Thinking through football hooliganism

• Main Author: Salter, Michael
• Published: University of Sheffield 1986
• Subjects: 306.483
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.539294

The overall aim of this work is to uncover, describe and analyse the phenomenon of soccer hooliganism both as it appears and in the was that it presents itself to consciousness. But why "think through" football hooliganism at all? Surely quite enough has already been said and written about this highly Publicise, form of public disorder? Already there have been Psychological, sociological, soci. o-psychological., historical and media study accounts - to say nothing of numerous articles and newsreports in the popular media. Upon the basis of their distinctive ways of setting up and relating to this phenomenon, these accounts have produced various types of policy-orientated reactions and explanations in terms of psychological immaturity, the Alienation of traditional working class fans from "their club" in an age of consumer capitalism, ritualised aggression, the expression of a traditional male working class form of territorial localism and finally as the outcome of and subsequent reaction to the "labelling" of fans and "moral panic" of the media. In all honesty, what more is there to say? Why has not the author tackled an area of crime that has yet to be so fully documented? This study is not primarily concerned with adding to the ever escalating and add academic enterprise of reviewing reviews of reviews from pre-conceived standpoints upon standpoints about such standpoints etc., which themselves rarely address the possibility conditions of that which they theorise about. A brief glance down the booklist of this research will confirm that there is currently no shortage of studies which concern themselves with the rehashing of all that which has been previously written about both phenomenology and soccer violence. What, in the face of all-this, WOULD truly be an achievement is the APPLIED phenomenological explication of the phenomenon itself. Undoubtedly the purported explanations mentioned above have, { taken as a whole, responded, to the problematic presence of something our culture understands as hooliganism in such a way as to explain this "something" in terms of the presence of something else. Only for as long as we understand research purely in terms of this causal-explanatory manner and policy-reactive mode, can this area be said to be unquestionably well researched. It is on this implicit basis that there appears little justification for yet another study of football hooliganism. But are the possibilities of academic research exhausted by the setting up and responding to the established presence of phenomena "out there" in the real world in line with the dictates of established disciplines? The title of this studs summarises a foundational Project in that both the thinking and the object "thought through" are brought together. It is a major'contention of phenomenology -- the method of our foundational research - that all the activities of consciousness and experience are intimately connected to an experienced object or "phenomenon", so that all experience is experience OF some thematic object meant and meant in a distinctive manner. Thus prior to the questions "Why is there football hooliganism"?, and "What should be done about it? ", is a more fundamental or "foundational" problematic: one which precedes explanation and addresses the possibility-conditions for the cultural presence of both the phenomenon and our accepted ways of responding to our awareness of it.