At the risk of sounding boring and academic, I’ll start with a bit of Kant (it may or may not get better, proceed with caution). On viewing the French Revolution, Kant believed that those who saw the conflict between the ancien regime (or the aristocracy) and the ascendant capitalist class made the crucial difference. He, if memory serves, detested the Terror and violence, but thought that the assent given by Europe and the people of France to the guillotine represented a sea change that no amount of propaganda or military force could overturn.
Philosophically, the role of the spectator – the ones on the sideline who make up civil society and whose assent is necessary for the governing classes – has a long history in determining the eventual outcome of events. For much of the late 20th century, fans have believed the same of professional sports leagues – especially in soccer (futbol) and basketball. In my home sports city of Seattle, the Seahawks and the now defunct Sonics had incredible home field/court advantages due in part to a raucous fan base (though they lost, I still get chills from this clip, so up it goes) that needed only a reciprocal respect to explode. This is a generalized fact across sports.
Of course, reasons for home field advantage vary from travel fatigue to role players breaking daily routines to food poisoning to hometown fans. Hometown fans, any hometown fan will tell you, are the dominating factor – though long suffering cities such as Cleveland, Detroit and Seattle show that skilled players and competent front offices are necessary as well. Fans give the players energy, help swing referees decisions to the home team, and – especially in the NBA and MLB – sometimes are able to use trash talk to get into the heads of opposing players.
The Sonics no longer play at the Seattle Coliseum (or in Seattle) and numerous other old and loud stadiums have similarly been vacated or torn down in the name of bigger corporate profits. Modern players like Dwight Howard decry the lack of noise during the regular season, ignoring two crucial changes the last twenty years have wrought: 1) the fabled drunken ‘blue-collar’ fan has been pushed to the upper deck or couch while that old layabout, the corporate ‘fan’, sips $15 dollars beers and makes deals on the ubiquitous Blackberry while quietly hogging the lower levels. 2) Dwight Howard himself has not given any sort of commitment to the Orlando fan base, the spectators the home team desperately needs, that he’ll be there if the lock-out ends – instead, he stokes fears that he will follow Shaq, Lebron and other high profile players who flee their adopted cities for more money or exposure elsewhere. At Madison Square Garden – home of the NBA’s Knicks and the NHL’s Rangers - the new plan is to have the players enter the court through luxury boxes rather than at mid-court, upsetting a half century of tradition and fan involvement in the pace and feel of the game . What we have been witnessing, and I’m certainly not the first to comment on this, is the erosion of the place of the spectator in the place of sports. In sports, this has occurred through public (largely) and private spending on new arenas so that business elites and those with disposable income can get closer to the action.
At this point, I’ll return to my (speculative) corollary to the wave of riots/revolutions around the world. There have been numerous books and articles tracing the arrival of the spectator onto the political scene and the almost immediate attempts by the governing and capitalist classes to manage – rather than destroy - that same spectating class. Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is just one of these histories.
While there is a long history of riots since the 18th century, some recent US riots/uprisings, specifically Watts and Detroit in the 1960s, have been brought up as corollaries to what has happened in London (Paris, too, sometimes creeps into the discussion). Commentators, as is their wont, have commented that these were prime spurs to LBJ’s Great Society and led the way to some really innovative attempts to reorganize the structural inequality of urban life in the early 1970s (the briefly encouraging attempts to humanize black welfare mothers was one such effort). These died a quick death. Brixton in ’81 was a similar spur to police reform (and a good excuse to post this prophetic song). In most instances of riots, the lowest classes strike out for bread, dignity, the temporary glee of a civil society made to confront a fraction of the terror they experience in daily life, etc. In revolutionary situations, rage and organized resistance meet in a crisis of legitimation for the political class and we sometimes get something like we’ve recently seen in Egypt.
Almost without exception only a minute portion of those spectating are able to participate in changes - significant to cosmetic – necessary to restore some sort of equilibrium through which a ‘return to normalcy’ might allow commerce to resume. Those who acted – including most cops, it should be noted – are left out of the decision making. Modern revolutionaries and rioters alike resume lives marked by this suffocating and oppressive normalcy (the event of the revolution is obviously a separate thing from structural revolution, especially in a globalized market economy). Police repression and violence against poor black and youths in London is certainly not going to abate following these past nights (though we might see the real life Robocops that Detroit once dreamed of. Those who flooded Tahrir Square in Cairo knew/are finding that eliminating a leader doesn’t change the economic and political conditions they are governed by. Revolutionaries, at least, get to move closer to political action, even if they’re still not playing on the same courts.
Given the ‘political’ options available in Europe and North America, the average spectator could be excused for feeling a bit like the average NBA fan: fierce loyalty to a team whose owner and players may or may not exhibit any empathy or even sympathy beyond platitutdes. Forced even out of arenas and onto couches (of course, we’ve recently learned that sitting will kill us), able to comment on the state of affairs through Twitter, Facebook and comments sections, but thoroughly unable to modify the behavior of any of the actors. Kept in the dark about the important financial and political matters that determine what our lives look like, we make judgments without knowing the history or ramifications of those judgments. Meanwhile, the arenas continue to fill with the wealthy, the poor riot outside and most people simply want to enjoy a game in the midst of people they like and an inexpensive beverage of their choice.
