About the Author
Thomas Alkemeyer
Professor of (Sports) Sociology
Our relationships with the world and ourselves are communicated materially and symbolically, for example through artefacts such as tools, language and images. In the words of American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the ‘webs of significance he himself has spun’ that communicate these relationships are generally referred to as culture. They are created through an interplay of linguistic, discursive and ‘unspoken’ physical and gestural practices such as working, playing and doing sport. In this context, human physical movements go further and are different to simple physical performance or changes of location. They really mean something; they are significance in action.
In the practice of sport, the movements of the human body are framed and formatted in a particular way. This is particularly obvious in organised sport. The places where it is played out, its courts, halls and stadiums, salvage movement from the river of day-to-day life and give it its own specific form and meaning for each type of sport through the material and symbolic arrangements of running tracks, playing fields, sports equipment, codes and regulations. These arrangements were a prerequisite for the emergence of particular kinds of movement, such as the Fosbury Flop, the modern high jump technique named after American athlete Dick Fosbury.
In this respect, types of movement in sport are independent from types of movement in daily life. However, I will argue that this autonomy is relative. Because the dynamic configurations of movement and play that are revealed in the practice of sport always maintain a link to their historically changing social contexts.
In this way, organised (Olympic) competitive sport (to some extent), embodies and makes visible the characteristic motifs of modern society, such as the ‘triumph of performance’, as German political scientist Christian Graf von Krockow describes the idea of fair competition, the introduction of the constitution of the subject in competition with others, and the ideal of a body that has an infinite capacity to improve; and it does this more comprehensively, clearly and convincingly than any other cultural system of symbols.
From this perspective, sport creates a system of significance by means of moving the human body, revealing a specific image of society. Through this function it has undoubtedly made its own special contribution to disseminating and consolidating this image in the normal practices, consciousness, emotions and feelings of the subjects.
In this way, sport is more than just a mirror of society. It does not reflect society, but allows it to be seen from a particular perspective – and in this way it implicitly contests other perspectives. For example, behind the visible embodiment of official equality at the start of a sporting competition, any kind of real inequality disappears, which arises from different training conditions and the unequal distribution of economic and scientific resources.
At the same time, it is not enough to simply describe competitive sport as an affirmative cultural system. As a physical form of social self-presentation it also has a reflexive dimension. In sport, modern society is in a way being overtaken by that unavoidable physicality of the social, whose disciplining, denigration and displacement was a sine qua non of its own self-image. We can simply call it the return of the displaced. Viewed this way, the systems of significance embodied in sport communicate two contradictory aspects of modernism: the rationality of calculation, regulated social processes and the technological possibility of optimising everything living with the romantic quest for physical activity and direct experience, for passion and sensual stimulation. Finally, it is the presence of conflicting powers in one happening, often played out on a stage in front of an audience, that underlies the popularity, affective energy and attraction of competitive sport.
Competitive sport is the prototype of modern sport. It is an invention of the 19th-century. Its protagonists, such as the father of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, consciously propagated it in contrast to older models of physical education, such as traditional German methods of physical training and Swedish light gymnastics.
Coubertin argued that competitive sport was much more suited to the conditions of modern life, saying that physical education and gymnastics were too stiff and static. In contrast, competitive sports were dynamic in their ‘purity’ and time pressures and reflected the competitive nature of fast-paced modern life in industrialised societies. He believed competitive sport was particularly suited to shaping masculine character, providing the right conditions for men to help themselves and achieve.
Coubertin’s role model was the athletic education given in English public schools and universities such as Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge and Rugby. These educational establishments were founded in the 17th century to educate the lower classes, but after the 19th century they became the preserve of the sons of the upper class. They became institutions that educated the leaders of the future. Their educational methods focused on building the character of these future rulers. Competitive athletics was the incarnation of a particular set of values espoused by the middle and upper classes.
Olympic athletes embody the ideal subject of industrial modernity: a masculine self that takes on the best and strongest opponents from around the world in the insecure context of competition, and in this way constitutes it.
In this context, Olympic athletes embody the ideal subject of industrial modernity: a masculine self that takes on the best and strongest opponents from around the world in the insecure context of competition, and in this way constitutes it.
The ceremonies of the Olympic Games allow this ideal subject to be symbolically elevated and ritually celebrated. The world fairs were good examples of this: they celebrated a belief in civilisation based on science, technology and industrial progress by means of elaborate exhibitions. The products of new technologies such as telephones, lightbulbs, lifts, machine guns, rotary presses, cameras, and lawnmowers were displayed using elaborate historical decorations, and artistically illuminated. They were given sentimental names such as The Invincible, The Wondrous and The Favourite. The audience approached the products displayed on altar-like pedestals as if part of a sacred rite. Coubertin was fascinated by these displays, which turned modernity and mythology into a cult of progress. In ‘his’ Olympic Games it was the athletes who took the place of these high-tech products – as living, high-performance machines with a human face.
As a cultural form of social self-presentation, sport is changing along with the society that it is part of. This makes it an indicator of social change. For example, some time ago I joined with philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and experts in sport and education (Gunter Gebauer, Uwe Flick, Bernhard Boschert, Robert Schmidt) to look at the development of new, risky sports such as skateboarding, parkour and free climbing from this perspective as part of Berlin University’s special Cultures of the Performative research programme. These new types of extreme sports no longer represent modern ideas of official equality, regulated competition and objective measurements of performance and improvements in performance.
It is noticeable that this kind of gliding, rolling, jumping, flying, and climbing is consciously done without safety measures. The underlying theme of these sports is letting go, their proponents deliberately place themselves in unsafe situations. For a time, they relinquish their habitual familiarity with the world and dramatize this renunciation in what are often spectacular ways. The meanings and values that they create and present are very different to those of competitive Olympic sport.
From an engaged, internal perspective, these practices may be a performative critique of the standardisation of behaviour in day-today life. The spectacular renunciation of normal safety measures and the 'Gesamtgestus' of a deregulated present-day society can be deciphered from the perspective of a secondary observer. It enjoins but also enables it members to push the boundaries of normality, take risks and constantly reinvent themselves.
From this perspective, the ideal subject of this new, ‘liquid modernity’ (a term coined by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman) is no longer the Olympic athlete but the (still predominantly male) players who are permanently testing their limits, creatively reinventing themselves, and seeking out intense experiences.
The underlying theme of these sports is letting go, their proponents deliberately place themselves in unsafe situations. For a time, they relinquish their habitual familiarity with the world and dramatize this renunciation in what are often spectacular ways.
'Gesamtgestus' is a term used by Bertolt Brecht in this theatrical theory, meaning the overall purpose, point, and character of a production. For cultural sociologists, it is interesting in its embodied forms in movement, in that Brecht only ‘vaguely’ understood the expression to be defined that revealed the ‘attitude of an era’. Through the looking glass of this concept, the movements of surfing and gliding can be understood as cultural articulations in which the structures that halt and bind neo-liberal liquefaction are given physical shape and made tangible.
In this respect, Californian sociologist Arlie Hochschild produced a study on changes to the relationship between work and leisure time in the 1990s, in which she wrote: ‘Since 1997, a new term – “zero drag” - has begun quietly circulating in Silicon Valley [...]. Originally it meant the frictionless movement of a physical body like a skate or bicycle. Then it was applied to employees who, regardless of financial incentives, easily gave up one job for another. More recently it has come to mean “unattached” or “unobligated”. A dot.com employer might comment approvingly of an employee, “He’s zero drag”, meaning that he’s available to take on extra assignments, respond to emergency calls or relocate at any time.’
In as much as representations and performances give a recognisable shape and meaning to that which they represent and present, they are part of the production of that which is represented and presented. So cultural presentations of sport are not only indicators of social change but also have their own constitutive significance for the organisation of modern society. In their physical practices, forms of movement and fashionable elements, their music and equipment, we find that milieus, sub-cultures, and scenes not only present their views of the world and themselves but actually create them.
Recreational sport is now a separate area that has developed rapidly over recent decades and become bound up with pop culture. It provides the perfect public setting for highlighting social distinctions. It is a high-profile place for the work of unending social representation. It is used by players in joint forms of movement and styles to articulate a shared attitude and create a joint identity that distinguishes them from others.
Cultural presentations of sport are not only indicators of social change but also have their own constitutive significance for the organisation of modern society.
Through joint practice, individuals reveal themselves as a social group or collective subject, whose fiction of unity becomes real in an incarnated essence. If we want to learn something about how this collective views itself and the world, then we need to not only listen to what they say but also look at their physical manifestations.
Studying such collectives that are generally created through the medium of physical exercise can sharpen our focus on the fact that other groups and social entities also constitute a large part of our physical representation work, in movements, attitudes and gestures. This opens the door to a sociology that is not only based on linguistic expression in order to uncover social self-images and systems of values and knowledge, but that also takes into account those ‘unspoken’ physical performances that articulate unconscious attitudes, knowledge and views of the world.
Culture has a strategic role to play in the process of European unification. What about cultural relations within Europe? How can cultural policy contribute to a European identity? In the Culture Report Progress Europe, international authors seek answers to these questions. Since 2021, the Culture Report is published exclusively online.
