I made certain vows and promises, in the days before this started, respecting things I wouldn’t touch, and I can’t break them now. So if it feels like something’s missing from this argument, it’s only that I’m trying to save my soul. You can fill in those blanks better than I could, anyway.
The question of the moment is about fans, and how they fit into all this. Maybe I’m wondering because not being in South Africa feels different from not being in Liverpool, or maybe because all those empty seats make the people who show up stand out. Either way, it’s an approved fact of the World Cup that the games will be stood around by people in party dress, face paint, giant plastic eyeglasses, no tops, styrofoam antennae, and the full heraldry and regalia of modern sports spectatorship. Compared to the fans at normal games—you know, the ones of only life-or-death proportions—World Cup fans are like aristocrats who wear diamonds everyday but finally break out the real ice for the opera. The queen, or Michel Platini, may be three seats away. Hoist the blue mohawk; hold up the family pride.
My question is: to what extent are these people complicit in their own objectification? And should it matter if they are? The background here is an argument I started to have with myself as a fledgling blogger, in a post that’s now slightly embarrassing but that still gets at certain truths:
The game assumes certain proportions. It crosses different thresholds as it grows. One of them is the moment at which the crowd’s creation of an atmosphere—the colors, the chanting, the song—can be understood not as the experience of the people who are watching the match but as an aesthetic element to be consumed by the people who are watching the match: that is, by millions of people around the world who are looking at the match on a screen. Who are not implicated in the crowd’s behavior, but are simply free to enjoy it or to ignore it, without commitment, like any other aspect of the match. This is the moment when the game has exported itself so successfully, to an audience so diffuse, that the impromptu culture created in the stands ceases to retain its original significance and becomes, to anyone watching from the outside, another selling point.
To put that in terms of the moment, FIFA, ESPN, ABC, and the rest are making tall piles of money broadcasting this game to people in the universe, and the number of people not in South Africa who are glued to these matches cosmically dwarfs the number of people in the stands. (And not only because Section 7D is empty.) Without the fans in the stands, though, this wouldn’t be the same event to that cosmic multitude. Japan-Cameroon in an empty stadium, with no dancing, no cheering, no sudden cuts to men in feather boas, would be a deflated thing. Those who love the game for itself would probably watch it anyway, but its energy, as Klinsmann would say, would be totally different. From out here, fans are intensifying. We need to watch people watching to know what we’re watching for.
So within the game’s order of unacknowledged priorities, how do these experiences compare? Are we supposed to think of the fans in the stands as the most important viewers, since they’re actually there, are proving a commitment, and—by urging the players on in a sometimes game-altering way—are participants as well as spectators? Or are we supposed to think of the billions watching on TV as the most important viewers, since there are so very many more of them, they’re on the outer ring of the concentric order of consumption, and economic reality means that the game is essentially tailored and packaged and timed and presented for them?
At the club level, where the convenience of the TV audience often trumps and offends the physically present supporters, this is a tough problem, one that’s hard to talk about without artificially taking sides. (In particular, I question the halo that sometimes gets over the heads of traditional supporters: people who don’t live by the stadium don’t necessarily care less, and TV is very far from being unambiguously bad for the game. The reverse of those qualifications is also true, of course.) At the World Cup, whose village-of-countries nature makes it inherently a displaced spectacle, I’m not sure it’s a problem at all. No one long for a more authentic past in which you had to live in Montevideo to see the tournament, and unlike at the club level, the fans who go to international tournaments don’t necessarily see themselves as the most hardcore or essential. The local community is only one part of this, in other words. The culture in the stands is a carnival, and you get the feeling that the people involved know they’re on, and want to be on, TV. It’s an Epcot version of nationalism, maybe, but that’s better than some other versions of nationalism, and it’s fun, and the tourists are invisible.
You could even say that this is one of the genuine happinesses of the World Cup: everybody’s sharing. That said, isn’t there something amazing about how seamless all this is—that we’ve arrived at a moment when it makes intuitive sense that the people in the stands for the biggest games on the planet are entertained by being part of the entertainment, and when this enormous nowhere where the rest of us live during these events (this year’s decor: South Africa) runs so easily through the semantics of about five different layers of avatars? It’s an incredible field of complexity around the experience of just watching a game, and we barely have to think about it.
I don’t know; maybe the best way not to panic about all this is to think of the media as an unwitting instrument. This is a time when we’re all supposed to turn frenzied nationalism into a form of global unity, and people watching people could be the best, even the only, way to make that happen. That’s not to say that the media, with its hierarchies of objectification, isn’t troubling. But it isn’t hopeless.
Photos from the Ivory Coast-Serbia match at the 2006 World Cup, taken by Hadi Barkat.
Read More: The Marketing of Meaning, World Cup
by Brian Phillips · June 14, 2010
Argintinan girls bouncing up and down makes any match bearable.
You have to wonder about the players’ perspective on the whole matter. Going from youth matches with no one there to Professional matches with the lights on and the nutters with face paint is weird enough- going from the club stage (where the stands are packed but not every match is that urgent) to the World cup (where the stands are, to be charitable, sparse, but every match is far more significant) must be jarring. Indeed, most of the people in the stands at this particular cup don’t seem to care who is playing, just that there’s a match on and an excuse to make a neutral racket (the vuvuzuela knows no favorites- except organisation and organized teams, the biggest subplot so far- given Nigeria and Cameroon’s play so far, the best thing for African teams would be to ban the damn things). It’s like playing with piped in crowd noise- there are no chants to buoy or crush the player on the field, just noise (must be like going to a Sunn O))) concert). If you play for Slovenia or New Zealand, it’s probably difficult finding your boys in the stands, or hearing them particularly well (Given their colors, most of the fans are wearing Slovenia colors anyway- which raises another point: why dress up and get all your SA gear on, and blow your racket horn for another country’s match?).
As a fan, I’m not going to paint up and act like an idiot- I take myself way too seriously, and invest myself in the tactics and flow of the match. I’ll wear a suit and like it, thank you very much- maybe a scarf for the old club’s sake. I believe in a certain purity of purpose- my position is only entertainer if I am participating in the purpose of the event (namely: the event). The jesters are just a distraction from the purity between the posts. I’m not there to laugh (I might be there to cry)- I don’t laugh at craft or skill. Maybe it’s a dour and humorless perspective, but I appreciate and respect the sacrifice every single one of those men had to make to get where they are- and given the personal stake many put in the game, the stake their country’s have as well. When you really think about it, the game stops being about “fun”- it’s a proxy for international conflict, btw- considering the weight of the stakes involved. I think that’s why, when the camera zooms on the player boxes, they’re never smiling. Not ever. They’re on the field, in a sense, and it’s always been too serious to be a game.
Just say it. Vuvuzelas vuvuzelas vuvuzelas. On the bright side, I am now aware of which device Gabriel will use to cue the Apocalypse. A pox on the children, grandchildren, friends, neighbors, co-workers and pets of whomever devised this paragon of unholy annoyance.
Your post makes me realize what I hate most about them. It isn’t the insistent buzzing that has forced me to disable the 5.1 surround sound, it’s that it drowns out the sounds that make the game special: the chants, the songs, the drums, the rising and fading roar. In this World Cup, the variety of the fan experience hasn’t been shared and instead we’ve been treated to the hypothetical of games being played in a virtual hornet’s nest.
I don’t know whether it would be “right or wrong” for the powers that be to ban vuvuzelas from the World Cup. I only know that as one fan watching abroad, it would make me very happy.
I think the best example of the self-aware fans to this point was the “Feel it! Ghana is here!” sign that was as much a part of that match as the goal. It couldn’t have been more perfect for the American broadcasters even if its designers had gone for an “Everyone Supports Pantsil Now!” acronym special. The story would’ve been told much less effectively if ESPN failed to show the Ghana supporters proudly carrying that sign. Adding to all of it was the sense their purpose for attending was as much to get that sign beamed all over the world as it was to see Ghana win. Yet the Ghanaians’ behavior came across the screen as genuine pride and enthusiasm. It’s just remarkable.
The shorter version of what I’m getting at is: Wow, the World Cup!
@Joe Poulsen’s smile after the own goal vs Holland was all at once unnerving, refreshing, horrifying, and hilarious.
@Sean Poulsen’s smile reminded me of my wife and her older sister, who seem to have a congenital neurological compulsion to smile and laugh nervously at awkward situations, such as when their children have attempted some daredevil stunt that results in the fathers of said children needing to evaluate whether a trip to urgent care is necessary. So I could understand that smile, and the dissonance/discomfort it created.
@Sean He can’t care about it nearly as much as the fans right? You have to remember it’s Denmark as well, they’d already talked themselves into beating the post cards home before the first match. They possess what our Danish striker called a “cheerful fatalism” about international tournaments- they’re the ultimate “just happy to be there team” with few expectations (and USA fans should take warning from their example).
Anybody else think that the noise level is affecting the play of some teams? I think not being able to hear yourself think is good for the teams that play together a ton and have a cohesive tactical identity (South Korea, Japan, Ghana, to a lesser extent the USA, Holland, Germany, and probably Italy), and bad for the teams who either don’t listen to their manager (Cameroon and Nigeria, step forward) or don’t have one at all (after the shitshow that was Argentina in the first match, I expect trouble against South Korea, who know what they’re about). It’s possible that teams will acclimate, but the whole noise thing might give teams that don’t play together a lot more trouble as well (England perhaps?, Holland had some positioning problems today). Talking and positioning are hammered in so early on that not being able to establish one or the other could wreak havoc, and arguably already has.
@Sean I had the exact same thought. A really awkward moment for the player and the viewers.
@Jim What’s crazy about that moment is that it shows that kind of awareness happening at the narrative level rather than just at the carnival/spectacle level. You’re not just representing a costume, you’re representing a story, and you’re going to the stadium to project that story and have it seen in a positive way.
@Brian Phillips This means, of course, that if you don’t fit the story as a player people are uncomfortable with your presence on a team. I think Phil Ball wrote about this in the context of “blue collar” and “finesse” players (his argument centered on Tevez and Ronaldo, and how people refused to see how direct and physical Ronaldo’s style is), but it applies to nationalities as well. Rooney buys into the whole image thing, and absorbs a stereotype as much as he projects one. Baptista and Kuyt are great examples of players who do essential things for there team, but people are sort of uncomfortable because they don’t fit the image of the sort of player that should be on their team. This is true for Brasil’s team as a whole, actually, and the country is somewhat uncomfortable because the dialogue on display doesn’t conform to a well established pattern- the story on display is not the one they want projected. People are afraid that the story will be received negatively (Italy seems to have no fear of this- maybe it’s why they’re successful), that they will produce something unattractive, making the nation itself unattractive.
@Joe, Brian. So could it be argued that WC fans–the new-to-the-sports fans all the way to the purists–are seeking just as much a sort of style, or maybe a definition of style–say, a free-flowing Argentinian game, an efficient German match, the (perceived, but not necessarily true) beautiful Brazilian one–than they are seeking results? Or is that absurd? Sure, most fans, it would be easy to claim, are looking to have their team win (and does that mean that the fans of that team also “win”?), but are these fans truly actually rooting for a style of play, something that will define a team (just as they’re defining their own style in the stands, or falling in line with another, a la, the Vuvuzelas)? Sure, WC victories, Euro championships define teams, no doubt, but is the style and/or the perceived style what is talked about in the long-run? Is it the sex-appeal to, say, Clooney’s Oscar nominations and single win? Rambling here. Just wondering thoughts….
This just reminds me of Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” and I don’t trust its displacement, as you put it, in this instance. I also just read Fake Sigi’s dyspeptic post about the tournament, and he can be hard to shake. The real problem, of course, is that I have yet to get a gravatar…
I love the fact that anyone can support anyone at a world-cup, armies of neutrals supporters randomly picking the country to support based on their thoughts on the country, their players, their supporters or even the colour of the Jersey. This is accepted and embraced by everyone and its a must for the world-cup to continue to be such a carnival of supporters.
In england, if you were a chelsea supporter and went to an away game against liverpool in full blue, face-paints, a head-peice, or a more eccentric take on in, you are signing away from rights to complain if you are beaten up! You need to be able to leave English grounds with the ability to blend in if things start kicking off.
Thats what makes the world-cup so special is that despite the odd flash of violence, fans are able to wear their colours with pride and eccentricity while safe in the knowledge they are pretty much safe from post-match revengeful punches to the head. Fans are also so accepting of fans-for-the-day type support at the world cup. Its a sense of sharing and international bonding, warmly welcoming strangers of different race and religion as part of the country for 90-mins of emotional rollarcoaster.
This would hardly ever happen in club football, as you have to earn your badges, know the songs, been their in the bad times and celebrated the good times. But in a way I agree, the tradition of earning your stripes and being part of the true supporters in vital to the survival of clubs. Portsmouth only have a chance at financial survival as they know they will have supporters who have earned their stripes supporting them next year. The supports who didn’t will be less likely to make the away trip to Hull on a Monday night. Manchester City and Leeds United would have crumbled if it not for the 20,000 – 30,000 supporters who kept with them week in week out during the lowly times in the third tier.
Supporters want to be on camera as they are celebrating the ability to dress-up, the ability to ironically support Paraguay when they don’t even know what the capitol city is, the ability make the World Cup what it is and so their friends and family’s can scream “it’s them bob! there on the telly!” while thousands of miles away.
@Bob Lalasz I don’t trust it either, but we’re living in it and might as well look at what kind of life is possible here. Anyway, to me, unphilosophically, the “it’s all just a sellout”/“what was once real life has been replaced by a representation” argument comes close to a kind of naïve fallen-golden-age narrative that I also don’t trust. The conditions in which people create meaning are constantly changing, and compared to many features of life in, say, the twelfth century, I think I prefer a modern representation. I don’t mean to sound sanguine about a media culture that makes me nervous a lot of the time, but again, this is the town I grew up in.
You have to remember that the vast majority of the fans are neutrals. Not only because they’re South African, but because of the pretty random nature of the selection of which games they attend. This is a big country, and apart from the Jo’burg/Soweto/Pretoria area, most people are only within convenient and affordable travelling distance of one World Cup venue. They therefore apply for tickets only at that stadium, and are not necessarily assigned tickets to all the games they apply for, or their first choice of fixture. Added to this, the majority of South Africans with the disposable income required to attend games are middle-to-upper class, mostly white, rugby- and cricket-supporting families. They aren’t (for the most part) part of the country’s football-following culture and the section who do follow the sport almost exclusively watch the Premier League and Champions League.
The upshot is that most of the spectators are at the stadiums for the once-in-a-lifetime chance to be at a World Cup game, not because they want to support one of the countries or, often, even want to watch live football.
I went to the Uruguay-France game on Friday with my brother (that game rather than any other for the reasons stated above) and it was pretty annoying to look at the spectators around me and see people who were only interested in creating and participating in the “atmosphere” by blowing their vuvuzelas and doing Mexican waves. One went around the stadium a few times about ten minutes into the game and one teenager in my section (wrapped in a French flag, wearing a blue and red mohawk wig and blowing a blue vuvuzela, though clearly not in the slightest interested in actually watching the French team on the field) spent the remainder of the game trying to start another wave. Incredibly annoying when the whole row in front of you stands up for no reason every two or three minutes.
This is again a result of the demographics of the crowd. Mexican waves are considered a fun part of being at a rugby or cricket game and since the majority of the WC crowds are more familiar with those sports that football, they don’t know that in football it implies that the game is boring. Then again, it shows again that they are more interested in the spectacle of being at the game, than the game itself.
And I suppose that brings us to the issue of the vuvuzela. Personally I don’t like them, although they’re not as annoying to me as they were at last year’s Confed Cup, and in Cape Town Stadium on Friday they were hardly noticeable. I don’t buy into the argument that it’s just South Africans’ way of supporting their team. It just creates noise, unlike songs and chants which encourage (or discourage) a particular team – here there is no way of knowing, as a player, whether the noise is being made by your fans or the opposition’s. The idea that (South) Africans’ answer to singing or chanting is just to make a mindless racket is one I find insulting. Unfortunately, the spectators at the World Cup (not necessarily football fans, as I’ve said) seem to be doing their best to prove this true.
Of course, if vuvuzelas were banned, there’d be nothing for them to do (except for whistle and other mindless noisemakers) so we’d have the low hum of private conversations, like Old Trafford on a bad day. Would that be preferrable? Probably not for Sepp.
Can the same be said for twitter’ing during the matches, that you are becoming part of the twitter- #worldcup carnival, you are representing a story, making it a carnival and doing this within the narrative.
Is the #worldcup twitter noise just as annoying as the vuluzela noise? and does it represent just the same detachment from the studying, the enjoying, the being in the moment of the game. Both examples that people are not watching the game but would prefer to have a slice of autonomy of the event?
@Joe Maybe. I’d say that being on Twitter changes the quality of my attention to some extent, though not nearly as much as, say, writing a live blog does. It’s easier for me to follow a match closely with Twitter open than to follow it closely when I’m watching with more than one or two friends. Interesting question.
@Brian Phillips The circularity of the twitter-attention span argument always kinda perturbs me. Why do we presume that the capacity to consume shorter bits of media (and preference) is a bad thing when the technology has developed to satiate that consumption (and preference)? Or perhaps the technology was developed to satiate a longstanding, already existing for efficient transmission of info?
@Elliott I agree that with you that twitter does not prevent people from multitasking but only on a non-emotional and non-reflective level. For me when I watch a football game with family I will said 3 or 4 things to them. This doesn’t break my full attention and connection on the emotional/intellectual/reflective levels. To me actively participating in the provision and consumption of twitter info would break the spell I am under when watching a game.
But I think this goes beyond the ‘twitter attention span’ debate when the reasons why twitter is currently having capacity issues are examined. 99% of the twitter content about the world cup is random annoying noise, the internet’s vuvuzela. Melo was trending directly after the game yesterday, although his inclusion was an interesting sign of brazil sticking to their more defensive dunga line-up, he did not score, he did not set-up a goal and he did not perform to world-class levels…. therefore the trending was not grounded in an intellectual discussion about the player but rather people just wanting to make noise. They want to be part of the tournament, shout out their involvement and claim some kind of autonomy.