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  • The Unbearable Dirtiness of Being: On the Commodification of MediaSport and the Need for Ethical Criticism
  • Lawrence A. Wenner (bio)

I’d like to reflect on the discomfiting and heuristical notion of sports dirt. As I have been wrestling with it for a number of years (Wenner, 1991, 1994, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2009a, 2009b), it is clear that I think dirt matters. My musings here are entitled with a tip of the hat to Milan Kundera’s (1999) Unbearable Lightness of Being. Under the guise of a novel, Kundera poses an intriguing existential philosophical argument. For Kundera, lives and decisions are in the end insignificant. Recognition of this insignificance enables a freedom that makes our celebratory postmodern lives unbearably light. Such arguments are both heady and slippery. They are at once defeatist and liberating, presenting a conundrum. The prospects associated with such unbearable lightness leaves one’s head spinning. In giving in, we are granted permission to “don’t worry, be happy.” Yet there is some disquiet to our satisfaction, both to our having given in and to the nature of the freedoms we have granted ourselves. Hovering is a moral shadow. So it is with dirt. But what does this have to do with sport in its increasing mediation and commodification and what we might do about it?

Dirt and Why It Matters

Dirt, like the insignificance of our lives and decisions as viewed from Kundera’s existential position, is unavoidable. Dirt, like [End Page 85] lightness of being, is a slippery concept. At once it is about meaning and a heuristic to facilitate meaning. Grasping for it, much may slip away like sand. Like Kundera’s lightness, defining dirt can be elusive. Perhaps the best we can do is Mary Douglas’ (1966, p. 35) seminal definition that dirt is “matter out of place.” For her, cultural dirt is significant because of its tendency to transcend boundaries, moving from where it belongs to where it may not. Still, in life, such assessments are necessarily judgment calls. Even Leach’s (1966, pp. 61–62) classic argument “that power is located in dirt,” outlining how dirt brings meaning and creates changes as it crosses boundaries, is predicated on an ethnocentric observation that “(e)arth in the garden is just earth” while “(e)arth in the kitchen is dirt.” However, the naturalness of a dirt floor in some kitchens does not negate that something moved necessarily changes its new place. Nonetheless, we know that things get “out of place” regularly. Life is messy. Further, in sense making we often need understanding of familiar dirt in order to facilitate meaning to new places. Thus, once again, dirt is unavoidable. But how and why can it be problematic?

One short answer is media and their central tendencies to strategically use dirt to port meanings, associations and logics from one sphere to another. Perhaps this is just the cost of doing business. As I’ve noted before (Wenner, 1991, p. 392), dirt, in and of itself, has no necessary “negative connotation” as it merely refers “to the cultural borrowing that allows one cultural entity to adopt the logic of another.” Problems arise with the employ of dirt. Still, it is hard to disagree with Enzenberger (1972, p. 105) that media are “by the very nature ‘dirty’” and their “productive power” results from their structural needs to “do away with cleanliness.” Advancing this structural argument, Hartley (1984, pp. 122–123, 127) asserts that communicative dirt is necessarily “parasitic” and “tainting” when moving to new venues. Nowhere is this clearer than in promotional communication and advertising, where dirt both soils and seals the sell. In such venues Hartley (p. 119) argues that the inherent “messiness” of [End Page 86] dirt enables “borrowed languages” to structure meaning and create power. Thus, dirt gains mutually reinforcing power from being structural, slippery, and strategic. As the “power of dirt ascends with its cultural primacy” (Wenner, 1994, p. 29), certain dirt is especially powerful. This is the case with sports dirt.

On this latter assertion, I have much company. The exponential rise of scholarly interest in sport and its cultural influences can be clearly seen over a wide swath...

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