Technology at the service of natural performance: cross analysis of the Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya cases

Abstract

Drawing from the pragmatic sociology initiated by Boltanski and Thévenot, this study bears on the moments of tension between nature’s dispositions and technology’s possibilities in sporting events. It is based on the premise that the deep meaning of sport competitions and their staging are best perceived when strange or foreign forces (an overly ‘bouncing’ prosthesis, an overly masculine body) comes and undermines the reality tests which constitute the events. Through a cross-analysis [in the sense lent to this term by Passeron and Revel], of two athletes whose sporting achievements generated debates – Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya – we will underline the fundamental role of technology, which consists in instituting, in secret, reality that is always more significant from a sporting standpoint.

Notes

1. It is mainly the defeats that can be attributed to technical problems. As Boltanski and Thévenot pointed out, the pressure for worthiness is stronger for the worthies than for the others. Although it is possible, for instance, that somebody be excluded because of a technical dysfunction, a victory could not be based on one without losing all its substance.

2. We do not want to too rapidly separate the social from the philosophical discourses since the quantitative importance of the latter seems to have an effect of homogenization of the discourses on technology.

3. The author writes (2011, 18): ‘the researcher’s technical routines and his/her intuition can bring him/her to perceive events and to take action, without him/her being able to account for it on a theoretical level. The permanent presence, in the field of genetics, of masses of non-theorized operations makes manifest the place taken by this technical part within the scientifico-technical mix, a part which is always denied, yet always present. In the field of embryology, the “intuitive” technical part played a fundamental role in the success of cloning mammals’.

4. Foucault (1990) clearly showed the necessity of having concepts at one’s disposal in order to produce discourses and knowledge.

5. The various scientific oral communications that we made concerning the analysis of the Oscar Pistorius case seldom ended without the suggestion that this comparative analysis be made.

6. The English acronym is used even in the French press.

7. We use the noun phrase ‘able-bodied competitions’ rather than the ‘Olympic Sports’ one to characterize the movement grouping the athletes who are not designated as disabled. The aim here is to avoid basing ourselves on a normative distinction which has a very strong symbolic load. Indeed, the ‘Olympic’ label is granted by the International Olympic Committee, which controls what is in conformity with its ideal and what is not. In 1983, the sporting movement for disabled people was banned from using this label, as was the case for homosexual people, thereby underlining this institution’s difficulty to ‘accommodate deviations from normality, whether on a sports level or on a social level’ (Issanchou, Lantz and Liotard, 2013, 135).

8. Schultz (2011) explains on this point that the relation between intergender and sporting advantage for women should be at the center of the discussion concerning the eligibility of Caster Semenya, for example.