charivari logo

Charivari Press

cultural theory

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

— Raoul Vaneigem

indecent acts

 

 BUY THE BOOK

Reviews:

 

"Indecent Acts in Public Place, by Rod Dubey, explores the roots, of insolence and sedition in football, looking at how the game and its associated culture emerged, making the point that in considering football hooliganism as separate from the game as it is played in stadiums is missing the point. In the containment and control of the game (and it's appropriation by media/corporate wealth) he sees that:

'Those critics who argue to reduce soccer violence (are) people who have missed the point of soccer's development, as a spectator sport. They do not see that two distinct games have sprung from folk football: the sanctioned game on the field and the unsanctioned game in the stands... As representatives of law and order they seek to protect the former and destroy the latter. By doing so, they become a contributing factor to more violence, since it is a violence essentially directed at the state...'

He suggests, that the game itself, along with other sports (such as baseball) at first banned by the Church and state because of their threat to 'order', were then organized, controlled (with their own laws) and contained on pitches and eventually in stadiums, before finally as is the case in the current era, appropriated as 'spectacle' within the Global media network. This, at the same time as further disenfranchising those playing the unsanctioned game on the terraces: 'Not surprisingly, a working class youth often sees soccer hooliganism as an initial means of effecting change ...' (Rod Dubey)"

—Doug Aubrey, Variant.

__________

ChAriVarI:

Reviving Dumb Ideas Momentarily before putting them to bed....

_____________________________________

 

Indecent Acts in a Public Place: Sports, Insolence & Sedition

by Rod Dubey 

 — New Edition January 2011

Indecent Acts In A Public Place offers four provocative essays that mark a radical departure from traditional descriptions of sports as a cultural event. It rejects any notion that sport is merely a passive consumer activity that indoctrinates the participant into particular social values and acceptance of his representation. Instead, these essays look at challenges by sports fans and athletes to the cathartic spectacle and their own seeming impotence. They argue that what is absolutely essential to sport, and what makes sport so popular, are its qualities of contestation of external authority and representation, hedonism and possibilities for creativity. For it is just these qualities (noise, disruption, festival, sensuality and antisocialness) that sport, as a business, seeks both to contain and commodify.

Indecent Acts In A Public Place considers sport with an attention to current critical theory that is usually reserved for `high art,' yet at the same time it is accessible, polemical, imaginative and witty. Along the way it takes up such fascinating and amusing questions as "Why do baseball players spit?" and "Why are athletes usually stupid?"

Contents

Introduction by Donal McGraith

Awash In Bodily Fluids

is an essay that considers the men’s society of the sporting fraternity. The spectacle of athletes more in the news for their womanizing, gambling and drug-taking than their play on the field shows how this manifestation of men’s society has become a Men’s Society, one of those groupings found in various societies that contests moral and social norms.

Playing Dumb,

the second essay, looks at the tendency of play to challenge authority, particularly the hierarchical and corporate organization of sport. This is seen as a structure that compels that resistance to it will be violent, perpetually adolescent and ganglike. In this context, the history of soccer violence is outlined as a form of rough justice and an attempt to control popular culture

The Sporting Gaze

is a look at sport as an active and accessible realm of fantasy and popular myth-making that makes sport far more popular than competing spectacles, such as politics. Also, it describes the tribalism of the sports fan as a means of autonomous representation.

Brute Strength

is an essay on the commodification of the body. The athletic body, and the ideological and aesthetic values it represents, are promoted as substitutes for participation. Challenges to the values symbolized by such a body, however, have been redirected, intensifying commodification. It is a body (symbolic of sport), that behind its increasingly synthetic veneer and simulated play, gradually atrophies, decays and begins to generate only disgust.

 

 

 

 

Contact Charivari