Farred on Athletic Movement and Rest

Over the course of two decades the South African–born Grant Farred has made contributions that have shown him to be the foremost analyst, from a standpoint we in the academy call in however many senses “theory,” of a range of sports encompassing soccer, basketball, cricket, and boxing.¹ There has been a noticeable change in Farred’s approach to sports over the years: The earlier work is more readily identifiable as the application of his distinctive version of cultural studies, whereas the more recent work, with its many references to Derrida, Deleuze, and Badiou (among others), is much more explicitly philosophical (as will become evident later). What has remained constant in the cumulative intellectual transitions evidenced in Farred’s oeuvre is an encyclopedic knowledge of the sports in question; a deft narrative ability allied to a highly distinctive voice (“postcolonial” but somehow not quite postcolonial, and also not quite South African or not quite American, and so on); a keen sense of the “evental” turning points in crucial situations (without which it is impossible to understand the dynamic aspects of any sport); the bravura zest of someone who is undeniably a fan—loving and critical at the same time—of the sports and protagonists he discusses; and an unflagging awareness of the powerful political and cultural underpinnings of the sports under consideration. What C. L. R. James, clearly one of Farred’s intellectual exemplars, said of cricket is just as applicable to the way Farred approaches all the sports he writes about: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”²

There is a conundrum, “methodological” as the jargon has it, that those of us who write about sports have to confront. There is a sense in which a sporting event, given its unique specificity of time and place and the distinctiveness of the protocols and protagonists involved in each performance, is nonrepeatable and not like anything else (no two tennis matches, baseball games, sumo bouts, fencing contests, etc., are ever the same). A play by Shakespeare always has a basic repeatability even if it reconfigured for a completely different context and setting, as when Romeo and Juliet are presented as twenty-first-century lovers. This repeatability is impossible where a sporting event is concerned.³ Given the unique specificity of the real sporting event, it may be tempting, and indeed feasible, to analyze a sporting event in terms that have an affinity with the way in which the disciple of F. R. Leavis would analyze a literary text (with the appropriate adjustments for differing contexts).

The hypothetical “Leavisite” approach to analyzing a sporting event, in parallel with his or her analysis of the literary text, would seek to relate the formal properties of the sporting event (in ways analogous to the formal properties of the literary text) to “immediate lived experience” (for the Leavisite there was a deeply moralizing dimension to “immediate lived experience,” which of course for the Leavisite was traduced—“deadened,” Leavis’s favorite phrase—the moment it was theorized). The appeal to “immediate lived experience,” as critics of Leavis and his followers over the decades have pointed out, is fraught with shortcomings, but even so it cannot be dismissed out of hand, as much as one is inclined to do this.⁴ Consider this description of a passage of play in cricket by Neville Cardus, widely regarded as one of cricket’s finest writers:

Many a great match has been lost by a missed catch; terrible are the emotions of long-on when the ball is driven high towards him and when he waits for it—alone in the world—and the crowd roars and somebody cries out, “He’ll miss it-He’ll miss it!”. Years ago, in a match for the rubber in Australia, Clem Hill and Victor Trumper were making a mighty stand, turning the wheel of the game against England. Here were two of the greatest batsmen of all time thoroughly set, scourging the English attack with unsparing weapons...