6. Bartleby

Chapter Six ("Bartleby"): Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall St." has become a signpost in cultural theory for a "new" politics of a "new" capitalism without borders in which wealth and inequality are assumed to acquire "materiality" in the circuits of exchange and thus invalidate the classical Marxist critique. Whether understood in terms of a "refusal of work" (Negri), or as signifying a "new" form of praxis of a "coming community" (e.g., Žižek, Agamben), contemporary readings of "Bartleby" serve as a lexicon in which capitalism is represented as having outlived its basic contradiction inscribed in wage-labor/capital relations and therefore the best mode of "resistance" to capitalism is the "interrupting" of the flows of exchange value. Against what I argue are such accommodationist views— accomodationist in the sense that they all, no matter their surface differences, argue that the time for revolutionary change is over and thus accommodate the domination of finance capital—in this chapter I give an original reading of "Bartleby," along with some exemplary instances of its cyber-left readers, as providing an ideology of capitalism that limits resistance to the realm of circulation and instead will argue for the new not as cultural change in the terms of exploitation but the new as abolishing exploitation.

Keywords: Melville; Bartleby, cyber-capitalism; Žižek; Negri; Agamben.