Coming in the Gym with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Alphonso Lingis

 

In the 1977 documentary, Pumping Iron, Arnold Schwarzenegger famously said that the pump provided by a good workout was a feeling as good as orgasm. We may find this kind of claim odd or problematic, especially if our thinking is dominated by pre-Freudian, Freudian and/or vaguely evolutionary scientistic terms. In terms of some post-Freudian psychoanalysis and cultural theory, however, as well as in terms of affect theory, Schwarzenegger’s supposedly eccentric claim is actually quite a lot easier to nod along to.

The pump is an intensity, a kind of singularity of pleasure/pain that defies binary thinking, and that is actually an illustration of the centrality of physicality to consciousness and identity, and of the ways in which the sensations of our bodies are segmented, regionalised, and given different kinds of meanings, values and connotations.

When I was a grad student, reading English language translations of authors like Roland Barthes, I would encounter untranslated French words such as ‘jouissance’. I never knew why they were untranslated, but I figured it had something to do with psychoanalysis in general and the work of Jacques Lacan in particular. One of my peers was studying the work of Jacques Lacan much more directly than I. So, I asked her: what is jouissance? She paused for a moment, and seemed to be wrestling with some difficulties. So, to fill the void, I ventured: is it like getting a joke? She said, with some delight, ‘Yes!’ This helped me.

Later, someone else said that this was incorrect. But it was too late. I had already decided that this supposedly untranslatable, intense thing called ‘jouissance’ could arise outside of the kinds of sacred or taboo moments that psychoanalysts and artists fetishize, and as a normal part of many other areas of everyday life. Laughing, sneezing, solving a logical puzzle or riddle, producing a preposterous syllogism, vanishing (as Kristeva once suggested) in an intense drug experience, and even – why not! – pumping iron.

Post-Freudian psychoanalysis, like that of Lacan, emphasizes that the pre-social and being or becoming socialised human infant and then child is initially ‘polymorphously perverse’. Sensations and pleasures are distributed wherever across the body and throughout the day, and they don’t mean anything to the child. Over time, these become charged with different meanings – private, public, good, bad, interpersonal/relational, matters of pride or shame, things to be hidden, to be displayed, to be disavowed, and so on.

These values are mixed in with the regionalisation of eroticism, so that over time different parts of the body become recognised in all kinds of registers as intense zones of sexuality. Others less so. It is often fine, in a social situation, perhaps in a bar, at a summer barbeque or between courses at a dinner party, to stand behind a friend and give them a spontaneous shoulder massage. It is fine for them to moan in pleasure. Massaging other parts of friends’ bodies in social situations, whether in public or in private, however, or to elicit moans of pleasure upon contact, less so.

Sensations and intensities are socialised, given values and meanings, in broadly social but also intensely personal ways. In many areas of our lives, our sensory capacities are streamed or channelled, sometimes routinised out of consciousness and into invisibility. People sometimes say they lost contact with themselves, their bodies, their physicality. Innumerable new activities might reconnect them with that, in innumerable ways.

In the essay ‘How one looks, how one feels’, philosopher Alphonso Lingis argues that we tend to think of our consciousness as being located in our heads, just behind our eyes. Against this, Lingis argues for the decentralization of our understanding of the mind, moving our sense of it from our heads and into the active musculature. Our consciousness is where what we are conscious of is. That is where we are.

Lingis adds to this that influential thinkers like Freud regarded the key to the riddle of dreams as lying in our sex organs – as if when we dream, it is our genitals and our unconscious sexuality that is dreaming. But, he proposes, just as our consciousness can and does migrate around all areas of the body all day for all kinds of reasons, then we must accept the possibility that our dreams are not just our genitals and our conscious or unconscious sexual desires dreaming or being let out to play. Rather, he suggests, the sleeping body shifts its ego into ‘dismembered organs’ (like eyes, jaws, or genitals) to secrete the vivid, visceral images of our dreams. This replays or reworks the exact same processes as take place through our days: just as the bodybuilder in the gym shifts their sense of self directly into their biceps, deltoids, or quadriceps, so our dreams replay such capacities. This is why our dreams can sometimes seem to be elaborated in terms of organs without bodies, with different pieces massively amplified and displaced into other things, and so on.

In the same essay, Lingis notes, under extreme exertion, all muscle fibres become highly sensitive ‘sense organs’. By feeling the world through these powerful, contractile experiences, the bodybuilder escapes the prosaic channels of everyday domesticity and projects their existence into an ‘epic and heroic space’, fully extending their force and vitality into the world.

As a contrast to this, Lingis asks us to think about the baseline, everyday, internal feeling of the body, and to think about disruptions to this ‘baseline’ or norm. He begins by arguing that when the human body is functioning normally or performing acquired skills seamlessly, its internal feeling is largely vague, stale, and unnoticeable. The body forces itself into our conscious awareness primarily through unusual things like discomfort, or more violently, through injury, surgery, sickness, and aging. These afflictions disconnect us from our own flesh, turning our limbs into alien, insensitive ‘dead meat’ or transforming our living tissue into fetid ‘filth’ that evokes a profound horror of decomposition and death.

Against all of this, he argues, bodybuilding is a pursuit of raw, self-generated pleasure and bodily triumph. He counters sociological theories that view female bodybuilding merely as a political strategy for empowerment or an attempt to change cultural images; instead, he argues that the true addiction to building massive musculature stems from physical pleasure – the singular ‘pleasure’ or extraordinary sensory intensity. By pushing muscles to exhaustion against iron weights, the individual maps out an internal anatomy of aches and burns, pleasures and pains, experiencing hot bursts of ‘muscled pleasure’. This superabundant energy functions as a daily, exultant ‘taste of victory’ over the encroaching corruption of sickness, surgical scarring, and fat, ultimately eradicating feelings of fear and shame.