Formalisms 1

I was recently asked why I could not get into sport.

For me, sport as a social art form presents a structural[ist] impasse: I can't get the hang of the relationship between its form and its content. As form alone, I would be perfectly happy with the politics and emotion that surround it - but I wouldn't be able to get passionate about what actually happened on a pitch just because it related to those politics. It would have to offer me something distinct to qualify them. If the sports players were not sports players but recorded music, I might be able to understand.

The week that Yes came out, I was reading Music Week twice daily. I still have all the web 'cuttings' about the midweeks, still know the different albums that were threatening it, still remember the daily sales figures. And I was totally, inarticulably devastated when Yes was not only beaten to number one but robbed of the number two spot its sales had earned.

But the competition for chart placing is just that: a competition. And my anguish didn't stem from the competition itself - which it strikes me is the meat of a sports match. What you watch is the competing sales figures. The press cuttings are running around in front of you. The goalkeeper is Ronan Keating's Songs for My Mother LP.

No, my anguish stemmed from what Yes was in relation to the Pet Shop Boys, who the Pet Shop Boys are in relation to the charts, what the charts are in relation to the media, and so on. For me, the competition was the form, not the content.

The joy experienced when your team is top of the league is, of course, related to what your team means to you outside of the league. But the majority of this meaning - the matches themselves - is analogous to the competition for chart placing I've just distinguished from album. It's like content built out of a vast web consisting only of form.

But to stop the chain here would be indefensibly selective. I'm unhappy with any analysis of cultural perception that doesn't take as its guiding principle a vast complex of unstable relativities without any objectives to relate to. The way I perceive cultural history, at least, is a bit like a Möbius strip, or a circuit that lacks any beginning or end. It's very definitely non-narrative. Much like the consumption of sports seems to constantly reference itself with no 'earth' wire, so too the notions of 'what Yes was in relation to the Pet Shop Boys, who the Pet Shop Boys are in relation to the charts, what the charts are in relation to the media, and so on' are only really borrowed from other arbitrary constructs like 'music' and 'identity', which trail back into the horizon without any full stops.

Perhaps, then, the theoretical separation of form and content only really comes into useful fruition - somewhat ironically - when the two swallow each other. It is then that the assumed passive object - sport, or Yes - becomes an active exercise. To perceive a form is to perform it. Once the active nature of the distinction is embraced, then we are embracing interplay, and our own role as creator and created in relation to the object being analysed. And interplay is fun.