Religions Reviewed

In order to defer challenges to his presentation of a secular spectator sport as religion, McBride invokes the archaeological conceit – to get his readers to adopt a wide cultural perspective. (While rhetorically effective, I’m not sure that I find this gambit to be intellectually rigorous. Compare David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries, in which he pokes fun at the propensity of archeologists to impute “religious” or “ritual” significance to any artifact that is otherwise inexplicable.) Ultimately, however, he doesn’t identify football as (a) religion per se, so much as explain its many and varied religious features in terms of its common functional basis with religion, in the category of expressions of male hysteria. He reaches this conclusion via the application of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. While he suggests that Freud “hoped to hide” the essentially neurotic character of religion as a “culture-building activity,” the contents of Freud’s History of an Illusion suggest that McBride is not correcting the Father of Psychoanalysis on this count. (p. 133) McBride seems to admit this very quietly (unconsciously?) in his penultimate sentence (with my emphases):

In that sense, the notion of history as an index of change, so cherished in the modern age, is an illusion. (p. 137)

On his way to the psychoanalytic summation, McBride draws on Durkheim’s study of aboriginal corrobori as a model for collective ritual generally, although it seems to be focused more particularly on the psychology of crowds, or even—since the emphasis is on disinhibition—mobs. He modifies this characterization from the far-removed cultural context of tribal Australia, by mixing in Guy DeBord’s post-Marxist (i.e. Situationist) theory of “the society of the spectacle,” so that rather than a participatory formation of collective identity, professional football represents a “one-way” propagation of mass culture, in which spectators collectively assimilate a mode of identification, without themselves contributing to it.  

When he is applying DeBord’s ideas, McBride emphasizes the sense of vision, the quality of distance, and the lack of physical interaction inherent in the spectator’s reception of the sport spectacle. These qualities seem to run counter to the notions of embodiment discussed by Chidester. And yet McBride mentions such phenomena as rhythmic chants generated by the crowd, and fans who paint their faces and strip off their own clothes in freezing weather. (pp. 125-7) The ideas of “shock” and “pressure” and “motion” are surely all germane to the spectator experience in football, even if a level of vicarious participation serves as the pretext for such embodied reactions.

While McBride’s theoretical materials are well-elaborated, the empirical portions of his study are tepid. His anecdotes about the sexualized violent language used by coaches and players were resonant enough, but I never got the impression that he had captured the fan experience that his study was out to delineate. When he writes parenthetically that “There is a certain absurdity in the assertion that one watches a spectacle “live,” I cannot help thinking that he’s just being obtuse about the sense invested in the word “live” in that context. It means “not pre-recorded,” and therefore without assurance of outcome. That lack of assurance, the uncertainty and inherent peril of one’s situation, characterizes the dynamism of life as contrasted with the stasis of death.

McBride gives etymological attention to the term “fan,” correctly tracing it through “fanatic” to fanum, (p. 125) but he neglects to give the same care to “hysteria,” consequently producing the oxymoronic term “male hysteria” (< Gk. hystera, womb). (p. 133) In an apparent effort to correct Freud’s chauvinism, McBride seems to merely reverse the valuation. He attaches the pejorative “hysteria” to masculine forms of sublimation, and even seems to go so far as to suggest that all sport, religion, and political organization are at root forms of misogyny. And he allows that women have a option for healthy psychic reintegration by means of identification with their mothers, whereas no corresponding mechanism exists for men, who are thus irredeemably pathological. (pp. 133-4) Some women can be just as screwed-up as men, though, as he is careful to point out in a footnote. (p. 137, n. 3)

The picture this study paints is a bleak one indeed. Whether it is to be applied to football or Christianity, McBride offers a theory that describes the institutional expression of an insatiable phallocentric desire for  revenge against the mother, placated only momentarily in violent diversions. Modernity may have offered a figmentary glimmer of hope that men might be able to cast off their legacy of reactive superstition; but such hope is firmly extinguished by the postmodern society of the spectacle, which—by means such as football—has returned all to the grip of “unconscious desires and fears” along with wrongheaded “myth.” (p. 137)

The Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories that McBride relies upon are, in my view, essentially religious doctrines regarding the nature of the soul (i.e. psyche). The fact that they provide materialist etiologies doesn’t vitiate their functional identity with the lapsarian myth of Christianity, as an explanation for why humans experience moral dissonance and emotional dissatisfaction. In fact, as construed by McBride, the Original Sin of pre-Oedipal trauma seems to result in the Total Depravity of masculine identity-formation.

And yet, as McBride points out, the very ability to form concepts, even to perceive as a subject, is contingent upon the alleged “trauma” that distinguishes the Lacanian “Symbolic” from the “Real.” (pp. 131-2) The grass is always greener on the other side of the psychic discontinuity, I guess.

As a para-theologian, McBride seems uninterested in the precise nature of the para-mystical “euphoria of the moment” that he identifies as the telos of football fan-engagement. (p. 137) Having successfully convicted football of fallen phallocentrism, he has foreclosed any possibility that activities rooted in male hysteria might result in psychic consequences of genuine value. If such euphoria represents an actual contact with the Real (rather than a demonic simulation), it is only serving to motivate the inherently evil masculine Symbolic order.