Sports Sunday 6: the Idea of football

Today's Sports Sunday post will do double-duty, marking the beginning of the American football season, and being a discussion of a Deleuzean "Idea" as developed in Chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition. Jeff Bell has done some wonderful posts on Deleuze in his Continental Connections Thursday series; so I thought I'd get in on the fun as well. 

Deleuze's Ideas, or "multiplicities." must be undetermined, determinable and bearing an Ideal of determination. They are transcendental, but they do not provide the conditions of possibility of objects of experience, but the conditions of the genesis of real objects.

An Idea is a set of differential elements, differential relations, and singularities. Ideas structure the intensive processes that give rise to the behavior patterns of systems, and they mark the thresholds at which systems change behavior patterns. In a word, the virtual Idea is the transformation matrix for material systems or bodies. Bodies are determined "solutions" to the "problem" that lays out the manifold options for incarnating bodies of that nature.

For Deleuze, singularities are turning points of systems; they are remarkable points as opposed to ordinary ones. This mathematical sense of singularity should be distinguished from the logical sense of singularity in which the unique is distinguished from the generic. We can combine them by saying that a mathematical singularity indicates a threshold whereby a logically unique or singular system changes behavior patterns.

Let me give you an example from the world of sports. Let's take the Idea of football games. Or better, let's start with a given, American football. What is the Idea that conditioned the genesis of American football?

Well, it would be a multiplicity of differential elements, differential relations, and singularities. The differential elements would be the players, the field, and the ball. They are differential elements because they are defined only in relation to each other. A prolate spheroid of pigskin leather is only a football in relation to the players, who are only players when the entertain a certain relation to each other and to the ball, and of course, to the field, which in turn only becomes a football field when football is played on it. The differential relations are what the players are able to do with the ball and with each other. They are differential in that they are relations of change in the elements: how they are able to move, to advance and retreat. And these relations are strewn with singularities, or sensitive points: when the ball moves between players across a certain threshold of the field, a touchdown or field goal is scored. 

But American football is only one actualization of this Idea. Changes in the elements, relations and singularities will change the game. Forbid the forward pass and blocking and you have rugby (which itself has two species, rugby league and rugby union). Make it a completely savage festival and you have either Gaelic or Australian rules football. Restrict the handling of the ball to the goalkeeper, change the shape of the goal and the field, install a penalty area around the goal and you have association football or soccer.

Now Ideas shade off into other Ideas. They are "perplicated." They are "objectively made and unmade according to the conditions which determine their fluent synthesis" (DR 187). Move soccer inside to a wooden court and require the players to dribble (but only three times) and you have team handball. Elevate the goal, make it circular, and allow as much dribbling as you want (but only from on top of the ball and only with one hand) and you have basketball. And so on.

What have we done? It's important to see first of all that we have NOT established a finite set of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a class, a set that would provide the criteria for identifying football games? "Ideas are by no means essences" (187). 

Instead, we have gone from an actualization to its conditions of genesis in a multiplicity ("vice-diction"), and then experimented with the singularities of the Idea: if we fiddle around with them, do we get a different football game (differenciation), or even a different kind of ball game (differentiation)?

Two passages from DR are relevant here. (1) "The problem of thought is not tied to essences but to the evaluation of what is important and what is not, to the distribution of singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points" (189). And (2) stupidity is "defined above all by its perpetual confusion with regard to the important and the unimportant, the ordinary and the singular"  (190).