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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 34 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Ansgar Nünning · Donald E. Pease 34 Democratic Cultures and Populist Imaginaries Edited by Donald E. Pease All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. © 2019 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de · eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISBN 978-3-8233-8335-2 ISSN 0723-0338 Editors Tobias Döring , LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Winfried Fluck , Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Ansgar Nünning , Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D-35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease , English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) Contents Contributors � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � VII D onalD E. P EasE American Democracy, Populist Imaginaries, and Donald Trump� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1 W infriED f luck Narratives about American Democratic Culture � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom: Notes on John Dewey and Frederick Douglass � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 47 l aura B iEgEr Reading for Democracy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 65 c hristian P. h ainEs Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception, or, Exhaustion and Endurance in Russell Bank’s Continental Drift � � � � � � � � � � � � 79 f iorEnzo i uliano One, No One and a Multitude: The Narrative of Seattle 1999 and the Emergence of Populism� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 105 D onatElla i zzo “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” Leadership, Charisma, Expertise, and Other Superstitions� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 125 D onalD E. P EasE Trump: Populist Usurper President � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 145 s imon s chlEusEnEr The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control � � � � � � � � 175 J ohannEs V oElz Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 203 Contributors l aura B iEgEr is Professor of American Studies, Political Theory and Culture at the University of Groningen, where she co-directs the new Research Center for Democratic Culture and Politics� She is the author of Belonging and Narrative (2018), which considers the need to belong as a driving force of literary production and the novel as a primary place and home-making agent� In another book, Ästhetik der Immersion (2007), she examines public spaces from Washington DC to the Las Vegas Strip that turn world-image-relations into immersive spectacles� Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Narrative, Studies in American Naturalism, Amerikastudien/ American Studies and ZAA� In her current work she explores reading publics as a pillar of democratic life� D ustin B rEitEnWischEr is assistant professor of American Studies and postdoc researcher in the DFG Graduate School 1767 “Faktuales und fiktionales Erzählen” at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. A former Fulbright and Studienstiftung fellow, he is currently working on his second monograph provisionally titled “Creative Supremacy: Slavery and the Culturalization of Poetic Genius.” He is the author of Dazwischen: Spielräume ästhetischer Erfahrung in der US-amerikanischen Kunst und Literatur (Fink Verlag, 2018) and co-editor of Die neue amerikanische Fernsehserie (Fink Verlag, 2014), the EJAS special issue Truth or Post- Truth? —American Studies, American Philosophy, and Current Perspectives in Pragmatism and Hermeneutics [with Tobias Keiling; forthcoming], and the ZAA special issue How to Read the Literary Market [with Johannes Voelz; forthcoming]� W infriED f luck is Professor em� of American Culture at Freie Universität Berlin� He is a founding member and former director of the Graduate School for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and one of the co-directors of the “Futures of American Studies”-Institute at Dartmouth College� Recent publications include Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (2009), Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies, ed� with Donald Pease (2014), and American Studies Today. New Research Agendas, ed� with E� Redling, S� Sielke and H�Zapf (2014)� c hristian P. h ainEs is an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth College� His book, A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons, will be published by Fordham University Press in 2019� His work has appeared in journals including Criticism, Genre, Cultural Critique, and boundary 2, as well as in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics� He serves as a contributing editor for Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and is co-editor of a special issue of Cultural Critique, “What Comes After the Subject? ” He is currently researching a second book, The Scored Life, on financial abstraction and contemporary culture� f iorEnzo i uliano is Associate professor of American literature at the University of Cagliari� His research interests include contemporary American fiction, cultural studies and critical theory. He is currently writing a book on the cultural scene of Seattle in the 1990s� D onatElla i zzo is professor of American Literature at Università di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Italy. Her research fields include American literature, American Studies, literary theory, and comparative literature� She is the author of many scholarly essays and books, and is currently at work on a study of the political philosophy of crime and detection narratives in post-9/ 11 USA� D onalD E. P EasE is the Ted & Helen Geisel Professor of English and Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth� The author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context, The New American Exceptionalism, and Theodor Seuss Geisel; the editor or co-editor of 10 volumes including Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, Futures of American Studies, Re-Mapping the Trans-National Turn in American Studies, and American Studies as Transnational Practice; Pease is also the General Editor of the New Americanists book series at Duke University Press, Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies at Dartmouth College Press, and the Global Pivots book series at Palgrave� s imon s chlEusEnEr is a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies� Previously, he has taught at the University of Würzburg and at the Culture Department of the John-F�-Kennedy-Institute in Berlin� In 2012, he obtained his PhD with a thesis on the topic “Kulturelle Komplexität: Gilles Deleuze und die Kulturtheorie der Ameri-can Studies.” He has published texts on American literature, Hollywood Cinema, neoliberalism, affect politics, cultural theory, rightwing populism, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze� Current-ly, he pursues a postdoctoral project on the cultural and affective dimensions of neoliberalism� J ohannEs V oElz is Heisenberg Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-University, Frankfurt� He is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (UP New England, 2010), and The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018)� D onalD E. P EasE American Democracy, Populist Imaginaries, and Donald Trump The idea for this volume emerged two years ago during the electoral insurrections when voters across Europe and the United States elected populist candidates to express their intense dissatisfaction with long-standing political arrangements and institutions� Milestone events included the 2016 UK vote to secede from the EU, the drastic increase of support for France’s National Front, the insurgence of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in Italy, the decisive victory of the populist ANO party in the Czech Republic’s October 2017 parliamentary elections, the decision by leaders of right-center parties in the Netherlands and Austria to embrace the policies of the far-right to secure victories in the March 2017 Dutch and the October 2017 Austrian parliamentary elections, the mutation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s version of “illiberal democracy” into the template of governance for Poland’s Law and Justice party, the elevation of the reactionary Alternative für Deutschland into the Bundestag, and, perhaps most significantly for the contributors to this volume, the 2016 U�S� election of Donald Trump� At once a rational rejection of establishment politics and an emotional backlash to a collective sense of disenfranchisement, populism announced its power as a galvanizing political force through this series of electoral revolts� Until recently populism was almost exclusively linked to the radical right� In the 1960s, the American historian Richard Hofstsadter famously dismissed populism as expressive of “the paranoid style” of American politics. Hofstadter situated populism in a political constellation comprised solely of right-wing extremists like Father Coughlin, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and members of the John Birch Society� Hofstadter’s analysis might be resuscitated to explain why Britain’s UKIP, the French Front National, and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland are enjoying record popularity. “Paranoid style” also describes the populist agendas of the right-wing populists who have gained control of political power in Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Switzerland, and on 11/ 9/ 2016, the United States� But the left-wing populists in Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s Syriza party have discredited the belief that populist sentiments can be restricted to reactionary right-wing partisans� What is perhaps most anomalous about populism is that the label applies equally to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders� Casting the 2008 Great Recession, the threat of globalization, and international trade as seedbeds, the political theorists Jan-Werner Müller and John B� Judis have recently argued that the global rise of populism on the right and the left is a central fact of contemporary politics� Populism cannot be 2 D onalD E. P EasE restricted to any particular social class or ideological framework, members of every populist movement share the belief in the people’s right to exercise greater control over their government than do the political elites� Whereas political commentators like Hofstadter denounce populism as a threat to democracy tout court, however, Müller and Judis describe its resurgence as a corrective to political contradictions internal to liberal democracy. Both theorists define liberal democracy as a structure of governance that values popular sovereignty and majority rule but that aims to avoid the emergence of the tyranny of the majority through institutions - an independent judiciary, a free press, regulatory agencies - commissioned to guarantee fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and the protection of minorities� Populists on the right believe that the will of the people should trump minority rights as well as the liberal institutions that safeguard these rights� Populists on the left and the right believe that political elites have used liberal transnational institutions like the IMF, the World Bank to take important issues such as economic, monetary, and regulatory policies off the public agenda and assign them to agencies insulated from public scrutiny� At its core populism refers to the belief in the people’s right to exercise greater control over their government than do political elites� Populists divide society into two non-comparable and antagonistic factions “the commonsensical, right-minded people” and “the sophisticated, corrupt elite.” Mobilized by the conviction that direct action of the masses is the most effective political agency, populists aim to unite the uncorrupted people and against the corrupt elites� However, because populists on the right and the left embrace the democratic principles of popular sovereignty and majoritarian rule, they both must address the question, “Who are the people? ” When populists say “we,” what does “we” mean? Müller denounces as blatantly anti-democratic populists’ arrogation of the sole power to make good on democracy’s primary ideal of majoritarian rule� Since the chief purpose of democracy in all of its iterations presupposes pluralism, it follows, Müller argues, that populists who declare themselves a single, homogeneous, authentic people and who cast their political opponents as ‘enemies of the people’ have abrogated the responsibility to find amenable ways of living together as free, equal but also irreducibly diverse people� Judis concurs with Müller’s diagnosis of the anti-democratic tendencies of “the people” banded together in right-wing populism. However Judis draws a distinction between what he calls the “triadic” structure of right-wing populism and the dyadic structure of its left-wing iteration� Right-leaning populism is triadic in that it distinguishes “the people” from those perceived as political elites as well as from those groups perceived to be at the bottom of the social order who are included in the national community in the form of excluded minorities. Insofar as the “dyadic” composition of left-wing populism merely distinguishes “the people” from social and political elites, it can potentially include members of minority groups that right-wing populism American Democracy, Populist Imaginaries, and Donald Trump 3 constitutively excludes� Indeed by permitting the aggregation of demands of excluded minority groups, dyadic populism can also work as a corrective or what Ernesto Laclau calls a “democratization” of liberal democracy. These remarks suggest that U�S� populist movements cannot be understood apart from their relationships to American democratic cultures that they can either supplement, antagonize or, as in the recent example of Donald Trump, threaten to displace altogether� If that is the case, can the concept of American democratic culture that has historically distinguished the U�S� from other countries provide a framework for the interpretation and critique of contemporary American populisms? Have contemporary United States writers, artists and activists imagined modes of democratic sociality that constitute the precondition for yet are irreducible to extant populist imaginaries? How has the fracturing of the media infrastructure by which publics come into existence contributed to Donald Trump’s strain of populism? Do the modes of analysis devised to diagnose twentieth century populisms provide adequate frameworks to understand Trump’s movement? The disparate yet complementary perspectives from which its contributors engage these and related questions promise to enhance the explanatory potential of this volume of REAL� Works Cited Hofstadter, Richard� The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books� 2008� Judis, John B� The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports� 2016� Laclau, Ernesto� On Populist Reason� New York: Random House� 2018 Müller, Jan-Werner� What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press� 2016� W infriED f luck Narratives about American Democratic Culture I. When the pioneers of the American studies movement tried to develop an argument that would convince a hostile academic world of the need to study American literature and culture, they basically had two choices� One was to claim that American literature and culture merited special scholarly attention because, in contrast to the elitism of European culture, it could be seen as a manifestation of specifically American virtues, as a culture inspired and shaped by democratic conditions and ideals� For this argument, scholars like Constance Rourke had paved the way in the 1930s� Against those European as well as American critics who considered American culture inferior and who asked, often in exasperation, whether and when an authentic, uniquely American culture would finally emerge, Rourke answered that it had been there all the time, but that critics, in their erroneous equation of the idea of culture with European high culture, had failed to take any note of it� 1 In order to make up for this oversight, her work focused on a vernacular tradition in American culture, tracing, as Alan Trachtenberg has put it, “the intricate web of indebtedness of all the major writers from Emerson to Henry James, and contemporaries like Frost and even Eliot, to the bursting, lawless energies of everyday vernacular comedy in America” (4) - a vision of American culture as expression of common American values that found strong support in American culture of the Thirties and its focus on “the people.” 2 One way 1 Cf� Arthur Wertheim: “Constance Rourke’s historical essays during the Depression were devoted to discovering the roots of American culture� The seven volumes she published between 1927 and 1942 are closely linked to the intellectual climate of the 1930s, specifically to the themes of regionalism and nationalism in the arts and related fields, and her interest in the relationship of folk and popular culture to regional traditions led to the discovery of neglected aspects of Americana” (50). The most important of Rourke’s books are Trumpets of Jubilee (1927); American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931); Davy Crockett (1934); Charles Sheeler. Artist in the American Tradition (1938); The Roots of American Culture (1942)� As Robert Spiller wrote in a review of the latter, Rourke’s “theory provided an explanation of national character, which freed it from (…) a formal aesthetic tradition. (…) Her hope was to discover and define a distinctive American aesthetic, however crude, as the expression of an emerging American national character” (66). 2 It is still echoed in the central role that the term vernacular culture played in the work of critics like Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx in the Fifties� See Leo Marx, “The Vernacular Tradition in American Literature,” and Henry Nash Smith’s book Mark Twain� The Development of a Writer� Twain played a key role for both, Smith and Marx, 6 W infriED f luck to create a culture of national self-recognition that would give expression to America’s best values was to turn to American democracy as a way of life and to focus on vernacular forms of culture in which common people would recognize their own voice and their own values� As Philip Gleason has shown in his discussion of the founding years of American studies, World War II played an important role in strengthening that argument by putting the idea of democracy at the center of American national identity� So strong was this phase of a “democratic revival” (349) that “America as a practical instance of democracy came to be equated with the abstract ideal of democracy” (353). America was the exemplary democratic nation and hence, in order to fully understand and appreciate the power of its ideals and values, one had to focus on its democratic culture� However, in the attempts to legitimize a special focus on the study of American literature and culture, the democratic culture-narrative was eventually displaced by another line of argumentation that may be called the American Renaissance-narrative� This narrative focused on a body of American authors of the Romantic period which F�O� Matthiessen had put at the center of American literary history in his study American Renaissance. 3 This shift from democratic culture to American romanticism raises the interesting question why the writers of the American Renaissance were considered more useful for the academic legitimization of American literary studies than the democratic tradition� I can think of two reasons� One is that a democratic culture defined as vernacular tradition was, aesthetically speaking, not a very imposing form of culture and hence, perhaps with the exception of Mark Twain, not very well suited to counter the reservations of skeptical Ivy League English-departments� The standards of cultural achievement and aesthetic value that had gained dominance in academia after World War II were those of formalism and aesthetic modernism, and vernacular culture because, of all major American writers, he came closest to vernacular culture� - In his study The Beer Can By the Highway. What’s American About America, John Kouwenhoven develops a theory of American culture based on the idea of a vernacular culture� See also his study The Arts in Modern American Civilization in which he aims to identify the arts that are truly representative of American civilization and finds them, preferably, in “Stone, Steel, and Jazz,” as one of his main chapters is entitled. As he makes clear in the chapter “What is Vernacular? ” Kouwenhoven uses the term vernacular to draw attention above all to American technological design� For a discussion of the continuing importance of the concept of the vernacular for a theory of American literature see also Sieglinde Lemke’s study The Vernacular Matters of American Literature. 3 Matthiessen’s study marks a key moment of transition from the one narrative to the other. On the one hand, Matthiessen claims that the five authors he studies have one common denominator, their devotion to the possibilities of democracy� On the other hand, however, his own analyses hardly highlight this aspect: “My aim has been to follow these books through their implications, to observe them as the culmination of their authors’ talents, to assess them in relation to one another and to the drift of our literature since, and, so far as possible, to evaluate them in accordance with the enduring requirements for great art� That last aim will seem to many only a pious phrase, but it describes the critic’s chief responsibility� His obligation is to examine an author’s resources of language and of genres, in a word, to be preoccupied with form” (xi). Narratives about American Democratic Culture 7 of the Rourke-kind fell notably short of those standards� You probably have to live in a small town, as Rourke did, to counter high-brow reservations about American culture with Davy Crockett� The American Renaissance writers, on the other hand, were far better suited to meet the aesthetic criteria derived from modernism� At least this is the case, if one reads them from the point of view that D�H� Lawrence had introduced into the study of American literature in his book Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923. In his brief foreword, Lawrence turned all conventional wisdom about American literature and culture on its head by arguing that some American writers of the nineteenth-century are really the most radical of modern writers, true modernists avant la lettre� His bold claim is worth being quoted at length, because, unwittingly, it provided a key argument for post-World War II American studies: Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American� Russian and American� And by American I do not mean Sherwood Anderson, who is so Russian� I mean the old people, little thin volumes of Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman� These seem to me to have reached a verge, as the more voluminous Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov reached a limit on the other side� The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached� The European moderns are all trying to be extreme� The great Americans I mention just were it� Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them to-day� The great difference between the extreme Russians and the extreme Americans lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit and hate eloquence and symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning� (viii) 4 Matthiessen may have put American romanticism at the center of American literary studies, but he had not provided an interpretive model� Lawrence, on the other hand, suggested a method of reading that became dominant in the 1950s� 5 His argument is ingenious� What he manages to do with it is to redefine an American literature long considered provincial as a modern literature in the mode of a literature of subversion and negation� This claim depends on the premise of a double structure, and in effect, in retrospect, one may 4 Cushing Strout draws attention to an argument by W.H. Auden that influenced Lawrence strongly: “I first set out on literary studies very much under the influence of Tocqueville’s literary prophesies� I was led to them by W�H� Auden’s long poem New Year Letter. One of his notes strongly impressed me� ‘The American literary tradition,’ it ran, ‘Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, T�S� Eliot, is much nearer to Dostoievsky than to Tolstoi� It is a literature of lonely people� Most American books might well start like Moby Dick, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Most American novels are parables, their settings even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomania” (144-145). The French may have transformed Hollywood movies into a “classical cinema” and elevated American hard-boiled fiction to pulp modernism, but some English writers proved amazingly perceptive about the future canon of American literature� 5 For a helpful discussion of the impact of D�H� Lawrence on American literary studies see Michael J� Colacurcio, “The Symbolic and the Symptomatic: D�H� Lawrence in Recent American Criticism.” 8 W infriED f luck argue that almost all major studies written in the post-war founding period of American studies, characterized as myth and symbol school, are based on this methodological premise� 6 In each case, the interpretation of American literature and culture aims at the recovery of a covert level of meaning that undermines the surface level in a stance of negation, reenacting Melville’s famous “No! in Thunder” in defiance of a naively and uncritically optimistic view of “America.” Seen this way, what Lawrence calls classic American literature becomes almost an allegory of critical theories of modernity and an aesthetics of negation: One level, the textual surface seems to reflect, in its bland optimism and lack of a critical attitude, the instrumentalization of reason in modernity, while a second, underlying level of meaning provides a resource - in fact, the only remaining resource - for negating this naïve version of progress� The often forced ways in which this negating potential was established in interpretations by the myth and symbol school can then be seen as an almost willful act of resignification, saying in fact: If we want to make a strong case for the study of American literature, then we have to find a way to describe it, not as democratic culture, but as modernist culture, that is, as an art of double-coding and subtle negation� As Leo Marx puts it in the afterword to a re-edition of The Machine in the Garden: “Nevertheless, The Machine in the Garden emphasizes a fundamental divide in American culture and society. It separates the popular affirmation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites, and the disaffected, often adversarial viewpoint of a minority of political radicals, writers, artists, clergymen, and independent intellectuals” (383). As Lawrence had suggested, the literary form that makes this double meaning possible is the symbol as a mode of representation that transcends any crude literalism� The symbol is inherently ambiguous, often an attempt to express the unsayable, perhaps even the unconscious� In reaction to the Thirties and its strong preference for realism, the symbol was rediscovered in the post-War period as a distinct feature of the language of literature, as something that provided literature with an aesthetic dimension of its own, complicated naively mimetic views of literary representation and prevented it from being instrumentalized as merely a political statement� 7 In their 6 On the central role of the idea of a double structure in the study of American literature, see my analysis in “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies” and in Theorien amerikanischer Literatur� 7 This explains the openly hostile attitude toward American popular culture in that generation, which, in taking another cue from critical theories of modernity, was rejected as “mass culture.” This rejection created a problem, however, with regards to a third strategy of legitimation, that of presenting American studies as a new, interdisciplinary method of cultural analysis focusing on American culture as a whole� The first attacks on the myth and symbol school within American studies therefore were methodological and not political, focusing on the apparent contradiction of an approach that claims to study American culture comprehensively and yet continues to regard high art as key document for an understanding of this culture� This challenge led to a crisis of self-definition and, eventually, to a shift in legitimation from modernist to methodological arguments� The debate - and what is at stake in it - is well Narratives about American Democratic Culture 9 search for a source of value beneath a corrupt Western civilization, modernist texts like T�S� Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses had emphasized myth and symbol as universal patterns of meaning, linking modern and pre-historic art� 8 In contrast to forms like realism or popular culture, this symbolism, transcending the limitations of Western rationalism, was “deep,” and an American literature that was organized along similar lines could thus gain the status of high art� Hawthorne and Melville moved to the center of the American canon, and the genre of the metaphysical romance with its intricate ambiguities became the American genre par excellence, the supreme embodiment of an American modernism avant la lettre� This elevation of American literature to the level of modern art provided a much better ground for justifying a special focus on American literature than 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� The myth and symbol school’s tacit reliance on a critical theory of modernity implies a particular view of American society and the role culture is supposed to play in it� In the democratic culture-argument, America is a pioneer country of democracy and hence a world-wide leader of a democratization process that is far ahead of European developments� In the American Renaissance-narrative, the view of America is that of a materialistic civilization, exemplifying some of the worst tendencies of modernity, and therefore only an art of negation or a strategy of double-coding can offer some kind of resistance� Virgin Land, the founding text of American studies, is already on the way from the vernacular tradition to a reconceptualization of literature as myth, but the following books by Charles Feidelson, R�W� B� Lewis, Richard Chase, Harry Levin, Leslie Fiedler, Leo Marx and Richard Poirier, the most important studies of American literature in the Fifties and early Sixties, moved the study of American literature from the democratic to the American Renaissance-paradigm� 9 Politically, this position may be defined as left liberal. It criticizes the naïve, self-congratulatory dimension of American liberalism and its undisputed belief in progress, but hopes that an interpretive skepticism about summarized in Leo Marx’s essay “American Studies - A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” which, despite the methodological emphasis of its title, is really a defense of, and a plea for, a continued focus of American studies on high art� 8 Important inspirations were provided by a number of influential “myth and symbol” studies like Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance; James Frazer’s The Golden Bough; Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces; in philosophy Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms and Susanne Langer’s popularization Philosophy in a New Key. 9 Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (1953); R�W�B� Lewis, The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth-Century (1955); Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness. Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964); Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere. The Place of Style in American Literature (1966). 10 W infriED f luck American “myths” may have the potential for increasing national self-reflexivity� However, when the new social movements emerged in the Sixties, this left liberalism was criticized for still believing in the idea of “America,” despite its own critical claims� This is a moment when the political Left, including left liberals, for whom aesthetic negation is still a strategy of resistance, is displaced by a cultural Left that considers dissent part of a ritual of consensus that merely stabilizes the system� Accordingly, modernity takes on a different meaning� In aesthetic modernism, there are still two versions of modernity, that of instrumental rationality and that of its negation by modern art� Now there is only one modernity left and it is all-encompassing in its reach� In aesthetic modernism’s version of modernity, there are conformists and non-conforming nay-sayers; now, even the nay-sayers are not merely complicit but colonizers in their own subtle, cunning, and often powerful ways� In the hermeneutics of suspicion that has dominated American literary studies over the last decades, phenomena like racism or sexism are no longer a dark underside of modernity but describe its very nature� In the context of this radical redefinition of modernity, a justification of the study of American literature can no longer be based on the claim that it offers a unique, especially interesting version of aesthetic modernism that cunningly undermines American myths� What other options are there, however, if one does not want to follow the radicalism of the cultural Left and its hermeneutics of suspicion all the way? Would it make sense, under these circumstances, to go back to the concept that had been left behind, that of a democratic culture? After all, the United States has been the standard bearer of democratic values in world history. As the influential political theorist and founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, put it in 1909, the United States is thus seen as the land of democracy with good reason, as a nation “committed to the realization of the democratic ideal“ (Keyssar ix)� 10 Basing our understanding of American culture on a value that has historically distinguished the U�S� from other countries would hold the promise of getting closer to the principles and values that have shaped America decisively and have given it a unique, if not exceptional role in history� Can such a focus counter the critique of America that has taken hold in American literary studies in the aftermath of the Sixties? Judging from the persistent re-emergence of the terms democracy and democratic culture in recent literary and cultural criticism, this is what some critics seem to have in mind; in fact, as we will see, the concept of a democratic culture and the claim that it is the representative American culture after all, has never gone away and has been kept alive by critics who do not see the unique potential of American culture in a culture 10 A typical version of an argument that is presented in many variants is provided by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua who claims in his essay “Democracy and the Novel” that for Americans democracy is “the very skin of their body,” because “the United States is the only nation in the world whose national identity is almost genetically related to democracy� Its national independence was forged at birth within the world of democratic presuppositions (…) Democracy is the only undisputed trademark of the American heritage” (Yehoshua 42-43). Narratives about American Democratic Culture 11 of negation or a radical political critique but in an - not necessarily uncritical - focus on the creativity of American democracy and its culture, often grounded in intellectual traditions like transcendentalism or pragmatism� 11 In the following essay I therefore want to take up the question again of how a democratic culture may be defined and whether - and to what extent - the concept can provide a conceptual basis for the study of American literature and culture� The argument will be presented in three main parts� The first part provides an overview of the many, often contradictory ways in which the concept of a democratic culture has been used in American literary and cultural criticism� Since this historical overview cannot provide a common ground for discussion, because of the very different uses made of the term ‘democratic,’ the second part will try to approach the problem in a more systematic fashion and focus on four influential theories and expressions of democratic culture� Responding to the limitations of these theoretical positions, the third part will propose a different perspective� In my conclusion the question of the relation between the concept of a democratic culture and the realities of American democracy will be one of the topics to be discussed� II. What exactly do critics mean when they use terms like democracy and democratic culture? Often, these terms are used as if their meaning and value would be self-evident, so that no further clarification is needed. In fact, the assumption of a common consensus may be part of the usefulness of the terms in the current intellectual climate: the word democracy seems to be one of the few remaining terms on whose value critics can still agree in times of postmodern relativism and philosophical anti-foundationalism� Democracy is where liberals and radicals, even conservatives, can still meet� And since democratic conditions will inevitably shape culture, one can expect to find the democratic principle pervading American culture� Thus, one of the most promising prospects of the term democratic culture lies in its suggestion that in studying it we are getting closer to the real meaning of America� As Philip Gleason and Leila Zenderland have pointed out in surveys of the development of American studies in the post-World War II period, many universities therefore “explained their new postwar American studies programs in the very language of the democratic revival” (Zenderland 277). 12 To study American democratic culture promised to provide a key to understanding America and to study America one of the best ways to engage in a support of democracy� 11 See, for example, Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, a critique of the cultural Left drawing on Walt Whitman and John Dewey as the main inspiration� In his Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle, Heinz Ickstadt describes the democratic principle as the distinguishing trait of American society and makes it the theoretical basis of his view of America and American literature� 12 Cf. Philip Gleason, “World War II and the Development of American Studies” and Leila Zenderland, “Constructing American Studies� Culture, Identity, and the Expansion of the Humanities.” 12 W infriED f luck But what exactly is democratic culture? Is it everything that is produced in a democracy as Tocqueville would have it? Or should we restrict the use of the term to those cultural forms that embody democratic values and ideals, as Walt Whitman would argue emphatically? And if the latter is the case, what is the contribution culture can make? A good starting point may be to take a look at what American cultural and literary criticism has highlighted as models or examples of American democratic culture� Even a quick, cursory glance reveals an amazing range of possibilities� On one end of the spectrum, the term is used for characterizing specific media in toto or entire taste cultures, no matter what their - possibly reactionary - content matter may be, for example when Garth Jowett calls film the democratic art or Jim Cullen entitles his survey of American popular culture “The Democratic Art.” Such sweeping definitions are not restricted to the mass media or popular culture, however. In his essay “Modern Democracy and the Novel,” A�B� Yehoshua describes the novel, starting with Don Quichote, as inherently democratic: “one finds the novel the most accommodating to a democratic perspective and reflecting in its flexibility and open structure some basic democratic principles� Perhaps, one can add, somewhat boastfully, the novel, more than any other artistic form, has encouraged and supported the democratic revolutions of modern times” (Yehoshua 45). One of the reasons is a greater degree of reader participation that the novel makes possible, “hence the relation of the author to the reader is more democratic” (47). However, reader positioning can vary, depending on author, genre, and period� Heinz Ickstadt thus shifts claims of the novel’s democratic potential to American classical realism where the narrator, in contrast to the historical novel, retreats, and reader participation is encouraged� Not the novel in general, but the realistic novel can thus be seen to come closest to Howells’s hope “that the fruits of the Enlightenment would finally ripen to the genuine cultural expression of realized Democracy” (Ickstadt 1979, 82). In his influential book Culture and Democracy, Horace Kallen argues that democracy “involves, not the elimination of difference, but the perfection and conservation of differences” (61). This is not something that the culturally still fairly homogeneous classical American realism can deliver, however, but multiculturalism can: “It involves a give and take between radically different types, and a mutual respect and mutual cooperation based on mutual understanding” (61) - not necessarily something America has already achieved but something that is one of its democratic promises� But it is in the 1930s that democratic art seems to have come into its own� For Ickstadt, the New Deal project of a public art brings to fruition “a concept of democratic art which runs through the history of American self-expression from Whitman to the democratic realism of William Dean Howells to the Progressive Era” (Ickstadt 1992, 277). At its heart was a populism that responded to the Depression with a narrative in which elites have usurped the power of the people and a regeneration of American society can only be achieved by the spirit of the people� Frank Capra’s 1930’s movies about smalltown heroes in the Lincoln mold, played by James Stewart or Gary Cooper, Narratives about American Democratic Culture 13 can be seen as a forceful reassertion of democratic ideals from a populist perspective� Capra was a political conservative, however, as was a painter like Edward Hopper: “Hopper’s belief in freedom and self-expression links his work to the democratic tradition� (…) Although his work is not usually discussed from the standpoint of politics and democracy, his focus on the common man links him to the values of democracy” (Levin 75). 13 This is a focus he shared with regionalist painters of the period and photographers who put „the dignity of labour and of the working-man, the dignity of the common people“ (Ickstadt 1987, 226) at the center of their visual representations� After World War II, views of Thirties-culture changed, and so did views of what constitutes democratic culture: what had been considered a forceful, authentic representation of the common man was now seen as sentimental populism that had tried to put culture in the service of a New Deal ideology� This - modernistically inspired - fear of a political instrumentalization of art led to a shift to an anti-representational aesthetic� Form and structure replaced content as the main source of meaning - which meant that the aesthetic value of art could no longer be determined by progressive political representations of the people� For narratives about American democratic culture this posed a challenge: they, too, had to locate the democratic principle of cultural forms in structural elements� This worked well in the case of jazz� For Stanley Crouch “jazz (…) reflects the very essence of our constitutional democracy,” because “there has never been a music in the Western world that allowed for so much improvisation on the part of so many” (7, 144). John Kouwenhoven agrees about the democratic qualities of jazz, but for different reasons� In his programmatically entitled book The Beer Can By the Highway, he focuses on objects that strike him as specifically American and that are, as Ralph Ellison puts it in a foreword, “democratically available to even the commonest of common citizens” (Ellison ii). The Manhattan skyline and the constitution, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Mark Twain’s writings, but also jazz and comic strips, and even assembly-line production and chewing gum are part of Kouwenhoven’s list - objects whose common denominator is not communal creativity but an open-ended, dehierarchized processual structure which for Kouwenhoven is also the idea that informs democracy - “the idea that there are no fixed or determinable limits to the capacities of any individual human being; and that all are entitled, by inalienable right, to equal opportunities to develop their potentialities” (Kouwenhoven 226). The shift from truthful representations of democratic conditions and ideals to “democratic structures” also proved immensely helpful in discussions of postmodernism� In an essay on “Postmodernism as a Democratic Aesthetic” Paul Cantor argues that at first blush “postmodern art seems to 13 Ironically, “Hopper and his wife (the painter Josephine Nuvision Hopper) disliked President Franklin Roosevelt� Hopper disapproved of the New Deal relief programs, including the WPA, which he believed would only encourage mediocrity� (…) The Hoppers believed that President was trying to make the United States a dictatorship” (Levin 77)� Other painters mentioned in this context are the precisionists Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler because of their paintings of mundane everyday objects� 14 W infriED f luck be elitist in nature, often obscure, esoteric, incomprehensible to the majority of people, seemingly out of touch with popular taste,” but that in fact it is a “democratic form of art” and that “it is therefore no accident that the movement has flourished most fully in the United States” (Cantor 173). 14 The more consistently the democratic principle is located in structure and not in politically progressive representations, the easier it is to argue that experimental avant-garde literature can become an exemplary version of American democratic culture: “Coming at the end of history, postmodernism is the democratic art form, for it denies that any form of art can truthfully represent reality, thereby making all aesthetic points of contention effectively moot and proclaiming the equality of all artistic styles” (Cantor 178). For Kouwenhoven and Crouch, democratic culture is constituted by openended processes, Cantor and other postmodernist critics think of a culture of radical dehierarchization� But Charles Hersch, who sees himself as member of a generation that grew up with Vietnam, brings the discussion back to a different definition of progressive politics, when, in his study Democratic Artworks, he defines democratic artworks as works “that support democracy” (2): “Through my examination of art and criticism from the fifties and sixties I show that politically engaged artworks can embody complex political ideas and support democracy by educating citizens” (3). One example is jazz that provides models of an egalitarian community, another example is Bob Dylan who “used folk music to unmask political deception and celebrate authenticity” (9). Sixties’ culture is especially useful for Hersch, because “what gives artworks a unique capacity for democratic political education is their engagement of the senses” (11). Hersch’s book offers by no means a throwback to a naïve politicization in the mode of the Thirties� Rather, it draws attention to an interdependence that we have already emphasized at an earlier point: whatever a critic’s view of democratic culture is, will depend on what his understanding of democracy is� The view of democracy that shapes large parts of Thirties-culture is that of a sentimental populism, the postmodern view is that of a radical structural egalitarianism that comes close to libertarian views� In contrast, Hersch takes his point of departure from a commitment to the idea of a participatory democracy and from the perspective of this premise, his inclusion of a singer like Bob Dylan makes perfect sense, because music, including Dylan’s, “contributed to the participatory, experiential politics of the sixties” (11)� “Because of its communal nature and its effect on the body and even the unconscious, then, music was more suited to the participatory nature of politics in the sixties” (12). At one time or another, it seems, terms like democratic culture or democratic aesthetics have been applied to almost every object or phenomenon in American culture - the mass media, film, popular culture, the novel, vernacular forms in writing and painting, Whitmanesque romanticism, realism, but also modernism, postmodernism, Thirties culture and Sixties culture, jazz, 14 As others would argue this process of dehierarchization already begins in modernism with writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 15 skyscrapers, multiculturalism, literature, films, and photographs about “the people.” One could add populist melodramas like the sensationalist novels of George Lippard, but also an anti-intellectual culture of immediate corporeality like rap music. Is there any way of making sense of this sprawling abundance? One obvious explanation is that democracy means different things to different people� Consequently, they can hold very different views on what the distinguishing marks are that make a cultural form “democratic.” The key terms here are access, structure, dehierarchization, and democratic ideals� For some critics, democratic culture is a matter of popular access, for others of democratic structures of representation, for still others of an aesthetic subversion of hierarchies, and for still others of democratic convictions� In each case different forms and practices become exemplary: 1) Access: some consider mass media like film or popular culture as exemplary forms of democratic culture, because they facilitate the consumption and comprehension of culture� Eliminating elitist barriers in culture can be seen as a democratic breakthrough� 2) Structure: another approach focuses, not on the question of access, but on aesthetic form; it calls those forms democratic that are organized by dehierarchized, open-ended processual structures in which no single element is a privileged carrier of meaning, as, for example, in the experimental literature of postmodernism� What others see as another chapter in the history of avant-garde elitism, can thus be reconceptualized as democratic culture� 3) Dehierarchization: a broader version of this form-focused approach sees the concept of democratic culture in the larger context of an ongoing historical process, starting way before the arrival of modern democracies, in which claims of religious, political, social, intellectual, and aesthetic authorities have been undermined by ever new aesthetic challenges� 4) Democratic Ideals: some critics want to narrow down uses of the term democratic culture to those cultural forms that are openly supporting democratic values, as New Deal culture often did, for example� In each of these cases, democratic culture can mean something entirely different: undermining the authority of high culture, of oppressive forms of order, of the dominant symbolic system, and of elite rule� At this point one could argue that democratic culture can indeed be many things and that its many differences do not matter as long as they are all democratic� But these different views of democratic culture can easily collide� Defining democratic culture by access could mean, for example, to include forms of popular culture or the mass media such as the film The Birth of a Nation, and indeed, for a long time, critics focused on the film’s pioneer contributions to the development of film language that made movies easier to understand for a broad public� However, from the perspective of democratic ideals, the film is, above all, blatantly racist and anti-democratic in its depiction of Reconstruction� From the perspective of access, but also from that of democratic values, experimental postmodernism does not look democratic at all in its hard-to-understand avant-garde aesthetic, whereas, on the other hand, from the perspective of “structural” democratic culture realistic forms of representation or the New Deal culture of the Thirties impose artificial systems 16 W infriED f luck of order that undermine egalitarian goals� From the perspective of a history of dehierarchization, New Deal culture looks aesthetically retrograde and does not fit into a story of aesthetic democratization, while from the democratic ideals perspective, forms of aesthetic dehierarchization can be conservative, if not reactionary, as modernism has shown repeatedly� To call a cultural object “democratic” is therefore not yet sufficient. 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� How is it possible that democracy as a word familiar to all of us and valued widely can lead to so many different narratives? The answer, quite simply, is that contrary to the intuition from which this section took its point of departure - that we all seem to know what democracy is and that we therefore all refer to the same thing in discussing it - there is not just one, but there are a number of very different concepts of democracy in circulation� To be sure, the central idea of democracy is a promise of equality� But even if we agree to see democracy’s common denominator in a politics of equality, the problem of conflicting meanings remains, because equality, too, is not a term with a stable, self-evident meaning; it, too, can take on very different meanings, ranging from equality of rights, of rank, of equal opportunity and equal recognition to communal values like cooperation, citizen participation and universal values like the dignity of all men� In fact, one may distinguish different versions of democracy by how they conceive of equality� Calling the mass media and popular culture democratic implies a view of democracy as a system of formalized rights to which everybody is equally entitled� Narratives of democratic culture that are based on criteria of equal access therefore imply a liberal democracy in which equality is guaranteed by constitutional rights� In populist versions, equality, although it may be formally guaranteed, has to be wrested from the elites and regained for the people; its standard narrative is that of a betrayal of the promise of equality and of a heroic struggle to regain it� Not access per se is what counts, only certain plots have democratic meaning� Where critics have described classical American realism as democratic, they draw on models of deliberative democracy: whereas populist forms see democracy as a realm of conflict and heroic struggle, realism wants to bridge the gulf between groups and classes through processes of communicative interaction� Deliberative democracy is still based on the authority of the better argument, however, it differentiates between reasonable and unreasonable argumentation, whereas in participatory democracy, evoked by Hersch in the version of Sixties-Culture, equality means that all groups should get their equal share of acceptance, as the new social movements argue� But even these movements can exclude groups, the most equal condition would thus be a state in which individuals and single elements of a text are freed from all arbitrary hierarchies and forms of order - Narratives about American Democratic Culture 17 which is a version to be found in postmodernism and other experimental forms that can go in the direction of libertarianism in their radical vision of a freedom unfettered by any rules� What explains the plurality of narratives about democratic culture, then, is that these narratives are grounded, though rarely explicitly, in a range of different concepts of democracy - liberal, populist, deliberative, participatory, libertarian, one might also add direct democracy - all of which have their own characteristic cultural manifestations� And again, these different concepts of democracy and democratic culture cannot easily be reconciled with each other� From the perspective of participatory democracy, a liberal democracy is not sufficiently democratic, in fact, it illustrates what is wrong with America: a promise of equality that remains abstract and protects established hierarchies of power� From the perspective of a deliberative democracy, the quasi libertarian views of structural democratic culture would be a threat to democracy, because they work against a spirit of cooperation and undermine community� Liberal democracy criticizes participatory democracy for creating new inequalities, as, for example, in calls for affirmative action� Populist democracy rejects high culture as elitist, while, on the other hand, the high-brow experiments of the avant-garde in structural democratic culture are boasting of their radical egalitarianism� I am sure that one could fill a whole book on these contrasting conceptualizations, their different cultural manifestations, and their many contradictions� The major problem with narratives about American democratic culture so far has been that they almost always evade the question what kind of democracy they have in mind and instead prefer to hide behind the authority of empty signifiers like the democratic principle or “the people.” Used this way, the term is wonderfully convenient: it evokes positive values like equality but does not have to say which one� What if we turn to theory instead, that is, look at more systematic conceptualizations of American democratic culture? I will call these conceptualizations narratives, because in their attempt to define American democracy and its manifestations in American culture, they are telling very different stories about democratic America� To make the topic manageable within the context of this essay, the discussion will have to restrict itself to what I consider some of the most important and influential descriptions and expressions of American democratic culture: Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Dewey� Taken together, these four different narratives represent four divergent ways in which American democratic culture has been discussed in the larger context of American studies� The question that emerges, then, is whether and to what extent these narratives can provide a basis and convincing legitimation for putting the study of American democratic culture at the center of American studies� 18 W infriED f luck III. Despite the fact that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is still widely considered, as Harvey Mansfield puts it in his introduction to yet another recent edition, “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America,” (xvii) Tocqueville was a reluctant advocate of the new political system� He did not see himself as “an advocate of such form of government” (18), but he regarded the progress of democracy as irresistible, so that one had to come to terms with it and understand its advantages and disadvantages. As he says in the introduction: ”I admit that I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom” (19). As is well known, for Tocqueville the distinguishing feature of democracy is equality, as the famous first sentence of the book makes clear: “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay here than the equality of conditions” (11). But Tocqueville is by no means enthusiastic about the prospect of equality, because he sees it as a threat to what for him is a higher value, namely freedom� This explains the often referred-to chapter on the “tyranny of the majority” that became a favorite reference point for American cultural critics after World War II who voiced dire warnings about the dangers of conformity, mass society, and other-directedness� But it also explains the Foucault-like passage quoted by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment that in a democracy power no longer reaches its goals by punishing the body but by going directly at the soul: “Under the absolute government of one, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul� The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us” (244). Tocqueville considered the arrival of democracy as the result of an irresistible and inevitable historical process. Why inevitable? Tocqueville’s reasons are given in a section of the book to which readers usually do not pay much attention, the author’s introduction� The reason why the progress of democracy is inevitable, is explained by his philosophy of history, a grand narrative about the course of history, that may look, at first blush, as if it were inspired by enlightenment narratives about the progress of civilizations but, at a closer look, shows a significant departure. To be sure, the story Tocqueville tells is one of a slow but steady advancement of equality, starting in the Middle Ages, but the forces that drive this process are by no means restricted to familiar enlightenment actors� It is not a gradual unfolding of reason, nor an ingrained longing for freedom, as the democratic narrative usually has it, that leads to a struggle for equality, but, paradoxically, often the very mechanisms of maintaining power: “In France,” Tocqueville writes Narratives about American Democratic Culture 19 for example, “the kings proved the most active and consistent of levelers” (10). Even adversaries of democracy cannot but contribute to its advancement: “As soon as citizens began to hold land otherwise than by feudal tenure, and the newly discovered possibilities of personal property could also lead to influence and power, every invention in the arts and every improvement in trade and industry created fresh elements tending toward equality among men� Henceforward every new invention, every new need occasioned thereby, and every new desire craving satisfaction were steps towards a general leveling� The taste for luxury, the love of war, the dominion of fashion, all the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart, seemed to work together to impoverish the rich and enrich the poor” (10-11). Seen this way, there is indeed, as Tocqueville argues, “hardly an important event in the last seven hundred years which has not turned out to be advantageous for equality” (11). In this history, America could become a pioneer nation of equality, not because of a hardy band of non-conformist freedom fighters who were driven by a vision to make America a shining city upon a hill, but, because “once discovered, (it) opened a thousand new roads to fortune and gave any obscure adventurer the chance of wealth and power” (11). This fits Tocqueville’s theory of the subject, which is, however, so elementary that the term theory may hardly seem fitting. Nevertheless, every grand narrative about history also has to give us an idea what it is that drives people and pushes the system forward towards equality (and, hence, democracy)� Tocqueville’s actors are far removed from heroic freedom-fighting motivations. They are driven, pure and simple, by “the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart,“ things like a taste for luxury, or the domain of fashion, or even, most shockingly, a love for war� What drives them, in other words, are ever new desires craving satisfaction, and this explains why the process is irreversible and unstoppable, because as soon as one desire is satisfied, another one will take its place: “Everywhere the diverse happenings in the lives of peoples have turned to democracy’s profit; all men’s efforts have aided it, both those who intended this and those who had no such intention, those who fought for democracy and those who were the declared enemies thereof; all have been driven pell-mell along the same road, and all have worked together, some against their will and some unconsciously, blind, instruments in the hands of God” (11-12). Therefore, Tocqueville concludes, “the gradual progress of equality is something fated� (…) every event and every man helps it along” (12). “The noble has gone down in the social scale, and the commoner gone up; as the one falls, the other rises� Each half century brings them closer, and soon they will touch” (11). In America they have touched and that makes democracy in America a fascinating test case� It is highly ironical indeed that the “best book on American democracy” radically undermines the founding myth on which many of the following theories of American democracy were based: that of the innate goodness and superior common sense of the common man, that is, “the people.” There is no common sense in Tocqueville’s democratic subjects; 20 W infriED f luck rather, they are inherently weak and therefore easily swayed by public opinion. In fact, as Mansfield and others have argued, democracy is government by public opinion� Individualism, as a form of willful self-isolation, reinforces this weakness� Tocqueville sees a remedy in voluntary associations but these depend on communal experiences that are not always available� In larger contexts, public opinion takes their place and makes the weak individual dependent on the tyranny of the majority� How does that affect culture and the arts? In his essay “Tocqueville and American Literary Critics,” Cushing Strout focuses on Tocqueville’s expectation that democratic poets, finding nothing ideal in what is real and true, would reach at last for purely imaginary regions� But Tocqueville’s remarks on the general fate of culture are much more pertinent here� After all, the main story he tells about the emergence of democracy is one of leveling, and since democracy transforms all spheres of life, including culture, leveling must also provide the key perspective for understanding this new kind of democratic culture� It would be wrong, however, to take this as a critique of mass culture along the lines of the cultural criticism of the post-War period� Tocqueville sees the process as one of gains and losses� Some things are gained by the process of leveling but at the cost of others: “So it is not true that men living in democratic times are naturally indifferent to science, literature, and the arts; only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate them in their own fashion and bring their own peculiar qualities and defects to the task” (458). On the one hand, there is a process of democratization at work; leveling also means that access to books and reading is increased, even on the frontier: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare� I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin” (471). On the other hand, however, leveling can also mean loss of excellence: “When only the rich wore watches, they were almost all excellent� Now few are made that are more than mediocre but we all have one” (467). Appearance is now more important than substance. When Tocqueville first arrives in New York by boat, he is impressed by a number of little white marble palaces, some of them in classical architectural style� But at a closer look, he realizes that they were “built of whitewashed brick and that the columns were of painted wood� All the buildings I had admired the day before were the same” (468). Aesthetically, it seems, the major challenge for democratic culture is how to present a house made of brick and plaster to look like a marble palace� Again, this should not be understood as an expression of aristocratic contempt� What Tocqueville is aiming at is an explanation of the logic that is at work in democracy’s transformation of cultural production: “In aristocratic societies, craftsmen work for a strictly limited number of customers who are very hard to please. Perfect workmanship gives the best hope of profit” (466). On the other hand, there is always in democracies “a crowd of citizens whose desire outrun their means and who gladly agree to put up with an imperfect substitute rather than do without the object of their desire altogether� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 21 The craftsman easily understands this feeling, for he shares it� In aristocracies he charged very high prices to a few� He sees that he can now get rich quicker by selling cheaply to all.” But there are only two ways of making a product cheaper: “The first is to find better, quicker, more skillful ways of making it� The second is to make a great number of objects which are more or less the same but not so good� In a democracy every workman applies his wits to both these points” (466). And the same principle is at work in literature: “Democracy not only gives the industrial classes a taste for letters but also brings an industrial spirit into literature” (475). An ever growing crowd of readers always craves for something new and “ensures the sale of books that nobody esteems highly” (475). Such a literature has little impact on mores, the beliefs, manners and attitudes of a society� The main way in which it gives expression to democracy is as an expression of its restlessness in which everybody is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities and new experiences� 15 To read these passages as a putdown of American culture is to miss the point� Tocqueville’s line of thinking is far more subtle: in a society characterized by an equality of rank, people have to find new ways of gaining recognition. The more “mobile” and accelerated the search, the weaker the identity that can result from any particular act of recognition or attachment to an object, and the weaker the identity, the greater the need for ever new options, finally leading to a transformation of culture into consumption, because consumption is best suited to deliver a sequence of quickly changing objects for attachment. Indeed, for this purpose an aristocratic culture of “quality” is no longer useful; the emergence of mass culture and its convergence with consumption is thus not the result of a deplorable drop in standards but a logical response to changing conditions of identity formation ushered in by democracy� As Tocqueville puts it: “In the confusion of classes each man wants to appear as something he is not and is prepared to take much trouble to produce this effect” (467). Tocqueville concedes that such feelings are not unique to democracy, but it is democracy that establishes entirely new status confusions and a newly intensified restlessness. And, as he points out perceptively, it is democracy that extends this frantic struggle for recognition also to culture, in production and distribution as well as - most prominently - in reception� 15 Among the many things Tocqueville foresaw was also mass culture: “With but short time to spend on books, they want it all to be profitable. They like books which are easily got and quickly read, requiring no learned researchers to understand them� They like facile forms of beauty, self-explanatory and immediately enjoyable; above all, they like things unexpected and new� Accustomed to the monotonous struggle of practical life, what they want is vivid, lively emotions, sudden revelations, brilliant truths, or errors able to rouse them and plunge them, almost by violence, into the middle of the subject� (…) Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste” (474). 22 W infriED f luck IV. The story of a relentless process of leveling that Tocqueville tells about democratic culture is not exactly an inspirational one� For those in search of an American culture that would embody the best of America’s democratic values and ideals it could hardly be useful� Something more inspiring was needed� Walt Whitman met the demand by declaring from the outset of his book Democratic Vistas (1871) that he would use the words America and democracy as convertible terms (2)� America would be seen as a “paradigmatic democracy” (Rorty 30). Accordingly, in Whitman’s proudly “speculative” book, written after the end of the Civil War, in which Whitman had made it his task to take care of wounded soldiers, democratic culture emerges as something that is completely different from Tocqueville’s version� It is no longer the end point of a leveling process but a word for its transcendence� 16 However, this transcendence is still a promise, not yet a reality� In its present state, American democracy is not in a condition to fulfil the promise: “Democracy at present is still in its embryo condition. Its justification lies in the future, in the production of perfect characters among the people“ (33)� Although Whitman has grand visions of America’s future greatness, he does not ignore the unashamed materialism of the Gilded Age: “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted� The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism” (10). Whitman welcomes business success as a source of America’s prosperity, but it is not sufficient to determine the success of “our New World democracy” (10). A great moral and religious civilization is the only justification of a great material one. Unfortunately, America “is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results” (11). To add this spiritual dimension and to activate the promise of American democracy is the task Whitman assigns to culture, more precisely to a yet nascent democratic culture� One reason why American has not yet fully realized its democratic promise is that its culture is still shaped by feudal “Old World” remnants. That is true even for a writer like Shakespeare: “The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy� The models of 16 Democratic Vistas was written in response to Thomas Carlyle’s essay “Shooting Niagara; and After? “ written against democratizing tendencies in England and the U.S. For the composition and publication history see Reynolds: “In September 1867, a month after Carlyle’s essay had appeared, Whitman wrote the first part of his response, an essay titled ‘Democracy,’ which appeared in the December issue of the New York Galaxy, edited by F�P� and W�C� Church� His second essay, ‘Personalism,’ appeared there the following May� The third, ‘Orbic Literature’ was rejected by the Churches� After many revisions and additions, the three essays were eventually combined and published in 1871 as a seventy-five-cent green-covered pamphlet, Democratic Vistas” (477). Narratives about American Democratic Culture 23 literature, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and basked and grown in a castle sunshine; all smell of princes’ favors” (28). A truly democratic culture can only emerge when these feudal elements are left behind: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past…“(4)� This culture is urgently needed� But the sad truth is: “America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing” (35). So far, then, culture has failed America� That explains the gap between the ideal of American democracy and its current reality: “As now taught, accepted and carried out, are not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing? ” (36) As Alan Trachtenberg has put it: “America provided an actual polity founded on constitutional principles of equality (for propertied white males, at least, in the founding formulation)� Yet America remained blind or unknown to itself� Once culture awakened America to itself, to the fact that it had already realized the conditions culture needs to achieve the externalization of inner harmony, then the true America would appear” (Trachtenberg 14). The struggle for realizing the promise of American democracy is thus a struggle over the meaning and function of culture� Only a truly democratic culture can save a corrupt American democracy� Whitman’s faith in this democratic culture (which, in his case, means literature, and, even more specifically, poetry) can be grandiose at times: “I suggest, therefore, the possibility, should some two or three really original American poets (…) rise, mounting the horizon like planets, stars of the first magnitude, that, from their eminence, fusing contributions, races for localities, etc�, together, they would give more compaction and more moral identity (the quality today most needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or materialistic experiences”(7-8). This culture would confirm and ensure what America promised, an egalitarian society, and even more importantly, an all-pervasive spirit of brotherhood� What are the characteristics of such a democratic culture? Echoing his hero Lincoln, Whitman’s recurring reference is to “the people,” for him the life-blood of democracy� As David Reynolds points out, Whitman had been confirmed in his belief in the people by his Civil War experiences. On the other hand, he did not willfully ignore reality and overlook the “crudeness, vices, caprices” (2) one can encounter in the people. The list of vices Whitman has seen in the city looks as if it were taken from a sensationalist novel in the mode of George Lippard. Flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity, abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, petty grotesques, malformations and a long list of other unpleasant attitudes and appearances do not exactly add up to an endearing picture of the common people (12)� At the beginning and end of Democratic Vistas, Whitman even meets Carlyle half-way by questioning universal suffrage: “I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States� In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing” (2). 24 W infriED f luck How can Whitman criticize the lamentable moral condition of the people and nevertheless envision a new, transformative democratic culture based on the people? Whitman’s theory of the self has to be taken into account at this point� Just as American democracy has not yet realized its promise, the common people have not realized theirs� The reason is that they are not yet truly independent� It must therefore be the goal of a democratic culture to inspire and encourage that aspiration for independence and self-government that is inherent in all human beings� Independence has to become an inner state� Only if the individual is free and autonomous, can we expect a genuine transformation, “a man (…) standing apart from all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state-safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty, or art” (14). This is how Whitman defines freedom: “The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American independence. What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds except those of one’s own being, controlled by the universal ones” (52). America remains incomplete as long as this transformation is not achieved, until the spirit of independence does not pervade all spheres, including that of individual being� Wouldn’t such a radical vision of individual independence lead to anarchy? No, because once the individual is in a state of freedom, his inner divine core that links him to universal and divine bonds, will guide him (52)� The liberation of a divine core in individuals will transform them into new beings� Goodness, virtue, solidarity, good laws follow freedom� Whitman’s treatment of religion is telling� He acknowledges that religion provides the foundation of man’s moral condition� In this it is the core of democracy� But not in its institutionalized form, because that, too, is governed by rules and bonds designed to tell the individual what to do. Religion can thus fulfill its moral function only, if it is set free from any institutional context� Only “in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all (…) the soul emerges, and all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like vapors” (39). Only this self can reach divine levels and commune with the unutterable� This potential resides in all people: “I can see there, in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true personality, developed, exercised proportionately in body, mind and spirit” (42). That is why Whitman can put his trust, not in the individual, but in the common people who, at this stage, are envisioned as an aggregate of independent individual beings� There can be no tyranny of the majority here� The one and the many cannot be separated, one depends upon the other. Poetry ”operates both by permitting the one to dissolve into the many and the many to emerge into the distinction of the one” (Ziff 583). But how can the transformation to independence, from a state of dependence to a free, autonomous soul, be achieved? At this point, Whitman’s vision of a democratic culture deserves another look� What is needed in his view is “a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the Narratives about American Democratic Culture 25 very first class, and especially for highest poems” (67). That is the sole course of radical transformation open to American society� Literature has to achieve what democracy promises: “The purpose of democracy (…) is (…) to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly trained in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself…” (15). But by what means can literature achieve this effect? Whitman remains vague: “At best, we can only offer suggestions, comparisons, circuits” (46)� In fact, he has to remain vague, because he is talking about a future phenomenon� But the common link of his scattered hints is a literature that would lead Americans to a self-recognition of their divine potential - and that of America: “America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and cosmical, as she is herself” (54). Self-recognition is the implied theory of effect of this version of democratic culture, and democratic culture is achieved when it provides a recognition of American exceptionalism� When Democratic Vistas appeared, the resonance was muted� Since then, the text has gained in importance and status, up to the point in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country in which Whitman and Dewey are credited to have forged a moral identity for America and to have given Americans “all the romance, and all the spiritual uplift” they need (97). Not everybody is an admirer, however: “Abstracted from his verse, Whitman’s democratic philosophy today appears naïve” (Ziff 590). The democratic culture Whitman talks about does not yet exist, it is only a vision that is put together in somewhat improvised fashion during the course of writing� However, there are two sets of assumptions that provided the basis for Whitman to present his vision with confidence. One is his assumption about the divine core of human beings that resemble Emersons’s who had already proclaimed in 1837: ‘A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (Trachtenberg 15). The other assumption is Whitman’s exceptionalist belief in America� Democratic Vistas is pervaded by his enthusiastic evocation of America’s greatness, of the prospect of a “nationality superior to any hither known” (4): “The Pacific will be ours and the Atlantic mainly ours� What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be? ” (55) To achieve this greatness and leadership among the nations, America has to pass through three stages� Two of them have already been mastered impressively: establishing a democratic Republic and becoming a successful, prosperous nation� What is still lacking is the third stage, establishing a truly democratic culture that would make independence also a state of being for the common people� But although this challenge has not yet been met, the fact that America’s evolution has already passed successfully through the other two stages is taken as a confirmation of the Hegelian narrative of progress on which Whitman relies here. The first two stages have already shown that America is bound to be exceptional, and because America is an exceptional nation, Whitman can argue with confidence that it will also successfully realize the third stage and become the superior nation of all ages� If not, 26 W infriED f luck there will be a breakdown in historical progress, America “will prove the most tremendous failure of time” (2). The claim of exceptionalism is derived here not from the city-upon-a-hill corpus of texts but from a Hegelian narrative of progress in which an ongoing struggle for freedom is the driving force� With his exceptionalist enthusiasm, if not self-intoxication, Whitman draws attention to a key problem in debates about American democratic culture, the wide chasm between theorized and actual democracy� Whitman realizes and acknowledges the problem in several passages of Democratic Vistas, and some commentators claim that his skepticism about American society increased during the period in which the three parts of Democratic Vistas were written� But ultimately, his optimism prevailed� It could prevail, because he solved the problem in a manner that is characteristic also of other theorists of American democratic culture: the not-so-ideal present is readily acknowledged, but taken as proof that it is more necessary than ever to insist on the ideal, for if one does not uphold the ideal, one will have to give up all hope for change� This formula is tailor-made for preserving the best of both worlds: to critically acknowledge American reality and yet to keep one’s faith in an American exceptionalism that can never be refuted, because its final realization still lies in the future� In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty provides a contemporary version of this kind of argumentation in his criticism of the cultural Left which, in his view, has given up any belief in America and its democratic potential� But what if the reality of a “Billionaire Democracy” undermines this belief so strongly that it can no longer be upheld? Whitman solved the problem by dividing his narrative into two parts, quite simply the presence and the future� But what does a philosopher like Richard Rorty do 150 years later who wants to revive Whitman’s equation of America and democracy to counter the pessimism of the cultural Left? The question is a crucial one for all narratives about American democracy and American democratic culture, namely how to deal with the disappointment that rhetoric and reality are often far apart from each other, in fact, may at present be drifting apart ever further� Rorty concedes that “Dewey and Whitman had to grant the possibility that the vanguard of humanity may lose its way, and perhaps lead our species over the cliff” (23). But they decided to keep the question open “in order to make room for pure, joyous hope” (23). And so does Rorty: “But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact� You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now� You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one in which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual” (Rorty 101)� However, wouldn’t democracy as a political system provide a sufficient normative base for criticizing democratic deficits? What about critics of democratic deficits who do not live in dream countries like America? The actual convertibility here is not between America and democracy but between democracy and American exceptionalism� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 27 For Rorty, too, the disappointment about the chasm between theorized democracy and its reality version is overcome by a belief in American exceptionalism: because we know that America is exceptional, we can also be sure that it will eventually bridge the chasm� It just has to be reminded (constantly) that it is exceptional� If the Left wants to bring about change, it will have to call for it by appealing to America’s greatness� That is the only way in which true democracy and democratic culture can be achieved: “As long as we have a functioning Left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman’s and Dewey’s dreams” (107). Whitman has shown the way. The source of his great influence on narratives about American democratic culture does not lie in his analysis of American society, but in the force of his rhapsodic, “orphic” rhetoric, his evocation of universal brotherhood, his insistence on the dignity of all beings, and above all, the promise of American exceptionalism� The literary models Whitman most often refers to are epics and tales of adventure, but in retrospect one wonders whether he is not another Don Quichote chasing, not dream countries but windmills� V. Tocqueville’s and Whitman’s versions of democratic culture could not stand further apart from one another� While Tocqueville approaches democracy as an irrepressible historical fact with which one has to learn to come to terms, Whitman elevates democracy to the level of a supreme historical promise, as the crowning touch and final confirmation of American greatness, and gives it a strong normative dimension: not everything produced in a democracy qualifies as democratic culture. A democratic culture is one in which independence is extended to the inner self of the common man by providing opportunities for self-recognition of a divine inner core in the individual and the nation� In his insistence on the common man as the key persona, Whitman evokes Mark Twain who published his travel-book manifesto The Innocents Abroad (1869) around the time Democratic Vistas was written and published� As in the case of Whitman, it was Twain’s starting point that the historical achievement of American society consisted in the recognition of the common man to be as good and worthy as any nobility, in fact, just as noble and dignified. Like Whitman, Twain assumed at this point of his career that this potential of the common man had not been fully realized yet, because of an unfortunate persistence in American society of an obsolete reverence for European standards of culture� As Lionel Trilling has pointed out, chapter 31 of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the key scene for understanding the conflict that characterizes all of Twain’s work. Henry Nash Smith has captured the conflict by calling his chapter on Huckleberry Finn ‘A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience�’ By dramatizing Huck’s feeling of duty to hand the runaway slave Jim over to his pursuers, Twain demonstrates to what extent Huck has 28 W infriED f luck internalized Southern ideology and thereby deformed his own conscience� But eventually, Huck’s sound heart proves stronger� Deep down the common man possesses an innate goodness, and the problem of American democracy is that this goodness is still deformed by remnants of European culture and its American copy, Southern culture� Hence Twain’s project: to use his irreverent humor as a weapon against authority and, as in The Innocents Abroad, especially against the custodians of European culture in order to break their hold on Americans and to liberate and strengthen the democratic potential of American society� This project reaches its politically most ambitious version in Twain’s 1889-novel A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court� What Whitman still projects into the future is tested by Twain in an ingenious utopia-in-reverse by sending a representative common man of nineteenth-century America, the foreman Hank Morgan from Connecticut, to the medieval England of King Arthur’s time� A true believer in progress (and in America as the exemplary land of progress), it is Hank’s noble democratic ambition to transform medieval society into a modern society “on the American plan.” Twain’s novel thus tries to address the problem that Whitman delegates to the future, namely how to achieve the transition from a still lingering, harmful legacy of Old World culture to a democracy and a truly democratic culture� Things go according to plan at the beginning� 17 Twain’s fictional set-up provides an ideal opportunity to expose the inferiority, injustice and backwardness of (English) feudalism (clearly a placeholder for the “Old World”) by confronting it with the common sense and moral idealism of the Yankee� But as the novel moves along - Twain is known for his spontaneous, unsystematic forms of composition -, the Connecticut Yankee begins to discover an unexpected bonus provided by his political mission, namely that he possesses a huge advantage in knowledge over the superstitious masses of the Middle Ages� As it turns out, the Yankee is by no means immune to the temptation of using this constellation to his own advantage� This leads to an amazing shift in focus as the novel progresses� Increasingly, the democratic reformer also turns into a successful businessman: “His career,” Henry Nash Smith points out, “resembles that of many industrial giants such as Carnegie and Rockefeller who were in the public eye in the 1880’s” (Smith 1964, 151)� The Yankee’s choice of words betrays the extent of his economic and social aspirations: proudly he awards himself the title of “boss” of the whole country, and by doing so, draws attention to a partial displacement of the intended object-lesson in democracy by a highly gratifying personal success story in which the liberator has turned entrepreneur and has become a successful self-made man� One striking fictional complication is that the very people whom the Yankee intends to liberate on the level of the political discourse emerge as potential competitors on the level of the success story� To liberate them would 17 For a more extended and detailed version of the following argument see my essay “The Restructuring of History and the Intrusion of Fantasy in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Narratives about American Democratic Culture 29 imply to gradually give up the privileged position that enables the Yankee to “take advantage of such a state of things” (37) and that repeatedly appears as a source of ill concealed satisfaction in the text: “… and if on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all right ��� I would boss the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years” (16). In fact, so extensively is the Yankee’s success celebrated in the novel that it seems justified to speak of yet another level of discourse that is closely connected with the success story but clearly transcends it and approaches something like a fantasy of omnipotence� In the course of the novel, the Yankee does not only witness an extraordinary material and social success� In parts of the novel, he seems to move in a daydream world of absolute superiority and power - and, again, takes great delight in doing so� Even the role of successful businessman appears at a closer look to be just one example of a varying repertoire of roles and role changes, from Cowboy to star magician� Thus, while in principle the Yankee pays careful attention to social and political improvements, the actual narrative continuity and substance of the novel stems, in surprisingly large parts, from his focus on scenarios of selfaggrandizement and uniqueness� Whereas his involvement in the political and economic possibilities of his democratic mission is resumed more or less in passing, the Yankee becomes eloquent in describing scenes that affirm his uniqueness and gain the admiration of the native population� Such feelings of personal triumph are magnified in the course of the novel to extreme proportions, which suggest the idea of a fantasy of omnipotence: “Here I was, a giant among pygmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles” (66). In another striking paradox, the Yankee’s fantasy of grandeur depends on the very ignorance that makes him despair in his role as a democratically-minded liberator� For the champion of progress their enlightenment should be the primary goal; for the cultural hero, however, their naive superstition remains the basis of his unique status: “When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered and fell back reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind of a superior being - and I was“ (218)� The Yankee’s gradual shift from democratic reformer to successful selfmade man and cultural celebrity must be seen in the larger context of democratic theory� If democracy is the political system that abolishes status hierarchies and empowers the common man, then how can we be sure that the common man will use this new status “democratically“ and for the common good? In Whitman, this expectation rests on the metaphysical assumption of a divine inner core of the subject, in Huck Finn we already get a watered-down version in the form of a not yet culturally deformed “sound heart.” In The Connecticut Yankee and other of Twain’s later writings even the sound heart has disappeared� There is no sound heart that would protect the Yankee from his own craving for recognition and self-aggrandizement� For Whitman, to be a common man and to be part of a crowd of equally common people is all the recognition the common man needs� An independent individual, free and autonomous, is not in need of additional recognition� In contrast, although he 30 W infriED f luck shares the common man-rhetoric with Whitman, Twain’s subject comes closer to Tocqueville than Whitman� It is inherently weak and insecure, and in order to overcome this insecurity, Twain’s main characters - think of Col� Sellers in The Gilded Age or Tom Sawyer - are constantly indulging in day dreams of superior recognition� 18 After Col. Sellers has finally managed to establish a close relation with the American President, his imaginary self-aggrandizement knows no boundaries: “If he respected himself before, he almost worshipped Beriah Sellers now, as a superior being” (271). There are, then, in Twain’s literary world two types of common man: those that are empowered by democracy to recover their inner sound heart, and those who discover the usefulness of democracy to pursue their own dreams and ambitions even at the expense of others� One can identify Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer as representatives of the two types, and the difference between them lies in the importance the search for recognition has for each� Tom’s behavior is driven by his constant imagining of what it would look like in the eyes of others� On Huck’s raft there are no others; it is an important part of the book’s pastoralism that the search for recognition can be put to rest on the raft� Only at the end of the book, in its often criticized concluding section, when Tom returns to Huck’s world, the story of liberation turns into a story of manipulation� Similarly, what drives the Yankee is a thirst for recognition of his superiority by the masses� Without thematizing this aspect, Twain, by following his instincts, reveals a complication in nineteenth-century narratives about democracy and the common man that apologists of the common man ignored: abolishing social hierarchies does not necessarily mean that equality and universal brotherhood will prevail from now on� On the contrary, because the liberated common man will continue to “crave satisfaction,” recognition foremost among them, new inequalities will emerge as the result of new opportunities but also the competition for them� American democracy is by no means immune to this danger; on the contrary, it is a pioneer society in liberating individuals, including common people, to discover entirely new ways for gaining recognition in their ongoing struggles for distinction� The Yankee could not resist the temptation of taking advantage of his superior knowledge, because, unexpectedly for the democratic reformer, the Middle Ages can provide something that nineteenth-century America could not, namely a superior form of recognition: “Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn’t a baby to me in acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be 18 Twain’s common men have two major weaknesses� One is their hunger for fame, that is, for superior recognition, the other, the lure of money� In addition to The Connecticut Yankee, Twain returned to the promise of a sudden rise in status and the lure of money again and again, for example, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “The Stolen White Elephant,” “The £ 1 000 000 Bank-Note,” “The $ 30 000 Bequest,” and The Mysterious Stranger. The Prince and the Pauper and Puddn’ head Wilson tell stories of a sudden rise in status and fortune made possible by the prototypically “fictitious” device of changed identities. Narratives about American Democratic Culture 31 foreman of a factory, that is about all“ (60)� Tom Sawyer, Col� Sellers and the Connecticut Yankee are “weak” subjects who crave, not primarily satisfaction of their desires, but ever new forms of recognition of which they can never get enough, so that they are willing to use deception, manipulation, even destruction. In the end, the proud, self-confident American democrat Mark Twain had to face a sobering truth� He did no longer trust an America that wants to bring democracy to the rest of the world� 19 While Whitman happily celebrated himself, Twain had enough good sense not to trust the Tom Sawyer in himself - and, by implication, also not the common man� 20 VI. It was this problem that pragmatism wanted to overcome by finding a source of selfhood that would be strong and resilient enough to resist domination and manipulation by others� The name that comes to mind in this context is that of John Dewey whose work has been called a “philosophy of democracy” by Hans Joas� Dewey has gained this status by taking Tocqueville’s desires and transforming them into what is desirable� As Robert Westbrook puts it: for Dewey - he could have added: in contrast to Tocqueville - democracy is “an association in which individual members seek by means of deliberation to transform their individual ‘desires’ into a collective consensus about what is desirable” (138). How can this be done? The answer can be found in a pragmatist theory of the self� There are no subjects in this theory, only organisms that are stirred into action by problems - even on this elementary level theories of mass democracy based on the idea of passive individuals are already undermined� Problem solving is the basic condition of organic life and in order to solve problems organisms have to consider the best course for action� In this process, experiences are made that give the self more control, more ability to rethink its problems and thus the potential for making changes� This process ties us to others, for in order to make sense of our experiences and make sure that we are drawing the right conclusions from them, we need to communicate with others� Human beings are therefore inherently social beings and must have a shared interest in social arrangements that further communication and social interaction� This must be the interest of every self, for only in this way can we hope to achieve growth� Growth is the key concept and the key value in this narrative� 21 Every organism must strive towards growth in order to overcome immaturity (= a lack of fulfillment of growth), and democracy is a social arrangement that is preferable to other forms, because it provides the best conditions for growth and personal development� 19 As is well known, Twain would soon become a harsh critic of American imperialism� 20 In his book Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s ‘A Connecticut Yankee’ William Spanos extends this reading to the level of a national allegory� 21 Cf� Sidney Hook: “By human freedom Dewey meant the power to realize one’s natural potential of growth in a desirable direction” (223). 32 W infriED f luck As in the case of Tocqueville, Dewey’s theory of democracy is constituted by a prior assumption about what constitutes human beings� If I assume that human beings are driven by passions and desires that crave satisfaction, I must focus on how these desires can be controlled and channeled� This is why Tocqueville takes up so much space in describing the division of power in American democracy� On the other hand, this is an aspect of democracy in which Dewey is not interested at all; as many observers have noted, Dewey is not really discussing democracy as a political system� The charm of his theory of democracy is that there is no need for finding answers for vexing problems like the division of power or voting rights or the fairness of political representation: “Democracy 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” (Dewey 1939, 224)� The common man, driven by Twain into destructive selfcontradictions as the result of a conflicted personality, has an entirely unproblematic reappearance in Dewey’s argument� His democracy is based on “faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with common sense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication” (224). If society provides free assembly and free communication, the common man will do the rest and pave the way for democratic cooperation� He will do so in his own best interest, because cooperation is the best way to become more rational, more social, and finally more moral and thus the best way to achieve growth and individual self-development� Resorting to the common man (and his common sense) as the backbone of democracy may be a familiar move� But in the case of Dewey it rests on assumptions that are different from those of Whitman and Twain - neither on a metaphysical belief in a divine inner core of the common man, nor on a sentimental pastoralism that nourishes a sound heart� Instead, the case for democracy can simply rest on the need of the organism to grow� Since every human being, like other organisms, will be - in fact, must be - interested in achieving growth, it should also be interested in establishing the best possible conditions for growth, and these are clearly provided by democracy and the possibilities it opens up for participating in communication and exchange� Democratic cooperation can help human beings to develop their capacities for growth� As Paringer puts it: Dewey saw in American democracy “the conception of a social harmony of interests in which the achievement by each individual of his own freedom should contribute to a like perfecting of the powers of all, through a fraternally organized society” (Paringer 34)� Dewey uses the term democracy not for describing a political system of majority rule but as an ethical ideal, or as Dewey puts it in The Public and Its Problems: “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life� It is the idea of community life itself� (…) Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just Narratives about American Democratic Culture 33 because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community” (148-9). In other words, democracy is only a real democracy when it has reached a state of true community� Its cooperative spirit will develop the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment, “to participate in the design and testing of social policies, and to judge the results of its actions” (Putnam, quoted in Westbrook 137)� Democracy, then, means social cooperation for Dewey� Social cooperation provides the best conditions for attaining growth through constructive and creative activity� Indeed, Dewey became of interest to literary scholars because he extended the idea of creativity to include everyday life and thereby to bridge the gap between life and art, as many modernists tried to do at about the same time� 22 One would expect him, then, to be open to aesthetic innovation; after all, his work is roughly coexistent with the rise of modernism and, more specifically, abstract art. But Dewey rejected abstract art: “In the light of this contribution to the question of form and substance, it is evident that Dewey would consider the treatment of form as illustrated in the poetry of Gertrude Stein, or other ‘abstract artists,’ spurious� Broken lines and fragments of curves when used ‘abstractly’ in graphic art are inadequate media for artistic expressiveness because (…) as fragmentary sensuous data they fail to arouse normal psychological responses” (Melvin 307). Abstract art rests upon a false atomistic psychology� It is the wrong kind of art for a democracy, because it is “expressive of the social atomism and natural rights doctrines of the seventeenth-century political thought” (308). This argument is not restricted to modernism� It applies to aesthetic experience in general� In Art as Experience Dewey provides a by now classical example to demonstrate that any object can be constituted as an aesthetic object by taking an aesthetic attitude toward it� He illustrates the point by a group of people approaching the Manhattan skyline on a ferry� Some see the skyline merely in practical terms without attributing any significance to the shape of the skyline� Others look at it in terms of real estate values, still others in terms of a tourist attraction� “Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view� He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying.” In contrast, the object becomes an aesthetic object when the observer sees the single aspects in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river: “He is now seeing aesthetically, as a painter might see” (140). For this observer, the single parts cohere and form an image which provides the basis for an aesthetic experience� It is, in other words, the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience that it sees single elements, not as separate entities, but as part of a whole� This successful integration of parts can become a metaphor for the successful integration of the individual into society, and, hence, for a fully achieved democracy� 22 For an analysis of Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience and a comparison with other, competing concepts, see my essay on “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” 34 W infriED f luck Dewey’s pioneer achievement consisted in shifting the discussion of aesthetics from the aesthetic object to the side of aesthetic experience� Aesthetic experience was the supreme form of experience for him, but only in a specific sense: not because of the intensity of experiences but because aesthetic experience could best provide an experience of wholeness and integration, that is, because it could be seen as the equivalent of a basic epistemological premise of pragmatism, already formulated in Dewey’s essay on the reflex arc concept, namely that it is the whole - the organization of all single elements by an integrating principle - that makes the parts what they are� 23 Aesthetic experience can thus become a model of successful integration� Even if this integration has a processual dimension, so that we are not talking about a static organicist model, the process remains meaningless, if it does not reach its fulfillment at one point - for which aesthetic experience as a heightened, enhanced sense of ordinary experience provides the model� For Dewey, aesthetic experience is a word for the fulfillment to which living can and should lead� 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 fulfillment - in contrast, for example, to aesthetic experiences of negation or de-familiarization and other aesthetic effects� The case is interesting, because it marks the limitations of Dewey’s often praised open-endedness� His emphasis on process has been praised by Rorty and others as an exemplary anti-foundationalist position� But when Dewey rejects modernist experimental art, because it takes openness into the wrong, “atomistic” direction, his view of process reveals its tacit normative bias. Dewey’s openness is that of evolution, not of pluralism� There is a normative basis to open-endedness, then� For Dewey, it remains incomplete, or, more precisely, unfulfilled, if it does not reach a state of fulfillment at one point, even if only temporarily. Aesthetic experience is such a moment of fulfillment - which would exclude a vast array of cultural and artistic forms� What makes Dewey different from Tocqueville - that democracy is elevated to the level of a normative concept - also limits the usefulness of his theory for defining American democratic art and culture as a plurality, in fact, it raises it to an abstract level that is hardly applicable� For Tocqueville unsolvable conflicts are the driving force of (and constant threat to) democracy. For Dewey, democracy is the social form that helps us to overcome conflict through cooperation� A problematic situation sets a process of problem-solving in motion that can lead to growth, just as growth will eventually lead to cooperation� Despite a rhetoric of open-endedness, this remains the underlying evolutionary, almost behaviorist assumption of Dewey’s pragmatism and his faith in intelligent democratic action. In his essay “Creative Democracy,” Dewey writes: “To take as far as possible every conflict which arises - and they are 23 Hence, the confirmation of wholeness must be the goal of interpretation: “analysis is disclosure of parts as parts of a whole” (Art as Experience 314)� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 35 bound to arise - out of the atmosphere and medium of force of violence as a means of settlement, into that of discussion and intelligence, is to treat those who disagree - even profoundly - with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far, as friends” (226). In a 1969-essay, Dewey’s student and longtime associate Sidney Hook writes in response: “Human beings will act in any event� To get them to act with intelligence, not out of blind passion and fear, especially in moments of crisis, if they have not already been habituated to think intelligently in moments that are not critical, is a vain hope� It is unintelligent to expect people suddenly to act intelligently” (231). This is why Dewey needs an evolutionary premise: it is not unintelligent to expect people act intelligently, if it is in the interest of the organism, both social and individual� Whatever the merits of Dewey’s approach to art and culture may be for aesthetic theory, his narrative about democratic culture can be of little use for American studies� The reason lies not only in the latent organicism of his definition of aesthetic experience which, if applied to an analysis of American culture, could have the consequence of having to exclude large parts of it� Dewey’s narrative focuses on culture and art in general; he is not interested in, and has little to say about, features that others may claim to be uniquely American� One might argue that his values - growth, cooperation, open-endedness - reflect special promises, or even qualities, of American democracy and can therefore be seen as specifically American values. But Dewey’s key claim that the value of art does not lie in specific qualities of an aesthetic object, as, for example, beauty, but that it is the result of taking an aesthetic attitude towards an object, was also put forward by the Czech structuralist Jan Mukarovsky at about the same time, and I haven’t heard anybody claim yet that this can tell us something significant about Czech values. In the final analysis, Dewey’s aesthetic theory and his narrative about democratic culture are trapped in circularity: if art can be a metaphor for democracy, but can only be experienced as art in a moment of fulfillment of everyday experience, then democracy and aesthetic experience become synonymous and define each other. Democracy is achieved by successful integration and as such modeled after, and realized by, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience, as a model of fully integrated parts, is exemplifying democratic values and hence the supreme manifestation of democratic culture� VII. Dewey highlights a recurring dilemma of definition in narratives about democratic art and culture: the narrower the normative content of the term democratic culture is, the greater the tendency for exclusion� If democratic culture is understood as a form of culture that gives expression, either on the formal level or on that of content, to democratic values and ideals, then media like film or the popular arts, or influential aesthetic movements like romanticism or modernism - to name a random sample - cannot be subsumed automatically under the category, because they are often anti-democratic� On the 36 W infriED f luck other hand, if we want to go beyond a normative conceptualization of democratic culture, should we broaden the term to include every form of culture produced under conditions of democracy - which would also have to include cheap sensationalist mass culture and The Birth of a Nation? If one looks at the uses that have been made of the term democratic culture in American studies, the latter practice is indeed the dominant one� However, such a broadening of the term makes it almost meaningless, not only as an analytical concept, but also as a value concept, and would thus undermine its usefulness for describing a supposedly unique and distinct trait of American culture� The same can be said about approaches in which democratic culture is defined by the criterion of access� Technology has continuously opened up an ever wider access to culture and has thus contributed to an ongoing democratization in the reception of culture� But this is a general phenomenon of modernity and has also happened in non-democratic countries and societies, for example when we think of the role radio and film have played in the Third Reich. What we encounter in trying to come up with a definition of American democratic culture are three very different narratives: it can be seen as expression of democratic ideals, as in the populism of Thirties-culture, as a principle of form, as in the case of jazz or postmodernism, or as a product of modern conditions that have led to a reduction of the cultural barriers of access, as in the case of film and other popular forms. These are the three options one finds in American literary and cultural criticism. Are there still others? In several publications the German Americanist Jürgen Peper has offered a theory in which he suggests a shift in the terms of discussion by defining the aesthetic as a “democratizing principle.” 24 In Peper’s approach it is no longer democracy that produces a certain type of culture; rather, it is a particular potential of the aesthetic that has had a democratizing effect on culture and society. Peper’s starting point is Baumgarten’s definition of the aesthetic as sensuous perception, that is, as a new branch of epistemology� As such the aesthetic opens up access to levels of consciousness and experience that an insistence on reason as the only legitimate source of knowledge has to subordinate� This does not mean that the aesthetic is the handmaiden of the irrational� As a form of cognition that is not exclusively subject to the claims of reason and open to sensation, emotion, affect, and even corporeality as sources of knowledge, it can draw on the free play of the imagination and, in doing so, has the freedom to try out untested, utopian views of reality. Its starting premise is the question “what if”: what if we assume that an American common man from Connecticut would get the chance to transform medieval society into a democracy on the American plan? In order to emphasize this utopian testing ground potential, Peper introduces the concept of an experimental epistemology� Experimental epistemology means that in order to stage his mental experiment, Twain temporarily put the reality principle in brackets - which is a freedom not restricted to utopias, but open to aesthetic objects in general� Such bracketing is the main mode of operation 24 See his essay “The Aesthetic as a Democratizing Principle.” Most of Peper’s work is in German, but this essay provides a good summary of his argument� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 37 of the experimental epistemology of the aesthetic and it allows us to focus on aspects that may otherwise have been subordinated or ignored altogether� In an aesthetic mode of perception, we can see an object temporarily freed from other possible functions and can temporarily ignore the question of how real it is in order to open up different, often very subjective ways in which the world can be seen and experienced� This does not mean that these texts and objects are removed from politics� It means that their political meaning and function is realized in their own detached, bracketed fashion as an experimental epistemology� For Peper, the history of literature and other aesthetic objects is that of ever new bracketings that aim to liberate dimensions of representation and experience that have still been suppressed by the dominant symbolic order� This story of liberation has a strong formal dimension; in the history of art, bracketing has been used to liberate and foreground formal qualities of artistic representations such as language, forms and structures, color, lines, rhythm, sound, even noise that had hitherto been perceived only as integrated, subordinated elements of representation� 25 But the story also has a social dimension, moving from Hegel’s representative hero to ever more marginalized figures and groups that had not been considered “presentable” in prior stages� Taken together, the story is one of an ongoing emancipation, although one may not always like the political uses that have been made of these new possibilities� As in the case of Tocqueville, this story is not necessarily and inherently progressive� It follows a logic of dehierarchization - and has, in this sense, a democratizing effect� Starting with the bracketing of reason in romanticism, we observe a movement downward to ever ‘lower’ levels of the symbolic order that were originally firmly controlled by a hierarchy of values that is now considered repressive� 26 What drives this process? At times, Peper suggests a homology of social and mental hierarchies� The process of dehierarchization he traces in literary and cultural history “corresponds to the emancipation of subordinate social groups and, at the same time, to the liberation of lower levels of consciousness hitherto disciplined by reason: imagination, emotions, sensuousness, and its appetites” (294). The link between the two stories of dehierarchization is provided by actors in search of emancipation who use the dehierarchizing potential of the aesthetic to subvert the authority and disciplinary power of the dominant symbolic order� Individuals or groups who, at one point, did not want to submit to a regime of reason have used the strong aesthetic effects of art to subvert its authority and subsequent hierarchies of knowledge� 25 This argument stands at the opposite end of Dewey’s� To keep single elements in their integrated form as part of a whole would stand in the way of democratization for Peper� 26 See also Herbert Grabes: “In this respect, literature is ‘only literature’, but as the ‘suspension of reference’ renders the affirmative or negating statements in literary texts merely quasi-statements from the point of view of epistemology, literature is also far less bound by the cogency of religious, moral, juridical and other collective norms� And this is, of course an important precondition for the ability of literature to make us aware of the limits of the culture of its origin and indirectly of the boundaries of every culture“ (Grabes 22-23)� 38 W infriED f luck The institutions of culture have helped them to assert their claims and have provided them with a certain degree of institutional authority� But can dehierarchization be automatically equated with democratization? In this case, the term democratization would simply describe any increase in individual freedom and freedom of self-expression� Moreover, from Peper’s perspective this emancipation is driven by, and limited to, the exploratory front-line of aesthetic innovation� At this point it can be helpful to broaden Peper’s approach by adding an argument Caroline Levine presents in her study Provoking Democracy. Why We Need the Arts. The book also takes its point of departure from a “surprising relationship between art and democracy” (ix). Levine would not deny that art is often elitist� Thus, it would seem to disqualify itself for narratives about democratic culture� However, as Levine puts it: “This book argues that democratic states need the challenges to mainstream tastes and values launched by artists in the tradition of the avant-garde.” Art “represents a struggle for freedom from dominant norms and values” (x) and the avantgarde “performs a necessary structural function within democratic contexts” (9). It is true “that art’s relationship to democracy is vexed and often hostile” and “that the historical avant-gardes often expressed a deep antipathy to democracy” (11). But as a social institution that is grounded in culture’s promise to explore questions of freedom from dominant norms, art can have an important function in articulating difference and dissent. This view finds a surprising confirmation in trials about modern art often initiated by populist politicians in the U�S�: “Working against the tastes and preferences of a volatile electorate, the courts have taken seriously the task of protecting unpopular expression, often overturning repressive statutes passed by legislators in favor of rebels and dissenters” (31). In their focus on the democratizing potential of art, Peper and Levine present different, but complementary points of view� Peper describes an inner-aesthetic logic of development, Levine does not deal with the avantgarde in aesthetic terms but offers a sociological interpretation by describing it as a social institution� As such, the avant-gardes use art to defy the bourgeoisie in celebration and defense of their own outsider status� Peper would not contradict, but not every defiant gesture against the bourgeoisie has had the same cultural impact and has found the same cultural recognition as aesthetically valuable� An exclusively sociological understanding can therefore not be sufficient; this is why Peper focuses on historical stages of aesthetic development and the experimental logic by which it is driven� But his theory is focused too narrowly on the inner logic of aesthetic innovation� Levine is right to remind us that culture also has a social and political dimension, what is liberated in ongoing processes of dehierarchization are often voices that have been ignored up to now, elements that did not yet fit the social and symbolic order and were not yet recognized as worthy of recognition� In more general terms, one may bring Peper and Levine together by saying that literature and other aesthetic objects can play an important part in linking processes of aesthetic and social dehierarchization� As a social group, Narratives about American Democratic Culture 39 the avant-garde’s role is to contradict what is mainstream, for Peper, it contradicts because in its search for freedom of expression it has identified certain epistemological barriers that still stand in the way of free expression� But these different approaches complement each other in significant ways, because, taken together, they can connect what often falls apart - aesthetics and politics, form and content matter� Although the dehierarchizing process, as both, Peper and Levine, point out, is not restricted to democracies, it has nevertheless gained a new force and dynamic in Western societies, including American democracy, where more and more voices are being heard, more and more claims for recognition are being made, and more and more difference is acknowledged� VIII. What is the driving force of this process of dehierarchization and its democratizing effect? Both, Peper as well as Levine, postulate a search for individual freedom� But if we want to avoid idealistic assumptions about a supposedly ingrained hunger for freedom in human beings, we have to ask by what need this search for individual freedom is generated� As I have argued in other publications, I posit a struggle for recognition as the driving force� The search for recognition is an elementary anthropological need; without recognition by others we would not know who we are� In societies of rank, the conditions for recognition are institutionalized; in democracies in which status is no longer institutionally secured, the search for recognition poses entirely new challenges� The absence of status markers increases status anxiety� In this situation, the function of culture changes� It can become a space for individual self-assertion and self-presentation� As a form that encourages individual expression, often of a transgressive nature, literature, taken here as exemplary for art and aesthetic objects in general, is a social institution with a special potential and privilege to articulate individual claims for recognition� 27 As part of the public sphere, it has increasingly played a crucial role in introducing such claims into a culture� This process is not inherently progressive; often it is unrepentantly self-centered - not because the modern world is populated with egotists, but because it lies in the nature of a struggle for recognition to aim at a positive self-reference, first and foremost for oneself� In literature, the starting points are often descriptions and experiences of misrecognition, of a sense of inferiority, weakness, or injustice� In order to overcome this experience it is necessary to defy those barriers and tear down boundaries that stand in the way of full recognition� The search for recognition in literature and other aesthetic objects can thus present the views of an individual or group that want to call attention to their own, often highly subjective experiences of misrecognition� In contrast to philosophical or social theories, literature can articulate individual claims 27 For a discussion of how these aims can also become those of the reader, see my essay “Reading for Recognition.” 40 W infriED f luck for recognition that need not necessarily be reconciled with other claims and need not be normatively justified. Hence, one of the major differences between literary texts and normative accounts is that literary texts can base the legitimacy of their claims on the power of aesthetic experience and its seemingly self-evident authority� This unashamed and unrepentant partisanship is actually one of the strengths of literature, because literary texts can articulate aspects of individual experience that are erased by broad social classifications, so that new dimensions of subjectivity can be revealed and normative accounts of what deserves recognition can be broadened� This process, I want to claim, is a driving force in an ongoing process of democratization and culture’s most important contribution to this process� IX. This essay began by drawing attention to the historical moment in the history of American studies in which the field had to find a convincing narrative of legitimation and believed that it basically had two options to do this: 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. Contrary to what one would have expected after the end of World War II, the second narrative prevailed and dominated American studies for several decades� Now that it has lost its dominance, the question has emerged again whether and to what extent a return to the democratic culture-narrative might provide an alternative for American studies programs� In search of an answer this essay has taken several steps. The first, a survey of cultural criticism on democratic culture, has revealed a wide-ranging plurality of different views of democratic culture. They reflect divergent possibilities to define the key terms of the debate, democracy and equality. However, interpretations rarely acknowledge on which of these definitions they are based and prefer to hide behind the consensus term democracy instead. In response, my second step was a discussion of the most influential theories of American democratic culture in American studies and the very different narratives they have produced: Tocqueville’s narrative of leveling, Whitman’s story of transcendence grounded in his belief in American exceptionalism, Twain’s failed sentimental populism, and Dewey’s narrative of cooperation and growth� This discussion has revealed a major problem of the debate: the more normative the concept of democracy, as in the case of Whitman and Dewey, the more limited the possibilities of using it for an analysis of American culture� On the other hand, where the concept of democracy is used in a comprehensive, non-normative fashion as description of the full plurality of cultural forms produced under democratic conditions, it begins to lose any precision as a description of supposedly unique qualities of American culture� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 41 This is an important point to make, because, as pointed out at the beginning, the promise of the concept of democracy for American studies was, after all, that we understand America better� Because the most important thing to know about America appeared to be that it is a democracy, an interpretive focus on the democratic dimension of American culture would bring us closer to the real meaning of America than any high-brow narrative about the American romance� But what is it that we might understand better? Certainly not the realities of America. In his essay “The Beer Can By the Highway,” John Kouwenhoven reminds us that the concept of democracy, as it is used in writings about American democratic culture, “is an ideal, not a political system and certainly not an actual state of affairs” (226). 28 But if studies of American democratic culture are only studies of an ideal, to what extent can this provide a basis for the field? Is American studies supposed to be the study of American ideals? We are getting here to a core problem of the field. In the final analysis, the problem does not lie in the shortcomings of theories of American democratic culture� It lies in the starting assumption of American studies that a principle should and can be found that defines the uniqueness of America and its culture� Or to put it differently, the main problem lies in the unacknowledged Hegelian premises on which American studies relied since its beginnings� This Hegelianism assumes that studying the literature or culture of a country can provide a key to understanding its mind or its national character or its distinct patterns of thought - a history-of-ideas terminology that was at one point replaced by more up-to-date terms like national identity� This starting assumption of the field was a legacy of intellectual history that formed an important part of American studies until the mid-Seventies and was still predominantly Hegelian in its interpretive approach� Its methodologically most problematic consequence is that it pushes the interpreter to look for a unifying principle that can define this national identity and provide a key for understanding its true nature� Thus, interpretation, within this theoretical frame, must focus on the identification of a unifying principle. Democracy could be such a unifying principle, but only as an idea, not as a description of the realities of American life� This is why democracy entered American studies as the idea of democracy� And it almost goes without saying that this idea had to be a positive value, in effect, a virtue that could be used to distinguish American culture from other nations, moving many, if not most, theories and interpretations of American democratic culture from idea to ideal� The idea of democracy 28 Kouwenhoven withstands the temptation to put this argument into an exceptionalist context: “If, as I think American institutions have been shaped by the democratic ideal to a greater degree than those of some other nations, that is only because they were established at a time when the democratic ideal was in the ascendancy in the Western world; in a place where there were no already-established institutions which conflicted with or were hostile to democracy; and by people who, having been chiefly ‘the poor and down-trodden of Western Europe,’ had little reason to be attached to the nondemocratic or anti-democratic institutions still dominant in many areas of European life” (Kouwenhoven, 226-7). 42 W infriED f luck 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. In other words: due to its intellectual history origins, American studies may have been intended to be the study of American ideas, but because American exceptionalism was added to the mix, it became the study - and propagation - of American ideals� Where narratives about American democratic culture have been moved to the center, American studies has thus become an - often rhetorically effective - form of American self-idealization� 29 A growing number of critics would add: and of American self-deceptions� Neither the idea, nor the ideal of democracy, can provide a unifying principle that helps to distinguish American society and culture� Some parts of American culture will be democratic, others won’t (think of large parts of Southern culture)� All of it will be part of a plurality opened up by democracy, but what this plurality adds up to is by no means a uniquely democratic culture� To be sure, many American writers have been inspired by the democratic ideal, but many others have drawn attention to its constant violation in American reality� What good are democratic principles, even those voiced in wonderfully poetic fashion, if they are constantly violated up to the point where they seem to function only to obscure these realities? It is almost pointless, however, to point out the often glaring gaps between democratic ideal and the realities of American society� Narratives about American democratic culture never wanted to describe these realities� They wanted to tie the idea of America to the democratic ideal in order to be able to attribute unique virtues to America� Thus, they are not always what they claim to be� Often they are narratives about America in which the word America is replaced by the positive consensus term democracy in order to quell our increasing doubts about America� The narratives about American democratic culture discussed in this essay are least convincing where they are openly or tacitly exceptionalist, as in the case of the strongly normative accounts of Whitman and, inadvertently, Dewey� In putting this exceptionalism to the test, Twain has deconstructed its foundation, the idealization of the common man and “the people.” The author that offers the most convincing and useful story, however, is Tocqueville, if we do not misunderstand his narrative of leveling as lament about a loss of aesthetic qualities, but as description of a level field, in which entirely new conditions are created for the struggle for recognition� The only way in which democracy shapes this process is that it multiplies these claims for recognition, some of which will be democratic and others will not� Peper and Levine offer helpful explanations what the function of culture can be under such conditions in which new challenges, but also possibilities are opened up for the pursuit of recognition� In their work the meaning of democratization 29 In retrospect, this opens up a new perspective on the American Renaissance-narrative� Whatever its shortcomings, it was directed decidedly against American self-idealization� In fact, this may be one of the reasons why left liberal Americanists preferred it to the democratic culture-narrative� Narratives about American Democratic Culture 43 changes, however, from the establishment and extension of constitutional rights or participatory democracy to a history of ever new claims for recognition - a perspective in which American culture, both in its themes and forms, its dramatizations, performances and aesthetic effects, can gain new interest and relevance. 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Introduction Whenever a citizen of a democratic society chooses to vote, to organize or to institutionalize; whenever she represents herself or is being represented by someone else; whenever she communicates and experiences with the world around her; whenever she processes a past, envisions a future, and commits to her present; whenever she is invested in modes of reflection and critique, one could argue that she, more or less committedly, engages in paradigmatic forms of democratic life, in modes of creative innovation and intervention, and in practices of aesthetic (self-)empowerment and (self-)liberation� Each of these instances potentially (or, at best) marks a moment in which the creative subject emerges as a democratic actor and in which the democratic subject emerges as a creative agent� Building on this idea, the following essay on John Dewey’s 1939 lecture “Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us” and Frederick Douglass picturetheoretical essays (published in the 1860s) seeks to determine the power of aesthetic freedom - i�e� the existential nature of a pre-subjective, non-conformist, creatively expressive liberty - within the dynamics of democratic existence and the social and individual struggles for equality� Disregarding the logic of chronology, I will first retrace the concept of “creative democracy” in the philosophical thinking of Dewey, for Dewey brilliantly combines a lucid historical analysis with a monitory prognosis of the future� The discussion of his conceptualization of creative democracy should therefore allow me to introduce an idea of the greater transhistorical disposition of ‘creative democracy’ in order to shed some light on Douglass’s philosophical fight for equality, freedom, and democratic participation in his writings some 70 years earlier� 1 Both Dewey and Douglass have formulated their theses on creative democracy and aesthetic freedom in times of great national and international political crises, i�e� the looming threat of two wars that have, at their time, determined the fate and the future of democratic societies� And both Dewey and Douglass, this essay argues, understand that (a) creative democracy 1 Even though it is unfortunate that she has not included Dewey in her thorough analysis of democracy and aestheticization, Juliane Rebentisch’s The Art of Freedom must be mentioned as one of the most timely and affirmative discussions of the relationship between aesthetic and democratic existence� 48 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr depends on an existential connection of nature (i�e� natural laws), equality (as expressed and experienced within the logic of these laws) and freedom (as the true expression of the aesthetic), and (b) creative democracy is therefore not merely a form of government but a way of life� In this regard, Dewey and Douglass place a particular understanding of aesthetic freedom (and aesthetic self-liberation) at the center of their democratic-egalitarian theories that, curiously so, follows the tradition of a post-Kantian thinking that has been significantly shaped by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his understanding of the poetic nature of human being� This post-metaphysical tradition will decisively inform my close reading of Dewey’s and Douglass’s theories of creative democracy and aesthetic freedom� In addition, my discussion of Dewey’s and Douglass’s influential transhistorical positions positions itself at the interface of two cultural paradigms of our time: (1) the international crisis of democratic sovereignty (vis-à-vis the rise of populism, right-wing autocracy, or the unforeseeable consequences of our communication in social networks and with the help of artificial intelligence) and (2) the all-embracing presence of the so-called creativity dispositive (as manifested in the growing impact of creative industries, the cultural changes due to flexible working hours and an increase in self-employment, and the infamous ‘aestheticization of life-worlds’ that forces individuals to act as creative designers of their own lives)� 2 And yet, this essay does not seek to provide an in-depth analysis of current crises� Rather, it wants to draw on a particular understanding of creative democratic participation that may eventually help us, in turn, to make sense of present misalignments� Its core ideas essentially revolve around the power of the aesthetic in the context of democratic (co-)existence and, along these lines, around the ways in which the freedom afforded by democratic participation always already intersects with dynamics and processes of aesthetic experience� In my comparative reading, I hope to show that Dewey and Douglass promisingly complement each other: while Dewey points out that being democratic always already means being creative (i�e� being an aesthetic existence), Douglass highlights the idea that aesthetic (self-)experience is a key factor in our democratic (self-) experience and (self-)creation� This essay asks: Does each of these two thinkers represent one side of the very coin whose minting reveals nothing less than the melded nature of creative democracy and aesthetic freedom? II. “…all should partake” - John Dewey In 1939, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, John Dewey delighted the guests of his complimentary dinner with a short lecture entitled “Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us.” 3 Dewey presents a nation that still suffers 2 For an introduction to these debates, see Brown, Undoing the Demos; Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism; Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity� 3 A list of literature on Dewey and democracy (and, in fact, a list of Dewey’s own insights into the dynamics of democracy) would go beyond the scope of this essay� The debate about Dewey’s understanding of democracy is too varied and complex to be Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 49 from the economic and social turmoil of the Great Depression and that faces outside threats from Soviet communism and European fascism� But aside from its historical specificity, a number of Dewey’s diagnoses are yet again all too accurate today. Dewey detects a “crisis” in U.S. democracy, which is “due in considerable part to the fact that for a long period we acted as if our democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically” (225). But Dewey does not merely urge his fellow citizens to act� Rather, he appeals to a common sense of collectivity by incessantly using the pronoun “we.” In this spirit of collectivity, the question arises whether Americans are actively (self-)governing or whether they are merely being governed, whether they seek to actively engage in democratic processes and institutions or whether they passively recede� For Dewey, as he underlines early on, life in a democracy is dependent on its citizens to cherish it as a way of life instead of simply accepting it as a given form of government� In fact, in the first paragraph, Dewey curiously conflates the “creation of democracy” with the phenomenon of “creative democracy,” thereby underscoring the processual dimension and the potentially infinite preservation of a “self-governing society” (224). And even though “creative democracy” may sound like a particular kind of democratic existence, Dewey’s lecture clearly testifies to his conviction that the ideal democracy is always already a creative democracy� What is more, and I will unravel this at a later point of this section, being creative and being democratic are more or less synonymous� Being democratic is being creative and being creative is being democratic� Or, to put it differently, Dewey’s understanding of creative being, i�e� of an aesthetic existence, is essentially (and even existentially) expressive and formatively democratic. As one needs to “realize in thought and act,” Dewey writes, “that democracy is a personal way of individual life” (226; emph. J�D�), democracy is dependent on its members’ imagination and participation, their passion for innovation and intervention; in short, their creativity� Dewey’s “vision of democracy,” Martin Jay therefore notes, “necessitated a robust commitment not only to an open-ended process of unimpeded free inquiry, which emulated that of the scientific community, but also to the selfrealization that came through active participation in the public sphere” (55). According to Dewey, a democratic coexistence is thus no longer the result of happy historical coincidences, as it had been in the early years of the young republic. And even though “[t]he crisis that one hundred and fifty years ago called out social and political inventiveness,” Dewey’s present (and, one may want to add, today’s present as well) even “puts a heavier demand on human creativeness” (“Creative Democracy” 225). Dewey warns his listeners that democratic self-regulation cannot endure if one merely relies on the self-reflexive (and, in a way, inventive) automatisms of systemic agency (i.e. “a kind of political mechanism” [ibid.]). Rather, he zooms in on the satisfactorily addressed here� Nevertheless, the following texts may be insightful as an introduction to the discussion: Friedl, “Thinking America”; Joas, The Creativity of Action; (in German) Joas (Ed�), Philosophie der Demokratie; Richardson, Pragmatism and American Experience; West, The American Evasion of Philosophy� 50 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr essential democratic actor, the human being� It is only with regards to the individual citizen that “we can escape from this external way of thinking” (226). Democracy “signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life” (ibid.), a task that can only be accomplished through “innovative effort and creative activity” (225). Democracy does not simply occur to last infinitely; it has to be continuously imagined, designed and reproduced according to its given socio-historical context� “Democracy,” in this sense, “is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature” (226), a statement that can be deemed one of the central insights in Dewey’s lecture, thus making it worth a closer analysis. Dewey suggests that democracy as a way of life is, by definition, not only dependent on the active engagement of each individual citizen, but that it is essentially “controlled,” i.e. actively guided, by one’s belief in the potentiality of and the capability to invest in such an engagement� For the pragmatist philosopher, democratic being is a mode of experience, the play-space for “free interaction of individual human beings with surrounding conditions” (229)� Which leads our discussion of creative democracy into the midst of Dewey’s aesthetic theory. Five years prior to “Creative Democracy,” Dewey presents his readers with a sentence that is as simple as it is exemplary for his pragmatist philosophy, and that may very well be understood as the essence of his theory of aesthetic experience� In Art as Experience, he writes: “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment” (17). According to this logic, the experience of the aesthetic object is existentially dependent on dynamics of creative agency on the part of the recipient� 4 Aesthetic experience is an act of completion, in which the order of the aesthetic object reveals itself and becomes engrained in the experiential universe, i�e� the life-world, of its recipient� The idea to highlight such a completion (in order to achieve fulfillment in order to evoke completion in order to…) epitomizes the antimetaphysical foundation of Dewey’s philosophy and exposes its essentially democratic spirit� In Dewey’s logic - and here we may only want to think of his museum pedagogy - 5 , the involvement of the recipient and the inclusion of the aesthetic object in the recipient’s immediate and (self-)determining conditions signal the breakdown of an aesthetics of autonomous art� In this regard, aesthetic experience, in general, and the experience of art, in particular, allow for immediate and often unexpected renegotiations and reassessments of one’s given social, political, intersubjective, etc� reality� As Stefan Deines notes: For this reason, Dewey can say that art is more moral than given moral principles or moral conditions� Rather, the moral or democratizing function of art can be attributed to its potential to transcend prevailing conventions and norms (or their 4 For an introduction to Dewey’s aesthetic theory, see Fluck, “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience”; Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics; for a discussion of completion and aesthetic in-betweenness in Dewey’s Art and Experience, see Breitenwischer, Dazwischen, esp� 56-63� 5 Cf. Hein, “John Dewey and Museum Education.” Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 51 interpretations) in ways that give us leeway over them� The freedom of the production process thus continues as it were - what is articulated by works of art are new aspects of social life, which are not yet included in the understandings and norms that originally orient the practices� They rather become irritated and challenged by that which is new and different� (5; my transl�) Art is not produced and received for art’s sake� The aesthetic is for and by human experience, and human experience, in turn, propels most strikingly within the experiential sphere of creative democracy� What is more, “Dewey’s insistence on making art accessible to the common man is not only an important facet of his thinking, it is also the proclamation of a political, an ideological belief,” Herwig Friedl argues (134). In a brief discussion of democracy and the arts in Freedom and Culture, also published in 1939, Dewey therefore underlines the necessary participatory nature of art, i�e� of art as an extraordinary mode of communication rather than a fetishized object of social distinction: “Even those who call themselves good democrats are often content to look upon the fruits of these arts [meaning, as he mentions earlier “literature, music, painting, the drama, architecture”] as adornments of culture rather than as things in whose enjoyment all should partake, if democracy is to be a reality” (9). 6 Neither is the aesthetic object autonomously detached from the life-worlds of its recipients, nor is democracy a self-sustaining form of government. - “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment.” Or, to apply this dictum to the phenomenon of creative democracy: “Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means” (“Creative Democracy” 229). Much in line with Dewey’s sentiment, Volker Gerhard writes that “the unprecedented novelty that [democracy] presents in comparison to any other constitutional model requires a lot of future, so that it can actually succeed on the never-before-taken path” (41; my transl�) - echoing Dewey’s plea to consider creative democracy the “task before us” and referring us back to the idea of experience as end and as means� For Dewey, experience is the generator of creativity and creativity is the essence of democratic and aesthetic being� In this line of thought, democratic experience can thus be understood as the quintessential mode of aesthetic freedom (i�e� of free creative innovation and intervention)� Or, to be more precise, democratic life and aesthetic life seem to complement each other in and through the constantly perpetuated forcefulness of experience that 6 What follows is a brief discussion comparable in sentiment to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the “aestheticizing of politics” and the “politicizing of art” in his 1935/ 36 “The Work of Art in Its Age of Technological Reproducibility” (esp. 41f.). And even though Dewey and Benjamin could hardly be more different in their ideological premises, Dewey too signals a warning about the dangers of aesthetic misapprehension of art in totalitarian regimes� He writes: “The theater, the movie and music hall, even the picture gallery, eloquence, popular parades, common sports and recreative agencies, have all been brought under regulation as part of the propaganda agencies by which dictatorship is kept in power without being regarded by the masses as oppressive� We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason” (Freedom and Culture 10)� 52 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr intertwines reason and feeling, mind and body, nature and society� Following the aesthetic anthropology of Christoph Menke, one could argue that, in Dewey, too, “[t]he freedom of aesthetic life, precisely as freedom from any rule of generality, including the norms that define rational faculties, is the condition of possibility of the development, and successful enactment, of rational faculties” (570). Against the backdrop of such an “intelligent judgment and action,” aesthetic freedom thus “open[s] the road and point[s] the way to new and better experiences” (Dewey, “Creative Democracy” 227 and 229). If practiced and reflected upon correctly, the aesthetic and the democratic, in Dewey’s philosophy, are essentially one “power in human association” (Art as Experience 334)� Creative democracy is therefore not the result of external processes and authorities, but of intersubjective dynamics� The aesthetic and the democratic - intertwined in what Jason Kosnoski has labeled “Dewey’s social aesthetics” - are thus phenomena that demand, but, first and foremost, enable creative action� Democracy, according to Dewey, “call[s] into being things that have not existed in the past,” and the “task before us” existentially consists in the “creation of a freer and more humane experience” (229). But Dewey is well aware of the fragile nature of democracy and he strives to make a virtue out of necessity in that he cherishes the inherent fluctuation in democratic cultures� As Eddie S� Glaude puts it, Dewey advocated “a more intelligent pursuit of conditions that would enable [democracy] to flourish under continuously changing conditions” (141), and, as I would like to add, he thereby underlined the poetic nature of creative democracy� At which point Dewey’s philosophy is truly Emersonian� As if anticipating Dewey’s experiential sphere of creative democracy, both in an early lecture on “Politics” and an 1839 journal entry, Emerson evokes a curious image. In “Politics,” he writes: “every subject of human thought down to most trivial crafts and chores ought to be located poetically” (Early Lectures 3 239; my emph�)� Quoting his lecture excessively, he notes in his journal: “Everything should be treated poetically” (Journals 329; my emph�)� In this vein, the poetic, i�e� the act of creative practice, is both a matter of setting a place for itself and of specifically engaging with it� To treat things poetically is to treat them as a way of life that is essentially marked by one’s creative agency� This being said, I concur with Herwig Friedl who argues that “[b]oth Emerson and Dewey think democracy as an experiment always erasing precedent” (155). So, against the backdrop of Emerson’s proto-pragmatist desire for poetic treatment, the condition for aesthetic and democratic experience in Dewey is based on the idea of a possibility of completion and fulfillment, and just as art and aesthetic objects are merely products of our aesthetic attitude (i.e. sources, reflections, and results of human practices), democratic rules, norms, and institutions are just as well merely “expressions, projections, and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes,” as Dewey puts it in “Creative Democracy” (226)� 7 For Dewey, democracy is directly linked to human creativity because it is not only its product, but because it is always already its most promising 7 On the pragmatist idea of art as human practice, see Bertram, Kunst als menschliche Praxis (whose translation, Art as Human Practice, is forthcoming)� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 53 foundation - it continuously “puts new practical meaning in old ideas” (226). In line with Rahel Jaeggi’s discussion of Dewey’s democratic philosophy, creative actions could therefore be deemed “practices of democratic self-determination” (343; my transl.). What is more, Dewey believes in the paradox that democracy is completest and thrives to the fullest when it is practiced as an ever-ongoing process of becoming against the backdrop of ever-changing social conditions, and, to use the words of Volker Gerhard, when it “make[s] productive that which is oppositional” (41; my transl.); oppositional to and within the sphere of democratic participation� Which leads us to Dewey’s understanding of a fundamental right to equality� Dewey seems to assume that inside every human being, “irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth” (“Creative Democracy” 226), works an aesthetic force whose absolute potential is civically and culturally dispelled in the creation of democratic freedom� Democracy is - and here Dewey takes up a term that is being similarly used by W�E�B� Du Bois in Darkwater - a “commonplace of living” (229). 8 The “commonplace” of democracy as a dynamic product of (individual and collective) creative action is thereby characterized by the “ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience grows into ordered richness” (229). 9 In this line of thought of democratic being as the creation of (an ever-changing) order, creative democracy (Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetic state) is the most powerful locus for processes of aesthetic education; it is the cultural sphere that (just like art) “liberates one from self-centeredness by 8 Cf� Du Bois, Darkwater 140f� 9 To which I may briefly add that “order” seems to be of the essence here. In another essay, it might be exciting to broaden the debate about Dewey’s alleged organicism to the phenomenon of a (post-idealist) order of beauty ( - an essay which would, first of all, need to distinguish between the aesthetic and the beautiful in Dewey’s aesthetic theory)� Dewey’s idea of a democratic order could, then, be contrasted with Friedrich Schiller’s idealistic and post-Kantian philosophy of beauty� In the 1790s, when the American and the French revolutions arguably marked the first critical moment in the advancement of modern democracy in the Western political world, Friedrich Schiller reacts with a striking theory of aesthetic freedom� Both in the Kallias letters (1790s) and his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Schiller grapples with his reading of Kant and suggests that beauty and freedom are intertwined in an existential relationship� At a time when man’s self-liberation is at the center of social and cultural life, Schiller, too, declaims the essential equality of human beings and their role in the make-up of the natural world� Schiller’s aesthetic theory is not only one of the most intriguing (early) interpretations of Kantian idealism, but, as such, a remarkable contribution to our thinking about the connection of the aesthetic and the political, or, as this essay seeks to investigate, the relationship between the idea of aesthetic freedom and the practice of democratic existence� Against this backdrop, one could argue that creative democracy, for Dewey, is essentially a system of implementing beauty ( - reminiscent of Friedrich Schiller’s dictum “beauty is freedom in appearance” [411; qtd� in Welsch]), i�e� a system that celebrates uncertainty and uncorrupted openness; a system that, on the one hand, underlines the aesthetic nature of human agency while, on the other, dismantling the metaphysical dualism of human being and the natural world. In a sense, Dewey (inadvertently) draws on this idea by conflating the erection of a sensible world with life in a free political community� 54 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr making it possible to experience and understand aspects of social life that (still) have no room in the given understanding that shapes one’s own identity and perspective” (Deines 5f.; my transl.). In Dewey’s words, creative democracy is determined by the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process� Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. (“Creative Democracy” 229) In contrast, then, “[a]ll ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences” (ibid.). As Cornel West insightfully notes, individual self-creation, for Dewey, is essentially tantamount to advancing creative democracy� 10 The democracy in creative democracy is not a set of rules, regulations, and institutions; it is not a set of ideas and governmental practices; rather, democracy must be understood (much like art and philosophy) as a “reflective human activity,” to borrow West’s words (73). One could turn to the proverbial and argue that democracy is the dynamic communicative acceleration of rhyme and reason� And as such, democracy is, in a sense, ‘unnatural’, for it is not a given but a created order; a polyphonic and diverse system whose ordered state depends on the ever-active forces of creative intervention� Or, as Dewey puts it, “[m]uch less is democracy the product of democracy” (The Public and Its Problems 84; emph� J�D�), which means that democracy is only insofar the enabler of the attainment of aesthetic (i�e� human) freedom as it is the latter’s product. “For Dewey,” to turn to Cornel West for a final time, “the aim of political and social life is the cultural enrichment and moral development of self-begetting individuals and self-regulating communities by means of the release of human powers provoked by novel circumstances and new challenges” (103). I dare say that there is hardly a more apt description of Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic freedom� To sum up, Dewey’s appeal is clear: creative action is an expression of freedom worthy of our respect for our democratic coexistence� But if one wants to fully indulge in this coexistence, one has to accept that it alone provides the best framework for being creative� Democracy is the product and source of creative agency� It would thus be wrong to assume that the democratization of a society is about the final, unalterable conclusion of an organic process� Creative democracy as an expression of aesthetic freedom is expressive of the continuous unrest of the democratic agents� Creative action sustains democracy; not the other way around� On this note, let us turn to Frederick Douglass’s philosophy of equality and creative intervention� 10 Cf� West, The American Evasion of Philosophy 72� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 55 III. “Pictures come not with slavery…” - Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass is one of the key political thinkers in the mid-nineteenthcentury United States, but his aesthetic philosophy is still hardly acknowledged when, in fact, as this essay argues, it must be considered one of the cornerstones of his political activism� 11 In a number of his texts, ranging from his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to anti-slavery essays and his lectures on pictures, Douglass sees existential connections between the realm of humans’ anthropological disposition of aesthetic being and their historical obligation to further the cause of universal equality and democratic coexistence� In said Narrative, Douglass writes about his (forbidden) process of (self-) education: The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness� Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever� It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing� It was ever present to torment me with a sense of wretched condition� I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it� It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm� (42f�) Within this array of anthropomorphisations of nature and imagining Douglass’s full immersion in the spectacle of his aesthetic freedom, Douglass is trapped in a “wretched condition,” which is marked by the insurmountable discrepancy between subjugation and the all-encompassing spirit of eternal freedom� 12 And when freedom “appeared,” Douglass entered an (idealistically framed) aesthetical world, a world in which, as Friedrich Schiller notes in one of his Kallias letters to his friend Körner, every natural being is a free citizen, who has equal rights with the most noble, and may not even be compelled for the sake of the whole, but rather must absolutely consent to everything� In the aesthetical world, which is entirely different from the most perfect Platonic republic, even the jacket, which I carry on my body, demands respect from me for its freedom, and desires from me, like an ashamed servant, that I let no one notice that it serves me� (421; qtd� in Welsch; emph� F�S�) 13 Much like the German idealists, Douglass understands the pre-subjective (i�e� existentially human) nature of freedom as aesthetic freedom� As he notes in his “Age of Pictures,” “how glorious is nature in action” (140). For Douglass, human beings are thus “free by the laws of nature” (qtd. in Buccola 49), and 11 John Stauffer’s essay “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” is a remarkable exception� 12 Quite similarly, in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? ”, Douglass draws on practices of creative innovation and intervention in conjunction with the (sublime) power of nature to make his (universal) case for an equal society� He tells his audience: “Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake” (1239). 13 See also Fn� 9� 56 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr those laws, in turn, are the laws of the aesthetical world, i�e� the form-giving laws of creative being� For in fact, it is creativity and the dynamics of free selfexpression that Douglass, in a number of his writings, is most interested in� At this point, I want to move deeper into a particularly curious and surprisingly underappreciated set of writings, namely Douglass’s inquiries into the aesthetics of the picture and the nature of human picture-making� Right during the time of the Civil War, between 1861 and 1865, Frederick Douglass toured the northern United States with three lectures on pictures, namely “Lecture on Pictures” (1861), the already quoted “Age of Pictures” (1862), and “Pictures and Progress” (1864/ 65). And not least John Stauffer’s, Zoe Trodd’s and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s 2015 publication of Picturing Frederick Douglass should encourage scholars in the fields of literary and media studies to extend and strengthen the engagement with Douglass’s love for photography� In their book, the editors lay bare a fascinating, if not to say, unbelievable, fact: namely that Douglass, a formerly enslaved man, had been the most photographed American in the nineteenth century, surpassing even the likes of Lincoln and Whitman� Whenever he could, Douglass had his picture taken, a practice grounded both in his fascination with his own photographic likeness and the technology that is responsible to afford him that pleasure� Douglass believed in the power of photography� He had his picture taken more than 150 times, adding to this body of images his lectures on the power of the photographic picture. In these lectures, Douglass insightfully reflects on the new technology and links it to matters of abolitionist activism, social liberty, and democratic self-possession� “Douglass believed that the formerly enslaved could reverse the social death that defined slavery with another objectifying flash: this time creating a positive image of social life and proving that African American consciousness had been there all along” (Wexler 19f.). In a letter to a befriended printer, written in 1870, Douglass notes: “Pictures come not with slavery and oppression and destitution, but with liberty, fair play, leisure, and refinement” (qtd. in McClinton 37). Both in his portraits and his theoretical writings, Douglass emphasizes a curious relationship between reality and image, namely that he desires a reality that is as forcefully publicly recognized as the reality of truth in images� The photograph, for Douglass, undeniably confirms an existence, and for the former slave - a subject of radical non-possession - to capture something forever is essential to human liberty� In this line of thought, pictures refer human beings back to their responsibility to care for themselves and thereby excel as agents in a creative democratic society� Douglass writes: “[S]elf-criticism, out of which comes the highest attainments of human excellence, arises out of the power we possess of making ourselves objective to ourselves - [we] can see our interior selves as distinct personalities, as though looking in a glass” (“Pictures and Progress” 171)� 14 Here, we touch upon a crucial point in Douglass’s aesthetics of freedom and democratic being: the idea of an Emersonian “impersonal” in which 14 Or, as Dewey puts it: “We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves” (Art as Experience 195)� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 57 human beings encounter themselves in a state of sheer and uncompromised humanity (the essentially natural potentiality of individuality) and, not yet, in a state of conforming subjectivity� 15 The “impersonal” marks a moment of self-abstention that links the personal with the public� In many ways drawing on Johannes Voelz’s understanding of Emerson’s “impersonal,” I argue that it is through an aesthetics of the impersonal that Douglass presents his listeners, readers, and the recipients of his images with a paradigmatic model of self-investment, in and through which one is enabled to retreat into the interpretative play-space of non-identical impersonality� 16 It is on the basis of this idea of “impersonality” that the force of creative powers designates a particular way of apprehending the future and of reconfiguring the public� And it is through his self-acknowledged appreciation for the Emersonian “impersonal” that Douglass, as Douglas Jones argues, “imagine[s] the self in ways that forestall, or, better, dissolve categories of identity that polities use to discriminate” (6). Yet it is an idea of the impersonal, and here I quote Jones again, that “remains fixed on the person (the affective, the corporal, the psychical)” (ibid.). Douglass’s fixation on the person is profoundly based on his belief in the liberal and ethical value and virtue of democratic and aesthetic self-possession, as he is convinced that “[e]very man is the original, rightful, and absolute owner of his own body” (“A Friendly Word to Maryland” 42). And I argue that this cannot only be seen in Douglass’s literary narratives, but in his pictorial representations and his picture theory as well� “There is,” Douglass writes, “a prophet within us, forever whispering that behind the seen lies the immeasurable unseen” (“Age of Pictures” 152). 17 “This voyage of discovery,” he continues, “lies over the broad ocean of our common humanity” (153). In many ways, it is of course this assumption of a common nature, i.e. his implicit reflection on the Emersonian impersonal as a means of radical (aesthetic) self-empowerment, in and through which Douglass is most radically advocating the power of creativity in the (human) struggle for democratic equality. John Stauffer speaks of Douglass’s “artful defiance” (“Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning” 202), which leads us to a philosophical challenge that characterizes most of Douglass’s writings and his modes of self-representation, namely the attempt to intertwine a liberal understanding of self-possession with the normativity of aesthetic freedom� About man he therefore says that “his distinctive qualities as man, are inherent and remain forever. Progressive in his nature, he defies the power of progress to overtake him to make known, definitely, the limits of his marvelous powers and possibilities” (“Self-Made Men” 333). And when Douglass contends that human’s appreciation of pictures may essentially be deemed an expression of his or her “poetic nature” (“Age of Pictures” 144), he links the poetic nature to 15 On Emerson’s impersonal, see Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment”; in response: Arsić, American Impersonal� 16 Cf. Voelz, “The Recognition of Emerson’s Impersonal.” 17 Which testifies to Douglass’s existential belief in the future. As John Stauffer puts it: “Douglass had to envision a sharp break from the past in order to believe in an impending new age of freedom” (“Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” 129). 58 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr the matter of debate and sociopolitical self-liberation� “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment,” writes Dewey. “[W]here all is plain there is nothing to be argued,” writes Douglass (“What to the Slave” 1237). The struggle of liberation vis-à-vis the forces of aesthetic freedom testifies to the productively irritating nature of creative democracy and its inherent demand for poetic intervention� At which point it is crucial to further dwell on the idea of the poetic in Douglass’s democratic aesthetics of pictures� Again, it seems to be Emerson who Douglass (an admirer of Emerson) most strongly complies with� In “The Poet,” Emerson writes about the gift of the poet that “Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language” (EL 452)� And it is Douglass who substantializes that metaphor when he notes in his lecture “Pictures and Progress” - and the Aristotelian undercurrent is all too obvious - that, generally, “man is the only picture-making animal” (166), but, in particular, “[p]oets, prophets and reformers are all picture-makers” (171). The poet as representative man, Douglass argues in direct reference to Emerson, “reflects, on a colossal scale, the scale to which we would aspire, our highest aims, objects, powers, and possibilities” (“Self-Made Men” 334). And against this backdrop, he contends that “all mankind have [sic] the same wants, arising out of a common nature” and that “[t]he power to make and to appreciate pictures belongs to man exclusively” (“Lecture on Pictures” 131). Fascinated by the aesthetic forcefulness of pictures as democratic media, Douglass sees an existential “superiority of imagination over reason,” as John Stauffer notes (Black Hearts 54)� In a romantic tradition, for Douglass, the transition from slavery to freedom, from objecthood to creative participation in a democratic society, is essentially dependent on the work of the imagination� “One had to differentiate freedom from slavery in one’s mind’s eye,” Laura Wexler writes about Douglass’s philosophy of the imagination, “before one could produce or procure it for oneself or others� The past, the present, and the future would have to be reimagined after slavery’s demise� The nation, too, like the former slaves, must be taught to discern the new facts of existence” (28f.). What is thus striking about Douglass’s understanding of said “superiority” is that he ties it to the promises of social reform and democratic equality� For him, individual and social freedom are inextricably tied to or, rather, grounded in aesthetic freedom: “The process,” Douglass writes, “by which man is able to posit his own subjective nature outside of himself, giving it form, color, space, and all the attributes of distinct personality, so that it becomes the subject of distinct observation and contemplation, is at [the] bottom of all effort and the germinating principles of all reform and all progress” (“Pictures and Progress” 170). Form and reform! Douglass has the foresight to understand reform not only in terms of sociopolitical reconstruction but also as a matter of poetic re-formulation - as an infinitely repeated form-giving play serving the laws of nature� To him, reform is the subject’s recurring mode of giving itself form, of formulating itself as subject, of giving itself form from the depths of pre-subjective non-form (and, as such, an existentially human non-conformity)� Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 59 And Douglass is, as Henry Louis Gates argues, “acutely aware that images matter, especially when one’s rhetorical strategy had been fashioned around the trope of chiasmus, the reversal of the black slave-object into the black sentient citizen-subject” (“Epilogue” 204; emph. H.L.G.). Douglass’s portraits, in this regard, are artistic through the aesthetic forcefulness of their subject� When being photographed, Douglass understood himself in the realm of art and within the aura of what one might want to call the liberating spirit of aesthetic power� In the photograph the subject of a creative process becomes resonant to itself as creative actor� Subject and object of photography activate each other and react to each other - they form and reform each other vis-àvis their social context and in light of their aestheticization� They are bounded in each other’s unboundedness� And this, for Douglass, is ultimately an act of individual and social reform in the face of a struggle for democratic participation� To link two of his ideas about the power of pictures, it is the “poetic and religious element of man’s nature,” his or her “dreamy, poetic, and religious disposition” (“Age of Pictures” 144), “wherein illusions take the form of solid reality and shadows get themselves recognized as substance” (“Pictures and Progress” 166). To sum up this section, the affordance of the picture (i�e� to bear witness to one’s aesthetic self-liberation) finds its political likeness in the equality of democratic government. In his 1871 essay “Is Politics an Evil to the Negro? ”, Douglass therefore writes: “The beauty and perfection of government in our eyes will be attained when all people under it, men and women, black and white, shall be conceded the right of equal participation in wielding its power and enjoying its benefits. Equality is even a more important word with us than liberty” (qtd. in Buccola 67). 18 “Wielding” and “enjoying” - creating and experiencing� For the spirit of equality (the order of the natural laws) reigns in aesthetic freedom, equality is existentially “more important” for Douglass� And as if he was responding to Douglass, Dewey stresses in “Creative Democracy” that “[t]he democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gift [s]he has” (226f.). IV. Conclusion As this essay has moved from Dewey’s plea for a creative democracy to Douglass’s politics of aesthetic freedom, democracy essentially appeared as a reformative, progressive, and, as such, as an utterly poetic set of forces� Having said this, this essay sought to contribute to current debates about the (im)possibilities of aesthetic freedom and the creative nature of democratic culture� It aimed to show that Americanist efforts to debate thoroughly the trials and tribulations of United States democracy might eventually benefit from the inclusion of aesthetic theory� And drawing on the established idea 18 Again, on the “beauty” of democratic government, see my remarks in Fn. 9. 60 D ustin B rEitEnWischEr that both Douglass and Dewey are significantly indebted to an Emersonian philosophy, I more specifically argued that their respective takes on nature, individualism, and creative being have been substantially empowered by Emerson’s post-metaphysical and proto-pragmatist position� “[T]he task of democracy,” Dewey writes, “is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute” (“Creative Democracy” 230). And both Dewey and Douglass know that a lack of freedom marks the impossibility of experience and therefore the impotence of creative agency� When Dewey furthermore writes that “[i]ntolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life” (227), we can almost hear Douglass reply, “[h]uman contact, not isolation, useful activity, not dull, monastic torpidity, is the mission to which the glorious fact of life calls the whole human family. […] We live most who experience most” (“Age of Pictures” 156). Dewey and Douglass understand that a democratic life can only come into full bloom under the regimen of active and innovative, communicative and equal participation and intervention� In times of an ever-expanding “creativity dispositive,” we may nonetheless not confuse Dewey’s and Douglass’s call for creative democracy as being tied to an exclusively romantic and/ or utilitarian understanding of creativity� 19 As this essay sought to show, Dewey and Douglass (and Emerson as well) raise questions about the importance of aesthetic freedom for the socio-cultural and political (co-)existence that today (perhaps more urgently than ever) have to be answered in diachronic and transhistorical perspectives� It is therefore important to press ahead with research on the aesthetics and dynamics of the aestheticization of life-worlds and to delve deeper into the cultural studies and philosophical discourses on democracy� In the end, this essay did not try to sketch an aesthetics of democracy, but to provide one angle from which to further determine the mutual interdependence of the aesthetic and the democratic� Works Cited Arsić, Branka (Ed.). 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Welsch, Wolfgang� “Schiller Revisited: ‘Beauty is Freedom in Appearance’ - Aesthetics as a Challenge to the Modern Way of Thinking.” Contemporary Aesthetics 12 (2004)� <https: / / quod.lib.umich.edu/ c/ ca/ 7523862.0012.016? view=text; rgn=main> Web. Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom 63 West, Cornel� The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism� Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1989� Wexler, Laura� “’A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation.” Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity� Ed� Maurice O� Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith� Durham and London: Duke UP, 2012� 18-40� l aura B iEgEr Reading for Democracy Democratic culture, as a “whole way of life” in Raymond Williams’s sense, is shorthand for ways of doing and making that are deeply engrained in democratic societies, a living structure that is not only their outcome but also their nourishing ground� Such ways of doing and making are not superimposed by ruling elites; they are fabricated from within democratic life� As one of the oldest modern democracies, democratic ways of doing and making are deeply engrained in U�S� society (which is not to say that democratic ideals are, or ever will be, fully realized in this society). They define how people dress and carry themselves (in jeans and with the self-esteem of being free individuals); how they interact with each other (on the basis of a shared belief in equality); what they consider a good life (being free to do and say what one wants) and a good government (one that is of the people, for the people, and by the people)� And because these democratic ways of doing and making pervade all aspects of life, they also define (through the constitutional right to free speech, a free press, public schools and libraries, a commercial book market) what can be said, written, and read by whom, for whom, and to what end� These latter aspects of democratic culture in the U�S� lie at the core of my current work, and I am especially interested in those doings and makings that generate and institutionalize reading publics; that is, publics that constitute themselves through acts of reading� Reading is attracting lots of attention these days� Scholars are asking how we read differently now that we often read on screen rather than paper, how our cognitive and affective engagement with texts changes under the impact of the ongoing shift to an increasingly digital reading culture� And closer to home, how our understanding of the humanities (why they matter and what we should teach our students) is invested in ideas about reading (close and for meaning) that are historically tied to the medium of print, and that are, for precisely this reason, under much strain today� 1 Thinking about reading publics intersects with these debates in its commitment to matters of literary use; it enhances them with questions of democratic participation� Why, what, and how do people in democratic societies read, and what expectations and gratifications do they have when they read? What functions and values are ascribed to this age-old cultural technique and to all the actors (authors, publishers, critics, prize committees, readers, books, magazines, newspapers, 1 The debate is extensive and sprawling. See, for instance, Hayles, “How We Read”; the “surface reading” issue of Representations by Best and Marcus; Love, “Close But Not Deep”; Felski, Limits of Critique and Uses of Literature; the PMLA Theories and Methodologies section “Reading over Time” by Halpern and Rabinowitz; McNulty, “Literary Ethics Revisited.” 66 l aura B iEgEr blogs, tweets, smartphones) involved in it? What is at stake for a culture at large and a political culture in particular when an entire reading culture is being transformed as it is happening in our present day and age, where print ceases to be the unrivalled foundation of our reading culture while the public sphere is undergoing its perhaps gravest transformation since the invention of the printing press? Whose reading culture is and was being transformed now and in earlier moments of this history? What modes of democratic participation are being affected, and how? These are some of the questions I am trying to answer in my current work� The aim of this essay is considerably more modest� Theories of the public have assigned a formative role to acts of communication which are catalyzed and institutionalized by the production, circulation, and reception of texts, and I want to revisit some of these positions here with a special interest in how they view reading as a mode of democratic participation� Against the persistent ideal of communication as transparent, intersubjective exchange, I hope to show, through the public’s role as a reader, that its doings and makings are indeed more thoroughly mediated than it is often assumed� And eventually, I will offer some thoughts on what this means for our understanding about the public as a democratic institution� Ways of Doing and Making Things Public In the history of modern democracy, print has for the longest time been the medium through which texts were made available to the reading public� In fact, printing technology brought into the world new ways of making things public that prompted new ways of doing politics� Jürgen Habermas has explored this shift in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (published in English much later as Transformations of the Public Sphere), and one of his profoundest insights about modern democratic culture concerns reading� Printing increased the availability of reading material, yes, but the result was not merely that people read more� Through printing technology, reading became tied to political institutions and practices in unprecedented ways; in fact, one could say that it became a political institution in its own right� “Reading was relevant in a new way,” writes Michael Warner on the outset of his Habermas-inspired study of early American democratic culture, “because print discourse was now systematically differentiated from the activities of the state and from civil society” (Letters x)� Building on Habermas’s model of the bourgeois public sphere (to which I will turn momentarily), Warner examines the emergence of a new political discourse in colonial America at the eve of the revolution� One of the great virtues of his book is that it analyzes the transformation set in motion by printing technology as fully historical; that is, he shows how the meaning and function of political terminology such as “individual,” “print,” “public,” and “reason” were recalibrated through printed discourse by reconstructing these processes from within that discourse� Reading for Democracy 67 In doing so, Warner manages to make tangible the cultural dimension of the technological upheaval that was to generate “the political structures of modernity” (xi). Contrary to assumptions that “technology is prior to culture,” and against the resulting “retrodeterminism whereby the political history of a technology is converted into the unfolding nature of that technology,” he insists on the immanent meaning of writing and print in the culture of republican America and in the context of imperial enlightenment. How was print defined as a technology of publicity, having essentially civic and emancipatory character? How was the relation between subject and letters altered? What was the relation between the socially determined character of the medium and the texts produced in it? These questions are grounded in the assumption that “the cultural constitution of a medium (in this case printing) is a set of political conditions of discourse,” which “include the practices and structured labors that we call technology.” But Warner does not grant these conditions any ontological privilege over their political meaning; in fact, he treats political conditions and meanings as distinguishable� Technology, for him shorthand for “practices of technology,” becomes meaningful to the degree that it is structured, with its “meaningful structure [being] the dimension of culture” (9-10; my emphasis)� Approached this way, any attempt at understanding how printedness became the main currency of publicness, and how publicness gained a new political meaning and function at a certain point in the history of modernity must entail an excavation of this meaningful structure� And one crucial aspect about the transformed culture of letters in colonial America that we find with Warner as our guide is how reading print went hand in hand with “incorporat[ing] an awareness of the indefinite others” (“Publics” 65) to whom printed texts were addressed� Warner has called this feature of printedness the “normally impersonal” (Letters viii): readers did not simply imagine themselves as being directly addressed by (and in communication with) a text or an author; in reading print they imagined themselves in a relation with strangers with whom they may have nothing in common but being users - readers - of the same text� And this means that reading was indeed essential to fostering a self-understanding of democratic publics as made up of “relation[s] among strangers” (“Publics” 55) - relations that reside in the publicness of print� In fact, for Warner, the connecting activity of printed texts is what calls a public into being� Publics do not exist because people exist; they exist when people are bound together through texts, which essentially means through acts of reading� And this leads Warner to contend, against models of the public based on direct, intersubjective exchange, that the “doings” of printed texts (their linking activity, their modes of address, their ways of engaging readers) must factor into our understanding of publics as political agents� The usual way of imagining the interactive character of public discourse is through metaphors of conversation, answering, talking back, deliberating� The interactive social relation of a public, in other words, is perceived as though it 68 l aura B iEgEr were a dyadic speaker-hearer or author-reader relation� Argument and polemic, as manifestly dialogic genres, continue to have a privileged role in the self-understanding of publics; and indeed, it is remarkable how little even the most sophisticated forms of theory have been able to disentangle public discourse from its self-understanding as conversation� In addressing a public, however, even texts of the most rigorously argumentative and dialogic genres also address onlookers, not just parties to argument� (62-63) In insisting on the opaque surface of the text, which initially turns the public into a mere spectator - which must be read for the text to perform any of the mediating and connecting labor mentioned above - Warner assigns a key role to reading, yes� But he does so implicitly rather than explicating it� For instance, he deems the capacity of printed texts to address readers as publics essential to the existence of publics, but when further unpacking what this means, he limits his discussion to rhetoric (how is public address both personal and impersonal) and does not further consider the main activity - reading - that connects a text with those whom it is trying to address� Moreover, in stating that “between the discourse that comes before and the discourse that comes after, one must postulate some kind of link” (62), Warner seems to suggest that only the linking activity should be rethought in terms of the mediating activity performed by texts, and that public discourse exists in a space (or sphere) beyond these doings and makings somehow� So, as much as I side with Warner in his effort to unsettle deterministic media histories by insisting that any form and practice is inherently cultural, I am not convinced that discourse is the best tool for the job� The critical value of the concept hinges on poststructuralist analyses of the relation between power and knowledge, and as such, it is still relevant today� The problem I have with it in this particular context, however, is that discourse analysis can only account for those aspects of media use that spell themselves out as discourse� Lisa Gitelman’s notion of the protocols at work in implementing and activating a new medium offers a more nuanced alternative. In defining media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation,” Gitelman introduces the notion of the protocol to get a firmer grasp on the “vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere around a technological nucleus,” and which “express a huge variety of social, economic and material relations” (7). She illustrates her approach with the example of telephony, with its typical salutation (“Hello? ”), its monthly billing cycle, the wires and cables connecting one telephone with another, and so on� The associated protocols of print involve a similar variety of relations thickening around a technological nexus (which is in itself dynamic rather than stable), among them sales venues (book clubs, newsstands, bookstores), institutions (newsrooms, publishing houses, libraries, review journals), release cycles and modes of circulation, expectations about content and form Reading for Democracy 69 (high or low, fact or fiction, news item next to sales add), familiarity with certain types of genre (editorial, essay, sentimental novel)� For Gitelman, protocols are inscribed in media objects, and in drawing together sets of relations that exceed the symbolic realm, they prompt us to think even more rigorously than Warner’s discourse-based model about the manifold and historically specific ways of doing and making involved in activating and implementing a new medium� This is not the place to reconstruct in full scope how the associated protocols of print were involved in generating the new ideas of publicness that were foundational to the project of modern democracy� Rather, in turning to Habermas, I want to highlight one key aspect, namely, the share they had in turning the new medium of print into a virtual “training ground” (29) of rational deliberation for the modern democratic subject (which, for Habermas, was fully embodied in the rising bourgeoisie that was the main benefactor of the emerging order)� If print was essential to turning publicness into “the organizational principle for the procedures of the organs of the state themselves” (83) it is safe to say that the resulting new forms of governance were to a substantial degree engrained in democratic life because people read� In fact, with Habermas as our guide, we find that rule of law, one of the founding principles of democratic governance, is rooted in a public discourse that endorses an abstract and universally binding understanding of the law as a result of converging the literary and the political public sphere� With Gitelman we can see how the protocols of print were essential to making this happen� But first back to Habermas, who grounds his claims about the new political meaning and function of reading in an understanding of the bourgeois public sphere as a site that exists to the degree that private people make use of their reason in public� In modern societies, the private, intimate realm of the domestic sphere had become the site at which a new, audience-oriented mode of subjectivity was being forged; a mode of subjectivity trained by reading sentimental novels and writing letters and diaries, which turned out to be highly compatible and indeed very well suited to perform in the “coffee houses, salons and Tischgesellschaften” (51) that were formative sites of the literary public sphere in its early stages� And this brings us back to Gitelman� For how the private realm had become this new site was in part the making of the protocols which defined reading as an activity that one engaged in in the sheltered space of one’s home (ideally in the intimate space of one’s private room), and that thrived on an imagined web of “intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals,” authors and readers weeping over the fate of invented actors, and in doing so, they “themselves become actors who ‘talked heart to heart’” (Habermas 50). Interactions among family members became infused with this role, and salons held in private homes to discuss what one had read among a larger group of people extended it beyond the intimate sphere of the family� So yes, all these relations can be considered as belonging to the associated protocols of print, and the effects they had on the emerging social order have prompted Habermas to claim that the public sphere is indeed “an extension and completion of the intimate 70 l aura B iEgEr sphere of the conjugal family.” Just as the privacy of the family home was oriented toward the publicness of the salon, the newly emergent subjectivity, “as the innermost core of the private” (49), was from its inception oriented toward publicity. And for Habermas, a “literature that had become ‘fiction’” was crucial in conjoining these two strands� On the one hand, the emphatic reader repeated within [herself] the private relations displayed before [her] in literature� From [her] experience of real familiarity, [she] gave life to the fictional one, and in the latter [she] prepared [herself] for the former� On the other hand, from the outset the familiarity (Intimität) whose vehicle was the written word the subjectivity that had become fit to print had in fact become the literature appealing to a wide public of readers� (50) Both factors at work in bringing about this conjunction (the reenactment of fictional scripts by the reader, the reader’s familiarity with a certain masscompatible subjectivity) belong, once again, to the protocols of print rather than to printed discourse� And while this account of the reading process might reduce the reading of fiction to a reading for empathy, for a sociological study written more than fifty years ago it is remarkably attuned to concerns with literary use that have gained traction in our field in recent years. In fact, Habermas’s account of how, what, and why people in democratic (individualistic, capitalist) societies read is strikingly resonant with the idea of a fusion of horizons between the world of the text and the world of the reader that, according to reception aesthetics and reader-response-theory (to my mind the only systematic theories of reading in literary studies), is the main source of meaning production and gratification in the act of reading. What Habermas brings to this model is an acute awareness of how the publicness of print factors into the production and reception of literary texts� Reading, with its structural ties to forging a new audience-oriented subjectivity and generating public debate, prompts new ways of doing politics, which crystallize in the already mentioned shift in the understanding of law� The criteria of generality and abstractness characterizing legal norms had to have a peculiar obviousness for privatized individuals who, by communicating with each other in the public sphere of the world of letters, confirmed each other’s subjectivity as it emerged from their spheres of intimacy� For as a public they were already under the implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons, whose abstract universality afforded the sole guarantee that the individuals subsumed under it in an equally abstract fashion, as “common human beings,” were set free in their subjectivity precisely by this parity� (54) So yes, for Habermas reading is an essential catalyzer of the public sphere as a democratic institution, and of rational deliberation as the participatory element that sustains its existence� And yet, he seems to assume that this role can best be fulfilled in communicative situations - i.e. the aforementioned “coffee houses, salons and Tischgesellschaften” (51) - that allow for a presumably transparent and direct form of intersubjective exchange� And this means that the mediated activity of reading is relegated to the second tear, whereas direct intersubjective exchange is deemed to be the most valuable form of democratic participation� But does not Habermas’s own example Reading for Democracy 71 of how profoundly reading sentimental novels has affected the formation of an audience-oriented subjectivity imply that face-to-face communication is never fully transparent? That the language we use, the forms of address we choose, the modes of deliberation available to us, the purpose and aim of our speech, that all these features of communication are indeed deeply pervaded by our media use? This blind spot about the fundamental opacity of communication is all the more problematic, for it comes in tow with a wholesale rejection of modern mass media, of which print - in advancing the commodification of culture by catering to the appetites of the (predominantly bourgeois) reading public (29) - is an early harbinger� Curiously, even Habermas’s critics have not fully dismissed the ideal of transparent communication� For Nancy Fraser (who wants to salvage Habermas’s model as a tool that “permits us to keep in view the distinctions between state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic association, distinctions that are essential to democratic theory,” by pluralizing it) the public sphere “designates a theater in modern society in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” (Rethinking 57; my emphasis)� As we have seen, Warner (who also objects to Habermas’s lack of acknowledging the heterogeneous and inherently conflicted nature of the public sphere) takes issue with precisely this kind of conflation of public discourse and face-to-face communication� Even so, in bracketing what happens in the act of reading, Warner’s own model of public engagement keeps separate the linking (or mediating) activity of texts and the discourse flowing from it. (And if a future task of scholarship on the topic is to refine our understanding of the interactive, participatory thrust of the public as genuinely opaque and mediated, approaching the public through its investment in reading and it role as a reader is highly instructive�) Needless to say, giving thought to reading as a mediating activity that has been formative in shaping the public sphere must involve an understanding of reading as a social privilege� And while Habermas’s Stukturwandel can be criticized for a number of things, a lack of attention to this dimension of the public sphere is not among them� Reading publics, with their structural ties bourgeois values such as cultivation, privacy and individualism, are a staple of liberal democracy (or “bourgeois society,” as Habermas calls it), and as such they have been important catalyzers of empowering marginalized groups and individuals� But today, scholars are asking whether this agenda - which is, for some, essentially a liberal plea for diversity - has not foreclosed other possibilities of democratic mobilization, possibilities that are geared toward a radical democratic equality of means rather than a liberal democratic equality of opportunity� 2 The point is valid, and it aims at the heart and soul of the public sphere� How compatible is this institution with the project of radical or social democracy? Would reading still be assigned with a political role in these alternatives forms of democracy, and how would they deal with the problem of social privilege that is so deeply engrained in this 2 See, for instance, Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal� For an earlier quarrel with the same issue see Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity� 72 l aura B iEgEr cultural technique, its associated protocols, its democratic use-value? Just think of the difficulties that present “reading counterpublics” such as n+1, Jacobin and Public Books with their formative ties to Ivy League institutions have with divorcing themselves from the bourgeois public sphere� This is not the place to get into this important and timely debate� In stepping back from it we can see that in the kind of society which the rise of modern, liberal democracy has brought forth - the kind of society that we still live in today - public engagement has become a crucial touchstone of people’s self-perception and sense of belonging� In Warner’s words: “Speaking, writing, and thinking involve us - actively and immediately - in a public, and thus in the being of the sovereign” (“Publics” 52). But why is reading - the mediating activity that interlinks democratic ways of speaking, writing, and thinking - missing from this list? How ‘We The People’ Read If reading assumes a new meaning and function in the modern democratic culture the idea of popular sovereignty has been pivotal in this development. The power of “we the people” endorsed in the first sentence of the U.S. Constitution (the first one to be made public through print) comes in tow with a new set of responsibilities, among them voting for the candidate or party that best represents one’s interests, knowing what those interests are and how to prioritize them, and weighing self-interest against public interest� These responsibilities call for a culture of letters that is dedicated to cultivating responsible citizen-subjects - subjects who read as a way of engaging in critical self-reflection and public debate. For John Dewey, an ardent liberal democrat, parting public interest from self-interest is what summons the public into being, and as we shall see, he, too, assigns reading a crucial role in this process� But since this role is less of a leading role than in the other theories discussed so far, grasping it demands a brief rehearsal of Dewey’s general ideas on the public� For Dewey, the public comes into being in response to shared experience, with negative experience creating the strongest incentive for collective action� This is how he describes said process: Conjoint, combined, associated action is a universal trait of the behavior of things� Such actions have results� Some of the results of human collective actions are perceived, that is, they are noted in such ways that they are taken account of� Then there arise purposes, plans, measures and means to secure consequences which are liked and eliminate those which are found obnoxious� Thus perception generates a common interest; that is, those affected by the consequences are perforce concerned in conduct of all those who along with themselves share in bringing about results. Sometimes the consequences are confined to those who directly share in the transaction which produces them� In other cases they extend far beyond those engaged in producing them� […] Those indirectly affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough to deserve a name� The name selected is The Public� (The Public 34-35) Reading for Democracy 73 Note how Dewey’s understanding of the public is inherently progressive� For him, collective response to negative experience moves democracy forward� In fact, the formation of the democratic state is an organic outgrowth of the formation of the public� “The public is organized and made effective by means of representatives […] association adds to itself political organization, and something which may be government comes into being: the public is a political state” (35). 3 Yet at the same time, Dewey’s public is an antagonistic force: “to form itself, the public has to break existing political forms� This is hard because the forms are themselves the regular means of institutional change” (31). In stark contrast to Habermas, who fails to acknowledge the plural, heterogeneous and conflicted constitution of the public sphere, its structural division into publics and counterpublics, Dewey’s public is nonunitary, diversified, oppositional by nature. Contrary to the Habermasian model, Dewey’s public does not move toward an ideal of consensus but from conflict to conflict, or rather, from experiment to experiment. 4 Conceived as a collective response to negative experience, the public cannot cease to exist� But it can cease to do the things that make its collective response to negative experience collectively felt and heard� The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for� […] Recognition of evil consequences brought about a common interest which required for its maintenance measures and rules, together with the selection of certain persons as their guardians, interpreters, and, if need be, their executors� (12-13) The crucial term here is recognition - “recognition of itself” (77) and recognition of its common interests� In fact, for Dewey, a public recognizes itself through its interests� “It is not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions� There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics […].” (137). Only when this public is sufficiently aware of itself and its interests can it properly function. For Dewey, this is “primarily and essentially an intellectual problem” (126) - a problem that can be solved by means of communication� And by this he does not mean the machinery of communication that interlinks science, the press, and the political system, but the art of communication that manifests itself in the dialogic process through which the people in a democratic society come to understand the nature of their interdependence through a system of shared meaning� The special role that Dewey assigns to reading is directly linked to cultivating this public and essentially democratic art� For Dewey (as for Habermas, who had not read Dewey when writing his book on the public but later acknowledged the kinship between the two models), communication makes up the core of democratic culture� In The Public 3 And, as Dustin Breitenwischer argues in his contribution in this volume, it is also an aesthetic state� 4 I offer a more in-depth comparison of the two thinkers in my forthcoming essay “The Public and Its Problems Revisited.” 74 l aura B iEgEr and Its Problems, Dewey specifies two components that impair the communication of his day: There is a lack of “symbols consonant with [the] activities [of the new age],” and the existing “physical tools of communication” (142) are not properly used. The symbols (about which he has significantly more to say than about the technology) are essential to creating the sense of shared experience that, according to Dewey, is foundational to generating the common interest through which the public can recognize itself� Only when there exist signs or symbols of activities and of their outcome can the flux be viewed from without, be arrested for consideration and esteem, and be regulated� […] As symbols are related to one another, the important relations of a course of events are recorded and are preserved as meanings� […] Symbols, in turn, depend on and promote communication� The result of conjoint experience are considered and transmitted� (152-53) So yes, symbols are crucial to making the flux of activity meaningful and experience conscious, communicable and collective� What Dewey brings to his diagnosis of the public and its problems here is an understanding of language based on his ideal of democratic communication that he had developed earlier, in Experience and Nature, where he writes: “Language is a natural function of human association; and its consequences react upon other events, physical and human, giving them meaning or significance.” And: “The heart of language is not ‘expression’ of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought� It is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership” (173, 179; quoted in Stob 239, 237)� To unleash the communicative capacity in and through language and foster the kind of language that is needed for the public to function as public, Dewey turns to the realm of art� In Art as Experience, which had been published two years prior to The Public and Its Problems, he uses the visual arts to develop a theory of aesthetic experience as an educational training ground for democratic citizens� For the problem at hand - the problem of generating new symbols and using them to transform the force of experience into collective action - he turns to literature: “Poetry, the drama, the novel,” he writes, “are proofs that the problem of presentation is not insoluble� Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation” (183). 5 The kindling is the public, and reading is the activity that can ignite it� So yes, not only does Dewey assign reading a vital role in 5 Dewey may have had Emerson in mind when writing these sentences� In an essay on Emerson called “Emerson: The Philosopher of Democracy,” he writes: “His own preference was to be ranked with the seers rather than with the reasoners of the race, for he says, ‘I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary; it will one day be taught by poets� The poet is in the right attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing�’ Nor do I regard it as impertinent to place by the side of this utterance, that other in which he said ‘We have yet to, learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself or no forms of Reading for Democracy 75 mending the problems of communication (and of democracy) of his day, he also has trust in its literature� But as his book draws to a close he reels back� Different from the presumably direct and immediate encounter that a recipient has with visual art, reading offers a merely secondary, derivative mode of experience� In Dewey’s words: Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained� But the winged words of conversation in immediate discourse have a vital import that is lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech. Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public� But it and its results are tools after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take� (218) And this brings us to my conclusion - and back to the inclination of idealizing the face-to-face as immediate and transparent in theories of the public sphere� Dewey is especially emphatic in his endorsement of these ideas� Reading is essential in preparing the individual for the art of democratic communication, but to actually constitute a public it takes direct intersubjective exchange� Yet as clear and outspoken as the above quoted passage is in its judgment of reading as a minor mode of democratic engagement, Dewey is not fully consistent in taking this stance� In other passages he ponders over the possible benefits of new communication technologies - the “physical tools” mentioned above: “When the machine age has […] perfected its machinery, it will be a means of life and not its despotic master� Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is the name for a life of free and enriching communion” (184). In passages like these, which bring to mind recent debates about the democratic forcefulness of the internet (or at least the participatory internet 2�0), 6 it seems as if Dewey’s fundamental belief in democracy (which Hans Joas aptly compares to religious belief) 7 allows him to interpret practically anything as a potential strengthening of democracy, be it an old-fashioned cultural technique like reading or new technologies (in his day, most likely the radio)� Yet while it is crucial to differentiate where Dewey is invested in describing democratic procedures (which tends to be rigorous) and where he is projecting democratic possibilities (which is by default optimistic), in the face of today’s crisis of democracy there is something refreshing in his unwavering optimism� The state of perfect communication that lets public discourse flow freely might be achieved, according to Dewey, if both the art and the technology of communication are subsumed in a community’s democratic grammar and no plausibility can give it evidence and no array of arguments” (406). I owe this insight to Dustin Breitenwischer� For a concise version of Dewey’s argument on communication as an essentially democratic art see Dewey, “Creative Democracy.” 6 See, for instance, chapter 4 in Mounk, The People vs. Democracy� 7 See Joas, “John Deweys Theorie der Religion,” in which he contends that democracy eventually becomes a “secular religion” for Dewey, and in which he poses the question whether we should endorse him as a kind of prophet (153)� 76 l aura B iEgEr ways of doing and making� Achieving this state might be a utopian enterprise, but the value assigned to it and the measures undertaken by a community to approximate it depend on political will and democratic intention� Whether we are getting closer or further away from this state is a subject of heated public debate these days, and it is not clear if reading will still play a prominent role in the newly emerging order� 8 But perhaps our current media age has at least made us aware of the inescapably mediated nature of even our most immediate and intimate experiences ( - and how are we to mediate successfully these experiences without some kind of ‘reading’? ). If and how this awareness can (and will) transform our understanding of the public as a democratic institution depends on our willingness to let go of the persistent belief that the proper functioning of the public depends on the presumably unobstructed mode of the face-to-face� Any conscious act of reading might be an instructive exercise in this matter� Works Cited Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus, Eds. Special Issue “The Way We Read Now.” Representations 108.0 (Fall 2009)� Bieger, Laura� “The Public and Its Problems Revisited: Reading Dewey through Habermas (and Habermas through Dewey).” Special Issue „Truth or Post-Truth? “, Ed� Dustin Breitenwischer and Tobias Keiling� European Journal of American Studies 15�1(Spring 2020) (forthcoming)� Dewey, John. “Emerson: The Philosopher of Democracy.” International Journal of Ethics 13, 4 (July 1903): 405-413� -----� The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927� -----� Experience and Nature� New York: Dover, 1958� Felski, Rita� The Limits of Critique. London and Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015� -----� Uses of Literature. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008� Fraser, Nancy� “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/ 26 (1990): 56-80� Gitelman, Lisa� The Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006� Habermas, Jürgen� Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1964]� Trans� by Thomas Burger� Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989� Hayles, N. Katherine (2012). “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” How We Think: Digital Media and Technogenesis. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2012� 55-80� Halpern, Faye and Peter J, Rabinowitz, Eds� Theories and Methodologies Section “Reading over Time’.” PMLA 133�3 (May 2018): 631-66� Joas, Hans. “Deweys Theorie der Religion.” Philosophie der Demokratie: Beiträge zum Werk von John Dewey. Ed� Hans Joas� Frankfurt/ M�: Suhrkamp, 2000� 139-159� Lilla, Mark� The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York: Harper Collins, 2017� 8 See, for instance, Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerburg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy; Mounk, “Is More Democrary Always Better for Democracy? ” Reading for Democracy 77 Love, Heather, “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History 41�2 (Spring 2010): 371-392� McNulty, Tess� “Literary Ethics, Revisited: An Analytic Approach to the Reading Process.” New Literary History 49�3 (Fall 2018): 383-401� Michaels, Walter Benn� The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality� Metropolitan Books: New York, 2006� Mounk, Yasha� The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It� Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2018� -----. “Is More Democrary Always Better for Democracy? ” The New Yorker (November 12, 2018)� https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2018/ 11/ 12/ is-more-democracy-always-better-democracy Osnos, Evan. “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? ” The New Yorker (September 17, 2018)� https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2018/ 09/ 17/ can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy Stob, Paul. “Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the Public.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38�3 (2005): 226-247� Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14�1 (Fall 2002): 49-90� -----� The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990� c hristian P. h ainEs Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception, or, Exhaustion and Endurance in Russell Bank’s Continental Drift Perfumed by gasoline and ocean salt, a haze of heat rises from the asphalt, stirring through a trailer park in which the homes, arranged haphazardly, compose a geometry of lives struggling to make do; in the cramped, sweaty space below deck, refugees long for another life, as Haiti retreats in the distance, buried in the boat’s wake; in the unrelenting chill of a New England winter, snow piles up in what used to be a mill town, as men and women gather in narrow bars, drink cheap beer, gossip over crumbling marriages - these are the settings, the affective milieux, of Russell Bank’s fictions. They draw a geographic triangle whose points are New England, Florida, and the Caribbean� There is an echo of the slave trade in this triangle, a reverberation of the plantocracy, that institution of social death through which African bodies became disposable commodities and land became raw materials for industry, capitalist modernity etched into the soil, but not without patches of wilderness refusing to be tamed� Nor could the social death of slaves truly be achieved� The absolute elimination of agency could only be a fantasy in the face of slave revolt and marronage� These milieux and the geography that they constellate are not only the sedimented histories of slavery but also of capitalism� Bank’s novels are humid with the aspirations and defeats of working class and un/ underemployed subjects for whom upward mobility is indispensable and impossible, the stuff of dreams and the hard wall against which satisfaction shatters� Yet, even for the proletarianized and the subaltern, there are moments of relief and escape, actions that push back against capitalism’s libidinal blackmail� Banks channels the energies of submerged, half-expired social agencies as they rattle against the system’s constraints� Banks writes in the not-so-narrow threshold between freedom and bondage, autonomy and subordination, the human and the non-human, the willful subject and environmental determinism� In novels such as The Book of Jamaica, Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Lost Memory of Skin, Banks populates this threshold with figures including the maroon, the drop out, and the schemer, as well as modes of agency such as making do, taking flight, and working the system� This threshold troubles the structural oppositions of a liberal social ontology in which freedom equates to autonomy defined in negative terms (freedom as freedom from dependency) and in which society rests upon a conception of individuality anterior to relationality (the atomistic individual)� Bank’s characters and settings defy these terms, insisting on 80 c hristian P. h ainEs a gradated spectrum of capacity and incapacity, connection and individuation� Situating Bank’s writing in relation to neoliberalism, this threshold also constitutes the disavowed sociality of the present, the dense weave of filiation and affiliation that has not yet been completely subsumed by the entrepreneurial recoding of subjectivity or by strategies of accumulation by dispossession� In other words, the substance of Bank’s writing consists of a sociality immanent, yet irreducible, to contemporary capitalism� This sociality constitutes a zone of limbo in respect to the political, because it fails to align not only with the identifications of party politics but also with left-wing and right-wing imaginaries of non-parliamentary politics, including social revolution and fundamentalist visions of community� This limbo is not apolitical but prepolitical; it is a state of nature, not an idyllic space outside of history but rather the condition of possibility, or social ontology, through which politics emerges in the first place. In the critical discourse of biopolitics, this state of nature has come to be known largely through Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception� Agamben’s thinking remains productive, I would suggest, because of its willingness to grapple with the foundations of politics� Agamben’s attention to sovereignty’s dependence on that which is included within the juridicopolitical only insofar as it is excluded (bare life) has offered an important resource for reckoning with those forms of detention, profiling, and killing that operate in the shadows of the law� 1 At the same time, Agamben’s political theology tends to reduce politics to the decision of the sovereign, offering a model that can be strikingly one-dimensional in its insistence on a singular nomos or matrix of the political� As Achille Mbembe, Jasbir Puar, and Alexander Weheliye have argued in distinct ways, Agamben’s choice of the camp as nomos both homogenizes the content of politics and excludes the particularities of political paradigms such as the colony and the plantation� 2 In this essay, I expand the category of the state of nature, understood as the prepolitical sociality on which politics depends, through a Marxist revision of the state of exception� Drawing on Paolo Virno, Gilbert Simondon, and Marx, I show how the state of exception names a phenomenology, ontology, and politics of crisis in which the suspension of dominant practices of governance gives rise to the potential for reorganizing the form and content of the political� This expanded conceptualization does not exclude Agamben’s thinking of sovereignty but reframes it as a subgenre of the state of exception, decentering the political theology of the king’s body - the king’s body as synecdoche and synthesis of the body politic 3 - in favor of a more complex 1 For Agamben’s formulation of bare life and the sovereign state of exception, see especially, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and State of Exception (2004)� 2 See Mbembe, “Necropolitics, Public Culture 15�1: 11-40; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), especially the Introduction; and Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014)� 3 On the legacy of the body of the monarchical sovereign for biopolitics, see especially, Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (2011)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 81 social ontology� Instead of a dialectic between the body politic and political bodies, or between sovereignty and citizenship, this social ontology turns on the processes of individuation through which preindividual potential and transindividual relations (the very stuff of sociality, I explain below) become the matter of politics� In other words, I am concerned with the way in which politics emerges from sociality without being reducible to it� This friction between politics and sociality unsettles the capitalist framing of ontology, showing how this ineradicable state of nature is irreducible to the regime of private property or to the neoliberal entrepreneurial imperative� In what follows, I show how Russell Bank’s novel Continental Drift excavates the state of nature in contemporary capitalism not only for the sake of critique but also in an effort to recuperate social potential against the predations of neoliberalism� This critical operation involves a reckoning with American exceptionalism, the latter understood not only as an ideological apparatus but also as a condition that informs life itself� I understand this condition in terms of a phenomenology of exhaustion, or a lived experience of being drained of life, reduced to an appendage of imperial fantasies of state control, confined to a treadmill masquerading as upward social mobility� The term exhaustion thus indicates how American exceptionalism facilitates the production of worn out lives, bodies fatigued by the tremendous energies involved in mere survival and nationalist affiliation. In this context, American exceptionalism names an ideological apparatus through which the libidinal impulses of subjects and non-subjects become tethered to the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism� I contend that exceptionalism (including American exceptionalism) designates the project of establishing a monopoly over the state of exception, of foreclosing practices of exception that contest the status quo� In opposition to exceptionalism, Banks stages practices of potentiality that dwell in a state of exception without succumbing to the temptations of state and capitalist monopolies over power� More generally, Bank’s fiction thinks the biopolitical in a way that attends to the production of the human - anthropogenesis - without falling into the trap of human exceptionalism - philosophical anthropology� It contributes to the imagination not of a new humanism but of practices that take exception to exceptionalism and, in doing so, articulate forms of life irreducible to the neoliberal regimes that govern our present� The Exhaustion of American Exceptionalism Continental Drift offers a phenomenology of the exhaustion induced by American exceptionalism� Before elaborating this phenemonology, it is crucial to articulate the connection between American exceptionalism and the state of exception in a precise manner, acknowledging their mutual imbrication but also their non-identity� American exceptionalism depends on the state of exception; it requires moments during which juridical regulation gives way to law-making force, which is to say that it requires moments when the letter 82 c hristian P. h ainEs of the law and the policing of the law become indistinguishable� These moments constitute the substance of exceptionalism� The suspension of governing procedures in the name of sovereign power testifies to a monopoly over the very force that brings the law and its administrative bodies into being in the first place. At the same time, as Donald Pease argues, exceptionalism also names the disavowal of the state of exception, the fantasies enabling the government of the United States to disregard established juridical norms without causing a crisis of legitimacy� 4 American exceptionalism and the state of exception thus enter into vicious circle in which exceptionalism provides an alibi for the state of exception and, in turn, the state of exception donates political substance to exceptionalism� Crucially, exceptionalism is not identical to the state of exception� Exceptionalism designates strategies that attempt to monopolize the state of exception, that foreclose practices that seek to revise the norms governing the production of social relations and political subjects� Banks situates the exhaustion of American exceptionalism within the context of a United States in socioeconomic decline� His 1985 novel intuits what has now become a difficult-to-deny fact of the U.S. position in the global economy, namely, that it can no longer maintain its hegemony in respect not only to international affairs but also to the management of global capital transfers� 5 The novel presupposes as its affective base-line a nation experiencing economic stagnation as the failure of the American dream� The characters of Continental Drift live the exhaustion induced by American exceptionalism as a sense of defeat� Bob Dubois and Vanise and Claude Dorsinville - the novel’s protagonists - invest their libidinal energies in the fantasies of American exceptionalism only to struggle with the deflation of their dreams of success� Bob is a heater repairman from New Hampshire who moves to Florida with his family for the sake of new economic opportunities� Claude and Vanise flee Haiti because of harassment by the police; they head towards the United States (specifically, Florida), which they imagine as a place of refuge and promise� These characters imagine America as a utopian site in which one can depart from history and discover a new life� These pursuits of rebirth fail miserably, terminating in death, depression, failure, and exhaustion� At the same time, however, Continental Drift introduces a perspective of natural history from which even defeat and failure offer gleams of potentiality, hints of the social possibilities buried by dominant modes of governance� As I explain below, natural history implies a process of individuation, of subject production, through which states of nature involve a complex dialectic between what is and what could be, between ontology and history, sociality and politics� 4 See Pease, Ch� 1, especially pp� 12� 5 On the declining fortunes of American hegemony over the capitalist world-system, see especially, Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994); “Hegemony Unravelling - 1,” New Left Review 32 (March-April 2005); “Hegemony Unravelling - 2” New Left Review 33 (May-June 2005); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (2003); and Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: the U.S. in the World Economy (2002)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 83 Continental Drift first registers this exhaustion as a crisis in the life of Bob Dubois, specifically, in the unbearable disjunction between a fantasy of upward mobility and lived material conditions: The trouble with his life, if he were to say it honestly, which at this moment in his life he cannot, is that it’s over� He’s alive, but his life has died� He’s thirty years old, and if for the next thirty-five years he works as hard as he has so far, he will be able to stay exactly where he is now, materially, personally� He’ll be able to hold on to what he’s got� Yet everything he sees in store windows or on TV, everything he reads in magazines and newspapers, and everyone he knows […] tells him that he has a future, that his life is not over, for there’s still a hell of a lot more of everything out there and it’s just waiting for the taking, and a guy like Bob Dubois, steady, smart, skilled, good-looking and with a sharp sense of humor too - all a guy like that has to do is reach up and grab it� It’s the old life-as-ladder metaphor, and everyone in America seems to believe in it� Bob has survived in a world where mere survival is insufficient, so if he complains about its insufficiency, he’s told to look below him, see how far he’s come already, see how far he’s standing above those still at the bottom of the ladder, and if he says, All right, then, fine, I’ll just hold on to what I’ve got, he’ll be told, Don’t be stupid, Bob, look above you - a new car, a summer house down on the Maine coast where you can fish to your heart’s content, early retirement, Bob, college-educated children, and someday you’ll own your own business, too, and your wife can look like Lauren Bacall in mink, and you can pick up your girlfriend in Aix-en-Province in your Lancia, improve your memory, Bob, eliminate baldness, amaze your friends and family� (14) This passage merits lengthy quotation not merely because it so pointedly encapsulates the pitfalls of the so-called American dream but also because it anticipates in its form the exhaustion that the narrative calls into being� The almost banter-like voice of the narrator, in its imitation of the overbearing tone of advertising, combined with the syntactical overflow of this passage’s final sentence generates a quality of libidinal saturation: desire finds itself repeatedly enjoined by the equation between upward mobility and personal significance. To exist in the fullest sense means climbing the rungs of the economic ladder, scaling over the rung of mere survival not for the sake of a concrete goal but in order to experience the kinetic energy of economic progress. The cloying second-person (“you can fish to your heart’s content,” “you’ll own your own business, too”) may suggest the emptiness of this injunction to desire more, always more, but the passage does not offer alternative objects of desire, nor does it map a way out of this libidinal trap� Instead, it outlines the shape that life takes when held firm by this trap: a life caught between, on the one hand, paralysis, an immobility in which intense expenditure results only in treading water, and, on the other hand, a demand to reinvent oneself, to actualize one’s full potential in specifically capitalist terms. This split state of being amounts, the passage suggests, to a perseverance without vitality: “He’s alive, but his life has died.” 6 6 The phenomenology of exhaustion that I am describing here encompasses what Lauren Berlant terms cruel optimism. The latter names a specific instantiation of exhaustion belonging to the contemporary moment of neoliberalism� My theoretical generalization of the state of exception beyond the parameters of sovereign power suggests an 84 c hristian P. h ainEs This living without life names not only Bob’s existential predicament but also the specific relationship between embodiment and environment from which he suffers. The “old life-as-ladder metaphor” promises an open futurity; it carves out space for a manner of living predicated on materiality not as a constraint but as a source of possibility� The passage thus marks a difference between matter as limit and matter as potential, and this disjuncture, in turn, engenders a hierarchical division between manners of being in the world: one can live under the weight of material compulsions, or one can treat material conditions as a springboard towards success� This division presupposes a capitalist framing of ontology, according to which potentiality is always already economic opportunity, always already subject to private property� In this frame, the difference between actuality and potentiality collapses insofar as the latter comes to be defined solely in terms of actual movement up the “old life-as-ladder metaphor.” To live “in a world where mere survival is insufficient” is to live in a world where mere being is not enough, where personhood hinges on a ceaseless conversion of potentiality into actuality, of survival into striving, of getting by into getting over� This passage implies a state of nature akin to Robinson Crusoe’s island, a capitalist fantasy in which social ontology immediately takes the shape of the free market, in which life is measured by entrepreneurial success� Continental Drift devotes much of its narrative energies to working out the implications of this capitalist imperative to equate being with striving� The novel’s plot launches from Bob’s insight that, according to this capitalist frame, his family’s relative socioeconomic immobility is a kind of death: “We’re all dead� Like my father and mother, and like your mother too� We only think we’re alive” (30). Bob seeks out social resurrection in geographic mobility, moving his entire family to Florida so that he can work at one of the liquor stores that his brother, Eddie, owns� Bob’s motivation depends on Eddie’s promise that, if Bob performs his job well, he will eventually become a business partner� Unsurprisingly, the vision Bob has for his new life bears little resemblance to what comes to pass� Bob quickly grows tired of his position as a liquor store clerk; he shoots to death an African American man who attempts to rob the store and suffers from the guilt of having done so; he quits his job at the liquor store and joins his friend Avery running charter fishing boats in the Keys; the income from that job is insufficient to support his family, driving him to engage in illegally smuggling people into the United States; this endeavor turns into disaster when, in an encounter with the Coast Guard, Bob and his first mate push their human cargo overboard, resulting in the death of all but one of the smuggled persons; finally, Bob is killed when he goes into the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti in search of atonement� As this outline of the plot suggests, Bob’s search for a new life is exhaustive and exhausting; the relentless process of exchanging mere survival for socioeconomic promise - of “trading up” - wears Bob down until he elaboration of Berlant’s notion of lateral agency in an effort to move beyond both the suspended animation of political paralysis and the stultified routines of orthodox radical politics� See Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 85 can do little more than sacrifice himself. There is an inexorable quality to the events of the plot, a weight of narrative compulsion in which individualistic conceptions of agency seem not only besides the point but mystifying, a ruse whose only obvious outcome is the reproduction of capitalist ideologies of aspiration at the most intimate level� Bob’s condition of suspended animation - his fruitless and exhausting running in place - belongs to a state of exception, one defined less by political theology or sovereignty than by capitalism’s systemic tendency toward crisis and contradiction� In Continental Drift, the state of exception describes the crisis that opens up because of a contradiction between, on the one hand, the aspirational routes of capitalist success insofar as they have normative force (one thinks, here, of the neoliberal imperative to treat all of life as a series of entrepreneurial opportunities) and, on the other hand, material conditions (including deindustrialization, global economic stagnation, and the international division of labor) that inhibit the execution of these norms� This crisis takes place on a microscopic level relative to the scale of global capital, so that Bob’s life allegorizes the capitalist world-system, suggesting if not the necessity then at least the likelihood of a breakdown in the dominant processes of individuation through which lives take shape under contemporary conditions 7 � In other words, life persists, but it does so without a surplus of potentiality, without a sense that possibility exceeds actuality: “He’s alive, but his life has died.” Simply put, capitalism cannot deliver on its promises, cannot translate fantasies of success into lived experiences of growth or even sustenance� This state of affairs does not mark the failure of exceptionalism but the success of it, for exceptionalism’s monopoly over the state of exception - in this case, its presupposition of a state of nature whose form is synonymous with neoliberalism - involves the negation of practices that hold the promise of making life livable� Bob indexes the circumscription of potentiality and relationality by the apparatuses (ideological, biopolitical) of contemporary capitalism� These apparatuses foreclose expressions of sociality that exceed the parameters of a competitive individualism, reducing modes of relation to means of getting ahead� In arguing that Bob’s exhaustion serves an allegorical function, that it constitutes an index of systemic processes productive of exhaustion, I am not implying the homogeneity of figures of exhaustion but rather acknowledging that the production of subjectivity is itself a systemic feature of capitalism� Without denying the force of the aleatory in the emergence of subjectivity, my argument insists on the ordinariness of subjectivity - on the ordinariness of “Bob” as a signifier for the banal tragedies of late capitalist life. Reminiscent of naturalist fiction, Continental Drift treats its characters as social types, as 7 For an extended discussion of the relationship between biopolitics and allegory, see Leerom Medovoi, “‘Terminal Crisis? ’ From the Worlding of American Literature to World-System Literature,” American Literary History 23�3: 643-659� 86 c hristian P. h ainEs products of impersonal forces and conditions (both social and natural)� 8 The novel theorizes this treatment of characters in a long section in which the narrative suspends the third-person limited perspective, replacing it with a sweeping ecology of global life� While the passage is too long to quote in full, a portion of it should suffice to demonstrate the manner in which Banks shifts the narrative register onto a scale in which individual human life can only appear as the tiniest stitch of a much larger pattern: It’s as if the creatures residing on this planet in these years, the human creatures, millions of them traveling singly and in families, in clans and tribes, were a subsystem inside the larger system of currents and tides, of winds and weather, of drifting continents and shifting, uplifting, grinding, cracking land masses� It’s as if the poor forked creatures who walk, sail and ride on donkeys and camels, in trucks, buses and trains from one spot on this earth to another were all responding to unseen, natural forces, as if it were gravity not war, famine or flood that made them move in trickles from hillside villages to gather along the broad, muddy river to the sea and over the sea on leaky boats to where they collect in eddies, regather their lost families and few possessions, set down homes and become fruitful once again� We map and measure jet streams, weather patterns, prevailing winds, tides and ridges where the plates atop the earth’s mass drive against one another; we name and chart the Southeast and Northeast Trades and the Atlantic Westerlies, the tropical monsoons and the doldrums, the mistrals, the Santa Ana and the Canada High; we know the Humboldt, California and Kuroshio currents - so that, having traced and enumerated them, we can look on our planet and can see that all the way to its very core the sphere inhales and exhales, rises and falls, swirls and whirls in a lovely, disciplined dance in time� It ages and dies and is born again, constantly, through motion, creating and recreating its very self, like a uroborous, the snake that devours its tail� (38-39) The very syntax of the passage generates a sense of immensity, the sheer enumeration of geographical, meteorological, and geological features, as well as social formations and modes of transportation, resulting in a version of the mathematical sublime: an approach towards infinite complexity - the infinite complexity of the world ecological system - that cannot be captured, only indicated� 9 Put differently, the passage gestures towards what it cannot represent, relying on the conditional “as if” (“as if the poor forked creatures […] as if it were gravity not war)” to defer representational and narrative closure, to ward off what Heidegger calls the “world picture” (Weltbild): 8 I am not only thinking of nineteenthand early twentieth-century naturalist fiction by the likes of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, which articulate character systems in terms of evolutionary natural history and which represent characters in terms of the impersonal forces that condition them� I also have in mind Émile Zola’s theorization of naturalist fiction in experimental terms, especially in “The Experimental Novel.” For a recent argument echoing my own concern for the flows between inanimate and animate matters in terms of natural history, see Kevin Trumpeter, “The Language of Stones: the Agency of the Inanimate in Literary Naturalism and the New Materialism,” American Literature 87�2 (2015): 225-252� 9 I am of course referring to Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, as well as between the dynamic and mathematical versions of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 87 the grasping of the world as image so as to subject it to an anthropocentric empire� 10 The turn to choreography to describe the churning and whirling motions of the earth (“a lovely, disciplined dance in time”) does not merely suspend the world-picture but offers another way of experiencing globality, of apprehending subjectivity in relation to an ecological system� The syntax’s shift into a rhythmic parallelism, a linguistic two-step (“inhales and exhales, rises and falls, swirls and whirls”), suggests the mutual imbrication of subject and object, person and system, organism and environment� In a sense, this rhythm is no more than the stylistic equivalent of the content of this section of the novel, the linguistic feeling of ebb and flow a not-so-subtle mimicry of wind patterns, tides, and the circulation of human life from continent to continent� The sublime thus gives way to the beautiful, the encounter with unrepresentable immensity to the harmony of a cyclical pattern knowing no separation between organic life and inorganic conditions� All belongs to a vast flow of being, to a dance whose music never ends. On this scale, Bob’s existence seems not to register at all� The tragic air of the novel would seem displaced by a comedy of dimunition, as if scaling up could not help but reduce the seriousness of an individual character’s plot to Lilliputian proportions� 11 At the same time, however, Banks introduces a language of entropy (of breakdown, destruction, and disorder) that does not so much cancel as complicate the cosmic unity of the global dance: Revolve around points and rotate on axes, whirl and twirl and loop in circles, ellipses, spirals and long curves that soar across the universe and disappear at last at the farthest horizon of our human imagination only to reappear here behind us in the daily life of our body, in our food, shit and piss, our newborn babies and falling-down dead - just keep on moving, keep breeding and pissing and shitting, keep on eating the planet we live on, keep on moving, alone and in families and tribes, in nations and even in whole species: it’s the only argument we have against entropy� (43-44) The global dance continues, but the micrological scale of the individual subject (“the daily life of our body”), as well as the groups to which that subject belongs, interrupts sheer processual flow - continental drift, geological indifference - with epistemological and existential concerns� The parataxis of “alone and in families and tribes, in nations and even in whole species” creates a set of nested scales, suggesting a plurality of dialectics between one measure of social life and another, less an absorption of individual human life by deep time or immense space than the reverberation of distant spaces and times in the here and now� 12 This reorientation comes across 10 See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977), Trans� William Lovitt� 11 See Mark McGurl’s essay “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012): 533-553. Specifically, I am referring to its theorization of weird fiction as a “deflationary enterprise” in respect to the human species. 12 One cannot help but think of Gayatri Spivak’s moving account of planetarity (as distinguished from globalization) in The Death of a Discipline, Ch� 3� In quite different ways, Banks and Spivak both invoke the planetary as a “catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right” (102). I would also call attention to an increasing body of 88 c hristian P. h ainEs most forcefully in the passage’s imperative mood, which urges that “we” (a pronoun including not only the novel’s characters but also its readers) “just keep on moving.” Banks calls this ethos “constant heroism, systematic heroism,” phrasing that substitutes ordinary perseverance in the face of the grind (grinding tectonic plates, the grinding force of erosion, the daily grind of work) for the conventional dramatic structure of the heroic act qua narrative climax (45)� The implication of this perspectival shift is not to valorize individual bravery but to expand the affective spectrum of heroism so that it includes social practices of getting by and making do - “just keep on moving […] keep on moving.” In doing so, Banks presents a narrative version of Elizabeth Povinelli’s distinction between exhaustion and endurance� In Economies of Abandoment, Povinelli describes the exhaustion of contemporary global social life as the effect of a “careful weave of sovereign killing (capital punishment and assassinations), criminalization of life staples such as certain food, drugs, and forms of protective gear, and self-righteous neglect” (118)� Exhaustion names the becoming unlivable of life because of a deprival of the material means of social reproduction� As Bob’s case suggests, this deprival implies an existential condition in which potentiality (what a life can do) is not so much eclipsed as overcoded, captured by the logic of capitalist accumulation, by the conflation of being with striving, of perseverance with the “old life-as-ladder metaphor.” However, Povinelli crucially qualifies her diagnosis of late capitalism and late liberalism by recognizing “an entwinement of endurance and exhaustion” (125). Endurance names practices, habits, affects, and attitudes that enable survival in conditions that would seem to forbid survival; it designates tactics for making do on the part of forms of life devalued by dominant modes of governance� It indicates a surplus of potentiality immanent to exhaustion, and it draws a horizon of social and political change, because this surplus of potentiality articulates itself in forms of life yet to come� Bank’s refrain, “keep on moving,” entwines endurance with exhaustion. It gestures towards an ordinary heroism that, instead of transcending social and ecological conditions, manages to live in the face of what appears unlivable� Continental Drift situates this endurance within natural history� The “whirl and twirl and loop” of the global dance includes human sociality not as a negation or suspension of nature but as its complexification, its reflexive differentiation as culture� 13 Bank’s ecological interlude opens onto a problem of representation and narration: How does one account for the historicity of the individual, for the social history of the subject, without reducing characters to mere types? How can characters index the currents of history - historical materialiast theories of planetarity� See, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35�2 (2009): 197-222, as well as Jason W� Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015)� 13 I find Elizabeth Grosz’s account of the nature-culture continuum involved in natural history very compelling because of its insistence not on organic oneness but evergreater complexification. See especially Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (2005) and Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 89 including history at the largest scale, at the scale of “continental drift” - without the narrative apparatus becoming sheer taxonomy? How can we manage to navigate between the most discrepant spatial and temporal scales without losing a sense of their mutual imbrication, their dialectical dance with one another? Natural history might seem a strange solution to these questions, but this strangeness derives less from the proposition itself than from our ingrained habit of conceptualizing history as distinct from nature, of assuming that history implies a leap out of the state of nature and into the dizzying, forward flow of progress. In contrast, I want to suggest that the problem onto which Bank’s fiction lights is also a solution of sorts, provided we understand solution not to mean resolution but rather the production of new problems, new adventures in thought� Namely, the natural-historical bent of Continental Drift, its resituating of culture in the realm of nature, involves a thinking of subjectivity in terms of processes of individuation� In other words, the subject (or character) comes to designate the mutable product of processes that not only exceed its contours but also undermine its stability� Put differently, the subject/ character becomes no more than an eddy in an impersonal flow of social forces, a tentative composition in the geometry of history� Natural History and the Biopolitics of Individuation Continental Drift narrates social life as embedded in natural history, as immanent to an ecological web that troubles distinctions between nature and culture� In doing so, it asks its readers to adopt a perspective from which subjects, or forms of life, are not so much preexisting figures as contingent constellations of movement and matter� Natural history, I am proposing, should be understood as a mutation of an older philosophical problem: individuation� This problem, stretching back at least to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asks how an entity distinguishes itself as such� 14 Beginning in the eighteenth century, it shifts from philosophical to biological grounds, not so much abandoning philosophy as discarding its theological trappings� In biological terms, individuation names the process whereby a species differentiates itself into members� It includes the evolutionary process of speciation, or the differentiation of species through natural selection, mutation, and adaptation� What should be clear, here, is that individuation is by no means synonymous with individualism in the liberal sense, for, as I explain shortly, it concerns itself not with individuality as a presupposition but with how distinct social figures (including collective formations) come into being in the first place. My larger claim is that contemporary biopolitical thought constitutes a renaissance of the problem of individuation, one which transforms individuation into a fundamentally political problem: the production of subjectivity by 14 On the philosophical problem of individuation, see especially, Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze and Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality (2016)� See also, Paolo Virno, “Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon,” Parrhesia 7 (2009): 58-67� 90 c hristian P. h ainEs relations of power� Foucault already implies individuation’s centrality in biopolitical thought when he distinguishes between an “anatomo-politics of the human body” and a “biopolitics of the population” (History 139)� Although Foucault initially describes this distinction as a “great bipolar technology,” he goes on to emphasize that life as a political object spans the distance between these poles, so that the significance of sexuality is that “[i]t was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life” (145). In other words, Foucault can only describe the emergence of biopower (the control of the “species body” on a demographic level) by introducing a mediating term (sexuality) that tracks the mutual imbrication of species and their members� Biopolitics thus names the politicization of life itself, with “life itself” denoting a complex array of heterogeneous terms including not only populations and bodies but also forms of life that fall in between these poles� Apparatuses of power are thus engines of individuation insofar as they produce forms of life as political objects� In what remains of this section, I examine the ways in which the critical theory of biopolitics supposes a state of nature, understood as a zone of preindividual potentiality and transindividual relationality through which politics emerges as a space of contested sociality� Put differently, what distinguishes biopolitical thought is that it brings the state of nature into play as the object of ongoing political struggle� The thinker who most explicitly grasps biopolitics as a problem of individuation is Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno. Virno defines biopolitics as follows: “Life lies at the center of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial (and in itself non-present) labor-power� For this reason, and this reason alone, it is legitimate to talk about ‘bio-politics’” (Grammar 83)� In line with Marx, Virno distinguishes labor-power from specific labors, noting that whereas the latter term denotes empirical activities belonging to actuality, the former term indicates potentiality as such� This separation between actuality and potentiality is crucial, because, under capitalism, it is possibility as such that gets bought and sold on the market: “Here is the crucial point: where something which exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller� The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence� ‘Life,’ pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential” (Grammar 82)� One might object to the reductive quality of this definition, noting, for instance, that it offers only a thin basis for analyzing state power� However, even granting the validity of that criticism, the proposition that a politics of life itself entails a politics of potentiality is extremely suggestive� It implies that actual configurations of bodies do not in and of themselves constitute the object of biopolitics, for biopolitics more precisely concerns the potentiality incarnated in such configurations. “Life” - the object of biopolitics - designates neither a secret substance nor a withdrawn essence but rather the potentiality that is at one and the same time proper to a given form of life and in excess of it� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 91 This sense of vitality as an immanent surplus of potentiality depends on a conceptualization of forms of life in terms of individuation� Borrowing vocabulary from philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon, Virno describes the process of individuation as the production, never complete, of the individual and the transindividual on the basis of preindividual potential: “When we speak of a process, or a principle, of individuation, we should keep clearly in mind what precedes individuation itself. This has to do, first of all, with a pre-individual reality, that is to say, something common, universal and undifferentiated� The process which produces singularity has a non-individual, pre-individual incipit” (Grammar 76)� 15 The process of individuation consists in the resolution of contradictory preindividual potentialities into semistable forms of existence� Individuation transforms the relative chaos of the virtual, with its incompatible itineraries for being, into a set of actual conditions through a process of selection and differentiation� Risking an analogy, we might say that the process of individuation cultivates embryonic realities (preindividual potentialities; nascent and developing forms of life) into mature social creatures (individuals in the widest sense of the term)� This process, however, never reaches its conclusion, defying the simplicity of natural teleology� There is always a remnant of preindividual reality, a surplus potential that inheres within the individual as the possibility for change� If preindividual reality were to exhaust itself in the production of the individual, the individual would be no more than an inert thing, incapable of adapting to surroundings� It would be a tautological, self-enclosed being - a creature without history� Crucially, the preindividual always already involves the transindividual, or a sociality that is both the cause and effect of the preindividual� The content, if not the form, of the transindividual can be ascertained in Virno’s delineation of three zones of preindividual reality: first, “the biological basis of the species, that is, the sensory organs, motor skills apparatus, perception abilities” (Grammar, 76-77); second, language, or “the historical-natural language shared by all speakers of a certain community” (Grammar, 77); and, third, “the prevailing relations of production,” which is to say capitalism as a mode of production in which “the labor process mobilizes the most universal requisites of the species: perception, language, memory, and feelings” (Grammar, 77)� In each of these zones, the preindividual blurs with the transindividual, that is, the production of individuality necessarily involves a collective dimension irreducible to individuality� The transindividual does not designate a super-organism existing above the threshold of individuality but rather a relationality that inheres within and even precedes the individual� Simondon articulates the point thus: “The transindividual is with the individual, but it is not the individual individuated� It is with the individual according to a relation more primordial than belonging, inherence, or 15 Simondon, it should be noted, is a philosopher of science whose two main areas of inquiry were the biological sciences and what he termed technical objects� On Simondon’s work, see especially Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2013)� 92 c hristian P. h ainEs a relation of exteriority” (193). It is “that which is exterior to the individual insofar as it is inside of him” (195). If the individual arises from a process of individuation rooted in preindividual potential, the transindividual arises from the gap - or, more precisely, the relation through difference - between the preindividual and the individual� The transindividual is that quality of being-with enabled by the constitutive openness to alterity of the never-entirely-individuated individual. The transindividual signifies not a particular social configuration but a relationality irreducible to intersubjectivity. It constitutes a primary sociality of which specific social formations constitute second-order derivations� With this in mind, I want to propose that the preindividual and the transindividual constitute, respectively, the potentiality and relationality of the state of nature� From this point of view, the state of nature is not a condition preceding the history of the political but rather the immanent cause of the political, the ineradicable social ontology on which politics depends� This extimacy of the transindividual, as Lacan might put it, stands in stark contrast to liberal political theory’s articulation of collectivity as an aggregation of individuals: “the people.” The principle of individuation suggests a path beyond the dichotomy of the individual and the collective: “By participating in a collective, the subject, far from surrendering the most unique individual traits, has the opportunity to individuate, at least in part, the share of pre-individual reality which all individuals carry within themselves” (Virno, Grammar, 79)� 16 This thinking of individuation stands in contrast not only to liberalism’s premise of the individual as the basic ontological unit but also to the inverse proposition of socialist thought: the attribution of authentic reality to organic collectivity� Individuation enables a thinking of commonality as neither the aggregation of individuals nor the embrace of an underlying social substance but rather as the constituent skein of relations through which individuals emerge� This third way, if I may be forgiven the term, should not be understood as a variant of social democracy but rather as a complex dialectic between two often-neglected terms in Marx’s lexicon: the social individual and species-being� Paraphrasing Marx’s Grundrisse, Virno introduces this dialectic by defining the social individual as “the relation between ‘generic existence’ (Gattungswesen) and the unrepeatable experience constituting the seal of subjectivity” (Word, 231)� Gattungswesen - usually translated as “species-being” - offers a useful point of mediation between broad discussions of the ontological implications of individuation and specific discussions of capitalism’s repercussions for individuation� Marx gestures in this direction in his 1844 Manuscripts, where he defines species-being with a great deal of elasticity as consist[ing] physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of of inorganic nature on which he lives� […] The universality of man 16 For an excellent recent account of the significant difference the concept of individuation introduces into political theory, see Jeremy Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (2013), especially Ch� 5-6� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 93 is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body - both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) his life-activity� Nature is man’s inorganic body - nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the human body� Man lives on nature - means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die� (75-76) Species-being is simultaneously in excess of nature and immanent to it� The embodiment of the species, which is to say its individuation, can only take place at the point of indistinguishability between the organic and inorganic, through the chiasmic “intercourse” (Verkehr: traffic, exchange) that alone enables the species to survive and sometimes to thrive� Marx constructs his critique of capitalism on the basis of the individuation of species-being, through analyses of the ways in which capitalism stunts the individuation of the human species� Capitalism estranges human beings not only from the products of their own labor but also from one another and from their connection to preindividual nature (Gattungswesen) (77-84)� As Marx puts it, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. - in short, when it is used by us” (107). This possessive mode of relation, which reduces all of the senses to the “sense of having,” amounts to a practical reduction of life to “the life of private property” (106-7). In other words, capitalism circumscribes the expression of the transindividual so that it can only take the form of private property relations� Given these premises, Marx’s formulation of revolution (the “transcendence of private property”) cannot help but constitute a biopolitical proposal, a transformation of the modes of species-being’s individuation, or, in Marx’s words, “the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes” (107). Marx’s analysis of the dialectic between species-being and capitalism demonstrates the historical and social dimensions of the principle of individuation� If individuation names the processes through which the state of nature translates potentiality into actual forms of life, then Marx reminds us that such processes of individuation are historically variable� Virno’s elaboration of Max’s thinking of individuation revolves around the linkages between species-being and language use� Virno’s theory of language is too complex to do justice to here, but we can still gain a sense of its distinctiveness through a consideration of the role of the state of exception in it� Virno wrestles with the same tradition of political theology as Agamben does, but he displaces the centrality of sovereignty by subsuming it under a broad set of “forms of decisionism” (Innovation, 13)� The state of exception arises from the ineradicable gap between a rule and the application of the rule� Since rules transcend particular empirical cases and since they cannot contain within themselves the guidelines for their execution, they require conventions (customs, informal norms) below the threshold of formal structures to determine their application. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, Virno articulates the content that fills the gap between the rule and its application as “the common behavior of 94 c hristian P. h ainEs mankind” (what I have been designating as the state of nature). 17 Whereas the tradition of political theology sees only a void, an absence into which sovereign power inserts itself, Virno discovers a “nonjuristic order,” a “radical blurring of fields and contexts” (Innovation, 116)� In Virno’s tripartite model, a state of exception occurs when the middle term (the common behavior of mankind) is not sufficient to enable a rule to decide on a case. According to Virno, innovation stems from this situation of crisis: “We find innovation, […] the abrupt deviation from the paths followed until now, when and only when, in applying a certain norm, we are obliged to sneak up behind that norm and to call upon ‘the common behavior of humankind�’ Strange as it may seem, the creativity of the linguistic animal is triggered by a return: by the intermittent return, demanded by a critical situation, to the ‘normal everyday frame of life,’ that is, to that grouping of practices that make up the natural history of our species” (Innovation, 118)� The state of exception sparks innovation by forcing one to grapple with the taken-for-granted matters of everyday life, or “that regularity of vital species-specific behaviors upon which rest the different norms” (Innovation, 121)� Decisions in/ on the state of exception intervene into the threshold between the preindividual reality of the species and the individuations of the species� Exceptional actions re-constitute species-being; they reconfigure the forms of life that compose or populate it. Virno contends that the sovereign’s monopoly over the exercise of violence describes only one manner in which such interventions occur� Whereas sovereign agents remain confined to “eccentric, surprising, and inventive applications of the given rule” - instances in which the law suspends itself only so as to reinforce its own foundations - non-sovereign agents “can also cause the transformation, and even the abolition, of the rule in question” (Innovation, 118-19)� For instance, the encampments of the Occupy movement (including not only Zucotti Park but also the occupation of foreclosed homes around the United States) can be understood as practices of exception insofar as they not only suspend the predication of social being on private property but also introduce new social bonds, new manners of being-with, in the midst of capitalism� To focus exclusively on the sovereign state of exception would be to miss the innovative possibilities opened up by the state of exception; it amounts to a conflation of species-being with the social parameters instituted by the modern nation-state� In opposition to such an approach, Virno’s analysis of language - an analysis that notably turns on minor forms of speech such as jokes - unfolds a much more variegated biopolitical terrain� Virno thus introduces a scalar plurality of exceptions, ranging from the everyday dilemmas with which individuals are faced (for instance, how to pay the rent after being fired) to national or global crises that call on all of our capacities for collective coordination (for example, emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina)� 17 Virno borrows both the concept of “the common behavior of mankind” and his understanding of the state of exception from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations� Virno’s innovation consists in making explicit the political dimensions of Wittgenstein’s theory of language� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 95 Virno’s theorization of biopolitics locates the possibility of political transformation and social change in the threshold between forms of life and life itself, or between the individuation of subjects and the preindividual potential of species-being� If Virno’s emphasis on human language as an exceptional feature of the species risks a resurrection of Man - the “Man” of the human sciences that Foucault so thoroughly dismantles 18 - his conceptualization of individuation offers a way around this impasse, namely, natural history� Virno calls attention not only to the rootedness of life in inorganic matters but also to the nature/ culture continuum through which the subject of “Man” gives way to a multiplicity of forms of life, unbound by human exceptionalism� The space opening up beneath such exceptionalism is the state of nature understood as the social ontology through which, from which, political orders emerge� This version of the state of nature temporalizes itself as natural history, in which (according to Virno) “[w]hat really counts is the immediate relation between the distinctive traits of the Homo sapiens as species and the most fleeting cultural dispositions, the ‘always already’ of biology and the social ‘right now,’ the innate disposition for language and a political decision dictated by exceptional circumstances” (Word, 173)� What I would highlight, here, is not the emphasis on a particular species but rather the intersection between preindividual life and socio-historical processes of individuation, the point at which history and nature, as well as society and biology, become indistinguishable� From this perspective, the state of nature unfolds itself as the history of states of exception, the history - irreducible to sovereign power - of practices that revise the norms of individuation� Virno does not offer an explanatory framework through which the narrative and representational problems that Banks introduces get resolved� Virno and Banks write the problem of individuation in different genres: philosophical anthropology and novelistic fiction, respectively. They belong to the same conversation, the same “disciplined dance in time” (natural history), though their voices are remarkably distinct� Distinct but not incommensurable: for Virno’s language of biopolitics reveals what in Bank’s novel might easily go unnoticed, namely, that failure - Bob’s failure to climb social ranks but also the greater planetary failure to devise a just and sustainable social system - is not definitive, that exhaustion meets the resistance of endurance, that exceptionalism cannot dispense with the state of exception, and that the state of exception implies the possibility of bringing other social systems into existence� Banks demonstrates this surplus of potentiality over the experience of 18 It is well known that Foucault declares that it is only with “the end of man,” in “the void left by man’s disappearance,” that thinking would again become possible (Order, 342)� The productive dismantlings of Man, humanism, and the subject by deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, and posthumanism (the list could go on) testify to the insightfulness of this proposition� At the same time, it is worth noting that in Foucault’s own work, the end of man took the form of genealogical inquiries into the constitution of human subjects� My point in this essay is that a posthuman theoretical horizon does not necessitate the negation of the specificity of the human species. Instead, it entails a thinking of the mutability of the species in terms of natural history� 96 c hristian P. h ainEs defeat in his representation of Vodou practices (analyzed in the next section), but even Bob’s stunted existence bears witness to an endurance that refuses the collapse of exception into exceptionalism� Paradoxically, the same aspiration for social mobility that kills Bob also transforms him into a restless cipher of social potentiality� This dialectical union of opposites becomes strikingly evident in the novel’s representation of Bob’s relation to the Belinda Blue, the fishing boat that he pilots in the last third of the novel� For Bob, the boat embodies the promise of autonomy and freedom, pleasures that he remembers from his time spent fishing on it in New England: “I guess that’s about as happy as I’ve ever been, days and nights I spent on that boat� It’s hard to say why, but that boat gave me a feeling that I owned myself. You know? I’d get a few miles out, and all of a sudden, my whole world was that boat� And I had it under control� I could take care of it, and it could take care of me” (192). Bob would seem to do little more than reiterate that stupidity Marx describes as the reduction of one’s worldly relations to a possessive mode� Bob owns the world insofar as he masters the ship, and insofar as he masters the world and the ship, he also owns himself. The pleasure derived from fishing has less to do with practical matters than with the fantasy of perfect liberty - a liberal and capitalist vision of self-sovereignty in which alterity (including the difference other people make) cannot intrude. At the same, the personification of the ship as care-giver (“and it could take care of me”) suggests another reading. The ships wraps Bob into its embrace, or Bob surrenders to the feel of the ship, and, in turn, the sea encompasses both pilot and ship, folding them into the swirls and whirls, into the dance, of continental drift� As much as the Belinda Blue constitutes a fantasy of capitalist and liberal sovereignty, it also offers the opposite, not the actuality of some alternative social arrangement but the intuition of its possibility and its desirability� In other words, it opens onto the horizon of natural history in a positive sense: the state of exception, or the suspension between one order of things and another, becomes the hope for a happiness beyond the constraints of present-day material conditions� That the novel’s plot dashes this hope by making the Belinda Blue into the fateful device of Bob’s downfall does not erase the reality of this potential� The ship serves as a placeholder for another world and another life; it constitutes a beacon of hope for the “casual observers on the causeway” who seeing Bob and the Belinda Blue out on the wide, blue ocean can only think the same thing: That man up there on the bridge of the fine white and blue boat should be me. I should feel the sea breeze in my hair, the sun on my arms, the flow of the boat through the soft Florida waters beneath me. […] I should be that man, who is free, who owns his own life simply because he knows whether to use live or dead shrimp for bait, jigs or flies, and where the bonefish feed, he knows where the basin narrows to a channel deep enough to bring his boat lunging in without touching its deepwater keel against the mudded bottom, he knows at sunup whether a squall will blow in from the northwest before noon, and he’s been able to trade his knowledge for power and control over his own life. […] We exchange our knowledge for mere survival, while that suntanned man in the captain’s hat up on the bridge of the Belinda Blue - out of Moray Key, Florida, it says on Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 97 the transom - that man rises above mere survival like a gull lifting from the sea, like the thought of a poet soaring the sun. Oh lord, wouldn’t that be a wonderful life! We think. But we do not say it, not exactly. (241-42, italics in the original) The poetry of this passage, the intensity that brings it to the point of ejaculation (“wouldn’t that be a wonderful life! ”), arises from the confluence of sovereignty and liberation, actuality and potentiality, exceptionalism and exception� Sovereignty - being the captain of one’s own ship - becomes the vehicle for a life defined not by mastery but by a loose flow, by the tides and by the wind, by the drift of natural history� This image breaks the capitalist imperative to equate being with striving by indicating a suspended potentiality, or a state of exception left unresolved and open� This scene is not actual but resolutely virtual, a reverie of life without work, a daydream of what it would be like if vacation never ended� If this sounds too much like that romantic longing for a return to oneness that Freud criticizes, if the fantasy of it appears no more than an alibi for capitalist command, a taste of imagined leisure to placate the restless and weary, that is perhaps because we have forgotten the other side of natural history’s dialectic: the historicity of nature, the reality of potential, the irreducible contingency of our given environment� Even the tides change, even the continents shift� This is not to confuse this image with actual emancipation but rather to acknowledge what Bank’s novel offers to a thinking of natural history: the undeniable gravity of hope and desire, a surplus of potentiality that eludes the “old life-as-ladder metaphor.” Enduring Exhaustion, or, Vodou as Potentiating Practice Continental Drift does not offer a systemic alternative to exceptionalism, capitalism, or the nation-state� At most, Bob’s narrative sets into motion a dialectic of natural history that troubles exceptionalism’s claims to a monopoly over the state of exception� It pries open the circuit of capitalism-nation-nature, revealing the irreducibility of the state of nature to dominant forms of governance� In doing so, it also provides glimpses of preindividual potentiality and transindividual webs of relations that might constitute resources for different ways of dwelling in the world� That being said, the novel does manage to go a step further in its imagination of social possibility through its representations of Vodou� These representations serve as a counterpoint to the striving of Bob Dubois’s plot line� This is not to say that Vodou is somehow autonomous in respect to global capitalism but rather that Vodou reroutes the energies and desires embedded in capitalism towards other ends, most notably, I would suggest, towards the power of endurance� I do not have the space to situate the novel’s representation of Vodou in terms of the general context of Vodou practices, but the following can serve at least as a placeholder for an extended discussion: Vodou constitutes a syncretic blending of African, European, and Carib traditions and practices; it takes shape in response to the history and institutions of slavery and colonialism, offering a milieu in which forms of collectivity irreducible to 98 c hristian P. h ainEs colonialism and slavery can establish themselves; it can function as a medium of resistance and revolt (for instance, during the Haitian Revolution), but it can also serve as an alibi for abuses of power (notably under the government of “Papa Doc” Duvalier); it includes a cosmological perspective in which the divine inheres in the natural not as an external force of creation but as a plurality of immanent causes (this immanence is perhaps most evident in rituals of possessions: practices through which the loa - the Gods - occupy the flesh of Vodou practitioners); and its conception of personhood crosses the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, as well as between the natural and supernatural, so that subjectivity exceeds the limits of both willpower and consciousness� 19 In this essay, Vodou describes an alternative to the capitalist equation of being and striving figured in the character of Bob DuBois� Instead of framing being as but the means of capitalism’s actualization, Vodou practices overload actuality with potentiality, converting mere being into the horse on which the possibilities of divine becomings ride� In Continental Drift, Vodou is a survival strategy� It takes place in the margins of the novel’s geography and in the interstices of its narrative� The novel’s representation of Vodou serves as the index of a counter-history, not a fully-fleshed out alternative to capitalist modernity but a subterranean tunnel within brutal processes of dispossession, oppression, and exploitation� The narrative line of Vanise and Claude Dorsinville charts a route from Haiti to the Bahamas to Florida, and the fractured line they travel exposes Vanise and Claude to violence after violence, including imprisonment (Vanise becomes imprisoned by a shopowner in the Bahamas and coerced into sex work), forced labor (they both work for no wages or low wages under the threat of being reported to immigration enforcement officers), and drowning (Claude drowns in the trip from the Bahamas to Florida and Vanise nearly does)� Vodou rituals offer a psychic salve for these characters, but they also offer another mode of dwelling in the world, a semi-autonomous cultural milieu in which species-being maintains its irreducibility to a capitalist model of subjectivity; in which the emergence of subjectivity operates by way of possession by natural-divine forces, rather than the negation of nature; and in which bonds of community come into existence on the basis of ritual� Put differently, Vodou becomes the means by which Banks recuperates the potentiality of species-being, its capacities for individuating itself in non-capitalist circuits of social reproduction� It is natural history against the grain of capitalism� When Vanise and Claude are dropped off on a small island in the Bahamas (instead of their intended destination, Florida), Vanise engages in ritual prayer not only to ward off fear but also to reconnect their subjectivities to the impersonal forces of being that make up the world: 19 I have relied especially on the following works for this account: Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953); Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997), eds� Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert; and Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 99 She passes the boy the sleeping baby, which he holds expertly in the crook of his skinny arm, and she breaks off a leafless branch of the tree behind them, squats in the dust and begins to draw� As she draws, she prays in a broken way that she knows is amateurish and incomplete, but it’s all she can remember from her sisterin-law’s teaching� She knows the names of the cardinal points, and she addresses them properly: to the east, À Table; to the west, Dabord; in the north, Olande; and in the south, Adonai� She draws a long horizontal line from east to west in the dust, then two verticals, one long and one short, that cut the horizontal into three parts� She crosses herself, and while she draws elaborations and curls, circles and lines around the crossbars, she salutes the two trinities, first the Christian God, his son Jesus and the Holy Ghost, then les Mystères, les Morts, and la Marassa, the sacred twins� Standing, she crosses her arms and examines the drawing at her feet, a vever [a beacon in the form of a ritual drawing] for Papa Legba [one of the central deities in Vodou; the God of the crossroads]� Now, she says, we wait� The boy relaxes and sits down on the low wall, the baby still in his arms� He’s no longer afraid� He did not know that his Aunt Vanise possessed so much rada knowledge, that she was a mambo [high priestess], or he would not have been frightened before, when he did not know where they were� They will wait now, here at the crossroads under the sacred cottonwood tree, for old Papa Legba to help them� (128-29) Vanise’s ritual prayer inscribes a planetary geometry of swirling impersonal flows; it copies the globe onto a two-dimensional plane in a manner that emphasizes a surplus of potentiality in respect to the dominant global order� Her mimetic practice appeals to cosmic principles in which the “crossbars” instantiate a brissure, a hinge around which the world swings, enabling traversals that break from, even as they interact with, the spatio-temporal linearities of Cartesian-capitalist modernity� 20 The ritual’s doubling of trinities, its casual refusal of monotheism, suggests that more important than the suturing closed of the cosmos according to a principle of differentiation qua unity (trinities are ontological engines of sorts, enabling conversions between the unity and the plurality of being 21 ) are the dérives (the “elaborations and curls”) that take flight from both nomos and cosmos. Being does not secure itself in a unitary principle, whether God or Man� Instead, the syncretism of Vodou implies what might be called a para-ontology, the imperial sway of logos giving way to the productivity of beings, to the polyphony of the modes through which being expresses itself� In other words, the grid of capitalist exchange, the ordering of the world as a set of resources for profitmaking, gives way to a sense of planetarity irreducible not only to quantification but also to the subject-object dialectic, to Heidegger’s world-picture� But what is perhaps most important in this passage is the conversion of waiting into an action: “She says it firmly, as if waiting were an action, like hiding or running away or building a house.” It would not make sense to refer to this 20 Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004) offers an excellent account of Cartesian-capitalist modernity, especially relevant for us because of its attention to colonialism and transatlantic slavery� 21 Agamben articulates this economy and ontology of the trinity in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2011)� 100 c hristian P. h ainEs narrative lull as an act of resistance, let alone rebellion or revolution, but it nonetheless enacts a suspension of the capitalist-ontological equation of being with striving. Vanise finds herself in a state of exception, caught between two worlds (between her home in Haiti and her destination in the United States), stalled out in the interstices of a social matrix that predicates the right to exist on state-sanctioned identification. She is a refugee without refuge. However, this state of exception does not resolve itself through state violence (the decision of the sovereign)� Instead, Vanise prolongs it, expands the state of exception into a temporal abode in a manner akin to “hiding” or “running away” or “building a house” (as the passage suggests). These gerunds are in fact the constituent elements of marronage: a history of flight from slavery, indentured servitude, and imprisonment that includes the construction of new communities; a genre of practice in which flight becomes creative, in which escape fabricates new ways of living and new places to do so� 22 The solace Vanise and Claude find in ritual and prayer is therefore more than simple relief� This warding off of fear interrupts the colonial-capitalist-plantation assemblage of rules and affects and, in doing so, intimates the possibility of practices of exception without exceptionalism, the potential for decisionmaking that takes advantage of crisis without reinstalling a statist/ capitalist nomos� Continental Drift makes explicit the social power of Vodou in its representation of the rituals taking place on New Providence, an island in the Bahamas� Vanise and Claude participate in these rituals, but the rituals exceed individual intentions, needs, and desires� They take place in “the Barrens,” a marginal patch of land located beyond the tourist areas of the island, a place which “except for the sight and the roar of the jets coming in and taking off from the airport a few miles north […] could be in the wilderness” (229-30). This is a space of “squatters and shack people, whose lives are official secrets. They are the off-islanders, most of them, illegal immigrants from Haiti, wandering foreigners officially forbidden and unofficially tolerated, for they provide a considerable part of the huge underpaid, unprotected labor force that is required by the tourist industry on New Providence” (230). In this liminal space - below the threshold of state-sanctioned identity, in the cracks of the official wage economy - Vodou constitutes a quasi-institutional support network, consistent enough to gather the poor “off-islanders” into a community, loose enough to avoid police crackdowns� This loose community possesses a specific kind of reparative power. Of its value for an anonymous off-islander, we read that it “connects her sad, suffering moment on earth to universal time, ties the stingy ground she stands on to the huge, fecund continent of Africa, makes an impoverished, illiterate black woman’s troubles the pressing concerns of the gods” (231). The phrasing, here, reiterates the coordination of the immanent and transcendent, the earthly and divine, that we have already witnessed in Vanise and Claude’s private ritual, but it makes explicit the social and historical gravity of Vodou� Vodou disseminates a 22 On marronage, see especially Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (2015)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 101 power of endurance through which a fractured African disapora can at least imagine generative reunion with the motherland, an overcoming of natal alienation� 23 What we might call the novel’s Vodou imaginary exceeds therapeutic value, because it revises the parameters of modern subjectivity, breaking with the dominant tradition of defining personhood in opposition to thingliness. As Roberto Esposito argues, this dominant apparatus articulates the person as a master over things, including the body understood as the primary unit of private property, the first thing one owns (Persons 16-33)� It also implies, as a necessary corollary, a category of non-persons who, despite being perceived as sentient are diagnosed as incapable of mastering themselves and the world and therefore ineligible for freedom� This is of course a well-known rationalization for the transatlantic slave trade, as well as for a host of other social, economic, and political practices that have deprived social groups of freedoms� Vodou is remarkable because it conceives of personhood in a radically different fashion� As Monique Allewaert argues, rather than recover subjectivity on the model of the person-thing dichotomy, it unfolds a “parahumanity” in which “a person is not an insular being distinct from entities and forces outside of herself but an entity whose component parts are pulled into other exchanges� Here, subjects and objects, are recalibrated as assemblages that are animate and entangling� It then follows that personhood is neither an a priori category nor a mode of being oppositional to objects, but a composition produced through the relation of (para)humans, artifacts, and ecological forces” (119). When Vanise invokes Papa Legba, when she prays to the God of the crossroads, she recomposes herself as channel through which ecological forces flow and through which self-enclosure gives way to transindividual relations� When the anonymous off-islander rediscovers the fecundity of an African motherland, what occurs is not so much a fantasy of oneness or a jouissance predicated on return to the primordial wholeness of the maternal body� Instead, it constitutes a break with the person as master over things in favor of processes of assemblage, in favor of a power of composition in which potentiality traverses the boundaries between world and flesh. In other words, Vodou, as an embodied thinking of natural history, suggests a different process of individuation, one in excess of capitalism and exceptionalism� There is much more one could say regarding the Vodou imaginary of Continental Drift, but, for the sake of brevity, allow me to note only one more significant moment. During another ritual, Vanise comes to be possessed by Agwé, the loa of the seas� During this moment of possession, liberal autonomy (whose abject underside, I have argued, is exhaustion) gives way to what Joan Dayan describes as “the reciprocal abiding of human and god,” “ not a matter of domination, but a kind of double movement of attenuation and expansion� […] [T]he possessed gives herself up to become an instrument in a social and collective drama” (19). To be possessed means allowing 23 I am of course alluding to Orlando Patterson’s theorization of social death in terms of natal alienation in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982)� 102 c hristian P. h ainEs social determinations to fall away not in a negation of sociality but in a recuperation of social potentiality in excess of a given regime of life� When Agwé looks out of Vanise, he does so as “the very face of history,” with “no look of impatience and no look of patience, either: he was beyond the notion” (238). Suspending the very opposition between activity and passivity, mastery and servitude, Agwé offers “infinite compassion, as if for a moment a whale with a whale’s understanding of life had risen from the deep to view human life and had seen humanity’s busy terror, its complicated affections, its nostalgia and longing, its shame and pain and pride. Tears flowed down the face of Agwé” (Ibid.). Compassion (com-passio: feeling or suffering with) involves a watery domain in which tears are the traces of an impersonal process of individuation irreducible to the actual order of things� Agwé, loa of the seas, is a god of transformation and the distance that the figure of the whale introduces between the scene of ritual, on the one hand, and “humanity’s busy terror,” on the other, constitutes a state of exception, a re-opening of the state of nature so that other forms of life, beyond the hustle and bustle of the capitalist life-world, might yet be possible� Becoming-whale, we might say, names an interregnum between one genre of species-being and another, between the natural history of capitalism and some other natural history whose mode of production remains formless, virtual, still to come� The Vodou rituals in Continental Drift exemplify endurance, that irreducible double of exhaustion� Endurance implies not only survival but also experimentation: the articulation of alternative forms of life in an ontological state caught between potentiality and actuality, not so much the birth of a new world as the tentative sketching of ways of being and doing otherwise� Vodou reenters the state of nature through practices of exception so as to revise the norms of individuation� The practice of active waiting that constitutes a crucial component of Vodou (an active passivity that involves attuning oneself to the divine forces traveling invisibly through the material world) promises a break with capitalist imperatives and relations, marking the excess of potential that inheres not only in the object-world or environment but also in human and other species. I say “promises,” however, because active waiting cannot substitute for revolutionary action; it cannot take the place of building a new system or a new form of social existence� That being said, it nonetheless constitutes a figure, a crossroads as it were, between the actual and the potential, a figure through which we might begin to conceive practices of exception without exceptionalism: practices that suspend those habits so deeply ingrained that they appear to be simply the instinct of our species; practices that occupy the state of exception not as if it were a crisis to be stomped out but as a laboratory for inventing new rules of existence; practices that surrender a monopoly over potentiality in favor of egalitarian investigations into the otherwise� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 103 Conclusion A practice of exception without exceptionalism: such is the aim towards which Continental Drift directs its narrative labors. The novel presents figures of life that endure, that sometimes (but not always) survive� It channels exhaustion, but it situates that exhaustion as a product of a global network of capitalist and statist forms of governance that differentially allocate conditions of being worn out and used up� Forms of life break down; the gyres of global capital overwhelm social formations that break from the norms of competitive individualism� Continental Drift nonetheless maintains a horizon of potential� It intimates a capacity for re-individuating the human species, for re-organizing life so that it exceeds the limitations imposed by neoliberalism. It does so not only through figures such as Bob and Vanise but also through a reflexive gesture that posits the novel itself as a Vodou ritual. The novel’s opening section, “Invocation,” frames the text not as representation but as a channeling of Legba, the loa of the crossroads: “Again, Legba, come forward! Let this man speak that man to life” (2). Banks allows himself to be possessed, to function less as author than as a horse to be mounted� The text acknowledges that “novels stories and poems stuffed with particulars” will not “set people like them [Bob, Vanise, Claude] free,” but it also declares that its own “objectives” are “sabotage and subversion”: “Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives - no especially wholly invented lives - deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself” (410). From one angle, this mission statement implies no more than an ethics of bearing witness to loss, an imperative to grieve each and every death, no matter social standing, but, more provocatively, it implies a desire to reinvent the human species, to reorganize the relations that constitute species-being, to abolish what Marx calls the “stupidity” of private property. Banks issues a radical task for aesthetic practices: they can take exception to exceptionalism, they can remind us of the potentiality for being otherwise, they can carve out a space between the species as it is - an exhausted mess - and a species to come� This call, I would suggest, is not only a task for aesthetic practices but also for the critical theory of biopolitics� Works Cited Allewaert, Monique� Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics� University of Minnesota Press, 2013� Banks, Russell� Continental Drift� Harper Perennial Classics, 2007 [1985]� Dayan, Joan. “Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods.” Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean� Rutgers University Press, 1997� Esposito, Roberto� Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View� Trans� Zakiya Hanafi. Polity, 2015. Foucault, Michel� History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction� Trans� Robert Hurley� Vintage, 1990� 104 c hristian P. h ainEs -----� The Order of Things� Vintage, 1994� Marx, Karl� Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844� Trans� Martin Milligan� Prometheus Books, 1988� Pease, Donald� The New American Exceptionalism� University of Minnesota Press, 2009� Povinelli, Elizabeth� Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism� Duke University Books, 2011� Simondon, Gilbert� L’ individuation psychique et collective. Aubier, 1989 (1964)� Spivak, Gayatri� The Death of a Discipline� Columbia University Press, 2003� Virno, Paolo� Grammar of the Multitude� Trans� Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson� New York: Semiotext(e), 2004� -----� Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation� Trans� Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson� Semiotext(e), 2008� -----� When The Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature� Trans� Giuseppina Mecchia� Semiotext(e), 2015� f iorEnzo i uliano One, No One and a Multitude: The Narrative of Seattle 1999 and the Emergence of Populism 1. The analepsis of the multitude The 1999 WTO protests in Seattle represent an important episode in the history of both the city and the anti-globalization movement� Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s are among the many voices that have praised, in the uprisings, the moment in which the movement was born and suddenly went under the global spotlight� The book Multitude, coauthored by the two scholars and published in 2004, relates Seattle’s events to the concept of multitude as the only - or one of the few - possible revolutionary subject(s) in the present era� The second volume of a trilogy started in 2000 with Empire, which theorizes the existence of a new political formation - the empire - engendered by late capitalism and by its rules, is followed by Commonwealth (2009), which ideally concludes the series� Multitude envisages possible strategies of resistance to global capitalism and identifies a new revolutionary subject that is not coextensive with social class, nor draws its strength from its ability to mobilize the oppressed and provide them with a strong political identity or a regulated organism, comparable to the party within Marxist tradition� Conversely, Hardt and Negri argue, the multitude is made up of heterogeneous forces resulting in a network of political and existential practices that fruitfully oppose the (visible and not visible) strategies of power enforced by the empire� Central to Multitude are the incidents occurred in Seattle in 1999� The authors, in particular, emphasize the convergence against the WTO meeting as the moment in which diverse forms of political activism coalesced in order to fight against the same enemy. They also, yet less noticeably, remark the importance of Seattle as the aptest context for the revolts, regarded as the culmination of the city’s long-standing radical tradition� No longer a simple background to the protests, Seattle becomes a crucial component in the birth and shaping of the anti-globalization movement because of its history and political identity� Hardt and Negri’s is among some of the narratives of the city circulated at the time, which read and sometimes forced the history of Seattle in order to corroborate the idea of the anti-globalization movement as the embodiment of a new revolutionary subject, which, in the riots, had experienced its first passage to the act. Multitude, thus, systematizes a diffused perception of the 1999 uprisings that circulated in the press and in the propaganda of the time� 106 f iorEnzo i uliano According to Hardt and Negri, what happened in Seattle between 29 November and 3 December 1999 was more than a largely attended protest against the WTO ministerial meeting� The conference was scheduled at the Washington State Convention Center, only one mile away from Pioneer Square, the original nucleus of the city that still honors the memory of both the loggers who first settled down in the area and of Chief Seattle, after whom the city is named� The thousands of people that gathered in Seattle, many of them from other parts of the State and the country, occupied a considerable area of the city, marching and chanting against the conference� Hardt and Negri identified the uprisings as “[t]he coming-out party of the new cycle of struggles” (215), the most significant and valuable of all the protests occurred in the US after the 1960s, and the beginning of a new phase in the global opposition to capitalism, also pointing out that none of the protests that had preceded Seattle had been able to mobilize the common so “extensively across the globe” (214). 1 Seattle at the end of the twentieth century is thus identified as the site of a global convergence, to the point that the very name of the city was turned into a metonymy that, even now, stands for a number of diverse, even contradictory, events� 2 For the first time in decades, Hardt and Negri go on, political subjects that in the past hardly ever shared campaigns and struggles, marched side by side� The heterogeneous groups gathered in Seattle, “the functioning mass coalition that has been lacking in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s” (Deusen and Massot 40), in fact, despite their differences, had “common practices, languages, conduct, habits, forms of life, and desires for a better future” (Hardt and Negri 215), and also embodied specificities and singularities that were not overshadowed by “the global mobilization” (216). What made Seattle almost unique and exemplary, thus, was the lack of any central coordinating organism and of any hierarchy among the groups that took part in the marches, the rallies and the other demonstrations� Elaborating a pattern that clearly resents of Deleuzian and Spinozian influences, Hardt and Negri therefore see Seattle as the moment in which 1 The common is one of Multitude’s keywords and subsumes the ideas of labor and productivity elaborated by Hardt and Negri� It is Hardt himself who provides what he considers an “initial” definition of the common in a collective book published in 2010. A long quote from his essay could help clarify the notion: “Here it is useful to distinguish between two types of the common, both of which are the object of neo-liberal strategies of capital� […] On the one hand, the common names the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals and so forth� […] On the other hand, the common also refers […] to the results of human labour and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects and so forth� You might think of the former as the ‘natural’ common and the latter as the ‘artificial’ common, but really such divisions between natural and artificial quickly break down. In any case, neo-liberalism has aimed to privatize both these forms of the common” (136). 2 The demonstrations are nowadays remembered as being marked by both peaceful marches and rallies and violent encounters between protesters and policemen� One, No One and a Multitude 107 distinct struggles were connected to each other, none of them losing its singularity but, conversely, each functioning “as a node that communicates with all the other nodes without any hub or center of intelligence” (217). By spontaneously converging in Seattle from different areas in the States, the protesters gave body to what Multitude theorizes as an unprecedented - and, as such, necessary - pattern of global insurgence� Rebellion, as the expression of an ever-expanding and creative desire, finally burst out as one of the people’s most genuine and unrestrainable impulses� When, over the centuries, it had from time to time found different forms to express itself, it had nonetheless been curbed into structures of power that annihilated its creative potential� The fact that different categories of protesters, “previously thought to be in opposition to each other” (217) - unions, environmentalists, anarchists, feminists, gay and lesbian activists among others - had found a common ground meant that the “desiring machine” of the global protest had fully displayed its true potential, “without any central, unifying structure that subordinates or sets aside their differences” (Hardt and Negri 217). In other words, there was no domineering force trying to channel the chaotic fluxes of revolutionary desires into hierarchical apparatuses of power and control� 3 Hardt and Negri did not hypothesize that Seattle’s protests could be appropriated and subsumed by any rigidly regulated political organization, probably because they were (delusionally) confident that the recent collapse of Soviet Union and global communism had liberated rebellious energies worldwide, without any risk of bureaucratic or totalitarian involution of the newborn revolutionary processes� To use the Deleuzian jargon, in Seattle no molar principle intervened to regulate and organize the molecular vectors of rebellion� As is often the case with Negri’s theories about power and revolution, however, even in Multitude the revolutionary subject that gives the book its name is more idealized than critically elaborated, and Hardt and Negri’s account of the event evoke a completely spontaneous and uncoordinated assemblage of people and militant groups that only partially corresponds to reality� 4 Indeed, the book’s insistence on the singularities that made up the multitude without ever being subsumed by it paradoxically turns the multitude itself into its very opposite� The body of the people celebrated as the trigger of a new revolutionary phase has apparently no voids, no lacks, no 3 Perhaps Hardt and Negri too easily merge the concepts of “chaos” and “lack of organization”. The Black Blocs, rightly or wrongly considered the most extreme and violent of the components that took part in the demonstrations, deny any lack of organization despite it representing one of the most appealing and innovative aspects of the multitude (Van Deusen and Massot 44)� 4 The volume The Art of Protest carefully lists and analyzes the different constituencies involved in the demonstrations (Reed 248-54), trying to discern a vague criterion in their arrangement: “The various constituencies (human rights, environmental, farmers, workers, feminists, debt relief advocates, and many others) were organized into two main components: nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and direct action-oriented movement groups” (247). A “very short representative list” of the groups represented at the demonstrations can be found in Thomas (66-67)� 108 f iorEnzo i uliano gaps, being instead constructed as a continuum of forces and vectors that exchange mutual feedbacks� What Hardt and Negri call multitude increasingly resembles a totality that, despite its heterogeneous character, produces a teleological process invariably oriented towards the final triumph of its revolutionary subjects� There would be nothing wrong in such teleology, were it not ultimately arbitrary and constructed as an analeptic narrative that incorporates different and sometimes contrasting events and geographies, producing a continuity that overlooks or even erases differences, contradictions, involutions and backlashes, gaps and voids, in order to produce the totality that Hardt and Negri call multitude� Over the decades, I argue, it is this erasure of the negative that has fostered a significant and definitive shift from the multitude to the totality� Many of the attributes and features then ascribed to the multitude have become, in the long run, essential components of the conservative and reactionary propaganda, and it is under this guise that they gained widespread consensus in the US and in Europe (and probably elsewhere)� Paradoxically enough, thus, the roots of nowadays right-wing populism could be traced back to a narrative of the people that, in the past, was charged with leftist revolutionary significance, and that has gradually been appropriated by reactionary parties within a (pseudo) welfarist and allegedly anti-elitist agenda� In this essay, I will first discuss the rejection of any dialectic process in the creation of the multitude, maintaining that the elaboration of the narrative of the people has been used in order to compensate for the missing negative moment in the construction of any alternative (be it socialist, communist, or generically ‘democratic’) political subject� Then, I will delve into the different narratives produced at the time in order to provide the multitude with a coherent strategy that would bypass any contradiction� I will focus on how the history and the (imaginary) geography of Seattle have been resorted to as rhetorical tools that produced a fictitious continuity among different and even contradictory events and identities layered over the decades� Finally, I will try to make sense of the events occurred in 1999 in the light of recent populist surge, arguing that it has at least partially incorporated the political stances that, in the past, had produced and informed the multitude(s)� 2. The story of an immanence I suggest that the multitude evoked by Hardt and Negri is the result of a narrative construction, which resorts to two distinct rhetorical artifices, to wit, metonymy and analepsis, in order to make sense� The former has turned the city into the event - Seattle 1999 - through a rhetorical gesture that instantaneously associates Seattle to what happened back then� This process is functional to the second rhetorical artifice, analepsis, that has infused a number of events occurred over the past (during or even before the riots) and the subjectivities they mobilized with a continuity that, in the different narratives of One, No One and a Multitude 109 the multitude - not only the ones authored by Hardt and Negri, but all those that had wide circulation at the time - has gradually, and despite what they claimed, turned into a teleology� These narratives hinge on one common and necessary feature, that is, the immanence of the people as, simultaneously, their author and protagonist� Immanence is thus essential to the construction of the multitude: there is no overarching principle, external signifier, or teleological projection in the process through which the multitude is born� The multitude is, at the same time, the trigger and the effect of a sheer, ever-expanding production of desiring vectors that give body to revolutionary subjects� The role of immanence has been remarked by Ernesto Laclau as an essential component in the construction of the political subjectivity of populism� Populists, Laclau argues, identify in “[t]he ‘people’ (as constituted through a nomination that does not conceptually subsume it) […] not a kind of ‘superstructural’ effect of an underlying infrastructural logic, but a primary terrain in the construction of a political subjectivity” (On Populist Reason 225-26)� This immanence, however, would not be conceivable or functioning were it not for the invisible presence of empty signifiers, like identity and totality, which embody “an unachievable fullness.” Having previously identified failed totality as “the place of an irretrievable fullness […] both impossible and necessary” (70), Laclau moves to remark that such category constitutes “a horizon and not a ground” (71). As an empty signifier, thus, not unlike “identity”, totality functions as a synecdoche and/ or a catachresis. It can only attempt to grasp and fill up its impossible and unachievable referents, which in the course of the twentieth century have been gradually emptied of any positive (that is, not merely differential) meaning� 5 The populist rhetoric, nonetheless, uses these signifiers as if they had meaning, turning them into idealized horizons of signification that provide diverse subjects and histories with a homogenizing, though actually absent, signifying agency� The immanence hypothesized by Hardt and Negri as the new horizon of rebellion and revolution, instanced by the 1999 events, likewise needs provisional and strategic rhetorical wedges to compensate for all those discontinuities that characterize the history of the revolutionary subjects and that are disavowed as such, and identified instead as diverse and diversely intense phases of a unique, modulating continuum� Analepsis is, thus, the most effective strategy through which Multitude comes to terms with the gaps and the discontinuities of the multitudes’ past� It is thanks to this rhetorical move that events and places that have little or no relation with each other are retrospectively aligned in a coherent narrative� 5 The debate about universalism has been a particularly animated one, and cannot even be summarized here� I will just mention Eric Lott’s contribution in a special issue of New Literary History about the “New Left Roots of Identity Politics”. Lott moves from Seattle 1999 as the attempt “to accommodate a host of mutually indifferent or even typically antagonistic movements momentarily converging around a common objective” (666), suggesting that the (Derridian) hauntological force of totality was coming back as a need to move beyond postmodern suspicion about any universal or universalizing subject (667-69)� 110 f iorEnzo i uliano The creation of this narrative undermines representativeness as essential to democracy and therefore questions the role and the existence of the political party� A necessary phase in the construction of revolutionary subjects for traditional Marxism, the party’s function is now emptied by the self-expanding process of the multitude� The rigidly organized and hyper-bureaucratized structure of traditional (especially communist) parties, in fact, is visibly at odds with the multitude’s spontaneous and rhizomatic nature� Once again, Hardt and Negri’s words anticipate present right-wing populism� Both, as a matter of fact, reject the party as a representative organization, to be overcome by either the unrestrained force of the multitude or by the rhetoric of “the people” as direct opponents of the elites, among which the parties are invariably included� Laclau’s discussion of the tension between the heterogeneity of the working class and its commitment to a common goal, and of the distance between its ideal aspirations and the limits and the contradictions imposed by their ordinary agenda, could be of help to further clarify why the multitude and its different narratives invariably edge toward populist rhetoric and, subsequently, policies� As early as in 1991, in an essay about universalism and particularism, in fact, Laclau questions some of the issues that would be at the center of Multitude� Explicitly addressing the American present, he insists on the role acquired by identity politics, referring to those “concrete finitudes” emerging after the post-modern “death of the subject”. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of any unifying onto-epistemological horizon, and in the light of “new forms of multicultural protest and self-assertion in the USA, to which we have to add the gamut of forms of contestation associated with the new social movements” (“Universalism, Particularism” 21), he argues, the limitation and partiality of any political position could fruitfully turn into a source of strength� Unlike Hardt and Negri, however, Laclau does not necessarily see in the (aspiration to the) universal the annihilation of the particular� The universal and the particular are in a relationship of mutual dependence, generating a tension that is destined to remain unsolved; this “non-solution is the very precondition of democracy” (“Universalism, Particularism” 35). The universal has always found its way in the particular through a mechanism of incarnation, that is, through the creation of proxies whose function was that of bridging the gap between these two extremes� For traditional Marxism, the function of gauging the distance between “the universal character of the tasks of the working class and the particularity of its concrete demands” (“Universalism, Particularism” 25) was entrusted to the party. The universal, as an empty signifier towards which the efforts of political action are oriented, could be broached or at least envisaged when the working class is able to avail itself of the party as a tool to achieve limited and discrete objectives that are, at the same time, part of a more general design� The groundbreaking character of the multitude born in 1999 is to be found not so much in the lack of any mediation between the universal and the particular, as in the lack of the need for such mediation� The activists and the groups involved in the protests almost unanimously agreed that the One, No One and a Multitude 111 absence of any structure and hierarchy produced a crucial shift in paradigm between past and present forms of radical subjectivity, making the newborn multitude radically different from any traditional socialist or Marxist party� This was acknowledged and praised even by Edward Luttwak, whose words incredibly do not contradict what Hardt and Negri argued about Seattle 1999 and the multitude: The protest’s incoherence was significant and even appropriate, unlike the pro-WTO side which could conceive of only one truth and one model� After all, it was once the Bolsheviks who proposed a single Leninist model for all countries� Ignoring all differences of culture, religion and economic and political structures� They attempted to impose their model everywhere� Today, the new Bolsheviks are the advocates of ‘turbo-capitalism’. (“Do the ‘Seattle Protestors’ Have a Point? ” 42-43) The protagonists of the protests, too, have persistently remarked that the convergence in Seattle of the numerous groups that took part in the demonstrations was not managed or directed by any coordinating center� Among the many voices of the activists - most of which have been archived online within The WTO History Project launched by the University of Washington - I will only mention here two quite typical testimonies by way of illustration� The words of David Solnit, a representative of the collectives “Art and Revolution”, best clarify the chasm existing between Seattle uprisings and progressive or radical organizations of the past� Solnit explains how different collectives scattered over the West Coast (from Vancouver to Los Angeles, with a stronger participation of militants from San Francisco and San Diego) coalesced and gave birth to the “Direct Action Network”, whose main aim was “to initiate focal mass direct action”. He goes on arguing that “[i]t wasn’t like an organization. […] People just got the word out however they could”, and concludes: “There was absolutely no Marxists, Leninist, or Old Left or Old New Left involvement� Those groups were completely not present� So, I mean, there’s no influence, very little influence of any liberal or progressive groups� It was almost exclusively radical and radical anti-authoritarian groups.” Denis Cooper, whose main effort was directed at coordinating the minority communities involved in the protests, not only confirms that “it wasn’t so much of us being an organization,” but overtly claims: “We didn’t want it to be an organization, so to speak, where anybody could join� We wanted to be more, not close so much as just more nurturing� […] It was like a few select people who chose to be together to work toward political ends.” Despite the existence of ongoing tensions among the different groups involved, documented by other interviews, even this scant record bespeaks the perceived self-sufficiency of the groups involved in the protests, and the fact that not only was there no overarching structure that provided the protesters with a common agenda and a goal, but, more significantly, that nobody resented its absence� Even those who maintained that the unions prevailed upon the other categories of participants - despite a narrative that has emphasized the diverse class and political origins of the protesters - had to concede that the coalition among different and once opposing militant subjects was the consequence of the escalating “decline in density” of unions (Levi 112 f iorEnzo i uliano and Olson 314)� The newfound cohesion among groups that “have long distrusted each other”, thus, was of course to be favorably saluted, but there still was “reason to be suspicious of the long-term maintenance of this solidarity” (Levi and Olson 314, 324)� These narratives of the uprisings confirm Hardt and Negri’s assumptions: as the infinite singularities that made up the new revolutionary subject did not aim at any transcendental goal, they did not need any synthesis of the partialities and differences into a unifying project� The tension between the universal and the particular, which, in the past, was mediated or even solved by the party, is presented as ultimately deceiving, because the multitude operates on a plane of pure immanence, in which the universal has no transcendental significance, but immediately results from the juxtaposition of the particulars� Yet this has also determined, in the long run, the disappearing of any lasting political strategy within the arena of global capitalism� If the multitude’s task was, in fact, that of fulfilling its own potential, there was no need to design any teleology in the political action� This pushes to the extreme Laclau’s understanding of radicalism in the global era� He argues, in fact, that given the entropic nature of global capitalism, it is not only necessary but even desirable to focus on discrete objectives besides longterm, almost eschatological, goals� Hardt and Negri’s multitude radicalizes this assumption, rejecting any strategy that is not aimed at immediate and tangible results� The strategy “disappears totally, while unconnected tactical interventions become the only game in town” (Laclau, On Populist Reason 242)� The full body of the multitude, thus, im-mediately incarnates and unceasingly (re)produces its own (albeit provisional) political achievements, its own decisions, its own desires� Multitudes, in other words, are as such and by themselves revolutionary, capable of radically transforming a reality that is utterly transparent to their eyes by simply fulfilling their own potential. 6 There still is, however, a missing link between the idea of the multitude and the fact that Seattle 1999, among so many similar events, was designated as its seminal founding moment� The arbitrariness of such choice has been contested, among others, by Robin Broad and Zahara Hecksher, who have remarked that Seattle was neither the beginning of the no-global movement, nor the watershed in its history (715-16)� Anti-globalization movements are, in fact, as old as globalization, and can be traced back, for instance, to the anti-slavery campaigns of the eighteenth century� The fact that an American and prevailingly white city has been symbolically designed as the birthplace of the anti-globalization movement, and that an event that enjoyed an unprecedented media coverage has been identified as its hotbed, perpetuates the myth of American exceptionalism rather than discarding and undermining its ideological biases� This choice, however, proves coherent with Negri’s genealogy of the multitude� The idea of an American intrinsically revolutionary - self-expanding and self-determining - subject had been central 6 As the late Italian philosopher Costanzo Preve has ironically put it in a video interview, the idea of the multitude implies that “the world is already communist, but it doesn’t know it” (“Costanzo Preve contro Toni Negri”, my translation). One, No One and a Multitude 113 to another book that he authored in 2002, Insurgencies� Here the notion of constituent power, pivotal to the whole book, is theorized as a democratic force that has often been restrained and domesticated by the constituted power, that is, the political, social and economic institutions that have, over the centuries, tamed its uncontainable revolutionary energy� In the history of the United States the strength of the constituent power has benefited from a distinctive American feature, which sets apart the specifically American constituent power as a revolutionary and democratic force per se� The immense land still to be appropriated, Negri argues, provided the Americans’ tension toward democracy with a usable, and not merely symbolic, space of articulation: “Space is the expression of freedom — but a very concrete freedom, a Harringtonian freedom founded on property, appropriation, and colonizing expansion” (Insurgencies 143)� The idealization of America as the place where the force of the molecular - what Negri also defines the barbarian, “Tartar” sense of freedom - could be aptly manifested had unsurprisingly been anticipated in Deleuze and Guattari’s tribute to American literature� The two philosophers’ (far too) idealized America embodies the pattern of the rhizome, the root that freely expands over a limitless territory and that informs a new philosophical paradigm, capable of breaking away with any past and with all genealogies: Everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside� American books are different from European books, even when the American sets off in pursuit of trees� The conception of the book is different� Leaves of Grass� (19) Deleuze and Guattari lay bare the implications of Negri’s discourse about America as the most natural homeland for the constituent power, ideally providing Negri’s pages with the missing link between American revolutionary tradition and the tension towards democracy of its present political organizations� There would be nothing more genuinely American, thus, than the anti-globalization movement born in Seattle, since it would incorporate that Tartar desire for freedom that Negri, echoing Deleuze and Guattari, ascribes to America (and which, as Negri obviously omits to mention, is closely reminiscent of the long-standing debate about dissent as an inherently American feature)� It is, thus, all the more clear the reason why, according to Hardt and Negri, any form of mediation between the singularities of the struggles waged by each component of the anti-globalization movement and its overall revolutionary momentum, was not necessary at all� Those who converged in Seattle to protest against the WTO conference were embodying, rather than simply expressing, a democratic tension that only drew its strength from its own protean essence, and that was all the more uncontrollable insofar as it incorporated and gave voice to a constituent power that had always inhabited the American soil� Any attempt at controlling, containing or simply regulating its force would have irremediably altered and deteriorated its nature� 114 f iorEnzo i uliano The machinic pattern that Hardt and Negri suggestively evoke in order to illustrate the functioning of the multitude, however, fails to completely account for its genesis� The idea of immanence as producing multitudes could at most explain how multitudes work, but is much less convincing when it is used to elucidate the process by which the people becomes a multitude, because it erases any past discontinuity and, deliberately rejecting the idea of the negative, mystifies the very events it wants to celebrate. Hardt and Negri, for instance, consider the alliance between different and once divergent forces, like unions and environmentalists, as the natural result of a convergence, and not as a consequence of a process of progressive weakening of the unions in the US, which, started in the Reagan era, was not halted by the Clinton administration (Cartosio 136-38)� 7 The fact that Hardt and Negri fail to consider any unconscious component operating in the creation of the multitude, postulating in its stead the existence of ever-expanding fluxes of desire that produce rebellious collective subjects, reveal the constructed and purely rhetorical and linguistic nature of the immanence evoked (rather then theorized) in Multitude� Immanence, thus, is the result of a narrative, rather than of a machinic process� It is this narrative that has connected the singularity of each component of the multitude, its past and layered history, with the moment in which the different forces coalesced to stand up against the new global order� It is this narrative, moreover, that has replaced the party as the tool that relates the multitudes to the objectives they set off to achieve� Representativeness, shunned by the constituent power, is substituted by (self-)representation� The narrative of the multitude, and of the American multitude in particular - as Insurgencies theorizes and Multitude tries to demonstrate - jeopardizes the very multitude it declares to celebrate and paves the way, however unwittingly, to present populisms by flattening the discontinuity and the contradictions of its actual stories and identities into a metaphysics of the revolutionary subject that, as a matter of fact, acquires its (much as paradoxical) coherence only when - and if - it is translated on a discursive plane� The disappearance of any negative, that is, of any transitory phase in which the political actors need to mediate among competing positions and look for a final synthesis, reframes the multitude’s political agenda and, more generally, the scope of its action as an irrational and utopian leap in the dark� Multitudes would embody, as such, the revolution, without any need to design a radical strategy or to envisage any 7 Negri fails to consider that, by the 1990s, unionism had progressively weakened and that Clinton’s administration had cut funding to welfare programs, dramatically widening an already existing gulf between workers (and, more generically, destitute people”) and the progressive wing of the Democrats. Deprived of their power in the farms and industries, and no longer backed by the Democrats, the Unions were registering in that decade a gradual but relentless decrease in participation� The unions had, by 1999, lost their role in American economy and in the relationship between workers and factories owners; the new models of industries and the fall of Soviet Union had decisively contributed to the dismantling of unionism within the US society� One, No One and a Multitude 115 figure of mediation and final synthesis. They are born revolutionary, Hardt and Negri suggest, and, if American, they are born all the more revolutionary because of the (natural) potential of the American territory� 3. A tale of many cities Laclau dismisses Hardt and Negri’s elaborations as the effect of “a triumphalist and exaggeratedly optimistic vision” of “the tendencies towards unity operating within the multitude” (On Populist Reason 243)� I have suggested that the pure immanence that should foster an “underlying and spontaneous” (On Populist Reason 240) universality amounts, as a matter of fact, to a discursive analepsis rather than to a machinic assemblage, and operates as an etiological myth of the collective self� This narrative, as I will try to elucidate in the following pages, has been constructed and, at the same time, endorsed by the subjects involved in the protests as a site of identification and as a cathected - much as (mostly) unacknowledged - telos onto which they have projected their expectations and desires and relocated their very ontological status� Different planes of immanence have been, more or less explicitly, mobilized to symbolically accommodate the multitude that gathered from 30 November to 3 December 1999 in Seattle. The riots have first of all been associated to a provisional geography of the anti-capitalists global movements; second, less noticeably, they have been identified as one of the many events that, over the years, have voiced the city’s radical history� After the riots against the WTO, Seattle has been incorporated into a map of the revolutions that were reconfiguring the geopolitical western order of the time. Symbolically removed from the Northwest of the United States, it was reconceptualized by many authors as part of a network of anti-globalization cities of the world� 8 Even Gayatri Spivak, whose effort to re/ deconstruct multiple and overlapping genealogies can hardly be related to any penchant for immanences, assembled her own map of global resistances, in which Seattle is followed by Naples and Genoa as alleged sites of “visible disruption of largescale international meetings”, to which she critically opposes the “subaltern disruption in detail [that] can throw the global machinery of world trade out of joint” (290). The geography of revolts, in which Seattle is included as the place where everything started, is accompanied by an even more telling rewriting of the history of the city� This history, by lining up the riots against the WTO meeting with a series of past events occurred in Seattle, turns out to be one more 8 These alternative maps comprise, for instance, Rome, Chiapas and Genoa (Hardt and Negri 265-67); Washington, Prague, Buffalo, Quebec City, Gothenburg, Genoa, Calgary, Prague, Geneva/ Annemasse, Tessalonica, Miami, New York, Scotland, Hillemm- Rostock, Strasbourg, Vancouver, Toronto (the latest of the events recorded, the G20 Summit, occurring in 2010, Dupuis-Déri 48-49); Porto Alegre, Florence, Paris, London, Mumbai (Negri, Good-bye Mr Socialism 69); Genoa, Porto Alegre, Rome, Barcelona (Reed 282); or, more vaguely, Quebec, Genoa, Spain (Aranowitz 206)� 116 f iorEnzo i uliano plane of immanence, which, conversely, belies the existence of a teleological sequentiality that sees in the city the (Hegelian? ) embodiment of the ideal nemesis of the United States as a capitalist-imperialist power� The 1999 uprisings, thus, seem to deterministically spring out of the history of Seattle that can be retraced to a long sequence of rebellions, as, for instance, Negri (again) remarks in a conversation with Italian scholar Raf ‘Valvola’ Scelsi� Whereas in Scelsi’s words Seattle is simply a “crucial place […] the American port that faces Asia, […] the land of Microsoft, Boeing, Coca-Cola, the home of grunge and even the first concerts of Jimi Hendrix” (Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism 63), Negri aggrandizes this description of the city, digging into its past: Seattle is also the city in which there was the first great repression of the American workers’ movement after World War I� […] Seattle is also the city where the colonists arrived, those who instead of stopping on the East Coast and becoming workers, fled from work and arrived there in order to invent a new life for themselves. … Seattle is also this in some ways, the organized right of flight. […] There is everything in Seattle� […] Hurray everybody! (Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism 63-65) Of course, Negri is not alone in retracing the 1999 riots back to their supposed, almost mythical, origins� He, once again, participates in and summarizes a strategy of representation and self-representation of Seattle, which many of the participants in the uprisings had already idealized as the natural site of American revolts when the 1999 riots occurred� The general strike of 1919, the first ever organized in the States, stands out as the seminal episode of the city’s long-standing revolutionary history� This is what, among others, Margaret Levi and David Olson argue, remarking that “Seattle is a city with a long past of militant labor and anarchist actions” (309) and that the city’s unionist tradition, so vital especially among the workers on the waterfront, has until the present days originated a considerable number of campaigns and demonstrations� Besides scholarly literature, political press was very active in 1999 and eager to relate Seattle’s present with its leftist and unionist tradition� The comparisons with 1919 were countless, despite the evident incommensurability of the two events� Justice, a socialist organization based in Seattle, before the riots issued a 20-page pamphlet titled The WTO, Global Capitalism and … the Socialist Alternative� The pamphlet is completely devoted to the WTO and to possible antagonistic strategies� Only one page diverts from the main theme to feature a brief but dense overview of the 1919 strike� No explicit parallel is drawn between the two events, but the final remark of the article exposes the rationale of this juxtaposition: “For us today, the Seattle general strike gives us a vision of the kind of response we need to the WTO conference” (15). The January 2000 issue of Ruckus, the “U[niversity of] W[ashington]’s Independent Students Newsmagazine”, features a couple of informative articles about the WTO, accompanied by trivia such as the “WTO Week Sign Slogan” (from the problematic “no globalization without representation” to the more prosaic “WTO kiss my ass”, 4), to which two survey-articles follow, “A short history of Communism in America” (13) and “A Retrospective of the Civil Rights Movement in Seattle and Beyond” (9). A 4-page newspaper-format publication issued at the time and emblematically One, No One and a Multitude 117 titled Shut Down the WTO, besides addressing debated questions about globalization and offering practical information to those interested in joining the protest, features a small box reporting an excerpt from an article published by Anna Louise Strong in The Union Record on 4 February 1919, “the eve of the 1919 Seattle general strike” (3). The Seattle late community newspaper Eat the State! featured a column, “Reclaim our History”, which reported events that had occurred in the same week but years or centuries before, on both local and global scale, thus placing Seattle within a broader, unofficial or even anti-official account of history. The column published in the special issue Eat the WTO! merges together the births of Peter Kropotkin (2 December 1842) and Noam Chomsky (7 December 1929) with the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal (1984) and the general strike of French workers against the government cutbacks (1995)� No actual connection among the events is implied, but a sort of analeptic effect is, though involuntarily, once again achieved� The dates mentioned, in fact, retrospectively produce a continuity in which the 1999 events perfectly fit as an essential part of the history of global rebellions. This continuity, needless to say, is the result of the need for a “usable narrative” of Seattle’s past, rather than an accurate account of the facts. This narrative, I argued, has repeatedly been evoked as a site for identification and, as such, as a unifying vector that connected the singularities of the protesters in one (forcibly) coherent, though diversified, multitude. Even scanty information about the history of Seattle’s working class and of the 1919 strike in particular, however, would suffice to disprove this narrative as chiefly fictitious and purposely elaborated so as to provide the multitude gathered in 1999 with a coherent history to identify with, rather than with an appropriate political (and practical) agenda� Idealized as the germinal moment of the birth of that multitude that, eighty years later, would have occupied the streets of Seattle, the 1919 strike, on the contrary, not only diverges from the pattern of the multitude illustrated by Hardt and Negri as intrinsically revolutionary, but counters its very animating principles� Consequently, it complicates the far-too-optimistic narrative of Seattle as the rebellious city of the United States par excellence� There was no “full” body of the people at all, nor was there any constituent power that, from below, produced its own policies by simply and creatively expanding its own revolutionary potential� There were, conversely, at least two perfectly identifiable master signifiers, proudly acknowledged by the protesters: on the one hand, the Socialist Party and the unions embodied and gave voice to radical militancy and activism; on the other, the intangible but essential presence of revolutionary Russia implied that these very radical positions needed to be enforced by law and authority� 9 9 After 1918, in fact, unionism was getting stronger all over the country (“total union membership in the US grew from 2,607,000 in 1915 to 5,110,000 by 1920”; Frank 30), also thanks to what was going on in Russia; in Seattle, moreover, the strong alliance between Wobblies and the Socialist Party represented an almost unique case in the United States of the time� 118 f iorEnzo i uliano Finally, the working class of the time had few or no traits in common with the multitude that took part in the “carnival against capital” of 1999 (Thomas 86). First of all, “working class” did not necessarily correspond to the category of the indigent� By 1919, in fact, many workers were enjoying relatively prosperous conditions, to the point that many of them were in the position of choosing whether to save or invest their money (Frank 67)� Moreover, the working class that animated the strike in 1919 was not at all heterogeneous and diverse with regard to gender and ethnicity� The strike, in fact, was organized and supported essentially by white men, some of whom were still animated by anti-migrant feelings (the Seattle labor movement “had originated in the 1890s as an anti-Chinese movement” and “the culture of male trade unions […] turned away many women”, Frank 20, 32). Affluent white male workers did not immediately associate with poorer female and/ or non-white ones, who were not easily accepted to unions� 10 As can be surmised even by this short overview, the multitude celebrated by Hardt and Negri was not only still to come, but not even detectable in the allegedly revolutionary past of Seattle� Those who opposed and repressed the strike accused protesters of being heavily influenced, if not directly maneuvered, by Russian Bolsheviks and their local representatives� Its supporters celebrated the strike as the triumph of those workers’ organizations, like the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Socialist Party, that had called it� In both cases, the strike was not regarded as the expression of a spontaneous convergence of groups who had, for different reasons, joined their forces, but rather as the result of a perfectly organized structure that responded to an absent yet overarching unifying scheme, as the one provided by the October Revolution and the newborn Soviet Russia� 4. The universal (as a) shame, or, what’s wrong with populism? I argued before that both the construction of the multitude and the narrative of Seattle 1999 contain some of the typical features and rhetorical structure of the populist discourse, such as the refusal of any form of representativeness and the rejection of the party as a mediator among different positions and a leverage to bridge the gap between discrete instances and universal goals� However, at least a question still remains to be answered: what would be wrong with all that? why, in other words, should populism pose a threat to democracy, instead of representing its culminating phase and its most accomplished expression? The answer to these questions is far from straightforward in relation to American history and identity, as several studies about populism in America remark� Alan Ware notices, for instance, that populism 10 As for the relationship between women and unionism in Seattle, see Oberdeck� The author remarks that working-class feminist activism, already dramatically declined after the war (the membership of the Seattle Womens’ Label League went down of 80%; 226), was severely undermined during the 1919 strike (227)� One, No One and a Multitude 119 (apparently? ) voices political positions that could be also held as the tenets of American democracy� He points out that “[p]opulism prioritises the opinions of people over anything else”, that “populists deny the legitimacy of a system in which representatives decide which policies will promote the interests of the people” (102), and that “[p]opulist movements can mobilise such mass frustrations against elites who seem to be exploiting constitutional protection in opposition to the views of ‘the people’” (103). To sum up, he concludes “populism resembles a number of mainstream political values, conflicts, and traditions in America” (104). Whatever it represents in Europe or in Latin America, in the United States populism would thus be the sheer expression of a democratic tradition that not only “lacks much of the anti-regime character evident in other countries” (104), but, conversely, valuably backs up and buttresses American democracy and its official apparatuses. So, again: what should be wrong with all that? In order to tentatively reply to this question, I will turn to an essay written by Italian political scientist and former communist senator, Gianfranco Pasquino, before finally going back to the relationship between multitude and populism� In a 2008 essay about “Populism and Democracy”, Pasquino sets off by referring to the United States in order to elucidate the controversial relationship between populism and democracy: “‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’� This famous phrase, pronounced by President Abraham Lincoln in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, could easily be accepted by democrats and populists alike” (15). Democracy and populism certainly share several of their ideals and principles, in that “both have firm and solid roots in the people and […] both indicate the paramount importance of the people” (15). However, the crucial divide between the two could be located in the meaning they ascribe to the very people they both regularly evoke: assuming that “the people” be a category of political thought, is it an inclusive or an exclusionary one? In the former case, the people is made up of citizens “endowed with rights and duties, but above all with the power of sovereignty that […] must be exercised within the limits and forms codified in the constitution itself” (15-16), as Pasquino clarifies by citing the first article of the Italian constitution� This means that the people, unlike the multitude, is an abstract entity and a political actor that draws its force from the law, according to a philosophical-juridical tradition long-established in western political thought. This definition identifies the law and the right as universal paradigms that define what the people is and who can belong to the people. It is probably a limited, and as such, for sure a disputable definition, since it assumes the universality of the western juridical and political thought� It has, however, at least the merit of indefinitely broadening up the category of the people and, at the same time, of relating it to a strict understanding of the dyad rights/ duties as the fundamentals of any legal system� As an exclusionary category, conversely, the people is made up of those, in Pasquino’s words, that “belong to the same tradition and share the same history” (16). Here, thus, the people does no longer refer to the abstract frame of the right as its precondition and guarantee, but to a story and an identity 120 f iorEnzo i uliano shared in common, such as the ones provided by the nation (which Pasquino, probably too restrictively, identifies as the primary instance of this exclusionary sense of people), or by other paradigms, presumably less abstract than those solely referring to the categories of law, rights and duties� In the conceptual slippage from the demos to the ethnos lies the transition between a democratic and a populist idea of people (16)� How about the multitude? did Hardt and Negri actually celebrate populism, while trying to theorize the multitude? does nowadays populism have anything to do with the ideas, the dreams and the aspirations of those multitudes that, almost twenty years ago, converged in Seattle, truly convinced that another world was possible and at hand? I do not want to go so far as to equate old multitudes with new populists� It is undeniable, however, that both stem from an angry response to poverty and exploitation� As Douglas Kellner puts it about Donald Trump’s admirers, “they had suffered under the vicissitudes of capitalism, globalization, and technological revolution� […] they have watched their jobs being moved overseas, displaced by technological innovation, or lost through unequal economic development amid increasing divisions between rich and poor” (23). It is undeniable, furthermore, that the words of those who, in 1999, along global capitalism and its crimes, also attacked representativeness and representative institutions because of their supposed uselessness or even complicity with national and supranational capitalist authorities, disturbingly resonate in the slogans used today by reactionary, conservative and nationalist populists who, almost thirty years later, have taken over the power in the US and in most European countries� The praise of the multitude’s coherence as a strategy, originated from the need to set apart internal differences so as to successfully struggle against a common enemy, has gradually turned into the praise of the people’s coherence as an essential and almost ontological datum� The absence of hierarchal and rigidly organized parties, typical of traditional Marxist and communist tradition, has often produced pseudo-democratic organizations that find a unifying vector in the leader as a “rigid designator” (as José Luis Villacañas Berlanga ingeniously remarks, referring to Saul Kripke and, once again, to the realm and language and signification, 56), or, as is the case of the United States’ past, in other forms of homogenizing identity� 11 11 Analyzing the origins of the United States’ populism, Paul Taggart remarks that the role of the leader has not always been an essential component of populist movements and policies: “The nature of nineteenth-century US populism was not a function of particular charismatic leaders (as in the case of Peron), or of studied groups of elites and theorists developing and then implementing complex abstract ideological frame works (as in the Russian case)” (26). The figure of the charismatic leader could be considered, thus, highly important but not indispensable for populists� In this, too, a coincidence between (old? ) populisms and modern multitudes could be detected. As brilliantly summarized by Mac Lojowsky, a student who participated in the protests and regarded Seattle 1999 as a “rite of passage” for his own generation, “[t]his new generation of activists has no leaders, for truly, ‘we are all leaders’.” One, No One and a Multitude 121 My contention, thus, is that the idealization of the multitude, despite what its theoreticians argued, could be held at least partially responsible for the appropriation of former revolutionary imagery and aspirations by exclusionary political positions� I have emphasized the rhetorical strategies adopted in the construction of the multitude, remarking that what was theorized and recounted as the result of an immanent process is instead an analeptic narrative that provides the multitude with an invisible master signifier to identify with� The metonymic gesture that stirs part of this narrative favors the concrete and the material over the abstract� The very lexicon Hardt and Negri use (and I am pretty sure they would not deny it) is imbued of materiality, constantly referring to bodies, love, desires, networks, habits and practices� The importance of Seattle, they remark, “was not to influence global leaders […] The real importance of Seattle was to provide a ‘convergence center” (287)� Once again privileging the sense of belonging to the event, the hic et nunc of revolution, over its inspiring doctrines - and they were unfortunately right, if it is true, as Gary Horlik states, that “[t]he colorful protests in the streets of Seattle had very little direct effect on the negotiations, beyond wiping out the opening ceremony” (170). The multitude, thus, apparently prefers the language of physics over the abstract, transcendent language of the law� Its rejection of any universality, wrongly assumed as intrinsically totalitarian, has in the long run produced the rejection of any universal principle� In its worst and most perverse appropriations, it has produced the rejection of the - probably too obsoletely Kantian - universal principle of right� Passed off and extolled as pure immanence, the multitude thus denies the existence of any external master signifier because it is - and functions as - its own master signifier. Being a narrative that predicates the process of its own construction and self-representation, it paradoxically turns out to be an exclusionary rather than an inclusive process� Despite its ostensible emphasis on heterogeneity, in fact, the multitude ultimately approximates to a prescriptive syntax rather than to an ever-expanding machine: it can mesh different subjectivities and generate new ones, on the condition that they belong to and self-identify with a shared code� Works cited Aronowitz, Stanley. “Reflections on Seattle 1999.” Dialectal Anthropology, vol� 33, 2009, pp� 203-08� Broad, Robin, and Zahara Heckscher� “Before Seattle: The Historical Roots of the Current Movement against Corporate-led Globalisation.” Third World Quarterly, vol� 24, no� 4, 2003, pp� 713-28� Cartosio, Bruno� L’autunno degli Stati Uniti. Neoliberismo e declino sociale da Reagan a Clinton� Milano: Shake, 1998� Cooper, Dennis, Interview by Monica Ghosh, The WTO History Project, University of Washington� 23 March 2000 http: / / depts�washington�edu/ wtohist/ interviews/ Cooper-Ghosh�pdf 122 f iorEnzo i uliano Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari� A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizofrenia� Translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (or� ed� Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizofrénie� Paris: Minuit, 1980)� Deusen, David van, and Xavier Massot, editors� The Black Bloc Papers. An Anthology of Primary Texts from the North American Anarchist, Black Bloc, 1988-2005, The Battle of Seattle, through the Anti-War Movement� Shawnee Mission (KS): Breaking Glass Press, 2010� “Do the ‘Seattle Protestors’ Have a Point? ” The International Economy, vol� 14, no� 4, 2000, pp� 42-47� Dupuis-Déri, Francis� “The Black Blocs Ten Years after Seattle� Anarchism, Direct Action, and Deliberative Practices.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol� 4, no� 2, 2010, pp� 45-82� Eat the WTO! Special Edition of Eat the State! vol� 4, no� 6, 24 November 1999� Frank, Dana� Purchasing Power. Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929� Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994� Hardt, Michael. “The Common in Communism.” The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, London-New York: Verso, 2010, pp. 131-44. -----, and Antonio Negri� Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire� New York: Penguin, 2004� Horlik, Gary. “Reactions to Seattle. The Speedbump at Seattle.” Journal of International Economic Law, vol� 3, no� 1, 2000, pp� 167-72� Kellner, Douglas� American Nightmare. Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism� Rotterdam: Sense, 2016� Laclau, Ernesto. “Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity.” Emancipation(s), London-New York: Verso, 1996, 2007, pp� 20-35� -----� On Populist Reason� New York-London: Verso, 2005� Levi, Margaret, and David Olson. “The Battles in Seattle.” Politics & Society, vol� 28, no� 3, 2000, pp� 309-29� Lojowsky, Mac. “Comes a Time.” The WTO History Project, University of Washington. http: / / depts�washington�edu/ wtohist/ testimonies/ comesatime�htm Lott, Eric. “After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism.” New Literary History, vol� 31, no� 4, 2000, pp� 665-80� Negri, Antonio� Insurgencies. Constituent Power and the Modern State� Translated by Maurizia Boscagli, Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 (or� ed� Il potere costituente: saggio sulle alternative del moderno� Milano: SugarCo, 1992)� -----� Goodbye Mr. Socialism� Translated by Peter Thomas, New York-Toronto-London- Melbourne: Seven Stories Press, 2008 (or� ed� Goodbye Mr Socialism� Milano: Feltrinelli, 2006)� Oberdeck, Kathryn J� “‘Not Pink Teas’: The Seattle Working Class Women’s Movement, 1905-1918.” Labor History, vol� 32, no� 2, 1991, pp� 193-230� Pasquino, Gianfranco. “Populism and Democracy.” Twenty-First Century Populism. The Spectre of Western European Democracy, edited by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, Houndmills-New York: Palgrave, 2008, pp� 15-29� Preve, Costanzo. “Costanzo Preve contro Toni Negri.” Interview by Diego Fusaro, 10 November 2010. https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=v4j41lmuJ74 Reed, T�V� The Art of Protest. Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle� Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005� Ruckus. UW’s Progressive Independent Student Newsmagazine, vol� 3, no� 3, 2000� One, No One and a Multitude 123 Shut Down the WTO� Direct Action Network, 1999� Solnit, David. “Interview”, The WTO History Project, University of Washington. 23 March 2000� http: / / depts�washington�edu/ wtohist/ interviews/ Solnit�pdf Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Translator’s Afterword.” Chotti Munda and His Arrow� By Mahasweta Devi� Trans� Gayatri Ch� Spivak� London: Blackwell, 2003, pp� 289-92� Taggart, Paul� Populism� Buckingham-Philadelphia: The Open University Press, 2000� The WTO, Global Capitalism and … The Socialist Alternative, A Socialist Pamphlet Published by Justice, 1999� Thomas, Janet� Battle in Seattle. The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations� Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2000� Villacañas Berlanga, José Luis. Populismo� Translated by Guido M� Cappelli and Daniela Signorino, Milano: Mimesis 2018 (or� ed� Populismo, Madrid: La Huerta Grande, 2015)� Ware, Alan. “The United States: Populism as Political Strategy.” Democracies and the Populist Challenge, edited by Yves Mény and Yves Surel, Houndmills-New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp� 101-19� D onatElla i zzo “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” Leadership, Charisma, Expertise, and Other Superstitions� The Interregnum In a passage from Notebook 3 of his Prison Notebooks, dated 1930, Antonio Gramsci writes: The aspect of the modern crisis that is deplored as a “wave of materialism” is related to the so-called “crisis of authority.” If the ruling class has lost consensus, that is, if it no longer “leads” but only “rules” - it possesses sheer coercive power - this actually means that the great masses have become detached from traditional ideologies, they no longer believe what they previously used to believe, etc� The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass� (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 2, 32-3)� This passage, repeatedly taken up by sociologists and political philosophers in recent years, has become a popular quote with bloggers and journalists in the wake of Donald Trump’s election� An especially popular version of the quote has been the short one used by Slavoj Žižek in an essay he wrote for the New Left Review in 2010, “A Permanent Economic Emergency,” where Gramsci’s final sentence reads as follows: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters” (95). 1 It does not take much speculation to understand why this apocryphal creative mis-translation of Gramsci - with monsters instead of morbid phenomena 2 - would appeal to the imagination of people appalled at Trump’s election� Gramsci’s wording in Italian, “fenomeni morbosi” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 1, 311) is in fact less evocative and almost clinical in its precision, since the 1 In his essay, Žižek uses the quote from Gramsci to advocate a leap of faith for the Left - “Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous� We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss” (95). 2 This quote is a favorite one with Žižek, who since his 2010 article (the earliest occurrence I have been able to trace) has used it repeatedly in his writings, tweets, posts, and interviews, though without ever providing an exact reference� No published translation that I know of actually uses this phrasing; the monsters, though, are also present in another widespread French version of the quote, also apocryphal (“Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”), which may have originated from some unpublished and unauthorized French translation of Gramsci� 126 D onatElla i zzo phrase refers not just to abnormal mental or psychical states but also and primarily to physical illnesses and epidemics� 3 The monsters, though, might finally prove to be truer to some deep undercurrents of the public imagination� I will go back to this point later in this paper� In his 2012 essay “Times of Interregnum,” Zygmunt Bauman proposes “to recognize the present-day planetary condition as a case of interregnum” (49), describing it in terms of a political crisis of the territorial nation-state that leaves sovereignty in an “unanchored and free-floating” (50) condition. This “planetary state of affairs,” induced by neoliberal globalization, which has increasingly shifted power to entities that are “unconstrained by political control,” produces an “emaciation of the political sphere (in its institutionalized orthodox meaning)” (52). In “Out of the Interregnum,” posted on the Open Democracy website the following year, 4 Étienne Balibar builds on Bauman’s use of Gramsci’s category with specific reference to the rise of nationalist rightwing populism in Europe, which “seek[s] to mobilize the electorate against official representation” in response to the rapid dismantling of “the solidarities and securities of everyday life” once provided by the welfare state. The “purely competitive economic order” of neoliberalism, Balibar writes, “has unleashed in Europe a quasi-Hobbesian ‘war of all against all.’” The growing inequalities, distributed along national, ethnic, gender, and generational lines and concerning “income and wealth, … but also education, opportunities or social recognition,” create what Balibar terms “a second degree of inequality, or inequality within inequality,” dramatically increased by neo-liberal dogmas, and which has “destructive effects on the legitimacy both of the national and the supranational institutions” (emphasis in the original). In her 2005 “Neoliberalism and the Ends of Liberal Democracy,” Wendy Brown had also mobilized the concept of interregnum (47), though without expressly citing Gramsci, in describing that gutting of liberal democratic institutions and practices under the new conditions of neoliberal governmentality that she has since termed “de-democratization” (Brown “We Are All Democrats Now…” 46). Most recently, in an essay suggestively titled “The Return of the Repressed,” published in 2017, Wolfgang Streeck, a long-time proponent of Gramsci’s idea of the interregnum to describe the crisis induced by what he has effectively termed “the splitting of democracy from capitalism through the splitting of the economy from democracy” (Streeck, Buying Time 23, emphasis in the original), again evokes this notion to account for the resulting “unstable 3 These are the symptoms that Gramsci identifies: “The death of the old ideologies manifests itself as skepticism toward all theories and general formulas; as the singleminded pursuit of the pure economic fact (profit, etc.) and of a politics that is not only de facto realistic (as it always is) but cynical in its immediate manifestation” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 2, 33)� 4 The post reproduces the text of Balibar’s statement at a panel discussion on “Europe as a Philosophical Project,” with Seyla Benhabib and Francis Fukuyama, part of the Conference The European Project Beyond Eurocentrism held at the Transatlantic Academy, Washington D�C�, on 2 May 2013� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 127 configurations …, and chains of surprising events,” which include “the populist revolution,” Brexit, and Trump’s electoral victory (Streeck, “The Return of the Repressed” 14-5, emphasis in the original). American Fascism? The renewed popularity of Gramsci’s quote both with scholars and with bloggers and tweeters testifies to a widespread perception of the present-day instabilities as commensurable with the twentieth-century crisis that led to Fascism and Nazism� Nancy Fraser noted as much already in a 2013 essay, discussing the relevance of Karl Polanyi’s analysis to our own times: In many respects, today’s crisis resembles that of the 1930s, as described by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation� Now, as then, a relentless push to extend and de-regulate markets is everywhere wreaking havoc - destroying the livelihoods of billions of people; fraying families, weakening communities and rupturing solidarities; trashing habitats and despoiling nature across the globe� Now, as then, attempts to commodify nature, labour and money are destabilizing society and economy - witness the destructive effects of unregulated trading in biotechnology, carbon offsets and, of course, in financial derivatives; the impacts on child care, schooling, and care of the elderly� Now, as then, the result is a crisis in multiple dimensions - not only economic and financial, but also ecological and social. (Fraser, “A Triple Movement? ” 119) Fraser’s broad comparison between the systemic crises of the past and the present has acquired a new cogency in the wake of the 2016 elections, leading many other analysts to discuss the analogies or differences between the two historical moments� Some scholars, such as Dylan Riley, have explicitly rejected the parallel: Contrary to what some have suggested over the past eighteen months, on the left as well as on the platforms of outraged liberalism, Trump is not a fascist� The political conditions in which he operates are quite different to those that shaped inter-war Europe, when exhausted ruling classes were prepared to countenance the suspension of bourgeois liberties and installed in office hard-right thugs who would physically eliminate the threat of workers’ revolution� Trump lacks a party organization, a militia and an ideology; his foreign policy as so far announced is isolationist, rather than revanchist - and indeed, what territorial losses could the US wish to reverse? (21) Other scholars, instead, have embraced it, though not without some qualifications. “Trump as fascist? ” asks Judith Butler in “Reflections on Trump,” part of a series on “The Rise of Trumpism” published in Cultural Anthropology: This may well be a moment to distinguish between old and new fascisms� The key reference point remains the mid-twentieth-century forms of European fascism� With Trump, we have a different situation, but one which I would still call fascist� The fascist moment comes when Trump arrogates to himself the power to deport millions of people or to put Hillary in jail …� When he speaks that way, he acts as if he has the sole power to decide … No one is sure that he has read the 128 D onatElla i zzo Constitution or even cares about it� That arrogant indifference is what attracts people to him� And that is a fascist phenomenon� If he puts deeds to words, then we have a fascist government� Another case in point is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, whose timely publication early in 2017 is itself clear indication of a wish to provide guidance in (or ride the wave of) a moment of widespread public anxiety� While studiously abstaining from mentioning Donald Trump or the 2016 election, Snyder explicitly presents the European history of the first half of the twentieth century as a memento that “societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.” That history, therefore, might hold a lesson for our present: “Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century� Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so” (8-9). The insistence on “today” and “now” makes the point unmistakable, to the point that one has to wonder why the author, while clearly capitalizing on the suggested parallel, would refrain from making the point more overtly: scholarly scruple? Political shyness? Snyder, in fact, is not alone in this attitude of reluctantly acknowledging similarities that are simultaneously suggested and disavowed� 5 As a person born and raised in Italy at a time when memories of historical Fascism were still very vivid, and living in Italy at a time when attempts to reclaim and resuscitate its political legacy are still vigorous, I find myself recalcitrant to embrace a somewhat generic, wholesale notion of fascism (let alone its equivalence with communism, under the general rubric of totalitarianism, that Snyder seems to be proposing)� Apart from the emotional rewards of name-calling or the ideological rewards of the Jeremiad, I wonder if the word “fascism” is really needed, and adequate, as an interpretive framework and an analytics for the present moment. Cursory conflation entails a loss of specificity that may finally operate in obfuscating and even selfexonerating manners� And yet, in spite of my own reluctance, and the reticence and qualifications of most professional historians and political scientists, there are other ways in which the parallel between Trumpism and Fascism might prove significant. The post-electoral moment produced a spate of memes, comics, cartoons, caricatures portraying Donald Trump as Mussolini or Hitler, which 5 See Christopher R� Browning’s review of Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler in The New York Review of Books: “To begin I would stipulate emphatically that Trump is not Hitler and the American Republic in the early twenty-first century is not Weimar. There are many stark differences between both the men and the historical conditions in which they ascended to power. Nonetheless there are sufficient areas of similarity in some regards to make the book chilling and insightful reading about not just the past but also the present.” “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 129 circulated at light-speed through virtual networks and social media� 6 Less historical parallel than shorthand to express outrage and alarm, this proliferation nevertheless has if not historico-political, at least symptomatic value: it shows the extent to which the association had, at least at that moment, a definite hold on the public imagination� More than any hard facts of the national and global economy, it is the public imagination, as revealed, expressed, and shaped through representation, that I wish to explore in this paper - the ideological fantasy that both betrays and mystifies our “real conditions of existence,” as Louis Althusser would have termed it, or the emergence of the Real, in Slavoj Žižek’s terms. If the perceived experience of the current moment elicits comparison - in the here and now - with the European crises of the early twentieth century, could the analytics put in place to interpret early twentieth-century Fascisms provide an interpretative framework capable of being deployed for specific diagnostic purposes, in order to understand the fantasy of Trump supporters? In the next two sections, I will attempt this experiment, reading the present moment through Gramsci’s concepts and terminology, and adopting suggestions coming from other thinkers who dealt with twentieth-century fascisms� I will draw, rather purposefully, exclusively from European thinkers, before reverting to a set of more contemporary texts in the two final sections. Charisma Let us, then, go back to the interregnum� Most thinkers who have discussed it have done so in the general context of the political crisis of neoliberal globalization� Much less widely addressed have been the two other points that Gramsci touches upon in his note, and that he seems to consider major symptoms of the interregnum: the crisis of authority and the question of belief� The most immediate sense of the “crisis of authority” mentioned by Gramsci is clearly political: a failure of hegemony, that is, of the ruling class’s ability to lead as opposed to coerce� As is well known, political leadership for Gramsci is ultimately collective, grounded in the interests and ideology of a class, prepared by intellectuals and performed by the party, the “modern Prince” capable of producing and organizing a consensus within civil society� Parties, however, “are not always capable of adjusting to new tasks and new eras, they are not always capable of developing according to the development of the overall power relations (and consequently, the relative position of their classes) in a given country or in the international field.” When they fail to effectively “react against habit, against the tendency to become mummified and anachronistic,” and when the party bureaucrats “end up establishing themselves as a mutually supportive body, which stands on its 6 As Sheri Berman wrote in a widely quoted post, “An analogy is haunting the United States - the analogy of fascism� It is virtually impossible (outside certain parts of the Right-wing itself) to try to understand the resurgent Right without hearing it described as - or compared with - 20th-century interwar fascism.” Aeon (March 27, 2017), https: / / aeon�co/ ideas/ fascism-was-a-right-wing-anti-capitalist-movement� 130 D onatElla i zzo own and perceives itself as independent from the masses,” then “in moments of acute crisis [the party] becomes voided of its social content and is left as if suspended in mid-air” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1604, my translation)� 7 These moments of crisis take place when “social groups become disconnected from their traditional political parties” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1602, my translation), whether due to some major political failure of the ruling class which has alienated the masses, or to the new political claims and activity of formerly passive groups� Such moments, then, bring about “a ‘crisis of authority,’ and that is exactly a crisis of hegemony, or a crisis of the State as a whole” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1603, my translation)� It is at these moments that “the immediate situation becomes delicate and tottering, because the field lays open to solutions brought about by force, to the activity of dark powers represented by providential or charismatic men” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1603, my translation)� Gramsci devoted considerable critical attention to these “providential or charismatic men.” Developing Karl Marx’s considerations on Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Gramsci repeatedly explored the phenomenon of “Caesarism,” to which he devoted several remarks both in paragraph 66 of Notebook 4 (1930-32) and in Notebook 13 (1932-34), where the whole of paragraph 27 is titled “Caesarism.” Gramsci understands Caesarism as the result of a political stalemate, a “static balance” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1604, my translation) in which none of the contending groups has the force to prevail and the balance is therefore “catastrophic” since “the continuing struggle can only result in mutual destruction” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1619, my translation)� While recognizing Caesarism as a historical solution that can be either progressive or regressive (and whose political function and significance, therefore, need to be assessed in each individual case through the analysis of specific forces and circumstances), Gramsci is consistently suspicious of the connected phenomenon of “charismatic leadership.” The notion of “charismatic leadership,” which Gramsci indirectly borrowed from Max Weber through the mediation of his pupil Robert Michels, 8 designates a direct relationship between the masses and an individual leader endowed with quasi-supernatural qualities: “When the leader exerts influence on his supporters because of qualities which are so extraordinary that they seem supernatural to them, he can be called a charismatic leader.” This definition - part of Gramsci’s comments on Michels’s 1928 essay “Les 7 This passage, like the ones that immediately follow, is from Paragraph 23 of Notebook 13 (as yet untranslated into English), containing “Brief notes on Machiavelli’s politics” and written in 1932-4� 8 A German sociologist, a pupil of Max Weber’s and Werner Sombart’s, Michels moved to Italy where he first joined the revolutionary syndicalist wing of the Socialist party, then in 1924 joined the Fascist party� He held university chairs in economics and political doctrines first in Turin, then in Perugia. The author of a book On the Sociology of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (published in German in 1911), he upheld the idea of Mussolini’s charisma as effecting a direct link between himself and the popular masses, capable of improving the latter’s conditions by dispensing with bureaucratic political mediation� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 131 partis politiques et la contrainte sociale,” to which he devoted paragraph 75 of Notebook 2 (1929-33) - is accompanied by a number of ironical remarks: “Michels has made a lot of noise in Italy with ‘his’ discovery of the ‘charismatic leader’ which, probably, was already in Weber [one should make a comparison]; …he does not even mention that a conception of the leader by divine grace has already been in existence, and how! ” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 1, 319)� 9 Always averse to sociological generalization (as opposed to theorization based on scrupulous historical and political analysis of the causes and configuration of forces characterizing each unique event), and particularly hostile to Michels for his support of the Mussolini regime, Gramsci was very critical of what he regarded as Michels’s false conceptualizations, and he explicitly cited the notion of the “charismatic leader” as the epitome of the inadequacy of both Michels and sociology itself: The so-called sociological laws, which are assumed as causes - such a fact took place because of such a law etc� - have no causal value: they are almost invariably tautologies and paralogisms� Usually they are nothing but a duplicate of the fact being observed� A fact or a series of facts are described; through a mechanical process of generalization, a relation of similarity is derived, and this is then called a law, which is assumed and made to function as a cause� But where is the new discovery in that? The only new thing is the name given to a series of small facts, but names are not innovations. (In Michels’s treatises one can find a whole repertoire of such tautological generalizations: the latest and most famous one is the “charismatic leader”) (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 2, 1433-4, my translation)� 10 In his long entry on Michels in Notebook 2, paragraph 75, Gramsci offers a trenchant critique of Michels’s celebration of charismatic leadership - whose immediate political function was singing the praise of Benito Mussolini - denouncing its historical inaccuracy, sloppy research, vague language, superficial categorization, and lack of argumentative rigor. And yet, in spite of his many political and scholarly reservations, and though he systematically distances himself by using scare quotes whenever he uses the expression “charismatic leader,” Gramsci returns to it again and again in his reflections on politics and history� Though he doesn’t make the connection explicitly, there is little doubt that Gramsci viewed charismatic leadership as one of 9 The notions of charisma and charismatic leadership have been in fact among the most controversial in Weber’s thought, partly out of dissent with the political model they evoke, partly because of the contradictory quality of Weber’s own thought on this topic, which he took up repeatedly at different moments in his career� First applied to religion and magic, the notion of charisma later emerges in the context of Weber’s sociology of domination, where he describes power as obedience, and investigates the subjective relationships between the obedient and the obeyed that stabilize domination by converting it into legitimate authority� Weber outlines three types of legitimation: traditional, validated by custom; legal-rational, validated by impersonal rules; and charismatic, validated by the extraordinary personality of the leader� 10 This passage is from Note 1, Paragraph 26 of Notebook 11 (as yet untranslated into English), containing “Notes towards an introduction to the history of philosophy and the study of culture” and written in 1932-3. 132 D onatElla i zzo the morbid symptoms of phases of political transition� In his observations on Michels’s essay, roughly coeval with the note about the interregnum, he actually offers an analytical exploration of the concept: so-called “charisma,” in Michels’ sense, always coincides in the modern world with a primitive stage of mass parties, the stage at which doctrine appears to the masses as something vague and incoherent, something that needs an infallible Pope to interpret it and adapt it to the circumstances� (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 1, 320) Interestingly enough, unlike Max Weber - who sees charisma as one of the three types of legitimate authority - Gramsci reads charismatic leadership not as authority, but as actually a symptom of its crisis: for him, as for other Marxist thinkers, charismatic leadership is another form of failed hegemony, originating in the party’s failure to ground itself on the coherent worldview of a historically progressive class: This phenomenon occurs all the more when the party comes into being and is formed not on the basis of a world view which is unitary and full of possibilities because it is the expression of a historically necessary and progressive class, but on the basis of incoherent and muddled ideologies that feed on sentiments and emotions which have not yet reached the final point of dissolution, because the classes (or the class) of which it is an expression, although in dissolution historically, still have a certain base and attach themselves to the glories of the past as a shield against the future� (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 1, 320) It is almost inevitable to recognize in the “incoherent and muddled ideologies” used “as a shield against the future” some of the typical features of recent right-wing populism, immediately evoking slogans such as “Make America Great Again,” but also Marine Le Pen’s “On est chez nous” (We are home, This is our home) or the UK Independence Party’s “We want our country back.” Establishing a direct relationship with the masses based on individual faith and unmediated collective representation rather than ordinary political mediation, the charismatic leader renders the people as an organic and territorially bounded community, to the exclusion of both alien intruders from outside - thus capitalizing on racism and xenophobia - and ordinary political representation inside - through the mobilization of antiestablishment, anti-politics, anti-elitist feelings� And yet, one must acknowledge that Barack Obama’s presidency relied on charismatic leadership no less that Donald Trump’s, although in a different style� Actually, it might be argued that his charisma was itself a product of what one might term, with Gramsci, the “mummified and anachronistic” state of the Democratic oligarchy, and that it in turn contributed to the doom of the Democratic party by dissimulating its ongoing crisis behind the façade of the President’s winning personality� Like populism - a term frequently associated with the emergence of charismatic leadership - charisma can cut both ways� Many critics - among them Dylan Riley and Wolfgang Streeck - have read the election of Donald Trump as a form of neo-Bonapartism, “a form of rule that substitutes a charismatic leader for a coherent hegemonic project” (Riley, 21-2). If the neoliberal settlement produces a hollowing out “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 133 of democracy and a systematic dismantling of political institutions and organized mediations (such as traditional parties or labor unions), charismatic leadership is what steps in to both replace these institutions and disguise their actual evisceration. Unlike the “invisible hand” of the global market, or the impersonal and intangible aloofness of the technocratic elites, the charismatic leader is individualized, visible, bodily, iconic, and can be the object as well as the producer of intelligible narratives� He or she (but it is mostly a he) thus provides the perfect alibi and symbolic compensation for the ungovernable, acephalous quality of global capitalism� In other words, what charismatic leadership amounts to is a narrative of governability at a time of crisis� Apocalypse Before going on to offer my reading of a few examples of the current narrativization of the question of leadership, I would like to emphasize two other points about leadership that I find embedded in Gramsci’s note about the interregnum quoted at the beginning: first, that the crisis of authority is not entirely or exclusively political, in the sense of state politics, but affects multiple levels of society and social interaction (in the rest of his note, Gramsci mentions questions of religion and of generational conflict); 11 and second, that - as Gramsci, again, underlines - what lies behind the crisis of authority is a crisis involving structures of belief: “the great masses … no longer believe what they previously used to believe.” In order to briefly explore the question of belief, I would like to introduce a set of concepts drawn from another prominent Italian thinker, strongly influenced by Gramsci but much less widely known in the United States, Ernesto De Martino� An ethnologist and historian of religions active between the early 1940s and his death in 1965, close to the Socialist and Communist party and best known for his studies on the social functions of magic and on mourning rituals in the South of Italy, De Martino, like Max Weber before him, was keenly interested in the connections between early religious forms of thought and ritual practices, and the social and political forms of modern life� In a retrospective account of his work, probably written in the 1950s, De Martino declared that his interest in ethnology had not been kindled by a wish for far-away ancestral experiences, but by his intellectual need 11 The paragraph immediately following the sentence on the interregnum reads as follows: “This paragraph should be connected to some earlier observations about the socalled ‘question of the young’ - a question that arises because of the ‘crisis of authority’ of the old generation of leaders and because those capable of leadership are automatically barred from carrying out their mission� … Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this manner, necessarily be resolved in favor of a restoration of the old? Given the character of ideologies, such an outcome can be ruled out - but not in an absolute sense� Meanwhile, physical dejection will lead, in the long run, to widespread skepticism, giving rise to a new ‘arrangement’ in which, for ex., Catholicism will become even more an unadulterated Jesuitism, etc.” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol� 2, 33)� 134 D onatElla i zzo to understand the resurfacing of those phenomena in his own time, when Hitler was “shamanizing” - De Martino’s term - “in Germany and Europe,” like an “atrocious European shaman trying to bury humankind in a fire coffin” (De Martino, “Promesse e minacce dell’etnologia” 85, my translation). In the same essay, he discusses the risky ways in which mythical, folkloric, and ritual symbols may lend themselves to operating as the mediators of irrational and nostalgic attitudes at moments of crisis created by “the spread of technological alienations and the extreme dynamism of the radical transformations in regimes of existence, which once again lay bare the anguish of history” (De Martino, “Promesse e minacce dell’etnologia” 101, my translation). The specific collective political manifestations that De Martino repeatedly exemplifies through Hitler and designates as modern forms of shamanism, take root, in his view, at moments of failure in participatory democracy and perceived lack of control, when citizens no longer experience themselves as active protagonists of social life� 12 In the last decade of his life, De Martino gathered notes for another volume, published posthumously in 1977, which in an essay on Italian Cultural Studies, “Non Finito: The Form of Italian Cultural Studies,” Michele Cometa has rightly compared to Gramsci’s Notebooks and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for the cultural energy and interpretive possibilities emanating from its constellations of fragmentary thoughts and notes� In this volume (over 800 pages long), entitled La fine del mondo. Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali (The End of the World� Contribution for an analysis of cultural apocalypses) De Martino brings together an array of cultural phenomena ranging from Christian theologies to myths, from collective millennial movements to decolonizing struggles, from individual psychoses to philosophical, literary, and artistic works, to address the question of the apocalypse as a form of cultural compensation to catastrophic crises - more precisely, to those moments when our Dasein, our ways of being here-and-now in the world, are threatened by the impending or perceived collapse of the specific cultural and historical horizons within which our ways of being-in-the-world have taken shape� 13 Thus understood, the notion of apocalypse equally applies to the end of individual worlds and to the end of collective worlds, and points to the deep significance shared by psychic, bodily, social, historical, and anthropological catastrophes as radical crises of a “world” in the ontological, psychological, existential, socio-cultural, planetary, and ecological sense� 12 See the section “Furore in Svezia” in De Martino’s essay “Furore simbolo valore” (173-4)� 13 De Martino had offered a synthesis of the conceptual and methodological assumptions of his work in a previous essay, “Apocalissi culturali e apocalissi psicopatologiche” (Cultural apocalypses and psychopathological apocalypses), published in Nuovi Argomenti 69-71 (1964): 105-41� In that essay, he proposed to deal with the question of the perception of “the end” of a specific form of social world by comparing accounts of subjective psychopathological states and literary and artistic works equally revolving around apocalyptic representations� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 135 In his focus on apocalypses, De Martino was interested in exploring the different outcomes and the historically specific cultural forms of response to diverse human catastrophes, which can take place as agony and destruction, or result in an overcoming of the crisis through what he terms an “ethos of transcendence,” aimed at producing a palingenesis, a transformative renewal of individual as well as collective life. “Transcendence,” here, needs to be understood as an immanent rather than metaphysical notion, pertaining to culture in an anthropological sense� His original Italian phrase, “etica del trascendimento,” actually translates better as “ethics of transcending”: “The ethos of the transcending of life - or ‘nature’ - into value is transcendental in the twofold sense of a principle of intelligibility of human, historical and cultural reality and of a regulatory ideal of the inexhaustibility of the process of transcending and valorizing” (De Martino, La fine del mondo 431, my translation). What is at stake, in other words, is not an affirmation of transcendence as a type of reality or a state, but an action, an active effort to find or create a subjective or intersubjective way of conferring meaning to the world� As such, it can refer to politics and ideology as well as magic and religion: indeed, one of De Martino’s recurrent examples of apocalyptic thinking is Marxism, with its “mythical structure,” its millennialism, and “the eschatological significance of its popular success” (De Martino, La fine del mondo 422, my translation)� One can recognize here a major point of De Martino’s thinking, namely that models of thought and behavior organized according to a metahistorical structure, such as magic, religion, and “mythico-ritual symbolism,” operate in the modern as well as the archaic world as institutionalized techniques for the containment of crisis, aimed at producing cultural re-integration by way of “dehistoricization”: a process of responding to a historically specific crisis through wilful alienation from an anxiety-producing condition, which allows individuals and groups to inhabit history “as if” they were not in it. It is easy, in view of De Martino’s former comparison of Hitler with a shaman, to see charismatic leadership as another form of this mobilization of magic thinking for dehistoricizing purposes� And yet, compared to Gramsci’s evident intellectual impatience for the “incoherent and muddled ideologies” fuelling charismatic leadership, De Martino examines them more dispassionately, not just rejecting them as backward, nostalgic, and irrational, but striving to understand their inner structural logic as the theoretical horizon available to certain individuals and groups, under given conditions, for articulating their relationship with material praxis in the face of individual or collective “ends of the world” - the kind of felt experience of precarity and “social quicksand” described by JoAnn Wypijewski in “The Politics of Insecurity” (9). To that extent, I would argue, De Martino, like Weber, attempts to supply the missing link between historical structures of power and domination, and the ways in which they are subjectively perceived and experienced� Thus, he might help us restore to our intellectual grasp of neoliberalism as an economic and political order, a sense of what he terms, as I mentioned before, the “regimes of existence, which once again lay bare the anguish of history.” It is when we view Gramsci’s description of the 136 D onatElla i zzo interregnum through De Martino’s lens that Žižek’s apocryphal monsters erupting from the throes of the transition between the old and the new may begin to appear, in their etymological sense of portentous and awe-producing manifestations, finally more adequate to account for subjective experience than Gramsci’s diagnostic “morbid symptoms.” Flying the plane In a short lecture recorded in 2011 as part of the Ten Years of Terror project on the “Histories of Violence” website, 14 Zygmunt Bauman resorts to an effective metaphor to convey the felt and lived experience - the “regime of existence” - of living in the neoliberal age. Let’s imagine ourselves sitting on a plane, up there in the sky, sitting very comfortably: some of us are reading, some of us are drinking, some are having a nap, some play computer games, some simply think, anticipate the pleasures or the chores which will meet them after the landing� But suddenly the news come in that the very pleasant information coming in through the loudspeaker in the cabin has been recorded quite a long time ago somewhere else, there is no one actually speaking to you� And then you discover that the pilot cabin is empty and that the automatic pilot probably leads you to some airport, but you learn also that the airport in question is still in the planning stage, or rather on the drawing boards, because the application hasn’t been submitted yet to the proper authorities� It’s a frightening image, really, but it is roughly, in a nutshell, what our contemporary fears are like. They are fears of nothing being in control, of first of all being ignorant of what’s expecting us, not really knowing what will happen next moment and secondly, even if we knew, we suspect there is very little we can do about it, to stop the danger and to get out of the trouble� No one is in control, that is the major source of contemporary fears� Bauman then proceeds to list a number of possible exemples of these fears of the uncontrollable - natural catastrophes, loss of job, crash of the stock market, terrorism - that result from the disconnection between power and politics, “the ability to get things done” and “the ability to decide which things need to be done,” under the conditions of neoliberalism. Let me now juxtapose Bauman’s striking apologue of the airplane with this other image, from which I have borrowed the title of this essay: 14 https: / / www�historiesofviolence�com/ full-lectures-c1nc8� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 137 “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” This controversial cartoon by Will McPhail, published in the December 27, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, 15 has been universally read - and resented by many - as a satirical comment on the recent presidential election� By pushing it to an absurd extreme, the image lampoons the populist excesses of anti-establishment feeling, transposing that attitude to the one setting where none of us would ever wish to endorse bottom-up leadership� It thus ridicules both the feeling and the practice as insane, exposing the rise of populist leadership as the rallying of presumptuous ignorance and festering resentment, which induces what amounts to mass-suicidal behavior in the easily misguided electors� The binary that implicitly sustains the cartoon is the opposition between charismatic leadership and expertise� Though Max Weber would have recognized both as types of legitimate authority, 16 the charismatic leader is the very opposite of the expert: the former mobilizes a faith that is empty 15 http: / / www�newyorker�com/ cartoon/ a20630� 16 To Max Weber, Western modernity coincides with capitalist rationalization and operates by way of specialization and division of labor. Every field of social operation, whether private or public, therefore, needs its bureaucratic organization, which is run by trained specialists� The impersonality, calculability, and effectiveness of experts marks the superiority of the modern forms of state organization over the old ones and has a standardizing and therefore democratizing impact: “The more complicated and specialized modern culture becomes, the more its external supporting apparatus demands the personally detached and strictly objective expert, in lieu of the lord of older social structures, who was moved by personal sympathy and favor, by grace and gratitude” (Weber 975). The expert thus stands at the intersection between epistemology, mode of production, and forms of social and political domination: he is the figure of a specific harnessing of secular knowledge to capitalist rationality and to its ways of organizing political power: “Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational” (Weber 225)� 138 D onatElla i zzo of factual content and rich in what could be called, in De Martino’s terms, “mythico-ritual” symbolism, and is based on identification and idealization; the latter presents itself as based on facts, knowledge, and specialized training, appealing to reason and experience� We saw those two poles at play in the presidential campaign of 2016: on the one hand, Hillary Clinton’s bid for trustworthiness based on competent knowledge and political expertise, which frequently made her come across as nerdy and didactic; on the other hand, Donald Trump’s boastful display of personal incompetence, claimed as proof that he was not one of those corrupt politicians in the Washington swamp, and his overt rejection of experts as part of an ineffective and unreliable oligarchy: They say, “Oh, Trump doesn’t have experts.” Let me tell you, I do have experts but I know what’s happening. … And look at the experts we’ve had, ok? Look at the experts� All of these people have had experts� You know, I’ve always wanted to say this - I’ve never said this before with all the talking we all do - all of these experts, “Oh we need an expert - ” The experts are terrible. Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have� Look at the mess� Look at the Middle East� If our presidents and our politicians went on vacation for 365 days a year and went to the beach, we’d be in much better shape right now in the Middle East� 17 While specifically aimed at undermining his rivals for the Republican nomination as well as Hillary Clinton’s status as a consummate politician, legitimizing instead his own common sense and lack of political experience as a reliable form of “folk wisdom,” Donald Trump’s mockery of the experts in this speech from the early phase of his presidential campaign proved to be tapping into a large reservoir of popular resentment against not just Washington politicians and decision-makers, but experts as such� 18 However ludicrous Trump’s performance of the ordinary man in the street might appear to be, given his billionaire status and quasi-royal style, one should keep in mind that, as much sociological work has shown, many working class and lower-middle class people, and especially rural and uneducated people, tend to admire the billionaires, seen as remote iconic figures of achievement, and to resent instead the doctors, the lawyers, the educated professionals - in other words, the experts - with whom they have actual, mostly unequal dealings, and therefore tensions, in the field of daily social relations. 17 Donald Trump, speech delivered at La Crosse, Wisconsin, Apr� 4, 2016, https: / / www� youtube.com/ watch? v=imOjgLTTnsY. 18 The role of experts has been variously analyzed, defended, and reclaimed over the last few years, especially in the political, juridical, and economic field, and the wide diffusion of an anti-expert attitude has been the object of much recent comment� See for instance: Philip E� Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment. How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Kennedy, A World of Struggle. How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise. The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 139 It is certainly no accident, in this sense, that the twitter debate over the cartoon immediately expanded into a discussion of the reliability of doctors, teachers, scientists, and vaccines, 19 manifesting the pervasiveness of the “crisis of authority” associated with the condition of the interregnum. Of course, the cartoon draws its force from what is in fact - as some of its critics have noted - a faulty parallel between two incommensurable fields: expertise based on a thorough technical or scientific training, and political leadership and representation� We - the educated classes, the readers of the New Yorker - recognize that distinction, though we accept that the cartoon’s satirical effect depends on transposing the two planes� And yet, despite my personal outrage at the reactionary demagoguery of many political leaders, in my own country and continent no less than in the USA, this cartoon contains something that is deeply troubling to me, something that goes well beyond the indictment of the political choices of a part of the American electorate� First, because of the way in which it uses technical expertise not just as a metaphor but also as a measure of political leadership, implicitly endorsing exactly the kind of technocratic rule that has been so crucial to the neoliberal voiding of the political sphere� And second, because the metaphor actually works both ways, implicitly suggesting that not just piloting, but also politics had better be left to the experts, rather than being subjected to the vagaries of an electorate whose ability to collectively act as a rational agent is clearly put into question by its emotional malleability� But what if, as in Bauman’s apologue, there is no one in the cockpit? What if the pilot is there, but really has no clue? What if the airplane is crashing? The Experts Of course I have no idea whether Will McPhail had Bauman’s image of the pilotless airplane in mind when he created his cartoon� I suspect he did not, and I suspect that the cartoon was meant more as a satire of anti-establishment populism, venting impatience and frustration with the outcome of the election, than as a critique of democratic processes as such� Either way, by the time I saw the cartoon in The New Yorker, the different versions of the apologue of the airplane had already begun to feel almost like a twenty-first century equivalent of the Medieval “ship of fools”: exemplary parables of contemporary government and contemporary governmentality� So I will now turn to my third and last parable of the airplane - possibly in some ways the most troubling one. This final airplane, however, is not a metaphorical but a fictional one, at least ostensibly unrelated to the political domain. During the last weeks of the presidential campaign, CBS started airing the first season of a new drama TV series, which - probably because of its juxtaposition with the presidential debates - soon came to strike me as a troubling political allegory� The series is titled Bull, starring Michael Weatherly 19 See online debate at http: / / uproxx�com/ news/ new-yorker-trump-cartoon/ 140 D onatElla i zzo (formerly of NCIS) and it is based on the early career of controversial psychologist and TV celebrity Phil McGraw - Dr� Phil - as the founder of a successful trial consulting firm. 20 The formula of the show is easily explained: the fictional Dr. Jason Bull uses his talent and training and the various fields of expertise of his team - which includes a lawyer, a neurolinguistics specialist from the Department of Homeland Security, a detective, a fashion expert and former football star, and a genius hacker - not simply to find out the truth about the various cases being tried in court, but more specifically, to convince the jurors of the innocence of Bull’s client� In order to do so, he investigates the individual jurors’ backgrounds and personalities, and secures mirror jurors whose response during mock-trials, recorded and analyzed through sophisticated technologies, will enable him to predict the real jurors’ reactions: “I know what they’re thinking before they do,” he boasts in the opening credits sequence� As a result, he is able to produce narratives accurately geared to each juror’s emotions, weaknesses, and inner needs, thus winning them over to his client’s side� In other words, Bull employs neurolinguistic programming and subliminal manipulation of the same kind used in marketing communication - or else, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal has revealed, political consultancy - meant to produce the desired affective response and thus direct the behavior of people who are entirely unaware of being placed under observation and control (and of course unaware that their personal data are being hacked and mined, in ways that are sometimes clearly illegal)� In the fictional world, the legitimizing assumption of the whole process is Bull’s moral certainty of the client’s innocence; but it is clear that in principle, this technique would work equally well if the client were guilty� The show, of course, presents this manipulation as entirely legitimate and desirable, since it is in the best interest of justice, and in fact proposes it to each client, and by extension to the audience, as an object of wonder - interestingly, Bull’s skills and techniques are frequently referred to, whether ironically or admiringly, as “magic.” The CBS website presents the series protagonist as “Brilliant, brash and charming … the ultimate puppet master.” 21 In other words, Dr� Jason Bull - named after a mythological hero and an animal conveying a sense of masculine potency, courage, and physical power - is a charismatic leader if ever there was one� And yet, the most striking feature of this show is that it revolves entirely around experts - a word that is obsessively repeated in each of the first episodes� The experts are not just the protagonist and his team but, at least during the first 8 episodes (aired from September 20 to December 6, 2016) in one way or another also most of his clients: a famous rock ’n roll singer, a genius biochemist, an emerging chef, a star surgeon, and - predictably - an airplane pilot� All need to be rescued from hostile jurors and reclaim the unique value 20 Created by Phil McGraw and Paul Attanasio, produced by Amblin Television and distributed by CBS, the show premiered on September 20, 2016� After running for two seasons, it has just been renewed for a third one, scheduled for 2018-9� 21 http: / / www�cbs�com/ shows/ bull/ about/ “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 141 of their expertise in spite of mishaps and against prejudice and resentment� An exemplary instance of this is episode 6, “Bedside manner,” concerning a brilliant gynecological surgeon sued for malpractice for having performed an emergency operation on her patient that made it impossible for her to have children - her original reason for undergoing surgery - though it actually saved the woman’s life� The doctor’s egotism, arrogance, God complex - “the closest thing that we have to God on earth is a surgeon at the top of his game” - and lack of empathy alienate every one of the jurors, and neither the surgeon’s flawless record, nor his technical explanations, nor the facts unearthed by the team’s investigative work change their negative opinion� Bull is only able to win the case by manoeuvering the jurors into emotionally connecting with his client’s human side and sympathizing with the overwhelming pressure and responsibility of his job, in spite of his social and relational inadequacies as a human being: “there are a dozen more decisions to be made every second after that, decisions that call on every ounce of my education, my expertise, my judgment� Decisions that threaten life, alter life, save life. Decisions that none of you are qualified to make! None of you want to make! ” As a human being he is a jerk, but as a surgeon he is the best: who would you like to be operated by, a nice friendly doctor or the most capable one? Each one of the episodes similarly operates as a relentless vindication of expertise against its uncomprehending and superficial detractors. But let me now turn to my third and final airplane parable. In the episode broadcast on September 27, 2016, “The Woman in 8D,” Bull’s client is a highly experienced woman pilot, Taylor Mathison, a former fighter pilot who flew 139 survey flights in Iraq, whose commercial plane has crashed due to wind shear, killing all of its 62 passengers and crew� The only survivor, she is accused of having lost control of the aircraft by disregarding the standard protocol, and is brought to court on charges of gross negligence� Due to concussion during the crash, she has no memory of the event and is unable to defend herself� Her lawyer, provided by the airline, urges her to settle in order to minimize the costs for the airline and maximize his own fee, though that would mean for her to take the blame, be fired, and be forever unable to work as a pilot� When Bull - himself a licensed pilot - takes on her case, his team finds that the jury would acquit her if she were a man, but is going to convict her out of mistrust for a woman pilot, in spite of her unimpeachable military and civilian record� This gender bias is made evident everywhere in the episode, from Bull’s colleague Marissa Morgan mistaking Captain Mathison’s male lawyer as their client when they first meet, to the airline mechanic’s assumption that the woman pilot who inspected the aircraft before the flight must be the co-pilot rather than the captain, and to the Captain’s lawyer’s easy way of asking a woman member of the Bull team to get him a cup of coffee. So, in order to have her acquitted, Bull does not simply need to find and prove the facts about the case: he has to trick the jurors into acknowledging their unconscious gender bias� Only at that point are they prepared to recognize the facts that he has unearthed: the pilot had in fact kept control of the aircraft to the end, and her apparent breach of protocol was the result of 142 D onatElla i zzo a split-second decision to have the doomed airplane crash on an empty road instead of a crowded neighborhood, thus averting an even worse tragedy� Captain Mathison is in fact an indomitable fighter and a hero: she has good judgment and the capacity to make life-and-death decisions, she has leadership and responsibility� Am I overinterpreting if I read this episode, aired in the thick of the presidential campaign, as a kind of subliminal Hillary Clinton ad, aimed at confronting the electorate with their implicit gender bias, and convince us of an expert woman’s capacity to fly the plane? Indeed, the show’s insistence on the exceptional reliability of the experts, even in the middle of death and catastrophe, sounds almost as an updated version of the Jeremiad - an invitation to a counter-intuitive leap of faith in the middle of crisis, which casts crisis as an accomplished fact, both inevitable and unpredictable, and the expert as a specialist in damage control� Doctor Jason Bull - a charismatic leader who is also an expert - operates under a kind of permanent state of exception in the interest of other, less charismatic experts who learn to trust him and whom he invites us to trust, however misguided or harmful their acts may appear at first sight. This twofold mutual validation thus operates as an almost desperately paedagogic vindication of expertise and of the reliability of the expert elites� What strikes me most about this show, however, is not just its way of reclaiming expertise as a life-saving quality that ordinary people should learn to respect rather than question, but the way in which, like the post-electoral cartoon, it raises the question of the proper limits within which democratic consensus should be exercised� This is made strikingly evident in the function of the jury� The forms of the adversarial trial system are respected, the jurors vote, but their vote has been pre-empted as the expression of a freely and rationally formed conviction by the trial consultant’s invisible technological control and psychological manipulation� Isn’t this a veritable political allegory of the technocratic voiding of the meaning of procedural democracy, where the vote of the man in the street is still required, but the real decisions have been invisibly taken elsewhere? Perhaps, then, Bull’s characterization as a pilot is not merely functional to the episode I just discussed, but responds to a sort of metaphorical necessity inherent in the current reconfiguration of political representation as leadership� What makes the airplane parable such an effective, if scary, narrative of neoliberal governmentality is the way the logic of the metaphor operates to reinforce and naturalize a sense of invisible and sealed off leadership, casting citizens in the position of passengers being passively led, whose revolt would be dangerous and misguided� Yes, we want to trust our pilots� But we should at least have a right to decide where we want the airplane to take us� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 143 Works Cited Balibar, Etienne. “Out ofthe Interregnum.” Open Democracy (May 16, 2013)� https: / / www� opendemocracy�net/ can-europe-make-it/ etienne-balibar/ out-of-interregnum Bauman, Zygmunt. “Times of Interregnum.” Ethics & Global Politics 5: 1 (2012)� 49-56� http: / / dx�doi�org/ 10�3402/ egp�v5i1�17200� Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism and the Ends of Liberal Democracy.” Edgework� Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics� Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005� -----. “We are all democrats now…” Agamben, Giorgio et al. Democracy in What State? Tr� William McCuaig� New York: Columbia UP, 2009� 44-57� Browning, Christopher R.. “Lessons from Hitler’s Rise.” The New York Review of Books (April 20, 2017)� http: / / www�nybooks�com/ articles/ 2017/ 04/ 20/ lessonsfrom-hitlers-rise/ � Bull� Created by Phil McGraw and Paul Attanasio� CBS 2016� Butler, Judith. “Reflections on Trump.” Cultural Anthropology (January 18, 2017)� https: / / culanth.org/ fieldsights/ 1032-reflections-on-trump. Cometa, Michele� “Non Finito: The Form of Italian Cultural Studies.” New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies� Vol� 1: Definitions, theory, and accented practices� Ed� Graziella Parati� Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2012� 19-50� De Martino, Ernesto� La fine del mondo. Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali� Ed� Clara Gallini� Turin: Einaudi, 1977� -----. “Furore simbolo valore.” Furore simbolo valore� Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002� 167-90� -----. “Promesse e minacce dell’etnologia.” Furore simbolo valore� 84-118� Fraser, Nancy. “A Triple Movement? ” New Left Review 81 (May-June 2013)� 119-32� Gordon, Peter� “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump.” Boundary 2 44: 2 (2017): 31-56� Gramsci, Antonio� Prison Notebooks� Vol� 1� Ed� and transl� Joseph A� Buttigieg� New York: Columbia UP, 1992� -----� Prison Notebooks� Vol� 2� Ed� and transl� Joseph A� Buttigieg� New York: Columbia UP, 1996� -----� Quaderni del carcere. Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci� 4 vols� Ed� Valentino Gerratana� Turin: Einaudi, 1975� Riley, Dylan. “American Brumaire? ” New Left Review 103 (Jan-Feb 2017)� 21-32� Snyder, Timothy� On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century� New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017� Streeck, Wolfgang� Buying Time� The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism� Tr� Patrick Camiller� London: Verso, 2014� -----. “The Return of the Repressed.” New Left Review 104 (March-April 2017)� 5-18� Weber, Max� Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology� Ed� Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich� Trans� H� H� Gerth and C� Wright Mills� Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978� Wypijewski, JoAnn. “The Politics of Insecurity.” New Left Review 103 (Jan-Feb 2017)� 9-18� Žižek, Slavoj. “A Permanent Economic Emergency.”New Left Review 64 (July-August 2010)� 85-95� D onalD E. P EasE Trump: Populist Usurper President Trump’s Crisis of Symbolic Investiture: Imposter or Usurper? Donald Trump may be the first President to have entered office with an asterisk by his name� Victorious in the Electoral College, he lost the popular election by more than 3 million votes� From the moment the election results became official, pundits and political opponents deliberated over the most effective stratagems for removing him from office. 1 Impeachment, the most frequently selected instrument for President Trump’s undoing, refers to different but intertwined legal procedures: it can refer to discrediting a witness by showing that he or she is not telling the truth or does not have a reliable basis for their testimony� Impeachment also refers to the constitutional process authorizing the House of Representatives to charge and put the president of the United States on trial in the Senate for illegal acts committed in the performance of public duty� From the Press’s standpoint impeachment in the legal sense began the day Trump announced his intention to run for the president; impeachment in the second sense - the trial of a public official for an illegal act committed in the performance of a public duty - began the day of his inauguration� 2 Pierre Bourdieu coined the phrase “symbolic investiture” to describe the civic rituals through which the social order authorizes the transformations in status whereby individuals acquire the titles and attributes of physician, judge, professor, president� In addition to the performative magic conveyed by the verbal utterance that pronounces an individual a judge or president the investiture ceremony’s social efficacy also involves a corporeal dimension. 1 David Remnick’s and James Fallows’ articles are outstanding examples of the numerous discussions Donald Trump’s election as a shameful turning point in United States history. See David Remnick, “An American Tragedy”, The New Yorker (9 November 2016) <https: / / www�newyorker�com/ news/ news-desk/ an-american-tragedy>, James Fallows, “After the Election: ‘What a Pathetic Thing Is Decadence’”, The Atlantic Monthly (14 November 14 2016) <https: / / www�theatlantic�com/ notes/ 2016/ 11/ after-the-election-what-a-pathetic-thing-is-decadence/ 507635/ >� 2 Two thoughtful essays on the possibility and necessity of impeachment were written by Jeffrey Toobin and Kindred Winecoff� See Kindred Winecoff, ‘Trump and the End of Taken-for-Grantedness: When Exception Becomes the Rule’ (13 December 2016) Duck of Minerva Blog <http: / / duckofminerva�com/ 2016/ 12/ wptpn-trumpand-the-end-of-taken-for-grantedness-when-the-exception-becomes-the-rule�html>, Jeffrey Toobin, Will the Fervor for Impeachment Start a Democratic Civil War ? ” The New Yorker (28 May 2018) <https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2018/ 05/ 28/ will-the-fervor-for-impeachment-start-a-democratic-civil-war>� 146 D onalD E. P EasE The inauguration of duly elected U�S� presidents offers a good example of an investiture ceremony in that this ritual of civic liturgy creates the occasion for a national people to witness the transubstantiation of the mortal body of an elected official into the immortal substance of the office of the president. 3 Bourdieu’s canonical description of the effect of rite of symbolic investiture on the body of an officeholder alludes to Ernst Kantorowicz’s notion of the King’s two bodies - the mortal body of the officeholder and the immortalitystructure of the office - as a relevant context: 4 As representatives they (the office-holders) partake of the eternity and ubiquity of the office which they help to make exist as a permanent, omnipresent and transcendent, and which they temporarily incarnate, giving it voice through their mouths and representing it in their bodies, converted into symbols and emblems� 5 Elected officials cannot wholly coincide with the second or sublime body of the office they temporarily inhabit. However, no previous occupant of the oval office has inspired as many commentaries on the incorrigible lack of fit between the office-holder and the office as has Donald J� Trump� Citing the irremediable disparity between Trump’s behavior and the bodily practices and disposition sedimented in the office, Trump’s detractors have described him as an imposter-president who possessed neither the comportment, nor the know-how, nor the character prerequisite to the position� 6 The specter of impeachment that has haunted Trump’s presidency since his inauguration instigated an ongoing crisis in symbolic investiture that highlights the divergence between Donald J. Trump and the office of the president� Bourdieu does not provide an explicit account of an infelicitous performance of the rite of symbolic investiture but his report of the obligation 3 “All groups entrust the body,” as Bourdieu explained this operation, “treated like a kind of memory, with their most precious possessions.” Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans� Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass�: Harvard University Press, 1991), p� 122-23� 4 See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)� The U�S� political theorist Michael Rogin argued that Kantorowicz’s notion of the king’s two bodies can help us understand how and why presidential identities have been the site of a struggle over national identity: “the image of the king’s two bodies could take the chief executive in the opposite direction, not separating physical person from office, but absorbing the office into the officeholder’s personal identity� � �From this perspective, the doctrine of the king’s two bodies offers us a language in which confusion between person, power, office, and state become accessible.” Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) p� 8� 5 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), p� 244� Bourdieu suggests that the investiture ceremony entwines the candidate’s vital body with what Kantorowicz called the immortal (or second) body of the mandated symbolic identity. The immortal body of the office is composed of the official motives, purposes, and activities inherent in this symbolically mandated social position� The performative dimension of the symbolic investiture enables the individual it initiated into office to incorporate the symbolic actions intrinsic to the office as the bodily habits through which the office’s sublime body is perpetuated. 6 See George Soros, “Trump Is an Imposter”, BBC News (19 January 2017) <https: / / www� bbc�com/ news/ business-38684556>� Trump: Populist Usurper President 147 of the person undergoing the ritual to be wholeheartedly “invested in his investiture” does provide criteria needed to recognize why Trump’s think the inauguration ceremony might not have yielded the normal result: He must be personally invested in his investiture, that is, engage his devotion, his belief, his body, give them as pledges, and manifest, in all his conduct and speech - this is the function of the ritual words of recognition - his faith in the office and in the group which awards it and which confers this great assurance only on the condition that it is fully assured in return� p� 243 Although his unpresidential conduct has made Trump an imposter in the eyes of his detractors, Trump’s populist supporters tend to think of what his critics consider impeachable offenses as evidence of his successful usurpation of the executive power needed to reinstate the sovereign will of what they consider the authentic American people� 7 The terms Bourdieu selects to describe the legal status of the person prior to undergoing a legitimate act of symbolic investiture seem uncannily pertinent to the controversy surrounding Trump’s presidency� With the devotion to precise detail of a canonist, Bourdieu declares that the public ritual of symbolic investiture quite literally secures and legally protects the person undergoing the solemn public ceremony against the accusation that the ritual has validated “the delirious fiction of the imposter, or the arbitrary imposition of the usurper.” This it does by declaring publicly that he is indeed what he claims to be, that he is legitimated to be what he claims, that he is entitled to enter into the function, fiction, or imposture which, being proclaimed before the eyes of all as deserving to be universally recognized, becomes a legitimate imposture, in Austin’s phrase, in other words misrecognized, denied as an imposture by all, not least by the imposter himself� p� 242� Bourdieu’s explanation implies that if the person going through the ceremony is not “personally invested” in the words “symbols and emblems” of the office, the investiture ceremony could misfire in the sense that it would not succeed in turning the imposter or usurper into, in the case of Trump’s inauguration, the President of the United States of America� 8 Trump invited such an interpretation when, in the opening lines of his inaugural address, he openly demonstrated his lack of personal investment in the ceremony’s 7 On the self-representations of Trump’s populist movement, see Peter Beinart, Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt, The Atlantic, (22 August 2018) <https: / / www�theatlantic�com/ ideas/ archive/ 2018/ 08/ what-trumps-supporters-think-ofcorruption/ 568147/ >, Katy Kay, “Why Trump’s Supporters Will Never Abandon Him”, BBC World News (23 August 2017) <https: / / www.bbc.com/ news/ world-uscanada-41028733>, Jonathan Allen, “At Rally, Trump Brings Up “the Impeachment Word” To Embolden Base, NBC News (7 September 2018) <https: / / www�nbcnews�com/ politics/ politics-news/ trump-tags-new-york-times-treason-charge-n907336>� 8 Benjamin Willes and Quinta Jureci argue that the Inauguration ceremony might not have accomplished the transformation of Trump into president because he is constitutionally unable to take an oath� See Benjamin Wittes, Quinta Jurecic ‘What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath? ’ Lawfare (3 March 2017) <https: / / www� lawfareblog�com/ what-happens-when-we-dont-believe-presidents-oath>� 148 D onalD E. P EasE official symbols and emblems by adding the following description of the inauguration ceremony that significantly altered the event’s established significance: Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning� Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another - but we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People� For too long the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished - but the people did not share in its wealth…That all changes - starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you� It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America� This is your day� This is your celebration� And this, the United States of America, is your country��� What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people� January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again� 9 Instead of accepting the settled understanding of the Inauguration ceremony, Trump has attributed the following “very special meaning” to this public ritual: “Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another - but we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People.” As the first declaration of the newly inaugurated “president”, this statement designates the American people rather than Trump himself as the actual and final recipient of the power that the inauguration ceremony officially transferred from President Obama’s administration. The ambiguous referent of the pronoun “we” in this passage calls attention to the lack of stable fit between Trump and the office of the president. Rather than wholly inhabiting the office of the president, Trump, at the site of this transferal, personifies the alternate subject positions of Imposter/ President and Usurper/ President. Trump uses the pronoun “We” to reference the subject who performs both activities. However, the “we” that is “not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another” is significantly different to the “we” that is “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you”. The “we” involved in the transposition of power within established locales (presidential administrations, political parties) is “merely” a participant in a pre-existing assemblage of power whose primary role is as stand-in or impersonator of the “another” in the phrases “from one Administration to another” and “from one party to another.” Each “another” indicates the Washington D.C.specific administration and/ or political party onto which power gets handed over� Contrarily, the sole “we” that can be said to possess the singularly exceptional authority to supplant the executive power installed in Washington D�C� and give that power back to the American people is a usurper figure who enacts sovereign power as if the expression of the pre-emptive sovereign will of “We the people”. 9 Donald J. Trump, “The Inaugural Address”, The White House (20 January 2017) <https: / / www.whitehouse.gov/ briefings-statements/ the-inaugural-address/ >. Trump: Populist Usurper President 149 The inauguration did accomplish the official work of legally recognizing Donald J� Trump as the 45 th President of the United States of America� However, the qualifying phrases Trump adds to the inaugural event tethers President Trump to the subject position of the usurper, the President who is not one, whose expression of the sovereign will to restore power to “We the People” requires his transgression of the normative structures of governance in Washington D�C� 10 Following his inauguration, commentators from across the political spectrum who believed in the sovereign power of the office of the president gave expression to the hope that the norms and mores embedded in it would spontaneously alienate President Trump from the reactionary positions the nominee had advocated during his campaign� 11 These commentators needed to believe that Trump’s inauguration to the office would enable Trump the governing president to disavow Trump the campaigner’s irresponsible behavior� This belief rendered them unwilling to countenance the notion that Trump could only “Make America Great Again” by transgressing the norms and breaking the rules of the political institutions that the fact of his election had supplanted� Whereas Trump’s critics focused on the rules and norms sedimented in the office of the president as the basis for the ongoing criticism of the officeholder as an imposter, his populist followers interpret his violation of the political establishment’s rules and norms as proof of his power to usurp the U�S� President’s sovereign power and transfer that power to the members of his ethno-nationalist movement� 12 As it turns out, Trump’s Inauguration Day assertion that “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again” was not merely an instance of Trump the campaigner playing to his movement’s grandiose fantasy� With this declaration as warrant, Trump announced his post-inauguration plan to re-purpose the sites on which he staged his campaign rallies as enclaves of populist rule� In so doing Trump designated the members of his movement as the genuine addressees and referents of the American people he represented� President Trump held the first of these “We the People” assemblies on February 17 one month after his Inauguration in Melbourne, Florida� At last count he has held 56 comparable gatherings� 10 For a cogent description of the various ways in which Trumps has taken on the identity of the Usurper, see Effie Deans, “Trump the Usurper”, The Daily Globe (16August2018) <http: / / www�dailyglobe�co�uk/ comment/ trump-the usurper/ >� 11 Doyle McManus “Why We Should ‘Normalize’ Trump” Los Angele Times (21 December 2018) <https: / / www�latimes�com/ opinion/ op-ed/ la-oe-mcmanus-trump-normalization-20161221-story�html>� Ezra Klein, “Why Barack Obama Thinks His Legacy Will Survive Donald Trump” Vox (19 November 2016) <https: / / www�vox�com/ policy-andpolitics/ 2016/ 11/ 19/ 13675694/ barack-obama-legacy-donald-trump>� For a discussion of the problems Trump poses to the office of president, see Robert Shrum, “The Big Picture: the office of the Presidency”, Public Books, (19 October 2017) <https: / / www� publicbooks.org/ the-big-picture-the-office-of-the-presidency/ >. 12 Brad Todd and Salena Zito The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics (New York: Crown Forum 2018). Robert Lemke, “Letter, Trump, the People’s President, The Herald Tribune (4 February 2018) <https: / / www�theherald-news� com/ 2018/ 01/ 29/ letter-donald-trump-peoples-president/ ar3r5ac/ >� 150 D onalD E. P EasE Trump turned the Florida meeting into the literal enactment of the Inauguration Day promise “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” “This was a truly great movement”, Trump announced to open the proceedings, “and I want to be here with you, and I will always be with you.” With this staging as backdrop, Trump cast activities that had received severe criticism during his first month in office - from the continuation of work in Keystone and the Dakota Access Pipelines and the appointment of the Climate Change denier Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency to the promise to repeal and replace Obamacare and ban Muslim Immigrants - as his execution of the will to rule of the authentic American people� To make this messaging clear, midway through the Florida spectacle, “We the People” officially recognized Trump as the executor of the people’s power when an anonymous member of the assembly stepped up to the podium and announced: Mr� President, thank you sir� We the people, our movement is the reason why our President of the United States is standing here in front of us today� When President Trump during the election promised all these things that he was going to do for us, I knew he was going to do this for us� Thank you so much, sir� 13 By way of such responses, the participants in Trump’s populist assemblies exercise what Trump represents as their sovereign power to restore American greatness by legitimating an ever-expanding list - his ignorance of rudimentary rules of governance, his annulment of multilateral agreements, his separation of immigrant children from their parents, his transgressions of international rules and norms, his justification of assassination, his violation of sundry constitutional laws, his withdrawal from international treaties, his collusion with a foreign power, his moral turpitude, his refusal to accept the findings of United States intelligence agencies, his denial of climate change, his ridiculing of a victim of sexual harassment, his profiteering on the office of president - of his transgressive actions� The disparity between Trump the campaigner and President Donald J� Trump is that the latter figure is supposed to be the representative of all the people of the United States� However, at his rallies Trump makes it clear that his primary loyalties are with this Alternative America dedicated to supplanting the America that superseded it� Trump did not run as a normal presidential candidate, he ran as the delegated voice of a movement whose members felt that they had been set aside by 21st century realities and that elected him to usurp the power to break established treaties and agreements, suspend the rules and alter the norms of the order of things that supplanted them� Following his inauguration, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior has prompted continuous calls for his impeachment; yet the people assembled at the rallies he has held throughout his term of office exercise what Trump represents as their sovereign power to “Make American Great Again! ” by vindicating him of all charges of dereliction of duty. Rather than affirming the consensus opinion that Trump’s transgressive activities proved him unfit 13 https: / / www.vox.com/ 2017/ 2/ 18/ 14659952/ trump-transcript-rally-melbourne-florida Trump: Populist Usurper President 151 to govern, Trump supporters use the rallies to change the rules determining acceptable forms of presidential behavior. Trump’s entire term of office has taken place within an uncannily recursive temporality: not-yet-impeached in the estimation of his critics, Trump is always-already vindicated in the eyes of the “Forgotten Americans” he purports to represent. Throughout the first eight months of the Trump presidency, political pundits joined ranks with the talk show hosts and late-night comics who cast the failure of Trump to follow the rules and carry out the duties conventionally associated with the office of the president as fodder for an ongoing situation comedy� 14 However, after these comedians witnessed in horror the events unfolding on August 11-12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, the satirical skits they had made of Trump’s presidency devolved into what Lauren Berlant has called an encompassing situation tragedy� 15 The ostensible rationale for the “Unite the Right” rally was to lodge a protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E� Lee from the Charlottesville historic courthouse district. When Neo-Nazis chanting “blood and soil! ” and “Jews will not take my place! ” combined forces with white nationalists, and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as weapon-carrying members of para-military forces, they retrieved images and events from the most execrable moments U�S� history� After such events, U�S� presidents are typically expected to represent the moral conscience of the nation� In place of a coherent representation of the nation’s ethical norms, however, Donald Trump issued a statement at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey on Aug� 12, 2017 declaring that “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides” He then repeated those three words —“On many sides.” The next day Trump noted “It’s been going on for a long time in our country…Not Donald Trump� Not Barack Obama. It’s been going on for a long, long time.” Then in a news conference at Trump Tower on August 15, President Trump insisted that there 14 The effectiveness of satire as resistance to Trump has been argued eloquently by Sophie A� McClennan Hitting Trump Where It Hurts: The Satire Troops Take Up Comedy Arms against Donald Trump”, Salon (11 February 2017) <https: / / www�salon� com/ 2017/ 02/ 11/ hitting-trump-where-it-hurts-the-satire-troops-take-up-comedyarms-against-donald-trump>� Nancy Loudon Gonzalez uses Bakhtin’s understanding of the social utility of carnival to offer a contrary perspective on Trump’s presidency. She specifically argues that Bakhtin’s analytical paradigm of carnival culture can help explain the successful presidential campaign of President Donald J� Trump� With its opposition to the official procedural discourse, carnival culture features antiestablishment attitudes that defined Trump’s presidential campaign from the start. Nancy Loudon Gonzalez, “Carnival or Campaign? : Locating Robin Hood and the Carnivalesque in the U.S. Presidential Campaign” The Humanist (19 April 2016) <https: / / thehumanist�com/ magazine/ may-june-2016/ features/ carnival-or-campaign>� 15 Lauren Berlant defines “situation tragedy” as a moment when “the subject’s world becomes fragile beyond repair, one gesture away from losing all access to sustaining its fantasies: the situation threatens utter, abject unraveling”. Lauren Berlant , Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p� 6� 152 D onalD E. P EasE was blame on both sides� 16 Trump’s equivocal pronouncements implied a moral equivalence between the white supremacist marchers and those who protested against them that provoked outrage across the political spectrum� 17 The perceived ambiguity in Trump’s responses rendered starkly visible the investiture crisis disjoining Donald J� Trump the President of all the American People who expected Trump to carry out the moral duties and responsibilities and Donald J� Trump the usurper-agent of a populist movement whose members demanded that he contravene the moral hegemony that consigned them to the wrong side of history. Throughout the first seven month of his presidency, Trump exploited the investiture crisis by convoking “We the People” assemblies at which his supporters re-cast activities that Trump’s detractors called impeachable offenses as fortuitous expressions of their will� Trump followed this protocol when, in the wake of the nearly universal condemnation of his response to the Charlottesville fiasco, Trump announced that he would hold a meeting with his supporters in the Phoenix Convention Center on August 22, 2017� Commentators have interpreted Trump’s address at this rally as a defense of his previous statements about Charlottesville� However in the remarks that follow I intend to show how Trump’s remarks in Phoenix resolved the crisis in symbolic investiture by quite publicly identifying with the figure of Usurper-President for the populist movement assembled there� Rather than defending his previous statements or straightforwardly condemning what had taken place a week earlier, Trump redirected the intolerance and bigotry displayed in the “Unite the Right! ” Charlottesville demonstration at the press and media covering the Phoenix event� In the following multi-pronged explanation of Trump’s role as leader of this populist movement, I will offer 1)� a brief description of the psycho-dynamics of the political processes catalyzing his populist crusade; 2)� an account of the symptomatic role “The Immigrant” plays in Trump’s ethno-nationalist retrotopia; 18 and 3)� a closereading of Trump’s presentation at the Phoenix Convention as the Inaugural address of the Usurper President� 16 <https: / / www.c-span.org/ video/ ? 432523-1/ president-trump-condemns-violencecharlottesville-va>, <https: / / www.c-span.org/ video/ ? 432578-1/ president-trumpcondemns-hate-groups-racism-evil>, <https: / / www.c-span.org/ video/ ? 432633-1/ president-trump-there-blame-sides-violence-charlottesville>� 17 For a representative account of this bi-partisan reaction, see Dartonurro Clark, “Democratic, Republican Lawmakers Decry Trump’s Latest Charlottesville Remarks”, NBC News (16 August 2017) <https: / / www�nbcnews�com/ politics/ white-house/ notmy-president-lawmakers-decry-trump-s-latest-charlottesville-remarks-n793021>� Maya Oppenheim,‘Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Applaud Donald Trump’s Response to Deadly Violence in Virginia’ The Independent (13 August 2017) <http: / / www�independent�co�uk/ news/ world/ americas/ neo-nazis-white-supremacists-celebrate-trump-response-virginia-charlottesville-a7890786�html>� 18 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity 2017) defines a retrotopia as a space that persons who fear the insecurities and anxieties of globalization construct as an imagined past of fulfilled desire. Trump’s rallies add such extraneous spaces to the political order� Trump: Populist Usurper President 153 Donald Trump’s Jouissance and Other Symptoms of Liberal Democracy “I play to people’s fantasies� People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do� That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts� People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular� I call it truthful hyperbole� It’s an innocent form of exaggeration - and a very effective form of promotion.” 19 Donald Trump’s presidential campaign began when he lent credence to a fabrication invented by alt-Right ethno-nationalists that Barack Obama was a Kenya-born Muslim who lacked a valid United States birth certificate. Such an assertion would most certainly have abruptly terminated the political career of any other presidential candidate� But Trump would not back away from this racist fantasy no matter how much empirical evidence was gathered to disprove it� Moreover, the enjoyment he took from the anger each repetition provoked in his political antagonists steadily increased his popularity� In proposing that Trump’s populist movement traffics in fantasy, I do not mean that we need only expose its fantasmatic myth to reveal the underlying truth. Following Slavoj Žižek, I would argue that far from offering an escape from reality, such fantasies actively construct social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic dimension� Fantasy does not merely stage the fulfillment of the already constituted subject’s wishes; fantasy constructs the frame enabling us to desire something� It is through fantasy that the objects of desire are given, and it is through fantasy that we learn how to desire� The fantasy frame is constructed so that we experience our world as a wholly consistent and transparently meaningful order� 20 Fantasies produce a figure, the subject who is supposed to believe in them, as the precondition of their credibility� Political theorists who believe they can dismantle the power of collective fantasy by exposing its factual inaccuracies believe that credibility rises and falls with the truth of a factual state of affairs� But the fetishism that lies at the heart of Trump’s base is grounded on the active disavowal of knowledge� Fetishists are interested in the facts as the occasion to display how their fantasies can reorganize the facts� Members of Trump’s base might be described as having rephrased the fetishist’s conventional formulation of “I know this is not true but I believe it nonetheless” as “I know this fantasy isn’t true� But since I cannot otherwise make any sense of this crisis, I need to believe it just the same.” 21 19 Donald J� Trump, Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), p�58� 20 Throughout this analysis, Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian reading analysis of fantasy has supplied the interpretive context for my understanding of the role fantasy plays in Trump’s populist movement. See Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), especially 43-56� 21 I discuss this paradoxical knowledge-belief attitude more fully in Donald E� Pease, “States of Fantasy: Barack Obama and the Tea Party Movement” in boundary 2 37�2 (2010): 89-105� 154 D onalD E. P EasE After the trauma of the financial collapse, the movement with which Trump affiliated his political ambitions constructed the fantasy of an autonomous political sphere - re-imagined within the representational matrix of the post-Reconstruction South - whose members were organized around a Contract from America� This movement reactivated the politics of fear that the Bush administration had turned into its principle of governance to negotiate economic and political dissatisfactions that the Obama administration was unable to address� Their coalescing fantasy enabled them to interpret the economic setbacks and cultural change from the standpoint of the loss of Real America� 22 Trump and other architects of the “Contract from America” capitalized on the generalized domestic insecurity that emerged after the subprime crisis and directed it onto the belief that President Obama was a Kenyaborn illegal immigrant, involved in a worldwide conspiracy designed first to destroy the U�S� Constitution and subsequently to exploit and imprison “mainstream” U.S. citizens. Reduced to the political demand underwriting it, this fantasy can be restated as a collective desire to secede from President Obama’s polity� 23 Whether or not this collective fantasy is factually true is of little importance, since such fantasies are structured at the site of the impossible demand that participants in Trump rallies act out� Political fantasies are always factually untrue, even as they reveal the truth of the participants’ very real fears� 24 What matters to the participants in Trump’s movement is the way their demands are organized in response to the enframing anxiety over the Obama administration’s imagined threat to the survival of their American way of life� Rather than becoming signatories to Obama’s proposed changes in the social contract, the affordable care act, members of Trump’s base resituated the “subject who is supposed to believe” within the provenance of the Contract from America that Donald would make great again� 22 For excellent essays on the erosion of trust in global institutions and the retreat to nativists and ethno-nationalist affiliations see essays by Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Alain Badiou among others see, The Great Regression (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), ed Henrich Geiselberger� 23 See Newt Gingrich and the Republican National Committee, Contract with America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994)� 24 Theorists of ideology who restrict their focus on cognitive mistakes relative to economic interest fail to recognize how emotional attachments have overridden what should have been seen as economic self-interest on the part of Trump’s working class and lower-income voters� Lauren Berlant has shrewdly remarked that [a]ll [affective] attachments are optimistic� When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us� This cluster of promises could seem embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea-whatever� (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) p� 23� Thomas Frank offers an important corrective to this perspective in What’s The Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2004)� Trump: Populist Usurper President 155 Trump’s signature injunction ”Make American Great Again! ” “offers his base a bellicose fantasy of return and renewal” for America and the American people� 25 Trump’s trafficking in fantasies in part explains why Trump does not need to comply with the norms of political rationality� The affects Trump’s supporters invest in fantasy are stronger than the facts his critics cite to expose his lies, distortions, or failures� A fantasy does not merely represent social reality� It also tries to shape it practically, so as to control the changes that cannot be incorporated within it� But every fantasy has its Real� The election of Obama designated that part of their practical reality that Donald Trump and the members of his movement could not accommodate� They could not acknowledge the reality of Obama’s presidency without undermining the viability of their prior construction of themselves� At the heart’s core of the Trump populist movement there sits a fantasy in which only the restoration to power of white supervisory control of black lives can contain the trauma of its Real - the spectacle of a black man being in charge of the nation� 26 Trump’s base construed the election of Obama as the breach of the white supremacist racial contract that supplied the precondition for their national belonging� Obama’s efforts to produce a new social contract with U�S� citizens, worked at the most intimate levels of the bio-political body� 27 He wanted to change healthcare policies at a conjunctural moment when the US body politic had undergone a frightening depletion of its vital energies, and the white American middle class was undergoing the foreclosure of its customary forms of life� In his presidential campaign, Trump turned President Obama’s changes in the provisions of the social contract related to healthcare into the occasion to repair the breach of the racial contract by promising to repeal and replace Obamacare� Trump’s supporters behave according to the emotional logics saturating what Brian Massumi has described as a “politics of affect” that entangles emotions and cognition in an inextricable knot� 28 The fear and the terror that a race man had penetrated white US citizens most intimate levels of social belonging incited the racist fantasies Trump articulated in mounting his campaign against Obamacare� Trump described the Affordable Care Act as 25 For a splendid analysis of the affective attachments and bonds of affiliation among Trump’s supporters, see Ben Anderson, “’We Will Win again� We Will Win a Lot’: The Affective Styles of Donald Trump” 2016, p.2. (accessed November 11, 2018) <https: / / www�academia�edu/ 30049871/ Donald_Trump_and_Affect�pdf>� 26 In White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998), Ghassan Hage describes the way that white nationals inhabit, experience, and conceive of their nation and of themselves as a fantasy in which they imagine themselves enacting the state’s will� p� 45-46� 27 I elaborate on this observation in Donald E� Pease, “States of Fantasy: Barack Obama versus the Tea Party Movement”, 90 boundary 2, vol�90 (Summer 2010), p�96-98� 28 See Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015)� In ‘Affective Economies’ Social Text� 22(2) 2004,� Sara Ahmed argues that political emotions do things� In concrete and particular ways, they mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective� p� 19� 156 D onalD E. P EasE a conspiracy to produce the financial ruin of the United States perpetrated by a black Muslim immigrant who usurped the most powerful position in the world� If Barack Obama’s election constituted reparation for the wrongs performed against minoritized populations in the historical past, was Obama going to do to white United States citizens what their colonial settler ancestors had done to the populations they had historically oppressed? 29 This question, which underpinned the idiolect at Trump’s rallies could not be answered by fact because it inscribed Obama within an order made in the image of questioners’ real fears� Trump’s quest to ‘Make America Great Again’ is not a political project built on policy, it is an affective and emotional appeal to Americans who feel Obama’s presidency destroyed the economic and social bases for their attachments to America� 30 Voters who show up at a Trump rally are less interested in the ideological content of his political propositions or the accuracy of his assertions than in the obscene transgressive pleasure they take from his vilifying Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug-lords, disparaging women’s bodies, ridiculing rally-goers’ physical disabilities, reveling in his resolve to bring back waterboarding, increase the illegal surveillance of Muslim mosques, and clear the deep state of the scum contaminating its ranks� At his rallies Trump openly expresses the delight he takes in his wealth and fame� Rather than pledging to bring an end to economic inequality, he revels in the power and social dominance his position within the 1% can buy� Trump takes comparable enjoyment in his spectacular transgression of the rules of political correctness� 31 Because the underpaid and exploited among his followers enjoy through Trump, he also gives them permission to express their racism, sexism, and hate� The populist abandon with which his supporters throw themselves into the rally-cries - Lock her up! Build the wall! Drain the swamp! - make it evident that their politics is not a means to a specific policy vision but enjoyment as its own end� 32 Their shared affective experience of enjoyment in being part of a wholly restored people is more important than any ideological content� At once foreordained by virtue of the people’s greatness, yet continually threatened by the hand of an alien and typically racialized agent, the America Trump would make great again stands in as an empty signifier, which, depending upon the affective investments of his addressees, can be made whole again through the cathexis afforded by the re-negotiation of 29 For a consideration of the numerous race-based fantasies in which Obama trafficked, see Donald E� Pease The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) p� 210-217� 30 John Protevi and Christian Helge Peters provide an incisive discussion of this aspect of Trump’s popularity in “Affective Ideology and Trump’s Popularity” p. 7-12 <http: / / www�protevi�com/ john/ TrumpAffect�pdf> (accessed November 1 2018)� 31 See Olivier Jutel, “Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power”, boundary 2 (23 October 2017) accessed June 10, 2017� 32 Olivier Jutel develops this insight in “Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power”, boundary 2 (23 October 2017) accessed June 10, 2017� Trump: Populist Usurper President 157 international trade deals or the fortification of the border or the vilification of media elites or the denial of climate change� Trump’s compulsive repetition of the impossible to realize demand “Make America Great Again! ” activates the perpetually incomplete process of recapturing this primordial wholeness. “The people” populating the America Trump would make great again is a powerful signifier for a political formation that is always negatively defined by an antagonistic enemy, whether cultural elites, or liberal media, or immigrants, or radical Muslim terrorists, or Black Lives Matter, or feminists, or globalists, or the press� The America to be made great again also serves as an encompassing referent for a historical bloc that could include workers in a coal-mining district decapitalized by environmental activists, residents of factory town down-sized by trans-national corporate interests, ethno-nationalists threatened by globalists, white triumphalist enclaves exposed by the black lives matter movement� 33 Trump supporters ‘enjoy’ the failure to recover this wholeness in that it instigates their combative transgression of civic norms in the pursuit of this illusory restoration� I draw my understanding of the relationship between antagonism and enjoyment from Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s psychoanalytic explanation of the populist subject as the psychoanalytic “subject of enjoyment” shaped by irrational drives to recover the fully harmonized America enemies have always already violated or threatened with destruction� 34 They do not consider the populist logics of antagonism and jouissance the pathological outside of liberal democracy but its symptom and repressed causative agency� The libidinal energy suffusing Trump’s populist movement depends on what Laclau calls an affective investment in a “people” whose enjoyment derives from the experience of their primordial antagonism to an enemy that threatens their very existence with compete destruction� If jouissance can be thought of as a libidinal enjoyment that revels in the ecstatic “hugeness” of object loss, it is Trump’s followers’ full libidinal identification with America as a primordially lost object that produces their collective jouissance. The ‘America’ that Trump would make great again can only trigger enjoyment insofar as the nation’s enemies have already violated the precondition for its restored wholeness� 35 However the loss of its achieved wholeness recursively generates an incessant drive and “desire structured around the unending quest for the lost, impossible jouissance”. 36 33 It is important to note that shortly after Trump invited his followers to imagine themselves wielding the power of the system against the elite, Trump appointed cabinet members drawn from the highest echelons of the Pentagon and Wall Street whose rise to financial and military power depended on their close ties to the Washington DC political elite 34 See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason� London: Verso, 2005), and Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005)� 35 For a cogent account of stolen enjoyment, see Jason Glynos, and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory.” Subjectivity� No� 24 (2008), p� 272-274� 36 Glynos, and Stavrakakis, p� 261� 158 D onalD E. P EasE According to Laclau the act of defining the enemy of a particular constituency represents “political logic tout court”. 37 The populisms that emerged during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign re-affirmed what Laclau described as the ontological necessity of antagonism in political formations� The key political role that antagonism - no matter whether experienced in racial, nationalist or economic terms - plays in Trump’s populism might be understood as a response to what Trump considers the emotional bankruptcy of procedural liberal politics� The explosion of emotion and anger emanating from Trump’s populist movement revealed and reveled in their hostility to the politics of consensus, rationalism and technocracy that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton advocated� Indeed Obama’s and Clinton’s liberal politics of principled compromise was structured in the disavowal of the central premise of Trump’s political ethos: namely that political identity is based on antagonism and enjoyment� The enjoyment of the emotional charge in the political antagonisms propelling Trump’s movement is not just a rhetorical strategy or a political style, it is part of the psychological reward structure of Trump’s populism� It is for this reason that Trump’s supporters are invested in him as their ego-ideal who will ‘Make America Great Again’ by licensing jouissance� In his classic study of authoritarianism and crowds, Freud describes the followers of authoritarian leaders as having elevated “the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” 38 But Trump differs from the primordial father in Totem and Taboo who rules a group “that wishes to be governed by unrestricted force” 39 in that he is the ego-ideal of antagonistic enjoyment who unleashes an unrestrained appetite for transgression� 40 The sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who devoted several years of research in southern Louisiana to explore the affective ideology underpinning the right-wing populist “Tea Party” cultural formation that emerged there, has provided a well-documented account of the psycho-political disposition that Laclau and Mouffe have depicted� 41 In Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, the monograph that collates her research, Arlie Hochschild has turned Trump’s rallies into case studies that provide sociological warrant for their insight that antagonism is not just merely political stance but part of the libidinal reward structure of populism� In chapter 15 of Hochschild’s monograph, “Strangers No Longer: The Power of Promise,” she describes a typical Trump rally as a ritual occasions at which his supporters undergo a psycho-social transformation from the 37 Laclau, p� 229� 38 Sigmund Freud,� Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, translated James Stratchey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1948), p� 80� 39 Freud, p�99� 40 I am indebted Olivier Jutel’s “Donald Trump’s Libidinal Entanglement with Liberalism and Affective Media Power”, boundary 2 (23 October 2017) accessed June 10, 2017 for this insight� 41 Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. A Journey to the Heart of Our Political Divide (New York: Free Press, 2016)� Trump: Populist Usurper President 159 condition of being economic cultural, demographic, and political ”strangers in their own land” 42 into an “affective national community” sustained by the collective enjoyment of their shared antagonism� Portraying Trump as an “emotions candidate” Hochschild contends that the people who attend a Trump rally are less interested in learning about his policies than experiencing an emotional re-orientation� The Trump voters Hochschild examines in her case study earn on average an annual income of $70,000 and are held together by two foundational moral beliefs: that Americans have a moral obligation to struggle to overcome any challenges God may have allotted them and to achieve the prosperity and happiness that the American Dream has promised them� The latter belief inspires his supporters to take genuine delight in Trump’s public enjoyment of the lifestyle his wealth and fame afford him� The former belief motivates them to feel contempt for members of identity groups - blacks, gays and lesbians, feminists, the physically disabled and impoverished - who claim victimhood status for physical and economic problems they should instead struggle to overcome� Trump’s followers are too committed to the ethos of hard work and self-reliance to label themselves victims of the knowledge economy� This moral disposition also causes Trump’s supporters to feel resentment at being rebuked for not empathizing with victim-groups whom they consider no worse off than themselves� Hochschild says their feelings of frustration and hostility mutated into anger-filled indignation when media and political elites criticized the moral institutions of faith, family, hard work upon which they based their refusal to empathize with victims of social oppression as the very racist, sexist and homophobic agencies responsible for the maltreatment of these victims� 43 What made matters worse was the fact that the federal government was helping the victim groups with whom Trump supporters could not identify “cut in line” ahead of them. They felt they were being rebuked not just for their lack of sympathy for others they felt were no worse off than themselves, they also felt berated for their positive valuation of church-going, of “family values”, of heterosexual marriage, of hunting and football, and of hard work and sacrifice. Yet, when they talked about their values, they felt accused of being racist and sexist and homophobic� In short, they felt trapped in an insurmountable double-bind� How could they feel sympathy for people no worse off than themselves who were being unfairly helped ahead of them, and how could they claim victim status without betraying their commitment to hard work, self-reliance, patience, and sacrifice. Unable to express their 42 Hochschild, p� 222� 43 It should be noted that Hochschild explains that her subjects do not find the notion of systemic racism credible� For them “a racist is someone who explicitly uses the “nword” and who actively and consciously hates and works against blacks (primarily), Hispanics, and Asians� The notion that racism need not be active and personal, but might also cover the acceptance of deep beliefs of racial hierarchy, or acceptance of invisible structural racism (racial housing segregation being chalked up to in-group elective affinity rather than, say, the history of federal mortgage programs), was not part of their belief system.”p. 8 160 D onalD E. P EasE exasperation at this dilemma without provoking a more encompassing form of moral censure, Trump supporters shared the experience of being trapped in this double bind� With this explanatory backdrop as warrant, Hochschild claims that the chief attraction of a Trump rally is its activation of interpersonal emotional processes that offer his followers an outlet for the collective expression of their anger-filled ressentiment. A typical Trump rally offers a conversion experience designed to recover the pride-filled identities of Trump’s predominately white, heterosexual, Church-going, gun-carrying, hard-working, middle class followers� To effect this transformation Trump recasts the emotional double-binds in which his rally-goers find themselves trapped within a grand narrative of the decline of a ham-strung nation and the promise of the regeneration of greatness to come� In the story, Americans face bleak prospects: dilapidated infrastructures, bad jobs, the threat of unemployment, immigrants, Muslims, feminists, Mexicans, terrorists, liberal values� Trump attributes primary responsibility for the hobbling of America’s future to the victim groups -Muslims, blacks, gays, Latino/ as, feminists - who jumped the queue� Trump’s ritual scapegoating instigates the transformation of his supporters collective feeling of undeserved shame into pride-filled enjoyment of their shared contempt for the identity groups that political and media elites cast as “victims.” Trump then successfully redirects their ressentiment onto targeted enemies - the “liberal elites” and the media who denounced them for their lack of sympathy with minorities - and identifies immigrants who have jumped the queue and stolen their jobs as those chiefly responsible for this negative valuations. Anxious about their future, Trumps supporters needed to find scapegoats to blame for their problems� Trump proved himself the political leader most suited to carry out this task when he liberated himself from what Hochschild dubs politically correct “feeling rules”. When Trump’s ritualistically defiles politically correct emotional norms, he quite effectively releases rally-goers from the shame that made them feel estranged from their “birthright identities”. His construction of racist and sexist stereotypes supplies supporters the wherewithal for the translation of their free-floating social anxieties into specified fears of Muslims, women, liberals and immigrants. This antagonistic understanding of the world sets “them” (secular humanists, “bureaucrats”, “Washington”, “the establishment”), against “us” (the “normal” and “modest” persons)� Trump’s followers end up hating the weak, the frightened, and the helpless� As Theodor Adorno observed in his 1950 study of the authoritarian personality, this targeted hatred offers Trump supporters the semblance of stability in a time of crisis� 44 Affect studies scholars characterize the political emotions that traverse Trump’s rallies as the agencies primarily responsible for binding its members together as a populist movement rather than contingently-formed assemblages of people� Trump evokes a kind of ecstatic transport in the participants in 44 Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, (New York: Harper, 1950) Trump: Populist Usurper President 161 his rallies at their experience of being among many folks felt to be in agreement The political emotions suffusing Trump’s rallies aim at building to a moment of ecstatic empowerment that Hochschild, after Durkheim, calls a “collective effervescence […] a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe. They gather to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected…” 45 Trump’s ability to call upon the hope of his supporters makes the rallies themselves feel like an answer for several of their problems� In the intensely affecting atmosphere of co-presence at a Trump rally where the future seems wide open and changeable, Trump supporters interanimate one another’s emotional transformations, which grow stronger, more normconstituting and norm-enforcing� Indeed the symbolic action that takes place during a Trump rally substitutes a collectively shared emotional uplift for a fulfilling policy solution. This may also explain why the criticism of his arguments, lies, distortions, or failures is not enough to convince his followers to stop vindicating his dubious activities� Uplifted in the collectively shared transport of self-vindication, they would do or say whatever necessary to vindicate their ego-ideal� Inspired by his followers’ approbation, Trump also changed the rules of political discourse� Political speech codes were designed in part to protect figures the racial contract designated as sub-persons from linguistic injury. But at public debates, in interviews, and during his rallies, Trump routinely trafficks in racist slurs against Muslim and Mexican immigrants, vitriolic demeaning of transgender folk and women of color, and heated denunciations of competitors for public office. What the norms of political correctness and state law have ruled unsayable in a public debate, Trump says with impunity� Trump’s promiscuous repetitions of these prohibited speech acts were in part intended to undermine Obama’s social contract: they tacitly invalidated the chief meta-agreement that tethered members of the Tea Party to the social contract (Obamacare) that they otherwise were obligated to share with sub-persons� 46 However, Trump did not limit his public displays of force 45 Hochschild, p�225� Collective effervescence, a sociological concept introduced by Émile Durkheim, describes what happens when a community comes together and simultaneously communicates the same thought and participates in the same action� See Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, (New York: Macmillan, 1912)� 46 In The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), Charles W. Mills defines the racial contract as that “set of formal or informal or meta-agreements (higher level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contract’s validity) between one subset of humans henceforth designated as white and coextensive with the class of full persons, and that categorizes the remaining subset of humans as non white and of a different and inferior moral status, sub-persons” (Ibid.: 11). The “full persons” referenced in this definition are contrapuntal ensembles that require their differentiation from sub-persons to achieve self-identity� In other words, no matter how universal the applicability of this cate-gory, the figure of the person necessarily requires its distinction from the necessary and related category of the sub-person� Although the racial contract that underwrites the modern social contract is constantly being rewritten, it invariably establishes epistemological norms of cognition along racial lines� It 162 D onalD E. P EasE to the violation of rules and norms of political correctness� He customarily bragged that he would reinstate the use of torture, waterboarding, the destruction of a terrorists’ family as well as other measures that openly violated the laws of war� Trump’s speech acts might be described as having emerged from another order of legal rationality that did not merely result in the dissolution of Obama’s bio-political contract� Trump’s enactments also invoked a juridicopolitical realm beyond the state’s jurisdiction� Speaking in the name of this future juridical order, he performed the legality of what did not legally exist in the form of his open violation of the Obama administration’s rules and norms� Speaking and acting from the position of the inconsistency in Barack Obama’s social order, Donald Trump has transmuted the Tea Party’s heterogeneous and inconsistent motives and purposes into a singular fantasy� As the literal personification of an alternative America that will have usurped control of the national government, Trump enacts his followers’ collective desire to defile what remained of Barack Obama’s cosmopolitan imaginary. Donald Trump’s Anti-immigrant Retrotopia Barack Obama characterized hospitality to immigrants as a trait intrinsic to the US national identity� He also associated American uniqueness with the nation’s ability to foster a national identity that transcended tribe and sect� However, in his campaign and throughout his first fifty days in office, Trump has proudly embraced the isolationist “America First” rallying cry from the pre-World War II era� Rather than continuing Obama’s policy of welcoming the foreign-born, Trump channeled his constituency’s anxieties and fears by heightening the suspicion of immigrants� Trump distinguished his strategies of governance from Obama’s in that at his campaign rallies he instructed alienated working class, predominantly white voters, to direct their hostilities against the Immigrant as the figure responsible for the disappearance of their jobs� Identifying immigrants with the economic and social crises effected by globalization whose resolution requires their expulsion, Trump cast immigrant populations as scapegoats within national rites of purification. The illegal immigrant became for Trump’s acolytes the general equivalent for a whole range of socio-economic figures including political correctness, people of color, radical Muslim extremists, feminists Wall Street, and the elite media� Located at the interstices of national consciousness and the state’s repressive apparatuses, the immigrant provides a figure of double-faced otherness through which the nation defines itself as an imagined community and against which the state affirms its sovereign power to secure that community’s threatened borders� The United States democratic imaginary constructs prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, a resilient combination of disavowal and nonknowledge that guarantees that whites “will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.” P. 45. Trump: Populist Usurper President 163 the immigrant as a necessary supplement to national self-representation� This is so because the immigrant is at once the embodiment of the political desire for liberty and equality, and the incarnation of a profound threat to national identity. A self-differentiating figure, the immigrant confirms the nation’s foundational myth as a political asylum for the oppressed; the immigrant also supplies the state with a threatening body upon which it can exercise its unimpeded sovereign power� 47 Nativism constitutes the irreducibly real violence at the core of the nation’s liberal discourse of cultural diversity. The myth of “asylum”, the nation of immigrants, the nation of nations all prove to be an amnesiac form of nationalism—at once neglectful of its own exclusionary tendencies and inattentive to the nativism with which it co-exists� Trump awakened this nativist strain of ethno-nationalist violence when he described the geographical territory over which Obama exercised rule as a retrograde nation� Trump went on to suggest that immigrants share the collective desire to render Obama’s America their homeland because the Kenya born Obama has remade America in the image of a 3 rd World country� 48 Trump’s speechwriter and future security adviser Michael Anton has distilled Trump’s strategy into the proposition that the future president aspires to restore America’s greatness by dismantling Obama’s trans-national imaginary. Describing Obama’s presidency as a “junta” and the rising share of the nonwhite population Obama celebrated as a foreign invasion, Anton asserts that “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty … form a permanent electoral majority.” 49 The comparative literature scholar Ali Behdad supplied a compelling scholarly rationale for Trump’s attitude in his monograph A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, which describes the United States’ ambivalence towards immigrants as the historic basis for shift in America’s status from a colonial settlement to a New World Imperial Republic� 50 Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States Behdad designates this site of transition - where the European colonist became an American citizen - as a prefiguration of the frontier border where the state imposed its immigration policies� When situated at this site, European colonial settlers were split into contradictory 47 I provide a thicker account of the immigrant as a self-differentiatingfigure in “Immigrant Nation/ Nativist State: Remembering against an Archive of Forgetfulness.” boundary 2 35 (1) (2008): 177-95� 48 See Ian Schwartz,”Trump: U.S. A Third World Country in Many Cases, ‘It’s An Embarrassment”, Real Clear Politics (30 March 2018) <https: / / www�realclearpolitics� com/ video/ 2018/ 03/ 30/ trump_us_a_third-world_country_in_many_cases_its_an_ embarrassment�html>� 49 Publius Decius Mus,”The Flight 93 Election” Claremont Review of Books (5 September 5, 2016)� Publius Decius Mus was the pseudonym of Michael Anton, who in January of 2017 left the private sector to serve on the National Security Council� <https: / / www� claremont.org/ crb/ basicpage/ the-flight-93-election/ >. 50 Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)� 164 D onalD E. P EasE identities� The one identity represented the Old World past of the European immigrant as what must be left behind; the other identity supplied European immigrants with the intellectual and practical instruments with which to accomplish this severance� The national geography upon which European immigrants underwent self-division was comparably divided� European settlers represented America as at once a savage wilderness that they struggled to transform into a civilization, and as a prelapsarian utopia in which order, progress and intelligibility “naturally” prevailed. Europeans transformed the savage wilderness by displacing the conditions of hierarchical subjection onto the structure of relations with indigenous populations in America� Their taking possession of already occupied land involved european-americans in the forcible expropriation of indigenous populations and in the exploitation of slave labor� Trump channels this colonial settler mentality at his rallies where he routinely attributes America’s degraded global standing to the immigrant narrative Obama celebrated� A typical Trump rally site hollows a zone of indistinction between the frontier and the normal political order� At a Trump rally, followers collectively participate in the fantasy of their own regression to a state of desublimated rage at a quite literal restoration of a frontier site where these descendants of settler colonists can experience their ancestors’ regeneration through violence� The frontier site a Trump rally opens up is, like the original, the not-yet bounded space on either side of the border, which is beyond clear jurisdiction. This alternative geography figures as a topological rendition of capitalist expansion beyond limits� As the primal scene of capitalist accumulation and contract, the frontier names an as yet uncolonized space upon which the processes by which the proper order of capitalist property and racialized capital gets re-installed through Trump’s contract from this relentlessly nativist America� 51 Trump’s Inauguration as a Populist Usurper-President, Phoenix, Arizona August 22, 2017 Nowhere did the nativist prejudices and frontier settler violence that U�S� history had relegated to the nation’s discredited past seem more visible than in the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville. The perceived inadequacies in Trump’s equivocal responses to the moral catastrophe unfolding in Charlottesville precipitated a generalized crisis in symbolic investiture that had lain dormant since his inauguration� In the three statements that President Trump delivered about Charlottesville between August 12 and August 15, he had not merely violated the rules and norms of presidential correctness; his equivocal pronouncements about the Ku Klux Klan and 51 Angela Mitropoulos discusses these aspects of Trump’s frontier settler capitalism in “Post-Factual Readings of Neoliberalism” Before and after Trump” Society and Space (5 December 2016) http: / / societyandspace�org/ 2016/ 12/ 05/ post-factual-readings-of-neoliberalism-before-and-after-trump/ >� Trump: Populist Usurper President 165 Neo-Nazis had more importantly breached the moral contract that had united the right and left political factions for more than fifty years. 52 Following the August 15 press conference at which he reiterated the phrase “on many sides” from his August 12 declaration “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides - on many sides,” the calls for his impeachment as an imposter utterly unfit to hold the office of president mounted in volume and intensity. 53 It was Trump’s arrogant doubling down on his August 12 declaration that he found “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” that provoked the nearly unanimous moral censure� Moreover, the outrage over his recalcitrance was not restricted to news reporters, pundits, and political opponents� Republican colleagues whom Trump had come to trust were uncharacteristically forthright in their criticism. “We must be clear”, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan cautioned, “White supremacy is repulsive� This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.” To which nostrum Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell added another, “There are no good neo-Nazis.” In a widely circulated tweet, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president, offered a useful disambiguation of Trump’s offensive phrase “many sides”: “One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.” 54 Trump’s political opponents alluded to the remarks of his Republican colleagues when they contemplated impeachment procedures against a man they considered utterly unfit for the presidency. 55 In the midst of this gathering storm, Trump announced that he would hold a meeting with his supporters on August 22 at the Phoenix Convention Center� In traveling to Phoenix, Arizona as the setting for the defense of what he said about Charlottesville, Trump enacted, quite literally, the Inauguration Day promise, “we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People.” Trump supporters who reassembled in the Phoenix Convention Center on August 22 would soon exercise the sovereign power Trump purported to transfer to them by changing the ideological and moral perspective on his statements about Charlottesville so as to clear him of the 52 Dan Balz, “After Charlottesville, Republicans Remain Stymied over What to do about Trump” The Washington Post (19 August 2017) <https: / / www�washingtonpost�com/ politics/ after-charlottesville-republicans-remain-stymied-over-what-to-do-abouttrump/ 2017/ 08/ 19/ >� 53 Josh Siegel, “Democrats renew calls for Trump impeachment after his Charlottesville response”WashingtonExaminer(15August2017)<https: / / www�washingtonexaminer�com/ democrats-renew-calls-for-trump-impeachment-after-his-charlottesville-response>� 54 Rubio, McConnell and Romney are quoted in Lauren Gambino, “Republicans on Charlottesville: Who’s with Trump and Who’s against him? ” The Guardian (16 August 2017) <https: / / www�theguardian�com/ us-news/ 2017/ aug/ 16/ republicans-charlottesville-trump-response-for-against>� 55 Lesley Clark, “Democrats Drafting Articles of Impeachment against Trump” Miami Herald (17 August 2017) <https: / / www�miamiherald�com/ news/ nation-world/ article167795437�html>� 166 D onalD E. P EasE charge of moral dereliction� However, the power Trump handed back to the Phoenix “We the People” assembly was not limited to the sovereign power to exonerate their leader of all charges of impeachable misconduct� Prior to the August 22 assembly in Phoenix, very few members of the Republican party were willing to defend a president who perceived a moral equivalence between the Neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan marchers in Charlottesville and those who protested against them� The consensus opinion that his press statements about Charlottesville had done real damage to the moral authority of the president had all but solidified. However when Trump flew to Phoenix, he changed the venue of the court of public opinion to a city where expressions of white triumphalism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, and frontier violence were not uncommon� Trump had visited the Phoenix Arizona Convention Center shortly after he announced his intention to run for president� On that occasion and throughout his campaign, Trump singled out Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s extra-legal tactics for rounding up and incarcerating immigrants as exemplary stratagems for defending U�S� borders� Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and paramilitary organizations might have seemed anomalies in Charlottesville, Virginia� But Phoenix was in Maricopa County, Arizona, which had been under the provenance of Sheriff Arpaio whose tent city jail erected for undocumented workers had elicited praise from ultra-right and racist groups, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan� 56� Trump supporters in Phoenix, Arizona did not adhere to the rules and norms that the majority the American people presupposed in judging his pronouncements about Charlottesville morally repugnant� Indeed, the people Trump assigned the role of his moral vindicators in Phoenix were the very people he had urged to take intense enjoyment in his transgression of established norms� Trump’s change of venue for the defense of his official statements called attention to the fact that from the day of his inauguration he felt doubly interpellated into non-commensurable figures: the Donald J. Trump who felt enjoined to execute the duties and responsibilities of the President of the United States; and Donald J� Trump, the president who is not one, who could not felicitously carry out those tasks without alienating the members of his populist movement who demanded he show flagrant disregard for the presidential mores that made them feel set aside� In the statements he would deliver during his Phoenix address, Trump made clear his intention to subject the official duties and sovereign responsibilities of office of the President to the will of a segment of the American populace who regarded them with disdain� In his Phoenix address, Trump did not apologize for the moral equivocations in his earlier pronouncements nor explain what he meant to say in his previous utterances� Trump began his remarks about Charlottesville by turning a segment of the offensive sentence (“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides.”) into the following rallying cry for the event “And tonight, this entire arena stands united in forceful condemnation of the thugs who perpetrate hatred and violence.” In a rhetorical tour de force, Trump: Populist Usurper President 167 Trump then proceeds to identify reporters from CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as among the “thugs” worthy of the people’s forceful condemnation: But the very dishonest media, those people right up there with all the cameras� (BOOING) So the - and I mean truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories� They have no sources in many cases� They say “a source says” - there is no such thing. But they don’t report the facts. Just like they don’t want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the White Supremacists, and the KKK� 56 With this opening gambit Trump signals his intention to stage the Arizona meeting as a battle royale setting the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center, who vociferously approve all three of his presidential statements about the Charlottesville event, in an increasingly belligerent relationship with the media covering the meeting. To accomplish this aim, Trump begins his Phoenix address with a verbatim recitation of passages from the official declarations about Charlottesville, which he delivered as the President of the United States of America� His recitations include actionable lines from all three of his official statements beginning with the opening lines of August 12 press conference: So here is my first statement when I heard about Charlottesville� So here’s what I said, really fast, here’s what I said on Saturday: “We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia” - this is me speaking. At the time President Trump delivered these official statements about Charlottesville, they conveyed the sovereign power and authority invested in presidential speech acts. When he recites the president’s official statements verbatim, he turns these sovereign speech acts into a merely formal exercise—what the office required him to say—when Trump repeats these official presidential pronouncements, that is to say, as if an actor rehearsing his lines in front of the genuine author, the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center� Casting himself in the role of representative agent of this people’s will, with each recitation of his presidential pronouncements, Trump divests these official utterances of the sovereign will of the president and declares them speech acts in need of the acclamation and approval of the assembled people for their felicitous uptake and legitimacy� In so doing, he is once again making good on his Inauguration Day promise “we are transferring power from Washington, D�C� and giving it back to you, the American People.” In this instance the power he transfers to this specific assemblage of the American people is that of sovereign will responsible for warranting the efficacy of presidential speech acts. Yet the sole “we” that can be said to possess the exceptional authority to supplant the executive power of the 56 For a discussion of these connections, see William Finnegan, “Sheriff Joe: Joe Arpaio is tough on prisoners and undocumented immigrants. What about crime? ” The New Yorker (20 July 2009) <https: / / www�newyorker�com/ magazine/ 2009/ 07/ 20/ sheriff-joe>� 168 D onalD E. P EasE occupant of the oval office and give that power back to the American people is a usurper figure who enacts sovereign power as if the expression of the pre-emptive sovereign will of “We the people”. Trump indicates the anomalous figure responsible for divesting these speech acts of the president’s sovereign will when he informs his addressees of the true identity of the speaker (“this is me speaking”) who impersonated the president to say “We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia.” The indexical phrase “this is me speaking” introduces a distinction between the presidential “We” who is closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia” and the “me speaking” who originally uttered those lines by taking up the persona of the president. With the stipulation “this is me speaking” Trump dis-identifies “this is me” from the figure (the presidential (“We”) obliged to make official pronouncements about Charlottesville� This distinction is important because it calls explicit attention to what I earlier described as Trump’s asymmetrical identifications as Imposter-President and Usurper-President. After registering this self-division, Trump proceeds to the next verbatim recitation: “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” That’s me speaking on Saturday. (APPLAUSE) Right after the event� (APPLAUSE) The persona who says “We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” is the figure who was inaugurated on January 20, 2017 and who was summoned on August 12 by the moral responsibility and solemn obligations attendant to the office of the President to condemn the violent and hate-filled action unfolding in Charlottesville”. However, the person who says “That’s me speaking on Saturday. Right after the event” is the Usurper-President (the president that is not one) who cannot identify with the official statement of the president without the loss of identification with the people assembled in the Phoenix Convention Center� The speech event Trump stages is that of an embattled representative of the people’s will who can express himself only retroactively in and as the distinction between the official statements of the president of the United States and those of the Usurper who divests these speech acts of their sovereign force. But the latter figure can successfully usurp the office of the president only retroactively when the segment of the American people before whom Trump recites these official presidential announcements in the Phoenix Convention Center spontaneously acclaim his power to divest these statements of the sovereign power inherent in the he office of the president so as to reinvest them with this people’s sovereign power. In the complex speech situation Trump staged in Phoenix, he proposes that the official statements he made as president could not acquire the status of felicitous or legitimate speech acts as he initially said them because they Trump: Populist Usurper President 169 were accompanied by an ongoing and simultaneous impeachment from an antagonist who finds them inappropriate responses to what is taking place in Charlottesville: So I’m condemning (sic) the strongest, possible terms, “egregious display,” “hatred, bigotry and violence.” OK, I think I can’t do much better, right? OK. But they didn’t want to put this on� They had it on initially, but then one day he talked (ph) - he didn’t say it fast enough. He didn’t do it on time. Why did it take a day? He must be a racist� It took a day� (BOOING) Now it should be noted that the speaker enunciating the utterance “So I’m condemning the strongest, possible terms, ‘egregious display,’ ‘hatred, bigotry and violence’” is different from either the figure of the president or the substance of what “that’s me speaking on Saturday” previously said about Charlottesville when impersonating the office of president. The figure who repeats these lines viva voce before the segment of the American people whose retroactive sovereign will he purports to incarnate is Donald Trump the Usurper� He requires this retroactive approbation because every one of the speech acts Trump uttered as the “this is me speaking” while impersonating the president underwent ongoing and simultaneous impeachment (“he didn’t say it fast enough. He didn’t do it on time. Why did it take a day? He must be a racist. It took a day”) as he uttered them and requires this fabulous anteriority of the populist movement whose sovereign power will have retroactively re-appropriated these utterances as expressions of their will� It is important to notice, however, that the phrases-“egregious display,” “hatred, bigotry and violence” - retroactively invested with this segment of the American people’s will are deflected from condemning what took place in Charlottesville and redirected against the members of the media who found them morally inappropriate� Despite Trump’s pretense of verbatim recitation, he quite deliberately omits the equivocal phrase “on many sides, on many sides” that listeners found morally repugnant in the official presidential utterances. Rather than defending himself against the charge of moral ambiguity, he casts himself as the embattled representative of the sovereign will of his populist movement� Then he redirects the charge of bigotry and intolerance onto his accusers and characterizes everyone who hears anything other than unambiguous condemnation into enemies intent on positioning him within moral doublebinds (no matter what he says it’s not specific enough, or belated, or racist) comparable to those Hochschild reported as the shared condition of his supporters� To intensify the assembly’s collective enjoyment of this newfound antagonism, Trump amplifies his righteous indignation at being accused of unambiguous intolerance of bigotry into the pretext for uniting the entire arena in forceful condemnation of the intolerant, bigoted reporters from CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times who have displaced the Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan as more suitable targets for his movement’s condemnation� 170 D onalD E. P EasE In attending to Trump’s strictly formal verbal stratagems, however, we should not fail to recognize that, in adding the media to the parties responsible for what the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence”, Trump’s virtuoso performance has quite literally materialized the phrase “on many sides” that his listeners found universally repugnant. By deflecting attention away from the lethal violence of white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan and redirecting his Phoenix assembly’s condemnation of bigotry and intolerance onto the media as well as anyone else who criticized his moral equivocations, Trump has, in the name of this segment of “We the People”, usurped the moral authority to offer an ethically truthful account of what had taken place in Charlottesville� In his Phoenix address, Trump did indeed recite sentences that served as strictly formal examples of President Trump’s official denunciations of the hatefilled violence enacted by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. But he designed this formal stratagem to distract attention from the truly offensive event his Phoenix meeting added to the Charlottesville debacle� The event to which I refer took place when, shortly after Trump completed his formal verbatim recitations, he turned to his constituency and announced his intention to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio who was then serving time for refusing to obey a court order prohibiting racial profiling of immigrants: By the way, I’m just curious. Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe? (APPLAUSE) So, was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job? That’s why… (APPLAUSE) He should have had a jury, but you know what? I’ll make a prediction. I think he’s going to be just fine, OK? (APPLAUSE) When Trump’s rhetoric of condemnation gives way to the substantive and materially efficacious act of promising to pardon a sheriff who personified the bigotry and violence he formally condemned and whose policing tactics had drawn favorable notice from neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, he gives away his intention to affiliate the populist constituency he has assembled in Phoenix with the “many fine people” in the “Unite the Right! ” rally in Charlottesville� 57 Trump thereby accomplished what the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville could not� He has usurped representational control of the America national imaginary from the mainstream media and delivered it to a movement and to an underground media network in which whiteness and white supremacy and frontier settler violence are the ruling norms� The populist spectacle unfolding in Phoenix supplanted the media representation of Charlottesville with this quite literally extraneous scene� The Americans he addresses here inhabit an historically superseded America that is populated by American firsters, isolationists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and that can only become great again when these ignominious 57 https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=bfBNmzL1RE8 Trump: Populist Usurper President 171 constituencies grant Trump’s speech acts the power to represent what took place at Charlottesville from the thoroughly contemptible perspective of this alternative America� By articulating the relations of mutual belonging of the people assembled here, Trump at once stages, represents, and embodies this alternative America� According to legal scholars, usurpation describes a state of affairs generated “whenever the people who make up the federal government, either as individuals, as departments or as branches, exercise power not expressly delegated to them as specified in the Constitution, they are usurping the authority of either the states or the people.” 58 Throughout this discussion I have attempted to demonstrate how Donald Trump’s enactments at the Phoenix convention center constituted a counter-investiture ceremony at which he divested himself of his obligation to carry out the duties and obligations assigned him as president of the United States, and usurped the power and authority of that office to act upon the sovereign will of the people of an alternative American whose condition of emergence involves the undelegated imposition of an ignominious past on the American people� Works Cited Ahmed, Sara, “Affective Economies” Social Text� 22(2), (2004), p� 117-139� Allen, Jonathan, “At Rally, Trump Brings Up “the Impeachment Word” To Embolden Base, NBC News (7 September 2018) <https: / / www�nbcnews�com/ politics/ politics-news/ trump-tags-new-york-times-treason-charge-n907336>� Anderson, Ben “’We Will Win again� We Will Win a Lot’: The Affective Styles of Donald Trump” 2016, p.2. 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First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009)/ s imon s chlEusEnEr The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control Introduction: Surveillance and Democracy What is the relationship between democracy and surveillance? Democracies embrace the idea of openness and transparency, but they also guarantee their citizens a right to privacy: “The right of the people,” as it is formulated in the 4 th Amendment, “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” According to Glenn Greenwald, the 4 th Amendment was specifically intended “to abolish forever in America the power of the government to subject its citizens to generalized, suspicionless surveillance” (Greenwald 2014, 3). Yet, anyone who is even slightly familiar with Michel Foucault’s work on ‘panopticism’ and the disciplinary society (Foucault 1995) is well aware that the relationship between democracy and surveillance is much more complicated (and intimate) than what is asserted in the 4 th Amendment� In fact, what Foucault’s perspective suggests is that the increase in mass surveillance during the modern era is in many ways connected to the establishment of a type of power that was specifically designed for democracy. In other words, surveillance, by its disciplinary effects, is able to ensure social cohesion and obedience, yet without having to rely on physical coercion and the premodern “spectacle of the scaffold” (32-69). In this regard, what Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon seems to represent is an architectural figuration of the democratic condition, but one that highlights democracy’s own totalitarian temptation� State surveillance, then, at one and the same time, is located within democracy and on its outside, inhabiting a zone of indistinguishability, where “governments of otherwise remarkably divergent political creeds” (Greenwald 2014, 4) are united in spying on their citizens� 1 In 2013, now under the conditions of the digital era, democracy’s totalitarian shadow spectacularly entered public discourse when Edward Snowden leaked the NSA’s PRISM program - a surveillance program that enables the US security apparatus (with the help from tech and social media companies like Google or Facebook) to collect massive amounts of Internet 1 “[M]ass surveillance is a universal temptation for any unscrupulous power� And in every instance, the motive is the same: suppressing dissent and mandating compliance” (Greenwald 2014, 4)� Besides examples from the American context, Greenwald mentions the monitoring departments of the British and French empires, the East German ‘Stasi,’ and the role of surveillance in the suppression of the Arab Spring� 176 s imon s chlEusEnEr communication data� Obviously, in any democracy, political authority essentially rests upon the trust people invest in their government� That is why governments are typically not simply enacting their policies, but are also engaged in a complex politics of “affect modulation” (Massumi 2015, 31), seeking to establish trust and confidence among their citizens. 2 In this regard, the disclosure of PRISM and other secret surveillance programs must certainly be understood as highly damaging to the credibility of the American government (in 2013 represented by Obama, although the program started under George W� Bush)� For how could one still put trust in an administration whose security apparatus gathers millions of emails, phone calls, and other communication data, thus effectively treating anyone as a potential enemy requiring constant surveillance? Interestingly, however, the massive breach of trust to which the Snowden affair drew attention had only very limited effects on political authority� Although much criticism was directed against the American government, protests have been rather isolated and nowhere near as intense as during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s� Of course, there are various reasons for this: On the one hand, the culture of dissent has significantly changed in recent years, and current protest movements are oftentimes rather ephemeral (see, for instance, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began two years prior to the NSA scandal)� On the other hand, the threat of terrorism - and the ‘politics of fear’ (see Massumi 2005) by which it is accompanied - has led to a widespread acceptance of all kinds of political or military measures enacted in the name of security, including the collection of one’s own personal data� While these are important issues, this essay will mostly concentrate on a different (although in some ways related) aspect� One of its arguments is that, having grown up in the Information Age, many Americans today have become used (if not numb) to the notion of some entity tracing their emails, phone calls, movements, consumer behavior, online profile, or other personal data� Placed in this context, the NSA scandal seems to be only one manifestation of an overall ‘culture of surveillance’ (Lyon 2018) that has evolved over the last couple of decades� This development - which can be characterized in terms of the transformation of ‘disciplinary societies’ into ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze 1995c) - not only corresponds to a metamorphosis of democracy, but it has also seriously altered the relationship between the public and the private� Furthermore, it has brought about new forms of surveillance, some of which have been described as ‘post-panoptic’ (Gane 2012), ‘liquid’ (Bauman/ Lyon 2013), ‘participatory’ (Cascio 2005), and marketdriven (Zuboff 2018)� As I attempt to demonstrate, the Foucauldian model of the panopticon proves to be increasingly unable to adequately grasp and 2 In this context, Frank Kelleter has analyzed the function of President Roosevelt’s famous ‘fireside chats’ in the effort of winning the citizens’ trust during a time of severe economic crisis (see Kelleter 2014)� Along similar lines, Brian Massumi has argued that Ronald Reagan’s popularity rested less on what he said than on “the timbre of his voice” and his ability to project “an air of confidence” when addressing the American public (Massumi 2002, 41)� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 177 illuminate such contemporary surveillance types� Moreover, I will argue that if we keep this larger context in mind, much of the public discourse on surveillance that resulted from the NSA scandal seems curiously outdated� In other words: To invoke an Orwellian scenario of massive governmental overreach that stifles freedom, creativity, privacy, and dissent (a common reaction to the Snowden revelations, particularly in the US) 3 largely overlooks the fact that contemporary surveillance mostly occurs within a neoliberal setting and involves the marketing of data rather than the despotic policing of individuals (see Mischke 2012)� As Shoshana Zuboff outlines in her work on today’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2018), most current practices of monitoring, tracking, and tracing can be linked to commercial interests� Along these lines, she highlights “unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification” (Zuboff 2015, 75)� It would be misleading, however, to strictly separate between ‘state surveillance’ (undertaken for security reasons) and ‘commercial surveillance’ (undertaken for profit reasons), as both types of monitoring tend to merge and collaborate, constituting what Christian Fuchs, among others, has described as the “surveillance-industrial complex” (Fuchs 2017, 204). Based on this neoliberal paradigm, what emerges today is an increasingly global culture of visibility, in which the sense that somebody might be watching you has become a predominant ‘structure of feeling�’ As I will argue, however, this phenomenon involves not just enforced types of surveillance, as exemplified by the NSA scandal, but also the ‘voluntary’ surrender of privacy performed by millions of Internet users who ‘publicly’ share their ‘private’ data, experiences, preferences, and particularities on social media like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter - a tendency which Jamais Cascio has referred to under the rubric of the ‘participatory panopticon’ (Cascio 2005)� Although I will therefore place voluntary and involuntary forms of surveillance next to each other, I neither intend to sanction the NSA spy programs (as simply an expression of a general cultural tendency) nor to downplay the justified political criticism directed against the American government and its security apparatus� I do believe, however, that to place government spying in this context (a) helps explain why the NSA scandal has not had more extensive political consequences and (b) may provide a more appropriate way of framing the issue� Hence, looking at the affair with an eye to the neoliberal backdrop of today’s surveillance culture may also problematize the effectiveness and adequacy of some of the more conventional forms and strategies of critique� 3 See Greenwald 2014, 174: “Invoking George Orwell’s 1984 is something of a cliché, but the echoes of the world about which he warned in the NSA’s surveillance state are unmistakable: both rely on the existence of a technological system with the capacity to monitor every citizen’s actions and words.” 178 s imon s chlEusEnEr In the first part, I will outline the historical transformations of surveillance practices, concentrating on Foucault’s reflections on panopticism and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘control societies�’ Subsequently, the second part will address the problem of ‘self-monitoring’ and the participatory panopticon, discussing the reciprocal relationship between voluntary and involuntary surveillance (which I have termed the ‘surveillance nexus’) in the context of neoliberalism� In the third part, I will then turn to Dave Eggers’s 2013 bestseller The Circle, analyzing the novel as a popular manifestation of ideas surrounding the debate about digital surveillance, privacy, transparency, and (post-)democracy� Here, my argument is that Eggers draws attention to many key elements of today’s surveillance capitalism, but in several respects still relies on the Orwellian imagination of totalitarian surveillance� From the Panopticon to the Society of Control On the face of it, the scenario evoked by the NSA affair does indeed bear certain similarities to the condition of panopticism described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish� Taking his cues from Jeremy Bentham’s famous architectural model, Foucault sees as one of the central qualities of the panopticon the fact that it creates a structure in which those who are observed are placed in “a state of conscious and permanent visibility” (Foucault 1995, 201), while the source of surveillance - the actual inspector who does the observing - becomes essentially invisible� In a panopticon, you are being observed, and you know that you are being observed, but you cannot see who is observing you and whether or not you are being observed at this very moment� As Foucault puts it, “the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon,” but he “must never know whether he is looked at at any one moment.” Yet, what he must be sure of is “that he may always be so.” The panopticon, then, “is a machine for dissociating the see/ being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (201-202). Obviously, what interests Foucault most about this constellation is the fact that the authority of disciplinary power is here inscribed in the architectural space as such� There is no need for physical coercion (and not even for personal contact) as the ‘machinic’ nature of the panopticon guarantees the internalization of its hierarchy of vision - to the effect that the inmate will eventually monitor himself and alter his behavior� In other words, what the panopticon is meant to achieve is that the observed become their own observers� It is easy to see how this scenario may, on first sight, conform to the context of Internet spying� To be sure, most people are by now aware of the fact that the data we transmit when using the Internet, or even a telephone, is far from ‘safe’: We know that we might be spied upon, but neither are we able to see the entity that does the spying, nor do we know whether we are spied upon at this or that particular moment� Hence, analogous to what Foucault claims about the panopticon, the Internet, too, is a space in which the question of The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 179 visibility is directly linked to a hierarchical distribution of power� More precisely, while the users’ data become more and more ‘visible’ to the forces of surveillance, these forces themselves tend to remain entirely invisible� It is for this reason that the notion of the panopticon has been used by scholars of the digital era to specifically refer to the Internet. 4 Others, however, have argued that today’s digital surveillance is in most cases situated in a decidedly post-panoptic context (see Bauman/ Lyon 2013, 11)� For one thing, if we relate the model of panoptic surveillance to the NSA’s PRISM program, it becomes clear that the latter differs from the former in that the program was never intended to be disclosed� While the whole point of panoptic power is to create a system of visibility in which the observed are aware of being monitored, PRISM and similar surveillance programs were initially designed to remain secret (which is why the U�S� Justice Department charged Snowden and other whistleblowers with violating the Espionage Act)� 5 More importantly, however, what sets today’s digital surveillance apart from the Foucauldian analysis is the fact that panoptic forms of discipline rest upon a well-defined and overly centralized spatial hierarchy. In contrast, the multitude of contemporary surveillance types obviously lack the panopticon’s “central tower” (Foucault 1995, 202), being much more fluid and decentralized� While the panopticon’s inmates “could not move because they were under watch,” such rigid “fixedness to the place” (Bauman 2000, 9-10) - in line with the overall flexibilization of economic and social arrangements (see Sennett 1998 and 2006) - is for the most part absent in today’s surveillance culture� This is certainly not to say that contemporary society is free of restrictions on mobility, places of confinement, and intimidating watchtowers. 6 But as a central metaphor designed to characterize the dominant tendencies of a whole social formation, the notion of the panopticon is largely outdated� Likewise, Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary society and its protonormalistic modes of power seems to refer to a world that is no longer ours� Along these lines, Zygmunt Bauman has argued that Foucault is, above all, a theorist of ‘solid modernity,’ whose analyses are unable to account for the contemporary shift to what Bauman defines as ‘liquid modernity’ (see Bauman 2000). Somewhat similarly, Nancy Fraser has claimed that Foucault “was the great theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation,” and that, read against the backdrop of neoliberalism and postfordist flexibility, his theoretical model (with its focus on disciplinary power and normalization) has lost its cogency� Noting that Foucault’s major works were written during the 1960s and 1970s, 4 Such critics typically use variations like ‘the new panopticon’ or ‘the virtual panopticon�’ See, for instance, Brignall 2002 and Waycott/ Thompson et al� 2017� 5 This point seems to be missed by Glenn Greenwald, who claims “that the essence of a menacing surveillance state, be it the NSA or the Stasi or Big Brother or the Panopticon, is the knowledge that one can be watched at any time by unseen authorities” (Greenwald 2014, 177). 6 A case in point is the prototypical panopticon, the prison, which has by no means disappeared as a result of disciplinary society’s decay� Rather, contemporary penal confinement represents (perhaps nowhere more blatantly than in the US) the static underside of postfordist deterritorialization and flexibility. 180 s imon s chlEusEnEr Fraser claims: “The irony is plain: whether we call it postindustrial society or neoliberal globalization, a new regime oriented to ‘deregulation’ and ‘flexibilization’ was about to take shape just as Foucault was conceptualizing disciplinary normalization” (Fraser 2003, 160). Although I tend to agree with such accounts on the ‘datedness’ of Foucault’s model of disciplinary power, it might be more fruitful to illuminate this matter via Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” (Deleuze 1995c), a short essay that was first published in 1990. Although Deleuze concurs with Bauman and Fraser that disciplinary society slowly vanished during the second half of the 20 th century, his reading of Foucault differs from theirs insofar as he questions whether Foucault’s analysis was meant to directly apply to the present in the first place. “Historical formations,” Deleuze argues in a conversation with Claire Parnet, “interest him only because they mark where we come from, what circumscribes us, what we’re in the process of breaking out of to discover new relations in which to find expression” (Deleuze 1995a, 106)� 7 In this sense, Deleuze is able to both use Foucault’s perspective as a starting point for his own analysis and, simultaneously, depart from it� The central thesis of Deleuze’s text is that after World War II, disciplinary societies gave way to a new type of regime, which, in reference to William Burroughs, he terms ‘control society�’ This new regime corresponds to a significant “mutation of capitalism” (Deleuze 1995c, 180) and represents “a general breakdown of all sites of confinement - prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family.” 8 According to Deleuze, the dismantling of these institutions (most of which are classic examples of Foucauldian panopticism) has occasionally given rise to “new freedoms, while at the same time contributing to mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement” (178). Unlike the sites of confinement, these new forms of control no longer function as “molds” or different kinds of “molding,” but constitute a continuous “modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next” (178-179). An example is the issue of wages: the factory was a body of men whose internal forces reached an equilibrium between the highest possible production and the lowest possible wages; but in a control society businesses take over from factories […] [and] strive to introduce a deeper level of modulation into all wages, bringing them into a state of constant metastability punctuated by ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars� 7 Moreover, one finds various ideas in Foucault’s oeuvre - most of which are linked to the notion of ‘governmentality’ (see Foucault 2008 and 2009) - that move in the direction of a specifically post-disciplinary concept of power. 8 As indicated in a previous footnote, this certainly misrepresents the recent history of the prison, which, according to Loïc Wacquant, “has made a stunning comeback,” just as Deleuze, Foucault, and many others “were forecasting its demise” (Wacquant 2016, 122). While Deleuze had in mind “the attempt to find ‘alternatives’ to custody, at least for minor offenses, and the use of electronic tagging to force offenders to stay at home during certain hours” (Deleuze 1995c, 182), what actually took place was a massive rise in incarceration rates, particularly in Europe and the United States� On the (post-disciplinary) role and function of penal confinement in the context of neoliberal governance, see Wacquant 2009� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 181 Thus, while factories “formed individuals into a body of men for the joint convenience of a management that could monitor each component in this mass, and trade unions that could mobilize mass resistance,” businesses “are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself” (179). As Deleuze argues, the model of the ‘business’ has been introduced on all levels of society, including realms like education or the arts� The most prominent features of what Deleuze calls ‘control society,’ then, correspond to what sociologists like Richard Sennett have termed the ‘new capitalism’ (Sennett 2006), which entails increasing commodification and marketization, on the one hand, and a turn towards more competition and flexibility, on the other� 9 Analogous to Sennett’s ‘flexible self,’ Deleuze describes the human actors in control societies as snakelike and undulatory, “subject to a continuous movement of liquefaction and dividuation, a result of the compulsion to participate and to process oneself” (Ott 2018, 34). “In disciplinary societies,” Deleuze writes, “you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything - business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation” (Deleuze 1995c, 179). But in what sense is the concept of the society of control relevant to the theme of surveillance? And how might it contribute to the discourse on spying, privacy, and digital culture? Reconstructing Deleuze’s arguments in view of current developments, I claim that it does so in at least five different but related ways: 1) Commodification: As Deleuze uses ‘the business’ (and not, for example, the state apparatus) as the model for control societies, he reminds us that spying and surveillance nowadays go well beyond the political tensions between nation states or the conflict between state security and individual privacy. Instead, they are in most cases related to commercial interests� There is evidence, for instance, that parts of the NSA spy programs are directly linked to industrial espionage (see Kirschbaum 2014 and Baumgärtner/ Blome et al� 2015)� More importantly, however, not just the NSA is interested in one’s personal data, but even more so are profit-seeking businesses. “By drawing together large amounts of data from various sources, specialised private companies are employing huge data bases with increasingly personalised information. These are being used to monitor, predict and influence consumer behaviour of individuals and groups” (Mischke 2012, 40). The arena of this ‘surveillance capitalism’ is, above all, the Internet, the public debate about which typically centers on the question of whether it is a technology that heightens personal freedom and self-expression or fosters new dependencies� 9 See Sennett 1998, 9-10: “Flexibility is used today as another way to lift the curse of oppression from capitalism� In attacking rigid bureaucracy and emphasizing risk, it is claimed, flexibility gives people more freedom to shape their lives. In fact, the new order substitutes new controls rather than simply abolishing the rules of the past.” 182 s imon s chlEusEnEr But with its infrastructure being largely provided by multinational companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook (whose actual customers are not their users, but their advertising clients), the Internet, more than anything else, is an overly commercialized space� As more and more aspects of social life enter the sphere of the Internet, these aspects oftentimes become, simultaneously, more and more commodified. 2) Digital Machines and Big Data: Surveillance in control societies, then, is above all ‘digital surveillance�’ Although Deleuze is eager to avoid any technological determinism, arguing that one has “to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component” (Deleuze 1995b, 175), he nevertheless highlights the digital revolution’s utmost significance for the new social-economic formation: “control societies function with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers.” This turn to the digital is directly coupled with two interrelated mechanisms of control: the question of (providing or denying) access and the exploitation of data� In contrast to disciplinary societies (which were ruled by ‘signatures’ and ‘numbers’), the “digital language of control is made up of codes indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied.” 10 Concerning the exploitation of data, Deleuze argues that, analogous to the transformation of individuals into ‘dividuals,’ “masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (Deleuze 1995c, 180). 11 Relatedly, and with reference to Deleuze and Guattari, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have created the term ‘surveillant assemblage’: a system that “operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention” (Haggerty/ Ericson 2000, 606)� 3) Decentralization: Since control societies are defined by a turn to the digital and a relative breakdown of the sites of confinement, the mechanisms of surveillance have obviously changed as well� While surveillance in disciplinary societies was mostly centralized and relied on particular spatial and architectural settings (which is why Foucault evoked a generalized panopticism), surveillance in control societies has become increasingly decentralized and more continuous - a phenomenon that Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon have discussed under the rubric of ‘liquid surveillance’ (Bauman/ Lyon 2013)� Today, surveillance of public and private spaces involves a wide range of different procedures� Next to rather classic types of surveillance - such as 10 Clearly, in the age of what is commonly known as the ‘internet of things’ (see Greenfield 2018, 31-62), digital access is not restricted to ‘information,’ but extends to the realm of the physical world - to objects and things� Deleuze seems to be thinking along these lines when he writes elsewhere in the text that “Félix Guattari has imagined a town where anyone can leave their flat, their street, their neighborhood, using their (dividual) electronic card that opens this or that barrier; but the card may also be rejected on a particular day, or between certain times of day; it doesn’t depend on the barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation” (Deleuze 1995c, 181-182). 11 On Deleuze’s concepts of ‘dividuation’ and the ‘dividual,’ see Raunig 2015 and Ott 2018� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 183 phone tapping or the use of security cameras - there are numerous forms of Internet monitoring (enabled by packet capture appliances, the use of ‘cookies,’ webcams, etc�), technologies such as GPS tracking, spy satellites, drones, body scanners, biometric verification, and various kinds of consumer monitoring (accomplished with the help of wifi and smartphone data tracking, debit card use, or facial recognition systems)� In addition, there is the whole segment of ‘self-monitoring,’ including the widespread use of digital selftracking devices (such as wrist wearables or ‘smart clothes’)� And last but not least, almost any pedestrian is nowadays equipped with a fully-functioning surveillance system installed in her phone� In this sense, decentralization goes hand in hand with a certain “democratization of surveillance” - a process, however, which has hardly “translated into anything approaching a leveling of social hierarchies” (Lyon/ Haggerty/ Ball 2012, 3). 12 4) Flexibilization and Mobility: While the sites of confinement in Foucault’s disciplinary societies had the function to make individuals “stick to their appointed places at all times” (Bauman 2000, 9), ‘dividuals’ in control societies are typically much more mobile and flexible. While this is obviously reflective of the general trend of an increase in flexibility in the neoliberal era, another important aspect of this development is that surveillance technologies have become more and more invisible� As Deleuze argues with regard to the example of freeways: “Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway� But by making highways, you multiply the means of control� I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled” (Deleuze 2007, 327)� Indeed, such an understanding of highways constitutes an almost perfect metaphor for the Internet� In other words: one can surf the Internet ‘infinitely and freely’ and yet be perfectly controlled. 5) Self-Modulation and the Participatory Panopticon: Lastly (though this has already been hinted at in points 3 and 4), Deleuze suggests that human actors in control societies tend to participate in the mechanisms of control themselves, constantly engaging in forms of self-modulation and self-monitoring� In a sense, Foucault has made a similar point regarding the panopticon, arguing that “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, […] inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault 1995, 202-203)� The difference, however, is that the panoptic machine was aimed at correcting behavior so as to conform to some pre-established norm, while control societies are oriented toward capturing (in)dividual desire and creativity� 13 This, for instance, is the logic of ‘prosumer capitalism’ (Ritzer 2015), 12 One may argue, though, that while previous forms of surveillance were primarily directed against racial and ethnic minorities, political radicals, dissidents, delinquents, prostitutes, and the poor, groups which until recently were “exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored” as well (Haggerty/ Ericson 2000, 606). 13 Another aspect of this difference is as follows: While Foucault’s conception of panoptic surveillance involves the ‘internalization’ of disciplinary power, the self-surveillance of contemporary lifeloggers or social media users corresponds to a process of 184 s imon s chlEusEnEr and it is also common among surveillance techniques related to social media platforms and digital self-tracking devices, whose users voluntarily share their personal data and make it public (see Reichardt 2018)� Along these lines, Jamais Cascio has coined the concept of the ‘participatory panopticon,’ referring to a type of “constant surveillance [which] is done by the citizens themselves, and [which] is done by choice� It’s not imposed on us by a malevolent bureaucracy or faceless corporations� The participatory panopticon will be the emergent result of myriad independent rational decisions, a bottom-up version of the constantly watched society” (Cascio 2005). Similarly, Steven Shaviro has argued that surveillance related to the government or the national security apparatus “is only one aspect of a broader process” (Shaviro 2010, 67): “The reign of universal transparency, with its incessant circulation of sounds and images, and its ‘participatory’ media ecology in which everyone keeps tabs on everyone else, does not need to be imposed from above� Rather, […] it ‘emerges,’ or ‘self-organizes,’ spontaneously from below” (69). Neoliberalism and the Surveillance Nexus In the debate about the PRISM program, one of the most frequent arguments was that the NSA’s indiscriminate spying practices need to be stopped because they violate the individual’s ‘right to privacy�’ Glenn Greenwald, for instance, criticizes the NSA’s surveillance programs as inherently “repressive,” claiming that through their attack on privacy they simultaneously abolish one’s sense of being “free - safe - to truly experiment, to test boundaries, to explore new ways of thinking and being, to explore what it means to be ourselves.” As Greenwald further argues, it is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state - where the private realm is effectively eliminated - is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level (Greenwald 2014, 174). Although I believe that Greenwald tends to romanticize the concept of privacy by disregarding its more problematic aspects (as manifested, for example, in the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’), it is not my position that the private realm should be abolished or that we should simply get used to living in the era of ‘post-privacy’ (Heller 2011)� Indeed, as Christian Fuchs has pointed out, the question is not “how privacy can be best protected, but in which cases whose privacy should be protected and in which cases it should not be protected” (Fuchs 2011, 225). More importantly, though, what is problematic about Greenwald’s perspective is the fundamental gap he posits between voluntary and involuntary surveillance, as if they were completely unrelated practices� In other words: by scandalizing involuntary surveillance, he implicitly justifies ‘voluntary surveillance,’ which - as long as it is ‘externalization,’ involving the creation of what Haggerty and Ericson have termed a ‘data double’ (Haggerty/ Ericson 2000)� As Ulfried Reichardt notes: “‘Subjectivity’ is externalized and transformed into information” (Reichardt 2018, 110). The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 185 free of non-legitimate government spying and formally based on individual free choice - seems to leave the private realm intact� That things are more complicated, however, is obvious� For instance: how should one qualify the daily practice of Internet users who ‘accept’ the storing of cookies on their computer? Is this an act of individual free choice or (since many companies deny access to their websites without cookie permission) simply a necessity for using essential resources of today’s digital culture? According to Greenwald, what originally “made the Internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration.” State surveillance programs like PRISM, however, have turned this arena of free expression into a site of repression and fear (Greenwald 2014, 174)� This common narrative, I argue, creates a false dichotomy that tends to misrepresent both the Internet (as a platform designed for creative expression and free communication) and the aims of surveillance programs like PRISM (as Orwellian instruments designed for spreading fear and conformity to silence dissent)� In what follows, I will demonstrate that set against the backdrop of neoliberalism - and analyzed in view of the ‘control’ mechanisms described by Deleuze - voluntary and involuntary forms of surveillance constitute a ‘nexus’ rather than being entirely discrete practices� It is possible, of course, to simply hold that any information that is voluntarily exhibited to the public gaze ceases to be private and therefore loses its entitlement to be protected� With regard to the participatory panopticon, however, the term ‘voluntarily’ is highly ambiguous� In other words: Contemporary self-tracking and self-monitoring practices, coupled with the prevalent inclination to ‘share,’ ‘post,’ and ‘submit’ private content on social media platforms, cannot simply be attributed to personal choice or be understood as a natural aspect of human desire� Rather, what the current accumulation of such practices points to is a general tendency of the world we live in: a ‘surveillance nexus’ that combines voluntary and involuntary forms of surveillance and their cultural, political, economic, and media-technological components� In many ways, this tendency is reflective of the neoliberal ideal of ‘selfentrepreneurship’ - the shift from employee to entreployee (Pongratz/ Voß 2003) - and ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski/ Chiapello 2007)� In this setting, what sociologists have coined ‘expressive individualism’ (see Bellah et al� 2008 and Fluck 2002) has been thoroughly transformed into an instrument of the neoliberal economy� Self-exploration and self-expression as well as the pursuit of cultural recognition and ‘cultural capital’ now directly correspond with financial exploitation and the competition for ‘economic capital�’ 14 Consequently, practices such as the widespread use of self-tracking devices do not merely satisfy a personal desire for self-maintenance or selfenhancement, but simultaneously function as essential tools in the context of a market economy, whose participants have been accustomed to viewing 14 On the relationship between ‘cultural’ and ‘economic capital’ (as well as ‘social capital,’ the third term of his conceptual triad), see Bourdieu 1986� 186 s imon s chlEusEnEr themselves (and their bodies) as ‘human capital’ (see Foucault 2008, 215-237)� Likewise, the forms of self-expression performed on social media platforms are oftentimes bound up with strategies of self-marketing, incentivized by a social environment for which the traditional separation between ‘labor’ and ‘leisure’ has lost its validity� Hence, while Robert Bellah differentiates between ‘expressive’ and ‘economic’ individualism, one may argue that the whole culture of self-expression, in the context of today’s post-disciplinary surveillance capitalism, has itself become increasingly economic and commodified. 15 Both in the case of social media and the use of self-tracking devices, many private companies profit from the transmitted data, which nowadays functions as “a form of capital” - that is, data capital - “on the same level as financial capital in terms of generating new digital products and services” (MIT Technology Review Custom 2016)� The affective and participatory elements of this constellation clearly play a major role in the economic logic of surveillance: “We perform tasks that are good for our health, for example, running� Yet at the same time, we provide the device, program, and app developers with the data that are intrinsic to their business models” (Reichardt 2018, 113- 114)� Here and elsewhere, data mining and monitoring inhabit a grey area between voluntary and involuntary surveillance, as users are oftentimes unaware that their personal data is being stored and used for commercial purposes� It would therefore be a mistake to draw a fundamental line between ‘involuntary’ external surveillance and ‘voluntary’ self-surveillance, since - in the context of neoliberalism and the society of control - these two aspects frequently intersect and reinforce each other� This is even the case for government spy programs like PRISM, which are part of the surveillance nexus as well� As has been investigated under the rubric of the ‘surveillance-industrial complex’ (see Hayes 2012), there are countless connections between the private sector and state institutions in both the implementation of surveillance systems and the analysis and utilization of the acquired data� Most obviously, state surveillance programs essentially rely on the data provided to them by private Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft - data that these companies obtain from their users� Commenting on the Snowden revelations, David Lyon therefore argues: “We can see that surveillance is carried out by government and commercial agencies acting together, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwillingly” (Lyon 2015, 13). In addition, Christian Fuchs notes that the NSA collaborates with roughly 2000 private companies “that make profits by spying on citizens. […] Surveillance is big business, both for online companies and those conducting the online spying for intelligence agencies” (Fuchs 2017, 204)� 15 On the distinction between economic (or utilitarian) and expressive individualism, see Bellah et al� 2008, 32-35� As an example of utilitarian individualism, Bellah refers to Benjamin Franklin, while Whitman serves as the prototype for expressive individualism� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 187 Placed in the neoliberal context of today’s surveillance nexus, the question arises whether the NSA’s PRISM program is really best described by drawing parallels to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or to Foucault’s conception of panoptic power (see Greenwald 2014, 174-177)� Besides their dealings with tech companies and the corporate sector, security agencies like the NSA also operate within an ideological environment - an environment which, in the course of the last few decades, has become distinctly ‘post-disciplinary�’ If, then, one indeed wishes to rely on Foucault in analyzing the NSA and the PRISM program, there are arguably instruments in his ‘toolbox’ that would be far better suited than his ideas about disciplinary society and the panopticon� More precisely, the ideological and operational logic of PRISM clearly is linked more to what Foucault discusses under the rubric of ‘governmentality’ and the ‘security dispositif’ than it is to the perspective of Discipline and Punish� In Security, Territory, Population, a series of lectures held at the Collège de France in 1978, Foucault explains that the “apparatuses of security” (dispositifs de sécurité) need to be distinguished from “the mechanisms of discipline” in that they do not rely on a pre-established norm - on “prescriptions and obligations” - but attempt to intervene in the run of events by grasping things “at the level of their effective reality” (Foucault 2009, 46-47). Hence, while the mechanisms of discipline are designed to correct or eliminate any type of abnormal behavior, the apparatuses of security operate much more pragmatically, frequently willing to ‘let things happen�’ The governmentality of security, then, is engaged in a much more flexible kind of normalization. 16 It is less concerned with confinement or with “fixing and demarcating the territory”; rather, what Foucault observes is “the emergence of a completely different problem,” namely that of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are canceled out (65)� Obviously, this characterization of the apparatus of security resembles Deleuze’s conception of control societies in that it represents a mode of power that manifests itself as decidedly post-disciplinary and is directed towards flexibility: towards controlling movement rather than preventing it� Moreover, I would argue that this model is much better suited as a description of a spy program like PRISM� For what such programs are typically aimed at is not the correction of any kind of deviant or abnormal behavior, but rather the securing of conditions under which things and information can be allowed to ‘circulate�’ While this may lead to interventions in cases of grave criminal transgressions (such as terrorism or drug trafficking), government 16 For a more elaborate discussion of this phenomenon, see Link (1999), who differentiates between ‘protonormalism’ and ‘flexible normalism.’ On the connections between flexible normalization and the neoliberal mode of production, see Schleusener 2013. 188 s imon s chlEusEnEr online surveillance is likewise oriented toward retaining the ‘participatory’ structure of the Internet: the regular flow of data, e-commerce and online marketing, the social media practices of its average users� Despite the cyberutopian ideas of some of its early advocates and commentators (see Barbrook 2000), it has become increasingly difficult to draw a clear distinction between the participatory, communicative, and ‘democratic’ elements of the Internet, on the one hand, and its ‘commercialization’ - the role it plays within the capitalist global economy - on the other� As Tiziana Terranova argues, today’s digital economy “manifests all the signs of an acceleration of the capitalist logic of production.” Evidently, this is the case not despite the Internet’s participatory network structure, but because of it� In fact, the “interface between capital and the Internet” (Terranova 2013, 46) essentially relies on the unpaid immaterial labor and data provided by participating online users, who generate much of the wealth of today’s giant tech companies and web 2.0 firms. 17 Consequently, if we understand the NSA as an actor within the neoliberal context of the surveillance nexus, it would be misguided to suspect that the agency’s function is to disrupt this ‘participatory’ structure� Instead, rather than massively blocking websites or applying other forms of pervasive censorship (as is the case in countries like China), there seems to be an effort to balance out the agency’s exercise of its basic security tasks - related, most importantly, to the unending ‘war against terror’ - with the commitment to securing the participatory structure of the internet: the continuous circulation of data and profits along the channels of the network. In this regard, one may question Greenwald’s assertion that the political function of security agencies like the NSA is, above all, the enforcement of compliance through fear: “A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one” (Greenwald 2014, 3). While it is true that the ‘war against terror’ is accompanied by a demobilizing politics of fear, neoliberal governmentality is more concerned with mobilizing desire (via positive affects, such as hope and joy) than with blocking it (via negative affects, such as sadness or fear)� 18 In this context, Brian Massumi has pointed out an ‘affective dissonance’ that is specific to the contemporary role of affects in American politics� Commenting on the media’s ‘affect modulation’ in the aftermath of 9/ 11, Massumi claims that the “constant security concerns insinuate themselves into our lives at such a basic, habitual level that you’re 17 See Terranova 2013, 52: “The idea that the value of such corporations is given by users’ participation has become common business sense� The composition of labor producing the value of such companies shows a massive surplus of free labor as compared to a tiny percentage of actual waged labor.” On immaterial labor, see Lazzarato 1996 and Hardt/ Negri 2001 (especially 289-294)� 18 The source of this ‘pragmatic’ conception of affects is the philosophy of Spinoza, who sees an intimate relation between the various types of affection and the body’s ‘power of acting.’ “By affect,” Spinoza writes, “I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained” (Spinoza 1996, 70)� For more on how Spinoza’s model can be used to illuminate the role of affects in political constellations, see Schleusener 2011 and Małecki/ Schleusener 2015. The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 189 barely aware how it’s changing the tenor of everyday living� You start ‘instinctively’ to limit your movements and contact with people.” Yet, while “the media helps produce this affective limitation,” it also works to overcome it in a certain way� The limitation can’t go too far or it would slow down the dynamic of capitalism� One of the biggest fears after September 11 was that the economy would go into recession because of a crisis in consumer confidence. So everyone was called upon to keep spending, as a proud, patriotic act (Massumi 2015, 31-32)� What Massumi claims about the role of the American media in the aftermath of 9/ 11 could also be said about US government surveillance of the Internet: “The limitation can’t go too far or it would slow down the dynamic of capitalism.” Hence, while the NSA makes use of its wide-ranging capacities to monitor online activity, the agency simultaneously seeks to minimize any demobilizing effects its surveillance measures might have on the Internet’s participatory nature and the regular flow of data. As I have argued repeatedly throughout this essay, this distinguishes contemporary surveillance in the context of what Deleuze has described as the society of control from Orwell’s dystopian imagination or the Foucauldian understanding of panopticism� Indeed, while Greenwald fears that the NSA’s surveillance programs enhance compliance and conformity, one could instead argue that, against the backdrop of today’s surveillance capitalism, a bigger threat than social conformity is personalized uniformity - an effect of the algorithmic logic that facilitates the emergence of ‘filter bubbles.’ 19 Again, my intention is not to defend PRISM or the actions of the NSA, nor is it to undermine the political criticism directed against it� It is my perception, however, that some of the critical arguments in this debate are based on a misplaced understanding of both the nature of contemporary surveillance culture and the political conditions of government spying� Especially in the American context, concerns about the exploitative monetization of personal data seem to receive far less publicity than privacy concerns or ‘libertarian’ arguments warning against the emergence of a quasi-Orwellian surveillance state� Such a forgetfulness of the political present typically corresponds to an antiquated mode of critique� One may argue, for instance, that it is politically misleading to invoke the scenario of a totalitarian surveillance state - as the other of democracy - if many of the features of today’s surveillance capitalism (participation, self-expression, ‘free enterprise’) call for an immanent critique, as they appear to be generally in line with the democratic model� In other words, while the public debate about government spying and largescale monitoring centered on the possible return of pre-democratic forms of sovereignty and the adoption of non-democratic means of command, what was largely missing was an account of the data-driven transformation of democracy itself - that is, of its post-democratic erosion� 20 19 For more on this phenomenon, see Pariser 2011 and Bulban/ Trotier 2012� 20 On the concept of post-democracy, see Crouch 2004 and 2011� 190 s imon s chlEusEnEr Post-Democratic Transparency: Dave Eggers’s The Circle Yet, the notion (and menace) of a data-driven post-democracy certainly is an issue in The Circle, Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel about a giant tech company located in Northern California� The book has been called “an update of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the post-Cold War digital age” (Martin 2016, 55) and interpreted as a present-day version of Brave New World� 21 Such readings underline the novel’s contemporary significance and firmly contextualize it within the tradition of dystopian writing - even though some critics have argued that the novel occasionally blurs the line between dystopia and utopia� 22 Besides its accessible style and storyline, part of the book’s success is surely related to the fact that it was published roughly four months after the Snowden revelations, when issues like privacy and surveillance were still regularly covered in the news� It is no surprise, then, that the novel quickly became a bestseller and, in 2017, was turned into a movie (starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks)� Different from the debates surrounding PRISM and the Snowden affair, however, the novel is not centered on government spying and national security� Instead, it addresses the problem of surveillance by focusing on a private company, namely the Circle, which Eggers depicts as the world’s most powerful Internet firm. This narrative decision clearly connects the novel with the contemporary context of surveillance capitalism and with Deleuze’s concept of the society of control� In other words, while a novel like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest still dealt with panoptic surveillance, ‘total institutions,’ and the disciplinary society (see Schleusener 2006), The Circle’s take on surveillance and transparency is rooted in 21 st century digital culture and the neoliberal surveillance nexus� The novel starts with a typical ‘cool capitalist’ scenario (see McGuigan 2009 and Schleusener 2014), echoing Fredric Jameson’s astonishment about “how the dreariness of business and private property” and “the dustiness of entrepreneurship […] should in our time have proved to be so sexy” (Jameson 1992, 274)� Indeed, the Circle is not just the world’s largest Internet company, it is also a decidedly ‘cool’ one� As Mae Holland, the novel’s main character, explains, it is the exact opposite of the local utility company for which she worked previously, an experience she describes as follows: It was sickening, all of it� The green cinderblocks� An actual water cooler� Actual punch cards� The actual certificates of merit when someone had done something deemed special. And the hours! Actually nine to five! All of it felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time, and made Mae feel that she was not only wasting her life but that this entire company was wasting life, wasting human potential and holding back the turning of the globe (Eggers 2014, 11)� 21 See, for instance, Charles 2013: “The Circle is Brave New World for our brave new world.” 22 Margaret Atwood, for instance, has dubbed The Circle a “satirical utopia” (see Atwood 2013, 6)� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 191 Conversely, then, Mae perceives the chance to work at the Circle as a liberating flight from trivial routines, regular working hours, parochial backwardness, and the ‘actuality’ of physical objects and things - in short: from the orderliness of ‘solid modernity,’ traditional bureaucracy, and the Fordist mode of production. Here, the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ - the turn to flexibility and deterritorialization, the merging of life and work, and the rise of global networks and the digital realm - is not marked as a simple ideology but, rather, as an effective desiring-machine. “My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven” (1). But what, specifically, is so ‘sexy’ and ‘cool’ about the Circle? Obviously, the company is modeled after actually existing Internet firms (Google, Facebook) and exhibits the usual features of a competitive business culture, intermingled with elements of moderately alternative lifestyles and ‘countercultural’ sentiments (see Frank 1998 and Turner 2006)� In The Circle, what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have termed the ‘Californian Ideology’ (Barbrook/ Cameron 1996) manifests itself as a mixture of entrepreneurial hipsterism and nerd culture (à la The Social Network), coupled with a general notion of benevolent do-goodism� As Margaret Atwood puts it, “recycling and organics abound, people keep saying how much they like each other” and “much energy is expended on world betterment” (Atwood 2013, 6). Yet, besides the prevalent emphasis on ‘caring and sharing’ and the pleasantness of life on the Circle campus - surrounded by “soft green hills” and featuring “a Calatrava fountain,” “tennis courts,” “a picnic area,” and a “daycare center” (Eggers 2014, 1) - the company also exhibits some rather different characteristics� For instance, the ubiquitous practice of ranking and rating each other (through so-called ‘zings’) fosters a keen sense of hierarchy and competition. Exempt from such “inexorable rivalry” (Deleuze 1995c, 179) - spurred by the instrumentalization of one’s desire for recognition - are merely the three ‘Wise Men’ at the very top of the company, who are cultishly worshipped by their employees� Moreover, the Circle is presented as a company that aims for nothing less but total global domination� With the invention of TruYou, “the Unified Operating System, which combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy,” the Circle “changed the internet, in toto, within a year” (Eggers 2014, 21-22), thereby acquiring an undisputed monopoly in the online and technology sector� While such processes of monopolization seem to go against the grain of the neoliberal ideal of market competition, the fictional Circle scenario is in fact hardly different from the current situation, in which a handful of companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) completely dominate the market� As David Lyon has argued, The Circle “is science fiction, sort of, but it is so close to our world that it feels as if the future has arrived” (Lyon 2018, 151- 152)� While Eggers exaggerates (and at times sensationalizes) aspects of surveillance capitalism, the world his novel depicts is clearly based on contemporary tendencies. This goes for the power and influence of multinational Internet firms, the role of social media, the technological aspects of surveillance, and the emergence of a culture of digital transparency and visibility� 192 s imon s chlEusEnEr Naturally, surveillance in The Circle is pervasive, and it comes in many different forms and guises� For one thing, it serves as an instrument to intensify competition among employees, who are compelled to constantly participate in online monitoring and self-monitoring, engaging in forms of “performance-based ranking” (24) designed to increase efficiency. Moreover, surveillance is an essential component of the products and services provided by the Circle, as, for instance, the ‘SeeChange’ technology (tiny, inexpensive cameras that can be put up anywhere to stream video through the internet)� Surveillance, then, is directly related to the Circle’s business model� At the same time, however, it is also part of this model’s ‘superstructure,’ in the sense that the novel transforms the notion of total visibility into a crucial virtue that effectively legitimizes the development of new means and technologies of monitoring and tracking� The key element that enables the book to switch back and forth between the utopian and the dystopian mode is, perhaps, the concept of transparency� 23 Obviously, transparency is closely related to democracy - to enlightenment values and public accountability� According to Foucault, at the heart of the French Revolution was the utopian dream “of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation” (Foucault 1981, 152). Total transparency, however, is likewise a central ingredient in many dystopian narratives (most apparently in Nineteen Eighty-Four) depicting a totalitarian surveillance state� In The Circle, the company’s management declares transparency to be the highest political principle, explicitly linking it to the utopian notion of a perfect society free of violence, crime, and political corruption� 24 Promoting the use of ‘SeeChange’ cameras, Eamon Bailey, one of the Circle’s three Wise Men, announces “the dawn of the Second Enlightenment.” As he explains: “Tyrants can no longer hide� There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness� And to this end, I insist that all that happens should be known” (Eggers 2014, 67-68). Yet, surveillance is not just legitimized on political grounds� During the same speech, Bailey also mentions his elderly mother, who is in poor health since she broke her hip in an accident� The SeeChange cameras in her house now enable him to make sure that she is safe� “As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind� No longer do I have to 23 In a sense, the ambiguity of transparency is already significant with regard to the panopticon and its conflicting interpretations. More specifically, while Bentham, being a utilitarian philosopher and democratic reformer, was convinced of his model’s utopian character (see Foucault 1981, 164), the panopticon is also constantly referred to in dystopian accounts of totalitarian surveillance� 24 “Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected […]� And it was natural that it was so, Mae thought� Who else but utopians could make utopia? ” (Eggers 2014, 31). On the ‘utopianism’ of transparency, see also 90-91, 386-387, and 488-489� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 193 wonder, ‘How’s Mom? ’ No longer do I have to wonder, ‘What’s happening in Myanmar? ’” (69). Digital surveillance, then, permeates everything, connecting the near and the far, the personal and the political� Elsewhere in the book, Mae points out yet another rationale for transparency, one that specifically addresses the question of self-surveillance. In a conversation with Kalden (alias Ty, the ‘dissident’ among the three Wise Men), Mae explains that “everything and everyone should be seen […]� I want to be seen. I want proof I existed” (490). Here, surveillance is justified and affirmed on the basis of a reciprocal understanding of identity: Who I am and that I exist is only confirmed through the recognition of others - even if these others merely exist in the virtual realm of the Internet and, besides sending digital ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ (51), have no relation to me� 25 This identity-oriented affirmation of transparency and surveillance directly links to the context of neoliberalism and the society of control� As neoliberalism is marked by an intense flexibilization of economic structures and social arrangements, one’s worth is no longer determined on the basis of relatively solid professions, work relations, or social positions� Rather, in line with the dismantling of the traditional separation between labor and leisure, it relies on more and more fluid (or, in Deleuze’s terms, ‘metastable’) constellations of recognition and modulation� The general merging of life and work under neoliberalism is exceedingly apparent throughout The Circle� In the beginning of the book, Mae is told by her boss “that just as important as the work we do here - and that work is very important - we want to make sure that you can be a human being here, too� We want this to be a workplace, sure, but it should also be a humanplace” (47). While this may sound like an effort to ‘humanize’ work, it actually turns out to be the opposite: a thorough transmutation of ‘private life,’ which gradually manifests itself as a mere continuation of work� Hence, Mae is told at another instance that what she thought would be “extracurricular” is an integral part of her employment: “We consider your online presence to be integral to your work here. It’s all connected” (95-96). While in the beginning of The Circle, Mae only hesitantly makes use of the company’s social media options - and only after being pressured to participate - she eventually develops into a “true believer,” recognizing the Circle’s mission as her own (Lyon 2018, 155). Among other things, this process involves a massive intensification of her social media activities, as she becomes overly eager to boost her “Participation Rank.” 26 Consequently, surveillance and self-surveillance become essential 25 Read in this manner, Mae’s statement in fact resonates with various contemporary recognition-based approaches to identity formation� See, for instance, Fluck 2009, 445: “Identities are not formed exclusively, not even primarily, by attaching one’s own desire to a subject position created in discourse, but by being recognized by others, for without such recognition we literally would not know who we are.” 26 See Eggers 2014, 101: “This is your Participation Rank, PartiRank for short� Some people here call it the Popularity Rank, but it’s not really that� It’s just an algorithmgenerated number that takes into account all your activity in the InnerCircle […] - basically it collects and celebrates all you do here.” Indeed, ‘collects and celebrates’ is a perfect way of describing the neoliberal logic of combining the purely numeric with 194 s imon s chlEusEnEr aspects of Mae’s existence, a tendency that culminates in her announcement to go fully transparent, agreeing to constantly stream video and audio of her daily life (Eggers 2014, 306)� 27 Although The Circle’s portrayal of tracking and transparency is certainly exaggerated, the novel nevertheless proceeds from today’s already existing surveillance capitalism and its technologies of control (many of which Deleuze anticipated almost 30 years ago)� In line with Steven Shaviro, what Eggers demonstrates is that the “reign of universal transparency” is not necessarily “imposed from above,” but involves complicated processes of participation and affective investment� It is hard to decide whether such surveillance practices “from below” (Shaviro 2010, 69) are voluntary or involuntary, as in the neoliberal world of work there is always pressure to participate� Yet, what Eggers underlines is that post-disciplinary surveillance is both based on a ‘desire to see’ and a ‘desire to be seen�’ What is at stake here, however, is more than the well-known question of ‘visual pleasure’ (see Mulvey 1989)� Rather, in the context of neoliberal insecurity, seeing, watching, monitoring, and tracking also function as compensations for the overall loss of social, economic, and personal security� In this regard, the desire to become “allseeing, all-knowing” (Eggers 2014, 71) - the impulse to constantly ‘check everything,’ from emails and social media to physical activity and calorie consumption - is not just related to ‘self-entrepreneurship’ (Bröckling 2007) and the Deleuzian notion of ‘self-modulation,’ but it can also be interpreted as symptomatic of the loss of security under neoliberalism� 28 In the culture of surveillance that emerges as a result of these practices, it is therefore not only ‘Big Brother’ who is watching you, but so might be anyone else� 29 In this respect, the world depicted in The Circle is decidedly post-Orwellian� In other respects, however, Eggers’s novel is in fact not that the Dionysian in order to stimulate participation and increase efficiency. For more on this strategy (with regard to the ‘flexible normalism’ of the Kinsey Reports), see Link 1999, 94-100� 27 In The Circle, this drastic form of self-surveillance is also practiced by politicians and public officials eager (and in many cases pressured) to prove that they have ‘nothing to hide’ (see Eggers 2014, 239-242)� 28 Economic insecurity, material precariousness, and class division - the “grim realities” of neoliberalization (Harvey 2009, 119) - are for the most part absent from the Circle’s ‘bubble,’ yet constitute its invisible outside� One of the rare episodes in which this dimension becomes visible is when Mae’s father is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and faces serious problems with his health insurance (see Eggers 2014, 75)� 29 Despite its art-historical background, it might be fruitful to draw on Michael Fried’s distinction between absorption and theatricality here� While Fried claims (via Chardin) that absorption is based on an “oubli de soi” or “self-forgetting” (Fried 2008, 40), he defines the theatrical (via Diderot) as a “consciousness of being beheld” (Fried 1980, 100)� By implication, the theatrical thereby also entails a consciousness of one’s self and one’s actions; for if one is conscious of being beheld by others, one tends to view oneself through the eyes of these others, being intensely aware of one’s own ‘performance�’ In a sense, this is precisely what is at stake in today’s surveillance capitalism, which is marked by the common feeling of an invisible ‘audience’ or ‘witness’ routinely observing one’s actions� Thus, if such ‘consciousness of being beheld’ is a dominant affect in today’s digital culture, ‘theatricality’ is its primary mode of subjectivity� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 195 different from Nineteen Eighty-Four� For instance, the slogans that are presented to the audience when Mae announces that she will go transparent - s EcrEts a rE l iEs , s haring i s c aring , and P riVacy i s t hEft (Eggers 2014, 305) - are plainly modeled after the Orwellian slogans W ar i s P EacE , f rEEDom i s s laVEry , and i gnorancE i s s trEngth (Orwell 2008, 6)� While this may simply be a playful reference to one of the key texts of dystopian literature, there are other similarities as well� Most importantly, by the end of the novel, the Circle seems to completely transcend the boundaries of business and capitalist commerce and literally becomes a surveillance state� The company now “has its own currency,” “will soon take over state and federal ID databases,” “proposes a system for collecting taxes,” and “is beginning to take over the voting process through its proprietary voting technology, Demoxie” (Martin 2016, 61)� On the one hand, this narrative move merely describes a process that is already taking place, namely the outsourcing of central governmental functions to private corporations� From this perspective, the notion of a privately-owned company that has effectively conquered and incorporated the democratic state evokes the image of post-democracy put into action� On the other hand, however, the reader may wonder whether Eggers’s novel is really so much concerned with surveillance capitalism, and whether the Circle has not served as a stand-in for the state or the government all along� Indeed, despite the book’s focus on ‘participation’ and the instrumentalization of desire, one may argue that its ending mobilizes fears that are relatively similar to the dystopian anxieties solicited by Orwellian narratives of totalitarian surveillance� In other words, although the context is an entirely different one, the politics of The Circle and Nineteen Eighty-Four may ultimately not be that far apart� For example, while Orwell’s novel is typically interpreted as a critique of Soviet-style socialism, The Circle attacks “Infocommunism” (Eggers 2014, 489) and could therefore be read as a warning against totalitarian attempts to stifle individualism and privacy, too. 30 In fact, although Eggers is well aware of the capitalist backdrop of contemporary surveillance, his book seems more concerned with the social costs of the loss of privacy than with the economic exploitation of data� Hence, if The Circle should be read as a critique of capitalism, then it would rather be an ‘artistic critique’ than a ‘social critique’: rather a critique of capitalism as a source of disenchantment and alienation than a critique of economic exploitation and social inequality (see Boltanski/ Chiapello 2007, 36-40)� In addition, by emphasizing how total transparency can have drastic effects on traditional friendships and families, Eggers’s critique is obviously intended to appeal to conservative sentiments as well� 31 30 Contrary to right-wing readings of Orwell’s novel, however, Nineteen Eighty-Four is more than only a critique of actually existing socialism� As Regina Martin argues, the novel instead represents “an urgent call for readers to move beyond the binary opposition of capitalism and Soviet-style communism” (Martin 2016, 60). Similarly, Ty, in The Circle, not just warns against “Infocommunism,” but also against the way in which it is coupled “with ruthless capitalistic ambition” (Eggers 2014, 489). 31 See, for instance, Mae’s deteriorating relationships with her parents, her best friend Annie, and her ex-boyfriend Mercer (who is eventually driven to suicide)� 196 s imon s chlEusEnEr To be sure, The Circle’s ideological ambiguities are in part responsible for the book’s success� As its storyline integrates elements of a (right-wing) libertarian “state-phobia” (Foucault 2008, 76) with aspects of a (left-wing) critique of capitalism, it seems to aim for a broad audience across the political spectrum� To some extent, The Circle’s insights about the nexus between surveillance technology, economic power, and cultural ideology are therefore mitigated by Eggers’s conventional narrative and his ‘individualistic’ focus on the loss of privacy� Nevertheless, what remains unsettling about The Circle is that its portrait of the culture of surveillance - its logic as well as its technologies - appears only slightly detached from the world we already live in� Conclusion Having used the Snowden revelations and the PRISM program as a starting point, the aim of this essay was to investigate the wide array of contemporary surveillance practices against the backdrop of neoliberalism� While authors like Glenn Greenwald have drawn parallels between the NSA’s spy programs and the Orwellian imagination of a totalitarian surveillance state, my argument was that contemporary surveillance (at least in the US and in most other Western democracies) is decidedly post-Orwellian, post-panoptic, and in many ways bound up with economic interests� Having taken my cues from recent analyses of digital ‘surveillance capitalism’ (e�g� Zuboff 2018) and from Deleuze’s notion of the ‘society of control,’ the essay outlined a ‘surveillance nexus’ that combines voluntary and involuntary surveillance, government spying and commercial data gathering, self-tracking devices and social media� On the one hand, this contextualization facilitated examining the US security apparatus as an actor within today’s neoliberal environment� Consequently, the essay emphasized the NSA’s dealings with the private sector and scrutinized the ideological and affective implications of its spying practice� On the other hand, the framework allowed for a possible answer as to why the NSA scandal has not had more wide-ranging consequences� Given the omnipresence of contemporary surveillance (as well as the range of its technological possibilities), it is likely that many Americans have simply become used to the idea of regularly being watched and monitored - a sentiment which might at least partly explain the relative absence of largescale protests and resistance� In this context, David Lyon has argued that ‘being watched’ and ‘watching’ have today become “a way of life”: Today’s surveillance is made possible by our own clicks on websites, our texting messages and exchanging photos� Ordinary people contribute to surveillance as never before� User-generated content engenders the data by which daily doings are monitored� This is how surveillance culture takes shape (Lyon 2018, 2)� As I sought to demonstrate, this ‘participatory’ dimension strongly distinguishes contemporary surveillance from Orwellian or Foucauldian perspectives, both of which are mostly concerned with centralized, ‘top down’ means The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 197 of monitoring and tracking� This is not to say, however, that the ‘bottom up’ manifestations of present-day surveillance culture should merely be attributed to voluntary decisions and personal choice� Rather, in today’s neoliberal environment, the desire to ‘always participate’ is often reflective of material needs and insecurities, or responds to cultural and economic demands - “the compulsion to participate and to process oneself” (Ott 2018, 34). In this constellation (and similar to what is depicted in The Circle), the boundaries between desire and compulsion, ‘inner-directedness’ and ‘other-directedness,’ become increasingly fuzzy� Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to be a popular reference in the discourse on surveillance� For here the boundaries are still intact: no one would doubt that the book is ‘dystopian,’ or that the state it depicts is ‘totalitarian�’ In contrast, discussing phenomena like the ‘participatory panopticon’ is politically much more difficult. 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Populism’s “representative claim,” to invoke political theorist Michael Saward, is paradoxical in that it presents representation as nonrepresentation, or, put differently, in that it insists on instantiating a unified and unmediated presence of representative and represented� The performance of the rally comes to carry the burden of making that postulated unmediated presence a felt reality� In other words, while the populist claim to (non-)representation is asserted rhetorically and bolstered ideologically, it hinges on the attempt to be put into practice by way of an assembly of bodies sharing a physical space in a temporally limited performance� In the course of such an assembly, the performance must produce an appearance in which something becomes manifest that can be identified with the populist claim to unity� In that sense, populism depends on an “aesthetics of appearing” (Martin Seel), or, to use the words of Hannah Arendt, a “space of appearance.” As will become clear in the course of this first half of my two-part suite, bringing up Arendt’s concept of the “space of appearance” and Seel’s notion of the “aesthetics of appearing” in the context of the populist rally is intended as a provocation. At first glance at least, populist rallies centered around figures like Wallace and Trump are no less than the antithesis to these normatively charged theoretical concepts� But I claim that these provocative discrepancies are useful, not primarily to engage in a philosophical dispute with Arendt or Seel, but rather to force us to complicate our understanding of the populist rally itself� To do so, it will be necessary to identify the populist aesthetic of appearing/ appearance as it pertains to right-wing (rather than left-wing) populism� I follow John Judis’s terminology in characterizing right-wing populism as “triadic.” While left-wing populism is “dyadic” in the sense that it creates a distinction between “the people” and “the elites” (or “the establishment”), “triadic” populism distinguishes “the people” at once from those perceived as social and political elites and from those perceived to be at the bottom of the social ladder. While the definition of “the people” in dyadic (or leftwing) populism is potentially inclusive (although the elites must remain the 1 For a sound normative argument about the requirement of - ultimately aesthetic - representation for a democratic public, see Juliane Rebentisch, who writes: “If it is true that the self of collective self-government cannot be assumed to be a unified will and that it must first be brought forth by political representation, then this means that the demos of democracy can never exist beyond the separation thereby established between representatives and the represented, producers and receivers, the rulers and the ruled, performers and the audience� … The democratic answer to the problem of sovereign power does not consist in concealing the latter, but in exhibiting it and thus exposing it to an examination of its legitimacy� For it is precisely through this democratically understood “aestheticization of the political” that democracy preserves its openness to the future” (unpaged). Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 205 people’s “other”), in right-wing triadic populism “the people” are structured by a constitutive outside, made up of groups that are included in the national community in the form of the excluded or the illegitimate� The level of specificity of the populist aesthetic is taken a step further if we take into consideration that today, populism is embedded in a media architecture of celebrity politics, in which the allegedly non-representing representative must use techniques of what I will call “performative polarization” in order to appear in public. This, at last, is where present-day populism as carried forth by Donald Trump markedly differs from the earlier populist innovations of George Wallace� Considerations of celebrity politics have so far come in two versions: either as a warning call about the submerging of politics in mere entertainment - Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) is the classic statement of this position - or as an optimistic perspective on enhanced possibilities of participation and relatability. In that second version, the influx of entertainment logics into politics is seen as a force of democratization� (This perspective has been developed must fully by scholars of political communication influenced by British Cultural Studies; see Corner and Pels, Street, Wheeler.) What both accounts share is the assumption that in celebrity politics the source of political appeal, and thus of power, resides in the media-charisma of a candidate rather than in the substance of particular political positions� The argument that I will develop in the second of my two installments suggests, however, that such accounts need to be revised in order to make sense of the ways in which the media techniques and aesthetics of celebrity politics have come to stand in the service of political polarization� Thinking through the role of the populist representative as a polarizing celebrity figure - whose capacity to polarize requires the attention of the widest possible public - will force us to consider the complex ways in which the populist assembly both consolidates and potentially unsettles the separation of the national community into two opposing factions� Ultimately, the purpose of my inquiry in these two essays will not merely be to consider the aesthetic strategies used to affirm populist claims to unity. The advantage of investigating the aesthetics of populism moreover lies in making us understand the experiential appeals or affordances of the populist assembly� I suggest that by drawing out the aesthetic experience of populism, political aesthetics can add an important dimension to the understanding of populism that has so far received only scant attention� 2 2 The closest to an aesthetics of populism currently available are studies about the “political style” of populist leader figures. See, for instance, Moffitt. These studies, however, rarely try to conceptualize populism as political performance in any comprehensive sense� 206 J ohannEs V oElz I. The Representative Claim In his writings on what he calls the “representative claim,” political scientist Michael Saward has taken important steps in thinking through the performative dimension of political representation� Saward belongs to a number of theorists - along with political theorist Ernesto Laclau, intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit, and political communications scholar John Street, among others - who work against the assumption that the represented are a knowable and given entity whose interests or will politicians will aim to do justice to. “The represented play a role in choosing representatives,” Saward writes, “and representatives ‘choose’ their constituents in the sense of portraying them or framing them in particular, contestable ways” (301-302). For Saward, political representation is not a matter of mimetic duplication, in which the relation between the represented and the representative is one of formal congruence� By formal congruence I mean the equivalence between the interests or will of the people and the actions of the representative who is translating the popular will into law (or at least into the political process of law-making)� On such a view, the representative duplicates the will of her constituency, and by inserting it into the process of negotiation, or by putting it directly into law, the representative simultaneously gives expression to the popular will� Against this (what I call, borrowing Frank Ankersmit’s terms) mimetic and expressive view, Saward insists that representation is a matter of making claims, on the part of the representative, about the representative herself, the constituents, and the world which is shared by both parties� Representation thus takes the form of performative acts, which is also to say that it consists of those very acts� As Saward puts it, “to an important extent, representation is not something external to its performance, but is something generated by the making, the performing, of claims to be representative” (302). These performances thus create the bond of representative and represented - a bond that in the fullest sense lasts only for the duration of the performative act� But performative representation is never productive in any uncomplicated way� It does not simply bring forth a shared world of the political that then becomes a given, uncontestable fact� Representation is a matter of claims rather than of matching or duplicating given, stable forms of will and action� In that sense, we can say with Saward that “no would-be representative can fully achieve ‘representation,’ or be fully representative� Facts may be facts, but claims are contestable and contested; there is no claim to be representative of a certain group that does not leave space for its contestation or rejection by the would-be audience or constituency, or by other political actors” (302). Nonetheless, representational claims do succeed, which means that the space of contestation and rejection is also a space of acceptance� Representative claims are only successful in bringing forth a shared reality with a specific bond between representative and represented if they are acknowledged and approved by the receivers of the claim� But two aspects of the act of reception of a representative claim should be noted here: first, Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 207 approval and disapproval, or acceptance and rejection, sound like cognitive operations, but they may very well play out on the level of affects; second, approval and disapproval, acceptance and rejection, ought not to be conceptualized as binary terms that produce totalized states� In principle, claims remain contestable and the renewal or endurance of approval is never assured. Affectively speaking, the intensity of approval is subject to fluctuation and reversal; from a cognitive perspective, agreement and disagreement are not given single-mindedly. Any “yes” to a representative claim may be followed by a silent “but,” which, on the next occasion, may be uttered as a “no.” Representational success, in other words, is highly unstable and momentary, even in cases where acceptance of the representative claim ends up enduring for a long time through multiple successful renewals� 3 With these thoughts in mind, consider the following description of a George Wallace rally, provided by historian Dan Carter, the author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (1995), from which I already took my opening quotation: As almost every observer sensed, a Wallace rally was an act of communion between the speaker and his audience, for he was one of the last grandmasters of the kind of foot-stomping public speaking that characterized American politics, particularly southern politics, in the age before television� A Wallace speech excited the kind of nonanalytical emotional response that media advisers had always sought to evoke� (345) Carter points to a common perception that assemblies around “grandmasters” produce momentary experiences of communion for everyone involved� In the context of a political rally, these experiences - emerging, as Carter says, from nonanalytical emotional responses - tend to be interpreted, implicitly or explicitly, as the coming together of representative and represented in a union of presence� This interpretation often seeps into the self-description of those participating in populist rallies� In a close analysis of the choreography of a Trump rally in Springfield, Missouri, on September 21, 2018, New York Times reporter Katie Rogers quotes a Trump fan as follows: “If you feel the country is divided, come to one of these rallies. There’s a lot of unity here” (Rogers). When we look at footage from populist rallies, whether those of Wallace or Trump, we often cannot help shuddering at the way in which those assembled in the venue begin to affirm the representative’s claim. Those who are present in the hall seem to take up their role as represented with remarkable abandon� As they cheer on the representative, they seem to merge into an undifferentiated mass� Not only do they seem to give up any capacity for judging the representative claim; they seem to cease to exist as independent 3 Particularly for the study of political affects this entails a warning� For even when we address the affective dimension of representative claims, we should avoid analyzing affects in quasi-behaviorist fashion (as is frequently done in studies based on affect theory)� Representative claims, even when they strongly address the level of affects, ought not to be imagined to work in the manner of mechanical manipulation� For a critique of affect theory along these lines, see Ruth Leys� 208 J ohannEs V oElz subjects altogether� Instead they engage in forms of expression that signal to the senses - to their own and to their observers’ - an overpowering sense of sameness� They chant in rhythmic homogeneity and often make gestures in synchronicity� These moments of the populist assembly have informed the assembly’s theorization and have, by extension, contributed to theories of populism as a whole. This is true for the analyses of such influential political theorists as Nadia Urbinati and Jan-Werner Müller. Müller identifies populism as a “particular moralistic imagination of politics: ” In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist: populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people� Other political competitors are just part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say, while not having power themselves; when in government, they will not recognize anything like a legitimate opposition� The populist core claim also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people to begin with� (unpaged) Without using it as a technical term, Müller singles out the anti-pluralist claim as the defining feature of populism. Not unlike Saward, he considers the “the people” constructed by the claim a fiction. But unlike the position I am trying to develop here, Müller seems to assume that in populism the anti-pluralist claim is heeded in a stable way� The whole question of how the populist claim is received doesn’t even enter into his account� It is not a necessary ingredient to his theory because the presence of the claim and the obvious political success of populist candidates make the reception of the claim seem obvious and thus irrelevant for the analysis� For Müller, it is as if the claim itself constituted an anti-pluralist political community� By contrast, Nadia Urbinati does take the audience reception of the populist claim to representation into consideration, but she bases that reception on the moment of experiential communion that I have sketched above� Quoting from Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), she writes: A populist leader is not properly elected: it is acclaimed� Consequently, Schmitt forcefully wrote that the “will of the people” is the same whether it is expressed in the ballot or by acclamation: “[e]verything depends on how the will of the people is formed.” But then he promptly added that “the will of the people can be expressed just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken for granted, an obvious and unchallenged presence, than through the statistical apparatus” of vote counting. … In a populist assembly there is no need to count votes and acknowledge minorities, because the leader will be a leader of the whole, not simply of the majority� Acclamation is not a form peculiar to representative democracy; moreover, it is antithetical to democracy� (119) By Urbinati’s account, “acclamation” is the activity and sole political function of the crowd of the populist assembly� Though she inverts Schmitt’s political valuation, she leans on his conception of what acclamation is: in acclamation, “something [is] taken for granted” and becomes “an obvious and unchallenged presence.” For Schmitt, that something is the will of the people as it is embodied and expressed by the leader figure. Translated into the vocabulary Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 209 of Michael Saward, acclamation is a total and unwavering approval, on the part of the represented, of the representative claim� In fact, Urbinati suggests that in the populist assembly, the leader’s claim to express “the will of the people” is not simply approved and accepted, but recognized as a presence that cannot be challenged� When a claim is acclaimed, it is reduplicated� If we tie together the descriptions of the rally that point to the feeling of unity and communion with theorizations by Schmitt or Urbinati that see in the assembly the acclamation of something that is obvious and unchallengeable, we can begin to see that a slippage is taking place between two different processes� The fact that people experience and describe the rally as bringing forth moments of communion does not, I suggest, mean that the representative has, in Saward’s phrasing, “fully achieved ‘representation’.” The imaginary experience of unity and communion may be described as a desired effect of the populist rally, but such experiences are momentary effects of dynamic relations which themselves rely on the continuing nonidentity of those involved in the performance� 4 When theorists jump to the conclusion that the populist rally shows how representative and represented truly merge in a unified presence, the performative logic of representation makes way for an expressive logic of representation� Suddenly, representation is regarded as a matter of expressing the people’s will - which is exactly as Schmitt phrases it and Urbinati repeats it� II. Staging the Rally If we want to avoid this slippage, the task is to come to an understanding of the aesthetic experience of unity occasioned by the populist rally� What kind of staging and choreography do populists employ to generate these experiences? If we get a better sense of the performative aesthetics of the populist assembly, we can also begin to grasp the dynamics of representation active therein� Let me sketch a few of the characteristic elements of the staging of Donald Trump’s rallies since 2015� During the 2016 Presidential campaign, literary writers and journalists like Dave Eggers (for The Guardian), George Saunders (for The New Yorker), Matt Taibbi (for Rolling Stone), and Mark Danner (for The New York Review of Books) wrote long-form reportages about Trump rallies, and they all stressed that the event didn’t begin when Trump took the stage, but much earlier, while audience members were waiting outside or inside the venue before Trump had even flown into the respective city. Waiting in line, conversing with fellow rally-goers, slowly walking by merchandise stands, filled with articles bearing slogans of varying degrees of combativeness, 4 This is the case even from the constructionist viewpoint that representative and represented are not preceding entities but come into being as a result of the representative claim� In other words, non-identity does not mean the difference between two preexisting identities� These interacting identities are rather produced in the process of their interaction, through the performative act of the claim� As so often, performative logic here is difficult to square with the temporal order of cause-and-effect. 210 J ohannEs V oElz being exposed to loud music by a range of pop music not necessarily associated with Trump’s political camp (as Eggers reports, Trump’s team chose Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”), engaging in altercations with protestors, mostly verbal, but sometimes physical: all of these, the reporters suggest, are standard pre-show features that have to be seen as an integral part of the event and that are crucial for building up the anticipation of the Trump show� But waiting outside and inside the venue is not just a matter of building up a sense of anticipatory suspense� At stake is also the need to bring to life the physical space of the events� Especially during 2016 campaign, Trump’s rallies often took place in the most nondescript and perfunctory of places, such as airport hangars� Among the reasons for this choice may have been the practical advantages of allowing Trump to fly in on his private Boeing 757, step out of his plane in front of his fans (and thus use the private jetliner as a symbol of his success, wealth, power, and American craftsmanship 5 ), and then fly to the next event immediately after. However, staging rallies in such non-places far exceeds its practical uses� From a performative perspective, the selection of such sites is highly significant. This becomes plausible at once if we compare the airport hangar (or even the more traditional multi-purpose event locations that Trump frequently used in 2017 and 2018) to the rallying grounds built for NSDAP conventions at Nuremberg� Initially, it may seem that the Nuremberg rallies and Trump rallies (or any other Populist rally) serve the same purpose� Consider Hans-Ulrich Thamer’s explanation of the rationale for Nationalist Socialist mass rallies: The principle objective behind these massive spectacles was to offer visual evidence of the German community united behind its leader� The ritualized rally of all National Socialist organizations was carefully stage-managed to present an impressive image of mass support for the new regime� The rally site formed the stage for the production of a Führer-cult� Hitler was not only leading actor and point of reference for both the architecture and the processions; he was also director and high-priest of the event, symbolically bringing the people together in an emotionally elating, communal experience� (172-173) As in the populist rally of our contemporary period, the purpose of the event was to demonstrate unity in the joint affirmation of a leading figure. But the architecture of the Führer cult was built for a type of performance that radically differs from a Trump rally� National Socialist decision makers consciously decided to build the rallying grounds as a single-purpose site� It was designed for a carefully planned political festival (lasting four, then seven, 5 See Dave Eggers’ description of a rally in Sacramento, California, on June 1, 2016: “‘You like that airplane? ’ he said, jabbing a thumb behind him. ‘It’s good, right? Made in America� Made in America� Boeing�’ The crowd roared and looked at the plane� On closer examination, there was something strange about the plane� It looked like it had come from another decade� And that decade was the 1980s� Trump’s name was emblazoned on it in a font called Akzidenz-Grotesk, a typeface popular 30 years ago� Its tail bore a giant ‘T’, rendered in a way that implied it had been striped by high winds� This was another design motif from the 80s, usually used on children’s basketball shoes” (Eggers, unpaged)� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 211 and finally eight days [see Thamer 176]) that followed a strict political liturgy, in which there was supposed to be no room for any contingencies� Indeed, the detailed liturgical plan for the NSDAP rallies served a dual purpose: it conveyed an atmosphere of the politically sacred, which was assisted by the monumental architecture - the National Socialist church of political theology - and it moreover set the rally free from any dependence on Hitler’s personal charisma� As Thamer explains: Albert Speer, co-creator and executor of this concept, informed us that it was Hitler’s aim to restrict the significance of the single personality of the head of State or Party leader within the ritual, and to put in its place a course of events which in itself was capable of impressing the masses� This idea arose from his observation that, in all probability, his successor would not be person with the same mass appeal� Therefore, the ritual had to predominate and a system be installed where even a “small political goblin” would be able to bring a certain fascination to bear on the masses� (178) The idea, then, was not to derive the emotional power of the rally from the singular presence of the leader, but rather from the totality that made up the Gesamtkunstwerk of the rally� The leader had a particular role to play that was integrated into, and subservient to, the overall effect� As George Mosse puts it, the aim was to bring “the audiences into contact with the supposedly immutable forces outside the course of everyday life” (qtd. in Thamer 178). Whereas Nazi rallies were intended to point to immutable forces, a Trump rally highlights mutability� The hangar’s nondescriptness points to the fact that it will serve a different purpose after the event� Rather than stressing eternity, it produces a visceral sense of “now.” In contemporary parlance of event-shopping, we might think of the hangar as a “pop-up venue”: its ephemerality stresses the urgency not to miss out on the now� Put differently, the sense of presence to be achieved through the Trump rally is linked to a particular spatio-temporality of architecture� Whereas for the “Thousand- Year Reich” the materiality of the rally site had to appear as timeless - to last longer than it materially (not to mention politically) could - for Trump’s populist campaign the venue has to suggest that its existence as a social site with a particular purpose will disappear before its material demise� Needless to say, the emphasis on the present moment is not intended to suggest that Trump’s power will be short-lived� The function of the dialectic of presence-in-the-now and vanishing is rather to facilitate an experience marked by the participatory unfolding of the present, and ultimately, of a sense of presence intended to be understood as the overcoming of representation� Trump’s performative style is perfectly calibrated to this end� III. Trump’s Performative Style Trump routinely boasts that he doesn’t use scripts� When he is forced to make presidential-sounding statements in the wake of tragedies, he subtly signals to his audiences that he has to set aside his habit of unscripted speaking for 212 J ohannEs V oElz a minute to placate the rest of the country� Thus, even when reading from script does he manage to affirm that the true Trump is the unscripted Trump. And he clearly isn’t just boasting: Trump really does seem to riff from talking point to talking point, with the riffing being at least as important as the talking points themselves� Katy Waldman has noted in Slate with only some exaggeration that like Obama or Clinton, Trump uses discourse markers to project folksiness or spontaneous feeling. (“Honestly, she should be locked up.”) In his mouth, though, these tokens hedge and redirect of their own volition, as if no one is driving the conversational car� … Regardless of his familiarity with the topic at hand, Trump will luxuriate in all the “let me tell you”s he can possibly throw into his sentences to draw attention to the fact that he’s talking� Of course he employs a ton of discourse markers: Trump as a political force is all discourse marker, no discourse� (unpaged) Indeed, Trump seems to derive narcissistic pleasure from the sheer act of talking - from being spoken by language, as it were - but because that pleasure is derived from language itself rather than from the speaking subject, his performance extends an invitation to his hearers to take up a share of his narcissism� 6 However, one of the reasons why letting language itself “drive the conversational car” provides a shared payoff of pleasure has less to do with some narcissistic sense of affirmation derived from being integrated into the symbolic order than it does with the sense of openness, of potentiality, produced by such semi-volitional discourse� In letting go rhetorically, Trump makes available to the senses an experience of the openness and contingency, not just of the future, but of the present� This moment can be theorized with an altered version of what philosopher Martin Seel calls “the aesthetics of appearing.” In discussing sports events - which share certain features with a Trump rally - Seel describes the aesthetics of appearing as leading to a pleasurable experience of the indeterminacy of the present� For Seel, appearance denotes the complete set of the phenomenal properties attributed to any object, whereas appearing designates the selective subjective perception of these properties, or, as he puts it, “the phenomenal simultaneity of the aspects sensitively perceivable in an object” (46). According to Seel, when we take up an aesthetic attitude toward an object we create the possibility of moving the appearing of appearances to the foreground of our consciousness� The result, Seel argues, has the capacity to be liberating: Much as consciousness of the fact of an extensive cognitive and practical indeterminateness and of an indeterminacy of the world can be crippling in many contexts, it can also be liberating� It is liberating when it emerges as consciousness 6 My account of narcissism here is admittedly non-technical� A more rigorous approach to this aspect would have to take into account Freud’s idea (developed in his “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 1914) that the narcissistic, self-loving individual develops her appeal precisely because she is self-sufficiently enamored with herself (the feminine pronoun here reflects Freud’s own focus). For a cogent, though not yet fully fleshed out, analysis of the appeal of Trump’s narcissism (based on Heinz Kohut rather than Freud), see Lunbeck� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 213 of unexplored, undetermined, open possibilities that exist here and now� This consciousness emerges when something is perceived in its sensuous particularity and for the sake of its particularity� This consciousness becomes aware that it is not the future but the present that is radically indeterminable� In a certain sense, of course, the future is much less determinable than anything that occurs in the present or occurred in the past� But the future is too indeterminable to be experienced in the repleteness of its indeterminacy, which is the privilege of the ephemeral present� (138, emphases in original) In making the aesthetics of appearing dependent upon the perception of an object’s sensuous particularity for the sake of its particularity, Seel discloses his normative orientation toward art as the proper place of aesthetics� He suggests that no matter whether we are in a sports arena or in a museum, we have to make a conscious effort to take up an aesthetic attitude and leave behind any regard for the pragmatic aspects about the object in question� In a sports arena, this would mean no longer caring about who wins� Only when we focus, if only for a second, purely on the athlete’s movements can we experience the present in “the repleteness of its indeterminacy.” On that condition, a political rally-goer would have to be able to zoom herself out of the heated social context and enter into a kind of disinterested pleasure - a highly unlikely situation, which, even if it were to happen, would tell us little about how a rally works� Though adherents of Kantian aesthetics would strongly disagree, there is ultimately little reason why we should only speak of a truly aesthetic attitude if it has been purified of any pragmatic admixture. In order to sense the openness of the present, attendees of a Trump rally do not need to change their attitude in such a way that they listen to Trump as if he were a language poet� In fact, they must not� The aesthetic pleasure to be derived from his performance very much hinges on his style, but style is only effective as a particular way in which something is done� If Trump’s talk were perceived as mere babbling - as sound emptied of ideological meaning and extracted from the pragmatics of the situation of speech - he would be incapable of evoking a strong sense of the ephemeral present� It is only because he is addressing his audience in his particular role and style - making use of language that veers from the protocols of political speech without ceasing to be just that - that the contingency of the present moment can be made to appear� 7 The core of this aesthetic experience of appearing is not the repleteness of an object that can be perceived only in a contemplative spirit and that requires bracketing all pragmatic considerations� Put differently, the sense of liberation does not come from the fact that we realize that our object of concern reveals unlimited aspects if only we approach it through the senses, outside of the strictures of concepts� It rather comes from the fact that once 7 See in this context Erika Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics of performance, which starts from the assumption that performances create communities through the “fusion of the aesthetic and the social� The community is based on aesthetic principles but its members experience it as a social reality - even if uninvolved spectators might perceive it as purely aesthetic” (55). 214 J ohannEs V oElz language itself “is driving the conversational car” of the political rally, each moment, each word, each sound presents a surprise, i�e�, a deviation from what is expected� It is a surprise that is not primarily future-oriented - we don’t expect the next word with anticipatory suspense - but that affects the present moment and charges it with a sense of presence� In deviating from the expected, the present moment displays its contingency and thus draws attention to its very now-ness� To say that language itself is driving the conversational car is no doubt hyperbolic and in a sense also beside the point� It isn’t quite true that Trump has given up all control� What matters is that he is an improvisational performer, that words and gestures are determined on the spot (whether by him or by some system of language is ultimately irrelevant)� For the audience members, this creates the sense that they are all equally part of a process of an unfolding present� This helps specifying the precise way in which the experience of his performance can be said to be “liberating”: If not even Trump can foretell how things will develop, being located jointly in the indeterminate present takes on an equalizing force� In that sense, unscripted, improvisational performance makes available an experience that can well be described as democratizing� More importantly, however, it is an experience that creates a sense of unity: everyone present is sharing in the same unfolding present� This is always the case when people inhabit the same space, but only through aesthetic strategies - in this case through Trump’s improvisational style - can this shared unfolding present be said to be sensed as appearing� And only in its appearing can it be experienced as shared� IV. Improvisational Interaction But the communion-effect of a Trump rally emerges not merely from the display of the unscripted, processual nature of Trump’s discourse� As in any improvisation-based art form, improvisational political performance is particularly suited for interaction� It doesn’t go too far to say that Trump’s style is made for interactivity with the participants of his rallies� In exploiting the possibilities of unscripted (which doesn’t mean unrehearsed) verbal and physical gestures, he creates invitations for audience input and can furthermore react spontaneously to that input� Before we look at particular examples to see how this process works, it should be noted that even the media-visual and architectural set-up of his rallies are designed to highlight this dynamic back-and-forth� Whereas some Republican contenders in the 2016 primaries, like Ted Cruz, still used (at least occasionally) the traditional stage set-up in which the politician is up on a podium facing the audience, Trump rallies architecturally create the impression as if he were positioned in midst of his supporters� To this end, so-called V�I�P� seats, rising up steeply from stage level, are installed behind the podium� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 215 These V�I�P� seats are limited in number, but on the images recorded by the cameras positioned in the back, they create the impression of an endless mass of supporters� They exceed, if not by far, the frame of the on-camera area� As The New York Times reports, attendees visible in that area are often “super-fans” who follow Trump from rally to rally. Alternatively, they are chosen by local organizers, get access thanks to having arrived early, or, in some cases, are chosen by chance (Mervosh, unpaged)� But as Jennifer Cunningham of SKDKnickerbocker, a political consulting firm that has worked on presidential campaigns, explains, “The rule is that you vet everything and everyone so there are no surprises” (Mervosh, unpaged). Indeed, it is remarkable that V�I�P� audiences tend to be composed of similar subsets from rally to rally� In the 2018 midterm rallies, among them were families with pre-teen children, groups of women in pink shirts carrying signs that read “Women for Trump,” and a few persons of color� The aim of showing this spectrum of cheerful faces, it seems, is to fight the impression that Trump attracts a fan base that looks backward in resentment� But if concerns with identity play into the composition of the V�I�P� group, those concerns are a tribute to a sphere of existence which the very phrase “V.I.P.” - in its resignified meaning of the rally - is meant to push to the background� The usage of the phrase by rally organizers suggests how two social realities - that of everyday life and that of the rally - are exchanged for one another. For what qualifies these people as “very important” has nothing to do with their social standing (here the rally differs from the V�I�P� lounges of sports events) and everything with their function for the rally itself� Capturing rally-goers on camera is a technique that was not invented by the Trump campaign, but for his performances this visual convention acquires heightened importance� It allows television and Internet viewers to see both parties to the interaction at once� Indeed, it is the interaction itself that becomes a crucial element of the televised content of the rally� The ramifications of this staging go even further: V.I.P. attendees interact with both Trump and their fellow audience members, but they do so in the awareness of being filmed, and thus of performing before the camera. This awareness is heightened by Trump’s frequent comments about the ways in which television teams will cover - or, as he has it, fail to cover adequately - the audience� Trump’s obsession with the size of his audience during his inauguration gains a new dimension of meaning in this light: turning the coverage of his audience into a public debate is in line with his interactive aesthetics of putting the audience itself at the center of attention� Because individual Trump audiences are invited to identify as belonging to a larger “movement,” turning the inauguration audience into a talking point at rallies becomes conflatable with talking about the audience present at a given rally. The attention which both Trump and his supporters collectively pay to their own coverage during the event also complicates the nature of the rally itself� On one level, rallies derive their character as performative events from the assembly of physical bodies in a physical space� “The bodily co-presence of actors and spectators [is] the basis for a community between them,” argues 216 J ohannEs V oElz drama theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte (60)� Only the interaction of embodied minds - that is, of beings who are conscious of themselves as bodily beings - allows a performance to produce what is perceived by the participants as “a temporary social reality” (55). On another level, however, these rallies are media events, and their existence as mediated realities is woven into the creation of the short-lived community of embodied performance: all participants of the rally consciously co-perform a media production� Even more, we can assume that the media appearance of the event is not merely discussed during the event but visually imagined by those involved in creating the temporary community of physical bodies� Thus the behavior at the rally - interactive and spontaneous though it might be - is informed by the model of the Trump rally made familiar on TV or the Internet� In short, in the rally, mediality and physicality are nested inside one another� For the analyst who relies on filmed coverage of Trump rallies, this requires taking into consideration that even when we watch the events in their full length, the co-constructedness of physical embodiment and mediality must be reconstructed from the mass-mediated material� This methodological complication notwithstanding, the available footage does convey a sense of the rhythm in which the interactive dynamic of the performance plays out� The interaction is marked by fluctuating intensities of affective involvement, which becomes visible with greatest clarity on the faces of the attendees in the V�I�P� stands (though those facial expressions, it should be noted, do not always fully correspond to the audible cheering and booing from the part of the venue not on camera)� Trump’s speeches do not excite the same level of audience engagement all the way through, although almost every one of Trump’s utterances, by featuring multiple repetitions of short phrases and various discourse markers, invites his audiences to respond� As a rule, the energy level drops whenever Trump announces policies at any level of detail or when he tells an extended story about himself without rhetorically involving the audience� For whole stretches of time, the camera captures V�I�P� members who seem uncertain of how to behave, who display low levels of attentiveness, or who outright yawn� Trump overcomes these low-energy passages by suddenly changing the topic to one of his (and his audience’s) boogey men� In these situations, he frequently provides cues for one of the well-known three-syllable chants - “Lock her up! ,” “Drain the Swamp,” “Build the Wall,” “U-S-A,” etc. - or he leaves a pause and lets the audience decide on its own which chant to choose (which sometimes leads to simultaneous, competing chants)� For a paradigmatic example, I will analyze a few moments from a rally held in Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 26, 2018, the day Cesar Sayoc, the suspect behind the mail bombs sent to several prominent Trump critics, was arrested� Approximately six minutes into the rally, Trump addresses the mail bombs and quickly comes to blame the media� Thereafter, he talks about his unfair treatment by journalists, his success in preventing a World War with North Korea, his proud identification as a nationalist, his plans for a tax Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 217 cut for the middle class, and the doom that awaits America should Nancy Pelosi become Speaker of the House� From here, he switches to his initiative to force down the price of prescription drugs� What follows is my attempt at a transcription of the ensuing two minutes and ten seconds (minutes 17: 50 to 20: 00) that captures his words, some of his gestures, as well as the V�I�P� audience response� Following my transcript, I include select screen shots that capture the different levels of audience engagement throughout the sequence: And yesterday, which got very, very little print - very little ink by these [pointing to the back] great gentleman, and ladies [he pauses, interspersed laughter and some boos in the audience], by the [another pause] fake news [boos and excited screaming simultaneously] - yesterday, yesterday - [he pauses to mark the insertion of a phrase which he then cuts short] - it really did, it’s a very imp… - we signed a bill: Prescription drug prices are going to come tumbling down! [He highlights this last phrase with a downward gesture of his right arm and lowers the pitch of his voice to mimic the movement of prices; the audience cheers enthusiastically, with individual V�I�P�s holding up their signs�] You know we have other countries [he pauses to wait until the applause from the previous sentence settles down], we have other countries that, for the same pill, from the same company, made in the saaaame plant [pause] - wherever the hell it’s made [some audience members break out in laughter] - you go and you see that saaaame pill, same box, same everything, selling for ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent of what Americans are forced to pay. That’s all ending, folks, that’s all ending, ok? [Mild cheers]� Hopefully you don’t need prescription drugs, but if you do, you’re gonna get them a hell of a lot cheaper, because it’s going this way [points downward with his right hand; the cheering is noticeably quieter than in the previous iteration of this point]� But the middlemen - and the drug companies - but the middle men are not thrilled with me right now� [Mild cheers�] They’re not thrilled with me� These are very rich people, they are not thrilled! They are not thrilled with Donald Trump right now� [Cocks his head as if to invite audience response; the cheering stays mild]� And the Democrats [pauses] want to invite [another pause] caravan after caravan of illegal aliens [loud booing] into our country [booing gets louder] and they wanna sign them up for free healthcare, free welfare, free education, for the right to vote, they want to sign them, for the right to vote [booing reaches a climax], what’s that all about! [He looks around askance� Then walks away from the microphone, facing the V.I.P.s. Some scream “Donald Trump! ,” some “Build that wall! ” In the course of chanting, their faces begin to lighten up. He raises his hand and turns back around to the microphone]� The right to vote - you ever hear that one! 218 J ohannEs V oElz Figure 1: “And yesterday…” Wavering attention in the audience. Figure 2: “by the fake news! ” Booing turns into excited cheering as Trump uses his signature phrase� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 219 Figure 3: “…tumbling down! ” The next level of excitement signaled by applause and the raising of signs� Figure 4: “…made in the saaaame plant.” Some audience members are drifting off, others seem to be awaiting the next cue, which will ensue in the following sentence: “wherever the hell it’s made” will be one of the comic high points of the sequence. 220 J ohannEs V oElz Figure 5: “It’s going down.” Repeat of “tumbling down” elicits hardly a reaction. Figure 6: “They are not thrilled [with Donald Trump right now]! ” Third iteration of the phrase, but the audience isn’t very thrilled either� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 221 Figure 7: “Caravan after caravan.” Audience is with Trump again, booing frenetically. Figure 8: Trump steps aside to let the audience take over� Some are still booing, some are chanting “Build that Wall! ” Hence there are thumbs up and thumbs down simultaneously� 222 J ohannEs V oElz What this sequence shows is that the temporary community emanating from the back and forth between Trump and his audience is by no means a stable entity� With every sentence, Trump risks disrupting what Fischer-Lichte calls “the autopoietic feedback loop [that] is generated and kept in motion not just through visible and audible actions and attitudes of actors and spectators but also through the energy circulating between them” (59). Thematically, this is one of the more challenging sections of the rally for Trump, as he is trying to address - or rather to celebrate - his policy measure about drug prices� Although bringing down prices for prescription drugs has great populist potential in that it addresses the problems of the common man in economic terms, its relative technicality makes the issue a challenge for the arousal of sustained emotion� There is a prolonged lull in this section which begins when Trump repeats his - initially popular - bit about declining prices. While in the first round he builds up the point to great effect (figure 3), in its second iteration the audience hardly responds at all (figure 5). Trump attempts to get the audience back by another typically populist move: he puts himself in opposition to pharmaceutical executives and lobbyists, who here come to embody the elites� But although he is pulling all the performative tricks he can muster - he repeats his punch line three times - the audience does not come back alive (figure 6). His solution is a sudden veering to a different boogey man: Democrats who are in cahoots with “caravan after caravan” of illegal immigrants. Only when Trump replaces his initial villain - the managerial elites of the pharmaceuticals - with a new villain made up of a combination of his political Figure 9: Audience fully activated, rhythmically chanting “Build that Wall! ” Facial expressions border on the ecstatic� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 223 opponents and the racially othered illegal immigrants does he succeed in eliciting a strong reaction� And a strong reaction it is, indeed: having incited their rage, he leaves the stage to his followers (figures 8 and 9). United in their aversion to the dual enemy (corresponding to Judis’s notion of “triadic populism”), Trump initiates what Fischer-Lichte describes as “role reversal”: “Role reversal … can be understood as an interplay of disempowerment and empowerment which applies to both artists and spectators� The artists relinquish their powerful positions as the performance’s sole creators; they agree to share - to varying degrees, of course - their authorship and authority with the audience” (50). Remarkably, the empowerment of the audience brings about an affective alteration that gets increasingly severed from the initial emotion. While figure 8 shows the overlapping of joy and rage, a few moments later the audience, fully engaged in rhythmic chanting, has reached something like a state of rapture (figure 9). It is the position of “authorship and authority” that transforms the initially negative emotions into enthusiasm� V. The Community of Judgment and the Populist Space of Appearance Trump’s rallies produce a constant string of occasions for judgment that play out in the medium of audience responsiveness: judgment is not expressed by the alternatives of booing and cheering, but by the very intensity of the response� In that sense, booing and cheering are interchangeable forms of responsiveness that must be contrasted with silence, boredom and yawning� I started my discussion by making use of Michael Saward’s notion of the “representative claim.” In that context, judgment takes the form of an “acceptance.” In Saward’s theory, acceptance does not refer to political proposals of the representative, nor to the bid of a would-be representative to be elected� Acceptance rather refers to the “political reality” (Ankersmit 47) produced by the act of representation, i�e�, by the framing and shaping of representative, represented, and the world shared by them� Though Saward doesn’t use the phrase, acceptance of the political reality at least in part takes the form of aesthetic judgments� The question this raises - and which I will address in this final passage - is how to conceptualize the relation between aesthetic judgment and acceptance (or affirmation). When interacting with the attendees of his rallies, Trump himself is stunningly candid about the aesthetic nature of their judgment (though he would not frame the issue in these terms)� Consider the following sequence from a rally in Golden, Colorado, held shortly before the Presidential election on October 29, 2016� The passage begins 43 minutes and 32 seconds into the recording: I want the entire corrupt Washington establishment to hear and hear, and I mean big-league hear [pause and cheering] the words of us - not me, it’s ussss - when we win on November 8th [pause and cheering] we are going [switching his voice to a growl] to Washington, D�C� [pause, cheering, and continued growling voice thereafter] WE WILL [long pause, in which he lifts up his hand to conduct 224 J ohannEs V oElz the audience, which picks up the cue and collectively chants: ] DRAIN - THE - SWAMP! [Cheering] I tell people I hated that expression� Started a week ago� I didn’t like it� I said, Ugh, that’s corny� [He spreads his arms, pauses, the audience laughs�] I said� And then I went, I said it, half-heartedly said it, the place went crazy. [Cheering.] You know, Frank Sinatra didn’t love “My Way.” And then he sang it, and he saw what was happening� And then it became the biggest [sic], and he ended up loving it like crazy, but: That was a very interesting thing - Drain the swamp [cheering] - very accurate� Let’s take Trump at face value here� He initially dismisses one of his signature slogans on aesthetic grounds - it is “corny” - and then compares his predicament as a political candidate with that of a popular musician� At issue is the aesthetic judgment of the performer in comparison to that of the audience� If the fans concur in their judgment, then clearly the performer must recognize that he has erred� No doubt, in Trump’s logic - yes, just like in Kant’s and Arendt’s - aesthetic judgments can be argued about� As Trump makes clear to his audience, any individual’s judgment is fallible, which also means that it is not purely subjective� Trump, of course, is not a real Kantian but an aesthetician brought forth by the culture industry: for him, authority lies with the criterion of quantity� The masses know best because they are they majority� They cannot misjudge collectively� What do we make of this self-conscious aestheticization of politics by a right-wing populist? The aesthetics of appearing, I argued earlier, admixes aesthetics and sociality� We can now see that this admixture produces a double reference for the judgments of his audience� First, in taking up their part of the improvisational interaction, rally-goers judge Trump’s input in reference to the social and political world� They judge whether they agree with his propositions, but more importantly, they judge to which degree his propositions (principal agreement to which is largely taken for granted) resonate affectively with the world they aim to co-create, with him and their fellow attendees, in the performance� Secondly, they also judge the aesthetic qualities of his - and their - performative propositions in and of themselves� Collective chants are no longer appreciated solely or primarily for their content but for their recognizable power as chants� Chants become chant-alongs, and they are self-reflexively greeted as such. In Trump’s world, comparing “Drain the Swamp” to “My Way” doesn’t pose the slightest risk of a shock of recognition about the reduction of politics to aesthetics� The affective judgment of cheering is about the aesthetic quality of the cheer, and consciously, affirmatively so. One has to ask the perverse question, then, whether a Trump rally might not be the fulfillment of Hannah Arendt’s highly idealistic concept of “the space of appearance.” My answer will be in the negative, but the fact that this question can be asked with at least a sliver of plausibility already goes a long way in challenging the idea that a populist rally can be characterized appropriately as the acclamation of some pre-existing popular will, that it is the successful (if regrettably totalitarian) expression and materialization of unity� Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 225 Arendt developed the idea of the space of appearance most fully in the late 1950s, in essays such as “What is Freedom? ” and “The Crisis in Culture” (both included in Between the Past and the Future, 1961), and in The Human Condition (1958)� The concept of the space of appearance can be thought of as Arendt’s understanding of the ideal democratic public, modeled after the Greek polis� The space of appearance does not automatically exist by way of the co-presence of human beings in the same place� For the space of appearance to come into existence, persons liberated from having to worry about reproducing their material lives (because they have delegated these tasks to slaves, wife, and other dependents) must come together to exercise their freedom in speech and action� For Arendt, freedom in speech and action does not denote the attainment of particular practical goals but rather an intersubjective constellation of mutual sensuous perception (and ultimately recognition)� When free people perceive other free people in their appearance, and when they mutually appear to others, they bring forth the appearance of a shared world to which they can now relate as an object of shared concern� If perceiving others in their appearance, and being perceived by others in this manner, is a particular type of their interaction that brings forth a shared, common world, then that world has a built-in multiplicity of perspectives: everyone looks at the world from a slightly different perspective� The result is not subjectivism or solipsism� Rather, the multiplicity of perspectives is what enables the creation of a shared world� A shared world is a world that is accessible to each of its members in its appearance and that appears to each member from a different perspective� But if the perception of appearances is to create a shared world, staying at the purely receptive level of perceiving appearances will not suffice, since sheer perception is not communicable� This is why Arendt, in “The Crisis in Culture,” begins to consider the importance of judgment - more precisely, pre-conceptual, aesthetic judgment required for the processing of sensuous appearances - as a core activity in the creation of a shared public world� That the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant, namely, the ability to see things not only from one’s own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present; even that judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient himself in the public realm, in the common world - these are insights that are virtually as old as articulated political experience. (“Crisis” 221) For a shared world to exist as a plural world, it is not enough for every participant to be aware that she takes up a particular perspective� These particular perspectives must be regarded as generalizable - i�e�, they must be presupposed to be shared in principle by every other member - and at the same time as fallible (otherwise other perspectives would be ruled out)� They must adopt a position which Kant, in paragraph 40 of his Critique of Judgment, calls “broadened mind” (“erweiterte Denkungsart”), which is achieved, much like Arendt paraphrases in the above quote, “if he [the individual] detaches himself from the subjective personal conditions of his judgment, which cramp 226 J ohannEs V oElz the minds of so many others, and reflects upon his own judgment from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by shifting his ground to the standpoint of others)” (Kant 124-125). Precisely because aesthetic judgment is non-conceptual, it must be formed - if it isn’t to end in solipsism - with the hypothetical way in mind in which others might form their judgment� In order to be communicable, non-conceptual, aesthetic judgment requires an inner deliberation that anticipates the position of others, and it is because of this requirement that aesthetic judgment is crucial for generating a shared world from the perception of appearances� This, in a nutshell, is Arendt’s rationale for calling Kant’s Third Critique his political philosophy� Arendt was a whole-hearted pessimist when it came to the question whether this ideal public could be realized in the modern age� In “The Crisis in Culture” she blamed the consumptive spirit of mass society for the impossibility to create a political space of freedom in which people could approach a public world as a matter of appearances to be judged with a broadened mind� And in line with that pessimism, it is quite obvious in which ways a Trump rally, as I have analyzed it in this essay, falls short of Arendt’s high requirements� It might, indeed, serve as an epitome of her worst fears� Most immediately, attendees of a Trump rally will not ask themselves how they ought to judge a particular element of the shared public world based on the question of how other attendees might judge it� That question is moot since judgment in the Trump rally is an open question only regarding its intensity, but the intensity of the response will hardly be determined by the anticipated judgment of others� Moreover, while the rally constitutes a space of appearance of sorts, it is a space of appearance in which the plurality of perspectives hardly seems to matter if the assumption is that everyone will chant along in unison� I believe both of these statements are true to some extent, but curiously, it remains possible to interpret the rally in ways that meet - against her spirit - some of Arendt’s more forbidding formal criteria (if we neglect her sweeping historical argument that society has infiltrated politics in such a way that political freedom has become unavailable altogether)� To take the two points I just made: isn’t the fact that aesthetic judgments in a Trump rally concern affective intensities (rather than judgments about aesthetic categories like beauty) an indication that the broadened mind of anticipating others’ judgments plays a particularly important role? For is not the jubilance of a chanting crowd the release of the joyful anticipation that a hit like “Drain the Swamp” will be chanted with full-fledged conviction by (nearly) everyone present? Likewise, is the rally in actuality not a space of plurality, quite simply because the improvisational interaction thrives on the risk of failure? Isn’t failure to elicit the desired response on the part of Trump already an experience of plurality? Indeed, is it not plausible to argue that the Trump rally creates moments of unity out of the improbability of the crowd coming together in a Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I 227 synchronous experience of appearing? In other words, is the temporally and spatially bounded performance of agreement, acceptance, or affirmation not energized by the overpowering likelihood of disagreement? I end on these questions not because I want to suggest that the populist rally is an Arendtian space of appearance, but because Arendt’s theory - crucially thanks to its idealized nature - allows us to see aspects of the rally that our habitual associations of the right-wing populist rally as anti-democratic, unity-driven (and thus potentially totalitarian), and acclamation-based will hide� Trump rallies provide a stress test for the democratic public� They do so because they bring to light the ambiguity between the democratic and the anti-democratic import of the aestheticization of politics� Works Cited Ankersmit, Frank� Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value� Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996� Arendt, Hannah. “The Crisis in Culture.” Between Past and Future: Six Exercised in Political Thought� New York: Viking, 1961� 197-226� Carter, Dan� The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics� New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995� Corner, John, and Dick Pels, eds� Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism� London: Sage, 2003� Eggers, Dave. “‘Could He Actually Win? ’ Dave Eggers at a Donald Trump Rally.” The Guardian� June 17, 2016� Web� Fischer-Lichte, Erika� The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics� Trans� Saskya Iris Jain� London: Routledge, 2008� Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism An Introduction.” Trans. 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