Submission and Submitting

Over the course of our conversation, we circulated around submission’s dual meanings. We considered the submission of things (proposals, applications, ect.), alongside the act of submitting to systems. Clearly these are interrelated definitions.

We painted a pretty grim picture. The submitter spends the time and energy crafting documents for submission in the hopes that this will raise them to a higher station, one where they are no longer required to submit. But having advanced, they find that rather than being freed from submissions, they’re just repositioned as the evaluator, an equally dutiful role. Their higher status seems to validate what they’d previously suspected, that as they rise in the ranks, they further commit themselves to a system of submission, thereby submitting to submission itself. The Kafkaesque nature of this was not lost on any of us.

So what are the components of this process? We started to think about deadlines, which in themselves require an act of submission, as you resign your sense of time to this obligatory calendar. A member of the group offered a spectacular image, dragging oneself towards a deadline in long pants, with the hems grazing the sidewalk and picking-up dirt and dust along the way. We could all agree that a deadline recharacterizes the thing that’s being brought to it. We drag our cover-letters through years of submissions, and they become cluttered with the odd, formal language of applications. And woefully, the skill that the submission is most geared towards uplifting becomes one’s capacity to submit. Like a test issued by a disinterested teacher, which most successfully evaluates one’s ability to be tested.

This all seems to be a problem of bureaucracy. Similarly, systems of submission presume neutrality, but actually just produce inefficiency, clutter, and more convoluted expressions of bias.