14 December 2009: "Who did Tiger Woods let down more: black ppl or white ppl?"

This post is about one-dimensional man. Carles uses the lens of the Tiger Woods tragedy to examine the contested problematics of race, class, and gender in American society, and how these are interpolated by the commercial imperatives of multinational corporations and the neoliberal attitudes they wish to sponsor and personify through the use of athletic champions as spokespersons. Is Tiger Woods a fallen übermensch or merely a highly visible exemplar of late capitalism's propensity to produce one-dimensional men, who internalize the dictates of a hypercompetitive and hyperrational economic system and administer their lives in unsustainable ways. Woods constituted himself through his athletic remorselessness as "the human brand" and let the prerogatives of capital accumulation dictate his public behavior.

His racial heritage cast this accomplishment in a particularly postcolonial light, serving as an alibi for the unstriated transition from colonial to independent regimes. His success as global brand mirrored the hegemony of the Washington Consensus, while attaching a person of color to its ubiquitous dominance. Carles claims that Tiger Woods white-washes (pun intended) the trouble history of race politics, with his success serving as a vindication and a closing of the books on the history of the subject: "This is why we love Tiger Woods. He is an African-American+miscellaneous other races, without all of the baggage of traditional coloured athletes."

But Woods's deviation from the imposed social norms somewhat hypocritically imposed by his corporate masters in the world of sponsorship marks the potential for an epistemic break, in which the repressed politics of race return with a vengeance to radicalize practices in the post-neoliberal order that is only now just beginning to emerge. Carles suggests that Woods's "transgressions" are actually nothing more than the vehement response of the established order to the threat Woods was beginning to represent.

I feel like this white world that he conquered has turned his back on him. No longer is he a white person with black skin who white people are comfortable letting into their metaphorical club house.

Carles notes that Tiger began to exceed his function of serving as "a representative of corporate america, some1 who we expect to ‘have values’" -- the meaning of his "evolution into a human brand" had led to his accumulating too much capital in his image, a superfluity of meaning attached to his persona which could find investment in ideas and movements outside the control of the multinationals who made him. So it became imperative for the stability of the order to decathect him as signifier and signified. Woods as transcendental signifier? It was not to be borne. Just as the media interests had worked to "enable" the "dream worlds" of figures like Woods, it could be turned against them, to recapture them within the distributed economy of signs.

Having fixed Woods's saga within the Saussurean structure of late capitalist sign-play and attenuated its relations to international structures of economic power, Carles shifts perspective to consider Woods as a cautionary figure, an example of the metastasized techno-rational principle gone awry. Woods, by personifying the "champion" in the post-Fordist era, put a human face on this question of Marcuse's: "At the advanced stage of industrial civilization, scientific rationality, translated into political power, appears to be the decisive factor in the development of historical alternatives. The question then arises: does this power tend toward its own negation -- that is, toward the promotion of the 'art of life'?" Woods, in turning to personal hedonistic satisfaction apparently warranted by his mastery of the technological means of his field, manifested one such historical alternative, one such expression of political power as a shattering of the contractual arrangements which have hitherto held together the hierarchical organization of family life under the sign of "romantic love" since the 18th century. As Carles points out, Woods domination of the sports field betokened and modeled new forms of expression in the social field generally: The integrity of contracts "doesn’t always apply to people who experience levels of joy that are way better than ‘finding solace in a relationship’" -- instead a new kind of relation is implied, a reflexive one engaged with one's one sense of accomplishment, a mimetic desire for the self as it appears socially, a way of interfacing with one's own ambition through the means of docile bodies. Carles notes that "Woods may or may not be able to ‘love’ other people" but underscores the irrelevance of the question to the post-love libidinal economy Woods was attempting to pioneer from the position of significatory surplus: "you could really ‘get banged’ by a true champion, instead of the same loser bro who thinks he is ‘fucking rich/hot/special,’ and that he is the one doing you a favor by giving u the opportunity to sleep with him." In the social arrangement that Woods was beginning to flesh out through his praxis, the circuit of authority and mastery that Woods represented could valorize all the human capital it touched and invalidate the pretenses of those operating according to moribund economic imperatives.

But the immediate backlash in the media suggests the negation of the negation, a reinscription of power at the expense of a regime's now-deposed champion, his mastery redirected in the guise of humility and futility to serve the order he had come to challenge in his ceaseless pursuit of "winning" for its own sake. Though "We want Tiger to live the life that he wants to live," the social order can no longer afford it. Woods's victories, once they cease to indicate the triumph of the status quo and instead intimate the triumph of the will, must be prevented by all means necessary. It would not be shocking if Woods's quasi-vacation fromthe public sphere is an extended one.