The International Journal of the History of Sport Sport ...

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Sport and Civilisation: Violence Mastered. From the Lack of a Definition for Violence to the Illusory Pacifying Role of Modern Sports a

b

Dominique Bodin & Luc Robène a

Université Européenne de Bretagne (Rennes 2), Rennes 35000, France b

Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 33000, France Published online: 10 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Dominique Bodin & Luc Robène (2014): Sport and Civilisation: Violence Mastered. From the Lack of a Definition for Violence to the Illusory Pacifying Role of Modern Sports, The International Journal of the History of Sport To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2014.949687

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The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2014.949687

Sport and Civilisation: Violence Mastered. From the Lack of a Definition for Violence to the Illusory Pacifying Role of Modern Sports Dominique Bodina* and Luc Robe`neb Universite´ Europeénne de Bretagne (Rennes 2), Rennes 35000, France; bUniversite´ de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 33000, France


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Following the seminal works of Norbert Elias, with regard to the ‘civilising process’, modern sports are generally considered by the scientific community as being, on the one hand, a privileged means that has long facilitated and contributed to ‘the control and learning of the self-control of impulses’ and, on the other, as a political device, which has facilitated, by penetrating into the private sphere in a restrained and play-oriented fashion, the state’s monopoly of violence. They are also considered to have facilitated the socio-genesis of modern states. But is this link so evident that this ‘new’ social configuration can be considered a new tool at the service of violence control? Acceptance is so strong that one can almost forget the contradictions, at least the questions, which can and should emerge from this proposition. It should in fact face up to criticism on a certain number of concrete points: definition of violence, rejection of the long-term view, sport be strictly considered in the light of the pacification of habits and social control, hooliganism, etc. This introductory article presents a series of reflections which aim to enrich Elias’s theory by underlining both its accuracy and its weak points. Keywords: Elias; civilising process; definition of violence; sporting games; emotions

Following the seminal works of Norbert Elias, with regard to the ‘civilising process’,1 modern sports are generally considered by the scientific community as being, on the one hand, a privileged means that has long facilitated and contributed to ‘the control and learning of the self-control of impulses’2 and, on the other, as a political device, which has facilitated, by penetrating into the private sphere in a restrained and play-oriented fashion, the state’s monopoly of violence.3 They are also considered to have facilitated the sociogenesis of modern states, following in this aspect the works of Max Weber.4 But is this link so evident that this ‘new’ social configuration can be considered a new tool at the service of violence control, forgetting in fact that the institutionalisation of budding practices also, and especially, bears witness to transformations which are both social (free time, access to education, growth of the cities, etc.) and societal (economic development of states, movement of goods and merchandise and therefore of people, shaping of the media and communication societies, dissemination of information and cultural models, factory of fantasies, etc.)? The theory is so appealing that it is rarely contested, at least on the question of the genesis of modern sports and their presupposed role in controlling violence. Acceptance is so strong that one can almost forget the contradictions, at least the questions, which can and should emerge from this proposition. It should in fact face up to criticism on a certain number of concrete points:

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] q 2014 Taylor & Francis


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D. Bodin and L. Robe`ne . First, the definition of violence. Does the ‘definition’ adopted by Elias, limited to physical injury and the spilling of blood, permit an understanding of the violence which surrounds modern sports practice? . Next, the rejection of the long-term view. Are modern sports the consequence of a conceptual and organisational ‘break’ in the eighteenth century or does their modern configuration bear witness, at the very least, to deeper tendencies which mark the slow transformation of ancestral physical activities and ‘ancient games’, leading sport to be considered more like a stage in the genealogy of codified combat? . Sport again as a tool of ‘civilisation’. Should sport be strictly considered in the light of the pacification of habits and social control, or can it be approached as an object with a much more complex cultural and sociopolitical fabric, integrating a doubleentry social dynamic, which shows that violence and sport both oppose and attract each other? . Finally, the question of hooliganism. Should hooliganism be limited to a negation of the ‘civilising process’, a stage of ‘de-civilisation’ pertaining to certain communities, or does it also facilitate in a certain way the re-creation of new social spaces?

On the Question of Violence It must be noted, in the mirror of what is observable in modern sports, that it has been from nineteenth century that ‘not only has “contemporary sport” not always pacified, but rather has increased violence; violence towards others, with others, violence towards oneself, symbolic violence or actual violence’.5 That said, a first stumbling block appears, that of the definition of violence sustained by Elias, or perhaps one should say the lack of definition to the extent that it is possible to wonder like Wieviorka if Elias is proposing ‘an analysis of violence or an analysis of aggressiveness’.6 The answer is uncertain. Elias uses the one and the other, the one or the other, throughout his works, without really situating them, the one with regard to the other.7 He tries to articulate, consistently, ‘the political and the cultural as well as the collective and the individual’.8 This is the strong as well as the weak point in Elias’s thesis. As by doing this he reduces the violence which can be shown by individuals to a state of nature, to animal-like and uncontrolled impulsive instincts in which the pleasures of destroying, of seeing (and inflicting) suffering are mixed, bearing witness, according to him, to a lack of civilisation or to a stage of ‘de-civilisation’. Elias confuses (amalgamates) the manifestation of impulses (the psychological mechanisms which lead to the act) and the act itself (the expression of physical violence), the social impact of which is a consequence of tension which should be analysed as being constitutive of, and constructed by, historical and sociopolitical processes. For Elias aggressiveness belongs to the ‘structures of man [which] form a whole’.9 It belongs to the ‘death drive’.10 His ‘definition’ is here very close to that given by Freud11 of human aggressiveness. The use of the terms ‘aggressiveness and impulses/drives’ is not unfamiliar, given the training and collaborations undertaken by Elias. His intellectual journey (studying medicine and philosophy) took him to the position of assistant to Karl Mannheim at the Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung in Frankfurt University, which also housed at that time the Psychoanalytic Institute directed by Karl Landauer, a disciple of Sigmund Freud. If the intention of Elias is to articulate ‘socio-genetics’ and ‘psycho-genetics’, he is certainly talking about impulses and the natural state when he puts the notion of the Superego at the heart of social transformations: ‘social relations are transformed so that

The International Journal of the History of Sport

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reciprocal constraints take on, in each individual, a self-constraining character, and we are faced with the formation of a more and more pronounced “Super-ego”’.12 If this quote is related to ablutions and cleanliness, the consideration thus begun is rendered permanent with regard to the acquisition of self-constraints and cultural and normative changes, which progressively contribute to the ‘civilisation’ of individuals through:


a very simple mechanism which produces the historical transformation of affective life: impulsive manifestations or pleasures considered undesirable by society are matched with punishments which associate them to unpleasant sensations or to the predominance of displeasure in the form of the threat of punishment . . . Thus there is a tension between displeasure and fear provoked by society . . . 13

But as Duerr14 suggested, is not the model of the imposition of norms by a now allpowerful state too simplified? Did the budding state have the capacity to act directly on and around individuals without taking into account the organisations that were so important in the structuring of the societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (communities, corporations)15 and, even today, can it really do so, in the face of the different organisations (political parties, unions and associations) which fight and oppose it or at least negotiate its impositions? Michel Foucault’s microphysics of power would seem even here to take more into account the systems of constraint which are imposed on the individual, not only in the frame of the socio-genesis of the State, which draws the essence of its theory from the classical model of Hobbes’s Leviathan,16 but also simultaneously bearing in mind the complexity of the machinery which organises the transfer and circulation of power to the different institutional and social strata, which in turn function in society in a much more horizontal or multidimensional perspective. It is this power mechanism which we have to understand ‘in its capillary form of existence to the point that power reaches the very core of the individuals, affecting their bodies, becoming part of their gestures, their attitudes, their conversations, their learning, their daily life’.17 The real question here is therefore to discover whether ‘sport’, taken as an institution or as an organised and structuring system, in turn integrated into other systems with which it is interconnected, constitutes part of the workings of this machinery. Is there in some way a sports capillarity of the exercise of power, and in which sense does it permit the imprinting of its mark on our consciences? With what precise effects, and above all, with what identifiable orientations? For even if it were possible to glimpse the shadow of a force imposing itself in a more restrained way, from then on it would be necessary to consider the ways in which sport, like other ‘devices’, does not act in just one way, but also produces unforeseen consequences. Foucault, in analysing the role of prison as a place to exercise power and its forms of capillarity, shows simultaneously how prison, in contrast to the expected effects of control and surveillance, ‘manufactures’ delinquency. This invites us, at the very least, to look at what way the device of ‘sport’, understood as a system for the controlled release of emotions, is in turn susceptible to producing unforeseen consequences. That is to say finally to work in a complex fashion as it has to do with the self-control of impulses, if we follow Elias, but equally, on the other side of the mirror, it contributes to (or is part of) the less foreseen ‘manufacturing’ of situations expressing the need of violent emotions in a society where the search for ways to alleviate boredom is becoming a cardinal principle. It would even confirm its ability to generate new forms of violence, sports violence. This new approach, by giving sense to aspects ignored by the good sporting conscience, makes it possible to take a different approach, for example, to hooliganism. But all of this sends us back, initially, to an important problem of definition, as one must be aware that sport is not a static construct and that the actors in it have greatly


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D. Bodin and L. Robe`ne

contributed to generating, appropriating and transforming its practices and even its structure, to the point of making it a social time embedded in other social times. These transformations may include changing its familiar features, making it a collection of extremely varied practices, for varied uses, with much more complex forms than are at first evident; in a word, with a far richer involvement than the advocates of a ‘decorous’ sport, simply virtuous, understood as a hermetic bubble, would have us believe. It is illusory to reduce sport to the mere theoretical existence of the principles of the game: because sport is by definition a social moment that can in no way avoid the problems engendered by society. In the end it is violence, but a better defined violence, which can serve as an analyser to clearly show how sport is simultaneously a factor of change in one direction (postulating acceptable rules of social behaviour susceptible to being imprinted in the minds of the players) and a generator and/or receptacle or even amplifier of tensions in the other. It is at the same time pierced by a set of dynamics and interactions, which do not stop at the limits of the sports field. They integrate into the first meaning of the term and/or add elements from social life that are fundamentally external to the game, but then become constitutive grafts as the social game transforms the sporting game. Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt18 can probably be classified, at least in part, in the category of impulsive manifestations like many other manifestations of violence that are seen on or off the pitch. But does considering it from this angle not prevent a more precise interpretation of violence? The first problem, starting from impulsive mechanisms, prevents taking account of the social and interactional dynamic of violent phenomena, and of the processes by which violence emerges. To consider violence only in its most abrupt version, that of blows and injuries, whether voluntary or involuntary, induced by impulses and the pleasure in making the other suffer, simply means changing the interpretation. Numerous authors have shown that the smallest incident or examples of incivility have spiral effects on violence.19 These sporadic and non-serious manifestations nonetheless constitute a ‘practical achievement’,20 which lead to a long process of subtle and complex social interactions among the different actors. For example, in the case of hooliganism, how should extremely violent confrontations be interpreted, when they sometimes take place a long way away from the stadia, if no attention is paid to the historic character of the relationships among the groups of supporters and the events that have led them from simple verbal provocation to endless vendettas? If certain acts, like the killing of Brice Taton,21 belong in part to impulse mechanisms, they also reflect other reasons like the match, provocation or just simply crowd psychology.22 A second example, Zidane’s ‘headbutt’, was not without consequences. In the days and weeks that followed the incident, the French Football Federation’s Behaviour Observatory23 was able to measure a number of similar acts during juvenile amateur football matches. By means of imitation, ‘headbutts’ made their appearance together with the justifications which accompany such acts of violence: ‘he called me names’. Even worse, Internet games sprang up which virtually reproduced the situation with a number of avatars in that configuration instigating a similar response. The points scored encouraged the performance of the violent act and not the pacific resolution of the tension inherent in the physical game and competition. The choice made by Elias negates both the process by which violence emerges and the place and the sense that each violent individual, taken in isolation or, on the contrary, in the midst of a community, gives to his violent acts. However, they include a subjective part (fear, feeling threatened, acts committed when in a crowd, etc.) and an objective part24 (construction of individual and/or collective identities, antagonistic acculturation, conflict,



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political orientation, etc.). With reference to Wieviorka’s propositions,25 there are three possible approaches that help to understand the sense of this violence. First, one takes into account the social and institutional dysfunctions that can lead certain individuals or groups to commit acts of violence or degradation. Second, violence is considered to be instrumental and is therefore a means to achieving other ends. Finally, one takes the point of view of the perpetrator of the violence, individual or collective, accepting that violence has a sense and that the action conceals expectations, desires and other stakes. The second problem derives from the first: the standardisation of violence. For Elias it is unitary and unidirectional because it is impulse-based. It is to do with men who are less advanced in the ‘civilising process’. It is true that when Elias wrote Uber den prozess der zivilisation and, later, Quest for Excitement, Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process the point of view of the victims had not yet been taken into account. Violence perpetrated by women was also denied. Studies on female violence began to be developed at the end of the 1970s as stated by Bertrand,26 beginning from the feminist point of view and asking if ‘In the end isn’t this indulgence [to elude women’s violence]27 suspicious? Isn’t rejecting woman’s criminal nature just one more way of excluding her?’28 The problem is not just one of definitions; it is also one of how Elias and later Elias and Dunning focus on violence. The result is evident, as by failing to consider all comprehensive definitions of violence, and reducing it to impulses and physical violence, they are prevented from reaching a more precise understanding by which each actor, old or young, man or woman, victim or perpetrator, can find their role and their status. Elias fails to recognise the logic of the actors, thus denying them any autonomy of action and rationality. Violence, wherever it is perpetrated, is considered as a tropism effectively excluding and denying economic, social, cultural or political factors.29 According to Elias, it is innate, although one can see in it, through the example of Franc oise He´ritier, a construction of violent behaviours, ‘as a function of needs, desires, passions and also dreams’, which are acquired through education,30 through challenging authority and rejecting institutions.31 This can be in response to the violence experienced or just simply for sport and the search for the excitement of rioting.32 We agree with Muchielli that to see it just as a gratuitous and spontaneous act ‘is the observer’s mask of ignorance. All violence has a meaning’.33 The third problem raised by such a restrictive vision is the rejection of factors which are concomitant to the appearance of violence: excessive consumption of alcohol, geographical peculiarities linked to the establishment of the clubs, the influence of the sports spectacle, cultural influences, the history of the antagonism and many more. Let us take a concrete example: that of geographic peculiarities. What can be said if we analyse Anglo-Saxon hooliganism in its origin disregarding the fact that in 1998 no less than 11 clubs from the Greater London area were playing in the first or second division of the English football league. This intramural territoriality is not without consequences. The ratio between the area under consideration, which is relatively limited, and the large number of clubs defines a density that favours encounters, provocations, clashes and fighting among supporters. Other countries like France rarely have more than one football team per large city, with very few exceptions.34 Sometimes going to the ‘Other’s territory’, to the opponent’s hometown, is made easy simply by the size of the country. Serbia is oneeighth the size of France, England, the country most affected by hooliganism, one-quarter and Poland one-half. Belgium and the Netherlands are two countries that are smaller than just the Aquitaine region in France, so travelling is easy and cheap. Supporters can thus travel easily, frequently and in large numbers to each of the matches. Thus, if agonistic behaviour, in the ethological sense of the term, is often part of sporting rivalry,


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geographical proximity conjugates and crystallises local and territorial antagonisms that are anchored in the particular history of cities, countries, classes and crises.35 All this talk about violence is important, as it is determinant. If one only concentrates on impulses and the act, what can be said about verbal violence? Equally what can be said about racist and xenophobic demonstrations when they do not lead to a direct physical attack? How can women’s place be discussed, as they are victims of violence but sometimes also the instigators without actually being physically involved? How can we discuss the conflicting relations that may exist, in amateur sport, among managers, trainers and spectators? Finally how can we interpret violence, whether in the framework of hooliganism, of confrontations between gangs of young people or the violence among amateur football players during matches, without trying to discover the complex processes that have produced it? In a word, stating that modern sports play a role in the control and self-control of violence implies clearly defining what type of violence is taken into account, something that Elias never really does. However, the place that he attributes to modern sports is fundamental to his scheme. By stating that they are ‘aware that knowledge of sport is the key to knowledge of society’,36 Elias and Dunning propose a dual reading of sport, which they qualify as ‘competitive’: on the one hand, it reflects social and societal transformations and, on the other, it contributes to these same transformations. Links Between Sport and Violence For Elias, modern sports have a triple function. First, they are a place for learning the selfcontrol of impulses by which one learns rules, to respect the opponent and the referee on the basis of a codified confrontation. They are also a controlling– decontrolling space. In this learning of emotional control, sports offer at the same time a type of outlet. In fact, they offer, and this applies especially to the sports spectacle, a space where unbridled emotions are tolerated. The stadium is the prototypical example of this. Where else in our modern societies can individuals continually make vulgar gestures and swear at other people, without the fear of judiciary or penal consequences? This break with ordinary life is nowadays only visible in certain limited spaces: a few traditional festivals, like those in the large cities in the south-west of France, or during carnivals, continue to constitute spaces for transgression which are tolerated by the social order. But in the light of the regularity of sports manifestations, one has to admit to the immense dominance of sport in the expression of these phenomena of controlled outbursts. In this way, sports may contribute to the ‘civilising process’ and to the control of violence in society. There is one requirement: sports must be considered a posteriori with respect to the socio-genesis of modern States. A key moment is needed to mark their advent. This must be the eighteenth century. Sport must be distinguished from the ancient games, thus marking a socio-historical break, which makes their role in the ‘civilising process’ intelligible and pertinent. This must be the structuring of play activities using the organisational model of fox-hunting. Hunting is transformed. It is no longer a utilitarian activity. People do not hunt to eat but for the pleasure of a codified pursuit. The proposition is appealing. However, it breaks the logic established to reflect the ‘civilising process’. While Elias takes the long-term view to justify the regular progressive decrease in violence on which he bases, in part, his ‘civilising process’, he rejects it for the genesis of modern sports. He mentions no common criterion between the ancient games and modern sports, which according to him come from another socio-historical reality. He even



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opposes one to the other to emphasise the distinction: internationalisation of practice, institutionalisation of sports, standardisation of rules, number of players in each team, dimensions of the playing area, etc. In doing so, he also fails to underline how much the shift owes to the emergence of the industrial and commercial world and to its propensity to calibrate the world to better channel economic exchanges: the invention of universal time, calibration of production and production standards, standardisation of exchange modes and the circulation of goods and merchandise, even to the agreement among nations as to the width between train tracks, etc. Here we have an important hiatus, which is materialised in some way by the difficulty Elias has in thinking simultaneously about rupture and permanence. Yet it is hardly possible to eliminate, with the stroke of a pen, that which probably constitutes a series of profound tendencies in the evolution of physical and sports practices: the slow emergence of a codification of the manners and arts of competition in which the eighteenth-century turning point could in fact only mark a particular stage in the process included in other ways of reasoning, notably societal and socio-economic. Not that we naı¨vely believe that the present repeats or explains the past, but because perhaps the past can help us to ask the questions of the present in another way. To imagine for just one moment that there is no link with the ancient games is a utopia. In the chapter devoted to the ‘Genesis of Modern Sports’,37 only the relationship with violence is mentioned, as, for Elias: the level of civilization of competitive games and their variations is incomprehensible if one does not compare them at least with the general level of authorized social violence, with the organization of the control of violence and, correlatively, with the formation of awareness in the societies mentioned.38

But while he describes the competitive games in classical Greece as being more violent than the Greek society which produced them, and sees in the popular games and tournaments of the Middle Ages a higher degree of violence than in either modern sport or the Greek games, he fails to explain, however, these multiple variations. The invention of the socio-historical break marking the genesis of modern sports is used to support the theory of the ‘civilizing process’. Elias does not hesitate to evade a series of common elements between the ancient games and modern sports. This insistence on taking into account the transformations as opposed to the permanent elements constitutes one of the weak points of his theory on which much criticism is based.39 Is the distinction between the ancient games and modern sports really so great? Can one not imagine in contrast debating the continuity between the ancient and modern forms of practice especially through the long entrenchment of certain behaviours, which Elias neglects to do as opposed to the medievalist Georges Duby? The latter, when relating the life of Sir William Marshall, does not just recount the life of an outstanding personality. Apart from social and societal organisation at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a period in which the feudal system was at its zenith, he describes the hierarchical structure of the tournaments and the jousts from the local to the international level and illustrates a calendar of the most important tournaments, showing that the rules surrounding them are extremely precise, and revealing how, through his successive victories, this child, from the lower classes, a younger son, would become the best knight that ever lived, the King’s Councillor and Regent of the Kingdom of England.40 A precise calendar had existed since ancient times and the most important competitions did not necessarily follow the religious festivals. But when they did follow this calendar system, was that so unusual? This confusion of the sacred with the profane

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simply reflects the social organisation of earlier eras in which the ‘official’ religion dominated, as the structuring force not only of social activity, but also of souls, bodies and spirits, and even the organisation of free time. But, even in Ancient Greece, the games, whether Corinthian, Nemean, Isthmian or Olympic, were held at regular intervals. They involved events and precise rules. A detour at Olympia today educates the visitor on the fate that awaited cheats, who were obliged to make amends for their offence by paying for a statue on which their misdeed was inscribed. Greek sport differed from modern sport. It was as much part of the rites of passage and ancient rites of initiation in Sparta or Athens41 as it was of a specific calendar of events. It is equally surprising that by evading permanent features and making the gentry the founders of modern competitive sport, Elias has not considered the parallel with the genesis of the Greek games in this aspect. Sports activities were also the preserve of the well-born: Sporting games are the confirmation of a code of honour, which formed the basis of warriors’ behaviour . . . Sport is reserved for the best (ariston), the well-born (eleutherion) that are also endowed with physical and moral virtue (the nobleman has to be kalos and agathos, beautiful and good). From its origins sport has therefore been a distinguishing activity.42 The code of honour and the knight’s ethics are also underlined by Duby who sees in them the foundations of the sports ethic emphasized in modern sports, stating: ‘I think that we are the heirs of the people of that time . . . ’ In the sports domain the idea of fair play, of loyalty, of respect for a certain number of rules, of not treating the adversary in an ignoble way, all this comes directly from the warriors’ moral code of the 11th century.43

At least all this evolved gradually. While until the middle of the thirteenth century ‘the tournaments were no different from war for which they were a propaedeutic . . . They sometimes took place between two battles, and at the beginning were a fight on horseback, one mass against the other . . . ’.44 The tournaments changed to become true spectacles. If attention is paid to the permanent features instead of the differences, there are a number of common points which lead to the belief, in line with the adage attributed to Lavoisier, that ‘Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed’, the ancient games do not constitute an exception to the rule.45 Other topics deserve to be debated, such as the existence of rules, the ‘pacifying’ function or the stages of ‘de-civilisation’. When Elias brings up the question of the commonly shared rules as one of the criteria for the differentiation of modern sports from the ancient games, he neglects to take into account those that regulated the ancient games as well as the tournaments and jousts in the Middle Ages. It is less the absence of common rules that should be underlined and more the lack of institutionalisation of practice, which is also a characteristic of modern sports. The activities are codified but within the limits of the commercial space, the ability to transfer information and the free time devoted to these sports and games in earlier civilisations. Moreover, the Greeks established a set of codes and rules with the objective of opposing ‘natural’ violence and the reign of force.46 In this the games followed the city. They were not just codified but also possessed this function of controlling violence. The Iliad and the Odyssey are examples of this. They show how the laws of hospitality guarantee economic and cultural exchanges through the ritual of the gift and counter-gift in which sport has a special place and plays the role of social regulator.47 Merdrignac shows that the tournaments became a minutely codified spectator sport, as shown in the Traite´ de la forme et devis d’un tournoi, written by Rene´ d’Anjou,


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orchestrated by the ‘king of arms and the judges chosen by the organizers’.48 ‘The ancient tumultuous battles, at full tilt, through the fields and villages were thus gradually transformed, into an elegant sport, a spectacle where the aristocratic and brilliant crowds gathered . . . they were regulated entertainments, subject to severe laws . . . ’.49 The same is true of the Calcio Fiorentino, which Elias does not mention. The ancestor of football, Calcio, which was played in Florence between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, constituted not only a demonstration of power chosen by the Medicis but also a strongly codified activity which was practised at regular intervals in front of a number of spectators to the extent that ‘on the occasion of the famous calcio in 1589, Simone Cavallino counted, just on the massive wooden galleries, a crowd of five thousand’.50 Duby reminds us that the tournaments had another function, which was a way of preventing the excesses of the knights and of channelling the passion and potentially violent aberrations of these warlike young men. He takes as an example the Count of Flanders who at the start of the 12th century took all the knights from his country every summer for friendly meetings, for him a way of exalting the glory of Flanders . . . but also a way of freeing Flanders from the troublemakers . . . these regulated meetings were periodical and well publicized . . . .51

While Elias tries, in terms of the available data concerning the pacifying functions of modern sports, to make the decrease in violence and crime objective so as to justify his ‘civilising process’, the function attributed to sport remains a totally a priori construction. The term a priori is important, as what normally and principally distinguishes sociology from philosophy is precisely the need for logical proof. At no point does he present the proof of his proposals. The problem of the ‘measuring unit’ is a central question in the ‘civilising process’ along with the phenomena of de-civilisation.52 There is nothing unusual in that. If we cannot trust the statistics produced from ‘extremely diverse and varied data according to the epochs’, they do, however, bear witness to the evolution of the official view of homicides.53 In saying this, it is not a question of enclosing the Human and Social Sciences in an exacerbated positivism in which only the proof in figures can be considered as valid. We agree with Duret54 that it would be a mistake to just think that, because ‘having recourse to figures or at least availing ourselves of them indicates more a need to fight against accusations of charlatanism than a true epistemological choice’. But the interpretation which Elias and Dunning give to the role of modern sports in the ‘civilising process’ remains intuitive and, although it is included in a purely comprehensive approach, it should have required ‘being analyzed, as far as possible, by the ordinary methods used to impute the cause, before an interpretation, however evident it may seem, becomes a valid “comprehensive explanation”’.55 The data used are from such diverse and variable sources that they lead to an exaggerated generalisation.56 Moreover, when Elias attributes this function to sport, he does so, as we have seen, from a restricted view of violence. As he fails to define the latter, he frees himself of the need to debate the emergence or the recurrence of other possible causes, as well as the impossibility or at least the failure of sport in the area of preventing violence. Elias is not the only one who uses such a restrictive definition to justify a reduction of violence in modern societies. Chesnais uses the same logic to state that only violence of the first circle (physical violence which can lead to the death of individuals) is to be considered; the other forms, moral, symbolic, verbal, economic violence, are just an ‘abuse of language typical of certain western intellectuals who are too comfortably installed in their life to be acquainted with the dark world of poverty and crime’.57


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The functions that Elias and Dunning attribute to sport are in fact generalising. Can sport claim to prevent and encompass all the forms of violence we can observe, both in its midst and in society? It is a question that in fact they never tackle, contenting themselves with indicating that it contributes to the control and self-control of impulses.58 The authors seem to ignore, or pretend to ignore, that sport is not just a question of individual trajectories or ‘oppositional’ logic, progressively integrated into a structured and regulated institutionalised system. Neither is sport just a neutral social time, a ‘spongelike’ moment, penetrated by the violence of society, which it must reflect; but rather it produces its own violence-generating dynamics. Examples of incivilities abound (arguing with the referee, provoking opponents), the habitual verbal and symbolic violence (insults aimed at the players, the referees, provoking the rival supporters). Moral and/or sexual harassment of female athletes is frequent, even if the cases are often silenced or covered up.59 Many sports people are victims of exclusion: women as participants (because of less favourable timetables, less competent management) but also in the role of directors,60 the disabled, the less talented or those, who even though they are elite athletes, are not in the federal fold or do not follow the federal line. It is no longer a matter of impulse or aggressiveness but institutional violence. Even though the most visible forms of violence are obviously examples of physical violence, it is essential to look past the violence which occurs among sportspeople and take an interest in the other forms of violence experienced by sportspeople: injuries due to blows received or overtraining, irreversible injuries which end their career, doping, the death of sportspeople, the collapse of stands which cause large numbers of deaths and injuries, confrontations among supporters and even the occasionally bloody repression of these confrontations which, as in Moscow in 1984, caused 340 deaths.61 Sport features and at the same time reactivates local, national and international antagonisms. In all countries the provinces oppose the capital. The matches between France and Germany are seriously lacking in neutrality, and the USA – Iran match in the 1998 World Football Cup saw a demand for tickets and merited a retransmission time that had no direct relationship with the sporting quality of the two nations. Simply put, sport possesses ‘internal and external political functions’ which underlie the activity itself.62 The examples are numerous extremist movements that do not hesitate to publicise their ideologies in the stadia, which at times become the theatre for racist and xenophobic demonstrations.63 Sports venues are also places where at times ethnic, cultural and religious conflicts occur. The confrontations between Croatian and Serbian supporters during the 2003 European Water Polo Championships are an example. At the final, the Croatian supporters shouted anti-Serbian insults which caused violence which sports other than football have rarely witnessed: thrown bottles, fights with iron bars, flares launched at rival supporters. At the state level, was not the East –West sports rivalry during the cold war another way to make war, or at least, ensure the promotion and supremacy of a political and economic system? The numerous boycotts which have affected the Olympic Games are also a theatre of political tension and of the use made of sport. How else can the reaction of General de Gaulle be understood, when declaring the day after France’s poor performance at the Rome Olympic Games: ‘Never again!’? Or the statement by Honecker, the former chancellor of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who declared in 1984 at an introductory conference for the Olympic Games: ‘Sport is not an end in itself but a means of attaining other ends’. According to the above criteria, sport cannot have the function of controlling violence. Sport is violence imposed on oneself, against oneself, against others. Taking two criteria, which we will call ‘stability’ (the capacity of sport to preserve this function of control



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whatever the epoch or the place) and ‘homogeneity’ (to keep it whatever the places and specialties practised, and the social origin and the aims and objectives pursued), this function is illusory if seen only in the French context. Sport offers no criterion of stability in space and time. It oscillates between a concept of revenge against Germany, perspectives for a healthy and active lifestyle, and the promotion of an independent political system to be sometimes used in the suburbs as a method for preventing violence. Neither does it offer homogeneity. Dependent upon where it is practised (clubs, PE class, sport in the city, etc.), the modality (spectacle, competition, physical fitness) and according to the social origin as shown among others by Bourdieu and Pociello, its function will vary.64 It is not therefore possible to state, like Elias, that sport, in the generic sense of the term, contributes to the control of violence unless the venue is precisely defined (PE class, for example) and the modalities of practice which favour this function. Furthermore, practice or sports spectacle only represents a time and a restricted social space, among others. How can it be believed that this particular time and space can have long-lasting effects and that one can acquire attitudes that can be transferred to the rest of society? This would be an illusion. The policies put into place in the more marginalised suburbs to prevent violence and juvenile delinquency demonstrate this. They are usually ineffective65 when they do not potentially or actually generate other forms of violence.66 When they turn their attention to the behaviour of hooligans, proof if one needed it that sport, far from pacifying, can actually generate violence, Elias and Dunning finally get to pose the question of spectator sports or sports spectacles. The answer they give: ‘decivilisation’ on the part of some ‘outsiders’ ignores the question of the influence of the sports spectacle on the violent behaviour of the spectators. However, it has been known for a long time that the cathartic effects of the sports spectacle are illusory even though football possesses undeniable scenic and theatrical qualities that make it ‘the most serious trifle in the world’.67 Sport is different from Greek theatre. The tragedy that unfolds is not familiar to the spectators. The outcome is uncertain. The referees’ decisions are brought into doubt and questioned: in football the degree of intent behind the foul is judged and not the foul itself: was the tackle made from behind, was the hand touch voluntary? Everything is debatable and is debated. Everything lends itself to opposition. To present the theory of ‘de-civilisation’ Elias and Dunning see in hooliganism some violence that is the result of the ‘normal’ cultural functioning of the rough working class, less advanced in the civilising process, simultaneously posing the problem of a civilisation, which is reserved for the well-to-do. It is true that Elias reminds us that all the members of a society do not become civilised at the same time. This approach remains marked, in spite of a more ‘culturalist’ interpretation of the facts, by a deterministic vision in which culture is just the armed wing of nature, prolonging it and producing in a quasi-instinctive fashion violent behaviours, which mostly escape the control of the individual. This interpretation of hooliganism is again found wanting when Elias and Dunning declare, and it is one of several examples, that: because it is difficult for them to find a direction, a status and a reward and to construct satisfactory identities in the spheres of school and work, the men from the ‘rough’ factions of the working class adopt particular forms of behaviour: physical intimidation, fist fights, excessive drinking, sexual relations based on the exploitation of the other.68

It seems in fact legitimate to ponder on a ‘naturalising’ assertion that if it does not denote a deep contempt for the working class, it nonetheless constitutes an exaggerated generalisation of the way it functions socially and affectively. Unless this highlights, although Dunning69 rejects this, in the particular and somewhat limited domain of

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hooliganism, a theory that a certain number of authors, such as Hargreaves, Horne and Jary, among others,70 have not hesitated to denounce and criticise as tarnished by a latent evolutionism. Does a manual worker necessarily behave more violently than a member of the intelligentsia? The studies on conjugal violence,71 on violence perpetrated on women in general72 or on bringing up children73 are there to overturn this theory.74 Of course, these are ‘more sheltered’ forms of violence, which belong to the private world and are less socially visible and which, above all, do not disturb ‘public order’75 but which are, however, committed by individuals who are not all social pariahs or less advanced in the ‘civilising process’.


Conclusion By integrating sport as a corner stone in the theory of the civilising process, Norbert Elias, aided by Eric Dunning, probably intuitively perceived the importance of this practice in the production and management of emotions by ably avoiding certain contradictions. This is what has constituted both the strength and the ambiguity of his theory. Its strength has become a total social fact,76 even a global model77 capable of making its dominant mark on all human activities in turn: from leisure activities to those of enterprise, from fashion to social imagery, penetrating into common language but also the technical, economic or political registers to the extent of becoming an unavoidable metaphorical reference, a totally remarkable place for emotional crystallisation. Starting with this influence, which alone demonstrates the social and almost ecumenical importance of sport in contemporary societies, Elias and Dunning study the features of an original device, which, not without reason, they integrate into the civilising dynamics of the West. Also not without reason, the intuition of Elias’s thinking, the core of which is in the analysis of control procedures, is extremely appealing. Sport, the producer of emotions and excitement, is also where they are channelled by the integration of socially acceptable norms, following in this the state modelling of social and political life, all concentrated in the apprehension by the authorities of the monopoly of legitimate violence. But Norbert Elias does not manage to avoid the pitfalls which make this approach ambiguous. There is an epistemological difficulty in determining the contours of what is observed, between aggressiveness and violence, impulsive control of aggressiveness and euphemisation of violence, the lack of definition of violence and the restrictions on a more precise approach to what is not simply a matter of blows exchanged but of different levels of violence (symbolic, verbal violence, racism, etc.). All of the above and the fact that it does not include the interactional dynamic of the construction of violence, its spiral effects, the fact that it does not take into account the point of view of the actors, victims or perpetrators and that it definitively denies all sense in socially produced violence, contribute to enclosing Elias’s analysis in a tautology which has its own justification, its own legitimacy: to serve the above-mentioned scientific theory. This ambiguity is even more visible in the totally unstable balancing act which Elias performs as a result of his inability to articulate the long-term transformations in social behaviours in the slow integration of methods of self-control with the short term of modern sport, as he sees it, totally separated from the physical activities of the past. Curiously, the modern configuration of sport from the end of the eighteenth century is the result of the forces analysed from the angle of a break when it would be logical for them to express more of a dynamic continuity – one which, like other components (politeness, civility), give sense and coherence to a civilising theory initially envisaged as a long-term process. By isolating sport from its potential ancient foundations and neglecting the weight of



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societal, economic, industrial and commercial transformations, Elias twists his demonstration in a certain way to force the break of ‘modern sport’ into a set of phenomena whose rhythm and durations are in the long term. As we have seen, other fundamental aspects constitute concrete obstacles which the sociologist has eventually evaded, or included in a quasi-naturalistic view of social life and violence. Hooliganism is thus the grain of sand that manages to clog the well-oiled machinery that demonstrates ‘civilising through sport’. It would undoubtedly have been enough for the sociologist to accept a simultaneous opening up of the field of definitions of violence in order to better perceive the sense that the actors give to their violent behaviours and thus avoid falling into an evolutionist approach which is materialised in his conception of hooliganism taken over by popular hordes, literally ruffians produced by the working class, who are less advanced in the civilising process because they are materially, intellectually and culturally poor. Elias is in fact jumping a step, the one which would have allowed him in contrast to constitute violence using a more open definition, as an analyser of sport which is itself understood in all its complexity. Yet this is no doubt the most important pitfall: that Elias never really envisages a sports model other than the ideal type of a practice whose generic architecture is sufficient unto itself: a codified practice (foxhunting followed by other activities like football) whose core remains the construction of a ritualising of violence and the emergence of the game for the sake of the game, i.e. the emergence of a distancing from the role. Sport, however, resists being enclosed in this sort of modelling as shown in the evolutions of sport in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The complexity of the sports fabric, the variety of practice, the increasing complexity and enrichment of modalities, the different ways of playing the same game, the competitive levels and the social division of the manner of physical engagement cannot fail to confront the researcher with the variety of affective involvement and the heterogeneity of the relationship of sport with the regulation of emotions – even with the affective and psychic economy as it is understood by Elias. Is sport a homogeneous practice or a complex, nuanced assembly, which is rich in social, cultural and identity pluralities? Today what do federal football and the football played outside the block of flats have in common, except players, a ball, two goals (sometimes only one) and a generic name? The way matches are organised, teams constituted, rules redefined, the differentiated investment in the game often disturbed by affective stakes, by egos, by visibility, linked to the construction of identities, to the self image, to oneself as opposed to the ‘others’, to the girls, the lack of adhesion in the social properties of the actors, everything, in fact, shows that sport is more than sport as it is understood by Elias. It is therefore undoubtedly from the starting point of this forgotten wealth that the work thus begun must be taken up and an ambitious but hitherto limited theory due to a certain number of blind spots must be amended and again updated. This is the work on which a series of articles will be produced. Notes on Contributors Dominique Bodin is a university professor at the Universite´ Europeénne de Bretagne (Rennes 2) and director of the Laboratory ‘Violences Identite´s Politiques et Sports’ (http://www.sites.univ-rennes2. fr/violences-identites-politiques-sports/) and of the International Federative Research Structure ‘Violences Pre´vention des Violences’ (http://violencesetpreventiondesviolences.org/index.php/fr/). His works deal with the relations linking sport and violence through two main prisms – sport as a place for the dramatisation of violence and sport as a way to control this violence. Luc Robe`ne is a Professor at the Universite´ de Bordeaux and a member of the Laboratory ‘Culture, e´ducation, socie´te´’ (Culture, education and society). His works deal with the history of cultural


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practices through three main axes: the history of aeronautics, the history of the body, the knowledge and techniques of the body, including the history of violence, and the history of popular music.


Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Elias, La socie´te´ de cour; Elias, La civilisation des mœurs; Elias, La dynamique de l’occident. Elias, La socie´te´ de cour; Elias, La civilisation des mœurs; Elias, La dynamique de l’occident. Elias and Dunning, “Sport et violence”; Elias and Dunning, Sport et civilisation. Weber, Ećonomie et socie´te´/1; Weber, Ećonomie et socie´te´/2. Bodin and Debarbieux, “Le sport, l’exclusion, la violence,” 13. Wieviorka, “Sur la question.” Lagrange, “Violence, re´pression et civilisation.” Ibid., 14. Elias, La civilisation des mœurs, 279. Ibid., 279. Freud, “Le moi et le c a.” Ibid., 242. Elias, La civilisation des mœurs, 296. Duerr, Der erotische Leib. See Thompson, The Making. The State is an emanation of civil society which constructed outside and above men guarantees them security which they are unable to guarantee/assume on their own as individuals. Michel Foucault, “Entretien sur la prison: le livre et sa me´thode,” Magazine Litte´raire 101 (1975), 27 – 33, quoted in Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, 1609– 10. For more on this subject, see the special edition devoted to Zidane’s headbutt in The International Review on Sport and Violence: http://www.irsv.org/index.php? option¼ com_content&view¼ article&id¼ 78%3Anumero-1-le-coup-de-tete-de-zidane-& catid¼ 52%3Anumeros&Itemid¼58&lang¼fr. Let us list, among others and from different registers, urban disorders, juvenile riots or violence in school. See Skogan, Disorder and Decline; Roche´, La de´linquance des jeunes; Debarbieux, L’oppression quotidienne. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. A supporter from the Toulouse Football Club was beaten to death by Serbian hooligans who supported the Partizan Belgrade Football Club, on September 17, 2009. At the end of a trial which finished on January 25, 2011, the 14 hooligans convicted of this murder were sentenced to between four and 35 years in prison. Moscovici, L’aˆge des foules. An observatory organised to measure acts of violence in amateur football and more particularly in young people to be able to intervene, propose mediations and establish prevention tools. Wieviorka, La violence. Wieviorka, Violence en France. Bertrand, La femme et le crime. Our clarification. Perrot, “De´linquance et syste`me peńitentiaire.” Lagrange, Le deńi des cultures. He´ritier, De la violence, 31 – 2. Dubet, Le dećlin de l’institution. Roche´, Le frisson de l’e´meute. Mucchielli, Violences et insećurite´, 173. Ravenel, Geógraphie du football. Bromberger, Le match de football, 242. Elias and Dunning, Sport et civilisation, 25. Ibid., 171– 204. Ibid., 196. Schlobberger, “Rezeptionsschwierigkeiten.” Duby, Guillaume le Marećhal. Jeu, Analyse du sport. Bodin and Debarbieux, “Le sport, l’exclusion, la violence,” 15.



43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

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Mehl, Vigarello, and Collot-Laribe, “EPS interroge Georges Duby.” Pociello, Sports et sciences sociales, 41. Guttmann, Games and Empires. Joly, Le renversement platonicien; De Romilly, La Gre`ce Antique. Austin and Vidal-Naquet, Economies et socie´te´s. Merdrignac, Le sport au Moyen Aˆge, 172. Jusserand, Les sports et les jeux d’exercice, 73. Bredekamp, La naissance du football, 144– 5. Mehl, Vigarello, and Collot-Laribe “EPS interroge Georges Duby,” 7. Mennell, “L’e´tude comparative.” Muchembled, Une histoire de la violence, 67. Duret, “Penser les outils.” Weber, Essais sur la theórie. Muchembled, Une histoire de la violence. Chesnais, Histoire de la violence, 13. Guttmann, Games and Empires. Female athletes also need a lot of courage and patience to make people aware of the physical and moral prejudices they suffer. This was patent in the matter judged in 1993 in which four athletes from the French Athletics Federation were accused of raping a female colleague. It is enough to look in each European country at the number of women who are Presidents of Sports Federations in their country or National Technical Directors, for example. Bodin, Le hooliganisme. Brohm, Sociologie politique du sport. Crettiez and Mucchielli, Les violences politiques en Europe; Bodin, Robe`ne, and Heás, “Racisme, xeńophobie et ideólogies politiques.” Bourdieu, Questions de sociologie; Pociello, Les cultures sportives. Duret, “Le sport,” 107– 18. Roche´, “Plus de sport”; Bodin, Robe`ne, and Damien, “Sport et cite´s.” Bromberger, Football. Elias and Dunning, Sport et civilisation, 355. Dunning, “‘Culture’, ‘civilisation’ et ‘sociologie’.” Hargreaves, “Sex, Gender and the Body”; Horne and Jary, “The Figurational Sociology.” For a classification of these criticisms, read also Bonny, De Queiroz, and Neveu, Norbert Elias et la theórie; Tabboni, Norbert Elias; Heinich, “De quelques malentendus.” Jaspard, Brown, and Condon, Les violences envers les femmes. Dauphin and Farge, De la violence et des femmes. Arie`s, L’enfant et la vie familiale. Among many works and just to cite a few. Roche´, La socie´te´ incivile. Mauss, Essai sur le don. Ehrenberg, Le culte de la performance.

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