Exercise: Forming Bodies, Selves, Disciplines

Exercise (askesis/melete/exercitium/exercitatio/usus)—the graduated, repeated performance of actions over time—is a far-reaching technology that has shaped innumerable practices of body and mind, whether in the context of sports, dance, military service, labor, religion, philosophy, rhetoric, or other arts. In European discourses, it has encompassed, among many other things: Stoic spiritual exercises; practices of Christian asceticism; philosophical meditation; training for skilled and professional work; training in the arts; military drills; pedagogical programs of all kinds, from physical education to instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic; and the present-day popularity of physical exercise routines and mindfulness practices cultivated in the name of recreation, health, and wellness.
     This workshop invites participants to reflect on and respond to several common threads connecting many of these practices and the discourses around them, particularly in modernity. Exercise has, for example, been considered fundamental wherever the mind-body-complex is thought to be organized according to possibilities, capacities, or ‘faculties.’ It has often been the task of exercise to develop and realize what exists only potentially. Exercise can also be deployed as a means of incorporating norms, whether social, cultural, religious, or aesthetic—and of forming a self in the process. At the same time, the iterative, performative character of exercise may also lend it the power to undermine normative identities. In complex ways, exercise intersects with techniques of discipline (Foucault) and habitus (Bourdieu), but also with ethical self-fashioning (Hadot), care of the self (Foucault), and perhaps all techniques of the body (Mauss). Linked to practices of domination but also of resistance and freedom, exercise might thus be understood as a sort of meta-technology of the self, and most fundamentally as a mode of its temporal existence.      
     Exercise thus has enormous potential to teach us about the formation of subjects and selves, and about the body and mind as technical and technological domains. Yet it has remained an under-studied and marginal topic in German studies and for scholars with interdisciplinary interests in the history and theory of culture in fields such as media studies, intellectual and literary history, and aesthetics and poetics. At the same time, recent work on the history of aesthetics (Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology), poetics (Gabriel Trop, Poetry as a Way of Life), and philosophy (Christopher Wild, Descartes’ Meditative Turn: Cartesian Thought as Spiritual Practice) has begun to take exercise seriously. The workshop responds to these impulses as an opportunity to take the study of literary and physical culture, media, and intellectual and cultural history in new directions.