Davis, Paul (2015) Football Is Football and Is Interesting, Very Interesting
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Davis, Paul (2015) Football is football and is interesting, very interesting. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 9 (2). pp. 140-152. ISSN 1751-1321 Downloaded from: http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/6295/ Usage guidelines Please refer to the usage guidelines at http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact [email protected]. FOOTBALL IS FOOTBALL AND IS INTERESTING, VERY INTERESTINGi http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17511321.2015.1020855 Paul Davis ‘Everything is what it is, and not another thing.’ (Butler 1726, Preface 39) ‘Football is not a rival poetry. It is not the poor man’s ballet. It is not an enlightened erotica. It is not samba dancing.’ (Davis 1992, 27) Abstract There are robust consequences of the fact that football is football and not something else. The aesthetic personality of football does not submit to a template inappropriately borrowed from elsewhere. One consequence is that beauty should not be awarded privileged status. Any just aesthetics of the game must be properly hospitable to the game's less hygienic and agonistic features, such as stolid defence, scuffling and scavenging, heroic goalkeeping, visible toil and strain, the intrinsic possibility of failure, the visibly strenuous working with materials (most obviously the body), one’s exposed vulnerability to conditions, luck, loss of form and the injured or ageing body, and the visible realisation of a plurality of life-values in a self-enclosed domain. This gives football a deep affinity with a Modernist aesthetics. However, ‘traditional’ aesthetics might also have a substantive and precious input into the aesthetics of football. Indeed, it might be that beauty is a legitimate aesthetic category and that it figures in true statements about football. Furthermore, the agonistic and traditionally aesthetic can fuse in rich and dramatic ways, within campaigns, performances and individual plays. 1 Football fandom therefore fails to normatively submit to any privileged desideratum of the contest. Fans legitimately enjoy the spread of both agonistic and traditionally aesthetic qualities. This is illustrated in the individual contest, but more powerfully through a campaign, where conditions, contests and performances of radically different flavours are properly enjoyed and sometimes not fully assessed in their meanings until the conclusion. Introduction Butler provided his famous epigram in the eighteenth century, and its principle was echoed in a late twentieth-century Scottish football fanzine essay of my own. The latter is an attempted interrogation of the then dominant discourse of Scottish football, which was taken – as ever – to be in a state of crisis. (Scottish football is precious about its perennial crisis. When the fanzine essay was published, Scotland were about to play in the European Championship finals after five successive World Cup qualifications, and Scottish clubs had been in two European finals in the preceding decade, winning one.)ii I suggested that this discourse betrayed a loss of confidence in football’s character as football, an affliction which might be diagnosed in terms of a Scottish pathology - itself a toxic variant of a British and even Northern European pathology.iii Shortly after the 2002 World Cup, the same organ published my flippant, faintly humorous critique of the British ‘Brazilophilia’ (Davis 2002), an essay which implicitly argued that this affliction requires, again, an ideological forgetfulness that football is football and not another thing. (Any illusion that Brazilophilia is passe is dispelled by the BBC’s sombre reaction to Brazil’s trouncing in the 2014 World Cup.)iv I had, more broadly, already challenged (Davis 1999) Jan 2 Boxill’s argument that competitors in the purposive sports are ultimately concerned with the production of beauty, upholding in the process the successes of sport’s existentially disparaged champions or victors, such as the prolific England rugby union side of the early 1990s. I consolidated this theme in a discussion (Davis 2007) of the normative status and the narrative configurations of skill in the purposive sports, championing (among others) the (West) German football team and one of their victories and goals in particular. A slightly earlier response (Davis 2006), finally, to Kretchmar’s (2005) argument that time-regulated games have flaws absent from event-regulated games also upholds football in particular and the rich range of narratives it grounds – just as it is and as they are.v Palpable from the preceding thread of intellectual autobiography is affinity with the integrity and value of sport as sport, and more specifically, football as football. I believe that Cordner (1995, 435) speaks wisely in asserting that sport is not art and that it has different allegiances, and that it is none the worse for that. I believe too that we must avoid impoverished conceptions of art, which would have the perverse consequence of impoverishing our conception of sport should the latter be admitted as art, a suggestion whose significance will become clearer as this essay proceeds. It was therefore with enormous enthusiasm that I read Edgar’s (2013) tour de force, ‘Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport’. Edgar rejects a classical aesthetic framing of sport or art in terms of beauty and proposes that sport requires a Modernist aesthetic, which must finally shade into a hermeneutics of sport. This hermeneutics will offer up accounts appropriate to sport as it is in its distinctive richness. In the remainder of this essay I will adumbrate Edgar’s treatment with special focus on his contrast between traditional aesthetic qualities and agonistic violence, note points of convergence and comparison with the preceding pieces of 3 my own, provide further elaboration and illustration of my own perspective and in the process express some apparent divergence from Edgar. Football is, naturally, prioritised as a site of the theoretical discussion. I will finally give brief consideration to some ramifications for the recent philosophical discussion of sports fandom, again with particular application to football. Edgar, Football and I Edgar’s treatment is much too rich for just exegesis here. Therefore, I select points, motifs and passages which I regard salient in his approach and illuminative of my treatment of football, trusting all the while that I don’t bastardise his monumental essay. His treatment is (arguably) summarised in the following passage: An aesthetics of sport will be shown to be either trivial – for there may be an aesthetics of anything, and as such it says nothing distinctive about sport – or remains in danger of being a narrowly restricted concern, if it fails to develop a vocabulary of aesthetic concepts that are properly relevant to sport. It will be argued that … aesthetics ultimately yields to a hermeneutics of sport. That is to argue that aesthetic qualities – and particularly qualities synonymous with beauty – are only superficially applicable to sport, and discussion of sport in terms of its beauty tends to conceal more profound and disturbing questions as to sport’s meaning. (Edgar 2013, 80). Despite my hospitality towards Edgar’s treatment, I first note two qualms I have, the first of which is, in the context, insignificant. The first is that the ‘aesthetic’ sports cannot brook the suggestion that aesthetic qualities are only superficially 4 applicable.vi Second, this suggestion is – as it stands – quite dubiously applied to the ‘purposive’ sports – which include football - too. I return to this and go so far as to argue that beauty might sometimes robustly and substantively characterise football. But I am in keen sympathy with the view that an aesthetics of sport must respond to sport as sport, and (therefore) discussion of sport confined to or privileging of beauty is fundamentally impoverishing.vii These sympathies are evident in the second epigraph to this essay and, with a little unevenness, in each of my preceding essays. For instance, in my critique (Davis 1999) of Boxill (writing fifteen years earlier), I argue that it is, pace Boxill, contextually inappropriate for the performer in the purposive sports to aim at beauty; such a performer misunderstands the logic of the activity. I now concede, however, that I too easily accepted Boxill’s collapse of the aesthetic in sport into beauty in sport. All the same, I affirm my concluding comments (Davis 1999, 93-94) that ‘aesthetic quality is only one of the values that we prize for our sports. It must exist alongside other sources of sporting value – for example, persistence, stamina, tactical-nous and determination … The competitive interests of the effortless and silken should not dictate that we change rules to disfavour the sweaty and determined.’ These sentiments are echoed and superseded eight years later (Davis 2007, 29) in my rhetorical question, ‘In the conspicuously organic world that sport now is, might it be democratically required to grant ideological equality to those who work, sweat, run, pound, organise, scramble, scuffle and even pray their way to success over more skilful opponents?’ Moreover, I try in this case to diagnose what I cast as misplaced ideological framings of specific sport competitors – the German and Brazilian football teams, for instance – in terms of perpetual and unwarranted hang-ups about the aesthetic status of the purposive sports and underlying hang-ups about ourselves (Davis 2007, 29-31) (and see Endnote 3). In 5 my reply to Kretchmar, again, I invoke Cordner’s suggestion (1995, 429-31) that sport, like art, allows the ‘realisation of life-values in a self-enclosed domain’, and cite doggedness, tenacity, resourcefulness, faith, command, plenitude, repose, urgency, patience and dignity (Davis 2006, 60-61). By no contortion can such realisation of life-values be collapsed into the triumph of beauty or, again, any set of aesthetic qualities. This reflection finds echo in Edgar’s (2013, 117) affirmation, in football, of ‘a dedication to rigorous defence and a begrudging midfield’, giving the slip to that eighteenth-century classical aesthetics of beauty, which is, Edgar notes, in danger of disenfranchising sport.