Sustaining Refusal and Imagining New Societies: The Scarlet Letter, “Bartleby,” and the Production of “Somewhere Else”

How can we restore or reinvent such political conceptions of happiness, joy, and love for our world? A conventional answer to such a question might offer a political program against misery, meaning by misery not only the lack of wealth and resources but also and more generally the lack of power to create and innovate, to rule oneself. Misery is the condition of being separated from what one can do, from what one can become.

—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth

For those who desire to create a society based on the principle of human freedom, direct action is simply the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

—David Graeber, “On Playing by the Rules”

In writing about literary responses to the miscount of persons during the antebellum period, I find myself thinking about twenty-first century manifestations of the miscount. I adapt my notion of the “miscount” from Jacques Rancière’s Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, where he argues that all political systems rely on a fundamental miscount, wherein all parts, or persons, are not part of the sum; Rancière refers to those left out of the system as “those who have no part” (11). Those without a part lack certain shared rights or privileges and exist somewhere on the periphery of the community. Starting with the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election, United States politics in this century have exposed a variety of sites of domination, social inequality, and civil death. Arizona and Alabama passed anti-immigration laws that not only defined groups of persons who could not be part of each state’s people, but they also called on citizens to participate in the policing of civic boundaries. Over two million Americans, many from black and brown populations, are incarcerated in United States prisons. Following the 2008 election of Barack Obama, ten states passed or bolstered voter ID laws in ways that disproportionately impinge on voting rights in poor and minority communities. The 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission Supreme Court decision upheld the free speech of corporations and, in the process, ensured that corporate support for political candidates could drown out the voices of normal citizens. Proposed personhood amendments to state constitutions challenge women’s rights to control their own bodies. This short list touches on only some cases of the miscount in the United States—all of which diminish or entirely remove that part that some persons hold in the nation, but these examples have been enough to spur resistance to inequality. Starting in Zuccotti Park in the shadow of Wall Street’s giant banks, the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to cities, small towns, and college campuses, and occupiers called for fairer representation and just distribution of resources. Today’s conflicts lead to the same sorts of questions that thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century had to ask in the face of civil injustice: what would a refusal look like and where could resistance succeed?

In response to the United States Constitution’s three-fifths clause, the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Dred Scott Decision, among many other juridical acts, some antebellum writers understood the significance of the individual person as the key component of refusal. Although the citizen could be defined only by a state, a person had the potential, in the words Nathaniel Hawthorne uses in “The Custom-House,” to become a “citizen of somewhere else” (35). That “somewhere else”—an alternative geographical and social space—could allow for new modes of human interaction and sustained refusal against domination. The two epigraphs to this essay outline key components of refusal: a successful refusal would break down the boundary between the person and his or her potential and would provide the ability to live as though already autonomous. In “The Custom-House,” the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne finds the space to be a “real human being” on the printed page of his novel. Significantly, print allows Hawthorne an opportunity to disseminate a version of himself into the print public...