the david foster wallace redux: sports, religion, aesthetics, and rule-following

8/12/2019 The David Foster Wallace Redux: Sports, Religion, Aesthetics, and Rule-Following

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Anamnesis Journal

The David Foster Wallace Redux: Sports,

Aesthetics, Religion, and Rule-Followingby Chris Barker

In 2006, David Foster Wallace wrote a well-regarded literary appreciation of Roger Federers tennis

genius. Written when Federer, then twenty-five years old, had won thirty-nine singles titles and eight

Grand Slams, Wallaces piece skillfully evoked Federers old-school stoicism and mental toughness and

good sportsmanship and evident overall decency.1According to Wallacethe successful novelist and

skilled amateur tennis player, and yet also someone willing to slum as a comic foil to athletic genius

Federers self-mastery induced a religious experience in the observer, one where you standor sit, or

sprawloutside your own body, ecstatically, an emotional spectator of another persons superhuman

achievement.

Wallaces account is engaging enough to have worked its way into a philosophical text as one example

of what it is to have a shining moment. Philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly (of

Berkeley and Harvard, respectively), laud the whooshing up that sports cause us to experience.

Dreyfus and Kellys shining moments are examples of fully embodied joys, ones in which we are

capable of luring back the gods so that we are taken over and directed by the situation rather than by

our own will.2Despite their admiration for David Foster Wallace, whose writings (including the article on

Federer) they interpret at length, they find Wallaces own notion of the sacred nihilistic. Wallaces

sacred is something we impose upon experience . . . For Wallace anything . . . can be experienced as

sacred if I choose to make it so.3Writing specifically about Federer, they themselves think that the

religious experience inspired by full-embodied athletic grace cannot be uncovered through control

and will and confrontation, as Wallace understands it to be.4

This romantic praise of whooshing up has been criticized trenchantly (and accurately) by critics ofAll

Things Shining.5But the experience of transcendence, as Dreyfus and Kelly relate it in their last chapter,

is less about superhuman achievement than about community. For example, a baseball game gathers

people together and focuses them on what is best about the season, the community, the game, and

themselves.6The experience of watching the 2012 London Summer Olympics (replayed on television
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each evening for an American television audience who already knew the outcome of many of the

events) fits their description. When the Ethiopian runner and gold medal winner Meseret Defar

removed a picture of the Virgin Mary from her track suit after winning her race, she showed this spirit in

miniature.

More than seven years after Wallaces piece, Federer now has seventy-six singles titles, seventeen

Grand Slams, and the all-time record for weeks as the number-one-ranked mens tennis player.

However, Federers preternatural kinesthetic control and the satisfaction that it brings to the spectator

are nearing a terminus. In comparison, Andy Murray, who recently bested Federer in the Olympic mens

singles final and won the US Open over Novak Djokovic, offers far less satisfying kinesthetic control and

harmony of action and much more evidence of striving. Still, the sport does not necessarily suffer

because of Federers decline. Sport can be about participation and striving as well as achievement.

Competitive sport can offer a chance for the celebration of nationality, or it can even be a way of

redeeming past traumas (such as, the Dunblane shooting that put Murrays hometown on the map). It is

possible to assign many values to competitive sports, but another way to defend (and to understand)

sports as cultural practices is in terms of how they uniquely show us how the imposition of rules and

necessities are (counter-intuitively) liberating, rather than constraining. Since the rules of games are so

clearly enunciated and enforced, sport provides a unique cultural venue where the average citizen can

learn about the virtues of following arbitrary rules. This is more true of sports than, say, a symphonic

recital, where specific roles are mapped out beforehand in scripts. If this sort of distinction holds, the

rule-boundedness of sports offers an alternative to the Dreyfus/Kelly (and, to a lesser extent, to

Wallaces) suggestion that sport offers a way to feel religious ecstasy without religion. Instead of

thinking of sport as providing a situation in which one feels an ebullition of emotion at supernatural

grace (like religion), one should view sports as providing a path toward seeing rule-following (and

subordination to laws) as a reasonable proposition, even or especially if the laws themselves are not

entirely reasonable.

It ought not to be assumed that when we distinguish sporting events from cultural events, like the

symphony, we do so for the right reasons. Sports give concrete evidence as to when it is acceptable or

unacceptable to act as an individual; and sports provide a context for (some of) the rules we accept,

situations when we should follow them, and reasons for breaking them. In some cases, the rules of the

game trumpor are interrupted or trumped bysocial rules about lying, harming others, and giving up.


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At other times, games reinforce existing social norms and also show the value in following rules and

creating norms.

Sports, then, are cultural events, as the movieBull Durhamargues when it analogizes baseball to a

church. But they are also games, and it is as games that they are distinct from theater, symphonies, andthe ritual practices of religions. In philosopher Bernard Suitss analysis of games, one of the constitutive

elements of game-playing is the lusory attitude, which involves accepting constitutive rules just so

the activity made possible by such acceptance can occur.7This is a penetrating insight that explains why

Wallace, Dreyfus, and Kelly are incorrect to imagine there to be little difference between games and

religion, or between a hail Mary pass and a Hail Mary.8Church membership has rules, observances,

and practices, but these rules ultimately present themselves as divinely willed and thus as righteous and

non-arbitrary.9Sport, in contrast, works perfectly well when the rules present themselves as arbitrary

conventions that function to make achieving a designated goal more difficult.

If sports, religious practices, and symphonic performances are all cultural events, reflecting the way that

particular groups have developed their natural inclinations, only sports are actual games, and only they

should be treated as such. In Suitss utopian celebration of the lusory attitude, games are the only

activity that a truly autonomous person would value, just for their own sake and not for any

instrumental or productive end. (This assumes that our material needs are taken care of, and we have

the leisure to pursue whatever activities we want.) The suggestion that we would voluntarily agree to

arbitrary rules and spend our leisure performing actions to better conform to these rules is an odd (and,

as Suits says) a utopian idea. Yet there is evidence for this in our non-utopian world, where sports are

precisely the fora where even the very rich and the very famous are noticeably and obviously imposed

upon by necessities, and they choose to suffer under those conditions in order to cultivate their will and

sense of control in response to necessities imposed under the rules of the game. In the quote of the

2012 sporting year, Kobe Bryant captured this thought when speaking about winning in the NBA play-

offs:

Its one of those things where psychologically you have to put yourself in a predicament, in a position

where you have no other option but to perform. You have to emotionally put yourself with your back

against the wall and kind of trick yourself, so to speak, to feel that theres no other option but to perform

and to battle. When you have that, when you put yourself in that mind state, then your performance

shines through.10
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In Bryants quotation we find one exposition of the athletes felt experience (the shining moment) and

one justification of his choice to impose arbitrary and even imagined rules upon himself to enable his

achievement to shine through. It is just this choice of will and control oversituational loss-of-control

that Dreyfus and Kelly criticize. (In an amusing confluence of approaches, some NBA statisticians have

come to agree with the [Heideggerian] prioritization of the situation over the atomic, willful individual:

imposing your individual will on a game is often not the best way to win a game in a team sport, and it

may not even be the best way to win an individual competition, because the unchosen situationthe

flow of the gameprovides the ground upon which the individual finds him or herself as an individual

or a team member.)11

Necessity, as noted, is a funny thing: we impose it upon ourselves, and (oddly)

we chooseto observe rules and to suffer penalties when we break them. This is one thing that games

teach: the utility of following rules that the participant did not generate but that are not externally

imposed against the will of the participant.

Since we cannot choose the given rules of biology and the historical social order, games and life are

different. How different they are is disputed. To a certain degree, my analysis of games, their

procedures and rules, and their ends borrows from but ultimately parts ways with Bernard Suitss

definition of a game as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.12In Suitss view,

there is no essential value in the telosof the task that game players undertake, and the importance of

game-playing lies instead in the lusory attitude whose main feature is accepting the arbitrary rules that

complicate the means to achieve a pre-lusory end, such as putting a ball in a hole.13

I retain the

teleologists sense that the choice to play games is not arbitrary, and that the rules of the games we feel

disposed to play are in some basic sense advancing us toward an unchosen goal. The connection

between dance and war and between sports and war suggest that game-playing, like Nietzsches

discipline of history, is used (and abused) to advance the goal of living. For his part, Suits mounts a

persuasive attack on the instrumentalists position,14

arguing that we think that autonomous individuals

do serious, socially useful things with their time while children play only because most of us feel the

need for an un-lusory narrativein which we are useful members of a social whole progressing toward a

goal. Once we instead accept that we live in a universe without such a teleological order, we can drop

the pretense of seriousness and get back to playing whole-heartedly and without guilt. The teleologist,

in contrast, argues that there is a definite destination to which human nature points, and that the

political unit (the whole, as Aristotle says, in which we are all parts) is the vehicle by which we achieve

such an end.
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To render this analysis persuasive, Suits relies on a utopian ideal in which all of our physiological needs

are instantly met, and only play retains its valued status as non-instrumental. If we still played games in

that society and did not simply rest in torpor, or instrumentalize our play by playing at increasingly life-

threatening games to provide an aim to an aimless life, then Suits would be correct. However, it is not

true that we can choose to play games in utopia if we wish, given that the change in material conditions

envisaged by Marx and others would not at the same time transform the nature of humans. We would

still be encumbered by our biology (if not our sociality) with reasons to compete, to fear God, and to

love with exclusivity; we would just have nothing and no one to compete over, to fear, or to love

exclusively.15

Given that we have strong, instrumental reasons for joining games, and non-instrumental reasons for

continuing to value and to play them, but (as far as we know) permanent limitations on the adoption of

the pure, lusory attitude, what do games tell us about ourselves? David Foster Wallace focuses on the

kinetic beauty of bodies at work, and his 2006 article is very strong on the actual mechanics of successful

tennis and about the changes in the mens game from power serve-and-volley to power baseline play.

He loves the game, and, acknowledging the rule-following elements of games, he argues by analogy that

the experience of watching the most skillful execution of actions under arbitrary rules is akin to the

experience of a religious mystery: how did the communicant go from A (in the back court, dead) to B

(volley winner, resurrected) by merely human means? Wallace thus answers the aesthete who sees only

biology in sports, and, in contrast, only imagination in the arts. In the radical expression of this

position, in which sport becomes either petty entertainment or mere biology, the unfettered

imagination roams free from constraint in the true arts, which, unlike sports, present rule-less games

of the imagination. But, as Suits correctly argues, even games of the imagination have rules that allow

players to coordinate their actions, or to coordinate themselves under the logic of their own thoughts.16

While granting the importance of situations that allow us to shine forth and to be the best that we can

be, it is hasty to say that we can achieve this transcendent end by divesting ourselves of will and control

in order to receive the divine aristeiaof the gods, just as it is hasty to argue that our desire for control

implies an unfreedom of will, whether as biological alphas or betas or anyone else. It is better to argue

that what game-playing shows us is that real, non-utopian communities work somewhat like games,

connecting participation, rules, and achievement through specific examples of reward that variously
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encourage participation, or effort, or performance. Even the more concrete aspects of games tell us

something about ourselves by focusing our attention on the times that one is forced to take control of a

match, or on the way that the winning team members are required to speak about their contribution to

the victoryoften in deliberately understated (read: egalitarian) terms, a truth expressed very

beautifully in the 1988 film, Bull Durham).17One of the virtues of Suitss book is that it allows us to

assign a definition to games, and then to assess the reasons why a pursuit is not a game, and also to

understand those cases where extrinsic goals are imposed to instrumentalize games. To make a rather

bad pun, the scripts imposed upon game players in the non-utopian world often cannot be avoided,

even for a moment. That is, the true game player does not play for or enjoy shining moments like

the spectator does; insofar as he is playing a game, he cannot adopt a purely lusory attitude, because, as

with everything else we do, the rules of a game are constituted by the social ends of societycontrol,

organization, liberty. Thus, agreeing with Suits, it is best to conclude that games are constituted by anattitude and by rules that complicate the achievement of a goal that can be specified in terms outside of

the game, and (with Suits) that there may be purely lusory activities in a counterfactual world, but

(against Suits) no purely lusory players in this one, now or in the future.18

To sum up: Agreeing with Suits, there is something very valuable in the lusory attitude, and, in an

environment where (we think) we have reasons to love, lust, acquire, steal, lie, and honor, games tell us

something about the boons of following socially coordinated rules rather than simply bonking other

people on the head to get our way. In a contrary-to-fact environment where there are no causes to act

in the manner just described, games would probably not be played at all, as all activities would lack

worththere would be no reason for rules to be maintained, just as there would be no reason to direct

ones attention to such rules. All social coordination would be for merely vestigial (and therefore, in

Suitss account, prohibited) reasons. Unlike the utopia in Suitss account, this world could not come,

because it would require a denaturalization of human beingstheir differences in gender, intellectual

capacity, prenatal environment, education, and rearing would have to disappear entirely from memory.

Unlike Dreyfus and Kellys account of our shining moments of pagan inspiration, sports are less spookily

authentic, and yet they have importance and value. Sports rely upon cultures of agonism and

confrontation, and upon the pressures that push us to value equality and hierarchy. Sport is not religion,

under a charitable conception of both concepts, and even spectator sports do not offer an experience
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interchangeable with and indistinguishable from the religious experience. The value of sports and game-

playing is not diminished by distinguishing between two different phenomena (sport and religion), and

the separation should serve to enhance our understanding of both.

Dr. Chris Barker is a Fellow in the George Washington Forum, Ohio University.

1. David Foster Wallace, Federer as Religious Experience,New York Times, August 20, 2006,http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html.

2. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean R. Kelly,All Things Shining (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2011), 197,199200.

3. Ibid., 47.4. Ibid., 198.5. Ibid., 201. Compare the critical response of Garry Wills, Superficial & Sublime?,New York

Review of Books, April 7, 2011,

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/superficial-sublime/.

6. Unless Dreyfus and Kelly are guilty of smuggling in an appeal to control and will, which is verypossible, it is difficult to understand how we can celebrate the greatness of our community and

ourselves without affirming the routines of practice, control, concentration, and development

that (partially) distinguish successful and non-successful competitors. But clarity concerning the

conditions of excellence and achievement is not the aim ofAll Things Shining.

7. Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press,2005), 54.

8. Dreyfus and Kelly,All Things Shining, 193.9. The identification of righteous and non-arbitrary depends upon how one solves the so-called

Euthyphro paradox. See, for example, Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of

Autonomy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which argues that modernity moves

us from a morality of obedience to one of self-governance.

10.Quoted in David McMenamin, Bryant Stomachs Illness in Game 6,ESPN, May 11, 2012,http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/7918159/kobe-bryant-stomachs-illness-lead-

los-angeles-lakers.
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18.Such an approach may also move even conservatives and right libertarians toward accepting orcelebrating Title IX or less intrusive and more liberal ways of extending the boon of coach-ability

and means-ends analysis to young girls. Over 150 years ago, first-wave feminist John Stuart Mill

characterized women as hanging a dead weight on mens public conscience. Putting young

women under the yoke of coaches, team discipline, and (from one standpoint) arbitrary goals

may not be something they necessarily want to do, as sex-differences proponent Steven Rhoads

has argued, but it may be a useful thing to do. See John Stuart Mill, Speech of the Late John

Stuart Mill at the Great Meeting in Favour of Womens Suffrage, Held in the Music Hall,

Edinburgh, January 12, 1871 [London] : London Society for Womens Suffrage, [1871?]. This

pamphlet is held in the Newberry Library, Chicago, to which I give thanks for research

assistance. See also Steven Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously (San Francisco: Encounter

Books, 2004), 15990.
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the david foster wallace redux: sports, religion, aesthetics, and rule-following

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