TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation

6. Bartleby the Incalculable

6 Bartleby the Incalculable The shadow is a manifest, though impenetrable, testimony to the concealed emitting of light. In keeping with this concept of shadow, we experience the incalculable as that which, withdrawn from representation, is nevertheless manifest in whatever is, pointing to Being, which remains concealed. —Heidegger THE CISTOPHORUS AS A CALL TO WRITING P lato responded to the call of the distinguishability of numbers and letters, constructing a matrix of value that was, after its incarnation as the Hegelian Weltgeist, overturned by Marx, who responded to the call of labor, alchemy, money, justice, and a table that was not a table. Already for Marx, the world was haunted by the frozen desire of commodities, fetishes, the vampire of capital, and specters that roamed Europe, specters possessing the workers of the world with a call for unity and revolution. Understanding that the machinic and the human were to be symbiotically linked through the mechanisms of organicity, he wandered the world, fleeing the law. He 93 sought a home, and, almost—not quite, but almost—ended up as a newspaper writer in New York City, that site of the utmost calculability which is, for this very reason, haunted by the incalculable. This, too, will summon thought. In a discussion of how thinking inclines toward the event of withdrawing, Heidegger argues that Socrates, by placing himself into the draft of that withdrawing, was the “purest thinker of the West,” and this is why “he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them.” Thus, after Socrates, all philosophers (indeed, all writers) are “fugitives,” for “thinking has entered into literature” (1968, 17–18). Elsewhere in the same text, he claims that “Literature is what has literally been written down and copied, with the intent that it be available to a reading public” (134; my emphasis). In a certain sense, Bartleby, too, “writes nothing,” refusing to copy and therefore not participating in the literary that relies on mimetic machinery and a public. And yet he, like Socrates, has a scriptorial other who is willing to do the necessary work, whether it is called “philosophy” or “literature.” This thin sheaf of fiction, really only the merest ghost of a story, concerns itself with drafts, money, rationality, machines, the nothing, counterfeiting, and a watery crypt that is a reservoir for thinking. Technologics is already in full gear. Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, published in 1853, begins as a wisp in the wind for the narrator, who in order to tell the tale must become a ghost-writer: I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature . Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report, which will appear in the sequel. (Melville 1990, 3) Bartleby is without explicable origin. The narrator’s writing, whatever it turns out to be, cannot match the “loss to literature.” Not a biographer or a man of letters, the narrator has no origin but what he has seen with his own “astonished” eyes, and, as he says before he has well begun, the report that will appear in the “sequel.” In the beginning is the afterthought, the afterword. The sequel is included in the origin, 94 TechnoLogics and, as usual, the logic of the supplement, while necessary to the operation of the narrator’s rendition of Bartleby, will not shed any definitive light on the enigma. It will not, finally, lay any ghosts to rest, but, instead, wake more of the restless shades from the grave pages of capital, justice, and the pyramidical tombs. Having introduced himself and the scrivener with whom he is obsessed, the lawyer-who-writes then makes a detour and describes his employees, his general surroundings, and his “chambers,” which are orchestrated both visually and aurally. He describes himself as “an eminently safe man” and adds, as an aside (we are taken into his confidence, a word to be wary of in Melville), that John Jacob Astor has characterized him as “prudent” and “methodical.” He “loves to repeat” the name...