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Abstract
With remarkable regularity, escalation processes in soccer stadiums lead to violence between police, private security guards, and soccer fans. This article examines the question of how this happens and what it means. In a consideration of Reckwitz’s thesis of the society of singularities, data from participant observation, interviews, and video analysis is examined in order to address the question of whether going to soccer games can be understood as a temporary break from the compulsion to individualize or singularize. In addition, the article develops the thesis that the escalation of processes of violence does not constitute the collapse of social order, but rather a predictable process in which all participants consistently cooperate (Collins). Through ordered togetherness and opposition, a common ritual (Durkheim and Turner) takes place, an always precarious walk up to the limits of what is socially acceptable, which also leads to the renewal of the social. Going to soccer stadiums, so my thesis, can be understood as testing the boundaries of the socially acceptable.
Highlights
As wide-view contemporary diagnostics agree1, modernity’s impetus to rationalize brought with it the promise and hope that human relationships, deep-seated emotions, and the insurmountable contingency of life can be discursively and cognitively processed, shaped, and safeguarded with
The general process of secularization and rationalization that has been taking place since the Enlightenment has eroded the foundations of religions and societies (Beck, 2015; Giddens, 1997, 2013), and with them the cultural commitments for a successful life: step by step, this process has handed the problem of the right way of living over to the acting subject, who increasingly has to design “the world from his or her own ego” (Wanke, 2001: 18)
This tendency is reinforced by the broad process of globalization supported and driven by media, as well as the mediatization process (Couldry & Hepp, 2016; Hepp, 2019; Reichertz, 2017): multicultural societies are impacted by contact compulsion (Soeffner, 2007); their cultural foundations, whose unity has always been problematic, is no longer as coherent as it was in pre-modern times
Summary
As wide-view contemporary diagnostics agree, modernity’s impetus to rationalize brought with it the promise and hope that human relationships, deep-seated emotions, and the insurmountable contingency of life can be discursively and cognitively processed, shaped, and safeguarded with. Against the background of a lack of overarching meaning (anchored in the beyond), subjects are challenged to decide for themselves about the meaning of their own lives and the forms and norms of life that follow from it (Luckmann, 2010) They are compelled to bind themselves (with the help of reflection and the media) to certain plans of action and to renounce others, first to exclude themselves (in two ways) from the group and to designate themselves as unique, and to establish themselves (Reichertz, 2000, 2015). I develop the thesis that the escalation of processes of violence does not constitute the collapse of social order, but rather (as Durkheim and Tuner have laid out) a common ritual, an always precarious walk up to the limits of what is socially acceptable
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