Liverpool FC Forum

by **andy_g** » Mon May 15, 2006 10:05 am

i think its only fair that the general chat section also has an advanced discussion section where we can indulge ourselves in some scintillating conversation about football on a deeper level.

i'd like to kick off, as it were, with a quote from "Parables for the Virtual" by leading thinker Brain Massumi which can serve as a springboard for further consideration and ruminations. Massumi is discussing the issue of 'subjective agency' and asks us to consider the game of football as a guiding metaphor.

"Put two teams on a grassy field with goals at either end," he writes, "and you have an immediate, palpable tension." He theorizes the field of play not simply in a literal sense, as grassy field, but metaphorically, as "a tensile force-field activated by the presence of bodies within the signed limits." I read the field as a kind of linguistic and rhetorical space in which an agency is realized, enacted, or put into play. For Massumi, the player cannot be conceived as a traditional philosophical subject who would act autonomously or rationally, on the basis of some obvious conceptual end. "When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation." Hence, the player is not the originary subject of action in any strict sense, because he is a responsive node in the complex relation taking place in/on the field of play, immediately, immanently -- in relation to his teammates, in relation to the opposing team, in relation to where every player is situated in/on the field, and not least, in relation to where the ball is situated in this nexus."

i don't know about anybody else, but i think yes...

by **woof woof !** » Mon May 15, 2006 10:12 am

I couldn't have put it better myself .

by **babu** » Mon May 15, 2006 10:26 am

Jay thinks yes, what about you?

by **dawson99** » Mon May 15, 2006 10:44 am

a body in motion can coincide with itself if it is one with itself tho.

by **andy_g** » Mon May 15, 2006 10:46 am

what's interesting, though, is that Massumi goes on to say;

"...if the ball is the intersection of multiple vectors of potentiality, a surcharged node in the field of play, we might also call it a technology of sorts. By this I do not mean that the ball is a techné or a tool to be taken up and used, but like language, it is that which engages us, actualizing the field-potential, potentially subjectivizing us. Like language to the one who speaks, the ball is that which allows for a relational transformation insofar as it can assume and catalyze a nexus of potential; it is a site of sublimation, and in this respect, always overdetermined. After all, no ball, no game. If we consider the field of play as a linguistic field, the ball is like a mobile and momentary expression, a spoken word that is put into play, a speech act that erupts from and punctuates the linguistic field, and an "agency" that belongs to the player as much as he belongs to it. Dynamically binding and releasing potential, transforming it. This helps to illuminate what Foucault means by ethical self-transformation, because the self's relation to the self is mediated by terms that are similarly in flux, and the self relies on such "technologies" to provide the catalytic vehicle for its own styles of life, engendering a way of being."

fascinating! i think the beautifuly weighted and haiku-like phrase "no ball, no game" just about sums it up for me.

by **dawson99** » Mon May 15, 2006 10:48 am

so...he likes football?

by **Mikz** » Mon May 15, 2006 10:56 am

advanced discussion -too advanced for me andy, it would be like talking to that white haired geezer that does "the sky at night"------ :Oo:

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