Skateboarding as a Commodity recap
I will begin this post with a mini recap of the points I made in the previous post, perhaps a good way to touch on ground already covered and lay the groundwork for my further analysis of skateboarding culture. I began the first post talking about the culture of skateboarding and how the capitalistic machine has repackaged and commodified the concept of pain. I then closely examined my reason for picking up skateboarding, realising (somewhat embarrassingly) that it was a result of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s definition of ‘culture industry’ products and the perceived ‘symbolic value’ (Baudrillard, 1993) that I would attain. I touched briefly on the consumption of “in-house” skate videos (perhaps too briefly, thus it being more closely examined in this post) and subsequently mainstream media’s creation of the skateboarding “hero”, resulting in increasing commodification of the pro skateboarder’s body. I concluded the first post with a heavy heart, that of the lost exclusivity of skateboarding and of my waning passion for it.
It has been approximately 3 months since my initial analysis and since then I have had the chance to engage with numerous screen texts (most of which were foreign to me) and abstract philosophical concepts (even more foreign to me!), some of which you will see interpreted in this essay, in my own special way. Just as skateboarding is the culmination of many different influences (rollerskating mechanics, surfing culture, urban punk culture etc), this post will draw on a variety of concepts, influences and media forms; some of which are directly related to skateboarding, others as remotely related as the Queen of England is to skateboarding (Hey! It’s the Queen’s birthday week so its only fair that she’s in my thoughts). This blog post hopes to address issues that were left outstanding from the first blog post and to explore new territories and ways of thinking about skateboarding and sick culture.
Screen machine and “screen machine conditioning”
It was after my first viewing of the hit US TV series The Sopranos that engaged me with the concepts of the power of the screen machine. The success of The Sopranos can perhaps be attributed to the fact that the genre of gangster movies is a well-established one. We see it in the movies and on the television. Viewers know what to expect from the social group known as the mafia, growing accustomed to the mass killing screen narratives on screen, often re-enacted in real life. This is what I call ‘screen machine conditioning’, the conditioning of the viewer to these characters to such a degree that we no longer bat an eyelid to such actions in reel or real life.
It also seems as if, in our eyes and theirs, family/historical background gives them an excuse for their actions. It has resulted in a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a social group feel like they have to behave like how they are represented on screen. I would argue that this has occurred in the case of skateboarding, especially considering the impressionable youth demographics of the sport. In skate videos, antagonising security, undesirable alcohol consumption and rowdy behaviour are routine occurrences. These occurrences seem to authenticate the skate video and in fact are often used in skate video trailers as a “seal” of authenticity.
Birdhouse’s “The Beginning” Trailer
Over the past 9 years, I have recorded some mini skateboarding clips of myself. After I showcased the videoclip of my skateboard accident in the previous post, I was asked, “Why film yourself skateboarding? Does it change your consumption of the activity?” This made me reflect on the impact a video camera had on myself, and perhaps can go some way into understanding the reasons for the (often outrageous/exaggerated) actions of skateboarders in their skate videos.
With a video camera around, Foucault’s notion of the ‘panopticon’ model as a self-disciplinary mechanism is easily invoked (Foucault, 1975), resulting in self-filtering and censorship. However, it is now important to see his concept of panopticism as it ‘functions in a culture that is inundated with technologies of seeing…surveillance as vista, as entertainment, as global spectacle rather than surveillance in a disciplinary regime’ (Murphy, 2000: 177). Knowing that his “performance” (or lack thereof) will be watched by the thousands who view the video, the skateboarder often acts out to the camera. The concept of ‘self-commodification’, the ‘selling or promotion of the self’ (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006: 184) is manipulated, each skateboarder trying to make an impression or emanate a certain style within his 5-10mins of video fame.
These skate videos belong to unique category of screen texts that I will term “screen emulation”. These are non-instructional screen texts, but yet they spur viewers with the necessary technical understanding (flicks of the foot, the subtle shifts of bodyweight on the board, etc) to try and emulate these actions. The rest, the “mainstream” who don’t understand these technicalities, just enjoys the spectacle (and perhaps emulate arguably non-essential things like the fashion).
To skateboarders, these athletes are their heroes, a model after which they would like to emulate. Thus skateboarding videos can be seen to be functioning as ‘desiring machines’, their creation and consumption a series of processes that flow into each other resulting in never-ending ‘binary machinery’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 5); the skateboarder pro and the company, the company and its customers, the customers and the skateboarder pro, the customers becoming the skateboarder pro, like the chicken and the egg.
Subjectivity production
The technical aspects of skateboarding videos are also crucial in the formation of skateboarding culture’s subjectivity. The usage of the “Fisheye” extreme wide-angle lens is prevalent in skate videos, allowing for the exaggeration of height and distance.
It also allows the focus to be on the skateboarding action, but at the same time (due to the extreme wide angle of the lens) giving us visuals of the surroundings, a visual framework in which we can set the scene. This is crucial as skate videos are often nothing more than a patchwork of hundreds of 3 to 20 second video clips, filmed in a broad range of locations. To the uninitiated, it can seem disorienting.
Another important, but often overlooked, aspect of analysis is the choice of music in a skate video. Each song is carefully chosen (by the skateboarder or video editor) to best represent the featured skateboarder’s personality or frame of mind. The choice of song can make or break a video part, setting the mood and theme of the video segment, akin to that of TV serial music selections [see here for a detailed listing of skateboard videos and song titles].
In 2003, pro skateboarder P.J. Ladd’s skate video part, “Silence is Golden”, in Flip Skateboard’s “Really Sorry” video defied conventions (Bowman, 2003). It was the first pro skateboard video part to not have any music, consisting only of natural atmospheric sounds; that of urethane on concrete and wood against metal.
P.J. Ladd’s “Silence is Golden”
“amazing skill. i love how you can hear the board hit his feet before he lands. just the audio gives me wood!”
- YouTube comment from “thejetski88” (YouTube, 2008.)
The lack of a music base drew attention to sounds that might have otherwise been masked by music, bringing a new dimension to the soundscape. Ironically, it has been deterritorialised and subsequently reterritorialised (more on deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation later in this essay) by fans with the addition of their choice of music. This DIY ethic comes from what Henry Jenkins would term ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins, 2006), the gradual breakdown of traditional notions of production and consumption. By editing music into the video, it is an attempt at showcasing their interpretation of the screen text and of the skateboarder. The skateboarder, via the aural alteration of his commodified video image, is now re-interpreted and portrayed as a hip-hop loving gangster skater, an indie emo skater or a hardcore heavy metal skater. A plethora of these user edited P.J. Ladd skate video clips have been uploaded onto video sharing websites like YouTube.
The consumption of skateboarding videos has to be re-conceptualised to reflect current popular (and often copyright infringing) modes of consumption. Skate videos are originally conceived as DVD products (preceded by VHS Tapes), sold in skateboarding or video shops, part of the commoditisation of pain to sell commercial products. In recent times, this mode of consumption has changed, DVDs increasingly being ripped and distributed via torrent websites or uploaded onto the Internet. This has disrupted the flows of the skateboarding machine, resulting in new “becomings” and unintended avenues of sociability and interactivity with the content. I would argue that unlike serial TV screen texts, in which viewership and the ability to sell advertising space is paramount, skate videos exist for the sole purpose of building brand image and awareness. These alternative modes of distribution actually add value to the content by bringing it to a wider audience that would otherwise not be able to afford or gain access to it. The very fact that someone took the effort to rip and upload the video also speaks positively about it.
Deterritorialisation & Reterritorialisation
While I have examined the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of on-screen skateboarder bodies by fans, it is now important to look at venues of skateboarding activity as physical spaces that constantly change in meaning. Are street skate spots venues of productive capitalism that have been deterritorialised and as it is ‘inseparable from correlative reterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:509), instantly reterritorialised thus gaining new meanings and identities?
Perhaps these places are merely ‘No-where places’ (Caronia, 2005: 97), places with no significant meaning in the narrative of everyday life and just form part of the journey. The staircases that lead to an office building, the open space of a public park, a handrail outside a shopping mall or a ledge outside a housing residence, none of which contribute directly to capital production, but all claimed (by the authorities or owners) as part of the capital machine.
[Photo Credit: Ben Kelly - Skateboarding.com][Photo Text: Brendan Ang]
In fact, one can argue that skateboarders open up our eyes to new functionalities of architecture. It becomes an instrument, the ‘role of the architecture changes into that of an ally’ (Kuttler, 2007: 124). Perhaps, it can make the locality more productive then it ever was. ‘Skateboarding shows that pre-existing uses of space are not the only possible ones, that architecture can instead be productive of things, and consumed by activities, which are not explicitly commodified’ (Borden, 2001: 247). For an extraordinary example, one can look at the battle for territory at Philadelphia’s Love Park, one of the most famous street skateboarding spots in the world.
But as the example of Love Park will show, the concept of sick culture can never truly be accepted as part of the mainstream. Challenges mount everyday, skate stoppers, security and (gasp!) even the sprouting of skateparks being seen as a form of regulation; the ‘construction of these parks is therefore seen as a control measure for these deviant bodies, no longer in public view’ (Macdonald, 2005: 111), enforcing Foucault’s (1977) notion that ‘discipline sometimes requires enclosure’.
An increasing trend is that of actual popular street skate sports being reterritorialised as video game locations, carefully recreated ledge for ledge, rail for rail. The experience of engaging in an environment, albeit a virtual one, has been turned into a commodity, one that has spawned more than 15 skateboarding games over the last 10 years (Gamespy, 2008). In the gamescape, rain or shine, the wheels keep on turning.
Top: Virtual Love park in THPS [Photo Credit: thpgonline.com]
Bottom: Real photo of Love Park [Photo Credit: destination360.com]
The skateboarding virtual gamescape as a “Body without Organs”?
I propose that the virtual gamescape of Electronic Art’s Skate video game can help us think about Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘Body without Organs’ (BwO) as an open platform, one of endless possibilities and potentials. The introduction to the game is such that you are an up and coming skateboarder who has met with a horrific bus accident. You then undergo an operation to save your life, which functions as the catalyst in which the gamer can reconstruct the virtual character’s face, body shape and style.
EA Skate’s Introduction
This video game provides the ability for a gamer to throw his virtual body around in a virtual space, one that allows for free flowing of skateboard bodily expression. In the BwO, there is a ‘connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 161) Within the structured virtual world of the gamescape, is the apparent lack of physical structure, the lack of rules, the lack of fear, the lack of pain. You can not only look however you want, but with a few flicks of your fingers, can do tricks that one dare not do or is incapable of doing on a real skateboard. While in-game, notions of bravery, fearlessness and progression are crushed and replaced by our mere fantasies. Whatever it does, it keeps us consuming (corporate sponsors flood the gamescape) and the cogs of the capitalistic machine keep on churning. “Skate: If only I was this cool in RL (Real Life)” - Blog commentary contrasting Real Life with EA Skate.
A Rush of Blood to the Head
As I shared the experience of my skateboarding accident in the previous post, I was asked, “Would I do it again? Would I trade the entire experience just to feel that pre-accident rush?” Though my first thought was a resounding “YES!”, my next few thoughts were much less positive. “What if I hit my head again and this time its much more serious?” The accident had left a lasting impression on the pain aspect of my education machine; like my first visit to the dentist, my first operation, my first fall, my first scar, my first stitches and now my first head concussion, all flowing in my consciousness, affecting my physical actions and decisions.
The purest, most fearless skateboarder. Untainted. 3 year old Jake Parker.
I would do it again, but not without a safety helmet. Each pain experience seems to spawn a new necessity, in this case, the newfound necessity for safety equipment (of which there is now a burgeoning market). And so, if I now don that helmet, does it make me less hardcore? Less extreme? Since no one in skate videos wear helmets to skate the streets, won’t it make me look stupid? Why am I concerned? Should I be concerned? This is starting to mirror Guattari’s concerns of ‘widespread anxiety’ when growing up and that ‘we are all turned into children by mass media society and various apparatus producing subjectivity’ (Guattari, 1996: 68-69). Perhaps I should break free from the “boxes” that Guattari talks about, boxes that keep us conforming and ‘progressively submits[ing] to all kinds of behaviours and images’ (1996: 63).
Images of skate heroics, the necessity to embody a commodified skate aesthetic, the fantasized world of the virtual skate body and the machinic subjectivity of the over-hyped skate video screen machine. Pain is not temporary and glory is not forever. But why should that matter? It can be as complex as the sum of all its machinic parts or it can be as simple (relative) as pushing on a skateboard.
Skateboarding is everything and nothing. It is my source of pain and joy.
It is whatever I want it to be.
Yes, that is me!
[Photo Credit: Tristan Quek]
Bibliography
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