Real Ultras and Ultra Realism: Deviant Leisure Cultures, High Theory and Raw Realism

Abstract

This chapter positions the deviant leisure perspective as a potent dialectical mixture of high theory and raw realism. The chapter pursues this combination, employing complex theory from the likes of Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Paul Virilio and ultra realist criminological theory to contextualise and make sense of international empirical research into the rise of the ‘ultra’ phenomenon in contemporary football fandom. As such, this chapter argues that the emergent deviant leisure perspective is a powerful new zemiological approach with the power to critique the embedded harms within contemporary leisure and consumer capitalism with theoretical and empirically informed accounts that are highly attuned to the historically specific context of a globalised, technologically accelerated culture of late-modern consumer capitalism.

I have spoken, and will speak again, about the so-called black versus white opposition. But isn’t it the opposition-tinged alliance between black and red that actually places black in a dialectical relationship with the real colours…once again we see the dialectics of black.

Alain Badiou, Black: The Dominance of a Non-colour (Badiou2017: 51)

† Steve Redhead was deceased at the time of publication.