K and the Lob: Towards a Minor Sport

Thursday 19th of May, I'll present a paper at the EASS conference in Umeå. Here is the abstract:

A recurring theme in critical sport studies is the issue of whether the element of competition -- measuring, comparing and ranking performances (Loland 2002) – in sports is fascistoid (Tännsjö 2000, 2001), and, whether sports constrains the potential of human movement, and its creativity, rather then enhancing it (Eichberg 2010). In this essay, I will argue that the element of competition is vital for the creativity of movement-potential in sports. Still, the alleged ‘fascistoid’ or ‘creativity constraining’ element could be ‘hi-jacked’.

As an example of this kind of hi-jacking, an autoethnographical (Chang 2008) account of my participation in recreational table-tennis will be seen through a process-philosophical lens. Deleuze’s conceptual pair ‘minor’ and ‘major’ (Bene & Deleuze, 1979; Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) will in the essay be extended to sport. The argument is that prolonging elements in athletic contests could be understood as ‘minor sport’, which in the essay is exemplified by defensive strokes, like chops and lobs, in table-tennis. ‘Major sport’, then, is understood as equivalent with ’the structural goal of sport’, namely, to produce winners by comparing, ranking and measuring bodily performances (Loland 2002).

As a table-tennis player in the corporative/recreational series, my way of playing has rendered different conceptions among the other players, ranging from joyful to provoked. This manner could be described with ‘minor’ actions like ‘suspending the game’, ´delaying the outcome’, and ‘never having learned to smash’. When contestants are equivalent in competence and desire to win, competitions tend to produce ‘sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome’ (Loland 2002). My way of playing is directed towards maximizing the ‘sweet tension of uncertainty’. Hereby focus is shifted from sport as context where winners are produced, towards sport as a context where ‘sweet tension’ is produced. This stance combines the benefits of both protagonists and antagonists of competition.

Conceptual Athleticism I: French soccer experts

Picture the proverbial match between Greek and German philosophers as staged by Monty Python with frog-eating commentators instead, such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Serres:



First, a rather dense analysis by Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, p 361-2) in which they couple movement, speed, and "sports" with different conceptions of science, in this case the distinction between a major and a minor science.

They too, like the original commentator, are surprised by, albeit excited about, the fact that Archimedes plays from the start. Archimedes minor soccer demonstration prior to the game (0.55-0.59 in the video), in which he nomadologically traces a neverending line of the ball while juggling, is probably what gets them started:

There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very difficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are referring to are not "technologies" in the usual sense of the term. But neither are they "sciences" in the royal or legal sense established by history. According to a recent book by Michel Serres, both the atomic physics of Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked by it. The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science would seem to be the following:

1. First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency.

2. The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a "paradox" to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary characteristic, a copy; in the Timaeus, Plato raises this possibility, but only in order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal science. By contrast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity, and of passage or becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the famed declination of the atom. The clinamen, as the minimum angle, has meaning only between a straight line and a curve, the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the original curvature of the movement of the atom. The clinamen is the smallest angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path. It is a passage to the limit, an exhaustion, a paradoxical "exhaustive" model. The same applies to Archimedean geometry, in which the straight line, defined as "the shortest path between two points," is just a way of defining the length of a curve in a predifferential calculus.

3. One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar or laminar flow, but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest angle. From turba to turbo: in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to the great vortical organizations. The model is a vortical one; it operates in an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things. It is the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated (metric) space: in the first case "space is occupied without being counted," and in the second case "space is counted in order to be occupied."

4. Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them: sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an "event" much more than an essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an "obstacle"; it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a pro-jection, in other words, a war machine. All of this movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the "problem-element" and subordinates it to the "theorem-element."

It bothers Deleuze and Guattari, as much as it bothers Serres, that Socrates gets the last word again (3.00 in the video). Serres (The Parasite, p. 251) mingles into the discussion and states that:

Socrates gets out unscathed. His beautiful individuation is different and evil. Ugly and evil. He runs to take care of his individuation in the gymnasium. To make it flexible, to clean it, to make it effective.

Whereas the other offensive Greeks -- Democritus, Heraclite, and Archimedes -- are atomists (and therefore hydraulic, minor, flux-oriented thinkers), Socrates thinks but of one thing, that is, putting the nail in the coffin. He does so with his head (of course!) and with the German net, two things, that arborescent thinkers have used to freeze atomistic flux ever since; to stabilize essence in 'statuelike concepts' (Serres, Conversations).

Yes, Deleuze and Guattari continue, the 'apparatus of capture' of Royal Science and State philosophers - always parasiting the benefits of atomism and nomadic war machines!

Mm, Serres (Conversations, p. 105) concurs, 'The mean player imagines himself to be a subject by imagining the ball to be an object – the sign of a bad philosopher'.

After a moment of silence, a time-space filled by the disturbing noise of vuvuzelas, Deleuze and Guattari, who have run out of steam philosophically, angrily rush up from their chairs and ostensively swarm out of the edifice. Serres (Conversations p. 23), still evaluating the events, finally -- with a smile on his face -- concludes:

I have always been a hellenist.

The moral, molar, or molecular winner of a contest?

In his treatise on fair play, Sigmund Loland repetitively comes back to one formula(tion) of what is produced in sport: the sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome. Michel Serres is of a similar meaning when he states that the 'glorious uncertainty' in sport is that which saves it from being just another crude dialectic scheme, like, for instance, war.

Are there any other practices and structures that produce uncertainty to the degree, and as sweetly, as sports do? Uncertainty, definitely; as sweet, perhaps. Listening to a story, having sex, taking part of, or consuming, artistic improvisation, sure. The list could be expanded, but none of them has this production as a guiding rationale. Due to this, and despite the fact that sport has as its structural goal measuring, comparing, and ranking human beings, Loland is right to emphasize sport as a possible arena for the Aristotelian eudaimonia - human flourishing.

'Generalized athleticism' is but one of Deleuze's (and Guattari's) physical culture concepts that never were elaborated enough with. According to D & G, this modus sprung from, and was established in, ancient Athens, where it contributed to the upbringing of the free men - the vanguards of democracy. In all spheres of life, these men were paradoxically constituted as both friends and rivals. Ideas of justice and equality are foundational pillars of this model. Harsh as it may seem, justice and equality both must be executed, both must have their procedures. Modern sport is probably the societal sphere that has implemented this rationale the most successfully and sufficiently, which the name 'generalized athleticism' also implies.

To compete in sport one will need other competitors, and moreover, their efforts will spur you to perform better. The more equal you are with concerns to performance ability, the more sweet uncertainty you are probable to produce. Friend and rival in one. Cozy contest. Contest is derived from contestare, Latin for 'to strive together'.

So far, so good - in both the dramaturgical, and the literal sense of the expression. Why must 'So far, so good' end? Sport is an autotelic practice with the structural goal of inaugurating a victor, and ranking the tawdry mass of losers behind, and beneath, the laureate(s). At the molar (concentrates of memories and mores - memores?) level winners and losers are produced, and added to history, while at the the molecular (atomistic, micropolitical, and mo/ve/mental) level, the sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome revels and unfolds like the crest of a wave. But does the sweet tension really rely on the uncertainty of outcome?

According to Loland, the (uncertainty of) outcome of a competition is the impetus that renders sport it's dynamics. For certain, Loland applies Caillois's concepts of Agon (contest) and Alea (chance) in his conclusion to support his preferred -- and, it must be added, rigorously accounted for -- moral (molar) imperative of sports: play (with a shared ethos) to win. Portions of Alea may be added to the Agon, that nevertheless always will be the essence of sports. In this line of thinking, outcome, i.e. the zero-sum game of the production of the molar positions of winners and losers, is the key driver in sports, but if uncertainty never emerges, neither will sweet tension .

This box is untouchable; we cannot think outside it, if we, at the same time, want to benefit from its sweetness. But in a good Latourian manner I would like to, at least ephemerally, try to 'extract the honey, and press away the poison' from this equation. So where do I start?

In posts to come, I will argue that outcome, per se, is not a sufficient source for eudaimonia, human flourishing. Such coarse identity politics will only reproduce the anxiety of winners (will I be defeated the next time?), and the anger of losers (next time I'll defeat him/her). And why only strive towards the blooming of humanity; why not post-human flourishing? This kind of point of departure would harmonize with many of the contin(g)ental thinkers, such as Deleuze and his 'molecular' analyses.