Traditional approaches to the study of American political theory often focus on two distinct though interrelated themes. The first regards the fact of founding conceived as a spatio-temporal event that gives shape to the descriptive term “American.” The second involves the rhetoric of formation. Not only was America founded, it was also shaped, molded, and formed by individuals and events in history. In this important and provocative new study, Michael Shapiro intertwines political, aesthetic, and cultural analyses in such a manner as to completely disabuse us of these two foundational American myths. Indeed, after reading Deforming American Political Thought, one can conclude with confidence that America is unfounded and deformed.

What distinguishes Shapiro's efforts from other studies of American political thinking is the selection of sources as well as his objects of analysis. For him, the term “political” is not limited to an examination of events associated with government, public institutions, or other conventional objects of social scientific inquiry. Politics is an interdisciplinary term of art that involves a reassessment of what counts as the objects that capture our theoretical curiosities. Thus, though the reader will find facts and figures that they will recognize as canonical to the discipline of American political science, Shapiro always couples these with atypical companions. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, is pitted with and against Thomas Pynchon (along with several other American novelists) in a chapter that begins with Judith Shklar's 1990 address to the American Political Science Association. Here, Shapiro turns to the status of facticity as a methodological ambition that legitimizes forms of knowing and, specifically, to Jefferson's land surveys (the 1784 and 1785 drafts of the Land Ordinance) that show his commitment to leaving nothing unclassified and “to displace contingency with necessity” (p. 5).

The choice of land surveys as objects of study reveals one of the main themes implicit in this book, namely, that practices of perception render things available to theoretical attention. In this regard, the importance that Shapiro places on the simultaneity of political and aesthetic reflection is crucial because it allows him to expand upon the concepts of deformation and partition that guide his interpretive prowess throughout the work. Deformation is, in this context, an aesthetic concept that he derives from his readings of Gilles Deleuze's foundational study of the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon. The theoretical considerations on “the partitions of the sensible,” on the other hand, are borrowed from the insights of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, whose important work on the relationship between aesthetics and politics (and whose revisiting and critique of the “aestheticization of politics” thesis) remains one of the most original contributions to political theory in recent years.

A theory of politics as perceptual practice, therefore, allows Shapiro to develop and sustain this book's central claim: American political thought endorses certain specific forms of appearance and, implicitly, certain specific forms of perception that allow events and identities to count as political. There follows from this an important ethical insight: Acts of appearance are the participatory stuff of democratic pluralism, and the multifarious and multigenre modes of appearing in any one polity solicit a consideration of how to attend to such forms of participation.

Though expanded throughout the work, these issues are perhaps best extolled in the chapter entitled “Composing America.” By integrating genres of cinema with Tocqueville, Dvorak, and Duke Ellington's jazz compositions (among a dizzying array of other intercultural sources), Shapiro not only manages to hold everything together and make everything fit, but he does so by retaining the tensions that make the assemblage of the chapter seem appropriately disjointed. This is achieved by the chapter's attention to contrapuntal rhythms as a central aural dimension of deformation. Thus, though we instinctively consider that political theorizing begins with the eyes, and though we might rest comfortably in the assumption that even acts of deformation are governed by visibility, the “Composing America” chapter reminds us of the prevalence of aurality in the American “cultural imaginary” that cannot be ignored as an important perceptual practice of political theorizing. Political acts of deformation, in other words, are to be found in contrapuntal rhythms as much as in disjointed narratives or dislocated landscapes, and the challenge for contemporary American political thought is to discover modes of perceptual attention and develop forms of reception and representation for such voluble noises.

“Contrapuntal” might also describe Shapiro's writing and expository style, which may be frustrating for readers unaccustomed to theorizing in the subjunctive mode. Though the author is lucid in his illumination of acts of deformation and partitions of the sensible, his theoretical engagements with cultural sources involve a series of staccato sequences that require of the readers a capacity to draw their own connections and depart in acts of improvisation. In other words, the comfort of the explanatory mode as a genre for the exposition of knowledge is not always available. In its place, Shapiro convincingly compels us to confront the conventional habits by which our experiences of the sensible are transformed into postulates of knowledge. This, in the end, points to a complexity accompanying his project: the challenge to account for political and cultural forms that are explicitly nonrepresentational and that escape our capacities for accountability.

It has been said that the singular achievement of the American painter Jackson Pollock's all-over drip paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s is their capacity to depict a line that defies the artistic convention of figuration. After Pollock, a geometric object that traditionally guarantees a form's coherence and containment—the line—no longer shoulders the burden of making shapes and is thus experienced as an object of contingency and ambiguity. Michael Shapiro's Deforming American Political Thought follows in this tradition and takes this aesthetic achievement as its guiding political principle. By exploring acts of deformation that pepper the American cultural imaginary, he questions our commitments to representational stability and unity in political thinking. The result is an aesthetics of democratic pluralism that can be neither dismissed nor ignored.