Despite these seemingly progressive discourses surrounding women’s involvement in higher education and exercise, interestingly women continue to be labeled as more predisposed to mental ailments such as depression. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics posit that women are twice more likely to have depression than men and one in five women are depressed. Exercise type also seems to be gendered, particularly looking at specific forms of exercise such as aerobics in the 1970s to more contemporary mindful practices such as yoga today. Although yoga, for example, appeals to men, 75% of practitioners in North America are women.

While scholars have been quick to identify the gendered nature of fitness practices like aerobics that perpetuate dominant female bodily norms (toned, thin, beautiful), less attention has been paid to the normative dimension inherent in practices that present themselves as mindful. In fact, some feminist scholars have even suggested that mindful practices may be positive for women because they decrease emphasis on women’s body image. While there may be something here worth exploring, I want to identify the side of the nature/culture, woman/man, body/mind dichotomy (artificial, yet also pertinently employed through discursive tactics and strategies) that appears to be less developed in these discussions. That is, are we neglecting to mention that women are normalized in more ways than just their physical appearance?

Rodney Yee, a well regarded “yogi” answered the question: “Why do you think more women practice yoga?” with the response: “Women are open. They’re more willing to go into their emotional state, in their own minds”. Does and should this response lend itself to further analysis in terms of the discursive nature of emotions? Do discourses continue to perpetuate women’s fragile bodies and minds in less overt, but more subtle and nuanced ways?

Thus far, scholars have claimed that EBR poses a number of challenges for sport. This is because governments have typically worked on the assumption that sport has a number of mythic and reverent qualities that deem it a utilitarian tool for social welfare programs (Coalter, 2007). Sport comes to be considered useful for tackling obesity epidemics, decreasing crime rates, encouraging community cohesion and inclusion for minority groups and those of a low SES. It also gets attributed to national and civic pride as funding is poured into elite level development initiatives. However, despite these vast alleged benefits of sport, when research teams are commissioned to provide evidence of the impact value of sport policies, they are often deemed inconclusive (e.g. Bloom et al, 2005). This is because “proof” or “evidence” of the impact of sport is a widely held belief but a tentatively questionable “fact”.

This is not to suggest that government funding should not go into sport, or that sport does not offer many of the qualities that the government policy initiatives claim. However, it does lead to a questioning of EBR and its goals. Other areas of research, not just sport, question the value of EBR—for example, much research in the social sciences and humanities claims that EBR is problematic because it relies on a post-positivistic view of research that suggests evidence can be provided through rigorous methodical analysis. I’d suggest that EBR  can further be challanged on the grounds that it is tied to political rationalities bound with power and knowledge that serve to constrain and limit new and innovative ways of exploring the potentials of sport and physical activity. In this regard, we might posit that EBR perpetuates dominant discursive ways of being and doing policy, making the process appear rigid, scientifically validated, and therefore inflexible. 

So, what do we do? It’s not so much a matter of dismissing the goals of EBR outright (clearly it makes sense to try and formulate an understanding of whether policy is doing what it sets out to achieve). However, we might consider expanding our understanding of “evidence” to incorporate a number of other knowledges that allow a more holistic reading of the value of sport participation…just a thought.

                The British media scrutiny leveled at Canada’s “Own the Podium” is perhaps, therefore, based on an under acknowledgment of UK Sport’s drive for excellence. Thus, the appropriation of Own the Podium’s strategies for excellence in high performance sport in the form of the “Team 2012” national campaign headed by UK Sport, should not be surprising. In fact, it should be further unsurprising, given that both countries, the UK and Canada, appear to be underpinned by similar sporting models, and further undergirded by similar political ideologies and aspirations (cf. Green & Houlihan, 2005). For example, both countries, known for their resemblance of “social welfare” models of governance, devote centralized government funding to sport through several National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and National Sporting Organizations (NSOs). Both, also, attempt to balance this funding through shared provisions from both public and private dimensions. Despite the structural differences in terms of organization of national and local sporting bodies, both governments also allegedly share a dedication to excellence and mass participation (Green & Houlihan, 2005). Research by scholars Houlihan and White (2002) has addressed this dedication as a tension between encouraging elite level sporting participation to few, and also encouraging widespread recreational opportunities to all. Specifically focusing on UK sport policy, this tension was uncovered through work that carefully unpacked the sport development structure of the UK sport system, providing a comprehensive analysis of the following four key goals: 1) to define sports development; 2) to describe the “evolution of sports development” (p. viii); 3) to uncover the organizational settings of sports development, and 4) to analyze how sports development works as a service.

Recent work of Green (2007) documented a clear shift in UK and Canadian sporting agendas, suggesting that despite excellence being at the forefront of policy regimes, in the early 2000s sport for all became a focus point given the claims of an “obesity epidemic” and the need to intervene in the public’s health. Although Green’s analysis is astute, arguably the government is merely paying lip service with regard to their “focus” on sport for all or “mass participation,” whereby the policy goals and media perpetuation within the last ten years have continued to be highly elitist and nationalistic. Thus, sport for all unfortunately continues to be seen as a by-product of an effective elite sport system as opposed to a primary government agenda.

Drawing on scholars such as Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, and following Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower and governmentality, Toby Miller’s critical sport sociology was working within an anti-foundational epistemological conception of politics that suggests a recognition of power relations that moves beyond outmoded sovereign and hierarchical understandings—hence the shift from sovereign governance to more diffuse notions of control through discursive power relations and a biopolitics that simultaneously individualises and totalizes the population. This conceptualization of politics (underpinned by work in sport sociology that addresses either/both arenas of biopower as technologies of dominance and/or the self) is readily used and manifest in much of the contemporary sport sociology literature.

However, despite this post-structural view of power in literature, an apparent difficulty comes in conceptualizing action as a result of this. That is, scholars have once again critiqued the post-structural (or what they term postmodern and queer) alliances within sport sociology as epistemologically bankrupt (Edwards & Jones, 2009). Likewise, Morgan (1995) had previously shared the concern over the difficulty of postmodern and post-structural paradigms to hold moral accountability and political purchase.  As Gruneau warns in his postscript to his seminal work Class, Sports, and Social Development, although scholars drawing on theoretical ideas from Michel Foucault have “forced an older generation of social critics to broaden…[their] understanding of radical politics” (p. 121), problems arise from a lack of normativity through shared values. Hence

“In a world where there is no truth, only power, and where power is said to circulate everywhere, politics can only be understood as an ongoing, localized tactical project….Any form of domination becomes as relevant as any other, so political struggle can easily be seen as little more than an arena of choice closely associated with one’s self-defined identity” (p. 125).  

Gruneau’s, like others’, hesitance of post-structuralism, stems from a belief in a transcendent notions of political action heavily rooted in statist politics (i.e. when we talk about political action we find it hard to remove ourselves from discussions of the state and tangible change through amended policy regulation; hence, we appeal to legality—i.e. the legal system as the barrier to change par excellence).  From a post-structural perspective, legality, though, as a specter of codification and striation, acts metaphorically as the principle site of contestation—hence, it serves as a way to reify the beliefs of those like Gruneau that it is the site of manifestations of normalizing discourses, particularly in sport around issues such as gender, race, sexuality, health, human rights and the like, and therefore the only negotiable site from which political action “truly” occurs.  That is, legality perpetually reinforces itself, naming itself as a truth the way in which the only means for “real” political action is through active resistance in the form of movements that appeal to social change through negotiation with those “in power” that usurp and replace a current mode of sovereign structure with an alternative.  

One might even posit another position in-between whereby, even when we post-structurally theorize power relations as discursive, we often recognize the tangible repercussions of the dominance of the legal discourse whereby we find ourselves resorting practically to a negotiation with law and sovereign forms of governance to effect or mobilize political change. In this regard we often find a chasm between our theorizing the political and our acting the political. The “critical” 3.0, as it links to the “political” then, falls at the hands of the conceptualization of power and politics; so, how can we use the critical theoretical frameworks we espouse to effect political change and what does this type of change look like?

This leads me to the following questions surrounding action: How do we understand political action? What does and should this look like? Can we have two (or three) converging types of politics or do they counter one another? Are the goals of post-structural politics so divergent to those of the critical and pragmatic lens that any type of collaboration is impossible? Can they coexist, or does one necessarily replace the other like the advancement of a Kuhnian revolution, an event, or a type of moral entrepreneurism? Do these events hit us like a divine violence, or are they replicated through different (yet the same) discursive interplays—hence Lyotard’s question of whether we invent new moves in old games, refine and modify existing rules, or invent new games altogether? Is there the possibility that these different politics could cement and reinforce one another, or do they necessarily dampen the political goals of the other? Or, does the answer to these questions rely on whether we accept an immanent or transcendent ontology?

Given these marks of divergence over what constitutes politics and subsequently political action,my next step is to understand how sport sociologists conceive of political action within critical, pragmatic, and post-structural paradigms. That is, the question I will be asking is twofold:

1. How does the concept of political action manifest in the work of sport sociologists, particularly given the field’s paradigmatic divergences?
2. Is there a way to articulate a unified understanding of political action that can present itself as a meaningful way for scholars to use in future research? That is, if we can come to understand the similarities and inconsistencies of the meaning of “action”, can we be clearer about how this will “look” and present itself in our research?

 In my mind, there are two ways to conceptualise this action

1. Action from within. This is action that occurs within the state. It is action that appeals to the state for intervention. It is action that does not incite new beginnings but that works within residual dominant and/or dormant discourses to effect a movement around subject(s) or cause(s).

Different types:

a)     Participatory democracy—we each have a stake in the state/political system and thereby serve to reinforce and support it with the belief that we have an element of control over life[i]

b)     Revolution. We want to overthrow the state and replace it with something else. Replacement with another form of governance is essentially remaining within the same state locus of control, albeit another typology.

c)      Appealing to state/sovereign benevolence. It desires equality and it asks for equality. When we appeal, we ask, and when we ask, we reinforce the sovereign mode of the state.  This could be considered communicative — we believe in better ways of being based on universal appeals to human reason (Habermas’ communicative action grounded in a transcendent ontology). Or we believe we can actively persuade people through justifications or appeals to inter-subjectivity that can allow us to be moral advocates for some form of action over others such is the case with Rorty’s sentimental education. Either way, there is no break with the status quo, just a re-articulation of it in some areas where moral change is deemed necessary.

d)     Dialectical change—not necessarily foundational like communicative, but grounded in similar principle of negotiation and persuasion. This type of change sees neutralization of political problems into a higher and more perfect state whereby we recognize a move must come from those conventions within society. Therefore, what is “new” political action comes from the conventions already in society. This relies on deep conventions that also don’t mark a break with the status quo because the status quo and the ability to assert change arise only from the conventions we have readily available to us.  

2. Action from without. This action does not occur within the state per se (although such a break is disputable and negotiated within action 1d). Rather this type of political action relies on inciting new beginnings through the creation of multiple discourses, in response to both disciplinary technologies and technologies of the self. Moving beyond Foucault into the work of Deleuze and others, the creation of multiplicity also serves to provide space for localized, micro-level event-type ruptures that mark a break with the norm and status quo, and revolutionize politics in a way that does not assist in reinstating or replacing the state with a different “order” but instead continues to fragment, to create smooth space within striation, and to draw out and activate potentials. Types:

a)    ” wait” for something new to happen. This is an event that happens from no-where. (An example could be Derrida’s decisionism). It can be regarded as a nihilistic way to conceptualise politics, and often is the notion of post-structuralism that critics will incite.

b)     Creation of new ethical selves. This is a part of (c*)

c)      *We “cultivate” space for an event. That is, we recognize that for an event to occur, we must be active in creating alternative discourses from which this can present itself. New discourses can be produced through (b) i.e. technologies of the self and/or through providing other alternative discourses to those dominant that aren’t grounded necessarily in an ethical creation of the self but as a response to other disciplinary technologies in wider society. In both of these we create multiplicity. [It seems like this is where we are currently in contemporary sport sociology]

d)     Political rupture. We negotiate a space as academics to not only create space for an event within the confines of our academic discourse (journals, conferences), but disseminate these new discourses into the public realm via media, communications etc. [Is this where we need to move to?]

Are these two modes of politics are necessarily exclusive? That is, can we articulate a unified understanding of political action that can present itself as meaningful for scholars to use in future research within sport sociology? Hence, if we can come to understand the similarities and inconsistencies of the meaning of “action” between these two typologies, can we be clearer about how this will “look” and present itself in our research?

Thinking through where I fit, and what my purpose is, has led me down a path toward the question: is theory pragmatic? Until now I’ve enjoyed wrestling with theory, but typically with the intention to instigate practical change. For example, I am primarily interested in the question of normativity; particularly in the creation of ethical guidelines to make sport participation a fair, safe, and healthy environment. I believe in the ability to formulate and defend particular ethical principles and I find certain frameworks politically stagnant. We can argue what being political means, but to me it’s about being able to take a stand. It’s about being able to claim, after contemplating all the possible positions we can, how to act in the fairest way. In this regard, I’m taking the middle road, arguing that yes I acknowledge nothing is objective and that we are informed by our subjective position, yet this should not deter us from at least trying to find the inter-subjective – i.e. producing a series of justifications for certain political acts. Everything has negative consequences, but let’s just do our best.

At the theoretical level this debate for me has become tautological. Instead, what strikes me now is the place of theory and how we use it. Of course theory is valuable, but does its value lie in how it’s used, or am I setting myself up for a debate about the subjectivity of value (if so, I’ll clarify by saying once again that I believe in normativity. Values are normative)?

To me, coming to conclusions about value lies in pragmatism. The point being, theory can be pragmatic but it depends on its practical use. I wonder just how pragmatic we are in sport & socio cultural studies. I question the way we turn theories into ontologies, and use them as inflexible frameworks which trap our research. Yes, a nice neat way to organize our thoughts following the ideas of someone like Gramsci, Foucault, or Deleuze.  But is this really how the world works? I hardly think so.  

Theory to me means putting it to use; it means using it implicitly in our work to inform, not to dictate. Theory is there to give us some way to make sense of the world, not to become an ontology. Besides a few key individuals who are thinking things through differently, mainly in Europe, I wonder how many of us pick up a theory, apply it, and publish…then I wonder, what does this say about the quality of our work? Certainly it’s illuminating if one hasn’t seen the theory applied in the sporting context thus far; hence, it can create a niche and a neat introduction to a scholar’s ideas. But after it has been done once, do we really need to produce and reproduce using the same theorist over and over again? Unless we think of new ways of using theory, and moreover using it implicitly to inform burgeoning issues in a pragmatic way, I wonder about where we are going as a field of inquiry.

What is good research? Perhaps it is best to start with the question what does our work do?

A typical claim is that post-structural readings open new possibilities for understanding the world. They allow us to see the world in multiple ways, and to question and challenge our taken for granted assumptions (and even our taken for granted “truths” that we are often led to believe are scientifically unquestionable). In this vein, post-structuralism is a political project because it allows us to identify different discourses in society that have become dominant and act to constrain individuals and groups of people; those discourses that oust and other those who do not conform to society’s norms. If this is not political, what is?

Despite these claims, Fish and others remain steadfast that post-structural theory holds little promise. Besides the fact that the theory itself is not monolithic, those working within the framework(s) of post-structuralism run the risk of becoming a dominant theoretical discourse. Questioning and critiquing forms of knowledge production as constraining and limiting serves to render post-structuralism as a metanarrative in and of itself. It can be undercut by its own critique.

Another interesting dimension I want to add to this is the “ivory tower” of knowledge production. I find most interesting the fact that those using post-structural theory do so in academia with little regard for praxis. How many scholars have used these theories under the guise of being political and opening up new possibilities for being, yet confine their analyses to a journal article barely anyone outside of the academy is impacted by? How many post-structuralists are making accessible their research? Perhaps the reason for this is the self reflexive knowledge that brandishing one’s research places one in a position of “expert knowledge” and therefore is itself problematic in terms of buying into dominant power relations that portray one’s work as a “truth”. Despite this understanding, numerous scholars do claim that the political effects of their work are seen through “teaching” and passing on these different knowledges (post-structural) to students. Does this not fall prey to the same problems with expert knowledge? Are they therefore inadvertently NOT advocating for a post-structural politics in teaching?

Can one ever open up new possibilities in education through a post-structural lens? I don’t think so. Even Foucault struggled with this very question when he compared teaching in a lecture theatre to teaching a seminar. Although a seminar would seem a more viable option, it disguises epistemic knowledge. At least a lecture format is more honest.

Unfortunately it seems to be a catch 22. Maybe I’ll just go do quantitative research and ignore it all. After all, it’s not necessarily bad either, right?

These important disruptions to dominant discourses concerning public health are certainly imperative. In the context of Foucault’s broader project of elucidating the differing power relations that constitute individuals as subjects, the task of illustrating how some practices create norms, serve as exclusionary, and perpetuate a social “morality” that ousts and others those who do not conform, is a productive academic project. Yet such critiques of public health may also be compromising. In terms of Foucault’s own acknowledgement that no knowledge is good or bad in and of itself, one ought to also count these governmental critiques. For example, understandably, from a Foucauldian lens it is crucial to identify differing sites of knowledge production and the complicated ways in which relations of power are perpetuated through different discourses around particular rationalities (i.e. public health).

Moreover, identifying the technologies used to implement these rationalitiers (e.g. statistics, epidemiology etc) is also complicated yet crucial task. However, the language used to (subtly) denunciate particular forms of knowledge (particularly scientific), could potentially be quite damaging. Thus, although perhaps we should be skeptical of the new public health movements in addition to “at risk” discourses, we might also recognize a level of usefulness to these too. Interestingly, the authors themselves clearly recognize this potential challenge. For example, Peterson and Lupton (1996) state:

 The focus on the social construction of risk is not to argue that there are no real dangers and threats to which humans may fall prey, causing ill health, pain, or death, but rather to contend that our understanding of these dangers and hazards, including their origin and their outcomes, are constituted through social, cultural and political processes (p. 18).

While this is likely to be accurate, and scholars analyzing public health through a governmental lens do have this in mind, such scholars also have their own personal agendas for study. On this note it is difficult to take the work seriously when it is leveled as a means of uncovering or disrupting dominant discourses (e.g. risk) without a) explaining one’s own agenda for such benevolent “disruption”, b) recognizing how such work appears to be more in line with a “critique” than an unbiased (objective?!) assessment, and c) offering any form of alternative. Certainly we can admit that there are rationalities and technologies at play (is this not obvious with any reading of governing, not only a governmental perspective?), but more importantly the question ought to be “where do we go from here?” What is the purpose of our analysis?

This is not a critique of studies undertaking a governmental analysis per se, given that any effort to disrupt a dominant way of knowing (in this case with regards to public health) can offer a new perspective. In fact, a governmental reading has much to offer by way of elucidating the potentially harmful effects of power relations and their repercussions for individual’s subjectivities as they come to be negotiated within the interplay of subjectivity and intervening governmental technologies. However, although scholars are keen to interrupt the operations of power and to highlight the possible problems with public health discourses, we should also note that perhaps there are some benefits to scientific discourse around the topic of public health. For example, scholars often downplay the link between physical inactivity, obesity and health (for example putting in quotation marks “causality” and explaining how one can be “fit, fat and healthy” (Heyes, 2006). Certainly, governmental agendas may vary, but who is to say that as many of the agendas are not benevolent as they are coercive and tactical?

Pragmatically speaking, where does a governmental study leave us? Where do we go from here? For example, in relation to the “obesity epidemic”, Gard et al (2005) suggest there should be more emphasis on “being healthy” rather than becoming ‘this or that’” (Gard et al, 2005, p.20). However, now we see a critique of discourses around “being healthy” per se. Will anything ever be the “right” thing to do?; probably not, according to this logic.

I find this really frustrating and I have to agree with Andy Miah. The UK Sport’s claim that we have to protect the “rights” of athletes to a level playing field is outdated and steeped in advanced liberal rhetoric of “freedom” (whilst simultaneously inculcating an anti-doping discourse into the populace. i.e. individuals should be “encouraged” to condemn doping). In some respects UK Sport is correct; logically speaking we can argue that doping goes against the “inner logic” of sport given that as an isolated practice it has its own set of principles that demarcate it from the rest of society (without going into detail here you can read this in Bernard Suits and Bill Morgan’s work amongst others). However, this isn’t a moral reason to condemn doping. And, moreover, even if we could normatively justify a condemnation of doping, since ethical values are determined by social conventions and are themselves highly discursive and subject to change over time, surely we should be challenging this rule-based ethical approach too? Isn’t it about time we start to be reflexive of the changing nature of society? Miah is right; sport has become a way of pushing the limits of the human body: doping is one means of this. Why should be prevent it on the grounds of equality or fair play when a whole host of other technologies (hypoxic chambers and the like) are attempting the same goal?

 Sport philosophers have, too, contributed to this corpus, adding a plethora of alternatives, ideas, understandings, and visions of what a playful life would or could potentially mean. The lens through which I approach play is somewhat different; I take my point of departure from what might be described as the post-metaphysical or post-humanist project of contemporary Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. In doing so, I argue that many of our current conceptions of play are underpinned somewhat by a humanistic Enlightenment vision of society in general, and play specifically, and thus are further underpinned by unfortunate binaries between nature and culture, man and animal, and adult and infant in our privileging of humanity and rationality. In following these natural humanistic dichotomies, play and sport fall into the same trap, whereby sport or games are privileged in their rational capacity over the irrationality and thereby non-seriousness of play. For example, even in a recent paper, “Sport, Philosophy and the Quest for Knowledge,” Heather Reid, argues that sport should be better considered a form of philosophy rather than play. Implicit in her argument is perhaps an unintentional reinforcement of this dualism between the seriousness and rational potential of sport (ludus) and the irrationality, capriciousness, and frivolity of play (paida). Given this, I therefore seek to challenge the notion of play as subservient to sport, in addition to the humanistic privileging of the human over animal. Not only do I intend to challenge the current humanistic lens through which play is often regarded, but also further challenges Agamben’s own politics. As I explain, Agamben’s emancipatory political vision also leaves one in a position of vexation and therefore I posit my re-reading of Agambian inspired play as an alternative example for Agambian logic, which intends to avoid the pessimism of some of the paradigmatic examples he uses to illustrate his own political philosophy. To orient this new conception of play, I first need to detail the logic underpinning Agamben’s ontology, second how this is pessimistic, and finally, how we may conceptualize play in sport philosophy differently, instead of the typical utopian teleological play-land, I re-conceive of play as an intermediary, as a limit-point, as a “gap” or “space”, or as absolute “openness”.

Central to Agambian logic, unpacked mostly in his work The Open, is the attempt to challenge humanist thought by looking to the relation between man and animal. Humanism, as Agamben explains, defines man in contrast to the animal—hence as the relation between man and “his” animality, or man’s rejection of animality—and thus he becomes understood as a human animal (homo animalis) or a rational animal (animal rationale). Instead, Agamben argues for a revised consideration of the man and animal in terms of a post-humanism, whereby instead he endeavors to find an “emptiness” between the human and the animal; a kind of non-relation or zone of non-knowledge. This idea of a hiatus or a zone of openness, traverses the corpus of Agamben’s work. In possibly his most well known work, Homo Sacer, Agamben tackles the project of sovereignty and law from the same ontological perspective. In fact, throughout much of Agamben’s work, he uses the same logic to set out a new foundation of a politics of what might be described as becoming or perpetual openness to being. While clearly this entire corpus cannot be detailed here, I want to briefly sketch out Agamben’s key ontological proposition, that of “abandonment” which is most clearly articulated in Homo Sacer, in order to better explain the relation between man and animal, and what will later be discussed between infant and adult, and eventually, play and games/sport.

Beginning, then, with Agamben…In Homo Sacer, Agamben tackles the problem of biopolitical sovereignty through abandonment. This is grounded in the notion of “exclusive inclusions” of being. The logic of an exclusive inclusion cannot be understood merely as an outside/inside division. Rather, that which is excluded remains included by its very exclusion as exception. He explains how life was once considered by the Greeks as divided between zoe (a natural life common to all living beings) and bios (a political life with others). However, Agamben argues that due to what he describes as the logic of sovereignty, these two realms of life are now bound and indiscriminate. His reasoning comes from his rejection of Thomas Hobbes’ conception of sovereignty. For Agamben, rather than sovereignty allowing us to escape the state of nature, rather it reinforces it. This is because the sovereign operates under the ontological proposition of abandonment. As Agamben explains following Carl Schmitt’s theoretic, the sovereign (like God) is both defined by the law (and therefore included) yet set outside of it since the sovereign can declare an exception to the law at any point in time (and is therefore excluded). Thus, sovereignty is an “exclusive inclusion”. Under this same logical rubric, Agamben explains how the homo sacer, a figure in Roman Law, was also both included in law yet excluded from it. The homo sacer was an individual who was banished from life in the city, yet was able to be killed without the murderer being committed of homicide. Essentially, the homo sacer was excluded from law, but also included in it though this relation of abandonment.

Now, if we rethink the man and animal distinction, we can see the very same logic in operation. For example, in exercising his own sovereignty, the human excludes his animality by rejecting his animal self and appeasing his rational self by entering into language, dismissing primitive life and privileging civilization. As Agamben writes in a chapter in Homo Sacer dedicated to the werewolf, it too operates as an exclusive inclusion; “a threshold of indistinction and of passage between man and animal, physis and nomos” (1995, p. 105). In this sense, the werewolf may be considered metaphoric for the fusing of zoé and bios in the state of exception. In this way it might be read that the werewolf is an embodiment of the state of exception in which man and animal, nature and culture are joined as one. The same can also be said for the adult and infant. In Infancy and History, Agamben identifies a similar parallel to that of man and animal. This parallel rests on the assertion that rationality and the ability to enter into language is lacking for the infant in the same way as the animal. Moreover, both can be described as being “in-human.” For example, Agamben (1993) posits that “If the ghost is the living-dead or the half-dead person, the baby is the dead-living or a half-alive person” (p. 83). The articulation of man and animal, adult and infant in these positions of exclusive inclusions serve as a means of exemplifying the fusing of zoe and bios. Now, returning to the topic of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben has argued quite controversially that, because zoe and bios have become bound, life itself is inherently politicized. Thus, politics is biopolitical in the sense that because the sovereign can step outside of law and declare a state of exception at any point in time, our life can be taken from us at any moment. So whilst we believe a juridico-political order protects us, rather it renders us fragile and vulnerable in a new state of nature.

Agamben uses the example of the concentration camps to illustrate this state of exception. He further shows how the prisoner in the camp, the Muselmann, has been stripped to the position of bare life, which is the zone between zoe and bios or nature and culture. Rather than, however, seeing the Muselmann as an instance for extreme pessimism, Agamben appears to place his emancipatory hope in him. For example, Agamben states that in the Muselmann nothing natural or instinctual remains nor anything rational, but only the conditions of time and space. In this sense, the Muselmann is neither zoe or bios. He is also not, however, a transcendence of the two. Rather, he exists in the gap or the space between them; in their openness. In the same way that Agamben argues that humanity should not be redeeming itself by grasping its relation to animality, a similar argument can be made for the Muselmann. Grasping at relations to in-humanness (and therefore negative dialectics) is problematic because this operates under the same logic of exclusion. Instead, Agamben almost wants a “letting be”. We have to stop trying to master our animal or inhuman self. We have to forget about redeeming the animal or the human and live in the suspension of the two positions.

What becomes crucial here, however, is the means by which an understanding of play can contribute to Agambian theory and how Agambian theory can, likewise, contribute to an understanding of play. Of course, in following Agamben’s key ontological proposition (abandonment), and in setting up play and games as an exclusion inclusive in the same way as man and animal, adult and infancy, and zoé and bios, this poses the question of how “play” can act as an intermediary much like that of the Muselmann. Is there a form of play, or a play-like quality, that can form the intermediary that is required by Agambian logic in order to free man from his bond with bios, to untangle and to separate nature and culture? Thus, here becomes the question of play as opposed to sport/games. It appears that the play games dichotomy can be said to exist on a similar level to that of Agamben’s distinction between zoe and bios, nature and culture. It isn’t far-fetched to comprehend how these dualisms reflect and mimic one another. Play is, arguably, in acquiescence with zoé, natural life whilst games/sport are amenable to bios, culture. Play in its most primitive form is free from constraints, it lacks boundaries of time and space, it lacks direction, it lacks purpose, it is gratuitous, and therefore completely unproductive in terms of any goods (outcome) it may produce. Primitive play, one may argue, is common to both man and animal, as evinced by Huizinga (1950) in his work Homo Ludens, wherein he describes the phenomenon of play as “older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them playing” (1950, p. 1). Moreover, because of this, play “cannot have its foundations in any rational nexus, because this would limit it to mankind” (p.3). This link to man and animal, consequently, also bolsters the argument that play is common to infants/children and adults, since infants and children are also known to play, yet arguably are not considered entirely rational beings. However, as Huizinga (1950) recognizes, higher and lower forms of play exist, which allows him to avoid the conflation of play with games which are rule-governed. This is also explained by Caputo, who states: “play, then, is that of the child. . .we ought to distinguish this sense of play with another, but distinct idea: playing as a game with rules. The game with rules…is a more rational behavior persisting throughout adulthood” (Netzky, 1979, p.90). In this way, it may be argued that, in contrast to primitive play which requires no form of rationality to participate (thus being common to both man and animal, in addition to adult and infant), play resembling a game-like scenario may be described as “sophisticated” play (Suits, 1988).

According to Suits (1988), sophisticated play is goal-oriented, and has limits of time and space. While this form of play is still considered, like primitive play, autotelic and an end in itself (Suits, 1988), play which takes this form requires skills and, therefore, also requires a level of rationality (in that one must have the cogency to abide by rules in order to participate) which distinguishes it from the spontaneity and irrationality of primitive play. When framed in an Agambian light, it might be considered that the play I am trying to identify within this presentation—the emancipatory form, the “silent form of resistance”—exists in a state which is not primitive in the sense that it is overly capricious or natural, yet can also not be considered excessively serious, rational, or language-bound. This conception, therefore, requires a zone unconstrained by rules or law per se.

Beginning with the rule-bound distinction, which appears to excessively demarcate the two states of play, scholars such as Schmitz (1979), Suits (2005), and Fink (1979) have asserted a “relational” quality to play (Kretchmar, 2007). For example, Schmitz (1979) suggests that play is “suspension of the ordinary.” This may be a better means of describing a realm of play which escapes the binary of play and games or primitive and sophisticated play. Thus, when appealing to a conception of play as imposing constraints on time and space, we should distinguish this from what we might describe as rule-bound conceptions of play requiring a level of rationality which also demarcates the play of animals and infants from the play of man and adults. In fact, in Agamben’s own writings on the infant-adult distinction, discussions on the concept of play emerge, particularly in terms of spatiality or temporality. For example, drawing on Heraclitus, Agamben states that he “depicts as play the temporalizing essence of the living being—his or her ‘historiocity’, we could say” (1993, p. 73). Thus, Agamben portrays the position of play as one with a temporal element.

Moreover, since play requires no use of language as it is available to both infant and adult, it may be able to render rules and laws futile, therefore escaping biopolitical sovereignty. Topically, although Agamben’s conception of the Muselmann appears to offer little emancipatory promise, he does acknowledge the promise of play. Hence, even in The State of Exception, Agamben uses play as a means of explaining how we can eradicate law: “One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use, but to free them from it for good”. Thus, it appears that for play to be considered emancipatory in an Agambian sense, it must be something that is not considered rule or “law” bound. This would imply that play which is constituted by adherence to rules is unsatisfactory, since the rules of sophisticated play, hence games or sports, may be considered be analogous to law.

Yet, according to Fink, “Play is established to a commitment and bound by it…However, the rule of play is not a law; the commitment is not irrevocable.” Agamben’s point of departure for understanding playing with law, however, is with regards to the non-instrumental use of objects in play. For Agamben, this lack of instrumentality is imperative because he argues that: “A look at the world of toys shows that children, humanity’s little scrap-dealers, will play with whatever junk comes their way, and that play thereby preserves profane objects and behavior that have ceased to exist” (p. 73). According to Mills (2008), this conception of play is too narrow, since it asserts that to be “playing” one must make use of an object. This, therefore, rules out make-believe and other activities commonly regarded as play. It appears, however, that in fact what Agamben identifies is the notion of “instrumentality,” and perhaps what Agamben is attempting to explain here is that play makes use of things and objects in a non-instrumental way. Thus, the objects a child plays with are not used for their intentional, instrumental purpose. A child jumping over a book, for example, is playing, and not making use of the book for its intended purpose, to read. Agamben’s conception of play could be furthered by stating that play, itself, is non-instrumental, much like the understanding of play given by Suits (1988). According to Suits (1988), for example, a distinction can be made between primitive and sophisticated play in considering the “payoff” we seek when we pursue an activity. Suits argues, for example, that “Primitive play is not concerned with the exercise and enjoyment of skills but with the introduction of new experiences that arise, usually, serendipitously” (p. 17). This distinction, consequently, elucidates the instrumental purpose of sophisticated play as opposed to the non-instrumentality of primitive play.

In terms of an intermediary, a new conception of play could not be entirely instrumental in the sense that it seeks ends. In order to find this intermediary, Damai (2005), posits that this must be an action “that not only halts the state-machine but also succeeds in shutting the actor, or more accurately the patient, off from the machine, as if the disjunction between birth and nation-state created by the exception were the only political ground to intensify the disjunction between bare life and the state. As a result, bare life becomes a self-enclosed paradigm communicating to itself as pure means without end” (p. 272). Such an action, or state of being, may be found in an understanding of play which overcomes barriers of language, is constrained by time and space yet not rule-bound per se in a fixed way that requires rationality, and can be experienced in the moment rather than as a futuristic goal, as pure means. Hence, as Agamben states in Infancy and History, “In play, man frees himself from sacred time and ‘forgets’ it in human time” (p. 70).

This is, arguably, a similar experience to that found in states of full submersion in a playful activity, a type of flow. Moreover, as Agamben explains, “The man who managed to separate the different natures tightly bound together during his existence would succeed in freeing within himself the profound sense of life” (2003, p. 90). But, what or who is this figure? It appears, therefore, that Agamben believes that this figure can no longer be human in the sense that we know ourselves to be, and can no longer seek to master its animality or infancy. Thus, for Agamben, we have come to conceive of humans as “the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation” (2003, p. 16). In consideration of this quote, a state of play would have to be found which, not only rejects rationality and language, but also does not privilege the body over the mind or vice versa (hence his reference to the union of body and soul). It requires a break with the animal instincts of play, yet is also devoid of the constitutive constraints of games. Scholars have documented experiences found in scenarios of play, physical activity, and sport, in which a state of sub-consciousness is entered into; a point at which the individual loses themselves in the activity in which they are involved.

For example, Hyland (1990) argues that when engrossed in a physical activity or sport, one can reach a state of being “in the zone.” Although sport, as previously asserted, is a state of sophisticated play—a rule-bound activity requiring rationality which reinforces rather than overcomes the state of exception and biopolitical sovereignty—sporting activities are still illustrative of individuals who have found and experienced this zone. As Standish (1998) explains, Heideggerian philosophy can enable us to recognize how an individual can come into this zone “with an openness to being” as opposed to “the deliberate action of a subject” (p. 261). For Standish, practice in sport allows peak performance, which is a stage wherein “non cognitive and increasingly complex movements are incorporated into larger tactical patterns in a kind of flow. . .lost in their movements, conscious skills disappearing in their ready-to-hand” (p. 266). Yet it is not only in high performance sport where we can reach this state of being in the zone, or being in a state of flow. Any activity we pursue with enough intensity to lose ourselves in, which can be described as arbitrary and hence has no foreseeable end of which the activity is acting as a means to this end, could be considered the intermediary play this presentation is searching to clarify.

At this point it is also imperative to grasp the concept of seriousness in terms of play. For example, in drawing a distinction between primitive and sophisticated play, and the instrumental use of play, a clear distinction in the seriousness of the activities pursued emerges. For example, primitive play appears to be somewhat capricious in nature. If we accept any spontaneous act which allows a new experience as “play,” is this an overly broad definition? Can we not argue that sophisticated play is no longer “playful” in that it is excessively serious? Moreover, playfulness, for instance, is also asserted to be a part of games. Thus, while play in its primitive form can be seen as distinguished from, as Suits (1988) describes, “sophisticated play” (games and sports), it is also an integral part of this latter conception of play. Thus, when considering this new conception of play it is also imperative to account for the fact that one may undertake an activity with utmost seriousness, even in recognition that the activity at hand is completely arbitrary. For example, as Fink (1979) explains, “Hegel. . .said that it in its indifference and extreme lack of seriousness, play is the unique and most sublime expression of true seriousness” (p.80).

Thus, in terms of play being a serious pursuit whilst recognizing its arbitrariness, although play is typically conceived of an end in itself, it could also be as easily conceived in Agambian terms as “pure means”; there is no end in sight with play, no instrumental nature to it. Play is not serious in the sense that in playing we are endeavoring to reach an important goal. Play occurs in the moment, it is temporal. Play makes use of nothing but itself. The conception of play as primitive, yet not entirely capricious, is not working toward a telos, there is no goal in sight in primitive play. Given the arguments foregrounded which have explained the requirement for a state which is intermediary, like the Muselmann, an understanding of play which does not require language or rationality, is not bound by rules, is infinite rather than determined, is not instrumental, and allows the individual to lose consciousness, is proposed here as a possible optimistic “silent form of resistance”.

To conclude, then … in understanding Agamben’s argument and the pessimistic position the Muselmann, in whom Agamben lays his emancipatory hope, I propose a particular form of play to be a new optimistic silent form of resistance that can work to overcome biopolitical sovereignty. As Agamben states in The Open, “To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more effective than authentic—articulations, but rather to show how the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man” (2003, p. 92). Perhaps this emptiness is a non-linguistic state that overcomes the metaphysical humanism underpinning the biopolitical sovereignty Agamben appears to purport as problematic and dangerous. Perhaps this non-linguistic state, which transcends abandonment, transcends the exclusion of man’s animality and infancy, and transcends bare life, can be found in a reformulated conception of play. Such would be an understanding of play as a temporal state which lacks a requirement of language, rationality, and futuristic visions of hope; as a state that is only ever “in the moment”; spatial, yet lacking definitive boundaries; infinite.