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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8365-9 During the past decades, it has been de rigueur in American Studies to approach the aesthetic suspiciously, as a vehicle for ideology. Recently, however, scholars have begun to recover the aesthetic from different disciplinary angles. The present volume brings together leading and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States of America to critically assess, and contribute to, the return of the aesthetic to the �ield. It does so by considering this return in the context of the aestheticization of the lifeworld. Contributors reexamine popular culture in an age of aesthetic capitalism and explore the aestheticization of (democratic) politics. They make forays into a practical aesthetics that thinks with rather than about art. They test whether aesthetic autonomy continues to have purchase, what the aesthetic forecloses, and how it has been turning against itself in the search for negative freedom. This volume of REAL thus intervenes in one the most heated debates in the �ield of American Studies of the current moment. 35 Volume 35 (2019) The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies Edited by Winfried Fluck, Rieke Jordan, Johannes Voelz Real 35 Umschlag.indd Alle Seiten Real 35 Umschlag.indd Alle Seiten 19.12.2019 13: 30: 47 19.12.2019 13: 30: 47 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Ansgar Nünning · Donald E. Pease 35 The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies Edited by Winfried Fluck, Rieke Jordan, Johannes Voelz © 2019 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen Typesetting: Dominik Fungipani The essay by Lee Edelmann is published by permission of the author, who holds the copyright thereto. 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. www.narr.de · eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISBN 978-3-8233-8365-9 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 J ohannes V oelz Introduction � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1 l ee e delman Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 11 W infried f luck The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 27 W alter B enn m ichaels Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe) � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 49 m arlon l ieBer Art and Economic Objecthood: Preliminary Remarks on ‘Sensuous Supra-Sensuous’ Things� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 61 r uth m ayer Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect� � � 81 r ieke J ordan The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 103 s usanne r ohr The Aesthetics of Madness � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 117 B ernd h erzogenrath Towards a Practical Aesthetics � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 133 e ugenie B rinkema Glimmers and Drabness and Scales of Loss: On The Grand Budapest Hotel � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 143 J ulius g reVe Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson� � � 155 l aura B ieger Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 169 l inda m. h ess The Aesthetics of Wonder: Networks of the Grievable in Richard Powers’ The Overstory � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 189 J ennifer g reiman Militant, Ruthless, Round: Herman Melville, William Connolly, and the Aesthetics of Radical Democracy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 207 d ustin B reitenWischer The Creolization of the Aesthetic: Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Haiti � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 221 r uss c astronoVo Security and the Informational Sublime� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 237 J ohannes V oelz With t om f reischläger Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 261 Contributors l aura B ieger is Professor of American Studies, Political Theory and Culture at the University of Groningen, where she co-directs the Research Center for Democratic Culture and Politics� She is the author of Belonging and Narrative (2018) and Ästhetik der Immersion (2007)� Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Narrative, Studies in American Naturalism, Amerikastudien/ American Studies and ZAA� Her current research is on literature’s social and political responsibilities� d ustin B reitenWischer is postdoctoral researcher and project coordinator at the EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin� A former Fulbright and Studienstiftung fellow, he is currently working on his second monograph on Frederick Douglass’s philosophical engagement with creativity and reform� He is the author of Dazwischen: Spielräume ästhetischer Erfahrung in der US-amerikanischen Kunst und Literatur (Fink, 2018) and co-editor of Die neue amerikanische Fernsehserie (Fink, 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)� e ugenie B rinkema is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology� Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics in texts ranging from the horror film to gonzo pornography, from structuralist film to the visual and temporal forms of terrorism. Her articles have appeared in the journals Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, film-philosophy, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Journal of Visual Culture, LIT, Polygraph, qui parle, and World Picture. Her first book, The Forms of the Affects, was published with Duke University Press in 2014� She is currently completing a book on radical formalism, horror, and love� r uss c astronoVo is Tom Paine Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison� His most recent book is Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America. He is completing a project on surveillance, information, and insecurity� l ee e delman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University� He has published widely on theory, literature, and film and is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and, with Lauren Berlant, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014)� Along with Berlant, he edits the book series, Theory Q, for Duke University Press� His latest book, Bad Education: Why Queerness Teaches Us Nothing, is 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� His book 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)� t om f reischläger is a graduate student and research assistant at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt� His interests lie in political aesthetics and the aesthetics of music� He regularly performs as an oboist and conductor� J ennifer g reiman is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University; she is the author of Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (Fordham University Press, 2010) and the co-editor, with Paul Stasi, of The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)� Selections from her current book project, Melville’s Ruthless Democracy, have appeared in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-century Americanists, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. J ulius g reVe is a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany� He is the author of Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), and of numerous essays on McCarthy, Mark Z� Danielewski, critical theory, and speculative realism� Greve has co-edited America and the Musical Unconscious (Atropos, 2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds (2017), a special issue of EJAS� He is currently putting together two edited volumes that deal with weird fiction, media studies, and cultural ecology, and he is working on a manuscript that delineates the relation between modern poetics and ventriloquism� l inda m. h ess is a post-doctoral researcher and assistant professor (wissenschaftl� Mitarbeiterin) at Goethe University Frankfurt� She completed her dissertation at the University of Muenster in the summer of 2016 and published her first monograph, Queer Aging in North American Fiction, with Palgrave Macmillan in 2019� In addition to queer studies and aging studies, her further interests in research and teaching lie in American Modernism, life writing, speculative fiction and ecocriticism. Her current research project brings together ecocriticism, citizenship studies, and affect theory under the working title “Grievable Nature? American Nature, Citizenship, and Discourses of Preservation and Loss�” B ernd h erzogenrath is professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University Frankfurt� He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster; An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach and editor of a�o� The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams and Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology. At the moment, he is planning a project, cinapses: thinking|film that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the neurosciences (members include António Damasio and Alva Noë)� His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), and Film as Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)� He is also (together with Patricia Pisters) the main editor of the media-philosophical book series thinking|media with Bloomsbury� r ieke J ordan is assistant professor (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt� Her monograph Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2019) examines contemporary texts that demand and reward the reader’s creative investment� Publications include articles on the representations of the body of/ at work in Chris Ware’s Building Stories, Jennifer Egan’s PowerPoint chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad, or the GeoCities online archive, among others� She is currently conceptualizing her second book, which will take her into the nineteenth century� m arlon l ieBer is assistant professor of American Studies at the English Department at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel� In 2018 he completed his doctoral dissertation on the novels of Colson Whitehead at Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2015 he spent six months as a visiting research scholar at the English Department at University of Illinois, Chicago� With Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich he has recently guest edited a special issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies on Karl Marx and the United States� r uth m ayer holds the chair of American Studies at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany� Her research focuses on transnationalism, seriality, the formation of modernities and mass culture� Her work appeared in New Literary History, Modernism / modernity, Screen and Velvet Light Trap� Her most recent book publications are the co-edited volumes Kurz & Knapp: Zur Mediengeschichte der kleinen Formen (2017) and Modernities and Modernization in North America (2019)� She is the director of the DFGfunded research project “Contingency and Contraction: Modernity and Temporality in the United States, 1880-1920�” W alter B enn m ichaels teaches at University of Illinois, Chicago� His most recent book is The Beauty of a Social Problem (Chicago, 2015)� His publications since then include essays on Richard Rorty’s politics (“From Achieving Our Country to Making America Great Again” in Pragmatism Today), on “Michael Fried’s Theory of Action” (in Michael Fried and Philosophy) and on “50 Shades of Neoliberal Love” (in Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Culture)� s usanne r ohr is Chair of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg� Trained in American studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and Cornell University, she received her PhD and her post-doctoral degree at the John F� Kennedy Institute for North American Studies� Her research at Stanford University, Harvard University and New York University was supported by grants of the DAAD and Fulbright, among other institutions� She taught at the John F� Kennedy Institute, at Smith College and at Stanford University� Her publications include Die Wahrheit der Täuschung: Wirklichkeitskonstitution im amerikanischen Roman 1889-1989 (Fink, 2004) and with Andrew S� Gross Pop - Avant-Garde - Scandal: Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History (Winter 2010)� Susanne Rohr has also published numerous essays in the fields of literary and cultural theory, semiotics, American pragmatism, epistemology, and on a broad range of topics in American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries� In 2017 Susanne Rohr was awarded an “opus magnum” stipend by the Volkswagen Foundation to finish her current research project on representations of the Holocaust art in the new millennium� 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)� J ohannes V oelz Introduction Most of the articles collected in this volume came out of the conference “The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies,” hosted by the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, from November 29 to December 1, 2018� The aim of the conference was to assess, take stock of, and contribute to a recent trend in American Studies of recovering questions relating to the aesthetic� The conference organizers— and most of the speakers—approached the discernible uptick in criticism concerned with the aesthetic from a sympathetic position� Michael Clune’s recent statement that “the restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts has been among the most exciting critical developments of recent years” (910) captures well the organizers’ primary motivation to convene leading and upcoming scholars from the United States and Europe who engage the aesthetic from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, film and media studies, political theory, and philosophy, and who are associated with a broad array of critical schools, including queer studies, Marxism, reception aesthetics, Deleuzian media philosophy, posthumanism, popular culture studies, relational sociology, and political aesthetics� “Return,” “recovery,” and “restoration” are, however, risky terms� Do they not ask to be misunderstood as expressing a desire that is nostalgic, conservative, or even reactionary? “Return,” “recovery,” and “restoration” suggest a wish to undo a lapsarian history, to recover a moment of “before�” In light of the fact that over the last four to five decades, the aesthetic has been relegated to the margins of the field precisely for its allegedly conservative and reactionary functions, such an invocation of anteriority may seem all the more hair-raising� However, such uneasiness about the wish for recovering the aesthetic is premised on a particular interpretation of the aesthetic and its relation to the political that should by no means to be taken for granted� That so many scholars in the field do take it for granted only shows how deeply the anti-aesthetic impulse has become ingrained in the field imaginary of American Studies� Despite the fact that today a growing number of scholars are rethinking and redeploying the aesthetic, and that their efforts have an increasing influence in the field, it remains the case that suspicion of the aesthetic constitutes a core element of the regnant doxa regulating American Studies� In the past decade, the field has engaged in vital discussions sparked by a number of manifestos introducing interlinked critical approaches such as postcritical reading (Felski, Anker and Felski), surface reading (Best and Marcus), distant reading (Moretti), new formalism (Wolfson, Armstrong, Levinson), new ethics (Hale), and new aestheticism (Joughin and Malpas)� 2 J ohannes V oelz Not all of these interventions have an explicit stake in the return of the aesthetic, but they all take issue with the kind of critique (widely designated, in a phrase borrowed from Paul Ricoeur, the “hermeneutics of suspicion”) that has dominated the field over the last four or five decades, and that has taken the aesthetic as its main target� While the labels enumerated above have had the greatest visibility and buzz-factor in U�S�-based American Studies, scholars outside the United States—among them two of the editors of this volume—have offered related critical accounts of the premises underlying the American Studies version of revisionist critique and its conceptualization of the aesthetic in particular (Fluck, “The Humanities,” Voelz)� In light of the plentitude of the manifestos and critical accounts mentioned above, the story of how the aesthetic became the target of an openly politicized form of critique does not need to be rehearsed here at great length� It is sufficient to mention that the critique of the aesthetic has relied on a particular understanding of the aesthetic, i�e�, on the idea of aesthetic autonomy� Originally theorized and popularized by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) and Friedrich Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), the idea of aesthetic autonomy later was picked up and transformed into l’art pour l’art aestheticism, and, starting in the 1930s, became adapted in yet another variant by the transatlantic movement of the New Criticism, from where it grew into the ideological foundation of the U�S� liberal consensus of the Cold War� In the hands of politicized revisionary critics who began to gain wider hearing in the 1970s, the idea of aesthetic autonomy was redefined as the “ideology of the aesthetic” (Eagleton). This redefinition was based on the claim that the alleged universalism of aesthetic value and aesthetic judgment conveniently obscured the way in which that “universalism” actually promoted and enshrined the interests and privileges of those at the top of established hierarchies (of race, class, and gender)� Hence, the aesthetic became seen as a force that actively worked towards the depoliticization of the exploited and subaltern and that helped sustain the status quo. The ideological critique of the aesthetic brought to awareness what had indeed tended to be a blind spot in the self-confident celebrations of aesthetic value and the even more self-assured devaluation of anything that did not reach up to “the states of consciousness embodied in serious art,” as Henry Nash Smith, pioneer of the Myth and Symbol school, put it in “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method? ” (203)� Yet, in supplying aesthetic criticism with its own “political unconscious” (Jameson), the ideological critique of aesthetics also created a truncated account of the aspirations of aesthetic autonomy� Virtually at no point in time was the idea of “aesthetic value” unconcerned with politics. It is not an exaggeration to say that “aesthetic value” was deemed valuable insofar as it was seen as a way out of the alienating effects of an increasingly rationalized modernity� In response to the unfreedom of the modern world, art, or autonomous aesthetics, offered what Stendhal called “promesse du bonheur,” a phrase that Adorno, in his Aesthetic Theory, interpreted as the “implication that art does its part for existence by accentuating that part of it which prefigures utopia” (409). Such interest in Introduction 3 the prefiguration of utopia can be detected even in those moments of the writings of the American New Critics in which they most vehemently insisted on the separation of art and society� According to the standard account (see, e.g., Jancovich), the American New Critics started out with the explicitly political (if reactionary) program of upholding the traditions of the Agrarian South as the counter model to the alienated form of life which Northern industrialism was spreading across the nation� But as a literary paradigm, the story continues, New Criticism only triumphed once its proponents gave up its Agrarian mission and resigned themselves to the professionalization— and depoliticization—of literature� Literature, on that account, had to be relocated to a “world elsewhere” in order for the New Critics to take over English departments and establish a fully depoliticized form of aesthetic formalism as the dominant method of literary studies� Yet, a very brief look at “Criticism, Inc�,” John Crowe Ransom’s 1937 post- Agrarian breakthrough manifesto, shows that even his vision of critical professionalism contained a political shadow program. Ransom exhorted critics to approach poems (here standing in for literature more generally) from a vantage point of poets: The critic should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manoeuvre [sic]� The poet himself, in the agony of composition, has something like this sense of his labors� The poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite. He knows that his practical interests will reduce this living object to a mere utility, and that his sciences will disintegrate it for their convenience into their respective abstracts� (1117) For the New Critic, the poem aesthetically evokes an organic totality that does not stand a chance of surviving in actual life, but that tingles the memory of a dream of organicism once hoped to come true in the Agrarian South� The allegedly de-politicized version of the New Criticism encapsulated by Ransom’s post-Vanderbilt manifesto cannot shake the political utopianism that the New Critics, in their early days at Vanderbilt, had tied to literary criticism in all explicitness. In effect, Ransom conjures a nostalgic version of the promesse du bonheur: having relinquished the South as the concrete figuration of utopia, he downgrades his former expectations by turning to utopia’s aesthetic prefiguration. The utopianism installed by the New Critics as a shadow presence in American literary criticism by no means ended as the method of formalism and the underlying concept of aesthetic autonomy came under attack� Indeed, what has been crucially overlooked in recent accounts of the fall and reemergence of aesthetics in American Studies is the persistence of utopianism organizing the field’s various political aspirations. In American Studies, the critique of the ideology of the aesthetic was hardly ever an end in itself� Indeed, Americanists rarely approached critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion—the reference point of current debates of postcritical reading—as a method designed exclusively for bringing to light the wily ways of power. 4 J ohannes V oelz To be sure, the new historicists of the 1980s turned the search for instances of ideological co-optation in the most unexpected places into a showcase for their own dazzling critical performances (cf� Fluck, “New Historicism”)� But the new historicism in American Studies was rather quickly supplanted by the critical agenda of the New Americanists, which, inspired by Gramsci, aimed to fuse literary criticism with the political activism of marginalized populations� Indeed, American Studies to this day continues to be a virtual think tank of utopianism� Rita Felski and Timothy Aubry have argued that critique is itself an aesthetic endeavor, that critique should be regarded as a genre (Felski) or as having an “aesthetic unconscious” (Aubry)� These observations are astute but incomplete� At least when it comes to American Studies, the scholarship marked by an anti-aesthetic impulse is itself aesthetic to the degree that it remains committed to political utopianism� What changes is the function of the aesthetic. For the proponents of critique, the aesthetic, now redefined as the medium of ideology, can no longer serve as the locus of non-identity unsullied by existing reality. And yet, harnessing the political imagination to the project of utopianism can never fully do without partaking of the aesthetic� In thinking up what doesn’t have any social reality yet, utopianism by definition relies on imaginary anticipations of futures yet to emerge� These anticipations require the aesthetic� Thus, the aesthetic—that which comes to us through the senses and provides the materials of the imagination—has long re-entered, even and especially, the most politicized quarters of American Studies� Even when the commitment to utopian politics remains below the surface, and when the concern more modestly lies with the politics of representation of a given identity, the goal is to establish counter-representations whose path of articulation leads through the aesthetic� This shift of perspective also sheds a different light on Felski’s emphatic call for turning to the “re-” rather than the “de-” variants of literary criticism: “We shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception” (17, emphasis in original)� Siding with a “new regime of interpretation: one that is willing to recognize the potential of literature and art to create new imaginaries rather than just to denounce mystifying illusions” (Felski’s approving summary of Yves Citton, 187), Felski doesn’t so much call for a turn-around than for a continuation, and even amplification, of the field’s longstanding commitment to the utopian� The difference, again, lies in the function of the aesthetic: her project is that of explicitly relocating the utopian in the aesthetic. But now the idea is no longer that the aesthetic can never leave its domain in a world elsewhere— that, to speak with Ransom, “the order existence” of the aesthetic object “constantly crumbl[es] beneath [one’s] touch” as soon as one tries to convert it into actual life� Instead, the aesthetic is now seen as the path to forging new connections in actual life, connections that will potentially bring about new modes of collective being� Introduction 5 Following the lead of Bruno Latour, critics like Felski and Heather Love strive to describe the literary text as an actor that acts upon the reader, creating a network of actors that the literary critic is tasked to trace—in prose that “has to be well written,” for otherwise “the social doesn’t appear through it,” as Latour puts it in Reassembling the Social (124)� The critical language used here may no longer be that of aesthetic analysis, but what could the nodal points of contact between a literary text and a reader be other than aesthetic effects? And how can one judge whether a work of criticism is well-written other than by aesthetic criteria? What surface readers and fellow postcritical readers are striving to undertake is a double transformation, each of which involves the aesthetic� First, the aesthetic is de-idealized and de-autonomized; and second, the aesthetic becomes appropriated as a component of the critical praxis itself (the conceptual blending of affect and aesthetics is particularly conducive to this end)� Which is another way of saying that the postcritical recovery of the aesthetic comes in the form of an aestheticization of literary criticism� Most auto-genealogies of postcritique have so far failed to observe that in the joint maneuver of de-autonomizing the aesthetic and aestheticizing criticism, they are in fact signaling their participation in a social transformation which philosophers and sociologists are describing alternatively as “aesthetic capitalism” (Böhme), the “creative revolution” (Frank), the “new spirit of capitalism” (Chiapello and Boltanski), or “cool knowledge work” (Liu)� In this social constellation—which took shape in the 1960s, just as the critique of aesthetic autonomy gained momentum—labor and consumption, indeed, the very fabric of everyday life, become characterized by aesthetic practices, i�e�, by practices “centered around the production of aesthetic perceptions” (Reckwitz 223, trans� JV)� These processes of “aestheticization of the life world” (Bubner) depend on the integration of the aesthetic into the mundane here and now—they therefore push toward aesthetic heteronomity—so that the aesthetic no longer provides the sacred space removed from the given (or the promise thereof)� Indeed, the aesthetic moves to the innermost core of the operations of society—and of power—and increasingly structures the fields of the economy and politics. To suggest that the return of the aesthetic in American Studies must be regarded self-reflexively as part of this structural process of social aestheticization is not necessarily to fall back on the very hermeneutics of suspicion criticized by various movements in our field. The aim is not to show that postcritical readers are really just the dupes of the latest lure of capitalism, i.e., the aesthetic. By the same token, however, heightening self-reflexivity does require gaining awareness of one’s implicatedness in forces one would rather disavow as the conditions of one’s actions� In that sense, Sianne Ngai offers an important observation when she writes that Latour’s “idiosyncratic use of network as a term of aesthetic praise for texts in which ‘all the actors do something and don’t just sit there’ … points to a general intensification of labor that the ‘new network morality’ of post-Fordist capitalism at once helps mask and sustain” (381)� Yes, we Americanists are part of the creative knowledge industry, our work consists of aesthetic practices, and even our 6 J ohannes V oelz intellectual innovations—such as surface and postcritical reading—reflect our needs arising from these conditions� But this does not mean that in order to remain ideologically untainted, we should reject our connections to the aesthetic or solely approach them in a spirit of self-flagellating demystification. Returning to the aesthetic rather means broadening the scope of perspectives on the aesthetic: assessing how aestheticization subjects, how it subjectivizes, which alternative forms of aestheticization are in competition with one another, how these competing versions are explained, legitimized, and narrativized, and to what degree the aesthetic can still provide occasions for “the great refusal” (Marcuse) after we have entered a historical phase in which “socialization takes the form of aesthetic activation” (Reckwitz 236)� The following essays are contributions to this effort of broadening the scope of work on the aesthetic. They thus explode the parameters of the debates that have stood at the center of this introduction, and yet take these debates as their starting point (sometimes acknowledged, sometimes unacknowledged)� The volume begins by two interventions into the state of the art of contemporary aesthetic theory� By way of a critique of recent attempts to recover the aesthetic in American Studies, Lee Edelman turns the aesthetic against itself, theorizing the “ab-sens” that resists the pedagogies of aesthetic education� Almost as if intended as a response to Edelman, Winfried Fluck details how the commitment to negative freedom among theorists and artists has paradoxically led to a widespread rejection of the aesthetic. In turn, Walter Benn Michaels and Marlon Lieber engage the question of aesthetic autonomy from a broadly anti-capitalist perspective� Michaels offers an appraisal of competing theories of action needed to come to terms with the relation between artwork and intentional structure, whereas Lieber engages the complex of aesthetic autonomy, commodity fetishism, and the Marxian theory of value. The volume’s ensuing section focuses on popular culture: Ruth Mayer takes a journey from 1944 back to 1914 in order to reverse-construct a discourse on mass culture that, as she shows, recognized fewer and fewer possibilities as it moved from Caroline Caffin’s book Vaudeville to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment� Rieke Jordan moves the discussion from the tradition of mass culture to contemporary aesthetic capitalism� In a close analysis of McSweeney’s balloon issue, she considers the role of the creative reader and consumer, who moves between the roles of archivist, conservationist, and curator. Susanne Rohr explores a related form of aesthetic capitalism by examining popular representations of madness in film that reflect disembedding processes Ulrich Beck has theorized under the rubric of individualization� The following section turns to the emerging field of practical aesthetics. Bernd Herzogenrath provides a theoretical foundation that draws primarily on Baumgarten and Deleuze and establishes thinking with (rather than about) art as the core characteristic of practical aesthetics� Eugenie Brinkema exemplifies the approach through a reading of Wes Anderson’s The Budapest Hotel, in which she argues that the aesthetic is an “active and generative and Introduction 7 practical operation of thought�” Julius Greve closes this section by discussing Ezra Pound and Charles Olson as proponents of a practical aesthetics that intertwines lived experience and mythography on the level of form. The final, and largest, section of this volume considers how the aesthetic and the political have come to imbricate each other from the days of the early republic to the election of Donald Trump� Laura Bieger stages a dialogue between Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright in order to reconceptualize the tradition of engaged literature through the lens of relational aesthetics� Linda Hess traces a posthuman network in Richard Powers’s 2018 novel The Overstory whose coordinates are drawn by the contestation of who and what is grievable as much as by a post-romanticist aesthetics of wonder� Jennifer Greiman returns to a classic question in Americanist scholarship: that of Melville’s relation to democracy� Greiman detects a democratic energy that runs through Melville’s writing as a transient, militant, and irreducibly aesthetic creativity� Dustin Breitenwischer considers Frederick Douglass’s lectures on Haiti as acts that creolize the aesthetic: Douglass, Breitenwischer argues, creates a relation between the unforeseeable self-liberation of the formerly enslaved citizens of Haiti and the black American experience of postbellum Jim Crow Society by way of an aesthetic style at once versatile and prophetic� Russ Castronovo creates a self-consciously anachronistic bridge between the contemporary security dispositif and Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels� What holds these phenomena together is the security dilemma arising from too much information, which, as Castronovo argues, Brown codified through the aesthetic category of the sublime. Johannes Voelz rounds out the volume by offering Part II of his foray into the aesthetics of populism (for Part I, on the populist rally, see REAL 34, 2018)� This time joined by Tom Freischläger, he and his co-author explore the aesthetics and affects of contemporary polarization� This volume is part of a wider effort to provide the conference from which it grew with lasting resonance� It is accompanied by video interviews with the conference speakers that are available on the conference website (http: / / www� returnoftheaesthetic�de) and on the conference’s Youtube Channel (search for “Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies” on https: / / www�youtube�com� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� Aesthetic Theory� Trans� Robert Hullot-Kentor� London: Bloomsbury, 2013� Anker, Elizabeth S�, Rita Felski, eds� Critique and Postcritique� Durham: Duke UP, 2017� Armstrong, Isobel� “When Is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet? Poetry and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century�” Victorian Studies 43 (2001): 279-92� Aubry, Timothy� Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018� Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus� “Surface Reading: An Introduction�” Representations 108�1 (Fall 2009): 1-21� Böhme, Gernot� Ästhetischer Kapitalismus� Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016� 8 J ohannes V oelz Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello� The New Spirit of Capitalism� Trans� Gregory Elliot� London: Verso, 2005� Bubner, Rüdiger: “Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt�” Ästhetische Erfahrung� Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989� 143-156� Clune, Michael W� “Judgment and Equality�” Critical Inquiry 45 (Summer 2019): 910-934� Eagleton, Terry� The Ideology of the Aesthetic� Malden: Blackwell, 1990� Felski, Rita� The Limits of Critique� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015� Fluck, Winfried� “The Activist and the Actor: The Re-Authorization of Historical Criticism in New Historicism�” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies� Ed� Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz� Winter, 2009� 39-48� Fluck, Winfried. “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism�” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies� Ed� Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz� Winter, 2009� 49-68� Frank, Thomas C� The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997� Hale, Dorothy J� “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty- First Century�” PMLA 124�3 (May 2009): 896-905� Jameson, Fredric� The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act� Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981� Jancovich, Mark� “The Southern New Critics�” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol� 7: Modernism and the New Criticism� Ed� A� Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey� New York: Cambridge UP, 2000� 200-218� Joughin, John J�, and Simon Malpas, eds� The New Aestheticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004� Kant, Immanuel� Critique of Judgment. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007� Latour, Bruno� “Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern�” Critical Inquiry 30�2 (Winter 2004): 225-48� Latour, Bruno� Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Levinson, Marjorie� “What Is New Formalism? ” PMLA 122�2 (March 2007): 558-569� Liu, Alan� The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004� Love, Heather� “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn�” New Literary History 41�2 (2010): 371-91� Marcuse, Herbert� One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society� London: Routledge, 2007� Moretti, Franco� Distant Reading� London: Verso, 2013� Ngai, Sianne� “Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social�” American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions� Ed� Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby� New York: Columbia UP, 2012� 367-392� Ransom, John Crowe� “Criticism, Inc�” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism� Ed� Vincent B� Leitch� First Ed� New York: Norton, 2001� 1105-1118� Reckwitz, Andreas� “Ästhetik und Gesellschaft: Ein analytischer Bezugsrahmen�” Kreativität und soziale Praxis: Studien zur Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie� Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016� 215-248� Schiller, Friedrich� On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters� Bilingual edition. Ed. E. M. Wilkinson, trans. L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1967. Introduction 9 Smith, Henry Nash� “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method? ” American Quarterly 9�2 Part 2 (Summer 1957): 197-208� Voelz, Johannes� Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge� Hanover: UP of New England, 2010� Wolfson, Susan J� “Reading for Form�” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 1-16� l ee e delman Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic When Schiller sets out to celebrate the exemplary freedom of the aesthetic, he finds himself snared in the contradictions produced by such exemplarity� Conscripted to a pedagogical function that connects “the whole fabric of aesthetic art” to “the still more difficult art of living,” Schiller’s description of Beauty as “released … from the fetters of every aim” (a condition he sees expressed in the sculpted faces of Greek gods), paradoxically imposes on the aesthetic the aim of exemplifying this aimlessness, this absolute of freedom, “in order to incite [the human being] into the ideal world” (80, 140)� Schiller may acknowledge as “self-contradictory … the notion of a fine instructive (didactic) or improving (moral) art,” adding that “nothing is more at variance with the concept of Beauty than that it should have a tendentitious effect upon the character,” but he bases his argument for aesthetic education on “the cultivation of Beauty” understood precisely as the “instrument” whereby our “character become[s] enobled” (107, 55, 50)� Though humanity, as he sees it, may be “chained … to the material,” the aesthetic lifts it to the realm of abstraction and allows it to reflect on the material world with which it no longer identifies (132). Hence “[c]ontemplation (reflection) is Man’s first free relation to the universe” (120)� As Walter Benjamin would argue, however, such a notion of freedom comes at the cost of collectivity and political engagement� Carolin Duttlinger, tracking Benjamin’s ideas about attention, contemplation, and distraction, sums up his views on aesthetics and autonomy during the period when he was writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “In modern secularized society, … contemplation not only loses its liberating potential but is in fact exemplary of a pervasive trend towards social fragmentation and isolation� As a result, he argues, the residues of religious practice in bourgeois art reception do not lead to greater (self-) awareness but are more akin to the secular state of absorption, which Benjamin criticizes in ‘Über das Grauen.’ Unlike in his earlier text, however, Benjamin’s critique is not primarily psychological in focus, but concerns the social and political consequences of such contemplative reception” (Duttlinger 41)� Schillerian aesthetic autonomy, as evinced by the self-enclosure that the aesthetic object and the contemplative subject share, carries with it, according to Benjamin, 12 l ee e delman a threat of political quietism� By contrast, the modes of distracted reception excited by encounters with urban architecture or by cinematic spectatorship enact a heteronomous subordination to forms of collective experience. 1 In “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” their jointly written introduction to a special issue of American Literature, Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo explore one consequence of this antagonism at the very core of the aesthetic between autonomy and heteronomy, withdrawal and engagement, the individual and the collective, and freedom and limitation. Though grounding their remarks in the specific context of cultural studies in America, they identify a more general tension in the politics of the aesthetic: “Cultural Studies, with its attention to the social conditions and settings that make aesthetic contemplation a privilege available to relatively few, keeps us alert to the dangers of making aesthetics inherently progressive� In a corollary and countervailing gesture, however, cultural studies, with its attention to the unpredictable nature of these social conditions and settings, keeps us alert to the parallel fallacy of discarding aesthetic process as inherently conservative” (424)� Taking issue with critics like Fredric Jameson, who described what he called the “aesthetic revival” in the final decade of the twentieth century as a repression of real social engagement, Castiglia and Castronovo insist that the aesthetic “can, in fact, facilitate collective becoming, and, with it, collective social interests” (427)� In doing so they make clear that the “return” of the aesthetic more properly names its rehabilitation by critics intent on (re)claiming its utility for politically progressive ends� Conservatives, after all, have never renounced the aesthetic’s importance in consolidating communities of taste, even if that taste can swing wildly between ethno-nationalist assertions of cultural supremacy and populist opposition to whatever smacks of cultural pretension� The post-civil rights era in the United States has nourished conservative aesthetic ideologies that simultaneously denounce high culture for its association with elitism and academic privilege and decry the loss of that culture, often blamed on resentment of its domination by European-descended white males� In either case, the aesthetic collectivizes “the people” in the conservative imaginary� That this “people” generally possesses a racial and ethnic specificity, despite its invocation as universal (or, at the very least, as national), inflects this populist notion with exclusionary force. Taking seriously the normative implications of such a conservative aesthetic, Fred Moten characterizes the racial logic of Western subjectivity as the invention of a “transcendental aesthetic,” an aesthetic of “abstract, equivalent citizens” conjoined in the political community he describes (with some irony) as “civil society” (740)� Similarly, Sylvia Wynter attributes the origins of racial subjectivity to a “bio-aesthetic system of figuration” that “sets limits to [the] Subject’s mode of imagining … and, therefore, to the knowledge it can have of its world” (36, 44)� This aesthetic 1 Such distracted spectatorship allows the subject to master the violent shock of the urban encounter with modernity—a violence that threatens the contemplative subject of aesthetic education as fully as do the home invaders in Haneke’s Funny Games. Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 13 shapes the normative framework within which subjects make sense of social existence; conservative defences of the aesthetic, therefore, coincide with defenses of that framework and that normativity both� Simon Gikandi puts it bluntly: “we cannot understand the idea of autonomy and transcendentalism in the ideology of the aesthetic outside of its economy of exclusion” (333). Proponents of the aesthetic’s contemporary “return” aspire, by contrast, to affirm the aesthetic’s potential to produce an inclusive community, one that Castiglia and Castronovo invoke as “an alternative, post-identity collectivism” (433)� This (re)turn to the aesthetic also reflects an impatience with what Rita Felski calls “the limits of critique�” It can signal, in such cases, an attempt to escape a pervasive hermeneutics of suspicion as expressed in paranoid, symptomatic, deconstructive, and ideological methods of analysis, all of which stand accused of performing a constraining and predictable set of moves that subordinate aesthetic objects to determination by history, context, rhetoric, or politics narrowly construed� Drawing on the currency of affect theory in its numerous iterations, Felski observes that reading “is not just a cognitive activity but an embodied mode of attention that involves us in acts of sensing, perceiving, feeling, registering, and engaging�” It is on this that she stakes her claim for the transformative power of the aesthetic: “To speak of a stylistics of existence is to acknowledge that our being in the world is formed and patterned along certain lines and that aesthetic experience can modify or redraw such patterns… . We give form to our existence through the diverse ways in which we inhabit, inflect, and appropriate the artistic forms we encounter” (175)� The aesthetic, so framed, is said to afford what critique alone cannot: a change in our being, and not just our thought; a freedom from the hold of the patterns to which we had previously been bound; a freedom, that is, from what Wynter sees as the limits on our “mode of imagining” that follow, as Wynters recognizes, from the dominant aesthetic itself� More than a decade after collaborating with Castronovo, Castiglia, hailing the “post-critique” moment to which Felski’s work responds, refers to it as potentially “the most significant dispositional shift [in literary criticism] since the advent of the New Historicism” (397)� He quotes Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus to explain his own enthusiasm for this renewed engagement with the aesthetic: “I believe that, as Best and Marcus assert, ‘immersion in texts (without paranoia or suspicion about their merit or value)’ can result in an ‘attentiveness to the artwork as itself a kind of freedom’” (415)� Let us bracket just what this attentiveness means (a return to Schillerian contemplation? ); let us bracket, as well, what immersion means and how it can evade the metaphorics of depth associated with paranoia and suspicion� Let us focus exclusively on the freedom claim being made on behalf of the aesthetic, a claim deeply rooted in the transformative potential that Castiglia links with “speculation, idealism, hopefulness, and their combination in what I’ve been calling imagination” (415)� Turning to the writings of Ernst Bloch, and following, by so doing, in the intellectual footsteps of José Esteban Muñoz, Castiglia views hope, understood as bound to aesthetic imagination, as the 14 l ee e delman engine that frees us from “the tyranny of unchallengeable facts” and the “inevitability … of the purported real”; only this imaginative freedom from fact permits us, Castiglia argues, to envision “counterworlds” (403, 405)� Like his view of the aesthetic as the gateway to freedom, Castiglia’s preference for hope over fact echoes Schiller’s association of the aesthetic with the imaginative liberty the latter associates with “seeing” as opposed to perception� “What we see through the eye,” writes Schiller, “is different from what we perceive …� As soon as seeing acquires an absolute value for [Man], he is already aesthetically free also” (126)� Such seeing, like the liberating immersion in art that Castiglia endorses via Best and Marcus, corresponds to the subordination of fact to the autonomy of aesthetic imagination, understood by Schiller as delight in what he identifies as “mere appearance” or form (127). Through the exercise of this function, Schiller argues, humans discover their sovereignty: “Since all actual existence derives its origin from Nature, as an extraneous power, but all appearance comes originally from Man, as percipient subject, he is only availing himself of his absolute proprietary right when he separates the appearance from the essence and arranges it according to his own laws� With unrestrained freedom he can join together what Nature has sundered, as soon as he can think of it together, and separate what Nature has combined, as soon as he can separate it in his intellect” (127)� Castiglia, however, parts company with Schiller when it comes to the imagination’s intervention in the world� With regard to aesthetic autonomy, Schiller insists that the human “possesses this sovereign right positively only in the world of appearance,” only “in the unsubstantial kingdom of the imagination” (128)� The aesthetic, in other words, frees us precisely by freeing us from the actual and it loses, for Schiller, its aesthetic status once harnessed in the service of reality, even if that instrumentalization intends to alter the reality we know� Schiller makes this point clearly: “Only insofar as it is candid (expressly renouncing all claim to reality), and only insofar as it is self-dependent (dispensing with all assistance from reality), is appearance aesthetic� As soon as it is deceitful and simulates reality, as soon as it is impure and requires reality for its operation, it is nothing but a base tool for material ends and can prove nothing for the freedom of the spirit” (128)� Displaying here what Paul de Man called “idealism as an ideology,” Schiller, as de Man goes on to observe, “posits the possibility of a pure intellect entirely separated from the material world, entirely separated from sensory experience” (146). This is not to say that Schiller denies the aesthetic any social consequence; to the contrary, he sees the aesthetic as the necessary condition for social relation� “Beauty alone,” he famously observes, “can confer on [Man] a social character� Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it establishes harmony in the individual� All other forms of perception divide a man, because they are exclusively based either on the sensuous or on the intellectual part of his being; only the perception of the Beautiful makes something whole of him, … only the communication of the Beautiful unites society, because it relates to what is common to all of them” (138)� The commonality to which Schiller refers, however, is the common pursuit of an aesthetic state that Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 15 severs our thralldom to the actual, not a common investment in actualizing an imagined aesthetic state� That commonality, moreover, as Moten suggests, presupposes a universal aesthetic, which is also an aesthetic of universality attached, as Schiller makes clear by referring to the indifference of the gods in Greek sculpture, to a particular ethno-cultural history despite remaining at odds with any political commitment to reality and directing us, instead, toward the disengaged abstraction of an ideal� 2 These differing interpretations of aesthetic freedom in the work of Castiglia and Schiller correspond, if inexactly, to what Jacques Rancière calls an originary and persistent tension between the two great politics of aesthetics: the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form� The first identifies the forms of aesthetic experience with the forms of an other life. The finality it ascribes to art is to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality� The second, by contrast, encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s very separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation of form into life� 3 (43-44) The return of the aesthetic as endorsed by Castiglia, who stands in for a host of others here—including Felski, Marcus, and Best—partakes of the hope, essential to progressive appropriations of aesthetic discourse, invested in what Rancière describes as the “becoming-life of art.” From this perspective, the aesthetic evinces the creativity of life itself and allow us, as Rancière puts it, “to construct new forms of life in common�” This is what Castigilia and Castronovo suggest when they declare that “illusion, masquerade, deception, artifice, and any other terms that connote the ultimate ideological bankruptcy of aesthetic practice can, in fact, facilitate collective becoming, and, with it, collective social interests” (427)� So conceived, the virtue of the aesthetic lies in its capacity to envision the possibility of a world beyond the reality of this one, though the ultimate goal is to reconceive this one, through the liberty of the imagination, precisely in terms of the oneness of a collectivity modelled on the aesthetic union of the ”sensuous” and “the intellectual�” By this logic, moreover, the freedom, which is also the autonomy, of the aesthetic (as invoked by Castiglia’s emphasis on its “turning away from facts”) paradoxically reinforces its submission to the heteronomy of social reality (403)� Elizabeth Dillon recognizes as much when, echoing Castiglia and Castronovo’s implication of the aesthetic in “collective becoming,” she writes, “it seems important to view aesthetic judgment in its connection with community function and thus with heteronomy” (518). To this extent, the return of the aesthetic among thinkers on the left is largely the return of the 2 As in the case of social politics as described above, that ideal might well be one, like “the people,” that finds its embodiment in the most mundane or even vulgar forms of expression; but that very vulgarity thus becomes the element that raises it above its mere materiality to figure an abstract idea. 3 Although Castiglia clearly endorses the becoming-life of art and Schiller is closer to the politics of resistant form, it is important to note, as Ranciere will do, that Schiller’s attention to the inaccessibility, the “celestial self-sufficiency” of a work like the Juno Ludovici (Schiller 81), indicates, nonetheless, the aesthetic opening of a space of human freedom and, to that extent, enters, despite itself, into the “becoming-life” of art. 16 l ee e delman politics it purports to supersede� But rather than leading to more critique or to largely routinized gestures of ideological unmasking, the return of the aesthetic “discovers” something just as predictable and predetermined: the imaginative elaboration of counterworlds meant to counter precisely the presupposed force of ideologically determined fact� Castiglia puts it as follows: “Facticity, in Bloch’s account, serves the interests of the privileged, but anticipatory illuminations turn the real into a fantastic—and vigilant—hope” (403)� Though what he refers to as aesthetic “illuminations” here both escape and transform “the real,” Castiglia’s reference to Bloch seems to challenge his privileging of aesthetic hope over critique in its negativity� How do we know that facticity “serves the interests of the privileged” except by performing the sort of critique—whether paranoid, suspicious, or symptomatic—against which the aesthetic is posed? And what props up the vigilance of hope but Castiglia’s a priori assumption of the imagination’s dispositive relation to the self-same factual world from which, in his argument, it turns? On the basis of such a presumed relation Paul Gilmore affirms a similarly political vision of aesthetic hope: “aesthetic experience could become a precondition to greater political and social freedom and equality by imagining a universally shared terrain in place of the delimited ground of identity politics” (472)� One needn’t be enamoured of “identity politics” to hesitate before Gilmore’s predication of freedom on a “universally shared terrain,” which is to say, on the sort of “transcendental aesthetic” discussed by Moten� The desire for universality speaks to an investment in the aesthetic as, in Rancière’s words, “a living tissue of experiences and common beliefs in which both the elite and the people share”—an investment, therefore, in producing, as Rancière goes on to observe, “a ‘consensual’ community, not a community in which everyone is in agreement, but one that is realized as a community of feeling” (37). Such a community, however, as Rancière acknowledges, comes at the cost of the aesthetic autonomy from which it purports to spring� The valuation of the aesthetic for its independence from the world of “unchallengeable fact” turns out to have been the projection of a political vision all along—a vision wholly determined by the “facticity” it claims to escape� As if speaking directly to Castiglia, for whom the return of the aesthetic explicitly hinges on the imaginative “suspension of reality”—that is, on the suspension of the political, social, and cultural reality of the world as given—Rancière writes: “aesthetic metapolitics cannot fulfill the promise of living truth that it finds in aesthetic suspension except at the price of revoking this suspension, that is of transforming the form into a form of life” (Castiglia 402; Rancière 39)� The “suspension of reality,” to put this otherwise, responds to the imperative to transform reality by means of this very suspension, which, in consequence, is never really a suspension of reality at all� Castiglia and Castronovo affirm this transformation of “form into a form of life” when they characterize the aesthetic as a mode of “collective becoming�” With this they partake of a Deleuzian tradition that aspires, in the words of Levi Bryant, “to formulate an ontology… that locates intelligibility at the level of the aesthetic or the sensible itself,” thus making the aesthetic a resource for the apprehension Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 17 of new ways of being (12)� 4 Insofar as this politics of the aesthetic is determined by the reality it purports to suspend, it engages a process of “becoming-life” that coincides with “becoming-intelligible�” As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, “it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding” (188)� Indeed, the very point of this (re)turn to the aesthetic for progressive political ends lies in the intelligibilization, the critical translation into new forms of life, of what the imagination conjures beyond the constraints of the actual world� So conceived, the aesthetic would offer us more than a merely affective access to what a given world forecloses; it would offer us cognitive access as well, allowing us to grasp what a given reality casts outside of sense� The aesthetic politics of “becoming-life” thus must posit the aesthetic as, simultaneously, sufficiently other than factual reality to be free of its conceptual limitations and sufficiently intimate with factual reality to yield new forms of collective experience. In consequence, the politics of becoming-life constrains the imagination to serve the ends of intelligibility� For all that this version of the aesthetic may insist on affect and embodiment, its social and political mobilization rests, as Felski puts it clearly, on our “inhabit[ing], inflect[ing], and appropriat[ing] the artistic forms we encounter” (176)� The pedagogical corollary of her project, as she implicitly acknowledges, is wholly cognitive: teaching her students “to think carefully about their attachments” (emphasis mine) will allow them to “move beyond the stultifying division between naïve, emotional reading and rigorous, critical reading” (180)� But the ostensible movement “beyond … division” wherein students “think carefully about their attachments” maintains the obvious privileging of careful thought over “naive” reading� Like the aesthetic, “attachments” must submit to the language of critical intelligibility even in the effort to overcome the “limits of critique�” Whatever remains outside the framework of a community’s intelligibility, whatever that community doesn’t possess a critical language to “think,” will therefore elude recognition by the aesthetic imagination as well� If the foremost stake in the return of the aesthetic for progressive political ends is its ability to offer, through imagination, a mode of thought free from the conceptual restrictions imposed by the world as it is, then we must ask what happens when the aesthetic itself “sets limits to [the] Subject’s mode of imagining,” as Sylvia Wynter asserts (44)� Or, alternatively, what happens if we take the notion of aesthetic autonomy seriously, recognizing the aesthetic as separate from and ex-centric to the concerns of actuality and, therefore, as incommensurate with the assumption of its intelligibility? 4 Bryant goes on to discuss Deleuze’s concept of the encounter “in a twofold way� On the one hand, … it suspends our habitual relations of recognition with being and allows us to call these structures into question… � On the other hand, the encounter functions as a sign of the transcendental, announcing an internal difference within intuition whose structure and essence must be unfolded” (13)� 18 l ee e delman This prospect shapes the second of Rancière’s “two great politics of aesthetics,” the “politics of the resistant form,” which entails the “radical separation of the sensorium of art from that of everyday aestheticized life” such that the aesthetic “retains its purity, avoiding all forms of political intervention” (Rancière 43-44, 40). This position conceives the aesthetic as so fully self-enclosed that it winds up eluding human thought, “refusing every form of reconciliation,” and “maintaining the gap between the dissensual form of the work and the forms of ordinary experience” (41). Like the becominglife of art, however, it still holds out, as Rancière explains it, a metapolitical promise for the organization of the world� On the one hand, that promise inheres in art’s very separation from the world, suggesting the possibility of a radical freedom from reality and its hierarchies of value; on the other, and to me the more interesting, hand, it inheres for Rancière in the aesthetic’s “testimony to the power of the Other” (43)� The politics of the resistant form insists on “the shock of the aistheton, attesting to the mind’s alienation from the power of an irremediable alterity� The work’s sensible heterogeneity no longer vouches for the promise of emancipation� On the contrary, it comes to invalidate every such promise by testifying to the mind’s irremediable dependency with regard to the Other inhabiting it” (42)� Referring to the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard to conceptualize this aesthetic of Otherness, Rancière describes it, using Lyotard’s term, as a relation of “pure difference,” a relation that names the non-relation between the mind’s “conceptual determinations” and the “sensuous matter” that the mind is incapable of grasping or presenting, although it consists of such matter itself (90). But Rancière touches, however briefly, on another way to broach the alterity at issue in the politics of the resistant form when he describes it as “grounded in a notion of art as that which testifies to the immemorial dependency of the human mind on the unmasterable presence that, following Lacan, [Lyotard] calls the ‘Thing’” (94)� As tantalizing as this suggestion is, Rancière does little to expand on the connection between the Lacanian “Thing” and the aesthetic� I choose, nonetheless, to press on it here for the challenge it poses to the return of the aesthetic as a mode of “collective becoming”—a challenge that centers on the insistent ab-sens by which queerness and Afro-pessimism both would fracture the ontological ground supporting the aesthetics of collectivity� 5 The Lacanian Thing designates the “beyond-of-the-signified,” the ab-sens foundationally excluded from Symbolic signification (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 54, 139)� Inhabiting the Symbolic as an impossibility produced by the Symbolic itself, it testifies to the persistence of the null set in every account of the world as it “is” and to the presence of something uncountable in every enumeration of collectivity� Each attempt to name it misnames it by turning its nothing into something, producing a catachrestic form to make 5 See, for example, Jared Sexton, who writes: “coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition” (“Afro-Pessimism” 3)� Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 19 present what language excludes. Incapable of positivization, the Thing never attains the intelligibility its catachreses intend� Refusing the logic of sense (both as sensory experience and intellectual apprehension), the Thing, instead, partakes of ab-sens, insisting on what never is presented in or counted as part of a world� Where Schiller understood the aesthetic as surmounting the division between “the sensuous and the intellectual,” the Thing, as ab-sens, instantiates the radical priority of division as such, a division that is not a division of something but an originary division� Only through the prior subtraction of ab-sens as meaningless division or subtraction does the thought of being become possible—but that subtraction, by contrast, makes impossible the thought of ab-sens as such. In this way ab-sens interrupts both the oneness of being and the oneness of any being by incising in every entity the subtraction that incompletes it and confounding the aesthetic hope of “imagining a universally shared terrain,” a “unite[d] society,” or a “collective becoming�” 6 The subtraction that constitutes ab-sens for Lacan is central to his theoretization of sex, which remains, as he frames it, unknowable: a cut or division irreducible to the traditional binarization of sexual difference and as such inaccessible to logic or sense� For this reason, as we have seen, Lacan maintains that “there is no sexual relation” and man and woman, the so-called halves pretending to totalize the subject positions available to the speaking animal, are merely linguistic positings that serve to dissimulate ab-sens� Queerness, as I have argued, rather than naming non-normative sexual practices by way of a vague umbrella identity, catachrestically figures the ab-sens that designates sex in psychoanalysis, the ab-sens that the fantasy of sexual relation, of complementarity between man and woman, masks� Such queerness has no mooring in particular characteristics in themselves� It refers, instead, to whatever figures, in a given social order, a disruption in the economy of meaning, even if such figures of disruption are required for that economy to survive. It stands in for the Thing that no framework of intelligibility can accommodate and so appears, from the dominant perspective of the becoming-life of art, as the anti-aesthetic, the aesthetic’s inverse: in other words, the obscene� If the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form both share, as Rancière maintains, “a common core linking the autonomy of art to the anticipation of a community to come” (128), then the queerness excluded from community, the queerness that figurally embodies the void inherent in the formation of every community, manifests itself as the obscenity that the aesthetic calls into being as its other� Major theorists of Afro-pessimism have framed blackness in tellingly similar terms� Noting that “it [is] impossible to divide slaveness from Blackness,” Frank Wilderson III proposes that since “the structure by which human beings are recognized and incorporated into a community of human beings is anti-slave,” the Black remains “a sentient being for whom recognition and 6 The universality of ab-sens in the structural production of speaking subjects does not produce a universal aesthetic of subjectivity, only the universality of aesthetic recuperations of subjectivity� 20 l ee e delman incorporation is impossible” (57, 57, 54)� Fred Moten, who places himself “in apposition” to the discourse of Afro-pessimism, declares nonetheless, “I am in total agreement with the Afro-pessimistic understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society” and he concurs that from within “the coordinates of the transcendental aesthetic,” “blackness is nothing, that is, the relative nothingness of the impossible, pathological subject” (739-41)� He then asks a series of questions: “What’s the relationship between blackness, thingliness, nothingness, and the (de/ re)generative operations of what Deleuze might call a life in common? … Can there be an aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of nothingness? ” (742). Although he answers in the affirmative (“[i]n the end,” he writes, “…life and optimism are the terms under which I speak” [742]), Afro-pessimists like Jared Sexton offer a very different perspective: “The question that remains,” writes Sexton in his respectful response to Moten, “is whether a politics, which is also to say an aesthetics, that affirms (social) life can avoid the thanatological dead end if it does not will its own (social) death” (“The Social Life of Social Death” 16)� The contemporary return of the aesthetic, of course, is far from willing its own social death, making it less a return than the continuation of a pervasive aesthetic politics whose dual aspects, as Rancière defines them, find “their common core” in a commitment to “a community to come�” With its promise of a redemptive collectivism, this aesthetics that returns without having left can realize such a community only by perpetuating the exclusion of whatever cannot be accommodated to being, whatever, as a consequence, finds itself figured by a catachrestic identity (like the queer, the black, the woman) constructed to be abjected by a particular socio-cultural regime� These catachreses of impossibility function as the aesthetic’s obscene remainders; they are positivized versions of the Thing, of ab-sens, of the pure negativity of division, as created by an aesthetic community to enclose and secure its notion of sense� The element of irredeemability inseparable from the category of obscenity— which never generates an aesthetic since any ascription of aesthetic value automatically disqualifies it as obscene—aligns it with the social death imposed on those made to figure the nothingness of ontological negation that inheres in queerness, blackness, ab-sens, or any of the myriad names for the void that disturbs the ethics, which is always also an aesthetics, of collectivity� The aesthetic, in fact, is bound to an ethics, specifically to an ethics of desire, even when that desire is the desire to escape our enslavement to desire as such� But this should hardly surprise us since our earliest seizure by the aesthetic coincides with our very precipitation as subjects through identification with the image of the other in which we first perceive an integral self. The ethical relation of the self to the other takes shape in the human from the outset by this internalization of an aesthetic image, of a totalized form, as the self—an aesthetic form whose intuited totality gives birth to our paradigm of being� That totality, however, can offer no image of queerness, or blackness, or sex, though the catachreses, the positivizations, that each of these precipitate may be mirrored back in a later moment under certain regimes of visibility. Queerness, blackness, sex, and ab-sens, as names for the primal Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 21 subtraction that renders totality not-all, oppose to the aesthetic’s ethics of desire (which is the desire for aesthetic unity) the anti-aesthetic expressed by the drive, which, as the primal instantiation of the aesthetic’s obscene remainder, admits no incorporation into a subject without division� What drives this incessant return of the aesthetic, which keeps coming back, to great acclaim, to where it has been all along? Rooted as it is in an ethics of desire, why should the aesthetic be constrained to enact the repetition compulsion’s negativity when its goal is precisely to surmount negativity by insisting on totalization? Perhaps, as I have suggested, the answer has to do with the aesthetic’s involvement in the misrecognition that structures the mirror stage, engendering the subject through anticipation of the unity of the “I�” The image in the mirror is never whole; it both marks and is marked by its division from the proto-subject it elicits (who discovers not only itself but also its rival in the mirror) as well as from everything else that the mirror’s image can never show nor representation ever include� In mobilizing the logic of division and initiating the movement of desire, the mirror invokes, if only by negation, what never appears in the form of an object: the negativity of division as such� Out of that division, the source of the drive in the order of signification, the other of the aesthetic emerges, too: the Real that dissolves our reality, the obscenity wherein we never are but without which we could not be� That radical division with no name of its own, though the names it assumes are legion (including queerness, blackness, woman, and trans* in their non-positivizable senses), is the site of the subject’s unfreedom where all claims of aesthetic liberation, self-possession, and autonomy founder� But it is also, as Alenka Zupančič maintains, the singular condition of our freedom: the place of the subject’s self-constitution insofar as “there is no Other of the Other, no cause behind the cause” (40)� Determined by nothing beyond that division as it expresses itself in the drive, the subject is not subjected to the drive as a constraint or a form of unfreedom but, instead, is subjectified by it� In her juxtaposition of Kant and Lacan, Zupančič reminds us that, according to each, “man is not only much more unfree than he believes, but also much freer than he knows” (39)� Freedom, in fact, is something the subject is incapable of “knowing” since it is realized only at the level of the drives and not at the level of desire. It expresses itself in the jouissance that cares nothing for the subject’s self-interest (which is always the interest of its aesthetic self-image); instead, it consists of the drive’s negativity that refuses every object� Rather than pertaining to the self engendered through an aesthetic ideal of unity appropriated from without (the coherence of the image in the mirror), freedom inhabits the gap or division internal to the aesthetic and resistant to its totalizations� The subject of desire’s continuous pursuit of satisfaction in a cathected object yields to the drive’s attachment to jouissance through fixation, instead, on the object a with which nothing in reality coincides� Lacan observes in Seminar XX that “[o]bject a is no being� Object a is the void presupposed by a demand” (On Feminine Sexuality 126). This aspect of the void finds its corollary, he tells us, in the metonymy that propels us through a sentence from its beginning to 22 l ee e delman its end, instantiating, in his account of it, “a desire that is based on no being” (126)� In this radical of desire uncoupled from any objectal realization we encounter the negativity of the void that Lacan evokes in the phrase, “ce n’est pas ça”: “‘That’s not it’ means that, in the desire of every demand, there is but the request for object a” (126)� That “request,” in its negativity, constitutes the drive as the radical of desire: in other words, as the subtraction of desire from any positivization in an object� This “ce n’est pas ça” thus closely corresponds with the de-ontologizing force of Frantz Fanon’s “n’est pas” (“Le nègre n’est pas� Pas plus que le Blanc�”) as incisively glossed by David Marriott: “Too many readings of Fanon want to say what this ‘n’est pas’ is, to explain it away as mere negation in the manner, say, of Freud or Hegel� It seems necessary to be able to locate blackness in terms of what negates it, or, more precisely, to be able to attach predicates to it to make it recognizable (it seems to be characteristic of these readings to assume at least the possibility that blackness can be incorporated as a thing, or else as an identity or subject whose demands can be met and its referent duly agreed on)” (Marriott 8)� With this refusal of positivization and this distancing of blackness from the “predicates” intended to bind it to an ontological referent, we see the commonality of blackness and queerness as designations for what escapes incorporation in the catachreses that generate (id)entities� In this context we might return to Paul Gilmore’s previously cited words: “aesthetic experience could become a precondition to greater political and social freedom and equality by imagining a universally shared terrain in place of the delimited ground of identity politics” (472)� The aesthetic—itself an “identity politics” inseparable from the subject’s constitutive self-identification as a subject—cannot procure the subject’s “freedom,” from a psychoanalytic point of view, any more than universality can avoid its condition as not-all� The only universality a psychoanalytic concept of freedom can acknowledge is the drive’s attachment to a jouissance at odds with the (aesthetic) identities through which we imag(in)e ourselves and the world� Such a freedom, because inaccessible to the subject’s conscious desires, can serve as the ground for no political program or collective social engagement� In her subtle analysis of the historical logic by which Hegel justifies the enslavement of Africans as “an essentially emancipatory project,” Andrea Long Chu asks a series of questions raised by the drive as well: “Can we think freedom without the future? What would a radically presentist notion of freedom look like? Would we even recognize it as freedom? ” (417)� Sade himself, in his most orgiastic scenes, filters his evocations of the drive through the lens of the libertine’s “liberty,” making it, at worst, a wearisome task to which the libertine accedes and not what it is for psychoanalysis: an imperative that sidesteps the will� Slavoj Žižek gives us a better image of the drive’s relation to freedom when he discusses the fate of Karen in Hans Christian Anderson’s, “The Red Shoes” (81)� While the woman by whom she was raised lies dying, Karen, eager to attend a great ball being thrown that night in town, turns her thoughts to the shiny red shoes in which she has long taken pride� Thinking it can do Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 23 no harm to look at, to handle, or even to wear them, she decides to put them on� No sooner has she done so, however, than they prompt her to abandon her guardian’s deathbed and make her way to the ball� Once there, they take control of her movements, merging with her feet and forcing her to dance continuously, night and day� Far from gaining the pleasure she imagined or the freedom of action she desired, she experiences herself as coerced by the shoes in which she now feels imprisoned. They exert, like the drive, as Žižek puts it, “a kind of impersonal willing” that “exacts satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being�” But Karen, who perceives this willing as something alien to her desire, determines to escape it, which she does by persuading an executioner to cut her feet off with his axe. Still ensconced in the shoes, her feet dance away while Karen, now crippled, devotes herself to a life of penitence and devotion, “free” of the enjoyment to which she had found herself driven by the shoes. But as Žižek rightly reminds us, while no subject can ever “subjectivize” the drive and “assume it as ‘her own,’” it “operates in her very kernel,” expressing “that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’”; indeed, to the extent that “desire is the desire of the Other, while drive is never the drive of the Other,” only the latter can express the subject’s freedom from external determination (81). Only it reveals, in the words of Zupančiç, “no Other of the Other, no cause behind the cause,” thus escaping heteronomy� Unlike what Rancière discusses as the aesthetic politics of the resistant form—where the work “no longer vouches for the promise of emancipation� On the contrary, it comes to invalidate every such promise by testifying to the mind’s irremediable dependency with regard to the Other inhabiting it”—the drive’s insistence, as “The Red Shoes” depicts it, implicates enslavement and emancipation in each other. It testifies not to what is Other than the subject but to the division of which the subject consists, its negative ontology� Intolerable to our cathected self-image, the negativity that emerges from within the aesthetic (not for nothing do the red shoes begin as the beautiful objects of Karen’s desire) occasions not only the disavowal of the obscene compulsion such negativity exerts (as when Karen asks that her feet be cut off), but also its sublimation, its rerouting toward socially sanctioned ends, like the piety that demands, as the red shoes did, submission to a will not one’s “own�” If the compulsion of the drive gets negated here as the antithesis of aesthetic freedom only to be refigured as Karen’s subservience to the mandate of celestial law, then we can recognize the underlying affinity between religion and the obscenity it demonizes, an affinity that shows how the drive’s sublimation, aesthetic education’s goal, preserves, in its own negativity, the obscenity it would subl(im)ate� The constant return of the aesthetic corresponds to the constant pressure of the drive, but in seeking to counter the drive’s enjoyment, aesthetic sublimation reinforces it� In the same way, the freedom the aesthetic proposes finds its predicate in constraint: not just the constraint that lets the subject escape its enchainment to materiality only by chaining the devalued material to the abstraction said to transcend it, but also the literal enchainment of those it excludes from rational thought. Like 24 l ee e delman philosophy in Badiou’s account of it, the aesthetic, as a form of education, “wants to know nothing about jouissance” and for just that reason remains bound to it, like Hegel’s lord to his bondsman (Badiou 66)� That latter relation models, in Lacan’s analysis, philosophy’s theft of the slave’s jouissance, but it also describes the structure supporting Schillerian aesthetic freedom, with its privileging of “idleness and indifference�” Exploring the central position of race in the formation of such an aesthetic, Gikandi observes that “[p]roponents of the aesthetic sought to use blackness as the counterpoint to beauty and enlightenment and then to relegate it to the margins of their discourse” (331)� In response to Elaine Scarry’s defense of beauty as a spur “to repair existing injustices,” he observes: “[i]t is perhaps true that concerns with beauty do indeed make us hanker for justice and just solutions to our social problems, but still, if this claim is to be taken seriously, if we are to associate beauty with an immanent idea of justice, then we need to consider its counterpoint: the injuries done to the bodies of those considered to be outside the domain of the beautiful and the injustice committed on these bodies in the name of beauty” (Scarry 57, Gikandi 327)� But we needn’t stop there� We should also consider the injustice done to those excluded from the realm of being, those figured as its negation in order to shelter the concept of aesthetic totality from its inherent antagonism� These are the queer, the monstrous, the alien, the irrational, and the nonhuman who embody that antagonism (to which the drive returns us); these are all who figurally embody the other of the aesthetic, the obscenity of ab-sens, and thereby refute the Schillerian hope of a purely aesthetic liberation, as well as the progressive political fantasy of an aesthetic of collective becoming, by insisting on the injury and exclusion that follow inevitably from this irreducible fact: aesthetic totality is always not-all� Works Cited Badiou, Alain� Images du temps present, 2001-2004. Paris: Fayard, 2014� Bryant, Levi� Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence� Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2008� Castiglia, Christopher� “Revolution is a Fiction�” Early American Literature 51�2 (2016): 397-418� Castiglia, Christopher and Russ Castronovo� “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies�” American Literature 76�3 (2004): 423-435� Chu, Andrea Long. “Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32�3 (2018): 414-425� de Man, Paul� Aesthetic Ideology� Ed� Andrzej Warminski� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996� Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock� “Sentimental Aesthetics�” American Literature 76�3 (2004): 495-523� Duttlinger, Carolin. “Between Contemplation and Distraction: Configurations of Attention in Walter Benjamin�” German Studies Review 30�1 (2007): 33-54� Felski, Rita� The Limits of Critique� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015� Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 25 Gikandi, Simon� “Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic�” Michigan Quarterly Review 40�2 (2001): 318-350� Gilmore, Paul� “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics�” American Literature 76�3 (2004): 467-494� Kant, Immanuel� Critique of Judgment� Trans� Werner S� Pluhar� Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987� Lacan, Jacques� On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-73� Ed� Jacques-Alain Miller� Trans� Bruce Fink� New York: Norton, 1998� The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XX� ---� The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960� Ed� Jacques Alain-Miller� Trans� Dennis Porter� New York: Norton, 1992� The Seminar of Jacques Lacan VII� Marriott, David� “Judging Fanon�” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges 29 (2016)� Moten, Fred� “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)�” South Atlantic Quarterly 112�4 (2013): 737-780� Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents� Malden: Polity, 2009� Scarry, Elaine� On Beauty and Being Just� Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999� Schiller, Friedrich� On the Aesthetic Education of Man� Trans� Reginald Snell� Mineola: Dover, 2004� Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges 29 (2016)� ---� “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism�” InTensions Journal 5 (2011)� Wilderson, Frank B�, III� Interview by Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr� Hate� “‘We’re trying to destroy the world’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson�” Ill Will Editions, Nov 2014� Wynter, Sylvia� “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism�” boundary 2 12�3 (1984): 19-70� Žižek, Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997� Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan� New York: Verso, 2000� W infried f luck The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom I. Why do people read long novels although they know that the story is made up? Why do they look at art objects although they know that these have no practical consequences? Traditionally, the answer has been: they do so because they are looking for an aesthetic experience. Literary studies and the history and criticism of art thus focused on the analysis of art’s aesthetic qualities, and, consequently, the aesthetic was the key concept of these fields. Today, however, we witness a sweeping and wide-ranging rejection of the concept of the aesthetic� In literary studies, almost all of the approaches that have replaced formalism as part of a radically revisionist turn after the 1960s, ranging from the ideological criticism of the Bercovitch group, British Cultural Studies and Althusserian Marxism to Poststructuralism and the New Historicism, and including Race and Gender Studies, have as their common ground a critique or rejection of the concept of the aesthetic� Continuing to rely on the concept as a key term of analysis, they argue, perpetuates a separation of the aesthetic and the political that is considered theoretically untenable and must lead to ideological mystification. This problematization of the concept of the aesthetic is not restricted to literary studies� A major topic in aesthetic theory—starting with John Dewey and leading up to Arthur Danto and others—is what has been called the “deaestheticization” (Rosenberg, “De-Aestheticization”), or “delimitation of the aesthetic sphere” (Wellershoff), or the “disenfranchisement of art” (Danto), all of them terms designed to undermine the status of the aesthetic as a separate, autonomous sphere� Similarly, in contemporary artistic practice, such a breakdown of the boundaries between art and life has been one of the major projects in avant-garde art, starting with Dada and leading to contemporary movements like Performance Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Installation Art� II. In literary studies, the rejection of the aesthetic has taken on several forms� Their common starting point is the revisionist turn of the 1960s that has led to a radical transformation of American literary studies� Up to then, the dominant approach—in fact, the institutionally only respectable approach—was 28 W infried f luck formalism which argued that form is the actual source of the meaning and aesthetic value of a literary text. This argument was perfect for the field’s self-legitimation, because it pointed to the need to have the professional expertise to be able to apply a formal analysis� But formalism depended on a particular concept of the aesthetic: form can only become the main source of meaning and value, if it transforms everyday language into a poetic object with a meaning of its own, and, hence, into an aesthetic object� For this, it has to constitute an autonomous sphere of its own� Only if the work possesses aesthetic autonomy, can it be considered art and is worthy of study� Starting with the 1960s, this formalism has been continuously and persistently criticized by revisionist approaches� Despite many differences, they share two basic assumptions� One is a rejection of the category of the aesthetic as a key concept for literary analysis, the other is a shift from aesthetics to the politics of literature as the main criterion of relevance and representativeness� Both aspects are inextricably entangled. For the revisionists, the aesthetic and the political do not constitute two distinctly separate realms; rather, throughout its history literature has also had important political functions, and discussions of literary texts focusing on their aesthetic dimension have helped to hide this fact� For revisionists, literary studies have thus played a major role in obscuring power relations or being in complicity with them� What formalists have praised as the power of art has really been the art of power, to quote Mark Seltzer’s clever bonmot about the politics of the novels of Henry James� To critique the aesthetic and its politics must therefore be a starting point for revisionist literary studies� 1 An important part of the argument is that the relation between the aesthetic and the political is not simply one of a co-existence� The point is that the aesthetic, too, is inherently political� The challenge is therefore to overcome the separation of art and life, or, more specifically, of the aesthetic and the political� A history of literary theories in the last decades could be written on the basis of revisionism’s different attempts to do so� But a brief overview must be sufficient here. In formalism a separation of the aesthetic and the political is crucial to secure the literary text’s autonomy and thereby separate art from ideology� If literature succeeds as art, it transcends ideology� In contrast, Sacvan Bercovitch claims that a work of art … can no more transcend ideology than an artist’s mind can transcend psychology; and it is worth remarking as a possibility that our great writers … may be just as implicated in the dominant culture as other, contextual writers, and in the long run perhaps more useful in perpetrating it� (Bercovitch 99-100) 1 Of course, there have also been attempts in recent years to defend the category of the aesthetic, but these attempts have remained isolated events and have not been able to establish a notable counter-position� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 29 This is not to reduce their achievement to ideology� They may have written great literature, but if there is no longer any ontological difference between art and ideology, the aesthetic may also have an ideological function, perhaps even through its strong aesthetic effects� The goal, then, is not to dismiss the concept of the aesthetic but to question the claim of its autonomy� Raymond Williams goes one step further: Art and thinking about art have to separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstraction, from the social processes within which they are still contained� Aesthetic theory is the main instrument of this evasion� … Thus we have to reject ‘the aesthetic’ both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function� (Williams 154-56) However, in contrast to more radical approaches, this artificial separation can still be overcome by redefining the aesthetic as an inherently creative dimension of ordinary everyday life; and, not surprisingly, the best method to reinsert the aesthetic into the context of a whole way of life is Cultural Studies (as practiced by Raymond Williams)� This is no longer possible in the structuralist Marxism inspired, above all, by Louis Althusser� 2 In a radical revision of classical Marxism, ideological analysis is moved from an analysis of content to one of form, from the analysis of a universal spirit that expresses the whole of a nation to the postulation of a structure that constitutes the whole� In bourgeois society, this truth cannot be openly admitted, so that the structure that constitutes social reality as a whole remains an absent cause and can only be traced through its effects� The aesthetic is such an effect� 3 In analogy to Lacan’s description of the mirror-stage in which the mirror provides the child with a mistaken sense 2 Deconstruction has not had a strong presence and formative influence in American studies, but it is, of course, part of the story of a rejection of the concept of the aesthetic which, in deconstructive criticism, is lost in the process of “writing” and its interminable différance� 3 Cf� Terry Eagleton for whom the aesthetic is another one of these cultural power effects through which the sensuous nature of the subject is “reconstructed from the inside”: “For before ‘interpretation’ in its modern hermeneutical sense was brought to birth, a whole apparatus of power in the field of culture was already firmly in place and had been for about a century� This was not an apparatus which determined the power-effects of particular readings but one which determined the political meaning and function of culture as such� Its name was and is aesthetics�” It will “be part of my argument that the ‘aesthetic,’ at least in its original formulations, has little enough to do with art� It denotes instead a whole program of social, psychical and political reconstruction on the part of the early European bourgeoisie” (327)� “The aesthetic, in other words, marks an historic shift from what we might now, in Gramscian terms, call coercion to hegemony, ruling and informing our sensuous life from within while allowing it to thrive in all its relative autonomy” (328)� “It is easier, in other words, for reason to repress sensuous Nature if it has already been busy eroding and subliming it from the inside and this is the task of the aesthetic” (329)� “Structures of power must become structures of feeling and the name for this mediation from property to propriety is the aesthetic� … What matters in aesthetics is not art but this whole project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law” (330)� 30 W infried f luck of wholeness, literary texts can thus be effective in creating a misrecognition of reality—not necessarily because of a particular ideological content, but because literary forms can present coherent images of the world that are illusionary nevertheless� 4 In Cultural Studies, the separation of the aesthetic and the political can still be overcome by reinserting the aesthetic into a whole way of life from which it has been artificially separated. In Althusserian Marxism, the separation is eliminated by reconceptualizing the aesthetic as the deceptive, “symptomatic” surface manifestation of an absent cause that constitutes society as a whole� The assumption of an absent cause that remains hidden and only manifests itself in the form of a symptom on the surface of the text is the core assumption of what has been called the hermeneutics of suspicion� For critics like Fredric Jameson or Terry Eagleton, this absent cause is capitalism, but the influence of this argument has gone way beyond structuralist Marxism and has also become the basis for critics like Eve Sedgwick, Toni Morrison or Edward Said, that is, queer studies, race and gender studies, and postcolonial studies; moreover, it also characterizes some of the work of the New Americanists which has had a major influence on American literary studies in the last decades� 5 Race, queerness, empire, or the nation-state have been the dominant absent causes in revisionist literary studies of the last decades� 6 New Historicism has been another influential approach that works against a conceptualization of the aesthetic as a separate sphere� To overcome this separation, New Historicists have taken a course that is different from other revisionists, however, by moving from a vertical reflection model, in which the aesthetic can be seen as merely a reflection or symptom of the political, to a horizontal model of relations, in which the aesthetic and the political are on the same level� As Walter Benn Michaels has argued in response to Marxist challenges, “the only relation literature as such has to culture as 4 In a stunning reversal, classical realism, in Marxism long considered a privileged literary form to provide at least some degree of critical insight into the “true” nature of capitalist society, is now seen as the ideologically most harmful literary form� 5 See, for example, Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture which is based on the starting premise that imperialism is the absent cause that pervades all parts of American society and also shapes every aspect of the literary (and, in her case, also filmic) text, so that it can be found in most unexpected aspects of a literary text or film. 6 For a concise characterization, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus: “The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature� Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages” (Best and Marcus 6)� To this list Edward Said‘s influential postcolonial study Culture and Imperialism (1994) should be added, in which Said argues, among other things, that Jane Austen’s social and literary world is constituted by the absent cause of imperialism� For a comprehensive analysis of the different revisionist approaches in literary studies see my essays “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings” and “Shadow Aesthetics�” The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 31 such is that it is part of it” (Michaels, The Gold Standard 27)� But if everything is shaped by the same systemic logic, and there is no outside of it and escape from it, then the aesthetic can no longer stand out as having a different quality or function� In Walter Benn Michaels’s book The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, this pervasive, all embracing logic is that of the market; in Mark Seltzer’s study Henry James and the Art of Power, together with Michaels’s book one of the best-known New Historicist studies of American literature, the logic is that of power as defined by Foucault. Such claims have interesting interpretive consequences� If single aspects of the text do not stand for a larger whole, whether metaphorically or metonymically, but must be seen to stand in continuity with other aspects of a system, then every single textual aspect can only exemplify a logic that characterizes all other aspects as well� Interpretation can thus only lead to a potentially unlimited set of equations� Thus, Mark Seltzer can claim that in a novel like Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, “love and power … are two ways of saying the same thing” (66). Love is only another form of exerting power, and so is care, just as benevolence and sympathy, not to forget the novel’s “organic form,” as well as its literary techniques� In effect, the whole point of Seltzer’s interpretation is to dispel the illusion that any of these things could still stand outside of power� But if they all stand in a seamless continuity, then the specific literary form of expression does not really matter; it is only another technology of power, and all that needs to be said about its function is that it “register(s) and secure(s)” (24) manifestations of power� The aesthetic becomes identical with the political to such a degree that it has no longer any signifying power of its own� This is where New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt differ, however� 7 Again, the starting question is how it is possible to overcome the separation of the aesthetic and the political, but Greenblatt takes another route to do so, because, for interesting reasons, he does not want to give up the concept of the aesthetic� Although he agrees that the aesthetic and the political do not constitute ontologically separate spheres, he nevertheless does not want to dispense with any claim of a difference� In fact, he—cautiously—raises the question whether it is “not possible to have a communal sphere of art that is distinct from other communal spheres” (3)� Why is the separation of the aesthetic and the political untenable, then? In Greenblatt’s view, it is untenable, because it is impossible to keep these two spheres apart in any neat fashion� Political spheres always have an aesthetic dimension, and the aesthetic object always and inevitably has a political function� Hence, the relation between these spheres should not be seen in terms of separation but as a continuous circulation and exchange. This is an important paradigm change. Formalist and Marxist models of the relation between the aesthetic and the political are uni-directional, so that one realm determines the other, or has dominance over it� In contrast, the term circulation implies a continuous process of exchange. But if the 7 The following discussion draws on Greenblatt’s essays “The Circulation of Social Energy” and “Towards a Poetics of Culture�” 32 W infried f luck aesthetic and the political are in a process of continuous circulation and exchange, then this also means that there is no stable pattern of relation—which also means that there is no clear-cut causality, no clear-cut hierarchy of influences, no aesthetic form on which we can focus as constitutive of meaning� Instead, the relation is now characterized by often unforeseen, unexpected linkages, subject to change at any given moment, so that Greenblatt can characterize their changing relations as dynamic, if not dizzying, and seemingly inexhaustible. At one point, he even speaks of a “restless oscillation” (8). III. Greenblatt’s position of not rejecting the separation of art and life altogether but blurring their boundaries shows striking affinities to a line of aesthetic theory starting with John Dewey and Jan Mukarovsky, who insist on the continuity of aesthetic experience with everyday experiences without regarding them as identical� A similar development can be observed in modern and especially contemporary artistic practices, starting with Dada and currently continued by artistic movements like Performance art, Minimalism, Conceptual art and Installation art� In fact, in his essay collection Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, Allan Kaprow, the chief theoretician of the Happening, provides a definition of contemporary art that is strikingly similar to Greenblatt’s when he says: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct as possible” (706). 8 Numerous definitions of this kind could be added. They bear a striking affinity to the developments in literary studies that I have traced in the first part of this essay. Just as the challenge to overcome the separation of the aesthetic and the political is the common ground that links revisionist approaches in literary studies, the call for overcoming a separation of art and life can be seen as one of the key projects of contemporary artistic practice� Why has his project become so crucial? When we look at programmatic statements, beginning with Dada, one aspect stands out, the search for an extension of the possibilities of art. As long as it is still tied to aesthetic principles, art cannot do full justice to life� Hence, Richard Huelsenbeck can claim in the “First German Dada Manifesto”: “With Dadaism new reality comes into its own� Life appears as simultaneous muddle of noises, colors, and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality” (Harrison 25-26)� 8 See also Kaprow’s provocative suggestions to leave the sphere of art altogether and move over to the sphere of life: “The Happening is conceived as an art, certainly, but this is for lack of a better word or one that would not cause endless discussion� I personally would not care if it were called a sport� … A United States Marine Corps manual on jungle fighting tactics, a tour of a laboratory where kidneys are made, the daily traffic jam on the Long Island expressway, are more useful than Beethoven, Racine, or Michelangelo” (706)� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 33 In order to do justice to this experience of life, traditional concepts of the aesthetic have to be discarded, including questions of the proper medium and the proper materials for art� As Archer puts it: “recent art is made not only with oil paint, metal and stone, but with all kinds of things taken from life, including air, light, sound, words, people, food, refuse, multimedia installations and much else besides” (7)� In similar fashion, long-cherished formal principles are dispensed with, as Harold Rosenberg already argued early on in his essay on “The Action Painters“: The new American painting is not ‘pure’ art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic� The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color� They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting� In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated� Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act� (570)� In Minimalism’s attempt to avoid all overt compositional effects, this tendency is further radicalized, so that its programmatic claim, directed against the idea of symbolic representation, can be “What you see is what you see” (Archer 52)� As Arthur Danto has argued, ever since Warhol’s Brillo boxes of 1964, an art object could be anything at all (or even nothing). For the first time in history artists were free to do whatever they wanted—to slice up dead animals, throw elephant dung on canvases, display their soiled underwear, and mold images of themselves out of their own blood� In this world of total freedom the actual physical attributes of a work counted for less than its philosophical justifications. All art had become conceptual art… (Gewen) Pop Art presents the final rejection of the uniqueness of aesthetic form. Even Duchamp’s ready-made could still draw attention to the unique form a urinal has once we disregard its purpose� But Warhol’s Brillo Boxes have no uniqueness whatsoever. “With it, art had finally become liberated from the representation of form. … For the first time in the history of art everything was possible, everything could be art” (Hauskeller 100, m�t�)� Can everything be art, then? How can we know that an object is an art object and not just a plain vacuum cleaner? One obvious answer is to point to contemporary art’s dependence on the institutional contexts in which it is presented and in which audiences encounter it. If it is exhibited in a gallery or museum, it must be art� But how does it get into these places? One possibility is suggested by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 used the pseudonym R� Mutt to justify the (unsuccessful) submission of a urinal entitled Fountain to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York: What are the grounds for refusing Mr� Mutt’s fountain: 1� Some contended it was immoral, vulgar� 2� Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing� Now Mr� Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows. 34 W infried f luck Whether Mr� Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance� He CHOSE it� He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object� As for plumbing, that is absurd� The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges� (Duchamp 248) The important point here is Duchamp’s emphatic statement: “Whether Mr� Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance� He CHOSE it�” And by choosing it, he created “a new thought for that object�” In other words: although no artistic work will gain recognition as an art object without any institutional support, it is, in the final analysis, the claim of the artist that what he is presenting is art that is the main criterion left once there is no longer a consensus about the aesthetic� 9 Since the object itself can no longer signal to us how it should be classified, only the artist is left to know what it is supposed to be� Ever since Dadaism, Surrealism, and, even more radically, Pop Art have made it their project to transform profane and banal everyday objects into art, artists have gained the freedom to turn everything into art—including the abject and all kinds of bodily fluids. Thus, Rosenberg can say about art povera: “Redefining art as the process of the artist or his materials, it dissolves all limitations on the kind of substances out of which art can be constituted. Anything—breakfast food, a frozen lake, film footage—is art, either as is or tampered with, through being chosen as a fetish” (“De-Aestheticization“ 37)� This new freedom also creates a new challenge, however� Since the appearance of the object itself can no longer tell us whether it is supposed to be art or not, a narrative is needed—in the words of Duchamp—to create “a new thought for that object�” In this sense, all art is Conceptual art today� Conceptual art has carried the development I have described to a logical endpoint, for example, when Sol LeWitt claims that all ideas are art if they are concerned with art: “All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art” (838)� In the same spirit, Joseph Kosuth quotes Donald Judd: “If someone calls it art, it’s art” (843)� And Kosuth himself adds: “All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually” (844)� The aesthetic dimension has become irrelevant at this point� How can we know, then, that something is art? That is easy: “Art is the definition of art” (849)� Until the arrival of Minimalism, a widely accepted criterion for determining what is art could be derived from the modernist story of aesthetic progress in which single elements like paint, light, color, abstract forms, or lines are liberated from their subordination to a larger context of meaning. That story has come to an end with Conceptual art and Installation art� One of the consequences is that the artist has gained a new level of creative freedom, because artists are no longer constrained by aesthetic principles that they have experienced as confining. In its decidedly anti-mimetic 9 In that sense, one can say with Benjamin Buchloh: “Critical practice at the moment resides in aesthetic practice itself” (Foster 86)� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 35 stance, contemporary experimental art is often described as expanding the freedom of interpretation for the viewer, but, more significantly, it also establishes a new freedom of expression for the artist who is now free to declare any object of his choice to be art� When the artist Daniel Knorr was asked in an interview why he had decided to become an artist, he could therefore answer: Because this is where I have the greatest freedom� 10 Instead of being subjected to the constraints of aesthetic principles, the anti-aesthetic attitude empowers the artist to set his own rules� Thus, the sculptor Robert Morris could declare programmatically at one point of his career that he would withdraw all aesthetic quality from his works: Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal The undersigned, Robert Morris, being the maker of the metal construction entitled Litanies, described in the annexed Exhibit A, hereby withdraws from said construction all esthetic quality and content and declares that from the date hereof said construction has no such quality and content� Dated: November 15, 1963� (Rosenberg, “De-Aestheticization” 28) In the same spirit, Donald Judd, in defiance of the idea of aesthetic quality, could claim that a work of art does not have to be good, just interesting: An art that saw itself as new in some way suggested that it should also be judged as good or bad according to new standards� Greenberg had asked that art might demonstrate ‘quality’, and his argument for this derived from Kant’s aesthetic theory. In place of quality, however, and in defiance of the rationalist tradition within which Kant figures prominently, Judd asserted that ‘a work of art need only be interesting’� (Archer 56) Aiming at the demonstration of “quality” narrows the freedom of the artist, although Judd’s rejection of aesthetic quality can also create a new problem: if the art object does no longer distinguish itself by its quality, other means have to be found to make it “interesting�” 11 If we do no longer have any aesthetic principles to determine artistic value, other criteria must take their place. As the example of Duchamp shows, one is the new freedom of the 10 Isabelle Graw puts it succinctly: “Because of the singular character of his product, the artist is in the position of a monopolist� He is the sole producer� What he offers can only be provided by him” (29, m�t�)� Moreover, a work of art holds the promise of a lasting value that a consumer object usually does not do� This makes the work of art a “precious” object—which is only a step away from today’s “priceless asset�” 11 See, for example, the review of an art critic of the New York Times on an exhibition of the artist Kai Althoff at the Museum of Modern Art in the year 2016: “It’s mostly downhill from that initial impression, as Mr� Althoff’s works are haphazardly displayed on walls, shelves and rolling racks amid all kinds of found objects, including antique dolls, vintage clothing, ceramics, personal memorabilia, beat-up furniture and accumulations of rubbish, including an open suitcase full of dirty dishes� It’s like a flea market or estate sale, a kind of anti-exhibition. … In all this there’s a sort of neurotic grandiosity� Finally, when she asks which of his works he would want to be remembered for, he declares, ’I do not want to be remembered’� As disingenuous as this sounds, it may be the secret of Mr� Althoff’s success, for the artist who cares least about his legacy may well be the most free. With this exhibition, however, he’s been given too much freedom” (Johnson)� 36 W infried f luck artist to declare any object of his choice to be art� However, although the artist’s freedom has increased, his own claims are not yet sufficient. A narrative is needed—provided either by the artist himself or his agent or his gallerist and/ or by art critics—to make a convincing case for the public acceptance of the artist’s claim� 12 As we have seen, it is part of the new freedom that this narrative does no longer have to be the modernist narrative, in fact, in the current phase it would not be advisable to use it� This creates a challenge, however, to come up with another, sufficiently “interesting” narrative that can help the artist to stand out in a crowded field. It is one thing to declare a vacuum cleaner to be art, but the actual challenge in the contemporary antiaesthetic climate is to get a range of actors, including institutions and viewers, to buy that claim, figuratively and literally. In her sociological study Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, Nina Zahner has described the complex formation of institutions that can play a crucial role in providing such an acknowledgment: Galleries, art dealers, auction houses, collectors, curators, museums, media and, not to forget, art history and art criticism, which are still needed to come up with narratives about an art object’s value and its cultural significance. Art history and art criticism have lost a good deal of their former authority, however� The anti-aesthetic attitude has shifted the authorization of value and significance to a much wider chorus, leading to a complex interaction process between a range of different actors to determine what is considered “interesting” art at the present time� The new freedom from the aesthetic thus leads to new dependencies, in fact, more freedom also means more dependence, and increasing dependence means that it is not always transparent how reputations are made� 13 More so than ever, then, narrative is crucial in the new anti-aesthetic world, since the object itself does no longer have aesthetic qualities that distinguish it from everyday objects� One of the risks is a growing convergence or even conflation of art and commerce on which Maria Slowinska has written a superb book entitled Art/ Commerce. This brings the art system closer to other cultural systems such as the fashion industry� In her study Der große Preis, Isabelle Graw points to a growing resemblance between art and luxury articles: “It is my thesis that the liberation of art from the concept of 12 Cf� Hauskeller’s discussion of Danto: “But this does not mean that everything was art or can become art, just because somebody has declared it to be art� My desk lamp will not become art, because I claim that it is art, even if I were an established artist� In order to make a convincing case, I would have to be able to explain why it is art and that means to explain what it is about” (Hauskeller 100, m.t.). The Brillo Boxes Warhol painted are about nothing, whereas his painting Brillo Boxes is “about the world in which we live, about ourselves, and our perception of the world” (Hauskeller 100, m�t�)� Thus, “out of three identical squares hanging on the wall one could be a work of art, the second nothing but a square, and the third another work of art, but a different one from the first. Which one is a work of art cannot be determined by my responses to the objects. These responses will only become significant once I know which one is a work of art and why” (101, m�t�)� 13 In his book Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, Michael Shnayerson focuses on the increasingly important strategic role that gallerists like Larry Gargosian play in this system� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 37 the aesthetic has created ideal preconditions for marketing” (Graw 14, m�t�)� Artists have to learn to sell themselves as cutting-edge (a challenge strongly resembling the situation in literary studies)� It is hardly surprising, then, that contemporary artists and gallerists have developed a repertoire of strategies to draw attention to their works� Branding is one of these strategies, the transgression of boundaries another� In artistic productions, we often encounter a seemingly random assemblage of objects that do not seem to belong together or do not seem to have anything in common, but can produce, because of these disparities, a defamiliarizing and possibly disturbing effect, a strategy characteristic of the assemblages and installations that currently dominate the art world� Still another strategy is the struggle over boundaries� In that respect, an interesting challenge was offered in 2006 by the Italian artist Pierre Pinonchelli who attacked Duchamp’s urinal at an exhibition with the intention of damaging it. His justification was that, if Duchamp’s urinal was considered art, then, damaging it could also claim to be considered art� 14 However, his argument was rejected in court, and he received a sentence for vandalism� 15 The incident provoked Alan Riding, art critic of the New York Times, to point out: “Still, not all vandalism is intended: Another work by Hirst on display in Mayfair Gallery in 2001—half-full coffee cups, dirty ashtrays, beer bottles and the like—was thrown away by the cleaners�” One might be tempted to regard this as a metaphor for the fate of the aesthetic in contemporary artistic practice� IV. What is the reason for these ongoing attempts that I have traced to overcome the separation of art and life, of the aesthetic and the political? Why has this project taken on such an importance? In an essay with the title “The 14 See Alan Riding’s article “If a urinal is art, can hammering it be, too? ”� Pinoncelli “claimed that his action was also a work of art, a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists who had made their name by challenging the very definition of art.” 15 Another contemporary work in the urinal-tradition (which also includes Piero Manzoni‘s “Merda d’Artista”), Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture “Maurizio Cattelan: ‘America’” (2016), a toilet seat made of gold, has found a welcoming place at the Guggenheim-Museum� As the New York Times puts it: “… the piece is of modest size and will not be on view in public gallery� It will, instead, be installed in early May just off one of the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, in a small, humble room where visitors often feel the urge to spend some time alone� The room has tiles, a sink, a mirror and a lock on the door� And now, instead of its standard Kohler toilet, it will have a solid 18-karat-gold working replica of one, a preposterously scatological apotheosis of wealth whose form is completed in its function: You could go into the restroom just to bask in its glow, Mr� Cattelan said, but it becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call� … Guggenheim official said that they anticipated lines for the Cattelan bathroom and added that a guard or attendant might be placed near the door to ensure orderly waiting—and also to make certain that no one tries to abscond with a piece of the toilet” (New York Times, April 20, 2016)� It seems that Pierre Pinoncelli will not stand much of a chance to launch another of his attacks here� 38 W infried f luck Search for an ‘Artless’ Art,” I have discussed the phenomenon in the context of a democratic aesthetics that drives a process of cultural dehierarchization� In this essay, I want to pursue a different line of argument, not because I consider the other one invalid, but because it seems to me that more can be said on the issue� However, before I pursue this line of argument any further, a possible objection has to be addressed� To be sure, by establishing oppositional terms like aesthetic vs� political or art vs� life, there seems to be a similarity between current literary studies and contemporary artistic practice� But aren’t we really talking about two very different projects? Yes, in both fields the aesthetic is rejected, but in each case, it seems, for different reasons� Revisionist literary studies reject the aesthetic, because in their view it obscures the ideological and political dimensions of literature� But contemporary artistic practice rejects the separation, in most cases not in order to uncover the work’s politics, but because it wants to redefine art by liberating it from the confining category of the aesthetic. In other words: contemporary artistic practice rejects the concept of the aesthetic in the interest of art, whereas contemporary literary studies reject the concept in the interest of politics� This leads us back to the first part of this essay, the role of the aesthetic in revisionist literary studies, where the rejection of the aesthetic seemed to have a function exactly opposite to that in contemporary artistic practice: instead of redefining and extending our notion of art, the goal of revisionist literary studies, I claimed, is to expose art’s politics. However, what exactly does politics mean in this context? The reference is usually not to actual politics, but to theories about the political effects of modernity, and in revisionist literary studies these theories have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by either Althusser or Foucault. For example, in following Foucault, Seltzer’s argument is that a focus on the aesthetic dimension of novels by Henry James obscures the role of power� Yet the term power, here, is not used in the sense of traditional political theory, as a word for the exertion of illegitimate force or dominance, but as something that puts constraints on the singularity of an individual and her freedom of self-determination� Thus, Seltzer can see even the most elementary forms of intersubjective relations, such as love and care, as exertions of power. In other words, at first blush revisionist literary studies may go in a different direction than contemporary art practice, but in doing so their normative base is precisely that which also informs the rejection of the aesthetic in contemporary artistic practice, namely the vision of a freedom unfettered by any confining constraints—constraints that can be imposed by any rule, social or linguistic, any principle (as in aesthetic principles), and, not just by social convention, but by even the most intimate form of social interaction� Freedom in this sense is freedom from any kind of imposition, no matter what the source may be: culture and society, family, intimate relations, but also language, discourse, or the aesthetic are all possible sources of constraint taken out of a long list� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 39 We arrive here at a point that is both paradoxical and ironic. It is ironic, because the very motive that I have identified as a driving force in the rejection of the aesthetic—a search for freedom—has also been the driving force in the development of that which is now rejected, namely formalism and its concept of the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere� We have become used to seeing formalism as a kind of reactionary leftover from less enlightened times that have to be overcome and left behind� But what we may be forgetting here is that formalism emerged in the context of a philosophy of history that dominated the first half of the twentieth century up to the 1960s. This view of history was based on the idea of an increasing incorporation of life forces by the relentless advance of instrumental rationality, driven by capitalism, industrialization, a market economy and their logic of rationalization, leading to a growing self-alienation of the subject� 16 In this context, art and literature could gain a special, utopian function as one of the few, if not the only remaining sphere, that had not yet been pervaded by instrumental rationality; or, to rephrase it in the terminology of this essay, one of the remaining, albeit endangered realms of freedom� This explains, for example, the almost hysterical tone of the chapter on the culture industry in The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, one of the key texts of Critical Theory. By coining the term culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno wanted to dramatize their fear that in the age of mass culture, the logic of instrumental rationality had begun to invade also the realm of culture, that is, one of the last realms of freedom� This is the reason for the central role the idea of aesthetic autonomy plays in formalism, as well as in Critical Theory: those forms of culture that are not yet shaped by instrumental rationality have to be separated from other cultural forms— hence the strict opposition of high culture and mass culture that was later criticized in cultural studies� From this perspective, an analysis of the not yet compromised forms of high culture will have to focus on the dimension that has so far protected them from being subjected to instrumental rationality� What are these forms? Forms that possess a certain degree of aesthetic autonomy! If they would not possess that autonomy, they would not be able to resist the invasion of instrumental rationality� The only aspect that can justify claims of a separate status of art is the dimension that distinguishes the text or object from other social and cultural forces and thus makes autonomy possible, the aesthetic dimension� Formalism is not focusing on form as art for art’s sake� In formalism, aesthetic autonomy is the precondition for making freedom possible—which paradoxically is also the value revisionists are looking for in their rejection of the aesthetic� The irony, then, in the rejection of the aesthetic is that, at a closer look, it is also a rejection of freedom� But, of course, one immediately has to add: not of freedom per se, but of a particular concept of freedom. In the final analysis, 16 In my essay “Narratives About Self-Alienation,” I am describing the centrality of the premise of self-alienation for critical theories in the twentieth century� For me, it is a founding assumption, not only of Marxism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory, but also of Cultural Studies, poststructuralism and even Constance School reception aesthetics� 40 W infried f luck the revisionist rejection of the aesthetic is driven by a reconceptualization of freedom� Or, to put it differently, discussions about the role of the aesthetic also open up a fascinating chapter of intellectual history in that they are based, in the final analysis, on different and competing visions of freedom. What is the concept of freedom, then, that underlies revisionist literary studies and contemporary artistic practice? In contrast to formalism, freedom is no longer defined as non-instrumentalization, because for revisionists there is no longer any sphere that is not yet commodified. Instead, freedom is now, not non-instrumentalization but non-constraint, the freedom to escape the structures that are the source and medium of constraint, including concepts of the aesthetic� The normative basis of revisionist literary studies and contemporary artistic practice is that of a singularity that should no longer be subjected to any constraints—in contrast, for example, to the philosophies of history I mentioned earlier in which subjects should be protected from certain constraints, such as, for example, capitalism, but not from others, such as the aesthetic through which they may develop their full potential� 17 In formalist approaches, freedom is defined as non-instrumentalization, in contemporary critical and artistic practice as non-constraint� V. As we have seen, the rejection of the aesthetic in literary studies and contemporary artistic practice cannot simply be attributed to a forgetfulness about the field’s core tradition or to an over-eager politicization. It has a philosophical basis as its driving force, the vision of an unconstrained singularity that regards the concept of the aesthetic as merely another imposition� What does that mean for the project of a reanimation of the aesthetic? I think that as long as these attempts remain within the theoretical framework of a freedom from constraint, the aesthetic will not be able to regain a meaningful function of its own� One important point of my discussion is that the question of a return of the aesthetic is not merely a matter of whether it can be redefined more convincingly, because such redefinitions cannot be separated from underlying assumptions about conditions of unfreedom and the role the aesthetic may play in the search for freedom from them� In the past, these assumptions were derived from theories of modernity, as, for example, that 17 In his criticism of poststructuralist film theory, Noel Carroll draws attention to a paradox that can be a result of a radical, in this case poststructuralist, concept of freedom: “As Silverman’s argument exemplifies, there is a presumption among Althusserian- Lacanians that if human actions have certain structural conditions, these constrain human action in a way inimicable to autonomy� Languages have both syntactical rules and semantical rules� But it is strange to think of these as constraints that preclude autonomy� For these very features of language are what enable the speaker to speak—to, for example, denounce capitalism. If the language lacked these structural conditions, nothing could be said, which would in fact be a real blow to the possibility of human autonomy� … The problem with Silverman’s argument, in other words, is that it presumes as a limitation on human autonomy that which is in fact something that facilitates autonomy” (78-79)� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 41 of the Frankfurt School with its combination of Marx, Weber and the idea of aesthetic negation� In one way or another, such theories have shaped the various kinds of formalisms that have emerged in the twentieth-century� Postmodernism and poststructuralism have dismantled these grand narratives� Is a Foucauldian narrative of endless domination, in which the aesthetic is merely another form of domination, the only alternative, then? 18 At this point, it is fairly easy to make sense of current trends in discussions of the aesthetic� There are those who do not want to go all the way in pursuit of a freedom from constraint and think that some constraints, for example that of the autonomy of form, are legitimate, even desirable, because they can carry important political meanings� Walter Benn Michaels’s study The Beauty of a Social Problem provides an example. And there are those, by far in the majority at the present time, who continue to look for freedom from, or resistance to, structural constraints and find them, above all, in bodily or affective resources—strongly, as in the case of Rita Felski, or weakly, as in the case of Sianne Ngai and the little resistance that a weakened, indeterminate emotivity may offer� I cannot discuss these approaches at length here, but in the context of this essay it is of special interest to see what role the question of freedom plays in their argumentation� With her influential study The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski wants to revitalize literary studies by recovering possibilities of aesthetic experience that a skeptical critique has ignored in its routine application of a hermeneutics of suspicion� Instead, literary studies should redirect its attention to the full range and variety of experiences that attract readers to engage in the reading of literary texts. The freedom that can be gained in this way is not a freedom from all-pervasive structural constraints, but from stifling routines that suppress the individual’s singularity� And the way out of these routines is not to reject the aesthetic, but to redefine it as a theory of attachment. What makes the reading process interesting, after all, is the literary “work’s dexterity in soliciting and sustaining attachments” (166) which means that reading can resonate with special force when texts “hook up with passions and predelictions of our affectively soaked histories and memories” (178). Aesthetic experience is created by intense, unexpected and unpredictable attachments to the literary text; these attachments can “surprise or startle us, nudge us into unexpected moods or states of mind, cause us to do things we had not anticipated” (84), so that we can be “aroused, disturbed, surprised, or brought to act in ways that we did not expect and may find it hard to explain” (167). Stifling routines suppress the individual’s singularity, aesthetic experiences can liberate it by a reactivation of life forces that break the hold of routinization� Felski’s philosophical basis is a form of vitalism that sees unfreedom as a constraint on the uniqueness of individual actors, their bodily responses and affects, while aesthetic experience can provide strong, often transformative experiences that may help to transcend these constraints. Inevitably, 18 On the key role this narrative plays in current literary studies see my essay on “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies After the Hermeneutics of Suspicion�” 42 W infried f luck one of the consequences is that in her attempt to rescue the aesthetic by reconnecting it with vital life forces, Felski also provides a quasi-vitalist reconceptualization of the aesthetic in which intense emotional and corporeal effects dominate� As a result, the question of quality is phenomenologically reconceptualized: the best aesthetic qualities are those that powerfully affect the reader, “a revitalization of vital life forces that only makes sense within an institutional context whose justification must lie elsewhere. For only in this context can one prevent her argument from becoming also an apology, for example, of a sensationalist, attachment-soliciting mass culture” (Fluck, “The Limits of Critique” 246)� Indeed, that might be too much reanimation! With Walter Benn Michaels we move into a completely different world� The unfreedom on which he focuses is not one of the body or its affects, but the consequence of a rising economic inequality in neoliberalism which is only the latest manifestation of a more fundamental conflict, however—that between capital and labor� What role can or should the aesthetic play in this context? Although Michaels wants art to have political meaning, he is strictly against a conflation of the aesthetic and the political; in fact, one may argue that his book is written to avoid such a fashionable conflation. For Michaels, the refusal of form that I have traced in this essay is the mark of a neoliberal aesthetics. If art is to provide a significant response to inequality, it has to do this on its own terms, that is, as an autonomous form, a form that is self-contained, immune to theatricality and literalism, and not aiming at an effect� This is basically a reconceptualization of Michael Fried’s concept of absorption (Fried is the main inspiration throughout the book), and the medium that is best suited to realize this ideal nowadays is photography, where Fried’s pictorial theme of absorption has become “a condition of the medium” (Michaels, Beauty of a Social Problem 118). An example is provided by the photography of Walker Evans in Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Paradoxically, it is Evans’s aestheticization of poverty that makes his photographs an honest record of capitalism’s class antagonism, because it establishes a structure of superiority that is neither concealed, nor denied, and thus tells the truth about class relations: It’s by seeking to make poverty beautiful in a way that will be invisible to the poor themselves that Agee and Evans produce in their work not just this gap between the rich and the poor but also the conflict between them—the sense that the riches of the rich come at the expense of the poor. (143) Thus, in these photographs “we can experience the society in which those pictures were made and in which they continue to be admired as fundamentally structured by the inequalities of class” (144)� Why does Michaels say ‘experience’ and not ‘comprehend’ at this point? Because the insight into capitalism’s class antagonism is provided indirectly by way of a structural analogy� The structural difference between photographer and his subject is also the social difference of capitalism’s class antagonism� The political meaning of the photographs lies in the structural differences they reproduce in their form� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 43 Recipients are irrelevant in this argument, since all that matters is the work’s assertion of form which would be distorted by the subjective response of the beholder. The whole point about defining the work of art in terms of Friedian absorption is to free the work from the subjectivity of the beholder (and thereby from the wrong kind of politics which for Michaels is identity politics)� But how can we be sure, then, what the work’s meaning is? Michaels tries to solve the problem by the construct of a self-sufficient form. A photograph is simply there, it is more an object than a representation of an object� No matter whether we try or not, it lies outside of our interpretive grasp, and that is why it can reproduce the structures capitalism has created without being compromised by ill-advised attempts to overcome the separation between art and life� The important point is that the political meaning is preserved and not watered down by the wrong kind of involvement: “My argument about the works described in this book has not been that they place today’s objective conditions at their center, but that, in imagining a form that refuses the politics of personal involvement, they make those objective conditions visible” (172)� An aesthetics of absorption can do this best and it is therefore the best answer art can give to rising inequality� Michaels’s unlikely bedfellows here are Karl Marx and Michael Fried. Taking Fredric Jameson’s characterization of postmodern culture as her point of departure, for Sianne Ngai, too, capitalism, especially in its contemporary, “postmodern” stage, is the main cause of the subject’s unfreedom� But Ngai focuses on other aspects than Michaels and, consequently, the aesthetic also has a different function in her argument� The liberation she looks for is not one from the suppression of vital life forces, or from the wrong kind of politics, but from an advanced stage of commodification that has also absorbed art and disseminated it throughout society, so that there can be no longer any not-yet-commodified realm of aesthetic negation or resistance. What role can the aesthetic still play under these conditions of powerlessness? Despite Ngai’s often overwhelming rhetorical fireworks, there is a pattern of argumentation that repeats itself throughout her work� Its common link is the assumption that a hypercommodified system produces negative feelings that once may have served as a source of political resistance but are now coopted by commodification and transformed into affects of low intensity. No matter whether it is “stuplimity,” a mix of awe and boredom, ugly feelings like animatedness, or weak emotions described as zany, interesting, and cute: in each case what we get are negative and ambivalent feelings that respond to a reality in which agency is blocked� This is precisely what makes them interesting for Ngai, however, who claims, for example, that the categories zany, cute, and interesting, “for all their marginality to aesthetic theory and to genealogies of postmodernism, are the ones in our current repertoire best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 1)� 44 W infried f luck How, then, has aesthetic experience been transformed? Ngai’s categories call attention to their own weakness, that is, to their lack of aesthetic impact, and, consequently, to the powerlessness of art under contemporary conditions� Precisely because of their weakness, however, the feelings they describe inadvertently come to resemble sites of non-instrumentalization� Thus, even under the conditions of contemporary hypercommodification, a weak negating potential survives: “Art has the capacity not only to reflect and mystify power but also to reflect and make use of powerlessness” (109). This negating potential is so weak, however, that it comes to reside in the subject’s affect structure� Ngai’s interpretation of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans in her essay “Stuplimity” therefore focuses on the affects produced by the text, among them unpredicted and seemingly accidental ways of linking bits and scraps of language� The result can at least be “a little resistance.” An example for this unexpected strength of weakness is taken from slapstick comedy: “While stuplimity offers no fantasy of transcendence, it does provide small subjects with what Stein calls ‘a little resistance’ in their confrontations with larger systems� … thus we have Chaplin versus the assembly line; Keaton versus military engines such as The Navigator (a supply ship) and The General (a locomotive); Lucille Ball versus domesticity” (Ngai, “Stuplimity”)� In their own way, these comedians do what Stein does: “Yet this preference for the cycle, one of ‘driving’ excitations and fatigues, could easily suggest Stein in Chaplin drag” (“Stuplimity”)� If one starts out from a theory of hypercommodification, the only possible way out are the little resistances of affect� One may call this the slapstick theory of the aesthetic� The three authors discussed in this section do by no means exhaust current discussions of the aesthetic� But for different reasons, they have drawn special attention. They can thus be taken as examples of current attempts to reanimate the aesthetic in literary studies� From this perspective, it is striking to see how different they are� This difference has its origin in very different conceptualizations of freedom: neo-phenomenologically considered, it can be regained by a recovery of vital life forces; from Michaels’s Marxist perspective, it is the utopia of a liberation from the conflict between capital and labor; and, from the point of view of Ngai’s critical postmodernism, it can be temporarily gained by the “little resistance” against hypercommodification that resistant and negating affects can provide. In each case, we have a completely different actor: a reader that wants to reassert her singularity in the case of Felski; an American defined by the Gini factor who is either rich or poor in the case of Michaels; the “small” subject of slapstick resistance in the case of Ngai� Inevitably, these assumptions must also produce very different reconceptualizations of the aesthetic: as a theory of attachment, as an aesthetics of absorption, and as an aesthetics of negative emotions and little resistances� And not surprisingly, these very different conceptualizations of the aesthetic focus also on very different aesthetic objects: fictions that invite intense attachments, a form of photography that rejects personal involvement, and “bits and scraps of linguistic matter” as they can be found in Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 45 In literary studies, calls for a return of the aesthetic have their origin in the dissatisfaction with the diminished role of aesthetics in the field. What are the chances for a return of the aesthetic, then? In their stark differences, my three examples reflect the current plurality of options. This means that the aesthetic may be reanimated, but may nevertheless lose its standing as a concept that anchors the field of literary studies, because there is no longer any common ground for agreeing on what the function of the aesthetic should be� Despite their disagreements over interpretive methods, formalists still pursued the same project� Today this seems impossible, because there are no longer any common assumptions about what constitutes unfreedom and freedom, what constitutes the subject, and what role the aesthetic can play in response� What may be said at this point, however, is that the project of a reanimation of the aesthetic will remain unfocused, as it presently is, and unsuccessful, as it also is presently, if a reflection of these guiding assumptions is not part of the project� Works Cited Archer, Michael� Art Since 1960. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997� Bercovitch, Sacvan. “America as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus�” American Literature 58 (1986): 99-107� Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus� “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 (2009): 1-21� Carroll, Noel� Mystifying Movies. New York: Columbia UP, 1988� Chipp, Herschel B�, ed� Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968� Danto, Arthur� The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1986� Dewey, John� Art as Experience: The Later Works, 1925-1953� Vol� 10� Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1987� Duchamp, Marcel� “The Richard Mutt Case�“ The Blind Man 2 (1917): 4� Rpt� in Art in Theory 1900-1990� Ed� Charles Harrison and Paul Wood� 248� Eagleton, Terry� “The Ideology of the Aesthetic�” Poetics Today 9 (1988): 327-338� Felski, Rita� The Limits of Critique. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015� Fluck, Winfried� “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies after the Hermeneutics of Suspicion�” American Literary History 31�2 (2019): 229-248� ---� “Philosophical Premises in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives of Self- Alienation�” New Literary History 47�1 (2016): 109-134� ---� “The Search for an ‘Artless Art’: Aesthetics and American Culture�” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009� 453-468� ---� “Shadow Aesthetics�” Reading Practices� Ed� Winfried Fluck, Günter Leypoldt, and Philipp Löffler. REAL 31 (2015): 11-44� ---� “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings: American Studies and the Realities of America�” Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies� Ed� Winfried Fluck and Donald Pease� REAL 30 (2014), 41-65� 46 W infried f luck Foster, Hal, ed� “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop: A Discussion�” Discussions in Contemporary Culture� Seattle: Bay, 1987� 71-87� Gewen, Barry� “Art for Arthur’s Sake: What Pollock did for Greenberg, Warhol did for Danto�” New York Times Book Review 26 March 2005� Graw, Isabelle� Der große Preis. Kunst zwischen Markt und Celebrity Culture. Köln: Dumont, 2008� Greenblatt, Stephen� “The Circulation of Social Energy�” Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. 1-20. ---� “Towards a Poetics of Culture�” The New Historicism� Ed� H� Aram Veeser� London: Routledge, 1989� 1-14� Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood, ed� Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993� Hauskeller, Michael� Was ist Kunst? Positionen der Ästhetik von Platon bis Danto. München: Beck, 1999� Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Auf klärung. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969� Huelsenbeck, Richard� “First German Dada Manifesto�“ Art in Theory 1900-1990� Ed� Charles Harrison and Paul Wood� 253-255� Jameson, Fredric� The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981� Johnson, Ken� “Two Graduates of Cologne’s 1990s Hedonism�“ New York Times 23 Sept 2016� Kaplan, Amy� The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002� Kaprow, Allan� “Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings�“ Art in Theory 1900- 1990� Ed� Charles Harrison and Paul Wood� 703-709� Kosuth, Joseph� “Art after Philosophy�“ Art in Theory 1900-1990� Ed� Charles Harrison and Paul Wood� 840-850� LeWitt, Sol� “Sentences on Conceptual Art�“ Art in Theory 1900-1990� Ed� Charles Harrison and Paul Wood� 837-839� Michaels, Walter Benn� “The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism�” Representations 9 (1985): 105-132� ---� The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987� ---� The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015� Morrison, Toni� Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992� Mukarovsky, Jan. “The Significance of Aesthetics.” Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky� Ed� John Burbank and Peter Steiner� New Haven: Yale UP, 1978� 17-30� Ngai, Sianne� “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics,” Postmodern Culture 10�2 (2000): 1-19� ---� Our Aesthetic Categories. Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012� Riding, Alan� “If a Urinal Is Art, Can Hammering It Be, Too? “ New York Times 7-8 Jan� 2006� Rosenberg, Harold� “The American Action Painters�“ 1952� Rpt� in Theories of Modern Art. Ed� Herschel B� Chipp� 569-570� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 47 ---� “De-Aestheticization�“ The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks. New York: Horizon, 1972� 28-38� Said, Edward� Culture and Imperialism� New York: Knopf, 1994� Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky� Epistemology of the Closet. Harvester: Wheatsheaf, 1991� Seltzer, Mark� Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984� Shnayerson, Michael� Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art. New York: Public Affairs, 2019� Slowinska, Maria� Art / Commerce. The Convergence of Art and Marketing in Contemporary Culture. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014� Wellershoff, Dieter� Die Auflösung des Kunstbegriffs. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976� Williams, Raymond� Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Zahner, Nina Tessa� Die neuen Regeln der Kunst: Andy Warhol und der Umbau des Kunstbetriebs im 20.Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Campus, 2005� W alter B enn m ichaels Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe) This essay is part of a larger project on the emergence of action as a topic in philosophy (it would be called the theory of action), as a problem in literary theory (the relation between meaning and intention) and as an opportunity in art (beginning with what got called Action Painting)� Part of the argument is that, with respect to literary theory, two different and conflicting accounts of what an action is played a role in structuring now longstanding debates about whether the intended meaning of a work is the only object of interpretation, a possible but not necessarily desirable object of interpretation or utterly irrelevant to the meaning of the work� Another part of the argument— the one that’s relevant to this essay—is that these two conflicting accounts of action played a similarly significant role in producing disagreements about whether artists themselves ought to repudiate the idea of intentional meaning and especially of the ambition to make the work formally autonomous that has often been thought to accompany that idea� It has, however been hard to see how these conflicts about intention and form are linked to the conflicts about action since until fairly recently the two competing views of action I’m interested in were—under the name the Davidson/ Anscombe thesis—conflated. Today, however, it’s pretty clear that the differences between Elizabeth Anscombe in her (1957) book Intention and Donald Davidson in essays like his (1971) “Agency” are significant. 1 And it’s because the Davidson/ Anscombe thesis has now come to look more like the Davidson/ Anscombe debate that although the title of the Robert Morris piece I’ll be discussing is Blind Time (Drawing with Davidson) the title of my paper about that piece is “Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe)�” For my purposes, Morris is a doubly useful figure. He’s useful first because he had a remarkably sophisticated interest in the theory of action so even though (as we’ll see) critics may disagree about where he stood in relation to Davidson, we can pretty much agree that figuring out where he stood is important to understanding his work� Second, long before he started caring about Davidson, he had (under the influence of Pollock and then breaking from that influence) become committed to the idea that an art that made visible the “process” by which it had been made (the artist’s actions) could make possible “the work’s refusal to continue estheticizing the form” (46) and would thus produce a break with the values of unity, intentionality, and autonomy he and many others identified with modernism. In other words, the departure from the aesthetic (the refusal to continue aestheticizing the form) that makes possible this collection’s interest in the return to the aesthetic was 1 For an exemplary analysis of the differences between Davidson and Anscombe, see Hornsby (2011)� 50 W alter B enn m ichaels not simply a function of newfound critical interests in politics or identity or theory or whatever; it took place first in art itself. And if, as I will argue below, there are theoretical problems with the idea of action to which that refusal of the aesthetic appealed, we should still recognize that the desire for such a refusal produced interestingly ambitious (albeit politically catastrophic 2 ) art� Morris made the Blind Time drawings with his eyes shut (see Figure 1) and then added quotations from Davidson and hand-written texts which, as the philosopher Jean Michel Roy puts it, “communicate his intentions,” “defined,” Roy says, “in terms of gestures” (137), as in: “Working blindfolded… the hands begin at the bottom, just to the right of estimated center… and then outward to the right margin…” etc� (Morris, Blind Time Drawing)� What Roy and others have seen in these works is what he calls not just a new kind of drawing but a critique of the “traditional conception” of drawing� Traditionally, he says, we might think that “drawing is a direct product of an intention” (136). We would, for example, describe ourselves as “drawing a horse” or “drawing a diagonal line” and we would think of the horse or the line as the product of our intentions� But the Blind Time drawings and the accompanying commentary show that that would be a mistake� The artist’s intentions are not to draw a horse but to move his hands on the paper in various ways (“upward” and then “outward”); the drawings are what happens when he does that� Thus, Roy says, they should be understood as “the by-products of the artist’s intentions and not its products” (137)� And this is particularly striking in the Drawing with Davidson series since Roy thinks of Davidson as a defender of the traditional conception, and thus thinks also that in the Blind Time drawings with Davidson, the juxtaposition of Morris’s statements of intention with quotations from Davidson is meant to highlight the difference between Morris and Davidson, to call attention, he says, to the “inadequacy” of our “ordinary conception” of “action considered as intentional behavior” (137)� The passage from Davidson that accompanies the drawing we’ve already been looking at suggests, however, that this reading can’t be completely right� It says: “We must conclude, perhaps with a shock of surprise, that our primitive actions, the ones we do not do by doing something else, mere movements of the body—these are all the actions there are� We never do more than move our bodies; the rest is up to nature” (59). This is almost the exact opposite of what Roy calls “direct action.” On this account, to use an example that has (weirdly) become canonical, what the “traditional conception” of action would describe as a person crushing a snail with her foot would better be described as a person moving her foot in such a way as to cause a snail to be crushed� The “direct” action would be the moving of the foot� And if the person were drawing rather than crushing the snail, the correct description would be not “I’m drawing a snail” but I’m moving my hand in such a way as to cause a drawing of a snail� The action is the movement of one’s hands� (The drawing is the effect of that cause�) 2 For my account of the politics of the refusal of autonomy (and the politics of the return to it) see, The Beauty of a Social Problem� Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe) 51 Roy thinks that Morris’s view is different from this because he thinks that in Morris, the drawing is more a by-product than a product� That is, it’s as much an unintended as an intended effect� But in Davidson and Morris both, the basic idea is that you can’t really be said to have intended to produce a drawing—what you intended to do is move your hand in a way that you anticipated or hoped would produce a drawing� For both, in other words, your intentional action is a movement of your body describable independently of whatever effect—products or by-products—that movement might produce� Thus the point of drawing blind is to insist on the distance between your action (the movement of your body) and what happens (the drawing) in such a way as to dramatize the gap that turns anticipation into hope but that is already there even in anticipation and always there even when your eyes are open� Why? Because on this account, what you intended to do (move your body) is structurally separate from what you hoped would happen (your drawing)� Thus, insofar as Blind Time Drawing thematizes the gap between what you do (moving your hands) and what happens (nature does the rest), rather than rejecting Davidson’s theory of action, it brings out some of its essential features� And also some of its essential problems� For although Davidson may have understood himself as following Anscombe, she described the idea “that what one knows as intentional action is only the intention, or possibly also the bodily movement: and that the rest is known by observation to be the result, which was only willed in the intention” as “a mad account…�” (51-52)� It’s mad, she thinks, for several reasons but the relevant one for us is the idea that what she calls “the rest”—the squshed snail, the drawing—can be understood as the “result” of the action� What Anscombe wants to say is that drawing is not a result of the action but is internal to the description of the action and, strikingly enough, she makes this point by appealing (like Morris) to the idea of doing something with your eyes shut� Imagine yourself, eyes shut, writing “I am a fool” (82) on a piece of paper or a blackboard� There are lots of ways this can go wrong and what you write won’t turn out to be legible—in other words, you won’t get the result you want� Nonetheless, the description we would give of what we’re doing, she thinks, is not holding the chalk or pen between, say, our thumb and forefinger, and moving our hand first up and then to the right (to make the f); it’s not moving our fingers in such a way that we “calculate and hope” the word “fool” will get written (when nature takes her course)—it’s writing “I am a fool�” And this is true even if you’ve run out of ink and the word fool never appears� On the one hand, you haven’t succeeded in producing a legible inscription of the word fool; on the other hand, it’s not as if what you really should have said was “this is what I am writing, if my intention is getting executed” (82). The fact that the word “fool” never appeared means your act was in some respects a failure; it doesn’t mean that you were really just moving your hand, that you weren’t writing “I’m a fool�” In terms of the theory of action, Anscombe’s point is that we should not think of what we’re doing as moving our hands in such a way as to cause there to be a drawing or a word—we should think of ourselves as drawing 52 W alter B enn m ichaels or writing� So insofar as it’s right to say that the Blind Time Drawings should be understood as the “consequences” of the artist’s intentional actions—his “gestures”—they are, as I’ve suggested, consistent with a Davidsonian account of action but not with Anscombe� 3 But, going back to one of Morris’s earliest and most important essays— “Anti Form”—we can also see something different, something in which an Anscombian understanding of the purpose of the act not as its effect or result but as internal to its description (we’re drawing, not moving our hand to produce a drawing) makes its appearance� And, despite the fact that the essay is called “Anti Form,” this appearance will have to do precisely with the relation between the form of an act and the form of a work of art� The hero of “Anti Form” is Jackson Pollock, since Pollock’s actions are sometimes so vividly readable in the works themselves that, as Michael Schreyach has written, “viewers commonly experience” his pictures “by reconstructing imaginatively his kinesthetic movements above the canvas surface during the process of painting” (51)� Indeed, in the wake of Hans Namuth’s famous photos of Pollock at work, there’s a whole tradition of understanding these paintings as records of his actions in producing them� What matters here is the movement of the body that produced the paintings and the fact that they bear the visible marks of those movements� They aren’t just the effects of the action that caused them (any painting is the effect of the action that caused it); they look like the effects of the action that caused them� Thus, the essay’s called “Anti Form” because what matters is not the form of the painting but the degree to which the painting makes visible the performance that produced it� This is in part what Morris means when he says that “Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it as part of the end form of his work” (43)� But even in that sentence—precisely because the essay is called “Anti Form”—we can see a certain tension: the tension between the idea of preserving the process rather than producing a form (hence “Anti Form”) and the idea of holding onto process and making it part of form—the “end form” of the work� And this is a version of the tension we have already seen between a Davidsonian understanding of the act as the intentional movement of one’s body that results in a drawing and an Anscombian understanding of the act as including rather than producing the drawing� The point in Anscombe is not to deny that the artist produces the drawing but to insist that the effect is already intrinsic to the cause� “The term intentional,” she says, “has reference to a form of description of events” (84), and since that form is distinguished by its inclusion of purpose (that’s part 3 See, for example, Davidson’s description of braking a car as “pressing a pedal” and thus causing the “automobile to come to a stop”; his point is that we can assign “responsibility” to the man braking not by “transfer[ring]] agency from one event to another” (the movement of the foot would be one event, the car stopping another) or “by saddling the agent with a new action” (first he pressed the pedal, then he stopped the car) but “by pointing out that his original action had those results” (59)� Following Anscombe, by contrast, we would say that the action the man performed was not pressing a pedal (with the consequence that the car braked) but braking� Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe) 53 of the description of an act), the gap between what we do (move our bodies) and what nature does is (in the description) always already crossed, What it means to preserve the process is not just to record the movement of our bodies (not just to imagine the painting as the result of those movements) but to record their purpose, thus both to record and transcend them� This is, I think, what Morris himself is getting at when he praises Pollock not only for preserving the “traces of touch” but for holding on to those traces—“the process”—in a way that makes it “part of the end form of the work�” On the one hand, those traces are in a certain sense held onto as long as the marks on the paper look like the movements of the hand that produced them, as long as, in effect, they look like what caused them� On the other hand, those traces are transcended when, for example, we write “I am a fool” since the meaning of that sentence would be identical if we wrote it with a typewriter instead of a pen but the movement of our hands would obviously not be. In the first case, we’ve held onto the process, but we haven’t managed to make it part of the form—indeed, the work has the shape of our hand movements but no form of its own� In the second case, the work has a form (the form of the words that it consists of) but we’ve lost the process—it doesn’t matter how we made the words� But what Morris is calling for is a work that preserves the process and makes it part of the form� It’s this form that disappears in Davidson’s idea that all we ever do is move our bodies; nature does the rest� It’s this form that the work of art can only preserve by turning the drawing into a work that doesn’t just record the physical process that produced it (which, after all, any drawing does) and doesn’t even just look like the process that produced it (which the Blind Time drawings do) but which turns the form of the act (not moving your fingers and your hand but drawing) into the end form of the work. Look at these two recent works by the photographer Phil Chang� (Figures 2 and 3)� They’re made eyes open, using a brush dipped in replacement Ink for Epson printers and dragged diagonally from the top left down to the bottom right on Epson paper� Why do they have a relation to photography? Because, even though no camera is used, they produce a crucial feature of the photograph—the ink on the paper is both caused by and looks like elements of the process that produced it, in the same way that a handprint is both caused by and looks like a hand and that a photo of a handprint is both caused by and looks like the handprint. Indeed, in a certain sense, they’re more indexical than, say, photographs made with a camera and then produced as inkjet prints since the mediation of the printing is foregone� They’re direct records of the process that produced them� And in this respect, of course, they’re also like the Blind Time drawings� But, if we compare the two pictures, we can see also that the trace of the artist’s movement is itself positioned in a space that’s not determined by that movement� Anscombe, imagining things that could go wrong writing with your eyes shut, mentions going over the edge of the paper� If we were to read these two drawings from the Davidsonian perspective—all we ever do is move our bodies; nature does the rest—we could say of Figure 2 that it fully 54 W alter B enn m ichaels records the artist’s action (the movement of his hand) while Figure 3 doesn’t, and this sense of failure in Figure 3 is precisely the incompleteness that—in relation to the purpose that, understood as a desired result, must be located outside it—is intrinsic to any act� The fact that we can’t see the whole brushstroke would thus be what Morris elsewhere called the work’s refusal of the totality of vision� In Anscombe, however, the illegibility of the words written outside the paper, or the invisibility of the brushstroke that goes beyond it, are understood differently� Her point is that the intentional structure of the failed act is the same as the intentional structure of the successful one� We might then juxtapose these two images—one in which the brush stays within the frame, the other in which it appears to go beyond it—and say that both function as traces precisely of that intentional structure� From this standpoint, the idea would be that the invisibility of the full brush stroke doesn’t compromise the internal structure of the act; indeed, it foregrounds it� What it shows is that the totality Morris refuses is already built into the very concept of the act, whether or not the act succeeds� On this account, Chang understands action better than Morris; that’s what Blind Time drawing not with Davidson but with Anscombe looks like� But this ability to reproduce both the physical movement of the act and its form, even if it improves on Morris, doesn’t really meet the challenge posed by Morris, which is not just to record the process by which the work is made but to make that process “part of the end form of the work�” And we can see both what this challenge means and how it can begin to be addressed by noting the way in which Chang, turning the edges of the piece of paper you might write or draw on into the frame of his drawing, has both preserved and reconfigured the mark he’s made. In Figure 3, as we’ve noted, we can’t quite see the trace of the whole action—it’s cut off by the frame� So there’s a difference between the brush strokes we can feel would have been made by the movement of the hand and the brush strokes we can see, and it’s in our experience of this difference that we can begin to see a difference not only between the record of the act and the work but between what we might call the form of the act and the form of the work� We experience the brush stroke on the top differently from the one on the bottom because the one on top is framed in a way that allows us to see it all while the other cuts it off; the one on top allows us to see the complete movement while the one on the bottom doesn’t� So, the one on top is in a certain sense complete but its completeness is in the complete visibility of the motion that produced it� On the bottom, however, the record of the physical motion is incomplete; its totality, as I suggested above, is the totality of the purposiveness that distinguishes action itself� But, in the picture (as opposed to in Anscombe’s example), the totality is marked not by the way it survives the brush going beyond the paper but by the frame that interrupts it� In other words, the completeness of the picture is not as a record of the completeness (the teleological orientation) that structures any action; it’s as the restructuring of that action—a completeness of the picture made out of the Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe) 55 visible incompleteness of the physical movement, a completeness of the picture instead of the action� What we see here is not just the record of the physical movement of the hand, and not even just the record of the intentional structure of the act being performed with the hand but the subsumption of that act into the work� What it means to see an event as an act, Anscombe wrote, is to see it as intentional (“the term ‘intentional’ has reference to a form of description of events” [84]). In literary theory, this view has been rare. We can find it in “Against Theory’s” idea that to see marks in the sand as words is already to see them in terms of the act of writing� And we can see it defended by Stanley Cavell against Monroe Beardsley’s claim that if we found out that “an abstract expressionist painting” we were “enjoying” “turned out to have been painted by a child or a chimpanzee or a machine,” the “discovery that it was naively done” would not “invalidate” our “response” (104)� From the standpoint of the theory of interpretation, this is obviously a non-starter� If, for example, what you were enjoying was the way the painting made the process part of the end form of the work and you were debating with a friend who was enjoying the way it refused the notion of form altogether, your debate would instantly vanish and your enjoyment would at the very least be transformed when you discovered that what you were looking at had been made by someone who didn’t have the concept of form� The debate would come to an end because your account of what the painting meant would now be reduced to a report on what it made you think of and the enjoyment would be transformed because whatever pleasure you took in the painting would now be of the same kind you might take in a sunset or the look of a beach when the waves wash up against it� Cavell says, “discovering an intention is a way of discovering an explanation” (235); by the same token, discovering the irrelevance of intention is a way of discovering the relevance of a different kind of explanation: say, how the waves on the beach produce irregular indentations in the sand� Of course, Beardsley (along with his collaborator, William K� Wimsatt) did not think that poems or even paintings were characteristically produced unintentionally� (“A poem comes out of a head not out of a hat” [4], as they put it�) Rather, they thought of the artist’s intention as relevant to the production of the work but not to its meaning� What they called the “designing intellect,” they say in “The Intentional Fallacy,” is the “cause” of a work� 4 The poet only moves her fingers; the rest is up to the syntactic and semantic rules of the language� Or, equally (and only apparently oppositely), up to the different contextual positions of the people reading it. Either way, the ongoing anti-intentionalism of literary theory depends upon this commitment to what Cavell, following Anscombe, called a “bad picture of intention” (227)� 4 For an ingenious account of “The Intentional Fallacy” as a good argument against the relevance of intention conceived as cause, see Jennifer Ashton (2011)� Of course, the problem is that, having no other way to conceive it, Wimsatt and Beardsley thought they were making an argument against the relevance of intention tout court rather than an argument against the causal account of it� 56 W alter B enn m ichaels And, with respect to literary theory, because it misunderstands what action is, it misunderstands what interpreting is and, in fact, makes the very idea of understanding (or misunderstanding) a work of art incoherent� With respect to the history of art, however, it’s action more than understanding that interests us, and here too, as we’ve already seen, the idea that the intentional act causes the work has played a central role� But even theorists who are alert to the difficulties produced by the invocation of the causal 5 can be so attached to some version of the bad picture of intention that they think of escape from intentionality as necessary. In the final chapter of his Force (2013), for example, Christoph Menke cites Nietzsche’s claim that because “there is no logical connection between the subject’s ‘inner’ states and his ‘exterior” action,’ “everything is causal” and “there is no intentionality” (88)� This is the view of intention as “a purely interior thing” (9) that Anscombe begins by criticizing, and Menke too, albeit still following Nietzsche, wants to go beyond it� He does so, however, not by rethinking the interiority of intention but by suggesting that the aesthetic offers “a peculiar way of doing” that can’t be reduced either to the intentional or the causal, a way of “doing” in which “the subject gives free exercise to his forces unfettered by all purpose” (89). As an example of which he offers us Nietzsche’s “blind sea-crab, continually groping in all directions and occasionally catching something; yet it does not grope in order to catch but because its limbs need the exercise.” But (setting aside the issues of species specificity), this example reproduces the opposition it is meant to deconstruct� Why isn’t moving your limbs because you need exercise just as intentional as moving them to catch something? Or, if we want to insist that the crab needs exercise but isn’t moving his limbs to get it, why haven’t we just returned to the purely causal? The flower “needs” water but absorbing it through its roots isn’t a “peculiar way of doing�” And the same thing happens when we turn to the human and to what Menke regards as “an essential feature of the successful performance of actions”: the “ability to innovate, to invent,” to establish “experimental conditions” which “expose” us “to events that then take their own course” (90). Why is innovation particularly relevant? Because the innovator can only produce something new, something that “has not existed before,” by “exposing” herself “to a change,” maintaining “an openness toward the accidental” (90)� Thus, inasmuch as the “concept of accident marks the moment at which the doing breaks loose from action,” when the accident happens, the subject does something more or other than she intended and the “doing” thus “transcends its purpose” (90)� But, here again, it’s hard to see how accident poses a problem for anything other than the most idealized concept of intentional action (that is, the one that Menke seeks to repudiate and to which he remains entirely attached)� All actions are open to accident; indeed, it’s only because 5 The project of Menke’s Force is precisely to go “beyond the Cartesian alternatives of self-conscious action and causal mechanism” (11); a short version of the critique of that project would be that it remains so attached to its model of self-conscious action that it thinks to escape it must be to escape intentionality itself� Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe) 57 you can fail to do what you meant to do that you can succeed in doing what you meant to do� So even an agent who isn’t the slightest bit open to the accidental (she wants everything to be completely in her control) is nonetheless exposed to it. You could not legibly write “I am a fool” unless you might turn out to have written it illegibly� And, to turn things around, the acts of an agent who is open to accident are just as intentional as the acts of one who isn’t. If, for example, the model of the experiment is to be taken literally, the idea that you don’t know and can’t control what will happen is intrinsic (rather than inimical) to the purpose of the action. If I dip my toe in the water to find out whether it’s warm or cold, it is indeed nature that does the rest (i�e� gives me my answer) but what I’ve done is not somehow made less purposeful by the fact that I didn’t know how it would turn out—indeed the purpose of the act was precisely to find out how it would turn out� By the same token, if I draw with my eyes shut, the picture I end up with will be exactly as readable in terms of my act (which is to say only readable in terms of my act) as the one I make with my eyes wide open� Just imagine the difference between a Blind Time Drawing with Davidson and an otherwise identical open-eyed drawing with Anscombe� Kenneth Surin enthusiastically describes the blind drawings as an effort to “destroy the very possibility of the unity” (165) that he thinks is a hallmark of modernism and argues that this destruction is enabled by a Davidsonian “image of thought that, when it comes to thinking of the mainsprings of human action, has no place for anything except bodies and bodily movements” (152). He would never say the same thing about the same set of marks produced by a Robert Morris who had just bought a new pair of glasses and was trying to see if the prescription was right� The act of drawing with your eyes shut is not somehow less intentional than the act of drawing with your eyes open—they’re just two different acts� Which is why Surin is mistaken to think that the “mainspring of human action” can have no place “for anything except bodies and bodily movements”—not because bodily movements aren’t crucial but because they aren’t even identifiable except in terms of their purpose. But it’s one thing to say that Surin is mistaken about the unity of action and something very different to say that he’s mistaken about unity in art� In other words, on my reading, he can’t help but be wrong about what Morris has in fact done since any understanding of Morris’s actions must be an account of bodily movements whose form is already intentional� But even if the action has a necessary unity, the work does not� And what Chang helps us see is the way in which—to establish that unity—the representation of action has needed to break with the action it represents� Or, better, to break with the action that produced it, and thereby establish the possibility of representing rather than recording that action� Again, my point is not that Chang or any other artist is likely to have been driven to his practice by thinking about what the best theory of action is� Actually, Morris would be almost alone among artists in thinking seriously about this question� And, among philosophers, Menke stands out 58 W alter B enn m ichaels for his commitment to the idea that aesthetic making provides a way into thinking about action as such� So even if, in my view, he’s wrong to think that the possibility of the accidental functions as a critique of the intentional (it would be better to say just the opposite—we wouldn’t even have the concept of action if we didn’t have the concept of accident, and we couldn’t have acts that succeeded unless we also had acts that failed), his tribute to openness usefully reinvigorates Morris’s enthusiasm for an art in which “chance is accepted” (46)� From the standpoint of the theory of action, there may be no interesting difference between drawing with your eyes shut and your eyes open but from the standpoint of the history of art, there is� And it’s from the standpoint of the history of art that we can see in Chang’s photographic brush strokes the refusal of Morris’s account of what action meant to art and, in that refusal, his tribute to it� Works Cited Anscombe, G� E� M� Intention. 2nd Ed� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000� Ashton, Jennifer� “Two Problems with a Neuroaesthetic Theory of Interpretation�” nonsite.org� Emory College of Arts and Sciences, 11 June 2011� 2 July 2019� Beardsley, Monroe� “Comments” Art, Mind, and Religion� Ed� W� H� Capitan and D� D� Merrill� Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburg P, n�d� Cavell, Stanley� Must We Mean What We Say? Updated Ed� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002� Davidson, Donald� Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Hornsby, Jennifer� “Actions in Their Circumstances�” Essays on Anscombe’s Intention� Ed� Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby and Frederick Stoutland� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011� Menke, Christoph� Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology. Trans� Gerrit Jackson� New York: Fordham UP, 2013� Michaels, Walter Benn� The Beauty of a Social Problem� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015� Morris, Robert� Blind Time Drawings, 1973-2000� Ed� Jean-Pierre Criqui� Gottingen: Steidl, 2005� —-� Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris� Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995� —-� “Writing with Davidson: Some Afterthoughts after Doing ‘Blind Time IV: Drawing with Davidson�’” Critical Inquiry 19�4 (1993): 617-627� Roy, Jean-Michel� “Triangulating Morris’ Intention? Davidson on Morris Quoting Davidson�” Investigations: The Expanded Field of Writing in the Works of Robert Morris. Ed� Katia Schneller and Noura Wedell� Lyon: End Editions, 2015� Schreyach, Michael� Pollock’s Modernism� New Haven: Yale UP, 2017� Surin, Kenneth� “Getting the Picture: Donald Davidson on Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings IV (Drawing with Davidson)�” South Atlantic Quarterly 101�1 (2002): 133-169� Wimsatt, W� K�, and Monroe Beardsley� “The Intentional Fallacy�” The Verbal Icon. Ed� Wimsatt. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1954. Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe) 59 Figure 1: from Robert Morris, Writing with Davidson, Some Afterthoughts. Figure 2: Replacement Ink for Epson Printers (Black 446004) on Epson Premium Glossy Paper, 60 x 42 inches, 2014 60 W alter B enn m ichaels Figure 3: Replacement Ink for Epson Printers (Matte Black on 25% Grey 222603) on Epson Enhanced Matte Paper" 29-1/ 2 x 24-1/ 2 inches, 2017 m arlon l ieBer Art and Economic Objecthood: Preliminary Remarks on ‘Sensuous Supra-Sensuous’ Things I In an oft-quoted passage Andy Warhol insists on the egalitarian nature of American society: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest customers buy essentially the same things as the poorest� You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too� A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking� All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good� Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it� (The Philosophy 100-01) This distinguishes the United States from European states still informed by feudal relations of inequality—and in the following paragraph Warhol refers to the different eating habits of “aristocracy” and “peasants”� Yet, the artist has no need to rely on an argument based on natural law, according to which all human beings were created equal� In Warhol’s America equality is a function of access to identical commodities—it is an equality of consumers� 1 Coca-Cola is, thus, “good”—and everybody knows it� And yet, is a common adjective such as “good” able to provide a sense of the affection felt for the beverage by Benji Cooper, the novelist Colson Whitehead’s fifteen year old alter ego? This “love” went beyond mere buzz, however� How could one not be charmed by the effervescent joviality of a tall glass of the stuff—the manic activity of the bubbles, popping, reforming, popping anew, sliding up the inside of the glass to freedom, as if the beverage were actually, miraculously, caffeinated on itself. That tart first sip, preferably with ice knocking against the lips for an added sensory flourish, that stunned the brain into total recall of pleasure, of all the Cokes consumed before and all those impending Cokes […]� What forgiveness for the supreme disappointment of a fountain Coke that turned out to be fizless and dead, or a lukewarm Coke that had been sitting for a while, falling away from its ideal temperature of 46�5 1 Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assert that Warhol denies actually existing inequalities� “America is really The Beautiful,” he writes� “But it would be more beautiful if everybody had enough money to live” (The Philosophy 71)� 62 m arlon l ieBer degrees Fahrenheit/ 8 degrees Celsius, all the bubbles fled, so that it had become a useless mud of sugar� Which is what New Coke tasted like, actually� (103-04; original emphasis) With these words the narrator renounces the Warholian tautology: a Coke is not a Coke and, hence, “good” under any and all circumstances; a New Coke most definitely is not. 2 But a “good” Coke is, from Benji’s perspective, not merely “good,” but serves as the occasion for a hymn of praise drafted in prose that seems to be as intoxicated by its own inventiveness as a Coke caffeinated on itself� Two things follow: On the one hand, Coke for some is not just “good,” but provides an experience of pleasure surpassing “mere buzz” by far. On the other, there remains the possibility that a Coke is not judged to be “good” at all, but rather as a “useless mud�” The essential goodness of Coca-Cola is, thus, contingent on a number of factors, the correct temperature being just one� More pertinently, however, for no matter how many persons Warhol enumerates—politicians, celebrities, indigents, and what have you—the claim that they all deem Coke to be “good” can never be more than conjecture, however well-founded it might seem to be� That is to say, as sensual beings humans are (more or less) unequal, for they have varying preferences regarding the objects they use to satisfy their desires. To be sure, Warhol remains exactly right about the fact that “no amount of money” can get anyone a better Coke� In their role as owners of money the President, the movie star, and the “bum” are indeed, if only formally, equals� To be sure, Warhol might have been fascinated by the Coke bottle and its role as an “icon[] of consumer society,” possessing a “special emotional charge” (Joselit 77)� Yet it is rather money and its leveling function that produces the community of—formal—equals he celebrates� In his Philosophy he notes that he tends to buy “STUPID THINGS,” not because he needs them, but because he feels the urge to “spend” money� Yet, at the same time he is “not happy” when he does not “have it,” presumably because this would limit his purchasing power (130; original capitalization)� The relationship of individual and money implies not a concrete person with specific preferences, but remains purely abstract, so that the money-owner’s individuality becomes arbitrary� When it comes to money, Warhol is not interested in “where it’s been” or “who’s touched it,” for everything that would tie money to a particular individual and a specific history is erased by “a certain kind of amnesty” (137)� From this perspective, the point about Coca-Cola—and the same holds true for each and every commodity—is not its taste, provided it is “good” enough that anyone would want to spend money on it� What is more significant is the fact that Coca-Cola—like each and every commodity— can immediately be purchased with money, regardless of the social status or identity of the buyer� But that is to say that the equality Warhol perceives is 2 Warhol himself would agree, however� In his diary, he notes: “Wednesday April 24, 1985� The big news on TV is that Coke is changing their formula� Why would they do that? It doesn’t make sense” (The Andy Warhol Diaries 644)� Art and Economic Objecthood 63 not one of consumers affected by the same commodities (say, a “good” Coke), but rather one of individuals involved in relations of exchange that are mediated by money� Interestingly, Warhol models his notion of the ideal work of art on Coca-Cola: You see, I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they’re all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting� And if the one “master painting” is good, they’re all good� Besides, even when the subject is different, people always paint the same painting� (149) Again, equality is not constituted by a particular content—or artistic “subject”—but rather formally� The art historian Sebastian Egenhofer, who notes that these passages dealing with classes of “good” objects should be read in conjunction, concludes that it is “the homogenizing function of exchangevalue” that finds an “emblematic expression” in the “equality of all Cokes” (120; translations mine). Exchange-value, however, is but the “form of expression” of value. As we shall see, it is only a “universal equivalent” (Marx, Capital 1 159) to which all particular commodities can be related, that makes possible an adequate expression of value. In practice this universal equivalent is identical with the “money-form” (139)� Warhol’s ambition, then, would seem to involve creating works of art that do not merely articulate the (unquestionably existing) fascination exerted by particular commodities, but are rather analogous to the form that makes universal commodity exchange possible in the first place; that is, to money. 3 In what follows, I will offer some meditations on this analogy of art and money, drawing on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, Michael Fried’s art criticism, and a recent attempt by Nicholas Brown to unite the two� The latter argues that their autonomy is what saves works of art from falling victim to the universalizing logic of the market. Brown, thus, suggests that “Marxism has something to teach aesthetics” (Autonomy 39), and, as will become obvious, I am very sympathetic to this approach� However, I will offer some critical remarks on Brown’s reading of Marx in a comradely spirit that might, accordingly, have some bearing on his argument about aesthetics� In short, I believe that Brown’s argument regarding commodities, objects, and works of art remains incomplete so long as the commodity’s determination as a value—and the appearance of value in the form of money—is ignored� The money-form, I will argue, is ultimately not antithetical but analogous to aesthetic form� 3 Warhol’s paintings of actual banknotes would, then, actually constitute a red herring, for the fact that the visible appearance of money becomes thematic diverts critical attention from his interest in the formal quality of money as ‘master commodity’� More generally, Fredric Jameson gets both Warhol and Marx wrong when he writes that Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes were “clearly fetishes” on “the level of the content” (8), for Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism has absolutely nothing to do with the veneration of individual commodities and their “content”� In a follow-up article I will discuss the relation of Warhol’s art to the fetish-like character of capitalist social forms in more detail� 64 m arlon l ieBer II The following remarks follow in the wake of several recent attempts to make sense of art from a perspective informed by Marxian value theory. 4 The art critic Isabelle Graw, for instance, goes so far as to suggest that Marx could have based his analysis of the commodity “on the ideal of the autonomous work of art,” as both are “sensible-supersensible” things (“The Value” 50)� 5 Without offering any speculations as to what Marx had in mind when penning his famed analysis of the commodity, I will offer further thoughts on this strange form of objectivity shared by both works of art and commodities� Another brief example might begin to make the issue in question more tangible� Haim Steinbach’s works, like Warhol’s, take their cues from that “immense collection of commodities” whose production, exchange, distribution, and consumption undergird the accumulation of capital� Characteristically, his ultra red #2 (1986), consists of everyday objects exhibited on formica-clad shelves. Except for their occurrence in the household, an alarm clock, a pot, and a lava lamp are objects that have completely different functions� If a shopper discovered all three objects in a department store, the three would hardly solicit the same interest; perhaps she already owns an alarm clock and thinks that lava lamps are tacky, but needs a new pot; consequently, she might purchase the latter� Yet, if she subsequently visited The Guggenheim to look at Steinbach’s work, her interest in the object’s function is all but irrelevant� If she grabbed one of the pots that are part of ultra red #2 she would obviously have acted in an improper—and potentially litigable—manner visà-vis the work of art� In an interview Steinbach made the following remark: “I think there are hierarchical judgments implicit in objects, and I think there is an equality between objects that goes across these hierarchies” (qtd� in Joselit 207)� It might appear counterintuitive to suggest that the distinctions between objects are constituted not by the objects themselves—certainly an alarm clock is not a lava lamp—but by the judgments implicitly contained in the objects; after all, we tend to locate judgments in subjects� Where is the “equality between objects” to be found, then? According to David Joselit it is the color red that prominently appears in all three objects that produces a “formal equivalence” (208)� Fair enough� But what about basketball shoes and candle holders? They lack a shared sensually perceptible quality that could be attributed to them before they are brought into a relation that bestows a “formal equivalence” upon them as parts of Steinbach’s related yet different (1985)� We can deem shoes or candle holders to be “good” based on their function and our needs; 4 See, for instance, Beech; Haiven; Lütticken; Mansoor; Spaulding; Stakemeier and Vishmidt; Vishmidt� 5 However, Graw’s use of Marxian concepts is flawed at times, when she identifies Marx’s point about value being a social property with the importance of “networking and social activities” as means of increasing aesthetic value (“The Value” 40), thus conflating levels of analysis. But see the chapter on “The Value of Painting” (including a conversation with Kerstin Stakemeier) in The Love (316-50)� Art and Economic Objecthood 65 but it is only as elements of a work of art that they possess an “equality” which is not a result of their physical properties or our personal preferences� Strangely, then, the objects that make up Steinbach’s works are sensuous things, but they have non-sensuous qualities; they are manifestly different, yet they are also somehow equivalent. Now, when turning to Marx’s Capital, we will see that much the same can be said of commodities� III Let us briefly return to the Coke. If it is not “fizless” or “dead” or “lukewarm” it will have some kind of utility for a potential consumer, whether it is its simple ability to quench her thirst or the additional quality to produce great “pleasure.” It is a use-value. This is the first determination Marx attributes to the commodity, with which he begins his critique of political economy� A commodity is “a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind” (Capital 1 125) and this “usefulness” is what “makes it a usevalue�” The latter “does not dangle in mid-air,” however, but is identical with the “physical body of the commodity itself; ” accordingly, it is “realized” in “consumption,” regardless of whether this occurs instantaneously (I drink a glass of Coca-Cola) or over an extended stretch of time (I use a refrigerator to maintain the ideal drinking temperature of a beverage)� Yet, use-values constitute “the material content of wealth” in any human society, which is why Marx loses no time to turn to the analysis of its “social form” (126). The object of Marx’s analysis, the capitalist mode of production, rests on the exchange of “the products of isolated and mutually independent private labours” (Capital 1 132; revised translation) on the market� If two products of labor are equated in exchange, there occurs an abstraction from their material properties which turn them into use-values and, thus, Marx claims, also from the concrete labors that have produced them. In Marx’s words: “There is nothing left of [the products of labour] but the same spectral objectivity [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit]; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour” (128; revised translation)� But if use-value is immediately tangible in the commodity’s “physical body,” it turns out to be remarkably difficult to catch hold of the specter of value. The first chapter of the first volume of Capital, then, can be read as a detective story of sorts� As Todorov notes, this genre in fact contains a “duality,” that is to say, the story both of an “investigation” and a “crime” and its cover-up (44). Marx, the great solver of the enigmas of political economy, similarly makes it his business to detect value’s “spectral objectivity.” But the first chapter also contains an explanation for the difficulties encountered in this task—a “theory of the selfmystification of the social” (Ellmers 32; translation mine)—in the section on fetishism� The “physical body of the commodity” cannot be of assistance, as it is but an ordinary, sensuous thing, whereas Marx is interested in “sensuous suprasensuous or social things” (Capital 1 165; revised translation)� The isolated 66 m arlon l ieBer can of Coke leaves the detective clueless—even if an aura of mystery might adhere to it because of its producers’ refusal to publish the exact contents of the drink, the referent here remain physical rather than social properties� Marx writes: Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values [ihre Wertgegenständlichkeit]; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects� We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value [als Wertding]� (138) Yet, he also finds a solution: if the objectivity of value is a “purely social” quality, it can only be discovered by way of looking at “the social relation between commodity and commodity” (139); in other words, in the exchange relation� Thus, Marx subsequently turns to the analysis of the value-form, where one commodity (linen) expresses its value in another commodity (a coat): the latter’s “body,” then, provides the “material” for the expression of the former’s value (139)� “As a use-value,” so much remains trivial, “the linen is something palpably different from the coat�” Yet, “as value, it is identical with the coat [ist sie “Rockgleiches”]” and, thus, “acquires a value-form different from its natural form” (143). This way, Marx has already solved the “whole mystery of the form of value” in principle, and analyzed the curious inversion which he will designate some pages later as the “fetish-like character of the commodity�” (163; translation revised) Through the equation that occurs in the act of exchange, a material object, the product of labor in its “natural form,” becomes the medium of expression of the “supra-natural property” (149) to possess value—a property that appears to be natural, however, because common sense is not used to thinking relationally and, instead, tends to (mis)recognize qualities that derive from an entity’s position in a field of relations as substantial ones (see Bourdieu 3-13)� 6 Now, it remains fairly simple to figure out that value is not a natural property of the coat as long as we are dealing with the value-relation of only two commodities; it becomes more tricky when Marx’s analysis of the value-form results in the “general form of value,” where the entire “world of commodities” expresses its value “through one single kind of commodity” (Capital 1 158)� This commodity, which becomes the “universal equivalent” (159), seems to always-already possess value immediately (or, what amounts to the same, substantially), as it can be used to purchase each and every commodity, thus promising its owner “a general power over society” and “the whole world of gratifications” (Marx, Grundrisse 222), which is precisely what Warhol 6 In Michael Heinrich’s characteristically lucid summary: “The objectivity of value is only assigned to the body of the commodity […] under particular social relations […] and is, thus, a social property which, however, appears as an objective property” (Die Wissenschaft 216; original emphasis; translation mine)� Art and Economic Objecthood 67 appreciated, spending money for “STUPID THINGS” to assure himself of this power� 7 That this quality appears to be the most natural thing in the world constitutes, according to Marx, the “magic of money” (Capital 1 187)� In conclusion, Marx’s search for the objectivity of value leads him to the money-form, in which the “supra-sensuous part of the commodity” obtains “a sensuous existence.” (Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft 235; original emphases; translations mine) The commodity’s dual form-determination as both usevalue and value cannot be made to appear at a single commodity and, hence, requires an actual “doubling” (Postone 173)� On the one hand, there is a multitude of commodities that are qualitatively distinct as material objects; on the other, there is money, which only needs to possess the one quality to be immediately exchangeable. “The exchangeability of the commodity,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “exists as a thing beside it” in the form of the one commodity that is unlike any other: money (147)� The objectivity of value expresses a social relation, even the entire capitalist “relation of production itself” (Marx, Capital 3 965), that needs to “take[] the form of a thing” (953) without being identical with the material properties of the thing� IV There is more to economic objects than their mere material existence gives away, then� To be sure, it is anything but surprising to claim that the same goes for works of art� You can “twist and turn” a urinal as you wish, but its porcelain body will never yield its status as a work of art� Like Duchamp, Andy Warhol repeatedly produced works of art that put everyday objects into the context of the art world. The possibility to do so already implies that it is not their materiality alone that constitutes their status as works of art� For the philosopher Arthur Danto, the Brillo Boxes (1964), which were “[e]xternally” identical to the commercially available cartons of soap pads, were instrumental in his recognition that “invisible differences”—supra-sensuous ones, that is—distinguished works of art (37; original emphasis)� While Duchamp’s Readymades or Warhol’s Brillo Boxes draw our attention to the institutional practices of designating objects as art, there exist also other attempts to think the artistic surplus that transcends the material properties of objects� A particularly influential one insists on the distinction between works of art and other objects in its title already: Michael Fried’s much-discussed article “Art and Objecthood,” which was originally published in a 1967 issue of Artforum� The text offers a critique of Minimal Art, although the art critic prefers to speak of “literalism,” as the works of artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, or Tony Smith in his view fail to transcend their physical “objecthood: ” they remain reduced to their “literal” shape, which leads Fried to 7 As we have seen, Warhol believes a “kind of amnesty” that erases any connection to a particular individual to be an effect of money; in the passage from the Grundrisse just quoted, Marx similarly argues that the relation between money and the individual is “a purely accidental one” (222)� 68 m arlon l ieBer conclude that they lack “pictorial” form (151). The latter is defined relationally. In a sculpture by Anthony Caro, a British artist greatly appreciated by Fried, it is the “mutual inflection of one element by another, rather than the identity of each” that constitutes the totality of the work� The “individual elements bestow significance on one another by virtue of their juxtaposition,” a significance that they do not possess in isolation as a substantial property (161)� 8 It is precisely this moment of a structural—or structured—whole constituted by the relationships of individual elements without being reducible to the immediately existing parts that Fried misses in the literalist artworks— the latter instead reject the “relational character” (149) of art� Admittedly, this is hardly the critic’s discovery; the eloquent representatives of Minimal Art are very upfront about this, and Fried is able to liberally make use of Donald Judd’s and Robert Morris’ own pronouncements� Already in 1965, Judd wrote that “[m]ost sculpture is made part by part,” whereas the “new three-dimensional work” rather has “something of an object, a single thing” (812)� Ultimately, Judd argues, the “thing as a whole” is more “interesting” than the relations between individual elements (813)� In Robert Morris, we find an even more explicit rejection of the relational. While he acknowledges that “art objects have clearly divisible parts” between which relationships are set up, he poses the question whether a work “that has only one property” could exist. He proceeds to answer in the negative, but notes that there are “simpler forms” which cannot be disassembled into “parts” as easily (815)� In the second part of his “Notes on Sculpture,” Morris demands to speak of “[s]tructural divisions” in works of art in a “negative sense,” precisely because this forces “specific elements to separate from the whole, thus setting up relationships within the work�” In the kind of object he prefers relationships vanish, and the beholder subsequently recognizes that she is the one who is actually “establishing relationships” (818)� Whereas the internally structured works rejected by Morris insist on the relations between its parts that constitute a whole which transcends the physical literality of the elements, in his “simpler forms” an entirely different kind of relationship is emphasized: the one between beholder and (art) object� Fried, however, does not care for this transformation of the beholder’s role at all, going so far as to write that “[a]rt degenerates” when it becomes constitutively dependent on its audience (164; original emphasis)� 9 More than that, without a beholder whose “interest” is aroused by an object—by the “sheer specificity of the materials of which it is made” (165; original emphases)—the minimalist works remain “incomplete” (163)� Even though he does not use the term, it would seem to follow that these objects are lacking autonomy� 8 Fried is well aware that all works of art are objects at the same time, writing that modern art has become conscious of the fact (“since Manet”), which is what produces the necessity to “defeat[] or suspend[] objecthood through the medium of shape” (160)� 9 Whether I agree with Fried’s art critical judgment about Minimal Art is neither here nor there� What is relevant for my purposes is how he establishes the structural distinction between art and objecthood� Fried himself likes to point out that the critics of his essay—and there have been many—usually take issue with his “evaluation” of Minimal Art rather than “the terms of his argument” (“An Introduction” 43; original emphasis)� Art and Economic Objecthood 69 V Now, what does all of this have to do with Marx’s analysis of the commodity? Michael Fried is hardly known for being a Marxist, let alone for being interested in the social context of art. Anthony Grudin points to a little known text published in 1962, in which Fried rather emphatically demands a political analysis of artistic phenomena, but in his subsequent writings explicit references to political issues are scarce (35)� 10 Yet, in Fried one finds affirmative references to the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, whose book History and Class Consciousness he discovered in the 1960s (see “An Introduction” 18)� 11 If one looks at the structure of Fried’s argument in “Art and Objecthood” rather than searching for explicit political statements, one has to conclude that there are overlaps between his critique of “objecthood” and Lukács’ account of “reification” [Verdinglichung]� 12 The Hungarian philosopher famously perceives the commodity-form as “a model of all forms of objectivity” in capitalist societies (83; revised translation)—and, hence, by implication for the issue of aesthetic objectivity as well. Lukács describes the implementation of capitalist commodity production and exchange as a process in the course of which the individuals subjected to it tend to lose the idea of a structured whole in all spheres of the social world� The transformation of the labor-process, which is divided up into specialized tasks only “arbitrarily connected with each other” (88), serves as the basis for universal fragmentation� Ultimately, “every image of the whole” is lost (103)� In the face of the reifying dismantling of a structural unity into seemingly isolated facts, Lukács defends the ambition to strive for “knowledge of the world as a totality” (112)� The latter is a “nonempirical constellation of empirical phenomena that is more than the sum of its parts” and can only be grasped, as Ingo Elbe puts it, when the “parts” are related to the “whole” (448; translation mine)� Similarities to Fried’s critique of theatricality are apparent� The art critic, too, is worried over works that 10 Grudin himself suggests that the “anxiety regarding the effects of capitalism on art constitutes the disavowed kernel of Fried’s theory of theatricality” (37) and shows that this idea can be found in Denis Diderot, Fried’s antitheatrical authority: the “economic subordination” of the model who poses for money is identified as the basis for “theatricality”� Fried, however, presents this issue as a purely aesthetic one, thus dismissing the social question (41)� 11 In the 1964 article “Modernist Painting and Formal Criticism,” for instance, Fried praises Lukács’—as well as Merleau-Ponty’s—use of “the dialectic,” which serves as a model for “perpetual radical criticism of the existing state of affairs”. At the same time, he argues (in a gesture reminiscent of Schiller) that this “ideal” could not be realized politically, but only in the realm of “modernist painting” (646)� Hence, the potential political (or marxisantes) implications of Fried’s reference to Lukács can easily be overlooked since it seems to reduce the dialectic to a method that can be applied to any object of study—which Lukács himself, admittedly, argues in “What is Orthodox Marxism? ” (History 1). Walter Benn Michaels reminded me of the possible significance of Lukács for Fried’s art criticism in personal conversation. 12 Juliane Rebentisch notes that Minimal Art amounts to “a regression of the work of art to the literal, a novel form of reification,” in Fried’s account, but does not mention Lukács in this context (47). 70 m arlon l ieBer no longer appear as structured wholes that are more than an aggregation of empirical—or sensuously perceptible—parts� The turn to undifferentiated wholes found in Judd or Morris, then, would constitute another iteration of the phenomenon of reification so ubiquitous in capitalist modernity. On the other hand, this may give rise to the belief that Friedian art would not be merely antitheatrical, but would, at least implicitly, side against reification and, hence, capitalism� Read through the prism of Lukács’ account of reification, Fried’s argument begins to sound vaguely western Marxist. One could point to intersections between Fried and Theodor W� Adorno, another defender of modernist works of art at the historical moment of their seeming demise, for whom the reduction of the work of art to a “thing among things” amounts to an act of “deaestheticization” [Entkunstung] (Aesthetic Theory 25)� It is particularly in his 1958/ 59 lectures on aesthetics, published only recently, that the critical theorist repeatedly explains what it means to recognize the work of art as a “context of meaning” [Sinnzusammenhang], in which “the relationship between its sensual aspects” form a totality in such a way that their status as mere “material aspects” [Stoffmomente] is transcended (139)� Here, Adorno also sketches an early critique of literalism when he writes that “specific aesthetic experience” must not approach the work’s “sensual stimuli […] in isolation, literally as such [buchstäblich als solche],” but rather relate them to its “unity” (110; revised translation)� For both authors, then, works of art must be autonomous from the beholder: “No painting is there for the viewer,” Adorno argues; instead, they exist primarily “for their own sake” (119). But unlike Fried, he explicitly blames the “total exchange society in which everything only exists for others [für anderes]” (Aesthetic Theory 308; revised translation) for presenting the greatest threat to art� Hence, the “useless” alone can serve as the “plenipotentiary of things that are no longer distorted by exchange” (310). Unlike a commodity—and unlike the Friedian object—the genuine work art is not for others, but insists on its autonomy� But what does it mean to say that a commodity is for others? If this issue is ignored by Fried and merely asserted by Adorno, it is a great merit of Nicholas Brown to have produced a rigorous account of the analogy between (Friedian) object and (Marxian) commodity. 13 To this end he turns to the Marxian analysis of the exchange-process in the second chapter of Capital, which stages an encounter between two commodity-owners� Here, “non-owning need” meets with “not-needing ownership,” as Wolfgang Fritz Haug puts it (13)� Brown poses the question what kind of meaning a product 13 Brown first presented his argument in the 2012 article “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption Under Capital” published on nonsite� It reappears—minus the allusion to Benjamin and slightly refined, but substantially identical in general—in the introduction (“On Art and the Commodity Form”) to his 2019 monograph Autonomy� Here, Brown suggests that a work of art “can, within itself, suspend the logic of the commodity, legibly assert a moment of autonomy from the market” (34) in a sophisticated theoretical argument drawing on Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Adorno, Bourdieu, and Jameson. In the book’s chapters he provides exemplary readings of works in various media in order to show how they make this assertion� Art and Economic Objecthood 71 of labor can have for its direct producer when its single purpose is to be exchanged. In this case the producer can only hope that her product meets a demand, yet the “concrete attributes” that might raise a demand are not determined by herself, which would only be the case if she immediately produced for her own use: “If I make a bowl for myself, it is a bowl because I wanted to make a bowl […]� Intention will be inscribed in the thing itself […]� If I make a bowl for the market, I am primarily concerned with one attribute, its exchangeability—that is, the demand for bowls.” Thus, what she needs to do is to correctly anticipate “other people’s desires” (Autonomy 7)� This way Brown arrives at a distinction between an object whose use (or purpose or meaning) is normatively inscribed in the object itself—a meaning that is universal […], available for everyone and not therefore a private matter—and an object whose use is a matter of indifference from one standpoint and a matter of possibly intense but necessarily private concern from another� (6) The first object is a work of art; the second one is a commodity. And while the former is a materialization of its producer’s intention, the latter must merely attract the interest of a solvent buyer� A Coke might be the matter of the most intense concern—think Benji Cooper’s paean quoted above—but this remains a private whim� From the standpoint of the Coca-Cola Company all the buyers are the same and all the buyers are good; what is on their minds when they buy a bottle, however, remains a “matter of indifference�” And if we remember that Fried charges the literalists’ objects with merely arousing the “interest” of a beholder, it will not surprise us that this distinction works analogously to the one between art and objecthood in Brown’s account� Confronting the (mere) object, the “customer is king” (Brown, “What We Worry”): “judgments” are replaced by mere “preferences�” Brown draws on Kant, for whom “[a]esthetic judgments […] are made without reference to external uses,” that is to say, without reference to the utility that an object might possess� An aesthetic judgment in the Kantian sense would, thus, have to refer to some dimension of the work irreducible to its usefulness to potential consumers and, thus, Brown argues, opposed to its “commodity character” (Autonomy 8)—and that is the work’s autonomy or “immanent purposiveness” (13)� 14 Provided that the capitalist mode of production prevails, it is “perfectly legitimate” that commodities which fail to attract the interest of a potential consumer are as “incomplete” as a Friedian object without a beholder (7); yet, as far as works of art are concerned, this has grave consequences, for “interpretation” becomes a matter of impossibility when the purpose an artcommodity is meant to serve is determined by potential consumers via the mediation of the market (8)� 14 In the next section, I will go on to argue, however, that this identification of an object’s “commodity character” with its use-value dimension fails to take into account the capitalist commodity’s determination as possessing value, which appears in the form of its exchange-value, that is to say, in its relationship to another commodity rather than to a potential buyer� 72 m arlon l ieBer Think of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes� Arthur Danto remarks that the original cartons were designed by the Abstract Expressionist painter James Harvey. As a “visual celebration” of the brand they are not a mere “container” for soap pads (41); instead, they are a “masterpiece of visual rhetoric,” which, however, has “nothing” to do with the success of Warhol’s boxes. The commercially available cartons are, after all, made with the intention “to move the minds” of consumers “to the act of purchase and then of application” (42)� According to Brown, any attempt to interpret the meaning of Harvey’s design—like the one that Danto himself engages in—would be a hopeless endeavor, since the boxes’ design merely materializes the intention to arouse a buyer’s interest in any way possible� Perhaps it was Warhol’s intention—that is to say, that which can be an object of interpretation—to insist on the “invisible differences” between works of art and everyday objects� Danto correctly points out that this “philosophical” point is independent of Harvey’s design (42; original emphasis)� 15 Now, if the production of art is entirely subsumed by the market, if all creative activity was reduced to the design of the bodies of commodities, this would constitute the death of autonomy� 16 For Brown this would amount to a realization of the neoliberal fantasy of a complete universalization of the market� This is also why the commitment to “aesthetic autonomy” gains a certain—if perhaps “minimal”—political meaning. Autonomy can only exist in opposition to the market, which merely knows the “personal” autonomy of the consumer (Autonomy 34)� Pure autonomy is an impossibility, but the work of art, according to Brown, could at least remind us that the principle of “universal heteronomy” of the market does not rule unchallenged (21)� Eventually, Brown arrives at a position fairly similar to Adorno’s—works of art that do not exist for others is a “plenipotentiary” of the negation of the exchange-principle—but argues closer along Marx’s text and, thus, circumvents imprecise claims such as the Adornian suggestion that “the principle of exchange value destroys use value for human beings” (“On the Fetish” 39). 15 It is entirely possible to argue that it had never been Warhol’s point to highlight the differences—invisible or otherwise—between works of art and commodities, but rather to insist on their “similarity,” as Paul Mattick suggests (139)� For Brown there can only be “disagreement” when we make reference to something like intention normatively inscribed in the work of art (Autonomy 31)� Consumers who have different preferences do not disagree; art critics who have different interpretations do� 16 In their critical remarks on Brown’s original 2012 article, Jasper Bernes and Daniel Spaulding correctly point out that Brown misunderstands the concept of “real subsumption,” because the latter does not refer to the integration of a practice into the capitalist world market, but to the transformation of the production-process on the basis of capitalist imperatives� To be sure, works of art can be traded like commodities, but artistic production is not continually revolutionized under competitive constraints: Andy Warhol, that is to say, did not need to worry that a competing “Factory” would produce silkscreened paintings more efficiently (Bernes and Spaulding 52; see also Beech 24)� In his 2019 book, Brown still uses the concept of real subsumption, though it seems to play a minor role compared to the earlier text. I do not think that Brown has successfully addressed Bernes and Spaulding’s critique, but the good news—for Brown—is that on the whole this does not matter too much, as I believe that his argument does not actually require an account of art’s real subsumption� Art and Economic Objecthood 73 Dirk Braunstein notes that “a commodity without use-value” is an impossibility (114)� Brown, on the other hand, focuses on use-value as constitutive for exchange, as it is only the promise of being useful—the promise that a commodity can be consumed—that arouses an interest� This way, Brown also tacitly rejects what Kornelia Hafner once termed “use-value fetishism,” which is to say, the belief that there is “a dimension of innocent usefulness” that needs to be saved from the corrupting influence of exchange-value (61; translation mine). Indeed, this position characterizes many reflections on aesthetics from a Marxist perspective. In Haug’s critique of “commodity aesthetics,” for instance, we read that under conditions of commodity production a “double reality” [ein Doppeltes] has to be produced, namely “first the use-value; second, and additionally, the appearance of use-value,” so that the “aesthetics of the commodity in its widest meaning—the sensual appearance and the conception of its use-value—become detached from the object itself” (16-17; original emphasis; revised translation)� This, however, implies that there is a normatively determined use-value that inheres in “the object” that can be obscured, mystified, or destroyed by a mere appearance. By contrast, Brown reminds us that a use-value by definition is “use-value for others” (Marx, Capital 1 179) and, hence, determined by “consumer sovereignty” (Brown, Autonomy 17). Marx already argued that the particular “nature” of the “needs” satisfied by a use-value is irrelevant (Capital 1 125); that is to say, they can be entirely imaginary, but as long as a product of labor is believed by someone to satisfy some need it has a use-value—as long as that someone is able to pay for it. In the first draft of his critique of political economy, Marx rejects the idea that needs are simply given; instead, they are “created by the perception” of the products in question (Grundrisse 92), which suggests that, pace Haug, the “appearance of use-value” does not need to be “additionally” [extra] produced with manipulative intentions (though that can and does happen)� 17 The “physical body” of the commodity always already possesses an aesthetic dimension (in the sense of aisthesis), and addresses the “five and more senses” of the potential buyer (Marx, Capital 1 179)� According to Brown, this means that commodities—as well as Friedian objects—bear a “deeply egalitarian promise” (Autonomy 20), as the promise of being useful (in whatever way) is a purely subjective category� Yet, if this was to be regarded as a victory over the implicit elitism of modernist art, it would well be pyrrhic, for they contain nothing that would oppose the “universality of the market as the sole organ of social metabolism” (17)� 17 See also the distinction between “desire-value” and use-value in Roberts (40)� From the Marxian perspective outlined here, use-value is always already based on human desires, if potentially very basic ones arising “from the stomach” (Marx, Capital 1 125)� 74 m arlon l ieBer VI What remains odd is that Brown’s account makes it appear as if the use-value dependent on potential consumers and their desires is the only form-determination that defines the capitalist commodity—this, paradoxically, would bring him into line with the position of neoclassical economics� The latter approach rejects value theory in both its Marxian and its classical version and, thus, the question how universal commodity exchange is possible in the first place� Instead, “value” is derived, as Ingo Stützle puts it, “from the individual perspective, from the individual in need or an individual’s relation to an object” (183; translation mine)� My point is not that Brown is committed to neoclassical economics; yet, he does move the relation between individuals (consumers) to objects (use-values) center stage. Marx, however, does not spend much time with use-value which is only relevant “as the material bearer of exchange-value” (Hafner 64) from the perspective of the critique of political economy. If the exchange-process is analyzed, use-value falls “outside of the economic form-determination” as it merely indexes “the natural particularity of the commodity and the natural need of the exchanging subjects” (65; emphases in the original; translations mine). As we have seen, Marx is not interested in the materiality of products of labor but in the strangely “sensuous suprasensuous” objectivity of value, which leads him to the money-form� It is money that makes all commodities exchangeable, for they can all represent their value in and through it. Thus, Marx conceptualizes commodity exchange not—like classical and neoclassical economic theory—as “an act between two individual commodity-owners,” but rather begins the first chapter of Capital with an analysis of the relationship that the money-form establishes between the private labors performed independently under capitalist conditions� This, however, is a structural condition that exists independently of “what the exchanging subjects think” or “which interests they pursue” (Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft 206; translations mine), which is why, methodologically, Marx’s analysis “cannot proceed from the perspective of individuals” (207)� Yet, this is what Brown is doing� Opening his book with the question what a commodity is, he, reasonably, suggests that we look for an answer in Marx, but, paradoxically, does not turn to chapter 1 of Capital (“The Commodity”), but chapter 2 (“The Process of Exchange”). In the latter chapter, the thoughts and desires of individuals do matter; but in Marx the analysis of the exchangeprocess firmly rests on the conceptual clarification of the necessary relationship between commodity and money, whereas Brown seems to think that the former can be grasped before the “appearance of money” (“The Work”)� 18 18 This formulation from the original article no longer appears in the 2019 book� Yet, Brown continues to call money a “nonmarket institution” (Autonomy 187, n� 32), which implies that capitalist markets are, in principle, based on the direct exchange of commodities (barter). Marx’s “monetary theory of value,” (Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft 250; original emphasis; translation mine) on the other hand, holds that “[o]nly by relating commodities to money a coherent social relationship between different private labors can be established” (251; original emphasis)� Art and Economic Objecthood 75 If this merely meant that Brown got the methodological implications of the relationship between the first two chapters of Capital wrong, it would not greatly affect his argument about aesthetic autonomy� But, since he goes so far as to claim that the “point of this book is […] that Marxism has something to teach aesthetics” (Autonomy 39), getting Marx right seems relevant. And, indeed, I would like to make some suggestions about why my disagreement with Brown might matter—all the while acknowledging that my reflections on art and economic objecthood are greatly indebted to Brown� Indeed, I believe that he is correct in drawing the analogy between the Marxian commodity—in its form-determination as a use-value—and the Friedian object� Both are “incomplete” without arousing the interest of buyer and beholder, respectively� They do not offer resistance to the consuming attitude that appropriates objects as “culinary elements” (Adorno, Aesthetics 111), thus “turn[ing] the work into a plate of pork rib and sauerkraut,” to quote again from Adorno’s lectures (120)� To oppose this attitude, which reigns in the sphere of the market, works of art would have to be autonomous. In Marx, too, there is an account of autonomy (Verselbstständigung), but it does not play the role of a “positive concept” (Stakemeier and Vishmidt 16); instead, he criticizes that the “social relation of individuals to one another” becomes “a power over the individuals which has become autonomous” (Grundrisse 197)� Here, the existence of a structure independent of individual thoughts and preferences does not emerge as a solution to the “heteronomy” of the market, but, on the contrary, as the problem itself� Now, first of all value becomes autonomous in the form of money. The sociality of the private producers exists as “a singular, tangible object” (Grundrisse 221); the “bond with society” can be carried in an individual’s “pocket” (157), but this social function of money as the “god among commodities” (222) is not a product of its material properties� The money-form emerges as the “joint contribution of the whole world of commodities,” which are materially different, without being identical with one of them (Marx, Capital 1 159)—and in this it is analogous to the work of art as conceptualized by Fried� The objectivity of value is a relational property, and so is the objectivity of the work of art� Brown argues that works of art certainly are commodities—they are bought and sold, after all—but, still, have to be commodities that are not “like any other” for them to “be art in any substantial sense” (Autonomy 21). For Marx, money similarly is a commodity—there might be a money-commodity such as gold or silver—but one unlike any other: in a memorable formulation that only appeared in the first edition of Capital, he suggests that “[i]t is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all other actual animals […] there existed also in addition the animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom” (“The Commodity” 27; original emphasis)� That is to say, it cannot be any object merely physically present in the world—that “immense collection of commodities”—but to assume the social form of money it must be more than—must “defeat,” as Fried might put it—its literal objecthood� The analogy between commodity and object, thus, would have to be supplemented by the one between money and 76 m arlon l ieBer work of art� Juliane Rebentisch suggests that we need not choose between art and objecthood, arguing instead that the “dual presence as things and signs” is a defining feature of all art (163). In short, works of art are always also objects that, however, due to their aesthetic form, possess a structural meaning—and objectivity as works of art—that is not reducible to an affective reaction to their materiality. Commodities, too, we can add with Marx, are objects whose “physical body” affects individuals� At the same time, money represents the objectivity of value as such in a manner that is irreducible to any individual’s will� Value, that is, is a social form� The work of art differs only insofar as the dual structure appears in and through one object, whereas the “internal opposition between use-value and value” must express itself in the “external opposition” of commodity and money (Marx, Capital 1 153)� 19 VII Let me note in closing that we might be in a better position now to understand why Haim Steinbach could claim that “hierarchical judgments” were “implicit in objects.” As use-values that, by definition, exist “for others,” commodities are formally determined to be dependent on the judgments of potential users—or, Brown might interject, their preferences� But in the realm of commodities there exists, just as in art, a form of “equality” that stands in a certain kind of opposition to these preferences, a “formal equivalence,” as Joselit puts it� Yet, a sensually perceptible property (such as the color red) does not suffice to produce this equivalence. If I am wearing a red shirt and walk up to Steinbach’s ultra red #2 in a museum, this item of clothing does not become formally equivalent to alarm clock, pot, or lava lamp� The equality between these objects only emerges when they are considered as parts of the work that can be related to a whole, as Robert Morris also recognizes when he notes that in works structured by internal relations, “different kinds of things” are “becoming equivalent�” (818) Michael Heinrich similarly notes that the objectivity of value cannot be attributed to the commodities in themselves, “in the way […] that both a fire truck and an apple have the color red in common�” It is instead only constituted when “they are set into relation with one another in exchange” (An Introduction 53)—and this only becomes possible when they are related to the money-form as an actually existing universal, a representative of “general wealth” (Marx, Grundrisse 222) or “itself the community [Gemeinwesen]” (223). This structural affinity between money and art might call into question the political power of aesthetic autonomy as 19 This tacitly presupposes that both commodity and work of art possess a material “body”� In how far immaterial commodities (services) and works would transform the argument would have to be further analyzed� More pertinently, since the end of the Bretton Woods system gold no longer plays the role of money commodity� Michael Heinrich defends Marx’s (monetary) value despite the absence of a particular commodity that serves as a “bearer” of the value-form (Die Wissenschaft 233; original emphasis; translation mine)� Interestingly, this corresponds historically with the turn to ‘immaterial’ works of art in, for instance, conceptualism� Art and Economic Objecthood 77 an alternative to the market—though it might, as Walter Benn Michaels proposes, still be worthwhile politically to understand a work of art as a structured “whole” irreducible to individual “feelings” (330)� Or perhaps I should rather say that Brown’s argument about the politics of autonomy is sound, but only from a perspective that focuses on the use-value of commodities� If this was not such a clichéd expression often serving to replace an actual argument, we might be tempted to conclude that, since works of art are and are not in opposition to the principle of commodity exchange, the work of art under capitalist conditions is an inherently dialectical object� Better, perhaps, to begin the work of actually analyzing particular works, as Brown does in Autonomy, to see how the relationship between social form and aesthetic form actually plays out� My remarks remain preliminary suggestions about this relationship in the abstract� The actual work remains to be done� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� Aesthetic Theory� Trans� Robert Hullot-Kentor� London: Bloomsbury, 2013� ---� Aesthetics 1958/ 59� Trans� Eberhard Ortland� Cambridge: Polity, 2018� ---� “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening�” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture� Ed� J� M� Bernstein� London: Routledge, 2001� 29-60� Beech, Dave� Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Chicago: Haymarket, 2016� Bernes, Jasper and Daniel Spaulding. “Truly Extraordinary.” Radical Philosophy 195 (2016): 51-54� Bourdieu, Pierre� Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action� Trans� Randal Johnson et al� Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998� Braunstein, Dirk� Adornos Kritik der politischen Ökonomie� Bielefeld: transcript, 2011� Brown, Nicholas� Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism� Durham: Duke UP, 2019� ---. “What We Worry About When We Worry About Commodification: Reflections on Dave Beech, Julian Stallabrass, and Jeff Wall�” nonsite.org� Emory College of Arts and Sciences� 5 April 2016� Web� 15 June 2019� ---� “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption Under Capital�” nonsite.org� Emory College of Arts and Sciences� 13 March 2012� Web� 15 June 2019� Danto, Arthur C� What Art Is� New Haven: Yale UP, 2013� Egenhofer, Sebastian� “Geld und Bild bei Andy Warhol�” Einwegbilder. 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Berlin: Sternberg, 2018� ---� “The Value of the Art Commodity: Twelve Theses on Human Labor, Mimetic Desire, and Aliveness�” Texte zur Kunst 88 (2012): 30-59� Grudin, Anthony E� “Beholder, Beheld, Beholden: Theatricality and Capitalism in Fried�” Oxford Art Journal 39�1 (2016): 37-47� Hafner, Kornelia� “Gebrauchswertfetischismus�” Gesellschaft und Erkenntnis: Zur materialistischen Erkenntnis- und Ökonomiekritik� Ed� Diethard Behrens� Freiburg: ça ira, 1993� 59-88� Haiven, Max. Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization. London: Pluto, 2018� Haug, Wolfgang Fritz� Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society� Trans� Robert Bock� Cambridge: Polity, 1986� Heinrich, Michael� An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital� Trans� Alexander Locascio. New York: Monthly Review, 2004. ---� Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition� Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999� Jameson, Fredric� Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism� Durham: Duke UP, 1991� Joselit, David� American Art Since 1945� London: Thames & Hudson, 2003� Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 808-13. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics� Trans� Rodney Livingstone� Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 1971� Lütticken, Sven. “The Coming Exception: Art and the Crisis of Value.” New Left Review 99 (2016): 111-36� Mansoor, Jaleh� Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia. Durham: Duke UP, 2016� Marx, Karl. 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Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 813-22� Art and Economic Objecthood 79 Postone, Moishe� Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993� Rebentisch, Juliane� Aesthetics of Installation Art� Trans� Daniel Hedrickson and Gerrit Jackson� Berlin: Sternberg P, 2012� Roberts, John� The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade� London: Verso, 2007� Spaulding, Daniel� “Value-Form and Avant-Garde�” Mute. Mute Publishing� 27 March 2014� Web� 28 June 2019� Stakemeier, Kerstin and Marina Vishmidt� Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis & Contemporary Art� London: Mute, 2016� 7-31� Stützle, Ingo� “Der Gott der Waren: Die ökonomische Theorie und ihr Geld�” PROKLA 179 (2015): 177-98� Todorov, Tzvetan� The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977. Vishmidt, Marina� Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital� Leiden: Brill, 2018� Warhol, Andy� The Andy Warhol Diaries� Ed� Pat Hackett� London: Simon & Schuster, 1989� ---� The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)� London: Penguin, 2007� Whitehead, Colson� Sag Harbor� New York: Doubleday, 2009� r uth m ayer Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect Was the aesthetic ever gone? Where did it go? Who made it leave? Already in the 1980s, when I was a student in Berlin, there was much mention of a ‘return,’ so by then, it seems, it had been gone for a while—and apparently, it is still returning and not yet fully back� In American Studies, at least, the putative sendoff of the aesthetic is closely associated with the success story of mass (or: popular) culture and its concerns� As the artist came to be replaced with all sorts of agents, and as the canon was swept aside by all sorts of texts, aesthetics was discarded too� Or rather: it went underground� The disappearance act of the aesthetic, after all, was as extended as its return. Perhaps we should take recourse to less definitive terms: the blurring, the flickering, the oscillation of the aesthetic? Ultimately, wherever (or rather: whenever) you look, the aesthetic is still around or not quite gone� It continuously changed its form and function, however, with the debates that tried to keep track of its status� In my contribution to this volume I would like to cast a closer look at this process of retreat or fluctuation, by zooming in on moments in time when mass culture manifested as an aesthetic configuration, and when the figures of mass entertainment and aesthetic experience were conjoined as opponents or allies or partners in an eternal love-hate plot� My point of departure will be in the 1940s, with one of the arguably most consequential takes on mass culture and its challenge to classical and bourgeois aesthetics—Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s seminal essay on the culture industry from 1944. This text is also important to me since it pulls together mass cultural aesthetics and totalitarian control in ways that should profoundly change the discourse on both issues. Instead of tracking the text’s well-researched impact and consequences (Kellner, Ross, Beaty, Fluck) one more time, however, I will then move backwards in time from the 1940s, to explore some dimensions of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s text that are almost submerged in the text of 1944, but resonate with earlier considerations of the subject matter, coming into ever sharper relief the farther we move away from the 1940s� On my journey from 1944 to 1914, I will spotlight some seminal texts of the field that aimed at a pervasive portrait of mass culture and its possibilities� I am especially interested in the writings on mass culture emanating from Weimar Germany that were published in the 1920s and 1930s and that have shaped the way in which we are thinking of modernity and mass culture today� Taking these as stepping stones, I will then proceed to ponder increasingly less systematic (and also less known) engagements with the subject matter, which disclose historical continuities that tend to get less 82 r uth m ayer attention in the history of the field. My anchor points will be the cultural media most frequently addressed in the texts themselves: the movies and the variety stage. It is my contention that the later—German—texts may be indispensable to come to terms with the workings of a mass cultural aesthetics, but that the earlier—American—texts, at least when read through the lens of later theorization, resonate most fruitfully with the constellations and concerns of our own days, in which mass culture (actually: ‘culture’ more generally) has fallen apart in a complicated assortment of scenes and sites� When tracing this particular history of the aesthetic we need to move away from the close association of aesthetics and art� As different as the takes on mass cultural aesthetics that I will review in the following are, they all agree that to approach mass culture as art in the classical sense is to misunderstand it, and they all aim to draw a sharp line, at the very least, between established ideas of artistic expression and mass cultural practices of production, address, and use� In doing so, all of them, although with different inflections and intensities, invoke the lexicon of gender and sexuality in order to pit the ‘old’ and ‘new’ aesthetics against each other� Seminal studies on modernity such as Andreas Huyssen’s “Mass Culture as Woman” (After the Great Divide 44-64) or Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity have identified this routine conjunction of mass culture and gender/ sex before, but largely confined their inspections to review correspondences between cultural theories on the one hand and extant social hierarchies or normative exigencies on the other� My reading, in contrast, aims to approach seminal theories of mass culture as response functions in a complex grid of social identification and distinction. I contend that what Matthias Makropoulos has identified as modern mass culture’s most trenchant effect—its “aestheticization of the social” (Makropoulos, “Organisierte Kreativität” 29)—impinges heavily on the figuration of social diversity and distinction. It does so not only by mapping out new social roles and personae, but more importantly by rearranging the very system of conceptualizing social diversity, as sex and gender attributions make exemplarily obvious (but enactments of race and class could also show)� Following Makropolous, I conceive of mass culture as a potentially nontotalizing and pluralistic system of meaning-making� That is to say that mass culture thrives on a characteristically modern “sense of possibilities” (Robert Musil, quoted in Makropoulos, “Organisierte Kreativität” 36) by generating an endless array of narratives of reality rather than working on establishing one committing and overarching idea of the world (or its future) (30)� The aesthetics of mass culture thus manifests on two different levels� First it serves to prepare largely autonomous individuals to perform in a modern world that capitalizes on mobility and flexibility and that is marked by contingency� And second it allows for participatory involvement in this world, encouraging an understanding of reality in terms of its malleability in ongoing and interminable processes of fictionalization and optimization (29, see also Makropoulos, Theorie der Massenkultur 78-91)� Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 83 Makropoulos associates this spirit of active engagement with the legacy of the artistic avantgardes of early modernism (71-5)� While these movements may indeed play a certain role in this context, I hold that the creative entertainment cultures of the turn of the century are by far more important than the experimental arts and their agenda of calculated provocation for the unfolding of a mass cultural aesthetic� This aesthetic is an operational aesthetic—beholden to the spirit of technical feasibility on the one hand and fraught with the dynamics of affect on the other (Harris 59-90, Brasch 43-80)� To formulate an aesthetics of mass culture, it seems, requires to calibrate the hard facts of technical and media affordances with the ephemeral substance of affective involvement� The outcome of this correlation varies greatly, however, depending on the larger socio-political contexts of the individual approaches� 1944: Adorno/ Horkheimer From his Californian exile of 1944, Theodor Adorno, together with Max Horkheimer, delineated the differences between an American culture industry and a European “bourgeois aesthetics” (122)� As one central feature of distinction, the authors mark the different understandings of lack in both systems� Like the culture industry, “genuine works of art” engage in a continuous deferral of gratification. While skeptical of the bourgeois art of the past and its aesthetic to begin with, the Marxist critics are outright disgusted with the maneuvers of an unabashedly commercial entertainment culture following on bourgeois art’s heels as its grotesquely distorted travesty� Where ‘genuine’ art mobilizes “aesthetic sublimation to present fulfillment in its brokenness” (111) the ‘false’ culture industry systematically obfuscates the negativity that inheres in the persistent denial of satisfaction and closure, duping its consumers into believing that the promise is the delivery: The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged: the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu. The desire inflamed by the glossy names and images is served up finally with the celebration of the daily round it sought to escape. (111) What Adorno and Horkheimer put in markedly negative terms has been described more neutrally by Frank Kelleter who characterizes serial modes of production and dissemination as a fundamental property of popular culture and an integral part of the larger logic of capitalism as an economic system that “functions only under the condition that it creates belief in its continued existence in the future” (30). Following this logic, commercial and massaddressed narratives that aim to reach and hold the attention of large and heterogeneous audiences over time need to produce a sense of lack and then keep it open, provoking their ‘users’ to seek more and more and more without ever quenching the want� Inscribed with the principle of seriality, these 84 r uth m ayer mass-cultural products generate “a sense of infinite futurity, without which capitalist market cultures would threaten to collapse at every crisis point” (Kelleter 30)� While the economic system of speculation and anticipation prides itself on its (putative) rationality and disavows any affective investment, however, mass culture’s ‘promissory notes of pleasure’ are nothing but affect� They are fueled by desire, not by ambition, acquisitiveness or audacity� Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s conflation of the rhetoric of commerce and eros pinpoints this dynamic: “Works of art are ascetic and shameless; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish� It reduces love to romance” (122)� Obviously, this is meant to expose mass-cultural expression as a perverse totalization of the logic of the marketplace, in which the individual and her body become an object of mass-consumption� As Juliane Rebentisch has elucidated, elsewhere Adorno invoked the logic of prostitution to denote the mass-cultural mechanism of operating with the (void) promise of instant gratification rather than engaging in the art of sublimation� Pornography and prostitution bear pointedly negative connotations for Adorno/ Horkheimer, but at the same time they shift the culture industry’s arena of action from the intellectual realm to the sphere of affective and sensorial experience. This relocation signals the specific agency of the mass cultural, which takes effect as an economy of exchange and endless deferral, an alternation of desire and projection, a teasing, taunting flirtation. This may well point to an ‘aesthetic of mass culture’—a phrase that Adorno and Horkheimer by and large avoid� Jarring with a classical aesthetic of the European bourgeois tradition, the mass-cultural aesthetic is not agonal or melancholic but future-directed and progressive, driven by a “relentless rhythm” (95, dt�: “stählerner Rhythmus” 128)� It is formulations such as these that substantiate Andreas Huyssen’s assessment of the writings of the Frankfurt School on mass culture as ‘ambivalently gendered�’ In contrast to earlier stylizations of mass culture “as woman,” Huyssen contends, critics like Adorno/ Horkheimer take recourse to both masculine and feminine ascriptions in their approaches to mass culture. Huyssen argues that they aim to overcome “the 19th century mystification of mass culture as woman,” only to routinely succumb to the temptation of feminizing the mechanisms and forms of mass entertainment after all (48, see also Felski 6)� But I claim that Adorno/ Horkheimer’s (and others’) assessment of the aesthetic of mass culture is complicated because it signals beyond a binary social gender hierarchy, pointing, through its highly critical and at times phobic tone, to an agency (or ‘business’) of affective reinscription, in which categories of social distinction (such as gender and sexuality, but also class and race) are turned into negotiable entities or optionable stocks; possibilities of becoming rather than points of departure� In the course of this logic, as we shall see, mass culture is gendered, but it is not female or male; it rather is an amorphous mix of contingent attributions, sexualized and sexualizing. Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 85 1935: Benjamin When Adorno and Horkheimer toward the end of their chapter project their observations about American mass culture onto Nazi Germany, they pull into plain sight what actually motivates their entire argument� In a similar manner, the writings of Siegfried Kracauer or Walter Benjamin from the late 1920s and 30s gesture to ‘America,’ to then time and again veer abruptly to their present-day reality in Germany, conflating the proliferating productivity of advanced capitalism with the dynamics of totalitarian integration� Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s closing remarks thus echo with the ending of Walter Benjamin’s 1935 artwork essay and Siegfried Kracauer’s “Mass Ornament” (1927)—as different as all of these texts’ lines of argument were (Buck-Morss 146-50; Hansen, Cinema & Experience)� Benjamin deplores a perilous “aestheticization of politics” under way that is propelled and steered by mass-cultural performances and machinations, depleting politics of concrete agency and totalizing it into a spectacular performance of power� This assessment, as has often been pointed out, jars with the essay’s obvious fascination with mass-cultural possibilities (Hansen, Cinema & Experience loc� 2370-2663), particularly the possibilities of the medium of film, which is made out as the epitome of modernity—future-oriented, optimizable, and largely uncharted: a “vast and unsuspected field of action [Spielraum]” (“Work of Art” 37)� The “revolutionary opportunities” of the medium hinge closely on what Benjamin identifies as film’s “highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation” (32), the fact that more than any other medium of representation, film manages to detach the individual from her image, enacting a division between the social presence and the projected performance� In contrast to the aesthetics of the classical stage, film does not aim at holistic integration and identification, splitting up its actor into a panoply of performances instead. The film actor is “exiled […] from his own person,” as Benjamin quotes Luigi Pirandello (31), to then contend: “His performance is by no means a unified whole, but is assembled from any individual performances. […] there are elementary necessities of the machinery that split up the actor’s performance into a series of episodes capable of being assembled” (32)� This actor is no agent but an interface (or medium), processing an endless array of modular images, split off from his person, which derive their relevance from their very disposability and openness� Benjamin does not resort to the gendered imagery of prostitution when he explores the dynamics of alienation in the artwork essay, resorting to the more neutral semantics of fragmentation and assemblage instead� But in other contexts, particularly Benjamin’s writing on the modern city, the prostitute as “saleswoman and wares in one” (“Paris” 157) plays a pivotal role� Assuming that ‘woman’ figures as “allegory of the modern” in Benjamin’s writing, Christine Buci-Glucksmann mapped the distinction between uncorrupted femininity and prostitution onto the divide of aura and media modernity, with prostitution “demonstrate[ing] the end of the aura and the decline (Verfall) of love” (99, see also Buck-Morss “The Flaneur”)� In contrast 86 r uth m ayer to Adorno/ Horkheimer, however, who conflate the culture industry with prostitution to signal the perverted character of both, Benjamin’s fascination with the mediated and de-auraticized artwork affects the motif of prostitution. Or perhaps his fascination with the prostitute as an emblematic figure of modernity affects his valuation of technical media: “Paradoxically […], the prostituted body is not only fragment, ruin of nature, disfigurement of the ‘sublime body�’ It is also a staging in and through new imaginaries created by a thousand excitations” (102). Seen in this way, the business of prostitution also becomes emblematic for cinematic (as opposed to classical theatrical) acting, since in both cases a mix of technical exigencies and affective dispositions intersect to release an agency that surpasses the individual ‘players’ involved� Miriam Hansen has complicated Buci-Glucksmann’s binary reading of gender by arguing that Benjamin’s auratic experience is “asymmetrically entwined rather than simply incompatible with technological reproducibility and collective reception” (Hansen, Cinema & Experience loc� 3134, for a critique see also Weigel)� But in either logic, technical mediation affords a proliferation of subject (and object) positions that is both disconcerting (because it subjects everything to the market imperative) and exhilarating (because it opens up hitherto unimagined possibilities and correlations)� This chimes with Benjamin’s reading of the modern city as energized by a transpersonal and overarching economy of affect� It operates like “the fun fair, which turned the average man into a clown, with its bumper cars and related amusements,” keeping people from expressing themselves “through anything but reflex actions” (“The Paris of the Second Empire” 30)� The mass-medial circuitry of the twentieth century, particularly the cinema, conducts this business of a transmission of affect and endless deferral of resolution much more expertly and smoothly than the nineteenth-century metropolis (not to mention the brothel), reduplicating the experience of sensorial onslaught and excitation to play out on the level of representation (in formats such as the slapstick film) and on the level of the apparatus� Mass culture, particularly the cinema, functions as a huge relay station powered by desire, enmeshing commercial, psychosexual, and political objectives to the point of convergence. 1927-1924: Kracauer There is an analogy between the routine cinematic equation of actor and prop, and prostitution’s conflation of the human body and the commodity, but Walter Benjamin does not spell this out in the artwork essay� However, when in the Arcades Project he invokes the dance revue—this other cultural practice that should become emblematic for the theorization of modern mass culture—he explicitly couples commodification, prostitution and modernity: In the form taken by prostitution in the big cities the woman appears not only as commodity but, in a precise sense, as mass-produced article� This is indicated by the masking of individual expression in favor of a professional appearance, such Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 87 as make-up provides� The point is made still more emphatically, later on, by the uniformed girls of the music-hall revue� (Arcades Project 346, see also: Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing 190-193) Clearly this passage gestures to Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal essay “The Mass Ornament” of 1927, in which Kracauer lays out his ideas on the aesthetic intersections of mass culture and modernity and their political implications� Benjamin’s fragment highlights the interlinkages between Adorno/ Horkheimer’s, Kracauer’s and his own assessment of mass culture as a business of multiplication and affective dispersal or reaggregation� Like his successors, Kracauer insists that the revue depletes the spectacle of sexiness of actual sex, producing “indissoluble girl clusters” (“Mass Ornament” 76) consisting of “sexless bodies in bathing suits” (77). Kracauer, however, is not so much concerned with the fetishistic commodification of the human body. His essay evokes the economic mobilization of sex in order to address the aesthetic reinscription of social relations� “The Mass Ornament” uses the synchronized and serialized performances of the big dance revues such as the Tiller Girls (which was a British troupe that Kracauer—like many others—took to be American) to get a grasp on concurrent processes of industrial mass production and political mass mobilization. At first glance, the essay seems to totalize the analogies between cultural performance and politico-economic streamlining, reducing culture and aesthetics to the role of the superstructure that vulgar Marxism had reserved for it� In this reading, the dance revues are metonymic of the system at large, figuring, together with other spectacles of orchestrated physical exercising of the day, as “the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires” (79)� But for Kracauer, like for Benjamin, mass culture is never only a means of placation, and “The Mass Ornament,” like Benjamin’s artwork essay, envisions spectacles such as the dance revue as a means of “bestowing [aesthetic] form” on the social reality of the working masses, which is otherwise systematically invisibilized and glossed over (“Mass Ornament” 79)� The mass ornament thus anticipates Benjamin’s idea of mass media like the cinema as a testing ground for modern subjectivities� But by and large, “The Mass Ornament” harnesses the phenomenon of the dance revue to the purposes of a larger “historico-philosophical allegory” (Hansen, Cinema & Experience loc� 1588), and by doing so, the essay downplays a fascination that is still discernible in the text and was openly addressed in his earlier engagement with the subject matter� In 1925, two years before “The Mass Ornament,” Kracauer had expressed “exuberant” praise (Hansen loc� 1588) about a performance of the Tiller Girls in Frankfurt: What they accomplish is an unprecedented labor of precision, a delightful Taylorism, of the arms and legs, mechanized charm� They shake the tambourine, they drill to the rhythms of jazz, they come on as the boys in blue: all at once, pure duodeci-unity [Zwölfeinigkeit]� Technology whose grace is seductive, grace that is genderless because it rests on joy of precision� A representation of American virtues, a flirt by the stopwatch. (Qu. in Hansen loc. 1450-1472). 88 r uth m ayer Here, what will be eventually disambiguated is presented in oxymoronic confusion: “delightful Taylorism,” “mechanized charm�” The later insistence on the revue girls’ “sexless” (ohne Geschlecht) functionality (“The Mass Ornament” 76) echoes with the current attribution of a “genderless” (geschlechtslos) grace, but what appears as a lack in the 1927 essay is made out as an interesting appeal in the earlier text, appearing in close conjunction with fantasies of “gender mobility and androgyny (girls dressed as sailors)” that are projected upon the United States as a space of futurity (Hansen loc� 1472)� The performative reinscription of the dancers’ bodies, this indicates, need not only be seen in terms of reification, it may also yield aesthetic pleasure by figuring an exciting rearrangement of established ideas of subject/ object relations, as Benjamin, too, would evoke them later on, and its concurrent reimagination of social gender roles� Unlike his later peers of the Frankfurt School, Kracauer does not draw an explicit connection between the spectacle of commodified and exposed female bodies at display and the profession of prostitution, although “the association between actresses and prostitutes lingered well into the twentieth century, and certainly tinted the mainstream public perception of chorus girls” (Cantu 46, cf� Rodger 174-76)� While Kracauer’s insistence on the ‘desexualization’ of dancers’ bodies chimes, thus, with a larger contemporary discourse on prostitution as reification (Smith 18-36), in the earlier text it also signals a notion of ‘desexing,’ an ambiguation of sex and gender identities, which is enveloped in the affects of desire and thrill� The dance revue accentuates the polysemic dynamic of the social reality it emanates from—turning the routines of Taylorism into delight, technology into charm, girls into boys, and transforming the streamlining forces of automation through the investment of affect� 1925: Giese Kracauer’s reflections on the ‘mass ornament’ are often short-circuited with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) to signal the dark collusion of automation, mass movement, and totalitarian streamlining (see exemplarily Meurer). Yet even though fascism’s ideological aestheticization of the masses may be already intuited in this text, it is not at its core. Instead, the text responds critically to the uneven economic prosperity of the Weimar period and the period’s fashionable ‘body culture’ in its display of organizational prowess and psychosocial fitness (Burt 72-85). But still, if one reads Kracauer’s essay side by side with Fritz Giese’s Girlkultur, a text that appeared two years earlier and that served as Kracauer’s sounding board, “The Mass Ornament’s” prescience of the compatibility of Weimar’s amalgamation of gymnastics and aesthetics and the later reactionary purposes of a totalitarian regime stands out� Fritz Giese’s prognostic skills on the other hand seem to be pitifully poor. Significantly, Giese dismisses the 1925 movement of the so-called “‘Swastika-bearers’ (Hakenkreuzler)” as “politically not very impressive” (62, my translation, here and throughout) and wagers Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 89 that in contrast to the United States, Germany would not stand much of a risk of being torn apart by the ‘race question’: “After all, who can make claims to race purity in Germany? ” (63)� To complicate matters further, Giese’s concern with possibilities of optimizing social processes, labor routines and the human being, and his enthusiasm about eugenics resonate with core elements of the Nazi ideology� And indeed, the school of psychotechnics, of which Giese was a major representative, came to be appropriated by the fascist state apparatus in Germany in the late 1930s� If one reads Girlkultur with the immediate future in mind, consequently, the text clearly falls behind Kracauer’s. But at the same time, Giese’s text reveals a sense of mass culture’s broad horizon of possibilities that differs interestingly from all previously discussed texts, precisely because it is less concerned with (and aware of) the impending danger of fascist cooptation and thus explores mass culture’s aesthetics of automation and serialization with far less reservations. This text thus serves as my gateway to an equally untrammeled American discourse on the subject matter that both differs strikingly from and resonates interestingly with the larger Weimar approaches� Giese’s work needs to be seen in close conjunction with other liberal advocates of a ‘modern’ psychology such as Hugo Münsterberg in the USA or Robert Musil in Austria, who all were interested in exploring methods of organization and management that responded to the processes of proliferation, distraction, and dispersal characterizing modernity (Rieger 156-192, Fleig 63- 78, Schrage)� They thus constitute a backdrop to Walter Benjamin’s assumption that the media of modernity such as, most prominently, film impact directly on the human sensory apparatus (Pethes)� Giese’s Girlkultur aims to expand the psychotechnical considerations “also and especially to the aesthetic realm” (Rieger 92, my translation), and to couch the phenomenon of the American ‘Girls’—these “cleverly commercialized little machines” (Giese 17)—in globally comparative terms as an index of modernity (Rieger 126-28). Unlike the critics of the Frankfurt School, Giese does not measure the aesthetics of mass culture against a classical bourgeois aesthetics with its shortcomings and strengths, but exclusively in terms of its resonance with the contingencies of modern societies, as a practical exercise to accommodate the individual to the capitalist agenda of efficiency and acceleration. Giese is convinced that there is no way around industrial modernization� The future, he holds, will be shaped by a regime of normalization, serialization, standardization, and typification: “The training of the serial man to serial labor: this may at first glance be upsetting, but it is an ineluctable imperative” (86). The question, consequently, is not how to prevent the inevitable, but how to shape the forces of the future in ways that meliorate their totalitarian impulses, allowing for diversity and specificity. To this end, Girlkultur does not only pursue those elements of a contemporary ‘body culture’ that chime well with what is seen as the inevitable agenda of the future� The study also—if much more tentatively—attends to resistant, or rather: recalcitrant dimensions in this larger sphere of cultural expression, 90 r uth m ayer associating these stoppages in the system with a “typically Anglo-American” aesthetics of eccentricity (94)� While the ‘American’ revue girls, for Giese like for Kracauer, signal the business spirit of a smooth and efficient execution of a given protocol, at the same time: it can very well happen with the girls that elements of grotesque bizarreness come to the fore. One example: There are images of Gilda Gray in a man’s jacket, without pants, only with little silk stockings half rolled down� And above this one sees instead of the male chest a shimmering female bosom; and the maid herself is smoking angularly-daringly [schiefwinkling-frech] the cigarette: a mix of mischievous perversity and harmless seeming cant� Such strange, typically unartistic attitudes can be found more frequently over there than here� The inclination to the grotesque is big, stronger than here, because the general intelligence is more alert� (95, tr� R�M�) In this acknowledgment of the ‘queer’ dimension of an American entertainment culture and its gender performances, Giese strikes a markedly different tone than Kracauer in the “Mass Ornament,” corresponding, instead, to Kracauer’s earlier observation of an androgynous versatility in the revue girls� Giese just touches upon this dimension, which he sees as latent, at best, in the German ‘Girlkultur,’ and he does not reflect upon the affective dimensions of the ‘eccentricities’ he maps at all� But we shall see that in the American reflections on mass culture it is precisely gender performances— and here particularly inversions, fusions, and hybridizations of normative constellations and coordinates—that are called up time and again to articulate the specific aesthetic potential of the mass cultural. 1924: Seldes/ Wilson The subtitle of Fritz Giese’s 1925 study Girlkultur—Comparisons between American and European Rhythm and Life Feeling—could, in many respects, serve as a motto to many other writings of the time� The German intellectuals of the Weimar era and the following decades looked at the mass culture of the United States as a semaphore of things to come� At the same time, their American peers tend to address the same subject matter under the insignia of nostalgia and loss� The coterie of bohemian New York critics and artists who frequented vaudeville halls, movie palaces, and burlesque theaters in the 1920s, and who prided themselves on their unbiased attitude, tended to agree that the grand days of entertainment culture were over or about to disappear� The major concern of this scene was not the commercialization of art, but rather the gentrification of the popular (Gorman 54). Gilbert Seldes, writing about the Keystone slapstick films in his seminal The Seven Lively Arts, the book that inaugurated “’popular culture’ as a critical category” (North 140, Kammen 83-120), exemplarily expresses a concern that he shared with others who were sympathetic to popular entertainment: Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 91 the tradition of gentility, the hope of being ‘refined,’ has touched the grotesque comedy; its directors have heard abuse and sly remarks about custard pies so long that they have begun to believe in them, and the madness which is a monstrous sanity in the movie comedy is likely to die out� (20) In what follows, Seldes pits an older ‘straightforward’ aesthetic of action, which he sees exhibited in vaudeville revues and the film serial, against the emerging ‘artificial’ aesthetic of acting. ‘Action’ signals fastness, immediacy, and precision, and brings about formats of entertainment that “hadn’t heard of psychology, and drama, and art” (279)� Seldes’ ‘action’ thus anticipates Benjamin’s concept of ‘acting’ as modulated by the movie camera rather than the individual actor (and it is of interest, in this context, that Benjamin’s few concrete references to films in his artwork essay all seem to point at the pre-classical cinema of the 1900s or 1910s [Hansen, Cinema & Experience loc� 2447])� For Seldes this simultaneously raw and machinic quality is what early film genres such as the action adventure serials or slapstick films have in common with the polished performances of the Ziegfeld Follies—all of them are spot-on� While like all nostalgic reminiscences this one conjures up an ideal that has more to do with the perceived shortcomings of the present than with the perfections of the past (Kammen 117-19), it is significant that what Seldes celebrates about the good old days of unapologetic entertainment in the very first place is its efficiency: it was good because it worked well� In doing so, he singles out for praise the very characteristic of mass culture that disconcerted the Frankfurt school critics so much: its operational aesthetics� About the performance of the Ziegfeld Follies Seldes enthuses: “it aspires to be precise and definite, it corresponds to those de luxe railway trains which are always exactly on time” (133, cf. Glenn 161). Seldes initiates his remarks on the aesthetic of the Ziegfeld revues by citing his friend Edmund Wilson, with whom he shared a fascination for the variety scene, although they favored different venues� Wilson, who preferred the downtown burlesque theaters, such as the Music Box Revue or the National Winter Garden, to the fancy Ziegfeld venues (Green 193, see also Tapper 69-100), echoes Kracauer’s verdict about the Tiller Girls: “the Follies are frigid—the girls are all straight, the ballet becomes a drill, the very laughs are organized and mechanical” (quoted in Seldes 136-7, cf� Glenn 174 )� Seldes agrees, but holds that Wilson misses the point� Of course the dance shows are “mechanical,” he argues, this is exactly what constitutes both their fascination and their function for the society at large: I recognize that Ziegfeld […] is in the main current of our development—that we tend to be a mechanically perfect society in which we will either master the machine or be enslaved by it� And the only way to master it—since we cannot escape it—will be by understanding it in every detail� (137) This resonates with Kracauer’s idea of the ornament as an emblematic figure to map modern reality and with both Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s conceptualization of distraction as a modern key competence� But with far less reservations than either of these successors, Seldes moves on to subtly reconsider 92 r uth m ayer what an “understanding” of modernity would really mean, by presenting mass-cultural entertainment as more than just a tool to master the challenges of modern industrial culture: The good revue pleases the eye, the ear, and the pulse; the very good revue does this so well that it pleases the mind. It operates in that equivocal zone where a thing does not have to be funny—it need only sound funny; nor be beautiful if it can for a fleeting moment appear beautiful. It does not have to send them away laughing or even whistling; all it needs to do is to keep the perceptions of the audience fully engaged all the time, and the evaporations of its pleasures will bring the audience back again and again� (134) The effect of the dance revue registers here as a truly aesthetic experience in the sense that it does not have a larger purpose, and that it brings about an intense and absorbing affective involvement� At the same time, it is rigorously uncoupled from the parameters of concentration and distanced appreciation, and associated with the open-ended quality of the culture industry that Adorno/ Horkheimer would later cast in terms of the “indefinitely prolonged” “promissory note of pleasure�” In Seldes’ rendition, however, the contract between audience and performers is not fraudulent, but delivers precisely by keeping its ‘promise’ open-ended� Seldes and Wilson may have had different preferences regarding the establishments they frequented, but when it came to the affordances of the dance revue, they seem to have seen eye to eye� This is how Wilson describes a burlesque revue of 1927 at the downtown variety theater Music Box. Given his critique of the Ziegfeld productions as ‘frigid’ one would expect him to celebrate the cheaper theaters as wild and sensuous� But not so: What strikes you at first […] when you are new to this more primitive form of burlesque, is the outward indifference of the spectators� They sit in silence and quite without smiling and with no overt sign of admiration toward the glittering and thick-lashed seductresses who stand on a level with their shoulders and who address them with so personal a heartiness� The audience do not even applaud when the girls have gone back to the stage; and you think that the act has flopped. But as soon as the girls have disappeared behind the scenes and the comedians come on for the next skit, the men begin to clap, on an accent which represents less a tribute of enthusiasm than a diffident conventional summons for the girls to appear again. This is repeated from four to six times for every number in the show. The audience never betray their satisfaction so long as the girls are there; it is only when the performance is finished that they signify their desire to renew it. They have come to the theater, you realize, in order to have their dreams made objective, and they sit there each alone with his dream� They call the girls back again and again, and the number goes on forever� When the leading performer begins to strip, they watch the process in silence, recalling her with timid applause when she vanishes behind the wings� Finally, she shows them her breasts, but her smile is never returned; nor is there any vibration of excitement when she has finally got down to her G-string—merely the same automatic summons, to which this time she does not respond� (280) Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 93 Although this setting is very different from the one evoked by Seldes, Wilson, too, describes a routine, not an uninhibited revelry or wild extravaganza. Neither is this the perverse comingling of sex and commerce that disgusted Adorno and Horkheimer� In Wilson’s rendition, the striptease act is characterized by both intensity and mechanical habituation� Once more, the scene suggests a contractual agreement reminiscent of the ‘business’ of prostitution� But here, the men’s passive endurance, “each alone with his dream,” calls to mind the long history of depictions of female audiences to whom “the dark of the cinema grants a refuge,” as Horkheimer/ Adorno write (111)� Wilson’s sketch enacts the space of the theater as an inverted mise-en-abîme of the larger order, with the female performers in command, while the male audience appears cowed and remote-controlled: addicts rather than fans� This is not a site of anarchic exuberance and Wilson’s depiction is fraught with uneasiness vis-à-vis the gender hierarchies at work� But it is not a scenario of streamlined rationalization either, indicating instead that the theatrical space tampers with the order at large, perverting the normal and established relations, rendering them strange and grotesque� 1917: Frank In Miniature Metropolis, Andreas Huyssen marks the “miniature” as “a paradigmatic modern form” (Miniature Metropolis 2)� He counts Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno among the major practitioners of this form of expression and emphasizes the fact that these critics’ writings were published in the “feuilleton of major European newspapers or in little magazines” (138)� While this publication format does not apply to all of the texts discussed previously, all of them are inconceivable without the sphere of intellectual debate opened up by European and American periodicals� Gilbert Seldes and Edmund Wilson, too, relied heavily on this print market, and here particularly the little modernist magazines, to promulgate their ideas (Golding, Kammen 83-120, Gorman 53-82)� In the United States, especially two little magazines made room for reflections on mass culture: The Dial (1880-1929), for which Seldes acted as the managing editor and theater critic in the 1920s, and the short-lived The Seven Arts (edited by James Oppenheim, Waldo Frank and Van Wyck Brooks, 1916-1917), which provided Seldes and other critics of the 1920s with “a vocational compass” with regard to the coverage of American culture (Kammen 39). It was in the context of the latter magazine that critical reflections on the masses and ‘their’ culture came to be framed “as a problem intrinsic to American rather than European culture,” with the consequence that “the European disdain for the popular [found] its truest elaboration in the culture of the United States” (Beaty 57, cf� Gorman 55-65; Blake 268-76; Hegeman 126-157)� A mission statement drafted by Waldo Frank and quoted by James Oppenheim in The Seven Art’s first issue in 1916 proclaimed this ambition to formulate a particularly American aesthetics: “an expression of our American 94 r uth m ayer arts which shall be fundamentally an expression of our American life” (52- 53)� Time and again, the journal’s contributors, and here prominently Waldo Frank and Van Wyck Brooks, expressed their skepticism regarding a cultural scene that seemed more and more sensation-driven and conceptually undirected� In the July 1917 issue, Frank uses a theatrical review article to venture forth an assessment of the contemporary scene of the performative arts that quickly goes off topic—swerving from a critique of current theatrical plays on Broadway to the “movies�” Frank voices his discomfort with what he sees as a pervasive turn to contrived and artificial articulation (Blake 266-95). But even though the piece is infused with an almost phobic tone vis-à-vis the impositions of mass culture on American aesthetics, its critique is different from later critical assessments, such as Adorno/ Horkheimer’s, to which Frank has been compared (Blake 272)� His review in all its negativity manages to capture the potential of mass culture precisely because he sees how fundamentally it is going to change the very idea of aesthetics and artistic expression in the United States� Although he differs from Seldes and Wilson in many respects, like them Frank sees mass culture not primarily as a culture of streamlining but as a site of continuous inversion and hybridization� More than any other critic addressed before, Frank is disturbed by mass culture because it is queer� Writing about stage productions of the day, Frank identifies the abnegation of a “straightforward love-motif” as a fundamental problem� His following examples illustrate that ‘straightforward’ could very well read ‘straight’ here, since he explicitly deplores that “[u]gly and unnatural unions, the exchange of the traditional attributes of each sex to the other and the use of clown brutality with clear erotic sources” invade and infect Broadway theater (357)� This is a trend that he also sees at work in the newly evolving format of the screen melodrama, which brews a “set of acidulous and denatured substitutes […] in place of the no-longer filling love-theme” (360). Where Horkheimer/ Adorno would deplore the movies’ putative proclivity to “reduce[.] love to romance” (111) and substitute complex feelings with trite signals, Frank is worried by what he sees as the contemporary performative arts’ dangerous proliferation of affective triggers� While the ‘old’ stage melodrama may have been over the top and vacuous in its often heavy-handed effort to force together effects and actions, he argues, the new and filmic melodrama is much worse because it does no longer bother to correlate emotions and actions into meaningful assemblages: They are indeed joined together by no power more subtle or more true than the camera itself� […] The two-dimensional scene [on the screen] runs one into the next with far greater fluency, far less resistance than was possible with the threedimensional structure of the stage� All of the tricks of the “movies” encourage the false dramatic logic which we have considered� Its freedom of shifting scenes and character-perspectives: its power of imposing one independent picture upon the other: its license of time and place and its illusory triumphs over nature, play their part� (362) Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 95 Frank goes on to explain that this trend is not unique to the movies, but hinges on larger cultural re- (or de-)formations. But the “moving-picture” figures as modernity’s “most satisfying, most gripping, and most expressive art” because it is uniquely suited to the demands of the day—it replicates the “disintegration” at large in its very technique: breaking down larger sequences and coherence into segments, images, shots, that can then be randomly rejoined� The camera interlinks things that do not belong together but “run into each other with […] fluency” and thus dangerously short-circuits affective dispositions, bypassing reflection. With this, the camera replicates the contingency of everyday life, and it abandons the ambition to implement a larger order or signal an overarching meaning� Instead it plays tricks that suggest false continuities and correlations� This anticipates, in a negative cast, Walter Benjamin’s insight that the cinema manages to shatter established parameters of meaning-making and perception, and figures forth new images that are modular, provisory, reworkable, and arbitrary� Both authors attribute mass media with a tenacious and subversive power of their own, the potential to tear loose from representation, looping into an autonomous cycle of ever more intricate (self)-references� But Frank associates the self-referential dynamics of the performative arts, and in particular of the movies, with their sexual politics in ways that go far beyond Benjamin’s allegorical conjunction of femininity and modernity� “Unhealthy” clowns (358) like Charlie Chaplin, Frank notes, turn the force of their humor not against the usual subjects of the powerful, the corrupted and the criminal, but against everybody, especially “the lover, the man and the woman” (359)� At the same time, the “musical and ‘movie’ farces” feature an array of “puny cavaliers, […] fool-ministers, […] astringent heroines and […] raping duennas” who pull the most basic of all certainties, the binary of sexuality and gender, into doubt, and thus contribute to the suppression of the age-old “love-theme,” until it “breaks its barrier in perverted forms; and the neurotic, auto-erotic ‘show’ is the result” (362)� In Waldo Frank’s complaint about the omnipresent “huge and aggressive women-clowns” on the stage and screen of his days rings a note of true gender trouble: “Some acute vagary of popular demand is supplying a bumper crop of women with the physical appeal of boys, and of men who act like women� On all sides, the theme of love emerges as if from some impalpable barrier whose repressive power twists it into abnormal guises” (358)� The threat of these ‘new women’ (Frank may have had Marie Dressler in mind) does not consist in the infectious quality of sentimentality and trivialization that Huyssen saw as instrumental for the gendering of the cultural divide, but in the subversion of reliable categories of differentiation and identification� What is epitomized in the camera’s random interlinkage of incompatible ‘things’ can thus be discerned all over the cultural scene, where it fosters problematical lifestyles and social practices� 96 r uth m ayer 1914: Caffin Mass culture is not a woman, but mass culture seems to be intricately tied up with gendered and sexualized ascriptions. Routinely conjoining what does not belong together, as Waldo Frank observed, mass cultural media display a cultural logic that caters to a sense of possibilities rather than closures, and that enlists social and sexual distinctions not primarily in order to create or challenge hierarchies or normality (although indubitably this also happens), but in order to envision variations and alternatives� The underlying precept is a purely formal one, endowed by the logic of optimization and transgression, and is infused with a sense of contingency� Everything could always also be different� Even though the simple equation of mass culture as “woman” that Andreas Huyssen drew in 1987 did not stand the test of time, gendered and sexualized imageries (including projections of female sexuality) indubitably play a central role in the conceptualization of mass culture, as we have seen� We have also seen that mass cultural criticism is a male business� Women may have been involved in the production of mass culture, but when it came to its theoretical reflection, they were largely silent. But I will end with a glance at a woman’s take on the subject matter, and one that resonates interestingly with the preceding motifs and themes� It is the earliest and most obscure of all the texts under investigation here, and it neither celebrates nor condemns mass culture, but aims to describe� Of Caroline Caffin not much more is known than that she was born in England, worked as an actor and journalist before getting married to Charles H. Caffin, a journalist and art critic involved, among other things, in Alfred Stieglitz’ little magazine Camera Work. Caffin was part of the feminist Heterodoxy Club in Greenwich Village and engaged in feminist theater projects (Glenn 137)� In 1914, she published Vaudeville, a slim study in which she probed the workings of this entertainment scene, mainly by looking at prominent acts and artists and their interactions with audiences� Justus Nieland, who discusses Caffin’s book in his investigation of modernism’s politics of affect and the dynamics of ‘feeling modern,’ accentuates that Caffin operates with an “idiom ill-suited to the Taylorized vaudeville stage” (33), when she approaches vaudeville not as a carefully crafted machinery or industry of entertainment, but as a generator of affect in the close coupling of audience and actors: “[I]t is ever the aim of the Vaudeville performer to seek the chord which shall evoke an answering vibration in his audience and to attune his offering in a key which, in spite of modulations and varying harmonies, shall strike constantly on that string” (Caffin 9). Nieland invokes Teresa Brennan’s concept of a “transmission of affect” to capture Caffin’s aesthetics as interactive, spontaneous and situational. The actors need to be well attuned to the mood of their audience and play them as they go along. This is what Caffin identifies as the secret of the extraordinary success of Eva Tanguay, the ‘Queen of Vaudeville’ whose career spanned the entirety of the contemporary mass-cultural landscape—from the burlesque Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 97 stage to the Ziegfeld revue to the screen. Tanguay, writes Caffin, “does not dance, cannot sing, is not beautiful, witty or graceful, but […] dominates her audience […] entirely” through her “almost breathless intensity” (36) and “alive, nervous, vital” performance (37): “It seems as if the exuberance of her intense vitality radiates through its raffish aureola, setting the surrounding atmosphere agog with vivacity” (37)� Tanguay’s “electric vigor” (37) is not explained in terms of control—as in Wilson’s description of the burlesque theater, in which the strip dancer plays the male audience at will—but attributed to the artist’s particular ‘feel’ for the performative situation, in which, as Justus Nieland writes, a “plasticity of identity” (45) comes to the fore that allows the vaudeville star to ingeniously “melt” from one “soft, diaphanous personality” into another (Caffin 138). In the case of Tanguay, Caffin identifies this pliability of personality explicitly with the imperatives of commodification. Tanguay, she contends, is a perfect projection surface, the “foundation […] on which to raise a perfect sky-scraper of illusion,” an incarnation of the “cult of self—Advertisement! ” (40)� But Caffin does not stop short at this interlinkage of the economic principles of acting and business, identifying, eventually, gender identity itself as one of the most prominent currencies in the theatrical economy—and in the cultural exchange system at large. In the 1910s, female to male crossdressing was still a routine practice on the vaudeville stage and film screen (Rodger 9-11; Horak)� This routine was not associated with non-normative sexualities at the time, but it was affected by a pervasive critique vis-à-vis gender-performances on stage� A vaudeville star like Vesta Tilley, who “must have spent nearly half of her life dressed in masculine garments” (Caffin 157), thus needed to regularly reconfirm her (feminine) off-stage ‘persona’ in contrast to her (masculine) on-stage act (Rodger 179) and did so by vociferously distancing herself from “mannish women” (Rodger 177)� Caffin, apparently, felt that this distancing act worked well when she attributed Tilley’s success to “the femininity of her personality� She is not mannish, and her point of view is not that of a man, though she has an understanding of it” (161)� This ‘understanding’ resonates with the ‘understanding’ of revue audiences that Gilbert Seldes lauded later on—it does not work by way of rational penetration, but rather enacts an intuitive and affective approximation that is characteristic of and dependent on the confined space of the theater stage� Younger cross-dressers like Kathleen Clifford or Kitty Donner, who are mentioned cursorily in Caffin’s book, would play with this sense of exceptionality by combining the teases of cross-dressing and striptease, one performative convention canceling out the provocation of the other: “Both of these acts would be seen as respectable because the performance context justified their disrobing and because that part of their act also served to reinforce their femininity and reassure their audiences” (Rodger 176)� Here, the quick succession of an ambiguation and hyperbolic reassertion of gender identities turns gender into a performative ‘act’ not so much in order to accentuate the category’s constructedness, but in order to keep the game of substitution afloat, figuring forth social roles as momentary configurations and 98 r uth m ayer fleeting effects. In this context, obviously incompatible realities are displayed not with the aim of overthrowing the dominant system of meaning-making but to point at some of its more exciting niches and corners. As sexological ideas of gender and sexuality as ‘identities’ would gain ground in the United States in the 1910s and 20s, these playful stagings of diversity changed their significance (Horak 93-117), and mass-cultural performances of gender and sexuality shifted gears. But we need to bear these early performance practices and their theoretical resonances in mind to understand what mass cultural aesthetics also was, and maybe what entertainment culture is becoming again today� Coda In 2006, Henry Jenkins contended that “YouTube represents for the early 21st century what Vaudeville represented in the early 20th century,” detailing striking analogies in the performance cultures of the turns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Jenkins emphasized the subversive potential of the popular practices then and now, while I am interested in their social functions and aesthetic repercussions, which may, at times, be subversive of extant hierarchies and conventions, but more often aim to chart and test the larger structures of meaning-making and organization rather than undermining them� Particularly the second part of this project—the testing out of possibilities—is something that drew much critical attention but was nuanced and evaluated very differently depending on who approached the subject matter against what backdrop� The history that I tried to sketch here, could have been told in a more conventional—chronological—fashion, and would then have probably evinced the gradual formation of an awareness that mass culture is tied up with politics and capitalism in ways that makes it inevitably complicit� But telling the story backwards discloses another trajectory, in which what ended up obscure and submerged is becoming increasingly more conspicuous. In this reading, mass culture does not figure as a bold counter-force to industrial streamlining, but rather sounds an aesthetic counterpoint by opening up, time and again, if spuriously so, options and visions that rearrange and revisit what tends to be taken for granted� By looking back at the period between the 1940s and 1910s, we thus may witness a disappearance act in reverse� A return� Works Cited Beaty, Bart� Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005� Benjamin, Walter� “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” (1935)� The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media� Ed� Michael W� Jennings et al�, trans� Edmund Jephcott et al� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008�19-55� Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 99 ---� “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century�” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. 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Eds� Suzanne W� Churchill and Adam McKibble� Farnham: Ashgate, 2007� 67-81� Gorman, Paul R� Left Intellectuals & Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1997� Green, William� “Gags, Girls, and Guffaws: Burlesque in Downtown New York in the Twenties�” Art, Glitter, and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America. Eds� Arthur Gewirtz and James J� Kolb� Westport: Praeger, 2004� 189-196� Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology�’” New German Critique 40 (1987): 179-224� ---� Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991� ---� Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno� Berkeley: U of California P, 2011� 100 r uth m ayer Harris, Neil� Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981� Horak, Laura� Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934� New York: Rutgers UP, 2016� Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments� Ed� by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr� Trans� Edmund Jephcott� Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002� Huyssen, Andreas� After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. New York: Macmillan, 1986� ---� Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015� Jenkins, Henry� “Youtube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic�” Confessions of an ACA Fan� Henry Jenkins� 19 Nov� 2006� Web� 30 April 2019� <http: / / henryjenkins�org/ blog/ 2006/ 11/ youtube_and_the_vaudeville_aes�html> Leslie, Esther� “Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades�” Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project. Ed� Beatrice Hanssen� New York: Continuum, 2006� 285-367� Kellner, Douglas� Critical Theory: Marxism and Modernity� Somerset: Polity , 1989� Kracauer Siegfried� “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces�” The Mass Ornament, 323-28� ---� “The Mass Ornament�” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed� Thomas Y� Levin� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995� 74-88� Makropoulos, Michael� Theorie der Massenkultur. Paderborn: Fink, 2008� ---� “Organisierte Kreativität: Überlegungen zur ‘Ästhetisierung des Sozialen’�” Kommunikation im Populären: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf ein ganzheitliches Phänomen. Ed� Roger Lüdeke� Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011� 21-41� Meurer, Ulrich� “1936 … Zur politischen Somatik bei Benjamin, Chaplin und Riefenstahl�“ Visual Culture. 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Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999� Oppenheim, James. “The Seven Arts: An Expression of Artists for the Community.” The Seven Arts 1�1(1916): 52-6� Pethes, Nicolas� “Die Ferne der Berührung: Taktilität und mediale Repräsentation nach 1900: David Katz, Walter Benjamin�” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik117 (2000): 33-57� Rebentisch, Juliane� “Die Liebe zur Kunst und deren Verkennung: Adornos Modernismus�“ Texte zur Kunst 52(2003): 78-85� Web� 30 April 2019� <https: / / www.textezurkunst.de/ 52/ die-liebe-zur-kunst-und-deren-verkennungadornos-/ > Rieger, Stefan� Die Individualität der Medien: Eine Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen� Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001� Rodger, Gillian M� Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2018� Ross, Andrew� No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture� London: Routledge, 1989� Schrage, Dominik� Psychotechnik und Radiophonie: Subjektkonstruktionen in artifiziellen Wirklichkeiten (1918-1932)� Paderborn: Fink, 2001� Endless Deferral: Theories of Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Affect 101 Seldes, Gilbert� The Seven Lively Arts� New York: Perpetua Book, 1957� Smith, Jill Suzanne� Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933� Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2014� Snead, James� White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. London: Routledge, 1994� Tapper, Gordon A� The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane and the Culture of the Body� London: Routledge, 2006� Weigel, Sigrid� Bodyand Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, tr� Georgina Paul et al� London: Routledge, 1996� Wilson, Edmund� The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties� New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952� r ieke J ordan The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue This article 1 is invested in delineating one reading position that readers of contemporary pop-culture are invited frequently to adopt: the curator� The practice of reading has come to entail more than the turning of the page, and reading today seems to be rather determined by the interaction with the work of art in the sense of co-making, as an experience of the narrative and material that is predicated on participation� What reading rewards and requires cannot be so neatly categorized anymore; the working through of elusive and open-ended works of fiction resembles more and more that of curating. The term “curation” or the figure of “the curator” stems from the museum context, where a curator’s job includes tasks such as exhibiting, showing, and caring for art works—like the organizing of an art exhibition or the implementation of a(n artistic) vision� As a subject specialist, the reader thus takes care of the interpretation of art that is not her own, and the idea of curation thus elevates the act of reading into an “artful” pastime—and the position of the reader into an aestheticized and aestheticizing one� Transferring the concept of curation into the realm of reading reconfigures the individual’s “singular” positioning toward an object (i�e�, the book, or the every-day consumer item) to one that engenders multifarious practices, such as rehearsal, assembly, and arranging. Without the investment of the reader, the text would remain disorganized, provisional, and maybe even merely conceptual at best� Enfolded within the concept of curation is the question of what a book is and what it does in the twenty-first century. This angle unlocks in what manner books self-reflexively address their material and narrative flexibility. In my monograph Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction, I coin these processes and interactions between reader and object “curatorial labor�” Work in Progress turns to texts such as the retro computer game Kentucky Route Zero by the programming team Cardboard Computer (2013-), or Chris Ware’s Building Stories, a graphic narrative published in a box in 2012, containing fourteen loose leaflets, booklets, comic strips or board games that can be read in any order� Another chapter of my monograph discusses Beck Hansen’s Song Reader (2012), which, similarly, relies on a reader who implements, rehearses, interprets an album that was not written by herself� The fan must play Beck Hansen’s sheet music album to make the songs by the indie rock beau audible, but Beck remains a mere figment. Other examples—not discussed in my book but worth mentioning—are S by Doug Dorst and J� J� Abrams (2013), a novel that asks what might be lost 1 This article extends questions raised in the chapter, “Work in Progress, Curatorial Labor,” published in my monograph Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First- Century American Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2019)� 104 r ieke J ordan between the lines, quite literally, if print novels vanish into the digital ether— for it chronicles two people falling in love via the marginalia they write in an old library book, or, as I will show, the periodical Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. In this article I want to think less about the history of the book, but rather how text has been under pressure in times of digitization processes and how the reader is to see herself rather as an archivist, conservationist, curator� As the case studies of my monograph suggest, reading has become, more than ever, a haptic process with multiple skills embedded, like playing the guitar or gluing together parts� These objects enumerated above notably demand physical interaction, and the experience of engaging with the book cannot be replicated online—the refusal to be digital lays bare a neat ambivalence of how books seem to become even more material as things in our lives become increasingly digital� Jessica Pressman’s notion of “bookishness” comes to mind, which she defines as a literary strategy figuring the book as “an aesthetic form” and “an emergent literary strategy that speaks to our cultural moment. These novels exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies“ (Pressman np)� Bookishness as literary strategy alludes to the changing roles of media, texts, and reader 2 in the twenty-first century� Caroline Hamilton concurs that books become mysterious lost objects, gateways to worlds of wonder, steadfast friends in one’s darkest hour� In a culture dominated by LCD screens and digital devices McSweeney’s is reassuringly tactile, crafted—not merely published� These are literary works designed not only to be read, but to be collected—and displayed� (22) Hamilton’s choice of words (“tactile”/ “crafted”) outline how books attempt to retrieve something that is “lost” and “mysterious” through their undeniable “bookishness�” But this mystery is not limited to books per se� Other media test out their respective “-ishness,” for they, too, have become increasingly digital� To be more precise, my research examines what a music album does if a song vanishes into MP3 streams 3 , or how a computer game can negotiate the rift between online and offline. These, too, we must understand as literary— or rather cultural—strategies of the twenty-first century. If and when these objects underline that there is something being “done” to the book today, we must assume that there is also something “done” to the interrelation of text, 2 As Jessica Pressman elucidates, the book “will not become obsolete with new reading platforms, but rather, will change and develop new incarnations and readerships; it will continue to serve certain kinds of literacy needs and literary desires—specifically, those related to its book-bound physicality and potentiality” (np)� And Pressman’s comment on platforms can be expanded to the material as well: “Literature has never really been just about information delivery—about information in the form of experience and enlightenment perhaps, but content that is inseparable from its formal presentation” (np)� 3 See here my article “Once Upon a Time on the Internet: Digital Nostalgia and the Music Album of the Twenty-First Century,” in which I turn to the Wu-Tang Clan’s album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and Taylor Swift’s album 1989 as case studies of what I call “digital nostalgia�” The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 105 reader, and object� Building on my work in my monograph Work in Progress, this article turns to a new object, namely the fifty-third issue of the periodical Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The magazine issue includes cute blow-up balloons onto which (very) short stories by revered authors are printed� I am particularly drawn to this issue (which I will refer to as the “balloon issue”) because it comments on the way text and material interact and explores the rifts between (conspicuous? ) consumption and (inconspicuous? ) reading� What does reading actually engender in this issue—is it an inflated/ inflatable sense of a literary text, or has reading become yet another way to consume and display taste? By singling out the balloon issue, I will discuss visual and material puns on text and material� Once we acknowledge the interplay of materiality and textuality, we come to understand that the tension between the consuming of aesthetic, cute objects and the diffuse term of textuality in the twenty-first century is at the core of McSweeney’s balloon issue—and the current shifts literature faces� This ambivalence, I suggest, acknowledges that curating might linger closer to consumption than to reading and that literature now seeps into the confines of cute, consumable objects. Curating and Collecting McSweeney’s McSweeney’s has through the years continuously defied what a periodical should look like, challenging assumptions about the forms and shapes stories, books, plots can take� Within the last twenty-one years, the publishing house has risen to be an experimental, hip counterforce against the supposed and much-lamented demise of the book in the digital age� The name “McSweeney’s” has become shorthand for independent and innovative publishing strategies that display an interest in literary experimentations and provocations about what a book can actually be (and what it takes to be regarded as a book)� McSweeney’s was founded, in millennial nonchalance, in an email in 1998—Dave Eggers reached out to friends and peers and suggested starting a new literary magazine: The hope is that this will be a place where odd things that one could never shoehorn into a mainstream periodical, and might be too quirky for other journals, might find a home. I do not expect everyone, or anyone, to produce brand-new stuff� I am relying on everyone who gets this letter or who passes it on to a friend (feel free), will have things sitting in a closet that they had long ago abandoned hope of publishing� (Eggers, “First” 1) He concluded that first email with an upbeat, “C’mon everyone! It’ll be fun, and if we’re not careful, we might make publishing history” (3-4)� This founding myth nestles McSweeney’s in the folds of the rise of the commercial internet and creative communities that promise freedom from publishing constraints� Since 1998, the McSweeney’s enterprise has turned into a conglomerate, with community centers in New York or San Francisco offering tutoring for high school students, or the plethora of printing outlets included 106 r ieke J ordan in its roster, such as The Believer, the daily-updated humor website called Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, as well as copious fiction and non-fiction books by American luminaries such as Michael Chabon, Bob Odenkirk, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, and David Byrne� McSweeney’s is, according to an NPR piece from 2013, “that flagship literary quarterly [that] has evolved from a plain-looking throwback to the 19th century, to an intriguing array of eye-popping designs and visual puns” (“‘McSweeney’s’: Quirky Quarterly…”)� These visual puns and eye-popping designs, this recalcitrance and eccentricity need the “right” reader to organize and recognize it and so it works, in turn, to create her. To briefly contextualize this cycle of “creating to be created”: I have turned in my research to similarly disorganized and fragmentary objects to explore how they presuppose a readership that “knows where to look�” Such works intentionally overwhelm and maybe even confuse or frustrate their readers who cannot make sense of the text at first glance. By emphasizing tactile interaction and self-reflexively addressing the retroness of their respective media, these forms and formats pose “challenges of digitization in creative and often unlikely ways” (Starre 7). These materials are, no less (and McSweeney’s is not an exception), embedded within twenty-first-century infrastructures for producing and consuming (digital) media, and mediate (and maybe mitigate) textuality by way of their materiality. Where does text end, where does material begin? Staged as decidedly offline, time-consuming, and “haptic,” such objects work against assumptions we have about pop-culture and the digital sphere, where quick overhauls and ever new and changing content seem to be the status quo. We might say that text and material interact in order to distil a reader who is in the know and is attuned to recognize what is cool� We can already detect a tension, for objects that demand such organization and care are equally niche objects while their material is mass-produced, available on Amazon or in a conventional book store� And none of these objects are cheap—the aforementioned Building Stories, Song Reader, and S cost about $30, and a McSweeney’s subscription is available for $95 per year and includes four issues� (The material needed for the assembly of these objects is not included�) And rare McSweeney’s issues, such as the infamous newspaper issue or the very first couple of issues that still look rather rudimentary, are highly sought-after collector’s items sold for about $250� These objects bespeak the layering of market value and art object, but they also reveal the links between spending power and distinction. The reader of such texts sees the creative, cultural, or niche value of the object—not necessarily the market or monetary value, or, to be more polemic, the value of the text� The curator is no less a subject specialist who accesses these worlds through fragmentary books, songs, or literary magazines—taking up many different tasks and honing different skill sets� And, in turn, she is also able to create new hierarchies among cultural objects� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 107 One question strikes me worth asking: isn’t the kind of cross-pollination weirdly like a blender that dissolves the boundaries between niche and, well, mainstream? 4 The reader easily traverses between niche and mainstream, between digital infrastructure and offline pastime. 5 The conceptual becomes consumerist, the unique work of art becomes mass-produced� And the objects, mass-produced yet individualized, do not necessarily take the readymade (hence an every-day, ordinary manufactured object) to reintegrate it into an artistic context. We know these gestures from Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jeff Koons, or Hannah Höch, but these texts that I have drawn on in my research flirt with the unique experience granted to a reader by mass products. Thus, these objects perform an obverse operation. They decontextualize the rarified art object and make it available to a wider audience for purchase. By this I mean that they take now rarified objects like sheet music, the short story, arty leaflets, love letters and make them every-day consumer objects. Blow It Up: McSweeney’s Issue 53 Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern demands interaction on material and narrative grounds while, simultaneously, creating a readership attuned to its quirkiness� Engaging with each issue becomes a question of how the subscriber approaches the periodical, how she manages the different formats, contents, and styles every three months� One issue could be compiled of junk mail, another one is a cardboard head of a sweaty man, and the fiftythird issue includes party balloons. The McSweeney’s Online Store explains, “Packed in Issue 53’s purpose-built ziplock bag are seven stories printed on eight party balloons, which one must blow up to read� Gracing these particolored balloons are arresting new stories” by esteemed authors such as Carmen Maria Machado, Percival Everett or Lauren Groff (“McSweeney’s Issue 53”)� The eighth party balloon, at least in my copy, has a hole in it and looks like it was mis-printed� I accept this as a McSweeney-ian joke at my expense(s). Issue 53 is not an aesthetic event, it is an aesthetic party: we can detect a flirtatious wink toward Jeff Koons’s balloon dogs and even speech bubbles we know from graphic narratives� The particolored balloons and the stories 4 Caroline Hamilton in One Man Zeitgeist explains that McSweeney’s speaks to “cultural capital that blends literature’s nostalgic value as high culture and its function in commodity culture as an identity marker� McSweeney’s offers readers much more than short stories: it is a collectable object, a virtual community and a social identity” (21)� 5 These tactile experiences cannot neatly be replicated online because they reward material interaction—even though digital practices of finding music, love, or a rare comics strip have been sleekly adapted and adopted by apps and websites such as YouTube, Tinder, or eBay. Even though these might be universal experiences that people online and offline go through, they are here undoubtedly negotiated by way of material—and the reader becomes a subject specialist in the most literal sense: by being able to categorize and recognize the material at hand� Additionally, by witnessing how music, love, and collections come into being and unfold on a material basis, niche knowledge extends from the realm of the art to the realm of every-day life. 108 r ieke J ordan are now “electrostatically charged”: they are tantalizing, they are hair-raisers—and the price for the every-day commodity is, indeed, hair-raising, too� For the short stories, the reader cannot be short of breath (or money)� Let alone shortsighted: the print is miniscule! Too much air and the story stretches thin or even pops—the work of art is forever lost or must be bought again, for yet another $28� But, in the same breath (sorry), such short stories increase the “value” of the balloon—a pack of eight balloons for $28 (including one broken balloon) are branded with the names of the authors who have critical appeal� The stories make the childish air balloon unique and literary, underlining how the idea of “text” or “story” changes. The balloons seem to reduce the literary event into an every-day object� The balloon materializes cliché: the reader breathes shape, form, and life into the work of art to make it legible (see fig. 1). The issue also includes a “vinyl-bound hardcover containing electrostatically charged new work” from writers such as Lesley Nneka Arimah and Namwali Serpell (“McSweeney’s Issue 53” np)� We also recognize a deliberate play on the material of vinyl� The accompanying book is not a hardcover, but its binding and cover are made out of vinyl (and its cover has little balloons on it, tying the party balloons back to the issue) which makes it flexible and, quite literally, bendable� The material of the balloon might tear and will most likely do so since repetitive interaction with the material renders it fragile. The balloons will slowly deflate and lose their tension, but the vinyl booklet will remain in shape� Fig. 1. Balloon including the short story “Relaxation Technique” by Carmen Maria Machado (image: author’s own)� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 109 Claire Boyle, the managing editor at McSweeney’s, explains to Rob Charles, of The Washington Post, that it was a childhood pleasure of hers to draw “on a balloon and then [watch] the image shrink as she let the air leak out” (Boyle in Charles)� McSweeney’s / Claire Boyle won the ASME Award for Fiction 2019 awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors for the short stories included in the book (but not only for its packaging, even though the jury lauds the “commitment to surprise”): “Skinned” (by Lesley Nneka Arimah), “Vinegar on the Lips of Girls” (by Julia Dixon Evans) and “Unsound” (by Maria Reva). The judges write, “young women find the fortitude to liberate themselves from communities that are hostile to them� With crisp dialogue, melodic sentences and nimbly immersive world building, ‘Skinned,’ ‘Vinegar on the Lips of Girls’ and ‘Unsound,’ deftly explore the imprisonment of young women by social convention and the peculiar and specific longing of girls” (“McSweeney’s Wins”). Confinement and longing are juxtaposed with expansion (blowing up a balloon) and partying. But also with the pleasures of childhood: the doodling on a balloon is being replaced with short stories by revered authors� In reverse, their literary efforts are more than doodles: they are remarkable, giving a new domain to the form of the short story� We come to understand that the reconfiguring of the reader as a curator also mirrors a changing understanding of the boundaries between object and text. This weird re-integration of the every-day consumer object into the realm of the literary aims to entice the reader to think twice about the way text and material relate to one another, and how (and why) a balloon is now a literary device� Another question that arises is the following—What, then, becomes of the text? If the object encourages a consumer position, how is the interaction with the piece of literary work preconfigured? What about the work of fiction that is enfolded within the conceptual, mass-produced, individualized object? Put differently, the balloon issue unfolds the interaction with the text and the consumer position of the curator. The genre of the short story, the fiftythird issue seems to suggest, becomes an inflated and inflatable thing that the reader has to recognize in the thick jungle of coolness and hipness� The format and formal presentation of text ties together the balloons and the booklet accompanying the gimmick into the grander mission of the periodical, as Eggers already explained in the email in 1998. McSweeney’s will give second wind (a new breath? ) to any literary piece vanished into the vaults of failure—or to any consumer good that will otherwise disappear from touch (I can send virtual balloons with iMessages, for instance). The material flexibility (expansion and deflation of the balloon) adds to the formal characteristics of the book included in the plastic bag, striking up a conversation between balloon and text. And, similarly, the balloons still work with the parameter of verso and recto, like a page in a book; you need to turn the balloon around to read the short story on the “back” of the balloon (see fig. 2). We can make larger assumptions about the genre of the short story, then, which might, because of its formalistic constraints, lend itself even more strongly to such playful gestures as well as creative uses of its narrative and material flexibility. This 110 r ieke J ordan could cement the role of the short story in contemporary culture, for it is built on confinement and brevity and hence refers to its own short-ishness: short of breath, short reading pleasure, short attention span� A balloon, suddenly, materializes literature, partying, gimmick, and collector’s item, and a new venue for the short story as the text for a throwaway consumer object� The American fast food chain Chipotle used a similar text-object strategy in 2014. Stories by Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, George Saunders, and Malcolm Gladwell were printed on soda cups, and the short stories are exactly the length of a cup, interacting with and catering to the constraints the object imposes on the text. 6 That is a lot of (cultural) work that a throwaway object has to muster� We see how distinctions between the 6 Apparently, it was Jonathan Safran Foer’s idea, who, as the legend goes, sat in a Chipotle restaurant one day, not wanting to die of boredom� Struck by inspiration, Foer emailed Chipotle’s CEO: “I said, ‘I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn’t have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text. … ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to your customers as a service’” (Foer in Makarechi)� Fig. 2. The “back” of the balloon, which includes the short story “Relaxation Technique�” The balloon still makes use of verso and recto, even though a balloon is round and has no left and right, no back and front. And one relaxation technique is undoubtedly calm and steady breathing (image: author’s own)� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 111 conceptual and the consumable become contested and the idea of “caring for,” “organizing” and even “second wind” reach new terrain� This invites a reading of Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic category of cute—one terrain she explores in her seminal Our Aesthetic Categories� Those categories of zany, cute, and interesting “grasp how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Ngai 1)� Cute is a category that evokes affection and aggression, and it indexes an intimate, sensuous relationship with an object that is based on these oftentimes contradicting emotions (see 54)� McSweeney’s rewards such “sensuous” relationship with their periodical by building upon exactly these contradictory affects. In our case: electrostatically charged and confiding; prone to pop and prone to deflate. Ngai continues that cute has becomes an emergent consumer option in the mid-twentieth century, arising out of the “marriage of modernism and mass culture” (58)� She argues persuasively that “these aesthetic categories [are] based on milder or equivocal feelings made explicit” and that it is “the continuousness and everydayness of our aesthetic relation to the often artfully designed, packaged, and advertised merchandise that surrounds us in our homes, in our workplaces, and on the street” (58). The description text in the McSweeney’s online store speaks to this, and the issue is even sold with these contradictions in mind: The balloons are “perfect for decorating a birthday party, reading and then popping as a zen meditation, or repeatedly blowing up and releasing in order to observe their whimsical flight around the room, these balloons will provide endless enrichment” (“McSweeney’s Issue 53”)� Notice that we can “pop” (destroy) or meditate (restore)—something akin to a simultaneously aggressive and zen operational aesthetic� The balloons invite the balancing of blowing too much air into them (so they could pop), or caring for them so much as not to inflate them at all (i.e., keeping them pristine as a collector’s item)� The reader/ subscriber/ consumer acknowledges that the balloons can be deflated and then refilled with air, always with the ambivalence of “aggression” and “failure” built in� Such a literary balloon is a different way of negotiating (print) consumer goods (or, rather, now elevating a trite thing like a balloon into print capitalism) that surround us day to day: McSweeney’s takes the every-day object and reintegrates it into the realm of high literature, marking it with text that would usually be found in anthologies or high-gloss blogs (the same rings true for the Chipotle cups)� But the one shape that always comes back into view—the balloon animal, if you will—is the consumer� Media scholar Jim Collins suggests in an interview with Ben De Bruyn that Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern insists on the “uniqueness of the reading experience of the consumer; apart from the rest of cultural noise in order to survive� And so in effect these books labor to create a space for a certain kind of reading which is clearly separate from the rest of popular literary culture but then, as soon as they become the stuff of literary adaptations, television bookclubs, superstore bookstores, Amazon communities, in effect they’re still a part of it” 112 r ieke J ordan (199) 7 � Notice how Collins does not speak of a reader, but rather of a consumer� The consumer seeks out a unique experience that pertains to her, and her alone. Being a louder, analogue, offline noise in a sea of other virtual options has certainly become part of McSweeney’s marketing and self-fashioning that caters to exactly this unique consumer position enabled by mass objects. End: less, Enriching The description on the McSweeney’s website promises “endless enrichment”: But why should material and narrative interaction with the objects at hand be “rewarding” and “enriching” for the reader? Or is the work of fiction here enriching? The balloon issue incorporates ideas of replicating unfree time within the confines of partying and leisure 8 —work, organizing, assembly, caring for come to mirror partying, childhood experiences, zen-ness, and decoration� These, too, are contradictory notions similarly to Ngai’s ideas of the ambivalent aesthetic parameter of the cute� Here, though, it is the work performed with and toward the object that remains ambiguous� Asked more blatantly: Is this work? Is this leisure? Is it reading? Is this a text? Is this a consumer object? Is it care work? Is it decorating for a party? Allow me to repeat my idea that curation describes tinkering with and implementing an artistic vision; it redefines the role of the reader in terms of the interactive and participatory notions of contemporary culture� And it matters that such (inter)activities are based and filtered through the act of reading and the way that the literary text is transferred onto a consumer good. McSweeney’s understanding of “reading” layers one activity onto the other� We could say that the balloon issue is writing “over” the long-standing nineteenth-century notion of reading as a true leisure time activity—for people really were not working when they read� Now there seems to be a peculiar pleasure in being overwhelmed, with arranging and figuring the material out, and with, well, partying� 9 But this endless enrichment is juxtaposed with material and narrative limitations (another short-ishness), and even aesthetic failure. You can only inflate the balloon up to a certain point, for instance, and to underline these limitations a balloon with a hole is included� This inbuilt failure (or aggression, to return to Ngai’s language) might indicate that success is actually antithetical to artistry� This, then, gives us a more nuanced idea of the curator-cum-consumer: the way that “making” is staged here has started to slide into something we rightly need to call “remaking” since authorial/ creative intention is so often stripped away from the consumer� We can relate this idea toward the material 7 Jim Collins calls this idea an effect of “de-convergence culture” in opposition to what Henry Jenkins famously called convergence culture (199)� 8 I borrow this idea from Theodor W� Adorno who in his piece “Free Time” traces the paradox of free time—free time cannot exist without unfree time (see Adorno 167)� 9 Similarly, pastimes like playing the guitar, collecting curio, or even partying are interlaced with the idea of working through the story and become a skill that relates to reading� I discuss this in depth in my monograph� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 113 strategies of McSweeney’s: the layout and content of the respective issues defy any notion of routine that would assure the reader of stability or even durability (i.e., the hole in the balloon). There is no single, consistent reading experience, because there is no consistent layout or consistent material property for McSweeney’s� Instead, there is a heterogeneous form that requires new and intensified forms of reading labor and consumption. The acts of reading and consuming McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern conflate and remain individualized—because it does not create a narrative of constancy in which one reader can clearly imagine the reading experience of a fellow subscriber or the layout of the following issue� Rather, McSweeney’s depends upon a singular grappling with dynamic and sometimes obdurate form: an affective negotiation that stresses the reader-text and reader-object relationship and relegates it toward that of consumption rather than toward reading� McSweeney’s balloon issue occurs exactly at the cusp of this ambivalence, this tension between the consumable cute story that now appears on party balloons (and brands them with literary names) and the way that literature seeps into the weirdest confines, like a party balloon or a cup in a fast food restaurant. In this way, the endless “enrichment” McSweeney’s promises is folded into a contemporary form of cultural cache that is predicated on consuming the “right” things� The curator “gets it”—and she knows the niches and the hip harmonies of American pop culture� Their aesthetic of hipness, of DIY fun, of maker creativity is marketed to and in the same breath creates a particular kind of consumer: a reader who is willing to move between formerly disparate aesthetic registers and who is able to bridge contradictory affects, such as aggression and affection (partying, leisure, work, reading, collecting), and other porous circuits that happily fall together in the twenty-first century, such as novels, artisanal coffee, and vintage sneakers that are all sold in the same hip boutiques, be it in Berlin or Brooklyn� As a connoisseur and curator, she is to perform “good work” with the preset components made available to give the beautiful objects the right shape (blow air into them? Keep them deflated? ). This allows the following speculation: will these objects ever be read or will they remain in their packaging? This is after all a McSweeney’s publication, an object of a certain cache and collector’s value� This adds a twist to the creative achievement that Andreas Reckwitz, for instance, 10 diagnoses in his work on creativity as a dispositif in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and marks the creative endeavor, such as the short story, as a thing to buy and throw away� And likewise the labor performed by the reader is culturally coded as creative, but is similarly much less institutionalized� The “achievement” here is not only the colorful feats of design and packaging, but of creating a reader/ consumer position that recognizes the work of art� Or, taken one step further: is it McSweeney’s achievement to create a curator in their image, or of their likes, whom they teach to engage in their 10 Andreas Reckwitz notes that a certain creative ethos has become a structuring principle in the individual’s life in the twenty-first century. He makes this argument explicit in The Invention of Creativity. 114 r ieke J ordan material gradually (with every issue, for example)? This gives us a slightly different version of the curator as an implementing, creative agent: to what degree does the curator-reader predetermine her own path through the object? Or is it predetermined by style and packaging? Through curation-cumconsumption, the reader legitimizes the work of art and her proficiencies and fluency in aesthetic subgenres. Cultural capital arises because she “gets” the aesthetic while never being its real maker. It seems as if the texts need a curating, crafty, careful reader to attain such levels of quality and legitimacy� The aesthetics of bookishness in the twenty-first century, as Pressman argues, are “decisively different in tone and ambition” compared to other playful forms of literature (np)� As my discussion has shown, we might have to take this at face value: the ambition of the curator not to be tone-deaf� So curation might be in fact a limited activity rather than a truly creative one, for curation enables a delicate position for the reader toward the object, author, and text. The objects dictate their own terms, they circumscribe the reader in a range of possible options that only seems infinite. We can wonder what kind of legacy McSweeney’s will project into the future: a testament to consumer culture or a playful subversion of textuality? What we might have considered a looser or more creative agency before might indeed not singularly be integrated into such modes of creative endeavors� Maybe the curator actually works for or toward the recognizing of a singular experience becoming manifold� This shift from reading toward consuming and, enfolded within this, the challenges that text and material pose to one another are indicative of a new consumer position that is artful and reliant on individuality� Maybe such objects like McSweeney’s issues or a Chipotle soda cup are test balloons about the new material aesthetics of texts in the twenty-first century. It is interesting to see that they all are kind of intersectional materials/ forms, for they need to translate material from one into the next. The love story, the album, the collection, or the party take on disparate forms that become recognizable only through interaction and consumption—only to be discarded� And maybe the cultural and consumerist need for literature to be unique and quirky are exactly those market forms that take on shapes of balloons—nothing more, little less than hot air in a literary container� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� “Free Time�” 1969� Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords� Trans� Henry W� Pickford� New York: Columbia UP, 1998� Charles, Ron� “Friday Thoughts: Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear: Trump in the White House’ Is Already a Bestseller�” The Washington Post - Books. The Washington Post, 10 Aug� 2018� Web� 22 March 2019� <https: / / wapo� st/ 2vwYhJa? tid=ss_tw&utm_term=�33ad55f8fa20>� Collins, Jim� “E-Readers, Deconvergence Culture and McSweeney’s Circle: An Interview with Jim Collins�” Interview by Ben De Bruyn� Image and Narrative 14�3 (2009): 193-206� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 115 Eggers, Dave� “First Email�” Art of McSweeney’s. Ed� Editors of McSweeney’s� San Francisco: Chronicle, 2010� 1-4� ---� “This book is being published…” Art of McSweeney’s. Ed� Editors of McSweeney’s� San Francisco: Chronicle, 2010� 5� Hamilton, Caroline� One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity. New York: Continuum, 2010� Jordan, Rieke� Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019� ---� “Once Upon a Time on the Internet: Digital Nostalgia and the Music Album of the Twenty-First Century�” Pop Nostalgia: The Uses of the Past in Popular Culture� Ed� Tobias Becker and Dion Georgiou� Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020� Makarechi, Kia� “Chipotle Cups Will Now Feature Stories by Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison, and Other Authors�” Vanity Fair / Hive� Vanityfair�com, 15 May 2014� Web� 26 March 2019� <https: / / www�vanityfair�com/ news/ business/ 2014/ 05/ chipotle-cups-will-now-have-stories-by-jonathan-safran-foer-toni-morrison-andother-authors>� “McSweeney’s Issue 53�” The McSweeney’s Store. McSweeney’s, 1998-2019� Web� 22 March 2019. <https: / / store.mcsweeneys.net/ products/ mcsweeney-s-issue-53? taxon_id=1>. “‘McSweeney’s’: Quirky Quarterly To Publishing Powerhouse�” Npr.org� NPR, 18 Nov� 2013 Web� 25 March 2019� <https: / / www�npr�org/ 2013/ 11/ 18/ 245420833/ the-best-ofmcsweeneys-from-quirky-quarterly-to-publishing-powerhouse? t=1553506682608>� “McSweeney’s Wins ASME Award for Fiction�” American Society of Magazine Editors. ASME, 6 Feb� 2019� Web� 22 March 2019� <https: / / asme�magazine�org/ asme/ mcsweeneys-wins-asme-award-fiction>. Ngai, Sianne� Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012� Pressman, Jessica� “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature�” Michigan Quarterly Review: Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age 48�4 (2009): np� Reckwitz, Andreas� The Invention of Creativity. Cambridge: Polity, 2017� Starre, Alexander. Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitalization� Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2015� s usanne r ohr The Aesthetics of Madness In this essay I explore current depictions of madness in American culture, particularly in American film, and what these representations tell us about contemporary conceptualizations of mental illness in the US� 1 What is more, I argue that in some new films the condition of autism, particularly Asperger Syndrome, is staged as the embodiment of a new normalcy and that the interest in autism has originated new forms of representation and new aesthetic patterns that break with firmly established traditions of depicting madness. I will explain my terminology in a moment, but I first would like to start my argument with the observation that many recent works of American art, in several media, deal with mental illness� For instance, the rock musical Next to Normal, a huge 2009 Broadway hit and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, tells the story of a woman struggling with worsening bipolar disorder� Pink’s music video for her song “F**kin’ Perfect” (2011) visualizes the story told in the lyrics by showing a young woman in distress starving and cutting herself� The documentary film Autism: The Musical (2007) follows five children with autism as they rehearse for a musical production� A number of mainstream and art house movies engage the topic� Among them are The Scribbler (2014), whose protagonist suffers from dissociative identity disorder; and a number of films in various genres represent the phenomenon of amnesia, such as Michael Sucsy’s romantic comedy The Vow (2012)� Perry Blackshear’s psychological thriller They Look Like People (2015) follows the protagonist’s descent into schizophrenia� The protagonist of Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine (2013) is afflicted with anxiety disorder and is dependent on psychoactive drugs� Adrian Monk, the protagonist of the police procedural series Monk, shown on USA Network from 2002-2009, represents the pathologization of the classic detective figure as he suffers from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, whereas Carrie Mathison, a character with bipolar disorder in the political thriller TV series Homeland (broadcast on Showtime since 2011) confronts the viewer with the question as to whether or not she functions more efficiently on or off her medication. Touch, a thriller drama television series that ran on Fox from 2012 to 2013, features an emotionally disturbed child protagonist; and in the comedy-drama TV series Parenthood that ran on NBC from 2010-2015, one of the children is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome� The medical drama The Good Doctor, currently broadcast on ABC, features a young savant surgeon� The series is 1 This is the enlarged and revised version of an article that has been previously published as “Screening Madness in American Culture,” Journal of Medical Humanities 36�3 (2014): 231-240� Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature� 118 s usanne r ohr developed by David Shore, creator of the Fox hit medical drama House, and can thus be seen as a radicalization of the bizarre House-figure into the autism spectrum� If we turn to literature, in Jonathan Franzen’s famous novel The Corrections (2001), one of the main characters suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and is gradually losing contact with reality and sliding into a dream world� Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006) prominently interrogates a rare delusional misidentification syndrome; and the protagonist of John Wray’s novel Lowboy (2009) is a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds� Kathryn Erskine’s young adult novel Mockingbird (2010) and Lisa Genova’s Love Anthony (2012) deal with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome as do quite a number of recent novels, and in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Lake Success (2018) a hedge-fund manager flees from the stress caused by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism. Clearly, in the new millennium the topic of madness is highly en vogue in the arts in the US. The question is why? While explaining the current infatuation with madness is part of this essay’s focus, I first and foremost want to suggest that it is autism which now appears to receive particular attention in film and literature and that autism seems to have become the embodiment of America’s current cultural condition� As Paul Hellker and Melanie Yergeau assert, “Public awareness and public discourse about autism are approaching critical mass” (485)� Jennifer C� Sarrett even talks about an “autism ‘epidemic’” (142), and an “Autism Awareness Month” was introduced some years ago� A documentary film produced in 2013 bears the telling title The United States of Autism, in 2015 another documentary, Autism in America, was released� Before I explore some pertinent works of art, let me explain my terminology: As my short list of examples indicates, I include a number of mental illnesses—bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, paranoia, amnesia, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, autism and others—under the umbrella term ‘madness,’ diseases that have diverse causes and produce very different symptoms� What unites all these mental dysfunctions is, however, their physiological effect, that is, their power to deeply affect a person’s perception of, relation to and ensuing interaction with reality� With this, I certainly don’t wish to imply that there exists ‘a reality’ which is the same for everyone, much less that there is one ‘normal’ version of it� 2 But as the physiological effects of mental dysfunctions define the term ‘madness’ at its core, I will continue using it in this essay, fully conscious of the fact that it surely is disputable to call autism or Alzheimer’s such and that the word has lost traction over the last decades and has been banned, due to its stigmatizing potential, 2 As a discussion of the various concepts of reality, and reality constitution, would almost coincide with a presentation of the main phases of Western philosophy as well as literary and cultural theory, it cannot be traced here. I have published extensively on the topic from a semiotic-pragmatist perspective, cf� for instance Rohr, “The Tyranny of the Probable,” and Rohr, “Madness as a Liminal State”� Also, madness and its counterpart sanity, or reason, are cultural constructs, evidence of a whole network of discourses on social norms active in a particular society at a given time� Thus the interconnected concepts of madness and sanity are open to continuous modification and reformulation, as Foucault and others have shown� The Aesthetics of Madness 119 from politically correct discourse altogether� In deliberately keeping the somewhat provocative or vexing expression, however, I want to profit from the rich field of cultural associations that it opens. The look of madness One of these associations is expressed in the saying “madness is as madness looks,” an assumption that, as Roy Porter explains, has been fed “[e]ver since Antiquity, [through] the theories of physiognomy, humours and complexion developed by Greek medicine” (92)� While the rich history of psychiatry shows that the conception and treatment of mental illness have indeed undergone dramatic changes, there are some noteworthy continuities� Stephen Harper names one: “If historians of madness—and most media critics—agree on one point, it is that madness has been systematically stigmatised in Western culture” (2)� Another continuity rests in the sustained belief that the mad look “different�” Yet how can mental phenomena that for the most part defy observation be made visible and revelatory of the otherness of the insane? A powerful and elaborate iconography of madness originated over time in medical as well as artistic contexts to represent and clearly demarcate that which transgresses mental normality and makes it identifiable and culturally perceptible� In spite of their historical contingency, in this vocabulary of madness some images have become somewhat standard� These recurring images constitute a visual continuum of “otherness,” and they concern predominantly a person’s facial appearance, expression, body build and gestures as well as features like wild, unkempt hair and tattered or inappropriate clothing� 3 Representations that display these characteristics mark the person in question as mad, or, to put it differently, portray the mad as culturally recognizable� Accompanying and interacting with these images, certain social codes have evolved over time into a vocabulary of their own� Three dominant views display a peculiar mixture of confining and liberating dimensions that go along with conceptions of mental illness, developed and exploited in innumerable accounts of madness in Western culture, artistic or other: 1� The mad seen as benign, as “wise fools” embodying some kind of wisdom or deep knowledge about eternal human truths� In this perspective, the mad are understood as playing a tolerable, if not valuable role in a society’s organization� As David Cooper holds, in the Middle Ages madness was even considered a somewhat consecrated state; it “was respected as a different way of being and knowing, perhaps a privileged way with a more direct access to heaven” (155)� 3 Cf� Gilman, Seeing the Insane, “Preface” n�pag� I owe a great amount of inspiration to this excellent in-depth study of the history and iconography of madness. I would also like to thank Sander Gilman for his highly appreciated comments on this paper� Cf� also Cross 199� 120 s usanne r ohr 2� In the contrary perspective, the insane are seen as wayward, animal-like savages, as ferocious, given to violence, or possessed by evil spirits� In this view, the mad need be taken away, as society must be protected from them� 3� Madness has also been associated with certain special mental talents, above all a heightened creativity, or clairvoyance� Hence concepts like the mad genius, as expressed, for example, in the form of the brilliant mad scientist or the ingenious mad artist� As Stephen Harper and others have shown, constructions of madness closely intersect with discourses of gender, class, and race and, as such, clearly bear an ideological dimension� For instance, the depiction of mental illness is highly gendered, and images of male and female madness tend to differ in important ways� While male madness is traditionally marked as tough or aggressive, even heroic, the female state of mental distress is usually staged as fragile and helpless, even if—or especially if—contemporary strategies of female self-empowerment and self-monitoring seem to promise control over mental health� 4 Wise fools, beautiful minds and black swans—madness in American film Although Western art has always been interested in the phenomenon of madness, the medium of film, with its interest in visualizing a person’s frame of mind, bears a particular potential when it comes to representing mental illness. Thus madness has always played a role in film, but when perusing the history of film productions in the US it becomes apparent that the number of films dealing with the topic of madness has indeed increased drastically over the last ten years. A closer look at the latest films reveals that their general layout follows the age-old iconography in a surprisingly seamless fashion, thereby inscribing the films firmly into the traditional western canon of views on madness. Thus, we find the three classical categories outlined above: 1� The mad as wise fool The motif of the “wise fool” is, for instance, displayed in the comedy The Ringer (2005), where the protagonist impersonates a mentally handicapped person in order to qualify for the Special Olympics� This attempt proves to be a humbling experience for the leading character as his team colleagues who are truly mentally challenged teach him a lesson in integrity and the values of friendship, fairness and team spirit� 4 Cf. Harper 186. The Aesthetics of Madness 121 2� The mad as dangerous villain Quite a number of films play out the thriller, thrasher and suspense potential seen in the view of the dangerous and uncontrollable mad villain à la Hannibal Lecter or Patrick Bateman, a recent example being M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological horror thriller Split (2016) that follows a man with 23 different personalities� 3� The mad as genius The mad as genius and gifted artist is a recurrent motif in movies such as Ron Howard’s celebrated biopic A Beautiful Mind (2001) or Joe Wright’s 2009 The Soloist� The latter features a former violin prodigy who has succumbed to his schizophrenia and leads a homeless life on the streets� His gradual process of recovery through the help of a journalist who befriends him is dramatized through the changes in his outward appearance, which turns from outrageous to more and more conventional� Finally, concerning the gendering of madness, quite a number of recent movies explore the topic of female self-construction gone awry, and the ensuing mental breakdown. A good example is Black Swan (2010), which earned Natalie Portman an Academy Award for her performance as an ambitious ballerina displaying signs of a borderline personality disorder and suffering from increasingly psychotic interludes� The movie shows how the protagonist falls to pieces under the internalized pressure to be perfect� In one scene, she claims to be “nothing” if she is not “perfect” (1: 22: 17). The film investigates female self-actualization through the dialectics of self-empowerment and abjection, leading to simultaneous success and failure in the final deadly “perfect” performance� Pink’s already mentioned video that accompanies her song “F**kin’ Perfect” functions almost like a response to this call (both film and video/ music came out December 2010), as it tells the story of a distraught young woman, who, bullied and ostracized by her class mates and misunderstood by her teachers, turns to stealing, cutting and starving herself as an outlet for her exasperation. Unlike the dancer in Black Swan who pays with her life for her striving for perfection, Pink’s video protagonist finds liberation and fulfillment through creative activity and becomes a successful painter; the singer all the while pleading with her audience “Pretty, pretty please / Don’t you ever, ever feel / Like you’re less than / Fuckin’ perfect�” Interestingly, both the movie and the video stage the climactic turning point in their narratives through the absence of language� Black Swan uses the well-established iconography of female madness and reverts to the corporeal dimension by showing the protagonist in the final performance with staring, bloodshot eyes dancing herself—guided by Tchaikovsky’s dramatic music—as the black swan into a frenzy while visually morphing into the great bird, thereby evoking the old concept of the mad as beastlike creatures� The video, on the other hand, chooses the opposite, quite effective strategy by creating a moment of complete stillness to transport the dramatic moment� When the protagonist is shown in her bathtub injuring herself and cutting the word “perfect” into her lower arm with a razor blade, the music 122 s usanne r ohr stops completely for a few seconds, and only the dripping of her blood into the water is audible� This scene illustrates very well what Casey and Long have explained in reference to the communicative or signifying function of the phenomenon of female self-mutilation: “self-mutilation is used as a form of symbolism or expression of mental pain where words and language have failed�” It is a “language of injury” (92)� Movies dealing with madness (and speaking the “language of injury”) are attractive to the audience, as the high number of productions alone tells us� If the phenomenon of mental illness has always caught the attention of scientists, artists, and society at large, movies in particular have a force of their own� As Colin McGinn puts it: “We want, badly, to watch” (3)� In the case of movies, the attraction is twofold� We want, badly, to watch movies— and we want, badly, to see “the other”—and make sure we’re not crazy and one of them� Here, the visual iconography is of vital importance as it helps the viewer to make the distinction between “us” and “them” regardless of how accurately the patterns of mental illness are represented� Thus we not only badly want to see the other, but also the object of our curiosity needs to be markedly different from us� Sander Gilman holds that “We want—no, we need—the ‘mad’ to be different, so we create out of the stuff of their reality the myths that make them different” (Disease and Representation 13)� I must mention the thriving anti-stigmatization discourse that received vital impulses from Otto F. Wahl’s influential study Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness (1995)� 5 This discourse is especially concerned with the psychiatric accuracy of the representation of certain mental illnesses in the media� Leaving questions of authenticity aside, I am more concerned with the expressive and subversive power of narratives of madness. Images of mental distress can function as expressions of social conditions, be those social alienation and political disempowerment or joyful denial and selfauthorization, and they have the force to interrogate what Erich Fromm has called the “pathology of normalcy�” 6 Adding a category: the mad as normal In this vein I propose that some of the contemporary movies screening madness have added a fourth category to the ones already mentioned: the category of the mad as normal, with the autistic personality, particularly those persons diagnosed with high-functioning forms of autism such as Asperger’s Syndrome, as the embodiment of this normalcy� More precisely, in these new films, the autist seems to become the epitome of individualization in contemporary society� These representations, however, overrun concepts that would understand, as, for instance, Erich Fromm did, the madness of modern society as humanity’s fall from biophilia, that is, from a sense of relatedness, rootedness and orientation� 5 Cf� also Harper, Cross, Sakalys and Sarrett� 6 Cf� Harper 6� The Aesthetics of Madness 123 Following Ulrich Beck’s individualization thesis, I argue that the autistic personality comes to constitute the paradigmatic “normal” individual in times of dramatic change, that is, in the transition from industrial society to the second society of informational modernity� In this “epochal shift” from one social condition to the next, Beck explains, there is a necessary interim period of anomie, or anomic individualism, of unsettling normlessness and the breakdown of social values� To quote Beck: “a fundamental change is occurring in the nature of the social and political—an erosion of anthropological certitudes” (xx). The emergent modernity is characterized by processes of globalization and cosmopolitanism and by a crisis of the traditional institutions such as state, class and family� The resulting indeterminateness and uncertainty create chaos that claims to be normal, leaving the contemporary individual displaced and, as Beck would have it, ‘fundamentally incomplete,’ driven at the same time by the persistent necessity to make fast choices and decisions and to find rules instead of simply following or applying them� The pressure to adjust to the normal chaos is complemented by high technological competence� In the practice of social relations, the individual of globalized modernity is forced to renegotiate the conditions of social co-operation in each and any new interpersonal encounter as none is prescribed per se in the ‘freedom culture�’ Some of the new movies depicting autism, such as Temple Grandin (2010), Adam (2009), Mozart and the Whale (2005), The Accountant (2016), Please Stand By (2017), or the TV series Atypical (2017-), currently shown on Netflix, interrogate just this contemporary conditio humana, and they do this by spreading out the disease pattern of autism� They depict globalized modern individuals caught in the endless constraint to look for and install rules, as a person with autism cannot fall back on a canon of preestablished standards: thus their pressing need to set up routines in order to structure daily life and to curtail reality’s normal chaos� As autism is a disorder that impairs sensory input and how it is processed, one of the primary symptoms of autism is the extreme disturbance of communicative functions. Consequently, autists can decode social interactions only with great difficulty and have problems comprehending another human being’s emotional situation� They lack, in turn, the possibilities to verbally communicate their own ways of perceiving reality, and, as such, these films try to visualize a reality that is constructed under alternative parameters, one of them being the literality of experience. In order to restrict the unfathomable complexity of impressions, the condition does not allow for the ambiguities of irony, satire or word play� An autistic reality is thus a literal reality, ordered according to the laws of scientific regularities, not playful creative improvisation. Hence a constant need ensues to renegotiate the common ground of communication in each new interpersonal encounter between individuals� Thus, these movies reflect the present social and cultural condition that all individuals have to confront during the epochal shift that, according to Beck, is currently taking place� The need to adjust to eroding rules, regulations and certainties is a universal challenge haunting both individual experience 124 s usanne r ohr and interpersonal encounter� In prominently and painstakingly staging the autistic person’s difficulties in coping with the overwhelming mass of sensory perceptions, the movies, to my understanding, bear an epistemological dimension in that they draw the viewers’ attention to their own predicament— the point here being not to showcase an autistic or non-autistic person’s particular cognitive capacity or lack thereof� This view is different from contemporary perspectives on autism in the field of disability studies, such as Melanie Yergeau’s research on autistic authorship and its special power and ability� To Yergeau, autistic authorship has the capacity to reconceptualize rhetorical traditions� She writes: “I believe in the potentialities of autistic stories and gestures, of neuro-queering what we’ve come to understand as language and being� I believe that autistic rhetorics complicate what we traditionally hold dear across a plurality of fields” (5). My own perspective connects, rather, to current discussions in literary and cultural theory that show a revived interest in analyzing interconnections between aesthetic form and social action, such as Caroline Levine’s plea for a new formalism in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), and in affect theory such as Sianne Ngai’s recent publication Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)� Ngai here develops a theory of aesthetic categories that classic aesthetic philosophy has traditionally neglected in its focus on exploring the sublime and beautiful. Ngai discusses why the categories she examines—the cute, the zany and the interesting—formerly considered trivial or marginal have become central to late capitalist culture� She is particularly interested in their potential to elicit equivocal affects— calling something “cute,” for instance, leaves it ambiguous whether one regards it positively or negatively� In reaction to Ngai’s analysis, I would hold that the present interest in ambiguous reactions well connects to the current fascination with the autistic personality’s puzzling obscurity in intersubjective processes� As already indicated, I argue that the attraction that the autistic personality’s struggles in identifying and applying rules for organizing interactions with the outside world currently holds for a wider audience can also be explained on an even deeper epistemological level� In his pragmatist semiotic theory, the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce explains how every act of understanding, an act thereby of creating reality, is at its core a process of creative guessing. Peirce calls these guesses “abductions,” next to induction and deduction a particular form of inference that seeks to produce explanatory hypotheses about what might be the case in every given situation� Abductive inferences, he holds, are not only indispensable for identifying—or creatively inventing—the rules that would make sense of one’s own perceptions; what is more, they produce the hypotheses that are then inductively and deductively examined until a satisfactory explanation of a given situation is momentarily formed. This procedure of producing and testing hypotheses evolves infinitely on an unconscious level and constitutes the cognitive basis of individual existence. According to Peirce, it is the infrastructure of the universal process of making sense by which individuals locate themselves within a The Aesthetics of Madness 125 cultural context: As the rules are not found or invented ex novo, they are a mixture of subjective and culturally preformed elements. Yet the whole process is as inescapable as it is precarious for one can never be entirely sure that one’s guesses are right: 7 there is always a residue of insecurity that cannot be overcome and causes the ontological situation of fundamental alienation characterizing an individual’s existence. 8 Thus, on these grounds I would argue that the current preoccupation with the autistic personality’s processes of making sense of it all that we see prominently reflected in recent film is not only geared to introducing a fourth category of normalizing deviant behavior but on a deeper level to negotiating fundamental alienation as conditio humana� The movies attempt to represent the autistic personality and its ways of constructing reality on both the thematic and the aesthetic levels� In their expressive power, I hold, movies surpass any other artworks that deal with the topic� I would argue that this is, to a large degree, because movies rest on close-ups, particularly on close-ups of the human face, and viewers feel particularly drawn to those� As Colin McGinn writes: The close-up affords a uniquely powerful window onto the mind of the character, more powerful than any encountered in the world of ordinary perception� […] The face on the screen becomes a means of psychological revelation to which the viewer’s eye is attuned. The close-up exploits what psychologists call ‘mind reading’: the minds of the characters become overwhelmingly present to us—more so than in real life. Part of our visual relationship to the screen is a kind of magnified reading of minds—soul seeing, as it were� […] Viewing the screen is a dynamic interplay between two minds, the actor’s and the audience’s; and the way we see and interpret faces is a central part of this� (52) This general (somewhat voyeuristic) fascination with close-ups of the human face is amplified in the context of films depicting autism. Not only are we drawn to deciphering the actors’ states of mind and realize that our “mind reading” of the autistic personalities they embody has to overcome severe obstacles, we are made aware at the same time that mind reading is precisely that which people with autism cannot perform or perform only with great difficulty. 7 In producing more or less extravagant explanatory hypotheses, it is thus a fine line that separates psychosis from creativity or madness from sanity, and a highly movable line it is� C�W� Spinks found the following image to account for this situation� He writes: “It may bother puristic minds that validity and invalidity, psychosis and creativity, truth and arbitrariness come from the same well, but then they will have trouble with the polarities of things” (204)� 8 This is a very brief summary of a highly complex process. I have published extensively on Peirce’s philosophy, cf� for instance Rohr, “Pragmaticism” and Rohr, “‘Amazing Mazes’”� 126 s usanne r ohr I would like to consider two examples. The first is from Temple Grandin (2010), a biopic that describes the youth of Temple Grandin, a highly functioning person with autism who received her doctorate in animal science and is a professor at Colorado State University� Grandin is both an eminently influential humane livestock facility designer and an important and much sought-after spokesperson for patients suffering from autism. In one scene, the film tries to visualize both Temple Grandin’s way of scientifically ordering reality and the literality of her experience. The protagonist, when visiting her aunt and uncle on their farm, surprises them by her ability to tell objects apart that seem identical to most people, in this case teaspoons� In a scene where the protagonist stands in the kitchen doing the dishes together with her aunt who tells her she and her husband both have trouble discriminating the different kinds, Temple Grandin holds up the spoons in question. The film tries to show her way of thinking visually by projecting a diagram onto the spoons, making the slight differences in size and form apparent (07: 28)� When her aunt suggests they all go to bed because they get up early on the farm, Temple Grandin does not understand the metaphorical quality of the expression “to get up with the chickens” and the movie in the next shot shows how she imagines her aunt and uncle in their pajamas up on the rooftop, crowing (07: 38)� One of the acting strategies that Claire Danes, who is playing Grandin, pursues to express an autistic personality is an unchanging facial expression of wide-eyed discomposure which in its consistency becomes quite unnerving after a while� The second example is taken from Max Mayer’s Adam (2009), in my reading a particularly significant example of the new movies featuring an autistic protagonist, although markedly not a mainstream blockbuster movie� It seems to me, however, that sometimes art house productions possess a particular power to express cultural conditions as they are not primarily geared to garner large amounts of money and don’t necessarily have to subscribe to dominant discourses� Adam depicts a decisive phase in the life of a young man who is left an orphan after his father’s death� Adam is suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome and is, like Temple Grandin, a high functioning autist� He is a genius in physical astronomy, yet lacking in many social skills, as autists typically are� Adam begins an intimate relationship with a young woman, his neighbor, who teaches him certain rules of etiquette and ways to interpret other people’s emotional states� When she realizes that her partner has come to depend on her entirely, she ends the relationship, leaving a more mature Adam who is now able to start a life of his own� In the opening scenes, the main character is shown attending his father’s funeral� Very few people are present at the event, no interpersonal exchange takes place, and no emotions are displayed on the part of the son� A close up of the protagonist’s face shows his somewhat bewildered expression, difficult for the viewer to interpret. What state of mind is expressed here? (01: 44). Arriving home again, Adam reacts by reverting to his own rules and rituals and by adjusting them precisely to his new situation as he crosses out the category “Dad’s chores” from the board of household duties� Otherwise, the routines structuring The Aesthetics of Madness 127 Adam’s reality remain intact, as we see when, still in his black suit that he wore at the funeral, he starts sweeping the floor because that is on that day’s list for him� The somber colors, minimalist background music and the setting of the tidy apartment all underline Adam’s need for monotony and reliability, as does the scene where the camera, in a non-traditional eyeline match, follows his perspective as he checks on the uniform and meticulously ordered contents of his freezer and kitchen cabinet� Seemingly undisturbed in his routines, Adam calmly takes his meal in front of his computer whose screen displays a complex mathematical diagram, hinting at the fact that Adam is a scientific genius (01: 08-03: 05). The strategies we see in both films to visualize the autistic experience and construction of reality have by now developed into a standard aesthetic repertoire of their own. All of the movies I named above try to express a somewhat scientific or rule-regulated ordering of the world governed by unfailing repetition� In this monotonous universe, every object has to compulsively be arranged in a specific manner, according to certain parameters such as color or form, and every activity is obsessively performed according to fixed rules. The execution of these routines serve the creation of a reliable, controllable environment that the movies try to realize through calm camera moves, slow motion sequences, dimmed light and soothing music, as illustrated by the opening sequence of Adam� Every breach of procedure is shown as a painful intrusion whose force is affecting both the protagonist and the viewer, through sudden noise, vertigo shots, hand-held camera simulation or blurred colors, all indicating a sensory overload� To further illustrate these observations, I would like to mention two examples from recent productions, The Accountant (2016) and the series Atypical, currently running on Netflix. In The Accountant, we see the protagonist as he pursues his daily regimen of compulsive arrangement when preparing and eating his dinner (00: 38)� In Atypical, by contrast, the mental breakdown of the autistic teenage protagonist, brought about by his therapist’s rejection of his declaration of love for her, is visualized through uncomfortable visual and auditory techniques (“The Silencing Properties of Snow” 01: 23)� In all the movies just mentioned, mental illness, or autism, is played out as highly functioning� What is more, a comparison with Barry Levinson’s paradigmatic Rain Man (1988) reveals a fundamental redefinition of the autistic personality� The autistic Raymond in Rain Man functions as counterpart to his selfish yuppie brother, who typifies the excesses of the greedy generation à la Gordon Gekko� Stephen Harper convincingly argues that “the ‘madness’ that such dramatic portrayals announce is not only that of the individual characters, but also that of the capitalist system which they embody; this satirical use of madness parallels the finding of psychologists that some ‘personality disorders’ are more prevalent among managers than criminals” (6)� If Rain Man is a critique of 1980s capitalism gone wild, where the motif of autism is staged as its innocent opposite, in Adam the autistic personality now gets center stage and has come to embody the new individual in times of disorganized capitalism� Moreover, Adam and Temple Grandin are 128 s usanne r ohr highly functioning in their social contexts, and they are explicitly described as savants, i�e� as human beings with brilliant yet restricted talents that are in contrast to their developmental disabilities, as they both are geniuses in mathematics and technology� Interestingly, Ronald Bass, who wrote the screenplay for Rain Man, shows this very change in how autistic personalities are conceptualized in one of his later scripts, the romantic-drama Mozart and the Whale (2005). This movie, my next example, is about the love story of a young man and woman, Donald and Isabelle, who are both diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. As in the other recent films with autistic leads, the two main characters are not contrasted to concepts of normalcy but shown in their very own reality� What is more, Donald, described much like Rain Man’s Raymond as a savant with the ability to perform difficult mathematical calculations in his head, is the founder of a self-help group for adults with autism who suffer more severely from the condition than he does� Thus, the dimension of community is added to the discourse on high functioning autism, as both Donald and Isabelle help the members of the group, and in the end, when both are finally married, they all gather around a large table as a single family to celebrate Thanksgiving� Asperger’s Syndrome, so the movie tells us, does not keep the main characters from falling in love or creating relationships, they are the most socially competent in their group and able to help others who fare worse� In the twenty or so years that separate Rain Man from Mozart and the Whale, we thus witness a complete reversal in the way autistic personalities are staged� In this movie, they certainly emblematize a kind of new normal� Hellker and Yergeau’s remarks support my diagnosis of the growing attention autism is receiving in the current cultural situation� Concerning the first World Autism Awareness Day they write: “CNN marked the occasion by launching one of its ‘worldwide investigations’ devoting the entire day’s programming to discussions of autism. Three recent documentary films, Autism Every Day, Autism: The Musical, and Her Name Is Sabine, all attempt to broaden the public’s understanding of the condition” (485)� Aesthetic reorientations In closing, I would like to return to a discussion of the formal design of the films mentioned. As my brief presentation of the movies has already indicated, contemporary films dealing with mental illness, particularly autism, have turned their backs on the postmodernist interest in narrative extremes such as Memento (2001), a movie concerned with amnesia and characterized by furious cutting and editing techniques, or extraordinary final plot twists made plausible by the protagonist’s associative identity disorder, such as in Fight Club (1999). As exceptions always prove the rule, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) follows this very pattern, and so does, to a certain extent at least, Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). By contrast, the new films featuring images of autism follow the rules of narrative coherence and narrative The Aesthetics of Madness 129 closure; their overall aesthetic is calm and sedate, trying to capture the perspective of the autistic protagonists and to visualize their processes of constructing reality. The formal characteristics of the films seem to be in direct dialogue with the characters’ attempts to make sense of it all, to methodically structure the chaos of reality and establish a system of routines, and this, in turn, refers us back to the theoretical framework of Beck’s individualization thesis� Interestingly enough, the same aesthetic reorientation seems to be at work as well in movies that would traditionally and in conformity to their genre be presented very differently. For instance, a film like Michael Lender’s brilliant psychological thriller Peacock (2010) stands in very close intertextual dialogue with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and features a Norman Bates-like protagonist with dissociative identity disorder. This film, its extreme proximity to Psycho notwithstanding, completely relinquishes any attempts to shock its audience through scenes such as Hitchcock’s famous bathtub killing� Instead, it follows the same sedate narrative pace as Adam� Finally, considering the equally calm narrative strategies of new novels such as John Wray’s Low Boy (2009), where the protagonist is a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds, it might be well worthwhile to also discuss the recent realist turn in fiction along these lines. The aesthetic strategies of both the films and the novels in question might well have a peculiarly mimetic core in that they seem to reflect the meaning-making processes of their mad protagonists� 9 Watching the movies and reading the books, a process of subtle “narrative knowing” might evolve, a concept that psychologist Donald E. Polkinghorne explored widely in the context of his research on narrative approaches to knowledge in therapeutic practice� 10 Polkinghorne explains how, by decoding the narrative structures of a client’s tale of past events, the listener is able to understand the particular meaning this person ascribes to the presented episodic units (11)� When interacting with the new works of art we might experience, then, in the evolving process of “narrative knowing,” a certain uneasiness about the proximity of the patterns of high functioning autism and the structures of our contemporary cultural condition� 9 Some research has been done on the question of whether works of art, particularly literature and film, can be used to teach social workers or the general public about the nature of madness� This, however, is not my line of argument as it assumes a different understanding of a mimetic relation and starts from the assumption that there might be a “right” or “authentic” way of representation� Works to be considered here are, for example, Oyebode, “Literature and Psychiatry,” Crawford and Baker, “Literature and Madness,” Bhugra, “Teaching Psychiatry,” and McGrath, “Problem of Drawing from Psychiatry”� 10 Similarly Baldwin, “Narrative, Ethics and People With Severe Mental Illness,” Oyebode “Fictional Narrative,” and Roberts, “Narrative and Severe Mental Illness,” all reflecting the “narrative turn,” a paradigm change that took place in certain psychiatric and psychological circles in the 1980s that were open to postmodern views on identity and reality construction� 130 s usanne r ohr Works Cited A Beautiful Mind� Dir� Ron Howard� Universal Pictures, 2001� Film� Adam. 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Blue Jasmine� Dir� Woody Allen� Sony Pictures Classics, 2013� Film� Casey, B�, and A� Long� “Meanings of Madness: A Literature Review�” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 10�1 (2003): 89-99� Cooper, David� The Language of Madness� Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980� Crawford, Paul, and Charley Baker� “Literature and Madness: Fiction for Students and Professionals�” The Journal of Medical Humanities 30�4 (2009): 237-51� Cross, Simon� “Visualizing Madness: Mental Illness and Public Representation�” Television and New Media 5 (2004): 197-216� Erskine, Kathryn� Mockingbird� New York: Philomel, 2010� Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox, 1999. Film. Franzen, Jonathan� The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Fromm, Erich� The Sane Society� New York: Henry Holt, 1955� Genova, Lisa� Love Anthony� New York: Gallery Books, 2012� Gilman, Sander� Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS� Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988� ---� Seeing the Insane� 1982� Introduction by Eric T� Carlson with a new afterword by the author� Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996� Harper, Stephen. “Media, Madness and Misrepresentation: Critical Reflections on Anti-Stigma Discourse�” European Journal of Communication 20�4 (2005): 460-83� ---� Madness, Power and the Media: Class, Gender and Race in Popular Representations of Mental Distress� Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009� Hellker, Paul, and Melanie Yergeau� “Autism and Rhetoric�” College English 73�5 (2011): 485-497� Homeland. Prod. Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Showtime, 2011-present. Television. Inception� Dir� Christopher Nolan� Warner Bros� Pictures, 2010� Film� Levine, Caroline� Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network� Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015� McGinn, Colin� The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact� New York: Random- Vintage, 2007� McGrath, Patrick� “Problem of Drawing from Psychiatry for a Fiction Writer�” Psychiatric Bulletin 26 (2002): 140-43� Memento� Dir� Christopher Nolan� Newmarket Films, 2000� Film� Monk� Prod� Andy Breckman� USA Network, 2002-2009� Television� The Aesthetics of Madness 131 Mozart and the Whale� Dir� Petter Næss� Millennium Films, 2005� Film� Next to Normal. Music by Tom Kitt� Book and Lyrics by Brian Yorkey� New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2010� Ngai, Sianne� Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012� Oyebode, Femi� “Literature and Psychiatry�” Psychiatric Bulletin 26 (2002): 121-22� ---� “Fictional Narrative and Psychiatry�” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10 (2004): 140-45. Parenthood� Prod� Ron Howard� NBC, 2010-2015� Television� Peacock� Dir� Michael Lander� Mandate Pictures, 2010� Film� P! nk� F**kin’ Perfect� Dir� Dave Meyers� LaFace, 2011� Music video� Please Stand By� Dir� Ben Lewin� Magnolia Pictures, 2017� Film� Polkinghorne, Donald E� Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences� Albany: U of New York P, 1988� Porter, Roy, ed� The Faber Book of Madness� London: Faber and Faber, 1991� Powers, Richard� The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Psycho� Dir� Alfred Hitchcock� Universal Pictures, 1960� Film� Rain Man� Dir� Barry Levinson� United Artists, 1988� Film� Roberts, Glenn A� “Narrative and Severe Mental Illness: What Place Do Stories Have in an Evidence-Based World? ” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 6 (2000): 432-41� Rohr, Susanne� “Madness as a Liminal State in the American Short Story: Edgar Allan Poe’s Ratiocination and Charles Sanders Peirce’s Logic of Abduction�” Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing. Ed� Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann� New York: Routledge, 2015� 175-185� ---� “‘Amazing Mazes’: The Locus of the Subject in Charles S� Peirce’s Pragmatist Epistemology�” Amerikastudien / American Studies 58�2 (2013): 199-212� ---� “‘The Tyranny of the Probable’—Crackpot Realism and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections�” Amerikastudien / American Studies 49�1 (2004): 91-105� ---� “Pragmaticism—a New Approach to Literary and Cultural Analysis�” REAL 19 (2003): 293-306� Sakalys, Jurate A� “The Political Role of Illness Narratives�” Journal of Advanced Nursing 31�6 (2000): 1469-75� Sarrett, Jennifer C� “Trapped Children: Popular Images of Children with Autism in the 1960s and 2000s�” Journal of Medical Humanities 32�2 (2011): 141-153� Shutter Island� Dir� Martin Scorsese� Paramount Pictures, 2010� Film� Shteyngart, Gary� Lake Success� New York: Radom House, 2018� Spinks, C�W� “Peirce’s Demon Abduction: Or How to Charm the Truth out of a Quark�” American Journal of Semiotics 2�1-2 (1983): 195-208� Split� Dir� M� Night Shyamalan� Universal Pictures, 2016� Film� Temple Grandin� Dir� Mick Jackson� HBO Films, 2010� Film� The Accountant� Dir� Gavin O’Connor� Warner Bros� Pictures, 2016� Film� The Good Doctor� Prod� David Shore� ABC, 2017-present� Television� The Ringer. Dir. Barry W. Blaustein. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2005. Film. The Scribbler� Dir� John Suits� XLRator Media, 2014� Film� The Soloist� Dir� Joe Wright� DreamWorks Pictures, 2009� Film� The United States of Autism� Dir� Richard Everts� The Tommy Foundation, 2013� Film� The Vow� Dir� Michael Sucsy� Screen Gems, 2012� Film� 132 s usanne r ohr They Look Like People� Dir� Perry Blackshear� Film1 Sundance Channel, 2015� Film� Touch. Prod. Tim Kring. Fox, 2012-2013. Television. Wahl, Otto F� Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness� New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006� Wray, John� Lowboy� New York: Picador, 2009� Yergeau, Melanie� Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness� Durham: Duke UP, 2018� B ernd h erzogenrath Towards a Practical Aesthetics 1 When in 1750 Alexander Baumgarten published the first part of his Aesthetica, he basically invented a new philosophical discipline, or, rather, he re|invented philosophy by defining a new way of how to perceive its objects of inquiry: logical analysis could not cope with the complexity of individual objects. Thus, logic had to be complemented by a non-abstractive way of analysis Baumgarten dubbed aesthetics, a theory of sensate thinking� Sensible or aesthetic cognition, ‘clear-obscure’ as it is, is of the utmost importance for ‘making sense’ of the world—the ‘logic of sense’ has to be aligned with the ‘logic of sensation�’ It might be of interest here that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (which he considers both a science and an art: a ‘science of the lower cognitive faculties’ and an ‘art of beautiful thinking,’ see §1) opens with a chapter on ‘heuristics’— which does not denote a clear-cut method (the term method in fact denotes a μετά όδός, meta-hodos, a way afterwards, a retroactive abstraction, a recipe), but is related to a (non-finite) inventiveness, an improvisation—and here Baumgarten relates to the αυτοσχεδιασ-ματα (improvisations) of the child that imitates beauty when it sees it, not merely apprehends it (like the adult), (see § 57)� Thus, what is at stake is not so much the issue of method, but rather the question of art’s specific potential for expressing sensible cognition, with aesthetics as an analogon rationis, both analogous to and different from rational logics� Aesthetics thus counts as a defense of the Sensual as the Non-Representational, and this is not only evident in the content of thinking, but also in new forms of presentation, in which figures of thought reveal themselves� The second part of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, though never published, was to be called Aesthetica practica—‘practical aesthetics�’ And although it is safe to say that Baumgarten here wanted to show practical examples of his theory, I would rather pick up the thread of heuristics and improvisation, and would like to speculate on aesthetics as a science|art that mimics and imitates beauty and art in its performance� That is a ‘practical aesthetics’ not as an ‘aesthetic practice,’ but an approach that takes aesthetic’s double signification as both science and art seriously and performs it from the perspective of the philosopher, not the artist� It takes the practice of the artwork not as its object of analysis, but as its own modus operandi: not thinking about art according to external (mostly rational, propositional) categories that more often than not follow the logic of the ‘written word,’ but thinking with art, thinking with images, thinking with sound, etc� 1 A longer version of this essay is appearing as the introduction to Practical Aesthetics, ed� Bernd Herzogenrath (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019)� 134 B ernd h erzogenrath According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the philosophers who, I argue, was instrumental in the notion of thinking with art 2 : [t]he theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the cinema, which are no less practical, effective or existent than cinema itself. […] Cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema� And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema� … … Cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice� (Cinema 2; Deleuze 280) For Deleuze, art cannot be contained by making it conform to pre-existent categories and concepts, explanations and thus ‘judgments’ that are brought to it from the outside� For Deleuze, the most important question is if—and in how far—art addresses life, how its creativity liberates vitality and processuality [of affects, of thought], or if it is rather a blockage to these forces, containing the free-play of vitality and making it ‘play by the rules’ of any given institution, language system, or ‘organization�’ Art thus is evaluated by the way it either enhances or reduces our powers to act, and it does so by affecting us in a particular manner� Art—as well as life—is a process of production and creation, and by that very characteristic involved in the bringingforth of ‘newness,’ which by definition is what evades ‘normative criteria: ’ the indeterminable processes of both life and art can only be evaluated by and on their own terms, by features that are immanent to these processes themselves, but not by explanatory logics external to them. What is at stake here is not representation, but presentation—practical Aesthetics is not the theorization of the sensual, but the inquiring and accompanying production of sensuality—or sensual thinking� Philosophy here does not morph into art, but proceeds in a playful proximity to art. As Deleuze specifies in one of his seminars, “between a philosophical concept, a painted line and a musical sonorous bloc, resonances emerge, very, very strange correspondences that one shouldn’t even theorize, I think, and which I would prefer to call ‘affective’ … these are privileged moments” (“Deleuze 22”)� 3 These moments privilege an affect where thought and sensation merge into a very specific way of “doing thinking” beyond representation and categorization—here, ‘traditional [rational] thinking’ faces its own shortcomings� This is why, for Deleuze [and Guattari], “[p]hilosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience” (Deleuze and Guattari 218), in order to focus on the ways in which art, philosophy, and science ask the same kinds of questions and relate to each other’s “findings,” as 2 Gesa Ziemer, who in Verletzbare Orte proposes a similar project, singles out Deleuze and Blumenberg as two ‘thinkers with art�’ She relates her idea of ‘practical aesthetics’ to the architect Gottfried Semper, while I think that already Baumgarten points into a similar direction� 3 My translation of : “Alors je dirais que le concept philosophique n’est pas seulement source d’opinion quelconque, il est source de transmission très particulière, ou entre un concept philosophique, une ligne picturale, un bloc sonore musical, s’établissent des correspondances, des correspondances très très curieuses, que à mon avis il ne faut même pas théoriser, que je préférerais appeler l’affectif en général … � Là c’est des moments privilégiés�” Towards a Practical Aesthetics 135 it were� Whereas science involves the creation of functions, of a propositional mapping of the world, art involves the creation of blocs of sensation [or affects and percepts], and philosophy involves the invention of concepts� Yet, since “sciences, arts, and philosophies are equally creative” (5), it might be fruitful, as Deleuze proposes, “to pose the question of echoes and resonances between them” (Negotiations; Deleuze 123)� Film Philosophy During the last ten to fifteen years, the convergence of film studies and philosophy has become the recent ‘big thing,’ with a community growing fast, and on a global scale� However, under the heading of Film Philosophy, different approaches have found an umbrella term—mainly an American tradition, represented by scholars such as Noel Carroll, Thomas Wartenberg, a�o�, and a German tradition, with researchers such as Martin Seel, Gertrud Koch� Both these approaches relate film to philosophical questions (ethics, justice, aesthetics, anthropology, etc�), but leave the disciplinary boundaries intact— film may illustrate philosophical problems, but these problems ‘belong’ to the field of [academic] philosophy proper. However, there is an alternative tradition in which philosophy takes film as a serious field of philosophical engagement: beginning with Henri Bergson this contestation culminated in recent decades in the approaches of the film philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, who argued for an appreciation of film as philosophy� How can this relationship between film and philosophy be thought anew? Can philosophy renew our concepts of film as art and/ or as a medium? And vice versa: can film change our understanding of philosophy as a scholarly practice and endeavor? Should both concepts of ‘film’ and ‘philosophy’ be reconsidered once we dare their encounter? Regarding the recent ubiquity of neuroscience in the humanities, a new perspective opens, which puts a focus on the process of thinking itself: what is thought and where does it occur? Examining the philosophical status of film, this project thus situates it within a greater context: is there something like cinematic thought? And if cinema can be a medium of thought, how does it relate to philosophical enquiries or to scientific analyses of this process? Can those disciplines benefit from each other? This essay argues that the two questions “what is film? ” (as a slight rephrasing of Bazin’s question What is Cinema? ) and “what is philosophy? ” (as Deleuze and Guattari have asked) are intimately intertwined—also in a very pragmatic and institutional way� When Roger Odin, one of the pioneers of ‘institutionalized’ Film Studies in France, was called to office in the early 1980s, he was faced with the fact that the field of Film Studies as a discipline did not (yet) exist. But, far from despairing, Odin rather felt confirmed in his belief that film and cinema are not suitable objects for an academic discipline� By that he did not mean to discredit cinema as an object worthy of academic analysis—on the contrary, Odin’s firm belief was that cinema 136 B ernd h erzogenrath opens up a whole field of research, with a whole range of disciplines contributing. While Odin was taking Gilbert Cohen-Séat’s ‘Institut de filmologie’ as a model, which was an interdisciplinary institute par excellence, he found that his own institute was still miles away from that ideal� But nevertheless, the amount of film scholars worldwide that have a degree in another subject (Odin himself is a linguist by training)—be it one of the National Philologies, Art History, Musicology, or Philosophy—is overwhelming� So, also institution-wise, an interdisciplinary approach to film (including philosophical expertise) is not only desired, but fact� 4 In the 1980s, cognitive film studies discovered the brain for the analysis of film. Against the “Grand Theories” of psychoanalytic and [post]structuralist theory they employed the findings of cognitive psychology for explaining the processes in the spectator’s mind to ‘make meaning,’ seeing the understanding of film as a rational and cognitive endeavor that applies scientific “theories of perception, information processing, hypothesis-building, and interpretation” (Cognitivism; Currie 106)� At that time, the dominant strand in neuroscience was the field of ‘computation’: the brain here was essentially seen as an input|output machine of representation� Approximately at the same time, Gilles Deleuze, in the ‘new image of thought’ he developed (among others) in his two Cinema books, also utilizes the concept of the brain, with implicit and explicit references to on the one hand Henri Bergson, and on the other hand to a more constructivist brand of neurosciences in the wake of Maturana, Varela and Changeux, seeing both film and brain as agencies of the ‘creation of worlds’—“the Brain is the Screen” (see Flaxman). Certainly, the brain that cognitive film studies, neuroscience, and Deleuze talk about is not the same ‘object|concept’ in these discourses� Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience into the so called 4EAcognitivism that considers the brain as embodied, enacted, extended, embedded and affective might however create new insights into the encounters of brains and screens� Here, in contrast to classical computation, and even in contrast to ‘connectionism,’ which is more advanced than computation in so far that it involves a far more complex [and a-centered] dynamics, thinking finally does not take place inside our skull (only) anymore, but ‘out of our heads’ [to quote the title of Alva Noë’s book]� Yet one of the main difficulties that impede a smooth and simple marriage of film studies, [Deleuzian] philosophy, and the neurosciences is the fact that the brain in question is in fact many brains� Not only do the concepts of the brain between these various disciplines differ, but Deleuze himself uses the brain in different guises� First, on a very general level, he traces the motif or metaphor of the brain in movies by Alain Resnais and Stanley Kubrick� Far more important in the context of our interest however are Deleuze’s references to the philosophy of Henri Bergson and his ‘new conception’ of the brain—Bergson “introduced a profound element of transformation: the brain was now only an interval [écart], a void, nothing but a void, between 4 I am very grateful to Vinzenz Hediger for this information� Towards a Practical Aesthetics 137 a stimulation and a response“ (Deleuze 211)� In a universe that consists, as Bergson has it, of images in motion that all react on one another, the subject (and the brain) functions as “centers of indetermination” (Matter and Memory; Bergson 36), in which the direct cause|effect or stimulus|response reaction is slowed down� This idea of the brain as a center of indetermination is supported by findings in neurosciences that focus on the brain as “an uncertain system” (Deleuze 211), as rhizomatic neural networks� Deleuze is here referring to Jean-Pierre Changeux’ Neuronal Man; The Biology of Mind, and Steven Rose’s The Conscious Brain (which also refers to Delisle Burns’ The Uncertain Nervous System): what it boils down to for Deleuze is that [w]e can consider the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass and ask what circuits, what kinds of circuit, the movement-image or time-image traces out, or invent, because the circuits aren’t there to begin with … the brain’s the hidden side of all circuits, and these can allow the most basic conditioned reflexes to prevail, as well as leaving room for more creative tracings, less “probable” links� The brain’s a spatio-temporal volume: it’s up to art to trace through it the new paths open to us today� You might see continuities and false continuities as cinematic synapses—you get different links, and different circuits, in Godard and Resnais, for example. The overall importance or significance of cinema seems to me to depend on this sort of problem� (Negotiations; Deleuze 60-1) One of the most decisive questions that emerges in the wake of thinking the interrelation between media—and here, more specifically, film—and thought is related to the respective status of “philosophy�” As we have seen, there seems to be a great divide between analytic and continental “schools of thought�” A possible answer is best summarized by the Cavell—inspired words of Stephen Mulhall: I do not look at these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action—film as philosophizing. (Mulhall 4) In this claim, films themselves are seen as capable of doing a unique kind of philosophical work (even though Mulhall’s characterization of films philosophizing ‘in just the ways that philosophers do’ might still be in need of some qualification). Thus, the question is, what kind of knowledge (affects and percepts themselves giving rise to concepts) does the medium film generate qua medium? Ultimately, the question ‘what is film philosophy’ might better be restated as ‘where is film philosophy’? Does it reside in the institutionalized version of [academic] philosophy (‘proper’), or might it also be said to be inherent to film itself? An important qualification has to be made here: the question of “what is philosophy” has to be addressed again at this point, because the different relations of film and philosophy owe a lot to the definition of the philosophical. If the rubric of film as philosophy claims that films or cinema can do philosophy, this does not mean the institutionalized version of academic 138 B ernd h erzogenrath philosophy, i�e�, the production of propositional knowledge, but rather what Deleuze and Guattari call the “creation of concepts” (What is Philosophy? ; Deleuze and Guattari 5). This entails a definition of philosophy that goes beyond its traditional territorialization, one that is extensional, forming assemblages rather than propositions, what—again—Deleuze has called ‘the new image of thought�’ 5 Following this approach, the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘thinking’ do not necessarily refer to rational propositions and|or a purely neural activity, though� Thinking is not just a representation of the world as ‘it is’—as Deleuze puts it, “[s]omething in the world forces us to think� This something is an object not of recognition, but a fundamental encounter” (Difference and Repetition; Deleuze 139).. While the idea of ‘thinking as (re-)cognition’ is based on the verification of ideologies, of pre-collected knowledge, customs and articles of faith, the notion of ‘thinking as an encounter’ shatters our epistemological and experiential habits, it produces a break in our ‘normal,’ habitual perspective of the world and enables the possibility to approach alternative points of view and means of thought and to question our common practices. Thus film-thought is philosophical since it offers its own genuine cinematic reflections about the world� According to Deleuze these are especially new approaches to concepts of images, time, space, and movement (concepts which are grounded in the peculiarity of the medium as a stream of ‘moving images’)� In an interview with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, Deleuze stated, “I’ve never been worried about going beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy� The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts” (Negotiations 136). This affirmative function of philosophy is also a call to transdisciplinarity, so that even when Deleuze was working on “painting and cinema: images, on the face of it … [he] was writing philosophy books” (ibid� 137)� In defense of Deleuze against Sokal|Bricmont’s attempt to control and regulate the limits of the disciplinary fields, Paul Harris points out that Deleuze’s work in contrast shows “how productive it is to work with and think through material from others and other fields … , working with ideas cooked up in geology and geography, zoology and ornithology, archeology and paleontology, and even mathematics and physics” (Harris 24-5)� The philosophical practice of ‘creating concepts,’ as a creation of ‘newness’ as well, necessitates, according to Deleuze, that philosophy enters into manifold relations with arts and sciences, since philosophy “creates and expounds its concepts only in relation to what it can grasp of scientific functions and artistic constructions� … Philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science or art” (Difference and Repetition xvi). It is these resonances and exchanges between philosophy, science, and art that make philosophy ‘creative,’ not reflective. These relations—from the perspective of philosophy— are vital for reasons internal to philosophy itself, that is, vital for the creation 5 With a nod to Arthur Danto, Robert Sinnerbrink has shown this tightrope act as an oscillation between the philosophical ‘disenfranchisement’ of film and its ‘re-enfranchising�’ See Sinnerbrink� Towards a Practical Aesthetics 139 of ‘concepts,’ and—from the perspective of film philosophy—in resonance with the percepts and affective logics and modalities of art in general, and film in particular. This approach attempts to bring film studies and philosophy into a productive dialogue without assigning the role of a dominant and all-encompassing referee to one of these disciplines� Rather, it is about relating the diverse entry points—the many colors of the spectrum—toward each other in a fertile manner in order to establish, ultimately, a media philosophy that puts the status, the role, and the function of the medium—here, film—into a new perspective: no longer are the representational techniques of the medium at the center of inquiry but rather its ability to “think” and to assume an active role in processes of thought, in finding alternative and differentiating point(s) of view� If we take this a step further, relating this approach to the whole range of media [production], but also take a step back, and see what this approach basically means, we begin to see the seeds of a new ‘media philosophy’— not talking about media by way of ‘philosophy proper,’ but by realizing the ‘philosophical qualities and impacts’ of the medium: it all starts from the assumption that our memory, perception, and thinking is not just a given, as a bodyand weightless, immaterial logics, reason or internal process that takes place behind the walls of our skull and is purely mental—there is always a ‘material basis: ’ as Nietzsche already claimed, “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (qtd� in Kittler, 200)� From here, we can derive the media-philosophical insight that media [help us] think [differently]� Media thus reveals themselves as the body [or, better: different bodies] of thought� It is important to note that these ‘bodies’ are not ‘retroactive’ to those thoughts that they ‘materialize,’ just like the telescope is not retroactive to the discovery of planets—media are coextensive with the thoughts they ‘allow.’ Media philosophy, as Lorenz Engell has put it, is an event, even a praxis—but of the media themselves� It takes place through and in the media in question—and this in turn opens up the question if this philosophy could only be described by translating it into the human ‘master-medium: ’ philosophical writingthinking … The Audiovisual Essay One way to deal with this problem of ‘media change’ is a form of aesthetic presentation that stays within the realm of the art form or medium it reflects on, thereby using the very modus operandi that defines that very art form/ medium— 6 6 This does not mean that a Practical Aesthetics rules out the option of writing with regard to any other medium—it would have to be a writing, though, that in its style thinks with rather than about� See also Herzogenrath (2019)� 140 B ernd h erzogenrath Question: does film analysis have to exist in the form of words alone, words in written or spoken language, as conventionally published in books and journals, or as verbally delivered in lecture halls, or on a DVD audio commentary? Might one not perform a thinking with film with the very tools of the cinema itself—with images and sound, that is? Hence the audiovisual essay (and I like the term audiovisual essay much better than other terms such as Videographic or Digital Criticism, because it both keeps the provisional and experimental character of the ‘form of the essay’ intact, as Adorno described it, and it also makes a point of the ‘relational character,’ or the montage, that is characteristic of the audiovisual essay as well)� Thus, even if there are academic audiovisual essays that present a combination of written commentary and filmand sound-clips, a more radical version of the audiovisual essay—‘truer’ to the idea of practical aesthetics, that is—consists in the form of a creative montage and juxtaposition of images, sequences of preexisting film works that ‘realizes’ a filmic idea, a film-thought, so to speak. In his 1919 dissertation on Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik [The Concept of Art-Criticism in German Romanticism], Walter Benjamin describes one of the key notions of the Romantics’ aesthetic as follows: Thus, criticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself� (151) The work of art—according to Benjamin—thus already contains its own criticism, a knowledge of its own which, if we follow Deleuze, is not (yet) conceptual or, rather: propositional� And today, there are quite some approaches to different arts that work on that brink between art and science, ‘sensible cognition’ and proposition, aesthetic knowledge and rational knowledge, while thinking with art (or the artistic material) rather than about it� New forms of aesthetic research and presentation, such as media philosophy, the audiovisual essay, the audio paper, artistic research, are no longer only a topic or an object of study, but a medium of mediation� Aesthetic modes of representation are increasingly being incorporated into critical academic practice, with the role of the aesthetic for “thought” coming to matter more directly than mere discussions of the aesthetic in whatever discipline hitherto could envision� This is no longer a question of what kind of critical methodologies we adopt to understand works of art, but of how we think with works of art—how they both shape our understanding and experience of the world, and also how they serve as ‘partners in crime’ to our thought� If a practical aesthetics almost performs a thinking with images, with sounds, etc�, such a non-writerly, non-propositional thinking pushes a strictly representational and logocentric reflection to its limits. And if what we have is a companion, then that relation is not one of hierarchy, subservience or distance, but is instead a relation predicated on an attraction that cannot be explained in terms of absolute identity� To have a partner or companion is to be with someone whose sensibility one shares, but in ways that are not identical, or else there would be nothing left to say or do� Towards a Practical Aesthetics 141 Practical aesthetics cannot be reduced to a common singular practice� It is a mobile and disparate set of practices, a dynamic approach� A practical aesthetics, thus understood, can be described as thinking with art, and with media, in order to find new ways to create worlds and thus to perceive and experience the world in different ways. Works Cited Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Ästhetik/ Aesthetica� Trans�, Ed� Dagmar Mirbach� Band 1, Lateinisch-deutsch. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007. Benjamin, Walter� “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism�” Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926� Ed� Marcus Bullock and Michael W� Jennings� Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1996� 116-200� Bennett, Jill� Practical Aesthetics. Events, Affect and Art after 9/ 11� Tauris, 2012� Bergson, Henri� Matter and Memory� Trans� N� M� Paul and W� S� Palmer� New York: Zone Books, 1991� Currie, Gregory� “Cognitivism�” A Companion to Film Theory� Ed� Toby Miller and Robert Stam� Malden: Blackwell 2004� Deleuze, Gilles� “Cinéma cours 22�” Cours Vincennes - St Denis: le plan, 2nd November 1983, Web� 22 March 2019� ---� Cinema 2. The Time-Image� London: Athlone Press, 1989� ---. Difference and Repetition� New York: Columbia UP, 1994� ---� Negotiations 1972-1990� New York: Columbia UP, 1995� ---, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia UP, 1994� Flaxman, Gregory. The Brain Is the Screen. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema� Ed� Flaxman, Gregory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Harris, Paul A� “Deleuze’s Cinematic Universe of Light: A Cosmic Plane of Luminance�” SubStance 39: 1 (2010): 115-124� Herzogenrath, Bernd� “Et in Academia Ego: Affect and Academic Writing�” How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices. Eds� Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 216-34. Kittler, Friedrich A� Gramophone, Film, Typewriter� Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999� Mulhall, Stephen� On Film� 2 nd ed� London: Routledge, 2008� Noë, A� Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness� New York: Hill and Wang, 2009� Sinnerbrink, Robert� “Disenfranchising Film? On the Analytic-Cognitivist Turn in Film Theory�” Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides� Eds� Jack Reynolds et� al� London and New York: Continuum, 2010� 173-89� Sinnerbrink, Robert� “Re-Enfranchising Film: Towards a Romatic Film-Philosophy�” New Takes in Film-Philosophy� Eds� Havi Carel and Greg Tuck� Blasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011� 25-47� Ziemer, Gesa� Verletzbare Orte. Entwurf einer praktischen Ästhetik. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2008� e ugenie B rinkema Glimmers and Drabness and Scales of Loss: On The Grand Budapest Hotel 1 I am beginning with an uncontroversial claim—to be shaded in, its qualities of appearance changed a bit later on� In his aestheticism and mannerism; inventive scenography; fetishizied color palettes; long tracking and symmetrical, planimetric tableau shots; and meticulous construction of mise-en-scene and soundscapes, Wes Anderson is one of the great cinematic stylists working today� But critical regard for the director is remarkably split: lauded or derided under the mantle of nearly every sensibility or structure of feeling deployed to describe the contemporary landscape—postmodern pastiche; irony; postirony; the new sincerity; the new [whimsy, quirky, cute, X] cinema; the New American smart film; or post-death-of-the-author auteurism—critical praise for Anderson’s films turns on his collector’s aesthetic, antiquated cinematic techniques, and stylistic excess, while critical loathing generally points to the very same attributes� As goes one summary of the condemnations: “Critics say that Anderson’s fastidiousness is his downfall, that the fussiness of his vision restricts his actors. They see his films as Fabergé eggs, beautiful but manufactured and empty” (Marshall 2014: 246)� What makes Anderson particularly vulnerable to critical distaste is his relationship to violence. His films are marked by a tension between beautiful if manufactured surfaces and disturbing cruelties and maltreated children; broken families and the exquisitely lonely; vicious mutilations, nonchalant injuries and indifferent deaths; depression and suicide; or, as in the case of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), the totality of 20th century European catastrophe and trauma given metonymic form in the film via death squads emblazoned with the initials ZZ—evoking what Badiou dubs in The Century “the site of apocalyptic events […] the crimes of Stalinist communism and the crimes of Nazism� […] This century is an accursed century� The principal parameters for thinking it are the extermination camps, the gas chambers, massacres, tortures and organized state crime” (Badiou 2)� The omnipresence of this evental potency of violence in Anderson’s films has led to intensely negative evaluations like that of Eileen Jones, who declares that Anderson “candycoats a world of casual nastiness in bright colors and hummable tunes, and death in his films makes no mark, it just functions as a design element, a dash of dark pigment that sets off the bright colors to better advantage” (2014)� As a result, even among those who would defend Anderson, his style’s relationship to suffering requires an overt accounting for, usually effected by converting form into a responsible engagement with those ethically 1 A slightly different version of this contribution is appearing in Practical Aesthetics, ed� Bernd Herzogenrath (Bloomsbury, 2019)� 144 e ugenie B rinkema disturbing aspects of his film’s narratives. Donna Kornhaber, for example, reconciles interpretive bellwethers by putting aesthetics to work as itself a matter of shared feeling: “There is along the axis of collection a kind of unity and reduplication between content and form within Anderson’s filmmaking, one that offers a means of understanding his visual style not from the stance of cold stylistic removal but as a manner of deep thematic engagement in the cinematic worlds he calls into being, one that seeks to offer sympathy for an act in solidarity with the characters who suffer there” (2017: 10)� Likewise, Kim Wilkins writes that “his film worlds are more than affectation or pure aestheticism: their artifice performs both narrative and thematic functions. These film worlds mobilize irony and artificiality to mediate sincere emotional and psychological concerns” (2018: 152)� Both defenses play out familiar topologies of critical commitment: instead of cold removal, Kornhaber promises “deep” engagement, while Wilkins insists on something “more” than affectation or pure aestheticism� In other words, even those who would praise Anderson’s formal inventiveness insist that aesthetic form has “real” (as in more-than-mere, as in deeper, higher, closer) concerns at play—or, in Wilkins’ insistence that his work is not “pure aestheticism,” an unstated avowal of an impure aestheticism that vouches for a purity of emotional sincerity (that latter word one that hides its etymological debt to notions of the clean, the sound, the uninjured, any one of which we might want to read and thereby hold accountable). Taking a broader view, we can say that Anderson’s films restage the fundamental and old fight at the heart of the question of formalism, or rather, how you feel about his films has much to do with how you feel about formalism: either agreeing with those who accuse it of abandoning the world, as in Fredric Jameson’s promissory offering of a “literary or cultural criticism which seeks to avoid imprisonment in the windless closure of the formalisms” (Jameson 42), or defending the self-showing formal language for its sincere showing of a philosophical seriousness taken as prior and exterior to the cinematic object—justifying aesthetic attention by presuming the legitimacy of notions such as sympathy or solidarity as the ground of ethics, holding form ransom until it proves its appropriate utility� In setting out my defense of formalism in The Forms of the Affects (2014), on the one hand I had in mind foundational assertions like the severing of aesthetics from subject in Maurice Denis’s 1890 symbolist manifesto “Definition of Neotraditionism”: “It is well to remember that a picture—before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” (Denis 94)� Insisting that close reading attend to line, color, space, scale, duration, montage, rhythm, mise-en-scene, and that only such a close reading for form would bypass the deadlocks and reveal the possibilities of the affective turn, I turned to the question of what a “radical formalism” might offer the theoretical humanities� My interest was not in a formalism that would instrumentalize readings for the sake of radical politics; rather, by radical I was referring to radix, the root, to return to the speculative ground of what formal thinking can claim of the as-yet-unthought dimensions of ethical and affective life, and to situate Glimmers and Drabness and Scales of Loss 145 reading for form as the rootedness of theoretical claims� Insisting that close reading attend to line, color, texture, space, scale, duration, mise-en-scene, I turned to the question of form’s relationship to theory: [G]iven that Bordwell [i.e. cognitivism] explicitly positions neo-formalism against what he terms ‘Grand Theory,’ my approach to affect recovers and reintroduces the insights and problematics of continental theory in dialogue with form instead of necessarily opposed to it� Not neo-formalism but radical formalism. This I mean quite literally: heeding its own etymological radix, radical formalism returns to roots, presses on what is essential, foundational, and necessary in formalism itself� A radical formalism in film and media studies would take the measure of theory for form and take the measure of form for affectivity; this vital formalism, in the sense of what is both affective and urgent, returns to the roots of formalist analysis, and extends their reach. […] Reading for form involves a slow, deep attention both to the usual suspects of close analysis that are so often ignored or reduced to paraphrase in recent work on affect—montage, camera movement, mise-en-scène, color, sound—and to more ephemeral problematics such as duration, rhythm, absences, elisions, ruptures, gaps, and points of contradiction (ideological, aesthetic, structural, and formal)� Reading for formal affectivity involves interpreting form’s waning and absence, and also attending to formlessness� (Brinkema 36-37) Although a renewed interest in form has been crucial to the recent ‘return to aesthetics’ that is the explicit occasion for this volume, what interests me is how to move past thinking about form to the question of thinking from form, testing and pushing to the limit the claims one might make from insisting on the priority of form, in the sense of both ordinality and interpretive privilege� If Anderson’s films are the perfect testing ground for complaints against formalism, my argument will be that both those who would dismiss his stylistics as empty form and those who would defend his formalism for its non-empty utility for a conversion to an external framework of ethical or political meaning make a common mistake of failing to treat his form radically enough, as rooting The Grand Budapest Hotel’s rigorous engagement with ethics and politics and history as problems, themselves, of form, specifically the way in which that film attests to a thinking of the scale of historical loss that is diagrammatic, impersonal, multiple, and marked by difference� Radical formalism, given due seriousness, disimplicates the sense that criticism must choose one of the two paradigmatic interpretations of Anderson: as empty aesthete or as thinker despite his aesthetic language� Instead, we might shorthand this as: it is nothing but the form of his works that is doing the thinking� In relation to the conceit of this collection, practical aesthetics requires beginning with the understanding that it is the realm of aesthetic form that is thinking with, speculating on, unfolding the as-yet unthought questions, problems, and aporias of historical trauma� This requires taking seriously what form attests to in its own right, in particular in its most apparent aspects: in autonomous problems of color and of light� A speculative relation to catastrophes of unimaginable scale does not require accounting for form, defending form, or moving past form; it requires putting more of our faith in form� For one thing that form can do is attest to a concept of suffering, shock, and loss that contains many nuances� 146 e ugenie B rinkema There are two privileged structures in The Grand Budapest Hotel: the general form of repetition with minor difference and the general form of nesting� The latter is complex and this is a gloss, but briefly: nesting accounts for the hypotactic narrative structure, which begins in the present at a cemetery, in which a young girl visits the memorial of a dead Author (modeled after the early twentieth-century Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig), sits and reads his book The Grand Budapest Hotel (and the film takes place in the real-time duration of her reading), moving from his author’s photo on the back cover into a 1985 frame in which the Author explains how he came to hear the story that comprises that work, flashing back to a 1968 conversation between the author as a younger man and the elderly proprietor of the titular hotel, during which they dine together and that man, Zero Moustafa, recounts his life in 1932 as a young refugee and lobby boy in the hotel under the mentorship of a legendary hotel concierge named Gustave H� with whom he forms an intimate friendship and whose death bequeaths a fortune to Zero� Each nesting is also a triple framing: a historical one, a narratological one, and also an aspectual, cinematically-specific one: the standard 1.85 aspect ratio is used for the present day, a letterboxed version for the 1980s, widescreen for the 1960s portion, and the 4x3 industry standard (the “Academy ratio”) for the 1930s. The film’s use of nesting and shifting aspects accounts for its theory of memory and its co-implicated theory of ruins in numerous ways including this salient one: save for the reading girl, everyone we meet in the film is dead, and this overwhelming thanatographic attestation will be important in the analysis to come. The film is set in a fictional former empire, Zubrowka (a stand in for the Czech lands), in which there is an invented war, collapsing the first and second world wars, pointing to the Nazi invasion, but also pointing ahead to the suffering of the Czechs under the Soviets� In other words, there is a broad interest in the generality of history’s hurts, the scale of millions dying, the totality of variable modes of human suffering accumulated by century’s end� The other general form, that of repetition with minor difference, governs the film’s chromatic palettes and spatial grids, but also bears on two nearly identical scenes on a train that set in place aesthetic problems of color and light in explicit relation to force. The first scene takes place twenty minutes into the film; the second, four minutes from the end. They are mirror inversions and elemental conversions of each other: in the first, leaning into the frame from the left, Gustave asks, “Why are we stopping at a barley field? ” as the train pauses next to an expanse; text gives the date as “19 October, Closing of the Frontier�” In the repetition of the scenario, Zero leans in from the right, asking the same question but adding “again,” and the text now reads, “17 November, Start of the Lutz Blitz.” The first sequence, in which border patrols attempt to arrest Zero for a lack of papers, concludes when he and Gustave are given a reprieve from violence through the timely intervention of a soldier who recalls Gustave’s kindness to him in childhood; at his promise of no further disturbance and the soldiers’ departure, Gustave says to a shaken Zero, “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left Glimmers and Drabness and Scales of Loss 147 in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity� Indeed, that’s what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant…oh fuck it�” The two scenes are formally symmetrical but ethically non-reciprocal because the second time brings with it two differences: at the sight of the death squad tableau in the barley field, Gustave declares, “I find these black uniforms very drab”; and the result of the encounter is not evaded violence and an ironic dismissal of civility, but arrived violence and a reassertion of civility� In the narrative block in which an elderly Zero recounts this story, to the author’s question of what happened to Gustave, Zero resignedly says, “In the end? They shot him�” The resulting ethical judgment turns on Zero’s accompanying insistence: “There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity� He was one of them�” Any strict repetition of two scenarios invites comparison� While the first train scene ends as comedy, the second concludes as tragedy, inverting Marx’s famous lines in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon� More precisely, the first time ends in irony and cynicism (all that is at stake in the “oh fuck it”), while the second de-ironizes irony and concludes with a positive declaration of sincerity: insisting on the possibility of a concept of civility in Gustave’s defense of, and ultimately sacrifice for, Zero. Or, rather, the second scene does not insist on the concept of civility—when Zero pronounces a faint glimmer of civilization left in humanity’s slaughterhouse, this is an avowal of an ethics of civility bound to percept and not to concept at all� That question of percept and not concept likewise appears with the supplement, the aspect that does not repeat across the two sequences: Gustave’s aesthetic judgment that greets the appearance of the death squads—his “I find these black uniforms very drab�” It is neither civility nor death squads that should interest us; our primary concern (in the sense of ordinality and prerogative) must be with glimmer and with drab: with qualities of light and color� The two train scenes repeat a formula, which is to say they take on and share a common and visible shape� Each begins with an interrogatory aimed at a change in movement, “Why are we stopping at a barley field? ” Before it is anything else, the barley field is a clearing, a visible expanse of earth marked by a flooding of the distant space with light, the free, clear open space for light to play against which the constraint of the train and its diegetic miseen-abîme frame is set as different� Before they are encounters with military force, state brutality and death squads, these two scenes are meditations on the autonomy and vitality of illuminated landscape. The barley field gives the play of lux as the give and expanse of the world beyond and outside the train, set in stark contrast to a symmetrical window in a vertical aspect ratio, opposite the aperture in the train and visible behind the passengers� This interior window is a gridded frame delimiting an opaque field, one showing a constraint and restriction of light with no depth behind it, the alternations of montage introducing a difference between this and the light into which the world recedes. Light as the extensibility of illumination is thus set against light given shape, edge, structure, limit, form� 148 e ugenie B rinkema Figure 1� The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures� Figure 2� The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures� Glimmers and Drabness and Scales of Loss 149 These scenes are not meditations on light (as metaphysics or metaphor) or color (as symbol) so much as meditations on and encounters with questions of degrees of difference in relation to light and color: the drabness Gustave finds of the black uniforms; the glimmer refused to civilization in the first encounter and reattributed to Gustave’s sacrifice in the latter. For all that Anderson is taken to be a master aesthete of world-building palettes (as in the exhaustive “Wes Anderson Colour Palettes” Tumblr page), drabness is not a problem of the palette, and in fact it takes an oblique relationship to color altogether� On the one hand, drabness is a positive color, referring to the undyed colour of material like hemp, linen, or wool; the Oxford English Dictionary’s etymological tracing of the term notes that from naming the positive color of undyed cloth, it “gradually became an adjective of color,” referring to a “dull lightbrown or yellowish-brown�” On the other hand, drabness names a lack of specificity in color—it is a symptomatic confusion that history cannot agree on whether it points to dull light-brown or a luminousless gray� In many languages, the words for drab and gray are the same; the 1869 A Dictionary of Dyeing insists, “Drab is a kind of gray” (199)� Perhaps brown, perhaps gray, drab is also taken to mean plain, unsaturated, not luminous (a quality applicable to any color); but it can also mean not a color at all but its possibility, its not-yetness, referring to what is “wanting brightness or color,” emphasizing not the positive chromatic attributes of undyed cloth, but the fact of having failed to take on color at all� This parallel sense of drab as in what lacks color makes it simultaneously a positive—if shineless and unsaturated—color and, in naming a hueless state of what has yet to take on color, it renders drab the negative ontology of the chromatic� Gustave’s pronouncement bonds together both senses of drab: as a quality of things, but also that which judges something to be lacking in chromatic intensity� However, there is no drabness in itself as essence or substantive; rather, this avowal of a black uniform marked by drabness is made within a cinematic episteme of black and white film stock. As a result, there is an inconstancy of tone in the color field of the death squad uniforms: against the rich continuous expanse of unmarked black in Gustave and Zero’s jackets, signaling the perceptually unavailable presence of color on the level of textile, the shots of the death squad textiles present patches of unevenness (difference, modulation, variability)� Drab, applied to the black of the uniforms, appears as gray; the only perceptually absolute black in the image is that of Gustave and Zero’s jackets, which disaffirm being black on the level of material precisely because they are not drab in this visual regime� (And indeed from previous appearances, we know them to be a vibrant purple�) Put another way: it is the formal aspects of the black and white film stock that visually interprets Gustave’s claim for drabness. This sequence is not a narrative climax in which an illustration of innocence and brutality confront each other so much a formal climax in which cinematic form interprets the qualities and intensities of light—in which form is offering a reading of qualities and intensities of form� The radical impersonality of drab and glimmer stands to offer an irreducibly aesthetic relation to the political violence that stains both sequences� 150 e ugenie B rinkema Figure 3� The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures� The negative motor of drabness (that it is indistinct and uncertain, that it marks having yet to take on color) positively attests to something else� This is most visible in a claim made by Benjamin, one of the great theorists of gray� In his 1925 essay on Naples, written with Asja Lacis, they pronounce of the city “In reality it is gray” (165)� But this gray has a particular aesthetic power: in its chromatic deficiency, it brings line to the forefront. Of Naples’ grayness, “anyone who is blind to forms sees little here” (165)� Gray is formrevealing: its negative qualities make form visible, unconceals it as all there is� In drabness, there is the inexhaustible potentiality of what has yet to take on color (that yet marking the tonality of possibility) and the infinite unconcealment of the possibility of form, what gray or drab or huelessness brings forth. Gustave’s pronouncement, “I find these black uniforms very drab” is an aesthetic judgment—a claim for regarding the uniforms as forms� Not to offer an ethical-political judgment on historical force but to offer an aesthetic reckoning with historical force as nothing but form� Benjamin and Lacis insist that those unconcerned with form will behold very little in Naples� We might say: they will see only a glimmer� If drabness is the infinite potentiality of color, what has yet to take on sufficient hue but thereby reveals form, glimmer also takes a complex relation to light. Just as drab is simultaneously a dull brown and a dull gray—or it is no color at all, but the state of the undyed and uncolored—glimmer means both “to shine brightly” with attendant notions of visibility and unconcealment (its fourteenth-century usage) and “to give a faint or intermittent light,” “a feeble or wavering light; a tremulous play of reflected light,” to send forth a weak, dim, and scattered light—its dominant sense by the fifteenth century. Glimmer thus comes to name both a self-showing brightness and the unsteadiness of light such that glimmer is always nearly not there at all (as in the nested qualifications of The Comedy of Errors, “My wasting lampes have yet some fading Glimmers and Drabness and Scales of Loss 151 glimmer left”—wasting, yet, some, fading, and glimmer multiply attesting to illumination’s barelyness that nevertheless is not absent)� As a reading of light, glimmer has a fundamental qualification attached to it: in the sense of a hedge or limitation, but also in an emphasis on qualities� Glimmer is not the vibrancy of an attestation, glimmer is the imperfection of light (as transitory, unsteady, notional); it is always the last glimmer of hope that marks a caesura before some form of finitude. The two words—drab; glimmer—resonate with each other, but also within each other, an insufficiency of luminosity, and an unsteadiness of its dispersion� They name, each of them, a vulnerability in the potency of light and a rhythmic unfolding of that potency’s modulation and differing by degrees� And so, the speculative claim: If the question of historical force and catastrophe and loss is given in a formal register, as a problem of aesthetic qualities and intensities, then only a resolute formalism can account for how the film navigates this terrain—not through allegorizing a priori ethical or political claims but in taking seriously the film’s formal language as a showing of drabness, glimmer, saturation, as degrees of difference in light� This is resolutely opposed to a taking of illumination as metaphor for a legible state of feeling: as in one reading that avows, “The hotel is bursting with colour in its heyday—[…]� But the colour fades as the war approaches� […] Like Zero, the hotel never recovers from the war; in 1968, it is as decrepit beige, orange and sickly pale blue as Zero is sad” (Marshall 249)� Such a reading takes saturations as stable, fixed representations of affective states of being instead of treating changes in chromatic aspects as what positively shows nuances in the quality of light� Drabness is the unvibrancy of a chromatic attestation having taken on sufficient color; glimmer is the unvitality of a brilliance having taken on the steadiness of light� If drab is a quality of things that reveals nothing but the potential for form, glimmer is a quality of light that reveals nothing but a difference: Glimmer names the minimal difference between the presence and absence of light itself� And it is the minimal difference that concerns us here, whether between the presence and absence of light, or the presence and radical absence of civility, a minimal mark, that is, of the possibility of a perceptible form of differentiation� This question of differentiation is a fundamental one with which any reading of the film’s relation to historical trauma must grapple, in particular in the way The Grand Budapest Hotel navigates the figure of Zero, whose presence as a refugee whose village was burned and family murdered and displaced opens up wounded European history to include the register of loss from the Levant� Attending to qualities of light negates the grounds for the alternative presented above: either condemning a formal exercise as failing to generate a speculative relation to the ethical or instrumentalizing form as demonstrating a prior conception of the ethical� Instead, The Grand Budapest Hotel is aesthetically proposing a general account of historical trauma that itself is a formalism—an effort to think violence as a structure that contains differences, degrees, nuances, one that places together (without mediating, synthesizing, 152 e ugenie B rinkema scaling or hierarchizing) Agatha’s death, Zero’s infant’s child’s death, his father’s death, his family’s execution, his village’s burning, the total violence engendering refuge in Europe, the violence of the first world war, the violence of the second world war, the death squads, Gustave’s execution, Madame D’s murder by her own children, and the assorted tortures and cruelties and beheadings of minor characters in the film in plot points this essay has failed to yet mention. The critical question is whether the film is indifferent to the historical specificity of these different losses (the question of form’s relation to content always a question of whether textual form is adequate to context) or whether one can positively theorize difference without returning it to a logic of the same, without presuming all speak to an ineffable in-commonness� How to let each (every) loss retain their quality of being different? One answer can be gleaned from the intervention Gilles Deleuze makes in his 1956 essay “The Conception of Difference in Bergson,” where he offers a theory of difference that he will revisit a decade later in Difference and Repetition� Here, Deleuze reads Henri Bergson’s account in The Creative Mind of how to develop concepts, in which his privileged example is the case of the concept “color�” How do we determine what colors have in common? Bergson says there are two ways: either we start with a color, say purple, efface its purpleness and then do the same negating process to other colors, to blue, to orange, until we have arrived at and extracted the abstract notion of color in itself, emptied of any specific content in a singular concept referring to multiple objects by containing and subsuming them� In Deleuze’s reading of this option, “we are left with a concept which is a genre, and many objects for one concept” (54). That’s the first way (—and, of course, the first way is never the right way in Deleuze)� The second way to arrive at the concept of color is to start with a continuum and pass the rainbow through a “convergent lens that concentrates them on the same point: what we have then is ‘pure white light,’ the very light that ‘makes the differences come out between the shades’” (54)� Deleuze reads this as a case in which “the different colors are no longer objects under a concept, but nuances or degrees of the concept itself� Degrees of difference itself, and not differences of degree� The relation is no longer one of subsumption, but one of participation” (54)� The concept is no longer a genre (or a generality) but a universal and concrete thing� What the formal language of The Grand Budapest Hotel bears out is not the content of difference but the quality and intensity of nuances or degrees in order to make present the aesthetic force of difference� Historical trauma is not a unifying or totalizing concept; every instance of violence and trauma is a manifestation of a process of differentiation, moving past thinking degrees of violence (and critical hierarchies that pose the question of which trauma best gives the concept of the twentieth century) to instead regard nuances or degrees within the concept as co-participants in history� Anderson’s film is not uninterested in a serious engagement with the traumas that run through the film, but nor should we instrumentalize the aesthetic as offering an abstract genre of “historical violence or trauma�” Rather, Grand Budapest Hotel’s formal language unsettles any claim for a genre (or Glimmers and Drabness and Scales of Loss 153 generality) that would adequately contain the inexhaustibility of nuances and degrees� Instead of a concept of formalism premised on negation (what ignores the world, what is indifferent to history, what fails to speak to ethical seriousness), formalism is revealed to be an aesthetic attestation of difference as a question of action. Claims for the film as “form for form’s sake” do not, therefore, go far enough: what the text’s navigation of color and light does is perform the irreducibility of form to any (every) serious thinking of the objects of critique: Anderson’s is a case of form for everything’s sake� If Grand Budapest is an aesthetic exercise, it is so in the strictest sense: the aesthetic keeps busy and does not wait to come about, is not a demonstration of a prior claim but is itself an active and generative and practical operation of thought—indeed the best one we have to make sense of the form of history: a grand accumulation of degrees of loss� Works Cited Badiou, Alain� The Century� Trans� Alberto Toscano� Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007� Benjamin, Walter and Asja Lacis� “Naples�” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings� Ed� Peter Demetz� Trans� Edmund Jephcott� New York: Schocken Books, 1978� 163-73� Brinkema, Eugenie� The Forms of the Affects� Durham: Duke University Press, 2014� Deleuze, Gilles� “Bergson’s Conception of Difference�” The New Bergson. Ed� John Mullarkey� Trans� Melissa McMahon� Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999� 42-65� Denis, Maurice. “Definition of Neotraditionism.” Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book�” Ed� Herschel Browning Chipp� Berkeley: U of California P, 1968� The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), [Film] Dir. Wes Anderson. Fox Searchlight Pictures. Jameson, Fredric� The Political Unconscious� Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981� Jones, Eileen� “Wes Anderson and the Old Regime�” Jacobin (March 2014)� https: / / www�jacobinmag�com/ 2014/ 03/ wes-anderson-and-the-old-regime/ (accessed December 20, 2018)� Kornhaber, Donna� Wes Anderson� Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2017� Marshall, Lee� “Wes Anderson’s Fabulous Fancy�” Queen’s Quarterly 121/ 2 (Summer 2014): 242-251� O’Neill, Charles� A Dictionary of Dyeing and Calico Printing� Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1869� Wilkins, Kim. “Assembled Worlds: Intertextuality and Sincerity in the Films of Wes Anderson�” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 60�2 (Summer 2018): 151-73� J ulius g reVe Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 1 “The thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying�” —Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist” “What it comes to is ourselves, that we do not find ways to hew to experience as it is, in our definition and expression of it, in other words, find ways to stay in the human universe, and not be led to partition reality at any point, in any way� For this is just what we do do, this is the real issue of what has been, and the process, as it now asserts itself, can be exposed.” —Charles Olson, “Human Universe” Given the highly suggestive arsenal of metaphors Ezra Pound mounts in one of his most important early essays, “The Serious Artist,” what could the word “radioactivity” possibly mean in the context of modern American poetry, and what are the consequences of that term for the latter? How is Charles Olson’s insistence “to hew to experience as it is” connected to his twofold poetological process that aligns the notion of breathing with the technological intricacies of the typewriter—this recording instrument he hails as revolutionary for the practice of poetic expression and innovation? Does the reconsideration of this process come at the cost—or, rather, in the form of a revision—of Friedrich Kittler’s insight that contemporary “media determine our situation” (Kittler xxxix) in a seemingly univocal fashion; meaning, that the study of cultural practices would require an examination of the media-technological transformation of the human sensorium in its entirety? If the first of the two epigraphs above is relatively straightforward, the other is deliberately obscure� In what follows, I hope to clarify these two conundrums of radioactivity and what I call “the breath of the typewriter” with respect to what could be termed Pound’s and Olson’s respective forms of “practical aesthetics�” I am interested in the connection between the practical aspect of poetry—that is, of poetry as an activity, a performance or simply as something that one does rather than defines—on the one hand, and, on the other, the notion of the aesthetic in poetry—that is, at least according to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s multi-volume Aesthetica (1750/ 58), the realm of sense, of perception, and of corporeally being in the world and knowing the world� 1 A slightly different version of this contribution is appearing in Practical Aesthetics, ed� Bernd Herzogenrath (Bloomsbury, 2019)� 156 J ulius g reVe In the wake of Baumgarten and his contemporary heirs, I want to address a set of issues, and, specifically, their examination in the work of the aforementioned modern American poets, Pound and Olson: How to determine the relation between doing (or praxis), making (or poiesis), and sensing (or aisthesis)? How is thinking (or theoria) to be reconceived along the lines of a firmly practical approach to the realm of literary activity, in general, and to that of poetry, in particular? I am invested in the ways in which we might describe poetry as a material articulation of thought—meaning both a consequence of its immediate and intermediary environment, and a technique for generating concepts of materiality as such� In other words, I consider poetry’s capability for both enacting and conceptualizing the material conditions of its mediation and remediation, on the one hand, and its ostensible channeling of affective immediacy, on the other� Finally, I attempt to think the reciprocity of social and aesthetic activity in early to mid-twentieth-century poetry� With these more general issues used as a conceptual backdrop, I will trace the adamantly practice-oriented strands of thought in Pound’s and Olson’s works (meaning, their respective emphases on the poetic act as a form of doing that is imbricated in a social, political, and historical circumstance), thus delineating what might be called their practical aesthetics� I will do so, first, by briefly contextualizing the question concerning the return of or to aesthetics in contemporary theory—or, rather, the continuous emphasis on the aesthetic at least since what has been called “the affective turn” 2 —in order to address the cleavage between practice and technique that both Pound and Olson seem to circumvent in their respective projects� Second, I will discern the main assumptions of Pound’s essay fragment “Pragmatic Aesthetics” (written around 1940-1943 3 ) and then compare these with two of Olson’s most influential essays, “Projective Verse,” (1950) and “Human Universe” (1951). Third, I seek to examine the pragmatic lineage of Pound and Olson by looking at how their poetry stakes out specific conceptions of materiality that include distinct visions of the social. This examination will entail looking at what each poet means by “pragmatic” or “practice�” As will become apparent, they do not always mean the same thing when it comes to both material practices (or praxis) and a pragmatic understanding of discourse about the sensible (or aisthesis)� In any case, neither for Pound nor for Olson do literature and the arts exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, poetry and poetics become diagnostic and quasi-gnostic tools with which to intervene in the social fabric� In this sense a practical aesthetics is one that links literary and media-technological technique with its social and political complement� Emphasizing the thematic intersections of history, philosophy, and scientific method in the idiosyncratic styles of both poets, I will delineate the conditions of possibility for thinking their poetics as individual attempts at a pragmatic “science of the human” by poetic means� 2 See Clough and Halley� 3 I take this assumption from Maria L� Ardizzone (164-65)� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 157 I A contemporary understanding of aesthetic discourse in reference to Baumgarten may be seen in a variety of contexts. One of these, unsurprisingly, is critical and cultural theory—or what has also been called “Continental philosophy.” In the past few decades, Jacques Rancière has spoken of the “distribution of the sensible [le partage du sensible],” a notion of the aesthetic determination of everyday experience, that is, in terms of participation and non-participation, inclusion and exclusion in regard of the dynamics of the social� It is important here to note the etymology of the original French, insofar as “a partage,” which “is a principle of aggregation that configures the forms of participation in a political community … , is at once a sharing and a division” (Panagia 96). This term, which is central to Rancière’s project as a whole, is highly productive in the present discussion of Pound’s “radioactive” poetics, as will become clear� For the moment, however, it is important to mention that Rancière’s notion—which evokes direct interventions in the political arena he calls the “aesthetic regime of art” (Rancière 22-23)—indexes modes of sensing, making, and doing that intersect in reciprocal kinds of human activity by which social life comes into being and perpetuates itself� Importantly, this broad definition of the aesthetic realm and its political nature is strictly opposed to what Rancière calls “the political (le politique)” or, in a more provocative inflection, “the police order” (29-30, 89, 2-3). Before Rancière, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have conceived of the realm of art as one of three specific modes of thought, working in terms of affects and percepts, rather than concepts or propositions—as would be the case in the adjacent realms of philosophical or scientific practice, according to them. 4 Both of these comparatively recent approaches to the problem of aesthetics are directly linked to the long trajectory of aesthetics as a discipline, as Christoph Menke’s important book Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology (originally published in 2008) has shown by implication� 5 While others have linked Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of art to Baumgarten’s notion of aesthetics as the analogon rationis 6 —thus, as a different kind of thought that is practical rather than theoretical or rational, yet which is nonetheless analogical to the latter—I am specifically interested in the way in which Deleuze and Guattari’s work, but also Rancière’s approach, corresponds to the problem pointed out by Menke with respect to Johann Gottfried Herder’s critique of Baumgarten’s discourse, because it neatly prefigures my argument concerning Pound and Olson. Herder’s critique, in a nutshell, points to the crucial Baumgartenian definition of artistic practice as a mode of thought, rather than a mode of feeling� In other words, for Herder, as Menke demonstrates, aesthetics does not need reason to serve as a legitimizing force, thus realizing the “force” inherent to artistic practice and its discourse. Even if aesthetic cognition is defined vis-à-vis the domain of the 4 See Deleuze and Guattari� 5 See Menke, Force� 6 See, for instance, Haferkamp 62� 158 J ulius g reVe sensible, Baumgarten’s concept of the analogon eschews art’s emphasis on human feeling� Instead, from Herder’s point of view, aesthetics harbors a “dark” or “obscure” component that is determined thus because of its indefinably non-practical, non-social, and consequently unreasonable character (Menke, Force 32-33)� This is the point, also with respect to Deleuze, Guattari, and Rancière, at which I want to distinguish between “practice”—the social realm of human activity, of habit and disposition—and “technique”—the realm of activity that may or may not entail a social or political element, and which refers to the concrete manufacture or construction involved in the poetic act� In other words, while practice imbricates aesthetics and politics, technique may or may not combine notions of the sensible as feeling or affect with its political consequence. The difficulty of differentiating between specific practices and their techniques and vice versa points to the way in which practice and technique, conceptually speaking, reciprocally presuppose each other in the context of modern American poetry I am concerned with here. 7 This is also how Rancière’s conception of distribution (partage) comes to bear on the terminology employed in my discussion, first, to point to the difficulty of distinguishing between practice and technique and thus to acknowledge their both shared and divided space of thinking social and artistic forms of articulation, and, second, to note the etymological vicinity of partage in a political context to partage in the context of the history of broadcasting. 8 Menke’s commentary on the conceptual developments from Baumgarten all the way to the late nineteenth century also distinguishes between aesthetics in the light of “force” and practice in terms of “faculty” or capability� This distinction ultimately arrives at an idea of aesthetic articulations and artistic expressions as the realm in which what is at stake is “human freedom”—the freedom of choosing between useful and useless activity within the social realm and the reciprocity between force and faculty that is the precondition of that choice (Menke, Force 98)� In this sense, aesthetics deals with an ethicopolitical panorama of practices and medial and material relations (which also entails intermedial and intermaterial relations) within which a quasianthropology—or “science of the human”—becomes possible with respect to sensible and social experience. 9 7 My account of the reciprocity of practice and technique is similar to, yet not entirely isomorphic with, contemporary theories of practice (cf� Reckwitz)� 8 Cf. Selena Savicic, who connects Rancière’s notion concept to that history from a contemporary perspective, shedding light on the politics of sharing and separation also in terms of sharing and dividing frequencies in multiple technologies of wirelessness (49)� 9 The notion of “intermaterial relations” is derived from Christoph Kleinschmidt’s Intermaterialität, whereas I take the idea of a quasi-anthropology from François Laruelle’s conception of non-philosophy as a “science of the human” (cf� Laruelle)� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 159 II It seems that the issue of defining social practice in contradistinction to (or in tension with) aesthetic technique in the context of modern American poetry would apply to the majority of twentieth-century authors, not just to Ezra Pound or Charles Olson� The cleavage between practice and technique— between act and form—and the struggle between aesthetic autonomy and engaged literature are the hallmarks of modern verse; that is, versified literature responding to or assimilated in the reality of the modern� Yet, in this case, Pound and Olson, figuring as what could be called the hubs of influence when it comes to modern American poetry, explicitly react to that cleavage, namely by dissolving it in unique identifications of the one with the other. Pound’s essay fragment “Pragmatic Aesthetics,” which he jotted down into a notebook in the early 1940s and which was published as part of Maria L� Ardizzone’s edition of Pound’s work on aesthetics in 1996, called Machine Art & Other Writings (comprising work from several decades), is a highly unsystematic, albeit instructive text. It suggests, in retrospect, the clear direction Pound assumed with regard to aesthetic discourse from his early prose onward� Some of the doctrines to be found in his Imagist phase, and in particular in his 1913 piece “The Serious Artist,” via Vorticism and his engagement with Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1919), can be rediscovered in the form of fragmentary notes and queries, as well as a few unmistakably declarative sentences� Recalling Imagism’s earlier dictate “Go in fear of abstractions,” Pound’s tone has changed slightly in congruence with the timeand site-specific “structure of feeling” in the late 1930s and early 1940s—both in Europe and the U�S� The writer no longer “goes in fear of” but vouches for an “Attack against abstraction” (Pound, “Pragmatic Aesthetics” 157)� Not just harkening back to “A Few Don’ts” but especially to “The Serious Artist,” Pound is deeply involved in what, back then, he had called “an art of diagnosis” that was correlated to “the cult of ugliness,” and the revelation thereof, at a specific historical moment (Pound, “Serious Artist” 45)� And yet, curiously, this type of diagnosis seems to be non-negotiable in any inter-subjective mode whatsoever: “The point is not to agree or disagree but to show … true thinking is ideogrammic in the sense that the general is composed of definite particulars known directly by the thinker� Art is the particular declaration that implies the general; and being particular … may not divert, distract, melt and muddle like an abstract declaration which becomes a party cry; or cloak or mask for a hundred different ideas” (Pound, “Pragmatic Aesthetics” 158)� Pound is alluding to multiple aspects here, one of which is the amplification of precision and the concrete in the art of poetry� From Imagism’s “direct treatment of the thing” that would be referred to in the making of a specific poem, such as “In a Station of the Metro” (published 1913, the same year as “The Serious Artist”), what we have in Pound’s “Pragmatic Aesthetics” is a well-nigh denunciation of other forms of thought, and one in particular: “Philosophy, philosophical expression” he describes as “nothing but vague 160 J ulius g reVe fluid approximation; art achieves a MORE PRECISE manifestation” (159). 10 Which type of thinking, however, does he align with poetic practice and which kind of practical consequence of that type may be found in society at large? In other words, what about the materialization of that specific mode of thought? The answer to the first question is given in the diagram Pound employs to clarify the new handmaiden of poetry: mathematics, the writing arithmetic algebraic geometric analytic� (157-58) This alignment of poetry with mathematics, in accord with his earlier reference to “the fourth dimension” of non-Euclidean geometry vis-à-vis a certain literary pastoralism in Canto 49 of his epic poem’s 1937 section The Fifth Decad of Cantos, is not a new gesture at all in the trajectory of Pound as a writer (Pound, Cantos 245)� It is the distinctly social and political usage of mathematical science in the form of technology that is of interest to Pound� Human technology—and specifically its ancient Greek etymology of technê as “skill in art, in making things” (Pound, Kulchur 327)—from the mid-1930s onward becomes increasingly important for the poet who begins to regard his practice and form of writing as functionally important in political terms� As he states in his 1938 book of criticism, Guide to Kulchur: “The history of a culture is the history of ideas going into action” (44)� If Pound’s image of “the serious artist” was already characterized by an exceptionally “scientific” disposition (Pound, “Serious Artist” 46), during World War II poetry ought to become imbricated in politics in order to stay relevant: practice and technique, act and form, become one� And for Pound it is in the context of a specific technological apparatus—the radio—that political action (or praxis), literary making (or poiesis), and lived experience (or aisthesis) converge� 11 It is important to remember at this point that Pound was at first skeptical with regard to this new communicational medium. On March 31, 1940, in a letter he wrote to the philosopher George Santayana from his home in Rapallo, Italy, he mentioned that a few of his “Blasted friends left a goddam radio here yester� Gift� God dam destructive and dispersive devil of an invention� But got to be faced� Drammer has got to face it, not only face cinema� … Anyhow what drammer or teeyater wuz, radio is� Possibly the loathing of it may stop diffuse writing” (Selected Letters 342)� Moreover, he complained about “the personae now poked into every bleedin’ ‘ome and smearing the mind of the peapull” (343)� Ironically, it is this “poking” and “smearing” that he himself set out to do in the form of anti-Semitic speech-acts “broadcast over Rome Radio between 1941 and 1943” (Flory 10 Compare with Laruelle’s contention: “We begin with the real that has no need of philosophy…” (Laruelle 70)� 11 On this convergence, see also Bacigalupo 230� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 161 284), showing his endorsement of Fascist Italy—speeches that eventually led to his arrest as a traitor to the United States and collaborator with Benito Mussolini’s regime� One of the poet’s particularly anti-Semitic Cantos—that is, Canto 46— broadcast on Rome Radio, in early 1942, refers to the essential concept “usury” or “usura”—in this case “hyper-usura”—which he identified as the sin of making money from nothing, or, as he himself writes elsewhere: “Usury: a charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production, sometimes without regard even to the possibilities of production” (“Gists” 355), thereby almost quoting verbatim from an earlier section of his epic. What is interesting in this context is his Jeremiad-like emphasis on the downfall of the American empire after Thomas Jefferson and, as will become apparent in the epic’s next section, John Adams. Even though this Canto, as part of The Fifth Decad, was published only a year before Pound’s Guide to Kulchur, I would argue that it is particularly in the next section, on Chinese history and Adams’ biography, that Pound’s radio-inspired poetics come to full fruition. This kind of poetics recalls the first of the two epigraphs with which I began: “The thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying” (Pound, “The Serious Artist” 49)� In his 1995 monograph, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound, Daniel Tiffany comments on this sentence thus: “In the ‘unifying’ power of ‘radioactive’ images we discover the origins of paideuma—the fascist ‘worldpicture’—in which the disparate features of history are fused into mythological coherence� More remotely, we also discover in Pound’s theory of radioactive art the origins of a conception of radio as a medium that is capable of unifying the ‘subconscious energies’ of an entire population” (Tiffany 224-25)� Pound’s organicist world-view, which is apparent throughout the majority of his writings on the level of content, and which I will revisit in the direct comparison with Olson’s work—this world-view is curiously amplified (in both senses) at the moment the poet’s writing style of documentary technique and archival accumulation goes full throttle� At this point of his career, poetic practice, on the level of “ideas going into action” via “skill in art, in making things,” means the underlining of poiesis as archeology� Yet, while others have commented on Pound’s “poetic archaeology” (Mottram 109) in the past, it is important to underline what this actually means in the context of “radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying�” While Pound had cited from literary, historical, economic, mythical, and philosophical sources long before this critical phase of his epic poem, there is a certain media-technological particularity to this “radioactive” context that sheds light on Pound’s oeuvre as a whole. In other words, what is the connection between the wirelessness of radio broadcasting and the organicism proclaimed politically and philosophically in the poet’s Cantos and his other writings? 162 J ulius g reVe I have already mentioned Pound’s ambivalent—or, rather, contradictory— relation to radio, or what he called a “destructive and dispersive devil of an invention�” Along these lines, Tiffany notes how the quasi-pre-Kittlerian Pound saw how “The insidious power of technology reaches deep into our hereditary past, the realm of the dead, as well as into the future, the realm of the unborn� What’s more, Pound’s fears about technology coincide with this condemnation of usury” (Tiffany 246)—once again, the chief factor that, according to Pound’s views, had led to the downfall of United States culture in the course of modernization� It is precisely the combination of the technological and the organic, of the modern and the archaic, and of the contemporary with the historico-mythological that defines the poet’s practical aesthetics� Tiffany helpfully suggests: “Given the historical speculations about radio’s relation to spiritualism, we might usefully ask whether Pound’s conception of radio doesn’t resemble a kind of ventriloquism originating with the dead … The exteriorization and projection of the voice that occurs on the radio has obvious parallels with the act of ventriloquism, as well as with the experience of haunting” (250). And it is as a consequence of this tension between embodiment and disembodiment, and between appropriation and depersonalization, of various controversial historical and contemporary voices in the Cantos of that time period—including Jefferson and Adams, Mencius and Confucius, Mussolini and Hitler—that Pound would turn to a fully fledged fascist and racist poetics that was more tacit at earlier moments of his career� What needs to be remembered, I claim, is not merely that he was eventually indicted as traitor to the United States because of his radio speeches, but that the latter are demonstrations, among other things, of his approach to poetic practice itself� The radio apparatus and the form of broadcasting it allowed for is key for any understanding of Pound’s fascist politics of medial distribution grounded in a univocal, rather than equivocal, notion of communication� III After being “interned [in 1945] at the US Army ‘Disciplinary Training Center’ north of Pisa, a prison and rehabilitation camp for US military offenders” (Flory 284), he was eventually found as unable to stand trial and thus transferred to St� Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC� One of the many authors and artists that visited Pound in this psychiatric hospital was Charles Olson, whose fascination with Pound’s Cantos is visibly present in many of his own writings, in particular his epic The Maximus Poems, a work that he started writing in the early 1950s� Much has been said about Olson’s debt both to the Cantos and to comparable works, such as William Carlos Williams’ long poem Paterson, yet it is the relationship between Pound’s “Pragmatic Aesthetics” and Olson’s critical work that I am interested in here� 12 Especially the text “Projective Verse,” in many ways a re-envisioned manifesto for the 12 See, for instance, Beach� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 163 post-war generation of American poetry, provides insight into Olson’s dissolution of the chasm between social practice and literary technique, between the faculties of political life and the force of art, as Menke would have it� However, it is important to remember that, politically speaking, Olson was on the other side of the spectrum—different from Pound, his politics were guided by a left-leaning liberalism� This poet, who had worked as a political activist for the Democratic National Committee during the closing years of World War II under Franklin D� Roosevelt, had picked up on Pound’s formalisms, while inverting the political orientation of his poetics� “Projective Verse,” borrowing its name from the mathematical branch of projective geometry, also praised the poetic act itself (which, especially in Pound and Olson, includes both the composition and the recitation of poetry): if for Pound, “the history of a culture” was regarded as “the history of ideas going into action,” for Olson, it was the history and geography of a region—of the locale—that was synonymous with specific “ideas going into action.” And this locality was again connected to the lived experience of the poet himself; in The Maximus Poems, Olson depicted his home and its environment in Gloucester, Massachusetts, adding to it the history and geography of it, from an ecologically invested point of view� As Olson writes in his 1950 manifesto, “the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects,” points to a distinctly ecological ethics that presents “man [as] himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages” (“Projective Verse” 25, 24), the projective stance leading to a kind of humility with respect to the poet’s environment; a stance that would regard humankind as “participant in the larger force” that is “nature” (25)� Olson would use the notions of poetic “speech-force” and “THE LAW OF THE LINE” rather than more traditional forms of meter and rhyme� Different from many versions of high modernist free verse, however, his take on what he also called “composition by field” focused on the poet’s siteand time-specific process of breathing while making the poem. This somatic “breath poetics” would then be reflected in the lines typed onto the page, the typewriter being christened as the technological apparatus that, “being the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work,” somehow correlated with “the kinetics” and “the process of the thing” (23, 16), of the poem in the making� Therefore, rather than secularizing the process of poiesis, as Kittler would have it, media technology in general, and typewriting in particular, re-sacralizes that process to the extent that the technology at hand is deemed essential on the royal road to what Nathaniel Mackey describes as “a primordial, Edenic immediacy in poetry,” along the lines of “American poetry’s Adamic aspirations” (Mackey 128)� 13 13 On Olson and Kittler, see also Foley� In his essay, Foley contends that, unlike Kittler, “Olson’s philology, in which love (philia) joins with the word (logos), affirms that an aesthetic shudder might yet derive from an ethical and undying affection for media and for the dead they bear with them” (100)� 164 J ulius g reVe Interestingly, like Pound, in his comments on “radioactivity,” Olson, too, relies on a semantics of force: the force of speech, of poetic construction in a kind of immediacy that seemingly denies what is so central even—or especially—in the kind of poetry Olson would go on to write� Note, in this regard, that according to an idiosyncratic poetological inference of Olson’s, the word “myth” in “mythology” is derived from “mouth,” rather than “story,” as common ancient Greek etymologies would have it� 14 And it is this form of understanding the use of myth—that is to say, not merely the use of mythological references as in high modernism, but literally, the use of one’s mouth—that the alignment of a poetics of breathing in Olson with the technological particulars and practical intricacies of the typewriter lead to a poetics of ventriloquism in Olson, if by ventriloquism we may also denote the disassociation of a voice from its usual origin� 15 It is only by means of the typewriter that the poet may breathe and thus produce the poetry that is most pressing in the time of what Olson calls “the dispersion,” the time after a new lapse of the human in the form of all that was endured as the collective experience of World War II, the Holocaust, and, more generally, the processes of modernization that led to that lapse� Olson’s (or any projective writer’s) breath is the typewriter’s breath, because otherwise, paradoxically, it would be impossible to escape the metric grid of the modern� In order to return to the issue of a “pragmatic aesthetics” in terms of both poets’ respective bodies of work, I would like to argue that it is not just in Pound’s case that “pragmatic” means “functional” as “opposed to something merely theoretical,” as Ardizzone has stated (14)� Olson, too, will condemn the theoretical overdetermination of sensible or lived experience by any universalist standpoints whatsoever; he will also equate such a non-lived overdetermination with the process of modernization itself� 16 Pound had referenced pastoral scenes taken from Chinese literature and historiography (filtered predominantly through the Orientalist lens of the Jesuit missionary Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s Historie générale de la Chine), and he was thus concerned with the rhythms of the working day in the aforementioned Canto 49 and even more so the Chinese Cantos� This idealization of the day’s rhythms of labor, with all its political implications, can be witnessed in another sense, in a 1939 recording of Canto 56, in which Pound’s voice is accompanied by a beating drum� This time, however, the beating drum is that of the war between insurgents and imperial soldiers from the rule of the Chinese emperor Yao onward� 17 14 Compare Pattison (61-62) on this issue� 15 Cf� Connor� 16 Compare with Mark Byers’ assertion that Olson’s “This is a practice of the self which stresses the practical activity of the individual in relation to the world as the central fact of human well-being; a position which might recall the American Pragmatist tradition but which follows more directly from the independent American left’s recent reconstruction of the person-centred and, significantly, embodied radical subject” (133-34)� 17 I am referring to the recording from Pound’s 1939 visit to Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, before the publication of the Chinese Cantos and the John Adams section; that is, 52/ 71� See the PennSound webpage: http: / / writing�upenn�edu/ Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 165 Olson, in a similar manner to that of the pastoral theme in Canto 49, praised Gloucester’s famous culture of fishing. The reader of both The Cantos and The Maximus Poems should take seriously the respective expressions of scorn in regard to the destructive processes of modernization, and should indeed take note of the respective versions of the aforementioned “cultural organicism” these expressions entail—in Olson’s case, “the wondership” of supposedly “older” forms of living being “stolen by, / ownership” (Olson, Maximus 13) of bigger companies, invading his beloved sea town on Cape Ann, Massachusetts; in Pound’s case, the notorious rants against “usury” from The Fifth Decad onward, and the penetrating commendations of Confucian ethics of feudal order and virtue, as well as Mencian paternalist affection or “benevolence” represented by the aforementioned historical figures Adams, Jefferson, and/ or Mussolini� 18 The identification of practice (praxis) and technique (technê), again, leads both to a skeptical take on modernity’s advantages in view of ordinary lives and to a technologically informed—that is, materially inflected—approach to literary activity in the name of the question concerning the “use” of oneself in the social realm� In this sense, for both Pound and Olson, the medial crossfertilization of modern technê—of “skill in art, in making things”—between poetry, radio broadcasting, and typewriting, also gives rise to adamantly practice-oriented strands of thought that either tend toward the imaginary of what Rancière terms the totalitarian “police order” or toward the reverence of humankind as one object among many in local geographies� As Olson writes in “Human Universe,” a text that can readily be called his critical statement on ethics, especially because it recalls the aforementioned problematic of partage: “What it comes to is ourselves, that we do not find ways to hew to experience as it is, in our definition and expression of it, in other words, find ways to stay in the human universe, and not be led to partition reality at any point, in any way� For this is just what we do do, this is the real issue of what has been, and the process, as it now asserts itself, can be exposed” (Olson, “Human Universe” 56; emphasis added)� I want to conclude by contending that regardless of Pound’s and Olson’s idiosyncratically staged identifications of practice and technique, the identification itself relies on a unilateral determination that goes from the performance of the poetic act to that of the social objective, thus inquiring by means of versification into the ways in which “men do use / their lives” (Olson, Maximus 63)� In other words, if there is a quasi-anthropological, or, rather, pennsound/ x/ Pound.php. On Pound’s poeticization of de Mailla’s take on Chinese history, see Park 41� 18 In terms of this organicist parallelism between Pound and Olson, the latter’s “jeremiads about America synthesize, interestingly, the critique of the contemporary radical left (the hatred of capitalism, excessive consumption, racism), and of the contemporary radical right (the accusation that the work ethic has been lost)” (Stimpson 152)� Consider also Andrew Gross’s exacting observation that “Olson’s attempt to place the human subject in nature as one object among many was consistent with Pound’s efforts to let the landscape find its own poetic form through the topographical analogy he called ‘periplum’” (Gross 228)� 166 J ulius g reVe non-standard anthropological impulse in The Cantos and in The Maximus Poems—that is, a “science of the human”—it is by way of the “forwarding” (6) poetic force, of poetry as a project, and of verse as projection, that material practice, pragmatic aesthetics, and thus practical aesthetics become possible� Radio, typewriter, breath—if the blurring of the demarcation that separates practice and technique is key in the majority of U�S� American poets from the twentieth century on, it is nonetheless in Pound and Olson that such a blurring would find its experimental, radical, and, importantly, organicist beginnings� However, this does not mean that “practical aesthetics”—the correlation of praxis and aisthesis—must necessarily amount to fascist artistic practices by default, based on the theoretical elimination of non-identity� It means that the prominent and lastingly influential cases of Pound and Olson demonstrate that cultural organicism in the literary domain may turn out to be fascist or it may turn out to be regionalist; to be sure, what has been a predisposition in both cases is not only a concept of doing correlated with a notion of sensing, but a way in which lived experience and mythography become intertwined on the level of form� Works Cited Ardizzone, Maria L. “Note on the Texts.” Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years� By Ezra Pound� Ed� Ardizzone� Durham: Duke UP, 1996� Bacigalupo, Massimo� The Formèd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound� New York: Columbia UP, 1980� Beach, Christopher� ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition� Berkeley: U of California P, 1992� Byers, Mark� Charles Olson and American Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Clough, Patricia T�, and Jean Halley, eds� The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social� Durham: Duke UP, 2007� Connor, Steven� Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000� Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Trans� Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. 1991� New York: Columbia UP, 1994� Flory, Wendy S� “Pound and Antisemitism�” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed� Ira B� Nadel� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999� Foley, Abram� “Friedrich Kittler, Charles Olson, and the Return of Postwar Philology�” Affirmations: Of the Modern 2�2 (2015): 81-100� Gross, Andrew S� The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015� Haferkamp, Leyla� “Analogon Rationis: Baumgarten, Deleuze and the ‘Becoming Girl’ of Philosophy” Deleuze Studies 4�1 (2010): 62-69� Kittler, Friedrich� Gramophone, Film, Typewriter� Trans� Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz� Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999� Kleinschmidt, Christoph� Intermaterialität: Zum Verhältnis von Schrift, Bild, Film und Bühne im Expressionismus. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 167 Laruelle, François� “A Rigorous Science of Man�” 1985� From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought� Ed� Robin Mackay� Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012� 33-74� Mackey, Nathaniel� Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing� 1993� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009� Menke, Christoph� Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology. Trans� Gerrit Jackson� New York: Fordham UP, 2013� ---� Kraft: Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie� 2008� Frankfurt a� M�: Suhrkamp, 2017� Mottram, Eric� “Ezra Pound in His Time�” Ezra Pound and America� Ed� Jacqueline Kaye� London: Macmillan, 1992� 93-113 Olson, Charles� “Human Universe�” 1951� Selected Writings� Ed� Robert Creeley� New York: New Directions, 1967� ---� The Maximus Poems� Ed� George F� Butterick� Berkeley: U of California P, 1983� ---� “Projective Verse�” 1950� Selected Writings� Ed� Robert Creeley� New York: New Directions, 1967� Panagia, Davide� “‘Partage du sensible’: The Distribution of the Sensible�” Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts� Ed� Jean-Philippe Deranty� New York: Routledge, 2014� 95-103� Park, Josephine Nock-Hee� Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Pattison, Reitha� “‘Empty Air’: Charles Olson’s Cosmology�” Contemporary Olson� Ed� David Herd� Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015� 52-63� Pound, Ezra� The Cantos of Ezra Pound� New York: New Directions, 1996� ---� “Gists�” Selected Prose, 1909-1965� Ed� William Cookson� New York: New Directions, 1973� 354-355� ---� Guide to Kulchur� 1938� New York: New Directions, 1970� ---� “Pragmatic Aesthetics�” Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years� Ed� Maria Luisa Ardizzone� Durham: Duke UP, 1996� ---� The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941� Ed� D� D� Paige� New York: New Directions, 1950� ---� “The Serious Artist�” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound� Ed� T� S� Eliot� London: Faber and Faber, 1960� Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics� Trans� Gabriel Rockhill� 2000� London: Continuum, 2009� Reckwitz, Andreas� “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing�” European Journal of Social Theory 5�2 (2002): 243-263� Savicic, Selena� “Immaterial Public Space: The Emperor’s New Architecture�” Digimag Journal 73 (2012): 45-55� Stimpson, Catherine R� “Charles Olson: Preliminary Images�” Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays� Ed� Paul Bové� Durham: Duke UP, 1995� 140-162� Tiffany, Daniel� Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995� l aura B ieger Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement Engaged Literature as Relational Art “Engaged literature” (littérature engagée in the original French) is a provocation by design� 1 Coined by Jean-Paul Sartre in the immediate post-War years, its job was to debunk the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, which was dominating the French literary scene, and confront writers with their responsibility to society: to engage readers with the social and political problems of the time� “From 1930 on,” Sartre writes about himself and a group of fellow writers (among them Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the world depression, the coming of Nazism, and the events in China opened our eyes� It seemed as if the ground were going to fall from under us, and suddenly, for us too, the great historical juggling began. The first years of the great world Peace suddenly had to be regarded as years between wars� Each sign of promise which we had greeted had to be seen as a threat� Each day we had lived revealed its true face; we had abandoned ourselves trustingly and it was leading us to a new war with secret rapidity, with a rigor hidden beneath its nonchalant airs� And our life as an individual which had seemed to depend on our efforts, our virtues, and our faults, on our good or bad luck, on the good or bad will of a very small number of people, seemed governed down to its minutest details by obscure and collective forces, and its most private circumstances seemed to reflect the state of the world as a whole� All at once we felt ourselves abruptly situated. The detachment which our predecessors were so fond of practicing had become impossible� There was a collective adventure taking form in the future and which would be our adventure� (175; his emphasis) From Black Lives Matter to Fridays For Future a strikingly similar sense of being situated, of historical urgency and personal accountability, is animating and re-politicizing our culture today, and literature is often part of the process� Occupy Wall Street participants read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” #MeToo protesters dress up as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, and public discourse on the systemic racism in post-Jim Crow America has led to the republication of works by James Baldwin and Richard Wright and to Ta-Nehisi Coates writing his first novel. So yes, the time might be right to return to Sartre simply because our time has a similar mood, is connected to his plea 1 This essay was written during my stay as a Feodor Lynen Fellow at Harvard University in the spring of 2019. Special thanks go to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and to my hosts Werner Sollors and Glenda Capri� 170 l aura B ieger for engaged literature by an existentialist zeitgeist, which Sartre so forcefully expressed in his work. But perhaps it is also the right time to return to Sartre’s ideas because our present age—sociologically speaking, a “network society” with its technologically imposed state of connectivity and participation 2 —is better attuned than his own to appreciate the relation/ participation-oriented model of the aesthetic on which his concept of engaged literature thrives� This essay sets out to reconsider the use of engaged literature as a critical concept for literary studies today� First popularized in a series of essays in the progressive magazine Les Temps Modernes, launched by Sartre and his fellow activists with a nod to the Chaplin movie (and to what Sartre viewed as a progressive potential of modern mass media), then in the book-length manifesto What Is Literature? , the idea of a socially engaged literature has been discredited from its inception by a presumed lack of the latter’s artistic value� How can an art that is not primarily responsible for itself be anything but propaganda? What is lesser known, however, is that Sartre conceived engaged literature in distinctly, if not primarily, aesthetic terms—terms that are at odds with the object-oriented understanding of the aesthetic that, in uniting conservative New Critics with formalist modernists and Frankfurt School Marxists, had a lion’s share in erecting the rigid opposition between aesthetics and politics that has sidelined the aesthetic in American (literary) studies in tandem with politicizing the field, and that volumes like these seek to overcome� 3 From the point of view of an object-oriented aesthetics, engagement must be rejected at all cost as it threatens the very foundations of art: its autonomy� 4 From the view of Sartre’s aesthetics of engagement, however, the value of art resides in an interactive process, in which the literary work is co-created by the reader in the act of reading, existing only as long as it is being read, but potentially extendable through a media network that reaches beyond the printed book� In the following, I will reassess Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature through the lens of non-object-oriented aesthetics, especially Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics� Introduced in the late 1990s by the French art critic, the concept has sparked much debate in the art world but has, to my knowledge, not been picked up by literary studies so far� 5 The reason for this might be that Bourriaud developed his theory first and foremost to make better sense of certain artworks of the 1990s, which were strikingly transient, situational, and participatory� 6 Beyond the immediate job to understand (and valorize) a particular form of contemporary art, however, Bourriaud’s theory 2 For two of the leading sociological studies on this phenomenon see Castells; Boltanski and Chiapello� 3 For a similar volume with an exclusive focus on literature see Weinstein and Looby. 4 This position is epitomized in Adorno’s rebuttal of Sartre’s idea of engaged literature in his essay “Commitment�” See also Jehle� 5 For critical responses to Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics see Bishop; Kester; Martin; Radical Culture Research Collective� 6 Bourriaud’s iconic example are the hybrid installation performances of Rirkrit Tiravanija, in which the artist cooks for the people attending the museum, gallery, collector’s house, or wherever the work is presented� Further artists regularly featured Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 171 charts an alternative understanding of the aesthetic, an aspiration that clearly speaks from his definitions. Relational aesthetics, for him, is a theory that consists “in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt” (112)� (The issue of judgment is crucial here; I will return to it at the end this essay�) In a similarly sweeping fashion, Bourriaud defines relational art as a “set of practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space” (113). And it is in this latter, aspirational sense that Bourriaud’s aesthetic theory is useful to revaluate Sartre’s plea for an engaged literature� What an aesthetics oriented toward rationality helps reconsider in particular is literature’s relation to the social world� And this relation has recently been subject to much scholarly interest� Drawing on concepts such as the “field” (Bourdieu) and the “actor-network” (Latour, Castells), scholars have explored how literature participates in theorizing the social (Alworth) and how it forges affective ties within the social world (Felski)� They have turned to the expansive field of world literature (Casanova), the emotional currencies of charisma and trust (Leypoldt) and the system of prizes and awards (English) to shed light on the production of literary value� They have approached modernist writers as celebrities and their celebrity status as generated by the field formation of modernist literature (Glass). They have examined the transformation of post-war American fiction under the auspices of the creative writing program, which for the first time interlinked literary production with institutions of higher learning (McGurl)� They have analyzed the role of writers, colonies and generating thematic as well as formal literary tendencies (Roberts)� They have traced the network of actors that has turned alternative publishing houses into significant players in today’s literary field (Hungerford). They have explored how literary authorship has been reconstructed through new possibilities of self-publishing and self-promotion (Levey, Vadde). They have begun to examine the impact of these and other, everyday aspects of life in a “network society” on literary content and form (Ngai, Hoberek, Rosen)� And while it is hardly surprising that concerns with the aesthetic play a minor role in the new wave of literary sociology that is reshaping the field (and the above list is far from complete), it would be interesting to see how Bourriaud’s thoughts on the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of relationality might enhance this prolific line of work. 7 For the present purpose of gaining a firmer grasp on the relational aesthetics of engaged literature, suffice it to say that literature’s relation to the social world is indeed the “master relation” in Sartre’s literary theory� And in his book (and his exhibitions; he is also a renowned curator and co-founder of the Palais Paris Tokyo) are Philippe Parreno, Vanessa Beecroft, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. 7 A rare exception is Ngai’s essay “Network Aesthetics.” However, Ngai describes aesthetic aspects of the network society as they become manifest in the sociological writing of Bruno Latour and the literary writing of Juliana Spahr rather than offering an aesthetics (that is, an aesthetic theory) of the network� 172 l aura B ieger in light of my aim to reconsider the critical value of Sartre’s ideas, it is worth adding that What Is Literature? does offer a full-blown literary theory, structured around the intersecting practices of writing, reading, and disseminating literature, and based on the assumption that all literature is engaged in the sense that writing means acting in the world (and passivity or political disengagedness are forms of action that support the status quo)� True to the Marxist and Existentialist premises of Sartre’s theory, understanding literature as a form of social action implies that it exists to the end of promoting freedom (which is why, for Sartre, real literature can only exist in a classless society)� 8 My aim here is neither to defend this view, nor to argue that all literature is engaged (even though I agree with Sartre that disengagedness is an affordance of privilege)� Rather, it is to show how Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature, when viewed through the lens of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, offer a fresh view on literature’s social function and use� And this takes me back to the question of literature’s relation to the social world that drives Sartre’s ideas: It comes best into view as an object of critical inquiry when approaching literature not in terms of independent artworks, but as a set of practices. Relations do not simply exist; they are forged and maintained through practices� Practices are forms of collective rather than individual action� A claim recently made about practices is that they are the very stuff out of which the social world is made—with literature being one of these practices� 9 So, who are the actors conjointly engaged in the practice of literature, and what brings them together? What structures their interactions, and how do these interactions intersect with other, non-literary practices? These kinds of questions form the critical horizon of this essay, and Bourriaud’s theory brings to them a welcome approach to conceptualizing the role of the aesthetic within a practice-oriented rather than an object-centered understanding of literature� Not unlike the art of the 1990s, which prompted Bourriaud’s intervention, then, the artistic, social, and critical value of engaged literature might escape us unless we approach it through the lens of its relationality� From this point of view—one that is more readily available in today’s “network society” than ever before—social engagement is not the antagonist but the baseline of artistic production. Riffing on Bourriaud, it is that which conditions the terms of representing, producing, and prompting the relations that determine the form of a literary work� 8 Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature are marked by a dual concern with individual freedom and social change, a tension that echoes Sartre’s life-long investment in both Existentialism and Marxism. Reconstructing even the basic tenets of Sartre’s philosophy lies beyond the scope of this essay� See McGuigan and, especially, Gyllenhammer for two essays, which admirably perform this task while also placing Sartre’s ideas about literature within the context of his philosophy. 9 For an introduction to what is often referred to as a “practice turn” in critical theory see Schatzki. For scholarship on the praxeological dimension of literature see the body of work produced by the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 173 Of course, the relational art of engaged literature involves a very different set of practices than the relational art of Bourriaud’s visual artists of the 1990s� Which also means that my attempt to understand engaged literature as relational art offers an opportunity to extend and differentiate Bourriaud’s theory� Drawing on his point that visual art “tightens the space of relations” (15; his emphasis), we would say that literary art tightens some relations (for instance, those between an individual reader and a particular text) while expanding others (for instance, those between the individual reader and all the possible other readers of the text), with the effect of participating in a transformation of the social world that involved (among other things) the rise of the public sphere� 10 The vectors of this double movement of contraction and expansion and the spaces it creates depend on the medium that is employed to reach the audience� In the case of engaged literature, the relations, spaces— and, we may add, the temporalities—afforded by printed books differ significantly from the relations, spaces, and temporalities afforded by e-books, just as the relations, spaces, and temporalities afforded by serial publications are different from the relations, spaces and temporalities afforded by books� In the context of literary art, the “affordances” of relational form (in Caroline Levine’s sense of formal properties that are at once aesthetic and social) are determined, it seems to me, by an interplay of three factors: the literary text, the physical object through with the text becomes available to its readers, and the relations conjointly forged by both of these things with and within the social world (to fictional characters and settings, other books and other readers, authors, publishing houses, critics, bookstores, blog sites, libraries, reading chairs, writing desks)� Bourriaud insists that relational aesthetics is “not a theory of art […] but a theory of form” (19), further arguing that the contemporary art practices he observes demand that “we ought to talk of ‘formations’ rather than ‘forms’,” and, in turn, think of the artwork as “a linking element,” a “bonding agent” (21, 20; his emphasis)� 11 Which is just as true for the historically specific formations of actors and institutions that define the practice of engaged literature within the discursive space of the public sphere� In fact, making sense of the transient and participatory formations that turn engaged literature into a distinctly relational art means attending to a multitude of different actors (writers, readers, publishers, scholars, critics, books, blogs, tweets, genres, characters) and institutions (prizes, awards, libraries, festivals, book clubs, literature departments)� 12 And if viewing the 10 For Bourriaud, literature, like television, and unlike cinema and theatre, “refers each individual person to his or her space of private consumption” (16)� But while this is a valid point about literature’s default mode of reception, it fails to acknowledge the formative role assigned to literature in most theories of the public sphere� See, for instance, Habermas; Warner� 11 In praxeological terms, acting in formation is a prototypical form of collective action. See Barnes� 12 As this list indicates, my praxeological approach to engaged literature assumes that both human and non-human actors are involved in it� For the ensuing debate on who counts as an actor and how to conceive of collective action see Dreyfus; Knorr Cetina; Pickering; Rouse� 174 l aura B ieger complex and dynamic interactions between these actors and institutions through the lens of relational aesthetics means valorizing the literary works created through them “on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt” (Bourriaud 112), literary works cannot be stable objects� Rather (in Bourriaud’s evocative terminology), they are linking elements in a complex and dynamic formation. In catalyzing and orchestrating a set of interrelated practices (reading, writing, publishing, reviewing, citing, reciting, recommending, republishing), they are the bonding agents in the production of literary engagement� I will later turn to the African American writer and bestselling author Richard Wright to illustrate the implications of this practice-oriented understanding of literature for my understanding of Sartre’s relational aesthetics of engagement� Curiously enough, Sartre draws on Wright, too; in fact, he turns to Wright regularly throughout his book to make his case for a socially engaged literature� Yet whereas Sartre is interested in Wright as an exemplary writer, I am interested in him—and by extension, in the figure of the ‘committed writer’ that is the neuralgic point of Sartre’s theory—as an individual actor who is acting in concert with many other actors in a complex and dynamic formation that extends (not least aesthetically) across, space, time and media, from Sartre’s and Wright’s intersecting contemporaneity all the way to our own� In bringing together Sartre, Wright and Bourriaud, I hope to show how literary engagement emerges from a web of relations that is woven out of a historically specific and transhistorically operative sets of practices (some artistic, some not); and that, against common assumptions of engagement as being intrinsic to certain aesthetics or politics, it defines the practice of literature from within this web of relations� Ultimately, my aim is to show that engaged literature might best be viewed as a set of practices that is geared toward producing meaningful and responsible relations with and within the social world—a process that is not exclusively, but irreducibly aesthetic; and, as we shall see, immensely valuable as such� Sartre’s Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement Sartre’s relational aesthetics of engagement unfolds from the interactions between the writer, the reader, and (sticking with Bourriaud’s useful terms) the “linking element” or “bonding agent” (21, 20) of the literary work� I have already mentioned that Sartre conceives the latter in strikingly dynamic and transient terms. At one point, he describes it as an object “which exists only in movement� To make it come into view, a concrete act of reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last� Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper” (50). The proximity to Constance School-style reception aesthetics is considerable, for instance to Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading, from which we learn that “the study of a literary work should concern not only the actual text, but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text. The text itself simply offers ‘schematized aspects’ through Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 175 which the aesthetic object of the work can be produced” (107)� The literary work is viewed here as co-created by the reader, a conceptual kinship that goes back to the existential phenomenology of Husserl, to which both Sartre and the Constance School thinkers were exposed (the former directly and through his study of Heidegger, the latter through Ingarden and Gadamer)� But in insisting that the writer always and imperatively writes for a reader, Sartre amplifies the importance of the reader’s share in the making of literature� Her activity of imaginatively reconstructing (or performatively reenacting) a text is conceived as “a synthesis of perception and creating” (52), and, a bit later, as “directed creation” (53). This creative act gains further significance through Sartre’s claim that the writer cannot read her own work, for she cannot act as her own co-creator� The literary work thus becomes a truly interpersonal achievement� The bond between the writer and reader in which this achievement resides is based on a reciprocal relation, on collaboration� It rests in “a pact of generosity” (61), entered by each party in performing their respective practice (reading, writing), with either side depending on, counting on, and trusting the other. The pact brings to mind the social ritual of gift exchange. The reader’s gift lies in her effort to understand the text, but she can, of course, also withhold her generosity (for instance when a text is perceived as artistically uninteresting, propagandistic, etc�)� The gift of the writer, in turn, “is to both disclose the world and to offer it to the generosity of the reader” (43)� I will have a closer look at the issue of “disclosing the world” momentarily� For now, my focus is on the bond itself—which is clearly social, yes� But is it also aesthetic? Here, I want to follow Paul Gyllenhammer’s reading of Sartre, in which the pact between the writer and reader is the product of an “aesthetic imperative�” The aesthetic imperative refers to a reciprocal duty between the writer and reader� The imperative is recognized as an appeal or call� The author writes to be read; so the writer appeals to the generosity of the reader to put the required effort into understanding a text (Sartre 1988, 65). The reader, on the other hand, takes up the work as an appeal from the author to recognize something about the world� The matter put forth in the text is a demand placed on the reader to try and critically reflect about a given reality (ib. 64). The reader prepares herself for a possible “aesthetic modification” of her projective understanding of the current situation (ib� 64)� (140) 13 Which is to say that said pact is aesthetic in at least two closely related ways: (a) it is founded in an “aesthetic imperative,” which, (b) opens up a space of “aesthetic modification” if both parties act on behalf of its appeal. And this takes us back to the issue of “disclosing the world�” The act of reading can transform the reader to the degree that she gains insight into her own situation and critically reflects on either maintaining or changing it. The act of writing and the literary work in and through which it becomes available to the reader are essential in bringing about this modification (which, by virtue of the reader’s actions in the world, is also a modification of the world)—for writing reveals the world to the reader� The revelatory capacity of literature that drives this 13 Gyllenhammer is citing the same edition of What is Literature? that I am using this essay� 176 l aura B ieger transformative process is a staple of the phenomenological understanding of literature as an art of aesthetic reflection in which Sartre’s thinking is rooted. 14 And if revealing and disclosing resonate (uncomfortably to many ears) with such things as an indisputable truth, the truth conveyed by the literary work in this model is (at least) self-reflexive: what the act of reading reveals to the generous reader is her responsibility to the world� In Gyllenhammer’s words, she “is brought face to face with the reality that a particular world of significance exists only through human action. The world disclosed in the text is not a mere factual given: it is a value system supported by human beings” (140)—a social world produced by those inhabiting it by acting and interacting in ways that either maintain or change a given value system� The formulation “bringing the reader face to face” is telling in this context. It signals encounter and intersubjective encounter as such� For Bourriaud, in turn, encounter is the motor force of relational art, which he conceives as “an art where the substrate is formed by inter-subjectiviy, and which takes ‘being together’ as a central theme, the ‘encounter’ between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning” (15). Quoting affirmatively Serge Daney’s claim that “all form is a face looking at us” (21; emphasis his), Bourriaud argues that in the case of relational art, where “form” gives way to “formation,” “inter-subjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, which is its ‘environment’, its ‘field’ (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice” (22)� In spite of the descriptive tone of this passage, “encounter” and “inter-subjectivity” have unmistakably normative implications here; in declaring them to be the apotheosis of art-making, relational art—as that art form which is fully defined by these aspects—is not one among others but an aspired ideal� We can see a similar logic at work in Sartre’s claim that, to fulfill her social responsibilities, the writer must write for her age, which “is the intersubjectivity, the living absolute, the dialectical underside of history” (241)� Only when consciously operating from within this matrix can the act of writing disclose the world for the reader� But whereas Bourriaud seems to take the inter-subjective dimension of the relational artworks of the 1990s at face value (as “social intersticies,” these works afford inter-personal bonds that remedy a lack of connections in the social world), for Sartre its value lies in affording a space of reflection that is the nucleus for social change (and I will come back to this issue at the end of this essay in conjunction with the question of aesthetic judgment)� One way of viewing the literary work within this formation, then, is as a transient, situational and interactive site of encounter� But the bonding agent changes its shape when Sartre considers its material and medial aspects� For instance, when he describes the book as “a go-between” which “establishes an historical contact among men who are steeped in the same history and 14 Again, this understanding can be traced back to Husserl, and it finds an especially powerful expression in Heidegger’s understanding of the artwork as opening up a space of reflection in which a truth is brought forth (even though, and curiously so, Heidegger’s philosophy of artistic revelation, i�e� “unconcealment,” is a rigid rejection of the aesthetic)� For a lucid discussion of this tradition and Sartre’s place in it see Vandevelde� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 177 who likewise contribute to its making” (72)� The book establishes this link both as a physical object and as the carrier of a message� But the same bonding agent can also assert a “sacred character” and become a cult object in a ritual of communion (Sartre names the Communists and the Church in one breath to make this point); or it can operate as a disjunctive force, turning the reader “against [her] family, against the society about [her]”, separating her “from the past and the future” (219-20)� In both of these cases, the book performs actions which mystify the act of reading, with the effect of withholding its transformative potential from the social word� And these are not the only problems with the book as the primary bonding agent of engaged literature� Its linking activity has shortcomings in the most basic sense� In Sartre’s words: “Books are inert� They act upon those who open them, but they cannot open themselves” (216)� Moreover, Sartre is keenly aware that the book confines the range of engaged literature to its already established audience; which, of course, also means, to the bourgeoisie� Unfolding the transformative potential of engaged literature means activating its “virtual public” (216), which is why a substantial part of the long section on “The Situation of the Writer in 1947” is dedicated to exposing these limitations and proposing a series of concrete measures to overcome them� And while Sartre does not want to give up the book, “the noblest, and most ancient of forms,” he contends that “there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial work, and reporting” (216), thus invoking a potential armada of co-actors (the “aeroplanes,” “V1’s” and “V2’s” of literature [198]) that might conjointly broaden its reach� For Sartre, it is clear that embracing these actors means changing the practice of literature, both in terms of its language (“We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the idea of our books into these new languages�” [217]), and in terms of the forms of writing produced by it� Collaboration with commercial ‘mass media’ (a term that Sartre only dares to use in scare quotes) means writing new works for and transmitting existing works through these media� Among his examples are newspapers columns and film scripts, broadcasts of plays on the radio, and film adaptations. In turn, the new bonding agents would enhance the relational form of engaged literature with new modes and sites of reception� “Film, by its very nature, speaks to crowds; it speaks to them about crowds and about their destiny� The radio surprises people at the table or in bed, at the moment when they are most defenseless” (216-17)� Engaged literature should tap into the receptive modalities of commercial mass media and exploit their linking potential for the project of inducing social change, ideally with the side effect of transforming those media themselves in the process, just as “the authors of former times have conquered [the commercial mass medium of print]” (218)� So yes, Sartre’s relational aesthetics of engagement thrives on a bond between the writer and reader with historical ties to the book, yet it proliferates through an extensive media network. But while engaging new bonding agents is a necessity for realizing the transformative potential of engaged literature, it comes at the expense of weakening the bond between the reader and writer, which is clearly the privileged relation in Sartre’s model� “The 178 l aura B ieger wider the public that the author reaches, the less deeply does he affect it, the less he recognizes himself in the influence he has; his thoughts escape him; they become distorted and vulgarized” (199)� That Sartre frames these common fears about popular media diminishing the work of the writer in terms of influence is significant, for it sheds light on the special position assigned to the writer in his theory� It falls upon the writer to reveal the world because, for Sartre, only the practice of writing can accomplish this task (which also explains Sartre’s preference for the presumably transparent prose writing and his dismissal of poetry as a suitable form of engaged literature)� Besides Sartre’s misguided assumptions about language as a transparent medium of reflection which become tangible here (and which he partly revised in his later works), this claim rests on a problematic assumption, namely, to quote Gyllenhammer once more, that “the writer has a translucent understanding of the situation” (143)� 15 Rather than the presumed lack of artistic autonomy—which Sartre shifts from the literary object to the “pact of gratitude between the writer and reader” (61)—the figure of the clairvoyant writer is the greatest weakness of Sartre’s theory. Aware of this problem, Sartre turned to exploring the consciousness of the writer in some of his following works (and Gyllenhammer gives a lucid account of this development and its significance in Sartre’s universe of thought)� For the purpose of reconsidering the critical value of Sartre’s literary theory, I want to take a different route and rethink the figure of the committed writer from within the formation of engaged literature as relational art, thus opening Sartre’s theory up for future use� “The day Native Son appeared …”, or, the Making of a Committed Writer In 1963, as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States approaches its decisive years, Irving Howe writes about Richard Wright’s first novel Native Son: The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever� No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies� In all its crudeness, melodrama, and claustrophobia of vision, Richard Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture� (119; my emphasis) These lines are not only remarkable in capturing the impact of Wright’s novel, but also in ascribing agency to the book rather than its writer (and I am especially intrigued who is “no one” here—other novels, other writers, other ‘native sons’? )� Few works of engaged literature have reached a public on the scale of Wright’s first novel. When it was published on March 1, 1940, it sold 250,000 copies in just three weeks, became the first U.S. bestseller by a Black author, and was quickly translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, and 15 For two representative and astute critiques of Sartre’s problematic and interrelated views on prose writing and language see Hung; Guerlac� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 179 Czech, thus internationalizing Wright’s audience� And in doing all of the these things, Native Son was essential to the making of Richard Wright, i�e� the committed writer who makes a regular appearance in Sartre’s plea for an engaged literature� Sartre treats Wright as an exemplary individual, someone who, in claiming the profession of the writer and writing about his oppression in a deeply racist society, “discovers his subject” (78), and (contrary to post-Althusserian implications of the term) liberates himself� And in addressing himself to a reading public divided by racism and white supremacy, he is, in Sartre’s view, indeed a model writer, for he “has been able to both maintain and go beyond that split” (80), thus occupying a position “between the oppressed and the oppressor, […] between blacks and whites, read by the oppressed and the oppressor, furnishing the oppressor with his image […], being conscious with and for the oppressed of the oppression” (195-96)� Now, this is a perfect illustration of the clairvoyant writer, for whom “to conceive the idea of drawing a portrait-challenge of his real reader” means that “[she] must have become conscious of a contradiction between [herself] and [her] public, that is, [she] must come to [her] readers from without” (88; his emphasis)� In line with Sartre’s ideas, I want to consider the figure of the committed writer as an actor in both the literary and the public sphere, whose actions are defined by an aspiration to transform the public sphere as a first step to transforming the social world� Contrary to Sartre’s view, however, I want to consider Wright—and by extension, Sartre’s beloved figure of the committed writer—as both a product of and a prominent actor in the dynamic formation of engaged literature� 16 A crucial part of this exercise is to widen the scope beyond the individual artwork and consider how its making (its being written, published, reviewed, reissued) and its doing (its finding readers, spurring responses, generating prestige and publics) are conditioned by other actors� In line with the model of relational art discussed in the previous sections, this means foregrounding the dynamic relations in and through which a literary work gains its form, meaning, and value in thoroughly mediated relations of proximity or distance, opposition to, or alliance with other texts. (As we shall see, for Native Son, relations to the non-fictional works dovetailing its publication, especially to his bestselling autobiography Black Boy, were key players in making Richard Wright the exemplary writer as whom Sartre features him.) These relations are aesthetic to the minimal degree that they involve engaging with a work of art, and (drawing on Sartre’s notion of aesthetic modification) to the maximal degree of invoking change (of address, opinion, outlook, behavior) in the recipient (and thus in the social world)� Both outcomes hinge on the physical and imaginary bonds forged within the formation of engaged literature; their impact on the social world depends on the degree to 16 This section is part of a forthcoming monograph, tentatively entitled Richard Wright Native Son and the Power of Literature� 180 l aura B ieger which the literary and the public sphere are synchronized in the actions and interactions prompted by a literary work� In other words, they hinge on the aesthetic relationality of the work� From this point of view, Native Son may best be described as the headstone in establishing a position that transformed the U.S. literary field in ways which enabled its author to become (like Emile Zola, in France, speaking out against the Dreyfus Affair from his field position as a renowned writer) an eminent public figure (and as Sartre later makes clear in his “Plea for Intellectuals,” the committed writer is always a public figure). The novel, its author and its iconic protagonist, written responses and follow-up publications in word and image, the ensuing interviews, public lectures, and adaptations of Native Son for stage and screen can be seen as co-actors in the dynamic formation of engaged literature, gathering and exchanging symbolic and cultural capital for literary fame and political intervention� Wright was a handsome man with gentle looks, whose portraits were featured in Life and Ebony, while his political essays (he was a card-carrying communist for a while) appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and New Masses� And as his literary stardom and his political activism supported each other, he used both to help aspiring Black writers (such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and Gwendolyn Brooks) with his public standing and institutional ties� That these writers positioned themselves (in essays, reviews, and literary works) against Wright’s daunting presence augmented the transformation of public discourse which the publication of Native Son had set in motion� It is indeed apt to say that Native Son’s reach as a work of engaged literature spans from Baldwin’s “parricidal” essays “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone” (collected in a volume with the title Notes of a Native Son) to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s protest essay Between the World and Me (which borrows its title from Wright’s first published work, an anti-lynching poem that appeared in Partisan Review in 1935), and, most recently, to the HBO adaptation (starring Ashton Durrand Sanders, best known for his performance in the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight), which came out earlier this year— an armada of bonding agents, transhistorically linking the pre-Civil Right era with the era of Black Lives Matter� But how could Native Son have such an impact? Am I not conjuring up yet another “master actor” here? Well, not if we consider the co-actors conjointly at work in making this impact happen� A vast factor in turning Native Son into a monumental work of engaged literature was the Book of the Month Club selection of the novel in its March 1940 edition� With close to half a million subscribers, this vast mail order business was, at the time, perhaps the most powerful marketing engine of literature� And if being selected came in tow with an instant exposure to a mass audience, in the case of Native Son, the Book of the Month Club selection (another first for a Black author) launched a real media event, catapulting Wright practically overnight into his new role as the most famous and influential Black American writer of his age� As a writer committed to engaging his readers with the pressing realities of racism and white supremacy that were haunting in U�S� society at this Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 181 time, Wright seized the opportunity to maximize his outreach—even though this involved grave changes in the manuscript (cutting a masturbation scene, editing out the white millionaire philanthropist’s daughter’s desire for the black servant), which remained in place until the Library of America published a restored version of the text in 1991, long after Wright’s premature death� These changes have often been viewed as market forces impinging on—crippling—an original artwork� 17 But one can just as well see them active participants in turning Native Son into the work that propelled Wright into becoming one of most renowned authors and public intellectuals of his age� It needs to be stressed that this view does not diminish the gravity of the revisions imposed by the Book of the Month Club� The magnitude of the interference is indeed a crucial measure of the co-actor’s agency� Yet in shifting the weight from what is—in the cultural logic of racism—done to an individual artwork on to the actors and institutions conjointly involved in this operation, the Book of the Month Club selection becomes tangible as a formative stage both in the making of a monumental work and a committed writer� And it also makes mistakenly clear that distribution channels are neither neutral nor transparent� They are bonding agents in their own right, with a set of interests of their own, and considerable stakes in creating a work and its author. In targeting specific audiences (the mostly white, bourgeois, and often female members of the Book of the Month Club; the academic clientele of the Library of America) with a custom-made product, these channels (along with the institutions using them) had a sizable impact in both shaping Native Son’s literary form and its reading public� In judging a work of engaged literature like Native Son, these complex and conflicting relations must be taken into account� Interactions between the publisher/ distributor and writer are by no means external to a work. Rather, they are part and parcel of its production, affecting the formal and physical shape and reach of the work, thus affecting all further relations forged by it� They affect, for instance, those relations forged by the hundreds of reviews, notices, essays, editorials, letters to the editor, and poems prompted by Native Son’s publication� The sheer number of these responses points toward another formative site of engaged literature in Wright’s age, namely, its flourishing magazine culture. It is indeed hard to imagine Native Son’s sustained impact on American culture and beyond without this powerful echo chamber� Responses appeared both in prestigious magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Partisan Review, which (like Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes) targeted the intellectual elite� But they also appeared in the many “little magazines” that were a staple of the literary scene at the time (among them Anvil, International Literature, The Daily Worker, Left Front, New Masses, Présence Africaine). Featuring progressive literature in tandem with radical politics, some of these magazines published just a single issue, but together they forged bonds with readers, who, in migrating from one magazine to another, formed a series of short-lived yet closely related publics� Wright was an avid 17 For accounts along these lines see Kinnamon; Cossu-Beaumont, “Wright and his Editors�” 182 l aura B ieger participant in this magazine culture—as reader, writer, editor, with contributions including poetry, short fiction, reviews, essays on literature and radical politics� In some of those pieces (for instance in his famous essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” first published in response to a devastating review and now, in some recent editions, featured as an introduction to the novel), Wright defends Native Son� It is safe to say that Native Son was written with this formative site of literary engagement in mind� And since Wright did not have much literary education before becoming involved with this culture, it must have also been formative for him as a maturing reader and aspiring writer� But back to Native Son: entering the literary scene when modernism had exhausted itself even in the socially engaged form that had been the hallmark of the depression era, it captured the interest of its readers with its blunt style (it opens with the ring of an alarm clock) and its boldly unsympathetic protagonist (Bigger Thomas is a rapist and murderer)� Its crude brand of modernism has been viewed as naturalism, psychological realism, Existentialism, Marxism, African American Modernism, gothic and detective fiction, and it is tempting (and certainly not inaccurate) to think of this style as a token of a literary system deeply pervaded by modern mass media� 18 And yet, it is important to bear in mind that the elements of this style could only become part of Wright’s repertoire once he himself had managed to gain access to practicing literature—which, in the segregated South of his upbringing, was a closed system for a Black person like him. Bourriaud defines style as “[t]he movement of a work, its trajectory” (114)—a line that, in Wright’s case, connects Native Son with the autobiography Black Boy, which features him becoming a reader (and thus an active practitioner of literature) as a formative act of selfauthorization� After coming across several issues of the American Mercury with thought-provoking essays by H� L� Mencken, Wright persuades a coworker of the ocular laboratory, where he works after his arrival in Memphis, to let him use his membership card of the segregated library, where he is only able to check out the books that, based on Mencken’s articles, would lay the foundation for his literary career, because he pretends that he is loaning them for the white cardholder� This is a striking episode in the book that becomes Wright’s second international bestseller (and his second Book of the Month Club selection, this one with even graver interferences), enforcing Wright’s standing as a writer with the factual weight of a real-life story� Moreover, and crucially so, the episode sets in motion a feedback loop that might be seen as a retroactive authorization of Native Son, both in terms of its style (the list of books checked out at the Memphis library closely resembles the list of books mentioned by many of Native Son’s reviewers) and its subject matter (the horrors of growing up as a Black man in a racist society)� So, if one views Black Boy and Native Son as co-actors rather than individual works, Wright’s moving back and forth between fictional and non-fictional writing, which had become a staple of his work in the years after publishing Native Son, becomes tangible as an extended attempt of authorizing a creation so 18 See, for instance, Fabre; Werner; Pudaloff; Smethurst� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 183 controversial that it could not be authorized in one single publishing act� And it becomes tangible as part of concerted (and lucrative) effort to broaden the range of his work—by lecturing and writing about “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” in prominent places and publications such as the New York Public Library, Chicago’s Church of the Good Shepherd, in Sunday Review, and Negro Digest, by collaborating with Life magazine on a tribute to Native Son’s notorious setting in Chicago’s South Side (which was never produced), and by working on adaptations of Native Son for stage and screen with such illustrious collaborators as the southern playwright Paul Green, the Hollywood director Orson Welles, the acting star Canada Lee, and the experimental French filmmaker Pierre Chenal� It is easy to see how these collaborative, multi and trans-medial activities set into practice Sartre’s ideas about unfolding the transformative potential of engaged literature by remaining invested in writing books while also engaging new bonding agents� And yes, they bring into view Wright as a prominent actor within the formation of engaged literature of this age, forcefully moving beyond the confines of national literature, linking intellectuals around the Black Atlantic (among them Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Baldwin, Wertham), and engaging readers with the problems of racism, colonialism, and economic exploitation on an increasingly global scale. 19 But they also make tangible the extent to which the actions of Sartre’s model writer were not so much the making of a singular and self-determined individual as they were the collective doings and makings of a multiplicity of agents in a historically specific and transhistorically operative formation. So, where does this leave us in terms of revaluing the artistic, social, and critical value of engaged literature? And, circling back to Bourriaud, where does it leave us in terms of “judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt” (112)? Aesthetic Engagement as Reflective Practice Aesthetic judgment is a loaded term, which brings to mind Kantian investments in disinterestedness, beauty, and taste� And yet, it is important, if not essential, to hold on to a particular mode of aesthetic judgment if we want to make claims about the value and use of art and literature—which, in the proposed understanding of the artwork as a dynamic formation, an interactive site of ‘engaging encounter’ rather than a stable object, must be located in the set of practices defining that work. And this is precisely what Georg W� Bertram agues in the neo-pragmatist aesthetics introduced in his recent book Art as Human Practice� Dealing with art, he contends (in an artful modulation of Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas about aesthetic judgment), always involves 19 For Wright as an actor in literary and intellectual world of the Black Atlantic see Gilroy; Cossu-Beaumont, “Paris Noir.” Wright’s non-fictional works Pagan Spain, Black Power, White Man, Listen! , and The Color Curtain, written during his year in Paris, are an impressive record of his move from the Black Atlantic to an increasingly global theatre� On Wright’s globalism see Rinehart� 184 l aura B ieger making judgments, and it is this evaluative and normative thrust of art which sets it apart from other human practices� Just as Sartre and Bourriaud, Bertram views art as an interactive practice, but more (or rather, more explicitly) than the other two, he conceives this practice as constitutively involving “normative and evaluative activities” (205; emphasis his)� For Bertram, engaging with an artwork always and inherently entails “relat[ing] critically to the artwork’s claim to realize art, and take an evaluative stance to the artwork,” a process which involves “compar[ing] the merits and relations of various artworks as well as their dynamics, comment[ing] upon their way of functioning and evaluat[ing] their aesthetic success” (204)� (For me, these lines bring to mind people like my parents in an exhibit of modern art.) The reason why this mechanism of critical reflection is built into the practice of art, according to Bertram, is that art has no intrinsic meaning or fixed value� The concept of art can never be merely descriptive; it must always forward a claim about what art is, and this makes the practice of art inherently self-reflective. Both Sartre’s What Is Literature? and Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics wear the prescriptive claim of defining (or re-defining) what art is (or should be) on their sleeves, and in doing so, they contribute to a (distinctly not ontologically but pragmatically driven) competition about (and negotiation of) the meaning of art, which drives and defines art as a human practice. (And one could indeed write an entire essay about how the two books, in their function as manifestoes—that is, as works of engaged literature par excellance—, participate in this process by not only envisioning but re-enacting the artistic practice they endorse, one in the form of a powerful narrative, the other in the form of meaningful pieces to be correlated by the generous reader�) And this brings me to one of Bertram’s overarching claims—and to the reason for bringing him into my concluding remarks� As an interactive, intersubjective practice revolving around making collective judgments about its own meaning and value, art “is not simply a specific kind of practice, but rather a specific kind of reflective practice, a specific formation of practices by means of which we take a stance towards ourselves in the midst of practicing our culture” (3). And while there are many different practices of reflection (speaking about speech, religion, therapeutic conversations, philosophy), art is the practice we use to reflect upon what it means to be human. Being human, according to Bertram, means in a most general sense that “we have to define what we are always anew” (3). I should add that, for Bertram, what it means to be human is not a matter of defining the ontological status (or essence) of humankind but of defining the relations with and within the world that define (and express) human subjectivity. And in this constantly evolving process of becoming rather than being human, art (as a collective and reflective practice) gives occasion to take a stance on ourselves and grasp our “taking a stance” as “a practical occurrence” (3)� Understood in this way (and this is important), reflection is decidedly not theoretical; it has practical value and use� And aesthetic judgment, because it remains strictly focused on art, is the component of art as a set of practices (or “form of practice” [2; emphasis his]), which affords this practical value and use� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 185 Bourriaud insists on precisely this practical value and use when he proposes that judging relational art (and, for that matter, art in general) should be based on the co-existence criterion� Assuming that “[a]ll works of art produce a model of sociability,” Bourriaud’s criterion asks: “Does this work permit me to enter into a dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines? ” (109; my emphasis)� And while Bourriaud has been much criticized for this mode of critical judgment (for equating openness and dialogue with desirable politics, for failing to offer an aesthetics of social change), it is important to note that the flaw lies on the level of applying his own criterion and not on the conceptual level of formulating it� For while it is most certainly true that some dialogues are better than others and not all forms of participation are politically desirable or socially progressive, the “Could I exist, and how …? ” is nevertheless a valid intervention, for it opens up a space of reflection in which we are asked (i�e� required) to take a stance� Taking a stance is always engaged in the sense that it expresses a relation to the world. In fact, riffing on Sartre, we could say that the act of expressing a relation is, regardless of the form of that relation, an action in the world and on the relations existing within it. Moreover, it seems to me that an amplified version of Bourriaud’s co-existence criterion—a “Can I... you... we exist, and how…? —is driving the practice of a committed writer as exemplified here by Richard Wright. The shift from the hypothetical to the practical, from could to can, makes tangible the overt politics that animates engaged literature without leaving the realm of aesthetic judgment� So, with Bertram in mind, we can view both Bourriaud’s ideas about relational art and Sartre’s ideals about engaged literature as pleas for an artistic practice that prompt us to reflect and take a stance on what it means to be human based on what it means to be in social relations� Moreover, and crucially, Bourriaud’s covert and Sartre’s overt aesthetic politics come into view as two sides of the same coin, both thriving on an interactive and dialogical practice of reflection as an integral part of the artistic practice which they endorse, both invested in using their version of the co-existence criterion as art’s reflecting shield for and bonding agent with the social world. Yet different from Bourriaud, Sartre’s claims about the value and meaning of art are animated by an aesthetic understanding of what happens in that space of reflection, and how taking a stance on what it means to be human involves taking on responsibility for one’s actions in the world as a result of entering that space� For a reassessment of the critical use of Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature today, this may be a starting point� 186 l aura B ieger Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� “Commitment�” [1992]� Trans� Shierry Weber Nicolson� Notes to Literature Vol� 2� New York: Columbia University Press, 1993� 76-94� Alworth, David L� Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016� Barnes, Barry� “Practice as Collective Action�” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. 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New York: Columbia University Press, 2012� Werner, Craig� “Bigger’s Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of African American Modernism�” New Essays on Native Son� Ed� Keneth Kinnamon� Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990� 117-52� l inda m. h ess The Aesthetics of Wonder: Networks of the Grievable in Richard Powers’ The Overstory The fact that The Overstory by Richard Powers is represented within the select, carefully curated library of “publications on the environmental humanities” in the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society 1 is a good indicator of its status as a notable work of environmental fiction, which it quickly achieved upon its publication in April 2018� The heightened attention the novel received from the get-go is certainly due in part to the established fame of its author, but also, indubitably, to the timeliness of its topic� Whether categorized as (new) nature writing, climate fiction (cli-fi), or environmental literature, works that focus on nature, the environment, and ideas of the Anthropocene 2 have clustered into a defining genre of the early twenty-first century. When Powers’ novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in April 2019, The Washington Post observed that this moment marked “a new high point in the growing prominence of environmental novels” (Charles, n. pag.); a high point that has also been reflected in other prominent authors’ recent treatments of environmental topics, such as Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), or Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016)� Margaret Atwood, quoted on the hardback’s jacket, compares Powers to “the Herman Melville of Moby Dick” because “His picture is that big�” The novel indeed presents an extensive and elaborate network, not only of nine 1 The Rachel Carson Center was founded in 2009, jointly by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Deutsches Museum in Munich� It focuses primarily on research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences� 2 While the term “nature” is of course complex, in this essay it generally designates non-human nature� The term “Anthropocene” was coined by scientists who believe that humans have altered Earth’s geology and ecosystems in such a lasting way that we now live in a new epoch that is no longer the Holocene� While the term has not (yet) been officially adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy or the International Union of Geological Sciences, it has become a buzzword in discussions about climate change in various fields, including the environmental humanities. In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (2018) Simon L� Lewis and Mark A� Maslin propose four possible starting points for the Anthropocene: a) over 10,000 years ago, when humans became farmers; b) around 1492, with the Columbian exchange and Western Colonization; c) the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century; or d) the period after World War II, also known as the Great Acceleration (11-12). Some geologists have proposed the first nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 as a specific official beginning of the Anthropocene because of the subsequent “stratigraphic presence of radioactive elements” (Monastersky 146)� 190 l inda m. h ess characters’ stories, but also of its other, in many ways overarching protagonists: trees� 3 Powers returns to themes here that have previously characterized his works� Jan Kucharzewski has traced networks in Gain (1998) while pointing out that they also “feature prominently” in other works by Powers (125)� Moreover, scholars such as Heather Houser, Laura Bieger, Greg Garrard, and Ursula Heise have called attention to ecocritical perspectives in Powers’ works� However, in The Overstory the author entangles these elements further to re-envision human relations to the non-human in the age of climate change on a different scale� The novel demands of its readers nothing less than serious contemplation of a new perspective on the world—one in which humans are not the telos of the intricate webs of being, and in which plants, not people, may be the possessors and professors of significant knowledge. In The Overstory, people really only form the understory, the underlying layer of vegetation, above which the trees soar� Heinz Ickstadt has noted that “the function of Powers’ structures and constructions is to a great extent appellative … meant to affect the reader, to change his/ her awareness” (29), and that each of Powers’ narratives professes an “intimate connection between content and the linguistic shape it takes: as if each story generated its own appropriate form” (29)� Both characteristics persist in The Overstory� I argue that in this novel Powers uses narrative strategies to create grievable nature; to bring about a recognition of nature, and an understanding of trees as creatures with which, as humans, we are more intricately connected than we commonly consider, creatures for which we should grieve, if they were lost� He achieves this effect via a network aesthetics that serves to evoke a sense of wonder, which serves in turn to render nature grievable, that is, too valuable to be lost� This grievabilty is particularly emphasized in a sentence that recurs—with slight variations—nine times in the novel� It presents an observation and a plea, to the characters as well as to readers: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (Powers, The Overstory 165)� 4 To tackle grievable nature in The Overstory, I first propose that the concept of grievability, which I transpose from Judith Butler’s writing on grievable lives, can serve as a productive concept for the analysis of environmental writing and may expand profound ecofeminist insights without risking the essentialism inherent in models such as the “ethic of care” (MacGregor 61- 65)� I then elaborate on how the aesthetics of wonder via an emphasis on networks pervade and shape Powers’ narrative and serve to create grievable nature on the page� Lastly, I illustrate that Powers’ narrative self-referentially discusses the mechanisms—or frames, as Butler calls them—of grievability with a specific focus on the way in which narratives may construct and embody such frames� 3 In an interview at Shakespeare and Company in September 2018, Powers mentioned that he “name-check[s] about three hundred trees” in the pages of The Overstory. 4 Hereafter cited as TO in the text. The Aesthetics of Wonder 191 What Counts as Livable Life and Grievable Death? 5 In 2004 Judith Butler published Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, and in 2009 Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Both works investigate the mechanisms and processes through which life becomes intelligible as life worth sustaining� Butler argues that all life is precarious and that all life depends on outward conditions to sustain it� She states, “Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live� Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear� Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters” (Butler, Frames 14)� However, realities such as war illustrate that not all life is equal� She observes, “Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as ‘grievable’” (Butler, Precarious 32)� There are lives considered “not quite lives” and thus “cast as ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’” (Butler, Frames 31)� 6 I propose to transpose the concept of grievability onto nature� While the fact that in our anthropocentric worldview a host of human lives are not considered grievable certainly complicates an extension of this concept beyond the human, the fact that “being human” and “grievable life” are by no means automatically equated renders this extension highly useful for inquiring into mechanisms of grievability� Butler herself highlights that her considerations of grievability are not focused on “whether the being in question has the status of a ‘person,’” but are rather concerned with the question of “whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible” (Frames 20) and with our obligations “to sustain life as sustainable” (23)� Renee Lertzman has argued that “In contrast to losing a person … environmental loss can be far more amorphous, particularly in a culture that does not recognize it as valid” (6)� In 2017, Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman published Mourning Nature, a collection of essays on grief born from the loss of nature, in which they emphatically underline the importance of comprehending the extension of grief and mourning “beyond the human” (3), particularly given the current realities of climate change and environmental destruction� Importantly, this grief does not solely touch past losses� Butler emphasizes that projections of the “future anterior” form an essential condition for grievability (Frames 15). Lertzman, in turn, points specifically to “environmental loss [as] ‘anticipatory’ [… ], insofar as we are mourning for loss that is likely to come” (6)� 5 Butler, Precarious xv. 6 Butler names racism as a mechanism that produces ungrievable lives: “Forms of racism instituted and active at the level of perception tend to produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss and who remain ungrievable” (Frames 24). As another example she names “those killed in the current wars […] including those the US has killed” (Butler, Frames 39)� 192 l inda m. h ess Anticipating loss has been a central part of nature writing and environmental writing in the past—for example in the works of Rachel Carson, John Muir, and Sarah Orne Jewett, or that of Frederick Olmsted arguing for protection of “wilderness” in his “Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove” 7 —which frequently tap into such anticipation of loss, pleading that nature should not be “cast as ‘destructible,’” as Butler has termed it (Frames 31). It has also become prominent in works of science fiction and speculative fiction with environmental themes, which use such anticipation for example in what has come to be known as the “if-this-goes-on story” (Octavia Butler qtd. in Canavan and Robinson 13). As such examples show, grievability, even when explicitly focused on grievable nature, is still intricately bound to human perception� Nevertheless, the concept provides new ways to think through human-nonhuman relations and to consider the conditions that sustain life� In some cases grievability results solely from the loss of nature as a loss to humans (as symbol of national greatness or as foundation of human life)� In other cases, such as Carson’s or Powers’, it in fact means recognizing nature as life in its own right� The observation that humans form deep emotional connections with nature holds a long-established and prominent place in ecofeminism, especially when it comes to questions of care� However, I hope that the concept of grievability might avoid some of the pitfalls of the “ethic of care,” popular in some strands of ecofeminism� Sherilyn MacGregor points out the problematic of uncritically adopting the position that women (often automatically understood as mothers) are instinctual caretakers and therefore better equipped to care for nature (61-64). She argues that “care is not an unqualified good” (61) but one that frequently signifies “self-sacrifice, exploitation, and loss of autonomy and leisure time” (63). Grievability expresses an emotional connection and a responsibility—which may translate into an “ethics that rests upon an apprehension of the precariousness of life, one that begins with the precariousness of the life of the Other” (Butler, Precarious xvii-xviii) without tying this ethics to gender in an essentializing way� The Overstory extends grievability as “apprehension of the precariousness of life” beyond the human� Powers does this in particular by emphasizing the myriad connections among humans and trees, and by transporting a sense of wonder at these creatures, for the ways in which their behavior resembles that of humans 8 and for the ways in which they exceed humanity’s limited existence. At the same time the novel presents a narrative that is invested in exploring mechanisms of grievability. 7 The report speaks of “the certainty — that without care many of the species of plants now flourishing upon it will be lost and many interesting objects be defaced or obscured if not destroyed” (Olmsted)� 8 Thus grievable nature is nevertheless tied to human perception� The Aesthetics of Wonder 193 There Are No Individuals in a Forest, No Separable Events 9 The Overstory expands Powers’ previous focus on ecocritical themes, particularly through the use of network imagery to transport its aesthetics of wonder� Network structures pervade the narrative, as a formal device and as metaphor� On the one hand, Powers uses the network to illustrate connections on the content-level, between characters whose storylines intersect, between humans and the non-human environment, and among trees� On the other hand, Powers, who once termed the novel itself “a supreme connection machine—the most complex artifact of networking we’ve developed” (“The Last Generalist” 104), uses the network as infrastructure, zooming in and out of storylines, fluctuating between the bigger picture and the small detail, so that sometimes readers observe individual moments of connection—the nodes of the network—and sometimes are confronted with overwhelming bird’s-eye views that suggest the expanse and fluidity of these innumerable connections� This technique taps into the general prominence of networks in the twenty-first century. In a 2015 special issue of American Studies on Network Theory and American Studies, the articles collected by Ulfried Reichardt, Heike Schäfer, and Regina Schober attest to the network as “a central concept and metaphor of our time” (12)� Elsewhere, Sianne Ngai emphasizes that since the 1960s the network has transformed into a primary concept for envisioning the world (“Network Aesthetics” 367-368)� Unsurprisingly, the concept is especially fruitful for ecocritics, for whom the focus on connections and interrelations has gained a special currency in the face of accelerating climate change in a globalized world� Moreover, given the long-standing central concern of ecology “with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” and the “totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment” (“Ecology”), the prominence of networks in The Overstory appears an organic choice� The novel embodies Emanuele Coccia’s tenet that we must understand that “[t]he world is not a place; it is a state of immersion of each thing in all other things” (67)� Her argument lays out the route to understanding via rescinding our zoocentric worldview: “To interrogate plants means to understand what it means to be in the world” (Coccia 5)� In The Overstory, the narrative sets out to interrogate plants: readers are called to pay attention to and marvel at the networks that trees form, individually and collectively� From the communities that trees build, to the myriad interactions that take place within these communities, to the communication with other life forms— readers are meant to recognize in such networks life forms equal to their own� Divided into four sections named “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds,” the novel begins by introducing, chapter by chapter, its nine human protagonists: Nicholas Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek, Neelay Metha, Patricia Westerford, and Olivia 9 Powers, TO 218� 194 l inda m. h ess Vandergriff� If The Overstory were a piece of music, its opening section might best compare to Bedřich Smetana’s symphonic poem “The Moldau,” which begins with light, rippling figures that represent the emergence of the Moldau River as two mountain springs, one warm and one cold� Water from the springs then combines to become a mighty river, symbolized by a thickly orchestrated, stately theme that recurs periodically throughout the remainder of the work� (Schwarm, n� pag�) In The Overstory nine springs combine� In section two, “Trunk,” they mingle and part, and the comparison to musical composition sustains itself since the storylines of the different figures weave in and out, like counterpoints moving through different voices, and yet all the while developing a common theme. The characters’ connections are first announced towards the end of section one, “Roots,” by the floating authorial narrative voice, which, zooming out from the details, gives readers a glimpse of the bigger picture, foreshadowing developments to come� This voice remarks that the other eight characters, who go about their lives in various parts of the United States, “are nothing to Plant-Patty [Patricia Westerford’s childhood nickname],” but that nevertheless “their lives have long been connected, deep underground� Their kinship will work like an unfolding book” (Powers, TO 132)� As the book unfolds, some of the characters meet in person� Nick, Olivia, Mimi, Doug, and Adam join the same environmental activist group� Olivia, after a near-death experience, becomes the group’s spiritual leader. Nick and Olivia become lovers� Doug and Mimi develop an intense friendship� Others will remain loosely connected� Patricia Westerford grows up to become a dendrologist who researches communication between trees� First ridiculed by fellow scientists, her findings and her name are later redeemed, and she writes The Secret Forest, a book that all eight other characters read� Neelay and Mimi hear her speak in person on one occasion� Dorothy and Ray read about the actions of the environmental activists in the newspaper� But each of the nine has a special connection with trees, and each is connected with a specific tree: chestnut, mulberry, fir, maple, gingko, oak, linden, beech, redwood� A black and white drawing of the respective tree leaf accompanies the beginning of each character’s chapter in the “Roots” section� And the trees turn out to be protagonists in their own right, anchor points for the humans, messengers, survivors, “most wondrous” beings whose communities and communication exist mostly outside the radar of human perception. Already on the first page of the novel, trees are said to speak, remember, gossip, laugh, “in the lowest frequencies,” which almost completely evade humans (Powers, TO 5)� 10 10 Powers’ anthropomorphic portrayal of the trees might be seen as problematic because it recreates the human perspective as the central one� I would rather propose that Powers ‘ depiction might bring readers to question whether what we have thought of as human traits are actually exclusive to humans. Moreover, Powers’ choice of depiction emphasizes that the recognition of similarities and feelings of kinship are essential ways that produce empathy in the human species� Powers purposefully focuses on similarities, not differences� He also does so when he depicts the A�I� “learners” as The Aesthetics of Wonder 195 Patricia Westerford’s research, which becomes the central node that ties the nine humans together, illuminates the communal networks of trees� She first realizes the connections between individual trees when she researches maples that are invaded by insects: The trees under attack pump out insecticides to save their lives� That much is uncontroversial. But something else in the data makes her flesh pucker: trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked� Something alerts them� They get wind of the disaster, and they prepare� […] The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell� Her maples are signaling� They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland� (Powers, TO 125-126, emphasis in original) Here the trees are portrayed at once as agents linked in a network and as one organism, like an immune system, leading to the following insight: “Everything in the forest, is the forest” (142)� As Patricia keeps researching, more awe-inspiring facts surface: The things she catches Douglas-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse� Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one� Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests� (142) The networks among trees are time and again used to emphasize their connectedness to each other as well as their collective intelligence� In another strand of the narrative, that of Neelay Metha, such imagery is doubled by a number of images of the Internet, the network that has become our prime concept for thinking about networks� More precisely, coding and non-linear online gaming are at the center of Neelay’s storyline� The son of Indian immigrants, Neelay begins building his first computer with his father at age seven� A few years later, he falls from a tree and becomes paralyzed, henceforth immersing himself completely in ever more complex coding. He witnesses and participates in digital evolution: Everything unfolds as Neelay foresaw it years ago� Browsers appear—yet another nail in the coffin of time and space. A click, and you’re at CERN. Another, and you’re listening to underground music from Santa Cruz� One more, and you can read a newspaper at MIT� […] The Web goes from unimaginable to indispensable, weaving the world together in eighteen months� (Powers, TO 276, emphasis in original) curious� The effect of these depictions is that humans and non-human creatures (forgive the binary) are all imagined as part of a much larger network, rather than putting an unbridgeable divide between the human and the non-human� 196 l inda m. h ess Using readers’ familiarity with the intricacies and reach of the Internet as “today’s master network” (Reichardt 21), Powers channels the marvel at nature via our habitual marveling at technology� When Neelay lies under the tree, his back shattered from his fall, looking upward, he sees [a] colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see� (Powers, TO 103, my emphasis) Later on, the parallel is emphasized further when Neelay marvels at a redwood tree: “Think of the Code that made this gigantic thing […]� How many cells inside? How many programs is it running? ” (197). Code—in trees and in computers—propels evolution; “the branch wants only to go on branching,” unfolding the network further and further (197)� What the web and trees share is collective intelligence—the network is necessary� Towards the end of the narrative simple browsers grow into complex algorithms in the same way that a grown tree branches out from a single seed. Collecting data all over the planet, artificial intelligence evolves. Powers names the bots the “invisible learners” who “preserve every single word and fit them into branching networks of sense that grow stronger with each addition” (TO 471)� The procedure is very close to the description that Patricia Westerford gives of trees and forests in her last public lecture� She claims, A forest knows things� They wire themselves up underground� There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see� Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions� Fungal synapses� What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware� (453, emphasis in original) These mirroring images of networks exemplify what Ngai has called “network aesthetics” in describing “an aesthetics that revolves around connection and information” (“Network Aesthetics” 368)� An important characteristic of network aesthetics is elusiveness� Ultimately, networks can be traced, but as a whole they escape comprehension. Their complexity results in “The narrative task” of continuously tracing “ties between a radically heterogeneous multiplicity of individual actors” (373)� The actors converging in The Overstory are both human and non-human� Powers’ network aesthetics trace various developments, trajectories, and life courses, allowing readers glimpses of the immensity of the network, the whole of which, however, cannot be grasped� The network not only expands but also multiplies in points of connection because in The Overstory connectedness is no longer limited to human interactions; it includes diverse forms of intelligence. This expansion and multiplication create a sense of being overwhelmed, but this sense is one of awe and wonder, not of disoriented anxiety. The language of the narrative suggests more than once that trees not only have agency, but also weave plans in dimensions that are beyond human understanding� This has the potential The Aesthetics of Wonder 197 to produce anxiety or paranoia, but the narrative’s portrayal of trees as creatures that might be not only on par with, but actually superior to humans, is paired not with fear, but with admiration, curiosity, and awe� The Overstory, rather than indulging in any illusion of giving us a complete picture of the network, provides us with an inkling of how many parts of the network we cannot quite grasp, and may always be missing� This effect resembles the way that gazing at a star directly in the night sky will make it disappear from our vision, whereas looking at it aslant will make it just barely perceptible in our peripheral vision� In this allusion to something greater, Powers’ narrative situates itself within existing traditions, in particular those of American Romanticism and of transcendentalist thought� As Regina Schober has observed, network imagery was already central to American philosophy and literature of the late nineteenth century and among the Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson� The aesthetics of awe and wonder Powers expresses in The Overstory are reminiscent of the emphasis Emerson puts on the metaphysical link of “individual experience” to “universal experience through a sense of divine interconnectedness” (Schober 101), an idea that he elaborates in his essay “The Over-Soul�” Powers’ link to Emerson is highlighted further through the shared preposition in their titles, The Overstory and “The Over-Soul,” which denotes the central significance of a connection that is larger than individual human existence (and comprehension) for both texts. The Living World’s Most Wondrous Creatures 11 In some ways, The Overstory evokes the sublime� As Philip Shaw states, “In broad terms, whenever experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever the power of an object or event is such that words fail and points of comparison disappear, then we resort to the feeling of the sublime” (2, emphasis in original)� The melding of awe and terror in the sublime surely seems to fit the moment when Neelay, having plummeted out of the tree, looks up into its branches, which appear at once to be “praying and threatening” (Powers, TO 103)� This ambiguous motion is paired with the question “whether the tree had it in for him” (103)� Likewise awe-inspiring is the sheer scale of the picture Powers provides when he sweeps readers along the networking processes driven by trees: the “ingenious designs that loft seeds in the air for hundreds of miles� The tricks of propagation worked upon unsuspecting mobile things tens of millions of years younger than the trees� The bribes for animals who think they’re getting lunch for free” (294)� Yet the simpler term “wonder” fits this narrative because it invokes not only crushing and engulfing sensations, but also a fellow feeling, a “kinship” that ultimately forms the basis of grievability� Houser, in her analysis of Powers earlier novel Gain, observes, “For the environmental thinkers who take inspiration from Thoreau and company, wonder is also what 11 Powers, TO 348� 198 l inda m. h ess converts inquiry into care for our astounding and increasingly threatened surroundings” (78)� This observation applies to Powers, who uses a quotation of Thoreau as one of three epigraphs of The Overstory, as well as to his human protagonists, many of whom read Thoreau and other environmental thinkers repeatedly� Within the novel “and company” also refers to Patricia Westerford, whose own book The Secret Forest does much to stir wonder in its readers (both internal and external to the novel). Incidentally, The Secret Forest begins with a recollection of kinship: “You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes” (Powers, TO 268, emphasis in original)� Other characters pick up the kinship theme� Olivia Vandergriff, who, after a near-death experience, changes from self-indulgent student to environmental activist, voices the thought that “plants are persons, too” (Powers, TO 319) to Adam Apich, the skeptical grad student of psychology who has come to interview her for his study on what motivates environmentalists� Olivia points out to him that the real focus of his study should instead be “everyone who thinks that only people matter” (319), inverting the presumed anomaly� The point is further emphasized when The Overstory portrays trees as sentient beings with “intention” (Powers, TO 283)� That trees are generally not perceived as possessing intelligence is clearly attributed to the limited perspective of humans, “who miss the half of it, and more� There is always as much belowground as above” (4)� The Overstory plays with perspective, suggesting new ways to consider trees, including seeing them as fellow creatures� Patricia Westerford insists that “trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them� This isn’t mystical� The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other” (454)� Another aspect of this shift in perspective is introduced via Ray Brinkman, the property lawyer, who reads a legal article entitled “Should Trees Have Standing? ” consequently puzzling over the ensuing questions: “What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them? ” (249)� The lines that defend the argument—“The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time” (250, emphasis in original)-allude to Christopher D� Stone’s real-life treatise Should Trees Have Legal Standing? (2010)� What becomes central for the narrative, as it prompts its characters time and again to adopt such perspectives, is that it also places a demand on readers: to take the characters’ wonder seriously� When Olivia and Nick stumble upon awe-inspiring sights in the forest, the line between artifice and accident blurs: The redwoods do strange things� They hum� They radiate arcs of force� Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes� She grabs his shoulder� “Look at that! ” Twelve apostle trees stand in a fairy ring as perfect as the circles little Nicky once drew with a protractor on rainy Sundays decades ago� Centuries after their ancestor’s death, a dozen basal clones surround the empty center, all around the compass rose� A The Aesthetics of Wonder 199 chemical semaphore passes through Nick’s brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand� That single work would be a landmark of human art� (Powers, TO 254) The exclamation “Look at that! ” interpellates readers as witnesses to the scene. The narrative seeks to affect readers, prompting them to adjust their vision so that they might share Olivia’s wonder� She perceives “The air around her spark[ing] with connections� The presences light around her, singing new songs� The world starts here. This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea” (165, emphasis in original)� Calling on readers to witness as well as to partake in the awe and wonder of the characters is central to The Overstory. It is due to this interpellation that Powers’ novel can be seen as taking part in a mode of writing that became known, through David Foster Wallace’s 1993 article “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U�S� Fiction,” as the mode of new sincerity� New sincerity turns away from poststructuralist play and from the postmodern centrality of irony� 12 In its simultaneous turn to earnest, unironic feeling, new sincerity can easily be regarded as a “natural” mode of environmental writing� 13 Those who hope to convey sincere (and urgent) messages—such as “Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together” (Powers, TO 281), or “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (165)—have to count on conveying their sincerity to their audience� As Johannes Voelz explains, because sincerity is first of all “a speech act [that] must persuade the listener as being sincere from the way it is uttered” (215), such persuasiveness is a matter of employing “a credible style or aesthetic” (215)� The Overstory turns away from postmodern aesthetic categories such as “the zany, the interesting, and the cute,” which Ngai has posited as the prime aesthetic categories of “the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Our Aesthetic Categories 1), and which govern “not only specific capacities for feeling and acting but also specific ways of relating to other subjects” (11). Powers’ aesthetics demand other forms of relating: those of awe and wonder� Nevertheless, like those aesthetic categories Ngai lists, they are meant to call “forth specific powers of feeling, knowing, and acting” (233)� The narrative prompts readers not only to consider in earnest the proposition that trees are agents with intentionality, but also—and this is perhaps the more difficult feat-to take at face value the un-ironic passion for nature that the characters present to us� And, as if anticipating resistance, Powers addresses this point directly via one of his characters� When Adam 12 Several authors have made note of Powers’ avoidance of post-structuralist modes� Nathaniel Reich calls Powers a “novelist in the grand realist tradition” and a “historian of contemporary society” (n� pag�)� In his analysis of Galatea 2.2., Jan Kucharzewski points out that Powers forgoes “engaging in a typical postmodern play with decentralized and self-consuming textual labyrinths” (69). 13 However, for anyone who has looked at, for example, Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction, such as the MaddAddam trilogy, it is clear that irony can be a mode of environmental writing as well� 200 l inda m. h ess officially joins the environmental protesters in an inaugural ceremony for new members, initially feeling repelled at the group’s “virtuous songs” and “platitudes,” he nevertheless cannot choose but wonder, “Maybe mass extinction justifies a little fuzziness. Maybe earnestness can help his hurt species as much as anything” (Powers, TO 335)� In this way, the narrative includes a meta-level reflection on its own mode of sincerity, creating a double vision which pairs a larger awareness of The Overstory as narrative with an immersion in the characters’ storylines and their sincere caring� After the giant redwood, named Mimas by the environmental activists, is cut down despite the activists’ best efforts, Olivia “touches the edge of the wondrous cut and breaks down sobbing” with grief over the loss (Powers, TO 330)� Olivia, Nick, Mimi, Douglas, and Adam lock themselves to machines, are violently harassed by the police, are gravely injured, swear oaths to defend “the common cause of living things” (336)—all out of the candid conviction that people and trees are deeply connected, “are in this together” (339). Despite her aversion to public appearances, Patricia testifies in court in order to halt deforestation because “she loves them, these intricate, reciprocal nations of tied-together life that she has listened to all life long” (282, emphasis in original)� Over and over the narrative earnestly asks, “What wouldn’t a person do, to help the most wondrous products of four billion years of creation? ” (345)� Powers’ language, moreover, furthers the personification of trees. The giant redwood, Mimas, is described as “the largest, strongest, wisest, oldest, surest, sanest living thing” (Powers, TO 262), and when Olivia gets the loggers waiting to fell the tree to use the name, it is “a small victory” (287), signifying a small step towards grievability� The spray-painted white numbers that Nick and Olivia find on trees in the forest ordered to be cut down become “[o]rders for a massacre” (254)� When Ray and Dorothy read about the chestnut blight that hit North America in the early twentieth century, this is described as a “holocaust that ravaged the landscape just before they were born” (442)� There is probably no word in the English language that is more strongly associated with mourning and that marks collective grievability as fervently� The Overstory proposes a post-humanist view as a post-anthropocentric one—humans are no longer at the center of this perspective on the world� They are part of a much larger network� Trees command the human protagonists to look, to listen, to try to understand, however inept their attempts may be� Powers’ trees are agents with their own intentionality, mysterious creatures that are at risk of being lost before humans have learned to interpret their signals, and his narrative composition seeks to make this loss intelligible as grievable� The Aesthetics of Wonder 201 What Is Needed Is a Myth 14 Claire Miye Sanford captures the self-referential qualities of The Overstory when she writes, “Powers is not only invested in writing from the perspective of trees but also in exploring what it means to write from the perspective of trees” (n� pag�)� Regarding this duality from a slightly different angle, I read it as Powers’ interest in creating grievable nature through writing� Simultaneously, his writing investigates the place of narratives in the negotiation of human-nonhuman relations, and it asks what this role may become in the current age of climate change� Compelling storylines are often the ones that tie in with values we already hold and narratives in which we are already invested as a culture� One of the already established narrative routes of affiliation between trees and people that The Overstory points to is myth� When Adam muses, “trees used to talk to people all the time� Sane people used to hear them” (Powers, TO 432), he paints a mythic, primeval connection, once vibrant, now lapsed� Powers’ narrative nudges readers to reconsider myth when he narrates the life of humans as deeply entangled with that of trees� When young Patricia receives a “bowdlerized version” of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from her father, she is immediately captivated by its opening phrase: “Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things” (117)� The story that holds her attention most is that of Daphne turning into a tree� Later on, the environmental activists give themselves tree names—“Maidenhair,” “Doug-fir,” “Maple”—and name the giant redwood they seek to protect “Mimas,” a son of Gaia (Mother Earth goddess) in Greek mythology� The narrative is sprinkled with other myths more specifically tied to America, beginning with the image on The Overstory’s hardcover book jacket, which also accentuates The Overstory’s connection to American romanticism� The cover shows a painting entitled Cathedral Forest, by Albert Bierstadt, the nineteenth-century painter whose art glorified the American West. In a similar vein, the characters are inspired by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and John Muir’s musings about the American wilderness (124). When Nick and Olivia come across “a grove of trunks six hundred years old, running upward out of sight,” these are dubbed “pillars of a russet cathedral nave” (254), a description that taps into the American history of wilderness preservation as a form of nation-building� As Alfred Runte has put it, “the natural marvels of the West compensated for America’s lack of old cities, [and] aristocratic traditions” (168)� Wilderness, which “had no counterpart in the Old World” (Nash 67), was to become that unique characteristic of the American nation. Mimi’s first-generation immigrant father knows no greater pleasure in America than to elaborately plan and document the family’s annual trips to America’s national parks (Powers, TO 36)� The outrage of Douglas and the other environmental protesters is incited by the destruction of the last untouched trees in national forests� Adam has a vision of downtown Manhattan as primordial forest: “Arboretum America” (463)� When Nick and Olivia camp out on top of the giant redwood in order 14 Powers, TO 252� 202 l inda m. h ess to save it, they are “high-wire surveyors of a newfound land” (264), and their outlook on the California landscape is described as a view of “America’s Eden” containing “last pocket relics of Jurassic forest, a world like nothing else on Earth” (319)� Wonder is therefore often connected to forms of nature that American cultural history has already taught us to value� While including these allusions, between the lines, the narrative prompts the following questions: What is it exactly that we are grieving for? Through which frames is grievability achieved? In Should Trees Have Legal Standing, Stone writes that for trees to be viewed in a new light by humanity, what is needed is a new myth (in the Barthesian sense), a narrative that compellingly transmits a world-view (29)� But changing myths in which masses of people are currently invested is not an easy game� Neelay’s highly successful Mastery proves it� His players crave “an uninhabited world,” a “virgin world” where they can build up empires as “frontiersmen, pilgrims, farmers, miners, warriors, priests” (Powers, TO 198, 275)� When Neelay proposes, after eight new incarnations of the game, to introduce limits to Mastery’s game-world—“No new continents� No sudden spawning of new mineral deposits� Regeneration only at realistic rates” (413)—his project managers doubt his sanity� They are certain he will “crash the franchise” and unanimously veto the idea (413)� The question of what role narration plays in creating grievability may be the novel’s own overstory, the canopy that spans The Overstory on the metalevel� Powers has one of his characters remark, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind� The only thing that can do that is a good story” (TO 336), only to have another character proclaim about fifty pages later that “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one” and that “no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people” (383, emphasis in original)� Powers does not give us a satisfying story (maybe to avoid the illusion of ready-made meaning)� The consequences of the protagonists’ actions remain uncertain� Actions such as sitting on top of a tree, protesting in the streets, and putting oneself in harm’s way on behalf of nature begin to frustrate the protagonists because they do not yield results in proportion to the sacrifices. Even the drastic step of Patricia’s self-immolation at a public lecture seems ineffective and short-sighted� One night, Nick dreams that “the trees laugh at them� Save us? What a human thing to do” (329, emphasis in original)� Thus, activism does not win the day� No children are introduced as beacons of hope for the immediate future� 15 People die, are incarcerated, or proceed with their lives in unassuming ways, allowing no unambiguous conclusions as to whether they have made the world a better place� The “learners,” the algorithms busily collecting all data, may be the new species on the horizon, an unexpected incarnation of the story Neelay has always loved: “Aliens land on Earth� They operate on a different scale of time� They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans” (Powers, 15 Heteronormative futurity is a myth that Powers avoids� For this and other reasons, temporality in The Overstory certainly merits a paper of its own� The Aesthetics of Wonder 203 TO 487)� And yet, whether they will remain, whether they will replace humanity, or whether nature will simply grow back is left open to time passing� Ultimately, The Overstory performs its own attempt to make the contest for the world as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people, and thus to render the world, the environment, nature, grievable� Does this mean that Powers falls for a romantic vision of the “ability of poetry to re-enchant the world” (Clark 23)? In The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America Dana Philipps points to this risk when she complains that ecocritics frequently put too much faith in the miracles literature can weave (7)� Powers engages the trope� He has his characters voice it, in different registers� Adam explains to his students, “You can’t see what you don’t understand” (Powers, TO 439)� Within the narrative, Patricia mirrors Powers’ own endeavor of writing for a change of perspective� After publishing The Secret Forest, in which she details the social life of trees and their many wondrous abilities, Patricia receives letters from readers who say, “I didn’t realize,” and “I’ve started seeing things,” attesting to her book’s ability to make people “think about life in a different way” (258, emphasis in original)� This is the hopeful outlook for the novel itself� But taking the investigation into grievability seriously, in the awareness that our myths constitute the framing structures that guide what we value and what we would count as loss, also means having a critical look at what we habitually ignore, or have erased from our consciousness� Here, two small moments in the last part of the novel stand out� They caution that grievability is also always a question of how many connections within a network we can meaningfully hold in our minds. The first moment is the short spotlight on the Occupy movement—as a quick flash reminder that social and economic inequalities are deeply entangled with “the contest for the world” and have to be thought within the network as well� The second moment comprises Nick’s encounter—deep in the forest—with a Native American man, who helps Nick build a sculpture out of fallen tree trunks. When Nick expresses his wonder at the tree—“It amazes me how much they say, when you let them� They’re not that hard to hear”—the man answers, “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492” (Powers, TO 493)� What stands out to me here is not some idea that Native tribes have all the answers because they are in some essentialist way closer to nature, but this brief exchange provides a reminder that the history of human interaction with America’s 16 is deeply entangled with re-definitions of nature and specific narratives that expose grievability as generally highly selective� The Overstory thus takes on two projects: its narrative constructs grievable nature via network aesthetics that fuel a sense of wonder at what life can do, but it also draws attention to grievability as a product of specific mechanisms playing on prominent values (and myths) of a given society� Ultimately, the novel does not provide a ready-made answer to the question of what narrative may do in the age of the Anthropocene, or 16 In Dispossessing the Wilderness (1999) Mark David Spence details, for example, how native tribes using land that became dedicated as national parkland were first defined as part of nature and later removed as “enemies” of nature� 204 l inda m. h ess what humans may do� Similar to Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic, 17 A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community� It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (224-225), the question of what the “right” things are is passed on to the readers, or possibly the “learners”—maybe because “a good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch” (Powers, TO 3, emphasis in original)� Works Cited Bieger, Laura� “‘I Am No One’: Self-Narration Between Continuity and Disorder in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.” Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers. Eds� Antje Kley and Jan Kucharzewski� Heidelberg: Winter, 2012� 195-216� Butler, Judith� Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004� ---� Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009� Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds� Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2014� Charles, Ron� “The Overstory by Richard Powers Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction�” The Washington Post. April 15, 2019� April 24, 2019� Clark, Timothy� The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011� Coccia, Emanuele� The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018� Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Karen E� Landman� Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017� “Ecology�” Def� 1 and 2� Merriam-Webster. May 4, 2019� Emerson, Ralph Waldo� “The Over-Soul�” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Vol. II. Eds� Alfred R� Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979� Foster Wallace, David� “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U�S� Fiction�” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13�2 (1993): 151-194� Garrard, Greg� “Ecocriticsm as Narrative Ethics: Richard Powers’ Gain.” Academia.edu� May 10, 2019� Heise, Ursula K� Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Houser, Heather� Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia UP, 2014� Ickstadt, Heinz� “The Multiple Functions of Richard Powers’ Fictions�” Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers� Eds� Antje Kley and Jan Kucharzewski� Heidelberg: Winter, 2012� Kucharzewski, Jan. “The Irreducible Complexity of the Analog World: Nodes, Networks, and Actants in Contemporary American Fiction�” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60�1 (2015): 121-138� Leopold, Aldo� “The Land Ethic�” A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford UP, 1949. 201-26� 17 Powers also alludes to Leopold’s text when Adam joins the environmental activists (TO 336)� The Aesthetics of Wonder 205 Lertzman, Renee� Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2015� MacGregor, Sherilyn� Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care� Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006� Monastersky, Richard� “Anthropocene: The Human Age�” Nature 519�7542 (2015): 144-147� Nash, Roderick� Wilderness and the American Mind. 1967� New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2014� Ngai, Sianne� “Network Aesthetics�” American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions. Eds� Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby� New York: Columbia UP, 2012� 367-392� ---� Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015� Print� Philipps, Dana� The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Powers, Richard� “The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers�” Interview by Jeffrey Williams� Minnesota Review 52-54 (2001): 95-114� ---� The Overstory. New York: Norton, 2018� Reich, Nathaniel� “The Novel That Asks, ‘What Went Wrong With Mankind? ’” The Atlantic� June 2018� April 12, 2019� Reichardt, Ulfried� “The Network as a Category in Cultural Studies and as a Model for Conceptualizing America�” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60: 1 (2015): 17-36� Reichardt, Ulfried, Heike Schäfer, and Regina Schober� “Introduction: Network Theory and American Studies�” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60�1 (2015): 11-16� Runte, Alfred� National Parks: The American Experience. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979� Sanford, Claire Miye� “Speaking for the Trees: Richard Powers’ The Overstory.” Los Angeles Review of Books. May 10, 2018� April 10, 2019� Schober, Regina� “America as Network: Notions of Interconnectedness in American Transcendentalism and Pragmatism�” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60�1 (2015): 97-119� Schwarm, Betsy� “The Moldau, Symphonic Poem by Smetana�” Encyclopedia Britannica. May 14, 2013� Web� April 11, 2019� Shaw, Philip� The Sublime. New York: Routledge, 2006� Stone, Christopher D� Should Trees Have Legal Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Voelz, Johannes� “The New Sincerity as Literary Hospitality�” Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives. Eds� Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge� New York: Routledge, 2016� 209-226� J ennifer g reiman Militant, Ruthless, Round: Herman Melville, William Connolly, and the Aesthetics of Radical Democracy “But I was talking about the ‘Whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he’s in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago� I’m going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other.” Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1 July 1851 “We are, as it were, under water in the grip of a hungry crocodile at the onset of its death roll…� Luckily, I met a woman in Australia ten years ago who had been caught in a crocodile death roll and escaped�” William Connolly, The Fragility of Things 1. Radical Democracy In the most influential formulations of radical democratic theory, democracy is often characterized by a notable lack of characteristics� Most famously, Claude Lefort argued in 1989 that “the revolutionary and unprecedented future of democracy” lies in the fact that “the locus of power is an empty place; it cannot be occupied … and it cannot be represented” (Lefort 17)� In 2002, Jacques Derrida argued that democracy, understood in its most fundamental sense, is always “democracy to come” because “it is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological difference” (Derrida 38-39). More recently, Jacques Rancière has defined democracy as groundless because, understood in its strongest political sense, “the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all” (Rancière 50). Empty, to come, groundless; defined by both spatial and temporal gaps; and resistant to representation: such a concept would seem to demand that we leave it alone, without qualities or qualification. And yet, to speak of democracy in this way still demands that we modify it� We call it “radical” to carry it back (literally, etymologically) to its “roots,” to rescue it from the accretion of those adjectives which belie and betray it: liberal democracy, constitutional democracy, representative democracy� Radical democracy does not just refer to a stronger, more egalitarian, or more direct expression of these, but to the form of democracy that opposes itself to the others by rejecting presupposed foundations that claim to give democracy its enduring forms—a constitution, 208 J ennifer g reiman a nation, even a presumptive people� 1 That is, radical democracy has become the necessarily compound name for the thesis that democracy is always becoming something else, the theory that there is and must be a basic selfdifference at the very root of any genuinely democratic formation� Given all this, it may well be that “radical democracy” as a term is both a redundancy and a paradox—an acknowledgment that the truest name for democracy is so lost to modernity that it can only appear to us as modified and supplemented. But I am more interested in another function of this modification—the aesthetic. I wonder how the very demand for the modifier opens up possibilities for qualitative and sensible distinctions within radical conceptions of democracy� At its root and radical, democracy may be “empty,” always “to come,” and “groundless,” but as these formulations all show, this fundamental self-difference is not one thing but many, nor is it without precise qualities, however fleeting. “There is an aesthetics in all things,” Herman Melville’s Ishmael insists, as he considers the color and texture of “the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line” that threatens to strangle him (Moby-Dick 278). Taking Ishmael at his word, I want to explore how a series of adjectives—radical, ruthless, militant, and round—figure differences within democracy’s ontological instability, qualifying it and giving it not only sensible features, but forceful ones at that� Of course, like the whale-line, democracy risks becoming alternately magical and horrible when it is viewed as an aesthetic phenomenon� On the one side, aesthetics seems to threaten democracy with a mystification that evacuates it of all political force, while on the other aesthetics threatens to fuse it with either sovereign or fascist violence� If my essay is about the distinct aesthetics that might appear in radical democracy’s dependence on grammatical modification, it is also concerned with the ways in which attention to the myriad forms of radical democracy’s instability may also address the risks that aesthetics and force always seem to pose to democratic politics� Those risks have been elaborated in a great deal of recent work on which I am building—in particular, by Paul Downes, Eric Santner, and Russ Castronovo, all of whom have examined aesthetics as these appear in the very place where democracy intersects with either sovereign or extra-legal violence� For Downes and Santner, the aesthetic stands at the origins and the ends of democratic sovereignty, respectively, as constituent act and surplus remainder� In Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature, Downes places the act of representation, equal parts democratic and aesthetic, at the inception of sovereign power (Downes 60-61)� Rightly understood, he argues, Leviathan is the collective, artificial supplement through which a people is constituted: “There is no democracy … without … a sovereign supplement,” but it is ultimately “the event of representation, the generation of an artificial social sovereignty” that makes Leviathan (67). In Santner’s 1 This is also the story that Raymond Williams tells in his chapter on “democracy” in Keywords: “one of the most significant changes in the meaning of the word democracy is in this exclusive association with one of its derived forms [representative democracy], and the attempted exclusion of one of its original forms, at one point its only form” (95). Militant, Ruthless, Round 209 Royal Remains, by contrast, the aesthetic tracks with the surplus remains of the king’s sovereign flesh as it migrates from monarchic to popular forms across the long nineteenth century, a persistent excess that, he argues, “must be managed” through biopolitics, psychoanalysis, and Modernist aesthetics (Santner xxi). Taken together, Downes and Santner define aesthetics as the art and artifice of a sovereign force that both constitutes democracy and threatens it� As Castronovo shows in Beautiful Democracy, the aesthetic often “reveals the political terrain of democracy as erratic and shifting” in this way (Castronovo 2)—dividing it on axes of preservation and transformation, hegemony and anarchy, autonomy and collectivity—because, he argues, “when aesthetic form shapes political possibility, violence appears at the edges of the discourse on beauty” (6)� Where literary scholars have tended to emphasize the double edge of democratic aesthetics, the violence at the edge of beauty, political theorists Lia Haro and Romand Cole have recently proposed, without ambivalence, what is best described as an aesthetic strategy for a revitalized, counterfascist, democratic politics� In “Eleven Theses on Neo-Fascism and the Fight to Defeat It” from a January 2017 special issue of Theory & Event, Haro and Cole build on the work of William Connolly to call for “new surges of radical creativity” that respond more effectively than “rote protest politics” to the “chaos sovereignty” and affective “amplification” of neo-fascism in the US and globally (Haro and Cole S100-01)� Democracy, they argue, must “become a double politics that can both combat the shock politics and resonant violence characteristic of the new fascism and creatively generate viable democratic alternatives” (S105)� Such creativity cannot be limited to public demonstration, they continue, but must become a “full-bodied” politics that “holds together in mutually reinforcing relations muscle, heart, and receptive senses�” What is more, such politics must embrace self-difference and “never perform [itself] the same way twice” (S106)� In calling for a revitalized democratic politics through creative, muscular, and mutable actions, along with an expanded political sensorium, Haro and Cole suggest that the radicalism of such a democratic practice is aesthetic at its root, and it is only in this that it has effective, counter-fascist force� Such a linkage of creativity and force may well promise to revitalize democratic politics in the face of new risks, but I would argue that there is nothing new about this vision of democracy’s aesthetic radicalism� In what follows, I’d like to connect such recent turns in political theory to Herman Melville’s writing from the late 1840s on� Working backwards through two examples from Melville’s corpus—what he called “my ruthless democracy” in a famous 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Round Robin mutiny from his 1847 novel, Omoo—I aim to describe a democratic force at work in Melville’s writing that speaks both to the politics of aesthetic radicalism and to the formal experimentation of Melville’s radical aesthetics. To develop the former, I’ll have recourse to recent work by William Connolly and, to a lesser extent, Étienne Balibar, both of whom have proposed ways of thinking about the place of violence and force in democracy—Connolly through a 210 J ennifer g reiman notion of a “militant democratic creativity” and Balibar through his concept of “civility�” For both Connolly and Balibar, radical democratic politics are rooted in the transience and self-difference that Derrida calls “democracy to come�” But even as both associate such politics with the need for forceful action, neither assumes that such action can only take the form of the sovereign “I can�” Instead both propose subtler ways of thinking about force and action, with Connolly deriving “militant democratic creativity” from processes that lie outside of human action and Balibar describing “civility” as intimately responsive to the forms of extreme violence such politics would oppose. In this, both seem to me to be sharing in the great insight behind what Melville calls the ruthless democracy that shapes his whole aesthetic project: namely, that democracy has its most radical force, not in sovereignty or violence, but in an unpredictable, improvisational, and irreducibly aesthetic form of creativity� 2. Ruthless Democracy In June of 1851, in the final stages of his work on Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote one of his most famous—if least erotic—letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne� 2 But what this particular letter lacks in the language of hearts beating in shared ribcages and lips touching on shared flagons, it more than makes up for in the expansiveness of the vision of life, writing, and democracy that it articulates� Opening the letter with a series of apologies for his negligence in visiting his more famous and patrician friend, Melville suddenly reverses course and withdraws the apology, saying “with no son of men do I stand on etiquette or ceremony.” He then goes on to explain what he calls his “ruthless democracy” in terms that, over the course of the letter, literalize democracy’s most radical roots� So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of shrink, or something of that sort� It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen� George Washington� This is ludicrous� But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun� … It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind—in the mass� But not so�—But it’s an endless sermon,—no more of it� (Correspondence 191) Melville concedes that his belief in democracy is both fixed and conflicted, captured in the paradox of asserting total equality and selective preference at once� Laying claim to an idea of democracy that is “ruthless,” Melville detaches it from pity, sentiment, partiality, and compromise and describes instead a principle that moves between the personal and impersonal, irreducible to either particularity or universality� Such a “ruthless” principle cannot be swayed by particular feelings of sympathy any more than it can be undone by a universal “dislike to all mankind—in the mass�” This is a democracy that 2 A brief sample: “Your heart beats in my ribs and mine in yours … Hawthorne� By what right do you drink of my flagon of life? And when I put my lips there! Lo! They are yours and not mine! ” (Correspondence 212)� Militant, Ruthless, Round 211 is “unconditional” without being given� That is, as the ludicrous becomes truth and truth ludicrous, “ruthless democracy” entails Melville in a practice of ongoing action and articulation—“an endless sermon”—through which he must constantly and “boldly” proclaim the equality of all that is denied everywhere by everyone, and he must proclaim it not as a feeling but as a fact� For this reason, Melville may try to end the endless sermon at the start of the letter, but he cannot abandon the principle he has claimed because that principle turns out to be a full-bodied process without beginning or end� Shifting into a vegetable idiom, Melville then pursues and extends his account of a “ruthless democracy” that is both true and ludicrous, both personal and impersonal, through images of growing grass that repeat throughout the letter as these elicit a series of sensations that relay between the “I” and the “all�” Biography becomes botany as each invocation of grass hinges on what the “I” can and cannot feel, know, or own� On the circumstances of family and farm that pull him out of work on “the Whale,” he writes: “The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose—that, I fear, can never be mine” (191)� On the belatedness of his development after his twenty-fifth year, he writes: “I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, grew to greenness, and then fell to mold� So I” (193)� On the truth in what he has earlier called the flummery of Goethe’s ‘all-feeling’: “You must often have felt it, lying in the grass on a warm summer’s day� Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth� Your hair feels like leaves upon your head� This is the all feeling” (194)� Unable to make the “silent grass-growing mood” his own, he turns grassy himself, becoming a seed that sprouts, “grows to greenness,” and goes to seed, only to lay himself down in the grass, sprout once again, and concede some truth to Goethe� In this way, the grass that winds its way through the disparate claims of this letter models a process of sustaining transformation that Melville cannot fully claim or direct, even as it is peculiar and particular to him� Although it goes by the name of “ruthless democracy” in the opening of the letter and the “‘all’ feeling” by its postscript, this process conforms to a specific political ontology that Melville begins to tease out in his earliest novels and fully develops in Moby-Dick and Pierre� Key to this ontology is the linking of abundant vegetal and animal life with the multivalent senses and actions that declare and fix particular truths and ludicrous sensations over and over again� For all of the grass that sprouts, grows to greenness, and goes to seed in this letter, Melville makes an equally forceful appeal for the work that remains necessary to his life, his politics, and above all his art—work that includes endless sermons on equality, reveries in the grass on warm summer days, and all of his “botched” books� Such work mirrors the process of vegetable life, in part, because the aesthetic and political tasks that are necessary to “ruthless democracy” are endless� That is, “ruthless democracy” involves a process that is recurrent and self-organizing, like the growth and going-to-seed of grass, but it demands the constant effort of a “never-ending 212 J ennifer g reiman sermon” because there is no decisive action or assertion that can fix equality on a permanent foundation even as the equality of all life manifests itself everywhere� In this, Melville’s “ruthless democracy” speaks to the transient and unstable qualities of democratic action that William Connolly has theorized as a radical “politics of becoming,” 3 while it also highlights what is essentially aesthetic in such a politics� 3. Militant Democracy In two of his recent books, A World of Becoming and The Fragility of Things, Connolly has drawn on process ontology and speculative realism to develop this politics of becoming as a corrective to both the theories and practices of democracy that, he says, “deny something essential to our engagement with the contemporary condition” (Fragility 11)� That condition, Connolly argues, is one in which ecological destruction, capitalist expansion, and political violence at once defy traditional models of sovereignty and “require a very large state to support and protect [the] preconditions” of power� The corrective, he argues, involves a re-scaled theory of politics which can grapple with “multiple zones of temporality” as well as “differential degrees of agency” all of which “move at different speeds” (Becoming 6-7)� Human and nonhuman forces do not share temporalities that can be linked in easy relations of causation, he says, and so it is not enough to develop an account of how, say, neoliberalism intensifies and accelerates ecological collapse, but neither is it enough to demand changes in political priorities, rights, or policies� Instead, the contemporary condition demands “a difficult combination” of all these things and more: If you join attention to differing degrees of creativity in the domains of human culture, nonhuman force fields, and culture-nature imbrications to a critical account of the expansion, intensification, and acceleration of neoliberal capitalism, you may be brought face-to-face with the fragility of things today—that is, with growing gaps and dislocations between the demands neoliberalism makes upon several human activities and nonhuman fields and the capacities of both to meet them. Almost paradoxically, I contend, an educated sense of the fragility of things today solicits a more refined sensitivity by us to dangers attached to several contemporary institutions and role definitions and that the inculcation of such sensitivities must be linked to a more militant democratic politics� (Fragility 10) Connolly’s call for a link between sensitivity and militancy is not “almost paradoxical” so much as it is multiply paradoxical—that is, it contains paradoxes of agency, temporality, orientation, and quality all at once. At the same time Connolly calls for new understandings of agency that are attuned to the entanglement of “differing degrees of creativity in the domains of human culture, nonhuman force fields, and culture-nature imbrications” (10), he also insists on “a politics of democratic activism” (11)� At the same time he says that such politics must “slow down” in order to attend to what falls 3 In Bonnie Honig’s phrase (46-7)� Militant, Ruthless, Round 213 outside “habitual” modes of perception, he also calls on it to “speed up” in order to keep pace with unimaginably rapid changes in political identities, state priorities, and economic practices (11). The paradox of sensitivity and militancy ultimately demands qualities and intensities of orientation and action that appear to be totally at odds with one another� Nevertheless, Connolly suggests that sensitivity and militancy are joined by a concept of creativity, which he situates at the intersection of becoming and activism� Connolly uses the term “creativity” to describe “self-organizing processes” that are heterogeneous, non-teleological, and ultimately not reducible to causal explanation. “Self-organization means a process by which, say, a simple organism restlessly seeks a new resting point upon encountering a shock or disturbance� Such activity may periodically bring something new into the world” (8)� “Real creativity,” he says, lies in the emergence of such new things and is as likely to appear within nonhuman processes as it is within the “puny human estate” (8). Although he does not explicitly tease this out, Connolly suggests that any “militant democratic politics” must partake of this creativity precisely because it is joined to a sensitivity to selforganizing processes� That is, rather than a theory of becoming that holds up non-human processes as alternatives to “politics of democratic activism,” he suggests that militant democracy derives from the relation and creative interaction between them� Finally, in allying militancy with sensitivity and creativity (rather than sovereignty), Connolly distinguishes it from violence in ways that echo Étienne Balibar’s concept of civility as a political response to extreme violence. Balibar defines civility as a principle of “anti-violence” that must accompany the radical politics of emancipation and transformation� Where emancipation describes forms of collective resistance to every limitation placed on rights, and transformation describes forms of collective insurgency that must re-found rights again and again beyond all limitation, civility appears as a check on the violence of insurgency: “unless a politics of civility is introduced into the heart of the politics of transformation,” Balibar writes, “[it] will not create the conditions for emancipation” (Balibar 104)� Civility is thus “the political action that specifically pursues anti-violence” (23), which Balibar is careful to differentiate from abstract non-violence on the one hand and mimetic counter-violence on the other� Civility is, instead, a “negation” of violence, a collective political action that responds to a particular form of violence as an internal displacement of it� Like civility, Connolly’s “militant democracy” aims to describe a creative collective force that cannot be presupposed (either as agent or action) because it is precisely attuned to specific formations of extreme violence or crisis. Where Balibar elaborates several strategies of civility through political philosophy, 4 Connolly is scrupulously vague about what kinds of practices and modes of creativity might comprise democratic militancy� But if 4 These are the hegemonic strategy (via Hegel), the majoritarian strategy (via Marx), and the becoming-minoritarian strategy (via Deleuze)� See: Balibar 108-24� 214 J ennifer g reiman Connolly doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete examples, he nevertheless concludes his call for a more sensitive and militant democratic politics with a memorably strange figure for it: We are, as it were, under water in the grip of a hungry crocodile at the onset of its death roll� Moreover, we are surrounded by many who fail or refuse—for reasons rooted in conceptions of science, religious faith, or economic activity—to be moved by the situation� Luckily, I met a woman in Australia ten years ago who had been caught in a crocodile death roll and escaped� (Fragility 11) In the midst of Connolly’s inquiry into self-organizing processes, non-human creativities, and democratic militancy, a hungry beast pulls us into the water to devour us, raising the obvious question: Is this a political theory crocodile, or a post-humanist crocodile? That is, are we meant to read this as the constitutive outside of political covenant—the beast to the sovereign—or as the sign of nonhuman life to which we are ontologically bound? In some sense, it appears to be both� If Connolly reprises his discipline’s long history of invoking beasts to describe the crises and limits of political power here, the strangeness of his metaphor for the contemporary condition also introduces something new into it� For one thing, his metaphorical crocodile is neither prior to a political relation nor the monstrous creature of it� Indeed, the metaphor suggests that the crocodile is this relation� Its actions—its grip and its roll—are the contemporary condition of multiple crises to which both sensitivity and militancy must respond creatively, not by killing but by escaping� The hungry crocodile stays hungry, but both we and it—not to mention that Australian woman—all live to swim another day� In the end, Connolly’s crocodile seems most salient as a meta-figure for the conceits of political theory that continually re-inscribe human subjects acting with force on exceptional objects, and the possibility of escaping such conceits altogether speaks to the urgency with which, Connolly argues, the contemporary world demands something more from politics than another death roll of sovereign violence� That something more can only come when we reimagine democratic force through aesthetic sensibilities and actions—a sensitivity joined to a creativity. And if this crocodile does serve as a complex figure for how political theory might respond to the contemporary condition with a militant politics of genuine creativity, it is also the place where Connolly shows himself to be a very Melvillean political theorist� Midway through Melville’s grassy letter to Hawthorne, he suddenly remembers why he had written in the first place—to tell Hawthorne about his book: But I was talking about the ‘Whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he’s in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago� I’m going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other. (192) Both Connolly and Melville figure forth creatures in a death roll, but for both of them, these figures are less metaphors than creatures to whose actions and force we must be attuned so that we can respond creatively� As readers of Moby-Dick well know, the whale in a flurry is one whose death is both agonized and ritualized, characterized as much by thrashing movements in Militant, Ruthless, Round 215 which, Ishmael tells us, the whaleman necessarily becomes caught up, as by its final roll—a turning-to through which the whale dies with one eye always upon the sun. That is, the whale that Melville conjures himself “finishing up” in this letter is not a beast to be killed but a creative creature like himself� The force of the whale in this letter does not lie in the demand that it be killed or cast out, but instead in the way that it is enabling Melville, in the final weeks of writing Moby-Dick, to figure creativity as a ruthless democratic art—and a very round one at that� 4. Round Democracy In the “Etymology” that opens Moby-Dick, a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School instructs the reader that the English word, “whale” is derived “more immediately from the Dut� and Ger�, Wallen … to roll, to wallow�” At its etymological root, that is, the whale rolls, and with its rolling the whale becomes living cetacean counterpart to the famous image of democracy as a giant circle that Ishmael proposes in the first of two chapters called “Knights and Squires”: But this august dignity I treat of is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity that has no robed investiture� Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! (Moby-Dick 117) Democratic dignity requires no clothing but it takes distinct shape: indeed, throughout Moby-Dick, collective formations that carry force are round� From the “center and circumference of all democracy” in “Knights and Squires,” to Ahab’s authoritarian “cogged circle that fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve” (167), to the miles-wide circle of sperm whales in “The Grand Armada” who have “sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection” (382), to the vortex which swallows the Pequod in the final pages, Melville draws magical, horrible circles around the forceful collective actions that both save and kill. But to regard the Pequod’s final spiral from circumference to center as the end of Moby-Dick’s round democratic art would be to miss the ruthlessness with which Melville’s circles repeat and recur� The circle of democratic dignity is less the beginning of a democratic process than it is an intensification of several circular political figures that appear in Melville’s novels throughout the late 1840s, particularly those which are centrally concerned with questions of sovereign power (White- Jacket and Mardi), class antagonism (Redburn), and representations of grievance and right (Omoo). The full significance of these circles to both Melville’s aesthetics and his politics does not appear in any single image, episode, or work from this period� Instead, they must be read as part of a larger cycle of political thinking and aesthetic experimentation across multiple books. Thus, in the case of the circle in “Knights and Squires,” it is not what follows it but what precedes it that best reveals its radicalism� In closing, I want to trace 216 J ennifer g reiman this circle of hands and arms back to its first invocation in Omoo and its most likely source in an apocryphal pirate tale to show how deeply Melville roots his ruthless democracy in his aesthetic practice� The earliest of Melville’s politically charged circles appears in the episode of the Round Robin mutiny early in his second novel, Omoo� Melville wrote Omoo in 1847 as a follow up to his tremendously popular first novel, Typee, the quasi-fictional account of a young American sailor who deserts a whaleship on the island of Nukuheva, to spend several months among the Typee tribe who had successfully staved off colonization from both American and French invaders for a half-century� Omoo picks up where Typee leaves off, with the rescue from the Typee Valley of the American sailor (who is confusingly called Tommo in Typee but Typee in Omoo) by an Australian whaleship, the Julia� Typee describes the Julia as decrepit, poorly captained, and run by a crew of “the villains of all nations” under the command of a perpetually drunk first mate (Omoo 14)� With both the captain and several members of the crew suffering from syphilis, and with insufficient food to maintain the health of the rest of the crew, the captain abandons the whale hunt and sails for Tahiti, where the sailors believe they will be released from their contracts or, at the very least, permitted shore leave on the most storied and spectacular island in the South Pacific. But when the captain goes ashore this storied island alone and commands the drunk mate to resume the hunt, the outraged crew “begin breathing nothing but outright mutiny” (73)� As they plot to take the ship and debate whether to kill the mate, Typee offers a creative political solution: “I proposed that a ‘Round Robin’ should be prepared and sent ashore to the consul … The idea took mightily, and I was told to set about it at once” (76). Cobbling together stationary from the flyleaf of A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies, ink from “a little pitch,” and a pen from an albatross feather, I indicted upon a chest-lid, a concise statement of our grievances; concluding with the earnest hope, that the consul would at once come off, and see how matters stood, for himself� Right beneath the note was described the circle about which the names were to be written; the great object of a Round Robin being to arrange the signatures in such a way that, although they are all found in a ring, no man can be picked out as the leader of it� (76) The Round Robin is notable for many reasons� For one thing, it marks a rare successful mutiny in Melville’s corpus, something which seemed all but impossible in Typee, where the miserable crew of another poorly supplied whaleship are so sunk in individual suffering that they “are only united in enduring without resistance the unmitigated tyranny of the captain” (Typee 21) By contrast, the crew of the Julia, though equally distressed, unite to assert their common rights, overthrow the rule of the captain, and secure their freedom from the ship� And Typee goes to great lengths to underscore the political meaning of their mutiny: beginning in a “council upon the forecastle” (Omoo 71) which grows into a “forecastle parliament” and finally a “democracy in the forecastle” (74), the episode marks the culmination of a debate among the men about the merits of violent and non-violent resistance� It yields a Militant, Ruthless, Round 217 concrete collective act of representation which does not delegate the crew’s authority because, by design, the Round Robin works by pluralizing its authorship and dispersing leadership among the signatories� That act produces both a collective body acting in concert and a visual representation of their action—another rarity in in Melville’s work—which Typee first describes at length and then reproduces on the page� In reconstructing the Round Robin, Typee does not list the men’s demands or grievances, but he does reproduce the image of fourteen names ringed around a circle, inside of which appear fourteen crudely drawn hands, each pointing to a name, and the underlined words “all hands.” The phrase “all hands” points to the figured hands, which point to the names raying out along the circumference—names which are themselves collectively owned and authored� 5 All of the names signed to the Round Robin are their ship names—those by which each man “went among the crew” (75)� Taken together, the narrative description and visual reproduction of the Round Robin show it as clear precursor to Ishmael’s radiant circle of “democratic dignity” in “Knights and Squires”: it is a circle that places “all hands”—those that wield picks and drive spikes (Moby-Dick 117)—in the center, and all of the names by which they are known to each other around the circumference� And in this circle of hands and names that point only to themselves, they bring forth something new� That something new is really three things� It is a collective actor that is constituted in what Paul Downes calls “the event of representation” (67)� It is a creative action that is both militant in Connolly’s sense and anti-violent in Balibar’s, displacing the violence of mutiny without evacuating the force of their insubordination. And, finally, it is an aesthetic work that creatively responds to the conditions on the ship by repurposing found materials into a visual artifact� 5 Katie McGettigen develops a compelling reading of these signatures through Derrida’s claims about the counterfeit nature of all signatures (45-46)� Fig� 1� “The Round Robin” (Omoo 77) 218 J ennifer g reiman Grounded as it is in the politics of representation rather than those of direct action, the Round Robin may seem a strange example of Melville’s ruthless democracy, but it is perhaps better described as an act of meta-representation—that is, it reflects and expands on the political history of representation itself. Specifically, the Round Robin strongly echoes two famous revolutionary circles: the “vicious circle” of presuppositional authority that Abbé Sieyès argues can only be avoided by an act of “extraordinary representation” (Sieyès 56), and the figure of the nation that Thomas Paine describes as “a body contained within a circle, having a common centre … formed by representation” (Paine 181). Melville’s Round Robin proposes a counter-figure to both of these, one that resists delegation and reasserts the constituent collective as both the source of authority and the agent of it� Simply put, the Round Robin represents democracy as a representation, but one that consists of act, agent, and art all at once—and the art of this is key� Melville’s aesthetics are more figurative than mimetic, and so too is his circular image of representation� To borrow F� R� Ankersmit’s distinction between mimetic and aesthetic representation, Melville’s Round Robin more closely resembles the latter, emphasizing representation as a generative act that creates something different, a new political reality apart from its constituent parts, all of which are also re-defined by their participation. Melville’s circle figures its constitutive members non-mimetically: names and hands point to each other as the distinct figurations of persons, while the all and the each remain visible in a balanced paradox. But, ultimately, I want to argue that the radicalism of the Round Robin lies in the detail with which Typee describes its fabrication and the materials that comprise it� Those materials include natural objects (an albatross feather), the stuff with which the sailors work (“a little pitch”), and a very layered historical fiction (the blank flyleaf of an apocryphal book, A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies)� The title that Typee refers to here is a fabrication, which has often led critics to dismiss the Round Robin episode as a joke through which Melville delegitimizes the actions of the crew as mere criminality� But in linking the Round Robin to piracy, Melville instead shows the precise place where its political significance lies. Melville’s almost certain source for the signatory device of the Round Robin was Captain Charles Johnson’s 1726 edition of his infamous General History of the Pyrates—the primary source text for historians of radical piracy like Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, Sonja Schillings, and Srinivas Aruvamudan� 6 Johnson’s book is more notable for its tales of pirate social contracts, articles of pirate confederation, and commonly held spoils than it is for tales of raiding and pillaging� Petitioning the crown for a pardon, so they could return to England, they signed their appeal “in the Manner of what they call a Round Robin, that is, 6 “Captain Johnson” is a pseudonym that has led to centuries of speculation on the authorship of the book, which was for a good 80 years attributed to Daniel Defoe� See: Srinivas Aruvamudan, Tropicopolitans (84) and Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations (179 fn� 24)� Militant, Ruthless, Round 219 the Names were writ in a Circle, to avoid all Appearance of Pre-eminence, least any Person should be mark’d out by the Government, as a principle Rogue among them” (Johnson 338)� Like the crew of the Julia, Melville tears a page from the book of piracy to draft his Round Robin� Both the reason given for the Round Robin in Omoo— the plan to petition the crown for release—and the description of the strategy behind the circular signatures come directly out of Johnson’s account of these reluctant rogues. In both Johnson’s and Melville’s definition of the Round Robin, too, it is the collective nature of the device—the avoidance of “all Appearance of Pre-eminence”—that is its most significant feature. In this, Melville casts the actions of the Julia’s crew as radically circular, resurrecting a 123-year-old action toward the creation of a new act and actor� But the full force of Melville’s use of the Round Robin lies in his creative addition to it—the visual representation of the device� Where Johnson reproduces the men’s petition on the page, Melville draws the circular device itself, and with this, he underscores the Round Robin as a creative, aesthetic work� With this, the circle of hands and names comes loose from both the thematics of the mutiny and from its textual location in the novel. In terms of its function in the plot of Omoo, the Round Robin is a fleeting and fairly ineffectual moment of collection action. But in terms of its figurative function, this circle becomes powerfully generative of scenes of resistance and collective articulation, in Omoo and beyond� Moving through Melville’s work like the reverberations of a capillary wave, circles form around the resistance of Tahitians to the imposition of European time (ch� 42) and the missionaries’ prohibitions against dancing women (ch� 63)� As these capillary waves pass through Mardi and White-Jacket, they assume the very shapes of sovereign force—“the insphered sphere of spheres” which houses absolute rule and “the mysterious circles” in the belly of the naval ship where powder is stored� But even if they enable Ahab’s “one cogged circle” to make the “various wheels” of his crew revolve to his will (Moby-Dick 167), these waves also roll with the whale to form both the circle of democratic dignity and the Grand Armada of cetacean social contract in Moby-Dick. Radical in their origins and ruthless in their recurrence, these circles ultimately reveal the democratic force that runs through Melville’s art as a transient, militant, and irreducibly aesthetic creativity� Understood in this way, aesthetics ceases to function chiefly as a menace to democracy. Ruthless democracy slips the twin threats of affective contagion and singular force to describe the unending, collective, creative work of becoming equal� 220 J ennifer g reiman Works Cited Ankersmit, F� R� Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996� Aruvamudan, Srinivas� Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804� Durham: Duke UP, 1999� Balibar, Étienne. Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy� Trans G� M� Goshgarian� New York: Columbia UP, 2015� Castronovo, Russ� Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007� Cole, Romand and Lia Haro� “Eleven Theses on Neo-Fascism and the Fight to Defeat It�” Theory & Event 20�1 Supplement (2017): S100-15� Connolly, William� The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism� Durham: Duke UP, 2013� ---� A World of Becoming. Durham: Duke UP, 2011� Derrida, Jacques� Rogues: Two Essays on Reason� Trans� Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas� Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005� Downes, Paul� Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015� Honig, Bonnie� Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009� Johnson, Captain Charles� A General History of the Pyrates from their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence to the Present Time. 4th ed� 2 vols� London: Woodward, 1726� Lefort, Claude� Democracy and Political Theory. Trans� David Macey� New York: Polity, 1991� McGettigen, Katie� Herman Melville, Modernity and the Material Text� U of New Hampshire P, 2017� Melville, Herman� Correspondence� Ed� Lynne Horth� Evanston: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1993� ---� Mardi, and a Voyage Thither� Eds� Harrison Hayford, Herschel Parker, and G� Thomas Tanselle� Evanston: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1970� ---. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale� Ed� Hershel Parker� Evanston: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1988� ---. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas� Evanston: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1993� ---� Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life� Evanston, Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1968� Rancière, Jacques. “Does Democracy Mean Something? ” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Ed� and trans� Steven Corcoran� London: Continuum , 2010� Rediker, Marcus� Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Piractes in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon, 2004� Santner, Eric� The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011� Sieyès, Abbé Emanuel Joseph. Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? Paris: Éditions de Boucher, 2002� Williams, Raymond� Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 2015� d ustin B reitenWischer The Creolization of the Aesthetic: Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Haiti I. Introduction On 2 January 1893, Frederick Douglass visits Chicago to give two consecutive lectures on Haiti. He delivers the first lecture, “Haiti Among the Foremost Civilized Nations of the Earth,” as a guest of the Haitian government in front of the country’s pavilion during its opening ceremony at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In the evening, he gives his second lecture, “Haiti and the Haitian People,” in front of approximately 1,500 esteemed guests at Chicago’s Quinn Chapel, the oldest Black church in the city� 1 In my reading of these two lectures, I argue that Douglass, after having served as the US government’s Minister Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti from 1889 to 1891, performs rhetorically and aesthetically what he had, until two years earlier, practiced diplomatically� He seeks to overcome the still prevalent effects of colonialism, slavery, and the hegemonic power of white supremacy, and he desires to forge a hitherto hardly existent relation between the Black diasporic subjects in the United States and Haiti� 2 Disguising his lectures in a politically agitated rhetoric, Douglass subtly engages in, what I call, a creolization of the aesthetic, which is, as I will unfold in more detail, Douglass’s way of relating aesthetically the unforeseeable self-liberation of the formerly enslaved citizens of Haiti and his own intimate relation with Caribbean culture to the Black American experience of living in a postbellum Jim Crow society� Douglass’s strategic decision to turn to the aesthetic as a mode of relating and mobilizing various apparently dissociated experiences is not the least bit surprising� Throughout his oeuvre—from his autobiographical writings and his political speeches to his lectures on pictures—, Douglass demonstrates a 1 Cf� Blight, Frederick Douglass 729� 2 It might sound paradoxical, but even though Douglass uses his lectures on Haiti to reevaluate his own stance on colonial annexation, his aesthetic creolization does not contradict his earlier support of possible US annexations of Caribbean territories in the 1870s as harshly as one would imagine� In fact, in a lecture on “Santo Domingo” (today’s Dominican Republic), which he delivered in numerous cities over the course of three years in the early 1870s, Douglass counters the imperial aspirations of many Americans—of “manifest destiny” as “manifest national piracy”—by advocating that any sort of annexation could only be successful for both parties when it relies on “the more poetic side” of human being (FDP 4, 344). On Douglass’s position on annexation, see Guyatt, esp� 316-319; Polyné, esp� ch� 1� 222 d ustin B reitenWischer remarkable openness to the aesthetic and its close relation to matters of social and political progress� Douglass recurrently presents his audiences and readers with a conceptualization of the aesthetic as a particularly inclusive and, at the same time, expansive relation to and with the world. And yet, scholarship on Douglass’s philosophical engagement with aesthetics is still remarkably scarce� Apart from John Stauffer’s scattered publications on Douglass’s view on art, picture-making, his modes of “self-fashioning” and his “aesthetics of freedom,” and Paul Gilmore’s chapter on Douglass in Aesthetic Materialism, there has been no systematic attempt to account for Douglass’s assessment of the aesthetic� 3 But if one seeks to comprehend and appreciate fully the multitudinous nature of Frederick Douglass’s thinking, one must not overlook his subtle but recurrent dedication to matters of visuality, form, and creative practice, or, to put it differently, to matters of aesthetics� Since the 1860s, as Paul Gilmore notes, Douglass “began to investigate how a kind of aesthetic stance might allow him simultaneously to express and suspend various tensions between the self and the other, humanity and nature, individual and society, freedom and slavery” (112), and, as will be seen, between the different experiences of the African diaspora in the Americas. However, since it is impossible for me to unfold the scope of Douglass’s aesthetics in a single essay, I will turn to his two 1893 lectures on Haiti, in which Douglass exemplifies a curious dimension of the politics of his aesthetic intuition. 4 II. The Process of Creolization and Douglass’s Doubled Disposition Before I begin my discussion of Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic, it is necessary to provide a brief outline of my particular understanding of creolization and to allude to the continuous differentiation and problematization of the term in recent Cultural Studies� My understanding of creolization relies significantly on Édouard Glissant’s transhistorical definition of the phenomenon because it provides us with a viable concept to grasp and problematize the production and evolution of intercultural contact and transcultural relations (especially in the context of Caribbean post/ colonialism)� Thus steeped in the violent history of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean, creolization, according to Glissant, is “the process originated by the contacts and conflicts of cultures” (“Creolisation and the Americas” 13) 3 Cf� Gilmore, ch� 3; Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man”; “Douglass’s Self-Making and the Culture of Abolitionism”; “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom”; Stauffer, Trodd, Bernier. And, needless to say, Douglass has at no point in his extraordinary career as writer and orator put forth a treatise, or at least a speculative essay, on aesthetics or the aesthetic as such, apart from the three published lectures on pictures and picture-making� 4 In my analysis, I will rely on the versions in The Frederick Douglass Papers (Series One, Volume 5). On the complex publication history of Douglass’s Haiti lectures, see Mcclish. The Creolization of the Aesthetic 223 in the West Indies and elsewhere� 5 As a virtually untraceable amalgamation of transcultural modes of expression, communication, and culturalization, creolization is a sociocultural (and, even though I will leave aside that dimension, of course, a linguistic) reaction to African diasporic being and, as such, both a force of resistance against and an expression of the subjugating powers of slavery and colonialism� “Creolisation is unpredictable” (Glissant, “Creolization” 13-14) and—which is crucial to my discussion of Douglass’s lectures—it “opens on a radically new dimension of reality” (14)� Creolization contains, conflates, and, at times, contradicts the “colonizer/ colonized paradigm,” as Stuart Hall puts it; it is “reciprocal, and mutually constituting” (15)� It is as much a utopic vision of community-building in the postcolonial Americas as it is the legacy of these communities’ past (and often violently suppressed) interactions� As such, creolization, despite Glissant’s assumption that all of its cultural elements are of “equal rank” (Kultur und Identität 13; translation mine), 6 “always entails inequality, hierarchization, issues of domination and subalternity, mastery and servitude, control and resistance� Questions of power, as well as issues of entanglement, are always at stake” (Hall 16)� 7 In the context of this essay, then, creolization—not despite but due to its highly conflicted definability—curiously matches the conflicted nature of Douglass’s lectures on Haiti and his attempt to link the civilizational destinies of the United States and that particular Caribbean nation� It is therefore important to note that, in the following, the term ‘creolization’ is not merely used as an affirmative reaction to Douglass’s rhetorical unfolding of a transnational Black experience—as a self-serving aesthetic gesture, that is. Rather, creolization may help us integrate the paradoxically hegemonic and resistant character of Douglass’s cultural analysis in this historically specific moment of transcultural communication� In both of his lectures, Douglass is put (and puts himself) in a peculiar position: the former slave, the Black American man and celebrated social reformer, is asked to serve simultaneously—and on native soil—as a representative of his country and as the chosen representative of another country� But Douglass acknowledges his doubled position, as he dares to walk the tightrope of initiating a transcultural dialogue between the “Black Republic” of Haiti (Douglass, FDP 5, 510) and the United States, the very country in which countless lawmakers and citizens deemed him “unfit” and “not rightly colored” to hold the office of Consul General, as he notes in the Appendix of Life and Times (1023). In the first of his two lectures, he clearly draws on this 5 Glissant himself translates the French term “créolisation” with the English “creolisation�” Apart from direct references to Glissant, I will keep to “creolization�” 6 Glissant’s Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (1996) has not been translated into English� Therefore, I use the German translation� 7 In his political desire for annexation of Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic), Douglass himself testifies to the fact that creolization is not merely a bulwark against colonial hegemony, but, in many ways, also its producer and promoter� 224 d ustin B reitenWischer dehumanizing experience and he begins to relate his past struggle for appropriate recognition as politician and diplomat (and human being) to Haiti’s place in the World’s Columbian Exposition (and in the world as such). “The nations of the Old World can count their years by thousands, their populations by millions and their wealth by mountains of gold,” Douglass notes� “It was not to be expected that Haiti with its limited territory, its slender population and wealth could rival, or would try to rival here, the splendors created by those older nations … In this she has shown her good taste not less than her good sense” (FDP 5, 504; emphasis mine)� And Douglass goes even further when he, “as an honorary Haitian” (Blight, Douglass 728), includes himself in the whole of the Haitian community and thereby excludes himself from the group of his fellow American citizens—“[t]hey have given us one of the very best sites which could have been selected”—only to relate his individual re-positioning to a greater aesthetic expressivity of sovereignty and Black diasporic pride within the Mid-Western landscape� 8 “We are situated upon one of the finest avenues of these grounds, standing upon our verandah we may view one of the largest of our inland seas, we may inhale its pure and refreshing breezes, we can contemplate its tranquil beauty in its calm and its awful sublimity and power” (FDP 5, 504-05)� Considering Douglass’s (strategically aesthetic) identification with Haiti and his dissociation from the United States, his enthusiastic celebration of Lake Michigan’s sublime beauty effectively serves as a reflection, as a trans-American mirroring, of the inherent beauty and humble graciousness of Haiti, its pavilion, and its citizens, “the brave people” who will be viewed with anything other “than sympathy, respect and esteem” (505)� 9 As I seek to relate this mode of (self-)reflection to processes of creolization, it is crucial to bear in mind the moment of “unexpectedness” that Douglass refers to above. Douglass stresses the expressivity of a particular interplay of aesthetic sensitivity (“good taste”) and self-reflection (“contemplate its tranquil beauty”) that turns the aesthetic into a mode of unforeseen and erratically productive cross-cultural communication, which he, in turn, sees paradigmatically expressed both in himself and in the cultural history and sublime beauty of Haiti� I thus argue that Douglass engages in an oratory performance of creolizing the aesthetic as a strategy to walk successfully the 8 In the 1860s, Douglass was tempted to strengthen his ties to Haiti beyond the status of being her “honorary” representative� As Robert S� Levine notes in his book on Douglass and Martin Delany, Douglass was so “disturbed” by Lincoln’s 1860 inaugural address that he considered emigration to Haiti as a viable option� Only the outbreak of the Civil War gave Douglass hope that slavery would end and all Black Americans would be liberated under Lincoln’s leadership� Cf� Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass 216-17� 9 The recurrent appearance of the sublime in Douglass’s writing is certainly not surprising, considering that “Douglass’s sublime aesthetic was a black aesthetic,” as John Stauffer astutely notices (“Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” 118)� In a unique reassessment of Kantian aesthetics, Douglass contrasts the sublime and, ultimately, unsettling aura of the Black aesthetic with the traditional premises of ideal (i�e� white) conceptualizations of beauty as harmony� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 225 aforementioned tightrope� In his efforts to understand, promote, and accelerate the dynamics of universal Black liberation, Douglass seeks to diminish the experience of white supremacy at home and abroad. In Douglass’s lectures on Haiti, the intrinsic struggle in processes of creolization that Hall alludes to above, i�e� the struggle between “control and resistance,” breaks forth in at least two—remarkably interrelated—ways: on the one hand, Douglass performs, what Ifeoma C� K� Nwankwo’s calls, a “twice-doubled double consciousness” in his relationship to “‘foreign’ people of African descent” (146) and their “implicit othering” (157)� 10 He is thus caught in a self-evoked interplay of aesthetic creolization (by drawing the cultural expressivity of Creole into the sphere of the aesthetic) and, more importantly, a creolization of the aesthetic (by exploring the aesthetic within the expressivity of the cultural logic of Creole). Such an interplay allows Douglass to move beyond questions of identity and into the broader realm of transcultural mobility and self-relation, i�e� into an intricately inclusive and expansive reassessment of representing and communicating Black diasporic experiences. Douglass’s political—and, ultimately, aesthetic—disposition as Haiti’s American representative and as a public orator has him, as Nwankwo further notes, “caught between the imperialist designs of his country and his desire to help maintain the independence of a country replete with large numbers of his racial kin” (154)� This, in turn, also forces us to understand Douglass’s lectures as attempts to include, to inject, “poor Haiti” (Douglass, FDP 5, 524) into what Stuart Hall so aptly calls the “external noise” of the colonizing hegemon (17)� As such, Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic is insofar truly ‘creolizing’, as it is entrapped, self-aware, and creatively accelerating in the force-field of subaltern resistance. And it is, at the same time, coming to terms with the tradition of Euro-American ideals of beauty and the sublime� On the other hand, Douglass acknowledges his own role in Haiti’s colonial past, drawing on the presumptuous “simplicity” with which he, as consul, hoped that the Haitian government would simply give up her most important harbor to the United States� “Until I made the effort to obtain it [the harbor; D� B�] I did not know the strength and vigor of the sentiment by which it would be withheld,” but, vibrantly expressing all of her self-liberating power, Haiti “has no repugnance so deep-seated and unconquerable as the repugnance to losing control” (Douglass, FDP 5, 513)� Douglass actively performs the conflicted role of the US representative of the Caribbean nation. He realizes that the self-reliant habitus of the creolized subject as a creolized subject can and must not be separated from the historical circumstances and the hierarchical power structures that have provoked and enabled dynamics of creolization in the first place. For as a mode of cultural and communal self-defense, creolization is always already tied to the forces from which protection is needed� 10 On Douglass’s “double consciousness,” see Blight, “Up from ‘Twoness’�” 226 d ustin B reitenWischer As I have already mentioned, in the first of the two lectures, Douglass moves right into the midst of this struggle, as he includes himself in the Haitian community by speaking of a “we” (the Haitians) that is provocatively juxtaposed with a “they” (the Americans). Douglass is held in the force-field of his own aesthetic relation since he is merely able to evoke an allegedly self-contained “we” by drawing on an encroaching and potentially overpowering “they�” He thereby creates a rhetorical mode of contraposition that gains even more momentum when it is contrasted with another “we” that Douglass alludes to in his Introduction to Ida B� Wells’s fascinating pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the Columbian World’s Exposition� Here, Douglass notes, “[s]o when it is asked why we are excluded from the World’s Columbian Exposition,” and this time, Douglass uses “we” to refer to the community of Black Americans, “the answer is Slavery” (10)� 11 What is more, in his second 1893 lecture on Haiti, Douglass includes himself in a “we” that may, at times, seem indeterminate but that basically entails the entire US American and Western population� “Before we decide against the probability of progress in Haiti,” Douglass, for example, writes, “we should look into the history of progress of other nations” (FDP 5, 533)� In three simultaneously composed addresses—in his two lectures and in the pamphlet—, Douglass thus explores and presents himself as a torn and essentially unsettled diasporic subject—as a Black man who counts himself among the vanguard of American republicanism, among the proud population of self-liberated Haitians, and among the oppressed community of formerly enslaved Black Americans� He appears as a man whose skin color affords him the curious chance and the heavy burden to oscillate in the in-between spaces of crosscultural transition and communal trans-identification. Douglass draws on the multifaceted dimension of the Black American experience, as he rhetorically and performatively reveals that the color of his skin not only enables him to explore and reflect upon these different subject positions, but that it existentially forces him to do so� And even though Douglass’s lectures on Haiti never escape the confining realm of ‘proper’ colonial English—even though they are truly not an experimentation with the linguistic play of Creole—his mode of creolization is, nonetheless, the communicative realization of coming to terms with his rhetorically multiplied (collective, vernacular) identity, and it serves as the most promising mode of aesthetic resistance against the unsettling fragility of that identity� Creolization, in Douglass, is as much a gateway as it is a gatekeeper� In his attempts to creolize the aesthetic, Douglass therefore 11 Or, to contrast it with the Black Caribbean experience and put in the words of Stuart Hall, “it would be strange to describe the thematics of Caribbean vernacular culture without also including the notions of trauma, rupture and catastrophe: the violence of being torn from one’s historic resting place, the brutal abruptly truncated violence in which the different cultures were forced to coexist in the plantation system, the requirement to bend and incline to the unequal hegemony of the Other, the dehumanization, the loss of freedom� So there are also, always, within créolité, the recurring tropes of transplantation and forced labor, of mastery and subordination, the subjugations of plantation life and the daily humiliations of the colony” (19)� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 227 uses a rhetoric that, very similar to the linguistic phenomenon of ‘Creole’ itself, aims to establish a “proper language in its own right” (Hall 13)� In fact, Douglass expands some of the stricter territorial limitations of creolization as a linguistic and sociocultural phenomenon by linking it aesthetically to a transnational narrative of Black struggle and to the conflated histories of emancipation in the United States and Haiti� Ultimately, then, creolization needs to be understood as its own (that is, intrinsically motivated) mode of cultural self-problematization, which Douglass’s lectures on Haiti remarkably unfold in their conceptual intricacy and their aesthetic potentiality� III. “the only self-made Black Republic in the world” - Douglass Creolizes the Self In his two lectures, Douglass seeks to discuss “the many reasons why a good understanding should exist between Haiti and the United States” (FDP 5, 510), and he is interested in forging such a relationship aesthetically� If we reconsider the specific historical case of Frederick Douglass—a formerly enslaved Black man, a social reformer, a politician, thinker and writer, and, toward the end of his life, the US government’s Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti—the turn to the concept and process of creolization does not “erode[ ] its strategic conceptual value” (Hall 13) as a methodological tool to conceptualize and understand processes of cultural mixing and hybridity in the French Caribbean� Rather, reading Douglass within and through the methodological framework of creolization and against the backdrop of a US society, in which, as Douglass puts it, “the asserted spirit [of slavery] still remains” (“Introduction” 9), affords us with an intricately more expansive and inclusive conceptualization of the aesthetic in the Black diaspora� Douglass is determined to overcome the established and, to him, well-known “discourse of the plantation,” to use the words of Glissant (“Creolisation and the Americas” 17), by way of drawing on a creolized aesthetic� Such an aesthetic, his two lectures suggest, provides a formidable entry point into processes of cross-cultural recognition and communication that simultaneously undermine and transcend the harmful and essentially dehumanizing rhetoric and imagination (i�e� the aesthetic) of US (and postcolonial) white supremacy� Haiti as such—even more so than the “Haitian revolutionaries,” as Robert S� Levine suggests—is an “inspiration” for Douglass (“Frederick Douglass” 1865)� Haiti allows the trans-American thinker to reassess the promise of a Black aesthetic as an aesthetic that testifies to Black sovereignty and universal equality� In his celebration of Haiti as point of orientation for all future attempts to facilitate Black sovereignty, Douglass does not distinguish between the depictions of Haiti’s “strikingly beautiful” land, the “sublimity of this country,” and the creative force of its Black citizens’ “manliness, courage, and self-respect” (FDP 5, 512), but he instead actively conflates them in the image of the “only self-made Black Republic in the world” (510) and his own presence as Black American orator� 228 d ustin B reitenWischer In Douglass’s attempts to relate aesthetically his Haitian experience, the Black Republic and her Black inhabitants intersect in equal rank, and they appear— or rather, they are made apparent by the Black orator—in stark contrast to the white supremacist society of the United States and the white architecture of the exposition grounds. 12 What is more, as he draws on the self-made being of Haiti as a “Black Republic,” Douglass strategically (and somewhat ironically) conflates the latter with the orator himself, for, to this day, Douglass is still regarded as one of the paradigmatic self-made men in US cultural history� 13 In the two lectures—lectures that “simmered throughout with the tense politics of race” (Blight, Frederick Douglass 728)—, orator, audience, and the discussed subject matter (i�e� Haiti and its sublime beauty) are thus integrated in reciprocal (and self-yielding) aesthetic processes, in which the creolization of the aesthetic forges cross-cultural and transhistorical relations and transcends experiential boundaries. In fact, the creolizing effect of this conflation becomes even more apparent when we consider Douglass’s sincere rejection of the idea of “Self-Made Men” in his 1893 address with the same title� Here, Douglass notes that “[p] roperly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men� That term implies an individual independence of the past and the present which can never exist” (FDP 5, 549)� 14 Inadvertently, Douglass detects and expresses one of the essential characteristics of creolization—its drive toward cultural independence by emerging in crossand intracultural dependence—, which does not so much unsettle his description of Haiti as a “self-made Republic,” but which rather highlights the implicit structural fragility of Haiti as an allegedly self-made republic� And it is particularly crucial for Douglass to entertain the idea of tradition� In “Self-Made Men,” he therefore continues that “[w]e have all either begged, borrowed or stolen� We have reaped where others have sown, and that which others have strown, we have gathered” (549)� Which, in turn, means that, even though the Haitian revolution may be deemed unique, it must nonetheless be suited to fit “in the line of civilization,” as he notes in the second of his Chicago lectures (FDP 5, 510)� In Douglass’s logic of creolization, Haiti is not self-made because she has emerged from nowhere� She is self-made because she opened a “radically new dimension of reality,” to use again Glissant’s extraordinary phrase. “[T]he freedom of Haiti was not given as a boon, but conquered as a right! ”, Douglass exclaims (530). Much like his recurring depictions of his liberating fight with Covey, Douglass’s creolization of ‘self-made narratives’ thus emphatically draws on the simultaneous dissolution of old, detaining boundaries (the power of colonial occupation and white supremacy) and the formation of new, reassuring, and essentially relating boundaries (the transnational self-made 12 The “whited sepulcher,” as Douglass sarcastically notes (“Introduction,” 9)� 13 Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man�” 14 In her essay on “Frederick Douglass’s Exceptional Position in the Field of Slavery” (esp. 177ff.), Christa Buschendorf offers an extraordinary cultural-sociological interpretation of this passage� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 229 Black community), and it underscores the existential relation between those boundaries� Loosely following Juri Lotman’s idea of semantically charged boundaries as “the transformative processing of the external to the internal” (210)—in our case, the processing of the subaltern to the hegemonic discourse (of the aforementioned “us” to the “they”)—, creolization, in Douglass’s lectures, is an aesthetically enforced interconnectivity of demarcation and selfpositing� In more concrete aesthetic terms, Haiti needs to appear in Chicago while Douglass—as an American representative man—needs to communicate in and through what he believes is the Haitian experience. But this simultaneously demarcating and transcending process is not merely the result of a rhetorical or narrative practice� Rather, it is the performative appearance of an aesthetic act—in the words of the earlier Douglass, it must be understood as the “soul-awakening self-revelation” of a diasporic community (“Pictures and Progress” 169), “the marvelous power of enlarging the margin and extending the boundaries of [its] own existence” (“Age of Pictures” 142). One could, in fact, argue that in his rhetoric and his oratorical performance, Douglass produces an aesthetic ‘third space’ between Haiti and the United States, which is not only alluding to the physical reality of a diasporic relation but which itself becomes such an unsettling relation� And Douglass’s aesthetic ‘third space of creolization’ is indeed marked by a curiously creative mode of what Stuart Hall refers to as “unsettledness” (18), by a transitory impulse that anticipates and pushes toward an unforeseeable future� IV. From the Process to the Progress of Creolization Exposed to a US society that still revolves around “prejudice, hate and contempt in which we [Black Americans; D� B�] are still held by the people, who for more than two hundred years doomed us to this cruel and degrading condition” (Douglass, “Introduction” 10), Douglass retreats into the transnational and utopic spirit of the World’s Columbian Exposition and its “magic to dazzle and astonish the world” (FDP 5, 503)� At this surreal site, he contrasts the still prevalent “ignorance and prejudice” in the United States with the splendid description of Haiti as this uniquely ‘self-made’ nation with “no Past at [her] back,” to rephrase the Emersonian dictum (TCW 2, 188)� While the American “war of the Revolution had a thousand years of civilization behind it,” the Haitian revolutionaries “were slaves accustomed to stand and tremble in the presence of the haughty masters�” And yet, “[t]his precious inheritance they hold to-day, and I venture to say here in the ear of all the world that they never will surrender that inheritance” (FDP 5, 506)� So, even though Douglass embraces Haiti’s central role in shaping the diasporic experience of Africans in the Americas in the past (“She has in many things been first,” FDP 5, 521), his representation of Haiti is remarkably future-oriented� Particularly in his second lecture, Douglass is mostly interested in carving out scenarios of Haiti’s “probable destiny” (510), an undertaking not uncommon for the chronicler and the poetic prophet of the Black American experience. 230 d ustin B reitenWischer In line with this orientation toward the future, Douglass’s turn to the aesthetic becomes all the more apparent� For Douglass, prophecy, reform, and poetry (which includes all modes of artistic expression) are essentially the same, and when Douglass speaks of the one he implicitly refers to the others� Furthermore, in earlier writings, Douglass assumes that within this three-fold aesthetic relation all three phenomena are fundamentally progress-driven� In fact, they are progress, and, as such, they turn the aesthetic into a mode of perpetual mobilization and unforeseeable communication� Paradigmatically exemplified in his aforementioned lectures on pictures, which Douglass delivered recurrently between 1861 and 1865, Douglass turns to picture-making as the exemplary practice to explore progress as the result of sociopolitical and aesthetic communication and relation� 15 And while “[p]oets, prophets and reformers are all picture-makers” (“Pictures and Progress” 171), picture-making as such is foremost a (radically egalitarian) process of “self-revelation” (“Lecture on Pictures” 132), an expression of the “sublime, prophetic, and all-creative power of the human soul—proving its kinship with the eternal sources of life and creation” (“Pictures and Progress” 167)� At which point it is crucial to comprehend fully this development in his thinking because I am convinced that the creolization of the aesthetic in Douglass’s lectures on Haiti is essentially based on his established understanding of the aesthetic as a relation of and to progress, as a relation of form and reform, as I have elaborated elsewhere� 16 Progress, for Douglass, is not merely a social, political, or technological dynamic, but—always already—an aesthetic relation� He therefore not only compares the virtues of progress and art with each other, he insists that they emerge in a dynamic of indivisible equiprimordiality� Progress and art, much like prophecy and poetry, conflate and emerge in an aesthetic relation because they are based on and cater to the same civilizing forces of human creativity� Hence, Douglass’s creolization in his lectures on Haiti is, in turn, marked by the aesthetic relatability of geopolitical, trans-racial, civilization-historical, and transcultural processes of progress� The prophetic habitus of his lectures thus uses the narrative and aesthetics of progress to retrace the unsettled boundaries of the Black diasporic experience. In his lectures on Haiti, Douglass ultimately relies on an already established understanding of the intricate relation between progress and aesthetics, and he recognizes that relation in the fortitude and the sublime aesthetics of the Caribbean republic of Haiti� In fact, Douglass makes use of his time as diplomat in Haiti to come to terms with something that Stuart Hall, in a discussion of Glissant’s understanding of creolization, calls “cultural ‘transculturation’”—a process, that is, which creates a 15 For a cultural-historical introduction to Douglass’s lectures on pictures, see the contributions by Hill and Wexler in Maurice O. Wallace’s and Shawn Michelle Smith’s important edition Pictures and Progress. 16 Cf� Breitenwischer, esp� 58ff� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 231 vernacular space, marked by the fusion of cultural elements drawn from all originating cultures, but resulting in a configuration in which these elements, though never equal, can no longer be disaggregated or restored to their originary forms, since they no longer exist in a ‘pure’ state but have been permanently ‘translated’. (15) And Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic is indeed a curious configuration, disaggregation, restoration, and translation of forms, in which he moves back and forth between images of slavery and subjugation and between images of majestic beauty and communal pride until those images become inseparable and almost indiscernible� He describes Haitian women as “elastic, vigorous and comely� They move with the step of a blooded horse” (FDP 5, 514), only to notice that “in the management of … animals we see in Haiti a cruelty inherited from the old slave system” (515)� “No other land has brighter skies� No other land has purer water, richer soil, or a more happily diversified climate”; but “there she [Haiti] is … floundering her life away from year to year in a labyrinth of social misery” (515)� In Haiti, sublime beauty and misery do not exist in opposition but in fluctuation; they are incessantly immersed in dynamics of mutual translation and re-translation� 17 Within this dynamic of creative (re-)configuration, Haiti appears as a paradigmatic case in point of the conflicted nature of postcolonial creolization. But she is also, as Douglass proudly notes, “a credit to the colored race” (523), and she has always been “a sharp thorn in our [the US Americans’] side and source of alarm and terror� She came into the sisterhood of nations through blood” (520). Douglass creolizes the aesthetic by juxtaposing Haiti’s sublime progress narrative with the regressive nature of supremacist racism in the United States� So, while I concur with Paul Gilmore that aesthetics “allows Douglass to delay, momentarily at least, the need for specific political solutions or reductive identifications as he explores the problematic intersection of race, culture, and politics” (112), I want to add that aesthetics also allows him to renegotiate the explanatory power of the aesthetic in light of these politically non-specific explorations. V. “in defiance of all opposing forces” - Douglass’s Aesthetics of Resistance Relying on the transformative impact of his rhetoric, Douglass, in contrast to a politician, missionary, or a returnee from an expedition, refrains both from offering reform-oriented proclamations concerning the United States and from bizarre depictions of savage exoticism in Haiti. Instead, he seeks to convince the members of his audience—his second lecture at Quinn Chapel 17 Stuart Hall adds that “[t]ranslation is an important way of thinking about creolization, because it always retains the trace of those elements which resist translation, which remain left over, so to speak, in lack or excess, and which constantly then return to trouble any effort to achieve total cultural closure” (16)� And drawing on the aesthetic is Douglass’s mode of translating the Caribbean experience (or, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, “signifying,” “renaming,” and “revising” the Black aesthetic [xxii]) into a site of trans-American recognition of subjugation and repressive hegemony� 232 d ustin B reitenWischer was attended by a predominantly Black audience—that the transnational, diasporic relation between the United States and Haiti literally concerns them, and he does so by drawing on and catering to that relation’s aesthetic particularities� 18 Recourse to the aesthetic suits him perfectly, as he seeks to introduce publicly the idea of a consonant, productive, and creative Black experience—the idea, that is, of what I refer to as ‘creolization’. This becomes even more apparent when we, yet again, compare Douglass’s celebration of Haitian sublime beauty and its relation to a greater Black trans-American experience with his analysis of the unsettledness of the late-nineteenth-century Black American citizen� In the Introduction to The Reason Why, he writes, the Negro is not standing still� He is not dead, but alive and active� He is not drifting with the current, but manfully resisting it and fighting his way to better conditions than those of the past, and better than those which popular opinion prescribes for him� He is not contented with his surroundings, but nobly dares to break away from them and hew out a way of safety and happiness for himself in defiance of all opposing forces� A ship rotting at anchor meets with no resistance, but when she sets sail on the sea, she has to buffet opposing billows� The enemies of the Negro see that he is making progress and they naturally wish to stop him and keep him in just what they consider his proper place� (14; emphasis mine) Douglass’s depictions of mobility and engagement, of resistance and reform, of regress and progress are equally striking� And while it has been adequately established that Douglass locates all matters of progress and reform in the vicinity of art and the relational nature of the aesthetic, it is noteworthy that Douglass draws on a particularly instable aesthetic to underscore the necessity, as Achille Mbembe so poignantly puts it in his discussion of the postcolony, “to take seriously the visual, the aural—all that has to do with the sensorial life of power” (8)� So, for the Black American to defy the “proper place” in US society is as much an act of sociopolitical resistance against a subjugating power as it is a mode of cultural, i.e. aesthetic, self-expression. In fact, Douglass seems to suggest that acts of actively resisting the forces of violent placement mark the Black American’s entrance into processes of creolization, the constitution and acceleration of what Glissant refers to as an “aesthetics of turbulence” (Poetics of Relation 155) and what Douglass himself evokes in the image of “whirlwinds of lawless turbulence” (FDP 5, 531)� To reiterate, in Douglass’s aesthetics, progress is art and, as such, an essentially aesthetic mode of relating oneself to sociocultural dynamics of creative intervention� Against this backdrop, Haiti, in his two lectures, becomes the epitome of the fragile aesthetic disposition of Black diasporic progress, and Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic appears within this argumentative bridging� But as we move deeper into Douglass’s aesthetics of progress and Black emancipation, we must, at first, acknowledge that Douglass, quite ironically, “lost faith in his former beliefs in racial equality” (Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” 136) after the Civil War, and that his Haiti lectures (and the Introduction to Wells’s pamphlet) strikingly 18 One of the audience members was 24-year-old W� E� B� Du Bois� Cf� Blight, “Up from ‘Twoness’” 301� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 233 exemplify this loss of faith. Even though Douglass still ties the aesthetic to the promises of civilizational progress, in his recurrent reference to Haiti as “the Black Republic” and in his creolizing distortion of Euro-American (i�e� white) ideals of beauty, progress can no longer be narrativized as the natural evolution of racial equality on North American soil, as he envisioned it in the 1850s and 1860s� Such a narrative, Douglass seems to suggest toward the end of his life, must turn out to be an illusion in a society that is essentially permeated by the logic of white supremacy� In his two lectures, Douglass shows that he radically needs to change the trajectory, the rhetoric, and the aesthetics of his progress narrative� As David W� Blight puts it, “[p]rogress needed some transformative history in order to seem real” (Frederick Douglass 729)� And, for Douglass, such a transformative history needed a transformative aesthetic� In this spirit, Douglass, at the end of his second lecture on Haiti, ecstatically summarizes his idea of a transformative Black aesthetic in and through the creolization of established norms and representations during and after the Haitian revolution� He writes, in the face of the fact that Haiti still lives, after being boycotted by all the Christian world; in the face of the fact of her known progress within the last twenty years, in the face of the fact that she has attached herself to the car of the world’s civilization, I will not, I cannot believe that her star is to go out in darkness, but I will rather believe that whatever may happen of peace or war Haiti will remain in the firmament of nations, and, like the star of the north, will shine on and shine on forever� (FDP 5, 534) Hardly is there another passage in his two lectures in which Douglass so extraordinarily conflates the history of US slavery and emancipation (“the star of the north”) and the sovereignty of the Black Republic (which “still lives”) with the prophetic justice of progress (“shine on forever”)� Having spent numerous passages on the rebuttal of Haiti’s prophesized “downgrade to barbarism” (524) due to her demonized blackness (her “darkness”? ), Douglass does not shy away from including the poetic relation of the diasporic experiences in the Black Americas in the indisputable and eternal truth of astronomic calculation. The creolization of the aesthetic salvages the Black experience from the disfiguring grasp of the white supremacist, and, in its cosmic dimension, it almost salvages that experience from human encroachment altogether (“like the star”)� VI. Conclusion Considering their extraordinarily versatile and prophetic modes of philosophical reflection and public oratory, Frederick Douglass’s two 1893 lectures on Haiti must be read as passionate attempts to explore an emphatically new and essentially transcultural mode of capturing the Black diasporic experience� Douglass, I argued in this essay, engages in a curious act of creolization to initiate and reflect upon creative processes of Black self-making and 234 d ustin B reitenWischer trans-American aesthetic relatability� In fact, in these two of his last public addresses, Douglass has inadvertently opened the door for those diverse and conflicting cultural theories that understand processes of creolization as “a potential new basis from which a popular creativity which is distinctive, original to the area itself, and better adapted to capture the realities of daily life in the postcolony, can be, and is being, produced” (Hall 19)� And as if he anticipated contemporary ideas of the “postcolony,” Douglass, in his two lectures on Haiti (and his Introduction to The Reason Why), manages to conflate and unfold aesthetically the different realities of emancipated Black lives in the United States and Haiti at the turn of the century. Both at the exposition grounds and in Quinn Chapel, Douglass engages his audiences in complicated and, at times, provocatively disconcerting comparisons of the Black diasporic experiences in the Americas, in which he strategically switches between his roles as Haiti’s American representative, as former slave, and as Black American social reformer� Douglass’s lectures on Haiti can thus be read as his final attempt to integrate and, ultimately, disintegrate the relation between his own experiences and the systemic forces of racism and white supremacy in the postbellum United States on the one hand, and his understanding of the aesthetic as a primarily relating and mobilizing force of progress and reform on the other� In what I described as a unique process of ‘creolization’, Douglass experiments with a particular mode of rhetorical performativity which, as he desires, should enable him to establish a cross-cultural communication between the diverse subjects of the African diaspora� Above all, Douglass’s depictions of the sublime beauty of Haiti—her essential Black aesthetics—help him transform the unsettling power of the aesthetic from a performative indictment of white supremacy and US imperial ambitions into a cross-cultural and transnational expression of Black sovereignty. In the end, this very transformation must be accounted for as the sole source and purpose of Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 235 Works Cited Blight, David W� Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom� New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018� ---� “Up from ‘Twoness’: Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of W� E� B� Dubois’s Concept of Double Consciousness�” Canadian Review of American Studies 21�3 (1990): 301-319� Breitenwischer, Dustin� “Creative Democracy and Aesthetic Freedom: Notes on John Dewey and Frederick Douglass�” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 34 (2018): 47-63� Buschendorf, Christa� “’Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men’: Frederick Douglass’s Exceptional Position in the Field of Slavery.” Intellectual Authority and Literary Culture in the US, 1790-1900� Ed� Günter Leypoldt� Heidelberg: Winter, 2013� 159-184� Douglass, Frederick� “Age of Pictures” (1862)� Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American� Ed� John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier� New York: Liveright, 2015� 142-60� ---� The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews� Vol� 4: 1864-80� Ed� John W� Blessingame and John R� McKivigan� New Haven: Yale UP, 1991� ---� The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews� Vol� 5: 1881-95� Ed� John W� Blessingame and John R� McKivigan� New Haven: Yale UP, 1992� ---� “Introduction” (1893)� The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the Columbian World’s Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature� Ed� Ida B� Wells� Reprint of the 1893 Edition� Ed� Robert W� Rydell� Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999� 7-16� ---� “Lecture on Pictures” (1861)� Picturing Frederick Douglass. 126-41� ---. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Written By Himself (1893)� Autobiographies� Ed� Henry Louis Gates, Jr� New York: Library of America, 1994� ---� “Pictures and Progress” (1864/ 65)� Picturing Frederick Douglass. 161-73� Emerson, Ralph Waldo� The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 2. Essays: First Series� Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1979� Gates, Henry Louis, Jr� The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Gilmore, Paul� Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism� Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009� Glissant, Édouard. “Creolisation and the Americas.” Caribbean Quarterly 57�1 (2011): 11-20� ---� Kultur und Identität: Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt (1996)� Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2013� ---� Poetics of Relation (1990)� Trans� Betsy Wing� Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2010� Guyatt, Nicholas� Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007� Hall, Stuart� “Creolité and the Process of Creolization�” Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations� Ed� Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate� Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015� 12-25� 236 d ustin B reitenWischer Hill, Ginger� “‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures�” Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity� Ed� Maurice O� Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith� Durham: Duke UP, 2012� 41-82� Levine, Robert S� “Frederick Douglass, War, Haiti�” PMLA 124�5 (2009): 1864-1868� ---� Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity� Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997� Lotman, Juri� “On the Semiosphere” (1984)� Trans� Wilma Clark� Sign Systems Studies 33�1 (2005): 205-226� Mbembe, Achille� “On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics�” Qui Parle 15�2 (2005): 1-49� Mcclish, John� “Frederick Douglass and the Consequences of Rhetoric: The Interpretive Framing and Publication History of the 2 January 1893 Haiti Speeches�” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 30�1 (2012): 37-73� Nwankwo, Ifeoma C� K� “Douglass’s Black Atlantic: The Caribbean�” The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass� Ed� Maurice S� Lee� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009� 146-159� Polyné, Millery� From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African-Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964� Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2010� Stauffer, John� “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom�” Raritan 25�1 (2005): 114-36� ---� “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative Man�” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative� Ed� Audrey Fisch� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007� 201-17� Stauffer, John, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier (Eds�)� Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American� New York: Liveright, 2015� 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: Duke UP, 2012� 18-40� r uss c astronoVo Security and the Informational Sublime “How had my ancient security vanished! ” Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland The paradox of security is that its pursuit requires the imagination of scenarios that contribute to feelings of anxiety, apprehension, even terror. Security, in essence, makes people feel unsafe: planning for security requires us to anticipate all the scenarios in which we might be in danger, at risk, in a word, insecure� The homeowner who imagines burglars breaking through a kitchen window can install an electronic security system� The investor worried about economic uncertainty and recession can create a portfolio that relies on financial securities to reduce risk—although recent history has shown that low-risk holdings such as mortgage-backed securities exposed entire national economies to levels of insecurity that wiped out billions of investment dollars seemingly overnight� States like Russia, North Korea, and the United States have sought international security through deterrence, a policy based on the ultimate insecurity of nuclear war� “By wanting after security,” R� N� Berki wrote in 1986, “we are really courting insecurity, nay, actually engaging in the question after insecurity” (39)� The tight circuit between security and insecurity generates an affective force field that makes paranoia, alarm, and fear an unavoidable byproduct of the striving for personal and public safety� Despite this powerful affective charge, security is not often viewed as an aesthetic matter� Instead, discussions of security have been dominated by the field of international relations, studies of policing, and surveillance studies with an emphasis on social science particularly after 9/ 11� The state has long been lodged front and center of security discourse, a tendency that favors diplomacy analysis, game theory, and probabilistic assessments of risk that orient discourse around data and information, not feelings and affect� Rather than accept this division, this essay raises a broad set of questions: What set of affects does the superabundance of information associated with security produce? What new understandings of security might an examination of unease, terror, and other feelings yield? That is, what information about security does affect provide? After 9/ 11 exposed the insufficiency of state-centric models for gauging security threats, former director of the Department of Homeland Security and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act Michael Chertoff argued that “the rise of ungoverned space throughout the world” (51) makes it urgent to ramp up intelligence gathering activities� To correct for “an outmoded conception of the nature of modernity security threats,” Chertoff advised abandoning 238 r uss c astronoVo a “neat binary conception of national security threats as either warmaking or crime” and concentrating instead on the networks and technologies that have deterritorialized terror itself (53-54)� For Chertoff, the lessons learned from previous intelligence failures present a clear case for expanding surveillance so that security agencies can be given “as many tools as possible to be applied overseas and at home” (61-62) in the gathering, sorting, and use of actionable intelligence� Like any good Foucauldian, Chertoff appreciates the linkage of power-knowledge, especially as it applies to the hard-to-define calculus of modern governmentality: populations� Where Michel Foucault recounts how states gradually recognized the population as a biopolitical problem during the famines and plagues of the Middle Ages, Chertoff and other security analysts now confront global populations as information problems responsible every day for innumerable cell phone calls, billions of emails, and incalculable—and often untraceable—amounts of electronic money transfers� Such immense data sets would seem to cry out for more capacious and sophisticated surveillance techniques to collect and sort information, but, as this essay will argue, the unimaginable expanse of information is itself the problem� What is more, that problem is at core affective and aesthetic, as information appears as a source of sublime terror� Neither International Relations nor the field of Critical Security Studies that emerged at the end of the twentieth century (see Krause and Williams; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams) are good at asking aesthetic questions� This oversight is understandable not only because researchers in these fields are instead concerned with the range of constitutional, ethical, and technological challenges created by security issues� For their part, cultural theorists interested in aesthetics have not asked very good questions about security� Not that literary critics, for example, have not turned their attention to security, but when they have done so their focus has often been limited to how an ecological, terrorist, or other crisis is represented� The result often takes shape as an appliqué that invokes a novel or film as demonstration of conclusions that theorists of biopolitics have already reached� As Johannes Voelz contends, “so far literary theorists have primarily offered readings of literary texts that illustrate and confirm the mappings of security mechanisms first articulated in other disciplines” (“Security Theory”). Foremost among these disciplines are International Relations, criminology, and political theory, which, while useful for understanding security as a matter of state, do not attend to all the zones of human activity that have become the subject of securitization� 1 The military and the police constitute only the most visible components of national security, but credit card fraud, computer hacking, and identity theft signal the extent to which security has expanded to encompass financial, epistemological, and even ontological concerns. “Political theory has much to say about the concept or concepts of ‘security,’ but generally neglects the term’s elasticity and its historically shifting applicability,” 1 Bigo and Tsoukala observe how International Relations has a “monopoly on the meanings of security” (6) and instead argue for interdisciplinary approaches� They include law, sociology, and psychology, but make no mention of art, aesthetics, or literature� Security and the Informational Sublime 239 writes John Hamilton in an erudite and fascinating philological approach to the topic (14)� Given the presence of security in every crook and recess of modern life and identity via regimes of surveillance that have morphed into dataveillance, political theory by itself seems inadequate for grappling with security� But nor has literary interpretation and theory, in limiting itself to representations of policing or state control, staked out much more than a subordinate and tertiary position with respect to security discourse� What if “instead of taking literature to reflect a set of problems and mechanisms first articulated in security theory,” as Voelz suggests, cultural theorists took aesthetics as a provocation for asking fundamental questions about the project of security that shapes information, health, technology, media, and just about every other facet of contemporary life? This essay moves modestly toward that goal by taking the eighteenthcentury gothic as critical commentary on the collecting, amassing, and sorting of information that undergirds the project of security� The Aesthetics of Information Overload The idea that literary research may play a role beyond merely representing or reflecting issues of security and surveillance appears ironically enough in a film. The American Literary Historical Society where Joe Turner reads books in Three Days of the Condor (dir� Sydney Pollack) presumes “literary historical” research as a valued and therefore vulnerable component of national security� As an analyst for a CIA front for counterterrorism, Turner (played by Robert Redford) spends his days reading books, but things turn deadly when, while working up a précis of a pulp thriller, he stumbles on a real-life conspiracy to take control of Middle East oilfields. Returning from lunch like any ordinary office worker, he finds all his colleagues at the American Literary Historical Society murdered and knows that he is next on the hit list. Turner, whose codename is Condor, begs his superiors to take him in: “I’m not a field agent, I just read books�” But reading books is a matter of security because it equips Turner with the facility to detect plots and amass information. Perplexed by Turner’s luck in avoiding assassination attempts, one of the agency men asks, “Where did he learn evasive moves? ” The answer shouldn’t surprise us, “He… reads�” But it does surprise the agency man, “What in the hell’s that mean? ” It means that information, especially an ability to process large amounts of text and assemble it into plots and narratives, is equally a security threat and a security resource. The deputy CIA director explains, “You don’t understand. He reads… everything�” Humanities work, especially the literary-historical variety, hints at a vital connection between information and security� The conspiracies and secrets at the heart of the spy novel, according to Matthew Potolsky, are recent iterations of a Gothic mode that stages national security as an overwhelming and ultimately unfathomable project� While never mentioning eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant or novelists such as Anne Radcliffe and Charles Brockden 240 r uss c astronoVo Brown who gave sublime terror theoretical and narrative form, intelligence experts and security analysts describe information—especially in its superabundance—as an overwhelming, often terrifying, phenomenon that dwarfs attempts at human comprehension. Gothic plots typically find resolution by unveiling secrets about an evil duke or other malefactor, but in the arena of national security actors are beset by the “dawning recognition that these secrets have become so large and pervasive that the powerful no longer needs veils of mystery” (Potolsky 85)� The promise of information consists of the specific facts that were once hidden and now brought to light. Such promise is also a problem, however, as the unbounded, incomplete, and infinite nature of information forestalls resolution and makes any conclusion inadequate� How to process in narrative form the massive volume of cellphone calls, web searches, and keystrokes logged by the NSA and other intelligence gathering agencies? “At present, US collection produces too much data,” writes the director of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security� “The sheer volume of the data, or ‘take,’ from the collection, just from intelligence’s own sources, threaten to overwhelm the processing of it” (Treverton 9). Intelligence gathering, in effect, creates its own knowledge deficits. In terms of information, security operations seek more only to find that there can never be enough� Criminologists and lawyers who view security as a “thick public good” (Loader and Walker 4) recognize that security often becomes an obsession that can never complete its task of controlling for every possibility� Knowing that there is always more to know, the project of security confronts “an infinite and ever-disappearing horizon of possibility” (Loader and Walker 84) that, ironically, makes security a source of insecurity� “The more it knows, the less it knows,” writes Michael Dillon in Biopolitics of Security (39). Usng the parenthetical expression “(in)securitization,” Didier Bigo captures how surveillance data, biometrics, and statistical knowledge produce a state of continual unease and vulnerability for citizens (12)� As the security apparatus tracks more and more things—letters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, telephone calls and radio broadcasts in the twentieth, and digital footprints and biometric data in the twenty-first—it gives rise to a dizzying awareness that there are an infinite number of finite things to keep tabs on� 2 The Latin maxim sapere aude (dare to know! ) that kicks off Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment? ” might thus also be seen as the motto of security society that strives for infinite knowledge about an ever-expanding archive of information� Faced with the prospect of too much data, we confront information as a sort of sublime overload. Even proponents of security admit that security exists “as a condition beyond our grasp that appears to require more ‘security measures’” (Loader and Walker 84). Yet this crisis in which an infinite amount 2 Dillon writes, “Politics, government and rule are problematised in terms of the infinite government of finite things. The infinity of finite things knows no eschatology in the traditional sense of an ending to time combined with the advent of a different, a better, time to come” (7)� The temporality of security always stretches out toward the future, trying to detect threats before they happen� Security and the Informational Sublime 241 of data dwarfs our senses and capacities represents more than a symptom of life within the contemporary security state� It suggests a problem of sense perception, cognition, and imagination that tracks back to eighteenth-century theories of the sublime� Information is more than a technical matter; it is fundamentally a philosophical and aesthetic concern, whose unsettled and expansive dimensions indicate that the human need for security cannot be solved by more data, sharper cameras, or faster computers� Long before the accumulation of massive data sets, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke probed the connections between infinite amounts of information and terror, and these thinkers discovered obscurity and darkness at the fringes of the human desire to know and communicate� The idea of complete and instant access to staggering amounts of information at once represents the fulfillment of enlightenment knowledge and the “delightful horror” (67) that Burke associated with sublime infinity. Philosophical consideration of the sublime could go on forever. “That task would be infinite,” muses Burke, as he embarks on the daunting mission of writing about the sublime and beautiful (4)� How sublime it is to conceive of a colossal, unending stream of information, and yet “the terrible uncertainty” (58) of such a thing rattles our faculties� Such tensions are constitutive of an informational sublime in which the amassing of knowledge simultaneously points to unbounded comprehension and “a moment of linguistic and cognitive breakdown” (McCarthy 548), each bound up with the impossible burden of knowing so much� Coming in and out of focus, defying human reason but broadening the imagination, the informational sublime denotes both a conceptual and aesthetic zone in which rational requirements for security are always in tension with sensations of terror� The sheer idea of information—whose status as an uncountable noun hints at its expanse—carries an affective charge that takes its toll on epistemology as well as ontology� The inventive formulation that “grammar notwithstanding, information is a gerund” (Lee 16) reinforces that idea that information, by virtue of its essential and inescapable incompleteness, can foster unease, distress, and paranoia� Surely, people act upon pieces of information all the time, but it is also the case that information, not so much in small bits or even large datasets but as a total concept, can erode our emotional security� “Information is not an ontological Thing,” writes Maurice Lee in Overwhelming Words, “but rather something that happens to communication” (16)� This sensibility that information does something affective to us, however, is hardly the usual way of understanding information� By the twentieth century, information became aligned with a “rational mathematical calculus” that imparts stability to definitions of the concept (Geoghegan 174). Yet the mathematical offers its own gateway to the sublime in ways that challenge the ascendancy of reason� A vast collection that conceivably runs on forever can prove captivating, not in itself, but because it awakens an imaginative capacity to envisage such vastness� Kant postulates that in contrast to beauty, which depends on external stimulus from flowers and such, we seek “the sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude for thought,” making 242 r uss c astronoVo the sublime a property of our own subjectivity (84)� When we confront some undefined magnitude or innumerable quantity, a sort of two-step process ensues in which our imagination runs to infinity and then reason cleans up the scene by employing math to comprehend it� How sublime is the mind that can ponder a question as eternal as the number of stars in the heavens! Or, as a contemporary variant, how sublime must it be to cull an endless stream of raw data from global telecommunications! Information might not appear sublime—after all, colloquial usage often aligns it with basic, straightforward stuff—but its superabundance can prove dizzying� The informational sublime outstrips sensory perception and provokes a vertiginous encounter with the mind’s own capacity to contemplate infinity. From this Kantian perspective, what keeps security experts up at night is that data abundance and information overload constitute threats in their own right, taxing to the extreme any meager human ability to assemble, process, and most crucially, to tell a coherent story about an expanse of information so incomprehensible that it can only be understood as sublime� Kant makes the crucial distinction that in these circumstances it is not the colossal object that is astonishing; rather it is our own mind coming to grips with the inadequacy of our senses, as we try to imagine some staggering infinity, that is sublime. We do not find pleasure in some object just because it is immense, but we do find “[a satisfaction] in the extension of the imagination by itself” to apprehend “what is great beyond all comparison” (Kant 86-87)� Unlike the experience of the beautiful that leads to “restful contemplation” (Kant 85), however, the sublime unnerves the rational person. Overawed by excess with no end in sight, “the feeling is one of on and on, of being lost,” as aphasia sets in and the subject becomes “speechless” (Weiskel 26, 30)� More profound and soul-crushing than the discovery of a specific plot or conspiracy, the terror of intelligence gathering lies precisely in the inability to imagine all the information that may be captured, not to mention the incalculable connections it creates� Incomprehensible and inassimilable, a glut of information carries the overpowering force of the sublime, but it differs from the Kantian account in one crucial respect� Kant’s subject ultimately achieves “elevation and transcendence,” but the intelligence expert or security analyst, not to mention the everyday citizen, is never free from the “resignation or bewilderment” (Potolsky 34) caused by the flood of too much information. Security may be sublime, but it is the sublime without release or enlightenment� The informational sublime creates a narratological crisis: how can experts, let alone ordinary human beings, detect a plot when there are so many details but no single story? As anyone who has struggled through Kant’s Critique of Judgment knows, aesthetic experience is difficult enough to parse; now try to imagine communicating the overwhelming aspect of sublimity that takes the form of a data set so vast and capacious that it is indescribable� So, too, as any consumer of information knows, the media that convey information instill a series of private terrors all their own by spinning scenarios of insecurity—news coverage of border walls and migrant caravans only being the most recent—in the name of security� “We feel secure only Security and the Informational Sublime 243 because we can be frightened,” writes Hamilton (297), and nothing is better suited to this purpose than the Gothic novel as an aesthetics of information� Communication is always a matter of security—and no more so than when the project is the impossible one to describe an encounter with a phenomenon that resists description� The sublime only “works” if assurances of ultimate security and safety mitigate the terror and fear that it inspires� At least, this is Kant’s view in which the human subject encounters the sublime not directly but in mediated fashion filtered through the capacity to imagine an overawing plenitude. With some distance or protection—think of guardrails at a precipice or a telephoto lens that offers the illusion of proximity—the observer can indulge in the sort of reflection that provides pleasure because, in these examples, reinforced metal barriers and enhanced optics mediate contact with the sublime� How thrilling to see “volcanoes in all the violence of their destruction” or the “lofty waterfall of a mighty river” (Kant 100)—but only when these phenomena are meditated (by distance, by television, by drones, etc�) and the observer is assured that any danger is minimal. The sublime must be experienced from a zone of safety otherwise the threat is too imminent to be intellectual� “Provided only that we are in security,” writes Kant, can we feel safe enough to ponder immensity and colossal power in ways that elevate the soul� 3 An unmediated encounter with the sublime incapacitates the viewer� Terror is disabling: “He who fears can form no judgement about the Sublime in nature … it is impossible to find satisfaction in a terror that is seriously felt” (Kant 100)� Mountain crags, rushing torrents, and other sublime features of the earth’s landscape can be viewed from safe distances, but what has been called the “digital sublime” (Mosco) of cyberscape allows for no such buffer� The transcendent annihilation of petty divisions of time and space promised by the digital extends the limitless reach of governments and corporations into public space and private lives� Whereas Kant invokes a vaguely Romantic landscape, assertions about the meaninglessness of geography within cyberspace make the digital sublime an experience of awe and terror with no refuge. For those who herald “computer communication as the logical continuation of Enlightenment rationality” (Mosco 91), it is worth remembering that security and surveillance fit nicely into this idea of progress. Where the aim of sovereign states had once been to ensure territory as a matter of geopolitical security, today the quest for biopolitical security makes life itself the focus of power� 4 3 Burke agrees about the need for distance and security when experiencing the sublime: “terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too closely” (42)� 4 For more on this point, see Hamilton (15)� 244 r uss c astronoVo The Unspeakable Terror of the Gothic Infinitude, as a primary attribute of the sublime, raises that disconcerting proposition that information may itself be a source of terror� The tight conduit between security and insecurity is an effect of Enlightenment priorities, as the passion for data and knowledge produces an inexhaustible reservoir of uncertainty, apprehension, and vulnerability� This set of unnerving affects takes narrative form in the gothic� Creepy dungeons, supernatural events, and other stock features of the gothic novel produce unease, but at bottom it is information that terrifies. As a mode obsessed with the intelligence gained from whispers, glances, eavesdropping, misdirected letters, long-lost manuscripts, chance encounters with newspapers, and other forms of communication, the gothic transposes the informational sublime to narrative form. Often corrupted, frequently deficient, and always lacking transparency, these media heighten the impossible quest to know more, driving characters to incur greater risks and propelling readers to turn page after page� For subjects both within and outside the world of the novel, the range of feelings from dull unease to sudden fright suggests the affective dimensions of information as powerful, encompassing, but unspecified security quantum. The sublime is an “overglutted sign” (Mishra 19) whose manifestation in gothic fiction stages a confrontation with excess and superabundance that induces a terrible but inexpressible crisis of subjectivity� Within “gothic sublimity” (Mishra), the subject crushed by an excess of information is not exalted or elevated with sudden access to complete knowledge in the end� Full understanding is at once promised and withheld by the mainstays of gothic fiction—secrets and surveillance—that make for emotionally charged storytelling suffused with terror and suspense� The intensity reaches such depths that gothic novels routinely resound with “the despair of the incommunicable” in ways that recall the sublime’s penchant for leaving the subject speechless (qtd� in Sedgwick)� Even though gothic tales routinely dredge up some “unutterable” or “unspeakable” terror, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or the Transformation, an American Tale (1798) is strangely prolix when it comes to the topics of information, communication, and media� His characters pore over manuscripts, compose letters, consult translations, scan newspapers, and become fixated by cultish religious tracts� As is typical for the gothic, scenes of doubling and repetition transmute the lack of verifiable information into its opposite, namely an excess of information that characters and readers alike struggle to assimilate and understand� “Until the gothic had been discovered, the serious American novel could not begin,” Leslie Fiedler declared in Love and Death in the American Novel (143), and critics since have often named Wieland as the prototype for the American gothic� Narrated by Clara Wieland, Brown’s novel tells the story of a genteel family that suffers a range of traumas, including self-combustion, multiple homicides, suicide, and attempted rape� From the paterfamilias who fervently believes that “security lay in ceaseless watchfulness and prayer” to his adult children, Theodore and Clara, who Security and the Informational Sublime 245 retreat to “the bosom of security and luxury” at their family estate, the quest for security is undone by a series of faulty, untrustworthy communications emanating from books, letters, the supposed voice of God, the deceptions of a ventriloquist, and their own sensory perceptions� Although Brown penned no formal or systematic study of information, his gothic novels, above all Wieland, imply that every medium of communication, from intimate conversation to public records such as newspapers and court transcripts, is proximate to terror. Brown’s recognition that each communicative act has the potential to bring subjects to the brink of fear is more than an uncanny anticipation of the epistemological crises that emerged with the advent of information age� Worry over the relationship among information overload, security, and terror appears as a biopolitical problem long before the rise of the security state and what Shoshana Zuboff has recently called “surveillance capitalism�” At a moment when critical studies of security are often dominated by International Relations and cognate disciplines in the social sciences, the gothic provides an unruly but insistent reminder that our never-ending and total encounter with security is always an aesthetic experience. Wieland in particular presents this experience as a philosophical conundrum: why does the communication of information make human beings feel unsafe and insecure? Simple and straightforward acts of communication unhinge listeners and readers in Wieland, which is overburdened with letter writing, scenes of textual exegesis, and “vocalic surplus” (Sizemore 95). Notices in newspapers create fears of pursuit� Court documents are doled out bit by bit lest immediate and full disclosure overwhelm the recipient� One-word commands such as “hold! ” incite extreme terror. Religious texts sear the soul instead of providing solace� Even silence is viewed as a variant of information that amounts to deception� “Brown’s work has few peers in its almost obsessive attention to speaking, hearing, reading, and writing,” summarizes Michael Gilmore (646)� Upon encountering a corpse that he will soon dispose of in fitting gothic fashion by carrying the murder victim to the cellar for a quick and clandestine burial, the title character of Arthur Mervyn might be speaking for all of Brown’s narrators when he confesses, “How to communicate my thoughts … I knew not” (84). The paralyzing desire to express the unspeakable and convey the incommunicable aligns with the genre’s conventions� There is little surprise that Arthur Mervyn and kindred narrators such as Clara Wieland or Constantia Dudley in Ormond struggle to express their surprise as they encounter conspiracies and other nefarious designs� What is more surprising is that a rational, serious, and dry setting—that is to say, a secular temple devoted to textual scholarship and humanistic interpretation—can provoke terror� Consider a communicative scene where gentlemen scholars debate the wording of a classical text and failing to agree, they return to the original source� The task seems simple enough: hunt up the original, check the text, return with accurate information, and resolve the discrepancy� But the endeavor quickly becomes gothic when the search throws the fundamentals of humanities inquiry—verifiability, rationalism, 246 r uss c astronoVo empiricism—into doubt� Wieland sets out a scene familiar to any academic� The novel describes a group of humanities scholars who enjoy a sort of endless postdoctoral fellowship, discussing classical rhetoric and ancient texts without any care to labor or precarity� Clara describes her brother’s rustic seminar in superlative terms: “no spot on the globe enjoyed equal security and liberty” as this secluded academy (35)� Two more mentions of “security” quickly follow, but the cautious balancing of security and liberty seen in authorizing documents such as The Federalist Papers is wholly upset by what seems like innocuous and, if you will, boring humanities scholarship� 5 Theodore Wieland “was diligent in settling and restoring purity of the text. For this end, he collected all the editions and commentaries that could be procured, and employed months of severe study in exploring and comparing them” (23)� Information becomes obsession� Wieland’s activities reflect a concern for security consistent with the drive to procure, gather, and compare information. What happens next is completely accidental but also a direct outcome of trying to aggregate information� His intense devotion to secular humanism, ironically not unlike his father’s religious fanaticism that ends in spontaneous human combustion, leads to a prolonged chain of unreliable but still strangely authoritative communications� His “psychological fall from devoted father and pious classicist to homicidal lunatic” (Cahill 192) originates from textual inconsistencies in addition to mental ones� Trying to resolve a disagreement about Cicero, Wieland returns to the summerhouse for the volume when a servant meets him with a letter describing a waterfall, which leads to talk of another letter describing another waterfall� The goal seems to be a cross-referencing of the sublime, comparing a European cataract with an American one� But sublimity goes from merely being the content of communication to its medium when a disembodied voice commands him to desist in his investigations� Awesome, mysterious, and unknowable, this voice produces “a thrilling, and not unpleasing solemnity” (32), not so much for what it says as for the attention it draws to communication itself as a vertiginous endeavor� To be clear, the classical volume Wieland is reading is hardly gothic, but then again Brown suggests that any text, simply by virtue of its communicative properties, leads to places unknown� His sister Clara recounts how debate over a fine point in Latin rhetoric introduces the possibility of “misquotation” (28), prompting Wieland to return to his pastoral think tank for the book� On his way he meets up with a letter that then has him retracing his steps to a promontory in search of a different letter where he encounters an “auricular deception” (32)� The information carried across this communication chain is raw and disparate, and it offers no accord or resolution about 5 In letters to his family, Brown wrote about safety, as the yellow fever epidemic approached New York� In a letter from August 25, 1793, he reassured his brother James that his “abode is far enough from the seat of the disease” to provide “the utmost security” (Dunlap 4)� In a follow-up from September 4, Brown chides James for his susceptibility, not to yellow fever, but to print by believing the worst about the epidemic: “When did you learn to rely upon rumor news-paper information? ” (Dunlap 4)� Security and the Informational Sublime 247 either Cicero or waterfalls� The information he does receive sets in motion a complex affective response that is expressly linked to “that terror which is pleasing” (42)� The original source should settle a matter of “misquotation.” Comparison of multiple texts should help determine aesthetic judgments about sublime splendor� But in Wieland philology fails, spectacularly so� When Wieland and his friend Pleyel question the authority of the mysterious voice, the reply from the void insists that the news (about the death of a noblewoman across the ocean) is “from a source that cannot fail” (41)� Neither can the volume of Cicero fail—until it does. Not unlike the textual authority that Wieland wants to summon but never does, the source behind this information remains incomplete, obscure, and suspect� 6 A dearth of information in Wieland seems to pose a barrier to human understanding� This view has the support of Trish Loughran’s argument in The Republic in Print that undependable deliveries, impassable rivers, and other infrastructural obstacles prevented the development of a national print culture� Brown suggests something different: instability is immanent to information itself, jeopardizing the security provided by empiricism and rationality within the vaunted “age of reason�” Brown reverses longstanding narratives that celebrate print culture for blazing the way to the expansion of commerce, the diffusion of knowledge, and the broadening of political liberty� 7 By falling out of step with this narrative, Wieland invites a suspicious re-reading of one of the signature texts of Enlightenment rationality, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)� Named by The Guardian in 2017 as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of all time, Locke’s Essay “could hardly be more topical today” (McCrum) when reason seems in short supply and empirical knowledge about election results and global temperatures is actively dismissed by heads of state� And it was just as topical in Brown’s day, as Wieland, a novel whose “primary assumption is vintage Locke” (Fliegelman 237), cautions against the dangerous conclusions that may be derived from faulty sensory data—like taking a counterfeited voice to be the real thing or reading written words as the truth� Even as Lockean reason appears as a beacon in the darkness, the gothic gloom that tints the informational sublime in Brown’s novel unsettles Locke’s ideas about cognition� Reflecting on his frequent use of the word idea in the Essay, Locke presents it as a substitute for a variety of words, including “phantasm,” that refers to whatever may be in people’s minds� The question to ask about phantasmatic ideas is: “How do they come into the mind” in the first place? By a mixture of accident and deceit. Brown’s answer to Locke’s query reveals the extent to which information provides not the bedrock but the unstable ground of 6 If “Brown embraces the problematic and inescapable need for creating narrative explanations” (P� Gilmore 119), the storytelling required by these narratives creates another set of problems whose dimensions are communicative and philosophical� 7 For a critique of such technological determinism that sees print as inherently progressive, see Warner (5-7)� An additional problem is the assumption that “technology has an ontological status prior to culture” (Warner 5), as though print is an external force that pushes “culture” in the abstract toward Enlightenment values and practices� 248 r uss c astronoVo Enlightenment rationality� Locke’s “defensive stance against any mode of thinking that undermines the principles of self-enclosure and internal coherency” proves vulnerable to gothic suggestions entering the mind “through the portal of the senses” (Roberts 13)� For Brown, the senses seem especially at risk from information transmitted via written and printed media� In the genteel society of farmer-philosophers depicted in Wieland, a servant can bring a letter at any moment or a newspaper can catch the unsuspecting eye� Sunny predictions about the American Enlightenment that “widespread publication of ideas of correct ideas will make all of the difference in human history” (Ferguson 87) bump against Brown’s rude reminders that gothic messages can intrude without warning upon even the most idyllic scene� The problem, however, is not the familiar epistemological one about the limits of sensory perception; an excess of textual stimuli and a glut of information vex—rather than facilitate—the project of human understanding. Whether one agrees that Brown’s work displays “egregiously sloppy writing” or that “his prose carries the dispensations of print to extravagant lengths” (M. Gilmore 648), there is simply too much text in a book that is presented as though it were one single letter written by Clara Wieland� What is more, this epistolary letter makes mention upon mention of books sent from Germany, newspapers carried by ship captains, letters beset by “miscarriage” (37), and memoirs hidden in closets� If the central question of the novel is “how to establish the authority of information” (Levine 27), then the surfeit of information that dwarfs the human (in)capacity to sort, verify, interpret, and understand speech and written communication renders that question still more pressing and fraught� As a speculative anticipation of the gothic energies that haunt the underside of modern information theory, Wieland offers a peculiar history of the uncertainty and distortion that inevitably accompanies enlightened, humanist communication� A narrative about transatlantic print production and reception, Wieland heightens the suspicion that writing does more than convey intelligence, deepen knowledge, or simply share news� It instills doubt that the link between information and communication cannot be trusted� Books and newspapers appeal to characters in ways that defy rational explanation. The history of the Wieland family takes a decisive turn when the paterfamilias encounters a book by an obscure religious sect� Not much of a reader, the elder Wieland “entertained no relish for books, and was wholly unconscious of any power they possessed to delight or instruct” (7)� By chance, this volume that “had lain for years in a corner of his garret, half buried in dust and rubbish” (7) gets reactivated by no discernible logic or intention� Books are not about human agency� Brown’s doomed characters do not consult texts because they want information or diversion. Instead, some inexplicable force draws them to texts. As the elder Wieland becomes a reader, he becomes a deranged symptom of Enlightenment print culture: born in Saxony, migrating to London, attracted to an obscure book by an obscure French Protestant sect, and impelled to become a missionary spreading the Word of the gospel to the indigenous peoples of North America, he becomes Security and the Informational Sublime 249 as combustible as the paper of the texts he reads. Not for nothing did Kant in “What is Enlightenment? ” cite falling back on “a book that thinks for me” as an example of self-imposed tutelage. In his first contact with a dormant book, Wieland père mistakes print culture as a genuine source of illumination. After reading this religious text for a while “he regretted the decline of light which obliged him for the present to close it” (8), a not-so subtle indication that books may not be messengers of Enlightenment, after all� No matter their dubious status, books, manuscripts, newspapers, and letters assuredly do provide information to Brown’s characters who wander the transatlantic world and then settle, hide, or reinvent themselves in America� The source of that information may flow from God or it may spring from the deceptions of an unscrupulous ventriloquist—or, still yet, it may be immanent to print itself� Then again, books, not the least of which are Wieland and the other specimens of Brown’s corpus, regularly fail to provide illumination and, along with all the other vehicles such as letters and newspapers that provide intelligence, stand counterpoised to Enlightenment� This tension cuts across Brown’s dark take on communication in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world, and it also suggests why the informational sublime continues to pose a problem for security in our own age of terror� To allow these two temporally distinct idioms to bleed into one another is to begin to wonder what lies in the gothic cellar of information theory� A Gothic Theory of Information Information theory tends to treat information as though it is clear and unadulterated at the outset, an attitude not unlike the manner in which Wieland fils trusts in “the purity of the text.” According to this thinking, distortion only makes its way into the communication chain in the process of transmission when unwanted noise is added to the message� A diagram from Claude E� Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication lays out a linear schematic (fig. 1) that traces how a message travels from its “information source” to its “receiver” and “destination�” Transmitting messages securely and ensuring the integrity of information encoded as printed characters, electronic signals, or data bits, is paramount to the security of all communication systems, whether postal, telegraphic, or digital� Hacking, data breaches, and electronic theft are the most recent in a long line of threats, including counterfeits and intercepted letters, that have long jeopardized the security of information� Brown’s gothic novel, however, points to a concern of a different order: not only is information never secure from tampering, but information promotes insecurity through its own abundance and proliferation. Gaps and occlusions create knowledge deficits, to be sure. But it is information experienced as sublime excess that reveals how doubt and incomprehension are identical to information itself� Having more information about potential threats is a security goal that nonetheless serves to amplify the number of possible threats, thus creating the need to track and gather 250 r uss c astronoVo more information about each new threat as it is imagined� Security, because it is always productive of insecurity, breeds affective states such as unease, anxiety, and terror that frustrate comprehension, forestall action, and multiply feelings of vulnerability� The inherent insecurity of information conflicts sharply with influential accounts of information theory� Look again at Shannon’s graphic of a communication chain that presents an “information source” without complication until it gets activated by the flow of information. A “noise source” not located on this trajectory, seemingly external to the system itself, interrupts and intrudes upon the message at some point between sender and recipient� Noise enters printed texts, telegraph messages, and faxes as typographical errors, smudges, creases, and the like� Radios pick up static and analog TV sets at one time were interrupted by random patterns described as “snow�” Cell phone calls can sound eerie due to an echo effect in which callers hear their own voices, inviting plenty of internet speculation about whether this experience of audio discomfort means that someone is tapping into phones. All these effects are added to the message at later stages after it leaves the “information source” at the start of the chain� Fig� 1� “Schematic diagram of a general communication system” (Shannon 2)� The scientific paper containing this diagram, first published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, earned Shannon acclaim as “the father of information theory�” 8 In the words of his recent biographers, “every email we have ever sent, every DVD and sound file we have ever played, and every Web page we have ever seen loaded bears a debt to Claude Shannon” (Soni and Goodman xii). His breakthrough insight applied principles of thermodynamics, especially entropy as a measure of uncertainty, to communication� Its potential for surveillance and secrecy was clear from the outset: calculating the range 8 A curious coincidence is that Joe Turner from Three Days of the Condor, like Shannon, worked at Bell Labs� Security and the Informational Sublime 251 of possible messages that can be sent relies on similar principles as the effort “to track an airplane and compute its probable future positions” (Shannon and Weaver 3)� Such information, of course, would be of immense value to anyone programming a “guided missile” (Shannon and Waver 3) to intercept this airplane, as Shannon recognized� Shannon had preceded this paper with another, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography” in 1945, indicating that connections between a secrecy system and an information system are closer than at first thought. 9 In translating Shannon’s mathematical formulae for lay readers, Warren Weaver declares that this theory gets at “the real inner core of the communication problem” (25), but that does not stop him from offering two small but important correctives� Given the opportunity, Weaver amends the above schematic and relabels the “noise source” in the above diagram as “engineering noise” to allow for static or other distortion. (Solar flares that intensify every eleven years, for instance, can disrupt telecommunications satellites�) Next, a new box, labeled “semantic noise,” is added to the diagram, placed between the information source and transmitter to register “the perturbations or distortions of meaning which are not intended by the source” (26) but nonetheless affect how the message is received, decoded, and understood at the other end of this communication chain (fig. 2). Perhaps I do not intend to be rude, but my tone gives offense� Perhaps I do not mean to confess my crime, but my words give me away. Or, in Brown’s terms as expressed through Carwin, “Who can betray but myself” (281)� “Semantic noise” in Weaver’s amended diagram comes into play only with the onset of communication; that is, the temporal lag that exists between the “information source” and its encoding as a “signal” that can be transmitted preserves this idea that information can be isolated from noise� Fig� 2� A theory of communication with input and interferrence from semantic noise and engineering noise� 9 As Gleick observes, “From the point of view of cryptologists, a secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communication system” (216)� One tries to hide a message within noise while the other attempts to filter out the noise that impedes meaning. 252 r uss c astronoVo A gothic theory of communication inspired by Brown is both shorter and less linear� Even though characters in Wieland hear voices and receive letters, the suspicion is that ultimately there may be no outside vectors that corrupt information because it is already distorted at its source (fig. 3). Rather than a linear schematic where message and meaning move from left to right in what appears as a temporal sequence, this image suggests that communication is part of a media “environment” that, unlike “logical systems of structures” (Mitchell 203), cannot be easily tamed� There’s little rhyme and certainly no reason to how people communicate with books and other texts in Brown’s world. Doing nothing in particular in his cluttered London flat, Wieland’s father looks about the room and “his eye was attracted by a page of this book, which, by some accident, had been opened, and placed full in his view” (8)� The insistence on the passive in this account of reading suggests that human beings have little control over the information they seek� A phrase from the book, “seek and ye shall find” (8), jumps out at him, but it offers neither assurance nor guarantee about what might be found� Variations of this scene are repeated in the novel, as characters “glancing carelessly round” (183) suddenly and without reason fixate on private correspondence and diaries. Like Wieland, do we know what we will dredge up from our searches? Do we know what results, either actual or metaphysical, our searches will yield? Can we be prepared for the deluge of information that we receive? Fig� 3� A gothic theory of communication� Locke, for one, hoped to answer such questions by defining the “bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things, between what is, and what is not comprehensible by us,” but the inhabitants of Brown’s transatlantic world have little success in this regard� Clara initially seems armed with a formidable supply of Lockean optimism in offering her tale as a contribution to human understanding: “If it [my story] be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit” (5)� Her stipulation echoes Locke’s advice that people should give wide berth to the “dark parts of things” lest they “wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing” (ch. 1, §7)� But Clara proves to be a better student of Burke, who disputed “Mr� Locke’s opinion, that darkness is not naturally an idea of terror” and saw Security and the Informational Sublime 253 empiricism as no match for the uncertainty that at every second and in every direction surrounds us in darkness (30)� Reason may not be the antidote to terror that has been supposed� Lurking within the “darker implications of Locke’s psychology” lies a mentality “stressed to its own limits” (Weiskel 16) and bruised by its inability to grasp what is at the fringes of perception� What eludes sense perception nonetheless quickens our affective sensibilities, stoking the impulse to gather more data in hopes of illuminating these dark recesses� “Known unknowns,” to use Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s memorable phrasing, are both the target of security efforts and source of continuing unease and insecurity� Clara’s encounter with the informational sublime, as a typology for the subject of security, produces terror, but, unlike the Kantian sublime, hers is terror without enlightenment� Events in Wieland suggest a theory of communication that contrasts Shannon’s linear diagram with its settled telos of “message received” at its logical endpoint. Seeking and finding leads not to revelation but to distressing encounters with obscurity and noise� A gothic theory of communication— as opposed to Shannon’s mathematical one—gets rid of the outside “noise source” (seen in fig. 2) that affects the message in its transit from “information source” to its “destination.” Instead, this model (fig. 3) makes noise immanent to the system and elemental from the get-go� No hard-and-fast distinction between “information source” and “noise source” can be made� Noise is always buried deep within information� In this diagramming of information as gothic, no logic explains why people are drawn to texts. There is no a priori reason that attracts Wieland’s father to the fateful religious tract� Seeking and finding hardly seem like intentional activities and, what is more, the implicit link between the two is rendered more doubtful than ever� “Some instinct induced me to lay my hand upon a newspaper” (119), says Pleyel in an effort to explain how he learns that Carwin is a hunted fugitive not to be trusted. This explanation explains nothing other than the fact that Pleyel is no more able to account for his textual attractions than anyone else in Wieland’s humanities salon. In another scene of unaccountable textual attraction, Pleyel confesses that, in a half-hearted attempt to exculpate his snooping and surveillance of his friend’s innermost thoughts, “my eye glanced spontaneously upon the paper” (115) of Clara’s diary� His reward is a partial, hurried reading, making the diary the source of misinformation and conjecture about Clara’s virtue� Reading here is not all that different from the invasion of privacy, the niceties of the Fourth Amendment to the U�S� Constitution neatly cast aside� Clara proves susceptible to the same condition: “What was it that suggested the design of perusing my father’s manuscript? ” she wonders (86), effectively repeating her father’s pathology in being drawn inexplicably to enigmatic texts. A little bit of information goes a long way, not in providing clarity, but in fueling the search for more information, more seeking in the hopes of finding� Pleyel acknowledges that he “caught only parts of sentences” (115) when he spies over Clara’s shoulder, which convinces him that more investigation and more surveillance will enable him to understand the whole� So, at midnight, he sneaks up to the summerhouse in order to listen in on Carwin and 254 r uss c astronoVo a woman, whom he assumes is Clara, having sex. In the darkness, “hearing was the only avenue to information” (125), but for Pleyel it suffices because this intelligence fits with what he has learned from transatlantic dispatches printed in the Philadelphia newspapers� The article he reads in the American press, reprinted from a British paper, impels more searching: “it occurred to me, that the information I possessed was, in one sense sufficient, yet if more could be obtained, more was desirable” (120)� Adding more details, acquiring more data, and securing more intelligence do not dissipate Locke’s “dark parts of things” or set the stage for perspicacity� The news item about Carwin, even if factual and illuminating, nonetheless motivates a search for additional reports, whether to satisfy curiosity or supply corroboration� A similar impulse seized Brown himself, who completed Wieland and then later began working on serial installments of Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, whose plot hinges on the mania for information� In his relationship with his Illuminati mentor, Carwin “must determine to disclose every fact in his history, and every secret of his heart … and must continue to communicate, at stated seasons, every new thought, and every new occurrence … This confidence was to be absolutely limitless” (263). Critical self-examination becomes indistinguishable from gothic surveillance� The collection of data, the retrieval of information, the aggregation of search results are by design always in need of supplementation even when they are, as Pleyel declares about the newspaper story, “sufficient.” To return to the biblical verse that spurs Wieland’s fanaticism, finding does not put an end to seeking. Instead, finding only drives more seeking� The countermeasure to terror, especially when this sensation is provoked by indistinct apprehension of the unknown, is often assumed to lie in the collection of more information� Enveloped by the darkness, we are “forced to pray for light” (Burke 30)� With more data comes more knowledge, illuminating what had been obscure� But there is never enough information; there is only, paradoxically, too much information—and too much to assemble into a coherent story. The more information Pleyel uncovers, the more horrified he is by the false proofs of Clara’s sexual perfidy. The more evidence Clara receives from her senses, the more inarticulate she becomes� “My terror kept me mute,” she says (128)� She realizes the futility of enlightening her fellow humanist who is also her off-and-on love interest: “all my conversations and letters, affords me no security” (108) from Pleyel’s suspicions� Her insight might diagnose the communication anxiety that pervades the novel as a whole� Prized volumes about Ciceronian rhetoric produce confusion� Misplaced letters enable deception� Voices confound hearers� Newspapers deepen distrust� In short, communication itself affords no security and, in fact, imperils the sense of safety� The reasons, as we have seen, are several: the restless search for more information; the glut of data received but also its incompleteness; and, above all, the “noise” and uncertainty that are endemic to information� Security and the Informational Sublime 255 Information is closely associated with uncertainty� In an effort to describe how such uncertainty might be measured, Shannon borrowed the concept of entropy from thermodynamics to express the randomness and range of possibilities that accompany any message� If “it seems intuitively clear that a message about which the receiver was highly uncertain prior to its arrival conveys more information than one that the receiver could predict with certainty” (Schweighauser 7), then information becomes a function of uncertainty. Shannon worked out a complex equation that posits information as a logarithmic function, but the basic takeaway is that uncertainty resides within all information as the possible number of messages that can be sent and received. A helpful—and prototypically American—example that James Gleick provides is the information about British troop movements transmitted from the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston by the number of lanterns. In this simple scenario from 1775, two possible messages exist (“one if by land, two if by sea”), and this fundamental uncertainty is the precondition for communicating information� In contrast, “if only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information” (Gleick 219)� Thus a courtroom where “only one answer is really conceivable” to the question, “‘Do you swear to tell the whole truth? ’… provides almost no new information—we could have guessed it beforehand” (Soni and Goodman 142). A more complex scenario, say, messages sent by a German “enigma machine” during World War II, has a much greater degree of entropy, but nonetheless the uncertainty and randomness are “still susceptible to statistical analysis” (Gleick 219)� A mathematical theory of communication, by this reasoning, is not without its reassuring affect—one that reminds men that they remain in control—for dealing with the uncertainty of information� When Warren Weaver popularized Shannon’s research at Bell Labs, his explanation relied on an analogy suited to the era’s fantasies about gender and technology: “communication theory is just like a very proper and discreet girl accepting your telegram� She pays no attention to the meaning, whether it be sad, or joyous, or embarrassing� But she must be prepared to deal with all that come to her desk” (Shannon and Weaver 27). The expectation for a modern communication system is no different, and like this feminine embodiment of modesty, it “ought to try to deal with all possible messages” no matter the content� But what if that girl is Clara Wieland? What if that girl is a “story-teller” who produces “enjoyably terrible and deliberately obscure pleasures” (Galluzzo 262) that take shape as the first gothic American novel? Like the discreet office girl, Clara and others versed in gothic reading know that the content of the message ultimately is not as important as the otherwise unnoticeable contrivances and accords that enable communication in a presumably enlightened era� In place of a statistical approach to communication, her mode for understanding communication as gothic is rooted in the suspicion that information is corrupted at its source and made less secure the more it accumulates� This decidedly eighteenth-century approach listens for the irrational fears and inexplicable desires within communications systems that are typically ignored as so much noise� 256 r uss c astronoVo The novel violates normative protocols by which “the understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself” (Locke, ch�1 §1)� Clara doubts this supposition since the media that inform her understanding are a constant source of apprehension in both senses as a feeling of misgiving and as the capacity to grasp an idea or concept� Wieland examines what happens when the understanding does, in fact, take notice of itself, insinuating a challenge to Locke’s rational investigation of how the mind operates. The path is self-reflexive and dizzying, diverting attention from the content of information toward the medium of its own conveyance� Media scholars such as Lisa Gitelman and Niklas Luhmann have suggested that communication depends on our not recognizing the media that facilitate communication. “Structural amnesia” is baked into our experience with media (Gitelman 7), allowing us to forget that communication requires an intervening medium such as paper or a screen� The trick, then, is to see what is invisible� But how can something “be made visible which must remain invisible to itself” (Luhmann, Mass Media 121)? Any effort in this direction confronts what Luhmann calls “an injunctive paradox” (Mass Media 121) that prohibits the eye from seeing itself, that keeps us from observing how we observe� Each time that Clara recalls the terror that paralyzes her, she steps aside from the flow of her narrative to observe her own writing practices. Or, perhaps more accurately, each time that she pauses to think about the account she is writing, she is thrown into terror. She experiences this shock on at least three separate occasions� First, as she basks in her brother’s erudition, assured that “the world would have accepted a treatise” on the Daemon of Socrates “from his hand,” she breaks off and turns her narration to the present time and space of her own writing (45)� “My blood is congealed: and my fingers are palsied,” she exclaims (45). Having reached the moment when Carwin appears in her story, her trepidation ostensibly arises from remembering the fateful chain of events linked to the deceiver� But what stokes her initial interest in Carwin is the “sketch upon paper” (49) that she executes of his countenance and then stays up “half the night” (50) examining in her bedroom. Not the biloquist himself but the examination of the media she uses to represent him places her in the vertiginous position of trying, in Locke’s terms, to enable her eye to observe itself� A second moment comes just before her discovery of her sister-in-law’s murdered body� Her present writing anticipates the shock she is set to narrate: “my fingers are enervated … my language is faint” (135)� Once more she is brought to the brink of an expressive abyss as she communicates “incommunicable sentiments” (135). In this state, she interrupts the flow of her narrative and warns her reader that “abruptnesses, and dark transitions” (135) will mar her account, a narrative advisory that is itself an abrupt, if not a dark, transition� As Clara writes about her own writing, the action of the story “is displaced by the process of uttering itself,” a recursive strategy symptomatic of the novel’s fixation with books (Seltzer 83)� A note from Carwin warning that she is about to behold “a sight so horrible” (137) heightens her alarm, not for what it says, but because Security and the Informational Sublime 257 its ink is still wet, suggesting that Carwin lingers and is stealing up behind her at the very moment of her reading� Seized a third time by the mania of writing about her own writing, Clara announces that she will die when she puts down her pen and ends her story� “A few words more and I lay aside the pen for ever” (202), she declares, but like a true obsessive she goes on for three more chapters� What is far from clear, however, is whether any of these endeavors of the eye to see itself, to write about writing, and to understand human understanding can provide clarity about ourselves� More likely, these efforts generate noise and distortion, what Luhmann calls “irritations” (Reality 7), that are routinely folded into self-reproducing media systems� But not always� While “it is conventional to assume that humans can communicate,” in strict actuality “humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate” directly with one another since a medium is always required (Luhmann, “Mind” 371)� Locke, too, had his doubts that the “thoughts of men’s minds [might] be conveyed from one to another” and regrets that many ideas, especially ones with the potential to instruct or delight, frequently are “invisible and hidden from others�” Worse still, potentially enlightening ideas cannot be intuitively apprehended or automatically understood since thoughts cannot “of themselves be made to appear” (ch� 2, §1)� Some other medium—air for vibration, language for words, ink and paper for texts—is needed, but “when the medium becomes visible, it becomes disruptive, just as the strong whoosh and whistle of the air inside a car traveling at high speed disrupts words of communication” (Luhmann, “Mind” 377). Clara Wieland experiences this disruption at her core when after writing about writing, she reflects, “I stand aside, as it were, from myself” (203). Should her claim be believed, which, after all, is itself interrupted by the subjunctive (“as it were”) to mark its status as supposition? When it comes to communication media, standing aside is a fantasy� As Gitelman contends, getting “outside” (20) of media is practically, if not conceptually, impossible when the formulation of such an external account in Brown’s world requires intense scrutiny of pens, paper, and other tools used for self-expression. The example Gitelman gives of such inescapable reflexivity is the impossible project of writing a history of the Word Wide Web without resorting to the resources, archives, and links of the Web itself. Clara’s example is similar but only more gothic: information about the self is always bound by the medium of its own existence. This observation about the self does not pretend to pass as a metaphysical conclusion� It might better be taken as a materialist description of the media that make information insecure� “However commonplace it is to think of information as separable from” or “uninformed by media” (Gitelman 7), the stuff that gets communicated is always determined by the mode of its communication� Luhmann’s assertion represents a radical condensation of this idea: “only communication can communicate�” The upshot of this sibylline pronouncement is that neither half-formed thoughts nor full-blown ideas can circulate or signify without a medium� Yet any medium must also have enough transparency to allow us to forget that it is there� “Sentences 258 r uss c astronoVo that are thought and spoken are only parts of a process that disappear at the moment of their generation� They are constitutively unstable� Their accumulation would very quickly lead to uncontrolled complexity, that is, chaos. Just imagine the noise that would result if spoken words did not fade away but remained audible! ” (Luhmann, “Mind” 379)� Biloquism in Wieland represents an eerie twist on this formulation: what if words appeared in two places at once, three, if you count their reappearance in Clara’s letters, four if you count the novel, and so on? We misread if we dwell upon “content without attending to the medium that … communicates that content” and, in the process, shapes what can be thought and expressed (Gitleman 7). The gothic nature of Brown’s novel draws unwanted attention to media that would otherwise remain invisible� Clara’s narrative-as-letter refuses to let the noise fade away in its compulsive return to the medium of its own narration� Wieland obsesses over authorship but not in the familiar sense of claiming a specifically literary identity in the early United States. Instead the fixation disallows the structural amnesia that is necessary to smooth communication. In thematic terms, Brown “attempts to make visible complex modes of communication” (Margolis 362). In terms of style, this refusal might explain Brown’s “egregiously sloppy writing” that “carries the dispensations of print to extravagant lengths” (M. Gilmore 648). It certainly explains Clara’s many locutions about people being the “authors” of events, outcomes, and narratives. She identifies Carwin as “the author of this black conspiracy” (174) and later accuses him directly, “Thou art the author of these horrors! ” (208)� Attributions of authorship would seem to clear up the mystery by identifying a single malevolent agent as the guilty party� Yet assurances that the malefactor behind a conspiracy can be brought to light become uncertain in the next breath, as Clara acknowledges that the “relief” found when “an author is discovered or imagined” may, in fact, only be imaginary� When she presses her uncle to learn why her brother languishes in a prison cell, he asks her, “Shall I make him the narrator of his own tale? ” (149)� The scenario is gothic in more ways than one: Wieland, the murderer of his wife and children, sits in a dark hole with the sole ambition of escaping to kill his sister and, at the same time, this odd estrangement from his own tale hints at an array of intervening institutions and media: medical authorities like her uncle, legal documents, signed confessions, and, of course, letters� Beyond the criminal court and the written text of her brother’s confession, the screen or barrier between Wieland and his own narrative invites the darker possibility that human beings are always hidden from others� A person possesses no true information to communicate because a self’s thoughts “are all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear” (Locke, ch�2 §1)� This last bit comes from not from Clara Wieland but from Locke, a flicker of recognition that the implicit arrangements that allow people to agree on what words mean are at best flimsy and ephemeral. 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But populism is aesthetic in a particular sense. As I argued in the first installment of this suite of essays (“Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance,” REAL 34, 2018), populism is driven by the fantasy of a type of representation that paradoxically represents itself as non-representation, i.e., as an unmediated presence and fulfillment of the popular will in the representative. Liberal democracy normally insists on the ineluctable difference between representative and represented, though on the campaign trail that difference tends to get elided for purposes of mobilization. Populist democracy, on the other hand, consistently denies that difference. It installs the logic of campaigning as the foundation of democratic politics, and it does so through recourse to a particular set of aesthetic strategies. These strategies are designed to equip the idea of the representative (the elected leader) embodying the represented (the voters, and by extension “the people”) with a palpable sense of reality. Crucial for the populist aesthetic is the creation of a particular kind of “space of appearance” (Arendt)—exemplified, in my analysis, by the political rally—in which the unity of representative and represented can be experienced by performative means. As I emphasized in part I, these performative stagings of unity are extraordinarily unstable and run the risk of losing intensity to a point where the performance becomes experienced as the failure of the populist community to pick up momentum and take shape. This is because the experience of unmediated unity hinges on a call-and-response structure between representative and represented that cannot fully be programmed beforehand but rather relies on improvisational techniques. Hence, rallies by Donald Trump are characterized by a dynamic that differs quite drastically from the soundbites and snippets usually seen in the coverage of those rallies on the news: they are characterized by a series of cycles of (sometimes dramatically) rising and falling intensity. This dynamic is so central to these events that Trump often self-reflexively thematizes it, for instance by commenting on the aesthetic qualities of his slogans and the responses they elicit. I concluded the first part of “Toward an Aesthetic of Populism” with a reflection on the normative import of describing the rally as a “space of appearance.” Insofar as the rally is designed to produce moments of felt unity, it contradicts the Arendtian notion of a democratic space of appearance as marked by a plurality of perspectives necessary for the co-creation of a shared world of interest. But during the actual political performance of the rally, these moments of unity cannot be taken for granted, and the rally 262 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger may in fact be most precisely characterized by the incongruity of the parties involved. From that point of view, the populist rally can indeed be said to resemble a democratic space of appearance—but only so long as it fails to achieve its goal of creating the experience of an undifferentiated unity of representative and represented. Extending the argument proffered in part I, I add that in contrast to the democratic space of appearance theorized by Hannah Arendt, the rally does not lend itself to any kind of reasoned argument on the basis of (aesthetic) judgment—even if one focuses on its phases of incongruity and plurality. Rather, populist non-identity is expressed affectively. In the affective language of populist performance, dissent and rejection are not expressed by saying “No! ” or by any form of reasoned disagreement. They are expressed by silence and, ultimately, by absenting oneself from the public space. The Rally as Emblem of the Politico-Aesthetic Order In creating a space for affect-driven non-identity that strives for affective unity, the rally is not so much a special sphere that lies outside of, or adjacent to, the public sphere. Rather, I contend that the rally encapsulates a politicoaesthetic order in which attendees actively, vocally, and improvisationally participate, but in which there is no room for the articulation of dissenting positions, nor for any form of compromise. In other words, I claim that the performative aesthetics of the rally figures what the political sphere as such is in the process of becoming today. To say that we live in a populist moment does not just mean that our moment is characterized by populist politicians like Trump, or that a sizeable portion of the population is open to populist messages, but that no matter which political positions we may hold, we are more and more doing politics in the manner of the rally. To make sense of this argument, it is crucial to understand the rally as a polarizing public form that is embedded in a polarized culture. This allows us to see the rally both as a condensed microcosm of tendencies that increasingly structure the political sphere and as an engine of the cultural logic of polarization. This second installment of “Toward an Aesthetics of Populism” will therefore shift from an analysis of the rally to the larger problem of the aesthetics of polarization. I will effect that transition by way of a brief analysis of the polarizing function of the rally itself. When the interaction between representative and represented in the populist rally is aiming for the momentary creation of a sense of unity, that interaction does not simply constitute a dialogue between the politician and his base. It is a dialogue between these two parties in reference to a third party, whose identity fluctuates between various kinds of internal enemies (including the political opponent, minorities, etc.). Adapting a distinction Ernesto Laclau makes between different kinds of demands made by populist movements, we can say that the populist community comes into being by way of performative acts that are alternately “particularistic” and “totalizing” (see Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 263 Laclau 39). In both “particularistic” and “totalizing” performative acts, “the people” are defined against the elites. This identity construction vis-à-vis the elites proceeds by the drawing of what Laclau calls an “internal frontier” without which “there is no emergence of a popular subjectivity” (38). But within this overall mechanism of performative identity construction with the help of an internal frontier, we can distinguish between those performative acts in which the unity aspired to between leader and followers is figured as the unity of “the people” (these are the acts I call “totalizing” or “universalistic”) and those acts in which the collective comes into being in contradistinction to a part of the people who are treated, not unlike the elites, as the populist community’s opponent (these acts I call “particularistic”). In the latter case, the shared opponent logically does not coincide with the elites needed to construct the internal frontier. Whereas the elites are constructed as external to the people, the opponent in the second case is uneasily recognized as belonging to the people, if only illegitimately so. Nadia Urbinati ingeniously captures this particularistic logic by calling it “pars pro parte: ” In extreme cases, populism in power attempts to constitutionalize “its majority” by dissociating “the people” from any pretense to impartiality and staging the identification of a part (the “good” part) with the ruler representing it (pars pro parte) instead. (Urbinati, Me the People 94) Whereas for Urbinati the particularistic identification stands at the center of populism (at least of populism in power), I suggest that it is overlaid with the universalist (or totalizing) logic of pars pro toto. In one moment, the populist community is a part of the people, in the next it is its entirety. Or, even more concretely, in one instance, the attendees of the rally stand only for the better part of America, and in the next instance, they stand for America itself. In the former case, the opponent is acknowledged, in the latter it is denied. The constitution of the populist community in reference to an other is facilitated by the presence of that other in the space of appearance. Hence Trump’s references to the journalists of the mainstream media positioned in the back of the venue, or the calculated appearance of protestors and hecklers from the opposite political camp (a tactic that had already been used by George Wallace). But as the Trump phenomenon demonstrates, evoking an other does not just construct and consolidate the populist community; it also constructs and consolidates that other from the perspective of the other itself. Trump is polarizing not only in the sense that he manages to rally a base that defines itself against the (allegedly illegitimate) rest of the country; in doing so, he also rallies the rest of the country against him and his base. This is what makes the populist a polarizing figure. It is not only Trump supporters who are enthralled by him. Those who loathe him cannot take their eyes and ears off him either. They, too, love the dynamics of the populist performative aesthetic, the booing and cheering, and booing and cheering for their booing and cheering. It is in that wider sense that the rally is in the process of becoming our political sphere. 264 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger These Polarized States of America When we say that populism flourishes, we thus mean more than that the ideology or preferred style of one particular segment of political society turns populist. We rather point to a logic and aesthetic that takes hold of society at large. Put differently, the constitution of the populist community happens by way of performative acts that create a relational structure between two halves of society. Populism takes hold when the relational antagonism of the two halves becomes recognized by both camps, so that each half recognizes the other as opponent or enemy and, as a corollary, is reluctant to accord the other half legitimacy. In tying populism to polarization this closely, the question emerges how current populism relates to the history of polarization in the United States—and, more fundamentally, in what sense the United States can be accurately described as polarized at all. While it has become commonplace to describe the United States as polarized, political science research is less than unanimous about the extent and time frame of polarization. Yet, major recent studies, published since 2016, have produced accounts that tend to agree on the major outline of the story of polarization in the United States. That story will serve as background to the analysis of the contemporary aesthetics of polarization. Very little controversy has ensued over findings that postulate political polarization among political elites, meaning elected officials, candidates, and activists. Major studies conducted in recent decades have shown that Congress has become increasingly structured by partisanship since the party realignment of the late 1960s (Andris et al.; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal; Campbell; Abramowitz). Political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who later also collaborated with Nolan McCarty, have developed the so-called DW- Nominate to track the voting behavior of members of Congress and quantitatively chart their position on the political spectrum. They do so by tracking how often individual members of Congress have voted with members of the other party, thus arriving at a measure that moves from centrist to partisan. This measure does not proceed by designating particular ideological issues as either centrist or partisan; it is rather a strictly relational measure of voting behavior. Moreover, by considering all roll call votes in U.S. Congress between 1879 and 2015, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal have recorded changes in partisanship throughout the long twentieth century. The most essential take-away of their research is that between roughly 1900 and 1967, representatives of both parties increasingly voted with members of the other party. In other words, this was a phase in which overall polarization decreased. Since 1967, the trend has reversed among members of both parties, though asymmetrically so. According to DW-Nominate, while the Republican Party is now more polarized than ever before, the Democrats are roughly where they started out in the late nineteenth century. The biggest movement within the Democratic Party has been by its Southern wing. While between 1927 and roughly 1990, Southern Democrats were the least polarized (sub-)party ever—meaning that they voted more often with the members of Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 265 the other party than any either Northern Democrats or Republicans, which is not surprising, given that they fit uneasily into the New Deal coalition—they are now just as polarized as Northern Democrats (though not as polarized as Republicans). But while most scholars agree on the view that the political class has become increasingly polarized, the question to what degree this polarization extends to ordinary Americans is more controversial. Yochai Benkler and his co-authors summarize the debate: “There is less consensus about what has happened to the majority of Americans who are not highly engaged partisans of either party and are not as polarized as the most engaged citizens. Morris Fiorina and his coauthors have been the leading academic voices expressing skepticism over ideological polarization of the broader public” (302). Indeed, Fiorina et al. declare the idea of widespread polarization and the idea of a culture war to be a “myth.” As they write, The myth of a culture war rests on misinterpretation of election returns, a lack of comprehensive examination of public opinion data, systematic and self-serving misrepresentation by issue activists, and selective coverage by an uncritical media more concerned with news value than with getting the story right. There is little evidence that Americans’ ideological or policy positions are more polarized today than they were two or three decades ago, although their choices often seem to be. The explanation is that the political figures Americans evaluate are more polarized. A polarized political class makes the citizenry appear polarized, but it is largely that—an appearance. (Fiorina et al. 9) Fig. 1 Polarization in the U.S. Congress by Party, 1879-2015. Source: https: / / voteviewblog.com/ 2015/ 06/ 10/ more-on-assymmetric-polarization-yes-the-republicans-did-it/ . 266 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger The idea that polarization is a myth, that in everyday life the center does hold, is certainly a charming fantasy, but its implausibility begins with the idea that the political class is delinked from the population, as if politics were not experienced through the media and as such incorporated into the political culture of everyday life. Fiorina and his co-authors neglect to account for processes of collective group-formation and identification via politics (perhaps these processes lie outside the scope of their methods). Moreover, the historical trajectory of polarization—with its moment of reversal located in the South of the late 1960s, when there was a strong reaction to the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Civil Rights Movement—further undermines the idea that it is the political apparatus and a sensationalist press alone that create the false impression of a polarized society. Rather, the results of the DW-Nominate suggest that the predictions made by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, have proved accurate. Phillips, whose assessment was taken to heart by Richard Nixon in devising the Southern Strategy, interpreted the 1968 presidential election as the beginning of a “conservative cycle” that was the result of the backlash to the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Civil Rights Movement. As Phillips put it: “The Negrophobe Deep South and modern Outer South simultaneously abandoned the Democratic Party. And before long, the conservative cycle thus begun ought to witness movement of congressional, state and local Southern Democrats into the ascending Republican Party” (36). In fact, Phillips did not innocently foretell the future of anti-black and anti-progressive backlash, but rather operated in a political context that actively courted political polarization in terms of racial or ethnic polarization. He did so on the basis of the conviction that “ethnic polarization is a longstanding hallmark of American politics, not an unprecedented and menacing development of 1968” (470). “Phillips,” concludes historian Dan Carter, “urged his party to work vigorously to maintain and expand black voting rights in the South, not as a moral issue, but because it would hasten the transfer of whites—north and south—to the Republican Party” (Carter 379). John Mitchell, Phillip’s mentor and boss, even propagated the “positive polarization” of American politics, i.e., a type of polarization that would give Republicans “more than fifty percent of the voters once the electorate was divided into warring camps” (379). The basis of Phillips’s analysis was not that the electorate would follow political elites, but vice versa: the political process would come to reflect the widely held resentment among whites of the civil rights struggle and its embrace by the Democratic Party. This chain of causality has been supported by political scientist James Campbell in his recent study Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America, first published in 2016. Campbell claims that “the electorate is and has been highly polarized since the late 1960s” (41), but it took the political parties time to catch up. “Polarization of the parties, in the electorate and among elites, seems to have developed [not until] the late 1970s and into the 1980s” (48). Campbell, in fact, is so keen on severing the two processes of polarization—one among the electorate, the other among Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 267 political elites—that he tends to fall prey to the same conceptual mistakes made by Fiorina, only from the opposite direction. Like Fiorina, he indirectly suggests that polarization in the wider population and polarization among political elites can be logically and practically distinguished from each other. More convincing in this regard is the work of political scientist Alan Abramowitz, who rejects the idea that the polarization of political elites and that of the larger public can be kept apart. He arrives at this position by rejecting another opposition, namely the distinction between sorting and polarization (held, among others, by Fiorina). By “sorting,” political scientists refer to the coalescence of ideological positions of voters and their party choice. In a well-sorted system, voters identify their own political convictions correctly with the party representing that position; they moreover adopt a whole set of positions in line with the issue packages represented by each party, so that “liberal” becomes synonymous with “Democrat” and “conservative” with “Republican.” “Polarization,” by contrast, refers to the extremity of the positions held by the electorate and of the views represented by the parties on a scale from centrist to extreme. In theory, it is possible to imagine a perfectly sorted political landscape (in which the views of each voter neatly correspond to the package of positions offered by one of the parties) in such a way that the positions shared by voter and party platform are predominantly centrist. Abramowitz contends, however, that in practice “sorting and polarization are almost always indistinguishable” (Abramowitz 101). His analysis of American political history since the party realignment of the late 1960s confirms this: Since the early 1970s, Democrats have shifted to the left, Republicans have shifted even further to the right, and the overall distribution has shifted away from the center and toward the two ends. These shifts are very similar to those seen among members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives during the same period, although the shifts in Congress have been somewhat larger. Nevertheless, the evidence shows very clearly that for both groups, sorting and polarization are very closely connected. As Democrats and Republicans in the electorate and in Congress have sorted themselves across the ideological divide, they have simultaneously moved away from the center. (104) One of the reasons for the confluence of sorting and polarization—which takes place on the sides of both the electorate and the political elites—is the principal change in the mode in which polarization (and sorting) takes place. While political scientists for a long time approached polarization primarily with reference to political issues and more abstract convictions dubbed “ideology” by political scientists, Abramowitz argues that polarization over the last decades has increasingly become a matter of voters’ affective identification with their party and candidate of choice. And not only does political identification work through increasingly strong affective attachments to party or candidate; even more important has become the strong dislike of the other side—what Abramowitz calls “negative partisanship” (109): “Large proportions of Democrats and Republicans,” he explains, “now dislike the opposing party more than they like their own” (164). In this combination of 268 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger strong affective identification with the candidate of choice and even more strongly felt negative partisanship, the polarization of candidates gets shortcircuited with the polarization of voters: “The polarized evaluations of candidates seen in 2012 require both polarized candidate choices and polarized voter positions on issues and ideology” (112). While political science scholarship based on polling, roll-call tracking and similar quantitative techniques is useful in giving us an idea of the extent to which voters have indeed become polarized, there are shortcomings to this kind of positivistic research: it cannot arrive at a theoretical explanation of the dynamics of polarization but ultimately stays limited to evidence-based statements about whether and how polarization has taken place. Only on the basis of a theoretical approach, however, does it become possible to explain why polarization can be regarded a phenomenon characteristic of democracy, how it relates to populism, and why polarization takes particular forms of cultural expression. For this reason, we will treat the findings of the political science scholarship on processes of affective polarization and negative partisanship as the occasion to think through the relation between democracy and polarization. Envy in America, or Tocqueville’s Democratic Passions When Alexis de Tocqueville, at the outset of Democracy in America (1835/ 1840), points to the “equality of conditions” as the defining characteristic of (American) democratic society, he does not have in mind actually existing equality among members of society, but rather a post-rank legal constellation in which citizens are nominally equal (4). Throughout both volumes of Democracy, Tocqueville traces various tendencies that grow out of the equality of conditions, including the character of everyday social behavior, forms and traits of cultural expression, and a particular set of feelings. Because he consistently—at times even single-mindedly—ties back his observations to the post-feudal conditions exemplified by the United States, his work continues to have heuristic potential for conceptualizing the cultural and political dynamics of (U.S.) democratic society. This, we shall argue, is true also for populism, which can be reconstructed, with Tocqueville, as a ramification of the affective consequences of democratic nominal equality. Tocqueville is writing about the United States as a French aristocrat who sees democracy as the future fate of his own nation. He does so with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he shares classical misgiving about democracy (inherited from political theory reaching back to antiquity) and particularly worries that it will turn into a “tyranny of the majority”—an idea that resonates with classical fears of “mob rule” and that was commonly discussed in debates about the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, he admires how Americans have kept their democracy from reverting into tyranny and therefore presents the United States as a best practice model for dealing with the democratic future his home country will (to his mind) inevitably face. Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 269 Ultimately, it is his fear of democratic tyranny, however, that is crucial for understanding Tocqueville. For it is this fear that shows Tocqueville to be deeply indebted to the Republican tradition of political philosophy, and, as we shall argue, it is by putting Tocqueville into dialogue with classical debates about democracy that his explanatory potential for contemporary dynamics of populism becomes particularly striking. According to Tocqueville, the equality of conditions “creates opinions, gives birth to sentiments, suggests customs and modifies all that it does not produce” (4). Opinions and sentiments, he suggests, are shaped by the equality of conditions in three related ways. First, they bring forth a love of equality; second, individuals are driven to stand out from the crowd of equals in a quest for the gratification of recognition, which paradoxically becomes fueled, in Winfried Fluck’s insightful take on Tocqueville, by the very conditions and love of equality (Fluck); yet third, individuals have to cope with the experience that it is not them who stand out from the crowd but somebody else. Naturally, for most people, it is this third type of experience that predominates in everyday life. So, in a sense democratic life is characterized by witnessing how other people excel, which is an experience doubly irritating. First, because the democratic individual aspires to the very distinction achieved by the other and thus compares herself unfavorably to that other; second, because the observance of the other’s advancement contradicts the democratic individual’s love of equality, according to which no one should stand out in the first place. Both of these irritations come together in the affect of envy, which Tocqueville discusses throughout both volumes of Democracy in America and which he ultimately singles out as the primary democratic emotion. In the chapter “Of the Government of Democracy,” Tocqueville writes: The fact must not be concealed that democratic institutions develop the sentiment of envy in the human heart to a very high degree, not so much because they offer each person the means to become equal to others, but because these means constantly fail those who use them. Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. (316) As Jon Elster once put it, envy, for Tocqueville, is “a comparison-based emotion” (71). The aim of envy is to counter the emergence of inequality by producing a leveling effect. In contrast to hatred, envy does not aim at the destruction of the other, but at leveling out the difference between self and other regarding some attribute. Envy presents one of two options to work towards leveling out that difference. One option is upward leveling—this, for Tocqueville, is the expression of a legitimate passion for equality; we may associate it with an American trajectory that leads from Transcendentalist notions of self-growth all the way to the human potential movement; the second option, associated with envy, is downward leveling, which Tocqueville describes as a “depraved taste for equality … that leads the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in liberty” (89). 270 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger For Tocqueville, the downward leveling of envy is doubly pernicious. It drives citizens of democratic societies towards accepting equality in servitude—a politically disastrous state of despotic conformity. On the level of the individual’s emotional life, it moreover leads to systemic unhappiness and even depression. The more successful the leveling efforts, the smaller the differences become; yet as equality increases, so does the sensitivity to remaining (or newly emerging) inequalities, however minute they may be. From this sharpened perception—which is echoed in the Latin word for envy, invidia, literally: to look upon—follows a continuous experience of disappointment: “Every day,” Tocqueville writes, “at the moment when people believe they have grasped complete equality, it escapes from their hands and flees, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight” (316). The costs are not merely political unfreedom, but a collective malaise of the soul. “It is to these causes that you must attribute the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic countries often reveal amid their abundance, and this disgust for life that sometimes comes to seize them in the middle of a comfortable and tranquil existence” (946). Affects of Athens: The Passions of Ancient Democracy In recognizing envy as a problem peculiar to democracy, Tocqueville links up with an age-old discourse about envy and resentment that goes all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. Envy and resentment are not quite identical, but it is remarkable that the Greek term phthonos gets translated as resentment, envy, and even jealousy. Whether in Athens, Rome or modern America, envy permeated the emotional life of democracy because democracy established a norm of equality—or, as Tocqueville called it, “a passion for equality”—which was contradicted by the really existing inequalities characterizing democratic society. In Athens and Rome, that disparity lay between political equality on the one hand and stark economic inequality on the other. “Class tension,” writes historian Josiah Ober in his classic study Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, “was endemic in Greece and often contributed to the violent and disruptive political conflicts (staseis) that were common in the poleis of the archaic and classical periods” (18). As a consequence, keeping mass unrest in check became one of the chief challenges of ancient democracy. Aristotle, in his Politics, devotes much space to recommendations of how class tensions can be alleviated, both ideologically and materially. It is in this context that “the philosophers of the classical period,” as Jeremy David Engels puts it, “conceptualized resentment as a bitter, eruptive, undignified force that had to be contained” (4). Interestingly, Aristotle, writing from an elite position, put so much emphasis on class inequality that his definition of the demos, and thus of democracy, tended to veer from the institutionalized understanding of these foundational concepts. While officially the democratic people of Athens were defined as the collectivity of native-born, free men, independent of wealth—which is to say that there were stark economic disparities among Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 271 those constituting the polis—Aristotle defined democracy as the “rule of the poor” and contrasted it with oligarchy as the “rule of the rich.” He went so far as to suggest that even if the poor were a minority, and not the overwhelming majority that they really were, their rule would still have to be called democracy. Likewise, even if the rich were not a minority but a majority, their rule would still have to be called oligarchy. In that sense, democracy was an ambiguous creature: officially, and by mass consent, it was the rule of all politically equal citizens, but from the view of elite writers, it was the unjust uprising of the poor (cf. Ober 192-93). We will see why this is important when we come back to Tocqueville. In Aristotle’s analysis, extreme social inequality is a fertile ground for the emergence of demagogues—those literal “leaders of the people” whose power rests on their rhetorical prowess. According to Aristotle, not all demagogues were dangerous to democracy, but under conditions of extreme economic inequality, demagogues had the capacity to turn into tyrants. Nadia Urbinati explains Aristotle’s reasoning as follows: Social distress unleashes the immoderate desire for power among the few, who realize that the breakdown of social and political balance [between the rich and the poor] can be turned into a strategy of regime change, through which they can make decisions without consulting the opinion of the people. (Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured 142) Demagogues utilized envy and resentment emerging from inequality to their own benefit. They were able to fortify their powerful position—and the position of elites more generally—by stoking and then deflecting popular unrest. Jeremy David Engels calls this mechanism, which he traces from classical Greece to present-day America, “the politics of resentment: ” What I call the politics of resentment involves channeling civic resentment—engendered by economic exploitation, political alienation, and a legitimate sense of victimhood—into a hatred of our neighbors and fellow citizens. Rather than allowing resentment to build up as the unifying emotion through which a demos becomes itself in opposition to an elite, the politics of resentment redirects resentment within the people, thereby taming the force of democracy to act as a path to justice. (12-13) By way of this mechanism of redirection, skillful demagogues use the resentment caused by economic inequality to entrench inequality even more firmly. In the case of classical Greece, resentment more specifically opened up the possibility of spreading inequality from the economic to the political domain. Ancient demagoguery is not the same as modern populism, not least because they have different impacts. In ancient direct democracies, a demagogue used the power of words to persuade the assembly to put his stirring speech into law directly. A modern populist, by contrast, may stay confined to the realm of ideological opinion-making and never get to the point where he or she can translate that ideology into law. But ancient demagoguery and modern populism both rely on exploiting the violation of the norm of equality, which is to say that both rely on the exploitation of envy and resentment. Moreover, both have in common that the politicization of resentment allows 272 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger them to reduce the plurality of positions circulating in the democratic public into exactly two poles, only one of which is given legitimacy. E pluribus duo, so to speak. This is why polarization is a built-in feature of the populist cultivation and appropriation of envy and resentment stemming from a violation of the democratic norm of equality. As mentioned before, Aristotle and other elite writers of his time wavered between defining the demos as the collective of all free men and defining them as the poor. The latter definition may not have been shared by the majority of poor yet politically enfranchised citizens, but the strong association of the people with poverty did carry over into the content of popular resentment. As Josiah Ober clarifies: When an average Athenian citizen observed a rich man, his emotions were complicated, but prominent among them was a straightforward sense of envy (phthonos). The poor man would like to have possessed the rich man’s wealth and the fine things wealth could provide. (205) The envy described here is a protracted, entrenched, and structural experience that, in modern usage, is captured by resentment rather than envy. Whereas envy tends to describe the feelings on an individual, resentment emphasizes that this feeling emerges from a stratified position. As the anthropologist Didier Fassin puts it, resentment points to “the misery emanating from the social location occupied and the frustrations it elicits” (258). Aristotle (much like Tocqueville in modern times) understands envy to be a comparison-based feeling based on equality. As he writes in Rhetoric, envy “is excited … by [the prosperity] of people who are like us or equal with us” (1386b 18-20). But despite being equal politically, the poor, in Athens, could not hope to acquire the attributes of the rich. We might say that here, political equality was coupled with a social caste structure. Hence the deep frustration typical of resentment. This, it would seem, is where the modern dynamics of democratic envy and resentment, as described by Tocqueville, differ from the classical model. What Tocqueville sees in the post-feudal equality of conditions of the United States is the transformation of a fixed caste structure into structures of inequality that are rapidly changing. He characterizes democratic society as marked by extreme economic volatility that can potentially affect any of its members in unforeseen ways. This, Tocqueville finds, affects the minds of Democrats by stirring the hopes of even the poorest person and creating anxiety among the very rich: I did not meet, in America, a citizen so poor who did not cast a look of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich, and whose imagination did not grasp in advance the good things that fate stubbornly refused him. On the other hand, I never saw among the rich of the United States this superb disdain for material well-being that is sometimes shown even within the heart of the most opulent and most dissolute aristocracies. Most of these rich have been poor; they have felt the sting of need; they have long fought against a hostile fortune, and now that victory is won, the passions that accompanied the struggle survive it; they remain as if intoxicated amid these small enjoyments that they have pursued for forty years. (934) Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 273 In other words, in Tocqueville’s conceptualization, the demos does not consist of the poor but of politically equal citizens who are collectively subject to the vagaries of continuously emerging structures of inequality. Here, envy and resentment still emerge from inequality, but the kinds of inequality that provoke envy and resentment proliferate. Certainly, economic inequality remains a crucial engine of envy, but economic equality is not pressing only because life is miserable when you do not know how to put food on the table. Poverty becomes the ground of the comparison-based feeling of envy because in poverty, a difference of status and standing becomes manifest that contradicts the norm underwritten by the equality of conditions. But differences in status and standing become manifest in other ways as well, including education, culture, and regional affiliation, etc. The difference between ancient and modern democracy, then, is not that the first produces resentment (because of its quasi-caste structure that contradicts political equality) whereas the second produces envy only (because in a situation of general volatility inequality appears as less structural and therefore frustration is less deeply entrenched). Rather, modern democracy tends to transform economic inequality into a question of status, which is another way of saying that it culturalizes inequality, without thereby diminishing economic inequality (for a Marxist genealogy and critique of this assessment regarding populism, see Jäger). This does not make the discrepancy of the norm of equality and de-facto inequality less of a question of social position but merely redefines social position, from a location in the economic hierarchy to a location in a symbolic hierarchy. So, to repeat, two processes go together in a Tocquevillian analysis of envy/ resentment and inequality in modern democracies: the first is the dynamization of inequality (which is not to say that there are not entrenched quasi-oligarchical structures in the United States). The second element is the transformation of inequality from poverty and riches to a question of status. To be precise on this point, material inequality retains a privileged role in the production of resentment even after this transformation. In most of his examples, Tocqueville grounds emerging inequalities of status in material poverty and wealth, and social scientists of our own age studying populism and polarization have also been acute to the correlation between rising economic inequality and political polarization (see in particular McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, who argue, in their co-authored Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, from 2006, that polarization and economic inequality have been on the rise in interlinked fashion since the 1970s). But the overlayering of economic and symbolic inequality has a crucial impact on how resentment can be redirected. In classical Greece, redirection stayed largely within the economic realm. Here, structural inequality was typically redefined as the scandalous, arrogant swagger of morally deficient rich individuals—black sheep, so to speak. As Ober puts it, “The ostentatious lifestyles of the rich provided the forensic orator with an obvious body of material which could be used in exploiting his audience’s envy of the wealthy” (207). By contrast, under the equality of conditions it becomes possible to 274 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger redirect economic resentment to all kinds of culprits. Not only can the elite be redefined as college professors, journalists, and latte drinkers; the elite can even be defined in such a way that the superrich do not belong to it. And, as influential theorists of populism point out, it also becomes possible for populism to become “triadic” (Judis), i.e., to usher in what we call a “resentment sandwich,” in which the resentful are defined as the middle, and the resented become those on top and the internally excluded at the bottom. In other words, it is the more flexible redirection of resentment under the equality of conditions that lends itself to turning economic resentment into racial resentment. As a side note, the image of the resentment sandwich—which imagines those feeling resentful to make up its middle—aptly captures the fact that in the United States of the late 1960s, the language of the politics of resentment, which stoked and exploited racial resentment in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, came to make excessive use of the idea of “middle,” as in Richard Nixon’s phrase “Middle American,” which, along with phrases such as “’Forgotten American’ became commonplace at the White House” (Lowndes 312). The mechanism of redirected resentment gives us a clue as to why the debates about whether Trump was elected because of economic inequality or because of widespread racism are wrongheaded (see for instance discussions by Schaffner et al. and Abramowitz). The politicization of resentment always needs some form of redirection, and so the current politics of resentment draws on racism for its translation of a resentment that is at least in part grounded in material inequality. Therefore, polling data that suggests that white Trump voters were motivated by race and not class does not give us conclusive evidence about the role that economic inequality really played because such polling cannot account for the process of redirection but only for its results. What it does suggest, however, is that polarization proceeds not along the vertical axis of poor and rich, but along horizontal axes that pit groups of citizens against each other. Once the people are no longer defined as “the poor” but as nominally equal citizens, even economic inequality is articulated as a grievance along horizontal lines. This is why Trump’s wealth does not contradict his claim to represent the rust belt. Indignation and Resentment as Mirror Affects The link between resentment and polarization does not stop at the idea that the redirection of resentment depends on the creation of a split in the population in order to deflect popular discontentment from its true target, the elites. Going back once more to Aristotle and elite writers of his time, polarization was regarded as an affective process that involved not only the masses but the elites themselves, with the two sides standing in a mirror relation to one another. Jeremy David Engels points out that in classical Greek, phthonos meant “envy,” “resentment,” and “indignation,” and was thus a synonym for nemesis. However, writes Engels, “class modulated these words: phthonos was Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 275 generally associated with ‘upward’ resentment of the masses toward the elite, and nemesis with downward resentment of the elite toward the masses” (33). In his Rhetoric, Aristotle is even more direct than Engels suggests (though, as David Konstan observes, in Aristotle’s time, to nemesan—the verb form of nemesis [indignation] Aristotle uses—was old-fashioned and no longer representative of common usage; see 115). Drawing on the old-fashioned word nemesis/ nemesan allows Aristotle to explicitly differentiate between indignation and envy, finding different (class-inflected) logics at work in each. While for Aristotle, envy (as we have seen) is excited by the prosperity “of people who are like us or equal with us,” indignation is excited “by the prosperity of the undeserving” (1386b 18-20). Indignation works as the mirroring complement of envy: whereas envy presupposes equality and generates a sense of frustration from de-facto inequality, indignation presupposes one’s superiority and generates a sense of anger from de-facto equality (or, more accurately, from a social reality that denies the superiority one believes to embody). Indignation, by this logic, is an affect experienced by elites who feel threatened in their privileged status by those who challenge the existing hierarchy through their success, prosperity, ambition, or direct challenge to authority. To Aristotle, indignation is a natural response by those in power to any change in the social structure: [W]hat is long established seems akin to what exists by nature; and therefore we feel more indignation at those possessing a given good if they have as a matter of fact only just got it and the prosperity it brings with it. The newly rich give more offence than those whose wealth is of long standing and inherited. (1387a 16-22) What appears to have been always what it is is regarded as real, and so the possessions of the newly rich do not seem to be really their own. (1387a 26-27) Indignation may therefore properly be felt when anyone gets what is not appropriate for him, though he may be a good man enough. It may also be felt when anyone sets himself up against his superior, especially against his superior in some particular respect (1387a 32-35) As David Konstan concludes from this extended passage on indignation, “Aristotle himself acknowledges that to nemesan … is not simply indignation at the illegitimate acquisitions of another, but is also modulated by what we may call class entitlement” (122). The very differentiation between indignation and envy/ resentment on which Aristotle insists (against common usage of his time) will re-appear in Roman writings. As Engels points out, “Cicero [similarly] distinguished indignatio from invidia, explaining that ‘indignation is not the same as resentment’” (37), because indignatio comes from above, invidia from below. Though as we have argued, today polarization no longer maps onto a simple class divide between rich and poor, we suggest that the affective economy of polarization has retained this mirror structure. Indeed, on the part of liberal America, indignation seems a much better term than resentment for describing the affective involvement in the polarized nation, whereas resentment is useful to describe the predominant affect on the right. We 276 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger might speak here of different righteousness claims, one of which—indignation—emphasizes the need to uphold norms and standards against the forces of disruption, whereas the other—resentment—adopts the stance of insurgency in wanting to demolish the system, the “deep state,” etc. Both appeal to equality, but from different angles. Indignation appeals to the application of standards—of respect, rights, etc.—to everyone (think here only of the slogan “Black Lives Matter”), whereas resentment demands the tearing down of privileges, the leveling downward of the playing field. Here, equality is to be found in the shattered ruins of existing structures. Superiority and the Middle Finger: The Aesthetics of Polarized Laughter This affective mirroring structure has its correlative in expressive repertoires of polarized democracy. This is where our analysis returns to the aesthetics of populism, which can now be understood more fully as an aesthetics of polarization. The aesthetics of polarization does not simply generate “affective polarization” and “negative partisanship.” Our detour through the theory of democratic passions from Aristotle to Tocqueville rather allows us to comprehend the aesthetics of polarization as the interplay between an aesthetics linked to the affect of indignation and an aesthetics linked to the affect of envy/ resentment. This mirroring structure of two interlinked forms of affective aesthetics we call “expressive polarization.” Staying true to our heuristic schema, the aesthetics of the affect of indignation ought to reflect and reconfirm a stance of superiority, whereas the aesthetics of the affect of envy/ resentment is expected to reflect and reconfirm a demand for disruption that stands in the service of leveling the playing field. The analysis of the populist rallies of Donald Trump in the first installment of this two-part essay brought to light some of the features of the aesthetics of resentment. In particular, it showed that the most successful way for generating an intense experience of unity from the perspective of resentment is by the combined attack of the political opponent and racially marginalized others (in accordance with the image of the “resentment sandwich”). During the mid-term elections of 2018, this was exemplified by Trump’s strategy of creating the specter of the “caravan” of immigrants allegedly about to invade the U.S. with the support of Democrats. Aesthetically, this sinister message was translated into the register of euphoric excitement. In opposing the dual enemy, the populist assembly collectively created the exhilarating sense of interactive, improvisational unity. When the collective attention was set on differentiating the assembly from the opponent, the attendees rejoiced in the collective creation of a pars pro parte community. As the self-enjoyment of the emerging collective began to heat up towards collective ecstasy, the world around it ceased to matter and the populist community moved towards a Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 277 pars pro toto experience. In the move from the collective pars pro parte experience to that of pars pro toto, the existing order was affectively and imaginarily shattered and displaced. In what follows, we will focus predominantly on the other side of the divide, i.e., on the aesthetics of the affect of indignation. For this purpose, we turn to political late-night television in order to show that this self-consciously politicized genre of television has assumed a structure that, in some respects, mirrors that of the populist rally. Indeed, late-night television, like the rally, can be described as a “space of appearance” in which there is no longer any room for plurality. This is a rather new development that can be observed by looking at the recent career of Stephen Colbert, whose CBS show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has become the leading late-night show of the nation. Before taking over The Late Show in 2015, Colbert delivered in-character satirical political statements on The Colbert Report. In that earlier show, which ran on Comedy Central from 2005 to 2014, Colbert addressed a liberal audience by playing the character of “Stephen Colbert,” a sharp-minded, strident, arch-ideological conservative whose extremism was meant to out-radicalize his real-life models of Fox News. The joy of the performance resulted directly from its satirical set-up, whose target was not merely the political opponent, but the very structure of partisan media. Colbert’s iteration of The Late Show is affectively more direct or sincere than The Colbert Report, and it lacks the satirical conceit of the earlier show. That satirical conceit allowed the audience of The Colbert Report to laugh at partisanship itself, while affectively siding with, and cheering for, the faux-conservative host. The disappearance of the satirical conceit in the new show has excised the earlier show’s invitation to the audience to split its allegiance—to root for Colbert, the performer, but against “Stephen Colbert,” the conservative caricature. Indeed, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has increasingly turned into a manifestation of the affective dynamics of polarization within the political left. As might be expected from a topical show making light of the day’s news, Colbert’s jokes on The Late Show during the 2015-16 primary and presidential elections were directed at a wide range of the candidates. However, as was the case for his peers on late-night television, by far the most frequent target was eventual Republican candidate Donald Trump, a remarkable front runner among joke targets in that he easily outdid recent Republican candidates, who had been more frequently joked about on late-night television than their Democratic opponents during each of the last seven presidential elections (Farnsworth, Lichter, and Canieso 338-40). As Trumpism manifested in U.S. politics, the humor of The Late Show shifted, and Colbert made the increasing polarization regularly explicit. He did so perhaps most strikingly during election night in 2016, when The Late Show aired live, as it had been during the weeks leading up to election day. By the end of the show, not having prepared material for the eventuality of a Trump victory, Colbert improvised. Speaking in a searching and spontaneous manner about political divisiveness, it became clear that Colbert decided to react to the election result in a sincere tone. 278 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger And I think the people who designed our democracy didn’t want us in it all the time. Informed, yes. Politicking all the time, I don’t think so. Not divided that way. … But now politics is everywhere and that takes up precious brain space we could be using to remember all the things we actually have in common, so whether your side won or lost [points finger towards camera], we don’t have to do this shit for a while. (“Stephen Colbert Signs Off on the 2016 Presidential Election,” 4: 20-5: 10) After this improvised section, he dutifully delivered a prepared segment of jokes about “things we actually have in common.” Reaching for an aura of patriotism, Colbert implicitly implored the nation to come together. Colbert ended the show on a call to action—“Kiss a Democrat! Go hug a Republican! ”—as if his audience was of a piece with the national community and comprised both sides. The premise of not doing “this shit for a while” signified the intent to return to non-polarized normality. But just as the winners of presidential elections have routinely come to pay lip service to national unity upon declaring victory, only to then proceed along the lines of polarized politics (one of the few rituals adhered to even by Trump), Colbert’s patriotically charged appeals to national unity and political normality had spent themselves at once. In the days and weeks after the election, Colbert’s show-opening monologues showed him struggling to find ways of joking about the election of Trump. The monologues were mainly preoccupied with the public expression of grief—a sure sign that he was no longer the voice of a unified America. Soon, Colbert returned to humor, but it was a type of humor that, while not new to the show, took on unprecedented prominence. It was a humor that bespoke an intensified and heightened affect of indignation. The political humor of the show in this new mode (re-)instituted a sense of superiority in the audience. By implication, this entailed claims to superiority of one side of the polarized divide. Theorists of humor and comedy have largely dismissed the notion that superiority is a driving force of laughter, but it might be worth revisiting the superiority theory of humor for the purpose of analyzing the aesthetics of polarized political humor. Laughter, as Thomas Hobbes (one of the key proponents of the superiority theory of humor) saw it, is the realization and affirmation of someone else’s weaknesses. It is a mechanism of competitiveness: we laugh when we feel that we are winning. The superiority theory of humor was christened by its critics, who sought to dismiss it as too harsh a view on laughter and humor (Billig 39). Admittedly, the feeling of superiority is a dubious explanation of laughter when it is treated as a general theory. One might point to many occasions of laughter when no competition or comparison is involved. We suggest, however, that as an aesthetic strategy of political humor, superiority humor—laughter that feels like winning—is a useful concept. Superiority alone might not make anyone laugh; it might not ever have accounted fully for the appeal of any but the vilest humor. But superiority humor does not exclude other mechanisms. The incongruity and relief theories of humor, respectively describing humor as the “substitution of an unexpected event or remark in place of what is anticipated” (Holm 10) or a psychological pressure-relief valve (Morreall 16), are later contributions Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 279 to a philosophy of humor which quickly superseded superiority theory. Especially incongruity humor—laughing at the surprise, the sharp contrast, or even the absurd—is a handy (and thus consistently popular) concept in analyzing the comedic triad of setup, punchline, and laughter. We argue that on The Late Show, patriotic middle-of-the-road humor seeking broad appeal made way for political superiority humor mixed with incongruity humor. As a paradigmatic example, consider the following extract of Stephen Colbert’s monologue from an episode of The Late Show in October 2019 in reaction to one of Donald Trump’s tweets on the impeachment process: Up ‘til now, the GOP has focused their defense on how the hearings are secret. Pelosi’s announcement of the vote tomorrow making it public changes that, but the president is not concerned, tweeting: [Colbert reads in Trump’s voice] “Republicans are very unified and energized in our fight on the Impeachment Hoax with the Do Nothing Democrats, and now are starting to go after the Substance even more than the very infair Process” [audience laughs]. The “infair process? ” [pause]. What are you…unsane? [laughter and long applause, then cheering]. (“Trump Pleads,” 0: 00-0: 40) Reading the president’s tweets had by then become a regular feature of The Late Show. Here, the joke itself is derived from a typographical error, an incongruity in language. And yet, it is not innocuous incongruity humor: the audience is affectively on board with Colbert’s indignation. His impression of Donald Trump and the shared experience of superiority in observing Trump’s incorrect language use are met with enthusiastic applause and cheering from the studio audience. The audience may be cued to laugh at the correct moments and yet the powerful end product is the jointly performed affect of indignation through superiority laughter. We have suggested that liberal late-night television should be conceptualized as the mirror image of the aesthetics of resentment performed in the populist rally. There is, however, also the possibility of putting the superiority humor of The Late Show in relation to right wing humor, though admittedly, right-wing comedians must be regarded a niche phenomenon. Stand-up comedians like Nick Di Paolo self-publish comedy sets on YouTube, thus sharing the publication strategy and media sphere of right-wing alternative media. To test our heuristic schema of expressive polarization, we briefly consider whether right wing comedy proceeds differently from liberal mainstream comedy. For an example, we turn to Nick Di Paolo’s comedy special “A Breath of Fresh Air.” Di Paolo begins with a claim familiar from right-wing pundits who stoke racial and gender resentment by claiming to have been marginalized, silenced, or discriminated against by the liberal mainstream: “‘Toxic white European? ’…There’s no respect for white European males anymore” (“A Breath of Fresh Air,” 1: 10). Such self-victimization is a core ingredient to the generation of resentment, understood, as defined earlier by Fassin, as “the misery emanating from the social location occupied and the frustrations it elicits.” As the next performative step, Di Paolo makes it explicit that in his (performatively constructed) audience of white males deserving more respect, 280 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger the other is nonetheless present as well. That other is easily recognizable: it is that part of the audience—sometimes an imaginary extension of it—that withholds laughter. To recognize this other, to give it presence in his pars pro parte performance, Di Paolo deliberately inserts pauses to allow for laughter and applause. While a comedian pausing for the audience to laugh is nothing out of the ordinary, it is remarkable that Di Paolo’s pauses—not necessarily following any discernible punch line—entail the provocation of “unlaughter,” as Michael Billig calls the rhetorical withholding of laughter (192). Di Paolo then turns the provocation of unlaughter into an explicit point: Some of youse are laughing. The rest of youse I can see you’re shitting in your little faggy fucking liberal pants. [Laughter. He pauses and smiles.] I’m woke, okay, and I’m on the right, motherfuckers! ” (“A Breath of Fresh Air”, 3: 50-4: 20) Throughout the hour-long performance, Di Paolo’s speech and body language are dominated by anger and frustration. He performs his own marginalization both in the field of stand-up comedy and in that of politics—never mind that he is doing so in front of a paying audience willing to agree with him. His humor principle might be called “middle finger humor,” to which his jokes on topics like cars and smoking adhere: if an action is perceived by the other to be harmful, it is worth pursuing (and humorous to display it) in an even more determined way than before. And if the other answers with unlaughter, then the humor principle of the middle finger finds its validation. Thus, in the realm of political comedy, polarized affects find their aesthetic expression in different modes of humor: indignation meets its correlative in superiority humor, resentment in middle finger humor. Circulation and Proximity: What Humor Has to Offer The in-group joking of The Late Show and “A Breath of Fresh Air” has the primary effect of making their constituencies impervious to penetration from the outside. Expressive polarization contributes to a process of self-perpetuating radicalization, by way of which both sides of the divide seal themselves off from each other. It is striking, however, that there is another form of political humor prominent in today’s media culture that seems to contradict this kind of self-immunization. We have in mind here the digital meme, whose defining operational characteristic is its viral dissemination. The specific aesthetic toolkit of the meme allows it to live not in a space of appearance on one side of polarization but in circulation across the divide. There is little doubt that online spaces have become a central location and infrastructure of political and cultural polarization. As is frequently argued, online networks (including social media networks, but also YouTube, where Stephen Colbert and the other late-night hosts have found a sizeable secondary audience) have the technologically designed proclivity to build “echo chambers.” Their algorithms aim to get their users hooked (and thus drive Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 281 up advertisement revenue) by showing them what they “want” to see, which essentially means: more of the same. This raises the question of how memes— designed for circulation—fit into the polarized structure laid out so far. Without having the space to engage in a deeper analysis, we suggest that the graphic form of jocular memetic content, which has been suggested to have the greatest chances to achieve viral online diffusion (Shifman 67, 161), succeeds by crossing the divide of the politically fractured discourse. It would be hasty to conclude, however, that memes are therefore a promising cultural strategy for overcoming polarization. Rather, to the degree that memes succeed in achieving virality, they tend to make use of forms of humor like irony and parody that provide their meaning with radical indeterminacy. They thus open themselves up for widely diverging interpretive possibilities. If it is their jocular character that allows them to go viral, this is because memes that are jokes never have to shed their multiple codifications. They thus allow for diverging acts of affective reception on either side of the divide. In a society already set on the process of polarization, memes can thus become short-circuited with that very process, helping each side to fortify itself. As a case study, let us consider one meme particularly popular in 2016. The meme originated from a video that showed a gorilla, named Harambe, at the Cincinnati Zoo being fatally shot to prevent a child from harm. Controversy ensued over the killing of the gorilla as well as over its justification. “Media outlets reported days of protests and candlelight vigils at the Cincinnati Zoo and other zoos around the country, while #Justice4Harambe trended online” (Romano n.p.). In the course of these controversies, Harambe became a household name, not to say an online celebrity. But the controversies quickly changed in tone. Harambe became a parody and stand-in for a wide variety of discourses, most of them political, ranging from celebrity deaths to police shootings. Different political groups and ideological camps politically and comedically charged the meme. Initially, “black social media communities embraced the Harambe meme to comment ironically on the ways in which society tends to minimize and overlook the deaths of ordinary people of color” (Romano n.p.). Quickly, racist online communities also picked up on the image, exploiting the racist tradition of equating people of color with apes. Harambe’s image and fate have spawned myriad spin-off versions, many of which form a choreography along the entrenched ideological and affective battle lines of the culture wars. In these acts of repurposing and remixing, logic often stretches thin. In one instance, a Trump supporter claimed Harambe in an interview with Breitbart as direct support for Trump’s border wall: “The one thing that would have prevented the tragic loss of Harambe is having a proper wall in place. There’s only one candidate who is supporting tighter border security and a beautiful wall and that’s Donald J. Trump” (quote in Romano n.p.). To make a more general point out of this, we observe that spin-off memes tend to be tailored to the interpretive demands of one side of the cultural divide. 282 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger Usually, memes proliferate through the act of varying the material. In the most basic and most common form of meme creation, an iconic image provides the unchanging foundation. That image gets combined with overlaid text that changes from one iteration to the next. Interestingly, in some cases it is the exact same meme—the same combination of image and text—that is capable of traveling across the political divide. Consider, for example, figure 2, which, depending on context and recipient, can be read in two ways: either it contrasts the outpour of grief over the gorilla’s death with a lack of grief in response to the death of people of color, or it conflates false grief over one with exaggerated grief over the other. The polysemic meaning, involving multiple layers of irony, is not resolvable without observing the context of dispersion and the recipients—and even once that knowledge is provided, memes such as figure 2 do not become wholly unequivocal. This polysemic indeterminacy, we can conclude, makes memes conducive to circulation across polarized divides. The indeterminacy of memes not only facilitates different forms of reception among different audiences. Indeterminacy can also be used to address, with one and the same meme, different polarized communities that understand themselves to be one another’s opponents. Not unlike a polarizing politician who rallies his base around himself and unites his opponents in aversion, memes that go viral manage to reach both ingroup and out-group recipients in polarizing fashion. But whereas Donald Trump tends to aim for the most divisive message, creators of memes have the option of choosing the path of ironic, parodic, or satirical indeterminacy to achieve this end. Taking political humor in the populist moment seriously as one particularly effective aspect of expressive polarization deserves more extensive scrutiny than we can deliver here. Further study is necessary to arrive at a better sense of how humoristic repertoires such as irony, parody, satire are employed as central components of expressive polarization. We see these repertoires to be at work in all of the formats touched on in this essay: memes, late-night comedy, right-wing humor, and even the populist rally (for a closer analysis of Trump’s indebtedness to stand-up comedy, see Hall et al.). As we Fig. 2. Viral image macro depicting Harambe Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 283 have begun to suggest, these aesthetic repertoires come to work differently in each of these formats, linking up with complementary polarized affects of resentment and indignation. Yet the recurrence of these repertoires also suggests that they share some important features, no matter which of the polarized affects they help to bolster. Irony, parody, and satire rely on imitation, repetition, and various kinds of alteration (inversion in irony, incongruous juxtaposition in parody, exaggeration in satire). This emphasis on repeating and transforming points to the simple—but no less significant—fact that polarizing acts obsessively pay attention to the other side. In other words, the aesthetics of polarized humor displays a concern with the very relationality on which polarizing us-versus-them constructions are built. Might this not give us reason to reconsider the function of political humor in polarization? Could humor not provide us with a way out of polarization? To provisionally flesh out this idea in conclusion, let us return to the segment of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert discussed earlier. The scene continues beyond the transcript given above. After joking about Trump’s typo— the “infair process”—Colbert continues (still quoting Donald Trump’s twitter feed): He went on, “just a casual reading of the Transcript leads EVERYBODY to see that… [Colbert reads the ellipses as ‘dot dot dot’ etc.] …the call with the Ukrainian President was a totally appropriate one. As he said, ‘No Pressure.’ This Impeachment nonsense is just a continuation of the Witch Hunt Hoax, which has been going since before I even got elected. Rupublicans [audience laughs], go with substance and close it out! ” Of course, Trump is referring [applause, Colbert pauses], of course Trump is referring to the stars of the VH1 hit “RuPublican’s Drag Race.” (“Trump Pleads,” 0: 40-1: 42) Fig. 3. Graphic of Republican politicians in drag (“Trump Pleads For ‘Rupublicans’ To Defend Him Against ‘Infair’ Impeachment”) 284 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger An on-screen graphic shows drag queen Ru Paul, known from the Reality TV competition series Ru Paul’s Drag Race, surrounded by Republican politicians in drag, among them Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence. The audience reacts with laughter and frenetic applause, during which Colbert comments: “That was a nice graphic” (1: 45). The conservative other is not only made present but is transported into the cultural sphere of the progressive left, exemplified by Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Clearly, this is a case of incongruity humor. But what makes the incongruity of seeing McConnell and Pence in drag funny? Does not the graphic elicit a homophobic laugh, the butt of the joke being less McConnell and Pence than the flamboyance of drag? Indeed, it seems plausible to suggest that for a short moment the worldview and ideology attributed to the other is contained in the audience’s very own laughter. We suggest that similar moments of proximity can also be observed in the right-wing humor exemplified by Nick Di Paolo. Not unlike Colbert’s superiority humor, the middle finger humor of the right contains in its core an acknowledgement of the other. This is because it derives its energy from the defiance of the convictions, arguments, and worldviews of the liberal other. Corresponding to Colbert’s graphic, we moreover find that Di Paolo elicits laughter by making his audience momentarily inhabit the worldview and ideology of the other. Di Paolo, as we have seen, creates for his audience a moral demand to laugh, in which not laughing means siding with the enemy. This results in a paradox: the moment the audience is made aware of its duty to laugh, it has to force its laughter. Forced laughing, however, feels close to not laughing at all. In other words, Di Paolo’s imperative to laugh paradoxically forces an audience response that is barely laughter. He pushes his audience into the subject position he has defined as that of the enemy: “faggy fucking liberal.” Thus, while expressive polarization predominantly seems to seal off both polarized parties from each other, both forms of polarized humor, as affectively distinct as they are, carry in themselves moments in which that seal is effectively broken. In this regard, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai make a crucial point about the ways in which humor brings otherwise distant materials into troubling proximity with one another. Comedy theory has tended to foreground detachment, but we think proximity deserves particular attention. In the comedic scene things are always closer to each other than they appear. They are near each other in a way that prompts a disturbance in the air. People can enjoy that disturbance, and one thing they can enjoy in it is that it feels automatic, spontaneous, freed-up. Pressed a little, the enjoyment is not always, hardly ever, unmixed; but in the moment, the feeling of freedom exists with its costliness. There’s a relation between the grin and chagrin; there’s the fatigue from feeling vulnerable because pleasure’s bad objects are not always in one’s control. (Berlant and Ngai 248) The disturbance of proximity—the sudden troublesomeness in the moment of assuming the cultural cosmos of the other—might point to a potential residing in humor to irritate in more ways than one. Expressive polarization is not simply reconstituted with each superiority joke, with each example Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 285 of middle finger humor. It is also affectively troubled by the proximity of its other, by the switched positions of self and other. 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Voelz, Johannes. “Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 34 (2018): 203-228. Call for Papers The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction, Then and Now Adventure fiction often seems embarrassing. George Orwell once called Kipling’s work “almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life”. In just this way, sophisticated readers often view adventure writing as a juvenile indulgence, full of clichés, bogus action, silly heroes and cheap thrills, which any selfrespecting literary culture leaves behind and which, in academic discourse, mainly serves to set off serious and critically worthy literature. Accordingly, the history of modern literature can be told as a programmatic resistance to adventure, discarding and denouncing both the genre and the cultural experience which it used to catch or prompt, the departure into some wild and open space, full of hope and promise and beyond the strict confines of everyday routines. Sometimes such wistful memories resurface, but otherwise the modern world has “ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery - a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over”. Thus, Joseph Conrad’s notorious narrator in Heart of Darkness articulates this sense of narrative nostalgia, which, already by the fin de siècle, had made adventure with all its allure a tale of the past: archaic, conservative, colonial, conventional. And yet, adventure has never really left the scene. As implied in Orwell’s quip, the pleasures may be perilous but carry on - and are being carried, not just into adult life, but also into modern literature where they serve sometimes in secret but often rather openly as forceful drives and forms to work with. Even an avant-gardist like Virginia Woolf acknowledged how the English seafaring tradition, codified in Hakluyt’s Navigations, captured and enraptured her - “I used to read it & dream of those obscure adventures” - as testified in many of her novels, like Orlando or even Mrs Dalloway, which take up, take on and transform adventure rhetoric of risk and fortune. In particular, performances of masculinity in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries - and narrative or critical engagements with them - continue to draw on the adventure genre and its gender repertoire to rethink or redress contemporary sexual politics. Similarly, postcolonial writers like Mary Seacole, Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris or M. NourbeSe Philip have all engaged with versions of adventure writing - consciously, critically, creatively - so as to reconsider and re-vision imperial legacies and texts from early modern to Victorian times as part of their own agenda. Crucially, the classics of adventure all take us across thresholds, into unknown, liminal or interstitial space, to the margins of a world and always beyond boundaries. It is this trope of transgression that allies the adventure quest not just to fantasies of conquest, dominance and power but potentially also to more subversive ventures that renegotiate the bonds and bounds, which make up our daily world. While today the discourse of adventure pays particular attention to film and the new media, where the old story patterns are frequently played through on screen and in the virtual reality of games, this volume takes a literary interest, focussed on the residues, rewritings and/ or reappropriations of adventure tales in modernist, postcolonial, postmodern and contemporary fiction. tobias.doering@lmu.de Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8365-9 During the past decades, it has been de rigueur in American Studies to approach the aesthetic suspiciously, as a vehicle for ideology. Recently, however, scholars have begun to recover the aesthetic from different disciplinary angles. The present volume brings together leading and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States of America to critically assess, and contribute to, the return of the aesthetic to the �ield. It does so by considering this return in the context of the aestheticization of the lifeworld. Contributors reexamine popular culture in an age of aesthetic capitalism and explore the aestheticization of (democratic) politics. They make forays into a practical aesthetics that thinks with rather than about art. They test whether aesthetic autonomy continues to have purchase, what the aesthetic forecloses, and how it has been turning against itself in the search for negative freedom. This volume of REAL thus intervenes in one the most heated debates in the �ield of American Studies of the current moment. 35 Volume 35 (2019) The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies Edited by Winfried Fluck, Rieke Jordan, Johannes Voelz Real 35 Umschlag.indd Alle Seiten Real 35 Umschlag.indd Alle Seiten 19.12.2019 13: 30: 47 19.12.2019 13: 30: 47