Searching for “American Democratic Culture” Heinz Ickstadt It is hard to imagine that Winfried Fluck will be turning eighty in a few months. He has been a good friend for more than sixty years, and it was truly a privilege and a great intellectual benefit for me to know him - as a stimulating colleague, and an asset to Berlin’s John F. Kennedy-Institute where we both studied, where he wrote his dissertation as well as his habilitation, and to where he returned after a few years of professorship in Constance. As long as I remember, he seemed a young man to me. (Yes, dear Winny, we shall miss your youthful intellectual aggressiveness! ) Like all of Winfried Fluck’s writings, his recent essay “Narratives about American Democratic Culture,” is magisterial - an admirable challenge to established notions and a clarification of the issue under consideration. It seems to say: before I start my argument, let’s first clarify what it is we are talking about. This way, an attempt at finding a precise definition for a loosely used term (such as “democratic culture”) is turned into a major exploration of the concept in question when Fluck goes through its vague, if multiple, definitions, quietly discarding one by one. Thus, he makes clear where he stands in a chaos of terminological confusion - just as, in turn, the reader may become aware of his/ her own muddle-headedness when it comes to the matter of clear definitions. One cannot but admire his procedure: In patiently going through a broad variety of apparently established meanings, he stakes out the ground of discussion while establishing his intellectual authority by calmly putting his terminological cards on the table. His critical acumen comes especially to the fore when he deals with such heavily loaded concepts as “American democratic culture,” taken as the spe‐ cific expression of common American values. Fluck is averse to such general‐ izations/ idealizations which he easily identifies as part of the rhetoric of a somewhat naïve - if pervasive - American exceptionalism. “To call a cultural object ‘democratic’ is therefore not yet sufficient,” he argues. “Instead, critics should clarify what the democratic quality is that they have in mind. However, as a rule, they don’t, perhaps because it is more convenient not to be associated with any particular version of democracy. In not clarifying which one is meant, the critic can embrace them all and remain above the fray” (in this volume 440). Fluck’s essays, therefore, function as a kind of exorcism of the rhetoric of American exceptionalism - not only in the field of American studies (and its critical representatives), but in the rhetoric of his own/ old American-studies self. Thus, his interest is not only focused on the question of what this fascination with the idea of an American “democratic culture” might entail when it is seen as the cultural expression of an “exemplary democratic nation,” but what might be implied when it is made the focus of an academic discipline. Except that, as Fluck argues, American literature was not academically accepted in the name of democratic culture but - via the impact of D.H. Lawrence’s essays on American literature - in the name of “modernist culture, that is, as an art of double-coding and subtle negation.” As an example of modern literature, American literary texts were more academically acceptable than as part of “a democratic culture defined as vernacular culture. Thus[,] American studies of the post-War period made the romance the core of an American tradition that was praised, not for its expression of the democratic principle, but for its artful, double-coded critique of American myths” (432). But in the wake of a radical critique of modernism in the 1960s and after, the focus shifted once again from American literature as a modernist literature avant-la-lettre back to an emphasis on “the creativity of American democracy and its culture, often grounded in intellectual traditions like transcendentalism and pragmatism” (434). Nevertheless, the concept is used in confusingly dif‐ ferent ways since “democracy” means different things to different people. Fluck discusses several versions of the “democratic,” from Alexis de Tocqueville to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Dewey. Of these, he feels close to Tocqueville’s skepticism and, with some reser‐ vations, also to Mark Twain whose realism has affinity to his own critical temperament. In contrast, Walt Whitman’s intoxicated praise of self and de‐ mocracy as well as John Dewey’s democratic idealism are more foreign to him. Tocqueville understood that the arrival of democracy was historically inevitable (“the gradual progress of equality is something fated…”). He accepted its leveling effect but did so without enthusiasm. But if there is an acknowledged loss of individual freedom, there is also the gain of a broader leveling field where the craving for individual recognition can be more easily fulfilled. Here Tocqueville’s and Fluck’s notion of the inevitability of the leveling process and the opportunities it offers in “this frantic struggle for recognition” seem close. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 476 Heinz Ickstadt Yet it was, of course, Whitman who gave “democracy” a transcendent meaning - as a promise of fulfilment yet to be realized: The, at present, still unfulfilled state of American democracy will eventually give way to a glorious future. In fact, the greater the misery of present conditions, the greater the need for, and glory of, the coming fulfilment. This is the structure of a peculiarly American literary genre (that Sacvan Bercovitch called the “American Jeremiad” several decades ago) and whose archetype is Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, written against the materialist spirit of the Gilded Age to restore or maintain a spiritual vision of America. “With his exceptionalist enthusiasm, if not-selfintoxication, Whitman draws attention to a key problem in debates about American democratic culture, the wide chasm between theorized and actual democracy” (451). This double vision - of a dismal present and a glorious future - constitutes the core of American exceptionalism: the conviction that the essence of America is the promise of a more perfect democracy; a project, however, that still has to be realized collectively and whose very unfinishedness reenforces the promise. “[T]he disappointment about the chasm between theorized democracy and its reality version is overcome by a belief in American exceptionalism: because [if ? once? ] we know that America is exceptional, we can also be sure that it will eventually bridge the chasm” (452). Twain puts his trust in the common man to a test in his fictions, especially in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court - a test Twain’s hero fails since he cannot resist his “craving for recognition and self-aggrandizement” (455). “While Whitman happily celebrated himself,” Fluck argues, “Twain had enough good sense not to trust the Tom Sawyer in himself - and, by implication, also not the common man” (457). Whereas Fluck has some empathy for Twain’s disappointment with the state of American democracy, his sympathy for John Dewey, the “philosopher of democracy (Hans Joas),” is limited. “The charm of [Dewey’s] theory of democracy is that there is no need for finding answers for vexing problems like the division of power or voting right or the fairness of political representation.” Rather, it “is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished” (458). For Dewey, real democracy is achieved only when it has reached a state of “true community” and “social cooperation.” Accordingly, Fluck makes short shrift with Dewey’s essay “Creative Democracy,” which he seems to take as more evidence of Dewey’s exceptionalist interpretation of democracy (ignoring the fact Dewey’s argument pushes beyond national conditions, making democracy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 Searching for “American Democratic Culture” 477 1 In fact, Dewey’s essay is directed against the complacent belief in “democracy” as a functioning political system. Democracy has to be more than that in order to survive. It has to be a faith, a personal way of life. The essay was written in 1939, at a moment of great political crisis when democracy was in danger in Germany and elsewhere. the personal task of those who care for it because they depend on it, especially during a time, when its very existence seems to be in danger). 1 Curiously, Fluck defines the limits of Dewey’s theory of democracy via his own somewhat limited view of modernism. It is true that Dewey rejects abstract art because it is, for him, a form of specialization that contradicts his concept of democracy as a state of community (aesthetically based on the concept of mimesis). But modernism is not, in essence, equivalent to abstraction as Fluck seems to imply. There is a broad spectrum of modernist painting of which abstract art is only the most extreme form. American modernism, especially, was still committed to forms of representation - until it shed its mimetic commitment with the shift towards Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Accordingly, modernist aesthetics is only in part identical with “aesthetic experiences of negation or de-familiarization” (460). For Dewey, Fluck argues, “[i]t is the distinguishing mark of aesthetic expe‐ rience that it sees single elements, not as separate entities, but as part of a whole. This successful [aesthetic] integration of parts can become a metaphor for the successful integration of the individual into society, and, hence, for a fully achieved democracy” (460). But Dewey might also have assumed - as had William Carlos Williams and other American modernists - that modernist innovation was not confined to a historical period, but, like democracy itself, a continuous, evolutionary process. The same premise that made Dewey such a strong supporter of the idea of democracy also steers his aesthetic theory - and hence his view of democratic culture - into a particular direction that subsequently undermined its influence: if aesthetic experience is a supreme form of experience, then it must also be, by definition, an experience that supports growth and provides an experience of fulfilment - in contrast, for example, to aesthetic experiences of negation or de-familiarization and other aesthetic effects. (460) Of course, it could also mean that Dewey embraces a concept of modernism that is different from the European version that Fluck seems to have in mind. Subsequently, more important to his argument than Dewey are Jürgen Peper’s and Caroline Levine’s quite different, yet complementary, links between aesthetic experience and democratization, when they explore the democratizing potential of art. “Peper describes an inner-aesthetic logic of development, Levine 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 478 Heinz Ickstadt does not deal with the avant-garde in aesthetic terms but offers a sociological interpretation by describing it as a social institution” (465). What is the driving force behind “this process of de-hierarchization and its democratizing effect”? Not surprisingly, it is “a struggle for recognition,” as Fluck has argued previously in many of his publications. “(…) literary texts can articulate aspects of individual experience that are erased by broad social classifications, so that new dimen‐ sions of subjectivity can be revealed and normative accounts of what deserves recognition can be broadened. This process (…) is a driving force in an ongoing process of democratization and culture’s most important contribution to this process” (467). The essay thus also deals with narratives of legitimation for the field of American studies. According to Fluck, there are two of them that marked the new academic discipline: “on the one hand a narrative about America as the land of democracy, and, linked with it, a uniquely democratic culture, and, on the other hand, a narrative about American culture as shaped significantly by an aesthetic modernism avant la lettre that could give unexpected depth to American culture” (467). Fluck believes that the second narrative dominated American studies for a long time but now the field seems to return to the “democratic culture -narrative” of an earlier phase. But if, according to John Kouwenhoven, American democratic culture “is an ideal, not a political system and certainly not an actual state of affairs” (Kouwenhoven qtd. in Fluck 468), then, thus Fluck asks very much to the point, “to what extent can this provide a basis for the field? Is American studies supposed to be the studies of American ideals? ” (Fluck 468) Here, Fluck points to the problem of the “Hegelian” (but isn’t it rather: the Herderian? ) premise of the field: the search for the unifying principle in a (national) culture and of an academic field dedicated to that search. “Democracy could be such a unifying principle, but only as an idea, not as a description of the realities of American life. (…) The idea of democracy became an American ideal, and the conflation of democracy and America served to nourish an American exceptionalism that was part of the founding mythology of the field (…) American studies has become a form of American self-idealization” (469). Instead, it should have increased an awareness of how democracy has opened up possibilities for the “pursuit of recognition” - which, for Fluck, is at once the essence and the driving force of his own idea of democracy. Accordingly, he argues, one should stop talking about “American democratic culture” - a concept idealized and promoted by the academic field of American studies - but rather “describe the role of culture under democratic conditions” (470). The critic’s role should therefore be that of the hard-nosed realist aiming at disentangling 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 Searching for “American Democratic Culture” 479 the field - as well as himself - from this rhetorical network of idealization, questioning its influence wherever possible. And yet, one might hesitate to accept his definition of “democracy” as a mere matter of “democratic conditions,” i.e. as a leveling field that allows people to assert themselves in “this frantic struggle for recognition.” To my mind, the appeal of the concept of “democracy” lies precisely in the subjective dimension that Dewey emphasizes, and Fluck tries to eliminate. For him, emphasizing the subjective, would allow idealization to enter back into a debate that should stick to the objective. But even if it does enter, isn’t there value in its also being an incentive to be democratic, or to act democratically? Fluck would probably not accept this as a valid argument, since “incentive” implies an element of idealization he rejects. Yet doesn’t the realistic flatness of his own definition leave out everything that gives Dewey’s position some persuasiveness, especially at a time when the objective conditions of democracy have become endangered and in doubt? In other words, “democracy” has always been a promise of better things to come and a reality of failure; it is impossible to have one without the other. To replace the idea(l) of “democracy” with the reality of “democratic conditions” isn’t a solution either, since where will then the ideal come from when we need it? For it may well be that the idea(l) will be important as a resource to ensure the realization, or even the mere maintenance, of “democratic conditions.” (Which is, precisely, the purpose of Dewey’s “Creative Democracy.”) However, Fluck’s eagerness to undermine the ideology of “democracy” and its rhetoric might only be the other side of his fear of being affected by it. His collection of essays, Romance with America? (2009), gives evidence of how attractive the idea of “America” had been for a postwar generation of Germans that, looking for a country with a less guilt-ridden history, admired “America” only to be eventually disappointed by it. Therefore, an English colleague called the first generation of German postwar Americanists “brainwashed,” and although I found this offensive, I was aware of the element of truth that his statement contained. Fluck, also reacting to the postwar spell exerted by “America,” eventually tried to extricate himself from the rhetoric of American democratic idealism/ exceptionalism. In other words, he is one of the leading representatives of an academic field whose legitimacy he questions since he has become ever more conscious of its idealizing/ ideological function. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 480 Heinz Ickstadt