All sports are reactionary?
Maybe...Was this implied by Walter Benjamin's point about the modern Olympics and their attempts to revive the Greek festival in order merely to submit athletes to the test of the apparatus. Olympics are compared to the "Industrial science of Taylorism that employed the stopwatch to analyze minutely the bodily actions fo workers for the purpose of setting norms of worker productvity." (cited in Susan Buck-Morss' Dialectics of Seeing, p. 326). Buck-Morss writes that what the modern revival of the Olympics produces are the conditions not for competition, but for the test.
But even so, the spectacle of the World Cup has called up an entire imaginary world of conflict and competition for me -- and in so doing reminds me of what we would like competition to be -- the collective reconciliation of justice in the fantasy of granting the prize to absolute merit beyond question. That would be a collective victory.
But the nineteenth century promotion of prizes, as Pierre Bourdieu has amply demonstrated are the tools by which the bourgeoisie extended its dominion over the fantasy life of art as well as sport.
But even so, the spectacle of the World Cup has called up an entire imaginary world of conflict and competition for me -- and in so doing reminds me of what we would like competition to be -- the collective reconciliation of justice in the fantasy of granting the prize to absolute merit beyond question. That would be a collective victory.
But the nineteenth century promotion of prizes, as Pierre Bourdieu has amply demonstrated are the tools by which the bourgeoisie extended its dominion over the fantasy life of art as well as sport.
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Though I too would like to think that sports are a collective celebration of merit and their just rewards, I cannot help but find a flair for fascism in this collectivity. Whether we look to the overt racism shouted by audience members at team members that has been widely reported of late, or the nationalism it breeds (for example, in Germany, though of course this nation's historical relationship with the World Cup is not at all simple, cf. _Das Wunder von Bern_ and Fassbinder's _Die Ehe der Maria Braun_) or the interpersonal exchange of insults and violence that so frequently happens on the ground. All of this leads me to believe that though the players may rejoice in the awards of their merit, it's not a wholly pretty affair...
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