Bartleby against Neoliberal Governmentality
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This article rereads Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as an early literary exploration of neoliberal governmentality and its techniques of subject formation. Drawing on Foucault’s analyses of governmentality and biopolitics, it situates the Wall Street law office as an infrastructural laboratory in which partitions, schedules, and proliferating documents fuse legal and financial rationalities into everyday rule. Within this milieu, Bartleby’s formula of preferring not to operates as a performative suspension that interrupts the conversion of command into compliance. The suspension travels across registers from language to spatial arrangement and, finally, to metabolism as conditional preference yields to silence, stillness, and the cessation of sustenance. This trajectory clarifies both the power and the limits of counter-conduct under a regime that compels freedom through self-management. The narrative exposes a central dependency of contemporary governance on voluntary cooperation while revealing the fragility of the apparatus when that cooperation is withheld. It also registers the vulnerability of solitary refusal in the absence of collective supports, resisting romanticization even as it preserves a narrow aperture for the otherwise. The conclusion links Melville’s scene to twenty-first-century refusals, showing how minimal deviations can interrupt competitive rationality and indicating the need for shared institutions capable of sustaining such interruptions without converting them into dispossession. Bartleby models neither resignation nor revolution but a sustained disidentification from the logics that render subjects governable, thereby offering a precise diagnostic of where governance can be made to hesitate.
Abstract
This article rereads Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as an early literary exploration of neoliberal governmentality and its techniques of subject formation. Drawing on Foucault’s analyses of governmentality and biopolitics, it situates the Wall Street law office as an infrastructural laboratory in which partitions, schedules, and proliferating documents fuse legal and financial rationalities into everyday rule. Within this milieu, Bartleby’s formula of preferring not to operates as a performative suspension that interrupts the conversion of command into compliance. The suspension travels across registers from language to spatial arrangement and, finally, to metabolism as conditional preference yields to silence, stillness, and the cessation of sustenance. This trajectory clarifies both the power and the limits of counter-conduct under a regime that compels freedom through self-management. The narrative exposes a central dependency of contemporary governance on voluntary cooperation while revealing the fragility of the apparatus when that cooperation is withheld. It also registers the vulnerability of solitary refusal in the absence of collective supports, resisting romanticization even as it preserves a narrow aperture for the otherwise. The conclusion links Melville’s scene to twenty-first-century refusals, showing how minimal deviations can interrupt competitive rationality and indicating the need for shared institutions capable of sustaining such interruptions without converting them into dispossession. Bartleby models neither resignation nor revolution but a sustained disidentification from the logics that render subjects governable, thereby offering a precise diagnostic of where governance can be made to hesitate.