Sport as Performance

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2001

Sport is a form of game. In games we waste time, energy, and ingenuity on pointless and childish tasks. Even the most performance-oriented game remains unproductive. It is all show, a display of excellence for the sake of excellence in activities that are completely irrelevant to life. That which is not, or is no longer, important for "real" life is precisely that which is boisterously celebrated: physical power, skill. Some suspect that there is something wrong with people who are fascinated with this sort of thing. Perhaps it is a form of psychological immaturity, obsessive behavior, or an infantile compulsion for order? Alternatively, is it a form of mass hysteria urged upon us and manipulated by entertainment giants? However, none of these reductionist explanations makes the extraordinary attraction of sports in modernity understandable. This attraction points rather to elements that aptly appeal to modern persons, not in their aberrations, regressions, and infantilisms, but to the very basis of their scale of values and to the heart of their culture. However, how can we be appealed to by that which seems irrelevant to life and apparently is without any meaningful purpose? Precisely because the game is outside of life, and is eminently not real, it can be a symbol. Because it is nothing, it can mean everything. The way that modern Western persons experience relationships to themselves, to their fellow persons, to nature, and to society is pregnantly staged in their games. We catch the modern person in an unguarded moment, a moment of spontaneous fervor, when engaged in activities that are not in service of urgently vital interests. Sports could be compared to that other unguarded moment when the censor and the demands of reality are weakened: the dream. The game is a lived phantasm. 1 Moreover, there is a second reason why sports can so accurately stage modernity. Being separate from life, the game is not affected by life's ambiguities either. In daily life every meaning is ambiguous, every value stained, every task a risk, every victory an injustice, every law an oppression. Not so in a game. The rules of the game separate it from this dark everyday ambiguity. Amidst the confusion of life, it offers what Huizinga calls a 'limited perfection'. 2 All ambiguity is cleared away. The game is ruled by the clarity and univocality of a closed formalism. The rules are logically exhaustive. Every case is solvable. One could object that real games are never completely separated from life. Actors are real human beings with their own idiosyncrasies, their own

This paper points out the potential of using sport for the analysis of society. Cultivated human movement is a specific social and cultural subsystem (involving sport, movement culture and physical culture), yet it becomes a part of wider social discourses by extending some of its characteristics into various other spheres. This process, theorised as sportification, provides as useful concept to examine the permeation of certain phenomena from the area of sport into the social reality outside of sport. In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of sportification which we parallel with visual culture and spectatorship practices in the Renaissance era. The emphasis in our investigation is on theatricality and performativity; particularly, the superficial spectator engagement with modern sport and sporting spectacles. Unlike the significance afforded to visualisation and deeper symbolic interpretation in Renaissance art, contemporary cultural shifts have changed and challenged the ways in which the active and interacting body is positioned, politicised, symbolised and ultimately understood. We suggest here that the ways in which we view sport and sporting bodies within a (post)modern context (particularly with the confounding amalgamations of signs and symbols and emphasis on hyper-realities) has invariably become detached from sports’ profound metaphysical meanings and resonance. Subsequently, by emphasising the associations between social theatrics and the sporting complex, this paper aims to remind readers of ways that sport—as a nuanced phenomenon—can be operationalised to help us to contemplate questions about nature, society, ourselves and the complex worlds in which we live.

Sport in Society, 2016

Sport has a deep, enduring attachment to nation as spatial anchor, governmental principle and romantic ideal while being simultaneously implicated in processes that strain, challenge and disrupt the sportnation nexus. Sport institutions, practices and tastes move into new territories and, correspondingly, people relocate to national spaces where they must negotiate the terms of an established sportingsocietal order in the context of a global 'media sports cultural complex'. Sport, therefore, is compulsively transnational, unevenly global, and reflexively national in character by means of multidimensional, dynamic interplay. This article focuses on how the lives of ethnically diverse, urban and mobile human subjects in Australia are interwoven with sport in ways that illuminate its capacity symbolically to bind and separate citizens/residents to extant national formations. In addressing sport's role in social inclusion/exclusion and cultural citizenship in demographically diverse societies, the article explores its positioning at the intersection of national symbols and material processes. Introduction: sport within and beyond nations Sport is a social institution and cultural form that derives much of its symbolic power from the idea of nation while, for over two centuries, increasingly exceeding the boundaries of the national in material and symbolic form (Bairner 2001). For this reason, to talk about sport in 'transnational contexts' is, in effect, to embrace all contemporary sport, including those that are highly local and more 'folk'-oriented (such as kabbadi, kho kho, jukshei and pelota) but cannot be isolated from external sporting forces. It may be more or less national, transnational or global in nature, but to be defined as sport-in short, rationalized, regulated, competitive physical play-is inevitably to be implicated in the realm of the supranational. This article is principally concerned with those sports that are most regulated, commercialized and mediated. Sport in the twenty-first century is pulled in different directions, appealing, especially when involving international competition, to nationalist frameworks and impulses, while, especially in the light of its digitally-facilitated mediation (Hutchins and Rowe 2012), creating myriad connections and points of identification. A double movement,

We are going to celebrate 10th anniversary of the European Association for Sociology of Sport (eass) which was founded in November 2001. There were organized successful scientific conferences of this Association – in Vienna (2002), Rzeszów and Łańcut (2004), Jyväskylä (2006), Münster (2007), Bled (2008), Rome (2009) and Porto (2010). A factography of the events is shown in the Part 4th, the eass history in photos – from Vienna to Rome. Under the auspices of eass there were published some valuable books. This is the next of the series. A part of papers presented in Rome (25 selected works) constitutes the content of the monograph. The 6th Eass Conference, held in Rome in May 2009 and dedicated to “Sport, Bodies, Identities”, aimed at focalizing surveys, studies and methodological approaches of the Social Sciences oriented to draw a wide-range representation of sport as one of the most important, expressive and socially relevant representations of body. It means that sport was considered as a privileged instrument and a strategy for producing both individual and collective identities, sense and belonging. By this point of view, the main challenge that the involved scholars had to face was to support, on one hand, a properly sociological perspective to the topics, and, on the other, enriching and integrating it by different scientific contributions involving all the domains of Social Sciences. Reviewing the contributions of the participants submitted to the readers, thanks to the cooperation between the main academic institutions which supported the programme – the University of Rzeszów (Professor Wojciech J. Cynarski and Professor Kazimierz Obodyński) and University of Cassino (Professor Nicola Porro), we can score an important point in favour of an advancement of such a critical, controversial and culturally debated question. The Conference held in Rome under the prestigious tutorship of the Eass President, Professor Georg Anders, can be considered at the same time as the arrival point of a first phase of involvement of the Sociology of sport in the intriguing domain of body and bodily experience and as the virtual starting point for a more courageous and systematic analysis of sport by the point of view of the Sociology of body. This statement implies a further reflection, regarding Sociology at large, its effort in fighting the tendency to enclose the discipline into the narrow and unfruitful perspective of hyperspecialistic approaches and against the intellectual dictatorship of the so called hypheneted sociologies. The body, and the bodies in action as narrated by the sports experience, can represent a privileged domain for an epistemological revolution. A turning point required by prominent scholars who have underlined the need and the urgency of revisiting the mission itself of contemporary Sociology. A privileged domain because body and sport are placed at the common set of nature and culture, man and society, space and time, matter and mind. Nothing is more personal than the body, and the way we represent it deeply contributes to the establishment of our individual identity. Despite the social control to which it is submitted, it is also the place of individuality, the material substratum of physical existence and social relationships. Through the history of the body, or better, of the bodies in action, it can be possible to tell the history of mankind, its itineraries from primitive communities to civilization, until modernity and the so-called hypermodernity. Pierre Bourdieu described the body as “a language from which we are spoken”, an intellectual provocation that is put in a continuity line with both Michel Foucault’s and Norbert Elias’s researches. Being impossible now to deepen philosophical premises of this statement, it could be useful to wonder, with Bourdieu, that the language could speak the body of sport and wonder, with Foucault, if the analysis of sportization doesn’t represent a possible point of attack for philosophical criticism, that are founded on the dichotomy between body and mind. Only in this way it will be possible to welcome the recommendations of Elias to avoid any reductionistic representation of social action and therefore of sportization. We cannot question the body without first distancing from traditional visions. Neither can we settle down in a Sociology incline to the “reduction to state” (Zustandreduktion) of social courses. While we have to adopt that dynamic and dialectic representation of social system that Elias identifies as figuration, in Simmel’s honour. From this perspective, that tries to combine Weber and Simmel with the civilization theory of Elias and with the anti-metaphysical criticism of Foucault and Bourdieu, the social action space is covered by the body. In sports, as well as in sexuality and in illnesses, the body represents a system of meanings. Sportized bodies are not just representation. They create a social construction. Sportization, in fact, cannot ignore formulation, transmission, and the continuous perfecting of practices and body techniques. With this formula, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss defined the “ways how men, in any society, learn to use their bodies”. Medicine, hygiene, medical theories, the use of physicalness during leisure time activities, but also the rules enforced by the fashion or by publicity, food taste and dietetic regulations belong to the social action field of the body. They produce specific body techniques. They have been matched and interconnected too with sportization courses and they contributed collective imagination to outline modern sportized bodies in a more usual technical action of physical modelling. The body was and is at the centre of a centenary struggle for power and amongst powers. By becoming, all human societies bring into being new taboos through the body and suppress the old ones, stir up new fears while leaving behind old ones. Current affairs provide dramatic examples. A new generation of kamikaze terrorists embodies (in its actual meaning) a collective nightmare, even more worrying because based on the denial of the instinct of self-preservation itself. The nightmare takes shape through the body of killer martyrs, it is designated as a metaphor place of a root cultural conflict. Moreover, the body gives evidence to the disenchantment towards the mythologies of hypermodern science. The society of the risk produces both the narcissistic illusion of a perfect body and the mass hypochondria of the target body. In the threat to the integrity of our individual bodies, our appeased civilization fears come up. Vulnerability of the body breaks off the illusion of immortality and transforms everybody of us into possible victims and virtual persecutors. This may be grounds for pathologies at venereal transmission or in the case of traffic risks, weapon violence or the endemic persistence of hunger, for illnesses or for the consequences of addiction to alcohol and drug. The body of hypermodernity is a prisoner of sexual insecurity and of dietary uneasiness. It is a body free from the repressive puritan ethic, and at the same time a body bought and sold to prostitution. It is a body modelled by surgery or genetically manipulated, deformed by caloric excesses or shaped by the rituals of diet and gyms. The body transformed in consumer religion and freedom, but also subject and object of the worrying contradiction of a contingent immortality. Late modernity raised it to preference instrument of a new inter-society ascesis, that enhances human condition and its diversity in comparison to animal world through the trait of the species, which is consciousness to own a body and not just to be a body, as Berger and Luckman emphasized in the late Sixties. The representation and the social construction of the body are two unavoidable elements of a civilization theory. According to Elias, especially close observation of sportization dynamics allows a social theory of emotions. A sociology of sportization is able to make the “unsaid” of Western civilization come out, because it makes clear how bodies – sportized bodies – are pervaded by the social element. This intuition includes a criticism of mentalistic epistemologies, from Plato to Descartes, not less root than that of Foucault. Unavoidably, it lives on the contribution of psychoanalysis. Freud, first of all, distinguished the material body, the inner body (Körper) from the experience body, as the source of excitement (Leib). The first one is the visible and tangible body, widespread on the space, with its anatomical coherence and subject to the compulsory logic of physiology. The other one is the body origin of life, subject of individuation. That is the body is historicized according to different sport corporeity examples described by the process of sportization and civilization. The body reflects main social forms and symbolic apparatuses of Western sportization, their relationships with the power, culture, media. This is why the sportized body is, by definition, able to take up different forms, representations and aesthetical canons. It is polymorph: there are many sportized bodies, and there are many and different cultural technical and expressive manners of sport activities. Or rather: the body identifies meaningful variations on the issue also if it refers to only one discipline. There is not a body of athletics or track and field disciplines, but a number of different bodies in motion of sprinters, jumpers or long-runners. Moreover, sportization doesn’t deal just with practiced disciplines, but also with the widen and different frameworks that represent sport events, such as social facts. The rhythmic advancing of a gymnastic choreography describes sportized bodies in the form of an anonymous fellow, of a mass-gymnast...

2022

The study of the body in sport remains dominated by Western scholars examining Western bodies and using Western conceptualisations of the body. Sports venues and agencies are complex locations for the production (and re-production) of whiteness because they deal with bodily practises that include material, social, and linguistic performances. Though mainstream sociology of the body research is founded within dualisms, often privileging one side of a binary opposition at the expense of another, a thread within Chinese philosophies cut across such dualistic categories. This chapter first outlines research in sport in various postcolonial contexts based on unsettling whiteness with a decolonisation perspective. It then points to an anthropocosmic perspective that departs from Western approaches that have informed a Euro-American centric tradition of embodiment research. It highlights the revelations in an anthropocosmic approach can bring to challenge dominant Western notions of performance culture predicated upon binary oppositions and more broadly the privilege of the body over mind and emotions. Thinking about decolonisation and embodiment with an anthropocosmic perspective this paper points to the future directions to rethink sport and bodily education and research.

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

The emergence of an unprecedented wave of race-based athletic activism in the last decade presents the opportunity to formulate a more critical, cultural theory of the significance and socio-political function of sport in contemporary life. We begin by centering athlete agency and highlighting the distinctive performative, communicative, and symbolic opportunities that sport affords. However, athletic activism and social messaging are also structured-and their impacts shaped-by a range of contextual factors and institutional forces as well as sport's own unique cultural status and ideological claims. We catalog these constraints to capture the larger cultural field of sport as a site of racial commentary and contestation. Situating this multifaceted field of protest and response in its larger social, cultural, and media contexts leads us to argue that sport presents a vehicle not only for the performance of protest (as existing theory might have it), but for the representation and dramatization of social contestation, struggle, and change more generally. The lessons and broader implications of this synthesis are discussed in the conclusion.

M Giardina and M Donnelly (eds), Physical Culture, Ethnography and the Body: Theory, Method and Praxis, Abingdon: Routledge , 2017

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed.

Physical Education and Sport Through the Centuries, 2018

Summary In this paper we evaluated the basic viewpoints on the mutual relations between contemporary sport and society. Sport is a global social phenomenon which is determined by a variety of different processes, including: the fast development of the industrial society and capital, an increase in leisure time, the development of a liberal democracy and the media. A special feature in these relations is the overall globalization process in today’s world. The basic structure of this paper is made up of two functional parts. In the first part we indicate the dominant theoretical-methodological paradigms in studying sport in social sciences, especially sociology: functionalism, conflict theory in society, interpretive and postmodern theory. In the second part of the paper we analyze the dialectics of contemporary relations between sport and society, where special attention is dedicated to the distribution of social power between sport, capital and the media at the local and global leve...

2016

What of fatherland! Thither striveth our helm where our children's land is! Thitherwards, stormier than the sea, stormeth our great longing! "Why so hard! " said to the diamond one day the charcoal; "are we then not near relatives? " Why so soft? O my brethren; thus do I ask you: are ye then not my brethren? Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in your looks? Old and New Tables, Nietzsche: Thus spake Zarathustra Our intention in this paper is to shortly address some of the basic categories that determine the paradigm of sport culture as we know it. We do believe that by understanding these basic categories the changes of prevailing sport paradigm, which is without any shame revealing all the pathologies of modern man, can be made. The call for active reflection and indirect careful intervention into sport is loud enough to recognize the stormy times that the presence...

Maribyrnong Press eBooks, 2011