Intima samhällsvisioner: Sporten mellan minimalism och gigantism

摘要

Ambitions and ClarificationsThe book takes its point of departure in the "intimate visions of society" that are significant of contemporary social life. This concept refers to the tendency to apprehend good social relations as personal, close and warm, while bad relations correspondingly are perceived as impersonal, cold, distant and alienated. Exemplary categories, such as closeness, warmth, community and love, tend to merge and denote identical or similar modes of emotion and experience. Since these qualities are supposed to be put into practice in actual life, intimacy can be said to constitute a norm and an ideal. This quest for closeness can be observed in many arenas. The book analyses its consequences, ramifications and paradoxes in the world of sport, where, for example, notions of collectivity are permeated with the ideal of intimacy. Since it appears as a norm, however, it is also threatened by contradicting tendencies. This is the inescapable destiny of norms. If they were unrefuted, there would be nothing to correct and thus hardly any demand for disciplinary mechanisms. Hence, norms fight for decency in a world where the immaculate cannot be taken for granted. In sport, the power that contradicts norms of intimacy consists of commercial interests. It is obvious that modern sport has become a gigantic industry, distinguished by sponsor money, abundance, spectacle, globality, publicity and extravagance. Sport can therefore be seen as trapped in a field governed by "minimalistic" and "gigantistic" forces. "Minimalism" is then used synonymously with terms such as "intimacy" and "intimate vision of society," underlining both the experience of intimacy as something of small scale and its contradictory relationship to gigantic large-scaleness. The intention of the book is to increase the understanding of the conditions of this paradox. It strives to do so by breaking the isolation that is characteristic of many sport scholars, who tend to withdraw from central debates in order to create a research community of their own. Furthermore, the discussions and analyses in this book refer primarily to a Swedish context. Many of the issues are, however, characteristic of sport in general in modern and postmodern society, but some of the notions of intimate collectivity seem to be dependent, at least to some degree, on the history of sport as a people's movement in a Swedish context.Intimacy as Vision of SocietyThe theoretical framework of this study is based on the work of several scholars, of whom many are sociologists. However, especially significant are the analyses of Jürgen Habermas and Richard Sennett on the relationship between the public and the private spheres. The public sphere, they argue, has undergone a decline in modern society. It has increasingly become conceptualized as an inhuman space, whereas the private realm correspondingly has been revalued as a zone for human emotion, closeness and warmth. Whereas the public sphere once served as the space where bourgeois citizens discussed politics and claimed influence in public affairs, it has, in the course of modernity, been drained of meaning. Public man has withdrawn to privacy, to the living-rooms of the suburbs, in secluded and unexposed environments. Perhaps theses of decline should not be exaggerated. And maybe one should especially avoid seing the divergence between public and private spheres as a result of such a decline. On the contrary, it has sometimes been argued that every society has some kind of arrangement for privacy, some kind of secluded zone, walled off to the outside as an arrangement, for example, of personal security or equality. However, the modern private realm seems to fulfil yet another function. Privacy is perceived as a space where people can act out their true identities, where one can "be oneself" and appear without wearing a mask. In modern and postmodern society, intimacy can thus be said to serve as an ideal and as a realm where truth