I might begin by watching other people play tennis. I might do some research to find out what tennis players are the best exemplars and watch them, on television or in person. I might buy books on tennis and read about the sport, trying to determine what equipment I needed to begin, what the various parts of the game might be as described by experts, what are the required gestures, what is the conventional wisdom about how to perform those gestures, what are the rules of the game.

I might make the rounds of stores that sell tennis equipment, trying out various items to learn their mass and feel. I might join a tennis club, sign up for lessons, and begin to try out the gestures of the game as described by my teacher. As I began to perform the required gestures, I would probably be clumsy at first. My teacher would coach me as I repeated the gestures, attempting to make them more efficiently and elegantly. As I began to try my emerging skill in actual tennis games, I might wish to be matched against players who were better than I was in the hope of continuing to improve my skills.

If I did these things (and after arduous practice, training and sore muscles) I might at some point be able to describe myself as a tennis player, particularly if my playing began to earn me as many wins as losses, if my teacher began to tell me that my form was good, and if good players (whose good form I could now observe and criticize quite readily) were to seek me out for games. My play would have become respectable. I might find myself playing for small audiences of onlookers at my tennis club. I might join another tennis club in the hope of finding more skilled opponents.

Now, if some philosopher were to tell me that I had learned a discourse and beyond that become a practicioner functioning within a discourse community, I might react with impatience. I had, after all, only learned to play tennis. But if I were to analyze my experience, I might reflect that I had read books, learned the lingo of the game, learned (a version of) its history, learned rules, experienced a deal of advice both good and bad: "hold your racket this way"; "watch those foot faults"; "don’t try to kill the ball"; "eat lots of pasta"; "take vitamin X," I might reflect that I had learned good form, a system of gestures by which I could communicate with other tennis players as a tennis player. And I might reflect that I played tennis at a tennis club, with a charter and a system of rules and fees for membership which served to establish how we tennis players do what we do. If somebody wanted to join our group in order to introduce golf, we tennis players might respond by saying, "That’s not what we do here."

If I reflected further, I might observe that I had constructed my knowledge of tennis, because much of my memory of learning would be memory of hard work and I would be aware of the performative and developmental elements in my learning process as well various levels of interest and desire which had impelled my progress as a tennis player: desire to improve my skills, to measure them against the skills of other players, desire to be well thought of by other players, to win and lose well or simply to win. I might realize that I had empowered myself among tennis players. My knowledge was conditioned by a web of textuality (text=web) comprising stories large and small, hortatory declarations and fragments of advice, rules on many levels governing ethics and style, required gestures of certain kinds having meanings of certain kinds, and fairly large concatenation of thoughts about those gestures which seemed to shift and rearrange themselves fairly constantly in my mind (I have used a word, mind, which is anathema to some discourse theorists, but that doesn’t matter at this point): "Damn, it felt good to hit that smash!" "Should I maybe hit my backhand with two hands?" "What’s wrong with my serve?"

But if I observed that my knowledge worked itself out through established institutions as well, my tennis club, various larger organizations including manufacturers of tennis equipment, pasta, and vitamins, I might thus have understood that my knowledge of tennis was social, depending for its very existence upon a certain solidarity among members of and participants in the tennis community. But my tennis community is also political, involving various arrangements and distributions of power. I, as a recently developed amateur with a fairly limited budget, possess less power to influence overall operations than the president of my tennis club, who is rich, less power as a player than the teaching pro who coaches me and knows the game better than I do (I have never beaten him) or than the great professionals whose exploits I have studied and sometimes witnessed.

In a given situation, I might find that I had more or less power than my opponent in a match, or that I and my partner had more or less power than our opponents at doubles. If I talked to the philosopher some more, I might reflect that my knowledge of tennis had become a discipline for me, a way of being in the world that is different from other ways of being in the world, a complex skein of relationships of empowerment and constraint to which I refer when I answer such questions as "How does one play tennis?" "What is a tennis player?" "Are you a tennis player?" "What is the good of being a tennis player?" "What does it mean to be good at tennis?" "Do you love the game?"

I might perceive that not only was I in possession of a discourse about tennis, but also that I had described tennis as, itself, a discourse. But I would also realize that I meant far more by discourse than the familiar notion of ideas expressed in language.

[Posted At Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 23 March 1999]