Читать книгу The Age of Fitness - Jürgen Martschukat - Страница 9

Fitness, then, is more than just the prerequisite for success in sport. In the twenty-first century, a broad consensus exists on this point, regardless of whether we ask health authorities, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, or kinesiologist Karen Volkwein.⁶ Volkwein, for example, defines fitness as “health stabilized through training.”⁷ At first sight, this definition may appear clear and simple. Upon closer inspection, however, it reveals the tremendous scope and complexity as well as the multiple implications of fitness. First, and quite obviously, fitness is closely bound up with health, and in the recent history of Western societies health means more than the absence of infirmity or disease. Health, as the World Health Organization (WHO) already stated upon its establishment in 1948, is a state of physical, mental, and social wellbeing. This implies that the healthy individual has the means and capacity to meet challenges and live a good, productive life. It also makes health a symbol of success and a precondition for recognition. Second, Volkwein’s definition of fitness indicates that health may be stabilized through training or neglected and thrown out of kilter by its absence. This makes health and quality of life – not entirely but to a considerable extent – the individual’s own responsibility. They must actively manage themself and their life, taking the appropriate preventive measures. Practices of prevention, in fact, amount to a “crucial cultural technology of modernity.” Since the 1950s, “prevention” has become a key principle in medicine and society, one that, according to sociologist Ulrich Bröckling, requires the individual to act “as an autonomous and competent agent vis-à-vis their own life.”⁸ Third, while health may be stabilized through training, it can never be entirely stable. So, health can never be achieved, at least not definitively. Health is a point that can never be reached, and the older one gets, the further one moves away from it. Those who stop exercising and working on their own fitness are neglecting their health. Health is fleeting. It requires permanent work on oneself and signifies constant action. The logic of fitness is very powerful, even though we all know that illnesses can occur despite constant self-care.⁹

Hence, health is a highly normative concept, one that molds our notions of a good and a bad lifestyle.¹⁰ This is even more true of fitness, as it functions explicitly as a hinge between lifestyle and health. Companies like Jawbone and Microsoft enjoin potential buyers of their fitness bracelets to “Know Yourself. Live Better,” and even to “be a better human” (see figure 1). These promptings also come across as promises.¹¹ Fitness is a regulatory and normative ideal of liberal, modern societies. It not only describes how you are, but what you ought to be – and how you can become what you ought to be.¹²

What we have to do, then, is interrogate how fitness operates, while laying bare the processes of inclusion and exclusion it facilitates.¹³ Who is considered fit, and who is not? What happens when some are considered fit and others are not? People are governed by fitness, and this is especially true of liberal societies, which are particularly vociferous in demanding citizens’ voluntary engagement.¹⁴ For the autonomous and self-responsible individual is central to liberal societies. And self-responsibility means ensuring one’s commitment and efficiency in every sphere of life. Those who manage themselves demonstrate their ability to take responsibility for society. Anyone wishing to be viewed as a successful individual and good member of society must be productive, reproductive, and ready to tackle challenges. One has to be hardworking, attractive, and strong. Here fitness plays a regulatory and normative role, though not necessarily through external enforcement in the form of prescription and punishment. Fitness creates zones of marginality and exclusion. This is its regulatory and normative effect. Those who fail to conform to the ideal at play here, who are considered ill or physically impaired, or who are, apparently, neglecting to work on themselves enough to become and stay fit, are marginalized or excluded. The power of fitness, the nature of its requirements, and the emphasis placed on them, have varied over the course of history.¹⁵

Figure 1 Advertisement for the Microsoft Smartwatch, 2014

Few things more clearly bring out the power of fitness, its linkage with physicality, and the political dimension of this entire complex than the collective fear of body fat. In recent decades, the fear of fat has taken hold of Western societies more than ever before. At first glance, fitness and fatness seem to be polar opposites, yet they are mutually constitutive. Together, they bring order to a culture and society that privileges the efficient, self-directed individual. For the members of such a society, it is obviously unsettling to hear and read every week, from one source or another, that, for example, “Germany is getting fat,” that Germans are less and less active and are becoming “fatter and fatter.”¹⁶ There is always a handy scientific study to quote from when the press or the political sphere declares that around half of all Germans are overweight and about one-fifth obese. More than twothirds of Americans are said to be overweight and almost 40 percent obese, especially in rural areas. Depending on state and demographic group, the obesity rate rises to 55 percent, the key elements being social status, level of poverty and, interwoven with these factors, race and gender. In other words, poor black women in Mississippi are among the fattest of the fat. The particularly fat are considered to have failed to meet the demands of a liberal society. Moreover, fatness is viewed as pathological. It is therefore referred to, using medical terminology, as obesity. Since the late twentieth century, fatness has even been called an epidemic. It is not spread by a virus, but has infected large numbers of people due to certain living conditions and circumstances. The US government officially adopted this medical terminology in 2001 and literally declared war on obesity the same year. The WHO, meanwhile, has for some time been referring to “globesity” to highlight the increasingly global scale of this phenomenon.¹⁷

I do not intend (and am not qualified) to evaluate the health effects of too much or too little body fat here. The various statements made on this topic are, in any case, highly controversial, while for years the seemingly straightforward relationship between body fat and health has become increasingly contested. For example, the Body Mass Index (BMI) has ceased to be a widely recognized indicator of body fat. Many commentators doubt that the BMI is an effective predictor of disorders and mortality rates. Recent studies have in fact shown that at least a certain amount of body fat is beneficial to one’s health. What is more, some research findings are more likely to be published and receive more attention than others, and those who do not subscribe to the prevalent fatphobia seem to experience a certain publication bias.¹⁸ The social demonization of fatness continues virtually unabated. Here the deceptive power of the visible seems to be at work. People feel they can see with their own eyes that fat cannot possibly be a good thing, but makes one sluggish and immobile.¹⁹

My concern here is not with what is truly healthy or unhealthy, but with the power and persistence of the discourse on fatness and fitness and its social effects. The discourse on fatness is deeply political in many ways. First there is the classic political level. In 2007, the German government adopted the “Fit Not Fat Action Plan,” and launched a campaign known as “IN FORM. Germany’s Initiative for Healthy Eating and More Exercise” in 2008. Initiatives of this kind have been instigated since the 1970s. Fit Not Fat and IN FORM are intended to embed the “healthy lifestyle as a social value” by 2020, improve Germans’ eating habits and increase their physical activity. But it is not laws or punishment that are to pave the way for these changes. Instead, the goal is to appropriately shape the overall framework within which people make decisions and take action, providing them with all sorts of incentives. Government agencies and representatives should be good role models, provide knowledge and information, and motivate people to eat better and exercise more. Germans can continue to decide freely whether to eat fries or salad, whether to stay at home and be couch potatoes or go for a bike ride. But the decision-making architecture should be arranged in such a way as to facilitate a healthy choice. This kind of politics is called “nudging,” a form of governance that seeks to prod or steer citizens to make voluntary decisions that are viewed as “better” and “healthier.” Certainly, from this perspective, free individuals in free societies should make their decisions freely. But at the same time, they should make decisions that are conducive to their own productivity and, therefore, to that of the community. “Prevention,” as the first sentence of the Fit Not Fat action plan emphasizes, “is an investment in the future.”²⁰

Michelle Obama received a great deal of public attention as First Lady of the United States, and it reached its apogee through her campaign against fat. Her “Let’s Move” program was aimed primarily at African American children, the goal being to motivate them to exercise more and eat better. Obama privileged information, incentives, the cooperation of school cafeterias and industry, and her own status as role model. She grew vegetables in the White House garden, cooked with children, skipped, danced, lifted weights, and did push-ups as she made her way through the American media landscape. Of course, the First Lady was aware that a program like “Let’s Move” cannot succeed by issuing directives and that fitness cannot be enforced politically. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg failed spectacularly when he tried to ban the sale of soft drinks by “food service establishments” in cups of more than 16 ounces in 2014 (a similar fate befell the German Greens in 2013 with their “Veggieday”). The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled against Bloomberg’s “Soda Ban” because the New York City Board of Health lacked the authority to issue such a prohibition. The public and political battle, however, focused not on the powers of institutions, but on civil liberties. The opponents of the Soda Ban assailed the “nanny state” and its alleged fantasies of omnipotence. Michelle Obama, meanwhile, was aware of the tremendous importance of freedom of choice and decision as a political principle, a precept that has shaped the United States since its birth, attaining unprecedented heights since the 1970s. Obama thus eschewed a ban-oriented approach. Instead, she sought to mold the architecture of decision making in such a way as “to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” as she herself put it. Nonetheless, Republicans accused her of state interventionism, highlighting the dogged nature of American battles over freedom of choice and decision.²¹

But the political dimension of the discourse on fitness and fatness goes far beyond the classic sphere of politics. It is about more than the actions of lawmakers and members of government, action plans, controversial statutory prohibitions, or sugar and fat taxes.²² A culture and society that draws its strength and success from the productive capacity of individuals and the population as a whole may be described, with Michel Foucault, as biopolitical.²³ The “birth of biopolitics” took place in the nineteenth century, a process I describe in more detail in the next chapter. Here I give the reader advance notice that a biopolitical order has its sights set on the population and its potential, and it defines and positions people and groups through their bodies and bodily form. Such an order regulates their access to resources and social participation and thus influences the recognition they may experience as productive members of society. Body shape becomes a sign of the ability to make responsible decisions, to function in a free, competitive society and to aid its development. Hence, body shape decides who gets to be a homo politicus. Fatness is believed to reveal a lack of these abilities. Just as self-trackers are the prototypical embodiment of the biopolitical fitness society, and supposedly even demonstrate the desire to be and the attempt “to become a better human” (as producers of smartwatches want to make us believe), fatness seems to stand for a dearth of decision-making ability, productive capacity, and motivation.²⁴

The crisis scenarios ramifying out from the alleged epidemic of obesity, then, bear witness to more than an individual problem. En masse, as the cover of the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic shows so clearly, fat bodies seem to signal a crisis of liberal society, its functioning and principles (see figure 2). The corpulent Statue of Liberty carries an unambiguous message. The survival of the social order, which is based on freedom and builds on the pursuit of happiness, on autonomous action and motivation, is at risk from body fat. In fact, this social order appears to be facing imminent collapse. Slimness, agility, fitness: in an age of neoliberalism and flexible capitalism, these terms are used more than ever to describe ideal individuals and their bodies. Such terms also serve to characterize the performance of society, economy, and state. Lean bodies for a lean state, fit (typically freelance) employees for fit companies and their “lean production.”²⁵

Figure 2 Cover of The Atlantic, May 2010

“Neoliberalism” denotes a form of society and government that is always and everywhere aligned with the model of the market. This sociopolitical system construes people, in every situation, as market actors subject to competitive conditions. Moreover, neoliberalism, as political scientist Wendy Brown writes, is “a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct’ [Foucault], and a scheme of valuation.” The actions of subjects must be geared toward investing in themselves in order – always and everywhere – to increase their own “portfolio value.” The goal is for these investments and one’s work on oneself to yield visible results. Such evident success enables individuals to be recognized as productive members of society. Consequently, in neoliberalism the relationship between individual and society is measured in a new way. Recognition as a citizen is not just a matter of rights. Nor is it linked solely with the individual’s concern for the public good. Such recognition arises from the individual’s success as an investor in themself and from the maximization of their human capital. It is thus the most effective investor that best meets the requirements of a good member of society: only a homo oeconomicus can attain the status of homo politicus.²⁶

The political heft of fitness in neoliberalism is neatly captured by the concept of “biological citizenship.” Sociologist Nikolas Rose emphasizes just how much, in liberal societies, concern for one’s body and health, the maximization of one’s vitality and potential, has become a kind of universal duty.²⁷ Rose is particularly interested in the social and political implications of genetic engineering and stem cell research. According to Rose, it has become a requirement for good citizens to track suspected health issues down to the basic programming of the body, examine options for correction, and adapt their lifestyle accordingly.²⁸

The concept of “biological citizenship” sharpens our awareness of the relationship between bodies, freedom, fitness, civic duties, and recognition. Liberal societies have in fact never done without biologically construed distinctions.²⁹ For example, upon its founding, the American Republic declared liberty for all its core political principle, yet at the same time it long tied the degree of individual liberty and social recognition to “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality,” that is, to categories conceived in biological terms. And it was long asserted that only white men have the fundamental capacity to get fit and make meaningful decisions about their own bodies and lives. Feminists have fought against this idea since the nineteenth century (by composing an ode to cycling as a personal and political practice, for example).³⁰ But it was only from the 1960s onward that the various civil rights movements prompted American society to shift away from the idea of fixed, biological categories. Although these categories persist in some measure to this day, they have certainly been shaken to their foundations. Belief in the malleability of societies, people, and bodies, meanwhile, has grown.³¹

This development, however, has changed what we might understand by “biological citizenship.” The shaping and optimization of one’s body, its capabilities and potential, that is, investment in one’s fitness, is now crucially important. Hence, distinctions made through the body are no longer necessarily distinctions between black and white or between male and female (though they still exist and are still very powerful). A culture and society in which fitness is a regulatory ideal distinguishes between “fit” and “unfit” bodies. In other words, there are people who can credibly show that they invest in themselves, work on themselves, and know how to tap their own potential. And then there are the others, who cannot demonstrate these attributes.³² The determination and ability to optimize the self are of great importance to the degree of one’s social and civil recognition, and the fundamental capacity for success or failure in this endeavor appears to show in the body and its form. Fat bodies have become the constitutive, contrasting counterpart to the fit, “capable” body and to the successful person in general. Fat is considered a sign of laziness, ineptitude, ignorance, and lack of discipline, of “wrong,” unhealthy behavior. The fat Statue of Liberty, then, stands for the failure of individuals, as well as the crisis of the nation and the liberal-democratic system.³³

The roots of our age of fitness lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the ideas of liberalism, competition, and Darwinism were gaining traction. These concepts staked out a field that was the prerequisite for the emergence of fitness as principle and practice, and thus a sphere in which fatness could be grasped as a problem.³⁴ I will explain this in more detail in the next chapter. For now, though, I will stay with the recent past, because a closer look at history since the 1970s helps us better comprehend the vehemence of the discourse of fitness in our immediate present.