Thanks to Momo I have discovered the blog Passive Aggressive Notes, and it is very useful. I did not realize how very many people I know fit the paradigm so perfectly. The site explains:
As the New York Times wrote: “the classic description of the behavior captures a stubborn malcontent, someone who passively resists fulfilling routine tasks, complains of being misunderstood and underappreciated, unreasonably scorns authority and voices exaggerated complaints of personal misfortune.”
That said, some of the notes found here aren’t really passive-aggressive even by our generous standards. some of these notes are really more aggressive in tone, and some of them are more passive — polite, even — but they all share a common sense of frustration that’s been channeled into written form rather than a direct confrontation. It’s barbed criticism disguised as something else — helpful advice, a funny joke, simple forgetfulness.
I dislike passive aggressive students and colleagues, but I dislike passive aggressive families and administrators more.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Sounds a bit like my supervisor, but we cope.
…by the way, TWO Gs in aggressive.
Mike is also a bit this way …when he feels neglected.
Thanks for spelling! Only one g in Spanish – I have been misspelling this for years in English, I discern.
I think I am also a bit this way when I feel neglected.
I thought it might have been a Spanish inflection.
I’m not like that when I feel neglected. I usually just do something random.
sounds like me alright…
:o(
I like that blog, too, although I agree that not all of the notes are passive aggressive. Lots of them are just aggressive aggressive.
Yet we are a society that demonises anyone (other than males) who tackles a situation head on. If a woman tackles a situation head on she is being combative, hostile, bitchy, and looking for a fight, or my favourite,— sexually frustrated “just needs to get fucked”. I don’t think passive-aggression is the same for males and females.
Hi y’all! Kitty – d*** straight and very important. I am constantly finding myself pressed into a passive aggressive role because I know that being merely assertive or merely direct will not be read right. It makes for *very* frustrating (non)communication, to say the least. !!!
¿Vamos a cantar ese fin de semana?
I know that being merely assertive or merely direct will not be read right. It makes for *very* frustrating (non)communication, to say the least. !!!
A lot of patriarchs are victims of an anti-auditory hysteria. They think that if you are addressing them directly, they couldn’t have heard you right. So, they walk away bemused and perplexed. It is not your fault that they are deranged.
S – siiii, aunque las selecciones son muy poco usuales. 🙂
J – anti-auditory hysteria, so true! I’d still rather be perceived as an overbearing b* than be passive agressive.
I’m not concerned about how I am perceived. As long as I can approve of myself. By the way I am now reading a truly hit the nail on the head kind of article, which articulates the underpinnings to the spiritual sweeps and flurries that I detected in BLACK SUNLIGHT.
The Gift/Curse of “Second Sight”: Is “Blackness” a Shamanic Category in the
Myth of America?
Jim Perkinson
History of Religions, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Aug., 2002), pp. 19-58.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-2710%28200208%2942%3A1%3C19%3ATGO%22SI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U
To some degree though you have to think about perception if you work in a large, corporate-style organization, if you want to be effective.
Blackness is definitely a shamanic category in the myth of America. Whether that is some form of stereotyping is one concern I have, or have had, about some literary representations of this – the “magic Negro.” The idea of being made Black as a shamanic struggle is more interesting – much more.
I was thinking earlier that I should write a post about minority faculty. How when I started being a professor I couldn’t figure out the misogyny of the institution, didn’t know how to name it or counter it or handle it in any way, and would sputter and be frustrated. I would observe minority faculty dodging, feinting, resisting racism with great dexterity and think, they have skills I’d like to have, but which I’m being weak and overprivileged to think I need. It took a long time to figure out that I did need them, to fight misogyny, and longer to learn them … in fact I think I’ve only just assimilated them.
I’m thinking about these things because we’re hiring. It is especially clear to me that I am from the last generation when I see how the women candidates aren’t worried about the misogynist strategies we had to be, and won’t go through (all) the same things. Suddenly I feel like a sort of pioneer.
To not care about how one perceives gives one the zenlike calmness needed for maximum flexibility of action.
—
What this article is giving me is the sense that intuitively I was right on target when I saw what Marechera was doing, but I was unable to articulate it in precise enough terminology before now. I think one of the aspects that is deeply disturbing for the modern day liberal (and consequently accounts for the strange, noncommital or negative reactions that some of my drafts have received) is the fact that one must take the evil into oneself and embody it in order to learn to master it from within. This is what the article points out. But this is precisly, I feel, the hingepoint of the shamanistic paradigm that made the liberals baulk with alarm. I think they see this in various ways as a descent into ideological impurity, exhibiting unsoundness of moral judgment or “madness”. They may see the appropriation and embodiment of the negative or demonic aspect (for example, the effect of violence) as psychologically regressive and pathological (as perhaps Pattison does). Yet this descent into hell is what contitutes the basis of shamanistic alchemy. Internalising the negative ideologies of society and re-experiencing their effects gives the shaman opportunity to amalgamate their qualities with other aspects of life, thereby enabling him or her to dominate these aspects through a thorough knowledge of them and rearrangement of their qualities in terms that are aesthetically more sublime. This is the sense in which the shamans lose themselves to (social, political and psychological) demons and then slowly manage to regain themselves (“putting the flesh back on their bones”) to the point where they are able to feel masterful over the ideology (at least through knowledge of it, if not actually through the ability to materially escape their effects).
Thanks for the “passive aggressive notes” site! Whether a truly passive aggressive trait or not, the tendency to anthropomorphize refrigerators, doors, toilets, and microwave ovens in nasty little anonymous notes is pervasive in most office settings I’m familiar with. And the practice has always made me want to do the opposite of what the note says, and, at times, in a former job, I intentionally left a lounge door open simply because of a note on it that said “Keep me closed, this is a place of business and not some backstreet alley.” I realize that leaving the door open was passive aggressive but still feel righteous about it.
Anyway, the site is so great that it makes me want to pull out Marx and highlight all the passages that would clearly link those insane but ubiquitous notes to the failure of capitalism.
J – slightly OT – I’ve got the shamanism related book you recommended! 🙂 More on all this and on Marechera ASAP.
A.F. – I cannot stand that anthromorphization, it is so nursery school-esque … I cannot stand the way a certain breed of secretary seems to think everyone is a nursery school child … I could not stand being treated in the diminishing ways children are supposed to enjoy even when I was one. This is one reason why I developed so much gravitas so early on.
But most of all: I think that idea about the connection of those notes to the failure of capitalism is fantastic, and I am hoping you post about it, we would all learn !!!
Good that you got that book Prof Z. It’s kind of lightweight in some senses (ontologically?) but it hits the nail on the head in other ways.
—
“Keep me closed, this is a place of business and not some backstreet alley.”
In terms of passive aggressive horror stories, I have one to tell. My father arrived at my place some time back, looking somewhat flushed. Apparently, in his line of work, he’d discovered or set off a chemical reaction that produced cyanide gas. He said, “I didn’t know how to get rid of the materials, so I placed them in a cupboard, and stuck a sign on the cupboard door that said DON’T OPEN.”
Yes, I’m sure that was very effective.
Now you know what happens when you do not take on authority a sign written by a patriarch.
😉 I wonder if having returned from Reeducation might have given me some shamanistic properties.
(I keep thinking of the MelquIades character in One Hundred Years of Solitude, who dies but returns. People ask him, you were not dead? “He said he had been in death, but had returned because he could not stand the solitude.”)
I wonder if having returned from Reeducation might have given me some shamanistic properties.
I think that if you do battle with demons and this gives you any kind of insight into societal demons, then that does give you so called “shamanistic” powers. You can see that I position shamanism in quite the rationalistic context, even though I think that the ability to express the meanings of these kinds of battles does tend to evoke the sublime, and hence can produce a rather religious kind of effect or feeling. (I think that this kind of religious gratitude and sublime feeling is, however, how humans are meant to feel when they are not practicing mind-body dualism and damaging the environment.)
As in Beethoven’s 9th symphony, which I’ve been listening to in connection with a novel I am teaching. The novel says the symphony doesn’t manage to transcend its form and give this sublime feeling, but looking at it conducted by Toscanini I am not sure I agree. 😉