Moebius, Style and the Double Strip Flip
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.
May 28th, 2009
[...] So where does the ART of the artwork lie? This is a question we can ask of any artist, a la art school 101, but given the current contexts it comes again that one should justify oneself against the concreteness of the "product". Is this really the case? Amidst the artfulness of the downfall of financial capital, what materialisms must we still rely upon? You might say that domestic interactions in China are less affected by such crisis, but we cannot neglect a reconsideration of where the artfulness of the thing is. (Do we get into a question of virtuosity here?) [...]
September 21st, 2009
[...] lygia clark, walking, striated space, camera, moebius, intersubjectivity, bodies, cut, plastic [...]
October 6th, 2009
[...] at the ostensible boundaries of play. Brian Massumi refers to this threshold phenomenon as the style that generates the evolution of the sport. Homo Transludens, then, may be considered as "the [...]
December 7th, 2009
[...] the national angst and sense of injustice borne by the supporters of the Republic of Ireland when a handball-abetted pass by France's Thierry Henry to William Gallas for the deciding goal — spotted by the [...]
February 14th, 2010
[...] In other words, the card stunt predates the introduction of televised sports and therefore must be considered a message system with an audience different from that of the TV spectator at home: it was originally designed for those players, coaches and fans who were present at the stadium. But once the football stadium is connected to the broader apparatus of television and sponsorship capital (and eventually to the jumbotron screen), the problematics of signal production are opened to newly consider the intensified subroutine loop of screen and subject relation. [...]
March 21st, 2010
[...] the Vancouver Olympics we witnessed yet another flip in the topology of discipline, spectacle and control — that is to say, in the topology of contemporary politics. No longer the disciplinary grid [...]
September 5th, 2010
[...] modulations between all agents in co-resonance that allows the skilled player to gain an advantage. But style is also a provocation to the referee. A penalty may be called, or new rules introduced in response to the modulations. But what if one is [...]
January 1st, 2011
[...] may understand the moebius strip as the topological figure describing those paired concepts of imaging through surveillance and spectacle, as well as those of ludic and deludic passage within [...]