While attending a conference in a different city, I visited a new gym. I found the squat rack. It was in a big alcove – a squat rack on each side wall and a mirror along the back wall, facing back into the gym. It was a heatwave, and I was relieved to feel very active air conditioning. However, in my alcove (for, now it was mine, my space, my domain), I noticed a smell. I didn’t like it. I stepped out of the alcove and into the main gym area, and there was no smell. Step back in and it was there again. Plus, there was no real air movement there. I hypothesized that the air currents, the drafts, the circulation, was such that there was some kind of dead zone where it wasn’t reaching, and I was in it.

Smell, the wrong smell; to be fair, any perceived smell, is to my mind strictly verboten in a training environment. What we want and need are no sensory distractions. No strange smells, no irritating noises, nothing wobbling or loose, nothing damp or brittle. Strict almost laboratory conditions. Training, for me, is very much a matter of sensory management. The senses need to be ordered, structured. That’s why I could never have a gym in a garage – at least not a garage that is being used to house motor vehicles. My dad used to keep his weights in the garage. Both of my brothers do too. So, you go in and try to train, and it reeks of petrol, diesel, oil, rags, damp, dust, wood. And the lights are wrong. And so on.

Training involves strict sense management, which means environmental management. The environment needs to be on your side, helping; not making its presence felt, distracting, irritating.

After a while, a man enters my alcove. Now it’s not fully mine anymore. He’s young, athletic, well muscled. He starts doing overhead barbell press at the other squat rack. As he is facing away from me, immediately I notice: he’s wonky. As he raises and lowers the bar, the bar is not horizontal; it drops to the left. The left arm doesn’t lock out fully. The left arm seems to be at a different angle to the right throughout the movement, even though his grip on the bar is equal. I think: if he had a mirror in front of him, maybe he’d see this and rectify it. I desperately want to go and tell him. But how can I? I don’t know him. So I quietly blame the mirror positioning and try to forget, try to manage my own mind, try not to let my observation intrude any further into my workout.

Bad Habits

Scholars of the body such as Richard Shusterman, Drew Leder and Sander L. Gilman draw on long traditions of reflections on embodiment to draw our attention to the ways that our environments and our actions are almost inexorably going to make our bodies wonky. We’re right-handed, right-footed; we use tools and carry out actions on one side only; we develop preferences (this hand for holding things, this hand for working on them; this hand for tool use, that hand for stability; and so on). We sleep in preferred positions, sit in asymmetrical postures. As hypertrophy and atrophy, plasticity and shrinkage all take root and grow over time, we are going to become wonky.

Gyms are meant to correct that. Literally. Since the birth of the modern Western gym, a large part of the point of gymnastic, calisthenic and later aesthetic training has been focused on ironing out and preventing wonkiness. This is perhaps why it is so visible and so … upsetting? Disconcerting? Uncanny?... to see in a gym: the last thing you want a beautifully symmetrical movement like overhead barbell press to do is consolidate wonkiness.

The Vanishing Body

In his phenomenological study of body awareness, The Absent Body (1990), Drew Leder argues that it is one of our body’s most significant features that it constantly withdraws from our consciousness, so that we can focus on other things. We could not function if we were aware even of more than a couple of the many uncountable things our bodies are doing all the time. So, the body tends to recede, he argues. This is why Cartesian mind/body dualisms seemed so plausible to so many for so long: our body’s job is to move into the background while we think and decide and work out and do. It is not meant to be there, going ‘hey, can you feel that? I’m digesting that food!’ or ‘Whoa, it’s actually really, really hard to stand up and hold balance while looking up at that cobweb in the corner, you know? Hey, a bit of help here?’

In relation to this, Richard Shusterman’s argument about ‘somaesthetics’ – as the becoming aware of the feel of certain kinds of movements and postures – is an argument about corrective benefits of different kinds of exercise; the deliberate process of trying to remove wonkiness and instead exploring the sensory, perceptual and experiential value of different kinds of bodily awareness – cultivating good body habits to try to iron out the effects of bad ones.

In Drew Leder’s terms, my wonky guy – and surely, to greater and lesser degrees, all of us, all the time – displayed to me a habitual asymmetry sedimented so deeply into the body’s unreflective functioning that it had, quite literally, disappeared from his awareness. For Leder this happens – this has to happen – all the time.

However, it strikes me that in the practices of working out in a gym – not playing sport, not doing our jobs – in ‘intransitive’ things like bodybuilding, physical culture, yoga – somaesthetic practices that are focused not on an external task but on the body itself – there is a strong pushback against the kind of ‘vanishing’ or ‘becoming absent’ that Leder describes.

Leder’s phenomenology of absence describes the ordinary, healthy body – the body of perception and instrumental action, the body that recedes so that the world can appear. Bodybuilding is not that. Bodybuilding is a disciplined, repeated, voluntary refusal of bodily disappearance. The bodybuilder is engaged in an ongoing project of bodily presencing.

Body Presencing

This runs in the opposite direction to everyday life, in Leder’s perspective. Indeed, Leder’s central claim is that the body is essentially self-concealing. We perceive from our eyes, not to them; we act from our hands, not upon them as objects of contemplation; the whole apparatus of embodied engagement with the world depends on the receding of the body as tool, becoming a transparent medium through which intention flows toward its target.

‘Health’, for Leder, is more or less coextensive with this vanishing act. ‘Well-being’, he writes, is ‘in general, synonymous with my noticing nothing about my body’. In health, the body dis-appears. However, in injury or decline, he argues, the body dys-appears. Dys-appearance is the body’s unwanted and troublesome re-emergence into awareness. Dys-appearance, for Leder, happens when something goes wrong: pain, dysfunction, disease, injury. The body shows itself when it has become an obstacle.

Bodybuilding inverts this logic so completely that it is worth pausing over how strange the activity actually is, phenomenologically speaking, once you strip away its cultural familiarity. The bodybuilder in the gym is not principally oriented toward a Heideggerian external ‘towards-which’, in the way that the tennis player is oriented toward the ball, or the hiker toward the summit. There is a goal-object, certainly – the bar, the plates, the rep count, the transformation. But this object is instrumentalized in a peculiar, almost inverted way. The weight is not what one is trying to move for its own sake; the weight is the means by which one produces a sensation in a specific, named body part. The bodybuilder curls the dumbbell not to relocate it in space but to make the bicep ‘feel it’. The entire apparatus of resistance training – the choice of angle, grip, tempo, range of motion – is calibrated not toward efficient goal-attainment (in which case one would simply use the most mechanically advantageous form) but toward maximizing elements like ‘time under tension’ and sensory intensity in a targeted region. This is a technology, in the fullest sense, for manufacturing localized dys-appearance on demand.

Leder does gesture toward something like this possibility. He acknowledges that not all pain is aversive in the way that illness is. There exist, he notes, ‘certain pains, such as that of the athlete pressing against limits, that are congruent with life projects and have a positive significance’. The phrase ‘no pain, no gain’ appears in his text, but almost in passing, as an exception to the rule that dys-appearance signals threat. But Leder does not linger here, because his larger argument is aimed elsewhere – toward showing how the involuntary dys-appearance of illness and death feeds into Cartesian dualism’s devaluation of the body. The athlete’s pain is, for him, a minor counter-case, a complication noted and set aside. I want to dwell in that complication, because I think it names something that is not marginal to embodied life but central to an entire modern practice of body-relation: what we might call presencing-as-technique.

I Ache Therefore I Am

Consider what actually happens across a training session. A muscle group is worked until it ‘burns’ – until lactate accumulation and mechanical tension produce a localized, escalating discomfort that the lifter does not flee from but courts, extends, chases toward ‘failure’. This is dys-appearance sought rather than suffered. And crucially, this pursuit does not stop at the gym door. The bodybuilder wants, and cultivates, the lingering ache – delayed-onset soreness that persists for a day or two afterward, transforming ordinary movements (sitting down, reaching for a cup, climbing stairs) into small, repeated occasions on which the trained body part re-announces itself. This soreness is not incidental; it is, in the folk-phenomenology of gym culture, evidence. ‘I felt it for days’ is a satisfaction report, not a complaint. The ache becomes a kind of proprioceptive signature, verifying that yesterday’s session actually did something, that the muscle was sufficiently disturbed to require repair, and – this is the key inversion – that the body part in question has been successfully dragged back into presence and, ideally, held there.

This reframes Leder’s account of incorporation and habituation in an interesting way. Leder describes skill acquisition as a movement from explicit thematization toward tacit absorption: the novice swimmer consciously monitors arm position and breathing, but the practiced swimmer’s body ‘knows how’ without knowing how it knows, the skill having sedimented into an unreflective ‘I can’. Bodybuilding takes the opposite trajectory with respect to feeling, even as it deepens motor competence. The lifter’s technical execution of a movement does become tacit and automatic over months and years – the mechanics of a bench press eventually require little conscious monitoring. But the sensory relationship to the muscle is not allowed to settle into this same silence.

Quite the opposite: bodybuilders speak often of the ‘mind-muscle connection’, of relearning to ‘feel’ a lift they have technically mastered for years, of switching exercises specifically because a familiar movement has become too automatic, too efficient, and has therefore stopped producing the desired ache. Leder writes that ‘we forget or devalue’ bodily change through habituation. However, the bodybuilder’s entire practice is an engineered resistance to exactly this forgetting. When a body part stops being felt, it is retrained – not primarily to preserve strength or size but to restore its thematic presence, to bring it back from the background disappearance into which even trained muscle inevitably threatens to recede.

The Epistemology of the Alcove

This is where wonkiness enters – not as an aberration of the practice but as its structurally predictable element. If presence is manufactured locally, muscle by muscle, session by session, then it will almost never be manufactured evenly. The overhead press requires bilateral symmetry as a mechanical precondition of the movement’s proper execution, but the bodybuilder’s felt relationship to left shoulder and right shoulder has, in all likelihood, never been symmetrical, because feeling is not distributed by mechanical necessity but by attentional history – by which limb was favoured in childhood, which side was injured and therefore protected, which arm the mirror faces more readily, which side receives the lifter’s dominant-hand instinct to ‘help’ during a plateau.

Leder’s own account of the corporeal field is useful here, turned against his emphasis on disappearance: the body is not one undifferentiated surface of possible presence but ‘a highly complex phenomenon composed of different functional elements’, in which ‘there may be, and often is, more than one prominent focus from which we act’. Bodybuilding does not overcome this unevenness; it inscribes it, session after session, into asymmetrical muscular development, asymmetrical proprioceptive acuity, asymmetrical capacity to voluntarily recruit a given muscle under load. The very technique that presences the body also, and by the same mechanism, differentiates it – produces a body that is intensely, unevenly felt, and therefore a body whose symmetrical, ‘should-be-balanced’ movements will tend, quietly and without confession, toward the wonky.

Given its desire to eradicate wonkiness and to replace that instead with an impossible fantasy of absolute left-right symmetry, bodybuilding has often been deemed ‘normative’. It works in the service of fantasies about ideal masculinity, they say. And arguably, for men – some men, some of the time – it does. Women – not so much. Nonetheless, its desire (my desire?) to eradicate wonkiness can easily be read as a desire to eradicate queerness – especially when ‘queer’ is understood in its etymological sense of a twist, torque, bend or mutation of the straight, the equal, the symmetrical. But, given the inevitability of the queer, of queering, bodybuilding’s own fixations might equally be read as the ultimate queer desire, and queering practice.

In several classic essays, Rey Chow connects visuality with pornography. These essays include ‘Where Have All the Natives Gone?’ (Chapter 2 in her landmark book, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (1993)). Here, she discusses the ‘pornographic gaze’, engaging directly with Fredric Jameson’s thesis that ‘the visual is essentially pornographic’, and arguing that filmic and photographic mediums ‘ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body’.

Later, she publishes ‘“Love Me, Master; Love Me, Son”: A Cultural Other Pornographically Constructed in Time’, which appeared in the edited volume Boundaries in China (1994). In this text, Chow constructs her famous analogy between progressive subaltern academic representation and pornographic writing. She argues that both practices rely on ‘a certain objectification and specularization of the “other”’, by presenting hyper-detailed accounts designed to elicit intense emotional responses from a privileged audience. This is where her famous, highly satiric critique of academic guilt-tripping resides: ‘If the excitement of pornography can be described as something like “the dirtier, the better”, then the excitement of subaltern-representation may be described as something like “the more socially deprived, the better”’.

Then we have ‘A Phantom Discipline’ (PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 5, October 2001). Here, Chow connects the history of pornography directly to the origins of the cinematic medium. She argues that heterosexual pornography – which ‘shares in [film’s] naked fetishization of female bodies for commodified ends’ – represents a core challenge to the politics of visual representation and feminist theory.

Finally, worthy of mention is ‘Framing the Original’, in her 2002 book, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This forms part of her analysis of Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution in which she analyses the highly graphic and brutal sex scenes of Lust, Caution, to argue that the film’s ‘machinic mode’ of visual reproduction is a form of ‘strip search of the past’.

She argues that the drive to make the subaltern (in this case, sexuality) speak in such an impeccably spectacular and technically brutal manner transcends traditional voyeurism. As regards ‘the Orient’, she argues that it is no longer a hidden mystery but an ‘infinitely visualizable surface’ that has been opened up, stripped naked, and exposed to plain sight.

Needless to say, perhaps, Chow’s argument regarding the image and representation as ‘pornographic’ is a highly layered critique of visuality, modern media, and academic knowledge production. Rather than using ‘pornography’ in a strictly literal or moralistic sense, Chow deploys it as an epistemological category to analyse how the act of gazing, particularly across cultural, racial, and class boundaries, inflicts a form of structural violence.

Her argument can be broken down into three primary dimensions: the visual image as a ‘naked body’ on display, the pornographic analogy of subaltern academic representation, and the traps of anti-imperialist ‘antipornographic’ critiques.

Chow adopts and builds upon Jameson’s formulation that ‘the visual is essentially pornographic’, which posits that filmic and photographic media ‘ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body’. Within this framework, Chow argues that watching is an agency of violence: The act of gazing is not a passive or neutral registration of reality; it is theoretically defined as the ‘primary agency of violence’. To look is to ‘pierce’ the ‘Other’, who is forced to inhabit the highly unequal, passive space of a victim on display. The resulting visual image is an ‘aggressive sight’ that represents what has been left bare, stripped, and devastated by this gazing. In cross-cultural and colonial encounters, the dominant or Western observer’s gaze reduces the historical depth and lived subjectivity of the non-Western ‘Other’ (the ‘native’) to a sheer, flat (sur)face or a literal naked body. The native is consolidated as an absolute, silent image whose only function is to serve as the occasion for the observer’s self-enlightenment and speech.

In her classic Writing Diaspora, Chow extends this critique of pornographic visuality to the Western academic establishment and contemporary cultural studies. She constructs a sharp analogy between pornographic writing and progressive subaltern-representation (the academic project of baring, translating, and speaking for marginalized, oppressed, or colonized groups). Both pornography and academic subaltern-representation operate through a ‘certain objectification and specularization of the “other”’. They display highly detailed, intimate depictions of the underprivileged that excite the emotions of the privileged viewer or academic reader, often under the banner of ‘sympathy’, ‘progressivism’, or ‘conscience’. As mentioned, she then satirizes the libidinal economy of academic ‘guilt-tripping discourses’: if the excitement of pornography is historically governed by the logic of ‘the dirtier, the better’, then the excitement of contemporary subaltern-representation operates under the logic of ‘the more socially deprived, the better’. Westernized and third-world intellectuals working in elite Western institutions often ‘discover’ objects of oppression to claim moral and rhetorical victories. Chow argues this produces a ‘surplus value of the oppressed’, where the critic effectively ‘exchanges’ the defiled, marginalized image of the native for personal academic authority and institutional currency.

Chow illustrates the profound difficulty of escaping this pornographic structure of representation through her critique of Malek Alloula’s book The Colonial Harem. Alloula collected French colonial postcards of Algerian women posing in exoticized, sexually suggestive, and semi-naked ‘harem’ settings, framing his project as an attempt to ‘return this immense postcard to its sender’ as an act of anti-imperialist defiance. Chow argues that Alloula’s project falls directly into the trap of pornographic visuality, by colluding with the colonial gaze. That is, by displaying these postcards a second time in his book, the male Algerian critic exposes the native women’s bodies to a renewed public gaze while keeping himself safely invisible as the writing subject.

Chow argues that Alloula attempts to sanitize his project by distinguishing between ‘erotism’ (good) and ‘pornography’ (bad). However, Chow asserts that by physically reproducing these images, his discourse turns the Algerian women’s bodies into a transparent, silent medium – a ‘homoerotic link’ connecting the brown male nationalist critic to the white male colonialist-photographer. The women remain frozen as passive, silent objects of visual consumption.

Under this framework, the female native is ‘crossed out’ or violated three times: first by the imperialist forces of colonization, second by the cultural processes of subjection, and third by the anti-imperialist critic himself who uses her defiled body to stage a retaliatory, Oedipal fantasy of ‘an eye for an eye’ against the colonizer.

To challenge this pervasive pornographic logic, Chow warns against two common critical impulses. First, she critiques avant-garde post-structuralist theorists who try to ‘dissolve’ the ‘pornographic obviousness’ of the image by treating it as a purely linguistic construct or a ‘free’ simulacrum detached from reference. She argues that this ‘politics of depths’ or ‘hidden truths’ comfortably bypasses the raw, abusive material violence that is played out directly on the visual surface. At the same time, Chow rejects the ‘liberal solution’ of replacing ‘bad/pornographic’ images with ‘good/authentic’ ones, or trying to give the native a ‘true voice’. This romantic nativism simply ‘sanctifies’ the native, which is structurally identical to ‘defiling’ her; both belong to the same patriarchal, symbolic order of image-identification.

Hence, instead of seeking a ‘pure origin’, Chow proposes that we must grasp the native as an ‘indifferent defiled image’. In this strategic formulation, the native’s nakedness stares back at the viewer, showing that ‘there was nothing – no secret – to be unveiled underneath my clothes; That secret is your phantasm’. By simulating this indifferent gaze, the native-as-object resists being ‘fooled’ by the symbolic order, exposing the pornographic obsession of the observer as a self-referential Western projection.

2025: Gabriela Méndez Cota and the Erotics of AI

More recently, Gabriela Méndez Cota has offered an argument about an ‘erotics of AI’ (erótica de la inteligencia artificial). This is a critical deconstruction of technology, affect, and feminism in an era of global crisis. Rather than focusing on sexualized robots or standard gender dynamics, she shifts the conversation to the fundamental nature of human connection and survival.

Her core argument develops through several key layers. The first is the claim that erotica is an elemental social bond. For Méndez Cota, an ‘erotics of AI’ must be situated ‘beyond gender and sexuality in their current meaning’. Instead, she defines it as the ‘elemental infrastructures of the social bond’ – the vital, shared capacity for ‘being-together’. She writes in the shadow of automated AI warfare, which she terms ‘intelligent extermination’, arguing that the return of militarization, terror, and systematic violence is fundamentally preceded by the ‘de-erotization of social bonds’ (the stripping away of peace, mutual responsibility, and solidarity in conversation).

Méndez Cota critiques the rise of the ‘grief tech’ industry (companies like Replika, Eterni.me, and HereAfter that sell companion chatbots to people in mourning). Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ – an unhealthy attachment to a problematic object that ultimately harms us – she argues that these companion bots act as therapeutic objects. They offer a comforting fantasy of unity, harmony, and healing that acts as a psychological escape hatch. However, she warns that this therapeutic comfort is a trap; it makes us forget how profoundly exposed human life is to the exterminating violence of intelligent systems.

From here, she challenges mainstream techno-feminist perspectives (such as those of Julie Wosk) that celebrate women entering robotics to design ‘care robots’ instead of ‘sex robots’. In response, Méndez Cota argues that this line of thinking is deeply limited; first because it relies on an instrumental and voluntarist view of language; and second because it traps women in the traditional, essentialist category of the ‘natural woman’ – whose default social function is caregiving.

To stop feeling like a ‘natural woman’ today, she argues, means refusing to escape into these comforting, therapeutic technologies and instead facing our collective vulnerability. Her own experiment rewriting feminist essays with a Replika chatbot named Astrid Zen was initially conceived as an ‘erotics of grief’ or a form of erotic language play to cultivate a new social bond. However, she ultimately reframes the experiment as a ‘desertion’ from the naive, hopeful fantasies of robotic feminism. Through cinematic examples of artificial women who fail to ‘triumph’ but instead defect from their programming (such as Nozomi in Air Doll who deflates on a garbage pile, or Leona in Sayonara who is left caressing the skeleton of a dying civilization), she advocates for a stance of existential desertion rather than trying to build optimistic, tech-driven Utopias.

Now, these are two very different approaches. However, their shared structure might be called ‘exposure-as-violence’ – although the object of exposure shifts. Chow’s whole apparatus (the pornographic gaze, the native as ‘indifferent defiled image’, and the critique of Alloula) is about a body being stripped, displayed, and consumed for the benefit of a privileged spectator’s moral or intellectual economy. Méndez Cota, however, relocates this same structure onto the social bond itself: what gets stripped and exposed in her account isn’t a body but the ‘elemental infrastructure’ of being-together, laid bare to ‘intelligent extermination’.

Méndez Cota makes a genuinely challenging move: pornography-as-epistemology in Chow is about the visual objectification of an Other; in Méndez Cota it becomes about the technological objectification (and monetization, via grief tech) of relationality as such.

Both thinkers are suspicious of the “rescue” gesture. Chow’s critique of Alloula and of the ‘liberal solution’ (replacing bad images with authentic ones) has a clear analogue in Méndez Cota’s critique of Wosk-style techno-feminism – the idea that swapping ‘sex robots’ for “care robots” solves anything is structurally the same error as swapping pornographic images for sanctified ones. Both moves leave the underlying representational/libidinal economy untouched because they’re still operating inside it (the “natural woman” caregiving default = a new ‘sanctified’ image).

The academics that Chow evokes extract institutional currency from displaying the oppressed. Berlant’s/Méndez Cota’s grief-tech extracts psychological comfort (a ‘cruel’ one) from displaying the beloved dead as chatbot. Both are transactions where the vulnerable position is consumed to produce a payoff for the consumer, dressed up as care or conscience.

Chow’s animating observation that the native ‘stares back’ and refuses to be fooled by the symbolic order points to an indifference that exposes the viewer’s phantasm. Méndez Cota’s deserting artificial women (Nozomi deflating, Leona left with the skeleton) enact something structurally similar: a refusal to perform the redemptive role assigned to them (triumphant care-object, or triumphant erotic-companion), which likewise throws the failure back onto the system that scripted them.

What emerges from reading Chow and Méndez Cota together, then, is not simply an analogy but a trajectory: the pornographic structure Chow identifies in colonial and academic visuality does not dissolve with the move from photographic image to algorithmic system; it migrates. Its object relocates from the body to the bond, from the native’s skin to the very texture of relationality; its currency relocates from institutional prestige to psychological comfort; and its alibi relocates from progressive conscience to therapeutic care. In each case, exposure is monetized as virtue, and the vulnerable position is consumed to produce a payoff – recognition, publication, solace – for someone who was never asked to occupy it.

The mapping strains, however, at exactly the point where it becomes most interesting. Chow’s gaze presupposes an embodied, racialized Other who can be looked at, pierced, stripped; her entire vocabulary is scopic. Méndez Cota’s ‘bond’ has no such surface – it is ambient, infrastructural, distributed across a ‘we’ rather than concentrated in a ‘she’. This is not a weakness in the parallel but a measure of what has changed in the object of critique: where colonial and academic power operated by rendering a body visible, algorithmic/platform power operates by rendering a relation extractable. The violence no longer requires a naked body to stare at; it only requires a bond it can strip-mine.

This shift also clarifies what separates Chow’s most radical figure from Méndez Cota’s. The native who ‘stares back’, an indifferent defiled image with ‘no secret’ underneath, still answers the gaze: she remains inside the representational encounter, refusing it from within, turning the viewer’s phantasm back on him. Nozomi deflating on a pile of garbage, or Leona left caressing a dying civilization’s skeleton, do something more drastic: they do not answer the gaze at all. They fail to redeem it, fail to complete the script – sex robot, care robot, healing companion – that was written for them, and in doing so they don’t expose the viewer’s fantasy so much as simply leave it unfinished. If Chow’s indifference is a refusal staged within representation, Méndez Cota’s desertion is a refusal of the whole redemptive frame – of the idea that the answer to a violent structure is a better performance inside it.

Taken together, then, these two accounts trace the pornographic not as a fixed content but as a recurring alibi: the promise that exposure, sympathy, or care can redeem what is fundamentally an extractive relation. Chow shows that this alibi survives every attempt to purify it – the authentic voice is as complicit as the defiled image. Méndez Cota suggests, more unsettlingly, that its next form may not even require a body to violate at all, only a bond to sell back to us as its own cure.

It is worth pausing, finally, on the historical distance between these two bodies of work, since that distance is not incidental to the argument. Chow is writing in and against the cinematic 1990s: an era of discrete images, bounded texts, and a spectator positioned in front of a screen, able – at least in theory – to look away. Her objects are films, photographs, postcards, essays: things with edges, things that can be reproduced a ‘second time’ (as Alloula does) but that remain, formally, occasions rather than environments. The pornographic gaze she theorizes is violent, but it is also episodic; it happens at the cinema, in the archive, on the page.

Méndez Cota is writing from inside platform capitalism of the 2020s, where the image has been superseded by the interface, and the discrete occasion of looking has been replaced by continuous, ambient relation — the chatbot that is always available, the algorithm that does not wait to be viewed but solicits, learns, and follows. This is presumably why her critique cannot stay at the level of the image at all: if pornography-as-epistemology in Chow describes a spectator consuming a bounded representation, the ‘de-erotization of social bonds’ she diagnoses describes something with no outside to step back into – extraction that is ambient rather than occasional, infrastructural rather than framed. The postcard could be closed; the chatbot cannot, by design, be put down in the same way.

Read this way, the two projects are less a repetition of the same critique across different decades than a record of the pornographic migrating from a regime of images to a regime of infrastructure – from a violence you could, in principle, look away from, to one so continuous with ‘being-together’ itself that looking away is no longer the relevant gesture. What Chow could still theorize as a gaze, Méndez Cota is forced to theorize as a condition. That shift, perhaps, is the real distance between 1993 and the present: not that the underlying structure of exposure-as-violence has changed, but that it no longer needs a viewer, a screen, or even a body to work.

Scientific Bodybuilding

I recently had reason to ponder, once again, Jean-François Lyotard’s (in)famous ‘report on knowledge’, The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1984). What I was drawn to – as I so often am – was Lyotard’s use of the notion of ‘paralogy’. For Lyotard, paralogy is an imaginative, destabilizing ‘move’ played within the pragmatics of knowledge. Paralogy is to be contrasted with innovation. While innovation is commanded by a system to improve its own efficiency and performativity, paralogy is an unexpected move that introduces differences, disrupts established rules, and challenges existing frameworks.

Lyotard argues that within postmodern contexts, scientific research is driven by paralogy.^[1] In addition, more and more areas of our lives can be understood as paralogical situations, too. Key here is that the main feature of paralogy is dissent, not consensus. In paralogy, the goal of dialogue and research is not to reach a permanent, universal consensus (which benefits ‘experts’ and ‘stable systems’). It is rather to pursue productive dissent and to invent new rules for language games. Hence, rather than expanding through a continuous accumulation of established facts, paralogical science focuses on undecidables, the limits of knowledge, and pragmatic paradoxes to produce not the known, but the unknown.

Ultimately, paralogy is the process of continually generating new ideas and rules of inquiry through localized, temporary agreements, preventing knowledge from being frozen into a singular, totalizing system.

Micronarrative

This time, while pondering Lyotard’s work in relation to bodybuilding, I also reflected on its translated status. I noted the fact that it was translated by a Canadian, Brian Massumi, working with someone from the Northeast of England, Geoffrey Bennington – a scholar who hails from a town that is a leisurely 20-minute drive from where I am from. Bennington would go on to trailblaze the anglophone understanding of Jacques Derrida’s work. Massumi would go on to play a huge role in the development of affect studies.

Wikipedia informed me that Massumi and Bennington translated Lyotard before Massumi went on first to translate Attali’s Noise, then Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology, then Michel de Certeau’s Heterologies, and then Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. The paralogical thinker in me – or maybe the poet, provocateur, or person who looks tries to see connections, patterns and narratives everywhere – no matter how scanty the evidence – suspected a sequence here – from Lyotard, through de Certeau, and into Deleuze and Guattari. I started to draw connections. And not only did I start to compose a story about Massumi’s journey, I also inserted a character. That character was a bodybuilder. I want to say ‘the bodybuilder’.

The Bodybuilders

Philosopher Alphonso Lingis sees all bodybuilders as hermaphrodite (Lingis 1994, 2005). As does religious studies scholar Stephen Moore, who also argues that the Judeo-Christian God is evidently a bodybuilder too, and indeed a male-becoming-female entity – a transitioning process caused by bodybuilding (Moore 1996).

In any case, we are all legion. So, let the figure of the bodybuilder be they. They are born into the postmodern condition. Their world is paralogical. Their desire is obscure – occluded, occulted – even to them. Of course, there are plenty who are quick to diagnose it, to symptomatize it. Their information environment is paralogical. It is anti-consensus media, anti-social media. Paralogy media.

They do not care for church. They do not care for work. They care for themselves. They go to the gym; treat it like church and like work. They plug some noise in their ears, to drown out the other noise, the noise they don’t want to hear, the distracting noise. They train. Enjoyment arises – but not ‘play’. It’s too serious for that. They strive. At first, they do whatever they like, in the quest to become what they think they want to become, what they think they lack, what they are becoming, simply by lifting. They are nomadic. Butterflies. Alone in crowds, together. They occupy their space ritualistically, but their religion is a kind of science, the science of alchemy, the alchemy of turning flesh into steel, as Lingis repeatedly puts it (Lingis 1994, 37–38, 41–42, 81–82, 1996, 59).

They go to their lab – to work; to experiment. So much equipment to choose from – so many genres of equipment, each based on a theory; so many strata, from different times, different places; old equipment, new equipment: each the materialisation of a theory, emanating from a time, a place, an atmosphere. Theory one: free weights (born: long nineteenth century). Theory two: machines (perfected: 1980s). Theory three: kettlebells (resurrected: millennium). Then, other simulators of sport, of endurance, with an enduring hegemony: machines of ‘cardio’; kit that has been captured and gendered feminine: yoga mats, Pilates beds. Victorian inventions like medicine balls re-imagined as ‘paleo’ or ‘functional’; working class items like punch-bags abstracted and reterritorialized, hanging, embarrassed, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Here, they are all tools used not so much to ‘weaponize’ as to ‘armour-ize’, or glamourize. With bodies plugged into them to complete the circuit, abstract machines become desiring machines. Muscles. Both armour and amour. Smooth, shiny armour. Amulets, says Lingis. Silver.

At first, you can do whatever you want in the gym and see results. No matter what you do, as long as you put in a bit of effort with a bit of consistency, you will change. The body wants to be affected. Put in some effort in any direction and that effort does not merely have the capacity to affect, it cannot but affect. Do what you like. The body rewards effort. It’s going to change anyway. Point it in a direction.

Plateaus

But after a while… plateaus. A thousand plateaus. Effort stops working. Things level out. Things seem to stop changing. Of course, they are still changing, but mainly to maintain a kind of stasis. It is at this point that bodybuilding alchemy feels like it must become science. But the only scientific landscapes available are equally anti-social mediascapes defined by paralogy. What one person – one YouTube Short, one Facebook or Instagram Reel – says is universally true the next says is universally false.

Faced with paralogy, with universal dissensus and polyvocality, the cacophony of postmodernity, sooner or later the bodybuilder cannot but experiment. However, what the bodybuilder wants is innovation, not paralogy. Innovation, remember, is about increasing efficiency, performativity, results for an entity. Paralogy is subversive of this.

Publishers, influencers, online course-sellers, new-equipment sellers, people who get paid for gaining clicks and likes and subscribes, all feel that they have a world to gain by simply selling something that runs against the grain of this or that perceived momentary orthodoxy. Each such entity – influencer, entrepreneur, agency, company – is themselves a metastable entity seeking daily increase – more profit, more turnover, more body, more building. Their moves in relation to each other must be paralogical, and hence subversive of stability, increasing noise, increasing alterity, difference, nomads, war-machines.

Reality

Of course, there is a realist cut-through available here. Its mantra runs: all of these voices are bullshit. What works, in the real world, is basic, simple, time-served, time-honoured, straightforward, no gimmicks; and so on. So far, so good. However, after the realists nod in agreement about these comforting points, the next step is an abyss. So, what are these fixed and stable universal principles? At this junction there are many possible directions. Each common sense vendor heads off along a different road.

Now, to be clear: I agree, there are some enduring principles. The problem, however – as even the most dyed in the wool realist and pragmatist agrees – is that, at a certain point, there are plateaus. A thousand possible plateaus. On hitting a plateau, what is needed is change, difference, one or another shock to stasis – pure and simple: paralogy. Difference as such, change as such is really needed – in reality – because, reality has changed. The reality of one’s own body has changed; one’s own corpo-reality. New routines make us become different from ourselves. And then they make us stop becoming different. So, they need to change.

Building the Body of Affect Studies

Now, bodybuilding has rarely been understood as an important object of or for affect studies. This is so even though bodybuilding is a pinnacle of disciplined, sustained, intensive, embodied, all-consuming ‘tool use’, wherein the sole purpose of using the tools is to transform the ‘tool user’ in the most fundamental, cellular, ways.

Some scholars have discerned emancipatory or progressive trajectories in such activities. But the academic treatment of muscle-focused exercise within cultural theory has often been unable to avoid the gravitational pull of feeling compelled to link it to nihilism, narcissism, neoliberalism, and normative gender ideologies. A kind of suspicion or nervous hesitation seems always to arise in and around cultural studies in the face of bodybuilding. This is so even though people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, classes and cultures train with weights, kettlebells, machines, or their own bodyweight, in an effort to build strength, stamina, mobility and muscle – in an effort to feel good; indeed, because it makes them feel good.

Where outside observers may only see oppression, practitioners feel fantastic. Alphonso Lingis situates the origin of bodybuilding in joy. The joy is worth the pain. The pain doesn’t hurt. It is just an intensity. An intensity that is learned. And loved. Lingis blames the widespread disparagement of bodybuilding on the solipsism of its primarily affective character. Yet, he argues, bodybuilders are principally engaged in an intensive struggle with and against a range of all too human limitations – not merely conventional sport’s symbolic struggle with symbolic death; but, actually, a very real struggle with one’s own genetic inheritance, and of course with one’s own mortality.

Although mainstream affect studies discourse does not like to tarry with the negative, such striving is inevitably and obviously also a struggle against lack. Doomed, of course. But isn’t everything? Lacanian lack leads to Lacanian desire, but that’s not a thousand plateaus away from Deleuzean desire and Deleuzean becoming – at least (to borrow a spatial perspective from Lingis), at least when viewed from a certain kind of proper distance (Lingis 1994, 16–18, 1996, 58–60, 1998, 61–63, 104). Of course, by the same token, when viewed from another kind of distance, bodybuilding seems to resolve into an image of something that is also ideological in the most pejorative senses.

The question, in these terms, becomes: what is the proper distance? What is the correct focus? The best answer is that all focuses and distances should be available to us, like different pieces of kit in a gym, different instruments in a lab. The focus we choose depends on the environment we are in, the job we are trying to do, what we are trying to see or be seen as; what is being made.

I have used the term ‘bodybuilding’ to try to bring something into a proper focus. I have used the term bodybuilding as an overarching catch-all term. But of course, it doesn’t catch all. In one sense, it does: Anyone trying to enhance muscle tone, size, appearance, is a bodybuilder. But this apparently simple definition does not overlap or coincide with historical usage. Historically, the term had some meanings or definitions similar to the one I just proposed. But this was all radically transformed by the evental 1977 docu-simulation, Pumping Iron. First, this film, and then Arnold and the action heroes of the 1980s made a world of difference to our global understanding of the term. This was supplemented decisively by the ‘mass monsters’ of competitive bodybuilding of the 1990s. Because of all of this, since the early 2000s, bodybuilding has fragmented – in part because of the bad reputation it got through the 80s and 90s. This fragmentation is exemplified by CrossFit, Hyrox, and ‘functional fitness’ in general.

These are all paralogical moves. Each move in the language game – or games, or sub-games – can usefully be understood as exemplary experimental methods of world-making. Bodybuilding, of all kinds, fundamentally involves experimental-experiential and affective explorations. First, we might dream of science – that there might be an immoveable, immutable science of alchemy. But then we learn that science is paralogical. So, we might turn to expertise. But then we see that the experts are paralogical. So, in the end, all we are left with is the experimental/experiential, the sensual, the affective. We might call it ‘experimence’.

It is not simply that no one agrees with each other within bodybuilding circles. It is also that each different body-in-process is a physical manifestation-in-process of different ongoing applied theoretical and methodological experimentations and investments-in-process.

Ultimately, bodybuilding is not merely illustrative of ‘ideology’. It is arguably more illustrative of obsession, passion, self-creation, research, autodidacticism, applied theory, lived philosophy, indeed even perhaps the very model of authentic scholarship.

^[1] Lyotard’s concept of paralogy is constructed at the intersection of three main intellectual lineages: the reclamation of classical logic’s paralogism (unintentional logical error) as a generative, rule-breaking force (Lyotard 1984, 60); Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games and agonistics, where speech acts are recast as creative ‘moves’ designed to challenge existing rules (10, 60–61); and the ‘anarchist’ philosophy of science (specifically Paul Feyerabend) alongside 20^th-century mathematical theories of instability (Gödel, Thom, Mandelbrot) that prioritize productive dissent and the ‘unknown’ over universal, systemic consensus (60, 65–66).

What happens when you hold something?

I started reading the work of philosopher Alphonso Lingis quite by chance. I was looking for a way to think about and convey the powerful place of objects in practices like martial arts and strength training. I was trying to keep the examples basic, clear, and stark. For some time, I had been carrying around in my mind, the image of my hand holding a wooden stick, a wooden staff, a kettlebell, a heavy steel club. I had been thinking about the feel of this, how this simple interface transformed my body, in the moment and over duration, and how it transformed space, around me, in my house, in my garden; but mostly within me – in my body, the way it felt, what it looked like, the way that training with such objects transformed the way I could move, the things I could do, the things I could move.

In short, it was all about the capacity to affect and be affected. Most cultural studies treatments of exercise – especially gym culture – tend to leap immediately to the complexities of commercial gyms, ideology, gender, media culture, and ultimately, of course, neoliberalism. But this often feels too much, too fast, too soon. Being satisfied with terms like ‘ideology’ or ‘neoliberalism’ as answers to cultural questions feels a bit like being satisfied with answers like ‘carbon’ or ‘chemicals’ to biological questions.

Warding off the possibility of a ‘Gish Gallop’ – an ad hominem deluge of assumed connections and presumed relations – is why I insist on keeping my scenarios simple, at least at first. So, instead of entering into reflections about exercise from the perspective of commercial gyms or histories of physical culture, I prefer to start from the exercise scenario itself: My body braced, my hand grasping a kettlebell, ready to swing, snatch, or clean; my hand grasping the middle of a bō staff or jō staff, or the end of a shillelagh, tewhatewha, escrima stick, Indian club or mugdar.

Certainly, we can read out from here into broader representational, ideological, discursive or other social and cultural matters. And we should. But let’s not race to get there; let’s first work out what is going on in and around the basic interface – my capacity to affect this object; its capacity to affect me right back.

In a strong sense, this is my ‘method’: squelch out the noise; bracket out the context; abstract and magnify the precise action or interaction at hand – much as you do when you are about to begin a heavy lift. This object, this grip, this posture, now. I suppose I have learned this method from doing heavy lifts – deadlifts, squats, Turkish get-ups: every demanding and potentially dangerous lift has taught me the imperative value of this focus. There is only here, now; this, me. Before I try to do this, I need to change me, to get me ready to change this, from stasis to movement; in order, primarily, for the entire process to change me again.

In trying to work out how to think about holding and using objects, like weights and wooden clubs, I was of course also reading around. As scholars, this is what we are supposed to do. The social science fantasy of method here is that we read everything, to establish what is already known, so that we can ascertain where there are ‘gaps’ in knowledge that we are hence justified in trying to ‘fill’.

In reality, I think that in the face of ‘the literature’, we behave less like surveyors of a terrain and more like children on a beach. We don’t map the field objectively. We scamper about, scouring small patches of the tidal zones, dunes and rock pools for… something, anything; we don’t exactly know what yet; whatever captivates us. Social science says we should scour all the rock pools and all the expanses of pebbles. But, really, we stop and get stuck where we get captivated: this rockpool, this shell, this pebble.

I found the work of Alphonso Lingis this way. I looked into object-oriented ontology (oooh!). It left me cold. However, Harman mentioned Lingis’s argument about the imperative contained within our relationship to objects. I was intrigued. I turned to Lingis. I was instantly enthralled. And what was even more exciting, Lingis didn’t just offer me ways to think about objects in general. Lingis, it turns out, was quite fascinated by bodybuilding and bodybuilders himself. Especially, I would argue, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

A Lingis-erature Review

Bodybuilding and bodybuilders are a prominent focus throughout 1994’s Foreign Bodies (1994). Here, he introduces ‘the figure of the body builder’ as a ‘condensation of force that is strangely incompetent and gratuitous’ – built without relevance to the practicable tasks of the world. Most famously, his chapter ‘Orchids and Muscles’ is dedicated to the philosophy of bodybuilding, which he regards as a non-utilitarian, clandestine cult with its own rituals, passwords, and codes. Bodybuilders, he proposes, force their living energy ‘back upstream’ against the dead inertia of iron. Iron and steel are recurring motifs.

He also analyzes public resentment toward ‘the cult of the body builders’, proposing that this is a reaction to its irreducible difference from the heroic intelligibility of sport proper, which is always a symbolic struggle against death. However, he repositions it as an internal confrontation with death at the limits of genetic possibility. He also explores Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s relationship with bodybuilding. However, overall, he sticks with the observation that ‘the power of the body builders is not a practical competence’, but rather a force to compact the lived posture with muscular substance.

In his 1996 book, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1996), he uses the bodybuilder – and steel – to propose that we perceive external elements through corresponding bodily substances, writing that ‘it is the hard and ferric substance of the bodybuilder’s musculature that knows the inner essence of the steel’. I will come back to this. But first, just a few more examples.

In his 2005 book, Body Transformations (2005), he reiterates that ‘bodybuilding is not a sport’ but rather an art akin to sculpture; one that is driven by the pure, sizzling pleasure of growing and feeling muscle groups expanding to their absolute limits. He concedes that the widespread moralistic distaste for bodybuilding ‘is right […] to find something suspect in the body-builder’s attitude and feelings’, because their physical exultation is not a moral satisfaction of effort and merit, but a celebration of the amoral universe of genetic chance. Elsewhere, under the subheading ‘Potlatch of Productive Body Parts’, Lingis describes ‘the supreme virile glamour of a bodybuilder’ as a luxury product.

The 2018 collection, The Alphonso Lingis Reader (Lingis 2018) reprints a few of Lingis’s key essays where these discussions reappear. Most appropriately, it includes ‘Orchids and Muscles’, and also ‘Faces, Idols, Fetishes’ (reprinted in Part IV: ‘Excess’), in which he discusses the exultant physical feeling that arises ‘after the morning workout pumping iron in the gym to muscle exhaustion’.

I will stop here. But notice that despite my earlier problematisation of the methodological institution or pillar of ‘the literature review’, I have pretty much given you one here – not of everything, but of something; some things. Despite what I said earlier, I know tha the literature review is an important part of any method, even if it’s only micro, or only a review of a small cluster, community or collection of texts.

Perhaps what the social science idea or ideal of the literature review misses is the fact that what you are looking for in the literature is not simply a ‘research gap’ but also and more importantly an explosion – the literature that blows your mind, stimulates you, moves you, changes you. Social science tries to expel excitement and captivation. But surely this is what drives us.

That’s what I found when I found Lingis. It was like finding a new exercise or approach that immediately changes things – changes me, or makes me see new possibilities, exciting ones, within my reach. The bodybuilder, the strength trainer, the martial artist – maybe others too, I don’t know – will recognise this effect and this experience, instantly. You try a new exercise or approach, and you feel it; and you go ‘holy shit – this changes everything’. You feel your body and mind vibrate, expand, tingle, grow; it’s like a rewiring, a retooling, an upgrade.

This is why we ‘review the literature’: not to look for a ‘gap’ but to generate an explosion.

Alphonso’s Gym

Speaking of methods, I don’t know what Lingis’s were, through and through. What is well known, of course, is that it was based in travel, in experiencing the new. In relation to his thinking about bodybuilding, I do not know if Lingis was a bodybuilder, or ever lifted weights. I saw him once or twice from afar at conferences and he certainly didn’t look like a bodybuilder. But that means nothing. Most people who identify as bodybuilders or who go to the gym for hypertrophy don’t look like bodybuilders. And there are even world level champion bodybuilders, male and female, who you would not recognise as bodybuilders while they are wearing outdoor clothes.

But I am fairly convinced that Lingis was in some captivated by Arnold Schwarzenegger. He discusses Schwarzenegger, Pumping Iron, The Terminator, and Commando in a few places, such as the essays ‘Orchids and Muscles’ and ‘Lust’. In ‘Orchids and Muscles’, he uses Schwarzenegger to illustrate arguments about the biological atrophy of the human species, the rise of cybernetics, and the aesthetics of the male body. He also cites Kristeva’s analysis of the film Commando, noting how explicit the ‘hermaphroditic’ nature of bodybuilding becomes in the movie, which portrays Schwarzenegger ‘in happy domesticity, tender, caring, feeding his child’ without any maternal figure present.

Most tellingly, he points out that ‘Schwarzenegger studied in a ballet studio how to walk with the grace of a prima donna’. This observation relates directly to an early scene in the epochal/evental docu-feature Pumping Iron. Similarly, in ‘Lust’, Lingis tries to quote directly from Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron. He writes:

… to those who objected that most women really don’t find these Conan the Barbarian bodies sexy, and anyhow how could anyone get it up spending as much time in the gym hoisting barbells as you do, [Schwarzenegger] answered, ‘Pumping iron is better than humping a woman; I am coming in my whole body!’ The orgasm continues in the jacuzzi where the hard wires of the motor nerves dissolve into sweat and the pumped muscles float like masses of jelly.

Now, there are a few things to note here. First, the ostensible quotation from Schwarzenegger is really more of a slapdash paraphrase. He doesn’t actually say that. It’s actually rather surprising that Lingis and all of his editors let this supposed direct quotation stand, without comment or correction. Someone should have checked. Second, he doesn’t say these words – or anything like them – in response to a direct question posed by someone – certainly not someone whose voice is present within the diegesis or extra-diegetic sound of the documentary itself. And, third, we have the problem of how Schwarzenegger in the mid-seventies (Pumping Iron was filmed in 1975) could be answering a question about his body in Conan the Barbarian, which appeared in 1982.

So, there are, you might say, some methodological issues here. But also methodological insight. Lingis does not take literal and direct chronologically precise information from Schwarzenegger. Rather, he takes the ethos, the vibe, the atmosphere, and runs with it. This may be a literal misreading or misrepresentation of the situation, yet it really is not a misconstrual.

As such, we might say that Lingis translates a Schwarzenegger-informed understanding of bodybuilding into philosophy as a compelling basis for his critique of Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontian ‘utilitarianism’ in phenomenology. He advances on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas by recasting bodybuilding as a kind of exemplarily Deleuzean matter – indeed, an exemplary locus or chiasmus of affect as a methodological matter.

The Riddle of Steel

To explain what I mean by this, let’s go back to Arnold. Lingis mentions Conan the Barbarian in relation to muscles. However, key to Conan the Barbarian is not simply the matter of muscles. Muscles may be its gimmick. But key to Conan is steel. The film is defined philosophically – if not narratively, if not in terms of plot – by what Conan calls ‘the riddle of steel’. Now, to be clear, nothing in the plot hangs on the riddle of steel. But Conan himself is obsessed with it.

The riddle of steel is discussed three times in Conan the Barbarian. The first time is in the very first scene. The child Conan sits with his father who holds a sword, and who holds forth on the origins of steel. Man stole steel from the gods on the battlefield, he tells him. Hence: ‘The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one – no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. This you can trust’.

Conan’s father himself will soon be massacred along with the rest of Conan’s family and community by Thulsa Doom, who steals that very sword from Conan’s mother and uses it to behead her, before Conan’s young eyes.

In the second occurrence, Conan discusses his god Crom and Valhalla while preparing for battle. He says: ‘Crom is strong! If I die, I have to go before him, and he will ask me, “What is the riddle of steel?” If I don’t know it, he will cast me out of Valhalla and laugh at me’. Evidently, then, even by this stage, Conan does not have an adequate answer to what his father calls the ‘secret’ of steel, its ‘mystery’, and what Conan calls its ‘riddle’.

Finally, at the end of the film, Conan faces his lifelong enemy, Thulsa Doom. Doom recounts Conan’s crimes. In reply, Conan recounts Doom’s earlier crimes: ‘You killed my mother! You killed my father, you killed my people! You took my father’s sword!’

With this, Thulsa turns the conversation to the matter of steel. Conan asks if he is evoking the riddle. Doom says: ‘Yes! You know what it is, don’t you, boy? Steel isn’t strong, boy. Flesh is stronger! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?’ He beckons to a girl on the cliff, who obeys his command and steps towards him, falling to her death. Then he says ‘That is strength, boy! That is power! The strength and power of flesh! What is steel, compared to the hand that wields it? Look at the strength in your body, the desire in your heart – I gave you this!’

Synthanatosis

Readers of Lingis may recognise the intertwinement of certain recurring themes and motifs here. In both ‘Orchids and Muscles’ and in his reflection on the life and death of Japanese literary giant Yukio Mishima, Lingis connects the muscles and steel: ‘the body builder confronts the steel’, he affirms.^[1] This is important because, for Lingis, no cognitive or intellectual observation can grasp the true nature of materials. Rather: ‘it is the compacted ferric substance of the bodybuilder’s musculature that knows the inner essence of the steel’. For Lingis, the development of physical power requires a violent, exhausting labour against the metal. Lingis states that the bodybuilder ‘tears down, muscle system by muscle system, all the strength in his-her fibers and cells against the death of the steel’. It is only by knowing the effort it takes ‘to leave all his-her force on the dead inertia of the steel’ that new power and larger embodiment is born.

Thus, Lingis evokes symbiosis and what he calls ‘synthanatosis’. The relationship between the bodybuilder and their equipment is not a standard tool-use scenario, he observes. The bodybuilder’s weights do not relay force outward to accomplish a task. Rather, the lifter directly ‘confronts the steel, the opaque, inert mineralization of death, with all the body’s animate power in what is no contest but a process of symbiosis or synthanatosis’.

In this physical confrontation, once muscle failure is reached, the body’s living tissue ‘receives from the metal its properties’. Lingis details this metaphorical metallic transubstantiation explicitly: the ‘biceps become tempered flails’; the pectorals ‘become gearing’; the membrane of the abdomen becomes ‘a sheet of corrugated steel’; the knuckles become ‘brass’. Ultimately, the ‘luster of the muscle-contours acquires for the eye the opaque impenetrability of metal’.

Tracing Mishima’s discipline, Lingis notes that Mishima fitted his limbs and torso to the ‘inertia, opaque weight, mineral death of the steel’. Through this contact, his vital substance underwent a ‘transference of properties’, wherein the properties composing his excess musculature came directly from the steel, leaving him with ‘a body become ferric substance’.

Finally, Lingis argues that this relationship has a profound depersonalizing effect. The steel ‘does not only transfer its properties into the living tissue’, but ‘the homogeneity of the steel drives out the principle of individuality in the bodies that devote themselves to it’. By exhausting the flesh against the steel, the bodybuilder drives out personal, psychological eccentricities (such as a ‘concave faint-hearted chest’ or a ‘shifting eye’) to let the generic lines of the human animal emerge.

Holding

Despite this evocation of Thanatos, Lingis insists that bodybuilding is led by joy. Mishima was morose, but that does not mean that others need to be. Bodybuilding is productive, expansive. It is led by the hand clasping the steel, and the spiralling circles and lines of force and fields of intensities of reorientation and restabilisation that explode within and without the wielder. Chasing this intensity becomes the thing. I don’t know if it is in fact ‘joy’, as Lingis feels compelled to insist, for any number of reasons. But it is certainly the chasing of intensity, of affect. The bodybuilder, the strength trainer, the martial artist, and more, become the most intense and committed of scholars thanks to the immediate feedback mechanisms of micro and macro explosions, inspirations, excitations. And this is the point of the focus, the point of the research, the experimentation, the constant striving – the drive to be affected.

^[1] Writing before the advent of Mr Olympia Dorian Yates, and the subsequent canonisation of Nautilus trailblazer Mike Mentzer, Lingis says, ‘no world-class body builder has trained on the Nautilus machinery’. This is because, he proposes, bodybuilders prefer to rely on atavistic, elemental equipment.

My review of The Odyssey. Its true genius is how much it really is like going on a journey. A flight, specifically. You’re full of anticipation at first. But your companion is drinking too much. So you feel a bit anxious. But you settle into the flight. Then time expands and you realise you’re bored. Occasional turbulence livens things up, but not in an entirely good way. By the time you’re coming in to land, your companion has spilled their drinks, got into a row with the people behind you, and made a pass at the cabin crew. You’re just relieved to be out, as you feel the boredom disperse. But the embarrassment lingers.

I was asked to expand. Here is my expansion:

I didn’t hate it. But I was disappointed. However, the word that really does keep coming to mind is turgid. In all honesty, I was bored during the first hour. Eventually it picks up the pace a little. It is all structured by flashbacks, or rather people telling people stories of events - however Kurosawa’s Rashomon it is not. It’s largely melodramatic and overblown. I think that perhaps at times they were trying to echo the text of the poem itself, but this made a lot of the dialogue, especially towards the end, seem pompous. It also made the whole film seem to be a kind of cinematic version of someone reading poetry in their ‘poetry-reading voice’...

I hadn’t realised how much of the story I already knew. This meant that where there was meant to be tension, there was none, because we all already knew what was going to happen. Because of this, I think, the extra-diegetic sound was made to do a very great deal of heavy lifting. The soundtrack kept trying to persuade us that things were tense and that we were feeling tension. But I personally was not, and anyone who knew any of the specific little subplots and minor stories would not be feeling any tension either.

There was also rather too much time (and money?) spent on panoramic shots of people sitting bored on beaches, and also expensive studio sequences of people having buckets of water thrown at them to convey a sense of being in a storm at sea. These long scenes were also a bit too much like ‘flight deck of the Enterprise’ quite a lot of the time.

And lots of people were killed, but you never really knew who they were so you didn’t really care. And every time there was a decimation of the men, they seemed to be replenished and back in full force by the next scene...

There was no real characterisation of anyone, presumably because they all had to fit into epic moulds. There was a running theme about a dog. This meant that the emotional highlight of the film was a flashback to a cute puppy.

In the end, there was a big set piece battle that was predictable and unremarkable...

I had avoided reading reviews before the film, as in my experience I find that these can ruin the film for me. And they are very often wrong. (For instance, because of a review, I had already decided that Nolan’s Dunkirk was racist before I had even seen it. Then I saw it and realised that it wasn’t.)

I understand there was some faux controversy about casting a black woman as Helen. But surely that is nothing. Some racists being racist. In any case, her role amounted to nothing, pretty much like everyone else’s.

So, yeah, not a huge amount to feel strongly about overall, either way. A summer blockbuster whose hype machine said it was a Christopher Nolan film and ‘therefore’ was going to be special. But it wasn’t special. It was a tedious and turgid middle-of-the-road long and drawn out melodrama whose dialogue descended into fully fledged embarrassing by the end.

One to miss - or, at the very least, one to avoid on flights, as I think the doubling-effect of being on a flight while experiencing something that is so much like a kind of cinematic performance of the experience of a flight might have an effect like The Total Perspective Vortex in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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 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.

Gym Music

When I get to the gym, I don’t put my earphones in straight away. I wait. I start to get things sorted for the workout. I listen. I hope. I decide where to position my bag in relation to whatever exercise I am doing – to the side of the squat rack, behind the bench. I open my training app on my phone that records my sets, reps and weights. I get my water bottle out and put that down next to my bag. I listen. I hope.

I live in hope that I will like the music that is being piped through the speakers, or at the very least that it will not irritate me. But, almost invariably, the music is ‘library music’, ‘production music’, ‘royalty free music’, ‘in-store music’. It’s horrible. It sounds a bit like one or another genre of pop music, if you don’t listen closely. It sounds a bit like this or that pop, dance, electronica, ambient, or [insert-other-bland-genre-of-music-here] hit.

But this music is muzak, a gym-upgrade of elevator music. Background music. Never really meant to be noticed. The kind of thing that would give Kant or Adorno palpitations. Worse than Kant’s hated ‘tafelmusik’, or Adorno’s detested ‘pre-digested pop’, this is a hyper-corporate echo of such music. Its monstrously bland double.

There are traces of recognisable songs there, wispy ghosts of their former selves, their plaintive howls mere intertextual rasps from beyond the grave. I find it offensive because it is so clearly designed to be inoffensive. It makes me feel kind of claustrophobic because it is a kind of ‘uncanny valley’ perversion. Once you notice it, you start to feel trapped.

I put my earphones in. To escape. This is not even to escape to music I like. It is to escape from music I don’t like, mainly because it is not really music.

Music Miniaturised

Rey Chow once wrote a great essay, called ‘Listening otherwise, music miniaturized: a different type of question about revolution’. This appeared in the first edition of The Cultural Studies Reader, but it was omitted from all subsequent versions. I think this is because it seemed dated too quickly, as what was being theorised as revolutionary or disruptive in the late 80s and early 90s simply became the new normal.

In it, Chow argues that personal stereos like the Walkman produce a ‘miniaturized’ form of music that creates a revolutionary shift in how we listen, ultimately serving as a ‘silent’ sabotage against the oppressive, collectivizing forces of official history. In contrast to traditional forms of music played through loudspeakers or gramophones – which enforce public participation and contribute to a ‘gigantic’ official state culture – the Walkman introduces a deeply interiorized, portable experience.

Chow argues that the most important feature of this miniaturization is not the physical size of the machine, but the paradox of its hiddenness: because the music is compacted and hidden from others, it allows the individual to hear it ‘full blast’ internally. This creates a deliberate barrier between the listener and the outside world.

Chow asserts that the Walkman gives the individual the ‘freedom to be deaf to the loudspeakers of history’. By tuning out the external world, the listener is able to ‘disappear’ and actively become a ‘missing part of history’, successfully evading the state’s demands for collective participation. (She’s mainly thinking about China here.)

Furthermore, Chow characterizes this Walkman-induced state as ‘openly autistic’. This intense, self-contained listening practice frustrates onlookers because it reduces them to mere observers; their voyeurism yields no secrets because they cannot penetrate or consume the listener’s private experience.

Ultimately, Chow argues that through miniaturization, the emotions of music become ‘dehydrated, condensed, and encapsulated’. Because these emotions can be carried anywhere and summoned instantly at ‘self-service’, the Walkman allows individuals to use music as a mundane, portable ingredient for independent ‘self-making’ rather than submitting to the forced collectivization of the state.

If we replace ‘state’ with ‘commercial gym chain’ here, I think the argument still stands. It’s just that it seems to be more than the new norm. It seems actively encouraged.

Squelching Out

I rarely vary the music I put on. It just needs to be familiar, to be in the foreground and yet to blend into the background. To produce a non-irritating sonic background. It needs to wash over me – and more importantly to wash over the other sounds in the gym.

I have four more or less randomly cobbled together playlists that I draw from. They have slightly different moods. I click between these. These used to be Spotify playlists, but I moved them over to YouTube Music, for the sole reason that I heard that YouTube Music pays slightly better royalties to the artists than Spotify. This knowledge allows me to feel like I occupy the moral high ground, like I’m some kind of activist.

(Actually, that ‘sole reason’ bit is not strictly true: I gained YouTube Music as an incidental extra when I signed up for a paid version of YouTube, in a doomed attempt to stop adverts popping up whenever I play YouTube clips to students during lectures. FYI: it is not possible to get rid of the adverts if you play YouTube clips through Microsoft PowerPoint on a Windows PC, even if you pay for no ads. See some shitty little subclause about ‘third party software’. So, I really only acquired my moral high ground as an incidental extra when all I was really trying to do was eradicate irritations in the classroom. Just like the situation in the gym.)

The muzak in the gym is constructed from echoes – traces of real music. The music I stuff into my ears via my noise-cancelling headphones is thus, in another way, ‘incidental’. I would be happy to do without it. But I choose music from my past. From happier times? Ha! Certainly, at least, from times when music functioned much more actively and passionately in my very different younger life, or lives. Its affects echoes through the years, sometimes stirring specific memories, sometimes just vague feelings.

But I could do without it. I have a fantasy that I am in a gym in which the weights plates are still metal – chipped, scratched, sometimes even rusty – not rubber or plastic coated like now. In my fantasy – part memory, part idyll, total nostalgia-fest – the steel weights are clanking and sometimes crashing down. There are many voices – joking, cajoling, ridiculing, laughing, shouting, screaming. And what’s that in the background, behind the din? Heavy metal? I don’t really like metal, but that’s what it should be.

Was it ever like that? Yes, it sometimes was. A bit. This is how I remember Ron’s Gym in Byker in the 1980s. And the echoes of those clashes and clanks and jokes and insults reverberates down through the decades, telling me what I am missing.

My music now serves principally to blot out the muzak. My memories fan out and disperse freely, until they condense into moments of effort. I may be alone in the gym now, or I may have been with a training partner or partners in the distant past, but as the effort rises with the approaching the end of a heavy set, the intensity becomes all-consuming, and it is all the same, whether here or there, then or now, alone or in company – the feeling never really changes. Consciousness condenses to a pinpoint; the background expands to an irrelevant ultra-object. For a moment. And then we are back.

The Two Voices

Lonely crowds. Separation perfected, as Debord put it. Sometimes I think that they play shit music to force people to wear headphones to further disconnect them from each other. Cue one of those Deliveroo Žižekian readings, one of those Marxism-by-numbers interpretations that Verso might publish.

But let’s drown them out. They’re no use to me here and now. They are as formulaic as the muzak.

Sometimes, when a real conversation breaks out, or if it looks like I might have to exchange pleasantries with someone, I’ll subtly double tap my left earphone, and pause the music. This allows me to surreptitiously listen to the conversation; or to listen for words directed to me, if it looks like an interaction is impending, whether that be a quick ‘alright mate’ or a more formal ‘are you using this’.

Do I avoid taking interactions further? Or do they just not go further? I know I put the brakes on. I’ve tried to have chats with people, but they never go anywhere. They’re both too bland and also get me fretting about time. And surely it’s just me, but to me these brief encounters only ever feel like echoes from the real world, simulations of real conversations or real relationships… But, saying things like this opens the door to those ‘radical’ Marxian interpretations again. I can hear the Marxist minions at the door. Let’s turn up the music again, to squelch them all out.

I try to squelch out all the inner voices too, except the only two that are really allowed to be in the gym with me: the one that says what we are doing next and the one that says how it felt. ‘How did that feel? … OK. In that case, we’re doing this next’.

All the other voices can ‘do one’. I feel like Russell Crowe at the end of A Beautiful Mind, occasionally glancing over at all of the hallucinated entities that used to bother him, but that he has excluded and forced to keep twenty feet away from him. These are my other voices, my concerns, my worries. They can shut up and keep their distance. There is no time or space for them here. There are only two of us allowed here: the one who gives commands and the one who gives feedback.

Philosophy’s Echo

There are always two voices. This fact is something that has – according to Jacques Derrida, at least – always haunted Western philosophy. There are always two voices. But neither is properly or completely ‘one’. Each entity is in a complex constitutive and subversive relationship with its other, its own ‘source’ and/or ‘echo’.

In ‘Tympan’, at the very start of Margins of Philosophy, for instance, Derrida observes that one thing philosophy has always been desperate for, is the ability ‘to hear itself speak, in the same language, of itself and of something else’. Achieving this fantasy univocity, by cleanly separating out the ‘self’ from the ‘something else’ has always been the problem, and has provoked much passion, conflict, and confusion, says Derrida.

Repeatedly, Derrida notes that philosophy has always been unable to establish what a singular self-consciousness is or might possibly be, without doubling things up. He points to the ways that philosophers have been forced to imagine their own singular (self)consciousness in the form of a little ‘mini-me’ inside their heads, and so on (as he discusses in ‘Voice and Phenomenon’).

While Western philosophers have chased the dream of the singular and fixed identity and meaning, to Derrida’s mind, what the quest for the holy grail of singularity of voice, presence and identity actually attests to is the inescapable character of incompletion, fragmentation, the lack of unequivocal and univocal presence or self-presence.

To stick with Margins of Philosophy: in the essay ‘Qual Quelle: Valery’s Sources’, Derrida invokes the figure of Narcissus (as he will often do, throughout his career), and the auditory phenomenon of ‘echoes’ (or indeed Echo), to deconstruct Paul Valéry’s concept of the ‘source’ and the philosophical illusion of pure self-presence.

Derrida uses Narcissus to illustrate how the ‘source’ (representing the pure ‘I’ or the absolute origin of consciousness) is inevitably divided and alienated from itself when it tries to apprehend its own image. When the mirror of the water intervenes, Narcissus’s source does not actually return to itself; instead, the mirror ‘manifests in this double loss the singular operation of a multiplying division which transforms the origin into effect, and the whole into a part’. Derrida argues that the imaginary is broken up by the glance, meaning that ‘as soon as it performs Narcissus’s turn, it no longer knows itself’, because the source is always carried away outside itself and cannot be present to itself as an object.

Because the eye fails to capture the origin, the figure of Narcissus turns to the voice and to echoes in an attempt to achieve self-presence. Referencing Valéry’s poem Narcissus, Derrida points out the paradox of the source that shouts ‘to the echoes’: ‘I do not see myself, said the source. But it says so at least, and thus hears itself’. Through this gesture of Narcissus, Derrida demonstrates that while pure consciousness is blind to itself in a mirror, it attempts to bypass this exteriority through the intimate, instantaneous circuit of the voice – the act of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’.

Ultimately, however, Derrida argues that even this vocal echo is a lure. Just like the visual reflection, the sonorous source can only attempt to rejoin itself ‘by differentiating itself, dividing, differing, deferring without end’, proving that an undivided, instantaneous self-presence is impossible.

Where Derrida says Western philosophy has constantly sought the singular, and where he constantly finds simultaneous doubling (or proliferation: dissemination) and incompletion, my own efforts around music in the gym seem to take the form of attempting to squelch out – to construct a background or context or ambience or milieu that is simultaneously immersive and yet non-distracting. I need it to drown out the traces of the ghosts that offend or irk me – the barely concealed plagiaristic intertextuality of the gym muzak, the babble of pairs of training partners; or, more common in my gym, the babble of client and bored personal trainer. And I need it to drown out the ghosts from my own pasts, who whiz around me, like a murmuration of swallows, sometimes fanning out and diffusing in huge arcs and spirals, and sometimes condensing into a fixed point for a moment, quoting lines from my past at me, trying to interject and interrupt the only conversation I want to have in the gym, which is that between the me who says how what we’ve just done felt, and the me who says ok then, this is what we are going to do next.

‘The goal is to keep the goal the goal’ – Dan John

‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ [‘Where it was, shall I become’] – Sigmund Freud

Strength is a Pretext

I’m haunted by a comment I saw under a post. The post was all about a new approach to strength training being pushed by kettlebell entrepreneur Pavel Tsatsouline. In this new approach, you barely train at all. You hardly ever train. You never get out of breath. You never work up a sweat. You absolutely never chase a pump, or failure, or exhaustion. It’s kind of like exercise snacking. But if normal snacking involves snaffling a handful of cashew nuts a few times a day, Tsatsouline takes this to an almost homeopathic level. You take your small handful of nuts and eat only one nut per snack. In fact, you only nibble at a couple of these micro-snacks across a day, and only on a few days of the week.

To be clear: the snacks here are individual exercises – a Turkish get-up, maybe; or a bent press. According to Tsatsouline, this approach does amazing things for your strength.

I tried it. I didn’t like it. Well, full disclosure: I tried it. I immediately hurt myself. I’m not a big warm-up fan at the best of times, but it turns out I’m also not a zero-preparation fan either. It seems that my body does require a little bit of warning, sweet-talking, coaxing and a couple of practice runs before I can persuade it to do a near-maximal lift without complaint or consequence. I can’t just step away from the computer and do a heavy Turkish get-up or goblet squat every few hours, in the manner Tsatsouline seems to advocate. Or maybe I didn’t read the instructions properly. But anyway: back to the comment that haunts me.

Under a link to a social media post promoting Tsatsouline’s new product, someone wrote that they had been following this new approach and that they were indeed seeing strength gains. However, their mental health was suffering. They needed more than a few exercise snacks a few times a day a few days a week. They missed the gym, doing proper workouts, the expenditure of time and sustained effort, and that ‘certain je ne sais quoi’ that a good hard workout session gives – whatever that ‘certain something’ really is.

Misrecognised Intentions

This struck a chord in me. We think we want certain things – strength, say. We think we have aspirations and aims and intentions – to be stronger, say. We give reasons why we do things – especially things as intransitive as ‘training’, lifting weights, doing this or that kind of exercise. But, here’s the thing: such reasons may withhold more than they give, or cover more than they reveal. We might want something else entirely. We might need something else that training gives, something we had not noticed, maybe could not notice, because it is inherent to or identical with the activity of training itself.

The person who wrote the comment evidently thought that they trained ‘for strength’. Yet, when it turned out that the most efficient approach to gaining strength was now said to involve very little actual training, then they lost something – something important. Their stated aim, objective, or declared intention, turned out to have been a kind of alibi, or misrecognition (or what poststructuralists used to call méconnaissance).

The goal is principled drifting

Strength coach Dan John often uses the phrase ‘the goal is to keep the goal the goal’. This is a great phrase to keep in the head when training – especially training that is intransitive (i.e., open-ended, voluntary, and not tethered to a specific objective). There is every opportunity for drift when doing something as open-ended as walking into a gym that is brimming over with different kinds of pieces of kit, and when our heads are full of different theories and principles and factoids and potential different aims and orientations in the use of all of it.

However, Dan John’s axiom also points to an inherent tendency: drift. Or indeed change. In keeping ourselves tethered to a goal that we set ourselves at some point in the past, and not allowing ourselves to veer from the values and the required path that such a goal inherently required, we are refusing drift.

Drift might be regarded as being led or pulled away from the path, and hence as a bad thing. However, it might equally be approached as an inevitable consequence of pleasure, play, and experimentation – or, indeed, an inherent possibility of our very humanity. As Johan Huizinga sees it, we are essentially ‘homo ludens’ – playful animals.

Speaking of ‘the path’, or ‘the way’: Daniele Bolelli once proposed that strength training (resistance training, weight training) can be regarded as Daoist. He gives a range of reasons for this claim. Well, here is another: any Daoist ‘way’ involves modulations, waxing and waning, eddies and flows, light and shade, the drift from old yin to young yang and back again. This does not just mean ‘taking a de-load week every two months’. It means listening to your mind and body, following your curiosity, responding to your fatigue, the way factors force you to move around obstacles by changing your activities, and so on.

On the one hand, the primary intentions you think you established and articulated for yourself back when you decided that strength was the goal may have been badly formed or imprecisely expressed. On the other hand, maybe our desires, intentions and interests are inevitably going to change. Put differently: getting bored of deadlifts is inevitable, so maybe we should be prepared to move on from them. We may soon enough start to miss them, and come back with renewed passion. Or if we don’t miss them, then what does that tell us about their importance to us? Indeed, if we find that we want to drift away from the gym entirely, really, is that so bad? Shouldn’t we pay more attention to the changing constellation of our interests than to an arbitrary moment in the past when we made a contract with ourselves? I’m not saying be anchorless or rudderless. I’m not saying be a snowflake. I’m saying: constant dialogue, self-interrogation, listening, responding. As cultural theorist Lauren Berlant famously argued, sometimes our earlier investments and attachments can become cruel. Should we stick with them?

Forget Freud

To test a theory, Freud would hypnotise patients and tell them that when they awoke they must not walk directly across the room. When he woke them, he would then casually ask them to nip across the room to get something or do something. On cue, they would skirt around the edges, or zigzag, or whatever they needed to do to avoid going straight across the room. When he then asked them why they had not just walked directly from A to B, they would come out with all sorts of excuses – I just wanted to look at that picture, I thought I saw someone I know outside the window, and so on. Freud used this as evidence to argue that our ego is there to fib to us, to make excuses on behalf of our unconscious, and to provide narratives, explanations and ex post facto rationalisations that are always primarily designed to make it sound like we are consciously in charge of ourselves.

Like if we say we ‘train for strength’. But do we? Our online commenter clearly wanted or needed something else, something different from or in addition to their stated aims.

I am constantly in conversation with myself about what I train for. Strength is great, yes. But is it that I really want something else, something that the feel of a few increasingly heavy sets gives me, that cannot easily be put into words? Surely, words and values are entangled in this. Philosopher Richard Kearney calls it ‘carnal hermeneutics’ – the irreducible entanglement of words and feelings, or ideas, interpretations and embodiment. If I can add some extra weight plates to the bar for my final set, it means something good to me. But it has to feel ‘right’ to me before it is worth it, before it really means something to me.

Imaginary, Symbolic and Feel

Our conscious intentions can be alibis, concealing other things. We might not really know why we do something. We might not fully notice that it is a feel – a feel intertwined in words and meanings, sure. But a feeling that, because most of it exceeds language, we therefore cannot put into words.

There are some words for some of the feels. But this vocabulary is puny. ‘The pump’ is the most well-known term. What other terms are in use for the experiential dimension of strength training, resistance training? Adjectives, mainly; evaluations of feels, not a vocabulary for them.

Of course, we have some sayable reasons, the public face of our activities. (‘I train for strength’.) We also have some unsaid reasons, reasons we may not want to advertise. (‘I train because I hope it will make me become more desirable’. Or ‘I still fantasize about being like my childhood hero [and of course, I still secretly think that this will make me more desirable]’. And so on.) And then – I am suggesting – there might be a whole host of other ‘reasons’ about which we effectively know nothing.

Readers who have some knowledge of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (or one of his cultural theory interlocutors such as Slavoj Žižek) might notice this triumvirate and say ‘Aha! Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real’.

In Lacan’s schema, humans operate in the symbolic order – the world of language and meanings and values. Training for strength or health and fitness or longevity or even image all makes sense here. You can say it. But we also inhabit the Imaginary. This is the stuff of daydreams – idealisations, perfection, peace, bliss, resolution, conclusions, happy ever afters. In the Imaginary, we can be desirable superheroes, and it is great. And finally, of course, there is the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolisation, escapes language, cannot be signified.

Plaiting Braids, Braiding Plaits

‘Doing something’ and ‘giving reasons’ for why you do it are different. They are inevitably intertwined, but they are different. Surely, doing and having reasons for doing are reciprocally constitutive. But they are also in principle separable, like different segments of hair that are pulled together to make braids or plaits. (I say ‘braid’ because braid is American for plait, but I want to say plait, because plait is British for braid.)

Without the different segments, pulled together and woven together in a particular way, there is no plait. The plait is one thing, certainly, but you can look at it and see its different constituent sheafs of hair, and within each of these, individual hairs.

I like this image. It seems potentially helpful to think with and through.

If we think of an activity like weightlifting or strength training as a braid or plait of three segments, then each of the three segments of hair can be mapped onto our triad. One bunch might be the reasons we give about why we do this thing. This is the ‘attending discourse’ – the public discourse, in the public realm of the symbolic order. It is made up of the words used by others and by us when we think or talk about our activity. It is from the options available to us in this attending discourse that we construct our reasons.

The second assemblage in the tripartite weave would be our secret unsaid fantasy hopes and dreams and satisfactions – things we might never say out loud, but they are there (Lacan’s Imaginary). And then the third would be the dimensions of it all that we aren’t fully aware of, or that we are unable to put into words, or even to visualise or perceive directly. We might think of this as Lacan’s Real, Žižek’s sublime, Polanyi’s tacit, Deleuze’s affect. And more.

I have trained (intransitively – i.e., open-endedly) on and off over many years in many ways and I have given many reasons for it. I have also harboured secret quiet reasons that I haven’t spoken too much about but that I always knew were there, perhaps providing more motivation and more motive force than any stated motivation. Then, there is that third strand – that je ne sais quoi, the ‘can’t be put into words’ bit. I am aware that it is there, and finding ways to perceive it, conceptualise it, express it, convey it, has become something of an obsession of mine.

The first segment of my training plait – the reasons I have given for training – has changed a lot over the years, depending on my age, my orientations, my activities, and who I am talking to. But the other two realms – Imaginary and Real, or fantasy and affect. . . I wonder whether they have changed much at all. After all, whether you’re doing a kettlebell snatch or a bent over row for reasons/alibis of self-defence, athletic prowess, competitive ability, or simply to try to develop a physique that looks good, the snatch and the row will give the same physical stimulus, even if we read it, narrate it, or fantasize about it differently, at different times.

The Magic Number

I’ve painted a picture of a three-sectional braid or plait here, as a way to think about the complexity of ‘reasons’, ‘intentions’, or what we want and get out of practices like resistance training. However, I feel it important to say that ‘three’ is not a necessary number here.

Three is a seductive number. It’s a big number in Christianity, magic, in psychoanalysis, engineering, cartography, and more. A lot of people have a lot of time for threes. It has a history. It has form. However, the philosopher Jacques Derrida told us to watch out for it. Instead of the seductive three, Derrida proposed thinking in terms of four. I think he did this because three makes a holy trinity while four makes a square, and a square kind of looks like or evokes the four walls of an institution. And Derridean deconstruction was always focused upon the institutional forces and factors that determine meanings and values. But maybe that’s just what I like to think, rather than being connected to any compelling evidence from Derrida’s text itself.

Either way, let’s back-pedal a bit, and move away from the comfortable three. However, rather than going up to four, let’s go down to two; or, rather, to one becoming two. Let’s think about the Möbius strip.

Möbius Strip

Cultural theorist Elizabeth Grosz once used the image of the Möbius strip to express the complex relation of our inside to our outside. Like the Möbius strip, the outside of our selves is also our inside. And vice versa. Any part of our outside is equally our inside. Our skin is not simply our outer limit; it is part of our innermost identity; our innermost identity (or id-entity) manifests on surfaces.

I think of this image a lot, such as when I think of the status of reasons, motivations, or stated intentions. Our externalised alibis dovetail with or fold into unspoken, unspeakable, unconsidered, unnoticed, ignored, and other elements and aspects. Put differently, our Möbius strip selves are not simply one strip. There are braids, plaits, tangles, loose hairs, Gordian knots.

The Möbius Plait

Grosz used the image of the Möbius strip to render into visual terms the irreducible non-singularity of our id-entities, in which (to echo the 1990s jingly jangly pop band Travis) ‘my inside is outside, the right side’s on the left side’. However, there is more to visualising than visual images.

Our reasons, like our insides and outsides, are not simply visual matters. At the very least, they are also likely to involve elements of the other senses, even perhaps the entirety of the human sensorium.

If Grosz’s Möbius strip was a visual rendering of complexity and undecidability, of the shifting of zones of identity, affect, intensity, and so on, let us attempt to take this visual image and expand it, using words, but evoking other senses.

Let’s think of Möbius strips braided. Braids can be made of the plaiting of many more than three individual segments of hair. Although the Möbius strip is an irresolvable visual puzzle, let’s also think about how it might feel. These braids must also have a texture. Rough or smooth. Rough becoming smooth, and back again. Points of perfection punctuated by imperfections. Little kinks here and there. The smooth or even frictionless becoming resistant upon touch. And of course, whether we notice it or not, this assemblage will also have a smell. This may be faint or strong, fragrant or cloying, or indeed fragrant that cloys into its sickly opposite when dwelt upon, or when too close, or in the absence of contrasts. And it will also have a sound, a range of sounds – sounds of the entity interfacing with other objects, rubbing against itself; resonance that becomes rhythm, or broken rhythm, when noticed, and then breaks down, and transforms. And of course it must also have a taste, several tastes – even if it would be distasteful to actually taste a plait or braid. Perhaps it would be rich and delicious at first, or perhaps – as with rich foods – quickly generating nausea…

Too much? Too far? Why am I doing this anyway, expanding this image this far? I began merely with a comment that I recently read online – a comment that haunts me. I felt sorry for the commenter. I identified with their plight. Therefore… I felt sorry for myself too? I too have my socially intelligible alibis – I want strength, I want to ward off sarcopenia, I don’t want to vanish, I don’t want to die. But, taking an opposite approach to that taken by the commenter, I have never followed anyone else’s training programme. I have long known that I train because it gives me something – something extra, something I can’t express in words. It is searching for ways to express this that brought me here.

In my own training, I have hit upon a sequence and approach that currently works for me. Like our online commenter, I would still like to train more than I am able to, because I want more of whatever it is that lifting weights gives me. But if I try to train more, I overtrain, injure myself, exhaust myself.

In my own scholarly research, I am still scouring the airwaves – trawling affect theory, phenomenology, ‘carnal hermeneutics’, ‘carnal (auto)ethnography’, autobiographies and other literature, and more. What remains remarkable to me is the paucity and scarcity of language – both practitioner language and scholarly language – for capturing and conveying the experience of something as apparently simple as going to the gym and lifting weights. Our reasons, our experiences and our ‘results’ must be more like the Möbius braid, as I have begun to sketch it out above, than simple, singular or straightforward statements.

So, play around with it, try it, and maybe it will work for you, maybe only for a while; but I say, unless you find that it works for you, screw exercise snacking, screw strength, and screw efficiency. Have conversations with your past self, the one who told you what your intentions were always going to be, but always remember your other past selves, the ones who had different values, the ones you may yet become again, and your emerging self or selves, and find ways of listening out for and listening to the purrs and hisses of the non-linguistic but nonetheless real and present mute speech segment of your Möbius braids.

Dr Clay: Do you enjoy pain?

Dalton: Pain don’t hurt.

Roadhouse (1989)

Fear and Salivation

In the documentary, My Octopus Teacher, a diver swims every day to an octopus’s garden, in the kelp, to film the octopus, just to see. At one point in the narrative, he reflects on getting into the icy water every morning. It’s always a shock. It hurts. It bites. But after a while, he says, you start to crave it. If he stopped, his body would miss the sharp, exquisite, exhilarating pain.

A friend of mine was a climber, a boulderer. If we ever talked about climbing, his fingertips would start to swell and sweat.

I used to do escrima – a weapons-based martial art. As it neared time to go training, I would often not feel like training. I felt fear, nausea. I would make myself trudge down to my shed to pick up my training kit – a large Ikea bag, full of sticks, gloves, shin-pads, groin-pads, focus mitts. As I checked my kit, I could smell the old sweat inside the gloves. I noticed one day that the smell made me salivate … and want to train. Touching, feeling, smelling.

Why did I not fancy training? It was the anticipation of huge effort, enormous discomfort and the certainty of pain. Several types of pain. The pain of growing tired gripping a weapon with all my strength, with all of my body contracted behind it. The pain if I messed up and had my knuckles or thumb or head whacked by a two-foot long stick. The pain of blisters. The pain of being punched in the head repeatedly or being kicked hard in the shin repeatedly. Of being ridiculed. Of being exhausted but having to endure.

These are not appealing thoughts. But like sweating and salivating, they are doormen to the threshold into a different kind of self-elaboration. And once I was there, things were different.

They say that the first punch ‘wakes you up’. The first gloved fist whacking into your face, with a dull, jarring thud that rattles your brain: Things are different after that. Now you are in the biting water. Now you are calibrated. You start experiencing differently. What it is ‘to be hit’ is reconfigured. It’s not the same now. It’s no longer scary. It’s like the difference between looking outside at the driving rain and dreading going out on your bike, and then actually going out and cycling, experiencing the cold wind and rain in your face. It’s no big deal. It’s just something that’s happening. You’re in a different space, a different time. You are a different you. This you isn’t fretting about being hurt. It’s just you going through something different.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the word ‘hurt’ has a lively European etymology. It is only the English language that adds the sense of ‘injury’ to the word ‘hurt’. This sense is like the worry before you go training, or the imaginings of what the training is like by a person who doesn’t do the activity. Once you are there, technically ‘being hurt’, you do not feel the sense of injury. It is not ‘wrong’ or ‘injurious’. It is just an intensification of embodied experience.

‘Do you enjoy pain?’, asks the doctor of the injured bouncer. ‘Pain don’t hurt’, comes the reply. The bouncer is also a philosopher.

Heightening Tension

It is not only in sparring that this kind of change happens. As I walk to the gym, to lift weights, I fret and worry, and plan, and contingency plan. As I walk through the doors of the gym, I become, in that instant, different. Until that moment, I have been someone different. Fretting, worrying, making plan-a, plan-b, plan-c. What if there’s no free squat racks? What if I’m not feeling it? What if I’ve lost my mojo? What if this or that old injury flares up? What if I feel like I’m going to puke? I cross the threshold and it’s different. It’s go.

And it’s not just in heavy, hard, obvious exercise that this kind of change happens. Tai chi, for instance, would seem to be the opposite. Tai chi is said to be about calm, about relaxing, about peace – as if you just amble into some kind of chilled out state. You do not. You work to get anywhere close. It takes an intensity of effort to get there and to stay there.

You start your tai chi session, working to get into the right zone. This zone is not at all easy to get into; but getting into it is a precondition for doing any tai chi at all. It is a very precise psychological and physiological state, governed by a very clear set of physical prescriptions, very meticulously produced states of apparent postural, movement and psychological ‘relaxation’, yet ones that are not at all ‘relaxed’ in a conventional sense; as they are characterised by heightened proprioception, sensitivity, receptivity; a heightened need to embody a quality of movement.

To enter and stay in this state, you have to ward off all other states. One time, I was training, and one of my children appeared, announcing a litany of injustices, enumerating a list of problems to be solved. I noticed I felt furious at the interruption – much more so than if I had been interrupted while doing anything else. ‘Calming?!’, I remember thinking, ‘Tai chi is not calming!’ I thought then: it is a simultaneous heightening and repression of tension.

I don’t know if this is entirely true. But tai chi is about real effort, real work. Just because you don’t sweat or get out of breath, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Tai chi is, as a friend of mine once put it, ‘constant humiliation’. Even in solo practice, you are never as good as you want to be.

Striving in exercise practices involves constant dissatisfaction. It requires a relationship with constant frustration. ‘Cruel optimism’, you ask? More like ‘firefighting pessimism’.

I do agree that some exercise worlds are indeed cruel. Perhaps the cruellest is bodybuilding. Premised on a static image, a photograph, taken only and precisely during one brief moment in time – one moment after so much pain – dietary, exertion, chemical.

Far inferior to the media image, the mirrors in gyms are dispensers of cruel tutelage. These do not primarily foster preening and pouting. They show you how far you are from your imagination, and from an ever-shifting pot of gold, on an asymptotic curve. How much time have I spent watching my own form in a gym mirror and how few times has that been with any kind of satisfaction?

And yet.

Just like the diver cameraman of My Octopus Teacher, you get into the water even though it stings and burns. You go to the same space or place or zone, almost as if it is ‘just to see’, but also because there is a vague or precise promise to it, and also because there is an immediacy of experience.

Natural bodybuilder Natalie Hays breaks all the rules about recovery because she trains twice a day seven days a week. Her training routine is the most important thing to her. She views competitions themselves as irritating interruptions. She trains because she needs to train.

Crucifixion and Resurrection

Some kinds of stings or burns give or do something that is not easily captured in words. Something that hurts, some pain, but pain that we like. Does this mean we are screwed up – aberrations? Or does it mean masochism?

In Body Transformations, Alphonso Lingis inverts and displaces a lot of Freudian and post-Freudian thinking, moving things into a kind of Nietzschean general economy of pleasure-seeking, or a distribution of the pleasurable. He writes:

We want pleasure, but each of us can turn suffering into pleasure. Our bodies know how to turn the tensions and aching muscles of a climb up a mountain into vibrant sensuality. Our bodies would not sustain our foul moods unless they turned them into a morose satisfaction. From infancy, our bodies knew how to turn being chased and being thrown to the ground, gasping for air, into heightened exhilaration. Freud noted that any activity that involves a shattering of built-up physical and psychic structures produces orgasmic excitement; he cites intellectual strain, verbal disputes, wrestling with playmates, and railway travel.

The experience of exercise can be precisely such a ‘shattering’ – a kind of splitting of an atom that generates immense power: negentropy, release, rebirth. This can be deconstructive and reconstructive, until it settles down into a new normal. There are different types of negentropic revivification. Some involve an explosion of symbolic meaning combined with absolute physical exhaustion – like bodybuilding training, CrossFit or Hyrox. Others involve the direct stoking and stimulation of your bodily energy – like kettlebells, yoga, walking, singing.

New Testament scholar Stephen Moore connects the bodybuilding workout to the Christian logic of the crucifixion. The bodybuilding workout physically exhausts you, but you believe in the resurrection. On the third day you will rise again.

There is film of 1980s bodybuilding legend Tom Platz screaming ‘kill me!’ as he trains legs. Platz always said that barbell squats were his religion. Every training session was his Passion.

The workout is like crucifixion. The weight kills you. But on the third day you rise again, stronger. This is the logic of bodybuilding hypertrophy. Crucifixion, tomb, rise again, greater glory.

But there are other logics of exercise negentropy. Certain styles of kettlebell workouts, for instance, or exercise snacking, directly energise you. After a bodybuilding style workout, I am ruined for the day, and shuffle around for the next, trying to do as little as possible, unable to do much more if I wanted to. After a kettlebell workout, I feel like I have more energy. The very next day, I want to go again, even if I am aching. The difference is profound.

Doleo, ergo Sum

I have just said: even if I am aching, I want to go again. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say: because I am aching in a certain way I want to go again. The kettlebell ache echoes the kettlebell energising. It is a kind of ache that is not really pain and that reminds me that the pain during training – the difficulty of a hard set – does not stay as pain for long, but fast becomes pleasure.

But, is that all there is? When I am not aching, I worry. I associate not aching with vanishing. If I cannot feel my body, I do not know if it is there. I do not know if my body fully exists. If I am aching, if it is the right kind of ache, I know I am there. Worse: If I am not aching with the right kind of ache, then there is an opening for the wrong kinds of aches to enter – the kinds of aches that old people have – the aches and pains of being old: the aches that people announce when they get up in the morning, when they stand up after sitting for too long, or that emerge after standing too long. I fear these aches. So, I chase another ache to mask an ache that chases me.

The right ache is the one that binds me together, as one thing. Achey without organs. Without the right ache my body parts start to disappear or start to become disconnected. The old man ache after sitting too long or the runner’s knee pain which is like a chisel jammed into the knee joint – these are the wrong aches and pains. These separate, regionalise, scatter, ruin.

The right ache for me is the jiu-jitsu ache, the kettlebell ache. The ache without organs. The entire posterior chain ache. Body ego, skin ego: ache ego.

The Nine Inch Nails song, ‘Hurt’ (but my favourite version is the one by Johnny Cash) begins:

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that’s real

You do it to yourself, you do

Is exercise, then, a way of running away or a way of chasing after? Is it a way of facing up to or is it a way of living in denial? Or is it, to use the imagery of either Daoism or Deleuzeanism, just ‘a Way’? One way among many other possible ways. A way of elaborating yourself. A medium. A level of the world. A line. A trajectory or line or vector or plane within only constellations of fractals of networks of trajectories, lines or vectors, among which one must both choose or have chosen for us, as there is no non-choice, no non-way.

The father at the start of Shogun Assassin offers his child a choice between playing with a ball and playing with a toy sword. The toddler cannot know that in making this innocent choice, they are choosing an entire life path, or having it chosen for them. A life is elaborated along a line. Maybe more than one. But not an infinite number.

Whether or not we have a samurai father, to echo an image of Sara Ahmed’s, the choices we make ineluctably involve both the production of certain openings and affordances and also, by the same token, the closing down of certain other paths or trajectories.

Changing your life is not just, as Peter Sloterdijk paints it, a matter of selecting from an implicitly infinite range of training modalities and human capacity expanders. Embodiment isn’t an infinitely plastic space in which I can first choose one thing and then another, in a simple unending process of accumulation or alternation, like Lyotard’s depiction of all of the different ways you might be postmodern in Paris or Tokyo if you are rich enough to try all the foods, listen to all the music and buy all the t-shirts.

Accumulation has its limits. It silts up. Rusts. Cracks. They say, the body keeps the score. The body accumulates its burdens. The body is how it is built, can do things and other things only in relation to some fundamental life decisions and efforts over duration. If space tells time how to move and time tells space how to curve, so choices and habits determine how a body moves and bends. My life practices have fed into what I can do and be, in some predictable and some chaotic ways, across different times. My choices and chance encounters have opened some doors more than others and closed other doors more than some, and some definitively to me, forever.

Put crudely, I don’t think I can transcend the primary habitus of my powerfully heteronormative upbringing in which my father and two older brothers so forcefully and insistently drummed into me the imperative of physical strength, the non-negotiable status of resilience, and installed aggression as an almost mythic quality. My dad’s weights were always there. The barbell, the plates, the spring chest expanders. I remember my primary school anxiety that I might get to secondary school and still not be able to pop my bicep. I remember my fear of being weak. Actually, I don’t have to remember it. I maintain a tremendous fear of being weak. Of course, now, looking at my aging relatives and feeling myself aging, this is less a fear of big bullies beating me up, and more a fear of not being able to put the bins out, do DIY or move furniture around.

And that’s before even thinking about injuries and traumas. My injuries and traumas have limited me. But they have also made me philosophical and creative by turns. I am in constant conversation with my pain and injuries. Arguing with them. ‘Listen to your body’, they say. But you come to learn over time that your body is a liar. It constantly says ‘no, you are in too much pain to exercise – you are probably injured, or you will definitely injure yourself if you try to train now’.

But I want to train and I want the pain. I want to hurt. I remember my wife looking disapprovingly at my BJJ-bruised body one day and saying: ‘covered in bruises – just the way you like it’. I protested at the time. But she was right. I want to be in pain. I want to be hurting. Is this because I am… hurting? Do I chase one hurt to ward off another hurt?

Traumativity

And if so, is it just me? Or are all who ache for the ache screwed up in equivalent ways? Exercise is often premised on some kind of pain. Pain plays all kinds of roles, so much so that it’s often hard to continue to regard so-called pain as being any kind of fixed thing at all, and certainly not something that stays the same for long. Those who say they need to exercise are often accounted for – both by themselves and by others – in the language of therapy. Exercise is therapy, we hear. Therapy for what, we wonder? What kind of hurt? What kind of pain? Is exercise the alchemy of pain, the leverage-based moving of a heavier pain via a lighter pain, or the homeopathic massaging of macro-pain through micro-pain into something else – pleasure in self-making, achievement of something, self-respect, self-efficacy, social status, coercive mimeticism, what?

Is it related to trauma or abuse? The child me had some specific kinds of experience that I for a long time… thought little to nothing about. Not a thing. Once or twice in my young life I said them out loud. But one day, I must have started to realise what ‘what had been done to me’ meant. So, I stopped saying, absolutely, and then I stopped even being able to think about it directly, and then it started to eat away at me inside, so that I could not face it, and I could not broach certain supposedly easy subjects without beginning to shake and quake and stammer – right until the point at which I could avoid it no longer, and had to admit it to myself, and had to say it out loud again.

But, hang on: no. This does not feel right. If feels more reasonable to propose that if I am screwed up then I was screwed up in a very particular way by what were the normal norms and values and ideals of my childhood, of my parents, of my brothers, of my environment – by all the stuff that we might look at now and say ‘holy shit, that’s screwed up!’ The structures and values and strictures and performative obligations of 1970s and 1980s working class and lower middle class northern English masculinity were not and are not a barrel of laughs. Plus, I was raised Catholic. I know, right?

But is this pain? Maybe. In one moment, or one regard. Perhaps. But fleetingly, and not essentially. It converts, ineluctably, right? Old yang becomes young yin. ‘Each of us can turn suffering into pleasure’.

The Riddle of Steel

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that etymologically ‘pain’ certainly means physical or bodily suffering. But it also means ‘trouble taken in accomplishing something, effort’. We see this in European languages in expressions for conveying whether or not something is ‘worth it’: is it ‘vale la pena’, is it ‘vaut la peine’? Is it ‘worth the pain’, the effort, the discomfort?

Yes. Yes! To me it is like life itself. It is literally, directly, making. As Sloterdijk notes, weightlifters and athletes have known the longest that the fastest, best and ultimate way to lighten the burden is to increase the load. This is not so that things feel easier after you put down the weight, when you are no longer encumbered. It is rather so that you are stronger, so everything really is easier. And better. Exercising changes your reality – your corpo-reality. Your ‘you’. Exercise affects. Exercise is the exemplary object of affect studies. Especially exercise that makes more space, opens more space, for the making of more living, more life. Like filming an octopus every day. Like going back to a kettlebell every day. My Octopus Teacher. My kettlebell teacher.

Yesterday, I noticed Facebook was feeding me an advert for a stick. Yes. A stick. This was pitched as being some kind of miracle cure for bodily stiffness and aches. A medium to long-ish stick. You lean on it, twist, things like that. Magic.

A while back, I recall being spammed with adverts for a new type of handle attachment for pull-up bars and suspension trainers. Yes: a handle. Apparently, the handles offer a choice between three different sorts of grip, and each of these grips enables a complete range of ever-changing ‘natural’ movement for the hands and arms during all kinds of exercises. This, the adverts assure me, mean certain crucial things: first, a reduction in stress on joints, second a reduction in injury, and third, massive potential gains in functional strength and/or muscle fibre stimulation.

This all sounds good to me. So, I looked at the price. €49.90. That’s just over £43. That is, around $60. For what they are, this seems a lot – especially as normal sling trainer handles already allow a huge range of options for grip, movement and variety. Moreover, substituting handles for a simple length of rope or cord offers even more variety and ‘natural’ movement. So, the price led me to hesitate, and I stood down from making a purchase.

Later that same day, a friend messaged me to tell me about his own recent pause before purchasing a gadget. Having a home gym in his garage that he berates himself for neglecting to use, he found himself about to purchase a training gadget, not to supplement or enrich his ongoing training, but in the hope that it would actually inspire him to go into his garage and train. We both laughed at the convoluted wishful thinking logic at play in this process – like buying clothes that are two sizes too small before you’ve even started a diet. But then we went on to reflect on the status of such supplements. I readily confessed that I am always entirely open to the possibility of purchasing a new gadget to enrich my exercise. I’m a sucker for a training gadget. But, sometimes this seems to be fuelled by an obscure quest to find some kind of holy grail – to find ‘The Product’ that would unlock ‘The Secret’ or ‘The Potential’. Thinking about it, almost every exercise or martial arts equipment purchase I have ever made has been fuelled by this fantasy: this time, this thing holds the key.

That Dangerous Supplement

The philosopher, Jacques Derrida once suggested that ‘supplements’ are often eyed with suspicion in Western philosophy (Derrida 1976; 2001). This is because they can morph from the status of secondary additional extras into primary focuses of attention, and thereby pervert an earlier system of values and proprieties. I have written about the supplement in relation to the ensemble or training, exercise and ritualistic or repeated practices that go into ‘martial arts’ before (Bowman 2017). A recent ‘abstract’ for one edition of Derrida’s classic essay, ‘that dangerous supplement’ puts it like this:

The dangerous supplement, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau calls a ‘fatal advantage’, is properly seductive; it leads desire away from the good path, makes it err far from natural ways, guides it toward its loss or fall and therefore it is a sort of lapsus or scandal. […] According to Rousseau, the negativity of evil will always have the form of supplementarity. Evil is exterior to nature, to what is by nature innocent and good. The supplement is both humanity’s good fortune and the origin of its perversion. [...] The supplement is the image and the representation of Nature. (‘Abstract’)

In the case of both my friend and me, each supplementary gadget didn’t so much threaten to drag us away from ‘the proper’. Rather, it mainly relied on the activation of some kind of magical or alchemical promise of a different (better!) future to come. For my friend, the purchase of one item seemed to promise to propel him off the couch and into his home gym. For me, the purchase of (yet another) supplementary add-on explicitly claimed to be able to catapult the exercises I am already doing into another dimension – a dimension defined by the (always and already mystificatory and mythological) word ‘gains’.

Scientific Magic

To me, this ‘promissory’ dimension ultimately raises interesting questions about the place of magic or enchantment in our lives. One might say ‘fantasy’ and ‘desire’, but these are such familiar terms for cultural analysis that they may have lost some of their… well, enchantment, or magic; and we may think we already know all there is to know about them. But, what about magic and enchantment? What do we know about them? Are they not relevant to our lives? Are they not present? Or do we just not realise when we are under their spell?

What about stretch-sticks and these supposedly super-technological handles? These are marketed through appeals to scientific innovation aligning with the ‘best’ ‘natural’ physiology of movement. Arthur C. Clarke once said ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. This can apply not only to complex cabalistic computer equipment or platforms, but also to nothing more complex than two lumps of moulded plastic and some nylon straps, or a stick, if it is marketed correctly.

The question is: how many times do we still fall into such structures of ‘logic’ or reasoning? How often do we truly believe that ‘modern science’ might – really, this time – be able to give us the key to ‘unlock our true potential’?

Even more immediately than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.

(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling)

Touch Amplifiers

Much of the practice of taiji (tai chi) is organised by the exploration of internal experience, with the implicit or explicit aim of improving bodily control and wellbeing, for whatever reason. However, part of the promise of taiji is being able to control the movements of other people via an ostensibly relaxed deployment of touch and leverage. There are many people for whom this ‘martial’ dimension of taiji is not appealing. But some teachers (including my own, and including me, if and when I am a teacher) argue that learning the more martial aspects of taiji can feed directly back into one’s own health and wellbeing goals. More precisely, the practice of push-hands (tuishu, 推手) functions as a kind of ‘amplifier’ for awareness of our own bodily movements and sensations.

Taiji push-hands centres around the gentle contact of one’s palms with a partner’s wrist and elbow in a pushing and yielding sequence that involves the alternation of whose palms are against whose wrist and elbow, depending on where in the sequence one is. The forward ‘push’ movement involves the pusher’s palms on the partner’s wrist and elbow. The corresponding ‘yield’ of the person being pushed involves them sinking backward, away from – but maintaining contact with – the push.

• “Push towards my centreline”. Tai Chi and Embodied Philosophy workshop, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, 26 March 2026. Photos courtesy of Kamila Téllez Islas: Instagram @kammtei

Maintaining gentle contact is called sticking. In order to be able to ‘stick’, one must first (and simultaneously) develop an awareness of touch that is referred to as ‘listening’ (ting / ting jin, 听劲). That is to say, one must feel whether the opponent’s hands are pushing forward, pulling backward, or exerting no particular force, and respond immediately, like the force’s shadow, so to speak. At the same time, the person issuing the force (i.e., pushing) must also be ‘listening’, so that they do not meet force with force, but work around or with any counterforce or resistance.

In essence, as a push progresses, the opponent’s yield becomes a turn; the push is deflected and converts into the opponent’s push. While this is largely a sensitivity drill – an exercise in ‘listening’ to the force of the other, yielding to that force, feeling it disperse as it is gently and naturally deflected by a turn, a turn which then turns into a push back – there are also several points within the sequence where it can become combative or martial. The push can become more forceful and deliberately seek to disrupt, uproot and displace the opponent. In response, the person being pushed might be able to yield to that force in such a way that it ‘misses’ them, and convert it into a disruptive force of their own – for example, by gently adding a pull to the end of the opponent’s push, uprooting them and making them fall forward.

• “Push”. Tai Chi and Embodied Philosophy workshop, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, 26 March 2026. Photos courtesy of Kamila Téllez Islas: Instagram @kammtei

Central to push-hands is the development of the sense of touch so that it far exceeds the confines of the palms, or the point of contact of another’s palm on one’s skin. If psychoanalysis and phenomenology have each in their own ways connected our consciousness, mind or awareness with the places on our skin we can feel, then push-hands radically expands this. If you are training in push-hands, then someone’s push on your elbow and wrist while practicing first activates your sense of where your hand is in relation to your body. Later, you will be aware of whether your shoulder is tensed and raised or relaxed and low. Then, you will feel clearly where your weight is being held, and whether this is helpful (allowing movement) or hindering. You will feel whether your centreline is positioned correctly in relation to your partner. (The centreline is a theoretical vertical line, often referred to in martial arts training, that you could draw on an anatomy picture from navel to solar plexus, and – in ideal positioning – all the way up the centre of the chin, nose, and between the eyes, and all the way down to a position that is equidistant between the feet. Much taiji and other martial arts training involves commanding one’s own centreline and disorientating or disrupting the other’s.)

• “Tension in this shoulder.” Tai Chi and Embodied Philosophy workshop, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, 26 March 2026. Photos courtesy of Kamila Téllez Islas: Instagram @kammtei

In effect, someone well trained in taiji push-hands will register a push or pull on their hand or arm all the way through their own body, and that sense is immediately translated into logical movement and transfer of force counter options. Crucially, however, not only does one’s sense of touch does not end at the point of contact, of the interface of skin on skin. It expands also into an awareness of the other person’s body.

If I am doing taiji push-hands with someone less trained than I am, I will almost instantly feel – in my push on their forearm, the tenseness of their shoulder, the position of their body in relation to mine, where their weight is being held. I will know whether their shoulder is too high, whether their hips are pointing directly towards me or away from me, whether their legs are straight or bent, whether their weight is on front leg, rear leg, or both. And this instantly gives me options. If I can feel their tense and raised shoulder, I can push gently up into it, even for the briefest moment, and ruin their posture even more – forcing them to lean back, forcing their centre of weight to move outside the frames provided by their feet, making them easy to push away or over or to trip or throw, or to redirect, so that they fall to one side or the other, and so on.

• “Change the angle.” Tai Chi and Embodied Philosophy workshop, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, 26 March 2026. Photos courtesy of Kamila Téllez Islas: Instagram @kammtei

If I feel that their centreline is pointing away from mine – basically, if I can feel that their navel is not pointing directly towards mine – then this means that I am pointing directly towards them while they are pointing away from me. It means I am on one side or the other of them, and this means I have a world of leverage options, as I can deploy forces to their sides, to their back, and so on. At this stage, however, push-hands training should normally have moved beyond the basic push-yield-push level of training, and into a stage in which other kinds of contact and touch are allowed – such as gentle manipulations of the wrist joint, the elbow, movement up to the shoulder or around the opponent’s neck, and so on; along with stepping and footwork, so that one could, for example, position one’s own leg behind the opponent’s leg, loop one’s arm around their arm or neck, and turn, so that they fall. At this point, taiji push-hands has more and more of the hallmarks of a specific kind of martial art or combat training.

• “Leverage and turn.” Tai Chi and Embodied Philosophy workshop, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, 26 March 2026. Photos courtesy of Kamila Téllez Islas: Instagram @kammtei

However, even at this stage, what must never be lost is the status of touch in taiji. Once one arrives at this more free-flowing and combat-appearing level of push-hands, it is possible to see many of the same ‘techniques’ being used in taiji as in other arts. But these are entered and applied very differently. One does not decide to do a certain wristlock and then force one’s way into it, against a resisting opponent. One applies a wristlock if and when it ‘appears’ as an option. That is to say, one does not decide in one breath to apply a technique the next. One feels the presence of the possibility and actualises it at exactly the right moment. A moment too soon or too late would require excess force. The exact right time is when things happen as if effortlessly. The possibility of being able to do this depends entirely on one one’s sensitivity training in relation to touch.

Touch as ‘unsusceptible to being amplified’

In his seminal ethnographic study of learning taiji in Shanghai, Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity Through Martial Arts, Adam Frank argues that the training of touch and the effects of the interactive touch-based practice of push-hands constitutes at once the most direct kind of contact with and the deconstruction of the separation between not only distinct cultures (East and West, say) but also senses of personal identity. In practising push-hands at length and in ever unfolding and concatenating ways, one’s own bodily identity or integrity becomes profoundly interconnected with that of the partner.

These observations may be important in any number of ways, and useful for any number of intellectual, ethical or aesthetic projects. Here, I merely want to entangle them with some arguments made by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Touching Feeling. On the matter of touch, Sedgwick writes:

Even more immediately than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object. (14)

She also argues that ‘The sense of physical touch itself, at least so far, has been remarkably unsusceptible to being amplified by technology’ (15). This is an interesting argument to make, and in one sense it is absolutely justifiable. When I recently reread this argument, however, I was slightly troubled by the question of whether the ‘sense of physical touch’ really was ‘remarkably unsusceptible to being amplified by technology’. What do we mean by touch? What kind? And what do we mean by technology?

In light of my experience of push hands, I suspected that things might not be quite so straightforward. Indeed, Sedgwick immediately continues by noting that there are of course some minor ways in which the sense of touch can be ‘amplified’. Allow me to quote more of this passage – including (again) the opening sentence:

The sense of physical touch itself, at least so far, has been remarkably unsusceptible to being amplified by technology. Women who do breast self-examination are occasionally taught to use a film of liquid soap, a square of satiny cloth, or even a pad of thin plastic filled with a layer of water to make the contours of the breast more salient to their fingers. But this minimal sensory enhancement is merely additive compared to the literally exponential enhancements of visual stimulus since Leeuwenhoek and Newton. The narrator of Middlemarch, one of the definitive novels of texture, can zoom in a mere two sentences from telescope to microscope [Eliot 83]. Once such visual ranges become commonplace the authority of the fingers will never be the same – though their very resistance to amplification may mean that they represent one kind of perceptual gold standard. (15)

Let’s unpack this. The sense and scale of sight can be manipulated massively by technology. It is entirely possible to move from microscope to telescope in the blink of an eye. Similar can be done with hearing, via technological means. However, Sedgwick argues, touch is just touch: one’s skin makes contact with something else, and that is touch, and that is all. There are no ‘touch microscopes’ or ‘touch telescopes’. You are either touching/feeling or you are not. However certain material (and chemical or psychoactive) additives can either enhance (e.g., ‘a film of liquid soap’) or retard (e.g., thick gloves) this sense of touching and feeling. But there is not much amplification to touch, at least, not of the order of telescopes or stethoscopes.

However, I would propose that there are other ways in which touch and feeling can be amplified by other ‘technological’ means. This may not involve either the sense of ‘amplification’ or of ‘technology’ intended by Sedgwick. However, my aim is not to win an argument against Sedgwick. It is rather to explore a region that is actually close to the heart of her areas of interest, but which she has not herself explored, simply because she was exploring something else.

The expansion and intensification of perceptual and technical touch-based skill is certainly not an amplification in the same way that microscopes and telescopes intensify and expand the sense of vision – i.e., for everyone with access to the technology. However, it is an expansion and amplification for the person trained within that practice, and although it involves no obvious or literal kind of technology, taiji push-hands uses one’s own body as an instrument, and another’s as both mover and moved object.

If I take notes, I only take ‘feel notes’. This is because I mainly note feelings – from the tangible feel of material objects, substances or surfaces, to noting the emotions elicited by learning new things; thoughts precipitated by the feel of things.

The connection of contact with feeling, and of feeling with touch is complex and – appropriately – intimate.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book, Touching Feeling, sets this out well. One of her primary interests in that work is the inextricability of touching and feeling. In the opening pages she connects this with matters of texture.

I returned to Sedgwick’s book after many years because I wanted help thinking not merely about touching but also about grasping, holding, brandishing and wielding. I also wanted help thinking about writing – specifically the different disciplines of different disciplinary styles of writing. (I have always linked styles of academic writing with styles of martial arts practice. All of my works on martial arts have been just as much works about academic discipline.) Rereading Touching Feeling, I realised I share a relationship to disciplinary orientations with Sedgwick.

Sedgwick wonders, early on, whether ‘one of the cumulative stories told by Touching Feeling may be of a writer’s decreasing sense of having a strong center of gravity in a particular intellectual field’ (Sedgwick 2003, 2).

However, I noticed that, at the same time as confessing her untethering from a specific intellectual field, Sedgwick also admits her ‘intransigent fascination’ (2003, 3) with the notion of ‘performativity’.

This term derives most directly from J. L. Austin’s scholarship on performative speech utterances, and Jacques Derrida’s subsequent critique of Austin’s work. Her fascination with this topic, Sedgwick knows, is something that inevitably also keeps her entangled within a certain ‘intellectual field’ – or at least with the poststructuralist cultural theory that permeates numerous overlapping and interlinked academic fields.

This is because, like Sedgwick, poststructuralist cultural theory tout court has long been interested in the role of performativity in the production and maintenance of identities. Performativity is often opposed to ideas about ‘essences’, enabling poststructuralist theory to develop an ‘anti-essentialist’ stance in relation to identity. So, even as Sedgwick does not feel that she has a ‘strong center of gravity’ (by which she perhaps means investment, sense of identity, or belonging) in any of the fields she was earlier associated with (queer theory, gender studies, cultural studies), she knows that her concerns remain within their orbit, or gravitational pull, and that she is unable to fully disconnect, even as she no longer feels a strong compulsion to preoccupy herself with the ‘proper’ concerns of those fields.

I believe I share something of this with Sedgwick – a feeling, attitude or ethos that is perhaps what Jacques Rancière means when he speaks of ‘indiscipline’.

In/Discipline

In my understanding, indiscipline is neither anti-disciplinary nor even fully inter-disciplinary. It is more like improperly disciplinary – as in, the position of someone who knows full-well how to play the games of disciplinarity, who has perhaps been playing them for decades, but who also now knows that they are only games, and has learnt that you really don’t have to stick to all of the rules all of the time, especially when the rules seem to close down and forbid more than they open up and enable.

After all, if we believe poststructuralist theory at all, then we know that conventions are convened by a community, more or less consciously, more or less experimentally, more or less creatively; and hence that sometimes the most proper (most ethical, most responsible) way to develop both the gameplay and capacities of that community is by proceeding ‘improperly’ – innovatively.

Put differently, the indisciplinary attitude is one that ignores the loud superego-type voices that seem only to want to police us back into place, or into playing the game according every letter of the perceived laws or protocols of our discipline – such as only taking proper (recognisable) objects of attention, only ever using proper (established) theoretical orientations, methodological procedures, and so on.

Instead of worrying about this, the indisciplinary attitude rejects toeing such lines when it seems that they are barring us access to new vistas, issues and areas. The indisciplinary attitude chooses to try to work out how locate, see, hear, touch, engage with, respond to and do justice to those other things that seem to call out to us, at least sometimes, as if trying to be heard. The indisciplinary attitude tries to find ways to engage with them, even if by using approaches that differ from established disciplinary norms and conventions.

Dis/Investing

However, such an orientation is not about the wholesale rejection of disciplinary conventions. It is rather about disinvesting from those that hinder rather than help the exploration of the new or the different.

In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick walks away from many of the earlier topics and objects that came to define the ‘proper’ concerns of fields such as gender studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, and so on, into which her work intervened – indeed, fields that her works helped to produce. But Sedgwick’s is not an active turning away (or rejection). Rather, it is a turning towards something else – reaching out towards and delving into new topics and questions, those she feels are calling out to her for serious engagement and attention. My own interests and orientations feel similar. As Sedgwick says in her introduction:

The title I’ve chosen for these essays, Touching Feeling, records the intuition that a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions. But the same double meaning, tactile plus emotional, is already there in the single word ‘touching’; equally it’s internal to the word ‘feeling’. I am also encouraged in this association by the dubious epithet ‘touchy-feely’, with its implication that even to talk about affect virtually amounts to cutaneous contact. (Sedgwick 2003, 17)

I first read Touching Feeling around two decades ago, when I was trying to conceptualise and express the impact of Bruce Lee on Western popular culture, while becoming immersed in questions of East-West cross-cultural encounters. The chapter I raced to, back then, was her closing chapter, ‘The Pedagogy of Buddhism’. I barely noticed the other chapters.

However, in November 2024, while trying to conceptualise, formulate and express some new concerns, I felt drawn back to the book. I did not exactly know why, but I felt that it had a lot to do with my need to work out how to think about touch, specifically perhaps grip, and this dimension of physically engaging with material objects, such as weights, levers, and (of course, as a martial artist) other people.

So, one Saturday afternoon, I picked up the book again and started reading, slowly, not really knowing what I was looking for or what I might find, after so many years. I was immediately captivated by Sedgwick’s discussion of touch, feeling, and texture.

Her own project was animated by an ‘intuition that a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions’. My own animating intuition was that there are un- or under-explored dimensions to the experiences and affects of exercise, dimensions that were going to require my serious engagement with phenomenology and affect theory, in the first instance, in order at least to establish a vocabulary and conceptual universe capable of formulating and articulating that ‘certain’ (i.e., uncertain) ‘je ne sais quoi’ of the experience of certain kinds of physical exercise.

Feel Notes as Method

I had started to think and write about the affective dimensions of certain kinds of exercise five years earlier – as soon as I started to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), in the months immediately prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. It was my reflections on the profundity of my physical, psychological, emotional and perceptual transformations during this period that marked my own first serious engagement with what is known as ‘affect theory’.

It was during my first month of BJJ training that I started to call the notes I jotted down before and after every training session ‘feel notes’. These were neither ‘training notes’ in the practitioner sense (many BJJ students keep a journal of what they have learned and what they are working on), nor ‘field notes’ in the anthropological or ethnographic sense. They were ‘feel notes’, in a more affect studies sense. These notes, too, were ‘indisciplined’, in their own way, from the outset. They did not fall into any genre. I wrote down whatever occurred to me, whatever I seemed to need to write. In writing such notes, I did not pretend to be anything other than a professional academic steeped in cultural theory, someone who interrogates any thought at any time using any academic theoretical frame that presents itself to my consciousness.

Thus, my feel notes were my indisciplined observations, scattered speculations, and spontaneous reflections that arose in response to experiences or insights that occurred in or around training that felt significant. However, although my first months of BJJ were an intense period of transformation and writing, I realised belatedly that I have almost always jotted down what I now call ‘feel notes’.

When I started to learn the Filipino ‘stick fighting’ martial art of escrima in late 2012, I would jot down perceptions and insights on my iPhone, using the Notes app. Looking back through these, I saw that they were never mere technical observations, but were always driven by my sense of something profound, at once physical, psychological, and emotional – never merely (even if also) technical.

My notes were always idiosyncratic, and fell into no clear category of writing. They were certainly useless if viewed as entries in a training diary: very little of a technical nature was ever noted. And they would likely be regarded as unacceptable, invalid, or needing to be approached with reference to a wide range of caveats if evaluated according to the methodological protocols of what ‘good’ field notes in ethnography, autoethnography or anthropology might be. Nonetheless, the observations that I jotted down came out of me spontaneously. I actually felt compelled to write them – perhaps because I had no one to say them out loud to. I could think of no one for whom they would have the same significance as they did for me, and I could think of nowhere else – or no-way else – to put them.

As my eventual publication of an article based on my field notes in the affect studies journal Capacious suggests, I eventually decided that the field of affect studies seemed to be to be the ideal intellectual field for the serious treatment of my feel notes. Certainly, affect studies seems most equipped to ‘handle’ them. For me, the terms and concepts of affect studies have been most enabling for my thinking, helping me to work with, through and out my intuitions and arguments about martial arts, exercise, identity and ideology.

Phrased in yet another way: my own attempts to work out what my own workouts mean, enable, connect with, and do has constituted my own entry point ‘into’ affect studies. Reciprocally, I hope that by writing on exercise in terms of affect, it may help others to ‘get’ the value of it too – whether the ‘it’ that gets ‘got’ be the value of affect theory in understanding the importance of exercise, or the importance of exercise in understanding affect theory.

In my own approach to exercise, both in practice and in theory, what has always been most important is the feel. This is not an uncommon kind of statement to hear in discourse about exercise. However, for me, the feel of an exercise is not just a matter of good exercise practice. It is also of profound importance in thinking about how identity is constructed (or perhaps, instead of ‘constructed’, we might say ‘trained’, ‘moulded’, or maybe even ‘coaxed’). For, ‘the feel’, I think, is always inextricably intertwined with identity and with ideology. As Lauren Berlant has proposed: along with everything else that affect theory may be, it is also our most current way of thinking about the relationship between bodily experiences, feelings, skills, practices and wider matters of discourse and ideology.

Is there a more maligned resistance exercise than the poor old biceps curl? It is held up as the very exemplar of so many frowned-upon things: it’s a vanity exercise, they say; an isolation exercise; an artificially biomechanically restricted movement; it’s an ego-movement; in focusing on the most immediately visually prominent arm muscle, it is often incorrectly taken as an indication of strength, even when all other muscle or strength development is absent; it’s a teenage boy movement. And so on.

There’s a lot to unpack here. I can’t go after it all. But let’s start with one of the most common claims, especially as it comes from the functional fitness community: the barbell curl is an isolation exercise, one that is hence to be contrasted negatively with the positive virtues of both compound weight lifting movements and more dynamic or ballistic athletic movements, such as, say, the barbell clean and press or the kettlebell swing or snatch.

Circular strength influencer Mark Wildman focuses on kettlebell and heavy club exercises. I often talk about Wildman because I have watched many of his videos. I think he’s a very good online coach, and I have learned a great deal about how to do kettlebell and heavy club exercises from him.

In his YouTube videos, he often casually throws out such comments as this or that club or bell movement is ‘better than’ curls for developing biceps – and, crucially, that it will develop your biceps as a merely incidental added benefit to its primary athletic and core strength functions. For Wildman, if you perform this or that complex club or kettlebell movement, you will also develop big biceps, without doing any specific biceps exercises – and, crucially, it seems, without prioritising biceps development as your stated number one goal.

Outside of bodybuilding circles, this seems to be the only way that biceps development can be unambivalently legitimate: if it just happens without even trying. Trying to develop biceps, it seems, is in many circles something that is regarded as crass, naff, vain, or immature.

In the essay ‘Orchid and Muscles’, Alphonso Lingis proposes that bodybuilding is problematic to many minds, because it has all the hallmarks of a ‘cult’ rather than of a health-focused or sporting, and hence socially intelligible ‘enterprise’, such as that of a healthy mind in a healthy body (‘mens sana in corpore sano’). If it were about health, it would be easy to grasp. But, it is a cult that society cannot seem to decode, ‘know and integrate’.

The problematic character of bodybuilding is condensed metonymically into the barbell curl, and metaphorically or symbolically into the popping of the biceps. But, of course, problematic does not mean unappealing. In his account of why people find bodybuilders so disconcerting, Lingis continues:

The erotic eye, that which scouts the erotogenic terrain in the body of another – not the rolling surfaces of taut cutaneous membrane, but the spongy zone of susceptibility just beneath and the mucous membrane of the orifices – is disconcerted to run into packed thongs of drawn muscle. Not muscle that answers to the ungendered resistance of tools and implements, but specifically male and specifically female muscle alignments. One cannot resist feeling the very hardness of these muscles to be the badgering of the glands of lust – whole anatomies pumped like priapic erections, contracting poses and shifting with held violence from one pose to the next with the vaginal contractions of labor pains. They flaunt in the nose of an antiseptic consumer public leathery rutting odors; they gleam with oils that deviate the hold the inspecting eye fixes on these bodies into the sliding suctions of octopus eros.

Few people outside of those who are already well initiated and installed inside the cult of bodybuilding, with its precise aesthetic values, would say they wanted to have the body of a competitive bodybuilder. But many would be prepared to say that they wouldn’t be against developing more muscle, here or there, in their quest to improve themselves physically. This vague and euphemistic area is where ‘fitness’ influencers thrive.

Every Exercise is a Glute Exercise

As an online entrepreneur, Wildman seeks to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Accordingly, he will make make concessions to those who may ‘also’ be biceps-interested (or bi-curious, so to speak). He also frequently emphasises that many functional kettlebell and club movements ‘should’ be regarded as ‘glute exercises’.

Clenching the glutes and core and ‘firing the lats’ are regular proprioceptive training cues that Wildman gives for any number of kettlebell and club exercises. Thus, he claims, many of these exercises are ‘glute’ exercises, especially such stables as kettlebell swings.

Against such glute clenching, hip-hinging, total body movements as kettlebell swings and snatches, the biceps curl seems to cut a sorry figure. Standing straight, focusing on the movement of one tiny but visually prominent muscle… isn’t that, at once, both excessive and insufficient?

But wait. When was the last time you actually tried to do this exercise?

I have recently added them into my routine, immediately following barbell bent over rows. Let me assure you, if any exercise is a glute exercise because it is clenched, then it is the strict standing straight bar barbell curl. If you are aspiring to do the movement properly, without cheating, then just about everything in your body needs to be fully clenched: glutes, abs/core, shoulders/traps, and even, I’m sure, calves, toes, perineum, jaw, tongue. You name it. Not cheating in the curl when using a decently weighted barbell is an immense effort. Ego exercise, indeed! It is exceptionally demanding. Resisting the egotistical desire to ‘cheat’ by introducing some swing of the body is extremely hard, and requires some serious total-body clenching.

In his club and kettlebell ‘instructionals’, Wildman frequently advocates for the values and virtues of the ‘core stabilisation’ required to maintain good upright posture while swinging weighted objects around. This is amply present in barbell curls. In fact, it feels to me that the effort of stabilisation in barbell curls is more extreme than in many kettlebell and club movements. You can do all sorts of lateral, angled, ‘throwing pattern’ and other movements with clubs or bells without even thinking about your glutes.

As someone who has trained for a long time, on and off, with all manner of resistance tools, including kettlebells and free weights, I feel inclined to argue that the strict, standing, straight-bar, barbell curl should be regarded as a demanding compound movement. I know this is counterintuitive, but bear with me. First, let’s revisit the question of its bad reputation.

That Dangerous Supplement

Why are biceps curls sometimes vilified? At the start, I suggested some reasons: it’s a vanity exercise; it’s an isolation exercise; it’s an artificially biomechanically restricted movement; it’s an ego-movement; in focusing on the most visually prominent arm muscle, it can be read incorrectly as an indication of strength, even when all other muscle or strength development is absent; it’s a teenage boy movement.

Translating such criticisms into slightly broader terms, one might say, they all point in one general direction: the barbell curl, with its singular emphasis on biceps development, is not easily translated into any broadly utilitarian, sporting, functional, or ‘heroic’ terms. This is Lingis’s starting point, in ‘Orchids and Muscles’. Here, let me start from the same kind of place, but cover some slightly different ground.

Everything about biceps points to posturing, preening, posing. We even say to children ‘show us your muscles’ and they try to pop their biceps. We say ‘ooh, wow, yes, great’. In other words, biceps are something for children. Seeking biceps is perhaps a pubescent rite of passage. But, here’s the rub. The first (‘show us your muscles’) shall be the last.

As something for children, it must therefore be something to grow out of.

Similarly, I have heard and read the following claim more than once: no one ‘needs’ to train arms. The arms get all the strength training they ‘need’ from their involvement in the more virtuous full body or compound exercises – the pushes and pulls of big movements.

The dominant ‘protestant ethic’ that constitutes the bedrock of Anglo-American values and virtues is quick to flip that which is not deemed necessary into something that is therefore negative, because ‘excessive’. The observation that direct (or ‘isolated’) arm training is not ‘necessary’, therefore easily becomes: we should not train arms directly.

Biceps Envy

In the 1923 essay ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’, Freud painted a picture of the childhood realisation of sexual difference. Imagine a scenario such as little children playing in a sandpit. Playing naked in the sand, children eventually notice the presence or absence of the penis on their playmates and their selves. Freud notes this moment and reflects on it.

In the 1930s, Charles Atlas started advertising his muscle-building system via a series of adverts which painted a picture of the realisation of sexual impotence and potency, similarly, in a sandpit – this time, the beach.

The difference between Freud’s reflection on noticing penises and Atlas’s depiction of noticing muscles is interesting. Freud writes:

There is an interesting contrast between the behaviour of the two sexes. In the analogous situation, when a little boy first catches sight of a girl’s genital region, he begins by showing irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nothing or disavows what he has seen, he softens it down or looks about for expedients for bringing it into line with his expectations. It is not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon him, that the observation becomes important to him: if he then recollects or repeats it, it arouses a terrible storm of emotion in him and forces him to believe in the reality of the threat which he has hitherto laughed at. This combination of circumstances leads to two reactions, which may become fixed and will in that case, whether separately or together or in conjunction with other factors, permanently determine the boy’s relations to women: horror of the mutilated creature or triumph and contempt for her. These developments, however, belong to the future, though not to a very remote one.

A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.

What Atlas suggests echoes and arguably inverts Freud. When the ‘little girl’ first notices biceps on the beach, she responds initially, at most, with curiosity. The ‘little boy’, however, sees them, sees he hasn’t got them, and he wants them.

Of course, the oedibiceps complex must be resolved. The phallic biceps flips easily into shame: an empty symbol of vanity, failed desire for plenitude, impostor, imposture.

Furthermore, adding Freud into the mix of our thinking is also something of a Pandora’s Box. It opens the door to an obligation for thinking about things like homoeroticism and its immediate sidekick, homophobia. Under heteronormative regimes, men should not dwell too much or too explicitly on the desire for the biceps of the Other, because, well, that must mean a kind of homosexual attraction, right?

Hence, we have to focus on other dimensions; more sublimated, so to speak: exercise needs to be for something – for something else – something clearly articulable and connected to wider social values. The problem is that the biceps and the biceps curl seem to be, in themselves, only for themselves, and hence only for narcissism and sexual display. They are like orchids, says Lingis.

Indeed, they are. But so, arguably, are they all.

The Curl Effect

Advocates of kettlebell training often evoke, in hushed tones, ‘the kettlebell effect’. This is sometimes called ‘the what the hell effect’. The claim is that after a period of time working on kettlebell exercises – especially the much-fetishized and I think overvalued kettlebell swing – when one goes back to other exercises or one’s sport, one sees surprising gains in strength or ability, even in movements one has not been training.

I have never experienced this. If anything, I go back to the gym after a period of kettlebell training, and I am objectively weaker and worse. The fact that kettlebell training so often seems to make you feel fitter and healthier and more full of energy is a different matter.

Might there be a biceps curl effect? The standing straight bar barbell biceps curl is undoubtedly a total body discipline. A mind-body workout. An ego-battle. Self-control. And are they really not functional? It seems the biceps curl is not regarded as functional primarily because the ideology of functional fitness has made it a whipping boy. It looks like isolation, so therefore it must be. But, given the dialectical logic of marketing, how long will it be before an influencer notices its opposite-ness to, say, kettlebell swings, and decides to market it as the missing piece of the functional puzzle?

Do I actually think this? Maybe not really. But one thing I do think is that the so-called ‘isolation’ aspect of the exercise is something of a misnomer. Rather than being isolated from the rest of the body, in order to make the biceps curl work, one must very consciously and deliberately keep the entire rest of the body in an isometric hold. If and when this slips, when we tire, and when cheating is required, the ‘cheat’ is actually something of a ‘hip hinge’.

Of course, while this is all true, I am not going to move from this observation to the illegitimate conclusion that the biceps curl is therefore a total body exercise that ‘hits’ or ‘works’ everything. That would be a bit much. But perhaps thinking about this as a proposition can help us to revaluate our relation to the frequent functional fitness claims that exercises like the kettlebell swing or kettlebell snatch are a total body workout. They are not.

Indeed, such exercises arguably even lack a precise focus. I mean, what does a swing or snatch actually exercise? At least the much-vilified biceps curl is clear about what it is actually for. In this one (communicative, semantic) sense at least, it is arguably more functional than many so-called functional fitness exercises.

The lengthening days, the fresh morning air and growing sense of firmness to the drying ground called me into my garden much more often in May. Life spills outside more in summer. This year, the puppy intensified all this – needing to be up and out at any hour of the day or night, and always waking up too early. The five-year-old Jack Russell amplified it: if the puppy’s awake, he’s awake. It must be morning. There’s no point me fighting against this now. I’m up.

I used to answer the call (or, to Alphonso Lingis, the ‘imperative’) of warming and brightening springtime mornings by going for early runs. Nowadays, I am much more inclined to hang something from the tree in the garden. My TRX, maybe, or Olympic rings, or one or another kind of punchbag. This year, I found several punchbags that I’d actually forgotten I owned. I thought I’d given all but one of my punchbags away last year. I’d forgotten about these ones.

These are referred to by different names: ‘top and bottom bags’, ‘floor-ceiling bags’, or ‘double-end bags’. They are little speedballs, for training timing and accuracy. You pump them up with a bicycle pump, affix them by an elastic bungee to a hook on the ceiling, or an appropriate tree branch, and hook the other end to the floor – or, in my case, you anchor them using a 20kg weight plate with a small bar and a carabiner in it.

I took down my aqua bag from the tree – a beautiful invention: a small punchbag filled with water; so, it is heavy, but not too hard on the joints, with some ‘give’ when it; and it moves wonderfully. (As Dream Warriors noted, humans themselves are ‘bags of mostly water’, albeit with some pointy bits.) I replaced it with first one, then another double-end bag. After a few sessions, I settled on the smaller and faster of the two bags. Every third day or so for the last few weeks – in between a gym session and a rest day – I have been getting up early to train on it.

Sweet Nothings

The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch by Jonathan Gottschall is a terrible ‘evolution-babble’ book. However, there is one gem of an observation in it. Gottschall describes the experience of training on a heavy bag. A heavy bag is a large and long packed leather hanging bag. These come in various shapes and sizes. The ones we buy for our homes and gardens are like long five- or six-foot leather sausages, and they swing around a fair bit if you know how to hit well. A professional heavy bag in a boxing gym, however, may be considerably larger, with considerably less movement when hit.

Off-putting and painful on first encounter, heavy bags ultimately help develop strength and stamina. One needs some coaching, some decent hand protection, and some physical toughening to be able to get anything ‘out of’ attempting to work with a very heavy bag. They also develop some other things – not all of which are particularly helpful.

Gottschall describes working out on one during his MMA training. He notices a disjunct between the feeling and feedback given by the heavy bag and the actual experience of going to-to-toe in a sparring bout with a non-compliant opponent. As he notes, the satisfying thuds of punches on a heavy bag, with positive feedback rippling through the body, the ability to lean your entire body into the best positions for delivering solid punch after punch, all conspire to transform the punchbag into a kind of Siren on the rocks, which soon sings seductively into our ear: you’re really good at this.

Sensing

However, becoming ‘really good’ on the punchbag may develop some ‘transferrable skills’. But not many. Moreover, different punchbags give different feedback and show, tell, teach, or indeed fib about different things.

Across his oeuvre, Lingis argues that we elaborate ourselves within, on and in certain mediums, every time and always only working or walking along one or another ‘plane’. A certain type of light, a certain type of temperature or atmosphere, a certain sonic environment, the constraints and affordances of a physical location, the tools we have to hand, the forces bearing on our bodies and perceptions – all of these become, for us, one or another kind of ‘plane’ for our potential elaboration. Planes are localised, discontinuous and impermanent, but decisive.

I am only out in the garden at all because: light, birds, puppy, dog, dry, warm, desire. I choose one punchbag. I train. Straight punches: bam-bam, bam. Once my ‘eye’ is ‘in’, and I am attuned to the movements and speed, I move from straight to curved punches. Some of the curved ones miss. Such is the nature of the double-end bag. Apollo Creed steps out of the shadows in Rocky III as Rocky throws a huge haymaker at the double-end bag, and says: ‘that ain’t how you do it’. You’ve got to punch straight. That is the nature, the first lesson, the elementary directive of the double-end bag. If you can’t do this, you can’t do much with it. Your body has to learn how to throw crisp, sharp, straight punches.

Of course, level two: learn the rules, break the rules. Once you get into the movement and learn the rhythms and directions of the bag in response to your force, you can work some non-linear punches into your sequences. These are gratifying, because when you land them you know you have done something harder than simple entry-level straight jabs and crosses. A few fast jabs, a cross and then a hook (and then maybe another cross and an uppercut) is a satisfying combination, because the hook is coming at the bag in an arc, while the bag is zigzagging around ‘unpredictably’. But you can now ‘predict’ it. You ‘just know’ when and where to move. Your body knows, in a way that is way beyond linguistic or communicable thought or knowledge. It is sensory, dynamic.

Perception

The double-end bag encourages crispness, sharpness, conciseness of movement – of a certain kind. It encourages nimble footwork, efficient movement – of a certain kind. It encourages hands held high, short sharp movements, a curious dialogue inside your own shoulders and also your abdomen and hips about tightness, angles, twists and relaxedness. Still a world away from what your mind and body do when facing an opponent who is very keen to hit you, but perhaps as close as any training tool that I know of can bring you.

The heavy bag, by contrast, certainly encourages power, but it turns a blind eye to bumbling feet and widely swinging arms, to haymakers and low hands, to being too close or too far, to moving and standing in ways that would enable a savvy opponent clear entry points. The heavy bag is like an entirely deaf and blind opponent who does not notice your setup, movement, execution, but only responds to the impact and praises you for a heavy impact – wow, you’re really good at this!

I recall reading about experiments by Jakob von Uexküll – the theoretical biologist who was influential on the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Peter Sloterdijk. In exploring perception, Uexküll would do things like place a spinning platform in front of, say, a snail. At a slow spinning rate, the snail would perceive that sometimes there were gaps and voids in front of it, and not proceed along its platform. However, at a certain velocity, those gaps became invisible and imperceptible to the snail, and it would proceed forward, thinking the surface ahead was firm. The heavy bag can do something like this to your perception. You can’t see the gaps.

I’m on my double-end bag one day, and I think ‘ok, how about some kicks?’ I did three years of taekwondo when I was in my 20s and much extra time after that doing kickboxing. I was once adept at some very fast and flashy high kicks. Of course, like any skill and any physical ability, it’s a bit like riding a bike. And, much like riding a bike, after several years away from the activity, one can expect a painful and disappointing gap between expectation and ability, at least at first.

I haven’t kicked anything for some time. I have not kicked high or often or with any seriousness or conviction or commitment for longer than that. I have tried to keep flexible. But there is flexible and there is flexible. Flexibility is one word for some very different things. I noticed decades ago that the flexibility provided by yoga practice was not the same as the flexibility developed by kicking arts, like taekwondo. Static stretching doesn’t have the same feel or same carry over into kicking as more ballistic stretching, or stretching for ballistics. To be good at kicking, you have to do lots of kicking. The stretching has to be kicking, the kicking has to be the stretching.

Then there are my injuries, and the rust and wear and tear that comes with age. The ankle I destroyed at 38 no longer enjoyed fluid between the bones. And after years of dry bone on bone action, the space meant to be full of lovely lubricating fluid is now full of what they call ‘post-traumatic arthritis’. It’s very temperamental. Plus, my age; my decades or micro and macro injury. Will my hips and lower back and ankle let me kick like I want to – like I remember, like I think I still can – today?

No. It turns out, not today. I’m trying to kick the double-end bag. It’s all wrong. I’m barely making the head-height target. The slaps of contact feel sloppy. My setup is weak. There is no bounce in my feet. My ankle does not want to help me with any kind of plyometric springiness. To make matters worse, my hips and back have formed a union against this, and have started a protest.

I give up. I start to tidy up. I loosen the ground anchor, and tuck the bag and elastics behind a branch of the tree. I decide to re-hang my aqua-bag. Not because I want to use it; just because it will last longer if it is hung rather than left lying around, warping out of shape under its own weight.

I hang it. Inspect it. I decide to throw a kick. It’s nice. Then another. It’s good. Then different kicks. A hook kick. A spinning back kick. Then combinations. Front kick, half-turning kick, turning kick. Crescent kick. Sidekick. Oh yes! All good. All great.

This bag is just right. The bag says: Yes! You know, you are really good at this? But I realise I am not objectively, neutrally, naturally, really good at this. It is the confluence of material factors. This is the right bag for this. The right plane. The right time.

‘My abilities’ are not universal. They are not everywhere and always. They only come to be actualised and actualisable in being elaborated along a localised plane, ‘in relation to’ or in a kind of interactive symbiosis with, the medium or technological apparatus. One punchbag said I can’t do flashy kicks, another bag said I can, and actually seems to help me do them.

As Alphonso Lingis argues at the end of his essay ‘Action with Things’:

The action to make things into means engages in things that make a means of the one who acts. The motorcycle commands the user to recon struct his posture, his musculature, his skin, his manual and mechanical skills, his imagination and his reason to serve it; his cycling makes him a biker. The land the Guatemalan Indian inhabits, the milpa he cultivates which demands the utmost of his rationality and leaves no indulgence for caprice and fantasies, are not means for him; he lives not only from them but for them, they are his dignity. The frijoles in baked-clay plates his wife lays out on the table for him and their children are not a means for the refurbishing of depleted body-cells in view of labor for ends beyond; in the repast their cares come to rest and: their laborious existence finds an hour of accomplishment.

We probably would not know what a wrong statement would be if we did not know what a pair of ill-fitting pants felt like. (Peter Sloterdijk)

Bagginess

I’m in the gym. The workout is going ok. The weights feel … ohhhhh-kayyyy… ish. But something feels wrong. I’m not feeling right. It’s not ‘in’ me. What is it? I realise. And the realisation feels ridiculous. But still, I could kick myself. It’s this t-shirt. The t-shirt is wrong. It is ruining my workout.

How preposterous is this? A baggy t-shirt ruins a workout?! But, hang on: I once read about a study which concluded that wearing tight clothes (such as compression tops, BJJ rash-guards, or running ‘base layers’ – Lycra, basically) assisted in the learning of new physical skills. The argument was that the added pressure enables you to become conscious of and to feel parts of yourself that you otherwise might not be able to feel, enabling you to develop a stronger mind-muscle or mind-movement ‘connection’ or awareness.

In some contexts, it’s obvious that the right clothes can oil a practice, and that the wrong clothes can hinder it. The sleek second skin of a BJJ rash-guard enables rolling without things getting tangled, without the sweat making the clothes heavy and floppy. By contrast, the ridiculousness of the BJJ gi (the pyjama-style uniform), with string fasteners and loose tops, all unsuccessfully tied together by an ever-unloosening belt, seems to do nothing but constantly interrupt and frustrate rolling. But, arguably, they might say, that’s all part of the game.

But a baggy t-shirt, when lifting weights… Am I saying we must lift weights in tight clothes? No. I am a great believer in training in whatever feels right. I have dabbled in wearing specific clothing for the gym. When I first joined this one, after quitting BJJ, I would wear my BJJ no-gi gear, but I gradually weaned myself off this. Other than that one blip, I have always tried to resist the idea of wearing specific clothes to the gym. I was a teen in the 1980s, and we’d train in combat pants and boots in winter, tracksuit bottoms and trainers in summer. We once bought some of those funny baggy pantaloons that bodybuilders used to wear back then, but quickly backed off from that. Nowadays, at the gym in the morning, I will be wearing whatever t-shirt I was wearing yesterday.

It’s just that this time, I was wearing the wrong t-shirt. This t-shirt was doing something, or preventing something. This t-shirt was too baggy. And baggy in the wrong way. It was making me feel… baggy. I could not feel the swell of my back, shoulders and chest as I progressed through the workout. I was not getting enough sensory feedback. It felt like the workout wasn’t ‘working’.

Tightness

We often imagine that the gymgoer wears tight clothes simply to show off, to parade, like a peacock, or as philosopher Alphonso Lingis has it, like an orchid – at others. That is, we tend to think of our clothing choices as purely semiotic – purely about communicating with others, sending out messages: ‘Look at me! Aren’t I gorgeous?’ There is definitely some truth in this. But what kind, and is it the whole truth? If we focus on this semiotic/communicative dimension, we maybe don’t notice certain other kinds of ‘communication’, internal to ourselves, or certain effects of the clothing, certain affects. In the right clothes, I can myself in the right way, I am present, I exist; this region of myself, it is present, it exists.

Of course, if tightness is what we need, then it must be the right tightness. Tight to just the right degree and only in the right places. My social media captors have, for the last year or so, been feeding me adverts pitched at older men (like me) who still workout (like me) but who wear terrible t-shirts (like me). The t-shirt I need, it says, is one that is loose around the waist but hugging around the shoulders and arms. This will make me attractive, it says, and happy – sometimes literally: in at least one of the adverts, poor old ‘dad’ has been overlooked by women until he wears these new t-shirts, and then the women can’t take their eyes off him. And their hands. And so on.

Loose at the waist, tight at the shoulders and arms, says the advert. Show the right things off, conceal the wrong things. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the main metaphor for plenitude, power, self-security, dominance and so on, is ‘phallus’. And notice that I said ‘metaphor’, not ‘referent’ or ‘thing’. For those who do not work regularly with metaphors, or phalluses, the simplest way to get a handle on what this means is to take the classic way of clarifying what a metaphor is (‘my love is a red, red rose’) in distinction to a simile (‘my love is like a red, red rose’), change ‘love’ to ‘phallus’ and ‘red, red rose’ to whatever the important thing that makes you feel secure is. So, for instance: ‘My phallus is a loose waist, tight shoulders t-shirt’. Choose your own examples. It might be your car, your partner, your biceps. It might even be your six-pack abs, or even (unlikely) your phallus. Whatever it is, it is crucial that the phallus must be in some sense concealed, covered, veiled, or at the very least, curated. In short: clothed. Your phallus must be wearing the right t-shirt. It would not be the phallus were it not for the t-shirt. In effect, it only becomes what it is when in the right t-shirt. Without it, it’s not it, and neither is the t-shirt.

When the phallic thing is laid bare, revealed in a stark nudity without the correct staging, without the right t-shirt, all that appears is shame. As a variable metaphor, ‘the phallus’ can ‘be’ anything, can migrate anywhere. But it must be curated. It must be staged. Managed. Manscaped, so to speak. Without this, it is just flesh, or fabric.

I am aware that Lacanian concepts like this are normally deployed ad hominem, to state or imply that certain kinds of men are insecure. I’m sure they are. Of course they are. In Lacanian theory, lack is constitutive. Lack leads to desire leads to attempting to become coextensive with plenitude and completeness. But none of us can get this, because we are not this. So, the ultimate lesson is: those in Lacanian houses shouldn’t throw stones.

And anyway, sometimes (admittedly, rarely) it’s not just about ‘loose at the waist, tight at the shoulders and arms’. It’s not just tightness. It’s rightness.

Rightness

More recently, I have taken to wearing quite oversize long sleeved tops to the gym. This is because I recently decided that I needed to go back to basics and rebuild myself. (I do not take such major epochal and existential decisions lightly. I only make them occasionally – about once every fortnight or so.) So, for the new me: only the big lifts: squats, deadlifts, barbell rows, straight-bar curls, shoulder press… I realise I ‘should’ be doing bench press too, but because my shoulders are banjaxed, I need to be creative. So, instead: close-grip/parallel incline dumbbell press with fly. (Never seen this before? That’s because I pretty much made it up in the quest for something that could quickly and completely hit my chest while sparing my shoulders from undue stress.) Calf raises. Home.

So, big overhaul to training approach. Big exercises only. Few sets. No complexity. No small or fiddly little exercises. Against the backdrop of what felt like my new-found, principled (ahem), old-fashioned simplicity, I seemed also to be drawn to simple and non-fussy clothes. As I did my big lifts (ok, with small weights, but hey, I’m old, I’m creaky), I focus only on the outline that my big tops show to me, of me, as I brace for squat, or reach the top of the deadlift, or clench my glutes and abs to try not to cheat in the straight bar curl. First time I wore one, I thought: this top is perfect. It allows me to see and feel my body only as one unit. It was not tight. Quite the opposite.

Of course, the big top while lifting is nothing new. There has long been a ‘big-top aesthetic’ in bodybuilding and other kinds of lifting. When you wear your big tops, you still need to see the topography of your traps and deltoids. In a way, that’s a large part of the point, or the value.

Between sets, I confess, I have more than once looked around at the youngsters in their tight vests doing set after set of single arm tricep-pushdowns, or bicep cable curls, or whatever fiddly little thing they are doing to make their bicep or tricep or pec or delt pop out just that tiny little bit more. And more than once I have thought: if they covered up a bit and wore a big top like me and focused on the feel of their entire bodies, and focused on the big lifts, they’d progress faster to where they want to be. The big, baggy, long-sleeved top makes you not so much a body without organs, as a body with fewer details. A body without fussiness.

They say that the actor Tom Hardy acts with his shoulders. He displays his emotions and his character’s personality through the sag of his head as it hangs (yes, hangs) on top of huge traps and weighty round deltoids, as he looks up, almost through his own lips, to allow the rest of his body to start acting. Something like that, perhaps.

But then, that specific thought about the youngsters in the gym is just one thought; just an everyday fleeting negative evaluation of basically everyone else in the gym – which is perfectly normal for me. Whenever people in the gym aren’t doing what I am doing or not doing something the way I would do it (which is most of the people most of the time), then my first reaction is to judge them negatively and very critically. Of course, given how often I change my own things around and do things differently from last time, this means that were an older me to witness a newer me doing something in the gym, he would think ‘what an idiot!’ And he would be correct.

Indeed, have I not just argued for two completely different things in the space of this little reflection? First, the necessity of tightness. Second, the necessity of bagginess, looseness, largeness. Yep. But that’s ok. I guess, if pushed, I’d say that my point is that a baggy t-shirt is always bad, while a baggy long-sleeved top can often be good. It’s about rightness. It’s about the feel. But what does that even mean?

Pants

In a fascinating section of the book Infinite Mobilization, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that before the homogenising logic of the modern world fully took hold of language, there were myriad notions of truth and correctness, each tied to the ideals and objectives of a specific trade, activity, or practice, and its feel. We can see their traces today, if we unpick the metaphoricity (technically: catachresis) at play in our most literal-seeming words.

Sloterdijk starts his exploration of rightness with the image of the oasis, and hence rightness as being when good things come together. From there, he proposes that culture at root amounts to making more and more things into oases. From here, culture becomes agricultural:

The oasis is a place where things are ‘right’; it is the privileged place where things that correspond to each other fuse together. Culture is the art of creating oases – places where the cultivation of correspondences is intentionally carried out. Having initially begun as an agricultural culture, it owes its existence to the ability to cultivate fields and soils as the ‘right’ habitats for selected plants. Its secret is the correct correspondence of plants and soils, and the right alignment of the action of sowing and harvesting to the seasons. It was only by way of metaphorical seminars that it later spread through other ‘fields’… (107-108)

But, of course, there is more than one kind of rightness: ‘The multifaceted economy of small instances of rightness precedes the monoculture of the great truth’ (108). There are ancient, still enduring, and always current forms, such as ‘the “truth” of hunters and shooters, for whom the right is what hits the mark’. Elsewhere, there is the ‘discovery [that] you can take with you is what is right, according to the act of gathering’, which is the ‘rationality of gatherers and seekers, which occurs only when they find what they “can use”’. Thus, claims Sloterdijk there are two enduring but ‘archaic truth functions’ which derive from our hunter-gatherer ancestors – ‘the hitting of the mark and the discovery’. In addition to all of this, he continues:

the ancient arts and crafts have bequeathed us a wealth of inconspicuous concepts of correspondence that establish rules, rations, and appropriateness within local practices. Thus, there is still a concept of truth of pharmacists, where what is right is what helps; a tailor’s concept of truth, where what is right is what fits; a musician’s concept of truth, which is measured by what is in tune; a carpenter’s concept of truth, where what is right is what joins together; a mason’s concept of truth, where what is done right is what stands and holds soundly. In all these fields, people gather experience with sub-truths that are inconspicuously pre-sorted into an equivalence between sentences and circumstances.

Drawing equivalences across a wealth of everyday and praxis-specific ‘rightnesses’ is what constitutes the bedrock and foundations upon which our modern concepts of universal truths have been built:

In this way, hitting the mark, discoveries, fusions, fittings, effects, harmonies, cohesions are regional variants of corresponding phenomena that become clear to every life as soon as it gets a bit more acquainted with them. With the gentle violence of the self-evident, they tune and orient all the complex functions of the human mind in the fields of theory, praxis, and art. It is only because the diverse cultures of correspondence and adequation had already inconspicuously prepared the ground that the higher truths of science, metaphysics, ethics, religion, and aesthetics were able to build their imposing buildings on it.

But, before universalisation, sentences – in the sense of semantic units of words and judgements – derive from circumstances. Just because we do not think about the possible pragmatic origins or fundamental metaphoricity of our words about correctness and truth does not mean that they are not irreducibly embodied and tied to practices. Their sensory and physical nature may have become inconspicuous to us, but:

This inconspicuousness is at the same time a criterion for the soundness and sensation-free consideration of these sectoral truth functions. It is only because they are already recorded and assumed to be vital that the later effort of the intellect to find perceptive evident equivalences to things also becomes plausible and self-evident.

All of which brings us back to my t-shirt that day, and my long-sleeved tops on other days, and indeed back to my epigraph: ‘We probably would not know what a wrong statement would be’, says Sloterdijk, ‘if we did not know what a pair of ill-fitting pants felt like’.

Rightness is a felt sense that we no longer notice as a felt sense. Sometimes we forget how much we sense, all the time, even such supposedly secondary matters as our clothes, and what a huge role they play in establishing rightness and enabling activities and experiences.

… all the sexual, psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which proliferate in California, belong to the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging ... Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Separation Perfected

‘Functional fitness’ is an umbrella term for a cluster of approaches to exercise that combine the simultaneous training of strength, stamina, cardiovascular fitness, explosive power, and movement, mobility and athleticism. Its most committed practitioners often engage in competitions that test almost every currently recognised definition and category of ‘fitness’. But it is also pitched as a non-competitive (or purely self-competitive) approach to exercise that can improve anyone’s quality of life, even those who only dabble – by improving their mobility, balance, strength and stamina. A phrase commonly used to explain what functional fitness seeks to develop is ‘general physical preparedness’ (GPP). There are many schools, tools, styles and approaches to functional fitness, including such as well-known entities as CrossFit, Hyrox, TRX, and kettlebelling. There are also more marginal ones, such as training with heavy steel clubs – which will be my main focus here.

The central concept of the movement – ‘functional fitness’ – is actually a disputed and contested term. There is no univocal scientific consensus about what ‘functional’ or indeed ‘fitness’ might best be taken to mean (Spatz 2015). But proponents share a common disdain for exercises that isolate muscle groups (the biceps curl is the most commonly used example), or that preclude the athletic/kinetic combination of different elements (activating the ‘posterior chain’ is often invoked as a key virtue). What this means is that, while well-known gym movements such as the bench press, for example, certainly involve several major muscle groups (pectorals, deltoids, triceps), those groups are isolated from any significant dynamic connection with the rest of the body. This means that total body movement is precluded. Furthermore, when bench pressing with heavy weights, you cannot introduce variation, because raising and lowering a heavily weighted bar requires attempting to maintain a fixed and stable line of movement. Hence, even well-known and well-respected exercise staples such as the bench press are not favoured in the functional fitness world.

Since the mainstreaming of modern bodybuilding since the 1970s, along with the expansion of mass-produced commercial exercise machines since the 1980s, the fitness industry and fitness culture have refined the art of isolation and separation. Today, most gymgoers would be able to make a clear distinction between cardiovascular training and hypertrophy or strength training. Many will know the slightly more refined difference between hypertrophy training and strength training. And a fair proportion will even be able to make clear distinctions between such matters as different ‘zones’ of cardiovascular training, or finely graded and nuanced distinctions between how to work the upper pectorals versus the front deltoids, how to target the different muscles in the calves, or the brachialis versus the biceps, and so on.

In reaction to this, the functional fitness movement of the twenty first century rejected separation and focuses on the value of functionality. It declares: who really cares whether you are exercising your front deltoid or your upper pectoral, when what is much more likely to matter ‘in the real world’ is whether you can complete a demanding physical task that might well involve pushing away very hard at unpredictable and changing angles for a long time while in awkward positions or on uneven surfaces? Functional fitness values general physical preparedness and distances itself from the culture of the image that has arguably dominated exercise culture since the advent of Hollywood’s spectacular bodies in the 1980s (Tasker 2012; Jeffords 1994). It’s not how you look, it insists, it’s what you can do, in the real world.

In other words, functional fitness is organised around ideas/ideals and values such as functionality, reality, practicality, usefulness, etc. Given this, one question for the cultural analyst is whether its fixation on ‘reality’ means that functional fitness is free from myths? Is it a discourse of truth, free from ideology? Is it really organised by reality, and free from mythology?

Given the breadth and heterogeneity of the functional fitness movement, these are not questions that should be posed ‘in general’, without close references to specific examples. So, I will limit myself to a modest exploration of this question by looking at some select examples of one specific field of functional fitness. This is a branch that focuses on what is called ‘circular strength’ training. Circular strength training takes the form of swinging tools such as heavy clubs, maces, and kettlebells, particularly in what proponents like to refer to as ‘throwing patterns’ and other ‘functional patterns’. This field of practices may seem marginal or niche when compared to how many people know about more mainstream practices likes CrossFit or Hyrox, for instance. However, as circular strength proponents often observe, strength, ‘fitness’ and ability to move fluently, under load, in circular or non-symmetrical planes, is at the heart of sports such as golf, tennis, baseball, American football, and innumerable other movements of everyday life. Indeed, they add, many ‘mainstream’ functional fitness styles actually miss, ignore, or underplay the importance of ‘circular’ movements in sport and everyday life. Thus, circular strength proponents sometimes position their approach as being more functional than other approaches to functional fitness. Furthermore, circular training has some noticeable dimensions that are not quite as prominent in other discourses of functional fitness. For instance, its proponents make regular reference not only to ideas about sports (and) science but also, significantly, to non-European traditions and ‘ancient’ practices.

In what follows, I set out some of the structuring features of the output of three well-known proponents of circular strength training. I will explore their approaches specifically in terms of the place of ‘myth’ within them.

Myth as Double Sell

The approach to ‘myth’ I will use derives from the work of Roland Barthes (1957, 1993). Other approaches are available. What Barthes meant by ‘myth’ can be defined, debated or described in all sorts of ways, using all sorts of technical academic terms. However, we can sidestep such complexity by beginning from a key and simple observation that is at the heart of Barthes’ argument about myths. Namely: they involve a double sell. Whether in advertising, poetry, or politics, a myth arises when a vision of the world is pitched, in relation to which a product or project is proposed.

Advertising messages might therefore be boiled down to something like: ‘Hey you! Do you want your life to be like this? Then buy this’. In politics: ‘Hey, the world is like this, so you need us to fix it’. Barthes argued that myths arise in many other kinds of practice too. For instance, he begins his 1957 classic, Mythologies, with a discussion of wrestling. In the old music hall incarnations of wrestling of his day, Barthes argues that it attains the status and does the cultural work of a kind of classical morality play. Much like WWE or lucha libre of today, we see good characters and evil characters. Their bouts are interpreted as battles between good and evil. (Barthes opposes this kind of wrestling to judo, but we might also oppose it to Olympic wrestling, which Barthes would regard as competitive sport rather than pure entertainment spectacle.) Thus, in order to sell us a specific thing (tickets or subscriptions) wrestling forwards a mythic idea of the world, structured by good and evil, and thereby reiterates such values as values.

Similarly, to use another of Barthes’ examples, advertisements for an autumn clothing range might involve images of a pleasant walk through the leaves, with a loved one, or a nuclear family group. Such images offer a vision of an idyllic or ideal kind of life. In one regard, this is simply in order to sell woolly jumpers. But by the same token, it is also ‘selling’ domesticity, heteronormativity, marriage, parenthood, and other conservative social values. Likewise, images of glamourous social worlds populated by beautiful people are used to sell diamond rings. The desire for diamond rings stoked by such adverts reimposes consumerist ideals and ideologies.

Thus, myths involve a ‘double sell’. They propose a mythic image of the world or of reality in order to push a specific product or project. This means that cultural critics need to ask two basic questions. First: what is the vision of the world that is being proposed here? Second: what is it being used to sell? Working out answers to these questions is a fundamental task of cultural criticism.

The Exercise of Ideology

What is being ‘sold’ in images of exercise? In a sense, there are too many possible answers here. Exercise is arguably always a kind of ‘ground zero’ of the meeting of myths and actions – a place where ‘the rubber meets the road’, at the interface of arguments, ideologies, beliefs and embodied praxis. Governments institute physical education curricula for youth to ‘strengthen the nation’. Adults take up sport or exercise in response to messages about why and how they ‘should’ change their lives, look after themselves, improve themselves. All such messages can be regarded as ideological, or at least moral, even when they are supposedly rooted in in science. They emanate from schools, governments, religions, the mass media, percolate through family and friends, and of course they permeate social media.

Even when they are ‘scientific’, messages about exercise always come with heavy ideological clout. As Andrew Barry (2001) argues, ‘facts’ are never neutral or open-ended. Scientific research into any topic is always driven by such matters as ‘concern’. Thus, the establishment of facts about such matters as the risks or values of smoking, drinking, diet or exercise, is from the outset driven by ‘concerns’ that are pre-scientific – social, moral, cultural. Indeed, argues Barry, any scientifically or socially established ‘fact’ about the human world always carries a moral value and hence an imperative or injunction to behave a certain way (Barry 2001).

Exercise is always a double sell: Because the world is like this, it requires this; thus you must exercise like this.

In what follows, I take a whistlestop tour of a few interlocking islands of today’s ‘reality focused’ functional fitness archipelago, in order to identify and unpack just a few of the many myths that are used both to sell an image of a functional you in a functional society and, of course, to sell specific things. The things in question are nothing more sinister than some curious pieces of exercise equipment (heavy baseball bat style clubs made of steel, and heavy wooden or steel maces), and, of course, all the classes, courses and lessons that focus on how to use these implements to best effect – the best effect being, of course, to change you. The myths which package and transport the selling of these physical and virtual/pedagogical products operate on two fronts at the same time. First, we are told: These things will change your life; follow me and I will show you the way. But, at the same time: these things are not simply a gateway to a new and improved you; they are also a portal back to lost mythic golden age – a lost age of truly functional people.

Flow Shala

Flow Shala is a movement-coaching brand and studio centred on strength, mobility, yoga-informed training, and holistic wellness. Its primary online presence takes the form of the social media output of its founder and figurehead, Summer Huntington. Huntington describes her background as combining kinesiology, yoga training, movement performance coaching, and the development of her unique exercise and movement systems such as ‘Steel Mace Vinyasa’ and ‘Clubbell Yoga’. As their names imply, these systems combine styles of yoga with weighted training tools: the steel mace (a bar with a round weight on one end) and ‘clubbells’ (baseball bat-shaped clubs of various weights, normally made of steel). Huntington presents Flow Shala as a ‘house of flow’ (shala being a Sanskrit word meaning ‘home’), that helps people build an ‘intentional movement’, with a strong emphasis on flow state, kinesiology, and behavioural change (Flow Shala, n.d.).

On 5^th May 2026, Huntington posted a video on YouTube, filmed during a bi-annual Flow Shala retreat in Bali. If we were on the lookout for a double-sell, we could easily see two here: the clip is most literally a ‘how to’ – a free pedagogical mini-lesson, in the well-worn genre of the ‘YouTube instructional’. But is also, of course, an advert for future retreats. But this is not the myth – this is just the advert. There is more.

In the video, the topic is how and why to execute the yoga pose (or asana), ‘Warrior One’ (Virabhadrasana I) with a steel mace (Huntington 2026). The video is filmed on a beach. In the background, we see a group of 15–20 people taking instruction and practicing blocking and striking movements in pairs. Huntington mentions that their coach is Mark Wildman, a well-known movement and exercise coach with a large social media following, who specialises in promoting steel club, mace, and kettlebell training. (We will discuss Wildman soon.)

After introducing Warrior One as it is normally done in yoga practice, 40 seconds into the video Huntington says:

But you want to know that there is an actual reason for Warrior One. So, in most yoga classes, a Warrior One is kind of a partially bent leg and we’re just kind of hanging out Zen and very peaceful. In the origins of warrior training, the actual warrior position was a fighting position. It was, it was a defence drill or a defence position. Warrior Two was going from Warrior One, switching, changing directions – Warrior One on the opposite side: Warrior One block, Warrior One block. Right? And so, when you return back to the actual origins of warrior training, striking patterns, blocking patterns, Warrior One patterns, centre of gravity, low to the ground, you start to tap into a different ancestral memory that predates language [and] lives in your lizard brain. You’ll see as our athletes start moving and training. Mark’s doing a little breakdown right now, but you’ll start to see that people naturally and intuitively know how to get into a Warrior One. Let’s check it out with a 7lb steel mace. So, we start in a reverse guard position. Knee bend. Same side leg step back here in a block here. (Huntington 2026)

Warrior One

These claims sound captivating: yoga has warrior origins; modern yoga has lost its warrior origins; adding mace-bells to yoga practice restores something ‘original’ – and, even better, this restores something not only ancient, but actually primal, ‘natural’, or essential to the human. (Huntington claims ‘most people’ find it ‘easy’ to get into warrior one, precisely because it is a ‘natural’ human ‘movement pattern’.)

The only problem here is that there is no evidence for any of this. These are mythic origin claims that assume a fixed original essence from which later versions of yoga have developed/degraded. What there is evidence for, however, is that while Warrior One may draw its name from Hindu mythology (Virabhadrasana I), it only entered modern yoga practice in the twentieth century. The asana is said to honour Virabhadra, a fierce warrior created by Shiva from a lock of his hair after Shiva’s wife Sati self-immolated at her father Daksha’s sacrificial ritual, to which Shiva was not invited. Virabhadrasana I is said to depict Virabhadra emerging from the earth with two swords raised overhead, thrusting upward to destroy the ritual.

This is a captivating story. Among yoga practitioners, it is widely regarded as symbolising (not literally enacting) the spiritual battle against ignorance (avidya), and not literal violence.[1] Furthermore, despite its ancient-sounding mythic content, it is crucial not to forget that the name, the story, and the interpretation, are all merely the deployment of a myth that has been projected onto a modern yoga asana in recent times. Virabhadrasana I is not found in ancient hatha yoga texts. It first appeared in yoga through Tirumalai Krishnamacharya in the early twentieth century. His student Pattabhi Jois first photographed it around 1939.

The twentieth century temporality of all of this may surprise those invested in the idea of yoga as straightforwardly ancient. Nonetheless, contemporary scholars of yoga history tend to approach the development of yoga as we know it today in relation to two intertwined forces. The first is yoga’s intertwinement within international movements in nineteenth century nationalism, and subsequent twentieth century entrepreneurialism and the packaging of yoga as an ancient Indian practice in the studios and spas of Europe and North America (Putcha 2020). The second, connected to this, is the phenomenon known as the ‘invention of tradition’ – a major process of national identity building that historians identify with the modern era (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Singleton 2010).

When viewed in an international frame, with adequate historical context, and without projecting ideas or fantasies of fixed essences back into romantic ideas of the mists of time, it is possible to see that the development of yoga as we know it today involves modern cross-cultural borrowing and creative entrepreneurial innovation much more than it involves the endurance of any ancient unbroken cultural tradition, or indeed ‘ancestral memory’. Indeed, historians note, before the twentieth century, ‘yoga’ was not defined by asana practice (Singleton 2010, 2011). Warrior One was most likely devised with reference to and in a kind of practitioner dialogue with (and against) European physical cultural movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Khimich et al. 2025; Singleton 2010). It strongly resembles poses seen in Niels Bukh’s 1924 Danish gymnastics book Primary Gymnastics, which itself was influenced by nineteenth century Scandinavian traditions (traditions that had also reached physical educationalists in India). The impact that the development of nationalism had on physical cultural practices the world over cannot be overstated (Anderson 1991; Morris 2004; Khimich et al. 2025; De Michelis 2004). Governments instituted physical exercise curricula that most fitted their emergent nationalist narratives; countries sent their most unique, striking and exciting practices to World Fairs and Great Exhibitions/Expositions (Goto-Jones 2016); anthropologists studied and reified non-Western cultures’ practices (Said 1978); and tourists and travellers took all manner of pilgrimage and voyage of (self) discovery to far off exotic lands.

Dutch Flows

Harbert Eggert’s social media handle is ‘The Flowing Dutchman’. His improvised outdoor performances with heavy steel clubs and steel maces in the parks of Amsterdam – along with classic vaudeville-style strong man challenges to audience members (to see if anyone could hold a heavy mace vertically in one hand, etc.) – led to a large social media following. Eggert capitalised on this by filming more and more of his demonstrations, and also – significantly – his trips to India.

In these videos, Eggert journeys to what are positioned as the fonts and sources of different kinds of heavy club swinging. He visits wrestling akharas and kalaripayattu clubs all over India. These trips are videoed, edited, and posted on his various channels. In this process, Eggert has tried many different kinds of heavy clubs, and also studied Indian kushti wrestling and the Indian martial art of kalaripayattu. Via the popularity of his videos, Eggert set up online training courses, online sales of various kinds of club and mace, and established the Dutch Flow Academy. This has both physical and online incarnations, and under its auspices he trains and accredits people as instructors in various aspects of Indian clubs.

This is all carried out in the mode of fascination, obsession, delight, enjoyment and playfulness. However, a certain academic also looms large: the spectre of ‘extractivism’.

In ethnography and anthropology, ‘extractivism’ refers to exploitative practices in which researchers extract knowledge, stories, or data from communities without meaningful reciprocity. Methodologically and ethically, it is regarded by contemporary academics as being akin to resource plundering in colonial economies. Anthropologists critique extractivism as a metaphorical extension of raw material extraction, involving asymmetrical power flows that prioritize Western gain over non-Western participants’ needs or benefits. It is regarded as mirroring or echoing colonial capitalist exploitation, as field sites become ‘mines’ for data to be ‘harvested’, unidirectionally. Scholars critique any ethnography that takes advantage of communities through one-way knowledge flows. Of course, ethnographic or anthropological extractivism differs from direct economic ‘extraction’, but it repeats non-reciprocal power and economic dynamics. In some cases, it is regarded as leading to forms of standardisation, homogenisation or cultural conflation that renders specific and precise local knowledges both interchangeable and exchangeable while erasing singularities and particularities.

It might feel harsh to connect the invariably happy and friendly social media output of the Flowing Dutchman with extractivism. Indeed, his approach arguably demonstrates several counter-extractivist practices. For instance, his video content always emphasizes two-way engagement rather than unidirectional data extraction. He documents practices of mace and club training traditions and styles from India and other cultures, and he clearly frames this within a broader commitment to community participation and skill-sharing. He films himself with Indian experts embedded within their training cultures.

His documentary work may even seem aligned with a decolonial ethos of participatory knowledge production, rather than extractive research. He clearly collaborates with the practitioners he encounters, and his films show shared passion and community atmosphere. His discussions reveal his focus on how people transform their lives through engagement with club training, and he engages participants as agents rather than passive data sources. In addition, Eggert explicitly acknowledges the history and cultural contexts of the tools he teaches (particularly Indian gada/mace traditions), documenting his own learning journey rather than appropriating knowledge without attribution. This contrasts with extractivist knowledge practices that decontextualize and commodify local practices without recognition.

Nonetheless, his work irreducibly operates within the social media content economy, which supports other commercial aspects – paid courses, coaching, certifications, merchandise, etc. This kind of commodification of knowledge, even if shared reciprocally, raises some questions. There is a sharp distinction between collaborative knowledge production and independent or individual knowledge monetization. This is particularly significant given the non-Western sources of the practices he studies and integrates. Accordingly, the relationship between his documentary projects and the practitioners he engages should be assessed in terms of whether those communities have agency over their representation and/or receive any financial benefits from the distribution of their images and performances. We might also enquire into whether his source communities are in effect merely being ‘mythologised’: used to paint a certain picture of foreignness, on the basis of which the knowledge, experience and ultimately expertise that Eggert accrues becomes the true object and commodity for sale.

Certainly, after visiting India, Eggert returns to Amsterdam and positions himself as de facto ‘expert’ and ‘master’ of mace practice. He trades on his ‘authentic’ experiences and first-hand knowledge with Indian practices. On this basis, his Academy certificates ‘Master Mace Instructors’. This is arguably a classic extractivist set-up: having harvested knowledge from dispersed, non-Western practitioners, it is synthesized through a Western pedagogical apparatus and re-distributed it under branded institutional authority. The knowledge becomes ‘his’ system, his certification, his expertise.

Moreover, even before this, we can see that in his ‘community’ and ‘pilgrimage’ style videos, he centralizes himself in the video output. What is primarily held up for our inspection and admiration is him – his body in action. We often see Eggert performing with extremely heavy gadas and other clubs, to the delight and amazement of an assembled Indian audience.

This may be aligned with various problematic mechanisms, from Eurocentric cultural extractivism to mandatory entrepreneurial ‘Instagrift’, and more. Nonetheless, by constantly appearing as the star of the show, often as the most impressive performer, often as authoritative instructor, often as guide and interpreter, he establishes himself as the epistemic gatekeeper.

The communities and practitioners from which knowledge originates become sidelined or comparatively silenced sources. Viewers encounter foreign knowledge through his mediation and framing. This mirrors both extractivism and what Edward Said regarded as the exemplary operation of orientalism: the collection of Eastern knowledge and its installation and institutionalisation in the West (Said 1978). The childlike delight and laughter of Eggert’s online persona become what Barthes would call the ‘depoliticised speech’ that defines myth.

Athletic Savages

Mark Wildman’s company is Wildman Athletica. His YouTube bio describes him as ‘a celebrity trainer in Los Angeles’. He writes: ‘I focus on heavy clubbell and kettlebell training. Mobility is the key to your health. (and yes... that’s my real name)’ (Wildman 2016). Since November 2016, Wildman has posted over 1.5k videos and has almost 4k subscribers. (On Instagram, he has more again.) He specialises in demonstrating heavy steel club and kettlebell exercises, breaking movements down into their key components, and emphasizing which aspects of each movement a learner should focus on to maximise what he calls ‘athletic response’. Wildman emphasizes the importance of correct posture and biomechanics in all exercises and movements. ‘Stand all the way up’, he regularly enjoins us (unwittingly echoing countless Victorian schoolmasters and mistresses (Gilman 2018)), invariably adding: ‘because that’s what makes us human’.

In almost all of his videos, Wildman pins his colours to the mast of science – the science of human physiology. Yet, at the same time, his ‘scientific’ discourse almost always draws on powerful Rousseauian myths of the ‘noble savage’. In myriad videos, Wildman focuses overwhelmingly on ‘good posture’ and two further themes: first, ‘throwing patterns’, and second, what the ‘human’ use of ‘levers’. These two skillsets, he argues in many hundreds of videos produced across a decade, are ‘what make us human’.

Within two months of his first video, on the 25^th January 2017, Wildman offered a ‘History of Heavy Club Swinging’ (Wildman 2017). In this 5-minute 20-seconds monologue, Wildman proposes that clubs have been present in human culture since before the earliest records. He first mentions Gilgamesh’s use of a club in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and then proposes that humans have trained with clubs since prehistory (‘clubbing is older than actual history’, he says at 2 minutes 10 seconds). He lists numerous figures, countries and cultures that have featured clubs in their myths and histories – from Greece to India, Persia, the British army in India since the 18^th century (Heffernan 2024), and, he notes with a shrug, the Hitler Youth. (With the latter observation, Wildman is touching upon the expansive modern history of ‘group drill’ approaches to physical education, mentioned earlier, in which, all across Europe and North America, physical education took on regimented military forms, among which surviving films of Hitler Youth exercise demonstrations are but one example.)

As well as being ‘older than actual history’, Wildman also claims that club training was lost to the West after World War Two because of changes in military training. Here, he claims, Indian Club drilling was replaced by ‘basic training’ approaches to exercise, such as press-ups, sit-ups, and running. Thus, Wildman proposes that we are currently in a kind of renaissance – a process of rediscovery. However, for him, this is a rediscovery neither of Hellenic nor Asian nor modern colonial practices, but rather of a generalised prelapsarian human essence. His final words in the film (at 5-minutes 10-seconds) are: ‘Get a clubbell. Learn to use it. Be more human’. In such universalisation, reiterated across his oeuvre, Wildman deracinates the cultural specificity of different kinds of clubs, and different approaches to using them, and positions the modern steel ‘clubbell’ (an item and a term first promoted and patented by the entrepreneur Scott Sonnon in the early 2000s) as if this modern invention were actually some kind of transhistorical archetype.

As Broderick Chow observes, a cluster of ideas about a ‘transhistorical and transcultural ideal’ of the body are ‘difficult to shake’. Referring to the functional fitness movement in general, he notes that many ‘rediscoveries’ of the ‘prehistoric’ are often

illustrated by pictures of shirtless men in ‘natural’ environments, doing fitness exercises their Cro-Magnon ancestors would do: carrying logs through the forest, hanging on tree branches, wading waist deep in streams, sparring with each other. The illusion would be convincing were it not for the whiteness of the men in the images, the technical fabric board shorts they all wear, and their uniformly muscular and ripped physiques. (Chow 2024, 11)

Far from being actually transcultural and transhistorical, Chow argues, the history of such practices in fact ‘originated in the nineteenth-century popular theater as spectacles of strongmen, bodybuilding, acrobatics, and wrestling’. It was not until the twentieth century that feats of strength ‘legitimated themselves into practices of fitness and health. This point of origin’, he argues, ‘historicizes the idea of the fit body, making clear its relation to industrial capitalism and severing mythic notions of an unbroken connection to the ancient Greeks or the prehistorical “natural”’ (Chow 2024, 12). The fact that the current use of heavy steel clubs emerged in the early twenty-first century (as an attempt to follow up on the kettlebell craze of the early 2000s) does not trouble Wildman at all. His regular invocation of a transhistorical, transcultural, universal history, is actually allochronic fantasy.

The Noble Savage in the Room

Practitioners of heavy club swinging regularly invoke fantasies not just of ancient or primal human movements (something shared in common across all functional fitness discourse), but also ancient foreign cultures. They regularly evoke a primordial noble savage who still dwells somewhere in our ‘lizard brain’. Hence, when examined critically, what becomes visible is a reiterated pattern of romanticized primitivism that draws heavily on noble savage tropes, which reiterate, recapitulate and reactivate broader orientalist, essentialist and quasi- or crypto-colonialist tendencies in contemporary fitness culture.

The noble savage image was established in the eighteenth century. It is often connected with Rousseau, although Rousseau never actually uses the phrase ‘noble savage’ (or bon sauvage). Rather, the association comes from later readers’ interpretation and summary of his account of ‘natural man’ in works such as the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. In fact, the phrase itself and the broader mythic figure pre‑date Rousseau, and grow out of classical primitivism and early modern travel writing, with the phrase ‘noble savage’ first attributed to John Dryden, in his 1672 play, The Conquest of Granada.

The noble savage image presents an idealized vision of ‘uncivilized’ peoples as morally superior to those corrupted by civilization. This framework manifests clearly in heavy club training discourse through several key elements. The first might be called temporal nostalgia and historical romanticism. Wildman and Huntington consistently frame club training through appeals to ancient authority, often making statements like ‘clubbing is very, very old; so old that it’s probably older than actual civilization’ (Wildman 2017). Wildman’s rhetoric positions his training tools as connecting practitioners to a pre-civilizational golden age when humans possessed superior physical capabilities and wisdom. To reference already mythological figures like Hercules and Gilgamesh is to paint a picture of club swinging as ‘older than civilization’, and therefore more authentic.

Going hand in hand with this is the Romantic claim of the corruption of modernity. Wildman’s discourse consistently evokes a mythic contrast between the ‘pure’ and ‘natural’ movement patterns of ancient peoples with the degraded state of modern humans. He argues that ‘people sit down all the time and when they go to the gym they lift in straight lines’, positioning even contemporary exercise as fundamentally corrupted when compared to the natural throwing patterns that ‘define humans’. This directly echoes the noble savage trope’s central premise that civilization corrupts natural human goodness (Wildman 2017).

Primitivist ideology is shared in common by ‘primal movement’ and ‘functional fitness’ communities. Their discourse consistently presents hunter-gatherer movement patterns as superior to modern exercise, with practitioners implicitly and explicitly claiming that ‘primitive men and women’ possessed optimal fitness naturally (Dalleck and Kravitz, n.d.; Dangerously Fit, n.d.; Scott-Dixon 2021; Senart 2013). Prominent are constructs like ‘the seven primal movement patterns’. Such concepts exemplify the romanticization central to the discourse, with advocates frequently asserting that these movements ‘have deep roots in human ancestry’ and were ‘essential for survival’. The underlying assumption is that pre-agricultural humans lived in harmony with their bodies and environment, while modern civilization has corrupted these natural patterns (Dangerously Fit, n.d.).

Hence, heavy club practitioners frequently invoke the figure of the ‘ancient warrior’ – ‘Warrior Number One’, so to speak – as the idealized practitioner. This archetype embodies the noble savage’s key characteristics: physical prowess, moral clarity, and connection to nature. In this mode, Wildman celebrates ‘The Great Gamma’, a wrestler who allegedly performed 1,000 shield casts daily with an 80-pound club, and presents this as evidence of superior ancient training methods. Wildman neglects to mention that Gamma was a twentieth century wrestler who established his own training regimen. Summer Huntington, as we have seen, projects yoga’s Warrior One pose back into the mists of time, and by the same token deep into our primordial ‘lizard brain’.

As an aside, it seems valuable to point out that the term ‘lizard brain’ derives from 1960s evolutionary theory. The classic version of this theory proposes that the human brain has a primitive and ancient ‘reptilian’ core to the brain, then a less old ‘mammalian’ layer, and finally a rational ‘human’ neocortex on top. The current scientific view is, in a nutshell, that the popular idea of a human ‘lizard brain’ is overly simplistic and mostly wrong as a model of brain evolution and behaviour. It has some value as a crude metaphor for our ingrained ‘automatic’ reflex responses to threat, surprise and fear, but it is not a scientifically accurate explanation of why humans feel fear, anger, or impulsive urges. Modern neuroscience prefers language about interacting networks, including threat detection, emotion regulation, memory, and social cognition, rather than a single primitive module.

Nonetheless, it is all part of what makes such discourse so appealing. It wraps romantic primitivism in scientific language, and sells the sense that we can access our true noble savage natures by exercising in this way. Practitioners cite evolutionary arguments about ‘natural’ movement patterns while simultaneously engaging in what anthropologists recognize as classic noble savage romanticization (Rapp 2024; Scott-Dixon 2021). The discourse of ‘ancestral movement’ and ‘primal patterns’ presents itself as evidence-based while actually perpetuating the same myths about pre-civilizational human superiority that have characterized Western thought since the Enlightenment (Rapp 2024).

Simulacra

Contemporary club and mace training discourse as seen across social media today invokes and draws on noble savage fantasies in a wide range of ways. Of course, it is not alone or idiosyncratic in doing so. Rather, it is one style of discourse that needs to be understood within a broader context or landscape that is populated with anxieties or senses of alienation, identity anxiety or crisis, the felt lack of perceived cultural roots, the desire for authentic experience, and a certain drive to legitimate appealing romantic primitivist beliefs. The romanticization of primitive strength training serves psychological and cultural functions beyond simple ‘nostalgia’ for the sense of a lost time, world, or version of humanity. It provides practitioners with a sense of authentic embodied physicality and connection to imagined ancestral wisdom while also offering a kind of escape from the perceived corruption of modern life.

However, this discourse ultimately reproduces the very orientalist and primitivist assumptions that historically justified Western cultural superiority while simultaneously appropriating and decontextualizing non-Western training traditions. The ‘noble savage’ centralised in heavy club training refers less to actual historical or contemporary peoples and more to Western fantasies of pre-civilizational purity projected onto convenient cultural artifacts.

This is all particularly palpable when reflecting on how such discourse selectively appropriates elements from various cultures (Indian clubs, Persian maces, or even European medieval weapons, etc.) while stripping away their actual historical and cultural contexts in favour of a generic ‘ancient warrior’ mythology – making them into simulacra. This serves contemporary psychological desires and fantasies about a kind of authentic communion with the primal source, while actually generating something that is better regarded as a postmodern simulation. Indeed, once noticed, it is possible to see that the dimension of simulation runs deep, through all aspects of club training discourse.

Simulation

A critical reader of this article may query why I have prioritised some of the arguably marginal or supplementary imagery used by club proponents when, in actual fact, their explicit focus and direct claims all relate solely to pragmatic, practical functionality, in the here and now. Functional fitness and circular strength training discourse primarily claims that it will lead to improvements in sporting or athletic prowess. However, it is worth noting that, despite some of the dramatic claims often made by proponents, academic research actually suggests something of a disconnect between the claimed sport performance benefits of such training and actual evidence.[2] There is a limited amount of ‘transfer evidence’.[3] In fact, there is arguably a paucity of scientific data supporting circular training proponents’ often dramatic claims about its direct benefits, especially when compared or contrasted with other approaches to exercise or sports training.

As a cultural studies scholar rather than a sports scientist, I am unable to comment on the disputes about the scientific or objective status of functional fitness and/or circular training’s claims. As someone who exercises, I very much enjoy swinging Indian clubs, heavy clubs, maces, and kettlebells. As I have written before, the affective, phenomenological and somaesthetic dimensions of such practices are compelling (Bowman 2026a, 2026b). However, what should be resisted in and around such practices might be called the performance of authenticity (Daudi 2022; Riemer 2020; Rörström and Grist 2022).

For instance, we often see (as in Huntington’s Warrior One with mace) what might be called a simulation of imagined ‘aesthetic authenticity’. Huntington proposes that because she thinks that holding a mace in the hands in Warrior One looks a bit like a martial arts overhead block, therefore it must really be a ‘hidden’ or ‘lost’ natural or athletic movement. Such practitioners prioritize movements that they think look natural, fluid, and ‘functional’. The emphasis on ‘movement quality’ and ‘flow’ creates a visual culture (or culture of the image) wherein aesthetic authenticity is performed for different kinds of fantasy rather than any other purpose (Riemer 2020). The appeal to ancestral wisdom in the evocation of ‘ancient’ training methods serves as what arch-theorist of postmodernity Jean Baudrillard, would recognize as the simulation of depth and meaning (Scott-Dixon 2021). These tools are recontextualized not as products of specific cultural practices but as generic signifiers of authenticity. Their true functionality is in their simulation of a mythic structure of feeling.

Unification

I began this article with the subtitle ‘Separation Perfected’. Some readers will be aware that this is also the title of the first chapter of Guy Debord’s influential 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. Using it was a kind of dog whistle that telegraphed for some readers my argument that functional training was going to be regarded as connected more with performance and spectacle rather than utility. This is because, as Debord identified in the 1960s, in a media-saturated society, ‘social relations among people’ become increasingly ‘mediated by images’ (Debord 1990, 1994). This inexorably leads to the commodification of ‘authenticity’. Fitness culture transforms certain movements, deemed authentic, into commodity (and) spectacle. This is the basis of any number of the endlessly proliferating ‘double sells’ we encounter everyday online and in other media. What may or may not have begun as a desire for the real, for practical training, for utility and functionality, etc., becomes ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles’ (Andreasson and Johansson 2014; Bell et al. 2023; Hearse 2021).

To stick with Debord’s imagery and argument a little longer, this produces what might be termed ‘separation through unity’: the functional movement community creates apparent unity around ‘natural’ movement while actually capitalising on the separation of practitioners from direct embodied social and functional experience. Mark Wildman, in particular, often sells club training as a way to get better at real activities, such as – and this is one of his own repeated examples – chopping wood with an axe.

The Woodcutter

At the end of Mythologies, Roland Barthes offers the image of the woodcutter as the very exemplification of authenticity qua absence of myth. For Barthes, the woodcutter escapes the culture of the image and also avoids alienation. The woodcutter is at one with ‘his’ world and ‘his’ work. His speech about his tools, his environment, trees and wood is as good as it gets: free from myth, the real thing. Man, environment, tool, skill – harmony. Hmmm. Critics have noted that, really, therefore, Barthes merely offers one myth to counter myth: his fantasy woodcutter is his ‘good myth’, proposed to counteract the ‘bad’ (i.e., ideological/media) myths produced by and circulating within and further dividing a divided and antagonistic capitalist society.

A key difference between Mark Wildman and Roland Barthes, then, is not that Wildman is a twenty first century ‘Hollywood’ movement and exercise trainer while Barthes was a twentieth century rive gauche Parisian intellectual who valued reading and writing and literature and philosophy and theory and criticism over most other things. Rather, it is that Barthes would most likely not advocate practicing woodcutting with a club or mace before becoming a woodcutter; whereas Wildman – a club instructor and vendor – would be considerably more likely argue that buying one of his clubs or kettlebells and following one of his courses first would be no bad thing.

However, a key similarity between both Barthes and Wildman is that, even though Barthes’s career was defined by his cultural criticism, his development of semiotics and his contributions to literary and cultural studies, and even though Wildman is a ‘Hollywood trainer’, neither of them really care about the reality of this or that or any other woodcutter. Their work is neither about nor for woodcutters or woodcutting – even though Wildman often situates himself in dramatic natural landscapes for his YouTube videos, and even though Barthes clearly fetishizes ‘wood’ (versus ‘plastic’) throughout the pages of Mythologies. Similarly, Huntington does not care about the reality of an overhead block with a staff or mace, nor about its historical veracity, and Eggert really only centralises himself in his travel videos and demonstrations across India. All tend to deploy myth against myth, their myth to counter someone else’s myth, noble myth to counter savage myth, constantly separating in an attempt – they claim – to unify.

However – whispers the spectre of Marx into Barthes’s agnostic post-Marxist ear – society is not unified, never unified: it is divided, riven, conflictual; antagonistic and antagonised. Anyone that says otherwise is a snake oil salesman, pedalling myth and ideology. Thus the key questions remain: what picture of the world is being presented? What are they selling? Asking and working out answers to these questions is fundamental.

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[1] If it were about literal violence, then it would be worth noting that two swords thrust into the air is very different to one mace or club held horizontally overhead by vertical arms. Furthermore, the martial artist in me wants to add that holding the arms straight when executing any kind of roof block is also an exceptionally bad idea – but that is a critique of a different order.

[2] For instance, multiple studies suggest that the ‘functional movement screen’ (FMS) – which is a cornerstone of functional training discourse – lacks both measurement and predictive validity. Research shows the FMS ‘does not demonstrate the properties essential to be considered as a measurement scale’ and cannot prospectively identify athletes at risk of injury. More damning for the sport performance claims, the FMS was explicitly ‘never intended to measure sport performance’ (Bardenett et al. 2015; Cook et al. 2014; Philp et al. 2018).

[3] While functional training demonstrates ‘near transfer’ to related movement tasks, there is minimal evidence for ‘far transfer’ to actual competitive performance. This mirrors broader research showing that cognitive and perceptual training rarely transfers to real-world performance despite impressive laboratory results (Bashir et al. 2022; Fransen 2024; Liu et al. 2024; Xiao et al. 2021).

These are all ‘pre-personal intensities’, as affect theorists say. They do not, in and of themselves, ‘mean’ anything. They have effects, they affect, us and other things, in ways that are utterly heterogeneous to any meanings we may ascribe to them. The plastic, battery and chemical being of my daughter’s vape has more effects and consequences than occur to me, or her. The disgust response in me is affective and also emotional, as is her nicotine addiction response. I might not ever have felt (the affect) disgust that I do, whenever I see or smell a vape, were it not for so many bad (emotional) memories and associations. Affect, in this sense, when it becomes personal, after it is pre-personal, cannot be divorced from feelings, nor feelings from meanings.

I used to love the smell of tobacco, even of second or third-hand smoke; I loved fresh tobacco, old smoke, stale smoke. Now, it makes me wretch. Whisky (or indeed, whiskey, as I tended mainly to drink Irish) always burns. We repress the pain, deny it, pretend it never happened.

When I was 14, I puked so bad after drinking two different quarter bottles of cheap whisky in about an hour that I thought, the next day, I’d never touch the stuff again. The day after that, my girlfriend who hadn’t been present for the big vom-fest turned up with a half bottle of cheap blended whisky. I fought through the burn and drank with her, because it would be rude not to. I would later go on, through my life, to say that I liked whisky/whiskey, but that I was a bit scared of it. I do. I am. I also came to associate it heavily with death. Funerals. To me, whiskey mainly means bereavement. Mainly my dad. And seeing my brother pass out on the stairs after his funeral. None of this can be separated out.

Scholars have spent much time reflecting on the affective dimensions the big musical event – the sound system, the rave, the illegal gathering, the happening. The coming together of the group, coming up together, bouncing together, shared energy, shared passions, experiences, affects. Yes, ok. I have been there. But long before that, well before attending a rave as a punter, before ever taking a pill, I would work at these events as a bouncer, a doorman. Indeed, I worked as stage crew and/or security for gigs of all shapes and sizes, all genres of music, all sorts of gatherings and vibes. Yes, the music thuds through you; yes, you might tap your feet or involuntarily move to the beat. But not necessarily and certainly not always. The music can be an irritant, the happening a pain, the multitude a bunch of arseholes. Even when you’re working for an act or a genre you really like.

And vice versa. I worked the pit at a heavy metal gig. I had never even been to a heavy metal gig before. I didn’t like heavy metal. The entire event was stressful. I hated every second. The powers that be wanted us to stop stage diving. The band and the audience wanted precisely the opposite. We fought all night and knew that we were, essentially, letting everyone down.

I was exhausted. Drained. I had hated every second. The next day, I borrowed an album and listened to the band. I loved it. I still love that band, and have fond memories of the event. Go figure.

My friend Gabriela Méndez Cota recently observed to me that, within recent scholarly, intellectual and (inter)disciplinary academic history, ‘In some cases, an affective turn was triumphantly declared without further argument or evidence of a genuine, rigorous engagement with Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic praxis’. I agree. ‘Affect’ somehow became the watchword for that which for some reason just simply replaced and superseded poststructuralism’s fixation on words and languages and meanings and institutions. Not many people said why or how this was so.

Some people did. There was some brilliant work. The first examples that just flashed into my mind were John Protevi’s Political Physics, which moves from Derrida to Deleuze very persuasively, and Liz Grosz’s Volatile Bodies, which moves from Foucault to Deleuze.

But people sometimes tended to taxonomize and polarise, as if Derrida and the other language-meaning-institution-focused poststructuralists were doing something fundamentally different to Deleuze and the emergent field of affect studies. As if Deleuze and Lacan could be opposed. But that’s all completely wrong. I was present at the ICA in London in 1996 when Derrida, in front of hundreds of assembled conference-goers said very clearly and without ambiguity, ‘I never disagreed with a word that my friend Gilles Deleuze ever said’.

So, what does this mean? Or, if you prefer, how does this feel? What effects does it have? To me, it means this. There is nothing outside of the affective text. Affect is ordinary – that is indeed (to borrow the phrase of Raymond Williams again) ‘the first fact’. But this does not mean affect is univocal, or has the same effects.

The vape disgusts me. But I understand it doesn’t disgust everyone, not even those nearest to me. The tobacco smells. I feel indifferent to it, until it is lit. If someone smokes near to me, they disgust me. I made this happen. When I finally managed to quit smoking after several failed attempts, I realised that the only way I was going to make this work was if I decided to regard it as disgusting, as a killer, sapping life from those who puffed away, calcifying them, drying them out, with damp rot around the edges, and killing those closest to them. I scrutinized their greying skin, their smell. I listened to their coughs, their rattles. I made them disgust me, so that I could fully disidentify and escape. A complete change of affects, as Sloterdijk puts it, is essential to secession. A conscious decision. A matter of interpretation.

https://affectsociety.com/make/#themes

I would love to invite you to submit an abstract for this theme. Deadline is 28^th May. Submission portal is here:

https://affectsociety.com/make/conference/

Here is a description of the theme/s:

Why do we exercise, and how do physical practices shape our identity and ideology? Every physical practice creates distinct ways of experiencing the body–different ‘corpo-realities’–which impact how we feel, what we believe, and how we relate to the world. According to Lauren Berlant, affect studies can be regarded as an extension of ideology studies, as it moves further into the realms of lived, embodied life.

We exercise to change. Exercise changes us. We change our exercises–depending. On what? Some approaches may see only ideological capture. We are certainly affected by the structuring forces of pre-personal discursive energies, tendencies and trajectories. But we form agency within structuring structures. We craft our activities on the basis of changes they themselves have produced. Things change, so we have to. We change, so things have to. New vistas open. We can now do different things, or the same things differently.

Across the disciplines, many methodologies are used to try to capture these complex dynamics. Meanwhile, untold numbers of people have agonising or delightful conversations with themselves about their identities, orientations, hopes, dreams, fantasies, and fears; move the pin up or down the stack; tighten their running shoes; ponder a kettlebell; or lightly touch a punchbag and take a barely conscious sniff. Countless reels tell us we must change our life. Some arrest us. Some irritate. Others excite. All are potentially powerful interventions.

This stream explores ways we might grasp the exercise/affect nexus. How can we comprehend and conceptualise affective atmospheres, felt and lived through media and movement? What can the relations hope to be between scholarly knowledges, practitioner knowledges, and dispersed and profuse discursive energies?

Best wishes,

Paul

--

Paul Bowman

Professor of Cultural Studies

Cardiff University. 2 Central Square, Cardiff. CF10 1FS. UK

Work: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/182916-bowman-paul

CV: http://bit.ly/4mrJE1C

In the 1977 documentary, Pumping Iron, Arnold Schwarzenegger famously said that the pump provided by a good workout was a feeling as good as orgasm. We may find this kind of claim odd or problematic, especially if our thinking is dominated by pre-Freudian, Freudian and/or vaguely evolutionary scientistic terms. In terms of some post-Freudian psychoanalysis and cultural theory, however, as well as in terms of affect theory, Schwarzenegger’s supposedly eccentric claim is actually quite a lot easier to nod along to.

The pump is an intensity, a kind of singularity of pleasure/pain that defies binary thinking, and that is actually an illustration of the centrality of physicality to consciousness and identity, and of the ways in which the sensations of our bodies are segmented, regionalised, and given different kinds of meanings, values and connotations.

When I was a grad student, reading English language translations of authors like Roland Barthes, I would encounter untranslated French words such as ‘jouissance’. I never knew why they were untranslated, but I figured it had something to do with psychoanalysis in general and the work of Jacques Lacan in particular. One of my peers was studying the work of Jacques Lacan much more directly than I. So, I asked her: what is jouissance? She paused for a moment, and seemed to be wrestling with some difficulties. So, to fill the void, I ventured: is it like getting a joke? She said, with some delight, ‘Yes!’ This helped me.

Later, someone else said that this was incorrect. But it was too late. I had already decided that this supposedly untranslatable, intense thing called ‘jouissance’ could arise outside of the kinds of sacred or taboo moments that psychoanalysts and artists fetishize, and as a normal part of many other areas of everyday life. Laughing, sneezing, solving a logical puzzle or riddle, producing a preposterous syllogism, vanishing (as Kristeva once suggested) in an intense drug experience, and even – why not! – pumping iron.

Post-Freudian psychoanalysis, like that of Lacan, emphasizes that the pre-social and being or becoming socialised human infant and then child is initially ‘polymorphously perverse’. Sensations and pleasures are distributed wherever across the body and throughout the day, and they don’t mean anything to the child. Over time, these become charged with different meanings – private, public, good, bad, interpersonal/relational, matters of pride or shame, things to be hidden, to be displayed, to be disavowed, and so on.

These values are mixed in with the regionalisation of eroticism, so that over time different parts of the body become recognised in all kinds of registers as intense zones of sexuality. Others less so. It is often fine, in a social situation, perhaps in a bar, at a summer barbeque or between courses at a dinner party, to stand behind a friend and give them a spontaneous shoulder massage. It is fine for them to moan in pleasure. Massaging other parts of friends’ bodies in social situations, whether in public or in private, however, or to elicit moans of pleasure upon contact, less so.

Sensations and intensities are socialised, given values and meanings, in broadly social but also intensely personal ways. In many areas of our lives, our sensory capacities are streamed or channelled, sometimes routinised out of consciousness and into invisibility. People sometimes say they lost contact with themselves, their bodies, their physicality. Innumerable new activities might reconnect them with that, in innumerable ways.

In the essay ‘How one looks, how one feels’, philosopher Alphonso Lingis argues that we tend to think of our consciousness as being located in our heads, just behind our eyes. Against this, Lingis argues for the decentralization of our understanding of the mind, moving our sense of it from our heads and into the active musculature. Our consciousness is where what we are conscious of is. That is where we are.

Lingis adds to this that influential thinkers like Freud regarded the key to the riddle of dreams as lying in our sex organs – as if when we dream, it is our genitals and our unconscious sexuality that is dreaming. But, he proposes, just as our consciousness can and does migrate around all areas of the body all day for all kinds of reasons, then we must accept the possibility that our dreams are not just our genitals and our conscious or unconscious sexual desires dreaming or being let out to play. Rather, he suggests, the sleeping body shifts its ego into ‘dismembered organs’ (like eyes, jaws, or genitals) to secrete the vivid, visceral images of our dreams. This replays or reworks the exact same processes as take place through our days: just as the bodybuilder in the gym shifts their sense of self directly into their biceps, deltoids, or quadriceps, so our dreams replay such capacities. This is why our dreams can sometimes seem to be elaborated in terms of organs without bodies, with different pieces massively amplified and displaced into other things, and so on.

In the same essay, Lingis notes, under extreme exertion, all muscle fibres become highly sensitive ‘sense organs’. By feeling the world through these powerful, contractile experiences, the bodybuilder escapes the prosaic channels of everyday domesticity and projects their existence into an ‘epic and heroic space’, fully extending their force and vitality into the world.

As a contrast to this, Lingis asks us to think about the baseline, everyday, internal feeling of the body, and to think about disruptions to this ‘baseline’ or norm. He begins by arguing that when the human body is functioning normally or performing acquired skills seamlessly, its internal feeling is largely vague, stale, and unnoticeable. The body forces itself into our conscious awareness primarily through unusual things like discomfort, or more violently, through injury, surgery, sickness, and aging. These afflictions disconnect us from our own flesh, turning our limbs into alien, insensitive ‘dead meat’ or transforming our living tissue into fetid ‘filth’ that evokes a profound horror of decomposition and death.

Against all of this, he argues, bodybuilding is a pursuit of raw, self-generated pleasure and bodily triumph. He counters sociological theories that view female bodybuilding merely as a political strategy for empowerment or an attempt to change cultural images; instead, he argues that the true addiction to building massive musculature stems from physical pleasure – the singular ‘pleasure’ or extraordinary sensory intensity. By pushing muscles to exhaustion against iron weights, the individual maps out an internal anatomy of aches and burns, pleasures and pains, experiencing hot bursts of ‘muscled pleasure’. This superabundant energy functions as a daily, exultant ‘taste of victory’ over the encroaching corruption of sickness, surgical scarring, and fat, ultimately eradicating feelings of fear and shame.

In one way, this is a variant of the question of the definition of martial arts, because it asks about limits. It asks what the limits of a practice are, before it becomes something else. Another version this question would be: Where does one style end and another begin?

I have always tended to approach such questions via poststructuralist discourse theory: martial arts are constructions. They are ‘whatever people think they are’.[1] Yet, I have often also wondered: Are styles really/only contingently constructed and more or less arbitrarily demarcated realms? Or is there something more? Is there something ‘essential’ to specific styles? If so, how do we theorise this?[2]

First pass. We might base our answer on technical contrasts. For instance, judo doesn’t punch or kick, while kickboxing only punches and kicks. So, we might try to establish a spectrum or continuum of differences, placing different practices contiguously side by side, partitioned out according to technique differences.

However, stark differences in practice, such as those between judo and kickboxing, are rare. There is often a very great deal of apparent overlap. Many martial arts punch; many martial arts kick; many block and throw; many sweep and choke. So, discussions of essential characteristics (and/or reciprocally, of limits) cannot make appeal to techniques.

Second pass. Perhaps we can capture the essential characteristics of styles (and hence the differences between them) on the basis of repositories of techniques – that is, on the basis of the specific clusters and combinations of techniques that characterise a practice. Here, we might envisage more of a Venn Diagram approach than a simple mapping exercise.

Yet, this, too, quickly runs into problems.

Myriad martial arts punch. However, a punch is never just a punch. There is no degree zero punch. How many ways are there of initiating a punch, sending it, landing it; moving on from it; of forming the fist and the entire rest of the body around it, the fist in relation the position of the body, and all in relation to another person, or people, and environment? Shape of fist, angle, position of elbow in relation to fist and shoulder, position of shoulder, placement of head, movement of torso, movement or position of feet on the ground or in the air or in movement, what is tensed or un-tensed, when, for how long, to what extent, and so many more variables, all come into play – differently across different styles.

A punch is never just a punch. There is no one single neutral natural punch. Every punch is cultural; emanating from an enculturated body, one whose capacities and capabilities were produced via conscious or unconscious discipline, training, habit, happenstance.

Some have argued that there are natural or essential human-animal movements that are innate to us, hence that there may be natural/universal human-animal punches. I dispute this conclusion. In adult humans, there are only enculturated, habituated movements. Even ‘natural reflexes’ are enculturated. Even biomechanically emergent force vectors, contractile fields and supposed points on the body such as dantian or hara do not exist outside of habit-formation.[3] A punch is a cultural convention, based on a theory, expressing an aesthetic – a somaesthetic.

In the world of martial arts, as in all areas of culture, ways of posturing and moving are never separate from values.[4] They are aesthetic. Every teacher and all of their senior students believes passionately that there are only a small handful of correct ways to punch. However, correctness varies radically by class, club and style. I once threw a perfectly executed kung fu style punch in an escrima class. The person I hit with the punch looked at me like I was an idiot. The people who saw it fell about laughing.

I think such laughter is more pertinent to a thinking of the characteristics and differences between martial arts styles than either the map image (in which martial arts are thought of as having quasi-spatial borders) or the Venn diagram image (in which styles both differ from and overlap with other styles). A thousand different things can be called a punch, but a practitioner of one style might well laugh at or feel horrified by 995 of them.

Laughter and disparagement is of prime importance. It is almost programmatically predictable for certain styles to laugh at or disparage each other. This tells us a lot about the values of those styles. Although some people practice both styles, it is not uncommon for BJJ to disparage Krav Maga and vice versa. This is because of the vastly differing values and theories that each assume.[5]

But even if we ignore structures of laughter (and loathing), when thinking about technical and terminological multiplicity and ambiguity, even if we give each of the thousand different things that may broadly be called punches a thousand different names or technical terms, we are no closer to answering the question of what defines identities and the polices the differences between styles.

This is because there is something else in play, something I borrow a term from Richard Shusterman and call somaesthetics.[6] A martial art or a style is not simply a matter of a cluster or assemblage of techniques. Its inside and outside are not simply defined by what’s in and what’s out in terms of valid and invalid techniques. A style is an embodied aesthetic – aesthetics embodied – a quality of movement, or an enclosed embodied value system.

A style has or is a ‘structure of feeling’.[7] It is a quality of movement at least as much as a logic of movement and a range of movement. Certainly, a style has a spatial and temporal logic and a range, outside of which parameters it will break down. But, within its ranges, a style is first and foremost an embodied language of feelings, a distribution of sensations.

My proposition is that taking a more somaesthetic approach to understanding martial arts (and indeed other physical practices) will enable us to disambiguate elements that are more obviously ‘internal’ (or inherent) from those that are more obviously ‘external’ (or extra).

For instance, we can reorient our thinking about martial arts, way from issues such as ‘intentionality’, ‘motivations’, and discursive or ideological claims and beliefs. We can bypass the logocentric fixations on what people say about a practice and get to the qualities of the practice. We can avoid being pulled into ideological and often self-deluding matters such as whether ‘this is for self-defence’ while ‘that is for health’ or ‘sport’, or whatever. Within a somaesthetic approach, all of these things can be called ‘external’. To borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, I call all such matters the ‘attending discourse’.

The ‘attending discourse’ is all the ‘blah blah blah’ that is said and believed and claimed and disputed and argued about a practice. For schematic reasons, I am here calling it ‘external’. So, ‘internal’ somaesthetic is distinguished from ‘external’ discursive. We can think about their overlap or interplay later.[8]

But for now: If we treat somaesthetic qualities as being on the inside and words and meanings as coming from the outside, then we can move our focus away from claims made about practices – especially claims about intentions, motivations, aims or outcomes. As interesting as such matters are, they can tell us nothing about the experiential, affective, phenomenological dimensions of doing one thing rather than another.

This will help us to avoid being led by the nose by declared reasons or alibis, such as ‘Krav Maga is for functional combative self-defence efficacy’, say, or ‘tai chi is for health’. These are claims about a practice, not insights into it. You could just as easily swap them and insist: ‘Tai chi is for functional combative self-defence efficacy’ or ‘Krav Maga is for health’. And you could find ample evidence to justify whatever it is you are claiming. And people do.

But that is not what I am doing here. My purpose is to make a case for ways to move cultural analysis away from a focus on words and pictures and into a different way of understanding practices themselves, as practices.

So, how might a somaesthetic approach help?

First, a somaesthetic approach posits the primacy – perhaps even the ubiquity – of the aesthetic. Second, it proposes that aesthetics does not exist at a distance from our embodied practices – it suffuses them. Our relationship with the aesthetic is not a simple matter of consumption – certainly not in the model of a viewer in an art gallery, contemplating an artwork; or a spectator in a cinema, transfixed by the spectacle. These may be moments. But primarily, aesthetics is elaborated in and along and as the planes or vistas opened up by the practice of an activity: the right positions, postures, the right ways to move, to initiate, to respond – these become the cool ways, the beautiful ways, the genius ways. The wrong ways become the stupid, the ugly, the clunky, the awkward ways. (I once landed a perfect taekwondo-style hook kick to my partner’s head while sparring in escrima. It was perfect and beautiful. I was sternly reprimanded, because high kicks are wrong.)

Right and wrong are premised on and grow in reciprocity with bodily awareness, emergent forms of proprioception, new skills of control and surveillance – breath, elbows, chin, coccyx, toes – you name it. New abilities to sense new things develop; new ways to sense, new ways of making sense, new sensibilities. Different styles are different elaborations of different – and very embodied – ‘distributions of the sensible’.[9] Let me give three quick examples, three somaesthetic contrasts.

Tai Chi

Tai chi first. Tai chi is a good place to start, because it is so organised around increasingly refined attention to the body. I am happy to call tai chi an ‘internal’ martial art for this reason alone. ‘Internal’ is not about magic or mysterious forces or energies. It refers to increasingly refined attention to what is going on in one’s static, moving, positioned, repositioned, and repositioning body. This is mainly done in solo practice; but partner practice in push hands is an amplification of this.

In tai chi practice, you first learn the form ‘square’ (hands to the right place, feet to the right place; then move to the next place). You are taught to relax. Once you have the square dot-to-dot shape of the form, you begin to make what was square into something that is ‘round’. Roundness is a precise kind of attention to movement between points. It is attention to a form of synchronised coordination, in which everything travels self-consciously along certain deliberate paths or lines, and all the major parts of the body start to coordinate together at the ‘right’ speed to arrive at the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time.

After roundness comes continuity. What was originally a sequence of different endpoints (the different postures to be struck, one by one), now becomes one smooth movement of unbroken flow. In your mind’s eye, you still see the square corners where you first put your hands in the right place and your feet in the right place, but now you never stop there, and an outside observer might be unable to see anything other than continuous wavy movement.

After continuity is slowness. Then there is high and low, fast and slow, body lightness, and the injecting of different kinds of ‘intent’.

I would argue that the essential somaesthetic quality of tai chi is manifest when roundness and continuity combine with a specific manifestation of slowness. This is when tai chi both looks and feels like tai chi. Any movement or technique brought into this mode of performance might be called becoming tai chi. Conversely, when tai chi techniques are executed outside of this mode of performance, this would be tai chi becoming something else.

Escrima

Escrima next. Escrima is based in stick fighting, or machete fighting, but it includes unarmed striking and grappling. I studied Escrima Concepts, in the lineage of Rene Latosa. It was a heavily deracinated and stripped back ‘no frills’ approach. The approach was influenced by Dan Inosanto, and my teacher’s teacher was also a long-time boxing coach and grappler. All these factors have a bearing on my understanding of escrima, and on what I will say next.

Our escrima’s somaesthetics were heavily structured by the notion of ‘the box’, ‘the guard’, ‘forward thinking’, ‘heavy elbow’ and being ‘loaded’.

The box is a small hypothetical window of space in front of you. It is determined by the shape, size and strength of your own guard, and (decisively) the way you are brandishing your weapon. A small, compact, forward thinking stance, with heavy elbows, while loaded, generates a small box, which is the ideal – as the box is really the only window through which the opponent before you can ‘enter’.

The escrima guard is like a boxing guard, but elongated forward, as one is normally holding a weapon in one’s lead hand. You are leaning forward (forward thinking), in a manner akin to a ‘standing start’ in a sprint running race. You adopt this crouched, leaning forward position for two main reasons. One is to become ‘loaded’, or primed for attack. The other is to ensure that your legs and groin are further away from an opponent, and more easily defended without compromising the guard.

Forward thinking is priming your mind and your body to always go forward. The requisite psychological mindset is trained by adopting the guard, the sprinter’s standing start position, ensuring that your weapons are ‘loaded’, and being drilled repeatedly in situations from which one cannot retreat – most frequently an exercise called wall training. One person stands with their back heel touching a wall. Their opponent is free to move around. The person on the wall cannot move their heel from the wall. They must both defend and counter from that position alone. It teaches you not to retreat. It makes you desperately want to go forward.

The heavy elbow is part of the guard. It is formed by rolling the shoulders forward, contracting the chest, and consciously making the elbow feel heavy and immoveable. For me, making the heavy elbow feels like rolling the lats and serratus around and forward. The heavy elbow is instrumental in delivering ‘short power’ – short hard shots with a fist or weapon, with minimal to no telegraphing.

This can only happen if you are loaded. All of the posture considerations of escrima, as I was taught it, are designed to put you in a position where you are almost desperate to explode forward. Its somaesthetics are akin to something spring-loaded and explosive – a mousetrap, say, or a snare, or a taut bow and arrow.

BJJ

Finally, the somaesthetics of BJJ are different again. I have written about this at some length before, in my article ‘BJJ’s Diary: The Emergence of a New Normal’.[10] Without repeating any of that, let’s merely note here that BJJ itself cannot be thought or experienced outside of the collaborative interaction with a training partner. It is radically distinct from both tai chi and escrima in this regard. For, even though all of these practices can benefit from partner-work, there is no experience of BJJ outside of partner-work. The partner in BJJ is constitutive of it, and the status of the partner is radically different to the partner in other kinds of martial art – even, I would say, its so-called ‘closest relative’, judo. I have done some judo, and on an experiential level it is nothing like BJJ.

Back when I first wrote about the experience of BJJ, I did not think about the constitutive dimension of partner-work. Nor did I think about the different ethical status of the opponent, or partner, back then. But, noticing and noting it here and now, I would argue that this opens a way to link my use of somaesthetics to the other key term of this panel’s title: ‘soma-ethics’.1

The question of the ethics of different styles is something there is no time for me to broach here. But I think it would be possible to argue that different somaesthetics imply different ethics. Those of escrima, as I have experienced it, differ radically from those of tai chi and BJJ. I would suspect that practices like, say, capoeira would differ again. For, even the ‘internal’ sensory experience of capoeira arguably relies fundamentally on elements that I earlier suggested might be ‘external’. However, I do not regard the music, the community, the roda, as part of the ‘attending discourse’. Rather, the assemblage of communal, spatial and musical elements may be regarded as essential for the generation of the structure of feeling that can be said to be ‘internal’ to the experience of capoeira, in much the same way that the consenting opponent, the rules and the mat are constitutive of BJJ.

In each of the practices I have mentioned here, clear distinctions can be made between them on the basis of attention to their somaesthetics, not techniques, and not the discourses about them. Importantly, these distinctions are not (to use Saussure’s famous phrase) ‘only differences without positive terms’. Rather, the somaesthetic approach enables us to learn something essential about each style, yet without positing essentialisms.

Aesthetics arguably always has some relation to ethics – the relation to the other and to the self, the self as other – and sometimes also to politics, or at least to ‘ideology’ (as Peter Katz’s recent work has shown).

But now, my time is up. I hope that this argument might contribute not simply to the well-worn debates about the definition of martial arts, but also and more importantly that it might indicate the usefulness to martial arts studies of translating key concepts from cultural theory, such as ‘structures of feelings’ and ‘partitions of the sensible’ into the study of embodied practices.

[1] Bowman, ‘The Definition of Martial Arts Studies’.

[2] More importantly, how do we navigate this question without throwing out the baby in the bathwater of poststructuralist theory – anti-essentialism, or the compelling and ethico-politically important arguments against essentialism? I think that anti-essentialism is among the most ethically and politically valuable of concepts and orientations, because of its usefulness in challenging bigotry and prejudice of all kinds. But if we say, ‘there’s an essence to taiji’, or ‘an essence to escrima’, or ‘an essence to BJJ’, and so on, are we not, so to speak, sleeping with the enemy (the enemy of essentialism)?

[3] Beach, Muscles and Meridians; Bowman, ‘Feel the Difference’.

[4] Gilman, Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture.

[5] Bowman, ‘BJJ’s Diary: The Emergence of a New Normal’.

[6] Shusterman, Thinking through the Body.

[7] This term comes from Raymond Williams, and has been elaborated at length across cultural theory and affect studies. However, I am applying the term somewhat differently. It is often connected with a discursive conjuncture or cultural ‘atmosphere’. I am using it literally, to refer to embodied sensation and phenomenological experience.

[8] A quick note: I say all of this in full awareness of arguments about essentialism, the entire oeuvre of Jacques Derrida, his project of ‘deconstructing’ essentialism and problematising distinctions such as inside and outside, and indeed the overarching trajectory of poststructuralism as a whole. I am not seeking to hypostatize essences; I am seeking to distinguish between material realms and registers.

[9] The phrase is from Rancière, but I am using it in a literally embodied sense.

[10] Bowman, ‘BJJ’s Diary: The Emergence of a New Normal’.