The Age of Fitness. Jürgen Martschukat

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.

Eating “right” since the Me Decade

In the age of fitness, eating right is one of society’s obsessions. The issue of what the “right” food might be leads us directly to the tensions between consumer society and the achievement-oriented society (Leistungsgesellschaft). Soon after World War II, during its “economic miracle” phase, Germany succumbed to a feeding frenzy. After years of deprivation, Germans could finally afford to splash out a little. Food was once again available in greater abundance, even if the average German family was still on a tight budget. In postwar America, consumption became the core activity of good citizens. Food was not the only element in the consumer republic of the 1950s, but it was a highly important one. It was increasingly manufactured industrially and – especially in the United States – consumed in a “progressive” and “modern” way, for example as a defrosted and heated-up TV dinner, or on the go at the first McDonald’s branches. The 1950s were the golden age of the food industry. It grew massively and its actions went largely unquestioned. Americans praised themselves as the best-fed people the world had ever seen. Soon, experts were talking about the end of hunger in America. Yet this applied chiefly