Steeler Notion

Let’s see if writing in here can be more constant than every few months:

My relationship to football is on par with my relationship to Christianity. I don’t really care about either, but if I want to navigate the culture in any meaningful way, I better know something about the both of them. Which is how I found myself a number of times this year at a friend’s house to watch Steelers games, though my interest was mainly in the food being served (Oreos and pizza at the Superbowl) and hanging out with pals. As a relative outsider though, what struck me more than anything else about the game, especially the Superbowl, was how over-officiated it was. Almost every play was flagged or there was some problem that had to be remanded to the care of an official to pour over in instant replay in what appears in my mind as an giant, ancient mutoscope.

Talking to my roommate Ben – a writer for mlb.com and eminently more knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of this than I am -  afterward, he remarked on the way in which the spontaneity of the game is being slowly drained out. It’s almost impossible at this point to enjoy a play because a person can’t trust the scene playing out before her eyes. No matter what happens or what is interpreted, it first has to be funneled through the senses of the referee, and then – only then – are we allowed access to the event. Thus, the officials stand as mediators between us and reality, a reality that we’re not allowed unfettered access to. This is all well and fine if a play is flagged here and there, but when it’s every play on every down for every drive, the game is no longer something immediate, but rather stands apart from us at a distance, always awaiting the judgment of the ref.

There’s obviously any number of philosophical parallels here, but what I think is most fascinating is  – primarily – the way this mirrors the political situation of the past eight years, but subsequently as well, the way in which Enlightenment certainty is so overpowering that it is even starting to dominate sports, arguably an activity that should mostly be about the visceral and the immediate. Politically, the last eight years, and even now with the dominant Obama worship, has been about abdicating our authority in the name of say, fear of terrorists or because we have a belief that the government will do right by its citizens or for whatever reason. They’re all flimsy when you actually work past that initial emotional push of fear and I don’t really need to go into the specifics as people like Glenn Greenwald are much better equipped than I am to detail them. The point is more to link it to a general trend of deferment that, as such, perhaps as this surfaces more and more in sports, it’s an indicator of just how corrupt this social system is. That is, if we’re no longer even trusting our own eyes to feed us information and must always wait for the expert assessment, we’re really living a degraded kind of existence.

All of that is up for debate, of course, and the point isn’t to say that one should never listen to experts – that in fact is what’s been politically wrong for a long time, the trust in the gut instinct instead of empirical testing, and in fact what is truly interesting here is the contradiction between the immediacy of a moment, of being part of something – part of a group, say here, The Steeler Nation – and that flush feeling of experiencing an event along with innumerable others, between that and the truly important need for empirical confirmation. Thus the dialectic swings between these two poles.

The driving force behind much of this as well is that need for certainty that sits in the background, the one imported from Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment science. I’ve always thought that this desire, more than anything else, is why our scientific systems are conceptually screwed up and why things like Creationism even have any purchase at all. If one expects certainty beyond any shadow of a doubt out of life and out of science, then when it can’t deliver – as no such theoretical construct ever could – one thinks there’s something wrong with it. So when evolutionary theory can’t explain every last possible instance, even though it is  – in its myriad forms – an excellent explanatory device, better than any other by far, people begin to think it is problematic and needs to be supplanted or addendumed or completely effaced altogether. Teach the controversy after all. If we had realistic understandings of how technoscience works, there’d be no room for these claims because they would a priori be excluded from the system.

Ben is worried in addition because of the introduction or possible introduction of the instant replay into the MLB, where baseball is already a rather slow sport. As well, for years, people have been suggesting that some kind of chip be placed in footballs so that we all know for sure when it crosses the plane. Not that that would have helped decide that final Holmes TD catch, but of course, the problem is that in building all these structures to reduce deliberation to one trajectory – the CORRECT path – reality, in all it’s myriad tentacling out, will always, always elude these structures. The desire for this certainty leads us to abdicate our will to these structures replacing intelligence with adherence to an orthodoxy as the primary method of figuring things out. No one can tell how this contradiction will eventually work itself out, but the most salutary result would be a decision process that allows for viscerality and immediacy but that is founded on the empirical.

As Chuck Dyke writes, “There is no doubt that with all the gods gone, necessity and certainty will be harder to find. Contingency will have to be respected, and that’s one of the hardest things for the monotheists to choke down.” Here, in his essay “Natural Speech: A Hoary Story”, Dyke works out a metaphor between monotheistic and pagan science, the former being that unifying, atomistic, rationalist linear science, while the later is about non-linearities and complex interactions. The difference between the two being that the former looks to the Law to explain itself, while the latter instead is founded upon praxis, upon the act first, and yet the visceral isn’t an excuse for mere gut feeling, but rather sets true limits on our theoretical structures, instead of our theoretical structures setting the limits on what actually exists.

“But I don’t really care…if the world conforms to my word. I want it to conform to my act. When I’m pulling on a weed I don’t really give a shit what Linnaeus had to say about it. I want it to come up, roots and all. And the fact that it’s a weed is embedded not in a cladistic tree, but in my garden. In fact, we might reflect on the way that the cladistic trees themselves are secondary, summaries of interactive engagements among the gardens, soils, rains, and other contingencies of times past. At least those of us who tell evolutionary tales would reflect in that way.”

(from How Nature Speaks, Dyke and Haile, ed. 2006, Duke University Press)

Filed by andyb at February 5th, 2009 under Uncategorized