The politics of exhaustion: Enduring at the end of the world

Prologue: Collapse

Advantageous is a 2015 film directed by Jennifer Phang. Set in the near future, the film follows the protagonist, Gwen. Gwen carries out research for a global cosmetics company, the Center for Advanced Health and Living, but also acts as its face, promoting their products. Despite her many contributions, the company decides that Gwen can no longer connect with their younger customer base. She is abruptly fired and joins the ranks of millions of other women who are redundant. Men are given priority for the few jobs that are available. The only job Gwen can find is as an egg donor, a role that has arisen thanks to widespread infertility in women (Phang, 2015). 

Infertility in the film gestures, albeit obliquely, to the human fallout of environmental collapse. It suggests perhaps a set of toxins or chemicals that have pervaded the global population to the point where the reproductive system has become irrevocably damaged. This danger to human existence is accompanied by other, more nebulous threats. At the beginning of the film, Gwen’s daughter witnesses an explosion in a nearby highrise, smoke belching forth from the side of the skyscraper (Phang, 2015). These attacks recur throughout the film, signaling their everyday nature. Whether from war or terrorism, these dangers have become just another one of the dense web of threats that people must face. This spectacular violence joins the slow violence (Nixon, 2011; Parikka, 2016) of environmental and economic collapse, a quieter but equally devastating array of pressures. 

How do women respond to this bleak set of conditions? In one scene, a Black woman is seen resting in the bushes beneath a blanket, awake but unmoving. In another, Gwen rents a small room by the hour and collapses onto her knees then lies on her side, knitting her brows in worry. In a third, one woman fishes, waiting for a bite, while another woman sprawls on a nearby bench, sleeping or resting. Throughout the film, Gwen and her daughter overhear women in the adjoining apartments weeping. ‘Upstairs woman or downstairs woman?’ asks Gwen; ‘both’ replies her daughter (Phang, 2015).

Although these portrayals supposedly take place in the near future, they resonate powerfully with our apocalyptic present. This dystopia is not defined by a single earth-shattering event, but instead by a slow-motion collapse: the collapse of the environment, the collapse of the economy, and even the collapse of progressive politics as the film shows a regression to traditional gender roles and the exploitation of children. In response, the body also collapses, succumbing to the relentless pressures placed upon it. Crisis in Advantageous is therefore highly ambient, a sprawling and structural set of forces that are diffused across society. It cannot be pinned down or even properly defined, but is instead a melange of social, political, and ecological problems that are entangled in complex ways (Falconer, 2002). Without a clear outlet for agency or a clear target for outrage, women respond in ostensibly more ‘passive’ ways: waiting, weeping, and resting. 

Introduction

Ours is a moment marked by the simultaneous breakdown of (at least) two spheres: the environmental, with its disintegration of ecosystems, its massive species extinctions, its floods and fires, and its acidification of the oceans—and the economic, with its rampant inequality, its repeated recessions, its erosion of long-term careers, and its rise in extractivist and precarious forms of labor. This double-collapse is inherently intertwined. ‘Industrial progress has proved more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined’, Tsing (2015: i)states, and this means that the ‘economy is no longer a source of growth or optimism’. While these conditions have historical roots, they are also specific to the present, driven by novel forms of capitalism (Wark, 2021) and unprecedented climate conditions (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021). The result, especially for the current and new generations, is a ‘jobless, worldless future’ which intensifies the ‘separation, disempowerment, and disruption of community’ (Crary, 2022: 47). For Tsing and Crary, this condition is not just the unfortunate fate of a few, but something more universal or generalisable. ‘Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate’, Tsing (2015: i) writes, but ‘now it seems that all our lives are precarious’. 

What does ‘politics’ look like in a contemporary defined by crisis and collapse? How do individuals organize for the future when ‘the future’ no longer exists? This article explores and develops a politics of exhaustion. As with one dictionary definition of politics, this politics is about ‘the art of the exercise of power’ (Bell, 2017). In this respect, it conforms to numerous definitions of politics which refer to power relations, power struggles, contestation and asserting control. Crucially, however, its confrontation with power doesn’t look like confrontation and its exercise of power may be internal or invisible, appearing ineffectual from the outside. The politics of exhaustion, then, is a form of politics, but one that may be unrecognizable if conventional markers are used, lying as it does on the fringes of the Political. 

Mine is not the first attempt at a politics of exhaustion. A decade ago, Dominic Pettman (2012: 9) was prescient in proclaiming that such a politics was urgently necessary, a ‘radical passivity’ that could threaten ‘the prevalent ethos of relentless productivity’. If ours is the age of exhaustion, where infinite growth hits finite limits with apocalyptic consequences,then we can plumb that condition to uncover the faint forms of the political that lie hidden in its depths. I share Pettman’s (2012: xii) interest, then, in delving into exhaustion and attempting to ‘glimpse the outline of a politics that barely resembles the movements that have historically been associated with such a category’. Yet, if the initial premise of that project was compelling, it never seemed to arrive at its chosen target. Pettman’s monograph, while provocative, circles around the concept, traversing it in a series of lateral and largely philosophical moves. 

My aim here is still theoretical but decidedly more practical. I want to sketch out a usable portrait of the politics of exhaustion: its foundations, aims, and activities. The goal is to offer a kind of schema to those both inside and outside academia which helps us make sense of our crisis-wracked present. Such a schema seeks to contribute to our scholarly understanding but also to be taken up by the increasing numbers of us whose life is conditioned by exhaustion in its various forms. In her autobiography chronicling the harsh reality of working at an Amazon Fulfillment Center, Heike Geissler (2018: 209) declared: ‘You don’t want reports on exotic antitheses to the world, you want theses with possibilities for living in this world’. This essay takes up that challenge. 

The question of politics-at-the-end-of-the-world is messy: rather than siloed in a single discipline, it sprawls out across domains and categories. To pursue this question, then, I take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing liberally upon worker autobiographies, social science ethnographies, media theories, environmental studies, and philosophical insights. The first section sets the foundation by considering our apocalyptic moment as the age of exhaustion. The second pulls from concepts and theories to build up a scaffolding for a politics of exhaustion. The third section provides examples of what this politics might look like in practice. The fourth section completes this conceptualization by drawing specifically on the work of Tung Hui-Hu. And the fifth section brings all of these insights together into a kind of “crib sheet” containing key concepts and concise summations. 

Instead of writing off exhaustion and lethargy as mere fatalism, the aim is to show how these conditions and responses represent an alternative kind of politics. This is exhaustion not heroism, enduring conditions rather than overturning them. This pragmatic, everyday response is taken up by workers at the front lines of the gig economy and the communication society. As automation and the ‘future of work’ takes its uneven toll on women, migrants, and people of color (Munn, 2022), it seems increasingly important to understand the potential politics in ostensibly ‘passive’ subjects and practices. Drawing on media, race, and cultural studies, I explore exhaustion as a form of politics which is quieter and smaller, an art of power that looks like powerlessness. 

The age of exhaustion

While Advantageous provides one portrayal of exhaustion, it is far from being alone. Theorists over the last decade have suggested that exhaustion, whether physical, psychological, or environmental, defines our contemporary moment. The next two sections draw on those conceptualizations, using them to develop an understanding of exhaustion in its various modes and build up a foundation for a politics of exhaustion.

Is our age the definitive age of exhaustion? Schaffner (2016) moves from Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE through to humanists in the Renaissance and physicists in the 19th century to show that concerns about exhaustion have occurred throughout history. This survey across thousands of years demonstrates that exhaustion is far from being a novel trope. And yet Schaffner (2016: 532) also acknowledges that ‘our age is unique in that anxieties about exhaustion, sustainability, and resilience no longer concern only the mind, body, or society but our very habitat’. 

Exhaustion in this sense goes beyond individual fatigue to capture the depletion and ruination of our habitat. Exhaustion can be witnessed in the overstepping of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009), massive species extinction and habitat loss (Kolbert, 2014), and the irrevocable destruction of the earth system (Angus, 2016). Such exhaustion is the inevitable result of centuries of expansion, extraction, and exploitation under capitalism (Moore, 2015). In this sense, it cannot be rewound or undone, defying any singular solution. If anything, the exhaustion and collapse of our ecological systems are only accelerating as positive feedback loops turn into runaway impacts (Bloch-Johnson, 2021). Collapse is not just theoretical but material, experienced on a visceral level as fires in Australia, heat waves in India, and freezing in Texas. 

So, if exhaustion is not new to the present, its diagnostic power is undoubtedly elevated. Exhaustion gains a new currency because it seems to capture an apocalyptic feeling that moves across our life-world: the individual, societal, and ecological. Franco Berardi (2012) picks up on this diagnostic potential. ‘Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy’, he writes (ibid: 84). But energy is fading because of increased life expectancy without a social safety net; energy is fading because fossil fuels and other resources are being depleted; and energy is fading because the competition of capital, with its aggressiveness and impulsiveness, is pathological. For Berardi (2012: 84), the outcome of this depletion is clear: ‘the future is over. We are living in a space beyond the future’. 

Exhaustion in this article thus designates the depletion of resources but also the depletion of an individual’s physical and psychological power. In their study of female activists across six European cities, Emejulu and Bassel (2020) found that exhaustion amongst activists was a consistent motif; extreme tiredness and demoralization reached a breaking point that prevented long-term activism. Such exhaustion is felt in a concrete way by the individual, but the immense uphill battle they face is a product of broader social and political forces. In the activists studied by Emejulu and Bassel (2020: 402), austerity, xenophobia, and fascism were some of the named forces that came together to create the ‘structural exhaustion’ that enacted a hefty toll on women of color. 

For some commentators, exhaustion has risen to become a key connector for political subjects in the present. Chaudhary (2019) suggests that ‘the exhausted’ are connected far ‘more through ties of affective feeling than precise phenomenological experience, common lineage, or even social position’. These feelings concerning labor, equality, and the future may be quite vague, never formalized into the language of policy making or a distinct political platform. But it is the recognition of these feelings—who shares them and who clearly does not—that forms the glue that unites political subjects. In the words of Chaudhary (2019), the exhausted are bound by affect that ‘intensifies into a political distinction’ and through ‘struggle with an enemy that fundamentally does not share that affective bond’. 

However, if exhaustion-as-affective-glue is possible in theory, it seems less probable in practice. For Byung-Chul Han (2015: 59), exhaustion in our current society is ‘solitary tiredness; it has a separating and isolating effect’. Faced with this tiredness, individuals tend to cloister themselves off from others and the world. This retreat is a means of self-care and survival, allowing the subject to rest their bodies and their minds, to reproduce their labor power as quickly as possible. Indeed, this is precisely what we see in memoirs of work in fast-paced, low-wage environments such as Amazon. At the end of a punishing workday, Geissler (2018) does not have the physical and emotional energy to care about her coworkers and their problems, a fact that she feels guilty about but cannot seem to prevent. ‘Tiredness of this kind proves violent’, writes Han (2015: 60), ‘because it destroys all that is common or shared’. 

Solidarity requires an intact individual who can offer what they have (care, comfort, empathy) to others, but our achievement society is designed to exhaust these psychological and social resources. ‘In order to hope for gentleness, we must ultimately have enough strength’, stresses Anne Dufourmantelle (2018: 80). Exhaustion wears us out and wears us down. Lives are robbed of any excess and particularly their capacity to give their presence to others. Instead, notes Dufourmantelle, this destruction registers as a kind of blankness or indifference: an absence to self, others, and the world. 

Indeed, within this system, others are often framed as an impediment, an obstacle which stands in the way of success. In his ethnography of Amazon warehouses, Rogaly (2020) highlighted the amount of competition and division between workers. Migrant workers from Poland or Slovenia go over and above their targets to prove their worth above their ‘British’ rivals (Rogaly, 2020: 98). Some shifts deliver pallets of quickly-scannable items to their associates, ramping up their metrics and forcing others to slowly pack bulkier products, hurting their stats (Rogaly, 2020). This practice of boosting quotas and screwing other shifts is documented in other accounts of warehouse labor (Guendelsberger, 2020). These systems are designed to optimize labor by offering rewards and threatening punishment. Yet their meticulous tracking and metrics-driven logic is also a way to instill competition and even antagonism between workers, actively undermining solidarity.

Towards a politics of exhaustion

What form might a politics of exhaustion take? Berlant (2011: 259) describes a form of alternative politics that is paradoxically a ‘turning away from politics’, a turning inward or ‘becoming-private’. Whatever it is, this activity does not neatly conform to the conventional category of politics, whether that consists of engagement with formal political parties and voting or recognisable forms of activism such as the strike, the march, or the protest. Instead, this not-politics manifests in less perceptible acts and gestures. These acts may look minor, Berlant (2011: 259) admits but this is only because we typically associate the political with ‘gestures of heroic action’ that ‘counter hegemonic ideologies with philosophies of refusal’. This alternative politics, by contrast, turns toward ‘deflation, distraction and aleatory wavering in unusual arcs of attentiveness’ (ibid: 260). These activities tend not to address their targets head on (indeed given how diffused these crises are, what target could even be pinpointed?) but rather come out sideways. Perhaps riffing on this theme, Berlant (2011: 18) speaks of a kind of ‘lateral agency’ as a ‘mode of coasting consciousness within the ordinary that helps people survive the stress on their sensorium that comes from the difficulty of reproducing contemporary life’. 

‘Coasting consciousness’ brings to mind stories of workers from Amazon Fulfillment Centers, which pick, pack, and ship products for the global tech company. These employees speak about their bodies being pushed to match the frenetic pace expected of them. Yet, while their limbs pound out mile after mile across the warehouse floor, picking up and dropping off items, their mind is free to drift (Geissler, 2018; Guendelsberger, 2020). This doesn’t mean, of course, that their mental states are inherently positive, transforming or liberating their labor experience in any spectacular way. Nor does it alter the often brutal conditions at these centers, which use sophisticated digital technologies to gamify competition, dock points for minor infractions, and even carry out automatic firing (Munn, 2022). Work remains low-waged and exploitative. Yet these stories also highlight the ingenuity and resiliency of workers, their ability to come up with small but tangible tactics that help them to keep going and keep earning. These might be ‘zoning out’, imagining a perfect comeback to a supervisor, or carrying out some act of micro-resistance that nevertheless feels significant in the mind of the worker (Geissler, 2018; Guendelsberger, 2020). Such acts never reach the lofty heights of the revolutionary ideal (du Plessis, 2018) expected of Politics with a capital P. And yet it is precisely such acts, however trivial they appear to others, which allow the laborer to endure. 

This conceptualization resonates in some ways with what Roberto Esposito (2015) calls the impolitical. As with the theorists above, Esposito is interested in exploring the peripheries of the political as conventionally understood, or further still, what lies beyond or outside it. For Esposito, this move is necessary because it is clear that such politics has been hollowed out. The traditional categories of the political can no longer provide a voice for radical perspectives—their potentiality and power have been used up. His project, then, is to sketch out an alternate set of responses and interventions. Esposito (2015: 8) suggests that the impolitical ‘disavows any connection with the great modern deracination, but without any utopian attempt at securing a new ground – which on the contrary it condemns’. 

Such a description echoes Berlant in elevating ways of being and doing that are typically seen as ambivalent. This stance does not endorse neoliberal logics and its systems of inequality and oppression—but neither does it contest them or resist them in any direct or heroic way.  I used to be ‘quite active against big corporations’ policy’ but now I’m actually working for them as ‘part of the big mechanism and that system’ stated one Amazon worker; when asked why she worked for someone she opposed, her response was simple: money (Rogaly, 2020: 96). To fully support these regimes is impossible; workers on the ground have seen too much of their negative impacts to enthusiastically endorse them. At the same time, to openly oppose such regimes is too risky, exposing the subject to increased harassment and surveillance, punishments like lost points or docked pay, or even redundancy (Munn, 2022).

This refusal to commit might be seen as a way to conserve energy, whether physical, emotional, or psychological. It brings to mind the ‘lie flat’ (躺平) movement in China. Originating in 2021, the online trend expresses disillusionment with a culture of endless work for little reward (Muzaffar, 2021). Faced with low job prospects and skyrocketing house prices, the younger generation have reduced their ambitions, checked out, and opted for indifference. This Chinese movement, while distinct, connects in many ways to Western phrases like ‘quiet quitting’, which describes a refusal by workers to go above and beyond. Quiet quitting, with its ‘disengagement’ and ‘low investment in work activities’ (Formica and Sfodera, 2022), is marked by the same kind of apathy as ‘lie flat’. There is no grand gesture here, no strike or riot, but rather an almost imperceptible withdrawal of serious commitment. Making waves or drawing attention to oneself in the form of praise or criticism is an added layer, an unknown variable that is unwanted. The aim instead is to keep your head down, to keep your well-being intact, to keep going—in short, to endure. 

Enduring at the end of the world

A politics of exhaustion does not seek to transform the world into a utopia nor to vanquish its enemy. For many contemporary workers, such high-minded goals are vestiges of the past, holdovers from the halcyon days of labor protest and social activism in ‘68, perhaps. Revolution in the form of seismic shifts in labor conditions and massive social upheaval is not seen to be feasible. For this reason, it is no longer the aim. Instead, the politics of exhaustion reduces its aims to something seemingly smaller but infinitely more doable: endurance. 

What is endurance? Povinelli (2011: 32) defines endurance as ‘the ability to suffer and yet persist’. The suffering of individuals, as we’ve already seen, may take many forms, ranging from pressures on the body and mental health of workers through to systemic discrimination and racialization. These forces arrayed against the individual are accompanied by damage to the air, water, and soil around us, the flora and fauna. This ecological destruction contributes to material suffering, as lives and livelihoods are impacted, but also exacts a psychological toll (Doherty and Clayton, 2011; White, 2015). 

To endure, then, is to keep going in spite of this suffering. For Feldman (2015), endurance has become the de-facto goal of current humanitarian interventions. Meaningful, structural change is no longer seen as being achievable. ‘There is nothing that develops into something new’, says one of Feldman’s (2015: 433) interviewees, ‘it is completely impossible’. In these conditions, the wholesale transformation of conditions is not on the table. Crises have mounted up to the point where conditions are regarded as unmanageable, unresolvable. The result is that interventions now seek to help ‘people live better with circumstances they cannot change’ (ibid: 430). The same fatalism pervades research on climate change: mitigation is off the table, the best we can do is to adapt (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021). To cope, to get through, to face up to our new normal—this is our new mantra.

Is it enough to merely endure? The general response from organizations and individuals is to radically ratchet down their targets. Feldman (2015: 431) cannot decide whether this is a fundamental ‘failure’ or a novel ‘innovation’ that is able to move beyond conventional impasses. Any form of politics that is regarded as passive or even fatalistic will be quickly pounced on by critics. ‘The political literature tends to frame active participation as a distinctly beneficial phenomenon’, note Lutz and Hoffman (2017: 879). Hogan (2002: 20) for example, writes scathingly about ‘passive political subjects and pliant consumers, who have been rendered uncritical, or at least silently and ineffectually critical’. When it comes to the mediatization of politics, Witschge (2014) suggests that subjects can be understood in two ways, as ‘passive accomplices’ or ‘active disruptors’. And a Habermasian understanding of politics, to take just one broader thread, champions the informed and actively-involved citizen who participates enthusiastically in the public sphere. 

Countless examples of endurance can be found. For instance, Hoai Anh Tran and Ngai-Ming Yip (2020) show how practices of endurance play out for street vendors in Hanoi, Vietnam. The state projects its vision of social order by policing and fining these vendors, albeit in an often uneven or ad-hoc way. This state-based regulation thus forms one set of negative pressures, while incentives to find busy spaces with many buyers provides a set of more positive pressures. Street sellers navigate these tensions through a series of small but strategic activities: befriending police or avoiding them by timing their trips, altering their routes to hit the most profitable locations at peak periods, or diversifying their business by selling balloons in the morning and snacks in the afternoon (Tran and Yip, 2020). 

These activities, like the others discussed above, are not seen as overtly political nor as acts of empowerment or agency. Indeed, the testimony of sellers suggests that these activities are not exactly forced, but also not entirely free. Instead, they can be understood as a kind of optimization of the variables that are given to them. By rising early, and avoiding a police precinct, and calling in a favor from another seller, and obtaining a shady spot during the heat of midday, and relocating to a plaza during rush hour—the seller can continue to sell. While such moves may be inventive, they are also demanded: this is what it takes to persist, to keep a life going, so that tomorrow morning they may get up and do it all over again.

Other examples echo this framing of everyday necessity. In an essay on the urban subaltern, Asef Bayat (2000) argues that globalization processes have reconfigured the plight of the poor, the precarity of labor, and the structures of social spaces in ways that have not yet been fully understood or theorized. These disenfranchised people and their activities, stresses Bayat (2000), are not adequately captured by the work on the ‘passive poor’ but nor can they be framed as the ‘resisting poor.’ In the place of these binary concepts, he suggests a new term that avoids their polarizing tendencies: the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. Bayat (2000: 545) defines this phrase as ‘the silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive and improve their lives’. 

It is clear that these people have agency; they are not merely the ‘passive’ subjects of the state, for example. Yet it is also clear that traditional forms of ‘resistance’ like the strike are not available to them. Bayat stresses that this group is highly diverse in terms of class and employment status, with many outside of traditional institutions. ‘Consequently, in place of protest or publicity, these groups move directly to fulfill their needs by themselves, albeit individually and discretely’ (ibid: 548). Fulfilling their needs might include leeching power from a power pole, for instance, or adding and renovating their dwelling without consent. Such activities never rise to the spectacle of the mass protest or the overt rebellion of vandalism. These acts are low-key, normal, or even banal. They are not about revival but survival. 

For AbdouMaliq Simone (2018), things are more complex. The myriad activities that contribute to endurance—chatting, laughing, playing, building, screwing—are not just about subsistence. These rituals and rhythms cannot be reduced to a white-knuckled clinging to bare life. Such practices are at once messier and more creative, rising to the level of a composition or an improvisation. This performance takes up the seemingly limited resources that are available—whether material, social, political—and reassembles them into new configurations. What is key is that these (re)compositions highlight elements of life that lay on the peripheries of the political, actions and relations that can never be fully codified, managed, or mandated. ‘It enables them to experience the operations of a sociality besides, right next to the glaring strictures of their obligations, expulsions, and exploitation, something that enables endurance’ (Simone, 2018: 20). 

Digital lethargy 

To round off our portrait of the politics of exhaustion, I draw on Digital lethargy: Dispatches from an age of disconnection (2022) by Tung-Hui Hu, which resonates in many ways with the insights developed so far. Hu is also interested in re-examining the subjects and activities that don’t qualify as sufficiently ‘political’. For instance, Western critics often paint a bleak picture of digital workers as exploited subjects who are forced to carry out menial tasks under brutal labor conditions (ibid: xxv). In this view, politics has been effectively quashed. 

But this portrayal, while powerful and affecting, is often a caricature. As Hu (2022: xxv) notes, digital workers consistently manage to find some kind of satisfaction in their work, whether it is using trickery online, improving their English or building other skills, or simply outlasting a depression in the economy. Similarly, while critics see this work as robotic, Hu counters that this is a result of a distinctly Western worldview that privileges expressive or creative work as ‘human’ and active resistance against management as the only mode of being politically engaged. Rather than all-too-quickly dismissing these people and their practices, Hu wants to linger longer, to explore their potential as alternative forms of politics. 

So, one way to frame digital lethargy is as an antidote for the commodification of the Political as conventionally understood. Firstly, the political subject, as discussed earlier, is consistently framed as someone who is actively engaged in struggle, who resists the ‘powers-that-be’ by speaking out and speaking up. But such a subject, in their stridency and self-actualization, carries out a performance that conforms closely to the neoliberal ideal. As Han (2017) noted, digital capitalism is not repressive but expressive: it is constantly prodding us to be engaged, to actively participate, to create and critique. This ‘always on’ performance is a form of labor that can be commodified and adds additional strains and pressures onto the self. The active subject is also a version of the self that is racialized and gendered; it is available to some and not to others. Hu (2022: xxvii), then, is less interested in subjects than objects; he wants to ‘undo the privileged position of the agentive subject’. 

Secondly, the Political is defined by its ability to make change for the better. Politics takes a situation that is unequal, or exploitative, or discriminatory, and stages an intervention. This act is transformative, altering these conditions in a significant way. In this sense, Politics operates on a paradigm of problem and solution, Before and After. Of course, even the grandest Political statements do not claim to resolve an issue entirely. Yet the ideal of improvement through activity remains. Lethargy has been burned (and burned out) too often to endorse such claims. For this reason, Hu’s lethargy, like the other forms of politics discussed above, is focused on endurance rather than refusal. It is a way of ‘abiding, remaining intact, or tolerating the intolerable’, a set of tactics to ‘survive within a condition…rather than a way of overturning that condition’ (Hu, 2022: xxvii). 

Thirdly, the Political still believes in the future. If we only care enough and are committed enough then the future will be better than the past. If we invest our physical and psychological energy in communities, infrastructures, and civic engagement, then we can anticipate a brighter tomorrow. In this sense, it stages a form of Hegelian history, a steady march towards greater degrees of human freedom and flourishing. Time and progress are inexorably intertwined. Lethargy is instead trapped in a time of stasis or what Hu calls ‘stuckness’. It cannot fast-forward time by fantasizing about the future, but rather remains caught in the unchanging now. While some might see this as a failure, Hu posits it as a positive kind of realism which confronts us with our problems in the here-and-now. ‘Lethargy is a drag’, Hu (2022: xxix) writes, ‘it weighs down our ability to rush to solutions, and forces us to listen to the unresolved present’. 

Who is this ‘us’, the subject of digital capitalism? To state that Cupertino developers and Bangalore call-center operators are trapped in the same way would clearly be a misstep, blundering through decades of scholarship in race, gender, and cultural studies, as well as history. Equally, however, ignoring the unifying aspects of financial and ecological collapse and treating each context as a unique silo seems to miss out on important commonalities. 

The same question applies to our analysis: who exactly are the exhausted? Existing theorizations only provide a partial answer. Guy Standing (2014), for instance, described a group called the precariat, who were on flexible and unstable labor contracts, who had no secure occupational identity, who had few non-wage benefits like insurance or healthcare, who lacked state benefits like unemployment, and who were denizens rather than citizens— lacking the legal, social, and economic rights that other groups had by default. For Standing (2014), these deprivations produced a mixture of anxiety, anomie, alienation, and anger. Such a group resonates strongly in many ways with the conditions and examples laid out in this essay. 

But if the precariat highlights the broadness of this group, it also risks flattening significant distinctions. Standing’s (2014) analysis is economic and class-based, only briefly gesturing to ‘migrants’ and ‘ethnic minorities’ without ever really interrogating how race, gender, culture, and other intersectional differences might articulate this precarity in a distinct way. To be Black, for instance, is to be subject to a very specific kind of racial calculus, a particular logic of anti-Blackness (Wilderson, 2020; Jung and Vargas, 2021). In the same way, survival for queer and trans individuals means confronting marginalization and violence (Dasgupta, 2022) and remote workers with disabilities must navigate particular challenges to leverage technologies (Aydos et al., 2021). In short, different groups begin from different positions and face different kinds of antagonisms. 

Conceptualizing the exhausted means holding these two insights in tension. One: everyone is not equal and exhaustion plays out differently for different groups. Two: economic and environmental conditions are wide-ranging in their impacts. So racial capitalism is predicated on the production of difference (Melamed, 2015) and novel forms of capitalist extraction and ecological devastation expand across the formal and informal economies of the Global North and the Global South (Tsing, 2015; Wark, 2021). The exhausted, then, is a both/and approach, acknowledging the racialized and gendered aspects of labor while pointing to the systematic precarity that moves in and across intersectional boundaries, destabilizing life for many on many different levels. 

Granted, this kind of synthesis only scratches the surface. A politics of exhaustion really requires a fully fledged geography of exhaustion to accompany it. Such a geography would be highly aware of the global division of labor and asymmetries in power established by colonialism, for example, yet would also take seriously the planetary-scale impacts of technical infrastructures, financial circuits, and ecological devastation. Only by holding these tensions together can we properly compare Amazon Mechanical Turk workers in the United States and India (Hara et al., 2019), for example. Both are exhausted, both seek to endure, and yet their conditions of precarity are clearly not identical. Where are the commonalities here, the experiences and intersections that might become moments of solidarity—and where does this algorithmic regime stop mattering and history, race, class, and gender start ‘mattering’ far more? A geography of exhaustion would highlight the thick strands of connection between global subjects but also remain attentive to their irreconcilable differences. 

A crib sheet for the exhausted

Stepping through worker memoirs, ethnographic encounters, and media, race, and cultural theory has allowed us to develop a rough sketch of the politics of exhaustion: what conditions it responds to, what its principles are, and what it might look like in practice. I want to conclude, then, by offering a kind of crib sheet for the exhausted, a quick reference of key concepts. Synthesizing our insights, we can compare Politics as conventionally understood with this politics of exhaustion. The table below sets out this distinction as a series of keywords. 

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Performance: Politics is premised on activity, on actively participating in established forms of political struggle (the strike, the march, the protest) and engaging with the public sphere. By carrying this activity out with commitment and purpose, the political subject will have an impact, transforming a debate or altering a set of conditions. The politics of exhaustion, by contrast, is often about waiting, passing time, or wasting time. When seen from a conventional perspective, such activity may appear fatalistic, passive, or ineffectual. 

Aims: Politics conventionally sets up two or more groups that are in opposition to one another, even if these are drastically unequal. The state as an oppressive, hegemonic regime, for example, is traditionally set against the worker. Politics in this framework is predicated on resistance, on countering this force through fighting or pushing back. The exhausted do not have the time, energy, wealth or privilege (e.g., racialized and gendered status) to resist and are instead focused on enduring. Their aim is to sustain themselves and survive, to keep going and keep living. 

Visibility: Politics, particularly of a certain countercultural or counter-hegemonic variety, is often framed in heroic terms. (This is not to denigrate the sacrifices and work of activists, but refers to the way they are portrayed in the media). Such practices are visible or even hypervisible—indeed this visibility (the awareness campaign, the viral protest video) is often equated with their success or failure. The politics of exhaustion, by contrast, is quiet, not wishing to draw attention to itself. These activities tend to be invisible or at least imperceptible, disappearing into the background noise of everyday rhythms and gestures. 

Stance: Politics is premised on criticality, on judging or even condemning a particular party, ideology, or organization. Indeed, the aim of resisting (see above) goes hand in hand with this stance of setting oneself against the enemy. The politics of exhaustion, by contrast, is far more ambivalent. This may be a byproduct of a person embedded (or less rosily, stuck) within an institution or set of circumstances and dependent on it (i.e., for a paycheck). The exhausted cannot endorse this regime and their values—but neither can they openly condemn it, exposing themselves to risk and further precarity. Their feelings and activities remain perpetually mixed, and these contradictions must be sustained.

Practices: Politics champions the rational subject who has access to information and meaningful agency. They can carefully weigh up the factors, make a decision, and then act upon it. This idealized vision does not correspond to the life-world of the exhausted. This is not to say that the exhausted have zero agency. However, rather than deciding freely amongst choices, they navigate through the given conditions as best as they can. This is an optimization of variables, but one done unconsciously and aimed at surviving rather than ‘winning’—of steering the least bad path between pressures, incentives, and punishments. 

Time: Politics is often underpinned by a paradigm of progress. There may be small setbacks, but history is advancing inexorably towards a future of increased human flourishing and freedom. Inequalities can be addressed; labor conditions can be improved. And this ability to carry out meaningful, structural change means that present struggles are temporary: the future will be better. The politics of exhaustion no longer believes in this future, both because of the broad failures of modernity and the pathologies of life and labor at an individual level. Nothing changes. The result is a feeling of stasis or stuckness. 

Identity: Politics is centered around the political subject, an individual who informs themselves of current issues, engages actively with the public sphere, and participates in established political activities. These activities may range from mainstream (discussions, voting) to various forms of activism (marching, protesting, striking) but all presuppose a willful individual with agency who speaks out and speaks up. The politics of exhaustion deflates this vision by speaking of the object. This is not to strip the individual of all agency, but rather to highlight the fact that they are acted upon in significant ways. The precarity of the world and themselves means that they are not masters of their own destiny, but rather conditioned by material and political constraints. 

Conclusion

As crises mount up around us, exhaustion becomes a key term for the contemporary, capturing the diverse forms of depletion occurring within our social, financial, and environmental systems. Within these conditions, Politics in the conventional sense seems to be hollowed out and increasingly difficult. Perhaps more importantly, the qualification for what counts as ‘political’—a strident subject who actively struggles against a hegemonic enemy and attempts to radically transform their conditions— increasingly appears to be limited or outdated. 

This is not to imply that Politics as conventionally understood is dead or irrelevant. Politics continues to play out in the form of strikes, marches, protests, organizing, and other longstanding practices. And from time to time, these hard-fought efforts achieve success, shutting down events, starting up unions, or elevating an issue into the public consciousness. However, to define the political purely in this way is to overlook the quieter strategies and activities taking place in warehouses, call centers, homes, and other contemporary labor contexts. 

To be sure, these examples have their limits. A ‘comprehensive’ spectrum of such practices is impossible, not least because the politics of exhaustion, by its very nature, often remains marginal, invisible, or imperceptible. But by moving from warehouse pickers in the Global North to those in the informal economy in the so-called Global South, we can see gossamer threads linking (if never equating) these individuals, their conditions, and their responses. These are incomplete links and faintly-defined figures. Yet, if this analysis is partial, it is also promising. The gambit here is to risk some ‘rigor’ in exchange for an insight into the unfolding present and a sketch of its emerging political forms. 

Rather than dismissing these practices of living, the politics of exhaustion takes seriously their potential and reconsiders what the ‘political’ might mean in the present. The politics of exhaustion is premised on waiting rather than acting, enduring rather than resisting, ambivalence rather than ‘criticality’, and the object rather than the subject. Conceptualizing this form of politics is a first step in opening up to alternative understandings, elevating these practices, and orienting ourselves within our contemporary condition. 

Is the politics of exhaustion enough? To repeat an earlier question, is it enough to ‘merely’ endure? Such a question, posed from the ostensibly objective outside, seems to take us backwards rather than forwards, establishing a threshold for the sufficiently political. Instead, we should evaluate these practices more immanently from the inside, from the perspective of those they serve—in other words, experientially rather than clinically. For those who adopt this form of politics, it seems to offer a workable model for dealing with asymmetric power, for retaining some kind of inner-power of their own in terms of energy and well-being, and for hindering further erosion of their (meager) future prospects. So, if this is certainly a ratcheted down politics, its reduced aims also make it more viable, more sustainable, even more banal in a positive sense. This is a politics of the everyday, a politics attuned to the present, a politics that navigates our new normal of crisis and collapse—and this is what makes it worth attending to and developing.  

Statement on ethics, compensation, and conflicts of interest

This research does not engage with human participants. This research was not financially compensated or supported in any way. The author declares that there is no potential or perceived conflicts of interest arising from this research. This research is not based on quantitative data and related code/software, therefore no additional datasets have been provided.