4 - SF Sport and the Individual Talent

Summary

In his popular 2002 Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi attempts to bring a solid footing to the notion of embodiment, even within social and cultural theory. His text is written in the hope that ‘movement, sensation, and qualities of experience couched in matter in its most literal sense (and sensing) might be culturally-theoretically thinkable, without falling into either the Scylla of naive realism or the Charybdis of subjectivism and without contradicting the very real insights of poststructuralist theory’ (4). Despite this admirable intent, the text accomplishes its latter goal much more fully than the former. That is, it is highly attentive to the insights of poststructuralist theory, so much so in fact that it once again finds itself dissolving the body within collective action. The body is a mover of action, but only ever the production (a term Massumi prefers to construction) of the collective action of the rules of the game, a self-referential node in a system that ‘back-produces’ it. He thus moves us beyond a supposedly simple social constructivism and into a

becoming cultural of nature. The very ground of life changes. But it remains as natural as it becomes-cultural. This becomingcultural of nature is predicated on the capture of processes already in operation. Putting up a new target to stop an arrow connects with forces of mass and inertia. The arrest of the arrow prolongs a tendency toward stoppage belonging to the ground, converting it into a cultural function—the foundation, say, for an archery competition. (10–11)

The addition of bodily movement to construction is compelling, it gives life to this approach and at least includes the movement of bodies, and even sporting bodies in an archery competition. When it engages a soccer game (taking a cue from Serres), however, it returns us once again to a problematically disembodied athlete.

To Massumi, as to many constructivists, sport becomes just another ‘collective formation,’ the conditions of existence for which he is able to reduce to simply a field. The field of sport exists as a metaphor to exemplify the primacy of movement for the creation of reality—again, it is the arrest of movement that produces the archery competition. In soccer, too, ‘The field of play is an in-between of charged movement. It is more fundamentally a field of potential than a substantial thing, or object.