Letter Twenty-six | 12/15 | Ryan
Berkeley
Dear Russ,
I’m going to take the fact that you mentioned offhand in your last letter that “freedom” stands among the many words, concepts, the phrases that really irk me as an opportunity to talk about yet another cliché that comes up all the time, in soccer discourse specifically and (my god) popular discourse more generally, a cliché that throws me around the clichéd bend every time: authenticity.
Frequently the term is found, like a remora attached to a shark, stuck to another, related notion: expression, especially self-expression. In the context of soccer this usually takes the form of praise for a player—almost always an attacking player—whose style of play is said to express himself, to be somehow authentically his own. In this way an aesthetic descriptor (and usually a pretty narrow one, at that: even among the attackers, it’s the dribblers, Dembele or Grealish or Hazard, upon whom encomia rain down, not the passers, who are creative rather than expressive, apparently) mimics a personal descriptor, an evocation of a personality. Young Ronaldo doing stepovers in the corner, or Mbappe managing a little heel-to-heel before bursting down the touchline: these techniques, although in no way exclusive or even proper to these players (in a way, maybe, that something like the Cruyff turn is) supposedly claim some tie to who these players are. They are the signfier to their personalities’ signified, the surface to their depth. The line leveled so often against a well-drilled, defensive side: “the players aren’t allowed to express themselves!”
To confuse these two kinds of judgments doesn’t have real ramifications, except insofar as it serves as further evidence of a general inability to talk carefully and seriously about sports and other things with aesthetic significance. (I’m complaining, but the state of soccer discourse, from the commentator to the commenter, is surely better than, say, the state of American football or baseball, which is a terrible souplike homogenate of fallacy, racism, and dullness.) But we use the same language to describe ourselves in other contexts, in our conversations at large, too. Authentic is an aesthetic judgement with super-portability: a poem is good, apparently, if it authentically expresses the poet’s experience. A movie is good if it authentically illustrates the situation it imagines. A person is good if they remain authentically themselves. Authenticity discourse is just Live, Laugh, Love that went to state school.
(This is a joke—state schools are good and should be free, and the Ivies should probably be, like, expropriated and turned into public libraries and museums of labor.)
The Korean-German theorist Byung-chul Han writes that the “cult of authenticity erodes public space, which disintegrates into private spaces. Everyone carries their own private space with them wherever they go,” and in doing so make experiences of art impossible. As soccer players, we have access to an absolutely crystalline example: the Pickup-game Asshole, who combines authenticity as a soccer term and a cultural term at once. The pickup game is, I’d argue, an instantiation of the commons, literally a shared space transformed cooperatively into something totally impossible without the performative evocation of many people in concert. It’s public sociality in motion. But the Pickup-game Asshole destroys the public space in two ways. One, he (it does seem to be, uh, an asymmetrically gendered phenomenon) slows or even obviates the cooperative performance by changing the frame and operation of the performance, turning the goal from the invocation of the game itself into the winning of the game, a key (and bad) difference. Two, he obliterates the social and discursive world that bubbles up to enclose the game: he interjects negative affect, self-consciousness, bad vibes, generalized assholery. The language of the game changes, sometimes literally.
The Pickup-game Asshole is just being himself. I have few doubts that the Assholes I’ve encountered were, in fact, expressing who they were “deep down” (insofar as that exists, which it doesn’t). They demanded that the material and social space of the game rearrange itself for them; they imposed their private texture onto the public. The personally authentic collapsed the publicly performative.
So it’s not just that “authenticity” as a judgment refers to nothing, that calling a work of art “authentic” is to say nothing about it except, I guess, that its provenance is proven (ah, an authentic Magritte!). It’s also that “authenticity” does something in the world, something which is not good. To repeat uncritically that everyone ought to “be themselves” is to misunderstand‚ to refuse to even try to understand, both being and self.
(Obviously, real political victories have been won by way of authenticity discourse, especially for queer folks, and clearly I’m not suggesting that people who experience the hegemonic fist along lines of identity cease to perform identity however they wish; the point in this case is that the reliance on authenticity actually reveals the precariousness of those political victories. Trans people, for example, often must execute a song-and-dance about feeling really like a certain gender deep down since forever in order to get medical treatment, which is bullshit—trans people should have healthcare (everyone should have healthcare!) regardless of their attachment to or ability to perform a particular authorized narrative. See Sara Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, and Lee Edelman for more.)
Returning to the context of soccer, this emphasis on authenticity limits what we can say and therefore what we can see. If we don’t imagine defending, simple passes, dirty work, or team organization as “worthy expressions of authenticity,” it’s easier to dismiss or vilify them. And so rather than extending authenticity to everyone, to say that Kante authentically covers ground or Busquets authentically regulates the passing game or Kostic authentically whips in crosses, let’s just find better language. Finding better language means thinking in more careful and precise ways about what soccer is for, what it is—which, once again, is the collaborative production of a narrative and aesthetic experience. That experience happens not in spite of a Diego Simeone side arranged to nullify a Barcelona attack; it happens, in part, because of and through that defensive ruggedness.
The same is true for culture at large. Rather than asking questions about how best to express ourselves, we could ask how best to contribute to whatever is being constructed in a particular situation: this is a kind of sincere solidarity. For some folks, that contribution will look like a stalwart individualism—thank god, for the sake of art and the world and everything, that geniuses of personality like David Bowie and Josephine Baker, that artistic mavericks from Toni Morrison to Andres Serrano, that everyday people with a strong sense of identity like the rioters of Stonewall, insisted upon their own visions of the possible. But that’s the key difference: theirs was an expression in service of something, a solidarity whose shape was still, only, barely, outlined. As Han argues, contemporary authenticity discourse serves little but the neoliberal apparatus only too happy for us to express ourselves by way of recurring monthly payments.
Okay then—another rant, or rant-adjacent thing, done!
I will see you remarkably soon!
Ryan