Professional Wrestling and the Kierkegaardian Turn - the return of the material repressed and the work of the Sports Legacy Institute (original) (raw)
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Sport, Bodies, Identities and Organizations: Conceptions and Problems
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...
If one takes as a starting point the post structural shift marked by the " language turn " that meaning is decentered, deferred, mere traces rather than locate the meaning of the word (or image for that matter) as corresponding with a particular referent or interpretation, then culture begins to reflect that in terms of plurality of discourses and narratives, detotalising, inclusivity and at the same time a relativism, and a lack of core identity. The " language turn " has implications as far as art (theory and practice) is concerned within postmodern culture, namely the duality of, on the one hand, detotalising creative play and ineffability, and/or, on the other hand, a potential sense of meaninglessness. Sport, as one instance of postmodern culture, likewise can be viewed via the lens of the " language turn " , especially as it, like art, is not necessarily an " authentic " expression, a natural and innocent game (an original point), but is embedded in a culture where commodification, consumerism and idealistic image-construction is the order of the day. Nevertheless, sport may offer much in the way of articulating bonds between people over-and-above native tongue. Consequently, as with art, one may discern the place of sport in postmodern culture as engendering the dual aspects of 1) ineffability and/or 2) meaninglessness. I shall explicate these concerns below using specific sports to make things clearer and take as an axiom that art whose handmaiden is often philosophy also exhibits these features or more precisely because it does it is no surprise that other cultural do so likewise.
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This article offers a critical, idiosyncratic take on the staging of sincerity in pro wrestling. It engages this popular cultural product as an athletic performance event, with the intention of highlighting the affective underpinnings of fans' interest in and connection with the medium. Specifically, it is argued here that the lack of legitimate competition in wrestling allows for images,
Theorizing and 'Playing' Sport in Elfriede Jelinek: Some Notes on Ein Sportstück
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Canadian Review of American Studies, 2019
Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.
Professional Wrestling Studies Journal, 2022
Analogies between politics and pro-wrestling have a long pedigree and are almost always meant negatively. What if, however, pro-wrestling is standing on its head in such analogies and must be turned right side up again? Building off arguments presented by Warden, Chow and Laine, this article argues that when approached as a specific form of embodied labor, embedded within the industry-specific performance convention known as kayfabe, a truer political analogy might compare pro-wrestling with the Proletkult, the cultural organization born amidst the 1917 Russian Revolutions to develop a new "proletarian culture" and usher in a socialist society. This is not to claim pro-wrestling offers a modern-day mirror of the historical Proletkult. Rather, drawing upon the work of Alexander Bogdanov, the leading intellectual force behind the Proletkult, this identifies pro-wrestling's latent potential to act as an anti-hierarchical, egalitarian organizational form able to platform human creativity with the goal of developing proletarian culture.
”You can’t wrestle!” – Professional Wrestling as Participatory Fiction
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Käsillä oleva pro gradu-tutkielma koskee pohjoisamerikkalaista viihteen muotoa, jota suomeksi kutsutaan yleisesti joko showpainiksi tai ammattilaispainiksi (professional wrestling). Showpainissa kaksi (tai useampi) esiintyjä eli painija esittää yleisön edessä, painikehässä ja sen välittömässä läheisyydessä painiottelun, jonka voittaja on ennalta sovittu. Esitys on siten osa fiktiivistä kamppailu-urheilulajia, sillä ottelijat toimivat yhteistyössä kertoakseen yleisölle tarinan. Tutkielma keskittyykin showpainin fiktiivisyyteen ja tämän lisäksi siihen aktiiviseen osallistuvaan rooliin, joka showpainiesityksen yleisöllä on. Lopulta showpainia tarkastellaan osallistavan taiteen teorioiden valossa. Tutkielma pyrkii vastaamaan kysymykseen: voiko showpaini toteuttaa osallistavan taiteen ideaalia?
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Thesis: Masters of Fine Art in Painting, 2022
Kleos, or How we are Victory: The Male Athlete and His Varied Proxies Michael C. Walker, August 2022 In the present body of work I concentrate on depictions of myself and other male athletes with illustrative portrayals of us in ways that speak to me about our lives on intimate yet also symbolic levels. In drawings of myself, I utilize ample nude studies but accented with the regalia of the sports in question—skateboards, sneakers and more—in homage to the Greek athlete/warrior who via coming of age also becomes a hope for society and in portrayals, when nude, often retained the regalia of warriors—sandals, helmets, swords, and shields. Other works in this series take a more literal and contemporary view of athletes in the processes and sites of their sports as well as iconographic depictions of the athlete as a graphic or cartoonish, illustrative, aspect. The overall idea is to examine how the Greek and extended Neoclassical concept of the heroic male athlete have come to inform the Western canon and how athletes as such are a construct in our contemporary personal and societal visual vocabulary. My core question is, when we represent an athlete beyond mere depiction of his athletic activity as would a sports photographer, how do we foster that representation and how do we channel the iconic ideals we have collectively as a society assigned to athletes over time? How do we see ourselves, how do we build extended narratives out of the interpolation of athleticism into our personae?
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The word 'sport' next to Nietzsche's name may raise eyebrows among many Nietzsche readers. 'What an odd pairing?' one may ask. We prefer Nietzsche and arts or something from the domain of the Geist. Sport is embedded in mass culture and Nietzsche detests anything that has to do with masses; fandom, an important part of sport culture, is nothing Nietzsche would look at favourably but call it a manifestation of the herd instinct. Besides, clubs and sports organizations control this sporting culture through political and economic apparatuses. On the other hand, modern sports, far from producing higher types and the overhuman, appeal to the lowest common denominator, the person on the street and all athletes are equal. All of these objections notwithstanding, one may still speak of a sporting spirit that embodies play, ecstasy in the sense of Dionysian, inventiveness, agonism, grand spectacle, festivity, a specific type of aesthetics and a form of askesis of the body, and a specific outlet for enactment of active justice and a Gestalt of power relations. Playfulness and game-making are crucial in sports, and play is key to Nietzsche's thought. Sport is a form of letting go, losing oneself in the game, and can be construed as a field for Dionysian forces. Agonism, a significant aspect of Nietzsche's thought, applies to all competitive sports. Furthermore, sport constitutes one of the major types of spectacles in our age. Finally, sport belongs to the regime of the body, a form of askesis, which Nietzsche would have supported as opposed to the ascetic idealism. In what ways do Nietzsche's ideas on interpretation shed light on sport and its various aspects as listed above? What hermeneutic tools do we have to interpret sport as a field of culture? These were the guiding questions for this essay.