mes un club!

Saturday, of course, FC Barcelona cruised to victory over Mancherster United in the Champions League final. I just made it to the television after many irritating distractions, not in the best of moods, but the game made me relax and enjoy it. Watching Barça play is like being hypnotised, and this seemed true for the United players as well. At times it looked as if they just stood there, motionless, except from one brilliant action from Rooney.

Anyhow, it brough back to me the argument by Terry Eagleton that football is the modern delirium of the people, made during the World Cup:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/15/football-socialism-crack-cocaine-people

But see for a counter-point:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/06/footballs-debt-socialism-world-cup

So, football as a kind of false consciousness, distracting people from the real material forces that shape their existence. I'm sure he meant it tongue in cheek. But as someone who favours the idea of the superstructure 'determining' the infrastructure, though not in an idealist sense, I think a different perspective can help. Like art, sports in the modern world are one of the areas in which values can be expressed. But art (within institutions) these days is hierarchical, it demands you fit in with a certain class of people, speak their language, imitate their manners, etc. To demand meaning, allowing for discourse and reflection, exposes you as a, well, a hooligan. Of course, there is art that does that, but it is marginal and not connected with either the elite or the people (just with generic creators and spectators).

Football is different, here values are displayed and they address society as a whole. Bruce Trigger in his 2003 magnus opum Comparing early civilizations wrote about values such as the warrior culture of the Mexica (Aztecs), the self-restraint of the Egyptian bureaucrat class and Yoruba competitiveness, as constituting a key element in these societies. More or less similar forms of organisation (infrastructures) can be coupled with very different superstructures. And here football comes in as a modern-day version for displaying such values, appropriately rooted in Renaissance Italy. As such, it actually trumps capitalism, socialism or any other meta-ideas about the economy. What is at stake is the relation of the individual to the collective in modern life and civilisation.

That is why Barça's victory over Real Madrid in the semi-finals was so important, one with cosmological dimensions. In the current philosophy, the universe of Real Madrid is centered on the celebrity, both with its coach (whose name I will not mention here) and with players like Ronaldo. Enormous sums have been spent by its president to gather these galactico players, who are all part of the celebrity show and culture of money determining everything, as well as a sometimes ugly show of egocentrism. For FC Barcelona by contrast it is the team collective and values of cooperation and beautiful footbal that are the core of the team's style. Messi of course epitomizes this philosophy, and like Xavi and many others was raised in it as a youngster on the training grounds there. Everything about them displays these values, and their victories materialize them in reality. This has an impact, not only in Europe but especially in the rest of the world, like the changing Arab countries.

The structure of the club, which involves not only football but also other sports, is also interesting. The members, known as socios, elect the president every four years in a kind of corporate democracy. Of course, it also is a corporation in that the salaries of the players are really high compared to those of ordinary Catalans that struggle to get by. Better than to spend it on bankers, though. Barça represents real added value to society, which is why its hymn talks about it as mes un club!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2O_cLcWyck&feature=feedf

Of course, the Dutch have a kind of connection with the Catalan club, some of which is explored in this (Dutch) movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAXtTscsmsk

That's it, I'm going back to my obscure Mycenaean high-culture work now.

dogs chasing their own tails

Lately I have been reading some books on modern art and material culture as part of modernity. A particularly interesting example is art and materiality in the Soviet Union. The fact that it belongs to the past, and is quite different from contemporary versions of modernity, makes it easier to study it in a holistic way. Something that is much harder to accomplish with the modernity in which we are ourselves embedded. The book I took for in-depth study was An archaeology of socialism (1999) by Victor Buchli. I'm still writing a review for myself, but one issue in particular stood out for me: alienation in modernity. As Buchli's book details, a number of attempts were made to overcome the phenomenon of alienation in modernity, as it was described by Marx in Capital. Marx' more technical analysis concerned the separation of production from consumption through commodity fetishism in capitalism, but I think the term can be considered more broadly as a dissatisfaction of humans as alienated from their nature in modernity. As such it was described very well by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Culture and value:

“It is very remarkable that we should be inclined to think of civilization – houses, trees, cars, etc. – as separating man from his origins, from what is lofty and eternal, etc. Our civilized environment, along with its trees and plants, strikes us as though it were cheaply wrapped in cellophane and isolated from everything great, from God, as it were. That is a remarkable picture that intrudes on us.” (50e)

It is indeed a remarkable picture, but upon further reflection it is not intrinsic to modernity but rather appears more strongly Christian in character. Humans as alienated from God appears regularly in the Church Fathers. It led some of them into the Egyptian desert to live like animals and find God again. I remember visiting such a site, Deir el-Baramus, back in 2002 as part of an archaeology project. Outside the monastery you could find scores of very simple habitation holes in the desert. Only the wind to kept you company. A good place for an alienated man to find God again. It strikes me that, come to think of it, this idea of alienation has always been part of Western spiritual culture. Should we then be very surprised that it recurs in the modern world that we have made? As Marshall Sahlins recently observed:

“Here was a clear injunction to expand structuralism to the infrastructure. Rather than a discontinuity, temporal as well as ontological, wherein culture appears as the symbolic afterthought of a material practice that has its own rationality, what is entailed in infrastructuralism is the realization of encompassing conceptual schemes in the particular material function of provisioning the society. Economy, one might even say, is the objectification of cosmology.” (Sahlins, 2010: 375-6)

This brings me to my main point. If one wants to overcome alienation, how can one achieve it? The Soviet example was to try to develop a new kind of culture, to achieve a radical break with the past. Theirs was what is now called the 'communist hypothesis'. Recently this has been elaborated by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek in a number of books, as an alternative to the contemporary version of modernity in crisis. While I am interested in alternatives to the present, their hypothesis contains some very peculiar elements. Apparently they think Paul of Tarsus, the founding father of the Christian church as an institution, is a central inspiration in their quest for a different world. I don't know, maybe they are ironic, but how can you use the originator of much of the problem as its solution? Both men seem to act like dogs who are chasing their own tails. No wonder both never yield from embracing violent action, for how could one expect reason to come from such a basic contradiction. It can only be overcome by unreasonable violence, I would observe. Very much in line with Paul, btw.

This ought to leave one concerned in a world that will become more polarized between mindless alienated capitalism and the violence implied by the communist hypothesis. The latter, possibly in a kind of brew with other fundamentalism, could well be seen as the only alternative. And alienation is something very real, creating harm in people:

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/07/alienation-and-animism.html

I feel there must be other ways. Ones that should proceed from a more anthropological perspective, realizing that we can make our own world to a considerable extent. Realizing, with Nietzsche, that alienation is something we have made ourselves by objectifying a certain cosmology (Paul's).

Sahlins, M., 2010 ‘Infrastructuralism.’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, pp. 371-386.

Besides these thoughts, I'm busy with my thesis, work and relocating, so I do not always post here as frequently as I would like.

party over

Alas, that is a third time we Dutchies did not get the World Cup. The game was like all games Spain played this tournament, boring but they win one to nil. Except for the Swiss, but that may have been courtesy for Euro 2008. At least our side showed some acrobatics, haha. Oranje had some mean vibes on Sunday. According to the English we were Beasts!! Hope we meet them in the Euro 2012 Cup, hehe. Not that Nigel de Jong's karate kick should be swept under the carpet, it was ugly and did not belong in any football game, let alone this one. But to judge the entire team on this is ridiculous, most of the other cards were not substantiated. But if Webb was an idiot, it is clear we lost it due to missing a couple of good chances.

So, I missed what would have been a really great party on Sunday. :(
End of my holiday. :(
End of the heat wave I think(still have hopes here). :(
But also new challenges, maybe more on which later.

Song that captures the mood a bit better now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tNs2ZuOVOQ&playnext_from=TL&videos=JwHakx2RLtw

Hope you are enjoying your summer!!

finalistas!!

One dream come true, my team playing Spain for the World Cup this Sunday. I'm really a Barcelona fan, and most of Spain's players are in their squad. Still, however much I love their style, they are going to lose this one to Dutch determination. Amsterdam is going to get crazy :)

What a nice summer so far. I even solved a little philosophy (at least for myself). It concerns the status of models in archaeology, especially concerning comparing different cultures. How can you 'catch' another form of life in your own language without 'rewriting' it. After reading much Wittgenstein and an anthropologist named Viveiros de Castro, I have formulated some ideas myself. Put simply it means being able to take another point of view. Now, that really sounds so simple, with large DUH factor. But for us comparativistas it is really hard to resist a 'craving for generality', so it serves a purpose. Also figuring out Amazonian perspectives is not as easy.

Still a lot of work to do, but it's adding up a bit. Persistence, determination, they get you places.

In case you don't get the vibes from watching the Oranje squad, maybe check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkcltdCknBI&playnext_from=TL&videos=D6p9VmmU7WQ

Happy St. Paddy

I'm not 100% sure what it's precisely about, but I do like the Irish and I do like beer. Wish I could have had one during my lunchbreak, too bad we got the calvinism thingy here.

Update/resumption

If anyone ever still checks this, an update from my life, which is now a Winter of Working. It's not bad, but not terribly good either. But as the course of life goes so Spring will arrive again. Being me I'm only half-capable of believing that, but it will happen.

Popol Vuh on youtube

I had seen this animated movie on the Popol Vuh by Patricia Amlin many years ago in class as a freshman. Had been looking for it for a few years now, and suddenly discovered it on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMo0-kEFis

It's brilliantly done, no documentary but the story itself in a gripping way. There's also a different film, The Five Suns, about central Mexico but haven't found that one yet.