The Healthy Body

This will all be wildly off topic, so apologies for those expecting commie kitsch, thoughts on Tacheles closing or a devastating analysis of the rise and rise of Die Linke! There are some nice ironic pictures about halfway through, so they're worth sticking around for....

I'm currently doing some research work for an academic looking at the water bottle as a modern thing, what it represents -- there's Latour, biopolitics, risk, neoliberal privatisation and many other theoretical bits floating around in the framing of the project. I don't get to touch most of that. I am just researching one specific campaign. I have managed, though, to spend a day or two reading Feher and Heller's 1994 slim book on biopolitics. (If you can't turn academic research jobs into explorations of pet topics/ideas/authors, what's the goddamn point?)

There's a clear sense in which this is a book written by people spooked by a far-reaching state. Presumably if you were in communist Hungary, saw 1956, had hopes crushed, academic positings withdrawn etc etc, this is something you'd be fairly careful about.

Nevertheless, they do a good job here of taking their longer view -- a fairly worked-through set of ideas about modernity's genesis and meanings (for them, in this context, it's an ongoing debate of life versus liberty) -- and marrying it to some contemporary analysis. So you get your Kant with some Rodney King race riots, your Hegel with some Andrea Dworkin and your Weber with anti-smoking campaigns.

It's this last point where we start to get crossover with the marketing of water bottles. I don't always fully agree with their positions, but they get in some cracking lines, paragraphs and, well, whole pages of analysis. Below is one of my favourites.

Since health politics demands that we force our sense of mortality into oblivion and continually remain fit labour machines, an odd version of the age-old dream of eternal youth also becomes one of ‘health’s’ metaphoric meanings. The politics of health runs a desperate race with time. It wants to bring time to a halt in order to raise the bodily state of the adolescent boy and girl to the pedestal of the ideal. The alliance of health politics with health industry makes this feature even more explicit.… Theoretically, one could expect at least an aesthetic yield from this exaggerated cult of youth, a new adoration of beauty. But the standards of youthfulness are technologically set; they aim at mass production. In the pursuit of health, biopolitics becomes unfaithful to the spirit of the post-modern. Instead of promoting ‘difference’—beauty as the mark of individuality—it promotes the production of ‘the healthy body’ en masse.

And just before this passage, they make a nice series of linkages between the stigma of being unhealthy, utilitarianism and the Protestant ethic.

He who commits ‘health crimes’ is ‘unreconstructed’ (a term of the re-education camps) and ‘contaminated’. Above all, he causes public expenditure (by the implied crime of eventually falling ill, being hospitalised, and perhaps even buried at public expense). Those who waste too much time discussing ‘progress,’ should rather compare the stone-hearted utilitarianism of health politics with medieval caritas. But the reference to ‘public expenditure,’ more than anything else, betrays that one of the major objectives of health politics is to restore the shattered Protestant work ethic to its abandoned central position, by reviving its neurotic self-discipline; its imperative to subject the individual to ‘public goals’ and the world of labour, as well as to Protestant work ethic’s inherent miserliness.

So the body -- our 'health' -- must be disciplined and punished. Health as a political metaphor can be seen, for them, in the various exhortations for the individual. Health, in such a setting

cannot be pursued without the binary of ‘friend and foe’. It is for this reason that the concept of ‘secondary smoking’ was created. It is not the general pollution of cities and the industrial environment, not AIDS, drugs, alcohol, the creeping back of tuberculosis (as well as other diseases which have never been mastered) that will cause our premature deaths but the results of Secondary Smoking. It is useless to waste time considering the ‘scientific basis’ of this inquisitorial concept. More important is to recognise its function. Our needs and habits no longer have a private character; we are directly responsible from them in front of the ‘public eye’. ‘Science’ has to be mobilised to ‘prove’ that in indulging in our particular health crime we endanger our fellow citizens, pollute (and thus abuse) our children, upset the mental peace of our neighbours, and contaminate the moral atmosphere. The conclusion is self-evident: either submit to the norm, or pay the penalty, perhaps la mort civile. This is what justifies sniffing the ‘secret smoker’ out of the toilet booth (as once the secret masturbator was sniffed out) and denouncing him without further delay or calling the guard to remove the perpetrator from the premises.…By and large the politics of health is successful insofar as it transplants a massive guilt feeling, the prerequisite for the victory of the course of ‘discipline and punish’, into the psyche of the individual. One sees on the same TV-set a host of young men and women who tell you that because they lost x pounds or kilos in their last diet, they no longer feel guilty.

In matters of water bottles and marketing, these healthy bodies are linked to healthy Nature. Drinking from those bottles, we undertake an ethic of care for the self/body -- health politics -- and for Nature -- environmental politics. We forego the less healthy choice -- sugary soft drinks, fattening milk, stimulant coffee -- in order to move closer to nature and purity, away from contamination and stigma/shame/guilt.

Following a kind of Weberian line, I wonder if this didn't represent re-enchantment of the water bottle: its messages and attachments are to connect [re-connect?] the consumer-as-body to nature, purity, clarity, a kind of singularity of nature, both universal (nature, the earth, the body) and particular (my body, my environment, my world). The tap is non-unique, anonymous, tracked by bureaucracy and water bills, immobile because owned by all. The bottle is unique, specific, instantly locatable and mobile.

(Pics via Flickr and Healthy Living Tip [?])