ABSTRACT
The sporting popular in the post-9/11 period, as revealed through this text and the work of scholars who ‘take sport seriously’ as a potent political and pedagogical device, sat rather uncomfortably at the intersections of a consumption-saturated society and a rampant state-directed neoconservatism predicated on a performed and performative (and delimited) patriotism, support for a strong military (with no option for dissent), an intensifi ed religiosity, and an expansionist foreign policy. The sporting popular, then, produced by a strange neoliberal amalgam of state / military and corporate entities invested in the pursuit of profi t-the new ‘modern intelligentsia,’ to paraphrase Anthony Smith-pointed to the extent in the post-9/11 moment to which the lines between war and entertainment, service and consumption, fi ghting and fun (Butterworth & Moskal, 2009), politics and culture, the popular and the ‘offi cial,’ have become blurred. Further, as indicated in the introduction to this text, the sporting popular
seems to be located in a space in which there exists a blurring of the boundaries between the society of the spectacle and what Giroux (2006) termed the ‘spectacle of terrorism,’ predicated on the affi rmation of a politics of war, life, sacrifi ce, fear, and death. Somewhat differently though than Giroux (2006), this complex fusion of state-politics and the logics of neoliberal market rationalities speaks not only to a reemergence of older forms of control and persuasion, but also to a rampant sporting entertainment industry, both of which capitalize on a notion of a troubled national identity and subjectivity. In this sense, in the post-9/11 moment, the sporting popular was centered on a new form of social control, one based on fear, terror, the military, and an attack on democracy and civil liberties. Yet, this sat alongside-resulting in quite compelling and equally disturbing footage and narrative-corporate objectives and the logics of the market; sport in the post-9/11 period was, then, shaped by, and answered to, both state and corporate power and served as an extremely powerful, highly affective, and extremely public, political, and powerful pedagogy that defi ned America, its citizenry, its politics, the ‘other,’ and the geo-political-imperial-military trajectories of the market and the state in the post-9/11 period. As such, the analysis in this book raises important questions about what happens when national mythologizing becomes bound with such contradictions, when the nation becomes corporatized, when the state (re)enters the arena, and when the ‘modern intelligentsia’ are (trans)national corporations invested in the pursuit of making profi t. Even though they may not be any more or less problematic than ‘offi cial’ discourses, these are important questions as we think through how national symbols are conveyed / become taken for granted (Smith 1991) when deployed through the commercial strategizing of corporations / in tandem with state-led directives and discourse. In this conclusion I attempt to reconcile some of the differences and fi ssures within such an argument, for even though there are many intersections between what are in essence neoliberal and neoconservative forces, agendas, and strategies, they can appear as rather unlikely bedfellows. To do so I turn to the work of Wendy Brown (2006), which held together these two disparate, yet overlapping, political rationalities.
