Epiphany of Form:
On the Beauty of Team Sports

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

I

Increasingly, the world that we perceive presents itself as a world of floating images. ¹ We tend to associate this experience primarily with the moving pictures of film and television, and this association, at least among intellectuals, normally leads to complaints about the technologization of our lives as it has occurred over the past century. There are only a few authors who ask themselves why moving pictures should be any worse or any more dangerous than the static pictures of painting or photography; even fewer of them make reference to another--also much increased--modality of perceiving the world as a continuum of moving pictures, that is, to the situation of the moving observer. Through the windows of railroad cars, ² automobiles, and airplanes, too, the world appears as a moving world, and it is not by coincidence that the most revolutionary scientific discovery of this century uses as its key reference the world perception made from a moving train. ³ But while there is no empirical evidence that one could hold against the fact of an increasing proportion of moving images in our entire world perception, it is also true that whatever we call "life" must have been seen, heard, and felt as in-movement from the beginning. Should we then not admit that, at least within "life" as the central sector of our perception, the proportion of moving images has remained unchanged?

Here exactly lies the point of departure for my essay. Counter to the thesis of a stability in the proportion of moving images within "life," I believe that the variety and the quantity of rituals staged with the explicit and exclusive goal of displaying human bodies in movement has clearly grown over the past decades. Such rituals present human bodies under the constraints of manifold sets of rules that often seem to produce effects of body grammaticalization (a limited number of rules producing an infinity of forms that share certain basic features). ⁴ Most of these rituals are covered by our everyday concept of "sports," and although we tend to presuppose that sports (or their equivalent) have existed ever [End Page 351] since the beginning of human sociability, ⁵ our present doubtlessly marks a culminating moment in the time dedicated to watching sports and in its financial impact. ⁶ While most humanists would not hesitate to admit that this intensified role of sports is an important symptom for the understanding of contemporary societies, they would also insist that, as a symptom in this sense, sports can only be read as a symptom of cultural decadence. Such a widely institutionalized prejudice may be the reason why so few scholars--if any--have seriously asked the question of what makes sports so particularly appealing to so many of our contemporaries. With the adverb "seriously" I want to pinpoint an intellectual attitude that does not just ask questions in order to create spaces for ready-made answers. For we all have of course read and heard, over and again, that sport is either despicable (an outlet of hidden aggressions, a compensation for unresolved frustrations, a catalyst of nationalism, and so on) or that sport is marvelous (because it improves health, builds character, fosters friendship, and so on). But if we are genuinely interested in an answer to the question regarding the appeal of sports, we soon realize that all those easily available "solutions" really miss the point (the unknown point, that is) which makes sports so fascinating--even for those who neither actively practice sport themselves nor root for the victory of any individual athlete or team. The very question of this fascination that brings together participation and identification, active sports and spectatorship, is the broad, complex, and as I claim, unresolved problem that I want to tackle in the following pages. ⁷

In relation to my primary question another topic becomes secondary, although it has recently lent some of its currently shining intellectual glamour to the academic Cinderella of sports. I am alluding to the presence and to the role of sports in the screen media, and I will adjourn this topic for the moment because I believe, first, that the broad space given to sports on TV screens simply reflects its increasing importance among the objects of our immediate perception. Second, I will argue that the question regarding the fascination of sports broadcasting can only be addressed with a solution to the more general problem in hand.

II

For multiple reasons, my primary question, the broad question concerning the reasons for the appeal of sports, can be identified as pertinent to the philosophical subfield of aesthetics. There is one potential reason for this categorization, however, that I want explicitly to exclude, and this is the "good intention" to improve the cultural prestige of sports. I do not believe that cultural phenomena become necessarily [End Page 352] more appealing by receiving an academic aura. The literary books taught in high school and college are far from always being those that we most enjoy. And nothing is more embarrassingly condescending than an academic blessing for "undeservedly neglected" phenomena. Also, I think that the blame is on us academics for having overlooked sports for such a long time--and not on sports whose representatives normally do not care much about their intellectual dignity. This said, I want to argue that the appeal of sports is an aesthetic phenomenon, first, because it is normally not guided by any obvious or conscious intention. It indeed is "interesselos" in the very sense that Kant gives to this concept in the Critique of Judgment. ⁸ Second, also much in the spirit of Kant's canonical description of aesthetic experience, watching sports does not typically yield any insights nor can it be fully described and evaluated by concepts and categories. It is true that for many types of athletic performance, their appreciation presupposes a measurement in space or time; it is true that we count goals or touchdowns toward victories, ties, or defeats; it is true that in some disciplines, for example, in figure skating or in gymnastics, judges grade each performance on a complex numeric scale. Nevertheless, we all know that the athlete who jumps the highest does not always have the best style; that some victories of our favorite teams make us more enthusiastic and prouder than others; and that, as spectators, we can of course profoundly disagree with the skating or diving judges. The component of elegance and grace, that component which can make us "happy and proud," may count more or less toward victory, according to the different rules of different sports, but there is probably not a single sport where elegance and grace do not play any role at all for the spectators' appreciation. One of the reasons why, in pursuing the question of the beauty of sports, I will focus on team sports, is that elegance seems to be more important for the spectators here than, let us say, in track events, while, on the other hand, team sports are not as completely aware of their aesthetic value as, for example, gymnastics. In other words, spectators will mostly agree on finding a game or an individual play beautiful or not--but they will find it difficult to explain why they react one way or the other.

III

My main thesis for this essay is that we will not even come close to any solution of our problem as long as we try to understand sports as a phenomenon belonging to the universe of mimesis, as a representation, as a signifier coupled to a signified, or, seen from the opposite perspective, as something to be interpreted, read, or deciphered. There [End Page 353] is a certain (half-serious) intellectual tradition of viewing different team sports as allegories. Baseball is supposed to express a nostalgia for rural America, soccer is seen as bringing out the existential struggle of young proletarians, American football is read as a staging of capitalism's (or imperialism's) quest for territory. While I of course do not want to prevent anybody from experiencing sports events in such interpretative ways, I wonder whether any person in his or her mind (let alone professionals with tight schedules) would sacrifice several hours and pay for tickets at a price of up to several hundred dollars just to see an allegory of rural America or of rapacious imperialism.

Sport is not--at least not primarily--representation. Simple as it may be, this observation constitutes the specific philosophical interest of any inquiry regarding the public appeal of sports. For most of the cultural phenomena that we normally deal with in the humanities present themselves as mimetic (or at least so we believe). This is why the humanities have developed a high level of sophistication in dealing with modalities and techniques of representation. Their interpretative competence is based on a broad repertoire of specialized concepts such as mimesis, allegory, symbol, simulation/simulacrum, fake, embodiment, mimicry, and so forth. On the other side, on the side of the nonrepresentational and the nonhermeneutic, in contrast, ⁹ the lack of critical concepts is so radical that doubts may come up as to whether nonrepresentational phenomena exist at all in our cultures. Even if this question had indeed remained unanswered (but I have already opted for sports being nonrepresentational), it would imply the philosophically interesting obligation to push as far as possible the quest for something nonmimetic, to try and think "the other of mimesis." This is the philosophical territory I want to explore here, and this is the problem that has the potential of making worthwhile a discussion of sports, even for those who have no primary interest in the topic.

But must we not object that the literature and the art of High Modernism, at least in their European manifestations, ¹⁰ had already provided us with a wide range of nonrepresentational phenomena? It is of course true that abstract painting, for example (especially painting in the sense of the German concept of "gegenstandslos"), is by definition nonrepresentational. From a historical perspective, however, we have to insist that its abstractness emerged from the will to challenge an overwhelmingly representational tradition in art and literature--up to the point of provoking the collapse of this tradition. In other words: despite their "revolutionary" gestures, the so-called "historical avantgardes" were always positing the principles of representation and hermeneutics as their primary frame of reference, and this may well be [End Page 354] the reason why their style has become so strangely sterile ever since their initial provocation has turned into a canonized convention.

Perhaps it is possible to describe the difference between the provocation of the historical avantgardes and our own interest in determining the other of mimesis, on the basis of Wolfgang Iser's recent proposal to see mimesis as a process of emergence. ¹¹ If we accept Iser's point that the emergence of mimesis, as a historical process, is constituted by a growing self-awareness regarding the constructedness of any type of representation, then we might postulate a correspondence between our search for "the other of mimesis" and the two contemporary phenomena with which Iser concludes his account on the emergence of mimesis. These phenomena are the simulacrum ("phantom reference") as a cultural habit and the replacement of the more academic question for a foundation, for a Grund (in this specific context, the replacement of the question for a reference) through a narrative of emergence that must leave open the question of its own origin and Grund. In this context, Surrealism, Dadaism, and other related movements might appear as announcing a farewell to the paradigm of representation, whereas our question, the question for the emergence of something that rejects interpretation, might be the--complementary--beginning of something epistemologically new.

IV

But what could "the other of mimesis" possibly be? In principle, this question opens up the space for an infinity of phenomena to be imagined or to be pointed to (if we could only identify them so easily). The one possible answer that I want to develop here--based on the example of team sports--introduces the "production of presence" as an elementary gesture which, without being confined to contemporary Western culture, seems to have recently wrested much space from forms, genres, and rituals of representation. The notion of "presence," in this context, refers primarily to the dimension of space. Based on the Latin verb producere ("to bring forth"), "producing presence" means to put things into reach so that they can be touched. An obvious reference for a further illustration of the production of presence within Western culture is the medieval (and, until the present day, Catholic) understanding of the eucharist as providing the "real presence" of Christ's body and of Christ's blood. From an anthropological point of view, transubstantiation ¹² as the central event in every celebration of the mass is an act of magic because it is supposed to conjure up material objects [End Page 355] into spatial closeness. Once Christ's body and Christ's blood are (believed to be) present, their bodily appropriation through the faithful can take place in the act of the communion, which is an act of theophagy made possible through the transubstantiation as an act of magic. In our context, it is above all important to understand that, according to the old Christian tradition, the bread and the wine which are visible on the altar are not signifiers, with Christ's body and Christ's blood playing the role of the signified. ¹³ A signified normally refers to an object absent in space--whereas Christ's body and blood are thought to become substantially ("really") present through the act of transsubstantiation. The concepts used in medieval theology for the bread and the wine are "species," "accidens," and "forma," with the latter notion fulfilling the Aristotelian paradigm of "substance and form" in its correspondence with the substance of Christ's body and blood. According to Aristotle, a form has no being without a substance, and a substance, at each moment of its existence, cannot help having a specific form. Instead of being signifiers, then, bread and wine thus function as those material objects of reference that are decisive for any type of magic. Without the material presence of forms in this sense (but the forms must not necessarily be bread and wine) Christ's body and Christ's blood could not become present.

The contrast between the phenomenology of the modern stage and that of the medieval stage ¹⁴ offers interesting parallels with the distinction between the mimesis-oriented "signifier/signified" paradigm and the paradigm of "form/substance" that is geared towards the production of presence. If medieval staging, like contemporary sports events, did not necessarily imply an absolute separation between the space of the actors and that of the audience (dialogues between both sides were customary and we know that the actors often sought to get into bodily touch with the spectators), modern theater counts on the curtain--more exactly and paradoxically: on the raised curtain--as a border that cannot be crossed in either direction. The raised curtain indeed is an equivalent of the screen in contemporary visual media inasmuch as it makes the actors behave as if they did not perceive the spectators' presence. At the same time, it imposes the obligation on the spectators to suppress, as completely as possible, the effects of their own physical presence: they are sitting in the dark and they are obliged to maintain the strictest silence. On the modern stage, the actors' bodies have the status of material signifiers that represent, as their signified, the characters of absent or invented (that is, not otherwise embodied) individuals. For the medieval stage, in contrast (and perhaps not only for the stage within medieval culture), the individual identity of characters was not an issue. Actors often wore de-individualizing masks. They embodied and [End Page 356] thus made real and present certain social and cosmological types ("the angel," "the saint," "the king," "the knight," "the virgin," "the widow," and so on). Likewise, the body of an athlete in contest is the incarnation of a certain physical and/or strategical function. It "is" a forward or a guard, a sprinter or a race walker--and nothing else. ¹⁵ As bodies on the modern stage have the status of signifiers, it becomes the task of the spectators to decipher the signified for which they stand. Modern theater thus assigns a hermeneutic position to its audiences. They have to identify and to construct, by induction, the individual characters "meant" by the movements of the actors' bodies and by the words they speak. What we call "the plot" of a play, the form, the length, and the unity of the action on stage, seems to be shaped by the task of providing sufficient--but never excessive--visual and verbal material as a level of reference for the spectators' hermeneutic efforts. In contrast, if we often experience an impossibility to understand the stories in the texts belonging to medieval "theater," this comes from the simple fact that most of them do indeed not have a plot in the modern sense. It is plausible to assume that many (in particular: late medieval) theater texts exclusively functioned as choreographies that showed how to produce and subsequently undo presence, without prescribing what exactly should be done with it. For similar reasons, sports events also lack the type of a content-based unity and the semantic development that we expect from modern plays. Among other things, this lack of a plot that provides structure explains why the rules of most athletic competitions and games contain instructions for a random limitation of their duration. A hockey game lasts three times twenty minutes, and an American football game consists of four quarters with fifteen minutes each; a sprint goes, for example, over two hundred meters or over one hundred meters, while each competitor in a long jump event has exactly six attempts. It would seem absurd to suggest, for example, that an individual sprint event should go over two hundred seventy meters because that format would make its finish more dramatic. The dimension "form of content" and the shaping of a plot belong to rituals of representation. On the other hand, plots do not have a function in the context of stagings that are exclusively geared towards the production of presence.

V

So far, I have argued that the formula "production of presence" points to cultural phenomena that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of "mimesis" and "representation"; I have said that this formula covers, [End Page 357] among many other things, the interaction between athletes and spectators at a sports event; and I have come up with the hypothesis that the increasing importance of sports events may be part of a shift, within contemporary culture, toward an environment that is predominantly constituted by floating images. But does my argument not almost naively run counter to the taboo with which present-day philosophy, especially Deconstruction, has surrounded any belief in the possibility of "real presence"? ¹⁶ As far as Jacques Derrida's position is concerned, the first objection to be held against this objection--in other words: a legitimation of my point of view--comes from a closer look at the concept of presence that he criticizes. ¹⁷ For Derrida's argument has little, if anything, to do with that notion of presence based on spatial proximity which I have tried to circumscribe in the previous section. Rather, he turns against the idea of a spiritual self-presence (in the sense of self-reflexiveness) that includes claims of self-transparency and meaning totalization (that is, the illusion that the "complete meaning of a text," whatever this might exactly be, can be present at every single moment of a reading). Such a conception of self-presence, according to Derrida, is a legacy of Western "logocentrism," it is the outcome of a habitual privileging of spoken language over written language as a model for human thought. The possibility of hearing our own voices while we are speaking fosters the illusion of self-presence, and the vanishing of the sounds produced by our voices creates the illusion that language is an immaterial phenomenon. Deconstruction's critique of this immateriality-illusion leads to an interest in the "materiality" (or in the "exteriority") of language, and it is this interest in the exteriority of language that, far from establishing a distance, rather suggests an affinity between Deconstruction and my own space-related concept of presence. ¹⁸

With more intensity than Derrida himself, David Wellbery has unfolded some of the implications inherent to the deconstructive motif of "exteriority." In the context of a thought experiment Wellbery asks for the levels of experience produced by a nonhermeneutic gaze at a written page, by a gaze, that is, which does not try to decipher a "text" and to find a "meaning." In the first place, such a gaze will not overlook the materiality of the forms drawn on that page (that is, the materiality of what an interpretative look identifies as the signifiers)--whereas we quite regularly forget about such materiality as soon as we think we have understood the signifiers' meaning. The distribution of these signifiers/forms over the page will appear as contingent, and there is, consequently, an almost infinity of sequences along which one may visualize all those different forms. A noninterpretative gaze would experience the more or less complex configurations constituted by these forms on the page as unique. If, in contrast, we read for the meaning and take the [End Page 358] signifiers as something to be deciphered, then we identify as "the same text" sequences of signifiers that seem to lead us to the same meaning--even if they are realized in different media and materialities. We overlook the uniqueness of the signifiers' configuration because what then only matters is the semantic dimension. A handwritten text, a printed text, and a text carved in stone can appear to be "the same," whereas each of them would look unique for a nonhermeneutic gaze (in similar fashion, a coach or an analytically-minded spectator, on the basis of the so-called "playbooks," can identify the sameness of certain plays performed by different teams whereas, for the passionately engaged spectator, "the same play" is not the same when played by his own team and when played by the opposing team, nor is it the same in sunshine and in rain). Finally, the forms on a page (and the body movements on a playing field) are perceived as accidental (here lies an interesting semantic convergence with the concept "accidens" that is synonymous to "form" and "species" in the medieval theology of the eucharist). That the forms appear as accidental means that they can never be expected to appear in the very configuration in which they present themselves at each individual moment. A nonhermeneutic gaze does indeed not allow for such expectations because it does not attribute functions (a signifying function, for example) to the forms perceived on the page--and only such a function would relate the forms on the page to one or the other predictable pattern of behavior and action. Taken together, all these levels of experience produced by the nonhermeneutic gaze give way to further combinations and associations. If we emphasize the nonhermeneutic aspects of singularity and materiality (without necessarily eliminating the other two aspects), then we begin to think toward the concept of "form." If, in contrast, we emphasize "contingency" and "accidentality," we think toward the concept of "event." Perhaps the convergence of an event-effect with an embodied form is precisely what we call "presence."

I will now interrupt my play with the nonhermeneutic concepts--for it has already carried us far beyond the philosophical point I wanted to make. Not only have we seen that a space-related notion of presence does not necessarily enter into conflict with the critique (of a different concept) of presence in Deconstruction. The experiment with an exteriority-oriented (that is, a deconstructive, that is, a nonhermeneutic) gaze at a written page has persuaded us that Deconstruction indeed privileges the dimensions of "form" and "eventness," and thus promotes, rather than excludes, a nonreflexive concept of presence. What may still appear to be a somehow precarious induction as long as we exclusively concentrate on Derrida's work, has become an explicit part of the deconstructive corpus since the publication of Jean-Luc Nancy's book [End Page 359] The Birth to Presence. Trying to elaborate an alternative to that habit of identifying stable meanings which Deconstruction so pertinently criticizes, Nancy points to a growing desire for presence of Being and for absence of Being taking the place of "reading the world" in the contemporary cultural and intellectual situation:

Presence itself is birth, the coming that effaces itself and brings itself back. . . . Only this birth, this "nativeness" that is not a signification, but the coming of a world to the world. A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification. That is why, if I speak here of birth, I will not try to make it into one more accretion of sense. I will rather leave it, if this is possible, as the lack of "sense" that it "is." ¹⁹

If it is not by coincidence that this point reminds us of the theological concept of "real presence," one crucial difference has to be underlined. According to Nancy, we know today that our desire for presence will never be completely fulfilled. We can therefore perhaps best describe the way in which we relate to this presence which will never be full presence as "sentimentalisch." What we experience in the impossibility of full presence is a continuous floating between an emergence of presence (hence the title of Nancy's book) and a vanishing of presence. The primarily spatial concept of presence thus undergoes a temporalization. With the emphasis on this nonreflexive, both spatial and temporalized concept of presence, a complex network of philosophical motifs begins to surface, and within this network we can discover surprising rapprochements between Deconstruction and other intellectual positions. Michael Taussig's reelaboration of the mimesis category, for example, does not lead back to the paradigm of representation but focuses on notions of "embodiment" and "magic." ²⁰ In a variety of mimetic acts, according to Taussig, humans lend their bodies to absent bodies and to absent things, with the goal of conjuring up their presence. For the anthropologist Victor Turner, a new interest in performance as process (and "performance as process" is nothing but temporalized presence in space) constitutes the vanishing point of all contemporary shifts in our cultural behavior and in our intellectual interests:

a major move [is occurring] towards the study of processes, not as exemplifying compliance with or derivation from normative models both ethic and emic, but as performances . . . . In the modern consciousness, cognition, idea, rationality were paramount. In the postmodern turn, cognition is not dethroned but rather takes its place on equal footing with volition and affect. ²¹ [End Page 360]

VI

After this rather lengthy philosophical loop which was meant to clearify the epistemological status of my essay, I return to the essay's central question. How can we explain the appeal, the aesthetic appeal, that is, with which sport wins the fascination of billions of spectators in present day societies? As it has already become clear that the answer will lie in an elaboration of the concepts of "form" and "event" and of the effects generated by their convergence, we can now specify the analytic agenda for the continuation of our argument. We will have to describe how the structure of a team sport produces presence as the event of form.

The sport on whose phenomenology I want to concentrate for this purpose ²² is American football--and, given its cultural eccentricity (compared, for example, to soccer or to basketball), this is not the most obvious choice. Practical aspects have played a role in my decision, especially the possibility, for an academic author, to gain access to the world of college football. ²³ From a more systematic point of view, however, two other reasons were predominant. First, the strategies and what one may call the "play culture" of American football are objects of a complex planning by the coaching staff and they are, therefore, highly conceptualized (American football leaves much less space to individual intuition than, among other sports, soccer or hockey). This aspect suggests that American football will lend itself more readily to an analysis conducted with highly abstract and highly generalized categories. In addition, the rules of American football, as the rules of all other North American sports that deal with a mass spectatorship, are constantly fine-tuned in order to improve and intensify the possibilities of spectator participation. We can therefore be assured that the link between the game shaped by these rules and the spectator fascination is as close as possible.

The following analysis will not be so detailed as to require a good knowledge of the rules of American football, let alone finesse and sophistication. Nevertheless, I will lay out those basic rules and principles of the game which I think are decisive for the production of form, event, and presence:

One: Unlike most other team sports, American football allows the spectator to distinguish clearly, at every moment of the game, between the team that is in an offensive position and the team that is in a defensive position. The offensive team is "in possession of the ball." Its task is to move the ball, in subsequent plays, into the defensive team's "endzone" (the rough equivalent of the "goal" in soccer). Moving the [End Page 361] ball into the defensive team's endzone is called a "touchdown," and the number of touchdowns scored decides about winning and losing (there are exceptions but we do not have to discuss them in this context). The exclusive task of the defensive team is to make the offensive team's moving of the ball impossible. If we say that the plays of the offensive team constitute forms, then we can define the mission of the offensive team as negentropy--whereas the mission of the defensive team is entropy.

Two: The offensive team remains in possession of the ball as long as it manages to move the ball ten yards toward the endzone of the defensive team in each four (or less) subsequent plays. Individual plays within sets of four (or less) plays may fail to produce yardage or even result in a loss of yardage. In other words: within sets of four (or less) plays, very successful plays can compensate for failed or less successful plays.

Three: The quarterback is the offensive player who communicates the strategy for each play to his team. He has three basic options for moving the ball. He can throw the ball to a player on his own team who is positioned closer to (or even in) the defensive team's endzone (if the player whom the quarterback has targeted fails to catch the ball, the next play starts at the same place where the previous play originated; if a player of the defensive teams catches ["intercepts"] the ball, the role-distribution between offensive and defensive team turns around immediately). The quarterback may also hand the ball to a player standing close to him who will then try to run the ball toward the endzone of the defensive team. Instead of moving the ball to another player, the quarterback may finally decide to run the ball himself. Each play starts at that level of the field where the player running the ball was stopped by a defensive player at the end of the previous play or where he had crossed the outside line of the playing field (where he went "out of bounds").

Four: Each play is preceded by a situation in which both teams are standing in front of each other, motionless. To initiate a play the offensive player in front of the quarterback ("center") hands the ball through his legs to the quarterback. During the motionless seconds preceding each play, the quarterback tries to analyze the positioning of the defensive players as a symptom for the strategy upon which they have decided. ²⁴ The quarterback has fifteen seconds to do this analysis and to let the center initiate the play. If the center does not initiate the play during these fifteen seconds or if any other player steps forward before the game is initiated, the play that was about to happen is suspended. In this case the offensive team has lost one out of four attempts that it has to move the ball for at least ten yards. [End Page 362]

VII

Let us now finally look, from a variety of perspectives, at the interface between the action on the football field and the spectators' perception. It goes without saying that, while our analysis will distinguish three different aspects of the game, it is the convergence and the interplay of such aspects which generates the fascination of football. I will begin by focusing on the stadium as the space occupied by the action of the game. This space--and its interior time--are isolated from the space and the time of the surrounding everyday world. For the game it only matters that there are, for example, two minutes left to play in the fourth quarter--whether this occurs at 3:43 p.m. or at 11:02 p.m. is of no importance whatsoever. The stadium doors open only a few hours before the game, and they close even fewer hours after the game. We know that, between games, the stadium is an empty space, a space where nothing happens, an unused space--although stadiums are often located in urban environments whose real estate prices have long obliged corporations to build high-rise structures. ²⁵ For what purpose does sport then afford the economic exception to leave this space mostly unused? My thesis is that the contrast between the empty field and the field occupied by the action of football stages what Jean-François Lyotard has once described as the most elementary ontic experience, ²⁶ the experience of something happening and of something "being there"--as opposed to nothingness. Lyotard exemplifies his thesis by pointing to the letter "y" in the French phrase "il y a." As a deictic particle, this "y" is an open reference to "something being there," to something occupying a space--as opposed to nothingness, to an empty space. Now, this elementary experience comes back on different stages of a football game. I have already mentioned the general contrast between the emptiness of the stadium during the week and the stadium occupied by play action and spectators. The same contrast is concretized when the players of both teams take the field for their warm-ups. They return to the locker rooms, leaving the field empty again. They take the field to initiate the game. With frequent and long time-outs that leave the playing space empty, all professional team sports in North America give specific emphasis to this component in their self-staging--but none of them does more so than football. For football presents another version of the same contrast and of the same experience during the seconds preceding each play. The two times eleven motionless players confronting each other are the opposite of the fast, complex, and often violent action that is expected to follow. What gives this contrast its specific dramatic tension, however, is the above-mentioned possibility of nothing [End Page 363] happening--which occurs if any of the players moves before center and quarterback initiate the play or if center and quarterback initiate the play too late. In these cases, the extreme tension of players and spectators is followed by "nothing relevant" for the game, by a moment of relaxation that looks comparatively trivial because the players are neither in action nor in a state of high and motionless concentration. How do we spectators react to these multiple stagings of the elementary ontic experience? Certainly not with philosophical reflections, despite the basic philosophical terminology that I am using here. What the crowd's concentration on the empty field and on the motionless players, together with the expectation of something to happen, can generate is a wide open and particularly intense state of alertness. Rather than being guided and focused, we are never allowed to anticipate where exactly what exactly is going to happen. But we do know that a complex multiplicity of movements will simultaneously happen--if something happens at all.

It is then immediately plausible to say that each successful play produces a form. After all, coaches try to teach plays by drawing "their" forms on the chalkboard. Once these plays happen, however, they are embodied forms and forms-in-movement. From this angle, I am interested in two different definitions of "form." One of them describes form as a movement whose directionality one wishes to see continued. ²⁷ The other one, by Niklas Luhmann, ²⁸ determines form as the simultaneity of self-reference and heteroreference. Luhmann's definition can be illustrated by the example of a circle that we draw on a sheet of paper. The line that "is" this circle separates the space inside the circle from the space outside the circle. This makes us understand that every form implies a component of self-reference--but it also means that self-reference is so general a criterion that we cannot hope to grasp through it the specific character of the forms produced by a football game. ²⁹ What seems to make the forms produced by a game so appealing is indeed their convergence with the dimension of eventness. The form of a successful play (and plays-as-form are always offensive plays) has the quality of an event. This is so, first, because the play is negentropy imposed upon the constant threat of entropy embodied by the defense. From a more empirical perspective it also means that, while we hope (or fear) before each play that a form will emerge, we can never be sure that this will actually happen. Second, once the spectators perceive a play as a form they do normally not relate this form to its ideal type--as it is shown and discussed, for example, in the strategy sessions of coaches and players. As if they saw a "written page" without trying to decipher the characters on it, most spectators see the form of a play as a pure surface phenomenon, and this means that, detached from its archetype, [End Page 364] they see the play in its unpredictable singularity. Here lies another connotation of eventness. Finally, the form of the play is temporalized form. It emerges from the interaction of the players with each other and with the ball, and it vanishes without ever freezing into a state of stability. No single photograph could ever capture the singularity of a play as form-in-movement. According to Husserl's terminology, a play is a time object in the proper sense. ³⁰ Interestingly, our description of the form of the play, together with the observation of an ontic component in the staging of sports, converges with Heidegger's definition of the aesthetic experience: "Art then is the becoming and happening of truth. Does truth, then, arise out of nothing? It does indeed if by nothing is meant the mere not of that which is, and if we think of that which is as an object present in the ordinary way." ³¹ If we replace "truth" by "form," Heidegger's characterization of the aesthetic experience corresponds exactly to our previous description of the play from the angle of form-as-event. What particularly matters in this context is the association between aesthetic experience and the dimension of emergence. The appeal of aesthetic experience lies in the possibility of seeing form--or truth--in the process of its constitution, as opposed to form or truth in the status of a stable "object." The eventness of the forms produced by a football game, we could therefore say, and the specificity of aesthetic experience both illustrate what the theological discourse calls "epiphany": epiphany, that is, of something substantial, not just the emergence of an idea.

So far, we have analyzed the game from the macroscopic angle of the empty and the action-filled space of the stadium, as opposed to the outside world, and from the microscopic angle of the individual play. There is a third perspective, however, a perspective that leads us to a level of mediation between the stadium-space and the play. This is the level of the "drive," a continued sequence of plays in which the offensive team succeeds in advancing sufficiently far to remain in possession of the ball. In order to describe the drive as a composite phenomenon, I will use Kant's distinction between "end" ("Zweck") and "finality" ("Finalitaet"). The difference between end and finality is a relative difference. We can also say that their relation is a relation that always subordinates finality to an end. If "finality" is the goal of an individual action, then "end" is the larger frame of reference which gives a joint goal to a number of actions and which thereby also determines the functionality of their interplay. We can thus see each movement of each individual player in each individual play as a finality that is designed to contribute to the end of the successful play. Seen from the side of the drive, each play turns into a finality that is subordinated to the end of the drive (or, more precisely, to the end of "keeping the drive alive"). The drive, however, is a finality in relation to the end of scoring a [End Page 365] touchdown. Consequently, the touchdown is a finality that has to be reached in order to make possible the victory of a team. At this point, it is crucial to understand that, within the phenomenology of the game and from the perspective of the spectators, the victory is a final, an ultimate end. For professional players, the victory may be nothing but a finality in relation to the end of becoming rich and famous. Within the logic of the game, however, there is no higher end to which one could subordinate the victory. However happy a spectator may be about the victory of his team, there is no way to functionalize it or to turn it into something profitable outside the stadium. The gap that separates the victory as an end from any practical goals in our everyday life constitutes what Mikhail Bakhtin has described as the "insularity" of the play situation. ³² This insularity, produced by the dynamics of the game, feeds back into the already-mentioned double isolation of the space and the time of the stadium from the space and the time of the everyday world. The convergence between the insularity of the stadium and the insularity of the game maximizes, I suppose, the concentration on what happens on the field. At the same time, this gap between the game and the everyday world prohibits any semantization, any "application" (in the hermeneutic sense of this term) of the game to life. The game is neither an allegory of the everyday world nor can it be transformed into a finality that serves an everyday end. The game is what it is: the staging of a tension between nothing and something which, whenever something (and not nothing) is happening, produces either, if the defense prevails, entropy or, if the offense is successful, negentropy as the epiphany of form.

We know that rituals and spectacles with a similar structure often have an intoxicating effect on their audiences, much in the sense of Nietzsche's famous description of the Dionysian principle in The Birth of Tragedy. For a lack of psychological competence, I will not even try to explain why this particular type of spectacle generates this particular effect. All I can contribute to the solution of this problem is the beautifully concise formula of a famous athlete ³³ who once described both watching sports and practicing sports as "being lost in focused intensity." Perhaps what he meant by "focused intensity" (and what Nietzsche referred to as "intoxication") is that wide-open alertness and that exclusive concentration which sports can induce. Perhaps he felt "lost" in focused intensity because this intensity is achieved through an isolation from our everyday worlds. And perhaps it is the elementary character of what we focus upon, that is, the tension between nothingness and something and the tension between entropy and negentropy, which requires the excusiveness of our concentration. ³⁴ [End Page 366]

VIII

With the strong emphasis given to the stadium as the site of the game, I have so far not made any explicit distinction between the experience of the game in a stadium and the experience of the game on a TV screen. Rather than being "media-specific," my interest has been a general interest in the ways through which an environment of floating images entertains our attention without having the status of a representation. If I will now discuss some differences between the stadium experience and the TV experience, this should not problematize the status of my previous analyses as valid for team sports in general. It should have become obvious by now why I cannot be interested in maintaining the usual distinction between the stadium experience as "original experience" and the TV experience as "mere representation." ³⁵ Instead of such a binary distinction, what will interest me in the following section is an elaboration of the results obtained so far. The question will be how the stadium environment and the TV screen differentiate and complexify in different ways the basic experience of team sports as images-in-movement.

The TV broadcast is constituted by images taken from a multiplicity of perspectives. What this multiciplicity of perspectives primarily secures is the value of "full coverage." TV spectators expect that no important detail of the game will escape their attention. In addition, the sequence of pictures taken from different angles and the comments of the TV announcers will at least partly achieve an "active synthesis," that is, an integration and compatibilization of different impressions. The stadium spectator has to achieve this compatibilization by himself--if he does not refrain from such an effort by simply letting "sink in" the subsequent impressions (this is what phenomenological terminology defines as "passive synthesis"). Above all, the spatial position of the stadium spectator is a stable one. While the TV broadcast constantly switches between closer and more distant images of the game, the stadium spectator experiences the game as moving either towards his body or away from his body. This does not only intensify the experience of the game as a sequence of events-in-space; it also emphasizes, within the stadium experience, the state of wide-open alertness and excitability that I have mentioned above. For without being always offered the possibility of recuperating each detail of each play in a replay, the stadium spectator must always fear that he will miss some relevant part of the play-action.

In achieving a plateau of active synthesis, the TV broadcast produces meaning. If meaning is the awareness of a contrast between what is thematized (or: what is actually happening) and what remains in the [End Page 367] background (what could happen without actually happening), then we can understand statistical and biographical information, comparisons with other teams and other players, and even slow-motion replays as meaning-producing devices. Together with the classical screen-effect, which suggests that whatever appears on a screen refers to some "original" and absent referent, the active synthesis of the broadcast surrounds the game with a halo of representation--but I do not believe that it ever ends up completely transforming the game into a narrative. What I have characterized as the staging of a double ontic experience (something versus nothing, negentropy versus entropy) remains in the center of a TV broadcast, although it is true that the conditions of the stadium experience seem to collaborate in a more radical, in a more exclusive fashion to bring out these two contrasts.

As I have already mentioned, a stadium spectator during a time-out sees nothing but the empty field. At least a part of his attention is therefore absorbed by the desire for the players to take the field again and for the game to continue. The tension of this specific situation is mitigated for TV viewers. However boring they may find the commercials that appear on the screen during time-outs, they are never confronted with any type of emptiness. Finally, it is important for the stadium spectator to know that, while he is not allowed to enter the field (this is the partial screen-effect of the stadium), the players perceive and often rely on the noise that the crowd produces. Football players indeed quite regularly encourage the crowd to "make noise" before they initiate important plays. For relatively complicated technical reasons, in the particular case of American football, this can sometimes have a remarkable influence on how the game develops. Even more important, the spectators' physical presence in the stadium makes them an active part of the ontic staging that I have described. Their bodies transform the empty stadium into a crowded stadium. They occupy the larger part of that isolated stadium space which is an empty space during the week. One may therefore argue that, in this very sense, the TV broadcast and a high level of viewer participation belong to the contemporary phenomenology of the great sports event. As such, TV broadcast and a high viewer participation certainly contribute to the positive excitement of players and spectators. Nevertheless it remains true that, as the game on the TV screen is surrounded by a halo of representation, the TV viewers' "participation" and "presence" are "participation" and "presence" interwoven with a feeling of distance. This "mixed" environment without doubt is the modality of presence that dominates in our present cultural moment. [End Page 368]

IX

Throughout the different stages of my argument, I have tried to illustrate and to complexify the thesis that our contemporary cultural environment is predominantly an environment of floating images, ³⁶ and that these floating images produce varying effects of presence. For the time being, I am not quite sure about the status that the analysis of American football might claim in this context. One possibility is that its main result, the presentation of American football as a staging of the epiphany of form, could be applied to all the other rituals and cultural forms subsumed under the formula "production of presence." Perhaps, however, the epiphany of form is a much more specific phenomenon--and this would mean that we would have to look for corresponding but different effects under different modalities and conditions of staging. What holds together all the varieties of presence-production are, on the one hand, the recurrent components of proximity in space and of thingness, and, on the other hand, their general distance vis-à-vis the dimension of representation as well as their rejection of interpretation. I think it is fair to say that whoever approaches sports with a hermeneutic attitude will not receive the pleasure that he could get, say, from a book; nor will he experience that focused intensity which sports events are capable of generating for those who refrain from interpreting them.

And how do the humanities, as a network of academic disciplines, relate to the rituals of production of presence? If we understand the humanities in the German sense of "Geisteswissenschaften," and if this implies, according to Dilthey, that those disciplines are centered around interpretation as their core practice, then we arrive at the--quite devastating--conclusion of an inadequacy between the cultural phenomena of production of presence and the analytic tools provided by the humanities. Fortunately, however, we know that the humanities, especially during the past two decades, have quite successfully complexified their repertoire of methods and concepts. ³⁷ After all, this very essay has tried to challenge what an interpretative approach cannot help presupposing, that is, the limits of culture seen as the limits of representation and interpretation. In its main result, my reflection perhaps confirms Wolfgang Iser's opinion that we are moving toward a new intellectual paradigm which makes us see things under the heading of "emergence"--and which leads away from representation and interpretation. How will this shift from the identification of meaning toward the description of processes of emergence end up changing our professional everyday life? Interpretation, we have learned in the hermeneutic elementary school, is an exercise that allows for an infinity [End Page 369] of variations vis-à-vis each individual cultural artifact. The same probably does not apply to the description of processes of emergence. Instead of indulging in infinite variation, we must try hard to get those descriptions right.

Stanford University

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University, where he also organizes the Stanford Presidential Lectures & Symposia in the Humanities and Arts. Among his books on literary theory and literary and cultural history, are Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (1990; English translation forthcoming, Stanford University Press, 2000), Making Sense in Life and Literature (1992), and In 1926--Living at the Edge of Time (1997). He is currently finishing a book entitled The Non-Hermeneutic. Gumbrecht is a regular contributor to the Humanities section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Notes

1. See Wlad Godzich, "Language, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, 1994), pp. 355-70.

2. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19.Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1979), esp. pp. 51-66.

3. See Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. A Clear Explanation That Anyone Can Understand (1916; New York, 1961), esp. pp. 9ff.

4. I owe the idea of a "grammaticalization of the game" to Renate Lachmann.

5. Which is a problematic assumption, especially if one takes into account the specific institutional structure of what we have come to call "sports" in Western culture during the past two hundred years.

6. Although specialists insist that the importance of sports within our national economies is often overrated. See Roger Noll, "Economic Perspectives on the Athlete's Body," in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ted Leland, Rick Schavone, and Jeffrey Schnapp, eds., Stanford Humanities Review 6.2 (1998), 69-73.

7. This essay reflects an early stage of my work on two thematically complementary books: The Non-Hermeneutic and the Present (forthcoming, 1999), and The Beauty of American Football (forthcoming, 2000).

8. My main reference regarding the conceptual repertoire and the history of aesthetics is Joachim Ritter, "Aesthetik, aesthetisch," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, vol. 1 (Basel, 1971), pp. 555-80.

9. See my essay "Fas Nicht-Hermeneutische: Skizze einer Genealogie," in Interventionen V (Basel, 1996), pp. 17-36.

10. Regarding the contrast between the European/Northern American, and a more "peripheral" (Latin American) version of High Modernism, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "'Objektiver Humor': Sobre Hegel, Borges y el lugar histórico de la novela latinoamericana," in Orbis Tertius. Revista de Teoria y Critica Literaria, 1 (1996), 49-65. For the concept and the historical circumstances of the so-called "crisis of representation," see Kerstin Behnke, "Repraesentation," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 8 (Basel 1992), pp. 846-53.

11. See Wolfgang Iser, "Mimesis/Emergenz," Mimesis und Simulation, ed. Andreas Koblitz and Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1998), pp. 669-84. With a surprisingly Hegelian gesture, Iser uses the concent of "Emergenz" both for his description of a historical process that has produced the Western practice of mimesis, and for a more systematic analysis of this practice.

12. See the entry "Transubstantiation," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York, 1967), p. 605.

13. The definition of bread and wine as signifiers for Christ's body and Christ's blood (and the subsequent transformation of the celebration of the eucharist into an act of commemoration) comes from Reformation theology. The decisive step in this process of reorientation was the translation of Christ's words at the last supper "Hoc est enim corpus meum" by (the equivalent of) "this means my body."

14. What follows is largely inspired by the four colloquia on "Medieval Theatricality" organized between 1991 and 1996 by an American/French/German research group. See my essay, "Für eine Erfindung des mittelalterlichen Theaters aus der Perspektive der frühen Neuzeit," in Festschrift für Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger, vol. 2, ed. Johannes Janota et al. (Tübingen, 1992), pp. 827-48.

15. In most team sports, the numbers on the players' uniforms traditionally pointed to such functions. Number 9 in soccer, for example, belonged to the center forward, number 1 was reserved for the goalkeeper, number 16, in American football, could only be a quarterback, and so forth. Today, a reorientation seems to take place toward a principle of random attribution of those numbers. Even the names that appear on the players' uniforms do not refer to the individuality of their character. Rather, a name like "Michael Jordan" points to an individual (and, in this specific case, hyperbolic) physical potential.

16. For a more detailed version of the same argument see my essay "Form Without Matter vs. Form as Event," in Modern Language Notes, 111 (1996), pp. 578-92. In his latest book, Gianni Vattimo discusses the question of whether such a return to a (more or less) ontological worldview is desirable and possible in the present intellectual situation (Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, tr. David Webb, [Cambridge, 1997]).

17. My main point of reference is Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill., 1973), pp. 107-28.

18. This motif is frequently touched upon (but never fully developed) in Derrida's earlier work. For an impressive systematic elaboration, see David Wellbery, "The Exteriority of Writing," in Stanford Literature Review, 9 (1992), 11-23.

19. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, tr. Brian Holmes (Stanford, 1993), p. 5.

20. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, 1993).

21. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York, 1986), p. 80. In the same context, one might also refer to the late Paul Zumthor's interest in the performative aspects of medieval culture, particularly to his emphasis on phenomena related to voice, body, and presence.

22. That is, for instance, for a book-length project under the working title The Beauty of American Football.

23. I am greatly indebted to the Department of Athletics and Recreation at Stanford University, and to its director Ted Leland.

24. In this "reading" of the other team, as specialists call it, lies a--relatively isolated, but clearly--hermeneutic element of American football. See Helmut Müller-Sievers, "Hermeneutik des American Football," Zeitschriftder Semiotik 12 (1983), 23-38.

25. In this context, it is interesting to mention that the teams' practice sessions that are held during the week have long moved out of the large stadium, contributing to the almost perfect isolation of the stadium.

26. In a seminar ("Suppléments au Différend") held at the Universität Gesamthochschule Siegen in the spring of 1988.

27. I am quoting my Stanford colleague, the musicologist Carol Berger, from a joint session of a seminar on "Philosophies of Form," during the fall quarter 1994-95.

28. Niklas Luhmann, "Das Kunstwerk und die Selbstreproduktion der Kunst," in Stil. Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt, 1986), pp. 620-72, esp. pp. 628-32.

29. This is my tentative answer to a critical question by David Wellbery.

30. See Edmund Husserl, "Die Vorlesungen über das innere Zeitbewusstsein aus dem Jahre 1905," in Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917) (The Hague, 1966), p. 23, in English as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), tr. John Barnett Brough (Boston, 1991).

31. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1975), p. 71. For a similar definition, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1965), pp. 94, 115-22, in English as Truth and Method, rev. tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, 1995).

32. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 96.

33. The swimmer Pablo Morales, Olympic gold medalist in 1984 and 1992, at a colloquium organized by the Department of Athletics and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford in May 1995.

34. Rainer Warning asks me how my own analysis of American football relates to Roger Caillois's analysis of the human play (See Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes. Le masque et le vertige [Paris, 1958]). Caillois describes a historical transformation from a type of play based on "simulation" and "intoxication" to a type of play based on "agon" and "randomness." While it is obvious that, as a category of representation, "simulation" runs counter to the central point of my argument ("the play is what it is") and while I bracket the aspect of "agon," I share Caillois's interest in the components of "intoxication" and "randomness." The concept of "randomness" seems to dovetail with my attempt to highlight the event-character of the play as epiphany of form. Regarding "intoxication," however, I disagree with Caillois's use of this concept exclusively as an attribute for a past stage in the history of human play. Contemporary sports, I think, often have clearly intoxicating effects on their spectators.

35. As much as I personally prefer the stadium experience, I realize that other fans can plausibly explain why they are more interested in the sports broadcast.

36. Most of what I have said about "production of presence" and "epiphany of form" in contemporary culture could also be applied to music. From a purely quantitative angle, there is reason to believe that, not unlike sport, our exposure to music has never been greater than today.

37. See my essay, "A Farewell to Interpretation," in Materialities of Communication, pp. 389-401, esp. pp. 396-99.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v030/30.2gumbrecht.html