Technik und Körperbewusstsein am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts

Gwen Bingle

This paper aims to uncover wellness in Germany as a technologically driven body project of the late 1980s, inserted within a continuity of 20th century body projects. Like its forerunners, it has been aiming at increasing the management of and control on the spheres of health, nutrition, movement and cosmetics but has also been heralding a turning point in the consciousness of the paradoxical link between nature and technology in the body.

Encouraging individuals to recover their bodies' natural balance, developing a capacity to prevent disease, rediscovering a sensuous approach to physiological functionalism... These are some of the characteristics of wellness that most users and promoters of this ideology have named when trying to define it. Although wellness heavily relies on body-related mass producing industries, its advocates still recoil at explicitly describing the body at the centre of wellness preoccupations as dependent on artificial, highly technological intrusions. There is undoubtedly a strong sense of the strain generated by the post-industrial but increasingly high-tech work and leisure spheres, especially in terms of the stress, tensions and lifestyle diseases it imposes on the metabolism. Nevertheless, the body itself is still often primarily categorised as a "natural", pre-technological entity, and this despite relatively discreet "cyborgish" modifications such as tooth fillings, stomachs digesting functional food, crooked feet or aching backs due to inappropriate shoes or sports routines.

I will thus be analysing the strategies used to mediate a gradual re-negotiation of technology's place in the "natural body" - by focusing on the discourse to be found in popular media during the emergence of the wellness ideology towards the end of the 1980s - in order to highlight the move towards an increasing naturalisation of technological well-being.