The Obviously Missed. The Blind Spot Revisited.

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In August of 2007 I posted “Blind Spot Spotted–Finally Visible in the Social Order of Sports.”  I started with an exact moment of illumination. It was intensely personal  yet it concerned a test of a sociological concept against the larger reality. I suddenly realized that the variety of the organizational forms of professional sports were traceable to human choice, that there was a constant element of discovery (finding) and invention (making-up) in the social field.  Whether episodic or continuous, whether encouraged or repressed by the people and their cadres, this process was a significant part of the social order.  I knew this in my ordinary, everyday life but had managed to not allow it into my formal sociological understanding.  I had treated a normal social process as though it did not exist.

I start with blind spot but I mean to include the entire human sensory capability.  A fact that is normally available to the senses is missed.  This missing can take many forms. It is not known–subjectively not there. It is known but its significance is not caught. It is, rightly or wrongly, treated as trivial.  It is rejected as grotesque, immoral, dangerous or even on a whim. The ah ha moment is in the sudden appreciation. There it is, where it had always been, in plain sight.

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One of the trends in early sociology was to  continue the much  longer history of speculation about origins and development of the world and our social orders. It is now based on a  careful and precise and methodical archaeology and history but many of the old studies were decidedly not scientific and were based on facts deemed too inaccessible to be made scientific.

A movement of rejection lead, for me, by British anthropologists active in the 1920 to 1940 decades, advanced an alternative way called functionalism. The social scene was limited to the exact moment of observation (with a little wiggle room of just before and just after) It was like pulling a frame out of a film clip.  The influences of the elements on each other were then traced. For example, the progressive success of organized crime, where the acts of petty thieves (fraud, extortion, bribery, black markets) intervene in commercial markets and in trade union activities and more and more  suborn  the police and government officials.  It can progress, as apparently it has in Mexico now, until  the criminal gangs become  parallel ordering institutions. The description of these functions and the  system which they form becomes the primary tasks for sociologists.

The social system, the social order and its functions, was thought of as like the human body and sociology as the analogue of anatomy and physiology. The garden plot in plant and animal ecology was another model. Isolated as a system, the consequences of each element for all the others (the functions) could be tracked and the system described as a unit.

These systems have a naturalistic quality–no human design nor intervention is permitted. And this expectation was carried over to the human order.  So even though the social order of organized crime is a human construct very like that of professional sports and all our other social orders– something that specific  human decision and choice has imposed–it was erroneously considered natural. The questions of finding and making-up were ignored within the observed social field.  They were reserved for the supposed scientific observer and his/her sponsor.

In accepting, or perhaps misinterpreting this received wisdom, I had been lead up the garden path. I had a received blind spot  that only dissipated on the sudden shock of the sports page newspaper stories where I finally confronted the contradiction between the totally established social system and man’s capacity for discovery and invention.

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For me this sudden shock of recognition was eventually decisive.  I gave up the idea of sociology as a hard science. I gave up the idea of the naturalistic social system. I finally understood the importance of a general creative capacity among members of our species and I realized that part of the investigation of any social order or situation had to search out this element, the form it was taking and the struggles pro and contra for each initiative.

Finding and making-up lead to social forms, that as long as they are permitted to exist can be analyzed formally as models.  There is no test for such a model or form.  It exists conceptually like a tool on a shelf.  The decisive question is in the comparison of the model with  actual concrete cases.So the analysis of  a social order, setting, or event will require notice of the changing decisions and influences of participants as well as the presence of internally selected formal social forms.

For didactic purposes my experience suggests that the sociological description of a professional sport–rules of play, history of innovations, executive actions, the formal order of the teams and the management of play, the spectators, the journalists, the law, and so on to as much detail as energy and time will allow–is a fine entree to the less fixed institutions and social orders and situations that make up our social life.

One more point.  The uncovering of socially shared sensory deprivations (of significant facts not noted or appreciated among people in their social lives )   is one of the tasks of the sociological project.  .