Labanotation is a standardized system for recording and analyzing any human motion. Developed by Rudolf von Laban in 1928, it is used primarily as a means of archival notation in dance and theatre, though it is also used in other forms of movement analysis.

"The immediate obvious use of movement notation has been the preservation of choreography for future revival. This indeed was the purpose of each of the historical systems of dance notation. Because of the inadequacies of earlier methods of notation, we cannot be certain, even upon a careful reading of Feuillet for example, that eightennth-century court dances are being reconstructed today precisely as they were originally performed. Details of style and execution were left unstated because knowledge of these was assumed. But with fully detailed scores, generations to come will be able to dance choreographies of today exactly as the choreographer would wish." — Ann Hutchinson Guest

"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?" — sportsbabel

"The language of the human body is complex and it will not be possible to do a satisfying simulation of it using computers before computer scientists give up their rough simplifications in simulation and notation of movement and use the experiences collected in the last seventy years (and the centurys before) in dance notation and make them their own." — Christian Griesbeck

"The unity of language is fundamentally political." — Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, p. 101

From the World Anti-Doping Agency yesterday:

"WADA announced that it had approved a Memorandum of Understanding formalizing its cooperation with Interpol, the world’s largest police organization. This Memorandum of Understanding, approved by Interpol at its October 2008 General Assembly, provides a framework for cooperation between the two organizations in tackling doping, in particular in the areas of evidence gathering and information sharing."

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Indeed, we must recognize that since the eight-year window essentially renders the current winners temporary, the boundaries of the competition space mutate over time to match the shape not only of the stadium, the testing lab, and the specimen storage facility, but also of the sites of out-of-competition testing and the transportation and transmission vectors through which these flows of human corporeality and competitive uncertainty travel. Qualitatively, this suggests that Bale’s formal conception of the contemporary sports stadium must be revisioned as a topological figure to account for this mutability and the social relations these changing spatial configurations produce in a shift from the optics of surveillance to the haptics of control. The potential vulnerabilities that exist in this topological model as competition moves out of the stadium and into smooth space should also be understood in a technical sense from both material and immaterial perspectives. Not only do anti-doping authorities need to secure samples from intruders, chemical change, etc., but they must also secure the data once it has crossed the threshold from the biological to the electromagnetic. And not only is that data susceptible to interception during transmission, but the physical storage devices that enable database mining and statistical regression are themselves vulnerable, given their "penchant for remanence."

Smith, S. (2008). WADA as sporting Empire: Prospects and shadows. Pathways: Critiques and Discourse in Olympic Research—Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium for Olympic Research, Beijing, CHN.

Understood architecturally, the Beijing Olympic Games most fully realized an aesthetic accomplishment of stereoscopic logic in the ludic context. No distinction was recognized between real and virtual spaces in the process, which we witnessed most acutely during the Opening Ceremonies, one of the most watched television broadcasts in human history. Consider attempts to alter weather patterns and ensure optimal studio conditions for the television production, or the substitution of a pretty muted girl for a chubby one with a beautiful voice, or the digitally-created fireworks accompanying those bursting in the real of Beijing's thick evening skies. This stereoscopic logic, which destroys all Euclidean conceptions of space and time, is but the most visible evidence that Beijing 2008 constitutes the Last Olympics, a signal at the end of sporting modernity and a punctuation mark to more than a century of athletic progress.

The thought occurs to me in a public square outside the train station in Köln:

I am fascinated by skateboarders and their sporting ilk.

Skateboarding is a skill that I was never able to easily grasp as a youngster and today it eludes me completely, though I am even more intensely aware of the sport's aesthetics and politics. All of which is to say that skateboarding requires a disciplined body in order to execute its skills, a particular form of discipline not immediately subsumable under a blanket label of athleticism, and a discipline that I lack and envy in others.

But hasn't sportsBabel become an extended polemic against the disciplining of bodies for sporting purposes? I suppose to some degree that it has, so perhaps I ought to begin delineating a personal ethics of sporting discipline.

As a starting point, we turn to Debra Shogan, who points out that there can be no sporting performance in the absence of a disciplined body. Any sporting skill requires a sophisticated coordination of muscle groups major and minor; an articulation of this motor potential with ground, ball, board, or other technical apparatus; and an ability to pass through space and time in a fashion appropriate to the sport question.

Here we face our first challenge: what should we consider an "appropriate" sporting movement?

To determine what is "appropriate" we must begin to look at the sport's formal requirements, its purposes and goals. Dare we settle on something so binary as objective and subjective sport classifications to construct our argument? For now we shall, though I suspect we'll find these categories limiting in the end.

Once again, we are beginning with the premise that there can be no sporting performance without the prior existence of the disciplined body. But once we divide sports into objective and subjective categories, the character of the disciplined body is divided as well. In the case of objective sport performance goals are fairly clear cut and there usually can only be one winner in an athletic contest.

Take the sport of running, for example. Humans have always been runners, whether to catch a quarry, escape from a predator, transport from one place to another, or contest Olympic championships. Running is a very naturally-learned physical activity even though it is very distinguishable biomechanically from accelerated walking. The pumping of the arm opposite the leg that is being lifted and propelled forward is necessary for this skill to occur, and should be considered an appropriate form of bodily discipline, one that is self-learned and imposed.

What, then, constitutes an inappropriate form of discipline in running? It is the discipline imposed on a body by another. It is when we cease to describe a discipline of the self and begin to describe the diagram of power that disciplines the self. If there is a turning point to be found in running, it comes with the introduction of timing to the race process.

When two or more people have a footrace, in the majority of cases the runners themselves can determine the winner; even when the race is close, the kinaesthetic sense of being-in-body is enough (if the contestants are honest with themselves) to determine the winner. If not, they turn around and race again.

Even when the gaze of an "impartial" third-party judge is introduced, we have not yet crossed a barrier into an inappropriate disciplining of the sporting body since, generally speaking, this judge simply confirms what the running bodies already know but are perhaps unwilling to admit in their competitiveness.

The act of timing, however, brings a particular and peculiar violence upon the sporting body, since the disciplining ceases to be a local disciplining of the self and crosses a threshold to become a general formula for efficient production by imposing the tyranny of the clock. Put another way, timing a race serves little purpose if it is only done once. In the absence of other times with which to compare, this temporal measurement becomes a number without context and therefore meaningless.

No, the purpose of timing is to create an archive for comparative purposes: times of past performance, benchmarks for future performance, markers of record performance. Optimal time becomes the alibi for a most brutal violence to the sporting body that goes beyond a self-discipline to broader networks of power and economy constraining the self. This must be considered an inappropriate disciplining of the sporting body, even though it leads to body movements that are appropriate for the formal requirements of the sport in question.

Before the disciplinary body is disciplined as such, it is a sensing body. And while the object of discipline is administered in part by the remote optic gaze, for the subject-in-discipline the process of becoming is embodied. It is felt in the pain of muscular fatigue, in the control over range of motion at joint angles, in the acute sensation of tactility and proprioception, etc. Before the body is disciplined, it senses.

So if the State requires fit and disciplined bodies, say, for its military apparatus, it also requires sensing bodies. Any counter-response will also require its own sensing, disciplined bodies, though with a discipline appropriate to the haptics of the control society rather than the optics of surveillance and docility.

When a basketball player dives headlong out of bounds to save a ball and runs face-first into the crowd occupying the courtside seats, one begins to have an embodied metaphor for the violence done to the sporting subject by the sideline and its enclosure.

"All in all you're just another brick in the wall." — Pink Floyd

"The tendency of electric media is to create a kind of organic interdependence among all the institutions of a society, emphasizing de Chardin's view that the discovery of electromagnetism is to be regarded as 'a prodigious biological event.' If political and commercial institutions take on a biological character by means of electric communications, it is also common now for biologists like Hans Selye to think of the physical organism as a communication network: 'Hormone is a specific chemical messenger-substance, made by an endocrine gland and secreted into the blood, to regulate and co-ordinate the functions of distant organs.'"

"Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports," says Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the philosopher most concerned with the question of bodies and flow. The surfing, flowing body finds its rhythm in a whole continuum of matter-states, from the gaseous waves of the hang-glider or skydiver to the concrete waves carved by the street skater, to the frozen in-between waves of aqua and terra shredded on the slopes by the snowboarder.

But we must remember that surfing has its origins in the smooth space of the ocean, with only the logic of the tide and the deep swell accompanying a hybrid of body and board on its path of creative potential towards the beach. From the very beginning then, despite its forays into other matter-states, the surfing body has always been a liquid body.

Today we are all becoming surfers — surfers of waves, surfers of electromagnetic transmissions, surfers of relational databases and other networked information-constructs. One need not have a board to be a surfing body. But one does need a body. The question today has become one of embodiment. Does the body sense? Does the body move or create?

Is the body liquid?

The surfer is equally comfortable navigating between signal and noise. Slight murmurs and adjustments made by the finely attuned body maintains an optimal position while riding the liminal edge between the two. For the waves that surfers call home are nothing if not the pure signal of the cresting swell in its becoming-noise, before crashing to shore at the feet of the masses lying recumbent on the sand: aqua meets terra where the noisy wave hits the beach.

The relationship between the two becomes more distant when moved to the urban context, though there is still a connection in noise. Today, aqua and terra are the noise to the constantly throbbing signal of dwelling and commerce. The tree, the pond, the park, the rain: all are noise to the decaying spaces and shiny interfaces of the contemporary city, connected in signal through the boulevards and underground conduits of the city, as well as the fluxes of people navigating the urban everyday. Though they, too, will eventually become part of the total communications infrastructure, for now they remain the playground of the surfer.

This urban playground, however, remains largely unused. For too long our sport has resembled the factory production model and for too long our surfing has been that of the data-net sort. Sport can be the anti-work, but only insofar as one is embodied and creative, or as one is a playmaker.

Interestingly, Deleuze describes the runner as the sporting figure obsolesced by the emergence of the contemporary surfer. We should not be surprised by his diagnosis, since the sprinter and marathoner seem increasingly to be products of the industrial laboratory, while the surfing body remains largely unchanged, except for the growing variety of energetic systems in which it realizes its potential. But obsolescence is not an entirely accurate diagnosis, however, for the dynamism of the surfer has folded back upon the runner, as we see embodied in the parkour athlete who contours and traces the asphault, concrete, bricks and mortar of the urban cityscape. In other words, a body can change.

Traditionally, the playmaker has been the figure in sports who makes plays, that is, who manufactures positive outcomes in the clutch, who embodies drill, discipline, execution and repetition. But everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports. Instead of making plays, one must now embrace the challenge of making play, rescuing it from the seriousness of industrial manufacture and the factory production model. To make plays, one blocks out the noise of the crowd and visualizes the task at hand. To make play, by contrast, one embraces and engages the noise of the crowd, sensing one's self in space as an affective body, athletic and full of creative potential.

Make play. Surf. This constitutes the tactile burden of all playmakers, regardless of their material habitat: to feel the heaviness of the body at the same moment one feels the lightness of its liquidity. To move, perform, create, liberate.

Every act of archiving or inscribing on a recordable media substrate, in both material and immaterial senses, is not an act of remembering but an act of forgetting (as Shannon entropy theory suggests). It is in this processual gap or passage that vectoral capital makes its play.

NASSS 2008: Hybrid Bodies and Social Change in Popular Culture

"One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects." — Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.385

What does the fact that both its police force and judiciary apparatus are embodied in the same person of the referee say about the (democratic) structure of modern, binary sport?

What does the fact that this same co-embodiment of police force and judiciary is intimately interwoven (in not quite real-time) with an optoelectronic surveillance apparatus add to the first question?

What does it mean that this same surveillance apparatus is in fact the repurposed machinations of spectacle used to support the sport-media complex, which is to say that the formerly "independent" media are now formally entwined in the democratic relations described above? Entwined not simply as a compromised partner, as perhaps before, but fundamentally in a high position of a sporting contest's judicial system, with its millions of real dollars in economic outcome at stake, in what has become a legitimation of the fact that the police force and judiciary are embodied in the same person?

One need only consider the cases of NFL official Ed Hochuli among others to demonstrate this legitimation at work. While one mistake made by an official can be simultaneously witnessed by millions, along with accompanying discourse by the announcers (fraught with its own politics), it obscures the everyday fact that police force and judiciary are embodied in the same person. At minimum, the official must now answer — via the camera — to the network, whether before the game (situation review and player briefing), during the game (coach's challenges and instant replay), or after the game. This latter may be effected along private (referee evaluations) or public dimensions (the sport-media complex and highlight packages).

"[A]ny member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible 'to the great tribunal committee of the world'" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 207).

The cases mentioned above are a complete perversion of Foucault's suggestion that anyone could step into the tower and observe, thus maintaining a system free of tyranny. The only reason the system "worked" in those instances was due to the power of the mass, with all the problems that implies.

One might suggest that if the network is embodied in the hybrid police+judiciary figure of the referee, then ultimately we vote with our media consumption. Generally speaking, those who have the vote today also have access to a television and in such a case our viewing patterns could retain the principles of democracy. Without getting into the obvious socioeconomic questions such as the discretionary leisure time available to watch television or the restricted ability to access subscriber cable channels, the suggestion is flawed from the outset.

A vote is in some percentage combination a choice (and expression of said choice) for the best interests of self and collective, a particular calculus of the democratic singular-plural. Rational interest is involved, yes, but it is that of singular-plurality. When state and market are kept as separate as possible in the democratic process, the latter is less able to distort this calculus in favour of the purely financial aspects of rational singular-plurality.

But when the Nielsen rating substitutes for the vote as the expression of choice, it must be communicated through an entire machinic circuit of direct market influence before it may arrive to fulfill its democratic purpose. Along the way lies the financial compromise and the distortion of the calculus of singular-plurality. Our viewing habits cannot fulfill the mandate of democracy simply because they must be free of economic gradients and the power relations they embody.

To come full circle, then, far from fulfilling a democratic mandate, the best that viewing habits can support in the sporting context is a legitimation of a system in which police and judiciary are embodied in the same figure. Sport is an institution that maintains strong hierarchical relations in the contemporary age of the network, and thus we might suggest that in the limited case of sporting Empire — bearing in mind its capillarization with broader meshworks of imperial power — the nexus of strong hierarchy and network at the level of assemblage of the league constitutes a weak point in the preservation of democratic relations.