Cultural Critique

This line whose writing is to be sought is a wandering line. It leads us in the search of this “something else,” the elementary object of this manifest begging that emanates from the slightest gesture of any child, and is exacerbated when coming from a maladapted child.

—Fernand Deligny, Nous et l’innocent

Browsing through Web sites dedicated to information about autism, one might come across a list, which is featured on a number of sites, of famous people with autistic traits. Alongside historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Glen Gould, there are also names of fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock, Mr. Bean, and Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener.¹ At first blush, this might seem strange, yet somehow unsurprising, given the extraordinary run of interpretations the figure of Bartleby has had. It is yet another entry on that long list of Marxist, psychoanalytic, existential, and theological commentaries the scrivener has inspired. However, a closer look into the various historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts implied by the juxtaposition of Bartleby and autism reveals a complex network of discourses relating to the problem of human communication—or rather, human communication as a problem.

In the following, I take up Bartleby as a figure upon which literature, science, and philosophy intersect on the question of human communication. In fact, Bartleby can be understood as uniquely inhabiting all three great forms of thought outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994): philosophy, art, and science. In the first he constitutes a conceptual figure, in the second an aesthetic figure, and in the third a figure of observation. The scrivener stands at the point of interference, [End Page 27] as it were, amid the sways of these three immense discourse generators. And if, indeed, what defines these three great forms of thought, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is confronting chaos, then the chaos confronted with Bartleby’s character is that of incommunicability. Reading Bartleby as autistic therefore interlinks with some key issues currently under debate in critical theory, cultural critique, and philosophy of language and communication.

My purpose, however, is not a sustained reading of Melville’s story; in a sense, the contrary. Weaving medical, literary, philosophical, and historical readings, the following is an attempt to account for incommunicability, where autism serves as a container and Bartleby serves as a personification. Yet the subject of incommunicability in terms of lack or excess (and hence as a species of alienation or the sublime, respectively) is not in question here; nor is incommunicability as that which negates communication, nor as that which constitutes its opposite extreme (the word itself already betrays such inclination). Rather, at issue is incommunicability as a mode of potentiality and, as such, as generative of various discourses of communication. What this discussion ultimately calls into question is the production of communication as a social value, attempting to reveal thereby the indeterminate and indeterminable link between communication and sociality.

The ensuing pages constitute an excursion into four topoi (in the double sense of topic and site) where the conjunction of Bartleby and autism is under consideration in terms of disability, expressibility, gender, and community. Each topos occasions unlikely encounters between divergent discourses that come to converge on the scrivener’s communicative impairment. Moving along a variety of interpretative trajectories, this nomadic reading is motivated by a theme elaborated on in the last topos—that of a “wandering line” (ligne d’erre)—which offers a novel approach for writing about and accounting for the incommunicable. The text as a whole can then be read as tracing the paths leading toward the conceptualization of Bartleby’s autism as well as the paths leading away from it, toward alternative conjunctions and correlations— lines of territorialization and deterritorialization, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) terms. Insofar as this reading bears out these two lines—the conceptualizing and the wandering, the territorializing and the deterritorializing—it is in between the lines where incommunicability is to be traced. [End Page 28]