Body Fascism : Salvation in the Technology of Physical Fitness

From the time I was very young, I loved physical activity, especially swimming and bicycling. I was not competitive and never raced. I just loved moving. There was an intensity in it that was very important for me. But the insight that I took in that way of life gradually eroded as I approached adolescence and started to realize that in my culture physical activity for boys is primarily about sport and competition, about building masculinity, about learning to take up space in aggressive and domineering ways. That did not appeal to me. Because I did not want to be part of that masculine heterosexist cult, as I would now call it in retrospect, I avoided physical activity almost entirely from my early teen years until I was thirty, when I started swimming again in order to lose weight and shape my body to fit the boufffant body style that was cmerging in Euro-Amer in Euro--American gay culturecultureee in the early 1980s. Like many other middle-class people, I joined the fitness craze and shaped my body according to my desire to embody the models of health and good looks circulating ever more widely in so many parts of Western consumer culture. Developing a more 'marketable' body afforded me power in terms of self-esteem and access to sexual experience. I found it reassuring to believe that I was living a more healthy way of life that would keep me young longer and stave off disease. Knowing that I had the self-discipline that it takes to be a highly fit person gave me considerable pride. Developing a fit body seemed to save me from many problems that ageing poses in modern Western culture. But something else happened as well -something that undermined the reassurances that getting fit seemed to bring me. What started out as instrumental exercise -swimming in order to xii Preface accumulate reassuring physical capital -in very short order turned out to be much more: a profound intrinsic experience. My sense of reality, of time, space, reason, and of sight, sound, and kinaesthesis, as well as my most solid senses of who, what, or how I was as a human being, my sense of the true origins of my life, was transformed by swimming. Everything that for almost twenty years had made me certain of the social structure of my finite life dissolved in the infinity to which moving through water brought me. Rilke's Third Duino Elegy describes what I felt was happening (Rilke 1989,. He offers a metaphor: a child letting go of the tender assurances given by its mother -assurances, I suggest, that parallel those that encourage us to stay with the solid way of life that comes from adhering to our socially constructed identities and hegemonic perceptions of reality: Ah, where are the years when you shielded him just by placing your slender form between him and the surging abyss? How much you hid from him then. The room that filled with suspicion at night: you made it harmless; and out of the refuge of your heart you mixed a more human space with his night-space. And you set down the lamp, not in that darkness, but in your own nearer presence, and it glowed at him like a friend. There wasn't a creak that your smile could not explain, as though you had long known just when the floor would do that... And he listened and was soothed. So powerful was your presence as you tenderly stood by the bed; his fate, tall and cloaked, retreated behind the wardrobe, and his restless future, delayed for a while, adapted to the folds of the curtain. And he himself, as he lay there, relieved, with the sweetness of the gentle world you had made for him dissolving beneath his drowsy eyelids, into the foretaste of sleep -: he seemed protected ... But inside: who could ward off, who could divert, the floods of origin inside him? Ah, there was no trace of caution in that sleeper; sleeping, yes but dreaming, but flushed with what fevers: how he threw himself in. All at once new, trembling, how he was caught up and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth, prowling bestial shapes. How he submitted -. Loved. Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness, This book was made possible by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Connaught Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Because it is a highly intertextual work, I owe an enormous debt to the many writers cited or alluded to. I have benefited immensely from a circle of friends with whom I have discussed these ideas over the years. I give many thanks in particular to my wonderful teacher and friend, Graeme Nicholson, to whom I dedicate the book. I also fondly acknowledge the contributions of the members of my swimming-and-Heidegger-reading group, which we called the Dasein Swim Club -Jay Cassell, Peter Ellinger, Trish Glazebrook, and Gerry Oxford -as well as those of Fadi Abou-Rihan and my dear friend Jim Bartley. The support of my dean, Bruce Kidd, and other colleagues at the University of Toronto has been invaluable. I am grateful for the support and enthusiasm of my editor at the University of Toronto Press, Virgil

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the physically fit body became the ideal of modern western societies. Images of lean, sculpted men and women dominate the cultural landscape and are now ubiquitous on billboards, in magazines, film, television, and video. Science and popular culture are profoundly mixed in the contemporary scene, and have lead to a host of exercising and dieting technologies that will make actual bodies fit the taught, muscular ideal. Many people desire this body and the attractiveness, health, longevity, and personal security that it represents. But, as Brian Pronger argues, this approach transforms more than the body's functions and contours; it diminishes its transcendent power, compelling it conform to a profoundly limited imagination of what the body can do.

Calling upon an impressive array of philosophers and other writers who have been critical of modern techno-scientific approaches to life, Pronger pries open the texts that form the technology of physical fitness in order to consider what they try to produce. Body Fascism views technology not simply as a tool for other projects, but as a project itself, producing its own realities that Pronger argues are ultimately nihilistic. Indeed, he says there are disquieting parallels between what technology has done to the environment and what it is doing to the body. Exploring fascinating intersections between postmodern Western and Zen approaches to life, he develops a theory of the body and of science and technology that shows how the body's energy is vulnerable to insidious forms of exploitation as well as harbouring the potential for transcendence. The sheer scope of this book make it unique in the discipline and it will be of great interest not only to scholars of the body, society, science and technology, but also to those who are personally drawn to modern technologies of physical fitness.

"Body Fascism views technology not simply as a tool for other projects, but as a project itself, producing its own realities, which Pronger argues are ultimately nihilistic. Indeed, he finds disquieting parallels between what technology has done to the environment and what it is doing to the body. Exploring fascinating intersections between postmodern Western and Zen approaches to life, he shows how the body's energy is vulnerable to insidious forms of exploitation as well as capable of harbouring the potential for transcendence." "The broad scope of this book makes it unique in the discipline, and it will be of interest not only to scholars in the fields of physical education, social science, science, and technology, but also to those who are personally drawn to modern technologies of physical fitness."--Résumé de l'éditeur "Body Fascism views technology not simply as a tool for other projects, but as a project itself, producing its own realities, which Pronger argues are ultimately nihilistic. Indeed, he finds disquieting parallels between what technology has done to the environment and what it is doing to the body. Exploring fascinating intersections between postmodern Western and Zen approaches to life, he shows how the body's energy is vulnerable to insidious forms of exploitation as well as capable of harbouring the potential for transcendence." "The broad scope of this book makes it unique in the discipline, and it will be of interest not only to scholars in the fields of physical education, social science, science, and technology, but also to those who are personally drawn to modern technologies of physical fitness."--Jacket Contents 7 Preface 11 Acknowledgments 17 Introduction: Reading the Science and Technology of Physical Fitness 19 Part One. Theory 45 1. Theory of Science: Practice, Power, Consensus 45 2. Theory of the Body: Technology, Puissance, Pouvoir 71 Part Two. Texts and Procedures 139 3. The Texts of the Technology of Physical Fitness 139 4. Writing the Fascist Body: Description, Inscription, Prescription 167 Postscript: The Other Side 243 Notes 257 Bibliography 267 Index 287