Verses From The Abstract

I made some brief comments in a recent paper round up about Ronaldo and postmodernism which set me thinking. This is the result: a tribute (of sorts) to Ronaldo, via the medium of critical theory. The intention is twofold, firstly, to look at some ideas of postmodernism in relation to football; and secondly to shed a kinder light on Ronaldo. Lacan says one always has to ask, "What is the analyst's desire?" Even in the, seemingly, most objective study, the desire of the writer is always present, and here, while making broader points, my desire is always to forgive Ronaldo. What follows presupposes the notion that football is Art, not just "the art of football", but football as Art to rank with painting, film, music etc.. Perhaps this isn't such a controversial idea anymore, but it is still a point worth making. This is not the place to ask, with Tolstoy, What Is Art? It is enough to point out the aesthetic pleasure that one can gain from football; the fact that such beauty as can be gained from football is created, rather than natural (it is not some form of natural beauty but the intentional creation by an agent). It is also important to point out that football can have affects in wider society. To take but one example of this here's a quote about France's World Cup win in '98:

a Socialist political kingpin in the Montpellier region sparked fury — and possible expulsion from the party — by lamenting that France's national soccer team fielded "9 blacks out of 11" starting players. "I'm ashamed of this country," in which "the whites are lousy," he groused, and would soon be fielding teams "where all 11 players are black." That echoed a comment a year earlier by philosopher AlainFinkelkraut , who — seeking to explain the 2005 rioting by youths descended from immigrants in France's suburbs — made allusion to France's "white-black-Arab" soccer side that won the 1998 World Cup and became an icon of French social integration. " Today, [the team is] black-black-black, and it's the laughingstock of Europe," Finkelkraut complained.

We can not consider football as an entirely separate realm without political and/or social significance, pure beauty as it were. To bring this round to the subject of postmodernism, we only need look at Zidane, a 21st century portrait, directed by postmodern artist Douglas Gordon, as evidence of the relationship between the two worlds. Much of the criticism of Ronaldo comes from a belief in football as the last bastion of modernist Art. Whereas the rest of the world has moved on from such ideas, football is still viewed from the nostalgic perspective of a now lost world. By placing Ronaldo in a postmodern context, his transfer, his on-field "antics", his character, can all be seen to be simply a product of the world around him, rather than as the wilful perversity of an egomaniac.
Postmodernism is one of those terms which can be mean just about anything, depending on who is using it and the context it is used in. To start with I shall look at several of these ideas and how they can be applied to football and Ronaldo specifically. To begin let us look at Frederic Jameson's definition:

Postmodernism is what you have when the modernisation process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which “culture” has become a veritable “second nature.” … So, in postmodern culture, “culture” has become a product in its own right … modernism was still minimally andtendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as process. [I'm not going to provide citations here, if anyone desires any please feel free to leave a comment and I'll post the relevant citation there]

Postmodernism here is the notion that an artwork cannot transcend it's commodity status, a belief that is associated with modernism, now everything is a commodity: JeanBaudrillard : ‘it is no longer possible to posit use value as an alternative to exchange value.’ Football is obviously a great example of this, the buying and selling of men as if they were nothing but commodities, the logical end to capitalism (in many ways the obverse of the beginning of capitalism, where slavery had to be abolished so man could give his work freely - man is again nothing but commodity, but at least he gets handsomely rewarded for it - so in some waySepp Blatter was completely right to compare Ronaldo to a slave). Exchange value becomes the measure of the artwork, and so Ronaldo is entirely correct to link his position as world's best player with the being the most expensive player - this is the only way to judge worth. He could have stayed at Man Utd for the rest of his career, leaving the judgement of who's the best player in the world to the subjective whims of football writers and players, or he could be judged in the objective field of money, cold hard cash which never lies. Ronaldo fully accepts, even actively embraces, his status as commodity, he is a "product in his own right" and his awareness of this fact makes him postmodern - he does not play the game of "no one is worth that money", or paying lip service to loyalty, he wears his price as a badge of excellence. This commodification of the footballer renders "loyalty" an outmoded concept. If everything is a commodity in competition with all other commodities then there is no place outside of this for loyalty to exist. Put another way loyalty becomes just another aspect of the commodity affecting its price, in a similar way that popular music uses rebellion to sell records (whether the artists themselves are "rebels" is beside the point), it is the effect of that rebellion in the market that matters - there is nothing but the market - so in football, there is no place outside of the market from which one could be loyal. Lawrence Grossberg says "authenticity is seen as just another style" in the postmodern world, to paraphrase this in the context of football, loyalty is just another style, if one is loyal then this can just be used to raise the price of the commodity/footballer. We shall look at the possible exceptions to this later on, but let me briefly mention Tevez here, who seemed to use loyalty as a bargaining chip, indeed he confuses the very notion of loyalty, loyal to the fans but not the club... Jean-Francois Lyotard's famous definition of postmodernism as 'incredulity towards metanarratives,’ also comes in here. Lyotard's point is that all narratives have equal weight, there is no ultimate narrative - for instance religion, political system etc.. It is postmodernism as the end of ideologies, the rise of pragmatism, grabbing bits from here and there, without living life via a guiding authority - for instance Tony Blair's New Labour project, a hotchpotch of ideas from all over the political spectrum, rather than adhering to the dogmas of Old Labour. In the football concept we can immediately see the connection. Why be loyal to a football club? All football clubs are essentially equal, the choice of club is relative, what does it matter whether I play for x or y, they both have their history, both have their fans, why should x be better than y? Chopping and changing at will becomes the norm. In the same way that in the wider world of work there is no longer any reason for loyalty to a firm, short term contracts become the norm and freedom of worker movement and trade allow anyone to work anywhere, so football, is the same, even if there is still a residual attachment to the older model among the fans. Again we shall return to this. The lack of historicity in postmodernism is linked to this, in postmodernism one is not tied to a particular style, one can pick and choose between all previous art and juxtapose them in the same piece, indeed this is one of the pleasures of postmodern art. In football we can see how Ronaldo chooses to represent himself as following the traditions of Manchester United while at the same time being fully immersed in the traditions of Real Madrid - he picks and chooses what he wants to represent himself as, with no grounding in any particular history. Where all this leads us is to a position of postmodernism, and Ronaldo is exemplary in this, where everything is done at one remove, there is self-awareness about everything. There is no attachment to any particular thing, we can pick and choose between any number of relative positions, histories and traditions and therefore we have a hyperawareness of the choices we do make. Jameson argues that the difference between modernism and postmodernism is in the lack of ‘a certain minimal aesthetic distance … the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last.’ What we replace this "aesthetic distance" with is a critical distance, what Slavoj Zizek calls cynical distance:

If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. … For example, they know that their idea of Freedom is masking a particular form of exploitation, but the still continue to follow this idea of Freedom.

Can we not see this attitude in Ronaldo's reaction to his transfer? The modernist footballer's reaction to this would have been to say something along the lines of, "I know no-one is worth this money, I am humbled that Real have shown such faith in me and I will try and live up to that faith." Immediately distancing themselves from the figures. Ronaldo's reaction is to accept the distance within himself, "I know very well that no one is worth £80 million but I will accept it, I am the greatest footballer in the world and this money, while arbitrary, is a reflection of that greatness, I shall wear it as a badge of pride, call it historical." Isn'tRonaldo's entire way of playing an example of "cynical distance" He plays not simply as a great player, but as a player who knows he's great. Past (modernist) great footballers just played, Ronaldo plays as if watching himself at all times. Take this quote from Ronaldo:

"I'm already among the best of the best and I want to continue to write many more beautiful pages. I really want to rewrite the history of football."

He plays, but at the same time he watches himself play, he writes on the pages of football history, but at the same time he reads those pages, makes notes, edits. It is not that he will change football by the way he plays, but that he will change the way he plays to change football. It is this level of awareness that makes him different - previously history was for historians, now history is for those in its midst. All of which is to say that one cannot blame Ronaldo for these things, he is simply an expression of the society around him. Football clings to the modernist paradigm, hence the misplaced criticism of Ronaldo. However. Is saying that Ronaldo is simply a product of society enough? On the one hand, yes, because why should we expect Ronaldo to rise above the ordinary when it comes to such things when the whole world is money/celebrity obsessed? On the other hand, no, because, Ronaldo is special, so I would have liked him to have risen above, proved he was special. What I want to do now is to find a way out of this conundrum, suggest how Ronaldo could have proven himself special, how he could have taken account of changed times but emerged as a hero - not a simple, yet impossible, return to an outmoded modernist football, but the possibility of going forward. Perhaps we could read all this differently: the playfulness of modern art is often cited as some sort of subversiveness, and so could we not view Ronaldo as a subversive figure, going against the misplaced modernism of football (by refusing to accept the corporate logic, by playing with notions of identity, writing his own history against dominant narratives, etc.)? No, simply because the subversiveness of postmodernism is in many ways a dead end. Slavoj Zizek expresses this well in relation to the film Shrek:

The recent Dreamworks animated blockbuster Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001) expresses this dominant functioning of ideology perfectly: the standard fairytale storyline is clothed in jokingly Brechtian ‘extraneations’ …politically correct twists … unexpected reversals of bad into good characters … up to anachronistic references to modern mores and popular culture. … Instead of praising these displacements andreinscriptions too readily as potentially ‘subversive’ and elevating Shrek into yet another ‘site of resistance’, we should focus on the obvious fact that, through all these displacements, the same old story is being told. … the true function of these … subversions is precisely to make the traditional story relevant to our ‘postmodern’ age – and thus to prevent us from replacing it with a new narrative.

And thus with the Ronaldo transfer, "the same old story is being told," the dynamics of capitalism/football remain the same, the inequalities remain, etc.. The question is, how do we actually break out of this? What would a subversive act look like in a football context? Here I'll draw on Alain Badiou's theory of the Event and Slavoj Zizek's political reading of Lacan's "act". To cut a long (and complicated) story short (and simple), they argue that it is only by being faithful to some idea that one can become a subject. We only become "human" via some "inhuman" idea. If we forever live only in the "human" we never fulfill our potential, we simply exist. Badiou, "denounces historicism, relativism, and postmodernist pessimism in favour of a renewed commitment to universal truth and subjective faith" (Carsten Strathausen). For Badiou being a subject is being "faithful to an event", an event being something that changes the "situation": a political revolution, falling in love, artistic innovation, scientific breakthrough. The event is precisely what modern capitalism cannot envisage, parliamentary democracy is there to ensure that (at least on the political level) events do not happen. After this brief preamble, how does this relate to Ronaldo? The striking thing about the transfer is that everyone describes it as inevitable, Ronaldo was always going to go, £80 million too good - impossible - to turn down etc.. What this talk hides is the obvious fact that there is nothing inevitable about it at all. Here we can refer it to capitalism itself, everyone recognises it doesn't work, but everyone accepts it as inevitable, there is no alternative. What I am suggesting is that what if Ronaldo just said "no". What precisely would happen? Wouldn't this be a subversive act? Everyone knows that the transfer is the right thing to do, but what if he said "no?" Slavoj Zizek looks at Bartelby, A short story by Hermann Melville, in which, to every thing his employer asks him to do, he simply replies "I would prefer not to" leading to his employer moving out of the building (if memory serves). Zizek compares this attitude to

aggressive passivity, the standard "interpassive" mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change. In such a constellation, the first truly critical ... step is to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participate -Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is the first necessary first step which, as it were, clears the ground, opens up the place, for true activity, for an act that will actually change the coordinates of the constellation.

The point, Zizek argues elsewhere is

Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence - just to engage us in a dialogue, to make sure that our ominous silence is broken. Against such an interpassive mode, in which we are active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate. This first step clears the way for true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the scene.

If Ronaldo said "I would prefer not to" to the transfer it would be such an amazing thing, no reason, just "I would prefer not to". It would be of an entirely different order toKaka saying no to Man City, which never escaped from the logic of the situation- it was a "no" borne of the status of Man City, and the knowledge of a Real Madrid move on the cards. Whereas Ronaldo saying no would be a no to the biggest deal possible, it would be a no to the very idea of the deal. The deals very inevitability would make the no a brilliant move. Of course I say all that knowing fine well he will only ever say yes yes yes. While all of this sounds fanciful I shall now look at someone who I think can be ranked in this great nay-saying tradition. Eric Cantona. It is no coincidence that he is a legend. Whether Ronaldo or Cantona is the better footballer there can be no doubt that Cantona is a legend that Ronaldo can never even dream of being. As I've pointed out, Ronaldo can hardly be criticised for all the moves he's made, conforming all the time to the reality of the situation, yet the very fact that he can not go beyond this reality makes him simply a footballer (even if a very good one). Cantona achieves legend status by going beyond reality. His Kung-Fu kick, isn't this a great example of refusing the dialogue of reality? He could have gone on record against the treatment that fans mete out to players, racism in grounds, and so on, but nothing would have changed (as we can see from the respect campaign - doesn't Cantona gain so much respect by the simple act of striking out?), instead he aims a kick. A violent act which came as such a shock to the system. Risking his career in one moment. Can one imagine Ronaldo rising above like that? And the press conference remark about Sardines? Can one imagine Ronaldo saying that? Cantona was in a way using the postmodernist agenda, but using it productively, here he has a self-awareness, can view himself from a critical distance as aesthetic object, but instead of using this to justify himself, he uses it to hold a mirror to the journalists awaiting his justification. And then goes silent. He acted and then refused to participate in the dialogue afterwards, refused to negate his act with disclaimer or justification or apology. He remained passive. And his retirement at 29. No transfer, no consideration of the economics of retirement. He simply retired. It could also be argued that his self awareness on the pitch was every bit as great as Ronaldo's but somehow it was different. He was making a display, showing off, whatever, for the pleasure of others, whereas Ronaldo never really seems to be doing things for others, only for his own myth, but a myth which will never enter the consciousness like Cantona's because it is simply too knowing, too tied to reality. And as for loyalty? As noted above the actual content of loyalty is empty as regards the postmodern capitalist economy, hence isn't a loyalty based on "I'd prefer not to" better and more radical than a loyalty based on words which mean nothing? It is a loyalty devoid of greater meaning, a loyalty beyond the economics and the grasp of the club, but withoutTevez's positioning of fan loyalty as a bargaining tool. The club is something greater than than the fans and the institution, it is an ideal beyond the sum of its parts. And here too need we look further than Cantona? Who's loyalty is never really spoken (beyond rumblings about returning as manager, so fantastical as to simply add to the myth) but whose loyalty remains above else. It is loyalty as assuming the risk - that Man Utd is beyond the economic, beyond the everyday economic reality. A gamble on something transcending reality, something great, an ideal. And this is the point, that against postmodern relativism one must fully assume the risk that one's ideals are the truth, there is no guarantee. And this is precisely why this loyalty is better - if there was a guarantee then the loyalty would again be meaningless, because it would not be chosen but imposed. This loyalty is not easy, which is why Cantona is special, a legend, and Ronaldo is a mere mortal. But, well, we can't really blame him can we?