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.

Lectures (3d)—Scholarship

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

[a] Managed pasts RF

Beloit College Mortar Board

26 October 2011
Part Four of Five

I had a whole passel of questions now that I was finding my own way with the Comprehensive Mirror, the book that started me down the path to scholarship. Only a few of them, I was beginning to notice, had been anticipated by scholars in either China or the West. It started with "Why are Liu Bei (good!) and Cao Cao (bad!) treated so differently, even humanely (with positive qualities and flaws side-by-side) in Sima Guang's text? It moved on to the very moment when my entire academic career was set. I regard this as the continental divide in my life between "student" and "scholar." And, before we go any further, let me emphasize that no particularly "lofty" qualities should be associated with the latter. It is just what we do when we move down the path of learning. It happens to everyone who keeps learning—a little like crossing the street...and never being able to turn back.

Thomas Wolfe might have had this part right, at least if "home" means "naming the capitals."

[b] All too RF

And just to reinforce the message, I will admit to deep misunderstanding of this matter when I was in college. During my first year, a political science professor referred to himself as an "intellectual." Even then, I understood completely that he meant that he got paid to think, write, and teach. Still, I could not believe that someone would say such a thing. Even though I knew it to be as matter-of-fact as the "crossing the street" example, above, I was scandalized. It was, to my mind, a little like referring to oneself as "pretty" or "smart" or "striking." I could not get my newly post-adolescent head around the idea that "intellectuals" and "scholars" are just people in a certain line of work. Matter-of-fact. Punch the ol' time clock and start readin'. It didn't make sense to my fiercely (and naively) democratic way of thinking. For me, the professor who called himself "an intellectual" was a little like Napoleon crowning himself emperor. Immodest.

Well, I got over it. You should, too. Being a "scholar" is just a particular habitus in the field of knowledge production. Ask Pierre Bourdieu, a rural French boy who just happened to spend his life being a "scholar," even as he reviled colleagues who thought they were particularly special for researching and writing.

O.k., now that we are over that, let's get back to the book. I was told that the Comprehensive Mirror was one of the world's great works of history, even one of the first truly "objective" historical narratives. One article mentioned that it was "scientific." Even then, I had enough background to prick my ears and be at least a little wary. "Objective?"..."Scientific?...History? You can't be serious とおもいました.* Nonetheless, I had no idea what would come next. I opened the book.

[c] Portentous RF

And then I saw the dragon.

Yes, there it was—a dragon writhing in a rural well. On the pages of one of the world's greatest historical texts, a dragon lay—constricted and frustrated—in a well outside of Ningling. The emperor "identified" with it, feeling that it spoke to his own imperial frustrations.

Every significant path that my career has taken comes back to this point. What were dragons, of all things, doing on the pages of one of the world's greatest histories? And it was not only once (as I would learn) and not only dragons. The pages of this monumental historical narrative are filled with hail as large as hens' eggs, mysterious portents, and leaping white fish. If only, by chance, I had turned to a passage on troop movements during a famous battle (also in the text, I should note), I might have missed all of this and been an untiring "objectivisit," tracing the battle lines of the third century. This path not taken would have been not unlike the one traveled by a senior scholar in Chinese studies who, during my first presentation of these matters to a scholarly audience (the Association for Asian Studies Conference in 1991), asked: 

Is it not possible that the text actually refers to a very large salamander?

[d] Business booking RF

I mangled my answer, not finding it possible to believe (even then) that a great scholar would cling so tightly to the hanging ladder of "reality," fearing even a little metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche...or even a spot of allusion. Because, by that time, I had already spent several years (since my first dragon-sighting...and citing), I had forgotten that much of the world is not terribly comfortable with the realms of "reality" and "fantastical" commingling like waste paper and empty plastic bottles. That dragon set my scholarly path, and all of my questions have emerged, in one way or another, from asking what the heck it was doing there (in the text, if not necessarily the well).

From there, it was a short, two-decade ride to the interpretation of the same text—the Comprehensive Mirror—as a work of eleventh century managerial literature. This was even less welcome among my scholarly peers. Let me assure you that in "scholarly" circles the interpretation of dragons, hens' eggs, and leaping white fish is a good deal more welcome than someone who calls a magisterial work of historical writing a work of management. What? Is Rob LaFleur saying that the Comprehensive Mirror was a business book—a complex combination, in classical Chinese, of The Fifth Discipline, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

Well, yes. That is what he is saying.

It had occurred to me as I spent more and more time (years, really) with this 10,000 page text that many of my colleagues have misinterpreted it, and often quite badly at that. It began to occur to me that the misapprehension had a great deal to do with antiquated and somewhat hieratic notions of what is scholarly—(the "record of the past")—and what is merely demotic (management and self-help). But it did not take much research (I had discovered this even reading the translation in college, twenty-five years ago) to realize that Sima Guang and his contemporaries understood that the record of the past and management were all of a piece. Why did my peers fail to notice this? I suspect that it is because many can't quite see how the same book might be studied in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Harvard Business Review...or even in National Geographic and Forbes.

[e] Cross RF

Scholarship is wide-ranging and ever-changing. It is also just something that learners do. They can't help it. They "cross the street" one day by asking just one more question that changes everything. Suddenly, the entire world looks different, and they can't find their way back to "just learning"—merely memorizing the capitals in the vast world of information—ever again.

As for me, I crossed that metaphorical street—arm in epidermal scale—with a coiled dragon...many, many years ago.

NEXT
We'll wrap things up by returning to questions of scholarship as new knowledge and as a way of life.

*I thought to myself.

Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five