In this piece, Jon Mackenzie turns to the writing of Michel Foucault in a bid to understand the debates about sportswashing a little more…
On the 1st of March 1757, a man—Robert-François Damiens—was conveyed by cart to the Place de Grève in Paris; to the scaffold where his life would end. Over the next four hours, his body became the site of a piece of corrective theatre, a state-mandated communiqué which saw him systematically dissected before an audience in retribution for an unforgivable crime: the crime of (albeit attempted) regicide.
At the outset, flesh was torn from his chest, arms, thighs and calves, and, into the viscera left by the harrowing, a smouldering concoction of lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur was poured. Following this, his right hand—the hand in which he held the knife which he had thrust so ineffectively at Louis XV—was burned with sulphur.
Then, a quartering was attempted. But Damiens’ body was less than compliant. Undeterred, the Royal Executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, sawed away at the still-living Damiens' tendons to allow the horses to perform the dismemberment.
With limb ripped from socket, and to the applause of the crowd, Damiens’ torso was burned at the stake. At this point, accounts differ: some say he died as his last remaining arm was removed; others maintain his screams could still be heard while the fire crackled around him.
On the 2nd of October 2018, another man-made a final trip; this time to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post journalist, would enter the consulate to receive documents relating to his upcoming marriage. But he would never leave.
It transpired that Khashoggi had been the victim of a state-sanctioned execution. Having been strangled shortly after entering the building, Khashoggi’s body was dismembered with a bone saw before being dissolved in acid. His last words, captured on an audio recording: “I can’t breathe”.
Two killings. Both gruesome. Both carried out by the state. Both disposing of enemies of that state. But the one more than two hundred and fifty years before the other.
To readers in the twenty-first century, it is hard to know which one of these stories is more disconcerting. On the face of it, the first is more macabre in its performative gore; the living man slowly eviscerated as a parable in full view of its audience. But the second seems the more inconceivable in terms of the proximity to us in time. How, you might think, can any state in the present day think that it can mandate a death in this way?
In both instances, the question becomes: how do you get from here to there? How did we get here from Regency France? And how is modern-day Saudi Arabia still there?
Instinctively, the Western liberal sensibility reaches for some sort of progressivist moralism as an explanation for this phenomenon. In three hundred years, so the story goes, we Europeans have moved beyond a worldview that sanctions the use of flagrant power as a dissuasive tool through a slowly evolving ethical outlook that now considers the sanctity of life somewhat differently that they did in the eighteenth century.
Looking outwards from our place in the world, the logic seems to follow a similar pathway when applied to the ‘regressive’ reality of the Saudi state. Despite a storied heritage, the house of Saud only formed a kingdom in 1932. In the grand scheme of things, you might argue, they are simply further upstream in the great river of history.
In fact, I have heard representatives from the Qatari government using this approach as a defence of their human rights record with regards migrant worker deaths in the run up to the World Cup in 2022. Qatar, I was told, are very much going through their own Industrial Revolution right now. And how many people died during the English Industrial Revolution? Eh? Eh? QED
This progressivist view of history places us on the sunlit uphills of a utopian moral sensibility. As we amble up towards the inevitable peak—the moral high ground, as it were—we look back at those regressive nations, wallowing around in the mud at the foot of the mountain. One day they may join us, but today is not that day.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault offered a different solution to the question, ‘How did we get from there to here?’ In his book, Discipline and Punish, Foucault begins from the case of Robert-François Damiens and traces the unfolding genealogy of the French penal system using sociological and theoretical mechanisms to explain the emergence of the prison as the principle form of punishment within modern France.
In doing so, he reacts against the moral causality which sees the human race on that inevitable upward trek to the high ground, refusing to accept that the only operative factor in the historical development was a humanitarian concern on the part of reformists to improve the lot of their fellow creatures. Instead, Foucault offers an alternative causality which proceeds by means of what he calls ‘discipline’.
In a famous passage in Discipline and Punish, Foucault expands on his idea of discipline:
“Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines.” (Discipline and Punish, 222)
‘Power’ is the operative term here for Foucault. This is about maintaining control. As a result, rather than Europe’s slow moral improvement being the result of what liberalism likes to think is just some sort of inevitable human tendency towards enlightenment, Foucault sees power as being the ultimate driver. Not power in the maximal sense, though—in the way that we see in 17th-century France and 21st-century Saudi Arabia; but a form of ‘micro-power’ in which sensibilities are subtly manipulated through time.
Here’s the thing: when a ruler attempts to administer power maximally through the use of, for example, vicious and public execution, they run certain risks. Primarily, the ruler sets themselves up as the embodiment of power in a hierarchy of power. But this leads to an agonistic system in which the head of a populace is always having their authority challenged by the body. Much of the early history of politics was punctuated by people being killed by other people. And at some point, power wanted to consolidate itself in a way that was a little more stable (and required less dueling).
This is the internal logic of Discipline and Punish: the movement from ‘there to here’ is prompted by a shift from the use of macro-power to micro-power as the means of ‘subjecting’ a populace, that is, literally ‘making the people subjects’. Why do ethical mores look so different ‘here’ than they did ‘there’? Not because individual consciences were pricked, but because power began to realise that it could disperse itself much more efficiently than it had. Punishment, then, gives way to discipline.
The most immortalised aspect of Discipline and Punish is actually an idea borrowed from the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham: the panopticon. The panopticon was an institutional facility designed by Bentham such that the prisoners could be monitored by a solitary guard. Bentham’s conceit was that, by allowing all the inmates to be visible to this guard but not knowing when he was looking at them, the prisoners would eventually be compelled to regulate their own behaviour.
This idea of the ‘unequal gaze’—the constant possibility of being observed—became fundamental to Foucault’s ideas about discipline. Not only does it give rise to the emergence of the prison system as the dominant model for the dispersal of power, it becomes the prototype for a whole ‘carceral system’: a vast network of schools, military establishments, hospitals, and factories which create a panoptic society for its members. Why do we not see macabre public executions anymore? Well, says Foucault, because we don’t need them. We have better methods at hand for the control of the populace.
But it’s not even clear that this shift from macro- to micro-power should be considered as an ethical development. In many respects, the shift instantiates a form of subverting in the old violence under a different guise. As an illustration of this point, you only have to look back over the last ten years of British history. Last year, 184 people were executed in Saudi Arabia. But between the years of 2012 and 2014, 45,000 people were estimated to have died because of austerity measures introduced by the Tory government. Through the enactment of micro-power—the implementation of economic sanctions on the most vulnerable in society—the Tories were able to impose control upon the British people without doing so in a manner that raised any question about their methods in much of the population. Thousands of lives snuffed out on the say-so of the state but to little moral fanfare.
Discipline and Punish tells the story of how we moved from ‘there to here’. And fundamental to the tale is the sense that our so-called ‘ethical evolution’ has very little to do with any intrinsic betterment and everything to do with finding more palatable ways to enact violence.
In the next few months, there is a strong possibility that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia will purchase an 80% stake in Newcastle United and become the majority owner of the North East club. Quite apart from the brazen murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi human rights record is beyond the pale. But in football, nothing is as simple as it should be. Inevitably, the fans, wearied by years of the Ashley regime, are finding every sort of excuse to hail Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, as the saviour to walk them from out of their enslavement and into the Promised Land; or to render it in the modern vernacular: the Premier League.
This, we are told, is sportswashing. According to Amnesty International, sportswashing is the phenomenon that occurs when “authoritarian regimes use sports to manipulate their international image and wash away their human rights record.” As to mechanics of this, it is largely left under-explained.
On the one hand, this is understandable. The idea that the Saudi state investing in English football might be bad seems so obviously preposterous that it doesn’t seem worthy of especially careful argumentation. But on the other hand, questions emerge: how does sportswashing ‘manipulate’ an international image of a state? Who, exactly, is forgetting the Saudi’s human rights record in all of this? What underlying processes are working beneath the surface when sportswashing occurs?
Bringing Foucault into this conversation throws it into a whole new light. At heart, sportswashing is all about dispersal of power. In a bid to move his kingdom onto the world stage, Mohammed bin Salman is discovering that displays of macro-power might not be as effective as they had proved to be in the past. This is true not only on the global level—Western nations are appalled at the sorts of abuses that take place under the auspices of Mohammed’s rulership—but on the domestic level too—these macro-power shows aren’t working on Saudi nationals either. With the news that flogging will be abolished as a judicial sentence comes the acceptance by the Crown Prince that a level of liberalisation is necessary if his aspirations for the country are to be achieved. Is this the result of a moral awakening on his part? Or is it not more plausible that he is coming to the recognition that a change of tack is needed if he is to continue his vertiginous rise?
This seems to be more properly a shift from macro- to micro-power as the mechanism by which polity will be realised in modern-day Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman is dragging his nation from ‘there to here’. And we fans of English football are being invited along for the journey.
The recognition that this is as much about governance on the international political stage as it is about governance within the relative legislative backwater of English football raises a number of questions that are currently passing under the radar:
On the one hand, by focusing on macro- abuses of power, there is a subtle avoidance of an inquisition into the micro-powers that pervade the world of elite football. If, as Foucault showed, the shift from macro- to micro-power is not about moral improvement but the more effective spread of power. Whilst the ethical questions raised by the Saudi takeover of Newcastle deserve careful consideration, they shouldn’t allow us to become distracted from the micro-abuses that take place within English football on a daily basis and have done for many years.
One of the best examples of how this works in the case of Premier League football is in the assumption that state ownership of a football club is a de facto problem but corporate ownership of a football club is not. Underlying this approach seems to be the idea that, because there exists a separation of state and corporation within liberal polity, there can be no issue with a company—read a famous energy drinks company who like to play Rasen Ballsport—or the owner of a company buying up a football club to do with it what they wish.
But of course, this just ignores the fact that power has consolidated in such a way that the separation of corporation and state has collapsed in the West, leaving nothing behind but the misguided sense that it still exists. If government is now the political arm of corporation, then it seems unlikely that we are out of the woods in this regard. If state ownership of a football club is an issue, the question of corporate ownership in football needs to be raised anew.
What, then, is sportswashing? By now, it seems obvious that it forms one part of the process by which a state attempts to move from ‘there to here’ through a redistribution of power by means of increasingly subtle mechanisms. But why should we reduce this washing simply to sports? Or narrow it to only the erasure of their human rights record?
In the end, the more you look at it, the more it becomes apparent that ‘washing’ is used by power in every walk of life as a means of dispersing itself more efficiently. Yes, it’s more obvious when it involves a country who brazenly kills journalists in full view of the international community. But rather than being an outlier, it is merely the most overt instance of a whole network of power dynamics that have been undergirding and underpinning our lives and have gone unchecked for years.
Where the tendency is to use sportswashing as a cipher for ethical discussion rather than actually carrying out the difficult conversations, the PIF buyout of Newcastle United should remind us of the task at hand. Doing ethics with Foucault complexifies the issue of Saudi Arabia’s ownership of Newcastle. But it doesn’t lower the stakes in any way. Rather it turns the mirror on the norms that are accepted by us in the West with very little comment.
In many respects, the fact that a state with medieval attitudes to the dispersal of power is the height of the bar for what constitutes ethical discussion in football today is an indictment of how far gone we are. There should be no sense in which Mohammed bin Salman should be allowed to own a majority stake in Newcastle. But we have only arrived at this point because we have refused to ask more difficult questions about the subtle ways in which power has consolidated in the Premier League at an earlier juncture.
The solution to these problems isn’t going to be intransigent posturing or line-drawing in the sand. Instead, we should turn to these difficult ethical questions and debate them, discussing issues that may be hard to come to terms with or uncomfortable. Without this discourse, we have sleepwalked into a world where the state-sanctioned murder of Jamal Khashoggi isn’t enough to put us off. It may be the case that we are too far gone.
You can follow Jon Mackenzie on Twitter @Jon_Mackenzie.
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