Reconciling the European? Globalization and the National Basketball Association

(submitted by sean smith to the 2009 contesting "europe" conference at york university)

The contemporary era of globalization in the world of professional basketball was catalyzed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by two primary events. The first consisted of a perfect storm of sport-media-sponsor synergy in which the U.S.-based National Basketball Association (NBA), athletic footwear giant Nike, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), and Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls assembled to form one of the initial success stories of post-Fordist production and consumption. The second was the decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to admit professional athletes for the first time at the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona. The U.S. Olympic Men's Basketball team, led by Jordan and the celebrity spectacle that accompanied him and his teammates, proceeded to demolish all competition it faced in claiming the gold medal.

The young media audiences from around the world that consumed the spectacle of 1992 Olympic basketball have become part of an increasingly cosmopolitan player base in the NBA. This paper examines the case of the NBA and basketball talent migration from three perspectives: under the rubric of a homogenized (and tacitly "non-American") European identity that has been variously applied to athletes from different European countries, South America and even China; in the positive sense of Europe as a potential source of untapped athletic labour talent; and in exploring the seeds of a counter-migration that suggests a challenge to the hegemony of the traditional power structures in North American professional basketball.

10.208   A building is constructed to host the production of great sporting spectacles. Cathedrals of consumption to showcase the pursuits of some of the most finely-tuned athletes on the planet. Concrete, glass, wood, polymer and electronic circuitry wrap around a skeleton of girded steel. Surveillance and spectacle meet in a moebius strip of control at the nexus of security and entertainment. A shiny new stadium is born.

11.085   Initially, this building is a sterile space of potential: it has yet to host any events that showcase great and wonderful athletic pursuits, or yet to become a place of individual and communal experience fashioned with its own sense of history. But soon the games begin. And as the cheers and jeers weave a fabric of nostalgia over time, the body of the building begins to show its age. Decay creeps in. Efforts at structural buttressing or cosmetic rejuvenation may prolong the building's lifespan (for quite some time in certain cases), but eventually claims on behalf of its use-value cannot be sustained and the building is euthanized. Do not shed a tear in architectural mourning, however, for the largest and most famous of these sports stadia will have been replicated long before then.

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from "micropolitics at the overexposed stadium," a companion essay written by sean smith for the homeshop series one: games 2008 project wii would like to play // we don't have tickets and published in the homeshop exhibition journal wear, december 2008.

though its shine within the grittiness of the hutong must be perceived in unique ways, the recently-born homeshop was named #4 on artforum china's best of 2008 top ten list for its "forward attempts to enter the public consciousness."

As Massumi points out in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, there can be no vision without the faculties of tactility and movement. In this he is describing the organic vision of an individual human subject. Virilio makes a similar leap for the question of machinic vision in Open Sky with his recognition that technical optics have become kinematic and that the perception of touch has become integral to such a vision.

To put Virilio's observation in different words, and paralleling Massumi, we might suggest that the social abstraction, ordering, and processing demanded of a machinic visual faculty is not possible without the tactile enabling of the digital pulses of electricity/information that constitute its technical apparatus.

Further, while movement is required for this technical form of sensation to become possible, in this case the relation is inverted to the movement of the objects themselves, since the technical apparatus (photo finish, RFID timing system) is stationary. Which should serve as an adequate reminder that the technical apparatus superimposed upon the sprint and marathon sportscapes emerges due to the incapability of organic vision to administer bodies and preserve the integrity of the enclosure at high speeds or broad spatial scales.