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