It's fairly easy to become a spy, really. All one needs is to secrete a few signifiers: a fake moustache here or a change of clothing there, an assumed name and a few passports to get through the checkpoints. Perhaps the skilled agent will modulate language in spoken or written form, while the truly gifted spy might go so far as to adopt a new gait altogether (Keyser Söze understood this best). The point is to both fashion and perform an identity, one that will allow passage between spaces of more or less regulated sovereignty. In other words, it is a will to movement that in its very becoming creates opportunities for critical investigation and possibilities for social change.

For a purportedly "secret" agent, Bond's identity was perhaps the worst kept secret in the spy game. Whether at the hotel registration desk, the baccarat table, or the cozy confines of the martini bar, the naming was always the same: Bond. James Bond. Square jaw, smoky gaze and cool Britannia. Tall and tuxedoed, shaken not stirred. There was nothing subtle about it, nothing secretive. One supposes this is because Bond performs himself at every moment the actor also performs the character into life, but at some point the theatre must become a bondage, no?

Of course there was always a second identity that haunted Bond from his very birth: 007, the numbering name of Her Majesty's Secret Service corporeally registered with every case mission assigned as an asset in the field. Clerical object of Moneypenny and spectral threat to a veritable constellation of villains: 007 was as well known in the spy network as Bond himself. Singular corporeal punctum and reductive technology to invisibly mark his body, the nexus between skin, gesture and inscribed identity never more apparent. This numbering name of 007 is not a counting number — it is never additive, much less multiple.

When Bond made love to 006, in other words, it's not as if 0013 was anywhere to be found.

The Spy's foot begins to vibrate. Shoephone, naturally: a smart technology for navigating the spy game's networks of lust and mistrust. As Ronell points out, one shoephone always implies another, always implies a relation, for what use is a single receiver on its own? Shoephone technology also presumes the walking, mobile agent, however, one whose gesture meets language in the everyday gait of the spyworld. His will to movement exists as an uneasy compromise between the perceived waves of affective tonality and the particulars of linguistic signification.

The Agency has his number too, of course: administrative numeration for organizing the field of potential. But perhaps also an unsecure connection, for our footings are always uncertain in these networks of flux. Someone might be listening to the call, or touching in synchronicity. Warily, he retrieves the message from the Colonel:

<code> FRIST LWA FO MDIEA: TEH SLEF SI TEH FAOCL PONIT -- COL.
. . . . .
<code> wtf? -- Spy.

As with the shoephone, the spy identity also exists in relation. Like all techniques of living, the signifiers of identity spring forth from the body in processes of co-emergence before folding back to re-form anew. Hence the birth of an identity is first and foremost an expression of violence: it demands a certain tearing away from existent relational fibres towards the adoption of newer signifying forms (this was one of the first lessons the Spy learned from the Colonel in basic training). But this violence brings with it liberation and empowerment: we get comfortable in our new skins, so to speak, and as we move into new relational forms we sing out to others who might likewise possess similar elements of performativity.

Co-emergence: this selfness is selfless, if not necessarily free of selfishness.

Eventually, these new rhythms and selves give birth to the name of the name, which we thereafter understand as the identity category. But this, categorically speaking, is where a different tearing occurs, at once an abstraction from the relational processes that gave birth to the identity proper and a parallel shift that sediments or stratifies its remaining fibres. Dogma and hygiene set in. Identity is policed. Fluidity is compromised. And the one thing feared most by any agent in the field of potential is to become compromised.

Simon Critchley illustrates the political importance that identity categories may possess in galvanizing a movement towards action and, potentially, change on a subrevolutionary scale. The name and its performance can be a rallying cry, "inauthentic" yet for a fleeting instant powerfully lived. Agency writ large: the question of how to live is simultaneously the question of how to die.

But this question also seems to concern the flip. When do the structural conditions of empowerment and possibility mutate such that they invert and become the conditions for repression? Or to phrase the question differently, is the identity category itself a choreographic object around which its associated part-subjects orbit, rearrange and otherwise flip in a movement from dominant to dominated (and/or submissive) positions?

Another vibration from the Colonel. The Spy hits the Submit button:

<code> FUOTRH LWA FO MDIEA: MDIEAITON SI TEH FOLW FO MDIEA -- COL.
. . . . .
<code> lol -- Spy.

"Mediation is no longer a deal between partners or a communication following established rules, but an innovative process of media to which we belong. In such a mediation there is not even the goal of mutual understanding, because the flow needs breaks. Dissent is the salt of mediation and designed to eliminate anthropocentric arrangements, the mafia practices of humankind" (Schirmacher).

The Spy hangs up his shoephone and considers the interface between gesture and language. He considers the binary of love and hate when brought together linguistically in oppositional expressions of relation: "I hate that I love you," or "I love that I hate you." There is no counterbalancing of sentiment between the two expressions: the antagonism between action verbs in each sentence is such that the speaking predicate — the "I" — becomes enclosed by abject misery in the former instance or appears monstrously callous in the latter. Hate always triumphs in this conflict, semantically speaking; it cannot be negated simply by love alone.

For love to emerge triumphant the situation requires pure will, or more accurately, pure will not: "I will not hate that I love you," or "I will not love that I hate you." In both cases the semantic structure has been modulated — not inverted, mind you, but rather emptied of its vitriolic sense. This should not be considered a second negation in addition to love's attempted negation of hatred, but instead a refusal: exodus walking together hand-in-hand with antagonism.

Language games, nothing but language games.

The University of Disaster is precisely such a language game. Has it not been from the outset? Given that traditional material infrastructure is largely absent from its constitution, save for the most skeletal required elements, we must indeed consider it a ludic architecture that has been performed into existence — a rich node of communicative action that errs largely on the side of spoken rather than written language. The very reason it "works" is due not to its facilities but rather to the produced intensity of experience in one's faculties: a relentless excursion in the mountains pushing its students and spies to ever-new possibilities. If operated as a traditional academy it would fail miserably.

Yet it succeeds. Process philosophy meets pedagogy meets praxis.

Despite our example of love and hate considered above, those in the spy game know that the situation is anything but binary. As Victor Vitanza teaches us with the language games of Lyotard, and with the specific example of Tegwar, the machines are always modulating with each move. Love and hate infold in flux: there is no time to remain sedentary. This fact assumes even greater significance when one considers the rich node of communicative action — that is, the balance between speaking and writing — that constitutes the University of Disaster as sovereign institutional form.

If the University of Disaster errs largely on the side of the spoken word, with all the perishability that implies, we might ask what respect it holds for its relation with the listener? What laws govern its sovereignty and ensure justice for its subjects if the tradition is primarily oral?

As Schirmacher points out, Lyotard's call for "just gaming" was itself an ambiguous play on the word just: "to take life lightly and at the same time insist on justice for the working of language games." Those in the spy network should not want to fall in love with language: in fact, they should be distrustful of its claims. But sometimes language is required to communicate the nuances of relation, of love, of hate — in other words, for me to express myself to you.

And so we play, we take life lightly.

In this sense, "lol" operates at the threshold of text and image: both an acronym for dark, sardonic, wicked humour (Critchley's third way between melancholia and mania) and a hands-up icon of powerlessness before the sovereign. I surrender, with a wry grin touching the very corner of my lips.

Can one play the game with style? Is there justice?

<code> TRHID LWA FO MDIEA: SYLTE SI TEH MDIEUM FO ATCOIN -- COL.
. . . . .
<code> kthxbye -- Spy.

"Style is a self-evolving activity producing a gaze and opening the ear. It is not the author's viewpoint, or his or her aesthetic judgment that style expresses. Style is a game playing with time and language in which you discover and forget the self. Style is neither an identification tag nor a tool of power but a composition never made before, in a language free of fixed meaning but still meaningful to you" (Schirmacher).

Massumi+Manning are back in the game. Great timing. Are they a deal between partners, or a multiplicity? It seems to be the latter: they do not make 007 or 006, or even 0013, but the more-than that is produced by the eventedness of relation and its perishability. Call its numbering name n+1 — or hesheheshehe returns!

Style, vision, sound: fine, in theory. But let's not dance around the important questions. Where is the touch? Where is the politics of touch, more precisely? And for that matter, where is its pedagogy and praxis?

Touch is where the spoken of the ear meets the written of the gaze. Each must be considered as relational forms. A speaking body is met by a listening body, the threshold or interface between the two at the skin of the tympanic membrane; a writing body, on the other hand, is met by a reading body, the threshold between the two at the skin of the archive.

The skin is a surface, however. It wraps around a volume, encloses gesture. Speaking and writing must be considered variations of a topology emerging from gestural expression, each of which transforms differentially in time and space depending on the performance of the relational bodies in question. Gesture is time in the always-becoming of volumetric embodiment and the space in which a touching body is met by another touching body.

Whither style in this relational context? Massumi+Manning analyze this precise question with deeper consideration to find that style is the sum of movement modulations between all agents in co-resonance that allows the skilled player to gain an advantage. But style is also a provocation to the referee. A penalty may be called, or new rules introduced in response to the modulations. What if one is in the peculiar position of being both the person who must play the game with style and also adjudicate the degree to which the other plays stylishly as well, however: can one call a penalty against oneself? As Critchley reminds, following Agamben, Schmitt and others, we must define the sovereign not by the power to constitute the law, but rather by the one who determines the state of exception.

Massumi+Manning point out that naming and institutionalizing a dynamic process challenges the ethics of said process at every turn. If the dynamism of the process is born primarily through the process of speaking, as with the University of Disaster, then should we not always keep the ethics of the speaker in question? And if the communicative act is always relational, should we not also do the same for the listener? Finally, if naming and institutionalizing an identity are precisely that which offered agency in the first place, then once again we ask: when does the flip take place?

It appears to be when the generative violence implied by the birth of the identity no longer serves the agent but rather detaches to exist as a repressive technicity of the image. If the function of power in disciplinary societies served to produce docile bodies, its correlate in the societies of control is to produce docile identities, which may also include docile bodies. As such, we must escape the violence of the image.

Exodus or antagonism? Exodus and antagonism? If the passage is preordained, is there truly the possibility for agency?

Perhaps the agent in this case is the one who ruptures the preordained passage from one identity to the next, confusing the threshold. Consider this form of rupture or refusal consonant with a project of skin tectonics: the shifts and rumbles between various integumentary layers (dermis, clothing, architecture, digital profile) that may at times rupture or crack the "surface". The logic of skin tectonics suggests that the moving, gestural body — always already a political body — will never be fully captured by the tightness of its spectacular skin, for there will always be a slippage between integumentary layers. It is this slippage that constitutes the contemporary zone of opportunity, of resistance, and of indifference.

And if the nexus between skin, gesture and inscribed identity has never been more apparent, then perhaps we might also consider style to be a contouring of the Word — at once a transversal flight of the witness through doxa and a terrifying yet liberating movement to create interstitial distance between the law and the state of exception.

Did the referee even notice?

<code> SCENOD LWA FO MDIEA: PREOFMRCANE SI TEH SGINARUTE FO TUTRH -- COL.
. . . . .
<code> cul8r -- Spy.

Mission is a go. Homo Generator is meeting him at the rendezvous point and bringing reinforcements.

"This second law of media asks you to sign your name to the event, with no credit given for the hidden agenda. Media babies nurtured by shows, soaps, and trash movies live happily with collage, parody, and pastiche characteristic of the realm of performance. … Media has to seduce and open up a field of action which has no goal other than playing life, rearranging a never fixed lifeworld" (Schirmacher).

Once upon a time Bond staged his own death in the play of life. Though the physiological signals were indeed remixed, this is certainly not a biological death we are describing but rather a death of the image. 007 flatlined to 000, with no new data-deltas in the process of manufacture. It was perhaps his most convincing engagement ever with the question of performed identity.

Bond is dead! Long live the Bond!

Bond's maneuver was significant in that it offered him a new opportunity for movement — not simply for passage between identities (that is, life and death), but for a temporary suspension of the passage itself. This movement in suspension sounds paradoxical if one assumes the fixed perspective of the medical gaze and its unitary subjectivity, though when understood as a renegotiation of the link between corpus and image and its multiple relations, the idea begins to make more sense. Bond unperforms his normative performance to challenge the body-image link of his fixed identity and complete the mission. Or at least to gain the upper hand in so doing, for eventually he must come back to life and resurrect his pursuit of the evil mastermind.

But what if one could stay in passage indefinitely? Would it be possible to leverage the event rupture and dilate the threshold of passage such that movement always remains a potentiality? As with hesheheshehe, could one understand this as a will not to movement and a language game to the last? Not suspended animation, that is, but animated suspension? Could one keep the predatory fembot drones at bay? Could one die and yet live?

(Such traps are everywhere to be found. The question is where. The question is when.)

It suddenly dawns on him. "Homo Generator, you're the mole."

"It's General Generator, you idiot." A dismissive wave from his black-gloved hand. "Of course I'm the mole — or the serpent, whatever. It's been Me all along. This pitting of ideologies against one another has proven to be a very profitable enterprise."

"You're the one who's been sending me the messages. The Laws. It all makes sense now."

"Are you so sure it wasn't the Colonel? After all, the messages were from her channel."

(And what makes you so sure we don't have a second channel? If we mitigate its ambiguity, the multiple redundancy flesh resonance offers can help authenticate any code.)

"The first two sounded nothing like her."

"Yes, I will admit that it took us some time to — how shall we say — tap into her mode of linguistic processing? She was quite uncooperative to begin with. Poetic, even. Still, our work was good enough to get you here today."

Searching for a way out . . . "What have you done with —"

"No more questions, Spy, it's time for you to produce, time for you to pass your final test. Are you with us?"

(Could one play the game with style?)

The Spy turns to General Generator and looks him squarely in the eye. Playing life, just gaming, and determining the signature of truth under the sign of intensity, for language games such as those played by the University of Disaster demand equally intense conclusions to determine truly just outcomes. (Is any passage always already preordained? No.) He will sign his name to the event and refuse the test drive toward Final Judgment. He will laugh out loud like Medusa and be powerless before the sovereign.

Rapture of the rupture: you only live twice, after all.

Just then the subtle creak of a footstep behind him and the muted blip of a silenced pistol. Searing pain engulfs the base of his neck. (Fuck, philosophy is what happens behind your back! Where were my senses?) The pain spreads immediately to his heart, lingers there as the moment dilates into a flash drive of hazy memories, before consuming the rest of his body with a numbing scramble of icy television snow. Generator's voice fades. A blinding light overwhelms him.

Whiteness.

___

(for taylor liss, agent in multiplicity.)

Labour Day has been celebrated on the first Monday in September in Canada since the 1880s. The origins of Labour Day in Canada can be traced back to April 14, 1872 when a parade was staged in support of the Toronto Typographical Union's strike for a 58-hour work-week. The Toronto Trades Assembly (TTA) called its 27 unions to demonstrate in support of the Typographical Union who had been on strike since March 25. George Brown, Canadian politician and editor of the Toronto Globe hit back at his striking employees, pressing police to charge the Typographical Union with "conspiracy." Although the laws criminalising union activity were outdated and had already been abolished in Great Britain, they were still on books in Canada and police arrested 24 leaders of the Typographical Union. Labour leaders decided to call another similar demonstration on September 3 to protest the arrests. Seven unions marched in Ottawa, prompting a promise by Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald to repeal the "barbarous" anti-union laws. Parliament passed the Trade Union Act on June 14 the following year, and soon all unions were demanding a 54-hour work-week (Wikipedia).

___

"The productive cooperation in which labor power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process. It includes also the world of non-labor, the experiences and knowledge matured outside of the factory and the office. Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor (that is, its inherent connection to a productive cooperation richer than the one implicit in the labor process in the strictest sense of the term).

Since social cooperation precedes and exceeds the work process, post-Fordist labor is always, also, hidden labor. This expression should not be taken here to mean labor which is un-contracted, 'under the table.' Hidden labor is, in the first place, non-remunerated life, that is to say the part of human activity which, alike in every respect to the activity of labor, is not, however, calculated as productive force" (Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p.103).

___

Labour Day football means a lot to the CFL and to Canadians in general with support at its peak during this time. Along with the RONA Canada Day Kickoff games the traditions of the game are well preserved after more than a century of play and the excitement generated by the Scotiabank Labour Day Weekend slate.

___

"The crucial point here is to recognize that in the realm of labor, experiences which mature outside of labor hold predominant weight; at the same time, we must be aware that this more general sphere of experience, once included in the productive process, is subordinate to the rules of the mode of capitalistic production. Here also there is a double risk: either to deny the breadth of what is included in the mode of production, or, in the name of this breadth, to deny the existence of a specific mode of production" (Virno, AGotM, p.103).

In the contemporary society of control, "naked life" should be most often understood as a statistical concept of the body. While this may indeed (and must) have significant consequences for the naked animal body proper, it should first and foremost be considered a databased abstraction of the dividual social body (the predictive model of simulation described by Baudrillard) thereafter given spectacular flesh as the body+body+body of libidinal desire.

In this sense, we may consider the sponsorship of a sports team jersey as a particularly effective and salient communication strategy in that it allows for the corporate brand or meme to propagate in a fashion far more molecular than what is possible with any focused traditional advertising campaign (the molar). Couple this with the poverty of gesture (or physical literacy) that emerged in the labouring classes during the latter half of the twentieth century, and the sports sponsorship of naked life comes to resemble a straitjacket of signification.

The "closer" the skin of spectacle is to the animal body proper, the more virile the transmission.

June 2007: It was a little blonde girl, perhaps twelve years of age, kicking a soccer ball by herself. Her actions were deliberate, as if trying to develop some skill that she couldn't quite muster. Since a few of us had taken to kicking a ball around in the hotel courtyard after lunches, I motioned her to send a pass in my direction. We started kicking the ball back and forth a few times, after which she asked me a question … in German. I didn't understand a word she said. I was also trying to ask her a question, and tried to communicate back to her in English, equally to no avail. Our gesticulations couldn't overcome the language barrier either, and I could sense her becoming increasingly frustrated with this inability to make ourselves understood.

___

"Only apparently do the players relate to each other empirically as discrete terms, mediated by reflection and language. They relate to each other in their collective becoming, as a distinct ontological level doubling their substantial being. It is this collective becoming that is the condition of a formation like a sport, common to the proto-game, the official game, unofficial versions coexisting with it, and subsequent variations of them all" (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p.76, emphasis added).

___

July 2006: Beaded with sweat, under the glare of the stadium lights and the softer Berlin twilight, his head gleamed like a golden ball …

"I'd like to risk a basketball example…" (Brian Massumi, Saas-Fee, August 2010)

___

June 2007: Isn't sport great sometimes? I left our random encounter and continued up the cobblestone path, spirits buoyed. Danke schoen, little German girl, for making me smile as well.

stay close, think with
a passage
together
expressing expression
to open the sky,
a double expresso
to double the
free falling flesh.

energy! ecstasy!
these are poor words
for expressing the falling
impoverished language
and bodies that fall.

becoming anew
with each spoken expression
ideas and thoughts and my
falling with you.

ping . . . : . . . pong

ping . . . : . . . pong . . . : . . . ping . . . : . . . pong . . . : . . . ping . . . : . . . pong . . . : . . . ping . . . : . . . pong . . . : . . . ping . . . : . . . pong . . . : . . . ping . . . : . . . pong . . . : . . . ping . . . :

ping . . . channeled phantoms of edison sublime . . . pong . . . aural corona the scramble of time . . . ping . . . rally duration to numbering game . . . pong . . . rhythm gives birth to the name of the name . . . ping . . . grip yields to grasp on our service and spin . . . pong . . . noise gives the slip to overexposed skin . . . ping . . . unchoreograph the frenzied ballet . . . pong . . . severed connect tournament tourniquet.

ping . . . :

ping . . . :

ping . . . :

>searching . . .

>searching . . .

. . . . . . .

here we go y'all, time to play ball
athletic gestural poet.

food for the brain, beats for the feet
, or
that's what Chuck D told me
when he D'd it up so sweet
, and

Balso and Beck speak bball, too, with the
jab step pitter patter pen to paper platter
, and

BB bootyshakes the late-night bebop backbeat
at the Happy sweaty hepcat hardwood affair
, and

Bebe peeps the love for a future nostalgia
no-look bounce pass hard drive to nowhere
, and

Baby Jesus leaps from the free throw line
presidential prophecy in his Air Force Ones.

apprehension
a prehension
re: sean app
impression

press on him
hymn on this
come on with
knot on miss

cat's cradle multiple
affects
percepts
and language that always says the wrong things.

sight lines crisscross, crossfade into
exaggerated forensic muscle.

body stereoed,
flesh pollination
of thickening agents
in the urban channel.

colourful koi fish nibble traces of my bastard image
along cobblestone stagery.

digital clean stays the
current hygiene, no matter the decay
that foreplays in the
foldings of its skin.

cut through the wash.
articulate.

i love that function of you
on the rivermade of my newsfeed,
just like i still love those
other traces that remain of you, too.

* * *

(department of biological flow: gait surfing study number two, kalverstraat, amsterdam, 16:45)