<snip>
And last week he was at it again, this time attacking sport as "the
antithesis" of art. [AC]
<snip>
I think there may be something in the antithesis argument after all. Sport,
surely, is an excess of result over 'content': you can reduce it to a result
(highest ever score when peeing against a wall) without doing untold damage.
But there can never be any sort of Teacher's Summary of, say, *King Lear*
that will ever do more than injustice to that 'content', which is forever in
excess.
Anyway here are three related points.
First Deleuze & Guattari on Kafka and the nature of 'minor literature'.
Meaning derives from the saying. It is not some putting-into-words of
something pre-existing. And it's the nature of 'minor literature' (its
indifference between speaking and spoken subjects, its asignifying quality,
its undermining of once established terrains through *deterritorialisation*,
that welling up of 'content', the point at which everything becomes
*political* and where everything also departs from being *political*) that
makes some sort of shared enunciation possible. And this is absolutely at
odds, I think, with what happens with football fans.
Here is Tiziano Scarpa on the business of looking at football on the
television. He takes the example of someone watching pundits watching a
match that they're discussing: 'Who said that television tells us lies?
Television is sincerity got up as a screen. It tells the truth about itself:
it shows that there's nothing to see.'
And here finally is a speaker in Nanni Balestrini's *I furiosi*, which is
about, I think, the AC Milan Ultras. The advantage, he says, of being a
football thug, is that you don't actually have to believe in things: no more
politics, thank G-d. All you need do now is just thump people.
CW
_______________________________________________
'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
might call it life.' (Judith Revel)
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