Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sports (review)

184 the minnesota review for Daniel Czitrom's book not because it deals at length with the contents oftelevision programming but because the perspective Czitrom adopts is infalUbly the eye of the Whitmanesque observer upon industrial-commercial popular culture. Czitrom's study extends back to the origins of mechanical communciations and up through the projection of the video disk. His teleological aim—to recover historical traces of the "as yet uncompleted dialectic"—has only been sketched out; but the dialectical tensions, the Utopian possibiUties, which reside within even apparently one-dimensional developments, may be seen as our options when we recover media technology from class society and put it to democratic, visionary purposes. From Samuel Morse and his electric telegraph onward, the monopolies have ot course won out. But not without, in most cases, feverish wildcat competition that at least in the early days shows a simulacrum or revolutionary alternatives. Spiritualists looked to the telegraph key, for instance, for perfect communication with the Other World, and great parades of working people marched for the opening of the Atlantic Cable. Robert Sklar and others have richly documented the immigrant contribution to the early cinema, the unwillingness of all but the most reckless entrepreneurs to bet cash upon the audience flocking to the new movies. We forget too easUy that network radio, though completely dominated by monopoly schemes, remained for a good while porous at the local level, part of the "radio mania" which seized amateur tinkerers and restless youth. Early TV, recurrently popular music, whether Country & Western, Rock 'n RoU or Reggae, and cable potentialities suggest additional alternatives. No wonder aesthetic snobbery against commercialism has failed to impress anyone outside university EngUsh departments and haute couture literary circles (however much power these may have in government and private dollars, reputations, etc.). No wonder Left-wing efforts to promote a wholly alternative culture have fallen so short. Czitrom's intellectual history of media theorists forces us to ask why was media theorizing left to sociologists Uke Charles Cooley, behavioral scientists Uke Harold Lasswell, unhappy exradicals like Theodor Adorno and conservative cutturalists like McLuhan? Why did Emerson, HoweUs, Edmund Wilson, Granville Hicks, V.F. Calverton and their successors up to a transition figure Uke Fredric Jameson expend their best energies upon prestige beUes lettres? Czitrom answers the first question so weU that no one wiU have to reexamine the sources of mainstream theory again for many years. The second is the sub-text of Media, for Czitrom has spent his own Ufe amongst the generation of radicals who palpably grew up within mass culture and have remained true to their childhood ideals. "The doctrine ofculture contained an implicit tension between the beliefthat culture was the province of an elite and the desire to see culture spread to the great masses of people," Czitrom says about Matthew Arnold. We, Czitrom's fellow travelers into the twilight of the twentieth century, have paid a dear price for giving up our own iUusions about the prospects of a cultural revolution without what Hegel called the "suffering of the negative." But if the dreary seventies had no other purpose than to teach the necessity of passing through popular culture by way of a great self-awakening, the decade will not have been wasted. PAUL BUHLE Gary Whannel. Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sports. Series: Arguments for Socialism. London: Pluto Press, 1983. 117 pp. £2.50. Gary Whannel's short book is an insistent demonstration of the poUtical nature of modern sports. Arguing that sports has unfortunately held a minor position in the articulation of a radical poUtics, Whannel sets out to arguethat this state-of-affairs has led to gaps in the force of that politics—most expeciaUy, in its abiUty to theorize the place and the potential transformations of the body and of leisure in contemporary Ufe. Whannel at- reviews 185 tempts to fiU in these gaps, providing both an historical analysis of existing structures of sports and some suggestions about possible forms for a transformation of sports through the efforts of new poUtical thinking. Blowing the Whistle details essential ties of sports to many of the pressing issues that radical culture confronts today: ideology...