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Toward a Politics of Now-Time:
Reading Hoop Dreams with Kubrick's Barry Lyndon
2:2 | © 1998 Michael J. Shapiro

Introduction: Ray Agnew's Interception

On Monday, October 28, 1996, sports journalist Mike Freeman's report on the Sunday Giants-Lions game, in the New York Times, featured a pass interception by the Giant's Ray Agnew:
This is an image that might endure in the minds of the Lions for months to come: Giants defensive lineman Ray Agnew, after picking off a pass, rumbling 34 yards for a touchdown, his 285 pound body running so slowly it seemed the feat couldn't be captured on an hourlong highlight show.1
If the phenomenon of professional football is confined to the playing field, the value of Ray Agnew's performance was 6 points, added to the Giant's score. But it is clear to Freeman that the spatio-temporality of contemporary sports exceeds what occurs during playing time. In extending the temporal boundaries of the Agnew event into a post-game media future, Freeman offers, in a remarkably efficient sentence, a sophisticated reading of how sports are now experienced. He recognizes that the value of Agnew's interception is also contingent on its duration. To be re-experienced as publicity, it must fit within an hour-long episode of sports television, at the end of the day.
To achieve a critical purchase on the ethico-political significance of the Agnew event, I want to locate Freeman's insights in a broader field of events and to take note of Agnew's identity as a black athlete. The aims of such an extension are both simple and complex. At a simple level, the aim is to analyze the contemporary experience of sports. At a more complex level, the aim is to explore critically the time-value relationships of the present, with particular reference to how these relationships are articulated in the movement of black bodies. The first aim requires an understanding of the genealogy of sports, which is briefly sketched below. The second, to which I turn immediately, requires a sorting through of philosophies of the event, with an eye toward a propitious way to characterize what Walter Benjamin called Jetztzeit ("now-time").2 To locate Ray Agnew's performance as an event in now-time, we must capture the event conceptually and critically; we must think it in a way that illuminates the present from an uncommon perspective. Having evoked the idea of the critical (for the second time) as well as challenging the notion of common sense, it is time to summon Immanuel Kant.
Enlisting/Resisting Kant

Why turn to Kant, who was among other things a philosopher of common sense, when what is sought is an uncommon sense? Although I will argue that Kant's commitment to a universalistic, model of thought is ultimately disenabling for thinking the present, I want to argue as well, that it is Kant who also creates the conditions of possibility for an uncommon, critical encounter with the present. Kant addressed the relevant question. He asked not only about the certainty of knowledge but also, as Benjamin aptly put it, about "the integrity of an experience that is ephemeral."3
In his approach to that question - to put it simply at the outset - Kant impeached the simplistic narrative of experience that privileges objects. Denying that things in themselves can command the structure of experience, Kant offered a narrative of understanding in which a representing faculty is implicated in the constitution of phenomena. And, most significantly for treating the event in question, that faculty, in the form of a shaping, productive understanding, constitutes phenomena with a sensibility that involves "relations of time."4
To treat the issue more extensively, I want to note the ways in which Kant's philosophy of experience inaugurates a critical view of the kind of exemplary experience that Freeman describes. At a general level, Kantian critique is aimed at asking how it is that an intelligible experience is possible, given our lack of access to things in themselves. His answer mobilizes various metaphors to treat the role of the faculty of judgment. But his most persistent figuration is governmental, suggesting that the achievement of intelligibility requires an integration of the various faculties through which phenomena are constituted, with judgment, as the mediating mechanism, providing the "transitions" among the various domains over which the different faculties exercise their respective legislative authorities.5
At a philosophical level, the Kantian construction of experience is critical, both because it recognizes that the raw matter involved in the flow of events does not by itself add up to a meaningful experience - what is required is what Kant calls a subject engaged in a "representational activity"6 - and because that representational activity does not achieve a natural closure.7 The (non- closural) narrative structure of the Kantian account of experience (presented most comprehensively in his Third Critique, but also developed elsewhere, especially in his Anthropology) is as follows: First there is "organic sensation;"8 but because sensation generates a disordered set of disparate perceptions, the cognitive faculty then becomes activated to order them. Sense perception is prior to an integrated understanding: "sense perceptions certainly precede perceptions of the understanding"9 ; it is the stage in which the subject is merely affected by the world. However, it is followed by "understanding" as the cognitive faculty "joins perceptions and combines them under a rule of thought by introducing order into the manifold."10
But this active aspect of perception, Kant's productive understanding, has not finished its task until it universalizes itself and goes public. Going public, however, is not a process of social communication. This portion of the narrative of experience is what Kant designates as enlightenment at the level of the subject, whose consciousness is engaged in reflection. The judging faculty of taste contains - on reflection - the assumption of a "universal voice" which, at the stage of mere reflection, is an "idea" whose confirmation must be postponed.11 Finally, because that same reflecting faculty contains an a prior estimate of its universal communicability,12 the movement of reflective consciousness gives rise to the public sphere (in a strictly formal sense) in that what begins with matter and is then given form ultimately becomes common or social. The ultimate part of the narrative is the movement to what Kant calls a "universal communicability," which, he says, is something that "everyone expects and requires from everyone else."13
The "enlightenment" achieved in this narrative is a process by which the subject, as a form of reflective consciousness, becomes larger than experience. Kant's solution to the aporias of experience is to make the subject larger than the world. This enlargement is effected by letting go of the sensible world: The subject's experience realizes its universality and communicability, Kant states, by virtue of the subject's "letting go the element of matter"14 and thereby accomplishing "enlarged thought."15 The narrative of experience is a story of judgment moving the subject toward a sensus communis "without the mediation of a concept"16 and without actual social communication. The expansion does not involve communicative dissemination; what increases is the size and coherence of the subject's comprehension.
We have to look elsewhere in Kant's writings to discover social as opposed to cognitive expansion. The social analogue to the individual enlightenment narrative can be found in Kant's political writings. Kant's hoped-for global enlightenment is a process that is structurally homologous with the process of enlargement he attributes to the enlightened subject. Just as the individual process of enlightenment aims, through the exercise of the faculty of judgment, to produce a harmony among the various spheres of the intellect and thereby achieve experience that is universalizable and universally communicable, the publicity achieved by important events must lead to a globally shared experience and ultimately a moral sensuscommunis, embodying a global harmony. People everywhere, reading the "signs of the times" would move, Kant hoped, toward a universal, cosmopolitan tolerance:
The peoples of the earth...have entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.17
Kant's reading of the "signs of the times," was inflected by both a current event, the French Revolution, and a more general, teleological commitment about the historical tendency of humanity: his prognostication that it was moving toward a more peaceful epoch. To discern a moral purpose in history, he thought, it is necessary to read historical signs, in particular to search for an important event which would allow us to conclude that "mankind is improving."18
Kantian temporality is thus divided into two structurally isomorphic enlightenment stories, one at the level of the subject and one at the level of international society. To what extent, we can now ask, does the Kantian story of experience, at both levels, fit the event in question? Certainly Ray Agnew's event, both the on-field performance and its futurity as a highlight on sports television, is public. And the temporality of experiencing the event more or less fits the Kantian enlightenment narrative. There is the raw experience - a large body in motion; then there is the imposition of form on the experience - it results in a score that is calculated in a way that integrates it within prescribed concepts; and, finally, because it involves a performance whose singularity stands out, it becomes (barely) appropriate for summarizing the action in subsequent publicity; it is featured on televisual and printed media with almost global distribution.
Just as certainly, however, Kant's mental formalism - his story of the individual subject's enlightenment through enlargement - which characterizes the later stages of the event, is inadequate for treating how the event achieves meaning and value, commonly or uncommonly. And his model of enlightenment at the social level hardly allows us to appreciate how the description of the event can produce a critical reading of modernity.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the uncommon sense needed to capture the event in terms of political insight - by which I mean the sense in which one can recognize what is special about today as opposed to yesterday with respect to the control implications of the spatio-temporality of sports - the Kantian reliance on cognitive faculties and his construction of the public sphere based on a shared mentality fail to illuminate the event's basic intelligibility. "We" (sports fans) know what Mike Freeman means; we can share his coding of the event-as-experience, not because of a shared structure of apprehension, in which time is internal to our subjectivity, but because practices of temporality govern the event. Such practices shape the organization of sports, of media, and of our structures of sociality in general. To the extent that we experience an event together as the same kind of event - and there are certainly diverse interpretive communities - we do so because of the way a complex set of spatio-temporal practices, which constitute today or now-time, shape the event and its reception as such. And the more social dimension of Kant's model of enlightenment, his conception of the effects of reading the signs of the times, cannot render the event in critical political terms because the reading of events is mediated by structures and technologies of dissemination, not merely by perceiving faculties, made coherent by the exercise of judgment.
Nevertheless, while Kant's notion of the sensuscommunis is ultimately cognitive and formal rather than social and cultural, failing to allow us to discern the complex process by which experiences are encoded in general and how they are re-inflected critically by those who seek to render them from different angles of vision, his introduction of a critical attitude toward modernity remains instructive. He provides an avenue for understanding the way the value of Ray Agnew's performance can be located in a more critical horizon of contemporary values.
Two contemporary thinkers, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, both edified by Kant's contribution to critique, provide thought vehicles for this purpose. In the case of Foucault, the vehicle is a genealogical approach to the events of the present. In the case of Deleuze, the vehicle is a demonstration of the way that contemporary cinema provides a mode of thought about time and events that encodes the peculiarities of the present.
In effect, Both Foucault and Deleuze resist Kant's idea that there is a universalistic, legislative power inherent in the common sense of mental faculties. Influenced by Nietzsche's attack on a philosophical tradition - exemplified by Kant - that has created a mode of thinking able only "to take everything that has hitherto happened and been valued, and make it clear, distinct, intelligible and manageable,"19 Foucault and Deleuze create conceptual strategies that resist institutionalized forms of intelligibility. Access to an uncommon sense, Nietzsche insisted, comes through a different kind of legislation, a law-giving that inheres in creative conceptual labor. Their glosses on Kant, and their Nietzsche-inspired re-inflections follow.
The Foucauldian Gloss

As is evident in Kant's political writings, his philosophical search for a universalistic basis for experience was accompanied by a more specific set of commentaries on the events of his day. While Kant strove to pose the "who" question, the question about the human subject writ large, at the level of the philosophy of experience, at the level of social commentary, he deployed his approach to value and judgment on his own historical period, seeking a politically perspicuous understanding of his historical era. With one mind he constructed a universalistic, timeless narrative, with another, he resisted that universalistic narrative and operated at the level of the historical example.20
Kant's attention to his own historical time is especially evident in his text on enlightenment, where, as Foucault suggests, "he is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday."21 Instead of encouraging a transcendental attitude toward value, which encourages us to ask what it is, given how subjects can, in a universalistic sense, make experience coherent, Kant ultimately sets the stage for a "historico-critical attitude."22 As Foucault summarizes the implications, Kant's specific question about the significance of his time and place:
entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.23
The consequence entailed is, then, a reorientation of the questions of value and intelligibility. A critical approach to these questions asks about the modalities of value and meaning - how valued aspects of life are shaped and represented, and about the time of the shaping and expression - when a difference with respect to value and meaning is articulated.
In Foucault's, genealogical frame, the "events" that have, for example, produced the modern body, as it is understood in institutionalized interpretations, are arbitrary. Foucault, like Kant, rejects the iconic thing in itself, but rather than displacing the privileging of the thing with a "productive understanding," responsible for the shape and temporal extension of phenomena, Foucault substitutes a genealogical practice of historical sensibility. His model substitutes "the haphazard play of domination" 24 for a model in which what exists arises from a progressive history of discovery, as understandings become historically enlarged.
To render Foucault's genealogical perspective relevant to the sporting event with which we began, we must turn to a genealogy of the sporting experience. Ray Agnew's slow body, is not something that the evolution of wisdom can discover; it is "slow" on the basis of the ways in which particular media, articulated with various other modern institutions, place demands on the duration of representations. Seeing the body, and the interpretations imposed on its motions, as an after-effect of complex structures of power and authority is afforded by a genealogical reading of the history of bodies and spatio-temporalities.
It should be noted in addition that this way of seeing bodies in motion implies a different answer to the question "what is critique?"25 from that supplied by Kant. For the Kantian concern with knowledge and legitimation, Foucault substitutes the question of "power and eventualization."26 Paying attention to what he thinks German critical thought has neglected, "the coercive structure of the signifier,"27 Foucault locates the politics of meaning in imbalances among forces, such that events achieve their intelligibility, at the expense of alternative possible modes of intelligibility. To examine "eventualization,"28 is therefore to inquire into the "mechanisms of coercion"29 that hover around the contemporary coding of events as experience. This Foucauldian focus encourages us to locate Agnew's performance as a peculiarly contemporary event, shaped by the forces now controlling the sporting experience.
A Brief Genealogy of the Experience of Sports

How, if we heed both the Kantian insights and Foucault's reorientation of the question of critique, can we deepen our appreciation of the power-related temporality of sports? The first step must involve a recognition of the temporarily invested legacy of contemporary sports; they have evolved from what were once regarded as "pastimes." Although there are various different places at which the narrative could begin in order to locate the significant ruptures that distinguish today's sporting experiences, the departure of sports from ritual, 30 and from its more ludic dimensions stand out. For the former, the practices of the Ancient Greeks provide an exemplary initiating venue, while for the latter, one would do well by investigating the changing balance of forces between play and display that Johan Huizinga observed. Writing at roughly mid-century, he argued that "with the increasing systematization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost."31
For purposes of capturing the implications of the Agnew event, we should restrict our attention to the relatively recent historical dynamics that Huizinga had in mind. The "systematization and regimentation" of which he spoke have been grouped and summarized by Norbert Elias as "sportization,"32 the historical process through which leisure time activities, whose structures had been controlled by (non-professional) participants, became subject to various rules and regulations, which altered their structures. Elias points out that the current strictures on duration, participation, and venue resulted from all of the forces associated with the commercialization of modern life, with time control and budgeting as the most significant dimensions.
The temporal dimensions of the sports themselves came to be experienced in the context of the temporal practices of spectators, as time for watching sporting events expanded with changes in the structures of work and leisure. In the earlier part of this century, sports had their seasons, and spectators came to associate their trips to various arenas or ballparks with the time of year as well as with the leisure time of the weekend.
The weekend, as a structuring time of experience, however, is a relatively recent invention. Parallel to a history of the sportization of pastimes is the historical production of the sporting spectator, who emerged as the result of two historic victories. The first was the victory of secular authorities over church authorities. Over approximately three centuries, Puritanism and other religious pressures to preserve non-working times for religious observance lost out to the pressures from political leaders, entrepreneurs, and the population at large, to produce a weekend in which leisure and sporting activities and spectatorship became dominant.33 But the weekend itself could only achieve its temporal specificity as leisure as a result of the second kind of victory, the historic victory of labor to shorten the working week. In sum, "although play and games have been part of every known society, leisure institutions as a segregated part of life available to the masses required a change in both organizational and cultural values."34
Without dwelling on all of the recent changes associated with the commercialization of sport and the proliferation of the various commodities - both things and persons associated with this stage - the role of media has to be considered as primary. Two analysts of the sport media relationship make this point unequivocally:
The single most dominant influence on the way sport is experienced in American society is that of the mass media, particularly television.35
Recalling Ray Agnew's (slowly) hurtling body, one might say that for a relatively brief moment, he had the game under control. But if Lever and Wheeler's attribution about the dominance of television in the production of the sporting experience is correct, the issue of Agnew's control over the game and indeed over his own moving body at other moments becomes more complex.
It is certainly the case that the televisualization of professional sports has displaced other forms institutional control over non-work time. It was a sign of the times, for example, that ESPN's advertisement for its Sunday football game (in the 1980's) showed Oakland Raiders corner back, Lester Haynes, kneeling in a prayerful pose in the Los Angeles Coliseum and accompanied the image with the lines: "Join our Congregation every Sunday for an inspirational experience."
The ad plays with an interesting anachronism. The "Congregation" will not physically congregate in church or at the game; it consists rather of remote viewers watching, for the most part, within the confines of their separate dwellings. And of course, the substitution of sports viewing for church attendance (as well as live stadium attendance) has economic correlates. The secularization of formerly religiously affiliated colleges has led, among other things, to more influence over the symbolism of the schools by sport shoe manufacturers than by denominational religious leaders.
The influence of sports clothing manufacturers is of course closely tied to the media-college sports relationship. At the college level, the importance of revenues from television has skewed athletic programs toward a heavy emphasis on athletic recruitment and has altered the goals of the sports program. A "winning season" must include post-season participation; the success of a collegiate sports program requires the chance of a post-season appearance in a bowl or tournament. A college team must be "bowl bound" to be "telegenic" and thereby be able to raise the revenues to have their program remain competitive,36 hence their susceptibility to inducements to exclusive sports clothing and shoe contracts. The media-related economic forces behind sports publicity have a more pervasive effect than the older forms of social publicity, religious and political, that participated in shaping the social body.
If we go back to the Kantian model of experience outlined above, we can recognize that the ultimate stage, that of publicity, must be understood differently from what is implied in Kant's notion of expanding, shared cognition. The conditions of possibility for publicity, involve a complex organization of space, time, economic value, and, ultimately, social meaning that shapes the prior stages of how events are experienced at the level of cognition. The "matter," which involves hurtling bodies, and the more immediate consequences of the bodies in motion - what counts as a valuable contribution - are significantly affected by the structures of publicity.
Games like football and basketball, for example, have changed their rules to hold the interest of present and remote spectators. And unregulated moves in the game by players are affected by the future publicity of the game. For example, one professional basketball player, Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls, when asked, during a post-game interview, why he had not contested an opponent's slam dunk, responded that he did not want his futile defensive gesture to be a post-game highlight.
At that moment, Pippen, a black athlete, functioning in a media-inspired, commercial environment, had seized momentary control over his value by controlling his movements. Similarly, as Giant's tackle, Ray Agnew, also a black athlete, hurtled toward the end zone, his movement and the value that would result, was under his control, even though the ultimate value of the experience, which would include its potential for post-game exposure, was not. The compelling value questions are therefore condensed in Ray Agnew's run. How are the power-implications of the time-value relationship, immanent in moving black athletic bodies, to be mapped, and, further, how does an approach to this question help us understand, more generally, now-time?
To approach these questions we must first broaden our gaze so that it takes in what precedes as well as what follows from a particular set of movements. More specifically, to appreciate more critically the relationship between moving black bodies and value, one must extend the game not only into its futurity in media reproductions but backwards into the dynamics of recruitment. We must analyze the motions produced by the search for "black gold"37 being mined by the sports establishment, from high school to professional levels. Recognizing that the value of the black athlete extends from the games and their media representations to the marketing of game related products - Michael Jordan is arguably the most globally recognized marketing icon as well as athlete38 - we must pursue the implications for how various forces that feed off games also participate in inducing movement and producing containment of moving black bodies in the process of collecting them.
Viewed from the perspective of potential professional athletes, the temptation to dream of a professional athletic career, no matter how the odds are stacked against success, is obvious. Given the enormous gap between black social mobility in general and the relative successes of black athletes in sports, the dream of a successful athletic career energizes the sporting play of many young black males in the poor neighborhoods of U.S. cities. Athletic success is seen as a "last shot,"39 as a way out. The affects of those dreams, the mobilization of black bodies that they evince, are portrayed in Steve James, Feeder Marx and Peter Gilbert's film version (1994), and (Ben Joravsky's subsequent book version, 1995) of Hoop Dreams, which follows the high school basketball careers of Arthur Agee and William Gates, two gifted players from a Chicago housing project. The emphasis here is on the film rather than the book version of the story because in important respects, the cinematic practice - the assemblage of camera shots in Hoop Dreams - captures both the motion requirements of the game of basketball and the social mobility requirements for althletic and monetary success imposed on Arthur and William, the primary personae of the docudrama. To understand how cinematic practice relates to such motions, however, we must preface a consideration of the film with a treatment of the intimate relationship between cinematic time/movement and modernity. This requires a consideration of another gloss on Kant, that of Gilles Deleuze.
The Deleuzian Gloss

Like Foucault, Deleuze extracts himself from Kant patiently, giving him his due at each juncture. From the point of view of the problematic of temporality, Deleuze recognizes that Kant's contribution, beyond introducing a more productive I/subject, involves the introduction of "time into thought."40 Because for Kant, time is not intrinsic to the world but rather to the productive understanding, Deleuze credits him with supplying a resistance to a progressive model of history. Understanding is a constitutive event not a form of recognition of events that preexist the modalities of their conceptual capture.
But Deleuze finds it necessary not only to depart from the Kantian formalism, where time is intrinsic to a universalizing mental faculty, but also from the Kantian emphasis on productive understanding as a mode of representation. For Deleuze, one constitutes events politically not merely cognitively. Elaborating on the necessity for leaving Kant's (and empiricism's) emphasis on epistemology behind, Deleuze notes:
We must then break with the long habit of thought which forces us to consider the problematic as a subjective category of our knowledge or as an empirical moment which would indicate only the imperfection of our method and the unhappy necessity for us not to know ahead of time - a necessity which would disappear once we acquire knowledge.41
Events have no determined actuality for Deleuze; they are formed neither in the world nor by structures of subjectivity. Rather, events have a virtual structure that is never captured in any particular determination.42 Because they offer no natural points of division, they emerge as a result of an imposition. But what is involved in those impositions in which the actual of the event emerges? It is not, as Kant would have it, the imposition of a universalizing intellect. Rather, it is the imposition of what Deleuze and Guattari call "order-words."43 Temporally, at the level of the virtual, the event is continuous. Bodies, for example, grow old. But for a given actualization of the body, there must be specific impositions, expressed in such order-words as: "you are no longer a child."44
Whereas Kant supplies a universalizing, cognitive status to the ordering faculty or intellect, Deleuze's ordering words should be understood normatively rather than cognitively; they function within a pragmatics and politics of language.45 To resist a cognitive rendering of the temporality of events-as-actualizations is to resist "dogmatism." But Deleuze's resistance to dogmatism is different from Kant's. The dogmatic image of thought, according to Deleuze, is the very idea that "thought has an affinity with the true."46 Thought for Deleuze is not aimed toward a Kantian sensus communis; it is aimed, rather, at achieving an uncommon sense. It does not seek "the truth" but seeks instead to provide vehicles for experiencing the world differently. Accordingly, thought expresses events rather than representing them. Deleuze rejects a commitment to the epistemic authority of common sense because it rests on the presupposition that "thought is the natural exercise of a faculty," which has an "affinity with the true" if we assume "good will on the part of the thinker and an upright nature on the part of thought."47 Deleuze regards this exercise of "common sense" as recognition rather than thought;48 it, along with "good sense" (the contribution of faculties) constitute the doxa, the unreflected upon acceptance of the world of actualities that exist in everyday, banal discourses.
As a critical enterprise, then, Deleuzian "thought," insofar as it resists representation and mere recognition ("common sense"), supplies an uncommon sense. By supplying resistant conceptualizations, it situates us in a place to both map and treat critically the current forces shaping relations of time and value.49 The question becomes one of the vehicles for the production of thinking-as-uncommon-sense. Among the places toward which Deleuze turns for critical thought vehicles is cinema, which, it in its modern realization, is a mode of articulation that thinks the politics of time and value. It is a critical and disruptive thought enterprise rather than a mechanism of representation that unreflectively participates in the production of a sensus communis.
Stills and Movement Images

As cinema evolved, the mobile camera ultimately led, as Deleuze notes, to the "emancipation of the viewpoint," and, most significantly, to a privileging of time over space. With the use of montage, the assemblage of camera shots: "The shot would then stop being a spatial category and become a temporal one."50 In Deleuze's neo-Kantianisms, then, experiencing events critically in the present is afforded not the exercise of a faculty of judgment, which can integrate the domains controlled by disparate cognitive faculties, but by a cinematic apparatus. Deleuze notes that whereas the meaning of movement in antiquity involved the idea of transition - "movement refers to intelligible elements, Forms or Ideas which are themselves eternal or immobile"51 - modernity is an epoch without privileged instants. Movement is understood as a matter of assembling "any-instant- whatever,"52 and contemporary cinema enacts modernity's construction of time and movement; it is "the system which produces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as a function of equidistant instants, selected so as to create an impression of continuity."53
The modern cinema has discovered that the "time image" constitutes a way of reading events that is more critical than mere perception.54 As long as the camera merely followed action, the image of time was indirect, presented as a consequence of motion. But the new "camera consciousness" is no longer defined by the movements it is able to follow. This consciousness, articulated through modern cinema, has become sensitive to a model of time that is more critical than what such a derivative model supplies. Now, "even when it is mobile, the camera is no longer content to follow the character's movement.."55 It employs the time image to think about the time and value of the present.
The homology, which Deleuze posits between cinematic practice and our (critically thoughtful) experience of time-movement of the present - "thinking in cinema through cinema"56 - is best observed when we distance ourselves from the present both historically and cinematically, the former to make the present peculiar and the latter to observe how a time-sensitive, camera consciousness can render any period critically. We need, therefore, to find a more static historical epoch and to analyze a cinematic practice capable of capturing it.
For this purpose, Stanley Kubrick's film version of Thackerey's Barry Lyndon is exemplary. Historically, the action unfolds within a static socio-political culture, the "estate space" of English aristocracy in the eighteenth century, a time in which the order was almost wholly ascriptive in structure and thought to be a creation of divine will.57 Various mechanisms were in place to defeat attempts to alter or penetrate that order. And, to complete this contrast, Kubrick is cinematically sensitive to the fixity of the eighteenth century order. He frequently immobilizes his camera. Moreover, he explicitly acknowledges his understanding of the social-cinematic homology by referring to his cinematographer (in the credits) as a photographer.
Barry Lyndon

William Makepiece Thackerey's The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. derives much of its critical edge from the narrative voice of its protagonist. The tale that Barry Lyndon tells does not ring true. As a result, the readers are drawn into a critical reflection on the boundary between truth and fiction. The novel makes problematic the interrelationship of text and reader while, at the same time, satirizing the seriousness with which one would-be social climber takes the value of heritage or pedigree. Written a century after its subject matter, the tale seems more directed toward illuminating the ambiguities of telling tales and distinguishing the telling from history than toward illuminating a particular historical period.58
In Kubrick's film version, "the power of the false"59 is also enlisted but in the service of a different aim. The protagonist's voice is displaced from narrative control by one of Barry Lyndon's contemporaries, and more importantly, the oral text is superceded by the visual, filmic text. The film viewers are not subjected to an unreliable narrator. Rather, they experience what Deleuze calls a "crystalline regime," which he juxtaposes to an organic one.60 In organic film narration, the objects of filmic description are assumed to be independent. The camera simply follows the action. Organic narration is therefore "truthful narration," even if it follows the action of a fictional story.61
In contrast, in crystalline film narration, the filmic description creates its objects. Chronological time - that which is imposed by following the actors - is displaced by "non-chronological time," and movements, which are "necessarily 'abnormal' are "essentially false."62 The experience created, in short, is a function of the ensemble of camera shots. Instead of composing movement images to treat the tensions explicitly acknowledged by the actors, the camera creates time images that respond to the critical thinking of the cinematic apparatus rather than the particular awarenesses of the actors.
More specifically, constructed in the modern period, Kubrick's camera work renders the eighteenth century from the point of view of now-time; the implied comparison strongly suggests that while modernity is cinematic, the eighteenth century was more painterly or photographic, that modernity is to the eighteenth century as the film genre is to those of painting and photography.
Frank Cossa has provided supporting insights to such a comparison, discerning the pervasiveness of art-historical referents of eighteenth century life in the film:
Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson)...is dressed and coiffed like the ladies in Gainsborough portraits...the famous candlelit interiors in the film resemble those of Joseph Wright of Derby...The crystal grey tonalities in many of the daylight interiors call to mind the genre paintings of both Chardin and Greuze [and] when a groom trots out a horse that Barry (Ryan O'Neal) will buy for his son, groom and horse strike a pose reminiscent of George Stubbs' portraits of famous racehorses of the day.63
Insofar as Kubrick is establishing a homology between technologies of representation and modalities of sociability, it is inapposite to complain, as one reviewer did, that Barry Lyndon is "a triumph of technique over any human content."64 It is the case, rather, that Kubrick's filmic technique constitutes the content. The deceptions of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon are less significant than the aristocratic practices of time and space that are revealed as Redmond Barry, an Irishman with a questionable pedigree, attempts to insinuate himself in English estate society.
That society is presented, through the camera work, in terms of its forms and slow, ritualistic pacing. Even the battle scenes, which on the basis of body count are very bloody, come across as rigidly organized death rituals. What one observes is a society that preserves its static structures of privilege by absorbing and defeating movement. And Kubrick's camera articulates this stasis as the film explores, with framing and zoom shots, massed armies, large estates, ornate interiors, and wall paintings, capturing them with a series of tableaux vivants. Through the ensemble of shots, the animate is continually overmastered by the inanimate.
The estates in Barry Lyndon are shot frontally; they are made to appear as they do in eighteenth century engravings. Pedigree is represented through various still portraits. And in the midst of the stasis and restraint of the eighteenth century English society, an ambitious Barry Lyndon tries to move in and upward, aiming to achieve an aristocratic status. His failure "to acquire aristocratic restraint,"65 ultimately defeats him. Unable to manage the slow, ritualistic decorum of the society to which he seeks admission, Barry Lyndon is finally stopped by a bullet in a duel. He could have shot his adversary, Lord Bullington, but is shot himself and ultimately is immobilized, for he loses a leg.
All of the structural elements leading to Barry Lyndon's failure are captured cinematographically. Most of the shots are taken with a static camera. While the framed shots and zooms are wholly appropriate for representing the stasis of the social order, even the use of montage reflects a lack of motion in that order. Rather than conveying action in the form of movement through time, montage in Barry Lyndon is referential.66
Dueling scenes occur at the beginning and end of the film, the latter recalling the former. Highly stylized scenes of kissing and embracing at many points throughout the film, more than a dozen of which involve Barry Lyndon, have the effect of demonstrating the perserverance of ceremonial forms rather than the social progress of the protagonist. Although Barry Lyndon does manage to rise up the social ladder for a while, his inability to adopt the correct forms leads to his fall. He does not fit correctly within the frames of his century, and this is represented figuratively in a scene in which the film-as-still-pictures focuses on Barry Lyndon's attempt to acquire pictures (at exorbitant prices according to the voice over narration). As Barry Lyndon ambles slowly through a room with many elegantly framed paintings, the room, containing an ensemble of stills, seems to reflect the spatio-temporal zone, English estate society, in which he is striving for a peerage.
It is made clear, moreover, that in the eighteenth century world, money alone will not produce the desired status movement. Movement and time are ordered by a moral economy that helps preserve the connection between birth and fortune. Nothing testifies better to this static arrangement than a scene in which the aristocratic Bullington family, into which Barry Lyndon has married, is going over its accounts. Seated with them is their friend and confidante, the Reverent Runt, who is beside Lady Lyndon along with Lord Bullington, Barry's stepson, the rightful heir, while she signs her bills in a tableau vivant, captured by a still camera.
Kubrick's immobilized camera does not, however, immobilize thought. It participates in providing a politics of time. For example, the frequent resort to a depth of field shot - shots in which current action is unfolding in front of enduring residences, ancestral paintings, and managed estate grounds - has the effect of showing those things that have time on their side as the more effectual background against which the mere striving-motion of a Barry Lyndon is futile.67 More generally, as Deleuze points out, even when a shot remains immobile, it can fracture the illusion that space is wholly separate from time, a mere container of actions and the illusion that time simply chronologically records the process of evoking and resolving the tensions, which are explicitly acknowledged by those who participate in them.68 The camera has access to what the characters do not: a thinking of time not in terms of its derivation from the chronology of action but in terms of the juxtapositions necessary to render problematic the forces at work and the intersections of those forces as they emanate from different layers in time.69
Hoop Dreams

In contrast with the filmic technique in Barry Lyndon, Hoop Dreams contains a majority of tracking shots as the viewer watches the attempts of Arthur Agee and William Gates to use their basketball skills to escape from their impoverished housing project and realize their shared dream of playing professional basketball. Speed rather than restraint and decorum are demanded of them, but to appreciate the prescribed movement they must achieve to realize their goals, we have to be attentive not only to their particular biographies, on which the film focuses, but also to the movement demands of modernity in general. The opening shots, while the credits are run, show the rapid motion demands of the present. Chicago's moving traffic - trains, cars, trucks and buses - crisscross our view of the city
The movement of vehicles with which the film begins is the beginning of a camera consciousness that operates throughout HoopDreams to provide a gloss on the politics of the collection of black bodies for professional sports. Although the camera consciousness deployed in Hoop Dreams is very different from its realization in Barry Lyndon, it nevertheless supplies a politicized reading of contemporary time-value relationships. What must be understood to situate this reading is that power manifests itself differently in the twentieth century from the way it did in the eighteenth. Since the French Revolution, the structures of domination have changed their modalities.
If we note that the French revolution was the most dramatic assault on the aristocracy's management of the stasis governing the European society of the eighteenth century, Paul Virilio's gloss on the events beginning in 1789 become especially appropriate. He asserts that the revolution, far from ending subjection in general, was rather a revolution against the "constraint to immobility."70 Thereafter, with the birth of the modern state, the "freedom of movement"71 of the early days of the revolution had been turned, by the exercise of state power, to an "obligation to mobility,"72 as the state involved itself in, among other things, the recruitment and mobilization of a citizen army.
Subsequently, of course, commercial forces have been at least as involved in the mobilization of bodies as the state and certainly more so in the case of the movement that nourishes sporting franchises. What must be added to this picture of mobilization, however, are the moving frames within which the movements constituting modernity are witnessed; the motion of the sporting bodies - from recruitment to performance and subsequent publicity - must be understood in the context of the way that motion is apprehended through modern media. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who observed the early, photographic stages of the cinematic society, conveniently glossed modernity-as-experience in an idiom that summons Kant's categories but revises the relationship between the form-imposing faculties and the matter they apprehend:
Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mold on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.73
As Holmes understood, "modernity" is a new kind of structure of experience. The modern city, as a venue of hyper-stimuli, places pressures on the Kantian reliance on faculties that tend toward a universal common sense. Jonathan Crary seconds this observation, noting, "since Kant...part of the epistemological dilemma of modernity has been about the human capacity for synthesis amid fragmentation and atomization of a cognitive field.74 But here, Crary renders the issue too much in Kantian terms. Rather than assuming that experience is formed and contained by a cognitive capacity, we must recognize (as Crary does in other parts of his analysis) the extent to which "experience" is owed to technologies of representation and reproduction.
Whatever the relative contributions of human cognition and technology-induced forms in the constitution of experience, there is a strong homology between the structure of filmic representation and modern life. No one has recognized this homology more profoundly than Walter Benjamin: "The film," he stated, "corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus - changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen."75
With Benjamin's, insight in mind, we can better appreciate the contemporary experience of sports, both from the point of view of those seeking entry into the rewards of playing for a high level of remuneration and those who watch games and enact their connection with them by buying sports shoes and clothing. Benjamin recognized that as exhibition value displaces ritual value in a variety of contexts, 76 market value intervenes and wrests control over the meaning of a performance, whether it is enacted in a feature film or a sporting contest.77
We are now in a position to locate the value deriving from what Virilio called the modernity's "obligation to mobility" as it applies to Arthur Agee and William Gates in Hoop Dreams. At a minimum, the contemporary demands on mobility and the correlative demands on "apperceptive apparatuses" are so familiar to us, it is easy to miss the extent to which Hoop Dreams captures the modern experience of sports more with its camera work than with its storyline.
At a thematic level, the story has a familiar theme. Arthur and William see their basketball skills as their opportunity to be part of the American dream; they hope to make it all the way into the status of professionals, as players in the National Basketball Association (NBA). And because a black recruiter, with contacts in a white private high school with big time basketball aspirations, has a similar view of their skills, they end up enrolling in the school.
The film is, among other things, an ethnography of both the venues in which they reside and those they must traverse in their quest. It effectively maps the spaces and living relationships in their impoverished black neighborhood, in white suburbia, and in the competitive basketball venues of high schools and colleges, which all participate in the structural recruitment of black athletes.78
Arthur and William must move rapidly, not only on the basketball court but also in the process of moving through discordant social spaces. The normalizing pressures that exist within their black neighborhoods, for example, are quite different from those that structure performances in the white high school they attend after being recruited for their basketball skills.79 This structural story, told by the camera, can be missed if one simply follows the drama associated with Arthur and William's attempts to achieve the status of professional basketball players.
For example, Jillian Sandell's highly politicized reading of the film fails to appreciate how it works, because the reading is wholly thematic. The problem of neglecting filmic form surfaces early in an otherwise effective gloss of the story:
Spotted by talent scouts when they are 14, Arthur and William are offered scholarships to attend St. Joseph's College - a predominantly white, Catholic private school in suburban Westchester and the alma mater of Detroit Pistons' star, Isaiah Thomas...the central conceit of Hoop Dreams is whether Arthur and/or William will become "the next Isaiah Thomas." Both boys must get up at 5:30 A.M. to make the three-hour round trip to St Joseph's...and this is a testament to the work ethic and sense of sacrifice that the film valorizes.80
Sandell may be correct that the pleasure the film delivers to white audiences derives from their witnessing of a story about two young African Americans seeking a piece of the American dream, but in addition to the "organic narrative," which follows the striving of Arthur and William, is the "crystalline narrative" assembled by the various camera shots. Sandell neglects this narrative because her focus is on representational space rather than cinematically-thought time. She notes that the black urban experience provides a space for film-makers to treat issues of cultural life in the ghetto,81 for example, but fails to treat the way the mobile camera renders movements through space and provides a critical, non chronological view of time. By cutting from the time of basketball games, to the temporalities of family life, to the temporalities of the educational process, and emphasizing both conjunctures and disjunctions, the camera consciousness in Hoop Dreams "invents," in Deleuze's terms, a "transverse continuity of communication" between different temporal layers.82 Rather than merely representing a sequence of events, the film seizes Arthur's and William's experiences and connects them to a politics and ethics of modernity. While it shows spaces and bodies, it thinks time and value.
The film can therefore be seen as an effective event when it is thought of as rendering aspects of mobility rather than merely exploring spaces. If we follow the camera, particularly its tracking shots and its cuts and juxtapositions (montage), we learn that success is denied to Arthur and William because they cannot move fast enough. On the one hand, the American dream, reflected through the promotion of a narrative about playing your way into the NBA, produces an incitement to mobility, but on the other, their need to move rapidly through discordant social spaces obviates the realization of that dream. There is the travel time required to get to St Joseph's; there is the difficulty of learning the kind of articulations demanded in the classroom and on the court in dealing with white culture; and there are the academic demands on young men without cultural capital. Their progress is impeded by these barriers to rapid motion.
Arthur is also frustrated by his biological clock; he fails to grow rapidly enough to impress St. Joseph's coach, and ultimately his scholarship is cut to the point where he must drop out of the school. Afterwards, he manages to move rapidly enough through academic space in the city school and on the court to push his inner city, predominantly black high school to the finals of the state championships, but all his rapid motion on the court is ultimately inadequate because he as unable to achieve the social mobility necessary to place him in a more visible trajectory through the sporting establishment.
The fate of William Gates, who appears more promising to the white basketball establishment at St. Joseph's, bears a striking resemblance to the fate of Barry Lyndon. William manages to stay at St. Joseph's and is recruited by Marquette University, a traditional major college basketball power, but he is ultimately defeated because a knee injury slows him down. Barry Lyndon's loss of his leg is symbolic. His immobility reflects the immobility of the aristocratic structure. After his moving fails to penetrate the stasis of eighteenth century English society, his final immobility is ironic and allegorical.
Williams loss of mobility handicaps him in the race to achieve an NBA level of playing ability. But he shows just enough promise to acquire help from the white establishment in moving over the academic hurdles, so that he manages to qualify for a basketball scholarship. William can move well enough to constitute "black gold" - to be a potential resource in the marketing of a basketball program - but the potential is never realized.
Most significantly, the narrative conveyed by the cinematic practice does not at all valorize the "American dream." The framing shots in Barry Lyndon are to the structure of power and authority in the eighteenth century as the tracking shots in Hoop Dreams are to that structure in modernity. Barry Lyndon, the marginal Irishman without pedigree, is defeated by stasis, while the marginal black would-be basketball stars, Arthur and William, without cultural and economic capital, are defeated by their inability to get up to speed in modernity's implacable "obligation to mobility."
Finally, in terms of the comparison of the filmic thoughts about the respective centuries, while the montage effects in Barry Lyndon are referential, serving to underscore the perseverance of static structures, the montage effects in Hoop Dreams provide a lesson in the political economy modern sports. The rapid cut from Arthur watching professional basketball on television to Arthur on the playground, seeking to enact the movement himself, shows, for example, the way the exhibition of sports mobilizes a would-be star. And equally significant, is the cut from scenes of playing basketball and watching basketball to one of the most telling scenes in the film: the camera suddenly captures a group of young black males walking down the street in new, expensive basketball shoes.
The mobility of exemplary stars on the court is ultimately realized in the movement of sporting goods. Some of the "black gold" turns out to be located in a different mine; it is the one holding consumers, the young black males who enact their dreams symbolically by buying clothes and shoes. Indeed, the political economy of "black gold" is shown through montage pervasively. In stark comparison with the moral economy of eighteenth century life, where a priest helps preside over the account books, is the use of a machine calculator on the desk of St Joseph's fiscal officer. When Arthur and his parents revisit the school to get his transcript released, the fiscal officer recalculates their payment schedule and suggests that they must make some payments on the new schedule to show "good faith," where economic "good faith" is strictly a budgeting concept.
Ultimately, by resisting a simple thematic reading of Hoop Dreams and lodging it instead in a comparison of the temporal practices of different ages, it becomes an important event. It reminds us not only of the extent to which modern life can be critically rendered cinematically but also the extent to which the contemporary experience of sports relies in part on the exploitation of moving black bodies.83 The philosophy of concepts guiding the comparison therefore lands us in the midst of a politics of now-time. As Deleuze and Guattari have put it, "what philosophy achieves when it extracts events from the clashes of bodies and things is the 'counter-effectuation' of the event."84 Ray Agnew's run therefore changes from an mere sports news item to a politicized event within a conceptual terrain that allows us to ask what is different about today. We are able to note that the contemporary experience of sports is, among other things, reflected in moving black bodies - on playing fields, in the social order, and in the streets (clothed and shod in sports-logo apparel). Those motions represent an important aspect of contemporary power: an imposition of an "obligation to mobility."

University of Hawai'i

Michael Shapiro is professor of political science at the University of Hawaii. Among other books, he has authored The Politics of Representation, Reading the Postmodern Polity, andViolent Cartographies, which is reviewed in this issue ofTheory&Event.