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Ljubodrag Simonovic
E-mail: comrade@orion.rs

Sport and Drama

Drama is the form in which sport, in a structural sense, most closely


resembles art. Speaking of the relation between sport and acting, Christopher
Lasch says: By submitting without reservation to the rules and conventions of
the game, the players (as well as the spectators) cooperate in creating an
illusion of reality. In that way the game becomes a representation of life, and
play takes on the character of play-acting as well. In our time, games sports
in particular are rapidly losing the quality of illusion. Uneasy in the presence
of fantasy and illusion, our age seems to have resolved on the destruction of
the harmless substitute gratifications that formerly provided charm and
consolation. (.) Play has always, by its very nature, set itself off from
workday life; yet it retains an organic connection with the life of the
community, by virtue of its capacity to dramatize reality and to offer a
convincing representation of the communitys values. The ancient connections
between games, ritual, and public festivity suggest that although games take
place within arbitrary boundaries, they are nevertheless rooted in shared
traditions to which they give an objective expression. Games and athletic
contests offer a dramatic commentary on reality rather than an escape from it
a heightened re-enactment of communal traditions, not a repudiation of
them. It is only when games and sports come to be valued purely as a form of
escape that they lose the capacity to provide this escape.

Since sports contests offer a dramatic commentary on reality and


they are in the organic connection with the life of the community, and not a
confrontation with reality which strives to overcome it, the organizers of
todays sports spectacles follow the demands put forward by Lasch. Their
main task is to turn sports contests into a higher form of existence which
will in the most authentic form reproduce the drama of everyday life. To be
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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.

By glorifying sport as play Lasch forgets that sport is dominated by


the principle of competition and the principle of performance, which means
that man's relation to himself and others is mediated by quantitative measures
in which both cultural and individual human expressions are alienated. It is
dominated by the absolutized principle of performance which in monopoly
capitalism, ruled by the principle Destroy the competition!, becomes the
totalizing power of profit that deals with individual achievement, which was
(together with the principles Equal chances! and Let the best man win!)
the ideological cover-up for the original spirit of capitalism (liberalism). The
development of relations in sport is best seen with the example of auto racing.
It is actually a fight between the most powerful car-manufacturing concerns,
their expert teams, while man is reduced to being the driver, who will appear
on the throne, in the wheel chair or in the cemetery. Not only in individual
sports (dominated by strength, speed and stamina) but also in playing sports
- the play has been completed before the players run out onto the field.

Huizinga's criticism of sport from a cultural point of view throws light


from another angle. Speaking of medieval sport, Huizinga concludes: The
medieval combative sport (...) is different from Greek sport and modern
athletics in that it is far less natural. In order to increase the combative
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tension, sport is invested with aristocratic pride and honor, romantic-erotic


charm and the appeal of artistic beauty. It is full of radiance and decorations,
full of rich fantasy. In addition to play and physical exercise, it also serves as a
sort of literature. The desire for and dream of a joyous life express a longing
for a dramatic performance, for life as a play. Real life was not nice. It was
cruel, horrible and perverse; in the judicial and military lives, there was little
room for the feelings of courage that inspired by love. But the soul is full,
people want to enact those feelings and create a nicer life in a beautiful play.
The element of true courage at a chivalrous tournament surely is no less
worthy than in the pentathlon. A very erotic character requires bloody
fierceness. The tournament is, in its motives, most akin to the contests in the
old Indian epic; to fight for a woman is the central idea in Mahabharata.

For Huizinga, the duel is a ritual form of expressing man's complete


submission to the established order. The same can be found in sport: in a fair-
play man's right to life is subordinated to the right of order to survive. Life
itself becomes a stake demonstrating loyalty to the established order, while a
fight to the death becomes the most authentic form of natural selection.
Huizingas homo ludens is the picture of a noble knight who is the idealized
incarnation of the warring aristocracy and aristocratic values. Instead of
humanism and love of freedom, ambition and love of power prevail. However,
what honor is shown by killing a man? What is the nature of the erotic
impulse expressed through bloody fierceness? What is beautiful about a
cruel fight to the death, in cutting throats and other butchery, in evisceration,
in mutilated bodies buried in mud? And all that just to win the favor of
courtesans? Huizinga proclaimed that the pathology of medieval society was
the source of the highest human ideals. Huizinga insists on the art of life, and
not on a free artistic creation. That is why he attaches such importance to
fashion: clothes are not an affirmation of human independence, but a class-
leveling shroud to which man is predestined. It is quite logical that Huizinga
gives priority to the art of life rather than to art, itself, for it, above all,
involves nicely stylized forms of life, which should raise cruel reality to the
level of noble harmony. The high art of life (fashion) becomes the form in
which a decorative aesthetics triumphs over art as a creative act. Huizinga
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goes so far as to proclaim the apparent forms of the established relations


pure art. By way of the artistic form, Huizinga actually seeks to prevent the
original human creativity from crossing the normative firmament of his
aesthetics, destroying the world of illusions and questioning the existing
order. Man is not the creator of his own world; he is part of the decor on the
stage of the present world.

Drama is possible because life is alienated from man. It is an alienated


form of playing the essence of life alienated from man. Ultimately, the
essence of life is given by the ruling ideological firmament, and it becomes the
prism through which man sees himself and society: a masked slavery, a
masked nothingness, a mutilated human image, a pendulum of capitalist
horror become a lollypop, people laugh and cry over their destiny... In the
theatre, life is being acted out, man being only an observer. The powers that
keep him obedient in society take on a caricatured form. Apparently, man has
control over them; he resists them. In reality, drama is the relation of man to
the world that pins him down to the existing world. A good performance is
the other side of a bad life. Actors are tragic products of a tragic world. Man
does not experience the essence of his life by way of an active life; it is given to
him by way of a cultural sphere that becomes a compensatory mechanism, a
form of sterilization of the critical mind and active will. It is cultured to
watch human sufferings on the stage, but it is uncouth to fight to eradicate
injustice in life. The destruction of the human pleases the petty bourgeois: it
helps him to shed his responsibility for the survival of the world and to lull
himself into accepting the existing hopelessness. The theatre does not produce
revolutionaries, but audiences. It is a form in which culture becomes devoid
of the libertarian. Orpheus without Prometheus becomes Narcissus. All that
proceeds is a virtual reality, which, as it becomes more realistic, offers man a
better opportunity to escape reality. The theatre, cinema, concert hall, gallery,
the church all these are forms in which the illusory world of culture is
institutionalized, and it is created as a parallel world to the everyday,
hopelessly uncouth world and gives the petty bourgeois an apparent escape
from capitalist nothingness to ensure his elite class social status.
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The nature of sport as drama is conditioned by the role of sport in


society. It is not an active integration into the ruling class, like the ancient
Olympic Games and medieval chivalrous tournaments, but a supraclass
phenomenon and as such means the integration of the oppressed into the
spiritual orbit of the ruling class and their depolitization according to the
principle panem et circences. Its purpose is to inseminate man with the ruling
spirit, to pin him down to the existing world, destroy his mind, imagination,
his hope of a better world... A sports spectacle is a modern pagan festival,
which gives a fatal dimension to the ruling relations and values. It does not
enable man to treat the existing world in a reasonable way, but completely
integrates him into it. Man becomes the toy of destiny, the implement of the
basic processes of capitalist reproduction. Sport abolishes the duality of
reality and ideals. In it, there is no opposition between play and life: it
represents life in its existential and essential sense. Sport is the authentic form
of the playing of life and, thus, is its glorification, which is supposed to create a
religious relation to the ruling values. Sport does not reflect the human; it is
rather that man becomes a means for deification of the ruling relations and
values. Sport is not an innocent childrens pastime; it is a ritualistic
manifestation of submission to the ruling spirit and, thus, is the highest
religious ceremony and liturgical in character. It is pervaded with a sacred
serenity. Hence the importance of the Olympic oath (serment olympique):
sport is the cult of the existing world, while man appears in the sports ritual as
the symbolic incarnation of the spirit that rules the world. A sports spectacle
is not an enactment of life; it is its reproduction: in it, the essence of the
capitalist world appears in a condensed form. Rugby, boxing and other blood
sports are immediate expressions of the American way of life, which is based
on a ruthless Social Darwinism and a destructive progressivism and
becomes a planetary way of life (globalism).

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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injury and to kill, to mutilate children, to apply medical treatment that


reduces sportsmen to laboratory rats, to turn the young into fascist hordes...
The theatre represents the scenery of the world of lies and crime; sport
represents its foundation. At the stadium, there is no human distance, there is
nothing comical: gladiators are not entitled to laugh. An increasingly bloody
life requires increasingly bloody sports spectacles, which are compensation to
the oppressed for the daily increase in their misery. The spectators love the
smell of blood! this is the golden rule of sports show-business in the USA
and other countries of the free world.

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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A match is an occasion for those increasingly deprived of his rights to


vent their frustration, and it is not a reflection of human evil but an
expression of their suffering and despair. Sports spectacles are a way of
turning the critical and change-oriented potential of people deprived of their
rights into aggression directed at the opponents, who belong to the same
oppressed class, and a way of provoking war between them. This is the basis
on which fan-groups are formed: instead of turning their discontent towards
the ruling order, young people turn it towards other fan-groups who,
themselves, are the victims of an inhuman order. Supporting masses are a
form of degeneration of working-class youth, while the fanaticism of
supporters is a form of their degenerated critical and change-oriented
consciousness. Symbols and slogans under which the youth gather do not
speak of freedom, brotherhood, peace, cooperation, love: they are of a fascist
character. Patriotism without culture is barbarism. As far as sports idols
are concerned, they are not fighting for freedom; they are the tools of
capitalism for combating the libertarian mind and integrating the youth,
reduced to a supporting mass, into the existing world. The increasingly
bloody conflicts between different supporters are an inevitable consequence
of the increasingly difficult position of young people in a world based on the
principle Money does not stink!, and on the increasingly ruthless
manipulation of the young, which springs from the fear that their discontent
might turn against the ruling order and be used for building a new (just)
world. On sports stadiums, the fresh mountain water, which overflows the
deteriorating capitalist dam, turns into a swamp. Firecrackers and other fan
paraphernalia do not express a joy of life: they are symbols of destruction.
Torches are not sources of light: they suggest the flames that are consuming
this world without a future.

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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conditions mans entire life. In sport, there is no confrontation between life


and human tragedy. It is one of the most important ways in which capitalism
reconciles man to the existing world, which reduces him to an impersonal
member of the worker-consumer mass: sport removes the tragic from the
capitalist cosmos by depriving man of humanity.

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