Barthes, the Curse of Exercise, and the iPod's Power

Because I am the consummate nerd, sometimes I like to imagine that I am Roland Barthes and think about culture in terms of Barthean “myths.” The Barthean notion of “myth”—drawn out of Ferdinand de Saussure’s system of signs (signifier/signified/referent)—is such that “signs” in the Saussurean system are elevated to a second level, in which signs end up becoming signifiers for larger cultural notions. While you might be thinking that this sounds somewhat too theoretical to be fun, Barthes's treatment of semiotics in his collection of articles Mythologies is both fascinating and funny.

For example, one of the cultural myths explored by Barthes in the book is that of “red wine” in France. Moving past the nature of the word as a Saussurean sign, Barthes discusses how wine exists in French culture, particularly in terms of how wine functions as an equalizer for the proletariat—citing how “wine will deliver [the bourgeoisie] from myths, will remove some of his intellectualism, will make him the equal of the proletarian” (Barthes 58-59). On one level, the notion is somewhat absurd (do the French really conceive of red wine as such?), but on a structural level, the claims he makes have a fascinating resonance with one another.

So while I cannot claim to make quite such elaborately staged arguments as Barthes in Mythologies (he does, after all, have this entire system of cultural semiotics behind each strange argument in the collection) as I’m  going about my day, I do have some thoughts that aren’t so far from Barthes’s notion of red wine

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One Barthean thought that I have fairly frequently is regarding the gym. I find the modern, American gym a riveting space, whose inhabitants operate between the polar principles of necessity and aversion. The gym demonstrates to me that physical exercise, in our society, no longer centers on pleasure; the pleasure that people now associate with the gym is the pleasure of having gotten something out of the way, of having crossed that "work-out" line off their to-do list. Exercise has become somewhat of a scourge; exercise is what everyone must do and what no one wants to do. This, in fact, is similar to how I talk about exercise and, I suspect, not so far from how you talk about it yourself.

But what does this have to do with an arts blog?

The answer to that lies in how people mediate between those two opposing notions of necessity and aversion, how people inject pleasure back into the act of exercise. This new thought, while less Bartean, seems to me no less intriguing. Confronted with something that they would rather avoid but cannot, people do what they have always done: distract themselves. 

When I do go to the gym, which is less often than I’d like (see above paragraph), I witness a swarm of people with ear-buds plugged into everything from iPods and other .mp3 players to the small television screens on treadmills and ellipticals. There are others who bring books or other reading materials to peruse as they do their half-hour on the stationary bike. There are even people who do more than one of these things at a time; I have seen people on ellipticals with a iPad “open” to a book while listening to music and even occasionally glancing up to the bank of televisions hanging over the fitness area.

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I would offer that there are two problems here. The first one strikes me as the more Barthean claim; these practices of distraction only contribute to the general malaise that has fallen upon modern notions of physical exercise. These modes of distraction—what seem like solutions to the problem of evading exercise—end up being more like an exacerbation of the problematic nature of exercise.

The other problem, far more pressing in terms of this blog, is that of what happens to those artistic forms we digest while we are running or biking or elliptical-izing. Let's look at reading: do we really think we’re “getting” the material we read while simultaneously pumping out legs back and forth or in or out or whatever? However, it’s a fairly small percentage of gym-goers who turn to reading for entertainment. The bulk of distraction is, without a doubt, manifested in the presence of .mp3 players and television.

To be honest, I don’t care much for how television programs are transformed by their being watched in a gym setting. Television, in my mind, is a medium that (mostly) doesn’t demand full attention from its audience. There is a core of primetime programming that really asks its audience to sit down and pay attention, but there is also an entire universe of television that asks for only a modicum of thought. In my college gym, the television programs shift between sports, news, and reality television. Only occasionally are there films or formal televisions series.

Like I said, most television programs don’t demand the full attention of their audience; news and sports programs are structured with exactly that in mind. These programs don’t provide the kind of in-depth reporting you'd find in a print or online setting nor do they beg for a “complete” viewing. Organized into a series of segments, which are even further broken up by commercials, news and sports television shows clearly don’t really pine for attention. As for reality shows…well…I won’t even go there.

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Music, it turns out, is my real concern. What happens to music when we listen to it in a gym setting—not simply for the sake of the music itself, but out of some half-baked notion of spicing up our exercise routine and making it, in some sense, “bearable”? The music, obviously, changes. Becoming a crutch for another activity, music is subsumed into a category of "audience interaction" in which music functions less like an activity in and of itself and more like a distraction from another, entirely separate activity. [By no means do I mean to refute the notion of art as a distraction from the emptiness and nihilism of the universe, for there is some validity to that claim, but rather I want to point out that we’re not talking about distraction from life, we’re talking about distraction from exercise. That’s a pretty severe distinction.]

If it sounds like I’m one of those people who has never been on a run with music, that’s almost true. I’ve never really taken to running with an iPod or listening to one while exercising in the gym…and that’s not for lack of trying. Indeed, there have been several instances over the years when I thought to myself, “Hey! That whole music-thing while working out would be a great idea!” But that’s never really the way that it turned out for me: the ear-buds were always falling out…my iPod would die halfway through the run…I would end up breathing to the beat of the song (not a good thing!)…in other words, there were just issues with the practice.

So, now that you know of my failed attempts, you might read me as a failed music-listener, a kind of pathetic pariah now stuck decrying a practice that never accommodated itself to him, but nevertheless seems to “work” for everyone else. 

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But does that mean that what I’ve pointed out about music should lie by the wayside? I think, regardless of my stance on music, that there’s an issue with how readily we employ music as a distraction from something we’re convinced is necessary but not fun. But while I’m tempted to take an opinionated stance on all this, it would feel self-contradictory. I must admit that if I could somehow get used to listening to music during my workout, then I would probably fall in with everyone else.

Thinking over this post, I see that it clearly looks back to my post about the legacy of Steve Jobs in terms of how he affected our cultural conceptualization of music; this notion of music as distraction in the gym is only a new manifestation of that new cultural role music plays. So maybe it’s not so much good or bad—as I’m tempted to think—but rather just different.