Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 08:42:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Hooliganism and class composition


 
The classic text on football hooligans is Marsh, Rosser and Harre, "The Rules of Disorder" - written in the 1970s from a phenomenological perspective.  Obviously this is a while ago and the phenomenon has changed over time - I think we can detect an entire Foucauldian pattern of the emergence of a distinct "delinquent" group as a result of labelling and criminalisation, its differentiation from the mass of "fans" and its coalescence in the direction of microfascism, and at the same time the conversion of the "straight" fans from a working- into a middle-class cultural constituency through the re-encoding of football via the exclusion of "hooliganism", though this might just be speculation on my part.
 
Also check out an article from Black Flag a little while ago.  There's one in the latest issue on homophobia which is interesting, but I can remember an even better one not all that long ago which deals specifically with class conflict in relation to football.It'll probably be somewhere on their website:
http://flag.blackened.net/blackflag/past.htm

While you're at it, it might be worth checking out Foucault's thesis on delinquency if you haven't done so already - his basic line is that the ruling class invents the category of delinquency to divide and rule the working class, dividing it into a "criminal" section trapped in an underworld open to surveillance and infiltration and to use as strikebreakers etc., and an "honest" section which is impeded in its resistance by unwillingness to break the law - a far cry from the pervasive social banditry and widespread lawbreaking of the early capitalist period.  (though obviously it's far more complicated that the ruling class deciding to label people - it's all about constructing people through apparatuses of control and territorialisation so they actually become what the capitalists say they are, and in any case this is a knockon effect of the failure of prisons to curb deviance, but you get the drift...) - see chapter 2, "Prison Talk", in the collection "Power/Knowledge", and the
 chapter in "Discipline and Punish" dealing with delinquency.
 
Here in Derby we have something called "Derby Lunatic Fringe" which the pigs are trying very hard to smash - there was recently a prosecution of a dozen suspected members of the group for the heinous crime of... chanting the group's name as a slogan (most of them acquitted, but a sign of how repressive the state has become).  This was reported in the local paper as "hooligans let off" or some such nonsense.  Another case involved someone convicted for trying to burn down a nightclub because it had banned suspected DLF members (What do the bosses expect? - as if working-class youths could retaliate by banning the nightclub owners from workers' clubs... the violence of power-asymmetry makes the idiocy of anti-"crime" ideology blatantly obvious).
 
Keep in mind that the whole war against working-class "delinquency" is being stepped up right now... ASBO's (bills of attainder) are one of the most swingeingly anti-liberal legal-systemic changes in a long time, foreshadowing a dangerously fascistic evolution in the form of the British state, especially when we add in curfews, laws saying cops can disperse groups standing around, harassment laws, etc. - I read recently that an ASBO and several harassment injunctions have been used against animal rights protesters, which is a very dangerous precedent.  Of course this is in addition to "anti-terrorist" measures, surveillance, Civil Contingencies Bill, ID cards... I haven't formulated it clearly yet, but I think this may be a change in the role of the state - from a device of recuperation of resistance through ideological legitimation and attempts to blunt struggle, to the gauleiter of global capitalism, directly operating as an agent of gleichschaltung; liberal and social democracies
 may be becoming fascist/totalitarian a bit at a time...  (Of course, this is just an extension of tendencies which were there all along...)

By the way, I wonder if there's any truth in the story about Italian and Greek football supporters chanting songs in support of Carlo Giuliani after the Genoa protests?
 
Andy

		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th

--- StripMime Warning --  MIME attachments removed --- 
This message may have contained attachments which were removed.

Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list.

--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- 
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---