clone 1: and i was all, like, the *basketball players* were, you know, forgetting and everything. but if you put them together they could kinda remember, or something like that.

clone 1: (snaps gum)

clone 2: LOL

clone 2: true

clone 1: 8-)

narrator: only then did i learn that brian massumi had in fact already written quite beautiful philosophy addressing this very question. it's called "the bleed: where body meets image".

An aging basketball player (or perhaps a dancer) attempts to execute a skill on the court made countless times in the past. Perhaps a feint with the dribble in hand, perhaps a lunge into the passing lane on defence. Whatever the move in question, the basketball player's age and lack of practice are such that the final biomechanical outcome in terms of displacement is blunted and awkward, despite the fact that he senses the intent towards the more highly skilled action. In other words, in attempting to execute the skill the basketball player is confronted by a split in his subjectivity: the intent for the body to move in a particular fashion standing against the approximation of that same intent in the actual body displacement that occurs.

The split is made perceptible by the relatively rapid decline in skilled motion and the intensity of responding instinctively to the unfoldings of play. It is this split-made-perceptible that offers the basketball player an embodied way of understanding Erin Manning's concept of preacceleration: the intent to a particular body movement that is the incipience towards its eventual realization in motion, "the ways in which movement is always on the verge of expression" (Relationscapes, p.14).

So which one constitutes gesture?

Is it the intent toward the more skilled movement, or the corporeal displacement that eventually follows? Often the latter occurs in such rapid succession and with such high fidelity relative to the former that one does not notice they are distinct, but the basketball player would argue this is precisely the case. And given the political significance that Manning, Giorgio Agamben and others ascribe to gesture, which one of the two elements we decide to label as such — or indeed, if we decide to take them both together as mutually reinforcing terms in relation — is a question that seems to merit closer attention.

So embodied are the demands of productive time in a basketball game that a team's reserve players (a form of surplus labour sitting in wait on the bench) will in unison chant a countdown of the final seconds remaining on the shot clock for a particular possession. This can be highly beneficial. For those players on the floor who are so into the haptic flow of the game that they cannot focus visual perspective on the clock, such a chant shifts the sensory cue to the aural and offers the team a better chance overall for productive success (scoring a basket).

In certain cases — as with Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University — a majority of fans will join, or indeed lead, such a chant. Though embroiled in the physiological intensity that comes with being part of a sporting crowd, each chanting fan retains a physical memory of time's passage such that there exists a sympathy with those players whose expiring shot clock constrains opportunity. Productive time becomes embodied in such a fashion that one need not even play the game in order to somatically register and respond to its demands. Not only do we see the surveillant gaze of the Foucauldian middle manager discursively brought to bear upon the hardwood shoproom floor, then, but in the Cameron Crazies and others of their ilk we also witness the fleshy presence that remains perceptible even with the emergence of an "immaterial" economy.

(That said, these same fans might in fact have a better intuitive and embodied sense of spectacular time.)

The Peripatetic Deleuze: Biological Flow and Walking as Knowing

(submitted by sean smith and barbara fornssler to the 3rd international deleuze studies conference in amsterdam)

We approach as if wasps forming a rhizome with the orchids of Deleuzian thought. Or, we thank you in advance for legitimating our presence and granting us the power of voice. Nomads or agents of the state, we are not certain as to whom we should address our conference submission, but we shall initiate a politics of approach that errs on the side of the former. And is this not to a certain degree the politics Deleuze and Guattari advance in their admittedly undertheorized concept of holey space: the ability to surf at the threshold between the ever-contingent striations of state authority and the myriad subjectivities and contexts we may understand as nomadic?

Perhaps this offers us a metaphor for our ability to move through public and quasi-public corporatized spaces: the surfer who rides at the break-point between the wave's signal and its becoming-noise, who stays slightly ahead of the movement in order to glide stylishly to the beach. Located in the urban context at the threshold between surveillant optics and smoothing gestural haptics, we will present three artworks from our program of research-creation — Gait Surfing, Kino-Gait, and Natality (Ingrid) — and discuss them with reference to work from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Massumi, Manning, and Agamben.

inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
i n h a l e
E X H A L E
i n h a l e
E X H A L E
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
.
.
     exhale!
inh
      xha
  hal
     exh
 nha
        ale
inha
      xhal
inhal
      xhale
inhale
     exhale
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exhale
inhale
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i n h a l e
e x h a l e
I N H A L E . . .
EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)
EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)
E X H A L E . . .
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
i   n   h   a   l   e
e   x   h   a   l   e
i   n   h   a   l   e
e   x   h   a   l   e
i    n    h    a    l    e
e    x    h    a    l    e
i    n    h    a    l    e
e    x    h    a    l    e
i    n    h    a    l    e    x    h    a    l    e

Department of Biological Flow, December 2008:

Once again, an over-reliance on the visual bias stymied attempts to fully get into the flow of the gait surfing exercise. Originally it was suggested that the surfing subject should direct one’s gaze about 45 degrees below horizontal and abstract the focus of the gaze to about 5-6 feet in front of one’s face. But this still made the exercise too visually-oriented: even if the flow of traffic was moving beyond the abstracted focal point, it was enough to stimulate the eye into refocusing, locating and tracking particular moving objects, thereby reducing any sort of dependence on the strictly haptic and proprioceptive aspects of negotiation and navigation.

Instead, Sean suggested to direct the gaze to 75 degrees from horizontal, such that the visual was deferred for as long as possible before encroaching upon the body’s ability to move affectively through the flow. This definitely worked better for track five, but the continual struggle against the visual remained poignant for both participants.

different types of bows in eastern orthodoxy (wikipedia)
the initial gait surfing study would have had the head bowed slightly lower than position no.1

Can we understand gait surfing as a bowing and act of reverence to the other-in-flux? Can we suggest that it is an act of gratitude for the relation that allows one to be liquid and surf? Can we consider such bowing to be free (at least right now) of the protocol we find, for example, with a bow to the deity or royal figure? Can we imagine this as an Agambenian gesture, or a "means without end"?

The traditional forms of bowing are gestural in quality but are also intensely optic in nature, at least insofar as averting one's gaze denies the optic. Can we further suggest, then, that such a gait surfing bow exists at the threshold between gesture and the optical qualities of language, and as such emerges inherently as an act of politics?

dear you,

ok, say you take a photo of me, perhaps at a cafe in paris or in the mountains of saas-fee.

you post the photo.

i take the photo, crop it, and make it my profile pic.

the extension of your visual domain via camera (kino-eye) thus flips in moebius fashion to become the extension of my skin into the virtual — or what we have called kino-gait.

but we have also said that camera and web profile aren't extensions, per se, but literally parts of one's own body instead, albeit at some phenomenological remove.

hence, such an instance of creating a profile pic becomes a moment of singular plurality between the two bodies. in one sense they become a singular flesh: kino-eye meets kino-gait, eye meets moving skin.

(surveillance meets spectacle.)

(such an instance of creating a profile pic, then, also becomes the moment in which capital most heavily invests.)

at the same time there is a separation: an offer of the photo, on the one hand, and an acceptance but also an editing of the gifted offer. i accept, but on my terms.

how do we understand this particular politics of touch?

do i simply presume your permission to make your eye my skin? does posting the picture online imply freedom to re-use thusly? do i commit a violence in editing the photo? do i offer an injustice to you by assuming that you could and would want to name my skin with your eyes?

dear you, did i engage this particular politics of touch based on prior flesh relation?

or would i do the same thing to a stranger?

Instant Karma's Gonna Get You: Reflections on Movement, Relation and Memory

(submitted by sean smith to the intersections 2010 conference in communication and culture at york university)

In 1966 the Fluxus-influenced artist Yoko Ono presented Play It By Trust, a conceptual work featuring a chess board with two sets of all-white pieces facing each other on a grid of all-white squares. The opponents become indistinguishable from one another in the absence of traditional visual signifiers, and as the hypothetical game progresses the entire binary of militarized competition becomes subject to reconsideration. Using Ono's white chess set as a model I will put the game into play, so to speak, as a means of questioning the interrelated concepts of movement, relation and memory within this ludic space. Drawing primarily on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, Kittler, Massumi, Manning and Agamben, I will contrast the archive as technical apparatus with a more embodied and intermediated form of collective remembering, as well as explore their implications for political sovereignty in the age of Empire.

Two passages from Jean Baudrillard:

- from "Beyond Artificial Intelligence: Radicality of Thought," in Impossible Exchange, p. 116:

"Kasparov has on his side the human passion of the challenge; he has an other ranged against him, an opponent. Strictly speaking, Deep Blue has no adversary; it moves within the scope of its own programme. This is a decisive advantage for the human, the advantage of otherness, which is the subtle precondition for play, with its possibilities of decoying, of 'overplaying one's hand', of sacrifice and weakness. The computer, by contrast, is condemned to play at the height of its capabilities."

- from "Deep Blue or the Computer's Melancholia," in Screened Out, p. 163:

"When up against the machine they have themselves programmed (let us not forget that it was men like Kasparov who programmed Deep Blue), human beings can only subtly de-programme themselves, become 'technically incorrect' to stay ahead of the game. They may even have to take over the machine's own place. … This is the only possible strategy: if you become technically correct, you are unfailingly beaten by the machine."

ESPN basketball analyst Jeff Van Gundy, speaking about an injured star athlete: "Just because you're getting paid a big salary doesn't mean you'll heal any quicker!"

"the camp intended as a dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we still live, and we must learn to recognize it in all of its metamorphoses." (g. agamben)

* * *

the leisure industry. enclosed spaces. striated spaces. iron gates. barbed-wire fences. tiled walkways. stone paths. flowered hedges. palm tree columns. spectacular spaces. controlled spaces. wear your bracelet at all times. english, french, german and spanish as the official languages of tourism. mexican, italian and mediterranean as the official flavours. edible muzak, vanilla music. authenticity. colonialism, then and now. why does it feel acceptable to speak ni hao and xie xie but condescending to speak hola and gracias? desiring the other. spf 45, 10, 30, 60. spectrum of melanin. skin versus flesh. pattern recognition of facial scans, gaits and volumes. excess fat, excess hair, excess food, excess alcohol. a powder keg of explosive violence. with the lights out, it's less dangerous. here we are now, entertain us. i feel stupid and contagious. here we are now, entertain us. a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido. yeah. instructions for washing hands: 1. soap; 2. wash; 3. dry; 4. disinfect. don't drink the water. wear shoes. hygienic paper covers half left on the straws. fist bumps offered by the staff. gastroenterology. jewish penicillin. too hot, too cold, too humid, too dry. sun worship. photo ops. covert ops. sport as statistical anomaly to the sedentary. in grid. subject, object, abject, traject. dialup internet. (stay in fantasy, maintain disconnect!) heterotopia. heteronormativity. repressed desire. bringing sexy back. techno-femme states that all communication is sexual. a mocking return of the tactile. an imagined lolita. spy versus spy.

* * *

"the social image of the consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations — moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance, and as desirable by definition. this particular commodity is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. yet even in such special moments, ostensibly moments of life, the only thing being generated, the only thing to be seen and reproduced, is the spectacle — albeit at a higher-than-usual level of intensity. and what has been passed off as authentic life turns out to be merely a life more authentically spectacular." (g. debord)

authenticate: whiskey-tango-foxtrot

(with an emphasis on the tango)

colonel. interned at desire camp. eyes everywhere. not much time. international situation is thorny. guyde? bored. s.o.s. read theses 152-153. end transmission. spy.

December, 2008: Deleuze and Guattari weren't totally correct. Surfing is not necessarily about entering into an existing energetic system in and of itself, as much as it is about riding the turbulent, frothy edge between signal and becoming-noise. In the case of gait surfing, there is an entering into the energetic system of the flow of pedestrian traffic, but this traffic is itself produced by the muscular energies of the individual body. We are still exerting a force within the striations of the urban environment, that is, the biomechanical leveraging of the musculoskeletal system towards a particular linear vector of production. But when examined intensively, this linear flow-in-theory has different internal paces, rhythms, deviations from normal gaits, errors, noise, speeds, purposes and objectives, cultural histories — and indeed, an entire erotics in its relationality to the unfoldings of the several.

It is these anomalies that constitute the minor perturbations in a flow that may thereafter become chaotic attractors and create turbulence (cf. DeLanda). We find in the aggregate from these perturbations in bodily locomotive style the corporeal jetwash or break point between signal and becoming-noise of the urban gait surfer — not unlike a television picture in which one can see the dopplered images of visual signal and snowy static noise.

department of biological flow vs. motion capture apparatus
(colonel fornssler handles the duties)

March, 2009: We are left with a conundrum: How to communicate the existence of embodied surfing potential in its myriad forms and work towards realizing such a new perhaps-radical politics without documenting the performance and contributing to a regressive politics of representation, fear and desire? This conundrum has lurked in the shadows for centuries, embedded in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the hydraulics of nomad science. One cannot document the act of surfing, the poiesis of being-in-body and becoming. Like secret whispers passed throughout history from breath to ear, then, one can only document the wave.

Paul Virilio (in interview with Sylvère Lotringer), Crepuscular Dawn:

"With the orthogonal plane, the flat plane, as in the entire history of architecture, there is no difference between making one movement or another. On an inclined plane, climbing and descending are radically different; but climbing diagonally or descending diagonally are different again; and walking laterally is different as well. Every dimension, every direction of space becomes a modification of the body" (p.36).

"The advantage of the oblique is that you can choose what you want, whereas with the orthogonal, or with Le Corbusier, the right angle is always straight and up. Architecture Principe was based on breaking the orthogonal in every way. It no longer accepted the tyranny of the right angle. Entering into topology — you can say into 'the fold,' even if Gilles Deleuze had not yet written his essay on the baroque at the time — we did a lot of work on it. We had a lot of choices to play with, but they were dependent upon the experiment" (p.40).

"I am not talking about auto-mutilation, obviously, just attempts to push the body to the limit. It was a bit like competition. There was a sport-like dimension to our research, that's for sure" (p.44).

basketball court as oblique function
(inspired by parent et virilio, architecture principe)

What if the normally orthogonal space of the basketball court existed as an oblique function, with the direction of the grade incline running from sideline to sideline? What if the goals at each end of the court remained aligned to the orthogonal right angle? Given an experimental group of athlete-performers, how would movement and relation on the surface of play change over time as the players adapted from the orthogonal to the oblique? Could such changes become manifest in the absence of language — that is to say, strictly as a matter of gesture?

purple: "a color circle based on spectral wavelengths will appear with red at one end of the spectrum and violet at the other, and with a wedge-shaped gap representing colors which have no unique spectral frequency; these extra-spectral colors, the purples, are rather formed by the additive mixture of colors from the two ends of the spectrum."

violet: "because i want … to. i've wanted to ever since i saw you that day in the elevator. i know you don't believe me, but i can prove it to you. you can't believe what you see. but you can believe … what you feel. i've been thinking about you all day." (bound, 1996)

(why is the body the lacuna at the centre of this optical system?)

yoko ono
play it by trust (white chess set)
1966

On the surface, Yoko Ono's Play It By Trust seems to be a smart and intuitive critique of the simple binary of war-conflict. By painting all of the pieces and squares white and positioning them in the traditional chess game opening formation, she immediately sets up a tension in which we seem to actually be waging war against ourselves. Once an imagined play begins and the pieces commingle (dare we say miscegenate?), they slowly start to lose their identity of standing opposite the other and the game tentatively suggests a metaphor for peace.

In any examination of chess play, however, we cannot just look at matters on the surface. We must admit the contours and perspectives of the volumetric, just as we must admit the unfolding of a particular linear timeframe while play emerges. Imagine this imagined game becoming material — momentarily — and its players using algebraic notation (eg. Nf3) to track the logistics of movement-play on the board, for even in Ono's chess-world the striations of the grid do still exist.

When the coding of the chess game moves almost strictly to the archival databank the pieces and squares cease to possess an "identity" in any traditional sense, save for abstract locational information at discrete moments in time. They do not stand embodied for anything in particular, save the continual generation of the code. As Deleuze would suggest, they have become dividuals.

Since the entire game could be played via notation at this point — which, in fact, is what happens with computer chess — maintaining any relation to Ono's white pieces remains strictly an exercise in sensuality and the act of touching or moving-with in touch. This is the only reason they need remain. Viewed from this perspective, Ono does not show us a peaceful future world in which the binary oppositions of black versus white cease to exist, but rather demonstrates the ultimate uselessness of the material body in its becoming-information. While at a "surface" level seeming to embrace hybridity and one-ness with the other — in the most postmodern, imperial sense put forth by Hardt and Negri — this chess world remains connected, disconnected and otherwise modulated by streams of data, perspectival vision, and the archive.

And so the question we must ask of Yoko Ono stands insistent: is the game being archived? In the contemporary age of "archive fever," is the game being coded, notated, recorded or inscribed, saved, secured — in short, remembered? If there were no hands moving the pieces around the board, but only the pieces collectively moving themselves, would such archiving occur nonetheless — perhaps automatically, as a new form of instant karma?

play it for as long as you can remember
who is your opponent and
who is your own self. (yoko ono)

Or do we refuse the archive? Do we retain tactility? Do we encounter the inevitable confusion once the board becomes more chaotic during middle and endgames? Do we collectively remember and resolve the confusion?

Do we collectively forget and allow certain memories to slip away, or fade to black?

(thanks to the switch, who is both black and/or white if i remember correctly)

Next week the Department of Biological Flow will visit the Balance and Gait Laboratory at Brock University to continue our trajectory of research-creation on the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise. To this point the project has primarily been about the walking body in surveillant public and quasi-public spaces, the idea of gait as a uniquely identifying feature, and what we have understood to be an emergence of gait-based surveillance.

Our Kino-Gait Study No.3 was basically an attempt to ask what would happen if the skin-as-volumetric-construct could "see back" in surveillant space — in other words, if gait became our method of seeing rather than the eye (kino-gait). The video above was an experiment to demonstrate that concept.

Following the twin legacies of Muybridge and Marey, the motion capture studio exists today as both clinical instrument for biomechanical analysis and productive apparatus for entertainment spectacle. Its surveillance function is located somewhere in between. Our goal during the study next week is to have an embodied experience of "motion capture" and to creatively play within these tensional intersections.

The objectives for this study include:

1. Develop a "normal" full model of walking body.
2. Decode or "scramble" the markers by changing their locations on the body joints and walk again — what would this do?
3. Have the two Department of Biological Flow members "glued" together front-to-back. The forward person has markers on front and left sides of the body, the rear person has markers on right and back sides of the body. The two bodies match strides, glued together, and then "split" apart halfway and veer off in opposite directions, as if "tearing" the subject in two or radically reconfiguring its relationality.

After these objectives are completed, the next phase of the study will have us wrap a simple videogame flesh texture map around the mocap model and then see what happens to the flesh and its gestural qualities when scrambled (as in scenario #2) or when the body splits in two directions (as in scenario #3).

"Baseball, fighter pilots, motor oil: all the rich symbolism of industrial-age corporeality disintegrating into information, signaling the decay of the American Empire and freezing it for the posterity of future history" (sportsBabel, Sept. 2003).

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 370:

"But on the other, the schizorevolutionary, pole, the value of art is no longer measured except in terms of the decoded and deterritorialized flows that it causes to circulate beneath a signifier reduced to silence, beneath the conditions of identity of the parameters, across a structure reduced to impotence; a writing with pneumatic, electronic, or gaseous indifferent supports, and that appears all the more difficult and intellectual to intellectuals as it is accessible to the infirm, the illiterate, and the schizos, embracing all that flows and counterflows, the gushings of mercy and pity knowing nothing of meanings and aims (the Artaud experiment, the Burroughs experiment). It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which simply consists in liberating what was present in art from its beginnings, but was hidden underneath aims and objects, even if aesthetic, and underneath recodings or axiomatics: the pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds — art as 'experimentation'."

* * *

In my most recent post I jotted down a few notes on what I perceive to be the emerging outlines of a sporting imperialism, following the work set forth by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. I wanted to give emphasis to how far-reaching and powerful this form of imperialism is, and so I used the rhetorical flourish of hypertext markup language to communicate this (<em> being the markup tag for "emphasis" — often italicized — in HTML).

My goal was to communicate the expression "sporting <em>pire," a bringing-together of two different languages into one word without dissolving the tension between them.

1. Wordpress
However, to do this within the Wordpress publishing interface required me to "escape" the angle brackets so that it would not confuse the browser into thinking I wanted the following text emphasized — which I did by using the "escape codes" for the brackets, &lt; and &gt;.

2. sportsBabel
Because I had escaped the characters properly, my browser was notified that this was not in fact markup and "sporting <em>pire" was rendered exactly how I wanted.

3. Feedburner
As with almost every blog and social media application today, when I publish a post it generates a syndication feed so that my content can be ported to other applications or communication services. My feed for sportsBabel is syndicated by the Feedburner service, which is owned by Google. After generating an XML file that was then processed through Feedburner's system, everything still looked as it should.

4. Google Reader
Here's where it gets interesting. I import my sportsBabel feed into Google Reader — a service from the same company! — and this "news aggregator" treats the <em> as an HTML markup tag and renders everything after it as italicized. And yet Google Mail, a different service owned by the parent company to which the same feed is emailed, keeps it intact as above.

5. Facebook
I also import my feed into Facebook, with each blog post becoming a new Facebook Note. This allows me to share my work with a diverse audience as well as leverage the Facebook "tagging" feature with friends. When this particular post was imported, however, the <em> was treated as HTML by Facebook and stripped out, simply leaving "sporting pire."

Is this how an Empire declines and falls, one stone at a time: through language, translation, portmanteau, hybridity and (sportsbabelist) glossolalia? Or does this fragmentation and recoding of linguistic flows actually signal a strengthening of Empire's grasp?

We have suggested already that Sporting Empire is an aspect of broader Empire, the seductive new vision of global political economy crafted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, which is constituted by a polycentric and fluid mesh of power featuring nation-state actors in shifting alliances with supranational organizations, transnational corporations, and certain humanitarian non-governmental organizations. No one actor can unilaterally seize power in a globalized world, according to Hardt and Negri, and thus a fluid network of inter-actor relationships emerges to modulate the global political order.

Shifting our analysis of the assemblage from Empire proper to those more particular elements that comprise sporting imperialism allows us to highlight some of the specific governing bodies and corporate organizations that constitute its meshwork of political economy, as well as highlight the competitive interplay between them that is such an important component of Hardt and Negri's analysis. Sporting Empire may thus be understood as those agents of capital and state who, acting both in and out of alignment with each other, collectively move the imperial sporting meshwork along a particular topology through time.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) is one such governing body that exerts a substantial influence in the movement of the meshwork, rivaling the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in terms of global sporting power. FIFA and the IOC are constituted by the greatest number of member organizations, directly or indirectly represent the greatest number of athletes worldwide, and host the two biggest sporting events in terms of audience and spectacle, the World Cup and the Olympic Games.

(As an aside, the spectacle and corruption that constitute both FIFA/World Cup and IOC/Olympic Games suggest immediately that neither a single-sport nor a multi-sport approach presents itself as inherently superior in any movement towards a sporting multitude.)

The World Cup is the biggest tournament of the most important sport on a global basis in terms of participation and audience. Years are spent in qualifying rounds before the field is whittled to a final group of teams, representing thirty-two nation-states, that will compete for the title of world's best. Based on the ritual importance of the tournament itself, the television audience it accrues, and the corporate sponsorship that follows, the economic significance of making the tournament's final cut of teams seems substantial. Indeed, for the 2010 World Cup to be held in South Africa each team will be guaranteed $1 million for appearing in the tournament, with overall prize monies totaling $420 million. This is in addition to the economic stimulus that media, advertising and consumable industries would receive in the country of each competing team, based on the extremely popular (and populist) satellite-distributed television broadcast feeds.

So one can imagine the national angst and sense of injustice borne by the supporters of the Republic of Ireland when a handball-abetted pass by France's Thierry Henry to William Gallas for the deciding goal — spotted by the television cameras of sporting spectacle, but not by the match officials themselves — knocked the Irish side from qualifying for the World Cup. They would not make the final thirty-two teams and its opportunity to reach the pinnacle of football capitalism. They wanted justice from FIFA.

A statement from the governing body read: "The Football Association of Ireland today confirmed that it attended an hour and a half meeting, at its request, with Mr Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA on Friday in Zurich. A lot was discussed at the meeting and at one stage the FAI asked if Ireland could be accommodated into the World Cup 2010."

This comment hints more of feudalism than capitalism, the lords of football lands in the FIFA realm being granted audience to plead with the King, does it not?

(prostrate before the king, perhaps, but this is not a post about fisting)

Deleuze suggested as much was possible in 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' (which Hardt and Negri argued further in Empire) — that such hybrids of political economy could create the fluid waves upon which contemporary bodies and subjectivities form and are formed. "The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications" (emphasis added). The sovereignty of FIFA and other governing bodies of sporting imperialism seems manifest as hybrids of earlier forms. This hybrid identity further suggests a fluidity between the terms of relation, which sporting imperialism appears to leverage towards modulating its own form in the service of control. As Deleuze continues: "What counts is that we are at the beginning of something."

(from chapter one in "body+politics: towards a sporting multitude," a work-in-progress doctoral dissertation for the european graduate school of media and communications)