Minor Post #3 by Lewis Brown

 Something I've been sitting with since our discussion of The Biggest Loser last week is a larger facet of the cultural/ideological work of that show that our discussion may not, in my view, have sufficiently touched on or articulated. We collectively critiqued it in part in terms of the instability or poor efficacy of the ostensible health intervention that the show performs; someone drew attention to the notion that the types of bodily change to which we bear witness on the show are unlikely to last, as a testament to the show's failure. But prior to evaluating the success of the show's intervention, we should name that the project of the show is to manufacture the felt necessity of that form of intervention. The title does pivotal work here: to whom does "The Biggest Loser" refer? It's a catch-22: the show's winner is its biggest loser; the losers are even bigger losers. To appear before its camera is to be marked the biggest loser and thus to help internalize this equation in the eyes of the viewer. It's a massive ideological staging of which types of bodies are to be evaluated as worthy or which ones are to be seen as necessitating intervention, along terms that have far more to do with cultural aesthetics (and a canny harnessing of capitalist industries of intervention onto them) than an innate, fixed idea of bodily "health." This calls to mind Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant's notion of "extractive abandonment," elaborated in their exceptional book Health Communism, which builds on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's notion of "organized abandonment" to describe the ways in which capital and the state find means by which to mark a given population as "surplus," according to necessarily shifting (often bodily) criteria, in order to then extract capital from them by harnessing the fact of their being thus marked while organizing structures of life to maintain their exclusion. The diet industry, or any other of the host of capital enterprises designed to cash in on a constructed aesthetics of bodily value, ought to come to mind here; The Biggest Loser is both an example and an ideological support of this extraction. To critique it on the level of the supposed success or failure of its intervention is to leave unquestioned the necessity of that intervention, to cede to it a capacity to define the types of bodies we want to mark as non-normative.