1 Introduction
Endings or new beginnings?
No-one can make sense of the notion of a last commentary, a last discussion note, a good piece of writing which is more than the occasion for a better piece
It perhaps seems incongruous to be confronted with a book about the sociology of deviance in sport when in the wider realm of orthodox sociology the subject area was pronounced dead a decade ago. Indeed, invoking a Barthesian interpretation, Colin Sumner (1994) in announcing the death of the sociology of deviance set about writing the obituary of the field of study. Sumner is the most important chronicler of the sociology of deviance and his eschatological account suggested that the academy no longer had a part and purpose for the sociology of deviance as its utility had been exhausted (Downes and Rock, 1998). In pronouncing this ‘death’, the central premise underpinning Sumner’s argument was that it had become increasingly impossible to justify the existence of the concept of ‘social deviance’ – whereby what he meant was ‘that which is censured as deviant from the standpoint of the norms of the dominant culture’ (Sumner, 2001: 89). What is could no longer be conceived as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘normal’ or ‘deviant’ – it had become merely is. The crux of Sumner’s argument was that even before the 1990s it had become increasingly impossible to justify the existence of the concept of ‘deviance’ in a plural world in which no one distinctive meaning of what was supposed to be ‘deviant’ should be allowed to gain ascendancy. Since no social group should be able to dominate, no person was being dominated in any singular sense, and no ground existed for any one principle of what could or should be constituted as ‘deviant’.
As far as Sumner was concerned the efficacy of the sociology of deviance was exhausted once it had been established that there could no longer be any satisfactory or general agreed definition of what ‘deviance’ is – and therefore no way of being certain we could ever distinguish it. Sumner’s conclusion was that human action only becomes ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘normal’ or ‘deviant’ when looked at and interpreted from the point of view of some alternative ideological position. Another way of thinking about Sumner’s invocation of the ‘death of deviance’ then was his idea that the ideological constitution of what was tacitly understood as ‘deviance’ had actually outstripped the theory used to describe it.
If we cast our critical gaze on sport it would appear to do justice to much of Sumner’s critique, because ‘deviance’ seems to reflect an ideologically laden force of its own in sport. Indeed, the popularity of ‘deviance’ in sport at the level of the popular imagination is certainly undiminished and it continues to keep exploding on the front as well as the back pages. From day to day, television, newspapers and magazines shower us with new stories, facts and figures, views and opinions. In relation to media representations of sport stars, for example, mention the concept of ‘deviance’ in sport today and any number of visual images spring to mind. Thirty years after the publication of Cohen’s (1972) seminal critique, confirmation of the ways in which the mass media construct ‘folk devils’ and ‘moral panics’ in sport is still plain to see. For instance, the ‘evidence’ of the English professional footballer Lee Bowyer’s culpability in beating up a young ‘Asian’ man was, at the time of his court appearances in relation to the matter, unequivocal. The conventional picture painted of Bowyer was that of some sort of monster and depraved maniac: ‘a boozing, pot-smoking, violent, racist, cowardly, unapologetic, odious transfer-listed scumbag’ to quote one journalistic commentary (Jones, 2003). More severe than even Bowyer’s representation in the mass media has been Mike Tyson’s metamorphosis from being the ‘baddest’ to the ‘maddest’ man on the planet, particularly in the wake of his biting off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear.
Of course much of what is understood through these representations is merely posturing, which blurs the distinction between the real and the illusory, but the mass media still hold a powerful ideological significance. Indeed, in the light of what we have learned from the sociology of deviance, such images inevitably lead to certain assumptions about groups and individuals even though they are in reality contested terrain and are in effect discourses which must be understood in the context of the ideological power possessed by the mass media and the exhaustive penetration of media technology into both public places and spaces and individual’s personal lives.
It is not merely in the mass media that this continued interest in ‘deviance’ in sport lies. Undeterred, sociologists too have continued to explore the problematic of both understanding and conceptualising the many practices, activities, situations, performances and problems which abound in sport. Indeed, whatever its public and moral hegemony, sociologists in our field of study have shown that sport has always offered spaces for the pursuit of the ‘deviant’, from the ritualised rule-breaking activities, such as football violence (see, for example, Dunning et al., 1988; Armstrong, 1998), to the more abhorrent forms of crime against the vulnerable, such as sexual abuse (Brackenridge, 2001). Moreover, whatever we want to call these different forms of ‘rule-breaking’ behaviour, the sociology of sport has always tried to show that ‘deviance’ against others always has been and still is evidenced and experienced as ‘real’ in its consequences for those at its receiving end.
Yet in terms of Sumner’s critique, those who continue to invoke the sociology of deviance are not only naïve, but also misconceived. For following the social constructionist logic of Sumner’s position, even the most pernicious forms of so-called ‘deviance’ are inescapably vulnerable to ideological misrepresentation. Sumner suggested that, for some in the field, there was a need for a neo-marxian recasting of the sociology of deviance, which would rewrite the field anew with its missing hybrid model of praxis and critique based on an egalitarian epistemology. But Sumner was having none of this and he wanted it to be recognised that faced with the realisation of the contingency of all ideological representations it had become pointless even to contemplate reconceptualising ‘deviance’ in sociology. He was unequivocal about this and in the concluding chapter of his book reconfirmed the prognosis by suggesting that:
the sociology of deviance died in the mid-Atlantic returning home after its disastrous European tour. Its ghost lives on in American sociology courses, but that is none of our business. It is a mere appearance. Its life-force has actually expired. It is an irrelevance how many scholars continue to use it as opposed to how many do not – popularity or unpopularity should never be taken as a test of genuine conceptual vitality. In this case, the decline in the significance of the sociology of deviance is an effect of its conceptual bankruptcy. It no longer reflects the dynamics of our lived history.
What we have here then is not simply a critique of the sociology of deviance, but the unequivocal disavowal of a whole subject area which had essentially become, in Sumner’s eyes, domesticated because of the realisation that it was no longer possible to immunise even the most reasonable and ethical of perspectives against their own ideologies.
With due respect to Sumner we want to argue in this book that the view that ‘deviance’ is merely ideology – and everything that implies from a marxian perspective – offers very little else in terms of the justification for abandoning this subject area in sociology other than the conclusion that there really is no such thing as ‘deviance’, only the vested interests and the beliefs of the powerful. In a nutshell we want to suggest that Sumner’s view that the sociology of deviance as ideology led to its final collapse was premature. We are not suggesting that the sociology of deviance is anything but a ‘disunited enterprise’, to use Downes and Rock’s (1998: 21) apt expression, but we want to argue the case for a reflexive sociology which takes into account how the world has changed around it and what implications this has for a sociology of ‘deviance’ made to the measure of understanding the complex and often ambivalent nature of sport in contemporary times.
As the reader will see from our own account, while following a similar trajectory to Sumner’s understanding of ‘deviance’, it nevertheless has an emphasis on beginnings rather than endings. In order that we can embark on this beginning exercise we first of all need to take a step back from the detailed consideration of our own position in order to provide a thoroughgoing critique of Sumner. This also involves a full consideration of the central tenets of Sumner’s justification for ‘killing’ the sociology of deviance.
The ‘end’ of deviance thesis
Our first criticism of Sumner’s thesis is that it falls for Barthes’ (1968) invocation like a lover, most intensely and profoundly. And following Barthes, it seems to us that Sumner misses the point that, very much like the topic of his book, he is himself a concept, the creation of a particular epistemological position rather than the provision of an alternative paradigm for exploring the topic of ‘deviance’ post-the sociology of deviance. Indeed, it needs to be grasped at the outset that Sumner’s thesis must be understood in the context of the time when it was written. In the early 1990s it had become fashionable in sociology to declare the death of anything and everything.
Another major criticism of Sumner’s thesis is that he provides merely a top-down theoretical interpretation which understands social ‘deviance’ as an object of enquiry rather than a lived subjective experience. While we may live in a society in which Foucault’s (1977) panoptical moralising gaze has all but disappeared, people’s contingent and subjective lived experiences often mean that they are confronted by the reality and consequences of the pain and suffering which constitute ‘deviant’ acts and behaviour. It is our argument then, that any rigorous study of ‘deviance’ needs to begin and end with people’s bottom-up, contingent and subjective experiences.
Sumner also has the theoretician’s appetite for certainty – that is of a sureness that the sociology of deviance is dead – which is to all intents and purposes at odds with empirical understandings of ‘deviance’. Basically, he seeks to kill off the sociology of deviance through a thoroughgoing theoretical approach, but because it is merely theoretical his project is inevitably unsatisfactory. There are always issues that seem to evade his grasp, issues which he sees but does not grapple with satisfactorily because they are contingent on times and on places and on those people involved.
These criticisms notwithstanding, Sumner the theoretician makes it very clear that he understood that the sociology of deviance had reached a point in its history when it needed another kind of theoretical understanding, which could only be written successfully through a quite different language. And he assumed that, because of the thoroughly ideological terrain within which he was operating – empirical data were more often than not insufficient to persuade otherwise – only a paradigm change would suffice. So Sumner makes a persuasive case against the sociology of deviance, largely on the grounds that it has become increasingly untenable to justify the case for the sociology of deviance.
In doing so Sumner invokes the ideas of Foucault to substantiate his case and it would have been more convincing had he enlarged his discussion of Foucault’s ideas of discourse and discursive formation to accommodate the weaknesses inherent to the marxian approaches he identified. However, he was not looking to provide some new and authentic position; he realised from Foucault that all positions are ‘ideological’ and ‘subjective’. Sumner set himself the task of reinterpreting ‘deviance’ in a different way, through a new language: the sociology of censures, which would be used to ‘describe a set of negative ideological categories or condensations – a set of social censures which were rooted in everyday social practice and were tied to the processes of regulation within social practice’ (Sumner, 1994: 302). This was his vision, which he thought would present his contemporaries with a new and more politically correct language and sociology, which would always be grounded in the quotidian to understand and make sense of what had previously been understood as ‘deviance’.
Sumner (1994) offers little else beyond this thumbnail sketch, however, and he never at this point fully explicates what he means by a sociology of censures. He was much more intent on laying to rest the sociology of deviance. And at this juncture Sumner’s major justification for the end of deviance thesis was the point that the consensus against which ‘deviance’ was established and understood had never actually materialised. As he points out, this meant that at all times through the history of sociology the question always remained: deviant, but ‘deviant from what?’
The major problem with this aspect of Sumner’s thesis is his reliance on hindsight. Essentially, Sumner’s argument is present-centred and relies too heavily on retrospective wisdom. As Bauman’s (2000) sociology shows, even if modern society in ‘its solid and managed phase’ never was completely successful in universalising its doctrine, the meta-discourse underpinning the modern project did a pretty good job of inculcating the ‘truth’ of what Bourdieu (2000) calls the illusio and the lusiones that there actually was a consensus against which all ‘nonstandards’ could be measured and understood. Sumner is right in suggesting that there never was such a consensus but what he underestimates is the extent to which people were caught up in and by the modernising game of consensus-making and believing that that game was the only game worth playing.
Sumner also underplays the fact that sociology itself was heavily implicated in this process, and as such played a key role in promoting the illusio and lusiones which maintained the opposition between majority consensus and minority ‘deviance’. Indeed, the preservation and perpetuation of capitalism, as conflict theorists from Marx to Bourdieu have demonstrated, has always been and still is reliant on this sort of immoral code of duplicity. And as Bauman (2000) makes clear, the fact was that maintaining this opposition was not only the goal of the powerful but also, ironically, the raison d’être of sociology itself.
What is more, and for the purpose of our own analysis of ‘deviance’ in sport, this ‘will to a consensus’, despite the contingency and plurality of contemporary social life, still remains a highly significant one to this day. As Webb et al. (2002: 26–8) show, the process of maintaining the illusio and lusiones that sport is ‘pure’ is often still very much part of both official and non-official discourses which vie to represent the ‘truth’ about sport, as they attempt to maintain its ‘“lily-white” values as the only true manifestations of [sport’s] undiluted essence’. The major difference now of course is that, as we will illustrate later, it is the discourses of interpreters rather than the legislators (Bauman, 1987) whose ideas compete to hold sway in the debates about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, what is the consensus and what is ‘deviant’ in sport.
While remaining firmly in the orbit of marxian understandings of ‘deviance’ Sumner’s suggestion of an alternative vocabulary does, none the less, have a difference of emphasis which, while recognising that any ‘will’ to ‘deviance’ is an ideological practice, focuses on social censures (Sumner, 1994: 308); since in Sumner’s view the only alternatives to a sociology of censures are sterility or the endless repetition of old interpretations which no longer work as well as they once did. In a later publication he explains that the sociology of censures deals with two interrelated issues (Sumner, 2001: 90):
- to locate, understand and create areas of social agreement which might constitute the basis of a social censure and control for a more healthy, secure and peaceful society, and
- to expose, criticize and explain social norms and systems of social control which are discriminatory, hypocritical and oppressive in order to enable society where its members are allowed to develop their positive capacities to the full.
On the face of it Sumner successfully breaks away from the limitations of such orthodox marxian thought, most notably in his discussion of the responsibilities implied by a sociology of censures. Yet as will be shown in the following section of this critique, the efficacy of understanding ‘deviance’ changed with the language employed to describe it. It is our argument that with this sociology of censures the study of ‘deviance’ became part of a new vocabulary which could not deal with the complexity of an emerging and dominating consumer culture. As we show, once the ‘reality principle’ and the ‘pleasure principle’ (Bauman, 2002a: 187) imploded into each other, the firm divisions between ‘normalcy’ and ‘deviance’ shattered along with the illusion that ‘rule-breaking’ behaviour could be understood through a sociology of censures.
The limitations of a sociology of censures in the age of consumerism
From our perspective understandings of what constitutes ‘deviance’ are complicated all the more once we begin to recognise that today, in many ways, what we often perceive to be ‘deviant’ is nothing more than a reified commodity form. It is inconceivable that ‘deviance’ in sport could have found such an excess of commercial favour in the period before the 1980s, but particularly in the years since Sumner wrote his book the demarcation between ‘real’ ‘deviance’ and that which has been produced for consumption has blurred the line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ as ‘deviance’ has turned into yet another marketable commodity. Indeed, our own analysis recognises that much so-called criminal activity and so-called ‘deviant’ behaviour in sport is now just that: all surface, flow and perform...
