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CommentonAndreiMarkovits"TheOther'AmericanExceptionalism'"
CommentonAndreiMarkovits"TheOther'AmericanExceptionalism'"
byCharlesS.Maier
Source:
PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:2/1988,pages:151154,onwww.ceeol.com.
EXCEPTIONALISM' "
Charles S. Maier
Let me start by saying this is a wonderfully conceived piece, a delight to read,
one that unites serious concerns with playful research in the best sense. I do not
wish to contest its major point, namely that each society has a certain "space"
for games, as it does for political parties. Once that sports space is filled, it is
not easy to uproot the established choice, nor to fit another game in. The American
sports space could accommodate two major outdoor games. Baseball was the first,
and certain contingent, historical factors made American football, not soccer the
second. Of course, as Andrei Markovits recognizes, the problem is also: why is
there no baseball in Europe? But what then would be the parallel question for
Sombart's inquiry? Why is there no Democratic Party in Europe?
My reflections, in fact, are prompted more by the question concerning Europe
than the one concerning the United States. For the inability to export baseball
suggests that more may be at stake than the contingent circumstances by which
a sports space gets filled. The key may be in the way given sports reflect a national
cultural configuration. We can make more progress in decoding this relationship,
I believe, if we recognize that the social-class categories proposed in the paper
are not the most refined possible. The paper itself provides the clue for its own
deconstruction when it refers to American football ("the funning game") as
Taylorized. Precisely - but Taylorism represented a revolt of the engineering
mentality against class categorization. It allegedly transcended classes and was
not a simple imposition of bourgeois norms. Obviously it reinforced capitalist class
hierarchies - but did so in the name of a technical intelligence that denied the
relevance of social class and insisted on a functional division of labor.
To my mind, the point is that in America baseball is an "artisanal" sport, football,
its Taylorized supplement. As an artisanal support (replete with craft rituals,
premodern methods of production - i.e. assignments by position, not by function)
baseball could cut across the class hierarchies of capitalism. The paper might think
further about the games themselves. I bring up several distinctions that Dan White
pointed out to me many years ago. The first was the one just mentioned: baseball
anchors its men to places, football has increasingly gone from designation of
positions according to place to designation according to function. The wide receiver
has replaced the left end. What the player does, not where he lines up is crucial.
Football restricts players from certain options: only certain players can receive passes.
It has pushed specialization to the two-platoon system. Its stadiums are in the suburbs
and attract a less raffish, more managerial crowd. The general point is that baseball
has remained popular because it appealed to a rural myth of pre-class society. It
has overtones of Masonic-like rites: what outsider could possibly understand the
Praxis International 8:2 July 1988 02060-8448 $2.00
152 Praxis International
game? But it is a freemasonry in which all of small-town America could share.
The analogue in American history is more the community of the elect than the
working class. Baseball is the generalized extension of John Winthrop's covenant.
This raises the issue of American exceptionalism in general. As a comparativist
I find the concept over-used. On the one hand, the idea was the creation of an
unsuccessful American Communist Party that needed a social theory to explain
its frustration; on the other hand, it elaborated that Partisan Review-type celebration
of American values precisely during the period of the late 1940s and 1950s, when
a generation of academics, neo-conservative avant la lettre, were renouncing the
socialist enthusiasms of their City College or Columbia youth. American excep-
tionalism, like Turner's frontier hypothesis, has been largely a myth. The reason
that an American Socialist Party was weaker than the SPD, but hardly negligible
in 1912 - was less the absence of a feudal past than the ethnic divisions among
recent immigrants. However, it is all the more fitting that American exceptionalism
is a myth, because I would argue that the importance of baseball is as amythic
sport. It is the game of the exceptionalism we like to believe we have enjoyed.
The confirmation of this I find by thinking about the sport that Andrei Markovits's
essay inexplicably does not cover: cricket. Cricket is the English pre-modern
equivalent of baseball. Indeed cricket is even more archaic in its gentlemanly aspects.
Consider the test matches that go on for days without heed of time, one team's
voluntary but strategic decision to renounce batting, the provision of an indefinite
turn at the bat for the individual, the primitive homogeneity of playing space with
batter and pitcher in the middle of an elliptical field (think of the progression from
cricket oval to asymmetric baseball diamond to football gridiron in this sense),
in its white flannel uniforms. In contrast to soccer, which became big-time in the
industrial north, cricket could unite village communities and serve as game of an
elite and laborers simultaneously. Of laborers, mind you, not of Labour in its
collective sense. It could persist at Oxbridge and in the country, but it, too,
presupposes a pre-industrial community. Indeed its community can embrace the
spectrum from colonial masters to dependent people: recall C. L. R. James's great
cricket memoir Beyond a Boundary, which shows how cricket as a game might
overcome the gap between masters and colonized. Thus if this essay included cricket,
I think, it would find the pre-industrial/industrial axis more relevant. Of course
it has implications about class: for in a sense baseball and cricket must represent
a somewhat utopian denial of the class divisions of industrial capitalism. But that
is precisely their power. Might one of the reasons that we had no socialism be
because we had baseball instead?
In this regard I find the paper could profitably have taken up another issue, which
is precisely that of what any game or play represents. In a sense game playing
is the activity that the society uses to counterpose against the workplace, just like
the Carnival turns society upside down. It is, in Victor Turner's sense, a liminal
or anti-structural experience: an anthropological program that might be thought
of as the logical playing out, so to speak, of lames' polyvalent title, Beyond a
Boundary. Hence a serious game should not be simply a reflection of the dominant
class structure, but a utopian counter-structure. It incorporates an idealized vision
(or alternative construction) of society's principles of hierarchization, which still
remains in some sort of dialectical relationship to the dominant structure.
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But how then, it will be asked, do the pre-industrial aspects of baseball retain
their vitality even when the forces of production and class formations have moved
way beyond baseball's archaic arrangements? They do so precisely because they
serve as the liminal rite that invokes the community of an earlier era. In effect, we
can envisage two sports forms of anti-structure: the one, football, is contemporary
and merely reworks current social structural divisions. This will yield a sport that
is quite as ruthless as the social structure it counterposes: indeed the game must
take on the function of giving expression to the agonistic relationships of the
contemporary social order. In this sense Packers' coach Vince Lombardi ("Winning
isn't everything; it's the only thing.' ') served as the Carl Schmitt of the game world.
But the other game, baseball, must evoke a now archaic pre-industrial social
formation to play its anti-structural role. Competition can be less ruthless since
the game embodies an idealized image of now vanished artisanal or village relation-
ships that were less stratified than industrial capitalism. Indeed, the effect of temporal
displacement is even greater, because baseball and cricket were codified precisely
as the pre-industrial community was already being dispaced. Baseball's heroes
are the game equivalent of Hegel's owl ofminerva, rounding the bases of the village
green as dusk falls. It is redolent with nostalgia and probably was from the days
of its birth. We preserve that nostalgia with the mania for statistics and trivia,
which now can be enhanced by the almost infinite storage capacity of the computer
that creates new statistical categories as each man comes to bat . We enhance the
nostalgia further by surrounding the game's origins, as this essay shows, in myth.
So too baseball's current will be suffused with an elegiac quality that
purely contemporaneous anti-structure cannot take on: I have not read The Boys
of Summer or Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's recent Me and Dimaggio, but from
all descriptions this is the literature of Heimkehr.
Let me conclude by posing a question. If baseball was the anti-structural game
that evoked the pre-industrial order, and football is the sport that has served as
anti-structure for the postwar industrial age - the carnival of managerial capitalism,
as Jack Kemp has recognized - what will be the sport for what Sabel and Piore
have called "the second industrial divide?" Tennis remains the aristocratic game,
the jeu de paume born in the medieval courts of France, preserved like some scarab
of sport. Basketball is an indoor alternative. Ice hockey will continue to preserve
some regional winter outlet. But football already finds the class structure it inverts
fading into some future we only dimly discern. Can it survive as baseball thrived,
as the game of image of a mythic past? Can each prior social formation preserve
its respective game inversion as new productive forces come into being? Or does
society have room for only one atavistic game and must the other be crowded out?
It seems to me that the new sports which offer the anti-structural alternative for
the computer era are the individualized, participatory ones: namely running,
aerobics, and fitness. They allow the collectivized, but non-team, individualized
testing that is characteristic of a society built upon networks and circuit boards.
With these thoughts and queries we turn from Sombart - who asked Markovits's
original question - to Sombart's contemporary, Simmel, who asked an even more
basic question: "How is Society Possible?" He answered by explaining that it
is possible only because its constituent members are inside it and outside it simul-
taneously: their social roles are possible only insofar as they are granted by
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individuals who are not totally socialized. That refusal to be gleichgeschaltet, which
ultimately is the foundation of our sociability, is also expressed in play, as Simmel
himself explicitly recognized. So when we run our IOk races, and when, nurtured
by hope and illusion, we focus on Fenway Park once again, let us recall that we
both affirm sociability and insist on our individuality.