Stuck In the Middle #3 Finding meaning13 min read

Last week, we explored why people work a job: to make a living. Today, we will explore the other reason, finding meaning.

Returning to my dad’s quote, “You aren’t supposed to like all parts of your job. That’s why they pay you.” Implicit in this quote is that there are parts of a job that you enjoy and that give you meaning.

For now, we will take for granted that people can and do find joy and meaning in their work. Most of us have experienced this empirically, so we will not question the existence of this joy or meaning.

Choice and autonomy

In Willing Slaves of Capital, Frédéric Lordon connects these parts of our job to a sense of choice and autonomy.

Those who love an activity – sales (‘for the contact with clients’), auditing or financial analysis (‘for the precision’), services (‘for the relational quality’) – or a sector – oil prospecting (high-risk venture), aviation (high tech), civil engineering (working outside) – or who seek the prestige of business accomplishments – success as measured by the job status, the monetary reward, or the executive lifestyle (burning the midnight oil, travel, sharp suits, deluxe accessories) – always speak of ‘my choice’, what ‘I enjoy’, ‘my’ lifelong vocation, and it matters little that the accumulation of affect-imbued images that constituted these things as objects of desire, and determined the enlistment through these choices of employment, came entirely from outside. The fact remains that these desires, induced from outside but turned into authentic internal desires, determine joyful commitments when they are given an opportunity for satisfaction by the line of employment that corresponds to them. In an expression that is now common despite meaning nothing at all, individuals ‘fulfil themselves’, which really means that they fulfil their desires. ¹

We can’t desire something we aren’t aware of. No one dreamt of traveling to the moon when they believed it was made of aether. Or, as Terry Eagleton has put it,

“Ideas and beliefs may spring from underlying desires, but they are also – partly constitutive of them. A member of some ‘lost’ tribe in the Amazon basin cannot desire to be a brain surgeon, since he has no such concept.” ²

Our choices are set within our context and what we perceive as available options.

“An affordance is not an independent feature of the world. An affordance is in relation to the evolving organism for whom it is an affordance to be seized or not by heritable variation and natural selection. Biological degrees of freedom are affordances, or relational opportunities available to evolving organisms.” ³

As our environment and technology change, new affordances open up. These can’t be known in advance and are what Stuart Kauffman calls the adjacent possible.

“Agents move into the adjacent possible not as logs float down a stream, but intelligently, with some set of (imperfectly) identified tasks and goals. In adaptive change, agents utilize partial information and approximations to best–according to some well-defined metric–realize their goals.” ⁴

There is a degree of freedom in what possibilities we go after, but this freedom is limited by what we see as possible, available, and positive. However, it is important to note that what we see as good may be determined by what we want rather than vice versa.

‘We neither strive, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.’ ⁵

There is a balance of freedom within the constraints of what is possible. Jason Read in The Double Shift further explains why this feeling that it is a free choice is not as free as we think.

In order to overcome seeing oneself as a kingdom within a kingdom, it is necessary to see the way in which passions and desires are not opposed to determinations but are reflections of them. As Spinoza writes,

The drunk believes it is from a free decision of the mind that he says those things which afterward, when sober, he wishes he had not said. So the madman, the chatterbox, the child, and a great many people of this kind believe that they speak from a free decision of the mind, when really they cannot contain their impulse to speak. Because this prejudice is innate in all men, they are not easily freed from it. (Spinoza, Ethics)

To Spinoza’s formulation we could add that the employee freely believes that they want to work. What is called motivation is nothing other than identifying with one’s compulsion. In each case, it is a matter of grasping a determination, a heteronomy, not just in those moments that feel constrained or confined but at exactly the point where one feels free. ⁶

The source of our desires

We feel free to pursue our desires, but from this, we must ask, “What is the source of our desire?” “There are a lot of things that I desire, I have a lot of desires – which of them is worth being the object of my desire? Which desire should I desire?” ⁷ Where does my choice of desire come from?

The Lacanian Psychoanalytic theory helps explain the nature of desire:

“For Lacan, the fundamental impasse of human desire is that it is the other’s desire in both subjective and objective genitive: desire for the other, desire to be desired by the other, and, especially, desire for what the other desires.” ⁸

Lacan, following Freud, takes our desire to be something that comes from outside of ourselves. We choose our desires based on what we expect others to desire and what we are told to desire in our work. As Lordon explains,

Within capitalist organisations, the very function of hierarchical subordination is to assign each individual to a defined task according to the division of labour, namely, to an activity object that each must convert into an object of desire: ‘Here is this very specific thing that you must desire doing.’ ⁹

At work, our boss shapes our desires by tying promotions, raises, bonuses, and even keeping our jobs to specific tasks and our desire for those tasks. This is what makes understanding our desires challenging. It isn’t that we don’t want to do what we are asked. The “violence” doesn’t feel like violence, as Lordon cautions,

Breaking with the subjectivist aporiae of consent, one can therefore say that Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, a soft domination that the dominated themselves ‘consent’ to, is a domination through joyful affects… The distinctive feature of domination is thus to rivet the dominated to minor objects of desire, in any case those deemed so by the dominators, who keep the other objects for themselves. With joy rather than fear – this is no doubt how the dominators govern most effectively; but they delimit the joys strictly, rigorously selecting the objects of desire that will be offered. ¹⁰

Auto-exploitation

What this starts to make clear is that the purposiveness that our work provides is part of the exploitation and what makes work so complex and contradictory. This view of meaning has, in many ways, turned Exploitation on its head, as Byung-Chul Hun explains in The Expulsion of the Other:

”In the neoliberal regime, exploitation no longer takes place as alienation and self-derealization, but as freedom, as self-realization and self-optimization.” ¹¹

We want to learn, grow, and get better at our jobs. We see this improvement as part of our personal growth and meaning, so we consent to do our work. But where does this consent come from? Is it all purely just our own desire? Lordon has some answers:

Consent is thus most often tainted by a violence arising from the fact that it is strictly oriented towards the service of an external master-desire, and because it is obtained against a backdrop of a threat. ¹²

In the case of work, this “violence” is often the reality of being unemployed. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, so they submit and consent to do what the job requires.

Now, you may object and say, but I love parts of my job. It is meaningful. It isn’t just for the paycheck.

But it is precisely because of this sense of meaning, because we feel the desires of our choosing, that we exploit ourselves. We work not just doing the job but with vigor to do more and get ahead and for what we believe is our success when, in actuality, our self-exploitation increases the surplus value of the company. Han sees this perspective as the “achievement subject, ” a perspective that drives us to burn out.

“The achievement-subject gives itself over to freestanding compulsion in order to maximize performance. In this way, it exploits itself. Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Exploitation now occurs without domination. That is what makes self-exploitation so efficient.” ¹³

From this perspective, it may seem disempowering to workers, but it doesn’t feel that way. It depends on harnessing the worker’s power and redirecting towards their exploitation. It is empowering workers to exploit themselves. We think we are free. We are empowered. And this empowerment through the performance review processes, promotion cycles, and competition of employees against each other replaces a disciplinary way of working with a “paradigm of achievement.”¹⁴

Han continues,

“The achievement-subject gives itself over to freestanding compulsion in order to maximize performance. In this way, it exploits itself. Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Exploitation now occurs without domination. That is what makes self-exploitation so efficient.” ¹⁵

While this may paint a dark and cynical picture, we should step back and recognize that there is an element of joy. We tend to accept these chains willingly because there is joy within them.

For although we are all equally enslaved to our passions and chained to our desires, to be happy with one’s chains is evidently not the same as to be saddened by them. ‘Coercion’ and ‘consent’ are simply the names that the respective affects of sadness and of joy assume inside institutional situations of power and normalisation. ¹⁶

The contradiction – exploitation and purpose

Where do we go from here? While we tend to see working for money as key to exploiting us through wage labor, a deeper investigation has shown that even the very meaning and purpose we find in our work is part of how we are exploited. Still, it is a form of exploitation we do to ourselves.

These desires and the sense of meaning feel very real and feel like our choice. This desire for meaning feels even bigger than the need to make a living.

The desire to find employment should no longer be merely a mediated desire for the goods that wages circuitously permit buying, but an intrinsic desire for the activity for its own sake. Neoliberal epithumogenesis thus assumes the specific task of producing on a large scale desires that did not previously exist, or that existed only in a minority of capitalist enclaves: desires for happy labour, or, to borrow directly from its own vocabulary, desires for ‘fulfilment’ and ‘self-realisation’ in and through work. ¹⁷

And many people will say that they enjoy their work. The question becomes, do you enjoy it, or have you learned to desire it? How might you enjoy it and recognize how this desire is used against you?

There is one possibility, which is the idea of the vocation. Slavoj Žižek described this in a lecture I attended: “a job you don’t just do for money, career or personal satisfaction… You choose it freely, but choose it because you feel you are chosen to do it.” This is fundamentally (and ontologically) different than a job or a career. It is not something I will explore here, but I will take up in a future newsletter.

Where do we go from here?

We work both for meaning and for money, which are essential for our survival, and both are ways that employees are set up to be exploited. We imagine we are free. We imagine that we choose to work and that we choose the job we do. That choice is core to our identity.

The individual-subject imagines itself to be a free being, endowed with an autonomous will, whose actions are the effects of its sovereign volition: hence, had I wanted emancipation strongly enough, I would have been able to escape my condition of servitude; consequently, if I am in this condition, it must be the fault of my will, and my servitude has to be voluntary. Under such a metaphysics of subjectivity, voluntary servitude is doomed to remain an insoluble enigma… Those who consent are no freer than anyone else, and are no less ‘yielding’ than the enslaved; only, they have been made to yield differently and thus experience their determination joyfully. There is no consent, in the same way that there is no voluntary servitude. There are only happy subjections. ¹⁸

What does this mean as a middle manager?

Similar to last week, as a middle manager, you are both exploited and exploiter. Part of the solution is to take the empathy you can gain from seeing how you are exploited to prevent and minimize the exploitation of those on your team.

1. Recognize that you influence the desires of those on the team. There is a power dynamic. How can you minimize your viewpoint’s role in framing success for your team members? How could you let your team members define their success and paths?
2. How can you help team members see more possibilities of success and a career? How can you accept those paths that are different than your own?
3. I once coached someone who was always complaining about the amount of work they were dealing with, and the challenge was they were creating most of that work for themselves. They were forcing themselves to overwork. How can you help employees see where they may exploit themselves?
   

Next week, we will look at an approach to handling the sense of alienation we may feel when we realize we aren’t as free as we thought. Until then, have a fantastic weekend.

1. Lordon, Frédéric, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire ↩
2. Eagleton, Terry, Ideology – An Introduction ↩
3. Kauffman, Stuart, A Third Transition in Science? ↩
4. Devereaux, Abigail, Koppl, Roger, Kauffman, Stuart, Creative Evolution in Economics ↩
5. Spinoza, Ethics quoted in Read, Jason, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work↩
6. Read, Jason, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work ↩
7. Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology ↩
8. Žižek, Slavoj, How to Read Lacan ↩
9. Lordon, Frédéric, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire ↩
10. Ibid ↩
11. Han, Byung-Chul, The Expulsion of the Other ↩
12. Lordon, Frédéric, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire ↩
13. Han, Byung-Chul, The Burnout Society ↩
14. Ibid ↩
15. Ibid ↩
16. Lordon, Frédéric, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire ↩
17. Ibid ↩
18. Ibid ↩