Football as strong force

[imomus]

Today sees the launch of the World Cup. I'll be ignoring it as much as is humanly possible in a city whose most conspicuous landmark has been turned into a giant football. Some of the reasons I'll be ignoring it are touched on in this piece by Martin Kettle in last week's Guardian -- the fact that World Cup football tends to come shrink-wrapped with an alienating culture of jingoism, racism and aggressive ignorance. According to a Goethe Institut poll, Kettle tells us, three out of five Britons can't name a single living German. They all know about Hitler, though, which is why, when England plays Germany, the Dambusters march and "What's It Like to Lose a War?" ring around the stadium.

But, thanks in part to 90s lad culture, football has many intelligent and cultured British fans, people who can name a living German. British Whitney curator Chrissie Iles can certainly name at least a hundred; when I spoke to her last month she was just back from the Berlin Biennial. When Chrissie told me that she actually enjoys and follows football, especially at World Cup time, I felt the need to defend my utter lack of interest in it. I reached for the kind of far-fetched explanation that people either find exasperating or fascinating, depending on how far they're willing to indulge my theories.

I told Chrissie that I'd only been to one football match in my life -- Dundee United versus Aberdeen. The match was rather boring, the stands were somewhat empty, and it drizzled with rain. But it wasn't the boredom that worried me -- quite the reverse. It was the sneaking suspicion that football might, potentially, become far too exciting. "I'd imagine that if you really got into football," I said, "it would carry over into your way of seeing everything. You'd be looking at a painting, for instance, and just asking yourself, well, where are the goals?"



Chrissie laughed, so I decided to go further (and this is very me); I started to justify my suspicion of excitement itself with an appeal to nuclear physics. I started talking about the metaphor of the Strong Force. Basically there's a Strong Force which binds elementary particles together, overcoming the electric repulsion between protons. When the atom is split, it's this Strong Force which unleashes the devastating explosion, an explosion which annihilates all the weak little lifeforms around it. You don't mess with the Strong Force; it's a genie you want to keep in its bottle. (Nuclear Physicists amongst you -- and I'm sure there are some who read Click Opera -- will tell me that my technical terminology is outdated; I know, I know, but this is just a metaphor, a way to make my dislike of football sound scientific!)

To continue, then: although tapping into it is often the source of amazing cultural energy, you shouldn't mess with the Strong Force. There are all sorts of "repressed repulsions" between the particles of our society, and deep in our own psyches. Sometimes we release them in the form of controlled explosions. Some of these controlled explosions are in art (think of Aristotle's idea of the "catharsis" provoked by tragedy), some in sport, some in sex. Some, less controlled, erupt into wars, murders, riots. The most fearful are shaped like a mushroom cloud.

Talking to Chrissie, I listed three "Strong Force" phenomena: football, sex and rock music. But, thinking about it now, I'd suggest all sorts of others:

* The unconscious, as described by Freud (the Id).

* The weekend (a controlled, alcohol-fuelled explosion for the frustration of people who work).

* Drugs. Mess with drugs and you risk upsetting the dynamic tensions within your own brain.

* Racism. Playing the "race card" in a debate will inevitably unleash "the Strong Force", banishing moderation and reason. (It's interesting to note that after the discovery of quarks, the Strong Force was called The Colour Force.)

I'm sure the list could be extended. Generally, my attitude to the Strong Force is to avoid its excitements (though clearly I have a weakness for sex, if I have to choose one "controlled explosion" from the list). I'd rather be the kind of person who finds pleasure in rather tiny, boring and everyday things (hello John Cage!) than the kind of person who demands or seeks out controlled Strong Force explosions. I think that the dynamic harmony of repressed repulsions is underestimated. Just as, when things seem still, we're actually on a planet rotating at 1670 kilometers per hour, so when things seem boring, quiet or weak, there's actually a dynamic of opposing tensions at work, massive forces in miraculous equilibrium. The Strong Force is sleeping, the world is at peace. Hush, let's not wake it!

Comments

[sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

In Toronto I'd say the World Cup has a very positive influence on the city. Since Canada sucks at footy and hardly anybody in Toronto was actually born here, it has become a way to celebrate everybody's multicultural origins and ethnic backgrounds. Not one single team is dominantly cheered here. You see cars driving by with Korean flags, Brazilian, etc. etc. every imaginable country from every continent. I like the colours it adds to the city.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Another connection: the Berlin Fernsehturm was originally built as a symbol of the Cold War. The Soviet bloc constructed something that looked like a spacecraft or a weapon in order to show the West that they could unleash the Strong Force in the form of a MAD nuclear strike.

And now that Strong Force threat, that techno-phallus, is a football.

[(Anonymous)]

You won't blitz the Fritz this time!

[nickink.livejournal.com]

I love football, but I can see how the ridiculous level of attention accorded it in the media and such would annoy the devil out of people who aren't interested.

For me, it was the thing that kept me and my dad talking for a few years which otherwise would have been pretty silent.

I also feel, perhaps simplistically, that being in Seoul during the 2002 competition was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life.

But, I really liked your writing and ideas, as usual!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd like to say something else, something about the two symbols of the World Cup I've shown on this page, the footballized TV tower and the logo. They project very different images, related to the different periods of Berlin's history.

Let's look at the last three periods of Berlin history. Nazi and Communist totalitarianism both have a relation to the Strong Force. Nazism rushed into its arms; as a result, little survives of the Nazi period here in terms of triumphalist monuments. The war -- the ultimate human Strong Force -- left the city a heap of rubble. Lots of stuff does survive from the communist era, though: Mutually Assured Destruction was a way of keeping the strong force in check by massive, mutual dynamic tension. You split the atom in our face, we split it in yours. So nobody splits it, and the Strong Force lies dormant -- though the sleep is uneasy.

Both these totalitarianisms used a Strong Force rhetoric. They made big gestures, whether it was Speer's mostly unbuilt, but vast, domes, or the Soviet-era Fernsehturm. But since then, Berlin (and Germany) has wanted to play down all heroic, puffed-up, Strong Force statements. The World Cup logo is twee, playful, tension-defusing, deliberately trivial, fun. And this is the tenor of German life now. But of course it's all in the shadow of -- and a deliberate antithesis to -- the Strong Forces in the city's history.

[(Anonymous)]

"the fact that World Cup football tends to come shrink-wrapped with an alienating culture of jingoism, racism and aggressive ignorance."
That's not a fact, it's a cliche.

[trickybrkn.livejournal.com]

Korea/ Japan 2002 changed the concept of the world cup ... it was truly a world party. There was nothing else that could have raised the spirit of Koreans like their cup run.

and for even a casual football supporter, the cup is a like frenzied month long orgasm. I'm an American, who will be in the very core of the 'strong force'.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd add that having no Strong Force to refute is what makes today's British football fans so "fascist" in their behaviour, especially when they travel abroad. If we can see guilt and refutation of the past etched into the World Cup 2006 logo (those different-coloured faces all smiling and coming together, no hint of conflict or competition), it's precisely the lack of guilt -- the lack of a sense of the need to counterbalance excess and stabilize the Strong Force -- which makes British football fans more closely resemble the Nazis than anyone German does.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There was nothing else that could have raised the spirit of Koreans like their cup run.

Actually, that's another fear I have. I was talking about this over dinner last night with my friends Kai and Ulli. The World Cup, like the Olympics, is a harbinger of economic growth. Already, the traffic in Berlin is much heavier, the air fumier. My fear is that this wonderful bubble we live in, with its absurdly cheap prices, will start to resemble other big cities. I don't want Berlin's spirits to raise, or money to flood in.

[trickybrkn.livejournal.com]

They also came up with a playful lion mascott, GoLeo. The toy version of GoLeo sold so poorly that production was stopped and the German toymaker, Nici AG, became insolvent. Designed by Jim Henson's company, people asked where are GoLeo's shorts?

[trickybrkn.livejournal.com]

if you are worried about Berlin, just imagine what will happen in Cape Town in 2010, where they say they only have 40% of electricity needed for in the influx of visitors.

[trickybrkn.livejournal.com]

those aren't British football fans, those are thugs. They really could care less about football, then the game of belittling others different then themselves. The face of British football fans is radically different then it used to be. I saw England play Columbia last spring in New York and the traveling fans where wealthy, well dressed and well behaved. I imagine there will be morons drapped in the cross of St George who will be prime pluckings for the BNP, but they really are not the face of British football.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha! Nice timing... I've just received a flyer from my friends, the artist couple Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard, for a group show called "Switch on the Power! Noise and Policies on Music". The exhibition, curated by Xabier Arakistain, will be at MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, Spain from 9th June - 17th September 2006. Iain and Jane are in it, so is Ladypat (who did the "Your Fat Friend" video) and, um, Lene Lovich!

Now, I'm not sure what attitude this show is taking towards noise and power -- as usual, the curatorial text hedges all possible bets with waffly, "inclusive" language, talking of "performative and aesthetic strategies as a means to construct discourses that often convey alternative values and/or political critique... blah blah blah... other significant processes have taken place and continue to occur in the spheres of music and the visual arts, processes that are also of importance to the exhibition..."

Nevertheless, I wonder if this is a part of something I'm seeing a lot of just now: curators buying into rock energy as a way to bring Strong Force flavours into their otherwise frighteningly still and quiet galleries? And I wonder whether, for all the talk of subversion, it wouldn't be much more subversive (not to mention less rockist) to actually emphasize art's silence?

Hint: my contribution to Blow de la Barra's Summer Show will be as close to silence as a sound-based artwork can be: it's entitled "Whispering".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha!

[larameau.livejournal.com]

"I wonder if this is a part of something I'm seeing a lot of just now: curators buying into rock energy as a way to bring Strong Force flavours into their otherwise frighteningly still and quiet galleries?"

this made me think of the sandretto re rebaudengo contemporary art foundation in italy, which co-produced a movie on soccer star zidane (entitled "a 21st century portrait") and, as far as i know, will probably be hosting the national preview of the film in their turin exhibition spaces. are they also tapping into the strong force...?

[nickink.livejournal.com]

That's amazing! I mean apart from the no-trousers situation, it's a lion! The symbol of the English football team, traditionally Germany's biggest rivals. No wonder they went bankrupt with that one.

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

those aren't British football fans, those are thugs.

I can understand why a thug might go to a football match: in hope of some sort of brawl... and I can even see how that might get their adrenalin pumping. It's the other sort of fan -- the wealthy, well dressed and well behaved fan -- that truly perturbs me.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think they may well be. Fine, energy is eternal delight, as Blake's Hellish Proverb goes. But just don't mix this kind of co-option of Strong Force energy into your museum with rhetoric which says it's politically "oppositional". It's not oppositional or subversive at all. It's a kind of populist fascism lite, if anything. Where is Lord Reith when we need him?

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

mm..inspiring musings
its always interested me how I can "justify my suspicion of excitement"
respect for the Strong Force is as good a metaphor as any
you even bring in Blake
interesting that you say "messing" with drugs influence "dynamic tensions without your own brain", which i dont necessarily disagree with and then admit your "weakness for sex, if I have to choose one "controlled explosion" from the list"

mm sex as "rather tiny, boring and everyday things"

so when things seem boring, quiet or weak, there's actually a dynamic of opposing tensions at work, massive forces in miraculous equilibrium

this is almost "spiritual"..almost "scientific"..which gods will we evoke/invoke?

this one piece could sustain me for weeks but I suspect my excitement

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Whoops, I meant to say drugs upset the dynamic tensions within your own brain. But it's true drugs do blur that distinction between inside and outside.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

"Honor thy error as a hidden intention"
Oblique Strategies

[larameau.livejournal.com]

THESIS: the "strong force phenomena" you mentioned are all negative. i would add a positive one: the righteous anger of people about their unfavorable social, economic, and political condition. the effect football has on popular rage as a positive strong force phenomenon is, alas, the reverse of what it does to the negative strong force phenomena: instead of waking it up, it keeps it dormant - unfortunately for people, but luckily for the political elite!

EXPLANATION: i definitely agree on football being a strong force in psychoanalytical and social terms. i'd add that precisely because of its strong appeal to all sorts of people from every social class it has attracted a huge flow of money over the last decades, and therefore it has also become a strong power, one of the "powers that be", at least in italy, but i guess also in germany and france. hence the big monuments, the huge media coverage, etc.
right now in italy we have a "football scandal" -corruption as usual...-. the press, both right-wing and left-wing, has often said that luciano moggi, former chief managing director of the juventus team and 'chief indicted', was among the most powerful men in italian economy and politics, receiving around 400 calls a day on his mobile.

i think we must ask ourselves why soccer/football is such a big business and such a big power. i tend to think that it has to do with the enormous, pervasive power it has on the life of so many individuals, as you rightly pointed out.
because of this pervasive power on millions of people, it's also one of the most effective means of political and social control - football-mania disctracts people from the real thing, from the social, economic, political problems they experience every day. i wonder how many people in italy would choose to watch a political talk show when they can have fun and relax following a football championship match.
the old latin adage "panem et circenses" is particularly valid now, in a media-dominated society: give the great beast bread and circus spectacles, and you'll keep it at bay. better still, you'll anesthetize it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I remember saying exactly what you're saying here to my Sociology prof at university: that football dissipates the political anger of the working classes and is therefore counter-revolutionary. "Christ," he said, "what have you been reading?"

[lightfromlight.livejournal.com]

World Cup football tends to come shrink-wrapped with an alienating culture of jingoism, racism and aggressive ignorance.

And yet, it still doesn't interest we Americans.

[larameau.livejournal.com]

and what did you answer...?

(personally, i read a lot of noam chomsky to keep my brain functioning...)