Following my excerpt via PLSJ on Deleuze's societies of control, I am wondering: what role does sport play in creating and normalizing such a society?

First, I will suggest that Guttmann's From Ritual to Record, an exposition of the transformation from a ritualized pre-modern folk sport to the highly-rationalized and bureaucratic modern sport form seen today, is perhaps the fundamental text for building a foundation from which to answer that question.

Second, I'll offer these recent sportsBabel voices as probes, including Notes From The Horse Races, The Sports Information Market (or Jimmy Hits a J), The Precession of the Model, Pantactilism, and Romancing the Stone.

But I also want to look more specifically at the "departure from disciplinary space" component of this question, so I will explore a little further here.

Many late modern racing forms (eg. mountain biking, triathlon) have left the carceral competition space of the track in favour of a more fluid and dispersed geography. The contestant escapes the panoptic gaze of the stadium architectural form while in this new geography, so a new mechanism of tracking/measuring/ranking performance is required.

The device that facilitates this tracking is an RFID tag or chip (see, for example, the ChampionChip), which is affixed to the athlete's body or technological prosthesis (ie. uniform, shoe, vehicle). Using chip sensors that vary from the short-range to the terrestrial global positioning satellite, the athlete's position in time and space may be plotted within such a fluid competition geography.

The sensor serves much the same purpose as the guard in Bentham's panopticon, except that the process has been automated — one is always being sensed by this open system of control. Rather than panoptic, one might call this system pantactile, a "seeing" in much the same way that a blind person reads Braille. And when connected by network to a database, it allows for a centralized "awareness" of this touch-sense as well as a permanent archive or "memory" of the performance.

Anne Galloway at PLSJ on Deleuze:

Deleuze got it right: we no longer live in Foucault's disciplinary society; we live in societies of control.

"In the societies of control … what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code… The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks' … The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network … Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt…"

… What we are all embroiled in is a network in the Deleuzian sense. We are not dealing with enclosed spaces where someone is responsible; we're dealing with a fluid space where no one is accountable. … The network encourages a constant state of movement, continuously avoiding being bound and continually passing responsibility to the next module.

This type of control is particularly insidious because there is no panopticon. Control is diffuse and we can't locate - or fix - responsibility and accountability long enough to affect change. And it's particularly dangerous because it allows each of us to play the victim of an imaginary structure.

What a fabulous essay! Thanks Anne! I think this frames what I hope to do with my project in sport rather nicely.

Deleuze: "Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports."

Brayton,

Following up with a bit more cyber-goodness for your brain:

(I don't have your responses in front of me, so I am going from memory.)

1. The movie Polar Express was filmed ENTIRELY in motion capture, as I heard Tom Hanks tell everyone on Letterman Tuesday night. WOW….that takes my Arizona paper and cranks up the dial.

2. If it is true that Michael Jackson has a "skin condition" that coincidentally happens to "whiten", that still doesn't account for the plastic surgery on his nose. I know this is somewhat unrelated, but I wanted to propose a theory: certain top-level entertainers are so used to being objectified that they begin to *self-objectify* and begin to take actions that allow their object form to have a better sales curve or longer shelf life. Thus, the number of young actresses that receive breast implants, and the number of aging entertainers that take drastic plastic surgery measures to stay "young" (see: Cher).

In the case of MJ, his subject identity has always been one of peace, love and harmony (yes?). When you combine this into the hybrid that is Michael Jackson the Brand Name, you get the same effect, but shifted cause: his body (and all of our bodies) is a container that prohibits the very message he is trying to promote. So why not modify the Object, by whitening the skin, narrowing the nose, straightening the hair (for visual reference, see "The HisTory of Michael Jackson's face").

"They will still love me," he thinks, "because my essence is NOT based on the racial tropes that made me so endearing to the mainstream as little Michael Jackson of the Jackson 5."

But we don't love him. We think he is a freak. We don't understand his radical body modifications, nor the post-racial message they are intended to convey. And sensitive man that Michael is, he retreats into the sanity of the Neverland Ranch and his missed childhood.

3. Your point that the videogame version of "cyberface minstrelsy" has an additional layer of mediation between subject and floating cyber-signifier is true (ie. the videogame producers), but I would argue that they are all working from a common pool of tropes: the thug, the hypersexualized black male body, etc.

Put another way, I would suggest that if John Walker Lindh was using the electronic equivalent of blackened cork to assume his identity, the videogamer is purchasing and consuming a commercially-packaged minstrel kit. Minstrelsy is now an act of consumption!!

Peace,

Smithers

Great ideas there, so I'll respond to them as the answers present themselves to me. "Minstrelsy" is indeed a negative term that, in no uncertain ways, Lindh reproduced. Through his "identity tourism" and racial appropriation, he was simply unable to imagine a complex (or dignified) black or Arabic subject beyond the hypermasculine Thug. The argument at hand is that his "racial transvestism" reproduced a stereotypical trope of an essentialized blackness as gangsta! Alexander Saxton has a nice description of Minstrelsy in "The Rise and Fall of the White Republic".

Part of what intrigues me about Lindh is his ability to play multiple sides of "race", so to speak. While he sits from his privileged white, middle-class abode, he adopts a superficial Otherness that is always detached from a certain offline i.e., "real" socio-economic oppression. That is, Lindh's appropriation of a mythical "blackness" is never a liability since he can always return to whiteness at any given time.

The sports videogame idea is interesting and certainly screams for some "representation" work. I would argue it is a form of surrogate minstrelsy: the trope is "predigested" by software engineers rather than the actual user (or perhaps I'm incorrect with this). With "minstrelsy", the (online) user actually has a hand in creating an essentialized "Other" that typically reproduces what Nakamura calls a "cybertype" (an online stereotype of sorts). The difficulty, of course, is methodological insofar as it remains difficult to conduct a "chatroom ethnography" but also to learn the "real" identities of users. Much literature makes guesses as to the predominantly white, middle-class male usership, but all estimations are speculative.

As per Michael Jackson, I'll start with a mildly entertaining anecdote. I was in Brian Wilson's class and for some reason refered to Dave Andrews' paper titled, "The Facts of Michael Jackson's Blackness"…I laughed as soon as I said it. Of course, the "real" title is "The Facts of Michael Jordan's Blackness".

There is an interesting article by Johnson & Roediger that explains the racial transcendance, and eventual return to blackness vis-a-vis OJ Simpson. It's a rich article that makes some provocative suggestions about what hooks famously calls, "the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy". What is interesting about Jackson, is that he is (in my opinion) irrevocably linked to "blackness" through his signature dancing. Jackson's ostensible "whitening", I think, has less to do with "bleaching" (urban mythology?) than an actual medicalized condition (not sure, perhaps I'll check out the links). What is more, both Jackson and Lindh, through their attempt to transcend their own ideas of race, actually work to reproduce an essentialized understanding of racial stereotypes. For Lindh, his escape from the perceived banalities of "whiteness" was facilitated by his own fetishized notion of "blackness" (I need more time to develop this one).

In the postmodern era (as trite as this is becoming), "race" is often reduced to a performance, or a set of cultural commodities. While this has the potentially transformative affect of nullifying eugenics and theories of biologically superior "races", there is a certain peculiarity that presents itself. Through the process, the Other has been the dish that is served up for appropriation rather than "whiteness". There is a certain white privilege granted to those who endulge in consuming, say, "blackness". hooks refers to this as "eating the Other", or the process by which "white youth enhance the blank palate of whiteness" with a bit of the Other.

This could explain why (white) culture finds Carlton Banks (Alfonso Robiero) of "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" so comically successful. There is a certian incommensurable idiosyncracy presented by Carlton's "whiteness". Some might say that Carlton is the "'whitest' black man in the world" (sort of a fictive Bryant Gumbel per se). Of course, critical race scholars would (and should) find this troubling. The expression relies upon and reproduces an essentialized understanding of both "whiteness" and "blackness". It constructs Carlton as a racial anomoly of sorts since he does not (indeed can not) perform a "proper fiction of blackness", which, evidently, is often a white fantasy parlayed by the likes of MTV, "White Men Can't Jump", and so forth.

That's where I'm at right now. I'm reading a book called "Space Invaders" (something about race, gender, and space. The Lindh paper will be done by next Wednesday…It is a rather schizophrenic work in progress that seems to have a lot going on. I'll send it to you regardless.

Talk soon,

S.

Brayton,

Some ideas that came to me last night:

1. I remember reading in one of those animated "Introducing Baudrillard" books that in the Order of Simulation, Michael Jackson can be read as "mutantly post-racial"……however, I have yet to see the reference in any of Baudrillard's primary material.

2. The concept is fascinating, however: it suggests that Jackson used advanced technologies to bleach or "whiten" his skin and move beyond the paradigm of "race".

3. What Jackson was willing (and financially able) to do at the bodily level, ie. go from black to white, others (notably "whites") do in the opposite direction via the electronic media of mutable identity — what you are referring to as "cyberface minstrelsy".

4. What do these two acts (ie. Jackson, and let's take Lindh) have in common? What are the differences? I think there is fruitful ground here….and have a list going.

5. Interesting material at Wikipedia on Blackface and Minstrelsy.

6. I am not sure still how you are planning to evolve this idea, but if it goes in the direction that I am imagining, there is material to be unearthed regarding suburban white kids playing characters in sports videogames. With motion capture, you can literally "slip on" Michael Vick's body — cyberface minstrelsy?? — and then slip out of it again once the performance is completed. Is this minstrelsy? Is this a stereotypical or hyperreal performance of "authentic" black culture? I would argue yes. But now the actor/audience dichotomy is erased.

7. What I am saying, I guess, is that "minstrelsy" has a very negative connotation for me. From what I understood of your Lindh thesis, however, you are seeing him as the "post-white, anti-racist male subject", which connotes something positive (in my opinion…!?!). Correct me if I am wrong on this.

Feed me……….

I am posting an emerging concept from my friend Sean Brayton, who we hope will someday have a blog of his own, since there is much more where this came from. I wanted to juxtapose a few of my ideas against this one, and he graciously gave his permission for this to appear here. (Note: slightly edited from our personal communication for clarity.)

"Cyberface minstrelsy" refers to the process by which a particular racialization takes place via the Internet. It is a nuanced form of "racial passing" (Nakamura, 2002) facilitated by the cyberspace avatars created and maintained by primarily white middle-class males. While Nakamura has noted this phenomenon with regards to online Asian stereotyping (i.e., geishas and samurai), there is little research concerning the cyber-co-optation of "blackness". Cyberface minstrelsy, then, is the co-optation of an essentialized black identity (i.e., the gangsta or thug) by a white middle-class male. The online persona, of course, is largely a white fantasy of "blackness" that works to reproduce racist discourse from within what is believed to be a post-body, and therefore post-race space: the Internet. Cyberface minstrelsy is essentially the white performance of black stereotypes. This cooptation of "race", however, is necessarily detached from any "real" social consequences of the "gangsta" avatar. As Nakamura reminds us, the racialized identity is never a liablity. That is, those individuals adopting these "cybertypes" (Nakamura, 2002) are able to log-off from not only hip-hop websites, but also their online identities. Thus, cyberface minstrelsy not only reproduces racist tropes of an essentialized Other, but also subsumes real historical struggles articulated around and through "race".

From Richard Florida's essay "The Rise of the Creative Class":

It is a telling commentary on our age that at a time when political will seems difficult to muster for virtually anything, city after city can generate the political capital to underwrite hundreds of millions of dollars of investments in professional sports stadiums. And you know what? They don't matter to the creative class. Not once during any of my focus groups and interviews did the members of the creative class mention professional sports as playing a role of any sort in their choice of where to live and work. What makes most cities unable to even imagine devoting those kinds of resources or political will to do the things that people say really matter to them?

Reminds me of the sportocratic VPS…

Take the poetry of soccer, combine it with four hundred years of racial bondage and the detritus of industrial America, and you have basketball, the NBA flavour of which flops around like a fish out of water as it tries to adapt to the forces of globalization.

How to rip basketball away from its essentially black roots as it makes the next movement worldwide? How to package a hyperreal urban blackness for a global audience?

TBA is the best way to describe this basketball association's transnational aspirations — to be announced.

China banned Nike's new LeBron James commercial, which is titled Chamber of Fear. Chinese officials stated that the ad "violates regulations that mandate that all advertisements in China should uphold national dignity and interest and respect the motherland's culture."

James replied, "It was never intended to hurt anybody or any culture or anything like that."

It is unclear whether this is good or not for Nike, but the conspiracy theorist in me says that this will be good for them, and that it was likely engineered by officials from Nike.

In light of the recent hysteria concerning BALCO, Bonds and Baseball, I thought I would post a short essay from Kroker and Cook's Panic Encyclopedia (1989). (Once again, I am not sure if this journal post contravenes the copyright notice included in the book or not, so I will post the link where you can freely download the book and decide for yourself. Boldface emphasis added.)

PANIC OLYMPICS

Ben Johnson committed a big sign crime, and he is paying for it as the newest sacrificial victim of the Olympics.

If, in twenty-four hours, he could implode from a Promethean hero of classic proportions into a sacrificial scapegoat for the masses' fury at being sign-switched, it just proves that Ben Johnson's body has now a second existence: an abstract screen onto which are projected all of the inadequacies of a TV audience that is suffering a bad case of distemper. In Canada, Johnson's return from Seoul was a scene taken directly from The Day of the Locust: a raging media scrum demanding why he had betrayed his country, government leaders trumpeting "swift retribution" by banning him for life from international competition. And Johnson, himself, who began running as a stutterer found himself finally unable to speak. On ABC's Nightline, Edwin Moses, who only wins bronze medals now, is having one last media career as a cynical comic in the Reagan style, by urging that Johnson's sign crime be taken up as a challenge for the policing of the drug free body. And, in Seoul, the panic claims of Olympic officials that this is a victory for "scientific detection" of the doped body is met by all the smugness of the TV anchors who talk darkly of "tainted competitions."

So, why all the hysteria? Perhaps because it is the age of sacrificial sports now: that point where the Olympics, under the pressure of the mass media, re-enter the dark domain of mythology. No longer sports as about athletic competition, but postmodern sports now fascinating only because the athlete's body is a blank screen for playing out the darker passions of triumph and scapegoatism. Johnson's second body (his simulated body that was the focus of all the mass media attention) then, as an empty sign onto which could be projected a triple resentment: the resentment of the Olympic Committee which, having already surrendered its sovereignty on the question of money, took up with a vengeance the policing of the drug free body; the resentment of the silent mass audience that saw its psychological investment in Johnson's triumph over Carl Lewis instantly reversed by evidence of his use of anabolic steroids; and the resentment of the media at being cheated of the illusion of an "even playing field."

Just as Nietzsche predicted, there is nothing quite so dangerous as a worldwide mob, robbed of its own dream-world and thirsting for revenge at the unmasking of its own illusions. With Ben Johnson, The Day of the Locust finally goes global in the psychological form of Panic Olympics.

"We're more comfortable with an earlier version of who we were and what we were — it makes us feel more in control."

I might take the liberty of tacking Gibson's words onto my theorizing of the ludic luddite, and note that he is absolutely correct in pointing out that panic is the fundamental driver of this group in society (see also Kroker).

"Technology is the knack of arranging the world so we don't have to experience it."

From American Roulette, a blog about a "professional casino cheater's thoughts on casinos, gambling and updates from currently working, never-caught, cheaters":

All the fantastic things you hear about casino surveillance systems, such as that cliche about surveillance cameras reading the date off a dime, are only partially true. Yes, they can read the date off a dime, but only if the lens is zoomed in for that particular purpose. Casino cameras are only zoomed in when surveillance personnel are already suspicious about certain activities and are trying to get a closer look at a suspected cheating move and film close-ups of faces and fingers to use later as evidence in court. But against us, that was zero. We were constantly on the lookout for undue attention. Plus, we were hit and run cheaters. We never got involved in prolonged continuous operations which gave the casino time to set us up. We hit and then we were gone. Their cameras never had the chance to zoom in on us.

My informants in the Strip Casinos surveillance rooms would give me the total lowdown on casino surveillance, and keep me posted on inter-casino communication about what cheaters were doing. I also received copies of my mug shots which were passed frequently around the casinos, helping me choose the appropriate headdress to avoid detection while I worked the tables.

We would watch these casinos surveillance tapes in my apartment. On the screen I saw everything their cameras were capable of. I learned all the details, became sort of a surveillance expert myself. They taught me about the multitudinous camera movements - pan and tilt, angle shots, zoom-ins, every minute detail concerning surveillance operating procedures.

Another thing I learned was that the surveillance inspectors themselves were quite ineffective. In the old days, Vegas used ex-casino cheaters who'd gone straight to spy on their ex-partners from above. These guys in the eye knew something, were capable of recognizing something going down in the casino on their own feet. But today, everyone working surveillance, was a legitimate person who had taken a training course before getting his job in the "sky." Imagine the level of incompetence existing when comparing today's book-smart casino sleuths with yesterday's sharpies who could read the date off a dime without the help of cameras. Asking someone fresh out of surveillance school to spot a slick move going down in a casino was tantamount to putting a cabdriver behind the wheel of a 747.

From "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation," by William S. Lind et al., an absolute must-read to understand the future of military conflict:

Terrorism also appears to represent a solution to a problem that has been generated by previous generational changes but not really addressed by any of them. It is the contradiction between the nature of the modern battlefield and the traditional military culture. That culture, embodied in ranks, saluting, uniforms, drill, etc., is largely a product of first generation warfare. It is a culture of order. At the time it evolved it was consistent with the battlefield, which was itself dominated by order. The ideal army was a perfectly oiled machine, and that was what the military culture of order sought to produce.

However, each new generation has brought a major shift toward a battlefield of disorder. The military culture, which has remained a culture of order, has become contradictory to the battlefield. Even in the third generation warfare, the contradiction has not been insoluble; the Wehrmacht bridged it effectively, outwardly maintaining the traditional culture of order while in combat demonstrating the adaptability and fluidity a disorderly battlefield demands. But other militaries, such as the British, have been less successful at dealing with the contradiction. They have often attempted to carry the culture of order over onto the battlefield with disastrous results. At Biddulphsberg, in the Boer War, for example, a handful of Boers defeated two British Guards battalions that fought as if on parade.

The contradiction between the military culture and the nature of modern war confronts a traditional military Service with a dilemma. Terrorists resolve the dilemma by eliminating the culture of order. Terrorists do not have uniforms, drill, saluting or, for the most part, ranks. Potentially, they have or could develop a military culture that is consistent with the disorderly nature of modern war. The fact that their broader culture may be non-Western may facilitate this development.