Abstract
This article develops cultural geographical understandings of exhaustion through an exploration of the bodily pressures induced by mobile working practices. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with resource sector workers in Australia who work away from home for periods of time as well as ‘left behind’ partners, we argue that exhaustion is a collective ‘structure of feeling’, but one that is differently experienced by mobile workers and partners. Tracing the diverse rhythms of compression and decompression that are experienced by workers and partners both at home and away, our focus on temporality connects the exhaustions experienced at resource extraction sites with exhaustions experienced in the home. By providing an important temporal focus to debates on intimacy-geopolitics, we explain how rhythms instigated by resource work are complicit in generating structures of feeling that compromise wellbeing within the home. We conclude that the exhausted bodies of mobile worker households are an obscured casualty of our current resource-intensive lives.
Introduction
We’ve got this analogy that we use for when he first comes home and it’s like when you get a new fish for your fish tank and what you’re supposed to do is keep them in a little bag and bring them home and put that in the tank and let the other fish get used to them. That’s pretty much what happens here. My husband sort of has to stay in a bag and acclimatise for a day or two with what’s going on before he really jumps in and starts living the routine like we do.
Our opening quotation illustrates a household practice that has emerged in response to the rhythmic absence and presence of a husband and father, Ed, from the family home. This is a rhythm set in motion by his employment at an oil and gas extraction plant. It is necessary for Ed to work away for 2 weeks at a time since home is located in the south of Western Australia and the site of resource extraction is around 2,000 km away in a northern corner of the same state. Indeed, Ed is part of a growing population where employment takes workers away from home for weeks or months at a time, exposing the household to the effects of a socio-spatial phenomenon that we call ‘mobile working’.
This article explores the everyday bodily and emotional impacts of such mobile working practices on the households involved. Given the repetitive nature of these working practices, rather than one-off experiences, we are interested in the patterned temporalities that emerge. As such, we trace the rhythmic and arrhythmic pressures of contemporary life and work that effectively ‘compressed’ our participants. Working through such pressures, we consider the concept of ‘decompression’ as a productive way to draw attention to the various rhythmic tactics that differently situated bodies develop to manage these pressures. In focusing on these pressures and their management, we contribute to cultural geographical work that emphasises the necessity to grasp not just the vitality of bodies understood through their extensions and connections but also their vulnerabilities, in terms of their limits and incapacities. 1
Exhaustion emerged as a significant concept through 60 semi-structured Skype interviews conducted with 42 mobile workers from different industry backgrounds and 18 partners variously engaged in paid and unpaid work. Many of these participants repeatedly drew attention to the ‘volumetric’ dimensions of their mobile working practices through reference to the various pressures they experience. Here, we focus on the exhausting experiences of those working in the resource sector and partners left at home. Exhaustion emerged as a highly palpable ‘structure of feeling’ 2 through these positionalities which spoke to an ‘always-already emergent’ 3 collective mood. Conceived by Raymond Williams, ‘structure of feeling’ is a useful concept for us since it pertains to the ‘felt sense of [a] quality of life of a particular place and time’ 4 where feeling ‘names a particularising, shared, affective quality’. 5 Therefore, while a quality such as exhaustion might be dispersed across different practices and processes, there is an important shared apprehension of it.
We use rhythm to analyse the different manifestations of exhaustion that emerge through various practices including the commute, labour and home-making since it provides a valuable temporal framework to consider the interface between ‘internal and outer selves, the individual and the group, as well as the social self and the emotions aroused’. 6 As such we approach exhaustion as a structure of feeling that intensifies the vulnerabilities that result from both paid and unpaid work, for it is not delimited to the workplace and requires management of the body and emotion. Tracing the dispersed qualities of exhaustion through rhythm, we highlight emotional dispositions and work that situates an unaccounted burden of mobile employment in the private space of the home. To do so, we draw on the concept of emotion management described by Head and Harada as ‘a set of broader coping strategies that incorporate emotional work and emotional labour’ 7 carried out within as well as outside sites of paid labour.
Exhaustion is a concept we approach through two avenues. First, we trace the ways it is ‘phenomenologically sensed through somatically-felt bodily sensations’. 8 Second, we consider the capacity of environmental sensory stimulation and associated affective atmospheres generated to exhaust. Where previous research on mobile working practices has tended to focus either on the experiences of left behind partners, 9 or the experiences of workers living at remote resource sites, 10 the value of our approach is the combination of these sites. This enables us to consider how exhaustion is manifest differently in the distal and proximate environments through which our participants are entangled, and the relations between the two. Accordingly, the empirical contribution of our article is structured into three parts. First, we explore the exhaustions that come with living and working in the regimented, institutionalised rhythms of resource extraction. Second, we turn to the different exhaustions and rhythms experienced by partners left behind in home environments. Third, we consider how these exhausted body come together upon a resource worker’s return and the arrhythmias that result.
This multi-sited approach enables us to make two contributions to the cultural geographical literature on exhaustion. First, we draw attention to the temporal dynamics of exhaustion by exploring how it is modulated by the rhythms and arrhythmias instituted by mobile working practices. Second, we approach exhaustion as a collective structure of feeling. Where previous research has tended to position exhaustion as an individualised phenomenon, 11 we consider it as not only a structure of feeling experienced by a community of workers and their families but also an emergent effect of bodies coming together. 12 As such, we look at the multifaceted sites of exhaustion in mobile working practice to take seriously Anderson’s argument that ‘structures of feeling are the resonances that create a dispersed but shared “affective present” felt across diverse phenomena’. 13
Considering the impacts of exhaustion, we highlight the ways in which it threatens wellbeing within the family home. While there is increasing awareness in Australia of the mental health challenges experienced by remote mobile workers, reflected in rates of mining worker suicide, 14 a recent parliamentary committee highlighted that the deleterious impact of mobile work on households is under-researched. 15 We found this troubling because previous research suggested that the risks of mobile working practices are increasingly privatised to workers and households. 16 Within this context, it is vital we gain a better understanding of the more intimate dynamics at play within mobile work that connects workplaces with households.
Tracing exhaustion through the temporalities of rhythm, we demonstrate that mental health and wellbeing for mobile workers and their partners is a multi-sited issue. In this regard, there is an important intimacy-geopolitics to resource extraction. Conceived by Pain and Staheli, 17 intimacy-geopolitics is a spatial concept which acknowledges how intimate, bodily relations are inseparable from broader political forces relating to shifts in the global economy, for example. Intimacy-geopolitics thus provides us with a lens to emphasise how everyday experiences of enablement and constraint are connected to the structural power relations associated with the rhythms of mobile work. Our contribution to debates on intimacy-geopolitics is to emphasise the temporality of these relations. We consider the relationality of exhausting rhythms to unpack ‘the already-thereness of the intimate as foundational to and within other realms’. 18 Intimacy-geopolitics, therefore, enables us to tease out ‘leakages’ 19 entangled with processes of resource extraction in Australia. Highlighting these connections, we explain how the exhausted bodies of mobile worker households are an obscured casualty of our contemporary resource-intensive lives. Accordingly, attending to the multiplicity of exhaustions and resulting emotion management required, we are reminded that ‘peace [at home] is always precarious’. 20 In sum, our focus on temporality highlights how rhythms instigated by resource work are complicit in generating structures of feeling that challenge wellbeing within the home.
Before describing the intimacy-geopolitics of exhaustion in the Australian resource sector, we contextualise our article through geographies of bodily limits. Situating exhaustion in relation to this body of work, we outline our approach to this concept before introducing rhythm as our analytical tool. Moving into the empirical sections of the article, we reflect on three environments that emerged as central to exhaustion experienced in proximity to this mode of mobile work. In conclusion, we consider our findings in the context of mental health challenges experienced by resource sector workers.
Situating exhaustion
Recent scholarship in cultural geography has begun to evaluate the extent to which our objects and subjects of analysis might straddle not just a more but also a less-than-human geography. 21 That is, cultural geographers have begun to acknowledge that emphasis in much current work has been on lively, vibrant and enchanted geographies which stem from actor–network theories and new materialisms’ assessment of non-human agencies, as well as geographic theories of practice and performance that emphasise the creative, open-ended nature of embodiment. For Philo, such work produces ‘worlds where the human is now added to prodigiously: where accounts of what is happening in/with those worlds ceases to be anchored around any limited sense of the human’. 22 Yet, questions are now being asked about how multiple forms of vulnerability and finitude are possibly overlooked by such approaches. As such, cultural geographers are beginning to explore the ‘shadows of vitalism’, by turning to some of the less ‘additive’ and ‘affirmative’ dimensions of worldly existence.
Working within the vein of non-representational and more-than-human geographies, Paul Harrison’s scholarship has been ahead of the curve here in this regard. As Philo 23 describes, his has been a ‘lonely road’ in consideration of corporeal finitude, brought about by exhaustion and insomnia, 24 sleep 25 and the take as well as the give of living. 26 Expanding on Philo’s contention that attentiveness to ‘what diminishes the human’ 27 signals a need to consider less-than-human geographies, Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcazar argue that corporeal finitudes such as weariness are more complex than such a bracketing would suggest. That is, weariness signals ‘a messy paradoxical state, a scene of exhaustion and endurance, diminishment and fortitude, decay and aliveness’. 28
As such, we take up Brunner et al’s approach to exhaustion as ‘an immanent critique of a reduced understanding of activity susceptible to surplus extraction’ 29 rather than through a framework of passivity or inaction. As our empirical investigations indicate, exhaustion in the context of mobile working practice is surrounded by experiences of activity that reduces the body’s capacity for action, as well as activity that is reduced by exhaustion. Tracing the rhythmic and arrhythmic temporalities described to us by mobile workers and partners, we consider how such reductions emerge from the relations between paid and unpaid working practices. Our approach to exhaustion, therefore, sees it not as an affliction of individual bodies, but an effect of interacting forces which acknowledges that such a structure of feeling ‘is the field effect of relational operation moving across different strata of human and more-than-human factors’. 30 As such, we account for the capacity of collective, patterned affects to put palpably felt pressure on bodies bound up with the rhythms and arrhythmias of depleting mobile working practices. Attending to these depletions, we draw out the emergent emotional strains experienced by participants which become a form of unpaid labour.
Our article develops the concept of exhaustion through analysing the pressures placed on bodies to sharpen our understanding of the temporal rhythms of compression and decompression. Rhythm is a useful tool to think with as it enables appreciation of ‘coexist[ing . . .] social and biological rhythms, with the body as the point of contact’. 31 That is, ‘[o]ur biological rhythms of sleep, hunger and thirst, excretion [are] conditioned by the social environment and our working lives’. 32 Thinking through the body and social environments, geographers have engaged with rhythm to analyse experiences such as marathon running, 33 coach tours 34 and festivals 35 as well as considered methods for apprehending the rhythms of street performances. 36 Here, rhythm and subsequent arrhythmias provide a window through which to approach the entanglement of the social and the corporeal, such that we might appreciate the exhausted bodies implicated in mobile working practices as a cultural product, rather than an individual malady. 37
The significance of exhaustion for cultural geography is that it acknowledges corporeal existence as always exposed and therefore vulnerable to the multiple pressures of the world. Heeding exhaustion’s limit qualities, 38 therefore, requires appreciating the body as ‘a vulnerable, fleshy decomposable substance’ 39 where its limits are entangled with its temporalities. Inspired by the ethical questions that arise through Levinas’s thought, Harrison foregrounds vulnerability as an important concept for cultural geographers interested in thinking about the exposed nature of corporeality. 40 We develop this idea of corporeal vulnerability through the themes of compression and decompression in terms that help us think through the differential affectivity of exposure to the other. Unpacking this affectivity through a temporal sensitivity, we highlight that while ‘corporeal capacities to sense rhythms opens possibilities to illustrate the reciprocal relationship between bodies’, 41 it can also bring about discord which has implications for mobile working families.
Mobile working practices: three exhausting environments
In this section, we explore how exhaustion becomes palpable in three distinctive sites implicated in mobile working practice. First, we consider the rhythmic experiences of mobile workers engaged in the Australian resource sector, an industry with particular rhythms upon which the Australian economy is heavily dependent. 42 Indeed, the accumulations of capital and corresponding exhaustion of bodies and environments through resource extraction is, of course, a global phenomenon, giving our analysis salience beyond Australia. While geographic research has been conducted on mobile work in the Australian context, its scope has been limited to consideration of socio-economic wellbeing, 43 effects on single regional towns, 44 socio-economic and demographic effects 45 as well as representational studies of positive 46 and negative impacts 47 of such labour practices on individual and family wellbeing.
Second, we explore the rhythms of partners left at home. Research has found that the prolonged absence of a mobile worker from the family home places an unequal share of responsibility on the partner managing home and children, as well as maintaining relationships with family and friends, 48 an inequality exacerbated if that partner also works outside of the home. 49 Furthermore, there is a highly gendered division of labour in the resource sector which dominates mobile work in Australia as historically it ‘has the lowest level of female workforce participation of all Australian industries, comprising fewer than nine percent’. 50 This is perhaps not surprising given that commuting itself is recognised as a practice that is not gender equal. 51 As such, mobile work has produced a ‘gendered division of labour’ 52 which, in the resource sector, has resulted in ‘masculinities that tend to perpetuate traditional gender roles reflected in divisions of labour and in workplace cultures’. 53 Drawing on empirical material collected with partners connected to various mobile work sectors including resource extraction, this section speaks to the broader experience of being left behind.
Our aim here is not to offer a ‘representative’ study of mobile working life. The selection of participants included is based on interviews with resource worker households that articulated exhaustion most explicitly. In the first and second sections, we explore material from interviews with those mobile workers and partners who reflected on their everyday rhythmic experiences entangled with exhaustion as part of a wider project on mobile work. These sections outline experiences of blue- and white-collar workers employed across night and day shifts both on and offshore, as well as partners working within and as well as outside of the home. These two sections set the scene for the third which considers what can happen when the qualitatively different rhythms of each site come together upon a resource worker’s return home. Such reunions can bring about arrhythmias leading to the production of collective exhaustion which challenges perceptions of the home as a safe enclosure for families.
Mobile working practices: ‘you’re worn out’
. . . you’ve been working 12, 13-hour days. You’ve been living in a camp. So yeah you get home and you know it’s the weekend and everyone, normal people that live in Perth they want to do stuff on the weekend but sometimes it can be a bit of a struggle just because you’re worn out, you’re tired.
Here, Bill, a mining operator in his late 30s who travels between Perth and the north of Western Australia, doing an 8 days on, 6 days off ‘swing’, draws our attention to the accumulative pressure of his job. As a way of understanding the multiplicity of sites and practices that give rise to mobile workers’ exhausted structure of feeling, in this subsection, we highlight the rhythms of compression and decompression that are related to three aspects of mobile workers’ experiences: the commute, the workplace rosters and timetables, and the labour itself. We do this by drawing out symptoms of exhaustion reflected upon in interviews. Such symptoms, Schaffner explains, become palpable physically as ‘fatigue, lassitudes, lethargy and weakness’, 54 but can also be manifest ‘on an affective, emotional, and spiritual level, [in the form of] weariness, disillusionment, apathy, hopelessness, and a lack of motivation’. 55
The first aspect of exhaustion concerns the pressures induced by mobility. For all our research participants, their mobile working practices commence with a long-distance commute. These commutes are rhythmic in so far as they have repetitive and durational qualities set in motion by company rosters. Furthermore, they require engagement with various forms of transport as Sam explained in relation to her production operator husband’s long-distance commute: . . . he’s on for two weeks on days, comes home for two weeks, goes away for two weeks and works a night shift and then comes home for four weeks but there’s also travel days in there so really he ends up, when he has travel days he works for 16 days and he’s home for 13, 12 days . . . Because my husband is home in remote Western Australia he has to drive for three and a half hours to get to Perth which is the city he flies out of [and because] they have a duty of care with regards to fatigue, they put him up in a hotel for a night and he flies out first thing the next morning and then walks straight into a day’s work, 12-hour day of work.
Here, Sam summarises some of the ‘dressage’ rhythms 56 particular to the resource sector which discipline her husband’s oscillating absence and presence from the family home in Margaret River. These rhythms are social, imposed by ‘top down forms of power’ 57 such as state and capital, 58 which ‘socialise’ 59 bodies or ‘break them in’ as if a non-human animal. 60 Sam intimates that not only does the travel deplete her husband’s bodily capacities, but work practices which demand bodies immediately segue straight into a 12-hour shift, exacerbate bodily pressures of the journey by not allowing time for decompression.
The second aspect of exhaustion, then, concerns the pressures induced by rosters and timetables that impose further rhythms of ‘dressage’. Once at the ‘remote’ site, working bodies are ‘compressed’ further through the regimented routines of the ‘camp’. Sam continues, outlining what she understands of her husband’s working rhythms set in motion by this pressurising temporal organisation: I think he wakes up around four-ish to try and fit a meal in and a shower and get ready for work to catch a bus, to go to the plant, do a 12-hour day, jump on a bus, try and jump into a mess hall with 3000 other people to try and eat, to jump onto the internet along with 3000 other people at the same time to try and talk to his family so he’s not missing out on seeing his daughter . . . and then he goes to sleep and starts it all again.
The sense of bodily pressure is accentuated here through Sam’s fast-paced, gapless phrasing of her husband’s schedule. This pressurising organisation of the camp was unpacked by electrical engineer Frank, who undertakes a roster of 15 days at work and 13 days at home. He reflected, going to work in the morning on the bus, you can sort of feel like it’s a – not punishment, but you can feel like it’s going to prison sort of thing, . . . sometimes when you’re just doing the same eat, sleep, work, repeat sort of thing, you get into the what am I doing it all for?
As socialising instruments of dressage, rosters and timetables use the linear rhythms of clock time to bend the cyclical rhythms of the body, enabling a ‘repetition pushed to the point of automatism’. 61 Such rhythmic instruments dictate repetitive routines that form the spatial and temporal norms of sites where mobile workers eat, sleep, communicate and undertake their labour. At sites of resource extraction, then, ‘[r]hythm appears as time regulated, governed by rational laws, but in contact with what is least rational in human being, the lived, the carnal, the body’. 62
As Frank highlights, the pressure of such routines can be their tedium, further signalling their rhythmic quality given that ‘for there to be rhythm, there must be repetition in a movement, but not just any repetition. The monotonous return of the same, the self-identical . . .’. 63 While it is possible for workers to punctuate rhythms of institutionalised time through communication with distant family, the ‘remoteness’ of work sites and the scramble for Internet connection limits worker agency 64 in this regard. Ensuing undisturbed monotony suggests the relational import of rhythm for wellbeing as Frank’s socialised working practice becomes meaningless when not interspersed with the rhythms of home, indicating the isolation of dressage rhythms compress mobile workers.
The third aspect of exhaustion for workers concerns the pressures induced by the large swathes of time undertaking labour itself. As indicated by our participants’ reflections above, the trend is upwards of 12 hours per shift. While some workers engage in project management and other white-collar roles that require cognitive energy, others undertake manual labour. As such, employees rhythmically encounter resources such as oil, iron ore, gold, coal as well as the infrastructures required for their extraction. Peter is a driller in his early 30s and has been working at an offshore site since he left school. He reflects that . . . everything is steel, and it’s bloody heavy . . . So yeah, it’s hard on your body. I was doing some work last night. I’ve got sore elbows. They’re a bit tender today, a bit tight. The back gets sore, but I wouldn’t change it for a minute.
Here, Peter draws our attention to the embodied and muscular pressures required of labourers to move and haul steel at this offshore site. Such labour exerts the body physically as it is pushed to the point that somatic feeling of being ‘sore’ and ‘tight’ becomes sensations of exhaustion through which he remembers yesterday’s toil.
Through these participants’ reflections on the felt bodily dimensions of mobile work, we can discern how the time-space of moving to and from work sites, the effect of inhabiting rosters and timetables, and associated labouring, provides a means to speculate on the temporality of exhaustion. The regimented time-space bracketing of eating and resting provides scant opportunities for decompression and, as such, re-works bodily rhythms so that they are in-sync with the demands of a camp. The fleshy, vulnerable materiality of the body to which our research participants allude highlights a changing bodily bearing as various forms of compression cause pressure to accumulate. In the next empirical section, we work through fieldwork that details how life at home unfolds and where rather different symptoms of exhaustion emerge in the absence of a mobile worker.
Life at home: ‘it’s just a crazy juggle’
. . . when Stefan is away – it’s just a crazy juggle, because then I just have to do all the shopping, all the cooking. He usually cooks when he’s here. Because I’m doing all the food prep and all the picking up and dropping off the kids – and they do a bunch of extracurricular activities. Because in Broome, school finishes at two. So you have this whole afternoon with kids, to do something with them . . . So I just run around like a crazy person when Stefan is not here. I think my mental health definitely will go down when he’s not here. I find it unpleasant. I find it hard work. Just living on coffee, like I’ve got a coffee drip in my arm. I really don’t find it fun. I pretty much cry when he leaves, and then have to rally myself together, ‘you can do this’.
In this interview extract, Bea, a part-time freelance journalist, explains her experience of being left behind carrying out the processual tasks of home-making including child care. As feminist geographers have long observed, such unpaid labour can be physically exhausting, 65 insofar as ‘[h]ome is as much as process as it is a thing’, 66 a process that absorbs ‘considerable emotional and physical energy’. 67 The busyness that Bea intimates highlights how the everyday 68 pressures that compress her are intrinsically related to Stefan’s absence, since she now undertakes a multitude of tasks and their various temporalities alone.
Bea’s use of the phrase ‘crazy juggle’ indicates that part of the bodily pressure here might be derived from a feeling of not quite being in control. This, she suggests, is a fragmented and unpredictable situation that involves the emotions and temporalities of children and as such is qualitatively different to the pressures of the institutionalised, emotionally lacking 69 resource extraction site where there is little opportunity for deviation from regimented rhythm. In contrast, ‘family temporalities are not unidirectional’ 70 meaning that intensification emerges here from ‘pulling [Bea] in different temporal directions’, 71 requiring the use of emotion management to handle the ensuing ‘craziness’. This aspect of (unpaid) labour conducted in relation to – but at a distance from – sites of mobile work highlights a gendered inequality that is intensified by Stefan’s absence.
Significant in this regard is how the development of fixed routines becomes a method of decompression for women left behind, rather than a source of compression. Establishing a fixed rhythm becomes a way of managing the energy required to undertake tasks of home making alone. As psychologist Rumina suggests below, this can require multiple lifestyle rhythms depending on a mobile workers’ absence or presence: I’ve got to have two routines. I’ve got to have a routine where it’s like ‘I’m by myself’, and then there’s another routine of ‘okay, I’ve got to do this, this and this, and think about what this other person is doing . . . You’ve got to be able to have that sort of flexibility to change between two completely different lifestyles.
Other research participants with children, however, intimated that the routines of everyday life are more fixed, as one mobile worker Frank, father of three, explained reflecting on the challenges he faces upon returning home. This challenge is located: In my wife’s kitchen – I go and try and make breakfast, and I’ve got to fit back in to the routine. She’s got a really good routine set up . . . I try to follow as good as I can behind her. It is difficult, trying to work in and around the same kitchen, and adapting back to it.
Frank’s reflection on routine indicates awareness of ‘the body to sense rhythm and anticipate certain communicative patterns [that] operat[e]’ 72 in ways, which can help him reconnect with the household’s pulse. Reflecting on the need to ‘adapt back in’, Frank intimates a sensitivity to his wife’s ‘time-space routine’ which, Seamon argues, instigates a ‘proper sequence and rhythm’ 73 that can enable work to be conducted ‘quickly and automatically’ 74 reducing effort. The time-space routine of this kitchen, then, is one that emerges as a technique to prevent the compression that singlehanded parenting in can set in motion as indicated by Bea in the opening quote.
Despite the potential of a fixed routine to alleviate compression experienced in the home, the absence of a mobile worker can produce a rhythmic tipping point. Frank went on to explain that, ‘after fourteen days, my wife is about to pull her hair out’, a strong indication that an intense exhaustion is experienced in this home. It is a reminder that duration ‘undoes as well as makes’ 75 and ‘rhythm brings with it a differentiated time, a qualified duration’. 76 Here, the sense of compression created by the mobile worker’s absence is felt differently in the family home depending on duration.
Our participants’ reflections strongly indicate that the home environment in their partner’s absence is a site of exhaustion. The sense of compression felt by partners left behind is largely an effect of the ways in which home becomes a site characterised by the juggling of extra demands alone. As the reflections indicate, the intensified pressures of the home environment during a partner’s absence become felt as exhaustion. It is not surprising that a mobile worker’s return home can be eagerly anticipated. However, as the next section explains, such reunions can themselves induce exhaustion of a different kind.
Exhausting exposures: ‘. . . it just always implodes. Always. Without fail’
After seven (working) nights, honestly I do not talk to him about anything serious or I just try to tiptoe around him ‘til Thursday because he is not human until Thursday. He just can’t function. Like he functions, he’s here but he is so irritable, grumpy. So he doesn’t come good ‘til Thursday and then he leaves on Monday . . . But when he comes home that first morning and we’re all together in the house, the four of us, it is hell. Honestly it is door slamming, screaming, yelling. It’s horrendous. Tears in the car because it’s just, ‘oh shoot me now’. I just always wait for that day to be over because, the four of us back in the house together you know we do things one way, then he’s home and he expects things to be done differently and . . . it’s exhausting because you just say things you don’t, shouldn’t say and you’re just, you all feel like crap because he’s just come home so everyone’s excited. You know we’re happy to have him home but then it just always implodes. Always. Without fail.
Here, Mary, a bank manager turned-mature student, describes a home environment that emerges in response to her husband Tom’s return from a roster cycle of 1 week ‘on’ working night shifts as a truck driver at a coal mining camp, to 1 week ‘off’ at the family home in Townsville. No longer in isolation, the rhythms of camp and home collide producing an arrhythmia with emotional repercussions. As Lefebvre explains, arrhythmia occurs because ‘there is no identical absolute repetition indefinitely . . . there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive’. 77 In this section, we work through the exhaustions highlighted in Mary’s testimony by attending to the arrhythmias experienced and their implications for theorisations of home.
The conflicts that Mary intimates routinely arise in the home, align with the findings of psychologists who argue reunions within mobile working practices may be eagerly anticipated 78 (along with partings), but can be the most difficult times for couples and families. 79 As Mary suggests, such reunions can be shrouded in an emotional violence symptomatic of Lefebvre’s recognition that ‘when rhythms are discordant, there is suffering’. 80
Tom reaches a limit after flying home from the more physically pressuring night shift where his bodily capacities and circadian rhythms have been worked and re-worked in a regimented context. This limit is demonstrated in his inability to function constructively, evidenced by his ‘grumpy’ disposition. Here, we find this working body has moved beyond tiredness, ‘a dialectic of work and productivity: one rests in order to return to activity’, 81 to a dissolution of the self that is part and parcel of exhaustion. Indeed, for Pelbart, the figure of the exhausted human takes as its ‘typical posture . . . not the man lying down but [that] of the insomniac, sitting up, his head between his hands, the amnesiac witness’. 82 Tom, then, has moved beyond the capacity to find immediate solace in rest. This results in a quality of feeling which, ‘as a peaking of intensity can lead to complete [a] breakdown, 83 that is registered emotionally.
In recognition of Tom’s reduced capacity for action, Mary reflects on her attempts to engage in emotion management insofar as she undertakes practices designed to support the emotional needs of her husband, keeping conversation light while tentatively moving about the house. Such behaviour responds to his irritability, a characteristic of exhaustion if we consider Pelbart’s recognition that ‘[t]he tongue is the first to disappear’ 84 in experiences of this structure of feeling. As such, the affective quality of Tom’s exhaustion has a form of power over the household during this transitional period. As Mary acknowledges, they feel both ‘happy’ but also exhausted by his presence.
Another mobile resource worker, Gavin, who undertakes various white-collar roles echoed Mary’s observations while reflecting on his process of coming home: I’d finish work generally at 3:00 on a Thursday and then my flight would be about 5:00, 5:30 . . . and then you’re on a two-hour flight so you’re already kind of tired and you’re worn out . . . So you get to the airport, you know, and there was times where I’d get to the airport and this should be a very happy moment where I’m just like, ‘I can’t be dealing with this stuff’, because your mind is somewhere else. It’s like too much at once. So, then you’re starting off on a bad foot, get back to the house and I’m already snappy and it’s like, ‘I just need time to decompress’.
Highlighting his emotional state, Gavin’s statement ‘[i]t’s like too much at once’ suggests that upon finishing work, the transition from the resource camps ‘dressage’ through the pulsing spaces of the airport, aeroplane and finally home produces a sensory onslaught that his already ‘worn out’ bodily capacities cannot deal with. We suggest that a mobile workers’ emotionally negative disposition on returning home is not simply attributable to exhaustion induced by the work environment, but it also results from exposure to what Simmel terms ‘violent stimuli’
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experienced as a jolting break from the space-time rhythms of the mining camp. Reflecting on the capacity of a city’s sensory stimuli to exhaust, Simmel unpacks his thinking around ‘violent stimuli’ as follows: . . . stimuli, through the rapidity and the contradictoriness of their shifts, force the nerves to make such violent responses, tear them about so abruptly that they exhaust their last reserves of strength and, remain in the same milieu, do not have time for new reserves to form.
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It is through the visceral experience of exposure to rapidly changing arrhythmic stimuli that another moment of corporeal depletion emerges for mobile workers as travelling bodies encompass a ‘sensuous fleshiness [which] is vulnerable to the processes and events that are immanent to travel’. 87
Significantly, for the family in Townsville, exhaustion is collectively experienced in the space of the home as Tom’s body, moulded through camp ‘dressage’, has repercussions for rest of the family. As Mary intimates, it is not only Tom’s use of negative words that causes disruption. Comments that reflect on everyday practices such as ‘we do things one way’ suggest Tom’s return home can be understood as a rhythmic disjuncture that returns effort to the comings and goings of family life. However, Mary’s elaborative comment ‘he’s home and he expects things to be done differently’ also indicates an attempt at change and control. For Pain, 88 the exertion of control through emotional registers is a form of violence. 89 We suggest that incoming effect of camp ‘dressage’ creates a gap in the synchronisation of the household’s rhythms which instigates a disconnection between worker and family that hinders communication. 90
Within this home, Tom becomes the figure of the ‘other’ insofar as his exposure to the time-space experience of the coal mine and the jolt of leaving the rhythms that he comes to embody, affects his bodily and emotional bearing, exposing the rest of the family to his alterity. That is, encompassed amid his corporeality is ‘the force of the outside’. 91 This acknowledgement helps us to emphasise the inextricable relationship between the home and the mine site. Harrison’s reworked understanding of dwelling is useful in this regard. Where dwelling, following Heidegger, has often been understood in terms of processes of enclosure, Harrison contends that enclosure is always a response to exposure, in other words, an inherent openness to the ‘incoming of the other’. 92 As such, we suggest that the pulse of mobile work rhythms brought home alongside the depletions sustained by workers at mine sites problematises their positionality as ‘insiders’ within the home as they are rendered out of synch with its collective spatial experience. As Mary’s testimony explains, this ‘without fail’ creates a period of tension made palpable through heightened sensory stimulation. A pressurising affective atmosphere emerges, created in part through the grating noises and violent stimuli of ‘door slamming’, ‘screaming’, ‘yelling’ and ‘tears’ which create an emotional strain which Mary concludes as ‘exhausting’. Such affective registers highlight that though there may be corporeal capacity to sense rhythm, relationships of reciprocity between bodies and space 93 take time.
To return to the article’s opening quotation, it is perhaps not surprising that some mobile worker families develop a responsive routine that isolates mobile worker and household from each other during a homecoming. We argue that this spatial separation, or ‘quarantining’, enables decompression to occur. The notion of decompression as a necessary transition from work to home has been given attention in psychology by Maslach 94 who recognised that people working in emotional and demanding environments need to unwind before moving into the pressures of their private life. Working through responses to burnout by health professionals, Maslach, together with Jackson describe a need for engagement in a ‘decompression routine’ as ‘a time in which [health] practitioners can engage in some solitary activity in order to unwind, relax, and take their minds off the events of the day’. 95 Duration is important to this conceptualisation of decompression, as it occurs in the time it takes to have a bath, a nap, do some exercise, read or meditate. For our research participants, however, ‘coming good’ can take days, suggesting that the duration of time away from home, along with exposures that re-work bodily rhythms, effects the length of time family and worker rhythms require to syncopate in isolation.
Conclusion
Responding to a relative lack of attention on mobile resource worker households, our article has explored the pressures experienced by our research participants through a focus rhythm and arrhythmia. In so doing, we have explored exhaustion as a structure of feeling that is central to understanding the in-situ, bodily enablements and constraints of mobile worker households. Drawing attention to the temporalities of rhythms and arrhythmias that exhaust, we have unpacked the ways in which the pressures of everyday life accumulate for mobile worker households. We suggest that the voluminous concepts of compression and decompression can help to describe the felt, oscillatory qualities of becoming exhausted. Decompression is particularly useful for analysing the various and differently situated tactics employed by our participants in response to their felt bodily limits.
Focusing on such limits through the concept of exhaustion, our article has also responded to recent invitations within cultural geography to consider more comprehensively the ‘less-than-human geographies’ 96 of bodily depletion and degradation. As we have explained, exhaustion is a helpful way of thinking about diverse forms of bodily pressures that are experienced by differently situated members of mobile worker households. However, rather than evaluating the impact of mobile working practices in terms of positive and negative effects, our article has drawn attention to the overlooked temporalities of enablement and constraint. In so doing, we have closely traced the temporal qualities of exhaustion offered by workers and partners who comprise the households that took part in this research.
Through their testimonies, our research participants drew attention to the rhythms of exhaustion forged through the coming and going of the mobile worker. Attending to these rhythms attunes us to the ways in which exhaustion is felt collectively yet experienced differently by worker and partner in different spaces and at different times. Acknowledging these divergent experiences, we have drawn out the everyday complexities of exhaustion in terms of its differential evaluations. Such complexity comes to the fore when, for example, we consider the diverse participant reflections on the exhaustion of physical labour compared with processes of home making. This complexity is further complicated in the reunion within the home environment, where differently exhausted bodies encounter one another with ensuing volatile effects. Focusing on the various rhythms of exhaustion has enabled us to unravel multiple space-times where wellbeing is compromised.
Using rhythm to probe exhaustion as a structure of feeling with deleterious effects for mobile worker households, we have demonstrated that a focus on temporality is a productive way of tracing intimacy-geopolitics. That is, we have traced the continuities that exist between the capitalist activity of resource extraction and the multiple everyday depletions experienced by mobile worker households. Not only are contemporary, intimate, everyday lives fuelled and facilitated by the resources extracted at such sites, the ‘remote’ camps of resource extraction are themselves enabled by the changeability of bodily and subsequently household rhythms. We argue such entanglement is vital to acknowledge for it is part of the way in which the politics of resource extraction extends into, and relies on, the most intimate environments of family life. In spotlighting the ‘leakages’ between home and work sites, we have also suggested that there is a significant degree of gendered inequality within mobile working life.
Echoing Pain and Staheli’s 97 argument that peace in the home is a precarious and fragile achievement, we have described how home for mobile worker households is repeatedly negotiated. Such negotiation emerges in the relations between the pressurising dressage rhythms dictated by resource company rosters and the time-space rhythms used as techniques of decompression during mobile worker absence. Highlighting the exhausting effects of rhythmic discord, our article demonstrates that time and labour is required to develop reciprocal rhythms within the home to enable a communicative, collective environment. As such, the spatiality of the home is not necessarily a safe enclosure or an environment where mobile worker families feel most ‘oriented’. 98 Instead, it can be an environment that is perpetually exposed to the otherness of resource extraction.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are sincerely grateful to the four anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments helped us to strengthen our paper and to Editor-in-Chief Dydia DeLyser for her thorough and generous editorial assistance.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research forms part of the Australian Research Council funded project ‘Living Apart Together: How Mobile Work is Transforming Homes’ (grant no. DP160103771).
