The furore over Dhoni’s recalling of Bell in the Trent Bridge Test match, and the increasingly distasteful posturing on issues of fair play by both sides might prompt a reconsideration of what sport is for. Is there a philosophy of sport, and if so, what is it? The concept of play, central to Enlightenment aesthetics, privileges notions of freedom and disinterestedness at the cost of material interests or practical ends. In constituting a field of pleasurable activity, whether in literature and the other arts, or in games and athletic pursuits, play is thought to be exempt from the conditions ordinarily attaching to social practice. Theoretically, it is pursued in and for itself: the artwork, the literary text, the game, are held to be their own ends, and to incorporate their own satisfactions. Post-Enlightenment social and aesthetic theory therefore lays particular emphasis upon the self-separation and autonomy of the realm of play and its manifestations in art and culture. Most importantly, it contrasts players with workers. This opposition creates a problem for philosophies of sport in modern capitalist societies, where professional sportspersons are clearly workers earning money for their skills. And gymnastic training was not an end in itself for Plato, who viewed children’s games as formative in both mental and physical terms, and sought to absorb them into the educational curriculum, the paideia.
Like other forms of cultural mimesis, such as literature, games obviously produce the illusion (from Latin illusio, mockery or deceit, derived from illudere, i.e. in ludere, in play) of an autonomous, sovereign field of activity not answerable to the demands of everyday life. Yet at the same time, such pastimes are determined by the nature and exigencies of our human existence, so in fact they are not free at all. Even Bakhtin’s notion of carnival founds itself upon the apparent freedom and privilege of non-official licentiousness, of subversive laughter, parody, and corporeal excess, while it recognizes the extent to which such subversion is permitted, and ultimately contained, by ‘official’ discourse.
We tend to use culture in order to try out – as it were, to test – the laws and values by which we wish to live. (This sounds a bit like a circular argument, though – for isn’t culture itself the field in which value operates?) Just as literature explores questions of suffering, desire, fear and happiness, so too games could be seen as presenting us with questions relating to justice, fairness, rivalry, endurance and sustained endeavour. In effect they inhabit the sphere of ethics and law, while at the same time they raise issues of freedom and control. In doing so, moreover, they question the mind-body dichotomy on which many assumptions of cultural value are founded. Jeremy Bentham famously wrote in The Rationale of Reward that ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry’. His Utilitarian disciple John Stuart Mill rejected this eminently reasonable sentiment, arguing that pleasure and/or value should be computed qualitatively, not quantitatively, so that music and poetry can be judged to provide higher pleasures, while games-playing provides inferior ones. This premise is linked to the deep-seated prejudice, in Western culture, against the body and its pleasures: although it is by no means the case that all games are bodily pursuits.
Just as a philosophy of play threatens to swamp and appropriate the entire field of culture, so too a theory of games is potentially too large to be limited to activities technically defined as sports. At the same time, the actual field of sporting practice constantly limits and redefines the theoretical freedom or, conversely, the rule-bound character, of the ‘game’. The game is bound by its own rules, upon which its success and pleasure depend. These can be broken, but they cannot be discarded without breaking up the game itself. Yet at certain times, the game may gesture towards the ‘saving’ illusion that winning and losing, and their palpable material consequences, are less important than the spirit of ‘play’ and its freedom from material interests, its ethical absolutism, and its desire for self-perpetuation. This is what it means to be in play, which, if one accepts the Latin sense of illusio, is simply a deceit of sorts. It would, I think, be a mistake to assert that a philosophy of sport involves the practice of ethics, the understanding of law, the knowledge of freedom. Rather, it involves the examination of ethics, law and freedom as hypotheses merely, as possibilities upon which we may or may not act.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Literature and/of Sport
Perhaps we should begin by focusing on the conjunction, and, rather than the preposition, of. As mimetic practices designed to produce pleasure, literature and sport are culturally analogous. Both appear to be rooted in the play-instinct which, disproving Friedrich Schiller’s maxim that ‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays’ (Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, XV), is common to all animals. One strain in European philosophy, from Schiller to Nietzsche and perhaps even through Gadamer and Derrida, sees play as fundamental to, or even preceding, the social manifestations of culture. Johan Huizinga began his classic study Homo Ludens (1938) with the statement that ‘Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for men to teach them their playing.’ Huizinga went on to argue that play is distinguished by certain characteristics: by freedom, by separation and boundedness (in that it is marked off from ordinary life by limits of time and space), by order, and by secrecy. But despite the power and persuasiveness both of Huizinga’s argument and its critical re-reading, in the context of modern capitalist culture, by Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games (1958), I think it is important to maintain some critical distance at the start from the discursive and ideological compulsions of the philosophy of play.
Let’s start, then, with the obvious analogy between literature and games as mimetic forms, reproducing or imitating human activities – such as hunting, fighting, war, and so on – without incurring damaging physical costs. In fact this lack of real-life expenditure, if we may so call it, might direct us towards the Kantian proposition that the distinctive feature of aesthetic pleasure is the absence of interference from interests. There is a great deal of neo-Kantianism in European aesthetic theory generally, and in the ideals of art for art’s sake and of true sport as a voluntary amateur activity. Huizinga, like Schiller before him and Caillois after, reposes extreme faith in play as an essentially free activity. This confidence is at the root of what turns out to be an invidious and largely untenable distinction between the amateur and the professional, a distinction that lends itself to manipulation by class interests (ie the opposition between gentlemen and players). Caillois states unambiguously that in the true game, property is exchanged, but no goods are produced:
As for the professionals – the boxers, cyclists, jockeys or actors who earn their living in the ring, track or hippodrome or on the stage, and who must think in terms of prize, salary or title – it is clear that they are not players but workers. When they play, it is at some other game. (Man, Play and Games, p. 6)
Is it possible, whether in the context of the sports of classical Greece and Rome, where athletes were separately maintained and paid an opsonion for their services, or in the context of the huge monetary investments in modern sport, to sustain this distinction between players and workers? This really is why I continue to be somewhat suspicious of the privileging of ‘free play’ as the source of all creative endeavour, and of efforts to demarcate this space for literature and the other arts on the one hand, and sports on the other. Both literature and sport are in our own time very largely commercial pursuits, by no means free from economic interests and practical ends, and it is extremely difficult to maintain the ideological purity of either. At the same time, it is clear that there are some compulsions within the space of play itself that tend to override financial or other interests. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham characterized certain types of gambling, where the gains cannot in any way outweigh the losses, as deep play, and in a seminal essay, Clifford Geertz applied this notion to the Balinese cock-fight.
Following Aristotle’s classification of forms of mimesis per differentiam, we might be tempted to see literature and sport as distinguished by their choice of medium. Literature uses verbal representations, while sport often – though not always – uses bodies as its medium. Would it be right, then, to think of literature as addressed to the mental, and sports to the physical realm? But not all games are physical pastimes (in fact many are verbal) and a more general theory of play, or of games, could function as a useful corrective to the mind-body distinction often employed to produce a Cartesian split between mental and physical culture, or between the arts and sports. Wittgenstein compared language itself to games-playing:
We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air, chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke and so on. And now someone says: The whole time they are playing a ball-game and following definite rules at every throw. (Philosophical Investigations, 83)
So instead of seeing literature and games as parallel cultural forms, we could see literature itself as a kind of game, which is what certain kinds of games theory, or the philosophy of play, would want to do.
Caillois builds on a throwaway reference in the fourth book of Plato’s Republic to institute a distinction between ludus and paidia, game and play. Play, paidia, is spontaneous, exuberant, joyful, and potentially anarchic. Game, ludus, is rule-bound, promotes skill, calculation and difficulty, and is productive of social discipline. Plato abhors ‘the lawless play of others’, but approves an educational programme, paideia, which begins by training children in music and gymnastics, to regulate and instill harmony in bodies as well as minds. The distinction between paidia and ludus is still employed by games theorists to set the putative freedom and anarchy of play – in all forms of art – against the systems and rules that regulate games. Thus just as one might contrast the free play of children with a rule-bound game like cricket, one might also contrast the joyful abandon of the ‘naïve’ artist, or the spirit of creative freedom itself, with the rules of genre or laws of form. Indeed genres might be seen as equivalent, in literature, to games. Unfortunately, it is difficult to push this contrast beyond the purely notional realm of theory. For even with children, we see that the transition from play to game is quick and imperceptible: rules are invented almost immediately to structure what seems to be aimless, random activity (as in Freud’s example of his grandson Ernst playing fort!-da!). So too, contra Derrida, it is difficult to speak of art, and literature particularly, as manifesting the nature of pure play, or free play: intention, will, and social conditioning always-already intervene to regulate artistic and textual expression, so that even where the ‘rules of the game’ are constantly being broken, they operate as frames of reference. More interesting is Caillois’s attempt to classify games into four categories: agôn, games of contestation; mimicry, games of simulation; alea, games of chance, and ilinx, games of vertigo. Within these broad categories, we can see the notional opposition of ludus and paidia as operating in the form of a tension, a two-way pull, rather than as a clear structural division.
Isn’t there the same kind of two-way pull in literature too? Which brings me to my first question – is there really any point in reading the literature of sport if the more interesting issue is whether literature is like sport, or like a game? Of course the latter possibility is one that we must always keep in our minds, but the reason why we’ve chosen the subject we have is that it allows us to focus on sport and its cultural representations in a way that asks many other interesting questions as well. Beginning by asking whether literature and sport are alike, we might go on to find out in what ways they are not alike: so that reading the literature of sport will enable us to focus on a deeply ambivalent preposition.
Reading
Plato, The Republic, Books III and IV
Friedrich Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, at http://www.bartleby.com/32/501.html
Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)
Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press,2001)
Let’s start, then, with the obvious analogy between literature and games as mimetic forms, reproducing or imitating human activities – such as hunting, fighting, war, and so on – without incurring damaging physical costs. In fact this lack of real-life expenditure, if we may so call it, might direct us towards the Kantian proposition that the distinctive feature of aesthetic pleasure is the absence of interference from interests. There is a great deal of neo-Kantianism in European aesthetic theory generally, and in the ideals of art for art’s sake and of true sport as a voluntary amateur activity. Huizinga, like Schiller before him and Caillois after, reposes extreme faith in play as an essentially free activity. This confidence is at the root of what turns out to be an invidious and largely untenable distinction between the amateur and the professional, a distinction that lends itself to manipulation by class interests (ie the opposition between gentlemen and players). Caillois states unambiguously that in the true game, property is exchanged, but no goods are produced:
As for the professionals – the boxers, cyclists, jockeys or actors who earn their living in the ring, track or hippodrome or on the stage, and who must think in terms of prize, salary or title – it is clear that they are not players but workers. When they play, it is at some other game. (Man, Play and Games, p. 6)
Is it possible, whether in the context of the sports of classical Greece and Rome, where athletes were separately maintained and paid an opsonion for their services, or in the context of the huge monetary investments in modern sport, to sustain this distinction between players and workers? This really is why I continue to be somewhat suspicious of the privileging of ‘free play’ as the source of all creative endeavour, and of efforts to demarcate this space for literature and the other arts on the one hand, and sports on the other. Both literature and sport are in our own time very largely commercial pursuits, by no means free from economic interests and practical ends, and it is extremely difficult to maintain the ideological purity of either. At the same time, it is clear that there are some compulsions within the space of play itself that tend to override financial or other interests. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham characterized certain types of gambling, where the gains cannot in any way outweigh the losses, as deep play, and in a seminal essay, Clifford Geertz applied this notion to the Balinese cock-fight.
Following Aristotle’s classification of forms of mimesis per differentiam, we might be tempted to see literature and sport as distinguished by their choice of medium. Literature uses verbal representations, while sport often – though not always – uses bodies as its medium. Would it be right, then, to think of literature as addressed to the mental, and sports to the physical realm? But not all games are physical pastimes (in fact many are verbal) and a more general theory of play, or of games, could function as a useful corrective to the mind-body distinction often employed to produce a Cartesian split between mental and physical culture, or between the arts and sports. Wittgenstein compared language itself to games-playing:
We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air, chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke and so on. And now someone says: The whole time they are playing a ball-game and following definite rules at every throw. (Philosophical Investigations, 83)
So instead of seeing literature and games as parallel cultural forms, we could see literature itself as a kind of game, which is what certain kinds of games theory, or the philosophy of play, would want to do.
Caillois builds on a throwaway reference in the fourth book of Plato’s Republic to institute a distinction between ludus and paidia, game and play. Play, paidia, is spontaneous, exuberant, joyful, and potentially anarchic. Game, ludus, is rule-bound, promotes skill, calculation and difficulty, and is productive of social discipline. Plato abhors ‘the lawless play of others’, but approves an educational programme, paideia, which begins by training children in music and gymnastics, to regulate and instill harmony in bodies as well as minds. The distinction between paidia and ludus is still employed by games theorists to set the putative freedom and anarchy of play – in all forms of art – against the systems and rules that regulate games. Thus just as one might contrast the free play of children with a rule-bound game like cricket, one might also contrast the joyful abandon of the ‘naïve’ artist, or the spirit of creative freedom itself, with the rules of genre or laws of form. Indeed genres might be seen as equivalent, in literature, to games. Unfortunately, it is difficult to push this contrast beyond the purely notional realm of theory. For even with children, we see that the transition from play to game is quick and imperceptible: rules are invented almost immediately to structure what seems to be aimless, random activity (as in Freud’s example of his grandson Ernst playing fort!-da!). So too, contra Derrida, it is difficult to speak of art, and literature particularly, as manifesting the nature of pure play, or free play: intention, will, and social conditioning always-already intervene to regulate artistic and textual expression, so that even where the ‘rules of the game’ are constantly being broken, they operate as frames of reference. More interesting is Caillois’s attempt to classify games into four categories: agôn, games of contestation; mimicry, games of simulation; alea, games of chance, and ilinx, games of vertigo. Within these broad categories, we can see the notional opposition of ludus and paidia as operating in the form of a tension, a two-way pull, rather than as a clear structural division.
Isn’t there the same kind of two-way pull in literature too? Which brings me to my first question – is there really any point in reading the literature of sport if the more interesting issue is whether literature is like sport, or like a game? Of course the latter possibility is one that we must always keep in our minds, but the reason why we’ve chosen the subject we have is that it allows us to focus on sport and its cultural representations in a way that asks many other interesting questions as well. Beginning by asking whether literature and sport are alike, we might go on to find out in what ways they are not alike: so that reading the literature of sport will enable us to focus on a deeply ambivalent preposition.
Reading
Plato, The Republic, Books III and IV
Friedrich Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, at http://www.bartleby.com/32/501.html
Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)
Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press,2001)
Thursday, July 7, 2011
ludere, to play
This is the blog for Performative Play: The Literature and Culture of Sport, an optional course for postgraduate students at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. It is being offered by Supriya Chaudhuri in Semester 1/3, 2011 (July to November). Students are expected to post comments and questions, and to report on their reading. Here is an outline of the course.
Week 1: Literature and Sport: theory, philosophy, practice
We shall look at the theoretical and philosophical assumptions behind the cultural categories of literature and sport, asking what they have in common as mimetic practices directed towards pleasure. We shall begin with the relation between games and play, looking at Plato’s comments in the Republic and going on to Johann Huizinga’s classic work Homo Ludens and Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. At the same time, we will consider the views of Kant, Schiller and Nietzsche on art as a form of play, as against Bakhtin’s influential model of the social function of play. Taking off from John Stuart Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures and between intellectual, aesthetic and moral ends, we will examine the long-held opposition between the ‘body’ and the ‘mind’, and the function of the performative in the aesthetics of both literature and sport.
Week 2: The Greek paideia and the cult of the athlete
We shall be looking at a variety of texts and extracts from Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle and their Roman successors to examine the nature of the Greek educational ideal, the emphasis on sport in the Greek way of life, the Olympic Games, the contemporary critiques of these models, and the cultivation of large-scale spectator sports, including gladiatorial combats, as a means of exercising popular control. The gendering of sport will be looked at in the context of Sparta.
Week 3: Sport, Ethics, England, and Empire
We will examine the emergence of sport as a critical component of the ideologies of empire and nation, from its inclusion in English public school education, as found in Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (1857). We shall also consider other variants of public school mores, such as in Kipling’s Stalky and Co (1899), the link between the British Empire and the Great Game in Kim (1910), and the postmodern, postnational depictions of quidditch in the Harry Potter series and the tournament in HP and the Goblet of Fire, 2003. Theoretical and historical frames may be taken from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and J. A. Mangan.
Week 4: Professionalism in Sport: Gentlemen vs Players
The text for this week will be George Bernard Shaw’s novel about a professional prizefighter and his entry into London society, Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886). We shall attempt to relate this work to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of sport, noting the distinctions he introduces between game and sport, and his treatment of class.
Week 5: Sport, Aesthetics and Politics: what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
They are still playing cricket at night
They are playing the game in the dark.
They're on guard for a backlash of light
They are losing the ball at long leg.
They are trying to learn how the dark
Helps the yorker knock back the off-peg;
They are trying to find a new trick
Where the ball moves to darkness from light.
They're determined to paint the scene black
But a blackness compounded by white.
They are dying to pass a new law
Where blindness is deemed to be sight
They are still playing cricket at night.
I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing God ever created on earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad.
Same author: guess who before googling it?
We may begin with Hugh de Selincourt’s 1924 novel, The Cricket Match, and other ‘classic’ writing about cricket, eg by Neville Cardus, and contrast it with CLR James’s account of cricket, colonialism and the politics of sport in Beyond a Boundary (1963). We will move on to social histories of cricket produced by, eg, Ramachandra Guha, Ashis Nandy and Mike Marqusee, setting them against two postcolonial cricket novels, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman (2011). Viewing: Lagaan (2001).
Week 6: Modernity and Sport
The text for the this week will be Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 long story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, made into a film in 1962. We may set this against the triumphalism of Chariots of Fire (1981) and the history of the modern Olympics.
Week 7: Modernism and Sport: anxiety, desire, and postmodernist fantasy
This week’s texts will include Bernard Malamud’s first novel, about a baseball star, The Natural (1952), and Moti Nandy’s modernist stories for the young, Striker, Stopper and Kony. We may view the film of Kony (1984), to discuss issues involving women in sport, such as the wish-fulfilment fantasy, Bend it Like Beckham (2003), and the later Chak De! India.
Week 8: The Body in Pain
Texts for consideration will be chosen from Norman Mailer’s The Fight (1975), Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing (1987), and F. X. Toole’s stories about boxing, Rope Burns (2000). Viewing will include On the Waterfront (1954), Rocky (1976), Raging Bull (1985), and Million Dollar Baby (2000). The question of gender raised by the last text will be further explored with reference to the journalism of Djuna Barnes, Payoshni Mitra’s documentary, The Bold and the Beautiful, and the career of M.C. Mary Kom.
Week 9: Studies in a Dying Culture
The texts for this week will be Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go (1951) and Munshi Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khilari (1925), together with Satyajit Ray’s film version (1977). We will examine the parallels between game-playing and cultural performance and the political allegory encoded through the game.
Week 10: The Opium of the Masses
We will consider the nature of football fandom with reference to Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and discuss issues of popular culture, racism and sexism in Tim Parks’s A Season with Verona (2002) and Laurent Mauvignier’s In the Crowd (2006). Viewing may include Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and The Damned United (2009)
Week 11: Humour
The texts for this week will be P G Wodehouse, The Golf Omnibus (1973), a collection of stories written over a long period, and Stephen Potter, Gamesmanship (1947) and The Complete Golf Gamesmanship (1968)
Week 12: The Book as Game
Starting with Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), we shall consider the relation of books to games as well as the conversion of books to games in the form of computer games, for instance. The nature of narrative, the function of representation, the problem of genre and many of the issues raised in the first week will be re-opened.
After the second half of the course, students will be required to present term papers on subjects/texts of their choice. They need not confine themselves to the texts under review, but must provide me with a copy of the text they wish to discuss.
An International Conference on ‘Sport and the Nation’ will be held in January 2012.
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