Fantasy sports rankings & E P Thompson’s ‘unhistorical shit’
I’m not sure that E P Thompson makes that many appearances in the Guardian’s sports pages but Barney Ronay managed a highly relevant reference in a column on 11th April. An extract and a link is below and below that is the section from Poverty of Theory where Thompson made the reference.
His point is that things change because of the actions of people not because a model or a statistic suggests they should. At the moment unfortunately there are no sporting actions being made by people. Period.
What is Expected Goals, or the Expected Points Table, or a counterintuitive stats-based gallery of the leading creative left-backs in Europe (No 5 will surprise you!) if not the type of “unhistorical shit” that so enraged the 20th-century historian EP Thompson? What is a revisionist colour sidebar take on the managerial achievements of José Mourinho, but the kind of counterfactual “parlour game” EH Carr, chronicler of the early Soviet Union, would have raged against?
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2020/apr/10/vacuum-month-sport-that-never-was-barney-ronay
We might define the present situation more precisely if we employed a category found frequently in Marx’s correspondence with Engels, but a category which evaded Althusser’s vigilant symptomatic scrutiny. All this ‘shit’ (Geschichten-scheissenschlopff), in which both bourgeois sociology and Marxist structuralism stand up to their chins (Dahrendorf beside Poulantzas, modernization theory beside theoretical practice) has been shat upon as by conceptual paralysis, by the de-historicising of process, and by reducing class, ideology, social formations, and almost everything else, to categorical stasis. The sociological section: the elaborate differential rotations within the closure of the orrery; the self-extrapolating programmed developmental series; the mildly disequilibrated equilibrium models, in which dissensus strays unhappily down strange corridors, searching for a reconciliation with consensus; the systems-analyses and structuralisms, with their torques and their combinatories; the counter-factual fictions; the econometric and cleometric groovers – all of these theories hobble along programmed routes from one static category to the next. And all of them are Geschichtenscheissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.
Leave a Reply