Vilém Flusser: "The theory of communication implies the theory of decision and the theory of games. And the theory of games implies art in a new sense."

Resample: "And what now? What of other use-values for the body athletic? Would he coach? Could he create shadows of his legacy from the fading twilight of his career? Or could he reinvent his running (and his body)? He was, after all, only thirty!"

* * *

Shot Put Final

1. VANNINI, A.	(CAN+ITA)	23.65 (SB)
2. YUTKO, J.	(FIN) 		23.63
3. OKKERT, S.	(SAF)	    	23.47

* * *

Vannini Goes Out A Champion

VANCOUVER (AP) — Her legs were aching. Her back was tightening. Her shoulders were exhausted.

But not too exhausted to lift the Pignataro Cup one last time.

In her final competition, veteran shotputter Autumn Vannini tasted victory in front of a home crowd at Warn Stadium with a season-best heave of 23.65 metres, narrowly defeating teen sensation Jan Yutko of Finland.

It was a bittersweet win for Vannini, who retires after a 12-year career on the international stage. But there will be no regrets for the athlete who during her peak season of 2005 won a jaw-dropping 17 straight competitions.

"The sport has been great to me," said Vannini, clearly emotionally spent as well. "When I was a girl I imagined competing against the best in the world, imagined representing my nations, imagined standing on this podium and seeing my flags raised. And I've been able to accomplish all of that. It's been tough these last few years with the injuries, but I'd be just as happy doing all of this, competing, even if nobody was keeping score and nobody was watching."

On this day, however, they were watching. And cheering. And, on her final attempt, chanting her name before the final throw that vaulted her to victory. The echoes are sure to reverberate at Warn Stadium for years to come.

At a recent conference critically reviewing Olympic reform actions over the past decade hosted by the University of Toronto, former International Olympic Committee Vice-President and World Anti-Doping Agency head Richard Pound questioned the emergence of a "lex sportiva." Such a rule of law particular to sport would govern in sporting contexts (international/global) while standing somewhat outside or at least with a very ambiguous relationship to the rule of civil law. In essence, the athlete — or at least a particular type of high performance athlete — becomes like a citizen of a particular sporting sovereignty. The figure of the athlete-citizen assumes the privileges and obligations of the lex sportiva upon entering the confines of the enclosed sports stadium.

The potential of a lex sportiva (it must be noted that its actual existence is a contested topic in the legal literature) becomes particularly interesting and important when uttered by the head of WADA, the most powerful anti-doping organization in the world and arguably the most explosive governing force of biopolitics ever created in short time. The World Anti-Doping Code outlines specific provisions for how the individual athlete may treat his or her own body in the course of preparing and training for competition. To a large degree these provisions have to do with the athletic as a distinct and discrete unitary entity: the athlete and his or her agents (coach, trainer, doctor) are by no means to transgress the boundaries of this unitary entity by adding or subtracting technological enhancements through the skin.

"The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion," contend Hardt and Negri, though in the case of contemporary high performance sport this contagion — referencing the fundamental binary of fair play — features pure bodies being contaminated by polluted bodies. The state of exception in the context of high performance sport and anti-doping may be described as WADA’s limited right to violate the sovereign organic unity of the athletic body from which the notion of fair play is partially derived. At a basic level, the relative constitution of competing athletes or teams must be based to the greatest degree possible upon symmetrical relations; any asymmetries arising in athletic competition must be grounded within the unitary athletic body in its genetic composition, refined through aptitude and hard work, and expressed through the poiesis of sporting performance. Substances, methods and other enabling technologies are permissible in this ethic of sport so long as they are supplementary to the organic unity of the athletic body and do not penetrate or pollute (Smith, 2008, "WADA as Sporting Empire: Prospects and Shadows").

The architecture of the sport stadium is no longer a discrete site of competition, however, but rather has become topological under the WADA regime. We must recognize this is because the state of exception in which the athlete-citizen stands at the fuzzy borders between lex sportiva and civil society has itself entered a transformational process in which said exceptionalism broadens to encompass all of that athlete's space and time. The state of exception becomes total, the state of competition becomes permanent. We find a resonance with the notion of exceptionalism put forward by Giorgio Agamben:

In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical order. Hence the interest of those theories that, like Schmitt's, complicate the topographical opposition into a more complex topological relation, in which the very limit of the juridical order is at issue. In any case, to understand the problem of the state of exception, one must first correctly determine its localization (or illocalization). As we will see, the conflict over the state of exception presents itself essentially as a dispute over its proper locus (Agamben, State of Exception, p. 23).

Agamben makes it explicit that the state of exception emerges as much a problem of language as one of political philosophy. It is an obfuscation or a location of lacunae within language that allows for the subsumption of non-traditional "threats" under the banner of exceptionalism. In the short time since its inception WADA has created a sophisticated and systematic language to govern anti-doping efforts, a newspeak bathed in science and jurisprudence that channels the parameters of discourse in such a way as to make a lex sportiva and a potentially corresponding state of exception a reality.

Where the case of anti-doping and lex sportiva differ from a strict reading of Agamben has to do with the rights of the individual under exceptionalism. In his reading, exceptionalism is that which writes or refashions language such that particular subjects stand outside of any affirmative identity positions that would grant due process or basic human right (as, for example, with the "detainees" at Guantanamo). While process and right remain intact in the case of sport (the point is not to perfectly equate "athletes" with "detainees"), identity plays a similar role in the creation of the exception, albeit in a method of abstraction rather than erasure. By vectoring into the athletic body via urine, blood and DNA signifiers the sovereignty of sport and its system of lex sportiva supersedes the sovereignty of the individual human athlete and its living tissues. In doing so it uses these biological samples as linguistic markers by which the athletic body "speaks" to the adjudicating authority.

These markers of "objectivity" are numerico-linguistic registers on a database that stand abstracted and apart from the identity of the athlete and the particular social, cultural, historical and economic processes of individuation that created the current high performance context in which he or she competes. (In "Postscript on the Societies of Control" Gilles Deleuze refers to this rather as a process of dividuation.) The abstraction or "anonymity" (and thus confidentiality) of data becomes simply a euphemism suggesting that it will take some effort to link a numerico-linguistic biological sample to a particular indexed identity, for such testing in the absence of identification would otherwise be meaningless.

But this abstraction of identity or anonymity — not unlike in the case of erasure described by Agamben — also provides a veneer of authority (scientific in this case) to the state of exception that WADA and the lex sportiva operate within. This allows WADA an endocolonial right to penetrate the sovereignty of the athletic body, to keep live samples of it incarcerated for eight years, to force all disputes to be argued in its own particular newspeak, and the list is certain to grow. Ultimately, the question is one of power and resistance.

The essence of global sports law or lex sportiva is that it is an argument for self-regulation or for a private system of governance and justice. This raises the possibility that lex sportiva as a legal concept will be used to disguise fundamental issues of regulation. Lex mercatoria is a false analogy. Lex mercatoria is ultimately justified as a private autonomous global law because it rests on contract. Lex sportiva rests on a fictitious contract. Although the relationship between an international sporting federation and an athlete is nominally said to be contractual, the sociological analysis is entirely different. The power relationship between a powerful global international sporting federation, exercising a monopoly over competitive opportunities in the sport, and a single athlete is so unbalanced as to suggest that the legal form of the relationship should not be contractual. Rather like the employment contract, a formal equality disguises a substantive inequality and a reciprocal form belies an asymmetrical relationship. This inequality makes it misleading to use lex mercatoria as an analogy for the development of ideas about lex sportiva (Foster, 2003, Entertainment and Sports Law Journal 2(1), p. 15).

Put more simply, if global high performance sport is the only game in town, and the balance of power is overwhelming in the face of the athlete-citizen, then whence the opportunity for resistance? And further, if the state of exception becomes total, can it and the lex sportiva rationalize other power imbalances that involve a governing right of endocolonial passage into the sovereign individual human body?

As a man walks through the park, he spots another man, solitary in his leisure. This other man appears to be a gunslinger. Slowly, the first man approaches the second. He can easily understand the skill of the other, steadfast despite the slight gnawings of time on the athletic body. The gunslinger doesn't shoot his pistol, but rather looks ready to, practicing his draw, quick but never in a hurry, the shooting body liquid yet coiled.

A risk is taken, the two strangers begin to engage. Very quickly he understands that the other speaks a different language: perhaps English or Chinese, maybe hiphop or youth, he cannot be certain. But he picks up enough fragments (archaeology in real-time!) to approach the other even more closely: about skill, about the grammar of a bodily linguistics being forgotten, about age, about geography, about family, about identity. A lot can be covered in a few minutes if the conversation is framed just so.

Here, the just-so in common was sport. Sport as linguistics and its potential for communicative action. He invites him to the upcoming contest: a showcase of marksmanship with others from around the world. An opportunity to touch others with the miniature cracks of blue lightning. A network location is passed, coordinates given. He reads the other's face, an open book. He says he'll be there.

On that day he'll still be a gunslinger, he thinks, but perhaps a different one.

Style exists at the flip of the moebius strip.

It is not a deliberate attempt to cheat, per se, but it is greater than the technical proficiency required to execute the skills of the sport. If it is too much of a variation from the technically proficient or encoded rules, then the referee calls an infraction and new rules are created or perhaps old ones modified (cf. Massumi).

Now imagine that the transludic flip of this moebius strip intersects (or is braided) with the flip of another one, which we shall understand as the dual surface of surveillance and spectacle.

Style belongs to both domains (or sets?): not only does it mediate between playing by the rules and cheating, but it is also the switch point at which the technical apparatus facilitating the surveillant gaze becomes the engine of sign value for the set of social relations that constitutes the athletic spectacle.

(This relationship is obscured insofar as the production of surveillance becomes increasingly visible in the contemporary age while the production of spectacle becomes increasingly invisible.)

In other words, it is style (or virtuosity?) that has been appropriated from the common good and pressed into the service of capital, but it is perhaps style — and its complex emergence from the relational — that offers the possibility for the common to return, however temporarily.

We begin our translation of Massumi's soccer ball to sportsbabel's basketball with an opening passage on rules and their retrospective coding of the conditions of possibility.

To the question of what founds a formation like a sport, or what its conditions of existence are, an obvious answer would be "the rules of the game." But in the history of sport, as with virtually every collective formation, the codification of rules follows the emergence of an unformalized proto-sport exhibiting a wide range of variation. The formal rules of the game capture and contain the variation. They frame the game, retrospectively, describing its form as a set of constant relations between standardized terms. A codification is a framing derivative that arrogates to itself the role of foundation. It might be argued that all foundations are of this nature: ex post facto regulatory framings rather than effective foundings. Once they apply themselves, the rules do effectively frame and regulate the play, taking precedence. Their precedence is retrospective, or fictional, but effective. It has all the reality of a formation of power, of which usurpation might be argued to be the model — usurpation of variation (Parables for the Virtual, p.71).

The history of basketball would suggest otherwise. James Naismith invented the game specifically to find an indoor winter activity as an outlet for aggressive masculine tendencies at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. In other words, the rules did not form later and apply themselves retrospectively, but were rather present from the outset (and the soccer ball became the first basketball!). Indeed, play in general would not be possible were it not for the loosely formed constraints that condition possibility in the space of ludic movement. Otherwise we would find ourselves squarely in the zone of the virtual.

I also think outside of sport to computer videogames. Julian Kücklich discusses the ruledness of a game environment and how in greater degrees it may also constrain the conditions of possibility. In effect, what he is describing is how linguistic codes can striate a space of play. But the spaces of computer videogames — which are rapidly becoming sites of collective formation not unlike sport — are always already ruled spaces by dint of their linguistic form, or put differently, their programmed nature. There is no proto-game from which Grand Theft Auto emerges to contain variation.

(It should be pointed out that ruledness is not quite the same as the striated-smooth dichotomy proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: a space may be striated in material form without firm rules necessarily being attached to the effect of those gridlines. That said, in the foreword to Baudrillard's In the Shadow of Silent Majorities Lotringer, Kraus and El Kholti state that "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." We will not understand them as synonymous, then, but rather as forms that modulate the conditions of possibility in similar fashion.)

But we are in the realm of sport for this discussion. And so we are more fully in the realm of the moving body, in all its sporting forms. Does this imply that Massumi's broader concerns are invalid? No, I don't think so: the point was still to capture and contain variation, but variation of a different order, the roughhousing of young male physical education instructors, rather than an earlier proto-version of basketball. Through the formalization of rules, variation is captured and contained across space and time: it implies that the sport will be played again on another occasion, in the same place or at a different location, and that there will be some consistency between the two events.

If the rules are ex post facto captures that take precedence, what do they take it from?: from the process from which the game actually emerged, and continues to evolve, to the extent that circumstances arise that force modifications of the rules. The foundational rules follow and apply themselves to forces of variation that are endemic to the game and constitute the real conditions of the game's emergence. The rules formally determine the game but do not condition it. (They are its formal cause, not its efficient cause) (Parables for the Virtual, p.72).

Do not forget that this "proto-sport" continues to exist (in basketball we have called it "pickup") alongside the more formal regulated versions of the "sport" (that is, league basketball). In other words, we do not want to get caught up in a linear "stages of progress" model in which pure play becomes proto-sport, which becomes sport, which is thereafter refined by variations in the style of play that are captured or modulated by new rules. The informal pickup versions continue to exist in parallel and in fact play significant roles in creating the variation that flourishes in (and challenges the formality of) "sport" proper.

Let us not become bound up in the search for origin and instead be more cognizant of the process. For in capturing variation — the motor of sporting emergence — we are capturing the possible of the body athletic. Herein lies the micropolitical moment of sport.

Elements of Style: Homo Ludens, Deludens, Transludens

(submitted by sean smith to the 2009 artfulness of play conference at the university of western ontario)

Play is a fundamental component of human cultures, one that has infused other structural forms of society such as art, philosophy and law (cf. Huizinga, Homo Ludens). Inherent in play to greater or lesser degrees are sets of rules that channel the conditions of possibility for the ludic subject, whether towards a particular goal or in freer forms of expression. But in the contemporary digital age, these rules of play become more implicitly rules of a system, algorithmically and architecturally so. Julian Kücklich suggests that cheating — deludology as a strategy — is one way to understand such systems, to learn what constitutes their conditions of possibility and opportunities for agency. Though the theory of deludology is born of the computer game medium, there are still other forms of game in which we play more directly with and against human competitors: is there a violence to these human others in executing strategies of the deludic? Here we turn to Brian Massumi, who suggests style as a third way of approaching the situation. In his analysis, style exists in the liminal space between rules-based technical proficiency and deliberate strategies of cheating, the space where the possible always emerges as a provocation to the game's governing authority. This paper will interrogate play, cheating and style together in trialectic form, as well as in resonance with Paolo Virno's notion of virtuosity, in order to investigate its applicability for a potential micropolitics.

On Performing the University of Disaster, Part Two

Bond. James Bond.

In the very name is the relational. Bond is the spy who operates in the liminality between smooth and striated, who fluidly shifts identity to meet the parameters of the assignment, who acts as an attractor of potentials. His is a contingent existence, at once strange and familiar, a unity of process and relation. Bondage.

(Switch.)

A process philosophy demands that one consider first and foremost the relation. Part-subjects are only thus insofar as they co-emerge with others from a streaming continuity of experience. Or better, not simply streaming but eddying and circling back to recondition the possibilities for becoming, aternally, often far from any conventional understanding of equilibrium.

The Colonel sets up a secret rendezvous in Toronto. A reversal from the movies, the city has an air of exoticism relative to the drabness that is the everyday of cosmopolitan Europe. Fragments of time and space coordinates are passed through various channels to notify and gather agents from the field, multiply redundant yet still requiring individual wit to zone in on the final locale. Glancing around the room I spot 007, over there Agent 99, Homo Generator appears to be wearing a disguise, and somebody whispers something about Bourne. Each looks on the surface to be relatively normal: I wonder what secrets they hold?

Intelligence has just come in from the strategists at the University of Disaster. As befitting the context, he delivers it with sobriety, grace and aplomb. Or does she? It seems to be hesheheshehe, stereophonically so. From the highest dancing trebles of art to the physically pounding basslines of philosophy, the sounds register to the depths of my body and back again. In other words, both-and. Relation. Process. Massumi+Manning as the catalysis to chaotic, non-linear and networked potential.

Take two people in bed. While sleep is shared need for psychosomatic regeneration, shared sleep is something different altogether. An enclosed space, though not a striated one: there is no line drawn down the middle of the bed separating the bodies into disciplinary partitions, no gaze ensuring the objects of information stay confined to the appropriate area. Rather, a negotiation takes place during the night — for space, for cover, for the presence or absence of touch in the depths of sleep. One might cross the theoretical dividing line in order to contour and caress the body of the other, or one might try to create distance in order to plunge more fully into restfulness. Either way, this negotiation is not spoken, nor even truly conscious, but felt: it is a haptic negotiation of both flesh and skin that continues throughout the night, in greater or lesser form, with the goal of corporeal, psychic and social rejuvenation hopefully balanced come sunrise.

Take three people tending bar. A long, tight space to navigate as one moves from customer to glass to fridge to tap to garnish to till to customer, all the while avoiding the other two. And the demands of capital drive the demands for speed in this space. Serve, quickly, and reap the rewards. One imagines this would create noise in the system, and the newcomer does literally run face-first into the situation. But once a new threshold for perception is reached (stop looking and feel!), speed actually enhances, turning the movements of the three behind the counter into a frenzied ballet as each moves along the length of the bar to pour drinks. Bodies negotiate and cantilever through space in real-time such that maximum reward is pragmatically achieved.

Take multiple people dancing at a club. This is Manning's tango with a live wire stuck in one side, multiplied and radiating rhythmically to every corner of the dancing space. How do bodies become-several within this multiple mass? Once again there is a negotiation, and once again it is silent save for the pounding basslines (philosophy!) that provide rhythm to the exchange. But we are more fully constrained in this case by the volumetric, as each writes or inscribes one's own four dimensions in such a way as to not physically strike fellow dancing bodies, while seductively sharing moments of the flesh with another.

Or, finally, flip the terminus and take these three examples in reverse order. Negotiation, approximation, risk. The slightest change in perception can have dramatic consequences for understanding the microsociality of relation.

Make no mistake about it, we are describing the state of affairs at the micro-level: microspaces, microsociality, micropolitics. But, as they say, smaller isn't necessarily better. One might think that the microspace would lend itself to be better surveyed by the intelligentsia of this mission, to be better mapped, better controlled. Au contraire, estime Jean-Christophe. A performed cartography suggests a renewed call for psychogeographical techniques that quickly fractalize a neighbourhood in advance of the mission-event: for food, drink, information or aesthetic sustenance.

It might be suggested that the requirement for food to nourish each of our bodies singularly, to keep alive our animal body alone, would offer an experience separate from the bonds of ontogenesis. But this is to fully misunderstand in its many forms the relational nature of food! Its growing, sourcing, preparation, consumption and reflection upon thereafter all constitute a relational experience par excellence. Vital nourishment!

Yet despite the trappings of wealth and style, James Bond doesn't seem to eat. How does he negotiate? I suppose one cannot eat much and still stay as thin as an image. Odd fellow.

Once again, we say farewell and flip back to the now of the network (this realization is sense made, a point of understanding that is mis/understood as a point, as an end). But a terminus is only so until the tendency produced by it is fed forward to produce another (it feeds forward into your next line, and the next, and the next). Process is always, resolutely, becoming (and the text is less important than that movement in your eye, the hollow glow from screen that dilates the pupil). Or, a coming into touch with. It is always co-emergent, prior to thought, prior to language (i am a dilated pupil…and now so are you).

Word is bond, yo.

(co-written by the colonel and the spy for all those who made the canvas of toronto cryptic.)

[03/05/2009 1:58:39 PM]

sportsbabel says: please say thanks to your mom……!
sportsbabel says: you are our relation……
sportsbabel says: (smiley)

[03/05/2009 1:58:55 PM]

Brian Massumi's ball. A soccer ball. Icon of the beautiful game and part-subject in the relation.

An example: Michel Serres's ball. A soccer ball. Bruno Latour is well known for taking up Serres's concept of the quasi-object, introduced through the example of a ball in a sports game. Serres and Latour used it to rethink the relation between the subject and the object. More recently, Pierre Lévy has used the same example to redeploy the relation between the individual and the collectivity. What follows flows from Lévy, moving toward a notion of collective individuation around a catalyzing point. Here, that point will be called not a quasi object but a part-subject (Parables for the Virtual, p.71).

But not a basketball.

Do we really need to translate Massumi's analysis of the ball as part-subject and the corresponding logic of relation it facilitates to every single other sport that exists? Perhaps not, though even in the shift from soccer to basketball, both relatively open-ended, flowing sports, we witness differences in the emergence of relationality, due to the different material and immaterial codings that frame the space and time of play.

The following series constitutes an attempt to engage these differences through a reading of Massumi's political economy of belonging and the logic of relation, shifting the locus of analysis from grass pitch to hardwood floor. In the process we will try to gauge the potential for sameness, difference and indeterminacy across these gamespaces and times, and perhaps also better understand its relational consequences for the moving human body.

[1:30:41 PM]

sportsbabel says: asymmetrical, but one hopes not overly so …

sportsbabel says: yes …… you don't need to calculate the price symmetrical amount of exchange
sportsbabel says: all you need to do is GET CLOSE
sportsbabel says: so that the gift isn't too big

sportsbabel says: GET APPROXIMATE
sportsbabel says: to what is an appropriate gift

sportsbabel says: in terms of effort, wealth, emotions

sportsbabel says: i am going to gift to you

sportsbabel says: we don't know each other

sportsbabel says: we can only calculate prices …… gifts cannot be calculated
sportsbabel says: but you need to give a gift that isn't TOO big
sportsbabel says: and close off the potential for reciprocity

sportsbabel says: anyways, i cannot calculate what is too big, so i need to approximate
sportsbabel says: what is too big or too small to gift you
sportsbabel says: where do i cross the line that what i give you is too much, and thus a power over you?

sportsbabel says: and so we negotiate
sportsbabel says: or emergence

sportsbabel says: perhaps?
sportsbabel says: and this is an erin manning politics of touch

sportsbabel says: we negotiate, we do this through language, the verbal
sportsbabel says: but also the visual, body language
sportsbabel says: and also the tactile, motion, affect …
sportsbabel says: fascinance

sportsbabel says: …
sportsbabel says: flesh
sportsbabel says: and skin
sportsbabel says: tactile and visual

sportsbabel says: and in this multisensory negotiation lies the zeroing in on what is the appropriate gift
sportsbabel says: the zone of potential between exchange and the power-gift
sportsbabel says: negotiation–>approximation–>risk

sportsbabel says: you need to find out if the negotiation was correct
sportsbabel says: someone has to risk the gift
sportsbabel says: make it explicit
sportsbabel says: you took the risk

[1:53:00 PM]

April 28, 2009: The IOC reanalyzed a total of 948 samples from Beijing after new lab tests for CERA and insulin became available following the Olympics. The testing began in January and focused mainly on endurance events in cycling, rowing, swimming and athletics.

"We suggest that athletes who may be tempted to cheat keep this reality in mind," WADA president John Fahey said. "We believe that retrospective testing serves as a strong deterrent."

* * *

Article 12 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights dictates that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation." In the contemporary high performance sporting arena, however, we might justly question if these same rights of privacy are extended to the athletes themselves. To police doping practices in high performance sport, the World Anti-Doping Agency has assumed formidable powers of registration and control over competing athletes, which allow it to draw biological specimens from an athlete’s body in or out of competition with no advance notice; which require athletes to provide accurate whereabouts information at all times for said testing; which reserve the right to retroactively nullify previous results should future detection techniques be discovered within an eight-year statute of limitations; and which tracks subjects longitudinally through an "athlete passport" system. This essay suggests that the conditions have been created through which high performance sport participation is subject to continual surveillance across both space and time, and that the formerly discrete site of sporting competition has topologically transformed such that it becomes a permanent condition of athletic being.

(to be presented by s.smith at the 2009 olympic reform: a ten-year review conference in toronto)