WADA AS SPORTING EMPIRE: PROSPECTS AND SHADOWS

Introduction While athletes have sought to gain competitive advantage over their sporting opponents for centuries, the stakes for winning have gotten much higher in the contemporary age of capitalist high performance sport, and the techniques by which competitive advantage are gained have followed suit. As a result, interventions at the level of the athletic body designed to improve performance have increased considerably, some of which push the boundaries of legality in sport while others cross them completely. These latter interventions, understood broadly under the rubric of sports doping, involve a host of techniques that introduce substances into the body or methods of body augmentation contrary to the rules of sport. This essay concerns the efforts of sporting authorities to police these practices in high performance sport on an increasingly global basis. The anti-doping efforts in contemporary sport arguably rest on a foundation of three critical concepts. First, there is a humanist conception of a bounded unitary athletic body that may be disciplined through training to achieve peak sporting performance and increasingly surpass limits of speed, height, or produced force. Second, there is a purportedly universal conception of competition that values sport as a vehicle of individual achievement in body and mind, which may be embodied in personal or group forms. Third, there is a corresponding ethic of "fair play" that suggests normative models of athletic behaviour in and out of competition, with deviations, like performance itself, being rationally measurable quantities. Regarding the latter, this essay does not intend to critique the ethic of fair play in modern sport as many others far more qualified have done in very eloquent fashion. (1) Instead, it seeks to illuminate how the former two foundational principles--universal sporting values and the unitary athletic body--contribute to the form of power that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its networks exercise in their anti-doping efforts. Given the scientific-technological disposition that dominates Western conceptions of physical culture, it may be argued that the particular mechanisms of control employed by WADA are the logical outcome of the purportedly universal values and unitary athletic bodies that have been so heavily influenced by Western ethics in the constitution of the modern sport project. (2) This essay will use the Empire thesis put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as the framework through which to interrogate WADA and the politics of its anti-doping efforts, and in doing so, shall suggest that the imperial formation of anti-doping control has radical consequences for sporting space, athlete subjectivity, and the nature of high performance competition. The Empire Thesis For Hardt and Negri, Empire constitutes a polycentric, fluid mesh of power featuring nation-state actors in shifting alliances with supranational organizations, transnational corporations, and certain humanitarian non-governmental organizations. No one actor can unilaterally seize power in the era of global capitalism, according to Hardt and Negri and, thus, a flexible network of inter-actor relationships emerges to modulate the global political order. (3) Hardt and Negri contend that capitalism is always about biopolitical production; while it has appeared historically as a matter of material commodity production, it was always in fact about the production of social relations. These social relations shifted dramatically during the course of the twentieth century, as various cycles of struggle between labour and capital continually renegotiated the parameters of production and consumption. Electronic media and communications technologies were being used to intensify levels of automation in manufacturing plants, most fully realized in the economics of post-Fordism, which led to a displacement of labour into new white-collar bureaucratic positions or lower-paying service jobs, and the concomitant relocation of manufacturing plants to developing economies around the world. …