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

Jimena Ortuzar
TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 53, Number 3, Fall 2009 (T 203) , pp. 54-66 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press

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Parkour or lart du dplacement

A Kinetic Urban Utopia Jimena Ortuzar
Draw a straight line on a map [] Start at a point A and go to point B. Dont consider the elements that are in your waywalls, fences, trees, houses, buildingsas 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 spacethe 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
TDR: The Drama Review 53:3 (T203) Fall 2009. 2009 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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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 activitywhose objective is to overcome obstacles in the most rapid, efficient, and free-flowing waydo 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 others 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 lart du dplacement, tracing, and free running,1 is neither an extreme sport nor a martial art. It is not linked to a particular urban youth movement 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 parkours 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 deterritorialization, parkouristes seek to destabilize the sedentary forces that constantly attempt to fix them in the gridthe plane of consistency that encompasses all multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:9).

1. The coupling of these two words is somewhat redundant in the sense that the concept of running already seems to imply a certain freedom of movement, a quality of unleashed energy inherent in its act. However, the activity of running has developed into a highly controlled sport with defined routes, techniques, distances, and other restrictionsmaking the phrase free running an oxymoron. Free running thus liberates running and turns it into a creative activity that involves not only running but also incorporates jumping, climbing, vaulting, and other forms of forward movement. Free running has emerged as its own practice, differentiating itself from parkour in its preference for style over speed when overcoming obstacles.

Figure 1. (facing page) A leap from one building to another demonstrated by a young free runner in Londons 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 traceurs trained body, exists as a potentiala 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, lifethe living bodyis 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 Hbert (1913), which became a standard military training technique. Hence, not only is parkours origin of a military nature, already suggesting that it can sidestep capitalism; but parkour also seizes the forcethe potentialof 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 (1992:37), 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 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, 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 (1997:2930). 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 disciplinary 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 Move
Roaming the Urban Surface The ability to move under the radar requires that parkouristes find ways to move within the systematic environment of our sociopolitical fieldwhat Kwinter describes as the slippery glacis of largely indistinct swells and flowsparkour finds ways to traverse this slippery glacis by discovering ledges, footholds, and friction pointsin 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 participants 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 surroundings, without the use of any tools. Much like the climbers, parkouristes must develop a certain sensitivity to gravitys 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 Kwinters 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. Moreover, 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. Parkouristesunlike 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. In his essay Building on Empty Spaces, Ernst Bloch critiques functional architecture for its flat, unadorned, sterile character and favors instead the expressive movement of the line and the inner form articulated by the ornament, characteristic of Gothic architecture (1988:18699).

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properties of its material nature. All around architecture appears as surface, states Ernst Bloch in his critique of functional architecture (1988:18889).2 Surface, rather than structures, is what truly confronts parkour. Not only is the abstract smooth surface characteristic of modern architecture, but it is also a fundamental aspect, if not a prerequisite, of the modern urban landscapea leveled surface imposed by Figure 2. A parkouriste in South Adelaide, Australia achieves a dash vault over a the modernist impulse to railing by jumping feet first and pushing off with his hands. (Photo by Sdewdney, flatten the ground. How courtesy of istockphoto.com) can the parkouristes have any possibility of discovering 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 (1996:35960). 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 ones 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 accelerated 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 accompanied by an apparent slowing down of time (Sacks 2004:6364). The speed of perception, suggests 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 accelerated 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 permanent 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 Deleuze 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 phenomenon of parkour functions rhizomaticallyemanating from a place without a beginning or an end, coming and going, rather that starting or finishing (25). From this middle or milieu,

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parkours 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 ordera 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 awarenessthe self-consciousness of the infiniteness of this processgives rise to the selfsurpassing aspect inherent in Hegels 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 selfs 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 parkours logic, which resides in its ceaseless pursuit of increased mobility, is precisely freedoma 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. Because parkour sets out to overtake its surroundings by positing the urban environment itself as its obstacle, this self-surpassing aspect is particularly pertinent to parkour given that it is fueled by ever-expanding urban landscapes and higher-reaching technologies that guarantee the continued construction and delineation of new boundaries to be surpassed. 4. The first associations between freedom, mobility, and city life date to the 16th century: A new freedom of movement that sprang up with corporate liberties claimed by the medieval town itself (Mumford 1986:277). The idea of mobility as an individual form of freedom was developed by Thomas Hobbes, who based this conception on Galileos reconfiguration of mobility, which saw movement rather than rest as the natural state of things, and present in William Harveys discovery of the bodys blood circulation system in the 17th century: The new world was an infinite, restless, entanglement of persistent movement (Cresswell 2006:14).

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increased movement (37). Following Sloterdijks definition of modernitys 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 1994:25556), 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 activityit 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 context in which conflict occurs. It changes the rules of the game and disorients those in power. Moreover, 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 Virnos 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 runand 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 flneur 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 ourselvesautomobiles, trains, planeswe find ourselves running towards them. Indeed, nearly every activity is preceded 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 automatism that condemns us to constant movement (2006:38). Perhaps, then, one needs to pose the question a little differently by simply asking: Whats 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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excellenceupon which its very ontology restsis 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. Consequently, 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.

Parkours 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 (Aug 1995:77). These non-places, emerging out of late modernity, transform the individuals relationship to space from one of engagement to one of subjection. Individual consciousness is thus subjected to entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude producing a solitary contractualitythat 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 banlieuesenclaves inhabited by low-income working-class whites, immigrants, and racialized groups, as well as the unemployed. Modeled after Le Corbusiers urban planning concepts that aimed to entirely separate living centers from those of commerce and work, these urban clusterscharacterized by grids of brutal towering high riseshave reemerged as dehumanizing spaces of social fragmentation as well as political and economic crises.6 The invention of parkour is creditedby those both inside and outside the parkour communityto two French suburban youths, David Belle and Sbastien 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 dominated by corporate discourse, is being converted by the forces of capitalism into a site predominantly 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 habitu 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 []. (Aug 1995:71)
5. In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank critique the paranoia that has spread over every aspect of our current society: No time could be too early for ones having-already-known, for its having-alreadybeen-inevitable that something bad would happen. And no loss could be too far ahead in the future to be preemptively discounted (2003:131). 6. The Parisian suburb riots that broke out in October 2005 are a case in point.

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Moving Forward
A 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 feelinga 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 possibilitiestools 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, theres something missing, you sit there with an emptiness, a void [] (Art of Movement 2004). This sentiment that somethings 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 dont 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. Its like a force of nature, something that at first seems disconnected from humanity in a way, because its 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 thats what strikes me as important, not so much some new art or sport, but more a return to something that over the centuries weve lost. Something that fills that void. (Art of Movement 2004)

Jimena Ortuzar

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 withto 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. Its here, we take it, thats all. [] Whereas the parkour[iste]s attitude is to wonder: perhaps there is another way to move forward, a way which hasnt 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 partsrailings, fences, doors, wallssome 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 placea location where mobility, power, and meaning convergeit 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 Hugos 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. This act of questioning boundaries in parkour shares a striking semblance with skateboarding. Skateboarders, like parkouristes, also use ledges, windowsills, hand railings, roofs, etc., to extend space and challenge the ways in which urban space is distributed. However, this act of redefining borders is not only limited to activities that are predicated on movement. French graffiti artist Zevs is known for tracing imaginary shadows of commonplace urban objects such as benches, garbage cans, and traffic lights: Im just prolonging what already exists (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 nonetheless 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 Dplacement

Parkour, as mentioned, is also referred to as lart du dplacement. In French, dplacement 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, sometimes 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 pausea 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 gridin the plane of consistencyand 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 whichor 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. If the parkouristes were to use a real springboard (as in diving) where the board uses stored potential energy (transferred from the person jumping) and converts it to kinetic energy to push the person up, they would not be using their own propulsion, a requirement of parkour. 9. In reality, the body keeps the same momentum it had to begin with; when a parkouriste uses a railing or a wall to jump from, the wall is staticit does not impart a force on the individual. If s/he were to be a solid ball (like in a pinball machine), s/he would bounce right off and keep almost the same momentum s/he had to begin with (there would be little loss of energy due to friction but not a significant amount). Unfortunately, an individuals bones would break doing this. Thus, in parkour, the bounce against the wall must be absorbed by the legs of the parkouriste by applying a force to counteract the hit, like a spring. However, unlike a spring, which would have stored that energy as potential energy, our muscles do not store this energy. So in fact, the parkouriste is wasting energy here by absorbing the bounce, and subsequently needs to spend more energy to continue with bouncing off (otherwise s/he would fall downwards due to gravity). Nevertheless, with proper training, parkouristes can make much more efficient use of the energy spent absorbing these bounces, and therefore propel themselves further.

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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 countertradition 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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