Postmodernity on Ice

Last Thursday night I went to a hockey game for the first time in my life.  It was great.   Hockey is a fun sport to watch.  (And no, I didn't just watch it for the fights, which were minor and few.) 

Because it was a weeknight game, when play started, most of the seats in the arena were empty.  So I got to hear what hockey sounds like:  the clack of the stick slapping the puck, the bang and clatter of skates, knees, elbows, helmeted heads slamming into the boards, and -- wonder of wonders! -- the shoosh of a player's blades slicing sideways across the ice when he comes to a quick stop.  Though many of our readers probably grew up hearing these sounds, I had never heard them before.  It was a revelation.

And, for a first-timer, this was an especially good game.  It was tied 3-3 at the end of regulation, went to overtime, and then went to a shootout.  The Dallas Stars scored on their last shot, and then their goalie blocked the San Jose Sharks' only chance of tying it up.  It was exciting.

But the game itself was only part of the spectacle.  A sports contest -- one team versus another -- comes embedded within a larger performance in which the spectator is also in some ways a participant.  Perhaps this has always been the case to some degree:  the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, a call and response as old as the game.  And there's a sense in which a sporting contest is substitutionary or representative -- a ritualized combat in which the competitors represent or embody or enact the aspirations and anxieties of the spectators.  But sport as a spectacle that blurs -- or pretends to blur -- the line between participant and observer seems to have taken a peculiarly Postmodern turn.  Athletes no longer perform for us; increasingly, they perform with us.

For team sports played inside a stadium or an arena -- baseball, basketball, football, hockey -- the giant video screen out in center field or suspended above the ice or looming over almost the entire length of the football field becomes a two-way picture window through which audience members can both see and be seen.  A pitching change, a time out, the end of a quarter or the end of a period -- these are times during the game when the stadium cameras start to pan the crowd, looking for cute kids or decked out fans or dancing women or (heterosexual) kissing couples or rowdy college students to ham it up for the camera and the crowd. 

These mini-dramas of boisterous fandom, interleaved with live shots and replays of the drama on the field, turn observers of the game into participants in an entertainment event.  These fans' performance can be intentional -- hamming and mugging for the camera -- or completely un-self-conscious.  In the latter case, the camera will sometimes linger on the subject until someone around him or her points up to the video screen.  Then the crowd gets to witness the moment when the unsuspecting spectator embarrassedly or enthusiastically embraces the unexpected role of performer.  These fans-realizing-they-are-on-camera moments are almost a genre unto themselves.

Nevertheless, there is still a fundamental difference between a fan's image on the screen and a fan on the field.  But the lines of that difference are blurring.

Dot Racing, for example, has (unfortunately) come a long way from its debut in the 1980s as a mindless, gimmicky video graphic meant to entertain the fans at Arlington Stadium.  The phenom spread to other stadiums and other sports. 

Now the inanity that is Dot Racing has taken us down the rabbit hole.  I have attended minor league ball games featuring "live dot racing" or "human dot racing."  The home team's promotional office chooses fans from the stadium to dress up in giant "dot" mascot costumes and race around the base path as the crowd cheers.  I have yet to see this happen in a major league stadium, but perhaps one of our readers has witnessed this strange transformation of sideline spectators into on-field competitors.

At the hockey game I attended this past week, the breaks after the first and second periods featured some form of "on ice" contest between fans.  After the first period, we were treated to a race between "human hamsters."  Three giant inflatable balls, each with a helmeted hockey fan inside it, were pushed out onto one end of the ice.  The fans had to race down to the other end of the ice, go behind the goal, and come back to the starting line.  The PA announcer in the booth provided live commentary for the cheering crowd.

After the second period, the spectacle was slightly more elaborate.  Four fans dressed as giant bottles of Bud Light had to race around some pylons, run behind the far goal,  come back across the ice, pick up a hockey stick, and knock a puck into the starting goal. 

This is harmless fun -- unless you're the life-sized beer bottle who does a faceplant, as one of the contestants on Thursday night did.  I'm sure he had to sign a waiver first -- besides, if he enjoyed enough of the product he was cajoled into promoting, it probably didn't hurt him much at the time anyhow. Of course, part of the fun for the crowd watching these kinds of contests -- human dot races, three legged races, human hamster wheels, anthropomorphic beer bottles toddling and teetering around a rink -- is the expectation that somebody is going to bite the dust...or the ice. 

But I can't help wondering what it means that the professional playing field has become -- if only momentarily --  the spectators' playground.  Is this a New Thing in sports?  If so, how new is it?  How did it come about?  And where is it headed next?  How does the "performance" of fans feed off of or feed into the performance of the athletes who are (presumably) the reason the fans are there in the first place? 

Extraordinary talent, discipline and skill -- and extraordinary paychecks -- separate professional athletes from those who watch them play.  Is the growing phenomenon -- or at least the growing visibility -- of participatory fandom a way of leveling the playing field?

But if the playing field is leveled between athletes and their spectators, then what is the future of the game?

Disembodied Voices in Intellectual History

In his recent post on Embodiment in Intellectual History, Ben raised the question of how intellectual historians might more effectively or fruitfully consider the "embodied aspects of the people about whom we write." He suggested that a consideration of "intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous." 
I began to wonder:  when was the last time that our communication technologies weren't in some way disembodied.  We probably have to go back to prehistory for that.  But I forbid my students from beginning their essays at the dawn of time, or writing an introductory paragraph about the course of human history, so I will spare you a similar sweeping gesture.  Besides, we do (mostly) U.S. history around here -- our wayback machine doesn't go very far back (though it might be salutary for us if it did). 

So as I thought about Ben's post, and I thought about how intellectual historians might "do embodiment" well, I was reminded of one of my favorite sections of A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin's brilliant biography of William Jennings Bryan.*

Kazin's extended meditation on the sonority of Bryan's voice provides an excellent example of how intellectual historians can explore what someone's physical presence meant for the articulation and reception of his or her ideas.  In the Great Commoner's case, this particular aspect of Bryan's (self-consciously performative) self-performance seems to have imbued his ideas with a liveliness and appeal that they lacked when presented in mere text, as printed words upon a page.

Kazin writes about the almost magical power of Bryan's speaking voice.

How did he do it? One born too late to hear Bryan on the stump or in a convention hall can only gather up reminiscences and marvel that, in an era satiated with oratory, he could lead so many people, foes as well as allies, to describe him as the most compelling speaker they'd ever heard (48).

Listeners commented on the extraordinary timbre of Bryan's voice:

Nearly every recollection begins by describing the quality of that voice. "Sonorous and melodious," "deep and powerfully musical," "soothing but penetrating," "free, bold, picturesque," "clear as a cathedral bell..." (48)

As Kazin points out, such praise sounds very much like the aesthetic judgment audiences might have pronounced upon a stage actor's talents.

Like them, the Nebraskan could project his voice a remarkable distance. Mary Bryan recalled one day in 1898 when, from inside a hotel room in Corpus Christi, she could hear her husband perfectly "three long blocks" away.  At national conventions, before the introduction of amplified sound in the early 1920s, Bryan's was often the only voice that could reach every seat in the house. And his diction -- clear, precise, and rendered with a slight prairie twang that passed for no accent at all -- ensured that listeners could understand every word (48).

I am intrigued by the gendered aspects of Bryan's appeal.  Apparently, he sounded like a man was supposed to sound.  And I can't help but wonder: what were women supposed to sound like when they spoke in public?  "They weren't," would be the easy laugh line here.  But there were women on the Chautauqua circuit, and I suspect that someone like Carrie Nation could hold a crowd's attention.  But I don't know that her appeal was aesthetic -- or acoustical -- in the way that Bryan's seemed to be.  Instead, part of the draw there (in addition to audience interest in the content of her speech) might have been the sheer spectacle of going to see a woman -- and such a woman! -- speak in public.

In terms of going to hear women, I suppose that famous female vocalists and melodramatic actresses could have drawn great crowds wherever they performed. But except for stage performers and professional entertainers, I wonder if there were many women who would have been able to draw a crowd simply to hear the sound of their speaking voices, as crowds wanted to do in Bryan's case.

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, what were the aesthetic expectations for public female -- and/or feminine -- speech?  (I mean besides "Ladies, please don't!")  What acoustical features, what kind of sonority, might have marked a pleasing, public female voice?  If you have some bibliographic suggestions, please add them to the comments below.  This is something I'll need to look at in relation to my work in the early 20th century, and I should probably base my understanding of the matter on something more authoritative than Singin' in the Rain.  ("I caiiiiiint staiiiind him.")

In any case, Bryan's heyday may have been the age of oratory, but it was not yet the age of radio. Kazin writes:

A...GOP partisan named Ira Smith first heard Bryan in 1896. Half a century later, he recalled: "I listened to his speech as if every word and every gesture were a revelation. It is not my nature to be awed by a famous name, but I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth." The next day, Smith read the same speech in a newspaper and "disagreed with almost all of it." He was glad, in retrospect, that "the most remarkable orator of the century" had passed his prime before the onset of radio. Otherwise, Smith, who ran the White House mailroom for five decades, believed the Nebraskan would certainly have been elected president (49).

To me, this is perhaps the most striking insight of all -- one of those "for want of a nail" arguments that sets history swinging on the hinge of a single slim contingency.

Heck, maybe old Ira Smith was right.

Or was he making the kind of appeal to technology's magic -- or to charisma's power? -- that often serves as a sop to our most simplistic explanatory urges?  For example, we've probably all heard some version of "Kennedy beat Nixon because of television."  That's a little too easy.  And I think it would be really bad history to say, "If Bryan had been broadcast coast to coast on the radio, he surely would have won the White House."  But Kazin, who doesn't tend to write bad history, doesn't say that.

Furthermore, as Kazin points out, it was not merely his voice alone that made Bryan so appealing; it was his deep sincerity. "Listeners enjoyed being in his presence and often felt inspired by a guileless orator who seemed an authentic representative of the producing classes. A politics of character thus blended into a politics of celebrity as Bryan's voice became known throughout the land" (49). That part about "being in his presence" suggests a whole performative rhetoric of look and gesture, physicality, sturdy manliness, that went along with that big sonorous voice.  So radio might not have helped Bryan much anyhow.

In their introduction to an audio clip of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, recorded in a studio twenty-five years after it was first delivered, the editors at GMU's History Matters site note that the recording "does not capture the power and drama of the original address."  Perhaps only listeners who had heard Bryan speaking live and also heard that recording could judge whether or not the recording "gets" Bryan.  Listening to his disembodied voice today, we have the challenge of wading through almost one hundred years of technologically mediated cultural history -- or culturally mediated technological history -- that have worked to shape what we think a (man's) voice ought to sound like.

But if audio recordings didn't seem to do justice to Bryan's oratorical gifts, that may have had less to do with the disembodiment of Bryan's voice than with the disembodiment of Bryan's audience.  Maybe it wasn't enough for Bryan to stretch himself out upon a Cross of Gold in a recording studio; maybe he needed a stadium full of people to bring power to his performance.

Along with Ben, I too would be interested to hear (!) our readers' thoughts on the more general question of how attention to embodiment can work in intellectual history.  I would suggest that exploring the (dis)connection between voice and presence, ideas and embodiment, matters not only in history, but for history -- for how we study it, for how we write it, and for how we perform it (and ourselves) here in the silent cacophony of the intellectual history blogosphere.

What say you?

---------
*If my discussion of this book seems vaguely familiar to you, it might be because I swiped a few paragraphs for this post from my old blog.  But I had, like, Seven Faithful Readers.  So I'm guessing it's new to you.