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ARTICLE
INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
Volume 9(1): 83–104
DOI: 10.1177/1367877906061166
Common culture, commodity fetishism and
the cultural contradictions of sport
●
Marcus Free
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Rep. of Ireland
●
John Hughson
University of Otago, New Zealand
A B S T R A C T ● This article examines the implications of Paul Willis’s
conceptualizations of ‘common culture’ and the cultural commodity for
understanding sport as a popular cultural form. It argues that Willis’s
Ethnographic Imagination (2000) successfully addresses accusations of ‘cultural
populism’ against his earlier Common Culture (1990) by acknowledging the
tensions between creative cultural consumption and the political economy of
cultural production. Hence his conceptualization of the ‘doubly half-formed’
cultural commodity, its usages and meanings neither determined by cultural
industries nor entailing unfettered consumer ‘symbolic creativity’. Arguing that
sport exemplifies this contradiction, the article examines two contradictory
aspects of commoditized sport as popular culture. First is the ways supporters’
financial, emotional, symbolic and intellectual investments in sport constitute a
material contribution to the sport commodity itself and enable an acute sense of
‘authenticity’ which may challenge sport’s (as a cultural industry) political
economy. Second is the ways supporters’ ‘de-fetishizing’ of the sport commodity
may combine with the commoditizing of athletes’ labour power as workers to
limit their capitalizing on the symbolic fruits of their own labour. ●
● commodity fetishism ● common culture
Paul Willis ● soccer ● sport fans
KEYWORDS
supporters
●
●
football
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Paul Willis’s ethnography of young people’s cultural consumption,
Common Culture (1990), was a divisive addition to qualitative consumption research in 1980s cultural studies. Willis criticized dismissive views of
creative potential in popular cultural consumption, from cultural elitism
through postmodernism to cultural Marxism. But his optimistic reading of
widespread ‘symbolic creativity’ in his ethnographic data was itself attacked
by, amongst others, Jim McGuigan (1992), who accused Willis of lazy
‘cultural populism’, ignoring cultural industries’ political economy
and insensitivity in methodology and data interpretation to their actual and
potential control of cultural commodities’ manufacture, circulation and
meanings. Willis’s later work, The Ethnographic Imagination (2000),
addressed such criticisms, turning to Marx to elaborate a complex conceptualization of cultural commodity as a contradictory form which undergoes
a process of ‘fetishism’, or disconnection from production history, but
requires individual processes of ‘de-fetishism’ to communicate ‘use value’
and be meaningfully used in everyday life. Hence a tension between the
commodity’s limiting the range and qualities of interpretations and uses
available and the necessarily interpretive engagement in consumption acts.
This article elaborates Willis’s more nuanced conceptualization of
cultural commodity fetishism and explores its implications for understanding the contradictions of the cultural commodity. Focusing on sport, we
pursue its logical implication that tensions between commodity fetishism
and de-fetishism must be carefully traced in order to identify contradictions
peculiar to cultural consumption in distinct cultural arenas. We argue that
sport exemplifies how the ‘de-fetishized’ commodity may attract deep
communal significance and attachment, but in consumption, consumers/
supporters are nonetheless constrained in the degree of ‘symbolic creativity’
afforded them. That is, there are cultural contradictions specific to sports
commodities’ creative de-fetishizing. We use recent evidence of British
football supporters’ trusts to support this argument. The article further
argues that supporters’ creatively emotional and intellectual investments in
sport as cultural commodity – processes of ‘de-fetishization’ claiming
‘symbolic ownership’ – may have contradictory outcomes for athletes,
reinforcing their objectification as disposable elements of the commoditized
form and limiting their capitalizing on the symbolic fruits of their own
labour.
From Common Culture to the doubly half-formed commodity
Renowned for his seminal account of how resistance to British schools’
academicist educational models ironically contributes to reproducing social
class hierarchies (Willis, 1977), Willis’s later research concerned ‘informal
cultural production’ via routine yet creative uses of cultural commodities.
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Free and Hughson ● The cultural contradictions of sport
A populist variant of Hoggart’s and Williams’s left culturalism (Inglis and
Hughson, 2003: 105), Common Culture (1990) drew on fieldwork chronicling a range of young people’s cultural practices in Britain, including the
consumption of media, music, fashion and sport. Willis sees creative use of
cultural commodities as contributing to a renewable cultural democracy, a
‘common culture’, borrowing the term from Raymond Williams (1958:
317) but in a more populist vein. Thus (1990: 2) people are deemed artistically creative in such routine acts of consumption as clothes and music
selection, and discussing such mediated cultural forms as television. Willis
conceptualizes such creative engagement as ‘grounded aesthetics’: aesthetic
value only emerges in use and deployment of cultural products, items and
forms, in the ‘symbolic creativity’ of invested meaning and interpretive
worth in cultural objects. ‘Grounded aesthetics are the yeast of common
culture’ (1990: 21), the cultural materials used in aesthetic practices drawn
from the commercial marketplace. Thus capitalism unwittingly enables
cultural democracy by providing the tools for symbolic work and creativity. Accordingly (1990: 27), ‘commerce and consumption have helped to
release a profane explosion of everyday symbolic life and activity. The genie
of common culture is out of the bottle – let out by commercial carelessness.’
Willis’s rescuing the commodity from its maligned status within critical
cultural theory and commentary variously challenges critics loosely aligned
to three theoretical orientations, broadly identifiable as cultural elitism,
cultural Marxism and postmodernism. Cultural elitists like F.R. Leavis
(1930) see cultural commodities as barely fabricated trash culture which, in
appealing to majority tastes, erodes any semblance of cultural discernment
for the masses. Within cultural Marxism’s variants, Marcuse’s (1964) depiction of cultural commodities as false needs keeping individuals on a treadmill of endless consumption, benefiting only capitalist producers’ interests,
would be most anathema. Willis sees the designation of cultural commodities as simulacra, replicated items detached from any meaningful cultural
referent (Baudrillard, 1983), as ‘postmodernist pessimism’ that reduces
commodities to ‘surface market quality’ (1990: 26).
Each perspective variously discredits commercially produced cultural
commodities’ promised use value. Cultural elitists divorce intrinsic aesthetic
value within the artistic canon from any notion of use value within broader
culture. Leavis recognizes a common cultural activity within popular arts
which would be associated with use value but sees ‘mass culture’ as both a
threat to high arts and a devaluation of popular artistic activity (Inglis and
Hughson, 2003: 92–4). Marxist theorists, particularly Adorno (1991: 34),
argue that use value is subjugated to the demands of exchange value in
cultural and non-cultural commodities alike. In Baudrillard’s postmodernism, cultural commodities’ symbolic value collapses as signification and
meaning are blurred by hyper-real commodities as simulacra. Willis, by
contrast, argues that cultural commodities attain value in use aesthetically,
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materially and symbolically as cultural resources, often connecting with
traditional folk and working-class culture or emerging grassroots street
culture (Willis, 1990: 19).
Sport features briefly in Common Culture, based on fieldwork in the
English West Midlands city of Wolverhampton, the focus being fans of
Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club. Two male fans exemplify Willis’s
position. Through such symbolic activities as making a bedroom a ‘private
temple to the Wolves’ (1990: 113), they ‘humanise, decorate and invest with
meanings their common life spaces and social practices’ (1990: 2). This
might appear fanciful, but for Willis, scarves, flags and team posters are not
isolated commodities but items infused with meaning in a particular cultural
context of commoditization and usage. Purchasing is experienced as an act
of support and investment – financial, emotional, symbolic – in a collectively meaningful cultural form, and is not simply a commodity purchase.
Like other soccer clubs, Wolverhampton Wanderers increasingly rely upon
merchandising to generate income, and as a founding member of the English
football league the club is connected to their working-class cultural backgrounds and associated sporting traditions.
However, such claims have been subjected to considerable criticism, most
prominently McGuigan’s (1992) accusation of ‘cultural populism’, the hub
of which being that theorists like Willis and Fiske (1989a, 1989b) emphasize the cultural realm’s importance over and above the economic and show
a misplaced ‘faith in market capitalism’s capacity to deliver the goods for
everyone’s creative use’ (1992: 119). Following McGuigan’s logic in the
sphere of sport, a phenomenon such as Manchester United’s global fan base,
the commoditization and circulation of figures like David Beckham and
Michael Jordan as ‘sign’ and as vehicles for merchandise sale, might illustrate Willis’s naivety. Whether seen as the postmodern disconnection of
signifier from signified or through political economy lenses as exploiting
new and ancillary image markets to sell commoditized sporting icons, such
cases might suggest the demise of any simplistic notion of enduring ‘organic
community’ in sports cultures and the untenability of the concept of
‘symbolic creativity’.
Willis’s later The Ethnographic Imagination (2000: 50) responds to such
criticism, conceding that cultural commodities must be understood via a
‘Political Economy approach’.1 He accepts a ‘first instance determination’
of cultural commodities’ production and distribution, but not that initial
economic control feeds into a ‘cultural chain’ where popular culture ultimately satisfies capitalist producers’ and message makers’ ideological and
material interests. Willis turns to Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism
in Capital (1976/1867), using his analogy of the hieroglyph to explain the
mystifying nature of the commodity fetish (2000: 53). The commodity is
both a material thing and a sign (a social hieroglyph), but a sign in
abstraction and of uncertain origin. If ‘impossible to decode’ it is ‘failed
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Free and Hughson ● The cultural contradictions of sport
communication’, allowing us to forget its origins and to be uninterested in
the social relations from which it arises (2000: 53).
The cultural commodity’s symbolic nature is particularly important to its
commercial success. It has a specific quality of usefulness pertaining to its
‘actual or potential cultural meaningfulness’ (2000: 55). Willis’s data show
how cultural and non-cultural commodities differ. Rather than concealing
or fetishizing themselves, cultural commodities invite usage, seek communication by reminding potential users of the ‘embedded expressive labour’ in
them (2000: 55). As cultural, not merely functional, objects they risk being
unsold and unused through their burden of communicating meanings, and
their communicated meanings highlight, rather than obscure, the labour
within them and the potential meanings generated in usage. Consequently,
cultural commodities are doubly half-formed (2000: 47–66), each side
vying with the other: commodity fetishism, the need to be sold as an object
disconnected from production history and circulate widely, versus the
necessity to communicate usefulness and be ‘de-fetishized’, to be usable
in acts of consumption that personalize or collectivize ascribed meanings in
specific contexts (2000: 58). And in such cultural forms as music (CDs in
material form), the latter requires imaginative recourse to production
history.
Cultural commodities operate, therefore, both in pure commodity form
(‘bearer form’) and in terms of cultural usefulness (‘cultural form’) (2000:
55). Accordingly, they work with a dual hieroglyph. In bearer form they
remain coded, but in cultural form they are ‘inherently decodable’ (2000:
56). By contrast with other commodities, they combine fetishism with the
necessity to stimulate communication and, therefore, to be de-fetishized.
While Willis (2000: 59) tempers Common Culture’s populism by arguing
that the cultural commodity is always ‘infected by fetishism’ which potentially ‘truncates meaning’, the closure of ‘commodity meaning’ is incomplete, leaving channels of communication and contestation open.
Common Culture’s ‘symbolic creativity’ reassumes significance here.
Commodities attain meaning through expanded ‘use value’ (as opposed to
the commodity’s exchange value in material form) as people creatively
employ cultural goods. For Willis, ‘the return of a kind of authenticity’
(2000: 70) occurs in commodity de-fetishization. Willis’s use of ‘authenticity’ here will prove particularly significant to our analysis of sport. Since, in
the cultural sphere, we associate authenticity with proof of origin, particularly the provenance of artists’ work, with ‘artists’ narrowly defined as
unique individual producers expressively moulding raw materials, Willis
takes a conceptual risk in positing that authenticity is actually enabled by
the commodity’s loosening from its origins and possible reinsertion into new
consumption contexts. His thesis hinges on consumption’s materiality,
making ‘objects’ one’s own by physical transformation or, if physically
intact, by conceptual transformation, individually or subculturally; and on
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consumption’s corporeality, its infusion with bodily experienced, sensuous
meanings and associations.
Sport as cultural commodity
For several reasons, the sport commodity exemplifies both how Willis’s
‘authenticity’ may be effected through consumption, and the contradictions
therein. First, however, a qualification: while sport is a heterogeneous
phenomenon, we focus primarily on professionally organized team sports
attracting large collective followings, where the ‘team’ or ‘club’ is the
enduring object of support over and above individual team players with
relatively short-lived careers. In sports involving individual opponents, their
roles as self-interested competitors within a packaged commodity and their
relationships with spectators (or ‘supporters’, but not in the sense of team
sports) would require consideration beyond this article’s scope, though we
do consider aspects of such variation below.
As commodity, sport differs from other cultural forms in several ways.
First, it consists of specific commoditized iterations in designated times and
places. While these associations are designated through sports’ particular
forms of governance, each contest-as-commodity’s meaning for spectators
is particularized and authenticated – not by that designation, but through
their material and corporeal experiences of ‘being there’. ‘Being there’
makes the commodity’s experience ‘original’ through spectators’ investment
of time, commitment, hope, imagination and money (in turn representing
their own commoditisation of labour power in other work spheres). Second,
each experience is unique; it entails individual and collective interpretive
engagement with the game unfolding which, not unreasonably from spectators’ perspectives, can influence both players and outcome – hence the
discernible differences in ‘home’ and ‘away’ results patterns. Third, therefore, spectators really are ‘supporters’ since their support contributes
materially to ‘purchasing’ players through ticket prices and corporeally
through number and vocality, and may influence outcomes. Thus, fourth,
their presence may contribute to the commodity’s actual production.
Although they have already paid the admission price, the commodity is not
pre-packaged but produced while in progress. Indeed, supporters may (and
frequently do) blame each other for inadequate support and for consequent
team failure or decline.
On the other hand, while acts of consumption ‘authenticate’ the sport
commodity, it has an impermanence deriving from each contest’s partial
cancellation in significance by each newly commoditized contest, whose
structuring, timing and location are matters for individual sports’ governance and commercial vendors. Thus new contests demand renewed prices
of admission as the initial cost of renewed authentication, a prerequisite for
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‘being there’ acts of consumption. As Garnham (1990: 161) argues, within
the cultural industries, which include sport as an industrialized but expressive symbolic form, gate-keeping power lies with exhibitors and distributors, not producers. Whether sport’s ‘production’ is athletes’ or spectators’
labour or a combination, the power of scheduling, locating and controlling
physical access to contests lies with organizers, owners and, increasingly,
electronic media. Contests’ rule-bound structures limit imaginative investment and projection. Outcomes are recorded results. Fans may make ‘what
if?’ imaginary replays, but results stand. Moreover, no single game ever
represents ‘the game’ for players or spectators. Players constantly face new
contests, and spectators pay the admission price every time.
Yet, while each game presents itself as a newly fetishized commodity, it
trades on supporters’ previous de-fetishization. Supporters become supporters through their investments’ cumulative value. In each new admission
expenditure, they seek a return on months or years of what Willis (2000:
55) calls ‘embedded expressive labour’. This labour is represented materially by cumulative admission costs (representing proportions of wages
obtained through sale of labour power in work), but also by cumulative
corporeal support in acts of being there. If no return, committed supporters may well be enraged, but anger is tempered by the necessity to support,
a necessity stemming from the cumulative authenticity of previous financial,
emotional and intellectual investments, not external compulsion. Authenticity is undone by relinquishing or shifting allegiance. In the commodity
form, supporters make and consume their own (and opposing supporters’)
contributions, compelled and constrained in their anger and their ‘consumer
choices’ by the cumulative experience of existing support. They are also
obliged to necessarily reinvest themselves with each new contest. Continued
authenticity in sport depends both on the ability to enter competition and
to take its risks (i.e. potential loss, relegation, falling attendances, lower
return on investment or actually negative equity) and on supporters’ willingly collective illusionment, the faith and determination to survive
competitive failure. Sporting participation’s competitive structure makes
team consumption – support – ‘real’ and authentic, not past achievements,
memories or nostalgia, hence complex relationships between production,
fetishization, consumption and de-fetishization, which may be understood
in terms of Willis’s doubly half-formed commodity.
Sport supporters also illustrate a tension within the concept of the
‘organic’ in cultural theory. Willis contends that a phenomenon like
Manchester United soccer club’s global brand destroys any traces of
‘organic community [since] the overwhelming majority of fans will never be
part of the original sensuous community’ (2000: 48–9), their contact being
solely through the purchase of secondary commodities, from broadcast
games to club merchandise. The notion of ‘organic community’ has featured
prominently within cultural studies’ evolution. Hoggart’s foundational Uses
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of Literacy (1957) extended Leavis’s earlier pessimism (1933) about Americanized popular culture damaging ‘organic community’, but replaced
Leavis’s folk tradition as its embodiment with traditional working-class life,
contrasting 1930s Britain’s urban community culture with 1950s mass
culture’s threatened dislocation of youth from pre-war working-class
cultural customs and values. Sociologist Ian Taylor’s (1971) writing on late
20th century soccer hooliganism echoed this theme. Taylor saw a quasiorganic ‘participatory democracy’ in the grounding of soccer clubs within
the historical working-class male ‘sub-culture of soccer[’s . . .] building and
sustaining of local teams’ (1971: 142), with players regarded as local
community ‘public representatives’ (1971: 143). Soccer’s 1960s bourgeoisification in the name of ‘professionalization’ and ‘internationalization’
(1971: 149) undermined players’ and supporters’ traditional cultural affiliation. Newly formed soccer hooligan gangs were an extreme but understandable ‘drift into resistance’ (1971: 153).
John Clarke and Chas Critcher at Birmingham University’s CCCS
reflected the Centre’s concern with youth culture’s relationship to the parent
culture and the working class (Hughson et al., 2005: 38–9). Clarke
eschewed Taylor’s ‘participatory democracy’ as working-class communities
never controlled soccer clubs (1978: 42), but saw supporters as traditionally ‘owning’ clubs informally, symbolically and culturally by regarding
them as ‘theirs’. With the ‘traditional working-class community’ in ‘real
decline’ (1976: 99), violent soccer supporter behaviour perpetuated ‘rough’
aspects of working-class culture in opposition to soccer authorities’ imposition of ‘disinfected commitment’ and ‘contained partisanship’ (Clarke,
1976: 60). Critcher likewise saw young supporters’ violence as attempts to
‘restore adolescent male working-class identity’ (1979: 172).
Each of these varied lamentations exhibits a romantic binarism which
Raymond Williams (1958) unpicked as far back as Culture and Society.
There Williams etymologically traced the term ‘organic’s evolutionary bifurcation from its Greek root, showing its correspondence to the modern
distinction between concepts of culture and civilization (1958: 256–7). In
modern usage we distinguish organic, associated with natural growth and
‘authentic’ cultural forms from organization’s association with civilization’s
artificial structures and forms of governance. The concept of manipulable
‘organs’ of control within hierarchical power relations reflects this bifurcation through association with suspicion of artificial ‘organization’. But the
common etymological root of organic, organization and organ should
indicate any cultural phenomenon’s inevitable tensions between countervailing forces: ‘organic’ collective growth and investment makes it meaningful, but it will have possibly hierarchical organizational layers. Since its
19th century organization and professionalization, British soccer has
embodied the tensions and interrelations in this bifurcation. Commoditized
sport may enable ‘organic’ communal endurance, becoming meaningful
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through supporters’ collective material, corporeal and collective investment.
And support requires collective organization as an ‘organic community’.
But it is nonetheless subject to organizers’ and owners’ authoritative designation, organized by each contest’s spatio-temporal parameters and organically grown in its specific form. Resisting sport’s organization, therefore,
may evince rhetorical and romantic adherence to ‘organic community’, but
this is existentially linked to the commodity form’s organization, on which
support focuses. Hooliganism as residues or ‘magical recoveries’ (Clarke,
1976) of organic communities were thus spatio-temporally organized
around soccer game schedules, limited in resistance by prohibition on
destroying the commodity which inspired their coalescence.
Willis’s talk of Manchester United’s global branding destroying ‘organic
community’ highlights the necessary ‘being thereness’ of physical presence
in forming community and resistance to sport’s governance and ownership
as cultural commodity. This makes sport special. Geographically distant
fans who have never seen a game ‘live’ might feel part of a protocommunity, but struggle over ownership and the materialization of ‘organic
community’ remains a local issue, even if collective organization involves
websites. The reason is the history of corporeal investment and embedded
capital that actual stadium supporters have contributed to the club. This in
turn highlights contrasting relationships between labour and capital in sport
as commodity and in supporters’ work outside of sport.
Marx characterized capital accumulation’s relationship with labour as
vampiresque blood-sucking, making capital the apparent blood and vessels
of social organization, reproduction and growth, while masking its devouring of ‘dead labour’. Workers are denied capital accumulation by their
necessarily perpetual sale of labour power and the appropriation of its
generated surplus value (Neocleous, 2003). The key to Marx’s concepts of
alienation and commodity fetish is the sale of ‘labour power’, rather than
simply ‘labour’. Selling labour power as an abstract commodity, the
labourer may be assigned any designated task whose resultant product is in
the capitalist investor’s control, hence labourers’ alienation from the fruits
of their labour and the commodity’s market exchange value as a ‘fetishized’
object disconnected from production history. However, while athletes are
(privileged) workers, whose labour power is likewise commoditized, the
commoditized ‘product’ also feeds off supporters’ labour in two ways: first,
admission revenue indirectly represents supporters’ labour power in other
work spheres by constituting a portion of their wages; and second, athletic
performances benefit from the vocality and corporeality of support in
unquantifiable but nonetheless tangible ways. But unlike the ‘dead labour’
of work, although uncredited in contributing to performances and ‘product’
and thereafter an unmeasurable factor in the commodity’s future enhanced
appeal and earning potential, there may be a legitimate sense that supporters have contributed to the capital presented as sport’s ‘life-blood’, the force
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enabling continuity, reproduction and growth by purchasing new players’
labour when existing players’ utility value is declining. Therefore, each
newly commoditized iteration of sport has an embedded history which
supporters know to be present within it, but on which they cannot capitalize. Because this dead-labour-as-living-capital entails actual ‘being there’ to
contribute to the commodity-in-production, investments in ‘secondary’
commodities (‘live’ broadcasts, pay-per-view or otherwise, or merchandise)
contribute only indirectly, and are closer to standard consumer purchases.
This conceptualization is therefore distinguishable both from Fiske’s
(1992) concept of ‘popular cultural capital’ and from conceptualizations of
fan activity in such cultural spheres as television. Adapting Bourdieu’s
‘cultural capital’ (1984), Fiske theorizes that fans’ popular cultural knowledge and creative engagement may enable ‘popular cultural capital’
accumulation, which is validated within informal or more formalized fan
networks if lacking the social status of elite cultural forms. However, this
is somewhat problematic. Capital is accumulated value. However valuable
such knowledge and activities may be to specific communities of interest,
their capacity to resist or transform corresponding cultural industries and
translate such ‘capital’ into broader ‘economic’, ‘social’ or ‘symbolic’ capital
– i.e. ‘capital’ that is ‘perceived and recognized as legitimate’ beyond a social
group’s boundaries (Bourdieu 1987: 4) – varies according to specific sociocultural circumstances and relations. Conceptualizing fan investment in
sport as ‘embedded expressive labour’ sensitizes us to limitations on fans’/
supporters’ symbolic creativity in this cultural arena. Phenomenological
engagement is limited by the hegemony of representations generated
through official designation of places and conditions under which sport is
accessed, and through judgement and recording of fixed ‘results’. Despite
meeting independently and writing their own fan materials, sports fans
contrast with the likes of Jenkins’s (1992) Star Trek fans’ creative writing,
which was inspired by and exceeded the 1960s series’ social liberalism,
because they cannot creatively refashion the cultural commodity. Their
imagining of the sporting contest’s space and meaning is limited by what
Lefebvre (1991) terms ‘representations of space’, the inscription of material
spaces and bodily movements within hierarchized, rule-bound designations
of spatial purpose and meaning. Sports supporters may struggle to transform such designations into Lefebvre’s more fluidly lived, contested
‘representational spaces’ (or, ‘spaces of representation’ in Soja, 1996: 67),
overcoming their sidelining to inspire their team, pitting their own collective imaginings against official designations. But each sport’s structures and
rules generate uncontestable representations of contests as ‘results’.
There may be a material underpinning to experiencing sporting contests
as ‘spaces of representation’ – supporters’ unmeasurable but collectively,
unmistakably ‘felt’ contributions to on-field performances, Lefebvre’s
embodied ‘connaissance’ or ‘knowing’ pitted against a ‘knowledge’ or
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‘savoir’ ‘which serves power’ (1991: 6). But this depends on extended but
rhythmic, patterned economic, emotional, corporeal and intellectual fan
investments. Its rhythmic incorporation into everyday life depends on
rhythmic availability, and commoditized sport’s rhythmic availability
patterns militate against accumulation of Fiske’s ‘popular cultural capital’.
Supporter-generated value is embedded in the commodity form’s multiple
iterations, symbolically available in memories of participation but unrealizable as economic or symbolic capital. And because the commodity form
is perpetually renewed in new contests, which supporters must consume to
remain supporters, ‘popular cultural capital’ based on previous investments,
informed knowledge and concern is impossible, at least by comparison with
other cultural spheres. Supporters cannot idealize the past and refuse the
present as, for example, music fans may refuse consumption based on judgements of authenticity and inauthenticity (Grossberg, 1992), or as the critical
mass and organization of 1960s Star Trek fans may have influenced the
return and form of later series. (But although intellectual, economic and
sensuous investment in such forms may enable ‘popular’ cultural capital
accumulation, underpinning selective consumption decisions and influencing the commodity’s future form, how often is Fiske’s ‘popular cultural
capital’ translated into economic or social capital, i.e. affording resulting
enhanced wider social standing?). Sports supporters are bound by attachment to the commodity form’s specific instance and the governance/ forms
of ownership controlling its availability.
This is why ‘being there’, above distanced or merely vocal fandom, underpins fans’ collective sense of quasi-organic community, and why supporters
are limited in their critical engagement with team or club. And because
place-specific iterations prevent the enduring value of acts of ‘being there’,
‘popular cultural capital’ accumulation, as Fiske formulates it, is severely
constrained. Supporters are complicit in the sporting cultural commodity’s
‘fetishizing’ dimension, limiting the extent of de-fetishization and the degree
to which de-fetishizing consumption can acquire cumulative value or
capital.
There are specificities to various sports which may be illustrated by some
examples. We focus first on how British soccer club supporters have pooled
economic, intellectual and emotional resources as a means of influencing
club management. These movements therefore contrast with British soccer’s
history of hooligan fan violence by combining pragmatic and pointed
economic and cultural tactics. A central theme is the soccer ‘club’ as a
contradictory concept, not just a synonym for team or business. ‘Club’ epitomizes the tensions within the ‘organic’, simultaneously connoting business,
commoditized ‘product’ and communal focal point. The club exceeds
factional interests by embodying the sedimented labour of its generations
of players and supporters. Quintessentially doubly half-formed, it becomes
meaningful through fans’ ability to see their own supporter history
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embodied within it. Generations of financial and emotional investment have
already de-fetishized the club, despite weekly re-fetishism as a re-saleable
object. In each case, conceptualization as ‘club’ informs fans’ asserted rights
to influence club governance; that is, the demand for support to be acknowledged in ‘production’, since ‘production’ results from repeated cycles of
production and consumption as support.
‘Embedded expressive labour’ to capital accumulation and
(re)investment: supporter trusts
Rupert Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster BSkyB’s proposed takeover of
Manchester United (Britain’s largest soccer club) in 1998 was referred by
the British Government Trade and Industry Secretary to the Monopolies
and Mergers Commission (MMC) under pressure from two supporters’
organizations, Independent Manchester United Supporters Association
(IMUSA) and Shareholders United Against Murdoch (SUAM). The MMC
considered its potentially adverse effect on broadcasting competition and
therefore the ‘public interest’ – owning exclusive rights to broadcast English
Premiership soccer matches, BSkyB would be on both sides in future deal
negotiations. An anti-competitive situation for sale of broadcasting rights
to English Premiership matches, particularly Manchester United games,
could facilitate unreasonably priced access to games (actual attendance or
satellite broadcast subscription), but which unswervingly loyal fans might
willingly pay (see Brown and Walsh, 1999).
The MMC report (1999) accepted the supporters’ position that the deal,
outwardly increasing the club’s capitalization, was a profit-extracting
investment in ‘fan equity’, the financial measure of supporters’ ‘irrational’
club loyalty irrespective of results. The term ‘fan equity’, deriving from
investment bank Salomon Brothers, acknowledges fan loyalty’s accumulated value as a capital asset which ‘decreases the volatility of earnings when
the team experiences failure’ (quoted in Carr et al., 2001: 75). It is a
predictable capital resource which investors may exploit by buying into
guaranteed loyalty, but whose capital realization is denied to fans. ‘True’
supporters will not shift allegiance because their ‘authenticity’ requires
continued commitment to their team in current and projected competition.
Investors accumulate capital while supporters’ capital-ize the club through
admission prices, merchandise purchases and pay television subscriptions.
Thus, both Manchester United and other club fans (given Manchester
United’s dominant position in English soccer), could be vulnerable to anticompetitive deals and unreasonable price hikes.
Recognizing fan loyalty’s value and vulnerability, and stressing the club’s
debt of loyalty to supporters above shareholding investors, the MMC
implicitly acknowledged sport’s particularity as a commoditized cultural
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form – that supporters purchase their own commoditized ‘bottled praxis’
(Willis, 2000: 103) through economic, intellectual and emotional investment. And the organized supporters’ resistance showed acute collective
awareness of this. Their argumentatively complex submissions to the MMC
may be seen as ‘performative consumption’ (Hills, 2002: 170) or ‘identity
production’ (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998; Crawford, 2004: 119),
asserting supporters’ moral authority rooted in generations of support-asinvestment, and a material act of coalescence and identity formation. But it
succeeded in freeing the commodity form from any single investor’s ownership, not transforming or forming an independently circulating additional
or alternative commodity.
This campaign, wrestling with sport’s doubly half-formed cultural
commodity and highlighting supporter vulnerability, inspired the formation
of Supporters Direct, a British government-funded scheme designed to
reduce vulnerability by assisting supporter groups to establish cooperative
and mutual soccer club ownership through trusts registered as industrial
and provident societies – a means of translating ‘embedded expressive
labour’ into economic capital. Owned corporately (i.e. publicly, noncommercially and non-profit), the trusts’ main stated aims are democratic
representation within clubs and building and consolidating genuine club
links with local communities. More popular with lower division supporters
but present in some elite English Premiership clubs, shareholder trusts are
defensive reactions to soccer club flotation which, despite ‘the language of
‘people’s capitalism’, extract money from the game (Michie, 1999: 9).
Pooling dividends to purchase more shares and increasing club capitalization, so justifying claims for Board of Directors representation, trusts constitute a limited guild socialism reminiscent of Williams’s aspirations for
popular culture (Hughson et al., 2005: 44). Thus supporters’ embedded
expressive labour may be realized as economic capital and may facilitate
social capital through representation on club Boards.
Some critics attack the trusts’ mutualism as symptomatic of ‘new middleclass’ activism and romanticism (Nash, 2001), but Malcolm Glazer’s
recently successful Manchester United takeover demonstrates the vulnerability of embedded expressive labour unrealized as economic capital. In
early 2005, alarmed by Glazer increasing his shareholding to 28 percent
(Pratley, 2005), the supporters organizations Red Action Group (Jay, 2004)
and Manchester Education Committee (MEC) (Rawling, 2004) threatened
direct action, the MEC proposing a ‘civil war’ with the ‘company’ should
the club executive support Glazer’s takeover ambition. Glazer fuelled this
vehement resistance by planning to extract club capital to partly fund
borrowing £275m of his eventual £794m purchase. Gaining over 75 per
cent of shares by 16 May 2005, Glazer could legally remove the club from
the stock exchange. Significantly, the borrowing entailed selling ‘preference
shares’ to three ‘hedge fund loan’ creditors at ‘an effective interest rate of
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12 per cent to 13 per cent’, irrespective of club revenue, thus severely indebting a hitherto profitable club. While Murdoch’s motives were debatable,
Glazer’s planned extra capital generation through increased ‘sponsorship,
merchandising and match-day revenue’ (Pratley and Taylor, 2005) was
blatant investment in fans’ ‘embedded expressive labour’ and ‘fan equity’,
represented as existing and future ‘company’ capital. Although Shareholders United trust’s attempt to prevent takeover by obtaining over 25 per
cent of shares failed, it was a viable rearguard action predicated on the
necessary transforming of ‘symbolic’ into economic (part) ownership and
influence.
By contrast with violent or other non-violent resistance to soccers’s
economic control, the trust concept bridges the cultural and economic,
retrospectively representing embedded expressive labour as economic and
therefore social capital. Supporters’ trusts additionally represent a more
general development in British soccer ‘fan culture’ by logically extending
the phenomenon of soccer fanzines, which developed in Britain from the
1980s onwards. Magazines produced and circulated by club fans, fanzines,
usually without clubs’ official approval and occasionally met with overt
antagonism from management (Haynes, 1998), in turn extended a history
of fanzine publication in various popular cultural spheres, including music,
comics and television (Jenkins, 1992; Triggs, 1995). With limited resources
and little or no commercial support, soccer fanzines, combining ‘straight’
journalistic criticism, rumour circulation and speculation, management
send-ups, cartoons and individual and collective memory rehearsal, were a
strange coalescence of 1970s ‘punk’ and 1980s ‘Thatcherite’ espousal of
individual enterprise and invention (Haynes, 1998). Fanzines imaginatively
extended, refined and defended the concept that the soccer club (many of
which were originally established by 19th century Church and benevolent
organizations to foster community) is just that, a club rather than a
business, and that its authenticity lies in fans’ history of collectively invested
time, emotion, imagination and money. This is also why, as Brian Lomax
(2001: 109) argues, supporters’ trusts must maintain independence from
actual club management. The club’s symbolism depends on the idea –
whatever the complex reality – that it is somehow independent of factional
interests within or outside the ‘community’ it symbolizes.
Wimbledon Independent Supporters Association (WISA) generated the
extreme case of supporter resistance. When this English First Division club’s
owners threatened to move it 70 miles northwards to Milton Keynes in
2002, supporters formed their own ‘authentic’ version of the club (Wimbledon AFC), even though it entailed entering the English soccer league several
divisions below the club which continued as Milton Keynes (MK) Dons,
though with radically reduced support. On WISA’s website, supporters
justified their claim to Wimbledon’s name and history, claiming theirs as the
authentic, local team, that Wimbledon’s name, not the ‘club’ in its ‘real’
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sense, had been purchased as a mobile franchise. Wimbledon AFC, therefore, was not an illegitimate arrogation of the club name. Rather, it was
legitimated by generations of invested fan support and was formally authenticated by subjection to the rules of competition in the annual league cycle,
however lowly, and with the collectively shared risk of competitive failure
this entailed. The club’s ‘official’ owners, however, were usurping an
unearned league position: ‘A new club is being allowed to start off in the
First Division. Unbelievable (a supporter quoted in Murray, 2002)’.
Compensating for failure to translate embedded expressive labour into
economic capital, supporters starved MK Dons of future economic and
cultural investment by forming their ‘authentic’, if officially ‘new’ version
of the club. Some mainstream journalists (e.g. Kelso, 2003) share this view.
Ridley’s (2003) label, the ‘Prefabricated MK Dons’, is a reference to Milton
Keynes’ artificiality as a 1960s post-war ‘new town’ built mainly to relocate
businesses and their workforces from London. That Wimbledon fans
appear to have overwhelmingly chosen Wimbledon AFC over MK Dons
suggests soccer’s continuing emotional attachment to locality and sense of
community.
However, we should note that since this newly established ‘authentic’ club
began life at the bottom of the league, while it was a moral–cultural victor,
it was also an economic and political defeat which demonstrates the
sporting cultural commodity’s doubly half-formed nature. De-fetishism
entailed considerable ‘symbolic creativity’, but although its outcome was
an entity claimed as the ‘authentic, real’ club, to officialdom and nonsupporters it was effectively ‘new’, and thus was required to become a
saleable entity subject to league and game regulations, so beginning a new
commodity cycle. Such forms of resistance should therefore be seen as an
ongoing struggle, and cannot be read simplistically through a romantic
populism as unfettered ‘symbolic creativity’, ‘counter-hegemony’ or the
accumulation of ‘popular cultural capital’.
De-fetishism’s logical paradox: the fetishized athlete
Applying Willis’s analysis to another aspect of the sport commodity highlights related anomalies. From a ‘production’ rather than ‘consumption’
perspective, if sport structures limit the extent and means by which
consumers ‘de-fetishize’ sport as a cultural commodity, they combine with
this de-fetishism to impact upon athletes’ – as ‘workers’ – relationships to
the fruits of their own labour. In Marx’s terminology, they are ‘alienated’
from them, despite their contrast with other workers in being visibly identifiable with their work and its value. Indeed they are quadruply ‘alienated’.
First, their labour power is purchased as an abstract commodity by employers, whose control over deployment or non-deployment within teams
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(sometimes sidelining for extended periods), is absolute: players may be
prevented from playing or deployed out of (their preferred) position.
Second, their actual labour’s value is subject to external judgement by
officials who mediate its meanings for onlookers. Third, it is affected by
the simultaneous labour of team-mates and/or opposition, and of supporters – their own or the opposition’s – engaging in interpretive acts of defetishism. Fourth, ‘mediations’ – television, press, etc. – impose additional,
possibly conflicting interpretations on ‘official’ representation, circulating
images of athletes whose form and meaning are beyond their control.
Athletes may exert considerable control over the price of their own labour
power. But the price to them is that commoditization combines the
industry’s fetishizing of their labour, their submission to regulations governing their availability and valuation as commodities, and their submission
to processes of de-fetishism through dually ‘mediated’ consumption (i.e.
official mediation between competitors and media representation). They
are subject to the closest scrutiny by officialdom, by media and by ‘supporters’ who see their own embedded expressive labour in their purchased
commodity. Thus, commodity fetishism limits the degree and nature of
athletes’ de-fetishism of their own commoditized labour. Contrasting with
other workers, athletes may have privileged access to their labour’s
cumulative economic value, but may not capitalize on its cultural, symbolic
value (though this contributes to its economic value), because the latter
value requires commoditization’s availability to, and processes of, defetishism by supporters, and is partly constituted by them. And de-fetishism
may entail subjecting athletes to the harshest criticism, particularly in team
sports, where individual athletes’ commoditized labour power is part of the
team’s commoditization. Indeed, routine speculation concerning the most
profitable disposal schedule for individual players nearing ‘sell-by’ dates,
so reducing athletes to the material commodity, commonly features in
supporter interactions. British soccer fanzines and websites, for instance,
are as likely to carry extended moaning about under-performing players as
to criticize club management.
Athletes may attempt to regain control over alienated labour through
published autobiographies. In this respect, an interesting development has
been the ‘ups and downs’ or confessional autobiographical sub-genre,
divulging hitherto hidden secrets – alcohol or drug addiction, etc. (Whannel,
2002: 61). Promising to demystify the athlete’s fetishized image by exposing
such embarrassing ‘truths’ (which may be symptoms of combined fetishism
and de-fetishism, the intolerable stress of external judgement and performative expectations), these autobiographies attempt to impose temporal linearity, personalizing and individualizing the athlete’s own worth over and
above the spatiality and rhythms of sporting contests, performances and
commoditizations. But they are by definition retrospective, after-the-event
attempts to alter earlier commodity cycles of production and consumption.
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Thus athletes’ opportunities to de-fetishize their own fetishized and already
multiply de-fetishized images with the ‘true’ account are limited by the
weight of existing embedded expressive labour in earlier commoditizations.
Two recent examples are illustrative. Manchester United and Irish soccer
international Roy Keane’s autobiography (2002) was marketed as a frank,
self-critical revisiting of Keane’s career highlights. Ghost-writer Eamon
Dunphy’s foul vernacular was a deliberate alternative to characteristically
bland, euphemistic or downright dishonest sports biographies. But Keane,
already severely punished by the English Football Association for a dangerous tackle on an opponent, was subjected to a second punishment for now
apparently admitting intent to injure, so breaking the sporting code that
personal injuries must be accidental outcomes of competitive play rather
than ad hominem attacks (McArdle, 2000: 149). While the fine (£150,000)
for bringing the game into disrepute hardly damaged Keane’s finances, it
brought opprobrium through official condemnation and media criticism for
representing sport’s idealized, extra-societal play as a coarse social reality
of personal enmity. Former Ireland team-mate Tony Cascarino’s ‘autobiography’ (Kimmage, 2000) confessed career-long insecurities and brittleness
in the face of fan criticism, which he related to childhood humiliation by a
destructive father, and this to paternal insecurity resulting from family
emigration from Italy to Britain. But this unusually insightful contextualization was eclipsed in the book’s marketing and reception by a short
segment confessing his concealing, for many years, the truth that he had not
properly qualified to play for Ireland through maternal parentage. Hence a
fascinating narrative threading of Italian migrant history, consequent unsettlement and serial masculine ontological insecurity over generations was
eclipsed by media concern with bogus Irish international qualification.
A further paradox of commoditization is that athletes’ labour power
commoditization may be liberating in ways that fully de-fetishized, direct
relationships with supporters may prevent, since sport’s intermediary structures protect athletes from supporters’ potential over-investment in their
labour’s symbolic value through processes of de-fetishization. We have
concentrated here on soccer, a team sport with mass, partisan fan bases.
However, sports with individual competitors representing only their
personal interests are a different matter, most significantly the individual’s
vulnerability to the career impact of poor form and competitive failure, an
occupational risk contrasting with the contracted team player’s relative
security. Crosset (1995) shows how US women golfers’ fans have attempted
to circumvent the distance imposed by the sport’s commoditization, and to
reduce the impact of competitive failure on individuals, by offering financial and other material support, a form of anti-commoditization ‘gift
exchange’: financial support for the pleasures of friendship and of supporting high playing standards. But the outcomes were uneven. Despite its
utopian market circumvention, for some, competitive failure could incur
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disappointed supporters’ frustration, even wrath, in turn fuelling potentially
disabling pressure to perform and satisfy the implicit conditions of friendship. Thus gift exchange may actually constitute direct payment for labour,
unfettered by formal employer–employee legal protection, so that players
are paradoxically entrapped by their de-fetishized image. For supporters,
de-fetishism removes the star’s fascinating unattainability. But witnessing
human fallibility at close quarters may create the possibility of familiarity
breeding contempt. Conversely, the commodity fetishizing of athletic labour
may liberate athletes from a potentially disabling sense of duty to perform
as supporters’ personal representatives. Capitalism’s promised relative
freedom for workers through increased mobility afforded by labour power
commoditization, despite ‘alienation’ from the fruits of one’s labour, has a
degree of validity. Crosset illustrates the peculiarities of commodity
fetishism in sport. Women golfers might struggle to survive financially in a
purely competitive environment, dependent on consistent prize-winning
performances. But the opportunity to capitalize on their labour’s cultural
value by participating in processes of de-, or even non-fetishism, may also
be limited as a result of that participation.
Paradoxically, then, the ‘subjects’ of the fetishized/ de-fetishized commodity may not have the privilege of de-fetishizing, of using their own fetishized
image. Such potential contradictions, which will vary across the plurality of
sports, follow logically from sport as cultural commodity’s doubly halfformed nature. Athletes are particularly vulnerable variants of the
‘celebrity’, since their success and social esteem requires consistent performance, failure in which is patently obvious to observers. But de-fetishism’s
logical paradox in cultural consumption, that it can heighten the constraining fetishism of the ‘performer’, may additionally apply in other cultural
spheres.
Conclusions
Paul Willis’s Ethnographic Imagination shows a progressive refinement and
qualification of Common Culture’s populism. The logic of Willis’s approach
to education, youth culture, work and cultural consumption was that
human involvement in social and cultural processes has a specificity whose
reducibility to abstractions is limited. However, Common Culture reduced
that specificity to a generality akin to populism. The Ethnographic Imagination qualifies this populism, highlighting the cultural commodity’s ‘doubly
half-formed’ nature. Here, Willis offers a nuanced and multi-layered
account of commodity production, usage and reproduction which may
be illustrated by the case of sport. Its competitive structures and its
tightly controlled, rhythmic cycles of production and consumption are the
key to its differentiation from other cultural forms and to how
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consumers-as-supporters are limited in the extent of their ‘symbolic creativity’ in acts of consumption.
A logical corollary of Willis’ work (but one which is not pursued in
Common Culture, despite its title) is that individual acts of consumption
cannot make a ‘common’ culture without some shared, ‘organic’ dimension
– organic in the sense of collective organization, however informal, and
resulting in some collective expressive outlet. Thus, it is necessary to differentiate between various cultural circuits of production, circulation and
consumption. In sport, commoditized cultural forms are simultaneously
sites of personal and collective cultural investment and of resistance based
on that investment, but limited in the latter by the ineluctable fact of the
former. Comparable but distinct contradictions and limitations undoubtedly exist in and are specific to other cultural spheres. Cultural theorists
must be sensitive both to forms of action at play in symbolic creativity and
to situations where such action is lacking. Moreover, to gauge whether or
not such acts contribute to a common culture – in Williams’s sense – forms
of communality, collective symbolic investment, renewal and transformation must be evident. Fragments of individualized cultural consumption do
not make a culture.
Finally, the logic of cultural consumption’s commodity de-fetishism
should alert us to fetishism’s potentially contradictory outcomes on the
production side of cultural circuits as, once again, exemplified by sport.
Despite the relative economic and symbolic power of those involved in
cultural production, sport exemplifies more than any other cultural sphere
the temporal boundedness and vulnerability of ‘elite’ performers, a factor
in which is the processes of de-fetishism and symbolic creativity in which
fans, as ‘supporters’, are necessarily engaged.
Note
1 The Ethnographic Imagination develops arguments in earlier published
papers (see Willis 1999a, 1999b).
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Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Willis, P. (1999a) ‘Fetishism and the Cultural Commodity’, in J. Pacheco (ed.)
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Willis, P. (1999b) ‘Labour Power, Culture and the Cultural Commodity’, in M.
Castells, R. Flecha, P. Freire, H.A. Giroux, D. Macedo and P. Willis (eds)
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Willis, P. (2000) The Ethnographic Imagination. Cambridge: Polity.
●
MARCUS FREE is Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. He is co-author
of The Uses of Sport (Routledge, 2005). He has published recent journal
articles in Men and Masculinities, Irish Studies Review and Sport in
History on constructions of masculinity and national identity in sport
media, sport ethnographies and television drama. Address: Mary
Immaculate College, University of Limerick, South Circular Road,
Limerick, Ireland. [email: [email protected]] ●
JOHN HUGHSON is Senior Lecturer in the cultural and social
●
theory of leisure and sport at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New
Zealand. He is the co-author of Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas
(Polity, 2003), The Uses of Sport (Routledge, 2005) and co-editor of The
Sociology of Art (Palgrave, 2005). He is writing a book on the cultural
history of sport. Address: School of Physical Education, University of
Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand.
[email: [email protected]] ●
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