Reporter | Little Que
Edit | Yellow Moon
Extreme frisbee and soccer compete for the field, which should not be a problem but become a problem. Fans have many stigmas against frisbee players, such as "frisbee", and question the legitimacy of the sport, and even hang up a large slogan: "In the football field, frisbee and dogs are not allowed to enter." "Frisbee players point to the prejudice and stigma of fans about Frisbee, especially for female Frisbee players.
In almost any country, it is difficult to have a football-frisbee battle. In the United States, Extreme Frisbee and football cannot shake the four major professional sports leagues; In Europe, football is extremely community-oriented, closely bound to the people, and frisbee cannot get close to the body of football. In China, football is relatively niche, less popular than basketball, and public courts are quite tight; Recently, the extreme frisbee has suddenly risen a lot of heat, and it is also facing a shortage of sports venues.
It seems to be a sports issue that involves history and society. Behind the dispute between football and the extreme frisbee field, we can also peek into the differences in the concept of sports between European football and the United States, the mainstream and rebellious discourse under the aesthetics of commodities, and the self-identity and identity of white-collar workers reflected in the frisbee.
01 Football Culture: Folklore or Runway?
Modern football is the product of British industrial civilization, and its invention and dissemination are basically on the industrial road. Wherever industry goes, football depends on the community and takes root in the working class. Football in England is the most extreme, Great Britain has been deinduminated for decades, starting from the establishment of the Premier League, and capital globalization has also been 20 or 30 years, but the survey of players who helped England enter the World Cup in 2002 and 2006 still has a working-class family background, and only 15% of the players are considered to be from the middle class.
With the deepening of globalization and the continuation of global migration, the working class attributes of European teams have become weaker and weaker, which is a general trend, but the community nature of football has never been lost. Just last April, Real Madrid president Florentino led the formation of the UEFA Super League (UEFA Super League) with 11 other European giants. This is a "rebellion" against the existing football pattern, only 48 hours, six Premier League teams withdrew, the European Super League was suspended, and the "two-day restoration" turned into a joke. One reason for the failure so quickly that cannot be ignored is the massive protests of English fans, and the owners of Premier League clubs have been woken up to realize that local fans still have a considerable main position in the team and have not yet been fully embraced by capital. The extremes of the situation, unexpected by the founding club of the European Super League, the football tyrant Florentino has not yet admitted defeat, and is still thinking that there is a crisis in football, young people are addicted to video games, and the European Super League is a necessary measure to save football.
Florentino said that the crisis does exist in part, but he cannot fail to know that the European Super League is not only shaking the interests of UEFA, but also the century-old football tradition of Europe. In addition to the community nature of European football, there are also promotions and demotions, which is the fairness and openness of football, which is the spirit of European football and the most significant features that distinguish it from the four major leagues in the United States. Compared with European football, the community nature of Chinese football is also very weak, there is a certain degree of topic, and the actual participation is not high.
European football is a European folklore, the most powerful cultural product in Europe – with uniform rules in the world and the most widely spread mass base, which is something that no religion or group can do. However, the European Super League is learning from the closed and non-community nature of American sports. The NBA (American Professional Basketball League) that the Chinese people are most familiar with is like this, there is no promotion and promotion, the connection with the community is not close, and the Americans also understand sports more as game (game) non-match.
American sports is a show where hero worship is tied to business, emphasizes team spirit, highlights individualism, and business dominates everything. American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey, including the U.S. Extreme Frisbee Professional League (AUDL), which has begun in recent years, are in some ways like american shopping malls, offering the aesthetics of ford-made goods.
Generally speaking, Extreme Frisbee began in 1968, when Columbia High School student Joe Silver borrowed from American football to play, redesigned the frisbee movement, created rules, named it, and held a game the following year, which is considered to be the first game of extreme frisbee. Previously, Americans only used frisbee as a toy, called strange, flying saucer or Pluto disk, and there were many ways to play, such as frisbee golf and frisbee courage game. At that time, Wham-O Toy Company has always wanted to promote frisbee, and has made many marketing attempts, such as binding with families and showing middle-class life, but it has always been illegal, and frisbee games are tepid.
The frisbee and the hippie movement met unexpectedly, an anti-traditional, anti-movement movement combined with hippies to set off a radical countercultural movement. Embedded in the mid-1960s, frisbee became a tool of rebellion, mirroring the spirit of that era as rock and roll.
Hippies drove the bus through The United States, threw out the frisbee, and spread the game. Joe Sever learned Frisbe at a summer camp in 1968, and an important reason why he was able to return to school to quickly promote the sport was that extreme frisbee had ushered in the era of television, and middle-class children had already seen frisbee from television and planted a sense of identity in their hearts.
02 Football and Frisbee: A Similar Path from Rebellion to Mainstream
Although the essence is different, the development path of football and extreme frisbee is the same.
Football was originally transformed from the upper echelons of society to become a sport in which public students rebelled against conservatism, pursued freedom, and used confrontation and rough play of hormones. When football became a working-class sport, the British upper class, including intellectuals, never shied away from indifference or even hostility to football. Times move forward, and change happens little by little. The advent of television media has changed the ecology of football, in addition to Thatcher is still afraid of football and habitually suppressed, the intellectual class has long accepted and begun to think about football. In the early 1990s, the Premier League defected from the lower leagues and was proclaimed, and the era of global capital arrived. Prince William, who was still a teenager, curiously walked into Villa Park and later became an Aston Villa fan.
The interest and embrace of football by the upper and intellectual classes shows that since the television era, especially the rise of Internet technology, it has completely reorganized and reconstructed commodities, capital and subcultural groups in the economic and social spheres.
Media scholar McLuhan calls television a cold medium, distinguished by participatory and inclusive. Television images depict society with far greater clarity than print media, reinforcing sensibility and empathy, putting young people's rebellion, games, and performances on a single screen, thus diluting the rebellious nature of the ultimate frisbee and bringing it closer to an adult's entertainment. Wham-O Toys was behind the mainstreaming of Extreme Frisbee and later led the formation of the International Frisbee Association (IFA) and hid behind it. In the 70s, Extreme Frisbee had built its own rules of the game and wrote the spirit of the game into the sport. At this time, it is the middle class, or the grown middle class children, who are endorsed by them.
Extreme Frisbee was once called the "fifth largest sport" in the United States, non-mainstream and rebellious is its genes, it is a confrontational competitive sport without physical collision, men and women can compete in the same field, the most significant point is that there is no referee - there is a dispute in the game, and the team members negotiate on the field to solve it. In almost all competitive sports, especially the confrontational football, basketball, rugby, etc., the referee is the authority and decision-maker of the game, an indispensable part of the game, and of course, the role of fans and players. McLuhan gave insight into the participatory and ritualistic nature of the audience in the movement, pointing out that referees were merely objects of irrational demand and abuse: "In a competitive industrial world, the goal or function of the game is excitement, not fun. In this sense, an analogy that may not be appropriate is that the Extreme Frisbee presents a spirit of business collaboration that mirrors a certain office picture.
At present, Extreme Frisbee is applying to enter the Olympic Arena. The Olympics require the existence of referees, extreme frisbee will not be an exception, and it is necessary to compromise the referee (who appears in other capacities) to participate in the game (which is now chosen by extreme frisbee clubs). If one day the Extreme Frisbee accepts the referee and appears on the Olympic field, it means that it has undergone a standardized transformation, completely abandoning the symbol of rebellion and joining the mainstream.
03 White-collar workers: Why Frisbee has become a cultural capital and social currency
The introduction of football and frisbee is to find the fundamental attributes of these two sports, although they belong to different cultures, but they once carried the same symbols, and there should not be such a quarrel in the Chinese field. The emergence of the dispute, first of all, shows that the extreme frisbee has become an emerging outdoor sports choice, and secondly, this dispute has nothing to do with professional sports (Chinese football has been professionalized for 30 years, and China's extreme frisbee has not yet been professionalized), mainly focusing on the people's outdoor sports choices, and the lack of public places is undoubtedly an important reason.
From a professional perspective, the urban youth group that is more receptive to Frisbee culture intersects the most with white-collar workers. According to sociologist Wright Mills, white-collar workers are dominated by professional technicians, managers, school teachers and office workers, and can also be called the "new middle class". Dividing groups by occupation is relatively simple and easy to accept. In the early definition, the middle class had political implications—between the two classes of the aristocracy and the peasantry, it was basically the middle class, referring to the rising class of citizens.
In order to avoid the conflict between concepts and reality, taking into account factors such as age, in China, we will give priority to summarizing this group as white-collar workers, which is the same as the "new middle class" in Mills' concept. Regarding the trick of "renaming", Cheng Wei, the author of the book "Middle Class Children", has discussed that the middle class has replaced the bourgeoisie, and white-collar workers are Mills's rhetorical skills:
"An attempt is made to secretly transform a set of hierarchical concepts (intellectual class and working masses, or mental and physical strength) into a set of bureaucratic concepts, so as not to create political associations. 'White-collar' and 'blue-collar' externalize or superficialize the concept of identity, and they are difficult to associate with different social classes and their class consciousness, but with colors and sweat glands. ”
Under the development of China's market economy for 30 years, new cultural forms are taking shape, and new ways of life seem to be being established. Monotonous work and the conformity between the lattice make the outdoor one of the healing methods for white-collar workers, even if the time is short, the body movement and fresh air are enough to awaken the body and mind that have been rigid because of sitting. Camping, adventure, surfing are becoming more common, and Extreme Frisbee is also entering the white-collar sports package, which takes more into account the young single men and women in the city, which not only highlights the taste of life, but also meets the social needs.
The ultimate frisbee is in the ascendant, and the specific direction needs to be observed, but what is certain is that under the call of globalized commodity aesthetics, white-collar choices are increasing - to explore, to climb rocks, to the most remote and poorest places, and the places where the footsteps are within the reach of commodity aesthetics. Unlike the colonial era and capitalist mass production, the aesthetics of commodities are blessed by pluralist values, deliberately maintaining (emphasizing) the difference between the other and the other.
The person who took the ultimate frisbee from the hippie's hand was a yuppie who transformed into a middle-class person, received the frisbee, passed out the frisbee, and noted his identity in the circle of friends, just like wearing a brand clothing. The German sociologist Zimmer once argued that our way of life is profoundly social, it is a sign of what kind of person we want to be, and it also shows what kind of person we do not want to be. We go around social circles that separate us from some and connect us to others. The French sociologist Bourdieu went on to summarize it, interpreting it as "cultural capital."
At this stage, the extreme frisbee is bound to white-collar identity, and the lack of selectivity is probably one of the reasons, after all, there are very few sports that can meet the conditions of outdoor collective sports, easy to get started, and unisex competition. Compared to footballs with more complex rules and more technical and tactical requirements, frisbee is more able to meet the requirements of high participation of white-collar workers. As China's "emerging" cultural products, extreme frisbee is also more in line with the white-collar pursuit of popular elements of the times.
Under the Large-scale Production of Ford, the aesthetics of commodities extend to the way of life, and "life should become an aesthetic project" is becoming a creed. Wolfgang Hauge, a professor of philosophy at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, said that after the subjectivization of trademarks, capital only needs to cultivate consumers. When the outdoor lifestyle becomes a language of mutual recognition among young people, capital will cultivate more people to participate in outdoor sports and participate in playing extreme frisbee. Hostility to it will continue for the time being, perhaps until the Ultimate Frisbee is no longer "emerging" and gradually integrated into public life, no longer a project of special concern to capital.
The media has incubated cultural FMCG and healthy, leisure and entertainment lifestyles, embracing and soothing anxious groups. Standing at the forefront of the era of consumption, the extreme frisbee is a spiritual fast-moving consumer goods just purchased by urban white-collar workers, and football provides spiritual catharsis for all classes. Sometimes it is inevitable to suspect that the football sport, which has not really taken root in China for decades, is full of slots, and Xu naturally vetoes the closeness of white-collar workers; The Ultimate Frisbee does not have so much burden, and almost parachutes into the city, filling the outdoor spirit of the young white-collar workers who are almost empty. If football has not brought pride to the Chinese people with china's economic rise in the past, perhaps the extreme frisbee can also accumulate a broader mass base and form a new image and proud identity.