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浪🧩📞 LACAN LESSONS 浪🧩📞

(Bullshit jobs are structured like a language)

In a deeply poignant twist of fate, just before his untimely passing at the age of 59, David Graeber — anthropologist, anarchist, and one of the most radical political thinkers of our time — gifted the world with a final, piercing insight. In what would be his last published article, he referred to “bullshit jobs” as a kind of “dream-work.” [1] This was a striking departure from his earlier lexicon.

While Graeber’s work often drew subtle inspiration from psychoanalytic giants like Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, he had never directly employed Freud’s concept of dream-work until that moment. Was this a conscious choice, a deliberate signal? Or was it perhaps the unconscious surfacing — the symbolic logic of his own thoughts erupting in their final articulation? Though we can no longer ask him, the appearance of this term invites us to imagine: Could it be that Graeber, even in his final words, was nudging us toward a deeper reading of the social world, one filtered through psychoanalytic critique?

If so, let us answer that call.

Bullshit jobs, as Graeber described them, are not merely pointless — they are structured. They don’t just waste human time and energy — they function as social symbols. They are linguistic constructs in action. And like language itself, they serve to prop up the symbolic order — that intricate web of social meanings, identities, and obligations we inhabit.

Let us begin with the word bullshit itself. Far from being a throwaway term, bullshit resonates deeply with psychoanalytic theory. It evokes what Freud would call the anal drive — that primal force of expulsion, control, and dirty refusal from which the symbolic order arises. In Lacanian terms, the anal drive is intimately tied to the production of meaning and the imposition of symbolic structure. Thus, bullshit is not the opposite of meaning — it is its perverse cousin. It is structure without substance, signification without significance.

Graeber’s typology of bullshit jobs, outlined in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, is not merely a list. It is a grammar — a syntax of symbolic roles. He identifies five categories: Goons, Taskmasters, Flunkeys, Box-Tickers, and Duct-Tapers. Each of these categories functions like a part of speech in the language of institutional absurdity.

Goons and Taskmasters: The Enforcers of the Symbolic Order

We begin with Goons and Taskmasters, who play the most active roles in reinforcing the symbolic authority Graeber refers to — what a Lacanian would call the Master-Signifier (S1). These are the roles that shout, that demand, that posture.

1. Goons are the frontline warriors of the symbolic order. They enforce the authority of whatever Master-Signifier happens to issue their paycheck. These are the lawyers who aggressively defend the “rights” of corporate trademarks, or the telemarketers who extol the “virtues” of useless products. They don’t merely perform a function — they embody a fiction. The scare quotes are not decorative; they reveal the rot at the center of the concept. “Rights.” “Virtues.” These are emptied signifiers, animated only by the energy of enforcement.
2. Taskmasters, on the other hand, wield the Master-Signifier from above. They don’t enforce the law — they fabricate the terrain upon which the law must be enforced. The Taskmaster does not simply manage — they conjure the illusion of management. When there is nothing left to manage, they invent busywork, create layers of bureaucratic fog, and hire subordinates just to maintain the illusion of hierarchy. They are not the voice of the Master — they are the echo chamber that keeps the voice alive.

These two roles — Goons and Taskmasters — operate like sentinels of the symbolic. They reproduce the fiction of purpose, even as they hollow it out from within.

Flunkeys and Box-Tickers: The Passive Reproducers of Symbolic Knowledge

Next, we turn to Flunkeys and Box-Tickers, whose roles are more passive, but no less complicit. While they do not directly enforce the Master-Signifier, they provide it with a steady stream of symbolic support. In Lacanian terms, they help manufacture the knowledge (S2) that props up the authority of the Master (S1).

3. A Flunkey is the courtier of the symbolic order. They nod, they smile, they attend meetings. Their entire job is to prop up the illusion of structure — to be the loyal subject who confirms the chain of signifiers. The moment they walk into a room, their mere presence validates the absurdity unfolding therein. They don’t produce knowledge — they reflect it back, like a mirror of complicity. The “knowledge” they support is full of scare quotes, because its substance is derived from the anal compulsion to sustain appearances.
4. A Box-Ticker is a ritualist in the temple of bureaucracy. Their work consists in endlessly completing forms, filling out compliance checklists, and satisfying procedural requirements. But these rituals do not produce results — they produce more rituals. Every box ticked gives birth to another box, another protocol, another spreadsheet. The knowledge they generate is exponential but meaningless — a recursive loop of signifiers that supports S1 in perpetuity.

Both Flunkeys and Box-Tickers perform acts of symbolic reproduction. They are the stenographers of the Master’s whims. Their ultimate purpose — even if they are unaware of it — is to “Make S1 Great Again.”

Duct-Tapers: The Symptomatic Exceptions That Hold the System Together

Finally, we arrive at the most enigmatic role in the typology — the Duct-Taper. This is no ordinary symbolic actor. The Duct-Taper does not serve a particular Master-Signifier. They serve the system as a whole — or more precisely, they serve the failure of the system.

5. A Duct-Taper is called in when the symbolic order begins to crack. When contradictions emerge between competing Master-Signifiers — say, between profit and safety, or between speed and accuracy — it is the Duct-Taper who steps in to paper over the abyss. Their work is ad hoc, desperate, and essential. They are not there to produce meaning — they are there to prevent the collapse of meaning.

In Lacanian terms, the Duct-Taper occupies the position of S(Ⱥ) — the signifier of the lack in the Other. They are the ghost in the machine, the paradoxical figure who reveals the absence at the heart of the symbolic system. They don’t restore order — they conceal its impossibility.

Where the others serve to uphold the symbolic structure, the Duct-Taper reveals its fragility. Their job is a symptom — and in that, perhaps, they are the only truly honest role in the entire typology.

Conclusion: A Language of Absurdity

Graeber’s brilliance lay not only in his political convictions, but in his uncanny ability to map the absurdity of modern work onto deeper structures of meaning. In calling bullshit jobs “dream-work,” he may have been suggesting that these roles are not just economic — they are psycho-social symptoms. They reveal the fantasies, the repressions, and the symbolic compulsions that hold our world together.

Bullshit jobs are not accidental. They are structural. Like language, they have grammar, syntax, and purpose — even if that purpose is hollow at its core.

And so we must read them — not only as a critique of capitalism, but as an invitation to analyze the fantasies that sustain it.

Notes:
[1] “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep” – David Graeber

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Shit Does Roll Downhill

(Shit rolls downhill)

There is a phrase—vulgar, crude, and yet strangely profound—that echoes across cultures, workplaces, and class struggles alike: “Shit rolls downhill.” It’s not just a colorful metaphor for injustice. It is a deeply psychoanalytic truth.

To understand why, we must begin at the beginning—not of civilization, but of the toilet.

In Freudian theory, there is perhaps no psychological moment more formative, more symbolically potent, than the anal stage of psychosexual development. Here, the child faces their first confrontation with authority: the societal demand to regulate and restrain their most primal and private functions. The child learns, through potty training, what it means to obey, to delay gratification, to control, to conform. As Freudian scholar Saul McLeod explains:

“Adults impose restrictions on when and where the child can defecate. The nature of this first conflict with authority can determine the child’s future relationship with all forms of authority.”
(Freud’s 5 Stages of Psychosexual Development, McLeod; see also: “Anal stage” on Wikipedia)

Thus, from the very beginning of life in society, shit and authority are intertwined. The power to command where and when defecation may occur becomes the prototype for all subsequent structures of discipline, compliance, and symbolic regulation.

But Freud did not stop there. He made an even more provocative leap: he connected the anal drive not only to authority, but to economics. In his essay On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism [1], Freud introduced the now-infamous equation:
faeces = gift = money.

What does this mean?

It means that from the child’s perspective, their own feces becomes a kind of offering — a first “gift” to the world, to the Other. When a child relinquishes control over their feces in accordance with societal demand, they are offering a token of submission, participation, and recognition. This act is psychically transformed into the idea of giving something valuable — and eventually, symbolically, into money itself.

It’s not a stretch, then, to follow the trajectory of this transformation toward a radical conclusion: the anal drive is not just about dirt and disgust — it is the hidden engine behind all symbolic exchange. Shit lies at the origin of value.

From this logic, we can derive another startling equivalence:
signifier = shit.

The implications of this are echoed—if not shouted—in a line from Lacan’s Seminar XI, one of the central works of his psychoanalytic teaching. In the course of analyzing transference, Lacan recounts:

“I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this of my person –as they say– Oh, mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit – a term that is also essential to our experience.”

In this statement, Lacan touches upon the most intimate betrayal of symbolic exchange. The subject gives something — love, truth, presence — and what returns is shit. Not just metaphorical shit, but symbolic shit. The signifier. A returned gesture that reveals not the essence of the self, but its reduction to a function within a larger symbolic system.

Thus emerges the uncomfortable truth: every signifier, every word, every claim, every label — is not pure meaning, but a “gift of shit.” The symbolic order is not an Eden of clarity, but a stratified sewer of signification.

But, importantly, not all shit is equal.

In practice, symbolic orders do not treat all “gifts of shit” the same. On the contrary, they are organized into rigid hierarchies, where some signifiers are elevated to divine status and others are discarded as worthless. And in this, we find the very essence of social inequality.

A brilliant example of this comes from a classic Turkish comedy film, Kibar Feyzo (1978), in which a pompous landowner expresses outrage at the idea of sharing the same toilet as his workers. He utters a line that has since become a cultural proverb in Turkey:

“Ağa pokunun üstüne pok olur mu la?”
(“Can there be a shit above the master’s shit?”)

Beneath the laughter lies a stark Lacanian truth: the Master’s Shit is the Master-Signifier (S1) — the signifier that asserts its authority purely through its position. And the workers’ shit? That’s the chain of signifiers, the knowledge (S2) that endlessly labors in service to the Master’s truth.

The Master-Signifier does not explain itself. It doesn’t need to. Its authority is self-justifying, circular, and absolute. It declares, it commands, it dominates. Meanwhile, the lower signifiers — the words, rules, rituals, reports — work tirelessly to sustain the illusion of order, legitimacy, and meaning.

This symbolic hierarchy sets the stage for one of David Graeber’s most incisive distinctions — that between bullshit jobs and shit jobs.

In a now-famous interview with Vox, Graeber explained:

“Bullshit jobs are jobs which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist. That’s the bullshit element. A lot of people confuse bullshit jobs and shit jobs, but they’re not the same thing.

Bad jobs are bad because they’re hard or they have terrible conditions or the pay sucks, but often these jobs are very useful. In fact, in our society, often the more useful the work is, the less they pay you. Whereas bullshit jobs are often highly respected and pay well but are completely pointless, and the people doing them know this.”

This is a crucial conceptual distinction:

• A bullshit job is one that is symbolically inflated but functionally empty. It pays well, looks prestigious, but is intrinsically useless — often even harmful.
• A shit job, by contrast, is one that is functionally essential but symbolically degraded. It is poorly paid, exhausting, and disrespected — but the world would collapse without it.

In Lacanese, we can now say:

• The bullshit job is aligned with the Master-Shit (S1) — it sits high atop the symbolic hierarchy, sustained only by its own self-importance. It does not need external justification; its authority is its reason. Think of it as the shit of Wall Street’s golden bull [4].
• The shit job, meanwhile, belongs to the chain of shit (S2) — the underpaid, overworked labor that supports the symbolic order but is never given credit for doing so. This is the ordinary excretion of Main Street.

This is not a symmetrical relationship. It is a hierarchy — and a deeply unjust one.

Thus we come to the final psychoanalytic translation of that infamous folk wisdom:
“Shit rolls downhill.”

In Lacanian terms, this means that the symbolic order is constructed through the top-down dissemination of Master-Shit. The higher signifiers project their arbitrary authority onto the lower ones, demanding loyalty, interpretation, and labor — but offering little meaning in return. What is passed downward is not value, but waste disguised as significance.

This is the perverse truth behind what economists once tried to brand as “trickle-down economics”: that prosperity would flow from the top to the bottom. What actually trickles down is bullshit — the symbolic excretions of a class structure built on fiction and upheld by suffering.

In the end, the very organization of political economy is revealed as a vast, uneven plumbing system of shit-signifiers — some exalted, others discarded, but all participating in the same perverse cycle.

And so, the symbolic order remains flush with hierarchy, authority, and excrement — a system where shit flows, yes, but never equally.

Notes:
[1] “On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism” – Sigmund Freud
[2] See also: “Bullshit Jobs Are Structured Like a Language” by the same author
[3] From the Turkish film Kibar Feyzo (1978), featuring Şener Şen as the landowner and Kemal Sunal as the worker
[4] “Comedian seeks permit for smiling poop sculpture in NYC” – Josh Kosman