Académique Documents
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Culture Documents
Ljubodrag Simonovic
E-mail: comrade@orion.rs
organically connected with the life of todays community does not mean to
be close to the original spirit of competition, but to the spirit of domination
and destruction. Idealization of sport, as a dramatic commentary on life,
involves idealization of the ruling relations and values which are shaped in
sport. It is interesting that Lasch does not see a connection between the
professionalization (commercialization) and the trivialization of sport: What
corrupts an athletic performance, as it does any other performance, is not
professionalism or competition but a breakdown of the conventions
surrounding the game. It is at this point that ritual, drama, and sports all
degenerate into spectacle. Huizingas analysis of the secularization of sport
helps to clarify this point. In the degree to which athletic events lose the
element of ritual and public festivity, according to Huizinga, they deteriorate
into trivial recreation and crude sensationalism.
The sports drama is an authentic way of playing out life but one in
which life, itself, is at stake. Sport is a drama without masks, without petty
bourgeois lies, without invented plots that are meant to glorify criminals and
obtain meaning for capitalist nothingness. Life, itself, continues without a
humanistic and artistic veil. It is legal in sport to inflict serious physical
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Sports stadiums were not built for the well-to-do (petty) bourgeois,
as is the case with the theatre, which has an elitist following, but for the
working masses deprived of their rights and for their children who are
reduced to hooligans. The modern stadium appeared along with the modern
industrial proletariat, at a time when workers had managed to obtain the
eight-hour work-day an era when the bourgeoisie was trying to colonize the
leisure time of workers and thus prevent their political organization and
integration into the ruling order. Stadiums are not designed to advance the
cultural education of the oppressed, but to pacify (depolitization) them
and to soothe their idiocy. Sport is the cheapest spiritual food for the
(working) masses and keeps them under control. is the most accurate
sociological (political) definition of sport. It was pronounced after the First
World War, and at the height of the revolutionary movements in Europe, by
the father of modern Olympism, Pierre de Coubertin. Sport is becoming a
way of destroying class-consciousness and shifting the fight from the political
to the sports arena. Stadiums are not the temples of culture but the brush-fires
that purge the oppressed of their discontent. This purpose is what dictates
their appearance: stadiums are modern concentration camps for people
deprived of their civil and human rights. Everywhere in the capitalist world,
where more and more people are becoming poorer, and fewer and fewer
people are becoming rich, we have the same picture: wire fences, special
police forces, trained dogs...
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The intensity of life for ancient man was conditioned by his tragic
position as a plaything of the gods and his endeavors to do all that is possible
during his short and meaningless life to achieve fame and thus gain
Olympian immortality. In capitalism, the intensity of life is conditioned by
the logic of capitalist reproduction: to achieve a better result (profit) in the
shortest possible time. This logic prevails not only on a sports field, it
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