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.