Politics, art, metaphor (part 1)
1.
Football, we are assured, occasionally these days with some exasperation, is political. The exasperation, I gather, is a product of the fact that a considerable number of people are inclined to respond to this assurance with indignation. Football is for such people an escape from the political, which (we can only suppose) bombards them at every other turn of their daily lives like a bug at a bulb after dark. They are, you see, in want of relief. Thus references—during football broadcasts, in the sports pages of newspapers and websites, on players’ social media feeds—to sportswashing, racism, LGBTQ rights, domestic violence, etc.—such references are but an obstacle to this relief, make of these people's private entertainment a political spectacle, invade their minds, stoke their (no doubt) already well-kindled sense of grievance.
Of course those who view football as an escape from the political, especially those who insist loudly on their right to such an escape, are merely staking out a political position of their own, and not just any political position, but the most reactionary political position available, the one that says that a person should be free from having to take any political positions at all if that’s what they really feel like doing, and thus a kind of magic trick, kicking the political ladder from underneath their own feet, as it were, and hoping somehow to remain suspended in the air. I say somehow. They assume, and some of them are even right, that they will be suspended by the status quo. So, football is political then. No shit.
I belabor (what I take to be) this obvious point because I want to place it in contrast to another point that is often taken to be obvious, that football doesn’t matter, not really, that it is just a game, the kicking around of a ball for the amusement of the bored and the mad and the hopeless. This latter point is typically made in the aftermath of tragedy or near-tragedy—the COVID pandemic, Christian Eriksen collapsing on the pitch during Denmark’s match against Finland at Euro 2020—or on those occasions when we are distracted from the game itself by a reminder of the context in which it is taking place, as when a player is racially abused during a match, or when the president of the Spanish football federation forcibly kisses a female player on live television after she has just won the World Cup.
Football is political, then—and thus meaningful, important, matters—right up until the moment the whistle blows and the players begin to actually play it, at which point it becomes frivolous, mere entertainment, one of, to borrow Arrigo Sacchi’s well-worn phrase, the least important things (that he said it was the most important of these things was, in my view, simply a way of burying his own lede). I must admit this attitude makes no sense to me at all.
Part of the trouble is that no one ever really stops to clarify what it means to say that football is political. Frankly I don’t know what else it could mean but the trivially obvious claim that football, like everything else in our lives, is subject to political forces. If this is all it means to say that football is political, however, surely we have to accept that what happens inside the four lines of the pitch over ninety minutes is political too (subject as it is to those very same forces). Thus we are faced with a choice: either to accept that football is political all the way through or to define the political so narrowly as to exclude our own lives (or to define our own lives so narrowly as to exclude the things we do while living them).
As it turns out, however, accepting that football is political all the way through is ultimately all that redeems the original claim from triviality. Because to insist on a distinction between the game itself and the structure surrounding it, and then to claim that only the latter is political (the former unimportant) is simply to insist on a tautology: that the political structure of the sport is a political structure. What I want to suggest, then, is that the only way to extract anything of interest from the claim that football is political is first by trying to figure out what it would mean to say that the game itself is political, and then by saying it.
2.
I was drawing an analogy between football and art, with a view to thinking about the former through the sort of interpretive lens we typically apply only to instances of the latter. I wish now to extend that analogy.
Art, too, exists in a strange relationship to politics. All art is political, it is sometimes said. It has also been said, no less compellingly (and by a poet no less), that “poetry makes nothing happen.” W.H. Auden, in whose elegy for W.B. Yeats that line appears, wrote around the same time that “artists and politicians would get along better at a time of crisis like the present, if the latter would only realize that the political history of the world would have been the same if not a poem had been written, nor a picture painted, nor a bar of music composed.” This is of course a deeply pessimistic view of art’s political potential, and yet perhaps understandable given the year it was written, 1939.
I came across this quote in a piece by Arthur Danto, “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” in which Danto, among other things, tries to square Auden’s attitude with the widely held belief that art is dangerous, a belief he thinks evidenced by the fact that “the history of art is the history of the suppression of art.” Of course the exact role art has to play in shaping the political history of the world is, as Danto points out, a complicated empirical question, but it seems at least plausible to suggest that its primary function has simply been to reflect back at people views they already hold. The importance of a such a role should not be dismissed, but it is hardly that of the dangerous revolutionary force art has often been claimed to be. Another way of putting Auden’s point, then, might be to say that poetry never changes anyone’s mind.
This last, at least, is demonstrably false. But then those works of art that have been most politically influential have, at least in some cases, suffered artistically for this influence. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, has been credited with changing white America’s perception of slavery to such an extent that it caused the Civil War, and yet it has also been credited, more persuasively, with not being a very good book. Moral force, if that is what it is, does not equate to, and may indeed undermine, aesthetic value. In fact, there is an interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that places it closer in kind (if not quality) to the dialogues of Plato or, say, Nietszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra than to the novel as an explicitly artistic enterprise. This interpretation may be implausible, but it would at least go some way to explaining the book’s literary defects.
The problem in general, on this pessimistic view, may be summarized as follows: for anyone hoping to effect political change, the choice to create art, as opposed to actually entering politics (I do not equate this with running for office), must seem a strange one. For the incentives in art-making are simply different to, and sometimes directly at odds with, those of change-making.
And indeed it is notable that even the art that does have a claim to having effected political change has done so by, so to speak, sneaking up on its audience, presenting itself as one thing (something interesting to look at, to read, to hear), and only then, once it has thus grabbed their attention, forcing them to confront a reality they had previously been blind to, to recognize the humanity of a group of people they had previously sought to oppress, etc. From the perspective of someone who cares only about effecting political change, producing art with the aim of occasioning such encounters must surely appear needlessly risky, since there is of course no guarantee the audience makes the intended connection between art and reality in the first place.
Danto’s view on this pessimistic outlook, not an uncommon diagnosis in philosophy, is that it is all Plato’s fault. Plato recognized art’s danger—its ability to stir our emotions, and so to turn us away from the truth—and his response was not only to banish the artist from his ideal city, but to banish art itself from reality. By insisting on a distinction between the world of the Forms and the world of appearances, and then arguing that the artist is in the business merely of imitating the latter (that is, of imitating an imitation), Plato succeeds in severing art’s ties from the political, the sphere of what matters, on two levels at once. “Platonic metaphysics,” as Danto puts it, “was generated in order to define a place for art from which it is then a matter of cosmic guarantee that nothing can be made by it to happen.”
Later philosophers abandoned Plato’s metaphysics, but followed his lead in neutering art’s political potential (whether they intended to or not). They did this by emphasizing in their various ways that art is concerned with beauty, and then claiming that what makes beauty worthy of art’s concern is its ability to elevate us, to allow us to transcend the ordinary and the everyday. All that is left to acknowledge is that the ordinary and the everyday are where politics happens, and art’s causal impotence is secured all over again, albeit by different means. So the view that art is dangerous, for Danto, is a very old philosophical belief, and much of the past two and a half thousand years of Western thought have been devoted to defining art in such a way that places it in a sphere of concern whose characteristic feature is its detachment from the ordinary run of human life, which placement then causes its dangers simply to vanish. If Auden’s quotes are anything to go by, this campaign has not been entirely unsuccessful.
Like art, football elevates us. Or at least part of what many of us love about football is that it can elevate us, when it is done well. This places the game itself in contrast to the circus that surrounds it (and, increasingly, threatens to destroy it), which is so debased and messy and reflective at such a deep level of the many glaring failures that plague our society that it could go by no other name than politics. From this angle, distinguishing between the game itself and the structure surrounding it is a compliment to the sport. But this can only ever be a backhanded compliment if emphasizing football’s ability to elevate us is just another way of insisting on its political impotence, its detachment from the things that really matter. The question that needs answering, then, and which I will turn to next, is why something’s elevating us should be thought to be incompatible with its being meaningfully political.