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Baudrillard on War and World Cup
An awfully juicy nugget from Baudrillard apropos today's non-events:
"Empty war: it brings to mind those games in World Cup football which often have to be decided by penalties (sorry spectacle), because of the impossibility of forcing a decision. As though the players punished themselves by means of 'penalties' for not having been able to play and take the match in full battle. We might as well have begun with the penalties and dispensed with the game and its sterile stand-off. So with the war [Gulf War]: it could have begun at the end and spared us the forced spectacle of this unreal war where nothing is extreme and which, whatever the outcome, will leave behind the smell of undigested programming, and the entire world irritated as though after an unsuccessful copulation."
(from The Gulf War Did Not Take Place)
Or, as Johnny Rotten might say: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"...
By RIPope | July 9, 2006 | Permalink
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Tony Negri on soccer, AC Milan, etc.
http://tinyurl.com/gbyef
Posted by: CR | Jul 10, 2006 1:09:36 AM
Anyone know what Materazzi said to Zidane so as to get a header to the chest?
Posted by: s0metim3s | Jul 10, 2006 1:19:15 AM
Well, that's the question of the hour, isn't it.
The speculation I've seen so far:
1) M twisted Z's nipple
2) M said something about Z's ethnic background
3) M said something pertaining the rumors about Z's sexuality
4) M said something about the shot that Z had just missed
5) Z was tuckered out and wanted to take a seat
6) Z knew the game was doomed - Barthes vs. Buffon in the shootout - and wanted no part in it.
Posted by: CR | Jul 10, 2006 2:11:12 AM
I think the headbutt argues against Baudrillard's argument. It was an extreme act, within the rules of the game, hence his ejection. Similarly the extremity of the gulf war results in a red card being given to any portrayal of that extremity.
Posted by: Nate | Jul 10, 2006 3:50:45 AM
Nah, it was a hair joke.
Posted by: Amish Lovelock | Jul 10, 2006 10:24:02 AM
Nate - ha! You are analysing too much. But, if you're really going to make me think about the particulars of this silly match, you are right. It was a little moment of the Real, particularly since it wasn't shown in real time but had to be 'found' to be replayed after the Italian goal-keeper was running around hysterically trying to get everyone to believe what he saw with his eyes, like the trauma that only 'comes to be' in its after-the-'fact' symbolization.
I thought Zidane's act had something graceful to it, a kind of encapsulation of the impotence and frustration that is the game of soccer. Maybe we can say he even Realized the stupidity of the sport, and he had, in his last game, finally had enough... and just wanted, for once, to leave the field when HE felt like it.
(And of course, the violent headbutt to the chest just after missing a headbutt scoring opportunity - so directly Realizing, in this repetition, the painfully boring pace of the sport.)
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 10, 2006 1:49:33 PM
You assumed no one would read this quote on my site a few days back! Fair enough...s'pose.
Posted by: infinite thought | Jul 10, 2006 6:54:53 PM
"a kind of encapsulation of the impotence and frustration that is the game of soccer"
What a total load of shit.
Posted by: daniel | Jul 10, 2006 9:11:49 PM
I thought the headbutt was totally out of order, but if it turns out Amish is right then I change my mind. As one of the balding I think it ought to be general policy that hair jokes lead to headbutts. And Italy should be retroactively docked two points. Full-pated no good rotten...
Posted by: Nate | Jul 10, 2006 9:31:22 PM
ZZ is expected to make a press statement later this week, and recent reportage points to the "terrorist" label being the catalytic epithet.
I have to admit I'm still confounded by the whole exchange, and after reading Richard:
"...we can say he even Realized the stupidity of the sport, and he had, in his last game, finally had enough... and just wanted, for once, to leave the field when HE felt like it"
and Daniel:
"What a total load of shit."
I have to (paradoxically) embrace the Realization that both sentiments likely point toward a Truth within the event.
Posted by: John | Jul 10, 2006 10:27:48 PM
John, yes, I agree, I think Daniel's comments are right on the money. Precisely what I was saying, yes.
What was Zidane's act if not a kind of impotent acting-out (especially when considering the inevitable consequences in this his much-hyped final game)?... And what is soccer if not a woefully impotent sport, as Baudrillard intimated?
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 12:00:30 AM
Would it be 'unsporting' to point out just how masculinised these tropes of impotence and frustration are? Why would anyone go looking to sport for libidinal satisfaction - or was it just the mention of nipple tweaking between men that brought this on?
If so, tweak eachothers nipples by all means - but interesting theoretical/political commentary (on sport or anything else) it aint.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Jul 11, 2006 1:57:59 AM
You could, of course, always check out the news sources and see what's purported to've been said. And from there, you could, of course, consider the fact that all sports contain a psychological (note, not necessarily psychoanalytic) element in which getting into the opponent's head is considered fair game. And you could, of course, recognize that were you a competitive athlete, this notion of yours is beyond ridiculous:
"Maybe we can say he even Realized the stupidity of the sport, and he had, in his last game, finally had enough... and just wanted, for once, to leave the field when HE felt like it."
I mean, I love that capital "R" on "realized," as if, you know, a man in the 110th minute of a football match acquired Lacanian Truth...although, I'm sure it'd be easier to take such patent bullshit seriously whilst dehydrated, exhausted, and the victim of an endless stream of racist remarks. (I know it'd take at least that much convince me.)
But back to you speaking with, you know, something resembling the facts:
"It was a little moment of the Real, particularly since it wasn't shown in real time but had to be 'found' to be replayed after the Italian goal-keeper was running around hysterically trying to get everyone to believe what he saw with his eyes, like the trauma that only 'comes to be' in its after-the-'fact' symbolization."
You love to fly off every available handle, that much is obvious--but were you to do so from, I don't know, a position in which you possessed the most basic of facts, you'd realize Zizi was not, in fact, carded after evidence his foul was "found," but was witnessed by the line judge who, as soon as he was consulted, immediately indicated the severity of the foul. Seriously, your commitment to the truth rivals that of American conservatives, by which I mean, you have none. They deploy theirs in defense of neoconservative nonsense; you deploy yours in defense of Lacanian, but other than that, what difference is there.
P.S. Did you you see the copy of Ecrits in Materazzi's back pocket on the replay? It demonstrates that his words to Zizi were designed with cruel intent to undermine the very Truth he had just come into possession of. From my vantage point, it is clear he informed Zidane of the utter conceptul inadequacy of the Real, twisted his nipple, then proved (via a diagram cunningly tatooed on his chest) that the unconscious is structured like his ass. Zidane couldn't handle it.
P.P.S. "Hysterically"? Care to illuminate the second- and third-wave feminist critique of Lacanian misogyny for me? What was that? Didn't think so.
Posted by: John Q. Rotten | Jul 11, 2006 3:27:08 AM
I agree with:
a) total load of shit.
b) masculinised tropes.
c) witnessed by line judge.
Soccer is a beautiful, beautiful game, and if there's a problem with World Cup, it's that it doesn't allow ties, not that the sport is deficient.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 10:27:39 AM
Rotten, your insistence on facts means you completely miss the level of perception, and how reality is experienced by the person in question - in other words, you miss entirely the realm where psychoanalysis works. The line judge may have seen it, but on the television (where the vast majority of people experienced it), the commentators didn't see it and they had to rewind the tapes to find it - much later...
You obviously haven't a clue as to what psychoanalysis is about, and since the bulk of my probes above were psychoanalytic, there's not much point in beginning to discourse with you. You are a travesty to your name.
s0metim3s: yes, it is a tad masculine, but it is a masculine game, watched by many a lad! So it's kind of ironic that it's rather impotent at its heart...
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 10:36:56 AM
What are you people trying to do? Eliminate masculine tropes from a bunch of guys running around a field kicking a ball? Isn't this the clearest case of academia being completely out of touch with the world, and dare I say, 'Rotten', the (barest of) facts, in the interest of liberal niceties???
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 10:40:20 AM
The incident is known to most people around the world through TV, not through having seen it. Meanwhile, it wasn't seen by the ref or the assistant refs. It was only seen, supposedly, by the fourth and/or fifth official. It's now reckoned that these officials only 'saw' it by 'seeing' it on a TV monitor. But they can't admit that because to do so would throw into difficulty some other decisions or non-decisions that took place in that game and in the tournament, most specifically, another act of violence in which a player headbutted another but wasn't seen by the ref but was 'seen' by TV.
Even now someone is writing 'The World Cup Did Not Take Place'.
In fact, I'm sure it could be argued that Materazzi only said what he said because he was on TV. Not because he knew he would be witnessed, but because of the level of hysteria created by the match as a piece of world watched spectacle. The very next day, there were sites that were not only streaming the headbutt episode but also montages of past Materazzi incidents. His violence as a player has been packaged up and is available as a piece of online entertainment/evidence.
Posted by: isakofsky | Jul 11, 2006 11:37:01 AM
Of course the tropes are masculine, but I was reminded of something Angela wrote that I think relates to what Richard is saying and I think is interesting. Namely, doesn't this blind "impotence" at the heart of the machismo circumvent its phallogocentric base, with Baudrillard's "empty war" as a radically impossible sexual relationship and rather a fetishized submissive/dominant one, as theorized (with masculine tropes intact) by Gayle Rubin and others?
And while, yes, the fourth official apparently did see the act, according to the Times article, Richard is right to point out that for the primary referees, the media and many of the fans present, this amounts to a "lost moment" that is only available via its by-now-endlessly replayed simulacrum. Now, I don't want this to seem like a Last Temptation of ZZ, but doesn't the emergence of the replayed act (over and over again on the American broadcast that I watched) occur at the expense of the "beauty" of the game Kenneth mentions? Doesn't it evacuate the "meaning" of the sport itself (whether or not that Symbolic investment is libidinal)?
Posted by: John | Jul 11, 2006 11:51:10 AM
First, I've been following this from 3 Quarks Daily of all places, which strikes me as odd.
Second, this is a prime example of psychoanalysis producing the most predictable, least interesting readings of cultural events. I mean, there's the "shock value" (and the concomitant pleasures of its production) of the conventional psychoanalytic reversal--"impotent," indeed.
Then there's this:
It was a little moment of the Real, particularly since it wasn't shown in real time but had to be 'found' to be replayed after the Italian goal-keeper was running around hysterically trying to get everyone to believe what he saw with his eyes, like the trauma that only 'comes to be' in its after-the-'fact' symbolization.
On what level does this work? If a subordinate official saw it, he wasn't obligated to rush the pitch to inform the field official. As I understand, the official doesn't volunteer the information until asked, much like the appeal to the first or third base ump on a check swing. So I'm not sure what experience you reference here, or how you do so. Or are you merely trying to say that that particular moment was an allegory of Lacanian psychoanalysis. And if that's the reason, I can't help but ask "Why?"
isakofsky, at the 3 Quarks link above, they have links not only to Materazzi, but to Zidane's former misbehavior, including a damn near identical headbutt. They also claim he has a famous temper, something Americans, treated to a constant stream of "the Great Zidane"--"the ball's cleared, taken by the Great Zidane, touch pass, back to the Great Zidane," &c.--wouldn't have known about.
Anyhow, isn't the more interesting comment Materazzi's bizarre profession of innocence via ignorance. He "doesn't even know what [the word 'terroist'] means"? What?
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Jul 11, 2006 12:05:25 PM
Oh Scott, I have a post I meant to send you, though it's not inappropriate to do the self-promotion here.
http://ghostinthewire.org/archives/2006/07/on_genetic_priv.php
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 12:33:06 PM
Oh, and on a related matter, Baudrillard thinks psychoanalysis is as silly and simulacral as Marxism, so we might want to consider reading the starting quote without all the Lacnian overtones.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 12:37:39 PM
And we haven't even begun on headbutt, heads, giving head, bowing down in front of someone but only in order to assault them, Materazzi's backward fall, Materazzi prone etc etc.
Posted by: isakofsky | Jul 11, 2006 1:08:34 PM
So an unsuitable quotation from Baudrillard leads to a Lacanian-inflected "analysis" that doesn't match the facts or even seem to get Lacan right, aside from throwing around the jargon. (You actually wrote "Realized?" What the hell?)
What a thoroughly useless post! You are truly one of the Internet's leading discreditors of Lacanian psychoanalysis -- but apparently unconsciously (see, did you catch the reference to psychoanalysis there, with the word "unconsciously"?).
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Jul 11, 2006 1:32:35 PM
Ken, I earmarked that a couple days ago, after my iatrogenic post, and plan on incorporating it into my follow-up (today or tomorrow).
And yes, I considered the Baudrillard independently of psychoanalysis, just not RIPope's statements about the Real. So I spoke more to the comments than the post. Were I to speak to the post, I'd say Baudrillard's "so with" is too far, far easy. Unearned, even. But I find most Baudrillard similarly flip, as if the ideas are tossed off to an audience he assumes will welcome them and ponder their profundity. With Zizek, at least, there's a sense that the wheels churn behind the easy associations. (I speak to prose style here more than quality of thought, but the latter's tough to fathom from so short a selection.)
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Jul 11, 2006 1:41:31 PM
Strangely, my impression of the two thinkers is reversed. Baudrillard seems to say stuff that he thinks is interesting or witty, somewhat off the cuff, somewhat hyperbolically, makes fun of himself for doing so, and then seems surprised when he builds up a bevy of acolytes. Whereas Zizek seems to pride himself on cultivating disciples who don't read carefully anyone besides Zizek, which then helps Zizek's arguments against other thinkers make sense and thus establish Zizek as bad-ass philo-mo-fo.
They're both over the top, but the madness in their methods seems a bit different to me.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 2:22:23 PM
Oh and my Baudrillard/Lacan disconnect comment wasn't directed at you, Scott.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 2:29:14 PM
RIPope, I took Angela's point about masculinity differently, I heard it to be not about the masculinity of the game but about the trope in the conversation here - impotence and all that. The game and talk about it aren't wholly discrete but nor are they identical. Assessing success and failure (assessing at the level of theoretical analysis) in terms of frustation and impotence and so on can not do other than find these dynamics in the sport. (I wonder what your theoretical register would make of a film like Bend it like Beckham and of women's professional soccer.)
I also just don't see why you characterize soccer as impotent. I'm having troublg thinking of a non-gendered term here, in part because I'm not sure I get what you're saying but I think mainly because I don't share your take on the sport. I think you mean that soccer doesn't satisfy, makes a promise it doesn't keep? If so, I don't agree. Even if accepting for the sake of argument that some matches don't satisfy as much or to some, that doesn't characterize the sport as a whole (Germany/Portugal was a great match, for instance) but even if one were to take that as a trait of soccer as such one could turn it (as an exercise in cultural studies-ness) into a comment on the resistance of the sport to a certain type of pleasure on demand: it's not a matter of guaranteed satisfaction for payment, automatic accomplishment of the money-for-affect consumer circuit.
I don't find that read particularly convincing either, of course, as I find soccer great (particulary the anticipation and uncertainty, like a good suspense film, as opposed to say basketball where there's little more sure than that another basket will be made soon), but my point here is that what you take as a deficiency in the game can just as easily be read as a superior quality.
Take care,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Jul 11, 2006 4:11:42 PM
Adam, what are you, Wikipedia personified, or avatarized? "One of the Internet's leading..." What nonsense. Adam, and all you people who think you know Lacan, show it to me. Prove it. Don't just whine about the jargon, which seems all you are capable of doing - over and over and over and over again.
Many of you have no sense of humour. It's too bad.
And simply because Baudrillard never tires of attacking psychoanalysis, that doesn't mean his analyses aren't fused through and through with Lacanian inflections. Almost all of his direct attacks on psychoanalysis concern themselves exclusively with Freud, a rather idiosyncratic gesture for a Parisian coming of age during Lacan's two decades of Seminaires.
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 5:25:27 PM
I support Kenneth's comment that "Baudrillard thinks psychoanalysis is as silly and simulacral as Marxism, so we might want to consider reading the starting quote without all the Lac[a]nian overtones," so I thought I'd look at some selections from Baudrillard's Simulations (Semiotext(e), 1983):
…order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, it always prefers this assumption…(B)ut this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation, through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.
I wonder if there is any discourse that, through its attempts to order, doesn’t simply lapse into the “silliness” of the simulacral. It would seem that FIFA’s rule on no replays actually seems to follow from this impossible task of separating the real from its (increasingly instantaneous) reproductions. And yet we are thrown by a simultaneous reliance (via media) on the simulation to somehow, once and for all, prove the “realness” of the real event:
This also means the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, in the minute duplication of the real, preferably on the basis of another reproductive medium - advertising, photo, etc…it becomes the real for the real, fetish of the lost object - no longer object of representation, but ecstasy of denegation and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal...(T)he very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction…(A)t the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.
As I mentioned before, the representation comes at the expense of the meaning and investment in the event itself. For Baudrillard, a game decided by penalties is a non-game, and a non-game that hinges on a “lost moment” of reality must be even moreso an exercise in impotence and futility. Moreover, the countless numbers who analyze the event, in the hopes of revealing the real truth of the situation, the event, the game itself, simply make their rhetorical bones upon a short-circuit. And, without wishing to inject any further “overtones” or widen any “disconnect,” there is a real connection here, for Baudrillard, to psychoanalysis, as merely one of the “media” that seek to order (conscious and unconscious) reality:
The messages of the unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.
All of this was, however, already agreed to, above, by Richard and Kenneth (and perhaps, unconsciously, by Adam) in Daniel’s impeccable summation:
“What a load of total shit.”
Posted by: John | Jul 11, 2006 5:29:12 PM
Yes, John, that is a great quote from Baudrillard, appearing in a lengthy footnote. But alas, I should hope we've learned a thing or two about footnotes..
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 5:42:45 PM
I'm all for Lacanian jargon! Long may it prosper!
But surely we can all agree: Its mere presence is no guarantee of actual Lacanian thought.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Jul 11, 2006 5:47:43 PM
Yes, I agree - but then show me how it's not.
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 6:01:42 PM
Mo'shit (BHL, WSJ, capitulum virumque)
Posted by: nnyhav | Jul 11, 2006 6:21:08 PM
I'm thinking mainly of your use of the capitalized "Realized."
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Jul 11, 2006 6:39:23 PM
I don't know, Adam. In my more cynical moments, I'm tempted to think Lacanian jargon might just be coterminous with Lacanian thought.
Though seriously, 99 Helens agree: Realized?
And to say that Baudrillard is fused through and through with Lacanian inflections is like saying Heidegger is fused through and through with Cartesian inflections or that Plato is fused through and through with Sophistic inflections.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 7:01:43 PM
Yes, "Realized" - the act, or passage to the act, of traversing or 'experiencing' the Real.
Funny, it's a usage of the term that, to my knowledge, neither Lacan nor (I'm less sure here) Zizek employ. So what's the gist here, that we shouldn't use jargon not already employed by the 'masters'?
Heidegger directly addresses Descartes, and Plato the Sophists. Besides this one little footnote well-brought out by John, and, I should add, a few confused references in Seduction, Baudrillard does not address Lacan like one might - or should - expect him to in his denunciations of psychoanalysis.
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 7:18:34 PM
My understanding is that JB considered writing an anti-psychoanalysis book after Mirror of Production and before Seduction, but thought that, between Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death, the argument was at that point all too obvious.
And yes, we should use no jargon not authorized or used by the Masters. That's what I was trying to get at. Yup.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 8:06:58 PM
Yes, he was going to. Seduction became - or short-circuited - that text. Which is a way of saying he must of read a lot of Lacan (or attended his seminars), but never really addressed him...
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 8:12:43 PM
Oh and if your complaint is that JB doesn't "reference" or "cite" Lacan sufficiently, it's because after Symbolic Exchange and Death, he decides the form of academic writing, with all that incestuous citing, is part of the simulacral nature of critical theory and something best avoided; so he decides to try his hand at short essays, with limited (or no) citations, and aphorisms.
One can't trick illusion into returning if they spend all their time obeying the formal rules that govern the discovery and discussion of the operations of the Real, especially now that the Real no longer exists, or rather exists only as a product of all those formal rules that govern discovery.
Puts the patter in pataphyics.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 8:13:00 PM
Btw, can you email a copy of your T&E article to those of us who don't currently have project muse access? If we ask nicely?
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2006 8:14:55 PM
How does the impotence and slow pace of football rest against the mirror of academic (re)production?
And what of its affinity with abstruse, jargon-riddled academic speculations on academics blogs as to the True Meaning of a footballer's head-butt, masculine tongues half-in-male-cheeks or not?
Am I effacing the *difference* of "politicized" "cultural theorists" by asking such impertinent questions?
I am a big fan of this blog and the individual blogs of its posters, but what is this if not a circle jerk?
Posted by: Circle Jerk | Jul 11, 2006 9:09:17 PM
Cat-calling repetition, again. We have not left the schoolyard. Shall we burn Seminar XX next?
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 11, 2006 9:17:35 PM
Zidane in "Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait": "The game, the event, is not necessarily experienced or remembered in real time. I remember playing in another place, at another time, when something amazing happened. Someone passed the ball to me, and before even touching it, I knew what was going to happen. I knew I was going to score. It was the first and last time it ever happenend."
So it is not all that ludicrous to speak of the pre-posterous nature of the event that is remembered as an after-effect. The goal that was 'always already' or in this case "the last time it ever happened" i.e the 'never already'...a thought which would most certainly please rye bau...
Posted by: riocabo | Jul 12, 2006 12:22:42 AM
circle jerk, I think it's possible to be ironic about being serious. Then it's possible to be either serious or ironic about having been ironic about being serious. circle jerk is a great name, btw - though it has to be translated for UK consumption.
Posted by: isakofsky | Jul 12, 2006 2:14:11 AM
fucking hell, and the game itself?
I sure hope there's a rebroadcast of that sometime.
(Aren't penalty shootouts in ice hockey soooo boring...OMG)
Posted by: Matt | Jul 12, 2006 6:01:20 AM
And then there's the anti-macho, liberal sentimental, über-truistic, greco-noble-moralising take (for which thankfully she gets a lot of flack). In fact, this comment was so good I'm just going to copy it on over. The author begins by quoting Lindsay Beyerstein's guest post:
#“...abject failure as a captain, a sportsman, and a human being”Oh, please, he’s a soccer player, not Kofi Annan or the pope. I would prefer to keep such serious criticism of someone’s humanity for the Bush Administration, or Al Qaeda/terrorists, or any of the various “war lords” out there. But all the shock and dismay at a soccer player giving another player a thump on the chest is overdone. Of course what he did was stupid, but hardly tragic.
I wish people would stop insisting that athletes in the midst of intense competition, and physical battles and exertion, should be perfect role models. At that point society better start pointing the finger at itself.
And what’s worse, spending one hundred minutes of kicking, elbowing and insulting a player specifically to provoke them (rather than just concentrating on playing well), or fighting back for one second? Again, what he did was stupid, but all the provoking that goes on is certainly no more sportsman-like.
Also, in the strange world of sports, sometimes starting a fight ignites a team rather than breaks it down. I know I’ve seen it several times—you can never tell.
Posted by mroberts on 07/10 at 04:03 PM
#By the way, Lindsey, look at the picture at the top of the blog you’re writing for
and so on..
Posted by: Matt | Jul 12, 2006 7:33:21 AM
John: doesn't this blind "impotence" at the heart of the machismo circumvent its phallogocentric base
But it's that circumvention which isn't happening, so long as 'impotence' is lamented, as frustrating, and so on.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Jul 13, 2006 1:51:16 AM
Angela,
I see your point. All of these lamentations - cries of foul - simply reassert the chest-beating machismo anew. Thanks for responding.
Posted by: John | Jul 13, 2006 11:06:57 AM
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