In this article I analyse the primary rejections depicted in Herman Melville's Urtext on the withdrawal of complicity, Bartleby (1853), and Hito Steyerl's video installation How Not to be Seen (2013), which experiments with a Bartleby‐like withdrawal from surveillance through becoming illegible to machine vision. My focus is on the potential of primary rejection to reveal the disavowed content of racist violence foundational to the regimes (financial, sociotechnical) rejected in these texts. Adopting a hermeneutic of hauntology, my reading of Bartleby emphasises its publication context amid the slow struggles over the abolition of slavery in the US, to explore the connections between Bartleby's strike and the history of racist violence lingering in Melville's depiction of an oddly vacant Wall Street. Turning to Steyerl's video installation, I evaluate the techniques it proposes for becoming Bartlebys of the digital age, emphasising the complexity of Steyerl's mobilisation of mixed‐footage montage to explore the dangers of legibility and invisibility in a racist internet era. Throughout, I set these two works in dialogue with leading interpretations of Bartleby, with Adorno and Horkheimer's interpretation of Hegel's ‘determinate negation’, hauntological analyses of German and other texts, and current theories of race and surveillance to pose the question: for whom is primary rejection affordable and who, like Bartleby, will perish if they try to exit dominant schemes of legibility?

中文翻译：

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赫尔曼·梅尔维尔的《巴特比》和希托·斯蒂耶尔的“原住民拒绝”的政治观：种族主义，（非法）合法性，监视和确定性否定

在本文中，我分析了赫尔曼·梅尔维尔（Herman Melville）的《乌尔文本》（Urtext）中关于共谋退出，巴特尔比（Bartleby（1853））和日托·斯泰尔（Hito Steyerl）的视频装置《如何不被看见》（2013）所描述的主要拒绝，该实验尝试了类似巴特尔比的方式，从监视变成监视机器视觉难以辨认。我的重点是主要拒绝的潜力，以揭示这些文本中所拒绝的政权（金融，社会技术）基础上的种族主义暴力的被拒绝的内容。我对巴特勒比的理解是对行为学的诠释强调了在美国废除奴隶制的缓慢斗争中的出版背景，以探讨巴特尔比罢工与种族主义暴力历史之间的联系，而梅尔维尔描述的华尔街却空无一人。对于Steyerl的视频装置，我评估了它成为数字时代的Bartlebys的技术，强调了Steyerl动员混合步态蒙太奇的复杂性，以探索种族主义互联网时代易读性和隐蔽性的危险。在整个过程中，我将这两部作品与Bartleby的主要解释，Adorno和Horkheimer对黑格尔的“确定性否定”的解释，对德语和其他文本的错觉分析以及当前的种族和监视理论进行对话，以提出以下问题：