Welcome to the Stuck In The Middle Newsletter.
This Newsletter aims to show you ways of thinking differently about the context of modern knowledge work. This first newsletter should be considered an extended introduction.
What does it mean to be stuck in the middle?
At times, we all feel stuck in the middle. You may feel stuck between the executive team and individual contributors as a middle manager: you don’t have the authority to make, or often even have a voice in, the decisions that most impact your team, but you are responsible for carrying those decisions through. You may feel stuck between wanting to feel a sense of purpose in your work and having to make a living to support yourself or your family. You may feel stuck in the middle class, still bound by your job to survive but doing well enough to feel you have no right to complain.
Being stuck in the middle is frequently seen as liminal—being on the threshold and waiting to go to one side or the other. It feels like you are either in both worlds or neither. Like being 19 in the United States, in many ways, you are an adult, but not all; you are old enough to be drafted and die for your country but not old enough to drink whiskey with your comrades. You are between.
Between or In-Between
The anthropologist Tim Ingold encourages us to think about the middle as a place in itself. He describes a way of thinking about this that differentiates between from in-between.
Between has two terminals, in-between has none. Any movement in the between, like the undergoing that is framed in doing or the growing framed in making, is merely from here to there, from an initial to a final state. In the in-between, however, movement is the primary and ongoing condition. 1
Like being on a journey, you can see yourself between Barcelona and Madrid or see the journey as where you are: on the train enjoying the beauty of the Spanish countryside.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gutarri go even further. They see the middle as indicative of a line of becoming. As we are always in the process of becoming, we are always in the middle. For them, the middle is not where we are stuck; rather, it is where we pick up speed.
A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both… Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. 2
What is interesting about this description from Deleuze and Guattari is that the motion is not from one side to the other; the motion is perpendicular to the sides. It is a motion in a new direction.
And so, if being in the middle is really about this movement, this becoming, why do we feel stuck in the middle? Stuck in this place between things?
Contradictions
Inherent in this is a contradiction, as we are always in the middle, forever being “stuck” in that place of becoming. It is both stuck and motion at the same time. It is a contradiction. We often think we want to avoid or resolve contradiction, but contradiction is core to the nature of things. And what feels stuck is that the contradiction can’t be resolved.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is the philosopher most associated with contradictions and the dialectical movement that they create. His focus is not on resolving the contradiction but on reconciling it.
What Hegel calls the resolution (Auflösung) of contradiction is not its elimination through a third term, as the idea of synthesis suggests. Instead, it is the reconciliation (Versöhnung) with contradiction, the recognition that contradiction is not a problem to be eliminated but the driving force of all movement in being. One cannot arrive at a synthesis that would eliminate contradiction because contradiction is the basic fact of all being. 3
So we are back with the movement in the middle, but now we can see that that movement comes from the contradiction. This allows us to return to those examples of middle spaces at the beginning of this post.
As a middle manager, there are multiple contradictions at play. You are in a position of authority but without true authority. You are an employee and a boss.
Most of us work for two reasons: to have a sense of purpose and to make the money we need to survive. These competing needs also represent a contradiction.
Being middle class is also a contradiction. In many, you are neither the actual working class nor a capitalist. You own stock through a 401K but still need to work to survive (sometimes paycheck to paycheck). The middle class reveals many of the inherent contradictions that exist in capitalism. Often, the worker’s movement focuses on the working class, and the benefits accrue to the capitalists, and those in the middle can be forgotten.
Dialectical Movement
Where does that leave us? We can now recognize that the feeling of stuckness is a place of movement, not toward what we already know but towards something new. It is a movement created by a contradiction, and we don’t need to resolve that contradiction; we need to reconcile with it. Hopefully, it allows us to reframe what being stuck in the middle means. We can see it as a constant state of becoming—a place where we are alive in the contradiction rather than being one thing or the other.
Instead of trying to be one thing or the other or create some artificial balance, we can see that the contradiction defines us and breaks us free of any definition.
Rather than synthesize two opposing positions, what Hegel calls unity involves the recognition that the position is opposed fundamentally to itself, that it involves itself in what it is not. Unity enshrines contradiction as the constitutive form that identity takes. Contradiction both undermines and defines the identity of the subject.4
What does this mean as a middle manager?
It means we are always in between and can see being in between as a place in itself. It is a place imbued with contradiction, and learning to accept those contradictions is vital to how to thrive and can make real change.
Going forward, each issue of this newsletter will explore contradictions we are inherently stuck in the middle of as knowledge workers. These will often focus on one or two books that offer an alternative perspective to most mainstream leadership literature.
Next week, we will explore being stuck between making a living and making a difference: how work is both a path to finding purpose and being alienated.
- Life Of Lines, Tim Ingold ↩
- A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ↩
- Emancipation After Hegel, Todd McGowan ↩
- Ibid ↩
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