Ungrounding Homo Ludens: on Agamben and Modern Sports

JPS, 2006

In his seminal work, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argues persuasively that sport is a form of play. This view is widely accepted among sport philosophers today, as evidenced by the use of terms such as ‘nonserious,’ ‘autotelic,’ and ‘gratuitous’ to describe the subject of our study. At the same time this play-paradigm seems at odds with the modern world, which takes sports very seriously, puts them in the service of deliberate ends, and views them (or competition at least) as essential for human thriving. Indeed our modern use of sport seems to better resemble ancient Greece, where athletic contest (agōn) served specific political and educational goals. Huizinga claims that the ancient Hellenes simply became unaware of their contests’ autotelic character (5: 30–31); my own concern is that we moderns are becoming unaware of–or indifferent to–sport’s contemporary ends.1 Insofar as we still value the social and educational potential of sport in the modern world, we can benefit from a study of its corresponding function in the ancient world. What my own study of these phenomena reveals is that sport’s social and educational benefits derive not from its playful character, but from its philosophical origins as a knowledge-seeking activity.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2001

Sport is a form of game. In games we waste time, energy, and ingenuity on pointless and childish tasks. Even the most performance-oriented game remains unproductive. It is all show, a display of excellence for the sake of excellence in activities that are completely irrelevant to life. That which is not, or is no longer, important for "real" life is precisely that which is boisterously celebrated: physical power, skill. Some suspect that there is something wrong with people who are fascinated with this sort of thing. Perhaps it is a form of psychological immaturity, obsessive behavior, or an infantile compulsion for order? Alternatively, is it a form of mass hysteria urged upon us and manipulated by entertainment giants? However, none of these reductionist explanations makes the extraordinary attraction of sports in modernity understandable. This attraction points rather to elements that aptly appeal to modern persons, not in their aberrations, regressions, and infantilisms, but to the very basis of their scale of values and to the heart of their culture. However, how can we be appealed to by that which seems irrelevant to life and apparently is without any meaningful purpose? Precisely because the game is outside of life, and is eminently not real, it can be a symbol. Because it is nothing, it can mean everything. The way that modern Western persons experience relationships to themselves, to their fellow persons, to nature, and to society is pregnantly staged in their games. We catch the modern person in an unguarded moment, a moment of spontaneous fervor, when engaged in activities that are not in service of urgently vital interests. Sports could be compared to that other unguarded moment when the censor and the demands of reality are weakened: the dream. The game is a lived phantasm. 1 Moreover, there is a second reason why sports can so accurately stage modernity. Being separate from life, the game is not affected by life's ambiguities either. In daily life every meaning is ambiguous, every value stained, every task a risk, every victory an injustice, every law an oppression. Not so in a game. The rules of the game separate it from this dark everyday ambiguity. Amidst the confusion of life, it offers what Huizinga calls a 'limited perfection'. 2 All ambiguity is cleared away. The game is ruled by the clarity and univocality of a closed formalism. The rules are logically exhaustive. Every case is solvable. One could object that real games are never completely separated from life. Actors are real human beings with their own idiosyncrasies, their own

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2017

We are going to celebrate 10th anniversary of the European Association for Sociology of Sport (eass) which was founded in November 2001. There were organized successful scientific conferences of this Association – in Vienna (2002), Rzeszów and Łańcut (2004), Jyväskylä (2006), Münster (2007), Bled (2008), Rome (2009) and Porto (2010). A factography of the events is shown in the Part 4th, the eass history in photos – from Vienna to Rome. Under the auspices of eass there were published some valuable books. This is the next of the series. A part of papers presented in Rome (25 selected works) constitutes the content of the monograph. The 6th Eass Conference, held in Rome in May 2009 and dedicated to “Sport, Bodies, Identities”, aimed at focalizing surveys, studies and methodological approaches of the Social Sciences oriented to draw a wide-range representation of sport as one of the most important, expressive and socially relevant representations of body. It means that sport was considered as a privileged instrument and a strategy for producing both individual and collective identities, sense and belonging. By this point of view, the main challenge that the involved scholars had to face was to support, on one hand, a properly sociological perspective to the topics, and, on the other, enriching and integrating it by different scientific contributions involving all the domains of Social Sciences. Reviewing the contributions of the participants submitted to the readers, thanks to the cooperation between the main academic institutions which supported the programme – the University of Rzeszów (Professor Wojciech J. Cynarski and Professor Kazimierz Obodyński) and University of Cassino (Professor Nicola Porro), we can score an important point in favour of an advancement of such a critical, controversial and culturally debated question. The Conference held in Rome under the prestigious tutorship of the Eass President, Professor Georg Anders, can be considered at the same time as the arrival point of a first phase of involvement of the Sociology of sport in the intriguing domain of body and bodily experience and as the virtual starting point for a more courageous and systematic analysis of sport by the point of view of the Sociology of body. This statement implies a further reflection, regarding Sociology at large, its effort in fighting the tendency to enclose the discipline into the narrow and unfruitful perspective of hyperspecialistic approaches and against the intellectual dictatorship of the so called hypheneted sociologies. The body, and the bodies in action as narrated by the sports experience, can represent a privileged domain for an epistemological revolution. A turning point required by prominent scholars who have underlined the need and the urgency of revisiting the mission itself of contemporary Sociology. A privileged domain because body and sport are placed at the common set of nature and culture, man and society, space and time, matter and mind. Nothing is more personal than the body, and the way we represent it deeply contributes to the establishment of our individual identity. Despite the social control to which it is submitted, it is also the place of individuality, the material substratum of physical existence and social relationships. Through the history of the body, or better, of the bodies in action, it can be possible to tell the history of mankind, its itineraries from primitive communities to civilization, until modernity and the so-called hypermodernity. Pierre Bourdieu described the body as “a language from which we are spoken”, an intellectual provocation that is put in a continuity line with both Michel Foucault’s and Norbert Elias’s researches. Being impossible now to deepen philosophical premises of this statement, it could be useful to wonder, with Bourdieu, that the language could speak the body of sport and wonder, with Foucault, if the analysis of sportization doesn’t represent a possible point of attack for philosophical criticism, that are founded on the dichotomy between body and mind. Only in this way it will be possible to welcome the recommendations of Elias to avoid any reductionistic representation of social action and therefore of sportization. We cannot question the body without first distancing from traditional visions. Neither can we settle down in a Sociology incline to the “reduction to state” (Zustandreduktion) of social courses. While we have to adopt that dynamic and dialectic representation of social system that Elias identifies as figuration, in Simmel’s honour. From this perspective, that tries to combine Weber and Simmel with the civilization theory of Elias and with the anti-metaphysical criticism of Foucault and Bourdieu, the social action space is covered by the body. In sports, as well as in sexuality and in illnesses, the body represents a system of meanings. Sportized bodies are not just representation. They create a social construction. Sportization, in fact, cannot ignore formulation, transmission, and the continuous perfecting of practices and body techniques. With this formula, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss defined the “ways how men, in any society, learn to use their bodies”. Medicine, hygiene, medical theories, the use of physicalness during leisure time activities, but also the rules enforced by the fashion or by publicity, food taste and dietetic regulations belong to the social action field of the body. They produce specific body techniques. They have been matched and interconnected too with sportization courses and they contributed collective imagination to outline modern sportized bodies in a more usual technical action of physical modelling. The body was and is at the centre of a centenary struggle for power and amongst powers. By becoming, all human societies bring into being new taboos through the body and suppress the old ones, stir up new fears while leaving behind old ones. Current affairs provide dramatic examples. A new generation of kamikaze terrorists embodies (in its actual meaning) a collective nightmare, even more worrying because based on the denial of the instinct of self-preservation itself. The nightmare takes shape through the body of killer martyrs, it is designated as a metaphor place of a root cultural conflict. Moreover, the body gives evidence to the disenchantment towards the mythologies of hypermodern science. The society of the risk produces both the narcissistic illusion of a perfect body and the mass hypochondria of the target body. In the threat to the integrity of our individual bodies, our appeased civilization fears come up. Vulnerability of the body breaks off the illusion of immortality and transforms everybody of us into possible victims and virtual persecutors. This may be grounds for pathologies at venereal transmission or in the case of traffic risks, weapon violence or the endemic persistence of hunger, for illnesses or for the consequences of addiction to alcohol and drug. The body of hypermodernity is a prisoner of sexual insecurity and of dietary uneasiness. It is a body free from the repressive puritan ethic, and at the same time a body bought and sold to prostitution. It is a body modelled by surgery or genetically manipulated, deformed by caloric excesses or shaped by the rituals of diet and gyms. The body transformed in consumer religion and freedom, but also subject and object of the worrying contradiction of a contingent immortality. Late modernity raised it to preference instrument of a new inter-society ascesis, that enhances human condition and its diversity in comparison to animal world through the trait of the species, which is consciousness to own a body and not just to be a body, as Berger and Luckman emphasized in the late Sixties. The representation and the social construction of the body are two unavoidable elements of a civilization theory. According to Elias, especially close observation of sportization dynamics allows a social theory of emotions. A sociology of sportization is able to make the “unsaid” of Western civilization come out, because it makes clear how bodies – sportized bodies – are pervaded by the social element. This intuition includes a criticism of mentalistic epistemologies, from Plato to Descartes, not less root than that of Foucault. Unavoidably, it lives on the contribution of psychoanalysis. Freud, first of all, distinguished the material body, the inner body (Körper) from the experience body, as the source of excitement (Leib). The first one is the visible and tangible body, widespread on the space, with its anatomical coherence and subject to the compulsory logic of physiology. The other one is the body origin of life, subject of individuation. That is the body is historicized according to different sport corporeity examples described by the process of sportization and civilization. The body reflects main social forms and symbolic apparatuses of Western sportization, their relationships with the power, culture, media. This is why the sportized body is, by definition, able to take up different forms, representations and aesthetical canons. It is polymorph: there are many sportized bodies, and there are many and different cultural technical and expressive manners of sport activities. Or rather: the body identifies meaningful variations on the issue also if it refers to only one discipline. There is not a body of athletics or track and field disciplines, but a number of different bodies in motion of sprinters, jumpers or long-runners. Moreover, sportization doesn’t deal just with practiced disciplines, but also with the widen and different frameworks that represent sport events, such as social facts. The rhythmic advancing of a gymnastic choreography describes sportized bodies in the form of an anonymous fellow, of a mass-gymnast...

This article aims at debating the status of truth taken on by sport in Brazil, which produces it as a right that is guaranteed by the State to every citizen. Methodology included some tools of Foucaltian genealogy, which is absolutely imbricated with archeology. Laws and decrees implemented since the 1988 Constitution were adopted as a corpus of analysis. The work found many statements that make up a truth regime that seeks to produce sport as a naturally accepted right that is always present in the lives of all Brazilians. Resumo: Este artigo tem como objetivo problematizar o estatuto de verdade assumido pelo esporte no Brasil, que o produz como um direito, garantido pelo Estado a todo e qualquer cidadão. Em termos de investimento metodológico, foram acionadas algumas ferramentas da genealogia foucaultiana, absolutamente imbricada com a arqueologia, adotando-se, como corpus de análise, as leis e decretos que foram implementados a partir da Constituição de 1988. Ao finalizar este tr...

The International Journal of the History of Sport 29:13, 2012, pp. 1936–1938, 2012

Philosophical Perspectives on Play , 2016

Even among participants, physical activity and sport seem run through with paradox-the drive (rather than walk or cycle) to the club match or the gym, the joy of movement and the focus on repetitive regularity and performance in placeless stadia and fitness centres, the claims of an 'endorphine rush' and bliss in a sterile, emotionless place devoid of leisure, and in many cases pleasure. The significiance of this paradox may be seen in public health responses to the lack of physical activity as an issue connected to a global rise of obesity, diabetes, and other health problems (Kohl et al. 2012; Min Lee et al. 2012). Many public health policies intended to stimulate physical activity, such as the WHO global physical activity strategy (WHO 2010), do not deliver on expectations. Public health attempts to understand and solve the problem of inactivity tend to rely on the behavioral sciences that frame the issue primarily in terms of self-efficacy and self-motivation of individuals (Isen & Reeve 2006), environmental factors (Van Lenthe et al. 2010) or the bio-medical sciences that focus on physiological condition and motor skills (Hamilton et al. 2008). These perspectives fail to unravel the phenomenon of becoming more physically active. Furthermore, some of the philosophical limitations of these approaches are suggested by MacLean's (2011) argument that the neo-liberal prioritization of choice makes physical inactivity a legitimate response to exhortations to do more physical activity. Paradoxically, it seems that we are physically active because we want to play. The joy of sport is within sport itself (in the game) and not in some abstract desire to move, so it is joy * This chapter draws on research carried out as part of the project The Power of Play. A philosophical anthropological investigation of the relation between play and physical (in)activity among adults in various body cultures. PR 13-01. Maastricht University, Department of Health, Ethics and Society. 2 The Power of Play. A philosophical anthropological investigation of the relation between play and physical (in)activity among adults in various body cultures. PR 13-01. Maastricht University, Department of Health, Ethics and Society. 3 Other forms of this argument may be seen in Bateman (2011) and Fuchs (in this volume). 4 Following Caillois, we do not maintain this distinction. 5 Consider for instance Gros (2014) 6 See YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdf6D19Etmc (accessed 6/12/14) 7 See also Dönmez in this volume regarding freedom and rule compliance.

2021

The focus of the book Philosophy of Sport. Emergence and Development of a Discipline is on a drawing and critical analysis of the history and development of the philosophy of sport as a separate branch of philosophy, but also the ethics and bioethics of sport as its key subdisciplines. In the first chapter of the book, the author discusses the question of what sport is. He first presents and critically considers the definitions of play, game, and sport as set out by B. H. Suits in his masterpiece Grasshopper. Games, Life and Utopia and some of his articles. Namely, Suits’ definitions and understandings of the “tricky triad” (play, games, sport) are the foundation and starting point of the philosophy of sport, as well as the framework for understanding sports and all its problems and issues. In relation to Suits', the author also considers the definitions of Huizinga, Wittgenstein, Fink, Guttman and Nguyen, and lay the foundations for the philosophy of play and games as separate discipline or area of philosophical consideration. The author concludes that the definition of sport cannot be provided in a logical and unambiguous way. Therefore, he turns to consideration and critical examination of the different characterizations and conceptualizations of sport presented in the literature – testing and contesting, the spirit of sports, the integrity of sports, Olympic sports. The chapter concludes with the author’s evaluation of the literature on the defining sport. In the second chapter, the author gives his definition of the philosophy of sport and a brief overview of all sub-branches developed so far. Then, he presents his own view of the history of the philosophy of sport in three phases. The first is the Ancient Phase or ‘the ancient Mediterranean roots of the discipline’, where he immediately points out that it is incorrect to call ‘ancient competitive games to honour the gods’ – a sport. Namely, sport per se, as well as its name, originate from the 19th century or over 2000 years after the ancient period. As the content relevant to the philosophy of sport in Ancient Greek period, he finds depictions of competitive games in the Iliad and Odyssey. Furthermore, in the works of Plato and Aristotle, he finds numerous passages that speak of the important role of physical exercise and competitive games in honour of the gods, especially in the terms of education. The second phase the author calls the Pre-Disciplinary Phase, which on the one hand, includes the post-ancient history of philosophy as the pool from which sport-philosophy pulls out relevant authors and works for better philosophical consideration and understandings of the sport, and on the other hand, includes the theory of sport in the 19th and 20th Century which is the forerunner of the philosophy of sport as a philosophical discipline. The third is the disciplinary phase that begins in 1972 – the point in time in which the philosophy of sport became a separate and distinct branch of general philosophy. Within the disciplinary phase, the author points out and critically examine the key points of development. At the end of the chapter, he gives a brief overview of the development of sports philosophy outside the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. In the third chapter, the author critically reflects and considers the role of William John Morgan in the development of the discipline. The author identifies Morgan as one who has made key contributions to the development and global spread of the philosophy of sport in several ways. He puts emphasis on Morgan’s consideration of economization and commodification of the modern sport as one of the fundamental reasons for almost all problems of today's sport. The author makes the second emphasis on the possible solutions for sports, which Morgan finds in sport practice communities and the application of J. Habermas’ deliberation process and J.-P. Sartre’s discourse ethics. Finally, the author brings his own addition to the solution for a (more) moral sport – proper upbringing and education. In the fourth chapter, the author critically examines and considers the ethics of sport, a dominant field or subdiscipline of the philosophy of sport from the 1990s. Firstly, he puts careful and detailed attention to the (development of) contours and divisions of the ethics of sport, where he makes a claim that in the ethics of sport there are actually only four fields of consideration: competition, enhancements, gender issues, and social issues in sport. Then he determines the key points in the development of the ethics of sport and puts critical considerations of them. Finally, he elaborates on possible directions for further development. The fifth chapter brings critical discussion over the normative theories of sport and of the internal or intrinsic values of sport. The author provides a critical account of the theories of formalism, conventionalism, and internalism in five variants: W. J. Morgan’s internalism, J. S. Russell’s interpretivism, R. Simon’s broad internalism, S. Kretchmar’s pluralistic internalism, and S. MacRae’s shallow interpretivism. The author points out, and this is mostly unrecognized in the discipline, that W. J. Morgan was in fact the originator of internalism on one hand, and on the other hand, that he got the idea from A. MacIntyre’s book After Virtue. Here, the author presents his critical understandings of the internal values of sport and suggests that they should be called intrinsic because they are not only internal but, moreover, essential. After the critical observation and evaluation of the debate between the proponents of rationally oriented broad internalism whose aim is to rationally extract the essence of sport and use it as normative guidance on the one side, and Morgans emphasis on the view that there is no essence of sport and that we need to historicize and socialize internal values on the other side, the author puts the emphasis on the possible solutions or ways out of the debate. Thus, on the one hand, he presents the (new) model of intrinsic values in sports that he has developed: intersubjective, emotional, spiritual, sensual, cognitive and ethical. On the other hand, he expresses a clear position on the impossibility of formulating intrinsic values of sports except through personalized narratives of sports practitioners. Finally, he presented three directions of possible exits from the current situation. In the sixth chapter, the author focuses on the bioethics of sport subdiscipline. A the beginning, he offers a (new) definition of the bioethics of a sport that would correspond to all present understandings of bioethics. He then presents a brief history (which is indeed very short) and considers the thematic spectrum in two different understandings of the bioethics of sport, which the author calls narrow bioethics of sport and broad bioethics of sport. In a narrow version, the concept of bioethics as the new medical ethics the term bio is reduced to biomedicine and biotechnology. Thus, the thematic scope is pretty narrow, including eight groups of issues: sports medicine, health, doping, genes, biotechnology, gender, Paralympics, and transhumanism. In a broad version, the term bio is understood as bios or life and refers not only to issues of human life but also to non-human and to all the life forms in general. Thematic spectre is thus very wide: human body issues, animal use, environmental issues, danger and threat issues, psychological and socio-political-economic issues, and the issues of ethical committees and codes in sports… Furthermore, the author defines the bioethics of sport as the one that deals with and solves the most difficult cases of sport today, but also as the one that creates and develops scenarios for the future of the sport. In that regard, the author analyzes cases of doping, cyborgization, intersexuality and the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, in his view of the future of sport, he recognizes and elaborates ten scenarios for the future development of sport. In the final, seventh chapter, the author brings the first history of philosophy, ethics and bioethics of sport in Croatia through three aspects: 1) organized classes at universities, 2) published publications with specific topics, and 3) organized conferences and gatherings. At the very end, the author brings several scenarios for possible further development.