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A Genealogy of Refusal : Walking away from crisis and scarcity narratives

Bartleby Compendium Entry

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1. Common Ground
2. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street Melville, Herman. 1853. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231 "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, with the words "I would prefer not to".
3. The League [Kyle Higgins Short film]. With the 1946 formation of "The League of Heroes" in Chicago, the country is introduced to the first ever Superhero Labor Union. Founded by The Grey Raven, his kid sidekick Sparrow, and the amazing Blue Blaze, The League of Heroes was a beacon of hope against evil and tyranny in Chicago. Now twenty years later, as The League is about to expand nationally, an old adversary makes a murderous comeback. Drawn by the rampage, the former sidekick Sparrow returns to the city--and The League--for the first time in years. Sparrow says: "Well" Gosh, I think it's great! I want to be a hero forever."
5. Beyond books: Librarians on front line of opioid crisis
9. Office Space Bare Minimum Meme
10. A Paradise Built in Hell : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.
11. The Starless Sea
13. Editorial: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
14. Feminist Data Manifest-No
15. Compassion: “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville”
17. 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University We can trace the histories of our schools, our beliefs and practices about teaching and learning, our disinvestment in public institutions, our investments in technological solutions to discover how and why we got here — to this moment where everything is falling apart and the solution (from certain quarters) is software that sounds like "panopticon." It's that last bit — the histories of our investment in technological solutions (and our faith in technological solutions even when they are obviously so utterly dystopian) — that is really the focus of my work.
18. Black Study, Black Struggle
19. Essential, Yet Disposable: How the Career Faculty FTE Cuts Impact Librarians
21. Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures
23. Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries
24. It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal For Library Workers "success risks jealousy, bullying, or being undermined within a competitive workforce, and that deferring to those higher up the ladder is part of the everyday emotional labour performed to manage the emotions of those with more power than ourselves. "an individualistic workplace can be isolating, controlling, and abusive. How can we advise workers to be vulnerable and authentic, if institutions replicating whiteness may in fact end up harming workers who express themselves with trust or authenticity?" "workplace policies can directly contribute to a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and internalized blame within their employees. The onus is on the worker to become resilient and less sensitive, gracefully absorbing harm for the comfort of the institution."
25. Gendered Expectations for Leadership in Libraries Despite significant gains in representation at the administration level, there is still a disparity between the percentage of women in our profession and women as library leaders. Additionally, even when women attain leadership roles, even top positions in libraries, there are still hurdles in the shape of gendered expectations. This article examines the history of gender representation in the field, discusses some recent trends, and then makes some recommendations for creating an environment in which women can succeed and how, more specifically, the profession could become more supportive of women in leadership roles.
27. Last Library Ward Shelley, Brooklyn NY The Last Library August 21 - October 16, 2015 The Last Library is 2 rooms full of about 4,000 (fake) books, books that have not been written. The rooms and the fake books are just supports for the text, but they are not neutral carriers. Apart from what they may individually be about, books and libraries are loaded with meaning in our culture just as symbols, and they represent many things to many people. As such, they add a certain kind of spin to the words we have written on them. You can say a lot with a few words. Where did the titles come from? There was a web page where people could submit titles; from there they were printed out on a book spine and put into the library. Like most creative projects, most of the titles came from a group of interested persons, the artist did a lot of them himself, but was not the most prolific.
29. Living a feminist life
30. Library workers fight for safer working conditions amid coronavirus pandemic
31. Distant Reading for Quick Insights
32. Librarians advocate closing campus libraries during coronavirus pandemic
33. Libraries find themselves on the front lines of Michigan’s opioid crisis
34. Most Libraries Are Closed. Some Librarians Still Have to Go In.
35. Bartleby Compendium Entry
37. Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote
39. Libraries are an essential service. Give librarians the vaccine now | Opinion
40. No Manifesto
41. I'm Not Your Hero - The Murderbot Diaries Animatic
42. Libraries, Librarians, and the Discourse of Fear This article presents examples of representations of libraries and librarians taken from modern popular culture, including popular film, television, and novels. Using Michel Foucault's approach to discourse, we assert that such representations are made possible by, and decoded within, the structures of a discourse of fear, a practice of speech and symbols that equates the control and fear of discourse in fundamental ways. The library as an institution falls squarely into the lived tensions of this discourse, and these tensions are made apparent in the themes of the threshold: the librarian as formidable gatekeeper between order and chaos, the other-worldliness of the library, the library as cathedral, the humiliation of the user, the power of surveillance, and the consequences of disrupting the sacred order of texts. The discourse of fear is a language and a vocabulary. It is a way of speaking about the library and the librarian that transcends any specific image or portrayal. Outside of the discourse of fear, such representations would not be recognizable as libraries or librarians at all.
43. Todd Rundgren Play Like A Champion Concert: Bang The Drum All Day
44. Big U First Edition Cover
45. A Quirky, Funny and Inspirational Game - SAY NO! MORE Review
46. Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopias: The difference between utopia and dystopia isn't how well everything runs. It's about what happens when everything fails.
48. Dismantling the public sphere : situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new public philosophy This work presents a thorough examination of librarianship and the social and economic contexts in which the profession and its institutions operate. As a basis of analysis, Buschman employs critical education scholarship and the research of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, whose seminal work on the public sphere—the arena in which the public organizes itself and formulates public opinion—serves as a meta-framework for Buschman's study of librarianship. Buschman asserts that a significant shift has occurred from the library as a contributor to the public good to a model where economic rationality directs policy. He challenges much of the current thinking and assumptions guiding libraries, exploring the circumstances in which librarians and libraries operate and linking the profession back to democratic and public purposes as the core essence of the field. Chapters include: • Crisis Culture and the Need for a Defense of Librarianship in the Public Sphere • The New Public Philosophy and Critical Educational Analysis • The Public Sphere: Rounding Out the Context of Librarianship • Studies in Librarianship and the Dismantling of the Public Sphere • Follow the Money: Library Funding and Information Capitalism • Follow-the-Leader Library Management and the New Public Philosophy • On Customer Driven Librarianship • Drifting Toward the Corporate Model: ALA • Notes on Postmodern Technology, Technocracy, and Libraries • The Public Sphere and Democratic Possibility Highly recommended for courses in policy and librarianship, as well as for academic and public library directors, this work will also be of interest to theorists in the social sciences.
49. Hench "Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. As a temp, she's just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called 'hero' leaves her badly injured. So, of course, then she gets laid off. With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks. Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it."
50. Fictional Labor Unions in Science Fiction

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A Kinship Diagram of Workplace Refusal 23 image_header 2021-04-09T14:39:28-07:00
Why bother doing a genealogy of refusal from Fiction and Science Fiction and popular culture? If we want to confront the options for workplace refusal it helps if we acquaint ourselves with some common stories and the worlds they've explored, exploited, and created. We can begin our own exercise in professional foresight by examining dystopian, utopian, satiric and humorous workplace scenarios.

Just as Bartleby lives on (and has been taken up by filmmakers, artists, literary theorists, and even RPGs), libraries and librarians don't exist apart from the culture we curate. We exist in that self-same idiosyncratic, imperfect, self-reflective culture of books, film, comics, music, history and theory. If we're going to look at workplace refusal through art, music, dance, film, sit-coms, and science fiction, from Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener to Doctorow's Walkaway we can construct a sort of kinship diagram of workplace refusal. In it we can also counterpose and trace the library profession’s inheritance of vocational awe.

This kinship diagram is a lighthearted visualization inspired by the CJAL Special Issue: Refusing Crisis Narratives . We hope it spurs discussion, maybe laughter, and another way of positioning the ways librarians can say and hear "NO" as a complete sentence. We know this genealogy is, by virtue of its motivation, bound to be: arbitrary, incomplete, inaccurate, and always a work in progress, open to argument, revision, and criticism. We are okay with that.

This genealogy is launching point for understanding the librarian's role in crisis narratives in the workplace. It lets us connect the librarian's role not just to the characteristics accredited through the award of an MLS or other degree or credential, but also to other memorable characters in popular culture, and to labor and feminist work. It helps if we have a common narrative history to refer to that exists "outside" the profession.

Now talk about
1. Doctorow - power of SF
2. Vonnegut - speculative fiction and SF genre putdowns
Vonnegut, Kurt. 1986. 48th PEN International Congress — Censorship in the U.S.A — 1/15/1986. https://soundcloud.com/penamerican/panel-censorship-pen-congress-1141986.
Vonnegut, Kurt. 1990. Hocus Pocus.
Frayne, David. 2015. The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/928883464.
Proud Descendents who "Prefer not to" So where do we find Bartleby the Scrivener today? Here are a few gems:

Bartleby has a significant entry in the Old School Role-Playing Community's 2010 compendium Petty Gods: Revised & Expanded Edition where he appears as "The Petty God of Inactivity." Bartleby's character responds to any and all requests with "I would prefer not to." Destroying Bartleby is impossible.

Bartleby's famous line appears verbatim in Qualityland, Marc-Uwe Kling's brilliant book published in 2020 about what happens when The Shop, that knows what you want, sends you something you really don't want. How do you say "No"? How do you return something if you have prove the algorithm wrong to get the company that sent it to accept the return? Jacques, A nurse in the story is pressured by the president to turn off her life support "for the good of the country", and responds: "I would prefer not to, Madam President".

Bartelby also makes an appearance in Toronto writer Natalie Zina Walschot's Hench. It's a story about a data analyst with some unusual clients that just about any librarian can relate to! In it the protagonist, Anna, rubs her throat where a superhero's not so super grip has left welts where his fingers have dug into her skin. Her co-worker Greg urges her to "have someone look at that" and she dismisses his attention by saying verbatim: "No, I'd prefer not to." His response is priceless: "Fine, Bartleby," Greg says. Anna does Bartleby plenty proud in Hench. Here's a promo that's a nice on-ramp to Anna's set-up in Hench.