1. Introduction

"I've been expecting you!" I hear a voice calling as I stand at the reception of a spa. The voice belongs to a middle-aged man wearing glasses and a white T-shirt with the inscription "Relax Coach" on it. He comes running towards us euphorically. I pay the 120€ affording me a so-called "Relax! Day Vacation Deluxe", thank the receptionist, and follow the Relax Coach, who is eager to show me and my companions around the spa, eventually leading us into a long underground corridor illuminated by violet light. At the end of the corridor, we climb a few steps to get to a large, echoing, and lively swimming hall, equipped with whirlpools, slides, and a large water mushroom under which some children enjoy themselves. While my gaze falls on the bridge running over the pool, which leads to an outdoor pool equipped with large water bowls, from which the spa takes its name, the Relax Coach activates the lift. We get inside and he selects the third and thus the highest floor on the number pad. Once at the top, we have to go through a turnstile in order to enter the spa area we have booked. The place is wood-clad, moss-walled, quiet, and discreet—and, as the Relax Coach assures us, reserved exclusively for us.

"A place reserved for us": This phrase already indicates that the wellness space grants access differentially. While indoor pools and "fun spas" may be visited by both the middle-class family treating itself to a relaxed weekend and the shift worker, thus making them somewhat egalitarian because they are accessible to the broad public, exclusive and expensively equipped "high-class spas" are reserved for a wealthy upper-class clientele. It is not unusual for such spa landscapes to offer bathing rooms at different prices, at least not in German-speaking countries. It reflects the attempt to cater to people with different socio-economic statuses. As we argue in the following, the "feel-good promise" evoked by everyday cultures such as architectures of wellness must be understood within the context of a wider societal change that affects the everyday working life of the "post-Fordist social character" (Eichler 2013, 10; our translation). Indeed, work today is structured in such a way as to prompt the subject to balance hard work with self-care in the form of wellness. We argue that the wellness practices and wellness products imposed on or offered to the subject can be read as a symptom of contemporary Western capitalist culture. Our analysis of the relationship between wellness and labour echoes the socio-critical studies by Alma-Elisa Kittner et al. (2010), Klaus Schroeter (2006), Elisabeth Mixa and Edith Futscher (2006) as well as Mixa (2016), who, following Michel Foucault, speaks of a "feel-good dispositif" (Mixa 2016, 2) that organises the spaces of wellness.¹ Whereas Mixa et al. concentrate on the paradoxes of the feel-good promise and ponder the transformations of everyday cultures that combine different wishes and yearnings in terms of wellness, we take a different approach. Our focus is on the institutions, spaces, and architectures within which wellness experiences are linguistically, emotionally, physically, and habitually performed.

Our considerations are based on two theses. The first is that wellness particularly addresses bodies within the bourgeois middle class that are exhausted by the post-Fordist work ethic. At first sight, the increasing attention paid to people's well-being is nothing to object to—indeed, it seems only natural—in a society in which, as Alain Ehrenberg suggests in The Weariness of the Self (1998), the ability and willingness to work constitute the highest values. However, the constant exhortation to participate in the aesthetic (self-)practices of the wellness industry—think, for example, of the admonition to manage one's self and one's time so as to allow for regenerative rest periods in order to gain "true sovereignty over body and mind" (Kittner and Scheller 2010, 3)—poses the question whether wellness can actually still be understood as a "sanctuary of immediate life" (Adorno 2005, 169)—that is, as the opposite of work.² As Adorno argues, the concept of freedom remains strictly "shackled to its contrary" (Adorno 2005, 167) and may even be a mere "appendage to labor" (Adorno 2005, 169). This becomes evident from, among other things, the fact that the notion of wellness has become a part of organisational and corporate cultures. Companies that expect great effort from their employees thus like to integrate the terminology of wellness into their health-promotion concepts and encourage their staff to take part in wellness measures in order to gain better control over the stress factors that might affect their work.³ This suggests that wellness is deeply rooted within the logic of work, since the point of taking a break is not simply to take a deep breath and to recover but to restore the working body as quickly and as efficiently as possible, which in turn requires a specific form of work. Therefore, our second thesis is that the relationship between work and wellness is co-constitutive rather than dichotomous.

In the following, we argue that the structures of post-Fordist work continue at precisely the point where the self—in order to live up to the growing demands of the performance society—is expected to devote itself to a form of self-care that the present culture of consumption promotes as wellness. This being so, it is clear that the current wellness trend does not represent a neutral or arbitrary development but symbolises a cultural practice that is part and parcel of the post-Fordist work ethic. In other words, there is a specific complicity between the prevailing work ethic and the promises of the wellness industry. We aim to develop the wellness dispositif against the background of a change in the social norms that, according to Alain Ehrenberg (1998) and Eva Illouz (2007), govern the psychic apparatus of the working body⁴ in late capitalism and constitute a subject liable to suffer from depression and become exhausted. We show that within this context the wellness experience conveys the promise of bringing about a comprehensive rehabilitation of the working body (1). Next, we take an empirical look at the wellness dispositif, based on a field study of three high-class spas in the Austrian, German, and Swiss Alpine region conducted in 2019.⁵ We demonstrate that the promise of wellness cannot be fully realised, since wellness today is dominated by a normative set of interpellations that operate spatially and temporally and are dedicated to the productivity of the body (2). This transformation of the body ultimately produces a new form of labour that appropriates elements of both Fordist and post-Fordist morality, and whose significance for contemporary society remains to be grasped (3).

2. Towards a Critical Theory of Wellness

In order to render plausible that the wellness dispositif is a specific expression of an affective discourse that shapes the current work culture, let us recall the central arguments put forth by Ehrenberg, for example in his essay The Weariness of the Self (1998). As we see it, Ehrenberg's reflections form a suitable framework for an investigation of the wellness dispositif, because they help us conceive of the latter as part of the societal shift that was characteristic of the change of individuality at the beginning of the 21^st century (Ehrenberg 2010a). Thanks to his critique of the neoliberal segregation of society in contemporary democracies, there is a political dimension to his socio-historical œuvre that we consider fruitful for a critical theorisation of wellness. The starting point of Ehrenberg's analysis, which is based on the conviction that pathologies are the product of social relationships, "an attitude, a mindset heavy with multiple social practices and representations of ourselves in a society in which values associated with autonomy […] have been generalized" (Ehrenberg 2010a, xxx), is a subject that since the 1960s develops its pathologies no longer in a prohibitive society but in a society of unlimited possibilities (Ehrenberg 2010a, 305). According to Ehrenberg, this changed social character is the result of a thoroughgoing structural change that is most clearly evidenced by the success of depression and of the anti-depressant Prozac. "Depression", Ehrenberg states, "began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviours, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves." (Ehrenberg 2010a, 4) Whereas neurosis, according to Ehrenberg's thesis, was still the pathological face of the border of the disciplinary society "between the allowed and the forbidden" (Ehrenberg 2010a, 4), depression mirrored the suffering from the tension between "the possible and the impossible" (Ehrenberg 2010a, 4).

Similar to Foucault's theorisation of power, Ehrenberg's diagnosis of society is not only concerned with the repression of the new social body. Rather, he also points out what results positively from the replacement of the rule of law by the new rule of the possible for the social body. Ehrenberg's particular interest in the question of how the replacement of coercion by possibility produces and normalises new social norms is evident in his description of depression as a "drama of a new normality" that simultaneously produces "a new prescriptivism" (Ehrenberg 2010a, 140). Compared with the "old" power, we might argue with Foucault, the "new" power has the advantage "that it doesn't only weigh on as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse" (Foucault 1980, 119). Although Ehrenberg himself does not refer to Foucault, he too seems to have in mind a productive power that affects and constitutes the social body in an entirely new way. As he sees it, today's social character suffers from the illusion of infinite possibilities, feeling itself compelled to use them continuously and repeatedly, instead of suffering from the call of restraint that the persistent compulsion under the law of the forbidden and the permitted produces.

Analysing those positions in psychiatry he uses as interpretational means for his genealogy of depression—for example, Freud's conflict model (Freud 1908) and Janet's deficit model (Janet 1909)—Ehrenberg registers a hidden reference to conflict that, in fact, is the "normative centre of democratic life" (Ehrenberg 2010a, 10) in both private and political terms. At the level of subjective behaviour, thought, and action, the rules and limits that have structured communal life over a long period of time thus appear to have softened and become virtually invisible. When Ehrenberg goes on to say that "the development of one's self became, collectively, a personal affair" (Ehrenberg 2010a, 117), his aim is to position the new subject as a "psychic" being whose agenda henceforth is the ceaseless self-administration of life. As authors such as Eichler show, this also applies to current working conditions (Eichler 2013). In this context, the latter notes the paradox that the "promise of freedom" (Eichler 2013, 13) accompanying the democratisation of work is successively absorbed by obligations that the subject imposes on itself out of fear of failure. Seen in this light, it becomes clear what Ehrenberg means when he says that the new freedom and sovereignty "does not bring about the rule of the private individual" (Ehrenberg 2010a, 7). Rather, they stimulate and produce values such as innovation, communication and motivation, which are external to labour—after all, they have to be trained outside actual working hours—but from now on are included in the evaluation of the work performed. From this it follows that the structural shift described is accompanied not only by competitiveness but also by a diffusion in perception, because it is no longer possible to stipulate clearly what constitutes "work" and what should be deemed "leisure". The volatility of this difference seems to be the result of the post-Fordist work ethic, which has recently moved eerily close to the self.

In other words, the economic changes of the last third of the 20^th century have played their part in the construction of a new working body by promoting a form of interiority that operates on the basis of "inner balance and tranquility" (Ehrenberg 2010a, 186) and is obsessed with continuously optimising and commodifying a person's own mental, emotional, organisational, and social abilities. As Ehrenberg points out a few years later in La Société du malaise (2010), the credo of the new (private) self-care, which from now on structures the collective psyche, is already evident in the patients treated by Ralph R. Greenson in the post-war period (Ehrenberg 2010b, 75). Greenson claims that his analytical subjects seem to be "ready and eager to make contact and to communicate" and are "very conscious of their skill or awkwardness with words and language" but nevertheless "belittle their accomplishments and have little faith in their genuine merits" and are "unduly concerned with their social standing" (Greenson 1958, 243). Ehrenberg views this as the anticipation of a performance imperative, which he places before his considerations on the economisation of the personality. As he sees it, whereas at the time of Freud the study of sexuality possessed high strategic value, nowadays it is the study of identity that is more in line with the spirit of the age. This focus on the self and its performance—therapeutic practice can, in the final analysis, also be understood as work on the formation and maturing of the self—finds a parallel at an institutional level in the ongoing staging of the self in a world (of work) that demands that one be categorically open to the indeterminate.⁶ The merit of Ehrenberg's studies of exhausted subjectivity, which he derives from historically changing models of illness, certainly lie in bringing to light the transformations in constraints, norms, and demands that shape and constitute our contemporary democracies at the macro level and our everday structures at the micro level. In doing so, he comes to blame the decline of conflict for the current malaise, thus identifying not only a central political implication of his thought but also the point of departure of the struggle for an egalitarian society. A weakness of his social theory, however, is that he does not spell out the institutional consequences of this social change, especially at the level of micropolitics. In order to bring together subjectivity and sociability in the context of the workplace, we therefore seek recourse to Eva Illouz's social theory. Illouz formulates her social theory, which she wants to locate within the programme of Critical Theory, against the backdrop of the fact that the normative power of the private has become increasingly important in the organisation of capitalist culture and the workplace. To make her point, she invokes the presence of practices of feeling and emotion that have been negotiated and institutionalised in the workplace in the form of moral claims. What is remarkable here is that Illouz's theory must be opposed to the liberal dispositif that strictly separates the "private" and the "public" realms, as advocated, for example, by Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1998): By conceiving of the political from the outset in terms of its emotional dimension, she thwarts the supposedly natural affiliation of the emotional with the feminine, private space. Indeed, the critique of this purported connection between the emotional and the private forms the normative starting point from which Illouz views contemporary subjectivity.

In her Frankfurt Adorno Lectures, published as Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007), Illouz contends that institutions are increasingly regulated and controlled by emotions. As she puts it, "the private self has never been so publicly paraded and harnessed for the discourses and values of the economic and political spheres" (Illouz 2007, 4). In the context of the workplace, this transformation can be measured by the change in the criteria used to evaluate work. Today, values such as emotional satisfaction, introspection, self-direction, and, above all, the ability to express oneself and be creative have become part of the production process (Illouz 2008, Cabanas and Illouz 2016). At the level of the subject, these new values manifest themselves as a specific form of self-management that implies a "new dexterity with one's appearance" (Illouz 2007, 19); at the level of institutions, they can be seen in new styles of speech and knowledge practices. According to Illouz, it is the language of psychology that holds these two levels together: From the employers' point of view, the language of psychology is attractive because it not only promises to increase profits but also holds out the prospect of neutralising class struggles (Illouz 2007, 17). From the workers' point of view, what speaks for the new emotional style is that now it is not social position but personality that is the focus of workers' control. Furthermore, the concession of capitalist employers to absorb workers' grievances and emotions suggests to workers a democratisation of social relations in the workplace and conveys values such as equality and cooperation (rather than inequality and dependence). Against the backdrop of this development, it also becomes clear why mechanisms of recognition are gaining in importance: once the evaluation of work is no longer primarily based on skills but on whole persons, the entire work process revolves around the ongoing stabilisation and economisation of one's self (Illouz 2007, 22).

Self-care is thus elevated to a principle, even an imperative, of post-Fordist work. Moreover, as Foucault points out in The Care of the Self, the demanded intensification of one's relation to oneself has produced a new relation to the world. Strictly speaking, the imperative "became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas that people reflected on, developed, perfected, and taught. It thus came to constitute a social practice, giving rise to relationships between individuals, to exchanges and communications, and at times even to institutions" (Foucault 1986a, 45). As examples of this complete institutionalisation or implementation of emotions and affect control in the workplace, Illouz cites not only a new, excessive form of introspection that—if one follows the literature that gives advice on good management—is about "seeing oneself from outside, so to speak, in order to control one's impact on others" (Illouz 2007, 19). Besides such a practice of negative care, ideals of humanistic or positive psychology, whose image of the human being is based on "the universal tendency for growth, self-actualization and the realization of one's unique potentiality" (Shachak and Illouz 2010, 22), seem to inform the current orientation of human resources departments. An aspect that Shachak and Illouz (2010) cover in this context concerns a more recent form of psychosocial intervention that, in their estimation, turns on the commodification of positive emotions of well-being—so-called (life) coaching. As a strategic aid for coping with everyday life, coaching is meant to foster self-realisation, the idea being that this takes place via a restructuring of the self into the manager of its own life. Constantly switching between psychological and economic logics, this form of guidance defines not only "a mode of sociability in which an always precarious sense of self must be preserved" (Illouz 2007, 21), but rather an "advanced stage in the commodification of personhood" (Shachak and Illouz, 2010, 30) that is invading our institutions. Against the backdrop of this "therapeutic narrative" (Illouz 2007, 27), it now becomes possible to analyse the extent to which the new values that Ehrenberg and Illouz define in the context of contemporary institutions also dominate the current spa landscape.

3. Organising Temporalities: Wellness as Work

The preceding remarks on the wellness dispositif have made it clear that there is good reason to assume that wellness is in the clutches of the post-Fordist work ethic. This becomes evident not only when we think of the axis between therapeutisation and emotionalisation but also when we think of the axis between tension and relaxation, which define both areas, wellness and work. Drawing on a sample of descriptions from the field study, this section of our paper argues that wellness has to be understood as a specific body work that produces the wellness subject in the first place. This production is based on so-called interpellations that are ritualised, habitualised, and internalised through a) specific spatial arrangements, b) the performance of concrete practices and bodily techniques and c) interactions as well as verbal codes. As we demonstrate below, the specific form of work here consists in the correct internalisation and perfection of these procedures, which are permeated by time regimes—an aspect Ehrenberg and Illouz do not consider. It is this temporal dimension of the wellness experience in particular that we seek to account for in what follows.

4. Concluding Remarks: The Relaxation Imperatives of Wellness

Looking back at the wellness dispositif we have developed with Alain Ehrenberg and Eva Illouz against the backdrop of the working culture in late capitalist western democracies and at the descriptions from the field study, the following picture emerges: Wellness is a specific form of body work that is habitualised through concrete practices and bodily techniques. The habitualisation of these practices is normatively produced in wellness institutions through concrete interpellations that act on the wellness subject both spatially and temporally. As can be seen from the field descriptions, this body work in the form of wellness can no longer be measured (only) by the value of health. Insofar as wellness always also produces stress, competition, lassitude, guilt, and punishment in the context of the treatments consumed, it stands to reason that wellness practices have become focused on the subject's productivity and performance. The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that institutions of wellness are not domination-free spaces but exhibit aspects of disciplinary power, which Ehrenberg considers to be the characteristic of Fordist labour. As we see it, Ehrenberg's thesis must be modified, at least as regards this point. For the example of wellness makes clear that the Fordist model of a culture of prohibitions and commandments is also at play in post-Fordist work cultures. How this new type of work, which exhibits both post-Fordist norms of behaviour and Fordist disciplinary models and time regimes, relates the social character of the present and affects the resilience of subjectivity is a question that merits closer examination. In this regard, it might be helpful to look more closely at Foucault's biopolitics lectures (Foucault 2008) in order to grasp the intersections between the disciplinary and neoliberal structures that also govern the wellness space. In particular, to further theorise the self-government of the wellness subject, it would be beneficial to include in the discussion the invisible and subtle arts of government and self-determination imperatives.

Yet, even as regards the wellness space, the old insight of Paolo Virno that "there is not a clean, well defined threshold separating labor time from non-labor time" (Virno 2004, 103) is valid. Just like labour, wellness calls for expenditure. The specific form of this expenditure is the production of a kind of relaxation that aims at retaining or restoring the capability of the working body, without, to be sure, releasing it from the prevailing work and performance ethic. At present, the governmental arts, which have both hard modes (the forbidden and the commanded) and soft modes (the possible and the impossible), seem to find their way into the institutions of wellness. Thus, we have shown that wellness is based on social imperatives that address an exhausted bourgeois middle-class subject and thereby reflect the economic logic that has made this exertion a prerequisite for survival. This is one of the reasons wellness, imagined as the other of work, ultimately appears to be an essential part of work; it is not exterior to work but an integral aspect of a society exhausted by the omnipresent obligation to work.