Affect and Number in Contemporary Cricket Sivakumar V. Arumugam

Governing Social Bodies: Affect and Number in Contemporary Cricket Sivakumar V. Arumugam Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Sivakumar V. Arumugam All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Governing Social Bodies: Affect and Number in Contemporary Cricket Sivakumar V. Arumugam Two recent cybernetics-derived academic disciplines, biomechanics and operations research, have worked to reshape cricket. Liberalization and the consequent large flows of money into the game have resulted in a transformation in how the game is regulated, coached, and played. In this dissertation, I have focused on how cricket is now being produced through an account of the use of biomechanics in the regulating and coaching of cricket and an appraisal of the role that operations research plays in regulating interruptions to individual games of cricket. I argue that these twin developments correspond to Foucault’s notion of a contemporary governmentality organized around the body as machine and the species of body, respectively. A consideration of the manner in which cybernetics under- pins these practices and theories broadens and deepens accounts of both how the contemporary world is continually being shaped and being studied. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Sciencestudiesandconstructivism . 5 1.2 Cyberneticthingsandgovernmentality . 13 1.3 Cyberneticsandtheory. 16 1.4 Anthropology of sport and cricket in India . 35 1.5 Asummary ................................. 37 2 Biomechanics and the habits of bowling fast 42 2.1 Liberalizationandexpertiseofthebody . 53 2.2 Biomechanics ................................ 57 2.3 TheMRFPaceFoundation. 71 2.4 IrfanPathan ................................. 77 2.5 Cyberneticsandbiomechanics . 94 2.6 Thelimitsofbiomechanics . 100 i 3 Spinning affect: the science and laws of cricket 102 3.1 Broadcastingderegulation . 113 3.2 Cricketandfairplay ............................ 125 3.3 Affectivebattingagainstbowling . 130 3.4 Muralitharan and the ‘throwing’ controversy . 144 3.5 Affect..................................... 150 4 Operations Research and predicting outcomes in cricket 163 4.1 Probityandprobability. 180 4.2 Information, mathematics and prediction . 183 4.3 Rulefollowing,numbers,andcommunity. 195 4.4 Acyborgmathematicsofsciencestudies . 204 4.5 Embeddingperformativity . 208 4.6 Computermodelsincricket . 213 5 Simulating cricket: the limits of data 221 5.1 TheDuckworthandLewisargument . 226 5.2 Aninterludeoncrime ........................... 244 5.3 Twomethodologies............................. 254 5.4 MonteCarloandBayes. 260 5.5 Numbersandmodels............................ 264 ii 6 Conclusion 267 Bibliography 273 iii For Ahilan iv Chapter 1 Introduction Introduction 2 Cricket is an old sport. The basic form of the game stabilized in the early 18th century. A bowler bowls a ball towards a batsman who in turn tries to hit the ball away from the bowler’s teammates—this is the micro-event at the core of any game of cricket. There have been a number of changes in the game and how it has been played, governed, and thought about over the last 300 years. Some of the changes in cricket since World War II can be traced to the imbrication of cricket with the exigencies and imperatives of modern markets. Denis Compton, a professional cricket player before and after the War, as well as a professional football player, was one of the first sportsmen to make a living from advertising—selling his image as a sportsman rather than just from playing sports itself. The compres- sion of the game in time and space in the form of “one-day” cricket in England in the 1960’s continued this connection between cricket and commerce. The game was structured to force a result within a single day as spectatorship for multi-day long cricket that often ended in draws dwindled. In the late 1970’s, the media mogul Kerry Packer persuaded the Australian Cricket Board to award his television channel exclusive broadcasting rights to Australian cricket by constructing a set of parallel “rebel” national teams and instituting commercially successful games between them. This pattern has continued to the present day via the creation of the Indian Premier League. The monies involved in this league of Introduction 3 city-based franchises in India has enabled it to draw on new sources of cricketing talent both within India and around the world.1 In this dissertation, I track some recent changes to how this international game is coached, played, and governed. I will demonstrate that two relatively new cybernetics-derived sciences—biomechanics and operations research—have been applied to cricket since the 1990’s. Both sciences have reshaped the regulation of games of cricket. Biomechanics is now woven into the regulation of what counts as “bowling” as well changing how bowlers are coached. And an Operations Research formula that purports to be fair and predictive of results is used to de- termine the outcome of interrupted one-day games. I will suggest that tracking these particular changes lends some insight into two concepts of some interest in anthropology—affect and number. Insofar as cricket is both a part of the contemporary world and a simulacrum of it, similar processes may be occurring elsewhere. Cricket in an era of globalization, with India at its center, has been transformed. A much shorter version of the game tailored for evening television view- ing has been heavily promoted. Various aspects of the game have been stan- dardized, with the ICC providing the mechanism to enforce those standards. An international league has been instituted to measure national teams’ success 1For a recent account of some of these changes, see K.R. Guruprasad (2011). Introduction 4 against one another in the traditional five day form of the game that aligns with a “World Cup” involving play of the short, one day long, form. Such measures have been designed to increase audience sizes in India and around the world. The resulting increase in revenue to all members of the ICC—although it is worth noting that only the cricket boards in India, Australia and England actually make a profit, which is used by the ICC to subsidize the other boards—have in turn been invested in increasing the competitiveness of the individual national teams. Training academies for cricket players now specialize in breaking down playing techniques into series’ of minute bodily gestures through computer analyzes of video images. Such televisual technologies, adopted from the visualizations made available to audiences, have made the efficiency of cricket players’ bodies rather than individual playing style of overwhelming concern within India and around the world. Furthermore, a concern over increased efficiency, in particular, of over- seeing players’ physical fitness, has led national teams to replace their system of ad-hoc hiring of players match by match to a contracting of players on an annual basis. Moreover, the laws of cricket have also been reformulated around advances in the statistical analysis of cricket. These new technologies, I argue, collectively make available a novel form of governmentality—or the conduct of conduct—in cricket. Introduction 5 1.1 Science studies and constructivism Studying the deployment of science in cricket suggests a science studies approach. Science studies as such, as a not quite stable broadly defined discipline in its own right, is part of the story that I think unfolds in cricket. I suggest in chapter 4 that science studies shares a certain similarity to what, after Margaret Mead, came to be called second-order cybernetics, or the study of the engagement of observers of a cybernetic system with that very system. Making that connection between cybernetics and science studies, and a connection between cybernetics and im- portant recent concepts in anthropological theory, does not, however, reduce the latter to the former. Much as demonstrating that something social is constructed does not imply that the writer thinks it ought not to have come into being or could cease to be, suggesting that these connections exist does not by itself undercut the usefulness of cybernetics, science studies approaches, or indeed certain theories of affect and number. In The Social Construction of What? (Hacking 1999), Hacking asserts four theses about social construction work, listed together here: 0 In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable (Hacking 1999, 12). 1 X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as Introduction 6 it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable. 2 X is quite bad as it is. 3 We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed (Hacking 1999, 6). Hacking suggests that this list comports with grades of (this time, unenumer- ated) least-to-most demanding varieties of constructivism: • Historical • Ironic • Reformist; Unmasking • Rebellious • Revolutionary (Hacking 1999, 19) It is easy to see the correspondence between these two lists. If only condition (0) obtains, one is most likely an historical constructivist, if (0) and (1) obtain together, one is likely an ironic constructivist and so on, in Hacking’s schema. The point behind these grades of constructivism comes out in his writing on the “science wars.” Hacking assumes a disagreement between two parties: con- Introduction 7 structivists and scientists.

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