In Praise of Passive Aggressive Colleagues

Herman Melville got it wrong. Bartleby the Scrivener did not in fact die in that prison cell. Instead, he was awarded tenure.

Of course today's Bartlebies cannot just say "I prefer not to" when asked to run the committee charged with collating all of his colleagues' TPS reports* (and entering into a fairly inscrutable database the raw data, the collated reports, and lies about how this data will improve the department to infinity, as well as attending brainwashing sessions about how the TPS reports and database is changing, and then doing all the work over again when the people at the TPS office find something wrong with the formatting, etc., etc. etc.)

Instead what today's Bartlebies do is just make sure that every time they are asked to do service, they do a horrible job. And they do a horrible job with so much unapologetic aplomb that the resulting cluster-**** becomes the fault of the person who actually asked them to contribute to departmental service. If you are really good at the jujitsu, you make it significantly more work for others whenever you are asked to help them with anything, and soon they stop asking. 

Everyone reading this has at least one colleague or professor who has made an art form of this very kind of passive-aggressive jujitsu. And the learned helplessness is always a bit of a con. If your organizational skills are good enough to do all the things necessary to get tenure, they are good enough to do your bit of the soul crushing meaningless labor handed down by the administrative class.

Prior to the reign of "assessment," (I am *just* old enough to remember those halcyon days) I was significantly bitter towards the Bartlebies among us. I mean, someone has to do the administrative work and passive-aggressive helplessness is taking advantage of people who are willing to do it (plus, it shows that anarchism probably won't work, which is a sad commentary on humanity). 

But in the era of TPS reports, I can't help but admire the Bartleby.

First, whatever he takes to be more important than doing the TPS reports, even if it's sitting on a beach with a sugary rum based drink,** really is more important than the TPS reports. Second, we all need to learn from the Bartleby. Even those of us who step into the breach to do the useless stuff need to harnass no small amount of passive aggression so that we don't let it drive us crazy. I mean, it's very liberating to realize that TPS reports make no difference whatsoever and that ones responsibility is to do the least amount of work possible with respect to them. In this spirit, I actually think that increasingly that part of being a competent chair is learning to discern which tasks really matter and which don't and then using passive aggression to do as crappy a job as is possible with respect to the latter. And another real skill here is determining just how crappy a job is possible, given institutional constraints.

Third, the Bartleby also looks much better if we ask just what the heck has happened to Western Civilization.*** During periods of economic growth in the industrial revolution, on average the work week went down and median pay went up. This radically changed in the 1970s. Since then we've seen enormous economic growth and productivity increases, while median wages have stagnated or declined and the work week increased. I do realize that there are all sorts of explanations for what has happened since the 1970s, but I think we should not ignore religious ones. Remember that the Judeo-Christian conception of pride is not that of taking pleasure in one's accomplishments. Rather, it's the absolute inability to allow someone to be your equal.

Well we now have the technology for all of us to sip drinks on the beach for a good part of the year while our robot bartenders and waiters attend to us. But this would be an absolutely intolerable state of affairs for the satanic person who must have lots of people significantly below them in the social hierarchy. So what does a satanic society do? Among other things, for a society to grow in satanism it must force people to work longer hours doing useless things like write TPS  reports. Such reports really do a very good job of not only keeping us at work and off the beach, but also keeping us in our metaphorical place. Having to pretend that useless labor is important is the very first step in turning one into a post-industrial, kiss up kick down, boot licking company man.****

So again, I can't help but admire contemporary Bartlebies, passive aggression perhaps being the only possible revolutionary act left to any of us since the bad guys won.

But what if we were all Bartlebies. Wouldn't that be horrible? I'm not so sure at this point.

Now back to collating those reports. . .

[Note:

*There's actually a very serious ethical issue here. So serious that I have no idea how much of the above is irony. I do now have a grudging respect for Bartlebies who can get away with it, but also realize that it can be a crappy thing to do to colleagues.  It's not an easy issue. In any case please Read James Rocha's "Autonomy within Hierarchies: Soldiers, Servants, and TPS Reports," hopefully soon to be uploaded HERE, but you can e-mail the guy for a copy.

**Cf. The embedded song. I give props to the Dead Kennedys taking a moment to explain their song in the live version. People who didn't bother with the actual lyrics and just listened to the chorus almost uniformly took the singer to identify with the narrator who "gets away with it." Here he explains the history behind the lyrics to remind the audience that getting away with it is not in general a good thing and can in fact be monstrous. Graham Harman once wrote on his blog that one of the most ethically significant thing about individuals is what others let them get away with. And Bill Clinton once said that "because I could" is the worst reason ever to do something. I think there's a tremendous amount of wisdom in both sentiments.

***Which, as we know from Gandhi, would be a very good idea. Let's try it!

****I'm not making this up or being ironic. There is serious research on this and the stakes could not be higher. See Schliesser's post on Ludlow's Stone article HERE.]