Can resistance be actualized simply by appropriating and rechanneling the structural forms it seeks to subvert? Does this not just provide an alibi that sustains the original forms of biopower and control?

Consider two examples from the nexus of sport and politics. The first is the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), an event launched in 1962 in Indonesia as a counter to the Olympic Games. As Wikipedia elaborates:

Established for the athletes of the so-called "emerging nations" (mainly newly independent socialist states), GANEFO made it clear in its constitution that politics and sport were intertwined; this ran against the doctrine of the International Olympic Committee, which strove to separate politics from sport. The IOC decreed that the athletes attending GANEFO would be ineligible to participate in the Olympic Games.

As Indonesia had established GANEFO in the aftermath of IOC censure for the politically charged 4th Jakarta Asian Games in 1962 which Indonesia hosted, for which Taiwan and Israel were refused visa, the IOC's reaction was understandably hard-line which led to an indefinite suspension of Indonesia from the IOC.

The first edition of GANEFO was held in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1963 where in total 51 nations participated such as Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, Cuba, Czechoslovakia Socialist Republic, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Dominican Republic, Finland, France, German Democratic Republic, Guinea, Hungary, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, People's Republic of China, the Philippines, Poland, Republic of Mali, Rumania, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Somali Republic, USSR, etc.

The USSR, in a show of solidarity, did send athletes to the first GANEFO, but in order not to jeopardize their position in the IOC, the Soviet athletes were not of Olympic caliber.

The second edition of GANEFO had been planned to be held in Cairo, Egypt in 1967, but this was canceled due to political considerations.

The second example is the Human Rights Torch Relay, currently underway in various locales around the world. This grassroots campaign seeks to raise awareness of the Chinese communist government's poor record of human rights violations including, but not limited to, the torture and oppression of Tibetans and followers of Falun Gong.

The torch relay began in Athens, Greece on August 9, 2007 where the first flame was lit. The relay now continues across five continents throughout the year preceding the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Events held by participating cities around the world will include the traditional Olympics run with the symbolic torch, welcoming events with speakers, concerts, petition campaigns, displays, press conferences, and interview opportunities. Athletes who have participated in past Olympics games will be among the torch relay ambassadors who will pass the torch from one country to another. Participating individuals and organizations will be responsible for holding a torch-receiving ceremony and organizing related activities. We encourage all participants to proceed with plans that best fit the customs and traditions in their host countries and regions.

Information and speakers will be provided to national, regional, and local governments, schools, libraries, civic and church groups, non governmental organizations (NGOs), etc., via printed material, talk shows, blogs, social networking and live presentations hosted by non profit groups, churches, and independent groups interested in human rights. Local contact persons will work with participants to determine the most appropriate events, outreach activities, and materials for their area.

Can such simple "rebrandings" of these traditional sporting structures work? According to Lotringer, Kraus and El Kholti, in the foreword to Baudrillard's In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, "Félix Guattari may have answered that it is no longer necessary to maintain a distinction between material and semiotic deterritorializations and that there is no more absolute primacy of one system over another."

True, but do these two examples really deterritorialize human subjects from the power structures theretofore oppressing them? In my opinion, both of these events are limited by the fact that they simply reproduce the original structural forms they seek to undermine, albeit with an appropriately modified semiotic gloss. With GANEFO, the problem was that the event sought to counter IOC hegemony with opposition at the nation-state level; in other words, by creating just another (potentially exclusionary?) form of nationalist competition. Similarly, the Human Rights Torch Relay seeks to destabilize the hegemony of the Chinese state by duplicating one of the most important symbols of a purportedly universal humanism, the Olympic Torch Relay, during its Beijing 2008 iteration; in this case, a lack of media exposure inhibits the potential for such a method to subvert with any high degree of success.

If the rules of the game create a particular power differential, then the object for those oppressed by this imbalance is to change the rules of the game! In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari elaborate:

What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. … Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries (ATP, p. 500).

Perhaps instead we need to recognize that both material and semiotic deterritorializations are required in concert for the struggle to be truly displaced?

I would like to offer two examples that stand in contrast to GANEFO and the Human Rights Torch Relay, not in terms of being "better" than these (my two examples don't even exist yet!), but rather as potential structural challenges to the hegemonic status quo. The first is the Global Village Basketball game that constitutes a portion of my doctoral dissertation project. Briefly, GVB uses networked media technologies to link together geographically-dispersed pickup games of basketball into one meta-game that is simultaneously located in real and synthetic spaces. The second example is the Peace Relay, which multiplies a singular signifier (as with a torch) into the thousands so that many running subjects may disperse as a contagion to spread a meme along multiple vectors.

Both examples potentially displace current understandings of the structures that sustain these sporting and political forms. Global Village Basketball and the Peace Relay — in contrast with GANEFO and the Human Rights Torch Relay, respectively — take traditional structures of linearity, hierarchy, bounded space and fixed identity as the starting point from which new rhizomatic counter-strategies of multiplicity may be launched. Even with these deterritorializations-in-potential, however, we must not fail to heed the coda to the Deleuze and Guattari quote above: "Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us."

Tactile burden of severality. A suggestive phrase, perhaps already located a little too gratuitously in the various crevices that constitute my verbal and written discourse. But isn't this how new concepts find their potential? Something felt is given a tentative genesis in thought and language; this voice swirls around in the mouth like a vintage syrah, opening up new sensations with each passing, and slowly emerges into form. With that in mind, consider the following as preliminary tasting notes for an emerging concept.

The motif of tactile burden may be traced back to the earliest voices posted at sportsBabel. I was concerned from the very beginning about the question of virtual (read: synthetic) sport and how that impacted the embodied aspect of performance. Certainly the best haptic technologies would never be able to replace the proprioceptions and external sensations of moving in concert with other bodies in sporting competition?

Over time I began to develop a more general understanding of the numbing that occurs with electric media technologies and their interfaces, from which the political dimension of such mediation became apparent. In contrast to the remote optics of surveillance, a close sensuous form of haptic control was being employed by the State that challenged prior understandings of bounded spatiotemporality — what Deleuze referred to as the "crisis of enclosure."

It seemed imperative to me that thinking political subjects needed to regain a sense of their own embodiment if they were to engage and resist the networked touching and imaging of their bodies by meshworks of government and corporate interest that occurs every day. Wholly yielding ourselves to the data networks was something that needed to be resisted, and thus my call to embrace a tactile burden.

So what is it that I mean by severality, on the other hand? Here, I am borrowing from the feminist psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger, who develops within her theory the idea of subjectivity as encounter between two or more individual subjects. These part-subjects affectively and mentally trans-inscribe and cross-inscribe one another to create the conditions of co-emergence within difference. We are part-subjects in several of these severalities, some of which mirror the old institutions of modernity — school, work, family — but many of which are either or both more granular in scale and more spatially diffuse. The crisis of enclosure begins with this fragmentation of the subject.

Interestingly, and departing somewhat from the influence of Deleuze and Guattari, Ettinger insists on the uniqueness of the few and focuses on severality rather than multiplicity. How do we differentiate between the two? It would appear to be simply a semantic distinction in terms of number (at what point does severality become multiplicity?), but it is more than that. Ettinger forces us to acknowledge at the level of lived, embodied, affective experience the many intimate foldings of severalness within a multiplicity. This is not to say that copoiesis with other partial-subjects never met before in the flesh cannot occur via networked forms of communication — after all, text (and increasingly audio, video and haptic technologies) may provide vectors of resonance between erstwhile strangers — but that such a resonance can only be the byproduct of a feedbackforward emanating from the prior lived everyday.

Virno, Hardt and Negri recognize the dimension of hybridity within their respective formulations of the multitude and they take great care not to dissolve and homogenize it, but they perhaps fail to resolve the particulars of affective experience and the myriad foldings of the few that exist in the passages between the real and virtual, between embodied and network-mediated. Ettinger, put simply, retrieves from the multitude the scale of the possible.

So, returning to the original question, what exactly am I saying when I refer to the tactile burden of severality? I'd like to leave that answer open-ended for now, but instead suggest an embodied experience that might offer a clue.

Sensing Several

This is a simple exercise that I did in Sandy Stone's class last year at the European Graduate School, which is apparently common among physical educators, but was new to me and I think quite powerful in its simplicity. Sandy is singular among EGS faculty in that she teaches in both the Media and Communications and the Expressive Arts divisions of the university; given her own history of embodied politics as a post-op transsexual, feminist scholar, and erstwhile performance artist, she brings unique insights about the body to the philosophy of technology.

The exercise: take a group of people within a broad open space such as a gym, dance studio or large classroom. Each person must choose one other person in the room (without notifying that person) and watch them out of the corner of their left eye. Everyone begins moving around the room, continually modifying position so as to keep that person in the corner of their left eye. Then, stop the exercise, choose a different person, and this time follow them out of the corner of the right eye.

The third iteration combines the first two: set everyone into motion while maintaining sight of the first person out of the corner of the left eye and the second out of the right eye. The resultant action will look something like this:

red arrow indicates viewing from left eye
blue arrow indicates viewing from right eye

I draw three main conclusions from this exercise:

1. Bodies must move rhythmically within the space by continually renegotiating the triangulation between the observer and the two observed (signals), as well as the other bodies in the room (noise).

2. This occurs not by optically focusing on either of the other individuals within the triangle, but rather by perceiving both through peripheral vision in a haptic sense. I understand this as correlative with the tactile burden.

3. Although each observer's severality only numbers three, the exercise demonstrates what Massumi refers to as every body's "immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary," albeit in a mutually interconnected fashion that encompasses the few as well as the entire group. This is what I understand as the foldings of severality within multiplicity.

Or: you, too, can be a turntablist-philosopher!

"Take William Burrough's cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.6).