Grid and Swerve

Abstract

This essay argues for a particular motion, “clinamen” or swerve, as the animating force of renewed democratic social space. The argument proceeds historically and conceptually, first by recounting the “gridding” of the western expanse in the antebellum era; second, by tracing Margaret Fuller's unique mode of travel throughout this expanse in 1843. Drawing on the late work of Louis Althusser, I conclude by extrapolating from Fuller's travels an “aleatory style,” conceptualized around the transformative power of clinamen. The semiotic renewal of democratic social space, I argue, emerges through the splendor and surprise of the swerve.

Keywords:

• Public Land Grid
• Margaret Fuller
• Louis Althusser
• aleatory style
• clinamen

Acknowledgements

The author thanks fellow guest editor, Greg Dickinson, for his patience, wisdom, and good humor. He thanks Eric K. Watts and the editorial staff at CSMC for their support and guidance. And he thanks Barbara Biesecker and Ronald W. Greene for their keen insights early on.

Notes

1. Monumentation refers to the act of physically marking boundaries. The early surveyors would often use the nearest tree, rock, or dirt mound; contemporary surveyors use metal rods with caps that list the registration number of the responsible surveyor. For a good account of the southern metes-and-bounds system of monumentation, see Chapter 11 in Linklater (2002, pp. 143–159).

2. Corinne was the central character in Mme. De Stael's novel, Corinna, or Italy (1807), a French woman who finds herself displaced in England.

3. On Transcendentalism see Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (1999).

4. In the book's introduction, Susan Belasco Smith notes, “The full journey Fuller and Sarah Clarke undertook was a difficult one and not without some dangers. They traveled by train, steamboat, carriage, and, at times, on foot, to make a roughly circular tour of the Great Lakes, beginning with Niagara Falls, extending as far north as Mackinac Island and Sault St. Marie, as far west as Milwaukee, as far south as Pawpaw, Illinois, and ending back at Buffalo” (p. viii).

5. “Living practices” here corresponds with the materialist ontology of labor captured in Greene's notion of “living labor” (2004, pp. 198–203).