Paradoxes of Context

When Herman Melville's narrator sets the scene in "Bartleby the Scrivener," he is careful, in many instances, to avoid details which might establish a context for the narrative outside of the text. For example, when he lists the address of his office, he says "My chambers were upstairs at No. -- Wall Street," leaving the number of the address blank so as to conjure in the reader's mind the symbolic image of Wall Street, not one specific facade (Melville, 5). In another case, the narrator describes receiving a compliment from John Jacob Astor, an early American businessman who was the first multi-millionaire and the creator of the first trust in the United States. But you wouldn't have to know who Astor is per se, because the narrator generalizes these facts as qualities he finds agreeable: "I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor, a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion." (5) The value of Astor is symbolic here too, the image of a tycoon, a man of great wealth and power, as the repetition of his name seems to transform him into shiny pieces of gold.

Indeed, the context of Bartleby's life, potentially much more critical than these minor details, is absent from the narrative entirely. "I believe no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man," the narrator confesses to the reader. "It is an irreparable loss to literature." (4) Or is it? In the very next moment, the narrator hints that he is suppressing some critical piece of evidence: "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." (4) The sequel arrives at the close of "Bartleby" (the story was serialized in two parts, November and December editions of Putnam's Magazine in 1853) and we learn that the scrivener worked at the Dead Letter Office in Washington, a job where he was charged with destroying letters, burning them "by the cartload," and along with their literal destruction, "pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities." (64) As the only surviving explanation or context for Bartleby's character, the narrator presents us with an opaque but fascinating image: a workplace, under the auspices of the State, where the collected leftover "texts" of lives are summarily incinerated, on and on forever.   

With this in mind, running parallel but not necessarily together, I want to turn to Claire Colebrook's very engaging piece "The Context of Humanism." Framing her argument within the milieu of "'after' theory" and against "Against Theory," Colebrook accepts the claim from two of theory's detractors, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, that "theory does indeed begin from an assumption that a text is necessarily detached from a context." (Colebrook, 703) She is committed to thinking about texts in a posthuman future, imagining an archive entirely without context and the way in which a theory of reading might be applied to decipher it. In section two of her essay, she then argues for some of the ways in which deconstruction can bring about interesting returns to textuality, both in a posthuman future and in a human present. Colebrook asserts two theories of context: the first is weak, coming at the dawn of deconstruction and positing that we can only know history through texts; the second is strong, creating space for textualities outside of linguistic parameters and including categories like "bodies" and "life." Here, Colebrook argues that traditional "texts" now occupy one place among many free-floating and autonomous categories. "If there can be something like a literary text -- an object that can be read, reread, copied, translated, distorted, and interpreted according to context," she writes, "then this is because of the necessary anarchism of text." (710)

To bolster her argument, Colebrook looks at several examples of traditional literary texts thought to be meaningful only in the specific contexts of their times. Yet she finds that paradoxically the more a work demands context, the more it opens itself up to poetic interpretations:

Blake's very singularity--his highly singular and idiosyncratic style that seems to demand acute contextual interpretation--actually, and for the same reasons, tends to produce works of such unique discursive difference that they appear nonreferential, mystical, or enigmatic. The more a text strives to be singular and absolutely of its own time, the more a later repetition--such as reading Blake today--will seem to yield an utterly inscrutable text open to almost any sense at all. (711)

Figure A. retrieved from: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/occupy-wall-streets-debt-to-melville/256482/2/

Beginning with Occupy Wall Street, Bartleby's famous refusal "I would prefer not to" has been freely appropriated as a slogan for a new generation of leftists in the United States. The strategic reuse of history by movements is one of my keen interests. But reading "Bartleby" with and against "The Context of Humanism," it becomes clear that there are more complicated dynamics at play regarding the mechanisms by which something can be successfully appropriated or taken out of context. I have included two posters from Mayday 2012 here: Figure A makes reference to Bartleby, while Figure B makes reference to the incident where students were pepper-sprayed by UC Davis campus police on November 18, 2011. Figure A does not necessarily require one to have read Bartleby, while Figure B, like many memes, requires specific contextual knowledge for it to be interpreted. Now let's repeat the thought experiment posed in "Against Theory," which Colebrook uses to kickoff her argument, that is, let's imagine a "text" washed up on a beach without any traces of human intentionality (701). First you see Figure A, an image of a hamster wheel with the words "I would prefer not to" written in the sand, then you see Figure B, also written into the sand. How do your interpretations of these texts differ? Is one more readable than another? Does this work for or against Colebrook's theory?

Figure B. retrieved from http://ideasandaction.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/unicorn-biting-cop.jpg