Hi Christopher
I'm up for it...any sports watcher of any kind - and I am the most
dilletante - knows that thinking of sport in terms of results is as
dull and misleading as, well, a teacher's summary of Lear. If sport
were simply a matter of result, who would be interested? Why do
football fans - those who aren't smashing in heads, anyway - call it
"the beautiful game"? Why have generations of eminent French writers
waxed lyrical about cycling? Why was Marianne Moore so transfixed by
baseball? Surely the "result" is hardly germane?
Sport is about much more than its commercialisation and mediation,
just as art is, and the unfolding act has to be distinguished from
what is made of it, just as you have to distinguish an act of art from
its transfixing mediations. (The arts have their own version of the
football hoons - those who think bestseller lists or fame are a
substitute for reading, say, or who value visual art by its auction
price, those who mistake "result" for practice - surely as much a
triumph of "result" over content as anything in sport, and much more
insidious).
A "result" might be a label for a game of any kind, but it is hardly a
summation of "content", whatever "content" is. I've watched countless
tennis games where a scoreline that looks like a walkover belies
totally a closely fought and fascinating game. And I'm not glued to Le
Tour every year because of the ultimate winner - I'm fascinated by the
epic narrative that unfolds over three weeks. Etc. What spills over -
joy, hope, desire, beauty (all of these can be in sport) is always in
excess...
All best
A
On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 12:08 AM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> <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)
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
|