Play, performance, and the docile athlete

Abstract

I respond to a hypothetical critique of sport, drawing on primarily postmodernist sources, that would view the high-performance athlete in particular as a product of the application of technical disciplines of power and that opposes sport and play as fundamentally antithetical. Through extensive discussion of possible definitions of play and of performance, I argue that although much of the critique is valid it confuses a method of sport for the whole of it. Play is indeed a noncompellable spontaneity, but one that involves the improvisational transformation of the technical skills of a sport within the context of a dynamic situation. Technique is a condition of heightened play; it does not produce it. This also means that the best play is not undisciplined. Play and sport can exist apart, but both are better combined.

Resumen

Replico a un a crítica hipotética del deporte, abstrayendo primordialmente de fuentes posmodernistas, que vería al atleta de alto rendimiento en particular como un producto de la aplicación de disciplinas técnicas del poder, y que opone el deporte frente al juego de manera fundamentalmente antitética. Por medio de una discusión de definiciones posibles del juego, y del rendimiento, argumento que aunque una gran parte de la crítica es válida, ésta confunde el método en el deporte por el todo en él. El juego es sin duda un espontaneidad no obligatoria, pero que implica la transformación de habilidades técnicas de un deporte dentro del contexto de una situación dinámica. La técnica es una condición para un juego realzado, mas no lo produce. Esto también quiere decir que el mejor juego no es indisciplinado. El juego y el deporte pueden existir separadamente, pero ambos son mejores cuando son combinados.

Zusammenfassung

Dies ist meine Antwort auf eine fiktive Kritik am Sport, welche sich primär aus postmodernistischen Quellen herauslesen lässt. Diese betrachten insbesondere Athleten des Hochleistungssports als Produkt der Anwendung von Techniken zur Leitungssteigerung, die zu Sport und Spiel im direkten Widerspruch stehen. Nach einer umfassenden Erörterung möglicher Spiel- und Leistungs-Definitionen, behaupte ich, dass, trotz eines Großteils berechtigter Kritik, hier sportliche Methoden mit der Gesamtheit des Sports verwechselt werden. Spiel beinhaltet eine Form von Spontaneität die nicht erzwungen werden kann, aber sie erfordert in der Spielhandlung auch die improvisatorische Umsetzung technischer Fertigkeiten. Technik ist die Bedingung für eine gesteigerte Form des Spiels, aber Spiel wird nicht erst durch Technik geschaffen. Das bedeutet, dass das optimale Verständnis von Spiel keineswegs als disziplinlos zu betrachten ist. Spiel und Sport können jeweils getrennt existieren, aber in Verbindung ergänzen sie sich positiv.

Keywords:

• play
• performance
• discipline
• body
• self
• Foucault

Notes

1. Docile bodies are those that can be ‘subjected, used, transformed, and improved’ (Foucault 1977, 136). Discipline ‘produces subjected and practised bodies, “docile bodies”. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an “aptitude”, a “capacity”, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it … turns it into a relation of strict subjection.’ (Ibid., 138).

2. See also Caillois who remarks that those who play for pay ‘are not players but workers. When they play, it is at some other game.’ (Caillois 1961, 6). Likewise, Suits (1988, 8 – 9).

3. Apart from Discipline and Punish, most notably in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1978), but see also ‘Body/Power’, 55 – 62, ‘Truth and Power’, 109 – 33, esp. 125, and ‘Powers and Strategies’, 134 – 45, esp. 141 – 2, all in the collection Power/Knowledge (1980).

4. This Apollonian-Dionysian opposition appears to be expressed by Huizinga as well (see 1970, 223 – 5).

5. Suits (1977) discusses playing with and remarks that the attitude implies a lack of seriousness in one's approach to that with which one plays. This would be true in a destructive way in the kind of situation I envisage here; this may in fact be a good part of what is annoying in such an attitude: someone who plays-with us in this sense is not taking us, much less our play, seriously. At best this may be time-wasting; at worst, it can be insulting.

6. ‘The pupils must always “hold their bodies erect, somewhat turned and free on the left side, slightly inclined, so that, with the elbow placed on the table, the chin can be rested upon the hand, unless this were to interfere with the view; the left leg must be somewhat more forward under the table than the right. A distance of two fingers must be left between the body and the table. … The right arm must be at a distance from the body of about three fingers and be about five fingers from the table, on which it must rest lightly. The teacher will place the pupils in the posture that they should maintain when writing, and will correct it either by sign or otherwise, when they change this position” (La Salle, 1965). A disciplined body is the prerequisite of an efficient gesture.’ (Foucault 1977, 152).

‘“Bring the weapon forward. In three stages. Raise the rifle with the right hand, bringing it close to the body so as to hold it perpendicular with the right knee, the end of the barrel at eye level, grasping it by striking it with the right hand, the arm held close to the body at waist height. At the second stage, bring the rifle in front of you with the left hand, the barrel in the middle between the two eyes, vertical, the right hand grasping it at the small of the butt, the arm outstretched, the trigger-guard resting on the first finger, the left hand at the height of the notch, the thumb lying along the barrel against the moulding. At the third stage, let go of the rifle with the left hand, which falls along the thigh, raising the rifle with the right hand, the lock outwards and opposite the chest, the right arm half flexed, the elbow close to the body, the thumb lying against the lock, resting against the first screw, the hammer resting on the first finger, the barrel perpendicular” (Ordonnance du 1er janvier 1766…, titre XI, article 2). This is an example of what might be called the instrumental coding of the body.’ (Foucault 1977, 153).  ‘Discipline … poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces. This means that one must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed internal arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum efficiency.’ (Ibid., 154).

7. Taken from Harrison et al. 2000, 3 – 6 – 2.

8. As Meier points out (1988, 20), Suits's example of the offside rule does not support his case, since it is regulative rather than constitutive. I would add that such game rules function very much like performance ideals. This is clearest if we compare points deductions applied in performance (in Suits's sense) sports with the penalties that are incurred in game sports: failure to play without taking penalties (i.e. getting caught) or a player or team having to commit infractions in order to succeed likewise argues incompetence; penalties are simply indirect points deductions and indicate poor performance (in my sense).

9. See The Care of the Self (1986). I am not seriously countenancing the existence of souls.

10. Because Foucault maintains that pleasure is a basic impulse that underlies and resists all the institutional pressures to construct pleasure and desire in specific ways: as heterosexual, as perverse etc. See, for example, Foucault 1997, 163 – 6.

11. Style can be false, affected; this is fashion–adopted because others are doing it, though the athlete has no subjective sense of why other than this.