excursus: sports and late capitalism
(1) Nancy Mauro-Flude, the abandoned avatar on the streets in
Amsterdam, wrote in her essay on software:
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These new social spaces created by 'social software' programmers allow them
to actively shape the meaning of the spaces in which we find ourselves and in
turn challenge us to reconfigure the limits of our sensory perception. According
to Mathew Fuller’s [2003] definition, Social Software is ‘built
by and for those of us locked out of the narrowly engineered subjectivity of
mainstream software’. There is an emerging importance of new technologies
within both social and fictional spaces created by ‘social software’.
These developments require a rethinking of just how far the ‘public sphere’
extends, what our notions of how we see ourselves are. The development of a
translocal public sphere requires further consideration in regard to not only
the concept of what constitutes the public sphere......
>>
This issue of how software (technology, coding) constrains or constructs "subjectivity" - and thus also movement, in extension -- is a very political issue that seems to be naturally involved and at stake in a project such as ours taking on the "system of organization" called games. (computer games, social games, sports games, entertainment games, social rituals, ritual organizations, industrial organization, "homo sacer" [Agamben] and the notions of sovereignty and naked life, etc).
(2) Training for New Subjectivity
In calling attention to a system and to the symptomatics of cultural
and political circumstances or situations, we enter a wider frame of analysis
for our work, and here the "roles" of Ermira-avatar, Nancy in the
streets, and Ivo in his private prison (the social autism of the fetishist game
Player in the home-office) , as well as the role of the triptychon film projections
of the "virtual urban worlds" in the Society of the Spectacle, which
is also now a society of the Empire (Negri/Hardt) of global capitalism, need
some attention. The larger political context can give us cues, or clues, as
to how we want our game to be understood, perceived.
What is the critical or aesthetic angle of our Walhalla system?
How is it related to the mundane terror we now experience in the free world,
and the horrific terror we see in the zones of conflict (Iran supplying weapons
to Hizbollah, Israeli children signing off rockets that destroy Lebanon civilian
urban life as they knew it).
Current paranoia in German train/tram stations: suit cases (baggage). Bombs
were found on the weekend, now every abandoned suit case is suspicious. Surveillance
is increased. While the daily subdued terror in western metropolises is de-tached,
the entertainment and advertising agencies promote constancy of expectation
for bread and games. The amphitheatres of sports are daily games, euphora experienced
this summer in high dosages that led, during the world cup in Germany, to a
new phenomenon of urban dérive -- the fan mile, the "public viewing,"
the publicly controlled celebration of new patriotism under the guise of global
brotherhood. Subjective experience here submerged under the collectivism of
Masse and Mensch.
(3) The exchangeability of avatars
Every avatar is like every other avatar. So every avatar, even Spartan 117, needs alliances. As the Evil Alliance is advancing to our galaxy, a dark secret is needed,. and many good new weapons. The Halo defenders, scattered in all directions online, gather to play together. You can join too, by moving into the Xbox live clans. A good clan is half the rent, as we say.
(4) Hyper-Training: to make the body a genius (doping)
(excerpted from Hartmut Böhme, Die Zeit, 20.7.2006)
Natürlich ist dem Menschen nicht sein Leib – sondern der Wunsch,
diesen zur Kunst zu optimieren. (Not the body is natural to man -- but his desire
to optimize the body into an artefact)
>>>
Die modernen Götter des Sports sind sterblich und austauschbar
The modern gods of sport are mortal and replaceable.(translated by JB)
After the fall of German super star bicyclist Jan Ullrich, now the disappointment
and the disdain are great. They are not noted too much on the Richter scale
of sportive excitements only because at the time when we heard of the doping
scandals in the Tour de France, we were still surfing on the waves of patriotic
enthusiasms duing the world cup. Not only Jan Ullrich, almost all superstars
of the Tour were banned. Only the gray field of the pelotes of bicycling is
no longer illuminated by the great gods of cycling. Hardly noticed, like through
a back door, the not yet caught pedalists and all the water carriers and helpers
carry on, un-doped in the no-man's land of the field they carry out their duties
for the chemical heroes, they began the race during the final moments of the
euphoria of the world cup (Zidane? Matterazzi? Zidane another fallen hero?).
But we need not worry. Even if apart from Ullrich many other stars are banned
now, new heroes will be born. Because, as I have argued, in a sport ruled by
functional and economic determinism, the heroes are as exchangeable as they
are everywhere else in the system. There need be heroes, but not this one (Jan
Ullrich) or that one (Lance Armstrong, Landis, etc).
>>>
Nevertheless, what happened to us in the case of Ullrich is remarkable for the
spectacle and the economy of sports. First, there is the tragic fall from height,
the fall of the hero/star. Stars are objects of a pitiless vampirism with which
we, the fans, suck the blood out of our objects of admiration. It has been known
for quite some time that sports as a competitive spectacle is today not only
a particular case of modern industrial/capitalist competitive society, but a
symptomatic case of the popular consumer culture and game culture. Our moden
gods are logos, and to identify with them gives us erotic pleasure, a pleasure/desire
which needs to be constantly repeated, and in its insatiability it is fairly
mobile and flexible. For example, we want to suck in the art of football like
an elixir, and if Ronaldinho cannot do it for us, well, then we look for Cristiano
Ronaldo or someone else.
With cycling it is not different. For the fans there need to be idols, it doesn't
matter which ones. Compared to the old religions, the gods today are mortal
and exchangeable: they can be dismissed, used up, and symbolically killed. The
modern sport never obeys the regime of only one god. It is superstitious, pagan,
and it adores polytheism and idolatry. Therefore the sport-religion is so connectible,
it can be plugged in so very easily to the polymorphous capitalism which is
only interested in the increasing circulation of goods (values), not in their
meanings or their distinctiveness. For this reason we are all accustomed to
safeguard our desire for extraordinary idols with a robust cynicism, a cynicism
which can casually and routinely handle the falls of gods, like the customary
disappointments in our lives, namely that the glamours of the consumer goods
do not keep their word.
Fetishistic or idolizing cults in sport or in consumption have long stopped
to operate in the mode of obsessive addiction or attachment like the older religious
or sexual fetishism or the magical aura of the Gods. Rather, it is part of our
modernity that it as much abuses the psychic attachment-energies (Freud's libido
attachment of cathexis) through magical or seductive objects to choreograph
collective intensities of experience (e.g. fascism), as it also "exchanges"
them, if the aura of divas and stars, as now in the case of Ullrich or Landis
or Gatlin, implodes. The "sudden death" of a half-god is re-adjusted
and balanced by the notoric unfaithfulness of our greedy lust for sensational
entertainment, if it is not consumed lustily as a particularly dense and satisfying
"tragedy." .......:>>>>:
Die Endlichkeit des Leibes als biomechanische Herausforderung
The Finality of the Body as a biomechanical challenge
During these days of our moral hang-over regarding the fall of the Ullrich god,
we should not forget that we have long since become the biomechanical engineers
and the molecular-biological alchemists of the human body, whose natural limits
above all have to be understood as a challenge to supercede them. The body is
our avatar or constructibility. The finiteness of the human body is the dull
border of a will power to make precisely this body the product and the instrument
( in old days as warrior, now as athlete). Let is not forget that outside of
the professional high athleticism millions of average citicens subject their
bodies to pharmaka and medical treatments, sometimes health-endangering diets,
as well as to mental and physical fitness programs and medical self-care that
amounts to an all-encompassing regime which is supposed to enlarge the personal
limits of action or competence. We have long since become our own bio-politicians.
In this operation, there rules the fear that we cannot accommodate the pressures
to achieve or to function in society, in our jobs, and the desire for self-enhancement
(doping) often exceeds the understandable interest in one's health. In this
case, health is not the aim, but the instrument. The professional athletes only
clarify and crystallize this point. The difference to multiple doping in every
day life only exists in the fact that the latter is not controlled at all, and
the former (in professional sports) not enough. There is a fatal connection
between super athletes like Jan Ullrich and all the doping Hans' or Peters around
the corner, which want to go out alone into the world, which they are afraid
of:
Sport is the medical, informatical-computational, psycho-mental and cybernetic-mechanical master-laboratory of the Games, in which not only the optimized bodies of our sports idols are fabricated, but also the strategies of an everyday pragmatic competition for optimization, a system which has its play-stations in the fitiness studios and gymns, the psycho-physical trainings stations and unfortunately also in the clinics and doctors' consultation rooms, all of which want to profit from the driven workers in capitalist production of our society. Therefore, the fall of the hero is also the crash of a million-dollar profit business, as well as the damaging of a sport, but above all it is our own crash. Because we sit in a glass house.
>>>(end of excursus)
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