1999

21.3

William R. Klink
Digging Your Lips: Foucault, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Pro Beach Volleyball

While volleyball as a competitive sport has been around for about one hundred years, most people know it today in its iteration as a television sport of the ‘90s. Like many of the entertainments of the ‘90s, volleyball—especially pro beach volleyball—is a nexus of competing behaviors mediated by television. Examining the phenomenon of pro beach volleyball through the ideas of the important postmodern French theoreticians reveals a peculiar blend of dialogic elements that is at once captivating and compelling for aficionados and would-be aficionados of the sport.

My own interest in volleyball extends back to the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976 when I first observed the differences in atmosphere that the teams from different nations brought to the gymnasiums. On the one hand, the Polish men’s team and its followers were effervescent and aggressive. On the other hand, the Soviet Union representatives were dour and mechanical. What neutral observers could not be swayed by the powerful emotionalism of the Polish team and its supporters? When I started to coach a college volleyball team shortly thereafter, I was struck by a different phenomenon. Volleyball was a women’s game, and much of the behavior and values that were on display were decidedly passive and feminized versions of those displayed in men’s sports. The ritual parade of handshakes at the net both before and after the match, and the unquestioning acceptance of the referee’s decisions are two such variations from men’s sports.. The requirement that a bad play be met by enthusiasm by the player and by players on that individual’s team supported values of psychological support relatively unknown in the male sports with which I was familiar. And that these behaviors took place in a sport that uses such war-like terms as "kill" and "crush" and "hit" created a paradox that resonated first with the absurdist views of the existentialists then prominent and now with prominent postmodern thinkers.

Jumping to the 1990s, we can see that as a mediated sport indoor six-person volleyball is dead. Its confusing scoring rules, Byzantine player substitution patterns, and most importantly its lack of time control—all make six-person volleyball a sport that will not fit into traditional television scheduling blocks, nor will it hold the attention of viewers who are edgy for instantaneous knowledge of situational complexities. Instead of the six-person game, the game of the ‘90s, the mediated game of volleyball, is beach volleyball. Subverting the conventions of the indoor sport, it offers two-person same-sex teams playing on sand, usually at a famous beach, on a court the same size as the indoor one that requires three times as many players to cover.

Beach players wear bathing suits and not the stodgy t-shirt and shorts that the indoor, collectivized players wear, and they are tanned and oiled machines in their sandy, healthy outdoor environments, quite in contrast to the drab presentations at the indoor arenas. The outdoor game, being more visual, fits the television medium well. There are only four constantly highlighted individuated players, which the camera loves; there are simple scoring rules, which the TV audience can follow haphazardly; and there is a clock, which makes the TV programmers happy because they can plan the programming schedule to the minute.

As a mediated spectacle, the beach game is also organized differently, and more metaphorically, than the indoor variety from which it sprang. The indoor game is a Fall sport for women in college and high school; the males who play in the Spring have lesser participation and a lesser following. The outdoor game, in contrast, begins in the hopefulness and exuberance of Spring and runs through late Fall. In the United States, the controlling governing body for the men is the Association of Volleyball Professionals (the AVP), and for the women, until this year, the Women’s Professional Volleyball Association (WPVA). Now, however, the women play on the global Federation International de Volleyball (FIVB) tour, whose tournaments are televised in sixty countries, fifty of which also receive a program called Hot Sand, which is a highlights show of FIVB tournaments. Augmenting the AVP tour is another FIVB tour run for men. These governing bodies set the rules, establish tournament schedules, negotiate advertising contracts, and negotiate media coverage. For the most part, the tournaments are covered by ESPN, with the over-the-air networks covering only the largest, most prestigious events, rather like the way that the early modern professional golf tour developed in the over-the-air 1960s. But volleyball is a sport developed during the cable era. Precisely because it is a sport mediated for the ‘90s, with tremendous programming competition, volleyball is well understood through the theories of the great postmodernists, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jacques Lacan.

A proper Foucault-inspired view of pro beach volleyball would center on its ambivalence, discrepancies, enigmatism, uncertainty, delusion, indecisiveness, and lack of resolution—all ideas present in the writings of Foucault, most specifically in Politics, Philosophy, Culture.

One finds ambivalence in the language of the sport, noted earlier, as well as in its current usage. The language betrays fatal aggression and terms of endearment. Take for example, "digging your lips." This is a term used by a player to describe a consistent control by the defender of a hard hit ball by an opponent. To control a ball in that fashion is called a "dig" because the ball is contacted just before it hits the sand by using a two-armed scooping motion—easy to picture the metaphor in action. The "lips" reference derives from a term describing the most aggressive act in volleyball, giving a "facial," or hitting a ball so hard at the opponent’s face that he is helpless to prevent it from hitting him in the bodily area that is a synecdoche for the self, the face. And yet "lips" is a word redolent of intimacy and love. So the phrase is ambivalent in its mating of aggression and love. And the phrase seems both positive and negative at the same time.

Discrepancies abound in pro beach volleyball on many levels. Probably the most discrepant behavior is the team bonding. At almost every tournament, the teams are set by the players themselves. Sometimes the friendship that is the basis of the team is established in childhood, as in the case of Daxx Holdren and Todd Rogers. In other cases it is a business decision, one similar to the staffing decisions of any modern professional sport. Seeking advantage, players change partners in pursuit of finding the perfect match. Probably the best example is the pairing of Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes, a pairing that resulted in scores of victories before Steffes was injured. Rather than sit out, Kiraly then got himself a new partner, Scott Ayakatubby, and proceeded to win at the same pace as he had with Steffes. When Steffes came back, gone was Ayakatubby. On the women’s tour, Holly McPeak and Nancy Reno played together merely because they were winning, going all the way to the Olympics in Atlanta as partners, even though they barely were on speaking terms. They lost in Atlanta; it seemed because of poor communication! Even while these human dissociations are going on, however, pairs are made by the media to seem as inviolate icons both in print and on the screen. And that is postmodern. That Reno and McPeak were barely civil to each was trumpeted by commentators, such as Chris Marlowe and Paul Sunderland, the regular beach announcers, in print, on cable, and over the air. Nevertheless, at the same time, these players were presented as a "team" representing the USA even as the commentary stressed their animosities, a discrepant message forced on, and then accepted by, the volleyball-watching audience in the summer of 1996.

Enigmatism in pro beach volleyball exists in its marketing of players in tournaments sponsored by bottled water drinks while the players themselves wear temporary body tattoo logos for a competing brand. Evian was a main tournament sponsor for the WPVA, but there were also ads for Naya bottled water as well. What to make of that? On the men’s tour, Adam Johnson refused to drink the sponsor’s sport drink because he had a contract with a competitor. After much Sturm und Drang, the situation was resolved with Johnson drinking from the bottle of the competitor. To Foucault, decisions that are based on the player’s self-examination of who he or she is as a piece of capital, and the display of this decision on a sexual, alive body, is part of the confessional mode, that is, constituting the self by writing (on) it, with its Rousseauian stress on completeness, on the inclusion of every detail. That such writing annihilates itself in two ways, by wear and tear, and by changes in sponsorship focus, shows the annihilation by the imaginary that Foucault writes about in Technologies of the Self (116-117). To the viewer such change leads to the Foucauldian "valorization of the imaginary" because of the enigma of changing identities of self and/as product.

Uncertainty is the hallmark of the scoring system. Since you cannot score a point unless you win on your serve, much of the play merely consists of contesting for serve, or attempting to "sideout." Such jousting can go on so long that the sideout game comes into conflict with the media-timed event. To ensure that the game ends in a "reasonable" (read "hourly") block of time, there is a game clock that runs continuously while the ball is in play. So while it is important to have more points, it is also essential that the team ahead use up time to eliminate the uncertainty of the other team’s eventually catching up. Of course, trying to eliminate an uncertainty while trying for an uncertain victory based on points creates two levels of uncertainty when previously there would only be one.

For the fans, delusion is to be found in the apparent amateurism of the players, who after all are playing a game that many play on the beach, just knocking a ball around over the net on a nice day. In fact, to keep such a sense of amateurism, until only recently admission to the tournaments for spectators was free. As if you could just wander on down and get into the game yourself! Now tickets go for as much as $60 for a courtside seat, and, as in other sports, corporations buy up and distribute the best seats to employees and customers. Fan delusion also extends to the creation of "indoor beaches." Hundreds of truckloads of sand are dumped on an arena floor so that a court can have six to eight inches of sand on the playing surface. Or truckloads of sand are dumped in a park, perhaps in downtown Chicago, to make a temporary "beach" court. Players and spectators alike simply pretend that they identify themselves as at the beach under a blue sky instead of under structural steel and catwalks or surrounded by freeways. Foucault, who attacks the division of human experience into the self and the other, would see such identification as support for his argument that individual and society are not separate but confluent, that the self is partly determined by similar selves, in this case all those happily deluded about who and where they are.

Finally Foucault’s ideas about indecisiveness and lack of resolution are found in the rotation of players from partner to partner and the fact that the tours have multiple tournaments to crown new champions, and in fact have multiple major tournaments that are said to crown the big champions. Rarely does one team win most of the tournaments, and never does one team win all the major tournaments. So it is impossible to know just who is the greatest, only who is the latest. Unlike football with its annual Super Bowl and baseball with its annual World Series, pro beach volley ball has multiple annual versions of each. For the AVP there are the tournaments at Manhattan Beach , the U.S. Open championship, and Hermosa Beach, arguably the U.S. championship— each equally prestigious. For women, the national championships are at Huntington Beach. Add to these the King of the Beach championships at the end of the season for the AVP, run in a slightly different format, rotating players among all their opponents to find THE King of the Beach as an individual and not a team. So indecisiveness is built into the structure of the tours.

Furthermore, the constant creation of temporary champions presents an overlapping instance to the theories of Foucault and Bakhtin in our inquiry into the postmodernism of pro beach volleyball. Bakhtin would see the indecisiveness of the identification of the champion as part of a bildungsroman tradition of modern narrative preference, as he explains that tradition in "The Bildungsroman," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. In volleyball there is a multiple plot narrative that is endlessly reconstituted; and every player in contention year after year is the hero of a separate bildungsroman—each player trying to become a man or a woman and alternately succeeding and failing over the seasons of his or her eternal pubescence.

Beyond the bildungsroman concept, Bakhtin’s ideas of the carnivalesque, developed in Rabelais and His World, are particularly relevant. If nothing else, the mediated contests of pro beach volleyball represent a culture at play. First of all, the sites of the contest are those associated with carnival. Beaches represent locations in which people strip off their everyday clothes and behaviors in order to frolic in childlike fantasies of the endless summer. Tanning, musculature, hair stylings, and body oilings are all part of the costumes of the carnival. The most marketable athletes are those on the men’s and women’s tours who not only are successful but also look like bronze gods and goddesses while wearing carnival outfits—beachwear chosen to highlight the brand names of sponsors. On the men’s tour there is the muscular, blonde Karch Kiraly, tanned, oiled with Aloe Vera, so his body says, and wearing the logo on his arms to advertise it. He is 6’3" 205 lbs. of Southern California muscle. His opposite on the women’s tour is Holly McPeak, 5’7", 120 lbs. of lithe, sinewy, and rippling muscular definition, complete with a long black braid, offering the promise of wildly sensuous freedom, and sporting a new bosom.

Music is a major part of the contested media-saturated carnivalesque proceedings. Piped in rock punctuates every halt in the action for time outs or court changes, thereby introducing the dialogic shift of contested turfs. Bakhtin’s ideas about dialogic voices in his important book, The Dialogic Imagination, here is on display in a carnivalesque atmosphere. The thumping rhythms of the musical voice are meant to get the crowd energized, adding the voice of the crowd to the discourse of the movement of the ball. The total result is the creation of what Bakhtin would call in his essay "The Problem of Speech Genres," "the creation of a highly complex secondary speech genre, more complex than even the speech of a novel or scientific research. Because it is more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication" (62). In fact, pro beach volleyball is one of the best loci for seeing Bakhtin’s contention that the ideas of "speaker," "listener," and "understander" are fictions. It is clear that he is correct when he says that "Any understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies extremely" (Speech Genres 68). There is a language on display here, but there are far too many speakers, with far too much heterogeneity involved to separate speaker from listener, so that all utterance is responsive in some way, from logos to line calls.

The music of the carnival is accompanied by the gyrations of the rotund referee, Marvin, who perches on the referee’s stand at the side of the net some four feet off the ground. A staple of the pro beach carnival is the crowd calling for Marvin to dance on his perch, an accommodation that he makes only once per match. Marvin’s movement is surprisingly sensuous and rhythmic for a large man but with an overtone of the comical. The carnivalesque dancer then becomes another voice in the dialogue of play and spectator. Thereby, as Robert Rawdon Wilson explains, the epic struggle on court and the hierarchical distance is destroyed ( 78).

Another important aspect of the carnivalesque is costume. The beachwear that adorns the players is heavily mediated. Name brands are prominently displayed, helping to identify style and brand with a given player. Kiraly always wears baggy swim togs and a pink cap with the brim turned up, and sometimes a tanktop, all logoed with the word Speedo, his clothing sponsor. Scott Ayakatubby used to own and wear the clothing of the manufacturer called Primitive, although he now merely wears the brand as a sponsor’s boy. On the women’s side, McPeak is a Speedo girl, usually a two-piece suit accented by a cap, brim turned up like that of her stablemate Karch. The intimidating dresser among the women, however, is Nancy Reno, who belies her Stanford graduate school education by appearing as a furious Amazon woman. Her demeanor and appearance literally scare younger teen-age girls for whom she otherwise would be a role model. Reno has a tattoo of a dolphin on her right ankle, ankle bracelets on each ankle, a two piece Jantzen suit with the word Jantzen prominently displayed on her rear end, a multi-colored cloth headband, a white wrist band advertising Killer Loop eyewear worn high on her left arm, balanced by a tattoo on her opposite shoulder, and a temporary tattoo of a Panama Jack sunscreen logo on her right upper arm. On her face she wears relatively small, round sunglasses. All of this complements her thick, curly, longish hair. Reno is definitely a carnivalesque work.

While the ideas of Foucault and Bakhtin are important, a central idea of Lacan is paramount. Desire, its expression and use, a hallmark concept in Lacan’s thought, is a constant presence in the mediated sport of pro beach volleyball. To be sure, in American society, sex sells. The expression of desire in pro beach volleyball not only helps sell the sport and the commodities that sponsor its live and mediated events but also energizes the sportiveness of the event.

The obvious site of desire is the display of the near-naked body. There is no sport that shows so much skin, not even swimming, because in swimming the body is after all contained in water. In pro beach volleyball the body is on display in repose and in action at all times. The rippling muscles of both sexes represent for the male a continuation of observed preferences of masculinity. Most male players are about 6’4" tall and about 200 lbs. While not mesomorphs, all have the bodies of filled-out, mature, basketball players, ectomorphic shapes, more specifically the bodies of those playing the most glamorous position in that sport, shooting guard, but more muscled. The bodies are oiled, sand sticking to the sunscreen, giving texture to the smooth tanned skin in addition to that offered by body hair and hair on the head. I know of no pro player who has any facial hair beyond the stubble growth or mustache/goatee meant to intimidate by reference to the grunge look of outdoor masculinities. Almost all are bodies that body builders would admire, ripped, chiseled, etched, and cut like models for Greek statures. And, as many commentators have shown, muscles are THE sign of masculinity. Add sweat, wild hair, temporary logo tattoos, and the picture of the sensuous gladiator is complete. Perhaps the most buff of these players is the old veteran Randy Stoklos. Now in his mid-thirties, Stoklos is near enough to the top of his performance to command the attention of the heterosexual male, and built enough to command the attention of anyone else

On the female side stands the counterpart to the male. Similarly near-naked, she is about 5’10", extremely lean, and muscular, although less powerful looking than the male is. Similarly oiled and adorned, this woman has a body that from the male gaze is just about perfect—small rear end, long legs, smooth, and wet. This body offers a new view of idealized femininity in the post-feminine world. It offers the realization of what Lacan calls in Feminine Sexuality "jouissance," an idea of sexuality that is beyond the phallus. The word associates with the French slang for "come" and is the equivalent for women to phallic bliss as an irreducible constant. That is, such women are tough, strong, durable, and still sensual. In Lacan’s view "jouissance is present no less for and by women than for the man to whom her instrument (organon) is hooked . . . she nonetheless obtains the effects of what limits the other edge of that bliss, namely, the irreducible unconscious" (Television 17). The privileged similarity of bodies male and female serves to demonstrate Lacan’s point. In addition to McPeak, a poster girl for jouissance, who is extraordinarily cut, there are other superb physical specimens, who, while not having McPeak’s body, are still desirable forms from the male and the female gaze, such as cover girl Gabriel Reese. Lacan’s sense, in Television, that "for the body, metonomy is the rule . . . because the subject of thought is metaphorized" (20) means that the sunlight that is shadowed in the cuts of McPeak’s body is part of a message that female muscle and sinew and sweat are as desirable as those of any man. In turn, these mediated images turn the object of desire from a soft to a harder image, change passive to active, change reactor to actor, and therefore undermine received perceptions of female perfectability. In other words, Holly McPeak rather than Holly Hunter.

All that is in repose. In action, both sexes fling their bodies through the air, roll on the sand, fetch with great energy, get up, wipe themselves off, and do it again, and again, in an arresting ballet of athletic freedom and ecstasy set in sun, wind, and sea. Their actions and ours as mediated viewers are important to our changing popular culture because they give insight into who we think we are and who we want to be. And, whether male or female, what we apparently want to be is: lithe, muscular, coordinated, wet, and naked, or at least logoed.

William R. Klink
Charles County Community College
LaPlata, MD 20646
 
 

—. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

—. "The Problem of Speech Genres." Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. 60-102.

—. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984.

—. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986

Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. Trans. Alan Sheridan, et al. New York: Routledge, 1981.

—. Technologies of the Self. Trans. Luther Martin. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P,, 1981.

Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Aecole Freudienne. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton, 1998.

—. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1981.

—. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. D. Hollier, R. Kraus, and A. Michelson. New York: Norton, 1990

Wilson, Robert Rawdon. "Character Worlds in Pale Fire." Studies in the Literary Imagination 23.1 (Spring 1990): 77-98.