Work and purpose: A return to Sisyphus and Bartleby

Sisyphus: A micro-genetic analysis

As we know, Sisyphus is a chastised god whose punishment consists of rolling a stone up a mountain and upon arriving there, letting it roll down the mountain and starting again, endlessly. The metaphor of this series of actions, of course, can apply well to a multitude of work situations. In fact, even activities in which a person has a wide margin of autonomy to decide how, why, and sometimes even when to work, we can still find elements of repetition and a trace of Sisyphus in our work. A key feature in the definition of repetition is its cyclic character, which can be rigid around a core of actions or looser but still not completely unframed.

Let us start with a comparative example. A Catholic Mass, for example, is arguably a cyclical ritual that relies on repetition. However, what makes this ritual different from a worker who spends the day frying hamburgers in a fast-food chain or a worker who spends all day cutting up chickens in a refrigerator? In terms of the formal aspects, all these rituals contain, albeit with variations, elements characterizing cyclical looping: Actions A, B, C, etc., performed more or less in order 1, 2, 3, etc. However, the psychological effect of participating in a Mass is not, as a simple observation of these rituals could demonstrate, the same as frying hamburgers or cutting up chickens. Why, however, as it could be argued, does each one have a purpose?

A first possible answer is to say that while in the two examples involving work, the purpose, at most, is one linked to situated actions (an objective); in the example of the Mass, the purpose is linked to the idea or affection of something transcendental, such as saving one’s own soul after death. This response can help us reveal an important psychological role of purposefulness in human subjectivity: purpose does not only refer to the objectives of action, purpose as objective, but also to a projection in time, a projection into the future, a glimpse. For what would be the purpose of frying hamburgers if we consider the microscopic level of action? The purpose is preparing a snack called a hamburger. By selling as many burgers per day as possible, the employee in question may even earn a little extra, and the purpose of their work will have been achieved, not for themselves but for another person: to generate dividends for the fast-food chain.

In his interpretation of the myth, Camus (1955) proposed an original perspective to understand what purpose is or, more particularly, to understand the process of meaning-making because this is what Camus proposed to analyze with this interpretation. For him, the exact moment Sisyphus could glimpse some sense in his inglorious, arid, and repetitive task was when, after letting the stone roll, he went down the hill to retrieve it and restart the other part of the cycle. At this moment of the descent, without the stone, Camus suggests, Sisyphus could think freely about his act of rolling the stone, and, who knows, perhaps he could even consider some variation, even if it was small, in the way of performing the rolling of the stone during the next cycle. In other words, it is as if we consider a micro-genetic analysis of Sisyphus’s action. At this level, as when you use a magnifying glass or increase the resolution of an image under a microscope, you then see what you could not see before, even though it was there—or, if you want to introduce imagination, something that could be there. Applying the notion of Valsiner (2015), the purpose would present itself to Sisyphus because by thinking and exercising his freedom, he broke the symmetry of his eternal return.

Sense and meaning of Sisyphus’s work

Another perspective of analysis of Sisyphus’s myth and of the two examples on work can be proposed here by considering the articulation between sense and meaning originally proposed by Vygotsky (1962). Based on this, Leontiev (1979) suggested separating three levels of analysis: operations, actions, and activity (for a more up-to-date review of activity theory, I refer you to Engelsted, 2017). The level of operations refers to the learned behaviors that become automatic—someone who makes themselves available to hammer a nail, as part of the number of things to be done during the construction of a house, does not need to (perhaps should not even) think about the micro genetics of their movements (except for a curious researcher). So someone who hammers nails and does so proficiently does not need to reinvent the wheel: they simply take the hammer and do what has to be done. Of course, “simply” here is not so simple: depending on the type of operation, it takes years of studying, practicing, making mistakes, and getting it right. A surgeon, for example, does not “simply” learn the gestures necessary to perform a lengthy neurological surgery. If surgeons or those who use hammers needed to learn everything from scratch in each new situation, it would be practically impossible to operate in the work contexts.

The second level is that of actions, which entails some degree of consciousness or apperception. It is the level of planning and operational objectives of actions—the level of manuals, books, and compendium. It is not enough just to tacitly know how to hammer the nail but to understand that the nail in question fits within a concatenated segment of actions related to, for example, the construction of the roof of the house and to know there are several “approaches” to how to hammer a nail depending on the type of object to be nailed, the tools used, etc. The level of actions is that of the tasks to be accomplished in order to fulfill a segment of a broader activity. In addition, it is necessary to do this (nailing) in the most rational, economical, and, why not, profitable way if we are talking about a construction worker who must rationalize the use of nails and hammers.

Finally, the third level is that of activity. Basically, the level of activity contains the answer to the following question: why, after all, build a house? Human activity is not merely a series of discretionary actions but is instead a sort of semiotic field in the sense that it delineates the social meaning of a particular event, such as building a house. There is a social and “final” reason embedded in any human activity because we face a recipient other than ourselves (a family, for instance, or someone else’s family) in a particular context (building a house in the periphery or central zone of a particular city may have completely different meanings and practical implications) and for a particular use.

Applying this key Vygotskian idea, operations and actions relate to the field of meaning—that is, to what has already been established in the general culture, disseminated and socialized, and of collective sharing. There is no secret to acquiring the art of hammering or even operating on heads—we have schools and libraries for a start as well as Google. In turn, sense refers to what touches a particular agent in a given situation and where we locate the source of purpose as a glimpse, as a hyper-generalized sign capable of channeling future affections and “subject positions.” For someone viewing it from the outside, the act of nailing nails while building a house can be a trivial and boring activity (social meaning), but for the actor of the action, it can mean something totally different (personal sense).

If, on the one hand, this schematization by levels (operational, action, activity, sense, and meaning) can be didactic, on the other hand, it may need some caveats. For example, from the viewpoint of meaning-making, which is a social process that is shared—sometimes even a “social representation”—frying hamburgers on a grill in a fast-food chain may not be something that “society” (at least part of it) considers a dream career for young people, representing a purposeful, professional path. However, for the concrete, singular person who is there for hours, standing, working as a “griller,” it can mean something different: in their own personal constellation of senses, it can even be, why not, something pleasurable and filled with perspectives that are not merely the repetitive actions of their task (contributing to what they understand to be a “good professional”)—as in Roberto Benigni’s film La vita è bella: for the “objective” spectator, the scenario was desolation, but for the child, thanks to the father’s eyes, the same scenario took on another connotation (with the message it all depends on how one sees it).

At this point, we have at least two questions to consider. First, this perspective on sense-meaning could open scope for justifying any inhuman work activity: it is enough to find personal sense (“I like what I do; this will make me a good professional”), and then, the cultural meaning of that activity and everything else is justified. For the second question, Leontiev’s (1975) perspective on the relationship between work/activity and purpose seems to be based on an allegedly “realistic” ontology about this same relationship. As such, for Leontiev, the purpose of labor is, in essence, to satisfy the common good and not the good of a small group of capitalists—like the small group of gods that satisfy themselves with the punishment imposed on Sisyphus. In other words, we already part from the concept of what the purpose of work should be, as the “ontology of the work” is already known. It is as if we can view Sisyphus’s objective situation from above. As long as work is considered only from an operational point of view, that is, as a series of actions to be put in place in order to obtain specific results, then, we could say, inspired by Leontiev, that we are confronted with alienated work. In this case, the meaning of working equals doing something to obtain something else that goes beyond the intrinsic reason of doing it in the first place. In this sense, doing particular work is irrelevant in terms of its content, provided that the results of this activity go directly to a few people/shareholders as revenues or as a “surplus.”

So, for example, if someone finds sense in an exploited and indecent job (social meaning, created from an “objective analysis” of the situation), perhaps thanks to the massive publicity conducted by the human resources department, this (personal) sense is built on a subjective basis that is disconnected from the social and objective meaning inherent in it: that work only serves to enrich someone other than the worker. The latter is served for the purpose of someone other than their own as a generic member of the species. Either we release the work of its capitalist exploitation, performing it according to our needs and use values (in contrast to exchange values and surplus values), or the purpose of work will be bound to disconnect from actions that, day by day, thousands of workers around the world, such as Sisyphus, are forced to perform to simply physically subsist. We will live in a matrix, such as that found in the famous movie of the same name. As anticipated earlier, one consequence in Leontiev’s analysis would be the alienation and sacrifice of the sense of labor. Sisyphus may even find (personal) sense using the expedient identified by Camus in his micro genetics; however, from the viewpoint of (social, “objective”) meaning, he is only trapped in the disgrace of being an imbecile in punishment, whose purpose is merely to make powerful gods feel some perversely satisfied up there on Mount Olympus.

We recognize that there may be epistemological problems in this division in levels, although it is not our focus here to look at this issue in more depth. However, just to advance some partial conclusions, when we talk about objective or social meaning, this “objective” does not necessarily derive from a better position of the analyst in relation to the “truth” of the work situations illustrated in our examples (of the “objective” type of the blue and red pills found in the film The Matrix). Rather, it corresponds to a particular place of analysis, to an investigative position, which itself is tainted by presumptions and assumptions. Moreover, sense and meaning, while they can be two autonomous facets in themselves, are not independent of each other; in fact, Vygotsky thought of them as a unit. Valsiner (2014), also from the unit sense-meaning proposed by Vygotsky, seems to prefer the terms personal culture and collective culture, both thought from an “inclusive separation” of the agent in culture.

In the next section, we will deal with another important literary figure in our task of thinking about the sense of purpose and its relationship with work from a cultural psychology perspective.

Bartleby and the power of No

In Melville’s novel (2016), we are introduced to Bartleby, a scrivener whose main activity consists of copying documents, and in fact, he does so uninterruptedly until the moment he utters the famous phrase I prefer not to. Until then, Bartleby, in the eyes of his boss, a man of law is an excellent copier, working as we now see machines that produce photocopies literally identical to the originals used. However, his decision becomes unshakable, and as we follow his story, we discover that Bartleby comes to the paroxysm of what could, at first glance, seem like a stance of radical denial, like the reverse of any conceptual, purpose-oriented behavior.

Bartleby’s attitude makes us think about the relationship among purpose, potency, and action. Let us consider work. When we are in the pre-conceptual phase of a task—that is, when we think about how we should or could act to achieve a goal (such as building a bridge)—we only have simulations of reality, so to speak. These are plans, ideas, objectives, anticipations, or, as the old Gestaltists said, mental experiments. Many such experiments are in fact mental actions that anticipate possible problems and solutions. As they say in the well-known jargon of business, planning is 90% of the work, the rest being execution. However, when we proceed to the action itself, the mentally anticipated does not always materialize. In particular, when we attempt to translate purposes into actions, we experience a reduction in potency.

By selecting a course of action, we reduce the universe of possibilities and enter the field of the événement and immediately afterward the remembrance of what happened, restarting the process. Returning to Sisyphus, in the micro genetics of his behavior after rolling the stone, he would have the possibility of thinking about alternative scenarios, variations in the task, even being a “Happy Sisyphus,” as Camus suggested. However, in the final instance, his mental freedom will each time be confronted with the actual rolling of the stone during each cycle. We can evaluate and consider various scenarios, for the tasks of our work, as well as for our lives more broadly, but ultimately, there will be choices to be made and specific actions to be put to the test of reality, and reality, in this case, has a restricted sense. It is the incorporation of gestures, affections, and thoughts—that is, the passage of conceptual elements to an act by which they have their potency, at the same time, reduced but also actualized. Such is the paradox. To use embryology terminology and as an additional illustration, it is the same as between the passage of stem cells from the morula stage to the next stage, the blastocyst stage. There is a compromise of totipotent cells (the cells of the morula), which then become pluripotent cells (of the blastocyst) and finally unipotent cells (the liver cells, for example, that “give up” their potency of being any other tissue to specialize in being liver cells); otherwise, we will never end up having a complex, differentiated organism.

When Bartleby says, I prefer not to, he imposes a disruption in the flow of action and expectations. In everyday life, the flow of events presupposes the tacit agreement of agents regarding their engagement in conducting activities in which there is not always room for in-depth deliberation. Even if we consider many of the cultural rituals that channel our daily lives, we can be surprised by their mechanical character. In fact, if we had to think carefully about how we behave when we get on a bus (which is different if it is empty or crowded), our practical life would be much more difficult and would, above all, not flow with the organicity, with which we see it flow every day.

The internalization of scripts and their incorporation at the level of operations, to resume Leontiev, makes our performance much more efficient in handling small daily rituals. From this viewpoint, culture is an immense cushioning mattress, an immense inertial machine. Thus, in broad terms, we can say that everyday life operates on the logic of yes. It so happens that Bartleby introduces the logic of no, and it is around this logic that the question of potency is reposed. Here having no purpose is paradoxically the basis for reopening the immense field of the possible. However, this field of the possible exists only at the border contiguous with the impossible, with the nothingness, the emptiness (Bendassolli, 2017). We will come back to this point in the last section.

Another interesting aspect of Bartleby’s situation—as at no time does Melville give us access to the character’s inner world—is his directing a question to the interlocutor. In the context of the novel, the immediate interlocutor is Bartleby’s boss, the man of law. He is confronted with a fundamental unknown, an enigma posed by Bartleby’s attitude. Of course, this kind of puzzle has several management strategies. For example, we can label a person who appears to have no purpose in life (I am consciously generalizing) as a “tramp.” With this, we isolate the issue in the other, more particularly, in a fault of the other—who could also be labeled as crazy, depressed, or, depending on the situation, eccentric. Bartleby’s boss does not do this, but the employee could also be fired, excluded from professional life, and replaced by another, and then, the problem would have been solved and not mentioned again. As a matter of fact, the boss insinuates that Bartleby’s previous work experiences precipitate his “innate tendencies,” which lead him to that sad end. The discomfort of the interlocutor is then immediately signified, and soon, the inertial machine of culture returns to function at its usual pace, and reality as we know it follows in its secure basis of the tacit and symmetric yes.

We can also find a similar discomfort in the cinema, and, perhaps, no other film better illustrates this than Persona by Ingmar Bergman. Although there is no literal Bartleby here, we have a character who marginally places herself in the field of the no. When Elisabeth Vogler decides to stop talking, she causes in her interlocutor, Alma, a spiral of semiotic struggle of a desperate attempt to give meaning to silence. In the context of the film, Vogler’s silence is on the same grounds as Bartleby’s I prefer not to, questioning the very raison d’être of the semiotic chain, that is, the meaning-making activity. Silence is the sign of the absence of explicit purpose, of a reflux to the field of the possible, to the field of potency.

Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, in his book Bartleby y compañía, calls “Bartleby syndrome” the phenomenon of giving up doing something definitively. In particular, Vila-Matas refers to writers who, after releasing a work, often one of great success, choose never to write again, entering a kind of permanent retreat and silence. They prefer to remain in the field of potency, without commitment to any particular œuvre. In doing so, they remain in a state of permanent openness, without their thoughts taking a form in a detriment to “x” amount of other possibilities. Doing so, such authors expect to keep the potency of their thoughts a step above the level of words. For words, when born by the hands of the writer, are born “smaller” than the thoughts that generated them, particularly if we consider that is fairly possible to “think without words.”

If Sisyphus’s story leads us to reflect on the difference between sense and meaning and purpose and objective, Bartleby’s tale invites us to reflect on the reason to have a purpose after all and how much it is no longer, from its origin, compromised by the inertia of the yes embedded in everyday culture. More than this, I prefer not to introduces an interruption in the semiotic chain flow (meaning-making), prioritizing the not-yet/not-still over the already there, so to speak. He puts such a chain into suspension, without denying it. If understood as mere denial, then the potential contained in Melville’s work would be misconfigured and eventually lost. Denial for denial’s sake could in itself already be a purpose—I deny X because I prefer Y. Bartleby does not prefer X over Y or Z, etc., but rather “prefer(s) not to”—that is, he prefers the “no.”

Emptiness and purpose

How do we interpret this “prefer not to,” and how does it move us forward in the discussion of purpose and work, specifically in the sense of purpose as a glimpse or hyper-generalized sign? In the first reading, as already anticipated in the previous paragraph, the “no” can be taken in its sense of negativity, of subtraction, as a position of a subject in which X does not wish to do Y. If we consider psychoanalysis, for example, we might think that such a subject would be dulled in his own desire. Around this problem of desire then, several psychopathological cases, such as the melancholic, the depressed, the asthenic, would be profiled. In this context, depression would be pathology of desires and action. In a culture of work that values entrepreneurial action, the depressed as a caricature of the subject “without desire” is fatally an anti-hero.

However, there is another reading of the “no” of which Bartleby is the bearer. It is about not related to emptiness, nothingness, as the hyper-generalized sign “prefer not to.” However, here, it is not difficult to be tempted by a negative interpretation of subtraction: emptiness and nothingness as absolute states, as absence of something (Bendassolli, 2017). In general, everyday culture, particularly corporate culture, seems to have an aversion to any sign that the reality of work may be resting on an immense abyss. For example, if there is an explosion of a bubble, such as the one that occurred with the real estate in 2008, then the process is re-elaborated and reframed as an episodic, historical event, albeit with incalculable impact on the lives of a countless number of people and countries. Financial bubbles are just one example of the fragility, which with human affairs in the field of economics can be so solid that they melt into the air, to paraphrase a famous expression used by Marx. Working is achieving goals, it is having a purpose, goals to beat, always a positivity to pursue. Merged with a certain vulgar materialism, business culture sees work as a way to bring about “something” where before there was nothing but stones, minerals, oil, water, land, and thin air—that is, pure immanence. “Nothing” here is understood as deficit. The contemporary entrepreneur goes to bed every night, agonizing about what they have not yet managed to invent because creating without interruption is the soul of business, the leitmotiv of a non-looser life. The will must always be in want of something, setting a goal, and striving to.

Emptiness and nothingness, in our proposal to read Melville’s novel, point in the other direction. Let us pick up where we left off with a previous example. At the very beginning of this text, we asked why the Catholic ritual of a Mass would not have the same psychological effect as the activity of frying burgers all day in a fast-food restaurant or cutting up chickens in a refrigerator. This is because in the first case, the emptiness does not take on the negative character that it does in the second. In the Mass, the terms employed and all the liturgy involved are sufficiently vague and generic enough to allow the imagination to work, and to offer the faithful a transcendent future possible after their death, but of whose experience the person has but a glimpse into the present. In the second case, the task is so deprived of imaginative possibilities (unless, perhaps, when represented in the cinema) that the worker has the concrete experience of the finitude of the activity. The activity is closed, cyclical, and symmetrical, unshakable in its sameness and suspended in time, which expands into an infinite present, like Sisyphus’s work.

In the semiotic process, emptiness is not an absence, a lack of something, but rather the very condition of the existence of the sign (Bendassolli, 2017). We can see this from two angles. First, as already mentioned, the object of the sign (Peirce, 1935) is placed in relation to a third, the subject, who interprets—both being mediated by a representation. The connection between the object and its representation occurs because this “third” establishes this connection, and this is not because the subject uses their “private mind” for this but because they interact with elements of the collective culture; that is, they are surrounded by other signs. However, without emptiness, the arbitrary character of the sign would be lost, and then, it would be as if the last word had been spoken. It would be as if a word only had meaning and not sense. Vygotsky (1962) proposed precisely the opposite by suggesting the unity between both sense and meaning around the word. Although meaning is a relatively stable zone of the meaning-making process, sense plunges one into the universe of personal culture, being continuously transformed there; thus, widening the meaning zones of the word.

A second angle to analyze the importance of emptiness in the meaning-making process and, at the same time, in our understanding of purposefulness has to do with the nature of the hyper-generalized sign of the latter. Here, we return once again to the example of the worker in a fast-food chain used when analyzing the myth of Sisyphus. We made the distinction between purpose as synonymous with objective and purpose as a glimpse or a hyper-generalized sign. Objective concerns the backbone that links and organizes a sequence of A, B, C, or N actions aimed at achieving a goal in some specific activity and material context. As a hyper-generalized sign, however, the connection of purpose with an immediate set of actions is not immediate.

For example, “I want to be a good professional in the fast-food business” (purpose as a hyper-generalized sign) does not have the same cognitive and affective value as “I need to turn the burger twice against the plate to grill it evenly” (purpose as objective of specific tasks or actions). Both refer to the work of a “griller” in our hypothetical example. However, while this last sentence can provide us with a good idea of what we are talking about, the former does not do so easily. What is it like to be a “good” professional? If we look for the word (“good”) in the dictionary, then the meaning will not necessarily be semantic—first, because it depends on the context (pragmatic sense) and second, and most importantly, because sense is not the same as meaning. The second sentence is closer to the body, to what animates behaviorists so much, namely, the possibility of translating thought into actions, and actions, behaviorists believe, would be unequivocal.

In the history of science, perhaps never has the ambition to make the semantic value of a word coincide with its unequivocal correspondence in the empirical world gone as far as among the Neopositivist philosophers gathered around the Vienna Circle. Any assertion not submitted to the criterion of verification and empirical correspondence would be dispatched as literature. Similarly, purpose, to have some practical effect in terms of directing the orientation of behavior toward an end, would have to be strictly defined (as a “thick description”). Otherwise, it would be nothing more than a daydream or a dream without greater consequences for a person’s professional life. The work of many career counselors comes down to helping their clients to clarify their purposes and make them tangible, separating them from mere unrealistic fantasies. In this type of approach, there would be no place for purpose as a glimpse, as a hyper-generalized sign.

Therefore, when Bartleby decrees I prefer not to, he is not referring to nothing as a kind of “death instinct” (Freud), of “eternal recurrence of the same” (Nietzsche), of nihilism. To Freud, the death instinct refers to the tendency to keep things in a conservative way; the desire is stuck in a sort of rut. For Nietzsche, eternal recurrence is related to the repetition of events, to the sameness and circularity present in all human actions (such as doing copies all day long, forever). Bartleby is referring to “no” as a creative potency because he introduces a breaking element capable of reminding us that nothingness/emptiness is the starting point, not the point of arrival, a condition for the purpose to effectively emerge because it creates a deep asymmetry in the inertial flow of “yes.” Such asymmetry can be observed in the form of surprise, amazement, and restlessness on the part of the interlocutor, his boss.

In a professional context, rarely does anyone worry about workers saying yes or tacitly engaging in actions that presuppose yes almost without limits. By acting in this way, there is no room for emptiness as time will always be filled with actions. As Nietzsche once suggested, work consists of putting a person staring at a point on a screen. Most people’s lives come down to thinking and projecting “goals” on such a point. I prefer not to generates a totally diverse framework. It places nothing on the scene (at least enlarging the range of our vision), reminding us that what has already happened (the dot point, say) does not have a monopoly on what could have happened and did not happen or on what could happen, even though one may not have a clear idea of what it is that could happen. To paraphrase Tolstoy, who in his novel Anna Karenina said that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” those who always say “yes” are all alike. This seems to be what Bartleby is calling our attention to.

Work and purpose: Final provocations

Purpose, as a hyper-generalized sign, can prove to be a promising unit of analysis for understanding the human experience with work. As we suggest here, this perspective could circumvent the tendency prevailing in business culture, not only in it obviously, to operate on the basis of the automatic premise of yes or to hyper-emphasize purpose as objective and then launch itself in the catalographic description of actions. Bartleby responds to Sisyphus, proposing to him the possibility of I prefer not to. Sisyphus’s drama, however, is that he seems to have no choice but to roll the stone. This is his punishment, and his body is trapped in the strenuous situation, although his mind may be free and even capable of the possibility of altering, by the fact that he is able to anticipate and glimpse, the fine detail of the act of rolling the stone—that is, at the micro-genetic level. So, what would it mean to Sisyphus and all workers like him to prefer not to?

In an essay dedicated to analyzing Bartleby, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1999) suggested that the universe of this character is that of contingency. Bartleby would not oscillate between the Shakespearean language of being and non-being (acceptance and refusal). According to Agamben, I prefer not to introduces a third possibility that would transcend both states: “rather” or “no more than,” implicated in the scrivener’s formula, meaning that X and non-X have the same power to occur or not to occur, and then, the philosopher wonders under what conditions something could occur and not occur, as it seems to violate the laws of classical logic. His proposal: only within an experience without any affiliation with truth as correspondence. The contingent is what may be or may not be, coinciding with the domain of freedom; thus, differentiating itself from the domain of necessity. Another philosopher, Richard Rorty (1989), in the tradition of American analytical philosophy, also placed contingency as a central element in what he called the “ironic man”—that is, a subject capable of relativizing all their beliefs, being guided not by the search for the belief–truth correspondence but for the expansion of solidarity and self-enrichment.

If X occurs, an endless set of non-Xs could have occurred, and the fact that X has actualized itself into reality—and, as such, reduced the potency that gave rise to it in the first place—it does not eradicate the potency itself; on the contrary: it confirms it. Sisyphus, in fact, could endlessly re-edit the ways he pushes stone through each cycle (even though not to reach the ultimate perfection). Although the stone is the same, Sisyphus is not the same—with each ascent and descent (contingency); he goes up as one person and comes down as another. In his condition, could he be guided by a purpose? Could he obtain a glimpse of something other than sunrise and sunset on the same hill, always doing the “same” thing? That may be so, as long as his purpose is understood in the universe of contingency.

Once again (like in our discussion on sense-meaning), thinking strictly about the universe of work, it is not difficult to anticipate the risk of this position of embracing contingency in such a way. In theory, it would be able to justify the most absurd situations, the most abject forms of exploitation. However, it would also bring about another tricky (and even opposite) risk, illustrated by this question: What would be the fate we should all pursue? What should our purpose be at work? Earlier in this article, we observed that there are authors who seem to have the answer to this, especially when they are based on “objective” analyses in which work plays a determined role in the “ontology of the social being.” The purpose would have a certain aim: the classless society, unalienated labor. Sisyphus would have to be freed from his punishment. The gods are lousy bosses. Nothing could come from that Sisyphean experience except for pain and suffering. Without ending Sisyphus’s “objective” situation, any attempt to help him would be committed to deception, to ideology, to the farce of individualized “subjectivity,” boosted with a creative and imaginative (“micro-genetic”) mind. When, today, we become aware of people working in a situation of extreme precariousness, there is no way to resist the desire for justice, for something to change, the desire to interpret Bartleby’s phrase as denial, as revolt, as resistance: I prefer not to as “no more” to such working conditions. Sisyphus revolts and says, “NO, that is enough.” Sisyphus wants radical changes in his “objective working conditions.”

This analysis becomes complicated because it tends to separate individual purpose from collective purpose. Just as we should question whether all people should have the same purpose in life, when talking about work (such as extinguishing the class struggle, for example, pursuing an ideal work), we should also reflect on whether purpose is something exclusively individual (“I wish to invest in my career to be a good professional and to get rich”). In fact, corporate culture tends to address the question of purpose mixed with an individualistic viewpoint, whose principle is that of career development, promotion of entrepreneurship, and valorization of the so-called “exemplary trajectories” (great leaders, etc.). Here, both Sisyphus and Bartleby could get by with the help of a career coach, as there is nothing that cannot be solved with a good individual strategy. Both collective and individual purposes seem to have the same weak point: they emphasize certainty, objectivity, and thorough delimitation of what would be purposefulness, an ideal work versus a contingent one. However, as we have proposed throughout this text, such delimitation would only capture the facet of purpose as an objective, even if this is the most salient and explored characteristic of purposefulness. Any trace of emptiness and contingency would be removed from the unboundedness or openness embedded in purpose as a generalized sign.

At this point, clearly, such a definition of purpose touches on aspects such as our conceptions of freedom, justice, and collective living. The consequences of understanding purpose as a hyper-generalized sign, capable of accommodating emptiness and contingency, go far beyond individual career development or the improvement of work as a means of building useful things, guided by previous objectives (purpose at the level of action). The challenge, at the end of this text, is to avoid the how to do, albeit tempting. Perhaps the affective experience of the hyper-generalized sign—in this case, I prefer not to—is a starting point. What does the experience of this sign generate in each person? How do they question the trend of “yes” in every course of action in our everyday lives? Trying to examine, scrutinize, and rationalize this sign can paradoxically produce the opposite effect to the intended one, reaping its potency. It is for this reason that, in this closing, we invite the reader to think of these and other issues raised here as provocations to generate their own effects.