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The coronavirus epidemic confronts us with two opposed figures that prevail in our daily lives: those who are overworked to exhaustion (medical stuff, caretakers…) and those who have nothing to do since they are forcibly or voluntarily confined to their homes.
Belonging to the second category, I feel obliged to use this predicament to propose a short reflection on different ways in which we can be tired.
I will ignore here the obvious paradox of the enforced inactivity itself making us tired, so let me begin with Byung-Chul Han who provided a systematic account of how and why we live in a “burnout society.”
Here is a short resume of Byung-Chul Han’s masterpiece shamelessly taken from Wikipedia:
“Driven by the demand to persevere and not to fail, as well as by the ambition of efficiency, we become committers and sacrificers at the same time and enter a swirl of demarcation, self-exploitation and collapse.
‘When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself. The neoliberal system is no longer a class system in the proper sense. It does not consist of classes that display mutual antagonism.
This is what accounts for the system’s stability.’ Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: ‘Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one.
Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.’ Individuals has become what Han calls ‘the achievement-subjects’; they do not believe they are subjugated ‘subjects’ but rather ‘projects:
Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves’ which ‘amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint – indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation.
As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.’”
While Han offers perspicuous observations on the new mode of subjectivation from which we can learn a lot – what he discerns is today’s figure of the superego -,
one should note that the new form of subjectivity described by Han is conditioned by the new phase of global capitalism, which remains a class system with growing inequalities. Struggle and antagonisms are in no way reducible to the intra-personal “struggle against oneself.”
There are still millions of manual workers in Third World countries, just as there are big differences between different kinds of immaterial workers (suffice it to mention the growing domain of “human services” like the caretakers of old people).
A gap separates the top manager who owns or runs a company from a precarious worker spending days at home alone with his/her PC: they are definitely not both a master and a slave in the same sense.
