The Bodybuilding is the Message

In a discussion of weightlifting and bodybuilding, theatre and performance studies scholar Broderick Chow notes a limit point:

When others ask me what I get out of weightlifting, the only answer I have is more weightlifting. The training – the ‘formation’ of transformation – is its own significance and meaning. It is its own desire and pleasure; work done well for its own sake. (Chow 2024, 76)

 

To those for whom the affective intensities of training and aching are a foreign country, this kind of statement can only be read for what it is: a tautology.

 

Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty used the term ‘final vocabulary’ for the point at which you can’t explain or try to persuade any further, and you just start going around in circles: ‘this is important because it matters; it matters because it is important’.

 

The problem with communicating the value or importance of weightlifting is that it is entirely internal to our own sensuality – literally, our sense of self. Weightlifting draws the sense of self from the metaphorical realm into the sensorium. The weightlifter can feel it. Everyone else can see it.

 

Here lies another problem. For the practitioner, feeling is first. For those who interact with them, seeing is first. To the viewer or interlocutor, all of this talk about ‘feeling’ sounds like an alibi for the empty vanity of ‘looking’. The bodybuilder is, after all, defined by the image of the competitive bodybuilder, the exemplary poseur.

 

Of course, to deny that we are somehow immune to the power of the image and the lures of scopophilia would be disingenuous. From Freud to Benjamin to Lacan to Mulvey and beyond, the case has been made and clinched that we live in one or another (or several) versions of a ‘symbolic order’, soaked in scopic relations, fantasies and desires about power and beauty which take masculine and feminine forms. And, in these waters, a bit more muscle and a bit less fat go a very long way to providing what they call different kinds of ‘capital’.

 

But in the dialectic between sensation and spectacle, in spectacular society, spectacle always wins out. It is hard to put into words what lifters ‘get’ out of lifting, other than visible size that can be seen by others. And it is easy for those others to interpret that size. And that size, in and of itself, seems to have little to say other than ‘look at me’. The possibility that this interpretation – that size is ‘saying’ ‘look at me!’ – may be something that has arisen entirely in the questioner’s mind never occurs to interpreters: the built body is taken to be speaking, and it is taken for granted that it must be saying ‘look at me’. The built body is, then, spoken for, or spoken by the people who claim only to be looking at it, and interpreting what it is ‘saying’.

 

Certainly, the request ‘look at me!’ is an element that comes to the fore in the realm of competitive bodybuilding. It is also active in the many realms of physical posturing and posing that are possible across the contexts of everyday life. But how are we to interpret these?

 

In one of the autobiographical vignettes that punctuate Muscle Works, Chow recalls seeing a gymgoer in the changing room:

 

He’s flexing in the mirror. A little while ago, I might have found this objectionable. I might have made some unkind comment in my head and maybe even scoffed as I walked by. I remember once coming out of Bethnal Green tube, and there’s this hipster guy in front of me on the escalator looking in disgust and just openly laughing at these two huge bodybuilders, who were, to be fair, ridiculously massive. They’d obviously come from MuscleWorks gym. But how is shaming their bodies any different than other forms of body shaming? Last night at L.’s party, her brother’s girlfriend was talking about a university friend who has ‘really gotten into weightlifting’ (bodybuilding, she meant). ‘He looks terrible now’, and everyone laughed, like they agreed. I wonder a lot about that laugh. What does it mean to police the way people take up space, be too ‘extra’, or think about their bodies, as if we all aren’t thinking about our bodies all the time? (35)

 

Flipping out of the autobiographical/anecdotal mode, Chow continues immediately: 

 

Victor Turner defines theater as a ‘hypertrophy’; that is, ‘an exaggeration of jural and ritual processes’. Roland Barthes also refers to hypertrophy in his discussion of theatrical costume. For Barthes, costume has multiple functions, and each must be in service of the theatrical sign-system as a whole. If, he writes, ‘one of those services is exaggeratedly developed, if the servant becomes more important than the master, then the costume is sick, it suffers from hypertrophy’. (35)

 

Hypertrophy as sickness? It is easy to regard competitive bodybuilding as precisely such a sickness – an unintelligible, perverse, excess. When I hear of excessive multiplications of cells, it feels hard to avoid the word ‘cancer’ flashing into my mind, if only for a moment. And yet.

 

In his autobiography, The Hero’s Body, William Giraldi raises and engages with many of the accusations against and investments in bodybuilding. He recalls his teenage years:

 

Nothing except literature was more intrinsic to my adolescent identity, my half-formed conception of selfhood, than muscle strength and the Greco-Roman aesthetics of a champion. A champion of what, exactly, I could not have told you. Of vanity, I suppose, since, unless he’s working out at the gym or competing on stage, a bodybuilder doesn’t actually do anything with his beauteous bulk. He just ambles around with it, totes heavy objects for Gram, helps Pa with the furniture. Bodybuilding at the highest level, on the Mr. Olympia dais, is more spectacle than sport, an art form as elite as anything you see in the American Ballet Theater. If you think its everyday uselessness is a fault, recall Dr Chekhov’s counsel: ‘Only what is useless is pleasurable’. (Giraldi 2017, 46–47)

 

This ultimate level of bodybuilding – the Mr Olympia dais – is indeed a kind of singularity (in the astrophysics sense), in which everything flips into its opposite or normal rules break down. As Stephen Moore put it in God’s Gym (Moore 1996), the competitive male bodybuilder is indeed a paradox: the supposed ultimate in masculinity, yet starved, shaven, weak, sun-tanned, oiled, wearing make-up, testicles no longer capable of producing testosterone, quite possibly having had a surgical intervention to remove gynecomastia – in this singularity, all the binary semiotic rules of twentieth century masculinity and femininity collapse or implode.

 

I say twentieth century masculinity, rather than masculinity as such, because, as we know, there is no masculinity as such, only historically and culturally sedimented forms. Even saying ‘twentieth century’ is still too much of a generalisation. But, certainly, competitive bodybuilding was a twentieth century spectacle that grew out of nineteenth century music halls and popular theatre.

 

Bodybuilding was a stage show that became co-opted by the logic of photography. The still, the snapshot. Of all the stage shows, the strongmen had something to offer the nineteenth century dominant/hegemonic technology of photography. A spectacle of the moment, of the instant, the spectacular body is an ideal message for the medium. Or, if not message, as such, then pure content. For, as Marshall McLuhan insisted, it is the medium itself that is the message.

 

For McLuhan, it is less that we use mediums and more that they use us. We pour ourselves into them and behave according to their dictates. (‘Please like and subscribe’.) I can think of no better exemplification of this in relation to photography than the bodybuilder. Nineteenth century strong men and women poured themselves into the medium of photography and produced themselves materially as its message.

 

Authors like Giraldi propose that the statement being made by every bodybuilder is always the same – look at me, I am powerful. I disagree. I think the statement being made might be something rather more like: look at me, I am photograph, I am image.

 

But where might this leave poor old mute feeling, taciturn sense – the true silent partners here? I have no statistics, but I would hazard a guess that 99.99% of people who are involved in progressive resistance hypertrophy (i.e., who lift weights, aka ‘bodybuilding’, though they may baulk at the term) are never going to go anywhere near a dais – neither as competitor nor as audience member. Most will not even like looking at the competitive bodybuilder. Most dwell in the middle zone – the ‘show me your muscles’ request followed by biceps pop followed by ‘wow’ and laughter and delight, and maybe desire or envy, and so on – not at the extremes.

 

Actually, no. Anyone who trains with weights, who aspires to achieve some kind of physical change, dwells at something like ‘extremes’. Or, rather, ‘intensities’. When we see images of bodybuilders, we are seeing one sedimented genre of extreme – an extreme from which 99.99% of us are excluded (as much by choice as by propensity). What cannot be ‘seen’ as such are the most important ‘extremes’ of the internal kinds.

 

Another vignette by Chow:

 

It’s June, and Pete and I are training together for the first time in ages: a mix of weightlifting and bodybuilding. With the cleans and squats I try to get Peter to focus on power and timing. But bodybuilding has a different mindset, a bit more meditative and mindful. We do strict shoulder presses, and Pete says, ‘let the lift start from your glutes’. But I don’t know how to do that if the glutes are held tight and not actually moving. Turns out, it’s visualization, as if the impulse for the lift begins in that muscle, even if that muscle isn’t working. This mindful approach begins to seem like a psychophysical tool, as in acting class. Lately, Peter tells me, he has been thinking about Michael Chekhov’s exercises for the actor, where the actor performs a ‘psychological gesture’ before entering the scene, to connect mind, body, and emotional state. There is a connection here. ‘When I started out training at drama school, I didn’t want to use my body’, Peter tells me, ‘because I was an athlete, and I wanted to be an actor, so I thought acting should be about the mind. But now I realize it’s actually all about the body’. (Chow 2024, 49)

 

It's actually all about the body. And performance. At both extremes: from the everyday ‘meditative’ experience of focusing mindfully on regions of your body, to the photographic capture of the most extreme immanent trajectory implied by the logic of progressive resistance hypertrophy training: the competitive bodybuilder – hyperreal vaudeville snapshot caricature: a kind of embodied astrophysical singularity – the exemplification of semiotic collapse, of what we most most/least want/don’t-want, desire/detest, are attracted to/repulsed by. A kind inverted and displaced Kristevan sense of abjection. On steroids. Or, what we might call inhuman growth hormone – the hypertrophic dais of the photograph itself: social media.