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Matthew Scully, Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in US Literature

Michael Tavel Clarke
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Matthew Scully, Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in US Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2024, 269 p., ISBN 9781531507077; $35 (paperback).

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1Matthew Scully’s Democratic Anarchy is a fascinating and provocative exploration of American literature in relation to democratic politics. It joins a wave of recent scholarship examining that subject (American Literary History’s 2023 special issue on “Democracy and the Novel in the US,” edited by Rachel Smith and Gordon Hutner, is one example among many) and undoubtedly motivated by current widespread concerns about threats to democracy in the US and globally. What sets Scully’s book apart is its anarchist orientation to the subject.

2At the heart of Scully’s argument is the idea that any attempt to instantiate or institutionalize democracy, to impose a form on democracy (whether a political or aesthetic form), fundamentally betrays the equality at democracy’s heart, inevitably erecting hierarchies as well as excluding and policing parts (of the society, of the text) it is meant to liberate or level. The argument is compelling, and it is consistent with a longstanding tradition in political theory.

3Scully pits “democratic anarchy, or the dissensual, political drive that figures democratic equality” (2), against consensus democracy, where consensus democracy refers to “a range of forms of government [and textual forms], including representative democracy and liberal democracy, that fail to be democratic precisely because of a structural impossibility” (2). Democracy shares with anarchism a preference for disorganization and decentralization, in Scully’s view, and it resists hierarchy, authority, inequality, and representation. Democracy is fundamentally a challenge to order, form, and consensus, “an anarchic interruption” (17); “democratic anarchy can only be glimpsed through […] its antagonistic disruptions of the order of things,” he writes (109).

4The book is divided into two parts, one exploring literary efforts to imagine and represent democracy, the other examining works that challenge such efforts. Chapters in the first part, for example, focus on nineteenth-century attempts to develop democratic genres, and twentieth-century struggles to reconcile an impulse toward coherence, unity, and order (of literary form, of subjectivity) with the democratic, anarchic drive toward heterogeneity, dissensus, and disorder. Chapters in the second part study contemporary texts that reveal the impossibility of representing democracy and resist the idea that identity is representable. If nineteenth-century authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Jacobs sought a genre compatible with emancipatory democracy, writing at a time when faith in that endeavor was still alive, Scully’s book implicitly proposes, then contemporary authors, writing in a time that has witnessed persistent disappointments of supposedly democratic regimes, often seek instead to resist the formalization (both political and aesthetic) of emancipatory democracy. In particular, contemporary artists—at least the avant-garde ones he studies, including Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, Safiya Sinclair, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—resist the mechanisms of representation and consensus formation that are the characteristic methods used to achieve democracy today.

5Employing an innovative method Scully calls “dissensual anachronism” (27), Democratic Anarchy moves expansively and impressively through American history and literature, putting disparate authors, texts, and forms (including some visual art) in conversation, and violating conventional ideas of periodization by adapting queer theory’s principle of unhistoricism. Studying authors not usually considered together, for example, one chapter puts in conversation works by Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison. Scully’s analytical method is an attempt to put his anarchic theory into practice, disrupting disciplinary expectations that regulate how and what we can know. The method also enacts dissensus by showing how different authors disagree (but also sometimes agree in intriguing ways) on aesthetic principles. The results are generative.

6On a theoretical level, the book is grounded in the ideas of Jacques Rancière (the term “democratic anarchy” comes from Hatred of Democracy 65) as well as the tradition of political anarchism. The latter makes it distinctive among recent literary scholarship on democracy, which tends rather to support a generally leftist orientation informed by disparate political antecedents, including Marxism, feminism, critical race theory, etc. If Scully’s indebtedness to Rancière means that his work shares that theorist’s tendency toward abstruseness, Scully’s style is helpfully balanced by an admirable conciseness. It does not take long to locate Scully’s central arguments, nor is it difficult to grasp those ideas, even if the terminology can be arcane at times.

7Another virtue of Scully’s writing is its generosity towards other scholarship. He acknowledges disagreements but focuses on the use and development of other ideas. A key example is his use of Rancière, a theorist he obviously admires but whose limitations he strives to overcome. Most notably, Scully recognizes Rancière’s neglect of race, gender, and sexuality, and he develops Rancière’s theories to address those issues. To accomplish that, Scully draws productively on an eclectic array of theory, including critical race theory, queer theory, and Asian-American studies. It is a valuable intervention.

8While the book is fascinating in a number of ways, for me, Democratic Anarchy raises two provocative questions in particular.

9One has to do with the form of the book. If Scully’s analytical method attempts to put anarchy into practice by uniting disparate authors, materials, and historical periods in surprising and unexpected ways, there is nevertheless always a unifying form: the chapter form, for example, and the underlying essay form, with its logic of introduction, body, and conclusion. If the form of Scully’s work parallels his interest in the tension between order and anarchy, it is intriguing that order always prevails. As he notes when discussing Zukofsky in a remark that could equally apply to Scully’s own writing, “Zukofsky’s formalism, regardless of its experimentation, leads back to the regulating logic that ultimately limits the democratic anarchy that appears in his work. The desire for synthesis […] is precisely what democratic anarchy steadfastly resists” (87). (Whether or not Democratic Anarchy’s coda resists closure, as Scully claims, the chapters nevertheless all contain conventional—and effective—conclusions that synthesize his ideas.) Does the book’s privileging of order self-consciously underscore the impossibility of rendering democratic anarchy in any compatible form? Is the book’s privileging of order a consequence of the academic marketplace, the demands of cohesiveness governing academic publication (and thus indirectly the job market and the tenure process), and thus does it highlight the hierarchy and exclusion inherent to the discipline? Would we welcome or tolerate an academic work that attempts to render democratic anarchy in a formal way (an impossible endeavor, no doubt, but one that can be approximated to varying degrees), the way we are, arguably, more willing to do with experimental artistic works?

10The second topic the book raises for me has to do with the political implications of democratic anarchy. If democratic anarchy is disruptive only, oriented solely toward interruption, contestation, criticism, and challenge—if democratic anarchy is a negative or critical force and not a constructive one, in other words—it risks leaving governing systems intact and thus preserving the status quo, or in the best-case scenario, encouraging modest reform. Scully imagines democracy as a “disordering force” or “rupture” (22-3), a “permanent revolution” (149), but in practice this presumes an existing order. As he notes, “every anarchic irruption of democratic equality […] takes place within a consensus order of inequality” (30). Anarchic equality, apparently, cannot exist outside inequality. Moreover, democratic anarchy “makes nothing happen” (160; emphasis in original) and “promises nothing […] [,] always fail[ing] to realize the force of equality that it figures” (179). The book’s coda emphasizes the “need to spend more time lingering with the dissensual antagonisms of irresolvable problems” (35), which is unquestionably valuable but might seem like a luxury to those demanding immediate change to the status quo. In fact, because anarchism is fundamentally oppositional, it limits even political mobilization. This becomes clear in the discussion of Ocean Vuong, whose poetry Scully says reveals the problems of oppositional political mobilization: formalization betrays the disruptive, anarchic, democratic force motivating it, creating a “we” that necessarily regulates and polices. If Vuong’s poetry “offers a rigorous democratic aesthetic” (136), it has clear limits for political purposes.

11Literature is not obligated, of course, to imagine a new political structure(s), nor is Scully as a literary critic obligated to do this. “While literature does not change a socio-political configuration in the way of a political movement—such as a protest or general strike,” Scully notes, “it does offer a political aesthetic that reorders what can be perceptible and thinkable” (44). He follows Rancière here and his idea of the distribution of the sensible (Politics of Aesthetics). In the coda Scully adds, “artistic works […] exemplify the classic paradox of aesthetic expression as at once useless and useful in its uselessness. No matter how aesthetically radical, no literary text will incarnate political equality” (180). Scully accordingly limits himself to figuration and the imagination, defending this restriction on the grounds that aesthetic works make the world “newly or differently perceptible” (180). But this move, too, is a way of withdrawing from the practical political realm and may trouble those with pressing political concerns. Readers will need to wrestle with that element of the book even as the force of Scully’s point seems indisputable (not to mention supported by a wealth of political theory) that any attempt to institutionalize or formalize democracy and equality necessarily betrays the goal.

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Bibliographie

RANCIÈRE, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated from the French by Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum, 2004.

RANCIÈRE, Jacques. Hatred of Democracy. Translated from the French by Steve Corcoran. New York: Verso, 2014.

SMITH, Rachel Greenwald, and Gordon HUTNER, eds. “Democracy and the Novel in the US.” Special issue of American Literary History, vol. 35, no. 1, 2023.

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Michael Tavel Clarke, « Matthew Scully, Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in US Literature »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27082 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i33

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Michael Tavel Clarke

University of Calgary

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