10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 F rederiK t ygstrup Literature and Democracy 1 The Experience of Literature Literary fiction is probably the medium that most radically extends and expands human experience When reading literature, you can visit every region of the world, and every world that can be imagined in any region, without leaving the armchair You can get to see and feel it in all conceivable scales, from minute sensation to full-horizon overlook; you can see it with the eyes of any living being and learn what it does to their minds and their bodies You discover the multiplicity of ways in which things, people, and situations can be apprehended, how emotions are formed, and how ideas coalesce This is the mundane magic of literature: It not only makes your world indefinitely big, it also, importantly, provides access to it through the other You enter into the consciousness, the eyes and ears, the sensibility of someone who is not you, all while opening up this world by means of your own imagination The experience of reading literature is one of blending into the other, of thinking the thoughts of others in your own head, and eventually of continuously becoming yourself by merging into the lives of others Moreover, literature is an experience of making this crucial leap, the leap into intimacy with the other, in language The encounter with the other in literature is twofold mediated: first an experience mediated into language, and secondly a language mediated into living imagination. The first mediation takes the craft of a writer; she will need to modify and transform, even deform, the language she has learnt in order to give a sufficiently precise rendition of any singular experience, belabouring the inherited forms and idioms she possesses and tweaking them into a language of that particular event And the second mediation is when a reader confronts this estranged idiom, straining her imagination to accommodate the experience engraved in language, and recognises the peculiar way it makes sense Thus, between the two universes that meet and blend in the literary experience, there is language, a very particular language, in which a singular figuration takes place, one which not only designates something in the world, but creates a novel way of making sense of it, thereby adding still one more figure to the repertoire of forms at our disposal to understand how this world can be inhabited 150 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 So literature is about sharing a world, and about sharing an artfully crafted language to make sense of this world This crucial and essential role of literature is probably as ancient as any known civilisation (or rather, our knowledge of any civilisation is essentially premised on its ability to perform this task, and on remnants of its production being preserved), instantiated every time a legend is transmitted, a story is told, or a song is sung But singing and telling are also practices that are framed in distinct ways in different historical situations and geographical locations In addition to thriving on what would appear to be a deep-seated anthropological propensity for telling and sharing stories in all their diverse forms, literature, as we know it and understand it today, also refers to a particular organisation of this propensity Telling tales and singing songs become literature when they are considered and produced according to a set of societal protocols that make them recognisable as such This idea of framing is pinpointed in this way by Jacques Derrida, in an interview with Derek Attridge from 1989: [T]here is no text which is literary in itself. Literarity is not a natural essence, an intrinsic property of the text It is the correlative of an intentional relation to the text, an intentional relation which integrates in itself, as a component or an intentional layer, the more or less implicit consciousness of rules which are conventional or institutional - social, in any case 1 In other words, the properties of singing and telling as a means of sharing a common world have been particularly associated with that institution which we know today as “literature ” Hence, to gauge the value of literature, we need to understand the conventions through which literature has become the predominant medium for encountering a world through the other, by way of a particularly crafted language The institution of literature, however, is a notoriously difficult kind of object to pin down; the framing of a piece of text that transforms it into literature has many layers and complex interactions to it There is a technological layer of materialising the text, with the Gutenberg revolution and the eventual industrialisation of printing that made it an object that can be circulated, and the concurrent social infrastructure of publishing houses, booksellers, and libraries, and around them again medial platforms for discourses of criticism, discussion, and judgments of value All of these are part of a huge infrastructure, with its own economy and an immanent logic of distinction and stratification, gradually putting into place a commonly acknowledged recognition of the existence of this particular thing called “literature ” 1 Derek Attridge, ed , Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), 44 Literature and Democracy 151 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Once it has been established that this infrastructure is not only an environment that surrounds literary works, but more profoundly makes these into works of literature in the first place, literary scholars are invited to approach the phenomenon of literature from two angles at the same time: on the one hand by engaging with the world-making qualities of individual literary works when read through that particular “intentional relation” Derrida talks about, that is, by having a literary experience proper and by reflecting on the advent of this experience And, on the other hand, by trying to understand how the social and infrastructural mode of existence of literature provides formats for this experience and affords it with coherence and consistency In this essay, I will follow this second path and discuss how the experience of accessing the world through the other and doing it by way of attentiveness to the idiomatic deformation of language installs literature as a resource for democratic citizenship 2 The Literary Public Let’s revert to the primitive definition of the literary experience: to merge into the world of another, mediated by a text Literature hinges on this relation, that of different human minds meeting through an event that takes place outside the realms of their proper interiorities. Hence, a first specification of the mode of existence of literature will be to understand the way in which this relationship is organised Here, however, an interesting dissymmetry stands out: On the one hand, we have the somehow intimate relationship that is enacted when a reader picks up a text, as if it were a missive addressed directly from the writer to the reader But on the other hand, this relation is mediated in a way that is anything but intimate - it is an address, not to the reader, but to a public The advent of the modern institution of literature is crucially linked to the way in which the literary text, as an address, is directed to individuals in so far as they are potential members of a public, which consequently makes the public itself the genuine addressee of literature One of the best accounts of how this structure came into being remains Jürgen Habermas’ 1962 dissertation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere In his enquiry into the genesis of the idea of a “public sphere” in European modernity, Habermas identifies the literary public sphere as an inaugural inception of this phenomenon, the ‘blueprint’ of what would eventually become a full-fledged political public sphere Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary public sphere gradually morphed from the nobility’s salons and the mostly aristocratic and courtly framework for cultural and artistic events, 152 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 readings, exhibitions, theatre and music performances, and so on For this to happen, however, two prerequisites needed to be in place. The first thing required was a social space, an arena where this new public sphere could circumvent the constricted spaces of the court and the nobility; this was provided by the expanding marketplace of capitalist exchange that burgeoned in the age of mercantilism throughout Europe The second was the consolidation of the third estate and the advent of the new bourgeois, a man of independent means in possession of a private household, who could enter this space as a propertied citizen with no other office than that of representing himself, comfortably lodged in the intimacy of his private sphere The nascent public sphere needed a space, and a model character for the agents to populate it These were gradually put in place in Europe - in different rhythms and different guises, to be sure - in the wake of the expansion of a capitalist market for commodities, labour, and services, and with the growing numbers of entrepreneurs for whom this market was their primary arena of social interaction The public sphere, thus, as an arena for public deliberation independent of and in opposition to the absolutist state, takes hold in the infrastructure provided by the capitalist market economy But the marketplace and the agents that came to populate it did not form a public in the first place; in the first place, the marketplace is just a marketplace And the crucial step from being a marketplace to becoming a public sphere where opinion is articulated and negotiated was, according to Habermas, precisely the intermediary form of the literary public sphere. Two features stand out here. The first is the change that took place in the production of literature - and of art at large - at the same time, where artists were no longer constricted to producing their works solely by commission of the nobility, court, and clergy, but now also had access to the newly expanding market where moneyed merchants, craftsmen, and capitalists that consolidated themselves constituted a new market for print culture and art objects. Secondly, as a result of this first change, the aesthetic criteria of the ancien régime hitherto upheld through normative poetics and academic conventions proved to be increasingly inadequate and incompatible with the preferences of taste that were cultivated in the bourgeois households In this situation, the literary public sphere comes into being as a particular way of using the market place, namely as an arena where the members of the third estate could meet as private citizens only answerable to themselves and their households, to negotiate the value of art and literature, just like they negotiated the value of the goods otherwise exchanged in the market The marketplace, as the locus of free entrepreneurs in need of interaction, became a model for how to negotiate the somehow ineffable value of a new commodity, that of art and literature: Literature and Democracy 153 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Released from its functions in the service of social representation, art became an object of free choice and of changing preference The “taste” to which art was oriented from then on became manifest in the assessments of lay people who claimed no prerogative, since within a public everyone was entitled to judge 2 In the end, Habermas is not particularly interested in the literary public sphere as such; to him, its crucial function resided in the way it provided a transitional form in a process towards the constitution of the idea - and the ideal - of a political public sphere proper, where lay citizens can deliberate on their interests in a common space without any interference from the state apparatus and the powers that be Nonetheless, as a contribution to the social history of art and literature, Habermas’ brief remarks on the advent of the literary public sphere are interesting in several ways First of all, they shed light on the profound changes that art, and the very notion of art, underwent in the late eighteenth century. Jacques Rancière has provided a useful distinction between a classical ‘representative’ notion of art and a modern ‘aesthetic’ notion, the first based on a normative poetics, the second on the aesthetic relation between the artwork and the beholder 3 Habermas’ analysis here crucially emphasises that this shift in the discourse on art - away from the aesthetic object and how it is made, and towards the aesthetic experience and how it is evaluated - is intimately linked to the way in which artistic production is becoming exposed to the market and hence increasingly assessed in terms of consumer use-value rather than prevailing standards of the trade When art becomes a commodity, not only can it be circulated in a new manner, being offered to buyers in the market rather than being commissioned by the crown and the church, but it also becomes a different kind of object altogether, no longer an ornament with a representational value, but a commodity whose use-value is assessed in terms of its exchange-value This novel constitution of the art object in turn had a profound impact on the social mode of existence of art The demise of traditional hierarchies of taste in favour of the actual propensities of buyers effectively paves the way for the modern aesthetic discourse as we know it, hypostasising the individual encounter with the artwork and eventually defining art as that which elicits a particular kind of sensation in the recipient - a sensation that has indeed been conjugated in a variety of guises throughout the history of aesthetics from Baumgarten to Adorno, from Kant to Lyotard, from Schiller to Dewey: as a potentiation of sensation, as a transformation of representations, as an equipment for life… 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (London: Polity Press, 1989), 43 3 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum Press, 2004) 154 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 The fecundity of this new discourse on art, and the tradition of thinking about art it has fuelled throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cannot be overestimated Developed in tandem with the rich experimentation that has characterised the buoying scenes of art and literature in the same period, it has delivered a language for assessing and probing the horizon of aesthetic experiences proffered by the obdurate rationalities of art-making In its guise as a commodity, as something whose value is corroborated in the act of consumption, the work of art has become a unique institutional form in western modernity, an experimental language to challenge and enhance the sensibility of individuals, accompanied by a critical discourse that constantly gauges and expands on the transformative power of this experience Going back to Habermas’ analysis of the constitution of the literary public sphere, however, we are reminded that the artwork in its new guise of a commodity, when it goes to the marketplace to find its readers and beholders, not only mounts its stand, as it were, to meet individual buyers: It addresses a public in charge of negotiating the peculiar value of this new thing on offer This value, the value of aesthetic experience, is thus being submitted to two kinds of assessment: to the assessment of the actual customer who wants to delectate the work in his private sphere, the bourgeois in his incarnation of homme, and to the assessment of free men probing this value in a conversation ideally aimed at common understanding, the bourgeois in his second incarnation as citoyen The important point here is, of course, that the marketplace, historically speaking, is not just this ghostly relational mechanism where supply and demand are weighed out against each other, but also a societal arena where such a thing as a ‘public’ could take on its specific features at a certain point in time Habermas again: The privatised individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted […] They formed the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity of itself 4 Habermas’s aim is to single out this particular structural arrangement, that of individuals coming to terms with themselves and what they desire by dialoguing with others on equal terms, as a historically contingent confluence of different economic, political, and cultural circumstances and agencies, which eventually came to spell out a vision of democratic organisation A vision, 4 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 51 Literature and Democracy 155 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 however, systematically betrayed and debased ever after, as he demonstrates, taking his readers through the historical stages of fusion of state and society, ‘re-feudalisation’ of the public sphere and a concomitant ‘re-privatisation’ of the homme, depriving him of his alter ego le citoyen, and the enclosure of art and literature as a segregated culture of experts accompanied by the streamlining of culture to the capitalist marketplace as culture industry Nothing that has happened in the almost sixty years since Habermas published his dissertation seems to contradict this bleak outlook, and the ideal of an enlightened and enlightening public discussion as a core piece of modern democracy does indeed appear still more remote As for art and literature, it can hardly be claimed that they now stand at the centre of a public discussion among private individuals aimed at ‘attaining clarity’ for themselves; on the contrary, the re-feudalisation of the public sphere entails a repulsion of the literary public discussion and a privatisation of the aesthetic experience as another item of reproductive consumption (and eventually also as a good business) In so many words: the commercial marketplace has defeated the public sphere, even though they spring from the same arena, the civic space of interaction that emerged in the transformation from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production Hence, it can come as no surprise that the discourse of individual aesthetic experience has prevailed throughout an era in which the aesthetic has been expulsed from the public sphere and privatised as a matter of individual consumer choice Even though, as claimed above, the merits of this discourse (and the merit of what has been achieved artistically within the aesthetic regime) cannot be overestimated, we can at this stage also add that this success seems to have somehow occulted one of the two main characteristics of the mode of existence of the artwork of our modernity. The first characteristic, that of art becoming a commodity for sale on the market, has been (however indirectly) hypostasised and celebrated by the discourse on aesthetics, exploiting the particular relation between commodity and end-user in the aesthetic realm to a maximum of refinement. But the other characteristic of the modern mode of existence of art, its address to a civic public, inviting private individuals to collectively reflect on themselves, has been concurrently attenuated. What is needed, then, is an understanding of the particular aisthesis of art objects within the aesthetic regime that considers both characteristics: its address to the individual consumer (as Baudelaire had it in his dedication of Les fleurs du Mal to the “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère”) and its address to a special and strange entity called ‘the public ’ 156 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 3 Literary Infrastructure If at this point we go back to my initial postulation of two essential values of literature, that it makes a world appear to us through the other, and that this appearance is a textual construct that produces a potential common language of sense-making, I will argue that these values are much better understood if we look at literature - in the sense, again, of the mode of being of literature - as a twofold address: to its reader and to its ‘public ’ What does it mean, actually, when literature becomes literature in its modern guise, to address not only any number of readers, but to address this new phenomenon which is the public? And what kind of thing is this ‘public’ in the first place? We get a sense of the actual intricacies of the notion of a literary public in this remark from 1959 by Maurice Blanchot: The “public” is not made up of a great or small number of readers, each one reading for himself The writer likes to say that he writes his book for the special friend Mistaken wish In the public, the friend has no place There is no place for any chosen individual, nor is there one for chosen social structures - family, group, class, nation No one is part of it, and the whole world belongs to it, not just the human world but all worlds, all things, and nothing: the others Hence, however rigorous the censors are and however faithfully the laws are obeyed, there is always, for authority, something suspicious and badly timed in the very act of publishing That is because this act makes the public exist, which, always undetermined, escapes the sternest political determinations 5 To the writer of literature, the public is a mirage, something that cannot be pinned down to empirical existence, but which retains nonetheless a vivid reality and presence The public exists as a vanishing point, a destination that can never be properly reached and underwritten, all while remaining a destination, the other out there who is always another one still For Blanchot, moreover, this mirage-public is not only a perennial condition for anyone who writes for the market, it is a defining feature of what makes the literary work into a “work” proper: “I think the writer desires nothing, either for himself or for his work But the need to be published - that is to say, to attain outer existence, this opening onto the outside […] - belongs to the work ” 6 The essential relation to the public as the work’s other - that which makes the work into a work in the first place - becomes a defining part of the mode of existence of literature, as an outside-in relation with which it defines its own interiority. With Blanchot, then, we get a first indication of how to 5 Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003), 246 6 Ibid , 247 Literature and Democracy 157 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 understand the modern idea of a literary public It is not only a provisionally undetermined set of anonymous buyers and readers; it is also, and more substantially, a construct whose anonymity is itself the very essence of its being Literature is engaging in a conversation with this anonymous body, this endlessly deferred other, where the intimacy between a finite interiority and an infinite exteriority becomes a core quality of the work of literature. This idea of the public as a public forever-to-come, an addressee with no fixed coordinates, is an idea that of course goes back to the logic of the marketplace and to the inscrutability of who might actually be out there to take an interest in the thing and perhaps then buy it But once the arena of the marketplace is considered not only as a space for the exchange of commodities, but also as a potential public to which art now turns to find its customers, the inscrutability itself becomes the essential, that is, not a detour or delay that we can wait out to see how the merchandise reaches its end point, but a predicative, even prerogative, quality of the ideal addressee: an anonymous nobody-in-particular, always another other Habermas hypothesises that the public - historically in the guise of a literary public - has the marketplace as its condition of possibility and, furthermore, that the public inserts itself as a second arena in the marketplace where a public body of citizens can assemble With Blanchot, then, we can add that this superimposition of the structure of the public onto the structure of the market has a specific impact when it comes to literature, because it turns the empirical anonymity of the market into an ontological anonymity of the public, which eventually becomes the ideal addressee of literature Speculations on the rhetoric of fiction often invoke an ‘implied reader’ to be detected in the structure of the literary work Such implied readers of course can take on a panoply of different forms, and following Blanchot one could say that it is precisely this legion of incarnations which is important: literature is an assault on the empirical reader, an insistent contestation of the reader’s empirical individuality, forcing the reader into a zone of neutrality To be a reader of literature, one must acquiesce to being bequeathed the anonymous mask of nobody in particular Understanding the historical mode of existence of literature in the context of literature’s new role as a commodity and in the context of the public sphere that co-emerged with the capitalist marketplace, we can observe two related but different qualifications emerge. In the context of the marketplace, we can see the rise of an aesthetic discourse that hypostasises the encounter between work and reader, an experience that forms the prominent nucleus of modern aesthetics In the context of the public sphere, on the other hand, the aesthetic relation is somehow opened up again, refusing to find the final 158 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 corroboration of aesthetic value in the taste of the end-user by dis-identifying the end-user with herself, shoving her back into the anonymity of a spectral collective public Here, a different avenue of aesthetic experience becomes palpable, one of collective experience rather than of individual delectation I will explore this second aesthetics in more detail at the end of this essay, but before that I will delve into another aspect of Blanchot’s examination of the notion of ‘the public ’ At the end of the quotation above, Blanchot claims that publishing is an “act [that] makes the public exist ” The sentence has a counterintuitive ring to it, as we tend to think about a public as an entity that can be addressed rather than an entity that comes to existence by way of the address So what is a public? Michael Warner, in his influential Publics and Counterpublics from 2005, calls it a “practical fiction” and a “virtual object.” 7 Like so many other social institutions we rely on, the public is a highly volatile and elusive phenomenon that resists empirical identification; even if it implies the idea of a congregation of people, it rarely designates a concrete one, and again, any concrete one can morph considerably, all while remaining a public Hence Warner’s two qualifications, that we should understand the public as something fictional and as something virtual The public is imaginary For it to exist, somebody needs to believe in its existence, either to understand oneself as a member of it, or venture to address it, and somebody else needs to share this belief because it rests on a social relation between members of a public, and between the public and the one who addresses it The public in this sense is a prime example of what Cornelius Castoriadis called an ‘imaginary institution of society,’ in both meanings of the phrase, as an imaginary that is socially shared, and as the coming into being of society by way of this shared belief Publics are, in Warner’s words, “a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and a very potent life at that ” 8 There is no public if no one believes in its existence and shares this belief with others; and secondly, there is no public if there is no one who addresses it The reality of the public, in other words, is performative, it is brought into existence once it is addressed - the point Blanchot makes in his characteristic convoluted style Warner puts it this way: A public is a space of discourse organised by nothing other than discourse itself It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced It exists by virtue of being addressed 9 7 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 8, 56 8 Ibid , 8 9 Ibid , 67 Literature and Democracy 159 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Imaginary, performative, and effective, publics institute a space of discourse that has the capability of upholding the social life of a society by producing meaning and creating legitimacy of choices and decisions Given, however, the ephemeral nature of the instantiation of a public, the space of discourse it creates needs to be continuously reproduced, the ‘practical fiction’ of a public must be reaffirmed by the public itself as well as by others for whom this particular public is of import The institution of a public demands both: iteration of address invoking the public on the one hand, reflexive self-determination of the public on the other In this way, a ‘public,’ this elusive thing, could be described - neither as an object in any restrictive sense, nor as a mere contingent gathering - as a societal infrastructure And like all infrastructures - whether the mostly material infrastructures of distribution, transportation, or communication, or the more complex infrastructures of, say, decision-making, value-assessment, or education - the infrastructure of publics needs to be described in two registers at the same time. The first register concerns the blueprint of an infrastructure, the map of relations and interactions that are facilitated by an infrastructural arrangement, whereas the second concerns the actual flows and processes that take place on the infrastructural grid, in Keller Easteling’s words, the “unfolding relationship between potentials ” 10 The public does not exist if there is no address and no reflexivity: this is the infrastructural process, the public in actu But this agency cannot take place if there is no space where it can actually work, an institutional framework for the infrastructural order When Derrida talks about the ‘strange institution’ of literature, he is referring to this kind of duplicity, on the one hand the ‘blueprint’ of libraries, editors, journals, and so on, and on the other a particular relation between a mode of address and a complementary reflexively attentive public that underpins the existence of literature 4 Being Public The infrastructural relation to a public is written into the work of art The artwork is not just a thing that is eventually dispatched and addressed to somebody; the address to a public is an integral part of the thing itself If we follow this analysis, we are tasked with resisting the temptation to consider the work of art as an isolated thing and to see instead how the individual work comes with an institutional wrapping, defined by the infrastructural 10 Keller Easteling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructural Space (London: Verso, 2014), 52 160 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 networks that allow it to exist In an attempt to attenuate the strict distinction between objects and their environments, and to pay attention instead to the relational webs that undergird the appearance of an object, Bruno Latour has suggested considering art and literature, or as he puts it, “beings of fiction,” as such networked creatures. 11 To properly analyse artworks, therefore, according to Latour, we should still look at the thing, but we should also follow the relations back to their production and forward towards their reception, the movements upstream and downstream from where we encounter them, to properly understand their power “In following these networks, it is impossible to separate out what belongs to the work ‘properly speaking’ from its reception, the material conditions of its production, or its ‘social context’ ” 12 Even if Latour’s analytical mode is strictly empirical - he is interested in the concrete conditions of production, in every individual case, as well as in the actual reception situations and their ongoing historical modification of the being of the work (in this, by the way, close to Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach to the history of reception) - he also emphasises some of the general ways in which artworks are networked in an institutionally specific way. First of all, he suggests specifying the mode of existence of the work of art as one that requires solicitation: 13 It demands something from its reader or beholder, it demands its public to actually complete and thereby affirm the work as such. To be a work of art, it needs to take part in a networked process of “veridiction” and of “imagination ” Veridiction is about acknowledging the thing as a work of art in the first place, a kind of judgment, in other words, accepting that there is a dimension of meaning in the work which it is worthwhile to relate to And imagination, on the other hand, is about realising this potential, thus not only to imagine something, but to be enabled to imagine something by way of interacting with the work The particular network-like character of this process is due to the reciprocity of these interactions; it is not only the artwork that gives me something by affording my imagination, I also give something to it, namely the conferral of the status as a work of art which is actually able to perform this task And this collaborative work, again, is framed precisely by the institutional scaffolding that provides the infrastructural order within which this work can take place Veridiction and imagination are the particular mechanisms that assure the upstream and downstream coordination that conditions any ‘being of 11 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013), 233 12 Ibid , 243 13 Ibid , 242 Literature and Democracy 161 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 fiction’: upstream toward a meaning which is not harboured in the thing and communicated through its form, but which is made possible by it; and downstream toward the actualisation of this potential when somebody takes on the designated position of reader, beholder, recipient Again: The work becomes a function of its recipient, and the recipient, no less importantly, fulfils the function of being a reader to become someone a bit different from her former self by submitting herself to the process of imagination elicited by the work With characteristic bluntness, Latour thus translates the idealist vision of an inspired artist who transmits her vision to a fascinated beholder into an infrastructural arrangement where, notably, that which in the former understanding was achieved through the volition and agency of intentional individuals is now seen as processes of subjectivation that are conditioned and empowered by institutional infrastructures The infrastructural metabolism that assures the upstream and the downstream movements that eventually coincide in the work of art harks back to the twin properties of literature evoked at the beginning of this essay: the appearance of a world through the medium of language and the peculiar way we are invited to experience this world through and by way of the other The merit of translating these insights into the technical language of network anthropology might not be obvious, but it does serve, I contend, to emphasise how the relation to a public, written into the very mode of existence of modern literature, is rehearsed and asserted on an operational level in mundane everyday uses of literature And secondly, by highlighting the particular mechanism of sense-making at work in the field of art and literature, shuttling back and forth between a dimension of potential meaning emerging from the material organisation of the work and a dimension where the receiver attempts to realise this potential, it points toward the significance of the public as collective aesthetic addressee 5 Making Sense of Sense When an artwork addresses a public, the address itself combines two different modalities of reaching out. The first mode is one of affect: It affects the senses of its recipients, it presents a material, ranging from the confected textual surface of a literary work to all kinds of visual, aural, and spatial stimuli organised and composed into the form of an artwork It impinges on us, stirs us up, calls for our attention by exerting, the best it can, a violence on our senses, sometimes by yelling, sometimes by whispering But this affective modality is followed closely by a call for solicitation, as Latour suggested The artwork not only affects us, it immediately also demands that we care for that 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 162 F rederiK t ygstrup affect - that we dwell on it and do whatever we can to make sense of it and eventually make use of it - again: veridiction and imagination, respectively This logic is well described in the traditional discourse of aesthetics as a relationship between artwork and beholder: how that which affects us in turn produces an affective reaction - an image, a feeling, a rumination, an insight, or again, an aesthetic experience This becomes a bit more complicated, however, once we realise and take seriously the collective nature of the address For one thing, going back to Blanchot, the collectivity of the address comes to take the form of a wilful effacement of the individuality of the reader or beholder, an insistance on her neutrality, to an extent where the solicitation of the affect produced by the work distances her from herself She becomes other, but also, and more importantly, another among still others, where ‘you’ singular merges with and becomes indistinguishable from ‘you’ plural In this sense, we end up, eventually, with the question how the ‘you,’ plural, of the aesthetic address might translate into a ‘we’ of aesthetic experience, a plural subject of validation and of imagination? Habermas did answer this question by imagining a “public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity of itself ” The republican fervour of Habermas’ argument comprises a set of different presuppositions One of them is to assume a kind of neutrality not very distant from the one articulated by Blanchot, basically that we are subjects in the same way (originating in the conjugal family), neutral in an egalitarian sense of the word, and that collective deliberation will therefore indeed entail “clarity of ourselves ” And secondly, of course, there is the idea of rational-critical debate itself, the perennial difficulty in Habermas, which is endlessly sympathetic, but somewhat difficult to vouch for in its somehow too good faith in the way politicised publics work What Habermas devises here is thus a logic of the political public sphere that would spring, in ideal terms, from the literary public sphere, rather than that modern sphere of the aesthetic public for which it in fact paved the way In addition to Habermas’ idea of an egalitarian and self-correcting rational social conversation, we should therefore factor in the particular logic of the aesthetic address through which artistic publics are by now brought into being One attempt in this direction can be found in Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflection, itself originating in an exchange with Maurice Blanchot, on the collective negotiation of aesthetic affect: 163 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Literature and Democracy Making sense of sensation, starting out from the senses, and in every other sense, is: taking interest in an affect from an outside, being affected by an outside, and also to affect an outside Sense resides in the sharing of an ‘in common ’ 14 In this dense quotation, Nancy actually identifies a point of convergence between the two strands of thought I have tried to develop in this essay On the one hand, there is the question of the nature of the public, where the performative act of address convokes a communality of those who accept the address and consider themselves reflexively as addressees; and on the other, there is the question of the aesthetic ‘object’ that embraces, as part of this object, the (upstream) extension towards its possible meaning as well as the (downstream) extension toward the imaginary instantiation of this meaning My intention has been to argue that when these two questions do actually converge, it is not a matter of a chance encounter, but an important historical contingency What Nancy shows is that the two questions fit perfectly together. His twin points of departure are a reflection on the nature of community, based on a reading of Heidegger’s Mitsein, and, secondly, an analysis of the nature of aesthetic experience as it unfolds from a negotiation of sensation and sense-making. In the first place, he wants to show how ‘being-with’ (être-avec, Mitsein) is a fundamental modality of being which is not premised on a primordially given ‘identity,’ but to the contrary on taking part in a community To demonstrate this, however, he turns to the realm of aesthetics, because here, paradigmatically, identity (the meaning of being affected) is suspended at the outset, or, as Blanchot has it, “neutralised,” awaiting the (downstream) advent of a meaning that does not reside in the individual, but in what a sensuous being might become In other words, a non-identitarian ontology that points towards an aesthetic and the heteronomous being it implies What’s more, Nancy takes the inverse trajectory and starts out from the aesthetic experience of being affected, hence potentially transformed, to then consider this exposedness to an appearance that demands the twofold investment of solicitation and imagination as an exposedness also to a condition of communality, where we are invited, or extolled, to corroborate the sensation and the sense of the sensation in common; or, an aesthetics that here invokes an ontology This convergence between a literary or aesthetic address and an exposition to a condition of communality is not arbitrary: It is inscribed in the advent of 14 Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (1986; Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1999), 211, my translation French original: “Le sens du sens, depuis le sens sensible, et dans tous les autres sens, c’est: s’affecter d’un dehors, être affecté d’un dehors, et aussi affecter un dehors Le sens est dans le partage d’un ‘en commun’ ” the modern aesthetic regime as it instantiated the public forum on the ground of the marketplace arena in early modernity The encounter that Nancy felicitously points to is an integral part of the mode of being of the work of art in its modern guise, immanent in the institutional infrastructure that was laid out in the nascent literary public sphere and eventually consolidated in the modern scaffolding of the institution of art I have tried to bring this genealogy to light in order to widen our understanding of the role and function of aesthetic experience to embrace not only the importance of the individual encounter with art, but also the experience of being publicly and collectively interpellated to answer the question how a common sensation can make sense, through common deliberation on how we can recognise ourselves - our collective selves - in the artistic images we process Having started out from those basic determinations of the value of literature - that it opens worlds to us, that it does it through the other, and that it does this, finally, in the medium of the crafted textual object - we can now specify the value of the literary aesthetic experience in a two-pronged perspective. In the first instance, considering aesthetic experience in its traditional understanding as an individual encounter with the artwork, the value of literature is one of widening horizons in the actual encounter with other worlds and others’ worldmaking, of emphatic assimilation with other ways of being in the world, under different circumstances, with different privileges and different sensibilities, and of seeing the worlds that emerge from the instantiation of different idioms and different formal constraints All this obviously goes into an ever-topical insistence on literature as first-rate medium to foster individual knowledge, sensitivity, and capacity; Bildung, in short In a second instance, then, as has been argued here, literature also submits such processes of Bildung to a negotiation where experience is produced - is consigned to be produced - in a communal process of questioning that cannot in any meaningful way be excluded from the realm of literary experience Literary experience in this sense encapsulates an originary sense for democracy, not only in that its early institutional form became a visionary pre-figuration of a model of democratic civil life, but also in its present mode of existence, where the self-images it presents us with invariably return to the challenge of accounting for ourselves - not just every individual one of us, but even as just ‘us ’ 164 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Works Cited Attridge, Derek, ed Acts of Literature London: Routledge, 1992 Blanchot, Maurice The Book to Come Trans Charlotte Mandell. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003 Easteling, Keller Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructural Space London: Verso, 2014 Habermas, Jürgen The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Trans Thomas Burger London: Polity Press, 1989 Latour Bruno An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns Trans Catherine Porter Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013 Nancy, Jean-Luc La communauté désoeuvrée Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1999 Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics Trans Gabriel Rockhill London: Continuum Press, 2004 Warner, Michael Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005 165 Literature and Democracy