Towards a Sporting Multitude
Sean SmithEuropean Graduate School
A Thought ExperimentFounding Spirits
does the global village have a basketball court?
A Thought ExperimentGlobal Village Basketball
millions of pickup basketball games simultaneously occurring around the world, each with a Red and Blue team
each “hooked in” to the larger meta-game via geo-tagged laptop, cell phone, or handheld device
players do not know the score at their own particular gym, though
A Thought ExperimentGlobal Village Basketball
score as a technology of competition gets taken to its logical conclusion: a reversal into a technology of cooperation
athletes "communicate" with their teammates around the world via photo, voice and video from their laptop, cell phone, or handheld device
information, images, identities produced and consumed by grassroots
RED 1,254,967
BLUE 1,376,224
Empire vs. Multitude
(Hardt and Negri, 2001)
Theorizing Sporting Empire(Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2001)
generally speaking, those organizations that create and sustain sporting capital and the vectors that communicate sporting products and practices
professional sports leagues, media conglomerates, corporate sponsors, athletic footwear businesses, International Olympic Committee and other sport governing bodies, WADA, etc.
Immaterial Labour(Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2001)
production of ideas, information, data, affect
plus, the informatization of material production, albeit not a in a linear "stages of history" fashion
labour becomes cooperative
Biopolitical Production(Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977)
capitalism is always already about biopolitical production
while it has historically appeared to be a matter of material commodity production, it was in fact always about the production of social relations
production of everyday (consumerist) life becomes immanent to the social domain
Smooth and Striated Space(Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987)
striated space is gridded, linear, metric, optic, State space; smooth space is open-ended, nonlinear, intensive, haptic, nomad space
disciplinary societies (striated) yield to societies of control (smooth)
as capital flows out from enclosure (striated) into global production and circulation (smooth), Empire emerges as a correlative political response
1. MOLAR:hierarchy, arborescence
2. MOLECULAR:cracks between identity categories
3. FLIGHT:rupture into smooth space
Lines of Segmentation
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)
Smooth Space(Deleuze and Guattari,
1987)
Meshworks and Hierarchies(DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 1997)
articulation of superpositions interconnection of diverse but overlapping
elements
intercalary elements effects these interconnections
endogenously generated stability temporal, spatial, etc.
Virtuosity and Politics(Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 2004)
virtuosity in language, which is also political
"Post-Fordism, hinging as it does upon the general intellect and the multitude, puts forth, in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of work, dissolution of the State, etc.). Post-Fordism is the communism of capital."
consider basketball as a linguistic form
Capitalism contra Vectoralism(Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, 2004)
land > capital > information
pastoralist > capitalist > vectoralist
farmer > worker > hacker
vectoralist is quite willing to outsource production to competing mass of capitalists
can athlete+worker+hacker usurp this source of economic power as motor of change?
What GVB Is Not
a universal vision of sporting practice
free of power differentials
THE sporting multitude
"Never believe that a smooth space will save us." – Deleuze and Guattari