1 See, for instance, Fluck, “Reading for Recognition” and “Narratives of American Democratic Culture” as well as Johannes Voelz’s and Heinz Ickstadt’s responses to these essays (all in this volume). Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method Laura Bieger It is neither surprising nor an exaggeration to say that reading for premises is Winfried Fluck’s intellectual superpower. He developed this way of reading - for the underlying assumptions that both animate and structure any inter‐ pretative activity, giving it a normative grounding of which the interpreter is often unaware - into a critical practice in its own right. Indeed, reading this way became his default mode and signature style of academic engagement. For decades, it defined his thinking about the work of his peers, his field, its bordering disciplines, and its relation to the humanities at large. It is a reading for meaning that is not so much hidden than implied. Explicating this un(der)acknowledged layer of meaning involves showing how it conditions an inner logic of meaning-making that one had tacitly subscribed to when making or agreeing with an argument and aligning oneself with the field position it marks. Fluck’s uncanny mastery of reading this way was key to establishing him as one of the leading Americanists of his generation, as well as to formulating his vision of American Studies. At the core of that vision is a view of American culture as shaped by and giving shape to the social, economic, and political developments that define western modernity - the unholy trinity of individualism, capitalism, and democracy, if you will; and that is democratic in the sense of being structured by the tensions and contradictions engrained in the nation’s democratic founding ideals (i.e. the heightened demand for social distinction in a non-feudalistic society based on the idea of equality that marks a longstanding research interest of his). 1 These ideals gain their structuring power from being lived and experienced in a certain, culturally specific way - with experience always and inevitably being partly aesthetic, and aesthetics thus being fundamental to the creation of social reality. In other words, Fluck’s 2 I discuss these premises in my book Belonging and Narrative. For a concise version of my theoretical argument, see my essay “No Place Like Home.” 3 A shortened English version appeared in 1978 in Other Voices, Other Views: An International Collection of Essays from the Bicentennial, edited by Robin W. Winks. view of the reality shaping power of (American) (democratic) culture rests upon strong assumptions about the aesthetic. So does his critical method of reading for premises. These assumptions are rooted in the phenomenological hermeneutics that subtends Fluck’s universe of thought, especially its view of the always-already and fundamentally embodied (read: experiential) status of interpretation, and about interpretation as a condition of being in the world. 2 But rather than exploring this nexus, I want to use my re-reading of his essay “The Philosophical Premises of Literary and Cultural Studies: Narratives of Alienation” for this volume as a springboard for thinking about how Fluck’s field-shaping method evolved, how its concern with aesthetics has guided its course, and how they can be taken even further. I. This exercise necessitates going back to an earlier essay on the importance of premises and the significance of studying them: “Das ästhetische Vorverständnis der American Studies,” first published in German in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1973, and first appearing in a full-length English translation in 2009 in the volume Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, edited by Johannes Voelz and myself. 3 Both of us were assistant professors under Fluck at the Department of Culture of the John-F.-Kennedy Institute at the time. We were humbled and awed by his intellectual rigor and international standing, and we were especially humbled and awed by his firm and often seemingly clairvoyant grasp on emerging trends in literary and cultural studies and their impact on our own field. From countless Q&A sessions in our research colloquium we knew that this grasp was essentially a grasp on premises. So, when it came to deciding which text should open the collection of essays of his we were putting together for his sixty-fifth birthday, it was clear that it had to be the one that first introduced his concern with premises - which he described as follows: “By the use of concepts like ‘a priori assumptions’ or ‘tacit premises’ I am not referring to pre-existing prejudices or to a hermeneutical hypothesis about the meaning of a text of object. Rather, I want to focus on prior assumptions about the object in question and its function that form the basis for every subsequent interpretive step in literary and cultural analysis” (“Aesthetic Premises” 17). In other words, Fluck’s concern is not with 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 362 Laura Bieger 4 For an especially lucid discussion of the hermeneutic circle, see Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode 250-91. 5 See also Kelleter, in this volume 416. the judgments that one necessarily brings along when trying to make sense of the world (necessary in the sense of an imperative framing of the object at stake), and that get tried and refined in their course through the hermeneutic circle, with the effect of keeping knowledge production categorically open. This would be the hermeneutical concept of “Vorurteil,” which is also commonly translated as “premise” (a literal translation would be “prejudice” or “preliminary judgment”). 4 One might quarrel with translating “Vorverständnis” as “premise,” which Fluck uses interchangeably with “assumption,” yet puts forth as his master term, for instance by using it in his titles. 5 Maybe the more appealing sound of the term “premise” prompted this choice, maybe its greater semantic openness, maybe a combination of both. But it is confusing - which is why one must bear in mind that Fluck’s premises are premises of the gravest kind. They are pre-set ideas about the circle itself; about the modes and mechanics of knowledge production envisioned by this figure of thought. These ideas are prior not in the sense of being preliminary. To the contrary, they are prior in the sense of being foundational, with the special twist that these foundations are rarely acknowledged - and thus especially powerful. This is, indeed, the assumption on which the importance of reading for them is based. Fluck started his inquiry into this unacknowledged dimension of our schol‐ arly practice with examining aesthetic premises; or, more precisely, the aesthetic premises undergirding the field of American studies that he was entering in the late 60s and early 70s. It was a time when speaking of American studies and aesthetics in one breath was a provocation. The interdisciplinary project through which the field was positioning itself against more traditional forms of literary studies with the Myth and Symbol School was defined by a move “beyond a merely aesthetic perspective on literary and cultural texts.” But this move “beyond” went hand in hand with embracing an understanding of the aesthetic as being genuinely complicit with “ideological, political and social interests.” It is this narrow and reductive understanding that Fluck seeks to unsettle when contending that “scholarly interpretations of aesthetic objects or cultural artifacts” remain to be based on aesthetic assumptions - simply “because these interpretations must conform to standards of evidence and plausibility that disciplines hold at any given time.” In a discipline that primarily deals with aesthetic objects, the evidence and plausibility that interpreting these objects may yield will inevitably be conditioned by shared ideas - “standards” - about the specific objecthood of these artifacts (“Aesthetic Premises” 17). In 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 363 6 See my essay “No Place Like Home,” where I write in a section discussing the underlying assumptions of different narrative theories (and the echo of Fluck is unmistakable): “Whether acknowledged or not, assumptions about human being are at the bottom of any theorization of literature or culture—which is, even in the most radically formalist or antihumanist assessment of its subject matter, bound up with the yearnings and activities of those who use and produce it” (27). 7 See, for instance, Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense; ” James, “The Sentiment of Rationality.” this logic, reading for the ideological complicity or resistance of these artifacts is not enough. It needs to be grounded in a reading for the disciplinary codes and conventions that make these artifacts readable in the first place - because these codes and conventions determine the interpretative choices that we have when reading them. Fluck reiterates this point at the outset of the 2013 New Literary History essay on the philosophical premises of literary and cultural theory when he states that “critical disagreements are [quintessentially] disagreements about premises” because “these underlying assumptions shape all subsequent inter‐ pretive choices: the choice of my object of analysis, the research question with which I am approaching this object, and the interpretive method I will be using” (333). I fully agree with the critical thrust of this claim; I have, indeed, made similar claims myself. 6 It is certainly true that this method is founded in a “strong assumption about assumptions” (Kelleter, in this volume 416). But then again, how could it not without undermining its own purpose? And yes, there is a performative circularity at work in garnering impact for truth claims based on this anti-foundational method that, in turn, invites a “charismatic” endorsement of its own hermeneutic baseline of there being “no value-free act of sense-making” (416). Indeed, after having witnessed Fluck’s method in action so many times, I find charisma a useful term to think of its particular kind of forcefulness. But is such charismatic performativity not a staple of anti-foundational philosophical discourse, and self-consciously so, at least since thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and William James have exposed it as such? 7 The affective dimension of scholarly evidence that becomes tangible here is yet another vastly unacknowledged aspect of our work. Certain assumptions just feel “more right” than others, and that feeling is to no small degree a matter of personal preference - of taste, i.e., the aesthetic. Fluck explores this dimension of reading, including scholarly reading, in his essay “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer” (in this volume). But in terms of the inner logic of Fluck’s critical method something else strikes me as at least as important: its historical context. Fluck conceived his method in the spirit of challenging established doxa: “In order to become 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 364 Laura Bieger 8 In the words of Henry Nash Smith: “What is needed is a method of analysis that is at once literary (for one must begin with an analytical reading of the texts that takes into account structure, imagery, diction, and so on) and sociological (for many of the forces at work in the fiction are clearly of social origin)” (Smith, “Can American Studies Develop a Method? ” 201, qtd. in Fluck, “Aesthetic Premises” 18). 9 On the significance of reading for premises, he writes: “an interpretation is not primarily determined by the methods it uses. On the contrary, the choice of method is already a manifestation of underlying assumptions about the nature and value of the interpretive object. These prior assumptions guide the interpretive practice and pre-determine the results. They dictate and limit the direction of our critical interest and constitute the very object the critic sees. An interpreter’s a priori views of literature - for example, why it is worth studying, what its function and potential is, and wherein its value lies - will decisively shape the way in which he will proceed methodologically. The kinds of features we are looking for in a work, the aspects we notice - or fail to notice - will influential within a discipline, more general political or other interests have to be adapted to disciplinary rules and conventions. We have to learn to analyze these disciplinary uses and to resist their seemingly self-evident authority” (“Aesthetic Premises” 17). But the urge to resist that Fluck names as the rationale behind his method is more than merely intellectual. It emerged from a site where disciplinary doxa was (and remains to this day) by default defined by U.S.-based Americanists and the venues of publication to which they have privileged access. Approached through the lens of this power imbalance engrained in the field, sophisticated and forceful judgments of a theory or a method that was a current rage based on its underlying assumptions come into view as a field-political counter move; a way of claiming authority where field-shaping international authority was an oxymoron, if not a structural impossibility. II. Fluck made his first intervention of this kind when the field he was aspiring to be part of was seeking to renew itself by developing a shared method - a method unified by a push beyond aesthetic concern. In being both literary and sociological, it was to enhance the field’s capacity to assesses literature’s social significance. 8 The collective, disciplinary endorsement of a new method is nothing less than a paradigm shift. In this case, it redirected the interpretative effort constituting the field toward literature’s relation to society, with the consequence of reorganizing the field accordingly and redefining the value of literature along the same lines. It was against this promise of radical renewal that Fluck made his case about the importance of premises and the significance of “reading for them,” with the ultimate goal of showing that this agenda was conceptually half-baked and intellectually half-hearted at best. 9 The reason for 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 365 thus inevitably be governed by what we take to be self-evident truths about the nature and value of literature (“Aesthetic Premises” 16). 10 “The construct of a unified principle by means of an analogy” which was the implicit goal of the interpreter using this method “cannot be refuted, since the creation of analogies or unexpected associations is basically a poetic activity” (28). this, according to Fluck, is that the governing assumptions about what constitutes literature and defines its value were taken straight from the very tradition they were seeking to leave behind - the New Criticism. For what was needed to methodologically ground literature’s newly claimed capacity to elucidate social reality was a criterion to define what literature was. And this criterion remained based on ideas about the “literariness” of literature; in particular, it remained based on the idea that artistic success and value are determined by the degree to which a literary work achieves an organic formal unity. Fluck substantiates this point by turning to Henry Nash Smith’s introduction to a new edition of Huckleberry Finn, where Smith writes: “We must try to see the book integrally. How well has Mark Twain succeeded in organizing his material into a coherent and unified whole? And what does this whole mean? ” (Smith, “Introduction” v, quoted in Fluck, “Aesthetic Premises” 21). And if the lingering presence of a New Critical aesthetics in this program‐ matic statement is hard to deny, Fluck next shows that even though Smith’s work was crucial to challenging the very assumptions about the novel’s structural unity on which this endorsement is based, Smith “continued to insist on the presence of a unifying structural principle in order to save Huckleberry Finn not only as an American masterpiece but also as a privileged object of analysis for American Studies” (“Aesthetic Premises” 21). And if this alone would have been quite an intervention, in the choreography of Fluck’s critical methodology it is a mere steppingstone to much larger claims about the prevalence of aesthetic assumptions in American Studies, among them (and anticipating current concerns about symptomatic reading) what Fluck describes as “a shift in the conceptualization of the interpretive object from ‘overt structure’ to ‘covert structure’” (27) and the dovetailing “liberation from strict criteria of evidence or plausibility.” 10 Indeed, Fluck’s most forceful point about how tacit assumptions about the specific and specifically aesthetic objecthood of the very thing one is studying aims at the heart of the matter: the validity of a method that grounds “the privileged epistemological status of literature” in “an elusive organic principle” (36). The evidence and plausibility that one’s interpretative efforts were bound to produce in this critical paradigm were “poetic” (28), even “metaphysical” (36) - in short: unscientific. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 366 Laura Bieger The incidental prevalence of flawed and outmoded aesthetic assumptions diagnosed as a hazard to an entire scholarly enterprise - this was a bold and sweeping claim to make. And it was an especially bold and sweeping claim coming from a novice. Johannes Voelz and I ruminate about the significance of this intervention in the preface to our volume of republished Fluck essays that opens with “Aesthetic Premises,” going back to its pre-published form as a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the German Association of American Studies in Hamburg in 1972, which marks Fluck’s first decisive act of selfpositioning in the field. He was twenty-eight at the time and had just finished his dissertation, a young and ambitious man from a working-class family in West-Berlin, who was probably more comfortable in the old leather jacket that he wears in photographs of this time than in the suit in which he was most likely attending the conference. What never fails to strike me when imagining this moment is how firmly and completely the critical method that was to become the driving force of his career was already in place in this “primal scene.” There are no records of how the paper was received at the conference, but two of the founding figures of the field, who happened to be among Fluck’s main targets - no lesser figures than Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith - endorsed his challenge by way of an exchange of letters that later appeared in American Quarterly (and I cannot help but marvel at this mythical moment of two leading scholars of the field reading the work of a promising young colleague from Germany in German). Marx: “… curiously, I find his argument, so far as I can penetrate the language, pretty convincing.” Smith: “As to what I think about Fluck: he is of course a young man who is taking out after one of the Fathers and he certainly goes in for all he can get in the way of scoring points. But in my own case I must admit that he has touched a weak spot.” (Qtd. in Bieger and Voelz 9) III. The piercing analysis of the field that occasioned this exchange was driven by the methodological concerns of the time. It is thus only consequential that the next major realignment of the field - through the shift from a national to a transnational paradigm - yielded a follow-up: “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies),” first published in REAL in 2007. Yet where the Sturm-und-Drang Fluck had left things with clearing, or rather, declaring the grounds on which a real transformation of the field could take place, the height-of-his-career Fluck of thirty-four years later links 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 367 his inquiry into the assumptions undergirding this new transformation with spelling out his vision of the field and the place of a self-asserted European American studies within that field: “[I]f the project of transnational studies is to be taken seriously, it must also mean that scholars outside the U.S. do not just mimic the latest U.S.-American developments, but are self-confident and independent enough to develop their own perspective on them.” Unsurprisingly, this act of self-assertion/ resistance should involve “looking at the underlying premises which have guided work in transnational American Studies and on which most of the work in this new line of research is based (“Theories” 71). These premises, Fluck goes on to argue in a way that should by now be familiar even to those encountering his critical method for the first time, determine the interpretative choices regarding one’s object of study. In the case of American studies, this object is American culture; and throughout the history of the field, the underlying assumptions about this culture have yielded interpretations that “investigate [its] possibility for resistance” (74). So yes, Fluck’s main concern in this essay is the underlying assumptions that turn American culture into a possible site of resistance. But as it turns out, these assumptions are strikingly similar across the humanities. Indeed, what reading for them brings into view are the founding conditions of the humanities writ large: Without a tradition of theorizing culture that dates back to the birth of the modern subject, or, more concretely, without the “search for negation or resistance” that animates these theorizations, “the humanities as a field of study (…) might not exist today” (74-75). I have vivid memories of how struck I was when this thought hit me for the first time, and I see iterations of my response every time I teach this text. Fluck’s brief sketch of the genealogy of these theorizations - from the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School on to Michel Foucault and Judith Butler - reads like a blueprint of the “Philosophical Premises” essay. Indeed, his concern with what might more fittingly be called the anthropological premises of critical theory - assumptions about “what humans want, what they need, how society responds to these wants and needs” (“Philosophical Premises” 333) - finds a first and forceful articulation here. Even the link to self-alienation is already in place: “The founding idea of most influential critical theories of modernity lies in the writings of Rousseau and German idealism and their claim that the instrumental rationality of modernity, that is, rationality severed from reason, leads to human self-alienation,” he writes. And while later theoreticians of modernity, including Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Foucault, may disagree on “the extent to which instrumental rationality has already affected and 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 368 Laura Bieger invaded the subject, her psyche and her body,” they “all follow this line of argument” (“Theories” 75). At first sight, reading theories of modernity for their underlying assumptions about the formation of the modern subject is quite a stretch from Fluck’s initial concern with the aesthetic premises of American studies. But at a closer look this new objective becomes tangible as an extension of that initial concern that is bound up with a shift in cultural and literary theory: even further away from the aesthetic and toward subjectivity and subject formation. Methodologically, this extension involved a move beyond an understanding of the aesthetic as a way of thinking about the disciplinary codes and conventions that make art objects readable in a certain way, and toward philosophical and anthropological concerns with the social and cultural functions and uses of art and with the aesthetic as a matrix through which to approach their everchanging shape that is most fully captured in Das kulturelle Imaginäre and poignantly reflected in essays on the importance of Wolfgang Iser and reception aesthetics, especially “Why We Need Fiction.” While being mostly tacit in Fluck’s readings for premises that do not involve Iser’s reception aesthetics, this shift becomes explicit when Fluck contends that “philosophical analysis of human self-alienation led to emphatic claims for the saving powers of culture (and, eventually, to the institutionalization of the humanities as the place where we can study and cultivate culture).” Only now, these premises are no longer, or at least not primarily, assumptions about the formal properties of particular (art) objects. The reason for this is that theories of modernity are based on assumptions that make culture legible as a social realm that might not yet be entirely “pervaded by instrumental rationality and thus holds a potential for resistance against the self-alienating logic of modernity” (75) - with the potential for resistance becoming increasingly smaller in the evolution of critical theory. And this is precisely where the transnational turn in American studies comes back into play. It is through analyzing the underlying assumptions of critical theory that Fluck is able to show how the logic of resistance that is the critical DNA of the humanities persists in this paradigm shift, with the effect of expanding the search for culturally conditioned possibilities of resistance beyond the borders of the nation-state - and at the risk of losing sight of the persistent power of the nation-state. Against arguments common in the early 2000s that globalization had weakened the state as a political actor, and that national identity was therefore becoming porous along with national borders, Fluck holds that “no talk about the crisis of the nation-state can distract from the fact that there is enough nation-state left to affect all of us decisively” - adding 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 369 11 In response to these claims, one of the leading New Americanists, Donald Pease, concedes: “Have not scholars in transnational American studies overestimated the ways in which global civil society can mobilize the political energies needed to remedy the economic inequalities that globalization has engendered? Has not post-exceptionalist American studies also ignored the US state’s power to describe the US as a permanent state of exception? Transnational American studies cannot effect the democratizing transformations within the global order without explaining how the US state has impeded their accomplishment” (22). this is especially palpable “from abroad” (81). He then concludes that rather than “going outside the U.S., we have to go back inside,” and further concludes that we need stop searching for possibilities of resistance and start reckoning with the special type of power possessed by the U.S., insinuating again that an outsider perspective is helpful to grasp it. The reason for this is that a view from outside is better equipped to see that “concepts such as imperialism, capitalism, the state apparatus, even the term class, which were developed in the analysis of European societies, fail to grasp the historically unique constellations” that have turned the U.S. into “an empire that bases its power (…) not [primarily] on the occupation of territory” but “on unique (…) forms of international dominance,” among them a persistent empowerment “of business and social elites by way of democratic legitimation” and the cultural transformation of “an egalitarian dream into a relentless race for individual recognition” (82). IV. I am rehearsing this argument not only to reiterate its lucid account of what both “Old” and “New” Americanists are missing about their object of study due to their stern and antagonistic focus on possibilities of resistance. 11 I am also rehearsing it to point out that Fluck’s reading brings out different sets of political assumptions on which these claims about American culture are based - about how this culture is involved in regulating who gets to participate in negotiating the shape of the world and based on what codes and conventions these negotiations take place. For the old guard, it was through its ties to “institutions like progressive political parties, or the labor unions, or the student movement, or simply the institution of art, that [held] a promise for resistance or negation” that this culture could stipulate political action and function as a bulwark against totalitarianism. For the revisionist, “the actual source of power [did] not lie in particular institutions but in culture and its processes of subject formation” (74); in other words, culture (read: aesthetics) was conceived as opposed to politics, and democratic ideals as a mere cover-up for racist and imperial politics. Fluck counters both of these views with his own, Tocquevillian 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 370 Laura Bieger 12 Fluck explore this dynamic in various essays. See especially “Reading for Recognition” (in this volume). 13 See, for instance, Voelz, “Wendungen des Neids.” 14 Where and how they meet is conditioned by the “distribution of the sensible,” Rancière’s term for a collective, practice-based and historically dynamic world-making operation that “determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience” in prefiguring who can appear and what claims can be made. This operation is aesthetic in the sense of being based on “a system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.” And while aesthetic practices are thus fundamental to “the delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,” they are emancipatory when they seek to define “what is common to the community” theory of American culture, which is based on the assumption that culture is a lived reality, and that what “democracy in America” (82) is emerged from within this culture rather than being defined by a fixed set of ideas that did not even exist when the historically specific and socially dynamic constellation that gave rise to this culture came into place. One striking dynamic that emerges from within this culture is a race for recognition born out of the idea of nominal equality and breeding its own forms of inequality as well as a dazzling cultural productivity geared toward feeding the hunger for recognition which is conditioning it rather increasing or even promoting actual equality. 12 As Johannes Voelz has shown in his recent work on the affective dimension of this dynamic, which is based on the same Tocquevillian premises, the structural paradox of equality vs. inequality can become a hazard to, as well as a remedy for U.S. democracy. 13 So yes, Tocque‐ villian premises can help us to better understand the conflicted and potentially corrosive dynamics engrained in the very fabric of democratic culture made in America. But as useful and compelling as I find the thought that lived experience defines the social and political work that the idea of equality performs within a specific cultural setting, with resilience possibly coming from the same source than structural conflict and potential self-destruction, the present crisis of democracy has compelled me to endorse stronger political claims - about equality as a premise of emancipatory politics that is fundamentally aesthetic. Jacques Rancière and Christoph Menke have recently made such claims, and it is with a nod to them that I want to close. For Rancière, “[e]quality is not a goal to be reached, but a point of departure that needs to be posited and verified.” Consequently, “[e]mancipation is not an ensemble of means that are geared toward realizing a promised quality, but an ensemble of practices that attempt here and now to refuse inegalitarian premises, to concretely refute them wherever inequality and equality meet one another” (“Vorwort” 21; my translation). 14 Similarly, for Menke, equality is “not as an assertion of fact, but 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 371 (“Politics” 13) based on the principle of verifying the political premise of equality. Rancière explores the emancipatory dimension of the aesthetic in The Emancipated Spectator, but he mostly focuses on “aesthetic regimes” that support different forms of governmentality. 15 Sontag, “Against interpretation” 14. as a presuppositional act: equality is a supposition we must make in advance” (13). Aesthetics is key to these emancipatory politics. Like the performance of inequality which is deeply engrained in modern democratic cultures as a motor force in the race for recognition that Alexis de Tocqueville so lucidly observed when visiting the U.S. soon after its founding, the verification of equality is an aesthetic procedure. Indeed, Menke makes a compelling case that there is no other way of producing evidence for it. Yet unlike the former, the aesthetic verification of equality transgresses social codes and conventions in the form-giving and form-defining interplay of sensual perception and critical reflection of social roles with the result of inventing new forms of collective action. In the charismatic circularity of Menke’s concluding remark: “In aesthetically transgressing our social existence we experience that we are equal. Political equality is an aesthetic effect. We make ourselves aesthetically equal; aesthetically, we make ourselves equal” (16). Riffing on Susan Sontag’s closing words of “Against Interpretation” with Menke in mind, in place of a hermeneutics of aesthetic premises, what we need right now is an erotics of political art. 15 Works Cited Bieger, Laura. “No Place Like Home; or, Dwelling in Narrative.” New Literary History 46.1 (2015): 17-39. Bieger, Laura, and Johannes Voelz. “Preface of the Editors.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 9-10. Fluck, Winfried. “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies).” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 69-85. ---. “Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsge‐ schichte.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 165-184. ---. “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 15-38. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 372 Laura Bieger ---. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans, 1790-1900. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Herme‐ neutik. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1960. James, William. “The Sentiment of Rationality.” William James: The Essential Writings. Ed. Bruce W. Wilshire. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. 25-38. Menke, Christoph. Aesthetics of Equality / Ästhetik der Gleichheit. 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 010. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions. Ed. David Wood and José Medida. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 7-14. Pease, Donald. “Re-thinking ‘American Studies’ after US Exceptionalism.” American Literary History 21.1 (Spring 2009): 19-27. Rancière, Jacques. “Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe.” An den Rändern des Politischen. Wien: Passagen, 2019. 11-21. ---. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2008. ---. The Politics of the Aesthetic: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum 2004. Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador: 2001. 3-14. Voelz, Johannes. “Wendungen des Neids: Tocqueville und Emerson zum Paradox einer demokratischen Leidenschaft.” WestEnd 2017/ 01: 141-154. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 373