Figures of Postwar Sliding: Utopia and Violence in the Extreme Sport Performances of James Bond

Jonnie Eriksson,Kalle Jonasson

doi:10.3390/socsci9120223

Abstract

This article investigates the utopian visions of extreme sports as a postwar phenomenon by contrasting it to the violence of the extreme sport practitioner par excellence in postwar/cold war cinema: James Bond. Continental philosophy and cultural studies furnish extreme sport as a manifold of wholesome, meaningful, sustainable, life-enhancing, and environmentally intimate practices, less orientated toward human rivalry than its traditional namesake. Certain attention is thus paid to the movement of sliding in extreme sports that thrive on powerful natural forces such as air, wind, snowy slopes, and big waves, creating an ambivalent field between mastery and letting oneself go. Sliding, or glissade, is treated as a “figure of thought” that Bond is mustered to embody and enact with his extreme athletic repertoire. The analysis of James Bond’s extreme sport sliding is contrasted to the musings of glissade philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres. It is concluded that if there is utopianism in James Bond’s extreme sport performances, it is in the sliding itself, while the attaining of that state is paved with violence towards everything material. The article reinforces the concept of the extreme in relation to sport as a processual tool, rather than a category describing a fixed set of characteristics adhering to a certain practice.

Highlights

George Orwell called sport “war minus the shooting” (Beck 2013)
The narrative, naming, synthesizing, and “living” aspects of the figure of thought of the glissade were treated as points of entrance for James Bond as our protagonist, and we find this method as productive for opening up the study of movement from a philosophical perspective
While we have been critical of the “utopian” visions sometimes reflected in both popular and scientific views on alternative sports, especially as we are putting an emphasis on the sense of the

Summary

Introduction

George Orwell called sport “war minus the shooting” (Beck 2013). In his case, the nationalism in international competitions qualified sport as a hostile tool and environment. Phenomenology (Brymer 2005; Breivik 2011; Immonen et al 2018) These strands talk of such new sports as lifestyle, action, adventure, or extreme sports, and one fascinating facet is a tacit ideal of the researcher applying such perspectives as a practitioner and performer of such sports. A third position, albeit not yet a strand, is represented by Steven Connor (2011), a scholar of English literature. In his A Philosophy of Sport, Connor labels these new sports those of “glissade”

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Discussion

Conclusion