"The Ball as Subject"

Burnwinter

http://systematicreal.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/michel-serres-and-the-ball-as-the-subject/

"As a quasi object, the ball is the true subject of the game, not vice versa. It is like a tracker of the relations in the fluctuating collectivity around it. The same analysis is valid for the individual: the clumsy person plays with the ball and makes it gravitate around himself; the mean player imagines himself to be a subject by imagining the ball to be an object – the sign of a bad philosopher. On the contrary, the skilledplayer knows that the ball plays with him or plays off him, in such a way that he gravitates around it and fluidly follows the position it takes, but especially the relations that it spawns"

Biggus

Bah!- Stick it in the net!

Burnwinter

😆 Just came across the above randomly, thought it might amuse and/or troll a few Tollyites.

y va marquer

Rex

It is a good article. I'd also argue that the shirt is a subject. If fans didn't have a shirt to identify with, the sport would also become rather pointless. Not as pointless as without the ball, but still. We all basically root for a shirt; the players wearing your shirt of choice are attributed good and positive characteristics, and players choosing to wear a different shirt are ridiculed and abused. 🙂

Coombs

Burnwinter™ wrote:
😆 Just came across the above randomly, thought it might amuse and/or troll a few Tollyites.

😆 I never bought in to Serres and Latour's (and indeed Adorno's) idea of the work of art as a subject, which this idea certainly ties into. The "autonomous work of art" necessitates that the artist's empirical subjectivity is somehow transcended, transcended to some more general state of quasi-subjectivity which gives it the capacity to now interact independently of the maker with the spectator. It's no longer limited by the player or the ballmaker or the oppositions influence on the ball, but rather influences those things itself from it's own quasi-perspective. This yields the spectator, or "the one who is interacting" as the object, now, of the work of art (the ball).

I don't buy it. While I appreciate the effort to do away with the hierarchical structure of modernism and privileging the artist above all else, transferring that power to another aspect of the process only further devalues spectating, which I think is far more powerful than we give it credit for in the same way that following is sometimes more powerful than leading, and indeed more of a considered choice. I do like what Rebentisch is trying to do, which is to discuss the interaction between the spectator and the 'ball' as the object of the work of art, thus placing the object in what is generally considered to be a non-object, a relation. Even this is problematic, it constantly gets the idiotic "tree falls in the woods" treatment. I'm tired of everyone trying to figure out subject/object relationships when he have no empirical way of addressing something as an object without doing an injustice to it, as objectification almost always leaves something out because objectivity is, of course, a crapshoot.

Ascribing subjectivity to the ball is a projection borne out of the need to overthrow or deny power structures that oppress, colonize, and murder. In fact, that is precisely what Borges meant by the zahir, it is ascribing or projecting a transcendent subjectivity to a thing, any thing. It's a deflection of humanity, almost a kind of scapegoating. It's what Asimov was also dealing with. It is mapping the general to the particular, a vessel that can carry all of society's will no matter it's size or shape, be it ill or good. I think it's an idealization that teeters on the brink of being an ideology. Dangerous thinking.

ElGeniodeOviedo

This is closer to some papers that I've had to read than I'd like to admit:confused:

Kurtz

Is this pomo?

Rex

Position of maximum opportunity. Just off the back post. No need to thank me.

Burnwinter

@[deleted] I'm going to respond but I'd better wait until I get off work.

If someone here catches me writing a counter-thesis on the application of novel continental ontologies to football I might get the arse ...

Burnwinter

So, I thought it was an interesting little article and not without merit, I guess.

I'm not familiar with Serres, and only know Latour via Graham Harman's explication of his metaphysics, which probably skews more towards object-oriented ontology than is strictly just.

I suspect Latour would regard a football match as a field of contests of strength between alliances of different actors—the ball, the players on a team, the divots in the pitch, the direction of the sun, the singing of the fans, the referee.

I'm not sure, short of an interesting transformation of perspective, what else is gained from demanding we go from one limited view, that in which the players are the protagonists of the match, to another in which the ball is the subject and hero, the organising principle.

There are other interesting ghosts that haunt football matches. As a spectator you can pay partial witness to the "perfect match" behind the real match—what you would be watching if every idea came off, if every run was picked and every shot was on target. The football itself is emerging from the imperfect execution of each player's rough and unsynchronised idea of what was to be done, the ideas formed by training, the experience of past matches, creative insight.

I think the Serres quote is perfectly right about "skilled" players. It's a bit like Muller's natural rebound goal against Portugal—you don't really know what Muller has, but he's got bags of it, just like all the best players do. It's almost as if in real time they're not anticipating, so much as reliving one of many trajectories dreamt awake moments before.

Coombs

I think it ties very much in way the that communication works, specifically what you said about ghosts. I've been reading John Durham Peters recently who traces the idea of communication through various philosophies, technologies, and time periods as a sociologist. His general thesis is that we have an idea of what perfect communication is, and that is essentially the instantaneous sharing of thoughts with another person or with a mass of people. Angels, notably, are capable of this in a lot of Christian theology.

Because communication is imperfect and not instant, as it must travel through some kind of medium, there are a lot of miscommunications, which exist regardless if they reach their intended audience, like a throughball that doesn't hit its target. Miscommunications, for Peters, are a manifestations not unlike ghosts, they are not alive yet they have an existence, and they are particularly human and yet elude human understanding by their very definition. Technology has only enhanced the possibility for miscommunication, and thus filled our world with these "ghosts" (i.e. letters that never reach their addressee, radio interference, mishearing someone on a Skype call, etc.). The "Perfect Match" is not unlike our notion of perfect beings, which, in theological ideas that span millenia, are defined in part by their ability for perfect communication.