The treadmill: prison disciplinary technology, work machine, spinning, grinding. But what, precisely, is being produced? Once the substratum of corn or grain is removed from the carceral equation and the treadmill takes a new turn in the production of bodies, hygiene and spectacle, we can say that the grind is one of spacetime itself: the elongation of the tangent in order to give an apparent linearity to what is a circular process — an illusion of displacement produced, certainly, but even more fundamentally the illusion of history and progress made (and its "high of mechanical annihilation").

The grind becomes ground and the body writes the metrics of its own imagined passage, or perhaps only an endless series of sweaty ellipses — unless elliptical thoughts are of another order altogether.

"It begins with the mass deportations. 25,000 runners packaged onto a fleet of school buses as neatly as you can say 'logistics'. They are being shipped to another town for processing — 26.2 miles away, to be exact — and yet the overwhelming sense in the air right now is one of optimism. An affirmative energy of nervous dialogue markedly contrasts the monologue of radical dividualization that steers the proceedings. Bright yellow sponsor bags, which hold those personal possessions one hopes will make the return journey, are clutched in every hand. An inversion has taken place: these overmen&women are the new figures of Agamben's camp logic, and yet they couldn't be happier. In some ways, they run for us all."

(Hunter Thompson Blanchot, I'm All In for the Disaster, p.22)

Endocolonization. What is appropriate and inappropriate in terms of ingested performance enhancers for the athletes of today and tomorrow? The paradox is born in the stars but finds greater resolution under the watch of the medical gaze. Modern sport is still the illusion of truth, after all.

_____

(speaking of medical gazes, thanks to MD for spotting this . . . get it? :{ )

[help side defence,
or the tactile recalibration of peripheral vision,
or the hands of the clock at 13h50 -- just past high noon.]

left hand

"The faster we go, the more we look ahead in anticipation and lose our lateral vision."

(Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, p.36)

right hand

"Whiteness as blindness, as third type of blindness in which one sees with one's eyes open to the world, yet sees nothing. Not the absence of light and the consequent darkness that renders one incapable of seeing, nor the total intensification of light on the retinal receptors such that one is blinded by its sheer intensity and has a visceral reaction, which forces a closure of the eyes to get relief from the pain (as when looking at a sunny sky after being in a dark room). But a visible sightlessness that Antony Gormley helps us perceive, a third type of blindness in which one listens and touches, in which objects emerge from the white fog of chaos only at the penultimate moment of proximity."

(sportsbabel, june 2012)

a recursive game of prisoner's dilemma

The problem is not, as Bertrand Richard suggests in conversation with Paul Virilio, "that we still want even more speed and instantaneity." It is rather that we cannot afford to slow down, that we do not want to be left behind. The problem of speed thus becomes the inverse of the problem of exodus, except that we are describing an exodus from the hyperlinearity of time.

And as a question of praxis, we borrow from Paolo Virno to suggest a gradual move from a determined problem: keep pace or fall behind, to a totally different problem: how to realize the tempos available or at hand and to experience forms of self-expression that perhaps belie these temporal qualities and/or release differential energies.

"A knuckleball or knuckler is a baseball pitch thrown so as to minimize the spin of the ball in flight, causing an erratic, unpredictable motion. The lack of spin causes vortices over the stitched seams of the baseball during its trajectory, which in turn can cause the pitch to change direction – and even corkscrew – in mid-flight. This makes the pitch difficult for batters to hit, but also difficult for pitchers to control and catchers to catch; umpires are challenged as well, since following the path of the ball makes it difficult to call balls and strikes." (Wikipedia)

"Unlike a fastball, which conjures images of fire and smoke, the dipping, floating knuckleball compares to the flitting of a butterfly." (NY Times)

~

"The picture that emerges from the trajectory analysis is that a knuckleball trajectory is an example of a chaotic system. That is, small changes in the initial conditions (e.g., seam orientation, rotation rate, or rotation axis) give rise to large changes in the average lateral force on the baseball, resulting in approximately random movement." (Alan Nathan)

~

"Butterflies aren't bullets. You can't aim 'em — you just let 'em go." (Charlie Hough)

With its lilting and stuttering, consider the (mecha) butterfly as part of an aesthetico-political topology of movement through gesture and language — passing through the free radical, to the busker, the jester, and finally to Paolo Virno's joke, which effectively "changes topics" in conversation and may be considered a form of innovative action in surveillant/spectacular societies dominated by language. In this topological sense, not only are the "logico-linguistic" resources of jokes important (as with Virno), but also the movements of the jester or joker, the gestures and delivery that allow for the topical change to occur (as with the butterfly).

~

The butterfly is relatively ambivalent to the local striations of anthropocentric territories (city streets, lot plans, the domestic home), save for an interest in those affordances offered by other objects within these striated spaces (flower beds, vegetable gardens, shaded areas). For the butterfly, in this sense, space is always "smooth", or at least its particular attractions and connections are not mapped in gridly fashion: it lilts and stutters from stopping point to stopping point, a nomadic line avant la lettre, but perhaps even more illustrative to us perceptually-conceptually as it moves in its delicate awkwardness volumetrically, lifting the nomadic line off the canvas or the cave wall or the desert route for understanding in other dimensional spaces.

~

The jester, on the other hand, figures prominently in the medieval court. Offering "witty" counsel to the king or queen through jokes (and other forms of performance), the jester is that one who attempts to provoke a minor shift in perspectival viewpoints — from on high to down low. As the feudal court apparatus is transduced to the even more striated and biunivocal relations of the chess board, serfs and pawns get their due while the jester is left behind. But in tegwar chess, or the societies of control, the rules are modulating with every move. We find the perfect opportunity for the (re)introduction of the jester and performative jokery into the game — a powerful piece on the board so long as it does not seek to enlarge its own image or invest in the credit.