I would prefer not to bore you

(The following is a guest post by Brian Lamb, author of the weblog Abject Learning.)

If you've been following the symposium this far, it's unlikely I'm can offer you a distinctive analysis of Tronti.   I've really enjoyed and learned a lot from reading the posts and comments this week but my theory discourse skills, never my strength, are presently in a derelict state.  Yet I was drawn to make at least a tangential contribution to this process in part by the power of Bartleby, invoked by Jodi's Long Sunday post on Bartleby in Power which, as Jon notes, was a precursor to this symposium.

I harbour a long-time fascination with Melville's uncanny anti-hero--depending on when I've read the story it's struck me as a marvel of style (Melville writes a Poe story!), as an examination of writing itself, as a covert sci-fi representation of entropic forces dispersing human vitality into the void of cosmic heat-death, or a preview of how of most my favorite twentieth century fiction would eventually define itself.

And of course, there is the satire of capitalism in this "Story of Wall Street".   And Bartleby himself as a figure of refusal.  Though when I enjoy scenes of Bartleby generating chaos in the legal office my Marxist reading is more of the Groucho, Harpo and Chico variety...

In reading up for this symposium I'm embarrassed to admit how surprised I was by Bartleby's significance to the literary-critical left.  Intrigued by Jody's examination of Zizek's reading, I learned that Bartleby has long been a standard bearer for Marxist literary critiques, such as Louise K. Barnett's "Bartleby as Alienated Worker"(1974), though the evident human concern of the lawyer-narrator of the story complicates the simple proletarian-parable, as does the fact that Bartleby refuses many things (food, to name one) besides work.

I started to print out and carry around instances of the school of Bartleby interpretation as I came across them.   Over the course of time my dossier of articles (usually read during my hour-plus bus commute to work) got so thick as to be unmanageable, and the range of nuanced yet significant distinctions between readings by the likes of Deleuze and Agamben blurred into a caffeine-altered internal mosaic of riffs carrying varying degrees of polemic power.

I came to feel as confused and ineffectual as Melville's lawyer-narrator, and became increasingly convinced that my own re-interpretation would simply deepen the fog of obfuscated representation initiated by his account.

Around this time my dossier got even thicker, augmented by a printed copy of a recent special issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour (pdf).  My interest in the issue was in part principled (focused as it was on "Academic Freedom & IP Rights in an Era of the Automation & Commercialization of Higher Education") and in part self-interested, as the articles were almost exclusively published by academics that work at my university (many of whom I work with personally), and the articles were largely critiquing programs and initiatives I am to varying degrees involved with in my day-to-day duties.

Disclosure:  in case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not a prof or a grad student. I'm a geek-for-hire dedicated to educational technology.   So my reaction to the whole 'Digital Diploma Mill' critique is complicated.   On the one hand, as someone who likes to think of himself as an advocate of open source, open content and a more humanistic approach to teaching and learning in higher education, the apparently tautological link of online communication to "automation & commercialization" comes close to fighting words.  But whatever my quibbles with the analyses and characterizations, the subject matter more than suffices to get me brooding about the nature of my work.

Perhaps surprisingly, the piece that got me thinking most did not concern education technology at all.   It was Changing Tastes: Coca-Cola, Water, and the Commercialization of Higher Education (pdf) by Sean Cook and Stephen Petrina -- a long saga detailing the disturbing linkages between a university's exclusivity contract with the Coca-Cola company and the concurrent removal or disabling of 44% (114 of 262) of the drinking fountains on campus.   The facts in this affair are contentious, but more troubling than the withdrawal of public drinking water coincidental to a lucrative beverage deal (vending machines sprung up as fountains were taken off-line) was the patently absurd set of justifications given by diverse sources to explain why it was all happening.   As detailed in the article, when Cook inquired why 17 of 18 fountains in the university's Faculty of Education building had been abruptly covered in clear plastic, he received a series of contradictory explanations, one following another as a previous account proved false.   The initial explanation cited the safety of the building's water, hinting at lead contamination.   This explanation was withdrawn when it was pointed out that the student cafeteria and coffee machines still used tap water, and that no warnings had been posted about drinking water from bathroom sink taps.

Soon after, Cook received an email from "another staff member":

Besides the old piping and horrible tasting water, the cleaning staff got tired of cleaning out fountains that had coffee dumped into them." Furthermore, "[W]hen the building was renovated, the pipes didn’t get redone!"  Her message reiterated the widely held belief that the water was contaminated due to "old piping" and introduced the alternative explanation that the cleaning staff had grown tired of cleaning them. It is worth noting that in her view, preference also played a role i.e. that the cleaning staff, and those who employed them,preferred not to maintain fountains. [Emphasis in original] (99)

Reading this passage on my commute, with Bartleby on the brain, I was stopped cold.   Here in the middle of an apparently unrelated article was the mantra of Melville's antihero placed into the mouths of workers mired at the bottom of the university's labour hierarchy.   And the word was italicised, no less!   Surely this was a coincidence too compelling to ignore?

For any reasonably clear-minded thinker, it would be easy to ignore.   And advisable.  But I'm clinging to the serendipity.

Cook and Petrina's account of the university's water-fountain/Coca-Cola deal is laden with frightening details.   But perhaps none is so disturbing as the nature of the misinformation concerning the removal of fountains across multiple buildings (Cook details many other explanations offered).   The authors of the piece take some pains to distance themselves from a straightforward "conspiracy theory" to explain the withdrawal of fountains, though that is exactly what they were accused of by the university's defenders (105).   There is no evidence of an organized centrally managed campaign to eradicate free drinking water.   What is clear in the article is how how overarching conditions (a need to reduce costs, and to increase revenues) set in motion certain actions, which then create perceptions that reinforce the trend (ie: most staff and students take the removal of water fountains as evidence of unsafe water in itself) in a broader context across the campus.   People across the campus more or less independently co-construct the rationale.  When Cook fills a bottle of water in order to have it independently tested (at his own expense, no contaminants were found), a fellow student advises "don't drink the water, dude." (101)

The final justification by administrators to moving to bottled water offered in Cook's article is "that they were simply responding to changing tastes."   Or preferences, if you will.

Probably irrelevant aside:  the building in question was built within a couple years of the publication of Tronti's "Strategy of Refusal."   Whatever the state of society, back then in Canada it was a given that a public building would have readily accessible drinking fountains.   A number of new buildings have been launched on campus in the past few years, and I have observed that it in each instance it is near impossible to find a drinking fountain, though there is invariably a Starbuck's (or something like that) on the ground floor.   It's a small expression of how the balance of power is exercised amongst money, human values and needs, and the tattered remnants of the public good.  And perhaps indicative of protean consumerism adapting more effectively to the conditions of post-modern society than the resistance to it.   At an institution that is ostensibly defined by its critical thinkers, and that boasts its commitment to sustainability.

Our university only drank half as much soda (and bottled water and juice and...) from the Coca-Cola company as it promised to over the course of the exclusive agreement.   "We could fill up the Empire Pool with Coke and we still wouldn't make it."

 

As penance, we will maintain the exclusive beverage arrangement for an additional couple years without the revenues.   Other than a couple snarky pieces in the student newspaper, reaction of any kind to the whole affair on campus has been negligible.

One might tweak Tronti for unrelieved negativity.   But a tall, cool glass of unadulterated refusal would really hit the spot sometimes.