The Age of Fitness. Jürgen Martschukat

performance, and assessing their importance to modern societies, to their organization and to the societal participation of different types of person. Another key question concerns body shape and health and the relationship between the two. Above all, though, a history of fitness is a history of the body as social history: a history of values and norms, epistemic and discursive orders, representations and figurations, technologies and bodily practices. A history of the body of this kind shows how people are placed in a particular relationship to society through their bodies and how they participate in their own emplacement.⁶

      My observations focus on recent history, since the 1970s. The last half-century may be considered the age of fitness, and it is no accident that this coincides with the age of neoliberalism. Rather than a generalizing call to arms, here neoliberalism denotes an epoch that has modeled itself on the market, interprets every situation as a competitive struggle and enjoins people to make productive use of their freedom. Neoliberalism thus describes a certain way of thinking about society and subjects, understanding their behavior and classifying it as appropriate or inappropriate. The individual is supposed to work on themself, have life under control, get fit, ensure their own productive capacity and embody these things in the truest sense of the word. This requirement has achieved unprecedented importance under neoliberalism.⁷ Fitness is everywhere. Fitness, as philosopher Michel Foucault might have put it, is a “dispositif” or apparatus – an era-defining network of discourses and practices, institutions and things, buildings and infrastructure, administrative measures, political programs, and much more besides.⁸

But I also reach further back into history in order to understand our age of fitness. At times the tracks we need to follow extend back to the eighteenth century, for example when it comes to the idea of liberty and self-determination, or the disciplining of the soldierly body. Yet it was not just the soldier but also the new republican citizen that was required to be disciplined and upright, rather than glutted, degenerate, and physically torpid like the nobility, or stooped and battered like the third estate.⁹ In a history of fitness, the middle of the nineteenth century also demands our attention. This is the period when Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest,” and the conception of inevitable, natural competition took the stage. And it was in the decades around 1900 that modern societies first experienced a fitness hype. At the same time, they were plagued by a crisis that was experienced, in part, as a crisis of the body. When it comes to the history of fitness over the last few decades, in many ways the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presaged future trends more than the cult of the body in fascism and Nazism. Historians have often highlighted the 1950s and 1960s in this regard as well. After years of crisis and war, many people on both sides of the Atlantic once again indulged in the pleasures of consumption. Yet this immediately led to anxieties about its harmful effects on the body, health and performance.

      The history of fitness related in this book is a critical one. This means that it pays attention to the ambivalences of fitness. It brings out how 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