Autonomy's limits, autonomy's illusion

The conditions of power, from trade wars to the NBA's trade deadline.

I wound up in an 11am showing of Babygirl because of a fire at the library.

I’d gone to the Reference Library to work on my book only to find, on arrival, signs taped to the doors and windows of the building’s vaulting glass atrium that said the library would reopen at noon.

A “fire incident”, I read online while standing outside the building, no one and nothing was harmed.

I start to walk with my coffee. It’s cold but the sun flickers in and out from behind the clouds, like a little kid with their hand on a light switch. I do the errands I planned to do after working through the morning, drop off rolls of film, hit the drug store. Time feels like a quality I can hold and hold off.

After a hour, I’m back where I started with 10 minutes to go before the day’s first screening at one of my favourite movie theatres in the city. The choice feels both obvious and authoritative. The person at the counter pulls up the screen of available seats and we both laugh because they’re all free. I pull off layers, sit through the PSA that asks everyone in the theatre to turn off their phones and be considerate. I reach into my bag and check that my phone is on silent.

The movie is good. It goes from what I thought it would be to a subtle, then not so subtle, inversion of power dynamics. The dynamics themselves, between Nicole Kidman’s lead, Romy, and Harris Dickinson’s Samuel, are fraught and simmering, shifting and at times awkward, tender. Autonomy, for both, strains and splits, it also doesn’t exist as a static quality. Neither holds it in absolute.

The ending is so satisfying I laugh and feel dazed, almost, leaving the empty theatre into the still largely empty lobby. There’s a little tinge of mourning for leaving how satisfying the experience, too. I feel myself subtly shift, mentally and physically, for what it means to reenter the public space, though one is on the surface not so different than the other. Myself in singular, no longer sitting alone in the dark, outwardly engrossed. Sitting now on the train, part of the collective of everyone else, jostling bodies, inwardly engrossed.

Autos the Greek for self, nomos for law. How much the definition shifts and changes, as outer rules or dictated by feelings within ourselves. Within a day. Within hours in a day.

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Autonomy’s limits. I think about them often in basketball, often too in our interpretation of power and who gets it. Or, who gets it freely.

Brian Windhorst reported new information on the rift between the Heat and Jimmy Butler that outlined a less than subtle degree of manipulation by Miami. “Baiting”, is how Windhorst put it. That in shootaround Heat coach Erik Spoelstra told Butler he wasn’t going to start in the team’s next game, delivering the news in front of everyone on the team. He did this, Windhorst says, because the Heat wanted Butler to storm off — which he did — and they wanted Butler to storm off so they could suspend him again, this time without pay. Pat Riley, Windhorst notes, knew Butler’s “temperament”, knew his history, and because of both, that he’d take the bait.

Butler’s been candid about his issues with authority as much as his being steered by pride. He’s left every team he’s played for because there was some degree of disrespect he felt levelled toward him, all real in the sense that in retrospect each slight happened, but further distilled for Butler because each instance was initiated from a flex in authority and a wound to his pride.

The catch with memory, when it comes to two conflicting versions, is the same as clashing autonomies: the “correct” version tends to be the one with the most power behind it.

To bait somebody is to know very intimately their patterns of memory. What makes patterns in memory — the way certain scenes stick out, crystal clear, more than others — is emotion. It’s a very unique, occasionally dangerous power to be the figure capable of pressing and prodding on someone else’s memory in order to orient their behaviour to better suit a situation, or in service to a desired outcome.

I hardly have to cast around to call up examples at a global, unprecedented scale with the trade wars Donald Trump is set to wage on three fronts. I don’t consider myself too patriotic of a person but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a visceral skein of anger, hurt and confusion (plus anxiety) Canadians have been feeling, and that Justin Trudeau didn’t pull on each thread in his response to Trump. Watching, I felt roused. Part of a collective turning point in the history between Canada and the U.S. that is, from this perspective, wholly unwanted, but that I have the sense many Canadians feel steeled for.

There is a point, in any relationship, where one person has enough. Where they call the other’s bluff. Whether that bluff is refusing to budge or walking away, that reaction is the overt rejection of manipulation, of baiting.

Butler’s limits, we’ve been told, are personal. But to that distinction, typically framed as a weakness, I wonder — whose aren’t? In basketball it just becomes a lot easier to shift the acceptance of personal limits depending on the situation those limits play against. Butler’s competitive drive, his “serial killer’s dream” intensity or famed addiction to working, work as an ideal initially. His limits being essentially limitless are what have made so many front offices take big swings on him. Likewise Butler’s candor, the impulse and ego behind his calling it as he sees it on the floor as in life, goes from outspoken to being considered arrogant when the limits of a franchise, a team president, or the league itself change.

Autonomy, we tend to forget, is power. It might appear removed from power, because it no longer cedes so directly to an outside power’s shifting whims and demands, but all autonomy still exists within tethering distance to the power structure it sought to separate from. In our current moment of would-be billionaire oligarchs and tyrannical expansionism, the path toward total autonomy, and therefore pure power, is by having material means enough to exist as an island. But the richest in the world, as we continue to see, are never satisfied with hitting one benchmark of wealth. There always has to be more — money, control, influence. So, greed becomes the wrinkle to true autonomy.

Athlete autonomy might be even less black and white.

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In fandom, and within the ecosystem of the NBA, we long for stars. Because of this, you’d think the hierarchy would go fairly neatly from rookie hopeful, to established player, to perennial star, and the through-line would be an easy to trace improvement of skill. Instead, at every level, autonomy veers, branches, inverts, and vanishes. Rookies deigned once-in-a-generation talents are bumped to the top of stardom’s shifty class, demoted immediately when their progression for any reason slows or stalls.

Many athletes have talked to me about the security not of their first NBA contract, but their second. That it’s the second that means they’ve proven staying power beyond the action of getting drafted — an act, after all, wholly outside their hands. Many of those athletes then become role players, reliable sixth men, fill-in-the-gap style players who make the machine of their team operate smoothly by focusing on one specific part of it (defence, offence, their star) or every little thing that usually a star’s autonomy dictates they don’t need to do (diving for loose balls, boxing out on every play, guarding their man so stiflingly it feels like sitting in a parked car with closed windows in July just watching).

The autonomy of stars themselves is no less clear, but the obvious marker of truly autonomous stardom is in decision-making. Namely, that you have the power to make any and all decisions about your present and future. There are only two NBA athletes who have no trade clauses in their contracts, LeBron James and Bradley Beal.

Beal’s no-trade clause has come up a lot as the February 7th trade deadline approaches, mostly in the framing of whether or not he’d be willing to waive it so the Suns can trade him (in a deal, hypothetically, involving landing Butler). It’s always mentioned so off-handedly, or else like a given, that Beal would be willing to give such a thing up. The no-trade clause becomes the most pressing element, the component drawn precisely, with Beal turning into a blurry abstract in the background of his own trade negotiations.

Here’s where autonomy, hard fought, becomes a burden.

In Beal’s case, his autonomy becomes the barrier in everyone’s way. Can’t this guy just let us move on? Is the question behind the question of whether he’ll waive the clause. What could this guy possibly want? (Well, not to be traded…) In this way, much like Butler, Beal’s autonomy becomes not just any problem, but his problem. His to solve. This is what happens when power is given (in Beal’s case, contractually) but still held in the broader public consciousness as negligible, negotiable.

Athletes are a ready example because we’ve put them into this terrarium of their sport and its pre-existing constructs, but I think of any group — racial, gender and sexual identities, class and labour — who’s had to fight to wrest power away from traditional structures. How that power is in many, maybe most cases, viewed as conditional. As existing until.

Until that power stops going unnoticed, until that power presses against the power of another group, until that power begins to recognize the upper limits placed on it were put there by historic powers intent on control.

Until that power becomes a problem.

I was going to leave it at that but overnight, hours after I watched Trudeau’s address and fell asleep wondering whether it’s possible to feel pre-stinctual whiplash for historical turning points, Luka Doncic was traded to the Lakers for Anthony Davis.

Here is a surprise, almost perfectly mirrored, revocation of star autonomy. Doncic and Davis both considered at the upper limit of their stardom, traded totally abruptly and with no warning. A week ago Davis made the mistake of wondering aloud if the Lakers didn’t “need another big”, and Doncic, well, the Mavericks had concerns about his conditioning, his defensive efforts, his health and whether he could see them deep into another postseason. For what it’s worth, the exact same concerns have been levelled at Davis.

The trade felt so strange, so totally out of the blue and unnecessary that, when Dylan told me about it as I came in the door from walking the dogs in the snowy, cold, pale grey morning, I asked where he’d heard it. A running friend, he said. But, like, ESPN? I called, wrestling with the dogs to wipe their paws (funny my own construct of power and autonomy, sports broadcaster as monolith). But it was true, and apparently no shortage of NBA execs shared my surprise.

If it was the encroaching trade deadline that got me thinking about autonomy, then it’s trades like this that illustrate autonomy (and power) in a vacuum. We see it flexed, we see it dispatched, we watch the shuffle of positions as a result, and at the end we wonder what for. In the NBA the pantomime of power is often best exemplified in change. Change’s illusion, like this apparent “overhaul” for two teams, offers the ruse of a reset, though both franchises are left in more or less the same situation. It strikes me that the same front of power is what’s being postured on the global stage.

Power like shadow finger puppets, thrown up against a wall. Autonomy’s illusion in being the one flexing fingers, real autonomy in being the one who says Enough now, and switches off the light.