Chronic Fatigue
Some thoughts prepared for the 'Bare Life' panel, in response to a keynote talk given by Alphonso Lingis, in the Research Symposium Civic Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance , London, 9-16 April 2003. It has been published in Performance Research, 9 (2004): 54-8.
Life and liveliness abounded in
Alphonso Lingis's evocation of the heroic continuing love affair
of two middle-aged AIDS sufferers in an Australian men's prison.
His talk provided invigorating proof of Merleau-Ponty's insight
that though there are reduced lives, deprived lives, cowering,
craving and damaged lives, there are no incomplete lives. Every
life is a complete life, every world a whole world. Heidegger
says that animals are 'poor in world', but they are not. Their
lives may not have our reach of ours, or be as powerfully
appurtenanced as ours, but they are no less full of world. I
found myself at the beginning of Alphonso Lingis's talk in the
Spencer Gallery of the Natural History Museum, poised between two
sorts of world or forms of life. On the one hand there was the
music with its refrain 'I want to fuck you like an animal' with
which the talk began, pulsing, musclebound and clearly meaning to
live for ever. On the other there was the portrait to which my
eyes kept flicking of the poor, ridiculous, edible, proverbial,
defunct dodo, with its daftly cocky, doomed look. The thoughts
to which I have been prompted by Alphonso Lingis's presentation
and by reading through his work concern questions of fullness and
emptiness, magnificence and minority, lordliness and falling
short.
What is at the end of, on the outside of, every work? What is
left when nothing else is left of any work? Exhaustion.
Exhaustion appears to be the rim, or the horizon of exertion, to
belong to the far edge of things; but it is in fact implicit in
its beginnings. Exhaustion is closer to vitality than might
appear, since the sign of vigour is that it desires the
consummation of exhaustion. Strength consists in the power and
the will to be drained to the invigorating extreme of exhaustion.
'Nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you', as
somebody says in Beckett.
Ted Hughes articulates something of this athletic ascesis in his
poem 'How Water Began to Play' from Crow:
Water wanted to live
It went to the sun it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back
They rotted it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back ( )
Till it had no weeping left
It lay at the bottom of all things
Utterly worn out utterly clear (1970, 93)
It's a cheap trick, I know, but
I have just done the obligatory divinatory dip into Google via a
search on 'fatigue' and, as always, have come up with what I
needed, in the form of a quack natural remedies site called www.beatingtiredness.com Why - or rather how - do we feel that tiredness
is something to be beaten or overcome? The problem with mounting
an assault of this kind on tiredness is that it requires such a
fund of energy in the first place. You have, therapists tell us,
to want to be well. But for those subjected to the corrosive
effects of what the Christian tradition calls acedia , or
paralysis of the will, it may be precisely the power to want that
is wanting. When I am fatigued, I find it angry or affronted
enough with my tiredness to want to shrug it off, like some giant
snapping his gyves. Of course, I know I ought to want to shrug it
off, ought to want to want to shrug it off, but I don't, because
that is what fatigue is and does.
What we call fitness and youth is an ideal situation in which
full vitality communicates directly with absolute exhaustion by a
logic of inversion. Alphonso Lingis represents the state of
health as a kind of gratuity or spurting superabundance, which
seems naturally to include exhaustion in itself: 'After the
morning workout pumping iron in the gym to muscle exhaustion, one
bounds up the steps to the street outside babbling How healthy I
am!' (1994, 54). That 'babbling' suggests that Lingis will have
it slyly in for this brawny self-affirmation, but the criticism
never comes. Health, he says really is 'the feeling of force to
squander gratuitously on barbells, on shadow boxing, and on
racing the deer through the forests and the zebras across the
savannah' (1994, 54)
In evoking exhaustion, we are clearly in the territory of the
negative that has been occupied by Bataille. But, whatever the
advantages opened up by Bataille's promotion of the potlatch
principle of glorious loss against the principle of conservation
of goods and energies, what he calls dépense is far too
heroic and ecstatic to cover what I have in mind in speaking of
the background condition of fatigue. You could never hope to
manage the gouging and slashing excesses evoked by Bataille
unless you were in the absolute peak of condition, just as one
imagines Nietzsche's Übermensch having to put in long
hours with the Indian Clubs to be up to all that overcoming.
Gilles Deleuze, one of the few philosophical writers to have
lingered on the question of fatigue, has identified in a late
essay entitled 'L'Epuisé' a will to exhaustion in the work of
Beckett. But even this is a characteristic overstatement.
Exhaustion - or rather exhaustiveness, which of course
requires a lot of energy - does not characterise Beckett's work
very well, which is full of a much more pervasive, less
philosophically glamorous state that one ought rather to call
weariness, lethargy or, my preference, fatigue.
Exhaustion is not the defeat of the will, but the maniac,
clenched persistence of the will into its very extinction. At one
extreme of human existence, there is full vigour, able to launch
itself energetically outwards into the 'projects' which
phenomenologists hold so dear. At the other extreme there is
utter exhaustion. This is why only the young are truly capable of
exhaustion, for to be young is to live catastrophically between
intimately-connected extremes. Age does not bring exhaustion.
What happens in age is not that one gets dried out, used up. The
loss of vigour in age means that one loses the capacity for
exhaustion as one comes increasingly to occupy the middle ground
between potency and exhaustion, the middle ground occupied in
varying degrees by the many forms of fatigue. One dies in and
dies of middle age: as you age, you do not get to the end of
things, you get closer and closer to the indeterminate, chaotic
silted-up middle of things.
Fatigue means the gnawing incapacity to project oneself into the
world, to combat its resistances, to encounter its strangenesses.
Vigour is the capacity for reach, for exertion; fatigue is the
world reaching back into us. I make my fatigue my own, as I do
not my exhaustion, for my exhaustion is beyond me. I take fatigue
into myself, harbouring it just as I harbour my fantasies of
exertion and excursion. I contain and coincide with my fatigue as
I contain and coincide with my desire for expense of spirit. For
fatigue is not just the discovery that I am not up to some
physical effort, it is also the intimation, as it were in the
muscles themselves, of this probable incapacity. One's fatigue is
always both prospective and in the background, never quite or
quantifiably there, as one's weakness may be. And yet, where one
can think of a weakness as a limit, to be overcome or compensated
for, you are always in the midst of your fatigue, in something of
the way you are always in the midst of shame (that the great
writers of shame, Kafka, Beckett and Coetzee in particular,
should turn out also to be the great chroniclers of fatigue seems
significant to me.) Fatigue is to be lived with, lived
through, rather than overcome.
Even if they do not centre as overtly as Lingis does on 'those
healthy with a superabundant health: the passionate, the
sovereign, the eagles, the Aztecs' (1994, 52), nearly all our
theories about art, value, politics, the nature of human
interactions, tend to assume a norm of well-nourished,
fully-charged, maximally alert beings. Art, and especially the
art of drama, has participated in this athletic aesthetic of
exhaustion. 'The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to
exhaust, human emotions', Laurence Olivier reminds us (1982); and
of no other art has it so routinely been said that its purpose is
to drain us down. To be a citizen is to be able, to wish to be
able, to submit to the requirement to wish to be able, to perform.
Athletes, actors and (the blending of these two categories)
pornstars all have to perform. Very few accounts either of art or
citizenship take into account the fact that most of us much of
the time subsist in conditions that make adequate performance
difficult to deliver. The human condition, most of the time, is
one of shambling fatigue, dragging depletion and limp
semi-impotence. And yet, as Freud concludes his Beyond the
Pleasure Principle by saying 'it is no sin to limp' (1984,
338). We have become used to the expression 'chronic fatigue
syndrome', as though there were something particularly virulent
or toxic about fatigue that keeps coming back. I do not doubt the
wretched reality of the conditions like myalgic encephalomyelitis
(ME), but there is still something rather odd about the popular
name for it, since fatigue, unlike exhaustion, which promises and
belongs to finality, is always and in its essence chronic. If
nothing ever got tired, there would be no time, no change, no
refreshment even. Ultimately, the only measure of time in the
universe is that of increasing entropy, the measure of the
universe's growing fatigue.
One of the characteristics of Alphonso Lingis's work is his
attention to the constitutive but unacknowledged backgrounds and
peripheries of things. His essay 'The Murmur of the World' (1994,
69-105) treats the rumble of noise that we must ignore and edit
out in order to be able to pick out anything of significance in
the world, while yet being unable to do without what we set
aside. Fatigue is of this kind. Perhaps it is for this reason,
that fatigue is always partial, that it has no obvious opposite -
unlike death, or exhaustion.
Exhaustion means the elimination of choice and possibility; but
there is something voracious and appetitive in this elimination.
Exhaustive logic is logic that systematically goes through all
the permutations of a solution to a problem in order to exclude
them all. Fatigue, by contrast, remains open, just about, to
every possibility. That's why fatigue is so strong - and so
tiring.
One question is: can there be a phenomenology of fatigue? If so,
what part might performance play in framing that phenomenology?
For this, one would have to feel friendly toward the idea that
there could be something like a performance-philosophy in the way
that Gilles Deleuze said there was a cinema-philosophy.
Certainly, the arts of performance seem to have more going for
them than other arts in this respect, since, unlike painting,
photography and writing, all of which require a withdrawal from
action into the representations of action, performance seems to
allow the exploration of what you are doing in the very act of
doing it. Furthermore, performance is unthinkable without
energetics. It is always, as we instructively say,
labour-intensive, requiring the gathering of resources, and the
training for what will always be an expenditure of effort. As
Alphonso Lingis makes clear in his recent essay 'Quadrille' (2000), the energetic cost of a performance
always determines its effect. By contrast, the other, more
reproducible arts and media nowadays allow for an almost infinite
economy of effort. Performance tires you out in a way that other
art forms and forms of communication media do not. All this seems
to make it apt for performance to inhabit the phenomenology of
fatigue, since it cannot in any case not. Interestingly, fatigue
has indeed formed the subject of much recent theatre and
performance or formed the horizon within which they have worked.
If performance has something to do with this general project of
disclosing and making thinkable, and so in some elusive way more
fully livable, the conditions of our experience, then perhaps it
does contribute to the work of cultural phenomenology, as I have, in an amateurish and philosophically
unaligned way sometimes called it, when I had to call it
something.
So then a further question posed by this week's events might be:
how can such a cultural phenomenology contribute to a richer,
more responsive, more versatile ethics of community and
citizenship? How might it change or consolidate what Alan Read in
the prospectus for this symposium has called 'the relationship
between contemporary performance, civic dialogue and political
involvement?' I am not sure of the answer to that. In principle
it seems as though our politics must surely benefit from knowing
better and being able to say more intelligibly who we are and
what it is we do. More substantially, if fatigue can be thought
of, not as a deficit or altogether as a problem, but as the
sanative declining of strenuous magnanimity in forms of measured
minanimity, there may be some value to be made out in this mode
of the minor. Although animals are obviously capable of
exhaustion, it is not clear that they are capable of experiencing
fatigue. This might be partly because fatigue is associated with
a capacity for self-limiting or holding-back which is largely
restricted to human beings. To see fatigue as something other
than a resistance to be overcome in the pursuit of ever greater
reserves of never-expiring energy might be a useful constituent
in a less expensive, less sacrificial, less immolatory and less
indefatigable kind of politics.
Well, I suppose it might be. But there is no guarantee. I have
come to believe that politics is both more important and less
interesting than we suspect: and that the more interesting we
make politics - by 'culturising' it - the less effective it may
become. I am no longer among those who believe that it is always
a good idea to expand the reach and diversify the forms of
politics. So I do not think there is an obvious political
surrender-value for the cultural phenomenology of fatigue, or
cultural phenomenology of any kind. This is not to say that
cultural phenomenology is not political, for everything, as we so
uselessly know, is political through and through. It's just that
it may not be politically very valuable, or not as valuable as
many of the more tiresome, uninteresting, important things about
politics; or if it turns out to be, it may not be as a function
of how strenuously and exhaustively we have geared ourselves up
for and gone in for it. Perhaps fatigue, in its alliance with the
instinct of self-limit, might form a part of a negative politics.
That is to say, a politics not based around a strong theory of
the nature of the subject, the state, or of the good, nor even
guided by something like Vattimo's 'weak thought' (Rovatti and
Vattimo 1983) (which has always seemed to me to require a quite
debilitating level of vigilance and alertness), but a politics
able to bear with a kind of weary thought, a thought weary of
cruelty, war, pride, exhaustion, extermination and ordeal.
References
Deleuze, Gilles (1998). 'The Exhausted'. In Essays Critical
and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco.
London: Verso, 152-74.
Freud, Sigmund (1984). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In On
Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Vol 11 of The
Pelican Freud Library. Trans. James Strachey et. al.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 269-338
Hughes, Ted (1970) Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow.
London: Faber and Faber.
Lingis, Alphonso (1994). The Community of Those Who Have
Nothing in Common . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
--------------------- (2000). 'Quadrille'. Performance
Research, 5, 1-10.
Olivier, Laurence (1982). Confessions of an Actor. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Rovatti, Pier Aldo and Vattimo, Gianni, eds (1983). Il
pensiero debole. Milan: Feltrinelli.
| Steve
Connor | School
of English and Humanities
| Birkbeck
|