Unstate: Disarticulating State Knowledge and Joan Didion's Democracy

Joan Didion's Democracy (1984) foregrounds the potential danger of state schemes of representation and their capacity to ignore the inarticulable details of lived experience—all that we know but cannot tell. This paradigmatic postmodernist novel critiques the ways representations backed by state violence extend and intensify hegemonic control. Pursuing such anti-state politics, Didion hopes to imagine political philosophy's unimaginable: escape from representation within the state. In Democracy, she does so by displacing the problem of political representation onto narrative representation, though the novel ultimately rejects the fantasy of escaping narrative in favor of articulating the very impossibility of escape. Democracy exemplifies a relatively unexamined political current prevalent in the past fifty years of American fiction: postmodernist animosities to representation are often tied up in an unfulfilled urge to escape the state.