The Reification of Skateboarding

Being a constellation sport, skateboarding is, in present times, at odd with itself because it is engaged in a process of reification. It is being transformed into an organized sport characterized by a single path and participation in ideology’s larger process of rationalization and identification of reality. To become an organized sport, a sport must submit to quantification: skateboarding and skaters are becoming quantifiable commodities. But skateboarding is and always has been a qualitative activity not akin to identification with ideology. Adorno’s negative dialectics provides a useful approach for understanding this contradiction as it exists between skateboarding and ideology and for showing how the reification of skateboarding is taking place in particular by means of the institutionalisation of skateparks and contests, all of which will be examined in the following.