Tennis, Class, and Zizek's Toilets

GOATs and PMCs

What do tennis, class and toilets have in common? Not a whole lot, really. Until, that is, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, makes an entrance. During Wimbledon a couple of weeks back, I had a bit of a ‘moment’ when watching Novak Djokovic play. Djokovic is one of those top, very famous, very respected, very wealthy athletes, who nonetheless has to exert a lot of energy on personal public relations and perception management techniques bordering on the strange and cringy, because unlike his other famous rivals, Federer and Nadal, he’s not been blessed with a lot of charisma with which to seduce his audience, an audience that seems to always teeter on the precipice of either loving or hating him. It’s not his fault. But it does present an interesting problem. Why are some personalities and celebrities universally loved while others are reviled? Is it a problem that can be solved by Jungian archetypal psychoanalysis? Perhaps. Or we can turn to the problem of ‘Zizek’s Toilets.’

For those who are unfamiliar with this concept, ‘Zizek’s Toilets’ is a way to describe, rather crudely, the differences  between and cultural underpinnings of the three major strains of Western Philosophical thought, radicalism, liberalism and conservatism.  In France (hotbed of radicalism) the toilet hole is directly underneath, so that when someone uses it, the excrement quickly disappears. Like the guillotine, which was meant to speed up the execution process during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, the French toilet is meant to present as little fuss to the toilet goer as possible. French radical thought is most obviously represented by post-structuralism and figures like Ranciere, Deleuze, Badiou, Baudrillard, but expressed in its essence by Existentialists like Simone De Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre. In the United Kingdom and the US (bastions of liberalism), the toilets are filled with water like little pools. There the shit floats freely, around and around, until it finally gets sucked down in a whirlpool, free and unencumbered but ultimately doomed. When thinking about liberal toilets, we’re mostly reminded of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and David Hume. By contrast, the German toilets have a small ledge and the hole is in the front, a complete opposite to the French toilet. Here the excrement lands where the user is able to look at it, poke it, smell and ponder it to find out what condition it’s in, which gives the user a sense of their general health. The German toilet is an externalization of conservative and/or analytic thought, primarily concerned with the examination of the notion of being, spirituality and existence. Here we find the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, GHW Hegel and yes, ironically Karl Marx. 

While I’m not going to use the toilets themselves to make comparisons with the tennis players, I will do so somewhat obliquely. Today, the three greats of tennis are Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Two weekends ago Novak Djokovic won Wimbledon. It was his 20th Grand Slam career title. He is now tied with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, each also with 20 Slams to their names, albeit each has a slightly different ‘specialty.’ Nadal, for example, dominates the French Open with 13 titles from that event alone. Federer has 8 Wimbledon titles, while Djokovic’s specialty seems to be the Australian Open with 9 titles. But trophies and money aside (all three have a lot of each), over the years what’s been apparent is that each player can be thought of as representative of a specific social class. Federer, with his style, fashion and obvious class, represents the elite, the upper social strata of society. Nadal represents the working class and Djokovic the professional managerial class or PMC as described by Catherine Liu in her book ‘Virtue Hoarders.’ Well, at least that is how I started to think about them. If we unpack this a little further, it becomes much more apparent why Djokovic, despite his lack of charisma, just doesn’t have the same kind of success with the audience as Federer and Nadal. Just notice that when Federer or Nadal are on court, there is nothing but sounds of awe and admiration coming from the audience. I’ve never heard the audience boo or jeer at Federer or Nadal, but if they have, it was surely a rare occasion. Both Federer’s and Nadal’s public personas are impeccable, they are universally loved, admired, celebrated, they smile and always seem to say the right things. This is also the case with Djokovic however. He’s very publicly conscious, he speaks several languages and always makes sure to use his language skills when he needs them. He’s socially engaged, gives smiling interviews and press conferences, he’s always willing to sign autographs for fans. He does generally seem like a nice guy.  But I’ve seen the audience jeering at him for the smallest infraction. And here’s the rub. Where the audience perceives Federer and Nadal to be selfless and acting in good faith, when it comes to Djokovic, good will could just as easily be interpreted as pandering, a smile as a disingenuous slight, and that is because Djokovic and his style of play encapsulate the PMC perfectly, which highlights the general public’s anxious connection to its very own professional managerial class of middle-managers, bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, merchants and internet gatekeepers.

Federer is widely considered to be the greatest tennis player of all time, the Wayne Gretzky of tennis. It is easy to see why. Google tennis and Federer is the first thing you’ll most likely see. If you look up a definition of tennis, it’ll be Federer’s face you’ll be staring at. Federer is the textbook perfect tennis player. He is the 1% of tennis. For a theory of class, Federer represents the business class and the aristocracy. He has the finesse, the style, and the effortlessness that come with a natural talent for tennis. Because he’s part of the elite he sets the bar for everyone else. He sets the tone and the language by which the game is described. This is what is meant when a commentator exhorts that Federer ‘changed the game forever.’ It is that effortlessness with which he plays that translates into what we’d call ‘surplus enjoyment’ of the game itself. We enjoy the game because Federer enjoys the game and the game in essence enjoys for us. In the world of Federer, as in the world of the elite, failure is temporary and is always followed by more and inevitable success. It is not surprising that Federer’s starting position was way ahead of his contemporaries, but rather than flaunting his talent and wealth, his approach has always been that of old money, of subtlety and sobriety. He has charisma, no doubt, and enough confidence to ‘act’ in a commercial alongside Robert DeNiro. It can be said that Roger Federer is the perfect product of the modern neoliberalism elite, a perfect fit for Western Society and the Global North.

By contrast, Rafael Nadal, though undoubtedly charismatic and physically attractive as well as wealthy, displays the characteristics of the working class and its inherent, though often politically repressed radicalism. He plays with his left hand, even though he’s right-handed. His style of play is tough, gritty, almost burdensome. Unlike Federer, he works because he has to, not because it’s fun. His charisma is almost entirely derived from his integrity and fidelity to his chosen sport. The audience loves his game because Nadal plays as though he has nothing left to lose each and every point. There is no ball he will not attempt to get to, even if it seems like a lost cause. Similar to Federer, Nadal is almost universally loved, enjoys amazing public relations, and guards his private life with resolve.

In final contrast to both Federer and Nadal, Novak Djokovic is representative of the professional managerial class, which is the updated term for the bourgeois class, just as the precariat has come to replace the proletariat in the 21st century. Thus it is no wonder that the audience is more anxiously cautious throwing their full support behind Djokovic. He has everything to gain and everything lose, balancing always on the precipice between having too much and having too little, gaining and losing authority at the drop of a hat. What the PMC does for modern corporate managerialism, Djokovic does for tennis. He is driven by metrics, performance, optimization and regulation. This isn’t anything unusual in tennis or sports in general, it is in fact what drives sports today, the difference however is that Djokovic in fact IS the elite who nonetheless ‘acts’ as though he is not. This aspect of his game and personality is what correlates best with the PMC as a class. His style reproduces in the audience the same type of anxiety one feels when confronted with impenetrable bureaucracy. It is robotic, mechanical, almost inhuman (or post-human), demanding respect and subjugation to the authoritarianism of numbers and abstractions. Just think of the call center experience or any interaction with customer service or human resources at your run-of-the-mill corporation. Djokovic may in fact be the perfect product of the neoliberal state, while Federer may be its ultimate site for fantasy projection. Djokovic’s style is derived from a total fixation on metrics, an optimization of human capacity and the human body to become an instrument of peak athletic potential. He and his team are always engaged in perfecting and optimizing his performance, always turning the screws, in order to squeeze even more out of his body, for yet another win, yet another trophy, the ultimate of ends for the sake of the ends themselves. He knows he can slide on clay courts, so he’s going to attempt to slide further than anyone else. This one-uppism does not necessarily come from Djokovic’s desire to be the best. To be the best is no longer sufficient or simply justifiable, only total domination is. This framing gets applied ruthlessly across every other metric; accuracy, serve speed, serving and left and right-handed return percentages, body mass index, calorie consumption, time on and off court, even days and hours of resting are quantified. Every single part of Djokovic’s life is regulated by an abstract mathematical number system. It is what constitutes our modern corporate bureaucratic system filled with metrics that run the gamut from the purely utilitarian like the GDP to the ridiculous, such as the ‘happiness index,’ each seemingly meant to quantify the amount of human exploitation across all industries, from manufacturing to tourism. And this is ultimately what produces anxiety for the audience watching Djokovic play, perhaps because many are members of the PMC themselves and know intimately the labyrinthine bureaucratic space within which they are ensconced, that they implicitly know what Djokovic and his obsession represent, an authoritarianism of enjoyment. It isn’t so much a conservatism that is at play here, but rather the logical end point of ‘capitalist realism,’ Mark Fisher’s dystopian vision of the present. In this space, no alternatives are possible, only endless ‘improvements’ or ‘innovations’ to our current really-existing-capitalism, which we are nonetheless forced to enjoy.

“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitude.”

-          Aldous Huxley