Abstract
Richard Gruneau offers a critical perspective on sports and modernity, proposing a historical sociological exploration of these two concepts. He discusses the ideology, narratives, and struggles underlying sports practices, and the associated body culture and spectacles – today identified as sports mega-events – since ancient Greece. He identifies the importance of the theory and processes of modernization underlying these practices, namely, ‘how they played a role in the making of modernity,’ how sport turned into an ‘autonomous “object” of modernity,’ how international sporting spectacles ‘developed as part of the “staging” of modernity,’ and, how sport developed as a ‘project and a critique of modernity.’ Finally, he demonstrates how sports spectacles at present tend to embody ‘competing views of modernization’ and major structures of ‘global capitalist modernity’ (p. 1), often representing social and economic polarizations in the host cities and nations.
The book is organized in five chapters focusing on different moments in the historical relationship between sport and modernity. The chapters (1) offer visions of the uses of the body and the structuring of sport in antiquity; (2) discuss English sports politics of representation and objectification; (3) discuss the establishment of modern sports mega-events; (4) focus on German (anti)modernism, and the importance of critical theory in sports; and (5) illustrate the problem of sports development and the resulting inequalities in global capitalist modernity. Although they can be read independently, they have central ideas in common that deserve consideration. The ideas offer a critique on the ideology underlying sport as a spectacle; the capitalist form of modern accumulation; and the description and criticism of the process by which imagery related to sport, leisure events, and body culture was historically conveyed as a system of collective manipulation. Finally, Gruneau’s discussion identifies the contradictions and dichotomies associated with sport and modernity, calling attention to the paradox of the process of modernization associated with both categories of analysis, i.e., the case in which they have been representing and reproducing both progress and destruction, sustainability and evolution, but also inequalities, or even values of health and well-being as well as discrimination and false hope.
In the first chapter, ‘Athletics, Body Imagery and Spectacle: Greco-Roman Practices, Discourses and Ideologies,’ the author offers an insightful critique of the ‘ideological legacies of ancient Greco-Roman athletics, body cultures and spectacles in shaping the nature of modernity itself’ (p. 17). He demonstrates how athletics, body imagery, and spectacles had an important role in reproducing ideologies of class, gender, and politics, and how ideologies or values of physicality, masculinity, and vitality were used to reach and influence populations, translating them into symbols of opulence, modernization, and advancement. He offers also a perspective on how woman first entered the Olympics (p. 22) and on the differences between relevant male and female visual representations during the Greco-Roman empire (pp. 23–26). Furthermore, he provides an interesting critique of political and economic changes that have implications for the organization, practice, and meaning of ‘athleticism’ (p. 27) by presenting an analysis of the way sports practices became associated with ‘labor’ and ‘property,’ and become commodities, objects of trade, and products of the process of modernization.
Chapter 2, ‘The Politics of Representation: English Sport as an Object and Project of Modernity,’ addresses the importance of the politics of representation to the constitution of sporting, and the ‘philosophical, political and moral discourses’ linking sport as a cultural object and as a ‘project’ of modernity through two related ‘processes of objectification’: (1) the creation of its own autonomy through representation, and (2) the formation of sporting pastimes as objects of contemplation and critical analysis. The author demonstrates that neither process was ‘politically innocent . . . they involved creating an effect that people recognized as reality’ (p. 81), and he draws attention to the importance of images as representations that refer not just to its making and meanings but also to forms of social practice set up in the social construction and lived experience. It goes from showing how English sporting recreations were depicted in 14th century, to describing the spread of metal-type printing in England during the late 15th century, and how printing created opportunities for the ‘widespread dissemination of written and visual representations of sporting pastimes’ (p. 65). The author shows how this expansion in sport was associated with colonial expansion. The rise of capitalist patriarchal enterprise, commercial trade, and slave trading over succeeding centuries brought new cosmopolitan ideas and identities to the English plebeian culture, affecting and changing it. We are able to understand how this ideological process of representation, objectification, and abstraction transformed sport into a distinctive field of practice by the beginning of the 20th century, demonstrating how representation belongs to the sphere of practice, being constituted of the autonomy of the field of sport itself, rather than of a superstructure.
Chapter 3, ‘ “Staging” (Capitalist/Colonial) Modernity: International Exhibitions and Olympics,’ outlines ‘modernity’ more than the ‘process of modernization’ itself, as in all other chapters. This chapter discusses the socially discursive conditions in which international exhibitions and the Olympics were constructed across different phases of the history of capitalism. It begins with the moment when labor power became freely exchanged through labor contracts (p. 101), to the moment of ‘mediatization of culture’ through media technologies and institutions, spectacle, and consumption, to the commodification of leisure and the rise of new forms of symbolic power, and demonstrates how the emergence of large-scale industrial exhibitions in Europe during the 19th century were influenced by these tendencies and conditions (p. 103). The author critically discusses how these exhibitions revealed a powerful ideological tendency to stage modernity as spectacle, reproducing values states wished to convey (p. 115). He also addresses the origin and implementation of the ‘Games’ that staged the promise of a better world, discussing the ambivalence associated with it: whereas some viewed modernity uncritically and as a promise, others saw it pessimistically and as degradation. This division influenced modern views on sport, opening space to a more rationalistic view, which is discussed in the next chapter.
Chapter 4, ‘German Modernism, Anti-Modernism, and the Critical Theory of Sport,’ focuses on ideology, sport, and risk while discussing the dichotomies associated with the idea of modernity. Focusing on German modernism, it clarifies how the modern Olympics emerged from ideas celebrating nationalism (such as in Germany), and others wanting to promote internationalism like in the United States. Also, there were divisions in Germany with the more conservative celebrating the male body as a primary source of vitality and energy, and more liberal views associating sport with capitalist conceptions (combining physical education, physiology science, and measurement, intending to promote the health of society, and compensate human physical decline in work; pp. 135–137). By explaining such historical dichotomies within German society, the author emphasizes the worth of ‘critical theory,’ remembering its purpose of analyzing the forms of domination and oppression in social life, with the specific goal of human emancipation (p. 138). Criticizing capitalist commodification and the instrumentality of rational bureaucratic organizations that originated the process of reification of human life (p. 139), and including Nazi aesthetics, the author shows its continuity today, particularly in the analysis of ‘modern sports’ as an ‘exercise in reification.’ He highlights the role of critical theory as ‘one of the only critical traditions devoted to combining a critique of modern society and culture with a critique of capitalist social relations’ and its importance in helping ‘us not to confuse our own analytical constructions with an unmediated objective reality’ (p. 157). This important critique is developed in Chapter 5 as sport spectacles organization today reinforce the ideology of mass culture.
Chapter 5, ‘A Savage Sporting of “Winners” and “Losers”: Modernization, Development, Sport, and the Challenge of Slums,’ is critical of the way modern mega-events are implemented in modern cities, because they often prompt new forms of social inequalities. The chapter shows the contradictions of modernity and sport nowadays, arguing that ‘large-scale sporting spectacles have increasingly become sites for social exclusion, corruption, and wide spread social unrest’ (p. 159). This is an important matter for critical theory, because actual sport is presented as utopia, particularly given the reality of slums, and the visions of urban revitalization associated with the creation of these events, which is usually not achieved. Drawing upon examples from the Olympics and the World Cup, he critiques modernization theory and the ideas influencing its institutionalization. He stresses that to be able to turn to sustainability, the organization of mega-events should involve an analysis of risk involving the reformulation of states and NGOs’ role, prevention and assessment of corruption, and evaluation of its consequences, including providing better sanitation as well as the means of work or even clean water for populations involved, instead of just ‘renovated airports, shopping malls . . . and facilities’ (pp. 185–191). With this critique the author calls attention to the paradox of development, to the constant and forever incomplete modernization process, and to the forms of destruction usually associated with productivity, competitiveness, and the capitalist accumulation process, that need to be addressed and discussed, in particular by the states, political and cultural organizations, and NGO partners involved in the development and structuring of sport nowadays.