Sporting futures, beyond automation: reading Bernard Stiegler to reinvent athletic gesture

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ABSTRACT This article applies Bernard Stiegler’s critique of automation to contemporary sport. Taking up Stiegler’s thinking of technics and his theory of ‘grammatization’ as technical memory, it suggests that mass automation of cultural and psychic infrastructures can limit our potential for thinking gestures and exercises differently. Stiegler’s ‘greatly extended’ thinking of technics (applied not only to objects, but writing, cultural practices, attitudes and gestures) allows for an assessment of the technical and specialized forms sport has assumed – for the athlete, the viewer, and its wider network of influences and ‘players.’ As sporting gesture becomes reduced to conformist, repetitive acts – and expected perceptions of these acts – it exemplifies Stiegler’s concern for the disruption of human knowledge by automation. The article considers industrial sport’s turn to statistics as derivatives, models overlapping with discourses of financialization, as representative of this disruption, foreclosing the potential of gesture for invention and human becoming. This correlates with Stiegler’s critique of anthropology as a science of averages and calculative norms, and the article’s final phase discusses his ‘neganthropology,’ concluding with the proposition that a different understanding of ‘training’ can help open and maintain these negentropic futures.