Page 91 - Sport Culture and the Media

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To develop this point a little further, Lash and Urry use the term ‘reflexive
accumulation’ to describe a strengthening tendency in the processes of pro-
duction and consumption of objects and images for the people involved to be in
a position not just to be ‘buried’ in what they are doing, but to reflect on it,
criticize it and adapt to it (Rowe and Lawrence 1998). In this way, human
subjects can be partially disconnected from the social institutions, structures
and identities (including class, gender, work, nation, locality and family) that
they inhabit. Or, to put it another way, as the ‘automatic’ power of traditional
social structures over individuals has weakened, new opportunities have
emerged to behave, think and identify in less socially prescribed ways. This
development, which is sometimes called ‘postmodernity’, may not be so very
new and may still have much in common with ‘modernity’, but the existential
and ideological fluidity of postmodern life is probably unprecedented. It has
created, in one sense, a ‘market’ for collective identification, a vigorous com-
petition between governments, business corporations and social movements
for the ‘soul’ – and, not uncommonly, the discretionary income – of ‘cultural
citizens’ (now described as ‘postmodern subjects’; see Miller 1993, 1998a).
In more obviously functionalist terms, perhaps a ‘values vacuum’ has been
created whereby many people feel alienated, no longer believing deeply in
anything, identifying with anyone, or feeling committed to any cause out-
side the immediate interests of themselves and their significant others. An
opening exists, therefore, for enterprising parties to engage in the ‘conscious-
ness’ trade (Enzensberger 1976), to help supply the meaning and commit-
ment that rapid social change under late modernity or postmodernity have
evacuated from many lives. But what phenomenon has the emotional force
to bind symbolically the fragmenting constituents of society (evidenced,
according to Enzensberger (1994) by proliferating civil wars from ‘L.A. to
Bosnia’), especially where there is abundant critical self-reflection, cynicism and
a seeming ‘exhaustion’ of novelty? Not surprisingly, the answer in the context
of this book is media sport.
There is a well known argument (e.g. Novak 1976) that sport is a secular
religion, having taken over from the church as the primary place of collective
and individual ritual, belief, ecstasy, and so on. When sports fans have
their ashes spread on the ‘hallowed turf’ of their favourite sports stadium, the
spiritual qualities of sport are very evident. When on occasion a sports team
receives a blessing from a religious leader before a major sports event, it may
appear that ‘sacred sport’ is supporting orthodox religion, rather than the other
way round. If sport and religion have certain qualities in common, they also
share an involvement with business, especially where the religion is, as Max
Weber pointed out, the Calvinist form of Protestantism, which he argues
supplied many of the values crucial to the formation of capitalism. Indeed, in