WORLD CUP STARTING TODAY

[NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS]

I should like to summarize few points giving to questions on the starting today World Cip of football in South Africa , a country full of social inequalities.

 

1/ The symbolic violence to say of football substitutes the real violence exercised in various social conflicts ? SA  is a country of extreme criminality , so the bet of the organisers is to present an

'' eidillic'' aspect of non-violence in the terraces as a good mass spectacle transmitted to 4 billion spectators? Or something more , yet undefined ?

 

2/ In case of real violence exploded uncontrollable ( beyond the draconian security measures) , what message the World massive village will get ?

 

3/ Who wants to exercise violence in the 21th century is not just riding his horse and creating an army of cavalry as in the Mongols' time , but rather tries to put his IMAGE  in the house of everybody affording a TV set. This simulation of reality that can substitute reality itself , inbcreases or decrease violence ?

 

4/ Architects who build these modern temples of the football cult, claim that they provide access to all in a democratic way, but after the polive measures , this is not sure. Does the stadiums'd construction and function reflect the social segregation of classes ?

 

5/ If football is a ritual and such World festivals as Mundial a mass ceremony, what is the message that can remain in the conscience of billions of spectators after it's end ?

 

6/ Nationalist exaggerations are more often now than some 20-30 years ago, concerning the fans of the national teams ?

 

7/ It's often said that professionalism is killing the good spectacle because teams play under scientific programs as scheduled by theur coutches. But this fact has not any effect on the frequency of spectacularization. Is it a simple matter of higher global access to technology or something else ?   

[Joel M. Wright]

Nikos,

You raise quite a few questions here.

One of my reactions can best be summed up in the following picture that accompanied a Wall Street Journal article. The article went on to state that $60 million dollars would go toward safety measures after a then-recent shootout that downed a police helicopter. Instead addressing the problem, Brazil's government, businesses and power interests would rather militarize their own streets. In the process, they would mobilize economic and military resources to exert pressure on the poor within Brazil, thus converting the two into the right kinds of political and ideological capital that we might be expected to interpret as safety and control.

The picture is telling: several residents of a slum casually standing by the side of a "police" officer in full combat gear and armed with an M-16 assault carbine.

But, hey, events like the Olympics or the World Cup are not for consumption, really. They're about (international) capital interests. Consumption is a secondary issue, and purchasing (that's to say revenue flow) is the most important point. As the global poor do not participate much in the consumerist economies of their nations, they occupy a kind of double identity, in which extra-national capital flows, as well as flows of tourists and business, are deemed more important than the issues of social inequality that most directly affect them adversly.

Yet no matter who bears the brunt, it's always the many-headed hydra of the middle class that will be pandered to. Should we be talking about class formation and the effects of globalization on local systems of inequality? It seems that globalization tends to make those local systems of inequality more pronounced then they already were, even if they were pretty bad to begin with; all so guests can pull revenue flows into the coffers of the state and the local rich and powerful.

Also, maybe we could discuss how local and national systems of dominance and authority often rely on, or are amplified and morphed by, phenomena external to local and national systems of inequality.

[Huon Wardle]

The most important is that what happens in these massive phenomena as athletic fiestas cannot be REALISED in the present time because the noise is covering every rational or cold-blood thought.

I wonder if the current 'vuvuzela' controversy - fans wielding extremely noisy plastic trumpets - has something to do with that insight.


World Cup 2010: 'anti-vuvuzela filter' could cancel out noise of horns
The World Cup may be just five days old but its unofficial soundtrack – the relentless drone of the vuvuzela – is already driving football fans across the globe to distraction.

[Huon Wardle]

I understood; I just couldn't resist making the connection given that the concern with how dissident noise is 'filtered out' is a primary issue in this thread.

NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS said:

I was meaning noise symbolically, ( or in metaphor in the sense of Bruno Latour ) but it's true this vuvuzela thing is something completely new and too much real to be neglected...

[Joel M. Wright]

What is the distinction between the symbolic/real and the virtual/real?

Here's what I'm seeing: the symbolic stands as a proxy for the real. The symbolic is an "it needn't be" of sorts, while nevertheless recognizing the necessity of the phenomenon itself. The virtual also takes the place of the real, but only by becoming a replacement reality, or a hyper-reality that does not cancel out reality, but that adds another layer or dimension to it. (This last point is why it's so important to guard your words on social media platforms, such as Facebook).

So, if I'm reading your comments correctly, Nikos, it seems that you are saying that events like the Olympics used to be symbolic in scope: we must compete between nations, to the result of winners and losers, but it needn't (or, in the ideology of the Olympics, shouldn't) be real competition. Here, I'll nod to the concept of sports as symbolic combat.

Now, however, it seems that these events are no longer symbolic, in the sense of being proxy combats between discrete nations. It seems that we have a virtual sociality, or virtual internationality, in which businesses, fans and hangers-on of all sorts add another layer to the realities of national civic order; one that is intentional, but also one that apparently has little staying power.

If I'm on the right track here, should we be discussing how the virtual may exonerate us from the real?

NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS said:

Globalised sport events such as this Mundial are mainly chosen in various countries as SA now, by big organisations such as FIFA under different criteria, but there is a common factor : How to facilitate the entrance of these countries to the World economy 1/ by exporting all it's raw materials 2/ by putting its huge medium class to the consumer sphere. That was the case of Southern Corea some years ago, Greece and China in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics and now SA and next Brazil in 2016 in the after Lula period. In the same time antiterrorist measures are dragonal and a lot of money are spent by the organising countries for safety. After the end of the fiestas , local inequality will be bigger but people will never notice it and of course they will have to pay the cost later when the lights of the fiesta will fade out. This happenned to Greece and maybe will happen to SA soon. Not any national problem social or financial will be solved but this psychological feeling of being good hosts and organizers of fiestas that gives much enthousiasm to the average citizen is covering all reality by the spectaculation. Once more a virtual reality is surpassing every other practical reality and people liuve for some time in a euforia of pseudo-success just before the coming of a big crisis that gives the chance to the big actors to restribute the national income and to create a new class articulation. The most important is that what happens in these massive phenomena as athletic fiestas cannot be REALISED in the present time because the noise is covering every rational or cold-blood thought. When people will realise it will be too late and the history is repeated but in different geographical loci every time and no one can take a lesson from what happenned to another country before.

Before the coming of the high technology in the communications , we had the distinction symbolic/real. This was best expressed by violence. Now, the distinction is between virtual/real. Symbols were well used for various rituals all around the planet since the neolithic times. The drama is that nobody knows where the distinction virtual /real will bring the human species. No more participating rituals now. Only mass spectacle and the illusion of participating through the World Web.

[Joel M. Wright]

Nikos,

I'm not suggesting that it does, or that it provides anything like a treatment or a cure for social ailments. If anything, the virtual would be more like a palliative.

I'd like to point out, though, that you and I work (play?) in a field (anthropology) that is pointedly analytical and critical in a way with which most people don't tend to bother. I'm not saying that most people can't be analytical or critical on the level that anthropologists and our kin tend to be, but rather that it's something of a huge bother, especially after working a full day in the factory, office or what have you.

For the most part in my culture ("American"), people will tend to run screaming from critical or analytical projects. Is it different elsewhere? (Although, I’d bet marginalization plays a mitigating factor here). My point is that most people won't ever stop to consider the virtual sociality that overlays the realities bounded by national borders. Sure, they'll see the slums, be told to stay out of certain areas and may even encounter scam artists and pick pockets, but I bet they won't let that get in the way of their vacation. Besides, they're told, you're bringing your dollars (yen, pounds, francs, yuan, what have you) to the local economy.

To what extent does this illusion aid people in creating a null-politics, where everything is all right, even when they get first hand glimpses of slums and poverty, a null-politics that helps them feel good about themselves while taking advantage of their privilege in the midst of what would otherwise be poverty?

Just another question: once all the revenue-generating businesses and tourists go away, where does the money they left go? Or, did they simply spend their coin in shiny event-specific venues erected by foreign businesses, and not in the local establishments?

NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS said:

You are on the right track Joel, but I don't ( really) think that any virtuality will ever exonerate us from the REAL But if you can propose a way, I should be eager how do you mean it.