5/24/10

Heels over head, and away!


We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures [sports] but the revolutionary conditions for every literature [sport] within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature [sport]. (Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 18).

A minor sport is not a specific kind of sport, the way sets of sports like risk, adventure, extreme or lifestyle sports lead thought to the extravagancies of for instance board sports. To do a minor sport is rather about a certain stance, or, even better, a series of stances. The foremost (ir)rationale of something minor is, as with most of D & G's concepts, deterritorialization.

Deterritorializing means exciting given categories of identity, making them unstable and opening them up for other possibilities. To deterritorialize is to be(come) revolutionary, but without striving for utopia. So it's not so much about freedom as it is about always having a way out (even from freedom?!). The most frequently recurring Kafka-quote in D&G's treatise of the same, is probably 'Head over heels, and away', an imperative of deterritorialization, and, in any situation, or case, the ideal stance.

Where does this leave (or flee) us in the case of sports? A literal inversion, as the allusion of the heading above implies, of 'head over heels and away', was performed by the Columbian goalkeeper, José René Higuita Zapata, in the friendly game between Columbia and England in 1995. His spectacular 'scorpion kick' definitely widened the range of what's expected of and accepted for soccer goalkeepers.

Perhaps agency could be understood thus; as the possible degree of deviance from subject-positions given by the discourse (or diagram).

1 comment:

  1. could we also think such a performance as a body-without-organs where the sporting body escapes the organ-ization of its regularities, from the ways players are trained from early childhood to give regular responses to recurring encounters with the ball?

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