A Poetics of Dissent; or, Pantisocracy in America

To know a bit more about the threads that trace the ordinary ways and forgotten paths of utopia, it would be better to follow the labor of the poets.

— Jacques Ranciere, Short Voyages to the Land of the People

The past can be seized only as an image, which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

“Pantisocracy” was an experiment in radical utopian living, invented in England in the closing years of the eighteenth century by a couple of young poets, never put into practice, and described in later, more sober years with a mixture of embarrassment and shame by the poets and their friends, and with sanctimonious anger by their enemies. In the essay that follows I will interpret Pantisocracy as an example of what I call a “poetics of dissent” — that is, a literary strategy that makes possible a dissenting politics. Immediately, however, it needs to be made clear that both “literary” and “politics” are understood broadly here; indeed, the politics I pursue is simply the possibility of speaking in a certain way. Moreover this essay bears a complicated relationship to a systematic exposition or exegesis, for although certain thinkers — Derrida, Ranciere, Benjamin, Hardt and Negri — appear here, I employ them opportunistically. The goal is to describe Pantisocracy in such a way as to create an historical “image” (in Benjamin’s sense of the word) of dissent. Importantly, that image should not be understood as opposed to “criticism” or to “theory” or to systematic thought more generally but rather as intrinsic to those activities.

The most readily-available interpretation of Pantisocracy is that it was an ill-conceived, impractical venture whose failure can be coordinated with the larger narrative of romantic apostasy. In that narrative, the youthful radicalism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth gives way first to counter-revolutionary feeling and then eventually to a full-blown conservatism. Even the early poetry and politics of these writers, goes this line of reasoning, can be read as symptomatic of their later rapprochement with the status quo. In contrast, I wish to suggest that focusing on what I call a “poetics of dissent” can reveal not only Pantisocracy but the larger movement of romanticism upon which it verges as more complexly engaged with the relation between aesthetics and politics. Of course it is always possible to dismiss romanticism because of its troubling tendency to align aesthetics and politics. Yet if we untangle the various threads by which those abstractions are woven together, we find that oppositional politics — understood as a form rather than a specific content — can sometimes come by way of aesthetic practices.

In an analogous way, Jacques Ranciere distinguishes his own interest in the relation of aesthetics and politics from the tradition of what he variously terms “critique” or “symptomatic reading.” “As I understand it,” remarks Ranciere in an interview, “critique combines a position of radical politics with a practice of interpretive suspicion guided by the idea that words always hide something profound below the surface.” “My own intellectual effort,” he continues, “has been to think the distance between words differently.”¹ The “difference” of which Ranciere speaks here has to do with words themselves, and their ability to circulate, disrupt, and create. Words, in this sense, constitute the political as such – or more precisely, the capacity to speak “excess words” is simply what it means to dissent from a ruling orthodoxy.² The speech act is the political act, with the result that politics must be understood outside the realm of the state, perhaps indeed as inherently opposed to the state with its “masters of designation and classification” (115). Of particular interest is Ranciere’s claim that politics is in this sense literary – part of that broader category he calls the “poetics of knowledge.”

One implication of this idea is that “critique,” despite its self-understanding as radical, actually polices words as rigidly as does state power: by reading through words in order to get at something hidden below the surface, critique actually shares in the...