In the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” Karl Marx outlines a theory of the bleak consequences of modern industrialization ― the experience of being alienated from one’s work, one’s relations, and ultimately oneself. No longer in control of their work or products, Marx argues, the workers are reduced to replaceable components in a colossal social machine. 

Building on this analysis, the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs viewed the spread of alienation in the beginning of the 20th century as so radical and pervasive that it threatened to penetrate all aspects of society. In such a society, Lukacs writes, “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and this acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”

Personal relations, thoughts, concepts, products, political ideas and so forth ― everything, as Lukacs gloomily ruminates, will eventually turn into isolated abstractions, objects detached from their original context. To Lukacs, the modern industrial world is one that is atomized into an endless series of quantifiable objects and items, each attached to a price tag.

Alongside these various theories of alienation in the modern industrialist society, we find an almost equal number of emancipation narratives, from Marx himself, e.g. in “The Communist Manifesto,” to Lukacs’ idea of radical class consciousness, and onward.

In today’s society, the popularity of self-realization books, as well as numerous TV programs in search of an authentic self buried underneath modern society’s norms and regulations, suggests that the concerns regarding alienation and “not being in control of one’s self” have progressed to more hysterical levels.

The enormous variety of different self-realization methods, life manuals and treatises on how to transform oneself in modern society is the concrete manifestation of a genuine fear of having lived the wrong life, someone else’s life. A familiar feeling that may invoke terror at all stages of people’s lives; hence the frantic pursuits of formulas that may give us back the life that is truly ours.

From a different angle, the solution to the problem of alienation ― of being cut off from one’s real self ― is perhaps less a matter of finding the “true” narrative of oneself, amid countless false narratives. Rather, as the French philosopher Michel Foucault has argued, the modern self is beleaguered by normative ideas, prepackaged identities, and predetermined subject-positions ― to the extent that the search for an “authentic” self is not only meaningless, but self-deluding; indeed, the modern notion of the “self” is itself a social construction, perhaps the very source of the experience of alienation in the first place.

Emancipation is, according to Foucault, less a question of discovering who we really are; it is rather a matter of rejecting or avoiding the multiple ways in which we are molded into a self ― which we mistakenly believe expresses the essence of who we are.

Almost around the same time as Marx was formulating his theory of alienation, the American writer Herman Melville wrote a story called “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” which in many ways anticipates the thoughts of Foucault.

Published in 1853, the story is narrated by a Wall Street lawyer who once had a very strange employee ― the copyist, or “scrivener,” Mr. Bartleby. In the beginning of Mr. Bartleby’s period of employment, everything is bliss; Bartleby provides impeccable, faultless copies of legal documents at magnificent speed.

One day, however, as the lawyer routinely asks him to double-check a report, Bartleby politely answers: “I would prefer not to.” At first surprised, the lawyer asks Bartleby again, but the latter is insistent.

The statement “I would prefer not to” confuses the lawyer ― indeed paralyzes him ― because it seems to express a polite desire, a plea, as well as a refusal of a kind, albeit an ambiguous one. Moreover, the statement does not lead anywhere; it constitutes a dead end, a cul-de-sac. The lawyer subsequently attempts all kinds of strategies to persuade Bartleby to resume work, but receives the same response on every occasion: “I would prefer not to.”

Later in the story, when the lawyer discovers that Bartleby has taken up residence in the office, he asks him to leave: “What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay any taxes? Or is this property yours?” But again the lawyer is met with the same apathetic, ambiguous answer, and eventually he decides to move offices.

A short while later the lawyer is called back to his old premises to remove Bartleby, who by now has been banished to the stairs and the entryway. But to no avail; when Bartleby is finally thrown in jail, he prefers not to eat, and soon after dies ― leaving behind the enigma of who this man really was, what he wanted, or rather what he preferred (or why he preferred not to). “I waive the biographies of all the other scriveners,” the lawyer at one point comments, “for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done.”

Ever since the publication of Melville’s puzzling story, there has been no shortage of suggestions as to who or what the figure of Bartleby represents; a hero, rebel, saint, Christ, Socrates, a mad person, a melancholic, even Melville himself. Some have argued that Bartleby embodies a political principle of working-class rebellion (the refusal to work); others have read Bartleby as an original individual in an inauthentic world of fakes and copies.

But there is a sense in which the figure of Bartleby exceeds all these interpretations, as if he “prefers not to” be reduced to any of these; indeed, as if the statement “I would prefer not to,” oscillating somewhere between a refusal and an appeal, articulates a position that insists on not having any preferences at all, except the empty, negative preference of preferring not to.

For in our positive preferences ― the preferences to do something (as opposed to preferring doing nothing) ― we are continuously molded into selves for which we are held responsible, selves that define and categorize who we are, and with which we desperately try to identify; even if, deep inside, we sense that our true self lies elsewhere. 

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.