A game you play with your brain

I attend one of those ‘lifestyle’ gyms that match the conventional aerobics class with chrome decor and bitter espresso. Indoor pools, outdoor pools, spas, saunas, squash courts and a sprung corked floor all transform sweaty exercise into fashionable consumption of fitness. It is a place where thin, pastel-clad women, accompanied by their Nike swooshes, work on their bodies to displace thinking about the world. They talk about dieting, husbands and children. It is a small life punctuated by self absorption and a coma of consumption. I watch these women with the horrific fixation of a car accident in slow motion. They are fighting a losing battle against ageing: forty-year-old women who, through botox, exhausting weight training and downward facing dogs, attempt to look like forty-year-old women trying to be twenty. That is supposedly a mark of successful femininity.

Ageing is not an illness. The game of life is not won by those with the tightest skin and the perkiest bum, who lie to themselves and others about the value of a woman. Sport, leisure and fitness, let alone leisurewear, should encourage movement for all shapes of people, rather than demanding that bodies be poured into tight tops and short shorts. Even better, exercise should encourage thought about our place in the world and about how we build relationships between others, rather than permitting inward fixations on the self.

Sportswear is part of this self absorption. It encourages men and women to look in enormous mirrors and see overhanging flesh and protruding stomachs. Corporations manufacture clothing that encourages dissatisfaction and desire: we see our weaknesses and desire new clothes to make us look better which supposedly will make us feel better. Clearly, we require a disruptor in this corporatized sporting sameness.

I made a decision to switch from the swoosh in my affluent gym and wear clothing to provoke thought rather than disgust. I choose to wear Philosophy Football shirts in bright colours of red, orange and blue, which feature slogans from philosophers, footballers and managers. Catchphrases range from Roy Keane’s ‘Happiness is not being afraid’ to Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Art is not a mirror to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it.’ I receive odd looks from gym members in these shirts. On one occasion while walking out after a Saturday morning class, a large man accosted me, aggressively demanding why I was wearing a ‘Marxist’ shirt. He had seen the word ‘socialist’ in one of the quotations, and the red colour of the shirt matched his mood.

The quotation read, ‘The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It is the way I see football, the way I see life.’ I tried to explain to him that this statement was derived from Bill Shankly. He blankly looked at me. I asked why he thought the shirt was red. He replied, ‘because you’re a socialist.’ I suggested that he needed to read a bit more about football. Shankly was (obviously) the most famous manager of Liverpool Football Club. They play in red, the same as the shirt. My conservative accuser went the same colour as the team strip, but – with finger pointing in my face – stated that my clothing was inappropriate for the club. When I noted that I thought the same about his Nike swoosh shirt, considering the payments received by workers in Indonesia, the gym’s personal trainers had to physically intervene, and escort me to my car. Clearly though, this moment confirmed the politics of the club, monitored through women’s clothing. Revealing and tight clothes with corporate logos are acceptable and naturalized. Anything political – or even ‘clever’ – becomes a problem.

For too long, football – the real football with a round ball – has been linked with an array of other nouns, like hooligans and violence. The World Cup has provided an evocative context to reassess these semiotic connections. Football is a metaphor for life, the pain, the injustice, the triumph and the lost opportunity. A clothing company with a political agenda, Philosophy Football tries to de-hooliganize soccer. The company was cofounded by Mark Perryman and Hugh Tisdale in 1994. Their slogan, ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction,’ transformed bodies into mobile billboards for the football thoughts of Cruyff, Clough and Camus alongside the scholarly musings of Naomi Klein, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Paul Sartre. The bright orange shirt featuring Cruyff’s most famous slogan – ‘Football is a game you play with your brain’ - confirms that sport, like clothing, can be not only be part of prosaic consumerism, but of thought, critique and questioning.

Clearly, this is not the time for such strange thoughts, putting the oxy back in front of the moronic. The company has had its critics. Duleep Allirajah described Perryman as, ‘the man responsible for those geeky philosophy football t-shirts favoured by Guardian-reading nouveau fans everywhere.’ It is very easy to attack and undermine Guardian readers, rather than tabloid’s tit-whisperers. It is also unproductive to attack those who encourage others to think. The existentialist/footballer Albert Camus provided the archetypal slogan for the Philosophy Football project: ‘All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.’ At its best, Philosophy Football affirms the globalized nature of the game, featuring slogans from players, thinkers and dissenters from around the world.

Yet a new project – a parallel project – has been developing during the last decade that undercuts this internationalist goal. Philosophy Football wanted to create an English patriotism without prejudice, like a ‘rock against racism’ for the boot. For Mark Perryman, ‘the broader network of largely uncontested negative values associated with following England away help to explain the significance of a violence relatively few are involved in. But the small numbers do not equate with … the huge impact of what is perceived virtually as a national trait, ‘football hooligan’.’

He wants to create a positive English identity, disconnected from racism and violence. The World Cup’s saturation of the St. George’s Cross and the terrace singing of ‘God Save the Queen’ confirmed his goal. Perryman became disenchanted when seeing the red and white crossed flag at BNP and National Front marches. Yet the colonial past of the (formerly) Great Britain can not be so easily erased, marginalized or denied. Perryman does not revise or reassess this colonial history, but his goal does raise the potent question: can a positive Englishness be summoned in the 2000s, having dumped the colonial baggage of the 19th century?

With the scars of colonization marking most of the former landscapes of empire, it does seem (too) convenient that Perryman wants to create ‘a practical project to construct an alternative, positive Ingerland.’ No reparations. No sense of how English power was based on colonial oppression. No recognition that institutional racism has empowered white faces as the embodiment of truth, wisdom and truth.

While critiquing racism in football, the Englishness Perryman supports is – by default – white. New shirts were added to their range in response to this project, including Blake’s Jerusalem and Rupert Brooke’s ‘There’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.’ While the joke about Brooke’s ‘corner’ suits Philosophy Football, the colonizing assumption of this statement goes unacknowledged.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s contribution to the Philosophy Football project – ‘In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team’ – captures the uncomfortable nature of colonialism and the difficulties confronting this new English (sporting) project. It suits the former colonizer to forget the past, evade the often genocidal injustices, and marginalize the institutional racism that survives in the present. English power is based on British colonial injustices. Living in Australia, seeing the Union Jack in our own flag, recognizing the Queen as head of state and speaking English, we live with and through the consequences of British colonization every day. So while cherishing the intelligence of Philosophy Football and the worth of Perryman’s politics, the refashioning of English sporting style is founded and tethered to the ugliness, injustice and denial of (a) black history.