Tennis and the supplement of family

With the proliferation of cameras covering big sporting events and modern editing possibilities has come more screen time devoted to inserts of spectators. At major international football competitions such as Euro 2008 the director selects from a deluge of crowd shots featuring attractive women and comedy-headwear sporting males a representative tableau of two particular niches which these two groups themselves traverse: individuals united in joy or despair. Lachrymose or merely crestfallen spectators have an enduring appeal, especially when matched to a reverse shot of defeated players collapsed on the turf. Tennis presents a different challenge to the television sports director. The fans of a Federer or Nadal are not identifiable by their adoption of a replica shirt, while the nature of stadia architecture and proportion, relative to the dimensions of the playing area means that identifying paraphernalia such as national flags are unlikely. More likely is a face-painting on the cheek of the national flag which only the most painstaking of camera operators will pick out. What is left? At Wimbledon at least it seems that the female beauty sensor has been disabled. Instead what the director favours is the family drama supplement to events on court. As mediated by the BBC the interpretation of almost every big match is channeled through a family narrative. It is one of the by products of Henmania. That and the execrable Henman Hill (I cannot bring myself to mention its new name). There has been a viral effect of this domestic prosthesis. The more a player's entourage is going to be on screen the more the tennis player is aware that the television audience is producing a particular image of the player as implicated in a domestic narrative. The Williams sisters cast of two and supporting cast has of course taken the supplement to a new level. The neutralising of the shot-reverse shot dynamic throws up an obstacle for the director. Indeed because they are sisters it could be argued that shot reverse shot between players is disabled. It is welcome however, that they perversely impact on certain of the cliches of this type of programme and so test the powers of the inane commentators who must struggle to find new ways of saying old things and must seize on, if not fabricate, any scrap of controversy to fuel conspiracy rumours and to find a reverse shot off-screen, in the unconscious.

Membranes, thresholds and the virtual

If, for Derrida, the lesson which Hamlet can teach in regard to representation is that the ghost dictates (in Spectres of Marx), for Deleuze the play offers a pedagogy of virtuality. One of the key differences between Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida in their respective approaches to texts and hermeneutics is in part clarified by Deleuze’s Logique du sens. Here, to the structuralist triad he had identified in his 1967 essay—of designation of concepts, manifestation of subjects and signification of concepts—he adds the fourth term, sense. Sense names the additional space of relation between language and objects/bodies. Sense is a transcendental field not exhausted by the operations of signification. It is, as Philip Goodchild points out, an empty place (Goodchild 1996, 38-48). By contrast, however, to the negative theology of deconstruction by which the absent process of différance produces all meanings (Derrida 1982, 6), inscription in Deleuze and Guattari is a synthesis of recording of the Body without Organs and is part of a contact with material bodies, culture and politics. The empty space works not to produce meanings, but rather to give rise to events. In the chapter of Logique du sens entitled ‘Fifteenth Series: of Singularities’, Deleuze sets out to articulate the characteristics of what he calls singularities; these are of the order of the Event, which escapes all of its actualisations/realisations, but which hovers over or under these latter as their condition and their impossible horizon. Taking his distance from the Sartrean perspective which holds on to consciousness and hence to person and individual, Deleuze wishes in fact to speak of the transcendental field, within which

emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consiousness. (Deleuze 1969/1990, 124-5/102)

Only when one acknowledges the pre-eminence of such singularities “do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental” (125/103). Since singularities, although they preside over the genesis of individuals and persons, do not exhaust the virtual through actualisations in bodies, individuals or persons, they belong to the same order as the Event. The battle, in Deleuze’s example, remains an event withdrawn from its actualisations on the field of battle per se: it is an incorporeal event. The event is non-localisable, then. Deleuze quotes Gilbert Simondon in support:

The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit...The characteristic polarity of life is at the level of the membrane; it is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists. (Simondon cited Deleuze 1969/1990, 126/104)

If below are to be found events and singularities, on the edges at the membrane are what pass for beings, bodies and subjects. In effect, however, these latter are nothing more than individuations (as opposed to presupposed individuation: see Deleuze 1969/1990, 128/105) within a transcendental field. The idea of incorporeal events, then, while attesting to sense and retaining this in common with phenomenology, significantly departs from phenomenology in so far as force is returned the status foreclosed in the phenomenological tradition.[1]
[1] It may however be true then that Derrida continues a project that can be thought of as an ongoing radicalisation of concepts and problems introduced by Husserl (Moran 2000, 436-7), and that in that respect deconstruction is a phenomenology.

Academic hoaxes of our time # 2

...terrifyingly true.

Reading Holby City, CALL FOR PAPERS

The editors of this forthcoming volume of essays from Palgrave Macmillan welcome submissions on any of the broadly designated themes listed below:

• Holby City at the crosscroads of utopia and dystopia
• Holby's physical relationships: masked polysexuality
• The surgical mask as subculture identity for medics
• Foucaultian perspectives on the architecture of Holby Central
• The apprenticeship of corporeality: inscribing in the flesh
• The patient as carcereal flea
• Holby to the power of three: performativity, unveiling and the medical gaze
• Disciplinary continuum: From Holby to Holby Blue

Submissions are not limited to the above. All articles should be 5,000 words maximum, including notes and bibliography.

Please address all correspondence to Dr. Smite Corpuscle, annex 359, University of Antibodies, Police/Corps/Esprit Interface Associates LTD, PO Box 21345, UK. email: smite.corpuscle@ant.ac.uk

Summer festival

Edwyn Collins did not sing the lines "Yes, yes, yes, it's a summer festival/A truly detestable summer festival" at Glastonbury last weekend - at least this what I am willing to wager. He has earned the privilege both of this about turn and repression of his back catalogue. No-one else would be forgiven this, but he is. He is. (To be subjected to psychoanalytic translation...that's what I call digging it).

Du Christ aux 'home counties'

Press and media reaction to Andy Murray's interaction with the Centre Court spectators has been divided. Some welcome his gesticulation after each hard-won point painfully garnered during his comeback against Gasquet, others lament the further decline of the decorum for which Wimbledon is anecdotally renowned, the most enduring symbol of which is that part of the sartorial fascism which decrees that 'ladies' be clearly identifiable as such by virtue of wearing dresses - a division of the sensible which many women players can unfortunately be relied upon to endorse - and that men should be, well, and here is where the divide manifests itself, manly in one way or another. Their privilege of course is to be able to choose between codes of masculinity. Manly, if effete, restraint a la Federer or manly battle-cry on home or adopted turf. The former was introduced by timhenam in an attempt to extract every last ounce (not gram) from the home counties and public school escapee/releasee contingent in order to help him on his way to the elusive title. But now with added actual perceptible bicep (just feel the quality) courtesy of Andy Murray. The difference between Nadal and Murray is that the former has his permanently on display (you imagine him in a customised sleeveless dinner jacket out sabadonoche-ing). A tanned armour-body continuum, a physique which has soared free of earth and taken on a Christic transcendence (yet made flesh), while Murray, with the round-necked T-shirt of the bedroom teenager in colder climes reveals his upon victory in an ironic riposte to those who would doubt that he exists, that he has presence, that he has staying power. timhenman retired at 29, JC at 33. Sampras? Who said Sampras? Borg retired only once and perversely early, but the most (paradoxically) jesuit of players he has never really been allowed completely to withdraw. He is there when the image of Wimbledon is viewed from a certain angle, like those wonderful pound shop images of the nazzarine.

Academic hoaxes of our time # 1

...but terrifyingly they are all probably true:

Reinvention: The Journal of Undergraduate Research