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A Genealogy of Refusal : Walking away from crisis and scarcity narrativesMain MenuCrisis narratives frame our responseBartleby at the WallHow can fiction and popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship?Proud Descendants who "Prefer not to"Some recent gems from Bartleby's lineageA Kinship Diagram of Workplace RefusalSatire is richComedic instances of workplace refusal are especially powerfulDark side of parodyMore SatireWhen Expectations Cross the lineWhy don't librarians "Just say No"?Do we prefer to suffer in silence because its a vocation and not "just a job"Feminized LabourSaying Yes all the TimeSuperhero LibrariansIt’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a librarian!I am not your heroMurderbot: the alternate patron saint for librariansThe invocation of crisis narratives is relentlessNo individual solution to our problemsDebunking myths that hold us back to enable collective ways of moving forwardWhat refusal can we take up?A Cosmic GiftManifest NOBecoming fluent in hearing and saying NoAsset FramingBibliographyWorks cited, featured, mentioned and consulted for Genealogy of Refusal projectGlossary of Key ConceptsMultiple PathsA compendium of paths through the Genealogy of Refusal content: a choose-your-own-adventure approach to this companion piece.Genealogy of Refusal TimelineWe welcome contributionsLearn how to contribute to this projectAbout the AuthorsNatalie K Meyers4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon1459b2fc55591cd9b08a290af468d31b5dfe46a3Mikala Narlockdb843c923469f0dadab98d57ee053b00c88a64b1Kim Stathersb8f352d1ce6eb714d5242702eaa05362c8eae357Multimedia project for the The Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship Special Issue on Refusing Crisis Narratives
A little reasonable
12021-02-14T11:30:33-08:00Anonymous339485"At the Moment I'd prefer not to be a little reasonable" scene, film clip from Friedman's 1970 Bartlebyplain2021-02-14T17:28:45-08:001970Friedman, Anthony. 1973. Bartleby. Drama. Pantheon Film Productions, Corinth Films.Pantheon Film Productions, Corinth FilmsNatalie K Meyers4b3948ab8901940da5f2eb884c2cc86b3dc6ac22
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1media/bartleby_the_scrivener_by_frisca_freak_d639ucd.png2020-12-07T15:00:38-08:00Bartleby at the Wall77How can fiction and popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship?plain2021-04-16T15:32:57-07:00 What can we learn from Melville's Bartleby about workplace refusal? As Andrew Delbanco comments, the story "Bartleby, the Scrivener"[is] “An old piece of writing by a guy who lived almost two hundred years ago and was describing a world that in some ways is very far from our own but it connects intimately and immediately to our own experience" (Giamatti & Delbanco 2020).
Melville's Bartleby character is the fictional cornerstone of workplace refusal. He begins work in an attorney's office as a scrivener, occupying a small work area near a window that looks out onto a brick wall a few feet away. Bartleby's employer is at first impressed by his respectful demeanor and industry-- Bartleby appears to work tirelessly and accomplish as much as, if not more than, his coworkers.
Later, however, the boss becomes baffled as Bartleby begins to refuse certain tasks, until eventually he's not working at all. The boss writes, "Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery" (Melville 1853).
Let's take a look at this clip from Friedman's 1970 film adaptation, Bartleby.
Bartleby, as an individual refuser, is engaging in a risky act: he is isolating himself from his colleagues, he is likely to draw ire from his boss, and is risking his livelihood. It is worth noting here, and remembering throughout, the refusal as an individual is an option open primarily to those who can afford it.
As the story progresses, Bartleby's continued refusals eventually cause waves throughout the office, as his coworkers gossip about his lack of work ethic, complain that they have to pick up the work of the slacker, and even encourage the employer to fire Bartleby. Instead of rallying around their colleague, they lose no time in passive-aggressively bemoaning their own situations.
This scene in Friedman's film captures that moment perfectly (Friedman 1970):
In the story, Bartleby's employer comments that "Nothing so aggravates an earnest man as a passive resistance . . . "
Delbanco observes that "what Bartleby does is make it harder and harder for him not to look at him" (Giamatti & Delbanco 2020). Pretty soon everyone's looking and they can't look away. Paul Giamatti in conversation with Andrew Delbanco observes that "All of us do a good job at not looking at other people, particularly if they look like a problem that we don’t want to have to deal with, then we’d rather they were somebody else’s problem" (Giamatti & Delbanco 2020).
"As Camus suggests in The Rebel, a “man who says no… is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.” And so for each of Bartleby’s rejections, might there be an unspoken acceptance of — or, at the least, a preference for — something else? Or is this guy so hardcore punk-rock that he’d even go so far as to eventually reject preferences altogether?" (Simón 2019).
From Bartleby can we learn how to say:
I prefer not to . . .
I prefer not to take on an unmanageable workload.
I prefer not to take on work outside the scope of my job responsibilities.
I prefer not to be the beneficiary of others’ endowments if the strings are too tight.
I prefer to choose where I spend my mental, physical, and emotional energy.
I prefer to fully occupy my role, my space, my destiny.
Let's look together at Melville and Bartleby's fictional descendants, examine the way they promulgate or refuse crisis and scarcity narratives, as we try to answer the question:
How can fiction or popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship?
In them we can trace a fictional genealogy of refusal, through which can we together consider the way workplace refusal plays out in fiction and popular culture between Bartleby and today's stories.
Can what we observe help us contextualize the way crisis and scarcity narratives influence expectations about the archivist's budget, the librarian's role, the curator's duty to the collection?