The Economic Super-Structure of the Spectacle: the Relationship Between the Leagues and the Networks - Research Paper Example

 Introduction The following discussion will focus on the issue of spectacle in the modern city. Spectacle will be defined as an event or activity that is memorable for its size and scale. It derives from the Latin, spectaculum meaning"a show". In the Roman world the gladiatorial matches held in the Coliseum and Rome were considered to be spectaculum. One attends a spectacle for what it offers to be seen and experienced. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary the adjective spectacular emerged in the 1890s. (Online Etymological Dictionary) It is, despite the differing meanings, today related to spectacles used as a synonym for eyeglasses. Spectacles show what the viewers eyes could not see unaided. In 1943 it was first used in the phrase spectator sport, a sporting event that one attends to watch rather than to participate and a spectator sport that is specially arranged or displayed to magnify the impact on the observer. (Online Etymological Dictionary) Ultimately, therefore, a spectacle is a specially prepared event or specially arranged display designed to have a significant impact on the viewer. This is the working definition of spectacle that will be applied throughout this discussion. The discussion will be given academic rigor and parameters through the application of the theoretical framework provided by the work of German sociologist, Georg Simmel. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” Simmel stated that, “The large cities bring the purchasability of things to the fore much more impressively than do smaller localities.” (Simmel, 1903) This quote will provide the theoretical basis for analysis of the role of spectacles in modern American cities. Therefore, the body of the discussion will be composed of two major sections. Initially, Simmel's writing on the role and meaning of spectacles in cities at the end of the nineteenth century will be outlined and explored. This will involve reliance on the aforementioned article, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”. Another article that he wrote 7 years earlier entitled, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition [of 1896]”, will also be analyzed. The second major section of the discussion will focus on the role of spectacle in modern American cities using the paradigm that Simmel established. The spectacles that will be considered will be modern, professional sports. Spectator sports are significant factor in the lives of modern Americans, particularly urban Americans. New Yorkers can be categorized according to whether or not they cheer for the Mets or the Yankees, the Giants or the Jets. The championship of American Major League Baseball (MLB) is not merely a league championship it is the 'World Series'. The 2010 Superbowl, the championship of the National Football League, is the most watched television event in the history of television. Spectacle sports and their role in modern American urban life will be taken to represent the broader topic of spectacle in modern American cities. Numerous other spectacles could have been chosen for analysis. Malls like the 'Mall of the Americas' are spectacles not merely shopping venues. Huge stadium musical concerts and events like 'Loolapalozza' and the Crossroads Blues Festival held every third year in Chicago are also spectacles. There are a wide range of spectacles in modern American cities but this discussion will focus on the heirs of the gladiators, the modern professional athletes that participate in spectator sports. Simmel, Spectacle and Amusement Simmel's articles on spectacles, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition” (1896) and “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) will be considered in chronological order. However, this approach is not predicated on chronology alone. The article dealing with the Berlin Trade Exhibition amounts to a case study. It presents Simmel's analysis of a single spectacle. The second article, as the title implies, is a broader and more theoretical consideration of the widest impacts of metropolitan life on the impact of the individual's mental life. It is more discursive than the 'case study' of the Berlin Exhibition and more complicated. However, it is also of more importance to the current discussion. The Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896 was a trade show were manufacturers from around the world displayed their most recent products and applications of modern science and engineering. They were a fixture of the last half of the nineteenth century in the industrialized world and urban outgrowths of the traditional annual fair and “one of the clearest examples of this most fundamental type of human sociation” according to Simmel. The first had been held in London, heartland of the first Industrial Revolution in 1851, and was called 'The Great Exhibition”. According to 'Victoria Station', “the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park in London in the specially constructed Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace was originally designed by Sir Joseph Paxton in only 10 days and was a huge iron goliath with over a million feet of glass. It was important that the building used to showcase these achievements be grandiose and innovative.” (Victoria Station) This exhibition set the standard for following World Exhibitions. When Paris hosted the World Exhibition in 1867 the Louvre was significantly renovated in preparation for the spectacle. Three years before the Berlin Trade Exhibition was held Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893 a project that was preceded by significant reconstruction of the downtown core and the construction of an entirely new Exhibition space on the waterfront. The Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896 followed from this long tradition according to Simmel and was firmly “placed in the category of world exhibitions.” According to Simmel the buildings within which the products were displayed was an integral element of the spectacle of exhibitions. “The specific exhibition style is seen at its clearest in the buildings.... In the exhibition style the imagination of the architect is freed from the stipulation of permanence, allowing grace and dignity to be combined in their own measure.” The architecture of the exhibition is an aspect of spectacle, as much as the actual products on display. (Simmel, 1896) Inside the architecture the products on display, the innovations and gadgets, as well as the mega-projects detailed, all combined to have a powerful impact on the visitor according to Simmel: “The way in which the most heterogeneous industrial products are crowded together in close proximity paralyses the senses – a veritable hypnosis where only one message gets through to one's consciousness: the idea that one is here to amuse oneself.” (Simmel, 1896) This quotation summarizes perfectly and concisely Simmel's impressions of the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896: To emphasize, it 'paralyses the senses' inducing 'hypnosis' and despite the wide variety of products and innovations on display leaves the viewer with only one impression 'the idea that one is here to amuse oneself.' Simmel makes one other comment in the 1896 article that is significant to spectacles in modern America, “it appears as though modern man's one-sided and monotonous role in the division of labour will be compensated for by consumption and enjoyment.” (Simmel, 1896) Simply put, spectacles of 'consumption and enjoyment' are compensation for wage labor in an industrial economy. In a nutshell, to paraphrase Marx, spectacles are the opiate of the masses. In summary, in “The Berlin Trade Exhibition” Simmel argues that the great exhibitions of the last half of the nineteenth century were designed to amuse and hypnotize the emerging industrial under-class of wage earners. In this sense, Simmel traces a direct line from the gladiatorial extravaganzas that the Caesars put on to entertain the Roman plebeians, through the annual fairs of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Exhibitions of the 1800s. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” Simmel expands on his previous article, focusing more on the impact of urban existence on the 'mental life' of the individual and its widest implications. He analyzes the manner in which urban life undermines individuality and fosters paralysis. He writes, “the deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.” (Simmel, 1903) According to Simmel, urbanization and industrialization demands “punctuality, calcuability, exactness” and these demands, “favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without.”[italics in the original] (Simmel, 1903) Urban life demands obedience to the clock, economic obeisance and submission to a culture of control imposed externally. Further, according to Simmel this constant conflict between the self-directed life of the individual and the conformist demands of the urban-industrial complex exhaust the individual. “In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength.” [italics in the original] (Simmel, 1903) Urban life, Simmel asserts, overwhelms and exhausts the individual. It leaves individual's impoverished and unable to resist conformity to the socio-economic superstructure and control mechanisms of the government and industry. Moreover, according to Simmel the role that spectacle plays in this overwhelming and exhausting of the individual is linked to the sensory inputs and activities of urban life, 'their rapidity and contradictoriness'. Also, he takes note of the very architecture and spatial aspects of these activities and inputs: “Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact.” (Simmel, 1903) It is not only the activities of urban life that exhaust the individual it is also the architecture and institutions of urban life that exhaust the individual. This is of particular importance to the discussion of spectator sport in modern America as stadiums and stadium construction are an integral aspect of the spectacle. Turning to more recent analysis of urban life and spectacle Antonio Negri discussing ways the individual can respond to the oppressive nature of the urban-industrial complex develops ideas that follow from Simmel's analysis and are necessary to understand before the discussion of stadiums and spectator sports as spectacle can be approached. Negri concurs with Simmel's comment that, “the large cities bring the purchasability of things to the fore much more impressively than do smaller localities.” Like Simmel, he sees the city as the embodiment of consumption and integrally linked to the industrial economy. According to Negri capital is “investing the city and transforming each street into a productive flux of commodities. The factory was then extended onto society: this much was evident.” (Negri) According to Negri the city embodies the extension of the industrial life of division of labour and wage labor onto the city. The role of urbanization, and the link between urban activities and urban architecture and construction of space is also implicit in Negri's analysis of resistance. Negri refers to cities as “the metropolises of skyscrapers and of Empire”. The city is physically massive and embodies the massive 'Empire' of control structures – from the industrial economy to the government - that exerts ever increasing power over the individual. Importantly, in terms of spectacle, Negri hypothesizes that, controlling the urban masses requires more than just a diversionary and impotent layer of democracy, it also requires avenues through which the urban masses can 'blow off steam' (literally): “In this period, today, we are carrying the weight of a series of old ignoble and impotent schemes of social democracy, according to which the metropolis can only reproduce if we introduce in it social safety valves that can be used to turn (and eventually to repair) the dramatic effects of capitalist development into money.” (Negri) Spectacles, in the modern city, are one of these 'social safety valves': They allow the urban dweller to 'blow off steam' and also contribute to (in Simmel's terms) hypnosis and paralysis by compensating for 'modern man's one-sided and monotonous role in the division of labour' with the opportunity for 'consumption and enjoyment.' Risking a pun, spectacles seen through rose colored glasses, distract and amuse. Spectacle in Urban America The polyglot urban underclass, the sharks on the bottom of the ocean on Wall Street, and the faceless computer persons at the terminals of the information age overwhelmingly love the sports and are fan(atics) of their local teams. Professional sporting events foster an image of urban unity, that is farcical: While they celebrate consumer culture and simultaneously batter a person's sense of individuality. They don't celebrate unity they subtly enforce control. Professional sports in modern America are spectacles. They are spectacular in the structures that they take place in and they are spectacles in terms of the events that occur there. They are both activities of spectacle and architecture of spectacle. Spectacle is both an object (the sports stadium) and a social process revolving around the teams and the game. This analysis will commence with consideration of the spectacular architecture (and economics) of stadiums and then proceed to consideration of spectator sports as spectacular activities; activities that 'bring the purchasability of things to the fore' while hypnotizing and paralyzing the urban masses. As bizarre as it may sound becoming the home to professional sports franchises and building the stadiums that will bring them to a city and keep them there has become one of the leading activities of urban governments. The municipal government in Seattle used long-term debt financing to get the Kingdome built. Twenty years later, in 1994, before this debt was paid out sections of the roof collapsed. The Seattle Mariners were forced to play there last twenty home games on the road. Eventually the stadium was deemed unstable (after a $51 million roof repair) and controlled demolition was undertaken. At the same time the city invested in a spectacular stadium complex consisting of a uni-purpose baseball stadium with natural turf and a retractable roof, a retractable roof football/soccer stadium, and transit upgrades to service them. As a result the taxpayers of Seattle were at one point paying for three stadiums at the same time, one a stadium that had already been demolished. Also, stadiums are the subject of intense media speculation and attention. Early in December 2010 the dome collapsed on the Metrodome in Minneapolis. On December 11, 2010 the Metrodome's roof collapsed under the weight of snow and rapidly deflated from convex to concave and tearing releasing thousands of cubic feet of snow onto the stadium field. It happened again a few days later. The incident, the disruption of the NFL schedule, and noises from the Vikings that they want a new stadium has been the subject of intense media examination and speculation. Ultimately, it is Seattle all over again. Minnesota Vikings Vice President Lester Bagley said, "Some people would say, 'Well, a couple of shingles come off the roof you don't build a new barn.' Well, the roof collapsed. We have concerns about the safety of the facility going forward." The article goes on to note that, “Minnesota is dealing with a state budget deficit of more than $6.2 billion that has to be handled first, but Gov. Mark Dayton and legislative leaders have said they're open to a good stadium plan. A state lawmaker plans to introduce a proposal by late January.” (Tribune New Services, 2010) Consider the implications of this, stadium funding is being debated on the same level as a massive state deficit. Cities are willing to pay handsomely to host professional sport franchises and their facilities despite the costs. Symbolically, these mammoth structures carry weight. A building is not called the Superdome or the Astrodome without visions of grandeur. In these mammoth stadiums epic battles are played out between the 'home team' and the visitors, between Springfield and Shelbyville. Shared support for the home team creates a facade of mythic proportions of civic unity. Simmel's emphasis on the spectacle as opiate of the masses is evident in the role of professional sports in modern America in another important sense. Being a fan, supporting the local team, serves to mask the divisions within the city and create a false sense of unity and shared interests amongst the urban proletariat and the patricians. They all love the home team. Fans will often arrive at the stadium in Recreational Vehicles days before the game to set up camp. Many are so fevered that the stadiums all have do not arrive before times posted on their websites for each event. Traditionally, at most NFL stadiums, it is Friday evening that the parking lots open up to RVs in preparation for Sunday games. The phenomenon is widely known as a 'tailgate party' or 'tailgating'. Fans spend the entire weekend, the night before the game, or just lunch before the game before attending. Frequently, more time is spent prior to the game than the actual game (2-3 hours) lasts. It is an event; a spectacle to attend and absorb; and, as much as a weekend of hypnosis and paralysis. Finally the game is followed by radio broadcasts, the vast majority listener phone in talk-shows. The perfect medium for this audience trapped in their cars in the regional rush hour that precedes and follows a professional sports spectacle is, archaically the radio. The listener phone in format makes every fan a media pundit. It offers a sense of participation in the media elite. When it comes to the spectacle all press is good press as long as they spell your name right. On another level the spectacle of the event hypnotizes and paralyzes the urban individual. Consider, also, the further reach of these spectacles. They are attended in person by only about 75,000 people. I imagine, far less than would have attended a week or month long exhibition in the last half of the nineteenth century. However, their presentation is now technologically mediated. The viewing audience for an NFL football game is numbered in the millions. They can also be watched on wireless devices that receive regular updates for every game. NFL Films makes documentaries and the NFL Network is all football, all the time, all year. Furthermore, sports books, bookies and endless office pools add a little spice to the event. A century after Simmel wrote, the audience for these professional sports spectacles have to be numbered in the millions. The Superbowl is the NFL championship game. The day on which the Super Bowl is played is now considered a de facto American national holiday, in 2007 NBC Sports described Super Bowl Sunday as “completely ingrained in our culture, unlike Presidents' Day” and proposed that it replace Presidents' Day as the official and legal national holiday in February. (Cook, 2007) This popular desire for legal recognition speaks to the event of Superbowl as a spectacle. Super Bowl XLIV, between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts, in February 2010 attracted an audience of more than 100 million and earned the title of most-watched program in television history. (Kent, 2010) Sunday Night Football has become the most popular show in prime-time television this season, dominating the overall Nielsen ratings, with the highest average viewership for a prime-time NFL package in 14 years. Sunday, December 6th's Pittsburgh-Baltimore game was seen in nearly 23 million homes. Sunday Night Football has been the highest rated Sunday night program since the start of the 2010 season. Football as spectacle has an impact on the tens of thousands at the game, the millions watching on the television, and the amorphous group following on wireless devices or financially committed to the outcome of the game. Moreover, the same can be said of every professional sport from golf to skiing, led by the big four, the NFL, the NHL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball. An urban individual can watch multiple teams and diverse sports at all times. This is how truly pervasive and expansive this spectacle of professional sports is when it is mediated through contemporary technology that was unimaginable (and one imagines, would be unbearable) to Georg Simmel. This fantastic reach is used to paralyze the senses, induce hypnosis and leave the viewer with the idea that one is here to amuse oneself, in Simmel's terms, but nothing more. On television professional sport is a spectator sport that does not even require the spectator to attend the event. The spectator does not even have to watch the game or the whole game. The spectator can restrict themselves to wireless updates. Spectatorship in the sense of the spectator is viral, apparently fragmented yet insidious. It is technologically vastly different from Simmel's ideas on popular perception of spectacles, but the concept of simply amazing the spectator remains with professional sports. All the major sports have made administrative and rules changes to accommodate television. All four major league sports cater to the needs of the customers, the networks buying the broadcasting packages that they then resell to viewers. They all take periodic breaks simply to accommodate television sponsors. There are cameras in the nets on the ice, there are microphones on selected players and coaches and reporters live on the teams' benches. The spectacular nature of professional sports has been magnified by an astute partnership with the media that has vastly increased their profile. The relationship between the leagues and the networks are only a small portion of the economic super-structure of the spectacle. On another level, it symbolizes wealth while substantiating consumption. At the game the patricians in the private boxes and club seating are separated in terms of geography and amenities from the majority of fans. Importantly, this message is carried to the electronic audience. The cameras frequently show the team owners and managers, the celebrities, and the former players aloof and isolated from the crowd (the mob?): Subtle reinforcement of the significant and unbreachable class barriers that always exist in the city. The 'purchasability' displayed by the spectacle is epitomized in sales of clothing, memorabilia and paraphernalia. Fans purchase their favorite player's jersey to wear to games. Fan(atics) can decorate a room in their home in team colored carpeting, upholstery, paint and paper, and all the accompaniments from tables and lamps to beer glasses. During tailgating vendors sell everything from team earrings to signed jerseys, inside the stadium there are team pro shops and other vendors selling sports related items, as well as food and beverages. Other retailers offer team-themed credit cards and cell phones. Food franchises and vendors are omnipresent. Understandably stadiums have alcohol free sections for family seating. Ridiculously many also have “all-you-can-eat' sections where for a premium price on a seat a fan can eat unlimited food. Literally, spectacle is the junk food of the metropolis's 'flux of commodities'. Turning again to the technological sphere this entire 'flux of commodities' is available over a host of electronic medium. Every professional sports team's website prominently features a shopping link to everything from vintage photographs to signed jerseys. When historic stadiums are closed or renovated fan(atics) purchase the seats and other accoutrements. The professional sports franchises and countless vendors market the entire 'flux of commodities' through every sales avenue available. The sale of advertising for astronomical figures, particularly for championship games is overwhelming. At millions of dollars per minute huge Transnational Companies from Nike to Coca-Cola unveil new advertisements at championship games, particularly the Superbowl. The Superbowl has also established a reputation for attracting the crème de la crème of the performing world to their halftime show. Fergie, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones, all with cross-generational and multi-media appeal typify their halftime performers. At the Superbowl the football game is wrapped in a week of media coverage and a one-day event that features the best of the NFL, joined by a major musical act and seasoned by a dozen outrageously expensive and hopefully technologically awe-inspiring new advertisements. Return briefly to a quote of Simmel's, “The way in which the most heterogeneous [industrial] products are crowded together in close proximity paralyzes the senses – a veritable hypnosis where only one message gets through to one's consciousness: the idea that one is here to amuse oneself.” (Simmel, 1896) Just like a nineteenth-century exhibition professional sports is an overwhelming experience because 'heterogeneous... products are crowded together in close proximity...' and the spectator manifests 'violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent' and they are left exhausted. The spectacle of professional sport is an orgy of consumption. As noted earlier Simmel's theory also captures the essence of the spectator professional sport when he speaks of the hypnosis and paralysis of the audience. The next morning they do not gather around the water-cooler and talk about the tax bill or Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem they talk about Vick or Brady. Under the guise of the game they are fed some of the most sophisticated advertising campaigns in the world. They consume consumption along with the spectacle. References Cook, Bob. (February 4, 2007). “Lets Make Super Bowl and Official Holiday”. NBC Sports. http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/16865062. Frisby, David. (1985). “Georg Simmel: First Sociologist of Modernity”. Theory, Culture & Society, 2: 3, 49-67. Kent, Milton. (December 8, 2010). “'Monday Night Football' Today Isn't Close to What it Once Was”. San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fg%2Fa%2F2010%2F12%2F08%2Ffanhousemondaynightfootballt.DTL. Negri, Antonio, “The Multitude and the Metropolis” online: http://www.generation-online.org/t/metropolis.htm. Rowe, Dorothy, (1995). “Georg Simmel and the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896”. Urban History, 22, pp 216-228. Simmel, Georg. (1991) “The Berlin Trade Exhibition” Theory, Culture & Society 8: 3, 119-123. Simmel, Georg. (1903) “The Metropolis and Mental Life” online: http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/Expressionism/Readings/SimmelMetropolis.pdf. Tribune News Services. “Vikings express concern over Metrodome safety”. 17 December 2010. http://www.chicagobreakingsports.com/2010/12/an-unsafe-situation-halts-metrodome-repairs.html. Victoria Station. “The Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace”. http://www.victorianstation.com/palace.html. Read More