Ethnomethods -- what people do

Sport is, quite literally, a folk-science. The moderns have in sport composed a particularly effective ‘ethnomethod’ (Latour, 2003) to encapsulate a notion – and to nourish the discourse – of a universal humanhood. Where human rights, religions, and literary canons have failed, sport has succeeded, as has capitalism in constructing the consumer. And these are not new thoughts -- the discourse of sports has always been saturated with brotherhood and communication. Sport as universal language is a Babel's tower, tacitly built not to wake up the ‘crossed-out god’ (Latour, 1993); Running up and down ‘the athlete’s stair’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) to stitch the Leviathan.

Hammer to fall

Hammer throw quite accurately describes what reterritorialization is about. The centrifugal (Latin: fleeing the centre) vertigo of the hammer might appear as a straightforward deterritorialization, but is actually dominated by the ego-boosting, centripetal (Latin: seeking the centre), effort of the athlete. Who is the centre of it all? A "me, me, me!" that eventually loses it all. Whereas the javelin thrower produces a centre-fleeing line.

Let us now pay a visit to the early hurlers in the Norse mythology, and compare the two precious weapons of the king of the gods, the one-eyed Odin, and his son, the thunder-deity Thor.

The trickster god in Norse mythology, Loki, happened to accomplish the task of fooling the dwarven master-smiths to give their most wonderful creations to the foremost of the Æsir. The fact that Thor was more impressed with his hammer, than Odin was with his spear, is a precursor of the reign of (re)territorialization as a pivotal organizational and metaphysical rationale in the modern constitution.

No wonder that the reterritorializations of Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer-cum-boomerang (hammerang?), appear as more useful and utilizable than the one possible deterritorialization of Gungnir, Odin’s all-piercing spear, that constantly increases the distance between itself and its thrower. Gravity and Celerity.

But the age of the hammer has come to an end. The gravity of the iconoclast's hammer will be substituted, perhaps with the celerity of the javelin - the maker of holey space.

Perhaps we are now entering the age of the javelin, in which:

we have only got one shot,

we are one-eyed,

we must use our intuition.

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?

Emulation and Equality in eSport

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Maximusnukeage at en.wikipedia

In From Ritual to Record, sport historian Allen Guttmann tries to categorize modern sport. In a Weberian manner he construes an ideal-type of modern sport, consisting of seven characteristics: bureaucratization, rationalization, secularization, specialization, equality, quantification, and the quest for records.

These traits could be seen as a blueprint for how elements should be gathered for a (modern) sport to take form. What follows here is an argument that eSport, ie competitive computer gaming, in its trials to perfect sporthood in certain aspects, here exemplified by equality, even betters its analogue namesake. This could perhaps be extended to further discussions on politics from Deleuze and Guattaris' point of view.

In its emulating endeavor, eSport in certain aspects even beats sport in the latter's own game, for instance with regards to the possibility of creating conditions of equality (which is crucial in any given sport). In eSport, players/gamers/cyberathletes have the theoretical chance to raze such boundaries that traditionally have been enacted within sports, in the name of equality. What I am referring to is of course categories like sex, age, weight and ability.

While these sections commonly constitute different classes within any given sport, eSport, with its specific repertoire of mastery of bodily movements, hypothetically makes this manner of managing sport obsolete. A game between the two best players in the world could well be played between an overweight teenage girl in a wheelchair and an athletic able-bodied adult male. Not that it necessarily would happen (macropolitics), but that it really could (micropolitics) is what makes eSport refine the element of equality in sport.

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.

The art of tracing XI: Constellation of Universes

In Chaosmosis, Felix Guattari tries to grasp how subjectivity is constructed in the fin de millenium-world. Psychoanalysis is not enough and has usurpated much of the concepts which might have been relevant: such as 'the unconscious'. Guattari directs us towards a concept of subjectivity which includes as well environmental as social and psychological dimensions. Subjectivity is defined as:

"The ensemble of conditions which render possible the emergence of individual and/or collective instances as self-referential existential Territories, adjacent, or in a delimiting relation, to an alterity that is itself subjective". (p. 9)

The many 'self-referential existential territories' that traceurs produce could be seen thus: as an almost promiscuous engendering of new events, situations, and singularities.

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

The art of tracing X: Homo pontifex

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.

"The ABC, or the D to the E of [whatever]"

The letters ABC mark that a chunk of pedagogy is coming your way - a brief canonization.

Arthuro Brizio Carter, the scorned referee of the World Cup in 1998, learned the consequences of taking things too literally. Prior to the cup the referees were asked by FIFA to take off their silk gloves in certain aspects. The frequency of tackles against players' backs had risen, transgressions, that often were followed by severe injuries.

Carter, who also refereed in the preceeding world cup which was held in the U.S., like no referee before him, blew his whistle, and flashed both yellow and red cards to the degree, just like he was ordered to, that he never got summoned to the next WC.

ABC might seem like a good, reasonable, and legitimate way to proceed, but the risk of stasis and rigid structures always lurk by. The fluid open-ended spirit of soccer was captured in '98. This strategy of learning or in-forming relates to what Badiou labels the didactical model, and, Deleuze & Guattari, the sedentary state-model of arborescence.

Why don't we start from the letters that follow for once?

Proposition for a new idiom:

Just as when you want to communicate a royal, major, state-scientific, non-ambiguous, and solid truth regarding whatever, with the phrase

this is the ABC of [whatever]

express

this is the D to the E of [whatever]

whenever you want to demonstrate the plasticity, dynamic properties, changeability, virtuality, in short, the minor and revolutionary conditions of the given whatever.

Deleuze and Difference are proper names not be worn out...

Boulder rush IV: "A loose boulder"

Contact and contiguity are themselves an active and continuous line of escape. [...] On the one hand, there is a rapid and joyous sliding movement or deterritorialization that makes everything adjacent even at the moment when the dreamer seems to have fallen into an abyss ("The paths there were very winding, ingeniously made and unpractical, but he glided along one of them as if on a rushing stream with unshaken poise and balance"). On the other hand, there are these pathways, these equally rapid segments that bring about deadly reterritorializations of the dreamer [...]. Undoubtedly, this [...] sheds some light in that deadly reterritorialization of K in a hard segment, "a loose boulder".

Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 61.

Bo(u)lder rush III: My, oh My, You need a boulder to cry on!

Nej där fanns ingen lilla My-
det blåste med ett gräsligt gny
det tjöt och drog ur alla vrår
och viftade i mymlans hår
och runt omkring dem, vart man såg,
hemskt stora bummelstenar låg.
De klättrade och kröp bland dem
och Mumintrollet ville hem.
Ack Mymla, sa han, aldrig mer
min mammas hus jag återser!
Fort ut i solskenet igen!
Vad tror du att det hände sen?

In The Book of Moomin, Mymble and little My, the two first desperately try to find the third. Just before My decides that she now might be found, the anguished Moomin and Mymble stumbles through a cave populated by humongous boulders. The wind howls hideously (det blåste med ett gräsligt gny), like it often does in passages and upon thresholds (when doors are opened), and the two are anxious to get out as fast as possible. The briefness of the visit to the realm of becoming is justified by the claim that "No, little My was not to be found there" (Nej där fanns ingen lilla My). She there, she there...

Could one not be found(ed) -- exist -- in becoming? A little forced lost in translation -- anti-etymology, ie philosophical lifestyle athleticism (such as surfing) -- might come in handy here.

Boulder comes from the Scandinavian word Buller (Bummel in the verse above) which means noise. Noise, in turn, is a central sense of the word parasite, which acts as exciter and catalyst in relations. Noise is the transductive area, which becomings inhabit - where the wild things are.
Let the shuttle weave back to Swedish, and we'll find that the word for noise is (o)väsen, which also mean entity! One could be found(ed) in becoming! QED! Yes we can!

Therefore:

Being is becoming. Be(com)ing. Essences, substances, definitions are but snapshots and freeze-frames of constant flux. Whatever is of the essence is off the essence, or, rather, the essence of being is becoming. To exist is etymologically derived from standing or coming forth, to get out of a standing position, or of a place.

Running on boulders is awesome! Becoming rulz! Deterritory FTW!!!!

The art of tracing IX: Foucan and the birth of the critic

What is critique? What purpose does it serve? According to Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, we are running out of entities to accuse, due to half a millennium of critics on a killing spree. 'Critique has run out of steam', as Latour asserts. When critique discerns, it labels, and when it labels, it creates. God was a critic, executed by his own method (meth OD). Paradoxically, critique may thus affirm what it tries to subvert or deconstruct. Critique, as a modern phenomenon, has been associated with another modernist innovation – revolution.

In its final anticipated overthrowing of the alleged adversary, revolution claims to open the pearly gates to an utopia. This dialectic scheme will unavoidably end in a new totalitarian reign, which, then, in turn, must be overthrown. D & G therefore claims that, for it to have impact on the states it wants to alter, revolution must be constant, and never fulfilled. The persona needed for this operation is the becoming-revolutionary. Kafka is, thanks to his joyous surfing on the waves of Law and bureaucracy, one of this guild's prospects.

The closest one comes to a place of constant revolution without resolution – at least up till now, when the leaking social system is the target for a multinational plumbing operation – is the utopia of the www (beaks pecking the soil for worms, or speakers sending noise up in the atmosphere, or both?). The vast realm of YouTubea is in that sense emblematic. The following composition sets the critic on our philosopher-traceur in the YouTubean maze.

The tracer of the day, Sebastien Foucan, is one of the founding fathers of parkour. In the first clip, Foucan is in dire straits with an angry chicken chasing him. We don't know his crime, only that the ferocious bird is after retaliation.



Perhaps Foucan is a representative of the last category there is to criticize (at least within the rationale of the critical humanist project): the whole of mankind. There is a long tradition of accusing man, but the majority of critical voices of animals has so far been silenced. This particular chick is a determined, street-wise, and cunning anthropologist, something that is evident in its knowledge of city-planning, short-cuts, and the use of escalators. Man built the city, the streets of which angry birds now hold. I bet there is a pissed-off post-humanistic posse of poultry rigging their slingshots outside your house right now!

Foucan is there to show all entities that man will not leave traces to the same extent as before. Rather, and to a greater degree, man will trace in the sense of sketching. By drawing creative, yet ephemeral lines of flight through the city, Foucan demonstrates how an "enlightenment without the critique" could be performed. HypheNation is my nation. The city is a burrow for the becoming-animal of man. By not playing the part of the guilty, and without making counter-attacks, the philosopher-traceur is enhancing a true ecology. Consciousness of umwelt, doesn't have to lead to masochistic asceticism.

Be as it may, with the becoming-critic of the chicken, the next hunt for the traceur moves us to Madagascar, where a fierce fight between a mongoose and a cobra has heated up a bunch of betting men (perhaps this, from a bird's-eye view, was the Foucanian crime in the clip above).



Casino Royale was a reboot of the Bond-series. Daniel Craig's Bond is a freshman, who just earned his license to kill. He is not yet the full-fledged man of taste (and of the world) that we are used to see him as. Intimidated over a loss in poker against Mads Mikkelsen's villain, Bond just grunts angrily at the bartender, who is asking him whether he wants his dry martini shaken or stirred. Bond-as-we know-him would never lose his temper in such a way. The other Bonds are nihilistic, yet tasteful men, i.e. critics, that don't give a damn about what they allegedly protect: empire, queen, state, democracy, etc. But Craig's Bond is still in conflict with himself, as well as with the values he has been hired to defend. He has not come out as a critic yet, and, paradoxically enough, this is what the traceur helps him to do.

Never mind the shitty story, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Bond starts to chase Foucan through shanty-towns, thickets, and finally a construction site. Foucan is always several steps ahead, and an increasingly irritated Bond must use foul tricks to keep track of his elusive prey.

The major, and most modernistic, sense of the verb 'to trace' is claimed by characters like the spy, detective and hunter, while traceurs represents the sketchy, scrying, and minor meaning of the term. The tracker is in it for the game, whereas the traceur, striving only to fuse with the middle kingdom of becoming, refuses to be the prey.

Repeatedly, Bond gives proof to his deconstructive skills, deconstruction being one of the cardinal competences in the critical repertoire. What other place than a construction site could be more suited for an exam in the art of critical deconstruction? The havoc Bond wreaks upon that poor scaffold shows that he is inaccurately named - if there is a bond, he will not cherish -- as Foucan does (tracing out even more bonds out from the present material) -- but, break it.

Where Foucan is climbing the fence, Bond is forcing it with a bulldozer. Where Foucan jumps down the holey facade, Bond violently short-circuits a lift with a monkey-wrench. And finally, where Foucan performs a underbar (which happens to be the word for 'wonderful' in Swedish) through a small opening near the ceiling, Bond fiercely pierce the plaster wall beneath the opening, making a new hole.

This last manoeuvre is the most lucid testimony to where the difference between the philosopher-traceur and the critic lies, and to what the implications for their respective agendas are. On the one hand, the traceur synchronically confirms and denies that the two rooms are distinct from each other. Denial by confirmation. here is A and B, A could be B, B could be A. On the other hand, the deconstructive critic, in his attempt to raze boundaries between two concepts, only affirms the boundary, and thus making it more impenetrable, let alone producing debris for others to clean up. That ugly hole will be filled by tomorrow. Confirmation by denial. A and B are the same! A will never be B...

How long will process and becoming provoke, and elicit the critic in and from, man?

The art of tracing VII: Monster Hug (avoid falling down)

Walking and perceiving, preferrably optically, stand out as the main acts of flaneurhood. Many testimonies bear witness to the flaneur as being one of urbanity's most well-known psychosocial types: Baudelaire, Benjamin, Simmel, de Certeau, Debord etc. The flaneur is a rather delicate and sometimes distant character that strolls through urban realms; Henry Miller creating a smooth space while loitering around in Brooklyn, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us.

In his conceptualization of parkour, Michael Atkinson timely interprets the traceur as a late-modern flaneur. While the modern flaneur was 'sketching' a space for himself (yes, unfortunately, this is just another persona based on an initially, and still hegemonically, male praxis), in which he could 'read' the city, Atkinson conceptualizes the late-modern variety as being capable of Heideriddean deconstruction. The void between houses, sous rature, becomes a void.

avoid falling down

It's inadequate to conceive of the opposite sides of a void as incommensurable, but it's necessary to stress that there is a gap, and that it takes a leap of faith to cross it. Association. Tracing is a micropolitically informed sociology. Life and live in HypheNation. Furthermore, concerning the flaneurie of traceurie, it seems that Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between smooth and striated space could enrich Atkinson's attempt to grasp parkour.

In sketching (tracing) space, the flaneur uses only the utmost tip of his body-brush: the soles of his shoes. The rest of the body is busy with an array of repetitive bodily idiosyncracies, such as smoking, walking casually, nodding, and tipping his hat at attractive and interesting passersby. The difference he makes is not to be found in these simple schemata, in this endless repetition, but in his interpretetive gaze. The optic reading of the city is the prime power of flaneurie. Compared with that, the bipedal itinerancy and meanderings of flaneurs appear as quite lame performances.

Deleuze and Guattari label the city "the striated space, par excellence", and by striation they mean the creation of channeled and hierarchical space, so that movement, in it, is rendered predictable. Striation, as the cybernetics of displacement, is the ordering of identities and positions onto grid-like fields, that are easily surveyed. In striated space, vision and optics therefore have a primacy. This of course relates to Foucauldian panopticon. One might even assert, that, as cities grew more and more entangled, more rhizomatic, and therefore more hard to overview, the proliferation of flaneurs served as a "necessary" distribution of surveillance. Big brother tips his hat at you. Male Gaze, and all that.

The traceur puts a different approach on display as he connects haptically, and not primarily optically, with the the city. The optic primacy of striated space, in smooth space, is inversed to a haptic primacy. A heightened hapticity, is the tactilization of (all) the senses. Although a loosely standardized and sketchy one, the repertoire of movements of traceurs often bear names that are lend from different agile species in the animal kingdom, such as cats and monkeys. And this should not primarily, as Michael Ferrari's analysis might imply, be interpreted as a search for an alleged pristine and savage nature of mankind. Rather, the quadropedal style of traceurs is functional-experimental. In parkour one does not mimic a animal, one is, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, becoming-animal. One dialect of Agamben's gestural communication in the 'coming community' could definitely be taught by traceurs.



Being a late-modern flaneur, the traceur grasps and embraces his surroundings, rather than putting them on the hermeneutical treadmill. As a philosophical stance, then, tracing is kin to the musings of Bergson, when he -- by way of intuition, rather than through conceptual clarity -- attempts to melt into the phenomena under investigation. Whereas the flaneur perceived and interpreted the monstrosities of urbanism, the traceur conceives the city, in all its denotations; demonstration. Monstrare means 'to show', and -- although tracing might be perceived by pedestrians (modern flaneurs perhaps) as a spectacle -- a show is primarily seen, in that it evokes vision. Monsters are seldom felt; the moment when the monster will reveal itself is always the climax (equivalent to the climax when it is defeated). Once in a while even a monster needs a hug.

And that, is what traceurs do: hug monsters.