Emergent Specters and Disruptive Play in the Production of Disc Golf

ABSTRACT

Disc golf is experiencing immense recent growth that, in 2020, noticeably outpaced the steady growth seen in the sport over the past decade. This spirited movement has vaulted disc golf into the position of a suddenly and perhaps unexpectedly emerging sport. “Growth” has become a central paradigm around which the sport (its institutions and participants) concentrates. Alongside this emergence, social and political issues emerge, unexpectedly for some, from the sport’s (recent) past that serve to challenge its present trajectory. To examine these emergences, I develop Derrida’s associated concepts of hauntology, absence/presence, and the trace to draw out and play with connections between the sport’s emergence issues. Revolving around “growth” as a central paradigm, production, excess, access, diversity, inclusion, toxicity, and sustainability all appear as related issues in the sport’s emergent present. Beginning with empirically based vignettes, I question the present social material condition of disc golf. This questioning, and emerging understanding, proceeds by drawing connections between the present condition of social relations in the sport and social and political theory. Here, I draw on an array of post-structural and political-economic theory during my analysis to carry through the vocabulary established by a hauntological framework and a sense of play. The resulting deconstruction provides both a playful vocabulary and conceptual apparatus for analyzing disc golf’s emergence and the status of other emerging sports. This process, in turn, demonstrates the transformative potential of embracing the decentering, disruptive potential inherent to ‘play’ in the double sense. The “play” of writing (with language) and the “play” of direct action that promotes difference to challenge fixed positions that are central to producing cultural phenomena, such as disc golf.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Joshua Woods for encouraging me to pursue this article and for his editorial guidance. I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers who offered their feedback and to all those who have worked to chronical and interpret disc golf’s emergence—especially, Steve Hill, Andrew Fish, Christopher Wiklund, and Bennett Wineka for the many conversations, and Addie Maxwell and Preston Thompson, whose work made this paper a possibility.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Disc golf is far from monolithic, purely homogenous, or a sentient actor in itself—rather, it is a disparate collection of institutions, communities, groups, and individuals who share a specific material activity. While I repeatedly refer to simply “disc golf” or “the sport” throughout the paper—simply for ease of communication—this is not to suggest “disc golf” maintains a stable ontological presence.

² Signs are what humans confront and interact with in our everyday lives: the combination of both material people and things and the ideas and concepts associated with them, which produces relative meaning (Barthes 1968).

³ Referents are material people and things (your neighbor, detergent, the Queen of England, a journal article printed on paper) to which a linguistic expression is given (i.e. there is a human body signifier that exists that has been given the names “Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor” and the “Queen of England,” both of which are external to that human body, and refer to it; colorful cleaning liquids used to remove dirt from clothing are referred to as “detergents”). Referents are also termed “signifiers” (Barthes 1968:47).

⁴ In a classic instance of Derridean play, he develops this neologism through the tension between writing and speech, in that, in French, ontologie (ontology) and hantologie (hauntology) sound the same because the ‘h’ is silent.

⁵ Logocentrism is the notion—emanating from Western philosophy—that there is a realm of certainty that is metaphysical, that there is an essential truth beyond language; such thinking privileges speech over writing, presence over absence (dualisms), and binary thinking that valorizes objectivity in knowing the world, suggesting that absolute knowledge is possible (Royle 2003).

⁶ The latter half of this statement is to acknowledge my limitations as both a writer and archiver of disc golf’s past. However comprehensive we attempt to be, pure comprehension eludes all.

⁷ However difficult it is to pull individual reactionary comments that are sufficiently representative of the various dismissals offered by the disc golf community, the several I have included in-text speak to the issues brought up in this section, and the full scope of the comments are worth reading at the links provided for the citations in the bibliography. I should also note that I was the managing editor at Ultiworld Disc Golf at the time, and I solicited and worked on this editorial with the author.

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Alex R. Colucci

Alex R. Colucci is an adjunct faculty member in both the Department of Geography and the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University. His research focuses on political economy, violence, genocide, capital punishment, inclusive design, social theory, and epistemology in geography. His work has been published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Social & Cultural Geography, Geography Compass, and ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.