sport ness

goes for art ness and music ness and whatever ness et al..

but adding page while reading jacques ellul‘s techno society:

270

The Russian citizen subjected to his government’s daily propaganda (the most highly developed in the world) is unaware of anxiety. But, then, the same was true of Hitler’s Germany..t

271

Sport is tied to industry because it represents a reaction against industrial life. In fact, the best athletes come from working-class environments. Peasants, woodsmen, and the like, may be more vigorous than the proletariat, but they are not as good athletes. In part, the reason for this is that machine work develops the musculature necessary for sport, which is very different from peasant musculature. Machine work also develops the speed and precision of actions and reflexes.

Moreover, sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today. Everyone knows the difference between a fisherman, a sailor, a swimmer, a cyclist, and people who fish, sail, swim, and cycle for sport. The last are technicians; as Jünger says, they “tend to carry to perfection the mechanical side of their activity.” This mechanization of actions is accompanied by the mechanization of sporting goods—stop watches, starting machines, and so on. In this exact measurement of time, in this precision training of muscular actions, and in the principle of the “record,” we find repeated in sport one of the essential elements of industrial life..t

Here too the human being becomes a kind of machine, and his machine-controlled activity becomes a technique. This technical civilization profits by this mechanization: the individual, by means of the discipline imposed on him by sport, not only plays and finds relaxation from the various compulsions to which he is subjected, but without knowing it trains himself for new compulsions. A familiar process is repeated: real play and enjoyment, contact with air and water, improvisation and spontaneity all disappear..t These values are lost to the pursuit of efficiency, records, and strict rules. Training in sports makes of the individual an efficient piece of apparatus which is henceforth unacquainted with anything but the harsh joy of exploiting his body and winning..t

The most important thing, however, is not the education of a few specialists, but the extension of the sporting mentality to the masses. Insofar as this represents a vigorous reaction to the mere passivity of spectator sports, it is good. But the usual result is the integration of more and more innocents into an insidious technique..t

It is needless to speak of the totalitarian frame of mind for which the exercise of sports paves the way. We constantly hear that the vital thing is “team spirit,” and so on..t It is worth noting that technicized sport was first developed in the United States, the most conformist of all countries, and that it was then developed as a matter of course by the dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi, and Communist, to the point that it became an indispensable constituent element of totalitarian regimes.

Sport is an essential factor in the creation of the mass man. It is, at the time, a disciplinary factor, and this in a twofold way. It coincides exactly with totalitarian and with technical culture. In the “new” countries, an interpenetration of technique and the practice of sport is to be observed. The authoritarian states understand and exploit fully the efficiency of technicized sport in making their citizens into conformists and mass men. It is one of the chief boasts of Communist states that they fabricate champions in countries which hitherto had never heard the word sport..t This is an effect of the totalitarian society, but it also represents one of its modes of action. In every conceivable way sport is an extension of the technical spirit. Its mechanisms reach into the individual’s innermost life, working a transformation of his body and its motions as a function of technique and not as a function of some traditional end foreign to technique, as, for example, harmony, joy, or the realization of a spiritual good. In sport, as elsewhere, nothing gratuitous is allowed to exist; everything must be useful and must come up to technical expectations..t

same with music/art et al

and too.. the fact that we separate them all in the first place..

Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions, and objectives—in short, all the technical laws and customs—which he encounters in office or factory..t

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super bowl ness et al

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marsh label law et al

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