On cooks, pots, and spoons
Cooking food-a practical experience that followed catching prey-represents an important moment in human self-definition. As a form of praxis, it parallels the experience of self-constitution through language. It extends, as language does, far beyond satisfying immediate needs, allowing for the establishment of expectations above and beyond survival. Cooking implies generality, but also integrates elements of individuality. Some foods taste better, are more easily digested, support specific practical experiences. For example, some foods enhance prowess. When eaten before a hunt, they can trigger lust for chasing the animal. Some foods stimulate sexual drive, others induce states of hallucination. Cooking was, in many ways, a journey from the known into the unknown. Together with the sensorial experience, intellectual elements were involved in the process. They are observations, of similarities and dissimilarities of certain procedures, of substances used, of the influence of weather, season, tools, etc.; simple inferences, discoveries-the effect of fire, salt, spices. The experience of preparing food, together with many other practical experiences on which it depends or which are connected to it, opens avenues of abstraction. Cooking improves the quality of individual life, and thus empowers members of a community to better adapt to pragmatic expectations.
The constitution of the notion of food quality, as an abstraction of taste, and crafting of tools appropriate to the activity, is of special interest. An example: Pottery, in the natural context where it was possible, became the medium for preserving and cooking. In other contexts, carved stone, carved wood, woven branches, or metal was used, for storing or for cooking, according to the material. Progressively, tools for preparing and tools for eating were crafted, and new eating habits were acknowledged. When the multiple interdependency food-container-cooking-preservation was internalized in the activity of preparing food, a framework for new experiences was established. Some of these experiences, such as how to handle fire, transcend nourishment. The significance of this process can be succinctly expressed: cooked food, which we need to associate to the tools used, is food taken out of the context of nature and introduced in the context of culture. The experience of cooking involves other experiences and then expands into other domains unrelated to nourishment. This experience requires instruments for cooking, but even more an understanding of the process involved, of the effects of combinations and additions, and a strategy for delivery to those for whom cooking was undertaken.
Satisfying hunger in the fight for survival is an individual experience. Preparation of food requires time. In the experience of achieving time awareness, cooking played a role not to be ignored. If time can be used for different purposes by different people, associated in view of shared goals, then some can tend to the need of prepared food for others, while in turn partaking in their effort of hunting, fishing, agriculture, and craftsmanship. It was a simple strategy of labor assignments, affected by tribal life, family, rituals, myth, and religion: knowledge gained in preparing food disseminated without the need for specialized activity. But once pragmatic circumstances of life required it, some people assumed the function and thus, once a critical mass of efficiency was reached, what we today call the cook was identified. From the not-too- many written recipes that come down to us through the centuries, as well as from religious writings containing precise, pragmatically motivated restrictions, we learn enough about the stabilizing role of writing upon food preparation. We also gain understanding of the new functions played by food preparation: celebration of events, sacrifice to gods, expression of power.
People learn to cook and to eat at the same time. In this process, they come to share values beyond the immediacy of plants, fruits, and a piece of meat. Mediations pertinent to the art of cooking and eating are also part of the language process and become language. Culinary restrictions, such as those set down in some religions, are but an example of this process. They encode practical rules related to survival and well- being, but also to some conventions beyond the physical reality of the food. Language makes such rules the rules of the community; writing preserves them as requirements and thus exercises an important normative role.
Each pragmatic context determined what was acceptable as food and the conditions of food preparation, henceforth the condition of cooks and their particular role in social life. Many cooks, serving at courts of royalty, in monasteries, in the military, became the object of folk tales, fiction, of philosophers' comments. No cook seems to have been highly educated, but all their clients tried to impress through the food served and the wines, or other drinks, accompanying them. In such circumstances, the symbolic function of food indeed takes over the primary function of satisfying hunger. Thus the cook, like the singer and the dancer and the poet, contributes his part to what becomes the art of living. It is probably worth pointing out that memory devices similar to those used by poets and musicians are used by cooks, and that improvisation in preparing a meal plays an important part.
Writing entered the kitchen; and some of the last to resist literacy, when it became a pragmatic requirement, were those who cooked for others. Orality is more stubborn, for many reasons, when it involves the secrecy of food preparation. There are good reasons for this, some obvious even in our day of cracking the most guarded secrets. Indeed, labor division does not stop at the gates of factories. The segmentation of life and labor, increased mediation, and expectations of high efficiency make mass production possible. Almost everything people need to feed themselves, in order to maintain their physical and mental productive powers with a minimum of investment, is provided in favor of productive cycles. In the pragmatic framework of the industrial age, this meant the reproduction of the productive forces of the worker in a context of permanency. The investment in education and training was to be recuperated over a lifetime of work. Nourishment contributed to the same pattern: the family adapted to the rhythms of the practical experience of industry related jobs.
At work, at home, in school, at church, and last but not least in nourishment, acceptance of authority together with the discipline of self-denial were at work. That literacy, through its own structural characteristics (hierarchy, authority, standardization) accentuated all these peculiarities should at this time be evident. On special occasions, accounted for in the overall efficiency of effort, nourishment became celebration. It was integrated in the calendar of events through which authority was acknowledged: Sabbath, religious holidays, and political celebrations were motives for a better, or at least different, menu. Other days were meant to raise the awareness of self-denial (fish on Friday, for instance).
The cook did not necessarily become a literate person, but he or she was a product of the literate environment of practical experiences of pre-industrial and industrial societies. The tools and the culture of spices, ingredients, matching food and dishes, of expressing social status in the dinnerware set out, and the meal, i.e., the structure of the entire statement which a meal constitutes were all subjected to literacy. Labor division made the cook necessary, while simultaneously generating an industrial culture of food. In the equation of the labor market in industrial society, with literacy as its underlying structure, eating equals maintenance of productive and reproductive power. It also means the reproduction of needs at an increasing scale, as well as their change from needs to desires triggering the expansion of industrial production.
In the expectations associated with food there is more than only the voice of hunger. Our system of values, as it was articulated in the literate use of language, is expressed in our hunger, and in our particular ways to satisfy it. Based on this observation, we acknowledge that all the forces at work in structuring democratic social relations also affect the socialization of our nourishment. Uniform quality, and access to this common denominator quality, are introduced in the market, and with them the possibility of stating and maintaining health standards. Within the boundaries of the civilization of literacy and its associated hygiene and health standards, there is little left that can be identified with the country home that cannot be industrialized and made uniformly available. Beyond these boundaries starts a new reality of expectations, of transcended needs, and of technological means to satisfy them within standards of quality that reinforce the notion of democracy.
The identity of food
It is the act of mixing ingredients, boiling or stir-frying them, and the preparation of everything, the testing of different proportions, of new ingredients, of new combinations that results in the food we care for so much. The awareness of the entire process during which humans distanced themselves from nature is reduced in our understanding to some simple facts: instead of devouring the hunted animal, humans cooked it, preserved some parts for other days, learned how to combine various sources of nutrition (animal and plant), noticed what was good for the body and the mind. What is generally not accounted for is the fact that the break from the direct source of food to the experience of preparing is simultaneous with the emergence and establishment of language. Consequent changes are the use of methods for preserving, the continuous expansion of the food repertory (sources of nourishment), the development of better artifacts for increasing the efficiency of production and preparation of foods, and industrial processing. These changes parallel differentiations in the status of language-based practical experiences: the appearance of writing, the emergence of education, progress in crafts, the pragmatic of industrial society.
With the experience of literacy, human awareness of food experienced as a necessity, and as an expression of human personality and identity, increases. Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, forcefully dealt with this subject. The basic idea-of human dimensions expressed in nourishment-becomes more significant today. None of the many writers infatuated with the subject have noticed that once the limits of literacy, as limits of the pragmatics that made it necessary, are reached, we transcend the age of McDonalds, of synthetic nutritional substances, and of an infinity of prefabricated foods. This is also the age of endless variations and combinations. The human personality and identity are more difficult to characterize. It is expressed in our nourishment, as well as in how we dress-choosing from an infinity of available cloths-our sexual behavior- free to experiment in ever-expanding possibilities: patterns of family life, education, art, and communication. The infinity of choices available in the civilization of illiteracy eradicates any center, and to some extent undermines commonalty, even at the level of the species.
In this civilization, the investment in self is less community-related and more an act of individual choice. These choices are embodied in precise, customized diets based on individual requirements as defined by dietitians. Computer programs control personalized recipes and the production of any meal or menu. The balance of time and energy has changed totally. Experiences of work, free time, and fitness mix. The clear borderline between them is progressively blurred. It is not clear whether one burns more calories today in jogging than in working, but it is clear that discipline, in particular that of self-denial, is replaced by unpredictable self-indulgence. Consequently, to maintain the body's integrity, individual diet and exercise programs are generated, given a new focus through the transition from the economy of scarcity to that of consumption. Illiterate subjects accept that the market decide for them what and when and how to eat, as well as what to wear, with whom to pair, and how to feel. The appearance is that of self-determination. Independence and responsibility are not instant-mix experiences. Whether embodied in fast food chains, in microwave nourishment, in the television cooking shows, there is an illusion of self-determination, continuously reinforced in the seductive reality of a segmented world of competing partial literacies.
The appearance is that one can choose from many literacies, instead of being forced into one. The fact is that we are chosen in virtue of having our identity constituted and confirmed within the pragmatic context. Awareness of and interaction with nature, already affected in the previous age of industrial processing of basic foods, are further eroded. The immediate environment and the sources of nutrition it provides are assimilated in the picture of seasonless and context-free shelves at the supermarket. Space (where does the food come from?) and time (to which season does it correspond?) distinctions, accounted for so precisely in literacy, dissolve in a generic continuum. One does not need to be rich to have access to what used to be the food of those who could afford it. One does not need to be from a certain part of the world to enjoy what used to be the exotic quality of food. Time and space shrink for the traveler or TV viewer, as they shrink for the supermarket patron. They shrink even more for the increasing number of people shopping through the World Wide Web, according to formulas custom designed for them. With brand recognition, brands become more important than the food. The rhythms of nature and the rhythm of work and life are pulled further apart by the mediating mechanisms of marketing. The natural identity of food vanishes in the subsequent practical experience of artificial reality. There is little that distinguishes between a menu designed for the team of the space shuttle, for the military personnel in combat far from home, and the energy calculations for a machine. A little artificial taste of turkey for Thanksgiving, or the cleverly simulated smell of apple pie, makes the difference.
The language of expectations
Beasts of habit, people expect some reminders of taste and texture even when they know that what they eat or drink is the result of a formula, not of natural processes. This is why the almost fat-free hamburger, devised in laboratories for people in need of nourishment adapted to new conditions of life and work, will succeed or fail not on the basis of calories, but on the simulation of the taste of the real thing. This is how the new Coke failed. Non-alcoholic beer and wine, fat- and sugar-free ice cream, low cholesterol egg, vegetable ham, and all substitutes for milk, butter, and cream, to list a few, are in the same situation. In the fast lane of the civilization of illiteracy, we expect fast food: hamburgers, fish, chicken, pizza, and Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Thai, and other foods. The barriers of time and space are overcome through pre-processing, microwave ovens, and genetic engineering. But we do not necessarily accept the industrial model of mass production, reminiscent of literacy characteristics quite different from those of home cooking.
We cannot afford those long cooking cycles, consuming energy and especially time, that resulted in what some remember as the kitchen harmony of smell and taste, as well as in waste and dubious nutritional value, one should add. A McDonalds hamburger is close to the science fiction image of a world consuming only the energy source necessary for functioning. But the outlet reminds one of machines. It is still a manned operation, with live operators, geared to offer a uniform industrial quality. However, the literate structure gives way to more effective functioning. At intervals defined by a program continuously tracking consumption, the restaurant is stocked with the pre-processed items on the menu. None of the cooks needs to know how to write or read; food preparation is on-line, in real time. And if the requirements of the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy overcome the current industrial model, the new McDonalds will be able to meet individual expectations no less restricted than those of the Internet pizza providers. If this does not happen, McDonalds and its many imitators in the world will disappear, just as many of the mass production food manufacturers have already disappeared.
The mediating nature of the processes involved in nourishment is revealing. Between the natural and artificial sources of protein, fats, sugar, and other groups recommended for a balanced meal and the person eating them with the expectation of looking, feeling, and performing better, of living longer and healthier, there are many layers of processing, controlling, and measuring. Many formulas for preparation follow each other, or are applied in parallel cycles. After we made machines that resemble humans, we started treating ourselves as machines. The digital engine stands for the brain, pump for the heart, circuits for the nervous system. They are all subjected to maintenance cycles, clean sources of energy, self-cleaning mechanisms, diagnostic routines. The end product of food production-a customized pizza, taco, egg roll, hamburger, gefilte fish-resembles the "real thing," which is produced at the lowest possible cost in a market in which literate food is a matter of the past, a subject of reminiscence.
The new dynamics of change and the expectation of adaptability and permanence associated with the nourishment of the civilization of literacy collide at all levels involved in our need to eat and drink. What results from this conflict are the beautiful down-sized kitchens dominated by the microwave oven, the new cookware adapted to the fast food and efficient nourishment, the cooking instructions downloaded from the digital network into the kitchen. The interconnectedness of the world takes rather subtle aspects when it comes to food. Microwave ovens can perfectly be seen as peripheral devices connected to the smart kitchens of the post-industrial age, all set to feed us once we push the dials that will translate a desire, along with our health profile, into a code number. Three-quarters of all American households (Barbie's included) use a microwave oven. And many of them are bound to become an address on the Internet, as other appliances already are.
The conflict between literate and illiterate nourishment is also documented by the manner in which people write, draw, film, televise, and express themselves about cooking and related matters. This addresses the communication aspects of the practical experience of what and how we eat. The people who could go to their back yard for fresh onions or cabbage, get meat from animals they hunted or tended, or milk their own cow or goat, belong to a pragmatic framework different from that of people who buy produce, meat, cheese, and canned and frozen food in a small store or a supermarket. To communicate experiences that vanished because of their low efficiency is an exercise in history or fiction. To communicate current experiences in nourishment means to acknowledge mediation, distribution of tasks, networking, and open-endedness as they apply to communication and the way we feed ourselves or are fed by others. It also means to acknowledge a different quality.
Once upon a time, writing on food and dining was part of literature. Food authorities have been celebrated as writers. But with the advent of nourishment strategies, literate writing gave way to a prose of recipes almost as idiosyncratic as recipes for the mass production of soap, or cookbooks for programming. Some gourmets complained. Food experts suggested that precision was as good for cooking as temperature gauges. The understanding of how close the act of cooking is to writing about it, or, in our days to the tele-reality of the kitchen, or to the new interactive gadgets loaded with recipes for the virtual reality cooking game, is often missing. When conditions for exercising fantasy in the kitchen are no longer available, fantasy deserts the food pages and moves into the scripts of the national gourmet video programs and computer games-or on Web sites. Moreover, when predetermined formulas for bouillons, salad dressings, cakes, and puddings replace the art of selecting and preparing, the writing disappears behind the information added according to regulation, as vitamins are added to milk and cereals. A super-cook defines what is appropriate, and the efficient formula turns our kitchens into private processing plants ensuring the most efficient result. What is gained is the possibility to assemble meals in combinations of nutritional modules and to integrate elements from all over the world without the risk of more than a new experience for our taste buds. From the industrial age, we inherited processing techniques guaranteeing uniformity of flavor and standards of hygiene. The price we pay for this is the pleasure, the adventure, the unique experience. Food writing is based on the assumptions of uniformity. In contrast, cooking shows started exploring the worlds of technological progress, in which you don't cook because you are hungry or need to feed your family. You do it for competitive reasons, in order to achieve recognition for mastering new utensils and learning the names of new ingredients. In the post-industrial, the challenge is to break into the territory of innovation and ascertain practical experiences of cooking, presentation, and eating, freed from literate constraints.
Coping with the right to affluence
Pragmatic frameworks are not chosen, like food from a menu or toppings from a list. Practical experiences of human self-constitution within a pragmatic framework are the concrete embodiments of belonging to such a pragmatics. A new pragmatic framework negates the previous one, but does not eliminate it. Although these points were made in earlier chapters, there is a specific reason for dealing with them again here. As opposed to other experiences, nourishment is bound to involve more elements of continuity than science or the military. As we have already seen, literacy-based forms of preparing and eating food exist parallel to illiterate nourishment. This is the reason why some peculiar forms of social redistribution of food need to be discussed.
From self-nourishment to being fed
Humanized eating and drinking come with moral values attached to them, foremost the rule of sharing. Pragmatic rules regarding cleanliness, waste, and variation in diet are also part of the experience of nourishment. These associated elements- values, expectations, rules-are rarely perceived as constituting an extension of the practical experience through which humanity distinguishes itself from sheer naturalness. Literacy appropriates the rules and expectations that acknowledge and support ideals and values. Once expressed in the literate text, however, they appear to be extraneous to the process. Changes in the condition of religion, civic education, family, and the legal code, as well as progress in biology, chemistry, and genetics, create the impression and expectation that we can attach to food whatever best suits the situation morally or practically. The self-control and self-denial of previous pragmatic contexts are abandoned for instant gratification.
In the competitive context of the new pragmatics that renders literacy useless, the sense of a right to affluence developed. Parallel to this, institutions, founded on literacy-based experiences, were set up to control equity and distribution. Against the background of high efficiency that the new pragmatics made possible, competition is replaced by controlled distribution, and the experience of self-nourishment is replaced by that of being fed. Absorbed by tax-supported social programs, the poor, as well as others who chose giving up responsibility for themselves, are freed from projecting their biological and cultural identity in the practical experience of taking care of their own needs. Thus part of the morality of eating and drinking is socialized, in the same manner that literacy is socialized. At the same time, people's illiteracy expands in the sphere of nourishment. Today, there are more people than ever who could not take care of themselves even if all the food in the world and all the appliances we know of were brought into their homes. Dependencies resulting from the new status of high efficiency and distribution of tasks free the human being in relative terms, while creating dependencies and expectations.
The problem is generally recognized in all advanced countries. But the answer cannot be so-called welfare reforms that result only in cutting benefits and tightening requirements. Such reforms are driven by short-sightedness and political opportunism. A different perspective is necessary, one that addresses motivation and the means for pursuing individual self-constitution as something other than the beneficiary of an inefficient system. The pragmatics that overrides the need for literacy is based on individual empowerment. As necessary as soup kitchens are under conditions of centralism and hierarchy, the dissemination of knowledge and skills that individuals need in order to be able to provide for themselves is much more important.
Run and feed the hungry
"Sponsorship for a charitable track event. Funds for Third World countries threatened by starvation sought. Register support through your donations." And on a nice sunny weekend, many kind-hearted individuals will run miles around a city or swim laps in a pool in order to raise funds for organizations such as CARE, Oxfam, Action Hunger, or Feed the World. Hunger in this world of plenty, even in the USA and other prosperous countries, derives from the same dynamics that results in the civilization of illiteracy. The scale of humankind requires levels of efficiency for which practical experiences of survival based on limited resources are ill suited. Entire populations are subjected to hunger and disease due to social and economic inequities, to weather conditions or topological changes, or to political upheaval in the area where they live. Short of addressing inequities, aid usually alleviates extreme situations. But it establishes dependencies instead of encouraging the best response to the situation through new agricultural practices, where applicable, or alternative modes of producing food.
Seduced by our life of plenty and by the dynamics of change, we could end up ignoring starving and diseased populations, or we could try to understand our part in the equation. Living in an integrated world and partaking in the pragmatics of a global economy, people become prisoners of the here and now, discarding the very disconcerting reality of millions living in misery. But it is exactly the pragmatic framework leading to the civilization of illiteracy that also leads to the enormous disparities in today's world. Many forces are at work, and the danger of falling prey to the slogans of failed ideology, while trying to understand misery and hunger in today's world, cannot be overestimated. Starvation in Africa, South America, in some East European countries, and in parts of Asia needs to be questioned in light of the abundance of food in Japan, West Europe, and North America. Both extremes correspond to changes in human self-constitution under expectations of efficiency critical to the current scale of humankind.
If human activity had not changed and broadened its base of resources, the entire world would be subject to what Ethiopians, Sudanese, Somalis, Bangladeshis, and many others are facing. Extreme climatic conditions, as well as decreasing fertility of the land due usually to bad farming practices, can be overcome by new farming methods, progress in agricultural technology, biogenetics, and chemistry. Spectacular changes have come about in what is considered the most traditional practice through which humans constitute their identity. The change affected ways of working, family relations, use of local resources, social and political life, and even population growth. It resulted in a new set of dependencies among communities that had afforded autarchic modes of existence for thousands of years. The environment, too, has been affected probably as much by scientific and technological progress as by the new farming methods that take full advantage of new fertilizers, insecticides, and genetic engineering of new plants and animals.
Motivated by literacy-based ideals, some countries took it upon themselves to see that people in less developed lands be redeemed through benefits they did not expect and for which they were not prepared. At the global levels of humankind, when the necessity of literacy declines, dependencies characteristic of literacy-based interactions collide with forces of integration and competition. What results is a painful compromise. Hunger is acknowledged and tended to by enormous bureaucracies: churches, charities, international aid organizations, and institutions more concerned with themselves than with the task at hand. They maintain dependencies that originated within the pragmatics of the civilization of literacy. The activities they carry out are inherently inefficient. Where the new dynamics is one of differentiation and segmentation, the main characteristics of these experiences are those of literacy: establishment of a universal model, the attempt to reach homogeneity, tireless effort to disseminate modes of existence and work of a sequential, analytic, rationalistic, and deterministic nature. Consequently, where nourishment from the excess attained elsewhere is dispensed, a way of life alien to those in need is projected upon them.
Aid, even to the extent that it is necessary, re-shapes biology, the environment, the connection among people, and each individual. Diseases never before experienced, behavioral and mental changes, and new reliances are generated, even in the name of the best intentions. In some areas affected by starvation, tribal conflicts, religious intolerance, and moral turpitude add to natural conditions not propitious to life. These man-made conditions cannot and should not veil the fact that human creativity and inventiveness are prevented from unfolding, replaced by ready-made solutions, instead of being stimulated. Empowerment means to facilitate developments that maintain distinctions and result from differences, instead of uniformity.
Would all the populations facing hunger and disease actually jump from the illiteracy of the past-a result of no school system or limited access to education, as well as of a pragmatics that did not lead to literacy-to the pragmatically determined illiteracy of the future? The pragmatic framework of our new age corresponds to the need to acknowledge differences and derive from heterogeneity new sources of creativity. Each ton of wheat or corn airlifted to save mothers and children is part of the missionary praxis commenced long ago when religious organizations wanted to save the soul of the so-called savage. The answer to hunger and disease cannot be only charity, but the effort to expand networks of reciprocally significant work. The only meaningful pragmatics derives from practical experiences that acknowledge differences instead of trying to erase them. Access to resources for more effective activities is fundamentally different from access to surplus or to bureaucratic mechanisms for redistribution.
Where literacy never became a reality, no organization should take it upon itself to impose it as the key to survival and well being. Our literacy-based medicine, nourishment, social life, and especially values are not the panacea for the world, no matter how proud we are of some, and how blind to their limitations. Human beings have sufficient means today to afford tending to differences instead of doing away with them. In this process, we might learn about that part of nourishment that was rationalized away in the process of reaching higher levels of efficiency. And we might find new resources in other environments and in the peculiar self-constitution of peoples we consider deprived-resources that we could integrate into our pragmatics.
No truffles (yet) in the coop
Our civilization of illiterate nourishment is based on networks and distributed assignments. The change from self-reliance to affluence corresponds, first and foremost, to the change of the pragmatic context within which the human condition is defined. We project a physical reality-our body-that has changed over time due to modifications in our environment, and the transition from practical experiences of survival to the experience of abundance. The room for invention and spontaneity expands the more we discover and apply rules that guarantee efficiency or limit those preventing it. There might be several dozens of sauces one can select from, and no fewer cereals for breakfast, many types of bread, meat, fish, and very many preprocessed menus. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that all taste alike. But it would not necessarily be false to ascertain that behind diversity there are a limited number of changing formulas, some better adapted to succeed in the marketplace than others, and some better packaged than others.
Yes, people are nostalgic. More precisely, people are subjected to the nostalgia- triggering stimuli of mass media: the attraction of the homemade, homestyle, Mom's secret recipe. This is not because the majority of us know what these icons of the past are, but rather because we associate them with what is no longer possible: reassurance, calm, tradition, protection, permanence, care. We also hear the voices of those who demystify the literate cooking of yesteryear: women spent their lifetime slaving in their kitchens. They did so, the argument goes, to satisfy males, only too happy to be taken care of. Both voices, those idealizing and those demystifying the past, should be heard: We enslaved part of nature and took it upon ourselves to annihilate animals or, worse, change their genetic structure. In order to satisfy our appetites, we sacrificed the environment. And, giving in to gluttony, we effectively changed our genetic constitution. The truth, if there is any above and beyond the cultural and economic conditions of cooking, is that transitions from one scale of humankind to another subjected practical experiences of self-constitution to fundamental modifications. Trying to understand some of the patterns of life and work, as well as patterns of access to food or of preparing it, requires that we understand when and why such changes take place.
Language stored not only recipes, but also expectations that became part of our nourishment. The culture of food preparation and serving, the art of discovering new recipes and enjoying what we eat and drink, is more than language can convey. Truffles, the food of kings and nobles, and more recently of those who can afford them, bear a whole history, obviously expressed in language. Whether seen as the spit of witches, a more or less magic aphrodisiac, or a miraculous life-prolonging food, truffles gain in status because our experience, reflected in the language pertinent to cooking, led us to regard them from a perspective different from those who first discovered, by accident, their nutritive value. It is in the tradition of orality that fathers whispered to their sons the secret of places where truffles could be found. Practical experiences involving writing, and later literacy, raised the degree of expectancy associated with their consumption. They affected the shift regarding the eating of truffles from the sphere of the natural (the pigs that used to find them, and liked them probably as much as the gourmets, had to be replaced by specially trained dogs) to the realm of the cultural, where the interests of human beings prevail over anything else. Through language processes paralleled by the semiosis of high gastronomy, truffles enter the market as sign-of a discriminating palate, of snobbery, or of actually knowing why truffles are good.
Language and food interact. This interaction involves other sign systems, too: images, sounds, movements, texture, odor, taste. Through the influence of language and these other sign systems, the preparation of food and the appropriate drinks becomes an art. In the age of illiteracy, the languages of genetics, biology, and medicine make us aware of what it takes to avoid malnutrition, what it takes to maintain health and prolong one's life. Literacy was reinforced in the convention of how people eat, what, when, and how satisfaction or disappointment was expressed. In our new nutritional behavior and in our new values, literacy plays a marginal role (including interaction at the dining table). The artificial truffle is free of the mystique of origin, of the method for finding truffles, of secret formulas (except the trade secret). It is one item among many, cheap, illusory, and broadly available, as democratic as artificial caviar or, as Rousseau would have put it, government by representation.
Identical in so many ways, the cafeterias that extend an industrial model in a post-industrial context feed millions of people based on a formula of standardization. Hierarchies are wiped away. This is no place for truffles. One gets his tray and follows those who arrived before. There is no predetermined sequence. All that remains is the act of selection and the execution of the transaction-an exercise in assemblage not far removed from composing your own pizza on a computer monitor. When the language of available nourishment is standardized to the extent that it is in these feeding environments-elegant coops stocked with shining metal coffee, tea, and soda dispensers, refrigerated containers of sandwiches, cake, fruit-the language of expectations will not be much richer. The increased efficiency made possible this way accounts for the wide acceptance of this mediocre, illiterate mode of nourishing ourselves.
We are what we eat
If we were to analyze the language associated with what, how, when, where, and why we eat, we would easily notice that this language is tightly connected to the language of our identification. We are what, how, why, when, and where we eat. This identification changed when agriculture started and families of languages ascertained themselves. It changed again when the pragmatic framework required writing, and so on until the identity of the literate person and the post-literate emerged from practical experiences characteristic of a new scale of human experiences. Today we are, for quite a broad range of our social life, an identification number of a sort, an address, and other information in a database (income, investment, wealth, debt history) that translates into what marketing models define as our individual expectations. Information brokers trade us whenever someone is interested in what we can do for him or her. Powerful networks of information processing can be used to precisely map each person to the shelf surface available in stores, to the menus of restaurants we visit on various occasions, and to the Internet sites of our journeys in cyberspace. Our indexical signs serve as indicators for various forms of filtering calories (how many do we really need?), fats (saturated or not), proteins, sugars, even the aesthetics of food presentation, in order to exactly match individual needs and desires. Scary or not, one can even imagine how we will get precisely what best suits our biological system, influenced by the intensity of the tennis game (virtual) we just finished, the TV program we watched for the last 30 seconds, or the work we are involved in. To make this happen is a task not so much different from receiving our customized newspaper or only the information we want through Pointscape, saving our monitors from excessive heat and saving us time from useless searches.
In the pragmatic framework where illiteracy replaces literacy, eating and drinking are freed from the deterministic chain of survival and reproduction. They are made part of a more encompassing practical experience. Each time we take a bite from a hot dog or sandwich, each time we enjoy ice cream, drink wine or beer or soda, take vitamins or add fiber to our diet, we participate in two processes: the first, of revising expectations, turning what used to be a necessity into luxury; the second, of continuous expansion of the global market present through what we eat and drink. Many transactions are embodied in our daily breakfast, business lunch, or TV dinner. With each bite and gulp (as with each other product consumed), we are incorporated into the dynamics of expanding the market. The so-called Florida orange juice contains frozen concentrate from Brazil. The fine Italian veal microwave dinner contains meat from Romania. The wildflower honey "Made in Germany" is from Hungarian or Polish beehives. Bread, butter, cheese, cold cuts, jams, and pasta could be marked with the flag of the United Nations if all the people involved in producing them were to be acknowledged. Meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, not unlike everything else traded in the global market, make for an integrated world in which the most efficient survives in the competition for pleasing if not our taste, at least our propensity to buy.
The efficiency reached in the pragmatic framework of illiteracy allows people to maintain, within the plurality of languages, a plurality of dietary experiences, some probably as exotic as the literacy of ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Aramaic, or cuneiform writing. Even the recipes of the Roman Empire can be enjoyed in exclusive settings (as in Saint-Bernard-de-Comminges in the Pyrénées) or as haute, ready-made cuisine (the Comptesse du Barry food company offers wild boar in spicy sauce, stuffed duck in ginger, and sea trout with wild leeks). The Japanese have their sushi prepared from resuscitated fish flown, in a state of anabiosis (organic rhythm slowed through refrigeration), from wherever the beloved delicacies are still available.
The multiplicity of food-related experiences in our time is representative of segmentation and heterogeneity in the civilization of illiteracy. It is also an expression of the subtle interdependencies of the many aspects of human self-constitution. The democracy of nourishment and the mediocrity of food are not necessarily a curse. Neither are the extravagant performances of artist-cooks that fetch a price equivalent to the average annual salary of a generic citizen of this integrated world. Difference makes a difference. Feminism, multiculturalism, political activism (from right to left)-all use arguments related to how and what we eat, as part of the broader how and why we live, to advance their causes. If nothing else, the civilization of illiteracy makes possible choices, including those pertinent to nourishment, for which we are ill prepared. The real challenge is still ahead of us. And no one knows how it tastes.
The Professional Winner
The connections between sports and literacy are far from obvious. Watching sports events, as a spectator in the stadium, or in front of the television, does not require the literacy we associate with libraries, reading and writing, and school education. One does not need to read in order to see who is fastest, strongest, or jumps the farthest or highest, or throws or catches the best. And one does not really need to be literate in order to become a champion or to make it into a first-league team. Running, jumping, pushing, throwing, catching, and kicking are part of our physical repertory, related to our day-to-day existence, easy to associate with ways through which survival took place when scavenging, hunting, fishing, and foraging were the fundamental ways for primitive beings to feed themselves and to avoid being killed. Even the association of sports and with mytho-magical ceremonies implying physical performance is easy to explain without reference to language, oral or written. Exceptional physical characteristics were, and still are in some parts of the world, celebrated as expressions of forces beyond immediate control and understanding. Gods were worshipped through exceptional physical feats performed by people worshipping them. In archaic cultures, athletes could even be sacrificed on the altar of gratitude, where the best were destined to please the gods.
The initial phases of what was eventually called sport correspond to establishing those sign systems (gestures, sounds, shapes) which, in anticipation of language, made language possible and necessary. This was a phase of syncretism, during which the physical projection of the human being dominated the intellect. Running after an animal or from one, and running for play are different forms of human experience corresponding to different pragmatic contexts. They have different motivations and different outcomes. Probably 20,000 years separate these two experiences in time. In order to reach the level of generality and abstraction that a competition embodies, the human being had to undergo experiences of self-constitution within which the domination of physical over intellectual characteristics changed drastically. The qualifier sport-a word which seems to have ascended within the English language of the 19th century-probably came about in the framework of the division between secular and non-secular forms of human praxis. Both maintenance and improvement of the human biological endowment and mytho-magical practice were based on awareness of the role the body plays and the recognition of the practical need to disseminate this awareness. Efficiency was the governing aspect, not recognized as such, not conceptualized, but acknowledged in the cult of the body and the attempt to make it part of the shared culture. The contest (for which the Greeks used the words athlos) and the prize (athlon, which eventually led to the word athlete) embody generalizations of those practical situations through which survival and well-being came about.
As a complex experience, sports involves rational and irrational components. This is why approaching the relation between literacy and sports, one has to account for both dimensions. Sports is approached here from the perspective of the changes through which it became what it is today: a well defined form of relaxation, but probably more a competitive type of work acknowledged in the market like any other product of human practice.
The immediate connection between physical fitness and the outcome of practical experiences dominated by physical aspects was established within very limited, but strongly patterned, activity. It soon became the measure of survival success, and thus the rationality shared by the community experiencing the survival of the fittest is reflected in competition. Athletes competed in order to please gods; to conjure fertility, rain, or the extension of life; or to expel demons. The process is documented in a variety of petroglyphs (cave paintings, engravings on stone) and in carvings or etchings on animal horn and metal, as well as in the first written testimony, in which the role of the stronger, the faster, the more agile was evinced. Documents from all known cultures, regardless of their geographic coordinates, have in common the emphasis on the physical as it acquired a symbolic status.
To understand how some biological characteristics improved chances of survival means to understand the rationality of the body. Its embodiment in the culture of physical awareness facilitated practical experiences of human self-constitution that would result in sports professions. The irrational element has to do with the fact that although all males and all females are structurally the same, some individuals seem better endowed physically. As with many other aspects of the practical experience through which each person acknowledges his or her identity, what could not be clarified was placed in a domain of explanations where the rationality is lost. This is why expectations of rain, of longer life, of chasing away evil forces are associated with sports. The cult of the body, in particular of body parts, resulted from experiences leading to awareness of oneself. When the body, or parts of it, became a goal in itself, the rationality of physical fitness for survival is contradicted by the irrationality of fitness for reasons other than individual and communal well-being. Rituals, myths, religion, and politics appropriated the irrational component of physical activities. In ancient communities, in the context of a limited understanding of physical phenomena, attempts were made to infer from the immediate well-being of the body of competing athletes to the future well-being of the entire community.
When it comes to physical fitness in the context of survival of the fittest, can we suppose that a lone human being stands out, something like the lonely animals on their own until the time for pairing comes, competing with others, killing and being killed? Probably not. Scale defines the species as one that ascertains its self-constitution in cooperative efforts, no matter how primitive. Up to a certain scale, the only competition was for survival. It translated into food and offspring. Only after the agricultural phase, which corresponds to a level of efficiency of more food than immediately necessary, the element of competition shifts from survival to ascertainment. Competition and expectations of performance correspond to the period of incipient writing, and were progressively acknowledged as part of the dynamics of communal life. Every other change in the role of humankind brought with it expectations of physical fitness corresponding to expected levels of efficiency.
Sports and self-constitution
Gymnastics is an expression of the cult of the body parallel to that of art. In order to realize its dimensions, it needs to be seen from this broader perspective, not as a random set of exercises. It has a physical and a metaphysical dimension, the latter related to the obsession with ideal proportions that eventually were expressed in philosophic terms. There are plenty of explanations to be considered for both the origin of the practical experience of sports and the forms this experience took over centuries. Alluding to some explanations, though not in order to endorse them, will help to show how diversity of sports experiences resulted in diversity of interpretations.
The basic assumption of this entire book, human self-constitution in practical experiences, translates into the statement that sports is not a reflective but a constitutive experience. Indeed, through running, jumping, wrestling, or otherwise participating in some game, human beings project themselves according to physical characteristics and mental coordination that facilitate physical performance in the reality of their existence. This projection is a direct way of identifying oneself and thus of becoming part of an interacting group of people. The majority of researchers studying the origins of sports identify these in the experience of survival, thus placing them in the Darwinian evolutionist frame. When survival skills, maintenance, and reproduction skills become distinct and relatively autonomous, they follow recurrent patterns on whose basis social practice takes place and new ideas are formulated.
From the perspective of today's jogger, running might seem an individual experience, and to a great extent it is. But fundamentally, running as a practical experience takes place among people sharing the notion of physical exercise and attaching to it social, cultural, economic, and medical meaning. We create ourselves not only when we write poetry, tend land, or manufacture machines, but also when we are involved in athletic experiences. There is in sports, as there is in any other form of practical experience, a natural, a cultural (what we learn from others and create with others), and a social (what is known as communication) dimension. The sports experience appears to us as the result of the coordination of all these elements. For someone attending a sports event, this coordination can become an object of description: this much is due to training, this much to natural attributes, and this much to social implications (pride, patriotism). This is why sports events sometimes appear to the spectator as having a predetermined meaning, not one resulting from the dynamics of the interaction characteristic of this human experience. In the mytho-magical stage of human dynamics, in which the ability of the body was celebrated, the meaning seemed to drive the entire event more than it occurs today in a game of hockey or football. Due to the syncretic nature of such events, rituals addressed existence in its perceived totality. The specialized nature of games such as hockey or football leads these to address only one aspect of existence-the experience of the particular sport. A game can degenerate from being a competition structured by rules to a confrontation of nerves, violence, or national pride, or into sheer exhibitionism, disconnected from the drive for victory.
Although the physical basis for the practical experience of sports is the same- human beings as they evolved in time-in different cultures, different recurrent patterns and different meanings attached to them can be noticed. This statement does not align itself with explanations of sports given in Freudian tradition, Marxist theory, or in Huizinga's model of the human being as playful man (Homo Ludens). It takes into consideration the contextual nature of any form of human practice and looks at sports, as it does at any human experience, from the perspective of a constitutional, not representational, act; in short, from the pragmatic perspective. When Japanese players kick a ball in the game called kemari, the recurrent pattern of interaction is not the familiar football or soccer game, although each player constitutes his identity in the performance. When the Zen archer tenses his bow, the pattern, associated with the search for unity with the universe, is quite different from the pattern of archery in Africa or of the archery competition at the Olympic games of the past. The ball games of the Mayans relied on a mythology which was itself a projection of the human being in quest of explaining and finding an answer to what distinguishes the sun from the moon and how their influence affects patterns of human practice. It is probably easier to look at the recurrent patterns of interaction of more recent sports experiences not rooted in the symbolism of the ancient, such as baseball, aquatic dancing, or ice skating, to understand what aspect of the human being is projected and what kind of experience results for the participants (athletes, sports fans, public, media). The surprising reality is the diversity. People never exhaust their imagination in devising new and newer forms of competition involving their physical aptitude. No less surprising is the pursuit of a standard experience, modeled in rules for the competition. Some are intrinsic to the effort (the rules of the game), others to the appearance (expected clothing, for instance). Parallel to the standard experience, there is also a deviant practice of sports (nonstandard), in forms of individual rules, ad hoc conventions, private competition. The social level of sports and the private level are loosely connected. To become a professional means, among other things, to accept the rules as they apply in the standard experience, within organizations or acknowledged competition. The language professional is pretty much in a similar situation. Literacy serves as the medium for encoding the rules.
Language and physical performance
But the subject here is not the similarity between sports and language, but rather their interrelation. The obvious entry point is to notice that we use language to describe the practical experience of sport and to assign meaning to it. As obvious as this is, it is also misleading in the sense that it suggests that sports would not be possible without language-an idea implicit in the ideal of literacy. In ages when written language emerged, sporting events become part of social life. Visual representation (such as petroglyphs and the later hieroglyphics), while not exactly a statement about the awareness of exercise, contain enough elements to confirm that not only immediate, purposeful physical activity (running after a wild animal, for instance) and the exercise and maintenance of the physical were, at least indirectly, acknowledged. Testimony to the effect that at a certain moment in time the community started providing for the physically talented-in the tombs of the Egyptian Pharaoh Beni Hasan the whole gamut of wrestling is documented in detail-helps us understand that labor division and increased efficiency are in a relation that goes far beyond cause and effect. The specialization, which probably started at that time, resulted not just from the availability of resources, but also from the willingness to allocate them in ways that make the sports experience possible because a certain necessity was acknowledged.
The pattern of kicking a ball in kemari and the pattern of language use in the same culture are not directly connected. Nevertheless, the game has a configurational nature: the aim is to maintain the ball in the air for as long as possible. Soccer, even football, are sequential: the aim is to score higher than the opposing team. In the first case, the field is marked by four different trees: willow, cherry, pine, and maple. In the second, it is marked by artificial boundaries outside of which the game rules become meaningless. The languages of the cultures in which such games appeared are characterized by different structures that correspond to very different practical experiences. The logic embodied in each language system affects, in turn, the logic of the sports experience. Kemari is not only non-predicative and configurational, but also infused by the principle of amé, in which things are seen as deeply interdependent. Soccer and football are analytical, games of planning, texts whose final point is the goal or the touchdown. No surprise then, that mentality, as a form of expressing the influence of practical experience in some patterned expectation, plays a role, too.
There are many extremely individualistic forms of competition, and others of collective effort. While in today's global market mentality plays a different role than in the past, it still affects sports in its non-standard form. These and other differences are relevant to understanding how different practical experiences constitute different instances of human objectification, sports being one of these. Even when the sports instance is disconnected from the experience that made it necessary, it is still affected by all the structural elements that define the pragmatic context. Indeed, while there is a permanency to sports-involvement of the human body-there is also a large degree of variation corresponding to successive pragmatic circumstances.
Sport is also a means of expression. During the action, it externalizes physical capabilities, but also intellectual qualities: self-control, coordination, planning. Initially, physical performance complemented rudimentary language. Afterwards the two took different paths, without actually ever separating entirely (as the Greek Olympics fully document). When language reached some of its relative limits, expression through sports substituted for it: not even the highest literate expression could capture the drama of competition, the tragedy of failure, or the sublimity of victory. But more interesting is what language extracted from the experience of sports. Language captured characteristics of the sports experience and generalized them. Through language, they were submitted, in a new form, to experiences very different from sports: sports for warfare, athletics for instilling a sense of order, competitions as circus for the masses. But primarily, people derived from sports the notion of competitiveness, accepted as a national characteristic, as well as a characteristic of education, of art, of the market.
Rationalized in language, the notion of competition introduces the experience of comparing, later of measuring, and thus opens the door to the bureaucracy of sports and the institutionalized aspects we today take for granted. Greeks cared for the winner. Time-keeping devices were applied to sports later, more precisely at the time when keeping records became relevant within the broader pragmatics of documentary ownership and inheritance. While playing does not require language, writing helped in establishing uniform rules that eventually defined games. The institution of playing, represented by organized competitions, is the result of the institution of literacy, and reflects pragmatic expectations pertinent to literacy.
In every sports experience, there is a romantic notion of nature and freedom, reminiscent of the experience of hunting, fishing, and foraging. But at the same time, sports experiences testify to changes in the condition of human beings as they relate to the natural environment, their natural condition, social environment, and the artificial world resulting from human practice. Target shooting, or, more recently, Nintendo-type aiming with laser beams, is at the other end of the gamut. The circumstances of human experience that made literacy necessary affected the status of the sports experience as well. The contest became a product with a particular status; the prize reflects the sign process through which competition is evaluated.
Allen Guttman distinguished several characteristics of modern sports: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification, and quest for records. What he failed to acknowledge is that such characteristics are not relevant unless considered in connection to the recurrent patterns of sports seen against the background of the general pragmatic framework. Once we make such connections, we notice that efficiency is more important than the so-called equality of opportunity, quantification, and bureaucratic organization. The quest for efficiency appropriate to the new scale of humankind is exactly what today affects literacy's degree of necessity.
The quest for efficiency in sports becomes evident when we compare the changes from the very sophisticated, indeed obscure, rules governing sports performances in ritualistic cultures (Indian, Chinese, Mayan, Apache) with the tendency to simplify these rules and make the sports experience as transparent as possible. When certain African tribes adopted the modern game of soccer, they placed it in the context of their rituals. The entire set of premises on which the game is based, and which pertain to a culture so different from that of the African tribes, was actually dismissed, and premises of a different nature were attached as a frame for the adopted game. Consequently, the Inyanga (witch-doctor) became responsible for the outcome; the team and supporters had to spend the night before the game together around a campfire; goats were sacrificed. In such instances, the ceremony, not the game, is the recurrent pattern; winning or losing is of secondary importance. Once such tribes entered literate civilization, the utilitarian aspect became dominant. If we take European soccer and extend it to the American game of football, we can understand how new patterns are established according to conditions of human practice of a different structural nature. This discussion cannot be limited to the symbolism of the two games, or of any other sport. The attached meaning corresponds to the interpreted practical experience and does not properly substitute for the recurrent patterns which actually constitute the experience as a projection of the humans involved.
What is of interest here is that literacy was a powerful instrument for structuring practical experiences, such as sports (among others), in the framework of a dynamics of interaction specific to industrial society. As the cradle of the industrial age, England is also the place where many sports and experiences associated with physical exercise started. But once the dynamics changed, some of the developments that the Industrial Revolution made necessary became obsolete. An example is national isolation. Literacy is an instrument of national distinction. By their nature, sports experiences are, or should be, above and beyond artificial national boundaries. Still, as past experiences show (the 1936 Olympics in Berlin was only the climax) and current experiences confirm (national obsession with medals in more recent Olympics), sports in the civilization of literacy, like many other practical experiences, is tainted by nationalism. Competition often degenerates into an adversarial relation and conflict. In the physical exercises of ancient Greece, China, or India, performance was not measured. The patterns were those of physical harmony, not of comparison; of aesthetics, not of functionality. In England, sports became an institution, and performance entered into the record books. Indeed, in England, the history of competitions was written to justify why sports were for the upper, educated classes, and should be kept for amateurs willing to enjoy victory as a reward.
Some games were invented in the environment of the civilization of literacy and meant to accomplish functions similar to those fulfilled by literacy. They changed as the conditions of the practice of literacy changed, and became more and more an expression of the new civilization of more languages of a limited domain. In the information age, where much of language is substituted by other means of expression, sports are an experience that results primarily in generating data. For someone attracted by the beauty of a tennis game, the speed of a serve is of secondary relevance. But after a while, one realizes that tennis has changed from its literate condition to a condition in which victory means obliteration of the game. A very strong and fast serve transforms the game into a ledger of hits and misses. Quite similar is the dynamics of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, all generators of statistics in which the experts find more enjoyment than from the actual event. The dynamics of changes in the nature and purpose of sports is related to what makes the sports experience today another instance in the process of diversification of languages and the demotion of the necessity of literacy.
The illiterate champion
The dynamics of the change from the sports experience embodying the ideal of a harmoniously developed human being to that of high performance is basically the same as the dynamics of change behind any other form of human projection. Structurally, it consists of the transition from direct forms of interaction with the outside world to more and more mediated interrelations. Chasing an animal that will eventually be caught and eaten is a performance directly related to survival. In addition to the physical aspect, there are other elements that intervene in the relation hunter-hunted: how to mask the presence of one's odor from the prey; how to attract game (through noise or lure); how to minimize energy expended to succeed (where to hit the prey, and when). Ritual, magic, and superstition were added, but did not always enhance the outcome.
Running for the maintenance and improvement of physical qualities is immediate, but still less direct in relation to the outcome than in hunting. The activity displays an understanding of connections: What do muscle tone, heartbeat, resilience, and volition have to do with our life and work, with our health? It also testifies to our efforts to preserve a certain sense of time and space (lost in the artificial environments of our homes or workplaces) and projects sheer physical existence. Running for pleasure, as we suppose animals do when young and enjoying security (think about puppies!) is different from running with a purpose such as hunting an animal, catching someone (friend or foe), running after a ball, or against a record. Running for survival is not a specialized experience; running in a war game implies some specialization; becoming the world champion in field and track is a specialized effort for whose outcome many people work. In the first case, the reason is immediate; in the second, less direct; in the third, mediated in several ways: the notion of running to compete, the distance accepted by all involved (athletes, spectators, organizations), the value attached, the meaning assigned, the means used in training and diet, the running costume. Before specialization, which is exclusive commitment to a particular practical experience, socially acknowledged selection took place. Not everybody had the physical and mental qualities appropriate to high sports performance. In the background, the market continuously evaluates what becomes, to variable degrees, a marketable product: the champion. In the process, the human being undergoes alienation, sometimes evinced through pain, other times ignored-books never read don't hurt. People tend to remember the festive moments in a champion's life, forgetting what leads to victory: hard work, difficult choices, numerous sacrifices, and the hardship inflicted on the bodies and minds engaged in the effort of extracting the maximum from the athlete.
How literate should an athlete be? The question is not different from how literate a worker, farmer, engineer, ballerina, or scientist should be. Sports and literacy used to be tightly associated in a given context. The entire collegiate sports world (whose origin in 19th century Britain was already alluded to) embodies this ideal. Mens sana in corpore sano-a healthy mind in a healthy body-was understood along the line of the practical experience involving literacy as a rule for achieving high efficiency in sports. Some forms of sport are a projection from language and literacy to the physical experience. Tennis is one example, and possibly the best known. Such forms of sport were designed by literates and disseminated through the channels of literacy. Collegiate sports is their collective name. But once the necessity of literacy itself became less stringent, such sports started emancipating themselves from the confinements of language and developed their own languages. When winning became the aim, efficiency in specific sports terms became paramount and started being measured and recorded.
Literates are not necessarily the most efficient in sports where physical prowess or quick scoring are needed to win: football, basketball, or baseball, as compared to long-distance running, swimming, or even the exotic sport of archery. This statement might seem tainted by stereotype or prejudice to which one falls prey when generalizing from a distorted past practical experience (affected by all kinds of rules, including those of sex and race discrimination). What is discussed here is not the stereotypical illiterate athlete, or the no less stereotypical aristocrat handling Latin and his horse with the same elegance, but the environment of sports in general. People involved in the practical experience of sports are sometimes seen as exceptionally endowed physically, and less so intellectually. This does not have to be so; there is really nothing inherent in sports that would result in the intellect-physique dichotomy, one to the detriment of the other. Examples of athletes who also achieved a high level of intellectual development can be given: Dr. Roger Bannister, the runner who broke the four-minute mile barrier; William Bradley, the former basketball player who became a United States senator; Michael Reed, once defense lineman who is now a concert pianist; Jerry Lucas, now a writer; Michael Lenice, a wide receiver who became a Rhodes Scholar. They are, nevertheless, the exception, not because one kind of experience is counterproductive to the other, but because the expectations of efficiency make it very difficult for one and the same person to perform at comparable levels as athletes and as intellectuals. Specialization in sports, no less than in any human activity, requires a focus of energy and talent. Choices, too, come with a price tag.
While literacy does not result in higher performance in sports, a limited notion of sports literacy, i.e., control of the language of sports, allows for improved performance. It is relevant to analyze how today's sports experience requires the specialized language and the understanding of what makes higher performance, and thus higher efficiency, possible. Once sport is understood as a practical experience of human self- constitution, we can examine the type of knowledge and skill needed to reach the highest efficiency. Knowledge of the human body, nutrition, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology is important. Information focused on reaching high performance has been accumulated for each form of physical exercise. As a result of the experience itself, as well as through import of pertinent knowledge from other domains of human activity, expertise becomes more and more focused. In some ways, the commonalty of the experience diminished while the specific aspect increased.
For instance, on the basketball court, as we see it in various neighborhoods, playing is the major goal. Rules are loosely respected; players exert themselves for the pleasure of the effort. One meets others, establishes friendships, finds a useful way of getting physical exercise. On the professional basketball team, various experts coordinated by a coach make possible an experience of efficiency predictable to a great extent, programmable within limits, original to some measure. The effort to coordinate is facilitated through natural language; but the expectation of efficiency in achieving a goal-winning the game-extends beyond the experience constituted in and communicated through language. Games are minutely diagrammed; the adversary's plays are analyzed from videotapes; new tactics are conceived, and new strategies followed. In the end, the language of the game itself becomes the medium for the new game objectives. In the last 30 seconds of a very tight game, each step is calculated, each pass evaluated, each fault (and the corresponding time) pre-programmed.
Technology mediates and supports sports performance in ways few would imagine when watching a volleyball team in action or a runner reaching the finish line. There are ways, not at all requiring the tools of literacy. To capture recurrent patterns characteristic of high efficiency performance and to emulate or improve them, adapt them to the type of sportsperson prepared for a certain contest, becomes part of the broader experience. Indeed, boundaries are often broken, rules are bent, and victories are achieved through means which do not exactly preserve the noble ideal of equal opportunity or of fairness.
Sports experiences were always at the borderline. A broken rule became the new rule. Extraneous elements (mystical, superstitious, medical, technological, psychological) were brought into the effort to maximize sports performance. The entire story of drugs and steroids used to enhance athletic prowess has to be seen from the same perspective of efficiency against the background of generalized illiteracy. The languages of stimuli, strategies, and technology are related, even if some appear less immoral or less dangerous. As drugs become more sophisticated, it is very difficult to assess which new record is the result of pure sports and which of biochemistry. And it is indeed sad to see sportsmen and sportswomen policed in their private functions in order to determine how much effort, how much talent, or how much steroid is embodied in a performance.
Stories of deception practiced within the former totalitarian states of Europe might scare through gruesome detail. People risked their lives for the illusion of victory and the privileges associated with it. But after the ideological level is removed, we face the illiterate attitude of means and methods intended to extract the maximum from the human being, even at the price of destroying the person. Whether a state encourages and supports these means, or a free market makes them available, is a question of responsibility in the final analysis. Facts remain facts, and as facts they testify to the commercial democracy in which one has access to means that bring victory and reward, just as they bring the desired cars, clothes, houses, alcohol, food, or art collections. Among the records broken at the Olympic games in Atlanta is the number of samples collected for doping control (amounting to almost 20 percent of the number of athletes).
American football is possibly the first post-modern game in that it appropriates from the old for use in a new age. Comparing American football with sports of different pragmatic frameworks-to tennis, volleyball, or rugby-one can notice the specialization, mediation, new dynamics, and language of the game. There are twenty- two positions and special formations for place kicks, kick-offs, and receiving. There are also support personnel for different functions: owners, managers, coaches, trainers, scouts, doctors, recruiters, and agents. The game is burdened with literacy-based assumptions: it is as totalitarian as any language, although its elementary repertory is quite reduced-running, blocking, tackling, catching, throwing, kicking. Rules implicit in the civilization of literacy-all know the language and use it according to its rule, sequentiality, centralism-are observed. The word signal, snap numbers, color code, and play name are part of the semiosis. It is a minimal rule experience, which seems a comedy to someone who never watched it before. The players are dressed in ridiculous gear. They seem actors in a cheap show, and act according to plans shared through private code.