Adam Conrad
Final Paper Draft

Note: This is in really, really rough shape and a lot of it is me rambling on and reminding myself of places where I need to insert either some more research or support my claims in the literature. I wanted to have more done by now but it just wasn’t feasible. I have a pretty good idea what I’m going to be doing up until the final analysis and have a significant amount of reading and historical research ahead of me for the final piece. The main things I’d like to help with is overall form and structure, advice on tying the concept of burnout to narrative, and help with the actual case study (not sure what is feasible in the time left this semester, especially since I have not yet started interviews for my qualitative project that would also be useful here). And whatever else you note. I’m not concerned with grammar and whatnot as of now since that will be ironed out in the final edit and much of this will likely look different and be rewritten by that time.

I understand rhetoric as making things matter. This might be through oral discourse, non-verbal communication, internal narratives, arrangement of space and place, or through written, illustrated, accidentally emblazoned, ink on paper text. Or something else. In any case, intended or not, rhetoric induces agreement or disagreement, identification or disidentification, cooperation or competition. In other words, it does. It is not a thing but a process.

For now, I am interested in doing some rhetoric that aids and abets environmental and environmental justice activists (I make this distinction because these two sets of activists have slightly different goals, both, to me, valid. From here on out, unless clarity is necessary, I will refer to all as environmental activists or simply activists). In doing this rhetoric as I write this and I’ll be doing some rhetoric as I research and compose this study.

A question that is supposed to come before deciding which group to study is this: what communicative or rhetorical phenomenon do I want to study and why? I also must answer a number of other questions my choice of theoretical tradition, particular contemporary scholarly conversation, the gap I hope to fill, and so on. These, to me, come secondary to my primary concerns about the future of life on this planet and the future of committed activists who share my concern. I do not want to study this group because I think that this is a “site” where my research questions can be answered. I want to study this group because this group is my own and my research questions arise from a desire to serve the interests of my community.

And so the heart of my inquiry beats in unison with the hearts of environmental activists. We ache for the fight, for the win, for the inevitable change that is to come, one way or another, as a result of or in spite of our efforts. The challenges are many, the victories few. And this is perhaps (but remains to be confirmed) the core of the problem I set out to study; the problem of attrition, turnover, resentment, fatigue and sometimes transcendence; a problem brought to my attention within the first month of my own activism and spoken about many times since; the problem of activist burnout.

The concept of burnout has existed for a long time. A New York Times historical search of the terms “burnout” and “burnt out” produced thousands of articles. I chose to keep my search limited to the New York Times so that I would have a more manageable sample (as opposed to all publications indexed by my University’s library). The first instance of the term “burnt out” appeared in a “Miscellaneous Items” article[1] in 1857 referring to a fire that had destroyed some buildings: “The firms burnt out were…” followed by a list of businesses. The next appeared in an 1858 article titled “Long Island” in the following sentence: “Before the flames could be stayed, the interior of the building was burnt out.” (Long Island, 1858). The next appeared in an article titled “Death by Burning – Probable Murder” published in 1860: “After the door was burst open she was discovered lying upon a bed, her arms and legs burnt off, eyes burnt out, but the body uninjured” (Death, 1860). The use of the term to refer to the effects of fire persists even today (Need to finish this search later).

The term “burnout” first appears in an 1860 article titled “Scientific Notes”: “The apparatus does not easily get out of order, and the plates to which the heat is applied, being covered with water, do not burn out like the plates of hot air.” Whereas the past-tense of the term (“burnt out”) tended to refer explicitly to fire, the present-tense tended to refer to either engines, electrical wires, or rockets. The first occurrence of “burnout” that refers to electrical wires appears in 1955: “A feeder cable that burned out Friday at Little and Evans Streets in Brooklyn was restored to service yesterday noon, the Consolidated Edison Company reported ….one burnout remains to be fixed” (One Brooklyn Line Out, 1955). In 1956 the first reference to rockets appears: “It will be attained at the rocket’s burnout point, when the rocket’s fuel is exhausted” (Hillaby, 1956). In this case, the term changes from an explicit reference to fire and shifts to refer to the emptying of a rocket’s supply of fuel. Since fuel is burned, the context of “fire” remains. When burnout refers to electrical wires, “fire” is also implied. The “fire” had the effect of rendering the lines unusable until Consolidated Edison comes out to fix them. This is a similar context to the reference to engine burnout in that an engine burns out and becomes unusable until fixed. For both of these contexts, the problem can be fixed.

Though it is implied that electrical and engine burnout can be fixed, the references to actual fires do not imply that the problem can be fixed. Whether it is burned buildings or burnt out eyes, the damage is irreversible. It seems that both senses of the term are used today amongst activists (NEED TO DO THE REST OF THE HISTORICAL RESEARCH STILL) . For some burnout is a monster always looming in the future (reference conversation with Diana), waiting to strike and inflict the person with this condition. In this sense, burnout is predictable, preventable, and treatable (I should probably flesh this out more or save it for later). Activists can do things, in this narrative, to take care of the problem. For others, burnout is final. Once feel burnt out, they quit. (So not sure how to work this out since this is me interpreting the actions and stories of people I’ve seen come and go from activism and I don’t have interviews yet).

In 1961 Graham Greene published A Burnt-Out Case, a novel about an architect that is no longer able to find meaning in the world or his work and lives in a leper colony in the Congo. According to Robert Gorham Davis, in a review of Greene’s novel:

The somewhat forbidding title of Graham Greene’s new novel is a term used for those victims of leprosy who can be cured because the disease has eaten about all that it wants – toes, ears, fingers. They no longer suffer the excruciating pains of those who undergo cure with their bodies intact. Pain is the alternative to mutilation. (Davis, 1961)

And later:

Querry is himself a burnt-out case. He is no longer moved to design a building or sleep with a woman. His love of women was really self-love, and his artistic self-expression was the kind that consumes the self. Even when he was creating modern churches, Querry’s art was inhuman, a matter of space and light and textures, with no feeling either for people or prayers. Now whatever fed his vocation has ceased to exist. In his terrible aloneness and deadness he can neither suffer nor laugh. (Davis, 1961)

Greene runs Querry’s life parallel to the burnt-out cases in the leper colony, setting the stage for clinical use of the term burnout in the 1970s. The back cover of the book states that he is “diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a ‘burnt-out case’” (Greene, 1961). The use of the term “burnt-out” here, both for the lepers and Querry, is used in the sense of “using up” or “emptying” similar to the usage referring to rocket fuel. The lepers are rendered shells where leprosy can no longer thrive and have suffered physical mutilation to get there. Querry is a shell of himself, emotionally mutilated (not sure I can really make this argument without having actually read the book yet?). (Is there some sort of connection of leprosy to emotional health? Kind of weird. Should read more).

Teachers:

INSERT BURNOUT RESEARCH FROM 70s ON HERE

The history of the term burnout from the 1800s until now is important to understand how the term has evolved and has shifted meaning over time. From the destructive aftermath of fires, devouring human creations and even human flesh, leaving charred, burnt remains to the implied draining of motivation, the term has remained centered around destruction and emptiness. I think it is telling that a term used to refer to fire, machines, and electricity is now the go-to term that encompasses a variety of emotions, feelings, and physical effects. It is fairly common for people in contemporary America to put much of their “self” into their jobs and they identify heavily with the work that they do (FIND LITERATURE ON THIS). This is especially true in activist work, as (Gregg and others?) note. It is easy with this paradigm to begin to see the human as a machine and the concept of burnout, as it has gained popularity and usage, seems to confirm this.

Thinking of burnout rhetorically, then, evokes a material understanding. Burning out entails a physical draining of some thing or things inside the body. At a certain point, these things are gone and the person is “burned out”. Despite this material connection, I am concerned here with narratives. The story someone tells himself or herself when they say something like “I just don’t have it in me anymore” evokes a powerful reaction. Whether or not there is actually some thing no longer in the person, it feels like this is the case. The story has a certain power and energy. George Kennedy, towards the end of his career, argues that rhetoric (INSERT STUFF FROM KENNEDY ARTICLE about Rhetorical energy).

Lit review:

Stories told to others are representative of internal narratives, shaped and reshaped in interaction but stemming, nonetheless, from an internal narrative. I do not claim that the origin of thought or narrative is necessarily internal but that, following Nienkamp (2001), the self is “merely its scene” (p. x). According to psychologist Jerome Bruner (1991):

…we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors. (p. 4)

The narrative construction of the self as argued by Bruner lends itself to be put into conversation with Kenneth Burke’s notion of the terministic screen. According to Burke (1966), "many of the 'observations' are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made" and "much that we take as observations about "reality" may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms" (p. 46). In other words, our perception of reality stems from the terms we use within the narrative we tell ourselves about the world. Nienkamp even coins the term “internal rhetoric” as a Burkean terministic screen in that it is “a lens through which to study mental activity rather than a reference to a particular kind of mental activity” (Nienkamp, p. ix).

Patricia Malesh (2010) argues that Nienkamp’s concept of internal rhetoric is a catalyst for what Foucault (2001) calls Socratic parrhesia, or “the philosophical practice of resistance through ‘altering one’s belief or opinion’ and also ‘changing one’s style of life, one’s relation to others, and one’s relation to oneself’ (Foucault, p. 106)” (p. 55). Ultimately, Malesh argues:

…the study of internal and embodied rhetorics is the study of identity – how it forms and how it fights. As such, it places all of our theorizing about aspects of the self-in-community squarely within the confines of rhetoric and rhetoric within the confines of self. (p. 76)

This meshes with Bruner’s (1991) idea that “even our individual autobiographies… depend on being placed within a continuity provided by a constructed and shared social history in which we locate our Selves and our individual continuities” (p. 20). These arguments strongly suggest that identity (both individual and collective) and narrative are intricately enmeshed and that ability to “speak truth to power” for environmental activists, embodying the movement in which they participate, is potentially a key factor in the persistence or breakdown of autobiographical narratives that influence one’s ability to continue to participate in activism.

The other major body of work that needs to be addressed is scholarship on the concept of burnout. The term “burn-out” seems to have been coined in Herbert J. Freudenberger’s 1974 article entitled “Staff Burn-Out.” The article deals with the physical signs of burn-out and how staff might prevent or deal with the effects of burn-out (Freudenberger, 1974). Though the term is most often discussed in occupational and psychological literature (see Kovan & Dirkx, 2003; Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002), Bert Klandermans (2009) and Bevington & Dixon (2005) use the term in their studies of social movements from social psychological and sociological perspectives. Bevington & Dixon acknowledge that the issues of burnout – in addition to “emotional conflict, motivation, and commitment” – are “all dimensions of movements that conventional academic theory has barely touched” (p. 194). After briefly defining burnout as a “stress reaction” that covers a few different symptoms, Klandermans (2009) writes “the question remains, of course, why some activists experience burnout and quit while others don’t and remain active. In fact, we do not know much about that subject” (p. 121) including how we talk ourselves into and out of it as members of groups. Klandermans cites a 1991 conference paper by Gomes and Maslach entitled “Commitment and Burnout among Political Activists: An In-Depth Study” to make the claim that “it is high costs or high levels of psychological tension in combination with high levels of commitment that produce burnout” (p. 122).