CC BY
18
© Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. 2021. 13(1):81-103 DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2021-13-1-81-103
ITNESS vs. FIZKUL'TURA: NIKE and the unfit BoDY
in Moscow
Ben Krupp
Ben Krupp, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign. Address for correspondence: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Anthropology, 109 Davenport Hall, 607 S. Matthews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. bkrupp2@illinois.edu.
Research for this article was conducted with funding from the Graduate College of the University of Illinois.
This article examines Nike's unique marketing in Moscow. Since 2012, Nike has treated Moscow as distinct among its global hubs. It has committed noticeable resources to operating public fitness classes, building public recreational facilities, and sponsoring a state fitness program "Gotov k trudu i oborone" (Ready for labor and defense). In all of these strategies, Nike is pursuing access to the bodies of Russian citizens as its primary objective. I argue that this intimate access to Russian bodies is being sought by Nike in an attempt to disseminate new ways of thinking about the body that open up new risk markets and make the body more available to global capital circuits. But while these new ontologies of the body are meant to erase local and historical ways of understanding, in colonizing Soviet forms of cultural production Nike has inherited many of the socialist relationships between individual health and social well-being. The result is the development of a local way of understanding the body that is an entanglement of socialist past and neoliberal present. This article draws on nine months of ethnographic research in spaces of public recreation in Moscow (gyms, parks, and public schools) conducted between 2016 and 2020.
Keywords: Fitness; BiopoLitics; Health; Sports; Body; Corporation; Nike
My shoe falls off my hand and hits the floor. I am on one knee, my right hand touching the ground behind me, my now-empty Left hand extended upwards. The evening coming in from high windows casts a golden Light on the 12 of us, 9 women and 3 men, evenly dispersed across the polished parquet. We are in a Nike fitness studio in the high-fashion Kuznetskii Most district of central Moscow. The whiteness of the walls makes the space feel more like an art gallery than a gym, an effect exaggerated by some wall-text remaining from a recent Nike-sponsored art show. This class is being held in one of Nike's three fitness studios in Moscow, all of which are free for anyone who wants to attend. Nike's corporate strategy of offering free fitness resources is not unique to Moscow—similar classes can be found in many of its global hubs—but the scale of Nike's fitness operations in Moscow is entirely singular. Over the month of February in 2019, Nike held an average of 8 events in the other 25 cities
across the globe on which it focuses its marketing. Over this same time period, it had more than 240 events—8 events daily—in Moscow.1
The exercise we are practicing is a Turkish Getup, a highly proscribed set of movements in which one moves from prone to standing while holding a weight above one's head. Though we have dumbbells by our yoga mats, we have not graduated from the shoe-balancing phase; our instructor patiently concerned that we are far from mastering this technique. From the mat next to mine, Dmitrii, a pensioner in his early sixties, gives me a nod of encouragement. Unlike most of the young Russians who populate these classes, he never wears Nike apparel—or anything (I suspect) purchased in the last decade. Dmitrii usually arrives moments before class, happy and hurried. During classes he watches the instructor with his full attention, smiling past his own failures as he attempts to mimic their movements. I am never quite sure whether he is smiling at the joy or the silliness of our activity, but I always find myself smiling back. In the locker room after classes, Dmitrii gives me hints about how to cheat the system and get access to the highly competitive morning yoga classes. Once, after showering, I asked him why he attended so frequently. "One has to keep moving in old age." He leaned in close to add emphasis and smiled: "We only have one ticket. Why waste it!"
In this article I show that Nike has arrived at this hyper concentration of these market tactics in an attempt to overcome a specific obstacle in the Russian market, partially represented by Dmitrii. His fanatic use of Nike's free resources and concurrent refusal to buy Nike apparel exemplify a local particular that impedes the spread of the consumption-dependent fitness culture on which Nike has built its global empire.2 For Dmitrii, the Nike classes are commensurate with a historical expectation that public recreation services be provided for free. This expectation is, in turn, integrated with an understanding of the body and its relationship to the state that is residual of Soviet physical culture. This refusal of corporatization is a version of an encounter I observed across the landscape of exercise in Russia, in which this quasi-American understanding of good health that I will refer to as fitness encounters a locally distinct understanding that I will callfizkul'tura. Though both epistemes denote making an individual healthier and happier through the movement of the body, they are undergirded by entirely different politics of value. Fitness and fizkul'tura represent diametrically opposed ways of understanding the inherent value of a body, one that engenders the creation of markets dependent on risk and frailty (the unfit
1 Barcelona, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Dubai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lima, London, Los Angeles, Manila, Melbourne, Miami, Milan, Moscow, Mumbai, Panama City, Paris, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Washington, DC. Nike's events calendar accessed February 15, 2019 (https://web.nike.com/events/my_events/#/discover).
2 At a market value assessed at $224.3 billion, Nike is the largest apparel brand in the world, dwarfing second-place Dior ($89.6 billion) and quadrupling its nearest competitor in athletic wear, Adidas ($52 billion). More dollars are spent worldwide on Nike products daily ($105.7 million) than on Coca-Cola products ($86.8 million), at Starbucks ($69.3 million), or at McDonalds ($57.5 million) (Andrea Murphy, Hank Tucker, Marley Coyne, and Halah Touryalai, "Global 2000: The World's Largest Public Companies," Forbes, May 13, 2020; https://www.forbes.com/global2000/).
body), and one that prioritizes communality, moderation, and low drain on health resources.3 In the desire to transform the Russian population from the latter to the former Nike has focused its attention on corporeal subjectivity, which resulted in its emergence as a biopolitical actor.
This corporate commitment to subject formation is new for Nike, but perhaps not so new to the Russians who were sweating and stretching around me. Since 1991 the disorganization of postsocialist capitalism has weakened the boundaries between state and market with respect to public health. As the state has receded from its centralized authority over the power to direct how people come to understand their bodies, corporations have advanced apace, opening private hospitals, buying sanatoria, sponsoring national fitness campaigns—willingly accepting responsibility for the health of Russian citizens and undoing the centralized infrastructures of physical and psychological health. As unique as Nike's strategy in Moscow is, it resonates with the many other corporate projects across the city that are pulling health, both emotional and bodily, further from the state.
This article is based on nine months of ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2020 in which I stretched, ran, danced, jumped, boxed, meditated, and played with Russians in Nike-adjacent spaces. In this research, I found that I often understood my surroundings more deeply by finding consonance with other bodies in motion.4 The relationships I developed in these spaces were founded on shared bodily experience—through exhaustion, muscle strains, sharing injury histories, newfound strengths—and so my own body was often a source of consideration and evidence. These relationships, of course, did not remain somatic and meandered to politics, pickling recipes, complaints about particularly malevolent trainers, children, and whatever else people talk about in locker rooms, saunas, and bars after exercising together. Over the nine months I talked with around 200 people and moved through space with many more; the majority of my interlocutors were between the ages of 20 and 40, approximately 65 percent of them men.5 In addition to this participatory work, I also conducted eight longer interviews with Nike employees in influential positions in Nike's Moscow office.6 The goal of these interviews was to probe into Nike's agency and intentionality in the spread of fitness.
3 I am not presuming any implicit overarching contradistinction between two ways of thinking (capitalist/socialist) but only describing an encounter between two ways of knowing the body, one thoroughly infused with logics of capital (fitness) and one not (fizkul'tura).
4 These are ways of mutual understanding that were not always made explicit through language. I owe much of my attention to these communions to Alaina Lemon, whose Technologies of Intuition (2018) gave me the confidence to let them be important.
5 This number does not represent the gender split of the settings so much as the gendered dynamics of my engagement. Many of my relationships began in locker rooms and saunas before and after fitness and were therefore more likely to include men. The classes and trainings were attended by about 65-70 percent women.
6 I am continually grateful to those from the Nike Moscow team who gave me their time and thoughtfulness. I have no official relationship with Nike, and those who chose to talk to me did so from a deep generosity of spirit.
In this article I focus primarily on the world around Nike's proprietary training program, the Nike Training Club (NTC). These in-person trainings are the centerpiece of the Nike Training Club, a global fitness community and exercise regimen that includes an NTC mobile app, the NRC (Nike Run Club) app, as well as the global NTC Tours, which are designed to introduce this community to Nike's target countries. In 2018 alone the NTC app was downloaded 538,000 times by Russian mobile devices, and its sibling, the Nike Run Club app, an additional 579,000 times.7 The popularity of these Nike apps—and of the enormous fitness and health app market as a whole— demands further investigation into the bodily knowledges that they disseminate. This article gestures toward this need with a brief digression concerning the relationship between contemporary fitness culture and broad trends over the last 40 years of American capitalism, before returning to the interaction between this ontology of the body and its Russian counterpart.
FIZKUL'TURA AND SOVIET BIOPOLITICS
Biopolitics has a unique history in Russia. While Soviet biopolitical particularities receive cursory attention in the works of Michel Foucault (2003:81-82, 2008:110111), Giogrio Agamben (1998:30), and Roberto Esposito (2013:87), the canon on biopolitics is built primarily from analyses of the relationship between Nazi biopolitical and thanatopolitical organization. This trend toward essentializing the Western European fascist experience as the extreme of a continuum of biopolitical control ignores the fact that socialist economic thought engendered distinct systems of environmental, infrastructural, and statistical regulation over life (Collier 2011; Prozorov 2013, 2016). From the earliest moments of the Bolshevik state, inheriting a population weakened by war and famine, its leader Vladimir Lenin understood that transforming the flesh of the body politic was fundamental to the building of a socialist empire (Grant 2013; Starks 2008). Through profound and pervasive campaigns labeled under the broad term fizkul'tura (physical culture),8 the state brought MarxistLeninist ideology to the domains of hygiene, sport, and health, drawing lines of signification between individual well-being and economic and social objectives of the state.
Under this banner of fizkul'tura the centralized state developed mass propaganda campaigns, recreational infrastructure, and educational institutions, all geared toward increasing the standards of health for Russian citizens. Magazines like 0uC
7 NTC has been downloaded 7.49 million times globally, and NRC 10.75 million globally (data acquired by email inquiry from market intelligence service Sensor Tower).
8 In describing Russian physical culture, I choose to use the Russian word fizkul'tura rather than the English physical culture to draw attention to the particularly Russian and post-Soviet understandings of these terms. While physical culture is a concept known to scholars of sport, the pervasiveness and commonality of fizkul'tura in Russia demands that it be shown in its own light. Saying to a Russian that I study fizkul'tura is often the fastest path toward a mutual understanding of my purpose, while saying to an American that I study physical culture yields blank stares and questions about the materiality of objects.
(Fizkul'tura i sport (FiS); founded in 1923) incorporated physical training within other, more holistic understandings of health like hygiene, orderliness, rest (sanatoria), tourism, nutrition, and cultural appreciation. The workouts that appeared in ФиС at the height of its publication in the mid-1970s were very different from those familiar to the contemporary fitness consumer. They were often long, some taking three or more hours to complete and suggesting rests between exercises of up to 10 minutes, and designed to be done at home using everyday items (chairs, couches, stairs, etc.) rather than specialized equipment.9 Most importantly, they propagated a holistic understanding of the body and health in which moderation was key. In the words of one of the most influential voices of Soviet fitness, Olympic trainer and regular ФиС contributor Suren Bogdasarov (2004),
To be healthy, you must adhere to healthy living principles: keep in moderation food, work, rest, and sleep, as old wise men will tell you, and abandon bad habits and traditions. Keep your weight steady, do not overeat. Your muscles and joints should work, and as long as that is true, you will live a long life. And again: the mind is a thread, holding on to which a person can exit any maze. It is important to maintain composure and not to panic.
As represented in this Bogdasarov quote, at the core of Soviet fizkul'tura was an assumption that health is implicit and need only be nurtured. Health should be pursued, not with the primary goal of individual productivity through excessive exertion (as in contemporary fitness), but through moderation toward the communal goals of improving the body politic, maintaining a strong and easily militarized citizenry, and establishing a high quality of life so that socialism can prosper. In the Stalinist era, the Soviet state redoubled its attention to these projects of bodily transformation, and this immense energy grounded Marxism-Leninism within particularly Soviet ways of knowing and thinking about the body (Grant 2013; Petrone 2000; Riordan 1980; Starks 2008), all interwoven with this particularly Soviet concept of fizkul'tura.
Following the death of Joseph Stalin, as Alexei Yurchak has argued, the strong connections between Soviet rhetoric and Marxist-Leninist ideology began to weaken. The mass repetition of Soviet authoritarian discourse eventually disassociated living socialism from ideological socialism, opening a space for the unpredictability and creativity found in the 1970s and 1980s (Yurchcak 2006). It is the distance between ideology and discursive practice that explains how the eventual demise of Soviet state socialism could feel at once so inevitable and so impossible. While Yur-chak's argument about this rift between the daily act of living and its ideological
9 A distinction should be drawn between recreational and professional fitness in the Soviet context. Professional fitness, as can be seen in the system of Olympic schools, ballet companies, and high-tier sports clubs had much more rigorous training regimens. I think this distinction is important because, as we will see with fitness, the contemporary exercise culture actively tries to disintegrate that distinction and give all people professional-intensity training. Across the wall in the Nike Moscow office is a quote from one of its founders, Bill Bowerman, written in large orange letters: "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world... (*if you have a body, you are an athlete)."
weight is unassailable, the absence of an analysis of fizkul'tura in his study points to something unconsidered. If, as has been discussed, the economic ideology of Marxism-Leninism was attached to these particularly Soviet body ontologies—ways of knowing embodied through daily bodily practice and experience and not through discourse—could they be as simply emptied of ideological reference? A wide body of literature on embodiment pushes back against the kind of dissociation Yurchak describes and makes the case that the everyday repetition of movements in fact makes the ideas connected to them more deeply held (Bernstein 2013; Farnell 2014). The practice of Sovietfizkul'tura perpetuated socialist body ontologies, even while Soviet discourse fell further from Soviet ideology (Kruglova 2017).
This connection between ontology and bodily practice continues to be particularly salient after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Through the 1990s the absence of any ordered and ideologically focused infrastructure in early post-Soviet Russia meant that Soviet fizkul'tura was not challenged in any meaningful way (Vlasov 1996). Many aspects of the Soviet sports system became invested with capital, but the bones of the systems—the sports schools, the physical education teachers, the clubs, the public parks, the open-air exercise arenas that accompany most housing complexes—remained.10 The infrastructural, environmental, and statistical regulatory mechanisms for socialist fitness that had anchored socialist ideology to the cultural reproductions of the flesh were weakened by the instability of the 1990s but maintained a relatively consistent relationship with the public. As Micha* Murawski (2019) has argued from a Marxist perspective, these infrastructural remnants retain their capacity to affect superstructure and push back against the designs of would-be transitologists. The very socialist fitness infrastructure and epistemes continued to be socialist, even after the world around them became capitalist.11 The perpetuation of these socialist body-ontologies can be tracked well into the 2000s, with the most bold example being President Vladimir Putin's revival of the national fitness assessment "Gotov k trudu i oborone" (GTO; Ready for labor and defense) in 2014. Having disappeared in 1991 in the disarray of early Russian capitalist statehood, it was reanimated with no major alterations and similar Soviet-Russian iconography and sentiment.
The revival of GTO was also a major foray for Nike into this corporate governance-like behavior in Russia. In the summer leading up to GTO's full renewal, Nike unveiled a series of enormous building-sized murals across Moscow depicting women in the midst of athletic performance accompanied by the state GTO symbol and the hashtag #TESTGTO. But the GTO sponsorship was not Nike's first biopolitical move in Russia. In 2012 Nike had already opened a small facility in the middle of Gor'kii Park
10 The CSKA football club provides a nice example of this infrastructural persistence. Previously operated by the Soviet Army, it was bought by oligarchic wealth in the 1990s and became one of the most capitalized of the former Soviet system, and yet it continues to this day to be supported by the Russian state.
11 In thinking along these lines, I walk a wide path made by scholars of postsocialism who focus on the ways in which infrastructures, materials, and social forms persist across the social and political transformations of the last 30 years (Fehervary 2013; Nadkarni 2010).
to house a few running and sports clubs. This little orange building (designed to look like a Nike shoebox) was the product of a contract between Nike and the Moscow municipal government that leased the public space to the private company, explicitly stating that Nike was not allowed to conduct commercial activity (selling shoes). "The Box," as the orange building came to be called, mirrored state-run Soviet fitness clubs in its appearance and purpose and entered Nike into an active biopolitical space.
The way in which this orange box came into being evidences an important tension between two different Nikes: Nike as an American-founded global project and Nike as a set of local actors.12 During the massive renovation of Gor'kii Park that began in 2011, the opportunity arose for Nike to open up a facility there. While the local marketing team saw some potential in this idea, they had a hard time convincing World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, of the efficacy of this tactic, as Nike's global marketing logics preferred to allocate resources based on a hierarchy of sport popularity. Running was not popular in Russia at the time, so opening a public running club did not track as a wise marketing choice. In the words of a Nike employee central to this decision making,
So I went to Nike and I was like, "Look guys, Gor'kii Park is the place. You must use this opportunity and please give me coaches and I will do everything I can." And they were like, "No, no, no, no, no.. We are not interested. We have Olympic Games coming in two years, and people are not running in this country." At this time, I think, our HQ (in USA) was looking at us—as they still do—as a third-world country where running is nonexistent.. But in the end, they kind of agreed on it.. The first three months it was all just wires, a building site. But in like six weeks, a hundred and fifty people, for no reason, came to the running session in the evening. And then it all opened up on the May 1, 2012, and people came. And they were very normal people who had a very deep need of social life. And I think what they really wanted to try and regain was their dignity. (Interview with SC, July 9, 2019)
While Nike is moving into this space brandishing the monolithic global episteme of fitness, its colonization of socialist fizkul'tura infrastructure forced fitness to entangle with aspects of residual socialist superstructure. The fact that the decision to open the running club on May 1, is also, of course, significant. In emulating Soviet
12 This challenge of holding both negative and positive in an analytical lens informs how I consider Nike as an object of study: neither wholly repressive nor wholly health promoting. To hold these two in hand simultaneously, the negative and positive, I follow others who see the corporation as an entity that can be enacted in different forms depending on the context and perspective of the encounter (Abrams 1988; Rogers 2015; Welker 2014). Nike sometimes appears as an entity with singular will and purpose—sometimes almost nefarious and omniscient—but this does not obfuscate other encounters in which Nike appears variously as a group of diverse and well-meaning local actors, as the connective tissue between a group running through a park, as a global brand affiliated with a charitable mission, as a number on the stock market, or as a constituent material network that traverses the globe from rubber trees to spandex (Rogers 2015). Nike exists as a multiplicity and is all of these iterations simultaneously (Mol 2001).
sports clubs, providing this public service within a space of profound import in Soviet history (Gor'kii Park) and celebrating this opening on International Workers' Day (May Day), one of the most important Soviet holidays, the space is finally made viable for "normal people" to have "social life" and regain their "dignity." Returning to the vignette that opened this article, the tenor of Dmitrii's use of Nike's public recreational facilities—his expectation (and excitement) that the services be provided for free—is another example of the preservation of fizkul'tura superstructure into Nike's biopolitical infrastructure. For Dmitrii, though Nike fitness brings new and foreign ways of thinking about and moving the body (I met him initially at a hip-hop dance class), this form of engagement is clearly familiar.
"TRAINING" THE RUSSIAN BODY
It is June 2017, and I have just finished playing basketball with Petr, a 30-year-old Muscovite marketing executive with a penchant for loud clothes and louder cars. We are leaning on his 1987 Pontiac Firebird waiting for the engine to warm. A single working headlight raised from the hood illuminates half of the mostly empty parking lot in front of us. Sighing deeply, Petr tells me that he is exhausted, that in addition to basketball he had already trained on NTC that day. Having never heard the acronym (Nike had yet to appear in my crosshairs), I ask him what NTC is. "You don't know? It is an app that teaches you to train like athletes. It is really very incredible. Today I did the Kyrie workout.13 You can do training as Ronaldo, Sharapova, Lebron— they have many athletes." He opened the app and handed his phone to me. "You know, this is amazing, I think. I like knowing that I am here, and Kyrie is there, and I can train the same as him.... I've never really trained before. This is new for me" (Interview with PK, July 8, 2017).
This admission that he had never really trained was surprising to me. The consummate sportsman, Petr had played hockey, basketball, and soccer his entire life. In addition to competitive sports, he still found time to skateboard, snowboard, bike, and run—all with a measure of seriousness. As I pressed him more about this distinction between this NTC "training" and a lifetime of athletic practice, it became clear that this Nike regimen was qualitatively different in Petr's understanding. It possessed some objective authority in its capability to transform his body. Curious about the power of this body knowledge, I downloaded and began to regularly use the NTC app and its available free workouts, and then to attend NTC classes and events in Moscow. When I entered my first NTC studio—this one located in Playground, a private gym located near Savelovskaia Train Station in north-central Moscow—I was greeted by a slogan that captured (and perhaps even begat) the difference Petr ascribed to the new Nike regime of fitness. In the sleek and contemporary designed space, printed in bold black letters along the entirety of one wall, across from wall-sized portraits of Nike-sponsored athletes Skyler Diggins and Kyrie Irving, were the words (in English) "Stop Exercising. Start Training."
13 Here referring to NBA star and Nike-sponsored athlete Kyrie Irving.
"Stop Exercising. Start Training" is a masterpiece of a marketing slogan. The work of global creative agency AnalogFolk, it entered into Nike discourse in 2016 and creates, in four words, a near-perfect paradigm shift in an understanding of what the body can do. The two words, "exercising" and "training," practically synonyms, are turned into a polarity: exercising is trivial, superficial, stale; training is inspired, profound, new. The slogan also has a unique valence added in the Russian context. Whether it is intentional or inadvertent, the word "training" indexes its Russian cognate "тренинг" (trening) as opposed to its partial cognate "тренировка" (trenirov-ka). While trenirovka is more simply connected to working out and exercising, trening implies a psychological component (Kharkordin 1999; Matza 2018).14 Relatively unused prior to the mid-1980s, the word became commonplace in the 1990s as many Russians attended costly self-help seminars, referred to as "trainings," meant to guide the practitioner toward success in the wild environs of capitalism. These two trainings resonate with each other: this new physical training of the body with that psy-oriented, intentional remaking of subjectivity of the first post-Soviet decade (Humphrey 2002; Krylova 2000; Prozorov 2016; Yurchak 2006). The project of becoming fit—the paradigm shift of accepting a new understanding of the body's materiality—is bundled within a larger remaking of that body's relationship to the commons (Curtin n.d.).
Launched in 2009, the Nike Training Club has been a focus of Nike's growth globally. NTC has had three branches to its operations: fitness centers, a smartphone app, and their global NTC Tours (2014-2016). If the immaculate and modern NTC studios are churches of a sort, then the NTC app is its mobile bible—a compendium of knowledge that validates the existence of the studio. NTC encompasses a fitness regimen that feels extremely familiar to anyone who has spent time in a gym in a global metropolis in the past decade. It loosely combines aspects of yoga, Pilates, dance, combat, and plyometric exercise into various boot camps, routines, and classes mostly named in vague alliterations like Quick Core, Tank Top Arms, or Glutes & Glory. While the app appears to offer a wide array of choices, a thorough examination shows that most of the possible decisions lead to the same small group of exercises, shuffled into different orders. Whether you want to work out like an NBA star or do the Hart-Serena (a workout purportedly designed by the team of comedian Kevin Hart and tennis megastar Serena Williams), you will find yourself doing a very similar assortment of exercises, led by a handful of silent NTC coaches, voiced-over by the same nondescript voice-talent. The NTC app is constantly expanding to include new workouts by Nike-sponsored athletes and trainers, but these recapitulated workouts performed by anonymous Nike employees make up the majority of the content available. In this manner, the NTC app is using the prospect of choice to disseminate a narrow selection of exercises—and a relatively precise conception of the body and its capabilities.
14 A Google Ngram of the term "тренинг" shows a 650-percent increase in its usage between the years of 1985 and 2005.
While the user experience is anchored by the hollow appearance of choice, the developer is in return receiving a wealth of information. Each decision fed back into the NTC app—about which workouts the user would like, which descriptors they prefer as goals (thin, strong, stable, core, energy, etc.)—as was data about the manner in which Russians consider their bodies, their imperfections, and aspirations. Consider the decision between Better Butts 2.0 and Leg-Pocalypse Now (both actual workouts). These are two workouts of very similar description that use practically the exact same exercises and are taught by the same coach-models—the user gets pretty much the same experience regardless of their choice—yet a preference for Better Butts 2.0 might encourage future marketing toward a concern for appearance, while Leg-Pocalypse Now would imply marketing toward a more dramatic and violent transformation of the self. The ethics that become bundled within the movements of these two options are very different, even while the movements themselves are very similar. In this way, Nike can bend the ethical relationships of its body-ontology toward the local space, in Russia or anywhere else.15
Once customers are using the app, their understanding of what a body is capable of becomes confined within the scales presented. For instance, if a user selects "easy" on the difficulty scale and finds that workout to be difficult, they are led to assume that their body is "out of shape"—with all the ethical implications that the out-of-shape body carries in a neoliberal economy (Greenhalgh 2015). In my conversation with Petr on the hood of his Firebird, his exhaustion served as a measure of NTC's expertise. He knew this training was something new, because it tapped into previously undiscovered levels of depletion. This is a strategy common among almost most fitness technologies, varying workouts in intensity so that there is always a workout that is outside of one's ability level. Once enrolled in this fitness practice, the practitioner is always advancing toward a moving horizon of "in shape," turning fitness into an iatrogenic technology in which participation instantaneously pathol-ogizes the body as imperfect (Nguyen 2010). Put another way, a requisite of using the NTC app is to consider yourself in need of training, and a body that needs training is one that is always lacking in some respect. This inversion of the app's stated intention—the making of an out-of-shape body image in order to make a fit body—catalyzes an ontological shift that resonates with neoliberal self-making subjectivity (Coombe 2016; Gershon 2011). It dictates to the user the expectation of self-work, individualizing the responsibility for health and wellness and freeing the state from
15 Prior to launching NTC in Russia, Nike did intensive qualitative research into the ethical needs and trajectories of Russian citizens in its target demographics, primarily youth (16-to-24-year-olds-year-olds) and women (roughly 70 percent of Nike's marketing budget). I interviewed a couple of influencers in the Russian fitness space, who were paid to come to Nike's European HQ in the Netherlands in the fall of 2015 to attend group interview sessions in which they were asked about the challenges and needs of women in contemporary Russia. According to my interlocutors, the data gleaned from this market research informs the themes that drive Nike's Russian marketing, the most noticeable being sometimes-moving but often-shallow references to women's equality and mobilization (Hayhurst and Szto 2016).
accountability to that obligation. In this way, Nike's marketing tactics are, unexpectedly, moving it within the arena of governance.16
While states have long used exercise and corporeal standards to manage citizens—for example, state physical fitness tests, health parades, or food pyramids— the advancement of corporations into this field is a relatively new phenomena (Besn-ier, Brownell, and Carter 2018; Fraser 2003; Moran 2018). With each of these novel marketing projects that bring Nike in closer contact with Russian bodies, there has been a requisite retreat of the Russian state. The government has allowed Nike access to bodies by giving it permits for public demonstrations, sharing with it state health data, allocating for it space in public parks, and collaborating on the revival of the state fitness campaign GTO. Drawing fixed lines between the two, the Russian state and Nike, becomes nearly impossible—the two sharing goals, responsibilities, and physical space with borders that shift, overlap, and disappear depending on the encounter (Rogers 2015; Welker 2014). This corporate governance-like behavior runs parallel to other fields in Russia such as medicine (Raikhel 2016), institutional therapy (Matza 2018), or public utilities (Collier 2011), but what is unique to this particular example of neoliberal state retreat is that it is not animated by the prospect of a lucrative contract on the corporate end—as with the examples listed above—so the profit motive cannot as simply account for Nike's involvement. Nike is pouring money into these trainings and centers, but there is no simple way to explain what it is, precisely, it is investing in. While profit is still expected to come from the eventual sales of sporting goods and apparel, the investment into this exceptional marketing takes for granted an unexplored domain of value accrual.
As David Harvey has noted, "part of what the creative history of capitalism has been about is discovering new ways (and potentialities) in which the human body can be put to use as the bearer of the capacity to labor" (2000:104). The advancement of scientific knowledge and technologies of the last half century has cracked open new domains for the production of value within the body. Whether it is a race for genomic technology to translate life into commodified information (Rajan 2006; Rose 2001), the creation of risk markets surrounding genomic markers (Inda 2014), new valuations of human tissues like umbilical cord blood and stem cells (Waldby and Mitchell 2006), or bodily movements translated into valuable data through wearable tech (Ruckenstein and Schull 2017), these "bioeconomic exploitations" (Rose 2007) are perpetually pioneering new fields—both material and ontological—in which value can be quantified from flesh. Framing its diverse tactics with these other projects, Nike has an awareness of a novel capacity for transactional value that is rooted
16 You can see parallel examples where the neoliberal self as an "autopoietic machine" is wrought within the commercial-biopolitical matrix of contemporary Russia in the cases of alcoholism treatments (Raikhel 2016) and psychotherapy (Matza 2012, 2018). These are comparable cases in which jurisdiction over the health of Russian citizens is passed from the state to the market, undoing the centralized system of psychological health and epistemology, making way for the self-working hypothesis of Western psychology (Dunn 2004; Zigon 2010). In the case of Nike, fitness and psychology appear as comparable epistemes that pull health (emotional and bodily) further from state jurisdiction.
in a scientifically founded understanding of human frailty. This human frailty is at the root of the NTC project. It is at the core of the training that Petr found so novel, and it is fueling Nike's investment in fitness in Russia.
THE UNFIT BODY
It is day two of a 10-day basketball camp being held at Playground, and 17 kids wander around the weights room waiting for training to begin. Two girls slumped against the padded walls stand out for being half the size of everyone else. Though the group is of 13-to-18-year-olds-year-olds, Anna and Irina are 10 and 11 respectively. In addition to their small size, they distinguish themselves from the group for two additional reasons: first, they are considerably more skilled, and second, they are considerably better dressed. While most of the kids are wearing random non-basketball-specific sports attire, Anna and Irina are wearing entirely coordinated Nike uniforms. I count 11 swooshes on Irina—on her pink Nike WhyNot basketball shoes, socks, jersey, and shorts selected in the same pastel palette, with a final swoosh resting just above her eyebrows on a pink Nike headband. Throughout the camp, these two sequester themselves in all drills, coaching each other confidently, with a seriousness beyond their years. The day is split into two sessions: 11:00-12:30 is physical training, and 12:30-14:00 is basketball skills. As the 11:00 session starts, Anna, slumped against the wall, is slow to respond when the trainer asks her to start stretching. Today it is Alesha, who has a kindness that envelops everything in its periphery. He prods her gently.
Alesha: Come on Anna, let's go.
Anna: I'm tired, I don't like getting up early. And my knees hurt.
Alesha: Eleven is not early.
Anna: I have already done my morning training.
Alesha: Morning training?
Anna: I have to run and train in the mornings with my trainer. Both of my tendons are injured.
[She gestures at two bright pink Nike-branded patellar bands wrapped around her
knees.]
[Alesha stares at her dumbfounded.]
Alesha: Come on.
[Anna shrugs as she slowly climbs to a stand to join the group.]
Later, during my training with Alesha, we discuss Anna and her knees. We both agree that it is nearly impossible that a 10-year-old have a patellar injury from overtraining, something usually reserved for aging long-distance runners and professional basketball players. Though we have discussed overtraining together extensively, Alesha is convinced she is making it up. While such an injury is not impossible in a child of 10, he assumes it is probably a tactic she's learned to get out of unpleasant work, with the added bonus of getting her parents to buy the additional accessory of Nike patellar bands. If Alesha is correct, how has a 10-year-old learned to mimic a patellar injury? What is it about fitness, this supposed transformation toward health, that ties so closely with injury?
I write this sentence sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco, where I am inundated with ads for gyms that tell me to "Rise and grind" or that "Home is where the hustle is" or remind me that "No time is no excuse."17 Walking my dog this morning, I spend most of the time dodging runners as they trot past on their morning jogs, avoiding bicyclists who may be doing 40 miles, before 9 a.m.—and this all feels unremark-ably normal. Americans have normalized the expectation of fitness into a $70 billion industry.18 We are encouraged to think of our health as a project that affirms our personal worth and taught to feel guilty when we lapse or injure, put on weight, or get various stigmatized illnesses like high blood pressure, cholesterol, or diabetes (Green-halgh 2015). But American bodies were not always presumed to be in need of this kind of perpetual attention. This understanding of the body as needing fitness is a learned behavior, as culturally specific as table manners or kinship relations. Americans had to be taught to understand their bodies as requiring this amount of intensive daily attention and movement, to believe that inactivity is akin to illness.
This is not the case in Russia, at least not pervasively so. Running through Moscow streets, one still routinely receives looks of surprise and astonishment. This is changing swiftly in Moscow, primarily in younger and middle- and upper-class communities, but the intense training of fitness is far from hegemonic. I encountered this often in talking to non-fitness friends in Moscow who would make fun of me constantly needing to go to such-and-such a class. "Okay Ben, what are you training today?" Understanding how a 10-year-old can normalize an imagined patellar injury requires examining what has animated this obsession with corporeal self-making and how to place it among the social and economic systems in which it was produced (Martin 1994). The global spread of capitalism in its most recent form has been accompanied by a new way of thinking about and understanding the body—a body that is inherently unfit and necessitates fitness as a commodity in order to achieve health. For the sake of clarity, I have taken to calling this ontology of the body that is inherently lacking and that I see becoming increasingly pervasive in centers of global capital the unfit body. This unfit body is connected historically to (at least) two preconditions: the demobilization of labor of postFordist capitalism (Harvey 1990; Sassen 1995, 2000) and a consonance between the prerogatives of the fitness industry and those of the pharmaceutical industry.19
17 Respectively, Barry's Boot Camp, Orangetheory, and NewFit advertisements (November 1, 2019).
18 Fitness centers and health clubs $30.1 billion, sports apparel $36.6 billion, and fitness apps $2.5 billion in 2018.
19 As Joe Dumit (2012) elegantly presents in his Drugs for Life, over the course of the twentieth century the American medical complex shifted its attention from individual health (a concern with injury and symptom) to mass health (a preoccupation with risk and preventative treatment) (see also Cooper 2008; Lupton 2016; Tobbell 2009, 2012). This shift was precipitated by the penetration of value-oriented pharmaceutical logics within the American medical complex. From university research centers to congressional law to the ways in which primary care physicians understand their accountability, care has become confused in all corners of the American system. The push to extract as much value as possible from the patient has resulted in the proliferation of prophylactic care that attempts to identify risks and come up with costly new treatments for those risks (Beck 1992; Harvey 2000).
Over the course of the last 50 years, American corporations have globalized and become automated, expanding the service and management sectors and making the American laboring body increasingly immobile. Workers sit in front of screens, behind desks or wheels, as productivity is connected to smaller and smaller movements. This logic contends that when the body is sedentary for long periods of time, the heart weakens, veins become less elastic, muscles atrophy, bones become brittle. Undoing this inaction and exerting oneself beyond the restrictions of daily labor becomes an essential part of the self-making neoliberal subjectivity, specifically in middle- and upper-class technological work (Gershon 2011). Immobile workers are encouraged to strap devices to their wrists to monitor their productivity, race to the gym, subscribe to workouts that promise to do more in fewer minutes, and the implication is that life itself—contemporary, unavoidable, adult life—is inherently unhealthy and, furthermore, that the individual is personally responsible for counteracting this slow drain on their vitality. This pressure compresses the worker's conception of time, as this self-improvement can only be done in the margins—at 6 a.m., on lunch hour, or over weekends—margins that are themselves a privilege, compressed by familial responsibility, financial stability, and the challenge of finding safe spaces in which to move.20
But while this sedentary world is certainly unhealthy, the normalization of the discourse around fitness avoids a problematization of its etiology. Americans are working longer hours, find themselves in multiple part-time jobs thanks to the pre-carity of the flexible economy, and have their work lives pervade all corners of the day with devices that make them perpetually available, and these factors slowly winnow the moments in which they are expected to eat, rest, and move healthily. Instead of questioning or litigating against these daily exploitations, the market ethics of efficiency and progress encourage responding to them with technological advancements—fitness apps, wearable tech, mirrors that have built-in personal trainers, workouts that engage new scientific vocabularies, virtual reality gyms—turning the consumption-fueled anxiety into an anxiety-fueled consumption. The more late capitalism squeezes our days and immobilizes our work lives, the more pervasive becomes the discourse that presumes our bodies to be inherently unfit.
All of this is to say that my normal experience of dodging joggers every morning, slightly worried that my idiosyncratic dog might mistake their speed as aggression, is made normal because this unfit body has become so familiar. An American ontology of the body has developed that considers adult working life to be inherently unhealthy and the body to be perpetually at risk. The fitness industry has found a comfortable position between these two larger projects and has flourished in its ability to extract value from the anxieties they produce. This abbreviated account of the growth of the American fitness industry is important because the narrative it tells of the last 20 years differs so dramatically in the Russian context. In Russia the medical infrastructure was (and is still) largely socialized, and the transnational pharmaceu-
20 The question of what a society does with surplus vitality is approached from another angle by Michael Taussig (2012) in his examination of cosmetic (cosmic) surgery. He borrows the concept of depense from Georges Bataille to consider the relationship between excess time and body obsession.
tical industry has not been able to infiltrate healthcare to anywhere near the same depth that it has in America. In 2009 the OECD recorded that Russia was second last of the 30 countries surveyed for daily pharmaceutical dosage per capita, well below half the European average.21 In 2010 Russians spent just 4.9 percent of their GDP on healthcare, less than a third of the 16.4 percent spent in the United States.22 This difference in spending masks the fact that health in Russia was in a particularly bad place after the first decade of capitalism. Precipitated by failing social welfare and weakened state health infrastructures, life expectancy in Russia fell during the 1990s by almost two years to the lowest of all OECD countries, bottoming out at a male life expectancy of 75.5 years in 1994, 4.5 years lower than the European average. Over the course of 1990s and into the early 2000s, the Russian body politic became defined by its aging population, heart disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
On the labor end of these two comparisons, while the US labor force has shifted dramatically toward the service sector, this shift has not been as dramatic in Russia. In Russia, industrial and agricultural labor (sectors in which a high percentage of jobs remain mobile) still account for 32.79 percent of the population, compared to only 20.84 percent in the US. While demobilization is still an active process in Russia, it has affected a much smaller percentage of the population. If we see the pervasiveness of pharmaceutical logics and the demobilization of labor as necessary requisites to the normalization of discourse around fitness upon which Nike beds its marketing and growth in America, Nike has faced a unique challenge when it tried to globalize within the particular conditions of postsocialist Russia: how to convince Russian citizens that their bodies were inherently fallible. To some extent, this resonates with a social recognition of the unhealthiness of the body politic following the disorganization and governmental failure of the 1990s. Russians were, broadly speaking, unfit, at least when compared with G7 European states and the US. If fitness (and by extension Nike) encourages Russians to recognize their unfitness and improves the health and vitality of the population, then what could possibly mar the beneficence of this union?
As has been mentioned, Russian fizkul'tura was designed to meet the challenges of the early Soviet state. Through the infrastructures and practices of fizkul'tura, Russians were encouraged to think of their bodies and their bodily capacities in their relationship to a holistic understanding of health, thoroughly intertwined with ideas of rest, travel, hygiene, and general orderliness. This also meant that the problems of the body politic were equally connected to the state and to the relative efficacy of state infrastructures. This is not the case with fitness. Fitness pulls responsibility for
21 The 2009 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development) study included: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
22 To let a brief ethnographic aside speak to a society as a whole: Russian friends are regularly appalled by my very "American" consumption of ibuprofen, a pharmaceutical I am thoroughly convinced I cannot live without.
the vitality of the population away from the state and toward the individual, and in the process marketizes the fallibility of the body. Nike's investment in fitness is meant to do exactly this work: to encounter Russian bodies within this local context and impart to them this ontology of the unfit body that is more readily available to capital. Alongside the bodily expertise that Anna has accepted in her training, she has learned new, scientifically rooted ways of understanding the weaknesses of her body. At only 10 years old, she knows that overtraining results in an inflamed patella tendon, that this can be managed with pink Nike patellar bands, and that all of this is part of the transformation.
FORGETTING FIZKUL'TURA
At Playground, the "Stop Exercising. Start Training" wall-text hangs above a space that feels at once both recognizable and discordant. The NTC studio looks out through a full wall of windows over two immaculate basketball courts. The beautiful hardwood floors, designed initially to be a sports school in the Soviet model, are backdropped on one side by a giant Russian flag and on another by three-story-tall Nike murals depicting oversaturated child models holding Nike shoes in front of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, framed by the slogan "All for one" (vse za odnogo). The beauty of the space and the familiarity of the signs—swoosh and flag—obscure the seemingly disparate sets of allegiances that are represented here: the friction between the nationalism of an increasingly insular Russian state and banners of an iconic American brand in front of one its most liberal landmarks. The friction between these signs mirrors the ontological encounters being processed through the moving bodies on the court, bodies that are doing the work of amalgamating new ways of thinking about the self from the ontological components available. It is easy to become accustomed to this kind of fuzziness in the complicated biopolitical-com-mercial landscape of life in a global city, where states auction off the contracts for care, education, and waste—in fact for nearly all aspects of public welfare (Gille 2016; Verdery 2001, 2003). But this becoming accustomed requires a certain amount of labor, a certain amount of smoothing of the frictions between things. As Marc Fisher describes it,
This strategy—of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question—has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, the motley painting of everything that ever was, whose dreaming up and junking of social dictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities. In these conditions of ontological precarity, forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy. (2009:56)
As has been discussed, there is one forgetting that is requisite to Nike's success in this space—forgetting Sovietfizkul'tura. The project of convincing Russians of the unfit body requires a leveling of the ontologies that came before, an undoing of the blocks that made up the previous regime of bodily understanding. Over and over again in interviews, interlocutors would reference these Nike projects as if they were
responsible for bringing exercise into a cultural void. A Nike employee in marketing (age 26) once said to me that the company's mission was "to change the attitude of sport from the older generation. We must change it so people don't think about the boring, old schoolteacher or that it hurts. Russians need to know that sports can bring community, lifestyle, culture" (Interview with SD, August 5, 2019). This was echoed by a Nike-sponsored trainer (age 28) at one of the gyms, who explained it this way:
We had no culture of sports and now we do. Training culture. Three years ago when we were opening the gym, there was no culture. Really. People didn't know anything about training, they would come into the gym and just stand there. So they didn't know anything. And now, it is normal to come, to have personal training, to do some gym. (Interview with AA, July 20, 2019)
This discourse about the perceived historical absence of culture conspicuously blanks a rich history of Russian fitness and sports. If fitness can erase some of the more difficultly subsumed historical and ideological components of fizkul'tura, this would allow Nike to fully integrate the two. There is a sharp generational divide to this forgetting. It is not an exact science, but in conversations I found the fuzzy line to fall around those born in 1980; the older group has enough formative memories of camping trips and factory teams, of watching Iurii Vlasov win Mr. Universe, reading Fizkul'tura i sport, attending the 1980 Olympics, or testing their strength in yearly fitness campaigns, that they find this forgetting harder to accept. As a friend who spent her childhood in socialist Hungary once commented to me, what she remembered most about having to attend public marches and Spartakiad parades was marching through the city for hours and always having to pee. Whether or not fizkul'tura is remembered fondly, those who lived through it find it a challenge to erase the phenomenological memory of its practice.
While the spread of fitness tries to forget the existence of fizkul'tura, it is also actively subsuming the infrastructures and cultural forms fizkul'tura has left behind. The market path that Nike has taken has been refined through a series of feedback loops meant to bend tactics toward the needs and expectations of the Russian market—data from the NTC app, group panels about Russian femininity, trial and error in the programming of the fitness spaces. Through their attention to these feedback loops, Nike Moscow has subsumed rather than replaced much of the socialist infrastructure it hopes to sterilize of its anticonsumerist lineage, and it is only intensifying this strategy. Box MSK, Nike's newest fitness center in Gor'kii Park, one that replaced the original orange box in 2018,23 refers to itself explicitly as a House of Culture, a direct callback to the Dom kul'tury of the Soviet era. For an event in 2018 Nike even issued its own red Troika metro cards with a giant Soviet star. Nike is taking on the cultural forms of residual Soviet infrastructure and believes that it can control which of the components of the embedded Marxist-Leninist superstructure they wish to preserve.
23 This new one, Box MSk, also designed to look like a Nike shoe box.
CONCLUSION: OLD MEN IN A PARK
Back in Moscow, the TV is on while I am transcribing interviews in my apartment. It is one of these light, overproduced murder mystery shows, though I am not paying enough attention to notice which one. The detective is wandering around a park trying to see if anyone had witnessed a crime days earlier. She approaches two old men, gray beards, barrel chests, who are exercising topless by a lake. They are doing wide arm circles and bouncing up and down, their knees splayed outward like marionettes. While continuing their exercises, they answer her questions—they had seen a man playing with a small dog off leash ... oh yes, and maybe the victim in an argument with a man (gasp) sitting on a bench. The detective takes their testimony seriously, unperturbed by the dramatic bobbing and arm waving. Her lack of comment affirms that this is an expected physicality for two men of their generation—perhaps as familiar to her as a city full of runners is to me.
This trope—the old man exercising in nature, contented (they are clearly happy)—points to a fundamental obstruction to the penetration of the global fitness market in Russia. This is an understanding of the body and its fitness that does not require capital. It does not begin with a negative body that is constantly a problem needing to be fixed. It begins with a body that is fundamentally strong and with exercise as the manifestation and perpetuation of this strength. It also takes for granted the state's responsibility to provide public recreational space—the one external requisite for such exercise. If one has spent any time in Moscow—or most formerly Soviet spaces—they would know that it is impossible to avoid the ubiquity of the outside exercise structures found in parks and in the courtyards of apartment buildings. These spaces are an increasingly vestigial reminder of a public expectation that the state provide fitness infrastructures and guide its citizens toward health.
Nike's NTC projects are part of a general winnowing of this governmental accountability, a transferring of ownership of this biopolitical sphere of influence into the corporate realm. But even as they evidence the disappearance of this local particular, they are also a recognition that it exists, that it is important, and that it is legible to corporate decision-making hierarchies. The internal machinations that culminated in support for these Nike marketing tactics identified that appealing to these residual socialist ways of relating was beneficial to market growth. In doing so, Nike seems to be replicating within this locally adapted fitness some aspects of fizkul'tura that are not consistent with American fitness. For one, Russian fitness has inherited the communality of fizkul'tura. In Moscow, fitness is something to be done with people, an act that builds community and can potentially even "restore dignity." This is not entirely absent in global fitness culture, but it is privileged and primary in almost all the fitness settings I found in Moscow. Runners preferred to run in groups and were as animated about the shared coffees and pastries after runs as they were about any individual wellness goals. At Playground, when I asked why people came to this gym in particular, the only thing referenced more than the expertise of the trainers was the warmth of the community. I felt this every day. My tiring days full of movement were always also full of so many warm handshakes, smiles, hugs, gifts—it would be near impossible to exaggerate the sincerity and generosity of spirit of these communities.
Though Nike seems to be facilitating the development of something new—an amalgam of the global and the local, fitness and fizkul'tura—by moving into this biopolitical sphere, it is also subjecting it to an entirely new set of incentives and logics. Broadly speaking, states undertake biopolitical fitness projects with the longue durée objectives of encouraging the productivity, efficiency, and vitality of their people (Moran 2018). While this is still a hypothetical outcome of these Nike projects, it is not what incentivizes Nike to become involved in biopolitics. Nike's goal is to sell more apparel by changing the way Russians think about their bodies, shifting the ontologies connected to fitness toward the more familiar and marketable grounds of its American capitalist origins. In this way, Nike's project has a comparatively much shorter horizon and time period of commitment. Its involvement in these biopolitical projects is engendered by a transitology in which there is an implicit assumption of an ultimate destination, influenced by an American- or EU-cen-tric understanding of market normality.
This shorter-term, goal-centric target comes with two hypothetical possibilities. If these tactics fail, or appear to fail—if Nike eventually decides that the project of transforming the Russian body is too vast, slow, or costly—it will change course and close its fitness centers and stop promoting (or monetize) its NTC app.24 If these tactics somehow succeed—if Nike is successful in colonizing fizkul'tura and the unfit body becomes the hegemonic ontology of bodily understanding—these projects still cease to be value-generative and justifiable to shareholders. Once Russians learn to be unfit and the ethics surrounding fitness become pervasive and accepted—once runners populate the early morning streets and gyms open on every corner—Nike no longer needs to devote energy to teach them and will stop supporting fitness as a public service.
The question will be whether this moment of encounter between fitness and fizkul'tura portends the inevitable march of neoliberal ontologies across the world or the stolid persistence of local particularities. Of course it is neither entirely, but the dilemma of Nike's temperamental involvement forecasts that this peaceable union between fitness and fizkul'tura is not forever. We will have to wait to find out whether the future will be full of children who waste time thinking about the fallibility of their knees or whether the next generations of old men will meet by the lake to bounce up and down with their shirts off.
REFERENCES
Abrams, Philip. 1988. "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)." Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1):58-89.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Bernstein, Anya. 2013. Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. Besnier Niko, Susan Brownell, and Thomas F. Carter. 2018. The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
24 Nike put the majority of the NTC app behind a paywall at the beginning of 2020.
Bogdasarov, Suren. 2004. Zapiskistarogo trenera. Moscow: Arbat-Inform.
Collier, Stephen J. 2011. Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Coombe, Rosemary. 2016. "The Knowledge Economy and Its Cultures." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(3):247-275. doi:10.14318/hau6.3.018.
Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Curtin, Emily. N.d. "Attention to Bodies: Shaping Subjectivities in Post-Soviet Belarus." Unpublished manuscript.
Dumit, Joseph. 2012. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define our Health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2013. "Community, Immunity, Biopolitics." Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18(3):83-90. doi:10.1080/0969725X.2013.834666.
Farnell, Brenda. 2014. Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory: "I Move Therefore I Am." New York: Routledge.
Fehérvary, Krisztina. 2013. Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fisher, Marc. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fraser, Nancy. 2003. "From Discipline to Flexibilization?—Reading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization." Constellations 10(2):160-171.
Gershon, Ilana. 2011. "Neoliberal Agency." Current Anthropology 52(4):537-555. doi:10.1086/660866.
Gille, Zsuzsa. 2016. Paprika, Foie Grass, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Grant, Susan. 2013. Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society: Propoganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s. New York: Routledge.
Greenhalgh, Susan. 2015. Fat Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America's War on Fat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hayhurst, Lyndsay M. C., and Courtney Szto. 2016. "Corporatizating Activism through Sport-Focused Social Justice: Investigating Nike's Corporate Responsibility Initiatives in Sport for Development and Peace." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 40(6):522-544. doi:10.1177/0193723516655579.
Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Inda, Jonathan. 2014. Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Kharkhordin, Oleg. 1999. The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kruglova, Anna. 2017. "Social Theory and Everyday Marxists: Russian Perspectives on Epistemology and Ethics." Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(4):759-785. doi:10.1017 /S0010417517000275.
Krylova, Anna. 2000. "The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1(1):119-146.
Lemon, Alaina. 2018. Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lupton Debora. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.
Matza, Tomas. 2012. "'Good Individualism'? Psychology, Ethics, and Neoliberalism in Postsocialist Russia." American Ethnologist 39(4):804-818. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01396.x.
Matza, Tomas. 2018. Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mol, Annemarie. 2001. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Moran, Rachel Louise. 2018. Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Murawski, Michat. 2019. The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw, and a City Transfixed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nadkarni, Maya. 2010. "'But It's Ours': Nostalgia and the Politics of Authenticity in Post-Socialist Hungary." Pp. 190-214 in Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Zsuzsa Gille and Maria Todoro-va. New York: Berghan Books.
Nguyen, Vinh-Kim. 2010. The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Petrone, Karen. 2000. Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Prozorov, Sergei. 2013. "Living Ideas and Dead Bodies: The Biopolitics of Stalinism." Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38(3):208-227. doi:10.1177/0304375413497844.
Prozorov, Sergei. 2016. The Biopolitics of Stalinism: Ideology and Life in Soviet Socialism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Raikhel, Eugene. 2016. Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Riordan, James. 1980. Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rogers, Douglas. 2015. Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Rose, Nikolas. 2001. "The Politics of Life Itself." Theory, Culture & Society 18(6):1-30.
Rose, Nikolas. 2007. Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ruckenstein, Minna, and Natasha Dow Schull. 2017. "The Datafication of Health." Annual Review of Anthropology 46:261-278. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041244.
Sassen, Saskia. 1995. "The State and the Global City: Notes towards a Conception of Place-Centered Governance." Competition and Change 1(1):31-50.
Sassen, Saskia. 2000. "Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization." Public Culture 12(1):215-232.
Schull, Natasha Dow. 2016. "Data for Life: Wearable Technology and the Design of Self-Care." Bio-Societies 11:317-333. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2015.47.
Starks, Tricia. 2008. The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Taussig, Michael. 2012. Beauty and the Beast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tobbell, Dominique. 2009. "Pharmaceutical Networks: The Political Economy of Drug Development in the United States, 1945-1980." Enterprise & Society 10(4):675-686.
Tobbell, Dominique. 2012. Pills, Power, Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America and Its Consequences. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
Verdery, Katherine. 2001. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Verdery, Katherine. 2003 The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vlasov, Iurii. 1996. My est' i budem. Voronezh, Russia: Publishing House of the Voronezh Region. Waldby, Catherine, and Mitchell Robert. 2006. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in
Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Welker, Marina. 2014. Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zigon, Jarrett. 2010. Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
INTERVIEWS
AA, 28-year-old man, trainer at a Moscow gym, moved to Moscow recently; interviewed on July 20, 2019
PK, 30-year-old man, marketing executive, born and lives in central Moscow; interviewed on July 8, 2017
SC, 32-year-old woman, former Nike employee in the marketing department, born and lives in central Moscow; interviewed on July 9, 2019 SD, 26-year-old woman working in marketing at Nike, moved to Moscow recently; interviewed on August 5, 2019
Бен Крупп, факультет антропологии, Иллинойсский университет в Урбане-Шампейне (США). Адрес для переписки: University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign, Department of Anthropology, 109 Davenport Hall, 607 S. Matthews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. bkrupp2@illinois.edu.
Статья основана на исследовании, проведенном при поддержке Колледжа аспирантуры Иллинойсскогоуниверситета.
В статье рассматривается уникальная маркетинговая кампания Nike в Москве. С 2012 года корпорация Nike выделяет столицу РФ среди других своих глобальных центров маркетинга и распространения продукции. Компания вложила значительные ресурсы в организацию массовых спортивно-оздоровительных занятий для всех желающих, создание общественных мест отдыха и финансирование государственной оздоровительной программы «Готов к труду и обороне». Все эти стратегии нацелены главным образом на получение доступа к телесности российских граждан. Я полагаю, что Nike стремится к этому в попытке распространить новые способы мышления о теле, что облегчило бы проникновение компании на высокорисковые
итнЕс и ФизкультурА:
Nike и нетренированное тело
в москве
Бен Крупп
рынки и помогло бы встроить телесность в глобальные цепочки капитала. Задача этих новых онтологий телесности - стирание локальных и исторических интерпретаций. Однако при колонизации советских форм культурного производства компания Nike получает в наследство ряд социалистических взаимоотношений между индивидуальным здоровьем и социальным благополучием. В результате развивается локальное понимание телесности, в котором социалистическое прошлое переплетено с неолиберальным настоящим. Статья основана на материале, собранном автором в течение девяти месяцев этнографической работы в московских общественных местах отдыха (спортзалах, парках и общеобразовательных школах) в период с 2016 по 2020 год.
Ключевые слова: физкультура; фитнес; биополитика; здоровье; спорт; тело; корпорация; Nike
