Exercise: Forming Bodies, Selves, Disciplines, Princeton
International Workshop
Organized by Susan Morrow (Princeton University) and Patrick Hohlweck (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Exercise (askesis/melete/exercitium/exercitatio/usus)—the graduated, repeated performance of actions over time—is a far-reaching technology that has shaped innumerable practices of body and mind, whether in the context of sports, dance, military service, labor, religion, philosophy, rhetoric, or other arts. In European discourses, it has encompassed, among many other things: Stoic spiritual exercises; practices of Christian asceticism; philosophical meditation; training for skilled and professional work; training in the arts; military drills; pedagogical programs of all kinds, from physical education to instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic; and the present-day popularity of physical exercise routines and mindfulness practices cultivated in the name of recreation, health, and wellness.
The workshop invites participants to reflect on and respond to several common threads connecting many of these practices and the discourses around them, particularly in modernity. Exercise has, for example, been considered fundamental wherever the mind-body-complex is thought to be organized according to possibilities, capacities, or ‘faculties.’ It has often been the task of exercise to develop and realize what exists only potentially. Exercise can also be deployed as a means of incorporating norms, whether social, cultural, religious, or aesthetic—and of forming a self in the process. At the same time, the iterative, performative character of exercise may also lend it the power to undermine normative identities. In complex ways, exercise intersects with techniques of discipline (Foucault) and habitus (Bourdieu), but also with ethical self-fashioning (Hadot), care of the self (Foucault), and perhaps all techniques of the body (Mauss). Linked to practices of domination but also of resistance and freedom, exercise might thus be understood as a sort of meta-technology of the self, and most fundamentally as a mode of its temporal existence. Exercise thus has enormous potential to teach us about the formation of subjects and selves, and about the body and mind as technical and technological domains. Yet it has remained an under-studied and marginal topic in German studies and for scholars with interdisciplinary interests in the history and theory of culture in fields such as media studies, intellectual and literary history, and aesthetics and poetics. At the same time, recent work on the history of aesthetics (Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology), poetics (Gabriel Trop, Poetry as a Way of Life), and philosophy (Christopher Wild, Descartes’ Meditative Turn: Cartesian Thought as Spiritual Practice) has begun to take exercise seriously. The workshop responds to these impulses as an opportunity to take the study of literary and physical culture, media, and intellectual and cultural history in new directions.
Schedule
Friday, April 4
202 Madison Hall
9:00–10:00 Breakfast and Introductions
10:00–12:00 Acts
Johannes Wankhammer (Princeton): Epimeleisthai sautou: Exercises in the Middle Voice
Christopher Wild (Chicago): “Storm of Thought”: Exercise and the Invisibility of Thinking as Practice
Susan Morrow (Princeton): Generating Acts: Physical Education around 1800
12:00–1:30 Lunch Break
1:30–3:30 Movements
Cara Tovey (UCLA): Life as a Dance: Performing Lebensreform at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Nina Tolksdorf (FU Berlin): Dancing, Miming, Writing: The Case of Grete Wiesenthal and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
[Graduate Student Presentation] Claire Massy-Paoli (Princeton): Exercising Dance: Between Paul Auster and Patrick Bossatti’s White Papers
3:30–4:00 Coffee Break
4:00–6:30 Embodiments
Rüdiger Campe (Yale): Style and Exercise: Habitus in Quintilian (Aristotle and Bourdieu)
Niklaus Largier (Berkeley): Hymnic Exercise, Speculation, and the Materiality of the Imagination
Frauke Berndt (Zürich): Fashion-Practices in Margareta Klopstock’s Aesthetics
[Graduate Student Presentation] Zeytun West (Princeton): The Necessary Body: Aespa’s Cyborg Idols and Post-Human Embodiment
7:00 Dinner for Workshop Participants
Saturday, April 5
202 Madison Hall
9:30–10:00 Breakfast
10:00–12:00 Disciplines
Heikki Lempa (Moravian): The Exercises of the Others. The German Discovery of Zurkhaneh in the Late Eighteenth Century
Janina Wellmann (MPIWG Berlin, via Zoom): Skilled Hands. Science as Exercise of Hand and Mind in the 18th Century
Lucia Ruprecht (FU Berlin): Self-Formation in Dance
12:00–1:30 Lunch
1:30–3:30 Possibilities
Gabriel Trop (UNC Chapel Hill): Contractions: Reflections on an Ascetic Operation
Patrick Hohlweck (HU Berlin): Transitus: On Insistence in Spiritual Exercise
[Graduate Student Presentation]: Esa Purschke (Princeton): Exercising Orientation
3:30–4:00 Coffee Break
4:00–6:00 Rhythms
Carolin Rocks (Hamburg): Grasping the Absurd. Meditations on Words and the World in Günter Eich
[Graduate Student Presentation] Sonya Merutka (Princeton): The Poetics of Weighted Rhythm: Dysfluent Performances of Language
Jeff Dolven (Princeton): (Exercise)
6:30 Dinner for Workshop Participants
https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/events/upcoming/exercise-forming-bodies-selves-disciplines
Made possible with generous support from our co-sponsors: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Princeton Departments of German, Comparative Literature, and Religion; Princeton Programs in Media and Modernity and European Cultural Studies; Princeton Humanities Council; Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies; Princeton University Center for Human Values; and Princeton Center for Culture, Society, and Religion.
Contact Information
Dr. Patrick Hohlweck
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Contact Email
hohlwepa@hu-berlin.de
URL
https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/events/upcoming/exercise-forming-bodies-s…