(no subject)
Apr. 16th, 2003 03:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistin response to a couple of inquiries--my sudden barrage of putting new pictures on the livejournal icon isn't a random surge of megalomania. i actually just figured out how to use the scanner, previously known to me as some sort of satanus-ex-machina entity, so i've been playing with it a lot. it's true, i have an almost medieval fear of gadgets like scanners, fax machines, copy machines, etc., yet it is not fully irrational, well, if one considers inductive logic "rational"--because historically, my attitude is substatiated. any time one of those machines needs to be used, if i am using it, something will go wrong. and not like i am a fuck-up, i mean something really does go wrong or break. i usually disclaim that "it's not gonna work," whoever around me will say "oh, just do it, it's easy," i will do it, something WILL go wrong, i will say "i told you it wasn't gonna work," they say "oh, just let me see" and then they will say "now, how the hell that THAT happen? what did you do?" and i will say "i followed the instructions," and they will say "i've never seen it do it before" and then they will usually get mad it me.
I have a similar relationship to certain institutions, such as any bank, UPS and USPS. when i have to deal with any of them, i have a preemptive seizure, not because i am too good to deal with them, or too impatient, but because if I am a variable in any interaction with any of these offices, the kafkaesque potential will not only be maximized, but will, in a quantitative leap, transcend into HORROR. and again, i don't just mean the normal low-grade baseline crap that everyone has to go through. I mean, getting a new ATM card is like a choose your own (mis)adventure game, and it WILL take four months instead of two weeks. I mean, after ordering plain pretty greet checks, I will get checks with Piglet pictured on them, and then be charged for it, which will be taken from one account, which will result in an overdraft. I mean, three and a half week my parents sent me a care package via express mail; it went missing for a week and a half, then for a week I was interpollated into point/counterpoint Onion-style with UPS where I was saying that they did not deliver the package to me because I was home/there was no notice/there was no phone call despite a specific instruction to call/most importanly, there was NO PACKAGE, with the UPS repeating with bred-in-bureocracy Bartleby-esqe singleminded insistence that "yes it was [delivered]."
by the way, that story, Bartleby the Scrivener? we read it in high school and it was in the unit on human spirit? (Units on human spirit are always interesting, it's a category that is weird cross-culturally--I remember in Soviet Russia the pivotal work on Human Spirit for 10-year olds was this Turgenve short story called "Mumu" about a mute serf, who loves his dog, Mumu, then his evil and selfish owner, some sort of baroness, orders him to drown Mumu, and he does, and then he leaves, breaking out of the chains of serfdom and into the anvil-ridden 5th grade discourse of proletarian personhood. As a point of reference and comparison, the other key cultural tribute to the Human Spirit was this opera that we had to see every damn year, called "A Story About A Real Human Being" that was based on the novel of the same title, that was based on a true story about this WWII pilot named Meresyev, whose plane was shot down by the Nazis and it crashed in the taiga and for a month he crawled to the nearest village living off berries and roots, and by the time he crawled there, he had gangrene in both legs and they had to be amputated, and then he spoke in schools all over the country about his experience, and then they made an opera out of it where the doctors went around the stage in a circle singing to him "We're gonna cut, we're gonna cut, we're gonna cut Meresyev's legs off," and then to him "we're gonna cut your legs off, we're gonna cut your legs off" and him singing "No, don't cut my legs off"). Anyway, Bartleby. So he supposedly asserted his humanity and individuality and "preferred not to" do anything that he was told? Because that's discourse of resistance? Well, I always had a problem with that. I mean, you could make an argument that his approach is kind of Nietzschean amor-fati Gay Science where his only condemnation is looking away, and refusal to engage, but I thought it was a comment on how bureocracy (in the grand Weberian sense) (or I suppose on could do a Marxist reading, and say the capitalist/Wall street system, although I prefer not to, he-he) drains everything from a subject, leaving no "identity" or sense of self, no agency repressed underneath the "false consciousness" (to use a Marxist term again), just exhaustion that, beyond the refrain of "I'd prefer not to" which lacks any real referent outside of itself in the story, and is thus only symbolic for the reader, is not articulated as a counterpoint. It's not an expression of individuality, it's some sort of metanegation. Bartleby dies in prison, and is at the end reinscribed back into the system anyway, because he is asleep with kings and counselors. Poor Bartleby.
I have a similar relationship to certain institutions, such as any bank, UPS and USPS. when i have to deal with any of them, i have a preemptive seizure, not because i am too good to deal with them, or too impatient, but because if I am a variable in any interaction with any of these offices, the kafkaesque potential will not only be maximized, but will, in a quantitative leap, transcend into HORROR. and again, i don't just mean the normal low-grade baseline crap that everyone has to go through. I mean, getting a new ATM card is like a choose your own (mis)adventure game, and it WILL take four months instead of two weeks. I mean, after ordering plain pretty greet checks, I will get checks with Piglet pictured on them, and then be charged for it, which will be taken from one account, which will result in an overdraft. I mean, three and a half week my parents sent me a care package via express mail; it went missing for a week and a half, then for a week I was interpollated into point/counterpoint Onion-style with UPS where I was saying that they did not deliver the package to me because I was home/there was no notice/there was no phone call despite a specific instruction to call/most importanly, there was NO PACKAGE, with the UPS repeating with bred-in-bureocracy Bartleby-esqe singleminded insistence that "yes it was [delivered]."
by the way, that story, Bartleby the Scrivener? we read it in high school and it was in the unit on human spirit? (Units on human spirit are always interesting, it's a category that is weird cross-culturally--I remember in Soviet Russia the pivotal work on Human Spirit for 10-year olds was this Turgenve short story called "Mumu" about a mute serf, who loves his dog, Mumu, then his evil and selfish owner, some sort of baroness, orders him to drown Mumu, and he does, and then he leaves, breaking out of the chains of serfdom and into the anvil-ridden 5th grade discourse of proletarian personhood. As a point of reference and comparison, the other key cultural tribute to the Human Spirit was this opera that we had to see every damn year, called "A Story About A Real Human Being" that was based on the novel of the same title, that was based on a true story about this WWII pilot named Meresyev, whose plane was shot down by the Nazis and it crashed in the taiga and for a month he crawled to the nearest village living off berries and roots, and by the time he crawled there, he had gangrene in both legs and they had to be amputated, and then he spoke in schools all over the country about his experience, and then they made an opera out of it where the doctors went around the stage in a circle singing to him "We're gonna cut, we're gonna cut, we're gonna cut Meresyev's legs off," and then to him "we're gonna cut your legs off, we're gonna cut your legs off" and him singing "No, don't cut my legs off"). Anyway, Bartleby. So he supposedly asserted his humanity and individuality and "preferred not to" do anything that he was told? Because that's discourse of resistance? Well, I always had a problem with that. I mean, you could make an argument that his approach is kind of Nietzschean amor-fati Gay Science where his only condemnation is looking away, and refusal to engage, but I thought it was a comment on how bureocracy (in the grand Weberian sense) (or I suppose on could do a Marxist reading, and say the capitalist/Wall street system, although I prefer not to, he-he) drains everything from a subject, leaving no "identity" or sense of self, no agency repressed underneath the "false consciousness" (to use a Marxist term again), just exhaustion that, beyond the refrain of "I'd prefer not to" which lacks any real referent outside of itself in the story, and is thus only symbolic for the reader, is not articulated as a counterpoint. It's not an expression of individuality, it's some sort of metanegation. Bartleby dies in prison, and is at the end reinscribed back into the system anyway, because he is asleep with kings and counselors. Poor Bartleby.
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no subject
Date: 2003-04-16 10:34 pm (UTC)xox marena
no subject
Date: 2003-04-17 11:27 am (UTC)my vote
Date: 2003-04-17 08:45 pm (UTC)what's wrong with those nyc guys?
-mjm
Re: my vote
Date: 2003-04-19 11:17 am (UTC)(and I don't know!)
two cents.
Date: 2003-04-17 09:03 pm (UTC)-mjm
Re: two cents.
Date: 2003-04-19 11:22 am (UTC)Uzma from that article is different...i think her labor might be called Sysiphian or Quixotic (only i guess the "windmills" are really dragons this time) before it would be similar to Bartleby.
Giles was acting appalling, he was disloyal and betrayed Buffy's trust, in some ways worse than he did in "Helpless" Also, if he is pushing for that whole "general" discourse, one does not go behind one's general's back. But i hate those categories and don't want to talk in them, Buffy is acting like Dubya, and Caleb is literally SOUNDING like dubya, and i really hope this will all resolve in some political statement i will be happy with, because if this is not building up to some sort of buffy-needs-a-lesson-because-this-is-not-working thing i will be really upset...
Re: two cents.
Date: 2003-04-20 08:50 pm (UTC)although buffy might be said to be acting like dubya, once she saw the consequences of her actions you can only say her reaction was regret (and fear) for what had happened to the two girls and xander (you have to admire the way whedon continues to show that actions have real consequences). you can't say that of dubya. (someone wrote recently that he gave up sweets for the duration of his attack -- how touching.) and if she has regret, it's possible that she's second guessing herself for having disregarded giles's warning about attacking without a plan and without knowing what she was getting into.
i'm waiting for the two of them to have some sort of reconciliation before the end.
-mjm
loyalty
Date: 2003-04-22 09:05 am (UTC)i think Giles was being disloyal. for me loyalty is entwined with honesty, not just assessment of "what's best." i guess i don't believe in "for their own good" as a "loyal" mode of behavior. And I resent it when characters do that, and I REALLY resent it when storylines try to justify them doing that. the single biggest plot/character behavior problem I have ever had with BtVS was the fact that Xander's lie to Buffy at the end of Becoming Part II (when Willow sends him to tell Buffy that she is doing the spell to restore Angel's soul, and instead Xander relays the message as "Kick his ass") went unaddressed for so long. And I know all these people who made the argument that Xander was being loyal, that he did what was best for Buffy, that if she knew, she would have stalled and gotten killed, and whatever. The point isn't what might have happenned. The point is, how characters act. With regard to that, I was also surprised that Joss Whedon just let it go for so long, on a show that is so hyperfocused on consequences. The first time they brought it up was this season in the episode where Buffy is about to kill Anya, and Willow mentions that she "never said that"--I was really hoping they would follow up on that more. But I got the feeling, to make a long story short, that JW or the writers or whoever DO consider that type of behavior loyal, which is consistent with the ongoing portrayal of Buffy as more and more Dubya and belligerent (and I imagine she will have to make amends with Giles). The problem is, I disagree with that stance. I think that Buffy has been acting really fucked up, but that does not justify Giles' behavior either. What was it? You can't fight evil with evil? What Giles did was not strictly speaking *evil* but it was WRONG, and maybe what Buffy is doing is wrong too, but since when do two wrongs make a right?
Re: loyalty
Date: 2003-04-22 07:04 pm (UTC)when we're kids, we're taught that honesty is a value in itself. but it isn't -- it has to be tied to what it is being used for. someone gave the hypothetical recently that if you were someone who was harboring a jewish family in germany during the 40s (they *always* use the nazis in these examples), then if you were asked if you were hiding the family, it would be wrong for you to be honest and reveal that you were.
but let's not go to the extreme of life and death. in ordinary life, if someone is dishonest with you they probably did it for one of two reasons: most likely, it was because they were afraid of telling you (for some reason), that is, they wanted to benefit themselves (in the indirect way of not hurting themselves) by not telling you the truth. this is the opposite of reason number three, above. the other reason is that they want to hurt you (the opposite of reason number two, above). so, most of the time, i'd say you're correct -- dishonesty and loyalty are incompatible. but not as a matter of principle.
-mjm
a different kind of bartleby?
Date: 2003-04-17 09:08 pm (UTC)On the first night of bombing in Baghdad, I recall having written about a much-loved young peace activist named Uzma Bashir who had gone to Iraq to serve as a human shield, and whose many friends had gathered in an Amman hotel to hear the latest news from Iraq. They were all very frightened for her safety, I wrote.
They needn't have bothered. As it turned out, the bombing campaign didn't hurt Uzma one bit. It did, however, really really piss her off.
When the first American tank column arrived in Paradise Park ... on the morning of Wednesday, April 9, they met a young woman who was still pulling on her shoes while running out into the roadway holding up a huge hand-lettered sign that read: "How many children did you kill today?"
...
Naturally, one of the tank operators lowered his gun barrel so that it pointed directly at Uzma's face. "Bring it on!" she screamed. "You bastards! Murderers! Go ahead and kill me, you pricks!"
Seemingly every soldier has heard of her. On hearing her name mentioned in passing, one US Marine told me: "Yeah, we drove over to the the hospital in Saddam City to provide security the other day, and she was standing out front yelling, 'What, did you come to finish them off'!?" ...
-mjm
p.s., so did buffy make a mistake not listening to rupert?
I prefer not to listen to the goddamn secretary next to me humming all day (Charlie thinks:)
Date: 2003-04-18 02:28 pm (UTC)I have discovered I can be Bartleby as well, by simply saying "Oh, sure I'll do that" and spending my day web-fucking instead. I haven't done any of the work I've been handed for 3 days, and the people I'm working for are all so new to the company that they're pretty awkward about asking me to do it.
Oh, and as far as that UPS/USPS curse thing you're talking about, I just have to say that I'll open my wrists and soak them in lemon juice before I ever go to a U-Haul with you again. I don't know if the curse of the U-Haul is yours alone, or if it's just when we're in league, but nothing has ever gone right at one of those places. Yeesh.
Re: I prefer not to listen to the goddamn secretary next to me humming all day (Charlie thinks:)
Date: 2003-04-20 07:30 pm (UTC)i forgot to put UHAUL as one of those institutions that are seizure-causing for me. see, you know what i mean, it's not just me. like that time we had to wait for the UHAUL at the Atlantic UHAUL and EVERYTHING was going wrong. moving in general is hell. like that time that the door to the Greenpoint apt. locked behind me and the hardware store called in a thief for me?
luckily, as the next move is going to be into an adjacent room, UHAUL is not in my (and thus your) immediate future