In U.S.-American popular vernacular, “whatever” is an afective, verbal response that deflects another’s comment. It is not generally uttered in response to a question, but to a statement or observation through which another might be attempting to harness the recipient or hearer.
“You haven’t cleaned your room.”
“Whatever.”
One of multiple video mash-ups of Liam Lynch’s punk-pop “Whatever” combines images of George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, Lynch’s guitar tracks, and a Bushimpersonation voice-over. Bush yells:
I’m George W. Bush, leader of the free world. I want to bomb Iraq. And when the world says, “no!” I say, “whatever!” Saddam has started to meet our demands. Yeah, whatever.
He sings the refrain, “’cause this is my United States of whatever.”
The response “whatever” registers the fact of another utterance, of a communicative efort or engagement. It acknowledges communicativity through the deflection of the communicative efort. The sender’s message (whether understood in terms of its content or its intent, whether conscious or unconscious) is neither accepted nor rejected. Rather, the “whatever” response distills the message into the simple fact of utterance.
“Whatever” resembles the response of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener who replies, “I would prefer not to,” when given a task or instruction.<sup>8</sup> For some contemporary philosophers (for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), Bartleby provides a figure of refusal, opposition, or resistance; a model of escape or disentanglement from the relations of power constitutive of contemporary capitalist control societies. The argument is premised on power’s dependence on resistance: the transgression of the law calls law into being. Or protestors need police brutality in order to demonstrate the validity of their protests. Bartleby, then, suggests a way out of the dialectic of law and its transgression. Sidestepping resistance, he deprives power of its hold.
Yet even as Bartleby evades the circuit of power and resistance by refusing to refuse, he continues to rely on his position as a singular subject: he says “I,” referring to himself as a subject—and not just any subject, but a subject with a view, a preference. As such, he remains exposed to power. He still cares. In response to a request, Bartleby does more than acknowledge communication, the fact that a message has been delivered and received. His answer afirms the intelligibility of the request even as it challenges the normative expectations informing it. And rather than challenging the sender of the message’s authority to make the request, Bartleby asserts himself as what matters—he would prefer not to. He is a subject with preferences, and these preferences must be attended to.
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