Refracted Input

Pascal Chabot, Global burn-out. Paris: Presses universitaires de France (PUF), 2013

I was so impressed by the arguments detailed in this review by Stéphanie Favreau of a new book by Pascal Chabot that I am posting up a quick translation. These ideas tie in extremely well with my own observations and sentiments in relation to the current situation in the higher education sector as well as other sectors. Chabot provides a very useful analytical framework to help understand and gain some distance from what is currently occurring. I am looking forward to reading his book.

You can find the original review in French on the nonfiction.fr site

Global burn-out : An ideology of the absurd syndrome

The Cholera of modern times

Let’s begin by drawing attention to this book’s style, a style which is both fluid and precise. This book allows us to make sense of the various elements that form the core of that complex and multifactorial phenomenon which is burnout. The first pages surprise the reader with their novel like narrative. The detailed description of a woman parked in an emergency highway layby after suddenly bursting into tears at the wheel of her car, is reminiscent of scenes from Jean Giono’s The Horseman on the roof which depicts emptied bodies, distorted by cholera, their disease oozing from every pore. We see a similarity in style but also perhaps more fundamentally, it is tempting to see burnout as the cholera of modern times.

Contemporary acedia

The author begins by offering a quick overview of the history of burnout in setting up a definition. We learn that although the contemporary psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Freudenberger was the first to introduce this term into medical language, there are much older traces of this phenomenon in other domains. It is echoed in the acedia that affected the most devoted of monks and theologians. Acedia is particularly well-chosen as it illustrates the paradoxical nature of burnout, namely the fact that it is the most fervent defenders of a cause who eventually exhaust themselves through their very dedication. Acedia for the religious “is the Our Fathers that can no longer be uttered, the forgotten Hail Marys, the genuflections you don’t get up from”. In the same way, according to Freudenberger’s observations, it is the doctors and nurses who after having believed for so long in the value of their commitment, one fine morning simply cannot get up  and go to work.

If there is so much discussion around burnout today, it is because it no longer affects just those in the caring professions looking after those, that an ideology we will look at later on, defines as “weak links”. Burnout affects the very pillars of the liberal system, “the meritocratic battlers, the heroes of rewarded effort”. If burnout is of concern, it is because it represents a “challenge to dominant values: it generates new atheists in relation to techno-capitalism”.

Mechanisms of the absurd

To try and explain this paradox, Pascal Chabot distinguishes three intertwined characteristics of our postmodern era.

Burnout is perfectionism that has run out of steam. Global economic development is largely based on the ideology of the self-made man. In this characteristic liberal archetype, the individual is encouraged to transcend him or herself by chasing the mirage that he or she will reach full self-realisation through work. In short, professional success has replaced salvation. Given the rarity of the best places, you have to elbow your way through the crowds to win. Engaged in this competition, whether they like it not, people throw themselves into the fray sacrificing a whole part of themselves on the altar of work. Once embarked on your career it is not enough to maintain cruising speed, more and more has to be done because the competition never sleeps and profit waits for no man. Perfectionism in the service of such an abyss is transformed into a veritable regulatory nightmare.

Burnout is also a humanism that has run out of steam. Indeed, to keep up the pace, more direct means need to be employed to encourage the race for recognition. Thus every enterprise worthy of its name, has two major components at its disposal: a human resources department and a management team. Of course, the human resources department is an essential element for the survival of the company, but what the author criticises here is the slippage from a figurative sense of the term to a sense that transforms the formula into a true oxymoron. Indeed, in the postmodern era, “the human is a resource: which disgorges its best energies, its sweat, its time. It is, in every way, supernumerary, and therefore replaceable”. Human resources departments are responsible for identifying the best stallions in the line up of the race for profit, and for weeding out the lame and other washouts, while the management team deals with those who are still on track. To give us an idea of the completely dead souls that such a system generates, the author gives the floor to the manager: “I have fulfilled my mission. I managed by terror, I singled out the weak links. There were indeed suicides, but what could I do about it?”

Burnout can also be defined as a race for recognition – this is the hidden motor in this infernal machine. Indeed, “human beings, constrained by necessity to do violence to their own needs, wants to see their sacrifice recognised”. They are willing to sacrifice themselves, but a minimum of recognition must be given in return. The height of cynicism is that it is precisely because they have this all too human feeling that people are grateful and will persevere in their efforts. On this point, Pascal Chabot also cites Axel Honneth who understood only too well that “recognition can be an ideological weapon which, in the guise of flattery, confines individuals to a subordinate function in order to prevent them from escaping”.

What burnout reveals through these three characteristics is that basically not even those most dedicated to their work are dupes of the non-sense of service which drains their forces. Burnout means that flattery and smiles are no longer sufficient to hide the vertigo of the logic of profit. Only sensed, not explicitly spoken or thought, absurdity is lived and somatized. “Bodies are smart. They sometimes know more about our needs than our blinkered psyches”. Burnout tells us that we cannot ignore the need that everyone has to have time for themselves. No number of fetishes can help, we have to live.

If this phenomenon has come to undermine the body, it is also perhaps because there is no space to express the absurd, as culture itself has also entered into the race for profit. In this sense one can only observe “the false promises of the knowledge economy”. Capitalist logic can be described as absurd in that nothing seems to be able to assign limits to profit. This logic of enterprise, has now spread its tentacles into people’s private lives and leisure itself and any kind of search for meaning have now become profitable. You are sold everything, right down to recipes for happiness.

What burn-out reveals, is a rootless form of existentialism where “there is an immense tribe of people who feel with ready-made feelings, […] think with ready-made ideas, […] who want with ready-made wills”.

Ideological roots

In an effort to conceal this incendiary spread through the postmodern world, some claim that burn-out applies only to “the weak” and other “maladjusted individuals”. In short, they take refuge behind that other ideological weapon of the pseudo-Darwinian argument of the survival of the fittest. This necessarily involves collateral damage. “But this is not the right axiom. In reality, humans are plastic beings par excellence.” Humans adapt to new situations and ethnological museums are bulging with the remains of this human diversity. In every civilization we find forms of spirituality and culture which respond to other requirements besides those of simple adaptation to the environment. This is because adapting and controlling one’s environment is one thing, “but one must also in addition realise oneself”. Humans are those beings who needs to find meaning in what they do with their life, they need to project themselves towards a horizon that transcends everyday concerns to give them confidence in themselves. When the logic of the absurd ends up covering every base, the system goes into crisis.

Thus “humanity groans, almost crushed under the weight of progress”. Technical advances that were meant to liberate us now serve a logic of production cut off from any sensible relation to reality. Work, which should allow people to free themselves from the grip of nature to devote themselves to “more interesting metaphysical and more caring purposes,” has become a trap no one can avoid and that nothing seems to be able to undo.

Finally, the author makes another interesting observation in relation to this cult of performance rooted as it is in the patriarchal model. Burnout takes on a particular dimension when it comes to women. There are numerous instances of burnout in the areas of professional care and education – positions occupied primarily by women. Burnout most often affects white-collar battlers. A double trap opens up here. The cliché is that women turn to these professions because they are naturally gentler, more compassionate, more dedicated. In reality, this is a historical myth and “this naturalism is controlled by more or less understood corporate interests”. But the tragedy of this situation is that somehow women have allowed themselves to be caught in this trap, interpreting their behaviour in the light of this reading.

The author’s emphasis on the issue of “Women’s burnout” is interesting in that it illuminates the overall situation. Indeed, just as no-one is responsible for anyone else’s situation but still contributes to the survival of patriarchal values, no postmodern individual is responsible for anybody else’s situation even though he or she continually endorses it. It is of course tempting to apportion blame but in reality everyone is “half victim, half guilty, like everyone else”.

Psychologists say burn-out is an endogenous reaction, sociologists that it is an exogenous phenomenon. But “this is where the relational philosophical approach enriches the debate. For philosophy, it is the relationship between the individual and the social which is the problem. It takes two to build a relationship”. Of course both types of factors may be intertwined but burnout is not visited on people from above, neither does it come up from below, it appears on this edge of existence where people strive to contribute as much as take from their environment. Burnout as a logic of the absurd corresponds at least to some extent with Camus’ famous definition: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”.

Towards a technological pact

The author proposes two things in taking the first steps towards the elimination of “the burn-out machine”.

First, we need to seriously “consider creating penalties for personnel management techniques that use fear and bullying as strategies”.

Next, we need to develop a pact or “technological contract” which regulates rationales with no other ends than themselves and puts them back in their place.

The author’s analysis of burnout indicates two possible paths of evolution. There is the path taken by the post humanists who invent technologies capable of making a machine that doesn’t call on “the bureau of metaphysical claims”. The other path accepts humans with all their flaws, or rather accepts a vision of humans where the need for time and the search for meaning are essential conditions. In short, “there is no solution because there is no problem, but only life which continues on through the generations and which is the raw material for all humanisms”.