Swolitical science

Source

An observation by Keally McBride in Punishment and Political Order (2007) popped into my head earlier:

The U.S. political and economic systems have been sustained by the ideology linking citizenship and labor. But maintaining this construction is requiring that a significant proportion of our population, particularly black men, be sacrificed. The unemployed are branded as criminals, removed from public view, and permanently crippled in their attempts to participate in the workforce. Releasing prisoners from the burden of maintaining this fiction for the rest of us should be enough provocation to dismantle the links between choice, labor, and citizenship.

One of her points, or puzzles, is that labor is connected to punishment in the US even when that labor isn’t directly profitable. Naked exploitation isn’t enough to explain the practices of prison farms like Parchman in Mississippi that, yes, had operations that were profitable for a period, but persisted in the South far later than their economically viability.

The socializing function of labor is even clearer in the context of children. Progressive-era reformers, who gave us the juvenile court, held similar beliefs about the virtues of labor. They saw the manual training of young boys in reformatories and industrial schools as the means to correct the noxious influences of rapidly industrializing cities like Chicago. Through work, “delinquent” and “dependent” boys could be socialized into middle-class norms of propriety and a life of productive, lower-class work. Reformers held on to these beliefs long after it was clear (for example) that small-scale farming was no longer sustainable nor was ‘farmer’ a viable career path for their wards.

Over time, we’re simply left living with a residue or echo of these older relationships and assumptions in our contemporary practices. McBride continues,

… we would do well to remember the origins of the treadmill. Tocqueville points out that treadmills, “machines that work without producing,” were developed in English prisons in 1822 to provide constant activity for prisoners without undue competition for other workers.’ At the time, it was inconceivable that such a machine would find its way out of the prison. How curious, almost two hundred years later, it has become a common metaphor for understanding the experience of work and leisure, the rhythms of modern life, even outside the walls of the prison. Endorsing rock crushing, boulder pushing, or any other form of labor, purely for the sake of laboring, shows how far we have traveled from Locke’s initial calculation that labor is fundamentally a matter of rationality (145).

Barbara Ehrenreich writes of her experience in the gym during the initial boom of the modern fitness industry:

I may not be able to do much about grievous injustice in the world, at least not by myself or in very short order, but I can decide to increase the weight on the leg press machine by twenty pounds and achieve that within a few weeks. The gym, which once looked so alien and forbidding to me, became one of the few sites where I could reliably exert control.

To men of the Left, she continues,

fitness culture may have looked like a “retreat.” But for women, “control over one’s body” could be understood as a serious political goal. While you didn’t have to be a feminist to take up physical fitness, most women pouring into gyms had been through the punishing culture of female dieting and thinness, with its purging and fasts. They knew that women were supposed to focus on shrinking their bodies and becoming, as near as possible, invisible.

But,

… if women are in a way “masculinized” by the fitness culture, one might equally well say that men are “feminized” by it. Before the 1970s, only women were obsessed with their bodies, although in a morbid, anorectic way. But in the brightly lit gyms, where walls are typically lined by mirrors, both sexes are invited to inspect their body images for any unwanted bulges or loose bits of flesh and plan their workouts accordingly.

These observations, and others, on wellness culture culminate in a wider discussion of class in the final pages of her chapter “Crushing the Body” in Natural Causes:

Fitness, or the efforts to achieve it, quickly took on another function for the middle class — as an identifying signal or “class cue.” Unfit behavior like smoking or reclining in front of the TV with a beer signified lower-class status, while a dedication to health, even if evidenced only by carrying a gym bag or yoga mat, advertised a loftier rank. … Working out is another form of conspicuous consumption: Affluent people do it and, especially if muscular exertion is already part of their job, lower-class people tend to avoid it.

She continues,

Many gym-goers will tell you cheerfully that it makes them feel better, at least when the workout is over. But there’s a darker, more menacing side to the preoccupation with fitness, and this is the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense, to control anyone else, and in their work lives that is a large part of what typical gym-goers do. We are talking here about a relative elite of people who are more likely to give orders than to take them — managers and professionals. In this class, there are steep penalties for being overweight or in any other way apparently unhealthy.

While the larger chapter is more meditation than structured argument, I understand her central worry to be the generalization, or spillover, of a culture of combat and control to domains where it is either inappropriate or directly harmful to the basic task of living well. Her warnings are largely well-taken, but they downplay a healthy ambivalence that I see in my own experiences. Mirrors and scales and heart-rate monitors need not be part of a panoptic regime of self-surveillance that dominates and immiserates. Nor does ‘combat’ have to be at the center of one’s gym experiences. Though, of course, they can. On a social level, gyms can also function as a third-place in a world that increasingly lacks them. And on an individual level, moving through space with confidence — whether a flight of stairs or a cliff face — is a privilege that many, myself included, would like to enjoy for as long as possible. It’s a mistake to reduce the confidence that strength training facilitates to a mere desire for control.

To stick with the combat metaphor… I’d like to think that the various pathological features of modern fitness culture highlighted by Ehrenreich are sites of active struggle, not simply conquered territory.

A few years ago I became severely ill. Despite being in the best shape of my adult life, I found myself laid out. In pain. Unable to eat properly. Rapidly losing weight. Unable to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time. I couldn’t physically leave my apartment so, whenever I could manage, I picked up books on rock climbing and mountaineering.

I read an angsty classic by Mark Twight, essays by Jon Krakauer (among my favorites is an anecdote about the corrosive boredom of being stuck in a tent on mountain with a friend in a snowstorm), and a modern history of sport climbing titled Hangdog Days, among others. Arno Ilgner’s book, in particular, has helped me think about the mindset I bring not only to routes but to other life stresses.

For context: while reasonably safe, lead climbing requires substantially more mental control than top-roping or (non-high ball) bouldering. Anyone can act like a hero on top rope. When you’re well above your last bolt or piece of protection, however, that heroism is tested. If you botch it… you’re going for a ride. And there are number places where I climb in the mid-Atlantic, particularly on easier routes, where one simply must not take a lead fall.

Most, intuitively, understand the difference between objective and subjective risk when it comes to falling. It’s the difference between smacking a ledge, for instance, and taking a heart-in-throat 10 meter whip into open air. The latter, while intimidating, is perfectly safe. In practice, the distinction isn’t always so clear. It can be difficult to sort one form of risk from the other. It’s a learned skill.

Errors in judgement can be significant. Not understanding objective threats, of course, can be devastating. With climbing, misperception is a literal threat to life and limb. You can’t manage what you don’t understand. Likewise, confusing subjective risks with objective ones has a cost. A failure to appreciate that a situation can be scary, but relatively safe, inhibits personal growth and closes off opportunity.

We all try to tune our risk tolerance. At the crag, for example, my appetite is relatively low; I prefer the puzzle-solving and gymnastic challenge of climbing, not the rush of mastering mind and body in the face of severe injury or death. We all do something similar across the various domains of our life. Some are directly analogous to the physical risks of climbing (say how we drive on the highway) and others go beyond physical injury to other harms (how we invest and spend money for instance). Moreover, we may be risk seeking in one domain and risk averse in other.

That all sounds reasonable in principle, but managing the feeling of risk is a distinct and difficult task — even when one believes the objective risk to be acceptable. Responding to fear has to be trained. And it’s here that I’ve found Ilgner’s advice helpful. Among the useful gems he offers is the following on ‘soft eyes’:

Instead of allowing your face to grimace, deliberately keep the face relaxed with a “soft-eyes” focus. Eyes should be comfortably open, held softly, not squinting or staring. Your attention should be on the whole field of view rather than on specific points in that field. Don’t focus on your hands, your feet, or one portion of the rock. Rather, spread out attention and look at color, depth, shadows, and the interrelationships between objects.

The physical responses that narrow our perception can be trained. Squinting eyes. A racing heart. Once understood, it becomes possible try hard. To allocate effort efficiently. To use the full force of our reason, our experience, to respond to the next moves in front of us. I’ve found more generally that situations that provoke fear and anxiety benefit from an awareness of my physical response to that stress. A similar approach has paid dividends in other environments in my life with some success: workplace social pressures, arguments with loved ones, and so on. Soft-eyes, for me, is a simple but helpful cue.

I’m relatively new to resistance training. The stress of finishing graduate school and securing a job took its toll in my late 20s. I threw everything into work. I was overweight, over-caffeinated, drinking too much, sleeping too little, and my nerves and digestive system were constantly on the fritz. For a number reasons, thankfully, I started turning to fitness in my early 30s. I found weight rooms and weight lifters to be friendly and supportive. And, most importantly, through resistance training I finally felt in control of my health. Each week I could add weight, or add reps, and I could see the difference. “Whoa, I benched my bodyweight! Dips? Weighted pull-ups? I couldn’t even do 1 of either of those in my 20s!!” The physical gains had knock-on effects for my mental health.

The weight room, both then and now, feels to me to be the embodiment of self-help. Of merit. Of connecting action to impact. I’m certainly not alone. For many, the gym becomes the dominant conceptual metaphor they use to assess choice and responsibility. The barbell becomes a symbol of achievement ideology. The meritocratic ideal. I find myself sliding into this idiom at times. The slippage between weight room and life, however, creates problems. (And, to be blunt, I’m not convinced the weight room metaphor is an accurate account of actual weight rooms.) There is a chapter in Forrest Stuart’s (2016) excellent ethnography Down, Out, and Under Arrest that, I think, rewards a close read.

In chapter 3, “Training for Survival,” Stuart follows a men’s weightlifting group on Skid Row. Here’s his description:

This group of about thirteen men cleared debris from the sidewalk to perform physical exercises together three or four days a week. Through their workout routines, they carved out a small but cohesive community amid the turbulence of Skid Row. […]

When the men reflected on their former lives, they overwhelmingly described addiction in terms of an alienated and antagonistic relationship between their body, driven primarily by the need to satisfy physical sensations, and their mind, which became increasingly overpowered.

For its members, the group was a site of self-help and resistance to pervasive policing.

[…] they used their time together to formulate what we might think of as a folk ethnography of policing, in which they attempted to model police “psychology” — the general tendencies and considerations motivating officer behavior. By sharing these experiences, they built a collective repository of knowledge about precisely which characteristics make some individuals more likely than others to attract police scrutiny. Throughout these exchanges, the men tended to explain police intervention as determined primarily by a potential suspect’s outward appearances and associations.

Weight training was in significant part about becoming ‘copwise’. The men “collaborated to make seemingly unpredictable police interventions more legible and manipulable.” As Stuart memorably puts it, “getting ‘jacked’ at the weight pile thus constituted a means to better escape getting ‘jacked up’ by the police.”

This resistance strategy, however, has costs:

Their approach to surviving Skid Row involved actively reconstructing the defining conditions of incarceration, locking themselves away in their SRO [single room occupancy housing] “cells” save for a few hours in which they ventured outside to engage in recreation at the weight pile.

Likewise, territorial stigma encouraged the cultivation of ‘infra-differences’ that cut against a wider potential for solidarity against arbitrary policing:

They invested considerable energy in their performances of infra-differences, in hopes of escaping officers’ default assumptions of criminality. Specifically, they minimized the scrutiny and suspicion they might otherwise draw form officers by amplifying the symbolic and physical distance that separated them from those they viewed as “belonging” in Skid Row. While these efforts did provide some reprieve from police contact, and even reinforced the therapeutic capacity of the weight pile, they did so at the expense of validating and exacerbating the same territorial stigma pressing down on them.

Stepping back, a few limits of the ‘resistance training as training for resistance’ view come into focus. Many of us are set up to fail. Vitally, when we do in fact fail — whether or not we’re members of a literal weight pile — a narrow focus on liberation through the control of one’s body risks personalizing that failure and exonerating the wider institutions, political decisions, and non-decisions that all but guarantee a negative outcome.

I don’t mean to suggest it must be this way. But I see others, and myself, often subtly slide into this worldview, particularly when it comes to issues of addiction. To my mind, in short, Stuart’s chapter nicely expresses a few of the limits, possibilities, and messy politics of weight-room style solidarity.

Over the last year I’ve populated my nightstand with various books on mental health. A few days ago I picked up a classic: Flow: The psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Briefly, Csikszentmihalyi’s aim is to understand “optimal experience” — what the sailor feels when the wind whips through her hair, what the painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to come to life, what the rock climber feels when they unlock a cryptic sequence of moves to ascend the sheer face of a cliff. Optimal experiences, the author argues, “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen” (3).

I still have a number of pages left in the book, but the following passage caught my eye:

Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They are adaptive responses, just as feather are for birds and fur is for mammals. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, build beliefs that help us tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternative goals and beliefs, and thereby limit possibilities; but this channeling of attention to a limited set of goals and means is what allow effortless action within self-created boundaries. […]

A culture that enhances flow is not necessarily “good” in any moral sense. The rules of Sparta seem needlessly cruel from the vantage point of the twentieth century, even though they were by all accounts successful in motivating those who abided by them. The joy of battle and the butchery that exhilarated the Tartar hordes or the Turkish Janissaries were legendary. It is certainly true that for great segments of the European population, confused by the dislocating economic and culture shocks of the 1920s, the Nazi-fascist regime and ideology provided an attractive game plan. It set simple goals, clarified feedback, and allowed a renewed involvement with life that many found to be a relief from prior anxieties (81-82).

At the crag I’ve often joked that climbing is a kind of cult. Gumbies are lured in and, eventually, become radicalized. Devotees adjust their diet, their exercise regimen, their information environment, and their free time in pursuit of an optimal climbing experience. In training one’s body, the mind begins to follow. Priorities. Assessments of risk and reward. The meaning of pleasure. Of pain.

To my mind, Csikszentmihalyi’s account shows at least one dimension of why, precisely, some ideologies are so seductive. By aligning tasks with difficulty (the author’s famous chart is reproduced above), they draw us in deeper. They provide a path to ‘optimal experience’, to flow. An effective ideology pulls on our subconscious, often without our awareness, and in so doing structures possibilities, shapes decision-making, and influences our response to reasons. While attributing this to climbing culture might be hyperbole, I don’t think it’s wildly off the mark for a number of other contexts in our midst. The anti-feminist radicalization of young men online through red-pill, MGTOW, and incel communities, is one example, or the exercise and dietary prescriptions of various theocratic regimes is another. One simple upshot is that flow is an under-appreciated, but potentially powerful mechanism of ideological maintenance.

MV and I intend to use this blog as a place to write & reflect. Our training plan is simple: post, post, post. Let the gains begin!