The generic potentiality of sports, or meaning without reference

Sports are about generic excellence. They are "meaningful" but have no meaning in the sense that art does, because we can talk about not just what we like about it but what it "means." Artworks can be interpreted, and arguably only exist as artworks because they can be. (Like Kant's "I think" that must be capable of being said of whatever we are aware of, but does not have to be in fact.). Sports are meaningful experiences in the way that many things people enjoy doing (picnicking, sitting by a campfire, doing something together you enjoy) but whose content does not depend on being able to say something about it. "Spirituality" is also of this character; arguably, what is spiritual is some experience that has an ultimate meaning or value. This is no longer necessarily connected with the sacred, which is an experience of the extraordinary, a heightened category associated with something ultimate. It aims to be but may or not be in fact; it is enough to pursue it for the activity to be so called.

I cannot decide if this genericity is bad or good. Perhaps it is like Agamben's "whatever" in The Coming Community. Which may be linked to his concepts of potentiality and also, in Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, of the importance of enunciation in language versus statements and their meaning. Potentiality is the ability to do anything considered as ability, independently of the content of what is done, and so is enunciation, it is the fact of saying, considered independently of what is said, the statement. (Thus, saying is a relationship between persons and things by way of language that is distinct from the saying truly or falsely, which requires the statement's being true or false, and so is a relationship between statements and the things they represent or are "about." Perhaps saying is more primary than truth; or perhaps it is always linked to a revealing or making-present but not always to a being-true of what is said. Note that it cannot be negated as a statement can be, but neither, strictly speaking, can a perception, which is "there" as perceived whether it is true or not, especially since truth is usually said of statements in relation to perceptions.). Potentiality in the abstract is the ability to do things, like work. Labor or work are notions of potentiality that are generic: one does or makes something, but anything, whatever.

Theater also turns on potentiality. And in a similarly empty way. To act in theater is to present oneself in a certain way, that is on the border between the non-being or nothingness of the actor who apart from his role or mask is only the potentiality to say or show something with and as a mask. There is not a true self beneath the mask, for the same reason that there cannot be a being like a God who causally effects or creates everything that appears as a being, because this would lead to infinite regress. So if there is an ultimate cause, it must be an absence, creation must be ex nihilo, the origin or arché must be unpresentable. But then the being of the actor, the problem of the actor, reveals the an inhabiting of the border between nothingness and being, which is pure potentiality, since whatever the performer might present himself as, he can be that, and might not have been it, and can be it as being able to not be it. If he knows this or we in the audience do, then there is a knowledge of the contingency of being as anything, of appearance. We see not only the role being played but this contingency. It is called into question. The actor experiences, and we grasp, the idea that the performance is contingent, and we "see" this contingency, we see the role being played as a putting to work. We see an event as not a thing but an event.