Bodybuilding and Poststructuralism: A Response to Daniele Bolelli

Daniele Bolelli recently wrote a beautiful short piece called ‘The Tao of Lifting Weights’. I shared it at the time and said that I agreed with every word. I did, and still do. Daniele focuses on the meditative dimensions of lifting weights, and argues that it is ‘Taoist’ in a number of ways: you have to be in the moment, it helps you to be in the moment, you have to find the right kind of path, and in a way the weights help you, and you can’t really veer from ‘the way’. Well, you can, but if you do, you’ll either get no results or an injury.

I wanted to add at the time that bodybuilding can also help you to understand cultural theory. Only now do I find the time to say this.

The teenage boy that I was who grew into the obsessive bodybuilder of his early 20s knew that the being of my body was not a static entity. It was not an ontological given. The body was a construct, my construct. It was made performatively, and through ritual – Jesus-like. As Stephen Moore put it in his classic book God’s Gym, the logic of bodybuilding is the logic of the crucifixion: Torture, death, rest, and on the third day He rose again, stronger.

On the downside, the built body is like an inner tube with a slow puncture. You can feel it deflating if you don’t keep pumping it up. It becomes an obsession. But, on the plus side, all of that process and all of those feelings teach you so much. You learn so much about posture, for instance. A bodybuilder, or at least someone with a built body, is forced to choose how to sit, stand and walk. You have a very wide range of options. You can no longer ‘just sit’ or ‘just stand’. You learn that posture is not natural. Your posture is a product of your activity. And bodybuilding amplifies your options.

Am I going to flex my lats (a lovely mini-stretch when you are sitting at a desk), or let them snuggle in and relax, and feel an ever so slight stretch on my chest instead? When I walk, am I going to be the stereotype with the flared lats and flared elbows, as if I am carrying invisible rolls of carpet under them? Or am I going to pull my scapula up and back so that I emphasize my deltoids, and affect an upright and square posture? Or, of course, there is the ‘Tom Hardy’: push the delts down and back, emphasize the traps, and lean forward slightly. There are any number of options.

The bodybuilder knows that the body is not natural. They can understand Judith Butler easily. It is performative. One is not born, one becomes built. And you won’t stay built, naturally. Construction is provisional, conditional, and (what’s that, Derrida? Laclau?) permanently deferred?

Certainly, the bodybuilder can just about start to understand even the most complex arguments of Jacques Derrida and so-called deconstruction. The primary is not self-sufficient but relies for its constitution on the secondary – the supplement. The supplement, goddamit! He even calls it the supplement! The supplement maketh the built body, of course. But a supplement is not just your creatine monohydrate or, zoiks, steroids or growth hormone, and all that. It is also the supplementarity of the exercise itself. Training is a supplement, without which the body does not become. It is a supplement to a supplement in a process or machine of becoming

And I just said become and becoming and machine. That’s Deleuze right there. And I mentioned the materiality of exercise and its equipment – which is material, technological, technical. What do we learn from that? Heidegger? Object oriented ontology? We are things, made by things. We are in process, in context. Those things are the medium into which we pour ourselves. The medium is the message. McLuhan. The materials have the capacity to affect us. Affect theory. And, of course, they are disciplining and disciplinary. Bodybuilding is a discipline, yes, Foucault; and also a technology of the self. But some of the technological supplements are machinic and programmatic. A shoulder press machine or a pec-deck only allow for one action. Is this us in control? Or a Deleuzean machine, one that has been captured? But what about that eccentric dude at the gym who sits backwards on the pec-deck, or who goes around to the back of the row machine and presses it instead? Gym parkour. Deterritorialization.

To me, bodybuilding helped me to learn all of this. I was still actively identifying as a bodybuilder during my MA and early PhD years. But I never forgot its lessons even during the many years I stopped lifting anything other than martial arts weapons and clubs.

But, of course, the question: did lifting weights really teach me about all of these things, or did reading about all of these things and trying to get my head around it by drawing on and drawing analogies from my own experiences make me think more about weight lifting in these ways? Well now, there’s a lot there, right there. As deconstruction proposes, the interpretation is always in some sense also added, created at the interface of the material and the encounter.

So, yes, I agree entirely with Daniele Bolelli. I also think there is more. As the late great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once mused, in her classic book Touching Feeling, was she drawn to philosophies like Daoism and Buddhism because they seemed anti-essentialist and constructivist like deconstruction and poststructuralism, or was she drawn to deconstruction and poststructuralism because they sometimes seem a lot like Daoism and Buddhism? (These questions do not preoccupy me when I am lifting.)