Running with a Coyote

Poetics and the Beautiful Game David Kilpatrick Soccer fans often claim their sport is “the beautiful game.” But anyone who has ever played or watched the sport must concede that not all games are beautiful. The history of soccer tactics can be characterized as the tension between creative and result-driven ambitions. Whether or not a side emphasizes the objective of scoring or the objective of not being scored upon, the means employed to achieve either or both objectives is often a source of debate among pundits and punters. “Its football, not figure skating” is a popular phrase that dismisses the ideal in favor of a more practical approach. The will-to-win often negates creativity and sporting expression; the “best team” doesn’t always win. Nonetheless, such a result can be pleasing, even to the neutral disinterested spectator. Soccer isn’t a judged sport—the winner isn’t determined by ideal spectators whose trained eyes allow them to discern the truly great from the merely good. How then can we account for a well played game if an anti-aesthetic approach achieves the pleasurable result? Is there a method we can employ that will help determine the aesthetic quality of soccer games? Throughout this summer’s FIFA World Cup in South Africa, the use of the word “drama” was de rigueur, if non-reflective, among the professional commentators in various media. This wasn’t a critique of the “bad acting” on the part of players appealing for fouls but to convey the tension and excitement of the games as the tournament’s narrative unfolded. This isn’t unique to soccer and the term’s use extends to the vocabulary of sport marketing: “The most memorable [sport] event experiences build drama from the playing surface outward” (Mullin, Hardy, and Sutton 153). The critical evaluation of sporting events isn’t dissimilar from the assessment of theatrical events (both are, after all, forms of play). Though many philosophers of sport, such 80 Aethlon XXVII:1 / Fall 2009 / Winter 2010 as David Best, are keen to distinguish sport from art, the art of drama can provide us with a means that will allow us to judge the aesthetic value of a sporting event. Critics judge dramatic effectiveness with reference to a play’s constituent elements, first identified by Aristotle in Poetics as plot (mythos), character (ethos), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis), melody (melos), and spectacle (opsis), a critical methodology that allows for an assessment of the aesthetic appreciation of a play, but I will argue likewise allows for a clearer sense of what constitutes a truly beautiful game. I hope, then, to justify the use of the word “drama” in contemporary popular sporting discourse to demonstrate that a dramaturgical appreciation of the sporting event enhances critical engagement, while contributing to the ongoing debate regarding sport as an aesthetic concern. Indeed, I seek here to counter David Best’s denial of the use of the term “in the same sense as when it occurs in the context of discussion of a play, since the relevant convention is lacking” (123) as well as his larger claim that “it is high time we buried once for all the prolix attempts to show that sport is art” (125). While I’ll attempt to avoid the crime of prolixivity, I hope to convey why the aesthetic is a central—indeed essential—concern for the sport of soccer (if not for sport in general). Sociologist Richard Giulianotti observed more than a decade ago that “academics have contributed relatively little to our understanding of football’s playing styles and techniques” (127), and that “playing techniques, styles and their aesthetic appreciation have been notably absent from scholarly work” (129). While scholars from the social sciences might well be the intended audience for Giulianotti’s call, likewise scholars in the humanities, especially those engaged in the study of drama, can play a crucial role in exploring the aesthetic dimensions of the global game. Matthew Kent’s “Aristotle’s Favorite Sport,” makes the case that “Aristotle would approve of soccer as theater” (58) due to the unity of action (the continuum of ball in space through time as a continuum of inextricably interrelated events) and the emergence of plot, allowing for the purgation of emotions among the audience. While I disagree with Kent when he claims that a one-nil loss is “truly a tragedy,” he’s certainly onto something when he says “defeat succeeds as a form of theater” (59). Kent touches briefly on these concepts found in Aristotle’s Poetics, but I want to further the exercise by exploring how Aristotle’s identification of drama’s constituent elements may be applied and adapted as a critical methodology, one which will allow for an enhanced engagement with the aesthetic concerns the game provokes. Aristotle defines tragedy as “a representation of an action that is worth serious attention, complete in itself, and of some amplitude; in language enriched by a variety of artistic devices appropriate to the several parts of the play; presented in the form of action, not narration; by means of pity Kilpatrick/Poetics and the Beautiful Game 81 and fear bringing about the purgation of emotions” (38-9; 1449b 21-29). One might argue that the work of art is the representation of an action whereas the sporting event is action itself. However, the mimetic nature of the movements inimical to the action—indeed, each action that occurs as the action unfolds—demonstrates Aristotle’s recuperation of the mimetic from its Platonic pejorative. Just as the “instinct for imitation is […] natural to us” (35), each player is repeating the techniques learned through mimetic means: muscle memory encodes a player’s skill, allowing for control of the ball and instilling patterns of movement in space both with and without (but always in relation to) the ball. We should not commit the error of understanding the mimetic in some sort of fixed and objective conception of the real (though this isn’t to say that literary, cinematic, photographic, painted, and musical representations of sport ought not receive further attention from philosophers of sport). And this is where Best’s argument is flawed as he claims “it is an understood part of the convention that tragedy in a play happens to the fictional characters being portrayed, and not the actors, i.e. the living people taking part” (122). This distinction between the actors and the characters, the real from its re-presentation, is naïve at best, as this divided line is far from a safe assumption with modernist drama and the theatrical avant-garde. Mimesis, after all, is essentially ludic, denying any fixed and static reference of an ideal condition, state, or form. The game, then, is always already an imitation or re-presentation of the game as conditioned by the seventeen Laws of the Game with players who imitate or re-present the actions they’ve done and seen countless times before. One might argue that the game’s global appeal renders it worthy of “serious attention,” but I’d rather take a somewhat different approach and say simply that the game attracts serious attention, so it is our task then (as philosophers of sport) to understand why and refine how such attention is given. The game is “complete in itself” within its ninety odd minutes or more, depending upon the conditions of the competition. As with Western theatrical convention, the action is divided by an intermission, the conventional match having two acts, with a third act only for contests of ultimate import (ones that must decide a winner from a loser). There are several parts to the “play” of each game, which we will identify, as the play or game itself is presented not through narration (and this would indeed be a representation of the representation) but the action itself, and that there is indeed a purging of emotions among all the players, both the athletes themselves and the fans in the audience. Conflating the play with the game reminds us of the ludic nature of sport. What little we know of medieval pastimes comes to us via church and civic bans on “ludus” or play without discerning between acts of theatre or sport. Disciplinary boundaries prevent scholars of sport from communicating with their theatrical kin when their shared object of inquiry, the performative, 82 Aethlon XXVII:1 / Fall 2009 / Winter 2010 ought to be obvious. Robert E. Rinehart, however, attempts (in Players All), to break this boundary when he discusses the prevalence of the “sport-as-drama metaphor,” which he rejects with an alternative metaphor of “non-narrative formations” (25) whereby sport “is examined in terms of a postmodernist avant-garde movement” (23). Rinehart contends that “sports contests are not inherently dramaturgical,” for, he observes, “not every sports contest is a ‘masterpiece’ […] even though someone may commoditize it as such” (24). I agree with Rinehart when he claims that “consumers of […] a sport contest have become enmeshed in its linear, narrative, and dramaturgical discourse—so that the drama of sport feels, unexamined, as real as sport itself,” but just because something remains unexamined doesn’t mean that its examination ought to be neglected. Rinehart cautions that “while sport as drama as a ‘master narrative’ is rampant in popular, personal, and scholarly discourse, reliance upon the sport-as-drama metaphor limits research to narrative formations, ostracizes the study of non-narrative formations, (re) creates unexamined assumptions of linearity and causality in sport, and perpetuates hierarchy, canonization, and the privileging of scholarly over popular texts” (24-25). Odd, then, that Rinehart neglects giving a single example of such scholarly texts that commit this modernist sin of narrativity.

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