Foucauldian Interactions of Desire, Knowledge, and Control in “Bartleby” – ENG 467: Race, Punishment and Biopolitics

The office becomes a space of biopolitical power in modernity.

“The offender becomes an individual ‘to know’” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 251).

“I would prefer not to” (Melville, Bartleby).

Expressing preference indicates an elevation in status or rank; it is a favoring of—or towards—someone or something that we, as people, value (OED). It is a value judgment and a promotion of a will or desire towards an option. Bartleby prefers not to do things; prefers not to work. Through his willing refusal, he exhibits a preference to not participate in normalcy. The narrator is frustrated by Bartleby’s non-compliance because preferring to not do anything the narrator asks interrupts the narrator’s ability to control Bartleby. Bartleby’s preference places him outside of the normal and the knowable. He is, in a word, deviant. Foucault argues that society is regularizing and that the promotion of regularity creates and acknowledges deviance. However, it—in turn—attempts control over deviance in order to pull the margins and peripherals of society back to the center and make them productive. Knowledge then becomes a major mechanism of control over deviance; to control something, it must be known. The narrator desires to understand and know Bartleby and the story surrounds his failure to attain that knowledge—and therefore surrounds his failure to control Bartleby. Melville’s “Bartleby” illustrates how a desire and motivation towards knowledge interact with systems of power within modernity to attempt control over deviance. Bartleby’s death illustrates that when deviance fails to be known and controlled it is cast off—and let die.

Establishing a foucauldian framework, through which to view “Bartleby”, requires an analysis of Foucault’s modern society of regularization. A society of regularization exerts what Foucault describes as “biopower” over its subjects—this power is exerted, in numerous forms and through myriad sources. Power—and therefore biopower—is a capacity; its exercise is observable throughout the interactions of individuals and institutions within society. Biopower takes a specific form, in what Foucault describes as the “right to make live or to let die” (Society Must be Defended 241). Power—and specifically how it acts as a capacity—is key to Foucault and is embedded in the language he uses to describe it. In the way that power is a capacity, so too, is a right. Both capacities and rights are innate abilities.

Biopower manifests in societal interactions, both individual and institutional, that decide the type of life that is promoted and the type of life that is allowed to wither away. The discourse of rights and the discourse of power rely on their inherent givenness of the capacity towards action. Wendy Brown proposes—through a foucauldian lens—that there is an implicit judgment that those who society fails, fail because they have not exercised the capacities of their “rights” to their fullest (14). And in fact, it isn’t even a matter of societal failure; instead, the blame and language of failure focuses on the individual. These subjects and citizens, who fail as individuals—who cannot best exert their rights and capacities of power—are cast aside; they are left on the edges of society to die. Failure and deviance are intertwined in this understanding; deviance is framed as an individual choice. Deviance is accepted so long as it passes an internal calculus that doesn’t position the deviance as an extreme outlier. Deviation and free-willed action is encouraged, insofar as it is allowed to be exercised in a very specific, calculated, not-too-bizarre way.

Through an individual’s banishment to the margins, ostracization, and subjugation to the language of a “mismanaged life”, Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish—that the mechanisms of prison have permeated every facet of modern life—bares its teeth. The modern individual is subject to disciplinary power, both internal and external; discipline embeds itself into the modern individual themselves and how these individuals interact within the social body. How an individual is subjected to a regime of discipline is directly correlated to how they engage or do not engage power.

To Foucault, this is where knowledge becomes essential; knowledge of an individual and their choices, actions and the exertion of free will, provide a narration of a person and their delinquency that can be judged—and therefore, controlled. Foucault describes this as “the punitive technique on a life” (Discipline and Punish 252). It is “this punitive technique [that] reconstitute[s] all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge” and is a “biographical knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives” (252). While Foucault is speaking directly about the delinquent in these selections, he makes explicit connections throughout Discipline and Punish to how these machinations manifest within modern, liberal democracies. Through his use of the term delinquent—Foucault avoids use of the word prisoner or offender—to illustrate the unique status of the delinquent as someone who is defined and controlled by “not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him” (251). Crime is secondary to criminality in this understanding. Criminality and delinquency provide a narration of the miscreant which allows an investigation into their knowable self—through this, they can be controlled and coerced out of delinquent behavior into more docile, normal subjects.

It is through this lens that Bartleby and his passive confrontation of the narrator’s desire becomes an allegory for Foucault’s delinquent and their treatment by society. Both the delinquent and Bartleby are approached as knowable bodies but Bartleby refuses to be known and this conflict provides substance for his story. “Bartleby” exits at a fulcrum, where society’s punitive technique—and its conversion of life into knowledge—beings to churn in the machinery of modernity. How a desire to understand is tied to a desire to control becomes apparent through the narrator’s descriptions and interactions with his subordinates and Bartleby. Bartleby is established, in the opening paragraph, as an object of knowledge but one that the narrator “believes that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man” (Melville 3). “Satisfactory”—as a word and concept—and its relation to desire is important in this opening. It delineates an immediate acknowledgement that the following account of Bartleby is insufficient and that there is a curiosity towards an understanding of this character. Caleb Smith uses the narrator’s struggle to understand Bartleby to describe a network of “disciplinary and rhetorical structures used by the lawyer in his attempt to domesticate, ‘the unaccountable Bartleby’” (Smith 257).

Smith’s analysis is buttressed by Melville’s narrator illustrating how he controls his own life, office, and co-workers through the language and described methodology of power-engagement. After he introduces “the unaccountable Bartleby” the narrator accounts for the order that existed before Bartleby’s introduction into the office. The narrator never attempts to make himself out to be a paragon of production and describes his “conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” (3). The narrator’s profession is espoused to this conception of ease, he describes himself as an “unambitious lawyer” and says that his work has never invaded his peace (3). The narrator does what he needs to do in order to be comfortable but nothing extraneous; his profession and decision making reflects this. The narrator manages his life through an internal calculus, doing what he needs to do to get by and be comfortable; his ability to regulate is sufficient to be considered normal. His life is unremarkable—to an extent—but, as his remarks about his life show, he takes great pride in falling squarely into the median. All the narrator desires is the norm; the middle satisfies his needs without straining his unambitious sensibilities. His desire for the norm drives how he controls his surroundings.

In addition to the pride of governmentality in his own life, the narrator demonstrates his control and power through the mediation of his subordinates in the office. He achieves the median and comfortable amount of production within his workplace by knowledge and mitigation of his assistants’ deviance. He first describes his office as a space with a view of adjacent buildings’ walls that “might have been considered rather tame” (4). But as he’s already discussed, the narrator isn’t averse to something being considered “tame” because it is controlled and unremarkable. In the same way, his colleagues Turkey and Nippers are equally unproductive but on opposite schedules; the narrator rejoices that “their fits relieved each other, like guards” (8). The narrator displays his control of office’s equilibrium by explaining how the two men are prone to certain deviant inefficiencies. Turkey is old and prone to paroxysms in the afternoon and nippers is a drunk who is nervous in the morning but happily buzzed and functional in the afternoon (6-8). His knowledge and understanding of these men provides the narrator with a sense of control.

Graham Thompson, through a queer, foucauldian reading of Melville’s mid-nineteenth century office, expands upon the office as a space of control and demonstrates how the narrator in “Bartleby” employs knowledge to navigate his system of control. Through the narrator’s explanation of the office and the employees’ compensation for one another, Thompson observes that the narrator is “well-attuned to the requirements of surveillance in organizing subordinate staff in an office” (Thompson 399). While Thompson largely employs his lens to describe the office as a space of sexual interaction—and such a reading isn’t directly relevant to my reading of “Bartleby”—he expertly summarizes that the office is “the home of these new disciplines characterizing capitalist disciplinary society: supervision, assessment, visibility, the distribution of bodies in space, normalization, hierarchies of power” (398). As Thompson points out, sexuality is one interaction and expression that is controlled in this space and by widening his lens—so too—are the office-people controlled by management, in general. Expressions and deviations and the unproductivity they yield are acceptable insofar as they can be known and controlled by the narrator as a manager.

Bartleby is introduced into the office and provides no knowledge of himself, who he is, why he prefers not to do things. He is uncontrollable to the narrator. Bartleby destabilizes the equilibrium that the narrator strives to maintain. Though “singularly mild”, Bartleby’s preference not to becomes an immediate source of agitation for the narrator; he “[rises] in high excitement”, to confront Bartleby’s willing refusal to assist him (10). The struggle between Bartleby’s preference to not be controlled and the narrator’s desire to know and control manifests itself in the narrator’s language as he explains their initial confrontation. The narrator professes that “had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in [Bartleby’s] manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless [the narrator] should have violently dismissed him from the premises” (10). The narrator doesn’t desire to punish Bartleby because he doesn’t know Bartleby. Through the dehumanizing lens that he views Bartelby’s behavior, the narrator displays a lack of knowledge and a lack of ability to understand Bartleby and his motivations. The narrator can comprehend why someone would refuse to do something based upon an emotional reaction; but Bartleby’s calm, polite refusal—with no expository clarification—incapacitates the narrator.

Bartleby’s interruption of the narrator’s capacity for power leads him into a state of existential crisis—as an existential crisis of desire towards knowledge of, a desire towards power over, and a desire to reinscribe regularity onto Bartleby. The narrator’s crisis is made apparent as he reflects that “it is not seldom the case that, when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith” (11). This excerpt exemplifies the power and effect that Bartleby’s calm preference, to not do what is asked of him, has over the narrator. Unpacking the awkward construction of “it is not seldom the case” underlines the language of deviancy; instead of positioning his introspection as normal, the narrator positions his reaction and introspection as not unusual. He differentiates himself from Bartleby, who is certainly unusual. However, he questions himself, surmising the possibility that “all the justice and all the reason is on the other side” (11). The narrator views Bartleby’s suppression of his power as violent and he illustrates his impotency through a near-submission to Bartleby’s preference.

However, as he makes clear, the narrator does not see himself as deviant, or wrong; he perceives himself as a regulator and agent of control. He desires to reassert control. As an analogue to a regularizing society—the narrator’s power manifests in his ability to enforce regularity. He first attempts to engage Bartleby on the level of reason—approaching him as an individual—and appealing to his duties as a scrivener in the narrator’s office (11). Bartleby has a part to play, but as the narrator attempts to argue, he isn’t playing it. When this doesn’t work, the narrator doubts himself since he is apparently unable to bend Bartleby’s preference. But he uses this impotence to his advantage by consulting “any disinterested persons” that are present, in this case, Turkey and Nippers (11-12). The narrator’s perception of Turkey and Nippers as a disinterested party illustrates power relations in two ways: Turkey and Nippers are subordinates to the narrator and they navigate power relations in an office managed by the narrator; however, they are still consulted as free-agents, which illustrates that they too have power over and control of the office space.

The society and the penitentiary are inescapably tied and Turkey and Nippers display how power acts to reinforce control. The narrator’s consultation of Turkey and Nippers illustrates plainly what Smith describes as “the virtual penitentiary regime” (257). Turkey and Nippers become the voice that decides whether Bartleby’s deviance is acceptable or not to the narrator. But they are subjects to the system of control to the office too and they participate in it daily—so too does the narrator. Bartleby is initially industrious and why he begins to prefer not to do work is never explained. However, his refusal to do certain things could have been an opportunity to examine why those things were asked of him in the first place. Instead, the narrator consults Turkey and Nippers to control Bartleby’s desires. The narrator desires the affirming answer that Turkey and Nippers give him because their vocal proclamations of Bartleby’s guilt and deviance, within earshot of Bartleby, provide a reinforcement of a norm and a return to normalcy. It is an attempted regularization—and yet it still fails. Everything the narrator does to regularize Bartleby fails.

The attempts at regularization display the arsenal of controlling apparatuses society employs over deviancy and the attempts continues until the story ends and Bartleby’s dies. Bartleby’s death has been interpreted as a success and failure, depending on which “disinterested party” in literary discourse is consulted. Bartleby succeeds by never surrendering his sheer force of will; he never allows others to control his desires or knowledge about him. However, as Foucault stresses, biopower makes live and lets die. Turkey and Nippers are not flawless employees but they let their deviance be controlled through the narrator’s knowledge of them—they are made to live. Bartleby is unknowable, by choice; he doesn’t engage power. And he is let die. So what we are left with as “Bartleby” is the story itself. And even the story is an attempt to regularize Bartleby and speak for him and about him—it is ultimately an attempt to know him and understand him. The narrator controls Bartleby and in this manner, he is made to live. What the narrator’s victory in controlling Bartleby’s life after death shows is the necessity to engage power in some way. Autonomy is lost via subjugation to regimes of power but death is the ultimate disenfranchisement. It allows those regimes of power to dictate the terms of existence for the deceased. Bartleby, through preference not to, becomes an object of interest and a subject of power, regardless of whether or not he rejected the power. He is known through his inability to be known—a permanent challenge to representation.

Works Cited

Brown, Wendy. “”Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.”.” Project Muse: Theory and Event 7.1 (2003). Web.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Random House, 1995. Print.

—. Society Must be Defended. New York: Picador, 1997. Print.

Melville, Herman. Bartleby and Benito Cereno. New York: Dover, 1990. Print.

OED, Online. “prefer, v.”. September 2012. Web. December 2012.

Smith, Caleb. “Detention without Subjects: Prisons and the Poetics of Living Death.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50.3 (2008): 243-267. Print.

Thompson, Graham. “”Dead Letters!…Dead Men?”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”.” Journal of American Studies 34.3 (2000): 395-411. Web.

Hyperreality and The Constructive Project of Neo-liberalism in Pastoralia – ENG 494: Debt and Culture

Hyperreality earns apotheosis in Saunders’ theme park cave.

Pastoralia navigates a multitude of absurd familiars and bleak banalities that permeate the everyday. It is an exaggeration and near-dystopia but rests comfortably within a fluency of language and behavior that is not unlike the now. As a story set within a theme park, its connection to Baudrillard and his lens of hyperreality and simulacra are inescapable; Sarah Pogell ties these two works together in her piece “’The Verisimilitude Inspector’: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard”. Hyperreality, the problems of representation in an age of mechanical reproduction—identities that rest on copies of copies for which there are no original—are what neo-liberalism thrive on. Tying together, Saunders, Pogell and Wendy Brown’s piece on neo-liberalism cast the actors within Pastoralia as subjects who navigate their world and their own humanity clumsily and confusedly, revealing a reality that is constructed to control them into docility and administer a type of humanity stripped of nuance and reinforced by controlled unreality.

In Pastoralia, two theme park employees—dressed as Cro-Magnons—enact a performed, pre-historical rendition of cave life for the entertainment of park guests. And yet, these two workers are not cave people, they are employees of the theme park. Their reality is an accepted exaggeration for educational and entertainment value and the two employees engage in a subjection to performance, unable to break character or behave as human beings within their cave. However, once their act is interrupted by the narrator’s distraught co-worker, Janet, she is given a poor review by both a park guest and her co-worker and subsequently fired.

Her firing represents a capitulation by the narrator to the management’s power and way-of-thinking by no longer making excuses for her inadequate performance, one that he, as a free agent, bears no responsibility for. He must separate himself from her anxieties, her foibles and her poor performance because he sees himself as a good employee being given a bad name through no fault of his own. Janet exists as a character with a mismanaged life which Wendy Brown characterizes as “a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers” (14). The narrator who defended Janet as “a friend with a dying mom on the day she finds out that her screwed-up son is even more screwed up than she originally thought” no longer considers this nuance, seeing her actions as having “totally blew it” (Saunders 34, 58). Her meltdown about her son towards the guests and calling them a “suckass” illustrates her failure, as a failure of personal judgment as “a ‘free’ subject who rationally deliberates about alternative courses of action, make choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of those choices” (Saunders 59) (Brown 16). Janet’s failure is now a failure of her to be stronger than her problems—it is a denial of why those problems are there in the first place and a denial that there is any lack of infrastructure to support her through her problems so she doesn’t have outbursts. She is expected to behave as a professional caveperson—keeping her composure and sticking to her inhuman script, even in times of deep emotional distress.

Janet’s firing is a triumph of neo-liberalism because it extinguishes a human inefficiency without questioning at-length or in-depth why an inefficiency occurred or why her behavior was considered inefficient—it simply was. Janet represents an identity and role where “the very idea of looking and acting human is a liability” (Pogell 472). Janet’s dismissal and subsequent replacement broadcast a social anxiety, an “admonition to potential job seekers, who in trying to survive in corporate America, might be tempted to forfeit their humanity” (472). The neo-liberal and corporate America are inseparable and the loss of humanity is palpable within their necessary cost-benefit-analyses. By reducing human morality to economics and competition, it “entails the erosion of oppositional political, moral or subjective claims located outside capitalist rationality but inside liberal democratic society” (Brown 20). The reason that there is no resistance to the system in Pastoralia—besides Janet’s speaking in English and a few, bitter notes left by fired employees—is that  the theme park exists within an absurd but familiar near-future where control has been so thoroughly entrenched that resistance isn’t even considered a possibility. As Pogell observes in Pastoralia, “language that expresses emotion and individual truth has been relegated to mere idiolect” through Janet, who in her letter to the narrator after her firing reveals “the complexity of her emotions, beliefs and values” through a diatribe rife of misspellings and vulgarity but full of emotion and sincerity (471).

Within a corporate memo given to the narrator after Janet’s dismissal, he is assured that “[him and Janet] are not the same entity. [They] are distinct” and yet, the same memo suggests that the narrator should consider to “think of [himself] and Janet as branches on a tree…sometimes one branch must die so that others may live” and finally asserts that he, “should be thinking in terms of the lens of what is the maximum good for the overall organism” (Saunders 59-60). This memo acts as both an appeal to the narrator’s individuality and to his part to play within a collective; this absurd, paradoxical identity that attempts to unify the collective and separate the individual through language of health and cost is an exemplar of neo-liberal logic. This contradictory metaphor shows how neo-liberalism can control subjects “through their freedom…because of [its] moralization of the consequences of this freedom” (Brown 16). As the narrator’s boss gleefully exclaims at the end of his note, “this is the way organizations grow and thrive, via small courageous contributions by cooperative selfless helpers” (Saunders 60). The moralizing language of sacrifice and individual achievement act as a corporate pat-on-the-back for the narrator who just allowed his friend and co-worker to be fired through his own condemnation—acting as a distraction from what just happened.

None of this is to say that Janet was, in fact a “good” co-worker, she was hardly doing her job at all; but the narrator’s attitude shifts from one understanding of her behavior to another—from compassionate understanding to that of truth. He explains early on that he covers for her, hoping that like his father, who helped his coworker in times of need, that he’ll be repaid someday (46). But his boss slowly works against this compassion and sense of debt by explaining that he needs to tell the truth on his partner evaluations (21).  And so, as the narrator concludes after writing his partner performance evaluation, “it’s all true” (59).The power of truth within Pastoralia is that there isn’t anything that is true but plenty that masquerades as such. Neoliberalism is able to foist itself and fact and truth because, structurally, it rests upon things that appear to be so—numbers, costs, its subjects own free will. This power appears to be, and has trappings of, an ontological claim—it attempts to be simply put as the way things are.

However, Wendy Brown asserts that Neo-Liberalism “involves a normative rather than ontological claim about the pervasiveness of economic rationality and advocates the institution building, policies, and discourse development appropriate to such a claim” (Brown 8). Since neo-liberalism cannot—and therefore, does not—claim ontology, Brown asserts that it “is a constructivist project” and “does not presume the…givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all domains of society but rather takes as its task, the development, dissemination and institutionalization of such a rationality” (8). This constant reaffirmation of the belief manifests in the narrator’s gradual shift from one perception to simply “telling the truth” about her. Truth then, becomes a tool of the management; truth is something that they control.

One small but integral form through which this manipulation of being and rationality takes is exemplified by the corporate memos within Pastoralia. Laden with corporate double-speak, an acknowledged unreality of reality and the need to buttress its own truth through a constructive project of truth, the memos show the danger and potential death of a free-willed, human subject. The last corporate memo in the piece best exemplifies how Saunders provides a parody of the familiar—to make extreme and explicit—the constitutive acts that neo-liberal hegemony enacts upon the burgeoning underclass of subordinates to its logic.

The concluding memo within Pastoralia begins with a discussion of rumors of corporate “reorganization”—essentially, mass firings. The memo begins “Regarding the rumors you may have lately been hearing…please be advised that they are false” (62). What makes this memo peculiar is that it initially denies the substance of the rumors, attacking the rumors as an idea in-and-of-themselves. Rumors—whatever they are about, within the memo are bad—except when they aren’t; when the rumors present the management, “us up here, in a positive light, and our mission, and our accomplishments, in that case, and in that case only, we will have to admit that the rumor you’ve been hearing is right on target” (62). The management’s prose is purposefully confusing and dense, both stream-of-consciousness and exacting in its meaning. It’s loaded with double-speak that obfuscates its motives through abstractions. But simultaneously, its meaning is clear: only good rumors are true and only bad rumors are false—and that those value judgments of good and bad directly correlate to how they portray the company. It exemplifies neo-liberal logic because it immediately acknowledges the possibility of a counter-narrative and its own structural nature; rumors serve to destabilize the logic and identity and may interrupt the “constructivist project”.

As a “constructivist project,” neo-liberalism allows for an acknowledgement of its own unreality and creates an identity of crisis—an identity that must always be reaffirmed and buttressed by those who seek to maintain the identity. This identity’s power is its ability to control its appearance of ontology through its misuse of language and ontological claims, as the memo continues it questions, “because what is truth? Truth is that thing which makes what we want to happen happen” (63). Truth, its definition, its essence, becomes explicitly a tool for those who hold power to maintain it. The memo continues, “so when a rumor makes you doubt us, us up here, it is therefore not true, since we have already defined truth as that thing which helps us win” (63). It best exemplifies the type of truth and reality that the management in Pastoralia tries to instill as Truth, with a capital “T” for its subordinates—Truth is that which is controlled by those in power and left unquestioned by those who aren’t. This is the neo-liberal apotheosis within Pastoralia—neo-liberalism may not be able to wrest claim to ontology but through reinforcement and pretense it can still attempt the claim.

All of this paints a very bleak picture; Pastoralia’s corporate near dystopia is a world in which the signifiers and language of meaning are controlled and mutated to reinforce a concrete power regime. In this way, it is not unlike the now. However, the power of the now rests within the ability to reject regimes claim to ontology or absolution. Counter-narratives, rumors, outbursts of sincerity, and active resistance to the status-quo still permeate contemporary society. Recognition of—and demystification of—cofounding language and reinforced power regimes is seminal to a resistance towards them. Saunders takes the logics of neo-liberalism and hyperreality, as they exist now, to their extreme in order to broadcast their absurdity, their inhumanity and their danger—if the logic is left unchecked.

Works Cited

Brown, Wendy. “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Project Muse: Theory and Event 7.1 (2003). Web.

Butler, Judith. “”Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-531. Print.

OED, Online. “Ontology n.”. September 2012. Web. 3 December 2012.

Pogell, Sarah. “”The Verisimilitude Inspector”: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard?” Critique: Sudies in Contemporary Fiction 52.4 (2011): 460-478. Web.

Saunders, George. Pastoralia. New York: Penguin, 2000. Print.