Sport in der Gesellschaft des Spektakels

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

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE, 2024

This chapter adopts a performance studies framework to discuss the study of sport as performance (both material and symbolic) by focusing on the performance aesthetics of sport (how sport is staged and performed) and the performativity of sport (what is performed through sport and how sport performs in society). This approach illuminates performances of nation, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, globalization, and community in and through sport, and shows that social norms and dominant paradigms can be reinscribed or challenged through performances of sport and their varying receptions.

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...

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...

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.

Respectus Philologicus

Sport in the Context of Social Sciences. W. J. Cynarski, J. Kosiewicz, K. Obodyński, Eds. 2012. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego. 282 pp. ISBN 978-83-7338-813-0. Sport has been a very important component of human existence for ages. It is a complex and colourful phenomenon which arouses the intense interest of fans all over the world and which can be analysed from different points of view. Sport is definitely something more than pure entertainment. Anyone interested in sport should be­come familiar with the latest fruit of the work of the Polish scientists conducting research on different aspects of sports his­tory and sociology. It is worth emphasizing that in Poland there are numerous scholars who have put sport at the centre of their scientific interests.

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2017

RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2020

In recent years, the importance of sports in Russia has increased dramatically, which is determined primarily by the country's hosting international sport events, in particular, the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup 2018. The influence of sports on social processes has increased, sports began to strengthen its position in public opinion as a prestigious sphere of employment and an important social category [24. P. 60]. Thus, there is an obvious need to identify the relationship of physical culture with society as a whole and with all elements of the social structure and specific social institutions. The article examines the origins and prerequisites for the formation of sociology of sport as a relatively independent scientific discipline; presents the issues of sports sociology in the historical perspective-in the context of both their social genesis and contemporary sociological theories; considers the social role and social functions of sport education and sports. The authors believe that the differentiated social distribution of sports practices is determined by the interconnections of the space of possible practices (supply) and the space of demand for certain practices. In the article, the well-known foreign scientists are presented in the new perspective as sociologists who provided for both Russian and foreign authors the incentive and direction for theoretical studies of sports issues. The article also presents to Russian readers the original studies on sociology of sports conducted by famous scientists-Norbert Elias, Eric Dunning, Anna Ingram, Georges Hébert, etc.

From Perinet to Jelinek: Viennese theatre in its political and intellectual context, 2001

Ein Sportstück (1998) is by no means the first of Elfriede Jelinek’s works to have dealt with the theme of sport. It is merely the publication in which sport receives its most central treatment. This article interprets Jelinek’s deployment of sport and its intersection with sociological, philosophical, and dramaturgical theories of sport. Jelinek’s writing can be seen to engage with sport in a series of interconnections with the media, religion, gender, and with the social and political dimensions of the practice and spectacle of sport. In Elfriede Jelinek, sport is not the civilizing force of Eliasian social enquiry, but the embodiment of war in peacetime and, ultimately, a symptom of proto-fascist enthusiasm for the strong, healthy body and condemnation of the weak and the sick. This latter perspective gains an Austrian dimension in Jelinek’s critique of the current political situation in Austria and the growth in popularity of the right-wing, populist party, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), with its fit, telegenic former leader, Jörg Haider.

In this paper we explore whether and how 'sport' can be an adequate and valid sociological concept considering the multitude of contested meanings and definitions attached to 'sport' by different stakeholders in the sports field. Firstly, we argue that essentialist definitions of 'sport' too often one-sidedly focus on physical exertion and neglect the socially distinguishing nature of sportive practices as part of a lifestyle. Secondly, survey questions reflect this physical definition of 'sport' and assume that 'sport' has an obviously similar meaning to respondents. However, reflecting the struggle to define 'sport' in the sports field, people with different socio-demographic backgrounds differ in their understanding of the concept. Because current measurement of 'sport' does not adequately deal with the open and contested nature of the concept, suggestions on how to collect survey data on sport participation are presented.