PLAYMAKER
By Neville Wakefield
Originally appeared in the NIKE NSW FA/HOL 08 Catalog
Just before the shortly thereafter decisions are made in a twilight tense. They concern the things that we know but do not fully apprehended. They might, for want of a better term, be described as belonging to the cognitive peripheries. These are the territories where knowledge and certainty are blurred by instinct and awareness, where everything is held in the liminal state of becoming or play. Being able to move freely within this barely defined time and space has been described as many things. It has in one way or another been attributed of virtually all catalytic figures who have made their mark on history, whether in the arts, sciences, politics or in the realms of social life and sport. These are figures whose interest is inclined towards momentum rather than goals and who prefer in life, as on the field, to be movers as opposed to goal-hangers. Their aim is not playing to an end result, the final score of a closed system. Rather their role is about the distribution of possibility. And while it’s a role that often eludes description it is one that is carried by the idea of what it is to have game – to make of any situation a creative field.
Living in this tense is to understand the world in the manner of quantum physics. Reading a situation, as much as understanding the particle nature of matter, is an act of fluid interpretation. Here, the twilight tense reveals not absolute truths but patterns of probability since the exact nature of things can never be know since they are always on the move, always affected by our interjection; by our desire for truth over interpretation. For the playmaker, like the physicist such finalities can never be known. The clock is never stopped. Time never stands still. The playmaker understands his or her position at the fluid interstices between what has been done and what has yet to happen. The field is one of quantum uncertainty for which even measure and understanding are acts of agency that change the rules of the game. Controlling such a field is never the goal since to do so is to render it in a state of artificial suspension. Instead the playmaker distributes probability and in doing so the opportunist becomes the creator of opportunity. And just as Heisenberg, the godfather of modern physics maintained that, “the more precisely the position is determined the less precisely the momentum is known”, so the playmaker operates on similar principle.
Whether speaking of the artist who seeks openings in the body of received ideas, the writer or curator who seeks renewals in the context of that which has gone before, the midfielder, point guard or quarterback who creates fluid opportunity out of rote strategy, the playmaker is defined less by facility than by attitude. He or she is not defined by history or constrained by the past. Nor is their understanding based on what is known any more than their agency can be said to be predictable or determined. What matters perhaps is a sense of being in a time and place under constant redefinition.
Facility, in this instance, may be less important than proprioceptive awareness, the sense one has of oneself as able to move freely within dynamic fields. And this may well be the elusive quality and character of the playmaker for whom the immediate pleasure of creating opportunity always outweighs the deferred pleasure of chasing goals.
