7/30/2019 2.2 - Maier, Charles S. - Comment on Andrei Markovits _The Other 'American Exceptionalism'_ (en)

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Comment on Andrei Markovits "The Other 'American Exceptionalism'"

Comment on Andrei Markovits "The Other 'American Exceptionalism'"

by Charles S. Maier

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 2 / 1988, pages: 151-154, on www.ceeol.com.

http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=03554d8d-bd83-4e93-9862-8c5f16fb4d72http://www.ceeol.com/

7/30/2019 2.2 - Maier, Charles S. - Comment on Andrei Markovits _The Other 'American Exceptionalism'_ (en)

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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 notwish 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 isnot easy to uproot the established choice, nor to fit another game in. The Americansports space could accommodate two major outdoor games. Baseball was the first,and certain contingent, historical factors made American football, not soccer thesecond. Of course, as Andrei Markovits recognizes, the problem is also: why isthere no baseball in Europe? But what then would be the parallel question forSombart's inquiry? Why is there no Democratic Party in Europe?

My reflections, in fact, are prompted more by the question concerning Europethan the one concerning the United States. For the inability to export baseballsuggests that more may be at stake than the contingent circumstances by whicha sports space gets filled. The key may be in the way given sports reflect a nationalcultural configuration. We can make more progress in decoding this relationship,I believe, if we recognize that the social-class categories proposed in the paperare not the most refined possible. The paper itself provides the clue for its owndeconstruction when it refers to American football ("the funning game") asTaylorized. Precisely - but Taylorism represented a revolt of the engineeringmentality against class categorization. It allegedly transcended classes and wasnot a simple imposition of bourgeois norms. Obviously it reinforced capitalist classhierarchies - but did so in the name of a technical intelligence that denied therelevance 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 thinkfurther about the games themselves. I bring up several distinctions that Dan Whitepointed out to me many years ago. The first was the one just mentioned: baseballanchors its men to places, football has increasingly gone from designation ofpositions according to place to designation according to function. The wide receiverhas 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 suburbsand attract a less raffish, more managerial crowd. The general point is that baseballhas remained popular because it appealed to a rural myth of pre-class society. Ithas overtones ofMasonic-like rites: what outsider could possibly understand thePraxis International 8:2 July 1988 02060-8448 $2.00

7/30/2019 2.2 - Maier, Charles S. - Comment on Andrei Markovits _The Other 'American Exceptionalism'_ (en)

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152 Praxis Internationalgame? 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 theworking class. Baseball is the generalized extension of John Winthrop's covenant.This raises the issue ofAmerican exceptionalism in general. As a comparativistI find the concept over-used. On the one hand, the idea was the creation of anunsuccessful American Communist Party that needed a social theory to explainits frustration; on the other hand, it elaborated that Partisan Review-type celebrationofAmerican values precisely during the period of the late 1940s and 1950s, whena generation of academics, neo-conservative avant la lettre, were renouncing thesocialist enthusiasms of their City College or Columbia youth. American exceptionalism, like Turner's frontier hypothesis, has been largely a myth. The reasonthat an American Socialist Party was weaker than the SPD, but hardly negligiblein 1912 - was less the absence of a feudal past than the ethnic divisions amongrecent immigrants. However, it is all the more fitting that American exceptionalismis a myth, because I would argue that the importance of baseball is as amythicsport. 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'sessay inexplicably does not cover: cricket. Cricket is the English pre-modernequivalent ofbaseball. 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'svoluntary but strategic decision to renounce batting, the provision of an indefiniteturn at the bat for the individual, the primitive homogeneity of playing space withbatter and pitcher in the middle of an elliptical field (think of the progression fromcricket 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 theindustrial north, cricket could unite village communities and serve as game of anelite and laborers simultaneously. Of laborers, mind you, not of Labour in itscollective sense. It could persist at Oxbridge and in the country, but it, too,presupposes a pre-industrial community. Indeed its community can embrace thespectrum from colonial masters to dependent people: recall C. L. R. James's greatcricket memoir Beyond a Boundary, which shows how cricket as a game mightovercome 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 courseit has implications about class: for in a sense baseball and cricket must representa somewhat utopian denial of the class divisions of industrial capitalism. But thatis precisely their power. Might one of the reasons that we had no socialism bebecause we had baseball instead?In this regard I find the paper could profitably have taken up another issue, whichis precisely that of what any game or play represents. In a sense game playingis the activity that the society uses to counterpose against the workplace, just likethe Carnival turns society upside down. It is, in Victor Turner's sense, a liminalor anti-structural experience: an anthropological program that might be thoughtof as the logical playing out, so to speak, of lames' polyvalent title, Beyond aBoundary. Hence a serious game should not be simply a reflection of the dominantclass structure, but a utopian counter-structure. It incorporates an idealized vision(or alternative construction) of society's principles of hierarchization, which stillremains in some sort of dialectical relationship to the dominant structure.

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7/30/2019 2.2 - Maier, Charles S. - Comment on Andrei Markovits _The Other 'American Exceptionalism'_ (en)

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Praxis International 153But how then, it will be asked, do the pre-industrial aspects of baseball retaintheir vitality even when the forces of production and class formations have movedway beyond baseball's archaic arrangements? They do so precisely because theyserve 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 contemporaryand merely reworks current social structural divisions. This will yield a sport thatis quite as ruthless as the social structure it counterposes: indeed the game musttake on the function of giving expression to the agonistic relationships of thecontemporary social order. In this sense Packers' coach Vince Lombardi ("Winningisn'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 socialformation to play its anti-structural role. Competition can be less ruthless sincethe game embodies an idealized image of now vanished artisanal or village relationships that were less stratified than industrial capitalism. Indeed, the effect of temporaldisplacement is even greater, because baseball and cricket were codified preciselyas the pre-industrial community was already being dispaced. Baseball's heroesare the game equivalent ofHegel's owl ofminerva, rounding the bases of the villagegreen as dusk falls. It is redolent with nostalgia and probably was from the daysof 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 computerthat creates new statistical categories as each man comes to bat. We enhance thenostalgia further by surrounding the game's origins, as this essay shows, in myth.So too baseball's current l i t e n ~ t u r e will be suffused with an elegiac quality thatpurely contemporaneous anti-structure cannot take on: I have not read The Boysof Summer or Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's recent Me and Dimaggio, but fromall descriptions this is the literature of Heimkehr.Let me conclude by posing a question. If baseball was the anti-structural gamethat evoked the pre-industrial order, and football is the sport that has served asanti-structure for the postwar industrial age - the carnival ofmanagerial capitalism,as Jack Kemp has recognized - what will be the sport for what Sabel and Piorehave called "the second industrial divide?" Tennis remains the aristocratic game,the jeu de paume born in the medieval courts of France, preserved like some scarabof sport. Basketball is an indoor alternative. Ice hockey will continue to preservesome regional winter outlet. But football already finds the class structure it invertsfading 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 preserveits respective game inversion as new productive forces come into being? Or doessociety 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 forthe computer era are the individualized, participatory ones: namely running,aerobics, and fitness. They allow the collectivized, but non-team, individualizedtesting that is characteristic of a society built upon networks and circuit boards.With these thoughts and queries we turn from Sombart - who asked Markovits 'soriginal question - to Sombart's contemporary, Simmel, who asked an even morebasic question: "How is Society Possible?" He answered by explaining that itis possible only because its constituent members are inside it and outside it simultaneously: their social roles are possible only insofar as they are granted by

7/30/2019 2.2 - Maier, Charles S. - Comment on Andrei Markovits _The Other 'American Exceptionalism'_ (en)

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154 Praxis Internationalindividuals who are not totally socialized. That refusal to be gleichgeschaltet, whichultimately is the foundation of our sociability, is also expressed in play, as Simmelhimself explicitly recognized. So when we run our IOk races, and when, nurturedby hope and illusion, we focus on Fenway Park once again, let us recall that weboth affirm sociability and insist on our individuality.