A review by colin_cox
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

5.0

In an essay well-worth reading on Medium, user The Dangerous Maybe explores why Hermine Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivner" has emerged as such an important text to thinkers like Slavoj Žižek. They write, "For Žižek, this story provides us with a strategy for how to go about coping with our current geopolitical and economic deadlock." Bartleby's strategy is not action-oriented, at least not in the way we often associate action with change and progress. Bartleby is not a labor-rights organizer. He does not protest against abusive labor conditions or what today we would call "corporate greed." Instead, he says and repeats whenever his boss asks him to complete a menial task, "I would prefer not to." Bartleby's declaration lacks grammatical conviction. He neither confirms nor denies his boss's requests. Instead, he exists in a liminal, or as The Dangerous Maybe describes it, "indeterminate" space. By neither confirming nor denying his boss's requests, Bartleby can better see and understand the contours of mid-19th century capitalism. For Žižek, if we embrace the liminality of "I would prefer not to," we too can better see, understand, and resist the shape and demands of early-21st century capitalism.

Žižek has real concerns about fetishizing action for action's sake. Too often, we act in response to abuse, corruption, and misconduct, but we fail to consider how those actions can reinforce capitalism's dominant ideologies. Bartleby, at least for figures like Žižek, offers a solution to this potential problem.