Eduardo Galeano once wrote that the goal is the orgasm of soccer. If this is the case, then it becomes much easier to locate and understand the role of basketball in late capitalist cultures: too many produced orgasms, not enough seduction.

Most goals in basketball, despite the scripted or unscripted (coded or uncoded) nature of the bodies that move in communion, necessarily derive in the end from a solitary effort. This is not an indictment, but rather an affirmation of a tiny linear chain of causality enmeshed within the sweaty conditions of emergence.

But there is one type of goal unique to basketball that would not properly be considered a solo effort: the alley-oop.

Feminine to masculine? No. Rather, co-poiesis between bodies. A matrixial encounter of mutually produced subjectivity. The several-as-one during the revealing of this goal (orgasm), which does not emerge due to lack but to the desire for shared affect in a vibrating string of sweaty emergence.

Several such severalities immediately spring to mind when thinking of the NBA: nashstoudemire, paulchandler, kiddmartin, kiddjefferson, kiddcarter (kidd: that lover of several). But one of the most famous alley-oops in basketball history comes from the college ranks, when Bobby Hurley connected with Grant Hill in the 1991 NCAA championship game. This became one of the signature vectors of sign-value for the annual March Madness basketball tournament, yet it would hardly qualify as pure in its execution: the pass was thrown high and to the right but body adjustments were made in response and the goal was consummated.

What initiates the encounter: the pass thrown or the back cut? Or is it a mutual obligation?

For the co-poiesis to begin, both players must sense and emote (or better, vibrate). Thereafter, a goal is reached, yes, but to consider it in terms of the binary (scored or not) is misleading, for in its co-poiesis the alley-oop is an act of communication between bodies that eliminates language. As seen in the hurleyhill example above, it does not eliminate error or noise — there may be mis-starts and correctives as both bodies bear wit(h)ness. ("There is always surprise in the system of affect.") If both bodies (part-subjects) give themselves over fully to the event, the alley-oop surpasses any codes proscribed on either body in a melding (or metramorphosis) of several-as-one.

Ultimately, the alley-oop still constitutes a goal, but it is a more-than-goal: it speaks that which cannot be spoken, communicating desire, mystery, (com)passion, tenderness, and love. In its concreteness, it expresses an abstract that remains ever so elusive today.

Revealing and concealing. This is what is at stake.

A back and forth. A tradeoff. A question inside an answer inside a question. A hesitation. A rhizome.

But we cannot make the mistake of considering it simply a matter of binary opposition between positive and negative poles. Concealing is not necessarily an act of negation, but in its most subtle forms perhaps an act of seduction. It is an act that wells up from within, bodily but only indirectly sexual, a series of slight gestures so trivial nuanced they may be unnoticed even by one's self: a delicate lowering of the eyelids; a slight turn of the shoulders so the other cannot read one's thoughts on the very concept of seduction; an involuntary lowering of the head, neck and shoulders when the intensity of the now becomes too powerful to bear for the dizzying vertigo of fear it brings.

If the game is played correctly ("the secret of the secret"), these tiny acts of concealing may undergo a metamorphosis: like a caterpillar emerging from the coccoon as a butterfly, concealing becomes revealing.

Concealing thus does not necessarily equal negation. But concealing all is a void; it is darkness.

Do all players know the rules of the game?

* * *

Revealing all, on the other hand, can be a negation.

Professional basketball and its networked alliances with transnational capital and the makers of spectacle are in the business of revealing. This assemblage must produce affect as commodity to be circulated endlessly through the networks of desire. Its revealing of all is like a continual innoculation against the latent potentialities of seduction. It, too, is bodily, though a paradox lies within: call it the anaesthesia of telesthesia.

The rules of the game are well known by all: this turn of the ankle and grimace is pain; this raising of the arms and jubilant smile is joy; this flexing of muscles and clenching of teeth is intensity.

But does that produced intensity even begin to approach the affective power of a delicately lowered pair of eyelids?

In considering the question inside an answer inside a question, we recognize revealing at its most monstrous.

* * *

Retrieve the body from its narcotic processing of code. Play improvised pickup basketball. Conceal something.

Let the body seduce.

Don't script the coordinated effort of limbs, the hot pumping of blood, the heaving of lungs, but rather flow with other bodies. Don't look at, but rather sense a teammate before delivering a pass through a mesh of stasis. Don't flex the muscle in anger, but rather in competition.

These little concealings may also become revealings.

* * *

Not everything needs to be revealed, however. Sometimes it can be simply felt (though there is nothing simple about it). It can be affective. Can we not simply do away with language and its problems and its contemporary desire for monstrosity?

No. Sometimes we need language, for our bodies do not always speak feel with one another in fusion. Instead, confusion: hesitations of affective thought can be noisy for the rational mind.

This is the game implicit in seduction. This is what is at stake.