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Chapter 1
Introduction
People often express their ideas about ‘race' through commentary on sport. Whether stood on the touchline, perched on a bar stool or reposed on the pundits' sofa, many tend to make sense of sporting performance by appealing to racial ‘truth'. Examples, therefore, aren't hard to come by.
In 1991 the Chairman of Crystal Palace Football Club, Ron Noades, described the division of labour in the current Palace side to documentary-makers. ‘The black players at this club lend the side a lot of skill and flair', said Noades, ‘but you also need white players in there to balance things up and give the team some brains and some common sense' (Critical Eye 1991). In the aftermath of the documentary being aired, Palace striker Ian Wright reported Noades to the Commission for Racial Equality, though subsequently admitted to feeling ambivalent about the remarks of his Chairman: ‘Later, I found out that he'd said a lot that was complimentary to black players, but those comments were edited out and only the bad things left in … In hindsight, I may have overreacted' (Wright 1997: 111).
In 1954 Roger Bannister achieved a feat many had hitherto thought impossible: he ran a mile in under four minutes. Forty-one years later, in his capacity as both former athlete and distinguished neurologist, Bannister delivered a lecture on the athletic limits of the human organism to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘I am prepared to risk political correctness', he ventured, ‘by drawing attention to the seemingly obvious but under-stressed fact that black sprinters and black athletes in general all seem to have certain natural anatomical advantages' (quoted in Hoberman 1997: 144). He then speculated as to whether these advantages consisted in the length of the heel bone and Achilles' tendon, levels of subcutaneous fat, and/or the elasticity of muscle fibres. Garth Crooks, a retired footballer of Jamaican ancestry, questioned the wisdom and veracity of Bannister's controversial address: ‘I don't think it matters what the biological conclusions are. It forges a distinction between black and white athletes which is unhealthy, unhelpful, and untrue' (quoted in Highfield, Berry and Harnden 1995).
On 20 April 2004, former manager of Manchester United and Aston Villa, Ron Atkinson, was co-commentating for ITV on Chelsea's Champions League fixture against Monaco. While viewers watched post-match analysis, microphones that should have been switched off once the broadcast from the stadium had concluded picked up the following remark made by Atkinson with regard to the performance of Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly: ‘He's what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger' (Prior 2004). Atkinson resigned on learning that his comments had been inadvertently broadcast in several parts of the Middle East, including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Raciology and historical ontology – knowledge and power ethics
Debate surrounding the relationship between human variation and sporting performance is often snagged by arguments over which statements count as ‘racist' and which as benign assertions of racial difference. In an attempt to move discussion beyond these considerations, this study employs Paul Gilroy's (2000) notion of ‘raciology' to interrogate the notions of racial difference which circulate within British sport. Gilroy has defined raciology as ‘the lore that brings the virtual realities of “race” to dismal and destructive life' (ibid: 11).1 His definition allows us to posit ‘race', racism and raciology in some relation to one another, as the study of racial lore requires a commitment to excavating the logic which underwrites this lore rather than marking regions where raciology shades into racism and/or identifying the threshold beyond which general assertions about ‘race' become unacceptable by violating one moral code or another. All raciology represents racism in more or less encoded form, and, following Gilroy, specific raciological ideas should be treated as the result of generative processes which give shape and texture to the categories of ‘race'.
In an attempt to see this commitment through, here I present the findings of historical and ethnographic investigations to show how specific racio-logical ideas subscribed to by coaches, commentators and sportspeople themselves, within specific settings, might be analysed critically. The study's historical component (contained in Part 1) centres on the raciological idea of the ‘impulsive' black sportsman (and the ‘impulsive' black male more generally). More specifically, I investigate how this idea came into being and gathered momentum throughout the course of British history via the pronouncements of various ‘experts' and the institutionally sanctioned discourses with which they engage. The task is then to discover whether such raciological ideas gain traction within the everyday behaviours of a group of young footballers, an inquiry which takes the form of ethnographic research. More specifically, the study's ethnographic component (contained in Part 2) focuses on Oldfield United Football Club, a semi-professional club situated in London, and the conceptions of human difference endorsed by club personnel. It should be said, though, that while both of these components use sport to access people's ideas about human variation, it is these ideas that take centre stage in the forthcoming analysis. Though sporting occasions and institutions provide a forum for the expression of such ideas, the range of institutions whose traces can be found in them exceeds the bounds of sport. I hope to show that the key to understanding conceptions of human difference, whether these rely on ‘race' or more complex formulations, seldom lies within the narrow confines of one institution or another.
Before I set about examining these conceptions I should describe the concepts and methods that are employed throughout the study. As well as Gilroy's conception of raciology, these include the method of historical ontology and the attendant axes of knowledge, power and ethics.
Historical ontology (Hacking 2002a) is a programme of inquiry that implores us to consult both the historical record and ethnographic data with particular questions in mind. Put simply, it is concerned with possible ways of being at different moments in time; more specifically, it is a strain of intellectual enquiry centring on the conditions of possibility of knowledge, human subjectivity and, taken together, on the possibilities for being. It was inspired by the cues taken by Michel Foucault in his reading of the works of Immanuel Kant, while the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking has been instrumental in developing Foucault's conception into a systematic scheme of questioning. This lineage begs elaboration.
In the early 1960s Foucault translated Kant's Anthropology into French and was immediately taken with the probing questions it posed, if somewhat disappointed by Kant's responses to these questions.2 The fact that Kant looked to anthropology to establish the limits of man's potential indicated an awareness that the lot of human nature was not fixed. The challenge was to understand how our human nature may evolve to shape the destiny of the human race. Foucault detected in Kant's arguments the possibility of a shift from the transcendental subject, which serves as the condition of possibility of all experience, to the subject conditioned by the specificities of historical, social and cultural circumstance (Allen 2003). This realisation provided the impetus for Foucault's archaeological and genealogical work (1970, 2002 [1972]) in which he analysed the bases of the human sciences, their substrata, and reflected on what made them possible as modalities of thought.3 The importance of subjectivity to Kant's conception of anthropology, along with his assertion that anthropology and geography provided ‘conditions of possibility' for all knowledge, also influenced Foucault's studies of the prison (1977 [1975]), the asylum (2000 [1961]; 2001 [1963]), and his related arguments with regard to governmentality and the disciplinary society (2007, 2008a).
It was reasoning on this plane that led Foucault to the study of the ‘historical ontology of ourselves', a programme outlined in his ‘What is Enlightenment?' first published in Paul Rabinow's The Foucault Reader (1984). Here Foucault provides critical commentary on Kant's own answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?' (Was ist Aufkläring?) as posed by the German periodical Berlinische Monatschrift in 1784. In his brief response Kant characterised enlightenment as a way out of the immaturity which impels us to accept someone else's authority to lead us when the use of our own reason would serve as a better guide. It was this characterisation, Foucault noted, that made Kant's critiques so urgent and necessary; for the use of legitimate reason to be assured, critique must define the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and how the achievement of these tasks may shape the destiny of human kind. Consonant with his views on anthropology and geography – with ‘inner knowledge' (of human subjectivity) and ‘outer knowledge' (of man's place in nature) – each individual was responsible for his/her role in this overall process, as Kant located humanity's passage to a state of maturity within the broader evolution of human kind. In sum, Foucault glossed Kant's response into a point of departure for a critical mode of relating to contemporary realities:
The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text (Kant's ‘Was ist Aufkläring?') is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise … it seems to me that this is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he was writing and because of which he was writing. It is in the reflection on ‘today' as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to lie.
(Foucault 1984b: 38)
Foucault's call for a ‘permanent critique of ourselves' ends with a brief formulation of historical ontology and an enumeration of its three axes of knowledge, power and ethics.4 He asks the following questions: ‘How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?' (ibid: 49). It is these questions that Ian Hacking has helped to generalise, develop and clarify in investigating how ‘various concepts, practices, and corresponding institutions, which we can treat as objects of knowledge, at the same time disclose new possibilities for human choice and action' (Hacking 2002a: 4).5
Hacking argues that ‘we constitute ourselves at a place and time, using materials that have a distinctive and historically formed organization' (ibid: 3). But he is not only concerned with how ‘we' constitute ourselves; he has in mind all manner of constitutings. For Hacking, the role of institutions is crucial. Concepts, practices and ideas do not come into existence through the simple process of naming. Even the dutiful repetition of a newly created name will not suffice. Names gain in authority when they are used in specific settings and circumstances; not only when people enunciate, but also when they act. When they are repeated on the plantation or the touchline, at the dispatch box or in the psychiatric evaluation room, and when they order the practices of the slave owner, the coach, the politician or the psychiatrist, they begin to take on the character of an essence. In short, ‘One needs usage within institutions' (Hacking 2002b: 8).
A characteristic set of questions might include: in which sentences are names and ideas used as objects of knowledge, who speaks these sentences, with what authority, in what institutional setting, in order to influence whom, and with what consequences for the speakers and subjects? These are the kind of specific questions that I have committed to answer, but before proceeding I should emphasise that these questions are informed by particular conceptions of knowledge, power and ethics.
It comes as no surprise that, drawing heavily on the work of Michel Foucault as it does, Hacking's scheme of historical ontology is sensitive to the issues of knowledge, power and ethics. Indeed, each represents one of the three cardinal axes, so integral to Foucault's ambitions, which have been preserved by Hacking's programme of investigation. Here I examine each in turn.
When dealing with the issue of knowledge, Hacking recognises that not all epistemological objects are of the same class or magnitude; they operate at different depths. To distinguish between various items of knowledge he borrows from Foucault the distinction between ‘surface' and ‘depth' knowledge. Items of surface knowledge, or connaissance, are the labels, theories, hypotheses and prejudices of scientists, psychiatrists and all those professing institutional expertise. Their assertions and statements can be revised in light of new ‘evidence', but only make sense because embedded in a deeper framework of rules that determines which count as true or false in a specific domain. These frameworks Hacking calls depth knowledge, or savoir, because they contain those elemental rules without which the propositions of specialists in a given area would lack meaning or credence.
The stories told in Part 1 feature both classes of knowledge. At times it is possible to glimpse and even list the elemental principles – approaching the depth of savoir – which frame expert pronouncements at specific stages in history. At others we have access to only these pronouncements. However, without gauging the level of each and every item of knowledge in terms of its epistemological ‘depth', I hope to have struck some balance between analysing surface hypotheses and the deeper set of postulates from which they draw their sense. In Part 2 the distinction between depth and surface knowledge is understandably more difficult to draw. That said, the ethnographic data garnered at Oldfield United is interrogated according to a similar set of ontological questions relating to how club personnel conceived self and others as objects of knowledge, together with the concepts, practices and possibilities for action attached to these processes of constitution.
Employing a Foucauldian notion of power, Hacking does not see forms of power as exerted by identifiable agents or authorities in the form of measures aimed at the exclusion or repression of passive recipients. But this isn't to say that any one person or group cannot dominate another. It means that authorities rely on the other terms in a power relation – including those controlled, criminalised, etc. – for mutual support and engagement, whether witting or unwitting. Power therefore operates through unowned configurations participated in by people ‘on the ground', or as Foucault called it, ‘power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others' (1984b: 351).
Foucault thus disapproved of attempts to uncover the overall strategy of individual people or institutions. He was interested in the immediate, short-term, professional and political tactics of various experts, specialists and technocrats, and how the cumulative effects of their efforts create new (or reinforce existing) possibilities for being; as we have seen, Hacking generalised this ethos of questioning to include not only possibilities for people's own sense of being, but also those possibilities which see certain names, ideas, kinds of people and methods of verification emerge at particular moments in history. In more concrete terms, we might discuss how certain possibilities for self-constituting can empower some (at the expense of others) or how the anonymous power of ‘psychiatric' or ‘criminological' discourse features in specific processes of classifying people.
Hacking's conception of ethics is necessarily related. Again it has to do with the possibilities for constituting the self, along with other ideas and concepts, as objects of knowledge. In this case he is concerned with possible ways to be (un)ethical or (im)moral; in short, with the constituting of moral agents. With the creation of new classifications and greater epistemological clarity come new or more urgent measures for treating and controlling people. This shapes how people so classified or depicted as objects of knowledge are seen in ethical terms by both themselves and others. For example, new values can spring up around certain kinds of person which promote their surveillance, detainment, disciplining, etc.
In terms of the study's basic structure, I analyse in Part 1 the emergence of the ‘impulsive', ‘unpredictable' black male according to the precepts of historical ontology, charting the long, unfortunate and consequential history of this raciological idea. The resulting account attempts to explain how the raciological idea of the impulsive black male came into being and gained epistemological credence throughout the course of British history, wherever possible showing how the idea has been articulated through sport.
Chapter 2 describes the fundamental oppositions laid down by Plato and shows how these were elaborated by those who followed his line of thinking. It also explores how these oppositions found their way into descriptive works such as Pliny's Naturalis Historia and eventually into explorers' reports, such as Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, penned at the dawn of British capitalist expansionism. In examining responses to the African body being ascribed the status of property, I argue that Cartesian and Newtonian axioms structured British justifications for the slaving industry and, more specifically, that this epistemological setting saw notions of impulse and instinct yoked more tightly to the immediate imperatives of British colonialism. The emergence of liberalism and the cosmopolitan ethic is documented, with particular attention paid to work of Locke and Kant (regarding the respective doctrines of liberalism and cosmopolitanism) and related concessions to discrimination and exclusion; the significance of German Romanticism and the abolitionist movement is also considered. As well as examining characteristic descriptions of the black pugilists who docked on British shores in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the chapter describes how notions of instinct a...
