Why We Are So Tired? On the Politics of Urban Exhaustion
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Exhaustion has become one of the fundamental features of urban life.
David Madden. 2022. Tired city: on the politics of urban exhaustion. City.
Source:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2022.2084264
David Madden, associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is the author of the book, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. In a recent editorial in the journal Cities, "Tired city: on the politics of urban exhaustion," Madden discusses the politics behind the pervasive state of urban exhaustion, linking this emotional-body state of overwork and lack of rest to the politicized perspective of contemporary capitalism. Here is an edited excerpt.
We at City are tired. Everyone we know is tired. Exhaustion has become one of the fundamental features of urban life. When an experience becomes sufficiently widespread, it makes sense to ask if it's an indicator of a deeper condition. Considering how cities and economies work today, there is no doubt that fatigue is not a temporary symptom. It's not (only) something you're feeling because you just had covid for the second time. Rather, after more than two years of the pandemic, more than thirteen years since the global financial crisis, and more than four decades of neoliberalism, exhaustion is now deeply rooted within contemporary urbanization.
Urban exhaustion results from the febrile rhythm and hastening speed of today's crisis-prone, globalized, financialized capitalism. Theorists like Judy Wajcman and Hartmut Rosa have argued that the world is undergoing acceleration, forced to follow a pace set by the likes of fibre-optic communication, satellite transmission and high-frequency trading. Financialized capitalism is not only fast—it's also restless and relentless, marked by a persistent, undifferentiated planet-spanning temporality that brings about what the critic Jonathan Crary calls 'a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning. It is a time that no longer passes, beyond clock time.' There is no down time anymore. Business is always open. Ever larger areas of economic and social life are pegged to this unceasing, undifferentiated tempo. It's no wonder that everyone's tired.
In this economic order, any non-productive or autonomous time is steadily eroded. Different economic classes clearly experience this erosion differently, yet the overall direction of change is similar. Marx had already observed in Victorian industry the imperative towards the intensification of labor and the 'filling-up of the pores of the working day'. But no 19th-century factory floor can match the digital Taylorism of today, when round-the-clock operations like fulfillment centers and delivery companies use geocoded surveillance systems to track workers' every movement and count every toilet break. Middle-class workers possess more autonomy, but they still face digital tracking, intensifying productivity metrics and an increasingly unbounded working day. The pandemic exacerbated all of these trends.
For some, working from home now entails a distended workday that sprawls into nights, mornings, weekends, mealtimes, holidays, and sick leave. For others, including many who are classified as essential workers, precarity compels them to keep their weary bodies performing through illness, consecutive shifts, uncertain staffing, extended hours and multiple jobs, all while real wages are falling.
If the pace and conditions of labor in extremely late capitalism are basically guaranteed to leave workers exhausted, the spaces and institutional structures of the 21st-century city are equally wearying. Urban life in its current configuration seems almost intentionally designed to be draining. Broken public systems, curtailed municipal services, hostile architecture and under-developed infrastructure stunted by years of austerity make everyday life in the city far more onerous than it needs to be. In British cities, manifestly anti-social architectural paradigms like Secure By Design have been used to justify the removal of public benches, tables and other gathering places that support non-instrumental convivial life.
Structures for collective care—such as council housing, community health clinics, youth centers, public parks, and communal gardens—are under threat of closure and redevelopment towards more profitable uses. The broader crisis of social reproduction is reflected in an urban landscape where the spaces for repose have been undermined or colonized. 'Depletion through social reproduction' is defined as what happens 'when there is a critical gap between the outflows—domestic, affective and reproductive—and the inflows that sustain their health and well-being.' Workers keep the economy going, but at the expense of their own welfare, in effect subsidizing financialized capitalism with their own fatigue. Cities today are filled with talk of regeneration and renewal, but for the people who actually live in them, life is becoming ever more depleting.
In neighborhoods that have been plagued by austerity, overworked activists are often picking up the slack through mutual aid groups, soup kitchens, community spaces and other forms of self-organized social infrastructure. But this also takes a toll. I recently visited Govanhill Baths Community Trust, an extensive network of arts, environment and communal well-being projects in Glasgow that was established following an occupation and grassroots campaign. Govanhill Baths is an example of self-organized solidarity plugging the gaps left by the retreating municipal state. But a long-time activist and organizer there remarked, 'We shouldn't need to be doing this. We're tired.' This kind of systemically-induced fatigue is one form through which the violence of state abandonment is experienced.
Exhaustion is, of course, unequally distributed. It is less likely to afflict the wealthy, the white, the well-housed, the native born, the able-bodied and others whose resources allow them to purchase domestic assistance and pay for missing municipal services. At the same time, for exploited and subordinated groups, the inequality and precarity of uneven urbanization creates surplus exhaustion. Working-class and poor households are more likely to be wearied by long commutes and frequent moves. For the growing numbers of people forced into homelessness, urban life is increasingly a time without rest, as jurisdictions in the US and elsewhere criminalize camping, squatting, and sleeping in cars. The persistence of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, people of color and other minoritized city dwellers is also oppressively tiring. All of these forms of exhaustion can fuel resistance.
But activists' burnout also makes organising more difficult. In their recent paper in City on "The Politics of Exhaustion", Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel argue that '"I'm exhausted" is a familiar refrain among women of color activists in cities across Europe and North America', an affective state so common that 'Exhaustion operates quite literally as a structure of feeling of mutual recognition.' Tiredness is not only a cause and consequence of mobilization. Exhaustion is also a form of rule. The powerful know that they can weaponize the general condition of fatigue, thereby maintaining the status quo by wearing down the opposition. Cities today are replete with examples of labor unions, anti-racist activists, tenants' campaigns, and other social movements that are locked in struggles that have been intentionally drawn out. There is a politics to urban exhaustion because it is shaped by—and in turn shapes—power relations, urban agency, and unequal rights to the city.
This exhausting urban social-spatial configuration is now the object of urban studies and urban theory as well as the condition of their production. For many precariously-employed academics, a state of overworked fatigue is becoming the default condition, as is clear in Purvis et al.'s article in this issue. But as a result of the forced competitiveness transforming university systems around the world, all academic workers are increasingly tired. The challenge for critical scholars specifically is to connect this overworked and unrested affective-embodied state with a politicized perspective on contemporary capitalism. We need to diagnose the system that's causing us to lose sleep—and also use the experience of exhaustion as part of an effort to buildsolidarity with everyone experiencing exploitation and depletion.
There's a distinctive kind of alienation that comes with being tired all the time. A city that truly never sleeps is a place fundamentally at odds with basic human needs. As Crary observes, 'There is no possible harmonization between actual living beings and the demands of 24/7 capitalism'. Systemic exhaustion is straightforwardly dehumanizing. A just city and world would allow everyone to get the rest that they need so that they can be as active and vital as they choose.
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