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Thinking Contradictions

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Thinking Contradictions qHE2001_7 From:Knut Dietrich (ed.): How Societies Create Movement Culture and Sport. University of Copenhagen: Institute of Exercise and Sport Sciences 2001. S. 10-32 Thinking contradictions. Towards a methodology of configurational analysis or: How to reconstruct the societal signification of movement culture and sport By Henning Eichberg A working paper for IIAC, seminar in Copenhagen, June 2001 (corrected 24.8.2001) Contents 1. The good story - and the researcher's amazement 2. From event to evolution, from progress to configurational change - The way of the historian 3. Configurations - coordinates of a "searching machine" 3.1. Bodily movement - How do people move in time, space, energy and interpersonal relation? (1.) Time (2.) Space (3.) Energy (4.) Interpersonal relations 3.2. Production - How do people objectivate their movements, what do they produce by moving? (5.) Objectives and objectivations 3.3. Institutions and ideas - How do people organize, think and evaluate movement? file:///Q|/Websted1/qHE2001_7.htm (1 af 26)18-07-2005 12:31:10 qHE2001_7 (6.) Institutions (7.) Values and ideas 4. It, I and You in movement - Inter-body and inter-humanism 5. Three spheres and logics of social life - State, market and civil society 6. The trialectical way 7. The contradiction, the system and the whole 8. Towards a squinting theory "Look - what a story!" Students can do research, indeed, and this is especially true in the field of body anthropology. Research can - or even should - be a central part of the students' qualification process in humanistic studies of movement culture. However, the academic system often inhibits this, not only institutionally - by the structure of examinations and the related production of stress - but also by establishing certain rigid patterns of thinking for both students and professors. How can we - as students as well as advising teachers - design a contrasting way of research, which favours students' studies in body anthropology? This includes a challenge for the professor-researchers, too. Maybe, we have to revise our own method of analysis. Why do we do research and - therefore - how? - with this question we are confronted a new, again and again. Research is not only a job. It is existential. 1. The good story - and the researcher's amazement "Whow, isn't this interesting?! - Did you ever experience this?! - This is the story, I want to tell you and which I myself want to know more about - Here is my problem. - This experience, isn't it amazing?" We start the process of research by describing a challenging situation of play, game, dance, fight, competition, festivity, conflict... What is the importance of this situation? What does this case of movement and/or festivity tell us? The form of the entrance is a short, living story. Or it consists of two or three stories which we want to compare. The good story, as we call it in Danish - den gode historie - may, however, and often will be a "bad" story. There are problems in movement, and the narrative may describe a critical case. Anyway, we are - as researchers, as students - a part of our initial story. By having chosen just this particular case, it tells something about me. (But, please, not in the boring form: "I file:///Q|/Websted1/qHE2001_7.htm (2 af 26)18-07-2005 12:31:10 qHE2001_7 have chosen this, because I am interested in it...") By the initial narrative, the problem- oriented entrance (der problemorientierte Einstieg) opens the view towards the human being, towards human practical life and togetherness. In the initial story, the human being appears in movement, life and love. While the mainstream of academic discourse regards words like "human being", "life" and "love" (Mensch, Leben und Liebe - menneske, liv, kærlighed) as non-words, critical research starts by humanistic questions. In other words: While the academic standard demands from the researcher to start by abstract definitions which are secondarily related to the concrete case, students should rather be advised to start by their subjective relation to the particular material. The entrance should not be a theoretical construction which the researcher adopts of second hand, i.e. in a more or less authoritarian way, but in the beginning there is the researcher's own amazement. By the good story, the discourse of body anthropology is subversive. 2. From event to evolution, from progress to configurational change - The way of the historian How to analyze the case which we have chosen as material? The history of knowledge, especially the changing methods of historiography can give us some red thread. The question of our interest - how societies create movement culture (and vice versa: how movement culture creates society) - is basically historical. But history is not only to be found in past times, it is also in an event happening here and now. What is history, if it is not only defined by being past, and where did or does the historian direct her particular attention? Historical inquiry started by the tale of events and the reconstruction of sources. Both cultural techniques were known in premodern times. They are still interesting. What is going on in body culture and sport, and what do our sources tell about movement, seen in a quellenkritisch way, i.e. critical of sources, documents and authorities? In modern times - around 1800 - however, the historical way of asking got a new quality and a new significance by the identitary question: "Who were we before - who are we originally?" (Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn). The social question became a quest of "roots", and this gave birth to modern historiography as a national discourse, followed by discourses of class identity, gender identity etc. Also if we actually may feel some distance towards these origins of modernity with their national undertones, the identitary questions has kept its significance - because alienation continues. And with it continue the dialectics between experiences of alienation and questions of identity. What does body display, movement and sport tell about the identity of the involved human beings - and about their alienation? In the same process of modernity, the classical historiographical techniques were supplemented by the inter-cultural comparison: "How are we related to the others?" This was the starting point for the modern disciplines of ethnography, ethnology, Volkskunde and comparative anthropology, Völkerkunde. What is specific with our chosen specific event of movement culture as compared with another one - with a movement culture from another country, from another subculture, from another social class...? On the level of time concepts, historical and sociological research constructed a collective file:///Q|/Websted1/qHE2001_7.htm (3 af 26)18-07-2005 12:31:10 qHE2001_7 temporal "movement" in society, called "progress", "development" or "evolution". The events of the past were connected with the actual identity by a linear figure: "How did we become, what we are now?" In the second half of the twentieth century however, knowledge turned towards structural knowledge. Now cultural change was discovered as something fundamentally different from evolution. The figure of the developmental line was broken. Change in history is change from otherness to otherness. This change could be subject to configurational analysis. A model was given by Michel Foucault (1966) when he described the order of knowledge. The configurations of savoir changed in following steps: (a.) The early modern age (Renaissance) played the game of similarities from sign to sign. Cervantes shaped an ironical picture of this configuration by the phantasmas of Don Quichote. (b.) The classical age constructed the tableau as a universal grammar. On this base, Linné constructed the genealogical trees of plants and animals as a tableau of life. In movement culture, it was the age of noble courtly exercises and their social geometry. Again, we find an ironical picture of this configuration - in the Life and Opinios of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. (c.) The modern age discovered progress and evolution - in life (natural history), in work (production) and in language (liguistic history) - and constructed the individual subjectivity. This was the age of pedagogic gymnastics and modern sport. (d.) There are indicators that all this may disappear or transform again in the post-modern age. Or what else is nowadays going on? Does actual body culture speak a transmodern language? The discovery of configurational change leads to a new attention, how significant conflict is for the inner contradictions in societal life. People disagree. They even fight about certain matters which they regard as important or fundamental.What is the point of conflict in "my story"? This methodological turn allows a certain return to the narrative. We may return to a way of telling the event, but on a new level of reflection. 3. Configurations - coordinates of a "searching machine" As a result of these changes of historiographical and sociological method, we can see the outline of a new configurational approach. The analysis of configurations is an analytical way to structure the narrative material of historical sources as well as of sensitive experience. There are patterns in human practice, whether we call them Inszenierung, setting, iscenesættelse, display, stageing, style, figuration or how ever. Anyway, how can we describe these patterns? Tension, choice and political clash open the way towards an understanding of these patterns file:///Q|/Websted1/qHE2001_7.htm (4 af 26)18-07-2005 12:31:10 qHE2001_7 and their change. Body cultural configurations are not only "just there", but they are controversial. Conflict on the surface of political or social action opens our understanding towards deeper differences and inner contradictions of life. The materialistic way of interpretation goes from the base of bodily practice - what people really do in time and space - to the superstructures of ideas and institutions.
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