Bartleby™

In his classic story of Wall Street, Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville recounts the tale of a humble copyist employed by the story’s narrator, a lawyer whose name we never learn. Initially, Bartleby performs remarkably, “working day and night…as if long famished for something to copy.” But his productivity stops suddenly. He does not refuse to work, he does not leave, he simply and without malice responds to every one of the lawyer’s requests, “I prefer not to.” The lawyer contemplates all sorts of responses to Bartleby’s intransigence: compelling Bartleby to work, berating him, forcing him to leave. But the scrivener’s language and his demeanor deter the lawyer. He is captivated by Bartleby’s “steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation…his great stillness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances.” Ultimately, the lawyer moves his entire office rather than contradict Bartleby’s preference not to.

What can we learn about design from a man who preferred not to?

In a seminar at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena this fall, Bruce Hainley and I posed precisely this question to our students. Could Bartleby’s perfectly crafted refrain be the appropriate response to a world where every choice and configuration has been designed? Would Bartleby’s steadfast evasion of work even be possible today, when all of our leisure activities have been replaced by their functional equivalents, from home improvement to working-out?

In this seamless flow of functionality even not working has become work. Every step of the way design is transforming choice into a network of sub-menus, converting free time into boredom. Instead of reinforcing this functionality, how could Design act as a Bartleby to the lawyers of the world? How would one design Bartleby™?

In The Substance of Style, cultural critic Virginia Postrel enthuses about mass customization and the proliferation of options that design provides. Bartleby’s is a provocative stance against this kind of prescribed circumscribed “choice,” where T-shirts are made in every shade of irony, and jeans are mass-“personalized” in every bouquet of distress. The proliferation of options crowds out the fundamental kind of choice that Bartleby represents. In Potentialities the philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes, “As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality.” Agamben invokes Liebniz’s idea of contingency, saying that Bartleby embodies, “the contingent, which can be or not be and which coincides with the domain of human freedom in its opposition to necessity.” This is precisely the freedom that is being compromised by the avalanche of superficial “choices” and “options” that surface design creates. When the purpose of design is formulated as a way to create difference through style, choice itself becomes a necessity and potentiality is replaced by finite potential (select from this list of background colors). Contingency is replaced by customization.

It is no coincidence that Melville finds his enthusiastically reluctant hero on Wall Street — the capital of capital. Bartleby’s contingency had to emerge in direct opposition to the dominant organizing principle of modern life: work. But thanks in large part to design, this kind of separation from work has become very difficult to achieve. In his essay “Free Time,” philosopher Theodor Adorno explains how our time away from work has gradually been filled with economically productive activities masquerading as leisure. He further explains how we become habituated to this functionalization, so that when we have free time we don’t feel relaxed, but instead feel an anxiety to function, commonly known as boredom. Consider how much time we spend navigating menus on well-designed hand-held devices, or immersing ourselves in shopping environments designed to feel like “experiences,” or mastering gourmet cooking techniques in our restaurant-style kitchens. Design does not create values or culture, but it is the primary means through which these values are integrated into daily life. In an ironic twist, design has itself become a leisure activity. People come home after working an eight-hour day and program their website or learn how to apply an aged-crackle finish to their bathroom walls. These used to be jobs (and rather unpleasant ones at that) but they have been repackaged as hobbies.

Bartleby’s act of inaction neutralizes this totalization of work and in so doing he calls out to a common humanity in his boss. In American Fictions, her examination of the literary history of Manhattan, Elizabeth Hardwick says, “Melville’s structure is magical because the lawyer creates Bartleby by allowing him to be, a decision of nicely unprofessional impracticality.” Unprofessionality is exactly the point. The lawyer too, has to compromise his work to engage with Bartleby. He walks home “suffering much from perplexity and distress of mind.” He tolerates; he mulls, but he does nothing. In fact, he says that each refused request, “only tended to lessen the probability of my repeating the inadvertence.” At one point Bartleby responds to a request from the lawyer by suggesting that he walk around the block two or three times; and the lawyer does so, despite “sundry twinges of impotent rebellion against the mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener.” Through his own unworking, Bartleby manages to unwork the lawyer as well.

The relationship between Bartleby and the lawyer is a striking metaphor for the relationship between consumer and product. In the current economy of individuality and perpetual “choice” (have you calibrated your preferences on MySpace today?) what would Bartleby the product look like? Bartleby™ would be absolutely definite but not particular. Bartleby™ would not work — and it would unwork its consumer as well. You could spend hours mulling over what to do with Bartleby™; but ultimately you wouldn’t do anything. Bartleby™ would be a source of potential; it would require no choices and it wouldn’t provide any, either. Most of all, Bartleby™ would produce urgent procrastination in its consumer. I believe design is capable of engendering this kind of complex emotional attachment and that, by striving to, design may give people access to the void outside of choice and work that has been slowly drained from our everyday lives.

Dmitri Siegel is a designer and writer whose writing has appeared in Dot Dot Dot, Emigre, Design Issues and Adbusters; he also publishes Ante Magazine, a journal of visual culture and is creative director of Anathema, a magazine dedicated to the pursuit of unacceptable ideas. He is currently an art director for the Sundance Channel and teaches in the criticism and theory graduate program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.