J ennifer g reiman Militant, Ruthless, Round: Herman Melville, William Connolly, and the Aesthetics of Radical Democracy “But I was talking about the ‘Whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he’s in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago� I’m going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other.” Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1 July 1851 “We are, as it were, under water in the grip of a hungry crocodile at the onset of its death roll…� Luckily, I met a woman in Australia ten years ago who had been caught in a crocodile death roll and escaped�” William Connolly, The Fragility of Things 1. Radical Democracy In the most influential formulations of radical democratic theory, democracy is often characterized by a notable lack of characteristics� Most famously, Claude Lefort argued in 1989 that “the revolutionary and unprecedented future of democracy” lies in the fact that “the locus of power is an empty place; it cannot be occupied … and it cannot be represented” (Lefort 17)� In 2002, Jacques Derrida argued that democracy, understood in its most fundamental sense, is always “democracy to come” because “it is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological difference” (Derrida 38-39). More recently, Jacques Rancière has defined democracy as groundless because, understood in its strongest political sense, “the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all” (Rancière 50). Empty, to come, groundless; defined by both spatial and temporal gaps; and resistant to representation: such a concept would seem to demand that we leave it alone, without qualities or qualification. And yet, to speak of democracy in this way still demands that we modify it� We call it “radical” to carry it back (literally, etymologically) to its “roots,” to rescue it from the accretion of those adjectives which belie and betray it: liberal democracy, constitutional democracy, representative democracy� Radical democracy does not just refer to a stronger, more egalitarian, or more direct expression of these, but to the form of democracy that opposes itself to the others by rejecting presupposed foundations that claim to give democracy its enduring forms—a constitution, 208 J ennifer g reiman a nation, even a presumptive people� 1 That is, radical democracy has become the necessarily compound name for the thesis that democracy is always becoming something else, the theory that there is and must be a basic selfdifference at the very root of any genuinely democratic formation� Given all this, it may well be that “radical democracy” as a term is both a redundancy and a paradox—an acknowledgment that the truest name for democracy is so lost to modernity that it can only appear to us as modified and supplemented. But I am more interested in another function of this modification—the aesthetic. I wonder how the very demand for the modifier opens up possibilities for qualitative and sensible distinctions within radical conceptions of democracy� At its root and radical, democracy may be “empty,” always “to come,” and “groundless,” but as these formulations all show, this fundamental self-difference is not one thing but many, nor is it without precise qualities, however fleeting. “There is an aesthetics in all things,” Herman Melville’s Ishmael insists, as he considers the color and texture of “the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line” that threatens to strangle him (Moby-Dick 278). Taking Ishmael at his word, I want to explore how a series of adjectives—radical, ruthless, militant, and round—figure differences within democracy’s ontological instability, qualifying it and giving it not only sensible features, but forceful ones at that� Of course, like the whale-line, democracy risks becoming alternately magical and horrible when it is viewed as an aesthetic phenomenon� On the one side, aesthetics seems to threaten democracy with a mystification that evacuates it of all political force, while on the other aesthetics threatens to fuse it with either sovereign or fascist violence� If my essay is about the distinct aesthetics that might appear in radical democracy’s dependence on grammatical modification, it is also concerned with the ways in which attention to the myriad forms of radical democracy’s instability may also address the risks that aesthetics and force always seem to pose to democratic politics� Those risks have been elaborated in a great deal of recent work on which I am building—in particular, by Paul Downes, Eric Santner, and Russ Castronovo, all of whom have examined aesthetics as these appear in the very place where democracy intersects with either sovereign or extra-legal violence� For Downes and Santner, the aesthetic stands at the origins and the ends of democratic sovereignty, respectively, as constituent act and surplus remainder� In Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature, Downes places the act of representation, equal parts democratic and aesthetic, at the inception of sovereign power (Downes 60-61)� Rightly understood, he argues, Leviathan is the collective, artificial supplement through which a people is constituted: “There is no democracy … without … a sovereign supplement,” but it is ultimately “the event of representation, the generation of an artificial social sovereignty” that makes Leviathan (67). In Santner’s 1 This is also the story that Raymond Williams tells in his chapter on “democracy” in Keywords: “one of the most significant changes in the meaning of the word democracy is in this exclusive association with one of its derived forms [representative democracy], and the attempted exclusion of one of its original forms, at one point its only form” (95). Militant, Ruthless, Round 209 Royal Remains, by contrast, the aesthetic tracks with the surplus remains of the king’s sovereign flesh as it migrates from monarchic to popular forms across the long nineteenth century, a persistent excess that, he argues, “must be managed” through biopolitics, psychoanalysis, and Modernist aesthetics (Santner xxi). Taken together, Downes and Santner define aesthetics as the art and artifice of a sovereign force that both constitutes democracy and threatens it� As Castronovo shows in Beautiful Democracy, the aesthetic often “reveals the political terrain of democracy as erratic and shifting” in this way (Castronovo 2)—dividing it on axes of preservation and transformation, hegemony and anarchy, autonomy and collectivity—because, he argues, “when aesthetic form shapes political possibility, violence appears at the edges of the discourse on beauty” (6)� Where literary scholars have tended to emphasize the double edge of democratic aesthetics, the violence at the edge of beauty, political theorists Lia Haro and Romand Cole have recently proposed, without ambivalence, what is best described as an aesthetic strategy for a revitalized, counterfascist, democratic politics� In “Eleven Theses on Neo-Fascism and the Fight to Defeat It” from a January 2017 special issue of Theory & Event, Haro and Cole build on the work of William Connolly to call for “new surges of radical creativity” that respond more effectively than “rote protest politics” to the “chaos sovereignty” and affective “amplification” of neo-fascism in the US and globally (Haro and Cole S100-01)� Democracy, they argue, must “become a double politics that can both combat the shock politics and resonant violence characteristic of the new fascism and creatively generate viable democratic alternatives” (S105)� Such creativity cannot be limited to public demonstration, they continue, but must become a “full-bodied” politics that “holds together in mutually reinforcing relations muscle, heart, and receptive senses�” What is more, such politics must embrace self-difference and “never perform [itself] the same way twice” (S106)� In calling for a revitalized democratic politics through creative, muscular, and mutable actions, along with an expanded political sensorium, Haro and Cole suggest that the radicalism of such a democratic practice is aesthetic at its root, and it is only in this that it has effective, counter-fascist force� Such a linkage of creativity and force may well promise to revitalize democratic politics in the face of new risks, but I would argue that there is nothing new about this vision of democracy’s aesthetic radicalism� In what follows, I’d like to connect such recent turns in political theory to Herman Melville’s writing from the late 1840s on� Working backwards through two examples from Melville’s corpus—what he called “my ruthless democracy” in a famous 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Round Robin mutiny from his 1847 novel, Omoo—I aim to describe a democratic force at work in Melville’s writing that speaks both to the politics of aesthetic radicalism and to the formal experimentation of Melville’s radical aesthetics. To develop the former, I’ll have recourse to recent work by William Connolly and, to a lesser extent, Étienne Balibar, both of whom have proposed ways of thinking about the place of violence and force in democracy—Connolly through a 210 J ennifer g reiman notion of a “militant democratic creativity” and Balibar through his concept of “civility�” For both Connolly and Balibar, radical democratic politics are rooted in the transience and self-difference that Derrida calls “democracy to come�” But even as both associate such politics with the need for forceful action, neither assumes that such action can only take the form of the sovereign “I can�” Instead both propose subtler ways of thinking about force and action, with Connolly deriving “militant democratic creativity” from processes that lie outside of human action and Balibar describing “civility” as intimately responsive to the forms of extreme violence such politics would oppose. In this, both seem to me to be sharing in the great insight behind what Melville calls the ruthless democracy that shapes his whole aesthetic project: namely, that democracy has its most radical force, not in sovereignty or violence, but in an unpredictable, improvisational, and irreducibly aesthetic form of creativity� 2. Ruthless Democracy In June of 1851, in the final stages of his work on Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote one of his most famous—if least erotic—letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne� 2 But what this particular letter lacks in the language of hearts beating in shared ribcages and lips touching on shared flagons, it more than makes up for in the expansiveness of the vision of life, writing, and democracy that it articulates� Opening the letter with a series of apologies for his negligence in visiting his more famous and patrician friend, Melville suddenly reverses course and withdraws the apology, saying “with no son of men do I stand on etiquette or ceremony.” He then goes on to explain what he calls his “ruthless democracy” in terms that, over the course of the letter, literalize democracy’s most radical roots� So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of shrink, or something of that sort� It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen� George Washington� This is ludicrous� But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun� … It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind—in the mass� But not so�—But it’s an endless sermon,—no more of it� (Correspondence 191) Melville concedes that his belief in democracy is both fixed and conflicted, captured in the paradox of asserting total equality and selective preference at once� Laying claim to an idea of democracy that is “ruthless,” Melville detaches it from pity, sentiment, partiality, and compromise and describes instead a principle that moves between the personal and impersonal, irreducible to either particularity or universality� Such a “ruthless” principle cannot be swayed by particular feelings of sympathy any more than it can be undone by a universal “dislike to all mankind—in the mass�” This is a democracy that 2 A brief sample: “Your heart beats in my ribs and mine in yours … Hawthorne� By what right do you drink of my flagon of life? And when I put my lips there! Lo! They are yours and not mine! ” (Correspondence 212)� Militant, Ruthless, Round 211 is “unconditional” without being given� That is, as the ludicrous becomes truth and truth ludicrous, “ruthless democracy” entails Melville in a practice of ongoing action and articulation—“an endless sermon”—through which he must constantly and “boldly” proclaim the equality of all that is denied everywhere by everyone, and he must proclaim it not as a feeling but as a fact� For this reason, Melville may try to end the endless sermon at the start of the letter, but he cannot abandon the principle he has claimed because that principle turns out to be a full-bodied process without beginning or end� Shifting into a vegetable idiom, Melville then pursues and extends his account of a “ruthless democracy” that is both true and ludicrous, both personal and impersonal, through images of growing grass that repeat throughout the letter as these elicit a series of sensations that relay between the “I” and the “all�” Biography becomes botany as each invocation of grass hinges on what the “I” can and cannot feel, know, or own� On the circumstances of family and farm that pull him out of work on “the Whale,” he writes: “The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose—that, I fear, can never be mine” (191)� On the belatedness of his development after his twenty-fifth year, he writes: “I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, grew to greenness, and then fell to mold� So I” (193)� On the truth in what he has earlier called the flummery of Goethe’s ‘all-feeling’: “You must often have felt it, lying in the grass on a warm summer’s day� Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth� Your hair feels like leaves upon your head� This is the all feeling” (194)� Unable to make the “silent grass-growing mood” his own, he turns grassy himself, becoming a seed that sprouts, “grows to greenness,” and goes to seed, only to lay himself down in the grass, sprout once again, and concede some truth to Goethe� In this way, the grass that winds its way through the disparate claims of this letter models a process of sustaining transformation that Melville cannot fully claim or direct, even as it is peculiar and particular to him� Although it goes by the name of “ruthless democracy” in the opening of the letter and the “‘all’ feeling” by its postscript, this process conforms to a specific political ontology that Melville begins to tease out in his earliest novels and fully develops in Moby-Dick and Pierre� Key to this ontology is the linking of abundant vegetal and animal life with the multivalent senses and actions that declare and fix particular truths and ludicrous sensations over and over again� For all of the grass that sprouts, grows to greenness, and goes to seed in this letter, Melville makes an equally forceful appeal for the work that remains necessary to his life, his politics, and above all his art—work that includes endless sermons on equality, reveries in the grass on warm summer days, and all of his “botched” books� Such work mirrors the process of vegetable life, in part, because the aesthetic and political tasks that are necessary to “ruthless democracy” are endless� That is, “ruthless democracy” involves a process that is recurrent and self-organizing, like the growth and going-to-seed of grass, but it demands the constant effort of a “never-ending 212 J ennifer g reiman sermon” because there is no decisive action or assertion that can fix equality on a permanent foundation even as the equality of all life manifests itself everywhere� In this, Melville’s “ruthless democracy” speaks to the transient and unstable qualities of democratic action that William Connolly has theorized as a radical “politics of becoming,” 3 while it also highlights what is essentially aesthetic in such a politics� 3. Militant Democracy In two of his recent books, A World of Becoming and The Fragility of Things, Connolly has drawn on process ontology and speculative realism to develop this politics of becoming as a corrective to both the theories and practices of democracy that, he says, “deny something essential to our engagement with the contemporary condition” (Fragility 11)� That condition, Connolly argues, is one in which ecological destruction, capitalist expansion, and political violence at once defy traditional models of sovereignty and “require a very large state to support and protect [the] preconditions” of power� The corrective, he argues, involves a re-scaled theory of politics which can grapple with “multiple zones of temporality” as well as “differential degrees of agency” all of which “move at different speeds” (Becoming 6-7)� Human and nonhuman forces do not share temporalities that can be linked in easy relations of causation, he says, and so it is not enough to develop an account of how, say, neoliberalism intensifies and accelerates ecological collapse, but neither is it enough to demand changes in political priorities, rights, or policies� Instead, the contemporary condition demands “a difficult combination” of all these things and more: If you join attention to differing degrees of creativity in the domains of human culture, nonhuman force fields, and culture-nature imbrications to a critical account of the expansion, intensification, and acceleration of neoliberal capitalism, you may be brought face-to-face with the fragility of things today—that is, with growing gaps and dislocations between the demands neoliberalism makes upon several human activities and nonhuman fields and the capacities of both to meet them. Almost paradoxically, I contend, an educated sense of the fragility of things today solicits a more refined sensitivity by us to dangers attached to several contemporary institutions and role definitions and that the inculcation of such sensitivities must be linked to a more militant democratic politics� (Fragility 10) Connolly’s call for a link between sensitivity and militancy is not “almost paradoxical” so much as it is multiply paradoxical—that is, it contains paradoxes of agency, temporality, orientation, and quality all at once. At the same time Connolly calls for new understandings of agency that are attuned to the entanglement of “differing degrees of creativity in the domains of human culture, nonhuman force fields, and culture-nature imbrications” (10), he also insists on “a politics of democratic activism” (11)� At the same time he says that such politics must “slow down” in order to attend to what falls 3 In Bonnie Honig’s phrase (46-7)� Militant, Ruthless, Round 213 outside “habitual” modes of perception, he also calls on it to “speed up” in order to keep pace with unimaginably rapid changes in political identities, state priorities, and economic practices (11). The paradox of sensitivity and militancy ultimately demands qualities and intensities of orientation and action that appear to be totally at odds with one another� Nevertheless, Connolly suggests that sensitivity and militancy are joined by a concept of creativity, which he situates at the intersection of becoming and activism� Connolly uses the term “creativity” to describe “self-organizing processes” that are heterogeneous, non-teleological, and ultimately not reducible to causal explanation. “Self-organization means a process by which, say, a simple organism restlessly seeks a new resting point upon encountering a shock or disturbance� Such activity may periodically bring something new into the world” (8)� “Real creativity,” he says, lies in the emergence of such new things and is as likely to appear within nonhuman processes as it is within the “puny human estate” (8). Although he does not explicitly tease this out, Connolly suggests that any “militant democratic politics” must partake of this creativity precisely because it is joined to a sensitivity to selforganizing processes� That is, rather than a theory of becoming that holds up non-human processes as alternatives to “politics of democratic activism,” he suggests that militant democracy derives from the relation and creative interaction between them� Finally, in allying militancy with sensitivity and creativity (rather than sovereignty), Connolly distinguishes it from violence in ways that echo Étienne Balibar’s concept of civility as a political response to extreme violence. Balibar defines civility as a principle of “anti-violence” that must accompany the radical politics of emancipation and transformation� Where emancipation describes forms of collective resistance to every limitation placed on rights, and transformation describes forms of collective insurgency that must re-found rights again and again beyond all limitation, civility appears as a check on the violence of insurgency: “unless a politics of civility is introduced into the heart of the politics of transformation,” Balibar writes, “[it] will not create the conditions for emancipation” (Balibar 104)� Civility is thus “the political action that specifically pursues anti-violence” (23), which Balibar is careful to differentiate from abstract non-violence on the one hand and mimetic counter-violence on the other� Civility is, instead, a “negation” of violence, a collective political action that responds to a particular form of violence as an internal displacement of it� Like civility, Connolly’s “militant democracy” aims to describe a creative collective force that cannot be presupposed (either as agent or action) because it is precisely attuned to specific formations of extreme violence or crisis. Where Balibar elaborates several strategies of civility through political philosophy, 4 Connolly is scrupulously vague about what kinds of practices and modes of creativity might comprise democratic militancy� But if 4 These are the hegemonic strategy (via Hegel), the majoritarian strategy (via Marx), and the becoming-minoritarian strategy (via Deleuze)� See: Balibar 108-24� 214 J ennifer g reiman Connolly doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete examples, he nevertheless concludes his call for a more sensitive and militant democratic politics with a memorably strange figure for it: We are, as it were, under water in the grip of a hungry crocodile at the onset of its death roll� Moreover, we are surrounded by many who fail or refuse—for reasons rooted in conceptions of science, religious faith, or economic activity—to be moved by the situation� Luckily, I met a woman in Australia ten years ago who had been caught in a crocodile death roll and escaped� (Fragility 11) In the midst of Connolly’s inquiry into self-organizing processes, non-human creativities, and democratic militancy, a hungry beast pulls us into the water to devour us, raising the obvious question: Is this a political theory crocodile, or a post-humanist crocodile? That is, are we meant to read this as the constitutive outside of political covenant—the beast to the sovereign—or as the sign of nonhuman life to which we are ontologically bound? In some sense, it appears to be both� If Connolly reprises his discipline’s long history of invoking beasts to describe the crises and limits of political power here, the strangeness of his metaphor for the contemporary condition also introduces something new into it� For one thing, his metaphorical crocodile is neither prior to a political relation nor the monstrous creature of it� Indeed, the metaphor suggests that the crocodile is this relation� Its actions—its grip and its roll—are the contemporary condition of multiple crises to which both sensitivity and militancy must respond creatively, not by killing but by escaping� The hungry crocodile stays hungry, but both we and it—not to mention that Australian woman—all live to swim another day� In the end, Connolly’s crocodile seems most salient as a meta-figure for the conceits of political theory that continually re-inscribe human subjects acting with force on exceptional objects, and the possibility of escaping such conceits altogether speaks to the urgency with which, Connolly argues, the contemporary world demands something more from politics than another death roll of sovereign violence� That something more can only come when we reimagine democratic force through aesthetic sensibilities and actions—a sensitivity joined to a creativity. And if this crocodile does serve as a complex figure for how political theory might respond to the contemporary condition with a militant politics of genuine creativity, it is also the place where Connolly shows himself to be a very Melvillean political theorist� Midway through Melville’s grassy letter to Hawthorne, he suddenly remembers why he had written in the first place—to tell Hawthorne about his book: But I was talking about the ‘Whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he’s in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago� I’m going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other. (192) Both Connolly and Melville figure forth creatures in a death roll, but for both of them, these figures are less metaphors than creatures to whose actions and force we must be attuned so that we can respond creatively� As readers of Moby-Dick well know, the whale in a flurry is one whose death is both agonized and ritualized, characterized as much by thrashing movements in Militant, Ruthless, Round 215 which, Ishmael tells us, the whaleman necessarily becomes caught up, as by its final roll—a turning-to through which the whale dies with one eye always upon the sun. That is, the whale that Melville conjures himself “finishing up” in this letter is not a beast to be killed but a creative creature like himself� The force of the whale in this letter does not lie in the demand that it be killed or cast out, but instead in the way that it is enabling Melville, in the final weeks of writing Moby-Dick, to figure creativity as a ruthless democratic art—and a very round one at that� 4. Round Democracy In the “Etymology” that opens Moby-Dick, a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School instructs the reader that the English word, “whale” is derived “more immediately from the Dut� and Ger�, Wallen … to roll, to wallow�” At its etymological root, that is, the whale rolls, and with its rolling the whale becomes living cetacean counterpart to the famous image of democracy as a giant circle that Ishmael proposes in the first of two chapters called “Knights and Squires”: But this august dignity I treat of is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity that has no robed investiture� Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! (Moby-Dick 117) Democratic dignity requires no clothing but it takes distinct shape: indeed, throughout Moby-Dick, collective formations that carry force are round� From the “center and circumference of all democracy” in “Knights and Squires,” to Ahab’s authoritarian “cogged circle that fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve” (167), to the miles-wide circle of sperm whales in “The Grand Armada” who have “sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection” (382), to the vortex which swallows the Pequod in the final pages, Melville draws magical, horrible circles around the forceful collective actions that both save and kill. But to regard the Pequod’s final spiral from circumference to center as the end of Moby-Dick’s round democratic art would be to miss the ruthlessness with which Melville’s circles repeat and recur� The circle of democratic dignity is less the beginning of a democratic process than it is an intensification of several circular political figures that appear in Melville’s novels throughout the late 1840s, particularly those which are centrally concerned with questions of sovereign power (White- Jacket and Mardi), class antagonism (Redburn), and representations of grievance and right (Omoo). The full significance of these circles to both Melville’s aesthetics and his politics does not appear in any single image, episode, or work from this period� Instead, they must be read as part of a larger cycle of political thinking and aesthetic experimentation across multiple books. Thus, in the case of the circle in “Knights and Squires,” it is not what follows it but what precedes it that best reveals its radicalism� In closing, I want to trace 216 J ennifer g reiman this circle of hands and arms back to its first invocation in Omoo and its most likely source in an apocryphal pirate tale to show how deeply Melville roots his ruthless democracy in his aesthetic practice� The earliest of Melville’s politically charged circles appears in the episode of the Round Robin mutiny early in his second novel, Omoo� Melville wrote Omoo in 1847 as a follow up to his tremendously popular first novel, Typee, the quasi-fictional account of a young American sailor who deserts a whaleship on the island of Nukuheva, to spend several months among the Typee tribe who had successfully staved off colonization from both American and French invaders for a half-century� Omoo picks up where Typee leaves off, with the rescue from the Typee Valley of the American sailor (who is confusingly called Tommo in Typee but Typee in Omoo) by an Australian whaleship, the Julia� Typee describes the Julia as decrepit, poorly captained, and run by a crew of “the villains of all nations” under the command of a perpetually drunk first mate (Omoo 14)� With both the captain and several members of the crew suffering from syphilis, and with insufficient food to maintain the health of the rest of the crew, the captain abandons the whale hunt and sails for Tahiti, where the sailors believe they will be released from their contracts or, at the very least, permitted shore leave on the most storied and spectacular island in the South Pacific. But when the captain goes ashore this storied island alone and commands the drunk mate to resume the hunt, the outraged crew “begin breathing nothing but outright mutiny” (73)� As they plot to take the ship and debate whether to kill the mate, Typee offers a creative political solution: “I proposed that a ‘Round Robin’ should be prepared and sent ashore to the consul … The idea took mightily, and I was told to set about it at once” (76). Cobbling together stationary from the flyleaf of A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies, ink from “a little pitch,” and a pen from an albatross feather, I indicted upon a chest-lid, a concise statement of our grievances; concluding with the earnest hope, that the consul would at once come off, and see how matters stood, for himself� Right beneath the note was described the circle about which the names were to be written; the great object of a Round Robin being to arrange the signatures in such a way that, although they are all found in a ring, no man can be picked out as the leader of it� (76) The Round Robin is notable for many reasons� For one thing, it marks a rare successful mutiny in Melville’s corpus, something which seemed all but impossible in Typee, where the miserable crew of another poorly supplied whaleship are so sunk in individual suffering that they “are only united in enduring without resistance the unmitigated tyranny of the captain” (Typee 21) By contrast, the crew of the Julia, though equally distressed, unite to assert their common rights, overthrow the rule of the captain, and secure their freedom from the ship� And Typee goes to great lengths to underscore the political meaning of their mutiny: beginning in a “council upon the forecastle” (Omoo 71) which grows into a “forecastle parliament” and finally a “democracy in the forecastle” (74), the episode marks the culmination of a debate among the men about the merits of violent and non-violent resistance� It yields a Militant, Ruthless, Round 217 concrete collective act of representation which does not delegate the crew’s authority because, by design, the Round Robin works by pluralizing its authorship and dispersing leadership among the signatories� That act produces both a collective body acting in concert and a visual representation of their action—another rarity in in Melville’s work—which Typee first describes at length and then reproduces on the page� In reconstructing the Round Robin, Typee does not list the men’s demands or grievances, but he does reproduce the image of fourteen names ringed around a circle, inside of which appear fourteen crudely drawn hands, each pointing to a name, and the underlined words “all hands.” The phrase “all hands” points to the figured hands, which point to the names raying out along the circumference—names which are themselves collectively owned and authored� 5 All of the names signed to the Round Robin are their ship names—those by which each man “went among the crew” (75)� Taken together, the narrative description and visual reproduction of the Round Robin show it as clear precursor to Ishmael’s radiant circle of “democratic dignity” in “Knights and Squires”: it is a circle that places “all hands”—those that wield picks and drive spikes (Moby-Dick 117)—in the center, and all of the names by which they are known to each other around the circumference� And in this circle of hands and names that point only to themselves, they bring forth something new� That something new is really three things� It is a collective actor that is constituted in what Paul Downes calls “the event of representation” (67)� It is a creative action that is both militant in Connolly’s sense and anti-violent in Balibar’s, displacing the violence of mutiny without evacuating the force of their insubordination. And, finally, it is an aesthetic work that creatively responds to the conditions on the ship by repurposing found materials into a visual artifact� 5 Katie McGettigen develops a compelling reading of these signatures through Derrida’s claims about the counterfeit nature of all signatures (45-46)� Fig� 1� “The Round Robin” (Omoo 77) 218 J ennifer g reiman Grounded as it is in the politics of representation rather than those of direct action, the Round Robin may seem a strange example of Melville’s ruthless democracy, but it is perhaps better described as an act of meta-representation—that is, it reflects and expands on the political history of representation itself. Specifically, the Round Robin strongly echoes two famous revolutionary circles: the “vicious circle” of presuppositional authority that Abbé Sieyès argues can only be avoided by an act of “extraordinary representation” (Sieyès 56), and the figure of the nation that Thomas Paine describes as “a body contained within a circle, having a common centre … formed by representation” (Paine 181). Melville’s Round Robin proposes a counter-figure to both of these, one that resists delegation and reasserts the constituent collective as both the source of authority and the agent of it� Simply put, the Round Robin represents democracy as a representation, but one that consists of act, agent, and art all at once—and the art of this is key� Melville’s aesthetics are more figurative than mimetic, and so too is his circular image of representation� To borrow F� R� Ankersmit’s distinction between mimetic and aesthetic representation, Melville’s Round Robin more closely resembles the latter, emphasizing representation as a generative act that creates something different, a new political reality apart from its constituent parts, all of which are also re-defined by their participation. Melville’s circle figures its constitutive members non-mimetically: names and hands point to each other as the distinct figurations of persons, while the all and the each remain visible in a balanced paradox. But, ultimately, I want to argue that the radicalism of the Round Robin lies in the detail with which Typee describes its fabrication and the materials that comprise it� Those materials include natural objects (an albatross feather), the stuff with which the sailors work (“a little pitch”), and a very layered historical fiction (the blank flyleaf of an apocryphal book, A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies)� The title that Typee refers to here is a fabrication, which has often led critics to dismiss the Round Robin episode as a joke through which Melville delegitimizes the actions of the crew as mere criminality� But in linking the Round Robin to piracy, Melville instead shows the precise place where its political significance lies. Melville’s almost certain source for the signatory device of the Round Robin was Captain Charles Johnson’s 1726 edition of his infamous General History of the Pyrates—the primary source text for historians of radical piracy like Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, Sonja Schillings, and Srinivas Aruvamudan� 6 Johnson’s book is more notable for its tales of pirate social contracts, articles of pirate confederation, and commonly held spoils than it is for tales of raiding and pillaging� Petitioning the crown for a pardon, so they could return to England, they signed their appeal “in the Manner of what they call a Round Robin, that is, 6 “Captain Johnson” is a pseudonym that has led to centuries of speculation on the authorship of the book, which was for a good 80 years attributed to Daniel Defoe� See: Srinivas Aruvamudan, Tropicopolitans (84) and Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations (179 fn� 24)� Militant, Ruthless, Round 219 the Names were writ in a Circle, to avoid all Appearance of Pre-eminence, least any Person should be mark’d out by the Government, as a principle Rogue among them” (Johnson 338)� Like the crew of the Julia, Melville tears a page from the book of piracy to draft his Round Robin� Both the reason given for the Round Robin in Omoo— the plan to petition the crown for release—and the description of the strategy behind the circular signatures come directly out of Johnson’s account of these reluctant rogues. In both Johnson’s and Melville’s definition of the Round Robin, too, it is the collective nature of the device—the avoidance of “all Appearance of Pre-eminence”—that is its most significant feature. In this, Melville casts the actions of the Julia’s crew as radically circular, resurrecting a 123-year-old action toward the creation of a new act and actor� But the full force of Melville’s use of the Round Robin lies in his creative addition to it—the visual representation of the device� Where Johnson reproduces the men’s petition on the page, Melville draws the circular device itself, and with this, he underscores the Round Robin as a creative, aesthetic work� With this, the circle of hands and names comes loose from both the thematics of the mutiny and from its textual location in the novel. In terms of its function in the plot of Omoo, the Round Robin is a fleeting and fairly ineffectual moment of collection action. But in terms of its figurative function, this circle becomes powerfully generative of scenes of resistance and collective articulation, in Omoo and beyond� Moving through Melville’s work like the reverberations of a capillary wave, circles form around the resistance of Tahitians to the imposition of European time (ch� 42) and the missionaries’ prohibitions against dancing women (ch� 63)� As these capillary waves pass through Mardi and White-Jacket, they assume the very shapes of sovereign force—“the insphered sphere of spheres” which houses absolute rule and “the mysterious circles” in the belly of the naval ship where powder is stored� But even if they enable Ahab’s “one cogged circle” to make the “various wheels” of his crew revolve to his will (Moby-Dick 167), these waves also roll with the whale to form both the circle of democratic dignity and the Grand Armada of cetacean social contract in Moby-Dick. Radical in their origins and ruthless in their recurrence, these circles ultimately reveal the democratic force that runs through Melville’s art as a transient, militant, and irreducibly aesthetic creativity� Understood in this way, aesthetics ceases to function chiefly as a menace to democracy. Ruthless democracy slips the twin threats of affective contagion and singular force to describe the unending, collective, creative work of becoming equal� 220 J ennifer g reiman Works Cited Ankersmit, F� R� Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996� Aruvamudan, Srinivas� Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804� Durham: Duke UP, 1999� Balibar, Étienne. 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