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.