Redhead parks a theoretical bus in front of goal

A review of Steve Redhead’s (2015) Football and Accelerated Culture: This Modern Sporting Life Routledge

I’ve tweeted some potted reviews of early chapters of this book and even linked to the video in which the author is interviewed by his wife. Many of these have been retweeted by them.

My first tweet was not RT’d and my last not so far. The first tweet read

engaging chapter 1 really preface/intro with enough music mentions to float @TimNewburn boat but poor index!

More popular were:

Ch2 Football and Accelerated Culture roars down left wing exchanging 1-2s with Baudrillard, Badiou and Virilio. Will score? 

in Ch 3 of Football and Accelerated Culture @steveredhead bigs up his firm (university archive) and 'hits and tells' about #criminology 

also picks out the ‘camp’ in hyper-masculinity #footballaccelaratedculture I’ll claim that for #queercriminology

ch 5 mixes hooligan memoirs with some academic ones of his own - his greatest hits 

mentions @DonalMacIntyre journalism not his professorship 

So far my final tweet has gone unanswered.

What do pages 58 and 74 have in common?

The answer is a very lengthy and identical quote (third of a page) from ‘Pete Walsh, publisher of Milo books’. Readers of subtext might see some criticism in the other tweets too but no subtlety is intended in my complaint about the index. I’ve complained in the past about the index in other titles in Routledge’s Research Sport, Culture and Society series. Rosie Meek’s Sport in Prison is compromised by a poor one but I’ll return to this from time-to-time as the are other complaints and some praise to attend to.

It is appropriate that some of my first thoughts were dashed off quickly on social media and the index has mentions of Twitter on pages, 1, 9, 12-15, 19, 76 and 80 only missing the discussion on page 40 of the campaign demanding justice for the 96 (Hillsborough #jft96). The accelerated culture of Twitter means I can, with sufficient wit, give the impression of deep reading but the slower pace of writing this blog with quill pen by candle light demands more.

I think the book better illustrates the acceleration of culture than football does. I’ve been supporting football less assiduously than Steve and only slightly longer but for all the changes many things have not changed. The length of match and the means of deciding the game have not changed. What has changed is the amount of space (I’m not sufficiently aware of Virilio’s work - and Redhead’s 34 mentions largely assume you are - to know if his dromology covers time and space) given to sport, specifically football. Once only the cup final enjoyed as much pre and post match speculation and analysis but even the most mundane, end-of-season, mid-table match is declared the wonder of our age.

Twitter is quick and this book has been written quickly. I used some football metaphors in my tweets but cricket fits the purpose better here. Cricket has become quicker with a variety of short forms that some blame for the speed of even its full test version. Redhead is found at the crease knocking the bowling of those less versed in high theory to boundary in a series of aperçus, reminiscences and boasts (which might have been demoted to footnotes) about his knowledge, connections and archive.

Tackling that high theory we find that he is attracted to Virilio’s work (but rejecting his idealist phenomenology) and to Baudrillard’s late (in his life and posthumously published) work (31 mentions) and dislikes attempts to position such work as either modern or post modern, preferring the term late modern. Zizek appreciatively mentioned nearly a dozen times.

He knows his criminology and criminologists (nearly 30 mentions but no index entry!) but you will need to them too as he rarely goes beyond a sketch or name check, save for a big shout out to Steve Hall and Simon Winlow’s Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology (TCRC) though not all of TCRC’s mentions are indexed and none of Hall and Winlow’s half dozen citations are indexed. Sociology has no index entry despite nearly 20 mentions.

He deploys terms like Claustropolis, Claustopolitanism and Claustropolitan Sociology extensively and these gets many index mentions and much of this is foreshadowed in his earlier work when at Brighton. From Virilio ‘Claustopolitanism’ is the move from the cosmopolis that classical sociology has studied to the gated (figuratively and metaphorically) ‘communities’ of today that require his Claustropolitan Sociology, ‘or ‘bunker anthropology’.

In addition to the problems with the index and the elliptical nature of some references to high theory and score settling the writing is often unnecessarily dense. Sometimes this in the obscurantist manner of some cultural studies but also, and contrawise (and here I’m aping the style) legalistically with, asides, and conditional legalistic, deemed necessary - but please in another sentence - clauses.

Additionally, and here we are moving on from the speed of the writing, we have the speed of the production. It has clearly not been properly edited or sub-edited and for this I blame his publishers. Thus, in addition to the repeat of the quotes on pages 57 and 74 we find that the term ‘Pete Walsh, publisher of Milo books’ appears six times. The expression ‘What I have called, with a considerable irony’ appears on pages 23, 51 and 67 and again as ‘heavy irony’ on pages 70 and 78. Throughout I found myself thinking I’d already read something in this book or his earlier work which he promotes at length throughout.

But it is not all bad. I’ll quote his work on the ‘camp’ ness of the hyper-masculinity of some of his hooligans (p23) and the queer tone of Morrissey’s love of Georgie Best (p92). I’ll quote too his opinion that sporting mega events will not regenerate Cities but ‘resettle’ them (p80).

I am grateful to learn of ‘physical cultural studies’.

And the football? Quite. There are sometimes long quotes (whole pages!) from the 108 hooligan memoirs covering the years 1987-2014 held at Charles Sturt University which are part of his ‘hit and tell’ project (nearly 20 mentions in book but none in index). Many of the mentions are otiose and repetitive. The contents of the archive are set out in Appendix 1 and Appendix 2 matches clubs and their ‘firms’ with the memoirs. A further appendix should have removed the unwieldy list of the ‘firms’ associated with various clubs that take up pages 29-31.

Most chapters start with a claim to link theory to the hooligan memoirs but most involve lengthy theoretical approach work and then some mention of those memoirs, diddling about the box, before shooting wide!

And finally back to the Index. As noted it is short and misses many of the most important topics, subjects and authors but it also includes some random elements. Reference to the Large Hadron Collider does appear on page 17 but only in most aleatory fashion. This book is as much about popular music as it is about football - and I agree with him about the need to treat sport as part of the cultural industries - though it is more about picking fights with fellow theorists, so it is worrying that Happy Mondays lose their second capital in the index though not throughout the text, as do Joy Division yet The Farm and The Hollies get their full appellation and Morrissey acquires his birth initial, ’S’ (and full name in text, p92).

Redhead parks a theoretical bus in front of goal.

No Philomena Cunk

In a previous post I mentioned that I had nearly been the ‘expert’ questioned by Philomela Cunk for Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe. I was doing so to contrast her character with the character I was confronted with recently. This is not to say I thought her performance was ideal. There is, however, plenty to get to grips with in her short piece and I might use it in my teaching.

So here I’m going to engage with Cunk’s arguments and those of her expert, Chris Williams of the OU. I note his profile does not include his appearance with Cunk. Watch her video here.

These are propositions/questions Cunk puts out:

One in 20 of us are victims therefore 19 out of twenty are criminals

The logic is entertainingly poor but illustrates the binary, Manichean presumption that one is either a good or bad person. Indeed it raises the question where do the police fit into such a taxonomy and she later mentions the possibility of police malfeasance. The official figures for victimisation talk of offences rather than numbers of victims. Research on offenders suggests, ’33 per cent of males born in 1953 had been convicted of at least one standard list offence before the age of 53. Just over half of these had been convicted on only one occasion and 18 per cent had been convicted more than 5 times’. Gender is an issue too with young men most likely to be victims and offenders.

No wonder we need police

An anarchist might disagree but neo-liberal policies are bringing new pressures to bear. Thus recent moves against illegal immigrants expects landlords to do policing or be criminalised themselves. And conservative commentator, Peter Hitchens, asks, ‘How long before the police stop investigating murder?’. He was thinking about reports that burglary victims cannot expect police to attend but I’ve long wondered about what proportion to time and money should be given to investigate murder over other crimes.

In olden days we could hunt down and kill someone who did ‘something wrong’

Some people still operate vendettas and attacks on minorities and amongst communities or even against ‘paedos’ show the resilience of this bloody pre-police attitude. And many criminologists are now interested in broader harms than the purely ‘criminal’ from pollution to homophobia.

but in 1829 Robert Peel ‘discovered’ the police

The ‘discovered’ is part of Cunk’s faux ignorance and forgotten moments later when talking of their invention. But the whole history of the police might be spun around how it came into being. How recent an invention ‘the police’ are when ‘policing’ is so old. Her expert might have been asked about that given his speicalism.

we could go to them as they identifiable by their special hats by those being murdered in London fog

This section is illustrated by an image of one of the Whitechapel murder victims from the Illustrated Police News, or the like. An irony is that we know more about Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly than other working class women of the time. Little of that learning seems likely to trouble the proprietors and potential visitors to a new ‘attraction’ or to the many tours.

if there was no crime what would police do?

Karl Marx said, ‘the criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market’. I’ve always presumed Marx to be ironically guying the functionalists but there is some truth in it and I’m now throwing this blog onto the market too.

stamp post codes on bikes to decorate them

She jokes about the crime prevention function of the police. The real joke is not that they decorate bikes but that ‘bobbies on the beat’ are largely decorative/symbolic.

no point fighting crime if you don’t know what a crime is?

She mentions the ten commandments and gives 3 - killing people, gravity, interfering with oxen. Gravity is an interesting joke as it varies on this planet and more so around the Universe so is less fixed than condemnations of murder.

She also asks who decides what right and wrong, works out what punishment and writes it down?Yet she asks Chris, ‘If a policeman broke the law would he be able to arrest himself’. He struggles to succinctly put her straight. I’d have been tempted to agree that it might be difficult for a police officer to uphold the law when other officers broke it and they might have to arrest each other - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

and she posits that ‘Reconstructions’ might go real before trailing off. I jokingly tell my students that Crimewatch and Harry Potter single-handedly keeping actors in work. Others joke about the gullibility of the public naming the actors to police.

without police we could do what we like

Back to anarchism but also forgetting we mostly police ourselves anyway and the growing army of security guards and surveillance systems.

but they’d not be able to be police which would be against there human rights

In a neat inversion she points out that the one thing the police would (logically) not be able to do would be to be police. Much of the work of police scholars examines the nature of police culture to which her ontological observations might now be added.