The Vibrant Days of Racket in the Hall
Negative Thinking in November
The ritual remains the same; the only thing that’s changed is where I’m coming from.
In 2019, the time it took to walk to the stadium was another reliable half hour or so, although this time through truly the most bucolic parts of town, heightening the bitter-sweetness and troublesome nostalgia. A family friend has a longstanding tailgate. I’d go. I’d feel uncommonly welcome in a way that I tried to resist thinking about, as it struck me like a parable—the over-educated and under-employed quasi-hermit, drifting through perpetual bachelorhood, traveler on the most boring Road to Jericho modern life can provide, treated kindly.
I was leaning hard then on reliability, and most especially—familiar to all but the rarest of fandoms—the potential for major disappointment to be shared, communal, instead of personal and alienating, inherent to each College Football Saturday. The pain of almost losing to a triple-option team, for instance. I was also taking advantage of my peripatetic habit to repeatedly, near-obsessively listen to Ulrika Spacek’s 2018 EP Suggestive Listening.
If you’re wondering about the moniker, singer and guitarist Rhys Edwards straightforwardly admits it is a blend of the “badass sounding names” of Red Army Faction founder Ulrika Meinhof and legendary actress Sissy Spacek, who perhaps could have played Meinhof in another timeline. At 21 minutes, I could take in Suggestive Listening on my walk down to the stadium and let it function as a strange cousin to more committed sports fans’ endearing penchant for simulating an athlete’s meaningful, preparatory listening of uptempo hype-up playlists.
Suggestive Listening is manically downbeat, little gallows-humor waltzes and tight krautrock scores for lonely all-nighters, each track a countdown to its dissolution and abrupt ending. “Just give it up,” Rhys whispers over the bridge of “Freudian Slip,” like a half-believed or else socially coerced encouragement to drop some alluded to “perfect tedium” festering “on the cusp of the next great depression.” “I’ll never give it up, / I’ll never give it up, / I couldn’t give it up,” he insists, a bit louder, correcting himself, over the subsequent chorus. They haven’t released any new music since.
Whatever other ways art functions in society, it seems to possess a sui generis capacity to grant access to more occluded and complex emotions than we may be capable of reaching through mere introspection alone. Even as art contours our social and political understanding, it often does so by providing new emotional language through which these realities might again be understood. “This album is like the soundtrack of my life right now,” we are fond of saying, positioning ourselves as the chimerical subject of a film over which this music plays: a blockbuster about a triumphant record-breaking multi-touchdown performance, say, or yet another indie slog about an adrift and newly-single 30-something Creative trying to mine the sacred out of their dutiful attendance to a diffuse spectacle they otherwise have trouble justifying to themselves.
In Max Horkheimer’s 1941 essay “Art and Mass Culture," the seminal critical theoretician wrote that “what is today called popular entertainment is actually demand evoked, manipulated, and by implication deteriorated by the cultural industries. It has little to do with art, least of all where it pretends to be such.” To the contemporary reader, in an age where truly nothing is not commodified, this sentiment may today either come across as surprisingly regressive and crotchety or else trivially true.
“The so-called entertainments, which have taken over the heritage of art,” Horkheimer continued, dunking in this essay on an almost proto-poptimist text by long-forgotten popular philosopher Mortimor Adler which “confuse[s] Raphael’s and Disney’s scenic backdrops,” and “seems to identify the Hays Office as the guardians of the Platonic Republic,” “are today nothing but popular tonics, like swimming or football.”
One must bear in mind, of course, the downright apocalyptic horrors Horkheimer was anticipating and fleeing; that he suspected these very cultural industries were busy driving home the “lies that are being hammered at men from all sides” in the Europe he had just left, or else pacifying man in the name of profit elsewhere, depriving him of “his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives. The other world was that of art. Today it survives only in those works which uncompromisingly express the gulf between the monadic individual and his barbarous surroundings.”
In the same essay, Horkheimer seems to praise John Dewey’s 1934 landmark work of aesthetic philosophy, Art as Experience. This is at least a bit noteworthy, as John Dewey was at the center of the American pragmatist movement and, as Stanley Aronowitz notes in his introduction to Critical Theory, the 1972 edition that first published Horkheimer’s selected essays, including “Art and Mass Culture,” in English, pragmatism was the “most attractive of the positivist doctrines” Horkheimer had set out to ‘acutely, methodologically refute.’ Horkheimer would later devote an entire book, 1947’s Eclipse of Reason, to this task.
Yet at the end of his essay, Horkheimer finds in Dewey a brief aesthetic ally against Adler’s positivist “Disney = popular = good art” thesis, holding up a stunningly clear insight from Art as Experience: “indifference to the response of the immediate audience,” Dewey wrote, “is the necessary trait of all artists that have something new to say.”
Were that Dewey alive to watch Northwestern play football.
This past week, having little ability or desire to say much of anything about the very hypostasized college football discourse du jour, and reflecting instead on how little attention I’d been able pay contemporary music lately, I realized I’d not yet in my one life listened to the much-heralded Toronto band Alvvays. No good reason, really (or rather, too many to contemplate).
So, instead of trying to write, I cued up the first song that came up when I queried the streaming service, “After The Earthquake,” from their well-received third album, Blue Rev, and listened. Then I listened again and again, in disbelief, hitting repeat every three minutes, the unmistakable feeling of a transcendent encounter with art coursing through my blood. I was having a real-life “Joe Pera Discovers The Who” experience, and a particularly bizarre months-long anhedonia with regard to music, generally, was lifting. Unlike Joe Pera, there was no pizza guy nearby to jump up and down with on the couch, so I texted some friends. The first thing you want to do with such an experience, after all, is share it.
Alvvays was doing something terrifying to me, interpolating a specific kind of nostalgia my generation is susceptible to into a song that seems like it could not be more immediate in its radiant intensity, more blisteringly new. While the song shares a great deal with its jangle pop forebearers—like Miracle Legion’s “Closer to the Wall” it makes a meditation on death anthemic, and like REM’s “So. Central Rain,” it produces the effect of a weirdly caffeinated melancholy—it does all of this at warp speed, humming with a kind of anxious ecstasy; there’s a desperation and precision to Molly Rankin’s vocal delivery that doesn’t seem humanly sustainable. If played any faster, it would explode on contact with the ears.
By the time Rankin is singing “say you’ll climb your way out your wake now,” whether she’s delivering this line as second-person motivation to herself or a futile plea to the deceased, it’s too late; you feel lifted up on a terrible hope, like that brief moment of zero-G on any carnival ride, your center of gravity suspended, believing that you are mere instants away from being either completely safe or else destroyed by the weight of how colossally fragile and very near collapse everything is strenuously pretending not to be, all around you, all the time. Nearly everything feels like that these days, you think.
On weary and self-aware circles of the internet, there’s a trend of responding to the endless klaxons alerting us to real or imagined political or species-wide crises with a curt dismissal: “football’s on.” This has escalated into very well-executed responses to absurd engagement farming about fantastical apocalypses, or else over-promised ones. The sentiment structuring these jokes is the same; some of us Football Knowers see that we are fools complicit in the horrible status quo by virtue of identifying ourselves too much in our consumption of the popular tonics, and we raise you that you first decry this very trait within yourself. Behind every “oh, is a sportsball on?” scold is someone who unselfconsciously views the sweep of history as a hero’s journey they get to watch and safely cheer on from the sidelines as if it just were sports. Your over-rationalized belief in having some tangible effect on compounding civilizational catastrophe through “this is not normal” cringe posts are about as useful as me yelling “throw it downfield” from the grandstand. Relax. Football’s on.
On the eve of unfathomable human suffering, Horkheimer hoped that “one day, we may learn that in the depths of their hearts, the masses, even in fascist countries, secretly knew the truth and disbelieved the lie, like catatonic patients who make known only at the end of their trance that nothing has escaped them. Therefore it may not be entirely senseless,” he concluded, “to continue speaking a language that is not easily understood.” That language is of course, in the essay, art, which football is decidedly not, certainly not college football.
“Are you awake now?" Molly Rankin sings, her voice nearly breaking, as the song careens into a tidy, wry conclusion.
And yet, isn’t it possible that the game we watch often as willful distraction can communicate to us in ways art once did, that we might still find signal within its noise of ‘demand evoked and manipulated’?
We are at a massive inflection point in the history of the American culture industry’s most curious and alchemical product. The old NCAA world is dying, a new, more palatably profit-driven way to organize the game struggles to be born, bringing with its terrifying possibilities at least the faint hope for familiar forms of resistance and solidarity.
In the sport’s meta-narratives, one can find clarifying reminders that shoring up capital on the snake-oil promise of infinite, unbounded durability and shareholder return will tend to buckle and collapse and that we’re right to be amused by it. On the field, there is an openness in this year’s title-run possibilities that threatens, in many, a whiff of optimism. To conceive of another world? Maybe not, but winning a playoff game often feels like another world given that all but a few teams have anything other than the longest of odds, the gulf between the haves and have-nots clear even within major conferences.
Even still, the old and intolerable guard hoarding power looks to be listing precipitously—suddenly we were all earnestly rooting for (Cheez-It Bowl National Team of the Week) Notre Dame’s new and likable coach and their old and unlikeable former coach, now a source of neutral bemusement by virtue of being installed in more suitably ill-fitting environs, to help topple it. There’s a lot of meat on the dialectical bone, here, in other words, if you want there to be.
Of course, none of this provides an opportunity for an individual to act meaningfully. Capital is amassing at the top of the sport so fast it eclipses the sense that this enterprise could be, even if metaphorically, anything other than a historical-material microcosm of forces we are powerless to interrupt. Even the NIL movements in favor of the sport’s actual laborers have become merely controlled opposition, a platform upon which over-compensated executives whine and cry poverty.
For the now much-maligned Frankfurt School, however, thinking through one’s experience necessarily preceded useful action. Horkheimer’s colleague Marcuse wrote that “thought ‘corresponds’ to reality only as it transforms reality by comprehending its contradictory structure.” It was this contradictory structure, reinforced by the culture industries and mass entertainment, that led to what Marcuse would call “one-dimensional” thought, which concealed the modern subject’s economic and social repression and thereby also concealed its already present potential for liberation. He called the interrogative process of penetrating and unconcealing these contradictions “negative thinking.”
The knock on critical theorists, and their way of social critique, by their non-hysterical contemporaries and recent interlocutors, has remained that, well, the contradictions were unconcealed and this, in their time, gave rise to absolutely nothing like liberation. The counter-culture movements that yesterday soaked up these texts comprised the very ad men who today ensure two-minute commercial breaks bookend every kickoff, who have mastered washing the inchoate progressive spasms of each subsequent generation back upon them as mere commodity. Does it make any difference if, at the end, the catatonic patient makes known that nothing had escaped them? If they dismissively remark “football’s on” with bitter irony, resigned to the overawing status quo remaining intolerable and immiserating? Our entertainments are now transparently corrupt, exploitative, and run-down because it doesn’t matter; we cannot stop consuming them.
In his book Old Gods, New Enigmas, the late Mike Davis writes that “in biology, one learns about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly.” To thus conceive of a world different from that in which we live might require, Davis suggests, “nonutilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual.” One thinks of the artist, of course, even though this is a bit far from what Davis intended.
Horkheimer, nearly a hundred years ago, was convinced that such actors were ‘steadily being menaced out of existence,’ and that popular entertainment could not usefully communicate.
But I can’t help but feel that, for instance, an Alvvays song encountered through the manipulative powers of commerce, nonetheless uncompromisingly expresses the gulf between the monadic individual and their steadily melting surroundings, even if it is also enjoyable. It synthesized the emotional discordance of my 2019 walks down to the stadium, playing like a soundtrack over the memory—acutely personal, interior world-weariness encountering, even wilfully and constructively clashing against, the mass, open air, joyful exuberance of Saturdays in the Fall, the racket in the hall, the caution to the wind, the anxious and communal capacity to potentially transform disappointments into weary optimism, for something like a better world, even if simulated, falsely utopic, and for-profit. Perhaps it is a gross perversion, here, to invoke Davis’s far less equivocal meditation on how we might find solidarity in “our brave new jobless world.” But I must start with where I am, at long last. Football’s often authorless randomness contains an indifference that is potentially communicative. Maybe to me alone, as a pitiful and hopeless true communicant. But even if dimly, November is hurdling many of us, anxious and bitter and optimistic, all at once, into America’s most immensely spiritual structure of feeling.
Thanks for sticking through a longer one, if you made it down here. Consider this entry a kind of throat-clearing Ars Poetica that might end up being of more use to me than it is to you. Future entries will probably, well, be more explicitly about this weird sport’s weirdness again.
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