Halfway Bartlebys
On preferring to not go the extra mile (and its mirror opposite).
This week’s letter, while it does not involve airline miles rewards programs, it starts and ends with a flight story.
A few years back, an old friend of mine in Mexico reached out to me in the hopes that I could offer a keynote at a symposium that my friend’s university was organizing. My friend shared with me that they had no budget for honoraria but that they could cover flight and accommodation. I agreed to do it both because of our friendship and because the subject matter interested me; I thus started the work of preparing my keynote. My friend connected me with her department assistant, who was tasked with arranging the flight details.
Without much consultation, the assistant reserved a flight that was utterly inconvenient for me in every respect. I wanted to make adjustments to the reservation, to which he bluntly said no. I then offered to book the flight myself and then get reimbursed, to which he also said no, adding: “the administration will not allow that misuse of funds”. I explained that reimbursing someone from a legitimate out-of-pocket, mutually agreed upon, expense does not constitute a misuse of funds, but a legitimate and routine practice (and I did not add that I had booked hundreds of flights for speakers for a living over decades), but he repeated that it was not allowed. Amidst this back and forth my friend stepped in to defend her assistant, threatening that if I did not like this arbitrary reservation they would cancel my participation altogether. She had clearly miscalculated, because the stakes were much lower for me than they were for them, so I agreed to cancel. Furious, she then threw a number of insults at me and accused me of being a prima donna; I only replied that I was sorry she felt that way (although I did think to myself: how many prima donnas agree to work for free?). Sadly, this is how our friendship ended.
In fairness to my friend, I believe we both were victims of the passive-aggressive vindictiveness of her assistant, who appeared to have been very unhappy in his job and, in the frustration and powerlessness that many administrative positions generate in one, he would take revenge through petty power trips onto the people he was supposed to service. He was a hybrid of some of the most bureaucratically sadistic characters in Kafka’s novels and Bartleby, the famously obstinate clerk in Hermann Melville’s short story who would simply refuse to do something he did not feel like doing.
Throughout my labor life, I have learned that no job description is ever completely accurate. Most of the times, job descriptions are aspirational, generic, and/or written by upper-level management people who really do not understand the job themselves. For the most part, these descriptions do not, and perhaps sometimes can’t, touch on the many complexities and responsibilities that every person who tries to fulfill or live up to the description need to follow. And, most importantly, employers know it: among the unspoken rules of thumb, every job is to an extent what you make for it, and those who take that generic job description and fulfill it with intelligence and creativity are the ones who will pull ahead.
Sometimes the vague aspiration to have employees go the extra mile feels ridiculous, especially when articulated with corporate language. A good example is a scene in the 1999 film Office Space. A waitress named Joanna (played by Jennifer Aniston) works at one of those silly chain restaurants where waiters are required to have a cheerful demeanor and wear articles of “flair” (buttons allowing employees to “express themselves”). Obviously considering the practice as stupid, Joanna does the bare minimum of “flair” for her daily job, and the manager calls her for it, with the vague explanation that “some people choose to do more flair, and we encourage that.” The scene is representative not just of the corporate commercial forced entertainment culture, but the inability to properly articulate the actual company’s expectations for an employee.
I also encountered (like I am sure most us have) those who underperformed, be it for lack of effort, interest or capacity, ranging from those who authentically struggled to the egregious instances of those who required termination.
But the latter were easy cases in comparison to halfway Bartlebys. This variety of worker is complex in the sense that they are not inept or incompetent enough to merit immediate firing, but they also are unambitious, mediocre, and unimaginative; they only do the bare minimum in order to keep their jobs, but they are unmovable when it comes to engage in an extra effort.
In his famous Nobel Prize speech, Albert Camus said, “Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.” The instinctive perniciousness and unusual expertise of halfway Bartlebys is that they stand in the exact place where they can generate just the right level of obstruction and mediocrity to ensure the failure of projects, while never acting incompetently enough to merit being blamed for it, let alone, justify their firing.
Several years ago, when I was trapped in a bureaucratic hell of this sort, it occurred to me that the creation of labyrinthine bureaucratic processes could be understood as an art form. I thus published a satirical book titled Hacia una estética de la burocracia (Toward an Aesthetics of Bureaucracy), which argued that Latin America excelled in this conceptual practice (“The history of Latin America has never been defined by democracy nor even plutocracy, but by bureaucracy”).
In defense of halfway Bartlebys, they seldom have enough self-awareness of their identity, and they don’t think of themselves as problematic; on the contrary, they often have a complex rationale (which often includes resentment and/or grudges against the administrative apparatus that governs them) that allow them to justify and praise themselves on their ability to outsmart the system, usually in small ways. I once supervised a halfway Bartleby who had run projects in the exact same predictable and unimaginative approach for years; when I wanted us to update our models because the old models focused on profit as opposed of quality, they only found lopsided ways to continue working in the old (profitable but less quality-oriented) model but pretending to have updated it. In the end they spent more time and energy creating elaborate lies and mirages for me than doing what I had initially proposed.
In Hacia una estética de la burocracia I also paraphrased the hermeneutic theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer (“we all are the others, and we all are a self”) to understand our psychological embodiment of this practice (“we all are bureaucracy, and we all are our own bureaucrat”). I added that last lime because I recognized that none of us is entirely able to slip into half-Bartlebyism, and I admit to having done so on occasion in my own work. As a young museum public programmer, once a scholar scolded me for sticking with the rules and telling him that I could not change the advertised location of one of his lectures. In a dismissive and contemptible tone, he told me, “I suppose this is a problem that would require some imagination to solve, but since you have none, I see I am wasting my time with you.” Ever since that time I have worried that I could be perceived again that way.
I often think of the work ethic of my father, one of the hardest working persons I have ever known. He was the most dedicated businessman, one who always made a point of going the extra mile to impress his clients. With the old-school salesman ethos best illustrated by Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross, he gave great attention to his presentations, investing in three-ring binders and elegant folders with metal prong fasteners for his estimates. Perhaps because of him I always felt compelled to always do more “flair”, partially with the eagerness to please, but also to communicate with the extra effort that I cared about the task at hand. I acknowledge I have not always lived up to it. But I have always appreciated individuals who had common sense, emotional intelligence, and the understanding of context, where every rule and definition requires some elasticity in order to meet the larger goal.
I have been thinking about this because last week we lost someone in the non-profit art foundation world that exemplified that mirror opposite of halfway Bartlebys—someone whose example actually exemplifies why one should never remain a stickler within the boundaries of a job description. In 2005, when I received the Creative Capital grant, I met Sean Elwood, who was then the Director of Grants and Artists Services. Sean was from a small town in Washington State, and perhaps because of that Pacific Northwest upbringing he had a relaxed, low-key demeanor that, added to his deep expertise and wisdom, I always found very reassuring. I was a young, bright-eyed grantee doing a very international project with great administrative and budgetary complexities. I must have emailed and called Sean hundreds of times, from different parts of the world, presenting him my problems, and he always listened intently, calmed me down, and offered solutions. On one occasion toward the beginning of my grant process, I was in an artist residency in Canada, scheduled to attend a Creative Capital grantee conference (a requirement for the grant) in New York. That week learned that my father was in his final hours in Chicago; I had to hastily cancel my flight from Calgary to New York and go to Chicago to be with him instead; I was unable to afford another ticket from Chicago-New York. But Sean, learning of my situation, maneuvered (and I am not sure with what authority, exactly) so that the foundation could get me a new ticket from Chicago so that I could attend the grantee conference. Such gesture could only have come from a place of empathy. But I also imagine that, in his wisdom, Sean understood that in the endeavor of supporting artists, one has at times to see them not only as professionals but as human beings. Sean’s case exemplifies a reality that many of us in professional capacities in the arts and elsewhere have encountered: there are times where we cannot, and should not, ethically separate our humanity from our jobs, when the task is such that we cannot ignore the broader picture.
In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, the narrator is an elderly Wall Street lawyer in need of a clerk. He hires Bartleby, who is quiet and odd but very efficient. At some point he begins to say “I would prefer not to” to doing various work tasks. He continues using that response more and more until he is performing no work at all. The narrator eventually finds out that Bartleby is living in the office. While he can’t bring himself to evict him, the narrator decides to move his entire office, leaving Bartleby in the empty quarters. Bartleby remains there, in a seeming catatonic state; the landlord calls the police on him and he is processed in the legal system as a vagrant and put in jail, where he perishes of starvation. The boss/narrator character never loses his concern for his assistant, and learns that before working for him he had worked at a dead letter office (i.e. mail that can’t be delivered or is returned to sender), something that must have affected his life. The story ends with the phrase, “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”
The end of that story makes me wonder if Melville ever thought of the dead letter office as a metaphor of our purpose in life, and whether that Bartleby’s paralysis was nothing but a defense mechanism against the redirection imposed by others; a rebellious stance taken in defense of one’s our own purpose (even if one is not clear about what it is). In a way, I believe we all experience those small moments, and whenever we don’t feel in control of our lives we rebel by giving what is asked of us but only in a perfunctory way. All because we would very much prefer not to become a dead letter.