53.3.Ortuzar

Parkour or l'art du déplacement: A Kinetic Urban Utopia

Jimena Ortuzar

TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 53, Number 3, Fall 2009 (T203) , pp. 54-66 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

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54TDR: The Drama Review 53:3 (T203) Fall 2009. ©2009 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Parkour or l’art du déplacement

A Kinetic Urban Utopia

Jimena Ortuzar

Draw a straight line on a map […] Start at a point A and go to point B. Don’t consider the elements that are in your way—walls, fences, trees, houses, buildings—as obstacles; hug them, climb over them, jump. Let your imagination flow. You are now doing parkour.

—Urban Freeflow (2004)

What is this gesture if not the act of cutting across the horizontal lines and vertical planes of striated spaces of power? It is a move towards creating what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as “smooth space,” an act of continuous movement, speed, and variation within the striated space of the city. Smooth space comprises free-moving bodies that continuously resist and evade the forces of striated space—the site of power, work, money, and influence. In the urban milieu, smooth and striated space are in a constant tension. Striated space attempts to capture and control all flows of populations, commodities, and capital, imposing, argue Deleuze

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and Guattari, “fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movement of subjects and objects” (1987:386). Striated space is thus not opposed to movement. Rather, it wishes to control it and hence is populated not by moving bodies, but by moved bodies (386).

In the urban phenomenon of parkour, free-moving bodies in smooth space launch off rooftops, scale buildings, and clear railings and fences in what appear to be humanly impossible feats of agility and speed. Most astonishingly, moving bodies leap from building to building, over and across urban structures in gravity-defying jumps. The practitioners of this perilous activity—whose objective is to overcome obstacles in the most rapid, efficient, and free-flowing way—do not just trek the urban terrain but rather, find ways to navigate across it, to seep through it, and to glide over it.

Parkour, which is derived from the French word parcours, meaning route or journey, has flourished across urban centers around the world mainly as a result of internet forums and networks, as well as countless videos disseminated through websites and YouTube. Parkour participants, or parkouristes, tackle urban structures alone or in groups, often participating in events known as “jams.” In these sessions, parkouristes, who are also known as traceurs, charge through the city, bolting from and leaping over any obstacle in sight while following each other’s footsteps or choosing their own solitary course. While aspiring parkouristes must first master a set of specific movements with a certain level of skill and precision in order to accomplish these manifestations of flight, there are no hard-and-fast rules. Each parkouriste ultimately moves from one point to another across the city by simply doing as a traceur suggests above: letting the imagination take control.

The urban practice of parkour, also known as l’art du déplacement, tracing, and free running,1 is neither an extreme sport nor a martial art. It is not linked to a particular urban youth move-ment or underground culture. It has no points of departure or destination. It is neither governed by a fixed set of rules, nor limited by pre-established boundaries. This stubborn refusal to be defined or pinned down, and parkour’s escape from easy classification, provide a glimpse into its very nature. Parkour is perhaps best characterized as an act of fleeing, of escape; it is an act of flight. However, it is a chase with no pursuer, at least not one that is immediately evident or easily identified. Hence, the flight of parkour can be seen as an escape from the practices of power that govern our movement and regulate our behavior. In the lines of flight or deterritori-alization, parkouristes seek to destabilize the sedentary forces that constantly attempt to fix them in the “grid”—the “plane of consistency” that encompasses all multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:9).

1. Thecouplingofthesetwowordsissomewhatredundantinthesensethattheconceptofrunningalreadyseemstoimplyacertainfreedomofmovement,aqualityofunleashedenergyinherentinitsact.However,theactivityofrunninghasdevelopedintoahighlycontrolledsportwithdefinedroutes,techniques,distances,andotherrestrictions—makingthephrase“freerunning”anoxymoron.Freerunningthusliberatesrunningandturnsitintoacreativeactivitythatinvolvesnotonlyrunningbutalsoincorporatesjumping,climbing,vaulting,andotherformsofforwardmovement.Freerunninghasemergedasitsownpractice,differentiatingitselffromparkourinitspreferenceforstyleoverspeedwhenovercomingobstacles.

Figure 1. (facing page) A leap from one building to another demonstrated by a young free runner in London’s South Bank. (Photo by Anthony Brown, courtesy of istockphoto.com)

Jimena Ortuzar received her MA from the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts/NYU.

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The Kinetics of Parkour

Although parkour is perhaps best recognized by its signature jumps, known as the “cat jump,” the “precision jump,” and the “gap jump,” as well as its famous “wall runs” (running horizontally across the walls of buildings), the practice comprises an intricate set of maneuvers:

The “tic-tac,” in which a nearly horizontal traceur takes at least one step and sometimes several steps along a wall and launches himself from it; and the “underbar,” in which a traceur dives feet first through a gap between fence rails, like a letter going through a slot, then grabs the upper rail as his shoulders pass under it. In addition, there are several vaults, including the “lazy” vault, the “reverse” vault, the “turn” vault, the “speed” vault, the “dash” vault, and the “kong” or “monkey” vault, in which a traceur runs straight at a wall or a railing, plants his hands on top, and brings his feet through his hands. (Wilkinson 2007:2)

These various techniques are combined into sequences to compose a “run,” during which parkouristes storm through the city, transforming it into a playground where chance, interaction, imagination, creativity, and change provide countless opportunities to challenge, on the one hand, the rigidity of urban space and, on the other, the precariousness of urban life.

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.

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 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 struc-tures 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, move-

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ments and techniques while simultaneously controlling and developing the temporal relations between them” (2001:14). Furthermore, architect Bernard Tschumi posits, “Architecture is always in confrontation with movement, the movement of the bodies that pass through it” (1997:29–30). Parkour reactivates the dialectic relationship between structure and moving body, a relationship that non-places have rendered unidirectional, i.e., as moved bodies passively going from one location to another. Parkour thus redeploys movement by shifting from the interior to the exterior of urban architecture, and by exploiting the structural specificities it navigates. Moving along the outer layer also means remaining outside “the protected place[s] of disciplin-ary monotony” (Foucault 1977:142). It also means remaining unseen, as the speed and agility of their maneuvers allows the parkouristes to remain in the blind spot of mainstream society.

On the MoveRoaming the Urban Surface

The ability to move under the radar requires that parkouristes find ways to move within the systematic environment of our sociopolitical field—what Kwinter describes as the “slippery glacis of largely indistinct swells and flows”—parkour finds ways to traverse this “slippery glacis” by discovering “ledges, footholds, and friction points—in short, all the subtle asperities,” and learning how to engage them (2001:12). Kwinter finds possibilities for these singularities in the fluid movements characteristic of airstream sports, such as surfing and gliding, where partici-pants must be able to tune in and slip into flows and tunnels of air, calling for both precision as well as a certain amount of intuition. Paul Carter points out a similar process in The Lie of the Land, where he describes falconry and its ability to “open up a tunnel in a dense environment, to find a way through a cloudy manifold of scents, sounds, distracting flight patterns and views, so that, albeit momentarily, the falcon sees a way through where it can fly unimpeded” (1996:323). While parkouristes may aspire to the flight of the falcon, they must necessarily tune in with the inevitable forces of gravity. In this sense, parkour is closer to free climbing, a sport in which individuals “flow” by moving their bodies in a delicate relation with their immediate surround-ings, without the use of any tools. Much like the climbers, parkouristes must develop a certain sensitivity to gravity’s pull and channel its forces to different muscles of the body.

The ability to move against the forces of gravity requires the redistribution of energy in the body. Kwinter observes, “It is not enough to prevail over gravity but rather be able to make it stream continuously through one, and especially to be able to generalize this knowledge to every part of the body without allowing it to regroup at any time. […] Thus, the body must be broken apart into a veritable multiplicity of quasi-autonomous flows” (2001:30). Following Kwinter’s thinking, the body of the parkouriste is thus constantly in a process of fragmentation, which suggests the possibility of its subsequent reconfiguration as a means of self-actualization. More- over, the constant breaking apart from within, of its own volition, results in a body that is always in the process of becoming more resistant, a body that will not be broken by the external forces of the cultural and sociopolitical fields that are constantly exerted on it.

Parkouristes—unlike free climbers who can often pause to consider their next move— must gather, recombine, and deploy their forces for their subsequent moves and leaps while always already in motion. Pausing or slowing down would not only defeat the purpose of this practice but would also inhibit movements that require a certain degree of momentum. Whereas climbers can rely on the infinite sedimentary rock formations and inhomogeneities offered by the mountain, parkouristes must face the technological coldness and flat surfaces of modern functional architecture. The abstract, smooth, reflective surfaces that dominate the modern metropolis repel any possibility to grasp, both physically and conceptually, the physical

2. Inhisessay“BuildingonEmptySpaces,”ErnstBlochcritiquesfunctionalarchitectureforitsflat,unadorned,sterilecharacterandfavorsinsteadtheexpressivemovementofthelineandtheinnerformarticulatedbytheornament,characteristicofGothicarchitecture(1988:186–99).

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properties of its material nature. “All around architecture appears as surface,” states Ernst Bloch in his critique of functional architecture (1988:188–89).2 Surface, rather than structures, is what truly confronts parkour.

Not only is the abstract smooth surface character-istic of modern architec-ture, but it is also a funda- mental aspect, if not a prerequisite, of the mod- ern urban landscape—a leveled surface imposed by the modernist impulse to flatten the ground. How can the parkouristes have any possibility of discover-

ing the singularities in and through which to unleash their potential energies in a land that is always already presupposed as a regulated flat and open surface? Carter suggests that the ground may not be as smooth and flat as the concrete pavement would lead us to believe. The “lie of the land” is rather made up of multiple surfaces full of irregularities, grooves, holes, and folds (1996:359–60). Parkour finds these inconsistencies in the disregarded spaces and residues of modern architectural and urban planning practices: gaps, crevices, ledges, pipes, cracks, and openings. It thus discovers and exploits a potential latent in the excesses of capitalist culture.

To uncover these opportunities requires a certain degree of awareness to one’s surround-ings. Carter posits that “to move over the ground is not simply to align oneself with the lie of the land; it is to be aware of a leading edge (the cone of sight) introducing perturbations into the environment” (343). This entails paying close attention to the landscape. But how can parkour attend closely to the ground over which it moves given its accelerated speed? While the acceler- ated state “tends to be exuberant in invention and fancy, leaping rapidly from one association to the next, carried along by the force of its own impetus,” the increased speed of thought is accom- panied by an apparent slowing down of time (Sacks 2004:63–64). The speed of perception, sug- gests neurologist Oliver Sacks, “depends on how many ‘events’ we can perceive in a given unit of time” (5). For athletes, race car drivers, and martial arts masters, who all move or respond at accel- erated speeds, this expansion of time allows more to be perceived and registered. The same is true of emergency situations in which an apparent slowing down of time occurs, resulting in heightened awareness. Parkour not only operates at maximum speed but also as if in a perma-nent state of emergency, continuously chased by its own paranoid sense of time.

If we could interrupt this paranoid chase for a moment, we may be tempted to ask, as Del- euze and Guattari do: “Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Where are you headed? These are totally useless questions,” they assert (1987:25). To start at the beginning, at point zero, “implies a false conception of voyage and movement” (25). Rather, one should begin at the middle. Without a point of origin or destination in sight, and with a particular tendency to materialize spontaneously on any surface across the metropolitan landscape, the phenome- non of parkour functions rhizomatically—emanating from a place without a beginning or an end, “coming and going, rather that starting or finishing” (25). From this middle or “milieu,”

Figure 2. A parkouriste in South Adelaide, Australia achieves a dash vault over a railing by jumping feet first and pushing off with his hands. (Photo by Sdewdney, courtesy of istockphoto.com)

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parkour’s unpredictable routes and freestyle maneuvers operate, like the concept of the rhizome, through “variation, expansion, conquest, capture [and] offshoots” (21). Its movements extend in all directions, creating free multiplicities that allow for new possibilities and new trajectories that cannot be reduced to the overcoding structures at work in the urban terrain. Thus, parkour is a form, a practice, whose logic emerges out of the tensions between the re-territorializing forces that seek to re-establish order and the de-territorializing ones that seek to subvert it.

Leap Leap Leap!Pushing the Limits of Self-Movement

One of the most captivating aspects of parkour, for both practitioners and spectators alike, is the leap, with its ability to elicit a range of reactions from surprise, to awe, to fear, to joy. It is the leap that represents the desire to fly, to be free from the pull of gravity and weight of the capitalist order—a liberation from natural as much as from social forces. The leap signals freedom not only as experience but also because it is a leap that occurs in thought. The leap, according to Martin Heidegger, “remains a free and open possibility of thinking; this is so decisively so that in fact the essential province of freedom and openness first opens up with the realm of the leap” (1991:93).

In Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that through the power of the negative, thought is continuously being unsettled, rethinking its ground. Furthermore, thought is aware that it is groundless since it is always already in motion (2002:23). This awareness—the self-consciousness of the infiniteness of this process—gives rise to the self-surpassing aspect inherent in Hegel’s conception of thought (see Lumsden 2005:207). As a form that is predicated on continuous motion and that seeks the groundlessness of the leap, parkour reveals a self-surpassing character inherent in its very nature, always attempting to reach beyond itself. Hence, a leap is only a stepping-stone to a further and higher leap. This suggests that this self-surpassing quality is also inherent in experience, which is constantly “trying the self at the self’s border, the immediate testing of the limit which consists in the tearing apart of immediacy by the limit” (Nancy 1993:87).3 The separation between thought and experience thus becomes inconsequential; “the thought of the imagination is the experience of freedom” (Fennes 1993:xx). Following this premise then, the possibility for the experience of freedom in the act of parkour resides as much in the imagination as it does in the actions of its free-moving bodies.

In fact, the underlying motive of parkour’s logic, which resides in its ceaseless pursuit of increased mobility, is precisely freedom—a freedom that modernity understands as freedom of movement (Sloterdijk 2006:38).4 Hence the autonomous, self-moving being strives to overcome any conditions that restrict its movement and thus result in a loss of freedom. The attempt to eliminate the limits of self-movement is thus a central aspiration of modernity, a project that realizes and perceives itself as advancing and progressing (37). Progress, explains Peter Sloterdijk, is not simply the change from one location to another, from point A to point B. Rather, it is the step that “leads to an increase in the ability to step,” always moving towards

3. Becauseparkoursetsouttoovertakeitssurroundingsbypositingtheurbanenvironmentitselfasitsobstacle,thisself-surpassingaspectisparticularlypertinenttoparkourgiventhatitisfueledbyever-expandingurbanlandscapesandhigher-reachingtechnologiesthatguaranteethecontinuedconstructionanddelineationofnewboundariestobesurpassed.

4. Thefirstassociationsbetweenfreedom,mobility,andcitylifedatetothe16thcentury:“Anewfreedomofmove-mentthatsprangupwithcorporatelibertiesclaimedbythemedievaltownitself ”(Mumford1986:277).TheideaofmobilityasanindividualformoffreedomwasdevelopedbyThomasHobbes,whobasedthisconceptiononGalileo’sreconfigurationofmobility,whichsawmovementratherthanrestasthenaturalstateofthings,andpres-entinWilliamHarvey’sdiscoveryofthebody’sbloodcirculationsysteminthe17thcentury:“Thenewworldwasaninfinite,restless,entanglementofpersistentmovement”(Cresswell2006:14).

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increased movement (37). Following Sloterdijk’s definition of modernity’s ontology as pure “being-toward-movement” (39), the practitioners of parkour display a mastery over motion and speed that envisions a kinetic utopia. This utopia however, is not the self-movement “at the wheel of a self-moving machine” (i.e., the automobile) (39). It is rather a kinetic utopia where the body becomes its own self-propelling force, moving faster, increasing its own speed from its own self-ignition. If “the modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being” (Sennett 1994:255–56), then the parkouriste is a human being always already in motion.

But as Teresa Brennan points out in Exhausting Modernity, the effect of speeding up the world only results in inertia (2000:13). The illusion of a kinetic utopia is shattered by an abrupt halt that manifests itself in the endless queues and traffic jams of everyday life. To the followers of parkour, the opportunity for unrestrained movement and mobility means the possibility of escaping the postmodern condition of stop-and-go. Hence, while enraged drivers may glance with furious envy at bikers dashing past them, parkouristes evade the traffic snarls altogether, using parkour as an alternate, and often airborne, route.

The Flight of Parkour

Flight, posits Virno, is not necessarily a negative gesture that evades action and responsibility. On the contrary, “nothing is less passive than flight” (2004:199). For Virno, the act of flight is a strategy for defection from the dominant rules that determine our roles, toward activity—it is “an affirmative doing” (33). In this sense, parkour is a political gesture, one that harnesses the productive energy caught in the prevailing systems of power that regulate its flow and exhaust its potential, and then redirects this energy toward itself. If, as Virno argues, the key to radical disobedience is not protest but defection, parkour is a form of resistance by defection (199). It chooses the exit rather than the confrontation. The “exit,” according to Virno, modifies the con- text in which conflict occurs. It changes the rules of the game and disorients those in power. More- over, it entails a constant “free-thinking inventiveness,” the thought of the imagination (199).

Although parkour is about movement, it is not a movement. Nonetheless, it is a rather radical manifestation of Virno’s concept of flight, one that requires no political organization, an act that springs up spontaneously, operates sporadically, and has the ability to vanish without a trace. Yet this raises the question: What, specifically, is parkour a flight from? We may be tempted, once again, to pose the questions: Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Where are you headed? Once again, the questions are useless since parkour is a race from nowhere specifically and to nowhere in particular; what matters is getting there as fast as possible and in the most efficient and flowing way. To accomplish this not only must one jump, climb, leap, and fly, but most importantly one must run—and run fast. Indeed, running is the underlying act upon which the practice of parkour rests, what links its various maneuvers as intricate choreographies of movement and speed. While walking may have come to characterize movement in the modern city, as exemplified by the Parisian free-strolling flâneur of Charles Baudelaire (1964), the state of running perhaps best describes our current capitalist social order. For even when partaking in forms of movement that are faster than ourselves—automobiles, trains, planes—we find ourselves running towards them. Indeed, nearly every activity is pre-ceded by the activity of running to it. The modern “being” means “having to be” and “wanting to be” more mobile, notes Sloterdijk. We have thus been gripped by a “moral kinetic automa-tism” that condemns us to constant movement (2006:38).

Perhaps, then, one needs to pose the question a little differently by simply asking: “What’s the rush?” A clue might be found in the ceaseless striving for increased productivity and efficiency inherent in the capitalist mode of production. As Virno point out, “The criterion of maximum productivity is extended to what appears specifically in the now predominant experience of nonwork.” Consequently, “[s]pare time takes the form of urgency” (1996:20). Thus, the phenomenon of parkour, as the embodiment of maximum efficiency and speed par

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excellence—upon which its very ontology rests—is both an expression and a symptom of the urgency of free time that has come to characterize our current condition.

Suffering from the paranoid temporality5 that has taken hold over society, parkour embodies a perpetual state of emergency. This state of emergency “through which [the] law incorporates the living being by suspending itself […] tends more and more to present itself as the dominant paradigm of government” (Agamben 2002). In this permanent state of emergency, the temporal and spatial distinction between the exception and the norm disappears and we can no longer distinguish the difference. But while parkour responds to this condition with lines of flight, it is also the condition itself that gives rise to parkour, and from which it gains its force. Conse- quently, parkour perpetuates the very conditions it sets out to overcome. The permanent state of emergency is thus precisely the condition from which parkour cannot escape.

Parkour’s Playingfield

The expression of parkour in all its urgency emerges with full clarity in the ruthless “urbanness” of the metropolis, the homogeneous environment of capitalist space. The urban landscape is becoming more and more characterized by non-places, spaces of transience and alienation. 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. Modeled after Le Corbusier’s urban planning concepts that aimed to entirely separate living centers from those of commerce and work, these urban clusters—characterized by grids of brutal towering high rises—have reemerged as dehumanizing spaces of social fragmentation as well as political and economic crises.6

The invention of parkour is credited—by those both inside and outside the parkour commu-nity—to two French suburban youths, David Belle and Sébastien Foucan. Both were inhabitants of the banlieue of Lisses, located on the outskirts of Paris. However, the practice was quickly picked up by immigrant and other disenfranchised groups that inhabit the suburbs of Paris and London.

It is not surprising that parkour has spread to urban centers across the globe, with groups emerging in cities in Australia, Croatia, and Japan. The global metropolis, increasingly domi-nated by corporate discourse, is being converted by the forces of capitalism into a site predomi-nantly defined by non-places,

where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened by demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transportation which are also inhabited spaces is developing, where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and the ephemeral […]. (Augé 1995:71)

5. InTouching Feeling,EveKosofskySedgwickandAdamFrankcritiquetheparanoiathathasspreadovereveryaspectofourcurrentsociety:“Notimecouldbetooearlyforone’shaving-already-known,foritshaving-already-been-inevitablethatsomethingbadwouldhappen.Andnolosscouldbetoofaraheadinthefuturetobepreemp-tivelydiscounted”(2003:131).

6. TheParisiansuburbriotsthatbrokeoutinOctober2005areacaseinpoint.

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Moving ForwardA Way of Being in the World

In this non-place world of solitary individuality, Virno identifies the emotional tonalities of our current global condition as an ambivalent mode of being and feeling—a mode that cuts across work, leisure, and politics that can present itself as either a form of consent or conflict. In other words, it can appear as a form of resignation just as easily as it can manifest itself as an attitude of critical restlessness (2004:84). The result is what Virno calls “bad sentiments,” characterized by the prevalence of opportunism and cynicism (84). These sentiments, however, are not the result of industrial discipline, but rather, argues Virno, of a socialization that occurs outside or beyond the workplace (85). Hence what is expected of workers today is mobility, adaptability, flexibility, and the ability to manage a range of limited possibilities—“tools of the trade” developed outside the work environment. Virno further observes that the present emotional situation carries the distinctive characteristics of nihilism. This sentiment is shared among parkouristes: “Throughout all of that, there’s something missing, you sit there with an emptiness, a void […]” (Art of Movement 2004). This sentiment that “something’s missing,” already identified by Theodor Adorno several decades ago, is a feeling that something should not be so in the present state of things even though we do not have a precise vision of what should be in its place (Adorno and Bloch [1964] 1988). Here, the practice of parkour provides hope, a hope however, that is as much anticipatory as it is critical:

Then, you see [p]arkour, and I don’t really mean just the first time you see PK, but the first time you catch a glimpse of what lies beneath the videos, beneath the moves. It’s like a force of nature, something that at first seems disconnected from humanity in a way, because it’s inherently human. It goes against all of the present notions of what mankind is, a separate entity, man against nature, us against the world […] To me that’s what strikes me as important, not so much some “new” art or sport, but more a return to something that over the centuries we’ve lost. Something that fills that void. (Art of Movement 2004)

Figure 3. A parkouriste holds his body horizontally, confronting the brutal verticality of the urban environment. (Photo by Bonerok, courtesy of istockphoto.com)

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In the emotional tonalities of opportunism and cynicism, Virno nonetheless finds potential for a way of being that is not necessarily negative or inevitably condemned to nihilism. Putting aside all moral implications, opportunists, he observes, are those who “confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another” (2004:86). It is precisely this ability to be in tune with—to maneuver the alternatives that present themselves—that allows parkouristes to master the art of parkour. “It is a question of a sensitivity sharpened by the changeable chances, a familiarity with the kaleidoscope of opportunities, an intimate relationship with the possible, no matter how vast” (86). Similarly, Virno sees cynicism as related to a “chronic instability” characteristic of urban life today. This instability however, reveals the rules that artificially regulate and impose the limits of action, exposing their constructed and groundless nature. To practice parkour is

to know how to deny evidences, to keep a critical acumen. [T]he streets, a marked out route, where we no longer need to wonder if we must take it or not. It’s here, we take it, that’s all. […] Whereas the parkour[iste]’s attitude is to wonder: “perhaps there is another way to move forward, a way which hasn’t been explored yet?” (Urban Freeflow 2004)

Parkouring the City

Discovering new ways to move forward entails a different way of looking at the world. Where we see buildings, parkouristes see railings, ledges, fences, doors, walls, etc. In other words, they see the city not as a totality but as fragments that can be recomposed through movement. In this sense, parkour operates metonymically, or more specifically by synecdoche, constantly substituting the parts of the city for the whole. Moreover, not only are these parts—railings, fences, doors, walls—some of the most commonly encountered and least-noticed structural objects, but they are also manifestations of enclosure that transform spaces into places of meaning and production. Parkour thus reconfigures the meaning of place by bringing into question the very borders that enclose it.7

The city is not only a place—a location where mobility, power, and meaning converge—it is also itself a discourse. The city, suggests Roland Barthes, speaks to its inhabitants just as they in turn speak the discourse of the city through the manner in which they inhabit it, move about it, and represent it. But Barthes does not intend a purely metaphorical remark when he refers to the “language of the city,” but rather, that the city itself is truly a locus of endless signification. In fact, he suggests, following Victor Hugo’s insight, that “the city is a writing,” which implies that moving within the city entails not only a way of seeing and perceiving but also of reading the city. The inhabitant or “user” of the city is a reader who “appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them” (1997:170). Similarly, Michel de Certeau identifies walking in the city as a kind of rhetoric, comparing linguistic formations to the processes performed by the pedestrian (1984). Walking becomes a creative act of choosing or refusing the paths given by the text of the city in order to make more personal geographies within the systematically structured urban space. Parkour engages in a rather extreme version of this creative reading, skipping over links, substituting totalities with fragments, and omitting entire parts of the city through its far-reaching leaps. It is thus constantly in a process of editing the space of the city.

In fact, the French verb parcourir means to travel or to skim through. Interestingly, Bloch observes that in the act of reading, it is preferable “to skim things” than “to stick to things” (1988:154). While both remain at the surface level, skimming through things, he explains,

7. Thisactofquestioningboundariesinparkoursharesastrikingsemblancewithskateboarding.Skateboarders,likeparkouristes,alsouseledges,windowsills,handrailings,roofs,etc.,toextendspaceandchallengethewaysinwhichurbanspaceisdistributed.However,thisactofredefiningbordersisnotonlylimitedtoactivitiesthatarepredicatedonmovement.FrenchgraffitiartistZevsisknownfortracingimaginaryshadowsofcommonplaceurbanobjectssuchasbenches,garbagecans,andtrafficlights:“I’mjustprolongingwhatalreadyexists”(2004).

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involves movement. Furthermore, “[t]he concrete adjustment of skimming opens pictures, insights, and tendencies […] that happen simultaneously in human beings and in corresponding objects” (154). Therefore, skimming can be a way of going over the ground. Like the falconer, the art of parkour involves reading the “lie of the land” in order to seize the opportunities it reveals. Moreover, skimming allows traceurs to read the urban landscape in a manner that does not follow a linear trajectory from beginning to end. Rather, like the rhizomatic mode in which it expresses itself, parkour begins reading at the middle and skips to different locations, never sticking to a single trajectory or to a preset pace. Traceurs produce a different picture of urban space, one that, despite its rizhomatic tendency to move in unpredictable directions, is none- theless unified by a motif of change and motion. A different topography of the city becomes visible, where the dynamic relationship to the land reveals itself in all its expressive movement and vitality.

Locating the Place in Déplacement

Parkour, as mentioned, is also referred to as l’art du déplacement. In French, déplacement signifies both movement and displacement. This definition perfectly captures the essence of this activity given that its crux lies in a movement that is constantly being displaced by another movement. The aim is never to remain in any one location longer than required to make the next leap. Many moves and jumps, like certain actions performed by the free climbers, are only possible by momentarily applying a given amount of force to the surfaces they traverse, some-times using these as springboards or launching pads.8 In the kinetic utopia of parkour, the traceurs become faster and faster as they spring from surface to surface. The more surfaces they spring from, the faster they become.9 Anything more than the minimum contact with the surface is undesired since this signifies the possibility of a pause—a rest. Coming to a rest is to become like surface, a place where meaning can be implanted (Carter 1996:361). But never staying put also prevents one from being fixed, from getting caught in the grid—in the plane of consistency—and becoming a fixed point in it.

For parkour, displacement is not a negative act forced upon its participants but rather a political move ignited from within; it is the key to its survival as well as the means to realizing its goal of freedom. For parkouristes, displacement is a way of being; it functions as a form of emplacement. It is thus not only a way of seeing the world but also a form of belonging. A belonging for those who no longer have a community to which—or any specific “to which”—they belong. Thus, parkour, as mode of defection and flight, “points toward forms of life that give body and shape to belonging as such and not toward new forms of life to which to belong” (Virno 1996:33).

8. Iftheparkouristesweretousearealspringboard(asindiving)wheretheboardusesstoredpotentialenergy(trans-ferredfromthepersonjumping)andconvertsittokineticenergytopushthepersonup,theywouldnotbeusingtheirownpropulsion,arequirementofparkour.

9. Inreality,thebodykeepsthesamemomentumithadtobeginwith;whenaparkouristeusesarailingorawalltojumpfrom,thewallisstatic—itdoesnotimpartaforceontheindividual.Ifs/heweretobeasolidball(likeinapinballmachine),s/hewouldbouncerightoffandkeepalmostthesamemomentums/hehadtobeginwith(therewouldbelittlelossofenergyduetofrictionbutnotasignificantamount).Unfortunately,anindividual’sboneswouldbreakdoingthis.Thus,inparkour,thebounceagainstthewallmustbeabsorbedbythelegsoftheparkour-istebyapplyingaforcetocounteractthehit,likeaspring.However,unlikeaspring,whichwouldhavestoredthatenergyaspotentialenergy,ourmusclesdonotstorethisenergy.Soinfact,theparkouristeiswastingenergyherebyabsorbingthebounce,andsubsequentlyneedstospendmoreenergytocontinuewithbouncingoff(otherwises/hewouldfalldownwardsduetogravity).Nevertheless,withpropertraining,parkouristescanmakemuchmoreefficientuseoftheenergyspentabsorbingthesebounces,andthereforepropelthemselvesfurther.

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Reactivating the Urban Landscape

The practice of parkour would not exist without the urban environment that gave rise to the impulse to break free from its constraints. It is a new relationship between the moving self and the urban milieu, one that is always in the process of becoming. It is a kinetic urban utopia that not only escapes the disciplinary monotony of repetitive spaces and repetitive gestures but also proposes an alternate way of interacting with and interpreting the urban landscape, one that has the potential to generate new gestures. Carter questions whether, with our continuous loss of contact with the ground as a result of enclosure acts, there exists the possibility of a counter-tradition that can constitute as a form of “ground-making” (1996:336). Parkour embodies a mode of flight that paradoxically reactivates the ground. As a way of seeing, knowing, and being that engages a nomadic metaphysics, perhaps parkour can constitute such a counter move towards a new form of “ground-making.”

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