Common culture, commodity fetishism and the cultural contradictions of sport

Abstract

This article examines the implications of Paul Willis’s conceptualizations of ‘common culture’ and the cultural commodity for understanding sport as a popular cultural form. It argues that Willis's Ethnographic Imagination(2000) successfully addresses accusations of ‘cultural populism’ against his earlier Common Culture(1990) by acknowledging the tensions between creative cultural consumption and the political economy of cultural production. Hence his conceptualization of the ‘doubly half-formed’ cultural commodity, its usages and meanings neither determined by cultural industries nor entailing unfettered consumer ‘symbolic creativity’. Arguing that sport exemplifies this contradiction, the article examines two contradictory aspects of commoditized sport as popular culture. First is the ways supporters' financial, emotional, symbolic and intellectual investments in sport constitute a material contribution to the sport commodity itself and enable an acute sense of ‘authenticity’ which may challenge sport's (as a cultural industry) political economy. Second is the ways supporters' ‘de-fetishizing’ of the sport commodity may combine with the commoditizing of athletes' labour power as workers to limit their capitalizing on the symbolic fruits of their own labour.

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