaning. I can only hope the fact that my background is different enough from other people writing on soccer that I will generate something distinct as well as plausible.  

From a Left Wing ended with her announcing a need to move on and worried that her critiques end up “feeding the beast”. 

The world is so much worse than it could be. So is the beautiful game. Despite that, I remain confident that peer-to-peer critique can undermine the manipulations of money, power, and privilege. In the long run, conversations will bend the world and the game towards justice.