Trials of the Leviathan: ret(errito)rial(ization)s or det(errito)rial(ization)s?

No, I don't even know your name, it doesn't matter.
You're my experimental game, just human nature.
-Katy Perry

Movement and territory

Movement is always a series of trials. The properties of actors are constantly being measured and exchanged during displacement. “Bruises bigger than dinner-plates” (The Smiths). Grinded concrete (Borden, 2001; Bäckström, 2005) – inverted statue (Serres; Jonasson, 2011). The movement-trial is necessarily always about deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Letting go and glueing; scattering and gathering; Slytherin and Gryffindor (Rowling).

Deterritorialization is literally something firm and dry in the process of being destabilized. Words leaving the mouth. A moth spreading out its wings and taking off. Movement is the message being translated, even the message of translation itself. Voiced by guides. A less known meaning of translation is betrayal. Betrayal in motion. Lost in translation. In medias res.

Concerning spatiality, temporality, and conditions for participating actors, trials in sport are rather elaborated and refined. The trials in sport aim to purify human action both with the help from and in relation to nonhuman actors. The outcome must result in the reconstruction and reproduction of universal humanness. In the same way Latour understands the universality of science, universal should here be understood as universal within its own network. Since both these networks, science and sport, are rather lengthy, universality in them are perceived as fully transcendent. A world record is a world record, and a scientific finding published in Science is a gift to the whole globe.

Without its deterritorializations, sport would be literally lame. (The extreme ability of athletes’ bodies in fact bears a heavy load of guilt regarding the stigma of disabled bodies). The appealing turbulence of sporting collectives – Serres’s ‘glorious uncertainty’ and Loland’s ‘sweet tension’ – is due to deterritorialization.

But sport without proper reterritorializations would only result in people throwing themselves out from, or cars crashing with, cliffs. Medieval folk-football was in this aspect poorly reterritorialized. Sports that are described as risk, lifestyle, adventure, and extreme are characterized by a high degree of deterritorialization. What kind of territory, then, is it that is confirmed and accumulated by reterritorialization in sport?

Sport reterritorializes on the modernist settlement, the abode of the tribe known as the moderns. Their most characteristic feature is that they make an absolute distinction between nature and society, in their story of themselves. At the same time, they let actors from both these ‘satellites’ (Latour), intermingle and proliferate, wildly and freely. A State, a Hobbesian Leviathan (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), such as the modernist settlement is based on dichotomous arrangements like these. Nature and society is an overarching metaphysical couple in modernity, but time is also divided into a before and after (enlightenment). Revolution. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), such dichotomies and binaries are abundant in the ‘State’, i.e. networks like the modernist settlement. In sport, this partitioning is effectuated in the reinforcing of age, weight, and sex.

Hobbes’ social contract and naked apes

So why has it in the modernist settlement been so crucial to construct pure forms of human, humanity, culture and society? This is a highly political question, and the administration and implementation of it have had wide implications on all collectives since the enlightenment. With concepts such as ‘contract’, ‘citizen’, ‘representation’, ‘sovereign’, ‘power’, and ‘society’, British philosopher Thomas Hobbes systematized a nomenclature, whose seal modern social science still bear. The erecting of a purely human collective, the Leviathan, was Hobbes’s solution to the religious conflicts that haunted Europe at the time, and had done so for quite long.

All local, contingent, and singular interpretations of the Bible were deemed dangerous by Hobbes. Inventive readings of the book could be harmful if they led to an exegesis that admitted the existence of immaterial, spiritual, yet potent entities outside the perimeter of State surveillance. Spectres and ghosts were all to be exorcised in one single stroke, that of inaugurating the Sovereign. If all human actors agreed on who was to represent them, the State would not only get a representative of the people, but also a highly legitimate spokesman for the divine realm. Chosen by both deity and laity, the Sovereign controlled both the earth and the heavens, but in a perfectly just way. For, who was this regent? Not just some despot, or tawdry usurper, but the very people itself, incarnated in one person.

This political strike of genius would ward off all that wasn’t human in collectives. This is how the discourse of that encampment of naked apes, today living under the name of society, came to be. The encapsuling of a society meant that nude monkeys henceforth established their own parks and Zoos (Sloterdijk, ten Bos, Agamben) in a way that protected them, not only from spirits, but from falling back into the violent ‘natural state’ (like that of folk-football). One could easily see why this neat little arrangement was worth to cherish, and to keep safe and sound.

Retrials and detrials

So, every reterritorialization acts to reinforce all these divisions. We can therefore in sport perhaps speak of retrials which repeat, accumulate, gel, and glue the Leviathan; macropolitically, in reestablishing power-relations between social categories, and, micropolitically, by purifying a universal humanity from nonhumanity.

Conversely, we could talk about, detrials, in which the outcome is more uncertain. Save for mass-production of losers and composition of a universal humanity, sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome is precisely sport's most decisive output.

Detrial and retrial are perfectly balanced in sport. The uncertainty of outcome in sport (detrial) feeds the need of seeing the humanity as a multitude of volatile and singular free-willed subjects, while the reproduction of social categories, their internal power-relations, and the controlled participation of objects in sport (retrial), vanguard the abode of naked apes (gymnos meaning naked in greek). This illustrates the shift, Latour claims that moderns do, conveniently and naturally, between society as soft (detrial), and hard (retrial).

That is why sport, despite its experimental endeavors to find out what bodies (anybody) could do, never jeopardizes the universal identity of humanity that it promotes.

Systems

In his Luhmannian analysis of sport, Norwegian sport sociologist Jan-Ove Tangen (2004) convincingly arguments that sport should be treated as a social system. In that its borders continuously must be protected, and in order to reproduce itself, the social system must repeatedly demonstrate its differences from other systems, i.e. its umwelt.

Social systems, such as law and science, all have their ’symbolically generalized medium’, which enable them to both differentiate, and reproduce, themselves (ibid. pp 61-64). According to Luhmann, everything in a system depends on its medium. While law’s is ”right”, and science’s is ”truth”, the symbolically generalized medium of sport is the ”victor”. If law isn’t entrusted to produce right, and if science is entrusted to produce truth, they would be fiercely criticized, and, concomitantly, put under rigorous scrutiny. And – since right and truth are so decisive for the organization, governance, and management of collectives – so they are!

The umwelt – the surrounding collectives which affect a given system – is a disturbing entity, the noise of which systems must reduce in order to safeguard, and to guarantee the longevity of, the system. But, inevitably, the system must transform some of the surrounding noise into signals that inject ”controlled newness”, which, I argue, is a decent semantic interpretation of the word ”reproduction”. This line of events has a lucid analogy in the sloughing of snakes: the new skin looks almost like the old skin, perhaps brighter and certainly stronger. Another illuminating figure of speech that would cast light on the system’s rationale in its umwelt relations, could perhaps be found in water that mustn’t stand still for too long, lest it would reek.

In the case of sports, actors are complaining, and even raging, when the victor is found to be produced in an inappropriate way, illegal substances, unfavorable weather conditions, and even, given the alleged quality of play of the respective teams in a match, the ”unfair” distribution of goals among the teams.

Regarding another system that is decisive for the present discussion, perhaps it could be said, following Deleuze (1991), that the symbolically generalized medium of philosophy is the concept? ”What would be the worth of a philosopher of whom one could say: he did not create the concept?”(ibid:474).

It is obvious how well the concepts of my metaphysicians of choice, Latour, Deleuze, Guattari, and Serres, resonate with Luhmann’s ”systems approach” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Latour, 1999; Serres 2008; Wolfe, 2008; see also Latour 1993 & 2007 for criticisms of the system as concept): Latour’s black boxes; Deleuze and Guattaris’ territorializations; and, Serres’ noises, parasites, jokers, and blanks. Considering the question of structure, that is. And one could be lengthy here, concept-dropping blatantly, but this tracing will do for now.

The questions this leaves me with, though, are epistemological ones: How much mending of other concepts does it take to construct a new concept, i.e. how much namedropping must the philosopher put her reader through in order to claim that her concepts are novel? Is namedropping in philosophy rather a question of education – of pedagogy and canon? Or is namedropping only an equilibristic excess, like somersaults in parkour? Latour and Serres tell us to stitch and mend, in opposition to the idol-breaking of the critical analytical stance, but is the plethora of philosophical concepts included in their TLC agenda for research?

This entry started out as an illumination of a ”systems approach” to sports, and ended up in epistemology. It happens to me a lot. Last note to self: what kind of system does this name-dropping of philosophical concepts and skewing from ontology to epistemology reproduce?

The Lab & the Lob: How sport contributes to the "modern constitution"

(Possible introduction to my thesis):

On quakes, waves, and figure-skating

In February 2011, the world Championship in figure-skating in Japan was cancelled due to the implications of a massive earthquake. Besides delaying the competition, the subsequent tsunami and nuclear melt-downs of the Fukujima power-plants dramatically changed the lives for the residents in the area. This is a perfect case of how fragile human beings and their societies are, when standing in the face of the abominable powers of nature. Or, is it?

A Swedish figure-skater expressed concern for the victims and how chocked she was by the disaster.[i] That she wasn’t able to compete was of minor significance to her, and she even said that “it feels awkward to speak of the two things at the same time”. Homo ludens[ii] – man, the player – seems so futile next to a natural catastrophe that has reaped so many souls. Or, does (s)he?

In 1755, when Lissabon was devastated, also due to an earthquake and a tidal wave, this marked a point when humanity ceased to ascribe nature the faculties of good and evil.[iii] Natural catastrophes hereafter were regarded as accidental in comparison with the evil excesses of the human race, the intentions of which could be assessed and judged properly. That particular occasion was just one out of many which convinced the soon-to-be-moderns about the need to establish a firm boundary between nature and society.

However, the last accident in the chain of the Fukujima events, the melt-down, is not so easily categorized. The power-plant is a man-made facility that contains the advanced technology capable of enrolling the force of nature in order to produce energy, which, in turn, is a resource that has the capacity to create large-scale changes on earth, for the fate of both “society” and “nature”. So who’s more evil in this case – the brute force of quakes, waves, and radiation, or the cunning, competent scientists and technicians (who develop and administer the processes contained within the networks of nuclear industry)?

The following discussions will shed light on why it feels awkward to speak of figure-skating and tsunamis, of sport and natural disasters, at the same time. The French science scholar Bruno Latour would argue that this uncomfortable feeling depends on the core rationale in each and every one of the collectives known as modern, and that the perfect dichotomy of society and nature is the result of a “work of purification”, which in turn is one half of the “modern constitution”.[iv] The other half of the modern constitution, the “work of mediation”, paradoxically enough, indicates the opposite, i.e. that society and nature is getting more tightly knotted by the minute.

During the coming demonstrations, I will argue that there is a perfectly symmetrical explanation to this conundrum, and that (modern competitive) sport in itself is a key to understand why society and nature are – or, at least, have been – perceived as incommensurable. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate how sport contributes, and has contributed, to the “modern constitution”.

Latour would perhaps call the melt-down a naturalcultural hybrid,[v] and furthermore an actor which exchanges the properties between nature and culture properly.[vi] This intense and complex coupling between society and nature makes up the other half of the modern constitution – the “work of mediation”.[vii] This blending is as important a feature of the constitution as ever the work of purification, the intensity of which oddly enough enhances the work of mediation. The borders have never been firm. With the quake and waves of Fukujima in 2011, perhaps the parenthesis that began with the quake and waves of Lissabon in 1755 could be considered closed?[viii] The universals of good and evil, and those of society/nature are evidently outdated.[ix] A new picture must be painted! The agency that made possible the environmental damages, in forms of radiation, and radioactive water leakages, was a network of human and nonhuman actors, the responsibilities of which are uncertain in these events.

Rather than to treat the disparate actors of this story as belonging to either society, or to nature, Latour advices us to see all actors as part of the same “collectivity”[x] – that very same “anthropological matrix”[xi] that we have always been a part of. On one hand, “we have never been modern”,[xii] but, on the other, behaving like moderns – i.e. treating the properties of the world as either society or nature – has had vast implications for our collectivities.

Throughout Latours entire oeuvre,[xiii] one main argument is carried out repeatedly: what has come to be known as “nature” in the modern constitution is composed in laboratories through rigorous experiments, the outcome of which must be cleansed from all traces of human action (in order for science to claim that it has unveiled objective facts and truths, which in turn render it a legitimacy in society). Interestingly enough, the construction of the notion of “society” doesn’t have an equivalent to the laboratory. This is where sports come in...

---

[i] Helsingborgs dagblad.

[ii] Huizinga, J., 1938.

[iii] Bauman, Z. 2006.

[iv] Latour, 1993.

[v] Latour, 1993.

[vi] Serres & Latour, 1995.

[vii] Latour, 1993.

[viii] Compare with Latour, 1987.

[ix] The german sociologist Ulrich Beck uses the notion of “Zombie Categories” to describe concepts that, even if they have lost their meaning due to the ever-increasing complexity and hybridity of our world, still thrive in academia, politics, and public discourse.

[x] Latour, 1999.

[xi] Latour, 1993.

[xii] Latour, 1993.

[xiii] Latour 1978, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1993, 1995, 1999, 2004, 2007.

K and the Lob: Towards a Minor Sport

Thursday 19th of May, I'll present a paper at the EASS conference in Umeå. Here is the abstract:

A recurring theme in critical sport studies is the issue of whether the element of competition -- measuring, comparing and ranking performances (Loland 2002) – in sports is fascistoid (Tännsjö 2000, 2001), and, whether sports constrains the potential of human movement, and its creativity, rather then enhancing it (Eichberg 2010). In this essay, I will argue that the element of competition is vital for the creativity of movement-potential in sports. Still, the alleged ‘fascistoid’ or ‘creativity constraining’ element could be ‘hi-jacked’.

As an example of this kind of hi-jacking, an autoethnographical (Chang 2008) account of my participation in recreational table-tennis will be seen through a process-philosophical lens. Deleuze’s conceptual pair ‘minor’ and ‘major’ (Bene & Deleuze, 1979; Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) will in the essay be extended to sport. The argument is that prolonging elements in athletic contests could be understood as ‘minor sport’, which in the essay is exemplified by defensive strokes, like chops and lobs, in table-tennis. ‘Major sport’, then, is understood as equivalent with ’the structural goal of sport’, namely, to produce winners by comparing, ranking and measuring bodily performances (Loland 2002).

As a table-tennis player in the corporative/recreational series, my way of playing has rendered different conceptions among the other players, ranging from joyful to provoked. This manner could be described with ‘minor’ actions like ‘suspending the game’, ´delaying the outcome’, and ‘never having learned to smash’. When contestants are equivalent in competence and desire to win, competitions tend to produce ‘sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome’ (Loland 2002). My way of playing is directed towards maximizing the ‘sweet tension of uncertainty’. Hereby focus is shifted from sport as context where winners are produced, towards sport as a context where ‘sweet tension’ is produced. This stance combines the benefits of both protagonists and antagonists of competition.

Conceptual Athleticism I: French soccer experts

Picture the proverbial match between Greek and German philosophers as staged by Monty Python with frog-eating commentators instead, such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Serres:



First, a rather dense analysis by Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, p 361-2) in which they couple movement, speed, and "sports" with different conceptions of science, in this case the distinction between a major and a minor science.

They too, like the original commentator, are surprised by, albeit excited about, the fact that Archimedes plays from the start. Archimedes minor soccer demonstration prior to the game (0.55-0.59 in the video), in which he nomadologically traces a neverending line of the ball while juggling, is probably what gets them started:

There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very difficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are referring to are not "technologies" in the usual sense of the term. But neither are they "sciences" in the royal or legal sense established by history. According to a recent book by Michel Serres, both the atomic physics of Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked by it. The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science would seem to be the following:

1. First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency.

2. The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a "paradox" to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary characteristic, a copy; in the Timaeus, Plato raises this possibility, but only in order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal science. By contrast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity, and of passage or becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the famed declination of the atom. The clinamen, as the minimum angle, has meaning only between a straight line and a curve, the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the original curvature of the movement of the atom. The clinamen is the smallest angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path. It is a passage to the limit, an exhaustion, a paradoxical "exhaustive" model. The same applies to Archimedean geometry, in which the straight line, defined as "the shortest path between two points," is just a way of defining the length of a curve in a predifferential calculus.

3. One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar or laminar flow, but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest angle. From turba to turbo: in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to the great vortical organizations. The model is a vortical one; it operates in an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things. It is the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated (metric) space: in the first case "space is occupied without being counted," and in the second case "space is counted in order to be occupied."

4. Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them: sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an "event" much more than an essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an "obstacle"; it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a pro-jection, in other words, a war machine. All of this movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the "problem-element" and subordinates it to the "theorem-element."

It bothers Deleuze and Guattari, as much as it bothers Serres, that Socrates gets the last word again (3.00 in the video). Serres (The Parasite, p. 251) mingles into the discussion and states that:

Socrates gets out unscathed. His beautiful individuation is different and evil. Ugly and evil. He runs to take care of his individuation in the gymnasium. To make it flexible, to clean it, to make it effective.

Whereas the other offensive Greeks -- Democritus, Heraclite, and Archimedes -- are atomists (and therefore hydraulic, minor, flux-oriented thinkers), Socrates thinks but of one thing, that is, putting the nail in the coffin. He does so with his head (of course!) and with the German net, two things, that arborescent thinkers have used to freeze atomistic flux ever since; to stabilize essence in 'statuelike concepts' (Serres, Conversations).

Yes, Deleuze and Guattari continue, the 'apparatus of capture' of Royal Science and State philosophers - always parasiting the benefits of atomism and nomadic war machines!

Mm, Serres (Conversations, p. 105) concurs, 'The mean player imagines himself to be a subject by imagining the ball to be an object – the sign of a bad philosopher'.

After a moment of silence, a time-space filled by the disturbing noise of vuvuzelas, Deleuze and Guattari, who have run out of steam philosophically, angrily rush up from their chairs and ostensively swarm out of the edifice. Serres (Conversations p. 23), still evaluating the events, finally -- with a smile on his face -- concludes:

I have always been a hellenist.

Scrimmage of thought

Holey diver

Holy Diver
You've been down too long in the midnight sea
Oh what's becoming of me - DIO

Hill Taylor stunned the world by breaking the world-record in backstroke 50 m in a minor championship. His performance was also a baptism, in which the name dolphin-man was lent to him.

Dolphin-man is the fastest in the contest, and, with regards to the distance backstroke 50 m, even in the world. But he cannot win, and he knows that. It all depends on his maneuvre of preference, the dolphin-kick. The excellence by which he wields this powerful weapon is the key to his total domination. This move is not essentially illegitimate in backstroke, only so when it emerges in certain proportions. A swimmer must return to air after fifteen metres, lest he's to be disqualified.



Consequently, backstroke 50 m should be named "backstroke more than or equal to 35 to less than or equal to 50 m". Given this, one cannot practically be a record-holder in backstroke 50 m! If you on the one-hand swim using regular backstrokes (think paddle-wheels on steamboats), your opponents will leave you behind as fast as dolphins ward off a shark attack. On the other hand, if you, like the dolphin-man, multiplicate the efficient dolphin-kick, your result is not qualified. That he aggregates a legitimate gesture at least qualifies him as minor athlete.

Practically, no one can be said to hold the world-record in this aquatic event, since what's measured is fuzzy. A fuzziness whose depth dolphin-man delves into. Almost like what D&G hold as the ideal stance in minor science, it is both the "backstrokeness" and "50 metresness" of backstroke 50 m that dolphin-man examines in this race. Albeit in a bigger bathtub, and with an euresqueeeeka, dolphin-man's performance appears as an Archimedean event.

Reading the work of Peter Sloterdijk incites us to ask strange questions. For example, can man become an aquatic being again? Is it possible for a human being to dive into the water not to drown there but to take up with dolphins and mermaids? Are we able to switch elements like this? (...) Sloterdijk's focus on the elements air and water is meant to counteract the age-old philosophical tendency to prioritise earth and fire. (...) It is true, philosophy started with a notorious claim about water. Thales of Miletus (624-545 BC) argued that it was no less than the basic principle (arche) of everything, but subsequent philosophers have done everything to stash away Thales's proposition. How, after all, could one base the world on something fluid? So, philosophy forgot about its own beginnings and became a dry exercise. (...) Almost all anthropology is suffering from a mono-elementary bias. It interprets us as creatures who in the end can only exist in one element, that is to say, on the mainland, in the so-called real. - Rene ten Bos, Towards an amphibious antropology, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 73-86.

The dolphin-man proves to be a fine specimen of the variety of conceptual athletes, by way of which the poet John Keats demonstrates the essence of poetry for his adept-lover Fanny Brawne in the movie Bright Star:

A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

Poetry (poeisis) is equivalent with pro-duction (Agamben), invention (Serres), and virtuosity (Virno). Poeisis just happens and is seldom an effect of a planned scheme; contrary to praxis, which contains in itself the goal, the implementation, and the expected outcome of an act. But doesn't dolphin-man, contrary to Keats' poet-swimmer, immediately swim to the other shore? Isn't dolphin-man rather an example of a teleological thinking devoid of all means and process? No. He demonstrates that speed is of the essence, not in order to win, but in order to be able to discern problems just before they gel. To gel is the same as being devoured by that great monstrosity that strives to capture all lines of flight: spectacle. Investigate into fuzziness instead! Dolphin-man will lead us past Leviathan.

During movement, the dolphin-man never leaves the water, which is treason against "the criterion of due humanness in sport".* It's mandatory that the body backstroke-swimmer breaks the surface at least once from underneath. In backstroke man must proof he's a mono-elemental entity by breathing once in a while. Dolphin-man doesn't. Beneath waves events are too furtive to be (made) spectacular.






*This concept will need more unfolding than the initial one, carried out here. "The criterion of due humanness in sport" is a concept that relies on the hypothesis that sport, in order to be sport, must include Latourian-flavoured "trials of humanness". The human factor must be guaranteed and legitimized in sports. When someone runs fast in track and field contests, wind speed must be accounted for in order for the results to be reliable. Testing for doping is legio in contemporary sports. That illegal substances mustn't be found in the athletic body is another example of the criterion of due humanness in sport.

On the one hand, sport is a perfect inversion of the laboratory in which humanness must be quashed, and in which substances are everything. On the other hand, sport is only partly a perfect inversion of the laboratory (at least in Latour's ideal-type of the same): whereas objective measure is celebrated in both laboratories and sports, the former purify nonhumanity from humanness, while the latter purify humanity from nonhumanness.