Sarahel's Semiotics 4U

more i think about it, it is harder to insert sports into a semiology of value systems and commodity exchanges of players etc. notwithstanding

eg the complete lack of messianism of team sport which employs you know "a level playing field" and where victory is regulated and endlessly repeatable (not definitive)

this is why it is always so lame to see players celebrating winning

Nah, I think you're on it Sarah, but my argument is that the choice can be made for reasons outside of Debord's 'preposterous ontological superiority' argument; many sports fans accept that their team isn't very good, but they support due to an almost familial desire to belong. A tribal and yes often regional association, but not necessarily a regionalIST one.

M White's last post is excellent. Not every team is the same. If you've invested consideration into one (or more) particular team, it follows that you'd want to see how the team(s) fared.

I really want to play 3-sided football. The instantaneous switchings of allegiance would be just so so so amazing and lol.

Winning is a transient state, but it's fun to bask before time has its revenge.

http://www.richardhellergallery.com/dynamic/images/detail/44_19_ONSPORTS5P.jpg

fyi

The basic definition of a "soccer mom" is a woman who spends a significant amount of time serving as chauffeur to her child or children to a variety of organized extracurricular activities that are chosen with the child's development in mind.

this is why it is always so lame to see players celebrating winning

And yet, oddly, so natural. Games are at the very heart of human child development and competition is the nature of life on Earth. It may be childish but what's more childish than an adult playing sport professionally?

adultbaby.jpg

not just a chauffeur which implies passivity, but is also an active planner and hunter out of those organized extracurricular activities xp

looooool @ that jpg

my issue with 'soccer mom' is that it has itself become a lifestyle label, associated with overcompetitive parenting and conversely subjugation to the needs of a child, whereas individual cases are not quite so black-and-white as this

i wouldn't say an adult playing sport professionally is childish. an adult playing sport professionally and throwing a wobbly when things go badly, now that is childish

subjugation to the needs of the child? IME the needs of the child are being subjugated

soccer mom

I think it was a socio-ethnologic niche for advertisers and politicians at first, no?

exactly ... the soccer mom character is a more innocuous version of the Angela Landsbury's Machiavellian mother role in "The Manchurian Candidate."

also, is soccer mom just a less-loaded term than stay-at-home mom which itself replaced housewife

No, soccer mom is even more loaded. The soccer mom isn't necessarily a stay-at-home mom.

sorry, subjugation to the SUPPOSED needs of a child, which are actually a projection of a false narrative of competitiveness which turns the child into an annex of the adult

i wouldn't say an adult playing sport professionally is childish

First off why necessarily assume that my use of childish is derogatory? Much of my childhood was idyllic.

If games are training for the kind of agression/defences that homo sapiens (and many other species) will engage in, warfare, hunting, etc., then continuing to play football as 26 year old as opposed to actually using all those athletic skills to defend ailing grandfathers and tots from marauding Vikings and saber-toothed cats might, indeed, be seen as childish.

do these uses of the world 'false' in terms like 'false option' and 'false narrative' imply some sort of platonic and normative true version that these sports fans and soccer moms just aren't privy to?

I didn't think you meant it in a particularly derogatory way; my issue is that sport is a universal impulse, and only when it involves uncontrollable and irrational emotional reactions (or, more positively, an instance of unprecedented and illogical genius), does it become particularly childish. I don't consider it training for combat. It is the combat itself. The test of self against fellows.

true choices: love, friends, art

...or ARE THEY

dan dan daaaaaaaaa

sport is not a universal impulse btw

The soccer mom's aim is to train her child/children to be the best he/she can be, with militaristic discipline in terms of adhering to strict timetables, and engaging in activities to strengthen both mind and body, based on intelligence gleaned from parenting manuals and articles.

I've always suspected that all soccer moms actually descend from the true bloodline of Sparta

universal along the chain of age, not among all people

the soccer mum is subjugated by the Needs of Her Child rather than the needs of her child, then, and the Needs also subjugate the child. The Child subjugates the child.

btw, here is a really pretty lolsome account of an actual 3 sided football match

wait why are some words capitalized and others aren't

I don't consider it training for combat.

I do. It teaches prowess and human aggression shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

(OMG I wonder if the preux in 'preux chevalier' is related to the prow in prowess?)

do these uses of the world 'false' in terms like 'false option' and 'false narrative' imply some sort of platonic and normative true version that these sports fans and soccer moms just aren't privy to?

This is one of the primary critiques of marxist/structuralist thought ... "false choices" and "false narrative" came out of the Marxist "false consciousness." It raised the question that there is a true consciousness, and how do those suggesting that people suffer from false choices, false consciousness, false narratives know that these are false? How do they know what is true? Also, if all anyone has experienced is false, and will experience is coded as "false," then what does truth matter, anyway?

I've always suspected that all soccer moms actually descend from the true bloodline of Sparta

No wonder 300 did so well at the box office.

wait why are some words capitalized and others aren't

The ones that are capitalised are the society-endorsed Spectacle.

Sport is, one might argue, the end rather than the means these days. Perhaps we've gone all soft.

Love, friends, art: true choices? :D

I've never heard of a proper place or name called Spectacle, unless you mean this one

(I'm just messin' with ya)

A singular feature of three-sided football is that casual passers-by are as entitled to play as the original participants. Before long an Italian runs on and proceeds to push, dig, goal-hang and score with all the flamboyance and petulance his footballing heritage can muster. Ignoring one third of the pitch, he's either a fascist or he doesn't see the third goal, but as his only words of English are "Goal! Goal!", it's difficult to find out which.

i haven't read this stuff in a while so i wasn't sure but i had always thought they didn't really care about what 'true' meant, they just wanted to point out things that were 'not true' and true is just like, an empty hole in the center. or it was something you could only experience if you were raised by wolves. but also that the point of materialism is that meaning is man-made.

Love is a rather difficult word to pin down.

Friends, if you are truly a friend to them then, yes.

Wait, I thought there was no free will... or is that just no free lunch?

Spectacle = all is Maya?

Art is found in the viewer, not the object

omg u killed the author

(alternately Art is a label applied by critics onto a vast array of knick knacks, curios, and detritus for the purposes of selling them at an increased price)

the Author never really existed anyway, after the pen left the page

tbh, the main point I was trying to make is that a lot of talk about sport at this kind of level gets really reductive and tries to turn it into a power struggle or a playing out of freudian aggression or something, but I think its more interesting to look at the internal forms of the thing where there are more ideas about movement and form and space, also strategy and compromise. I mean there are a lot of ideas about how to get from here to there on a soccer pitch that I think a lot of painters right now could take on board for example. Also, the creative space afforded by sport and how within the playing field the movement of the players constantly reactivates and redefines the nature of spaces and politicises the spatial aspects of the board. Not in a chess way, which is much more regulated and mechanical than most sports (don't jump down my throat about that, the grid naturally involves a different way of politicising space imo) but in a way that is gestural and imaginative and energetic.

the Author never really existed anyway, after the pen left the page

― a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful (dyao), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 10:56 PM (1 minute ago)

thank u celebrity author Michel Foucault <3

haha I was actually miming Barthes, but I'll take Foucault

Tiarnan, you're basically touting Nomadology as a key text for understanding field sports? Marry me. That shit is potent.

women's sports bras = sexist?

i haven't read this stuff in a while so i wasn't sure but i had always thought they didn't really care about what 'true' meant, they just wanted to point out things that were 'not true' and true is just like, an empty hole in the center. or it was something you could only experience if you were raised by wolves. but also that the point of materialism is that meaning is man-made.

Marx, and to a certain degree Debord, believed that some form of cultural revolution would result in greater "truth" in terms of lived experience/society.

Art is found in the viewer, not the object

the Author never really existed anyway, after the pen left the page

The art is subjective whether it's by a third party or the orginator.

uh i suppose I am, i'm also trying to get Todd Chilton to watch some ice hockey tbh

cycling/athletics are where the finish line = mayan 2012 btw