The vast conceptual morass of modernism, modernity, and the modern subsumes many different strands. Christopher Mann, in an earlier piece for this site, articulates one such strand quite nicely, ultimately lamenting global soccer’s inexorable march toward “materialistic modernity.” For Mann, the modern robs soccer of its spontaneity, its naïveté, its inner Romanticism. For me, the modern strips soccer down to its most raw and most beautiful form. Mann treats the modern as a cultural condition, one that defines an era of commercialization and celebrity. But it’s also possible to view the modern as an aesthetic category, and in that vein, T.S. Eliot’s version—the one to which I subscribe—illuminates the unlikely literary underpinnings of the beautiful game.
The Eliotian conception of modernism, which I derive from his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” presents at its core the idea of “tradition.” In a literary sense, this idea holds that all literature, from the works of Homer to those of Jonathan Franzen, enjoys a “simultaneous existence,” and that this simultaneous existence endows any given work with meaning. We measure artistic significance in this version of modernity by judging the work vis-à-vis the work of “the dead,” according to Eliot. Interestingly, and controversially, Eliot also believes that this canon constitutes a “simultaneous order,” an order that is altered every time a new work enters the canon. Upon a new work’s entry into the canon, a process of modulation occurs until “the values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” As Eliot sees it, the present can alter the past, and vice-versa.
Sound confusing? Well, the same goes for soccer, where Eliot’s essay can help us consider the accomplishments of players past and present. Consider the case of Lionel Messi. On the surface, he appears to exemplify the Romantic, full of youthful guile, inimitable skill, and iconically bad hair—an individualist anathema to Eliot’s impersonal tradition. Some say he’s the best player in the world, others say he might be the best player in history. Regardless, these claims are actually grounded in modernity. Eliot writes, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” How can we evaluate Messi? By comparing him to the players he competes against. Who is Messi better than? Pretty much everyone playing right now. This juxtaposition of the work (Messi) to the canon (worldwide player pool) makes the claim possible. Who else do we compare Messi to? More grandiose claims about his greatness invariably include his fellow Argentine, Maradona. The YouTube videos comparing every single (eerily similar) step of their mazy half-field runs side-by-side—those are extensions of Eliotian tradition, Eliotian modernism, in modern day. Maradona’s run gives meaning to Messi’s, and his past accomplishments situate Messi’s current ones. Similarly, Messi’s current feats alter our perception of Maradona’s past ones. Messi is pretty damn good, but he doesn’t have meaning alone.
Moreover, modernism can reveal to us insights into the success of Messi’s club. Here we must consider Eliot’s depersonalized conception of beauty because, for Eliot, “it is not the greatness” or “sublimity” that matters “but the intensity of the artistic process.” The “artistic process” I equate to Barcelona’s system: for me, the joy of watching the system collectively overwhelm an opponent trumps any ephemeral awe from watching an individual bit of skill from Messi. Barcelona’s flashy players will come and go—see: Ronaldinho—but Catalonia’s most famous onomatopoeia, tiki-taka, remains. Barcelona actually employs an almost mechanical system—the kind of artistic process that Eliot later refers to as “an efficient engine”—that deemphasizes the individual. After all, Eliot says that “poetry…is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” The Barcelona system neither caters to a superstar—just look at the emergence of former squad-players like Pedro—nor relies on the particular attributes of any of its players (e.g. Ronaldo’s pace for Real Madrid). On the contrary, each player essentially has the same role: pass and move. At Barcelona, “there is no room for puffed-up, show-boating individuals,” says Iain Rodgers for Reuters Soccer Blog. “The players work as a unit, constantly creating space for each other and harrying the opposition into giving up the ball.” Each player is fungible, for “the emotion of art is impersonal.” Behold! Modernist thought is behind the production-line success of one of the world’s biggest clubs.
Next Saturday. Cold. The cacophony of metal cleats. Lionel Messi is in a Blaugrana shirt, standing in the tunnel before the game and thinking. He might be thinking about his coach’s pre-game instructions. He might be thinking about the abuse that awaits him from opposing fans. And he might be thinking about how itchy his right shin guard is. But the one thing that Lionel Messi will not be thinking about is the only thing that is guaranteed to happen every single time he plays for Barcelona. Once he steps on the field, he will give up his self-contained existence and open himself up to immediate evaluation, unfair speculation, and comparison to his peers and his predecessors. Once he steps foot on the field, he will shed his individuality and assume the 112 years of his club’s existence, Total Football, tiki-taka—tradition. Once Lionel Messi steps on the field next Saturday, in the cold, amidst the clatter of cleats, he will become modern.
Shaj Mathew attends the University of Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in The Millions, Goal.com, This Is American Soccer, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. You can reach him at shaj.mathew@gmail.com.
In a literary sense, recall how Chinua Achebe’s (recent) criticism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has affected the current perception of the (much older) book. Likewise, Edward Said’s Orientalism has revised contemporary opinion on many novels (Mansfield Park, for example) that have already been published.
Read More: Barcelona, Lionel Messi, Modernity
by Shaj Mathew · February 9, 2011
Brilliant !
Jesus.
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” and soccer glued together? My 19 year old undergraduate self salutes you.
Had you formed some kind of ungodly triangle between Barcelona, Eliot, and Tolstoy’s “What is Art?”, my 19 year old undergraduate self would be forced to propose marriage.
Well done.
“Messi is pretty damn good, but he doesn’t have meaning alone.”
That is the bee’s knees.
I love this blog because of things like this. Bravo, excellent piece.
This is, bar none, the best football writing website on the internet. Shaj, I think this article ranks as my favorite on Run of Play. This really helps put my ruminations on the history of our beautiful game in perspective.
This is great. It reminds me of the RoP series on Pele from August. Good stuff, Shaj.
“The Barcelona system neither … nor relies on the particular attributes of any of its players”
This statement simply isn’t true. Barcelona, to a far greater degree than any other team in the world, rely on the close ball control of their attackers. Not aerial ability or physical strength, but ability to receive the ball in a tight space and control it.
Also, Messi has scored or assisted 38 out of Barca’s 70 league goals this season (more than every TEAM has scored bar Villareal, Real Madrid, and of course Barca), a fairly incredible ratio that indicates his importance to the team. Barca are obviously not a one man team, but saying that they don’t place a disproportionate creative burden on Messi, more so than his teammates, is just false.
It takes both talent and ideology to build world beating teams. One without the other never produces lasting success. Would Total Football have been as successful without Cruyff and Neeskens? Did Cruyff and Neeskens ever achieve their Ajax success anywhere else?
@matt Exactly. To say that each Barcelona player is fungible and could be replaced is simply ludicrous. Who could possibly slide into Xavi and Leo’s roles? Take Xavi’s vision and Messi’s Jesus skills away from Barcelona and you have a good, but not amazing team.
Before Messi steps on the field he will be thinking about legos. Nothing else.
Cincher of a last paragraph – although the argument is (necessarily) distorted to make more of the system than required, it is uncontroversial that Barca does have a systemic approach within which even great players fit, though the system paradoxically elevates their individual attributes by making use of them in a team context. The influence of the Barcelona way, with its own history (and set of comparisons from “like Ajax” or “came with Cruyff” to “not Real Madrid”), as well as the pantheon or canon of individuals, infuses the meaning of each player on the pitch.
In what is otherwise a really interesting piece, in one respect I think Shaj is putting the cart before the horse to shore up a preconceived notion of what modernity in football is: “The Barcelona system neither caters to a superstar—just look at the emergence of former squad-players like Pedro—nor relies on the particular attributes of any of its players (e.g. Ronaldo’s pace for Real Madrid).”
Barcelona has catered to Messi the Superstar a lot. A big lot. A completely-changing-their-system-just-for-him lot. And Guardiola’s assistant coach Tito Vilanova happily admits as much in an interview in today’s Sport (my translation):
“When we moved up to the first team in 2008, the first thing we did was to opt for a straight 4-3-3 with Leo on the right wing. But it’s not surprising that after people have seen us play for a while it gets harder and harder to surprise the other team. Out on the wing, Messi – or any other player – is easier to counter, especially as they nearly always put two men on to cover him.
“Putting him in the middle of the forward line was a decision we arrived at together and were sure was going to work, because Leo is pure talent. Playing in what he calls a “two-faced striker” role, he participates much more in the team’s play as a group. And it’s much more difficult to stop him, because you don’t know whether he’s going to move to the left or right and, most of all, because the other team will think twice about fouling him on the edge of the area because of the risks involved in doing that.”
And we can point to other, albeit less obvious, examples of Guardiola adapting his team to play to the players’ individual strengths. Carles Puyol originally played right back, then right centre back, but Guardiola plays him as the left-sided central defender. Why? Because Piqué is stronger at moving the ball upfield to start an attack – that’s one of his main “talents” – and the right side of the pitch is where Alves, Xavi and still often Messi happen to hang out ready to set phase two in motion. Or another example: for many years it was a tenet of faith at the Camp Nou that Iniesta and Xavi could never play together because they cancelled each other out – no team needs more than one diminutive pirouetting playmaker, the thinking went. But Guardiola adjusted the midfield system specifically so that they could play together, simply because they were too good not to have both of them on the pitch at the same time.
The system adapts to suit individual idiosyncracies.
(Er. . . and idiosyncrasies too.)
Wow.
Just, wow.
Thank you Shaj and Run of Play…
I think a little update on literary theory is needed here. What you are getting at in a round about way via Eliot is the concept of intertextuality. Although coined by Kristeva, one can turn to Bakhtin or Barthes as well to understand the “intersecting planes” of various texts. One could imagine “Death of the Author” morphed into “Death of the Individual Superstar” perhaps or “From Work to Text” as “From Game to Play,” or something like that. Kristeva also ties intertextuality to modernism. The point here I guess is that you are of course right in trotting out a point about how the past of anything informs the present of it and vis versa but instead of dealing with the complexities of poststructuralist theory which elucidates this process in a way Eliot does not concerning social and temporal relationships, this piece leans arbitrarily on a decontextualized Eliot. In a sense, by not participating in the larger conversation concerning the process you explain you inadvertently make Eliot into “the Individual Superstar” the piece sets out to problematize.
In terms of how this applies to the game, I think the tools of this are rightly pointed out as digital media-you mention youtube. A bit more on youtube and the ways in which video, stats, etc are available now to create these intertextualities to flesh out the particular process of intertextuality and modernism you speak of would be useful. Of course many have compared players or teams before the digital age but these new tools have certain let’s say “time-lag” diminishing properties, to borrow from Bhabha, that simply hearing someone who saw Madrid in the 50’s speak or reading about Nottingham Forrest simply do not. This is not to say they are better, though perhaps they are, but that a new way of understanding the way we compare is afoot and we need to get neck deep in it.
@Jim Yes, how dare he use a work that talks about the ideas he wants to talk about rather than using a work that you would have preferred and that talks about the ideas you claim he actually wants to talk about. Let’s keep the hermeneutics of suspicion on a leash.
Nice point about YouTube.
@Brian Phillips
This is not simply I like this book and you like that book. Eliot is at the cusp of a conversation that develops into the ideas that I mention. In other words, he’s a good enough starting point but if you don’t get past him in relation to the past informing the present informing the past then you’re simply arbitrarily ignoring seminal arguments that could bring your argument into more focus, and make it more relevant to what scholars are saying in relation to it today. Eliot has insight into the point the author is making, no doubt, but so much has been done with this issue that dwelling on Eliot alone is to ignore 50+ years of brilliant scholarship. I’m not saying that anyone has to do anything my way or that every highlight of theory needs to be touched on in a blog posting on football but I do think that when many comments are just “brilliant” and “wow,” while others do not address the literary theory deployed in the making of the argument, that complicating what the author constructs as theoretically straightforward, when it clearly isn’t, is useful. In short, a lot is elided in getting us to the author’s Messi/Maradona comparison or sphere of influence and unearthing a bit of that is not just an ad hominem attack on the author but a way of continuing the conversation in the vein of the original post.
@Jim Fine, but your comment above isn’t about “continuing the conversation,” it’s about attacking the post for what you see as its faulty emphasis. Your points about postmodernism are interesting as far as they go, but criticizing an 800-word blog post about Eliotic modernism and soccer for not ranging across the works of Homi Bhabha is just hobby-horse riding, or else intellectual trollery.
You could just as easily critique the post for failing to incorporate a foundational discussion of late-nineteenth-century canonicity, or critique your own comment for not incorporating any of the really interesting Spanish-language work on colonialism and aesthetic hierarchy (the soccer equivalent of which would be the Castrol Rankings, obviously). Either might be useful if presented as an extension or a source for possible further discussion; neither is particularly valid as a dismissive critique.
@Brian Phillips @Jim I get it. In order to truly appreciate this post we must read all the other posts and literary critiques from before and after both Eliot and this post.
@Brian Phillips Actually continuing the conversation is exactly what I’m doing. In fact, I am telling the author that the conversation on the topic has moved on and that he would be wise to incorporate these new facets (Bhaktin, Barthes and Kristeva) into his discussion. To be clear, the Bhabha comment is about the use of new technology not the use of Eliot. My comments are not tangental in the way that bringing in Benitez-Rojo or something would be just to throw theory around for its own sake or for my own self-agrandizing purposes. The main point of the much of the post is that figures like Messi do not stand alone but in relation to other figures. I said “Hey, Eliot is just the tip of the iceberg in talking about these things. Take a look at these other people too.” So the theorists I pointed out are highly relative (unlike say questions of canonicity) because they directly engage the author’s central point and seek to extrapolate from it. I’m not careening his argument into some far flung and irrelevant discussion but simply providing food for thought via a clearly linked genealogy between Eliot and studies on intertextuality. I don’t know why you find that so distasteful.
@The Dead No, that’s the author’s job.
Speaking for myself, I like this site because of posts like the above, and I like posts like the above not for their sophisticated analysis and airtight intellectual vigor, but because they offer an uncommon means of thinking about the soccerfootball I spend altogether too much of my time watching and thinking about.
And so sometimes a “wow!” or a “well done!” or a “bravo!” in this context indicates more of a “gosh, I’m just so happy someone somewhere is doing something at least mildly creative and interesting!” than a “holy jesus you’ve just unlocked the truth!”
I am all for continuing the conversation (the discourse!) and watching the history of literary theory unfold via the soccer, but I’m way too much of a dilettante to get involved in the specifics.
I will however suggest to Jim, with all due respect, that perhaps he’s suffering a problem of style, if not content. Get an ironic Gravatar! Make a jokey aside about a dopey football journalist’s latest irrelevant twitterism! The discourse and etc., you understand.
But most importantly: A matter where I am not a dilettante is in reading words strung together in long chunks, and I’d like to heartily encourage the use of paragraph breaks, particularly when using words from the big kids table like Bakhtin and problematize.
Ya’ll are the Oxbridge of soccer/football blogs!!! Makin’ me think about footy like I’ve never thought before. Thank you!
@Tim Using words like “problematize” (a horrific coining that; I’d love to meet the person who uttered it, so I could slug him) will get you ignored more thoroughly than brandishing an Esso card at Tiffany’s.
@Jim I think @Brian Phillips is defending his writer from what came across as a condescending dismissal, rather than an honest attempt to engaging and extending the discussion. Whether you meant it or not, “I think a little update on literary theory is needed here” is a bit of a Foghorn Leghorn “step aside, son” moment. Yes, the conversation in literary theory has moved on, but that’s not what the post was about.
@Archie_V
Changing a formation does not imply changing the system, Puyol on the right or center, Messi on the right or center… Tiki Taki Tika Taki Tiki Taki…….. Tactics here are really not relevant.
Although a sound case may be made – and yet, at once, not – for the hegemonicity of the multiple intertextual resonances of PSG’s legendary attacking trio of Colin Deleuze, Tommy Derrida and Phil Foucault as a diachronic metaparadigm, a rigorous post-redeconstructionalizational analysis of the signified/signifier dichotomies at play reveals that it was in fact (i.e. the construct) – and also in fable (i.e. the deconstruct) – the twin-pronged strike power of Bryan Barthes and Kenny Levi-Strauss, not least under Alf Saussure’s then diversionary – yet ultimately reversionary (cf. Keegan, op.cit.) – wingless 4-4-2 system, for which they surely will be best disforgotten.
@Archie_V You were always already going to (dis)cover that comment.
@Archie_V Somebody’s cruzin’ for a brusin’…
@Austin A bruising? No, I should be OK. Their midfield hard man, Gary Althusser, is out for the rest of the season with a gammy knee.
@Michael K. While I was certainly critical of the post, I did not dismiss it. If I had done that I would have told him that he was barking up the wrong tree. Instead I said that he’s not barking nearly far enough up the tree. And while I do agree that ultimately the post is not about literary theory, it is used to make a point and it was how it was used that I thought could be improved. But I think what some people are missing is that I was being critical of theory because I think that if it had been developed then the points about football would have been better. I’m not a theory for theory sake guy, I want it to get us somewhere and I don’t think the Eliot did it as well as others could have.
As the in-house literary theorist at Run of Play, I’m not going to comment on this discussion except to say that I will now edit all my old posts with Shakespeare allusions and replace them with Tony Kushner allusions. This may take me some time, however.
Can’t say I have read an article this good drawing parallels between tradition and modernity written this beautifully. Kudos Shaj
@Brian Phillips I didn’t want to complain about the lack of references to modernity and the Spanish language poets Dario and Lorca, but, well, it smacks of anglo saxon cultural imperialism and to exclude them from a discussion blah blah blah trollllllllllllll
Is Jim my roommate in disguise? If so when did he start doing this pretentious breathing about soccer? Or give a sh!t for any sport, for that matter.