The Training Camp

Proem

Korey Stringer, a 6′.4″, 335-pound Pro Bowl offensive tackle, died on August 1, 2001, after complications arising from heatstroke suffered during the Minnesota Vikings preseason training camp. After having regurgitated several times during a morning practice, Stringer continued participating in full pads with few water breaks. It was a 110° summer day with high humidity (Braunsdorf, 2001). Stringer collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, unconscious, with a body temperature of 108° (Gustafson, 2011). His organs failed throughout the day, and his body eventually succumbed to heart failure (Rosen, 2011). The football-consuming public was shocked; teammates Randy Moss and Chris Carter were brought to tears (Rosen, 2011). The scientific community publically deliberated the legal (Charnley, 2005; Hess, 2002; Hurst & Knight, 2003), biotechnological (Casa, Armstrong, Kenny, O’Connor, & Huggins, 2012; Landry, 2003; Ranalli et al., 2010), risk management (Franklin, 2001; Siegel, 2002), and social consequences (Casa, 2011; Schnirring, 2004) of Stringer’s very public death.

The tragedy thrust the National Football League (NFL) and American football’s history of harsh training systems (back) into the center of public debate (much like an earlier crisis of American football, ca. 1905-1911). The public discourses surrounding the death of Stringer, although they illuminated the harsh conditions of the training camp, were ultimately oriented toward developing an individualizing and, to some extent, pathologizing explanation of his untimely demise. The public (and presumably the sport’s administrators) needed to know what happened, how could it be prevented from happening again, and—ultimately—who was at fault. The perhaps not-so-surprising result of this public inquest tended to emphasize Stringer’s own actions as producing the unfortunate circumstances in which he suffered. Although there were clearly counter narratives—such as those produced by Stringer’s widow, Kelci Stringer, in wrongful-death lawsuits directed at the NFL, the Vikings, and equipment manufacturer Riddell Inc. ¹ —the common narrative absolved the teams and league of responsibility for the tragedy, and even went as far as to place accountability with Stringer himself.

Eleven years on, the suicide of former San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau on May 2, 2012, once again reignited debates about football death. Seau, like Stringer, was a former Pro Bowl player who had performed at the most elite levels of the game. Following his playing career, Seau exhibited erratic behavior and suffered from insomnia and depression (Moore & Brady, 2012). Through his suicide, Seau became a (dis)embodied public reminder of the many who had suffered similar post-NFL fates; former players Terry Long and Dave Duerson committed suicide after suffering from the long-term effects of brain trauma (Khan, 2012), and Justin Strzelczyk and Mike Webster died tragic deaths in which brain trauma had an impact (Schwarz, 2007). ² The long-term effects of chronic head trauma and violent football collisions have left many debilitated with dementia and depression; in dealing with these nearly irreparable issues, many found escape only through suicide.

In the same manner as was detailed in the debates on heatstroke, the league has largely managed to avoid the brunt of harsh criticism for the increasing amount of player suicides. Even as the incidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in recent player suicides becomes too obvious to ignore, ³ we have seen the worrying tendency of scientists, public media voices, and administrators to look for anything but football as the source of the problem. For example, just as Stringer’s death was absolved from the public and NFL consciousness as anything but a training camp issue—instead restructured as an individual issue, a hydration science issue, or a trainer issue—so too have suicides, and other concussion-related concerns, become the fault of helmet manufacture (Underwood, 1978), the result of steroid use (Laskas, 2009) (and, by implication, player misconduct), or the fault of the players themselves in failing to recognize their own bodily limits. This form of punishment implicitly implicates the players themselves in their own, and each other’s, deaths or grievous injuries. As one social commentator put it,

Instead of pointing the fingers at the league, point them at the players. They are the ones who hurt each other, who lie about their health and injuries, and who laugh at fines larger than what most of us make in a year. Junior Seau’s death is an absolute tragedy, but no one made him mislead trainers and medical staff about the head injuries he sustained during his career. (Gorman, 2012, p. 1)

These are but a few instances that point to a broader tendency within the public sphere (and the league administration) to overshadow, obscure, or avoid the systematically violent basis of football in favor of individualizing logos, whereby the athlete in pursuit of elite-level performance is turned into the maker of his own painful ends. ⁴ In the remainder of this article, we seek to turn this individualizing logic on its head. We re-envisage the American football institution not in a way that denunciates the individual players (suspected of everything from steroid use to playing too rough) or physicians for not correctly diagnosing symptoms, but in a way that makes the NFL visible for what it is—a unique corporeal formation systematically replete with, if not made into an enterprise of, processes of dehumanization, exploitation and, in a radical sense, death. In the following sections, we will develop a notion of this apparatus as a mechanism for the reproduction of the political conditions in which it exists, conditions which are constituted through the demarcation and inclusion of their exceptions.

Our argument is that the NFL training camp constitutes, what Giorgio Agamben might call, a “zone of exception”—that is, a place where individuals possess only bare life, or apolitical, biological life, the existence of which becomes foundational to the operation of sovereign power. To make this case, we will draw on Agamben’s complex tracing of the relationship between the cessation/termination of life and the proliferation of modern techniques of power. Sociologists have examined various aspects of the phenomena of violence and dehumanization in sport from multiple standpoints, including the violent use of the body as a weapon in sport (Messner, 1990), overconformity to the sport ethic of sacrifice for the game through challenging limits and taking risks (Hughes & Coakley, 1991), the relationship between sport and war (Kusz, 2007; Scherer & Koch, 2010), and the objectification (Oates, 2007) and exploitation of players (Connor, 2009). While much of this scholarship offers understandings of football as part of broader, late modern political economy and cultures of masculinity, nationalism and racism, ⁵ we seek here to better understand another trajectory. This trajectory might be understood as the American/football dialectic—that which makes football exceptional in terms of the broader politics of life in America and that which, through the practice of football itself, extends the normality of this exception back to the political conditions from which it arose. In this endeavor, we believe that Agamben’s work provides an important heuristic frame for presenting our argument.

Specifically, Agamben’s concept of the camp, developed to understand the concentration camps of the Third Reich, allows us to illuminate the contextually important spatial politics of the NFL, with specific attention to the NFL training camp as “the space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (Agamben, 1998, pp. 168-169, emphasis in original). As we have seen in the atrocities of the Nazi regime (which, Agamben reminds us, were understood as reasonable by a particular people in a particular place and time), the camp becomes a space where the radically unjustifiable occurs without question, a space where the impossible act (based on conventional moral and legal codes) is the normal everyday experience, a space where the exception becomes the rule.

Thus, we argue that the training camp is a unique sporting configuration that can be understood as a locus of a particularly violent space of exception—whereby the production and management of kinematic force are constituted by, and constitutive of, a certain biopolitical rationale. Without intent to generalize or conflate the experiences of the occupants in these obviously divergent forms of the camp, we wish to link these phenomena through their fundamental biopolitical machinations; in these spaces and contexts, we find the human condition produced as bare life—a mode of life that can be executed without retaliation. And while Agamben’s notion of bare life—as the subjection to governmental decisions over life and death—refers explicitly to the realm of state politics and the wielding of the law, we believe that our understandings of the football player and the NFL can also be furthered by using this concept. In this we argue that the convenient individualization of deaths in the NFL amounts to a parallel form of bare life. This manifests in the privileging of players’ movements and vitalities over their rights and capacities as political agents, as well as through the spectacular nature of the sport as a political and governmental tool. As such, ours is primarily an inquiry into biopolitics, the political dimension of biological life, as well as into the spectacularized production of bare life in the NFL that renders these lives an exception to the rule; these are lives that are valuable primarily in terms of their bare life capacity in the service of entertainment. In this way, the football player is subjected to sovereign power (on the part of the NFL administration and, by extension, the broader politics of the state ⁶ that rely on similar logos) and violence by way of exclusion through spectacular individualization. Thus, “the camp” is a uniquely biopolitical apparatus through which the logic of state sovereignty is both exercised and reproduced.

In addition to Agamben, we turn to Debord’s notion of the spectacle to further conceptualize the training camp as an institution that gives rise to the spectacular product of the NFL, and which contributes to the biopolitical effects of the spectacle as a technique of modern societal governance more generally; in Debord’s terms, the emergence of the society of the spectacle as a feature of late modern capitalism, with its reliance on the mediation of relationships by images, places spectators in a unique position with regard to their participation in their own governance. This connection between Agamben and Debord allows us to make a proposition about the operation of spectacular society in conjunction with the biopolitical force of the market-state’s renderings of life and death. This operation is echoed in the logos that renders the training camp athlete a form of bare life. That is, spectators actively participate in the production of bare life through their consumption of and “passive identification” (Debord, 2002) with the images and rhetorics presented by the NFL.

Sovereign Power, Bare Life, and the State of Exception

Agamben draws, most notably, ⁷ on the theories of Foucault and Schmitt to develop a provocative understanding of biopolitics as the fundamental core of a political system that found its archetype in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime, and now constitutes the nomos of Western Democracy. In a challenge to Foucault, who labors to illuminate the significance of the incorporation of life processes into politics in the 17th and 18th centuries, Agamben argues ⁸ that life has always been included in politics by means of its initial exclusion. That is to say, the notion of natural life itself is suspended for individuals to take on the qualities of proper political citizens: “It can even be said that the production of the biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998, p. 6, emphasis in original). Thus, modern biopolitics, instead of representing a fracture in the historical logic of governance, is the emergence, or realization, of that which has been present since the foundation of political thought.

To develop this concept of biopolitics, Agamben builds on Carl Schmitt’s (1985) notions of sovereign power and the state of exception. Agamben contends that the sovereign’s right to power is realized through decisions on what constitutes the state of exception. In other words, the sovereign is the one who decides on that point at which society’s rules and laws do not apply (for instance, two states of exception in modern politics might include Hitler’s suspension of the Weimer Constitution during the Third Reich, or George W. Bush’s military order on November 13, 2001 authorizing the “infinite detention” and trial by “military commissions” of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities). Thus, sovereign rule is not realized in the creation of law, but rather through law’s suspension. For Agamben, this suspension (or exception) manifests itself in the form of exclusion. However, the important part of the exclusion principle is this: What is excluded from the law or rule is not entirely omitted but instead “maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule’s suspension” (Agamben, 1998, p. 17). Therefore, what is excluded from the political realm of the law, or the rule, is in fact included by virtue of its very exclusion.

This negative relationship constitutes the state of exception. For example, we can think about how the rule is tied to the exceptional case in how we know when the rule is no longer in application. It is important to think about the state of exception as more than just a spatiotemporal suspension; Agamben (1998) refers to it as a “complex topological feature” (p. 37) which constitutes a zone of indistinction between inside/outside, reality/rule of law, and life/politics. It allows for a confusion of the relationship between these categories, ⁹ and this confusion is a productive one. For example, Agamben argues that the sovereign uses the state of exception to create and guarantee the situation the law needs for its own validity:

[T]he state of exception appears as the opening of a fictitious lacuna in the order of the purpose of safeguarding the existence of the norm and its applicability to the normal situation. The lacuna is not within the law, but concerns its relation to reality, the very possibility of its application. It is as if the juridical order contained an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be filled only by means of the state of exception, that is by creating a zone in which the application is suspended, but the law, as such, remains in force. (Agamben, 2005, p. 31)

Hence, the state of exception is key to understanding contemporary politics, its structure, its logic, and its power (Ek, 2006).

We will now move to expand on how this relationship functions biopolitically, after which we identify such biopolitical mechanisms at work in the NFL training camp by way of their structure as a spatialized state of exception. In this concept of the state of exception (inclusive exclusion), we see the originary relationship between law and life. Life—natural life, or what Agamben refers to as zoē (the biological fact of living common to all living beings)—is seen as necessarily separate/excluded from politics; politically qualified life, “good life,” or bios. This separation between natural life and political life is seen as necessary to ensure the protection of natural life. Thus, based on the inclusive exclusionary principle, law does not act on life through application, but rather through the state of exception. Agamben uses Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the ban to describe this tendency of law to include life by suspending it:

He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside of the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order . . . It is in this sense that the paradox of sovereignty can take form “there is nothing outside the law.” The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment. The matchless potentiality of the nomos, its orignary “force of law,” is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning it. (Agamben, 1998, pp. 28-29, emphasis in the original)

In the act of abandoning subjects, the sovereign power produces a new category of life: bare or naked life. This form of bare life “is the distinct modality of existence in which zoē is politicized (through abandonment and/or the exposure to sovereign violence, on/in the threshold/zone of indistinction)” (Ek, 2005, p. 366). Put simply, these distinctions form the foundation of Agamben’s work. Life, as always inherently excluded from politics (and therefore included within), exists under the power of the sovereign in a form that is given its political nature by the production of its counterpart—bare, biological life. To this extent, the sovereign can, indeed must in some instances, abandon life. When life is abandoned, it becomes bare life and is thus exposed fully to the extent of sovereign violence.

Homo Sacer

Based on a character of archaic Roman law, homo sacer, for Agamben (1998), represents the first time that sacredness became tied to human life. This is not a sacredness based in terms of holiness or divinity, but in the political act of having been set apart, or placed outside of the political system that its “apartness” enables; it represents a double exclusion—both from human jurisdiction and the realm of divine law:

Just as the law, in the sovereign exception, applies to the exceptional case in no longer applying and in withdrawing from it so homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificeability and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed. Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life. (Agamben, 1998, p. 82)

Here, we observe the link in Agamben’s thought between abandoned bare life and sacred life. Bare life, like sacred life, can be permissibly killed without committing homicide, and without having been attached to any ideals that would make its death sacrificial in nature. The implications of this permissibility of death are worth considering. To begin, we must assume that biopolitics—politics based on the demarcation and governance of life—has been at the core of Western politics since their advent in ancient Greece. As opposed to Foucault, who characterized biopolitics as a feature of Western modernity, Agamben understands all of politics to be biopolitical in nature, constituted by, in the first instance, the circumscription of life that falls under the realm of the law and life that does not. Agamben’s theory of modern biopolitics is characterized by the enduring collision of bare life (historically located at the margins of political order) with the political realm, which has its most concrete manifestation in the organization of the camp. Therefore, as citizens of the “now” we should be uniquely concerned with this trajectory of modern biopolitics:

Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri. (Agamben, 1998, p. 115)

Thus, the ultimate human fragility is revealed. Bare life resides within us all as the biological minimum to which all humans are potentially reducible. Indeed, the biopolitical object is the “zero position” of human life, with political rights only being granted to us as political strategy. Hence birth, as the initial moment at which one earns citizenship through incorporation into political relationships, necessarily subjects life to politics. Furthermore, the suspension of our ontological status as citizens is all that is required to reveal life in its bare, unjustified, killable form. In such a deeply biopoliticized society, “all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes exception” (Agamben, 1998, p. 148). And it is the camp that acts as the archetypical manifestation of this exceptional logic, the definitive biopolitical space in which the imperatives of political life are enacted and “whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize” (Agamben, 1998, p. 123).

The Camp

For Agamben, the camp is a manifestation of the state of exception. In this, the camp arises when the temporary suspension of the rule of law given is given a permanent spatial and/or temporal arrangement. In other words, the camp is a space where the exception is formalized as the condition of rule. However, the camp as a space of exception remains outside of the normal order; it is the space that is not protected by the enactment of the law. This reveals a paradox within the camp. Although placed outside the normal juridical order, it is not simply a space defined by clear borders. As we have seen, what is placed outside, or set apart from the sovereign, remains exclusively included in the political order. Thus, because the state of exception resides within the “external” location of the camp, an exceptional—otherwise unfathomable—logic becomes realized as normal within this space. The exception becomes indistinguishable from the norm. Where previously the sovereign realizes power over the law through decisions on exceptional situations, sovereign rule now becomes a decision over that which is permanently and spatially suspended and excluded in the camp. We can clearly see how the space of the training camp gives rise to exceptional practices such as acts of violence, exploitation, and injury. These are practices which we understand as normal within this space but outside of which constitute an aberration.

Thus, the camp is a materially constructed zone of indistinction. It is simultaneously licit and illicit, whereby fundamental rights of life and liberty no longer apply; thus, bare life is realized. This life is no longer imbued with political rights, but is confronted by the potential of power, violence, and death without mediation. In this space the former, or occasional, citizen is totally confused with homo sacer. This categorical confusion is the inherent logic of the camp. Thus, as Agamben suggests, it is not a question of how it is possible that horrific crimes can be committed against human beings, but rather the question is, What are the “procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (Agamben, 1998, p. 171)? A similar question might read, How is bare life produced such that we accept that life as bare?

How then do we understand bare life in the football training camp? Surely, these players are not representative of bare life in the same respect as those subjected to the autocracies of the Nazi regime. Instead of being reduced to bare life, the athlete’s life is made glorious, built to accelerate, and is celebrated. Here, we depart from Agamben’s insistence on the repressive function of political power, because here, in the (training) camp, corporeality is realized by way of some productive capacity as exceptional logic. In the act of constituting football players—corporeal vessels of exceptional violence, strength, and speed—by suspending the typical ascription of rights, the training camp hyperbolizes bare life (physical, lively attributes, and their valuations) in such a way that it dominates political life. This is a reversal of Agamben’s reductive hierarchy. Instead of taking away bios—abolishing it through the removal of citizenship or rights— zoē is amplified. It is cultivated through the rationalized mechanisms of the production of bare life: the drills, the measurements, the equipment, the ideologies, the injections. Bare life swells to the point where bios can be, at least temporarily, discounted. The superhuman athlete is super—“above ” and “beyond”—to the point where he is exceptional, or outside of the normal human condition. Rather than being devoid of political value, such as the case of the refugee or the Jew—exterminated, as Hitler had announced, “as lice”—the football player’s life is literally “larger than life,” exceptional, but exceptionally bare. Thus, as opposed to the camp dweller who is “allowed to die” because of nonvaluable status given to their life, the athlete is “made to live” because of his extralively value. However, a football player is made to live in a particular way. The sovereignty that they are thought to embody is actually the outfit of homo sacer—the body of bare life, complete with shoulder pads to distance the pain of contact. The paradox of the training camp lies in the fact that the valuable life of the football player, made to live, can ultimately be exposed to unrelenting and unjustifiable violence by the same logic as the concentration camp inhabitant.

Here, we see how the inherent logic of the concentration camp and that of the training camp are closer than first appearances. The same false promise that adorned the gates of Auschwitz—“Arbeit macht frei” (labor makes [you] free) in cast iron—is the same false promise presented to the prospective NFL player. However, we argue that the irony of such an ideological inscription is more obscured in the training camp than the labor camp. Indeed, this is part of the central argument of this article. As we will continue to develop, the camp’s processes of producing biological exceptionality (and thus a particular form of biopolitical force) and spectacular individualization—by way of the football player—recasts labor as freedom. In fact, employment in this particular form of violent labor is promoted as one of the most desirable positions in American society. It is in this way that the political nature of the training camp is obfuscated and, ironically enough, rendered uncomplicated.

The Making of the Camp

American football became established as a professional sport with the formation of the NFL in 1920. This, along with growing trends of player injury in the game, ¹⁰ led to the introduction of training camps in the early 1920s, followed by their proliferation throughout the 1930s. ¹¹ In their early forms, these camps often took place in locations that varied from the common in-season training and meeting places. Indeed, the camp may have had at the heart of its function the separation of players from their daily lives, their families, their homes, to “live” football for 6 weeks. As Dave Meggyesy (1971) recounts, his rookie training camp in 1963 for the St. Louis Cardinals, set just north of Chicago in Lake Forest College, was an ideal spot from the coaches’ viewpoint “because it was isolated” (p. 133).

What is it about the training camp that demands this isolation? The training camp was perhaps “perfected” by legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant who, in the summer of 1954, took the Texas A&M University football team to Junction, Texas, “a flyspeck on the Texas map . . . that was nothing but rocks, sandspurs, rattlesnakes and turkey buzzards” (Dent, 2003). The historical narratives constructed by Dent speak of this training camp as “ten days of hell,” far removed from the sightlines of students, administrators, fans, and media. These camps require material spaces of a specific type—“hell,” if you will—for, as we shall see, a specifically exceptional purpose. Indeed, the training camp cannot be thought of as anything other than a spatialized practice. As such, Gary Shaw (1972) understands the space in which he trained for the University of Texas football team beginning 1963 in a rather telling way:

The practice field was talking to us each day when it surrounded us with the beauty of an Austin spring. Its deep setting told us we were apart—somehow different from the rest. Others couldn’t subsist on getting life and blood from its hard belly. (pp. 109-110)

Why these deeply meaningful relationships to patches of land? What does the spatialization of the training camp mean? What do these spaces permit? Indeed, what happened during those “ten days in hell” in Junction 1954 (Dent, 2003)?

Training camps have had a history of violent, inhumane, and dangerous technologies of subjugation. For example, the “hell” of Junction consisted of intense training, substandard facilities, and brutal environs that led several players to suffer heat-related illnesses, including one who nearly suffered a Stringer-like football death due to heatstroke. One player broke four bones in his back, only to return to the practice field, shunning an ambulance seeking to return him to the hospital. The fields themselves were mere dust reserves covered with rocks and cacti. Water breaks were banned despite the treacherous Texas summer heat. By the end of camp, 76 players had quit the team; only 25 remained (Dent, 2003). This is consistent with Meggyesy’s (1971) experiences of the humid days of camp:

The coaches relished these kinds of days because they were under the impression that heat helped you get into shape. So we never went out in the afternoon without our field equipment. The coaches were continually screaming at guys to keep their hats on. (p. 131)

There was strength found in survival; those who did not survive were deemed unfit to play football. Injuries and other physical limitations were seen as failings to be overcome, and many players were put at extreme risk or had their pains and injuries discounted. Charley Taylor from the Washington Redskins describes his experience:

In Spring training in my sophomore year, I broke my neck—four vertebrae. “Hey, Coach,” I said, “my neck don’t feel good.” “There’s nothing wrong with your neck, you jackass,” he said. So the numb went away a little, and I made a tackle. When I went to get up my body got up but my head just stayed there, right on the ground. The coach says, “Hey, get this jackass off the field.” So the trainer put some ice on my neck and after practice they took me to the infirmary for an x-ray. The doctor said, “Son, your neck is broken. You got here ten minutes later, you’d be dead.” Dead! Man, that scared me. I mean those colleges let you lie right out there on the field and die. That’s something to think about. (Quoted in Shaw, 1972, p. 121)

Taylor’s memory describes the absolute disregard with which players’ bodily well-being was treated, to the point of being literally abandoned to die. Some narratives tell of systems in which destroying players seemed to be the very aim of the training process. Shaw (1972) explains how University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal needed over half of his more than 200 full-scholarship athletes to quit during 1961 to 1964 to stay inside the conference scholarship limit. To achieve this, the Texas management employed “shit drills” designed to be so devastating that players would be physically “persuaded” to sign away their scholarships. Shaw cites a teammate who was involved in these sessions:

[M]ost were literally killed off. They would pit us in a way to most quickly eliminate people. For a long time I went against John Jolly who was five feet six and 210 pounds. I killed Jolly off, but Jolly killed off lots of others. Our punishment was injuries. (p. 129)

The training camp operated on the logic of “survival of the fittest from beginning to end” (Meggyesy, 1971, p. 190). Players were tasked not only with surviving the threat of being cut from the team, but enduring the limits to which bodies could be, and were, pushed, surviving as well the very real threat of physical and mental violence and injury.

Those who survived these conditions were those who could best (re-)produce this logic, those who could make violence a part of themselves. As Sabo (2001) recounts of his football days:

I learned to be an animal. Coaches took notice of animals. Animals made first team. Being an animal meant being frantically aggressive and ruthlessly competitive. If I saw an arm in front of me, I trampled it. Whenever blood was spilled, I nodded approval. Broken bones (not mine of course) were secretly seen as little victories within the bigger struggle. The coaches taught me to “punish the other man,” but little did I suspect that I was devastating my own body at the same time. (p. 374)

That Sabo needed to become an animal, non-human, to succeed is telling of the training camp’s association with the allowance of violence. Shaw (1972) provides a similar perspective in explanation of his training “success”:

I think my “secret” was an ability to numb myself. I would gradually come not to notice my bruises, soreness, and body pain. “Men, you must toughen yourself against feeling body pain and soreness.” Contact came to have a strange, distant feel to it . . . I think this ability to dissociate from your body is the key to those able to endure the most pain. (p. 110)

The training camps of old were attuned toward readying the body for receiving and performing violence. Furthermore, the production of these violent bodies occurred in designated, often isolated, spaces and in conditions of labor surplus that made anything possible, from “shit drills” to the discredit of serious injuries by those in positions of power. A memory provided by Sabo (Sabo & Panepinto, 1990) illustrates the extreme circumstances that could occur in the training camp:

At preseason camp, to sort out who was the meanest, he’d stick two guys in the pit and whoever got out first was better. It wasn’t really football, because guys would just punch and scratch the hell out of each other until someone managed to crawl out. (p. 123)

In some respects, Sabo and Panepinto (1990) provide us with a metaphor for the training camp of old. An isolated space guarantees an isolated focus of performance; a pit of isolation pits man against man, a conflict from which emerges the man most fit for football by virtue of his implemented and endured violence.

Survivalism and the Training Camp

The training camps of today’s game are rather different. Heavily restricted by the collective bargaining agreement, teams effectively meet for 2 weeks before the first preseason games (Robertson, 2012). ¹² During this time, teams are only allowed one padded practice per day, as long as 3 hr, where hitting is permitted (Maske, 2011). This rule has seen the demise of dreaded “two-a-days” (two full-contact practices per day), such that secondary on-field practices are now limited to walk-throughs. In addition, there has been a substantial increase in strategy and media-based sessions (Diamond, 2012). Teams have smaller initial rosters of 90 players, meaning that an entirely more cautious approach to training is required, and this is especially the case for particular franchise players who represent large financial investments (Hanzus, 2012). ¹³ In addition, the heightened awareness of health and general injury issues has shaped the way that training camps operate. A physician is now required to be present on the field at all times, and each player, on arrival to training camp, undergoes a conditioning test (George, 2002). Training camp is no longer a place for whipping players into shape or “making men.” Yet, this change is not one away from spectacular and exceptional violence, injury, or dehumanization; rather, the changes have provided greater rationalization of these things. The contact cannot continue because the bodies have become too big, too strong, and too fast. It cannot continue because it is only valuable on the field of play. Hence, just enough contact is allowed to “maintain [the] edge.”

Bare life now appears differently from the process that was experienced by Sabo and Shaw, or at Bear Bryant’s camp at Junction, Texas. Dehumanization in the contemporary training camp is the rational, logical production of the body, requiring specialization, expertise, and specific types of bodies. While performance on the field is what ultimately counts, the athlete’s performance of abstracted tasks is heavily scrutinized and valued. Following the scientific rationalities of the modern life sciences—bench press repetitions, agility tests, 40-yard sprints, vertical jumps—all of these practices come together to define the exceptional athlete; their life, their value, has come to be conceived in the barest of terms. Football players are unquestionably talented, but they are diminished to the categorically objective level of talent. Nowhere can this be more readily seen then in the NFL scouting combine, in which athletes have their qualities quantified and compared, their amplified abilities reduced to numbers, their economic (and subsequently political) value ascribed therein. ¹⁴

As the techniques for building these athletes become increasingly systematized by scientific rationales; as the methods of training become the purview of a proliferating field of “experts”; and as the principles of training camp become progressively rationalized as industry truths, so too does the football player assembly line become more efficient. The players that make it out the other end are bigger and stronger. For example, professional football players have gained up to £1.5 per year over the last seven decades (Dalek, 2013) with the average player weighing 89.9 kg and having a height of 180.9 cm in the 1920s in contrast to 137.2 kg and 193.2 cm in the 1990s (Norton & Olds, 2001). This change is especially apparent in linemen where the average center has gone from 242 lb in 1979 to 304 lb in 2011 along with increasing average bench press repetitions of 225 lb from 21 to 30 between 1991 and 2011 (Easterbrook, 2011). As a result, in camp, as in all aspects of the game, the competition is intensified and contracted into bursts of corporeal violence, the contrasts magnified, the pressures multiplied, and the collisions glorified. No longer is the camp a mechanism of survival, but rather of hyper-competitive rationalities and—much like commercial football more generally—structurations of ephemeral, spectacular violence.

Thus, the banning of “two-a-days” does little to reduce the dangers of physical impact. It merely changes the emphasis. The athlete can no longer subscribe to the ethos of survival of the fittest, but must realize that only the fittest will survive. This logic and pressure can be seen in players’ accounts of “live” drills, where players play without contact restrictions under game-like circumstances. These live drills provide one of the few opportunities remaining in the contemporary training camp for full contact. And as a result, live drills provide one of the few remaining opportunities for athletes to prove their worth. Experiences of these drills are the harrowing norm in today’s training camps, such as that recounted by former NFL player Ryan Riddle (2012):

It’s on the field where your spot on the roster is either won or lost. This is your battlefield, and the spoils of this war are employment in the National Football League. In this sport, there is no space for the weak. Everyday, every play must be executed with the intent to impress . . . These are the moments you make a case for a spot on the 53-man roster. So I made the decision to sacrifice my health and well-being . . . A massive collision ensued right at the line of scrimmage between me and the fullback; the thunderous noise from our two helmets crashing elicited cheers and excitement from the crowd, as well as fellow teammates. As our helmets and bodies smashed together, I experienced a sudden flash; the hit itself was painless, as all mental systems shut down for a brief second. When my awareness returned, I was laying on the ground trying to get my wits about me. Lying next to me was the fullback and running back; the latter had fallen short of the end zone, so it appeared that my job was at least somewhat accomplished. (p. 1)

This is still part of training camp. Perhaps it even constitutes the central logic by which it runs, by which the plays are run, by which the player runs—“despite the pain and the fear, you will say Yes. You always say Yes” (Jackson, 2010). Indeed, the concentrated moments of violence in today’s camp can perhaps best be described as obligation masqueraded as opportunity, permission as prohibition. The collective bargaining process provides the added guise of consent—as players seek to limit the duration and frequency of violence through restrictions on dangerous contact, they simultaneously acquiesce to instances of “proper” violence, with added intensity and excess force to achieve the exceptional. This rationale for legitimate violence further normalizes a state of exception that proliferates in the training camp.

Performing the Exceptional in Spectacular Society

Agamben (1999) reminds us: “The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival” (p. 155, cited in Genel, 2006). Indeed, Margaroni (2005) identifies sur-vival (maintaining existence by living-on) as one of the most valuable insights in Agamben’s work. In this respect, she reminds us of the most profane and banal death that is at times present in Agamben’s work: “an un-heroic, unaccountable death that simply occurs in/because of abandonment” (Margaroni, 2005, p. 35). ¹⁵ This notion of survival explains why the training camp has become more rationalized. No longer does the training camp set out so mercilessly to build players in “two-a-days” and “shit drills,” ¹⁶ without water. The training camp is only operative so long as the players are subjected to its power. Indeed, Minca (2005) reminds us that “the death of a detainee . . . is an error, a snag, the end of the game” (p. 407). This is because power over life is lost in the act of killing. Instead, the exceptional nature of the camp must last indefinitely. Thus, the camp must sustain its occupants in the zone of survival, to reproduce itself and its exceptional logic. It must retain the surplus of labor that sustains it, for the camp “needs our bodies for its very reproduction, and very often our consensus” (Minca, 2005, p. 411). We thus come to glimpse the truly disturbing and inherently paradoxical nature of Agamben’s (1998) modern biopolitical view:

[T]he spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with the central powers always simultaneously prepare . . . a tacit but increasing inscription of individual lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. (p. 121)

To wit, recent progressions in nature of NFL training camp have been touted as significant achievements in the quest for player rights. In particular, the 2011 collective bargaining agreement in which the dreaded “two-a-days” was banned, is considered as a significant step toward ensuing athlete well-being.

What then do we make of these “changes” to the camp’s organization and practices? How do we understand the training camp as a historical and economic re-productive phenomenon? The present training camp is less so “a pit”—as experienced by Sabo, Shaw, and Meggyesy—and more so an enfleshed human highlight reel in the making. It is more systematized, rational, and efficient. More spectacular. There is a clear emphasis toward exceptional performance in all areas of embodiment as the market-driven training camp creates a competitive landscape in which performance edges are smaller than ever. To protect these human investments, opportunities for violent destruction of football-producing bodies are limited, yet intensified, as opportunities to impress through bodily sacrifice are similarly decreased.

It is here that the NFL training camp as a biopolitical apparatus clearly intersects with the logics of capital accumulation and spectacular consumption that characterize late modernity; here is where we draw on Guy Debord’s (2002) understanding of modern society as engendering the spectacular form, or as a “pseudoworld” in which social relationships are increasingly mediated by images, to flesh out the highly visible training camp’s simultaneous function as both politics and entertainment. Debord situates the spectacle as both the basis and manifestation of contemporary society’s unreality, and as an evolution of the logic of capital that would have us fetishize an increasing number of things—and relationships—as commodities ready for our visual consumption. The spectacle is “the culmination of humanity’s internal separation,” our separation from one another, the world, and the goods we produce (Debord, 2002, Thesis 20, p. 3). The society of the spectacle is intimately tied to the capitalist mode of production, in that it is both the goal and instrument of these processes.

We argue that the contemporary training camp is a spectacular apparatus in its function of providing a tantalizing and mediated notification that full-fledged football products are forthcoming, and that this function is imbricated with the proliferation of biopolitical governance. Exposure to the exceptional demands placed on players and the rigors through which they push their bodies, the limits they seek to transcend, only magnifies the spectacle of the final product of the game. Through this exposure, there is also a proliferation of the exceptional as it becomes normal; only exceptional effort is acceptable. The only true survivors are the victors, and victory is only achievable through the exceptional, by pushing bodily limits beyond that of the opponents and in ways that are also an exception from the norms of human interaction. Whereas the isolation of former camps represented a state of exception, hiding the violent dehumanization otherwise impermissible throughout society, the spectacle of modern camps represents the normalization of violent dehumanization—a state of exception, wherein only the exceptional are rewarded/punished. But the exceptionality of the modern camp is now magnified by its being an image ready for passive consumption by a fetishizing audience. Thus, we return once more to Agamben. Having shown that the training camp is a biopolitical apparatus driven by a spatialized labor relationship of production and consumption with an emphasis on the exceptional production of bare life, we must also acknowledge how our training camp is different from Agamben’s concentration camp. The camp as spectacle warrants our attention, as theory and as consequence.

The Camp as Spectacle of Exception

The training camp confuses the production of athletic life with the production of bare life in the zone of indistinction—the state of exception—of which the camp is a materialized example. This apparatus (and the athletes within it) is driven by an excess of labor, and rationalized through scientific and corporate valorizations of life. The gears of this mechanism are violence, dehumanization, valorization, quantification, and individualization.

However, it is here we would like to make a departure from Agamben’s camp. In his conception of the camp we tend to think the camp as exception. It is the “what” that is exceptional—the mechanisms, the practices, the spaces, the state of emergency. Here, we would like to posit that in the spectacle of/as training camp it is clearly the “who” that becomes exceptional—the athlete himself is the exception.

Furthermore, we invoke exception in this instance through both of the word’s conventional meanings. ¹⁷ The training camp athlete is both outstanding, as a positive valuation, and not-typical—concepts that are far from mutually exclusive but have important differences nevertheless. The player must be outstanding to enter the training camp space (materialized monopsony, the labor bottle neck) and—on entry—must perform exceptionally to survive. However, if this athlete is to falter, to cross the line between life and death that the camp is incessantly negotiating—a line that is constantly being redefined and refined to the point at which exceptional (outstanding) football performance sits on the precipice of violence, bodily degradation, and death—then the athlete is an exception in the sense that he is not typical. Stringer, the once exceptional (outstanding) Pro Bowl football player, died from heatstroke—a result of the exceptional performance the training camp demands—and became the (not-typical) exception to the rule.

It is in this respect that the training camp hides the biopolitical logic that lies at its heart, the logic that supports the operation of the State itself on biopolitical terms and on terms that increasingly rely on a spectacular mode of capitalism. It makes the “who” instead of the “what” exceptional, and thus produces a new commodity form. And it is in this process that we find the importance of the camp’s spectacular appearance in contemporary society. If we take Debord’s notion of the spectacle as “separation perfected,” then it becomes apparent that the training camp is, in some respects, more of a separation than the concentration camps discussed by Agamben. The concentration camp was spatially separated, it was fenced, and the victims were taken by trains to its isolated locations. The camp was, if not exactly hidden, ignored. The training camp on the contrary is entirely, even hyper-visible. It is consumed through a variety of mediums; most notably, the reality television show “Hard Knocks,” which mediates the training camp and the athletes’ pursuit of “the spoils of . . . war [being] employment in the National Football League” (Riddle, 2012, p. 1). However, it is this mediated familiarity that produces a separation more insidious than a simply spatial one. The spectacle as “a social relationship among people, mediated by images” (Debord, 2002, Thesis 5) brings us close to these individuals at the same time that it separates us from them and marks them as separate from the community—they become objects with which we, as spectators, passively identify on only the most inhumane terms, the terms of fetishized consumption. It is their transcendence of humanness, rather than a stripping of human status, that defines their inclusive exclusion from the community more broadly. They are celebrated for their exceptional (outstanding) vitality, their bare athletic life. But when they suffer, they are individually condemned for their (not-typical) exceptionality. The fault is placed squarely on their broad shoulders—as capitalist individualism demands—and we do not question our own demand for their exceptional bodies as objects, nor do we look more deeply into the ways in which biological lives and events become categorized to support a particular operation of power that has, at its heart, little to do with the individual. And here, we are presented once more with Agamben’s critical intuition. It appears that the exceptional “who,” the training camp athlete, is in fact, abandoned or banned:

What has been banned is delivered over to its own seperatedness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it—at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. (Agamben, 1998, p. 110)

If then, the football player is homo sacer, captured in the mechanisms of the training camp, “with respect to whom all men [sic] act as sovereigns” (Agamben, 1998, p. 83) who is the sovereign? The one to whom homo sacer is subjected. What the refiguring of Agamben’s concepts within a theory of spectacular society allows us to claim is that the power of the sovereign state, with its inherently biopolitical foundation, becomes echoed in the logic that governs our patterns of production and consumption. Indirectly, the training camp spectator engenders these biopolitical forces that render life and death in such particular relations to power. After all, the same exceptional performances that bring these athletes closer to death ¹⁸ are the exceptional performances that we fetishize.

Our constant redefinition of what constitutes an (outstanding) exceptional performance moves that line between life and death incessantly closer to death for those who are subject to the camp. Each time we watch ESPN’s Top Ten biggest hits compilation, or commend/condemn an athlete for playing/not playing through injury, we push those same heroes further into the biopolitical abyss. The spectacle we demand is no longer attainable without the camp and its mechanisms of both the production of spectacular entertainment and the magnification of bare life. Could anyone disagree that these players are the essence of sur-vival (existence in excess of death; Margaroni, 2005)? They are made to live in an exceptional way, as bare athletic life—as supermen.