Abstract
‘Anaesthesis’, this chapter argues, can be understood as an (anti-)aesthetic realm beyond failure, where sensation itself is depleted. With dance marathons in 1930s America, movement 24/7 for days, weeks, months, depleted participants’ energies in a show of exhaustion. But this is not a Beckettian exhaustion, in which one is not certain whether to sit or stand, and lie down one last time; rather, this anaesthetic exhaustion tends catabolically towards a limit – the limit point on an ever-receding horizon where any distinction between night and day, work and life, vanish. At this limit-point, where ‘worker’ ‘productivity’ and self-fulfilment become evacuated from the scene of capitalist modernity, another sort of emergence arises: that of senseless feeling, a space of chaosmotic nothingness in which resistance to overproductivity and gestureless motion signal an order of worklessness that is not bound to fear – or fear of failure. Beyond failure – beyond the feeling or fear of failure – lies a horizon of potential mutuality the exhausted dancers barely glimpse. In this zone of (in)distinction, they are too exhausted to care – thus, they cannot be exploited or subjectivated, in an economic regime that requires self-fulfilment and self-making. They may begin to feel again; to feel better.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance |
| Editors | Tony Fisher, Eve Katsouraki |
| Place of Publication | London |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Pages | 121-147 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781351247733 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780815370994, 9788815370987 |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- exhaustion
- productivity
- work
- 1930s
- America
- dance marathon
- capitalism
- modernity
- affect
- feeling
- sensation
- aesthetics
- aesthetics and politics
- sense
- limit