Rewrite of Troubadours
Welcome to this first rewrite.
Why am I engaging in this experiment? There is this tension in modern life between being and doing, creating and preserving, I experience this tension with generating but perhaps not necessarily generating the things I intend to generate. Perhaps through the process of rewriting I can get It is a way to play with reflection and refinement.
I listened to this David Graeber’s talk From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes, that relates to these notion of creation versus maintenance.
What are those things that distinguish the managerial class from the caring class? Managers manage, they manage people and processes. This involves creating processes, forms, organizations, theories. You can imagine that what managers do is not terribly tangible or measurable unless the managers themselves are creating output. But what does a manager create? These days it is paper work. Either their own paper work, or paper work that other people either fill out or follow.
It is unfortunate that our society can only measure things in terms of work generated. I imagine the head of a biology lab, or a chief designer, that is able by their experience, pattern matching ability, and wisdom to quickly diagnose problems and help align on the salient issues. I doubt that everyone in the managerial class is able to do this, but this is the value that a gifted manager can provide. A good manager optimizes processes.
In the caring class we have people that take care of others, people like teachers, nurses, doctors, home aids, waiters. These people do things, rather than optimize things. Neither group makes things in the sense of perhaps an auto factory worker in the early 20th century. However, in addition to doing things, like caring for a patient, the caring class also has to fill out the paper work generated by the managerial class, in the service of optimizes.
You could imagine that what I am doing is optimizing the newsletter, but really I imagine myself as caring for the newsletter. The care giver starts every day anew. Although there are long term goals, teachers have to grade assignments, and performers have to practice instruments, there is the sense that every day the care giver is practicing care. The manager is not practicing management but something else, the manager is perhaps practicing awareness, or practicing wisdom.
With this newsletter one could say that I am currently in a management stance, optimizing my newsletter, but I imagine myself more in the role of a care giver. I am tending my newsletters, I am practicing newslettering.
Troubadours!
What is the archetype of the manager vs the carer. When I think of the management class I think of Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville. It is a fantastic short story I suggest you read it. It is about a clerk who fills out forms and rebels by refusing to work. This is about the work that is involved in maintaining the apparatus of the managerial class and what is at stake when you refuse to perform - which is nothing. This is quite different from say a care giver deciding not to perform. The ramifications are more obvious is a nurse refuses to care for a sick patient.
More about the rise of the sort of work that Bartleby does is in Peter Burke’s fantastic two volume work, The Social History of Knowledge. For example there was a class of people who’s job it was to vertical draw lines in ledger books of a certain dimensions so that they would conform to standard accounting practices. This practice went away as printing became more sophisticated but we can imagine similar jobs today, perhaps in UX, or event front end web engineering, that involve the formatting, display, and saving of information for the managerial class.
The troubadour is a caregiver. The performer is a care giver. We could even think of this in biblical terms with Cain, the agrarian as the managerial class, having to plan crops and irrigation, and Abel as the care giver, tending his flock. I am thinking about this biblical story after reading a reinterpretation in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael a few months ago
In the language of performance and art, I imagine Bartleby would be something like a performance artist. Performance art in the late 20th Century, early 21st Century, is a way for artists to rebel against the commodification of the art market, freeportism, and the use of art objects as financial instruments.
The 1966 Album by Allan Kaprow How To Make A Happening
What does it mean for me embody this archetype?
For me, this is about practice rather than product. It is about the daily recreation or rewriting or repetition of the creation, not the singular moment of creation. It is about continuity rather than a rupture. It is about Sisyphus continuously rolling the boulder up the hill, Prometheus’ liver being devoured every day only to regrow at night, it is about the changing of the seasons the summer that Persephone spends with Demeter and the winter she spends with Hades.
Why are all these myths so dire and depressing? John Vervaeke in his 3rd awaken from the meaning crises video, I think, talks about these stories as approaching live without the possibility of experimentation or newness. They restrict freedom. What history does, what logic does, what science does, is free us from these repetitive cycles so that we can act.
There is something in this cycle, in this practice that we have lost, and in modern times starting with Nietzsche and the Eternal Return, we see the idea of the cycle again. The idea that everything is happening over and over again in infinite time and space is perhaps metaphorical and intended to provide meaning or weight to actions, or perhaps it is a true metaphysical possibility. Either way, it seems that in the escaping these cycles we have lost something valuable in the notion of the cycle and care.
Perhaps that is one of the tasks at hand now in modern times, to combine the newness with the repetitiveness.
xo
Meredith