Logic of sensations in physical activity: a review of Brazilian gyms' discourses and their projection in contemporary society

Abstract

For the German philosopher Christoph Türcke, in "Excited Society" (2010), it is possible to identify a new standard of behavior, the "logic of sensations". In this logic, human beings search incessantly for sensorial stimuli and sensationalize the everyday. Our review questioned if it would be possible to identify such logic in discourses on health and physical activities. For this, we analyzed the discourse from a hundred Brazilian gyms, through their web sites. In our methodology we used a coding process in which we grouped recording units into context units. We found five representative context units of the gyms' discourse on physical activities and health, involved with the logic of sensations: promises of behavior, suggestion of emotions, proposals of sensorial stimulus, holistic concepts and esthetic projections. With that, we were able to make a lot of inferences, many of them around the premise that physical activity and health have been converging, in the gyms' discourse, into an opportunity for to experience stimulating sensations and produce a sensationalized life style, for which the gym space itself would be onstage. Thus, we corroborate the initial hypothesis that Türcke's thoughts probably apply pertinently to the harvest of physical activity in contemporary society, that this is present in the Brazilian gym discourse and that a specific sector of reflection is emergent in the context of the relation between health, physical activities and society: the philosophy of sensation.