societies are governed through fitness – understood as the freedom to work on the body and the successful self. This means doing more than just admiring fitness and more than praising freedom as a fundamental human right and opportunity. In fact, freedom is bound up with the demand, made of all of us, to use our freedom productively and in the best possible way; and fitness perfectly embodies this facet of freedom. People’s success or failure in this respect establishes differences, engenders exclusion and legitimizes privileges.10 The coexistence of, and simultaneous antagonism between, fitness and fatness, their meanings and associations, reveal the manifold tensions inherent in governing through freedom and fitness. Fitness and fatness – often perceived as non-fitness – have a significant impact on whether a person is recognized as a productive member of society, on who may be considered a subject and who may not.11
In the course of this book, I will routinely locate fitness in “modernity,” describing fitness as its hallmark and regulatory ideal. Modern societies have declared perpetual optimization and renewal one of their core precepts and achievements, and fitness posits the constant optimization of body and self. In line with this, as they have developed over time, modernity and fitness have been closely interlinked. The origins of both lie in the late eighteenth century and both experienced a boom in the decades around 1900. Toward the end of the twentieth century, meanwhile, both modernity and fitness began to change or come to a head in key respects. This applies, for example, to the paradigm of the body’s malleability. In postmodernity, working on one’s body has even gained in importance and, as sociologist Paula-Irene Villa writes, “Bodywork is always and inevitably work on the social self.”12
Similar may be said of my references to the “West” as the main setting for the following history of fitness. What I have in mind here is a critical perspective on a community of values, norms, and principles, which include the productive use of freedom, the optimization of the self, and constant progress.13 Hence, the following chapters focus on the US and Europe, especially Germany, and on the similarities and differences that typify the relationship between freedom, bodies, and social order on each side of the Atlantic. The US is in fact the society most dedicated to the idea of freedom as norm and practice.
Fitness, then, operates via the body, but it is by no means limited to it. So, this book is about much more than “just” the training of the body. The first chapter foregrounds our present and recent past, bringing out the significance of the body and body shape. My focus is on those practices and policies that are directly related to the body and that are obsessively pursued in our contemporary societies. The key terms here are exercise and eating right. Chapter 2 sketches the history of the fitness concept, from the eighteenth century to the 1970s. It shows how the idea of dynamism and the notion that we can achieve anything we aspire to have increasingly permeated modern societies, and it reveals how the notion of fitness, as we know it today, emerged. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 go even further beyond fitness as bodily practice. They scrutinize three fields of tremendous importance to the individual’s recognition as a productive member of society and as a subject. Chapter 3 deals with the relationship between fitness and work, and thus revolves around the importance of bodies and productivity. Turning to the relationship between fitness and sex, chapter 4 considers reproductivity and potency. The fifth chapter discusses the relationship between fitness and the ready ability to deal with challenges and achieve our goals through sustained effort, probing how fitness and heroic visions intermesh. For a long time, these visions were of a martial cast. For some time, however, and increasingly, they have been taking inspiration from the struggles of everyday life.
Each chapter in this book forms a coherent whole and may be read individually. But only reading the entire book will convey how deeply fitness is inscribed in modern societies, and how critical fitness is to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets such great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition.
Notes
1 1. On “sport as an economic factor,” see Informationen aus dem Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft #12/2018, June 7, 2018, https://www.iwd.de/archiv/2018/; see also the Instagram account of Kayla Itsines, https://www.instagram.com/kayla_itsines/?hl=en.
2 2. Gruneau, Sport & Modernity; Eisenberg, “English Sports” und deutsche Bürger; Eisenberg, “Die Entdeckung des Sports.”
3 3. In using the phrase “pursuit of fitness,” I borrow from the American Declaration of Independence, which refers to the “pursuit of happiness”; see esp. chapter 2 and Martschukat, “The Pursuit of Fitness.”
4 4. See, for example, Werner Bartens, “Krankhaft sesshaft. Der Bewegungsmangel hat weltweit erschreckende Ausmaße angenommen,” SZ, September 6, 2018, 14; on Germany, see Froböse et al., Der DKV-Report 2018; Guthold et al., “Worldwide Trends in Insufficient Physical Activity.”
5 5. Editorial, Geschichte der Gegenwart.
6 6. See esp. Netzwerk Körper (ed.), What Can a Body Do? See also many of the articles in Body Politics: Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte, http://bodypolitics.de/de/uber-die-zeitschrift/; Lorenz, Leibhaftige Vergangenheit, was pioneering in its day.
7 7. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 15–50; Rödder, 21.0, 54–5. In those parts of the book where I write about fitness, the economy, and the world of work, I also use the term “flexible capitalism” to refer to the last 50 years because it more accurately captures the specific historical shifts and challenges involved; Lessenich, Die Neuerfindung des Sozialen, 9–19.
8 8. Foucault, “Confessions of the Flesh”; Ganahl, “Ist Foucaults dispositif ein Akteur-Netzwerk?”; van Dyk, “Was die Welt zusammenhält.”
9 9. Alkemeyer, Zeichen, Körper und Bewegung, 212; Mayer, Wissenschaft vom Gehen.
10 10. Krasmann, “Regieren über Freiheit”; Rose, Powers of Freedom.
11 11. Honneth, Anerkennung, 182–234; Butler, Psychic Life of Power.
12 12. Gumbrecht, “Modern, Modernität, Moderne”; Dipper, “Moderne, Version: 2.0”; Gruneau, Sport & Modernity, 1–14; Villa, “Einleitung – Wider die Rede vom Äußerlichen,” 8.
13 13. Hall, “The West and the Rest.”
1 “FIT OR FAT”? FITNESS IN RECENT HISTORY AND THE PRESENT DAY
Cycling and self-tracking
Anyone who practices cycling – whether the average Joe on their Sunday morning bike ride or a pro ascending the Alpe d’Huez – almost certainly has a little computer on their handlebars. This measures speed, distance traveled and altitude attained, but also, depending on the device, one’s pulse rate, cadence, and power output in watts. The number of calories (supposedly) burned is also shown. The goal is obvious: the bike computer is an aid to self-observation. It is intended to provide information about the cyclist’s performance level and help optimize their activity,
