_ THE 4" HUMAN MOTOR - —S ees Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity ANSON RABINBACH du —) BasicBooks A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers“reparative justice” that could compensate for the defects of an obso- lete laissez-faire liberalism.** Similarly, the energetic caleulus, which viewed fatigue as the objective boundary of the human motor, was not restricted to any single political doctrine or ideology: it represented a widely shared belief that ig the energy of the working body held the key to both productivity and social justice, ‘The problem of charact the peculiar combination of nine~ teenth-century social knowledge and politics is reflected in the mutabil- ity of the term discourse, which many historians, mayself included, use to describe the way that epistemology, language, and rhetoric are orga~ nized around a common set of political and cultural designs. Though discourse has by now entered the conventional vocabulary of historians, it is seldom defined in terms of a coherent body of social thought. Even Foueault's work reveals a distracting lack of consistency. His emphasis on discourse began as an analysis of the rules ordering the organization of knowledge and representation—how the world is mediated by ideas and systems of thought—across epochs but was eventually scaled down to refer to subsystems of ideas, laws, techniques, and practices embod- ied in particular institutions.** Nevertheless, I prefer the earlier model of discourse as an epistemological category because it avoids the redue- tive position that different forms of knowledge are simply an “endlessly repeated play of dominations.”** As opposed to ideology, the ambiguity of the term discourse with its implication of neutrality ought to evoke the tension that characterizes the relations between knowledge and power, relations that are neither entirely fixed nor predictable Finally, the idea for this book was inspired by Walter Benj Jabyrinthian unfinished study of the: ‘of modernity, of the Nineleenth Century. The notes he left behind indi jess because: charting the obscure pathways of to rescue from oblivion a fragment ‘This study seeks to restore our of the past whose power is still mani { understanding of an aspect of ninet zy thought by exploring ‘a metaphor that, perhaps because iquity, has become invisible tous; the metaphor of the human motor—a body whose experience was ‘equated with that of a machine. INTRODUCTION ‘CHAPTER ONE From Idleness to Fatigue THE BODY WITHOUT FATIGUE: A NINETEENTH-CENTURY UTOPIA ‘Wrrivc in1888, Fricdich Nietzsche asked “Where does ou od ern world belong—to exhaustion or ascent?” acterization of the epoch by the metaphor of fatigue was symptomatic of a general fear ry was depleting its “accumulated energy” and falling into that sleep, which a Hoa. symbol of a much deeper and longer compulsion to rest.” In the fading Light of a century that “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothie cathedrals,” whose industry ing of production, the uninterrupted distur- b 1¢ came to play a major role in the “mobile army of metaphors” that dominated the language of social description in the late nineteenth century. Exhaustion was the ‘constant nemesis of the idea of progress, the great fear of the “Age of Capital.” As George Steiner remarked, “For every text of Benthamite confidence, of proud meliorism, we can find a counterstatement of nervous fatigue.”> nnth-century thinkers, fatigue sintegration characterizes this 4faith in itself; one lives for tomorrow as the day after tomorrow is Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice supports us has become thin: all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one wil able to walk.”* Balzac, too, “planned to write a ‘pathology of soci to show how men's stock of strength was diminished by too much ‘expense of effort, indced of any kind.”* Despite his own belief in human progress, Darwin's discoveries, which dethroned the notion of teleol ogy, or design in natut ied that man’s future depended on unend- fing struggle and the tudes of chance. The discovery of entropy fattested to a pessimistic view of nature in which the available amount jof energy or heat was continuously diminishing, conjuring up the \specter of an apocaly, te of unchanging death.”* As the historian ‘Saul Friedlinder has pointed out, the fin-de-sidele loss of faith in prog- sw vision: that of the total end of man.” wly acquired prestige of fatigue, not sciences as well. the paradoxes of le smands that it made on the body and spirit? Did not scientific and Itechnological advances produce a dark undorside in the physical and \psychological exhaustion of modern life? The nineteenth-c session with fatigue, both metaphoric and real, located in natur. body, and in the psyche the negative dimension of the consi ‘energies required to service the new productive forces unles nature and harnessed by society. Nietzsche saw little way o recorded. By the turn of the century, the U.S. Surgeo! listed more than one hundred studies of muscle fat numerous studies of "nervous exhaustion,” “brain exl nia,” and “spinal exhaustion.”* Mental and physical f a range of modern disorders, were classified as “diseases of the will” (les ‘maladies de Uénergie) and as the ubiquitous “neurasthenia,” and were the object of an outpouring of scientific, medical, and popular litera- ture."® Exhaustion was not merely the consequence of physical overex: ertion, but the cause of a variety of physical and mental pathologies born of the languid and torpid state of men, women, and especially schoolage children. Fatigue was also a metaphor for the modern form of psychological sulfering, for inertia, loss of will, and depletion of en- ergy. Nietzsche's image of civilization succumbing to fatigue cannot be ‘re Human moron QO distinguished from that of many contemporary physicians and phy itr whens ttrtites “llr ley a ela pee vice, to “whatever weakens—whatever exhausts.”"" The importance of fatigue in the mental life of nineteenth-century Europe was, as the historian Theodore Zeldin has shown, more than a hallmark of the scientific mania of the age: it expressed a profound amxicty of decline, social disintegration, and even cosmic death"? The ability of fatigue to move fluently between science and litera- ture reveals the tendency of nineteenth-century thinkers to equate the psychological with the physical and to locate the body as the site where social deformations and dislocations can be most easily observed. A host of social ills could be traced to the consequences of fatigue: from alechol and opium cravings to miseducation and the loss of social standing; from crime, vice, and the disintegration of the family to the degradations and discontents of industrial work.!? Asa tangible and ever-present mental and physical disorder, fatigue could, however, be distinguished from emotional states, for example—melancholy, ennui, and listlessness— which were its subjective manifestations. The physical symptoms of fatigue were regarded as mere “representations” of more profound conditions. As one prominent physician noted: ‘The modes of representation are various. Some feel covery” of fatigue, we might conclude that medical science was con: fronted by a considerable epidemic. The concern with fatigue in nine- science, and the medical and literary obsession with decline, and ‘cultural decadence in fin-de-sidcle Europe, was both a consequence of new scientific developments, and, as the historian Eugen Weber has noted, an expression of “the right- ‘eous concern for moral regeneration, the s Robert Nye has aptly called “the medical model of cultural erisis” took FROM ipuEeNEss 70 FATIGUE |