Seinfeld Ethnography (37)—Pool Man

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.

[a] Spacious RF

Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party
George's Friend        Jerry's Haircut          Face Paint             Mustachioed       Smoking              East River
Pool Man                   Dunkin' Joe              Life Lessons          Reckoning          Dog Medicine      Shower Heads
Looking Busy            George Tips             Kramer's Job          Empty Tank
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific

Structure, history, culture, and event. That is what we will explore today on Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific. Have you ever tried to play pool in an awkward room? Have you ever tried to meet oncoming traffic on city streets...with cars on both sides of the streets? In a new series, I will soon be covering larger implications of the ideas behind structures we negotiate day-after-day throughout our lives. For now, we are just getting our feet wet. Take a look at how Kramer and Costanza the Elder negotiate the structures of time and space in this clip.

Pool Man 1:26

Pool Man 3:27

[b] Framed RF

What do we mean by structure, history, and culture? Well, I devoted an entire advanced seminar to the topic two years ago, and suffice it to say that it's complicated. I don't mean that in an ordinary sense. Everything is complicated. The way we "negotiate" space, though, has so many connections to the way we think and act that it is worthy of special consideration. As I often tell my students, we are "structure-negotiating animals," and we manage our physical and temporal barriers from the time we get up in the morning (negotiating the spaces of "bed," "floor," bathroom," "fasting," blood sugar, and so forth). Every moment of our lives, we "negotiate" multiple structures. The keyboard on which I am typing is a structure that I am negotiating according to a culturally and technologically scripted framework (English langugage, QWERTY keyboard, and so forth). I am drinking green tea in a mug structured in a manner to keep the teabags from spilling out. It goes on and on, as you will see in the new Round and Square series (coming soon) called Structure, History, and Culture.

For now, however, let's think about Kramer and Frank struggling with the upstairs pool table (and the structures and cultural overhead, as it were, of betting strategems). Think even of our woeful conductor with his twisted baton. Why should a damaged piece of metal affect the performance of music? Because it's fiction, I hear you say. Well, yes, but think about it. Have you ever watched a conductor carefully? Have you ever played for a conductor? If the conductor is any good, s/he will manage the cultures and structures of the orchestra in ways that bring the very best from the talent s/he encourages. These, too, are matters of structure, history, and culture.

[d] Tight RF

Let's think about just one more term-defining example, and I'll leave the rest to our theorists and the new "Structure, History, and Culture" topic on Round and Square. Structure: Frank and Kramer have to "negotiate" a full-sized pool table with full-size pool cues. The room is not adequate to the task. These matters are structured. Culture: the various rules ("I'll break," "what's your game?," and calling your pocket). History: the particular choices that an individual (or group) happens to make at any particular point. Faced with structural challenges, Kramer innovates, picking up the conductor's baton. He is within the shared cultural "rules" of the game (you know this if you have ever seen the mini-cues in houses or bars with inadequate room), but his particular historical (this time he sees it; before he didn't) choice is due to luck, chance, fate, or happenstance. The structure (full-sized table; small room) never changes, but the negotiation of it (using the baton as a cue) does.

Don't worry if this sounds confusing. It is (this is my argument) only the most important thing to understand in all studies of...everything. We'll tackle it more deeply in the coming weeks.

Our readings deal with some of the most important writings on structure and history ever written. This will be one of the few times that we deal with three writings from the same theorist in Seinfeld Ethnography. His name is Marshall Sahlins, and we'll have much more to say about him in the future.

Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities
Marshall Sahlins (1981)

[d] Metaphor ADV

Structural anthropology was founded in a binary opposition, of the kind that would later become its trademark: a radical opposition to history. Working from Saussure's model of language as a scientific object, structuralism similarly privileged system over event and synchrony over diachrony. In a way parallel to the Saussurean distinction between langague (la langue) and speech (la parole), structural analysis seemed also to exclude individual action and worldly practice, except as they represented the projection or "execution" of the system in place. I will argue here, mainly by concrete demonstration, that all these scruples are not really necessary, that one can determine structures in history—and vice versa.

For Saussure the engagement of structure from history had seemed requisite, inasmuch as language could be systematically analyzed only as it was autonomous, referentially arbitrary and a collective phenomenon...Perhaps it is too much to claim that Maitland's famous dictum should be reversed: that history will be anthropology, or it will be nothing. My object in this essay is more modest, simply to show some ways that history is organized by structures of significance.[1] 

To a degree, the task is not difficult, since the ready structuralist notion of plus ça change...is a very historical idea. The past, it says, is always with us. From a structuralist perspective nothing is simpler than the discovery of continuities of cultural categories as modes of interpretation and action: the celebrated "structures of the longue durée." I shall begin my discussion of the Hawaiian kingdom with considerations of this kind. But only to lay the groundwork for a more ambitious project. The great challenge to an historical anthropology is not merely to know how events are ordered by culture, but how, in that process, the culture is reordered. How does the reproduction of structures become its transformation?[2]

Islands of History
Marshall Sahlins (1985)

[e] Islands ADV

Still, the Hawaiian case, for all its historicization of the world, has already shown that there is not ground either for the exclusive opposition of stability and change. Every actual use of cultural ideas is some reproduction of them, but every such reference is also a difference. We know this anyhow, that things must preserve some identity through their changes, or else the world is a madhouse. Saussure articulated the principle: "What predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance; disregard for the past is only relative. That is why the principle of change is based on the principle of continuity." Yet in certain anthropology, also notoriously in the study of history, we isolate some changes as strikingly distinctive and call them "events," in opposition to "structure."

This is really a pernicious distinction, structure and event. If only for the relatively trivial reason that all structure or system is, phenomenally, evenemential. As a set of meaningful relations between categories, the cultural order is only virtual. It exists in potentia merely. So the meaning of any specific cultural form is all its possible uses in the community as a whole. But the meaning is realized, in presentia, only as events of speech and action. Event is the empirical form of system. The converse proposition, that all events are culturally systematic, is more significant. An event is indeed a happening of significance, and as significance it is dependent on the structure for its existence and effect. "Events are not just there and happen," as Max Weber said, "but they have a meaning and happen because of that meaning." Or in other words, an event is not just a happening in the world; it is a relation between a certain happening and a given symbolic system. And although as a happening an event has its own "objective" properties and reasons stemming from other worlds (systems), it is not these properties as such that give it effect but their significance as projected from some cultural scheme. The event is a happening interpreted—and interpretations vary.[3] 

Baseball is Society, Played as a Game

Marshall Sahlins (2004)

[f] Baseball structures ADV

The Giants' implausible season became "The Miracle of Coogan's Bluff" (the site of their ballpark, the Polo Grounds). Bobby Thompson's home run was "the shot heard round the world." Every red-blooded American baseball fan of a certain age remembers where he or she was when listening to the broadcast of Thompson's great feat—just as they remember the news of Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the assassination of President Kennedy. After first writing that sentence, I came across the following passage on Bobby Thompson's home run in Jules Tygiel's Past Time: Baseball as History:

It was likely the most dramatic and shocking event in American sports and has since taken on the transcendent historical character of Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination," observed journalist George W. Hunt in 1990. "Anyone alive then and vaguely interested can answer with tedious exactitude the the question "Where were you when you heard it?"

Perhaps we have underestimated sport the way we underestimate talk about the weather, as the integuement of an otherwise divided and only imagined community. Tygiel notes DeLillo's musing on this score: "Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment [i.e., Bobby Thompson's homer] enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?"

So is it truly chutzpah to put "the shot Heard round the world" on the same plane as the Peloponnesian War or the 2000 U.S. presidential election? Hexter said Thompson's homer was "the equivalent (in its sphere) of the defeat of the Armada, the battle of Stalingrad, the Normandy landings."

Or else, in the same hyperbolic vein, it was the equivalent of the Copernican Revolution. The difference between the types of historical change we have been discussing seems much like Thomas Kuhn's famous distinction between revolutionary "paradigm shifts" and "normal science"—the first described in such terms as "breakthrough" and "transformation," the second as "progressive" and "cumulative"—as much in their respective temporalities and agencies as in their dynamic forms.[4]

Notes
[1] Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 3.
[2] Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, 8.
[3] Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 152-153.
[4] Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xxx.
 

Bibliography

Sahlins, Marshall. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the 
       Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981.
Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Sahlins, Marshall. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. 

       Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

[g] Structure, event (history) RF

NEXT
Wednesday, February 1st

Dunkin' Joe

Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio...? Kramer thinks he has found you in a coffee shop, and insists that you dunk. There is ample grist for the mill of social theorizing next week on Seinfeld Ethnography.