So I did a 6:25.5 on the ergo earlier in the week. I am also under 110kgs for the first time since being in Sydney (4 years) at around 108-109.
Plus I have started back at Gleebooks for the year with two massive 200-seater events. A co-worker and I need to lay out at the start and then stack at the end all the chairs normally within about a 20-40 minute period. It is a solid workout of constant lifting and moving. Not all events are this intense though.
Work has created problems for me because my work rhythm for the last three weeks involved going to the gym at about 3:30 in the afternoon after doing about 5 hours writing work and then I’d work for about another 3-5 hours writing after dinner and some television.
I need to find a new rhythm.
oh and I am up to just under 67,000 words with almost all the historical archive magazine work and complex lit review/theory chapter work done.
Are you doing any stretching/flexibility stuff as well?
I ask because it sounds like a lot of heavy duty resistance training and aerobic work?
[warning: yoga obsession talk approaching]
I find that when I’m doing a lot of dance training (ie hardcore practice sessions every day plus a couple of insanely aerobic/athletic social nights a week) I have problems with fatigue and muscle strain. The obvious things help (ie eating and sleeping properly), but I’ve actually found yoga (I do Iyengar because it’s physically quite demanding and has an emphasis on technique) really important in balancing all this stuff out.
Advantages of yoga in a busy training program:
– learning to stretch and warm up properly. I actually add in 15-20mins of yoga to the end of my training sessions to help me warm down. This means doing some basic poses and holding them for a while. I have found I get fewer aches the next day, and the yoga makes me stronger, but stronger in a technically-right way (ie I’m improving my alignment, making sure the right muscles do the right job, etc).
– the calming, meditative aspect of Iyenga/Hatha/Geta yoga (ie doing only a few poses, and holding them for a long time, rather than moving through poses quickly) encourage a more centered approach to movement. It also helps you become more aware of your body (ie develop body awareness) so that you learn new movements more effectively and quickly (something I find invaluable for learning routines) and recognise the difference between ‘good pain’ and ‘bad pain’ more effectively. I also find that the calming part of yoga helps me maintain balance in my physical activities – it gives me some ‘down time’, where I’m still working, but in a calm, contemplative way, rather than a furiously crazed way.
– the in-your-body-ness of yoga makes competing against other people silly. I also find that it makes me concentrate on how I do things in a positive, rather than self-flagelating way. I’m not thinking ‘you suck – work harder!’ but ‘you rock’.
– yoga is phenomenal for resistance training and developing muscle strenth in a _holistic_ way – you work all your muslces as you move through all the poses, rather than focussing on one particular muscle group.
– working with an instructor is important – for obvious reasons.
– yoga is good for your attention span – it improves concentration because you’re working on holding a pose properly for a long time, rather than doing a set number of repeats quickly. You also have to hold the pose long enough to figure out which muscles are doing the right thing and which need to be calmed or energised. Because the poses have a special name and ‘story’, they also keep my brain stimulated, but in my body – I’m not off thinking about something else.
– the endorphines rock
– yoga uses lots of inverted poses. It’s only when you’re upside down do you realise particular issues with your posture/musclces. eg, when I’m upside down I can see how my poor core strength makes me lock my shoulders, which means I find it difficult to do hand stands because I’m not using my shoulders properly. When I’m right way up, I just let gravity move me. When I’m upside down, I have to know how to activate each muscle group so that I don’t fall over or so that I can just get into a pose!
– yoga gives you a hawt, toned body and freaking amazing posture (something I really need to facilitate my partner dancing – it’s hard to be able to communicate your weight transfers to a partner if you aren’t aligned)
– it’s social but not too social
– I get fewer injuries when I’m doing yoga regularly while training a lot – without yoga dancers regularly get sore knees and feet. I also get sore hips and shoulders. Yoga keeps me fitter and stronger in a healthy, resilient way, and I find my knees don’t hurt as much, and my hips are easier. I also find it’s easier to get my leg over my bike and balance on my bike when I’m doing lots of yoga
– yoga is good for your body-image – the way you feel about your body. You stop thinking ‘oh, I’m too fat/too skinny/whatever’ and start reading bodies in terms of their use of muscles/posture, etc. You start thinking about your body as this fabulous _you_ that can do neat things like hand stands and hanging upside down from ropes.
Yoga was really important to my getting through my thesis. It was two session a week where I didn’t think about work, and had a nice, calming session with nice people where there was no shouting and no pressure to achieve anything other than feeling good. The long-term nature of yoga (ie you have to accept that any changes you make will take years and long-term maintenance) made me chill out and stop rushing.
You can also go to yoga when you have injuries (which is why it’s essential to do it at a proper centre not a gym, and to have a good instructor) – you just do different versions of the poses. So you don’t get that ‘i suck because i can’t go exercise’ feeling, and don’t get the endorphine-withdrawl downer. Yoga is also good for recovering from injuries and strengthening muscles to regain fitness.
Glen, good to hear you’re doing thesis + body work at the same time, like you and dogpossum, I’m trying to do everything at once as well. I have taken the opposite tack and gone for a boxing regimen, fuelled by angry amounts of thrash metal via headphones and visions of baroque battlefields to instill a whirlpool of energy, going home and writing for about three hours.
When we’re done, lets meet up on a beach somewhere, oil each other up and read Deleuze. Totally, totally nothing weird about it at all, though, you know how it is… (etc).
By the by:
I have been thinking about Sharviro’s post on Delanda’s new book, and I am constructing a response post myself on this topic (because I have not blogged anything philo-based for a couple of years now, but also because I think his reading is at odds with Delanda’s stated aims.) Delanda’s positing of a future society comes with a very different impetus than say, Agamben’s coming community, and there is a very strong element of the diagnostic to Delanda which requires a slightly different analysis – and I think, consequently, to say that the book doesn’t approach class is to do a disservice to how books like this one operates. However, taking on Shaviro on his home turf is a massive massive task, and I’m scared, Jonny. I think that saying Delanda’s approach doesn’t allow for any reading of becoming is absolutely key to that critique, but I have trouble agreeing with it.
Delanda’s book is flawed, and by no means offers the kind of methodology and intuitively driven philosophy that “A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History” did, but what it offers is really amazing. He merges Deleuzian assemblages and strata into his own reading of assemblages, and at one point, and this blew me away, was insistent that assemblages cannot be properly theorised except in the context of history, that their historical contingency is the measure by which we can think of them. Assemblages cannot be thought of as part of the future, by definition. This was one of the first times I had read what I felt was a concrete method for discerning where these ideas overlap, and while I think its an overly cautious method, its compelling in its approach. Delanda has plenty of enemies due to his materialist approach, but this is powerful stuff. Anyway, I am preparing my blog post on this so I’ll ping ya when it gets sorted and I find the right pictures.
massive commenst will reply on w/e when I have more time.
xian, re: futurity, from the diss:
In Deleuze’s argument forwarded in The Logic of Sense a pure event can be recognised by the multiplicity of actualisations, and the singularities which pertain to an event may be predicted ahead of time, however their exact nature (inflection, bottleneck, fusion, etc) cannot be determined ahead of time and remain problematic. This is the objective definition of the problematic as the “indetermination which [the event] carries along, since the nature of directed singularities and their existence and directionless distribution depend on objectively distinct instances†(Deleuze 1990: 104-105).
So like the finish line in a race?
or a pure process with no end, this is what is pissing me off about Hallward’s book.
I am getting the vibe from Hallward’s book that he doesn’t want process, only creation, ie something is created (actual), and there are creatings (events), and the cosmos doesn’t keep turning because the creatings exist in their own time (Aion). So if the Event of events can be likened to God (ie see previous post), then it is a God that cannot yet completely exist because the multiplicity-singularities of the God may be predicted but His exact nature remains indeterminate. Hallward seems to think this means that Deleuze is advocating a position where we must will our our indetermination. No, I would argue the contrary!
Well, the phrase ‘to think things through’ means to take a thought to a position up ahead, or originally, to think through camels through the eyes of needles (or so I’m told) so thought has the element of arrival. Maybe this God-like presence of the singularity of time is his way of delimiting the conduct of his thought? I haven’t read Hallward so I can’t comment beyond your comments (contingency of thought necessarily being bound by the virtualised event modes available to me) … but to say that we will know a capital E event when we see it because it has all these actualisations (vectoral residue), but can’t possess knowledge of where those go, or what they do… very biblical. So it sounds like Hallward isn’t effectively speaking about what Deleuze is saying, but arriving with his own thought at the eye of the needle.
But I’m continuing this for a reason; this post is about exercise, and this is precisely the philosophy of exercise, creating an impenetrable bubble around an infinitely contingent and actualising present moment through a first prior return to the realm of events-which-retain-time. Plan for the best, prepare for the worst.
dp, that you for that on yoga. I have tried yoga in the past, when I lived in Perth and I was looking to vary my exercise pattern. I will have to wait until I get a steady job because one of the benefits of the gym is that they do student rates which for the six monthly membership makes it affordable (so I can go 5 times a week).
I can appreciate what you mean by ‘knowing what your muscles are doing’. I used to throw discus at a high level in juniors and I don’t think I ever really knew what my body was doing. Every now and again my style would click like a bunch of spinning levers turning into one big lever and I’d throw well, most of the time the levers of my spinning body were not connecting, so the big lever wasn’t as effective.
The ‘getting you through part’ is basicaly where its at for me. I went out last night after a seminar with some peeps from the CCR (like Mel’s friday night drinks!) and I felt a little sad contemplating how I missed such social interaction. In my nerdtastic ways I would have probably spent the night reading. The danger is that now everything in my life is accelerated into finish mode, which is a bit of a massive rush btw, anyway so I need to be careful I don’t go crazy when out and about. I feel the gym is a safe spot to let go (in a hyper-masculine sort of way). It would’t be like that for everybody, that is for sure, but it works for me.
Plus I like the way my body is continually changing. My favourite aesthetic in modified-car culture is the work-in-progress primer’d up body shell sometimes with some minor pieces of shiny chrome or with mags, but no flash paint jobs or anything yet. It captures a movement of transition, and the car is pregnant with potential. There is a similar thing going on with my own body, but not exactly the same. Now I have people saying things like “Have you got taller?” or just straight up “Have you been working out?” And I am like, “Yeah, I am so much taller.” No, I give them the accelerated life spiel, so like I tell them I am in finish mode for the diss so I have accelerated everything in my life including the gym work.
Now I just have to bust through the barrier of univeristy form-filling and case-pleading to get a variation on my maxiumum period of candidature. That is what slows me down.
Christian, re: SHaviro and DeLanda, I like Steve’s writing and I think Whitehead’s work has some very productive things for me for the event. It was his blog writing that got me onto Whitehead so for that I am appreciative. In terms of DeLanda’s materiality, well, don’t you find ANT approaches to be more useful? What DeLanda does with Deleuze and Guattari’s work is problematic from what I have read because DeLanda makes the concepts conform to common sense scales of relation/complexity/emergence/etc. I think it would be a mistake to assume that assemblages correlate so well with already established entities. Whitehead’s concept of the ‘society’ is an extremely powerful concept for disrupting these sort of homological mappings between assemblage-concepts and common sense categories of actual objects. The vectors of an event arrive all at once (or of the same duration) according to Whitehead, but ‘societies’ are made up of the same vectors that make up events only these vectors do not arrive all at once. I read ‘society’ in a way that is similar to ‘desiring machines’ (which Alliez argues would later become ‘assemblage’). However, one element of desiring machines which is not sufficiently or explicitly explicated is that in _AO_ D&G talk about how they are continually breaking down and they are in fact defined by how they break down.
For Whitehead there is something similar where he talks about how societies are defined by how they incorporate contingency — either a conservative reactionary tendency towards a single outcome or as a variation to appetition (like as in appetite) which is a relation of futurity incoporating the sensual elements of an appetite (thirst) with the conceptual prehensions (a glass of water). (Appetite and societies are not anthropomorphic senses of the words.)
I can’t see how in DeLanda’s work there is this variation to variation if he accepts the common sense categories as assemblages, that is my first problem, but he may demonstrate otherwise in the actual book, so I’d be quite happy to be wrong.
Re: materialism vs enemies. I follow Massumi in his neo-Foucaultian ‘incorporeal materialism’. Massumi’s definition of the event as a variation of potential resonates with me. It is the almost polar opposite of Hallward’s definition of the event according to Deleuze in _Out of this World_.
Hmm… I will spin this off into a blog post I reckon, because this is not the first time I’ve heard this about Delanda and I feel driven to take it on, as my reading of Delanda’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History is as different to other people’s as chalk and a picture of the word ‘cheese’. That is, diametrically opposed on the logical scale, then removed by abstraction. Morphogenesis is not a totalising conceptual framework, but a diagnostic for the relationship of time to events which short-circuits our prevarications about the order-of-knowledge between the Real, the event, the time in which it occurred and suggests a morphic and open frame that is at least ontolophagous (being-devourer) and goes beyond the assemblage-within-pre-existing modes.
For me, it delivers on the potential of Deleuzian thought in one important direction, which is to investigate what occurs when your diagnosis of anything present is retroactively applied; what analysis can you make?
“Academics of different brands have reduced all material and energetic processes, and all human practices that are not linguistic or interpretative (think of manual skills, of “know-how.”) to a “framework.” The 20th century has been obsessed with positioning everything. Every culture, given that it has it’s own framework of beliefs, has become its own “world” and relativism (both moral and epistemological) now prevails. But once you break away from this outmoded view, once you accept all the non-linguistic practices that really make up society (not to mention the non-human elements that also shape it, such as viruses, bacteria, weeds or non-organic energy and material flows like wind and ocean currents) then language itself becomes just another material that flows through a much expanded picture.”
A philosophy of the total is not a totalising philosophy. People are suspicious of Delanda because it seems too neat, when in fact, it is neatness, coincidence and pattern that lie at the centre of his approach. Its become so heretical to philosophy that they are having to call him writer/actor/filmmaker/philosopher is as much an indictment of how we approach thought – like you and can be as fucking out there as we like, but we still chastise thinkers for straying from their traditions, complain about languages not snapping to our grids.
So, that’s the defense. The other side of it is, how useful is it? Well, not bloody much, and maybe even less than its contemporaries.
My rejection of ANT is complete, absolute and heartfelt, and I’ll go into that too, I reckon.
Dude… talk to me about your bibliography… Word 2007 has its own database thing and I’m wondering how useful it is…
Don’t let them tell you that hyper-masculine workouts are bad, either!
ok, I think one point of contention then may be around what DeLanda calls the universalist dimension of Deleuze’s philosophy, which DeLanda associates with multiplicities. From INtensive Science:
From a Deleuzian point of view, it is this universality (or mechanismindependence) of multiplicities which is highly significant. Unlike essences which are always abstract and general entities, multiplicities are concrete universals. That is, concrete sets of attractors (realized as tendencies in physical processes) linked together by bifurcations (realized as abrupt transitions in the tendencies of physical processes). Unlike the generality of essences, and the resemblance with which this generality endows instantiations of an essence, the universality of a multiplicity is typically divergent: the different realizations of a multiplicity bear no resemblance whatsoever to it and there is in principle no end to the set of potential divergent forms it may adopt. This lack of resemblance is amplified by the fact that multiplicities give form to processes, not to the final product, so that the end results of processes realizing the same multiplicity may be highly dissimilar from each other, like the spherical soap bubble and the cubic salt crystal which not only do not resemble one another, but bear no similarity to the topological point guiding their production. (22)