Toward a Politics of Now-Time: Reading Hoop Dreams with Kubrick's Barry Lyndon

Introduction: Ray Agnew’s Interception

On Monday, October 28, 1996, sports journalist Mike Freeman’s report on the Sunday Giants-Lions game, in the New York Times, featured a pass interception by the Giant’s Ray Agnew:

This is an image that might endure in the minds of the Lions for months to come: Giants defensive lineman Ray Agnew, after picking off a pass, rumbling 34 yards for a touchdown, his 285 pound body running so slowly it seemed the feat couldn’t be captured on an hourlong highlight show.¹

If the phenomenon of professional football is confined to the playing field, the value of Ray Agnew’s performance was 6 points, added to the Giant’s score. But it is clear to Freeman that the spatio-temporality of contemporary sports exceeds what occurs during playing time. In extending the temporal boundaries of the Agnew event into a post-game media future, Freeman offers, in a remarkably efficient sentence, a sophisticated reading of how sports are now experienced. He recognizes that the value of Agnew’s interception is also contingent on its duration. To be re-experienced as publicity, it must fit within an hour-long episode of sports television, at the end of the day.

To achieve a critical purchase on the ethico-political significance of the Agnew event, I want to locate Freeman’s insights in a broader field of events and to take note of Agnew’s identity as a black athlete. The aims of such an extension are both simple and complex. At a simple level, the aim is to analyze the contemporary experience of sports. At a more complex level, the aim is to explore critically the time-value relationships of the present, with particular reference to how these relationships are articulated in the movement of black bodies. The first aim requires an understanding of the genealogy of sports, which is briefly sketched below. The second, to which I turn immediately, requires a sorting through of philosophies of the event, with an eye toward a propitious way to characterize what Walter Benjamin called Jetztzeit (“now-time”).² To locate Ray Agnew’s performance as an event in now-time, we must capture the event conceptually and critically; we must think it in a way that illuminates the present from an uncommon perspective. Having evoked the idea of the critical (for the second time) as well as challenging the notion of common sense, it is time to summon Immanuel Kant.

Enlisting/Resisting Kant

Why turn to Kant, who was among other things a philosopher of common sense, when what is sought is an uncommon sense? Although I will argue that Kant’s commitment to a universalistic, model of thought is ultimately disenabling for thinking the present, I want to argue as well, that it is Kant who also creates the conditions of possibility for an uncommon, critical encounter with the present. Kant addressed the relevant question. He asked not only about the certainty of knowledge but also, as Benjamin aptly put it, about “the integrity of an experience that is ephemeral.”³

In his approach to that question - to put it simply at the outset - Kant impeached the simplistic narrative of experience that privileges objects. Denying that things in themselves can command the structure of experience, Kant offered a narrative of understanding in which a representing faculty is implicated in the constitution of phenomena. And, most significantly for treating the event in question, that faculty, in the form of a shaping, productive understanding, constitutes phenomena with a sensibility that involves “relations of time.”⁴

To treat the issue more extensively, I want to note the ways in which Kant’s philosophy of experience inaugurates a critical view of the kind of exemplary experience that Freeman describes. At a general level, Kantian critique is aimed at asking how it is that an intelligible experience is possible, given our lack of access to things in themselves. His answer mobilizes various metaphors to treat the role of the faculty of judgment. But his most persistent figuration is governmental, suggesting that...