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Journal of the Philosophy of Sport

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Sport as a drama
Lev Kreft Version of record first published: 05 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Lev Kreft (2012): Sport as a drama, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 39:2, 219-234 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2012.725898

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Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, Vol. 39, No. 2, October 2012

SPORT AS A DRAMA
Lev Kreft

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Argument of this text is that: to develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life; to start with aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful of pure aesthetics but with the dramatic; to analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance; to get at the meaning of sport as a drama, we have to discuss different meanings drama has in theory and everyday communication; to map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first, and its potential as spectacle later. To proceed with the argument, we have to take into account contemporary state of aesthetics, recent development of aesthetics of everyday life, and theory of performance, together with Bernard Suits definition of game, Gadamers vy-Strauss account on conjunctive and disjunctive ritual. idea of play, and Le

KEYWORDS aesthetics of sport; the dramatic; everyday life; drama; theater and sport; performance

Sport can be noble, nasty, attractive, beautiful, aggressive, boring, educative, healthy, daring, ugly, graceful Some of these epithets may be aesthetic, some may be not. In principle, everything concerning sport could be examined from aesthetic point of view as well. But what key can open the box with heading Aesthetics of Sport? Which of aesthetic attributes is crucial for philosophical examination of sport? How to think sport aesthetically? Here is my argument: (1) To develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life. (2) To start with aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful or pure aesthetics but with the dramatic. (3) To analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance.
ISSN 0094-8705 print/ISSN 1543-2939 online/12/020219-16 2012 IAPS http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2012.725898

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(4) To get at the meaning of sport as a drama, we have to discuss different meanings drama has in theory and everyday communication (drama as action, drama as complex action, drama as mimesis of action, drama as theatrical form and institution). (5) To map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first (body involvement in action, the role of actor/athlete in sport performance, imitation and pretense in sport, dramatic aesthetics of involvement in sport), and its potential as spectacle after.

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1. Sport and Aesthetics of Everyday Life

As Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens (1985) proposal for new philosophical discipline, aesthetics appeared in 1735 to fill in the missing part of logic: examination of laws and rules of sensual and perceptive knowledge. While existing part of logic treats what is common to a group of objects as their denominator and concept, aesthetics as logic of the sensual offers knowledge of particular, concrete object from all aspects accessible to sensual experience. The work of art is perfection of sensual verbal communication because it communicates individual, concrete and particular aspects of sensual knowledge. Unexpectedly, introduced as humble discipline of lower abilities, aesthetics became philosophical success story: Anyone who inspects the history of European philosophy since the Enlightenment must be struck by the curiously high priority assigned by it to aesthetic questions. (Eagleton 1990, 1). During this process, however, it experienced many reductions, to become pure aesthetics, religion of beauty and of beautiful art. This reductionism became target of criticism from time to time, as did its tendency to lose any contact with actual contemporary art. When art itself left realms of institutionalized beauty, and clearly showed its wish to get back to life again from its lofty place at metaphysical heights, and when everyday reality experienced aestheticization, be it with commodity fetishism or beautification of environment, aesthetics had to change its scope from artistics (philosophy of art) and calistics (philosophy of the beautiful) to much broader field of all kinds of pleasant and unpleasant sensitivity again. During second half of the twentieth century, aesthetics went through process of self-criticism which exposed all its reductionisms one after another, and even self-accusation of philosophical disenfranchisement of art (Danto 1998, 6380). It was found guilty of missing all aesthetic phenomena but artistic ones, and of treating art in a metaphysical manner which should be abandoned long ago. Jean-Marie Schaeffer criticized and examined history of aesthetic and its contemporary fate (Schaeffer 2000, Schaeffer 2006) to get rid of metaphysical speculation which occupied at least

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continental aesthetics for around 250 years, and to prevent further reduction of aesthetic dimension to artistic dimension (Schaeffer 2006, 23). Terry Eagleton found out similar consequences of ideology of the aesthetic as Arthur Danto did of philosophical disenfranchisement of art:
Aesthetics is thus always a contradictory, self-undoing sort of project, which in promoting the theoretical value of its object risks emptying it of exactly that specificity or ineffability which was thought to rank among its most precious features. The very language which elevates art offers perpetually to undermine it. (Eagleton 1990, 23)

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Wolfgang Welsch introduced his effort to develop aesthetics beyond aesthetics with this characterization of aesthetics:
In short, aesthetics is considered as artistics, as an explication of art with particular attention to beauty. I however, as the title of my paper indicates, intend to advocate an understanding of aesthetics which goes beyond this traditional understanding, beyond the scope of artistics. (Welsch 1995)

This criticism, however well founded, could be itself guilty of another kind of reductionism, namely, getting rid of metaphysical flowers but forgetting to pay attention to chains which were ideologically covered by these flowers. Metaphysics of art was, as Herbert Marcuse brought out in his case against socialist realism and Soviet ideological regime, traditionally the chief refuge for the still unrealized ideas of human freedom and fulfillment (Marcuse 1961, 113). Twelve years later, Eagleton somehow repeats this caveat in the context of postmodernity:
There are now, to parody the case a little, those who would appear to believe that sometime around 1970 (or was it with Saussure?) we suddenly woke up to the fact that all of the old discourses of reason, truth, freedom and subjectivity were exhausted, and that we could now move excitedly into something else. (Eagleton 1990, 415)

To add the final blow, Michael Kelly, editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, searching for reasons that so many invited authors did not want to contribute to a book on aesthetics, found out that even in its most (post)modern and sophisticated edition, aesthetic theories like those of Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida or Danto, have the problem of iconoclasm, by which I mean a combination of disinterest and distrust in art (Kelly 2003, xi). During its historical process of reduction aesthetics became artistics, but of such a kind that it became inadequate for its own object of examination. But this is another story. What aesthetics as it was cannot support is aesthetics of sport, because to put aesthetics of sport under

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canonization of the pure aesthetic and of artistic metaphysical beauty could only mean to treat sport in analogy with pure art, or even to argue (unsuccessfully) that sport is pure art. Among proposals for new aesthetic approach beyond reductionism the most all-embracing is development of aesthetics of everyday life. The idea of everyday is at the same time in opposition to metaphysical division between art and life typical for pre-avantgarde modernism in art, and in philosophical opposition to scientific view of the world which originates from Husserls phenomenology. In this direction, special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy on nkova phenomenological study of sport opened some new perspectives (Mart and Parry 2011). Some thoughts on aesthetics of everyday life were included in broader studies of everyday life or practice of everyday developed by different philosophers who did not belong exclusively to phenomenological school of thought, for instance, Michel de Certeau (Certeau 1984), Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre 2008), and Agnes Heller (Heller 1984). During last few decades, new studies appeared which focus on aesthetics of everyday life specifically, as those by Ellen Dissanayake (Dissanayake 1996), Ossi Naukkarinen (Naukkarinen 1998), Crispin Sartwell (Sartwell 1995), Yuriko Saito (Saito 2007) and a group of authors included in Andrew Lights and Jonathan M. Smiths The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Light and Smith 2005). Most elaborated and systematic approach is found in Katya Mandokis study Everyday Aesthetics. In the first four chapters, she submits existing aesthetic discipline to criticism which should open a way for everyday aesthetics (Mandoki 2007, 142). Concerning problems of definition of the aesthetic, disciplinary location of aesthetics, and distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art, she opts for aesthetics as multidisciplinary field of elusive phenomenon difficult to define (Mandoki 2007, 6). What we can do is marking its boundaries despite its blurred edges (Mandoki 2007, 6). Among aesthetics fetishes, three are most distinguished and venerated: beauty, art work, and aesthetic object. She calls them fetishes because they represent reification of subjective relation to object into object itself, which constitutes aesthetics manner of anthropomorphizing things and investing them with human qualities. The most deep-rooted and problem ridden fetish of aesthetics (Mandoki 2007, 10) is the aesthetic object. Term itself is already an oxymoron since the aesthetic denotes, by definition and etymology, the capacity to perceive, appreciate, enjoy, and experience (Mandoki 2007, 10). Therefore, the aesthetic object is a product of an aesthetic relation that a subject establishes with it, and not the reverse (the subject is not the product of the object) (Mandoki 2007, 12). Beside problems and fetishes, aesthetics produced its myths. There are many, like opposition between art and reality, or between aesthetics and everyday life; installing disinterestedness as inevitable characteristics of aesthetic attitude; and universality of beauty preventing pluralism of culturally conditioned differences to be acknowledged on equal

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terms. Among these myths is also synonymity of art and aesthetics built on the ideology of art which seals off all non-aesthetic aspects of artistic production (Mandoki 2007, 30) and shoves all aesthetic aspects of non-artistic production aside as impure, therefore non-aesthetic. Also, myth of aesthetic experience is in itself another oxymoron, because experience is aesthetic, sensual and perceptive. We can speak of artistic experience, so that We can consider as well that there are sports experiences, sexual, religious, touristic experiences we may have when practicing sport, sex, religion, or travelling (Mandoki 207, 34). Finally, aesthetics as it was developed through 250 years of existence, is afraid of undesirable aesthetic experiences, putting beautiful under inspection and leaving ugly alone, not to speak of disgust, the abject and similar aesthetic categories. Tendency towards construction of separated metaphysical world of pure aesthetic pushed away all everyday impurities, preventing aesthetics to become what its start promised: investigation into aesthetic (i.e. sensually perceptive) comprehension in its wholeness. To demarcate aesthetics beyond traditional aesthetics with its reductions, Katya Mandoki proposes aesthesis denominating processes that involve the subject as a live being open and receptive to the world (Mandoki 2007, xi), so that aesthetics is the study of the conditions of aesthesis. Aesthetics refers to the particular nature of subjectivity that makes it sensitive, receptive, or porous to its environment (Mandoki 2007, 48). This is very broad field, however, and covers not only human receptiveness but all living beings, and all their contacts with the world: the whole life. To give aesthetics less broad and undistinguished field of examination, I propose that aesthetics should deal with those sensitive openness and receptiveness where self-awareness of being alive is perceived or felt. The joy of being alive was proposed as a starting point of aesthetics by Jean-Marie Guyau as a component of our relationship with the world, and source of our striving for the fullness of life (Guyau 1927, 42). This does not mean that all our sensations and perceptions are aesthetically relevant, but it means that all our sensations and perceptions can become aesthetically relevant under certain conditions (Guyau 1904, 37). What kind of conditions? ovsky Prague Linguistic School and its leading aesthetic expert Jan Mukar distinguished practical functions of our relationship with the world from the aesthetic function. According to him, aesthetic function makes us aware of being-in-the-communication and of being-in-the-world as bodily, sensual beings because it turns attention from informational content of communication to the way we are in the world: it is a sign of existence of non-conceptual reflection present in our sensorial, sensual and perceptive touch with the world ovsky 1986, 89). The aesthetic function can appear anywhere and at (Mukar any time, on purpose or by chance, and it can accompany other functions, support other functions, or even, as in modern Western art, dominate over

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other, more practical function. It is indeed autonomous (i.e. not oriented towards our practical hold on the world) and subjective, as traditional aesthetics claimed already, but reduced its claim only to pure aesthetic which resides in disinterested aestheticism of modern art (Bourdieu 1992, 465509). But it is not individually subjective. Quite the contrary: the aesthetic function appears in social and historical context of collective subjectivity. Mandokis elaborated version of aesthetics of everyday life actually includes sport into its scope as part of socio-aesthetics which is divided into prosaics and poetics. Prosaics is aesthetics of daily life, and sport belongs to it. She does not approve of Wolfgang Welschs proposal to accept sport as species of art, but admits that they have their similarities because sport, like the art, is a professional public performance for contemplation and enthusiastic, even empathic, participation of the public (Mandoki 2007, 84). The difference between them lies in their semantic and syntactic density (Mandoki 2007, 191), where art is multiple and complex and sport is not (which is debatable, especially if we confront contemporary art and contemporary sport). In sports, it doesnt really matter how a point is obtained as long as it sticks to the rules of the game (Mandoki 2007, 192): how arts get to their end is for them more important than getting there, with sports it is the other way around. And sports, oriented towards winning, are praxis performed in live; their dominant symbol is triumph. This reduction of sport and sport aesthetics to professional spectacles with audience demanding triumph proves that even within aesthetics of everyday life the place of aesthetics of sport still has to be developed, furnished and secured and such reductionisms seriously questioned. On one side, it is important to note that sport, even if understood in terms of global association sports (which excludes many local sport practices and games which are not member of Olympic family), covers much greater territory than just professional sport games. More important from aesthetic point of view (even if lesser semantic and syntactic density than in art is accepted because we still compare in-live performance of sport cricket, for instance with condensed performance of traditional theater) is another aspect of sport as praxis: it means that sport is practiced by living person(s) and not by theatrical dramatis personae, and that before aesthetic pleasure it conveys to its public there is aesthetic pleasure it evokes in athletes themselves, involved in sport with their selves, body and soul included. This transports us to the question which kind of aesthetic pleasure dominates in sport.

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2. The Dramatic and Sport 2.1. Drama and Dramatic

At the beginnings of aesthetics of sport as a discipline, among first attempts were those which put in front comparison with art, understood in terms of estheticisms pure aesthetic, and in terms of beauty as the most

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important category. David Best (1980) was more than persuasive in his efforts to dismiss such approach which, in extreme cases, put an equation between sport and art. His proposal to distinguish purposeful and aesthetic sports, however useful for this dismissal of previous aesthetics of sport false approach, is not useful enough because it does not allow searching for general aesthetic dimension(s) of sport as such: it seems to claim that sport, in general, is not aesthetic. If we look for a way out, we have to start, then, at most general level that of game as such. And there is no better way to touch philosophical account of playing a game than to quote Bernard Suits:
To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goal), using only means permitted by rules (lusory means), where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where the rules are accepted because they make possible such activity (lusory attitude). I also offer simpler, and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (Suits 2005, 4555)

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There is something generally dramatic about game: voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. In ordinary life we can do without obstacles gladly: life goes on smoothly, as intended, planned and wished for. In a game, we accept unnecessary obstacles just for the sake of it, because to play a game can be attractive only if it is not too easy and simple to achieve its purpose. But what, aesthetically speaking, is the dramatic? Before postmodernism, modernism was quite a vague notion. To find more about drama and the dramatic, it might help to look into their borders and limits as explained in Postdramatic Theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann (Lehmann 2006). Postdramatic theater, as one could expect, consists of who knows how many different ways, some of them not dramatic, some of them not even theater any more, and some of them still more traditionally oriented. Before that, there was more unified model of theatrical fiction: an event embraced into meaningful whole represented with the help of hierarchically used manifold artistic means governed by spoken word. If we leave insight into what happened in this fictional Garden of Eden aside, we are confronted with different meanings of drama and the dramatic. Sometimes it seems that drama is used as designation for modern or bourgeois theater, born in eighteenth century under influence of Denis Diderot and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as neither tragedy representing people better than us nor comedy representing people worse than us (Aristotle 1996, 5), but drama representing people like us in their ordinary but dramatic and touching family stories. Then, it seems that drama is a name for theatrical piece/textbook. But the moment later it reappears as signifier of any action, which is its original ancient Greek use. Historically, drama, similar to praxis, meant action. But

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praxis is the other of theory, while drama is the other of linear continuum of praxis. Theater is an imitation of action (praxis) (Aristotle 1996, 10). Which meaning of drama to apply then? Is it action, mimesis or imitation of action, complex action (which Aristotle found in well-developed tragedy), or special genre of theater? All four are interwoven within Lehmanns analysis.

2.2. Theater and Sport

If we start with drama as a name for bourgeois theater which started with Diderot and Lessing, we have two different statements, one coming from foundations of contemporary postdramatic theater (Brecht 1995), another from aesthetics of everyday life (Mandoki 2007). This kind of theater is what Bertolt Brech called dramatic theater, and confronted it with sport, mostly boxing events, because sport is real action and dramatic theater is fictional boredom (Kreft 2011). On the other side, however, we have Mandokis remark that sport does not possess semantic and syntactic density of theater, a position which probably does not take into account postdramatic theater, which covers many different practices, starting from those which depart from dramatic theater as historical convention, and arriving at those which cannot be understood as mimesis any more. For comparison between sport and theater we can get some help from Paul Woodruff who, in The Necessity of Theater, introduced analogy between theater (Hamlet) and sport games (American football), conditioned by his understanding of theater which includes sport as a kind of theater because theater is the art by which human beings make human action worth watching, in a measured time and space, (Woodruff 2008, 39) Analogy between theater and sport game was examined in Anthony D. Buckleys article as well (Buckley 2006), only to show that certain sport matches can happen in accordance with Aristotles characteristics of tragedy. Woodrow is different and more general. His proposal is to stage Hamlet as a game, and to think about football game as a theater, to find out what limits appear from such analogy on theatrical side of it. From his point of view, sport or sex games are two cases of theater, but not ideal specimens, no, the sex show, the lopsided football game, the interminable baseball game, the dull demonstration of pie making all of these are specimans of theater, but they are bad specimens (Woodruff 2008, 6466). They are human action worth watching, and have a lot in common with performances of Hamlet or Antigone because they too need roles to fill, rules to follow, a measured space and time, and some other common features, which draw the attention of onlookers. But they are bad specimens because they are not ideal examples of definition: sometimes they represent action worth watching in a measured time and space, and sometimes they do not because, for instance, in sport game final result might be obvious long before the game has finished. These does not mean that sport

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game, cooking lesson, or sex show cant be good specimens of something else (Woodruff 2008, 66), but not of theater. In conclusion, we are confronted with theater which is complex drama like Hamlet, which makes it a complex action of such semantic and syntactic density that sports drama can be only bad specimen of it (and only sometimes, as Buckley claims, structured as complex drama), but also with postdramatic theater where we can find theater which does not follow rules of dramatic theater, that does not represent complex action, and possesses less semantic and syntactic density that certain sport games, especially those with ball where two teams are confronted. We can call theater any human action worth watching, including view of neighbors cooking in their kitchen, or, having sex on their terrace, but perhaps we should introduce another name for it, not just to escape confusion but to delineate a place where all these different practices, including classical theater, can feature as different, but good specimens.

2.3. Performance and Sport

Being alive is to perform. Human beings perform many complicated and complex roles, from being son and daughter to being old, from being good worker to being good boss, and from being nice to being dangerous and threatening. Among proposals which include theater and sport under another and broader categorization, performance theory seems to be the best choice because it covers everyday life performing as well. At the beginning of Performance Theory, Richard Schechner presents two of many possible systematized views of performances; one is The fan and another The web, both presented in graphic, but also verbalized form. The fan consists of different types of performances put in order of appearance, where
Theater is only one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritualizations of animals (including humans) through performances in everyday life greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, professional roles, and so on through to play, sports, theater, dance, ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude. (Schechner 1988, xii)

In The web, the same types of performances are arranged in their mutual interaction. In the center of the web is Schechners own environmental theater, which is, as he too admits, no accident, but still an arbitrary choice. This gives us right to put sport as one of performances in everyday life at the center, and examine Schechners theory from our central point of view. If we take his performance chart, where he compares play, games, sports, theater and ritual by 13 circumstances (special ordering of time, special value of

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objects, rules etc.), games, sports and theater have many similarities. Between games as such, and sports, there are only three slight differences: games need special place often, sport always; games appeal to others often, sports always; with games, audience is not necessary, but with sports it is usually there. There are only two differences between sports and theater, but these two are sharp and fundamental: sports do not possess symbolic reality in theater, symbolic reality has to be produced; and theater is scripted which sports are not (Schechner 1988, 12). Script is all that can be transmitted from time to time and place to place (Schechner 1988, 72), neither scenario nor rules but the basic code and formula of the events which presupposes somebody as transmitter who can teach the others how to perform. Sport is dramatic as such, and the dramatic is its basic aesthetic category which comes first, before the other categories which can appear in sport, or in one kind of sports, but are not fundamental part of sports aesthetics like the dramatic is. First reason to find dramatic aesthetics in sport is character of its rules which demand lass efficient way to reach the goal, but there are other reasons as well, because the main obstacle on the way are the others with their skills and abilities to reach the same goal: beside obstacles as such, we have to accept that in sport, there is play and counter-play. To examine the dramatic in sport, it is better to understand it as action and complex action than to search for theatrical element in sport. There is enough reason to compare sport with theater, even dramatic theater as its special kind, but when we go into this direction, we have to remember that sport is not mimetic and not pretense: in sport, athletes appear and perform as themselves. Therefore, aesthetics of sport, on one side, is one of the aspects and one of disciplines which belong to aesthetics of everyday life and not to philosophy of art; on the other side, aesthetics of sport covers an activity which is not an ordinary aesthetic practice of everyday but its performing practice, executed under special circumstances, and fits well within different kind of performances, as one of its special and historically developed fields. What makes sport different from ordinary aesthetic which appears in everyday practices and encounters, and what makes sport performance different from mimetic, imitative and fictional performances, and what kind of consequences this difference has for the dramatic of sport? This question calls for aesthetic approach to historical and taxonomic sources in ritual, in play and in game.

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3. Sport, Everyday Life and Life

Hans-Georg Gadamer1 starts the second part of Truth and Method with the concept of play. It comes first because from Kant and Schiller on it played a major role in aesthetics (Gadamer 1989, 102). Gadamer, however, thinks that their orientation on freedom of creativity was too subjective. Through approach

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of subjectivity, we miss the seriousness of play. At the beginning should be ontology of play. Taken seriously, play still retains its purpose, but under specific condition: Yet, in playing, all those purposive relations that determine active and caring existence have not simply disappeared but are curiously suspended (Gadamer 1989, 102). This suspension is curious indeed: the player knows that play is only play, and that it needs, consequently, a worldly purpose to become something serious. But this purpose is suspended because it is external: it is visible as an excuse for playing before we enter the play, but when play starts, it disappears. Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself or herself in play. At the core of relationship between play and its player is the structure of play which absorbs the player into itself. Play is a place of reality where we can enter through suspension of any external purpose; it becomes unsuspended part of reality when external purposes take the play over. The place of sport is a place under suspension of everyday reality, but still part of life, not of dreams. Players play the play, not the other way around; still, absorption has to be there, so that at least for a moment the play becomes the only real way to live your life. Play will turn into a game, and movement will become drama (action); both game and drama require goal, purpose and end which play and movement as such do not. Such a turn requires more than just introduction of rules. It presupposes involvement of subjectivity taking over the process. In game, people appear as actors within their own identity and as persons of a game who develop their game-identity through their place in a game and repeated action. From this point of view, ritual play and sport game are definitely different, as much as ritual play and theater are different (by the way, this is a difference which annoyed Plato: instead of sacred ritual, we get performance staged for the pleasure of spectator). Even if games in principle developed from rituals, they had to be transformed and changed. This transformation is what we can see in Gahuku-Gama approach to vy-Strauss. In already hybrid football described and analyzed by Claude Le situation in-between ancient rituality and imported modern sport game, they vydecided to play as many matches as necessary to even the score, which Le vy-Strauss Strauss commented as treating a game as ritual (Le 1966, 31). His interpretation had many echoes in different disciplines, from philosophy of law to philosophy of sport, where Arlei Sander Damos article on football and aesthetics proposes three analytical categories: disjunctive ritual, attachment to vy-Strauss describes is club, and absorbing play (Damo 2011, 8291). What Le disjunctive contest of football put under rule of conjunctive end demanded for ritual reasons (re-established harmony):
Gamesappear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or teams, where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and

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losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; in conjoins, for it brings about a union (one might even say a communion in the context) or in any case an organic vy-Strauss 1966, 33) relation between two initially separate groups. (Le

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When ritual and game understanding of play meet, as in this typical postcolonial situation, a solution which maintains stability of cosmic perspective and unity of community has to be found. This demonstrates when ritual becomes a game: when disjunctive effect wins over conjunctive end. What Gahuku-Gama achieved was not transformation of football game into ritual again, but transformation of hierarchical value-list which comes out as result of game into equality between subjects again. The subject of ritual is the whole, the subject of game are its actors: individual or team subjectivity wins over equality of all members of community. Mandoki is partly right: traditional form of theater may have more semantic and syntactic density than sport. But theater is not a game, in spite of Woodruffs comparison, and its thrill is always one step behind attractiveness of reality itself. Edmund Burke offers good comparison of the effects of tragedy:
The nearer it /tragedy/ approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power. But be its power of what kind it will, it never approaches to what it represents. Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. (Burke 1987, 47)

The drama of sport games, has more attractiveness than theater because it is not representation but the real thing. In sport games, we are involved as its actors, consciously taking the risk of disjunction as their outcome. The dramatic of sport games is more existentially dense and aesthetically attractive than the dramatic of theater, or mere play, at least for actors-athletes who are not dramatis personae but real persons taking risk in disjunctive play and finite game. Action and movement in sport are not mimetic. On the other side, what makes sport different from everyday aesthetics is staging which does not necessarily need special or even monumental buildings or places. It can start anywhere, at a place which allows necessary body movements, and offers enough space for chosen game. For many sports special equipment is needed, but in most cases it can be improvised; not under serious associations, of course. But what is always needed is characterization of place as place for

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sport, and limitation of space of the game (in advance), limitation of time (not necessarily in advance), and bargaining about the rules applied. For game to start, its place has to be separated from the other space, at least symbolically or even virtually. This separation is thin: it is still part of everyday life, and it is not limited to sacred places or ritual moments in time, but it is not ordinary. This thin limit between ordinary life and sport means that sport does not have to be as near to life as possible, but never to cross the line, because the line between sport game and ordinary life is a line drawn inside territory of everyday life. In life, one does not accept the rules voluntarily, because we cannot enter and leave it freely. In sport game, we accepted what goes on afterwards, and can withdraw from it. They call appearance in sport games half-pretense, in comparison with traditional theater, but there is no pretense when you are inside sport game. In principle, sport is not deep play for its actors-athletes. It is serious enough to be dramatic, but there is big difference between sport game and gambling, and between modern sport and deep play. Watched from outside, sport game is not serious, it is just a play; experienced from inside, especially by players themselves, it is serious but playful, not dead serious as deep play.

4. Conclusion
What, then, makes sport performance different from other kinds of performances, and what is dramatic about sport? Gadamers suspension, movement and absorption are decisive features of sport performance as well. In sport, suspension does not mean that it inhabits ritual or mimetic space and time, because sport is part of everyday life. What is extra-ordinary about sport performance, then? Exactly that: it is de()s)portes because it brings us into another, specially constructed part of everyday life. Sport used to signify all activities which went on on the other side of ordinary everyday, which were not under control of order installed and maintained by sovereign power. Contemporary authorities tend to be universal, covering the entire place and all the time with their power, but sport still remains a place governed by other rules and by autonomous authorities which belong to civil society itself, and are recognized by universal state authorities to be autonomous, including legislative and judicial power. Sport is not mimetic activity which needs, besides special place which actors and public occupy together, an agreement between actors and public that what goes on at stage means something different than what it is, and that persons appearing on the stage are not themselves but dramatic personae. If there is any mimetic activity in sport, it goes on during training time, not during performances. Sport goes on under suspension of everyday life order, but still inside everyday life, In sport, there are both movement as such and movement in physical sense. As in finite game, we have movement from start to end, inside limited

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space and time, intended to reach a certain goal. Its goal is to reach provided end. Disjunctive final outcome can be proclaimed when contesting individual or collective persons can be ranked according to their achievements. In physical sense, sport has been reduced to those games which rank by skill and achievements in body movement, so that other former de(s)portes do not belong to the family of sport any more. Inside this limited space and time, under rules which describe extra-ordinary order, absorption turns this limited room for movement from start to goal into a whole, an entirety where, however, players are not played by the play itself. They play it, they are actors, and they are expected to inhabit this part of everyday life as if as if = is (Schechner 1988, xiii). This pretense is not theatrical pretense. It means to accept a view sub specie aeternitatis (under aspect of eternity) which in aesthetics means ability to make the smallest part of the world a universe, as in Leibniz monads which mirror the wholeness while they are just basic particles of worlds structure. This as if is limited, it belongs inside everyday life and in case of sport, it does not produce cosmic wholeness. What it produces is wholeness inside limits which is extra-ordinary and worth inhabiting. Comparison between sport and art is always possible. But we can get more insight into similarities and differences if we compare contemporary art practices, especially those of artistic performance, with broader idea of sport, and not just spectacular elite sport with modernisms lofty and contemplative idea of art. The source of the dramatic in sport is that sport games are among disjunctive games which demand active personal (individual or collective) involvement, risk, and body movement towards a goal which is reached at a stage when all actors get their comparative value measured. To accept such risk freely, without any real pressure to do so, as in other parts of everyday life where we cannot decide even if we want to be involved, is nobility of decision to start: one starts because it is attractive, not because one has to. What follows is a real life drama, more or less complex, but always personally disjunctive, existentially challenging and aesthetically attractive. Sport is action worth watching because it is an action worth doing. Note
1. For sport philosophy interpretation of Gadamer, I am indebted to Matic Kastelec and his article Play which was presented at the First Conference of EAPS in Prague (May 2011) and will appear in Slovene in the next issue of the journal Ars&Humanitas which is published by Faculty of Arts (University of Ljubljana).

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Lev Kreft, University of Ljubljana, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Sport. Faculty of Arts, Askerceva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. E-mail: lev.kreft@guest. arnes.si