"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," Deleuze exhorts.

"One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control?"

It appears that the sports world is about to get an early answer to that question.

Eddy Curry, an NBA free agent who played most recently for the Chicago Bulls, is being asked by the club to undergo a DNA test so that it may determine if he is genetically predisposed to cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that could prove fatal when combined with his recently diagnosed cardiac arrhythmia. NBA Commissioner David Stern supports the request in principle.

Sports Law Blog provides a backgrounder and follow-up on the issue. And for more information on the topic, I will point to Dr. Andy Miah's Bioethics and Sport blog, and in particular a post about genetic testing in the Australian Football League.

A reminder to myself: before the advent of Deep Blue and the leveraging of chess code, there was The Turk, purportedly a chess-playing automaton, but in fact a clever hoax.

Baudrillard: "Snow is no longer a gift from on high. It falls precisely at those places designated as winter resorts."

Or perhaps downtown San Francisco? As our technologies increasingly divorce us from nature, tons of man-made snow are trucked onto Fillmore Street for the Icer Big Air snowboarding competition.

The logic of post-industrial capitalism (or, "I swear you can't make this stuff up")

On the front page of ESPN.com the other day, a Flash advertisement for Viagra's sponsorship of the MLB "Comeback Player of the Year Award" (groan…) rolled back to reveal the headline story: Rafael Palmeiro, the priapismic one himself, ratting out teammates for giving him a supplement that ultimately caused him to test positive for steroids.

ESPN's Skip Bayless: "Soccer permanently contaminated football."

As much as I think Bayless is an atrocious attention-seeker, it's an interesting perspective when put in the context of the historical evolution of folk football. Basically, at one point a bunch of people decided the game would be played predominantly with the hands, while others decided it would be played predominantly with the feet. From then on, the various strands of the game developed: association football (soccer), gridiron football, Aussie rules football, rugby, Gaelic football, etc. I'll borrow from biology the term cladogenesis to describe this evolutionary break-point.

The idea that one strand of the newly mutated game could return, post-cladogenesis, and infect or "contaminate" another seems to strengthen the link between biological and communications processes.

After posting Haraway's thought framework from "A Cyborg Manifesto," I wanted to jot down a few notes as to how I see her interpretation of these "scary new networks" overlapping or meshing with what I have developed here at sportsBabel.

Labor ›› Robotics

When Haraway discusses a shift from labor to robotics (elsewhere in the essay she says that "microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing"), is the sportocratic equivalent not Rasheed Wallace and his perfectly-assembled soundbite — "Both teams played hard." — which the typing classes then turn into content? Wallace's perfect quality control gives truth to the lie about the nature of professional athletes, who are in fact I3-producing techno-bodies.

Physiology ›› Communications engineering

Gatorade changes from a drink that will provide fatigued athletes with fluid and electrolytes to a circulating image-sign indicating superior athletic performance available as consumptive possibility.

Representation ›› Simulation

Can something be represented that has never taken place? This is the situation in which sport finds itself once we begin to introduce motion capture into movies and videogames. The recombinant nature of fantasy gaming is another postmodern take on the sporting text, the "anterior finality" (cf. Baudrillard) of simulation that irrevocably shapes both product and producer.

Perfection (Heat) ›› Optimization (Noise)

Haraway could be speaking specifically about sabermetrics with these points. Rather than diatribe myself, I will resample a talk from Paul DePodesta, GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers, that I posted earlier:

I was on a quest to find relevant relationships. Usually it wasn't as simple as "if X then Y." I was looking for probabilistic relationships. … We may not always be right but we'd be right a lot more often than we'd be wrong. In baseball, if you win about 60% of your games, you're probably in the playoffs.

One of the other problems is that the traditional metrics and stats used in baseball are muddied with so much noise that just didn't matter that I was having a tough time distilling all the information.

Biology as clinical practice ›› Biology as inscription

Though obsolesced, the administrative numeration found on the extended skin of the sports uniform, which finds its contemporary manifestation in the jersey number tattoo, foreshadows the inscription on the body of DNA recombination and other communications/biotechnological practices.

From the IOC web site:

Athletes who wish to use authorised inhaled beta2 agonists at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Turin must submit a specific request to do so to the IOC Medical and Scientific Department using the on-line Therapeutic Use Exemption request form.

It is important that we can depend on Authority when faced with a panic.

I am a sucker for these sorts of thought frameworks, so today I wanted to post this sample from Donna Haraway's seminal watershed essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century."

(Don't just take it from me … listen here.)

ESPN's Don Barone writes about the NFL's new policy to physically pat down every patron that attends a game before entering the stadium. An excerpt:

Kickoff. Bills winning. Losman turns out not to be the kid in front of me with the backpack, and plays well. People in my section describe him as "Kelly-esque." Anointment.

Still, with visions of the mass pat-down in my head, and worrying about the memory etched into 16-year-old minds, I lean over and shout: "So guys, you OK with the pat-down?"

Not taking their eyes off the game, they shake their heads, thinking something like, "Stupid dad, please, dear God, don't let him talk about Thomas Jefferson again — not here."

"Yeah, it was no big deal …"

Cheers. Bills up by three more.

"… no one touched my balls."

And there you have the late modern sportocratic condition in a nutshell: complicit in normalizing behaviours that erode personal and political freedoms, while buttressing a hegemonic heterosexuality in the process.

I was in a client's office recently that featured an "official" framed photo of Antonio Davis, then with the Toronto Raptors, on the wall.

What made it official?

Besides the photo of Davis himself, taken during the 2002-03 season, there was a swatch of game-worn jersey, an NBA-logo hologram, and a 9-digit serial number prominently displayed within the frame. The requisite Davis signature and number seemed far less conspicuous.

Sampling Deleuze may offer us a theoretical underpinning (italics are his, boldface mine):

The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest–the flock and each of its animals–but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). 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."

In this case, the numerical language of control grants us access to the authenticity of "Official NBA Merchandise".

Like me, many athletes tattoo their jersey number to their skin, a ludic identification unmindful of its sinister antecedents. Lest we forget.

tattoo on my ankle of a basketball with my university number inside.

detail of tattoo.

A day at the golf course offers a very succinct expression of the late modern sportocracy, and after a few recent outings with my best friend Seabs and another with my Dad, I had an opportunity to collect my thoughts and interpret my experiences on the course.

Though it is a production orientation that marks the game of golf when taken as a whole, particularly at the recreational level, each successive stop on the assembly line chain is in fact imbued with libidinal desire. We find that for the most part these two drives are compatible, though we may note that in attempting to accommodate both, friction may be created. More on this shortly.

First, we must ask: What is the product of the commercial golf course?

It is the completed round of golf. It is a post-industrial retrieval of the industrial, but in the form of leisure. It is an agreement between capital and labour, in which the latter may lease the apparatus of production to simultaneously produce and consume this assembly-line manufactured round of golf. It is an opportunity to spend a few hours in a hyperrealized "natural" setting, through the payment of "green" fees — after which many will drive across the heavily fertilized and manicured grass on motorized golf carts.

More on the carts: as with process and supply chain logistics in many other industries, golf wants to streamline production and improve flow. To this end, the golf cart purportedly helps speed up play, and on many courses is a mandatory purchase. Increasingly, these mandatory carts feature embedded GPS and RFID technology designed to improve efficiency even further, thus presenting a radical challenge to the notion of a "good walk spoiled."

Every clock on the golf course assembly line is set to the same time: the time at which you teed off on the first hole. If the time on any one particular clock reads later than the time at which you began your round, then you have become "behind pace." We are outside of real time on the golf course: at once, we are presented with a pastoral time in which gentlemen would knock a ball about during their walk through "nature", and a production time in which completed golf rounds are turned out along the fashion of an assembly line.

It is only on a micro-scale that we begin to detect the libidinal in play. Manufacture begins before stepping to the tee, when the producer puts his ball into the Par Aide ball washer and vigorously pumps the handle up and down. This is a sub-process of hygiene, designed to deliver pristine white balls to the tee box once the pump has been suitably primed.

No gutta percha, this. We are strictly in the realm of balatajaculate, the spermatozoa of golf — evolved, though, in their ability to travel such long distances without a tail.

Then, with a violent swing, the game(te) begins, as the ball leaves the freshly mown (tee) box and shoots up the fairway.

Resample:

In many sports with a high degree of male bonding, one of the strongest unifying factors is the proverbial swinging dick, and so it is in golf. The driver in golf is nothing more than the extension of the male phallus, shooting Balatajaculate hundreds of yards in all directions (preferably straight) while onlookers go slackjawed or nod approvingly. Even with drivers made out of graphite or titanium or moonrock, or whatever, the man's always got the Number One Wood in his hands.

There's even a class of "golfers" out there who do nothing but hit long drives, evoking comparisons to the disembodied circus schlongs of the porn industry. Preying on our insecurities, both groups can sell our fears back to us, either as equipment to lengthen us on the tee, or in the sack.

If you can't grip it and rip it, then you're not a man at all — or so the subtext reads.

(This graphite extension prefigures the cyborgian coupling of man and machine, amputating the phallus in the process. Once detached, the woman then straps on the technological prosthetic herself, and bangs balls 250 yards plus, with the top female hitters being far more lengthy than the average male and his withering phallocentrism. As with the porn strap-on, men are initially intrigued by the act, but ultimately come to recognize the message of their own obsolescence in the process. Thus, Wie men perceive a threat to our manhood if women are allowed to join the men's golf competition.)

The farther a skilled golfer is able to hit the ball up the fairway, the longer he must wait on the tee box until the group ahead has cleared beyond the danger point of being hit. The further away this invisible threshold becomes, the more pressure against the ubiquitous clock of production. Meanwhile, in an unskilled golfer's hands, the libidinal drive(r) is apt to spray balatajaculate in every direction but straight. This in turn incurs the shame (and penalty) of the lost ball, which, when coupled with longer hitters on the tee box behind, has the potential to create serious bottlenecks along the assembly line, motorized golf cart conveyances be damned.

Thus, we see the slightest friction where production and consumption meet on the golf course. While the two co-exist peacefully for the most part, it would be misleading in this case to declare that the demands imposed by productive power and the libidinal drive(r) of consumption are one and the same, or even totally compatible. Instead, we might suggest that the site of prosumption may contain unique properties and problems that the factory space of the capitalist is not used to administering.

Derrida, Archive Fever:

The question of the archive is not a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal. An archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive, if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come; not tomorrow, but in times to come. Later on, or perhaps never.

This is an interesting perspective that Derrida offers us, and in that spirit I would like to offer an example regarding the unknowable tomorrow that an archive presents.

Consider chess, a game with centuries of history. Were the original archivists of the game to understand the possibilities afforded by the elegant simplicity of the grid system? Were they to foretell how this grid system could offer a higher degree of information compression in their archival pursuits? Were they to imagine competition by telepresence? Between human and computer? Or that said computer would destroy the human and become a celebrity?

No, it would be inconceivable for these keepers of the archive to have known what their archivization of the game would eventually mean.

Marcel Duchamp:

The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. … I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

To Duchamp's chagrin, I am certain, the block alphabet of the chess game appears to contain more than just poetry in its structure. There is also the more prosaic consideration of chess notation, and the use of its language in the archive. For what can we say if the greatest chess player in the world — the game's greatest artist and poet — is summarily dismissed by a computer?

Is the computer showing signs of artistry? Or, on the other hand, is science beginning to pull away from art (at least in this case) — a shift with grave consequences for humanity, as well as one that implicates the archivists of the game from so long ago?

Interestingly, CBC's Labour Day telecast of the CFL matchup between Edmonton and Calgary drew a season best 584,000 viewers. The reason this is interesting is that CBC has been broadcasting its CFL games without announcers, as Canada' public broadcasting corporation has locked out the 5,500 members of the Canadian Media Guild, including on-air sports staff.

In their place, CBC full-time staff have been operating the cameras and instant replay technology, while extra field mikes and amplified sound provide the atmosphere. And guess what? The lower production values don't seem to matter.

Now we'll see if the same principle holds true in a few months when Hockey Night in Canada gets into full swing, but these audience numbers certainly cannot be helping the cause of the union.

Resample:

[T]he Lineage of Radio Hewitt ends up running through the Television Cole and Neale to the recombinant nature of the Videogame Hughson and Simpson, suggesting a Third Golden Age of (fantasized and fragmentary) professional sport that is mediated by virtual space and artificial intelligence engines.

Or does it? Maybe we just get rid of the announcers and embed advertising in other ways…