Sportworld
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/17511321.2013.761881
ISSN1751-1321
Autores Tópico(s)Sport Psychology and Performance
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes My concept of 'sportworld' is a philosophical concept, concerning what it means to play sport. As such it should be distinguished from Maguire's 'sports world' (2011, 860), derived from Howard Becker's (1982 Becker, H. 1982. Art worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]) sociology, and as such is concerned with sport as a collective activity, or 'networks, or figurations, of interdependent groups of people'. Such as Tracy Emin's My Bed (created in 1996, and now part of the Saatchi collection (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.htm), or Rauschenberg's Bed (1955, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=4823 (both accessed 29 August 2012)). Heraclitus, fragment 79, 'Time is a child playing at draughts, a child's kingdom', will be discussed in the chapter 'The Birth of Sport'. For Suits, a sport is understood to be a game that additionally requires a test of physical skill. There is an inherent vagueness in Suits' characterisation of the 'pre-lusory'. It is not clear that charactering golf in terms of getting a ball into 18 holes has not already exceeded the pre-lusory remit. Suits himself specifies getting the ball into a single hole. Golf is about getting balls into holes, and soccer is about getting balls into nets. However, as Meier perhaps unwittingly implies (1995, 29), the characterisation of pre-lusory goals can be extremely elusive. Can one, for example, characterise the pre-lusory goal of the gymnastics beam exercise as 'to perform an interrelated series of stipulated compulsory moves a certain specific number of times, as smoothly and rhythmically as possible'? Meier seems to assume that excluding reference to the beam itself, and specifically to its height, is sufficient to characterise the pre-lusory. However, 'stipulated compulsory moves a certain specific number of times' comes very close to invoking the lusory rules of the exercise, and so begging the question of why references to compulsory moves may be included and not a phrase such as 'on a beam of a specified height off the floor'. Importantly, it may be the case that the objectives of certain sports are inconceivable without reference to the rules of the sport (and so the pre-lusory goal is at best a sometimes useful abstraction). Even Suits's example may presuppose that the audience is thinking of a golf-ball sized ball, and a golf-hole sized hole, and all on something akin to a golf green. Some 17 years before Emin's work, Danto himself (1981, 12–13) imagines an artist displaying their own bed as an art work, in a defiant repost to Plato. Duchamp is the master of transfiguring commonplace objects into art works, including Fountain (originally a urinal) and Bottle Dryer or Hedgehog, which is simply a bottle rack (see http://www.marcelduchamp.net/artworkspage.php, accessed 29 August 2012). To illustrate the transfigurative power of the artworld, Danto invites his reader to consider what sensitive barbarians, which is to say, those without our artworld but with a certain eye to the refined and luxurious things in life, would take if sacking a modern art gallery (1981, 106–7). Danto's suggestion is that while they would take the glittery and jewelled or gold leaf encrusted objects, most art works would be left – or taken only for the sake of their ornate frames, and not dull and muddy coloured Rembrandt within. There is an important distinction between Searle's and Danto's arguments that will be addressed below. Searle's account of C focuses on the rules through which an institutional fact is constituted as such. His account is, as such, highly formal. Danto focuses on the knowledge that is contained in the artworld. As such, it is a more substantive and hermeneutically rich account, stressing less the human capacity to follow rules, and more the capacity to interpret situations. It is all too easy at this point to be sidetracked into reflections of what a Martian observer might make of a football match. The point would be that the Martian is ignorant of all human cultural conventions, and would therefore be baffled by the brute facts before them. Searle's appeal to brute facts perhaps encourages this. A more fruitful thought experiment might consider encountering a new game, such as the first time a Brit experiences baseball. Crucially, the observer will not have the profound ignorance of the Martian. They will know they are watching a game. They will know that the actions of players in a game are governed by the rules. The challenge is then to work out what those rules might be, from the evidence of the behaviour before them. Some awareness of the significance of runs may come quite quickly, and especially the home run, if enough are seen. The double play is always something of a stumbling block to those brought up on cricket. More subtly, as understanding of the game develops, questions might arise as to what is forbidden and what is just unwise (e.g. is a player at second base not allowed to steal a base by the rules, or would the pitcher and catcher simply get the ball to third base too quickly?). This is the problem of differentiating Suits's constitutive rules from what he calls 'rules of skill'. This is typically done so subtly that much orthodox economic theory can quite effectively treat the rules of market exchange as if they were natural laws, and not social conventions. The great comedian Tommy Cooper had a fatal heart-attack on stage (and indeed on live television). The audience thought that it was part of the act, especially so when the curtain descended, leaving Cooper's quite substantial feet still visible on the stage. The confusion of institution and brute fact became all the greater as the man and his feet were dragged back behind the curtain and out of public view. This problem is posed by the example of Petit's high-wire walk between the twin towers. My introduction explored the tension between an artistic interpretation of the event and a sporting one – where the latter entailed seeing the escapade primarily as a test of physical skill and courage. The police and New York authorities, in contrast, entertained neither an artistic nor a sporting interpretation, seeing it as a straight forward act of criminality. Persona is preferred over the more usual sociological concept of 'role' in order to stress a fundamental quality of self-expression and self-discovery, in contrast to the more mechanical occupation of a previously defined office or function. A famous photograph, reproduced on the cover of McNamee and Parry (1998 Mcnamee, M and Parry, S. J. 1998. Ethics and sport, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) shows the soccer player Vinny Jones, a notorious 'hard man' of the game, engaging with Paul Gascoigne, famous among other things for crying on his sending off and England's exit from the 1990 World Cup semi-final. These two personae exemplify contrasting ways of speaking the language of football – of enacting themselves as footballers This is to touch upon the same issues that were raised in 'Philosophy and Sport', in comparing sport to a Bach fugue. It may similarly be argued that a fugue has syntax, but no semantics. Despite Oakeshott's dismissal of the instrumental advice of the coach, it must nonetheless be acknowledge that the rules to which the sporting practitioner subscribes include, for most games, strategies and tactics. A game will only make the most minimal sense to someone only conversant with its constitutive rules. Suits himself is well aware of this, noting that once the sport is constituted as such, rules of skill may be taken to include how strategies and tactics – that indicate how to play well – work within the sport (Suits 1995 Suits, B. 1995. "The elements of sport". In Philosophic inquiry in sport , (2nd ed.), Edited by: Morgan, W. J. and Meier, K. V. 8–17. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. [Google Scholar], 9). To learn chess, for example, is not merely to learn the legitimate moves of knights and bishops, but more significantly to understand the strategic development of a game, to appreciate the Sicilian Defence and King's Gambit, and the subtle permutations of middle game and end game. So too appreciation of American football requires an understanding of the difference between a nickel defence and a dime defence, or between an offense in I formation and T formation (see Thomas 1983 Thomas, K. 1983. A guide to American football, London: Orbis Publishing. Whittall, a. 1988. Music since the First World War. London: Dent [Google Scholar]). Thus, certain deployments of players on the field only make sense given, not merely the constitutive rules of the game, but also a number of contextual factors, such as the state of play (scores, time left, number of timeouts available, and so on), the teams and perhaps aspects of the psychology of the players – their personae. A daring quarterback or coach yields different strategies from a cautious one. D'Agostino's thought experiment is intended to highlight certain inadequacies of the formalist account with respect to its handling of penalties. It may be noted that much of the debate around Suits's formalism has focused on the problem of rule breaking in sport. A cheat is someone who strives to achieve the pre-lusory goal of the game without respecting the lusory-means permitted by the rules. For the formalist, the cheat, having neglected the rules, has ceased to play the game. This leaves the problem that someone who accidentally breaks a rules (e.g. by committing an accidental handball in soccer) or intentionally does so (e.g. committing a professional foul) equally appears to have stepped outside the game and thus has ceased to play it. Yet, in many if not most games, players commit fouls routinely, without a suspicion that their victories are thereby made illegitimate or that they have cheated. This has led to elaborate refinements and reclassifications of the rules of sport, drawing typically on a distinction made by Searle (1969 Searle, J. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 34) between constitutive and regulative rules, where the concept of 'regulative rules' is taken to clarify Suits's use of 'penalty rules'. As Kretchmar (2001 Kretchmar, R. S. 2001. A functionalist analysis of game acts: Revisiting Searle. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 28: 160–72. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 160) has observed, these elaborations play little attention to Searle's original argument and, it may be added, lead at times to a certain over-elaboration. Ahern (1982 Ahern, E. M. 1982. Rules in oracles and games. Man (new series), 17(2): 302–312. [Google Scholar], 306) clarifies the problem of rule-breaking, in a comment that reflects Suits's point that the athlete must take the game seriously, by noting that what matters is not whether a rule is broken, but whether the player acknowledges having broken it, and thus takes the consequences as specified in the rules of the game. The cheat does not acknowledge the authority of the game, and thus denies the relevance of the penalty to them (for they do not subscribe to the persona of games player). To put this World Cup example slightly differently, it may be seen as a struggle over the persona of the 'world cup footballer'. Spain and the Netherlands offered radically different enactments of that particular persona, but crucially, through the intervention of the referee and subsequent media comment, they may also be seen to be entering into negotiation over that persona. In effect, while the Dutch persona was disclosed, it was fundamentally rejected by most spectators and commentators. Sporting and artistic interpretations might be confused or conflated in the case of certain sports. In artistic gymnastics, under an artistic interpretation, the gymnast's fumbling of a move or dropping an apparatus spoils the aesthetic quality of the performance. Aesthetically, the fumble is meaningless. Within a sporting interpretation, where the performance is understood as part of a competitive challenge, the fumbled move remains meaningful precisely because the possibility of failing to meet the challenge is an intrinsic part of sport. Further, it may be suggested that a requirement of the judges is for them not to be misled by the aesthetic illusion of the gymnast's performance. That is to say that aesthetically a performance may be judged in terms of its appearing to be easy –to have the illusion of ease. In a sporting interpretation, the performance will be judged upon whether it actually is easy or difficult. (This concept of illusion will be returned to in the chapter 'The Beauty of Sport'.) Goodman's approach is not as absurd as it initially seems. Consider a work by the serialist Webern (see Whittall 1988, 157–76). His works, at least during one period of his career, were extremely short and extremely rigorous in their construction, typically relying on the repetition of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. If a single note of the second movement of Webern's Variations for Piano op. 27 is misplayed, then arguably a different piece has indeed been played. If Webern had actually intended and written the 'wrong' note, which would double one of the 12 chromatic notes and exclude another, the piece would have to be interpreted differently. There might, for example, be an ironic allusion to tonality that his rigorous application of serialism is designed to avoid; the op. 27 would have more in common with the earlier Kinderstück fur Klavier than the contemporaneous String Quartet, and so on. Equally, a changed note in a Beethoven score (if it is an appropriately momentous note) might lead the musicologist or conductor to rethink what that particular passage was about, and its place in the whole.
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