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Sixta Quassdorf
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Quassdorf
First name
Sixta
Email
sixta.quassdorf@unisg.ch
Phone
+41712242402
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PublicationMeaningless Work with Words: The Plight of the Literary ScribeThis paper argues that literary scribes constitute a fertile ground for understanding (post)modern transformations concerning the relationship between sign and referent. Scribes are not supposed to be concerned with the signified, but merely with the transposition of the signifier as signifier from one medium to the other - a mechanical work that, by decoupling the signifier from its signified, turns meaningful words into meaningless objects for the sake of profit generation. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) and Amy Rowland’s The Transcriptionist (2014) are two narratives about scribes that implicitly discuss the mechanisms of decoupling the linguistic sign from its referent and speculate about the repercussions. The scrivener and the transcriptionist, the one at the beginning and the other at the erstwhile end of industrial capitalism, thus enter into the discourse about an economic system that shows its ultimately inhuman foundations in its treatment of its human collaborators, who first have to adapt to machine-logic and then, when machine-logic is all-pervasive, are being replaced by machines altogether. Moreover, the scribes seem to warn us that the “liquidation of all referentials” (Baudrillard) threatens to deprive human beings of meaningful, intersubjective language. Yet, as human beings are each the zoon logon echon, an animal that has language, this threat to language could amount to an existential threat to humanity itself.Type: book section