Footballisticalism? No, not yet.

So much of experience is perception. Notionally, perception is in turn informed by experience, though it should be noted the interpretive community of Premier League football may not offer the most lucid examples. If, for the sake of analysis, we accept with Freud the notion that a given symbol (or set of symbols) is (or are) understood in opposition both as the desire to satisfy impulse and the desire to suppress it, then this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4u1QQLVWyw&fmt=18

- raises above other considerations the nature of the governing dialectic – or perhaps lack thereof – of (post)modern football.

Let us – petitio principii? – agree that coherence itself may only, as it is proposed elsewhere, be fully understood contradictorily, and accept that its acceptance in itself accepts the necessary existence of différance. A cheeky wave at Derrida, then, and we wonder: what are the features governing the production of meaning – footballistically speaking? (Wenger, 2007).

The most obvious conclusion and the easiest is – of course – that words and signs do not by definition express, embody or incarnate what they mean. Terry weeping, Henry shrugging, Heskey glowering at the imagined divot of life: they appeal fruitlessly to us. Their pitiful advances denied (naturally we reject 'meaning' as an instrinsic quality), they appeal to other words, words from which they differ. Meaning is eternally "deferred", a succession of linked signifiers as endless as Munich choreography or an Escher staircase. Ars est celare artem.

The Americans, by contrast, lack this subtlety. But as Jordan (unique in the basketball pantheon in that he is both signifier and signified) himself expressed it:

“I'm not out there sweating for three hours every day just to find out what it feels like to sweat”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoTDNJL0GLI

Coming soon from SHOT-G: Spot the Signifier competition. Keep it locked.