Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition Johannes Voelz Winfried Fluck’s groundbreaking work on the aesthetic experience of recogni‐ tion - developed must fully in his essay “Reading for Recognition,” published in New Literary History in 2013 and reprinted in this volume - is marked by a productive tension. On the one hand, Fluck argues that aesthetic objects (literature, film, and even purportedly non-narrative art forms, such as painting) make available an imaginary experience of recognition in the sense that they enable us to undergo dramas of recognition characterized by continuous ebbs and flows as well as ups and downs. On the other hand, Fluck argues that recognition becomes imaginarily available in the act of reading (or viewing, listening, etc.) because the reader partakes of the experience represented in a widely shared plot pattern that leads from inferiority to superiority. These two observations do not necessarily contradict each other, but they place their emphasis on different aspects. Where “drama” is about a clash of starkly different experiences, the narrative “from inferiority to superiority” is about resolution and fulfillment. My reconstruction in the following pages is intended to show how Winfried Fluck resolves the tension of these two aspects of his approach: In an argumen‐ tative style that is at once sweeping, penetrating, and eye-opening, he drives home the point that over and over again we seek out fictions in popular and literary culture because they enable us to experience, within the realm of the imaginary, the transformation of frustrating hardship into vindicating gratifi‐ cation. However, I want to suggest that the other, somewhat less pronounced strand of Fluck’s theory of aesthetic recognition is at least as provocative. In thinking about recognition as a drama that is less about denouement than about unresolved conflict, Fluck opens the door to an understanding of the aesthetics and affects of recognition that can help explain what binds us to negative experiences and emotions, such as envy, resentment, hatred, contempt, and vindictiveness. Indeed, Fluck’s writings equip us with the tools necessary to explore the full range of the aesthetics and affects of recognition, so that recognition is to be imagined as a multilayered and temporally structured experience. The experience of recognition in this sense is far more, and more complicated, than a momentary feeling of affirmation. Moreover, Fluck anchors his exploration of the aesthetic experience of recognition in the dynamics of democratic culture. The ultimate aim I pursue in these remarks is to suggest that in building on Fluck’s work, we can begin to think about why the dramas of recognition characteristic of democratic culture are prone to turn against democracy. I. I think of Winfried Fluck’s expansive oeuvre as falling into two halves. There is Fluck the metacritic, who dissects the premises and narratives that have in‐ formed the developments in the field of American studies and in the humanities more generally (in this volume, Laura Bieger, Frank Kelleter, and Heinz Ickstadt explore different facets of this side of Fluck’s work). And there is Fluck the cultural and literary historian, who arranges the cultural output of the United States into a narrative of unfolding and accelerating modernity. His perspective in this second endeavor is trained on the act of reception. His guiding question fuses the aesthetic with the sociological and the philosophical: What does the engagement with cultural objects do for the individuals who make up modern society? It has been fascinating (to use one of Fluck’s favorite aesthetic categories) to observe the theoretical terms that have allowed him to tell, retell, and refine this story over the past decades. While he has largely stayed beholden to the basic outline of the aesthetic encounter elaborated by Wolfgang Iser and the Constance school of reception aesthetics, his conceptual apparatus for understanding modernity has continued to evolve. Recognition, I suggest, is a relative latecomer to this apparatus, but in many ways it is his master term. This is because recognition acts as a relay between the individual and society, or, more specifically, between aesthetic experience (which ultimately lies in the domain of the subject) and the dynamic structure of democratic society. For Fluck to come to see recognition as the key problem of modernity - democratic modernity, to be more exact - he first had to come to terms with the full import of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. By my estimate, this act of discovery must have taken place in the late 1990s, after the publication of his magisterial study, Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans (1997). I became Fluck’s student in the year 2000, and I remember distinctly how around this time he brought photocopies of the table 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 320 Johannes Voelz of contents of Tocqueville’s second volume to class. His excitement over his (re)discovery was palpable. It was clear that he had known Tocqueville’s book for decades (the state of his paperback alone gave it away), but it was also obvious (with the advantage of hindsight, at any rate) that in re-reading Tocqueville’s brazen interpretation of American culture, something had suddenly clicked for him. He was grappling at this time with how best to conceptualize the historical trajectory of American (and modern) culture, and the terms that seemed to suggest themselves at the time were “individualization” and (in a more limited sense) “expressive individualism.” Indeed, the story told in Das kulturelle Imaginäre is ultimately one of individualization. Yet, for those of us students at the Kennedy-Institute who kept up with his steady stream of publications and who sought to be part of the dramatic debates that seemed to be going on in his mind (to us, he was never easy to read as a person but stunningly clear in his teaching and writing), the problems that this term - “individualization” - posed were unmistakable and even troublesome. Was “individualization” a merely descriptive or a normative term? Did it suggest that we of the postmodern generation possessed any substantial degree of freedom (a distinctly unpopular idea among us students), that things were getting better (a suggestion that was anathema to us) or that in fact everyone was becoming burdened, if not overburdened, with having to manage their own lives (a much more palatable claim)? What precisely did “individualization” describe? And could it actually explain very much? The observation that modern cultures such as that of the United States are increasingly oriented toward the individual was what stood in need of theoretical explanation. “Individualization” provided a tautology rather than a proper theory. It seems to me that the theory of “individualization” left Fluck unsatisfied as well and that around the turn of the millennium, he found his way out of this fix by coming upon two sources of inspiration that hitherto had not been considered together: There was Tocqueville, and there was the moral-philosophical debate on recognition. Fluck first treated this nexus in “Fiction and Justice,” an essay published in New Literary History in 2003. The core features of his adaptation of recognition theory for a reception-oriented explanation of the function of fiction in democracies are already in place in this essay. In that sense, “Fiction and Justice” really may be the most important milestone in Fluck’s mature career (it is for this reason included in Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, the collection of his essays that Laura Bieger and I edited on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, in 2009). But while the link between recognition, fiction, and democracy is already established in “Fiction 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 321 and Justice,” Tocqueville merely gets one paragraph. Clearly there was more work to be done. In the following half-decade or so, Fluck convened an informal study group made up of PhD students and postdocs, many of them faculty in the Kennedy Institute’s Department of Culture (it never seems to even have entered his mind to write a third-party funding proposal for this purpose; those were the days). Together we read up on contemporary debates and theories of recognition as well as on related concepts relevant to our question, such as popular treatises on “the attention economy; ” not in order to contribute to normative moral philosophy, to be sure, but to be able to make the theoretical moves necessary for reading American cultural and literary history through the prism of recognition. In 2012, many years after the working group had ceased to exist and many of its members had left Berlin, Fluck edited a special issue for Amerikastudien/ American Studies that collected some of the results from these long afternoon sessions in room 305 of Lansstraße. The title of the issue makes clear that Tocqueville now takes center stage: “Tocqueville’s Legacy: Toward a Cultural History of Recognition in American Studies.” Several members of the working group are represented in that issue - Laura Bieger, Julian Hanich, Hannah Spahn, and myself - and the historical range of the contributions alone is rather expansive, moving from Hannah Spahn’s exploration of the tension, in the political discourse of the early republic, between ambition and the quest for esteem, to Laura Bieger’s reflections on fashioning the modern body, which hinged on the “conjunction of the actual and the imagined body” (663). Fluck’s own contribution, “Fiction and the Struggle for Recognition,” is an early version of his argument presented here, but whereas the early version has been cited a mere five times (according to GoogleScholar, as of January 2024), the more expansive and polished rendition of his argument, printed in the following year in New Literary History as “Reading for Recognition,” has received significant attention - not least, I suspect, because it may have resonated with the then emerging debate on critique and postcritique. That debate, however, did not - and could not - concern the Berlin group at all. Our collective had dispersed long before US-based Americanists ever started debating “the uses of literature.” II. In forging a nexus between Tocqueville’s guiding idea about democracy as a way of life, intersubjective recognition, and the act of reading, “Reading for Recognition” puts forth a theory that is stunning because of its simplicity and because of the reach of its implications. Put in a nutshell, the argument goes 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 322 Johannes Voelz like this: Once people live under conditions of nominal equality, recognition becomes a problem for every individual: We all have to forge our own identity and find ways of differentiating ourselves from all the rest. This is done not merely in direct social interaction, but crucially with the help of cultural texts. It is in reading - in relating ourselves to fictional materials - that we create a sense of who we are. And because we relate to texts by creating analogies between ourselves and what we read, we seek out fictional dramas of recognition. We are attracted to fictional recognition scenes not because fiction allows us to vicariously experience in our imagination what real life won’t grant us (this would be mere wish-fulfillment), but because in imaginarily experiencing recognition, we work on our narrative identity. And such work requires experiences of recognition, whether in reading or in social interaction. Fluck insists that his theory is not dependent on the mechanism of identifi‐ cation. In relating ourselves to fictional dramas of recognition (in acts of what Fluck calls “imaginary transfer”), we do not identify with a character, or at least we do not do so in any consistent manner. Fluck maintains that “[w]hat used to be called identification is really a series of different and segmented attachments. Because of this segmented use, the relation to the text is established, not by identification with a particular figure, but by analogues between a potentially wide range of textual elements and the recipient’s imaginary (including affects, feeling, moods, corporeal schemata, etc.)” (“Reading for Recognition,” in this volume 310). Thus, to use an example from the essay, we may engage in an imaginary transfer with a fictional outlaw figure and make use of that figure for our own purposes of building up our identity. But we do not therefore wholly identify with the outlaw. As Fluck puts it: “We take the heroism and ignore the criminal context” (310). In relating to fictional characters, our attitude may move from cheery to leery within the span of a sentence. And sometimes the recognition drama isn’t even tethered to a particular character, but rather to the social constellation represented, or to the atmosphere and mood, or perhaps quite simply to the energy transmitted by the language of the text. What Fluck here proposes is a “strong theory” in the technical sense that it covers a whole lot of ground. Indeed, it may come close to being a theory of everything. “In many, if not most cases,” he writes, “fictional texts tell stories about a transformation of inferiority into superiority, of weakness into strength, of worthlessness into worth, or, more generally speaking, of misrecognition into recognition” (303). What makes “Reading for Recognition” stunning is the scope of its claim (scope here amounts to strength), as well as the range and incisiveness of Fluck’s knowledge: not only has he mastered canon upon canon, from the popular to the avant-garde, but he also knows how to cut through the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 323 piles of material and to fully submit them to his guiding thesis. In his hands, virtually all of American cultural history - from Cinderella, Pretty Woman, and Horatio Alger to “the artistic cosmopolitanism of the Harlem Renaissance [, …] the angry nationalism of the Black Arts Movement and a more recent rhetoric of trauma” (307) - becomes legible as a sequence of recognition dramas. “Reading for Recognition” is a text designed to make you see the world differently. This is precisely the effect an early draft of the essay had on me when reading it during the days of our study group (somewhere around 2005). I told Fluck so one day as we were waiting in line at the lunch counter. He merely scoffed. Maybe he wondered if I was pulling his leg. At times our mentor-mentee relationship amounted to a recognition drama of its own. III. So, what does Fluck mean by dramas of recognition? And how do they relate to the narrative trajectory from inferiority to superiority that he recognizes “in many, if not most” fictional texts? Before zeroing in one these two questions, we would do well to take a step back and reflect on Fluck’s decision to create a link between readerly recognition and the emplotment of recognition. This link should not be taken for granted. Some might indeed consider it a conceptual misstep. In any case, it is striking that Rita Felski, who treats recognition as one of the four “uses of literature” discussed in her manifesto of the same title, does not draw a direct line from the particular type of textual engagement she calls recognition to any particular story line of the literary text. In a spirit and language very much attuned to Fluck’s, she writes, If our existence pivots around the drama of recognition, our aesthetic engagement cannot be quarantined from the desire to know and to be acknowledged. We all seek in various ways to have our particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us. The patent asymmetry and unevenness of structures of recognition ensure that books will often function as lifelines for those deprived of other forms of public acknowledgment. (43) Felski, in effect, suggests - very much like Fluck - that our quest for recognition spills over into our engagement with art. We desire to have our “particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us,” and we bring this desire to the encounter with literature, especially (but not only) if we have collective identities that get little social recognition. Like Fluck, Felski also argues against the explanatory power of the concept of identification: “The idiom of identification (…) is poorly equipped to distinguish between the variable 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 324 Johannes Voelz epistemic and experiential registers of reader involvement” (35). For Felski, these variable epistemic and experiential registers ultimately serve the same purpose they serve in Fluck’s account - the drama of recognition that finds its continuation in the act of reading is a “drama of self-formation” (33). In other words, reading is affective and cognitive work on our identity. This is what reading for recognition ultimately means. And yet, despite all of these echoes, there is that one crucial difference between the accounts provided by Felski and Fluck: For Felski, the encounter with a fictional text liberates the individual from a sense of loneliness and alienation. “I feel myself addressed, summoned, called to account: I cannot help seeing traces of myself in the pages I am reading” (30). Whereas we might feel unseen, unheard, misunderstood in much of our social existence, in the engagement with the literary text we find a sense of “affiliation” (the key term of Felski’s approach). “Through this experience of affiliation, I feel myself acknowledged; I am rescued from the fear of invisibility, from the terror of not being seen” (33). In Felski’s thinking, a text recognizes us - and thus relieves us from loneliness - when we find a way of recognizing ourselves in it, either by reflecting on ourselves, or by losing ourselves in the fictional world to the extent that we no longer know the boundaries between self and world. Hence recognition, in Felski’s version, retains the strong cognitive meaning of re-knowing: We experience a sense of acknowledgment if we find ourselves echoed in the literary text. How this act of finding ourselves in the text is textured varies widely and helps explain what Felski means by the “drama of recognition.” It is a drama generated by the clash of contravening forces that push and pull us inside and out of ourselves, inside and out of the fictional world. Reading for recognition consists, by turns, of the extension, intensification, and clarification of our sense of self. This drama is set in motion not by a particular plot pattern, but by a discovery of similarity between ourselves and any element of the text. Fluck, it seems to me, would agree with almost every aspect of Felski’s account. Yet in his version, readerly recognition is not about finding a sense of affiliation. The question of recognition, to him, is not whether we are all alone in this world. The question of recognition is about hierarchy and distinction: Are we inferior or superior, are we sufficiently different from the pack? Where Felski’s readers dread being alone, Fluck’s readers dread losing out in a competition for glory, or at least for sufficient attention. It is the ingredient of Tocqueville - of his idea that in a society of equals we are condemned to make ourselves stick out - that sets apart Fluck’s drama of recognition from Felski’s. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 325 This combative, competitive character of the drama of recognition, however, can hardly be found in our engagement with literature if we only look at the question to what extent we recognize ourselves in the fictional text. Who, after all, would we be competing against if we found ourselves by immersing ourselves in any given narrative situation? Fluck needs to tie the question of readerly engagement to the nearly archetypal plot pattern “from inferiority to superiority” in order to make the claim that our aesthetic experience is of use in a world of equals. The plot pattern, in other words, acts as a sort of engine for our imaginary: It channels our engagement with the literary text into the drama that is Fluck’s concern, namely, how to stake out a claim for ourselves in a democratic order in which everybody is a somebody - and thus in danger of remaining a nobody. It is no coincidence, then, that Fluck, in his essay for the special issue of Ame‐ rikastudien/ American Studies that directly preceded the publication of “Reading for Recognition,” chose a remarkably Hegelian title, “Fiction and the Struggle for Recognition.” Not only is he riffing on the title of Axel Honneth’s monograph, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, but, more crucially, in taking up the figure of the struggle, he also highlights the element of dramatic conflict that precedes the eventual triumph of superiority. In Fluck’s rendition, the drama of recognition consists of the fact that superiority and distinction have to be fought for. And while in our everyday lives, superiority, indeed even mere visibility and acknowledgment, often remain out of reach, in the plot pattern Fluck has identified as nearly all-pervasive, the struggle for recognition is usually won in the end. There is a degree of wish-fulfillment to Fluck’s version of the aesthetics of recognition after all. Indeed, without the telos of fulfillment (however provisional, ironic, or ambiguous it may turn out to be), the struggle for recognition literally would not make sense. IV. It would be a misunderstanding, however, to conclude that Fluck’s theory suggests that we seek out fictional scenarios of recognition merely for the happy ending of awarded affirmation. After all, as Fluck suggests in “Reading for Recognition,” if we keep on reading for hundreds of pages or keep on watching for hours on end, we do so because apparently we are captivated by “dramas in which the struggle for recognition is acted out in all of its tensions, conflicts, complications, and emotional ups and downs” (307). It stands to reason that as readers, we do not merely want the sense of recognition granted eventually, but we want the entire struggle. Properly speaking, the aesthetic experience 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 326 Johannes Voelz of recognition is the experience of struggle as well as the experience of its resolution. If this is the case, then recognition consists of an affective vocabulary that is strikingly ambivalent. In exposing ourselves to dramas of recognition, we expose ourselves not only to the eventual triumph of affirmation, but to a whole range negative affects that fall under the rubric of what Fluck calls inferiority. These affects and emotions include frustration, envy, resentment, hatred, vindictiveness, and many more. Tocqueville is a capable guide for making us see that these negative emotions are democratic emotions. They stem, he argues throughout both volumes of Democracy in America, from the fact that under conditions of equality, we (the citizens of post-rank societies) are prone to compare ourselves to others. And while we may develop a “bombastic style” and other performative habits that are designed to attract attention, the fact of the matter is that in the attempt to set ourselves apart from all the rest, most people fail (nothing illustrates this as clearly as the forms of sociality offered by the internet). In the democratic struggle for attention and recognition, frustration is the norm. I have explored elsewhere how Tocqueville develops this train of thought (Voelz, “Wendungen” and Voelz, “Aesthetics of Polarization”). Put briefly, ac‐ cording to Tocqueville, the most ordinary experience of democratic life consists of witnessing how other people excel, which is an experience doubly irritating. It irritates, first, because the democratic individual aspires to the very distinction achieved by the other; and second, because the act of observing how others advance contradicts the democratic individual’s love of equality, according to which no one should stand out in the first place. These two irritations are really at odds with one another (the first is a complaint about our not standing out enough, the second is about others not being equal enough), but they come together in the passion of envy. In the chapter “Of the Government of Democracy,” Tocqueville writes: The fact must not be concealed that democratic institutions develop the sentiment of envy in the human heart to a very high degree, not so much because they offer each person the means to become equal to others, but because these means constantly fail those who use them. Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. (316) The aim of envy is to counter the emergence of inequality by producing a leveling effect. In contrast to hatred, envy does not aim at the destruction of the other, but at leveling out the difference between self and other regarding some attribute. Envy presents one of two options to work towards leveling out 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 327 that difference. One option is upward leveling - this, for Tocqueville, is the expression of a legitimate passion for equality; in the case of the United States, we may associate it with a cultural history that leads from Transcendentalist notions of self-growth all the way to the human potential movement; the second option, associated with envy, is downward leveling, which Tocqueville describes as a “depraved taste for equality (…) that leads the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in liberty” (89). For Tocqueville, the downward leveling of envy is doubly pernicious. It drives citizens of democratic societies towards accepting equality in servitude - a politically disastrous state of despotic conformity. On the level of the individual’s emotional life, it moreover leads to systemic unhappiness and what we would call depression. The more successful the leveling efforts, the smaller the differences become; yet as equality increases, so does the sensitivity to remaining (or newly emerging) inequalities, however minute they may be. From this sharpened perception - which is echoed in the Latin word for envy, invidia, and its verb form, invidere, which in its most literal meaning translates as to look upon - follows a continuous experience of disappointment: “Every day,” Tocqueville writes, “at the moment when people believe they have grasped complete equality, it escapes from their hands and flees, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight” (316). The costs are not merely political unfreedom, but a collective malaise of the soul. “It is to these causes that you must attribute the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic countries often reveal amid their abundance, and this disgust for life that sometimes comes to seize them in the middle of a comfortable and tranquil existence” (946). Tocqueville was not the first to worry about the ramifications of the social logic of recognition. He inherits a good part of his skepticism from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in turn, as Axel Honneth has recently shown, is indebted to the seventeenth-century French moralists, such as François de La Rochefoucauld (Honneth, Recognition). In his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind (1755), Rousseau had begun to worry about what he terms amour propre - a pernicious longing for recognition that develops as a distinctly social trait, particularly when people have to put an effort into shaping their own social standing. For our purposes, we don’t have to bother reconstructing and assessing Rousseau’s historical sketch of human history told in this so-called Second Discourse; it suffices to turn to Rousseau’s description of the first signs of the emergence of amour propre amidst what he thinks of as the “golden age.” At this moment of human history, a healthy self-love (amour de soi), which is innocently invested in preserving natural survival and is wholly 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 328 Johannes Voelz unconcerned with others, gives way to a quest of recognition driven by the self ’s urge to favorably compare herself to others. Put in a more modern idiom, the inner-directed self becomes utterly other-directed. Here, then, is Rousseau’s historical ur-scene of amour propre (which, as Frederick Neuhouser [2] has noted, contains striking echoes of the Biblical fall from grace): It became customary to gather in front of the Huts or around a large Tree: song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle men and women gathered together. Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a price. The one who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step at once toward inequality and vice: from these first preferences arose vanity and contempt on the one hand, shame and envy on the other; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. (Rousseau 166) Where for Tocqueville, equality is instituted by the post-rank order, for Rousseau equality is the natural condition of humans (his version of the “state of nature,” after all, is the inversion of Hobbes’s: natural man has a unique proclivity for happiness; he takes equality for granted). What matters is that both thinkers tell a story in which inequality emerges from equality by way of a mechanism that grows out of particular social conditions. Equality lapses into inequality once humans live in a social constellation that asks them to compare themselves to each other. As they take stock of each other in comparative terms, the emotional landscape becomes poisoned. Those who deem themselves superior (read: recognized) develop a sense of vanity and contempt for their inferiors; and those who feel slighted (or misrecognized) bathe in shame and envy. Thus, in the culture of recognition - understood as a culture of comparison and competition - negative affects become predominant. V. This distinctly negative interpretation of recognition - which, according to Axel Honneth, is characteristic of the French tradition of thinking about recognition, probably for socio-historical reasons (Recognition 5) - isn’t merely of interest because it allows us to contextualize Tocqueville’s take on American democracy. Its real provocation, it seems to me, lies in its potential (or, put more cautiously, in its potential potential) to help explain the affective landscape that has come to structure our own times, particularly in the United States. Today, the politics 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 329 of anger, resentment, and vindictiveness have taken on the power to color the national mood; on the American right in particular (and among its international allies), it has become acceptable and indeed common to openly favor authoritar‐ ianism over democratic political rule. Thinkers in the line of La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, and Tocqueville might have an explanation for this development. Guided by their writings, we may argue that the prevalence of negative, spiteful affects that finds expression in calls for doing away with democracy is itself the ramification of a democratic social structure in which value, worth, and esteem are measured in purely comparative terms. Not for nothing was Tocqueville so intensely worried about how to protect democracy from certain of its inbuilt tendencies. The reversion of democracy into tyranny, to his mind, was the most likely course of future events, and he may yet be proven right. Why, however, is it so appealing to bind oneself to a range of negative emotions that swirl around misrecognition? Why is it promising to generate political energies out of the claim of inferiority? And why is it the case that authoritarian-populist movements around the world engage in symbolic selfvictimization, as if any minimal gain of social status by formerly excluded groups amounted to the total and complete loss of power by formerly dominant groups (cf. Voelz, “Reading Populism”)? Indeed, why do people cheer when their leaders tell them that they are victims and that they are losing their country? My sense is that Rousseau and Tocqueville are of great help in explaining why cultures of recognition produce a great deal of misrecognition, but that their ideas need to be developed further in order to explain how weakness, inferiority, and misrecognition gain something like a positive, binding charge. If we return to Fluck’s theory of recognition, we may see a path forward. Fluck, as we have seen, is concerned with the question of how our reading com‐ plements and intersects with our social existence, how the imaginary experience of recognition to be gained from literature fills a need for people who have to actively shape their sense of self. In this line of argument, narrativity exists on both sides of the equation: in our social existence (where come to a sense of self by way of telling stories about ourselves) as well as in our existence as readers (where we transfer elements from our imaginary to our mental and affective construction of the text). By slightly tweaking and expanding this insight, we can conclude that our engagement in collective political life likewise is structured in narrative terms. Indeed, it seems entirely plausible to argue that our politics are structured by narrative recognition dramas. It’s just that in political discourse and the affects it elicits, we don’t always get to hear the full story. While some pay lip service to triumph and affirmation (“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning”), mostly these parts of the narrative are relegated to a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 330 Johannes Voelz distant horizon. The drama of being threatened, of standing to lose, of being all but doomed, lends itself much more to trump up the affective intensity needed for political dramas of recognition. What’s more, it appears that democratic recognition dramas are prone to take on a melodramatic shape (cf. Anker). Few have argued more forcefully than Fluck that melodrama has the distinct narrative advantage of redefining weakness as moral superiority. Political melodrama thus has two sources of imaginary power: It generates a sense of urgency that inheres in proclamations of existential threat (on this level, we are dealing with a story that highlights inferiority), and it makes available a sense of moral self-satisfaction derived from weakness (here we’re dealing with a story highlighting superiority). What were once contravening forces of the drama of recognition here become reinforcing elements. VI. One of the questions opened up by these reflections concerns Fluck’s original project of coming to terms with the function of fiction (or, as we say today, the uses of literature). Does the textual engagement with fictions fulfill any function for the formation of our political identities? Do we read for political affiliation? If the answer is no, this does not necessarily have to surprise or worry us. It may well be that the formation of collective political identities draws on different media and genres - nonfictional public discourse, for instance - than does the formation of our individual identity. But maybe something more fundamental is going here as well. Could it be that political theater is taking over the function that fiction once held? In other words, might it be that in the course of the intense politicization of culture and the culturalization of politics that has marked our recent past, we increasingly build up our personal identities, not by drawing on fiction, but on the discourses and narratives of politics? If this seems likely to you, perhaps we have assembled the building blocks needed for a melodramatic recognition drama starring literary studies. - Works Cited Anker, Elisabeth R. Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Bieger, Laura. “’Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone’ - Notes on Fantasizing the Modern Body.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 57.4 (2012): 663-688. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 331 Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans. Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp, 1997. ---. “Fiction and Justice.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 385-408. ---. “Fiction and the Struggle for Recognition.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 57.4 (2012): 689-709. ---, ed. Toqueville’s Legacy: Towards a Cultural History of Recognition in American Studies. Special issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies 57.4 (2012). Honneth, Axel. Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. ---. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, and Victor Gourevitch. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Historical-Critical Edition. Ed. Eduardo Nolla. Trans. James T. Schleifer. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010. Voelz, Johannes. “Reading Populism with Bourdieu and Elias.” Reading the Social in American Studies. Ed. Astrid Franke, Stefanie Müller, Katja Sarkowsky. New York: Palgrave, 2022. 233-258. ---. (with Tom Freischläger) “Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 35 (2019): 261-286. ---. “Wendungen des Neids: Tocqueville und Emerson zum Paradox einer demokratischen Leidenschaft.” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 01-2017: 141-154. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 332 Johannes Voelz