Parkcour

The article "Parkour, ou 'l'art de deplacement" by Jimena Ortuzar, 2009 discusses the free-practiced art of moving through the city with the body at high speed, using fragments of the city (railings, walls, roof-tops, stairs, etc) as supports for one to jump, flip, and climb. Parkouring is the art of traversing the city in a way which defies the proposed mode of displacement. The structures of discipline and control in the city are architecture structures much like the material architecture of the city. The structures of discipline and control subscribe the individual body to a specific way of thinking, acting and therefore moving. The individual, in order to live freely, is in fact tied to the corporate body's way of living:

"Paradoxically, while Deleuze observes that the disciplinary societies of the 18th and 19th
centuries have now been replaced by societies of control (1992:3–7), traceurs [parcoureurs] employ the very disciplinary practices developed in the former and redeploy them to evade the forces of the latter. Sanford Kwinter calls these practices of discipline and control “architectures,” for they are as much imparted by the dominant order and its institutions as by the architectural structures in and through which they operate. They constitute a system of domination that imposes a blueprint upon the social field that “organizes, allies and distributes bodies, materials, movements and techniques while simultaneously controlling and developing the temporal relations between them” (2001:14).

We drive down prescribed streets in vehicles and must stop at the red lights. We must not drive to exceed a prescribed maximum speed, which to us is usually also the minimum speed. We use side walks, because we cannot walk on the road (prescribed for the vehicle) or the grass (prescribed to the landlord, but ultimately the government). These prescriptions are set, indeed to control us in order to deter choas, but in doing so also control our relations with the streets, with the sidewalks and with the grass, and others on these transient spaces. The parkourist doesn't use sidewalks, and streets to displace through the city, but flies from building to building, climbs walls, and suspends oneself from fire-escape ladders. People embody a potential. A potential energy which the power structures use to feed capital. But the parkourist uses this potential to drive a personal intention:


"While parkour asserts itself as a creative, free-flowing, expressive form, it also involves
rigorous training and the development of techniques not unlike those institutionalized by the
military and the educational apparatuses, techniques that discipline and subjugate the body
and thus hold power over it (Foucault 1977). But the practices used in parkour do not restrain
the body from moving. On the contrary, they help it move faster and more efficiently.
This aptitude, this capacity of the traceur’s trained body, exists as a potential—a potential
that in the capitalist social order means potential to produce. But potential is something not
yet real, not yet realized, not yet an actuality. This potential however, in the capitalist mode of
production is a commodity that has exchange value; it is bought and sold as labor-power. The
paradox, argues Paolo Virno, is that this potential is not separable from the actual living person.
“‘Life,’ pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of
dynamis, of mere potential” (2004:82). Thus, life—the living body—is an object to be managed
and controlled precisely because it contains the potential without which capitalism could not
exist. This potential, posits Virno, is at the core of bio-politics, and its significance lies in its
inseparability from its repository, the living body. This inseparability of body from potential is
the reason why bodies must be disciplined and administered.
However, while discipline produces docile bodies upon which capitalism maintains and
reproduces itself, it simultaneously creates a subject that, as exemplified by the parkouriste, is
able to resist or dodge the very mechanisms and structures in place to direct, distribute, and
move bodies. In fact, the term “parkour” refers to the obstacle course method parcours du
combattant, a system of physical training proposed by the French physical education theorist
Georges Hébert (1913), which became a standard military training technique. Hence, not only
is parkour’s origin of a military nature, already suggesting that it can sidestep capitalism; but
parkour also seizes the force—the potential—of the living body and redirects it away from the
grasp of capitalism. In other words, parkour actualizes this potential in a way that does not
correspond to the prevailing modes of production. "


What interests me is how the movement of the parkoureur is only possible with the architecture power structures, because without them, there would be no buildings to jump across, no railings to fling from. The architectures verticality enables the parkoureur a resistance to suspend in the air horizonally. It is the opposition of architectural control structures, and the free-spirited body which feed the continual momentum. Transient spaces, the spots where parkours move through, 'non-places' , are interesting because in these spots the individual becomes the source of subjection, as opposed to one of engagement:

"Where place is defined as relational, historical, and centered on identity, non-places are spaces
to be passed through (Augé 1995:77). These non-places, emerging out of late modernity, trans-
form the individual’s relationship to space from one of engagement to one of subjection. Indi-
vidual consciousness is thus subjected to “entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude”
producing a “solitary contractuality”—that is, a nondialectic relationship with space (93). It
is then not surprising that parkour emerged from some of the most alienating non-places in
modern urban history: the infamous Parisian suburbs, otherwise known as banlieues—enclaves
inhabited by low-income working-class whites, immigrants, and racialized groups, as well as
the unemployed. "