Lyotard and the Bodybuilders

 

Scientific Bodybuilding

I recently had reason to ponder, once again, Jean-François Lyotard’s (in)famous ‘report on knowledge’, The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1984). What I was drawn to – as I so often am – was Lyotard’s use of the notion of ‘paralogy’. For Lyotard, paralogy is an imaginative, destabilizing ‘move’ played within the pragmatics of knowledge. Paralogy is to be contrasted with innovation. While innovation is commanded by a system to improve its own efficiency and performativity, paralogy is an unexpected move that introduces differences, disrupts established rules, and challenges existing frameworks.

Lyotard argues that within postmodern contexts, scientific research is driven by paralogy.^[1] In addition, more and more areas of our lives can be understood as paralogical situations, too. Key here is that the main feature of paralogy is dissent, not consensus. In paralogy, the goal of dialogue and research is not to reach a permanent, universal consensus (which benefits ‘experts’ and ‘stable systems’). It is rather to pursue productive dissent and to invent new rules for language games. Hence, rather than expanding through a continuous accumulation of established facts, paralogical science focuses on undecidables, the limits of knowledge, and pragmatic paradoxes to produce not the known, but the unknown.

Ultimately, paralogy is the process of continually generating new ideas and rules of inquiry through localized, temporary agreements, preventing knowledge from being frozen into a singular, totalizing system.

Micronarrative

This time, while pondering Lyotard’s work in relation to bodybuilding, I also reflected on its translated status. I noted the fact that it was translated by a Canadian, Brian Massumi, working with someone from the Northeast of England, Geoffrey Bennington – a scholar who hails from a town that is a leisurely 20-minute drive from where I am from. Bennington would go on to trailblaze the anglophone understanding of Jacques Derrida’s work. Massumi would go on to play a huge role in the development of affect studies.

Wikipedia informed me that Massumi and Bennington translated Lyotard before Massumi went on first to translate Attali’s Noise, then Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology, then Michel de Certeau’s Heterologies, and then Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. The paralogical thinker in me – or maybe the poet, provocateur, or person who looks tries to see connections, patterns and narratives everywhere – no matter how scanty the evidence – suspected a sequence here – from Lyotard, through de Certeau, and into Deleuze and Guattari. I started to draw connections. And not only did I start to compose a story about Massumi’s journey, I also inserted a character. That character was a bodybuilder. I want to say ‘the bodybuilder’.

The Bodybuilders

Philosopher Alphonso Lingis sees all bodybuilders as hermaphrodite (Lingis 1994, 2005). As does religious studies scholar Stephen Moore, who also argues that the Judeo-Christian God is evidently a bodybuilder too, and indeed a male-becoming-female entity – a transitioning process caused by bodybuilding (Moore 1996).

In any case, we are all legion. So, let the figure of the bodybuilder be they. They are born into the postmodern condition. Their world is paralogical. Their desire is obscure – occluded, occulted – even to them. Of course, there are plenty who are quick to diagnose it, to symptomatize it. Their information environment is paralogical. It is anti-consensus media, anti-social media. Paralogy media.

They do not care for church. They do not care for work. They care for themselves. They go to the gym; treat it like church and like work. They plug some noise in their ears, to drown out the other noise, the noise they don’t want to hear, the distracting noise. They train. Enjoyment arises – but not ‘play’. It’s too serious for that. They strive. At first, they do whatever they like, in the quest to become what they think they want to become, what they think they lack, what they are becoming, simply by lifting. They are nomadic. Butterflies. Alone in crowds, together. They occupy their space ritualistically, but their religion is a kind of science, the science of alchemy, the alchemy of turning flesh into steel, as Lingis repeatedly puts it (Lingis 1994, 37–38, 41–42, 81–82, 1996, 59).

They go to their lab – to work; to experiment. So much equipment to choose from – so many genres of equipment, each based on a theory; so many strata, from different times, different places; old equipment, new equipment: each the materialisation of a theory, emanating from a time, a place, an atmosphere. Theory one: free weights (born: long nineteenth century). Theory two: machines (perfected: 1980s). Theory three: kettlebells (resurrected: millennium). Then, other simulators of sport, of endurance, with an enduring hegemony: machines of ‘cardio’; kit that has been captured and gendered feminine yoga mats, Pilates beds. Victorian inventions like medicine balls re-imagined as ‘paleo’ or ‘functional’; working class items like punch-bags abstracted and reterritorialized, hanging, embarrassed, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Here, they are all tools used not so much to ‘weaponize’ as to ‘armour-ize’, or glamourize. With bodies plugged into them to complete the circuit, abstract machines become desiring machines. Muscles. Both armour and amour. Smooth, shiny armour. Amulets, says Lingis. Silver.

At first, you can do whatever you want in the gym and see results. No matter what you do, as long as you put in a bit of effort with a bit of consistency, you will change. The body wants to be affected. Put in some effort in any direction and that effort does not merely have the capacity to affect, it cannot but affect. Do what you like. The body rewards effort. It’s going to change anyway. Point it in a direction.

Plateaus

But after a while… plateaus. A thousand plateaus. Effort stops working. Things level out. Things seem to stop changing. Of course, they are still changing, but mainly to maintain a kind of stasis. It is at this point that bodybuilding alchemy feels like it must become science. But the only scientific landscapes available are equally anti-social mediascapes defined by paralogy. What one person – one YouTube Short, one Facebook or Instagram Reel – says is universally true the next says is universally false.

Faced with paralogy, with universal dissensus and polyvocality, the cacophony of postmodernity, sooner or later the bodybuilder cannot but experiment. However, what the bodybuilder wants is innovation, not paralogy. Innovation, remember, is about increasing efficiency, performativity, results for an entity. Paralogy is subversive of this.

Publishers, influencers, online course-sellers, new-equipment sellers, people who get paid for gaining clicks and likes and subscribes, all feel that they have a world to gain by simply selling something that runs against the grain of this or that perceived momentary orthodoxy. Each such entity – influencer, entrepreneur, agency, company – is themselves a metastable entity seeking daily increase – more profit, more turnover, more body, more building. Their moves in relation to each other must be paralogical, and hence subversive of stability, increasing noise, increasing alterity, difference, nomads, war-machines.

Reality

Of course, there is a realist cut-through available here. Its mantra runs: all of these voices are bullshit. What works, in the real world, is basic, simple, time-served, time-honoured, straightforward, no gimmicks; and so on. So far, so good. However, after the realists nod in agreement about these comforting points, the next step is an abyss. So, what are these fixed and stable universal principles? At this junction there are many possible directions. Each common sense vendor heads off along a different road.

Now, to be clear: I agree, there are some enduring principles. The problem, however – as even the most dyed in the wool realist and pragmatist agrees – is that, at a certain point, there are plateaus. A thousand possible plateaus. On hitting a plateau, what is needed is change, difference, one or another shock to stasis – pure and simple: paralogy. Difference as such, change as such is really needed – in reality – because, reality has changed. The reality of one’s own body has changed; one’s own corpo-reality. New routines make us become different from ourselves. And then they make us stop becoming different. So, they need to change.

Building the Body of Affect Studies

Now, bodybuilding has rarely been understood as an important object of or for affect studies. This is so even though bodybuilding is a pinnacle of disciplined, sustained, intensive, embodied, all-consuming ‘tool use’, wherein the sole purpose of using the tools is to transform the ‘tool user’ in the most fundamental, cellular, ways.

Some scholars have discerned emancipatory or progressive trajectories in such activities. But the academic treatment of muscle-focused exercise within cultural theory has often been unable to avoid the gravitational pull of feeling compelled to link it to nihilism, narcissism, neoliberalism, and normative gender ideologies. A kind of suspicion or nervous hesitation seems always to arise in and around cultural studies in the face of bodybuilding. This is so even though people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, classes and cultures train with weights, kettlebells, machines, or their own bodyweight, in an effort to build strength, stamina, mobility and muscle – in an effort to feel good; indeed, because it makes them feel good.

Where outside observers may only see oppression, practitioners feel fantastic. Alphonso Lingis situates the origin of bodybuilding in joy. The joy is worth the pain. The pain doesn’t hurt. It is just an intensity. An intensity that is learned. And loved. Lingis blames the widespread disparagement of bodybuilding on the solipsism of its primarily affective character. Yet, he argues, bodybuilders are principally engaged in an intensive struggle with and against a range of all too human limitations – not merely conventional sport’s symbolic struggle with symbolic death; but, actually, a very real struggle with one’s own genetic inheritance, and of course with one’s own mortality.

Although mainstream affect studies discourse does not like to tarry with the negative, such striving is inevitably and obviously also a struggle against lack. Doomed, of course. But isn’t everything? Lacanian lack leads to Lacanian desire, but that’s not a thousand plateaus away from Deleuzean desire and Deleuzean becoming – at least (to borrow a spatial perspective from Lingis), at least when viewed from a certain kind of proper distance (Lingis 1994, 16–18, 1996, 58–60, 1998, 61–63, 104). Of course, by the same token, when viewed from another kind of distance, bodybuilding seems to resolve into an image of something that is also ideological in the most pejorative senses.

The question, in these terms, becomes: what is the proper distance? What is the correct focus? The best answer is that all focuses and distances should be available to us, like different pieces of kit in a gym, different instruments in a lab. The focus we choose depends on the environment we are in, the job we are trying to do, what we are trying to see or be seen as; what is being made.

I have used the term ‘bodybuilding’ to try to bring something into a proper focus. I have used the term bodybuilding an overarching catch-all term. But of course, it doesn’t catch all. In one sense, it does: Anyone trying to enhance muscle tone, size, appearance, is a bodybuilder. But this apparently simple definition does not overlap or coincide with historical usage. Historically, the term had some meanings or definitions similar to the one I just proposed. But this was all radically transformed by the evental 1977 docu-simulation, Pumping Iron. First, this film, and then Arnold and the action heroes of the 1980s made a world of difference to our global understanding of the term. This was supplemented decisively by the ‘mass monsters’ of competitive bodybuilding of the 1990s. Because of all of this, since the early 2000s, bodybuilding has fragmented – in part because of the bad reputation it got through the 80s and 90s. This fragmentation is exemplified by CrossFit, Hyrox, and ‘functional fitness’ in general.

These are all paralogical moves. Each move in the language game – or games, or sub-games – can usefully be understood as exemplary experimental methods of world-making. Bodybuilding, of all kinds, fundamentally involves experimental-experiential and affective explorations. First, we might dream of science – that there might be an immoveable, immutable science of alchemy. But then we learn that science is paralogical. So, we might turn to expertise. But then we see that the experts are paralogical. So, in the end, all we are left with is the experimental/experiential, the sensual, the affective. We might call it ‘experimence’.

It is not simply that one agrees with each other within bodybuilding circles. It is also that each different body-in-process is a physical manifestation-in-process of different ongoing applied theoretical and methodological experimentations and investments-in-process.

Ultimately, bodybuilding is not merely illustrative of ‘ideology’. It is arguably more illustrative of obsession, passion, self-creation, research, autodidacticism, applied theory, lived philosophy, indeed even perhaps the very model of authentic scholarship.

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^[1] Lyotard’s concept of paralogy is constructed at the intersection of three main intellectual lineages: the reclamation of classical logic’s paralogism (unintentional logical error) as a generative, rule-breaking force (Lyotard 1984, 60); Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games and agonistics, where speech acts are recast as creative ‘moves’ designed to challenge existing rules (10, 60–61); and the ‘anarchist’ philosophy of science (specifically Paul Feyerabend) alongside 20^th-century mathematical theories of instability (Gödel, Thom, Mandelbrot) that prioritize productive dissent and the ‘unknown’ over universal, systemic consensus (60, 65–66).