The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure: Habermas and Leisure at the End of Modernity

The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

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The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure Habermas and Leisure at the End of Modernity Karl Spracklen Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

© Karl Spracklen 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20525-3

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

Part I

9

Theory

Chapter 1

The Paradox of Leisure

11

Chapter 2

Habermas and Communicative and Instrumental Rationality

31

Chapter 3

Habermas, Globalization and Postmodernity

52

Chapter 4

Reading Habermas on Leisure

72

Part II

Research

91

Chapter 5

Applying Habermas to Sport

93

Chapter 6

Applying Habermas to Culture

115

Chapter 7

Applying Habermas to Tourism

138

Chapter 8

Conclusions

158

References

160

Index

174

vii

Acknowledgements Thanks to Imagem Music for the permission to reproduce the lyrics to ‘A Blaze in the Northern Sky’ by Darkthrone in Chapter 6. I would also like to acknowledge Ken Roberts and World Leisure Journal, for publishing part of the research and analysis underpinning Chapters 5 and 6.

viii

Introduction

Critical studies of leisure face an uncertain future as meaningful, intellectual and professional pursuits. Postmodernism and postmodernity have challenged the taken-for-granted assumptions about Gramscian hegemony underpinning much of the leisure theory that dominated the discipline twenty years ago (Rojek, 1995, 2002). Many theorists and researchers of leisure have given up the attempt to develop a coherent theory of leisure and have retreated to specialisms in sport, tourism or cultural studies (Bramham, 2006). In this book, I defend leisure as a meaningful, theoretical, framing concept; and critical studies of leisure as a worthwhile intellectual and pedagogical activity. Getting beyond concerns about the grand project of leisure, I argue that leisure theory is central to understanding wider debates about identity, postmodernity and globalization. Central to the argument of the book is the work of Jurgen Habermas and his response both to critical theorists such as Adorno and Gramsci, and postmodernists such as Derrida and Lyotard. Using Habermas’ idea of two competing intellectual frameworks or rationalities (Habermas, 1981:1984; 1981:1987), I go on to conclude that examining leisure actions can help us understand the conflicting pressures of instrumental control and individual will – and in doing this, critical studies of leisure can and should continue to play a central role in understanding society. Drawing on my own research on rugby league and black metal music, and observations about and a review of debates around authenticity and the future of tourism, I demonstrate how Habermas can help us understand the meaning and purpose of leisure. I suggest that although leisure is globalizing, the extent of the postmodern turn has been overplayed. For everyone, even in the commodified West, leisure remains a place where late modern identities are defined and defended. 1

2 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

This book is distinctive and novel as the work of Habermas has yet to be used in any consistent way to understand Leisure Studies and leisure research. In applying his work to leisure, the crises of the paradox of leisure and the end of modernity can be resolved. This book is of importance in the need to develop and mature theory in Leisure Studies and the sociology of leisure. As such, it is hoped that this book will be of interest to theorists. However, I also draw on a range of empirical research, and this research analysed in the Habermasian framework will be invaluable to other researchers in the sociology of sport, popular culture and tourism. In an age of instant gratification and soundbites, this book is divided into two clear parts – Part I on Theory, and Part II on Research – before a concluding chapter that ties the two together. These two parts are in turn divided into chapters. In this way, it is hoped that the book will be accessible to those who have an interest in tourism, say, but no interest in sport or popular culture, or leisure theory. However, the book is also designed to be read as a consilience of ideas and their application to an argument about the meaning and purpose of leisure.

The paradox of leisure The book’s first chapter sets out the historical development of Leisure Studies and the growth and crisis of leisure theory at the beginning of this century. Leisure studies as a recognizable academic discipline, with a shared theoretical framework and (perhaps) a research paradigm emerged out of the work of a number of pioneering researchers driven by an interest in leisure as something oppositional to work (Parker, 1971; Roberts, 1978). In trying to expand on this initially problematic definition of leisure, Roberts and Parker developed an epistemological and ontological position on leisure that took it to be, in essence, something to do with free action, free will, free choice. This idea of leisure as freedom is one that a number of Leisure Studies researchers, not least Roberts himself (2004), have continued to defend. On this understanding, leisure is part of a liberal capitalist industry that provides for our consumer needs, and the task of researchers, as good empiricists, is simply one of following trends and explaining them. Choices are limited by circumstance and history, but there is a trend towards greater freedom of choice in leisure, especially evident in Western, neoliberal economies. This liberal view of leisure and Leisure Studies, with its notion of freedom, is, of course, one that has suffered sustained criticism from a large number of theorists drawing from the critical well of mainstream

Introduction 3

sociology. This structural critique of leisure is built on critical studies in sociology and pessimistic ideas about the emptiness of popular culture and the invisible leash of Gramscian hegemony, but ultimately the idea of leisure as constraint, the circumstances inherited through everyday life and society that limit us, owes its origin and its intellectual survival to Marx. The emergence of a critical Leisure Studies consensus in the 1980s, and its continued existence, is evidenced by its explanatory power. In passively consuming commodified leisure, individuals are contributing to their disenfranchisement. Critical theorists do not deny the possibility that leisure choices could be made freely, but do argue that the ideological structures that shape the world make such a choice (almost?) impossible (Coalter, 2000), or at least impossible in any significant way. The paradox of leisure – as freedom, as constraint – is one that both approaches to leisure theory recognize. But all previous attempts to escape the paradox have collapsed into one discourse or the other. Leisure studies, it seems, have found themselves in an epistemological crisis. This crisis surfaced in the belated recognition of structural changes to society and culture underpinned by a shift to post-Fordist, postindustrial, postmodernity (Lyotard, 1975:1984). In response, many leisure researchers have abandoned theory for empiricism or specialism. Others, such as Rojek (1995, 2005a, 2005b), have attempted to reengage with critical sociology and shape ideas about epistemological doubt, the multiplicity of truths, and the fracturing of social structures to establish a theory of postmodern leisure, or postmodern leisure theories. While the postmodern turn has been useful in understanding the complexity and the fragility of meaning, and has brought to Leisure Studies more awareness of consumption, postmodernism itself has been the subject of a sustained, theoretical critique within Leisure Studies (Bramham, 2006). In concluding the discussion on the paradox of leisure, I return to the normative question of change at the heart of critical theory: if we are to remain committed to challenging inequality, we must remain committed to some notion of truth and justice.

Jurgen Habermas The second, third and fourth chapters introduce the work of Jurgen Habermas and draw links between his key ideas and Leisure Studies. Habermas has been very influential within European critical sociology, though his polemical attacks against postmodernism have rendered him less acceptable to critical and cultural studies in the United Kingdom

4 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

and the United States of America. Although his writings range from political science to epistemology and ethics, the fundamental Habermasian concern is to protect the project of modernity and provide a new critical approach to understanding society. For Habermas, the critical work of Adorno and Gramsci can be reconciled with liberal ideas about freedom by recognizing the tension between two irreconcilable rationalities: communicative rationality, which stems from human interaction and the free exchange of ideas (for example, through the Enlightenment); and instrumental rationality, which is a product of capitalism and the emergence of the modern nation-state. Habermas balances historiographical caution about writing metanarratives with a desire to introduce and explain the slow submergence of the lifeworld of civic society, the Enlightenment project, by non-communicative and instrumental rationalities. For Habermas, market capitalism and bureaucratic states are two products of the same instrumental rationality. Just as communicative rationality produces free, communicative action (Habermas, 1981:1984), it is these instrumental rationalities that constrain the ability of individuals to rationalize and act on anything other than commodified things: so instrumental rationality leads to instrumental action, which leads to commodified leisure and passive consumption. This chapter will explore these ideas and demonstrate how they can be used by leisure theorists and researchers. In the third chapter, Habermas’ influence on mainstream sociological theorizing about modernity is examined (Habermas, 1985:1990). Habermas argued strongly for the defence of modernity as a normative project, and suggested that postmodern attacks on truth and structure were illconceived. Habermas did not doubt that the world changed dramatically in the last century. In this chapter, I will refer to research on leisure to demonstrate the increasing commodification, globalization and hybridization of our social lives (Rojek, 2005b). However, I will use Habermas to question the extent to which this globalizing trend is a phenomenon of postmodernity. To conclude the first part of the book, I explore Habermas’ own writings to analyse his thoughts about the meaning and purpose of leisure. In exploring the way Habermas reflected on leisure to make his own social and political arguments, I will suggest that academics of leisure need to understand Habermas to make sense of their own research. This suggestion is then taken up in Part II of the book, where I apply a Habermasian lens to three areas of interest in leisure research: sport, popular culture and tourism. The content of these chapters is discussed briefly in the remainder of this introduction: the conclusions of the analyses are brought together at the end of the book.

Introduction 5

Applying Habermas to sport Kevin Hylton (2005) has recently challenged sport and leisure researchers over the paucity of critical studies on the way in which sport and leisure construct racialized identities. This chapter will take up that challenge by concentrating on analysing rugby league in England through a Habermasian lens. The sport of rugby league, like all modern sports, has changed over the last thirty years due to the pressures of commodification, globalization and the transition to postindustrial and postmodern identity formations (Denham, 2004). Previous research on rugby league has shown that the game in England is associated with an imaginary community of white, northern, working-class men (Spracklen, 1996, 2001a, 2005). This chapter examines this previous work and compares it with new primary research that explores the negotiations of belonging faced by players and fans in three places: the north of England, London and the south of England (Spracklen, 2007a), and South-West France (Spracklen and Spracklen, 2008). Using a Habermasian framework to analyse identity formation in late modernity, the chapter concludes that while there are similarities in the way in which men use rugby league to construct masculine identity, issues of exclusion and racism remain significant in the experiences of these players.

Applying Habermas to popular culture This chapter again uses my own primary research (on-line, ethnographic) about the subculture(s) of black metal (Spracklen, 2006): a globalized form of heavy metal music. Black metal owes its origins to the Norwegian scene of the early 1990s, based around the band Mayhem and its founder Euronymous. It is this scene, with its strict rules about seriousness, style, and elitism, that spawned the growth of black metal in the 1990s as an underground elite. Although the ‘second wave’ of black metal was focussed on Norway, tape-trading networks and fanzines in the underground extreme metal community (Harris, 2000) allowed the ideology and style of black metal to become globalized, albeit in a small circle of musicians and fans. Following the wave of church-burnings associated with the black metal bands in Norway, the mainstream metal press became interested in black metal as an extreme, elitist movement. Anti-Christian statements were examined and the Norwegian police started to investigate the musicians. Then Euronymous of Mayhem was found murdered and the police arrested Varg Vikernes for the crime. These crimes made headline news

6 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

across the globe, and although the initial impact on the black metal scene was negative, the long-term effect of the crimes was to make black metal attractive for young people looking for the most extreme heavy metal music. This chapter suggests that black metal can be understood as a selfreferencing community, or a more permanent neo-tribe, in which action is communicative. Black metal exists outside of traditional or modern social structures, its meaning and purpose are the subject of discourse and debate. Even the streak of nationalism and extremism associated with black metal can be seen as an example of the liberal nature of the meaning-setting discourse and action: there is no bureaucratic, hierarchical structure to remove or impose such extremism, which ironically allows such extremism to prosper without censure. Black metal’s essential nature is individualist. So individuals choose to consume black metal as a way of expressing their individuality and their ability to rise above instrumental rationalities and make informed, civilized choices about consumption and leisure. However, the chapter also suggests that black metal can be also understood as a place that reaffirms instrumental rationalities and promotes instrumental action in leisure and consumption. Black metal is part of the Westernized, commercial pop and rock music industry that has imposed itself on the rest of the world, and as such black metal reproduces the instrumental actions that govern that industry. Music is recorded and sold. Small labels and specialized shops and websites cater and foster demand for commercial products. People make a living from black metal. The most successful black metal bands are booked by professional agencies to undertake tours in venues owned by multinational corporations. More obscure black metal bands send out press releases, establish websites, upload music files. Rather than being truly democratic, communal and liberal, it will be argued that black metal is governed by instrumental rationalities associated with the music business, and by ideologies of elitism that owe their origin to nationalist debates in European nation-states going through the phase of late capitalism (Habermas, 1985:1990).

Applying Habermas to tourism This final research chapter uses the Habermasian framework of the previous two chapters to explore and analyse published research on tourism, one of the areas of Leisure Studies that has seen a massive growth in interest and disciplinary boundary formation. Of particular

Introduction 7

interest is the globalization and commodification of tourism, and the communicative backlash to these trends typified by the search for authenticity. I discuss a number of examples of this search for authenticity drawing on my own reflections and a number of case studies drawn from the literature. I conclude that debates about authenticity can be understood as communicative debates in opposition to the instrumentality of the commodified, corporate tourist industry.

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Part I Theory

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1 The Paradox of Leisure

Preamble: On the nature of theory The application of theory to research poses a number of problems. If we can define theory to mean, in a common-sensical way, an idea that attempts to shed some light on a research phenomenon, then we can (ideally) describe data (taken singularly) as either the phenomenon itself (data = reality), or an interpretation of that phenomenon (Craib, 1992). Generally, theory is seen as the brainwork and the data that is related to that theory comes from the research. In the sociological case, such data is presented in the form of interviews, observations and statistics. Yet the relationship between theory and data is not as simple as it first appears. One argument is that theory must be explanatory (Friedman, 1974; Lipton, 1991). A theory must be able to explain the data, not just describe it. It is not enough to present the data, one must also say what the data is. What this entails is the traditional, scientific approach, which suggests hypotheses taken from theory are tested by the field (Hempel, 1966). In essence, the field becomes a site for proving or disproving (Popper, 1968) theories. This approach has a number of flaws, especially when applied to sociology (Winch, 1958). It assumes a scientific method actually exists, though a definition of what that is has proved elusive to philosophers and sociologists of science (Feyerabend, 1975; Latour, 1987; Lipton, 1991). It ignores problems of objectivity, representation and truth correspondence (Hesse, 1980), such as the problem that any one set of data can be explained by a number of opposing hypotheses, with no way of deciding between them without recourse to inductive logic (Chalmers, 1982). Another approach suggests that the researcher enters the field without any preconceptions, and listens to the field without prejudice. 11

12 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

From the data collected, the researcher sees patterns that form ideas, which are supported by further fieldwork (Ely, 1991). This method forms the basis of naturalistic paradigms, and this position of theoretical production is known as grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). However, the assumption that anyone can enter the field without any preconceptions is untenable. We have all gone through a system that has enculturated us with mental tools of reckoning, language and perceptions that are all laden with theory (Latour, 1987). This book, even in its introductory chapter, has used already a wealth of theoretical language with no apology or qualification, as it belongs to the tacit knowledge we share (Bloor, 1974; Collins, 1985; Simons, 1989). In addition, and perhaps despairingly, it can be argued that all data is theory laden (Kuhn, 1977; Chalmers, 1982). Schaffer (1989) describes the role of Isaac Newton’s hegemony and self-interest in early modern natural philosophy in ensuring Newton’s optical data was accepted as ‘true’. What counted for Newton was that the optical data conformed to his larger theoretical framework, and data that did not conform challenged this framework. Hence, when he became President of the Royal Society, it became a matter of defining good results and good apparatus (that is, what was real) as those that supported Isaac Newton. What is important in Schaffer’s work is that data that is still used now (the data that helped design my spectacles) is not only theory laden, but shaped by theory. Harry Collins (1985) has also shown that theory plays a large role in shaping and describing data. So the idea that we approach data without any theoretical assumptions is erroneous – it is unrealistic and elitist of us to expect we can shake off our preconceptions and indeed our cultural background (Thomas, 1979; Baudrillard, 1988), though some would claim to try (Gellner, 1985). My solution is pragmatic, and attempts to avoid the pitfalls of philosophy. I am creating language from the field, but at the same time I am working in a particular ‘language-game’ (Wittgenstein, 1968) that has a corpus of theories at its base. As Fleck showed (1935:1979) many years before Kuhn repeated the observation (1962), the production of facts and knowledge in academic enterprise is fostered by ‘thought collectives’ in which individuals operate in a particular normal paradigm (Kuhn, 1962). Some theories are givens, they are accepted as facts (such as logic, though see Woolgar, 1989), while others are contested (structure versus agency, truth correspondence, and so on). I write in the language of the thought collective of critical sociology, of Leisure Studies, so I communicate with others who share the game.

The Paradox of Leisure 13

Introduction Discussing the meaning of leisure with first-year Leisure Studies students is an interesting exercise. Most students, of course, will fall back on their own experiences of leisure, so leisure is defined as watching football, or playing football, or (if you are lucky) playing computer games or listening to music. For the majority of students in any one initial class, leisure is something they instinctively understand as an activity that they choose to do, a sport or something popular or cultural, ‘because I like it’. As with the common-sense use of the word leisure, these students will see leisure as something essentially free of compulsion. Having to come to university to learn about leisure trends may be something they feel obliged or compelled to do; but watching football on a big screen in a bar is something they feel they choose to do. If a student has come to university with previous learning in the discipline of Leisure Studies, then they will be cautious about giving one particular meaning to leisure. They will recognize that leisure has a number of meanings. The brighter students will have read in their sixth-form studies some extract from Understanding Leisure (Haywood et al., 1989:1995), perhaps, and will try to articulate the argument that leisure is something of a confidence trick: we think we are making free choices about our leisure lives, but those choices are constrained by a ‘core set’ of structures in wider society. Perhaps a few students will then challenge this argument, by suggesting the world as they see it is different to that represented by Haywood and his co-authors (after all, for the average student going straight from school to university, Haywood’s text is pre-history): today’s world, they might say, is less classbound, more global, less misogynistic, more free. The arc of debate in a first-year class about the meaning of leisure is reflected in the growth and development of leisure theory and the discipline or field of Leisure Studies. Within the student discussion there are three ontologies of leisure: leisure as free choice in a world where leisure is defined by choice against other areas of life that are structured (for example, work); leisure as structurally-constrained choice (or no choice); and leisure as a completely free choice in a world where structures are breaking down altogether. These three ontologies are directly related to three epistemologies of critical studies of leisure, associated with the history of Leisure Studies as an intellectual study: liberal theories of leisure as freedom; structuralist theories of leisure as a (re)producer of social structures and unequal power relations; and postmodern theories of leisure (along with poststructural theories of

14 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

postmodern leisure). As Leisure Studies has developed, then, it has changed its epistemological focus according to prevailing debates in mainstream sociology about structures and (post)modernity. And in changing the epistemological focus, the ontological status of leisure has changed, to such an extent that the post-Marxist paradigm of ‘Leisure Studies’ no longer seems a coherent project. Critical studies of leisure face an uncertain future as meaningful, intellectual and professional pursuits. Postmodernism and postmodernity have challenged the takenfor-granted assumptions about Gramscian hegemony that underpinned much of the leisure theory that dominated the discipline twenty years ago (Rojek, 2002). Many theorists and researchers of leisure have given up the attempt to develop a coherent theory of leisure and have retreated to specialisms in sport, tourism or cultural studies (Bramham, 2006). As suggested in the introduction of this book, Leisure Studies as a recognizable academic discipline or field, with a shared theoretical framework and (perhaps) a research paradigm emerged out of the work of a number of pioneering researchers driven by an interest in leisure as something oppositional to work (Parker, 1971; Roberts, 1978). In trying to expand on this initially problematic definition of leisure, Roberts and Parker developed an epistemological and ontological position on leisure that took it to be, in essence, something to do with free action, free will, free choice. This idea of leisure as freedom is one that a number of Leisure Studies researchers, not least Roberts himself (1999, 2000, 2004), have continued to defend. Ultimately, leisure and studies of it are to be predicated on a notion of a freedom to act sketched out by John Stuart Mill: The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he [sic] is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. (Mill, 1859:1998, p. 14) On this understanding, leisure is part of a liberal capitalist industry that provides for our consumer needs (Bacon, 1997), and the task of researchers, as good empiricists, is simply one of following trends and explaining them. Choices are limited by circumstance and history, but there is a trend towards greater freedom of choice in leisure, especially evident in Western, neo-liberal economies (Roberts, 1999). Those choices are rational in both the classically economic and the Weberian sense. The discourse of leisure seen from this theoretical perspective is, historically, the discourse that most people in the past understood. By taking a

The Paradox of Leisure 15

liberal position on leisure, it becomes possible to understand the meaning of leisure in, for example, seventeenth century Protestant fears of idleness (Weber, 1930:1992). This liberal view of leisure and Leisure Studies, with its notion of freedom, is, of course, one that has suffered sustained criticism from a large number of theorists drawing from the critical well of mainstream sociology. For researchers such as Clarke and Critcher (1985) and, in this century, Sugden and Tomlinson (2002), leisure is best understood as a place or activity, or structure, that constrains the working classes and other social groups. Others have explored the way in which leisure constructs and (re)creates inequalities of gender (Watson and Scraton, 2001), sexuality (Caudwell, 1999) and ‘race’ and ethnicity (Carrington and McDonald, 2001). Feminism, in particular, provided and continues to provide a crucial resource for critical studies of leisure, with radical feminist researchers providing systematic criticisms of the way in which women’s leisure had been marginalized in society and in Leisure Studies themselves (Henderson, Presley and Bialeschki, 2004; Henderson, 2006). This structural critique of leisure is built on critical studies in sociology and pessimistic ideas about the emptiness of popular culture (Adorno, 1991) and the invisible leash of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), but ultimately the idea of leisure as constraint, the circumstances inherited through everyday life and society that limit us, owes its origin and its intellectual survival to Marx: Men [sic] make their own history, but not of their own free will… but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. (Marx, 1852:2004, p. 85) The emergence of a critical Leisure Studies consensus in the 1980s, and its continued existence, is evidenced by its explanatory power. In passively consuming commodified leisure, individuals are contributing to their disenfranchisement. Critical theorists do not deny the possibility that leisure choices could be made freely, but do argue that the ideological structures that shape the world make such a choice (almost?) impossible (Coalter, 2000), or at least impossible in any significant way (Clarke and Critcher, 1985). The paradox of leisure – as freedom, as constraint – is one that both approaches to leisure theory recognize (Coalter, 1989). But all previous attempts to escape the paradox have collapsed into one discourse or the other. Leisure Studies, it seems, have found themselves in an

16 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

epistemological crisis. This crisis surfaced in the belated recognition of structural changes to society and culture underpinned by a shift to post-Fordist, postindustrial, postmodernity (Lyotard, 1975:1984). This shift in turn is related to wider globalizing trends in politics, trade, and culture. Globalization as a process is a direct effect of increasing commodification and homogenization of culture, and the commercialization of everyday life. Globalization itself is claimed by Giddens (1991) and Bauman (2000) as one symptom of a shift to the postmodern in the (current) late or fluid state of modernity, indicating close affiliations with the basis of postmodernism. Some writers see in globalization an exchange of ideas, values and identities: the hybrid world of multiple identities (Kraidy, 2005). In political and cultural studies discourses, however, globalization is identified as a whirlwind for American values (Appadurai, 1996), leading to claims by Ritzer (2004) that the empty, homogenous values of McDonaldization are becoming de facto the norm for the world of work (and leisure) far removed from Kansas. In the brave new world of globalization, the modernist paradigms of national, class and gender structures are swept away by the hegemonic values of a postmodern free-for-all (Bauman, 2000). For leisure theorists, the evidence accumulating in the 1990s for globalization was evidence for the societal change to postmodernity (Rojek, 1995). But if the world was becoming postmodern, and social structures were being swept away, what then of critical studies of leisure? In response to the challenge of globalization and the shift to postmodernity, many leisure researchers abandoned theory for empiricism or specialism in subjects such as the sociology of sport, cultural and media studies, and the economics of tourism. Others, such as Rojek (1995), have attempted to reengage with critical sociology and shape ideas about epistemological doubt, the multiplicity of truths, and the fracturing of social structures (Harvey, 1989; Lash, 1990; Featherstone, 1991) to establish a theory of postmodern leisure, or postmodern leisure theories. While the postmodern turn has been useful in understanding the complexity and the fragility of meaning, and has brought to Leisure Studies more awareness of consumption, postmodernism itself has been the subject of a sustained, theoretical critique within Leisure Studies (Blackshaw, 2003). Critical leisure theorists such as Long and Hylton (2002) return to the normative question of change: if we are to remain committed to challenging inequality, we must remain committed to some notion of truth and justice. However, some leisure theorists have questioned the very existence of a coherent, critical paradigm of Leisure Studies: in the 25th Anniversary issue of Leisure Studies, Peter Bramham (2006, p. 388)

The Paradox of Leisure 17

suggested that the leisure project ‘has been re-routed by changes in economic, political, cultural and social formations of modernity’, not least the fragmentation of traditional Leisure Studies courses and increasing specialisms in leisure research (and teaching) around sport, tourism and the media. For Bramham, as for Henderson (2006) in the same issue, the postmodern challenge may have been routed by sustaining a critical, normative narrative of leisure, but the shift to postmodernity only brings the paradox of leisure into sharper focus. In the rest of this chapter I want to examine four ways in which leisure theorists have drawn upon the work of mainstream social theorists to try to articulate a resolution of the paradox of leisure. Gramsci, as already mentioned, has dominated thinking in leisure over the last twenty years or so. But other theorists have been influential to a greater or lesser degree; specifically, Norbert Elias distilled through Chris Rojek, and, in the last ten years, Pierre Bourdieu. Before I come to the influence of Gramsci, Elias and Bourdieu, however, it is important to begin with the work of Ken Roberts, as it draws on the work of Weber.

Ken Roberts – leisure is freedom Ken Roberts’ answer to the paradox of leisure is simply to reaffirm his previous position: leisure is something we do in/with our free time. In his later, more globalization-sensitive work, Roberts has recognized the blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure (Roberts, 2001, 2004, 2007). He has also accepted that the world has become increasingly globalized and commodified, and that this has changed the way in which some leisure activities – such as watching a local football team – might have changed into something that is less bounded by the structures of modernity – such as the global reach of a brand like Manchester United and the international membership of its supporters’ clubs. However, these societal shifts do not make Roberts abandon the idea of leisure of freedom; nor does he enter into a Gramscian despair about the evils of capitalism. Rather, Roberts embraces the commercialization of leisure as a fact of our lives, and welcomes the increase in leisure opportunities such commercialization brings. In his student textbook The Leisure Industries, for instance, after providing information about the net increase in consumer spending on leisure, Roberts (2004, p. 2) introduces his current position as follows: Leisure’s role in people’s lives is not purely economic. Leisure has important social, psychological and cultural dimensions. As leisure’s

18 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

share of the economy grows, so does its role in people’s everyday lives. So the balance tilts from life being work- and productioncentred to becoming leisure- or consumption-centred… The leisure industries do not supply just goods and services. They also market desires, and enable consumers to be recognised as – and to feel like – particular kinds of people as a result of what they wear, eat, drink, what they listen to and watch, and where they are seen and who they are seen with. So for Roberts there is no paradox: the market economy of leisure provides opportunities, albeit in a social context that limits some people’s freedom to choose, and leisure remains the thing we do when we are not working. The crisis of the end of modernity is in fact an opportunity for the leisure market to drive the economy: all things come to the choice of individuals, and their desires create the leisure industries we see today of spectator sports, beach tourism, fast food and pop music. But other people have different desires, so the leisure industries adapt to provide other choices: fitness centres and gyms, adventure holidays, authentic slow food and global roots music. The examples are as endless as the iterations of taste; the choices limited only by economic power and social context. So Roberts is able to criticize the leisure industries for failing to provide the right opportunities and choices for women (ibid.); but is also able to argue that women with economic power can shape their leisure choices to better suit themselves as women, as individuals, and consumers. For Roberts, the notion of the rational actor, free of constraint making free choice, is fundamental; but he is also aware of the importance of the State or other non-commercial sectors in protecting and creating leisure choices that may well be uneconomic in simple monetary terms. As he puts it (Roberts, 2004, p. 7), his book on the leisure industries ‘stakes out a third way in leisure… here the market is unfettered, more or less envisaged by the libertarian right… Commerce is restricted only in so far as some territory is occupied by the public and voluntary sectors. Otherwise markets are liberated.’ Roberts’ ontological view of leisure as free choice, as well as his epistemological position on exploring the nature of leisure through empirical observation of our choices, owes a debt to the theoretical framework of Max Weber, which in turn influenced functionalist theories on the sociology of work developed by Talcott Parsons (1964). Parsons, in fact, was the person who popularized the work of Weber when he translated the latter’s key texts into English. Weber argued that social relationships were caused by things other than the relationship between labour

The Paradox of Leisure 19

and capital, bosses and workers (Weber, 1964). He also argued that modernity was an era of rationality: the establishment of large bureaucracies, factory assembly lines, scientific certainty, and the application of all this to the division of our everyday lives into work and leisure. This Weberian framework was not only hugely influential on Parsons, but also on Roberts and the first generation of leisure theorists. Leisure is not work; leisure is rationalized; leisure is free choice. In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the importance of work in Western capitalism was a result of concerns within protestant Christianity about predestination and good works (Weber, 1930:1992). Protestantism was a sixteenth century reaction against the corruption of the Catholic Church and an attempt to reform liturgical and theological practice (hence the Reformation). The work of reformers such as Calvin influenced Puritans in England in the seventeenth century. Calvin believed that a person’s fate after death was predetermined: that is, a person could not do anything to influence God’s decision. For Calvin and the Puritans, only an Elect few would be saved. But how would you know if you were one of the Elect? Puritans in England believed that the Elect could be identified by their diligence and hard work in this life. Predestination became something that could be demonstrated through diligence and rectitude, through making the right moral noises and shows. The inward grace of the Catholic Church was replaced by the good judgement of one’s neighbours. If one had free time, then one spent it doing something edifying, something outwardly moral. Weber said that capitalism and Industrialization had happened first in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this was because the Puritan ‘work-ethic’ had become a part of English culture. It was this, said Weber, that enshrined the importance of work in modern life. The importance of good work concerns the after-life: it is no surprise, then, that Roberts sees in leisure choices some way of distinguishing uneconomical but moral leisure industries, the (important therefore subsidized) work of the public librarian as opposed to the market-driven, bottom-line accounting of a multimedia entertainment corporation.

Peter Bramham and the Gramscians – leisure is not free The Gramscian solution to the paradox of leisure, exemplified by the theoretical work of Peter Bramham, is to argue that although some people – the well-off, the middle and upper classes, white people, men – may have some agency and freedom to choose their leisure, the working classes and other marginalized and disempowered social groups are

20 The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure

denied that freedom (Bramham, 2006). Furthermore, the hegemonic status of power at the end of modernity suggests that leisure, in its commodified state, is a way in which the ruling classes keep the working classes ignorant of their oppression (Carrington and McDonald, 2008). For example, while earlier theorists such as Veblen criticized sport for being savage, Theodor Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School drew parallels with religion as described by Marx, the oft cited ‘opium of the masses’, as being a vehicle for the suppression of the masses by totalitarian states. As Adorno saw it, Modern sports… seek to restore to the body some of the functions of which the machine has deprived it. But they do so only in order to train men [sic] all the more inexorably to serve the machine. Hence sports belong to the realm of unfreedom, no matter where they are organized. (Adorno, 1967, p. 81) This view of leisure as the diversion of the masses is, of course, an old one. Juvenal, the Roman satirist, wrote that the people of Rome in his day were happy to be given dole (bread) and entertainment (circuses) as diversions from engaging in political debate: … iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses. … (Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81, in Braund, 2004) Of course, the Gramscian account of leisure has been criticized for failing to take into account the condition of postmodernity. The weakness of defining class through looking at and categorizing occupation has been commented on by a number of theorists (Drudy, 1991; Scase, 1992; Scott, 1994). Changing employment patterns brought about by a shift to a postindustrial society (Bell, 1973; Lyon, 1986) have seen a rise in the number of traditionally white collar, lower middle-class jobs in insurance, banking, and other clerical and service professions. However, it is clear that this new class of workers – those who, in the United Kingdom at least, are classified as C1s – share a similar heritage and culture to the traditional working class (Roberts, 2001). The miner’s daughter is now an insurance clerk, the miner’s son is now a bank

The Paradox of Leisure 21

cashier. So although it is true to say the occupations traditionally associated with the working class are in decline, and that the postmodern society has created a wealthy consumer class where hamburgers and Hollywood films (‘movies’) are devoured by all (Featherstone, 1991), there is still a class divide between the ruling class, a managerial bourgeois class, and a working class that is denied control in the workplace and which still does the work. Now, however, that work is more likely to be inputting data on policy claims rather than riveting steel. To summarize, there is still in all Western countries a class system, and still a working-class consciousness (Roberts, 2001), even though the definitions and boundaries of what traditionally constituted those classes have changed. The relationship between the working class and the dominant class can be seen as a hegemonic struggle (Bocock, 1988). There is a power relationship that tries to infer the ideology of the dominant class on the ruling classes. The transfer of sport and the ethos of Victorian amateurism onto the subjected classes (Mangan, 1988) is seen in the development of Imperial hegemony in Wales through the spread of rugby union, and the popularity of cricket in the Caribbean. Sport and leisure played a powerful role in creating and maintaining the Imperial hegemony by distilling the culture of the ruling amongst the ruled (Stoddart, 1987). Hegemony theory, which owes its popularity to the publishing of the works of Gramsci (1971) – who elaborated at length on the difference between the dominance of a ruling class and complete cultural hegemony of the ruling culture throughout the ruling and the ruled – has been criticized in its application to leisure and sport studies. MacAloon (1992) sees the centrality of hegemony theory as being detrimental to what he sees as class-obsessed British cultural studies. He suggests that issues of hegemony detract from wider, global issues, of the felt experience of people in sport, and this makes cultural studies ethnocentric. In response, Hargreaves and Tomlinson (1992) say that the concept of hegemony, when applied to the analysis of structures in sport, emphasizes both class and cultural practices. As Gruneau (1983) and Ingham and Hardy (1993) claim, sport does not necessarily have to be a medium for the hegemony of the values of the ruling class. It can, Gruneau claims, be a medium for counter-hegemonic resistance, where the ruled react against hegemony and try and overcome imposed cultural values. Both Jarvie (2006) and John Hargreaves (1986) explore this role of sport in challenging as well as maintaining hegemony. Morgan (1994), in a response to Hargreaves and Tomlinson (1992), suggests that cultural practices may be distinguished by semiotic differences – identified by

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distinctions between the meaning of signs – not just class. Hence, hegemonic relationships can occur between any dominant-dominated twin, anywhere where there is a power relationship. Williams (1977, 1981) develops the concepts of hegemony and culture in great detail. In Marxism and Literature (Williams, 1977) he develops a trifold relationship of culture. By culture it is taken to mean the cultural and ideological practices that pertain to a particular social group. At any one time hegemony produces a dominant culture, the culture which in contemporary society is taken as the template for good modes of behaviour and ideas. This is the ‘culture’ to which sections named so in newspapers refer to, things that are seen to have good aesthetic, intellectual and social power, such as classical music, literature, theatre, and so on (Williams, 1981). However, the hegemonic relationship means that this dominant culture is dominant throughout all levels of society, so how can there be anything else cultural? Williams (1977) responds to this challenge by stating that – in opposition to the dominant – there will be cultural forms that are residual forms from the past, or emergent forms that may eventually challenge the hegemony. Hence there are three power relationships, and culture can be represented as a contested dynamic. This concept can be and has been applied to sport (Ingham and Hardy, 1993). Donnelly and Young (1985) use the idea of the dominant and residual to explain why modes of behaviour associated with rugby union in this country before the professionalization identified by Dunning and Sheard (1979) became attached to the sport in North America. The idea of the residual-dominant-emergent can be used to explore the tensions within an imaginary community where sport and leisure define belonging and are defined by history (Spracklen and Spracklen, 2008). That said, there are problems with the concept of hegemony as it is applied, as nearly always it is taken that complete hegemony has not occurred, and some form of resistance is in process. Foucault (1972, 1980) suggests that what is important when exploring power relationships is the actual distribution of power, which is never concentrated on one group. So there is a constant interplay between sites of power, not a process of domination-hegemony that unequal power relationships imply. Hence, what Williams (1977) is describing would be an idealistic impression of the complexities of the centredless distribution of power. It is in this way, drawing on Gramsci filtered through Williams and Williams’ student Stuart Hall (1993), that Peter Bramham has developed a sustained paradigm of leisure as unfreedom (Bramham, 2006). Bramham’s sophisticated understanding of the end of modernity and the impact of

The Paradox of Leisure 23

globalization and postmodernism on leisure allows him to capture the dilemma between older meanings and new usages, though ultimately couched in a critically real epistemological view of class. As such, there is a pessimism about Bramham’s work: the project of leisure as an emancipatory tool is a failure, and while some lucky people choose to go walking or watch a play, agency is a chimera, and the steady hand of Adorno ensures that the rest of us eat at Subway and cheer on our sports teams.

Chris Rojek and Nobert Elias Theories on the significance of leisure and sport socially and culturally could, until recently, be categorized as the ‘Leicester School’ and everything else. The Leicester School meant figurational sociology, and the work of Nobert Elias. The figuration, briefly, is described as a set of interdependencies connecting individuals, a dynamic structure whose centres of activity are in flux (Elias, 1978, 1982; Elias and Dunning, 1986). As used by Elias, the figuration becomes a dynamic network that subsumes the structure-agency debate surrounding sociological metatheory (see also Urry, 1982; Smith and Turner, 1986; Cohen, 1989), without giving up the modernist desire of scientificity (Winch, 1958) to postmodern ideas about localized discourses (Foucault, 1970, 1972; Baudrillard, 1988). The concept of the figuration has as its dynamic the metatheory of the civilizing process (Elias, 1978, 1982), which suggests that there is some progression through time of society, towards more civilized modes of behaviour. Organized sport becomes in the eyes of Elias and the Leicester School a site for the validation and confirmation of this metatheory. Rather than being a tool of oppression, as Adorno claims, organized sport is seen as a sign of civilized behaviour, a form of life where the natural violence of humanity is first controlled, then replaced with mimetic violence (Elias and Dunning, 1986). According to the figurationalists, the history of sport shows a marked aversion to violence, and an increase in the codification of individual sports, which is evidence for the existence of the civilizing process. The dogmatic fighting between the supporters and critics of figurational sociology became fierce in the last decades of the twentieth century, when both Gramscians and figurationalists attempted to dominate the intellectual development of leisure theory (Horne and Jary, 1987; Jary, 1987; Dunning and Rojek, 1992; Jary and Horne, 1994). Figurational sociology is very much a modernist paradigm, influenced by concepts of realism and theory testing developed out of the Vienna Circle

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and logical positivism (for example, Carnap, 1962), in the same way Popperian falsification owes the Vienna Circle a debt (Popper, 1968). The civilizing process is a progressivist account of society and society’s history. Historiographers have warned of the dangers of making present-as-better judgements on the past, where history is written as a neat preface to the present, or a time just in the near future (Butterfield, 1931:1968). Such accounts have led to misrepresentations and omissions, as the writer attempts to draw a picture of historical progression which justifies acts and issues in the present: classic examples would be the historicism of Marx’s metanarrative and Weber’s account of the progression of capitalism. Less radically, progressivist accounts such as the civilizing process just do not explain the richness and diversity of human thought and action, and often assume an ethnocentric history that makes the cultural and economic structures of the modern West an inevitable conclusion to History (see Fukuyama, 1992). Horne and Jary (1987) claimed that, at best, figurational sociology was merely good sociology – historical sensitivity, awareness of processes and human agency in larger structures – that did not need to be distinguished from the rest of the field. Certainly, figurationalists have produced some insightful and influential work, such as Eric Dunning’s discussions on masculinity and sport (Sheard and Dunning, 1973; Dunning, 1986). Horne and Jary criticized figurationalism for what they saw as latent functionalism (Parsons, 1964), parochialism within the theoretical domain and the seeming lack of class and gender analysis in figurational accounts. They also pointed to the claims made by Elias that although the civilizing process is directional, it can suffer regressions. This clause in the metatheory seemed to be an afterthought, designed to explain the violence of football hooligans, behaviour which the figurationalists had focussed on in an attempt to both explain the problem through the use of the civilizing process and prove the metatheory (Dunning et al., 1982). Responding to Horne and Jary’s criticisms, Dunning (1994) suggested that the idea that figurationalism is a unique paradigm was not made by figurationalists themselves, though he reasserted its importance as a crucial idea in the sociology of sport and leisure. Its uniqueness, he argued, was due precisely to the civilizing process and the methodological idea of ‘involvement and detachment’. That is, figurationalism allowed both a sympathetic understanding of the field, and scientific objectivity. Figurationalist had made the claim that their critics did not understand the subtleties of their method and the civilizing process (Elias and Dunning, 1986). However, they are – although they may not

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explicitly describe it this way – trying to build a paradigm to challenge the existing normal sociology in a Kuhnian revolution (1962). The debate has moved on. Jary and Horne (1994) reiterate their misgivings about the civilizing approach and the uniqueness of the approach, and criticize the emphasis on the control of violence. It is clear that the rigorous Eliasian is under threat as the metatheory is continually challenged, though the dismissal of the civilizing process does not mean figurationalism per se is bad. The idea of researching historical sociology and following processes is valuable (Scambler, 2005). And the concept of the figuration itself, of a network in flux with a shifting power base, is reminiscent of Foucault’s description of power relationships (1980). Chris Rojek started out as a figurationalist, working with Eric Dunning on key work defending figurationalism and attacking neo-Marxist accounts of sport and leisure (Dunning and Rojek, 1992). As previously mentioned, in the early 1990s Rojek made a significant theoretical shift in his own intellectual position by embracing postmodernism. He criticized sociologists of leisure and sport for failing to recognize three things: that society (or at least, society in the developed world) had become postmodern (the end of class, the dissolution of structures in the face of homogenization); that leisure had become postmodern in appearance (the rise of lifestyle sports, neo-tribes, virtuality); and that positivist truths about theory had been rendered insecure due to epistemological uncertainties (there is no hegemonic or figurational structure underpinning everything). In three books (Rojek, 1993, 1995, 2000) and two papers (Rojek, 2001, 2002), he detailed postmodern leisure in a postmodern society, while being careful to abandon the certainties of Dunning and the neo-Marxists. But he later drew back from postmodernism, and in Leisure Theory (Rojek, 2005b) and a paper in Leisure Studies (Rojek, 2005a), he has attempted to sketch a theory of leisure that recognizes postmodern trends in leisure and society, but which also allows for practical, empirical research questions to be answered confidently. The theory (or approach, to use his cautious terminology) of leisure he proposes, Action Theory, is a return to figurationalism’s methodological rigour and metaphysical scepticism about structures. Rojek attempts to provide a way out of the paradox of leisure by returning to agency: we build our leisure lives, we shape the world around us, but with the limitations of the tools provided to us. As he argues: the Action approach has no truck with essentialist perspectives that explore leisure as the reflection of, as it were, ‘God-given’ individual

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freedom and choice. Nor does it support approaches that investigate leisure actors as dumb ‘bearers’ of structural forces of class, gender and race. Competence and knowledge are always assumed to be preconditions of action. Equally, the mobilization of these resources are always understood to be conditioned and patterned. (Rojek, 2005b, pp. 12–13) For Rojek, then, there is a difference between the active citizen playing sport or acting in an amateur drama, and the passive consumer of leisure watching football on the television with a beer in one hand and the remote control in the other. Leisure has become postmodern, and the structures of modernity have (on the whole, though not quite totally) dissolved. What separates the active citizen and the passive consumer is knowledge, upbringing and the motivation to transcend commodification and consumption through agency. So for Rojek, there is good and bad leisure: that which is good is defined as the sort that gives power and agency to individuals, that which instructs them in being good citizens. Rojek’s ideal of leisure is locally organized, worthy activities such as walking and cycling (the cover of Leisure Theory, is a reminder of the Clarion Clubs of Edwardian socialism, shows a bike in open countryside, in the winter, with hills on the horizon). In this sense, Rojek has returned to the civilizing process by contrasting active leisure associated with middleclass norms and values (self-improvement, healthy living, morality) with the passive consumption of the ignorant, docile masses. In this, as well as Nobert Elias, Rojek is seemingly in debt to David Putnam’s idea of social capital (Putnam, 2000), which in turn can be followed back to Pierre Bourdieu.

Applying mainstream social theory to Leisure Studies: the influence of Bourdieu The work of Pierre Bourdieu has been very influential in sociology, even though (or perhaps because) the nature and meaning of his ideas has been questioned (Calhoun, et al., 1993; Robbins, 1999; Shusterman, 1999). At the heart of his work is a concern with understanding the relationship between freedom and constraint, between our self-categorization and the categories in which we are limited. For Bourdieu, class was an obvious research category to be investigated, and in Distinction, his exploration of the meaning and function of taste, cultural preference is seen as both the product and the producer of class, or status, or what Bourdieu describes as habitus (Bourdieu, 1979:1986, pp. 101–102). The

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mechanism through which taste is linked to status is through the acquisition of cultural capital: knowledge of what constitutes appropriate taste (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Cultural capital, in this sense, is analogous to economic capital, but cultural capital is accrued and applied in particular fields of human life. So, in Distinction, we see Bourdieu describing the ways in which different classes accrue cultural capital through the material and activities of different sports in the sporting field: Thus it can be seen that economic barriers – however great they may be in the case of golf, skiing, sailing or even riding and tennis – are not sufficient to explain the class distribution of these activities. There are more hidden requirements, such as family tradition and early training, or the obligatory manner (of dress and behaviour), and socializing techniques, which keep these sports closed to the working class. (Bourdieu, 1979:1986, p. 217) Cultural capital is not the only capital that Bourdieu recognizes as operating in these different fields. He also suggests that individuals in these particular fields gain power (freedoms) and acceptance (belonging) through the acquisition of social and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu (1991, pp. 229–231), if cultural capital is legitimate knowledge (for example, knowing which knife and fork to use at a formal dinner), then social capital describes the valued relations with others in the field (for example, being a member of a formal dining club through attending the same public school as the club’s chairman). Again, social capital is analogous to economic capital in the sense that individuals accrue contacts and relations as if they were turning cash into assets. However, social capital, like cultural capital, accrues in the field in which it is situated. For Bourdieu, leisure, sport and tourism are clearly important activities. It is no surprise, then, to see Bourdieu’s voluminous works being picked over by empiricists and theorists, Weberians and Marxists, postmodernists and realists, all seeking to claim Bourdieu as one of their own (Jenkins, 2002). In the sociology of sport in particular, a number of post-Marxist theorists such as Alan Tomlinson (Tomlinson, 2004) have championed Bourdieu’s work as a way of protecting critical realism (the ability to say something purposeful and normative about sport) and resolving problems around structure and agency (whether sport is a liberation from oppression or part of the system of oppression). In wider cultural studies, the notion of habitus and the connection with

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cultural capital has allowed researchers in various (post)modern subcultures (such as those like Bennett (2001) interested in popular music and youth identities) to explore identity, connectivity and rules of behaviour. In the period reviewed in my own research paper (Spracklen, 2007b), the journal Leisure Studies published 177 papers. Of these, 48 papers used the phrase ‘social capital’ at least once in the text, and 44 used the phrase ‘cultural capital’ at least once in the text. The number of papers that used both phrases at least once in the text was 42: six papers that discussed social capital did not mention cultural capital at all and one paper mentioned cultural capital without referring to social capital. Taking the 42 papers that refer to both phrases, we can assume that this usage is not an accident of an author referring to social capital and cultural capital quite by chance. Approximately a quarter of the papers in this review of Leisure Studies, then, draw on the work of Bourdieu to inform (in parts) their critical analysis. Interestingly only 17 papers refer to Bourdieu in the text, and two of these papers use his work in ways that do not mention cultural or social capital at all. So in other words only 15 of the 42 papers that do use the two phrases (less than one-third) deign to mention Bourdieu. Turning to Spracklen’s (2007b) review of titles, abstracts and key words, only six papers out of the 177 published mention the phrase ‘social capital’ in these significant areas. Three of these also refer to ‘cultural capital’ (Blackshaw and Long, 2005; Drew, 2005; Urquia, 2005), and one paper that does not mention social capital does mention cultural capital in the abstract. The six key papers that mention social capital in these significant areas, on further reading, have a clear analytical focus on the accumulation of such capital in and/or through sport and/or leisure. Ravenscroft (1998) can be read as an exemplar discussion of social capital in leisure in the first wave of research using the idea of social capital, and Jones and Symon (2001) and Arai and Pedlar (2003) seem to be harbingers of the second wave of research. Two of the six papers belong to a special issue on popular music: Urquia (2005) limits the use of social capital to the interpretation of salsa lessons and salsa nights in London (i.e. seeing salsa as part of an ethnicized neo-tribe) and Drew (2005) follows a similarly cautious path in examining the interaction between capital, structure (class) and karaoke. Only Blackshaw and Long (2005) provide a sustained account and critique of the use of social capital and cultural capital in justifying leisure and sport policies. Blackshaw and Long, along with Urquia, are also the only authors of these six papers who reference Bourdieu anywhere in the title, abstract or list of key words.

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This review taken from Spracklen (2007b) demonstrates a number of ways in which the work of Bourdieu, and specifically his concepts of social and cultural capital, have entered the academic discourse of leisure and sport studies. Firstly, social and cultural capital have often been used unproblematically. Leisure theorists and researchers seem happy to use either, or both, to highlight the way in which leisure relates to agency and constraint in interactions, social or cultural. Secondly, Bourdieu is not always mentioned when social and cultural capital are mentioned. In other words, it is taken as read that these ideas are part of every academic’s conceptual framework. Indeed, using Bourdieu’s discourse in such a confident way is a mark of one’s academic status. Dropping his terminology into arguments demonstrates authorial capacities to understand theory, and the high proportion of papers that use the terminology is clear evidence for the field-bound success of such a strategy. Thirdly, there is an undercurrent of assumptions about the positive way in which leisure and sport help individuals accumulate social and/or cultural capital, and in instances such as Urquia’s salsa classes there is evidence that individuals create social capital for themselves in those instances. Finally, there is a small number of leisure theorists and researchers who have attempted to engage with Bourdieu in a more critical manner, who remain cautious about the assumptions made by other academics and policy makers about the value (use) of sport (in particular, though occasionally with leisure) in tackling problems in modern society.

Conclusions It would be easy to dismiss the debate about the paradox of leisure as a medieval scholastic argument over the number of angels that can stand on the end of a pin. Many readers of this book might wonder, like those first-year students, just what it is we leisure theorists are arguing about. Leisure is leisure, to paraphrase my students, it’s what we do with ourselves, innit? Such common-sense ideas about leisure are reflected in the responses to the paradox. For Roberts, there is no paradox because leisure is just what we do with ourselves when we are not working, though he allows that choices are restricted. For Bramham and other Gramscians and radical feminists (for example, Watson and Scraton, 2001; Scraton and Holland, 2006), there is a paradox because people are not allowed free choices: social structures, globalization, power, hegemony, all limit our agency, our freedom, though Bramham does accept that the trend towards postmodernity gives some people (especially

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reasonably wealthy, white, Western men) a smorgasbord of leisure diets to consume. In the latter case, the paradox is reduced to a chimera, though it remains for the rest of us caught in structural constraints. For Rojek, at first there was no paradox because it was logically possible for leisure to be all things to all people, a liberation and trap at the same time (Rojek, 1995). After Rojek moved away from postmodernism and back to faith in ontology and epistemology, the paradox of leisure returned: his answer is to delineate, like the Mitford sisters of twentieth century English High Society, between the U and non-U in our leisure lives (Mosley, 2008). While this is very persuasive, and relates to the growing influence of Putnam and Bourdieu in the sociology of leisure and sport, it remains problematic. There is the spectre of figurationalism and the civilizing process. The Mitford sisters made arbitrary decisions about what they considered fashionable and respectable, worthy of the upper class in-crowd (U), and what they considered to be gauche, lower class or otherwise disrespectable (non-U). There is a danger that Rojek and supporters of Bourdieu’s work end up doing the same. The debate about the value of sport as a tool to create social and cultural capital demonstrates the ad hoc way in which the tastes and preference of the authors become recommendations for action, which become truisms.

2 Habermas and Communicative and Instrumental Rationality

The work of Jurgen Habermas has been very influential within European critical sociology (Thompson and Held, 1982; Pedersen, 2008), though his polemical attacks against postmodernism have rendered him less acceptable to critical and cultural studies in the United Kingdom and the United States of America (though see Aboulafia, Bookman and Kemp, 2002). Although his writings range from political science (Habermas, 1991:1996; 2001:2006) to epistemology and ethics (Habermas, 1983: 1990; 1991:1993), the fundamental Habermasian concern is to protect the project of modernity and provide a new critical approach to understanding society (Pedersen, 2008). For Habermas, the critical work of Adorno and Gramsci can be reconciled with liberal ideas about freedom by recognizing the tension between two irreconcilable rationalities: communicative rationality, which stems from human interaction and the free exchange of ideas (for example, the aim and model of the Enlightenment); and instrumental rationality, which is a product of capitalism and the emergence of the modern nation-state. Habermas balances historiographical caution about writing metanarratives (Finlayson, 2000; 2003) with a desire to introduce and explain the slow submergence of the lifeworld of civic society, the Enlightenment project, by non-communicative and instrumental rationalities (Habermas, 1981:1987). For Habermas, market capitalism and bureaucratic states are two products of the same instrumental rationality. Just as communicative rationality produces free, communicative action (Habermas, 1981:1984), it is these instrumental rationalities that constrain the ability of individuals to rationalize and act on anything other than commodified things: so instrumental rationality leads to instrumental action, which leads to commodified leisure and passive consumption. 31

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In this chapter I will explore Habermas’s key philosophical concepts of communicative rationality and communicative action (and their instrumental counterparts), and how he intended these ideas to be applied to thinking about history, sociology and modern society. I will examine the philosophical problems that led to Habermas developing a defence of rationality, while at the same time allowing himself a critical space to attack the bias and partiality of the late modern world (Pedersen, 2008). Central to the problem was another seeming paradox: that the success of science and free-thinking had apparently led inexorably to the brutal rationality of twentieth century fascism and communism. So to better understand Habermas’s motivations, it is necessary to consider two things: the fall of the Enlightenment project, and how that influenced Habermas; and the philosophical and sociological lessons from studies in the history and philosophy of science. Before any of this, however, it is worthwhile considering briefly the context of Habermas’s professional and political career.

Jurgen Habermas: Early iconoclast and later hero of Europe Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 in the last years of the Weimar Republic of Germany (Horster, 1992). The attempt to introduce liberal democracy to Germany had been hampered from the Weimar Republic’s beginnings by war reparations, right-wing nationalism and left-wing agitation. Habermas was probably too young to realize it, but in the first four years of his life, the National Socialist Party of Adolf Hitler started to gain considerable political power through the ballot-box, taking advantage of the various strands of nationalism and the fears of communism. By 1933 Hitler was Chancellor of Germany; soon after, the Reichstag, the icon of German liberal democracy, was burned to the ground. The Nazis blamed the communists, and used the fire as an excuse to enact a law clamping down on free speech and other civil liberties. In these conditions, with many communists and other centreleft and left-wing political activists arrested, the Nazis won the Reichstag elections the month following the fire. With this electoral victory, and with intimidation of smaller right-wing parties, the Nazis pushed through laws that gave Hitler the right to rule Germany by degree. Hitler was already de facto dictator: the parliamentarians had given him de juro powers of dictatorship (Martel, 1992; Kershaw, 1993). Habermas grew up in Nazi Germany, and could see every day the consequences of the failure of the Weimar Republic, and the failure of liberal democracy. The first years of Hitler’s Third Reich brought

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confidence and prosperity to the country, alongside the racial politics, anti-semitism and totalitarianism of the Nazis (Traynor, 2008). But the logical consequences of Hitler’s project to make Germany pure, to make other countries bow to German superiority, led to the horrors of war and genocide. Habermas himself was caught up in the lie of German solidarity, and when he was old enough he joined the Hitler Youth (Finlayson, 2004). Only at the end of the war, when the horrors of the camps came to light, did Habermas see the error of his own reason. Through all this the young Jurgen Habermas must have pondered the weakness of democracy, the cold rationality of totalitarianism, and the danger of using German romantic philosophers such as Hegel to justify murder and intolerance (Habermas, 1997). In 1949, the year West Germany was founded as a democratic, liberal bulwark against the communism of what became East Germany, Habermas went to university to study philosophy (Finlayson, 2004). There an interest in Hegel led to a doctorate in philosophy critically exploring the ontological and historiographical work of Hegel’s contemporary and friend Schelling (Habermas, 1963:1988). Schelling’s fundamentally conservative view of the absolute in nature, and the relationship between this and Hegelian historical (manifest) destiny, had been largely forgotten in twentieth century German philosophy; but it had been influential as a theme in the work of Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and who remained a member of the Party until the end of the war in 1945 (Finlayson, 2004). Habermas’s careful critique of Schelling led to him joining the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University at Frankfurt am Main. This was the famous Frankfurt School, dominated by post-Marxist critical theory. Here Habermas was taught and supervised in his post-doctoral work by Horkheimer and Adorno. Both of these had already published influential works in philosophy and social theory. Adorno had just published research on the poverty of popular music, and the evil of modern culture (Adorno, 1947). Horkheimer’s book Eclipse of Reason (1947:2004) dealt with the ontology of rationality, and its historical development. For Horkheimer, true reason was rationality. Horkheimer claimed that the modern world had moved from true, objective reason to subjective reason. Subjective reason led to arguments about the ends justifying the means, to defining meaning through function, to removing the concept of the ideal and replacing it with the dangerous idea of the will or interest of the people. Nazi Germany was Horkheimer’s example of this dangerous eclipse of objective reason. With Adorno, Horkheimer also wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment

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(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944:1992), which set out the critical theory approach of the Frankfurt School and the attack on the Enlightenment as a failed, misguided, arrogant project. Habermas could have simply become another member of the Frankfurt School, aligning himself with critical theory’s pessimism about the evils of modernity and the failure of rationality. Instead, he developed his own position on critical theory to account for individual freedom and agency within an optimistic view of progress taken from Marx (Finlayson, 2004). In doing this, he fell out with Horkheimer, and left the Institute before his post-doctoral thesis could be formally examined. But his brief connection with the Frankfurt School opened up other career opportunities in philosophy and sociology, and Habermas soon became an established Professor and member of the liberal-left West German intelligentsia. His alignment with Marxism was broken when he disagreed with the confrontational tactics of hard-line Marxist student activists (Finlayson, 2004), but he remained a key critic of capitalism and totalitarianism/fascism, and a defender of liberal democracy. By the 1970s he was also a public figure in West German civic life, supporting federalism and the enlargement of the European Union; but also, ultimately, criticizing the unification of Germany and the creeping growth of nationalism and revisionist history (Muller, 2000; Traynor, 2008). For Habermas, the idea of Europe as a public sphere (Habermas, 1962:1989) was evidenced by its transcendence of national self-interest, and the establishment of a shared, civic discourse. This contrasted with the myth-making and self-serving stories of patriotism that, especially in Germany, resonated too closely with the far-right ideologies of the early twentieth century. Habermas’s later political thinking, then, was a product of his earlier struggles with authority and autonomy: Habermas attempts to defend reason and the philosophy of the Enlightenment and Truth (Habermas, 1998). Both, however, faced difficult challenges at the end of the twentieth century.

The fall of the Enlightenment … the search for explicative laws in natural facts proceeds in a tortuous fashion. In the face of some inexplicable facts you must try to imagine many general laws, whose connection with your facts escapes you. Then suddenly, in the unexpected connection of a result, a specific situation, and one of those laws, you perceive a line of reasoning that seems more convincing than the others… but

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until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit. William of Baskerville (in Eco, 1983, p. 305) In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, a Franciscan friar called William of Baskerville is employed as an investigator into the mysterious death of a Benedictine monk. As the death toll rises and the mystery deepens, William explains to his companion Adso the logic behind his reasoning, which will, he hopes, lead to a theory that fits the facts and hence find the murderer. What happens at the end, however, is that William’s theory – while being wrong – leads him to the truth, which is far more complex than he believed. Eco’s novel operates at a number of levels, as one would expect from a semiotician, and the key to the mystery is the pursuit and protection and interpretation of knowledge and the truth. That the ‘truth’ is realized through a misreading of the signs, and a belief that no theory is absolute a priori, is a joke best appreciated by semioticians. That the mistaken man is a Franciscan – the order that pursued a new natural philosophy that revitalized Aristotelian learning – is a joke for medievalists. But the message is clear: beware confident explanations of truth. The epistemological underpinning to much contemporary social research has diverged from conservative ideas of scientism that underlie much ‘positivistic’ social ‘science’ (Gellner, 1985; Craib, 1992), and followed a different paradigm influenced by Kuhn (1977), Feyerabend (1975) and Latour (1987, 1988), one which Lincoln and Guba (1985) – among others – have identified as naturalism. As Bloor (1974) suggests, objective knowledge has been mystified as a quasi-grail which we, as latter day templars, must swear to seek without straying from the path to any Subjective Castle. As Bruno Latour (1987, p. 99) explains, in a rule of method loaded with relativism: ‘Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.’ It is an unusual paradox within academia that although a) debates surrounding the usefulness and application of the scientific method to other fields, b) nihilism and c) postmodern knowledge have existed for much of this century and the latter quarter of the last (for example, see Hobsbawm, 1987, chapters 10–11), academic research itself still has to conform to tacit rules of truth and validity (Long, 2007). There must be a scientific method amidst the postmodern madness. This is because conceptions over what is real, what is testable, what is valid, and what

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(eventually) is a fact in our society have come directly from an enlightened bourgeois standardization of knowledge that itself drew upon invented traditions of science (this is, of course, the Enlightenment worldview that postmodernists and poststructuralists argue against). We live in a culture permeated with this Enlightenment view of science (Woolgar, 1989; Latour, 1990), yet as Collins and Pinch (1994, p. 2) argue, ‘science is so enmeshed in [our culture]… that what actually happens has never been told’. The uncertainties of twentieth century philosophy and sociology, which in turn led to crises of faith in reason and progress, stem from the postmodern, or linguistic, turn. Postmodernism is associated with a social change. As Zygmunt Bauman has observed, postmodernism recognizes the end of industrialization, and the end of modernity (Bauman, 2000). Postmodernism is, in part, a herald of the shift to postmodernity, which will be discussed in the next chapter. Yet postmodernism is more than a mere recognition of the breakdown of social structures and other social realities: postmodernism itself heralds an epistemological change, perhaps a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962), leading to the dissolution of notions such as truth, certainty and progress, and their replacement with truths, uncertainty and relativism. Postmodernism was originally a movement in the arts, which recognized a specifically modern style in the early twentieth century (Butler, 2002). Postmodernism, in this sense, simply became the new fashion or orthodoxy in art; but it was also seen as a reaction to the art of the modern movement that did not specifically privilege one canonical explanation for the artefacts produced by artists. As the years of the twentieth century passed by, postmodernism in the arts became associated with a cultural anarchism that challenged the confident aesthetics of the Establishment, which were drawn from eighteenth and nineteenth century commentaries on Classical sources. Art, and the postmodern movement, reflected the breakdown of social order, a rejection of tradition, and an attempt to shock the complacent middle classes out of their cultural conservatism (Butler, 2002). Where sculpture, painting, poetry and fiction led, popular journalism, criticism and the academic social sciences followed. In the second half of the twentieth century, postmodernism came to be seen as an intellectual resource against the terrors of rationality, fascism and communism; as well as a bulwark against the evils of Romanticism and the mythologizing of identity and nation (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Postmodernism became a term loosely adopted by some post-

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structuralists in cultural studies, literary studies and philosophy to describe a point of view that does not reify any particular ideology, ontology or epistemology, and indeed argues that such reification is (almost?) impossible. This was the postmodern turn. In Leisure Studies, it has been argued that there has been a postmodern turn in leisure activities (for instance, on-line gaming could be said to be an example of postmodernism in leisure; or street activities such as skateboarding). Moves towards postmodernism are identified by hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers and academic papers. But common themes include: changes to cultural practices; dissolution of cultural boundaries; playfulness and pastiche; depthlessness and superficiality; and fragmentation. Lyotard (1975:1984) argues that Western culture has become postmodern, and that differences, language, signs and representations are more significant than the social structures of the earlier twentieth century. Derrida (1976) uses poststructuralism to claim there is no single authority, no one single truth: in particular, the old metanarratives such as Marxism or Feminism are no longer relevant, or trustworthy, and for every meaning there is another iteration of signification. Baudrillard (1986, 1988, 1995) has argued that there is no reality we can access outside of, or unmediated by, discourses. He has gone on to claim that all we can see is a hyperreality constructed by these mediating discourses: his argument that the (first) Gulf War never happened except on television shows the way in which our impression of reality is distorted by the power of the media. Finally, although he often challenged the idea that he himself was part of the postmodernist intelligentsia (Gutting, 2005), Foucault has been incredibly influential in mapping the shift from modernist definitions of power as oppressive to power as productive, exercised rather than held, by a multiplicity of power relations rather than a single source (Foucault, 1972, 1980). Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard all mapped out hypocrisy of the Enlightenment project, which they argued was driven by a private elitist agenda while having a public face of democracy and freedom. As the history of science has shown (Hankins, 1985), the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century was a narrow philosophical, political and social movement. Its main theorists and thinkers such as Voltaire, Hume and Kant were members of a social elite, keen to preserve their privileges. They embraced the mythology of Athenian democracy because that democracy, like theirs, was a democracy only of propertied men with enough wealth to give them the leisure time to read and write philosophy. That wealth, like the wealth of the intellectuals in the salons and coffee-shops of eighteenth century European public society, was accumulated through

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oppression, slavery and hegemonic control of the masses – just as Horkheimer and Adorno had pointed out. Kant, who constructed an ontology of the mind that made reason a necessary adjunct to freethinking (Kant, 1781:1999), was wary of extending the liberty of freethinking too far: in his book Perpetual Peace (Kant, 1795:2005, p. 11) he argued that ‘democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which all decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, all, who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom’. Kant’s metaphysical idealism set the tone for the Romantic revival of the nineteenth century and German philosophers such as Hegel, Schelling and ultimately Marx; where history and the Enlightenment were seen as inevitable precursors to either nationalism or communism. The failure of radicalism in the French Revolution and the rise of Bonapartism was, for Foucault in particular, the end of the Enlightenment as a genuine movement for change: the industrialization of science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the distorting influence of capitalism and elite power, made a nonsense of a naïve belief in the power of truth and reason (Foucault, 1973). Immediately, postmodernism became used as a term of scorn by conservatives and traditional theorists who stereotyped postmodernism as a form of extreme nihilism and relativism. If there is no way of saying which theory about the world is true, then we are left with the conclusion that nothing and everything is true, depending on a certain point of view. Such epistemological relativism lends itself to ontological scepticism about science: if there is no privileged knowledge, for example, then a belief that the universe was created out of jelly by a Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster has as much validity as a belief that the universe is the end-product of the Big Bang. Again the postmodern Slough of Despond threatens reason. But we cannot turn back like Pliable; instead we must follow Christian’s example and face it. Postmodern philosophy suggests that the entire debate over validity and truth is part of a modernist enterprise that deals with metanarratives, and which should be rejected in favour of localized discourses that speak of many truths or no truths at all, opposed to the Truth. The relativistic implications of this are too dangerous for many critics to face, as without some kind of ability to make value judgements the academic enterprise fails (Vattimo, 1988). Others suggest that postmodern philosophy shifts the focus of academic debate from logic to rhetoric (Simons, 1989; Kvale, 1995). Such arguments are, of course, diametrically opposed to the scientism that still prevails in academia, and which supports the

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rigour and supposed validity of quantitative methods. However, such methods also come under attack for the lack of validity they claim to have (Bloor, 1973), and sociology in particular has been criticized by Collins and Pinch (1994, p. 143) for ‘physics envy’, attempting to be like a science that itself is a social product. Habermas himself took up the philosophical challenge of facing and criticizing postmodernism: in his book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas, 1985:1990) he attacked Derrida for reducing philosophy and critical thinking to sophistry. In Ancient Greece, the sophists were those individuals who framed their arguments in rhetoric and wordplay, as opposed to the philosophers who used logic and reason. Habermas argued that Derrida’s infinite regress of meaning led nowhere except polemics, where debates about reason and truth are given up to the question of who shouts the loudest and longest. Derrida’s poststructuralism tore apart any sensible philosophical reasoning and replaced it with whatever dogma Derrida felt he needed to communicate to his adherents. In turn, Derrida and other postmodernists attacked Habermas for defending the discredited Enlightenment and accused him of misrepresenting the subtleties of poststructural theory: but following the challenges to liberal democracy from political Islam in the early twenty-first century, Derrida acknowledged that there was something worth defending in Europe, and he recognized that Habermas’s defence of the Enlightenment as a model for the future of Europe was worthwhile (Borradori, 2004). The attempt made by Habermas to attack the nihilism and relativism in postmodernism was connected to his attempt to preserve reason against sceptical challenges from the history and philosophy of science. To understand his defence, then, it is necessary to explore those challenges, and the lessons they provide, both for us and for Habermas.

Challenges and lessons from history and philosophy of science Post-Kuhn (1962), the role of scientists in the construction of science (Barnes, 1977), the success of scientific theories (Fuller, 1993, 2000) and the construction of scientific truths (the ‘nature’ of Latour, 1987, p. 99) has been documented by an industry of philosophers, historians and sociologists working under the loose banner of constructivism. As Fuller argues: More and more philosophers are coming to believe that the future of the philosophy of science lies either in some other branch of

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science studies (especially history and sociology) or in the conceptual foundations of the special sciences. (Fuller, 1993, p. xii) Following Foucault (1970), we can see that the sociology of science has become, post-Kuhn, a discourse about power, a discourse far removed from the concerns of the scientific realists. If we are to believe Lynch (1992), the scientific realists are simply playing a form of life (Wittgenstein, 1968), one which hides the political behind a veneer of rationalism. This of course is Foucault’s concern with critical theory, Habermas and the Enlightenment. And yet, while Lynch may be right about scientists and their discourse, and whilst the rational may be used as a tool in a Foucauldian power struggle over the hegemonic right to decide the nature of ‘nature’ the subject of that discourse may still be epistemological: we may still, after all, be concerned with what is true, what is needed to get to the truth, how truth is understood, what is a true account of things, and how we are justified to think of those things and accounts as true (even if what we think that truth is may be expressed in different ways). Or, put another way, as epistemologists we are all (still) concerned with whether scientific theories are true, and if so, why (Psillos, 1999). But there is a wider issue at stake: whether or not we accept science has a privileged position in our accounts of things, a position due to its relationship with some sort of realism (Leplin, 1997). This is the central tenet of Habermas’s epistemology (Habermas, 1992, 2003; Pedersen, 2008): that although meaning is pragmatic, our ability to think rationally is predicated on scientific realism about knowledge, epistemology and ontology. It is here, where Habermas engages with social philosophy and ethics (O’Neill, 1997; Gunnarsson, 2000), that Habermas defends the Enlightenment as a project based on the establishment of truth and reason. To see how he does that, we need to explore scientific epistemological realism, and its critics. Papineau provides a reasonable, working definition of epistemological realism: Realism… scientific or not… [involves] the conjunction of two theses: (1) an independence thesis: our judgements answer for their truth to a world which exists independently of our

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awareness of it; (2) a knowledge thesis: by and large, we can know which of these judgements are true. (Papineau, 1996, p. 2) Scientific realism, then, if we apply Papineau’s argument, enables us to know which of our scientific theories are true, which of the terms those theories genuinely refer, which successive theories preserve the relations and referents of earlier theories and are closer to the truth (and as a consequence later theories explain why earlier theories were successful in their limited circumstances), and which scientists aim to provide true accounts using true and knowable theories. In other words, scientific realists aim to demonstrate why ‘mature and genuinely successful scientific theories should be accepted as nearly true’ (Psillos, 1999, p. xvii). This definition does not differ in any significant way from those provided by other defenders of scientific realism, such as Leplin (1997, pp. 100–101) and Couvalis (1997, p. 172). For the defenders of scientific realism, there is a commonality of opinions regarding the nature of scientific theories. Science gives us true accounts of the world. Scientific realism is a ‘common-sense’, intuitive view of the success of science. Following Putnam, scientific realism is the only epistemological position that explains the success of science: unless we are prepared to accept that this success is due to miracles, scientific realism follows from the extraordinary success of science (Putnam, 1975). Psillos extends the No Miracles Argument (NMA) by admitting it is a form of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE – Lipton, 1991), but arguing that it stands up to scrutiny provided it is part of an overall ‘externalist and naturalistic realist epistemological package’ (Psillos, 1999: p. 71). In other words, ‘NMA is a metaabduction’ (ibid.: p. 79) that allows us to be confident of science, reason and reality, providing we accept it as an argument. Convergence, the emergence of truth (the step-by-step approach to truth through inferring to the best explanation), is a consequence of accepting this argument. There are, however, a number of key problems in the epistemology of science that seem to challenge scientific realism. Firstly, it could be argued that convergence does not seem to be happening, as Laudan (1981) and Fuller (1997, pp. 80–105) suggest. It could also be claimed that the NMA, as a form of IBE, does not escape begging the question about its circularity, despite the attempts of Psillos (1999) and Lipton (1996). Van Fraassen (1980, p. 40) has also pointed this out and

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argued, paraphrasing Darwin, that ‘the success of science is not a miracle… for any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive.’ Sceptics have questioned the claim that scientific theories are true accounts. According to Van Fraassen, science provides accounts that are only empirically adequate: that is, theories that are compatible with the empirical data. As Van Fraassen states: Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate: and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate… A theory is empirically adequate exactly if what it says about the observable things in the world, is true – exactly if it ‘saves the phenomena’. (Van Fraassen, 1980, p. 12) Constructive empiricism, as it is called, trades on the distinction between theoretical and observable entities and the empiricism of logical positivists (Carnap, 1962), though it owes its version of empiricism to the earlier pragmatism of James (1912). So, for Van Fraassen, while we can be confident of the truth of our accounts of observables, we can only have empirically adequate theories (which account for unobservables) (Van Fraassen, 1980, pp. 15–16). For Van Fraassen (1980, 1989), the success of science can be explained as a progression of successfully empirically adequate theories. There are two further problems raised by critics of scientific realism. The first is the problem of the underdetermination of theory by evidence (UTE). As stated by Van Fraassen (1980), albeit in the midst of another argument, the UTE problem goes: If T and T′ are theories which are both empirically adequate, their conjunction need not be – it may even be inconsistent. Two rival theories, giving incompatible accounts of unobservable processes, could in principle each be empirically adequate. (Van Fraassen, 1980, p. 83) According to the UTE problem, there will be another theory, T′, that explains or accounts for the phenomena E explained by an existing theory, T. How then can we choose between these two theories? Van Fraassen uses the historical example of the Newton-Leibniz dispute about the nature of space (1980, pp. 44–47), but the UTE problem is

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best observed in the argument by Poincare about the impossibility of distinguishing between a non-Euclidean geometric space and a Euclidean one with non-standard forces operating (as discussed in Sklar, 1992). The UTE problem, claims Van Fraassen, undermines scientific realism, as there is no way of believing either T or T′ to be true (1980, p. 21). And if the realist appeals to pragmatic (and hence subjective) virtues, scientific realism is again undermined. Lipton offers a possible solution by invoking the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE): If I were a scientist, and my theory explained extensive and varied evidence, and there was no alternative explanation that was nearly as lovely, I would find it irresistible to infer that my theory was approximately true. (Lipton, 1991, p. 184) IBE, then, is the realist argument that the best explanation is the likeliest to be true (Lipton, 1996, p. 94). Van Fraassen, however, claims that realist advocates of IBE must make the unwarranted assumption that a true theory is likely to be among those considered, or else they should not claim that the best of these is true (Van Fraassen, 1989, p. 143): this is the argument from underconsideration. In response, Lipton argues that scientists can make an inference to the best explanation when faced with two or more competing theories, and the best explanation is approximately true. They do this, he claims, by ranking theories in a coarse but reliable manner (Lipton, 1996), and that ranking is done by scientists on the explanatory power of theories and in relation to local, background theories (Lipton, 1996, p. 103). However, this begs the question, as any ranking is ranking in relation to the truth, and Van Fraassen (1989) would argue that we just cannot know the truth. Also, Lipton’s argument only works by appealing to the truth of background theories, something which Van Fraassen would deny. And even if we accept Lipton’s appeal to the truth of background theories, it is still not clear what logical relationship is entailed by the truth of those theories. Laudan (1996, p. 67) takes a different approach, and asks us to consider a theory T, from which a hypothesis H1, empirically equivalent to a hypothesis H2, is a deductive consequence. Another hypothesis entailed by T, call it H3, is supported by empirical evidence E. According to Laudan, this evidence E then provides empirical support for H1 over H2. However, this seems to ask that we accept without question that empirical support can be transferred across deductive relations,

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when it is not clear, from the argument provided by Laudan, that this will always be the case. Kukla (2001, pp. 27–29) has reiterated a version of this argument against Laudan, and Bueno (2000, p. 274) has implied a similar criticism of Laudan’s move, though within a deeper analysis of embedding using the semantic approach. The second problem with realism I want to concentrate on is a historical one raised by Laudan: the Pessimistic Meta-Induction (PMI) (Laudan, 1981). According to Laudan, the history of science provides us with a long list of theories that explained phenomena, which were used by scientists to work through problems and produce answers. For example, Joseph Priestley, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, explained the process of a candle going out in a sealed glass as an excess of something he called phlogiston (Hankins, 1985). Similarly, Victorian scientists accounted for the propagation of electro-magnetic waves through the vacuum of space by positing a theory of the ether (Turner, 1993). Yet we now know that these theories are false. Laudan then asks us to make an inductive inference: if all the theories in the past that worked were actually false, and demonstrably so, then there is no way of knowing that our existing theories, the ones we would like to be true, will be shown to be false in the future. That is, given the history of science, we have no inductive warrant for supposing our existing theories to be approximately true. As Laudan says: For every highly successful theory in the history of science that we now believe to be a genuinely referring theory, one could find half a dozen once successful theories that we now regard as substantially non-referring… I am aware of no sense of approximate truth (available to the realist) according to which such highly successful, but evidently false, theoretical assumptions could be regarded as ‘truthlike’. (Laudan, 1981, pp. 32–33) The PMI raises a serious objection to scientific realism and the NMA. How can we be confident (in truth terms) about our existing theories, if Laudan is correct? One possible solution is to say that the theories Laudan mentions were not sufficiently developed as scientific theories, that somehow they were not robust enough to be allowed as part of the induction (Worrall, 1989). Assuming we ignore the essential Whiggish fallacy of such an approach (Golinski, 1998), and accept that the induction must only include those theories deemed scientific according to our prejudices, there are still theories such as those of the ether

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(Kitcher, 1993; Psillos, 1999) which cannot be dismissed. To deal with these false theories, Worrall (1989) has argued that there is a continuity of mathematical structure between discarded theories and existing ones. The success, according to Worrall, is attributable to the epistemologically real status of mathematical structures that exist embedded in scientific theories. Kitcher (1993) takes a different approach, and argues that terms in theories can be divided into working posits, those putative referents that do the work in problem-solving schemata, and presuppositional posits, those ‘entities that have to exist if the instances of the schemata are true’ (Kitcher, 1993, p. 149). Naturally, Kitcher believes it is the former that are retained when theories are replaced. Psillos criticizes Kitcher’s claims because he believes Kitcher fails to show how it is possible that the empirical success of the theory can lend support to only some, but not all, existence claims issued by the theory (Psillos, 1999, p. 111). However, Psillos goes on to make the case for a distinction between terms in theories used in making empirically successful predictions, and ‘idle’ terms that are part of the hypothesis, but from which the former terms are independent (Psillos, 1999, p. 113). It is not clear that there is much difference between Kitcher’s and Psillos’s response to PMI. In any case, Laudan could reply that these attempts to escape the PMI fail because the idle terms and the presuppositional posits cannot be separated from the structures or working posits they shape, and any survival of these from one falsified theory to a newer theory is just coincidence, or a result of our present-centred conceptions of what is true about a theory (see Wilson and Ashplant, 1988). Psillos’ response (Psillos, 1999, pp. 115–145) – to show how terms which scientists believed contributed to ‘the successes of their theories (and hence to be supported by the evidence)’ (ibid., p. 112) are retained in theory change – is to provide two detailed case studies: of caloric theory and dynamical optical ether theories. While these do show a structural continuity it is difficult to see how Psillos can justify making the move from the specific case studies to a defence of his position on theory change. Habermas’s philosophical position is broadly in line with that taken by structural realists. Structural realist epistemologies of science (Worrall, 1989; Ladyman, 1998) can begin to provide accounts of scientific theories that account for key problems associated with scientific realism, and can help make a differentiation, for example, between Creation Science and the science of evolutionists (Nelkin, 1982). By following Ladyman (1998) in applying a semantic view of model building (see Suppe, 1977) within a

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‘metaphysical structural realism’ (Ladyman, 1998, p. 411), we can begin to defend epistemological realism and hence reason and rationality in general. Structural realists argue that our knowledge, our rationality, is predicated only on models of reality, ones that are abstracted, simplified and perfected in a way that maps but is not identical to ontology (Cartwright, 1983). These models, in science, are constructed through mathematical relationships and abstractions. It is here that confidence can be regained for realism, if only at a level of epistemology. For the social sciences, there is no easy mathematical modelling to adopt, but the focus on models allows an analogy to be made: models in sociology are not built from a structure of mathematical relationships, but a structure of language, symbols and meaning. This is where Habermas’s ideas can be defended: as a way of understanding the hermeneutics of the social world (Habermas, 1981:1987). If the epistemology of science can be defended as a rational, progressive accumulation of knowledge through structural realism, then Habermas’s hermeneutics can be the basis of a progressive epistemology of sociology. We can begin to see the way in which there can still be truth-claims, an Enlightenment worldview of knowledge underpinning social progress, a rationale for academia, critical research and radical politics. Habermas’s approach is to try to avoid ontology, and where he does approach ontology it is through constructions and meanings that come from the discourse and understanding of the social network (Habermas, 1992). Quite simply, he is suggesting that epistemology comes before ontology (Winch, 1958; Bachelard, 1968; Wittgenstein, 1968). What counts is the language that is used, and how that language is used to imply meaning. It is here where Habermas begins to map out the way in which rationality is shaped by meaning, and how that meaning can be found through an open discourse or through the use or abuse of power. Not only can we as researchers feel confident about the truth-claims we make, but we can also examine the hermeneutics of the social world through the epistemological struggles over meaning that create that social world (or rather, model that social world). If epistemology creates ontology, we are also able to see how critical the work of Habermas becomes: for if the making of meaning is forced through the misuse of power, then the social world’s very reality – its ontological status – is shaped by that misuse, and it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to challenge that social world. In essence, the rationality that creates a social world creates an (almost) incommensurable reality: it becomes (almost) impossible to challenge the epistemological sleight of hand, and we are back to a philosophy of Kuhnian paradigms. So for

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Habermas, as critical theorist, a liberal thinker, there is a vital question. The question becomes – how is rationality shaped by meanings attached to it in and/or by any given context?

Habermas’s communicative rationality and action The concept of communicative rationality has to be analysed in connection with achieving understanding in language. The concept of reaching an understanding suggests a rationally motivated agreement among participants that is measured against criticisable validity-claims. The validity-claims (propositional truth, normative rightness, and subjective truthfulness) characterise different categories of a knowledge embedded in symbolic expressions. These expressions can be more closely analysed in two ways – with respect to how they can be defended and with respect to how actors relate through them to something in a world. The concept of communicative rationality points, on the one side, to different forms of discursively redeeming validity-claims… on the other side, it points to relations to the world that communicative actors take up in raising validity-claims for their expressions. (Habermas, 1981:1984, p. 75) What Horkheimer described as objective reason is, for Habermas, only possible where there is a free interaction of ideas and debate (Habermas, 1981:1984, 1981:1987). That interaction is what Habermas calls communicative action (ibid.), which is necessary for the unimpeded functioning of communicative rationality (Pedersen, 2008). If actors have the freedom to act in a democratic, communal manner, treating each other with respect and testing each other’s claims, then it is possible to make sense of the world in a way that is classically rational, and the Enlightenment project is saved. William Outhwaite has shown that Habermas’s approach to communicative action is predicated on a hermeneutics of language grounded in the analysis of speech. As Outhwaite (2005, pp. 11–12) explains: Habermas’s central idea is remarkably simple. It is that every standard use of language to make statements involves certain presuppositions: that what the speaker says is true, that it is sincerely meant, and that it is normatively appropriate. Joking apart, talking about things, including ourselves, only has a point if we are serious about it and can at least envisage the possibility of reaching agreement, as autonomous

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and equal partners in discussion. I can make you believe what I want by hypnosis, or by deception, or by perhaps appealing to authority, but this isn’t playing the game: our discussion in this case is merely a simulated one. We can see that Habermas’s idea of communicative rationality is an idealized model of the democracy of Athens, a reflection of the demands of Paine and others for a public society based on a free and fair exchange of ideas leading to actions based on the common good of that society (Honneth and Joas, 1991). As Brand argues, Habermas’s communicative rationality begins with more than one individual actor and a mutually agreed set of rules about discourse, language and meaning (Brand, 1990). One actor could choose to break those rules. For instance, I could decide that I believe that the world, pace Pratchett, is a flat disc carried around the universe on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle. And I could say that your argument about the earth going round the sun and the evidence you present to me backing up your claim is rubbish, because you haven’t taken into account the chelonian theory of the world. But if I expect you to pass judgement on my giant turtle argument on the basis of Pratchett’s discworld novels alone (see especially The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic (Pratchett, 1983, 1986), where the anti-hero Rincewind has a close encounter with said turtle), then I am not playing fair. Pratchett is a novelist, not a cosmologist. His books are entertainment. They have no epistemological value. So you have every right to reject my argument, especially if I have refused to consider your evidence. Progress in the public sphere, then, works through mutual agreement of those rules, and actions that support and establish communicative rationality. For Habermas, Adorno’s conception of rationality is too subjective: either the product of the work of one individual, or the product, following Marx, of a collective subject (Habermas, 1981:1987). In one sense, it could be argued that Habermas is attempting to retain a Marxist account of society while also preserving faith in reason. Communicative rationality is emergent, contingent on actors and action, and dependent on consensus over the hermeneutics of language. Furthermore, communicative action takes place in what Habermas calls the lifeworld, which ‘comprises a stock of shared assumptions and background knowledge, of shared reasons on the basis of which agents may reach consensus’ (Finlayson, 2004, p. 52). The lifeworld shares many similarities to Cohen’s symbolic community (Cohen, 1985), or perhaps Bourdieu’s habitus-field nexus (Bourdieu, 1979:1986, 1991). All three are based around the

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notion of shared principles, discourse, agreements on meaning, and the objectification of the social. But there is one difference between the lifeworld and these other imaginary constructions of belonging: the lifeworld is the totality of our social world, not just small set of our ontological environment. Habermas’s concept owes its origins to the work of Karl Popper, who tried to make a distinction between the worlds of physical objects, mental states and cultural products (Thompson and Held, 1982). The lifeworld is the world of the latter, a symbolic construction of the first two worlds. Ideally, the lifeworld is constructed out of communicative rationality, which leads to principles of progress, fairness and ethics being part of that world. So Habermas argues in his analysis of discourse ethics and morality: the lifeworld is where reason and discourse shape laws about equality, for example, which can be seen in the way in which racial discrimination has been slowly challenged and criminalized in many liberal democracies (Habermas, 1983:1990, 1991:1993). There is, then, a simple seductiveness about the theory of communicative action and communicative rationality. The latter is an ideal of objective, unfettered reasoning, drawing on structural realist ideas of meaning and language, which in turn inherit older notions of rationality from Kant and Plato. The former is the way in which the latter is acted out in discourse: free from constraint, democratic, fair and consensual in its rules and outcomes. In an ideal world, the lifeworld would be built solely from such stuff, and progress and truth would be assured to all those in it.

Instrumental rationality [Weber] described as ‘rational’ the process of disenchantment which led in Europe to a disintegration of religious world-views that issued in a secular culture. With the modern empirical sciences, autonomous arts, and theories of morality and law grounded on principles, cultural spheres of value took shape which made possible learning processes in accord with the respective inner logics of theoretical, aesthetic, and moral-practical problems. What Weber depicted was not only the secularization of Western culture, but also and especially the development of new modern societies from the viewpoint of rationalization. The new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had taken shape around the organizational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber

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understood this process as the institutionalization of purposerational economic and administrative action. (Habermas, 1985:1990, pp. 1–2) Against the lifeworld of communicative action and rationality, Habermas presents in The Theory of Communicative Action what he calls the system: a symbolic construction that is created entirely from the workings of instrumentality on modernity. Instrumentality is purposive rationality and action, things done and ways of seeing the world imposed on us by the goal-seeking behaviour of actors and institutions that wish to limit our choice and our ability to get in the way of their goal-seeking. As Finlayson (2004) argues, this instrumentality itself establishes an instrumental rationality: the subjective reason of Horkheimer, where the freedom of communicative rationality and action is curtailed for the greater good of some other enterprise. Habermas is here in debt to Weber and Adorno, who had both identified the way in which modernity is a product of increasing rationalization, industrialization, and capitalization; and also Gramsci, whose work independently of Adorno had articulated the way in which power is used to establish hegemonic constraints on people’s freedoms to choose. With Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno had argued that the Enlightenment had been turned from a way to freedom to a way to slavery precisely because of its nurturing of instrumental rationality and reason. Gramsci (1971) had demonstrated that instrumentality went hand-in-hand with the increasing centralization of power and hegemony of the capitalist elite over all forms of life, including culture. Instrumentality comes from two sources in modernity, as Habermas describes in the extract above from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, drawing on the earlier work of Weber: from the power of capitalism and its all-embracing pursuit of economic goals; and from the rise of the modern nation-state and its interference with and limitations on the freedoms of individuals. Both capitalism and the modern nation-state create systems that limit our freedoms and choices, and our ability to make communicative rational decisions and actions. Capitalism has become an accepted good of liberal democracy, and the theory of the free market is the exemplar of liberalism. Yet economic power is clearly used in a way counter to the principles of communicative rationality. It is instrumentally rational to support the appropriation of small, self-owned shops by larger supermarket conglomerates. The conglomerates can (possibly) bring cheaper goods and convenience to customers; and at the same time the profit

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imperative can keep its shareholders happy. Yet the closure of locallyowned, independent shops is not good for the local communities they serve: it reduces choice, social capital and democratic discourse. It is not communicatively rational to rip out the heart of villages and small towns to squeeze another half-a-pence of dividend to the bankers who own the supermarkets. However, it is clearly instrumentally rational to pursue those profit margins for short-term gains, without any reason to think of long-term concepts such as the environment, sustainability and the wellbeing of producers and consumers. As for the nation-state, there may be a perfectly instrumentally rational imperative to ensure a country’s international status by diverting funds from the national budget to pay for high-performance sport science, in the hope that such science may offer a way to increase the number of gold medals at the Olympic Games. Such a combination of nationalism and jingoism is to be expected from a nation-state in thrall to instrumental expediency. But it might not be the most rational way of redistributing funds: it could be argued that a more communicative approach to sport might reveal that the millions of pounds would be better spent on a sports day for every school in the country. Or if it were possible to rise above such petty nationalism, it might be hoped that a more rational use of the resources invested in high-performance sport could be diverted to solving problems of poverty and environmental destruction. It is here Habermas embraces the claims made by critical theory about the pernicious nature of modernity and its malevolent impact on freedom and rationality. In the lifeworld, it is possible to develop a public sphere where knowledge, progress, consensus and civility are held dear. As the system of instrumentality grows, however, the lifeworld becomes endangered. Habermas used the metaphor of colonization: the lifeworld is invaded by the system of capitalism, and the system of bureaucratization (Habermas, 1981:1987). Sometimes without realizing it, individual actors in time begin to make seemingly communicative actions that have instrumental consequences: as Finlayson (2004, p. 54) suggests, ‘the actions of the supporters of Manchester United football club are serving the aim of making enough money for Manchester United plc to pay a dividend to their shareholders.’ As the system grows, the lifeworld becomes a lifeboat, a place of refuge for actors who have escaped the flood of instrumentality: but that refuge is only temporary, and as the waves of instrumentality get higher, the chance of the lifeboat-lifeworld sinking draws ever closer. Instrumental rationality, linked with modernity and capitalism, is also clearly linked to globalization, itself a product of high or late capitalism.

3 Habermas, Globalization and Postmodernity

In order that a population scattered and uncivilised, and proportionately ready for war, might be habituated by comfort to peace and quiet, he [the Roman General Gnaeus Julius Agricola] would exhort individuals, assist communities, to erect temples, market-places, houses: he praised the energetic, rebuked the indolent, and the rivalry for his compliments took the place of coercion. Moreover he began to train the sons of the chieftains in a liberal education, and to give a preference to the native talents of the Briton… As a result, the nation which used to reject the Latin language began to aspire to rhetoric: further, the wearing of our [Roman] dress became a distinction, and the toga came into fashion, and little by little the Britons went astray into alluring vices: to the promenade, the bath, the well-appointed dinner table. The simple natives gave the name of ‘culture’ to this factor of their slavery (Tacitus, Agricola, 21, 1–2, translated in Henderson, 1914:1970, p. 67) In his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon sketches out the reasons for the success of Imperial Rome in the first and second centuries CE, so that he can then show better the way in which the Empire declined in power (Gibbon, 1776–1788:2005). One of the key ways in which the Roman Empire accrued power, according to Gibbon, was the spread of Romanitas: the essence of Roman cultural norms and values, its civilization. In every corner of the Mediterranean world, people adopted Roman fashions, Roman games, Roman literature, Roman food and Roman political systems – whether they were conquered by Rome’s soldiers or just 52

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living in parts of the world in Rome’s sphere of influence. Rome, of course, stole much of its cultural heritage from the places conquered by the Republic and the Empire. The Hellenistic world, in particular, was a strong influence on the Romans, and preserved a sense of Greekness throughout the centuries of Roman hegemony, to the point where the only part of the Roman Empire surviving was the Greekspeaking Empire of Byzantium in the East (which survived until its destruction by the Ottoman Empire in 1453). But Byzantium proves the power of Romanitas: even hundreds of years after the fall of the Empire in the West of the Mediterranean, the Emperors of Byzantium maintained Roman political structures and dreamed of reconquering the West (Gregory, 2005). In the world known to contemporary Roman writers, Romanitas was something that transcended fixed notions of culture and belonging, something that imposed civilization and order in the boundaries of the Empire and in the satellite kingdoms surrounding it (Potter, 2004). Although there were rules limiting political rights of Roman citizenship, inhabitants of the first and second century Roman Empire were Roman by their acceptance of and participation in Roman culture. By the third century, all free inhabitants of the Empire were Roman citizens, and the Roman Empire had already seen Emperors born in Syria, Africa and Arabia. What united the Roman world was Romanitas. Beyond Romanitas was only a confusing world of barbarians who, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted various facets of the Roman world into their lives (Heather, 1998). To be Roman was to be part of a global civilization, sharing an understanding of Cicero, worshipping Jupiter and Mars, speaking and writing in Latin, watching games in stadia that have left so many standing remains in Europe, North Africa, Syria and Turkey. It is just a coincidence that the single arch of Roman architecture was the symbol of Rome’s power and hegemony and globalization, in the same way that the double arches are a symbol of America’s cultural colonization of the globe. It is because of this globalizing trend in Roman history that so much physical evidence of Rome survives for us to consider today. Romanization spread Roman literature, and literacy, so that when the Empire collapsed in the West there was enough of a culture of literacy and learning to ensure the transmission of primary sources like the work of Tacitus. In Agricola, Tacitus writes of his father-in-law’s exploits in Britannia, and suggests that the British were Romanized under Agricola’s rule. Historians have argued that the Romanization of Britain was incomplete; and that conversely the south-east of the island had been Romanized before the invasion of Claudius in 43CE (Salway, 2001). But whatever the

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extent of Romanization, Tacitus describes an active attempt to turn the British from barbarians into Romans in a way that presages the debates about globalization today: in becoming Roman, says Tacitus, the British were accepting the hegemony of Rome and their own political and cultural slavery. In this chapter I will explore Habermas’s philosophical and sociological programme for ways in which to understand and account for the influences of globalization and postmodernity. It has been claimed that both of these macrosocial shifts are happening now, and are resulting in the end of modernity, or at least the complete disruption of notions of tradition, structure and certainty. That claim in turn has led to researchers of leisure, sport, culture and tourism to make claims about the impact of globalization and postmodernity on their respective subject fields. Before I turn to Habermas, then, it is necessary to give an overview of globalization and postmodernity, and of their relationship to debates in Leisure Studies.

Globalization Globalization as a process has been happening ever since the first merchants sailed the Mediterranean in the age of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. But clearly the spread and diffusion of culture, power, wealth and ideas has increased exponentially in the last 150 years. Globalization is a process that transcends traditional norms, values and ideologies associated with the pre-modern and modern world, ideologies such as modern nation-states (Held et al., 1999), or authentic/permanent notions of cultures and tradition (Williams, 1977). Instead, as argued by Brah (1996) and many others, globalization forces the adoption of universal norms, values and ideologies through the power of transnational processes. Globalization can be strongly linked to the socioeconomic trends of commodification and consumerism (Bryman, 2004): a link that makes globalization somehow the cause and the effect of postmodernity and its liquid, hybrid worlds (Bauman, 2000). Globalization is also related to what is sometimes called Americanization; or what Ritzer (2004) refers to as McDonaldization: of culture, and ultimately society. As Hall (1993) and Holton (2008) have argued, the United States has become not only a political superpower but an economic and cultural one as well, with the global brand of McDonalds epitomizing a commodified, Westernized, convenience culture (Appadurai 1996; 2001) that has metaphorically, if not literally, consumed the world. Global capitalism, then, goes hand-in-hand with Western cultural

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imperialism and the coca-colanization of the rest of the world: from India and China to Russia and Argentina, everybody wants to choose global brands, Western bands, and American burgers. Perhaps the most cited conceptualization of globalization is Roland Robertson’s: ‘[globalization is the] compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ (1992, p. 8). Hence as communication technologies and means for travel grow, the potential for sport, its history and traditions to transcend cultural boundaries becomes increasingly rapid and less problematic. A central feature of globalization is the manner in which social relations become ‘disembedded’ from their local constituents (Nayak, 2003), thus making it harder to conceptualize identities within a particular time and space. The reality of globalization is best evidenced by pausing for a moment to explore the news of any given day. I’m writing this on 29 July 2008. On the front page of The Guardian newspaper there are two lead stories. One of them is the story of a newly-wed couple from Wales who have been shot while on holiday in Antigua (Taylor and Lewis, 2008, pp. 1–2). It is a tragic story: the picture of the newly-wed couple shows them smiling outside a church, and the headline reads ‘Fifteen days after this was taken, the bride is shot dead, the groom fights for life’. The story explains that the couple had gone to Antigua to stay in a ‘luxury resort’ for their honeymoon. Increasing wealth, cheaper flights, and the commercialization of tourism has led to a boom in long-haul holidays: the report in the paper explains that ‘about 96,000 UK visitors’ go to Antigua alone each year to ‘all-inclusive resorts’ (ibid., p. 2). However, the Caribbean is not a safe place: Antigua’s police reported nineteen murders in 2007, and ten as of the date of the newspaper’s publication (ibid., p. 2). The tension between the poverty of the developing world and the commodification of tourism into package holidays in all-inclusive, luxury resorts is clear in this case. The resort where the couple are on honeymoon is reported as having ‘a perimeter fence, security lighting, CCTV and motion sensors, as well as three unarmed security guards… on patrol’ (ibid., p. 1). All this protection of consumerism and Western wealth has failed to protect the bride being shot in what appears to be an armed robbery undertaken by local criminals. There are four teasers for stories within the newspaper on the front page: the one for the International section of the paper, by definition, reflects the widening of horizons and the shrinking of distance. The teaser for the story in the National section, is actually a story about the same issues of the shrinking world and commodification of travel: a profit warning posted by Ryanair, the low-cost airline, which has come

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about because of ‘the worst crisis since 9/11’ in the global airline industry (‘Ryanair warns of first loss in 20 years’). The global crisis could be taken as proof of a trend against globalization and internationalization of tourism. But it is more likely to relate to the third teaser for the Finance section – ‘Credit crunch worse one year on: IMF’ – where the complex global financial crisis is pessimistically reported. The International Monetary Fund’s latest financial stability report is reported as saying ‘world markets are still under strain from the US housing crisis, and central banks are facing difficulty in setting monetary policy because of rising inflationary pressures’. In other words, the world’s economy has become so inter-linked and sensitive to change, that an accumulation of bad debts selling the dream of home ownership to poor Americans has left the global economy in freefall, and there is nothing bankers and politicians can do to stop it. Only the Sport section teaser along the bottom of the first page is free of globalization: the lead sports story reports on the release from prison of Newcastle United footballer Joey Barton. However, turning to the front of The Guardian’s Sport section, alongside the Barton story on the front page, there are three stories about global sport: one about the Chinese preparations for the Beijing Olympics, one on problems in the British Olympic team for the Beijing Olympics, and one covering the build-up to the cricket Test between England and South Africa.

Postmodernity As previously discussed, postmodernism is an epistemological turn in philosophy and literary or cultural studies. But postmodernism is also associated with a social change in (Western) society: from the Industrial to Postindustrial (or the Fordist to the post-Fordist – see Bramham, 2006); or what is described as the shift from Modernity to Postmodernity (Bauman, 2000; Giddens, 1990). Modernity is a social, or cultural, or political phase, or era in time, or period in history, recognized by sociologists (Hall and du Gay, 1996), historians (Hobsbawm, 1988, 2008) and critical theorists (Adorno, 1991). It is the time in the West when a dominant paradigm of progress, scientism and capitalism became a feature of academic and political discourse (Broks, 2006). Modernity became a feature of early sociological accounts, such as functionalism and Marxism. Modernity came to be associated with a specific place (the West) at a specific time (the twentieth century), and specific values: humanism, secularism, individualism, liberalism. Sociologists of Modernity, then, were concerned then, as now, with critical arguments about the inequity of

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modern society, the inequalities of class, and the constraints of gender and ethnicity. Since the first half of the twentieth century, however, it is argued that Modernity has been overshadowed by something else: something associated with the postmodern turn, something that might be termed postmodernity. Historical changes in the second half of the twentieth century associated with changes to society, to economics and to culture, include: the restructuring and deregulation of markets; the globalization of economics; the decline of production and the rise of service industries in the West; mass migration and the growth of international travel; the gradual dissolution of social structures (Bauman, 2000); and the rapid expansion of new technologies that has led Castells (1996) to term the current age the Information Age. The neo-tribe (post-tribe, tribus, pseudo-tribe) has become the subject of sociological debates in youth studies (see for instance Maffesoli, 1996), replacing traditional (‘modern’) working-class loyalties to place or community with transient, globalized, fragmented, ‘pick and mix’ identities, for example black metal fans with global (virtual) links, codes of dress, choices of music, making play of rebellion (see Chapter 6). Leisure and sport are seen as key sites for the production of the neo-tribes (Hughson, 1997: tribes and football cultures in Australia). Bennett (2001, 2006) argues that the postmodern shift has led to a move away from identities defined by work to identities defined through play, leisure and choice. For him and others, the importance of popular culture (sport, music) as a site for the production of new identities is just a symptom of the collapse of traditional (modern) social structures. The rapid growth in studies about the neo-tribe have coincided with equally postmodern accounts of identity formation such as debates about hybridity (Brah, 1996; Jacobson, 1997; Solomos, 1998): the counter-hegemonic making of meaning and identity in a globalized, heterogenic world of diaspora. What these all have in common is the reification of choice – the freedom (agency) of the individual to choose his or her neo-tribe, their sense of belonging, their hybrid identity. This is the thinking behind the postmodern leisure turn of Rojek (1995), and the more nuanced arguments of Bramham (2006), Roberts (2001) and more recent Rojek (2005b): that the rise of postmodernity, whether universal or specific to those who can afford it, has led to greater choice and freedom in our leisure lives. So for those who are touched by the magic wand of postmodernity, there are opportunities to re-shape their bodies in the sanitized world of the health club; or a choice of surfing, windsurfing or sailing on the sea; or a holiday along the Inca Trail with a hotel with

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wi-fi at the end of it; or a confident re-claiming of something like football to show off a diasporic, hybrid identity (Ratna, 2008).

Global leisure: An example of global sport When News Corporation first offered millions of pounds of funding in exchange for exclusive rights to rugby league in ‘Europe’ (England) and Australia, the game of rugby league was split between loyalists (traditionalists) and those who took the cash or bought the global (expansionist) vision (Colman, 1996; Kelner, 1996). In the north of England, some rugby league fans opted to defend the game against any change or expansion (Kelner, 1996; Spracklen, 1996). But ultimately, in England and in Australia, the game’s clubs, sponsors and administrators all accepted and welcomed the involvement of Murdoch’s global media empire (Denham, 2004; Collins, 2006). The growth of television coverage, via News Corporation, of the European (English) Super League and the (Australian) National Rugby League has led to the game expanding into new regions and territories around the world (Spracklen, 2005; Spracklen and Fletcher, 2008). Spracklen and Fletcher (2008) examine the content of English-based rugby league periodicals, and also the commitment to the game’s traditions and mythologies among expansionists on a rugby league prodevelopment on-line forum. During the summer season in England from 2005 to 2008, when the Australian National Rugby League (NRL) season is taking place in the Antipodean winter, the average breakdown of coverage in the weekly League Express was 83.3% Super League and other English rugby (including match reports of the French Super League team XIII Catalans from 2006), 15.3% Australian NRL and 1.4% news and analysis from France and the rest of the world. A smaller sample of the rival New League Weekly newspapers from 2007 and 2008 provides a breakdown of coverage that is even more parochial in its focus: 90.8% Super League and English rugby, with regular multi-page coverage of National Leagues (semi-professional, mainly northern English clubs) and news from northern-based amateur rugby league clubs, 8.3% NRL, 0.8% France and the rest of the world. League Express, of the two weekly newspapers, is clearly more expansionist in its outlook and its willingness to report on new developments from around the world, but that flag-waving support of globalization is tempered by an editorial emphasis on news and match reports from the professional Super League and National Leagues One and Two, and the Australian NRL. International matches between the ‘Big Three’ of Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand are guaranteed pre-match news, detailed

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central double-page match reports, and pages of post-match analysis. But matches between newer rugby league nations struggle to be found between reports from Barrow, Batley and Leigh. Evidence of the commitment to globalization in the imaginary community of rugby league can be found more clearly in the monthly magazine Rugby League World, owned and published by the same company that owns League Express. In the same period 2005–2008, Rugby League World consistently printed analysis and features on rugby league from around the world. In the sample identified, 13.3% of the editorial pages were about rugby league outside Great Britain and Australia, including regular two-page round-ups from France (written, it has to be declared, by my father) and ‘World RL News’ in brief (latterly renamed Worldwide Results) that normally stretched to two pages. Although the magazine’s editorial has become noticeably popular in style, with a resulting slight shift to increasing Super League content, the desire to support global rugby league development is still clear: in the May 2008 issue, for example, there was four pages of French rugby league; news from Serbia, Papua New Guinea and Fiji; and results from Lebanon and the Cook Islands. In many of the expansionist areas, the involvement of students attracted by television coverage has been a catalyst to development (Collins, 2006). All the respondents from the international rugby league on-line forum, by their very involvement in the expansion of the game, were believers in the globalization of rugby league: they all saw the benefits of television exposure and commercial sponsorship, and all welcomed the professionalization of the game (Spracklen and Fletcher, 2008). However, despite their enthusiasm for expansion and globalization, they were reticent about abandoning rugby league’s working-class history. Most of the respondents had some connection to the game’s working-class heartlands of Brisbane, Sydney or the north of England: either they themselves were born in those places, or they had family there, or they had lived for some period there. As such, they saw in their expansionist work the work of spreading the idea of rugby league as a working-class, masculine game: even when they admitted that they themselves were not working class, or they explained that rugby league in their particular developing country was played by middle-class students. Clearly, rugby league is globalizing, and in doing so it demonstrates all the material, demographic, technological, social and cultural flows of globalization (Appadurai, 1996; Holton, 2008); as well as the dominant flow of westernization (commodification, professionalization, Americanization via Australia) identified by Hall (1993), Giddens (1990) and Bauman (2000). In the home city of my university employers, Leeds

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Rhinos are part of this globalizing rugby league phenomenon, and Headingley Stadium is an outpost of the conspicuous commodification and consumption of professional sport (Horne, 2006). Watching the World Club Challenge of 2008 between the Rhinos and Melbourne Storm on television, with the sound of the commentators muted, one could be forgiven for mistaking the match for any other global team sport spectacle: the prominence of sponsor logos, the huge crowd in the dazzling lights of the stadium, the multicultural nature of the hypermasculine professional athletes, the designs of the jerseys and the tricks of the television studio, all part of the Americanization of global sport (Denham, 2004). Turn the commentary up, however, and despite the Americanized style of delivery, the rough tones and flattened vowels remind the listener of rugby league’s connection to the imaginary, and the imagined, working-class world of the north of England. There is, then, a contradiction. Rugby league is, like its union counterpart, a commodified product, its elite competitions part of the global calendar of passive consumption (Horne, 2006), its international profile fuelling participative and commercial expansion into new markets. In this expansion and development, the postmodern nature of commodified sport becomes apparent (Maguire, 2005), as News Corporation and other multinational sponsors create supranational leagues, as rugby league clubs change, lose their local identity and become businesses in the same way as elite football clubs have changed (Fawbert, 2005). As Denham (2004) has argued, rugby league’s embrace of Americanization and commodification, a postmodern turn itself, is evidence for the dissolution of identity and liquidity of structure (Bauman, 2000) associated with postmodernism. The existence of Leeds Rhinos and the World Club Challenge is some evidence for some postmodern shift away from high modernity (Giddens, 1990), from the traditional, fixed working-class communities and identities typified by the Hunslet of Richard Hoggart (1957). Leeds itself is a microcosm of the move towards postmodernity and the decline of the traditional, industrial base of the working-class economy. The globalization of rugby league, then, demonstrates some embrace of the rationality of instrumental capitalism at the end of modernity (Habermas, 1985:1990), perhaps the beginning of postmodernity (Harvey, 1989; McGuigan, 2006a).

Postmodern leisure? Throughout his career, Chris Rojek has argued that leisure theory has been dominated by historical, historicized sociology; false dichotomies

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over the debate between agency and structure, and an over-emphasis on the ideological clash between the public and the private sectors (Rojek, 1993, 1995, 2005a, 2005b). In his recent work, as discussed in the previous chapter, Rojek (2005b) is still critical of researchers and theorists who argue that social structures have survived as key constraints on (post)modern leisure lives. In the 1990s, Rojek argued that Leisure Studies as an academic discipline had been impoverished by policy-led work in the 1970s and the critical turn in the 1980s, which were no longer (completely) useful (Rojek, 1995). He suggested (Rojek, 1993) that Leisure Studies needed to turn towards examining postmodernity, and applying the epistemological and methodological lessons from postmodernism to sport and leisure: that leisure was neither free time nor freedom, that leisure is shaped by history. Rojek identified four trends in leisure that were harbingers of the postmodern turn: a) Individualization: leisure has become personalized, anonymous, private, (for example, watching football on television at home with a couple of cans of beer); b) Privatization: ownership of leisure and delivery of leisure activities has become a victim of Thatcherism (in the United Kingdom) and ‘New Right’ capitalist ideologies, restricting choice and increasing exclusion, (watching football on digital television); c) Commercialization: leisure has become a commodity, bought and sold like any other commodity, with pressures of commerce, fashions, marketing and advertising delineating and restricting freedom to choose, (watching football wearing the latest expensive jersey with the logo of the team sponsors); and d) Pacification: leisure is no longer a site of potential resistance or challenges to hegemonic values, and has become sanitized and safe for consumption (what figurationalists such as Eric Dunning would call civilized, for example watching football at home and not on a seething terrace of angry men). A collection of research papers on lifestyle sports, edited by Belinda Wheaton (2004a), points to the postmodern turn in leisure. Beal and Wilson (2004) examine the growth of street cultures and street-based activities through an exploration of skateboarding. Booth (2004) discusses surfing, Robinson (2004) rock climbing, and Wheaton (2004b) herself windsurfing: ‘cool’ activities that have aspects of sport, leisure and recreation. The growth of these lifestyle sports seems to be at the expense of the decline in participation in traditional sports (Roberts, 2004). There seems also to be a link between the growth of these sports and the growth of mass media (Rowe, 2004), the internet and video gaming (McGuigan, 2006b): all these things contribute to the idea that individuals can make lifestyle choices that make a statement about who they are, through their participation in a particular leisure activity. So

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individuals have the freedom to be a skateboarder or a free-runner, depending on what they want others to think for them, or they can choose to spend their evenings accumulating gold and killing goblins in the World of Warcraft. What counts is the plurality of choices, the freedom to choose, and the identity it confers. This idea returns to that of the subculture – whether it be something like Hebdige’s (1979) concept of music and cultural resistance, or Bennett’s (2006) neo-tribes with little loyalty to the cause. New global cultures and hybrid cultures then begin to emerge with the postmodern turn, including what Donna Haraway (1991) describes as the emergence of the cyborg: human/technology hybrid identities. Postmodern leisure seems then to reflect the idea from postmodernism of liquidity (Bauman, 2000), or the blurring of boundaries. Rojek (2005b) describes the rise of leisure in the workplace – whether unofficial surfing of the net, or the formal support and use of company gyms. There is the globalization of leisure spaces – on-line communities of interest, such as Facebook. There is spectatorship – what Horne (2006) calls passive consumption, via television not at sports grounds. Bramham (2006) and Brown (2008) identify postmodern leisure as something that creates or is created by hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1988); something that leads to a loss of authenticity. They see the postmodern turn in the growth of the leisure industries (Pay-per-view television, theme parks, package holidays, corporate sponsorship of music festivals) and decline in public provision, in the way leisure itself has become individualized, commodified and privatized. So, for example, heritage becomes a sanitized (re)creation of the complexities of the past (Ray et al., 2006). Leisure becomes indistinguishable from consumption, from gratification. In the postmodern world, leisure is amoral, it serves no moral function – there are no good or bad leisure choices, providing you have the money to pay for your instant hit. There are no social structures or constraints limiting your choice. Leisure is anonymous, free of guilt: it is a lifestyle, a way of (re)creating our own reality, a hyperreality in which there are no essential differences between virtuality, work and free time. In this postmodern world of postmodern leisure, nothing that has come before can help us understand it: the world has changed in a way that is seemingly incommensurable (Kuhn, 1962) with the world of modernity. Roberts (2004), Bramham (2006), Henderson (2006) and Rojek (2005a, 2005b) all recognize a (post)modern social and economic change in the West. Some people do seem to have more free time; people are employed in new work, often without the security of the past, and the rise of

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women in the workplace have created new family patterns; and mass migration and relaxation of traditional values on the family (Rapaport and Rapaport, 1975) have led to a diversity of household structures. As such, there is more choice and diversity in sport, leisure and recreation experiences: there is more mobility and travel; more opportunity for holidays; and people have less loyalty to traditional leisure activities and are more willing to try new things (Rojek, 2005b). Are we moving towards a society of leisure, or is this trend, this turn, only for those who can afford it? This is the crucial point of difference between postmodernists, and the liberal and radical critical theorists of leisure. There is still a debate about the universality of the turn to a postmodern society. Postmodern culture seems to be something that is accessible on the streets of London or Sydney, but for most of the world the idea that there is a smorgasbord of leisure treats is egregious. Even in the global cities of the West (Sassen, 2002), there are still divisions between those living the lifestyle and those on the margins because of poverty, class, gender and religion. If a change is happening in leisure lifestyles, and clearly something is happening, can Habermas help us account for it? I believe Habermas’s central ideas, applied to globalization and modernity, can help us make sense of the relationship between leisure, the postmodern, and globalization.

Habermas and globalization In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas describes how the lifeworld, the democratic space of the public sphere, is in danger of being subsumed by the systems of capitalism and bureaucracy (Habermas, 1981:1984, 1981:1987). Capitalism, out of the two systems, is of a particular concern for Habermas because of its inherent opposition to democracy, and its insidious growth and globalization (ibid.). In opposing the growth of global capitalism to the communicative rationality of democracy and the lifeworld, Habermas showed his critical theoretical roots, aligning himself with Adorno, Gramsci and indeed Marx on the question. As free markets grow and consume local economies, more and more power (economic, cultural, political) resides in a smaller number of transnational companies. Furthermore, the globalizing economy pits the power of politicians against the power of bankers, and throughout the twentieth century Habermas could clearly identify the capitalist system at work in the removal of local, democratic freedoms and actions. Just as Adorno saw in capitalism the banality and blandness of conformity and the invention of the popular (Adorno, 1991), so Habermas warned of the moral bleakness

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of instrumentality that went with the commercialization of the public sphere (Habermas, 1983:1990). In later work, Habermas returns to globalization to explore its impact on modern society, and its relationship to political questions about nationalism and the European Union. In The Inclusion of the Other (Habermas, 1998), Habermas discusses how the idea of the nation-state first emerged. He argues that the nation-state was a political solution to the social problems of industrialization, urbanization and alienation in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Traditional elites in the West struggled to maintain hegemonic control of their land and workers as these social problems destroyed the norms and values of pre-modern and early modern society. No longer did the labouring man believe his place in life was pre-ordained by God and his betters. The solution was to tie the labouring man, and everyone else in the new society of modernity, to an abstraction of hegemonic power. Myths of blood and soil, of the common bond that transcended class and politics, were the stuff from which arose the idea of the modern nation-state (Easthope, 1999). Nation-states were of course created out of a mishmash of invented traditions, imagined community and other symbols (Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). At the same time as the nations were being imagined, the political power in these communities was shifting. New elites tied to capitalism and espousing varying forms of liberalism demanded greater democratic control. So the nation-state was a compromise that allowed an increase in communicative action, but which was constrained by the myths of nationalism: as Habermas (1998, p. 115) puts it, the compromise was between ‘the universalism of an egalitarian legal community and the particularism of a community united by historical destiny’. Globalization, says Habermas, challenges the nation-state in two ways. Firstly, the increasing movement of people, ideas and money across the globe challenges the myth of national uniqueness and separation, and fuels elitist ideologies of nationalism. These ideologies are already part of the discourse of the nation-state, and according to Habermas there is always a tension between the easy dogma and hatred of nationalist politics and the ideal free speech of liberal democracy (Habermas, 1998). Nationalism, for Habermas, is nearly always a dead end of political discourse, and his arguments against the reunification of Germany were predicated on the belief that folk-nationalism and prejudices were at work (Finlayson, 2004). However, although suspicious about the purpose of the integration of Germany, Habermas at the same time defended the political integration of Europe through the rise of the European Union. The European Union had initially been established to allow a free (common)

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market between its member countries, but there had always been supporters of greater political and cultural integration in Europe as a reaction against the horrors of the two wars of the earlier twentieth century. In The Inclusion of the Other, Habermas argues that the European Union’s main role must be seen as a bulwark against the growing trend of nationalism in Europe, to act as a project that develops a communicative network of European politics and culture. As for the second challenge, globalization has led to the balance of power to be shifted decisively away from nation-states and their democratic institutions, which therefore limits the ability of nation-states to make communicatively rational decisions about things like spending on social welfare and education (Habermas, 1998). The solution to this challenge, according to Habermas, is not to accept the dominant economic instrumentality of neo-liberalism, but rather to develop global politics in response to the global economy. There is no reason, says Habermas, why communicative action cannot operate on a global scale, even if the project of democratic, open world government and global politics may sound like something from the science-fiction Federation of the Star Trek universe. In relation to current international politics, Habermas is cautious: if he believes the European Union is a good example of transnational politics, it is by no means perfect. As he suggests, the growth of the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’ is just another system threatening the democratic, public space of the lifeworld; and in combination with the neoliberalism of the European Union’s economic rules, it seems the European lifeworld is caught between a rock and a hard place. But there is a potential to the European Union as a place for transnational, democratic, and political discourse. The European Union has expanded its activity beyond a mere common market into questions of culture, history, subsidiarity and democracy: by this means, it has become a potential source of a communicative discourse about the values of European civilization, and the rules by which we live. For Habermas, those rules are governed by the civic society out of which emerged the defence of reason and the pursuit of truth (Habermas, 2001:2006). As such, the idea of Europe, built as it is on the ideal of the Enlightenment, can serve as a corrective against the instrumental impact of global capitalism.

Habermas, modernity and postmodernity It will come as no surprise to find out that Habermas strongly rejects postmodernity, along with its epistemological counterpart postmodernism. It is worth examining Habermas’s position in more detail, as the rejection

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of postmodernity (as a project, and as a description of the world today) and the defence of modernity (as a project, and as a description of the world today) is central to this book’s argument about the meaning and purpose of leisure. In making his stand against the postmodern turn, Habermas is aware he is deeply unfashionable (as if the pursuit of truth and application of reason could be something susceptible to fashion!), and his argument becomes animated. In this defence, Habermas stops being a dry philosopher and uses language and style to force his point across. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, he summarizes his critiques as follows (Habermas, 1985:1990, pp. 336–337): The radical critique of reason [postmodernism] exacts a high price for taking leave of modernity. In the first place, these discourses can and want to give no account of their own position… There is an asymmetry between the rhetorical gesture with which these discourses demand understanding and the critical treatment to which they are subjected institutionally… No matter whether Heidegger and Derrida evade the obligation to provide grounds [for their claims] by feeling into the esoteric or by fusing the logical with the rhetorical: There always emerges a symbiosis of incompatibles, an amalgam that resists ‘normal’ scientific analysis at its core… That the self-referential critique of reason is located everywhere and nowhere, so to speak, in discourses without a place, renders it almost immune to competing interpretations. Such discourses unsettle the institutional standards of fallibilism, they always allow for a final word… that the opponent has misunderstood the meaning of the language game and has committed a category mistake in the sorts of response he has been making… This is Habermas’s rejection of the epistemological sleights of hand associated with postmodernity and postmodernism. If there is no truth, and no way of coming to an agreement over truth, then there can be no sensible academic debate. As we have seen in the previous chapter, communicative rationality is curtailed by a beauty contest of subjective opinions. Habermas rejects it on the basis of Popper’s test of a pseudoscience (Popper, 1968). Yet there is also a self-limiting logic to postmodernist theory, which make a mockery of its own claims: as Habermas is suggesting here, it rejects truths about everything except the truth of its claims about the lack of truth. Habermas continues (ibid.), now turning to postmodernity’s description of the world: They [postmodern theories] are guided by normative intuitions that go beyond what they can accommodate in terms of the indirectly

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affirmed ‘other of reason’. Whether modernity is described as a constellation of life that is reified and used, or one that is technologically manipulated, or as one that is totalitarian, rife with power, homogenized, imprisoned – the denunciations are constantly inspired by a special sensitivity for complex injuries… Between the declared normative foundations and the concealed ones there is a disparity… Not only the devastating consequences of an objectifying relation-to-self are condemned along with this principle of modernity [social structures and constraints], but also the other connotations once associated with subjectivity as an unredeemed promise [individual freedoms, truth, equality]… What is thrown out is precisely what a modernity reassuring itself once meant by the concepts of self-consciousness, selfdetermination, and self realisation. Habermas believes the postmodern theorists are wrong philosophically, and wrong in their account of the world. We still care about truth, we still care about our freedom and protests strongly when those freedoms are curtailed. And the postmodernists are just as vocal about those freedoms as any other middle-class, politically aware academic. So we cannot be in a world of postmodernity, if we still understand and articulate the lifeworld through a communicative rationality predicated on reason, freedom and the struggle against the constraints of social structures. Of course, there has been a dramatic shift in the social and economic shape of modernity, but we live in a world that is still, essentially, modern. For Habermas, modernity is recognized and traced by the emergence and dominance of two systems of instrumentality – the capitalist and state-bureaucratic – over the communicative space of the lifeworld (McGuigan, 2006a). The complex interaction between the two systems and the lifeworld, and the increasing success of instrumentality, account for the difference in modernity from its formative years in the nineteenth century to the postindustrial modernity (late or high modernity – Giddens, 1990, 1991) in which most people in the West live today. Postmodernity, as claimed in the postmodern turn of culture and leisure, for example, is either the work of instrumentality producing commodified, passive consumption of goods (buying the latest computer games and consoles), or, more positively, the work of communicative rationality, where individuals come together to resist the constraints imposed by instrumental rationality (the on-line community of voluntary Wikipedia editors). In rejecting postmodernity, Habermas is explicitly setting out his defence of modernity as a project of reason, based on the Enlightenment.

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As discussed in the previous chapter, Habermas wants to be able to understand meaning, philosophically and in the social world, to enable us to make secure judgements about truth, reality, morality and justice. In defending modernity, then, Habermas is defending the lifeworld, where communicative action allows individuals the freedom to think rationally and make such judgements collectively. In the lifeworld of modernity, there is recognition of injustice and the constraints of instrumentality, and the role of the philosopher-politician seems to be a resurrected version of the role of Plato’s philosopherkings of The Republic: to guide the polity into making the right decisions about itself, so that people live good lives according to reason and justice. This is one reason why Habermas is so angry with the postmodernists: in setting up false equivalents and chimeras of relativism, they seem to allow injustices and constraints to continue in the name of diversity (Habermas, 1998). So in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, misguided notions of impartiality stopped Western governments condemning the siege of Sarajevo because they did not want to be seen as pro-Muslim or anti-Serbian. And the basic, communicative human rights of women have often been compromised by Western politicians scared of condemning misogynist cultural practices in other countries. Habermas is also defending modernity as a true description of the world and the historical moment in time of the West. We are, says Habermas, at the end of modernity (Habermas, 1985:1990, 2001:2006), but we are not in a world where social structures and other constraints have been removed. As McGuigan (2006a: p. 158) puts it, for Habermas, ‘modernity is characterised by the uncoupling of lifeworld and system’. This was the moment at the beginning of modernity, when instrumental rationality animated the construction of capitalism and the nation-state. At the end of modernity, as in the previous chapter, these two systems are endangering the lifeworld by threatening to colonize it: slowly replacing communicative rationality and free choices with the instrumental, strategic rationality of consumption, economics or state control. The only way to stop the lifeworld sinking under the waves of instrumentality is, according to Habermas (1991:1996), to enable individuals to take collective, communicative action in the public sphere against these systems. As the systems grow stronger, the ability to fight back is limited spatially, socially and temporally. Habermas (1991:1996) is positive about the role of social movements in forcing change in the systems, and believes such force can turn the tide, as it were, back from the lifeworld to lessen the impact of the systems. It is in this communicative action of resistance, then, that leisure might play a useful role.

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Conclusions Jim McGuigan’s Culture and the Public Sphere (McGuigan, 1996) is a key text in sociology of culture and a strong account of change in and through contemporary culture. McGuigan’s work since its publication has charted the impact of the postmodern on both Western society and Western academic intellectuals, and has served as a defence of rational criticism in the shadow of postmodernism. His recent development of the concept of cool capitalism (McGuigan, 2006b) is an example of his nuanced approach to the postmodern: a recognition of the importance of postmodern culture; a recognition of a change from the capitalism associated with modernity to one where the rhetoric of resistance is co-opted into the business of control; but an epistemological stance that recognizes and critiques this change which is based on modernist assumptions about truth and reason. In Modernity and Postmodern Culture, McGuigan attempts to guide the perplexed through the morass of postmodernism and postmodernity (McGuigan, 2006a). He begins by defining the difference between the two, though this definition is not always adhered to by the theorists he discusses elsewhere in the text. Postmodernism, for McGuigan, is the intellectual, epistemological paradigm that challenges the certainties of the Enlightenment: the metanarratives, the scientism, the realism. Postmodernity, however, is the historical moment(s) following changes to (Western) society such as the end of Fordism, the decline of class structures, and globalization. McGuigan sees postmodern culture as something that is emerging out of these changes, and devotes a chapter in this text to the evidence of this change in the work of Manuel Castells on the information age. There is no doubt that these changes have started to happen, and no doubt that some aspects of culture (if not society) could reasonably be described as being postmodern. Indeed, leisure theorists and researchers can find common ground here with cultural sociologists. But McGuigan is also interested in the intellectual challenge posed by postmodernism and postmodernity, and the response to the postmodern turn from those (especially on the left) who defend modernist ideas and epistemological frameworks of modernity: principally Habermas, Giddens and Beck. McGuigan is even-handed in his analysis of key theorists, postmodern or otherwise, but it is evident that he sympathizes with the critical realism of the modernists, in particular Habermas and the defence of the lifeworld of communicative rationality from the instrumental reasoning of late modern capitalism. So it is no surprise that he ends this text with his own defence of critical thinking as a means of understanding postmodernity and the rise of postmodern culture.

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Habermas helps us account for globalization and postmodernity. The first is something which he recognizes, and which his work can help us explain. As we understand and experience globalization today, it is the increasing influence of instrumentality and strategic rationality associated with capitalism. Globalization is not a free communicative exchange of ideas, all such exchanges are predicated on the economic and cultural power of the West (especially the United States of America). World music, for example, might appear to be a cultural product constructed out of a democratic, liberal politics, but it is based on Western notions of what is acceptably exotic. The globalization of rugby league might be good news for rugby league fans in England and Australia, but its arrival in new countries embodies the Westernization and commercialization of those polities – another success for the marketing team at News Corporation. Going back to the Romans, we can see that Romanization was a nascent state-bureaucratic system imposed on the lifeworld of the Mediterranean in the first centuries of the Common Era: its weakness was the insecurity and unsustainability of pre-modernity, but even so it could be argued that Romanitas was merely replaced by Roman Christianity, which as a system still dominates large parts of the world. The second concept, postmodernity, is best understood as something that is still in the modern world, but which shows evidence of a shift from the modernity of the twentieth century. As modernity is challenged by the dominance of the capitalist system, postmodern symptoms may be instrumental or communicative: our job as researchers is to work out what is instrumental action or reason, and what is communicative action or reason. This Habermasian framework is one that has been undeservedly overlooked in wider theoretical debates about leisure (though see Scambler, 2005, and Morgan, 2006); yet it is one that offers a way of reconciling arguments from structure and arguments from agency without resorting to epistemological despair. In the second half of this book, I will apply this framework to rugby league, extreme black metal music and tourism, drawing on my own research on black metal (Spracklen, 2006) and rugby league up north in England (Spracklen 1995, 1996, 2001a) and down south (Spracklen, 2007a). The research on rugby league developed out of my previous research on that sport, and on issues around identity and exclusion, which ultimately arose from my personal interest in the game. In that sense, I am using Habermasian epistemology to understand some of the changes in rugby league – arising from globalization and commodification – since I started my academic interest in rugby league in the 1990s. The research on black metal, arising from my own

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membership of the extreme metal scene, has been framed explicitly by Habermas’s project of framing and understanding modernity through rational action(s). As such, the methodological choices were linked to my desire to identify some leisure activity on the cusp of modernity and postmodernity. This does not mean uncritically accepting all of Habermas’ work or applying it without caution to the messiness of real, empirical fieldwork. I will merely show that we can begin to resolve the paradox of leisure through understanding action (leisure choice, leisure consumption) as the epistemological product of two irreconcilable Habermasian rationalities. I will then finish with an analysis of tourism, applying Habermas to explaining issues about the pursuit of authenticity. Before I begin any of that, however, it is worthwhile examining what Habermas wrote about leisure.

4 Reading Habermas on Leisure

Habermas invokes leisure in a number of places in his published works, though it is rarely a central concept to his critical and epistemological frameworks. The exception to this in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, where bourgeois leisure is used to articulate the development of the public sphere, and its necessary opposite, the private sphere. In this chapter I will provide a commentary on Habermas’s work on leisure, beginning with The Structural Transformation and continuing chronologically through his later works, where leisure is used in bigger arguments about reason, public discourse and action. In providing a commentary, it will be necessary to quote Habermas at length. In the translations provided by Thomas Burger to Habermas’s main works, the author’s forceful, magisterial style is still evident, but the conceptual frames depend on an a priori familiarity with the similar philosophical and critical work of, among others, Adorno and Horkheimer, which in turn draws on the earlier work of Hegel, Weber and, of course, Marx. I make no apology for citing Habermas at length in this critical analysis, indeed it would be deficient of this book to not include such citations; for those who feel daunted by the depth and breadth of his arguments, I can only suggest that these extracts are to be read slowly, and carefully, alongside my discussion of them. In citing Habermas at length, I have retained the American English and grammar of the translated texts.

The structural transformation of the Bourgeois public sphere The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1962:1989) is the most important of Habermas’s early works, in which he first articulated the concept of communicative rationality and action, centred 72

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on a public sphere or space in which free-thinking and discourse was not only possible, but a natural consequence of such a sphere. In the first few pages of the book, Habermas sketches out a brief (and hence historiographically questionable) history of the development of the public sphere in European civilization and culture. Just as the apostles of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment looked back to classical Greece for their exemplars for reason and rationality, so too does Habermas. This is perhaps the crux of Habermas’s entire corpus, and one of the areas in which his critics accuse him of ethnocentrism (Finlayson, 2004). But Habermas is not ashamed of this Eurocentric, return to the Enlightenment and its Ancient Greek heroes. The ideal Greek city-state, and its role in the development of unique ideas on freedom, politics and rationality, is reason enough for Habermas to start there. The golden age of fifty-century BCE Athens, home to Socrates, the founder of systematic reasoning through logical argument, and Pericles, the author of the first democratic constitution, is in the mind of Habermas as he discusses the ideal Greek city-state. This city-state is legitimized through a sleight of hand: its citizens are enfranchised and given the leisure time to discuss matters of public importance through the mechanics of slavery and domestic suppression of women. What was common to the free men of each city-state was also common between those city-states: the geographical and cultural expansion of the Hellenic world also spread its solutions to debate and competition. For Habermas, those solutions included the seasonal warfare of the elite classes, but also the regular cycle of sacred games, of which the Olympics continues to provide an albeit profane and secularized example to us moderns. In the fully developed Greek city-state the sphere of the polis, which was common (koine) to the free citizens, was strictly separated from the sphere of the oikos; in the sphere of the oikos, each individual is in his own realm (idia). The public life, bios politikos, went on in the market place (agora), but of course this did not mean that it occurred necessarily only in this specific locale. The public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis), which could also assume the forms of consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as well as in common action (praxis), be it the waging of war or competition in athletic games… In the competition among equals the best excelled and gained their essence – the immortality of fame. (Habermas, 1962:1989, pp. 3–4) The Greek model of the city-state survives, according to Habermas, as a model of the ideal state of affairs between free citizens through the

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Hellenistic age and into the Roman world. The Roman Empire, though de facto clearly an autocracy, and often an arbitrary one at that, was itself legitimized by myths about the balance between the Princeps, the Senate and the People of Rome. Even at its most powerful under the ‘Five Good Emperors’ of Edward Gibbon, the propaganda of the Roman Empire continued to claim decisions and conquests were made in the name of the latter two groups (Gibbon, 1776–1788:2005; Birley, 1993). The Roman Empire appropriated Greek philosophy and culture, including sacred and secular games, drama and other arts, and (later) Christianity. When the Empire collapsed in the West, and transformed itself in the East into the Christian city-state of Byzantium, it was inevitable that an echo or memory of fifty-century BCE Athens survived into the Christian Europe of the early Middle Ages. But Europe in the Middle Ages was also shaped by the norms and values of the barbarians who replaced the Roman Empire (Heather, 1998). Discourse was replaced by highly stylized shows of strength and power. In describing the way in which the public manifested itself in post-Roman times, Habermas identifies leisure as a site for such representation and reproduction. In particular, Habermas explains how the joust sublimated an ideal of public nobility that was very different to Ancient Greece, but which was still predicated on the sleight of hand of hegemonic power. For Habermas (1962:1989, p. 8) the joust was linked to the staging and representation of power, expressed through the rituals of the performances and the symbolism and rhetoric of culture and status. The joust was the visual representation of a hierarchy of power culminating in the good Christian knight, the noble lord holding land; jousts were not only expressions of good courtly behaviour, but also, and more importantly, allowed the participants and spectators to share in a celebration of a holy day and the hegemonic masculinity of the chivalric ideal: Steel that he was, his courage never failed him, his conquering hand seized many a glorious prize when he came to battle… Thus I salute the hero. – Sweet balm to woman’s eyes, yet woman’s heart’s disease! Wolfram von Eschenbach (1200–1210:1980, p. 16) In the poem Parzifal the aspiring knight is given an image of what it means to be a man, to be a knight. The hegemonic masculinity portrayed is one of nobility, courage and prowess in battle. However, the site of developing and reinforcing this masculinity is not found in war: instead, it is the tourney ground where the allegorical character of the perfect thirteenth century noble man is found.

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Habermas then describes how the jousts and other festivities associated with the nobility of Europe became increasingly associated with the palaces of the princes. This association defined an elite culture that was dislocated from the taverns, towns and tradesmen of the emerging European states. Through the early modern period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this elite sphere was subject to and dictated by the whims of the ruler. But in the establishment of autocracy in high culture, there was, in the same period, an inevitable reaction against such feudal submission. Those men (and the few women) who owed their wealth to their own capitalist endeavours, at first denied acceptance into the elite, soon found their wealth bought them status and recognition, as princes out-spent their land-based resources. Autocracy, then, gave way to a synthesis: what Habermas calls the ‘good society’. This good society was both a part of the social world of the eighteenth century Royal Courts, and a product of the rise, on the back of colonialism and industrialization, of the early modern capitalist economy. These in turn were connected to the rise of nation-states and concepts of territory and power. With the freedoms and individuality associated with capitalism, trade and the emergence of power away from the Court, the good society flourished. And the good society allowed the creation of the modern public sphere. In comparison to the secular festivities of the Middle Ages and even of the Renaissance the baroque festival had already lost its public character in the literal sense. Joust, dance, and theater retreated from the public places into the enclosures of the park, from the streets into the rooms of the palace… Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense… The authorities were contrasted with the subjects excluded from them; the former served, so it was said, the public welfare; while the latter pursued their private interests. (Habermas, 1962:1989, pp. 9–11) This moment, the birth of the public sphere in the coffee-houses of eighteenth-century London, Edinburgh and Paris, is also the high-point of European rationality: the Enlightenment. It is the time of radical political ideas such as secularism and republicanism; an age beginning with a conservative bookworm like Gibbon, and ending with the modern science, atheism and mathematical reasoning of Laplace. Until quite recently, men like Hume, Kant, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Lavoisier needed no introduction or footnote among the educated classes of the

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West: these were the philosophes who had rejected superstition and autocracy, and established reason and rationality as the only arbiters of truth. However, although these men – for the published and well-read writers of the Enlightenment were mainly men (Hankins, 1985) – wrote for a public that would discuss their work in public places, that public was not the same as the people: the public was the bourgeois classes, who saw themselves as intellectually and socially distinct from the popular masses. Habermas returns to the Enlightenment origins of the bourgeois public sphere in the second half of the book, where he draws on the writings of a number of nineteenth century political and social theorists to account for the transformation of the public sphere of the Enlightenment. In discussing the post-Enlightenment reactionary position of the bourgeois public against the masses, framed by the terror of the French Revolution (when the sanculottes, the poorest classes literally ‘without shoes’, led the mobs and, for a moment, held power over the bourgeoisie) and its Napoleonic coda, Habermas cites freely from the work of nineteenth century German political philosopher Wieland (1857, 32: 191–218, cited in Habermas, 1962:1989, p. 102 and n. 50). Public opinion, according to Habermas (1962:1989, p. 102) originated from people who had education, knowledge and understanding. So, referencing Wieland, Habermas argues that this public opinion ‘spread “chiefly among those classes that, if they are active in large number, are the ones that matter”. Of course, the lowest classes of the people, the sanculottes, did not belong to them, because, under the pressure of need and drudgery, they had neither the leisure nor the opportunity “to be concerned with things that do not have an immediate bearing on their physical needs”.’ Here we can see that leisure time, the ability to control one’s work and resources to support time where one is free to think, read and discuss, is crucial for communicative rationality and action. Habermas expands on this point when paraphrasing Marx’s normative programme for social and economic change. Marx, identifying the inequality in the bourgeois public sphere of power, autonomy and hence freedom, comes up with a model, discussed by Habermas, for a public sphere in which such power is more evenly distributed. This, of course, is a utopian dream, but Habermas uses it to reflect back on the actual development in the nineteenth century of the bourgeois public sphere. Here, again, leisure is a central part of the analysis. The autonomous public, through the planned shaping of a state that became absorbed into society, secured for itself (as composed of

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private persons) a sphere of personal freedom, leisure and freedom of movement. In this sphere, the informal and personal interaction of human beings with one another would have been emancipated for the first time from the constraints of social labor (ever a ‘realm of necessity’) and become really ‘private’. (ibid., pp. 128–129) From discussing the work of the first theorists of Modernity, Habermas moves to articulating the consequences of the industrialization, secularization and individualization of society associated with the Modern turn (ibid., pp. 155–156). In analysing the role of Modernity in the decline of the family, he develops a model of leisure as a form of consumption in a State-capitalist political economy. Modernity, for Habermas, destroys the traditional role of the family and the notion of family property, family norms and family values. The enculturation of children through the family is lost, and with this loss comes a decline in the power of the family as a private institution. In compensation, politicians and society establish support systems for the family, such as welfare policies, public health and doles of various kinds. However, this support is not just material, for Habermas the Modern State intervenes in other words to provide structured mechanisms for managing the life of private individuals. There is a further erosion of the private, and the development of an instrumental network of consumption of many things, including leisure. As he continues (ibid., p. 156), ‘the family now evolved even more into a consumer of income and leisure time, into the recipient of publicly guaranteed compensations and support services. Private autonomy was maintained not so much in functions of control as in functions of consumption; today it consists less in commodity owners’ power to dispose than in the capacity to enjoy on the part of persons entitled to all sorts of services.’ What is happening in Modernity is the transformation of traditional social structures into ones dictated by instrumentality: so the old, private space of the family is colonized by the rationality of commodification, and codes of honour are replaced by shopping lists; in turn, leisure becomes measured by the timing of television programmes. Habermas continues his strong critique of the instrumentality of Modernity and capitalism, and leisure behaviour becomes an ersatz copy of communicative, rational behaviour, a shallow, meaningless replacement for the public sphere of the Enlightenment. Habermas is not dismissing all leisure activity, only that which is imposed on people by those in power as a hegemonic trick to make the people

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forget about the power of public discourse and reason. With the shrinking of the public sphere, Habermas writes (ibid., p. 159): ‘private people withdrew from their socially controlled roles as property owners into the purely personal ones of their noncommittal use of leisure time… Leisure behavior supplies the key to the floodlit privacy of the new sphere, to the externalization of what is declared to be the inner life. What today, as the domain of leisure, is set off from an occupational sphere that has become autonomous, has the tendency to take the place of that kind of public sphere that at one time was the point of reference for a subjectivity shaped in the bourgeois family’s intimate sphere.’ The theme of leisure behaviour continues, when Habermas contrasts the bourgeois culture of the Enlightenment with the empty leisure lives of us moderns, caught as we are in a realm of instrumental consumption. In making the contrast, Habermas also elucidates the distinction between affairs (action) self-directed by individuals pursuing private interests, and affairs (action) that unites individuals into a critical, communicative public sphere. In the Enlightenment, Western Europe was for a brief moment shaped by the latter: now, as in the last 150 years or so, caught as we are in a lifeworld colonized by instrumentality, our public sphere and our capability of free, communicative action, is limited. How we use our leisure time is indicative of our inability to choose freely or wisely; leisure defined as something apolitical or frivolous (something to do to keep us amused from boredom, as hundreds and thousands do every lunchtime when making friends on Facebook, perhaps) is itself evidence of the drain of critical thinking from the public sphere. So-called leisure behavior, once it had become part of the cycle of production and consumption, was already apolitical, if for no other reason than its incapacity to constitute a world emancipated from the immediate constraints of survival needs. When leisure was nothing but a complement to time spent on the job, it could be no more than a different arena for the pursuit of private business affairs that were not transformed into a public communication between private people. (ibid., p. 160) The early stages of Modernity, the rise of the nation-state and the homogenization and globalization of capitalism, lead inexorably for Habermas into the present times, and our late modern dilemmas of freedom, free will and constraint. Here Habermas is at his most pessimistic, and most in debt to his mentors Adorno and Horkheimer. His strong criticism of the leisure activities of the culture consumers reads

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like a British Leisure Studies paper written in the 1980s by Bramham or Critcher: ‘leisure is not only denuded of any political philosophy, but in its shallow, instrumental form it limits and constrains the ability of people to realise they are limited and constrained’. As he continues (ibid., p. 163): ‘In the course of our [the twentieth] century, the bourgeois forms of sociability have found substitutes that have one tendency in common despite their regional and national diversity: abstinence from literary and political.’ That is, the twentieth century has seen a decline in the engagement of people with critical, communicative debates about the nature and direction of politics, a decline equated by Habermas with the decline in discourses about the meaning and value of literature (and indeed other forms of high culture). What was crucial, for Habermas, about the critically-debating public in the Enlightenment public sphere, was its reliance on private reading and learning, which allowed for the intellectualization of the critical, public debate. In contemporary society, however, Habermas (ibid., p. 163), ‘the leisure activities of the culture-consuming public, on the contrary, themselves take place within a social climate, and they do not require discussions.’ There is in instrumentalized leisure and culture, an absence of both private cogitation and public discourse. Leisure, instrumentalized or not, is seen as a place or activity where culture is produced, discussed, and/or consumed. Habermas may be defending a form of culture that some would say is elitist: the canon of Western literature, the great art of dead, white men, the big ideas of the European Enlightenment. But what is important about this corpus of high culture is the demand it makes of individuals to think clearly and rationally about its meaning, and the need to engage in dialogue and discussion about it. The corpus is not fixed, and there is space for other works of art and literature, for voices that are not simply those of dead, white men. Habermas did not say it, but there is room, for example, for Toni Morrison alongside William Shakespeare. In a truly communicative lifeworld, both Beloved and Hamlet would be cherished and debated. In the instrumentality of mass, popular culture, one is lost to a niche market, the other is well-known if not well-read, and neither work of art is used to shape our critical thinking. Habermas is aware that art is produced to pay the rent of the artist, and is a product of the market, and that we consume art as we consume our daily bread. But there is more to this act of consumption: communication and reason. Put bluntly: you had to pay for books, theater, concert, and museum, but not for the conversation about why you had read, heard, and seen

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and what you might completely absorb through this conversation. Today the conversation is administered… The market for cultural goods in the expanded form of the leisure market takes over new functions… Meyersohn speaks in this context of the reduction of the ‘entrance requirements into leisure’… The consumption of mass culture leaves no lasting trace; it affords a kind of experience which is not cumulative but regressive. (ibid., pp. 164–166) In his concluding remarks to the book, Habermas argues there is no replacement for democratic participation and communication. If the bourgeois public sphere is no more, however, or limited to our leisure lives, then it is necessary to structure and regulate that leisure in a way that resist the instrumentality of capitalism and supports communicative rationality. As he puts it (ibid., p. 229): ‘The development of personal freedom in a private sphere that has de facto shrunk down to the circle of family and leisure time is itself in need of a status publicly guaranteed through democratic participation – instead of a basis in private property that formerly was adequately protected by liberal exemptionism.’

The theory of communicative action In the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1981:1984, 1981:1987), Habermas returns to the Enlightenment to use its social, political and philosophical manifesto to articulate ideas about freedom, truth and democracy. It is these two volumes that he introduces the concept of the lifeworld, its communicative rationality, and the danger of the instrumentality of systems (capitalism, state bureaucracies) at the end of Modernity. The central role leisure plays in his earlier work, especially in the history of the public and the private, is subsumed by Habermas’s normative concern with how we should structure our lives. But the theme of leisure as something that has become, or is in danger of becoming, something instrumental, remains in his thinking. How this is resisted through the norms and values of high culture and art is hence articulated in the first volume of The Theory of Communicative Action: We call a person rational who interprets the nature of his desires and feelings [Bedürfnisnatur] in the light of culturally established standards of value, but especially if he can adopt a reflective attitude

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to the very value standards through which desires and feelings are interpreted. Cultural values do not appear with a claim to universality, as do norms of action. At most, values are candidates for interpretations under which a circle of those affected can, if occasion arises, describe and normatively regulate a common interest. The circle of intersubjective recognition that forms around cultural values does not yet in any way imply a claim that they would meet with general assent within a culture, not to mention universal assent. For this reason arguments that serve to justify standards of value do not satisfy the conditions of discourse… In the discussions of art, music, and literary criticism, this happens in an indirect way. In this context reasons have the peculiar function of bringing us to see a work or performance in such a way that it can be perceived as an authentic expression of an exemplary experience, in general as the embodiment of a claim to authenticity. A work validated through aesthetic experience can then in turn take the place of an argument and promote the acceptance of precisely those standards according to which it counts as an authentic work. In practical discourse reasons or grounds are meant to show that a norm recommended for acceptance expresses a generalizable interest; in aesthetic criticism grounds or reasons serve to guide perception and to make the authenticity of a work so evident that this aesthetic experience can itself become a rational motive for accepting the corresponding standards of value. This provides a plausible explanation of why we regard aesthetic arguments as less conclusive than the arguments we employ in practical or, even more so, in theoretical discourse. (Habermas, 1981:1984, p. 20) In other words, art provides its own internalized justification, and it provides a ground or space for undermining purely instrumental arguments about utility and cost. But because the discourse about art is internalized, there are no grounds for using art and art criticism as a starting place for truth and reason. Art is purely subjective: this preserves high art from becoming a commodity of instrumentality, but it also limits art’s potential to be used in a communicative way to challenge injustice and support freedom and truth. In Germany, to use an example that will have been in Habermas’s mind, if not articulated by him in this book, the initial growth of National Socialism was mocked and challenged by the artists of Berlin, and for a time the power of plays, music and comedy seemed to stop the extreme right-wing. But contrary to the claim made by Woody Guthrie, musical instruments do not and can not kill fascists.

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Further on in the opening section of the first volume, Habermas does acknowledge that leisure activities can be places where arguments, reasons and actions are placed in a context of regulated but otherwise free discourse (ibid., pp. 131–132): ‘To begin with, we can characterize [contexts of action] by referring to institutions, for instance to law courts, scholarly congresses, meetings of boards of directors, medical consultations, university seminars, parliamentary hearings, discussions among engineers in settling a design, and so on.’ The multiplicity of contexts in which arguments can appear can be analysed in terms of functions and reduced to a few social arenas or ‘fields’. Corresponding to these are different types of claims and just as many types of argumentation. Thus Toulim distinguishes the general schema, in which he holds fast to the field-invariant properties of argumentation, from the particular, field-dependent rules of argumentation which are constitutive for the language games or life-orders of law, medicine, science, politics, art criticism, business enterprise, sport, and so on. ‘We are unable to judge the strength of arguments and to understand the category of validity claims that are supposed to be redeemed by them if we do not understand the sense of the enterprise that is supposed to be advanced through argumentation.’ This is Habermas embracing Wittgenstein’s concept of the language-game, where rules of morality, behaviour, truth and justice are held to be valid only within the language games to which they apply. So the rules of football are only applicable on the football field; in the kitchen, they are irrelevant. This concept is used by Habermas to identify conditions for the language game of communicative action: consensus, critical debate, acceptance of reason. In the second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas returns to leisure only once. But the section where he does mention leisure is instructive, as it comes where he is sketching the consequences of the colonization of the lifeworld by the systems of instrumental rationality. Here Habermas describes how leisure, culture, recreation and tourism are key areas of struggle between the communicative, freethinking of the lifeworld and the brutal commodification and consumption of capitalism. Of all the work of Jurgen Habermas, this paragraph is the most important to the thesis of the book you are currently reading: The thesis of internal colonization states that the subsystems of the economy and state become more and more complex as a consequence of capitalist growth, and penetrate ever deeper into the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. It should be possible to test this thesis sociologically wherever the traditionalist padding of

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capitalist modernization has worn through and central areas of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization have been openly drawn into the vortex of economic growth and therefore of juridification. This applies not only to such issues as protection of the environment, nuclear reactor security, data protection, and the like, which have been successfully dramatized in the public sphere. The trend toward juridification of informally regulated sphere of the lifeworld is gaining ground along a broad front – the more leisure, culture, recreation and tourism recognizably come into the grip of the laws of commodity economy and the definitions of mass consumption, the more the structures of the bourgeois family manifestly become adapted to the imperatives of the employment system, the more the school palpably takes over the functions of assigning job and life prospects, and so forth. (Habermas, 1981:1987, p. 368) Despite the briefness of the discussion, Habermas’s use of leisure in The Theory of Communicative Action provides the justification for leisure theory, Leisure Studies and an on-going empirical programme in leisure, sport and tourism that critically investigates the struggle over the meaning and purpose of leisure. The pessimism about art does not rule out leisure and culture being places where communicative rationality can produce communicative action: only that to be communicative, there has to be a public (externalized) sphere in which debates about meaning can take place. Just as in his earlier work, leisure can only be morally instructive if it plays a communicative role, or is the product of such communicative rationality. Where leisure is a product of consumption and commodification, the end-point of some instrumentally rational system, such as global capitalism, it becomes less useful as a space, form or activity that gives individuals meaning and purpose. Then there is only the circus, at which we are entertained and made to forget our dreams of freedom and democracy.

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas, 1985:1990) is one of Habermas’s most difficult books, but in it he provides his strongest defence of the Enlightenment against theorists such as Foucault and Derrida. His argument, that the Enlightenment project in philosophy, sociology and politics, remains central to our understanding of Modernity, ranges widely across current and previous theory, always

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endeavouring to challenge critiques of epistemological and epistemological truth and realism. Leisure is invoked in one short section of Habermas’s analysis, in relation to a discussion about the consumption of goods unnecessary for life. Here Habermas is talking about what Veblen (1925:1970) called conspicuous consumption, the deliberate waste of resource on wealthy goods or practices that give the consumer a selfdefined sense of status and power. Leisure is, in the beginning of Modernity, something that is a symptom of wasteful consumption, though not in an absolute sense: some leisure can be productive. But rather than invoking Veblen, Habermas engages with the theory of consumption discussed by Georges Bataille (1933:1985). According to Habermas (1985: 1990, p. 222), Bataille ‘sees a deep ambivalence embedded in consumption itself between the reproduction of labor power directly necessary for life and a consumption of luxury that removes the products of labor from the sphere of vital necessities in a wasteful way and hence from the dictates of the processes of sheer metabolism. Only this unproductive form of expenditure, which from the economic perspective of individual commodity owners represents a loss, can simultaneously make possible and confirm the sovereignty of human beings and their authentic existence.’ Habermas is aware that these ideas have also been discussed by Marx, though in a pessimistic way that suggests individuals do not have the freedom to use leisure time wisely. He continues (ibid., pp. 222–223, citing Bataille, 1933:1985, p. 12): ‘To be sure, Marx, too, speaks of freedom beyond the sphere of necessity, beyond the realm of production determined by the metabolism with external nature. But Marx also subsumes even the creative use of leisure time under the externalization and reappropriation of the essential powers of the individual – the reference point remains the total individual, universally realizing himself. With utter realism, Bataille sees in this the danger that the habitualized necessities of nature merely continue under the cover of a seemingly autonomous freedom; he fears that true sovereignty would also be suppressed in a world of material abundance as long as the rational – according to the principle of balancing payments – use of material and spiritual goods did not leave room for a radically different form of consumption – namely, of wasteful expenditure in which the consuming subject expresses himself. This unproductive form of expenditure places Bataille in proximity with the toxic state of self-transcendence of frenzy. This unbounding of the self also leaves its economic traces in luxury consumption: “Human activity is not to be reduced wholly to processes of production and reproduction; and consumption is to be divided into two different domains. The first, which is reducible, comprises the minimal

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amount necessary for individuals of a society to preserve their lives and to continue their productive activity… The second domain embraces the so-called unproductive expenses: luxury, mourning ceremonies, wars, cults, the erection of splendid buildings, games, theater, the arts, perverse sexuality (that is, detached from genitality) represent activities that at least originally have their end in themselves. The self-sufficient activity performed for its own sake (Aristotle), as displayed in the luxury of the leisure classes, still reveals something of primordial sovereignty”.’ Habermas concludes his discussion of leisure in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity by suggesting that conspicuous consumption, overt consumption of the unproductive, has given way in modern society to a privatization of leisure. Again, the engagement with Bataille is framed by Marx: Capitalism is characterized by the fact that all surpluses get reinvested, that is, they are spent again productively; the process of accumulation is guided by imperatives of the self-realization of capital. In this regard, Marx criticized only the growing independence of the production of exchange-values from the production of use-values… Hence modern society does without the public display of luxury – ‘exhibition of wealth occurs now behind private walls in accord with boring and oppressive conventions’. The generous, the orgiastic, the lack of measure that still marked feudal waste, has disappeared. (ibid., p. 223, citing Bataille, 1933:1985, p. 22) There is a poignancy around the emptiness of Modernity, and the shallow nature of its new, instumentalized, privatized, leisure forms. Habermas argues that Bataille’s mourning of the loss of the orgiastic (the pre-modern, Dionysian revelry of fairs, feasts and fights) is a response to the rationalizing, civilizing leisure and culture that appears in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But this pessimism about Modern leisure is tempered by a belief in the power of communicative action, which, according to Habermas, is never completely swamped by instrumentality.

Leisure in the later works of Habermas In his later works, Habermas’s political agenda becomes more urgent, as the impact of globalization and economic change, what could be called postmodernity, and the rise of extremism all call into question the (Western) liberal democratic settlement of late modernity. As he

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observes in Post-National Constellation, ‘[the] same consumer goods and fashions, the same films, television programmes, and best-selling music and books spread across the globe’ (Habermas, 2000, p. 75). This spread weakens local and national social structures, and also swamps any attempt to provide a communicative space for the free exercise of reason. Here, leisure is simply commodified, instrumental, popular in nature and used to turn us all into pliable, docile consumers. In other places, Habermas uses leisure in a more positive way, using leisure to identify where we are free to make rational decisions about our lives. In Between Naturalism and Religion, Habermas uses leisure as a basic good that is negotiated over between different parties committed to a democratic dialogue, consensus and distribution. The commitment to compromise is crucial – and separates communities of faith, with their absolutes, from such a dialogue. As he suggests (Habermas, 2008, p. 135), ‘the acceptance of voting procedures is explained by the willingness to compromise of parties who at any rate agree in their preference for the largest possible share of basic goods, such as money, security, or leisure time. The parties can reach compromises because they all aspire to the same categories of divisible goods… conflicts over existential values between communities of faith cannot be resolved by compromise.’ In Between Facts and Norms (Habermas, 1991:1996), he attempts to provide both a justification for political freedom and a programme for a political ethics based on shared legal rights. How those rights are shared is understood by the German sociologist Ludwig Raiser as a consequence of the construction of different public and private spheres (Raiser, 1961, cited in Habermas, 1991:1996, n. 15, p. 559). Habermas (1991:1996, pp. 398–399) uses this to describe how the private sphere establishes an ethical core of private rights, and in doing so he uses leisure as an example of the private: ‘Raiser demarcates a sphere of private life in the narrow sense (the domestic sphere of home, family and marriage, as well as the domains of leisure and consumption, private association, etc.) from a private life in a broad sense, which is characterized by typified group interests. Here individuals in their client roles depend, for example, on employment and tenancy or transportation and supply companies. By contrast, the social sphere is dominated by interactions among corporate enterprises, large organizations, associations, and intermediary structures of all sorts, which have an influence on individuals’ decisions through the exercise of economic and social power. This theory of spheres… has a certain descriptive value. Its real intention is to emphasize the ethical core of private rights with the help of a sociological concept of the private sphere.’

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In examining how individuals use the legal system to ensure their individual and social rights, Habermas also tackles the paradox of social welfare and individual liberty. He sees in the countries of late twentieth century Western Europe exemplars of the welfare state, where legislation is made by states to protect those who do not have the individual power to protect themselves in the existing legal frameworks. But, as he puts it (ibid., p. 407), ‘welfare state paternalism has raised the disturbing question of whether the paradigm is compatible with the principle of legal freedom at all. This question has become more acute in the view of the juridification effects arising from certain properties of administrative power as the medium for state interventions, properties that are hardly neutral. The welfare state provides services and apportions life opportunities, by guaranteeing employment, security, health care, housing, minimum income, education, leisure, and the natural bases of life, it grants each person the material basis for a humanly dignified existence. But with such overwhelming provisions, the welfare state obviously runs the risk of impairing individual autonomy, precisely the autonomy it is supposed to promote by providing the factual preconditions for the equal opportunity to exercise negative freedoms.’ If the State provides leisure opportunities, the danger is that such leisure is also prescribed by the State (and other leisure may be proscribed). The debate about obesity in the West (Gard and Wright, 2005) is a classic example of a moral panic leading to instructions and interference over individual lifestyles, justified by an instrumental argument over the cost to the economy of the unhealthy, overweight, working classes. A way out of the paradox is offered by Habermas, though it is only a partial solution. He suggests (1991:1996, pp. 410–411) ‘in the area of private law, we find a number of proposals for escaping welfare-state paternalism. One line of thought directs attention to the actionability of rights. This approach starts with the observation that materialized law, because of its complex references to typical social situations, requires conflicting parties to have a high level of competence. Rights can become socially effective only to the extent that the affected parties are sufficiently informed and capable of actualizing, in the relevant cases, the legal protection guaranteed by the basic right of due process. The competence to mobilize the law already depends in general on formal education, social background, and other variables (such as gender, age, previous courtroom experience, and the kind of social relationship affected by the conflict). But the access barriers are even higher for using materialized law, which requires laypersons to dissect their everyday

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problems (regarding work, leisure and consumption, housing, illness, etc.) into highly specialized legal constructions that are abstractly related to real-life contexts.’ Again, Habermas invokes the idea that leisure is one private sphere where our individual preferences may be at risk of instrumental intervention from the systems of the State and capitalism. Habermas argues in favour of mobilizing education to improve access to legal systems, reducing the power of experts, but he acknowledges that in a context like leisure it is difficult to debate legal issues without the need for formalized (professionalized) interpretators of the rules. Finally, Habermas discusses leisure in the context of heritage tourism in the book Time of Transitions (Habermas, 2001:2006). In particular, he is interested in the debate in Germany about the construction of a holocaust memorial, and the controversy over its meaning and use. He begins his analysis of the debate by suggesting it can be examined through the work of Ernst Cassirer (1945). What is useful for Habermas about Cassirer is his awareness of the symbolism in the construction of worldviews and communities of interest (Cohen, 1985). For Habermas (2001:2006, p. 62) ‘Cassirer undertakes a semiotic transformation of Kantian epistemology, transferring the spontaneity of world-constitution from the transcendental subject to various “languages”: the language of everyday life, of myth, of art, of religion, of science, and so on. The various symbolic “worlds” which we simultaneously inhabit reflect as many views of the world as forms of practical interaction with the world: rites, everyday practices, arts, cults, procedures and institutions, handicrafts, aesthetic and scientific techniques, and so on. In this very broad conception of symbolic forms… on the one side stand linguistic, propositionally structured, and hence rational, forms of representation, and action with explicit meaning contents; on the other, non-discursive, pre- or extra-linguistic, ritualized, imagistic modes of expression or styles, whose performative or pre-predicative, meaningcontents await, as it were, explication in the linguistic medium.’ So leisure in the form of arts and culture plays a key role in the construction of the different (symbolic) worlds we inhabit, and provide for us our worldview. But in Modernity, this symbolic construction is at the cost of our ability to connect and live in a (natural) world established through a naïve realism. So we no longer play football; we merely support our team on television. Habermas continues: As human beings master the forces of nature that assail them through symbols, they gain a measure of distance from the immediate pressure of nature. To be sure, the price they pay for this liberation is

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the self-imposed dependence on a semanticized nature, which returns in the magical power of mythical images. But the break with the first nature continues within this second, symbolically generated nature, namely, with the conceptual tendency toward the construction and categorical articulation of symbolic worlds. As civilization advances, humanity entangles itself in an ever-denser web of symbolic mediations, thereby freeing itself from the contingencies of a nature with which it enters into contact in increasingly indirect ways. (ibid., pp. 63–64) It is this distillation of the theories of Cassirer, transformed through a synthesis with the philosophical and sociological framework of Habermas, that leads Habermas to his despairing conclusion. Symbolic forms of representation and ritualistic forms of expression occur in modern societies, and not only in residual forms. The example of the Berlin Holocaust memorial project… shows that the cultural memory of a nation is not only transmitted in the discursive media of education, literary traditions, and the pedagogy of museums and memorials; clearly it requires symbolic representation and ritualization as well. On the other hand, prior to the realization of a project of this sort, the forms and ideas that render it so inspiring are also stripped of their last vestiges of naturalness in the acid bath of relentless public discourse. (ibid., pp. 69–70) Any moral or ethical instructiveness about the memorial is lost in the simplifications and arguments over history: whatever the original intention was, the memorial becomes tainted by claim and counterclaim over the role of the German ‘people’ in the Holocaust.

Conclusions Habermas was never a leisure scholar, and leisure was never the primary focus of his various theoretical and research programmes. Nonetheless, he was interested in the way in which leisure was used to establish key concepts in those programmes. Leisure played an important role in his history of the development of the public sphere. Leisure is seen as a form of behaviour that allows both communicative rationality to be nurtured, and as a form that works against the communicative,

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democratic discourse under the pressures of globalization, capitalism and State bureaucracies. He saw how leisure was privatized in the onset of Modernity. He argued that instrumentality was commodifying leisure and culture in such a way that made it difficult for individuals to find the political and social space to think freely. For all these reasons, his work on leisure is important for Leisure Studies, and how research into leisure is maintained in the twenty-first century.

Part II Research

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5 Applying Habermas to Sport

Reflection Rugby league’s heartlands are the small towns of the north of England, the towns and villages of south-west France, and the working-class communities of Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. Before the collapse of England’s heavy industries, rugby league clubs had strong associations with the work of their supporters. Many amateur rugby league clubs relied on local factories for financial support and sports facilities. Professional rugby league clubs were sponsored by the local factories, and their players found employment there. A large number of English professional rugby league clubs were in mining areas: Wigan, Saint Helens and Leigh in south-west Lancashire; Workington and Whitehaven on the Cumberland Coast; and the West Riding of Yorkshire’s Castleford, Featherstone and Wakefield. Even in Leeds, there were mines on the south side of the city, and the last one survived until the end of the Miners’ Strike in 1985. Other clubs were in towns associated with other heavy industries: Widnes owed its existence to the ICI Chemical Works that gave the club their nickname; Hunslet was in a part of Leeds famous for its railway engineering; Dewsbury and Batley were part of an area still known as the Heavy Woollen, dominated by textiles. Once upon a time, reading the rugby league results was like reading a concise history of the industrial north, from the fishing fleets on Hull to the wire works of Warrington. Rugby league was part of the north of England, part of the north’s industrial landscape: and when the industries declined at the beginning of the 1970s, rugby league also fell into a spiral of falling crowds and failing clubs. Amateur rugby league almost disappeared completely at that time as the factory teams were 93

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lost with the factories, and men had no money to spend in club bars or on the terraces. Then in 1984, Margaret Thatcher took on the National Union of Mineworkers, and the rugby league belt of the north of England (sometimes called the M62 Belt after the motorway that conveniently links up most of the northern league-playing towns) was galvanized by the prospect of class war. Club owners, new-money types with a tendency towards buffet lunches and golfing trips to the Algarve, were held under close scrutiny by the fans. Some club directors lent their support to the striking miners because they remembered their roots; others, wisely, kept their silence but did not intervene to stop collections for the Strike Fund. Many of rugby league’s elite players were miners themselves, or ex-miners, or the sons of miners. The rugby league community was on the side of the workers. Arthur Scargill was a hero. A few years later, when the strike was lost and most of the pits were closed, the Rugby Football League naïvely accepted sponsorship from British Coal, the successor to the National Coal Board that had done Margaret Thatcher’s bidding. It is a mark of the sense of solidarity and pride amongst the northern working class that at the 1992 World Cup Final between Great Britain and Australia, held at a packed Wembley Stadium, thousands of fans wearing Great Britain shirts defaced the British Coal logo emblazoned on the front of them. To understand the north of England, its history, and the development of modern sport, there is no better place to start than Saltaire in West Yorkshire. It is a perfectly formed industrial village, tucked between Shipley and the river, founded by the archetypal Victorian patriarch, Titus Salt, to house the workers at his mill. Titus was typically proud of his own worth, and named the streets of terraced houses in the village after himself, his immediate family, the Queen and her beloved Albert. The houses he built for his workers were ahead of their time, and a vast improvement on the cramped slums of nearby Bradford. Titus believed in looking after his workers. He was a Moses, and they were his Israelites. That meant the village came with a number of edifying amenities, such as a grand Unitarian chapel and a school, but Titus ensured his workers were morally upright by banning alcohol (banning it for them, not himself: his birthday parties were quite notorious affairs, and his brand new house up in the woods at Milner Field boasted a kitchen based on the one at Glastonbury Abbey, only with bigger wine cellars). At the bottom of the village, by the canal (the same canal that snaked through the valley to Leeds), Titus’s mill was the centre of his world.

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Its chimney, the tallest and grandest in the Aire Valley, soared above the smoke and grime. As a child, I was used to the tall shadows of mills and factories, made out of the local black stone (it was only when I was much older that I realized Yorkshire black stone was normal millstone grit blackened by years of soot). Saltaire was the best and biggest of them. Some of the mills were still working or being used as warehouses, but most of them in Bradford, Batley, Dewsbury, Leeds were empty shells. Down in Rodley, near where we lived, Smith’s crane factory was coming to an end, and the windows along the back of the canal were all smashed in. In Saltaire, it seemed the industrial revolution was still something of which we could still be proud. The houses were still lived in, the chapel was still in use, and the mill seemed in its vastness to be untouched by the half-bricks of modern vandals. These days, the mill is even more secure. It has become a centrepiece of the middle-class revival, the heart of a World Heritage Site. Part of the mill is now the headquarters for a global electronics company, the new mill houses health officials, and other parts are now a tourist attraction. You can browse the David Hockney galleries in the vast rooms where the spinning machines once rattled, buy a latte, eat posh food. The terraced houses Titus built are mainly bought and sold by folk who work down the valley in Leeds, but there are still some almshouses rented out to the elderly. Only Titus’s fancy house at Milner Field has gone, lost under trees and brambles, with the mosaics of the conservatory and the old cellars the only relics that mark its passing. On a summer weekend, Saltaire heaves with round people in beige shorts and cotton shirts. Enterprising locals imbued with the spirit of Titus Salt offer guided tours for Americans wearing white baseball caps that match their white socks and white trainers. Families graze on ice creams, chips and pasties. Titus Salt’s workers were part of a wider surge of industrial capitalism, a surge that swept through the quiet valleys and dales of the north of England and left them scarred by factories, railways, roads and terraced houses. Titus the capitalist wanted his workers to be productive. Titus the philanthropist wanted his workers to be comfortable in this life so he could be comfortable in the next life. Titus wanted his workers to be loyal, to be morally correct, and, importantly, to be physically healthy. So as well as the chapel and the school, and the houses with their back yards and improved sanitation, Titus and his successors built a park, cricket pitches, and, ultimately, a football pitch. When I first went to Saltaire I didn’t understand why there was a cricket pitch there. What did cricket have to do with capitalism? But

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Saltaire is the key to understanding the industrial revolution, the growth of the working class in the north of England, and the development of modern sport. Saltaire is a microcosm of the wider story: the story of how the growth of industry and the working classes in the north led to the adoption by the mill workers and miners of the sporting activities of their employers. Titus Salt himself was too early for the game of rugby football, but his philanthropical concerns and his capitalist drive are a model for the muscular Christians who, a generation later, were establishing rugby football clubs in the small towns on both sides of the Pennines. Knowing about Salt and Saltaire helps explain why Wakefield’s rugby league club is still, to this day, called Trinity (and still known by most people as Trinity, rather than the Wildcats, the bastardized Americanism they adopted in the wake of rugby league’s deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation).

Applying Habermas to leisure and identity At the beginning of this century, Kevin Hylton (2005) and Ben Carrington (2004) challenged sport and leisure researchers over the paucity of critical studies on the way in which sport and leisure construct racialized identities (see also Carrington and McDonald, 2001). This chapter takes up that challenge by concentrating on previous and new research around rugby league in England and France, and analysing the social ethics of identity formation in terms of communicative and instrumental rationalities (Habermas, 1983:1990). Specifically, the idea that rugby league is an example of a leisure space where both communicative and instrumental actions can be observed is used to explore the negotiations of identity that minority ethnic rugby league players encounter in the game. The sport of rugby league, like all modern sports, has changed over the last thirty years due to the pressures of commodification (Hughson and Free, 2006), globalization (Maguire, 2005) and the transition to postindustrial and postmodern identity formations (Wheaton, 2004a). Its historical development as a variant of rugby union played in the north of England limited its ability to expand internationally for much of its existence in the twentieth century (Collins, 2006). However, that has now changed. Once a sport limited to working-class communities in England, Australia, New Zealand and France, rugby league is now played in over thirty countries, and every year the game’s emic, popular literature reports on new horizons and new ventures ranging from Argentina to Georgia. For example, in one issue of League Express (2506,

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10 July 2006), the United Kingdom’s best selling rugby league weekly newspaper, it was reported that: In blistering hot conditions the Czech Republic became the latest country to establish an international presence in rugby league when it made an encouraging debut against the Great Britain Student Pioneers yesterday. (Keenan, 2006, p. 3) On the same page the newspaper reported on the visit of a delegation of officials from the Jamaica Rugby League Association to Leeds, and towards the back of the newspaper there were match reports from Cyprus (where Lebanon Espoirs won one and lost one against British army bases on the island) and the Ireland versus Serbia match at the Rugby League European Federation’s under-19 competition in Perpignan. At the same time as the sport expands its horizons, however rugby league has continued to be associated with the areas of the globe in which it originated and spread as a semi-professional game at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth: the north of England (where the game, as the Northern Union, was established in 1895 and consolidated over the following ten years); the eastern states of Australia; New Zealand; the south-west of France; and Papua New Guinea (where rugby league is the undisputed national game). The same issue of League Express leads on the front page with a top story about the close defeat of West Yorkshire’s Bradford Bulls by Leeds Rhinos, whose home ground is only a few miles down the Aire Valley from Bradford. Most of the reports inside the paper are about the thirty-four teams in the Super League and the National Leagues One and Two, and twenty-nine of these are in traditional rugby league areas of the north of England. In addition, five and a half pages are given over to coverage of the National Rugby League of Australia: evidence for Australianization, certainly, but not so obviously evidence for globalization. This chapter draws on a long-standing personal and research interest I have with rugby league. The findings of my research projects are compared with new research undertaken into the life stories of rugby league players in London and France, and fans in the north of England. This will enable comparisons to be made, referring to the work of Foucault (1972) and Habermas (1983:1990) about the way in which rugby league constructs a sense of belonging and identity through its relationship with hegemonic masculinity, whiteness and locality. In examining

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the situation of black London-based rugby league players, and their counterparts in France, some sense of the liminality of the community of rugby league will be identified. It will become clear that this research has strong implications for wider metatheoretical narratives within Leisure Studies around postmodernity and identity. In historiographical terms, rugby league in England is rich with invented traditions, on the side of the game and its origins in the coal smoke of the late nineteenth century (Delaney, 1993), and on the side of the game’s detractors, who dismiss it as merely a professional adjunct of ‘proper’ rugby: rugby union (see for example the potted version of this split in Roberts, 2004, p. 85). The supporters of rugby league, and those who write about it, are clear that rugby league is an expression of working-class defiance, of northern working-class culture and a celebration of working-class masculinity (see Bamford, 2002; Hinchliffe, 2000; Kelner, 1996). This equation of ‘the game’ with northerness and northern identity, however, does not stop people within the community of rugby league from also adopting the language of equality and diversity and boasting of the historical and current involvement of black people (Collins, 2006; Melling and Collins, 2004). Following Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), it can be seen that this is an invented tradition that conflates rugby league’s origins in the north of England in the nineteenth century with a mythical ‘northerness’ founded on resistance. And this invented tradition has become normalized: rugby league is seen by Melling and Collins as a model of inclusivity, despite the continued references to belonging that associate the game’s imaginary community with northern, working-class masculinities (Spracklen, 1995, 1996, 2001a, 2005, 2007a); and despite the ‘small but significant’ problem with racism and the stereotyping and lack of minority ethnic supporters and officials identified by Leeds Metropolitan University (Long et al., 1995). That this ‘northerness’ is also in essence a culture and community of whiteness has been observed and discussed elsewhere (Spracklen, 2001b). Rugby league in its traditional English heartlands remains a predominantly white game. But just because rugby league is based on symbolic boundaries (Cohen, 1985) and invented traditions that are embedded in normalized whiteness (see Long and Hylton, 2002; Spracklen et al., 2006), it is not necessarily the case that rugby league is a sport exclusively for white, northern working-class men (Spracklen, 2005). An imaginary community based on a sport is inevitably susceptible to change, and its symbolic boundaries will always be sites of contestation over meaning and interpretation, between insiders and outsiders (Garner, 2006). What is at stake is how individual actors make decisions about

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being involved in rugby league, and how the rationality behind that choice is both communicative (free, deliberative) and instrumental (constrained, egocentric), in an explicitly Habermasian sense. As Habermas (1981:1984, p. 285) explains, ‘the effects of action comprise the results of action (which the actor foresaw and intended, or made allowance for) and the side effects (which the actor did not foresee).’ What is at stake is the construction of social identity in rugby league through the creation of an imaginary community (Spracklen, 1995, 1996, 2001a, 2005, 2007a; Spracklen and Spracklen, 2008). This imaginary community is constructed partly through the process of being imagined historically (see Anderson (1983) on the use of myth in imagining community) and through the process of being lived through symbols and symbolic boundaries (Cohen, 1985). Unlike the neo-tribe of much postmodern critical discourse (Maffesoli, 1996; Wheaton, 2004a), the imaginary community gives to its members social identity and status in traditional structures of class, gender and ethnicity. As such, belonging is more than just buying a Leeds Rhinos jersey, even though such an act is a matter of free choice and a matter of great symbolic meaning. I argue that rugby league, traditionally viewed as a northern, white, working-class male game (Denham, 2004; Spracklen, 1995, 2001a) has had to re-imagine its symbolic boundaries to accommodate the needs of players from non-traditional rugby league areas and from non-traditional backgrounds. However, despite this, much of the game’s working-class and masculine discourse (and relationship with the gender order and male identities – Connell, 1987; Pringle and Markula, 2005; Edwards, 2006) and symbolism remains. Interviews with twelve rugby league fans from Hunslet and Bramley, two semiprofessional clubs in Leeds in the shadow of the Super League team the Rhinos describe this continued commitment to late modern ideas of class and community (Spracklen, forthcoming). This chapter explores the tensions between the game’s expansion, the involvement of black players in London and the south of England and the south-west of France, and the racism and sexism normalized by the symbolic boundaries and myths of belonging of the imaginary community identified in earlier research (Long et al., 1995; Spracklen, 1995, 1996, 2001a; Long and Spracklen, 1996; Long et al., 1997; Spracklen et al., 2006).

Rugby league in the north of England in the late twentieth century For players and supporters in the north of England, rugby league was and is associated with the culture and history of the working-class

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north: with what was identified in previous research as ‘northerness’ (Spracklen, 1996, 2001a). The north of England associated with rugby league is a narrow geographical area, confined to certain towns in the pre-1974 counties of Lancashire (in the south of the old county), the West Riding of Yorkshire (and the outlying cities of Hull and York), and the west coast of Cumberland. Places in the geographical north that fall outside the rugby league heartland are not, according to people involved in rugby league, to be seen as properly northern: [Rugby league] showed me a way of living, admitted me into a world where I belonged… rugby league has this love affair with its people, its geography, you can’t separate it from where it is, it is so involved. (Spracklen, 1996, p. 235) The north is where rugby league is played: northerners are the people, the men who play and watch the game, who create the northerness that is held up as the archetype of what it means to be a white, working-class, northern man. This northerness is itself part of the way in which the imaginary community of ‘the game’ is constructed and maintained through the shared (imagined) history of belonging and the reinvention of traditions. It is seen in the shared knowledge of the stereotypes and symbolic boundaries of the north of England – the mills, the pits, the pints and pies – but also a reverence of ideals of northern, working-class masculinity: players as hard as nails, men who take no nonsense, who are tough but fair, who are as gritty as the stone that divides the north in two along the ridge of the Pennines: It’s like… everything about it, it’s always been about honesty, about being our game, pride in yer roots… A northern game, for northern folk, that’s what it’s always been… you see we went our own way because we wanted to rule our own destiny… and the people who play it, they’ve always reflected their roots… you don’t get any egos, well you didn’t until they started, all this contract business, I’m talking about back then, before Lindsay [Maurice Lindsay, then the Chairman of the Rugby Football League] came along, players lived in the same street as the fans, drank in the same pubs, so they were like… it were an accepted part of the game, that it was ours, and that we, that is the hard working class I suppose, your average

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man, could somehow have his values expressed through rugby [league]. (Spracklen, 1996, p. 223) Following the Habermasian analysis of leisure it can be seen that rugby league in the north of England in the 1990s was caught between two incommensurable trends: the nostalgic desire to define a sense of communicative freedom and resistance in the game’s history; and the instrumental machinations of professionalism and commercialism.

Rugby league in Leeds as globalized Super League Leeds Rhinos were crowned the club champions of world rugby league in February 2008, following their defeat of Australian National Rugby League champions Melbourne Storm. Sponsored and named after Leeds Metropolitan University’s Carnegie Faculty, the World Club Championship win followed the Rhinos’ Super League title in 2007 when they were sponsored by Carnegie and promoted across the city and the wider city region as one of the strongest clubs of the Super League era. Since the formation of the Super League and the switch to summer (Denham, 2004), the wealthy rugby league club of Leeds RFLC – the Loiners – had transformed into the Rhinos, marketing themselves as a leisure destination for middle-class families looking to fill their summer Sunday afternoons with some Americanized entertainment delivered by highly-trained, highly-paid professionals. As the Rhinos, Leeds RLFC bought into the idea of Super League as entertainment, as glamour, as the northern hemisphere equivalent of the National Rugby League in Australia. They bought the Leeds Rugby Union Football Club, re-branding it as the Tykes and themselves as Leeds Rugby – both codes in one all-year round package. With sponsorship deals and season tickets all rising year on year, the Rhinos invested in talented young players from across the city and Yorkshire, alongside the best players and coaches from Australia and New Zealand. Although the debate over which rugby league club has been the most successful in the Super League era is one repeated ad nauseam in pubs across the north of England, there is no doubt that Leeds Rhinos – Leeds RLFC – are on most fans’ shortlists. The change to Super League in the 1990s, and the increasing dominance of Leeds Rhinos in the city, is regretted by nearly all the fans of Bramley and Hunslet who reflected on the last twenty years (Spracklen, forthcoming). Arnold (a pseudonym, as are all other names

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of respondents in this chapter and the next chapter), a Bramley supporter since the 1960s, said that Super League had ‘given the sport publicity, but in reality it has destroyed the game… those outside [like Bramley] have no chance now of breaking into the select group at the top.’ Christine, a Hunslet fan, was critical of the Rhinos and suggested they ‘have forgotten where they came from… they were once the same as us’, indicating that the Rhinos had betrayed their working-class roots and betrayed the working-class community of rugby league in Leeds. Another Hunslet fan commented that ‘Leeds and others have just cast us away’, expressing the feeling of a community divided and a working-class supporter base in South Leeds angry and upset at the way the game had changed. For Charles, someone who first watched Bramley play Leigh in 1937 at the old Barley Mow ground, some of the changes to rugby league were acceptable. He was quite happy about the switch to summer, and excited about attempts to expand rugby league into places like London, but he was dismissive of the commercialization of the game. On Super League, he admitted ‘they play some very good football’, but went on to say that he could not understand why they have these names, it seems overdone… Wakefield Trinity already had a good name that everybody knew. So why are they the Wildcats? At one time every club had a chance, now it’s just the same teams. Another Bramley supporter, Claire, echoed Charles’ comments: ‘I don’t like all that razzmatazz, I think it’s crap and too American.’ She argued that Bramley’s fans went to matches to watch Bramley play, to ‘meet mates and have a drink and a chat.’ The social world of the game was crucial to her and her view of rugby league: nobody at Bramley would watch cheerleaders or singers or fireworks because ‘they would be too busy talking rugby and having a drink, or in my case selling raffle tickets.’ Bramley’s social world is working-class, northern, things denied by the Americanization of Super League (Denham, 2004). Craig, a key volunteer in the Hunslet Independent Supporters Association, set up to make a direct connection between fans and the club, also preferred summer rugby. He described a match against Workington in January as ‘just freezing, far too cold’, and pointed out that so many games were ‘mud-baths’ that it spoiled the spectacle of the game. In one sense, then, Craig was aware that rugby league was entertainment, that its old environment might not have been favourable to its

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function as entertainment. But despite this acceptance of change and Habermasian modernization, Craig was sure of the negative impact of Super League: ‘money came into the game big style but it was not shared equally… the big clubs want more and more and the rich will continue to get richer.’ Craig’s distrust of the big clubs and Super League extended to the Rhinos: even though he was happy for Leeds to play Hunslet in the Lazenby Cup, he ‘would not go out of my way to watch them.’ Another Hunslet fan was worried that the strength and dominance of Leeds in the city meant ‘they might be attracting former Hunslet fans, or at least fans who in the old days might have normally gone to watch Hunslet.’ The anti-Super League, anti-Leeds sentiment was also echoed by Danny, one of the directors of the reformed Bramley Buffaloes. He believed that Super league was ‘a different game [to rugby league]… players are so big, so pumped up, I think it will not be long before someone gets killed. It’s not our game anymore.’ Again, Danny made clear the difference between his game, rugby league, the game of the working-class semi-professional, and the Super League world of elite automota, ‘pumped up’ by some artificial means (a reference to performance-enhancing drugs: see Waddington, 2000). His hatred of Super League, and Leeds RLFC in particular, stemmed from his belief that the Leeds club had betrayed Bramley, that individuals at Leeds Rugby somehow still owed Bramley hundreds of thousands of pounds. Rugby league at the home of the Rhinos was ‘a totally different game [to the rugby league played at Bramley].’ Danny’s anger at Leeds RLFC went further: he supported ‘any team that is playing them’, and suggested that the success of the Rhinos ‘does nothing for us [Bramley]… if I won the Lottery I will buy Headingley and build a Netto on it!’

Minority ethnic rugby league players in London Thirteen minority ethnic rugby league players were interviewed to explore their relationship with the game and the game’s imagined and imaginary community (Spracklen, 2007a). All the respondents were recruited to the research by asking contacts in amateur rugby league in London about minority ethnic players, so in one sense their ethnicity was defined for them by the contacts who gave me their details. However, what came across in the interviews was a uniformity of perception about their blackness. Every player questioned said they would call themselves black if asked to define their ethnicity; and when pressed on their own opinion of what they were, most of the players continued

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to state that they were black British, with only two players stressing the African origin of their families. As one player explained, being black was how others saw him, and how he felt he was, even though a Government Census would define him as Mixed Race: My mum is white, but I’m black… no-one cares about your mum or dad when they see you on the street, it’s what I am that people see. In research with coaches and development officers in London and the south of England, it was found that these individuals, all themselves white, held strong opinions about the suitability of rugby league to working-class black southerners (Spracklen, 2005). Some, but not all of these individuals commented on the suitability of working-class black men to rugby league, raising the spectre of the ‘natural’ speed and agility of the stereotype familiar from the 1990s research of Long et al. (1995) and other, critical studies of ‘race’ and racism in sport (Carrington and McDonald, 2001; Woodward, 2004). But whatever the motivation of coaches, their commitment to working with young black men was recognized by all the players interviewed in this new research. Every player suggested their first awareness of rugby league came from the intervention of coaches, either through teachers at schools being involved in rugby league or through rugby league development programmes. None of the players interviewed had any real awareness of rugby league prior to these development or school based contacts: No one in my family knew anything about rugby, it was just football, football, football, y’know, that’s all there is… I didn’t know nothing [sic] about rugby til [development officer] came to our school. He like gave us a lesson, and invited me down to training with them, and that was it. There ain’t a tradition of rugby in South London, it’s not like there’s any rugby of any type, it ain’t like Leeds where every day you see some rugby on the telly or in the papers. I just thought rugby was for the middle-classes, not for a boy from South London. I didn’t know there was another type of rugby. Five players who said they had heard of rugby league before they started playing qualified that claim: one said he had a vague idea

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of rugby league as a game played in the north of England, another explained he had seen a few games on Sky Television but had not taken much notice of it. For the players interviewed, then, rugby league was not part of their surroundings, not part of their community, and if it was known to them it was only in passing. Unlike the north of England, rugby league was not, when these players were younger, part of an extended imaginary community. Furthermore, the rugby they did know about was rugby union: for them, a middle-class, white game. However, there were signs that involvement and commitment to rugby league was creating the same kind of family and peer networks – an imaginary community – that sustains rugby league in the north of England. Two players suggested they had encouraged their mates to join them in taking up rugby league: ‘At first they didn’t want to know but I got them to come along… we all went together, after school… and now J’s overtaken me and plays professional.’ And one player stressed the way in which rugby league had taken over his family, to the extent that his mum was a volunteer at his club and his sisters watched the team play even when he was not picked. All the players interviewed expressed commitment to playing rugby league: some hoped to become professional, one had played for the Broncos (now the Harlequins RL), and all saw their involvement in rugby league continuing. They identified strongly with their clubs and expressed an interest in the professional game that ranged from watching matches on television to actively supporting professional clubs (Bradford, Leeds and what is now Harlequins RL). Rugby league was their sport, and they could see themselves being coaches, volunteers and fans at the end of their playing careers. Playing rugby league teams from the north of England meant all thirteen players were exposed to the norms and values of the game up north. This had led them to a recognition that rugby league was an expression of northerness, that northerners used the game to define themselves: Most of my mates just think of the Coronation Street thing, that’s what they think the north’s all like, and rugby’s a part of that… it’s got an image problem, yeah, maybe a little bit, it still scares my mum sometimes when we go to Castleford or somewhere like that, places not on a map… The popular British soap opera Coronation Street is set in a fictional town in the north of England, and revolves around the daily life of

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working-class families on a terraced street with a pub at the end: for many southerners in England, this image of the cobbled street, the terraces, and the corner pub, is the predominant stereotype of everyday life ‘up north’. Of course, one is just as likely to find Castleford on a map than Fulham or Wandsworth, but the perspective from South London is clear enough: the north is off the map, inhabited by flatvowelled, working-class white people. One of the players told me that ‘rugby league up there [the north of England] is still a white game, it’s a different place.’ Another explained that the game was used by the white working-class communities up north to ‘keep themselves to themselves.’ Personal experiences of racism differed dramatically, a reflection, perhaps, of how some players may have chosen to normalize such experiences or ignore them (see also King, 2004; Woodward, 2004). While three players said they had never had any problems with racism, two of the others said it was a regular problem when they played teams from the traditional northern working-class rugby league towns, and the other two said they had come across racists but the experiences were infrequent. Those who had said they had encountered racism all seemed to suggest there was a particular problem earlier in their careers when they were playing as juniors against northern teams: You’d go somewhere in the middle of this big estate and you knew there’d be trouble… from the other team, from their parents even… every week it was the same. However, all the respondents agreed rugby league might still be perceived as being unwelcoming to black and other minority ethnic individuals (or it might actually still be unwelcoming, as two of the players suggested), even if there was no consensus over the extent to which racism played a part in their experiences of the game. More positively, despite the stories of racism and the association of the game with stereotypes of northerness, the players saw in rugby league a means to express their own masculine identities. They identified with high-profile rugby league players and acknowledged the black role models of ex-players such as Ellery Hanley and Martin Offiah even though their careers had ended at the end of the 1990s. Offiah in particular was highlighted by the two players whose families were from Africa as someone – a Nigerian – they could relate to. For these black Londoners, playing rugby league allowed them

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to show their commitment to the masculine norms of the game, even if this was wrapped up with notions about black physicality: I play rugby league because I’m big and I’m fast, and I like the aggression, the physical test… it’s about who I am, proving myself… getting that respect. Furthermore, by recognizing the attraction of the hegemonic masculinity of the game, these black Londoners were establishing a sense of their own black, working-class masculinity through rugby league: ‘because rugby league isn’t really played much down here [but] there are no barriers for us, y’know, there’s so many bad things people say about black youth… it’s about showing other people what I’m capable of, it’s about providing my younger brothers with a role model… you can be tough, but disciplined, through sport.’ Rugby league was an alternative proving ground to the more criminalized, gang elements of local masculinities: a sport, like that of boxing in Woodward’s research (2004), in which young black men could celebrate their blackness and black masculinity, within a Gramscian system of white control. Adopting and adapting the Critical Race Theory approach championed by Hylton (2005), it is clear that rugby league in London and the south of England is a leisure activity where the notion of British blackness can be realized. As Denham (2004) has shown, British rugby league has globalized and, in many ways, now resembles and reflects postmodernity. For the players in this research, rugby league just is a game for them, as individuals and as racialized actors expressing choices in postmodern free-for-all. Yet at the same time there is a three-fold contradiction inherent in the game’s ‘northerness’ that comes out in the way in which these players rationalize their involvement with the game: rugby league is part of the hegemonic masculinity that controls identity and Foucauldian embodiment in modern sport (Foucault, 1972; Pringle and Markula, 2005); rugby league’s masculine narratives are informed by working-class identities, both up north and down south; and ‘northerness’ racializes rugby league and makes it (up north, if not down south) white. One way to resolve the contradiction is to challenge the assumption by Denham (2004) that rugby league is postmodern. Clearly, rugby league has globalized, but at the same time the imaginary communities associated with the game in England remain fixed in late modernity. The players in this research make their own identities but are still constrained by class, gender and ‘race’ in that construction. What seems to

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be happening, then, can be understood by accepting the view of Habermas (1983:1990) that individual actors in a social setting make communicative decisions (leisure choices) through constraints and structures imposed by instrumental rationality. Therefore, these players can use communicative rationality to form their own view of rugby league in their social identity; but at the same time, the instrumental rationality associated with the gender order limits the black masculinities that are created in the process. Rugby league is an example of a leisure space where both communicative and instrumental actions can account for the negotiations of belonging that minority ethnic rugby league players face in an area where the game is not historically popular. The impact of rugby league’s expansionist efforts in England on the proportion of minority ethnic individuals involved in the game can be identified (Spracklen, 2005). Firstly, there is the continued underrepresentation of British Asians in the game. This, of course, is not just an issue for rugby league. English sport in general fails to attract participants from a wide demographic base (Long et al., 2003; Long et al., 2005); this is partly due to differing experiences of social exclusion between different ethnic groups in the country, but is also a symptom of the imaginary community that ‘sport’ represents in England, a community based around symbolic boundaries that define middle-class, white masculinities (Spracklen, 2003). Most sports fail to attract and retain British Asian participants (Fleming, 1995). Association football, like rugby league, has failed to recruit significant numbers of British Asians into its spectator base and its professional ranks, though there is evidence that British Asians do play football at junior and amateur levels (Burdsey, 2004, 2007). The absence of British Asians in rugby league is even more worrying when the game’s own traditional heartlands are examined. Much of the growth of Britain’s Asian and black communities in the last fifty years has been in traditional rugby league towns and cities (Spracklen, 2005). On the west side of the Pennines – Salford, Oldham and Rochdale; in Yorkshire – Leeds, Bradford, Keighley, Batley, Dewsbury and Huddersfield. The black community in rugby league towns and cities is quite dispersed except for a few places in the bigger cities, but the Asian community, and in particular the workingclass British Pakistani communities, is heavily concentrated in urban areas around rugby league grounds and in streets from where rugby league clubs once drew thousands of fans and hundreds of players. The figures for the 2001 Census show that British Pakistanis alone make 14.5% of the population of Bradford (including Keighley), 7.7% of the population of Rochdale and 6.8% of the population of Kirklees

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(Huddersfield, Batley and Dewsbury, concentrated in the latter two) – it is clear that there are thousands of British children from the Asian community growing up a drop-kick away from rugby league. The second participation issue is related to the first: the representation and involvement of black players in rugby league. Although there is clear evidence that black players face discrimination (see Long et al., 1995; Spracklen, 2001a), that black players are encouraged to play in positions that perpetuate stereotypes about the natural attributes of black people (their speed, their physicality – all myths perpetuated by many people in sport, which have no scientific basis whatsoever – see Marks, 2003), the participation data shows that black people are involved in rugby league at some levels and in some roles. For Melling and Collins (2004), this is evidence that rugby league has always been an inclusive game. But as I have argued elsewhere (Spracklen, 2001a) this participation maps the extent to which black people are allowed to participate in the making of the game’s symbolic boundaries, its myths and invented traditions, and the route through which individual black players become accepted as part of ‘the game’, by playing the role of the northern, working-class man. Rugby league has always been, and continues to be in many places, a game of close-knit localities. And in areas where people from the black community have settled, new traditions and networks have developed over the last thirty years that allow black people to become involved in rugby league: black players and supporters have become associated with certain amateur clubs such as Queen’s in the Burley district of Leeds. But this adoption of black players is limited, and outside of those networks – in amateur rugby league in the old mining towns, in the spectator base and ranks of administrators, and even in the key tactical role of scrum-half (Long and Spracklen, 1996; Spracklen, 2001a) – the whiteness of the game is still one of its defining characteristics. In an unpublished conference research paper by Hylton et al. (2005), the key respondents in rugby league who were asked to reflect on the ten years since the 1995 report suggested little had changed. The work of the Rugby Football League in meeting the demands of policy exercises such as the Racial Equality Standard (Long et al., 2003; Spracklen et al., 2006) has led to some awareness raising, but the demographic profile of the game in the north of England remains a reflection of the game’s whiteness (see Spracklen, 2001a, 2003) – and the handful of fans reported in 1995 remained the same in 2001 (Spracklen, 2001a, p. 76) and in 2004 (Spracklen, 2005).

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Previous work on rugby league has examined the way in which the sport has established a sense of belonging and identity through the creation of an imaginary community (Spracklen, 1995, 1996). This community of belonging is both imagined, in a historical sense (Anderson, 1983) and constructed through the (re)production of symbolic boundaries (Cohen, 1985) that define both belonging and exclusion. Insider texts such as the player biographies collated by Melling and Collins (2004) reinforce the invented traditions that define the imagined, but also reproduce the norms and values associated with ‘the game’ that create the symbolic boundaries. But, of course, Melling and Collins’ account of the heroic working-class nature of rugby league, in constant rebellion against the Establishment, is a contested one: the imaginary community of ‘the game’ could also be described using more conservative rhetoric, being a community that maintains and perpetuates the existing, hegemonic gender order (Connell, 1987; Edwards, 2006), for instance, or one in which whiteness is normalized and made invisible, as in so many other sports (Long and Hylton, 2002; Spracklen, 2003). Taking this more critical stance, the work being done in London and the south of England can be seen to be both challenging the imaginary community of ‘the game’, through communicative action, but also replicating it. Black players coming into rugby league in London and the south of England do not bring with them invented traditions about ‘northerness’, northern working-class pride and whiteness (Garner, 2006). In that sense, the involvement of these players could present a challenge to the symbolic boundaries of ‘the game’, provided those players come through in significant numbers and remain in ‘the game’ and are not excluded or marginalized (as has happened in other sports such as cricket – see McDonald and Ugra, 1998). However, existing black involvement in rugby league has been limited by the narrowly defined symbolic boundaries – that is, black participants playing roles defined by ‘northerness’ and its white, working-class masculinity – which has excluded British Asians from becoming fully involved (Spracklen, 2001a, 2003): it is therefore too early to tell whether the changing demographic profile in London and the south of England will have a lasting impact on ‘the game’ itself, or whether these players will be absorbed into the existing culture and community of rugby league. This may, in fact, already be the case, given the comments made about their working-classness, and their hegemonically correct fit with rugby league’s own stereotypes about manliness and masculinity (Spracklen, 1995; Pringle and Markula, 2005).

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What is clear from this new research is that rugby league’s meaning (its norms and values, its myths and traditions, its symbolic boundaries) is at the same time being challenged by the involvement of minority ethnic players and maintained by their commitment to hegemonic masculinity (Edwards, 2006). On this latter point, it is not surprising that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The rugby league research in the 1990s demonstrated its importance as a sport for men to be conservative, heterosexual, aggressive men, showing off their physicality and power (for comparison with rugby union see Pringle and Markula, 2005). The working-class, heterosexual, physical masculinity expressed through northern English rugby league seems to be replicated in the masculine constructions of minority ethnic players in London: rugby league in all these places is dominated by working-class men, watched by working-class men, governed by working-class men. In this replication, there is also a tendency demonstrated in the new research to perpetuate stereotypes and myths of racial physicality. However, the negotiations of belonging in the game demonstrate that there is nothing to stop players who are not from the north of England becoming part of rugby league. That rugby league is played across the globe, in more than thirty countries, disproves the argument that only northern English men can play the game. Despite persistent low-level racism in England, the southern, minority ethnic players in this research have chosen (employed communicative rationality to make a decision) to stay with rugby league because it gives them an opportunity to belong and demonstrate their status as minority ethnic men. In this sense, the London players are challenging entrenched notions of whiteness and black inferiority (instrumental rationalities tied up in the meaning of rugby league) and providing counterhegemonic stories of identity formation and resistance (Carrington, 1998; King, 2004). Rugby league in London provides places for belonging and exclusion (Hylton, 2005), but control of who belongs and who does not belong is no longer the privilege of white gatekeepers: away from the north, the constraints of rugby league’s imaginary community are absent (or, paraphrasing Habermas, the instrumentalities of the game), and minority ethnic players in London are able to define the game in their own terms away from traditions of whiteness.

Minority ethnic rugby league players in France Fifteen French minority ethnic rugby league players were interviewed to explore their relationship with the game and the game’s imagined

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and imaginary community (Spracklen and Spracklen, 2008). The identity with rugby league and the rural, working-class culture of southwest France extended, in some cases, to an awareness of the history of rugby league in the Second World War. Four of the players spoke about the Vichy Government banning rugby league, and two more mentioned it indirectly when discussing the game’s distinctive history and character. The four who spoke directly about Vichy banning rugby league linked the ban to the wider oppression of the south-west and connection between rugby union and the white French Establishment, the connection articulated by Saouter (2000) and Fassolette (2007). One player claimed that ‘rugby union was also behind the banning of our sport and they continue to treat us like dirt’; another pointed out that ‘the Gypsy people were rounded up by the same [Vichy] Government… my grandparents were rounded up by the Vichy Police.’ The struggle against Vichy, against fascism, against rugby union, and against the white Republican French Establishment in Paris and the north was a struggle still to be made fully public, and a struggle still underway (see Falcous and Silk, 2006). Another respondent, who had played rugby union in the French Army, hinted that ‘even in the Army there are a lot of things not mentioned about the War’. As Silverstein (2004, 2008) argues, Frenchness is tightly delineated by whiteness, secularism and the processes of the State, which in turn are related to the chauvinism that was endemic in French politics in the twentieth century. The feeling that rugby league was a community to which they belonged was tempered by the experiences of racism the players discussed. All the respondents except one talked at length about racism as a problem in wider society, with some of them acknowledging the increased racial tensions in France and the presence of the Front Nationale (FN) in the south of France. There was agreement that the presence of the FN combined with increasing exclusion and poverty among disaffected urban communities challenged both French secularist ideals and the practicalities of social cohesion (Noiriel, 2001). For one Arab player ‘race and immigrants’ were ‘everyday discussion at the work or in the bar.’ The same player expressed exasperation that a good white friend of his had also told him he was going to vote for the FN. Another Arab player said he noticed racism ‘at work when you have to do a job and somebody sees you are an Arab… not with most people, but just occasionally somebody looks at you almost surprised… and a bit mistrusting.’. Another felt that racism was directed at more newer immigrants to France who suffered ‘from generalisations made

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by politicians, and the local population.’ For the black and Arab players in particular, such everyday racism made their attempts to establish hybrid identities more difficult, as the Otherness of their diasporic identity was reified by racist discourses over their Frenchness (see Kemedjio, 2003). For the Gypsy players, the long history of exclusion and racism against Roma in Europe led them to identify strongly with their Gypsy identity as counter-hegemonic, communicative resistance, though they still insisted on the centrality of their Frenchness and their commitment to Frenchness as a national (instrumental?) identity. Sadly, racial tensions were also recognized as happening between newer immigrants from Africa (black and Arab) and the existing French Arab communities (secularized Moroccans in particular), and also, as one respondent stated, ‘between young Gypsies and Arabs.’ These struggles over definitions of ethnicity, between groups marginalized (whitewashed?) from the ‘mainstream’ nationalism of France demonstrate both the complexities of belonging and the way in which the marginal groups use and are used by the State (Wievorka, 2000). The experience of minority ethnic rugby league players in France exhibits similarities and differences with that of the London-based minority ethnic rugby league players interviewed by Spracklen (2007a), and the northern English minority ethnic rugby league players in earlier research (Long et al., 1995; Long et al., 1997; Spracklen, 2001a). The working-class, heterosexual, physical, instrumental masculinity expressed through northern English rugby league seems to be replicated in the masculine constructions of minority ethnic players in south-west France: rugby league in both these places is dominated by a mythologized (romanticized) identity of working-class men, where working-class maleness is the ideal identity symbolically constructed in the imaginary community. In this replication, there is also a tendency demonstrated among the French players (Spracklen and Spracklen, 2008) to perpetuate stereotypes and myths of racial physicality – especially so in the discourse around Arab forwards in French rugby league. In terms of its role in the construction of hegemonic masculinity and communal identity, rugby league in France shares a common purpose with rugby union (Saouter, 2000). However, the negotiations of belonging in the game demonstrate that there is nothing to stop players who aren’t from the north of England (Spracklen, 2007a) or who aren’t white Catalans from becoming part of rugby league. In France this is made more difficult by instrumental, State-dictated notions of Frenchness, and also particularly by Catharism (traditions of rebellion and resistance (re)invented in the

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histories of the white, working-class villages of the region: Bourdieu, 1980; Dine, 2001) – but ironically, the game is well established in Arab and Gypsy communities in the Languedoc and Provence areas of France. These communities have their own specific histories, but for Arab players – as for black players in French rugby league – there is the additional story of postcolonialism and diaspora that shapes their identities (Wievorka, 2000; Noiriel, 2001). The political tensions over what it means to be French (Kumar, 2006; Silverstein, 2004, 2008) has not made rugby league in France, despite persistent questions over the meaning of diversity and ethnicity in France and the role of sport (Ungar, 1996; Leff, 2001), a vehicle solely for exclusion and the making of whiteness (Garner, 2006). The regionality of French rugby league has left open the possibility of minority ethnic communities embracing the game and using it in a number of complex but communicatively rational ways to define their own relation to the French state, Frenchness, the south-west, and each other through the agency of hybridity but within the structure of French nationalist ideologies.

Final words In all this research, it in the psychological and sociological spaces between structure and agency, between constraint and freedom, that identity is constructed. In the north of England, despite the instrumentality of the Super League and the globalizing tendencies of professionalism, some supporters of the game cling on to a late modern identity that allows them a point of communicative resistance. But that communicative, democratic community is by its nature also exclusionary and elitist (the familiar English inverted snobbery famously lampooned by Monty Python in their Four Yorkshiremen sketch). In France, there is a closer sense of solidarity between the minority ethnic players and the treizistes of Languedoc and Provence, but the bureaucratic, instrumentalized (and instrumentalizing) rationality of the French State denies them a wider freedom to have hybrid identities. It is only in London and the south of England where minority ethnic players can take part in a Habermasian discourse of involvement and action.

6 Applying Habermas to Culture

Reflection The Norwegian black metal band Mayhem have come to Rio’s, a club on the edge of the city centre in Bradford. Fans of extreme metal have come from all over the north of England to see the band, attracted by the history of murder and violence associated with Mayhem as much as the music they play. Watched by a handful of men standing next to their parked cars, the white, mainly male metallers with their long hair, black band tee-shirts, studs and spikes wait politely to get inside to see the Norwegians. The club is directly opposite the new extension of Bombay Stores, a South Asian themed retail outlet, and a Barelwi mosque housed in an old school. The men by their cars are Asian, older than the white metal fans, wearing a mixture of Western clothing and traditional shalwar kameez. Just round the corner is a local authority funded recreation centre controlled by volunteers from the Kashmiri community who live in the terraced streets stretching back from the night club. Inside the club, there is nothing to suggest this is Bradford. The venue is dark. The beer is made by a multinational corporation. Only the accents of the pale people give any indication of where we are. I am in the middle of the crowd, dressed in a metal compromise: I’ve got a leather jacket and a tee-shirt with the logo of a popular but safe Swedish death metal band. Back in the early 1990s, the guitarist of Mayhem attacked death metal for being a trend, for not being serious about death, about the Devil. But that was before he was murdered by Mayhem’s bass player, before most metal fans realized how violent the scene was becoming, and I don’t feel in any danger. Most of the people around me are wearing black metal tee-shirts, and a 115

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significant minority have gone for the full black metal uniform of bullet belt, spikes, and, most importantly, black and white corpse paint. Some of them look more like badgers than demons. There are a handful of people here, all men, wearing Burzum shirts: Burzum is the solo project of Varg Vikernes, the bass player from Mayhem who murdered Euronymous, the guitarist. Since his imprisonment, Vikernes has become a neo-Nazi, a nationalist pagan, a believer in his own destiny: he has fallen out with Mayhem and most of the Norwegian black metal scene, and the fracture has divided black metal fans all over the world. But here in Bradford, despite the presence of skinheads in Burzum shirts, there is no tension, no sense of danger, only a sense of collective solidarity, a sense that here there is belonging, against the rest of the world outside. Then the mood changes. All of a sudden the crowd bristles and jeers. On the stage, a roadie has appeared. But the crowd aren’t excited by him. They are excited by what he is carrying: what appears to be a pig’s head, fresh from some butcher’s shop. He shows it to the crowd, who wail and shout, then he sticks it on a spike at the front of the stage. The crowd pant with anticipation. The skinheads in their Burzum shirts push forward to the front. It is at this point, even before I have seen the singer of Mayhem cut the head with a knife and throw it to the crowd, that I realize this music, this tribe, this place, is very real. I have chosen to come here as, it seems, have the rest of the crowd. We are all consumers expressing our choice of leisure. But being here raises another question: why this, and not some other thing?

Theoretical frameworks Critical studies of leisure have explored the way in which leisure activities construct identity, belonging and exclusion (for example, the studies by Woodward, 2004; Urquia, 2005; Scraton and Holland, 2006). The work of cultural theorists such as Bennett (1999a, 2001) and Cohen (1991) have examined the paradoxes of rebellion and cool inherent in popular music consumed by young people. Black metal provides an opportunity to continue work within this neo-tribe framework (Bauman, 1992; Maffesoli, 1996; Bennett, 1999b); however, this chapter intends to critically analyse the discourse of consumption (Poster, 2004) within black metal circles to shed light on the epistemological problem addressed at the beginning of the book, associated with the history of Leisure Studies as an academic discipline: the problem of freedom and constraint.

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As discussed in the first half of this book, the paradigm of Leisure Studies has struggled to explain the seeming paradox of leisure as free action, and leisure as constraint, ever since the work of Parker and Roberts in the 1970s. On the one hand, the ghost of Mill allows human actors limitless opportunities to express their individuality within a set of moral and social obligations. On the other hand, the spectre of Marx points to a framework of social inequality hidden by ideological smoke and mirrors, in which we quietly consume our bread and circuses. While leisure theorists such as Rojek (1995, 2000, 2002) have, at the turn of the twentieth century, offered a postmodern response to the paradox of leisure, the purpose of this chapter, as in the previous chapter and, obviously, the rest of this book, is to continue to develop and apply a theoretical framework to leisure based on the social theoretical work of Jurgen Habermas. Specifically, Habermas’s theory of communicative and instrumental rationality (Habermas, 1981: 1984, 1981:1987) is suggested as a way of understanding and defining leisure as (communicative) action and leisure as (instrumental) consumption. This chapter applies Habermas to an analysis of a particular form of commodified leisure – extreme black metal music – to show that we can understand such leisure forms as attempts to resist passive consumption and establish new communities and social identities linked with Habermas’s civic society. By restricting theoretical use of consumption to actions and practices associated with instrumental rationality, it will be shown that post-Marxist and liberal accounts of leisure can be reconciled. Furthermore, it will be shown that postmodern accounts of leisure may be fatally weakened by the retention of modernity as an explanatory tool for contemporary society. In using Habermas in this way, it will be argued that critical studies of leisure, following the pessimism of Adorno and Gramsci, can and indeed should be maintained as a means of identifying and understanding the increasing dominance of instrumental rationality in society and culture.

Methodology In addition to insider, ethnographic reflections on the scene (see Hodkinson, 2002; Urquia, 2005), the material used in the critical analysis of discourses in black metal was gathered over two ten-week periods observing and recording comments made on a black metal website forum (Spracklen, 2006, 2008a, 2008b), as well as ethnographic work complemented with six informal, semi-structured interviews

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with black metal fans. This approach to on-line data collection followed the work of Hodkinson (2002), Hine (2000) and Kanayama (2003) in using publicly available discourses on-line to establish how understandings and identities are represented and constructed. The forum, at www.blackmetal.co.uk, is a publicly accessible one. Knowledge of the scene (Hodkinson, 2002) established this forum as a key on-line space for black metal fans, both British and International, to discuss the music and its surrounding culture in English. The forum has private spaces accessible to members who sign-up; on reflection, the decision was made not to use material from these private spaces, as this research project was about understanding the public discourse of black metal and whether the rationality was communicative or instrumental in debating the ‘essence’ of the scene and the music. Also, by limiting the research to public postings and discussions, ethical issues of consent were avoided.

History of black metal The history of heavy metal music as a popular music genre has been examined in detail by researchers such as Weinstein (1991), Walser (1993) and Harris (2000). The music’s construction of commodified outsider identities (Bennett, 2001), its conformity to hegemonic masculinity (see discussions in Spracklen, 1995, 2005) and its globalized, globalizing appeal (Harris, 2000) is clear: from Black Sabbath to Metallica and the new wave of corporate bands such as Trivium and Killswitch Engage, heavy metal has played and continues to play a key role in the globalized entertainment industries (Roberts, 2004). Part of the contemporary debate about the meaning and rationality of black metal today is shaped by disagreements over the origins of black metal. Bennett (2001) and Harris (2000) suggest black metal owes its origins to the Norwegian scene of the early 1990s, based around the band Mayhem and its founder Euronymous (Vestel, 1999). It is this scene, with its strict rules about seriousness, style, and elitism, that spawned the growth of black metal in the 1990s as an underground elite. But Euronymous and the other musicians in that scene were also reacting against an extreme metal scene – death metal – that they felt had become musically and ideologically bankrupt and beholden to the music industry (Moynihan and Soderlind, 2003). The Norwegian black metal scene was an attempt to return to what they considered a more pure, uncommercial-

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ized, Satanic heavy metal epitomized by bands such as Venom and Bathory: Normal metal isn’t very popular anymore, all the children are listening to death metal now… (we are going to) make a shop where all the trend people will know that they will find all the trend music. This will help us earning (sic.) money so that we can order more evil records for evil people… we’ve thought of having total darkness inside (the shop), so that people would have to carry torches to be able to see the records. (Euronymous, cited in Moynihan and Soderlind, op. cit., pp. 64–65) Although the ‘second wave’ of black metal was focussed on Norway, tape-trading networks and fanzines in the underground extreme metal community (Harris, 2000) allowed the ideology and style of black metal to become globalized, albeit in a small circle of musicians and fans. Following the wave of church-burnings associated with the black metal bands in Norway, the mainstream metal press became interested in black metal as an extreme, elitist movement. Anti-Christian statements were examined and the Norwegian police started to investigate the musicians. Then Euronymous of Mayhem was found murdered and the police arrested Varg Vikernes for the crime. Soon another black metal musician, Faust of Emperor was in prison for the murder of a homosexual man, and his colleague Samoth and others were rounded up after confessing to some of the church burnings (Vestel, 1999). These crimes made headline news across the globe (Harris, 2000), and although the initial impact on the black metal scene was negative, the long-term effect of the crimes was to make black metal attractive for young people looking for the most extreme heavy metal music (Moynihan and Soderlind, 2003). The murder of Euronymous and the arrest of Varg Vikernes also led to the fracturing of black metal. Vikernes expressed neo-Nazi, Nordic pagan beliefs at his trial and subsequently became heavily involved with far-right racist politics after repudiating the Satanism of Mayhem. Following his lead, many black metal bands and fans rejected Satanic imagery and embraced overt nationalism or more subtle, but equally elitist, romantic heathenism (Vestel, 1999). Others, however, remained true to the Satanic, misanthropic template of Euronymous and Mayhem, rejecting any connection to mainstream heavy metal. In the United Kingdom, black metal remained on the margins of the extreme metal community until the crimes associated with the

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Norwegian scene and the tabloid headlines about organized Satanism kick-started an interest in the music amongst metal fans and musicians. British band Cradle of Filth established a professional music career on the back of tabloid stories and a slot supporting Norwegian black metal band Emperor. But they quickly changed their musical style and their image, becoming more acceptable to the music press and amenable to the business whilst still retaining the ability to sell records through shock tactics. For a period of time, Cradle of Filth used the black metal tag and defined black metal for British teenagers reading weekly metal magazine Kerrang. But away from the headlines, the real black metal underground was growing. Since the imprisonment of Vikernes in 1994, black metal has remained largely an underground phenomenon within heavy metal, associated with small labels, fanzines and latterly on-line forums and websites. Only a few bands such as Immortal, Dimmu Borgir and Satyricon have became well-known in heavy metal and adopted professional attitudes to business, marketing and production; but, as will be seen, their status as black metal bands is itself questioned by people within the black metal community.

Black metal as elite resistance For a number of years, I have been intellectually and aesthetically curious about black metal and the elitist ideology at its heart. Black metal is not easy listening music. The lyrics are often unrecognizable, there is no groove to dance to, and even headbanging is difficult because of the speed of the blastbeats played on double-bass drums. The people who attend the concerts, who listen to the music, are drawn by the ideology associated with black metal, and the feeling it gives them. At black metal concerts, it is clear that the majority of the people there are white, and male (Bennett, 1999a), but slightly older than mainstream metal fans. These people are not an elite in a traditional sociological sense, but by coming to a black metal gig, by watching the theatrics of Mayhem throwing a pig’s head into the crowd, or John from Dissection invoking Satan, or Marduk appear in full-corpse paint and spikes, black metal fans are associating with things mainstream society find threatening or repulsive. Although there are all kinds of black metal bands, including ones such as Ludicra and Woods of Ypres that sing positive messages (and even, allegedly, Christian black metal bands), most bands that sell records and tour the metal venues stick to a pseudo-Nietzschean

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message of superiority distinctiveness:

over

others,

of

self-worth

and

elite

Coven of forgotten delight Hear the pride of a northern storm Triumphant sight on a northern sky… Souls of blasphemy Hear a haunting chant We are a blaze in the northern sky The next thousand years are ours (A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Darkthrone, 1991) Black metal bands are international in orientation but nationalist or individualist in their message; but in the darkness of a gig, in the company of like-minded misanthropes, the fans can forget the ambiguity of the scene and play at being the supermen they think they are. On the blackmetal.co.uk open forum, it is clear that the majority of people posting comments see black metal as something beyond the bounds of normal, respectable society. In a discussion about the possibility of Varg Vikernes visiting the United Kingdom on his release from prison, the posters were largely dismissive of mainstream white working-class culture and contrasted the conformity of belonging and passive acceptance with the elite individualism of black metal. As one poster claimed: ‘Black Metal is for the “intellectual elite” therefore chavs will never listen to it…’ (Diabolical, posted 21 November 2005). The poster who instigated the discussion started by saying: I think he’s gonna be shocked if her ever visits the UK, as to the fucked up social class of people we like to call chavs… maybe one of them will go shout something at a ‘fuckin skater’, not knowing that the ‘fuckin skater’ is Varg, and end up in a world of pain. (Valtam, posted 20 November 2005) Immediately, then, Valtam was making a distinction between himself and the black metal scene, and the white, working-class ‘chav’ subcultures (Nayak, 2006). But there are two other themes in his posting. The first is one of elitism: what offended Valtam was potentially being misidentified as a skater, a member of a teenage subculture who might dress in black but who would not be a member of the black metal elite. The second theme is that of the fantasy of revenge: Varg Vikernes killing a chav on behalf of all the black metal fans who had faced abuse for the

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clothes they wore, the hair they grew long and the music to which they listened. This theme was picked up by another poster, who criticized the violent nature of white and black working-class youth, then asked, seemingly without being aware of the irony: ‘Why aren’t there more groups of BM warriors setting clubber’s [sic] cars on fire, instead, and attacking people, in a more meaningful way?’ (Lesh, posted 23 November 2005). Others doubted that Varg would ever come to the United Kingdom because its cities were ‘multicultural disaster zones’ (abysmal_i_exist, posted 24 November 2005), leading to a heated debate between posters who defended the National Socialist black metal movement (typified by bands such as Nokturnal Mortem) and others who rejected Varg’s racism and murder of Euronymous. But even where a poster was strong in attacking the illogic of race and racial distinctions, the need to maintain some credibility within black metal and an elitist stance was necessary. So a poster called centurion, in insisting race was purely imaginary and based on the way human beings try to make order out of difference, ended his comment by declaring race was Commonly used by the alienated human as an excuse to have some sort of pride other than individual pride… oh well, I admit some National Socialist BM sounds nice and have some interesting pagan imagery. (centurion, posted 5 December 2005) The forum is governed by tacit rules about what one posts, and what one says about black metal or particular bands. When one person posted a message about Cradle of Filth, who were touring England in December 2005, they were mocked by other posters for transgressing the boundaries of what constitutes black metal. Older members of the forum seemed to police the comments and make pseudo-authoritative judgements on the boundaries of the genre and the importance of the ideology of elitism and resistance. For instance, when someone asked the question – what is black metal to you? – a member called jonesmark, who was one of the most prolific commentators on the forum, was the fourth person to reply to the initial posting and tried to fix the definition as follows: First and foremost for myself is the music, period. Second comes the ideology and philosophical standpoints. (jonesmark, posted 9 December 2005) Although this thread continued to be discussed through 148 posts over a period of two months, in essence the debate was about the rela-

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tionship and balance between the music as an aesthetic style (coldness, anger) and as a vehicle for elitist ideology (Satanic, pagan, misanthropic, nationalist). In other words, jonesmark’s intervention at the beginning had limited the focus to a debate along those lines, which stressed the elitist nature of the music and the nature of the music itself. The tacit rules of the forum encourage posters to conform to a view of black metal that is elitist, that resists a mainstream defined by inferior people and inferior attitudes: ‘Black metal is a musical and idealogical [sic] form of seperating [sic] myself from the flock of sheep that is modern life…’ (Nelly75, posted 14 December 2005).

Black metal as neo-tribe? In the description of the Mayhem gig that opened this chapter, I identified the importance of band tee-shirts in marking out the imagined space of the black metal community (Spracklen, 1995; Maffesoli, 1996; Bennett, 1999b). The black metal uniform of black and white corpse paint on the face, black hair, black lipstick, black jeans, black boots, black shirt, bullet belt and spiked or studded arm-bands is familiar in the photographs of bands that adorn magazines, record covers and websites: As long as you don’t know who I am then the corpse paint works. (Nomadic, posted 30 December 2005) But for most fans this extreme look is compromised by the need to walk through public spaces to get to gigs, so it is through wearing obscure band tee-shirts that black metal fans stake out their identity and belonging to the neo-tribe (Bennett, 1999b). In choosing to wear a Darkthrone or Enslaved top, for example, a black metal fan is not only making a symbolic rift with mainstream fashions, but is also showing to other metal fans their commitment to black metal as opposed to other forms of metal. At the gigs I attended, I noticed that wearing a Nehemah tee-shirt (an obscure French band) provoked looks of recognition and admiration from older black metal fans, gestures that were absent when other people walked past with Dimmu Borgir tee-shirts (a Norwegian band signed to a large independent label, Nuclear Blast, which releases mainly mainstream metal records). An important aspect of black metal is the design aesthetic of record covers. In an independent record shop called Hellraiser in Leeds, England, a large stock of new heavy metal records is displayed on a rack on a

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wall. The black metal releases are easily identified amongst the other metal albums: stereotypically, black metal albums have a monochromatic colour scheme, use gothic fonts, and the names of the bands are often designed to be unreadable. Black metal inspired by paganism or nationalism is often represented by covers evoking northern forests; that inspired by Satanism may have more baroque covers inspired by occult symbolism. Knowing which bands to like is an important part of identifying with and belonging to the black metal community and its neo-tribe. Because of its underground nature, black metal is not usually found on music television stations, or even on music radio. Knowledge of which bands are in, which band are sell-outs, and which bands represent which ideologies within black metal, comes from reviews in extreme metal magazines (Terrorizer and Zero Tolerance in the United Kingdom) and on websites (especially small labels such as Supernal Music); but also through word-of-mouth and through comments on on-line sites such as blackmetal.co.uk. Here any interest shown in bands that are close to the commercial mainstream is mercilessly mocked, and posters compete to prove their black metal credentials by name checking obscure bands from around the globe. For example, a Ukrainian pagan black metal band called Drudkh, founded by members of the nationalist band Hate Forest, is a band that is frequently mentioned by posters showing off their commitment to both the ideological extreme and the symbolic centre of the true, ‘kult’, black metal community: ‘I’m not white but I can still appreciate lots of great NSBM from some awesome bands such as Burzum, Graveland, Drudkh, Kristallnacht and Nokturnal Mortum [sic]…’ (DungarthBanshee, posted 4 December 2005). DungarthBanshee’s comment opens up another aspect of the neotribe: its imagined, or fictive, ethnicity (Spracklen, 2005). Heavy metal is white man’s music (Weinstein, 1991), and despite high-profile black rock stars such as Jimi Hendrix and Phil Lynott, the music has always been associated, in the West, with white, male, working-class communities. The adherence to norms and values associated with hegemonic, heterosexual masculinity is evident in the language of the forum: bands not liked are called gay, and sexist and homophobic jokes and pictures are often posted. The homoerotic, hypermasculine nature of black metal is not so evident, but comes across in the sense of maleseparateness and bonding in the following comment: I remember reading an interview with rob darken [of the Polish band Graveland] where he stated that black metal should not be used to

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impress chicks, but rather scare them away… if I play a show and some chick comes onto me saying that she loved my music and would like to get to know me better, then that is just the surest way NOT to get me to know her better. (Nattestid, posted 2 January 2006) At the gigs I have attended, there have been barely a handful of black and Asian metal fans, if any at all. The comment by DungarthBanshee continues with a reference to ‘the fine line between very proud of culture and heritage and also hating other people’s cultures’ and the poster defends their non-whiteness by stressing that ‘I love this country myself and I love its medieval history and [I wonder]… whatever happened to England.’ On the forum, this whiteness is largely tacit, but comes through when extreme nationalists make postings and others react to the racism. For the nationalists, black metal is a music solely by and for various permutations of white/Nordic/European elites, and there are tediously regular and frequent statements along those lines. When other black metallers attack this racism, they still couch their attacks in terms of a white, eurocentric world view that conflates ethnicity with exotic, foreign Others: I couldn’t care less what people do in their spare time… [whether they] worship hitler or are asian (if anything, being a black metaller in a country like Malaysia where you risk prison and even the death penalty deserves more credit than being a BM fan in social-democratic tolerant Norway). (Arkeos, posted 14 December 2005) This comment also reflects the tensions within the neo-tribe between the globalized nature of black metal and the ideology of nationalism and romantic nostalgia for the past associated with it. If the scene originated in Norway, it has spread across the world on the back of tapetrading in extreme metal, globalization and commodification. There are thriving black metal scenes in Japan, Turkey, Malaysia and South America with their own bands, labels and fans. Posters to the blackmetal.co.uk forum come from locations around the world, yet their understanding of black metal remains consistent. For example, a poster from Peru described black metal as ‘a thing for itself; cold harsh, raw, dark, sharp and quite brutal and violent’ (Solid_Snake, posted 10 January 2006). This international, globalized aspect of black metal contrasts with the narrow, nationalist view of the music, in which ‘the

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Norwegian idea that one oppose the imperialism of christianity by returning to traditional belief’ (scale, posted 10 January 2006) is seen as the root of black metal’s elitism: Then you can wear crazy ass viking hats and scream to Thor and Odin. (Legato, posted 4 December, 2005) For most of the black metal fans posting on the forum, black metal is about not selling-out, about not being posers or followers of fashion, about being anti-trend, and against mainstream metal that is not serious about its elitism and misanthropy. Echoing the warnings Euronymous of Mayhem wrote in the early 1990s, one poster indicated a commitment to black metal because death metal was ‘too positive and pleasant…’ (dsmolken, posted 12 December 2005). Ultimately, the black metal fans on the forum were concerned with demonstrating an understanding of the feeling or mood of black metal: in showing they understood this, they were indicating their identity with and belonging to the neo-tribe. So in another post following the thread about what black metal meant, jonesmark listed: Forests Nature Candles The Full Moon Oak Furniture Fog (jonesmark, posted 16 December 2005) Other black metal fans were not as confident as jonesmark in attempting to find images to express the feeling and mood of black metal: Grond (posted 13 December 2005) attempted ‘music and darkness’, while a number of others simply suggested ‘atmosphere’. But again, the forum was being used to define and delineate that mood, and educate newer members of the neo-tribe into understanding the music. Of course, some posters could not resist transgressing and satirising black metal, the music, the neo-tribe and the community: one suggested that black metal was ‘all dressed up like a necro-panda that’s trying not to look like a goth’ (mikeofdoom, posted 13 December 2005), another wrote that the music was ‘for geeks that aren’t even cool enough to play Dungeons and Dragons’ (nebelfrau, 21 November 2005). But the postmodern playfulness

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of black metal was not something that dominated discussions on the forum.

Black metal fans This section of the chapter summarizes the findings of a small-scale research project talking to and interviewing six black metal fans in the north of England – three of whom were personal contacts. The other three were identified through talking to the first three and finding out the contact details of people I had seen at gigs or in the Hellraiser metal/punk shops in Leeds and York. All six of the black metals fans were white, male, and all were aged over twenty. Half of them had long-term female partners of some kind – and one of them attended gigs with his long-term girlfriend. All six were serious consumers of black metal music: they went to gigs across the north and in London (three of them travelled down separately to watch the same concert headlined by the band Shining, whose singer had allegedly slashed fans in Sweden during another gig), two were regular customers at the Hellraiser shops, one of them infuriatingly being the person who beat me to the Leeds shop on a Saturday to buy rare imports. One of the fans was a collector of black metal vinyl, and had built up an obsessively huge horde, which he then burned on to compact discs to play during the working day. Everyone used the internet to buy records: Supernal Music was an on-line retailer (and underground record label) they all recognized and used, and two of the fans had built up a close friendship with Alex Kurtagic, its owner. The fact that Kurtagic has been one of the standard-bearers of elitist ideology in black metal – through his column in Zero Tolerance magazine, the use of his catalogue to support revolutionary conservative views associated with nationalism and purity and European identity, and through his record label releasing albums by National Socialist Black Metal bands like Hate Forest – did not worry the fans I interviewed. Melkor, who in his day job worked in the public sector in a traditionally left-wing profession, admitted that ‘there’s a lot of edgy stuff put out [written] by Alex, for sure, but it’s all provocation.’ In this research with black metal fans, a common theme that quickly emerged was a sense of (some) ironic distance from the seriousness of the genre’s elitist ideologies. That is not to say that the fans I spoke to were actively against those ideologies. Far from it: all were sympathetic towards the anti-Christianity and anti-conformity of the ideologies, and all wore Thor’s Hammers at gigs, signifying an empathy with the

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scene’s (Scandinavian, Nordic, Aryan?) heathen turn. They all agreed with the view that black metal was more than just music, and that there was a distinctive depth to the genre’s ideologies which went far beyond the cartoonish Satanism of 1980s metal bands like Venom. One of the fans, Gothmog, even went so far as to claim that black metal was ‘against everything in the modern world, and back to the old gods.’ But they all saw black metal as being something visceral, to be enjoyed as a feeling or a sound, rather than an exposition of political beliefs. In this sense, the fans were similar to those interviewed by Kahn-Harris (2007) in his ethnographic work with people involved in the black metal scene in England and Israel. Bauglir, for example, told me that black metal was about ‘aggression, darkness, hatred’, but also that ‘you can’t tell what they’re saying anyway, so it doesn’t matter what they’re singing about.’ Another black metaller, Glorund, was more precise, when he told me that it was always ‘about the MET-AHL!’ and nothing else. For him, a heavy metal fan who first got into the music in the mid-eighties thrash era, and who still listened to and played (as a drummer) all kinds of extreme metal, black metal was just the most metal – the most evil, the most Satanic, the most hard – of heavy metal’s many genres and scenes. Like the other older (post-thirty) black metal fans, he had progressed from the thrash of Anthrax and Megadeth to the first ‘true’ extreme metal genre, death metal, before that scene was in turn overshadowed by Norwegian black metal. As such, the older fans had been on the fringes of the death metal ‘tape-trading’ scene in the late eighties and had expressed support for bands like Obituary and Death (Kahn-Harris, 2007). But of course, as I have already mentioned, it was this death metal scene that the Norwegian Black Metal Circle condemned for not being serious about Satanism. The arrival of demo tapes of black metal bands like Mayhem and Emperor, the conversion of Darkthrone from a death metal band in baggy shorts and trainers into corpse paint wearing monsters, and the fall-out from the church-burnings and murders, ensured that these extreme metal fans knew the difference between their gumby thrash, poser death and the true music of the dark side. What these fans got from black metal was a feeling that the scene, but especially its music, expressed something authentically (primevally) evil. The Devil has always had the best tunes: heavy metal, right from its roots in the Crowley-worshipping Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and the Hammer Horror theatrics of Black Sabbath, has always flirted with darkness and Christian ideas of Evil. Black metal is just another iteration of that relationship with evil, darkness and anti-conformity. Melkor described it

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as ‘playing around with the things that we were told were scary, just to get a reaction from normal people… and you don’t get more scarier than Satan.’ The contrast with normal people typifies the tension in black metal between the explicit elitism and individualism (physically retreating into the snow-bound woods and mountains of northern Europe) and the need to have the transgression recognized. All of the fans expressed a need to have their anti-Establishment, anti-modern, anti-Christian music vindicated by the reaction of people outside the scene: on discussing Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto’s self-produced and directed film about his home in the Norwegian wilderness, Thu, one of the younger fans interviewed, contrasted Culto with his band mate Fenriz: ‘Black metal is about opposition, not hiding away. Fenriz lives in Oslo surrounded by shit. That’s what makes him angry. That’s what makes Darkthrone a proper metal band. Anger, and watching the faces of the people who look at you when you walk past them. Fenriz walks the streets.’ For these fans, then, black metal resembled a neo-tribe, in the way in which they were able to be ‘true’ and yet be aware of black metal’s playfulness and relationship to other forms of extreme metal. None of the fans wore corpse-paint and spikes round town, and only two of them had gone to gigs in the full black metal costume. But they did wear Thor’s Hammers, black metal tee-shirts and other items of extreme metal jewellery to perform black metal in public. And for all the fans, black metal marked a space in which masculinity, individuality and freedom of thought were privileged over conformity and commodification.

National Socialist Black Metal I returned to the blackmetal.co.uk forum in 2007 to further examine the extreme ideologies of the scene. I was particularly interested to explore the tensions between black metal as a neo-tribe and black metal as a site of the construction of whiteness (Garner, 2006) and white (racist, Aryan, heathen) identity. As an insider in the black metal scene, I would then use my knowledge of that scene to observe discussions on the black metal on-line forum about what it means to be a black metal fan (being ‘kult’). As already mentioned, National Socialism is one of the four extreme ideologies associated by the fans on the forum with black metal – as a subgenre, it has its own bands, and draws on the flirtation with fascism, white supremacy and anti-semitism expressed by bands like Darkthrone in the early 1990s.

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During my time observing the comments made by the fans on the forum, four threads came to my attention. The first was a discussion about a spate of church burnings in France; the second and third were about two bands associated with National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM): Absurd and Drudkh; and the fourth was about NSBM itself. This last thread proved to be very timely and useful for this research, as the discussion was connected to an anonymous on-line poll of forum users. On 10 July 2007, after just under a month of discussions, and after the heated arguments had faded away, the poll showed a majority of the black metal fans agreeing with the statement that National Socialist ideology in black metal was stupid: 54% of respondents (31 where n=57). Only 16% believed that the ideology was ‘great’, seemingly approving of the music and its ideology; 14% believed NSBM was ‘entertaining’, a more ambivalent position to take; and 11% said that black metal was ‘supposed to be bad’, apparently supporting NSBM as an extension of the provocative nature of the scene. In addition, a further 5% believed that NSBM was ‘just a bit of fun’. This online poll, while clearly not representative of all black metal fans, was reflective of the ambiguity of NSBM in the wider scene, and perhaps the majority-held opinion of NSBM as something that is a provocation too far. It is also instructive to see that the people who did see a place for NSBM in black metal were not automatically in accord with its white (racist, Aryan, heathen) supremacist, romantic nationalist politics: the 11% who saw in it an extension of provocation and anticonformity; and the 5% who saw NSBM as a big joke on the anti-NSBM fans who took it all too seriously. The thread on black metal (‘What do we all feel about NSBM?) resulted from an original posting on 15 June 2007 by someone called diseasedmind. It is worth quoting from this original post at length, as diseasedmind made a number of articulate arguments against the legitimacy of National Socialism and its ideological influence in black metal: I have a massive axe to grind with NSBM… the problems I see are these: 1) Most importantly, it’s an invasion of the scene by people with political agendas who have no actual regard for the broader BM scene itself… 2) Politics has no place in a musical form focussed on the destruction of everyone… I’m not including bands who simply write about their cultural heritage in this, though there’s quite a degree of crossover which is of course exploited by… NSBM activists… 3) The assertion that the demise of our culture is the fault of one section of society is again incompatible with a musical form

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which recognizes (and often celebrates) the inherent self destructiveness of the human species. National Socialism is an idiot’s philosophy in which history is romanticized… stupid people exist in all races and cultures and a mass global cull would in purely logical terms be no bad thing. NS subscribers are the most intellectually stunted of the lot so logically we should start with them. NS activism in BM is a cancer which threatens the long term health of the BM scene as a whole and needs to be checked. That’s my position anyway. I expect there’ll be some neo-fascist sympathizers lurking in the wings to have a rant… anyway, figured it’d be interesting to see how many sympathizers vs. passive acceptors and objectors. This initial posting is interesting in the way diseasedmind asserts that black metal is purely misanthropic in its ideology. For diseasedmind, black metal’s pure misanthropic message is in danger of being subsumed by an elitism based around (white) racial supremacy – though he/she does allow room for heathen romanticism (bands that write songs about their pagan/heathen cultural heritage), as long as that romanticism (for example, Enslaved writing a song called 793 – Slaget om Lindisfarne, celebrating the Viking attack on the Christians of Lindisfarne) does not spill over into nationalism. This racial supremacy is critiqued by diseasedmind as being the antithesis of black metal’s misanthropic elitism: there is no culture or race or nation that is any better than any other, because the whole of humanity is rubbish. Note that diseasedmind is quite happy to criticize National Socialism for its irrational logic of supremacy, while at the same time writing about global ‘culls’ of the stupid (ironically, starting with the neo-Nazis as prime examples of stupid people). Also note that diseasedmind ends the post by suggesting this is just his/her opinion: an explicit declaration of black metal’s commitment to individuality and freedom of speech and thought. By 28 June 2007, 133 postings had been made on this thread, making it one of the liveliest discussions on the website that year. The first response to diseasedmind’s argument came at 8.58pm on 16 June 2007, a mere three minutes after the original post. The poster, Invocation, added to his position at 9.03pm. He/she agreed with ‘everything’ but suggested that ‘nazi’s [sic] will never, EVER change their opinions.’ Invocation’s second post added the point that ‘one of the goals of the Pagan Front is to remove all Satanism from black metal.’ The Pagan Front is a key organization promoting extreme right-wing propaganda in black metal: Invocation’s comment demonstrates the way in which the neo-Nazis are seen

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to be trying to dissociate black metal from Satanism (something he/she presumably thinks has a place in black metal, given his/her name and their comment). More ambivalent comments followed soon after Invocation’s. One poster, a heathen romantic based in the United States, said I find European history and paganism really interesting, and I like it when bands incorporate that stuff into their music. I only think it becomes stupid when it just turns into Hitler Worship, but most of the worthwhile NSBM bands don’t do that. (jeffnogo, posted 16 June 2007) Some other postings made similar points that legitimized some NSBM as being about paganism and local (white) identities, against NSBM that supported Germany and the Holocaust. The first challenge to diseasedmind from a supporter of National Socialism appeared at 10.43pm on 16 June 2007. Carpathianhell may have adopted a cod-horror name, but their comments justified and supported the aims and objectives of National Socialism and its black metal subgenre. ‘NSBM supports the destruction of the judeo-christian regime does it not?’ they argued, ‘NSBM supports the elimination of all who are “impure”… anything that supports the destruction of something, at least human-wise, is welcomed in black metal as far as I’m concerned.’ Here, Carpathianhell was linking black metal’s anti-Christianity to a wider resistance against something they called ‘judeo-christian’ religion, an extrapolation that allows anti-semitism to be justified as being part of a wider defence against religion. Carpathianhell continued BM needs allies to achieve it’s [sic] ultimate goal, the destruction of all humanity, the destruction of all judeo-christian like filth. If NSBM supports any part of that ultimate goal (which they do) then BM must accept these allies. And from what I’ve seen, NSBM groups such as the Pagan Front have a much more real chance… of making actual changes in society… what is better the destruction of some people (whose who NSBM wants destroyed), or of no people at all? Carpathianhell’s comments were immediately criticized by other posters. Some postings argued that ultimately black metal was about the music: ‘I’ll start by stating I don’t agree with any NS ideology but half the time I haven’t got a fuckin’ clue what the hell their [sic] on about

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anyhow… don’t give a toss if they goose-step round their bedrooms all night so long as they don’t bother me… give me a good toon [tune]…’ (posted by no-necro-name.com, 16 June 2007). But one poster, Nemesis, provided a critical demolition of National Socialism and NSBM, which led to Carpathianhell retreating from overt support of neo-Nazi genocide to a position that attempted to establish National Socialism as a genuine political philosophy. But by 17 June 2007, at the twentieth post in the thread, others were picking up the defence of NSBM in more crude terms: ‘it’s the fucking bestest, haha cunt fuck off…’ (posted by Wehrwolf). After others continued to try to justify NSBM by equating it with freedom of speech and freedom to provoke, diseasedmind and another anti-NSBM poster, centurion, ended up caught in a number of debates with ambivalent or pro-NSBM black metal fans. On the latter side, for example, someone argued that ‘you can hate everyone, but hate certain groups less… some people may endorse NS movements (not necessarily white power movements), due to the fact that they bring death.’ (posted by schadel_reich, 18 June 2007) The thread continued to grow over the next few days as more defenders of NSBM appeared, but diseasedmind continued to answer their comments. In the end, by the time the thread tailed off at the end of the month, the NSBM defenders had stopped posting, and more anti-NSBM posters had appeared, as well as a number of people who had been sidetracked into a discussion about the lack of non-white musicians in black metal (and the existence of black metal musicians such as Mystifier, and the Pashtun Muslim black metaller Taarma). The thread and the poll demonstrated that while there is a revulsion about NSBM and the influence of such racism in black metal, there was both ambivalence and ambiguity about whether it was acceptable or legitimate. The Habermasian nature of its democratic, communicative discourse, leaves black metal open to such influences. The tension in black metal was apparent in the other three threads I examined. The first (‘Recent Church burnings in France’) began with a post by ROBL250 on 21 June 2007. He pasted up a report from Blabbermouth about a series of arson attacks and vandalism at nine Christian sites in Brittany. The report from Blabbermouth said a group called True Armorik Black Metal had claimed responsibility for the attacks, and that ABM had been scrawled at the sites, which ‘Police believe’ signifies ‘Aryan Black Metal, a Satanist movement which has links to heavy metal music, paganism and far-right politics.’ Although there was a string of responses that supported the burnings, the thread soon

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became dominated by black metal fans condemning the destruction. This was led by a poster called Gaendaal, who argued that destroying art is the weakest reaction I can imagine… if you burn a church then you simply destroy the physical place of worship. For a Christian, this doesn’t really mean that much. For a historian, it means everything. Black Metal is Art, not Hooliganism. (posted 23 June 2007) This defence was supported by the posting of pictures of old churches of clear architectural merit, by Gaendaal and by others such as jonesmark. For these black metal fans, old churches represented a link to (white, European) culture, heritage and local mythology, and a reaction against modernity. As Gaendaal pointed out on 22 June 2007, ‘if you want to return to your heathen roots then burn down a MacDonalds.’ The second and third threads were about new albums by two bands associated with NSBM: Absurd (‘Absurd – Fifteen Years War, Re-recorded old songs’), initial posting 27 June 2007) and Drudkh (‘Drudkh next album pre-order’, initial posting 21 June 2007). Absurd started out as a racist, neo-Nazi punk band from Germany, whose lead singer murdered a fifteen-year old. Now the band has been reformed, with a more-BM style, and has the backing of the Pagan Front. The response to the initial posting showed the division between black metal fans who oppose NSBM, those who support, and those who believe it is all about the music and freedom of expression. For example, when one fan said ‘early Absurd is great… people hate NSBM just because they’re moronic sheep thinking they’re profound for hating something bad’ (posted by blackpower, 4 July 2007), another replied ‘don’t tell me you’re that fucking simple and shallow… most people hate the majority of NSBM and Absurd because it’s artistically worthless trash.’ (posted by centurion, 4 July 2007) Drudkh are a Ukrainian pagan Black Metal band, whose key members were also musicians in Hate Forest, a NSBM band. When the initial posting advertised the availability of Drudkh’s new album, it drew two responses from those critical of NSBM. The originator of the NSBM thread, diseasedmind, was quick to point out Drudkh’s link to the Pagan Front and Hate Forest. Another poster, Tantalus, mocked Alex Kurtagic of Supernal Music by claiming that the high price of the deluxe edition was due to a surcharge on ‘all those dedicated to the downfall of ZOG [the codeword used by neo-nazis for the secret Jewish

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conspiracy].’ (posted 21 June 2007) Again, many black metal fans said they would buy the record, even though there was a question mark about the band’s ideology (especially since the lyrics, translated from the Ukrainian original, do not seem to be explicitly pro-National Socialism). The situation was not made any clearer when a fan of Drudkh claimed that the band was ‘not involved with the PF… the Pagan Front is completely irrelevant to Drudkh… I’ve been to the site before… none of the money from this deluxe edition is going to some NS organization.’ (posted by Kveldulf, 24 June 2007) When diseasedmind tried to make people realize that the Pagan Front was actively supporting neo-Nazi activism, one fan, Valgrinder, asked ‘black metal is about hate and death… but how come hating for example jews is a bad thing then?’ (posted 23 June 2007): so, even if Drudkh are not National Socialist, they have fans who are.

Conclusions Black metal can be understood as a self-referencing community, or neo-tribe, in which action is communicative. Following Habermas’s definition of communicative rationality and action as democratic, communal and non-hierarchical (Habermas, 1981:1984), we can begin to analyse actions and words within the black metal community as being representative of communicative rationality. Black metal is against the instrumental rationalities that dominate Western society: it is antiChristianity, anti-State, anti-commercialization. In talking about black metal, the posters on the form were keen to distinguish the communal, democratic nature of black metal from the mainstream, commodified world of corporate rock. Black metal exists outside of traditional or modern social structures, its meaning and purpose are the subject of discourse and debate (Habermas, 1981:1984). Even the streak of nationalism and extremism associated with black metal can be seen as an example of the liberal nature of the meaning-setting discourse and action: there is no bureaucratic, hierarchical structure to remove or impose such extremism, which ironically allows such extremism to prosper without censure. Black metal’s essential nature is individualist. So individuals choose to consume black metal as a way of expressing their individuality and their ability to rise above instrumental rationalities and make informed, civilized choices about consumption and leisure. However, in many ways black metal can be also understood as a place that reaffirms instrumental rationalities and promotes instrumental action in leisure and consumption. Whatever individuals in black metal

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might think about the nature of the music, the community, the genre, it is still a business operating in a market in a commodified, globalized industry. Black metal is not a communal music played live in a free setting. Black metal is part of the Westernized, commercial pop and rock music industry that has imposed itself on the rest of the world, and as such black metal reproduces the instrumental actions that govern that industry. Music is recorded and sold. The symbolic boundaries of the neo-tribe are shaped by the consumption of commodities such as records, tee-shirts and fanzines. Small labels and specialized shops and websites cater and foster demand for commercial products. People make a living from black metal. The most successful black metal bands are booked by professional agencies to undertake tours in venues owned by multinational corporations. More obscure black metal bands send out press releases, establish websites, upload music files. Rather than being truly democratic, communal and liberal, black metal is governed by instrumental rationalities associated with the music business, and by ideologies of elitism that owe their origin to nationalist debates in European nation-states going through the phase of late capitalism (Habermas, 1998). This overview of black metal reveals the paradox of leisure, but by following Habermas we can begin to see that the paradox may not be so frightening after all. If the ghost of Mill is still with us then that is because we can understand the consumption of black metal as an action predicated on communicative rationality. If the spectre of Marx still hovers above us, again it is because we can understand the consumption of black metal as an action predicated on instrumental rationality. What looks like a paradox, then, is explained by understanding human action through two epistemological frameworks: two rationalities. For Habermas, black metal would probably be too much to listen to, but at least he would probably see how the contradictions could be reconciled through his framework of communicative and instrumental action. Leisure is important for the construction and maintenance of civic society (Habermas, 1983:1990), which is built on communicative rationality, the democracy and freedom of reason; but at the same time leisure has become a place where individuals are persuaded through instrumental rationalities (associated with globalized capitalism and the State) to consume only what is suitable for the survival of those instruments (Habermas, 1981:1987). For leisure theorists, this framework, it seems, may be a way of understanding what leisure is really about, and why it is a subject of legitimate, scholarly interest. Furthermore, postmodern accounts of leisure may be fatally weakened by the

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Habermasian framework, which explicitly retains modernity as an explanatory tool for contemporary society (Finlayson, 2000). So black metal is ultimately a product of high modernity, and is not an effect of postmodern change. In using Habermas this way, we can see that Leisure Studies are essential if we are to understand the relationship between modernity, civic society, communicative action and instrumental consumption. Critical studies of leisure, following the pessimism of Adorno and Gramsci, can and indeed should be maintained as a means of identifying and understanding the increasing dominance of instrumental rationality in society and culture.

7 Applying Habermas to Tourism

Reflection It is the end of a hot day of lazing about on the beach with what feels like half of the entire population of northern Europe. We have had a proper English, Bangladeshi curry for our tea (what others more refined might call dinner, or supper), and we have walked across town against the flow of Dutch and Germans just starting to go out for their evening meals. Now we are sitting in the Turbo Rock Pub which is in the Centro Commercial Kasbah in the huge tourist destination of Playa del Ingles, Gran Canaria. Rammstein, an industrial metal band from Berlin, are on the sound system, and the bikers in the bar are howling their appreciation and headbanging away. The history of the Canary Islands is one of invasion, genocide, exploitation and poverty. In the capital city of Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, there is a museum in the old town that attempts to explain the culture and lifestyle of the island’s pre-European Guanche inhabitants (http://www.elmuseocanario.com/index.html). It is not a museum on the tourist trail – Las Palmas is at the other end of the island to Playa del Ingles, and the coach trips up to the capital stop in the shopping area of the city. When we went on such a trip, it took us a good thirty minutes to cross the city to find the museum, and even then we had to wait until the long lunch break had finished before we could get inside. No one else from our coach got anywhere near the place, and when we were there we were the museum’s only northern European visitors. There are modern-looking exhibitions and reconstructions of everyday life, and artefacts in cabinets that have been found in a number of archaeological sites, but the most impressive display is that devoted to physical anthropology. Filling one entire room is a collection of over 138

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a thousand Guanche skulls. Guanche, of course, is the name the Spanish originally used to describe the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands when they invaded and colonized in the late middle ages. It is the name the tour guides use to describe these people on coach trips up into the mountainous interior, it is the name used in most guidebooks and popular histories. The museum’s website designers, perhaps conscious of the colonial origin of the name, now refer to the museum’s subjects as just los canarios, a vague, inoffensive term. But the room of a thousand skulls remains as a reminder of a now discredited notion of racial difference. As the website says of this display: The anthropological remains are displayed in this room according to the exhibiting criteria of the founders of the Canarian Museum. There are over a thousand crania, which together with other bones bear witness to the anthropological features of the aboriginal population. These early settlers came to the Archipelago from Northern Africa some time after 500 B.C., and brought with them their own cultural heritage with which to face the peculiar challenges of life on an island. (http://www.elmuseocanario.com/siteing/plantillaset.html) The Museum is almost apologetic about this exhibit of the racial ‘laws’ of physical anthropology, and the website justifies the continued display of the thousand skulls by referring obliquely to the wishes of the museum’s founders. Yet the museum’s web-designers also go on to claim that the skulls provide clear evidence of the physical (racial) difference of ‘the aboriginal population’. This is not unlike anthropometry, the measurement of the size and shape of crania to find racial characteristics, the kind of ‘research’ that was central to the discredited work of people like Samuel Morton and other nineteenth and twentieth century scientists of race (Gould, 1992). Standing in the room is a strange experience: where are they all from? Who were these people? Why did some Spanish racial scientist feel the need to gather so many skulls in one place? The rest of the museum, with its concern to represent los canarios in a more sympathetic manner, is clearly an attempt to counterbalance this reminder of colonialism, racism and genocide. In the Turbo Rock Pub, the German bikers don’t seem to care much for the story of colonialism, racism and genocide. Some of them look like they are about to fall over from the day’s drinking. Some of them are looking out of the open window of the Turbo Rock Pub at the English girls standing outside the Lineker’s Bar across the Arabesque courtyard.

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As ever, lazy nationalism and suspicion has come to the fore in places like Playa del Ingles: Lineker’s is for the English, there is a reggae bar for the Dutch, and the Germans and Finns are in the Turbo Rock with a handful of local metal heads. We’re metallers, too, so our Englishness is forgotten. We feel more at ease in the Turbo Rock Pub then we ever would be in Lineker’s Bar, anyway. After a few more cervezas and a couple of shots of some strange sweet spirit, I end up in conversation with one of the bikers. He apologizes for the rowdiness of his friends, and explains that they have all come to drink and meet girls. He tells us we should listen to the German band called In Extremo, and when we ask him what the band sounds like he says they play bagpipes and other mittelalter instruments. We’re bemused at the combination, but the biker insists that the music is great, and even tries to get the bar staff to play it, but they don’t have anything beyond the standard global names (Metallica, Slayer) and the Eurometal standards (In Flames, Hammerfall, Rammstein). The biker is disappointed but writes the name down for us, along with the band website. He asks us where we are from, and when we say the north of England he smiles and says he has been to Scotland, and it is his favourite place in the world. He goes there because he loves the countryside, the whisky, the bagpipes, the history of its struggle against the English (I think he thinks the north of England is Scotland; I never corrected his misconception). It is for him one of the last places of rugged authenticity in Europe, a place he can go where there are castles, mountains and traditions. I realize then that it is a particular Scotland that he visits, one inspired by German folk metal, which in turn, with its bagpipes and lead singers in kilts, is strongly influenced by the antiEnglish sentiment of Mel Gibson’s egregious film Braveheart. In Playa del Ingles, he is a drunken biker, eating chips and getting into fights. But in Scotland, he can be William Wallace. He may have laughed at the coach trips from Playa del Ingles to the recreated Guanche village, but he was convinced of the realness of clan tartans and his true experience of the Scottish Highlands.

Introduction: A dram of whisky Tourism studies as an academic discipline has, in recent years, broken away from more generic Leisure Studies, to become a respected area of critical and vocational research. That said, tourism remains in the purview of leisure, and is a key sector of the leisure industries (Roberts, 2004), as well as a site for sociological analysis of leisure lives and

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lifestyles (Rojek and Urry, 1997; Aitchison, 2005, 2006; Rojek, 2005b). Although there may be sound professional reasons why tourism has become its own discipline, with its own courses, departments, associations and journals, there is still a compelling reason to situate academic research on tourism within leisure. In this chapter, I will argue that tourism studies in all their guises not only provide leisure researchers with strong empirical bases for leisure theory, but they also demonstrate the continued importance of leisure in our social worlds. The very idea of a holiday, a displacement of space and place, a different pace to the usual, is a reaction of the individual to the challenge of modernity on their private freedom. So the German bikers I met saw in the bars of Playa del Ingles the liminal space of drink and sex that John Walton finds in twentieth century Blackpool (Walton, 2000); and so I find myself sitting in my office on a cold autumnal day, watching the rain drops fall on the window as I think (in my middle-class, healthy eco-freak left-wing liberal way) of my next communion with a Scottish hillside, and a Scottish whisky distillery. We are all exercising a choice. The German bikers want to swap the grey streets of Hamburg for the winding roads of the Canaries, for the sun-stained tiles of the fauxOriental Casbah and the promise of its street, light, street-light bars. I want to escape the stress of committee-making and assessment strategies, and the smell of commuter carriages, and find myself a place of heather, rocks and Bruichladdich. But we are all trapped by the limits of the tourist industry. Playa del Ingles is an ugly place, but no more unreal than the west coast of Scotland and the make-believe fairy stories of the Whisky Trail (Gold and Gold, 1995; Martin and Haugh, 1999). Bruichladdich, on Islay, is a noble exception on the Whisky Trail that makes, matures and bottles its whisky in its distillery. On the same island, the multinational corporation Diageo, the biggest company in the whisky industry, runs Lagavulin and Caol Ila: despite their fine taste, these two whiskies are mainly matured away from Islay, in some faceless factory, and bottled like most single malt whiskies hundreds of miles from the distillery. Despite that, both distilleries have visitor centres, where the guides will tell you that it is irrelevant where the whisky is matured. Even Bruichladdich, for all its public display of tradition and loyalty to the local community, is dependent on people around the world buying into the ideal and drinking a large dram. In turn, Islay’s tourist industry is dependent on those self-same whisky drinkers making the pilgrimage. So whisky is big business for the island, and the Port Charlotte hotel vies with its competitors in Bowmore to demonstrate its importance in

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the whisky experience: on the website of its owners it boasts ‘the public bar serves excellent bar lunches and evening bar meals and has some of the finest malt whiskies in the world for you to sample.’ (http://www.milford.co.uk/scotland/accom/h-a-1729.html, accessed 29 September 2008) The hotel is a stop on whisky tours to Scotland, and on a summer weekend you have to book ahead to eat even in the public bar, as the whisky tourists fight to be fed alongside the birdwatchers and walkers who represent Islay’s other tourist constituencies. Away from Islay, the whisky industry presents itself to the national and international tourist trade in unusual ways. Scottish whiskies have been successfully promoted as unique, authentic brands since the whisky craze of the late nineteenth century, when the English and American petit bourgeois taste for brandy was hampered by successively poor grape harvests. Whisky-makers saw a gap in the market: fuelled by the reinvention of the Highlands under Queen Victoria, who liked a dram herself (Pittock, 1995), whisky, the old Scottish and Irish drink of the rural poor and the urban working classes, was transformed. Malt whisky produced by single distilleries was mostly considered to be too harsh for middle-class, London tastes. The alternative grain whisky, much cheaper to make, and produced in huge factories, was tasteless. So the whisky-sellers in the late nineteenth century decided to blend the two products, using a small measure of the single malts to give some taste to the cheap grain, while using the grain to keep the malts bland enough for the mass-market. The resulting blends – Johnny Walker, Teacher’s, Famous Grouse – were an enormous financial success, and, backed by huge profit margins and claims of authenticity, branded whisky blends spread across the globe in the twentieth century. They were harbingers of globalization but also bottles of invented tradition. Single malt whiskies, with the exception of Glenfiddich, could not compete in these global markets for much of the century. But single malts were important for the blends, so the distilleries that made them were bought and sold between multinational companies seeking to protect or change the taste of their blends for different global markets. In the second half of the twentieth century, with a reaction against globalization and commodification among Westernized elites, these single malt whiskies came to be recognized as being more authentic than the blends. Small businesses emerged that bought up spare stock of single malts and sold the bottled product. At first, the multinational corporations that owned many of the single malt distilleries failed to recognize the growing demand for those malts (and indeed, some single malts are still not available on the market): the predecessor of Diageo,

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for instance, closed a number of distilleries in 1983, among them Port Ellen of Islay. But the global demand for blended whisky has led to a global demand for single malt whisky, and Diageo now cultivates the demand for authentic single malts through careful promotion of its ‘classic’ single malt distilleries, all of which have visitor centres and guided tours; as well as bottlings of ‘rare’ malts from distilleries that have tended to be used mainly as malt sources for blends, or distilleries that have ceased to exist. Despite closing Port Ellen in 1983, for example, Diageo maintains a stock of Port Ellen single malt in its network of warehouses across Scotland. This stock survives because of the three years minimum it takes, by law, to mature the new spirit of a distillation into whisky; as most single malt is at least ten years old, by tradition, all distillery owners keep thousands of whisky barrels in storage, and much of this can be over twenty years old. Diageo has millions of barrels in its warehouse empire, and a healthy supply of Port Ellen distilled in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By carefully limiting the release of this stock to the market, it ensures there is a high demand for what is a taste of something that will soon no longer exist. Whisky tourism has grown to be an established part of Scotland’s wider tourist trails, mirroring the visitor centres at vineyards and breweries in other countries, partly because of the globalization of blended whisky blends, and partly because of the quest for the true, supposedly authentic, cultural experience of single malt. It is here that the Whisky Trail becomes unusual, because tourists want to visit the home of their favourite whisky, and blends, if they have a home, have it in the huge factories where they are concocted. But the tourist visiting Scotland does not want to see a big factory on an industrial estate on the edge of Glasgow: to be authentic, the home of whisky needs to be a ramshackle old building by a river or the coast, where the tourist can hear ghost stories and tales of old workers stealing new spirit by poking a straw through the bung of a barrel. So the owners of the Famous Grouse blend, seeing the rise of visitors to single malt distilleries, decided to create the Famous Grouse Experience at what they called the Home of Famous Grouse: the single malt distillery of Glenturret, which was owned by Highland Distillers (later the Edrington Group), which owned the Famous Grouse blend and brand. Glenturret single malt is just one small component of the Famous Grouse blend, yet the Famous Grouse Experience at the Home of Famous Grouse has taken over the distillery, and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Glenturret, thinking of the funny animated grouse on the TV adverts, thinking of Scotland and heather and the tartan shortbread they have bought at

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the last coach stop, are seemingly oblivious about this invention of authenticity. Perhaps by visiting a single malt distillery like Bruichladdich, one can feel superior to hoi polloi at the Famous Grouse Experience: but don’t be fooled, the owners of Bruichladdich, for all the romance of the Victorian distillery’s resurrection, are not philanthropists. They have challenged the myths and tartan iconography of the Scottish whisky industry, they employ local people and make a show of avoiding artificial colouring and chill-filtration techniques, but there is a hard-nosed financial calculation in every claim to authenticity and purity. They have a visitor centre too, where you are offered, for the cost of your entry, a dram and a discount if you buy a bottle in the shop. There is still a system, and someone still takes our money. It is at once the commodification of leisure expressed in the brochure, and the dream of liberty and the choice of the open road in a hundred Hollywood movies. Tourism, then returns us to the paradox of leisure: the way in which it is both freedom and choice, and constraint and commodification. We have seen already how this paradox is resolved through the simple adoption of Habermas’ two rationalities, which strive for dominance in late modernity. Tourism is, then, in essence, a prime site for expanding the Habermasian framework. This final research chapter uses the Habermasian framework of the previous two chapters to explore and analyse published research on tourism, one of the areas of Leisure Studies that has seen a massive growth in interest and disciplinary boundary formation. Of particular interest is the globalization and commodification of tourism, and the communicative backlash to these trends typified by the search for authenticity.

Authenticity One of the most contentious, and perhaps over-used, analytical frameworks in the discipline is the concept of authenticity. As first sketched out in the work of MacCannell (1973, 1976), authenticity, something real or essential in a place or experience, was the ultimate goal of every tourist. Like some modern-day knight of medieval romance, the tourist was, according to MacCannell, constantly seeking a sense of fulfilment in a quest for an authentic Holy Grail. For MacCannell, and those researchers of tourism who developed the concept, authenticity was both a description of something morally good and something that provided a normative framework for the tourism industry. This concept became increasingly powerful in helping researchers and theorists

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demarcate and understand the diversity of the tourist experience. Tourism in pursuit of the authentic, and authenticity at the point of destination, was edifying and profitable; in turn, the authentic allowed tourism researchers to distinguish between the destructive cultural and economic practices of mass consumption, exemplified by the Spanish Costas package holiday; and the more equitable cultural discourse and exchange of travellers in search of the real Spain. The morality of authenticity elides smoothly into a Western, middle-class sensibility of culture: the authentic is good because it runs counter to the homogenizing tendencies of globalization, because it encourages diversity and respect and cultural heterogeneity. In this sense, going on holiday becomes a pilgrimage, or a learning experience, where we (re)affirm our commitment to pluralism and grow as individuals (in the way middle-class people grow as individuals in late modernity, which has nothing to do with biology but everything to do with popular psychology and the chatter of broadsheet weekend magazines). This notion of the authentic, although situated by MacCannell and leisure researchers in tourism (Rojek and Urry, 1997), was also at the heart of similar debates about aesthetics and experience in the arts, in history, and in wider, popular culture (McGuigan, 2006a). Indeed, the question of authenticity related to ones about taste and high culture: the trueness of something could be a token of its place in the echelons of the fashionable classes. So, for instance, in popular music in the 1990s there was a turn away from pop and dance music to forms of guitaroriented ‘indie’ music, played by bands in gig venues (Bennett, 2001). This turn was a result of taste-makers seeking to reject unauthentic artefacts of consumption and commodification, and embracing something perceived to be more real and pure. Similarly, the turn to authenticity in aesthetics is visible in the rise of the slow-food movement in the West, in the ‘fan’ rejection of Premier League football for clubs lower down the leagues, and the growth in long-haul, adventure holidays. For Robertson (1992) this is a consumer reaction to the homogeneity of globalization; for Appadurai (1996, 2001) and Brah (1996), it is part of the identity-seeking problematic of global hybridities, which tear people’s histories away and force them to find new ways of making sense and meaning of their lives. With so much of the West a barren wasteland of shopping malls, motorways and commuter towns, it is inevitable that individuals in the West with power and wealth use that power and wealth to seek out an authentic world they have lost on their doorstep. Authenticity in this respect becomes a deep-rooted myth about some paradise lost, which can only be found by leaving the well-travelled

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roads of Kansas behind and searching somewhere over the rainbow. The authentic becomes a place of dragons, a Middle-earth, where the tourist is only fulfilled if there is no trace of the West, of the lowerearth of globalization, in its uncharted lands. Although authenticity and the quest for it played an important part in the late twentieth century research agenda for tourism studies (Rojek and Urry, 1997; Aitchison, 2006), the concept was the subject of much academic criticism. Wang (1999) undertook a careful analysis of the tourism research literature that claimed authenticity as a key concept, and found the concept to be carelessly applied and multiple in meaning. Authenticity seemed to mean too many different things, in too many different situations, for there to be one over-arching metatheoretical and analytical framework. Furthermore, the research itself separated out into three different schools of thought or paradigms, in which particular assumptions were made about the meaning and use of authenticity. Wang identified three types of authenticity used in the research literature, associated with these paradigms: object authenticity, where it is assumed (by the researcher) to be possible to find an external criteria of authenticness to judge some tourist experience; constructive (or symbolic) authenticity, where it is assumed (by the researcher) that there is no objective criteria of authenticity other than that constructed or shaped by the tourist and their notions of identity, culture and place; and existential authenticity, where postmodern notions of subjectivity suggest authenticity is an existential state of activity, where the individual strives for self-realization. Wang’s criticism of authenticity is typical of the turn against authenticity in tourism studies, and is echoed in the work of others such as Steiner and Reisinger (2006). What all these critics of MacCannell’s notion of authenticity object to is MacCannell’s commitment to the objectivity of the authentic: in other words, tourism studies have undertaken a postmodern turn to reject the idea of anything objective or externally verifiable or good about this thing called the authentic.

The postmodern turn in tourism studies The strong critique of authenticity in tourism studies is predicated on the wider postmodern and poststructural turn in sociology and cultural studies. Following Wang’s typology, it is clear that his constructive authenticity is based on a postmodern ontology of subjectivity: there is no true, authentic tourist experience, and no object by which such authenticity could ever be measured. All we have are narratives and

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stories about authenticity and place, and critical analyses of symbolic construction and hegemony. Tourism becomes part of the trap of consumption, where there is no escape and no freedom other than acceptance of the commercial pact. So the whisky tourist makes the Famous Grouse Experience authentic by joining the pilgrim trail along with the millions of others who see in Glenturret Distillery a mythology of invented traditions and imagined community. Scotland and Scottishness are seen by the tourist as being made authentic through the mediation of the global brand, and its relationship to heather, highland kilts, clan tartans, bagpipes, haggis and mountains. There is no other Scotland, no place that offers more authenticity, that we can experience. All the tourist sees is the mediation of myth, and the mythology of the authentic; unless the tourist is able to view the Experience through the lens of some supposedly ironic, postmodern gaze, in which case the sham of the experience is embraced and loved for its kitsch value. This postmodern gaze, of course, is itself a product of postmodernity and postmodern culture: when all things are fake, the fakes become real (Eco, 1986). So Elvis Presley’s aesthetically ugly Graceland mansion, the place where he died as a latter-day saint in the torment of tribulations, has become a site of pilgrimage: not just for Elvis fans in love with his voice and his hips, but for anybody passing through Memphis in search of the authentic Deep South. As with Graceland, so with the tawdriness of Blackpool in the north-west of England: the faded tourist destination of Blackpool is loved by John Walton (2000), for all its sex shops, strippers and stag parties. Indeed, for a place like Blackpool, the unauthentic and cheap has been perhaps the only authentic thing about it: its history is one of liminality and profit. In one of my other books, a novel based on the true story of a murder and the growth of rugby in Lancashire, the main character Humphrey Whittle branches out into tourism, lured by the call of Blackpool: It had been Humphrey’s idea to invest in the new industry – tourism – after Leo had told him of the expansion of Blackpool and the numbers of people who flocked there during the wake’s days, when the mills and pits of Lancashire were shut to allow the workers to do whatever they wished… Leo told them about the money to be made along the golden coast, between the salt marsh, the sand dunes, and the cold Irish Sea. Every day men laid down a new road in Blackpool, marking out land and building rows of houses, each brick placed in an effort to keep up with the madness of growth… The aldermen of the town and those in the know said that by the end of the century

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Blackpool would cover the entire Fylde coast, its rows of pubs and houses stretching to the horizon, out of sight, to consume the towns and villages north and south. When Humphrey heard this he knew they had to invest in Blackpool, something which would be a certain success. (Spracklen, 2001b, p. 79) Existential authenticity is also a product of the postmodern turn, and is the type of authenticity that Wang (1999) recommends in a normative sense for the tourism research programme. Where meaning has become so fractured, there is nothing left except the subjectivity of one’s actions, and the struggle for self-realization. This is postmodern ontology at its most individualized: the tourist becomes an outsider in an absurd universe, where there is no wider meaning to life, where only the choices she makes allow her some fleeting moments of Being. This existentialist authentic tourist subject is akin to Meursault, the main character in Camus’ L’Étranger (Camus, 1942:2000), someone who comes slowly to the realization that there is no structure or purpose to life, only the logical consequences of one’s actions on one’s own life. Where Meursault is an outsider because of his inability to lie (to fake the correct emotions for the funeral of his mother, for example), the tourist is an outsider because of her alienation from the fractured, meaning-less postmodern world. As Wang (1999: 359) suggests, following Heidegger, existential authenticity becomes ‘a potential state of Being that is to be activated through tourism experiences… authentic experiences in tourism are to achieve this activated state of Being within the liminal process of tourism.’ By seeking out the transgressive, heightened, hybrid situations of liminality, the tourist finds some satisfaction through self-realization and the making of meaning (Reisinger and Steiner, 2006). For many consumers of tourism, such situations are attained in the suspension of the rules of home and work in the anonymity of the destination: the liminal spaces of bars, nightclubs, and hotels (Walton, 2000). For others, the liminality is expressed in the unreality or hyperreality of the destination: the theme parks of the Disney company, for example (Baudrillard, 1986). Existential authenticity in tourism, then, is a reification of the self: the meaning and purpose of tourism becomes a quest for an activity that fulfils – albeit fleetingly – our search for identity, place and teleological satisfaction. The German biker who saw Scotland as his spiritual home finds existential solace there, perhaps like Pirsig (1974:1999) a moment of euphoria on the curve of a lochside road. This may be the

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one time of truth in his life, or of psychological flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), where all the emptiness of work and home is dissolved in the oneness of the bike, the road, the mountains and the water. Heywood (2006) has explained how such adventure tourism can transform individuals through moments of high-risk challenge, offering the chance of some authentic experience of self-realization in the successful completion of a difficult climb. Existential authenticity is achieved in such places and such activities, when flow combines with freedom and exhilaration. There is a poetry in this self-realization, in the reflection back on one’s own agency, whether it is the planning of a route up a rock-face, or the more mundane preparations back home for the journey to the place of pilgrimage. My own tourist meanderings up and around various hills and moors are also existential in nature: like the Renaissance humanist Petrarch, who claimed to be the first person since Antiquity to climb a mountain for the simple pleasure of reaching the top (Katz, 2007). I find in high places an experience of oneness with nature, some transcendental moment, that seems to be authentic. On top of a hill is where my quest for authenticity meets the pull of Romanticism and the existential joy of the absurd.

Analyses of authenticity in tourism research To see how Habermas can help us understand authenticity, in this part of the chapter I will analyse four tourism research papers. These case studies will be used to explore the concept of authenticity further, even where, in one case, authenticity is not central to the theoretical framework of the authors. I will begin with three studies where authenticity is central. These are studies on: Native American tourist art; the experiences of pilgrims on pilgrims trails; and Celtic music festivals. The final case study takes the global perspective back to my part of the world, and examines the rise of film tourism in Yorkshire. Native American tourist art Maruyama et al. (2008) examine the perception of authenticity of tourist art among the Native American artists who produce this art in New Mexico. This art work, produced by local, indigenous artists for tourist outsiders coming to their communities, is potentially a valuable source of income and prestige for the artists. But of course built into the art are the social and political structures of tourism, exploitation and globalization (Appadurai, 1986): the Western pursuit of the exotic, barbaric Other (Opotow, 1990). Maruyama et al. (2008) cite the work of

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Nelson Graburn, who was the first tourism researcher to examine the complex relationship between this locally-created, globally exploited or appropriated art form (Graburn, 1976, 1984; Graburn and Glass, 2004). At stake are questions of power, ownership, status and freedom. The tourists who travel into the developing world want to bring something back to symbolize their familiarity with the exotic Other, to prove to their friends in the developed world that they have wealth, time and taste to appreciate and understand the ‘native’ or ‘primitive’ art of the foreigner. Tourist art is a distillation of Victorian anthropology: like the skulls and pottery of the guanches in the museum on Gran Canaria, the works of tourist art are reified as something providing a real, explanatory insight into the complex social and cultural life of the people they represent. What tourist art gives to the consumers, then, is sense of an authentic, lived culture, which they have accessed and appreciated. The tourist takes home something they believe to be real, more real or authentic than the hotel in which they stayed, or the meal they ate. Maruyama et al. (2008) are aware of the criticisms of tourist art and the claims that such work should not be seen as authentic by tourist consumers (Revilla and Dodd, 2003). However, in their research with Native American artists, they find that the artists themselves take a different view. For them, the art is authentic through the method of production, even if the work is not made according to what could be construed as ‘traditional’ designs. For the artists interviewed in the research, what was important was their status as authentic artists working in a framework of traditions, culture and lived experience, but re-working that framework to ensure the survival of their art and its heritage. This means, for the artists, a balancing act between preservation, innovation and survival through the sale of their work. As Maruyama et al. (2008: 460) report, ‘the artists realise that contemporary forms may be more attractive to the current audience than traditional styles and that producing more appealing forms can help the artists increase sales while also maintaining culture.’ According to Maruyama et al., then, there is no perceived loss of authenticity through innovation aimed at the outsider tourists and their credit cards. The Native American artists are comfortable in how they see their work as belonging to an authentic culture, and they do not see any conflict between that authenticity and the commercial transactions they make with tourists to make a living from their art. The authenticity of the art is in the agency of the artists. Following Habermas, it can be seen that the agency of reproduction and represen-

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tation in the art is part of a communicative action of identity formation. For the Native American artists of New Mexico, this art is more than the mere satisfaction of consumer tourist demands for ‘ethnic’ hand crafts: it is an expression of self-determination. The historical tradition in which they work defines who they are as Native Americans, in opposition to the historical narrative of defeat and despair. The art is authentic because they have made it a part of their culture. It is a conscious act of rational choice, a consensus about how much innovation is accepted before the designs and hence the artefacts become inauthentic. Authenticity, then, is an expression of communicative rationality, which is what makes it so alluring to Western consumers seeking the ‘true’ culture and art of the Native American artists. What those consumer tourists want to avoid is the influence of the ersatz, inauthentic flim-flammery of instrumental rationality. This is what makes the artists so aware of their position as brokers of perceived authenticity. Against their Native American-ness are the strong flows of instrumentality: they live in modernity, they need to make a living from their art so they need to engage in the capitalist system, they need to adapt their art to meet a Westernized aesthetic while retaining enough Otherness to meet the need for the exotic. Pilgrim experiences Belhassen et al. (2008) approach the concept of authenticity through research into the pilgrim experiences of fundamentalist Christians in the Holy Land. These modern-day pilgrims arrive in Israel seeking affirmation of their beliefs, confirmation of the sanctity of the land, and a lived sensation of experiencing the actual or supposed sites of crucial events in the Old and New Testaments. The research suggests that these pilgrims do find what they are looking for: for them, the Holy Land is a real sacred place, an authentic place where they can feel the presence of God and Christ. In the Holy Land, these pilgrims feel their faith is validated: for some, the Protestant fundamentalism of their belief is further validated through becoming involved in or witnessing the evangelization of Muslim and non-Protestant Christian Arab Israelis. This is proof the authentic work of God and Christ, overturning the traditional beliefs of the inhabitants and preparing the way for the end times of fundamentalist theology. For the researchers, the authenticity of these experiences is best understood through a concept they call theoplacity, an inter-connecting relationship between the beliefs of the pilgrims, the action of the pilgrims in touring the sacred

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sites, and the social and physical context of those sites. As they explain: Physical environments, personal actions and experiences, and social meanings converge to shape the authenticity of evangelical tours. The sense of authenticity would not be as strong without such convergence. Put differently, individual human meanings alone are not enough. The authenticity of places like Nazareth and the Jordan River is not just about the experiences of individuals, but also about a sociopolitical heritage manifested in those individuals’ actions at a physical locale. (Belhassen et al., 2008: 683) This theoplacity, then, allows for an understanding of authenticity that recognizes social construction, existentialism and an objective account of place. For the pilgrims the Holy Land is a sacred site, and the pilgrimage is an authentic expression of their faith. Of course, this authenticity sits uncomfortably with the imagined and imaginary communities of the Muslim and Jewish people, Palestinians and Israelis, who live in the Holy Land and make their own strongly-contested claims of authenticity. The arrival of fundamentalist Christians seeking understanding of the life of Christ amidst the political and social turmoil of Bethlehem or Jerusalem perhaps only fuels the debates over access and ownership. For Belhassen et al., the concept of theoplacity is useful in allowing the construction of sacredness and authenticity to be explored: as they argue, ‘without a belief in the objective quality of sacred sites in the Holy Land, such as Nazareth and Gethsemane, the Christian pilgrims… would not have been attracted to them.’ (Belhassen et al., 2008: 686) Applying a Habermasian analysis to this research, it is clear that the existence of fundamentalist Christians in the Holy Land is demonstrative of the power and direction of globalized, instrumental capitalism. The history of the twentieth century, and the early part of this century, has been one where globalization has been associated with Americanization. Fundamentalist Christianity is a product of America, and the Christian pilgrims bring to Israel and the Holy Land a fixed, dogmatic interpretation of its authenticity. For the people who live in the Holy Land, like the Native American artists in New Mexico there is a sense of agency in how they respond and adapt to the demands of the pilgrim tourists. There is, as Belhassen et al. (2008) describe, some exchange and action over the meaning of the Holy Land between the pilgrims

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and the people who live or work at these sites: there is some agreement about authenticity with Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, for example, or with Israeli Jews in Jerusalem. Yet there is little that is communicative in the meeting of three instrumental worldviews, and while the pilgrims are convinced of the authenticity of their sacred experiences, there remains a tension about the universality or applicability of that authenticity. Celtic music festivals Matheson (2008) explores authenticity in the context of Celtic music, and in particular through qualitative research with music tourists attending a Celtic music festival in Scotland. Matheson is interested in investigating the contested meanings and dimensions of Celtic music, and how these relate to questions about the authenticity of the music itself, and the live festival experience. In tackling the authenticity of this Celticness, Matheson’s research draws on questions of commodification and postmodernism: how much of Celtic music can be attributed to unbroken traditions in communities that are authentically Celtic, and how much of the music is a postmodern hybrid of traditions and commercialization, or an invention of modernity? Questions about the authenticity of folk music lead to the invention of traditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the realization that all forms of music are in some way reshaped according to the taste of the times and the demands of the market. As for Celticness, there is a strong body of literature, from the historiographical work of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) to writers like James (1999), which suggests that any common cultural identity for Celts is a product of fictive ethnicity formation (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988) overlaid by a patina of linguistic similarities. What and who counts as a Celt is a political question, with a political answer: so English speaking Scots find common cause with Gallic speakers in the Highlands who see no difference between the English and the people of Glasgow; or Irishness in Northern Ireland is linked with Catholicism, and Protestantism becomes something inauthentically Irish. Matheson’s respondents identify something authentic in the music and the experience of listening to it at the festival. For some, there is a something about the way the music is performed that is essentially Celtic: particular instruments such as bagpipes or tin whistles; or emotional vocal performances. This leads to complaints about the presence of more commercial acts at the festival, whose Celticness is not so obvious in their music, and accusations from some respondents that

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the festival had become inauthentic through this acceptance of innovation and commercialized taste. For other respondents, the festival serves to authenticate their own Celticness, through their emotional response to the music. One respondent argues that to feel moved by the music, to become emotionally involved in it, listeners need to have ‘some Celtic blood’ (cited in Matheson, 2008: 69). For others, the emotional response to the music was a way of becoming Celtic: establishing their own personal identity as a spiritual successor of the Celts, a member of the imaginary community. This, Matheson, argues, is the central theme in her research: ‘the emotional aspect has a role to play in the ways that event consumers interpret the authenticity of the music… it signifies that theoretical readings of authenticity demand a closer examination of consumer’s emotional attachment and reactions to cultural rituals and experiences.’ (ibid., p. 70) This, of course, can be understood as communicative rationality in action: Habermas would see no contradiction in the agency used to attempt to define identity through Celtic music and Celtic tourism, against an instrumentalist structure of the commodification of that music and that tourism experience. The fact that the respondents at the festival could engage in such agency, within the limitations of the festival programme and its controlled, controlling consumption is proof of the power of human reason. Yorkshire, England O’Connor et al. (2008) explore the growing importance in tourism of destinations as brands developed from films and television programmes, typified by the strong branding of New Zealand as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth (Jones and Smith, 2005). In particular, the researchers use Yorkshire in the north of England as a case study of film-induced tourism, exploring the extent to which the region’s tourism economy, tourism campaigns and tourism structures interconnect with the use of the region’s towns and villages as film locations. Yorkshire has been used as the backdrop to a wide range of films: the list produced by O’Connor et al. (2008: 431) begins with This Sporting Life, the 1963 film of the book by David Storey about the life of a professional rugby league player (Storey, 1960), which used a range of locations including the home ground of Wakefield Trinity and the rural picnic retreat of Bolton Abbey; and finishes with the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which used the preserved heritage line of the North Yorkshire Railway to depict the Hogwarts School train station. The researchers’ list also mentions the main television programmes filmed in Yorkshire,

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which provide destinations and branded experiences for hundreds and thousands of tourists every year: Emmerdale, set in a fictional village somewhere in the southern part of the Yorkshire Dales, filmed initially at Esholt village near Bradford, latterly on a set constructed for outdoor shots in the grounds of Harewood House, a stately home; All Creatures Great and Small, which was filmed in the real Wensleydale village of Askrigg; the long-running comedy series Last of the Summer Wine, filmed in and around Holmfirth in the South Pennines west of Huddersfield; and arguably the most famous of Yorkshire television dramas, Heartbeat, which has turned Goathland in the North York Moors into the fictional 1960s village of Aidensfield. The researchers find that Yorkshire ‘is further evidence of the influential effect that films and television series can have on a destination.’ (O’Connor et al., 2008: 433) There is a clear economic benefit from such film-induced tourism, especially in places like the Yorkshire Coast and the industrial towns of West and South Yorkshire where traditional industries have collapsed. Such film-induced tourism is also, according to the researchers, important for the way in which Yorkshire is represented nationally and globally as an attractive, interesting and accessible destination. The managers and promoters of Yorkshire, as a tourist destination, have to tackle a number of negative connotations about the county: the mills, mines and mean-mouthed stereotypes about the place mentioned earlier in this book; or another negative view of the county as being wet, cold and devoid of anywhere nice to eat, fit only for the bedraggled sheep that shiver on its hills. That some of these negative connotations are reinforced by the same films and television programmes that bring people to visit the county is a dilemma that the Yorkshire tourist industry is still trying to resolve. As someone who lives in one of these Yorkshire tourist destinations, I know all about it. Every market day, whatever the season, I can see at first-hand the attraction of my home town to the day-trippers on the Emmerdale Trail: they have been to Esholt, to Harewood House, to Bolton Abbey, now they are spending their money on Wensleydale cheese, fish and chips, and sheep-breed tea towels. The combination of a big coach park, a big fish-and-chip shop, and a castle at the end of the high street, is too good for the tour operators to miss. My town is dependent on tourists, and has been for the last hundred years. But the day-trippers bring with them an expectation of a certain kind of Yorkshire, one shaped by the rural idyll of All Creatures Great and Small or the eccentric working-class comedy of Last of the Summer Wine. They don’t want to know about the prevalence of drug use, or petty crime,

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the seasonal jobs and the slow death of villages as communities with the inexorable spread of holiday cottages. O’Connor et al. (2008) do not discuss authenticity, but it is clear that the tourists are in pursuit of an authentic Yorkshire, constructed through the medium of film, and only seem interested in the real geographical locality as long as it offers some confirmation of the filmic Yorkshire they have constructed in their heads. Film-induced tourism, then, may be profitable, but for the people who live in Yorkshire it feels like an imposition of an inauthentic, instrumentalized, simplified mythology of the county. If the reality of the postindustrial Yorkshire means embracing tourism as a postindustrial industry, the Habermasian approach would suggest that (authentic) Yorkshireness and Yorkshire space and place need to be defined through dialogue and inclusion with all stakeholders in the county, and not merely through the strategic planning of brand managers.

Final discussion: The future of tourism and the Habermasian project It does not take too much of a logical leap to realize that the globalization and commodification of tourism is symptomatic of the instrumentalization of reason posted by Habermas. In one sense, of course, tourism has always been a product of capitalism, a leisure pursuit of the modern age, industrialization and modernity. The origins of the tourist industry in the leisured lives of the eighteenth century is proof of the importance of the mechanisms of capitalism in the creation of a need and a market. Yet when Edward Gibbon visited Rome, for example, the destination’s pitiable state was enough to motivate him to seek out the literary remains that explained the desolation and destruction of the Roman Forum. In its origins, then, tourism could be instructive, edifying and communicative. Only with the industrialized topography of modernity could there be modern, commercialized tourism, fuelled by the technology of steam engines and the objectification of work and leisure time (Cunningham, 1980). The instrumental logic of the tourism industry has been seemingly inexorable, and for most of the twentieth century there has been little critical commentary beyond the confines of the green movement, or outside the academic world, about the growth of tourism. Even in tourism studies, much teaching and research in the twentieth century assumed that tourism was a good thing, but a good thing that needed to be better understood or managed to ensure material or financial returns over differing timescales. Only recently has there been an attempt to

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investigate and analyse critically the communicative backlash to the trends of instrumental commodification, a backlash typified by the search for authenticity, or the search for sustainability. It is in these areas that tourism studies can provide clues to the industry’s future, and the Habermasian project provides the key. The authentic in tourism is where we can see communicative reason at work, in the agency of individuals attempting to challenge the restrictions of the tourism industry. Dissatisfaction with the constraints of package holiday brochures, or guided tours, leads tourists to reinvent themselves as travellers in a search for an authentic interaction with the destination. Unease with commodification leads individuals away from big corporations to small businesses. The industry responds by rebranding artifice as authentic experiences, but these exercises are always subject to the tension of criticism. So the Famous Grouse Experience may attract hundreds of thousands of customers, but the company behind Famous Grouse feels the need to pretend its product is as aesthetically pure as a single malt. Where ever authenticity is claimed or challenged, we can see the competition between communicative and instrumental rationality. Sometimes, instrumentality seems to persuade consumers into thinking there is a village just like Emmerdale; at other times, communicative actions like the agency of the Native American artists demonstrates a compromise or consensus that preserves a sense of tradition, a sense of self-realization.

8 Conclusions

This overview of three leisure forms (sport; popular culture and music; tourism) reveals the paradox of leisure and the limits of theoretical frameworks predicated on either freedom, constraint or postmodern play. However, by following Habermas we can begin to see that the paradox may not be so frightening after all. If the ghost of Mill is still with us then that is because we can understand the consumption of black metal as an action predicated on communicative rationality. If the spectre of Marx still hovers above us, again it is because we can understand the consumption of black metal as an action predicated on instrumental rationality. What looks like a paradox, then, is explained by understanding human action through two epistemological frameworks: two rationalities. For Habermas, black metal would probably be too raucous for his ears, but at least he would probably see how the contradictions within this extreme form of popular music could be reconciled through his framework of communicative and instrumental action. Rugby league would probably be viewed by Habermas as a more formal expression of instrumental rationalities, as he would probably view all professional sports: the triumph of hegemonic masculinity, rationalization and commodification. Yet even in this leisure form there is a way in which such instrumentality can be resisted through communicative rationality, whether it be the working-class narratives of rebellion or the young black men of London who in turn reject the whiteness of the ‘northern’ game. As for tourism and the pursuit of authenticity, Habermas would applaud the communicative desire to treat other cultures, other experiences, in a more carefully considered manner. Leisure is important for the construction and maintenance of civic society (Habermas, 1981:1984), which is built on communicative ratio158

Conclusions 159

nality, the democracy and freedom of reason; but at the same time leisure has become a place where individuals are persuaded through instrumental rationalities (associated with globalized capitalism and the State) to consume only what is suitable for the survival of those instruments (Habermas, 1981:1987). For leisure theorists, the framework in this book, it seems, may be a way of understanding what leisure is really about, and why it is a subject of legitimate, scholarly interest. Furthermore, postmodern accounts of leisure may be fatally weakened by the Habermasian framework, which explicitly retains modernity as an explanatory tool for contemporary society (Finlayson, 2000). So black metal is ultimately a product of high modernity, and is not an effect of postmodern change. Similarly, rugby league is undoubtedly globalized and globalizing, and with the influence of Rupert Murdoch it is clearly part of a capitalist system (Denham, 2004), but there is little evidence that the late modern identity formation associated with the game being replaced by a postmodern bricolage. To be a rugby league supporter in England still means to be a part of an imaginary community of the working class (Spracklen, 1996). The pursuit of authenticity in tourism can also be seen as a place where very modern notions of freedom are at work in a system of instrumentalized capitalism. So although leisure is globalizing, the extent of the postmodern turn has been overplayed. In using Habermas this way, we can see that Leisure Studies are essential if we are to understand the relationship between modernity, civic society, communicative action and instrumental consumption. Critical studies of leisure, following the pessimism of Adorno and Gramsci, can and indeed should be maintained as a means of identifying and understanding the increasing dominance of instrumental rationality in society and culture. Leisure as a meaningful, theoretical, framing concept; and critical studies of leisure are a worthwhile intellectual and pedagogical activity. Leisure theory is central to understanding wider debates about identity, postmodernity and globalization. Indeed, leisure is the part of our lives where the tension between freedom and constraint – agency and structure, resistance and control – is most visible, so understanding leisure is even more essential as the world and its societies become increasingly commodified and ordered. Following Habermas, examining leisure actions can help us understand the conflicting pressures of instrumental control and individual will – and in doing this, critical studies of leisure can and should continue to play a central role in understanding society.

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Index action, communicative 31, 47–49, 80–83, 135–136 Action Theory 25–26 Adorno, Theodor 20, 31, 33, 48, 117, 158 authenticity, theories of 144–147 black metal anti-Christian 127–128 elite resistance and 120–123 evil in 128–129 masculinity in 124 murders in 119 National Socialist 122, 124, 129–135 neo-tribe of 123–127 origins of 118–119 whiteness and 124–125, 127 Blackpool 147–148 Bourdieu, Pierre 26–30 Bramham, Peter 19–20, 22–23 class 21, 26, 98–99, 105, 110 commodification 117, 158 Critical Race Theory 107 cultural capital 27–29 Dunning, Eric

24–25

Elias, Norbert 23 empiricism, constructive 42 Enlightenment, The 24, 39, 40 European Union, The 65 figurationalism 23–25 Foucault, Michel 37, 38, 40, 107 Frankfurt School 33 Frenchness 112–114 Fuller, Steve 39–40 globalization 16, 54–56, 157–158 Gramsci, Antonio 21, 31, 63, 117, 158 Gran Canaria 138–140 grounded theory 12

Habermas, Jurgen critique of heritage by 88–89 defence of modernity by 65–68 early career of 33–34 history of modernity by 76–78 later work on by 85–87 upbringing of 32 Habermas and globalization 63–65 Habermas and the public sphere 72–80 hegemony 14, 21–22 Horkheimer, Max 33–34 Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis) 20 Kant, Immanuel

38, 49, 88

language-game 12 Leicester School 23 Leisure Studies (journal) 16, 28 Lyotard, Jean-François 37 Marx, Karl 15, 84–85, 158 Mayhem (band) 115–116, 119 Mill, John Stuart 14, 158 modernity 17, 18, 51, 56, 65–68, 158 nationalism 51, 64 neo-tribe 57, 123–127 northerness 98–99 Olympic Games, The ontology 46–47

51, 56

postmodern culture 69 postmodernism 30, 36–39 postmodernity 16, 20, 29, 36, 56–58, 65–68 postmodern leisure 16, 60–63 Pratchett, Terry 48 Presley, Elvis 147 174

Index 175 rationality, communicative 31, 47–49, 111, 114, 117, 156–159 rationality, instrumental 31, 49–51, 111, 114, 117, 135–136, 156–159 realism, epistemological 40–41 realism, structural 45–46 relativism 35 Roberts, Ken 17–19 Rojek, Chris 25–26, 30, 60–63 Romanitas 52–54, 70 rugby league black French players in 111–114 black Londoners in 103–111 British Asians and 108–109 globalization of 58–60, 70, 101–103

imaginary community of 99, 105, 110 invented traditions in 110 northerness of 99–101 origins of 93–96 whiteness of 97, 109, 114 Scotland

140, 147

Vienna Circle

23–24

Weber, Max 18–19 whiteness 97, 109, 114, 124–125, 127 whisky 141–144 Yorkshire

94–96, 154–156