The Autonomous Animal: Self-Governance and the Modern Subject

5. Fit to Be Tied: Exercise Fads and Our Addiction to Autonomy

137 It is . . . the game of the world that must first be thought. —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology The death of Len Bias in 1986 from cardiac arrest following his first encounter with cocaine became one of the most successful antidrug ads. Bias, a twenty-two-year-old All-American basketball star, had just been drafted in the first round of the NBA draft by the Boston Celtics and was set to become one of the highest played professional basketball players ever. Bias’s death made national headlines, not just on the sports pages, and became a national rallying cry for the war on drugs. One story that emerges from the sensational response to Bias’s death is about the drug war and panic about drugs and their threat to autonomy. A second is that Bias, hardly the only young African American male to die that day of drug ingestion, was an athlete. Bias was a modified Horatio Alger who triumphed in overcoming the limitations of his body. He defied the fate of many poor young black men through the meticulous cultivation of his physical abilities. A momentary loss Fit to Be Tied exercise fads and our addiction to autonomy 5 Fit to Be Tied 138 138 of self-control led to his body’s betrayal. This fear of the ever-present possibility of the failure of the project of autonomy made Len Bias’s story all the more haunting. The flip side of the addict is the athlete, dedicated to the hypermanagement of the body. Athletes control their body as a valuable commodity that works for them rather than against. Beyond the cultural celebration of athletes, American culture spends a great deal of time and money cultivating its own fitness. Fitness, athleticism, and other practices of controlling the body demonstrate the subject’s autonomy in overcoming physical limitations. Bias’s story is about a loss of control because of a moment of weakness, a step away from his athletic subjectivity. His death was described as a warning, reinforcing narratives of discipline and self-control as the defining feature of autonomous selfhood. Failure to maintain self-control at all times was at best a betrayal of the self and, at worst, a literal death of the subject. Yet a second possibility exists within the figure of the athlete, the possibility of a loss of control through the very act of controlling. If the fit body must be ever vigilant in maintaining its integrity, then it is compelled to continually work on itself. Athletes must be addicted to their own autonomy, unable to stop the continual act of striving toward physical perfection. This chapter brings together the tensions between autonomy as law and autonomy as creativity by considering the possibility of an addiction to autonomy. This seeming contradiction captures Nancy’s description of the experience of freedom being as surprise. Freedom is not located in the intentional liberation from power relationships but rather in the ways in which power can produce consequences that disrupt the ordinary operation of power and require us to think and act differently. In this chapter the experience of freedom is sought in the everyday practices of self-construction through discourses of health, fitness, and athleticism. The practices of constructing the self through rigorous attention to the body is reminiscent of Kant’s joy in his successful self-management, but the practices of fitness can be interpreted as challenging his view of the sovereign unitary subject who practices intentional agency in the management of the body. Instead, some bodies produced by relationships of power can, in turn, challenge the very power relationships that make them possible, requiring 139 Fit to Be Tied 139 us to reflect on our idea of autonomy and what, or who, constitutes autonomous subjectivity. Building on the last chapter, which considered how challenging the clarity of our categories might produce new ways of relating to otherness and ourselves, this chapter will use the fitness fanatic as a way of thinking about autonomy and political agency differently. The chapter begins by examining the inextricable relationship between autonomy as law and autonomy as creativity in contemporary discourses of selfhood that emphasize self-help. I then discuss a variant of self-help culture, that is, physical fitness culture, or a cultural drive toward selfimprovement evidenced by the shape of the body. The discussion then considers another seeming “other” of...