walking to the subway this morning with bags in hand, solitary traveler among the throngs in the urban jungle. packets of green, notably the park i am skirting on my last steps before the terminal entrance, fleck the otherwise grey landscape, providing a pleasant noise to the constant signal of dwelling and commerce. suddenly i am hit with a dense olfactory burst of lush vegetation — fetid, alive, of mud and wet leather.

verdant …

my thought splits in two directions. in the first, slightly more immediate, i am transported back nearly two decades in time to the high school cross-country running team and its races in the damp of an eastern ontario autumn. royal trails, carpets of fallen leaves immersed in a layer of moisture as they continue their journey back to the soil.

in the other direction, slightly more rational, i wonder if i have the right word in mind. verdant? though i have no way to be certain as i navigate the signal and noise of the journey at hand, the dictionary of my mind is convinced: this smell, deeply inhaled in a fleeting instant, is verdant, and it has evoked a lush, rich patch of memories, perhaps not quite whole as with an ecosystem, but rather as one might still breathe life from a bouquet of hand-picked flowers.

training runs to fort henry hill. plantagenet. an entire topography of irregularity — surfaces, conduit widths, distances — as we leave the domestic domain of track for the wilds of cross-country competition. cool, crisp air and a soggy undergrowth. rich kids wearing racing spikes and spandex tights, poor kids wearing simple running shoes and repurposed soccer shorts, others falling somewhere in between. retching as i gasp for oxygen only steps from the finish line. third place.

and, once upon a time, that fetid whiff embracing a body in motion.

verdant.

Paul Virilio, Open Sky, p. 37 (emphasis in original):

How can we really live if there is no more here and if everything is now? How can we survive the instantaneous telescoping of a reality that has become ubiquitous, breaking up into two orders of time, each as real as the other: that of presence here and now, and that of a telepresence at a distance, beyond the horizon of tangible appearances?

How can we rationally manage the split, not only between virtual and actual realities but, more to the point, between the apparent horizon and the transapparent horizon of a screen that suddenly opens up a kind of temporal window for us to interact elsewhere, often a long way away?

Unless, like Marvin Minsky, we deny the importance of 'analogue' optics and so of the horizon of appearances, we must now absolutely question the stereoscopic nature not only of the 'relief of appearances' and of the third dimension of space, but above all of the fourth dimension, the temporal relief brought about this time by the split between spatial and temporal proximities, the relief of a world in future overexposed to the optoelectronic amplification of its depth of field.

On the one hand, I think that Virilio overstates the decline of the local here in favour of the now of instantaneous electronic transmissions on a planetary (and superplanetary) scale. The relentless persistence of the local and what Virilio refers to as "small scale" optics was brought sharply into focus for me this summer with the HomeShop: Games 2008 project organized in Beijing by Elaine Ho. While it is easy to consider HomeShop as simply an alternative art space, it is in fact just such an attempt to navigate this stereoscopic reality with the tools at hand, whether those tools are art, sport, the screen, or the intersections of embodied tracings and disembodied electronic documentation.

That said, Virilio's broader point about an emergent stereoscopic reality merits serious consideration: how does one live stereoscopically?

How do we negotiate a politics in this stereoscopic existence? Increasingly, the multitude seems to be the answer, as much as we struggle to define and breathe life into the concept.

How do we engage a sporting practice that doesn't neglect the body in favour of the interface?

Perhaps most importantly, how do we love stereoscopically, simultaneously in the here and now?

Is it a matter of smooth and striated, the curiosities of nomadism set against the rich diversities of State living?

Yes, and no.

The "large scale" optics that give rise to the shrinking and disappearance of extension also bring with them new forms of striation, new forms of sedimentary living. Put differently, circulation through the network does not necessarily imply a smooth or nomadic existence; it may instead signal a State living that is not that of the nation-state but rather that of polar inertia and an emerging Empire.

Again, how do we navigate and negotiate this "grey ecology"?

As McLuhan suggested, perhaps schizophrenia is a necessary consequence of media literacy.

"The multitude is a by-product of the technological mutation of the productive process just as the consumer class was a by-product of the metamorphosis of commodities from objects to signs."

Do we really want to set consumption apart from the potential emergence of the contemporary multitude as multitude and rely solely on production instead?

In sport at least, and the present project to articulate the multitude through sport, we certainly do not want to — indeed, we cannot — separate the two. If anything, we might suggest that the rise of the consumer fan-class in sport, the metamorphosis of sporting commodities (players, teams, outcomes, footwear) from objects to signs, and the creation of athletic celebrity-spectacle are responsible for technological mutations in the productive process.

Sport contributes to the function of hegemony in very diverse political economies precisely because it is such a minimally contested locus of biopolitical production. In many overdeveloped nations this is partly due to the fact that the salaries for professional sport workers at the highest level of competition vastly outpace those for other types of workers and that the attendant celebrity culture introduces a regressive binary of power between athletes and other workers that complicates any attempts at common struggle. Given that the charitable activities of professional athletes are increasingly captured by sporting capital to become media events in themselves (part of the mutation of production), the potential for a sporting multitude to emerge through worker-production is problematized further.

This is not to deny professional athletes a political consciousness, but to say that the financial risk for those worker-athletes involved to express such a politics can be an unfair obligation for one to ask of them, particularly if one has not also put millions of their own dollars on the line. In other words, it should be considered ethically acceptable for the professional worker-athlete to privilege the several over the multitude, taking care of a local body-politic (family and friends) while somewhat subordinating the broader political in the process.

Nor is it to say that professional athletes will not be part of a sporting multitude, but that in its becoming this multitude must be sufficient in intensity to offset or withstand the semiotic force of celebrity and restore a balance to communal relations between all of those in a common struggle within and without sport. It also means that liberating the class consciousness of the worker-athlete cannot alone provide the path to political action in the spaces of sporting biopolitics and beyond.

However, while work time now "virtually extends to the entire life" of the post-Fordist worker, at the same time it must be understood that play or leisure has extended fully into work life as well, with an equal yet opposite magnitude. The desk jockey brings work home every night, but plays fantasy sports at the office every day. Put another way, it is sporting consumption that primarily constitutes the diagram of biopolitical space and it is the concomitant work of consumption that fosters alienation. Thus consumption is what needs to be targeted for political action, particularly because the worker class in professional sport, at least in the top, most-mediated leagues, is too well paid to form an internal coherence — as class — between themselves and other workers.

So the focus of the multitude turns instead to the consumer-worker who has been united by a new form of alienation, born primarily as an alienation-from-body that is immersed continually in pleasure and gaming, which the sporting biopolitics at a microsocial scale and post-Fordism at a macrosocial scale have played a substantial role in forming. The consumer must refuse the sensory distortions that form the mediated version of the sporting event as embodied activity for the worker-athlete, and become the event instead. Or at the very least, the refusal must remix and repurpose the media tools and their sensory distortions in a recombinant logic towards the project of political action.

This is the paradox of the sporting multitude: it requires sport consumers to become aware of the work of their consumption by embodying the experience of instrumental sport production in the ludic arena. In other words, don't rescue the workers from production, but rather the consumers from consumption. Allow consumers to emerge as multitude through the work of their own consumption.

Snowboarding and Strategies of Refusal: Goddess, Cyborg, Switch

(submitted by barbara fornssler and sean smith to the 2009 sport, sexuality and culture conference at ithaca college)

Framed as a necessary departure from Donna Haraway's theoretical cyborg, the figure of the "switch" is introduced to understand the complex relationality experienced by the athlete-subject in a moment of Olympic competition. Appropriated from the complex sexual politics of BDSM culture, the figure of the switch allows for a renegotiation of Haraway's cyborg by creating a space in which the submissive/dominant dichotomy between the emancipatory feminist cyborg and the patriarchical military-industrial cyborg may be explored as a contextual and meshed embodiment of contingency and historical decision-making in strategic situations.

* * *

The race begins and four bodies careen out of the starting gates to dart headlong downhill. Immediately, one of the challengers is shot off the track and into the safety net lining the course. Then another one drops, and another, until it is just Lindsey Jacobellis out in front, substantially ahead of her nearest pursuer. Four sources of energy on the video screen have been quickly whittled down to one, Jacobellis absorbing the electromagnetic flows from the other three as millions of viewers crane towards their screens to watch her race to the finish line. She knows she's out in front by a large margin and as she nears her final goal the adrenaline rushes, though she is hardly aware of her pounding heart.

This is the logic of theatre.

Almost at the finish line, about to achieve the orgasm of modern sport, the athletic body speaks of its own accord. In the moment of climax, Jacobellis chooses a different model of gratification. She hit a short rise in the snow and pulled a method grab. Ecstasy!

But snowboarding itself is not immune from its own spectacularization. Indeed, the sport came of age in the era of digital cameras and handheld personal videocameras, and thus from the very beginning, snowboarding was spectacle. Given enough attempts, one will almost always get the optimum photo or video clip, detached from the aura of its icy production environment.

This is the logic of film.

In this case, however, given the primacy of the sporting theatre, Jacobellis was only afforded one take for the camera … and she wiped out. Face plant.

In the end, as the body lays sprawled helplessly on the snow while a pursuer pulls up from far behind to claim the gold medal, it is the ecstasy that is left open, a libidinal investment that refuses its return to the wish-desire and its sign of negation. In crashing, Jacobellis is loyal neither to the cyborgian body-machine-image complex of the Olympic athlete nor to that of the recreational snowboarder, though she is of both domains. She is Switch.

This is the logic of the network.

[Chorus: "Thanks be to God(dess)."]

* * *

This paper interrogates the figure of the switch through a case study of American snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis, who crashed in the 2006 Olympic boardercross final while pulling a trick only a short distance from the finish line and a certain gold medal, ultimately having to settle for silver. In this case, the switch engages in sport as dominant or submissive — as Olympic versus freestyle snowboarder — dependent on the context of encounter, allowing for a new agency of the subject that is affective through its movement and sensation. The emergence of Jacobellis' fall just prior to the climactic point of victory stands as a double strategy of refusal — a negation of the spectacle that makes explicit the identity of the switch and its implications for a new feminist politics.

"Circulating is the first ethical act of a counterimperial ontology." — Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

???? jingshan park,
beijing, china
august 2008

"Within the culture industry, even in its archaic incarnation examined by Benjamin and Adorno, one can grasp early signs of a mode of production which later, in the post-Ford era, becomes generalized and elevated to the rank of canon" (Virno, p. 58).

The era of technical reproduction did in fact become generalized to the rank of canon, but within this canonization lay the seeds of its own obsolescence. The speed of capital required increasingly faster means of technical reproducibility, which begat developments in systems theory, statistical modeling, information management, etc., yielding innovations such as just-in-time inventory and production. As the fluxes of manufactured desire and consumption concurrently accelerated via the increasingly networked electronic conduits of the late twentieth century, production encountered a limit-barrier as it was unable to produce faster than just-in-time while retaining maximum efficiency levels.

For gains to be made, capital needed to anticipate consumer demand as keenly as possible to curtail overproduction, which has subsequently become an increasingly central preoccupation of statistical mathematics and gives us the era of Baudrillardian simulation: the creation of a hyperreality in which every exchange, every corporate (and increasingly non-corporate) interaction is anticipated by a statistical model.

The speaker alone — unlike the pianist, the dancer or the actor — can do without a script or a score. The speaker's virtuosity is twofold: not only does it not produce an end product which is distinguishable from performance, but it does not even leave behind an end product which could be actualized by means of performance. In fact, the act of parole makes use only of the potentiality of language, or better yet, of the generic faculty of language: not of a pre-established text in detail. The virtuosity of the speaker is the prototype and apex of all other forms of virtuosity, precisely because it includes within itself the potential/act relationship, whereas ordinary or derivative virtuosity, instead, presupposes a determined act (as in Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, let us say), which can be relived over and over again (p. 56).

It is never quite clear to what degree Virno sees a departure from an earlier mode of production qualitatively and quantitatively rooted in seriality. Virno, whose life, theory and praxis are primarily embedded in the era of technical reproducibility, would have seen improvisation steadily devalued over the course of the twentieth century as the archive increasingly redefined boundaries of space and time for the recording and distribution of performance. But once technical reproduction reaches its logical conclusion and is succeeded by the age of digital simulation (following in the line of McLuhan, Baudrillard and others) and replication (following in the line of Dawkins, Virilio and others), each located within an overarching logic of recombination, improvisational forms of culture — understood in a formal, linguistic sense — see their value increase once again in a societal desire to retrieve the "real".

Given more exposure to improvisational culture Virno would certainly have realized that pianists, dancers and actors are equally as capable of improvisational performance as the speaker. And when one further considers the presentation of self in everyday life as always already a performance (often a speaking one), subconscious improvisational "acting" jobs for the multiple publics one faces, then the privilege Virno gives to the speaker over these other "derivative" virtuosos fully crumbles.

Simply put, the pianist, dancer, actor (and basketball player) also possess a virtuosity that "includes within itself the potential/act" relationship. If Virno is going to posit a multitude in which the poiesis of labour merges with the praxis of political action, all rooted within the virtuosity best exemplified by the speaker, then we must consider that contemporary cultural forms have revived the value of improvisation and that the utterance may emerge from the whole body rather than simply as breath expired artfully from the lungs.

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, p. 55:

Each one of us is, and always has been, a virtuoso, a performing artist, at times mediocre or awkward, but, in any event, a virtuoso. In fact, the fundamental model of virtuosity, the experience which is the base of the concept, is the activity of the speaker. This is not the activity of a knowledgeable and erudite locutor, but of any locutor. Human verbal language, not being a pure tool or a complex of instrumental signals (these are characteristics which are inherent, if anything, in the languages of non-human animals: one need only think of bees and of the signals which they use for coordinating the procurement of food), has its fulfillment in itself and does not produce (at least not as a rule, not necessarily) an "object" independent of the very act of having been uttered.

I would submit that the athletic basketball body also moves to fulfill itself and not to produce baskets as objects independent of the very act of having been scored. One might counter that it is the linguistic form of basketball itself — its space, time, rules, its structures-in-assembly — that provides the necessary cause for athletic bodies to produce the effect of baskets in the first instance. But this linear approach to the linguistic question does not tell the full story: athletic bodies were moving, interacting, communing, conversing long before James Naismith and his peach baskets captured them towards productive end on a court.

And this movement, which Virno might characterize as the potentiality of the utterance and which still exists in all forms of the game, whether improvisational pickup or elite-level league play, comes phenomenologically prior to any movement that is channeled towards the productivity of the basket. Hence, our participation in the game of basketball (never our consumption alone) must also be considered virtuous and inherit all of the characteristics of virtuosity that Virno wishes to ascribe to the figure of the Speaker.

"Each individual and collective human level has its own peculiar 'quantum' mode; various forms of undecidability in logical and signifying systems are joined by emotion on the psychological level, resistance on the political level, the specter of crisis haunting capitalist economies, and so forth. These modes are fed back and fed forward into one another, echoes of each other one and all" (Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, p. 37).

Written by Elaine Ho and Sean Smith, 17 Days in Beijing: Screen of Consciousness on the Micro-political is a proposal for issue 40 of PUBLIC. Please read the full text at the Encounters and Leftovers blog.

A while ago I briefly mentioned the relationship of sign equivalence that exists between the sports uniform and the human epidermis in a pickup basketball game of shirts and skins. This equivalence exists despite the fact that many pickup basketball games are multi-racial and colours on the skin team feature pigmentations of multiple hue, while those that play on the shirts team are wearing a panoply of colours, patterns and cuts of fabric. Yet it is almost never a problem to identify one's teammates and opponents in these games. This is because the identification is not so much a visual identification with colour, as exists in the more rigidly binary league structure of the game, but rather with texture and its play with light that gives the flesh a luminescence different from that of fabric. Further, there is a tactile contouring facilitated with vision that identifies the shape of the naked athletic body as distinct from the clothed one.

In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Brian Massumi offers us a more in-depth means of thinking through this sensory identification:

The separation of the visual field must in some way coexist with its interconnection with other sense fields. Although "coexist" is the wrong word. "Co-attract" is better. In actuality, the senses cofunction. But for that to be possible, there must be virtual purity of each sense separately, as well as a virtuality governing its cofunctioning with the others: differentiation and integration go together. You can't have one without the other.

A simple example. We can see texture. You don't have to touch velvet to know that it is soft, or a rock to know that it is hard. Presented with a substance you have never seen before, you can anticipate its texture. Of course, this ability to see new tactile qualities depends on past touchings of other textures and movements providing continuous visual-tactile feedback. You have to know texture in general already before you can see a specifically new texture. But that doesn't change the fact that once you can generallly see texture, you see a texture directly, with only your eyes, without reaching (p. 157).

In military affairs, once the uniform of modern warfare cedes to the non-uniform of fourth-generation warfare (4GW) skin again becomes a signifier, but this time colour returns to makes its presence felt. At a surface level, biased human relations identify brown skin, for example, as potential threat and increases the level of "security" at the various checkpoints that ensure the integrity of the flux (customs checks, airline terminals, stadium gates).

Automated tracking and facial scanning programs, though perhaps blind to the same ethnic biases, also use the colour of skin as a signifier and catalyst for action, albeit in a slightly different fashion. The pigmentation is converted, pixel by pixel, to a grid of numerical colour coordinates, the whole of which are plotted and compared to databases of comparable profile information. In contrast to the human security checkpoints described above, the sensory modality of the facial scanning programs is far more haptic, with the eye of the camera merging with the tactile qualities of the database and the frisson of texture as the data file in question (profiled individual) resonates with the data files stored in the security archive (known criminals or "persons of interest").

In a much earlier sportsBabel post discussing baseball legend Ted Williams and his cryogenesis, I summed up the critique with the following passage: "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. The triumph of modern capitalism, rational science, and abstract individualism have led us to the logical end point where the only economic and social need left to be served is to supersede the limits of our human bodies. We have trouble accepting the fact that we die. We are hysterical about aging. Surely human ingenuity can overcome these limits? Yet ne'er shall The Greatest Generation understand the ecology of this brave new world it has set us towards and thus it seeks solace in the warm nostalgic embrace of the simulated (re)creation of history."

While there is a definitive shift in all forms of sports media towards a dissolution into a single information stream, we should not confuse this together with the historical progression in sports media from newspaper to telegraph to radio to television to videogame and internet as if it were a linear evolution with each successive stage obsolescing the one prior. Each medium in fact persists (though perhaps in slightly modified form with the subsequent advent of newer media forms) simply because it serves a particular rhythm and its attendant ritual as, for example, with locals at the Corner Bistro in New York who casually flip through scores and standings in the newspaper sports pages on a weekday afternoon while idly scanning the Yankees-Red Sox tilt on the YES network.

This is desirable for sporting capital: to sell the same original stream of information not so much to different consumers, but to different consumer-rhythms. In other words, when the original stream of information, images and identities leaves the production space of the stadium to become a television broadcast, web page, fantasy sports league, etc., it is not simply a break in the flow in the sense articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, but also a break into various distinct rhythmical outputs.

Of course, in the business of sports media (vectoralism) this is but a primary consumption; individual consumers in resonant harmony with one particular consumer-rhythm or another are themselves packaged into "audiences" for distribution to third-party corporate sponsors. As such, these latter sponsors have the opportunity to purchase across rhythms, or to select specific rhythms for their advertising campaigns.

The Matrix was half-right in its metaphor: though the relationship is symbiotic, we are not producing electricity for the Machine but are rather producing — through activities such as fantasy sports, online casinos and internet stock trading — a non-rational agency for the Machine that pulses information forward and backward as a continual, rhythmic flow. (The fact that both electricity and information are representable by the zeroes and ones of binary code is, however, not insignificant.) This collective intelligence is known as "the market" and is the basis of the information age of capitalism.

Or, as DeLanda suggests: "We might just be insects pollinating machines that do not happen to have their own reproductive organs right now."

But as much as anything, sport provides a reminder that embodied, serial labour is not dead in this emerging information age of capitalism. The vectors of archive and telesthesia are layered on top of the embodied capital production that manufactures its information. Though salaries are indeed inflated well beyond the relative earnings of most other classes of worker due to the attendent celebrity spectacle so entwined with the volumetric diagram of biopolitical production, we should understand that professional and quasi-professional "amateur" sport provides an excellent laboratory through which to examine the dynamics of material and immaterial labour precisely because of this exaggerated formal structure.

In a discussion last year with Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu and Anne Querrien titled "What makes a biopolitical space?", Antonio Negri tackles the question of urban space as a potential site for opposition and resistance. Key to his analysis is the city as the site of intersection between the "political diagonal" and the "biopolitical diagram":

The biopolitical diagram is the space in which the reproduction of organised life (social, political) in all its dimensions is controlled, captured, and exploited – this has to do with the circulation of money, police presence, the normalisation of life forms, the exploitation of productivity, repression, the reining in of subjectivities. In the face of this, there is what I call a "political diagonal", in other words the relation that one has with these power relations, and which one cannot but have. The problem is to know what side you are on: on the side of the power of life that resists, or on the side of its biopolitical exploitation. What is at stake in the city often takes shape in the struggle to re-appropriate a set of services essential to living: housing; water, gas and electricity supply; telephone services; access to knowledge and so on (emphasis added).

Though his understanding of political action as always being intimately interwoven with the space of biopolitical production is important, Negri's problematic choice of metaphor gives the analysis as a whole the appearance of being overly reductionist and binary. Purportedly contra the biopolitical space of lines and vectors and the subjectivities produced therein, Negri's concept of the "political diagonal" is essentially just another line or vector, bisecting or cutting in two ("know what side you are on"). Though the political diagonal works counter to the grid of biopolitical production or the biopolitical diagram, it certainly seems to do so within the same geometry and logic.

Resistance is more nuanced, supple and contingent than that. And thus in contrast to Negri I think we need to consider the political as rhythmical, as pulsing+expanding-contracting, as beating like a heart. This focus on the pulse or rhythm would more fully appreciate the potential for minor practices at the level of the microsocial, which is the preferred approach of Negri's interviewers. Further, if we are to think of political action in terms of pulses or rhythms our analysis then demands an even more granular approach, moving not only from the level of the social to the microsocial but to the level of the individual body itself.

The biorhythms of the individual body are continually played out against the collective rhythms of the microsocial or social, as well as against other rhythms produced by the biopolitical diagram such as work and leisure in their institutionalized forms. The alignments between these rhythms are not reducible to binary outcomes of either/or, but rather result in varying degrees of harmony that may or may not lead to political actions, though if so, are realized along a full spectrum of intensity.

All of which is why sport, above other forms of physical culture, may be so crucial to this particular understanding of politics: precisely because the individual body (eg. athlete), the microsocial (eg. team) and the social (eg. fans at stadium) — read in terms of sporting pulses or rhythms — lie at the intersection of work and leisure, of discipline and creativity, of body as robotic labourer and body as playful hacker, all increasingly within a contested urban milieu. Hence, if we consider sport as the site of a politics located at the borderspace between the work-model and the leisure-model by exploring the rhythms and frequencies of the body, the microsocial and the social, then perhaps we have a lens through which we can see the political anew in cognate areas outside of sport.

Structurally, late modern sport operates along two primary temporal vectors: it is at once the eternal recurrence of a particular sporting history wrapped in the warm folds of nostalgia (or better, what LCD Soundsystem might call borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered century) and a continual preparation for contagion, processing, incarceration and trauma.

Somewhere in between this implicated past and future is the now of consumption.

Forty years after the Mexico City Olympic Games, which gave us the Tlatelolco Massacre, the Olympic Project for Human Rights, and the immortal Black Power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal podium …

"I had no regrets, I have no regrets, I will never have any regrets. We were there to stand up for human rights and to stand up for black Americans. We wanted to make them better in the United States." — Tommie Smith

"Those people should put all their millions of dollars together and make a factory that builds athlete-robots. Athletes are human beings. We have feelings, too. How can you ask someone to live in the world, to exist in the world, and not have something to say about injustice?" — John Carlos

"Ghetto-fabulous! I'm the nigger who started it: I'm the one driving around in the Rolls-Royce with his hat turned, goin' down Fifth Avenue with the system booming in the back. Walkin' into Gucci, shuttin' it down, buying everything at the mother-fuckin' same time. Driving up to Harlem, out to 125th Street, and on my way back downtown goin' and givin' hundred-dollar bills to homeless people. No other nigger out there can say they're ghetto-fabulous; I'm ghetto-fabulous." — Sean Combs