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Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities Author(s): Lee Edelman Source: History of the Present, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 99-118 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.3.1.0099 Accessed: 26-08-2018 19:36 UTC

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History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2013. Copyright © 2013 University of Illinois Press

Intervention

Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities Lee Edelman

On August 11, 2011, Mitt Romney, while pursuing the Republican nomination

for the presidency of the United States, appeared before a crowd at the Iowa

State Fair to argue for cutting government spending instead of raising taxes

on people. When a heckler called out the alternative of raising taxes on cor-

porations, Romney responded with the now famous phrase, “corporations

are people, my friend.”1 In a climate of intense political debate over income

inequality, corporate bailouts, unregulated Wall Street speculation, illegal

mortgage foreclosure practices, and seven-figure executive bonuses, this

response seemed to crystallize, for many in the United States, the continu-

ing appropriation of democratic institutions in order to protect and enrich

corporations, at least those considered “too big to fail,” at the cost of ordinary

citizens whose economic failures could be taken in stride. The following

month, on September 17, the Occupy Wall Street protests began. With the

encampments in Egypt’s Tahrir Square as their model, hundreds, later thou-

sands, of people showed up to represent “the 99 percent,” those whose needs,

as the protestors saw it, had been sacrificed for the sake of big banks, mort-

gage lenders, and other corporations whose campaign contributions bought

all-important influence with elected officials in both major political parties.

Just a few weeks later, on October 11, two months to the day after Romney

identified corporations as people, Hannah Gersen, a freelance writer with

experience as an assistant for a Wall Street law firm, posted an article on a

blog called The Millions titled “Bartleby’s Occupation of Wall Street.”2

Focusing on the central character in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the

Scrivener,” which bore the subtitle, “A Story of Wall Street,” when originally

published in 1853, Gersen’s article proposes that the cadaverous young man

who refuses, in the course of Melville’s tale, either to continue his work as

a copyist for a Wall Street lawyer involved with mortgages or to vacate the

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office in which he also secretly squats by night, might serve as a figure for

the Occupy movement’s resistance to Wall Street today. Gersen dismisses

mainstream complaints that the Occupy protestors in Zuccotti Park had no

plan for the future, no clear-cut demands, and no leaders through whom

they might speak. All that, she declares, is irrelevant. “ The parallels be-

tween Bartleby’s peculiar form of rebellion and the protestors of Occupy

Wall Street should be obvious,” she writes. “The point of Occupy Wall Street

. . . is to put a face to America’s dwindling middle class. There is no need

to be any more specific than that.”3 Countering the claim that corporations

are people, the Occupy movement offered people themselves in the act of

reclaiming their personhood. And just as the protestors, in Gersen’s view,

gave a “face” to the “middle class,” so Bartleby, in the logic of her essay, could

equally lend his face to them. For the people must implicitly supplement the

collective presentation of their personhood with a figure whose pathos can

underscore their subordination to corporate interests, a figure, that is, in

which “the people,” as collective abstraction, could incorporate themselves.

This brings me to the first of the ironies from which my meditations on

Bartleby, Occupy Wall Street, and the humanities take off: to counter the

prerogatives of corporate personhood, the expanding influence of corpora-

tions conceived, as a Supreme Court decision had already asserted in 1819,

as “artificial being[s]” endowed with some rights that are vested in “natural

persons,” the Occupy protestors insist, instead, on the preeminent rights

of the “natural person.”4 But Gersen makes the case for the natural person

over corporations as “artificial being[s]” by adducing the figure of Bartleby,

no more than an “artificial being” himself. And this invocation of Bartleby

in relation to the Occupy Wall Street movement quickly took on a life of

its own. Just four days later, The New Republic published an essay by Nina Martyris that argued for the relevance to the protestors in Zuccotti Park of

Bartleby, “the patron saint of civil disobedience,” in her words.5 Referring

to Bartleby’s recurrent phrase, the memorable “I would prefer not to” with

which he responds to his employer’s requests, Martyris asserts that “the

power of NO is what O[ccupy] W[all] S[treet] should harness.” And to help

it do so, she ends her essay with a modest but telling proposal: “The ‘Ninety

Nine Per centers,’” she writes, “could start by changing their meaningless

Facebook profile picture of a ballet-dancer pirouetting on the back of a bull

and putting a scrivener there instead. In one stroke they could project the

image of a dignified predecessor and compatriot—an educated but home-

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less vegan (Bartleby only ate ginger nuts) who looked languidly down at

Mammon, which tried but failed to buck him.”6 From Gersen’s description

of Occupy Wall Street as the face of the middle class to Martyris’s call for

Bartleby to become the movement’s face on Facebook, Bartleby emerges as

the avatar of the spirit of resistance for those asserting the rights of humans

over corporations as artificial beings. The struggle for US economic justice

at the beginning of the twenty-first century thus finds a face for the value of

the human in a fictional character, an “artificial being,” from a nineteenth-

century tale.

Just a few days later, a man named Zach, assisting at the Occupy Wall

Street Library, is photographed wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Bartle-

by’s famous phrase. And shortly thereafter, on October 25, the library’s blog

prints that photograph as part of an essay by Michele Hardesty, a literature

professor at Hampshire College, discussing the timeliness of Melville’s story

in the context of the Wall Street demonstrations. Hardesty finds “Bartleby”

“an evocative but not perfect analogy for the present moment”—not per-

fect in part because, as she writes, “such a rich story could never be a neat

analogy—or supply brief slogans—and the strength of ‘Bartleby’ lies in the

way it escapes singular interpretations.”7 I’ll be returning shortly to this fram-

ing of literature, the framing that recurrently justifies its place at the center

of the humanities even as it frames the university’s larger justifications for

the humanities themselves; but for now let me mention in passing a second

irony made visible here. Even as literature, like the humanities, is celebrated

for its relevance to civic engagement and social transformation, the faults

in its join to the social get expressed as the putative surplus of literary over

political interpretation. In the context of Bartleby’s enshrinement as the face

of a protest against income inequality, it’s ironic, if understandable, that

the limits of the analogy are attributed to the reduction, the interpretative

impoverishment, that overtly politicized readings produce on what Hardesty

calls “such a rich story.” To the extent that it succeeds as a work of art, the tale, according to Hardesty, “escapes singular interpretations,” by which she

means that its literary richness, its aesthetic worth, exceeds them. Though

his own resistance to his rich employer may give Bartleby political value, the

richness of the story, for Hardesty, resists such constraints on what Bartleby

means. Instruction in resistance to singular interpretation, for Hardesty, as

for most contemporary defenders of the humanities, underlies literature’s

singularity by distinguishing literature from the referential transparency

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presumed of political claims. Hence the importance, from this perspective,

that Bartleby not be read as merely an instance, a genre, a kind: that he not

be made a corporate body stripped of aesthetic complexity. The text most

famous for its unsettling iterations of Bartleby’s mechanical slogan must

not, Hardesty tells us, be made to supply “brief slogans” itself. Where the

protestors may take the poor scrivener as the icon of their challenge to cor-

porate wealth, that very gesture, for partisans invested in literary richness,

betrays a logic of corporate branding, marketing, and commodification. But

does the irony implicit in this reversal emerge from a literary or a political

analysis? Can literature separate itself from politics without proving itself

political? Can political discourse escape the overdetermination of the liter-

ary? Just what, in the context of Occupy Wall Street and its mobilizations of

“Bartleby,” is the politics of the literary and what does it have to do with the

humanities and the power of corporations?

To broach these questions, we first need to track our story one step fur-

ther. For the week after Hardesty’s blog post appeared, she returned to this

theme in another entry that observed in its opening sentence: “Bartleby’s

positive refusal continues to resonate with the OWS movement.”8 And she

offered more tangible evidence. To show its solidarity with Occupy Wall

Street, the Housing Works Bookstore Café announced its plans to spon-

sor a public reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” This reading, which was

organized in conjunction with the McNally Jackson Bookstore, the pub-

lishers Melville House and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and various authors,

including Stephen Elliot and Justin Taylor, took place on November 11 in the

atrium at 60 Wall Street. In choosing “Bartleby” as the text for the occasion,

the organizers, according to Taylor, set out “to evoke the long history of re-

fusal that informs and enlivens OWS.”9 Insisting on the importance of such

radical refusals and their performance in public spaces, Taylor added: “the

first step toward building a better world is asserting that the present state

of affairs is intolerable and cannot be allowed to continue.”10 This refusal to

accept the world as it is, this rejection of normativity, coincides with what

I’ll be discussing as Bartleby’s queerness in the following pages. But to un-

derstand what’s at stake in that queerness, to see why it matters in thinking

about politics, literature, and the humanities, we must stay with the public

reading and the notion of singularity for a few minutes more.

An article about the reading appeared in Library Journal the day after it took place. In that article, Molly McArdle wondered if Bartleby was the most

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appropriate icon for the Occupy movement after all: “for all of Bartleby as

ur-Occupier,” she wrote, “what has always struck me about the story is the

character’s profound aloneness. One could, and I’m sure many have, read

the absence of Bartleby’s relatives or friends as the scrivener’s rejection of

the hegemonic, rigidly classist structure of a family and connections—the

stuff of which so many nineteenth-century novels were made—Bartleby’s

solitude as protest of all things nuclear and patriarchal. But it’s strange to do

so in light of yesterday’s reading and this year’s Occupy movement, which is

all about solidarity and community, the creation of new societal structures.”11

If the political analogies about which Hardesty had expressed reservations

just two weeks earlier forced Bartleby’s plurality of meaning into the “singular

interpretations” expressed in “brief slogans,” then here, in McArdle’s view, the

collectivity essential to political community proves ill-matched to Bartleby’s

singularity. Though the singular, in this sense, already points us in the di-

rection of the queer (opposing, to be sure, the “structure of the family” and

“all things nuclear and patriarchal,” but also, and perhaps more significantly,

the notion of “community” as such), it’s that very singularity, the pathos of

Bartleby’s exclusion from every social role but that of employee, that equips

him so well to serve as the Occupy movement’s “human” face—or the face,

at least, of one whose humanity seems to tremble on the brink of extinction.

Bartleby’s iconic function, that is, both in the story and for Occupy Wall

Street, derives from the dignity of his resistance to power, his refusal of spe-

cific demands or requests, and his poignant lack of connection to the world

that would make him comprehensible. The lawyer who narrates Melville’s

story (and who does “a snug business among rich men’s bonds, and mort-

gages, and title-deeds”) describes Bartleby in the opening paragraph as “one

of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original

sources, and, in his case, those are very small.”12 From his first appearance

the scrivener seems, to the narrator who will soon employ him, an image of

life’s withdrawal into a stillness beyond itself. Seen standing one morning

“motionless” on the threshold of the lawyer’s office door, Bartleby, in the nar-

rator’s account, looks “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”

(66). The pathos attached to his presence is linked to the liminality he never

escapes, as if he were always on a threshold, poised uncertainly between life and death, between relation and its absence, and never coming into focus as

more than the localization of the distance between being and being known.

Even his habits while copying, before he announces his preference not to,

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seem colored by the impenetrability marking Bartleby himself; the nar-

rator recalls him at his copy desk working “silently, palely, mechanically”

(67). Though scriveners, in the lawyer’s view, make a “singular set” (59) on

the whole, Bartleby evinces, within that set, a singularity of his own. Small

wonder that the copyist, described by the lawyer as “singularly sedate,” first

sounds his resistance to his employer’s demands “in a singularly mild, firm

voice,” pronouncing the fateful, “I would prefer not to” (68), that from that

moment on will define him. What singularizes Bartleby in the lawyer’s mind,

though, is not just the singular commitment expressed in his unwavering

assertion, but also the absence of any apparent affect as he voices it. He

displays, as the narrator tells us, not the “least uneasiness, anger, impatience

or impertinence,” not the slightest trace, as the lawyer adds, of “any thing

ordinarily human” (68). But far from disqualifying Bartleby from the task of

embodying some human essence, this lack of the “ordinarily human,” this

unsettling singularity, will be viewed by the lawyer as its surest sign.

One might even say that it’s to incorporate Bartleby as the paradigm of

the human that his employer, become the tale’s narrator, employs him and

the tale alike. You’ll recall, for example, that the narrative, which begins with

the flattest of opening statements, “I am a rather elderly man” (59), con-

cludes with a famous outburst of passion: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

(99). Though this lyric effusion must seem, at first blush, incongruous in

the mouth of the lawyer, what moves him to such emotion is nothing less

than his triumph in moving from constative utterance to performative ef-

fusion, from prosaic particularity to the poetic universal: his triumph, that

is, in constructing Bartleby as a figure for humanity as a whole and so as the

very token of the lawyer’s own literary success. Framed in this way by the

lawyer, Bartleby’s singular impenetrability can speak to a universal condi-

tion, expressing the “pallid hopelessness” of one for whom every “errand

of life” (99) seems vain in a world of death and despair. Incurably forlorn

but singularly mild, refusing to labor but never a militant, Bartleby, in the

lawyer’s depiction, evokes the mystery of a being at the limit of the human

and gesturing toward its own beyond. In doing so, he defines the human

as inherently self-transcending and, therefore, as what no human can ever

plausibly hope to fathom. By virtue of this logic, though, Bartleby’s unfath-

omability, his lack of “any thing ordinarily human,” which so profoundly

unsettles the lawyer, submits at last to being fathomed: fathomed as the

sign of Bartleby’s participation in a universal humanity.

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However much it associates Bartleby with hopelessness and despair, this

humanizing reading gives the lawyer who proposes it a genuine sense of

relief. By making Bartleby recognizable it brings the scrivener back to the

human community that he pointedly refused. But the lawyer can achieve this

recuperation only after Bartleby’s death, and only by permitting his imagina-

tion to fill in the gaps in his (and our) understanding of “who Bartleby was”

(99). On the basis of an unconfirmed rumor about Bartleby’s life before he

showed up on Wall Street—a rumor “that Bartleby had been a subordinate

clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington” (99)—the lawyer spins out a

fantasy designed to make Bartleby make sense, a fantasy rife with the morbid

sentiments that, as readers of Dickens know well, add just the right touch

of piquancy to let us enjoy our lot all the more:

Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity— he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death (99).

So moved is the lawyer by these self-conjured phantoms intended to make

Bartleby comprehensible that he produces the twin exclamations, simulta-

neously mournful and triumphant, with which the story ends: “Ah, Bartleby!

Ah, humanity!”

And that, for Occupy Wall Street, is the end of the story in more ways

than one. In an article published a week and a half after the public reading

of “Bartleby,” Lauren Klein quotes H. Bruce Franklin, a prominent Melville

scholar, as follows: “we can never know who or what Bartleby is, but . . .

we are continually asked to guess who or what he might be.”13 Klein tells

us that this is the “function of the story” and the “obligation of its readers”

and aligns this obligation with the politics of Occupy Wall Street: “to extend

this from the literary to the political realm, when presented with a person’s

resistance—passive or otherwise—it is the obligation of observers—indeed

of all in a democratic society—to think about the possibilities of what that

person might stand for, even if we cannot pinpoint a single issue, meaning,

or demand.”14 Could anything speak more clearly to our sense of the pur-

pose and the value of the humanities—to their value, that is, in helping us

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know ourselves and each other more fully by insisting that even what resists

comprehension can be colonized by imagination? Consider, for example,

these words from the 1980 report produced by the Rockefeller Foundation’s

Commission on the Humanities: “by awakening a sense of what it might be

like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, [the humanities]

tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience.

They increase our distinctively human potential.”15 Yet this value emanates

in Melville’s tale from the well-to-do Wall Street lawyer and gets reinforced

by the corporate managers of the United States today who shape the insti-

tutions, including the academy and the various foundations (Rockefeller,

Carnegie, Mellon, Ford), on which the humanities depend. For the task of the

humanities, in such a light, remains to affirm the human and so to reproduce

the ideological fantasy that the human as concept sustains. The work of that

concept, in no small part, is to produce a fiction of community, however large

or small its scale, that rests on the constant aesthetic demonstration of the

sameness at the core of the human: the sameness that makes us, in one fell

swoop, comprehensible in our opacity and collectivizable in our singularity.

That fantasy may be put to progressive ends by reducing our fear or anxi-

ety about what could seem, at first glance, wholly foreign, and permitting

us, instead, to see ourselves in what presents itself as different. But it works

in the other direction too by maintaining that only such sameness to our-

selves could make those differences tolerable. The progressive insistence

that we’re all alike is not that far from the reactionary claim that what’s

valuable is what’s like us. In both cases whatever holds fast to its difference,

resisting appropriation to sameness, resisting even sameness to itself, gets

read as the radical threat of an otherness essentially inhuman. When we

“think about the possibilities of what [a] person might stand for,” to quote

Klein on the political imperative of reading Bartleby’s resistance, we may

extend our capacity to know the world through sympathetic imagination,

but by making a person stand for something, by making her or him a figure

for whatever we project, we make that person a screen on which, like the

lawyer, we see no more than what we’re predisposed to imagine. Such a

person, therefore, like the corporation, is an artificial being. Or to carry this

one step further, while the Occupy movement may resist the equation of

artificial beings with natural persons, “Bartleby” reminds us that natural

persons are artificially constructed, that both “natural” and “person” oper-

ate as ideological fictions.16

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We need only remember our nation’s own history and Justice Curtis’s

dissent in the Dred Scott case in which he quotes Judge Gaston on the status

of the enslaved in the colonies before the Revolution: “Slaves were not in

legal parlance persons, but property,” he observed.17 From what we call a hu-

manistic perspective, we affirm that the personhood of those enslaved ought

never to have been in question because personhood, like the foundational

claim that “all men are created equal,” ought to have been, as the Declaration

of Independence puts it, “self-evident.” But whatever we call “self-evident”

reflects the biases of the self; hence the personhood historically denied to

the enslaved can now be extended to corporations not because truth’s self-

evidence is either forgotten or denied, but rather because the ever-elastic

category of personhood, like everything to which we attach the performative

claim of its self-evidence, retains the literary provenance that marks it as

a fiction. Even the framers of the Declaration, after all, had to “hold ” their truths “self-evident,” had to assert them at the outset to render self-evident what hadn’t been before. When Justice Taney, writing the decision for the

majority in Dred Scott, denied that the phrase “all men are created equal”

could possibly have been intended by its authors to refer to those being kept

as slaves, he made clear that whatever else it might be, that phrase was not self-evident. The labor of creating self-evidence, of making the “natural”

seem intuitively obvious and therefore unexceptionable, occupies politics

and the humanities both, even when they explicitly resist it. Every decon-

struction of humanism relies on a logic whose structuring principles appeal

to self-evidence in the end. And the queerest politics will base its claims on

natural rights that emerge from the shifting fictions of social bonds.

Thus the lawyer’s exclamations at the end of “Bartleby” aspire on his

part, if not on Melville’s, to present as self-evident that the now-deceased

scrivener, who in life refused charity, companionship, and the lawyer’s best

efforts to understand him, embodied, despite this, the very essence of a piti-

able “humanity.” In leading us to this recognition, the lawyer, or so he would

have us believe, expresses his own “humanity” by displaying his moving

capacity to be moved by what he so vividly imagines. Doesn’t the corporate

funding of the humanities work in similar ways? When ExxonMobil sponsors

Masterpiece Theater or Goldman Sachs the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

they purchase their humanization by contributing to the work of affirming

the human. So the government bailout of Goldman Sachs in response to the

economic crisis (itself fueled by Wall Street’s relentless pursuit of profit at

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any cost), permits Goldman Sachs to contribute its support to the Metropoli-

tan Museum, in return for a corporate tax break and public recognition in an

advertisement in the New York Times. It thus reasserts its humanity through its commitment to the humanities, for which, of course, in this roundabout way, noncorporate persons pay. The ad, which appeared in the New York Times on March 19, 2012, celebrated a raft of corporate sponsors (Goldman Sachs among them), but the image from the museum’s collection used to

invoke their civic mindedness depicted a man in boat, not a raft. For the

painting was Ernest Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, the anodyne exemplar of the culture that corporate sponsorship promotes. In

this framework, the humanities, like General George Washington, cross

boundaries only to consolidate the state and thereby shape the discourse of

the human in ways conservative by definition: conservative insofar as they

aim to conserve the use-value of the human as a mask for the machinery of

production we’re all conscripted to support.

In funding the humanities, corporations get more than just tax breaks

and public recognition; they buy, which is much more important, a means

of shaping an ideological fantasy of a coherent human community beyond

the lived experience of social contradiction and structural antagonism, a

community wherein the fractures to which, like Bartleby’s employer, they

contribute, seem resolved in the commonality to which the humanities at-

test. Not that the aesthetic education to which the corporate humanities are

devoted excludes the prospect of debate or the performance of conflicting

points of view. But even those conflicts are made to confirm the richness and

vitality of the human, which thereby reinforces its value as a means of secur-

ing, as collective value, collectivity itself. As the British Council announces

in explaining its financial support for the arts and humanities: “Great art

and culture inspires us, brings us together and teaches us about ourselves

and the world around us. In short, it makes life better.”18

In an article published in Academe called “ The Humanities on Life Support,” Ellen Schrecker reviewed recent books on higher education in

America and drew attention to the work of two major scholars invested in

rethinking the humanities: Geoffrey Galt Harpham, currently the director

of the National Humanities Center, and Martha Nussbaum, who teaches

law and ethics at the University of Chicago. Quoting from recent books by

these two major scholars, Schrecker efficiently summarizes how we think

about the humanities in America today: “ The humanities, Harpham as-

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serts, offer the knowledge that [to live in a human—and humane—society]

requires ‘an awakened understanding of oneself as a member of the human

species, a heightened alertness to the possibilities of being human.’ Along

with that self-awareness, he notes, the humanities also create ‘the capacity

to sympathize, empathize, or otherwise inhabit the experience of others.’

Nussbaum agrees; the sympathetic ‘ability to imagine . . . the predicament

of another person, along with the ability to think for oneself,’ are the ‘skills

that are needed to keep democracies alive.’”19 But thinking for oneself has

never had any fixed connection to democracy; and sympathetically imagin-

ing another affords no guarantee of justice. After all, if that other person

is what some might call a fetus, personhood here revealing once more its

status as ideological fiction, then “sympathy,” depending on where it falls,

may justify acts terroristic to some, but deeply humane to others. Only a

humanities designed to affirm, for its corporate and government sponsors,

the harmony of social values (whether local, national, or universal) could

offer such a vision of sympathy as its intellectual goal. Politics may depend

on the capacity to encounter what exceeds our own subjectivity, but simply

imagining other subjectivities from the perspective of our own assures no

particular political transformation.

Melville’s story, which invites us to read it as the narrator’s advertisement

for himself, as a flattering display of the insight and feeling induced in the

smug man of business (self-described as “eminently safe” [60]) by his en- counter with the “strangest” (59) of scriveners, offers an implicit critique of

this dominant corporate framing of the humanities. Faced, you’ll remember,

with Bartleby’s intransigence, his refusal either to perform his job or to vacate

the office he occupies, the lawyer, unwilling to evict the copyist or to have

him “collared by a constable” (91)—a scruple apparently foreign to many in

positions of power today—determines to give up the chambers he rents and

locate his offices elsewhere. But what the lawyer himself is too tender to do,

he leaves to those who come after. And sure enough, his former landlord,

urged to action by his new tenants on discovering that Bartleby comes with

the office, has the scrivener removed as a vagrant and sent to the prison called

“the Tombs.” There, preferring not to dine, and aloof from every community,

Bartleby, referred to as “the silent man,” dies quietly a few days later, as if

maintaining to the very end his preference for the negative. In the wake of

this death, the lawyer, far from heartless throughout his ordeal and open to

anything that might have reconciled the scrivener to normative life, feels

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compelled in the name of that norm itself to positivize Bartleby’s negation,

to turn it to a profit, by making both it and Bartleby speak to a universal “hu-

manity.” He assuages the guilt he carries for the part he played in Bartleby’s

fate (recall his words on abandoning Bartleby to the empty Wall Street office:

“something from within me upbraided me” [91]), by attributing Bartleby’s

eccentricity, which he’ll portray as a type of “derange[ment]” (97), to the

heightening of Bartleby’s sensitivities during his time in the Dead Letter Of-

fice. The never-to-be-delivered letters he imagines as causing the scrivener’s

despair—a despair evinced in the preference not to copy the letters of the

law—find their answer, their redemptive counterpart, when the man of busi-

ness turns to writing and becomes, with his tale of Bartleby, a man of letters

himself. We might say he produces “Bartleby” to make Bartleby disappear,

to eliminate the rupture, the negative preference, at odds with social totality

and to make Bartleby, in his singularity, merely a copy of the human. Much

as the corporate humanities do, and as Occupy Wall Street does as well in

appropriating the scrivener to its cause, he turns the resistance to human

community, the preference not to be integrated into the order of sociality,

into yet another instrument of social affirmation.

But the story in which Melville sets before us the story told by the lawyer,

though it coincides letter for letter with the story produced by the lawyer

himself, resists, as does the scrivener, such an erasure of what resists. Con-

trary to Lauren Klein’s assertion, our political obligation in the context of

Bartleby is not “to think about the possibilities of what [the person who

resists] might stand for,” but rather to interrogate the politics of making

him “stand for” something in the first place. Bartleby, with his persistent

iterations of what Gilles Deleuze describes as his “formula,” speaks to the

tension between standing for something and engaging in an act.20 To stand

for something is always to accede to a logic of social exchange that con-

solidates its figural economy as a totalized field of meaning. But an act, by

breaking from the framework of legibility itself, denies the closure that such

a framework imposes in the form of its own self-evidence. By refusing to

submit to the regulative norms of community and communication, the act

insists on something else, on a preference that negates what is.

Far from a socially compliant mode of sympathetic imagination, it com-

pels a violent encounter with something radically unimaginable, inspiring,

in turn, the mimetic violence of communitarian self-assertion. The lawyer

at first may vacillate before Bartleby’s unyielding, “I would prefer not to,”

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but he recalls a more choleric response by one of his employees: “‘Prefer not, eh?’ gritted Nippers—“I’d prefer him, if I were you, sir,’ . . . ‘I’d prefer him; I’d give him preferences, the stubborn mule!’” After telling Nippers, in response

to this outburst, “I’d prefer that you withdraw for the present,” the lawyer

succumbs to self-consciousness about his unintended choice of words:

“Somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word

‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to

think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected

me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not

yet produce?” (81). The aberration of Bartleby’s speech act, with its indif-

ference to social norms, condenses itself for the lawyer in that single word:

prefer. That word, however, not only begins to obtrude on the lawyer’s own

speech, but also makes its way into that of his other copyists, too. When one

of them observes to his boss, for example, “I was thinking about Bartleby

here, and I think that if he would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every

day, it would do much towards mending him,” the lawyer responds with a

certain excitement: “So you have got the word, too” (81). But the employee

fails to recognize what word the lawyer means, and when finally made to

understand, he replies in a way that sunders the logic by which words and

meanings are bound: “Oh, prefer? Oh yes—queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer—” (82).

This verbal contagion that saps the sovereignty of meaning in linguistic

exchange defines the queerness of the word that comes to epitomize Bar-

tleby’s queerness, a queerness the story disposes us to see in its illegible

materialty as a dangerous textual preference. Perhaps that explains why at

one point the lawyer describes the effects produced by Bartleby’s phrase

in terms that explicitly frame it in Sodomitical terms: “For a few moments

I was turned into a pillar of salt” (69). In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida touches briefly on Melville’s tale. After noting that the scrivener’s famous

phrase “says nothing, promises nothing, neither refuses nor accepts any-

thing,” he calls it a “singularly insignificant statement [that] reminds one of a

nonlanguage.”21 In this context the word “insignificant” denotes a resistance

to signification that makes Bartleby’s phrase, from the vantage point of the

social order of meaning, an affront to the notion of value. Infecting linguistic

communication with this element of “nonlanguage,” it reifies the queerness

of language as iterative machine and in doing so it gestures toward some-

thing else at work in language, something that communal norms of meaning

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and value seek to foreclose: the queerness that every regime of “what is” must

construe as what is not, as the nothing, the negativity, or the preference for negation that threatens the normative order, whose name is always human

community. And it’s not just the Right that pits human community against

the queer threat to its future; the Left, and many who call themselves “queer,”

embrace that position too. That’s how Left and Right acquire political leg-

ibility and come to share the political terrain; it’s even what makes them, in

this sense at least, effectively interchangeable. Though each has a different

vision of the human community it aims to procure, both aspire to realize the

coherence of a social collectivity. Thus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

writing from the Left in Empire, the global bestseller they published in 2000, see in Bartleby what they characterize as “the absoluteness of refusal,” which

they then align with the “hatred of authority” and the “refusal of voluntary

servitude.” But their admiration for this queer refusal of the norm can only

go so far. Such refusal may be, as they put it, “the beginning of a liberatory

politics, but it is only a beginning. . . . What we need is to create a new social

body, which is a project that goes well beyond refusal. . . . Beyond the simple

refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of

life and above all a new community.”22 Here sounds the doxa whose chorus

aspires to incorporate us all: wealthy sponsors of the corporate humanities

and neo-Marxist critics of global empire; the protestors of Occupy Wall

Street and Wall Street’s CEOs alike. Bartleby, in his utter refusal to mean for

communitarian ends, can possess no value except as a proof of negativity’s

insufficiency. Hence the lawyer who authors Bartleby’s tale, unlike Melville

who authors the lawyer’s, must conscript the copyist to the cause of the hu-

man by making his resistance make sense. His distance from community

and his absence of anything “ordinarily human” must prove in the end his

hypersensitivity to the pathos of the human and even his longing for a uto- pian “community” where “good tidings” and “hope” on their “errands of life”

can neither be errant nor erring. Like Hardt and Negri, the lawyer, that is,

must refuse “the absoluteness of refusal,” forcibly wrenching Bartleby from

the queerness of preferring not to accede to normative reason and sense.

To appreciate the complex politics of these multiple negations of the queer

as negation, and to conclude this discussion by bringing it back to the Occupy movement once more, let me place beside Hardt and Negri’s text an editorial

from the politically conservative Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City. Pub- lished in the Sunday edition of the paper on November 6, 2011, the editorial,

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which bore the title “Goal Remains Fuzzy for Occupy Protestors,” appeared

four days before the public reading of “Bartleby” on Wall Street. But this edi-

torial identified Bartleby with the Occupy movement in advance, intending

that identification to discredit the movement and Bartleby both. Allow me

to quote at length:

“I would prefer not to.” So sayeth Bartleby, the intransigent copyist in a classic Herman Melville short story. To every request to earn his pay, to move on, to do something—anything— Bartleby would reply, “I would prefer not to.” . . . “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a study in petulant behavior met with inexplicable patience by Bartleby’s employer. The story of Wall Street today is one of petulance met with inexplicable patience by authorities dealing with the “Occupy This” movement that’s spread from lower Manhattan around the country. A sk the occupiers what they hope to accomplish. They’d prefer not to tell you. Perhaps they don’t really know. Who’s in charge? They’d prefer not to tell you. Everyone is in charge. Nobody is. What good does it do to hang around a park, beat drums and occasionally march to a designated site? They’d prefer not to say. It’s the doing, not the point of it, that matters. Some occupiers have done their best to incite police reaction to their doings, all the better for news footage of how The Man is cracking the heads of the innocent. . . . . . . The “Occupy This” movement’s story is still being written. The childish and sometimes violent behavior of its participants is still being met with inexplicable patience. . . . The people will express their intolerance for lawlessness at the ballot box. That’s exactly where the movement could have beaten its drums, in the way the tea party did. It preferred not to. Ah anarchy! Ah enough already! 23

The specter of anarchy, of radical lawlessness, of acts that have no point,

however little connection it bears to the Occupy protests themselves, is

refused in defense of an implicit ideal of the integrated “social body,” the

harmonious community endorsed by Hardt and Negri’s text as well. Unlike

Hardt and Negri, though, the author of the editorial fully acknowledges the

force of Bartleby’s queerness and draws a reasonable conclusion about where

resistance to reason must lead. If the Left would normalize Bartleby as a

crucial step toward a “new community,” then the Right perceives, correctly,

his threat to community as such. And it recognizes something else that the

Left too frequently ignores as well: that the Bartlebys of the world don’t ask

to be liked and the queer remains whatever a given order cannot accept. All

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progressivism in politics, all gradualist normalization, aspires, in the end,

to the very same thing that moves the radical Right: the elimination of the

queer; not, however, by resorting to the violence of or outside the law, but by constructing a community from whose total embrace no one would be

excluded. No one except those Bartlebys excluded through forcible inclu-

sion, eliminated by being turned into pillars of the collectivity they resist.

Consider, in this context, “Occupy Bartleby,” a post that appeared on a

left-leaning blog in response to the Oklahoman’s editorial. With the inten- tion of defending the Occupy movement and Bartleby at once, the author of

the blog post offers a rival interpretation of the tale: “The point the edito-

rial seems to make is that the protestors are as strange as Bartleby, but that

misses the main message of the story. It’s a simplistic reading. The real point

is that Bartleby’s protest, like the Occupier’s protest, actually represents a

sane and human reaction to an indifferent world dictated by the greed of

Wall Street.”24 For all the difference in their political viewpoints and their

approaches to Melville’s story, the editorial and the blog post pray side-by-

side to the gods of the “sane” and the “human.” The left-wing blogger denies

Bartleby’s strangeness to enshrine him at the heart of community, while the

right-wing author, alert to that strangeness, rejects him for the community’s

good. Both would eliminate the queerness that doesn’t worship the gods

of the polis, recalling the indictment of Socrates that led to his date with a

hemlock cocktail for “refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state”

and “corrupting the youth.”25

The corporate humanities, by contrast, serve the gods of the state quite

well, transforming Socrates and Bartleby into poster boys for democracy,

social responsibility, the triumph of the human spirit, until the humanities

classroom can start to seem like a Unitarian church. But another relation to

the humanities persists by virtue of preferring not to. Operating not for the

good of the state or the cohesion of any community, this queerness dwells

on the fractures that make the social a site of dissension and attends to the

discontinuities that turn the aesthetic against itself. Rather than affirming

the putative “richness” and plurality of meaning, it empties meaning of au-

thority without, in the process, denying its power. Power without authority,

in fact, is its object of analysis, even when it focuses on its own analytic force.

This queerness, this materiality that never resolves into relation, bespeaks

the nonhumanity inseparable from the assertion of the human and the “non-

language,” the negativity, that linguistic sense drowns out. If it teaches, it

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teaches us nothing—or, more precisely, the place of that nothing, that non, in the politics of the human and, therefore, the place of the humanities in the

performance of every politics. Like the poet, in Sir Philip Sidney’s words, this

humanities “nothing affirmeth,” but its queerness inheres in the force with

which it stubbornly affirms this nothing, insisting, thereby, with Bartleby,

on its preference for the negative, which is also to say, its preference for what

the governing orders, the circuits of opinion, the frameworks of collective

reality make invisible, impossible, and, to that extent, unthinkable.

It functions, in short, as a version of the irony that Cicero saw in Socrates,

whose thought he describes in De Natura Deorum, as “a purely negative dialectic which refrains from pronouncing any positive judgement.”26 But against that

Socratic irony, Cicero, the Roman, despite his admiration for the Greek, af-

firmed the role of “positive judgment” and with it the centrality of philosophy

to public life and to the state. It was Cicero, as Hannah Arendt observes, who

“first used the word [culture] for matters of spirit and mind” and in this he

played a crucial role in developing the notion of humanitas. Humanism, Ar- endt reminds us, “like culture, is . . . Roman in origin; there is no word in the

Greek language corresponding to the Latin humanitas.”27 In its Roman origin, however, that concept already opposes the queerness, the irony, of relentless

negativity in order to identify culture with the conservation of human com-

munity. Cicero himself declares, after all, “One thing, therefore, ought to be

aimed at by all men; that the interest of each individually, and of all collectively,

should be the same; for if each should grasp at his individual interest, all hu-

man society will be dissolved.”28 For the Occupy protestors the collective inter-

est has been trampled on by Wall Street; for the Daily Oklahoman the Occupy protestors trample on it themselves; for the jury in Athens it’s Socrates who

threatens the good of collectivity; and for Cicero, the father of the humanities,

it’s the pure negativity of an irony that affords us no positive “standards of

guidance” and as a result occasions the dissolution of every truth. Perhaps

that explains why Bartleby, refusing conversation with his employer, says

nothing at all when the lawyer cries out, “But what reasonable objection can

you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you.” Though Bartleby offers

no answer here, he responds in a way nonetheless; “He did not look at me

while I spoke,” the lawyer writes, “but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of

Cicero, which, as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above

my head” (80). Does Bartleby know that the lawyer is to him what Cicero

was to Socrates and will similarly eradicate his queerness through the very

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humanity that claims to embrace it? Or does he know, perhaps, that the steady,

unwavering fixity of his glance preserves the force of the irony that will always

occupy the humanities, even if that glance is powerless to escape its incor-

poration by them in turn? Or is the question less what Bartleby knows than

what our not knowing does? That nonknowledge, that radical irony, asks one more thing of us all: are we willing to forego incorporation in the “human” as

offered by the humanities, and so in the secularized immortality proposed at

once by the humanities and by the fictions of corporate personhood, in order

to encounter, instead, a queerness at odds with what we think we know or

what we think we are—a queerness that prefers the not, the non, or the dis-

of disincorporation? Might the negativity that prefers not to pledge itself to

the goal of a new community and declines its positivization in a recognizably

political agenda remain faithful, by that very refusal, to what vitalizes politics

as such? Is the “negative dialectic” of Socrates, which ironizes every effort to

pass, like the lawyer, from “Bartleby” to “humanity,” the unacknowledged

wellspring of the humanities themselves? So long as we, like the humanities,

are overdetermined by these questions, they, like Socrates and Bartleby, will

continue to occupy us.

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays on theory, film, and literature, he is the author of Transmember- ment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Sex, or the Unbearable, a book he cowrote with Lauren Berlant, will be published by Duke University Press in 2014. This essay is excerpted from his latest book project, Bad Education: Why Queerness is No Good.

Notes 1. Ashley Parker, “‘Corporations Are People,’ Romney Tells Iowa Hecklers Angry Over His Tax Policy,” New York Times, Aug. 11, 2011, http://www.nytimes .com/2011/08/12/us/politics/12romney.html. 2. Hannah Gersen, “Bartleby’s Occupation of Wall Street,” The Millions (blog), Oct. 11, 2011, http://www.themillions.com/2011/10/bartleby’s-occupation-of-wall-street .html. 3. Ibid. 4. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 US 518 (1819) at 527, http:// supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/17/518/case.html. 5. Nina Martyris, “A Patron Saint for Occupy Wall Street,” The New Republic, Oct. 15, 2011, http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/96276/nina-martyris-ows-and-bartleby -the-scrivener.

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6. Ibid. 7. Michele Hardesty, “I Would Prefer Not To.,” Occupy Wall Street Library (blog), Oct. 26, 2011, http://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/. 8. Michele Hardesty, “Marathon Reading of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ @ 60 Wall St, 11/10,” Occupy Wall Street Library (blog), Nov. 4, 2011, http://peopleslibrary.wordpress .com/2011/11/04/marathon-reading-of-bartleby-the-scrivener-60-wall-st-1110/. 9. Quoted by Maryann Yin, “‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ Reading at Occupy Wall Street,” Galleycat: The First Word on the Book Publishing Industry (blog), Nov. 11, 2011, http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/bartleby-the-scrivener-reading-at-occupy -wall-street_b42052. 10. Ibid. 11. Molly McArdle, “Preferring Protest: A Reading of ‘Bartleby’ on Wall Street,” Library Journal, Nov. 11, 2011, http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2011/11/in-the-bookroom/ preferring-protest-a-reading-of-bartleby-on-wall-street/. 12. Herman Melville, “Bartleby,” in Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (1975), 59. All subsequent page references will be to this edition and appear within the text. 13. Lauren Klein, “What Bartleby Can Teach Us About Occupy Wall Street,” Ar- cade, Nov. 21, 2011, http://arcade.stanford.edu/what-bartleby-can-teach-us-about -occupy-wall-street. 14. Ibid. 15. Commission on the Humanities, The Humanities in American Life: Report of the Commission on the Humanities (1980), 1, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8j49p1jc/. 16. For a brilliant discussion of slavery in relation to the question of personhood, see Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 549–73. 17. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1856) at 574, http://caselaw.lp.findlaw .com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=60&invol=393. 18. “Artists’ International Development Fund Opens for Applications,” The Brit- ish Council, http://www.britishcouncil.org/new/press-office/press-releases/artists -international-development-fund-opens-for-applications/. 19. Ellen Schrecker, “The Humanities on Life Support,” Academe Online Sept.–Oct. 2011, http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2011/SO/br/humanities.htm. 20. See Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” in Essays: Critical and Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (1997), 68–90. 21. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (1995), 75. 22. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000), 203–4. 23. “Goal Remains Fuzzy for Occupy Protestors,” The Daily Oklahoman, November 6, 2011, http://okne.ws/u1UHkv. 24. DocHoc, “Occupy Bartleby,” blueoklahoma, Nov. 6, 2011, http://www.blueoklahoma .org/diary/2469/occupy-bartleby. 25. The Dialogues of Plato, Volume 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, Menexenus, trans. and with comment by R. E. Allen (1984), 61.

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26. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Academica, trans. H. Rackham (1967), 19:15. 27. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (2006), 208, 221. 28. Cicero, Offices, or Moral Duties, Book 3, in Cicero’s Three Books of Offices, and Other Moral Duties, trans. Cyrus R. Edmonds (1871), 124, http://books.google.com/books ?id=xZEZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA275&dq=cicero+on+community&hl=en&sa=X&ei =O3yET4nTFqH00gHx8rXUBw&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAjgK#v=snippet&q=%20 community&f=false.

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