Screw Your Mother

Baudrillard has an interesting piece in the latest New Left Review.  What struck me is how it seems to share a theme that Jodi just pointed out regarding Bartleby's "I prefer not to."   Both point to a fundamental refusal:

But France, or Europe, no longer has the initiative. It no longer controls events, as it did for centuries, but is at the mercy of a succession of unforeseeable blow-backs. Those who deplore the ideological bankruptcy of the West should recall that ‘God smiles at those he sees denouncing evils of which they are the cause’. If the explosion of the banlieues is thus directly linked to the world situation, it is also—a fact which is strangely never discussed—connected to another recent episode, solicitously occluded and misrepresented in just the same way: the No in the eu Constitutional referendum. Those who voted No without really knowing why—perhaps simply because they did not wish to play the game into which they had so often been trapped; because they too refused to be integrated into the wondrous Yes of a ‘ready for occupancy’ Europe—their No was the voice of those jettisoned by the system of representation: exiles too, like the immigrants themselves, from the process of socialization. There was the same recklessness, the same irresponsibility in the act of scuppering the eu as in the young immigrants’ burning of their own neighbourhoods, their own schools; like the blacks in Watts and Detroit in the 1960s. Many now live, culturally and politically, as immigrants in a country which can no longer offer them a definition of national belonging. They are disaffiliated...

But it is a short step from disaffiliation to desafío—defiance. All the excluded, the disaffiliated, whether from the banlieues, immigrants or ‘native-born’, at one point or another turn their disaffiliation into defiance and go onto the offensive. It is their only way to stop being humiliated, discarded or taken in hand. In the wake of the November fires, mainstream political sociology spoke of integration, employment, security. I am not so sure that the rioters want to be reintegrated on these lines. Perhaps they consider the French way of life with the same condescension or indifference with which it views theirs. Perhaps they prefer to see cars burning than to dream of one day driving them. Perhaps their reaction to an over-calculated solicitude would instinctively be the same as to exclusion and repression.

The superiority of Western culture is sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join it. When there is the least sign of refusal, the slightest ebbing of that desire, the West loses its seductive appeal in its own eyes. Today it is precisely the ‘best’ it has to offer—cars, schools, shopping centres—that are torched and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through which the car-burners were to be integrated and mothered. ‘Screw your mother’ might be their organizing slogan. And the more there are attempts to ‘mother’ them, the more they will. Of course, nothing will prevent our enlightened politicians and intellectuals from considering the autumn riots as minor incidents on the road to a democratic reconciliation of all cultures. Everything indicates that on the contrary, they are successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight.

Comments

[chabert]

Hi Alain...

I think Baudrilliard is doing something similar to the staggering obtuseness of Z's reading of Bartleby. The thing about Bartleby is he's uncanny; Melville is debunking classical political economy's Figment of the Individual, saying you could imagine The Ideal Scrivener but its not a human being that can be the protagonist of a human life. It would choose between its two alternatives - Existence Scrivening Infallibly and NonExtisence - completely at random because it would lack motivation precisely because it is unlike human beings. So a human being could 'refuse work' but it would *not* be Bartleby's mysterious, uncanny refusal, which is not a human act but the effect of a *flaw in his design* as a *concept,* attributable to Bentham's bad faith.

Here Baudrillard, faced with human beings, is commiting the same crime of Theory which was the target of Melville's attack on behalf of humanity: he is replacing human subjects with mysterious opaque uncanny figments. He refuses to hear their/our speech and pronounces instead that they are mute, unable - like Betham's Imaginary Man The Ideal Scrivener - to explain themselves, to interact creatively in the world, to differ from one another, to negotiate Copying and life experiences extraneous to Copying. It is almost as if Z and B were determined to embody Melville's lampoon - its kind of a punchline to the Melville story that a 'philosopher' would claim to have discovered something secretly, ineffably, invisibly revolutionary in Bartleby's Meaningless, Inconsequential Fading To Death Due To Excessive Abstraction. But this bit from B isn't so funny - rather disturbing I think.

[chabert]

"I AM a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature."

Here are the human beings in the office:

"At the period just preceding the advent of Bartleby, I had two persons as copyists in my employment, and a promising lad as an office-boy. First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut. These may seem names, the like of which are not usually found in the Directory. In truth they were nicknames, mutually conferred upon each other by my three clerks, and were deemed expressive of their respective persons or characters."

Now this is the situation that conjures "Bartleby The Scrivener":

"Now my original business—that of a conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite documents of all sorts—was considerably increased by receiving the master’s office. There was now great work for scriveners."

Apparition:

"In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!"

Then:

" At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had be been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically."

Then Bartleby is asked to do a social thing:

" In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.""

"Bartleby The Scrivener" is imaginable but you can't tell a story about him - except an uncanny bizarre anecdote - because he's not human.

There is some resemblance between the 'Paris teens' and 'French No Voters' as they are described in the newspaper and by Baudrillard and Melville's depiction of Bartleby. But the Melville figure/monster is meant to be visible - importantly visible - as uncanny, extraordinary, inhuman; there is something wrong with the creature that gives rise to this description; it has no history (apart from emerging from the dead letter office...which would seem to be Western Philosophy.), whereas B wants us to take the uncanny fictions he presents as adequate references to human beings, who in fact merit nicknames, and have idiosyncrasies, and desires, like the human copyists in the law office, whose tales could make you weep or laugh, in contrast to whom Bartleby The Abstract Scrivener appears.

[s0metim3s]

I'm not clear: what, about this depiction, is disturbing?

[Adam Kotsko]

The Bartleby reference may well be nothing more than a symptom of Zizek's desire to have his own "take" on every single fucking academic trend in history.

[chabert]

Melville's depiction of Bartleby? Or B.'s depiction of the No voters and the Paris rioters?

[chabert]

"The Bartleby reference may well be nothing more than a symptom of Zizek's desire to have his own "take" on every single fucking academic trend in history."

Could be, but if we suppose Z has a psyche, if we think Lacan had anything valid to say in his life, the specific reading is interesting in all its details.

[s0metim3s]

I guess the question I was thinking of Chabert was: Is there such a neat distinction between 'human subjects' and 'uncanny fictions'?

[chabert]

S: Right.

I am firmy and irrevocably persuaded there is a distinction between human subjects and uncanny fictions.

How 'neat' it is...depends on what you consider 'distinction' and 'neat' to mean. Is there a distinction between a neat distinction and a distinction tout court? Is that a neat distinction? Colloquially speaking, I think the distinction is neat enough to be discerned in every actual case, though perhaps with varying degrees of effort.

[Matt]

There is something suicidal in these two pop-heros' theorizing of Bartleby. They seem to have missed the ending, not to mention all the fictive allegory, pertaining especially to the law. If only literature would translate into political slogans quite so simply!

It would be one thing, if they were concerned with drawing out a faithful and nuanced analysis of the unique status, or even perhaps "sublime irony" or "sacrificial passion" (Derrida) that marks Bartleby's unique performing utterance, with metaphorical implications--such as for the loss of letters, and for mourning--transcending party politics.

I haven't read the book, but judging on past performance only...it's tempting to say that imagining a bunch of Anthnoy Perkins-like(!) "Bartlebys in power," far from being the "difficult" (but knee-jerk necessary!) work of the brave new revolutionaries, is rather structurally inconceivable, if not utterly trivializing. Bartleby was not psychotic or delusional; he was not "of this world" in a whole other manner!

They just expect so much to be taken on cheap, almost doting faith, these guys. It's depressing. Undoubtedly they are paid too well. Then again, there's just enough mildly redeeming whiff of Agamben's 'passivity' in the air, &c.

I don't know, maybe it's counter-productive and snobbish to even say this much.

I'm not at all sure that Bartleby is purely abstract (what characters ever are?), nor that his unique refusal doesn't offer some sort of inspiration, faced with the passive violence and arbitrary laws of 'the castle' as we all remain..

Derrida calls the comparison of Bartleby with Abraham (as in, the "unique Abraham, in a singular relation with the unique God") because they both "speak no human language" at once "tempting and obvious." Derrida suggests instead that Bartleby "could be compared to Job--not to him who hoped to join the kings and counselors one day after his death, but to him who dreamed of not being born." (Gift of Death, 74) So, a rather different emphasis anyway.

One of the primary features of Bartleby's statement, according to Derrida, is that it "evokes the future without either predicting or promising." How this could possibly square with Zizek I have no idea. Then again (speaking gliberally of course), maybe it's hardly difficult at all.

[s0metim3s]

Well, firmness and irrevocability are in no way uncanny. That's for sure.

[chabert]

"I'm not at all sure that Bartleby is purely abstract (what characters ever are?)"

Right - not purely abstract. Just too abstract to exist in storia.

[Matt]

Oh stop it, you pithy two!

[chabert]

S: I don't find myself uncanny, no. And so I assume you aren't either. Are you?

[chabert]

"Bartleby was not psychotic or delusional; he was not "of this world" in a whole other manner!"

Possibly this is the proposal though - fictional characters "in Power." Maybe the proposal is just to change the way we presently 'read' the real people in Power now - stop thinking of them as bunglingly active and think of them as militantly passive. It is kind of Zizek's take on the present condition - and it is also precisely the White House's description of itself.

USS Bataan says Mr President we request you give us authorization to rescue people in NO. Bush says 'I prefer not to.' This is what we are to believe political power is in fact *always* saying in the neoliberal world order. If you asked the WTO, they would say Bartleby is in power almost everywhere, and they are just hoping he soon comes to power in China. They would be lying, but maybe Z's proposal is that we stop noticing that.

Perhaps 'Bartleby in Power' is an argument for relinquishing one's scepticism regarding the official portrait of the status quo, and changing nothing. Which would be also a way of 'imitating Bartleby' by simply removing oneself as an active agent and leaving everything unaltered.

[s0metim3s]

I like to think so, Colonel.

Though, to backtrack -

nothing will prevent our enlightened politicians and intellectuals from considering the autumn riots as minor incidents on the road to a democratic reconciliation of all cultures. Everything indicates that on the contrary, they are successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight.

... is it the suggestion that there isn't an "end in sight" and/or that the riots are not stages in a democratic progression that you find unecessarily uncanny?

[Alain]

I apologize for coming to the party late. Thank you everyone for the spirited comments. Chabert, I appreciate the general point about the uncanniness of a fictional character and the description that Baudrillard is attempting - it is ridiculous to attempt to use one to say something profound about the other. But, in fairness to Baudrillard, he does not attempt to do that here; in fact, in the piece before us, the pyrotechnics of simulation are rather understated. I only referenced Bartleby because Jodi's summary of Zizek's account (which I have not read) resonated on some level with this issue of refusal, of denying the "common wisdom" of the zeitgeist, that free market multicultural nonsense is good and inevitable.

I do not mean to suggest that summary reviews of literature, movies or TV is a substitute for studying what is happening in the world. Or that they somehow provide "truer" insight into the political. Far from it. I think my interest is more banal - I am just struggling to articulate something other than where we are today.

[PaulS]

Find oneself uncanny? God, who doesn't, from time to time, and in both senses...or maybe more like Artaud or this guy said...

[roger]

I love Col. Chabert's comments about Bartleby. And I don't really want to interrupt the stream, but on a side note -- Baudrillard has topped himself with this remark: "There was the same recklessness, the same irresponsibility in the act of scuppering the eu as in the young immigrants’ burning of their own neighbourhoods, their own schools; like the blacks in Watts and Detroit in the 1960s." And so the majority becomes exiles in their land because they didn't vote for the enarch's choice? What was the phrase of Brecht's about the leaders reluctantly having to elect a new people... The poppycock of interpreting the wholly justified response to Giscard D'Estaing's masterpiece as some kind of riot of exiles, adrift now from daddy is such that it has to hide itself in the irony of its own act of comparison in order to be emitted.

How totally disgusting.

[s0metim3s]

something other than where we are today

Alain, thanks for pointing out what's at stake.

[chabert]

"... is it the suggestion that there isn't an "end in sight" and/or that the riots are not stages in a democratic progression that you find unecessarily uncanny?"

Oh! I see! I did really misunderstand where you were going. I meant to remark on B's depiction of actuality, not his speculations about the future.

So the answer is: Neither. My objection is to the despictions of the characters in the B's story, who are similar to Bartleby. I find the reckless 'No Voters' who destroyed something belonging to them, and the mindless 'rioters' who had no consciousness of an agenda or the strategic content of their acts, uncanny fictions. Fictions because the assertion that they exist in France is unfactual; uncanny because collective 'hydras' of this type are implausible and a bit eerie.

[chabert]

Agree with Roger. The NO vote was an immense achievement of organizing; the objections were concrete; it was not destructive in the least, on the contrary it was to prevent the burning down of the welfare state. B wants to infantilize and demonize and treat with contempt those he failed to persuade of the plausibility and charm of his previous uncanny fiction, the mystical "United Europe." The free fictionalizing and continued discursive control of those who refused his control and that of his entire class last summer is really infuriating.

[chabert]

"I like to think so, Colonel."

Hm. Maybe I don't know what you mean. Is there a distinction between 'uncanny' and 'not uncanny'?

[chabert]

Or, maybe I should ask are human subjects uncanny in a distinctive way specific to human subjects, so that one could identify a strain of uncanniness unlike all other instances that one could usefully term 'human subjects,' in order to distinguish them from say 'Bartleby' or 'al Zarkawikaida' or 'Unified Europe'?

[chabert]

"this issue of refusal, of denying the "common wisdom" of the zeitgeist, that free market multicultural nonsense is good and inevitable"

I get you: just looking at the implications of this particular model of 'refusal'. Really Bartleby is the ideal 'dissident' for the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo: for a period of life, he is a very efficient productive machine. Then when he ceases to be, he dies. He has a very short retirement.

[chabert]

(...and no childhood.)