Male Fantasies posted by Richard Seymour

After the creation of a unified Germany in 1870, and their defeat of the French in 1871, it was absolutely the military constructing the body. The model for all people was male, grim and disciplined. The military was said to be the school of the nation; you had to go and bear it, and come out of it a different person than you had been before. You came out German whereas before, implicitly, you were not.

Medicine, psychoanalysis, and religion go on in a way, but weakened. Sports, now and since the World Wars, has entered very strongly into this fear of how the body is constructed and how a person has to function: "training"; what is "fair play" and what is not; winning. The whole "beating and defeating" kind of language has gone from war to sports. I see it especially in the American newspapers: "Knicks burn the Bulls." (Interview with Genevieve Fay & William Stern).

The "new man" sired in the drill (the drill as organized battle of the old man against himself) owes allegiance only to the machine that bore him. He is a true child of the drill machine, created without the help of a woman, parentless. His associations and relationships bind him instead to other specimens of the new man, with whom he allows himself to be united to form the macro-machine troop. All others belong only "under" him - never alongside, behind, or in front.

The most urgent task of the man of steel is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines and feelings that calls itself human. (Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, p 160).

By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has 'got rid of the peasant' and given him 'the air of a soldier'. (Discipline and Punish, p 135).

June twenty-ninth. I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be 50 pushups each morning, 50 pullups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.