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Ljubodrag Simonovic
E-mail:comrade@orion.rs

SPORT AND ART

Sports and Artistic Competition

Art is the most authentic manifestation of the cultural heritage of mankind and the
basis of humanistic civilization. Sport is the manifestation of a technical civilization and as
such deals with humanistic civilization, which means that it is a means for creating a
civilization without culture. Unlike philosophy, science and art, sport does not offer the
possibility of establishing a (critical) relation to the existing world or the possibility of
overcoming this world. In art, a conflict leads to quality, something new unlike sport,
which is governed by the absolutized principle of quantitatively measurable performance.
Sport deals with historical time: the history of sport is reduced to a linear augmentation
of numbers (records) to which the names of impersonal champions are attached. In
playing sports, the quantity of different situations conceals a lack of possibility for
stepping out of the existing world and creating a novum. A work of art has a universal value
and is intended for all people regardless of their race, nation and gender: art creates
symbols which express universal human values. In order to understand and experience
their meaning man has to have the power of reasoning and a developed esthetic sense,
which means a developed cultural being. Sport also aspires to become a universal and
global phenomenon. The essence of the Olympic universalism is based on the universal
character of the fundamental principles of capitalism: bellum omnium contra omnes and the
absolutized principle of performance shaped in the Olympic maxim citius, altius, fortius.
Sport is the crown of a mondialistic ideology which deals with national cultures, destroys
man's artistic being and turns him into a civilized beast. In sport, the prevailing spirit is
not that of creativity, but of victory. Medals are not won for creating something new, more
beautiful and human but for the victory achieved by an ever better result (record). The
true effect of art is the development of man's aesthetic being, which means man's specific
and unique creativeness, while in sport man is reduced to the model of a dehumanized and
denaturalized sportsman. Artistic competition is based on the spiritual motion of one man
towards another, and not on one man's physical confrontation with another man, which
involves the infliction of bodily injuries and killings, as is the case in sport. In art, there are
no winners and losers, but only the development of man's creative powers and widening of
the horizons of freedom: art enables man to become that what he is not but can be. In sport,
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man becomes something else by way of physical and mental activity which alienates him
from himself and destroys his cultural and biological being. A sportsman makes sports
achievements by means of a technicized body and combative character and with a
dehumanized and denaturalized skill. What is being created is victory and record, which
means that a sportsman produces the ruling relations and values. Sport deals with
competition which does not involve the domination of one man over another and his
elimination from the life contest, as well as with the competition which enables man to step
out of the existing world. Furthermore, in art, there is no sex segregation, while in sport
women, being physically and in their character weaker than men, are reduced to lower
beings; art is dominated by man's aesthetic nature and limitless creative powers, while in
sport results are conditioned by man's restricted physical capacities; a work of art is
intended for people with a developed aesthetic sense, while a sports spectacle is intended
for masses deprived of their rights, as the cheapest spiritual food which should destroy
their libertarian and cultural being and turn them into idiots...
Art creates a humanized sociability based on the motion of man towards another
man. A sports team is not a cultural community, but an anti-cultural, anti-reasonable, anti-
erotic, anti-aesthetic, pseudo-social group, with a militaristic structure: sport is a war
waged by bodies and a dehumanized playing technique. As such, it is an institutionalized
violence where killings, physical injuries, bodily and mental mutilation of children are
legalized Sports play does not produce humane people, but fanatics ready to destroy both
their own body and that of their opponents in order to achieve victory (record). A
sportsman's face, as the anthropological manifestation of the ruling spirit, is not expected
to have a noble expression, it should rather express the victorious spirit, which means his
fanatical commitment to victory, while his body is to be the symbol of the expansionist
power and stability of the ruling order. Coubertin's maxim mens fervida in corpore lacertoso
indicates the esthetic pattern prevalent in sport. Not a harmonious body, as was the case in
antiquity, but a muscular body in combative exertion this is the highest esthetic challenge.
In contemporary capitalism (consumer society), sportsmen relate to each other in roles
they are given in the show-business, which means as (sporting) commodity. The rules
which apply to them are those which apply to any other commodity on the market,
although they are not an ordinary commodity, but the commodity with a special purpose:
they are here to fulfil the strategic interests of capitalism.
In sport, imagination does not strive to create something new nor does it seek to
escape from the existing world; it rather deifies the ruling relations by means of
appropriate symbols. Sports aesthetics is of a mystifying and cult character. A typical
example is the film by Leni Riefenstahl about the Nazi Olympic Games Olympia (Festivity
of People-Festivity of Beauty/Fest der Vlker-Fest der Schnheit). Riefenstahl's camera
carves modern sportsmen according to the ancient aesthetic model from the
cosmological period (Windelband), which has a religious character and expresses the
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domination of a (geometrically constructed) cosmic order over man. Bodily monumentality,

harmony, eyes directed to the skies, religious devotion, self-confidence, exultation this is
the physical appearance of the contemporary Olympic contestant. The sports body acquires
a cult character: sportsmen become live statues manifestations of ancient heroes (semi-
gods) and as such are the symbolic reincarnation of the immortal spirit of antiquity. Her
aesthetic is the mythological picture of a triumphalism which, through the idealized ancient
model of man (Hellenes) acquires a timeless dimension. Using the ancient aesthetic model,
Riefenstahl falsified a concrete historical image of the contemporary sportsman and thus
the capitalist order. The close-up shows symbols which give a quasi-mythological
dimension to the ruling values: the spirit of capitalism has the ancient religious veil.
Riefenstahl's film tries to prove that the Nazi regime is the immediate successor of
the Hellenic civilization. Her film came at the time of the final stages of German
archaeological excavations in ancient Olympia, which started at the time of Bismarck and
were completed by the Nazis; it shows the carrying of the Olympic torch from holy
Olympia to the Nazi Berlin (designed and realized by the organizer of the Nazi Olympic
Games Carl Diem, Coubertin's ingenious friend), which clearly expresses the Nazi's wish
to present themselves as heirs of the Hellenic cultural heritage. Olympia is a propagandist
spot in the artistic disguise. Its aesthetics is reduced to a technical means for turning people
into the symbol of fascist expansion, with the Nazi model of superman being superseded
by a mythologized ancient model of winner. It is an abuse of the artistic form meant to
produce particular psychological effects and achieve particular political goals. In Coubertin,
also, we do not find an authentic sports aesthetics; he rather tries to estheticize sport by
(ab) using the works of art (Beethoven, above all). The main reason for that lies in the
nature of sport: in it, man does not follow his artistic nature - which is based on man's need
for another man and, in that context, on man's motion towards another man - but his
combative character and an appropriate body.
In spite of glorifying the ancient world, the philosophy of sport does not find in it
any aesthetic challenges. One of the main reasons for that is the static nature of antiquity
which is opposed to the Social Darwinist and progressistic character of modern times that
conditions the nature of sport. Sports aesthetics does not have a formal character, which
means that it does not stick to the a priori rules; it is rather a cultural expression of the
ruling spirit with a dynamic character. At the same time, in addition to obtaining a cultural
legitimacy for sport, sports aesthetics also creates a magic which inseminates man with
the spirit of the ruling relations. Sport is more than an ornament (agalma): it deifies the
existing world and pins man down to it. For Schiller, education by way of art is education
for art; education by way of sport is education for the existing life which destroys man's
aesthetic being.
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The Aesthetics of the Sports Spectacle

A sports spectacle is the climax of the sports aesthetics. To direct a spectacle is the
highest form of manipulation with highly developed technical equipment and scientific
methods. A sports spectacle tends to raise the marginal to the level of fatal, in order to
marginalize the crucial social issues and leave their solution to plutocracy. Sport is always
pictured in an idealized form, as it is the incarnation of the basic principles of the ruling
order. At the same time, the spectacle promotes sports commodities, which means that it is
a market manifestation of the basic principles of capitalism. The purpose of contemporary
sports spectacles is not to produce a religious relation of viewers to the ruling values of the
existing world, something Coubertin insisted on, but to offer them a possibility of an
(illusory) escape from everyday life. Sportsmen do not fight for genuine human values and
do not encourage people to oppose injustice; they are the incarnations of the ruling values
and as such are mythological characters with legendary features and biographies, similarly
to heroes from national mythologies, and are the hallmark of the epoch. At the same time,
they are the billboards of multinational concerns and symbols of their expansionist
(victorious) power, which means that they are a specific commodity designed to ensure
the strategic ends of the ruling order. The aesthetics of the spectacle has the same purpose,
making sportsmen the incarnation of the ruling values and as such the symbols of capitalist
paganism: to glorify the winner means to glorify the ruling order.
Sport is no longer the indicator of the developing capacities of the ruling order and
thus the carrier of progress: its main role is to deal with the (critical) mind and perform a
depolitization of the oppressed. The purpose of the sports spectacle is not to create a
physically and mentally active man, but a profitable spectator who will, in his leisure time,
be pinned down to the TV set or will spend his free time at stadiums and sports centres.
The focus has been transferred from the ideological to the psychological level: sports
spectacles serve to blind and pacify people. The grandeur of a sports spectacle
corresponds to the miserable life of an ever bigger number of people. Everything is being
done to blind the man deprived of his rights with glamour, offer him an opportunity to
experience and take part in something big and run away from everyday gloominess. The
magnificent dimension of winners is the other side of the humiliating social position of
losers (working class). The ruling establishment of capitalism has discarded the idea of a
happy world, which for almost two centuries was the main ideological lure for working
masses deprived of their rights. Instead of the promised better life, those deprived of
their rights are offered increasingly bloody sports spectacles as the compensation for
their increasingly bloody life which is to reconcile (Compte) them to the existing world
and prevent them from becoming aware of its current (destructive) development. The
stadium, as the most authentic space of modern man's spiritual slavery, becomes a space of
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freedom and the oasis of happiness, where modern cesars sit in blue loges not to watch
the fights of modern gladiators, but to make sure that the masses of those deprived of
their rights are (still) under control.
In sport, the beautiful is determined by the nature of the ruling order and not by
universal human values. The victory achieved by an ever better result (record) is the basic
criterion for determining the beautiful - and this is being imposed as the ruling aesthetic
model (sports body, sports image). The beautiful has a positivist determination and is
attributed to anything that symbolizes and glorifies the existing world and the ruling
values: it is an attribute of the victorious spirit. Hence the highest beauty is the body in
combative exertion. A sports body does not emanate spirituality, nobleness or
naturalness, but a dehumanized and denaturalized (destructive) strength. Sportsmen are at
the front line of the increasingly ruthless economic war and are reduced to a circus-
gladiator billboard. Instead of a winner whose eyes have a look of the magnificent beast
(Hitler) with a passionate cry (Coubertin), we have a sportsman who is in the functional
unity with the victorious strategy of capitalist concerns. The aesthetics of the sports space
indicates the truth that the basic purpose of sport is not to create a healthy body and thus
a healthy spirit, but to produce a man suited to the nature of the ruling order. Stadiums,
sports centres, body-building and fitness-centres are modern Procrustean forest mutilating
man's natural being and destroying Eros, imagination, the feeling of being part of the
human community... Sports aesthetics is a spectacular manifestation of slavery and
destruction of humanity.
Capitalism has abolished paradise in heaven and has created numerous illusory
worlds which enable people to escape from life which is becoming a capitalist hell.
Instead of a universal illusion offered by Christianity, man can choose between virtual
worlds which have become a commodity on the ever bigger market of illusions. Freedom
is reduced to an escape from the existing world. Capitalistically degenerated art transfers
into the world of symbols whatever appears as a concrete human need: the struggle for a
nice world replaces the struggle for a just world. In it, creative powers become a power
alienated from man which draws libertarian spirit from life and degenerates it by way of
symbolism in which it acquires a caricatured and Don-Quixotean form. Masterpieces of
art become a highly concentrated power alienated from man, and a suprahistorical
criterion for determining the human, which means an instrument for man's spiritual
submission. A profusion of artistic expressions, which are of a commercial character and
technical form, is the other side of the spiritual misery in society. Beaux-arts are the
ideological mask of a hopelessly ugly world ruled by the principle Money does not stink!,
which is based on the destruction of life. Artistic galleries are ghettoes for art. Outside
galleries we have increasingly primitive and aggressive symbols of the ruling order. The
whole life space has become a billboard of capitalism. Man is deprived of the right to
illusion: it does not have only anti-libertarian, but above all an anti-existential character.
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Individual Actions

The theory of sport glorifies individual actions by taking them out of the whole of
event and giving them a meaning which is supposed to give sport a humanist aureole. The
glorification of individual actions is not the glorification of man, but of the ruling values
incarnated in sport. Otherwise, the actions would be understood as man's hopeless
endeavour to assert his humanity in inhuman conditions, and this would be the critical
starting point in man's relation to sport as an institution. Individuality is restricted by
rules of the game determined by the nature of sport as show-business. Individual play and
bravuras are elements of a directed performance in which free play is but an illusion.
Habermas also emphasizes that: To the extent in which a coach allows his players to
perform individual actions, sport has nothing to do with play. What is claimed to be play is
actually a professional show on one side with consumers on the other. (1) By insisting on
the reductionist approach with which the essence of capitalism is ignored, Habermas is not
capable of realizing that coaches are only participants in the formation of a playing style the
change of which is conditioned by the spirit of time and requirements of the owner of the
sports show-business. Coaches are modern slave-drivers being driven themselves by the
whip of capital under which they must bend the knee - if they are to stay in play. They are
the extended hand of club-owners who constantly change the rules of play in order to
preserve the attractive character of sports spectacles and fill the sports halls (stadiums),
which means to provide TV broadcasts and commercials. The estimated public taste,
which is conditioned by the ever more impersonal and cruel life, represents the guiding
principle of the owners of sports show-business in the creation of new rules which
immediately condition the playing style and technique. The coach's physical appearance,
his clownish behaviour, his relation to players everything is in the service of show-
business. It is all about a modern circus, whose rprtoire is directed by its owners and in
which the coach, as well as players, have their respective roles. The improvisation, which
Habermas identifies with (free) play, is but a part of the well done job of a professional
player (entertainer). Adorno and Horkheimer rightly observe that in sport, just as in all
other areas of mass culture, there is a tense, purposefull undertaking, and a not so well
informed spectator still cannot perceive differences in combinations, the meaning of
changes which proceed from arbitrarily set rules. The organisation of the whole life is
deprived of content. (2) The racial quota in professional sport in the USA indicates that
the rules of sports show-business are conditioned by the logic of profit. Assuming that the
largest part of the audience is composed of white people and that they want to see white
players so that they should not feel degraded (since sportsmen are a mythological
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incarnation of the combative spirit on which man's survival in capitalism is based), the
owners of the sports circus must offer a certain number of white players, in spite of their
being below the level of skill of Afro-American players - who are their competitors on the
sports labour market. This is an obvious example of discarding the principle of free
competition, which has a direct influence on the quality of play. At the same time, the place
of the (main) coach and the ownership of sports show-business have remained, with rare
exceptions, the exclusive privilege of white people, which clearly indicates the (racist)
character of American democracy.
The true nature of individuality in sport is clearly shown if we consider several
matches in the same sport in continuity. Then it can be seen that, in fact, we deal with
typified moves and actions and that individuality is reduced to variations within a
patterned behaviour given by the nature of the concrete sport. A man who does not have a
developed aesthetic being can only technically work out the play, cheat the opponent
and make him a laughing stock, but he cannot realize his playing being. What motivates a
professional player is not the joy of playing, but a fear of not meeting the expectations of
the coach and of losing the place in the team. Existential uncertainty is the force that
destroys playing spontaneity. In addition, the joy of playing involves an unquestionable
acceptance of the ruling value model which discredits man. Sport is less and less a space
showing an opportunity for personal initiative, and more and more a space ruled by
scientific mind manipulated by political and financial centres of power. The development
of sport is immediately conditioned by a further development of science and increasingly
deep integration of the sports engine into the capitalist machinery. Instead of being the
creator of sports results, man becomes a tool for achieving records; instead of a will to
win, the main anthropological driving mechanism of capitalism, sport is dominated by a
technocratic mind which turns the breaking of records into a scientific project.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the quality of the sports play belongs to the shrines
of a soulless artistry dominated by a planning mind which demands that everything should
prove its meaning and effect. (3) The true winners in sport are capitalist concerns and
teams of scientists and doctors who treat sportsmen as experimental rats: a means for
experimenting with medicaments and realizing profit.
The so-called playing sports, created in the Modern Age, are actually surrogates
incarnating in a pure form the basic principles of capitalism: the principle of competition
and absolutized principle of the quantitatively measurable performance. This is the basis
and framework within which the elements of sports play (such as dribbling, passing the
ball...) acquire their meaning. The dynamics of their changes (above all, the rules of play,
gladiator's spirit and mechanized body) is not conditioned by the natural, cultural or
individual needs of the actors, but by the capitalist whip which makes from them an
attractive show-business. Instead of developing playing capacities and various playing
moves, sport is dominated by a technicized destructive power which abolishes the very
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possibility of playing. In tennis, the service is expected to be so strong that the opponent is
incapable of returning the ball; in volleyball, smashes should hit the ball into the floor in
such a way that any kind of play becomes impossible; in basketball, the greatest challenge is
the dunk-shot; in boxing, the strike should knock the opponent down to the floor; the
development of football has long ceased to involve the development of playing skills and
individuality, but the development of stamina, speed, a system of playing with less and
less space for imagination and spontaneity... In individual sports, man has become a tool for
achieving top results; in collective sports, man has become a wheel in the team that seeks
to be a perfect mechanism. The players are not required to play, but to do a good job,
which means to successfully accomplish the given task. In ranking the qualities which
determine the value of players, coaches put in the first place their readiness to serve to
the team play (conception), which means to unquestionably execute the coaches
ideas. An obedient player who works hard and thinks little, is the prototype of a good
guy. A man who seeks to realize his playing (creative) individuality, which means to have
his own ideas, is undesirable as he destroys the play of the team. At the same time, a
sportsman must actively participate in the increasingly merciless destruction of his own
organism. Instead of having the conscious of a free individual, fanatical conscious is literally
being inserted into a sportsman's head, driving him into self-destruction for the purpose of
achieving the required result. In addition, the top sportsman must be capable of and ready
to inflict to his opponent (serious) physical injuries and to kill him, treating the opponent
in the same way in which he treats his own body: it has an instrumental and destructive
character. The attractiveness of a sports spectacle is not measured (primarily) by the
quality of the playing skill, but by the extent to which the drama of life is reproduced
measured by the amount of the spilt blood and the number of massacred sportsmen.
Sportsmen's clownish looks and behaviour are part of the sports show-business, in
which the leading role is given to the black players. In basketball, the most prominent in
that sense were Haarlem Globetrotters, a basketball circus made up of young black
players from the poorest New York ghetto, which has become a role model in the
contemporary American professional basketball. The image of the coloured people
created in sport is meant to justify their humiliating social position. In boxing, with
(almost) complete domination of the coloured sportsmen, boxers are not shown as noble
fighters, which would be in line with the claim of the bourgeois theorists of sport (above all,
Coubertin), that boxing is a noble art, but as beasts. Public media show us the picture of a
sportsman who looks like a circus performer and, like stars in Hollywood soap-operas, is
expected to entertain (depolitize and stupefy) the masses. The names of clubs and
players' nicknames have a circus and caricatured note, quite suitable to the ruling values.
The extent to which sportsmen are degraded as people in the sports show-business can be
seen from the performance of Chicago Bulls: they run onto the field imitating the roaring
of bulls, the best players appear on posters as bulls with horns, while sports commentators
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begin TV broadcasts of their games with the following words: The bulls have run onto the
field.... Special significance is given to the sports equipment. It has become a marketing
robe, and the number of one's idol is a magic sign offering viewers the possibility to
identify with their idol and thus acquire some of his power. Of course, all that is meant
to increase the profit and create compensatory mechanisms for those deprived of their
rights: idols are an instrument for creating the illusion that in capitalism everybody can
earn money and fame. By becoming a show-business, sports is increasingly dominated by a
circus and entertaining movement, which means a skill that does not develop man's
creative powers and enable people to develop their interpersonal relations: its aim is to
entertain the audience. It is a controlled spontaneity, while the man-circus rider is but
one of the tools of the owners of show-business, used for making an attractive show. Play
is not a free and spontaneous realization of man's playing abilities, but a well-rehearsed
technique of behaviour reduced to working out the (entertaining) role of the player. The
development of the playing technique in sport is straightforward and corresponds to the
combative, progressistic, and ultimately, profiteering logic. A better move is always the
one which contributes more to the purpose of play, that is, to the realization of the given
end. In sport, man literally becomes a mechanical doll, thus reaching the highest level of
dehumanization and denaturalization in capitalist society. Sportsmen have turned from
heroes into clowns of capitalism. The truth about sport and sportsmen can be found in
books written by retired sportsmen in order to show that sportsmen are human beings and
not beasts, clowns or robots. What gives a special dimension to the sports show-business is
that sports games, like horse and dog races, have provided a new way of betting. Sportsmen
are reduced to impersonal objects of a gambling euphoria, which is one of the most
perfidious forms of incorporating the oppressed into the spiritual orbit of capitalism -
dominated by the separation of goods from their appropriation and the illusion that
happiness is the power determining human life.
Sports skill, which in sports theory and practice is called sports technique, does
not come from the cultural, but from the technical sphere that appears in the circus robe.
Sportsmen are not guided by artistic inspiration, but by a rational pattern of play
conditioned by the rules of show-business and based on the logic of war and capitalist
productivity. In athletics and other record-making sports, this is a war without the
opponent: man pursues a record, which symbolizes the capitalist progress, and thus
becomes his own opponent. Instead of the playing technique being subordinated to man as
the universal creative being and instead of offering him a possibility for a specific individual
expression, man is, even during the process of acquiring a playing technique, subordinated
to the model of play, which means to a particular playing technique. In sport, mastering of
a technique involves technicization of the body and the relation to it. To master a sports
technique involves destruction of a man's playing individuality and his being reduced to a
robotized model of sportsman. In playing sports, mastering a technique involves a
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circus-gladiator relation to the body. Man seeks to show his playing individuality, but he
does that in such a way which leads to technicized and patterned motions, thus distorting
his playing being. In sport, a bodily motion does not express man's natural or divine
being; it is a manifestation of the anti-cultural and anti-existential spirit of capitalism. It is
not grounded in art, but in the ruling Social Darwinist way of life and the technical
civilization based on the absolutized principle of the quantitatively measurable
performance. The basis of the sports motion is the industrial mimesis, the logic of industrial
modelling, the principle of efficiency and rationality... The technicization of sport has
become one of the ways of manipulation and submission of man: playing technique is the
form in which the ruling order, by means of natural laws, establishes domination over man.
To master a sports technique means suppression and mutilation of man's original playing,
spiritual, rational and physical capacities and his submission to a dehumanized and
denaturalized progress, which becomes a force majeure the fatal pace of which man can
slow down but cannot stop: sport symbolizes the victory of the technical civilization over
man. Instead of a (creative) unity of the spirit and body, there is a (repressive) unity of the
given ends and a (degenerated) body and psyche. The mastering of a sports technique
becomes the development of a dehumanized technique of motion directed towards the
development of strength, speed, stamina and the creation of a loyal and usable subject. In
sport, the model of motion corresponds to the nature of a concrete sport, which conditions
not only the technique of play and rules, but also man's physical and personal development.
Instead of a man who has developed his universal creative powers, we get a sportsman
who is reduced to a specific body, motion and skill required by a particular sport. Sports
technique is subordinated to a rationally established model of motion dominated by
precision, mechanical repetition of movements, coordination, methodicalness,
concentration, stamina, self-control, submission to progress the pace of which is
measured by quantitative indicators... These are all positive qualities which are to enable
man's complete incorporation into technical civilization. The more dominant the principle
of performance is, the less playing technique is a playing skill, which means the expression
and assertion of human (individual) capacities, and it is increasingly a degeneration and
destruction of the human, especially with the early selection.
Unlike the ancient techne, which did not distinguish between nature and man and
involved the virtue expressed in an artistic form, sports technique is a capitalist form of
gaining control over nature and thus deals with man's natural being. As the authentic
expression of technical civilization, sport mutilates man (disciplining, the principle of
greater effort, quantification, the absolutized principle of performance, mechanical
learning of movements through repetition which becomes the main way of acquiring the
appropriate body and killing one's individuality...) and disables humanization of nature
through culture, which is the highest challenge of humanistic pedagogy. Instead of a free
bodily movement, which is a humanized natural movement, sport is dominated by a
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repressive model of movement the nature of which is conditioned by the Social Darwinist
and progressistic nature of the ruling order. Sports technique involves a specific space,
which is the capitalistically degenerated natural space corresponded by a degenerated body
and a degenerated playing skill. The dynamics of movement in sport is conditioned by the
life rhythm dictated by the dynamics of the capitalist reproduction and it deals with the
natural rhythm of movement. The perfect rhythm of movement, the highest functional and
aesthetic challenge, which used to be found in the animal world, now is found in technical
processes and the progressistic spirit of capitalism. In this context, extremely important in
methodological terms is the distinction made between progress and progressism, which
means between the development of science and technique which are to enable the
development of a free, spiritually rich personality and interpersonal relations, and the
development of science and technique which turns into the destruction of nature,
interpersonal relations and man himself. Technicization of sport is not the result of a direct
influence of the industrial work on sport, as Plessner, Habermas and Rigauer claim, but of
the fact that sport has become the means of the capitalist reproduction and, in that context,
of the instrumentalization of science and technique by capitalist concerns and centres of
political power. Sports technique becomes a means for turning man's life energy into a
destructive capitalist practice.
Bodily movement is based on the model of behaviour which expresses a certain
value (ideological) model, which means that bodily movement is of a symbolic character: it
reflects man's position in the world and his relation to the ruling order. In Christianity, to
kneel and kiss a hand (master's or priest's) is a symbolic form of man's essential
degradation, while asceticism and torturing of the body are symbolic forms of man's
degradation in existential terms. The aristocratic bodily posture (aristocratic bearing: stiff
posture, protruded shoulders, head leaned backwards...) demonstrates a nobleman's
superiority and it is an estheticized bodily manifestation of the oppressive power. The
same applies to chivalry, which becomes an idealized form (directed against the working
man) of a murderous power. In Renaissance, among the emerging bourgeoisie we see the
development of a playing (ludic) movement which is not normatively founded, does not
insist on a (given) form and expresses an awakened humanity. It is dominated by man's
self-discovery corresponded by passion, impetuosity, aimlessness, joy of action regardless
of consequences, joy of a free physicality, intellectual powers, imagination... Ludic becomes
ludicrous, as opposed to the later strictly normative and repressive ludus (Huizinga), and its
movement is most akin to the children's movement. In capitalism, the ruling model of the
body and bodily posture demonstrates the progressistic and expansionist nature of the
ruling order having its climax in sport. They deal with libertarian heritage of the popular
physical culture, with Rousseau's pedagogical doctrine and emancipatory intention of the
philanthropic and dancing movements, based on man's right to a free body and free
movement. Sports play as a specific model of behaviour requires an appropriate model of
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movement (motion), body, man and thus an appropriate pedagogy (obtaining legitimacy
of the universally human) and appropriate aesthetics (obtaining the legitimacy of the
cultural). Stylization of play is not based on the aesthetic, but on the functional principle,
which conditions also the modelling of movement. In the sports movement there is no
relation of man to the existing world. There is a positive relation to reality whereas the
human disappears in the factual. In sport, man's authentic movement is abolished - the
movement through which man relates to the world and expresses his peculiarity - and a
model of movement is being imposed on him which corresponds to the nature of the ruling
order. People become bearers of roles and thus are part of the (given) play. The quality of
play is not determined according to the manifestation of a specific human expression, but
according to the extent to which the play of the player corresponds to the model of a
particular playing role. It is not a humanization of man, it is his disciplining achieved by
way of technique, man being not only the working power and tool for achieving results
(victory, record), but also a source of energy and object of production (raw material).
Movements are defined and patterned, and the rhythm of exertion and its intensity are in
the service of achieving the given end. Skill has an adaptive and repressive, and not a
creative and change-oriented nature. It is reduced to the imitation of imposed dehumanized
and denaturalized patterns of behaviour conditioned by a specialist one-sidedness. A
variety of movements is achieved through loss of the human. Sport is dominated by a
movement which is formally technical and essentially destructive. It takes man out not only
from culture but from the living world.
Bodily movement is the creation not only of a certain aesthetic and living, but also
of a social (class) form. This was the purpose of the ancient physical culture, and this is
what Nietzsche insists on, trying, by way of physical movement (aristocratic manners), not
only to produce the aristocratic way of life but to turn the new aristocracy into an
exclusive organic (class) community. Sport has an anti-social character. It turns man into
opponents and society into a civilized menagerie. Horkheimer and Adorno are right:
brotherhood of sports supporters protects from the true brotherhood. (4) A sports
team and audience are pseudo-social groups and as such are forms of capitalistic
degeneration of man as a social being. As play becomes more developed, so is the sports
collective less and less a community of people, and more and more a group of robotized
gladiators. Instead of human communication, sportsmen use the body language, which is
reduced to a conflict between mechanicized beings as advertising billboards of capital.
As far as the argument that sport develops physical abilities, achieves mastery and
realizes the impossible is concerned, the question can be raised: why is it not circus skills
which represent a challenge, but sports competitions dominated by a denaturalized
(technicized, destructive) Social Darwinism? A circus performance requires one to master
one's own body by acquiring specific physical powers, but it does not develop a ruthless
combative character and a self-destructive conscious. It is not ruled by the principle of
 13

greater effort, as is the case in sport, but of the optimum effort. Circus gymnastics requires
an early specialization and the creation of a specifically built body capable of performing
the given acts. The aim is not the victory or record, but to achieve the impossible, and
thus one's own personal achievement which involves a perfect control over one's own body,
high concentration... Circus gymnastics is similar to sports gymnastics, which has little
significance for Coubertin's utilitarian pedagogy on which the sports pedagogy is based. It
does not calculate the results according to a given model, the aim is rather to have a highly
attractive performance which, through hard work, makes possible what ordinary man
regards as impossible. Skill is not grounded in culture nor does it make new forms of
culture, which means that it does not have an artistic character, but is reduced to the
technique of performance, the body being reduced to the instrument for performing the
act. Circus skill is progressive only in technical terms, as it does not have a libertarian but
an entertaining character. The circus demonstrates human powers at a technical level
reflecting the characteristic risk of the ruling order: acrobats play with death, for example,
in triple and quadruple salto mortale. It is a victory over death through letting off the
steam of the fear of life, where life itself is the stake and where man faces the spectre of
death every day. Circus troupes are international, but it is not visible on the scene: acrobats
are united by their technical-entertaining skill, not by the variety of their national
cultures. A circus group is based on cooperation and strict division of roles imposed by the
act which is to amaze the audience. It is no accident that Coubertin does not depart from
circus players when he speaks of courage. Coubertin realized that circus is dominated by
the entertaining skill and that in it there is no conflict between people and the development
of belligerent conscious which is the basis of his religio athletae that was to form colonial
phalanges which would conquer the world. Similarly, mountaineering, gardening and other
ecological activities, kolo and popular physical culture, playing musical instruments, dances,
swimming and water plays, skiing and plays in the snow, various forms of children's play
with the ball and other objects, modelling, kite flying, cycling and mastering of other
technical devices all these enable man to develop his creative abilities, but they are all
excluded from Coubertin's (sports) utilitarian pedagogy. Only those skills are acceptable
which involve a conflict between people and are aimed at a better quantitatively
measurable performance. The essence of sports mastery is the production of the ruling
relations and values.

The Principle of Perfection

In the philosophy of sport perfection is proclaimed the highest aesthetic

challenge. This is also indicated by Coubertin in his Sports pedagogy : Sport is a voluntary
 14

and regular cult of intensive muscular exercises motivated by a desire for progress and
which is not afraid of risk. So, five concepts: initiative, persistence, intensity, pursuit of
perfection (recherche du perfectionnement), acceptance of possible risks. These five
concepts are crucial and basic. (5) In antiquity, perfectioning involves the harmonization
of man with the divine order which represents the unattainable ideal of (cosmic)
perfection. Since the earthly world is doomed to perish, a pursuit of perfection does not
involve the struggle to preserve the already existing world, especially not to create a new
world, but to do such acts which will bring man closer to the cosmic perfection. At the same
time, man looks back at the past as, according to the ancient view, people are less and less
perfect as they move further away from their (divine) pre-being. In the original (ancient)
Olympic doctrine, perfection does not have a productivistic and progressistic, but a
spiritual character, and is the climax of man's complete (religious) incorporation into the
established world according to the principle gnothi seauton, which means as the Gods' toy.
The pursuit of perfection is actually the imitation of the given model of behaviour.
Man is degraded as an individual if he accepts the given model of play which becomes the
basic value-related challenge. Spiritual, emotional and creative impoverishment is conditio
sine qua non of perfection in sport and the bourgeois physical culture. It becomes man's
supreme alienation from himself as the playing being. Victory, honour, beauty,
happiness, observation of the established rules, pursuit of perfection and mastery -
all these terms are used to disguise the practice of dealing with man's libertarian
aspirations. What appears as human is man's endeavour to accept the given role and
thus give the human content to the model to which he must submit. Play before an audience
becomes a behaviour in which man (hopelessly) tries to find a compensation for lack of
humanity. Play is not the expression of freedom; it is the spasm of a desperate man who
invested in it the last human element in him in order to get the applause from the audience.
Self-valuation is not achieved through the development of playing skills, but through the
(public) effect produced by the sports technique. The greatness of a sports success
becomes the measure of human degradation.
In sport, a pursuit of perfection becomes an aesthetic disguise for progress
based on the achievement of results (records) which have an objective quantitative
measure and involve the absolutized principle of performance: modern sport deals with
man's erotic, ethical and aesthetic being. Perfection symbolizes the final world that can be
perfected according to the criteria of the given value model as the ideal incarnation of the
basic principles of the ruling order. Pursuit of perfection is not mediated by a natural
movement or aesthetics, but by technique. In the past, the animal body and movement were
the most important challenge for achieving perfection. Today, perfection is achieved
through the fundamental principles of technical civilization, the emphasis being given on
technical precision, efficiency, robotized mimesis... Sport is dominated by unity and
quantity, which means a positive one-mindedness and confrontation with the creative
 15

personality. Instead of the principles of universal development of human powers and, in

that context, man's perfectioning as the universal creative being, the highest challenge
becomes a fanatical dedication to a particular sport. Perfection of a particular sporting
activity is achieved by man's mutilation, especially in bloody sports as well as in sports
dominated by speed, strength and stamina. That the principle of perfection is but an
abstract requirement and thus a way for obtaining an artistic cover for sport is seen from
the fact that there are no medals for the perfectioning of play and physical exercises, but
for the victory and records. Even in the events where the artistic expression could be
important, as in gymnastics, the criteria of measurement (assessment) destroy the
specific and unique playing expression. What is particularly significant is that, in sport,
specialization is becoming increasingly narrow, which is totally opposed to the physical
culture ruled by the principle of a harmonized and universal development of man as a
unified physical and spiritual being which prevailed in the civil education of ancient
Hellas and which is the basis of ancient paideia. It is corresponded by the principle of
optimum effort which is of individual character, and is opposed to the principle of greater
effort (Coubertin) dominant in sport. Unlike the ancient principle of perfection which
had a cosmic essence and characterized the divine world which was of a holistic character,
the modern principle of perfection has a fragmentizing character corresponding to the
division of labour and specialization. The ideal of reaching human perfection which,
according to Diem, is the highest goal of Coubertin's Olympism, deals with the ideal of the
development of man's universal creative powers, and this means with man as the creator of
his own world and with the open horizon of the future. Perfection is the end of history. In
the modern Olympic philosophy, the ideal of perfection, which man should
unquestioningly strive for, was already created in ancient Greece. Instead of the idea of
future and struggle for a human world, it offers a romanticized picture of the ancient world.
The perfect world is not the matter of man's free choice and the result of his creative
practice, it is the given which appears in the form of an idealized picture of the Hellenic
world which achieved everything modern man should and can strive for. It becomes the
incarnation of the ideal of a harmonized world in which mankind was able to smile and
where people died happily (Coubertin). It was the time when demos had not yet appeared
on the political scene of the polis and before the self-will of the ruling aristocracy had to
face the universal principle of humanity which applies to free people (Hellenes) and was to
acquire its highest form in Socrates's moral philosophy, while in modern times it was to be
turned into Kant's categorical imperative. Coubertin sees in the ruling bourgeois elite
the master race capable of returning mankind to the way it had left back in the ancient
times, and this will be achieved by the final struggle with the emancipatory heritage of
mankind and the idea of future. The restoration of the holy Olympic measurement of time
serves to return mankind to this right way. Future does not appear as a step out of the
existing world and the creation of novum, but as a continuous development of the existing
 16

world and its perfectioning. In its original Olympic doctrine, Coubertin sees in sport an
area in which the best representatives of the white race, as representatives of their
nations, fight for primacy which leads to the development of their conquering-oppressive
character and thus to the perfectioning of the white race. At the same time, perfectioning
of the world involves the destruction of the critical mind and pacification of workers: the
public (political) sphere is the privilege of the ruling elite. Sport becomes the chief
political means of the ruling class for depolitization of masses and for turning man into
the objects of the ruling political will and sheer working force. The fight for
perfectioning of society is reduced to a pedagogical reform which will lead to the creation
of a uniform character of people and a uniform worldview. Physical exercises and sport
become a means for cloning people's character and spirit. The ultimate end of
perfectioning is to eliminate the critical and change-oriented conscious and the idea of
future and to realize the idea of order and progress - the establishment of the total and
final rule of capital over mankind and planet as the source of energy and raw material. As
far as the ancient world is concerned, ancient society itself dethroned the aristocratic
values from which the modern sports theory (especially Coubertin's Olympic philosophy)
tries to create an indisputable suprahistorical ideal of man, who appears in the form of
slave-owning, aristocratic and bourgeois master race.
The demand for perfection involves harmony. In antiquity, harmony means a
harmonious development of human powers and the body based on the principles know
yourself (gnothi seauton), measure is the best (metron ariston) and beautiful and good
(kalokagathia) which involves arete mousike and arete gymnastike. The unity of man and
cosmic order, incarnated in the Olympic gods, is the highest challenge (eurythmos). The
demand for harmony is actually an expression of the endeavour to prevent the conflict
between gods, which is fatal for people, and ensure a harmonious functioning of the divine
world. In ancient art, man is an anthropological manifestation of the ruling order. When we
analyze Myrons Diskobolos, we notice the ideal proportions, harmonious movement and
unity of parts and the whole. Ears are almost blended with the head so as not to spoil the
harmony of the whole. The body does not express the motion of an athlete who seeks to
throw the discus as far as possible and win, but an (idealized) Hellene who seeks to
perform the act in a way which would not destroy the harmony of his body and thus the
geometrically constructed cosmos whose (anthropological) form he is. The body, bodily
posture and expression on his face emanate an erotic charge, more noble than aggressive,
which expresses the innocence of youth and corresponds to a paedophilic erotic vision.
Diskobolos does not have a look in his eyes but it is hardly noticeable as his whole spiritual
expression is given in his face and body. His face does not show a competitive urge, but
spiritual blessedness. The body is not tense: it does not emanate a victorious will, but
spiritual meekness. His figure is the incarnation of Plato's view that a strong body cannot
 17

make the mind noble, but a noble mind can make the body noble, as well as of Aristotles
idea of a spirited body.
In modern society, the demand for harmony becomes the demand for a
harmonious functioning of the existing world, which is similar to the aristocratic order and
measure (order et measure) as the criterion of measure is the extent to which man fits into
the existing world. The harmony of the manifest form by suppressing the human becomes
the basis of beauty - which becomes a mask for the monstrous life produced by the ruling
order. Perfection, mastery, creativity, beauty - all these are parts of a mosaic which
covers up the destructive capitalist nothingness. Instead of creating a human world, the
prevailing tendency is to immortalize the existing world. Harmony becomes the aesthetic
way of creating an apparent order in the chaos of everyday life. It involves the acceptance
of the established world and an endeavour to create a picture of harmony in which man
will find compensation (peace of mind) for the horrors of his life. Harmony obtains a
prophylactic and therapeutic dimension: it becomes a spiritual drug. The demand for
harmony in sport has a positivistic character: it is reduced to the destruction of the
critical and change-oriented relation to the existing world. It is an aesthetic form expressing
the basic political principle which strives to prevent social (class) conflicts that offer a
possibility for creating a new world: harmony is the sister of order (Coubertin). According
to Coubertin, the basic purpose of Olympism is to bring order in people's heads and give life
a meaning to which corresponds the holy rhythm of the Olympic Games which by no
means must be interrupted. The Olympic harmony deals with humanistic harmony, which
means with harmonious interpersonal relations based on the guiding principles of the
French Revolution, with a harmonious development of physical and spiritual powers, with a
harmonious relation to nature... In sport, man is hermetically closed: the world develops
according to the laws of progress, while man is but a means with which the ruling order is
to enable its free development. The demand for perfection and harmony deals with the
dialectic of history, which means with disharmony which is the basis of dynamics of the
historical process and the basic presupposition for the creation of future. There are no
leaps, there is no change-oriented practice which crushes the ramparts of the ruling order
and opens new horizons. The libertarian physical motion expresses man's disharmony with
the existing world, it is a form of not resigning to the destiny determined by the process of
capitalist reproduction. Imperfection, openness, uncertainty in terms of possibilities and
their creation, right to illusion and mistake all these are challenges that man cannot avoid
on the road to future. As Goethe says in Faust: Man makes mistakes as long as he strives
to something higher (Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt), but a good man in his vague
impulse is well aware of the right way (Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunklen Drange/ Ist
sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst).
The claim that top sport creates new aesthetic values (Matveev) is based on the
identification of the achievement of higher results (records) and the achievement of higher
 18

(human) values. New has a quantitative and not a qualitative (historical, cultural,
libertarian, visionary) dimension. A better result in sport is not a more cultural and thus a
more valuable form of human practice. Top play deals with man's ability to create a true
play which will help him realize his creative being: in football, kicks to the goal are
variations of the model of movement given by the nature of football as an institutionalized
repression which appears in the playing robe. As far as man's legitimate need to achieve
the unachievable is concerned, it is in sports theory used as a proof that in sport, in spite
of all bad things, prevail true human challenges. There is no doubt that man's pursuit of
self-assertion by achieving the unachievable is that natural stake with which man enters
sport and which remains as a motivation throughout one's sports career. However, to
overcome the horizon of the possible refers exclusively to quantitative shifts on the basis
and within the framework of the ruling order, and not to the opening of a new horizon
which will go beyond the existing world. A confirmation in terms of values (Supreme!) is
given only to the performance that confirms the developing power of the ruling order (a
Fantastic record!), while the true meaning of the record-mania is a mindless and fatalist
submission of man to the existing rules of the game. The development of sport does not
follow a particular aesthetic pattern: the road to perfection is cobbled with victories and
records. Sport is not ruled by taste, which is subjective, but by quantitative indicators with
an objective value, which express the fatal pace of capitalist progress. Mimetic impulses
do not spring from nature or art, but from technical processes. A robotized body represents
the highest aesthetic model. The final result of perfection is a dehumanized and
denaturalized man, the Olympic zombie, devoid of reason, libertarian dignity, Eros, the
creative, imagination, nobleness... By focusing all his ambition on becoming someone by
way of sport, man inevitably becomes the slave of sport, which means that he fits into the
ruthlessly grinding machine designed for achieving top results. If we bear in mind the
limited capabilities of the human organism, it is clear that the absolutization of the
principle of performance leads to man's destruction.
Sports play is only apparently dominated by uncertainty, which is one of the
conditions of freedom, in which the most important moment is coincidence. Every action
has a number of alternatives. In fact, they are necessary accidents. Uncertainty is
conditioned by the very nature of sport as the incarnation of the ruling relations and values
and it is reduced to the question: who will win and what will be the result? Basically, it is
about an apparent uncertainty, and thus an apparent freedom: the winner is always the
ruling order man is always the loser. In sport, man produces chains with which he is
pinned down to the existing world. Sport deals with the visionary conscious and
aspirations to create a new world. Sports play is, like the ancient drama, the enactment of
everything that has already been acted and in that sense it is the copy of copy ad infinitum.
In spite of insisting on progress, philosophy of sport discards the idea of future. The
 19

orientation towards an idealized past becomes the source of true and eternal values
symbolized by the flame of the Olympic torch which can never be extinguished (Hitler).

Sport and Drama

Drama is a form in which sport, in a formal sense, most closely resembles art.
Speaking of the relation between sport and acting, Christopher Lasch says: By submitting
without reservation to the rules and conventions of the game, the players (as well as
spectators) cooperate in creating an illusion of reality. In the way the game becomes a
representation of life, and play takes on the character of play-acting as well. In our time,
games sports in particular are rapidly losing the quality of illusion. Uneasy in the
presence of fantasy and illusion, our age seems to have resolved on the destruction of the
harmless substitute gratifications that formerly provided charm and consolation. (.) Play
has always, by its very nature, set itself off from workday life; yet it retains an organic
connection with the life of the community, by virtue of its capacity to dramatize reality and
to offer a convincing representation of the communitys values. The ancient connections
between games, ritual, and public festivity suggest that although games take place within
arbitrary boundaries, they are nevertheless rooted in shared traditions to which they give
an objective expression. Games and athletic contests offer a dramatic commentary on
reality rather than an escape from it a heightened re-enactment of communal traditions,
not a repudiation of them. It is only when games and sports come to be valued purely as a
form of escape that they lose the capacity to provide this escape. (6) Since sports
contests offer a dramatic commentary on reality and that they are in the organic
connection with the life of the community, and not a confrontation with reality which
strives to overcome it, the organizers of todays sports spectacles follow the demands put
forward by Lasch. Their main task is to turn sports contests into a higher form of
existence which will in the most authentic form reproduce the drama of everyday life. To
be organically connected with the life of todays community does not mean to be close to
the original spirit of competition, but to the spirit of domination and destruction.
Idealization of sport, as a dramatic commentary on life, involves idealization of the ruling
relations and values which are shaped in sport. It is interesting that Lasch does not see a
connection between professionalization (commercialization) and trivialization of sport:
What corrupts an athletic performance, as it does any other performance, is not
professionalism or competition but a breakdown of the conventions surrounding the game.
It is at this point that ritual, drama, and sports all degenerate into spectacle. Huizingas
analysis of the secularization of sport helps to clarify this point. In the degree to which
athletic events lose the element of ritual and public festivity, according to Huizinga, they
 20

deteriorate into trivial recreation and crude sensationalism. (7) By glorifying sport as
play Lasch forgets that sport is dominated by the principle of competition and the
principle of performance, which means that man's relation to himself and others is
mediated by quantitative measures in which both cultural and individual human
expressions are alienated. It is dominated by the absolutized principle of performance
which in monopolistic capitalism, ruled by the principle Destroy the competition!,
becomes the totalizing power of profit that deals with individual achievement, which was
(together with principles Equal chances! and Let the better win!) the ideological cover-
up for the original spirit of capitalism (liberalism). The development of relations in sport is
best seen on the example of car-racing. It is actually a fight between the most powerful car-
manufacturing concerns, their expert teams, while man is reduced to the driver who will
appear on the throne, in the wheel-chair or on the cemetary. Not only in individual sports
(dominated by strenght, speed and stamina) but also in playing sports - the play has been
completed before the players run out onto the field.
Huizinga's criticism of sport from a cultural point of view throws light from
another angle. Speaking of the medieval sport, Huizinga concludes: The medieval
combative sport (...) is different from Greek sport and modern athletics in that it is far less
natural. In order to increase the combative tension, sport is invested with aristocratic proud
and honour, romantic-erotic charm and the charm of artistic beauty. It is filled with
radiance and decorations, full of rich fantasy. In addition to play and physical exercises, it is
at the same time the applied literature. The desire and dream of a joyful heart seek a
dramatic performance, play enacted in life. Real life was not nice, it was cruel, horrible and
perverted; in the court and military career, there was little room for the feelings of courage
that springs from love, but the soul is full, people want to enact those feelings and create a
nicer life in a beautiful play. The element of true courage at a chivalrous tournament surely
is not less worthy than in the pentathlon. A very erotic character requires bloody fierceness.
The tournament is, in its motives, most akin to the contests in the old Indian epic; to fight
for a woman is the central idea in Mahabharata. (8) For Huizinga, the duel is a ritual form
of expressing man's complete submission to the established order. The same can be found
in sport: in a fair-play man's right to life is subordinated to the right of order to survival. Life
itself becomes a stake which proves the loyalty to the established order, while fight to life or
death becomes the most authentic form of natural selection. Huizingas homo ludens is the
picture of a noble knight who is the idealized incarnation of the warring aristocracy and
aristocratic values. Instead of humanism and love of freedom, prevail ambition and love of
power. However, what honour is proved by killing a man? What is the nature of the erotic
impulse achieved through bloody fierceness? What is beautiful in a cruel fight to life and
death, in cutting throats and butchering, in taking out the intestines, in mutilated bodies
drowned in mud? And all that only to win the favour of court ladies? Huizinga proclaimed
the pathology of medieval society the source of the highest human ideals. Huizinga insists
 21

on the art of life, and not on a free artistic creation. That is why he attaches such
importance to fashion: clothes are not the confirmation of human independence, but a
class leveling shroud man is predestined to. It is quite logical that Huizinga gives priority to
the art of life as opposed to art itself, for it, above all, involves nicely stylized forms of life,
which should raise the cruel reality to the sphere of noble harmony. The high art of life
(fashion) becomes the form in which a decorative aesthetics triumphs over art as a
creative act. Speaking of the Middle Ages Huizinga says: All these nicely stylized forms of
life, which should raise the cruel reality to the sphere of noble harmony, were parts of a
high art of life, and did not find a direct expression in art proper. (9) Huizinga goes as far as
to proclaim the apparent forms of the established relations pure art. By way of the
artistic form Huizinga actually seeks to prevent the original human creativeness from
crossing the normative firmament of his aesthetics, destroying the world of illusions and
questioning the existing order. Man is not the creator of his own world; he is part of the sets
on the scene of the present world.
Drama is possible because life is alienated from man. It is an alienated form of
playing the essence of life alienated from man. Ultimately, the essence of life is given by
the ruling ideological firmament and it becomes the prism through which man sees himself
and society: a masked slavery, masked nothingness, mutilated human image, capitalist
pendulum of horror becomes a lollypop, people laugh and cry over their destiny... In the
theatre, life is being acted out, man being only an observer. The powers that keep him in
obedience in society acquire a caricatured form. Apparently, man has control over them, he
resists them. In reality, drama is such a relation of man to the world that pins him down to
the existing world. A good performance is the other side of a bad life. Actors are tragic
products of a tragic world. Man does not experience the essence of his life by way of a life
activism, it is given to him by way of the cultural sphere which becomes a compensatory
mechanism, a form of sterilization of the critical mind and active will. It is cultural to
watch human sufferings on the stage, but it is uncultural to fight to eradicate injustice in
life. The destruction of the human pleases the petty-bourgeois: it helps him to get rid of the
responsibility for the survival of the world and to lull himself in the existing hopelessness.
The theatre does not produce revolutionaries, but the audience. It is a form in which
culture becomes devoid of the libertarian. Orpheus without Prometheus becomes
Narcissus. All that proceeds in a virtual reality, which, as it becomes more realistic, offers
man a better opportunity to escape reality. The theatre, cinema, concert halls, galleries, the
church all these are forms in which the illusory world of culture is institutionalized, and
it, as a parallel world, is created as against the everyday hopelessly uncultural world and
enables the (petty) bourgeois an (apparent) escape from the capitalist nothingness
ensuring him an elitist (class) social status.
The nature of sport as drama is conditioned by the role of sport in society. It is not
an activist integration of the ruling class, like the ancient Olympic Games and medieval
 22

chivalrous tournaments, but is a supraclass phenomenon and as such means the

integration of the oppressed into the spiritual orbit of the ruling class and their
depolitization according to the principle panem et circences. Its purpose is to inseminate
man with the ruling spirit, to pin him down to the existing world, destroy his mind,
imagination, hope of a better world... A sports spectacle is a modern pagan festivity which
gives a fatal dimension to the ruling relations and values. It does not enable man to treat the
existing world in a reasonable way, but completely integrates him into it. Man becomes the
toy of destiny, which means of the basic processes of capitalist reproduction. Sport
abolishes the dualism of reality and ideals. In it, there is no opposition between play and
life: it represents life in its existential and essential sense. Sport is the authentic form of the
playing of life and thus is its glorification which is supposed to create a religious relation to
the ruling values. Sport does not reflect the human; it is rather that man becomes a means
for deification of the ruling relations and values. Sport is not an innocent childrens play; it
is a ritual manifestation of the submission to the ruling spirit and thus is the highest
religious ceremony with a liturgical character. It is pervaded with a sacred serenity. Hence
the importance of the Olympic oath (serment olympique): sport is the cult of the existing
world, while man appears in the sports ritual as the symbolic incarnation of the spirit that
rules the world. A sports spectacle is not an enactment of life; it is its reproduction: in it, the
essence of the capitalist world appears in a condensed form. Rugby, boxing and other
bloody sports are immediate expression of the American way of life, which is based on a
ruthless Social Darwinism and a destructive progressism and which becomes a planetary
way of life (globalism). The sports drama is the authentic way of the playing of life in
which life itself is the stake. Sport is a drama without masks, without petty bourgeois lies,
without invented plots which are to glorify criminals and obtain meaning for the capitalist
nothingness. Life itself continues without a humanistic and artistic veil. It is legal in
sport to inflict serious physical injuries and kill, to mutilate children, apply medical
treatments which reduce sportsmen to laboratory rats, to turn the young into fascist
hordes... The theatre represents the scenery of the world of lies and crime; sport represents
its foundation. At the stadium, there is no human distance, there is no comical: gladiators
are not entitled to laughter. The increasingly bloody life requires increasingly bloody sports
spectacles, which are the compensation to the oppressed for the increasing everyday
misery. The spectators love the smell of blood! this is the golden rule of sports show-
business in the USA and other countries of the free world. Sports stadiums were not built
for well-to-do (petty) bourgeois, as is the case with the theatre which has an elitist status,
but for the working masses deprived of their rights and for their children reduced to
hooligans. The modern stadium appeared along with the modern industrial proletariat, at
the time when workers managed to obtain the eight-hour working day when the
bourgeoisie endeavoured to colonize the leisure time of workers and thus prevent their
political organization and integrate them into the ruling order. Stadiums are not designed
 23

for cultural education of the oppressed, but for their pacification (depolitization) and
idiocy. Sport is the cheapest spiritual food for the (working) masses that keeps them under
control. this is the most accurate sociological (political) definition of sport reached, after
the First World War and the then revolutionary movements in Europe, by the father of
modern Olympism Pierre de Coubertin. Sport is becoming a way of destroying the class
consciousness and shifting the fight from the political to the sports arena. Stadiums are not
the temples of culture but bonfires for burning out the discontent of the oppressed. This is
what determines their appearance: stadiums are modern concentration camps for people
deprived of their civil and human rights. Everywhere in the capitalist world, where people
are becoming increasingly poor, and fewer and fewer people are becoming rich, we have the
same picture: wire fences, special police forces, trained dogs... A match is an occasion for
giving vent for a man increasingly deprived of his rights, and it does not reflect human evil
but suffering and despair. Sports spectacles are a way of turning the critical and change-
oriented potentials of the people deprived of their rights into aggression directed towards
the so called opponents, who belong to the same class of the oppressed, and a way of
provoking a war between them. This is the basis on which supporting groups are formed:
instead of turning their discontent towards the ruling order, young people turn it towards
other supporting groups, who are also the victims of an inhuman order. Supporting
masses are a form of degeneration of the working youth, while fanaticism of supporters is
a form of degenerating its critical and change-oriented consciousness. Symbols and slogans
under which the youth gather do not speak of freedom, brotherhood, peace, cooperation,
love: they are of a fascist character. Patriotism without culture is barbarism. As far as
sports idols are concerned, they are not fighting for freedom; they are the tool of
capitalism for combating the libertarian mind and integrating the youth, reduced to the
supporting mass, into the existing world. The increasingly bloody conflicts between
different supporters are an inevitable consequence of the increasingly difficult position of
young people in a world based on the principle Money does not stink!, and on the
increasingly ruthless manipulation of the young, which springs from the fear that their
discontent might turn against the ruling order and be used for building a new (just) world.
On sports stadiums, fresh mountain water, which can overflow the increasingly rotten
capitalist dam, turns into a swamp. Firecrackers and other supporting equipment do not
express joy of life: they are symbols of destruction. Torches are not the source of light: they
are a symbolic form of burning the world without a future.
The intensity of life of the ancient man was conditioned by his tragic position as
the Gods toy and his endeavours to do all that is possible during his short and
meaningless life in order to gain fame and thus reach the Olympic peaks and eternity. In
capitalism, the intensity of life is conditioned by the logic of capitalist reproduction: to
achieve a better result (profit) in the shortest possible time. This logic prevails not only on a
sports track, it conditions mans life. In sport, there is no confrontation between life and
 24

human tragedy. It is one of the most important ways in which capitalism reconciles man
to the existing world, in which he is reduced to an impersonal member of the working-
consumer mass: sport removes the tragic from the capitalist cosmos by depriving man of
humanity.

Sport and Music

The philosophy of play does not come to the essence of play departing from music
and dance, but from sport and war. It is no accident. Blacking's view that music is the
humanly organized sound indicates that man is not by his nature a beast, but a humane
being, and that man's need for another man, on which the motion of man towards another
man is based, is the most important characteristic of the human nature. Blacking says on
that: When I watched young Venda developing their bodies, their friendships, and their
sensitivity in communal dancing, I could not help regretting the hundreds of afternoons I
had wasted on the rugby field and in boxing rings. But then I was brought up not to
cooperate, but to compete. Even music was offered more as a competitive than as a shared
experience. (10) He continues: In a world in which authoritarian power is maintained by
means of superior technique, and the superior technique is supposed to indicate a
monopoly of intellect, it is necessary to show that the real sources of technique, of all
culture, are to be found in the human body and in cooperative interaction between human
bodies. (11) Blecking's conclusion on the significance of interpersonal relations for the
developoment of human creativity is of primary importance, and this conclusion was
reached while he was studying the music of the South-African tribe Vende: I am not
arguing that particular musical systems are innate, but that some of the processes that
generate them may be innate in all men and so species-specific. Similar evidence of
creativity may be found in Venda childrens songs, many of which may have been composed
by children. Their structures suggest a creative use of features of the musical system which
extends beyond techniques that might have been learned in society. I do not see how the
deeper, apparently unconscious processes of generation could have been taught or learned
in society except through a whole complicated process of relationships between innate
potentialities and the realization of these in culture through social interaction. (12) By
learning more about the automatic complexity of the human body, we may be able to prove
conclusively that all men are born with potentially brilliant intellects, or at least a very high
degree of cognitive competence, and that the source of cultural creativity is the
consciousness that springs from social cooperation and loving interaction. By discovering
precisely how music is created and appreciated in different social and cultural contexts, and
perhaps establishing that musicality is a universal, species-specific characteristic, we can
 25

show that human beings are even more remarkable than we presently believe them to be
and not just a few human beings, but all human beings and that the majority of us live far
below our potential, because of the oppressive nature of most societies. (13)
Music is expelled from sport and bourgeois physical education (physical culture).
It is opposed to the strivings to create in sportsmen a ruthless combative (murderous-
destructive) character and the appropriate iron body. Music arouses emotions, a need for
closeness with other people and thus breaks with the fanatical focusing on victory.
International sports competitions are regularly opened with military marches, which
clearly indicates the truth that sport does not have a pacifistic but a militaristic nature,
although in the consumer society it obtained a trivial circus dimension. As far as
competitive dancing is concerned, dancing turned into a sports event and thus became a
technical dance mutilating man's erotic being and producing a technical body and
movement. The same applies to rhythmic gymnastics and figure skating.
In Coubertin's utilitarian pedagogy music does not serve to shape the soul, as in
antiquity, but to create a cultural scenery for the Olympic Games as a cult performance
and a solemn atmosphere that is to arouse a religious zeal in people, as well as to create
a cultural scenery for a muscular combative primitivism. As far as shapening of character
is concerned, it is not achieved by mastering an artistic skill nor by developing a musical
sense, but exclusively through a combative physical activism and bodily drill which involves
suppression and mutilation of impulses, emotions, senses, reason... Trying to deal with
everything that can weaken the ruthless conquering and oppressive character of the
bourgeoisie and destroy its fanatical mind, Coubertin discards the Dionysian and Orphic, as
well as the ancient poiesis. He, like Hitler, does not want peaceful aestheticians, but new
people characterised by an iron body and the look of a magnificent beast. Coubertin
tries to take over the political and discard the cultural legacy of ancient aristocratic
education.
Sports manifestations are dominated by songs of clubs and supporting groups,
which do not come from the cultural heritage, do not express man's need for another man,
do not humanize people... They are the forms in which the discontent of young people,
coming from their humiliating social position, is directed against their peers, who appear in
the form of rival supporting groups. They cause massive hysteria, vindictive fury, they
create the feeling of belonging to a group, which is reduced to a civilized herd, and thus
the feeling of power. Ultimately, they serve to destroy all those feelings that make man a
human being and society a human society. Supporting songs indicate that decultivation is
the basic way of turning young people into modern hordes of barbarians: sport satisfies
people's needs by depriving them of humanity.
 26

x x x

Notes

(1) Compare : Ju rgen Habermas, "Soziologische Notizen zum Verhltnis von Arbeit und Freizeit,
In : H.Plessner / H.E.Bock / O.Grupe (Hrsg.), Sport und Leibeserziehung, 28-46.p. Piper,
Mu nchen, 1967.
(2) Max Horkheimer, Theodor dorno, Dijalektika prosvjetiteljstva, 96.p.
(3) Ibid, 148, 149.p.
(4) Ibid, 170.p.
(5) Pierre de Coubertin, "Pedagogie sportive", Cursive P.d.C.
(6) Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 63, 64.p. Warner Books, New York, 1979.
(7) Ibid, 194, 195.s.
(8) Johan Hojzinga, Jesen srednjeg veka, 106, 107.p. Matica srpska, Novi Sad, 1991. Cursive Lj.S.
(9) Ibid, 71.p.
(10) Blacking John, How Musical is Man?, 44.p. Sixth printing, University of Washington Press,
Seattle and London, 2000.
(11) Ibid, 116.p.
(12) Ibid, 115.p.
(13) Ibid, 115,116.p.

x x x