The May issue of The Walrus features a story I wrote with Jan Dutkiewicz on mixed martial arts. I promised when we went to press that I would write a blog post on the subject of Barthes and MMA, which will hopefully not prove as obnoxious as it sounds. I’m also not sure I can top Chuck Liddell (pounding Randy Couture in photo) on the subject, but I’ll give it a shot.

Like^{*As part of my and Ed Keenan’s ongoing efforts to reclaim the footnote from D1a2v3i4d5 F6o7s8t9e*r& W!a†lπl∑a√c≈e©, we’re taking things up a notch. Henceforth, sidenotes.} most people with a Bachelor of Arts degree, I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to forget about Barthes. I’d largely succeeded at this task, until a former intern here, much better read than me,^{*Except for the works of Richard Scarry, which I am the world’s foremost expert on. It was I, you probably know, who first explicated the subtext of his masterwork, What Do People Do All Day? Turns out they mostly sit around thinking about sex. For shame, Mr. Scarry, for shame.} handed me a copy of Barthes’ Mythologies in conjunction with my research for the story. She’d flagged the essay “The World of Wrestling” for me, which I soon realized I’d read and subsequently repressed as an undergrad.

Barthes was a twentieth-century French theorist who did a lot of things intellectuals really like, such as rhetorically punching linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in the brain kidneys and logically contorting psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s medulla oblongata until it was no longer oblong. Also, according to my Oxford Companion to Philosophy,^{*Which weights in at roughly seventy-five pounds, making it about as companionable as a tympani.} he found this out:

Reading, then is,^{*Yes, that’s right, OUP misplaced a comma. Perhaps if Philip Pullman’s not too busy letting Hollywood ruin his books, he could come down from Exeter College for a copy editing session.} not reductive deciphering but a productive activity analogous to playing from a musical score. This eliminates the possibility of any privileged interpretation, authorial or critical, but makes it possible to participate in a ‘hedonistic textuality’, a paradoxical jouissance, where the psychically split reader is at once lost and merged within a sea of cross-pollinating signs.^{*The Companion leaves out that Barthes discovered this in an underwater sea cave while scuba diving.}

Nothing in that quote has anything to do with “The World of Wrestling,” but since it was probably the only chance I’ll ever get to type the word jouissance, I had to take it. TWoW takes an ordinary populist pastime, professional wrestling, and analyzes it in terms that make it seem acceptable to sit around in your underwear yelling at John Cena to hit the Big Show with a steel chair, regardless of how smart you think you are. Though Barthes is writing about wrestling in France several decades ago, his points still stand for today’s World Wrestling Entertainment.

Early on in the essay, Barthes draws some key distinctions between wrestling and boxing, essentially exploring the sport vs. spectacle question Jan and I were interested in with respect to MMA. Wrestling, he says, isn’t about outcomes—it’s the depictions of themes like justice and suffering that the crowd is there for. “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so,” he writes. “it abandons itself to the virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what is sees.” During bouts, he adds, “the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious.”

Elevated as it may sound, serious wrestling fans will appreciate the insight Barthes offers into how the average WWE bout is mapped out. Fights are generally choreographed around a set of dramatic plot points that the wrestlers are expected to sell to the best of their abilities. The rest of the match is essentially filler, but filler that approximates dancing in that it is an improvisation of certain basic moves that fill out the dramatic arc. Fans in the know speak of the best wrestlers as those who dance at a high “workrate,” while lesser ones draw matches out with stall tactics.

Boxing has always had an element of the theatrical, too, achieving its pinnacle on this front in Muhammad Ali, who was talented and personable enough to create moments of artificial drama in the ring, and to incorporate that drama into his fighting style. Generally, though, the drive for victory makes showiness risky in boxing. In MMA, where the activity is frenetic and even more fraught with potential for defeat due to the smallest of slips, it is practically impossible. Jan, who reported the Edmonton scene in our story, was fortunate to witness a “comment” of the kind Barthes identifies—something that gave the crowd a villain and helped them know who to cheer for. But that sucker punch came during a break in the action, over the touching of gloves. (I’m personally still curious why Dave Scholten, the fighter who threw the punch that riled up the crowd, did it. I’m sure he’s not generally a dirty fighter.)

Without obvious potential for the kind of in-ring spectacle that might grab fans who don’t appreciate the sport at a technical level, MMA needs to wring drama out of its context if it has any hope of moving beyond the “You mean that crazy sport where people just whale on each other?” reaction I heard countless times while working on the story. Thus far, UFC, the number-one MMA promotion, hasn’t been successful at this, partly because it hasn’t generated a star with the crossover appeal of an Ali and partly because it ends up selling every ounce of potential drama as though it were actual drama, which waters the whole thing down. As I think I wrote in a post about Norman Mailer, when you hold everyone up to be larger than life, no one ends up being larger than life.^{*Save for the Almighty and Eternal Bironist and his favourite Star Trek captain, Jean-Luc Picard.}

Barthes describes the outcome of good character creation in wrestling like this: “I know from the start that all of Thauvin’s actions, his treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is.”

In UFC, fans have respected “The Iceman,” Chuck Liddell, admired “The Natural,” Randy Couture, and gaped at Brock Lesnar, but none of these grapplers has shown the force of personality needed to capture the imagination of a mass audience. The closest the organization has come to making this kind of inroad is probably the Ultimate Fighter reality show, which is captivating only in the American Idol sense that anyone shown risking success is captivating. The program has won some young males away from boxing, but has done very little to dent the broader culture.

Barthes’ final paragraph: “When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.”

This raises one last point, related to a question I heard repeatedly while working on the MMA story: “Why do they do it?”

Again, Barthes is on to something.^{*Though I’m a little embarrassed by his need to use capital letters so that “Good” sounds more laden with meaning than “good.” We get it, Roland: you’re smart. Only smart people use words like jouissance. You don’t have to try so hard the rest of the time.} The sense I got from the fighters I met and watched while doing the story is that, like Barthes’ wrestlers, they do it not just because they like it or because they’re good at it, but because it’s a vehicle for their aspirations, for being something more than themselves and projecting that thing to others.

This need not be, like Muhammad Ali, that they’re kings of the world. It’s usually a bit simpler: that they can endure things they didn’t think they could endure, that they can look better than they thought they could look, that they can achieve a level of mastery at something most can’t do. The same reasons, basically, that some of us write, or edit, or lift weights, or quilt, or raise ten kids. For fighters, the vehicle happens to be a stage, upon which they’re doing something some consider base. MMA might win those skeptics over, but if it’s going to do so, it won’t be transmutation—it will be someone who comes along with a drama that’s both powerful and real.

Next, on the Bironist: My sidenotes become overgrown and bushy, forcing me to get a straight-razor shave from the local Greek barber.

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Posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 3:17 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.