One more and then I should stop...
<snip>
passivity is less to do with sport itself than with the consumerist
economies around it (to be like one's favourite sports hero, one just
buys the nike shoes, etc). Stephen's point about the politics of
post-colonialism is another issue that plays here. [AC]
<snip>
I suppose my underlying prejudice is that sport may be more vulnerable to
those pressures than, for example, the arts. That may seem an odd thing to
say in an era where some paintings cost the equivalent of the annual GDP of
one of the smaller third world economies. However, I think that the
discourse generated and/or constituted by even the visual arts allows more
chance for subversion.
Stephen's coaching examples are telling, though. (So are Roger's re:
participation and elites.) None of the answers is simple and few, if any,
are certain.
As to postcolonialism, the spirit of global capitalism which trawls the
world sampling earthbows and throat songs in order to set them to backbeats
would be essentially that of Bartok, albeit in larger form, were it not for
the machine-like nature of its capture: like a tape-recorder it hears what
is said, plays back what is said, for money, and promptly chews up the tape.
Soon molecules of that tape, forcing the initial metaphor only a little,
will be smeared all over the world like so many PCBs, and I don't think
that's a good thing. So if you're a small, creative community outside the
artistic beltway do you make poetry in an indigenous English within which
you yourselves feel comfortable and private, do you join what's perceived to
be the English language mainstream or do you write in some sort of bogus
creole that's been got up for the tourists? (The dilemma here is How does
one work _within_ that process of capture but against it?)
Globalisation's flattening of difference seems to me a second, related thing
to which sport is, once again, peculiarly vulnerable: little chance of that
Afghan game with dead goats making it to the Olympics, for example. And the
ticket out, as Stephen notes, can be good individually whilst
demographically destructive: 'it is very hard professionally to go back':
Dozens have gone missing, the decision taken is Elsewhere.
but yes, yes we remain as poetry, pure immateriality.
in the name of the 'current state of things' they murmur to us:
"we went for a stroll, now it's a question of marching!" But this
stroll of ours has brought us a long way off, and now
the horizon is behind us.
(from *Materiali*, Metropolitan Indians 1977).
CW
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'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
might call it life.' (Judith Revel)
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