1 “there’s the siren!”
15. the delicate
with respect to the sounding of football, considered from the perspective of kik.tok . we note the importance of not-the-stadium, to play . the extraordinary thrill that stadium sound can be has attracted scholars in the past (Redhead 1997, 65–79; Back 2003, Bale 1994, 139-142),26 but recognition of the necessity of kik.tok, means we
must go much further afield in our pursuit of
football/sound/aurality, fanning out from the mcg, listening to those currents of play from which its games gather: suburban, desert, schoolyard games, freezing-morning games on a local ground by a mist-hung river; and then further, away from any “ground” at all, melting into all instances of its shoving throwing tackling kicking joshing and banter, the endless chatter of football radio and tv (on and on and on it drones) . as we do this, football starts to sound more scattery, less urgent, more funny, quieter, has more birds tweeting, more dogs barking, more interruption, more scrappy
unfinished blended, sometimes with tears, sometimes with crickets that stop chirping as you run down to the beach to have a kick
before sunset, twigs snapping underfoot . we must bring this breadth and delicacy of consideration to football’s aurality, must be careful not to over-emphasise its volume, mass and sheer sonic spectacle, even while recognising the tremendous importance of these effects to its play.
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25. grass
Many people have a tree growing in their head, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 15).
the sounds of grass are rustle, scatter, crinkle and puff . the sounds of light crowds of movement: “Lice hopping on the beach”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 30) . run the fingers through the hair behind your ears, rub the back of the head on the chair . those loud/quiet sounds rich in timbre and percussive detail, even though very soft: incidentals, everywheres . football ovals, before everybody starts to run and shout, are quiet places . sound is muffled by the earth which is, for all its firmness, friable: soft and loose with seeds, wee hopping insects, and tiny bundles of grass.
sound of grass is inconspicuous murmur and hum . that rubbing and sooth that curls semi-perceptible through footy chatter, in its phatic speech and particular laconic intonation, the weed-like spread of which distributes football-as-paspalum-seeds, finding its sticky way into everywhere, you’re always picking out of your hair and off your socks . you can walk into a front bar anywhere in Australia, and if you utter even the tiniest scrap (the tinier the better, since tiny things allow movement) of footy talk you are not only home, you are part of the furniture27 : “yep . stick with ‘em love, they’ll
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consider the material and emblematic significance of grass tofootball . more than a convenient surface to play on, grass enables football’s animation through inherent sympathy with its gathering style . it provides for space and rest, entices, is churned up, is many, flies everywhere, gets on everything, smudges and stains, settles back down, is tough, regenerates, scarcely draws attention to itself . along with the ball, grass is football’s most rousing agent . like the ball,
“it attracts and arrays the players” (Massumi 2002, 73); part-subject, it makes part-objects of every player . draws them into blade-like identity in play . grass is the ground for that “space”, the finding of which is one of football’s chief aims and pleasures . where grass is not available dust twigs sand and gravel assume its place . all drift and scatter, all gather and tumble . all move . transforming an apparently solid surface in depth, crumble, puff and skid-ness. grass is playful, characterised by: “quirky shifts and latent potential”, “redundancy”, “proliferation of form”, and “flexibility”, (Sutton-Smith 1997, 222–224) . it is excessive . and as such, despised by the plain
ol’haters, whose protestations about its “wasteful” consumption of water in time of drought, cover a more fundamental anxiety about its invitation to (violent, intoxicating) play . the site for a type of
sensuous engagement we pursue with other bodies animates,
inanimates striving to reorganise our own material limits through
collision . this is a communal pleasure . grass is the invitation to a sensuality shared . a version of Bataille’s erotic plethora: “the first obvious thing about eroticism is the way that an ordered parsimonious and
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shuttered reality is shaken by a plethoric disorder” (Bataille 1987, 104).28 we
run roll fall tackle tumble embrace on it, most usually in small groups, in two’s or three’s . let’s call this lawn-embrace: the
tumbling that draws us whether we enact it or not . even front yard lawn, ostensibly just for show, is experienced as potential space for this sensuous engagement . a titillation . perhaps we will fall into its embrace at night? run across it, destroy something on it, light a fire on it, roll on it in a damp frenzy? blowing up letterboxes points to this . as does the kidnapping or decapitation of garden gnomes . a powerful relation between all kinds of bodies is enacted in lawn embrace . anywhere grass is . it precisely draws a collision between “us”, the ground and the other . a number of others . press and press against earth, to find its limits and our own, all of ours . to lose them.
tormented British playwright Sarah Kane loved the football bless
her . reflecting on (liverpool fc player) paul ince’s claim that tackling is more enjoyable than sex, Kane puts it down to the visceral
experience of performance, but we think, more likely, attraction to the magnetic, communal mash-up occasioned by grass (Kane in Singer, 2004, 141) . earth yields . the body of the other yields . our own body yields . in this crush the density of our matter is drawn towards the point of our own, other’s and the earth’s
obliteration/transformation . scary-marvellous . “i don’t think they should use all that water for a football oval! it’s such a waste “ . o please! 29
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47. ash
One is … like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things … Saturate, eliminate, put everything in.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 280).
it is possible as Les Back has suggested, writing about football in England, that the reason people ask to have their ashes scattered on the football pitch after they die is because “the playing surface provides a connection to past and future heroes who perform on it [and] serves literally and metaphorically as an altar of memory and commemoration” (Back 2003, 312) . but it is also possible that they ask this because becoming ash is the logical end to a life’s work in football . we are overjoyed to think of scattering at last over the grass, between the blades, to puff and swirl, fuse with particles of mud . there to be trimmed by lawnkeepers, soared over by stout lads, skirmished by mad children, strolled upon by gulls . the opposite of heroics and commemoration, becoming-ash we finally achieve our aspiration to football’s grass- like ubiquity, its dissolution of ponderous constraints . in ash . grass . dust . twigs . sand . gravel we rest (and drift . it is an animated rest, a convivial one) in a condition where singularity (blade/particle) is combined with infinite inconspicuousness of “everything” . these drifty materials affirm our attraction to the deep
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inconspicuousness we (each, singularly) seek and find in participation in football (together) . finally! in death . a life! yay!worlding…
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6. worlding
becoming everybody/everything … brings into
play the cosmos with its molecular components. Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde).
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 280). it is not that football makes everyone the same but rather that it reorganises each of us as EVERY a totality of different things .
each one is called upon to take on every role, every texture, every move . individual inflection dissolves in the swarm, the crowd, the team . the colours we wear, the phrases we utter, the perspectives we share with each other; there are even certain vocal intonations and physical attitudes that not only identify us to one another but are themselves movements that fold “us” into the swarm (the gathering) that is football’s element which we all desire to enter, and cannot resist entering . when i am walking to the train station wearing my football scarf, on the way to a game, and someone in a car honks and waves and yells “go ‘pies!” it is not that I am being hailed so much as that i am being recognised emerging into the swarm which the one in the car is part of too . together, via these waves, honks and calls, we fold, another particle, another bird, into the flock . as i arrive at footscray station with its scattering of folks along the platform dressed in the colours of both sides, i am further folded, exchanging wry remarks with a couple of essendon supporters leaning against the station wall . on the train, where the clusters of colour and
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their volubility increase, the effect is more, it draws me to where i sit: more wry remarks, smiles, raised eyebrows . it will be odd if, at this moment, i meet a friend on the train who is not going to the football because i am marked, my body, language and feelingsdissolving into this other world and she is not, and this will have to be bridged . walking up to the mcg from richmond station, by now part of that crowd converging from 360 degrees on this central point, it is not that i am the same as everyone, it is not that i have lost my feeling of myself, but that each one of us by now stands in for every other . we are not indistinguishable, but we are each now representative of every single other one . by the time we are buying match-day raffle tickets (fending off the ticket sellers), and our footy Record, meeting our mates at the top of the stairs, we have become thoroughly “worlded” with the colour topography noise of the football swarm . in worlding we have been brought into play as molecular components of the cosmos (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 280) . who can deny?
this worlding prefigures the allegiance to sides which appears to define much of football’s operation, but in fact is an add-on to this more fundamental dynamic . before we are eagles, lions, swans and kangaroos, we are grass . before we are later structured by
attachment to the drama of the game, we have entered the condition of ubiquitous interchangeability . before becoming “one-eyed” we have been every-eye . allegiance is arbitrary, worlding is not.
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37. the smashed up
1. All technology is destructive through its amplification of scale, its shift into virtuality, and its bodily replacement.
2. All action is sexual due to its predication on force through pressure and the establishment of the active event.
3. All sound is violence due to the manifestation of sound waves, their displacement of space, and their rupturing transformation of atmospheric density.
(Brophy 2001, 15). we have said that part-object play is the fun of being smacked up in relationship with other forces and things, which is to say, the fun of collision . collision is of extreme and obvious importance to kik.tok and its various manifestations in/as football . it is everywhere . the knee of one ruckman collides with the gut of the other and disables him, the ball glances off the goal-sneak’s boot to score, the full-back slams into the fence and saves the day, but injures herself in the process, barry hall (swans) thumps brett staker (eagles) and all hell breaks loose . a shade more subtle, but still working by force of collision: breath is forced in and around the umpire’s whistle, colliding with its own airstream to make the sound that arrests play, and air is forced through the vocal cords of all players to produce commands, curses and invocations performed so violently that voices are routinely damaged in the execution .