Sports Sunday 7: Women and children first!

It was meant as a sanction against a particular club, but maybe smart marketing execs at other clubs and in other sports will see the potential. Look at the joy and exuberance on the faces of these fans.

Excerpts from the CNN story: 

The Turkish Football Federation had planned to make Istanbul favorite Fenerbahce play two games in an empty stadium after fans invaded the pitch after a friendly against Ukraine's Shakhtar Donetsk during the summer, according to a Turkish Weekly report.

But new rules say those games will be open only to women and children under age 12, National Turk reports. Admission is free.

The policy got its first test Tuesday night in Istanbul, as 45,000 women and children turned out to watch Fenerbahce and Manisaspor face off in the Turkish Super League....What they were hearing was something unexpected in the usual partisan atmosphere of Fenerbahce Istanbul’s Sükrü Saracoglu stadium: cheers for the visiting team.

Players from both teams greeted their female fans before kickoff, tossing flowers into the stands, Turkish Weekly reported...

“This memory will stay with me forever. It’s not always that you see so many women and children in one game,” Fenerbahce captain Alex de Sousa said at a post-game news conference, National Turk reported.

There's so much to think about in this story: gendering practices, emotional contagion, shared joy, mirror neurons ... A good case study would unravel all sorts of fascinating dimensions to the multiplicity* actualized here, to the differential field* of which this event is a crystallization, lightning flash, or hurricane.

*"Multiplicity" and "differential field" are technical terms for Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.

"Multiplicity" means the patterns of a set of linked dynamic processes, such that a change in one process is linked to changes in other processes, along with the thresholds at which qualitative changes to the system takes place. "Differential field" is the set of material processes themselves underlying any one singular event or actualization of the multiplicity. So all hurricanes have the same patterns of links among air and water currents driven by temperature and pressure differences, while hurricanes receive proper names to indicate the singularity of their being. 

Now when we move to the social realm, we can say events are hurricanes. There's a multiplicity of "human society" with all sorts of bio-social intersections (this is in the general ballpark of Developmental Systems Theory or "eco-devo-evo"; I make a stab at thinking through some intersections of Deleuze and West-Eberhard here), while the historical reality of Turkish society would be the differential field, the matrix if you will from which this event emerges.

But what is the status of the saying "all events are hurricanes"? It's something much less than a scientific model -- we can model hurricanes now, but we can't really model revolutions, let alone smaller events like this one. But I think it's something more than a metaphor, something closer to an "image of thought," a concrete way of thinking about how things happen: they emerge from patterned differential fields when their processes hit certain thresholds. Or at least that's the wager you have to take if you want to think Deleuze as a metaphysician, and as a naturalist, materialist and realist one at that, as someone who puts forth an account of how things hold together, an account that while it can be applied to humans, is not human-centered.