decouple camera from eye + gait surfing + vitruvian man + cubo-futurism + matrixial borderspace =

* * *

agamben: "an age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them. for human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny. and the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable" (notes on politics, p. 53).

virilio: "the first difference between cinema and photography is that the viewpoint can be mobile, can get away from the static focus and share the speed of moving objects" (war and cinema, p. 16).

muybridge and marey are both known as grandfathers of the cinema, but also as grandfathers of biomechanics, the scientific field of study that breaks down the human body into its functional components for discrete analysis and optimization.

muybridge: sequential images from single or different cameras; sensation or perception of the surface of the moving body.

marey: one camera capturing a spectrum of movement in one image, united by stroboscopic lighting; presence of clock within photography illustrates the folding of time within process.

this folding of time within the image — making it chronometric — has become the politics of the high performance athlete as speed increases, challenging the earlier usefulness of a foucauldian understanding of surveillance and panopticism as politics.

the concept of sousveillance first proposed and practised by steve mann — a seeing from "below" of those who see us through surveillance — was an important step towards navigating and negotiating such a politics, but suffers in that the camera is still identified with the eye.

in the age of gait-based surveillance, how can we make our gait see? how do we reduce ocularcentrism without becoming blind to the politics in which we live?

(i think a personal moment in the genealogy towards asking this question may be located in my 2007 mind's camera portrait study.)

the first instinct upon seeing antony gormley's sculpture above is to presume the moving body is an object of volumetric striation in negative space.

why can't it suggest that the moving body itself is a total visioning apparatus? call this kino-gait.

with motion capture and econometric technologies like prozone, multiple cameras function together to synthesize a single omniperspectival gaze.

similarly, kino-gait should have multiple cameras functioning together to create a single omnidirectional volumetric vision.

the goal of kino-gait is to have the whole surface of the body function as an eye: the entire skin-as-camera becomes a preliminary limit of kino-gait.

might kino-gait become a strategy for negotiating the topological transformations of three-dimensional information environments?

this is not to replace or diminish the flesh as a means or locus of knowing, but rather to complement or enhance it.

"He wants to write about physical culture at the University of Disaster as that most Sisyphean quest for knowledge!"

"In the aesthetic lies the political, for in the contemporary city we are indeed all characters in a cinematic production, the archiving of everyday life under the rubric of an ever-contingent notion of risk and security. There is no soundtrack to this cinema, no rousing symphonic score or pounding techno breakbeat, but only the barely-audible hiss of white noise to accompany the otherwise bleak visual tracks from which nothing is relegated to the cutting room floor." (sb rmx)

"Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominates world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus's fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it." — Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 80

"It is essential at any rate that the human community comes to be defined here, in contrast to the animal community, through a living together that is not defined by the participation in a common substance, but rather by a sharing that is purely existential, a con-division that, so to speak, lacks an object: friendship, as the con-sentiment of the pure fact of being. Friends do not share something (birth, law, place, taste): they are shared by the experience of friendship. Friendship is the con-division that precedes every division, since what has to be shared is the very fact of existence, life itself. And it is this sharing without an object, this original con-senting, that constitutes the political." — Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, p. 36

We have noted that the Beijing Olympic Games, and in particular the Opening Ceremonies, most fully realized a stereoscopic aesthetic with no distinction recognized between real and virtual spaces. But it also bears mention that the specific example of the fireworks which punctuated the lighting of the Olympic Torch suggested an opening to complement the closing or tangential touching of the two spatial layers. While the temporal length of each fireworks sequence — both the computer-generated version shown on television and the material version exploded in the physical area surrounding the Beijing National Stadium proper — was of the same duration and run in synchronized form, in fact a rupture or split in time was introduced.

As Siegfried Zielinski suggests, if we are able to speak of a metaphysics of communication perhaps it is because its basis can be located in its time-based character: media, above all, capture time and fold it within its communicative process. We cannot step out of time, but rather only objectify and structure it, as each successive phase of capitalism makes increasingly apparent.

While emerging from vastly different eras in the depths of media history, fireworks, television, and CGI graphics may each be considered a form of writing or inscribing with light against a remote perspectival backdrop. But the ways in which each of these forms of writing captures time are radically different. The material substrate of fireworks-based writing — gunpowder and other pyrotechnic fuels — possesses a chemical ignition or burn rate that is temporally distinct from the time in which a television signal is transmitted and written to screen, or in which computer processor chips may render the graphics of optically-convincing bursts of coloured fire.

Though the spectacular outcome lasted an equivalent number of seconds for each audience, the chemical and digital inscriptions each folded time in separate ways. So while on the one hand we can suggest that during the twentieth century spectacle industrialized the compression of information in a spatial sense, and on the other hand we can suggest that the multiple cuts into the time of a video reel creates a narcotic effect for the viewer, perhaps we ought to consider the two together and suggest that narcosis is equally possible with a compression of information in a temporal sense, one that is unique for each member of the viewing audience.

Print is, of course, an expression of the eye taken in linear sequences. But it is also a folding and capturing of the hand and its sensual laying of pen to paper, hammer to marble, remington typekey to carbon paper substrate, plastic keyboard to digital sensor to random access memory chip to immaterial hard drive memory sector. And though translation does not belong exclusively to the domain of print, we must bear in mind that even in the most seemingly disembodied form of communication as a written manuscript, the act of crossing a threshold through translation will bear to some degree this folding and capturing of the body. As such, it will also fold and capture time.

It has been recently reported that Major League Baseball is conducting genetic tests on certain young Latin American baseball prospects and their parents, in response to cases of identity and age falsification. Naturally, the bioethics and privacy issues involved in such practice immediately come to the fore:

Many experts in genetics consider such testing a violation of personal privacy. Federal legislation, signed into law last year and scheduled to take effect Nov. 21, prohibits companies based in the United States from asking an employee, a potential employee or a family member of an employee for a sample of their DNA.

. . .

The federal bill forbids an employer from asking for DNA or to hire, fire or compensate based on a person’s DNA or any family member’s DNA. The employee or family member of the employee does not have to be a citizen of the United States.

Because the law is not yet in effect and has not been enforced, it is unclear how it will apply to cases in which American companies conduct DNA tests abroad on citizens of other countries.

We might also examine the situation from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben's politics. The birth certificate is one's original claim to citizenship in a state apparatus, without which one essentially becomes stateless, a sort of refugee whose tethers to citizenship are deeply frayed at best. In voluntarily obscuring the significance of the birth certificate, Latin American baseball players have been able to negotiate a cloud of ambiguity to obscure their ages and identities, thereby making themselves seem more talented prospects at a younger age and thus more attractive to major league franchises in the United States.

"The refugee should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed" (Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, p. 22).

We witness spectacular capitalism and the specific meshworks of sporting Empire respond in turn, however, not by reassigning the bios that is the political life of the citizen, but rather by having the zoe that is one's naked existence as a living being speak to the models of truth it proposes.

On Performing the University of Disaster, Part Three

James Bond does not exercise. And frankly, if one was an image why bother? There is no sense in doing so, no sense in maintaining one's structures ossiferous and muscular, no sense in engaging the productive and sensual pleasures of the lipidinal and libidinal.

But this feels wrong. And so the Spy plans to write a brief to the Colonel.

He wants to file it "09-10-09: Mixed Signals from the Other."

He wants to let the Colonel know that the University of Disaster does not have an athletic department. No rowing crew, no football team, no cheerleading squad. He wants to write that this is not to suggest an absence of physical culture, nor even sporting culture for that matter. There is swimming and hiking and running and cycling. There is sauna and yoga and chess. There is eating and drinking and dancing and sexing, each in portions of one, two or several. There is slacklining and hacky sack and table tennis and riding the craziest swingset in the world, poised on a precipice of nothingness in the cool sunshine of the Alpine mountains.

There is the artful inspiring of breath these mountains enable.

And then there are the toxins in the air. The contagions. The signifiers.

Mixed signals, indeed, but embodied nonetheless.

He wants to write about physical culture at the University of Disaster as that most Sisyphean quest for knowledge! Imagine oneself as both force and counterforce, a body-rock continually pushing and being pushed up a hill, beginning to breathe heavily, starting to perspire slightly, leaning into the grade of the slope, turning a sharp angle, deepening into a full pant, breaking into a full sweat, being mocked by the steep mountain backdrops … and all of sudden coming around a corner to lay eyes on one's colleagues and co-conspirators.

(deep breath…)

Before rolling back down once again.

He wants to write that there are even sports at the University of Disaster, a little basketball here or some futbol over there in the giardini. They appear to be gendered events, though perhaps tentatively approaching passage through those decrepit borders of normativity. At any rate, the altitude is punishing. And most amazingly (intelligence!), these student-athletes play without a referee, without a league, without cameras, without an archive, without representation or legitimation.

They compete!

He wants to seal the brief as classified intelligence with the caption Eyes Only.

But Agent 99 grasps his hand, gently.

She teaches him that we have never been separate from our technologies: they have always been us from the beginning, or at least from the beginning of our language and logos. There is no antagonism to speak of between "man" and "machine", but only a humanity that continually generates itself through its techniques of living. This includes those things to which we give the label "machines", a relationality of both-and that frustrates any attempt at dialectical thought positing and perpetuating man versus machine or body versus tool.

In other words, she teaches him that the camera and the archive are part of his body. Revisioning versus. Eye knowing.

She teaches him that the "eye knows" and the "I knows" want to multiply, serially, as if a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. And as each term is added to the preceding one the possibilities of the relational are changed as well, from a knowledge of self and being-in-the-world to an epistemology of the rational mind to an ontology of metaphysical Being. Aura, not to mention authority, fades like a satellite transmission choked off by high altitude and a strange crepuscular dawn.

But she also teaches him that once the "I knows" reach a certain threshold they cease to be additive and instead become recursive. Non-dialectical. There is a folding, an infinite telescoping of these I-knows into the You-know, of the self into the other, of the singular into the plural.

She calls this the flesh.

She teaches him that the body is insistent and relentlessly present at the University of Disaster because it offers its students and spies a different locus of knowing to complement the equally relentless drives for rational thought, inscription and the skin. This locus should not be mistaken as a singular corporeal punctum, however, since the flesh and its somatic way of knowing is more diffuse, unfettered by the skin, relational and multiple.

This is why the futbol athletes are able to play without referees, without representation or legitimation. Speaking in the voice of Avital Ronell, she teaches him that authority is stronger than force, that the authority of the futbal players emanates from the flesh and that this flesh is stronger than the remote gaze and force of the referee. The authority of this temporary futbal community is made possible by both a self-discipline of the body and a respect for relation. Or, speaking now for Agamben, a gesture.

She teaches him that embodiment-as-process is not a productive resource nor a standing reserve. It is rather a gift, and not one to be taken for granted. For at any moment a spasm in our singular-plurality can abscond with it, rob us of it — not in the sense of a numbing or as with the narcosis of Narcissus, but in the sense of being violently and perpetually detached from one's being-in-the-world and thus always in the process of catching up to one's flesh.

She teaches him that there can be intimacy and empathy through our techniques and technologies, both hardwire and softdata, for they spring forth from and return back to the flesh. There is always a distance between us in our touching, though, and so the intimacy and empathy will always be incomplete. The trauma will remain open-ended.

But she speaks for Ronell again and teaches him that trauma is what structures us. Not determines, but structures. She teaches him that the camera always stops rolling before Bond returns home to face his trauma.

Traumatized, structured, remixed, the Spy crumples his unfinished brief to the Colonel and burns it to ashes. He picks up his notebook instead, burdened by the high altitude and strange crepuscular dawn that is his flesh, and tries to scribble his thoughts in poetic verse. The ash on his fingers smudges the lined paper, as if grasping.

He leaves the camera rolling.

I tell all. Or do I?

No. The flesh never reveals all of its secrets.

* * *

(for dr. no and all the other egs villains recently convocated upon the world.)

Monologic, Dialogic, Severalogic, Technologic: On Blogging as Method

(to be presented by sean smith at the 2009 north american society for sport sociology conference in ottawa, can)

Taking Vilém Flusser's distinction between dialogue and discourse as an entry point into the surfed waves of networked communications, this paper reflects upon my eight years of maintaining a blog for the purposes of critical sport research and creative expression. In laying bare the writing project and identity that is sportsBabel (www.sportsbabel.net), I will discuss questions of voice, number, relationality, technology, noise and public assembly. Each of these issues inform my ongoing attempt as a critical theorist to engage what is described by Paul Virilio as "speed writing", Hélène Cixous as "écriture féminine", and Giorgio Agamben as a "form-of-life" while thought is still in my body.

"the gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. it has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality." — giorgio agamben, means without end, p.59

"what is it to touch one's own limit thus? it is also not to touch, not to touch oneself enough, to touch oneself too much: impossible sublimity of tact, the diabolical machination of love when it dictates infinite renunciation." — jacques derrida, on touching — jean-luc nancy, p.111

"from one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. there is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up. all of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other." — jean-luc nancy, being singular plural, p.5

"can i touch without violence? can i think of transformation without being jolted by the violence of change? can i even consider the reciprocal relationship that exists when i reach out to touch you (when i become other through touch) without being aware of the violence induced by my recognition of myself as other?" — erin manning, politics of touch, p.50

* * *

in pickup basketball there is one gesture that stands above all others. whether one wants to acknowledge a great play, send encouragement, demand hustle, give thanks for a pass received, apologize to a teammate for making a mistake or to an opponent for poor sportsmanship, the gesture in question is a touching of hands.

we are not describing here the complex signifiers of the handshake, those scripted patterns of digit and movement that serve on the one hand to create a linguistic exterior, and on the other to provide a password for passage.

rather, we want to articulate a simple touch — a pat, really — just enough to be felt given and received by both individuals. this one form of content (or contact) may communicate many things given the proper context, perhaps while looking in the other's eyes, or perhaps not.

(oh, sweaty palms!)

of course, when we play pickup basketball (or any other form of physical culture, for that matter), we sweat. this is the fact of our very being-in-the-world as athletic bodies.

sweat bears a paradox, though: it is at once a positive form of olfactory writing or inscription that signifies our athletic poiesis, and a liquid-haptic vector of waste, filth, toxin, or contagion.

this does not prevent us from touching the other, however, in our sweaty athletic-becoming. the abjection secreted by this paradox commingles-with and washes-through those bodies one comes into contact with during production and passage. so long as both of us are sweaty, it doesn't matter. this is as true in sport as it is in labour as it is in sex.

but what if one's hand was dry? would the desire to touch the other player's sweaty palm remain?

would such a gesture be an act of love?

or, difference and repetition, would such an act be a gesture of love?

or would it be a gift of power-burden, a risk taken but in the absence of an appropriate negotiation and approximation?

or is the metaphor just slightly out of reach, proximal yet distant?

In a normal basketball game, score is a marker of difference. It provides a purportedly objective measure of which team was better able to meet the primary goal of the game, namely to score more baskets than one's opponent.

As such, score has a subtractive aspect to it, in which the difference between the scores of the two teams, a and b, becomes a margin of victory c (and we must remember that in almost all North American team sports c cannot equal 0, for tie scores are anathema). In professional contexts this value c is then compared to Vegas point spreads to determine an even more "authentic" victor, one determined by the logic of the market.

The inaugural Global Village Basketball event treated score in a slightly different manner. While Red and Blue teams were indeed competing against one another on a local basis in six countries around the world, and as such followed the formula outlined above, score was also used as a means of linking the various games together into one meta-game. In this sense score became additive, with the goal to collectively score as many baskets together worldwide as possible.

In other words, we may describe an aggregated score d that adds together the Red score and Blue score to show the collective production of those around the world who played in the game.

Of course, d isn't simply a singular Red score added to a singular Blue score, but rather the sum of all local game scores and their additive characteristics:

But even this formula doesn't tell the whole story, for there is an error coefficient that exists at each local game event that accumulates across the network. As we know, this error exists even in the most carefully constructed apparatus of truth that is professional basketball. But it is far more pronounced in the pickup version of the game, when all participants are in the process of playing and there is no external governing authority responsible for the role of archon and the accorded hermeneutic right to interpret the archive, or scoresheet (cf. Derrida).

Let us say, for example, that a game of pickup basketball is played in which the first team to seven baskets is declared the winner. The game begins, the action moves up and down the floor, always in flux, and baskets are scored. After a while one of the players shouts out the query: "Score?"

"4-2," someone responds.

"Oh no, it's only 3-2," counters an opponent.

A dispute arises, however banal, and play temporarily comes to a halt.

Everyone plays, everyone performs. In their running and passing and shooting and sweating everyone participates in a collective act of forgetting. What ensues in the absence of an external governing authority granted the "hermeneutic right" to maintain and interpret the archive is a local oral micro-history of the game. Rather than an archive, the memory of score becomes a distributed, communitarian process of orality and embodiment.

This is not as trivial as it seems. Once such a rupture in basketball-flux arises, there is no external referent from which the assembled athletes may regain their bearings. In practice, it might play out something like the following. The opponent says, "OK, who scored your 4 baskets then?" Since both sides agreed that at least 3 baskets had been scored, the group quickly identifies who had scored those.

But the fourth basket proves surprisingly elusive. Someone suggests that Brown scored the fourth on a slashing drive to the hoop. And here is where we find the greatest moment of contrast between the archive and the attempt to overcome collective forgetting. In the former instance, we have a remote locus of surveillant optics as with the Foucauldian disciplinary diagram, which gives us the official basketball scoresheet. In the latter, the perspective-as-memory is fragmented and scattered around the court, with each part-locus of the collective gaze turned toward the path or trajectory through which Brown allegedly passed to score the basket.

This is not simply an optic phenomenon. Each person who may have witnessed the basket taking place actually retrieves in an embodied sense one's memory of self located where they were at the moment of the drive and shot attempt, rhythmically relative to Brown and each of the other bodies on the court. The "visual" memory of the basket does not take place without this somatic relocation in memory. As Brian Massumi suggests, "Where we go to find ourselves when we are lost is where the senses fold into and out of each. We always find ourselves in this fold in experience" (PftV, p. 182, emphasis in original).

In this case, however, the fold is not an individual experience but one that is collective and relational. And it is not perfect, but fuzzy. If enough players on both teams are able to retrieve from this folding of sense-dimensions a memory of the basket, then the group agrees to count it towards the score — or, put differently, to treat it as a knowable object of truth.

And the game goes on.

* * *

As a mathematical-linguistic construct, the last equation shown best describes the structural form of score as it is used in the Global Village Basketball game: what DeLanda describes as an intercalary element that condenses the gaseous particles of pickup sport into liquid form. But the epsilon that signifies error in the model should also at once signify embodiment. For the flesh as a way of knowing always contains a zone of error, negotiation and approximation. It is decidedly imperfect in a positivist sense yet often good enough to reach compromise or agreement, and for that very reason should be embraced in those nebulous arrangements we call community.