Slave to the Machine, Or How My Gym Is Turning Me Into An Asshole

A month or two ago, Alain Finkielkraut, a philosopher and one of the talking heads of the French media, criticized the new President's exercise regime. Nicolas Sarkozy's public jogging came under attack for being undignified and too, you know, American.

Now, I would argue that of all the ways in which he is imitating American presidents, jogging is the least worrisome.

But the central part of the critique is that jogging, unlike walking (in the somewhat dubious tradition of the flaneur, perhaps), does not lend itself to reflection or meditation. It is about the regulation, the ratiocination, of the body.

Well, when I first read about this, I just laughed. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Eh, the French. What are you going to do?"

But then...I joined a new gym. It's closer to home and less crowded than my old gym, so it seemed a no-brainer. Everything was fine. They gave me a tour and showed me this thing called "Fit-linxx." Which I find both revolting and mesmerizing.

This system logs in every workout that you do on a machine at the gym, and then gives you "points" for every hundred pounds you lift or every five miles you run or whatever.

When the tour guy first told me about it, I thought: "Doesn't that strip every shred of in-the-moment joy from one's workout? To know that you're being surveilled and measured by some electronic chip?" Ugh. In short, I got all Finkielkraut on its ass.

But then, oh dear, how can I tell it? Then, I got hooked. I am now obsessed with my "points." I figured out how to record workouts that I do outside the gym. So, if I take a run around the resevoir, I immediately log it in to Fit-linxx. I am so filled with self-loathing I can hardly stand myself.

And yet, at the same time I am wondering if there is any cardiovascular benefit to self-loathing and if I can log it in....

There is something insidious about this need to make our lives external, verifiable to ourselves. It's somehow real only insofar as it has an electronic expression somewhere (I have achieved a kind of meta-level of this by blogging about Fit-linxx: both my workout and my angst about it are now available in digital format).

Although, as I sit and decry the self-alienation of the computer age, I remember that it's just part of a continuum. In 5th century Greece, with the advent of book culture, people started keeping diaries of sorts, called "hypomnemata." Michel Foucault describes the phenomenon:

What seems remarkable to me is that these new instruments were immediately used for the constitution of a permanent relationship to oneself -- one must manage oneself as a governor manages the governed, as a head of an enterprise manages his enterprise, a head of household manages his household...So, if you will, the point at which the question of the hypomnemata and the culture of the self comes together in a remarkable fashion is the point at which the culture of the self takes as its goal the perfect government of the self – a sort of permanent political relationship between self and self. The ancients carried on this politics of themselves with these notebooks just as governments and those who manage enterprises administered by keeping registers. This is how writing seems to me to be linked to the problem of the culture of the self.

So, as they say, plus ca change.

I wonder what Foucault (rest in peace) would have had to say about the perniciousness of Fit-linxx?