Politics, art, metaphor (part 2)
3.
Art—possibly unlike football, although this remains to be seen—is capable of expressing content, of making claims about the world. Thus, Guernica condemns the brutality of war, 1984 warns against the dangers of totalitarianism, 4’33” tells us something about the nature of sound and silence, etc. Whatever exactly is going on that allows these (and countless other) artworks to make such claims, it has something do with the relationship between the works themselves, the artists who made them, their public, and the world.
If there were no bombing of Guernica, for example, and certainly if there were no war at all, a painting that was identical to Guernica in every other respect would simply not make the anti-war statement most people think it obviously does. However troubling, however violent the audience of this alternative Guernica may find its imagery, there would be nothing in reality for them to connect it to that would allow them to interpret it as being about war, much less against war, in the first place. If it were possible to make sense of the idea of an artwork existing in isolation from a world, I want to suggest, such an artwork would be meaningless (in the same way that a tree or a mountain is meaningless—though still, perhaps, beautiful).
All of which is just to say that an artwork’s ability to express content, political or otherwise, is closely bound up with the sort of interpretive activity most of us (Susan Sontag notwithstanding) tend to think of as an essential, possibly even an unavoidable, component of the consumption of art. In this context, beauty becomes a tool, a way of lamenting the ugliness of human affairs, of destabilizing an audience’s assumptions about what ought to count as beautiful in the first place, of chastising them for their failure to see the world aright, and so on.
It is true that experiences of beauty can elevate us, can produce in us a feeling of the smallness or insignificance of the ordinary, a sense of detachment from the particular—but it seems to me that much of what is compelling about these experiences is that they are unstable, fleeting, that they appear to us only as glimpsings, rather than genuine seeings. The idea, then, that art is valuable because beautiful, and what is beautiful is valuable because it allows us to transcend the common run of daily life arguably misses not just what is most interesting about art, but also what is most interesting about those moments of elevation it provides us. I can’t decide if I would be mixing metaphors if I were to to add that the reason we seek out higher ground is to get a better view of whatever is down below.
Of course all of this only works, if indeed it works at all, because the artist and their audience take themselves to be engaged in an act of communication. The artist is treated as trying to say something, and the audience attempts to figure out what it could be. Beauty thus becomes an element of the communicative act, and this is what grounds it in the ordinary, even as it allows us these occasional glimpses at something extraordinary. I ended the previous section by asking whether something’s elevating us should be thought to be incompatible with its being meaningfully political. If these considerations about art are right, or even on the right track, they would suggest that the answer to that question is ‘no’: because beauty and transcendence are better thought of, at least in the artistic context, not as a means of escape, but as something like ways of seeing, ways of understanding the world.
4.
Our interpretive encounters with football appear highly impoverished in a way that our interpretive encounters with art are not. The main reason for this is that we take it as given that the point of the game is to win, and everything that happens on the pitch must therefore be interpreted on the basis of this fact. The result is that the sort of interpretive questions that prompt us to treat art as expressing content of various kinds—above all: what does this mean?—are replaced by a single, I am tempted to say, a tyrannical question: how did that contribute to winning?
Tyrannical not because it prevents us from interpreting players and managers as expressing content, but because it forces us to interpret everything they do as expressing exactly the same content: I think this will help my team win. Because of this, it is not at all clear what a player could do on the pitch that would count as making the sort of world-directed (as opposed to winning-directed) claims that artworks are able to express.
Of course football can be, and often is, beautiful, but if the above is correct, then football’s beauty cannot be thought of as an element of a communicative act in the way that more traditional artistic beauty can be. The problem is not that football cannot communicate, but that it can communicate only a single claim (a claim, moreover, about itself).
And so while experiences of beautiful football may be able to elevate us, they would seem to do so in a way that has, that can have, nothing to say about the world down below, and therefore nothing to say about politics. If this is right, then to the extent that football—that is, what happens inside the four lines of the pitch over ninety minutes—is political at all, it is political only in the shallow sense that politics has an influence on the outcome of individual matches, that political decisions, as it were, contribute to winning.
Now, the discovery that something potentially interesting—in this case, the claim that football is political—is in fact trivial is never a happy one, and so I am I going to try to resist it. But where have I gone wrong?
The obvious, possibly the only, place to start is the claim that the point of football is to win. This may well be so, but it does not follow from this that winning is the only thing that matters. And indeed people certainly say things (the extent which they really mean them is unclear) to the effect that winning is not the only thing that matters. How you play matters, too. There is, we feel, a right way to play the game. And what could motivate this feeling other than considerations having to do with beauty?
Winning, then, important though it no doubt is, does not have to be the interpretive dead-end it initially appeared to be. Still, even if we are not required to interpret everything that happens on a football pitch as expressing the same content, there remains a question about how wide a range of content we can plausibly interpret it as expressing.
5.
It has been said (or maybe I just imagined this—at any rate, it seems like it could have been said) that different styles of football represent different visions of life, possibly even different visions of political life. Free-flowing, attacking football represents a commitment to freedom of expression, or an open, inclusive, democratic society, etc. Conservative, defensive football represents the opposite; or perhaps, given the way it emphasizes the collective over and above any one individual, it is the truly democratic style.
The right way to interpret these and various other ways of playing is an open question, but in this case that is what we want, because it means there is something at stake, interpretively speaking, beyond the attempt to figure out how a particular way of playing contributes to winning. How, for example, should we interpret the positional play that has come to dominate European football over the past couple of decades, as exemplified by the teams of Pep Guardiola? At its best, it can be breathtaking, exactly the sort of progressive, brave, attacking football most of us wish our own teams played. And yet it is the product of an extremely meticulous choreography, and so there is a sense in which whatever freedom the players appear to display is ultimately only illusory (in other words, Guardiola ruined Jack Grealish).
There is much to be said in this vicinity, but is any of it plausible? How seriously are we to take the claim, say, that the dominance of Guardiola’s Manchester City represents the final degradation of the capitalist enterprise: the world’s most talented players flock to play for the world’s most talented coach, only to have the true light of their talent extinguished at the altar of a system that promises freedom, but in the end can provide only victory, a lucrative substitute no doubt, but a substitute all the same.
The metaphor is not a total failure. Pompous maybe, overwrought, but not a total failure. You can see how someone might get from one side to other. On the other hand, give it a fucking rest, would you? To wit: my main memory of City’s last match (against Arsenal) was of Kyle Walker collecting the ball near his own box, dribbling thirty yards up the pitch and then, faced with absolutely no pressure whatsoever, turning around again. Admittedly I wasn’t counting, and for a while I actually fell asleep, but I’m sure he did this several hundred times. The final degradation of the capitalist enterprise, really?
Maybe the problem is that I picked the wrong metaphor, or maybe it is that such analyses must be metaphorical. The kicking of a ball, the making of a run, the choice to play a back three, to defend in a mid-block—none of these can be understood as literal claims about the world. Which means if we are to read such claims into the sport, we must engage in metaphor.
This is true of art, too, of course. Even the novel, which certainly seems to make claims about the world (as in the first lines of Anna Karenina, for example), is ultimately hampered by the fact that it is, essentially, fictional. And so in art, like football, this gap—work on the one hand, world on the other—seems unavoidable, and bridgeable only by means of metaphor (or something like it).
6.
I suppose the question that remains is why attempting to bridge this gap should appear so natural in an artistic context, while in a footballing context it is likely to produce only (and at best) a large quantity of eye-rolling. There is a sociological-historical answer to that question that I am simply going to ignore. Maybe I will pick it up another time. Instead, I close with two related observations.
First, nothing in principle rules out such interpretations of football because nothing in principle prevents a manager or set of players from deciding to play in a certain way because they feel that way of playing expresses something worth expressing about the world (even if only metaphorically). And so if interpreting what happens on a football pitch as expressing some explicitly political content seems, as I don’t deny it does, clearly ridiculous, this is in significant part because we have been given no reason to think that this is what anyone involved in the sport is actually trying to do.
But I, for one, sick freak that I am, long for the day when some brave idiot responds to a question about why they played a back three instead of a back four by saying that they wished to represent technology’s destabilization of society’s traditional power structures, or some such bullshit. Not because that is an interesting claim, but because it would mean we had finally discovered what a truly unencumbered version of the sport might look like.
Second, if it is true that no one has ever actually made tactical choices as the result of the desire to make a political statement of some kind, it is worth asking why. And again it is hard to avoid answering the question by saying that it has to do with the obsession with winning and losing—an obsession which is, it might be worth adding, encouraged in increasingly unhealthy ways (see: the latest betting scandal) by the more explicitly (and literally) political elements of the sport.
The suggestion, then, is that football—what happens inside the four lines of the pitch over ninety minutes—is just as capable of expressing political claims as anything else, and its failure to do so has less to do with anything internal to the sport than it does with the sport’s preoccupation with winning and losing.
Perhaps ‘preoccupation’ is too weak. After all, it is not clear a match would even make sense if neither team was trying to win. And yet a huge number of football fans would, I think, happily admit that their love of the game has very little to do with whether their team wins or not. What they love about it is what I have been referring to as its ability to elevate us. I suppose what I would ultimately like to suggest is that, as some of my comments about art attempted to bring out, the ways in which something can elevate us are much richer and more varied than the football world seems to have seriously considered.
If football doesn't matter, then, perhaps it is time we acknowledged that this is so at least in part because the managers and players (and all of us, too, I suppose) have decided we don't want it to. We would rather contribute to winning.