Gilles Deleuze, in "Postscript on the Societies of Control":

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. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something.

Three years ago, Chicago Cubs baseball fan Steve Bartman committed a blunder of monumental proportions when he snatched a fly ball destined for the stands. The mistake was critical since Chicago's Moises Alou had a chance to reach into the stands and make a play on the ball for a key out that would have nearly sealed the game and a spot in the World Series, which the Cubs hadn't won since 1908. Rattled, the team eventually lost the game and the series, continuing the championship drought.

As I suggested at the time, Bartman's gaffe constituted "an operational failure of the panoptic gaze." The same technologies that ensure spectator docility at a sporting event also constitute the apparatus of spectacle that is so important economically. Put another way, Bartman was trained to internalize two truths: first, to sit down in your seat at a game unless standing up to cheer in an appropriate fashion; and second, to try and catch a fly ball when possible for its sign-value as ball and for the possibility to get seen on TV. With one out in the top of the eighth and the Cubs nursing a 3-0 lead, these two truths came into direct opposition with one another.

So an older method, borrowed from the society of sovereignty, was leveraged to resolve the anomaly, though with the necessary modifications: Bartman needed the spectacle of public torture and death: however, since we could not literally kill Bartman, we instead used the ball in simulation as the proxy by which the public spectacle of torture and execution could be enacted. And hopefully everyone learned their lesson.

* * *

Today there is a new lesson. It has to do not with the bounded space of the stadium, but rather the space within one's body. Generally, we are discussing claims to a "natural" body and chemical compositions that might challenge such a natural state. Specifically, we are discussing Barry Bonds and allegations that steroids, HGH or other illicit doping methods allowed him to break Major League Baseball's all-time record for home runs.

It was anticipated that the record-breaking ball would be somewhat depressed in value given the allegations leveled against Bonds, and would only fetch about half a million dollars. The ball ended up selling for $752,467 — substantially more than expected, but a far cry from the $3 million Spawn creator Todd McFarlane spent in auction to land Mark McGwire's record single-season home run ball.

The Bonds ball was purchased by urban streetwear entrepreneur Mark Ecko, who offered baseball fans the ability to decide what to subsequently do with it by voting online through the web site Vote756.com. Fans were offered three choices in the vote: bestow the ball intact to Cooperstown; brand the ball with an asterisk before sending it to Cooperstown; or blast the ball into outer space.

Over 10 million votes were cast. The result? Brand the ball with an asterisk before putting it on display forever at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

If we can consider the Bartman ball as acting in proxy for the simulated spectacle of torture and execution, should we not extend our analysis to consider the Bonds ball as a proxy in a similarly spectacular fashion? And if so, what does the collective desire of baseball's voting fans to have the proxy branded reveal in this analysis?

Once again, in administering mechanisms of control older methods return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. The branding of human beings has a long and varied history, most notably to mark slaves as a form of property or to identify and punish the criminal. Later, as the practice of branding extended to domesticated livestock, the presence of a brand on an animal often constituted prima facie proof of ownership.

While baseball holds a special and important place in the topography of American collective consciousness, the nation's historical legacy of slavery holds perhaps an even more important place in its collective subconsciousness. We might suggest that the desire to brand the record-setting baseball is a collective expression of that subconscious awareness — Bonds should be branded (in simulation).

From now on, the presence of an asterisk on cowhide — the scarlet punctuation, as it were — will be considered prima facie evidence of guilt in the absence of hard physical evidence. But it will also serve as a reminder of ownership: the career home run record (and indeed all of baseball history) does not belong to Bonds but rather to The American People. Moreover, it is the body of Bonds himself (and indeed all other baseball players) that is symbolically owned by The American People, a lesson that will be internalized by every future visitor to Cooperstown.

The United States Drug Enforcement Agency has recently completed the largest performance-enhancing drug crackdown in U.S. history. 50 arrests, 26 underground labs raided, millions of dollars in cash and product seized. But it was this passage that caught my attention in Shaun Assael's ESPN article (emphasis added):

The investigation also focused on message boards where advice is traded about obtaining raw materials, as well as on the Web sites that help the labs sell finished products to the public. Hundreds of thousands of e-mails were intercepted, according to Dan Simmons, a San Diego-based special agent for the DEA. Simmons said that no professional athletes have been implicated so far but that the e-mails are being compiled into a massive database of names and are being analyzed.

. . .

In an interview, David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said that he expects to learn if the names of any athletes attempting to qualify for the Olympics are in the database. Howman said that he is working closely with the DEA, and veteran BALCO investigator Jeff Novitzky of the Internal Revenue Service, to make sure that any legal hurdles are cleared so that WADA can get that access.

Does it not seem odd that WADA — a sports organization — would have this degree of access in a U.S. criminal investigation? Consider the mission statements of the three organizations:

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency

"The mission of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is to enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States and bring to the criminal and civil justice system of the United States, or any other competent jurisdiction, those organizations and principal members of organizations, involved in the growing, manufacture, or distribution of controlled substances appearing in or destined for illicit traffic in the United States; and to recommend and support non-enforcement programs aimed at reducing the availability of illicit controlled substances on the domestic and international markets."

U.S. Internal Revenue Service

"The IRS is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury and one of the world's most efficient tax administrators. In 2004, the IRS collected more than $2 trillion in revenue and processed more than 224 million tax returns. … The IRS Mission [is to p]rovide America's taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and by applying the tax law with integrity and fairness to all."

World Anti-Doping Agency

"The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is the international independent organization created in 1999 to promote, coordinate, and monitor the fight against doping in sport in all its forms. Composed and funded equally by the sports movement and governments of the world, WADA coordinated the development and implementation of the World Anti-Doping Code (Code), the document harmonizing anti-doping policies in all sports and all countries."

While sport operates as a striated space on smaller geographical scales, we might posit the preceding as an example of the legitimization of sporting Empire in a smooth space of control.

In the passage of sovereignty toward the plane of immanence, the collapse of the boundaries has taken place both within each national context and on a global scale. The withering of civil society and the general crisis of the disciplinary institutions coincide with the decline of nation-states as boundaries that mark and organize the divisions in global rule. The establishment of a global society of control that smooths over the striae of national boundaries goes hand in hand with the realization of the world market and the real subsumption of global society under capital (Hardt & Negri, Empire, p. 332).

<!–a series on antony gormley and the origin of "tactile burden", in no particular order–>

I have already discussed two of Gormley's pieces that explicitly concern optic vision in general and the surveillant gaze in particular. Certainly, given my own research interests, this contributes to my favouring these specific works for review. But it is the next work I wish to examine that provided the eureka moment for me in terms of conceptualizing the idea of tactile burden, and it arises not due to the absence of vision, but rather light/vision amplified to such a point that it renders (nearly) sightless.

Consider two poles of blindness. One involves the absence of light and the consequent darkness that renders one incapable of seeing. The other involves the total intensification of light on the retinal receptors such that one is blinded by the sheer intensity of the light and has a visceral reaction, which forces closure of the eyes to get relief from the pain (as when looking at a sunny sky after being in a dark room). In Blind Light, Gormley finds a third way between these two poles of blindness by creating a pain-free immersive environment of lightness that becomes a de facto visible sightlessness.

Blind Light is essentially a glass box that has been filled with thick vapour and brightly lit with fluorescent light. The glass walls are reinforced so that atmospheric pressure can be increased to one and a half times normal levels. While this makes the air within slightly more thick and tangible, it avoids becoming excessively warm since heat is being wicked out by a venting system, leaving the environment within eerily cool. You are left to wander in the pitch white of the box.

As Gormley himself describes:

Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter his interior space that is the equivalent of being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important for me that inside it you find the outside. Also you become the immersed figure in an endless ground, literally the subject of the work.

When I entered the space, the first thing I noticed is that it wasn't as "heavy" as I'd anticipated, but this was probably due to my preconceived understanding that the atmospheric pressure would be slightly higher than normal; in fact, the environment was slightly thicker. Though my eyes were fully open, the space in front of me was pitch white, so sound assumed new importance. I became attentive to the playful voices of others enjoying the space, which alerted me to their position long before my visual faculty could confirm. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of my time inside was the oily residue on my eyeballs I came to notice: was this a film from the thick vapour in the room or was it instead the normal atmospheric detritus of urban society, only now made apparent in the pitch whiteness of Blind Light? I do not know.

So why was I so excited when I saw this piece during Gormley's presentation at EGS? From his early lead bodycase works, through his Domain series, to his Feeling Material series, I witnessed what I perceived to be an increasing dematerialization of the body into the information and data networks that bind the multitude of human bodies together. I have discussed such a dematerialization or outering into the data networks for several years here at sportsBabel, a sample of which I include here:

• bODY_rESAMPLE?
• Hybrids, Mutants and Replicants
• Sport Amputees
• Polar Inertia
• Attempting to Extend Benjamin
• Body Treble
• Dematerialization and Disinformation
• The Art of Sport in the Age of Mediated Simulation

So, if artists are the antennae of society, detecting problems and shifts and articulating them through their work to the rest of us, then what was next, I wondered. Was there a potential way out, so to speak, for the dematerializing body?

During Gormley's presentation at EGS, Blind Light was the answer.

Theoretically, we might usefully contrast Blind Light with Virilio's concept of the "vision machine." While Virilio's vision machine is a networked collection of cameras, databases and tracking algorithms that is visually impotent in the classical sense, yet sees everything, Gormley's Blind Light constructs an environment in which eyes are wide open and everything is illuminated, yet one sees nothing. In both situations the notion of the tactile is key: the vision machine manipulates data and enables "sight" through the tactile, digital interplay between the senses: a haptic-made-optic.

With Blind Light, by contrast, we are at a point in which the body is completely dematerialized into or merged with its architectural container, the glass box, while bodies also interact within its space; we are at once corporeal and in the network. And for one to navigate the other vision becomes useless: we feel the heavy atmosphere on our skin and in our breathing, we listen for audio cues in the acoustic space, we tread gingerly with the soles of our feet and reach out tentatively with our fingertips. It is tactility, or the interplay between the senses, that allows us to survive the blinding light(ness) of the network.

Hence, tactile burden.

Eureka.

For Benjamin, lithography was a visual technique of representation that allowed for an acceleration — for the visual depiction of daily life to keep pace with printing. Similarly, he saw photography (and later cinema) as a subsequent acceleration that allowed visual depiction to keep pace with speech.

Following Benjamin, we might suggest that the multiplex television viewing experience (in concert with its accompanying stream of meta-data), such as that offered with DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket package, allows the visual depiction of sporting life to keep pace in real-time with flashpoint events at distributed geographical locations. In other words, for visual depiction to keep pace with sight.

Edwin Moses they are not. But forget about technique for a second and consider the following as an interesting exercise in the compression of space:

(via panoptican)

When discussing the human-machine connection in sport from a media/communications perspective I have tended thus far to privilege the technical component. For example, I keep reiterating how the techniques of videogame production and consumption have to an extent subordinated the role of the human agent in sporting practice. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn this summer from European Graduate School artist-in-residence Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) about Robert Rauschenberg's 1966 performance piece titled "Open Score".

As the Media Art Net site describes:

Open Score, Robert Rauschenberg's piece for 9 Evenings, began with a tennis game on the floor of the Armory. Bill Kaminski designed a miniature FM transmitter that fit in the handle of the tennis racquet, and a contact microphone was attached to the handle of the racquet with the antenna wound around the frame of the head. Each time Frank Stella and Mimi Kanarek hit the ball the vibrations of the racquet strings were transmitted to the speakers around the armory, and a loud BONG was heard. At each BONG, one of the 48 lights went out, and the game ended when the Armory was in complete darkness.

Thus we have a situation in which tennis provides the engine for this improvisational theatre art. I had an idea similar to this a few years ago in a post called Gymprov; in a hastily sketched outline I suggested the game would re-tell a classic tale of binary opposition, such as the temptation of Jesus by the Devil, through the engine of pickup basketball. Game play would inspire thematic dialogue, while lighting would have to intuitively follow the appropriate speakers.

Rauschenberg was clearly ahead of his time: in Open Score, by contrast, the "dialogue" is not between the athletes and offstage voices, but rather between the athletes and the technical infrastructure of sound and lighting itself, via the material sporting apparatus (tennis racquet) and immaterial channels of communication (FM radio waves). As Rauschenberg writes: "The unlikely use of the game to control the lights and to perform as an orchestra interest me. The conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through a reproduction is the sort of double exposure of action. A screen of light and a screen of darkness."

(It is worth noting that Rauschenberg attended the experimental Black Mountain College in the late '40s and early '50s, where he met, among others, John Cage. The parallels between Black Mountain College and the European Graduate School have been suggested to me more than once.)

smithers:

[Aside] Well, I am a little over six years into the world of blogging and it was time for a change. So I unveil a new design for the site, sportsBabel 4.0.

It's come a long way from sportsBabel 1.0, that's for sure:

A short tour through the 2.0 and 3.0 series, during which I moved from Blogger and Haloscan to Wordpress:

And here we are today with the official launch of sportsBabel 4.0, with cake and hats for everybody. The new design features include:

• a new, more dynamic-looking masthead image
• a clean new stylesheet that highlights content better
• a Creative Commons license updated to version 3.0
• fixed rss feeds
• the removal of the Flash-based post headers
• the addition of Michael Woehrer's Tag Cloud plugin to navigate categories
• the addition of GNot's Simple Recent Comments plugin
• the addition of a latest five posts box to single post pages

I hope that you enjoy the new look … I had fun putting it together.

[Exit]

In my work here at sportsBabel, I have discussed (following Eichberg, Guttmann and others) the tyranny of timing that arises as we measure sporting performance in pursuit of the linear record. Athletics sprint races are measured to the thousandth of a second and ratified as conclusive to the hundredth, a situation similar to that found at the velodrome, swimming pool, bobsleigh track and other sites of sporting speed.

We may trace a genealogy of the timing systems used in high performance athletics that increasingly discards the mechanical in favour of the digital and photoelectronic. To measure these absolutely precise times — or more correctly, to maintain the illusion of acceleration and linear progress — we move from the hand-held mechanical stopwatch (with human operator) to the electronic stopwatch (more precise, though still with human operator) and autonomous photo finish camera to the fully automated timing system and its modular photo finish system. We eliminate the visible smoke from the gun report as the referent to begin timing on the stopwatch in favour of electronically-integrated timing (a flow, or vector through space), and we eliminate the substrate of film and darkroom chemical development techniques for the digital image (a stock, or vector through time). Sporting time becomes a part of the electronic network, what I have referred to as a panhaptic technique of control.

But it is this will to speed that should cause concern. Jean-Marie Brohm refers to this will in sport as facilitating a "prison of measured time." I'll say that it fosters a sporting epistemology of the instant.

Can we resist such an epistemology, not only in sport, but in society? If yes, what sort of timing system would be required to do so?

If, for example, in the era of planned obsolescence we are to build a clock to last 10,000 years, what sort of materials do we need to use? Certainly not the cheap circuitry found in common digital timepieces today. For that matter, nor can we likely count on even the more complex electronics required in cutting-edge precision timing systems discussed above — how can we presume that our systems of electrical production and distribution are sustainable for 10,000 years?

No, we need something more durable and reliable, with an energy source that is likely to extend deep into the future.

The Long Now Foundation has been working on such a problem for a while now. Following a proposal by computer scientist Danny Hillis to build a monument-scale, multi-millennial, all-mechanical clock as a symbol to promote long term thinking, the Long Now have built two prototype clocks and are currently working on the full-scale monument.

But this is just the technical apparatus of measuring time; what about the measurements themselves and the epistemological shift they may imply/catalyze? Well, if contemporary high-speed timing systems can allow us to "authoritatively" discuss the hundredth and thousandth of a second — that is, to extend the zero in a rightward direction — then the clock of the Long Now similarly allows us to extend the zero in a leftward sense: the year 2007 becomes 02007 when measured on a 10,000-year scale.

It's not that we are incapable of fathoming such a time scale — indeed, temporal units of analysis in paleontology are of the order of millions of years — but that we fail to think on such a time scale in everyday practice as we navigate the society of the instant. The work of the Long Now is an attempt to have each of us think beyond the society of the instant in a quotidian sense; following the example of friend and colleague Stuart Candy (author of The Sceptical Futuryst and himself a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation), I will endeavour to write years from now on in 5-digit format.

It is seemingly a simple or trivial gesture, but it gets me thinking about resisting the epistemology of the instant, and for that reason alone is sufficiently complex.

Any biological material collected for the purposes of doping control through surveillance, tracking, and laboratory testing.

Manuel DeLanda, in interview:

The metaphor they use is solid, liquid, gas. If the system is solid, too crystallized, its dynamics are completely uninteresting. If it's gaseous, it's also uninteresting — all you have to do is take averages of behavior and you know what's going on. Liquids have a lot more potential, with all kinds of attractors and bifurcations. Now what they're coming to believe is that the liquid state in nature — not just actual liquids, but liquidity in the abstract sense of being not too rigid or too loose — these liquid systems "poised on the edge of chaos" are natural computers.

We are beginning to think that every liquid in nature can compute, and perhaps consciousness can be an emergent property that can skip the organic and go into silicon — perhaps via us. We might just be insects pollinating machines that do not happen to have their own reproductive organs right now.

In an earlier post on Global Village Basketball, I subconsciously wove the solid-liquid-gas metaphor into my description of the game's emergence. After learning more from DeLanda (one of my professors at EGS this summer), I have a better idea of how this actually works in a basketball context. I am suggesting that basketball as a linguistic system currently exists only in solid and gas phases (preliminary notes below) that shift back and forth in processes of sublimation and deposition — a phase change from solid to gas or vice-versa in which the liquid phase cannot be observed. Global Village Basketball then becomes my attempt to actualize the liquid phase of this linguistic system.

The preface to Jean-Luc Nancy's The Creation of the World or Globalization:

"The creation of the world or globalization": the conjunction must be understood simultaneously and alternatively in its disjunctive, substitutive, or conjunctive senses.

According to the first sense: between the creation of the world or globalization, one must choose, since one implies the exclusion of the other.

According to the second sense: the creation of the world, in other words globalization, the former must be understood as the latter.

According to the first sense: the creation of the world or globalization, one or the other indifferently, leads us to a similar result (which remains to be determined).

The combination of these three senses amounts to raising the same question: can what is called "globalization" give rise to a world, or to its contrary?

Since it is not an issue of prophesizing nor of controlling the future, the question is, rather, how to give ourselves (open ourselves) in order to look ahead of ourselves, where nothing is visible, with eyes guided by those two terms whose meaning evades us — "creation" (up to this point limited to theological mystery), "world-forming" [mondialisation] (up to this point limited to economic and technological matters, generally called "globalization").

I am interested in this passage (and the book generally) for two reasons: first, I had the opportunity to meet M. Nancy this summer in Switzerland at the European Graduate School. While I had trouble focusing on the paper he was presenting in an English-translated form he clearly wasn't comfortable with, I was captivated by his delivery — regardless of what he was saying I could sense the conviction of his words and the gravitas of his philosophy.

While that provided the impetus for me to learn more about his work, it was the contrast he introduces here between globalization and mondialisation that I wanted to explore further in the context of my proposed Global Village Basketball project. I desire GVB to be about more than economic and technological matters — that is, not strictly about an instrumental globalized sporting event but rather a world-forming in which athletes come to understand both their singular and plural identities through the physical act of playing basketball.

But is this what I am actually creating?