I’ll take a trip to the Gulag for that as long as @Hanover precedes me.
I think the proper formula for understanding what Bartelby, as revolutionary, represents, and the lesson we should learn from his tribulations is Beckett’s “I can’t go on I’ll go on”
Formally, we insist on failure but then still go on. This is to perform, as Bartelby did, the persistence of an excess that is not hamstrung by conceptual failure, failure in legible social terms, because it transcends it. Of course, this means too that we can only gesture at Bartleby here, we can’t inhabit him symbolically—the symbolic can only be a gateway, just as his words can only be a gateway to his being as potentiality.
This is because Bartleby inhabits the social only as a negativity. And though he can’t, as a pure negativity, positively engage, it’s just this that keeps his eyes open right up until his death. He can see the social for what it is because he occupies a place outside it. Those who don’t reach this limit (essentially everyone else) cannot achieve that perspective. We live with our eyes closed or close them in order to live whereas he dies with his open or opens them in the knowledge that doing so makes life impossible.
That polarity is important. We can functionalize ourselves within institutions as long as we miss the significance of what we are doing. Or to put it another way, we can manifest the social as necessity by viewing our functionalization within it as such.
In the story, Bartelby’s office colleagues represent those who manifest the social as necessity by treating it as such. The narrator then occupies the meta will of the social in the world of the office and Bartleby is the obscured in-between, the place of ontological freedom that is willing to reject the nominal freedoms necessarily reliant on submission for the ontological freedom inherent in potentiality.
To return to Beckett, we should be precise in claiming re Bartleby that it’s not “I’ll go on even though I can’t go on”, it’s rather “I’ll go on because I can’t go on”. Because I can’t go on allowing the social to simulate the excess for me, I can go on as a free excess that refuses such simulation. Bartleby doesn’t persist in the social world despite his exhaustion with it, instead, he cannot stand to persist in it so he exits it in order to persist outside it. A Bartelby that simply persisted even though he “couldn’t go on” would be indistinguishable from his beleaguered colleagues yet, as the tale makes clear, he stands in polar opposition to them.
We can view this dynamic according to Agamben’s analysis of the story in terms of will, necessity, and contingency. The social will, personified by the narrator, functions smoothly just so long as it is seen—as it is by Bartelby’s colleagues—as a necessity, and this is not to say that any particular social injunction isseen as an absolute necessity. but that there is a social will that (to the limit of the absolute) delimits freedom, that sets the conceptual boundaries of freedom.
Only Bartleby treats the social will as a contingency, as a matter of preference, rather than necessity, and so while he writes as a scrivener should, he “prefers not to” submit fully to the narrator’s demands. More crucially, he shows no indication that he considers what he is doing as disruptive or unusual. Rather, he occupies fully the attitude of the in-between. He is, in his own words, “not particular” and so cannot be particularized; that is, he is not legible and cannot be read in the usual binary categories; he is rather than a particular, a potentiality, the undefinable excess that the social will inevitably asserts itself against in its struggle to be recognized as necessary, but actually being contingent, requires of it acquiescence.
Bartleby refuses to acquiesce and maintains his potentiality. But the cost of keeping his eyes open to this fact of social contingency is his social death. The limit he expresses is authenticity unto oblivion. Or, he presents us both with the possibility and impossibility of authenticity, which is precisely for being in this state, a pure potentiality.
To keep our eyes open as Bartelby did, and more to act fully in accordance with such knowledge, is a fully hopeless hope. However, it exposes the only vulnerability the social has —to be faced with its own contingency. The narrator who is affected by Bartleby shows this—the social can change, but that requires a sacrifice. Bartleby is the authentic subject as social sacrifice taken to the ultimate conclusion.
Further, this is, in a sense, what saves the social from itself. Its excess of will is found in our full submission to it, but if that could really be fully realized, it too would die through stagnation. This is the obverse unspoken limit the story presents us with. Our ontological freedom. in recognizing the social as a contingency, at least to some degree, is necessary for its mutability and its long term viability, just as it is necessary for our authentic survival within it.
We can analogize with evolution here. If we consider particular social forms (the macro-social) against the background of sociality as principle (the meta-social) just as we consider particular species or groups against the background of life as principle, then we see that though mutations can be destructive of the former, they are necessary for the latter. A “perfect” species that resisted such change could not adapt and if all species were “perfect” in this way, life would end. Similarly, if a particular social world could functionalise us fully into a particular formula, that social world would be frozen in a particular state and unable to respond to competition from social worlds that were not so limited. This is somewhat the equivalent of the claim sometimes made that it is great people who change societies not societies that change themselves. And great people can only become great because they resist, or better, transcend their social worlds, and dramatically so, for to overturn social inertia requires dramatic change.
But resisting is a complicated and difficult thing as Bartelby shows. It is not simply overt defiance, certainly not under market regimes where everything, including, and perhaps especially, overt defiance is commodified. Whereas ancient anti-establishment heroes legitimately moved worlds in this way, Antigone being the prime example, the modern hero cannot so move the world. The world, through a potent combination of economic and technological science moves too fast for it to beso moved. It must instead be “moved” by not moving with it, by therefore illuminating, in our relative inertia, the nature of its movements.
And that does not come naturally to us. In fact, it is anything but natural, as, developmentally, after we have taken the primeval bow to language—which we must to become a social subject, or any kind of recognizable subject at all, to become, in effect, a person—we already have one foot in the ideological grave, so to speak. And it is no easy task to dig our way out.
To use a less morbid metaphor, to see socially, that is to see as we are expected to see, we must close our eyes to the social’s contingency, and so it is necessary that we have a blindspot. And it is this blindspot from which it derives its twinned powers of necessity and will, i,e, its potency. Just as the blindspot in our sight is the phenomenological representation of the physical channel of information that makes sight at all possible, so is our blindspot towards the social the opening that allows it to make itself fully visible to us, for it to fill our vision.
So, social potency does not spring from a vacuum. It is transferred or less charitably stolen from the subject who submits but such submission is to some degree inevitable. We are, considering our developmental pathway into society, burdened with a kind of symbolic debt from the start, which, when we try to pay it off through social submission, we only make more of it at the cost of our (ontological) freedom which is just what admission into language first potentializes and the social through its primacy in language, its dominance of the concept tries to take back from us. There is the ultimate bind: that which gives us life, gives in order to deprive us of it.
The suggestion here, to allude to the famous Groucho Marx quip, is that we should refuse any society that would have us as a member because to have us as a member is to use us to transform itself from a contingency into a necessity, to make of us its platform as the final will and arbiter of freedom, the end of the chain of wills defined by its hierarchies. And where there really is a final will as necessity is just where we end as ontologically free subject. It is only beyond that in the contingency of the social where we can creatively rest as Bartelby did “with Kings and counselors”.