In fact, it's easy to imagine a World Cup without the trappings of consumer capitalism which, rather than being intrinsic to the tournament, perfectly fit Negri's description of Capital as parasitic upon the powers of the multitude. ITV HD's notorious blunder whereby they broadcast a Hyundai commercial over England's goal against the US unintentionally demonstrated the violence of this parasitism rather too clearly. The advertising and branding campaigns have felt for the most part, deeply tenuous and desperate; they have hung over the tournament like an irritating fog of semiotic pollution, and, like the punitively annoying, heavily repeated sponsor idents, they resemble exercises in the making of spurious connections, as if they were the result of some clever-clever competition in Nathan Barleyland (make a film linking Hyundai cars and the World Cup!) What does it mean, for example, that McDonalds is "the official restaurant of the World Cup?" I can't help but be reminded of the Wing Commander's recent comments. "Fortunately, advertisements on the commercial channel strike the right tone. Children! Have a Mars bar! A burger! A Pepsi! The diet of future English World Cup winners." (Incidentally, speaking of the Wing Commander, it really is the case that Send Them Victorious is one of the funniest books about football ever written; it sounds fatuous to say it, but it's true, it's funny even if you don't much like football.)
Eagleton's most intriguing remark - and one that I suspect may have been of particular interest to Giovanni - is his contrast of football's "vivid sense of tradition ... with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique." This characterisation of postmodern time only gives half the picture - the other side is the nostalgia mode attachment to the past, the formal repetition that hides beneath the hypberbright simulation of newness. Nevertheless, Eagleton's intuition that there is something important about the World Cup's marking of cultural time is correct. David Stubbs has argued that sport provides a unique kind of unscripted drama in collective life. Sport does not belong to the distributed time of Web 2.0, even if - as something like Twitter and indeed Minus The Shooting have shown - it can be greatly enhanced by certain aspects of Web 2.0. Like the X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent - which, in the spirit of Jameson's "Wal-Mart as Utopia" we need to learn from - the World Cup once again illustrates the continuing power of live television. Web 2.0's distributed time affines with the neoliberal notions of choice and bourgeois models of discriminating consumption (watching DVD box sets at our own pace), but these televised events involve a kind of voluntary subordination - in order to enjoy them adequately, we have to submit to them in real time. Yet this subordination is also a liberation, from digital twitch and constant partial attention and into new forms of digitally-enhanced collectivity, which are only just emerging. At the moment, it seems to be the case that such collective events cannot be demonstrated by the web alone, but the web has created a new ecology of participation around them. [...]
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011625.html