Questioning Play

What play can tell us about social life

Henning Eichberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134821617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

What is play? Why do we play? What can play teach us about our life as social beings? In this critical investigation into the significance of play, Henning Eichberg argues that through play we can ask questions about the world, others and ourselves. Playing a game and asking a question are two forms of human practice that are fundamentally connected. This book presents a practice-based philosophical approach to understanding play that begins with empirical study, drawing on historical, sociological and anthropological investigations of play in the real world, from contemporary Danish soccer to war games and folk dances. Its ten chapters explore topics such as:

• 
  
  

• play as a practice of search

• 
  
  

• playing, learning and progress

• 
  
  

• the light and dark sides of play

• 
  
  

• playing games, sport and display

• 
  
  

• folk sports, popular games, and social identity

• 
  
  

• play under the conditions of alienation.

From these explorations emerge a phenomenological approach to understanding play and its value in interrogating ourselves and our social worlds.

This book offers a challenging contribution to the interdisciplinary field of the philosophy of play. It will be fascinating reading for any student or researcher interested in social and cultural anthropology, phenomenology, and critical sociology as well as the ethics and philosophy of sport, leisure studies, and the sociology of sport.

.

Part I

Cases of movement play

1Soccer, crisis, and grace

How round is the Danish ball?¹

No one can fly, of course not. But now I want to tell you something strange …

(Hans-Jørgen Nielsen)

“What is Danish in Danish football?” a German friend and football expert asked me some time ago. (And he was not the only one who asked, see Gregersen, 2011.) The question has troubled me through many years. Why should soccer in Denmark be different from the game in other countries? It is a game, at the international standard, of considerable popularity. It is a highly entertaining pursuit of an elite of specialists, which produces mediocre discourses. There are moments of the highest collective suspense and euphoria in the field, which dissolve in the boredom of the – internationally interchangeable – tactical constructions, anecdotes, and recollections. That is also soccer in Denmark, indeed (Lundberg, 1986–89).

But, at the same time, soccer in Denmark is something different (Gregersen, 2011). The external appearance of the football fan offers some hints.

In respect of supporter behavior in football, two paradigm cases have been identified for the Europe of the 1980s: the hooligan and the roligan (Williams and Goldberg, 1989). The hooligan, who is ready for violence or even in search of it, took shape in England. He spread internationally, both simultaneously from autochthonous roots (in Germany, Russia, the Netherlands) and by direct imitation, as a cultural export. The carnival-clad roligan, by contrast, took shape in Denmark: scarcely less alcohol-intoxicated, but peaceful and with more of a family mood. The word is derived from Danish rolig, calm, peaceful. Roligans became an alternative international model – starting among Dutch, Swedish, and Irish fans. The Scottish Tartan Army developed similar traits, too.

Does the different external appearance of fans tell something about differentiations in the ball game itself? Indicators from the inside of football-related discourse might point in this direction. What does the history of football critique and sports critique tell us about this?

When, in the late 1960s, the attention of critical theory in Germany turned to sport, it primarily hit soccer. It was “sport” in general which the critics wanted to talk about, but in fact their critique was primarily or exclusively directed at the popular ball game (Vinnai, 1970). Football, with its group discipline, its subjection to an authoritarian trainer, and its rigidified cult of masculinity, seemed to mirror the constraints of the world of work in authoritarian capitalist society. While allegedly compensating for industrial work, sport duplicated it. Football was regarded as a paradigm of alienation.

Not so in Denmark. When Danish sport critique emerged in the early 1970s, it was primarily directed against record-scoring, that is, against those patterns of sport, which aim at producing and measuring records, in centimeters, grams, and seconds. This means that the critique largely ignored football. And the fascination with football was larger than the link between football and alienation. The critical, yet football-fascinated discourse reached a culminating point in Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s novel Fodboldenglen (The Football Angel, first published 1979). Sometimes regarded as the key novel of the Danish 1968 generation, it centered on soccer as a model of society, indeed of dream and of the world. Critical analysis as a literature of football fascination continued into the 1980s, never losing sight of the “utopian function of the game” (Christensen, 1983; also Nørregård, 1980; Nielsen and Thobo-Carlsen, 1981; Berthelsen, 1983a, 1983b; Jørgensen et al., 1986; Warming, 1987; Hansen and Stjernfelt, 1988).

The Danish critical attack on sports could thus be specified to the thesis that maybe sport would disappear as it came, but football would remain. Does this mean that football in Denmark is not a sport? What is it then?

There is no explicit theory existing on such a question. This lack of theoretical attention contrasts the attention to those forms of body culture that have become the paradigmatic embodiment – critics would say: the fossilization – of Danish sport history: Danish gymnastics (Korsgaard, 1982, 1986a, 1986b; Trangbæk, 1987; Eichberg, 1989a, 1989b). Whereas sociological studies and theoretical controversies about gymnastics accumulated, the state of thought about football remained mostly “near to earth” and allowed little more than questions and poetical fragments.

Between sport and dyst

Football was in the focus of German sports critique because, along with boxing, it embodied competitive sport. The analytical connection of competition and capitalism – and alienation – was a central aspect in the critique. However, this may have been a historical shortcoming. The Danish critique of sport did not fall for it. It concentrated more on the connection between achievement, production of records, quantification, and alienation.

Competition and competition is not just one. There is on one hand the classical sport competition of industrial culture about centimeters, grams, and seconds, or points, which in Danish is expressed by the word konkurrence. In contrast, competition in football appears more as dyst, which is a Danish word for jousting (see Chapter 9). The competitive set-up of dyst is similar to a tourney, being a combat or contest of two parties. Dyst as word as well as practice has a tradition in old Scandinavia that reaches back into prehistory (Wahlqvist, 1979). The old Nordic folk games, which persisted in peasant culture up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were full of combat and contest, too, whether with a ball or in trials of strength, whether man against man or group against group (Götlind, 1933; Stejskal, 1954; Møller, 1997). The dyst-contest as such was, therefore, by no means specific for the modern, capitalistic, or industrial pattern. On the contrary, the old European competitive ball games like Breton soule tended to disappear – or to survive marginally as local folklore – rather than to be turned into modern sports (Moëlo and Le Bihan, 1986; Floc’h and Peru, 1987; Hornby, 2008).

The duality and difference between dyst and konkurrence has a certain parallelity in the Danish use of idræt side by side with sport. Idræt, along with Swedish idrott and Norwegian idrett, is rooted in Old Nordic language and culture, and expresses some remarkable deed, feat, or action, both by bodily performance and in literature, by song or narrative. When modern sport came to Scandinavia, the new competitive sport organizations preferred to call themselves idrætsorganisationer instead of adopting the English concept sport (which, however, also is known and sometimes used). The concept of idræt also facilitated to bridge from sport to gymnastics, which was very strong in the Nordic countries, but declined to be a sport.

The Danish duality between sport and idræt has given inspiration to study the eventual parallelism of Chinese language inside the word yundong (see Chapter 7). This discussion also gave reason to use the more broadly embracing concept of “body culture” (Tang, 2010).

The older type of dyst was not automatically converted into modern sport, as can be observed by the tug-of-war. Rope pulling was a popular group competition in older popular cultures. That is why in the early days of sport, it was expected that this traditional contest could easily be developed into a modern achievement sport (Hansen, 1890–93). Indeed, there were attempts to bring tug-of-war into the Olympic program (Burat, 1990). At the 1900 Olympics, a Danish–Swedish team won gold in this discipline. But after 1920, this folkelig form of contest was abandoned as an Olympic sport. In Denmark, tug-of-war found its place instead, along with other nonsport contests, in Fagenes Fest, the working-class festivals held since 1938 (see Chapter 7).

Football as dyst in Denmark can thus be related to an older, peasant-based folk-game culture, though football as soccer was a British import in the context of bourgeois class sport, when it first appeared in Denmark in 1879. How did this class profile develop?

Between the class bodies

The cultural import of football from Britain to Denmark came from a strictly class-divided society. In British class culture, the game of football had in the course of the nineteenth century become a workers’ sport. Danish society, which football invaded towards the end of the nineteenth century, was however not dichotomously split in the same way. Five different types of associations made up the world of early Danish football clubs (Jørgensen, 1986; Toft, 1990). Two of them correspond to the class patterns prevailing in the phase of industrialization: middle-class clubs (often originally cricket clubs) and workers’ clubs (among which there developed, around 1930, also politically oriented socialist workers’ sport clubs). In two other types, the class boundaries were blurred, though not quite invisible: the Fælledklubber (named after the green, the common, fælled, out of which the people’s parks later developed as meeting places for football players) and the urban neighborhood clubs, which were often street teams. A fifth category should, however, not be overlooked: the country clubs, the football associations of farmers and the non-farming rural population in the countryside.

Farmers played an important part in the development of sport and body culture in Denmark. It was through them that Nordic gymnastics came to Denmark, in the context of Folk High Schools and Grundtvigianism (Eichberg, 2015). The Lingian gymnastics of the farmers formed a counterweight to the German gymnastics of the upper strata and to urban sport. Ove Korsgaard, born to a farming family on the island of Mors, has vividly described how in the 1950s he personally experienced the transition from gymnastics to football.

It didn’t suit father and mother. That was not said openly, but it hung in the air. The Sunday morning tournaments meant I had to break off half-way through mucking-out, and that meant one hour longer in the byre for the others – usually father. Mother was concerned with the company I kept. The persons who played football were different from those who went to gymnastics. Certainly, most of them were decent people. On the A-team were craft apprentices and journeymen, a postman, a mechanic, a bicycle repairman, the innkeeper’s son and so on. But they spoke a different language and held a kind of party, which was different from that the gymnastics people. They held dances in the inn, where you drank and danced close together, whereas the gymnastics people did country dances in the assembly hall, and without beer (except for the farmhands, who drank themselves into the mood behind the hall) …. But football gave Sunday a suspense it had not had before.

(Korsgaard, 1986a: 9)

When the population of the countryside – eventually including the young gymnastics enthusiasts like Ove Korsgaard – joined football, its social profile changed. Alongside and between the bourgeois townspeople’s and the workers’ clubs, a third milieu unfolded.

This was – like the class question of sport on the whole – not only a question of external settings, i.e. of the arrangement of time and place of sport, of parties, singing, and dancing. The class question in sport has a material basis: the body of the athlete him- or herself. The workers’ class body is at this point different from the townsmen’s, the noblemen’s as well as from the peasants’. Where was, or is, soccer located here?

The class analysis of the footballer’s body is – at any rate for Denmark – so far a desideratum. However, preliminary studies from other types of sport give some hints (Bonde, 1989 and 1991). Around 1900, when football had its breakthrough as a mass game, the phenotype of the social classes changed in Denmark. This was documented by the transformation in the preferred cultures of body and movement. The heavy-bodied, slow-moving strongman of the older – urban and rural – folk culture disappeared as a model. The farmers turned to disciplining and self-disciplining by Swedish Lingian gymnastics. The worker’s body, with its stress on power and strength, stayed closest to the old strongman, but new patterns of tension and stiffness – which Wilhelm Reich later called body armor – challenged workers’ sport. The bourgeois townsman, who in the nineteenth century was still on high – on horseback, skates, or penny-farthing bicycle – and performed skilled and elegant exercises, now bent himself to be streamlined in the functional interest of speed. New patterns of time and suspense, spreading since the start of the industrial epoch (Eichberg, 1978), replaced other configurations as un-contemporary. Class struggle – in sport as outside sport – was thus not only a matter of political content and organization, but also of the forming of the body. It became visible in its material, bodily basis: as a conflict and distinction between the cultures of the body within society.

It may be no coincidence that the differentiation of class b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction Play as a practice of quest. Philosophical discoveries through play and game
• Cases of movement play
• Critical questions to some play-philosophical commonplaces
• Play as diversity and question
• Socio-political dimensions of play
• Index of names
• Index of play and games
• Index of structural subjects