Everyday life, the ordeal of the real and the psychophysical exercise

My article takes exercise as a concept with a historical memory. I will schematically give some attributes to exercise, which I believe have pertained through the twentieth century. These attributes are via negativa and self-penetration. As a more general description, these attributes translate into a diagram of exercise: testing one’s body/life through extreme situations. I localize the origins of psychophysical exercise in the kinaesthetic movement and life philosophy of the early pre-war century. This I see as a biopolitical movement that was radicalized through war rhetoric and war experience to include death in life as a fundamental test for expressive life force (courage and stoicism). I find an aggressive stance against everyday life and everyday body fundamental to both kinaesthetic or physical culture movement and war rhetoric. I also regard today’s exercise markets as part of this biopolitical assemblage. I emphasize the shell-shocked (or physically mutilated) body as a body that has been produced by the sensorial field of the trench warfare. The meaning of this group of damaged male bodies becomes evident when it is connected to post-war reconstruction movements with heightened biopolitics (leading to racial biopolitics and thanatopolitics). I will use some examples of Jouko Turkka’s pedagogical practice and exercises to give evidence of the psychophysical exercise’s modernist and violent memory (vitalist kernel). In the end I will give a schematic description of everyday life and use it as a background to criticize the exercise of ordeal and to give some provisional sketches for a pedagogy taking the everyday life (situationality, kairology, multiple) as its starting point or a working model.