The People and the People: Democracy and Vitalism in Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass

This chapter examines the relationship between politics and philosophy in Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It focuses on Whitman’s articulation of two different concepts of democracy: a vitalist version, based on the organic life of the nation, and a revolutionary version, based on transforming the political culture of the people for the sake of fulfilling the American Revolution. The chapter traces Whitman’s reception as a Spinozist (an inheritor of the radical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza), a pantheist, and a monist. It argues that this philosophical legacy enables Whitman to reimagine the nation as the common property of the people and to reconceive of national belonging in terms other than citizenship. The chapter pays particular attention to Whitman’s commitments to labor politics and the abolition of slavery.

Idle Power: the Riot, the Commune, and Capitalist Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

This chapter argues that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) not only represents the temporality of capitalism but also contests it through an aesthetic strategy of idleness or sloth. It analyzes how Pynchon recuperates nineteenth-century traditions of anarchism, work refusal, rioting, and the commune as a way of responding to contemporary conditions of labor under capitalism. Putting Pynchon into conversation with the Italian Autonomist Marxists—most notably, Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti—it shows how Against the Day frames class struggle as a conflict between capitalism and workers regarding the social organization of time. It explains that Pynchon links the utopian reinvention of the United States to a political version of idleness, or a willful refusal of capitalist efficiency. It also situates Pynchon’s utopian imagination in respect to the social forms of the riot and the commune.

A Revolutionary Haunt: Utopian Frontiers in William S. Burroughs’s Late Trilogy

This chapter examines William S. Burroughs’ late trilogy of novels—Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987)—as a critical response to American neoliberalism. It analyzes what Burroughs terms the trilogy’s retroactive utopianism, or the way in which it reactivates the potential of historical revolutions (including the American Revolution and the global revolts of the 1960s) as a way of reimagining the future of global politics. Focusing on The Place of Dead Roads, the chapter shows how Burroughs combines science fiction and the Western to envision the Frontier in utopian terms. It argues that Burroughs’s fiction builds on the politics of the multitude, or the antisystemic politics of the late 1990s to the present, articulating a vision of the nation in terms of communal property, egalitarian relations, and democratic self-rule.

Assembling the Future

This chapter concludes the book by drawing out the connections between the American literary commons and contemporary social movements. It explains these connections not in terms of theory versus practice but rather as a shared project of commoning America (the United States), or inventing a non-capitalist, non-statist version of the nation. It contends that utopianism, or critical hope, is more necessary than ever in times of political reaction.

Nobody’s Wife: Affective Economies of Marriage in Emily Dickinson

This chapter examines Emily Dickinson’s poetry, especially her poems focusing on marriage, domestic life, and coupling. It argues that this poetry develops a feminist critique of the social reproduction of American capitalism, that is, it examines how housework, domestic labor, and other kinds of activities are integral to the reproduction of capitalism and the nation-state. The chapter focuses on how Dickinson’s critique of domesticity deals with affect, intimacy, and emotion, especially heteronormative love and bourgeois romance. Finally, it analyzes how Dickinson creates a utopian alternative to bourgeois, heteronormative romance in the form of queer marriage: a non-normative form of coupling based on equality, preference, tactility, pleasure, and contingent relationality. The chapter puts Dickinson into conversation with Marxism, feminism (especially socialist feminism), and queer theory.

Impossibly American

This chapter distinguishes American exceptionalism from what the author terms a singular America. It argues that American exceptionalism depends on disciplining or taming the utopianism associated with the United States. The chapter defines a singular America as a politics, culture, and literature that draws on American exceptionalism only to overturn the latter’s investments in capitalism, settler colonialism, and the nation-state. It argues that American Studies needs to pay more attention to the excluded middle between American exceptionalism and its critique—a zone of politics and culture in which complicity and critique mutually constitute one another. The chapter also explains the connection between the critical discourse of biopolitics and utopianism, reading the work of Michel Foucault in terms of how it refocuses utopianism on the body and life, rather than geography or space. It elaborates a singular America in terms of a literary commons: a tradition of literature devoted to non-capitalist and non-sovereign social relations. Finally, the chapter explains the book’s literary historical trajectory—how it connects the American Renaissance (or mid-nineteenth century) to the contemporary period—in terms of the rise and decline of American hegemony in the capitalist world-system.