the secret society may act by influence, creeping, insinuation, oozing, pressure, or invisible rays; “passwords” and secret languages
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 288)
murmuring is a special style of sounding in the crowd that makes constellations between bodies that have the power of imperceptibility and therefore unfold all sorts of possibilities for secret action . this secret style of murmuring is also called muttering, a term redolent with sinister potentials . muttering can comprise a kind of shorthand affect/effect that moves between bodies that know each other . and can also draw strange bodies into relation, due to the disposition of all bodies to be drawn in/to murmuring . thus in public, in relation with large numbers of strangers, we ceaselessly experiment with relationships that are playful, pleasurable, de-
territorialising and secretive . who has not felt the curious intimacy of a stranger’s hand placed gently on the small of our back, as he or she (who knows?) moves past behind us, with shred of word-
muttered, or just breath (it is the same thing) upon our neck? who has not felt a counter-intuitive sense of security entering a press of strange massed bodies, as we move towards an exit, or enter a lift? the warmth of bodies and becoming-soft of the acoustic, becoming- quiet, ushering in that shared, imperceptible belonging that is
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44. herd
if as it happens after the game, patrons are permitted onto the football oval, they will roam across it in a wild, animated herd.* if
you take the opportunity to join this marvellous herd you will note with awe the divots carved from the ground by the on-ground players, the surface mangled by speed and hardness of form: grinding, slicing, ricocheting . you will imagine that, feel it . you will stand on the fifty-meter line and try to kick a goal . you will do commentary . you will take a mark badly … or perhaps brilliantly! DID YOU SEE THAT?! you will bend to comfort a hurt child, creating a tight little circle between you, sheltering from the fever that simmers all around . you will try to keep sight of another child gone mad . all around balls will ping, pop and thud as hundreds of people of all ages and sizes wheel about running, jumping and falling over . family groups will disintegrate to form impromptu sides of serendipitous order . you will apologise, avert your gaze from, laugh and hand pass with strangers all
vibrating together in the special shimmer that buzzes out of the grass . it is a thrill, a noisy-frenzy, the hard cloud teeming.
* if lance franklin kicks another hundred they will do it without permission
. let’s go! who cares if it’s hawthorn! let’s all go together on that night and run onto the ground!
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11. tickle
sound is a favourite element of play . see for instance Claudia Haagen’s book Bush Toys (Haagen 1994) in which playing with sound gets a chapter all to itself, alongside hunting and fishing games, water play, community play etc. . we are all the joy-ful product of bashing away on toy xylophones rattles, bells, whistles, bull roarers, and
plastic trumpets, drums, cymbals, hammers that honk when you hit something, fairy wands with built in glissandi, dolls that speak, bears that growl, and nowadays tamagotchis and the whole world of
Nintendo et al., flooding the body-worlds of play with their electronic ping-a-ling and la-la-la language that sits somewhere between sugar coated command and tiny winks and kisses.40
we have mentioned earlier the attraction that sounds of/in collision hold for the Body in Football, the everywhere-evident thrill of the sonic in indissoluble relation with all sorts of other colliding forces . and this holds for great roar of noise and crunch of tackle as well as gentler charms that caress the unitary form, tickling the ear throat chest top of the skull bottom of the feet with erotic flourish think how the game, playing over the radio on a saturday
afternoon, turns to waves of soothing murmur and all of a sudden you are nodding-off, a slumbering giant full of the faint cries of ABC Grandstand (the weekend sports commentary) . thus it is not only crunch and smash, but tickle, hum and buzz, that preoccupies the
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BiF, an unmaking of “the body” in a kind of sonic froth, a fluffycombination of vibration, sound and densities that liberates us from our singularity and our mass, re-composing us as fraying part- animates, not quite here or there, not quite this or that, but in process of change and in (murmuring, shivering, nodding off) relation. beyond its auto-erotic pleasures, this delicious sonic mousse we love, of course, forms relationships between (and transforms) different bodies around and together with me, and so the world
since all of us who are in play are fraying, feeling the buzz and ring, the teeny footsteps of scattering sound-fairies through our throats and heads . sound is a communal business that registers
simultaneously as intimate and as intimately simultaneous, in the sense that it is charming/alarming the bodies around me too . while in the concert hall this commonality may be only speculation or sensed by quivering intuition, in the football crowd it is palpably shared . we roar, howl, scream at each other in response to what’s going on, and no-one is baffled by the voluble outpourings of those around “why is that man so angry?” you don’t hear it, except from
very small children who have not been to many games . likewise we laugh, sing, engage in improvised vocal trilling, imitate the siren . even in settings where we are remote from the game, at home in front of the tv, driving whilst listening to the radio, the moves of the BiF conjure all sorts of vocal ejaculations and body percussion in us . its
sounds and moves traverse us, we know, flowing across a crowd that is spread more widely: yelps, curses, wailing, throwing the
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remote and slapping the wheel . wry remarks and deep sighs embroider the nation . Melbourne sound artists Sonia Leber and DavidChesworth made an installation piece exploring precisely this . The Persuaders (Leber and Chesworth 2003) featured close-ups of seven solo football barrackers, on seven separate tv monitors, delivering their at-home commentary straight into the camera . showing how, even when we are alone, watching the game on tv jerking, muttering,
shouting we are gathered-up, fraying inanimates within a crowd-in-
play . despite the rhetoric of loyalists, the Body in Football has not one whit of attachment to locale, but will play wherever and with whomever it gets the chance all the nostalgia for particular
grounds is precisely that: nostalgia and not football .
i note how broadcast sound enormously amplifies th BiF’s reach . in recent times barracking’s scattered crowd (wherein players remote from each other are nonetheless caught up together in play), has been wonderfully enhanced by the advent of text messaging, that allows tiny remarks or just punctuation (“!!”, or” … “) to fly between players in different households, states, countries, in an exchange of precisely the kind of abbreviated muttering that occurs when we are all standing together at the game i am at the mcg
with mark and jude, watching cats v pies, but i am messaging with paul who is in east st. kilda, and eddie in Florence, and charlz in Kuala Lumpur (all of whom are watching too) . this happens! the chime and rattle of message alerts has brought a new texture to the mix of crowd roar, commentary and one’s own incessant chatter; has
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brought a new style of interconnectedness . the jingling and part- worded content of the messages is so light, so unobtrusive, it gives voice/touch to the way in which we are, pretty much, conjoined like a cloud of fairies, in fleet and fun . it embodies in sound and tickle . makes “our” disappearing-jingling-palpable . this is the BiF wearticulate, in charming extensions afforded by the sms.
the body in play and so the Body in Football is a soundful one . a whole range of the fundamental pleasures of the game are sonic . especially the feeling of sound as/in thrill of collision/caress, elaborated in all sorts of seductive and witty constellations, to innovate relationships in the world . just as brett burton loves to jump and throw himself around, players caught up in the BiF send all the sonic pleasures of the body, the voice and their marvellous
technological prosthetics jumping around for pure joy . humming, ringing and lalala . pitch and tone sliding about in that jouissance Renata Salecl speaks of with respect to the opera diva’s high notes,41
that is also audible in unperformed abundance in the football crowd . free from any attachment to musicality, the sounding body in the crowd plays elsewhere, liberated from the pressure to charm an audience, or to express a self, stretches languorously in the possibilities of articulating jointing with saliva, air and bile,
burping, spitting and retching, voice of colonic wind in farting, various forms of kissy-growling, blowing hard, buzzing and rumbling against the skin of the other (often on the stomach, why? an attempt to call directly to that ooze and rumble that lies within?) . the sounding
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body at play makes up new sound-bodies for its own amusement and/or the amusement of the ones around, just to further delight . attending training with the western bulldogs, in the run up to the 2006 finals, i was surprised by how much giggling was going on . finals football is Very Serious Business! and indeed, over on one side of the oval it seemed to be: “COMMUNICATE!” screamed thecoaching staff, to hapless players running on the ground . but, back at the chain link fence where short-kick practice was underway, the boys were laughing so hard they were bent double . football, even at its most serious, is fun and friendly, full of playful sounding. in a break in sex, i look down at my partner, who, flat on his back, pushes sweaty hair off his forehead and looks up at me . “so” he says, “how about those ‘pies?”
affect with care…