In yesterday's post I said that any attempts to reform American college football would have to grapple with the political affect of football fandom and not just trot out the stats about the bad economics of most college athletic programs, etc.
In Aristotelian rhetoric terms, you would have to bring in an appeal to pathos and not just to logos. Now some of that pathos could be directed to fairness issues, as in condemning the exploitation of the players' labor, or to health and safety issues. But the power of the pathetic appeal must obey Spinoza's dictum than only a stronger affect can defeat an affect, and I have my doubts, to put it mildly, that the modal American college football fan will be moved by pathetic appeals to exploitation and player safety.
In any case, the other side of Spinoza's dictum is that logical appeals are helpless in the face of strong affective structures. In this context I'm always reminded of the bit in Theweleit's Male Fantasies, mocking the Critical Theorist who neglects this rhetorical necessity.*
CT to proto-fascist: "But Herr Schmidt, can't you see that when you say the Communists are a flood that you're illegitimately mixing political and natural categories?"
Proto-fascist to CT: "My God, you're right, we're all going to be drowned!!!!"
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*Note the restrictive clause marked by the lack of a comma before "who." Not all Critical Theorists neglected affect.
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