Toward Meaningful Work

At long last, the finale to my (5 part) 4 part series on Labor-Time, Turning Toward Death, and Meaningful Work. This week I return to Bataille and the Accursed Share, try to get to what Meaningful Work might be, and why it should be an ethical project. I also discuss Chairs. Grab a seat.

Recommended links:
https://umistapotlatch.ca/potlatch-eng.php
https://voegelinview.com/the-gift-marcel-mauss-and-rene-girard/

Obligatory bibliography, or books you may also want to check out.

Bataille, Georges, and Robert Hurley. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. 1. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007
Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden: Blackwell, 2013.
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review, 1992. 

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other existential, phenomenological, mythological, ontological, and socio-political questions regarding Work (Life and Death). I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 6: Toward Meaningful Work 

(To Fear, or not to Fear, the Reaper; pt. 4)

American concept artist Jospeh Kosuth has a piece from 1965 called, “One and Three Chairs,” which, I have to admit, prior to getting seriously into art and aesthetic theory, and philosophy, had I seen it in a museum, I likely would have briefly glanced at it and noted something along the lines of ‘this is why people dismiss art’ or ‘there’s not a single comic book artist that’s not more deserving of this space.’ I have; however, over the years, come to be really interested in this piece. “One and Three Chairs'' sets up, from left to right, a black and white photo of a wooden folding chair on a wooden floor before a blank white wall; the same, actual chair on the same floor and before the same wall (at least in the principal photo of the work as shown by the Museum of Modern Art, New York); and then another black and white panel displaying the definition of the word, “chair.” What I find compelling about “One and Three Chairs' ' isn't the use of form, or color, or medium, certainly not any notions of aesthetics as “beauty,” but rather that it compels questioning. 

Is a chair a chair by definition? If so, is the definition of a chair, placed on display, a chair somehow? Is the photo of a chair a chair? If we want to follow Plato and get into the essence, or form, or image of a chair, then it could be the image is even more so a chair than the chair beside it. Is the chair even a chair now, as its utility, its use-value, has been ripped away from it? It’s now an art object on display and no longer for sitting. 

I bring up “One and Three Chairs” because its time to start talking about meaning, specifically, meaningfulness and work. 

We’ve gone over the difference between work, labor, and toil – that work is a kind of labor, the combination of effort and energy, that results in creation and/or growth, that it is both means and ends driven; whereas toil lacks ends, is ultimately meaningless, or the means are the ends – as in punishment or abuse (the task of digging a ditch for the sake of digging a ditch followed by filling the ditch in, or Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill), work as enframing, in it both being what it is as well as what is done in its doing , and as that which is revealed in how it is available (present-to-hand) and how it is used, its equipmentality; Labor-Time as the time of ones life spent, or consumed, in laboring; and we’ve addressed Being-towards-death, anxiety, and authenticity; and turning towards death, authentically considering one’s own mortality and constant contingency – the, “I can die at this moment” – prior to thinking about how to spend one’s Labor-Time. 

Now, perhaps somewhat ironically, I should make clear that I’m not actually going to attempt to define what meaningful work is or provide a prescriptive account of how to achieve it. This is not a pop-psychology self-help podcast. Rather, the best I can do at present is offer a sketch of what meaningful work might look like.

Meaningful work is subjective; though, again, that doesn’t mean it ought to be dismissed as purely opinion. My opinion about a pizza doesn’t change whether or not a pizza is a pizza, I’m looking at you Chicago. Relegating subjectivity to pure opinion, or to atomism – every individual thought about every individual thing – is to invite anarchy to linguistics. I’m no fan of analytic philosophy, so I’m not going to bury myself in the weeds of making sure we can all agree on what words mean before continuing. I’ll just say this, even opinions, judgements (of taste, to be somewhat Kantian), are judgements of real things and states. If I don’t like pineapple on pizza – and yes, I’ll admit to being one of those weirdos that do, pepperoni, pineapple, and jalapeno is one of my favorite combinations – there has to be, at least, 1. Pineapples. 2. Pizzas. 3. Pizzas with Pineapples. 4. They need to be edible. And 5. Sense perception and cognition – I need to be able to eat and tase the pineapple pizza to make a reasoned judgment on it. If I’m from Naples, Italy, I’m likely to find the combination off-putting and prefer simple tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. On the other hand, if I’m from Japan, I’d likely prefer squid ink or cured fish and mayo. My cultural situatedness will impact my tastes, but my tastes are still judgements of real states.  

Last week, I noted that Bataille identifies three laws of General Economy; Growth (there is a superabundance of energy in nature, that energy is used by living organisms for growth or reproduction, or it is squandered), Pressure (the spatial, and temporal, limits of growth, result in extension, death, or luxury (squander)), and the Accursed Share, but I had left this last one out – b’dum tsh.

The Accursed Share, you may have guessed, if you’re following how these are flowing into and overlap each other, is that remaining part of the economy destined for squander; but, it is also the basis of political economy (restricted economy): the organization and distribution of resources, application of technologies and techniques to increase energy to be spent, and wealth accumulation. The Accursed Share, the luxurious, sumptuous squander, can lead us to art and gift giving, but it can also be realized politically through campaigns to raise the standard of living – spending the accumulated wealth on improving the lives of the populace, or war, spending the accumulation on mobilizing and killing. 

Now, I did say we were pivoting this episode to start talking about art and stop, for a moment anyway, talking about death, and I’d already said a little about this last week, so, we’ll come back to this side of the equation later. Just know that squander realized through war, as a function of the economy, war as employment and clearing a path for growth through violent death, is why (at least I’m fairly certain from my reading – if there are any Bataille specialists listening out there, feel free to push back in the comments) this is the “accursed” share and not simply ‘the remainder’ or ‘luxury’ or some other such concept. 

Surely meaningful work can’t be as conceptually easy as making art or giving gifts, and, even if it were, how do we get there if it may require some underlying part of the economy to produce the luxurious ‘extra’ (wealth) that needs to be consumed. So, we need to take a brief detour back to David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, specifically to what Graeber calls out as in opposition to them, the creative and productive jobs; jobs that he notes remain remain socially necessary - to which I include care-economy jobs (the traditionally so-called ‘women’s work’ of caring for others; nursing, child rearing, education, cooking and feeding, etc. – I do not, however, include housekeeping. Housekeeping, I believe, is simply reproductive labor – the kind of labor that needs to be done in order to reproduce our capacity for labor, much like eating and sleeping. To the extent that housekeeping is waged work, I classify it with what Graeber calls, simply, shit jobs (in contrast to bullshit jobs), these are the jobs that do need to be done that no one actually wants to do, which is precisely why there are always people willing to pay someone else to do it.)

As alluded to earlier, the phenomenon of bullshit jobs may simply be an artificial extension of the job market. An extension made to accommodate the pressure that the growth of the industrial reserve army is exerting upon the current political-economic class, in order to preserve the capitalist mode of production.

Sidenote - At the time I was writing my MA paper, this was the neoliberal, capitalist ruling class, which is arguably on its way out, having largely, globally, been pushed further and further to the sidelines by right-wing populism. We’ll get into what Neoliberalism is sometime later, it’s an incredibly broad topic and we need to lay a good bit of economic groundwork before getting into it. Suffice to say, it is not some kind of ‘new leftism,’ if anything, it is, in terms of political economy, extraordinarily (pre-MAGA) Conservative, and basically seeks to supplant the rule of law with the laws of market economics. Rough and ready example, elected officials and judges that believe, and enact rulings and policies based on, the idea that the public is lying when they say something like ‘we want stronger privacy laws’ because the same public willingly spends their money at a grocery store where they forfeit their privacy by joining these member programs that track their buying habits in order to get a discount. Or the fantastical notion of the George W. Bush administration that if they just take down Sadaam and give the Iraqis access to free markets, a functioning democracy would magically appear in its wake. In other words, in Neoliberalism, money is the real politics. 

Back to bullshit jobs and extension. 

Speaking as someone who, until recently, worked in an IT administrative capacity (and knows several people who had automated themselves out of a job at one point of another by successfully writing scripts that enable their computer to accomplish many of their day-to-day job functions), I can honestly say that my job was largely meaningless. The only reasons I can think of that my job continued to exist were, 1. I came at it from a research background to do, essentially audit work in an IT department that a. Wanted full control over their processes, and b. Had no one in the department to manage inventory as they were all techs and support staff; and, for my end, I had no knowledge of script writing, and, 2. because there was no appetite amongst management to invest capital in purchasing the relevant software – or hiring someone to write the software – that would have completely automated my daily job functions. I should also note that some of these ‘highly efficient’ people who had automated themselves out of a job were offered lateral ‘promotions’ to less technical, more administrative positions. In one case, I had a friend of mine who left a highly technical position for a better paying project management position that drove him kinda nuts, as there was nothing technical to it at all. The whole job was basically drinking coffee, taking meetings, and sending emails. As someone that had wanted to both be productive and grow his skills, despite the better pay, the largely bullshit nature of the job was soul crushing.

Another version of the problem of artificially extending the job market through bullshit jobs, or rather, another version that points to how and why working beyond the productive needs of the economy, can be found in the work of John Maynard Keynes – who I’m looking forward to getting into in greater depth eventually, though I’ll admit I’m less keen on working through Friedrich Hayek, but if we’re going to address Keynes, then it just makes sense to address his largest counterpoint. Keynes, whose economic theory was crucial to FDR’s New Deal, also points to the idea that, based on the growth of productivity via automation and the reduction in the amount of labor hours required to produce the needs and wants of the country, we should have been working 15 hour weeks decades ago, having all the productive capacity we need and leisure time to fill the rest of our days. Fun fact, Abraham Lincoln had proposed much the same thing regarding the benefits of industrializing America. 

I’ll just leave it hanging for now as to my thoughts on why a ruling class may not a working class with so much leisure time on their hands, you can probably guess my position on this. 

In contrast to the bullshit jobs, Graeber points to productive and creative jobs as jobs that are actually worth doing.  These are the jobs in manufacturing and agriculture, but also music and literature.  These productive jobs can be problematic as far as they’re considered broadly to be work worth doing, so far as regards to their having been more and more heavily automated over the years.  Many of these jobs today, in industrial manufacturing or industrial agriculture, epitomize the problem of the same deskilling of workers pointed to by Marx over a century ago. So, I believe, these should be viewed in contrast to so-called artisan productive jobs in manufacturing and agriculture – the small farmers, woodworkers, bakers, and so on, that have found a way to exploit niche markets and turn away from industrial, i.e. Fordist, division of labor. 

The creative worker; the writer, artist, musician, chef, etc., does this to an even fuller extent.

I, cautiously, include content creator in this list. Not long ago it would have seemed a natural addition, but this form of creativity seems to be ever increasingly astro-turf’ed; with a firehose of new “content” being churned out by industrially modeled production houses, misinformation and disinformation camps, and AI generated, I hesitate to say junk, but I honestly don’t really know what to call it, as so much of it is either lazy, unthoughtful, uncaring, emotionally vapid, kitsch, or outright theft of another artist’s work.  

And, yes, I do get the problematic that I am, technically, also a part of this group now. 

These creative outliers may not earn the wages of those engaged in industrial forms of production, but they gain a distinct benefit; namely, they spend their labor-time in the production of something which contributes to their thriving; theoretically speaking anyway.

I don’t believe it’s far-fetched to imagine the artisan farmer or chair-maker that is generally indebted to a bank for the cost of their home or business and must sell the products of their labor in order to return money and interest to the bank regardless of whether or not they “own” their means of production. And that’s to say nothing about the small famers forced to sell their farms over some failed get-rich-quick scheme of the bank’s that prompted the bank to foreclose on their debts in order to raise capital, or the encroachment of large corporate agriculture firms pressed by investors to turn higher profits over shorter periods, resulting in growth via buying and consuming any and all smaller competitors. 

Admittedly, the creative-worker also exchanges the product of their creation for money, whether it is art, music, food, or a chair, an education, a diagnosis, a healing hand, etc.  Back in 2017, a faculty advisor of mine, Dr. Gordon Hull, made a great point about this that I had glossed over. He noted, “one distinction that [I could have made] here is that of [the] individual creator versus the “creative industry.” The [TV, movie, and magazine writers, who] do creative work that isn’t really their own in the strong sense.  [They do] work that is rewarding, but also perhaps alienated.  … The argument in its defense is that those same people (a) wouldn’t be able to support themselves as creators outside the creative industry and (b) what they’re doing is a lot better for them than working in a factory or doing bullshit work.” Now, I find this really interesting being on the other side of last year’s writer’s and SAG strikes – and also being in the middle of this now as someone seeking voiceover work and having a vested interest in the industry myself. 

These creative and/or socially necessary workers, as we’ve identified, are, generally speaking, freelancers, owner-operators, or other small business owners, and as such are working ‘for money’ but not for wages specifically. So, if we’re to make this about ethics, we do need to note that Marx’ interest in wages and appropriation is way too narrow. So, what about money as recompense for work writ large? 

A chef can become wealthy operating a successful restaurant, as an artist may become wealthy selling a work of art to a wealthy buyer that finds great value in the work. I do not draw this comparison to indicate that meaningful work necessarily includes (or precludes) monetary compensation, but rather that what makes work meaningful is something independent of the monetary value attributed to the act of exchange. If we want to get to what it is about creative and care work, other than a potentially greater share of earnings-per-widget, then we need to see that behind this transaction is a sense of gift-giving that differs from pure labor-selling, as in the case of toiling for wages.  It is in this gift-giving that one produces an increase, not in wealth, but in one’s conditions for thriving.  

Fun fact, the German word for poison is das Gift, and, yes, the etymology is related. The word is believed to have come to Germanic by way of the Greek dosis in translating the idea of a ‘dose’ or a ‘giving.’ 

Without getting into the weeds of this, the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote a text titled, The Gift, that examines the history and cultural practices of gift giving, and notes the practice of gift giving includes three obligations (civil rules and customs that predate and, in cases, carry the weight of law and bind the parties involved); the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. In giving someone a gift, I have obligated them (by custom, and, depending on cultural situatedness, by law) to receive the gift, and to reciprocate. 

If you know someone that’s uncomfortable with receiving gifts, it’s possible their familial and/or cultural background is probably tied up in this understanding of gift as obligation. 

Bataille turns to a particular kind of gift-giving in trying to determine what’s to be done with the accursed share, for it to be sumptuously and luxuriously consumed, in general economy. Potlatch. 

What the hell is potlatch?

Well, it’s a Chinook “trade jargon” word meaning “to give” – check out umistapotlatch.ca for more detail on how potlatch fits in the culture of the Kwakwaka’wakw people. And I apologize if I mispronounced that. I’ll leave a link to check out the U’mista cultural society’s web page on this. It’s pretty interesting. 

In short, a potlatch is a Native American, joyous, ceremonial feast, that had been common in the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the US, in which objects of personal, and/or familial, wealth were gifted, given away, or destroyed as a way of demonstrating wealth and power. “The more gifts given, the higher the status achieved by the potlatch host.” As opposed to accumulating wealth – hoarding it as a sign of wealth or putting it on display in one’s own opulence and excess, the proof of one’s wealth was the demonstration of how much one could give to others.

Think of this as the mirror opposite of coronations and other royal ceremonies you may have watched on Game of Thrones. Rather than celebrating the crowning of the king by throwing a party for the king, with all of the noble houses in attendance to offer gifts to the king; stand this on it’s head wherein the king throws a party for the people and gives gifts to everyone else to celebrate (and display) their own wealth and power. 

Note, a component of this isn’t terribly foreign to the ancient Roman ideas of civil service, in which the wealthy and powerful demonstrated their wealth and power by funding great public works of art, architecture, and infrastructure. Forget public/private partnerships or something like Tepper Sports and Entertainment asking the city of Charlotte to cough up $650 million to upgrade ‘his’ stadium; in this system, if David Tepper really wanted to demonstrate his wealth and commitment to the community, he’d fund the whole project out of his personal wealth. 

Now, what both these systems have in common, and what Bataille is going to get to, is the idea that giving wealth, through gifts (or destruction (sacrifice)) empowers the giver, and the receiver. 

To wit, I would add, hoarding wealth isn’t just not-empowering, it’s disempowering, it’s weakness, qua selfishness and/or fear. It’s weakness qua Being. It’s an inauthentic form of Being-with-others that denies the Other. 

Also, just realized I’m dropping jargon on you. For those of you not following philosophical and/or legal jargon, or maybe haven’t played a lot of Scrabble or Words with Friends, the Latin “qua” is shorthand for “in the capacity or character of being.” Bruce Wayne fighting crime qua Batman. 

Right, back to the point. 

In describing a ‘theory of potlatch’, Bataille sates, “If there is within us, running through the space we inhabit, a movement of energy that we use, but is not reducible to its utility… we can disregard it, but we can also adapt our activity to its completion outside us. … The problem posed is that of the expenditure of the surplus [the Accursed Share]. We need to give away, lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless… if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring a power.” 

To be a bit cliché, you could basically say giving is more powerful than receiving. By this understanding though, giving is giving and receiving, as while one gives away (their wealth, understood as surplus, and/or property, understood as that which one has combined their labor with in order to create), one also gains a power. 

Now, I don’t believe this is power to be understood as power-over; that, I believe, would remain trapped in the realm of restricted or political economy through the concept of debt – the, ‘I will give you my wealth, but you will need to repay, probably plus interest, and from there get into all the rigmarole of the enforcement of debt through violence. Defining wealth as surplus though short circuits this process. It’s surplus… what the hell do I need it back for?  What am I going to do with it other than hoard it, consume it (or spend it), or give it away? 

Now, I don’t want to go too much deeper into Bataille at this point as I’d like to revisit the text and just do a deeper dive on it, and I had set this up to be a 4 part series, and it’s technically already 5, if you include the episode on Heidegger. So, lets get back to art. 

As you may recall, I previously briefly mentioned that Heidegger inspired my thinking about work in his thinking about art and technology, in terms of work being what it is as well as what is done in its doing. In his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger states, “The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other.”

I do not believe there is such a thing as an ‘end of work,’ but nor do I believe either a.) that our aim as a society or species ought to be the end of work, or b.) that our aim should be work for work’s sake. I think it is aimlessly and pointlessly self-destructive to sacrifice ourselves at the altar of work just to either somehow ‘redeem’ work, or any system of economic organization of work, from its banality or profanity. In short, I believe work is a necessary, but, critically, by itself, insufficient condition of thriving. 

Now, I can certainly think of things I’d rather be doing than “working,” though I’ll also admit that weighs less on me now as I’m trying to make a living from writing, voiceover, and this podcast. I would love to spend my days traveling, visiting museums and cafes and wine shops and breweries and bakeries and restaurants… man, I could really go for a croissant and an Irish coffee… yeah, um, moving on… playing video games and reading comic books, but, maybe with the exception of traveling, while I find pleasure in these things, none really contribute in any way to thriving. Writing, this podcast, and the voiceover work I’m trying to book, these can. Why? Because they’re work. It takes work – human effort over time, plus intentionality, and the creation of… something – to do these things. Plus, I want to do them. And despite my waged recompense of my meaningless and mind numbing corporate ITAM job being leaps and bounds financially, so far anyway, better than where I am today, I would rather fight tooth and nail to keep doing this than spend one more day in a meaningless 9-5. 

And, um, don’t forget to like and subscribe, links to support the channel, yada yada yada. 

Which brings up another point; I need to take a moment to address a common and vitally important distinction between work’s potential meaningfulness, and motivation to work; especially as regards waged labor. 

The preponderance of wage labor and the resilience of the capitalist mode of production over alternatives like socialism and communism is a major sticking point for taking motivation (in this case, money) over meaning. Their preponderance makes it easy, though logically fallacious, to hold up monetary recompense as a ‘natural’ desire for the ends of one’s labor. And despite nearly every single benefit workers receive in the US today – 40 hour work weeks, overtime, weekends, child labor laws, workplace safety, minimum wage (as insufficient as it is), social security benefits, the right to collective bargaining, discrimination protections, and the banning of blackballing – where a prior employer could prevent your ever working in that industry again, and on, are all largely thanks to the efforts of American Socialist and Communist party actions from the early 1900s and up through the Red Scare of the 50s, the two terms will likely forever, at least in the US, be stained by the Cold War, Leninism, Stalinism, and Nazism, and let’s not forget the fearmongering of McCarthyism. 

When I was giving my MA defense, one of the professors. Dr. Trevor Pierce, whose research focus is on Pragmatism, I believe inadvertently as we hadn’t done any work together before then, tee’d me up probably the best layup question any of the faculty could have. If there was any pushback I was prepared for, it was this one, as this was the one I had gotten into argument after argument after argument over throughout the prior year. Now, I do have to paraphrase, it’s been like 6 years, but was essentially, “why can’t my meaningful work be providing for my family? I choose work that gives me the freedom to spend more time with them, and my wages provide for them.” 

And the answer is, I think, actually quite simple. Because that isn’t meaningful work. Drawing meaning from what work enables one to do outside work is intrinsically different from that work itself having any kind of meaningfulness. It confuses motivation for meaning. 

To be fair, it’s also a great question, because it’s incredibly difficult to process that distinction as we live in society that is economically, and I would also argue theologically, organized around compulsory work. Finding work that provides the monetary recompense to provide for yourself and your loved ones, especially work that also provides time to spend with those you care most about and other passions and hobbies you may have, can certainly feel rewarding. But that’s not what work, is. By and large, those jobs are the exception, and they do little, if anything, to overcome the estrangements that are so central to work under capitalism. Even the loftiness of the collegiate Ivory Tower is subject to estrangement and bullshitization. Professors find their work ever increasingly burdened by administrative tasks that leave them less and less time either for their students or for their loved ones and outside-work passions. Administrative tasks largely geared toward transforming education based on capitalist economic models of profitability and return on investment rather than intellectual curiosity and growth, and, it needs to be noted for the entire education system, from elementary school through college, ever increasingly falling under the control of the most politically and/or theologically motivated of the wealthy/ruling class. 

I should also note, when I was giving that defense, the mainstream of the Republican party still agreed that book burning was something left to the history and sci-fi section of the library, rather than the parking lot. 

So what is the ethical project of meaningful work? Well, essentially, it’s the idea that meaningless work does harm. It does harm to the worker, their families, and friends, but also does harm to the employer in terms of their responsibility for enabling it, the guilt they carry, and anxiety stemming from turning toward death is how to get both parties to realize the truth of what’s occurring. 

Anxiety regarding death cannot be separated from the question of one’s time. Time is a limited resource on the individual level.  Every individual has only so much time, though that determination can only be made once the entirety of the resource has been spent (or lost) – whether that spending occurs through luxury or growth, or whether it is exploited or extinguished by other pressures.  In turning towards death, consideration for one’s own imminent death (as well as that of others) must take precedence.  One is forced to realize the labor-time they spend – or the labor-time they demand from others – is withdrawn from an exhaustible account, the total balance of which is unknown, until death.  Labor-time spent in creative production of those things which contribute to thriving, one’s own as well the thriving of others, may begin to lead us in the direction of what meaningful work might be.

I believe meaningful work is best approached in three aspects (taking, lets say, three seats at the table… hey, I warned you I had things to say about chairs). 

First, an aspect of gift-giving or generosity. 

Second, an aspect of monument or legacy. 

And finally, an aspect of art. 

The production of a such a kind of work (be it music, literature, the visual arts, nursing, educating, food, chairs, etc.) ultimately has one thing in common; namely the implicit investment in the experience of the other.  Such a product implies a more intimate relationship between the producer and consumer by intertwining the functions of gift and exchange (as opposed to exchange alone) in order to either fulfil a need or satisfy a desire, or to produce wealth as commonly understood by market capitalism.  The purchaser gains both the object of purchase as an object-in-itself, be they goods or services, as well as the gift of the sensuous, aesthetic experience.  The seller gains money in exchange for the product of their labor (which can be converted into capital by using it to acquire further resources with which to produce more work) and at the same time gains the benefit of thriving, of working for ones’ own gain as well as the gains of others.  This is what I refer to as the aspect of gift-giving.

The aspect of monument or legacy requires that something of the product of one’s work survive the worker; this can be most clearly seen in works of art, architecture, and literature, yet also in the education or training of the succeeding generation (to include child-rearing); or the stories of those who received the fruits one’s service-work (such as the diners served by a chef or the regular patrons of a particular barber); or in the passing down of a tradition or place of work.  In this manner, one’s work represents a transcendence – it is a proof left upon the world of one’s existence, and a proof that one’s life was more than mere existence.

Finally, the aspect of art; at least from the time of the Renaissance on, when artistic expression and the artists themselves became central to a work of art – and I do mean work in a broad sense. Keep in mind, the art produced in the workshops of the Renaissance masters was very literally a professional workshop, staffed by various tiers of apprentice and journeyman artists. Art was a profession. A “masterpiece” did not mean what it means now, a masterpiece was what an artist submitted for judgement as to whether or not they could themselves be considered a master artist and open their own shop. This aspect of art is a combination of factors such as expression and labor, skill, techné, and the actual object or product of one’s labor. This is perhaps the most ambiguous aspect, yet it is in the work of art that, I believe, the strongest parallel to meaningful work may be drawn. 

And here I need to note, I don’t limit this aspect to “art” specifically. The work of any master artist, artisan, craftsman, chef, etc., and the works of those seeking to master their craft in such a way, all fall into this potential category. 

A few years ago I had the pleasure of eating at Bacchanalia in Atlanta, Georgia –and  this was before they earned their Michelin star – and, sure, it was undoubtedly pricey, but the care and the artistry and the intentionality and artistry of the food blew me away. Now, I am, what you would consider a foodie. I am a huge fan of food, wine, spirits, etc. – but, also being into the visual arts and movies and live music and… it’s safe to say I’m an “aesthete” – chasing aesthetic experience is just something I love to do. But while dinner at Bacchanalia was phenomenal, I equally enjoy being blown away by a killer food truck outside a great local brewery. And, I think, what they share, what makes them great, is the intentionality and the combination of their seeking to master their craft and engage the aesthetic experience of the other. 

Each of these aspects share this common thread of being-with and giving-to others.  Meaningful work is a bringing-forth, like art, it is a gift to the future. 

And on that note, I think it’s time I start looking to the future as well. Specifically, the future of this podcast, rather than the history of my MA paper. 

We’re off next week, but keep an eye on the socials for what’s coming up soon. In the coming weeks I’ll be looking into the late Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, we’ll circle back to Marx and Weber, take dip into linguistics with Roland Barthes and mythical language, swing back to anti-work and post-work arguments from Kathi Weeks and James Livingston, and I’m thinking I should grab a drink with someone – more on that later. 

‘til then. 

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