Team of Substitutes

What Glueboot says here is spot on:

football... have been reading football message boards for work recently. I find it strange that when a player is a member of a certain team the fans love him and when he leaves they no longer care. It seems that the people do not exist, just the signifier of the team name with transient bodies moving in and out. The driving force behind the movement of players is shifts in capital... 'I have more money so I will buy the better players,' little to do with the actual home city of the team. All the emotion of it comes from the fans... their emotion driven by the capital that shifts the transient bodies between different signifiers. Is football real? I think maybe not.

All I would add is that that the logic at work here - of transient, substitutable bodies bearing larger symbolic mandates; the abstract and determining logic of capital replacing any sense of local attachment etc, the atavistic and necessary libidinal glue (the fans' "emotion") - is hardly peculiar to football. Indeed, if you tinker with the above a fraction you could have quite a nice little social allegory.

n.b., The 'symbolic mandate' of the 'team name' is most obviously incarnate in 'the shirt', as when you say 'he's not fit to wear the shirt'. The shirt incarnates 'the team' which is never synonymous with its actual players. 'The team' is, so to speak, endlessly reincarnated in these flesh and blood individuals.

A note from the University

On teaching:

'Please be sure to make clear to your students that attendance is compulsory.' Apparently some students have complained, on receiving a low grade, that they had not been told that it was necessary to actually come to class.

The whole edifice of common sense can no longer be taken for granted. The more litigious American society becomes the more this edifice will be eroded. Employee sues employer for being made redundant, after employer fails to point out that attendance is compulsory. Vastly overweight man sues McDonald's for not providing him with written documentation that lard-burgers are not entirely compatible with optimum athleticism. A vast legal superstructure, wordily detailing the bleeding obvious will gradually come to occupy the set of silent rules that had previously regulated - but also enabled - human interaction.