Move that Dope

Just a quick word that I've moved over here - manutdmediawatch.wordpress.com - for no other reason than a change is as good as a rest...

Master of Puppets

When Van Gaal was first appointed as manager - and again now, in his first weeks in charge - I was reminded of this quote from Lacan on the uprisings of 1968:

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master.  You will get one. 

Which I argue can be applied to footballers thus:

What you aspire to as footballers is a new master.  You will get one.

Which is to say that the void created by Sir Alex's retirement had to be filled, and that when it became apparent that Moyes was not the man to do this, for whatever reason, the players were lost.  It could have been a chance for a glorious experiment in socialist democracy, they could've created a free-thinking commune where everyone takes reponsibility and they band together and overcome everything.  Instead, they disappeared.  They hid until Moyes had been pelted out of the job.
And now they have what they want again.  A glorious leader. The authoritarian, masterful Van Gaal, who can come and tell them what to do.
And all is right with the world.

Perhaps the difference between them can be found in the adage that if you have to resort to anger and violence you have immediately lost power - Lear futilely shouting at the elements - and that the master is the one who perpetually holds it in reserve.  Van Gaal has not had to demonstrate his power, it is there, an aura around him.  One does not imagine that Moyes' aura was quite the same, and his hairdryer, one imagines, was probably not the most terrifying thing on earth...

Reflections

(It's that time of year where I vow to myself that I'll get back to blogging on the regular and I write a couple of things and then disappear again.  Maybe this time it'll take... Actually thinking of revamping the look and suchlike but we'll see. Time related issues rather than lack of footballing enthusiasms are generally what stops me, a guy has to make a living and there's only so many hours in a day...)

Not Man Utd related but I just wanted to comment on Jack Wilshire's recent comments on his being photographed smoking.  Footballers are not renowned for their intelligent words- interviews full of cliché being the norm - but here we have words from Wilshire so utterly empty and banal that they go out other end and come back into the world of interesting.

Here is what he said, as quoted by the BBC:

"Of course I regret it," he said. "It's unacceptable and I will accept the consequences and move on. I've been seen before doing it," he said. "I said then I made a mistake and I have made a mistake again. People make mistakes. I'm young and I'll learn from it. I realise the consequences it has and the effect on kids growing up. I have kids myself and I don't want them growing up to think their dad smokes and it's OK for a footballer to smoke because it's not. This is a big season for me," he said. "I came back early to pre-season to show people my commitment. I am fully committed to the club and to my job and I want to show everyone that. Over the past few seasons I've had a few injuries. This season I'm looking to have a really great pre-season and get a really good base of fitness and take that in to the season."

The first thing we notice is just what an absolute crock of shit he talks. It's all just so many words, absolutely disconnected from his actual being - I like to imagine him speaking dead-eyed, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style.  The whole thing basically screams drones, "I do not give a fuck."

Which frankly would be OK wouldn't it?  If he just either didn't say a thing about it - it was a cigarette for fucks sake - or just said, "Yeah, I had a drag.  And...?" Then the whole thing could be handled in house and everyone would be happy.

Wilshire's words link into the reflexivity of the modern world - that our actions are no longer simply actions, everything is over-determined, every act is conditioned by any number of narratives that we can pick and choose between, and consequently, if something goes wrong, we can be spared any responsibilty.

Zizek (as ever) elaborates further here:

Perhaps the best example of the universalised reflexivity of our lives is the growing inefficiency of interpretation. Traditional psychoanalysis relied on a notion of the unconscious as the ‘dark continent’, the impenetrable substance of the subject’s being, which had to be probed by interpretation: when its content was brought to light a liberating new awareness would follow. Today, the formations of the unconscious (from dreams to hysterical symptoms) have lost their innocence: the ‘free associations’ of a typical educated patient consist for the most part of attempts to provide a psychoanalytic explanation of his own disturbances, so we have not only Annafreudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian interpretations of the symptoms, but symptoms which are themselves Annafreudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian – they don’t exist without reference to some psychoanalytic theory. The unfortunate result of this reflexivisation is that the analyst’s interpretation loses its symbolic efficacy and leaves the symptom intact in its idiotic jouissance. It’s as though a neo-Nazi skinhead, pressed to give reasons for his behaviour, started to talk like a social worker, sociologist or social psychologist, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood.

The first bit of this might seem a little irrelevant, but the point is simply that no one is free from this reflexivity, in our example, footballers know the import of their comments, they know precisely what the media will expect them to say, what their club will want them to say, how what they say will be received.  So the words they speak are no accurate reflection of their thoughts, instead they are a reflection of what they think they should think, and thus the words have no real meaning to the footballer, no real connection to his behaviour. The second part makes this point more explicit: all the explanations for society's problems on a macro level become an excuse for one's own behaviour on a micro level.

The result? Zizek again:

‘When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my gun,’ Goebbels is supposed to have said. ‘When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my cheque-book,’ says the cynical producer in Godard’s Le Mépris. A leftist slogan inverts Goebbels’s statement: ‘When I hear the word “gun”, I reach for culture.’ Culture, according to that slogan, can serve as an efficient answer to the gun: an outburst of violence is a passage à l’acte rooted in the subject’s ignorance. But the notion is undermined by the rise of what might be called ‘Post-Modern racism’, the surprising characteristic of which is its insensitivity to reflection – a neo-Nazi skinhead who beats up black people knows what he’s doing, but does it anyway.

Isn't this what we see in Wilshire's "I'm young"? It has become an excuse for an all-knowing stupidity - "yes, I know that it's wrong but I'm young, I'll learn."  Being young means there's no reason to reflect on one's mistakes,  In Wilshire's case we see this taken to its ridiculous extreme - "I said then I made a mistake and I have made a mistake again. People make mistakes. I'm young and I'll learn from it."  I made a mistake then - I've made the same mistake again, I've learnt nothing in between, but this time, this time I will learn, I'm young, older than when I made that first mistake, but still young.

Imagine the same attitude on the pitch, "That cross was rubbish? I'm still young, they'll improve," rather than, "That cross was rubbish? I know, and I'm going to keep working at it, keep practising crossing until my crossing improves."