Indecent Acts In A Public Place offers four provocative essays that mark a radical departure from traditional descriptions of sport as cultural event. It rejects any notion that sport is merely a passive consumer activity that indoctrinates the participant into particular social values and acceptance of his representation. Instead, these essays look at challenges by sports fans and athletes to the cathartic spectacle and their own seeming impotence. They argue that what is absolutely essential to sport, and what makes sport so popular, are its qualities of contestation of external authority and representation, hedonism and possibilities for creativity. For it is just these qualities -- noise, disruption, festival, sensuality and antisocialness -- that sport, as a business, seeks both to contain and commodify. Indecent Acts In A Public Place considers sport with an attention to current critical theory that is usually reserved for ‘high art’, yet at the same time it is accessible, polemical, imaginative and witty. Along the way it takes up such fascinating and amusing questions as “Why do baseball players always spit?” and “Why are athletes usually stupid?”.
You may read some excerpts on the next page.
“Post Modernism, ‘Panic Culture’, the reported ‘death’ of everything from the Avante Garde to rock n’ roll. Such is the thrill of leaving the 20th Century, By way of a contrast, it also brings a ‘renaissance’ and rekindled interest in (of all things) Football. Suddenly, intellectual premier leaguers, popular culture’s ‘new wave’ of First Division ‘Mediaristocrats’ and artists in any division can admit that they love the people’s game... Indecent Acts In A Public Place by Rod Dubey, explores the roots of insolence and sedition in football, looking at the game and how its associated culture emerged, making the point that in considering football hooliganism as separate from the game as it is played in stadiums is missing the point. In the containment and control of the game (and its appropriation by media/corporate wealth) he sees that: ‘Those people who argue to reduce soccer violence (are) people who have missed the point of soccer’s development as a spectator sport. They do not see that two distinct games have sprung from folk football: the sanctioned game on the field and the unsanctioned game in the stands... As representatives of law and order they seek to protect the former and destroy the latter. By doing so, they become a contributing factor to more violence, since it is a violence essentially directed at the state...’ He suggests, that the game itself, along with other sports (such as baseball) at first banned by the Church and state because of their threat to ‘order’, were then organized, controlled (with their own laws) and contained on pitches and eventually in stadiums, before finally as is the case in the current era, appropriated as ‘spectacle’ within the Global media network. This, at the same time as further disenfranchising those playing the unsanctioned game on the terraces: ‘Not surprisingly, a working class youth often sees soccer hooliganism as an initial means of effecting change...’ ”
—from ‘Professional Fouls/Media Casualties’ by Doug Aubrey in Variant
ISBN 1-895166-00-4
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