Our Friends in the North

The England flags are out. Cars are festooned with the cross of St George. It can only mean the four yearly football jamboree of the World Cup is here!

An accident of birth means it would be churlish for me not to wish England well, especially as I've cheered them on in the past. But as an internationalist, anti-imperialist, and a socialist there's only really one team worthy of unconditional but critical (military) support:

Extreme Sports and Sociology

Time AVPS returned to brass tacks and started blogging again about sociology. A few weeks ago your humble scribbler went along to a paper given by James Hardie-Bick on 'Flow, Enjoyment and High Risk Autotelic Experiences'. In everyday plain language, this was a presentation on the sociological understanding of skydiving.

To make sense of why some people go in for skydiving and other extreme sports, psychology and sociology have put forward a number of explanations. The former suggests that the desire to risk life and limb for fun reflects certain personality types. However, sociologists argue that participation is an outcome of learned behaviour - to throw yourself out of a plane is the result of an acquired preference to engage in what Stephen Lyng has called 'edgework'. He defines this as voluntarily taking part in/seeking situations with the potential to transgress daily practices. It draws attention to the positive consequences of risk-taking - the intense feelings of testing one's skills in the face of a directly observable threat (if the ground rushing up to meet you at 200 miles an hour isn't an observable threat, I don't know what is).

For Lyng this is where the thrill of risk-taking resides. As failure to act appropriately has terminal consequences, a sense of agency is heightened, which is something usually denied the overwhelming majority of people in contemporary advanced capitalist societies. And so risk-taking acts as a drug. The more one approaches the edge, the greater the buzz. So greater risks - such as jumping while on drugs or without a secondary parachute, lead to a more intense sense of gratification. Therefore you can reasonably expect this sort of behaviour to be common among extreme sports enthusiasts.

Except that isn't the case at all. James's study of skydivers (of varying levels of experience) found the opposite. The majority not only refused to take unnecessary risks, but frowned on those who did so as irresponsible. They were concerned with staying inside the limits and were foremost concerned with safety consciousness. For example, one participant said one reason he took up skydiving was that it was safer than the bungee jumping he used to do.

So what's going on here? If it's not about risk is there an alternative explanation? On this James finds the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi particularly interesting. His work is concerned with understanding how people live happy, fulfilled lives. Csikszentmihalyi found that happiness is linked to meeting challenges and stretching their limits. So activities that are ends in themselves - the 'autotelic experiences' of the paper's title - are their own reward (something I also found in my own research on Trotskyist activists).

To accompany this insight, Csikszentmihalyi has developed a concept of 'flow', which is a focus on/desire to engage in autotelic activities to the extent that substitutes don't ever seem to do. Now, whereas Csikszentmihalyi used artists and chess players to develop his theory, for James high risk sports can be understood in this way. He uses flow to define enjoyment as constituted by opportunities for action, actions with clear goals, the offering of immediate feedback, feelings of competence, high concentration, an altered sense of time, an (almost) loss of consciousness and a transformation of a sense of self. In a sense one's embodied experience is almost merged with the exigencies of the situation. James also notes that to continue enjoying the flow, one has to complicate activities (which isn't necessarily the same as taking greater risks). Even jumping out of planes and activating your 'chute at the designated height can get samey after a while. Learning new skills, timing pulls, performing turns etc. help keep the flow going. The training programme and activities endorsed by the British Parachute Association certainly enable this.

It follows from this that enjoyment lies not in the risk itself, but rather the minimisation of danger, of testing skills and exercising self-control. Hence, even though it might seem extreme, this form of flow activity is a good way of relaxing because the outside cannot intrude.

As you might expect, a number of questions came up in the discussion after the presentation. The most interesting one took James up on the disappearance of self-consciousness and how it can be squared with the existence of team extreme sports, such as formation skydiving? He replied that skydivers tend to jump with others they trust, and they rehearse their moves on the ground so it becomes embodied behaviour. He also noted that when skydivers die, the culture tends to focus on the actions/inactions of these unfortunate individuals - be it they didn't check their equipment properly or took too many risks.

So, once again, extreme sports are not about taking risks but minimising them. The popular image of the adrenaline junkie is a stereotypical myth. Those who do take unnecessary risks are frowned upon by actual skydivers as dangers to themselves and others. And like any other autotelic activity skydiving is about escaping the mundane insecurities of the every day, much like spending hours chatting on Facebook, doing needlework, or maintaining a blog.

Marxists for Middlesex

For those of you who aren’t familiar with darn saaf, Middlesex was a county that ceased to exist in around 1965. It formed the northern and western part of what was to become Greater London into which most of it was transferred. But Middlesex didn’t disappear altogether. Its county cricket club remains and the name still appears in postal addresses, and there is a Middlesex University. It wasn’t the most exciting of counties, mostly samey suburban semis although it inspired Leslie Thomas’s steamy The Tropics of Ruislip and, I imagine, Betjeman’s Metroland. The astrologist Russell Grant used to champion a campaign to restore the county, although I can’t really understand why.

Middlesex County Cricket Club has produced some famous players over the years - Dennis Compton, Bill Edrich, Phil Tufnell and Mike Gatting to name a few. However, in recent years the trophy cabinet has remained closed. They hadn’t added to their silverware for the past fifteen years but all that changed on Saturday when they lifted the Twenty/Twenty Cup. Twenty/Twenty cricket has been around for six years. There are lots of thrills and spills, razzmatazz and dosh. It might not be for the purist but it puts bums on seats, and it is fun.

Brother S is a native of Middlesex, having been born and raised in Potters Bar which is sadly best known for its rail crash. He spent all of Saturday listening to the finals via his pc. Occasionally, he goes to Lords cricket ground to watch Middlesex play. Being thoroughly bourgeois, he usually watches the game from the famous pavilion that is a throwback to a bygone age. Male spectators (gentlemen) have to wear jackets, ties and ‘tailored’ trousers. Female spectators (ladies) have to ensure that their shoulders are covered (presumably breasts as well that are not mentioned in the regulations). So what is the connection with Marx?

Brother S was sitting in the pavilion one day and contemplating that he was probably the only person in there with a Socialist Party membership card in the pocket of his acceptable black blazer. He felt a bit confused about the apparent contradiction of his quaint but stuffy surroundings and the class war. The game was interrupted for the wonderfully-named ‘tea interval’ (middle-class tea, a cup of tea and a slice of cake, not one’s evening meal) and Brother S wandered over to the club shop to browse the gaudy ties and overpriced replica shirts. Then he saw a copy of the book Beyond a Boundary by the famous Marxist theorist C.L.R James. This was it; the missing link between cricket and Marxism! I bought a copy.

Actually in Beyond a Boundary (1963) James writes little about his Marxist convictions. But he does give a fascinating insight into the divisions of race and class that determined membership of Trinidad’s top cricket clubs, and the structure of society when he left school after the First World War. The players in the top team were ‘for the most part white and often wealthy’ but ‘there were a few coloured men among them, chiefly members of the old-established mulatto families’. The second most prestigious club was ‘the club of the old Catholic families’ and ‘almost exclusively white’. Then there was ‘a team of plebeians …totally black and no social status whatever’. There was another, ‘the club of the brown-skinned middle class’ that had been founded ‘on the principle that they didn’t want any dark people in their club’. Another team consisted of black policemen captained by a white Inspector. Lastly, there was a team from the black lower-middle class. However, if a player was exceptionally talented he could cross the divides. James was persuaded to join the club for ‘the brown-skinned middle class’.

James was a remarkable man- a versatile scholar, cricket journalist, an accomplished cricketer himself and a campaigner for West Indian self- government. He was the Johnson in the Johnson-Forest tendency, a Marxist group that operated in the US in the 1940s and 1950s. Possibly his most acclaimed work was The Black Jacobins. Alex Callinicos described this work as ‘a classic of Marxist histiography’ in which James ‘set the great slave revolt of 1791, which transformed Saint Domingue from a French colony into the Republic of Haiti, in the context of the Atlantic world economy and the French Revolution’.

James’ life merits a far more detailed blog. I thank him for providing me with a faint link between cricket and Marxism. I call on all Marxists to get behind Middlesex in the forthcoming Champions League!