Letter Twenty-two | 12/11 | Ryan
Berkeley
Dear Russ,
Tifo Football, the YouTube channel now owned by The Athletic that produces short-form soccer content—think, like, Crash Course or Kurtzgesagt, but instead of the French Revolution or black holes they talk about total football and the history of club soccer in Palestine—posted today on social media to promote their new travelogue series, “A Postmodern World Cup.” It seems like they’ve sent a journalist on a kind of European walking tour (except, you know, they’re driving) to visit the major soccer nations and conduct a continent-wide vibe check re: Qatar, the Cup, and the state of the fandom.
[Ryan here, in my own letter, editing: because I accidentally clicked “Save as Draft” rather than “Publish” last night, I can, now, this morning, add the link to the first episode of “A Postmodern World Cup here.]
As the whole scope of this project has made clear, the fact that the Cup is in Qatar is a multivalent symptom, capable of generating both frisson (it’s in Qatar? Really?) and resignation (of course FIFA gave the Cup to Qatar!). It declares unambiguously a set of facts about the contemporary soccer world—and the contemporary world in general—that hasn’t been hidden, exactly (indeed, everyone knows these things, or at least everyone who shares our political-historical orientation), but which have remained tacit, unspoken, vouchsafed on the far, silent half of our negative capability. Is corruption still corruption if it’s done in the daylight? Does shadiness, in that illuminated context, just become business as usual?
It’s not like anyone wasn’t aware that FIFA is unusually corrupt. The MLB, NBA, NFL—these are malicious organizations, but their corruption strikes me as the everyday corruption of self-interest. Of course the NFL covered up the facts of concussions and CTE: evil, but not at all out of character. Of course the MLB spent years operating as a de facto cabal, engaged in price-fixing that was also, because players are employees and product both, wage-fixing. FIFA is more like the Olympic committee—multinational in scope, possessed of uncertain ambitions, operative at a level difficult and perhaps impossible to comprehend without being embedded in it, which embedding would necessarily skew your vision, destroy your perspective.
In other words: investigating the MLB or NFL would be the plot of a thriller. Investigating the Olympics or FIFA would be the plot of a Pynchon novel—less an investigation than a baptism, an immersion in a close but markedly different universe, an experience not of discovery, not of epistemological heroism, but of disorientation, overwhelm, and political absurdity.
And so, is the Qatar World Cup properly postmodern? Look, you know how frustrated I get with the popular deployment of postmodern. Not only the obviously bad-faith use from folks (assholes) like everyone’s favorite opiate-and-raw-meat addict Jordan Peterson, or what-if-a-Hutt-went-to-prep-school-dude Ben Shapiro, but more vernacular (here’s a lovely word taken from Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin: skaz) situations: postmodern as “weird,” as “meta,” as “composed of juxtaposed or incommensurate objects,” as “suggestive of big systems,” as “paradoxical,” as “total ethical relativism,” as “perspectival identity politics,” as “nothing is true, man.” Modernist just never really appears in popular discourse, but postmodern absolutely does. Is that, actually, a postmodern fact? (No! No! Stop it!)
I’ve just compared FIFA’s corruption to a Pynchon novel, admittedly. Except I haven’t: I’ve suggested that the plot of the corruption would lend itself well to a certain kind of narrative form. And that’s the thing: postmodern as a description of a narrative form, an aesthetic and political context, is not the same thing as postmodern as description of a contemporary global-cultural arrangement. These things are related, of course, but they are not precisely congruent. That’s why criticism, theory, writing exist: that’s why the very best study of postmodern culture alongside postmodern economics and politics—Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—runs 450 pages. And so if we want to say this World Cup is “postmodern,” we need to be more specific.
What I think people mean when they call this World Cup postmodern is twofold. One, that there exists an unusually active tension between what the Cup claims to mean, what we feel the Cup to mean, and what we think or observe that the Cup means. This collision of marketing speak (The Cup brings people togetherI), of personal and emotionally oriented language (The Cup still does mean something to me!), and of political criticism in a rhetoric of exhaustion (Hundreds dead, queer folk attacked, what the fuck is the point?) feels postmodern not because it’s a rare collision (indeed, it’s everywhere) but because the Cup intensifies these feelings, demands we confront them, and exaggerates their effects. And this combination of intensification and deflation, the adjacency of facts, our feelings about facts, and our feelings about those feelings—these strikes us as postmodern in its paratactic logic and recursive or self-conscious series of framings. Two, that the political situation the Cup makes evident is simultaneously pellucid and totally opaque. The journalism’s been done; we know, well, not everything, but enough. But also, we know that we don’t know everything—the unknown unknowns proliferate. The Cup is both a flat surface and an immense depth. As a political-cultural shape, it’s some kind of terrible non-Euclidean thing. It’s hard to understand, which is both an understatement and precisely true.
But is it postmodern? To twist a line from Ben Lerner (lol), yes, but not how you mean that. It’s postmodern only insofar as one dominant characterizing fact of the contemporary world is the way postmodern aesthetics and their historical grounds (the 60s, new politics, individual expression, spectacle, and on and on) link up with more recent political arrangements, specifically post-Cold War neoliberalism, to become our cultural dominant. That is, the contemporary world is postmodern insofar as its texture is postmodern, insofar as postmodernism is something immanent to the world rather than an object discrete and locatable within it. There’s one very good line in The Art of Fielding where Guert thinks that postmodernism properly began when modernist self-consciousness trickled down to popular culture, to sports, became not a rarefied aesthetic technique but a widespread structure of feeling. Something similar has happened to postmodernism, whose logics and politics fit neatly into the project of neoliberalism, into finance capital, into the post-2008 world at large.
It’s the same with the Trump administration. It’s not that the curtain has been pulled back, the veil torn, not that he says the quiet part out loud, that conservatism no longer needs the humane face of a Reagan or Romney. This is all true, but the performance of openness, of filterlessness, by an individual draws our attention away from what has always been there and always required analysis, careful examination, a little digging: structure, power, ideology, discourse.
The Qatar Cup is unabashed in its cruelty, but the obviousness of that cruelty makes it easy to localize that cruelty, to imagine that cruelty as originating from that place because visible in that place. And to be sure, I’m not suggesting in a kind of dismissive and ostensibly leftist gesture that because other countries, especially European countries, participate and have participated in the long machinations of imperial capitalism that we shouldn’t worry about Qatar, that homophobia is a liberal distraction from the “real problems.” The point is that calling this Cup postmodern should be our signal, our lightbulb: that this complex operation of surface and depth, visibility and invisibility, local power and global system, is at play and taking on new forms all the time. If we call it postmodern, we should recognize that system, understand its particularities. The Cup isn’t postmodern because it feels weird or because its politics are unusually visible. It’s postmodern because people call it postmodern. It’s postmodern because calling it postmodern obscures the way it’s actually postmodern, which is to say, political—a political object in the contemporary world.
I hope you enjoyed this essay. I’ve been putting off doing the very last bit of work needed on my prospectus draft, and all that energy has gone here.
All my best,
Ryan