Why bother doing a genealogy of refusal from literature, 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 explore, exploit, and create. Our kinship diagram is a lighthearted visualization inspired by the
CJAL Special Issue: Refusing Crisis Narratives. 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. Here we look at workplace refusal through art, music, dance, film, sit-coms, games, literature, and science fiction, from Melville's
Bartleby, the Scrivener to Doctorow's
Walkaway. We trace the lineages of workplace refusal counterposed alongside the library profession’s inheritance of vocational awe.
In "The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories" Cory Doctorow describes how “made-up stories, even stories of impossible things, are ways for us to mentally rehearse our responses to different social outcomes" (
Doctorow 2020). He remarks on how Daniel Dennett’s conception of an intuition pump—“a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem”—suggests that fiction (which is, after all, an elaborate thought experiment) isn’t merely entertainment (
Doctorow 2020). While science fiction authors often engage in world-building, creating entire universes with rules that differ from those their audience are accustomed to, these thought-experiments often reflect current reality, even if shrouded in metaphor. As described by Ursula K Le Guin, science fiction does not work “to predict the future… but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (
Le Guin 1979, 156). Philip Jose Farmer wrote that "...Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, write[s] parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'" (
Farmer 2008). We can begin our own exercise in professional foresight by examining dystopian, utopian, satiric and humorous workplace scenarios observed in our kinship diagram. We explore
workplace refusal as depicted in satire and comedy for much the same reasons, to look at our present day situation through the lens of popular culture. The extremes presented in this type of media help us develop an appreciation for the language of refusal.
This genealogy is a 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 labour and feminist work. It helps if we have a common narrative history to refer to that exists "outside" the profession. We hope it spurs discussion, maybe laughter, and another way of positioning the ways librarians can say and hear "NO" as a complete sentence.
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.