Moral injury, injurious subjectification
Think out loud again.
I’ve been thinking off and on for a long while about the construction of kinds of subjectivity or personhood, and thinking about Foucault and ideology. These are all longstanding interests that I only sometimes see as connected and haven’t pursued consistently. Independent of those interests I stumbled on the concept of moral injury. I first heard of it on a radio show I was randomly listening while driving. There was a segment on PTSD among military personnel and it said that moral injury is thought to be one source of PTSD. The idea is that falling short of deeply held moral values can create or intensify a kind of trauma and pain. I saw something on this again randomly in a discussion about physicians (I occasionally dip into stuff on medical personnel because of research for my book, and issues of occupational safety and health, I’ve done so more often during the covid pandemic). More recently there’s been a bit of an uptick of articles on this. I’ve had an inkling for a while that this concept sheds light on the exhaustion that many educators are expressing currently in the face of pandemic teaching, including my own exhaustion. There are lots of factors creating that exhausting. I think one of them is something like moral injury. For myself I can say I finished last spring feeling completely wiped out and over the spring and summer everything I repeatedly felt a kind of near-crash in my energy and mood when I’d get certain kinds of emails or see certain kinds of articles on social media. My hunch is that I’d become someone deeply invested in achieving a specific standard of teaching performance and I was interpreting my teaching under the pandemic such that it fell short of that standard. This is in addition to over work, the emotional work of listening to students and colleagues, etc - like I said the exhaustion has lots of factors. It seems to me there’s processes of subject- making with at least two or three things that happen. One is a process of making people into certain kinds of people - I became, due to experiences of being on the receiving end of institutions, someone who took my teaching performance personally. Another closely related one is shoring up that personhood - I got messages that encouraged me to stay that kind of person. A third is shaping some of the meanings and practices and interiority of that kind of personhood - I got messages that it was possible to succeed to some extent, and they evoked pre-existing standards I held, they encouraged me to keep working, etc. And then there’s the sort of political economy - how much work there is, the length and intensity of the work day and so on.
My half-thought when I started typing this was something like the following: there’s a making up of kinds of roles (a sort of social script writer), and then there’s a kind of assigning of people into various of those roles (a sort of social casting director; neither the ‘writer’ nor ‘director’ really exist in any clear conscious way, it’s more a set of emergent and unconscious/impersonal/behind-the-back collective processes). Some of those roles are injurious insofar as they involve significant suffering, presumably distribued unevenly along lines of gender, race, etc. I guess I do think all of that but the injuriousness is also context-variable. I suspect healthcare workers always had to endure (potentially?) traumatizing conditions. I suspect being enrolled into a type of personhood always involves uncomfortable frictions with other kinds of personhood and values (we’re never just one kind of person, never interpellated by just one ideology) but under specific conditions, like now, those injurious qualities get massively amplified.
I suspect that in a lot of cases in businesses and other organizations there’s at least one or two kinds of unevenness in the distribution of moral injuries. One is that people’s exposure to certain harms is uneven and concentrated downwards - my impression is PTSD concentrates downwards among military personnel - and another is that kinds of subjectification are different across organizational hierarchies - nurses and chief financial officers and other managerial personnel don’t have the same kinds of professional subjectivity in addition to the differences in their work environments. CFOs et al don’t do nurse work and don’t have nurses’ experience and values to the same extent, yet they control nurses’ working lives to important degrees. Similarly school superintendents and university presidents aren’t full-time instructors. So people less prone to moral injury in both predisposition (difference in subjectification) and exposure (difference in work performed) exert significant control over the work environments of people more prone to and, due to design, exposed to moral injury.
I think stress and exhaustion are multi-factor and so can be mitigated through multiple changes but at the same time to the extent moral injury is happening because of the mismatch between subjectification and context, I think there will be harms that remain even if other factors get mitigated. So time off work is good for recovery but if work remains something people can’t succeed at according significant standards and people remain enrolled in/subjectified relative to those standards, moral injury will persist. I also suspect that for educators aspects that may have once been good like continuing education for employees is a source of messaging that generates the mismatch. I suspect a lot of attempts to provide resources to employees have this quality in that they interpellate people/subjectify people into the roles that involves the standards we can’t live up to. So some efforts to help actually hurt. I also think absent serious collective democratic worker control it’s likely these harms will be only minimally visible at all because of the distributions I was talking about above - people directing the work don’t do the work or as much of it, aren’t enrolled in the same subjectivities, don’t experience the degree or intensity of the mismatch between values and outcomes/practices, and so don’t endure moral injury in the same ways or degrees - enterprises will likely not even notice this and it’ll be largely an invisible kind of pollution, a negative externality. I expect it will manifest in mental and physical health effects and attrition.