Exercise Messes You Up

 

I. Training is not a kind of religion – Religion is a kind of training

At several points in his major study, You Must Change Your Life! On Anthropotechnics, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk reflects on the relationship between silence and speech in ascetic practices. The person who is locked into their meditating, praying, or indeed, in Sloterdijk’s terms, any other kind of training may look perfectly silent and serene. But, he suggests, they are more often than not involved in intense internal conversation, debate, or even crisis. He writes:

The practising life is thus a continuum of self-persuasive acts. Without these, nothing whatsoever can happen among the practising, not even those who have devoted themselves to a largely non-verbal mode of practising, as is the case in the majority of Asian school systems. Many doctrines incessantly emphasize the vast difference between the desired inner states and the rational level with its linguistic reference points. Nonetheless, the cult of non-verbalizable states drifts towards an endless stream of speeches on stages and nuances of ascent. All exercises, be they of a Yogic, athletic, philosophical or musical kind, can only take place if carried by endo-rhetorical processes in which acts of self-admonition, self-testing and self-evaluation – in line with the criteria of the respective school tradition – play a decisive part, and with constant reference to the masters who have already reached the goal. Were this not the case, recessively isolated subjectivity would return to its diffuse initial situation in a very short time, mingling once more with uncultivated conditions. (p. 237)

Throughout You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk draws many of his examples from the world of religious or quasi-religious asceticism. However, he is also clear that he is only using these because they are often the clearest kind of examples of something much more broad. Indeed, he emphasizes two things:

1. He does not believe that there is such a thing as religion; and

2. What he is saying about religious, mystical, devotional or ascetic practices can and must be extended to all other kinds of exertion practices, such as, and especially, exercise.

Put crudely, everything that makes us achieve anything is based in repetitive striving – i.e., exercise: training, self-discipline and the focused application of desire or drive. So-called religious practices are no different. Praying requires training; meditation requires training; devotion requires training; discipline requires training.

II. Exercises that mess you up

In the gym. Heavy dumbbell rows. I finish a set, drop the dumbbell and stand up; start to walk around the bench to take a drink, pick up my phone to record my weight and reps on the app. My lats, my arms, my lower back too: they are ‘messed up’. I use the term ‘messed up’ in my head, and recall that this term, in this context, was provided by a certain bodybuilding YouTuber I was watching a lot last year. ‘Do exercises that mess you up’, I recall him advising, in a piece about which exercises to choose. Wow, these rows have messed me up, I think, with some pleasure. But also some confusion. It’s almost like I have forgotten how to stand up straight and walk naturally. I have to have a conscious conversation with myself, and run through a conscious inventory of where each body part is and where it should be. I have to think about where my shoulders, elbows and chest are versus where they should be positioned in this kind of context.

Your shoulder girdle and ribs constantly give you options. With shoulders back, chest expands, a stretch appears across the pectorals, a flex can be felt in the middle back. With shoulders forward, lats flare, pecs flex. With shoulders up, shoulders look and feel more square, delts look more prominent, upper lats flare, chest feels wider, neck can even look and feel thinner or longer. With shoulders down, head wants to tilt down, traps lift, neck feels broader (Tom Hardy specialises in this, acting with his shoulders in this mood). You may not be aware of any of this unless you’ve spent some time in a gym. You may think that posture is natural. It is not.

I remember a delightful thing my dad showed us when I was young, very, very young. The memory is like a faded sepia snapshot. He stood or knelt behind us, one at a time, and held our hands down at the sides of our hips, and told us to try to push our hands up and out to our sides, with all our might. After a minute or so of trying, he told us to relax, completely relax, and just stand straight. He let go. Our arms floated up and out to the sides like they were levitating.

III. Exercise is Body Roughening

The first thing I was taught about literature when I got to university were some theories of the so-called ‘Russian Formalists’. The one thing that I can remember without having to look up names or concepts is the proposition that ‘literature’ might be regarded as ‘the roughening of language’ – of the drawing of the reader’s attention to language itself, by becoming strange, unusual. This is the transformation of words and phrases into art. Language is no longer a tool, or something that vanishes away from our consciousness. It becomes the object of attention itself. It becomes aesthetic, problematic, creative, manipulable, philosophical. The exact same thing can be said about strength training, or especially bodybuilding: it is the roughening of the body, the making of it into art, into a problem, a collection of philosophical and ethical issues elaborated performatively, aesthetically.

Full disclosure about my dumbbell row anecdote. The gym was quiet. A young woman had started to do stiff-legged deadlifts (or what people today like to call Romanian deadlifts) over in the power rack behind my bench. It was clearly a big day for her: she was wearing some snazzy gear and her hair was done. She was setting up her phone so she could point her camera at herself and video her lifts.

I found myself very much not wanting to draw attention to myself, or to look at her, even though everything she was currently doing was about showing herself. But she was recording something for later. Whatever she was doing was not for my eyes there and then. And, in any case, I didn’t even want to see. I certainly didn’t want her to think I was watching. So, when I stood up at the end of my set, my awareness of her presence and my desire not to appear to be watching her, even though I could not help but have noticed her, all amplified the ‘roughening’ of my own bodily awareness. How am I supposed to compose my body and move in this situation? I’m already struggling to work out how to compose it.

My body did not feel like an aesthetic object, but its somaesthetic messed-up-ness came to the fore in the form of a set of questions – questions that bodybuilders and injured people know quite well: Oh God, my back, my side, my hip, my leg – how do I stand up? Where is the end position of this standing up? Here also: where do my shoulders go? Where should my elbows be?

It was a fleeting moment, and it was quickly interrupted by another voice – a more appropriate and correct voice for the context. This was the voice that said ‘Yes! That exercise has messed you up! That means it’s working!’ From here, the normal internal conversation about how many more sets, how much weight, and what should then follow, etc., resumed. I was externally silent, but internally, what Sloterdijk would call my ‘endo-rhetorical processes’ were in full flow, chattering away constantly.

I wonder what the endo-rhetorical call and response, self-persuasion and adherence rituals of that woman might be, and whether and where they overlap with mine.

IV. Endo-Rhetorical Processes

The next morning, it was the weekend, so instead of sitting at the computer like I am now, I forced myself straight out into the garden. I was aching. Because of the ache, and my ‘let’s respect the weekend’ sense of obligation to step away from the computer, I decided to stretch.

I did the baduanjin (the 8 ancillary stretches of taiji and qigong). Then, almost automatically, I did some standing qigong, only for a couple of minutes. Then, ineluctably, I moved into the short taiji form, and finally the long form. While moving through the stretch-relax sequences of the baduanjin, my endo-rhetorical processes were basic: try to focus on the correct movements, breathing and feelings; feel that stretch, feel that relax; try to silence the constant chatter in my head about other things. In the standing qigong, the work is similar: perfect the posture, attend to the breath, monitor feelings, silence the chatter. But by the time we get to the taiji forms, well now, things always go crazy.

Every move, every sequence in my taiji form activates a memory – pedagogical, normally, or conversations had with my instructor, or with this or that taiji student or peer of mine. Every movement takes me to a specific time and place – learning the movement, teaching the movement, executing it correctly while sparring; some time before or some time after my catastrophic ankle injury; times of pain, times of revelation.

My ‘endo-rhetorical processes’ within my taiji form practice is extremely complex and wide-ranging. There are so many voices, observations, questions; things to focus on, things to decide whether to ignore; feelings or possible dimensions to add to the form – faster or slower, higher or lower, harder or more gentle – different areas of the body to focus on today, or here and now, before moving the mind elsewhere.

Today, the academic thought intrudes: wow, the endo-rhetorical discourse of taiji is radically different from lifting weights. I note that and file it for later. For now.

V. In Toxic Hating Masculinity

I once wrote a piece about MMA and masculinity called ‘In Toxic Hating Masculinity’, in which I suggested that the academic and cultural discourse about MMA seems to have been led by the nose by the very discourses about MMA and masculinity that many academic and cultural commentators seem to want to critique or challenge. But, I asked, aren’t there more things going on within and around MMA practice than, say, toxic masculinity? Why reify this theme? Why not look at vulnerabilities and the performativity of different kinds of identity or even emancipation from stifling discourses in and through the practice?

When doing my dumbbell rows, I thought of the intimate connection between what one feels in one’s muscles and connective tissues and fibres and the wider world of discourse. Upon experiencing a massive sense of postural and movement messed-up-ness after my heavy rows, one of the voices in my head went ‘Hell, Yeah!’ and immediately delighted in the idea of an increase in size and strength. That voice, it occurs to me, may well be the selfsame voice of a person who might chant ‘USA! USA!’ or ‘America, fuck yeah – comin’ along to save the mutherfuckin day, yeah!’. But, still, I hope, that is just one voice.

My abiding concern in thinking about relationships between physical practices and ‘ideologies’ is exploring the question of whether something about the very physicality or affective dimensions of practices themselves may interact in an if not ‘necessary’ then at least an ‘overdetermined’ or heavily determined way with specific ideologies. Maybe this is registered in such moments as the ‘Hell Yeah!’ – the one that sounds uncannily like its source material might be more comfortable in a Trumpian MAGA rally than a gender studies seminar. And I would prefer me and my voices to be more aligned with the latter than the former. I like to think of me and my voices as coming from or at least preferring places like universities, libraries, leafy parks and communal public spaces, rather than sports stadiums or reactionary political rallies.

VI. Symphonies, Cacophonies

When I compare and contrast the ‘endo-rhetorical processes’ that are activated, constantly active, and irreducibly necessary for the sustained practices of weight-training, on the one hand, and taijiquan, on the other, I am keenly aware of their different somaesthetic ‘moods’ or ‘genres’. At the weekend, I thought: the voices, considerations, forms of self-awareness and concerns with posture, movement, body and its interaction with its environment that are attendant to taiji are radically different to those which attend with me and to me during my lifting sessions. And my immediate feeling was that my endo-rhetorical gym processes were somehow less sensitive, less intellectual, and/or indeed less ‘ethical’ than my endo-rhetorical taiji processes. But is that really so? Does the one process encourage a kind of masculinist or macho relation to self and other, while a different process encourages something inherently different? On the one hand, this must be so, to some extent. But on the other hand, does this have knock on consequences for anything else?

These are the kinds of questions that constantly pester and disrupt my endo-rhetorical processes while I am training. The most frustrating thing about them – and many other interruptions of their ilk – is that I know, even as they pester me while I am training, that I will forget about most of them a moment later. This is not solely because I actively try to squelch them out, there and then, as they are gatecrashers to my proper endo-rhetorical processes. It is also because these intruders are radically embodied, heavily emplaced in moments, and they only really emerge or appear in my mind while I am in the process of performing a certain movement, in a certain moment.

This means that many of my most philosophical or theoretically searching questions never make it out of the gym. They never even make it out of a brief moment within or between sets. Many of my clearest memories are never emancipated from where they dwell, locked into a small sequence within a taiji form, say, or a small gesture in the gym. I adjust my t-shirt or my cap and have a profound memory of training with my brother 35 or 40 years ago. A shift in my weight during a taiji move takes me am back, 20, 25, 15, 17 years to my old friends or my teacher, in a building that is no longer there. These ghosts trapped in moments interrupt me, mess me up, but they also make me; are me.