the strong arm of the law kenneth j. saltman

8/18/2019 The Strong Arm of the Law Kenneth j. Saltman

1/20

http://bod.sagepub.com

Body & Society

DOI: 10.1177/1357034037736846492003; 9; 49Body Society

Kenneth J. SaltmanThe Strong Arm of the Law

http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/49 The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University

can be found at:Body & SocietyAdditional services and information for

http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://bod.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/9/4/49Citations

by William Stranger on April 18, 2009http://bod.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://ntu.ac.uk/research/school_research/hum/29480gp.htmlhttp://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://bod.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://bod.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/9/4/49http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/9/4/49http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://bod.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://ntu.ac.uk/research/school_research/hum/29480gp.html


2/20

The Strong Arm of the Law

KENNETH J. SALTMAN

This is a body for war. From the disciplined routines in the gym and kitchen, tothe posturing and posing regimens on stage and street, to the martial slogans,metaphors, and boot camp sergeant screams, to the battle in the body itself between lean muscle accumulation and fat depletion, the conflict between inges-

tion of mass quantities of food and dangerous drugs and the tactics to keep thebody from breaking down, the bodybuilder is embattled against other bodies andagainst his or her own body. But the bodybuilder does not merely drape thecorpus in thick slabs of fleshy armor thrown up as fortification against a hostileworld.

Bodybuilding magazines with their glossy multi-page spreads of massive,defined, tanned, oiled bodies exist primarily to sell nutritional supplements.These bodies also sell training videos, gym equipment, cures for steroid-inducedbaldness, and impotence. Bodybuilding as a form of labor has a productivefunction of mobilizing consumption within the capitalist economy. Symbolically,the bodybuilder functions to expand a capitalist morality of hard work, meri-tocracy, discipline, competition, and progress defined through quantifiable andempirically confirmable results. The bodybuilder also functions symbolically topropagate a sexed division of labor strengthening the discursive links betweenbiologically ascribed gender traits and labor roles. As well, bodybuilding has adisciplinary or dressage role in Foucault’s sense. Bodybuilding trains bodies, or,

Body & Society © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),Vol. 9(4): 49–67[1357–034X(200312)9:4;49–67;039149]

www.sagepublications.com by William Stranger on April 18, 2009http://bod.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://www.sagepublications.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://www.sagepublications.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://www.sagepublications.com/


3/20

rather, makes bodies that are in need of constant training, putting people intoregular regimens of behavior that regulate activities and produce desires crucialto the maintenance of the social order. These desires include the desire to

consume and the desire to sacrifice oneself to the nation, God, the family, andthe corporation.

Like soldiering, bodybuilding extracts big sacrifices by making big promises.Like the military, bodybuilding promises to transform the whole body into aweapon. The promise of becoming a weapon is to become that which hasimmediate presence, that which sees first hand, that which impacts, grasps, evenif only for a moment before destroying the object of its grasping. To dream of becoming a bodybuilder, to dream of becoming a soldier is to dream of being a

human weapon.The utopian kernel in becoming the commodity, the weapon, and God is a

promise of freedom by virtue of control over the physical world. Yet, as Marx(1978) shows in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, in capi-talism the alienation of Man from his labor, Man from the world, Man from Man,Man from Himself and His needs results in loss of control over the physicalworld. In turn, one invests psychically in money, the abstract form of thecommodity, the expression of control lost through estrangement/alienation. The

bodybuilder enacts the production process and makes himself, the product. Whatis sought in the activity of bodybuilding is a recovery of control over the laborprocess and a recovery of control over the commodity [the self] – one’s own bodybecomes both the locus for the process and the product. One controls one’s ownlife but on the terms of the capitalist model. Power over the body as commodityrather than as human body is sought in bodybuilding. In other words, freedomcomes through the embrace of the commodification of oneself. As Marx puts it,‘The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, thegreater is your alienated life – the greater is the store of your estranged being’(1978: 96).

What is at stake in this essay is grasping how the identification with militarypower that is produced through corporate mass mediated spectacles such as body-building threatens democratic identifications. What is more, the militarized bodyaims at ever greater control over the physical world and results only in ever-greater estrangement from it. In what follows I first show the martial dimensionsof the bodybuilder’s body. Then, I reveal the extent to which the built bodypromises safety, security, and freedom while contributing to the militarization of civil society – a process at odds with democratization. Next, I demonstrate thelogic behind the bodybuilder’s identification and appeal as not merely soldier butweapon. I conclude by raising the possibility of imagining the democratized body.

50 Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 4


http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/http://bod.sagepub.com/


4/20

The Militarized Body of the Bodybuilder

What were these great chunks of tanned, taut muscle but modern-day armor? Here werebreastplates, greaves, and pauldrons aplenty, and all made from human flesh. He had taken

stock of his own situation and used the weight room as his smithy. A human fortress – a perfectdefense to keep the enemy host at bay. What fool would dare storm those foundations? (Fussel,1991: 24)

The surface of the body must be smooth, shaven, tanned, and oiled to highlighteach perfectly balanced curve, peak, and muscle striation. Imperfect hair must bedepilated for its irregularity. Tanning solution and posing oil must be evenlyapplied. As the competing bodybuilder approaches the posing dais, his muscu-larity, skin, and symmetry must be highly regularized and consistent. Military

principles of preparation, order, regularity, and discipline appear on this bodyfrom surface of the skin to rituals of training. Calories, protein, carbohydrates,fat, vitamins, minerals are counted and highly regulated to maximize musculargrowth; feedings are organized around six carefully planned meals a day – thebody becomes an ammo dump for food that counts only for its nutritionalmuscle-rebuilding value.

Continually increased growth and strength result from the continuallyincreasing breaking down of muscle. No increase in poundage, no increased

growth. One goal. Same as capitalism. Growth at any cost. In pursuit of the goalone destroys one’s body over and over. The steroids cause kidney failure, cancer,hardening of heart walls, cystic acne, gynecomastia, excess bone growth, andsometimes death. The dieting for competition and the drugs to increase vascu-larity and muscle swelling result in severe weakness, seizures, and sometimesdeath. As for soldiers, for bodybuilders the goal of the image of security comesbefore the safety, health, and security of the body. As the bodybuilder approachesthe image of perfect health, he/she nears the precipice of total physical break-

down.The bodybuilder is permanently in a state of military attention. While not

lifting the bodybuilder constantly checks the muscles, their growth or god-forbid, their shrinkage. In Muscle: Confessions of An Unlikely Bodybuilder Samuel Wilson Fussel details the roll call he does on his own body:

Every few hours, no matter where I was, I found myself running through my muscle inventory,checking to make sure I was still there. From head to toe, I’d squeeze and flex every body part:traps? check; deltoids? check; pecs? check; lat wings? check; bi’s and tri’s? check; quads? check;

calves? Check. All present and accounted for. (1991: 82)

While not posing, the bodybuilder stands his or her muscles to attention forregular self-inspection. While posing on stage, the bodybuilder stands the wholebody to stiff attention for display as the judges order ‘stand relaxed’. Seasoned

The Strong Arm of the Law 51




5/20

vets of competition know how to display their ‘big guns’ and hide their weak-nesses through multiple strategies.

The militarized body of the bodybuilder makes the sounds of war. Under the

yoke of heavy iron there are screams, rebel yells, grunts, wails, karate-likeKeoghs designed to focus the power of the body into the muscles being taxed.As in boot camp, in the gym taunts are hurled between lifting partners, inspira-tional clichés slung, boasts belted out, slogans, slogans, slogans: ‘no guts, noglory’, ‘no pain, no gain’, ‘bigger’s better’. Slogans are pillaged from the MarineCorps and the bumpers of cars, ‘pain is fear leaving the body’, ‘I’d rather bekilling communists in Central America’, ‘pray for war’. These exclamations beliemilitary fantasies.

The War on the Body

The bodybuilder is at war not only with gravity and other bodybuilders but withhis or her own body struggling to break the body, shock it, surprise it. Anadvertisement for Met-Rx products in Flex magazine makes clear the battle onthe body to maximize growth while minimizing fat. Referencing the

Schwarzenegger films Terminator (1984; 1991), an angry looking bodybuilderappears with computer weapon-system targeting graphics over his face; next tohim what looks like a body seen through infrared scan might also be a computer-ized map of narrow islands, maybe South America, maybe Southeast Asia.Accompanying text reads:

The Art of War. We are driven by madness. By our compulsion for deep cuts, muscle separ-ation and razor-sharp striations. And we’re obsessed with counting carbs to get there. Thisreduction in carbs primes our metabolisms to use bodyfat for energy. Unfortunately this alsoputs our bodies in survival mode – prompting them to go after our own muscle tissue forenergy needs. The war begins. In constant struggle, the body does everything in its power tomaintain carbohydrate balance. The battle rages and when the dust settles, to the victor goesthe spoils – a rock hard shredded physique. (2000: 74–7)

Consumer capitalism produces a constant state of anxiety and more fundamen-tally an internalized social morality about the body that takes its ultimate formand appears most clearly in extreme bodily regimes such as anorexia, bulimia, andhard core bodybuilding.

The American cult of fitness, dieting, and bodybuilding which induces aspir-ations to become like the image in the glossy magazine is a strategy of consumercapitalism that produces public pedagogies of corporeal morality. One mustconsume, indulge, and enjoy! Yet, remain at all times vigilant of the fat on one’sbody. The war in the body instantiated through the contradictory dictates and





6/20

promises of corporate produced consumer culture are translated by the adver-tisement above into the allure of exotic war outside the body, far, far, away. Thepromise made to the bodybuilder is the promise of conquest and domination.

The promise can only be fulfilled through consumption. Mass marketedcommodities are elements in a salvational technology of consumption.

In a society driven by the imperative for consumption and growth one of thebiggest taboos remains on obesity. Such a taboo functions well to producefeelings of constant lack, insatiable longing, and anxiety in subjects. Massmediated consumer pedagogies structure social relationships such that people aremeasured by their ability to consume and simultaneously measured by theirability to reject the most fundamental form of consumption, that of food. The

bodybuilder functions for men as the impossible real object to become – anenfleshed paradox in which the contradictions of consumption are worked out –incredibly built through hedonistic mass consumption yet incredibly leanthrough acetic denial.1 Though most men do not aspire to look like steroidedfreaks, they do aspire to the image of the disciplined body exemplified by thehard core bodybuilder. While male bodybuilders are the model for men toemulate, the counterpart for women can be found in fashion models or the MsFitness contest.2 Here the hedonism/acetic moral principle of the body plays out

as well. In the case of women, however, a western tradition of defining womenthemselves as embodied indulgence and hedonism joins with acetic denial in theform of starvation dieting.3 In fact, the bulimic, (a practice much more commonamong women then men and more common among male bodybuilders than thegeneral male population) is the female figure par excellence of the hedonistic/acetic relation, engaged in rounds of indulgent consumption and self-denyingexpulsion.4 In the case of both idealized bodies, the male bodybuilder and thefemale model, the dialectic of hedonism and aceticism produces a lack in thesubject which can be filled through consumption. What must be realized is thatthe very same advertisements and magazines which offer to fill the void betweenoneself and the image simultaneously make the void by proferring the modelideal body. Hence, mass mediated bodybuilding culture produces both problemand solution at the same time. This is a nervous system, and fear sells. But so doessecurity.

The Fantasy of SecurityThe practice of bodybuilding is bound up inextricably with bloody dreams. It isno coincidence that the bodybuilder appears on the silver screen as techno-threator law enforcer in the form of the Terminator (1984; 1991), Predator (1987),





7/20

Rambo (1982; 1985), Alien (1979; 1986; 1992; 1997) and as fascist model in LeniRiefenstahl’s Olympia (1936), Conan the Barbarian (1982), and the popular tele-vision shows Xena: Warrior Princess, and professional wrestling. This is evident

in the bodybuilding magazine spreads that describe assaults on bodyparts andcompare bodybuilders with soldiers. The muscle magazines are filled withmilitary recruiting advertisements. Fussel details his entry into bodybuilding asa means of self-defense that could transform his terrified skinny self into anintimidating visual deterrent to physical conflict. Yet, once inside bodybuildingculture, he quickly learns that predatory offense in the form of bravado, verbal,and physical assault but also a kind of military camaraderie is the way of themuscle. Fussel describes his bodybuilding flatmate Bamm Bamm as a lisping

gigantic baby who laments having been deprived of a war and so spendsweekends fighting dressed as a knight in the Society for Creative Anachronism.As Bamm Bamm plays out the fantasy of war through medieval recreation, Fusseldescribes training a fat, hung-over, middle-aged lawyer who, as he is led througha workout in his suburban home, narrates his own physical heroism

‘He felt the raw power surging through his body’, he’d start with a whisper, raising his voiceas the reps continued. ‘He snapped the man’s neck like a breadstick and left him on the ground.Human detritus! Food for flies! . . . The Cajun common folk paddled from bayous beyond

to catch a glimpse of Mister Man. He was big all right, but no bigger than a beer truck andwith muscles to match. When he shook the beef of his bicep, it sounded like rolling thunder.’(1991: 154–5)

Seymour’s quasi-pornographic narration, like Bamm Bamm’s medieval dreamscome from films and television, from comic books and pulp novels as well ashistory books organized around the military triumphs of ‘great men’.

The bodybuilder dreams of getting bigger and is terrified by the prospect of shrinking. The fantasy is as much one of establishing the body in space as it is a

dream of martial conquest:Up on the high wire, the trapeze artist frantically waves his arms to generate a feeling of danger.But on the dais, the goal is to generate safety, security. The bodybuilder projects a feeling of utter self-control. The winner in the free-posing round is not simply the man with the bestbody, but the builder most adept at selling the fantasy. (Fussel, 1991: 190)

Who better to sell the fantasy of safety, security, and self-control than a cop? MrOlympia for the past few years has been not only one of the most massive anddefined bodies in bodybuilding but also a Texas police officer. If the bodybuildersells the fantasy of safety, security, and self-control, the possibility of identifyingwith a body established in space, then what produces a need for that fantasy of corporeal solidity and stability?

Zygmunt Bauman suggests that corporate globalization with its unchecked





8/20

liberalization of trade, privatization of public services, ‘flexible’ labor, and capitalin constant flight renders individuals in a state of constant insecurity about thefuture (Bauman, 1998, 1999). For Bauman, the possibility of the kind of political

struggle that could expand democratic public values and would provide thenecessary solidarity that forms the pre-conditions of social security has beenimperiled by such a thorough commodification of social life that even thinkingthe public, let alone working to strengthen it, has become difficult. Mass-mediated representations found in such varied locations as on nightly news andmarginal sports, translate economic insecurity into privatized concerns withpublic safety such as street crime, school dangers, viruses, and, of course, terror-ism. As well, mass media channels this anxiety into private preoccupations with

controlling and ordering the body, its fitness, its appearance, its fluids, pressure,caloric intake. Both the material and representational assault on the public sphereproduce anxiety, insecurity, and uncertainty about a future filled with flexiblelabor, capital flight, and political cynicism. The dismantling of social safety netsand other public infrastructure (such as social security, public schools anduniversities, welfare, public transportation, social services, healthcare, public legaldefense, public parks, and public support for the arts) intensifies and acceleratesthis insecurity. The widespread insecurity resulting from the dismantling of the

public sector undermines the kind of collective action that could address the verycauses of insecurity.5 As Bauman insightfully writes:

The need for global action tends to disappear from public view, and the persisting anxiety,which the free-floating global powers give rise to in ever growing quantity and in more viciousvarieties, does not spell its re-entry into the public agenda. Once that anxiety has been divertedinto the demand to lock the doors and shut the windows, to install a computer checking systemat the border posts, electronic surveillance in prisons, vigilante patrols in the streets and burglaralarms in the homes, the chances of getting to the roots of insecurity and control the forcesthat feed it are all but evaporating. Attention focused on the ‘defence of community’ makes theglobal flow of power freer than ever before. The less constrained that flow is, the deeperbecomes the feeling of insecurity. The more overwhelming is the sense of insecurity, the moreintense grows the ‘parochial spirit’. The more obsessive becomes the defence of communityprompted by that spirit, the freer is the flow of global powers . . . And so on. (Bauman, 1999:195–6)

For Bauman, the roots of insecurity, at a fundamental level, stem back to adistinctly human consciousness of death. Knowledge of death produces an exis-tential anxiety that is channeled into various institutions and practices thatpromise the individual infinite life. Religion, nation, family, the corporation, themilitary – all offer transcendence of the finite flesh through incorporation intoinstitutions that survive the individual. Bauman’s perspective offers an under-standing of the extent to which bodybuilding individualizes and privatizes the





9/20

social and public causes of insecurity. Through the disciplinary regimes of dietand exercise the bodybuilder can only pursue individualized goals. Like themilitary, like capitalism’s promise of freedom in consumption, the image of the

bodybuilder sells the fantasy of security, safety, and continuity as social conditionsrender real bodies increasingly subject to a global order experienced as beyondtheir control. While, for example, Samuel Wilson Fussel can explain how body-building muscle is fleshy armor thrown up as a defense against a hostile world,Bauman situates the fantasy of security within the economic, political, social, andexistential conditions that give rise to an increasing social and individual insecur-ity, to which bodybuilding is but one of many individualized responses.

If Bauman is correct, then that raises the question of what ontically grounds

the epistemological insecurity towards death that can be channeled intoindividualized concerns through such forces as mass mediated cultural produc-tions like bodybuilding magazines. Hubert Dreyfus (2001) offers an insightsimilar to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of sens practique or ‘feel for the game’(Bourdieu, 1998: 25).6 Dreyfus’ insight allows us to wire Bauman’s insights intothe body itself.

Dreyfus draws on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of Ur-Doxa or primordial belief inthe reality of the world to explain a contemporary crisis of insecurity. For

Dreyfus the rise of what he calls ‘disembodied telepresence’, the hyper-media-tion of individual experience through technologies such as the internet and virtualreality, results in a difficulty in keeping a solid ‘embodied readiness’ – the feelingof readiness for the interaction with things and other bodies that come along.Through electronic connectedness ‘our bodies seem irrelevant and our mindsseem to be present wherever our interest takes us’ (2001: 50). There seems every-where to be a radical anxiety about bodies disappearing. We are losing our bodiesand the more technology we develop to restore our grip the more reality seemsto slip away. Reality TV programs, cell phone use, the turning inside out of private relationships, the mind appears in public as disembodied private conver-sations on cell phones invade the public space. The roving eye of the camerainvades the private space of the body, the bedroom, the bathroom, with pee-cams,and sex-cams, and MTV’s Real World , and ‘reality’ television shows Big Brother ,Boot Camp, Survivor , and Lost, and the anxiety of recovering the bodies of thevictims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001.These shows belie the anxiety that the body is actually disappearing. As thefeeling of readiness, the grip on the world and others becomes increasinglytenuous there is a rising need for one’s subjectivity to be affirmed by beingwatched and an obsession with watching the inside workings of the private spacesof others from the MTV real world house to the laproscopic view of the inside





10/20

of the body found everywhere from televised medical documentaries to thecartoon film Osmosis Jones (2001).

The search for Chandra Levy’s missing body dissipates only when it is replaced by an evenmore intense search for missing victims of the World Trade Center bombings, with news itemsfocusing on various methods for identification, and photographs plastered throughout thestreets of New York, the ghostly presence of “the missing”. Meanwhile, as the factory dis-appears into the sweatshop and the sweatshop disappears into domestic outsourcing, asidentities are no longer solidified through contracts with signatures or organizational bodies,the laboring body too, is becoming ever more irresolute and unidentifiable, beyond even thereach of the photograph or other means of representation. (Goodman, 2001)

What better means of restoring the loss of control over the body that comes

with disembodied telepresence than through training regimens that put the wholebody in a state of constant readiness. Bill Phillips’ wildly popular ‘Body For Life’program (Phillips, 1999) radically transforms bodybuilding from being its ownend to becoming a preparation for work, family, and relationships. ‘Gaining totalcontrol over your body and your life’ is the promise the program makes, goingso far as to describe as ‘real-life heroes’ those who take this challenge of total self-control and preparedness. Heroism derives not from great deeds and sacrificesfor others so much as an embodiment of preparedness for the coming disaster.

Phillips’ program preaches constant vigilance to maintain the security of one’sgrip on social relations that ‘before and after’ stories explain can erode at anytime. Borrowing from the ‘dieting down’ phase of bodybuilding and utilizingcharts that approximate corporate spreadsheets, this weight loss and musclebuilding program puts the body under intense management. Every meal isscripted and workouts are carefully prescribed. Half the meals are pre-packagedshakes. Similarly another recent bodybuilding phenomenon is corporate bootcamp for upwardly mobile executives. The November 2000 ‘College Issue’ of Muscle & Fitness features an article ‘Hard Corps’ in which a corporate whitewoman describes military training as a workout she simply can’t get in the gym.As she wears fashionable gym clothes she is encouraged by Latino drill instruc-tors on the beach of Los Angeles. For her, military service is strictly a consumerchoice. She takes pleasure in the pain and sacrifice, the individual gains. Sherecalls, ‘While lifting weights, we’re serenaded by “You’re in the Army Now”sung by a guitar-strumming homeless man’ (Sonnenburg, 2000: 169). An ad forArmy ROTC in the same issue depicts a shark and states that ‘only the strongsurvive’ (2000: 37). Like the ‘Body for Life’ program, bodybuilding boot campsreveal that insecurity is commodified and sold as prepackaged forms of securityalong with moral praise for investing in self-regulation. The homeless man maybe free on the beach but he gets what he deserves for failing to successfully fight





11/20

with the sharks – he gets a state of radical insecurity. And you, members of theprofessional class, don’t let your guard down for a moment, don’t stop taking thehigh-tech supplements and following the program because there is plenty of

room on that beach for you too!To identify with the bodybuilder is to identify with a body that grows, stands

solidly, martially, and defies the assaults that come from economic insecurity andtechnological innovation. What is more, the bodybuilder’s image promises thatwith the sacrifice beneath the weights you too can build this body. This body isreplicable and replaceable by you. And like the bodybuilder the soldier stands asa vision of national security by renouncing the uniqueness of his body. Theuniform, the posture, the hair, the training, like his weapon, these are all replace-

able elements. The soldier’s body can be rendered a riddled sack or cut to shredswith shrapnel but there is another one coming from behind the hill. This bodycan be killed but cannot die. Like the greatest-ever bodybuilder ArnoldSchwarzenegger in the film Terminator (1984) or his police officer successor inits sequel (1991), the promise of the soldier’s infinite replaceability is found in thebodybuilder. Bodybuilding promises the transmutation of the builder into notmerely a soldier but a weapon.

The Big Promise

In the 60th Anniversary issue of bodybuilding’s widest distribution publication,Muscle & Fitness Magazine (1999: 45), a United States Navy advertisement showsthe head of an intent looking black youth in the lower right corner of the page.He is wearing a microphone and earpiece. He is also wearing on his head anaircraft carrier. Or rather, his head dissolves into the massive ominous aircraftcarrier that fills the bulk of the page. His head is the aircraft carrier. Accompany-ing text reads, ‘We Challenge Not Only What You Know, But Who You Are’.The small print on the page promises cash for college ‘and most important,develop the honor, courage, and commitment to overcome any obstacle’. Thepromise in big print and in the image, the big promise, is the promise of beingbig. The Navy promises the recruit all the techno-power of its most destructiveweapons. Yet, the promise is not merely one of learning how to use theseweapons but the possibility of becoming the weapon of war. The black kid’s headis coming out of the hull of the ship below the waterline as if he is a torpedo.7

But the ship is also coming out of his head as if his mental processes are theweapons of war. The sailor also wears an earphone and microphone and his gazecan only be aimed at a computer screen that is not in the picture but would bethe young reader of the ad interrupted in his fantasies of swollen muscle. The





12/20

reader, as the abstract tele-information on the screen is offered by the ad thepromise of transubstantiation into the militarized body of the fighter depicted.Why be the disembodied telepresence of the screen when you can be firmly

embodied, a weapon, controlling the information on the screen? The ad suggeststhat the service offers not only the accumulation of knowledge necessary forpower but the possibility of becoming a different person. Maybe even leavingbehind being a person entirely to become something bigger, better, becoming theweapon of war, becoming the entire damn military.

Turn the page of the Navy ad and there he is, Mr Olympia, champion of thesport of bodybuilding, Ronnie Coleman, a black cop from Texas instructingreaders in how to build the body of techno-power. Bodybuilders enact the

promise of capital, which is the promise of raw power, the power to expand,conquer, and accumulate, and the bodybuilder represents the potential for theviolence necessary to get the job done. The bodybuilder and the recruit identifywith power, the promise of power in all its incarnations – growth, penetration,dominance. The bodybuilder wants to be what the marine wants to be – obliter-ated in finitude, reinvested in the absolute.

Mr Olympia has the physique of comic book law enforcer Superman whodefies the laws of nature to enforce the laws of man. Coleman’s is the ideal body

for domestic policing as articles in Muscle & Fitness and Flex depict in featureswith titles such as ‘Arresting Delts’. In some photos Coleman’s massive muscu-larity bursts through the police uniform that fails to contain him. In others he isshown on the job policing yet dressed in sweats and hip hop gangsta wool hatrather than uniform. The cop is a criminal. Criminality is the law.

The unspoken but universally acknowledged truth about Ronnie Coleman ishis heavy illegal steroid usage to have attained such a mammoth physique.Coleman is a cop on drugs only capable of achieving the superhero aesthetic withthe assistance of illegal substances. Coleman achieves the height of civilization bybecoming robo-cop – part human, part synthetic, he is a super law enforcer whoembodies the achievements of science. Coleman’s massive muscularity puts himon the verge of the human and the non-human. He is a body caught in a crisisof overproduction and on the verge of leaving the realm of the human altogether.He advertises supplements called MetRx, a title that suggests both medical andmachinic technology.

Like Robocop, Coleman has built the ideal body of justice, another achieve-ment of civilization. At the same time, Coleman incarnates the other side of civilization. In picture after picture in Flex and Muscle & Fitness, Colemanappears bursting out of his police uniform, sleeves are torn off, sometimes thereare no pants. It is as if the law cannot contain this crazy juiced-up, criminal





13/20

body8, this physical monstrosity that breaches the laws of biology. In thesephotos Coleman appears less as Superman and more like The Incredible Hulk –the green, semi-retarded, semi-human, pre-historic, primitive comic book super-

hero, who has transformed from the civilized and overly-erudite white nebbish,Dr David Banner. In order for justice to be done David Banner must draw onthe repressed power of the primitive, shred the white lab coat, lose his mind andhis whiteness and kick a little ass by becoming nothing but body. And the biggreen badass will see justice done when the heady Dr Banner can’t get up thenecessary muscle of justice. Of course, nobody knows that Dr Banner becomesthe Hulk and when they start to sniff around, he quits town. In the Hulk comicsand the 1970s television series, the reality must remain hidden that lurking

beneath the height of civilization is the brutish barbarism on which it dependsfor its survival. Like the Hulk, Coleman is civility and the barbarism that backsit on the same body. Unlike the Hulk, Coleman is both at the same time.Coleman embodies both ‘the natural cop’ despite the artifice of steroids andsupplements and he also embodies the ‘natural criminal’ simply because he isblack. This radical ambivalence in Coleman perfectly suits the radical ambiva-lence of hardcore bodybuilding which promotes the transgressive body.

What does the phenomenon of a black cop Mr Olympia mean in the contem-

porary context when the USA, the ‘world’s cop’, has 2 million prisoners, 2million disappeared bodies, in a rapidly privatizing prison industrial complex anda disproportionate number of prisoners are black? Coleman’s is a radicallyambivalent black body incarnating both law and the criminality that is the trans-gression of law. Rather than undermining the abject symbolic status of blacks,the image of the black cop Mr Olympia from Texas succeeds hegemonically bybringing together on one body conservative discourses of masculine physicalpower, law and order discipline, and civility stemming from the rule of law,together with the racist images of the big bad black man, the animal physicalityof the black inmate, the criminalized body par excellence. Thus, RonnieColeman, like African-American Secretary of State, former head of the JointChiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, Colin Powell, stands as the good individual black,proof that individual blacks can achieve the American dream with hard work anddiscipline. At the same time, there is a perception that black men are causingstreet crime and this perception, which is both ideological and materialized,creates the demand for an increased militarization of civil society. RonnieColeman embodies both the threat and the means to eradicate it.

Mr Olympia incarnates the morality of meritocracy. The bodybuilder onlygets this big through nearly inhuman levels of hard labor. This model body forendurance of physical toil does not produce a product with his labors. Rather,





14/20

the bodybuilder’s efforts are essentially useless. He produces only himself –another non-productive black male goes the white supremacist discourse. Andhis social role is purely visual. He is a vision of excess – of excess labor, consump-

tion, and accumulation, but also of tempered restraint keeping not an ounce of fat on his physique.

The meritocratic corpus justifies racial disparities in criminal justice,education, housing and employment not to mention political enfranchisement.The spectacular work performed by Coleman and Powell is to prove that successis the result of hard work. Ronnie Coleman could be viewed as the quintessen-tial black Horatio Alger model, a better model than black professional athleteswho have succeeded financially and physically, but seldom morally, according to

mass mediated narratives. Like Colin Powell, Ronnie Coleman, the dark avenger,carries with him both the moral authority of the law and the power of thebarbaric primitivism that the law absorbs. Like the Tomahawk missile, theApache helicopter, and the Raptor fighter plane, Coleman is both the height of technological achievement, the god-like beyond humanity and the primitive priorto humanity that must be absorbed to push civilization forward.9

Most detective novels and action films show the necessity of breaking the lawto uphold the law. Do not the vengeance plots of popular fiction and film, not

to mention images and narratives such as Mr Olympia, successfully simul-taneously tap into the two possibilities for control over violence: state control of violence and vigilante/citizen control over violence? Robert B. Parker’s best-selling Spenser novels feature a white, masculine, former soldier, former cop,former boxer, weight lifter, private dick who lives by both an ethical code of society and an ethics of manhood. Spenser, a cultured brute who quotes poetryand guzzles beer in front of televised ballgames, solves mysteries privatelybecause the police are too corrupt. While justice resides with private vigilantesnot with the public, justice requires lawbreaking nonetheless. When Spenser hastrouble with particularly tough opponents he calls in Hawk, his black double of ghetto origins (Vietnam Vet, former boxer, weight lifter, playboy) who also hascultivated tastes and is the only one in Boston as tough as Spenser. Aside fromhis skin color and taste for champagne over beer, the prime distinguisher of Hawk is his thorough willingness to break the law for money. This includesassassinations especially. Hawk’s developed intellect, vocabulary, and ironicsensibility serve his own survival and amusement as distinct from Spenser’swhose same attributes serve justice. Though Spenser embodies both white-working-class muscle and white bourgeois idealism in order to draw on thebarbarism to get the job done, at least once in a novel, he must draw outside theracial pool, invite his best friend to step up the evolutionary ladder and join him





15/20


16/20

remains invested in the body. The body becomes both the catalyst of productionand the product of one’s labor. Not only is the body the site and end of laborbut each part of the body is continuously reproduced with the specialization of

labor, an endless series of repetitions designed specifically to increase mass andbetter reveal the workings of the product. Bodybuilding incorporates massproduction and reproduction onto the body itself. Hardcore bodybuilders,among all types of bodybuilders, are perhaps the purest expression of capitalism.They identify not with the use of capital. They identify as capital. Hardcorebodybuilders display the virtues of competition, discipline, accumulation, andself-sacrifice on their flesh. Capitalism builds them. In the words of another greatAfrican-American bodybuilder, perennial Mr Olympia contender Shawn Ray, ‘I

am a commodity’ (Lipsyte, 1998).As Shawn Ray’s self-consciousness teaches us, the bodybuilder is not simply

built by capital. Cultural logics do not merely play out through people. For thetransmutation of flesh into capital requires the desire of the subject. For thesubject to undergo the torment of the flesh that is bodybuilding and bootcamp,there must be a powerful promise to which the bodybuilder and the recruitrespond. And the promise is not merely to become a commodity but one particu-lar kind of commodity: the weapon.

Why would one willingly identify as this particular kind of commodity, theweapon? Is not the body-as-weapon the ultimate expression of self-denial, aradical renunciation of the individualism that is so constitutive an element of capitalism?

Bodybuilding is about destroying the body over and over to become some-thing else. The bodybuilder destroys the body to become God, capital, thecommodity. Becoming the weapon is the promise of being the most powerfulcommodity, godlike, omniscient but also translatable like money into multiplescenes.

The promise of becoming the weapon is the promise of becoming the tech-nology that sees all, is the Christian promise of becoming God. The newcampaign for the Air Force titled ‘Lullaby’ promotes its new slogan ‘No OneComes Close’:

An ad . . . shows home videos of happy children and their mother with a soft voice singing inthe background. At the words ‘guardian angels will attend thee all through the night,’ thevisual image shifts to an F-117 ‘stealth’ fighter roaring across a dark sky. The only explicitappeal to recruits comes in the final second, when the Air Force’s new slogan, ‘No One ComesClose,’ appears on a black screen followed for an instant by the words ‘Join Us’. (Suro, 2000:A3)

A central strategy of this campaign as well as the Army’s new ‘Army of One’





17/20

campaign is to suggest a heroic exclusivity of service in this particular branch. Allof the branches are following the Marine Corps’ successful campaign that‘portrayed enlistment as a chance to become a dragon-slaying knight in shining

armor. The macho ads were designed to convince young people that joining theMarines was not merely a career choice but a powerful statement about what kindof adults they intended to become’ (Suro, 2000: A3). The Air Force advertise-ment draws on Judeo-Christian imagery of an angry and protective techno-god.By joining the Air Force one can be the protector of the innocent and approachthe infinite power of the almighty – interchangeably God and the unmatchabletechno-power of Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, and Raytheon.To be in the Air Force, the ad suggests, is to be in an elite and exclusive, powerful,

and moral position.It is no coincidence that Mr Olympia is a cop because of the need for policing

the body, detecting and recovering the body as the body disappears, slips awayfrom us. Mr Olympia as both the idealized male body and a weapon makes sensebecause one is taught to identify with the powerful, the almighty techno-powerthat mysteriously and omnipotently causes the disappearance of the body. Gulf War documentaries and video games offer identification with the missile guidedfor target with video camera in its nosecone. The omnipotent technology merges

destructive power with omnivisual telepresence. In other words, the most potentform of telepresence is its incarnation as high-tech weapon. To become theweapon is not to have the experience of tool-using mediated by alienating tele-visual apparatus but actually to become the tool. The body disappears not simplybecause of the rise of disembodied telepresence that accompanies technologicalinnovation, but rather disembodied telepresence is a particular manifestation of the more general phenomenon of commodity fetishism that results in the abilityto live only through a body that is no longer human. Fussel recalls a shockingrevelation as he stands bleeding in the bathtub after a failed attempt to shave hiswhole body: he feels nothing, no pain. Not only has he been radically desensi-tized emotionally to the feelings of other people, but bodybuilding radicallydesensitizes him physically to his own body. A product of mass production, thebody in bodybuilding is radically estranged. As one aims to assert the tightestgrip of control over the body through bodybuilding, the more it slips away. Thereality of this is confirmed by the endless articles and advertisements in the maga-zines that describe the bodybuilder as animal and monster. An article by MichaelBerg in Muscle & Fitness titled ‘Monster Mash: The Sequel’ reads:

The strength of Frankenstein, the size of King Kong. . . . This full-on assault will make allthree triceps heads pop out of your skin, wriggling and writhing as they take on a life of theirown . . . (Berg, 2001: 110)





18/20

Hardcore bodybuilders who seek ever-greater control over every aspect of theirbodies lose control of the insides of the body which come out to the surfacewriggling and writhing as they take on a life of their own.

Conclusion – The Democratic Body

This article began by detailing the many authoritarian ways that the body-builder’s body is structured. Why is it that the militarized body is so easy toimagine but it is so difficult to imagine the democratic body? The assumptionthat there can be an authoritarian body form suggests that there could be a demo-

cratic body form. Yet, to suppose a uniform democratic body form would be atodds with different and diverse body forms and practices. Democratic bodies arenot bodies in a state of high regulation or docility but what could this democraticbody look like? What does the body of justice look like? Is the opposite of themilitarized body not the body of peace idealized in the figure of the Buddha withhis belly, Gandhi with his beatific smile, laughing eyes and protruding bones,Martin Luther King, Jr with his determined brow above hopeful eyes set on adream he knew he would not see, or one of many serene or suffering visages of

Christ? A lone youth standing down a tank in Tiananmen square? Or likewisethe global justice protester who risks her body beneath baton and rubber bulletbecause she knows that the clothing she wears was made by the crushed bodiesof those who toil in sweatshops out of sight, those who will not appear on thesides of buses to advertise their work? Are these all not bodies of the people?

In his novel In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck tells the story of a labor battlein the orchards of California. The protagonist Jim, who has a lean workman’sbody, joins the communist party and travels with the leader to incite a strike

among workers who are exploited by the bosses and yet suspicious of the reds.At the end of the story when the bosses have militarized the struggle, the workersare on the verge of quitting rather than fighting a battle they know they cannotwin. As Jim and the party leader scramble to keep the fighting spirit alive in themen they are betrayed and Jim is killed, shot in the face with a shotgun. There isnothing left of his face. The party leader brings Jim’s lifeless body before the men,telling them, ‘He didn’t want anything for himself.’ This faceless body could beany one of them. Jim sacrificed his individual interests and indeed his life for

them. Jim’s body incites the men to fight the dubious battle. What makes thebattle dubious is both the question of whether this particular conflict can be wonbut more importantly the question of whether the struggle for justice is worththe sacrifice.





19/20

Notes

Thanks to Robin Truth Goodman, Shawn Smith, and Alphonso Lingis for their thoughtful commentsand keen insights on the topic. Now get to the gym!

1. On the hedonism/asceticism ambivalence see Baudrillard (1998). On gender struggle within thesport of bodybuilding see the film Pumping Iron II: The Women (1982) and Bordo (1995), Freuh et.al. (2000), Heywood (1998), Moore (1997) and Saltman (2001).

2. Hard core female bodybuilding continues to be marginalized in the bodybuilding industrywhile fashion model form takes greater prominence. For example, the 1999 Mr Olympia contest isbeing paired with the Ms Fitness contest rather than the Ms Olympia. For a discussion of the struggleover competing forms of female bodybuilders see my 1997 article ‘Men with Breasts’.

3. See Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society for an extended discussion of this.4. Harry Crews’ novel Body (1990) draws a very revealing character of this disciplined body

named Billy ‘The Bat’ Bateman. Billy is a short professional bodybuilder and a bulimic who falls inlove with an enormous morbidly obese woman in whose flesh he can indulge. His indulgence in theunlimited pleasures of the flesh must be resigned to another body and not his own.

5. ‘People feeling insecure, people wary of what the future might hold in store and fearing for theirsafety, are not truly free to take the risks which collective action demands. They lack the courage todare and the time to imagine alternative ways of living together; and they are too preoccupied withtasks they cannot share to think of, let alone to devote their energy to, such tasks as can be under-taken only in common’ (Bauman, 1999: 5).

6. Writes Bourdieu, ‘ “subjects” are active and knowing agents endowed with a practical sense, thatis, an acquired system of preferences, of principles of vision and division (what is usually called taste),

and also a system of durable cognitive structures (which are essentially the product of the internal-ization of objective structures) and of schemes of action which orient the perception of the situationand the appropriate response. The habitus is this kind of practical sense for what is to be done in agiven situation – what is called in sport a “feel” for the game, that is the art of anticipating the futureof the game, which is inscribed in the present state of play’ (Bourdieu, 1998).

7. In a subsequent recruiting advertisement campaign the Navy adopted a slogan consistent withthe body as weapon: ‘Accelerate Your Life’.

8. In the late 1990s former Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, Edwin Meese lobbied success-fully for both the removal of bodybuilding from prisons and the privatization of prisons. Meese arguedthat society should not allow criminals to develop the tools, muscles, to succeed at crime. The strong

body, for Meese, should be the lawful body as opposed to the criminal body. As I argue here thisdistinction is tenuous as the lawful body is a transgressive body whose maintenance of the law dependsupon the breaking of the law.

9. See Bederman (1995) and Nancy Lesko (2000) for discussions of how the discourses of civiliz-ation, millennialism, masculinity, and race were intertwined and central in forming 20th centuryideologies about the body, progress, science, and the need to educate the muscles for character-building. For a brilliant discussion of the ways that neoliberal ideology is implicated in both milita-rizing civil society and attacking black males by infantilizing them see Giroux (2003).

10. There are fewer examples of films in which women break the law to uphold it though two recentexamples are Ghosts of Mars (2001) and The Deep End (2001).

11. As I argue in ‘Men with Breasts’ (Saltman, 1997), as the hypermasculinity in bodybuildingreaches its zenith it unravels resulting in a kind of transvestitism of the body. The laws of patriarchyare unsettled but hardly overturned within the sport.





20/20

References

Baudrillard, Jean (1998) The Consumer Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Bauman, Zygmunt (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University

Press.Bauman, Zygmunt (1999) In Search of Politics. New York: Polity Press.Bederman, Gail (1995) Manliness and Civilization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Berg, Michael (2001) ‘Monster Mash: The Sequel’, Muscle & Fitness, September: 110–15.Bordo, Susan (1995) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) Practical Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Crews, Harry (1990) Body. New York: Simon & Schuster.Dreyfus, Hubert L. (2001) On the Internet. New York: Routledge. Flex (2000) ‘The Art of War’ (advertisement for Met-Rx), November: 74–7.

Frueh, Joanna, Laurie Fierstein and Judith Stein (eds) (2000) Picturing the Modern Amazon. NewYork: Rizzoli International Publications.Fussel, Samuel Wilson (1991) Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. New York: Poseidon

Press.Giroux, Henry A. (2003) The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear . New

York: Palgrave.Goodman, Robin Truth (2001) Personal communication.Heywood, Leslie (1998) Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women Bodybuilding. New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers University Press.Lesko, Nancy (2000) Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. New York: Routledge-

Falmer.Lipsyte, Robert (1998) ‘Backtalk: Extreme is in the Eye of the Beholder’, The New York Times, 11October, Sports Desk.

Marx, Karl (1978) ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’, pp. 66–125 in Robert C. Tucker(ed.) The Marx–Engels Reader, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Moore, Pamela L. (ed.) (1997) Building Bodies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Muscle & Fitness (2000) ‘Only the Strong Survive’ (advertisement for Army ROTC), November: 37.Phillips, Bill (1999) Body for Life. New York: Harper Collins.Saltman, Kenneth J. (1997) ‘Men with Breasts’, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 35 (XXV): 48–60Saltman, Kenneth J. (2001) ‘Embodied Promise: Pedagogy of Market Faith in Bodybuilding’, in Sherry

Shapiro and Svi Shapiro (eds) Body Movements. New York: Hampton Press.Sonnenburg, Beth (2000) ‘Hard Corps’, Muscle & Fitness, November: 164–9.Steinbeck, John (1992) In Dubious Battle. New York: Penguin.Suro, Robert (2000) ‘Army Ads Open New Campaign: Finish Education’, The Washington Post, 21

September A3.

Kenneth J. Saltman is an Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at DePaulUniversity. He is the author of Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools – a Threat toDemocracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), co-author with Robin Truth Goodman of Strange Love, Or

How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), and co-editorwith David Gabbard of Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools(Routledge, 2003). He has published various articles and chapters on the cultural politics of body-building.


the strong arm of the law kenneth j. saltman

Documents