eJournals

Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 38 (2023) Dialogues with Winfried Fluck Essays and Responses on American Studies Edited by Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 38 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Ansgar Nünning Donald E. Pease · Johannes Voelz 38 Dialogues with Winfried Fluck Essays and Responses on American Studies Edited by Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz 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. © 2024 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de · eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISBN 978-3-381-10871-8 (Print) ISBN 978-3-381-10872-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-381-10873-2 (ePub) ISSN 0723-0338 Editors Tobias Döring , LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, 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 Johannes Voelz , Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut für England- & Amerikastudien, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, D-60629 Frankfurt am Main 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) 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 7 9 25 37 67 71 83 95 113 127 147 159 Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Americanization of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonard Cassuto The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Greenblatt Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Arac The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susanne Rohr From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions . . . . . . . . Peter Schneck A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 197 213 241 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 197 213 241 253 281 293 319 333 361 375 401 427 475 481 Philipp Schweighauser Fluck and the Early American Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Aesthetics and Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rita Felski “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer . . . . . . . . . . Ramón Saldívar Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Reading for Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johannes Voelz Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Bieger Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kelleter Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Fluck Narratives about American Democratic Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heinz Ickstadt Searching for “American Democratic Culture” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents Preface The occasion of this volume is Winfried Fluck’s eightieth birthday. The form we have chosen to celebrate his life and work - the dialogue - combines the formats of the two earlier volumes we have edited in his honor. Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, from 2009, republished twenty-one of Fluck’s most seminal essays, ranging from early works to what were then very recent pieces. Our idea for that volume was to map both the impressive scope and the conceptual rigor of Fluck’s universe of thought. Selecting the essays that went into Romance with America? was daunting, if only for the fact that (re-)reading everything Fluck had published in essay form (roughly 125 articles by that time) amounted to a colossal task. It also created a first opportunity for real collaboration with a scholar whom both of us deeply admired, with email exchanges on editorial matters late into the night. The later the night, the more casual the emails became. And the longer we worked together, the more perplexed we became: Did our “boss” ever sleep? After months of intense collaboration, we were rewarded (and, to an extent, also challenged) by being offered the German “Du” (we hadn’t expected to enter into this informality before finishing our habilitations). The book that was the result of these efforts came out right in time for the conference “Imagining Culture: Norms and Forms of Public Discourse in America,” hosted by the John F. Kennedy Institute of Freie Universität Berlin in the summer of 2009 to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. The second volume that we published in Fluck’s honor, and for which we were joined by our treasured colleague Ramón Saldívar, grew out of this gathering. The Imaginary and It Worlds: American Studies After the Transnational Turn, from 2011, is a collection of essays by colleagues and companions of Fluck’s that explore the imaginary - one of the concepts most central to his work - in the context of the transnational turn that had just recently reorganized the field of American studies. Though the publisher - the now defunct University Press of New England - didn’t allow us to call it that, The Imaginary and Its Worlds was in effect a classic Festschrift. The present volume, finally, consists of twelve dialogues on key topics of American studies, each including a republished essay by Fluck, the earliest of which dates back to 1990, and a response by an esteemed colleague and companion written specifically for this occasion. We have chosen essays that convey a sense of his ever broadening interests and that were not included in Romance with America? Several of the included pieces were in fact written after the publication of the earlier volume. For the responses, we have asked friends and colleagues from different parts of the world who met Fluck in different roles and at different points of their lives. Among our contributors are colleagues of Fluck’s generation who met him - in many cases in the United States - early on in their careers. We are also joined in this collection by some of his companions from Germany who have journeyed with him through roughly a half century of American studies. Then there are his students and mentees from several generations, who have in the meantime enjoyed academic careers of their own. And finally, there are those colleagues who, while never having formally worked or studied with Fluck, have nonetheless created bonds of affinity over the years, both in Germany and abroad. It’s a very illustrious group of interlocutors, to be sure, and we are grateful that each and every one among them has carefully and thoughtfully devised their own method of responding to what is surely one of the field-defining voices in the history of American studies. That the present book is published as a volume of the Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) could not be more fitting. Winfried Fluck joined its editorial board in 1993 (at the time his co-editors were Herbert Grabes and Jürgen Schläger) and served as the board’s senior member up until this past year. The present set of dialogues, then, celebrates not only the career of a premier scholar but also of an editor who helped shape an important publication of English and American literary studies for three decades. We thank Kanu Alexander Shenoi, Tom Freischläger, Talia Houser, and Lorena Nauschnegg for their tireless commitment in editing and formatting the manuscript. Likewise, we are grateful to Kathrin Heyng and Lena Fleper at Narr Verlag for facilitating a swift and seamless production process. And we are happy to report that while Winfried Fluck goes about the business of American studies as energetically and enthusiastically as ever, fifteen years into his retirement his working and sleeping hours have finally adjusted to what ought to be considered normal. Even so, it has been our pleasure to have the opportunity to closely collaborate with him on this volume once more. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz Berlin, Bochum, Frankfurt, February 2024 8 Preface First published in American Studies International 28.2 (1990): 9-22. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. The Americanization of Literary Studies Winfried Fluck To begin with, let me briefly define the sense in which I want to use the word “Americanization” in the following argument. Instead of the customary meaning of a covert or overt, clever or clumsy imperialist ploy, “Americanization” in this paper is meant to refer to developments that have either already taken place in the United States or are in a state of advanced development there, so that they can serve as models, or, where still contested, at least indicate some of the problems and consequences connected with them. Of these developments, widespread private enterprise and the all-pervasive impact of market conditions upon the organization of almost all aspects of life are probably most striking and significant. In view of a fast-growing global interdependence and especially in view of the breathtaking recent changes in Eastern Europe, it seems that this trend towards private enterprise will gain even more momentum so that the United States will continue to be of interest as a country in which certain tendencies of modern democracies have had an early start and therefore can be studied for some of their consequences. Instead of complaining about an alleged “Americanization of European Literary Studies,” I therefore prefer to deal with “The Americanization of Literary Studies,” which does not so much imply a cultural contrast and polemic but a discussion of a general line of development in the field and, indeed, in the humanities in general. This development is most advanced in the U.S. but is already taking shape in Europe as well - not because Americans have found a way to skillfully lure or pressure us into that direction but because the inner logic of a growing professionalization under market conditions leaves very little choice in the matter. In this somewhat reduced sense, then, the term “Americanization,” deprived of its customary melodramatic connotation, does not refer to scenarios of a 1 On this point I very much agree with Stanley Fish, although I draw different conclusions. See his essay “Anti-Professionalism” (1985). 2 For one of the last examples in a long series of similar jeremiads see Jacoby, The Last Intellectual (1987). By now, discussions of the state of the humanities from inside and takeover or seduction but to institutional changes in the profession that, due to the remarkable strength and vitality of American scholarship - which is, after all, one of the biggest success stories of the 20th century - begin to affect and shape scholarship outside the U.S. as well. Part of the complexity of the problem is that these changes have positive as well as negative consequences and that almost all of us in the profession, whether radical or conservative, apologist or critic, are participants in this development and are profiting from it. Thus, I intend to offer the following critique neither as a European who feels threatened by an American takeover, nor as an individual who has a reason for dissatisfaction and dissent and is looking for a meta-perspective which would allow me to rise above recent developments. 1 There is no such meta-position outside the profession (and also no European high-road), as the example of a well-known (European) critic of modern science illustrates who, in an article which I read in preparation for this paper, lodges the by now familiar complaint about an ever growing tidal wave of publications that is caused, among other things, by a ready willingness to publish almost everything nowadays. The article points out that it seems to have become commonplace to publish papers read at conferences and then to recycle them in various versions and publications. I was duly impressed until I read at the end of the article that it, too, was the abbreviated version of a paper read at a conference whose proceedings would be published soon. The following discussion is thus intended as presentation of a number of observations whose tentative and preliminary nature is readily admitted. However, in a situation in which ambivalence, for reasons yet to be discussed, must prevail as an attitude, such a provisional mode of analyzing certain developments in the field may have the advantage of resisting easy, foregone conclusions. Some of these developments are quite obvious. Let me begin with the most obvious one affecting not only literary studies, but the humanities and the natural sciences as well: that of ever increasing specialization. This trend has often been pointed out and criticized, but usually from outside the profession and from the perspective of the amateur or the ‘public’ intellectual who feels lost (and perhaps also threatened) by the growing inaccessibility of arguments on culture and art. As a result, such criticism has usually focused on the emergence of a professional jargon which makes public discussion of cultural matters increasingly difficult. 2 I think that this recurring complaint, although one may 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 10 Winfried Fluck outside of the profession abound, ranging from Marxists such as Ohmann, English in America: (1976), to liberal skeptics such as Crews, Skeptical Engagements (1986) and the well-known neo-conservative attack by Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). I have abstained from drawing on this rich material because all of the observations that could lend support to my argument have their own theoretical and political context to which they should remain related. The basic difference I see between these books and my argument is that I put the main emphasis neither on political or social attitudes, nor on private fantasies of power, but on institutional structures by which left and right are equally affected. 3 The same applies to the phenomenon of professionalism itself. The following remarks are thus not based on a value opposition between “professional” and “genuine,” but are concerned with a certain stage in the development of professionalism. sympathize with its underlying democratic ethos, makes the professional weary because it does not get to the heart of the problem. For even if one were willing to “translate” difficult arguments for public consumption, this would not solve the more serious problem that, as a result of specialization, we are flooded by observations and interpretations that no longer can be meaningfully related to each other. In other words, the main problem caused by specialization consists not so much in obscurantism, but in an increasing fragmentation of knowledge. In principle, specialization, in the search for knowledge, is a useful and neces‐ sary procedure because it increases our knowledge of individual phenomena and thereby protects us from, or at least cautions us against, undue generalization. 3 The question, therefore, cannot be whether we should have specialization, but how much of it we can absorb before reaching a point of diminishing returns where the sheer number of observations or interpretations can no longer be integrated so that quantity minimizes the meaningfulness of knowledge. This seems particularly pertinent in cultural and literary studies, for what we have here is not only a horizontal, but a vertical extension of knowledge. In the natural sciences, to take the other extreme, knowledge is gained, strictly speaking, when one conclusion replaces another. What causes problems is the horizontal extension of knowledge that has to be connected. However, cultural and literary studies, in fact all disciplines not dealing with systematic but historical knowledge, do not produce knowledge in the same sense as the natural sciences do, since they are interpretive sciences in which one interpretation does not necessarily replace another but merely adds another perspective which, in addition to horizontal extension, also creates a continuous vertical extension of the basic body of knowledge. In one sense, the fact that we cannot work under the assumption of gaining “definite” knowledge but can only add interpretations may appear to be liberating because it enables us to add freely to the existing body of knowledge in the field; on the other hand, one 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies 11 may still argue that a new perspective only becomes a truly new perspective as long as, and to the extent to which, it defines itself in relation to already existing views on the subject in question. A growing specialization and the ensuing fragmentation of knowledge, however, stand in the way of setting up such relations. What we may have to distinguish, then, is specialization as a temporary research strategy and specialization as an institutionalized mode of dealing with knowledge. Europeans may experience this problem more painfully than Americans, for whom the tendency toward specialization and fragmentation has its institutional equivalent in academic hiring practices. At American universities, literary scholars are often hired as specialists, for example, on American romanticism. In Europe, on the other hand, a professor is expected to represent his or her field more broadly, which, although it may seem to be a touching anachronism, really makes good sense. After all, the concepts that are used for delineating our areas of study, such as culture or history, are concepts designed to express the idea of a set of relations. A single event or text remains an anecdote as long as one is unable to relate it to a larger context; only then does it acquire meaning and significance. But clearly, the fact of an increasing specialization and the ensuing fragmen‐ tation of knowledge connected with it works against such linkage. Allow me to describe but one phenomenon which I have noticed time and again while dealing with the American novel of the nineteenth-century for a book on the changing functions of fiction in American culture. Although American romanticism and realism stand in close temporal and cultural relation in the nineteenth-century and interact in many complex and intricate ways, American realism specialists’ lack of knowledge about preceding literary traditions is, as a rule, rather striking and is usually limited to a vague concept of the “romance” derived from realistic polemics. On the other hand, specialists on American romanticism usually have equally reductive and polemical notions about concepts such as realism, mimesis, or representation. The consequences can be seen in the exaggerated claims about the importance of American romanticism for an understanding of America. That such claims were not merely the result of an ideological need for a unified national tradition is borne out by recent revisionist developments in the field in which the reality of disagreement and cultural conflict is readily acknowledged, but American romanticism continues to stand at the center of revision. How could it be otherwise, one may ask, for this is after all an important area of specialization for many of these scholars; to play it down would also hold the danger of diminishing one’s standing in the profession. This provides 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 12 Winfried Fluck one possible explanation for why scholars, as a rule, do not seem to be overly concerned with the consequences of fragmentation. Professionally speaking, specialization has two big advantages: (a) It provides the individual scholar with a golden opportunity to distinguish himor herself because (b) fragmentation of knowledge, or, to put it differently “the cutting of relations,” is a useful precondition for offering new and “original” readings. In my view, it is part of a developing culture of overstatement that scholars increasingly take note of each other only as comrade or adversary and not as a predecessor who contributed some important insights which ought to be linked with one’s own. In writing an essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, I noticed that the recent revisionist studies of the novel, especially the two most interesting ones, do not take note of each other. One describes the novel’s sentimentality with reference to typological thought, the other with reference to a tradition of cultural radicalism, but neither attempts to accommodate or criticize the other similarly “powerful” way of explaining the phenomenon; as equally original versions, the two readings are happy to coexist. This is for good reason, I think, because to acknowledge the validity of, or even the interest in, the other perspective would make the issue more complex and would no longer allow the type of strong overstatement of one’s own thesis that provides it with the impression of powerful originality. This cutting off of relations repeats itself on the larger level in the current revisionist rediscovery of the novel. As interpretations in the last thirty years have shown, a novel such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be angrily dismissed when it is seen from the perspective of classical modernism and it can be highly regarded when it is related to, for example, the female culture of sentimentality in the nineteenth-century. These are two influential possibilities for looking at the novel, but I think that their respective merits as interpretations (do they see something the other does not see? ) can only be assessed if related to each other. Is modernism’s point of view obsolete, or does it highlight something that even a sympathetic interpretation of the book should take into account? What is the relation, in other words, between these two influential versions that we have of the novel? In what way do they contradict, complement, or qualify each other? I think that the phenomenon of a loss of relation (and thus of a resistance to one’s own readings) recurs on all levels and in all areas of current literary studies. Reflecting a close link between specialization and (professional) interest group politics, the result is that other areas are set up, usually by binary opposition, in stereotypical versions and often as caricatures: Romanticism is pitted against realism, sentimentality against modernism, modernism against postmodernism, representation against jouissance and so forth. Ethnic literatures are almost 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies 13 always treated separately and popular culture studies, setting themselves up in triumphant opposition to a Marx-Brothers’ version of high culture, have successfully managed to establish their own journals and institutions. What we are witnessing, in other words, is a breathtaking balkanization of the field that, ironically enough, in the process of expanding its outlook, is threatening to replace the exploration and confrontation of cultural alternatives with exercises in role taking that are limited to a special cultural realm or subculture. There is a deadly dialectic at work here: the more relations are eliminated, the greater the chance for new interpretations; the more new work is produced, however, the greater also the tendency of diminishing the role of individual interpretations and thus the greater the difficulty to distinguish oneself. This, in fact, may provide an explanation of what is, from a European point of view, one of the most amazing - and most puzzling - aspects in the current development of the humanities at American universities in the 1980s: a renaissance of political and cultural radicalism that seems to have almost completely replaced the long dominant liberal paradigm and has become the new hegemonial system at a time at which many of these radical ideas have been discredited in Europe after a decade or more of testing them, both in writing and in political practice. In the U.S. this somewhat belated reemergence of radicalism is usually explained in political terms, as a legacy of the Reagan years, but it also makes sense to regard it as an effect of professionalization. To be sure, radicalization and the new type of professionalism, go together well despite the fact that radicalism may have a different self-perception. In fact, I would even claim that under current conditions they reinforce each other, as American universities demonstrate that radicalism (forever happily insulated from the possibilities but also from the dangers of political practice) has been transformed into academic radicalism. It has thus gained a new function and striking professional usefulness because if the basic challenge in a highly specialized professional culture is to stand out from the rest, a radical stance can provide a welcome short-cut for gaining scholastic visibility and acquiring a reputation (in addition to a reference point for networking which is a necessity within any professional culture). If one has to sell bathtubs in a crowded market, there are basically two ways of attracting attention: either by offering a completely different model (which becomes harder and harder to do) or by distinguishing one’s tub from all the others by painting it red. Radicalism promises both, although, as a rule, in most cases it only achieves the latter. At a time in which all historical experience points the other way, radical‐ ism’s main asset is that it allows and encourages strong statements; hence its resurgence goes together with a transformation of the criteria by which 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 14 Winfried Fluck interpretations are judged and praised. The two key words here are “powerful” and “on the cutting edge” (with “dazzling” coming in as a strong third), for they stress performative qualities, namely daring and strength and not necessarily substance of argument. This makes good sense, however, because in a professional culture in which relations must be cut because of the sheer quantity of knowledge production, the critic with the greatest persuasive power has a good chance of standing out. If radicalization provides one counter-strategy against the growing fragmen‐ tation of knowledge, theory provides another. Not surprisingly, literary and cultural theory thus play an increasingly important role in current literary studies. In my opinion, it makes sense to argue that the striking “theorization” of the humanities which is decisively and dramatically transforming American literary studies can be explained best as a response to an accelerating profes‐ sionalization of the field. Theory’s usefulness for countering a trend toward increasing specialization is obvious: the more data and observations we have, the more we are in need of a theory that can bring them together (as is demonstrated by current research on the brain, for example). As Clifford Geertz points out in his well-known essay on “Thick Description,” in which he argues against the inherent representativeness of any given object of interpretation, theory alone can give meaning to material that would otherwise remain anecdotal and on the level of the particular. Again, the question should be therefore not whether we need theory, but in what form and function. The growth of theory in literary studies has by now gained its own mo‐ mentum and inner logic of development in a new stage of over-profession‐ alization. For again - wouldn’t you know it - it is noticeable the role of theory has become, the greater the trend toward specialization. As a result, another split opens up, this time one between theory and practice - which leads to many ironies and absurdities. For example, there must be ten times as many books and articles on Roland Barthes and his seminal book S/ Z than applications of the mode of reading he suggests in this book. In the context of increasing specialization, theory is turned into another possibility for specialized knowledge and thus for professional distinction: Where this is the case, however, the focus of theory must shift, for it becomes more important now to secure one’s place and reputation by battling one’s competitors than to provide theoretical models for the integration of research material for interpretive practice. Let me try to characterize the transformation that theory undergoes in this process by comparing two recent publications on theory in the humanities. One may entirely disagree with Jurgen Habermas’s book on the “project of modernity; ” nevertheless, it represents an attempt to pursue a thesis through 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies 15 4 Jürgen Habermas, Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (1985); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An lntroduction (1983). Eagleton has offered a sustained analysis in an earlier book, Criticism and Ideology: A Study of Marxist Literary Theory (1978), but increasingly books on theory in literary studies are collections of essays or pieces published separately before. a sustained investigation that compares the major philosophical views on the issue at stake, their relationship to each other, what they contribute to the central question in the book, and in what way they differ. In contrast Terry Eagleton’s introduction to literary theory, justly considered by common consensus as the best comprehensive survey of current literary theory, illustrates what may become of theory in current literary studies: instead of a thesis, it offers largely unrelated expertise. Although a book on theory, it is not a theoretical book itself, but a handbook written by an expert. 4 I employ this comparison in order to evoke two possibilities of theory: one is its usefulness as a genre for the systematic and sustained pursuit of a question or project, the other its usefulness for demonstrating a special expertise. That the second possibility may be winning out in the current state of professionalization is shown, in my view, by the rapidly changing fates and fortunes of what is called Continental or Critical Theory in the United States. At first sight, the discovery and wholesale import of Continental theories - certainly another major recent development in the field -, seem to contradict any talk about “Americanization of Literary Studies; ” very likely many Americans would consider it more fitting to speak of a Europeanization of the discipline. The crucial point is not where a theory comes from, however, but what use is made of it. The current theory boom, which is turning theory into yet another form of specialization with a special potential for strong statement, is primarily an American phenomenon that has not left literary theory unaffected: what prevails is no longer the pursuit of a thesis or project but a sequence of fashions in which heralded theoretical perspectives lose their authority, sometimes literally from one season to another. This rapid changing of the guards occurs not because the discarded theories have been found inadequate, but because they have lost their novel value and thus their usefulness for scholars to distinguish themselves from others as a new and strong voice. Take the case of deconstruction for example. Deconstruction we learn - among other things from Hillis Miller’s MLA address - is now considered out and replaced by a return to history and politics (283). In principle, there is no reason for complaint because, after all, as human beings we are apt to change our views. On the other hand, deconstruction made sweeping claims about the pitfalls of logocentrism which seemed to have gained widespread authority or 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 16 Winfried Fluck 5 Cf., among other recent articles by Fish, “Pragmatism and Literary Theory” (1985); “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory” (1987), and “Critical Self-Consciousness, Or Can We Know What We’re Doing? ” (1989). All are reprinted in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989). at least recognition while deconstruction was still in vogue. What has happened to these claims? Have they turned out to be invalid or only partly so? If still valid, how do they affect the possibility of historical studies? Can these claims be simply ignored? A new theoretical perspective should point out how such perspectives are related to one another. Hillis Miller is right to complain; he only forgot to mention that deconstruction’s sudden rise in America may be attributed to the same factors that are now contributing to its equally rapid and sudden fall. In a way, however, I may be asking too much. Even well-intentioned efforts toward integration are constantly undermined by the very pressures toward specialization which they try to counter. Again, we face a paradoxical, seem‐ ingly inescapable logic: Continental Theory may have been imported for its explanatory, maybe even synthesizing power, but the more importation there is, the more specialization we need to process it and the lesser the chance for integration and linkage. There is one way, perhaps, in which this trend could be countered, namely, if theory itself made issues like synthesis or integration part of its agenda. What would then arise in this unlikely instance, however, would be another chance for professional distinction and thus a new area of expertise. The current development of theory in literary studies does not seem to be moving towards an acknowledgement of the need for integration and linkage but in the opposite direction: current development justifies the situation I have described rather than to challenge it. The most interesting current theoretician in this respect is Stanley Fish. In fact, during my last year in the United States, it was not Derrida or Foucault, but Fish who was most often referred to and discussed. One reason for this is, I think, that the neo-pragmatic or antifoundationalist perspective to which he has moved actually poses a stronger challenge to the profession than poststructuralist semiotics because Fish, by returning the act of interpretation to a power struggle of beliefs, attributes the unreliability of interpretations to a much more tangible aspect of professional experience than the disseminative power of the sign. His theoretical position seems tailor-made for the new professionalism. 5 Fish’s version of what happens in interpretation is set up in deliberate opposition to hermeneutic models in which understanding is achieved by a dialogic exchange between text and reader moving toward. a potential conver‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies 17 gence of perspectives. Since, in Fish’s view, the reader will never be able to transcend his or her own beliefs in the act of understanding, no “intersubjective” ground for legitimizing the validity of an experience is possible. Interpretations gain acceptance not by their “validity,” but by their power of persuasion. In understanding, therefore, as in all other aspects of life, there are only winners and losers. Undoubtedly Fish, as we all constantly do, is reflecting here his own profes‐ sional experiences in which strong statements have served him well in the academic power struggle. But I do not mean this observation to be facetious. For actually my observation confirms Fish, although it may ultimately also provide an argument against his position. It confirms him because it serves as a fitting description of a crucial relation between theory and practice: if I believe that interpretation is basically a power struggle of beliefs, and if, on account of this belief, I act accordingly, the results of this action will most likely confirm my theoretical premise. Or, to put it differently, if I approach interpretation and the problem of legitimation as a power struggle, I may create exactly the conditions which are most apt to confirm my thesis. Theory thus functions as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which the claim that interpretation is nothing but a power struggle is taken to be a justification for that very same procedure. Similarly, scholars who believe in the possibility of an intersubjective con‐ sensus on the validity or adequacy of an interpretation may be able to confirm their premise or at least arrive at the impression that they have done so by their willingness to reconsider their own interpretive hypotheses. If this is valid, however, the very choice of premises makes a difference and is thus open to rational argument; for a premise cannot justify itself by the mere fact that it works or is a description of something that comes naturally. It would be possible, for example, to justify Fish’s position by a theory of self-interest, but then his position would no longer simply reflect a belief (although it may be grounded in one). The crucial question, then, is whether one considers a set of norms and interpretive criteria - which, to be sure, have to be open to constant scrutiny and revision - indispensable for literary studies or not. One may argue, in view of the historicity of understanding, that we may never be able to fully grasp our own motivations or beliefs and that any attempt at rational discussion is thus also a rationalization; but, again this argument should not be used as an argument against the possibility of self-reflection and intersubjective validation, for it simply serves in this case to protect those beliefs and interests on which it is based, including the belief which declares its own self-reflection to be impossible. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 18 Winfried Fluck What are these interests? Why should the model of understanding as a power struggle be more attractive than the search for intersubjective legitimation? Again, the reason, I think, has to be sought in the needs of a professional culture under market conditions for which the neo-pragmatic denial of the possibility of intersubjectivity fits perfectly. What is implied in this rejection is the inevitability and indeed the cultural usefulness of interest group politics in literary studies. The implied model of social interaction in hermeneutics is a more or less benign fiction of the possibility to agree on common norms and responsibilities; its governing metaphor for society is therefore the small conversational circle. Fish’s social actors, on the other hand, meet in court, naturally an American court, where the powerful defense of one’s own belief is the only possible and functional role. The court in the American system is, by definition, the site of a power struggle between self-interests in which many of the diagnosed tendencies of a professional culture recur: there is a need for strong statements in order to be heard and to drown out one’s adversary; there is a strong need for performance, maybe even for a certain dose of impression-management; finally, there is the institutional necessity to consider only one’s self-interest in order to be successful. To me, this also explains Fish’s strong interest in legal studies and provides an explanation for the fact that his theoretical essays bear a strong structural resemblance to the way arguments are presented in court. This paper, however, is not supposed to be one on Fish, nor is it concerned with the very tricky and complex question of whether the hermeneutic or the neo-pragmatic theory of understanding is the more plausible one. My goal here is not to argue in favor of one or the other, but to point out how theory and a certain stage of professionalism interact and thus end up justifying each other. In this context, I can see numerous reasons why the rejection of an intersubjective ground for assessing the validity and merit of an interpretation may be useful for current literary studies. The first and foremost reason is to provide a welcome theoretical justification for what I have called the “cutting off ” of relations, or to put it in broader terms, to defend oneself against the suspicion of selfishness. If I make a strong case in my own work for a particular group without considering the claims of others, I may appear to be selfish; if, however, I am assured that this is exactly what everybody else is doing out of a kind of epistemological inevitability, then I can do so with good conscience. American studies, for example, has thus witnessed a series of declarations of independence in the last decade which has contributed to the increasingly centrifugal tendencies of the field. Again, one should be careful to register the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies 19 gains as well as the losses. A declaration of independence is a liberating move and thus a good thing; in fact, the interest group politics motivating it may be the only way in which a democracy no longer held together by a common national goal may be able to function. On the other hand, this development increases further fragmentation and thus, potentially, decreases our abilities to know each other, to interact, and to link our concerns with others. As a strategy for making one’s voice heard it has no alternative; as an institutionalized procedure, it may be counterproductive. As interest group politics are set free from the suspicion of selfishness, so is the individual scholar. This, however, intensifies a problem that has always, depending on one’s point of view, plagued or enriched literary studies: since the material we deal with, in most cases, is fiction - which is something that does not have a stable referent against which it can be checked - the temptation to use interpretations for self-projection or for staging oneself has always been considerable in literary criticism. The case may be made, in fact, that the critic who interprets a literary text is always talking about himor herself because, even as hermeneutics tells us, he or she would otherwise be unable to see anything at all. There has to be a theme emerging from the horizon in order for a meaningful gestalt to appear and it is reasonable to assume that this theme is somehow connected with the interpreter. Hermeneutics tries to work against the ensuing danger of mere projection by thematizing the possible breakdown of understanding into vicious circularity. If, on the other hand, understanding is to be conceptualized as inherently and inevitably a power struggle that cannot be avoided, controlled, or transcended, one of the main sources of resistance against self-projection is eliminated: even where we try to work against the dangers of self-projection, we deceive ourselves because all we are really doing is casting ourselves into the role of a disinterested and thus superior reader. More openly than ever, interpretation can thus become an exercise in role-taking in which the daring and power of the actor emerge as the main sources of authority and validation. Again however, I think that this tendency, although perhaps initially experi‐ enced as liberating, may be ultimately counter-productive: I take it that we read each other’s work with the assumption that what somebody else has to say may be significant for ourselves. Conflicts over value and traditions thus imply taking note of one another. In the final analysis, the idea of scholarship rests on the ideal of community and linkage; in fact, it may be claimed that, even in conflict and dissent, one of the important cultural tools is to establish communication between the members of a community. Criticism, as unrepentant role-taking, increases this tendency and, in doing so, also works against it. For the like-minded, it may 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 20 Winfried Fluck make itself interesting and provide a strong focus in the search for an identity; for the rest, it becomes irrelevant. For there is no reason why we should be interested in the fantasies of others, unless these fantasies provide a possible point of interaction. Many of the aspects with which I have dealt in this section converge in the problem of how to deal with resistance to a mere projection of meaning. Traditionally, theory has been one form of “resistance” because it compels us to place our reading within a systematic framework of relations and urges us to reflect on our own presuppositions; in its “over-professionalized” shape, however, it is, to the contrary, turning into a tool for justifying the elimination of such resistance. “Method” has been another potential source of resistance because it urges us to account for our procedure; under the new conditions, however, method becomes performance. Finally, the idea of the aesthetic has been a third source of resistance because it urges us to account for an experience that can be shared and discussed in ongoing acts of communicative interaction. The current revisionism in literary studies makes sense when it attacks a particular version of the aesthetic and as long as critics claim that this particular historical version must be considered the only legitimate aesthetic norm. But the attacks on the aesthetic are less convincing where they discredit the concept altogether because what they do is confuse the notion of the aesthetic in literary studies with a particular historical version of it. Consequently, the plausible ideas that there is something like an “aesthetic” function and that fiction can be considered a specific mode of communication with its own communicative possibilities and effects are given up in favor of the idea of discourse in order to make the fictional text part of a network of hegemonial or subversive gestures. Such a move suits a state of professionalization in which the idea of a specific aesthetic dimension of the literary text can function as a potential barrier for powerful new performances because it implies a recourse to experience. How would it be possible, for example, to read a book such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) as a supreme assertion of the idea of individuality when reading the novel, as a long history of reception shows, tends to evoke experiences of order, conformity, and control? Such a reading may one day become possible, however, because professionalization has a tendency to undermine or even eliminate the authority of such reading effects. After a specialist, let us say on the Progressive period, has dealt with the novel in class for the fiftieth time, there will most likely be very little “experience,” aesthetic or other, left and the more articles, symposia, workshops and anthologies we have on the topic, the more this will be true. This, in turn, sets the interpreter free, indeed challenges him or her, to boldly try out something entirely new 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies 21 and different, perhaps even the opposite of everything that has ever been said before on the subject. And this, in turn, not only narrows down the chance for further “powerfully original” readings, but puts pressure on other critics to become even holder in suggesting new possibilities for reading the text. The result is something for which we already have unmistakable contours: literary (and perhaps other) studies as a form of permanent overstatement. To use the term overstatement implies that something which may be sound and sensible is exaggerated. One might argue, then, that even in overstating their case readings of this nature add to our knowledge; in fact, one may even extend this argument by claiming - with good reason, I think - that the system, by a cunning logic, thus manages to tease out ever new bursts and waves of insight which can then be sifted through and secured by another (less performance-minded, boring) scholarly species. In arguing this way, however, one must assume a well working division of labor in the discipline between two different views of its purpose and procedures. In such an argument, each of the two approaches would profit from, but also depend on, the other. Or to put it differently: a professional culture of overstatement could justify itself by tacitly presupposing the corrective force of that which it constantly wants to radicalize and out-perform for the purpose of professional distinction. But this argument is only valid as long as the radical challenge is not too successful in establishing its own values as the dominant norm. In the current situation, I think, radicalism tacitly depends on what it criticizes harshly. In talking about “The Americanization of Literary Studies,” there is good news and bad news then. The “bad” news - at least for those who think that some of the recent aspects of professionalization create problems - is that, either on the intellectual or the institutional level, it is hard to imagine an alternative to most of the developments I have sketched out. On the intellectual level, one of the conclusions may lie in an appeal to work against separation and segregation of knowledge, and to encourage linkage and integration. But these have been encouraged (and, to a certain degree, realized) in American studies and yet the professional momentum of the field has ultimately increased its centrifugal tendencies to a point of almost no return. Although desirable, “integrational” moves will thus have their limits; in fact, it seems reasonable to assume that, instead of serving as a remedy, they would most likely lead to a further area of specialization called “Integrational Studies.” The main problem in arguing for an alternative to overspecialization and performance-for-its-own-sake may lie, however, in the danger of looking for help in a new moralism, drawing either on a conservative fantasy of moral guardianship, or on a neo-Marxist insistence on political “relevance.” Ironically 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 22 Winfried Fluck enough, if one does not want to do this, the only remaining role is that of the professional itself. In fact, an analysis of the situation that seeks to avoid a new moralism can only be another version of professionalism. If this is the case, an answer to the problems I have outlined can only be found within professionalism, not outside of it. And this may provide, if not exactly a piece of good news, at least a glimmer of hope (and a new source of “resistance” as I have used the term in this essay). Together with an increasing and ever accelerating professionalization, discussions of its goals, function, and changing conditions also increase in quantity and with them the profession’s potential for self-reflection and self-criticism. True, it is to be feared that this will soon become just another area of exchange between experts. But it is also to be hoped that such development will in turn generate new responses to, and analyses of, exactly this situation so that the race between tortoise and hare may be kept open, at least for the time being. Works Cited Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: Education and the Crisis of Reason. New York: Simon, 1987. Crews, Frederick. Skeptical Engagements. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983. ---. Criticism and Ideology: A Study of Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1978. Fish, Stanley. “Anti-Professionalism.” New Literary History 17.1 (1985): 89-108. ---. “Critical Self-Consciousness, Or Can We Know What We’re Doing? ” Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1989. 436-468. ---. “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory.” Yale Law Review 96.1 (1987): 771-1798. ---. “Pragmatism and Literary Theory.” Critical Inquiry 11.1 (1985): 433-458. Habermas, Jürgen. Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frank‐ furt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1985. Jacoby, Russel. The Last Intellectual: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic, 1987. Miller, J. Hillis. “Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory, The Resistance to Reading, and the Question of Material Base.” PMLA 102.3 (1987): 281-291. Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Professions. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0001 The Americanization of Literary Studies 23 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” Leonard Cassuto Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. - E.M. Forster,-Howards End Reading Winfried Fluck’s “The Americanization of Literary Studies” in 2023 was a resonant experience. Writing more than thirty years earlier, Fluck demonstrated a prescience rarely seen in any form of inquiry. Taking stock of the enterprise during somewhat better times for the humanities, Fluck identified the dominance in literary studies not so much of American ideas as American practice. He called the practice “professionalization,” and he located it in what he called “ever increasing specialization” (“Americanization,” in this volume 10). That charge is all too familiar today, and that’s one of the reasons that Fluck’s analysis deserves our attention still. Another reason is because of the ethical implications of what he describes, and their continuing relevance not just to our own times but to the whole academic enterprise in the United States. Fluck points to “the inner logic of a growing professionalization under market conditions” that leaves scholars “very little choice” but to fall in line and deliver increasingly specialized analysis (9). Fluck doesn’t oppose specialization as such. Instead, he’s concerned about certain uses he saw it being put to. “As a result of specialization,” Fluck says, “we are flooded by observations and interpretations that no longer can be meaningfully related to each other.” As a consequence, we face “an increasing fragmentation of knowledge” whose “quantity minimizes [its] meaningfulness” (11). In other words, everyone does their own particular and specific things without considering how their things relate to other people’s particular and specific things. It’s like a music room full of soloists all playing, fortissimo, at the same time. I want first to spotlight the terms that Fluck uses. He doesn’t say that “the marketplace” or “the professional arena” has been flooded by unconnected observations. Instead, he says that “we” are vexed by this problem. In Fluck’s eyes, overspecialization is a problem that a community - a “we” - inflicts on itself through the questionable professional practice of its members. At the center of Fluck’s interpretation are the people - ourselves - who do the professional work. I will return to this observation later on. Since Fluck wrote “Americanization,” the internet has become a permanent amplifier of this cacophony of disjointed interpretation. It has exponentially increased the amount of information that pours out, and it has simultaneously decreased the power and influence of gatekeepers. John Guillory - to whose more recent work I will presently turn - made the absurd but painfully true observation some years ago that scholars these days are writing so fast that they don’t have a chance to read (Guillory 9-13). Everybody is writing, but for whom? If everyone else is also busy writing, who is the reading audience that tries to keep up? One of Fluck’s most trenchant points is that the design of the system actually discourages keeping up at all. Because it cuts the scholar off from other scholars and their ideas, professionalized specialization readily enables “new and ‘original’ readings” that don’t have to do with anyone else’s readings. This specialization, Fluck says, produces new knowledge of a lower quality because it lacks outward reach to broaden its community. Instead, this knowledge inhabits “a culture of overstatement” in which “scholars increasingly take note of each other only as comrade or adversary and not as a predecessor who contributed some important insights which ought to be linked to one’s own” (13). Fluck saw in this behavior “a breathtaking balkanization of the field,” a specialization that opposes what he calls “linkage,” an important keyword (17). But wait, there’s more. Fluck connects unlinked specialization to a “political and cultural radicalism.” This radicalism displaces “the long-dominant liberal paradigm” in American academia. Fluck suggests that this academic radicalism isn’t just “a legacy of the Reagan years,” as it may reasonably be viewed, “but it also makes sense to regard it as an effect of professionalization” (14). The reason is expediency: “A radical stance can provide a welcome short-cut for gaining scholastic visibility” because “It allows and encourages strong statements” (14). In other words, this radicalism isn’t very radical at all. Nor is it especially political, at least not in relation to government or public affairs. Within the economy of the marketplace of ideas, we could even call it conservative: everyone jockeys for position in the prestige game without questioning the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 26 Leonard Cassuto 1 Another important side effect of professionalized specialization that Fluck noticed was the increasing importance of literary theory. In retrospect, Fluck was writing near theory’s high-water mark, at the same moment when “literary theory” briefly emerged as a specialty that became a hiring category within American English departments. “In the context of increasing specialization,” writes Fluck, “theory is turned into another possibility for specialized knowledge and thus for professional distinction” (15). In the name of linkage, Fluck suggests that “A new theoretical perspective should point out how such perspectives are related to one another” (17). These many years later, the opportunity for distinction through theory has come and gone: as any graduate student will tell you, we are all theorists now, more or less. 2 For example, “Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.” rules of that game. 1 And those rules construe academic achievement narrowly, exclusively in terms of certain types of publication. The connection between literary study and politics has increased in salience since Fluck published his essay. Literary critics in the United States have sought to interject their voices into all manner of political arenas. The well-chronicled effort of the American Studies Association to have its say about the Middle East is one example among many. 2 In his important new book, Professing Criticism, Guillory also critiques the rise of specialization in the practice of modern criticism, and his argument similarly points to the vexed relation of literary study with political engagement. Guillory’s choice of terms conveys his view starkly. He describes specialization as a disability. His name of that disability, which arises from “the specialization of cognitive labor,” is “deformation” (5). For Guillory, “professional deformation” leads to an “overestimation of aim” by literary scholars. As the enterprise of literary study has diminished in size and visibility, Guillory observes, its practitioners have made increasingly strenuous claims for it (79). Fluck’s radicalism and Guillory’s overstated claims are two names for the same thing, viewed from different perspectives at an interval of more than thirty years. Where Fluck sees antisocial careerism, Guillory sees errant professional practice on a long-term, global scale. To Guillory, literary studies has veered out of its lane. To get back on course, he suggests, we should “begin with the recognition that literary critics can enter the realm of publicity only as experts on literature.” But this affirmation has a rub: “If literature is the basis of our entitlement to enter the public sphere, what does this imply for our public-facing representation of what we do? ” For Guillory, it boils down to legitimacy (which he calls “justification”) - he thinks that literary critics claim more of it than they’re entitled to (80). Guillory’s book has received a remarkable reception, and much engagement with it has centered on the proper place of politics in the critical enterprise. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 27 3 Guillory’s argument that criticism should describe its separation from politics has already proved a lightning rod for reviewers of Professing Criticism. See, for example, the exchange between Bruce Robbins and Guillory in The Chronicle of Higher Education that begins with Robbins’s “John Guillory’s Non-Alignment Pact.” Guillory says that literary critics may certainly encompass politics, but criticism should not be political (or activist) as such. Parsing these distinctions may lead one’s eyes to cross. 3 Jonathan Arac cuts meaningfully through the blur when he says, pace Guillory, that “judgments made about literature and its study connect directly to the national culture and carry real political implication” (Arac, in this volume 91). Guillory is wary of any such connection. Any hope for solutions to the structural problems that vex literary study lie, for Guillory, in critical practice itself: we should “resist overestimation” and just keep engaging in the study of “literary artifacts” in an open and generous way, and hope for the best. He ends with the idea that we should value this “cultural transmission” for itself, because “society would be the poorer without it” (386). Faith in the long-term value of cultural transmission is pretty thin gruel for a humanities professor whose department is in danger of being eliminated, or for a young Ph.D. who’s teaching four classes a term as a contingent academic laborer, or a graduate student agitated about what the future may hold. But from Guillory’s high-altitude perspective, it’s the sensible course. From Guillory’s historical-sociological vantage point, the problems may be imagined as tectonic plates rubbing against each other slowly, with seismic changes resulting only from major events like wars or - though this remains to be seen - pandemics. This detached and disembodied overview, however rational it may be, does not effect reform where reform needs effecting. Movement from a dismal status quo can begin with point of view - and here we may turn back to Fluck for inspiration. Unlike Guillory’s, Fluck’s perspective remains gratifyingly earthbound. He looks at the activity of people doing professional work, for when we talk about professions, professionalism, or professionalization, we are necessarily talking about people doing work. There’s no such thing as a profession without workers. Fluck does not call for literary critics to refrain from politics. Instead, he suggests that the stridency with which they engage with politics has a venial and antisocial aspect. If people behave badly, we might look for ways to persuade them to behave differently and change their workplace. The laborers in that workplace demand the attention of anyone who looks at the academic profession. The academic job market had already tightened at the time that Fluck wrote “The Americanization of Literary Studies,” and the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 28 Leonard Cassuto 4 A statistic that reveals just how unrepresentative the 1960s were in terms of academic economics and employment: During the 1960s alone, more faculty positions were created than in the entire 300+ year history of American higher ed leading up to that decade (Menand 452). 5 As Robbins points out in his recent review of Guillory’s opus, this logic is right out of the work of Pierre Bourdieu: “For Bourdieu, righteous politics talk was merely a jockeying for position, a competition for dominance within a given institution, the pursuit of personal and disciplinary self-interest. Crying politics is never anything more than a move in a game” (Robbins).- contingent academic labor market (that is, the adjunct labor pool) had swelled correspondingly. The situation has worsened since “Americanization” appeared, and it’s dramatically worse now, unrecovered from a collapse in tenured and tenure-track jobs resulting from the financial crisis of 2008. But in truth, American academics - including literary studies professionals - have been misunderstanding our own economics since the 1970s. After a decade of full employment amid widespread expansion of the higher-education sector in the 1960s, the industry contracted beginning in the 1970s. Instead of understanding that the 1960s were an anomaly, U.S. educators responded by waiting out what they believed would be a temporary lull before a presumed return to abundance. Fifty years later, we’re still waiting - but at least now there’s a growing understanding that we must address the reality faced by our students and not their grandparents. 4 Guillory says that the problem is not with the market but with the organ‐ ization of the enterprise. Practicing his own form of historical sociology in which people turn into dots moving pathetically to and fro when viewed from thousands of feet above, Guillory talks himself into an elegiac quietism. Fluck wants to save the enterprise - and I want to believe with him that we can. We should start with his observation that critical radicalism - political or otherwise - can bring you notice in what even then was a blighted academic job market. 5 Fluck describes a contest between two metaphors for humanistic practice. First there is the conversational circle, which features a search for common ground: this leads to linkage, that keyword of Fluck’s essay - and, I realize, my own. Second, there is the courtroom, where one view engages in a contest for survival against another, with the loser sentenced to banishment and exile. From where Fluck was sitting in 1990, the courtroom was winning. Its winning streak extends to the present. This victory leads to a tragedy of the critical commons that Fluck describes this way: “If I make a strong case in my own work for a particular group without considering the claims of others, I may appear to be selfish; if, however, I am assured that this is exactly what everybody else is doing out of a kind of epistemological inevitability, then I can do so with 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 29 6 For more detailed discussion of these social trends, see, for example, Newfield, The Great Mistake. good conscience” (19). Thus does bad practice become enshrined, when wellintentioned actors see no alternative. For Fluck, scholarship should instead rely on “community and linkage” (20). We need “to know each other, to interact, and to link our concerns with others” (20). This view is sentimental, in the sense that Joanne Dobson described sentimentalism as life “in-relation” (267). It’s also moral in its generosity. “Even in conflict and dissent,” Fluck says, “one of the important cultural tools is to establish communication between the members of a community” (20). That’s Fluck’s humanistic creed. It’s a rational and emotional protest against a professionalization that erodes the bonds between people with common purpose. Today’s academic culture in the humanities does not address that common purpose very well. The status of the academic humanities in American public discourse has sunk, and philanthropic support has diminished with it (Cassuto and Weisbuch). Reaganism brought with it a widespread tendency to view higher education as a personal investment, not a public good, and this argument - which has persisted - made it easier to cut support to public colleges and universities. 6 The intramural response of humanists to these challenges has not been encouraging. Partly because of staffing cuts and partly because of old habits of being that die hard, departments have mostly failed to come together behind coherent missions to save themselves. The academic job market is both withered and stuck, and is adapting to changed realities only with difficulty. Even now, graduate students still get encouragement to prepare as microspecialists in an educational world that increasingly requires generalist expertise - a particularly cruel irony in the present context. Those who seek one of the tiny number of research faculty jobs encounter the same perceived need to stand out that Fluck identified decades ago. Here is a social media post written by a full professor with a lot of publications who is serving on their university’s tenure and promotion committee. I quote it not because it’s exceptional but because it’s such a typical observation of the brutal socialization of young scholars into the ranks: I see all the extraordinary things these junior faculty are doing. They make me realize that when I went up for tenure and promotion (just 9 years ago), by comparison, I had accomplished hardly anything and was just a nobody. It’s so humbling to be in the presence of this next generation. (Anonymous) 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 30 Leonard Cassuto 7 The same thing has been happening to the Colorado River. Years after Fluck described the lack of linkage between scholars at their work, one of the meliorative measures taken by the Modern Language Association has been the creation of a literal (though virtual) “MLA Commons” to promote sharing. It’s a salutary development and I trust it’s doing well, but its recent establishment serves to acknowledge the persistence of the problem that Fluck identified decades ago. In American studies, for example, the readerships of the flagship journals American Literary History and American Quarterly scarcely recognize each other now. And if you’re a graduate student, “American literature” and American studies” are paths that now diverge early. Put simply, professionalization and specialization drive the field now more than they ever did - at a time when humanists can least afford the divisions that they produce. So what should we do now? I’ve long believed that the only way we may successfully confront our present problems is to understand where they came from - that is, how we got here. In his still-indispensable 1965 book, The Emergence of the American University, Laurence R. Veysey describes the development of the American university through the continuing jockeying for power and influence of three missions, or points of view: research, utility, and what he calls “liberal culture” (roughly speaking, the liberal arts ideal). Writing at a time of unprecedented prosperity for academia, Veysey - who was a stubborn utopian at heart - was dismayed to see that instead of engaging with each other, the three points of view tended to retreat and separate from each other. Given sufficient acreage and rainfall, each camp retreated to its own corner and tended its own garden. As long as there were enough resources, the university could promote research, utility, and liberal arts education at the same time - and that’s still the model for the typical American research university. But this isn’t the 1960s, and acreage and rainfall are surely not plentiful. Climate change-related drought is surfacing long-ago sunk shipwrecks in the Mississippi River (Rojas). 7 The situation in academia is figuratively similar: there isn’t enough rain, and the academic resource base has turned sere. Without enough money to go around, the different sectors of the university compete for fundamental resources. In Veysey’s terms, we may say unequivocally that utility is winning the competition right now. Underperforming humanities departments are the biggest losers - and such a situation only encourages the sort of competitive “professionalization” in literary studies that Fluck rightly deplores. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 31 I want to extend this environmental metaphor in search of a way out of this, but first I turn to a proposal by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. In a formulation that recalls for me Fluck’s ideal of linkage, Fitzpatrick calls for a university that is centered on community and collaboration. “The university,” she says, “has the potential to model a more generous public sphere” (235). Fitzpatrick acknowledges that this change won’t be easy. The “inner logic” of professionalized specialization, Fluck says, lies in “market conditions,” and the neoliberal beast is a many-headed hydra. All of our higher-minded values are baked into a system that prizes individual achievement centered in published research. I often remember that I get more credit for writing an article about teaching or institutional service than I do for actually doing these things. Fitzpatrick knows that academics are unlikely to engage in “generous thinking” unless something changes - she says it will take a revolution, or in Thomas Kuhn’s terminology, a paradigm shift (194). But where would we find one? How can the public recover an active sense of higher education - especially the humanities, along with the liberal arts generally - as a public good? Nor is this simply a matter of persuading everyone else to believe that. We’re have the same problem ourselves. We inhabit a system of values in which we get more credit for publishing our research in than we do for teaching it to students. In the spirit of Fitzpatrick’s vision, how might we begin to think more collectively and communally about our own enterprise? Education centers on caretaking - that’s the real business we’re in. But as Fitzpatrick wisely points out, “focusing an institution or community around principles of care” is risky (209). I’m aware that I’ve expanded the field here. Fluck (and also Guillory) scrutinize the field of literary study, as practiced in the United States. I’m now taking in the larger territory of American higher education generally. That’s because the problem of fractured, unlinked community that Fluck identified in American literary study extends to higher education as a whole. Like Fluck - and Fitzpatrick - I believe in the power of committed community. And as a humanist, I believe in the power of rhetoric to enable change. I’m looking for a rhetoric that can dislodge the market-driven message that leads incoming freshman to believe that a humanities major will lead them to the unemployment line (even though there’s solid and easy-to-find data that suggests otherwise). More and more people think that literary study, and the rest of the humanities, are useless. This problem of perception was extant, though not as serious, when I first started thinking about the culture of higher education years ago. I noticed that in all of United States public policy, there was a single 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 32 Leonard Cassuto 8 Leopold elsewhere speaks of the importance of measures besides economic ones (247), a view which might reasonably be viewed as a hard sell in the United States, but perhaps less so to academics. example in which a rhetoric of caretaking overturned one of business. The field where that happened was environmentalism. Until relatively recently, the American environment was seen almost entirely in financial terms. Today, most people would agree that we are stewards of the land, and even the opponents of environmental measures are obliged to argue in terms of the dominant governing metaphor of caretaking. The environmental movement faces many obstacles at the moment, and I don’t want to be accused of unfounded optimism in the face of riverbed shipwrecks, but my point is that environmental rhetoric retains the power to guide the narrative. The rhetorical victory of environmentalism involved the imposition of a modern caretaking metaphor over a business one. That’s exactly what academia needs. The key concept for environmentalists was ecology, the idea that organisms live together in an interlocking equilibrium. Clearly, higher education would benefit from the same sort of awareness - because higher education exists in an ecosystem with the government, the tuition-paying middle class, and the businesses that hire our credentialed graduates. So how might we impose an ecological consciousness on higher education policy? I think that useful answers lie in the recent history of the American environmental movement. From the utilitarian thinking that prevailed at first, a rhetorical change took place during the first half of the twentieth century. That change signals the evolution of a philosophy of collective responsibility to the planet - it’s an ethic, which is simply a community-based way of thinking. Aldo Leopold articulated the environmental ethic in a classic book in 1949. “We abuse land,” he said, “because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (4). The breakthrough of ecology into policy came in the 1970s, fueled by the public debate catalyzed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but that debate was made possible by Leopold - who was in turn responding to the arguments of an earlier generation. 8 Much of the landmark environmental legislation in the U.S. of the past three generations has been passed and renewed during Republican administrations, with a great initial burst during the Nixon administration (Wilderness Act, Endangered Species Preservation Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environ‐ mental Preservation Act). The Environmental Protection Agency was also formed during the Nixon administration. Obviously this was a synergistic moment, but it didn’t arise out of nowhere. These were victories for ecological 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 33 9 I first advanced this argument in The Graduate School Mess (226-228). 10 The first one was “We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Literary Criticism in the Academic Workplace.” consciousness, a sense that we live within a system that we need to take care of together. 9 The land ethic led to a triumph of the caretaking metaphor - followed by the assumption of collective responsibility for that caretaking. A higher education ethic needs to do the same. In particular, we should pay attention to the most important feature of an ethic: collective obligation. Leopold calls for “responsibility for the health of the land” (258). Reformers of American literary study, and of higher education writ large, have to build a similar collective responsibility. A higher education ethic would define a relation between the university and the community - and also within the university itself, from graduate students through faculty and administrators. There’s no consensus on that in the United States today, either outside universities or within them. Winfried Fluck seeks that community within American literary studies. Accordingly, he advises that we consider specialization as “an institutionalized mode of dealing with knowledge” rather than “a temporary research strategy” ( 11) so that we might avoid its anti-communal effects. Fluck’s call for a reformed professionalism ought to be an ethical imperative in a profession whose ideals (rooted more than a century ago in German ‘Wissenschaft’) are balanced by the practical need to do right by the young professionals we train. American literary studies is already “as a city on a hill,” visible to all. So let’s try to set a good example. Winny Fluck himself offers a model for how American literary studies might proceed. In Europe, Fluck points out, “a professor is expected to represent his or her field more broadly” than in the specialized world of American literary studies in the United States (12). Fluck’s amazing career demonstrates the rich rewards that come from doing that - and those rewards come from - and produce! - the linkage he values. For Fluck, linkage is the textual equivalent of community, where scholars talk to each other, as they talk to Fluck in this volume. This is my second response to Winny’s work. 10 For my own part, I can scarcely imagine a more educational or enjoyable form of intellectual community. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 34 Leonard Cassuto Works Cited Anonymous, November, 2022. “Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.” American Studies Association. ASA. 4 Dec. 2014. Web. 5 Mar. 2023. <https: / / www.theasa.net/ about/ advocacy/ resolutions-actions/ reso lutions/ boycott-israeli-academic-institutions>. Cassuto, Leonard. The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix it. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. ---. “We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Literary Criticism in the Academic Workplace.” American Literary History 31.2 (2019): 287-295. Cassuto, Leonard, and Robert Weisbuch. “Where Have All the Funders Gone? How Big Philanthropy Left the Humanities Behind.” HistPhil. WordPress. 6 Jan. 2023. Web. 5 Mar. 2023. <https: / / histphil.org/ 2023/ 01/ 06/ where-have-all-the-funders-gone-how-bi g-philanthropy-left-the-humanities-behind/ >. Dobson, Joanne. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature 69.2 (1997): 263-288. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Guillory, John. “How Scholars Read.” ADE Bulletin 146 (2008): 8-17. ---. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Leopold, Aldo. “A Sand County Almanac.” A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation. New York: Library of America, 2013. Menand, Louis. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Robbins, Bruce. “John Guillory’s Non-Alignment Pact: Is the Prominent Critic Stuck in the ‘90s - or the ‘60s? ” Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 3 Feb. 2023. Web. 5 Mar. 2023. <https: / / www.chronicle.com/ article/ john-g uillorys-nonalignment-pact? cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in>. Rojas, Rick. “As Drought Drops Water Level in the Mississippi, Shipwrecks Surface and Worries Rise.” The New York Times. NYT. 3 Nov. 2022. Web. 5 Mar. 2023. <https: / / ww w.nytimes.com/ 2022/ 11/ 03/ us/ mississippi-river-drought.html>. Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0002 The Continuing “Americanization of Literary Studies” 35 First published in Why Literature Matters. Ed. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 211-234. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism Winfried Fluck I. As discussions of contemporary literary theory point out in fascination as well as frustration, the present situation in literary studies is dominated by an unusual variety of approaches and literary theories, ranging from the rediscovery of (Russian) formalism and the work of Bakhtin, to narratology, structuralism, hermeneutics and reader response criticism, poststructuralism and deconstruction, the new historicism, cultural materialism, various forms and stages of psychoanalytical criticism, the new pragmatism, the so-called race, class, and gender studies (not to be confused with an earlier women’s studies, ethnic studies, or queer studies), colonial studies, and a newly emerging field of cultural studies in which the study of high and popular culture is supposed to merge. In the last two decades, these approaches have followed - and often replaced - each other in quick succession. They confront the student of literary theory and American literary criticism with a bewildering array of possibilities - and the daunting, seemingly never-ending task of trying to catch up with the latest developments in the field. And yet, despite the pleasing self-image of a postrnodern plurality of approaches, carefully nurtured by a new academic “theory-industry,” it is striking to realize that, at a closer look, this Babel-like diversity of voices is linked by a surprising similarity of premises and critical purposes. This common purpose is, in fact, acknowledged in the frequent use of the term “critical theory” as a welcome umbrella concept for contemporary literary theory, and the fact that there is such a link is not really that surprising after all. New positions and approaches in the humanities do not just represent a progress in methodology. Inevitably, they also function as cultural acts of selfdefinition and self-empowerment. They present new research, but also, and even more importantly so, its cultural interpretation. They are, in other words, developed in the service of certain values by which they are decisively shaped and for which they function as a source of authorization and legitimation. Seen from this point of view, what we are witnessing today in American literary theory and American literary criticism is a confrontation of, and struggle between, two major sets of premises and systems of value: a post-War liberalism that emerged in reaction to the political radicalism of the Thirties, and a new form of radical thought which I want to call cultural radicalism in contrast to prior forms of political radicalism because it is no longer the realm of politics, but that of culture, which is considered the major tool of domination as well as the major resource for resistance. Both positions, liberalism and cultural radicalism, have developed a wide variety of different and often conflicting critical approaches, ranging, in the case of American liberalism, from new critical formalism and the so-called myth and symbol school in American Studies to the cultural analysis of a Lionel Trilling or Irving Howe, and, in the case of cultural radicalism, from the linguistic play of deconstruction to such explicitly political approaches as cultural materialism, the new historicism, and recent forms of race, class, and gender studies. Different though as these approaches may be in many important respects, they share basic assumptions about society, power, and the role of culture which do, in turn, shape their characteristic attitude toward literature. This common set of assumptions makes contemporary critical theory far more homogeneous and predictable than it itself wants to acknowledge. In the following essay, I shall try to describe contemporary American literary criticism from the point of view of intellectual and cultural history, that is, as an intellectual system, in order to compare its views about society, literature, and individual identity with those of the liberal consensus that dominated American literary criticism in the post-War years and shaped the study of American literature as a field of academic study decisively. Such an approach seems to me to hold two advantages. To start with, it provides a certain degree of distance from the current flood of positions by discussing them not primarily on their own terms and with the concepts they have introduced themselves. As long as one remains within the self-definition, and thus the self-fashioning, of a critical approach, one is also at its mercy, because one cannot escape its terminology, and hence cannot arrive at an outside perspective which would make it possible to describe it as a cultural strategy. If the major disagreement in interpreting a literary text is that of whether this text is affinnative or subversive, for example, then certain premises about society and the function of literature are already accepted as given and their dimension as a rhetorical strategy is easily obscured. This, in fact, is the current situation 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 38 Winfried Fluck 1 Very often, in the familiar, often triumphant insistence on the historicity of all acts of interpretation and evaluation, the implication seems to be that the historicity and politics of the critic are sufficiently clarified by the mere fact that he or she is able to point out the historical embeddedness of the arguments of others. 2 A note on terminology: In one of the founding texts of this reorientation, Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, Trilling himself uses the term “liberal intellectuals” to refer to a political criticism that values a writer like Dreiser over James. Consequently, in literary theory and American literary criticism in which concepts such as resistance, opposition, subversion, deconstruction, or cultural critique have gained such seemingly self-explanatory and self-evident authority that their underlying political analysis, rhetorical purpose, and tacit aesthetic premises are hardly ever examined. There clearly exists a tendency at present to suppose that the critical or marginal perspective automatically represents a privileged, self-authorizing position. 1 In contrast, a discussion of contemporary American literary criticism as a cultural strategy (in the sense of Kenneth Burke) may provide a new base for comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the two dominant critical perspectives and their different versions of why literature matters. This comparison is not committed to either one of these positions. There must be a good reason why a liberal view of literature was held by a whole generation of leading post-War intellectuals, just as there must be a good reason why the next generation finds a more radical vision more plausible. It is one of the major shortcomings of current debates that they hardly ever try to take such questions of historical and cultural function into account. In contrast, my claim is that the question of why literature matters must be placed in the context of cultural and intellectual history. II. The new cultural radicalism in American literary criticism is right in arguing that the view of literature which dominated literary studies in its professional take-off phase after World War II until roughly the 1970s was not just the result of a growth in serious, “non-ideological” scholarship. In the U.S., the post-War version of why literature matters emerged in response to a dramatic disillusionment about the political conunitments of the pre-War period. After the sobering realization of the naivete of one’s own ideological position, literature promised to lead the way out of this ideological entrapment. For many, it emerged as the only possibility to show commitment in an apparently nonideological fashion. Liberal criticism thus reconstituted itself anew out of the radicalism of the Thirties and the fonnalism of the New Criticism. 2 From the one, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 39 Amy Kaplan and others speak of “Trilling’s anti-liberal polemics.” In retrospect, what Trilling called liberalism would now be called leftism or political radicalism. 3 For the constitution of a post-War liberal approach toward literature in the U.S., Trilling’s essay “Reality in America” in his The Liberal Imagination is a milestone. In this essay, Trilling provides an exemplary critique of an older left liberalism identified with the intellectual historian Vernon Louis Parrington and his simplistic “public-document” view of literature: “Whenever he was confronted with a work of art that was complex, personal and not literal, that was not, as it were, a public document, Parrington was at a loss” (2). 4 Misunderstood because the claim did not necessarily mean that literature had nothing to do with reality, but that it was related to reality and culture through communicative conditions of its own. The challenge which emerged out of this anti-mimetic stance was to describe these specific conditions, and the subsequent history of literary criticism is also that of the changing views and versions of what constitutes this specifically literary dimension of literature. This history leads from the assumption of an ontologically different mode of existence to linguistic models of difference, and, finally, to repeated attempts to focus on the concept of fiction as a distinguishing feature of literature. In Wolfgang Iser’s most recent reconceptualization of the fictive as a combination of the real and the imaginary, these attempts have reached a new quality of moving away from “essentializing” notions of what constitutes literature, while the idea of a distinct and different form of communication is retained. it retained the idea of an ultimately moral or social purpose of literature, from the other, a set of procedures of literary analysis that could professionalize literary criticism and provide it with interpretive know-how as well as institutional legitimation. This promise of professionalism was desperately needed because a directly mimetic interpretation of literature had become an embarrassment after the utopian ideals of communism had turned into the cruel realities of Stalinism. In this context of disillusionment and self-doubt, literature gained an important new function. It was redefined as a unique form of communication that had the potential to complicate simple, single-minded, that is, “ideological” interpreta‐ tions of the world. As a privileged source of what Lionel Trilling called the moral imagination, literature thus reemerged as one of the few credible bulwarks against the deceptive simplicities of ideology. 3 “Complex” literature seemed to provide a chance to counter the reductionist versions of the world provided by political parties. To protect the integrity of literature as an independent, nonideological realm of communication became an important act of engagement. The promise of art replaced the promise of socialism. From these premises, all significant theoretical claims of the liberal view of literature follow quite plausibly: Its often misunderstood or polemically reduced argument for aesthetic “autonomy” was directed against the political instrumentalization of literature. 4 The turn toward the analysis of literary form 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 40 Winfried Fluck 5 See Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition and a whole series of works on the American romance in its wake. was necessary, because there had to be a convincing description of the different, unique ways in which the literary work created meaning. Furthermore, it was equally important to insist on the distinguishing power of aesthetic value, for only if literature had a structure of its own could it be sufficiently “complex” to defy ideology. This led to an often scathing criticism of popular culture as, principally, a form of kitsch. Where resistance to ideology is linked to literary forms of defamiliarization or negation, popular culture betrays this potential of negation for conunercial reasons. This typically “modernist” bias, which looks to literature to battle the suffocating reign of social and intellectual convention, also explains an increasing distance to realism and a mimetic theory of literature, because its appropriation by Marxism had turned realism into an example of what literature should not be or should not become. Instead, post- War liberalism created a theory of American literature centered around the idea of “the American romance” in which the shallow optimism of American culture was subtly questioned and undermined by indirect, symbolic, and thus ambiguous, modes of representation that supported the theory of an inherently “complex” and non-referential potential of literary language. 5 At the same time, this theory of language contained a theory of effect: It was embedded in the vision of a reader “growing” in competence and independence in the encounter with a text that offers resistance to conventional explanations of the world and therefore challenges the individual to throw away the crutches of cultural orthodoxy. The experience of a generation of critical intellectuals, regretting in retrospect their own or their culture’s tacit acceptance of the claims of a political party and a political cause, led to a renewed emphasis on the liberal idea of individual autonomy and an identity that would be stable enough to resist the conformist pressures of society. Finally, this promise of individual growth and social regeneration through literature became the basis for the liberal project to institutionalize the study of literature as an academic pursuit. This elevation of literary studies to the level of a legitimate academic discipline in higher learning, from which following generations profited enormously, can be considered as, ultimately, the major impact of post-War liberalism on literary studies. Liberalism had succeeded in convincing society that not only 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 41 6 In the liberal approach, there exists a wide variety of opinions and positions on how individual growth can be achieved through literature. For Trilling, it is the complication of our perception of reality which counts; his exemplary literature is what he calls the moral realism of the James of the middle period. For the myth and symbol school, it is the subversion of an official American consensus through the symbolic and allegorical modes of the romance, for which the “dark romantics” Hawthorne and Melville provide the best examples. The disagreements about who the major American writers are can be directly attributed to a prior analysis of how literature can best contribute to individual development. 7 An interesting example is provided by the development of critical discussions of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While the liberal debates of the 50s centered around the question of whether “lighting out for the territory” constitutes true freedom or its deformation by American individualism, recent discussions stress the role and fate of Jim as the true test of freedom. the individual, but society as a whole would profit and be strengthened by the special potential of literature to instigate and further individual growth. 6 It was this promise of individuality, however, which also created a major problem for liberalism when the student movement and the counter-culture began to carry the search for individual freedom further than liberalism itself had ever thought of doing. A generation raised on a rhetoric of individual self-determination became aware of the boundaries that post-War liberalism actually set to self-realization, and they challenged liberalism by a penetrating and relentless critique of the actual economic, social, and cultural limits posed to individual choice. Individual identity, it was realized, was really a normative idea tied to a restrictive set of social and discursive rules in which the much vaunted “pluralism” excluded many manifestations of difference. From this point of view, cultural constructions of a social, ethnic, racial, sexual or “engendered” identity are always already there before the individual “grows” into them, and they function as seemingly natural forms of defining individual possibilities. 7 “Identity” thus becomes social ascription, and to achieve “autonomy” inevitably means to draw arbitrary boundaries. From this point of view, “identity” is a concept based on exclusion and the continuing cultural presence of racism, sexism, or homophobia, which stigmatize “other” forms of identity flatly contradict, and ultimately render hypocritical, the egalitarian promise of liberal democracy. The discovery of these subtle, seemingly natural effects of hierarchization and exclusion through the “invisible” power of discursive regimes led to a radical re-definition of what constitutes social control and paved the way for a radical theory ideally suited to explain the vexing problem of why capitalism had been able to avoid the often predicted class conflict despite glaring economic and social inequalities. In this redefinition, the work of Herbert Marcuse played a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 42 Winfried Fluck 8 Thomas Claviez has suggested, although not in these words, that Bercovitch drew his argument about the shrewd containment of resistance through a liberal consensus on “America” from the work of Herbert Marcuse. 9 In his analysis of the current state of capitalism, Marcuse introduces the central argument which inspires and anchors almost all of the current cultural radicalism by asking whether consent cannot be considered the supreme form of manipulation: “Mit anderen Worten, sie [eine Wahlanalyse] kann die entscheidende Frage nicht aufwerfen, ob nicht die Zustimmung selbst das Werk von Manipulation war…” (135). crucial role in leading the student movement and the New Left from political to cultural radicalism. In fact, Marcuse’s idea of repressive tolerance can be said to stand at the beginning of contemporary cultural radicalism. For what unites this cultural radicalism in the final analysis is its reconceptualization of what constitutes power. As long as the exertion of power was equated with force and violent acts of suppression, arguments about the repressive nature of liberal democracies were not terribly convincing. Taking its cue from Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance - reemerging, for example, in Sacvan Bercovitch’s argument about the shrewd containment achieved by a liberal rhetoric of consensus 8 - political power is thus severed from its equation with force and broadened into a concept that includes the creation of consent by language, symbolic systems, and discursive practices. 9 In this view, power is not primarily exercised from the outside. Rather, it is embedded in cultural forms and creates consent from “within” without the need of physical coercion. For liberalism, culture is primarily of interest as a potential realm of creativity, for the new radicalism it is the major source of the “naturalization” of oppressive social hierarchies. By the term cultural radicalism, I thus want to designate all those approaches in literary criticism after the linguistic turn which regard culture (and hence literature) as an “invisible” form of social control and domination. While earlier forms of “left-wing” political radicalism placed their hopes in radical change on a Marxist analysis of capitalist society, the subsequent disappointment over its lack of acceptance by the “masses” pushed radicalism toward the analysis of “systemic effects” of the social order that are beyond the comprehension of those who are subjected to them. Political radicalism tied its analysis to a particular political movement or party within the spectrum of political possibilities, and, more specifically, to the eventual ability of the oppressed to gain a certain measure of awareness and political consciousness through the experience of their oppression or disenfranchisement. In contrast, the various forms of cultural radicalism, in one way or another, emphasize fundamental “systemic” features such as the prison house of language, the ideological state apparatus, the symbolic order, ideology redefined as semiotic system, the discursive regime, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 43 logocentrism, patriarchy, or “Western” thought which pervade all acts of sensemaking and thus also determine political behavior and individual identity, because they constitute the very concepts and modes of experience through which the social order is perceived. This systemic exertion of power can be especially effective because there is no way of experiencing the real power relations of the system outside of its cultural categories. The theories which the various critical manifestations of cultural radicalism hold about the actual source of this “invisible” power vary considerably. But the basic reliance on the idea of structural power (strukturelle Gewalt) is always the same. What stands at the center of the current conflicts between liberal and radical interpretations of American literary history is, in other words, not a disagreement between one position that denies social meaning and function to art and another one that reaffirms it, but a struggle between two different versions of that relation, and, linked with it, a fundamental disagreement about the “real” condition of American society, the possibilities of individual choice, and, as a consequence, the potential of literature. For liberalism, the individual is challenged to struggle against the coercive powers of a society which needs the constant challenge of art to prevent itself from becoming ossified, but which is also sufficiently liberal and far-sighted to grant spaces of individual self-determination. For this development of individual identity, literature can offer major forms of inspiration and encouragement. In contrast, the common denominator of the various approaches within the current cultural radicalism in literary studies lies in their focus on a systemic limit to this struggle for self-realization, because the individual, including the writer, is subject to forces quite beyond his or her comprehension. This is true to such an extent that even oppositional gestures must be considered mere effects of the system and the promise of reform its shrewdest strategy of containment. Within this context, radical approaches can be distinguished according to their different versions of what constitutes this systemic effect. A history could be written, in fact, about the continuous redefinition and radicalization of the fundamental idea of an “invisible” systemic source of power: While structuralism’s description of the prison-house of language is still content to demonstrate the inner operating logic of the linguistic (or semiotic) system itself (already attacked by liberalism for its “anti-humanist” elimination of the idea of individual agency), the various forms of post-structuralism, including deconstruction, provide this prison-house of language with a political meaning by redefining it as major manifestation of Western rationalism or logo-centrism. And while poststructuralism still sees language (and with it literature) as a potentially anarchic counter-force which it hopes to liberate by deconstructing 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 44 Winfried Fluck 10 This line of argument is extended by others in the search for phenomena that appear to have the potential of resisting discursive domination such as the body, sexuality, madness, or desire, only to provoke new discussions intent on showing that these phenomena, or at least their perception and experience, are discursively constituted as well. 11 See, for example, the studies by Trachtenberg, Gilmore, Lears, Wilson, and Kaplan. 12 This almost exclusive focus on the question of oppositionalism is more than the narcissistic preoccupation of a generation with its own counter-cultural past. Rather, it must be understood as logical consequence of cultural radicalism’s political analysis: If power is, in principle, “everywhere,” the question of containment or resistance must indeed become crucial for all acts of interpretation. 13 Liberalism is not blind to such features of classic American literature but approaches them differently. For example, Twain’s racism in the depiction of “N***** Jim” in his its binary systemic logic 10 , the various recent forms of a new historical and political turn in literary studies - which have quickly relegated deconstruction to a radical has-been - criticize such hopes as illusory and, by either following the lead of Althusser, Foucault or Lacan, point to the effect of such all-pervasive structures as “the ideological apparatus,” the discursive regime, the “political unconscious,” or, more recently, the cultural construction of race, gender, and sexual preference. This trajectory of radicalization was, in fact, anticipated in Marxist literary studies by the transition from class analysis to marketplace criticism which, in retrospect, emerges as something like a connecting link be‐ tween older and newer forms of radicalism. The radical promise of marketplace criticism already lay in the ubiquitous presence of the market as a systemic feature that seemed able to explain the effective neutralization of resistance by the system. At the same time, however, this version of systemic cooptation still implied a choice between resisting the temptations of the market or “selling out” to it, and thus retained an ultimately moralistic stance. In American literary criticism, marketplace criticism played an important role in the emergence of a new revisionist view of American literary history. In the final analysis, however, it remained an episode because it was not yet “systemic” enough. 11 In American literary criticism, the “systemic” approach of cultural radicalism has had interesting consequences for literary interpretation. Guided by the goal to revise liberal versions of American literary history, the new revisionist versions are almost exclusively concerned with the possibility or impossibility of cultural opposition. 12 If the major heroes of liberalism, such as, for example, the writers of the American Renaissance, stand for the heroic possibility of saying “No! in Thunder” to the conformist pressures of the social system, then it must be the major task of cultural radicalism to unmask the unwitting complicity of these liberal heroes with an inhuman capitalist, racist, sexist, and homophobic system. 13 In keeping with the different stages in the development of cultural 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 45 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is related to other versions of the Gilded Age by liberal critics in order to reveal the radically egalitarian dimensions of Twain’s version which coexist with his condescending treatment of Jim. For cultural radicalism, on the other hand, such taking account of the writer’s good intentions and relative merits is beside the point. Rather, the point is that even well-intentioned writers were subject to allpervasive cultural constructions of race in order to demonstrate the power of such constructions exactly in those aspects of the text of which the writer was not aware. 14 A weaker version of this same argument is to point to the far-reaching entanglement of a writer like Melville in the historical crises and political debates of his time, so that it can be said that his work is not constituted by primarily aesthetic goals and considerations but by “politics.” Similarly, David Reynolds sees the writers of the American Renaissance not, as liberalism did, as alienated from their culture but as emerging out of its popular forms which they actually domesticate. 15 See the fine and very fitting observation by Bercovitch: “Recently, the subversive in literature has been raised to the transcendent status once reserved for the noble, the tragic and the complex” (152). radicalism, this oppositionalism has two basic choices and two characteristic manifestations: Critics can either demonstrate to what extent the cooptive powers of the system are at work in the literary text (and, preferably and ideally, in its very gestures of opposition), 14 or point to a subversive potential of literature, but now to one that derives from the “violence” or inner contradiction of the very systemic aspect that undermines liberal visions of individual agency. If there is subversion or “deconstruction” at work in the text, then not by the individual but by the systemic feature that shapes the individual’s selfdefinition, so that the presence of a larger systemic force is confirmed even in the description of subversion. A summary of the new, revised American literary history could thus be short: Most of the classical texts of American literature are complicit with the system. Some seem to resist complicity by deconstructive effects of language, or by the unforeseen, explosive effect of the literary representation of such phenomena as sexuality, desire, the body, or, most often, “the other.” However, some of those texts which seem to resist do not really do so at a closer look and thus have to be unmasked. And finally, some which look fairly conventional or surprisingly realistic in their mode of literary representation are excused, because this representation stands in the service of a therapeutic search for new, not yet established forms of selfhood. Basically, however, the two choices remain unwitting complicity or subversion. 15 Either Hawthorne’s writing questions the concepts of the culture in which he wrote, or its apparent stance of resistance remains, as Sacvan Bercovitch argues in exemplary fashion, part of a ritual of consent, so that the American Renaissance, in contrast to liberalism’s celebration of its nonconformism, is unmasked as a force against basic social 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 46 Winfried Fluck 16 In a typical characterization in the introduction to The Office of ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ Bercovitch provides a class description of what I call the “systemic effect”: “The Scarlet Letter is a story of socialization in which the point of socialization is not to conform, but to consent” (xiii). 17 See my essay on “Cultures of Criticism: Moby-Dick, Expressive Individualism, and the New Historicism”. change. 16 Both of these radical options have their usefulness and professional pay-off. In the first case, one has the authority of the famous writer on the side of one’s own critique of the system, in the second, the radical critic can assert his or her own superior radicalism by unmasking even the purported nay-sayer. Between these options, cultural radicalism moves back and forth in a kind of see-saw logic: Whenever a radical analysis points to possibilities of opposition, somebody else will criticize it for being naive in view of the sweeping cooptive powers of the system. Where this leads, on the other hand, to an insistence on the effective systemic containment of opposition, still somebody else will criticize this claim as a universalization of power and hence as defeatist in its implications. As I have written in a different context, “in this debate, diametrically opposed answers to the question whether a past text was complicit or subversive seem to coexist as equally valid options” (223). 17 Both positions can argue their case with equal plausibility (or implausibility) because of a new conception of the literary text and the task of interpretation. For liberalism, literary form became a major focus of literary studies, because it was form that distinguished literature from other, more directly referential modes of conununication and thus held the key to its potential for a complication of meaning. These complex meanings of literature were accessible only to the degree that one knew how to interpret its form. The interpretation of form thus became essential for an adequate understanding of literature and the codification of a body of knowledge about narrative structure and formal strategies the center-piece of a professional literary education. For cultural radicalism, the formal level is crucial as well, but for different reasons: Form is important not as a self-contained structure with its own potential for the transformation of meaning, but as the element into which the power effect is inscribed. Since the systemic effect derives its power from the fact that it is not visible, it cannot be represented and identified on the level of content. To identify the political meaning of a literary text on its content level was the major mistake of political radicalism. To repeat this mistake would not only mean to retreat to a pre-professional stage of literary studies. It would also mean to betray one’s own political analysis of the system. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 47 18 The special role of the rhetorical figure of the chiasm in cultural radicalism is another example of its radical claim that things are exactly different from what they appear to be. 19 The founding text here is Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production, which provides the basic methodological inspiration for Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, British cultural materialism and some of the newer revisionist studies. See, for example, Sacvan Bercovitch who tries to apply the idea to Hawthorne: “Pierre Macherey argues that gaps and silences in narrative structure - the sorts of indirection in which Hawthorne specializes - demarcate the limits of ideology. According to Macherey, they are symptoms of fissures in the culture, the contradictions that the system can neither absorb nor wholly exclude. His theory seems especially pertinent to classic American literature, which abounds in strategies of process through hiatus, and to Hawthorne’s work in particular” (92-93). In Macherey’s approach, the psychoanalytical concept of the symptom is applied to society as a whole, so that gaps, silences, inconsistencies or contradictions reveal the system’s “unconscious.” On this point, see especially Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Thus, one of the major revisions of an earlier political radicalism by the new cultural radicalism is to shift the search for political meaning from the representation of politics to the politics of representation. 18 In keeping with cultural radicalism’s focus on discursive practices as forms of exclusion, any “representation” is conceived as, in principle, already an attempt to impose boundaries and thus functions as a form of cultural coercion in which the metaphysics of a culture are naturalized and skillfully upheld. For liberalism, art promises to transcend politics, for cultural radicalism, everything, and especially an apparently non-political element like literary form, is inevitably political. The analysis of form therefore remains crucial for a political interpretation. It can only be considered successful, however, if it manages to lay bare the power effect that is inscribed in the mode of representation itself. “Formal” analysis thus becomes a search for manifestations of that which is hidden from view, and since it is not a particular form of representation or representation in a particular generic context, but representation per se, which exercises power, the most rewarding targets for such an analysis are those elements of the text where the systemic closure of literary representation is disrupted by absences, inconsistencies, contradictions or other disparities that reveal the tyranny or “violence” of the representation itself. 19 In this type of “symptomatic” interpretation, there is no need for an innertex‐ tual contextualization which would ask how recurrent and thus representative an instance of textual disruption is for the text as a whole. For liberalism, this innertextual context is a most important point of reference in the interpretation of a literary text, because it is also the potential source of a creative transfor‐ mation of the referential dimension of language. For cultural radicalism, on the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 48 Winfried Fluck 20 An example that I find especially striking is provided in a recent discussion of one of the first African American novels, William Wells Brown’s Clotel or, The President’s Daugher (1853). From a liberal point of view, this text shows so many deficiencies in structural and narrative organization that it was always read as expression of a still considerable confusion about the potential of literature and the goals of emancipation. From the point of view of cultural radicalism, on the other hand, this weakness is redefined as a strategy of deconstruction: “Brown unmasked the conventionality of both signs…simultaneously asserting and denying unity of self. In so doing, he effectively deconstructed the notion of essentialized self ” (Peterson 564). It is theory that turns former weaknesses into deconstructive strengths: Because Brown writes as member of a marginalized group, he must act as marginal groups do in current political theory. 21 Thus, one of the unforeseen consequences is an amazing homogenization of literary texts that belies a rhetoric of difference. Formal aspects such as imagery, or structural recurrences, setting, character, plot, point-of-view, style etc. are no longer of interest, because they are all rhetorical manifestations of a representational power effect and thus of a single function. This homogenization of the text finds its equivalent in an equally sweeping homogenization of the ideology at work in the text. Only if it is sufficiently general, can one expect it to be “everywhere.” One result is that the differentiations in sociological and historical readings of texts achieved in the 70s have other hand, a case of textual disruption is of interest because it is regarded as symptomatic of the system. The context that matters is thus not that of the literary text but that of a prior political analysis of this system. One striking consequence is the devaluation of experience as a source of knowledge and meaning. The implied reader of liberalism must be shaken out of the habitualized acceptance of cultural conventions in order to revive the possibility of genuine, that is, “unconventional” and hence authentic, experience. The greater the potential for authentic experience, the greater the potential for individual growth (and, correspondingly, for aesthetic experience). For cultural radicalism, on the other hand, there is no way of experiencing the “real” power relations of a system outside of its cultural and ideological categories. Since there is no way of being “outside” language, ideology, or discourse, our experiences, including those called aesthetic experiences by liberalism, can only reenact invisible systemic effects. If experience can no longer provide knowledge, however, what can? Only critical theory can. It alone can tell us in what way textual inconsistencies and contradictions reenact or deconstruct power relations of the system. In consequence, critical theory becomes a precondition for the intelligibility of literary texts. 20 Cultural radicalism’s substitution of aesthetic experience by theory, or, to put it differently, its redefinition of literary form as ideological mimesis, has a price, however: These textual disparities which are read as symptomatic manifestations of a power effect, are always already determined in their meaning and will, in principle, always signify the same thing. 21 In a certain sense, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 49 all been thrown overboard and concepts such as “logocentrism,” Western thought, or patriarchy have come to prevail that operate at a breathtaking level of generalization and stereotypization. liberal readings are also highly predictable. When liberalism searches for the meaning of literary form, one can predict a focus on such aspects as complexity or ambiguity. But the way in which this com plexity is described depends on the formal strategies of the text and thus has to be determined in a close reading. When cultural radicalism interprets the meaning of textual disparities, one also knows what it will find, namely manifestations of power relations. This time, however, there is no need to go into a detailed reading of formal strategies. All one has to do is to identify the contradiction as such, in order to be able to claim that there is an “absent cause” at work in the text. As Wolfram Schmidgen has shown in a brilliant analysis, the interpretive practice of cultural radicalism is anchored by this confirmation of an “absent cause” which critical theory tells us must be there. This means, in turn, that the plausibility of an interpretation is not determined by the plausibility and skill of a close reading of the text, but - since the absent cause is, in principle, everywhere and thus need not be pursued in detail - by the “powerfulness” and the radical credentials of the theory that anchors the interpretation and of which the interpretation presents an allegorical version. Interpretive disagreements nowadays are therefore most often disagreements about how radical an analysis really is. What role can literature still play in such an intellectual system? Does it, can it, still matter? At first glance, the answer seems only too obvious. Cultural radicalism constitutes itself against liberalism’s sacralization of art and literature in order to show that literature is not, as liberalism claims, a source of authentic regenerative experience, but, quite on the contrary, an - often unwitting - accomplice in the ideological formation of a society through discursive regimes. The role of literature in cultural radicalism is to be part of a linguistic system, symbolic order, system of representation, ritual of consent, or discursive practice, in short, of a disciplinary practice. This conflation of text and context explains a very characteristic move of cultural radicalism to downplay the importance and function of the fictive as a special mode of communication with specific conditions and possibilities of its own. For liberalism, literature defines human potential, including the potential to gain a certain measure of freedom against the pressures of the social and cultural system. For cultural radicalism, literature offers an object lesson on the working of the linguistic or ideological system. It is primarily of interest as a discourse that participates in, and reinforces, the system’s power relations. Accordingly, the concept of the aesthetic - in liberalism the key term for an exceptional creative achievement - 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 50 Winfried Fluck 22 See Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power and my analysis in “Radical Aesthetics”. loses its special status. Many critics within cultural radicalism can only conceive of the aesthetic as a term which obfuscates questions of ideological effect, so that rhetoric replaces aesthetics as the crucial category of analysis. If used at all, the attribute “aesthetic” has thus come to refer to a powerful rhetorical effect at best, that is, to the experience of a special power of the literary text which may very well signal that an ideological effect is transmitted with special skill and efficacy. Hence, in another memorable chiasm, the power of art has become the art of power. 22 Why not give up on literature, then? It is here that one encounters an interesting paradox in current cultural radicalism. For although the classical American texts and writers have been repeatedly unmasked as unwitting accomplices to a system of invisible power relations, radical critics return to them again and again, instead of dismissing and relegating them to obscurity. If one reason for this remarkable case of repetition compulsion lies, as these critics would undoubtedly claim, in the continuing cultural authority and presence of these classical writers, then such interpretations must do their own share in perpetuating this presence. What would be the alternative, however? To ask the question is to recognize the inherently parasitic nature of the new cultural radicalism in literary studies. Since cultural radicalism constitutes itself in the rejection of the political and literary theories of liberalism, it needs liberalism’s work and results to be able to do its own work. Of course, it could also, as it frequently does, move to those writers on the margin whose marginalization seems to allow them to stand outside the grip of discursive regimes, but such revised priorities have their limit in the restricted usefulness of this literature for an analysis of systemic effects. Cultural radicalism needs literary texts that can be described as enacting this systemic effect. It angrily questions or rejects their presumed aesthetic superiority, it dismisses claims about the regenerative and individualizing power of literature as illusory, it denies literature’s uniqueness by analyzing literary texts as yet another manifestation of a discursive regime, but it needs them in order to be able to do all this. If it would terminate this practice, on the other hand, and offer its own body of exemplary works, it would have to develop criteria for selection, analysis, and evaluation that would have to do more than to stand in contrast to a liberal theory of literature. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 51 III. The interpretive consequences of the debate I have traced can be clarified by considering, in brief, the changes in the critical reception of one of the “classics” of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. For liberalism, the novel was a godsend for its theory of American literature, because it tells the exemplary story of a nonconformist individual who asserts herself against Puritan pressures of social stigmatization, learns to speak for herself, and acquires a “heroic” individual identity in this process. Melville’s enthusiastic comments on the “power of blackness” in Hawthorne’s work provided welcome support for the liberal view of a courageously rebellious, if not shrewdly subversive, form of literature that did not, however, merely indulge in a fantasy of individual liberation, but also dealt with the problem of social responsibility. For Hawthorne, individualization is a process in which one not only learns to take on responsibility for oneself and the interpretation of one’s own life but also for the community. In contrast to an official American ideology of individualism, Hawthorne’s narrative of victorious self-assertion was thus linked to the complication of a conventional promise of individualism. This exemplary “moral realism” finds its expression in Hawthorne’s programmatic rejection of the realistic novel of manners and in his plea for the romance which penetrates the deceptive surface of reality and gets to the “truth of the human heart.” Hawthorne’s celebrated ambiguity, his continuous oscillation between alle‐ gorical and symbolic modes of representation, can be connected with the cultural meaning of his work. His resistance against the power of cultural convention and the emphasis on the individual’s right for determining meaning against the orthodoxies of her culture are acted out in the changing interpreta‐ tion of the letter A which the adulteress Hester Prynne has to wear on her dress as a punishment for her deed. As a form of “conventional” signification, the scarlet letter stigmatizes Hester’s gradual transformation of the meaning of the letter, until it is no longer conceived as a mere allegory of sin but as a symbol with multiple and ever growing possibilities of meaning. For the liberal critic, this individualization through interpretive struggles exemplifies literature’s best potential: As Hester transforms the meaning of the letter A, she also transforms Puritan society and creates a space for individual self-determination. By resisting a realistic mode of representation and thus complicating the perception of moral meaning, Hawthorne skillfully draws the reader into his struggle for interpretation, so that a negotiation between an individual’s transformation of meaning on the one hand and communal 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 52 Winfried Fluck claims on the other may also be enacted on the level of reception. Here, too, individualism is thus encouraged as well as complicated. Liberalism could not hope for a text that would be better suited to illustrate its basic view of the relation between literature and society, individualism and social responsibility. There is therefore hardly a major study of American literary history in the 50s and 60s which does not put The Scarlet Letter at its center. And there is hardly a radical revision of American literary history that does not feel challenged to address the question of Hawthorne again. As in the case of other writers, the first attacks on the liberal Hawthorne are made from the perspective of marketplace criticism. Hawthorne, it turns out, was not aloof from the market, so that it seems that his critique of the power of social convention is severely compromised by his wish to be accepted by the public. His ambiguities reflect his own predicament to be successful and yet to preserve the integrity of his art: “Hawthorne’s predicament shapes the novel’s characters and structures and can be discerned in the very texture of the world he creates (…) For Hawthorne, the effort to articulate a cosmos is intimately bound up with his uncertainty as an artist who has to sell but wants to speak the truth” (Gilmore 72). Clearly, Hawthorne’s anxieties over his lack of success in the marketplace do not fit the image of a supreme nonconformist saying “No! in Thunder.” In addition, the fact that Hawthorne, at one point, called the highly successful competition of domestic novelists “a damn’d mob of scribbling women” reveals that he did not hesitate to act out his anxieties through the hierarchizing effects of gender categories. However, the marketplace represents a systemic effect of co-optation that the writer can, in principle, still resist, if he fights his own craving for success and public recognition. Co-optation is bad enough, but it is not yet “policing” or containment through invisible systemic effects. And although marketplace criticism undermines the liberal version of resistance, it does not yet deal with the liberal claim that it was a special aesthetic value of his work that led to Hawthorne’s standing in American literary history. Obviously, this liberal claim posed a special challenge to cultural radicalism, because it implied that the canon of classic American literature was based on considerations of genuine merit and not of power. For the revisionist challenge of the liberal canon, the question of aesthetic value therefore became central. In a major piece of revisionist criticism, Jane Tompkins drew on anti-foundationalist debates about literary evaluation to demonstrate that the description of Hawthorne’s novels as “masterpieces” was the result of the clever institutionalization of a national literary tradition by the publisher James T. Fields who needed a suitable candidate for the status of an American classic and skillfully elevated Hawthorne to that role. It was only 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 53 after Hawthorne’s reputation had been established safely in American literary criticism that the elements of his work that are now considered his true aesthetic achievements were gradually “discovered.” If Hawthorne was not elevated to the level of classical American writer because he was good but is now considered “good” because he was chosen to fill out the role of classical American writer, the apparent aesthetic value of his work must be cultureand institution-specific and thus “discursively produced.” Tompkins’ argument is supported by Richard Brodhead who points out that “Fields’s real accomplishment is less that he saw how to market literature than that he established ‘literature’ as a market category. (…) Fields found a way to identify a certain portion of that writing as distinguished - as of elevated quality, as of premium cultural value; then to build a market for that writing on the basis for that distinction” (55). Tompkins’ and Brodhead’s radical subversion of the liberal belief in aesthetic value has one basic shortcoming. Even if this aesthetic value is not “actually there” in Hawthorne’s novel but was ascribed to it by institutionalizing the category of “literature,” the question remains why a novel like The Scarlet Letter has continuously found readers long after Fields’ skillful maneuver and independent from the changing interpretations of literary criticism. Are people reading and enjoying the novel simply because they are being told that it is a classic? Clearly, it is one thing to say that Hawthorne’s reputation was made by Fields and quite another to claim that it depends on Fields. Inevitably, the next stage of radical revision had to link the question of Hawthorne’s powerful connections to the question of the powerful effects of his work. For Sacvan Bercovitch, who has put Hawthorne at the center of his own influential reevaluation of the American Renaissance as an essential part of the formation of an American liberal middle class ideology, The Scarlet Letter enacts a ritual of consensus exactly by telling a story of dissent whose “free enterprise democracy of symbol-making” shrewdly guides the reader “toward accommodation” (92) and thus “absorbs and refashions the radical energies of history” (90). In this reading, the novel becomes a case study to demonstrate “the capacities of culture to shape the subversive in its own image” (150): “My assumption is that oppositional forms, like those of cohesion, cooptation, and incorporation, are fundamentally and variously forms of culture” (152). It is striking to see the changes three decades of Hawthorne-criticism have brought. For liberal critics, the consistency of Hawthorne’s literary strategies of ambiguation determined the possibilities of articulating a “mature” indi‐ vidualism. The plot level is therefore of little interest. What matters is the complicating of meaning by the suggestiveness of Hawthorne’s imagery, his symbolism, and his ambiguity. For cultural radicalism, discussions of form in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 54 Winfried Fluck 23 In talking about the issue of slavery at another point in his argument, Bercovitch says: “We might call the novel thick propaganda. Its range of possibilities includes most forms of resolutions generated by the ante-bellum North. To repeat the logic of Hester’s vision, injustice is to be removed by some ‘divine operation,’ which, however, has not yet done its office. This representation of conflict as ambiguity, and of ambiguity as an absenceto-be (an injustice to be eliminated) is not substantially different from the Liberian solution (deportation of African Americans) endorsed by Harriet Beecher Stowe and enacted in the happy ending to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by her mulatto hero, George Harris” (89). such terms are all part of a deceptive promise of the possibility of individual agency. In marketplace criticism, this agency is severely compromised by market pressures. But it is, in principle, still a possibility, so that the question of how Hawthorne met the challenge has to be determined by looking at the actual treatment and fate of “resistance” in his texts. For the “institutional” arguments of Tompkins and Brodhead, on the other hand, considerations of formal strategies remain minimal. Finally, in Bercovitch’s extensive analysis of the dominant ideological system of liberalism, textual aspects are almost exclusively discussed as rhetorical moves in the interest of, or temporary distance to, that ideology. This must also affect the interpretation of central formal aspects of Hawthorne’s work such as his ambiguity. For liberalism, ambiguity is a major term of valorization, because it points to both the polysemic suggestiveness of literature and an awareness of the contradictory nature of life in exemplary fashion. For marketplace criticism, it dramatizes the dilemma of having to decide between two equally tempting sources of self-esteem, public recognition and the integrity of art. Finally, for Bercovitch’s focus on “structures of consensus founded upon the potential for dissent” (159), ambiguity is part of a “metaphysics of choosing”: “The Scarlet Letter reconstitutes inconclusiveness, in all of its luxurious uncertainty of meaning, into a unified design, grounded in the dynamics of liberal culture: the necessary friction between private interest and the public good; the ironies of personal agency; and the ambiguities of group pluralism through which consensus is established and sustained” (114). 23 IV. Because cultural radicalism is primarily interested in the possibilities of dissent, subverson, and resistance, it hardly ever addresses the question of alternate social organization, that is, of a social order that would be able to accommodate all those radical individualists without establishing new forms of coercion. The reason, I think, lies in a basic assumption of cultural radicalism that makes the political allegorization of literary texts as a form of ideological mimesis possible 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 55 in the first place: In current cultural radicalism, it is, in the final analysis, the idea and terminology of textuality that provides the basis for political analysis and political vision. Terms developed in the analysis of literary representation or linguistic analysis - such as closure, dialogicity, heterogeneity, semiosis, hybridity or free play - can thus become key terms for the analysis of power relations and power effects. Because of an equation of reality and textuality, tex‐ tual relations and social relations become interchangeable, if not identical. This equation is useful in two ways. On the one side, it provides the theoretical basis for a political analysis of power relations in which the authoritarian “policing” power of a system can be made transparent by analyzing the control a textual structure or interpretation exerts over meaning. On the other side, the equation can provide something like a mise en abyme for a possible alternative in the organization of social relations. Questions about alternate social arrangements are thus implicitly addressed (and answered) in the valorization or rejection of texts. The argument for another (free, anarchic, multicultural) organization of society comes to rest on the authority of a certain type of textual or semiotic organization. Because a radically dehierarchized model of social relations cannot be imagined on the level of social organization, the experimental text is used as an analogy for such forms of organization. Social justice can thus be relmagined on the model of textual dehierarchization and political commitment can be expressed without actually having to enter the field of politics. It is by no means accidental that literary studies have become one of the last havens for radicalism in our time. Ironically enough, cultural radicalism thus still needs literature, maybe even more so than ever. In the analogizing of reality and textuality, semiotic and social system, literature can make the presence of power “visible” and its radical critique of systemic cultural coercion plausible. Inevitably, however, such a “textualization” of power has consequences for the definition of power and its explicit or implicit opposite points of reference, freedom and justice. The instances of power or violence for which textual analysis can shape our awareness are, above all, those arbitrary acts of exclusion and hierarchization that are part of any sense-making process or identity-formation. If the exclusion of certain dimensions of semantic free play or the discursive construction of hierarchies become the central standard for identifying power, then this also implies an altogether new, quasi-semiotic understanding of power: Wherever meaning is created by limiting the free play of semiosis, wherever there is representation in literature governed by the “tyranny” of the referent, wherever texts are interpreted so that meaning is arrested and controlled, there is 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 56 Winfried Fluck 24 The often nasty culture wars about the canon that are waged at American universities at the moment and that hardly have a very inviting effect on European observers, find their explanation here, because in view of cultural radicalism’s textualization of power, the canon must become supreme evidence of “symbolic” coercion. 25 Love, for example, is also a struggle for power, and the ensuing manipulation of anxiety can be seen as exercise of power in the name of love. Thus, Seltzer can argue: “Far from being opposed, love and power in The Golden Bowl are two ways of saying the same thing” (66). 26 These arguments are developed in more detail in an analysis of mine of the liberal and the radical view of the work of Henry James. See “Power Relations in the Novels of James: The ‘Liberal’ and the ‘Radical’ Version.” 27 So that in an interpretation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, one of the key texts of current debates, Ivy Schweitzer argues, for example, that “motherhood (is) incompatible with female desire, autonomy, or independent subjectivity” (169). The solution, here, too, is “semiotic,” by moving through the paternal linguistic network to the “archaic exclusion and thus coercion at work. 24 From this point of view, power is indeed “everywhere” and the universalization of power cogent. Transferred to the level of social relations, power resides, in principle, in any kind of hierarchy, any kind of social interaction, any drawing of boundaries, so that, in a notable rereading of James, and, specifically, The Golden Bowl, Mark Seltzer sees “a power of normalization” at work, “a disciplinary method that induces conformity and regulation not by levying violence, but through an immanent array of norms and compulsions (…) an immanent policing so thoroughly inscribed in the most ordinary social practices that it is finally indistinguishable from manners, cooperation, and care” (61). This widening of the meaning of the term power is so all-embracing that it must ultimately include all forms of intimacy, of innerdirectedness and psychic self-regulation, and, in the final analysis, all forms of social relations. 25 Such a radicalization of the concept of power has as its own tacit norm a utopian egalitarianism based on the promise of a complete dehierarchization in social relations (or, where absolutely unavoidable, asking for only temporary and short-lived hierarchies). If “power inheres in the structure of relations among characters” (70), however, and the bond thus formed is, in principle, “reciprocally coercive,” power must ultimately be seen as a word for everything that puts requirements on the self and thus stands in the way of one’s own wishes for self-realization. 26 In looking for the vision of freedom and justice that is implied by this redefinition of power, one arrives at a claim for the right of uncoerced and unfettered difference. If power resides in the drawing of arbitrary boundaries, or any kind of asymmetry in relations, freedom must be defined through the right of the individual to be freed from these impositions and to realize his or her individual choice. 27 From this point of view, liberal concepts of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 57 language" of the semiotic” (184), so that motherhood can be redefined as a “metonymic space where perceiving subject and perceived object are fused” (186). “Freedom” can thus only be achieved on the level of the textual. 28 By this, I mean, above all, that one hardly ever finds any attempt to take the actual political problems or options into consideration that would emerge from radicalism’s critique of power. “identity” and individual growth must be seen as highly restrictive indeed. The idea of “growth,” for example, can only refer to the successful internalization of a social role and thus to another imprisonment of the self. If there is a common denominator in the revisionist discussions of The Scarlet Letter, it is the complaint that Hester does not go “all the way” in her liberation and lets herself become trapped by ideological notions of social responsibility, mutuality etc. A civic notion of individuality is thus contrasted with the idea of an entitlement of individuals to be free of reciprocal obligation and the pressures of social interdependence. Consequently, where individual choice and possibilities of difference become the only undisputed values, the role of literature in history can appear as a series of disciplinary regimes that limit self-realization without overt repression. We are here, it seems to me, at the heart of the current revisionist challenge: Although it sees itself as a political turn in literary studies, cultural radicalism represents, at a closer look, another turn of the screw in the cultural history of individualism. This is its skeleton in the closet, the absent cause it itself cannot and does not want to acknowledge and theorize. However, many of its most characteristic aspects begin to make sense in this context: its vague equation of politics with oppositionalism, its equation of power with rationalism, its “pre‐ sentism” in interpretation, and, finally, its self-fashioning through imaginary marginalization, “patchwork” identities, and cultural crossover movements. Radicalism’s universalization of power can be most plausibly explained by the fact that power is now defined as structural, systemic limitation to individual choice. This can help to solve one of the most perplexing, and occasionally vexing, puzzles connected with cultural radicalism: the phenomenon that a movement which claims to be so thoroughly political, is actually surprisingly uninterested in politics, and presents its own politics only in frequently shadowy and rudimentary form. 28 Instead, cultural radicalism relies on a basic dualism of the system and the oppressed. It is satisfied to “unmask” manifestations of power, because its politics of individual self-empowerment quite logically focus on those instances of inequality, asymmetry, coercion and hierarchization that stand in the way of the individual’s desire and entitlement to be different. This epic struggle between systemic effect and unfettered self-realization, rational 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 58 Winfried Fluck control and desire, representation and semiosis, free play and closure, unity of self and fluid self-fashioning also explains a - for a self-announced historical criticism - curiously a-historical, “presentist” approach to literature in which interpretation often consists of little more than measuring past texts against contemporary claims of emancipation or fantasies of “real” dissent. In this way, cultural radicalism’s own agenda is projected into history and becomes the standard for judging literary texts of the past, instead of treating these texts also in their alterity, that is, as manifestations of the different possibilities and limitations of another culture and period. Instead of being merely an indulgence in irrationalism, cultural radicalism’s critique of rationalism must also be understood in the context of a politics of individual self-empowerment, because rationalism establishes norms that censor the free, unrestricted expression of desire, sexuality, or the imaginary as legitimate forms of individual self-realization. Finally, the wide-ranging identification of a privileged class of academics with a marginalized “other” can best be explained in the context of the politics of an expressive individualism for which the historically oppressed become the new role models because they can give political authority to the search for cultural difference. The reference to historical victimization, in fact, provides the crucial argument to link the politics of this new expressive individualism with a political critique of society. Again, the important point here is to understand that this individual self-realization is sought on the semiotic level, on which whiteness or maleness can function as signifiers of power, so that the marginal can move into the position of a symbolic alternative for a process of imaginary refashioning. Hence the striking paradox that the culture of African Americans or Native Americans is appropriated for the society at large while they themselves remain socially excluded from it. What we encounter in cultural radicalism, then, is the paradox of a radical‐ ized form of individualism pursued in the name of a radical egalitarianism. This egalitarianism needs radical dehierarchization to eliminate remaining cultural restrictions, but it also needs the cultural construction of difference to escape from the consequences of radical equality. Thus, contrary to its own self-perception, “cultural radicalism does not provide a political critique of individualism, but a more radicalized version of this individualism, not a critique of individualism by ‘politics’ but a critique based on the politics of expressive individualism” (“Cultures of Criticism” 226). This expressive individualism can best be described by comparing it with a prior form of utilitarian or “economic” individualism. What distinguishes the two stages are different sources of self-esteem and hence different ideals and models of selfrealization. In this development from economic to expressive individualism, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 59 29 I have tried to describe this redefinition of politics as cultural activity in an essay on the contemporary American artist Jenny Holzer. See my “Radical Aesthetics.” the essential point is the new and historically unheard-of usefulness of culture for matters of self-definition and self-empowerment. While in economic indi‐ vidualism, hard work and self-discipline were considered preconditions for economic success and social recognition, it is now the assertion of cultural difference which has become the major source of self-esteem. This change in the sources of self-esteem is the logical outcome of an ever intensified process of individualization and, coming along with it, of an increasingly radical cultural dehierarchization. In this process of individualization the individual has to assert his or her self-worth in opposition to those forces that stand in the way. Initially, these were obvious sources of inequality such as caste, class, or patriarchy. With the increasing democratization of Western societies - in itself a result of individualization - these structural sources of inequality have been undermined in authority, and have, in fact, often been dissolved or weakened decisively. Inequality remains, but it can no longer be as easily attributed to institutionalized social structures. Hence the search for new “systemic effects” of inequality, and hence an increased importance of self-fashioning by cultural difference. If the source of power is cultural, then culture must also serve as the source of counter-definition and the search for self-realization must become the search for alternate cultural options, including those of politics. Ironically, it is thus not a ritual of consent that “absorbs and refashions the radical energies of history,” as Bercovitch has it, but a new stage of expressive individualism, articulated most forcefully by cultural radicalism, that redefines political engagement as one cultural option of self-realization among many. The individual that is liberated from systemic power effects by evading a stable identity in a new flexibility and fluidity of the self is also in a position to treat forms of social or political engagement as optional extras on a menu of individual choice and to exchange them rapidly for other pursuits. 29 This situation is, in fact, enacted in current literary criticism in exemplary fashion in which new oppositional options are constantly “tried out” and replaced by more recent and more promising possibilities. In this sense, the current cultural radicalism actually fuels the condition it deplores because it has contributed its own share to the transformation of “politics” into a cultural practice of self-definition. Liberalism, then, seems right in its often harsh criticism of cultural radi‐ calism. Unfortunately, however, this criticism has been largely defensive. It has neither acknowledged the cultural logic of individualization that leads from the modernist challenge of cultural conventions to radicalism’s focus 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 60 Winfried Fluck 30 Examples are provided by the studies of Davidson, Brodhead, Reynolds, or Buell that surpass liberal studies of the 19th century in their wealth of historical information and contextualization. 31 See, for example, Hewitt’s reference to an aspect of consensus which Bercovitch seems to ignore: “Whether or not Mead was correct in his prediction about the direction of human evolution, his microscopic thinking seems sound: one way of achieving the integration of people who are economically and morally in conflict is by acts of imagination in which they perceive the common ground that makes them alike rather than the matters on which they disagree” (208). on structural effects which liberalism itself ignored, such as, for example, the hierarchizing effects of gender categories. Nor has liberalism been able or willing to acknowledge the immensely productive side of the radical revision of literary history which have drawn our attention to manifestations of power and politics in supposedly neutral debates about aesthetic value, or to the presence of a liberal interest in self-definition in “classical” American literary history. The current cultural radicalism in American literary studies has unearthed a number of important political, historical, discursive, and literary contexts of which liberalism simply did not appear to have been aware or which it did not want to acknowledge. 30 The major analytical gain, however, lies in the awareness to what extent discursive practices entail hierarchies of power, structures of domination, and forms of subtle coercion, that is, in the awareness to what extent every discursive practice contains elements of coercion. But what are the consequences of this insight? It seems to me that cultural radicalism often forgets the heuristic status of its own claims. If identity would really be radically “plural” or heterogeneous, there would be no continuity of self and thus only schizophrenia. If there were no social glue provided by a ritual of consensus, the logical consequence would be civil war. 31 If history and fiction were both nothing but “textualizations,” it would not be possible to “unmask” certain approaches to literary history as ideological. If the claim for truth were nothing but a claim for power, what sense would it make to argue with liberalism? If the aesthetic is the political, on what basis can one distinguish between literary texts of the same political persuasion? In each case, a genuine insight - made possible by cultural radicalism’s new sensitivity to power effects - is turned into a false generalization that fails to consider questions of degree, context, creative response, and the possibility of transformation. Which finally brings us back to The Scarlet Letter and its interpretation. As long as one reads the novel only as a shrewd liberal version of containment, one may out-radicalize the book but one also silences it as a historical voice of its own. In particular, one ignores that the novel itself offers its own analysis of the social and cultural forces of coercion, as does almost all of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 61 Hawthorne’s work which focuses on questionable historical genealogies, the tyranny of moral convention, or the self-destructive consequences of (male) selfauthorization. In all of these instances, however, there is one major difference to radical readings of the novel: Although Hawthorne shows the tyranny of moral principles, he also insists that they are needed, albeit in a humanized, “liberalized” form. Otherwise, as the Custom House-Preface to The Scarlet Letter implies, the result will be a corrupt state of interest group politics which does no longer acknowledge any principles whatsoever. For Hawthorne, a compromise between the claims of the individual and the moral and social order is thus vital. One can either regard this view as “dated” (or, typically liberal), or take the work seriously as a form of cultural commentary with good reasons of its own. In the first case, one can in fact dispense with literature. In the second, it becomes a challenge exactly because it offers a different view and version. If cultural radicalism is not content to act out yet another “power effect,” namely the rewriting of The Scarlet Letter according to the discursive regime of expressive individualism, it would thus have to interpret the novel not only on the basis of its own radical convictions but also take it seriously as a challenge to these convictions. If the radical view of literature is parasitic in the sense that it has no explanation of its own on how the art of power is related to the power of art, then we must go back to the liberal view, that is, to a view of literature as an expression of human potential. If the radical analysis of the subtle power and hierarchizing effects of language and literature appear convincing, on the other hand, then we must add an awareness of the regulatory and disciplinary effects of that kind of human potential. However, if it does not appear sufficient to limit the interpretation of literature to an analysis of its power effects, because such an exclusive emphasis erases fiction’s transgressive potential for creative boundary-crossing, then the task would seem to set literature’s potential for exploration and experimentation in relation to its potential for “containment” and to trace the interaction between these two functions of fiction. Clearly, containment restrains, but it is also, in a very elementary sense, necessary for the creation of society and identity and, thus, provides a necessary precondition for an extension and liberation of the self. Such “boundary-crossing,” on the other hand, inevitably takes the transgressive energies of the self in a certain direction and thereby also channels and contains them. The current cultural radicalism is not willing to admit this dialectical depend‐ ence because it argues exclusively from the point of view of individual liberation from which containment can only appear as a barrier to the self. There are, it seems to me, two options available at this point: One is to defend this position 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 62 Winfried Fluck at all cost and to remain trapped in the endless reenactment of a radical critique that can only treat literature as a political allegory of co-optation, coercion, and containment. The other choice lies in addressing also the social side of the self, that is, its dependence on containment. For this project, literature, as a supreme articulation of individual desire and self-empowennent, and, at the same time, as a supreme medium of cultural socialization through aesthetic effects, provides an exemplary object of study and an overwhelming wealth of material. In that sense, literature continues to matter a lot. Works Cited Bellah, Robert et al. Habits of the Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of The Scarlet Letter. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. ---. The Rites of Assent. Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993. Brodhead, Richard. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. --- . “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America.” Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture. From Revolution Through Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957. Claviez, Thomas. “Dimensioning Society: Ideology, Rhetoric, and Criticism in the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 11. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübingen: Narr, 1995. 173-205. Cohen, Stephen. “New Historicism and Genre: Towards a Historical Formalism.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 11. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübingen: Narr, 1995. 405-424. Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word. The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader.” American Literature 63.1 (1991): 601-622. Dimock, Wai-Chee and Michael T. Gilmore, ed. Rethinking Class. Literary Studies and Social Formations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Fluck, Winfried. “The Americanization of Literary Studies.” American Studies International 28.1 (1990): 9-22. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 63 --- . “The ‘Americanization’ of History in New Historicism.” Monatshefte 84.2 (1992): 220-228. --- . “Radical Aesthetics.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 10. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Herbert Grabes, and Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. 31-47. ---. “Cultures of Criticism: Moby-Dick, Expressive Individualism, and the New Histori‐ cism.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 11. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübingen: Narr, 1995. 207-228. ---. “Power Relations in the Novels of James: The ‘Liberal’ and the Radical Version.” Henry James, Power and Ethics: Interrogating and Enacting History. Ed. Gert Buelens. London: Routledge, 1997. Fox, Richard Wightman and T.J.Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption. Critical Essays in American History 1880-1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Gilmore, Michael T. American Romanticism and the Marketplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Graff, Gerald. “Co-optation.” The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989, 168-181. Harris, Susan K. “‘But Is It Any Good? ’: Evaluating Nineteenth-century American Women’s Fiction.” American Literature 63.1 (1991): 43-61. Hewitt, John P. Dilemmas of the American Self. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979. Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923; New York: Viking, 1968. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge, 1978. Marcuse, Herbert. Der eindimensionale Mensch. Studien zur Ideologie der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1967. Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Romance and Real Estate.” The American Renaissance Recon‐ sidered. Ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 156-182. Peterson. Carla L. “Capitalism, Black (Under)development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s.” American Literary History 4 (1992): 559-583. Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere. The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 64 Winfried Fluck Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance. The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf, 1983. Schmidgen, Wolfram. “The Principle of Negative Identity and the Crisis of Relationality in Contemporary Literary Criticism.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Vol. 11. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübingen: Narr, 1995. 371-404. Schweitzer, Ivy. “Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” Boundary II Spring 17.1 (1990): 158-186. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984. Smith, Henry Nash. Democracy and the Novel. Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations. Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Thomas, Brook. The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs. The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America. Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1985. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0003 Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism 65 Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” Stephen Greenblatt Though I am not an Americanist and have never been guilty of formulating a theory of The Scarlet Letter, I read Winfried Fluck’s brilliant and still timely essay with a certain rueful amusement and a sense that it is my own ox that is being gored. I recognize that I am personally implicated in much of what Fluck undertakes to take apart, an implication signaled in his use of terms like selffashioning, subversion, and containment, and, still more, in the whole enterprise that he characterizes here as cultural radicalism in response to the liberalism of literary studies in the mid-twentieth century. I am a quintessential product of those studies, having been educated in a classic 1950s suburban public high school, one with a rigid academic hierarchy that situated automotive mechanics and wood-working shops in the basement and then rose floor by floor to the Advanced Placement classes at the top floor where we learned Latin, studied the Constitution, and discussed King Lear. Enrolled at Yale for both my B.A. and Ph.D. degrees, I majored in English and was taught by such giants of New Criticism as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Louis Martz, and Maynard Mack. But sandwiched in between my undergraduate and graduate years in New Haven I had two years at Cambridge University in England, where I first encountered Lukács, Benjamin, and Althusser. I was particularly influenced by the lectures of Raymond Williams who agreed to serve for a semester as my tutor. When I returned to Yale to write my thesis, I had first thought to study with Geoffrey Hartman, but I found the structuralism to which Hartman at that time adhered to be only a more abstract, French-inflected version of the formalism in which I had been trained, a formalism with which I felt impatient. For his part, he found my political concerns and my interest in history distasteful distractions from a proper engagement with underlying literary codes. In the turbulent late 1960s, I longed for something more engaged with questions of class, politics, economic exploitation, and the exercise of authority. I decided to write about Sir Walter Raleigh, whose plangent, deliberately fragmented poetry fulfilled a New Critic’s taste for complexity, ambiguity, and self-referentiality, and yet whose income depended wholly upon monopolies on wine licenses and broadcloth, control of the tin mines in Cornwall, and the rents from some 40,000 acres of ruthlessly expropriated land in Ireland. I wanted to understand what Raleigh was doing, writing exquisite poems that to my ears sounded eerily like T. S. Eliot, and what the relation was between that aesthetic side of his life and the side that massacred the soldiers who surrendered unconditionally to him at Smerwick. At Berkeley in the 1970s and 80s I became increasingly fascinated with the extent to which the writers in the period I principally studied - Elizabethan and Jacobean England - were bound up with structures of power, helping to shore up those structures, or so I thought, even when they were calling them into question. Hence the strain of argument to which Fluck calls attention, one that shifted the search for political meaning, as he puts it, “from the representation of politics to the politics of representation” (“Literature, Liberalism,” in this volume 48). Fluck observes cannily that this shift felt like a form of empowerment: if political reality was textual, then radical literary criticism could seem like a crucially important intervention, a kind of action. I remember this feeling of excitement with deep nostalgia. The burden of Fluck’s critique is that the sense of empowerment was an illusion, a distraction from actual engagement in radical action. “Social justice,” he writes, “can thus be reimagined on the model of textual dehierarchization, and political commitment can be expressed without actually having to enter the field of politics” (56). The observation hits home, though it slips over the fact that at the time that I and others were trying to analyze the politics of representation, we were also marching through the streets and breathing our share of tear gas in Sproul Plaza. Fluck implies that there is always a stark choice - criticism or politics - but in my experience of those years it was possible to choose both, and also to fall in love, plant a garden, sample the California wines, and take long walks on the Pt. Reyes Peninsula. Still, it is the case that as the marches diminished in size and number and as we settled down to our tenured lives, we kept up the enterprise of radical critique and felt that we were doing something not only to understand literature but also to reshape political discourse. We set the stage for the process that eventuated in our students convincing themselves that changing the curriculum or making a few new academic hires was going to revolutionize the whole social order. Or as my late, lamented friend Todd Gitlin wryly quipped, “While the Right has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0004 68 Stephen Greenblatt been busy taking the White House, the Left has been marching on the English department” (qtd. in Côté and Allahar 21). According to Fluck, we set the stage too for a kind of revulsion against literature itself, that is, for what he calls the “radical critique that can only treat literature as a political allegory of cooptation, coercion, and containment” (“Literature, Liberalism,” 63). Over the years since Fluck’s essay was written, this revulsion has morphed from an attack on the canon into a decline of interest in reading literature altogether, and especially in reading the literature of the past. For what is the point of engaging with The Scarlet Letter or The Faerie Queene or The Canterbury Tales, if they are only monuments to ideological incarceration? Here I am less inclined to plead guilty, and for two reasons. First, for me at least, the crucial word “containment” always meant two things at once: enclosure within literary form, in order to keep a subversive force from spinning out of control, and incorporation within literary form, in order to keep a subversive force from extinction. Literary containment does not bring the possibility of radical change to an end. It is a mode of keeping it alive and transmitting it forward. Second, and again for me at least, the skeptical analysis of literature in an attempt to understand its implication in the dominant structures of authority was always built around and meant to intensify love for that literature. Without that love - without the deep pleasure at its heart - what is the point of the whole enterprise? Works Cited Côté, James E., and Anton L. Allahar. Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0004 Response to Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism” 69 First published in Modes and Facets of the American Scene. Essays in Honor of Christina Giorcelli. Ed. Dominique Marcais. Rome: Ila Palma Press, 2014. 223-237. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 Trilling played an important role in changing critical perceptions of Henry James, “generally regarded, at the time, as a writer infatuated with the manners of the upper classes and as the practitioner of rarefied aestheticism” (Menand xi). See also Jonathan Arac: “James was for Trilling an extremely important case. American liberals judged James harshly, yet James is the kind of writer who, Trilling believed, has the most to offer liberalism” (118). 2 Trilling wrote introductions to new editions of James’s The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians. Other than that, only a few scattered references to Henry James can be found in Trilling’s writing. This is especially notable in the case of Trilling’s wideranging and philosophically most ambitious study Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), in which James does not play any role. Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature Winfried Fluck Dealing with Jane Austen in the context of an essay on American literature - and for a distinguished expert on American literature like Cristina Giorcelli - may look like a puzzling choice. It should make more sense, once we consider the role Jane Austen played in the thinking and critical practice of Lionel Trilling, one of the most respected and influential American literary critics of the post- War period. In his position-defining essay collection The Liberal Imagination, Trilling had called for a moral realism to replace the social realism of the Thirties. In the introductory essay of The Liberal Imagination, “Reality in America,” this reconceptualization is established through a contrast between Theodore Dreiser and Henry James. While Dreiser is dismissed because of his “vulgar materialism,” James is praised for his “extraordinary moral perceptiveness” (“Reality in America” 18, 9). 1 What makes James so great is that, in contrast to Dreiser and other social realists, he understands and captures the complexity of reality. In view of the programmatic contrast between Dreiser and James that stands at the beginning of The Liberal Imagination, it is surprising, however, that James did not play any notable role in Trilling’s subsequent critical work. 2 Instead, Jane Austen took the place of James. In almost every one of Trilling’s 3 See Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park” (1955); “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen” (1965); “Why We Read Jane Austen.” (1979); Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). 4 Cf. Louis Menand, who writes in his introduction to a recent re-edition of The Liberal Imagination: “The first thing to say about The Liberal Imagination is that it is a cold war book, though that is by no means the last thing to say about it. It appeared around the same time as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center, Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed, and George Orwell’s 1984 - books that belong to the case for a liberal anticommunism. Trilling was certainly a liberal anticommunist. (…) He and his wife, Diana, were members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1951; and he was prominently associated with Partisan Review, which had been, since 1937, the journalistic home of the anticommunist left. Anyone likely to pick up The Liberal Imagination in 1950 would have understood it as a warning against the dogmatism and philistinism of the fellow-traveling mentality, and, later in his life, Trilling explicitly acknowledged that he had intended the collection to be an attack on Stalinism” (vii-viii). See also Joseph Frank, who already argued in the 1960s that “the pervasive disillusionment with politics was given its most sensitive, subtle, and judiciously circumspect expression in the criticism of Lionel Trilling - and this is the real answer to the anomaly of his success” (254). essay collections, as well as in his wide-ranging study of the history of selfhood in Western culture, Sincerity and Authenticity, we encounter an essay on Jane Austen. To no other writer did he return as often during the five decades of his academic career as to the work of Jane Austen. 3 Trilling’s focus on Austen should be seen in the context of post-War debates about the politics of the intellectual Left in the Thirties. In their naive, well-intentioned but “innocent” trust in the Popular Front and the “People,” left and liberal intellectuals (that had often moved to the Left under the pressure of claims for solidarity) had not realized that they were instrumentalized by Stalin and the Communist party. It seems not exaggerated to speak of a trauma here: critical intellectuals who had criticized the American system with strong moral indignation, had been blind to the immorality of what they considered the better alternative. In his essay “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth,” published in his second major essay collection The Opposing Self, Trilling claims: “The extent to which Communism made use of unregenerate force was perfectly clear years ago, but many of us found it impossible to acknowledge this fact because Communism spoke boldly to our love of ideas and ideals. (…) And in the personal life what was undertaken by many good people as a moral commitment of the most disinterested kind turned out to be an engagement to an ultimate immorality” (“George Orwell” 152). In the rejection of leftist politics as naive and immature that pervades intellectual debates in the Fifties, one can sense a deep shame about how that could happen. 4 One can also sense a strong determination to not let it happen again. For Trilling, literature played a key role in this project. Only literature, he argued, could truly cope with the complexity of reality and help to transcend 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 72 Winfried Fluck 5 Trilling is lavish in his praise indeed. He calls Huckleberry Finn “one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture” (“Huckleberry Finn” 101). In support of his claim, Trilling refers to an introduction to Huckleberry Finn by T.S. Eliot that had appeared two years earlier and also played an important part in the reevaluation of the novel. simple dualisms. But only a special kind of literature has this potential. For interesting reasons, Jane Austen turned out to be more useful than Henry James for defining this potential. In order to understand these reasons, one has to take a detour to an interpre‐ tation that, apart from his introduction to The Princess Casamassima, must be considered Trilling’s most important contribution to American literary studies: his introduction to a new edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1948). Trilling’s essay contributed to a post-War reassessment of the American canon by focusing on a text that, until then, had not played any notable role in the canon. The transformation of Twain’s beloved boy’s book into, not only a “quintessentially American” novel, but also into one of the masterpieces of world literature, can be traced to the end of the 1940s. Jonathan Arac argues convincingly that Trilling’s introduction to the Rinehart College Edition of Huckleberry Finn played a key role in this reevaluation. The essay “is widely recognized as marking a decisive turn in discussion of Twain’s novel” and launched the novel into “academic hypercanonization” (108). 5 In his introduction Trilling touches on a variety of aspects, but, for him, the main significance of the novel lies in Huck’s moral struggle and, especially, in the scene in chapt. 31 in which Huck, despite his internalization of Southern slave-holder morality, decides not to betray Jim, even if it means that he will have to “go to hell.” With this moral choice, Huck transcends the popular bad boy genre and becomes a character who has outgrown the stereotype. From the perspective of Trilling’s critique of liberalism, the usefulness of the scene is obvious: it does not so much lie in an innate moral sense of Huck (which would be another naive assumption) but in his courage to go against the grain and to be willing to face the consequences, even if it means to be damned. As Trilling puts it: “(…) yet in point of fact Huckleberry Finn is indeed a subversive book - no one who reads thoughtfully the dialectic of Huck’s great moral crisis will ever again be wholly able to accept without some question and some irony the assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives, nor will ever again be certain that what he considers the clear dictates of moral reason are not merely the engrained customary beliefs of his time and place” (“Huckleberry Finn” 108). In a fascinating chapter of his study Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target, Arac 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 73 6 Cf. Arac’s apt characterization of the political function of this argument: “To locate the force of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ within Trilling’s own oeuvre, we must determine what ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ has to do with anti-Stalinism. For Trilling identified his deepest concern in this period as combating ‘the commitment that a large segment of the intelligentsia of the West gave to the degraded version of Marxism known as Stalinism’” (124). has shown how this interpretation was ideally suited for Trilling’s revisionist, anti-Stalinist agenda. 6 Trilling’s reading did not go unchallenged. However, the issue here is not how convincing Trilling’s interpretation was, but why he made certain interpretive choices in the first place. This leads us back to the question of what attitudes are needed to resist the lure (and the pressures) of political and social orthodoxies. The answer. is obvious: in order to be able to resist, a certain inner strength is needed, one that makes the right moral choice, even in the face of adversity. Huck Finn provides an example, but for a wider ranging cultural project he is perhaps not the best possible choice, because, even if taken seriously, Huck’s choice takes place in a sudden act of conversion that is based on his moral intuition after all. As a bad boy character that gains a moral dimension in one chapter of the book (only to give it up again in the following chapters), he does not really possess any psychological depth or complex interiority. Huck’s usefulness for Trilling thus remained limited, and Trilling turned to Jane Austen as a better alternative. What is it that made Jane Austen so useful for Trilling? In what way do her novels exemplify and clarify his concept of moral realism? One possible starting point is to focus on the conflict between social and moral order that posed a central challenge for Trilling and his critique of American liberalism. In Austen’s social worlds, we regularly encounter characters who disturb the social order by their personality flaws or moral weaknesses. In a way, her novels are long-drawn scenarios on how to eliminate these sources of disturbance and to restitute a balance that has been temporarily lost. However, as every reader of her novels knows, this balance can only be regained, if the central characters have managed to establish a certain degree of control over their own, still unbalanced selves. In exemplary learning processes, Austen’s heroines are engaged in ongoing dialogues about the right balance between sense and sensibility, pride and vanity or prejudice and firmness, until in the end they have learned to overcome their own character flaws, and social and moral order can become congruent again. This rebalancing becomes possible because the weaknesses and flaws that disturb the social order do not yet threaten the social fabric; in the final analysis, they remain on the level of follies and eccentricities. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 74 Winfried Fluck 7 See also the following comments on Mansfield Park: “Perhaps no other work of genius has ever spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and constraint, even for dullness. No other great novel has so anxiously asserted the need to find security, to establish, in fixity and enclosure, a refuge from the dangers of openness and chance” (“Mansfield Park” 210). “Almost the opposite can be said of Mansfield Park. Its impulse is not to forgive but to condemn. Its praise is not for social freedom but for social stasis. It takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, but only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life” (211). 8 Cf. Trilling: “But there is one novel of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which the characteristic irony seems not to be at work. Indeed, one might say of this novel that it undertakes to discredit irony and to affirm literalness, that it demonstrates that there are no two ways about anything. And Mansfield Park is for this reason held by many to be the novel that is least representative of Jane Austen’s peculiar attractiveness. For those who admire her it is likely to make an occasion for embarrassment. By the same Trilling can therefore describe Pride and Prejudice as a novel that celebrates spirited social interaction and offers happy endings as a form of communal renewal. Only one year after Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen published Mansfield Park - a fact that has often astonished critics. In many of its features, Mansfield Park looks like a countermodel to the harmonious rebalancing act of Pride and Prejudice. In contrast to Austen’s other heroines, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, is unattractive, inhibited and mostly passive in her responses to the challenges of the social world (Trilling, “Jane Austen” 35). 7 At the same time, the narrative voice of Mansfield Park shows little of the ironic sparkle of other novels by Austen, and the unwavering principles of Fanny Price provide a rigid counter model to the model of communicative interaction presented in Pride and Prejudice and other novels. Thus, it is surprising indeed that Mansfield Park is the novel by Jane Austen that Trilling is most interested in. He wrote a lengthy introduction to a new edition of the novel, referred to the novel repeatedly in his other essays on Austen, and returned to Mansfield Park at greater length in his final critical study Sincerity and Authenticity. In making a case for Mansfield Park, Trilling by no means ignores the prob‐ lems many readers have had with the novel and acknowledges that Mansfield Park may be the one novel by Austen that may alienate modem readers: “Greatly admired in its own day - far more than Emma - Mansfield Park is now disliked by many more readers who like everything else that Jane Austen wrote. They are repelled by its heroine and by all that she seems to imply of the author’s moral and religious preferences at this moment of her life, for Fanny Price consciously devotes herself to virtue and piety, which she achieves by a willing submissiveness that goes against the modem grain” (“Emma” 31). 8 However, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 75 token, it is the novel which the depreciators of Jane Austen may cite most tellingly in justification of their antagonism” (“Mansfield Park” 208). although “the imputed philistinism of its particular moral judgments” may be seen as bad enough, Trilling focuses on another aspect that “constitutes the chief offense of Mansfield Park” in his view: “our commitment to the dialectical mode of apprehending reality is outraged by the militant categorical certitude with which Mansfield Park discriminates between right and wrong. (…) A work of art, notable for its complexity, devotes its energies, which we cannot doubt are of a very brilliant kind, to doing exactly the opposite of what we have learned to believe art ideally does and what we must love it for doing, which is to confirm the dialectical mode and mitigate the constraints of the categorical” (Sincerity and Authenticity 79). And yet, it is precisely this difficulty that makes the novel interesting for him: “Yet Mansfield Park is a great novel, its greatness being commensurate with its power to offend” (“Mansfield Park” 211). As we have seen, Trilling’s critical work is directed against the unquestioned authority of a dominant but unexamined social consensus, and thus a novel must be of special value to him in which the heroine resists joining that consensus. In Fanny’s firm, unflinching determination to adhere to her principles, the novel depicts a character who has the courage to say no, even if it means to become unpopular. The main illusion that Mansfield Park resists by its, as Trilling calls it, “uncompromising honesty” is an illusion that Trilling also sees at the center of liberal thought, namely the conviction, “that right action is typically to be performed without any pain to the self ” (“Mansfield Park” 216). What links Huck and Fanny Price, then, is their courage to resist group conformity. But in contrast to Huck, whose resistance to conformity is described in terms of a rather sudden conversion, albeit humorously framed, Fanny’s resistance is based on principle. Not only is her joyless insistence on principle old-fashioned in view of a new flexible personality type exemplified by the Crawfords and their theatricals; the principles themselves are good old-fash‐ ioned middle-class values. In that sense, the novel appears as a step back from Jane Austen’s vision of a social interaction that transforms its participants and ultimately makes them more balanced persons. Fanny Price also seems to stand for a surprising regression in those characters who have the courage to say no and are ready to accept the consequences: “Even those who are of Jane Austen’s party and absolute in their allegiance must make a special effort to come to terms with this novel. Those who are less fully pledged to its author are commonly alienated and angered by what they take to be its impercipient and restrictive moralism, its partisanship with duty and dullness, its crass 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 76 Winfried Fluck 9 See also Trilling’s comment on the role and significance of Sir Thomas: “The bluff, unimaginative single-mindedness of Sir Thomas is not in every way admirable (…) yet it is the principle on which Mansfield Park is founded and by which it endures and holds out its promise of order, peace, honour, and beauty” (Sincerity and Authenticity 75-76). 10 Cf. Krupnick: “The second half of the book is concerned with Trilling’s struggle to find a new basis for his criticism, and for his role as a cultural critic, from the early fifties on. By that time the theme of ‘the liberal imagination’ had ceased to be sufficient to anchor a general criticism of culture” (17). respectability” (Sincerity and Authenticity 79). The basis of Fanny’s behavior is a permanence of the self that is grounded in notions of duty, principle, and fortitude in virtue: “The sanctions upon which it relies are not those of culture, of quality of being, of personality, but precisely those which the new conception of the moral life minimizes, the sanctions of principle, and it discovers in principle the path to the wholeness of the self which is peace. When we have exhausted our anger at the offense which Mansfield Park offers to our conscious pieties, we find it possible to perceive how intimately it speaks to our secret inexpressible hopes” (“Mansfield Park” 230). 9 In order to understand the surprising turn to Fanny Price in Trilling’s literary and cultural criticism one has to put it in the larger context of the development of Trilling’s thought. Key parts of “Reality in America” had been written in the early Forties, The Opposing Self was published in the mid-Fifties. By that time, the resistance to leftist conformity was no longer the pressing issue it used to be for Trilling and his wife Diana Trilling. 10 This does not mean, however, that Trilling gave up his focus on how the self can resist conformity and assert a certain degree of independence and self-determination. By the mid-Fifties, his intellectual and philosophical ambitions had grown, and references to a (self-knit) Hegelian philosophy of history become more frequent: “In the late sixties Trilling was no longer the same kind of critic that he had been in the forties. If the younger Trilling had imitated the manner of Victorian men of letters like Arnold, the older man was moving toward a Central European mode of cultural criticism, a philosophical history of consciousness in the Hegelian mode” (Krupnick 150). This widening of his intellectual scope allowed Trilling to now reconsider the matter of the self in the context of a theory of modernity that was expanded in following essays and essay collections and reached its most consistent expression in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). In this development, Jane Austen and Mansfield Park remain important and recurring reference points. To discuss the problematic of the non-conforming self no longer as a problem of Stalinism, but of modernity, also means that the problem is no longer 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 77 restricted to the Left. Instead, it is seen in more general terms as the problem of a particular social configuration, the class of intellectuals. Trilling’s reformulation of the problem can be traced in exemplary fashion in his essay “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth” in The Opposing Self. For a committed anti-Stalinist like Trilling, Orwell was an obvious hero. But books like Animal Farm only play a minor role in the essay; somewhat surprisingly, Trilling calls the book over-rated. Orwell is of interest to him, not primarily as a critic of Soviet-style communism but as an unwavering voice for seemingly “old-fashioned” middleclass values, because, for Trilling, these values made his resistance to Stalinism possible. This “old-fashionedness of Orwell’s temperament” reveals itself “when Orwell speaks in praise of such things as responsibility, and orderliness in the personal life, and fair play, and physical courage - even of snobbery and hypocrisy because they sometimes help to shore up the crumbling ramparts of the moral life” (“George Orwell” 158-59). At another point, Trilling refers to “the love of personal privacy, of order, of manners, the ideal of fairness and responsibility” as exemplary manifestations of the simple but genuine virtues Orwell held. The leftist intelligentsia has forgotten what the real values of life are. Accordingly, Trilling stresses an unexpected source as reason for Orwell’s ability to resist left orthodoxies: “We may say that it was on his affirmation of the middle-class virtues that Orwell based his criticism of the liberal intelligentsia” (“Orwell” 162-63). Trilling still uses the term “liberal” intelligentsia here, but the target is now really the intellectual class as a whole. Leftists have only done what intellectuals do all the time: “The characteristic error of the middle-class intellectual of modem times is his tendency to abstractness and absoluteness, his reluctance to connect ideas with fact, especially with personal fact.” This is the reason why intellectuals, despite their often strong moral claims, can be so inhuman at times: they have lost, or rather cut, their ties to everyday life and, more specifically, to the middle-class from which most of them come: “the prototypical act of the modem intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of his family.” This abstraction is tempting but costly: “By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familial commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things” (“Orwell” 163). Seen in this larger context, we may be in a better position to understand how a sophisticated gentleman-critic like Trilling could discover unexpected merits in a mousy character like Fanny Price. Fanny has no intellectual or artistic pretensions, she is a family person, and she has no problem to stick to old-fashioned middle-class 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 78 Winfried Fluck 11 As Cornel West claims, “since Trilling can no longer view the political arena as a credible sphere for self-development, he moves toward the quotidian, the family, the domestic sphere. Keats’s penchant for small-scale sociality will give way to the glories of William Dean Howells’ ‘family piety’ and Jane Austen’s fixities of personal relations” (174). 12 As Chace points out, “Trilling sees intellectuals and the ever-developing awareness of self they provide as the cause, the germ, of modernity” (157). virtues like responsibility, orderliness, and privacy. 11 (Clearly, Huck Finn did not fit that bill). Even her shortcomings may be seen in a different light when we consider what Trilling writes about Orwell: “Toward the end of his life Orwell discovered another reason for his admiration of the old middle-class virtues and his criticism of the intelligentsia. (…) Orwell, it may be said, came to respect the old bourgeois values because they were stupid - that is, because they resisted the power of abstract ideas” (“Orwell” 166). Mansfield Park became a key text for a critique of modernity for Trilling, because the novel has the courage to take the side of middle-class values that have come under siege by modernity. Huck may resist the slave-holding society of the South, but Fanny resists modernity. Or to be more precise: a certain unfortunate tendency of modernity. This can explain the growing significance of Jane Austen for Trilling, for as he claims: “It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being” (“Mansfield Park” 228). At the beginning of modernity stands the vision of an autonomous self. For Trilling, it was Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew that “asks us to consider the awesome force of society as it encroach es upon the individual.” And the book inaugurates, at least for Trilling, a process to be traced throughout Western literary culture at its highest level: the movement of the individual beyond the strictures of morality and into a ‘freedom’ allowing him “an elaboration of his personality, an invigoration of his self-consciousness, and the chance to put on display the full potential of his being” (Chace 154). 12 However, in the modern pursuit of this “free” selfhood, the idea began to take on a life of its own and was severed from its social base; in consequence, intellectuals could extend their calls for autonomy and liberation to the class from which they came, namely the middle-class: “The middle class, which had given to the ‘adversary culture’ its writers, and then its audience, had become in time the central object of its hostility” (Chace 182). As a result of this liberation from their own roots, intellectuals have become irresponsible, at times. A search for authenticity in self-expression has replaced values like sincerity, a development that stands at the center of Mansfield Park and its critique of the “theatricals.” Acting means to impersonate somebody else, impersonation is 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 79 13 As Trilling puts it: “What is decisive is a traditional, almost primitive, feeling about dramatic impersonation. (…) It is the fear that the impersonation of a bad or inferior character will have a harmful effect upon the impersonator, that indeed, the imperso‐ nation of any other self will diminish the integrity of the real self ” (“Mansfield Park” 218). Thus, impersonation is “dangerous to the integrity of the self as a moral agent” (ibid. 219). 14 Cf. Trilling: “How right, then, that Mansfield Park should contain its own ‘Letter on the Theatre’” (75). “The objection to the histrionic art is exactly Rousseau’s: impersonation leads to the negation of self, thence to the weakening of the social fabric” (75). therefore insincere. 13 It may open up entirely new and tempting possibilities for “diversifying” the self, but, as events at Mansfield Park show, it has adverse social consequences and may eventually lead to social disintegration. 14 Sincerity and Authenticity, in which Mansfield Park has an important place, was the philosophically most ambitious of Trilling’s publications: a history of Western philosophy and literature based on a theory of modernity in the mode of a Hegelian philosophy of history. This theory of modernity has a decidedly critical thrust: “In Sincerity and Authenticity Trilling was arguing against the excessive willfulness revealed in the modernist rage for an ultimate freedom transcending the conditions of human existence” (Krupnick 181). The “modernist rage for ultimate freedom” must have negative consequences for literature. As long as the problem was how to muster the courage to resist widely held social expectations, literature could provide a model, as in the case of Huck’s courageous decision to go to hell. When the problem was redefined as a problem of modernity in which the challenge was to resist the lure of unlimited self-expression, Fanny Price could become a model, but now a model of selfrestraint, accepting unpopularity as a price one may have to pay for standing up for principles. However, Fanny was a figure of nineteenth-century literature, a century to which Trilling felt the strongest affinities. For him, the novel, particularly the nineteenthcentury novel, “could best acknowledge the necessity of constraints” (Chace 180). The novel of manners was not only valued by Trilling because it presents social reality in a more complex manner but because its message is that the self has to accept constraints. Modernist literature, on the contrary, had gone in the other direction and become a powerful voice for unlimited freedom and a self-expression without constraints. Instead of resisting problematic tendencies of modernity, “modernist literature portrays and at times promotes” them. Trilling thus “found himself pitted against most of modernist literature” (West 178, 172). During the development of Trilling’s work, the call to resist the claims of well-established orthodoxies, even if they appear “progressive,” is gradually transformed into the call to resist a modem obsession with unconditional 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 80 Winfried Fluck 15 Trilling never became a neoconservative, however: “Although Trilling’s major themes, like that of the adversary culture, were easily appropriated for neoconservative ends, he never assented to the political program of the neoconservatives. On cultural issues he was clearly conservative, but politically he remained an old-fashioned liberal, closer in freedom. The project of opposing a shallow liberalism now turns into the argument to stay true to the self and to accept the price we have to pay for civilization. Trilling’s model of the self comes to resemble that of an innerdirected character who acknowledges the necessity of putting constraints on the unbounded freedom of the modem self. Although Trilling likes to refer to Hegel in his later writings, the underlying model on which his cultural criticism is now based as an explanatory frame, is Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. This became a problem in the 1960’s, because major intellectual voices in the counter-culture, foremost among them Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, were critics of the Freudian claim that self-control and selfdetermination are not possible without self-denial. Trilling “tries to secure his advantage over Marcuse by noting that, whatever Marcuse’s arguments embody, they do not uphold character. And the will, on Trilling’s part, for people to have character is the high cause he has served all his life” (Chace 171). Much like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and Georg Lukacs’s The Destruction of Reason (1954), Sincerity and Authenticity “traces the decline of reason and the rise of irrationality; that is, the slide of the Western self, down the slippery slope from the ‘sincere’ Horatio to the ‘authentic’ Kurtz, from the heights of Shakespeare to the depths of Conrad, reaching rock bottom with the id-applauding polymorphous self in Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Ronald Laing, and Michel Foucault” (West 177). In view of Trilling’s critical view of modernity, it can hardly be an open question how he responded to the counter-culture of the Sixties. “Once again the cruder aspects of liberalism were asserting themselves” (Chace 150). Worse, what was happening now was a “socialization of the anti-social,…the accultur‐ ation of the anti-cultural,…the legitimation of the subversive” (Krupnick 145). In literature, a vulgar parody-modernism had taken over. A key phrase in Trilling’s critique of the counter-culture is the formulation ‘acting out,’ “a term used by psychoanalysts to describe activity in which patients externalize their conflicts instead of remembering and analyzing them” (Krupnick 146). More than ever before, Lionel Trilling became Fanny Price, insisting on principles that the counter-culture threatened to discard. As in the case of many of his peers at Partisan Review, his revision of liberalism had finally moved him to an outspoken conservatism. 15 Complexity was one of the casualties and the excuses he made 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 81 sensibility, say, to nineteenth-century English liberals like Arnold than to contemporaries like Irving Howe” (Krupnick 147-48). for Fanny’s rigidity were ultimately also justifications of the direction in which his own thinking had gone. Works Cited Arac, Johnathan. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Chace, William. Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980. Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Bruns‐ wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Evanston, IL: North‐ western University Press, 1986. Menand, Louis. “Introduction.” Lionel Trilling. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008. 1-5. Trilling, Lionel. “Reality in America.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. 18-31. ---. “Huckleberry Finn.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. 92-101. ---. “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth.” The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking Press, 1955. 151-172. ---. “Mansfield Park.” The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking Press, 1955. 206-232. ---. “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen.” Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. New York: Viking, 1965. 31-56. ---. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972. ---. “Why We Read Jane Austen.” The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75. Ed. Diana Trilling. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. 204-225. West, Cornel. “Lionel Trilling: The Pragmatist as Arnoldian Literary Critic.” The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 164-181. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 82 Winfried Fluck The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more Jonathan Arac It is an extraordinary pleasure and honor, and a daunting challenge too, to be invited to engage with Winfried Fluck’s essay on “Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen and American Literature.” Trilling retains challenging authority as a critic, and undertaking this dialogue has led me to recognize more fully his importance both widely and for myself. “American Literature,” the shared study that has brought us together in our maturity, turns out, I find, to take on special urgency in assessing John Guillory’s new Professing Criticism. Guillory’s book, which appeared in January 2023, while I was developing this essay, stirred me to articulate further thoughts on Trilling’s significance. Trilling’s work and position never became the main line, either for Americanists or other literary scholars. Yet his vision has flourished beyond his time and sustained practitioners whose specific views differ from his, as mine do. Trilling stands for the value and legitimacy of directing literary criticism to the culture at large, which always includes politics. Winfried Fluck and I started to know each other as Americanists and then friends, during my first visit to Berlin, nearly thirty years ago at a conference to honor Ursula Brumm upon her retirement. But it turned out that Fluck and I had already met some quarter-century earlier at Harvard - I a doctoral student, he a Harkness Fellow - in Harry Levin’s 1968 “Thematics” seminar, offered in the Department of Comparative Literature. Levin (1912-1994) was a brilliant polymath, who played a major role in establishing the discipline of Comparative Literature in the U.S. He won wide renown for his 1941 James Joyce, published by New Directions before he was thirty, in effect in lieu of a PhD, a book still worth reading eighty years later. To scholars of English literature, Levin was known for his books on Marlowe (1952) and on Hamlet (1959); to scholars of French literature for The Gates of Horn (1963), on realism in the novel from Stendhal to Proust; and to Americanists for The Power of Blackness (1958), a thematic study of the Gothic element in what was coming to be known as the American Romance. So his seminar attracted a heterogeneous, ambitious, and daunted group of students. Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden was on the syllabus, just a few years after its 1964 publication. Marx’s book is generally considered the last of the foundational works later known as the “myth and symbol” school, a cluster of thematic studies that gave its first institutional shape to the postwar study of the literature and culture of the United States. Each week in Levin’s seminar we addressed a different theme, with one text assigned for common discussion and three more for reports. I recall the week on the Devil (including The Brothers Karamazov and Mann’s Doctor Faustus), on the Haunted House, and on the blonde-brunette typology (for my presentation, I diagrammed relationships between Rebecca and Rowena in Ivanhoe, Cora and Alice in The Last of the Mohicans, and Isabel and Lucy in Pierre). The decade from 1963 to 1973, in which Fluck and I first met, counts the years of my undergraduate and graduate studies, when I also first encountered Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Trilling spent the year 1969-70 at Harvard as the Norton Professor of Poetry, a highly prestigious post - two years earlier it had been Borges! He delivered as lectures the substance of Sincerity and Authenticity (1971), to which Fluck’s essay pays substantial attention. I attended all the lectures except the last, the critique of anti-psychiatry and radical Freudianism. It was the sixties: that lecture took place during a riot. A big protest against the war the U.S. was waging in Vietnam took place in Boston, and as demonstrators were coming back to Cambridge, they were attacked by police. The long-haired, bearded son of the family in whose house I rented an apartment was beaten on the steps of his home. No protester, though he looked the part, Sidney worked for the Coast Guard, doing deskwork downtown. Some protesters fought back. From my apartment on Mass Avenue, you could see a burning police car. You just couldn’t get to the lecture. Not then and not now either do I think that this scene proved Trilling’s critique accurate. This wasn’t youth revolt but violence from a government already waging unjust war. I still have the 1953 Anchor paperback of Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, with its Edward Gorey artwork showing the scales of critical judgment; it was in my parents’ home as far back as I can remember. Trilling was born the same year as my father, both in New York, and both Jewish, and I’m sure this multiple coincidence explains part of why this book was there. My father was a tax attorney who went to night school, not a scholar, except by temperament, or an intellectual, but he cared that such a world of activity existed. My mother read poetry ambitiously as a young woman, but the books of hers I remember growing up include psychoanalytic works addressed to a lay readership, such 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 84 Jonathan Arac 1 Fuller assessment of Trilling and American literature would include early essays on Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Whitman, which were not included in The Liberal Imagination but posthumously collected by Diana Trilling in Speaking of Literature and Society; the essay on Howells in The Opposing Self; the essay on Hawthorne in Beyond Culture. There is more yet. For instance, I take issue with Trilling in “Emily Dickinson.” as Listening with the Third Ear by Theodor Reik. Novels weren’t featured on the home shelves. My high school girlfriend told me I should read novels so I would understand what people are like. I don’t think there’s any direct causation, but starting a few years later, I read a lot of novels, including Huckleberry Finn, the keel on which Fluck and I first federated, both of us taking strong exception to Trilling’s beautifully written and massively influential claims for the book’s formal and moral perfection, as Fluck discusses in the essay to which I’m responding. Now, to speak formally of Fluck’s essay, he offers the striking and accurate observation that two essays in The Liberal Imagination (1950) constitute Tril‐ ling’s main claim as a critic of American literature, those on Huckleberry Finn and on Henry James’s Princess Casamassima (1886). 1 This observation, I believe, points toward to a larger fact about Trilling: little of his major criticism is directed to specific works of literature. This feature of his writing originally kept me at some distance from him; my undergraduate study of literature took place through younger teachers who offered a broadly new-critical perspective, emphasizing language-based interpretation of individual works (quite contrary to the department’s senior faculty). In doctoral study, as I specialized in Victorian literature and culture, Trilling’s early work on Matthew Arnold came to the fore, pointing toward the larger issue of the historical formation of the role of the critic. My access came through Trilling the Victorianist rather than Trilling the Americanist. Trilling and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society together fed my thinking, both strongly diverging from thirties Marxism, though Williams as a socialist, Trilling as a liberal. For this essay, I’ve now studied the recent selection from Trilling’s letters, Life in Culture (2018), which offers tantalizing glimpses of Trilling’s views over fifty years and many topics, including how he felt about teaching American literature and British literature. Effectively, Trilling taught American literature only for a decade. He was at first eager to do it, after completing his work on Arnold. In 1940, he wrote to Newton Arvin (Smith College, author of important books on Hawthorne [1929] and Whitman [1938]) that he “wanted to turn to America” and to have his say “about my two best American friends,” Hawthorne and James (87). By 1951, however, he wrote to his brilliant student Norman Podhoretz (later the reactionary editor of Commentary), “I’ve already shaken off 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 85 2 See 218; his well-known role in defending Lolita doesn’t appear. the contentious incubus of American literature,” and with that burden gone, “my new course on Wordsworth and Keats has led me to enjoy teaching again” (197). When Trilling a few years later got to teach for the first time his “own course in the College” (that is, for undergraduates), it involved British literature from the 1790s onward, and he found it “quite a revelation of pleasure”: “The complexity of lines we were able to draw through “Austen - Dickens - Lawrence, and then through Wordsworth - Keats - Yeats, was astonishing” (224). Just a week earlier, Trilling had written cordially and respectfully to C. L. R. James, who had sent a copy of Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. Trilling explained that he couldn’t really lay out his grounds for disagreeing with James, because “the fact is that I am not at the moment intimate with Moby-Dick as I once was and should like to be again” (219). A few years later, writing again to Podhoretz, Trilling states, “Perhaps Faulkner will never really mean much to me one way or the other” (244). Trilling’s letters to his student Allen Ginsberg are admirably humane documents, but his response to Howl (1956) was completely cold (257). On the evidence of the selected letters, the only postwar American book to delight him was The Adventures of Augie March (1953). 2 I had never before thought to ask the question Fluck does, namely what accounts for Henry James dropping from sight in Trilling’s publications, while Jane Austen comes to play a larger and more continuing role. Her role in Trilling’s work is even larger than the essay discusses, since Trilling’s first posthumous publication, not complete at his death, was “Why We Read Jane Austen” (collected in The Last Decade), provoked by the massive undergraduate applications to take his seminar on Austen (he modestly ignores that some of the crowd was certainly students eager to take a seminar with Columbia’s most famous professor). Regrettably, the answer to why was the part he didn’t live to answer. One answer I would have given to Fluck’s question about James’s disappear‐ ance is simply departmental: Trilling gained a younger colleague, Quentin Anderson, who was a James expert, and that meant Trilling didn’t teach James anymore. When Trilling wrote to Arvin about James as one of his two best American “friends,” Trilling’s experience of James was quite recent. In 1937, he revealed to his lifelong friend, the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, that “There are few people to whom my heart goes out as it does to him. I wonder why I delayed so long getting to him” (69). Thirty-five years later, writing again to Barzun, James has become just a fond memory. Trilling turns away with dissatisfaction from Leon Edel’s biography, and he instead conjures “the old 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 86 Jonathan Arac 3 See my essay “The Critic’s Duty.” Henry, who hasn’t been much in my thoughts for a long time, [to] stand forth in all his monumentality and charm. One is led in our bad days to forget how large, how alive, how eager and devoted it was once possible for a man to be” (395). That is, James counts now less as a great writer of sentences, characters, plots, and novels than as a great example for the conduct of life. This view of James comes close to the reasons for valuing Austen that Fluck cites from Trilling, but I don’t find it distinctly conservative. Just about when Trilling was writing that last essay on Austen, I was teaching an undergraduate seminar at Princeton on the novel from Cervantes to Tolstoy, in which Emma (1815) figured. My students challenged Austen’s significance: why should we care about the life choices of a spoiled rich girl? My reply just came out; both the challenge and my answer surprised me, but I stand by it. It touches on what I imagine was part of Trilling’s answer, had he reached it. I said that like her contemporary William Wordsworth, Austen believed in the importance of individual human beings and of writing about them with “words which speak of nothing more than what we are” (Wordsworth, “Prospectus” to The Recluse). I sharply contrasted Austen and Wordsworth to Joyce - a great favorite of the Princeton seventies - who needed to tie the whole tin can of history to Leopold Bloom. Trilling’s letters show that he was moved by the revolutionary ethos of English Romanticism, and that he came to relish teaching a course in nineteenth century literature, including both prose and poetry, both Wordsworth and Austen. So my answer tends in a different direction from Fluck’s. It’s not part of Trilling’s conservatism, but rather of his free spirit, which for all the nuance and complication that buries it remains part of Trilling’s character at least from the middle 1930s until his death. That free spirit, a fighting spirit, which I have disagreed with in particulars repeatedly and vehemently across decades of my published writing, nonetheless instances the large lesson Trilling took from Arnold and made part of American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. As I titled a recent essay, quoting Arnold but also citing Trilling, “The critic’s duty is to refuse.” 3 Trilling made his soul, and also his career, by opposing Stalinism in the 1930s and 1940s, but after The Liberal Imagination, by the time of Eisenhower and the full Cold War, there wasn’t much left of that. The refusals Trilling made later in his life constitute what many register as his later conservatism, but now that we’re a long way from the specifics (some of which in the letters are quite distasteful, including Sammleresque views of New York), I find enduring value in the fundamental premises that guided Trilling. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 87 4 I draw here from my fuller discussion in “What Good Can Literary History Do? ” In his notes for a 1971 autobiographical lecture, Trilling places his life’s critical work as addressing something “new”: the “politics of culture” (Last Decade 239). He means “A politics in which concern is not with immediate personal interest but with the interest of others - with the moral assumptions of the polity, with the quality of life that the polity generates and sustains” (239-40). He found in “intellectual-political life” a “self-deception” that expressed itself as “an impulse toward moral aggrandizement through the taking of extreme and apocalyptic positions” (240-41). He found such positions wrong and dangerous, because they “seemed political” but “actually express a desire to transcend the political condition - which, as I saw things, and still do, meant an eventual acquiescence in tyranny” (241). I don’t think anyone will find these terms of analysis and concern irrelevant to current debates, or to much of the best work within American literary studies in the fifty years since Trilling drafted them. Earlier in his career, Trilling stated a related credo in his essay on the function of the little magazine (in The Liberal Imagination and originally published as the introduction to The Partisan Reader, an anthology from the first decade of Partisan Review). 4 He directly faces the fear we share now, in the twentyfirst century, that our work is marginal, because as a scholar of the nineteenth century, he had learned from William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold that it is possible to write toward a future. Trilling affirms that if you do not yet have your audience, you do not write for what you have but for what you seek to form: “The writer does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors or posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all” (xv). The daemon, the uncanny power, that Trilling and his colleagues faced was, he believed, fundamentally political: “Our fate, for better or worse, is political. It is not in itself a happy fate, even when it has an heroic sound. But there is no escape from it and the only possibility of enduring it is to force into our definition of politics every human activity and every subtlety of every human activity. There are manifest dangers in doing this, but greater dangers in not doing it” (xiv). His language of “force” is deliberately violent to signal a difficult and risky undertaking. Yet force does not simply mean the triumph of politics, for the “we” Trilling cited and summoned aimed at changing politics. Specifically, the transformation Trilling envisaged would “organize a new union between our political ideas and our imaginations” (xiv). These terms organize 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 88 Jonathan Arac 5 A listing of New York Intellectuals on p. 295 confirms that Trilling is included among them. This observation concerning the Cambridge History I take from my essay “Why Does No One Care? ”, which devotes several pages to aspects of Trilling not discussed in “Huckleberry Finn.” and union resonate from 1930s labor struggles and also from the founding, formative moments in the history of the U.S.: Revolution, Constitution, Civil War, sit-down factory occupation - in each case force but also hope. I find it important to rehearse Trilling because I realize that these fundamental positions he took and elaborated have helped to inspire and to justify much of what I have done in my career, despite profound disagreements about specifics, which I have expressed. It seems to me ridiculous to have to affirm it, but it needs saying: For decades in the later twentieth century, Trilling was an important critic, whose work and career provided an aspirational model for many younger scholars of American literature. It needs saying because first in The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994-2005) and then, a generation later, in John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (2022), he is erased. The Cambridge authors explain that their choice to focus on “the acade‐ micization of criticism” has required giving “short shrift to such brilliant cultural commentators as ‘The New York Intellectuals’ of the 1940s and 1950s, whose largely nonacademic and cross-disciplinary criticism might be central to a different kind of account” (Carton and Graff 264). 5 Accordingly, Trilling gets six brief mentions. Yet the Cambridge History gives far more attention to such “cross-disciplinary” figures as Derrida, Foucault, and Adorno, none of whom held tenure in literature departments of the U.S. academy. In the same vein, again with scare quotes, Guillory names Trilling with Edmund Wilson and Susan Sontag as “‘public intellectuals’” whose work “failed to model interpretive practice for the literary professoriate” (59). Wilson and Sontag were professional writers, neither with a PhD; late in life he held an occasional visiting professorship; she spent five years as an untenured faculty member, around age thirty, while establishing her career. Trilling shaped his life to become, and even after his fame he remained, a faculty member at Columbia for all the years after he completed his BA and PhD there. He came to Columbia as a freshman in 1921, and when he died in 1975, he was still there. He held a University Professorship, the institution’s highest academic distinction, and Harvard had twice tried to recruit him (Life in Culture 286). As the first Jew to gain tenure in English at a major private university, he is widely understood to have played an important role in the institutional transformation of academic criticism. He actively took part in faculty governance, spending innumerable hours on committees. No one 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 89 could have been more academic. Like many other professors, only now and then did it make him happy. Yet for the immensely erudite and informed Guillory, Trilling doesn’t count. How can this be? The very large question, which I must address more fully elsewhere, concerns the character of evidence appropriate for historical soci‐ ology of the sort Guillory practices so provocatively and insightfully. Unlike the Cambridge history, Guillory doesn’t attach his view of the last fifty years in academic criticism to any names, whether for praise or blame. Consider Fredric Jameson, whose institutional stature might be demonstrated as greater than Trilling’s, or anyone else’s, by an objective professional measure: he is the only person ever to have been awarded by the Modern Language Association, at twenty year intervals (1971, 1990, 2011), its prize for best article in PMLA, for the best book, and for lifetime achievement. Guillory mentions Jameson on one page, taking issue with those who consider him important: “the assumption that Jameson’s version of theory has widely governed critical practice seems to me mistaken” (86). Guillory’s assumption that one single way of doing things has modeled or governed our critical practice seems to me mistaken. As sociologist Michèle Lamont, an actual student of Pierre Bourdieu, demonstrates in How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (2009), literary study in the early twenty-first century differed from other humanities and social science disciplines, because even its highly credentialed practitioners do not agree on what counts for excellence. My fifty years as a faculty member chimes more closely with her perception than with his. There’s a further problem that Guillory’s neglect of Trilling points to, and he candidly attempts to state the problem, although I think he does not quite recognize it. Rather like what Paul de Man explained concerning his massively influential collection of related essays, Allegories of Reading (1979), Guillory began with the idea of producing a continuous history, a “linear narrative” (ix), but he found it impossible to execute. For Guillory, “that plan ultimately proved impractical, largely because of my limitations as a scholar of English literature.” Guillory does not wish that he were a better scholar of English literature; rather he means that he is limited because he is a scholar only of English literature. Of course he knows a lot more, including a lot of sociology, but he acknowledges his limits. He names two concrete obstacles: first, “the asymmetric relation between English and the modern foreign languages in the Anglo-American university”; but then, too, “the converging and diverging histories of British and American literary study are equally difficult to integrate” (ix). He means by “British (…) literary study” criticism as practiced “in the United Kingdom.” Of course it could 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 90 Jonathan Arac 6 See my arguments on “Stalinism” in Critical Genealogies, 310-15. have meant the study of English literature, in contrast to the study of American literature. This is where I find Guillory has gone astray. He seems not to recognize that professors of American literature may not only feel, but may actually participate in a longstanding practice that Trilling most powerfully exemplified: judgments made about literature and its study connect directly to the national culture and carry real political implication. It’s not just fantasy. Living in the state of Florida, I disagree with Governor DeSantis’s specific judgments and policies, but I agree with him that what students are required, or even allowed, to read in schools and universities is a live and significant political fact, as is also how they are encouraged to think about what they read. I conclude with a few more citations from Trilling’s letters over the decades to illustrate that once he gained his fundamental perspective, he maintained it. In 1937, he wrote to Barzun, defining the position that led Geoffrey Hartman to call Trilling “the man in the middle” (an essay in The Fate of Reading): “I find no intellectual position more grateful to me than that of trying to keep the walls of the Right and the Left from moving together to squash me, like the Poe story” (69). A little later that year, Trilling wrote to Edmund Wilson, concerning Matthew Arnold, as he was just finally understanding the subject of his first book. Trilling explains that Arnold is a “terribly slippery fellow (…) you never know where to have him because he uses what might loosely be called a dialectical method - what he calls ‘criticism’ is really that (…) and he was constantly changing his emphasis to meet the occasion” (70). What began here as an insight into Arnold became a self-portrait. Nearly a decade later, in 1946, Trilling wrote to Eric Bentley (whose important book The Playwright as Thinker appeared that year), “I am no longer sure that I am, in any accepted sense of the word, a leftist: put it, not a leftist except ultimately.” Here he adapts his emphasis that Arnold, who so often criticized liberals, was a “liberal of the future.” Trilling was a socialist of the future. Meanwhile, he continues, he will “stand with other anti-Stalinists, keeping my own position clear, because, on the coldest political grounds - the grounds of daily events - and on the farthest cultural, civilizational grounds, I am sure that Stalinism is corrupt and dangerous” (135). I should emphasize that I have never accepted Trilling’s definition of Stalinism in American life. 6 He understood it as culturally and intellectually deadening, and he believed that it infected readers of the New York left tabloid PM (1940-48, now best known as the paper for which Dr. Seuss did political cartoons). Those readers included my parents. Some literary scholars revered Trilling because 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 91 he gave them a better figure than their parents offered. Not me. Nonetheless, his concerns have the power to animate understanding that he was not himself capable of. In 1948 Trilling wrote to John Crowe Ransom a letter I find fascinating. That year Ransom founded at Kenyon College (where he taught and edited the Kenyon Review) a summer institute, The Kenyon School of Letters. That school may be seen, from our time, as a model for The School of Criticism and Theory that Murray Krieger launched at Irvine in 1976 and which still exists at Cornell, but in its own day, the Kenyon School clearly began to fulfill the idea Ransom had put forth in an essay of 1937 titled “Criticism, Inc.” There Ransom had argued the need for the practice of criticism to become organized and disciplined, not just random insights and praise or blame. Ransom was a poet, teacher, and Southern Christian conservative, a founding figure of New Criticism. Yet he chose for the two founding senior fellows of the School critics, nearly a generation his junior, who were radically different from him on anyone’s map, both far less formalist and far more left: F. O. Matthiessen, author of American Renaissance (1941) and a Christian socialist gay man; and Lionel Trilling, New York Jew and Freudo- Marxist. Trilling and Matthiessen, both far to Ransom’s left, nonetheless were not allies, since Trilling saw Matthiessen as Stalinist. In my view, this trio speaks very well for all three of them. They saw there was a goal: criticism was a good that could join them for all their differences. But Trilling would have none of this feel-good story I’m offering. Trilling is distressed that “we critics” have “by now become institutionalized” - not jailed or crazy, just routine: “I wonder if you ever get a notion of how established the critical idea has become (…) now the danger comes that all that was won with difficulty will turn into academic cliché, given back to us by almost all the students who are at all bright” (173). Seventy-five years before Professing Criticism, Trilling was already sick of it. Finally, writing in 1961 to the modernist art critic Clement Greenberg about their prematurely deceased old friend and Partisan Review figure Robert Warshow, Trilling offers a simple summary of what remains the perspective he did most to articulate in American literary study, and which still bindingly but noncoercively guides many of us: “In those days we were all political - as I still feel I am - in the sense that we thought that cultural preferences were bound to lead to political choices and even to some degree of political action, and also in the simpler sense that we thought that political partisanship would express itself in cultural preferences and cultural action” (311). 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 92 Jonathan Arac Works Cited Arac, Jonathan. Critical Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. ---. “Why Does No One Care for the Aesthetic Value of Huckleberry Finn? ” New Literary History 30.4 (1999): 769-84. ---. “What Good Can Literary History Do? ” American Literary History 20.1 (2008): 1-11. ---. “Emily Dickinson: Length and the Liberal Imagination.” boundary 2 44.3 (2017): 3-15. ---. “The Critic’s Duty is to Refuse.” American Literary History 34.1-2 (2022): 380-86. Carton, Evan and Gerald Graff. “Criticism Since 1940.” Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 8. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Guillory, John. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Trilling, Lionel. “Introduction.” The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of “Partisan Review” 1934- 1944: An Anthology. Ed. William Phillips and Philip Rahv. New York: Dial, 1946. ix -xvi. ---. The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75. Ed. Diana Trilling. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. ---. Speaking of Literature and Society. Ed. Diana Trilling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. ---. Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. Ed. Adam Kirsch. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0006 The long lineage of cultural politics: Lionel Trilling once more 93 First published as “Containment or Emergence? A Theory of American Literature.” Making America: The Cultural Work of Literature. Ed. Susanne Rohr, Peter Schneck, and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. 67-82. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 I use the word containment here as a shorthand for a whole range of radical claims in which, in a first stage of the argument, concepts like systemic cooptation, unwitting complicity or invisible forms of constraint were seen as power effects of American literature that should be unmasked. In contrast, concepts like surveillance, disciplinary regimes or subjection have dominated a second, more radical stage. In each case, revisionists have argued that it has been the main function of American literature to serve as an invisible form of ideological and political control, if not subjection. Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature Winfried Fluck I. In the revisionist criticism that has dominated the study of American literature over the last fifteen years, we have become used to a mode of reading which focuses on literary and fictional texts as discursive and disciplinary practices. The interpretative emphasis lies on what is cleverly and cunningly contained by the text, not on what is made possible by literature. In contrast, I want to provide the sketch of a theory of American literature in which literature does not only figure as a site of systemic containment but also of imaginary self-extension. 1 In fact, as I will argue, the two are interdependent and regularly reinforce each other in ever new constellations. The stronger the containment, the greater the wish for an imaginary self-extension that can go beyond existing constraints; the more radical the wish for self-extension, the greater the systemic need to find new ways of containment. The inherently provisional and exploratory dimension of fictional texts as “as-if-statements” offers an experimental space to try out new responses to these challenges. In the following essay I will trace the changing constellations of this ongoing interplay. My theory is based on the following assumptions: 2 Iser’s use of the concept of the imaginary is taken from a phenomenological tradition. His two major sources of inspiration on the imaginary are Sartre and Castoriadis. For a detailed discussion of the concept of the imaginary see Iser’s books Prospecting (1989) and The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993). 3 For Iser, the preferred term to describe the function of fiction is that of a self-extension. The term comprises two aspects. On the one hand, a fictional text will not be of any interest to a reader if it cannot evoke any personal resonance. We have to be able to relate to the text. On the other hand, readers will not be interested either if the fictional text does not go beyond a mere reproduction of what already exists. Thus, as Iser puts it, for the duration of the reading process, “we are both ourselves and someone else” at the same time (244). 1. The gradual liberation of the “fictional” from religious and moral contexts and its institutionalization in literary texts, especially in the form of the novel, is one of the major events in modern Western cultural history. 2. This emergence and institutionalization of literary fictions establishes a mode of communication with conditions and possibilities of its own and draws its major force from a particular potential, namely to provide the imaginary, whether radically individual or cultural, with new possibilities for articulation. 3. The imaginary is defined here, following Wolfgang Iser, in a phenomeno‐ logical sense as that realm of diffuse, discontinuous and decontextualized associations, images, feelings, affects, and moods which constantly feed our perceptions and flood our consciousness but which need to be translated into a recognizable form or Gestalt in order to find expression. 2 One advantage of such a broad definition of the imaginary is that it is not equated with any of its manifestations. In fact, to trace the changing words and concepts that have been used to grasp this imaginary dimension - such as fancy and imagination, prophetic vision, phantasm, the uncanny, the unconscious, or desire, to name but a few - would in itself provide a fasci‐ nating cultural history of changing conceptualizations and manifestations of the imaginary. 4. This “articulation effect” has made fictional texts, and especially the novel, one of the primary cultural instruments of imaginary self-extension and individual self-fashioning in Western societies. 3 By giving the imaginary a Gestalt, fiction can give expression to thoughts, feelings, and affects that may remain elusive otherwise. For Iser, “the act of representation brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object” (Prospecting 236). However, the imaginary is not identical with its representation because fiction can only give expression to the imaginary by linking it with cultural codes of the real. In the history of literature (and other 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 96 Winfried Fluck 4 The term individual is not used here in any emphatic philosophical sense, as a subject, but in the Tocquevillian sense of a new type of social character who wants to extend his or her own possibilities of self-realization. The special potential of democracies for liberating the imaginary is already perceived by Tocqueville, although with concern: “I have no fear that the poetry of democratic peoples will be found timid or that it will stick too close to the earth. I am much more afraid that it will spend its whole time getting lost in the clouds and may finish up by describing an entirely fictitious country. I am alarmed at the thought of too many immense, incoherent images, overdrawn descriptions, bizarre effects, and a whole fantastic breed of brainchildren who will make one long for the real world” (489). Since this essay was first published, sociologists have introduced the concepts singularity and singularization in order to avoid suggestions of individual autonomy and self-determination that have often been associated with concepts like individualization and individualism. But as used here, individualization simply refers to an increasing dissociation from the authority of social and cultural claims. It can be a story of loss but also of gains. 5 Actually, I think, one should speak of an act of suppression, because to acknowledge this dimension of cultural history would also mean that one would no longer be able to define those considered oppressed as dupes or victims of the system. fictions), we encounter this interplay of the imaginary and the real in ever new combinations. In this process, no side remains unaffected: While the imaginary aims to redefine reality, the codes of the real transform the imaginary into something that can be understood and experienced by others, thereby socializing subjective experience. 5. The paradoxical interaction of the imaginary and the real can be seen as a motor of an ongoing process of cultural rehierarchization and individual‐ ization in Western societies. 4 II. Such assumptions do not necessarily stand in opposition to revisionist insights into the cooptive and disciplinary powers of fictional texts. However, they provide a necessary addition to these insights by drawing attention to the interdependence between a growing refinement in disciplinary regimes and yet, at the same time, a growth in individual self-expression, between ever more subtle forms of ideological containment and, at the same time, a steady increase in the possibilities of imaginary self-extension. This interdependence escapes the new revisionism. 5 Its paradoxical logic works both ways: It is one of the major promises of fiction to give expression to not yet fully articulated, diffusely imagined desires, feelings and associations, but this articulation also leads to the discursive configuration of the imaginary element by which it was generated and, thus, to its socialization. This configuration, in turn, provides a basis for 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 97 6 This alone I think can explain a strange paradox that pervades the current critical argument in literary studies and which I have described on another occasion: the fact that, contrary to revisionist analyses about the all-pervasive cooptive and disciplinary power effects of discursive regimes, a culture of opposition and dissent has emerged in contemporary intellectual and cultural life that is unique in its scope and critical intensity. new forms of social and cultural control; however, in doing so, it also provokes new wishes for self-expression and imaginary self-extension. In following the heated debates between the various revisionist camps about whether American literature has any oppositional potential, it may seem that we have to decide between either containment or opposition. But the real challenge is to grasp their interdependence, that is, the way in which they depend on one another and constantly reinforce each other in that extremely unstable semiotic system called literature. 6 This is not to say that the new revisionism, which has given us intriguing and powerful readings of classic American literature, should be dismissed. It means, however, that the role and function of literature seems to me to be more complicated than it is presented in many revisionist readings at present. Literature can be a site of cultural containment and ideological formation, but it is also a struggle for expression and, in consequence, a major medium of self-definition and imaginary self-extension. III. In order to illustrate a view of literature as a realm of negotiation between seemingly contradictory functions of fiction, let me focus on two types of novels which can be considered as breakthrough genres in the development of a specific American tradition and which are nowadays often described as supreme examples of ideological containment, the historical novel of the frontier and the domestic novel. The frontier already plays an important part in a novel such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799). But since Brown’s Indians are only beastly manifestations of an imaginary fear and nothing else, belonging together with a ferocious panther to a paradigm of life-threatening forces, the threat to the self remains ultimately uncontrollable and the imaginary functions as an uncanny double of the self. In contrast, in James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novels of the frontier, this Indian threat is dramatized as challenge of a prior, savage state of civilization that must be conquered and contained. This encounter is described from the perspective of an eighteenth-century ideal of civilizatory progress which insists on the superiority of modern stages of historical development over the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 98 Winfried Fluck savagery of prior stages of civilization but also fears the “modern age” as a threat to communal values and established social hierarchies. James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms write on the basis of a stable, unquestioned historical and social hierarchy, both use their novels to dramatize a threat to this hierarchy in order to provide it with a new legitimation and to reconsolidate it successfully, and both present their narratives in an unambiguous mode of representation which reflects their strong belief in the legitimacy and transparency of the social organization they favor. Both authors, finally, write historical novels in order to give their struggle for social recognition the heroic dimension of an epic battle. However, in their efforts to elevate the novel to the level of a national epic, they also introduce fictional elements designed to make their stories of a rightful historical genealogy interesting and “powerful.” As a result, the historical novel emerges as a highly paradoxical genre. On the one hand, it can be seen as an attempt by gentry-authors to put fiction in the service of their own “civilized” values and political claims, while, on the other hand, the historical novel heats up the imagination with wild adventures and daring deeds in order to engage the reader in support of these goals. It stimulates and constantly refuels the imagination - but it does so in order to increase the legitimacy of its own social and cultural claims. Thus, it is in constant movement between two constitutive elements: its nourishing promise of adventure and the “socialization” of these elements of adventure, so that emerging threats to authority can be successfully contained. The license of fiction to reconfigure social hierarchies, if only temporarily, may provide a crucial explanation for the initially unexpected success of Cooper’s version of the historical novel, as, for example, in the case of The Pioneers (1823). By elevating Leatherstocking to the level of a vicarious father figure who saves the heroine where the actual father and patriarch, Judge Temple, fails, a process of rehierarchization is set in motion which becomes a major source of attraction and gratification for the reader. However, this also creates a major problem of representation. For clearly, in view of the ultimate goal of the historical novel to legitimize an established social hierarchy, “wild,” heroic adventurers that have the potential to overturn this hierarchy must be prevented from becoming too seductive. In The Pioneers, Cooper solves the problem by removing Natty from the new social order after he proves unwilling and incapable to adjust to the legal code of civilization. When Cooper resurrects Natty as a younger self in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Natty has already internalized an idea of the “natural” order of things for which he now becomes a willing pathfinder and for which he needs no social legitimation. Simms, on the other hand, solves the challenge of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 99 7 On the problem of how to relate history to fiction (and how to invert the hierarchy of the two), cf. Dekker: “In most of his romances, Cooper solved this problem by virtually dispensing with the kind of famous historical personages and events that figure so prominently in most of the Waverley novels. As a result, Cooper’s casts of characters could be smaller, his plots simpler, and his natural settings could bulk larger than was usual in Scott’s romances. For Simms, the potential gains of concentration which Cooper’s practice offered did not outweigh the losses of panoramic effects and ‘real’ historical interest; and so he crowded the plots of his romances with the notable figures and incidents that also appeared in his History of South Carolina” (63). 8 I think it is the successful balance Cooper achieved between the two contradictory pulls of the historical romance which provides the answer to the question Green poses: “But granted that driving interest in America - which I called the cultural reason for Cooper’s popularity - why should Cooper’s treatment of these themes have been its beneficiary, when for instance Robert Montgomery Bird’s was not, though his Nick of the Woods (1837) treats the same themes with what seems to me much more literary power and skill? ” (“Cooper, Nationalism” 166-67). 9 The unstable semantics of the genre designation thus reflects an inner conflict or tension at the heart of the genre, a tension between historical specificity and a fictionalization of history in the interest of excitement and adventure, a conflict between an imaginary attraction to the “wild” and its exemplary reintegration into a “natural” social order. In fact, it may be argued that one major attraction of the romance consists in its considerable freedom in combining generic forms and modes of representation. “Pure” examples are temporary rehierarchization even more cleverly (but also more conventionally): In The Yemassee (1835), his rough outdoor hero is really a disguised aristocrat who returns to his true identity and rightful social status after the attack of the “savage” forces is successfully repelled. In both cases, the historical novels draws its appeal from a carefully controlled interaction between “historical” and “fictional” elements, the realm of the reality principle and the wild desires of the imaginary which are temporarily rearranged in hierarchy in order to “tempt” and engage the reader, but which are, in the end, reintegrated into the reaffirmation of a social hierarchy legitimized by history. 7 Seen in this way, the historical novel presents a highly instructive case for the gradual liberation of elements of the imaginary in the history of the American novel. It dramatizes a state of tension and strikes a precarious balance: It has to draw on elements of the romance in order to make itself dramatically interesting and to provide a space for scenarios of heroic selfenhancement. But it also has to discipline and ultimately control these elements of the romance in order to meet their potential challenge to a social hierarchy which the historical novel set out to defend and to exempt from the suspicion of undue privileges of power and possession. 8 Hence, it moves between novel and romance; accordingly, it has been called both historical novel and historical romance almost interchangeably. 9 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 100 Winfried Fluck rarely found. The American romance usually appears as a hybrid form, constantly and promiscuously establishing new discursive links and generic combinations. In terms of its theory of effect, the main point about the historical romance is thus not simply the liberation of an imaginary core of “wild,” savage selfassertion but its connection with a countermove of control, resulting in a constant tension between wish-fulfillment and restraint, the articulation of a desire for imaginary self-extension and its socialization. The reader is lured by the excitement of heroic deeds; at the same time, he or she is also reminded of the need for self-discipline and the legitimacy of social hierarchy. In its recurring sequences of victory and defeat, pursuit and escape, anxiety and relief, the narrative produces something like an emotional see-saw effect, in which the imagination and the emotions of the reader are constantly refuelled, but also never quite released from the need for self-restraint and self-regulation. The heroic self-discipline which the hero demonstrates therefore also be‐ comes a model for the reader. While the hero has to fight enemies, the reader has to grapple with his or her own projections of triumph and fear and bear the continuing challenges to a fantasy of self-empowerment “manfully.” Thus, the “work” of readers consists in learning to control their own “wild” impulses and to thus to contain a conflict that is carried out on the level of plot in a passionate, openly violent way which is still “savage” and pre-civilizatory. Indeed, in terms of cultural history, this exemplary reenactment of a conflict between the articulation of imaginary temptations and the reassertion of a need for self-regulation is the major achievement of the most popular early forms of the novel, the sentimental, the historical, and the domestic novel. All can be seen as emotional training grounds that use dangerous encounters to dramatize the need for self-regulation. The historical novel can thus be seen as a form instilling a disciplinary regime. However, this function is only part of a trade-off in which imaginary self-extension and temporary rehierarchization also play a crucial role. IV. The adventure story in the style of Cooper’s historical novels and the female domestic novel are usually set in contrast as irreconcileable and antagonistic genres while, in fact, they resemble each other in striking ways in their strategies of internalization and their implied theories of aesthetic effect (so that, in fact, this genre, too, has been called both “domestic novel” and “domestic romance” interchangeably). As critics such as Nina Baym, Jane Tompkins and others 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 101 10 See Brodhead’s chapter, “Sparing the Rod. Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” in his book Cultures of Letters (1993). 11 Cf. my essay “Cultures of Criticism” (1995). 12 These categories are taken from Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985), although I do not use them here for a critique of individualism, as Bellah does. have shown, the domestic novel - at first blush the story of an unappreciated, orphaned, underprivileged girl or young woman - holds a well-calculated theory of power designed to turn weakness into strength and make submission and self-sacrifice the basis for an assertion of the self. At the beginning of Susan Warner’s domestic novel The Wide, Wide World (1850), the young heroine has to learn to overcome a cruel experience of sepa‐ ration which turns her, not legally, but surely symbolically, into an orphan. This, clearly, is another version of the Cinderella-motif whose striking dominance in nineteenth-century women’s literature must have something to do with the fact that it provides an exemplary drama of recognition. Inevitably, one consequence of Ellen’s loss of social relation is a loss of self-esteem. Hence, it must be the project (and promise) of the novel to find new sources of self-esteem. This search draws on images of trimphant self-enhancement in the presence of a father figure, and emotional symbiosis with a mother figure. But as Richard Brodhead has shown in exemplary fashion, both of these forms of imaginary self-empowerment have to be earned, by the heroine as well as the reader, in a painful process of psychic self-regulation. 10 In the historical novel, the “savage” stage of human development has to be overcome, in the domestic novel, it is the “childish” stage, but in both cases it is precisely this realm of yet uncivilized or “immature” forces that becomes the nourishing ground for fiction. V. I have shown in a different context how in Herman Melville’s hands, the novel, no longer following the predictable plot pattern of the historical novel of adventure, metamorphoses into a book that defies any generic formula in its exuberant celebration of fiction’s potential for imaginary role-play and selfextension. 11 In this process, the novel of social apprenticeship, which dominates the first part of the nineteenth-century, is replaced by the early manifestation of an expressive individualism that begins to challenge and replace the selfregulative ethos of fictions of so-called utilitarian individualism. This shift from utalitarian individualism to expressive individualism provides the imaginary with entirely new possibilities. 12 In Moby-Dick (1851), in screening virtually the whole archive of human knowledge for the purpose of imaginary self-extension, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 102 Winfried Fluck 13 For especially helpful discussions of this aspect, see McIntosh, Schulz, and Porter. 14 This, in fact, explains Hawthorne’s characteristic choice of genre. In classifying his novels as romances, it is often forgotten that they take their point of departure from the historical novel and its particular interest in Puritanism. Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (1971), Brumm, Geschichte und Wildnis in der amerikanischen Literatur (1980), and Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986) have discussed Hawthorne’s work in the context of a literary tradition dealing with early New England history, and, especially, with the legacy of Puritanism. The American Revolution, the encounter between white settlers and Native Americans, and the Puritan past of New England were the three dominant themes of the American historical romance until the Civil War. Ishmael as well as Ahab discover ever new roles and forms of self-fashioning. 13 But they are also in constant danger of being overwhelmed by this semiotic abundance - a danger that gives Melville’s rewriting of the Bildungsroman in Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852) its characteristic self-destructive trajectory. Consequently, Melville’s heroes do not fail, as heroes often do in utilitarian individualism, by disregarding the reality-principle. They either exhaust or ruin themselves in the chase and struggle for ever new possibilities of self-expression, so that the novel’s quest for the ungraspable phantom of life turns into “the chartless voyage of an ardent, self-dramatizing ‘I’” (Milder 438). The subsequent history of American literature can be seen as that of a continuous unfolding and increasing radicalization of expressive individualism, although there are moments and movements, like the work of Hawthorne and that of American realism, that try to integrate claims of individual self-assertion into visions of a transformed community. 14 However, where this is done with radical insistence, the imaginary can reassert itself in entirely unforeseen ways. An example is provided by Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which starts out as a democratic critique of feudalism, only to discover unexpected possibilities for self-aggrandizement nourished by the very “fictions” which the book sets out to discipline. But the most intriguing case is provided by Henry James, who first bases his negotiation between individual and society on the possibility of common experiences, then realizes the need for an interpretation of these experiences through consciousness, and finally reveals the uncanny presence of imaginary elements of desire, voyeurism, even vampirism, and, above all, a will to power and self-assertion in this consciousness. In this process, the realist project is transformed from within and a new conceptualization of the imaginary is opened up, as, for example, in James’ stories “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) and “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), in which the imaginary becomes an ungraspable bait. As in the case of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 103 15 See Ickstadt on Howells: “Throughout his writings therefore the romance is associated with everything destructive to the balanced vision: with selfishness, the passions, the morbidness of dreams and the unconscious; with class society, aristocratic conceit and idleness, and with imperialist expansion” (98-99). 16 See Peper’s pioneering study, Bewußtseinslagen des Erzählens und Erzählte Wirklich‐ keiten (1966). Twain, a realistic containment is subverted by fiction’s potential to exceed the “real.” VI. It is fascinating to consider, for a moment, the transformations which the imaginary undergoes in the development of American literature: In Hawthorne, the imaginary is the source of “dark” suggestions of guilt and sin that create all kinds of ambiguities. But this imaginary is still morally contained. In realism, we find a determined attempt to redefine the imaginary as a literary illusion and to subdue it by contrasting it with “experience.” 15 However, as realists, including Howells, find out, this “romance” of real life is much more powerful than they were initially willing to acknowledge. In James’s enigmatic stories of the 1890s and his late novels, a new stage is reached. The imaginary becomes a source of unnameable suggestions which no longer trigger moral reflection but horror. With the works of Kate Chopin, which occupy a major role in the transition from nineteenthto twentieth-century fiction, a long tradition of regarding the imaginary with both fascination and fear comes to an end. In The Awakening (1899), the imaginary is now reconceptualized as an authentic life-giving force, which can no longer be represented, not even by enigmatic, ambiguous signs. It can only be experienced through sensuous suggestion, acknowledging the force of an intangible desire (as does Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie at about the same time). As Jürgen Peper pointed out in the context of a different, but related argument, 16 the subsequent development of modern literature in the twentieth century can be seen as an attempt to penetrate ever new layers of cultural convention, including those of language, in order to get access to an underlying, but inaccessible authentic life force that cannot be represented in language. It can only be represented indirectly by evoking feelings, moods, and associ‐ ations that are tied to signs used for representation. When the idea of an “authentic,” unrepresentable existential dimension is finally undermined by postmodernism’s redefinition of reality as a semiotic universe, this must, in turn, also affect the conceptualization of the imaginary. Instead of acting as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 104 Winfried Fluck placeholder for an existential truth that cannot be expressed, the imaginary now becomes the generator of an endless chain of signifiers and plots that only faintly retain the possibility of an underlying meaning. VII. Again, this story of the changing conceptualizations and literary manifestations of the imaginary has two sides to it. On the one hand, it is a story of liberation: While most conceptualizations of the nineteenth century still emphasize an uncanny, potentially self-destructive dimension of the imaginary, it emerges as a liberating force in most twentieth-century versions. But at the same time, the story of the changing literary manifestations of the imaginary is also one of constant retreat, ranging from the still overpowering presence of the double and the savage in Brown’s work to the narrative function of a mere blank or empty signifier. Hawthorne’s characteristic modes of ambiguity, even James’s “unspeakable suggestions,” though they may only function as hermeneutical baits, still hold a promise of meaning. In contrast, Chopin’s evocation of sensuous experience (or, to give another example, Scott Fitzgerald’s green light on the other side of the bay) assumes a central role in the text because it is, by definition, “untranslatable” in its primarily sensuous suggestiveness. Finally, the postmodern romance of a Donald Barthelme retains meaning only as a faint linguistic echo of mythic patterns and narrative conventions. This story of retreat is closely bound up with the rejection of those (real or imagined) authorities which seem to impede individual self-assertion. Here, too, a fascinating story of changing concepts of the “antagonist” to individual selfrealization is opening up, in which the initially universal claim (and restraints) of rationalism that still govern the world of Charles Brockden Brown are first taken back to a historical dimension, the concept of civilization, and the idea of gentry-guardianship, and are then reduced to a social dimension, the authority of moral and social traditions which become “manners” in the work of James. In James, manners can be both deceptive and an element of self-definition; in Chopin, they have become oppressive only and threaten to suffocate the self. In the worlds of Dreiser and Fitzgerald, on the other hand, manners are displaced by a new materialism that is much harder to grasp and to battle because it already resembles the unstable plasticity of the consumer market and the stock exchanges; moreover, it is so all-pervasive that the individual can no longer be sure whether and to what degree it is infected itself by these forces and desires. This, in turn, triggers the modernist search for non-materialistic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 105 residues of existence such as art (or the aesthetic realm) or an existential reality that explodes all social conventions. However, it is one of the paradoxical consequences of this retreat to a seem‐ ingly authentic, uncorrupted sphere of life that the relentless and continually radicalized search for an authentic dimension that is not yet compromised by social forces reveals ever new layers of linguistic and cultural convention, until the idea of authenticity is undermined itself. Not only are the concepts of art and self now considered as discursive constructs that imprison and “discipline” the individual, but also such seemingly private dimensions as sexuality, the emotions, and the body, so that it has become a major project of contemporary art to overcome the separation between life and art and to dissolve the authority of these concepts by parodistic, self-reflexive, or deconstructive forms of signification. This, in turn, must again affect the conceptualization of the antagonist. Already in modernism - and then especially in the culture of the fifties - the threat of materialism is complemented and, in part, replaced by the concept of conformity, which, in contrast to materialism, can no longer be tied to specific acts. But as long as materialism or “conformity” are the antagonists, there is still a possibility of escape. This flight from conformity lies at the center of many, if not most, cultural texts of the fifties. In the following decades, the question whether a writer managed to escape from the lure of materialism became the central question of revisionist marketplace criticism. However, if the separation of life and art is torn down and the belief in an “authentic” self or existence is rejected by insisting that the self is generated by linguistic or discursive conventions, then threats to the individual can arise from literally everywhere. Society becomes a linguistic system or discursive regime, social criticism is replaced by the search for “plots,” and cultural criticism becomes a search for invisible power effects. In postmodern literature, it is the ubiquitous presence of narrative or linguistic patterns in all processes of sense-making that threatens to engulf the individual and make it subject to invisible power effects. Thus, what is still a source of potential insight in James - the hope that single impressions cohere - becomes a sign of possible paranoia or of a potentially totalitarian dimension of the social or cultural system. In this cultural history of forces that stand in the way of the self - this is the important point here - there is an unmistakable tendency to gradually broaden the perception and definition of the antagonist. In most nineteenthcentury texts, claims of order are still tied to social groups with a special status such as the gentry; or to philosophical concepts or positions such as the enlightenment, Calvinism, idealism, transcendentalism etc. If threats to the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 106 Winfried Fluck individual are dramatized, they are attributed to clearly identifiable historical forces, such as Puritanism, the Southern system of slavery, or the city. These are already rather broad categories, so that a good deal of scholarly debate is generated by the counter-attempt to dispel or problematize such generalizations - by claiming, for example, that not all Southerners are cruel slave owners etc. But the source of power is still attributed to a social or cultural realm that is separated from others. One can therefore flee or fight this opponent, for example, by leaving the city, fighting a civil war, or breaking with religion. In such struggles, society is still conceptualized as an entity with a distinct historical and regional identity, which can be described by spatial, temporal, and social distinctions: past and present, upper class and lower class, North and South. In the reconceptualization of social threats as materialism, society is redefined as an all-pervasive consumer culture, in the criticism of social conformity as a faceless mass society. In both cases, the them/ me dichotomy loses its clear-cut spatial or temporal contours. Materialists and conformists can be found everywhere, you never know where and when you will encounter them. Nevertheless, materialists and conformists are still visible opponents one can identify and avoid. In a world of invisible linguistic and discursive power effects, on the other hand, one can never be sure whether their identification is an act of paranoid projection or shrewd insight into the hidden mechanisms of the system. VIII. These varying conceptualizations of the antagonist must in turn shape the conceptualization of the counter-force on which the individual can draw in his or her own search for a scenario of liberation. The two conceptualizations are interdependent. Where eighteenth-century rationalism and the idea of civilization still anchor social authority, a challenge will most likely emerge from the irrational and the savage. Where this semantic opposition is replaced, in the Jacksonian period, by the conflict between individual and society, this newly discovered individual must begin to explore the options it has for realizing his or her own potential. While, at first, the painful search for individual identity seems to provide a chance of self-assertion, the coercive dimension of all social identities, and, ultimately, of language and other discursive regimes is gradually foregrounded and radically criticized. In this process, the significance of an “unnameable” imaginary must increase because it holds out the promise of a force that remains inaccessible to social control. At the same time, however, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 107 17 A key author here is Leslie Fiedler, precisely because of his methodological indifference and his unrepentant reappropriation of literary studies for the purpose of self-expres‐ sion. See his books, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) and No! In Thunder (1960), but also his provocative defense of a wild, unruly imaginary even in novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) and The Clansman (1905) in What Was Literature (1982), published separately as The Inadvertent Epic (1979). this imaginary must also constantly retreat in order to maintain its status as an inaccessible and uncontrollable force. An interplay is thus set in motion: • The stronger the promise of self-extension by means of fiction, the greater the sensitivity to possible sources of coercion; • the greater the sensitivity, the broader and more comprehensive the defini‐ tion of what constitutes coercion; • the broader the definition, the greater the pressure on the imaginary to retreat to that which still promises an escape from the coercive potential of the social or linguistic system. Such forms of interdependence (and interplay) can hardly be grasped by traditional liberal theories of American literature because these theories have been locked in a basic, restricted, and ultimately ahistorical opposition between conformism and rebellion and, hence, have argued along the reductive semantic lines of society/ conformism/ realism on the one side versus individual/ noncon‐ formity/ romance on the other. Critics like Richard Chase articulate a certain moment in the history of cultural self-extension I have traced, but they are incapable of developing any self-awareness about the projective dimension and historicity of their own theory. For this post-war liberalism, the romance posed the challenge of coming to terms with two possible narratives about individu‐ alism in American life: While the individual who evades social responsibilities by lighting out for the territory exemplifies a type of individualism that lies at the bottom of what is wrong with American society, the individual who says “no! in thunder” to middle-class expectations exemplifies the individual who rescues American life from the iron grip of conformity and whose right for unfettered artistic self-expression must therefore be protected at all cost. 17 The one type of individualism is to blame for the fact that American society appears superficial, maybe even for the fact that it has not developed a socialist tradition or a tradition of social or political engagement, while the other type of individualism remains the only hope against a bourgeois regime of moral censorship and the tyranny of cultural conventions. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 108 Winfried Fluck 18 Thus Michaels writes in “Romance and Real Estate”: “Looking for the Seven Gables in Salem, Hawthorne says, is a mistake because it ‘exposes the Romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing (its) fancy pictures into positive contact with the realities of the moment.’ The implication seems to be that the romance (unlike the novel) is too fragile to stand comparison with reality, but Hawthorne immediately goes on to suggest that the difference between the romance and the novel is perhaps less a matter of their relation to reality than of their relation to real estate. (…) The romance, then, is to be imagined as a kind of property, or rather as a relation to property. Where the novel may be said to touch the real by expropriating it and so violating someone’s ‘private rights,’ the romance asserts a property right that does not threaten and so should not be threatened by the property rights of others. The romance, to put it another way, is the text of clear and unobstructed title” (157). IX. The radical revisionism of American literary history emerging in the late 1970s focused on this promise of individual self-assertion as the core of liberal selfdeception. The debate has continued to focus on the genre of the “American Romance,” which the liberal tradition had identified as the major novelistic expression of American identity. The romance has thus remained a central topic in the ongoing debates about the true nature of American literature. However, recent discussions have not focused on the tenability and representativeness of the romance-thesis but on its political implications. Walter Benn Michaels’ essay on “Romance and Real Estate” provides an exemplary case. In rejecting a liberal view of Hawthorne’s romance as “revolutionary alternative to the social conservatism of the novel” (156-57), Michaels rereads it as a form of displacement and subtle containment: But in my reading, the point of the romance is neither to renew the past nor to break with it, it is instead to domesticate the social dislocation of the 1840s and 1850s in a literary form that imagines the past and present as utterly continuous, even identical, and in so doing, attempts to repress the possibility of any change at all. (179) For such a radical revision, Michaels has to reconceptualize the imaginary dimension that nourishes the romance. What distinguishes his and other examples of the new revisionism in American literary history is a radical political allegorization of the imaginary. If the literary symbol is ambiguous or “unknowable,” then only because it represents something that is hidden by the system and not supposed to be known. In Michaels’s case, this “absent cause” is the market - a market, however, that is no longer a metaphor for the instability and corrupting forces of social life, but for the invisible hand of the system. 18 From being the site of the not-yet-domesticated, the imaginary thus turns into 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 109 a model case of how even the seemingly most private and inaccessible sphere of the human makeup is thoroughly pervaded by the logic of the market or other systemic effects. However, such an analysis of the systemic containment of all acts of indi‐ vidual resistance can only be made, as I have tried to show in tracing the changing relations between imaginary self-extension and changing conception‐ alizations of social constraint, from the perspective of a radical norm of selfrealization. The more radical the claim for individual self-assertion, the more “totalitarian” will the social system that stands in the way of this claim appear. In this sense, the new cultural radicalism, although ostensibly unmasking and criticizing an ideology of individualism, voices this critique from an even more radical vision of that same individualism. Inevitably, such a vision of the unobstructed freedom of radical self-assertion must draw on the imaginary in order to even think the possibility of an “other,” fully liberated self. It constitutes, in other words, a romance of its own - and clearly one that is not pervaded by the market but is the result of a process of ongoing rehierarchization propelled by the discovery and increasing use of literature as a means of self-definition. Where it “unmasks” the romance as complicitous, it does so in the name of its own political romance of a society without coercion and restraints, in which individual self-extension is no longer constrained. X. To sum up: In contrast to recent revisionist accounts, I see the social and cultural role of American literature not primarily in the systemic containment of individual liberation, but, quite to the contrary, in its constantly renewed stimulation - a stimulation for which discursive regimes that socialize and contain the imaginary (and other seemingly non-discursive elements) regularly provide new motivations for imaginary self-extension. The individual that has been strengthened by an internalization of discipline or by establishing an identity (even of an illusionary nature), will pursue its own interests and claims, including those for the articulation of his or her desires, more insistently, setting in motion ever more radicalized struggles for self-expression and self-extension. Such a claim, I am afraid, is not a message revisionist critics want to hear, however. My theory, to make a last point, can explain why. For in order to justify their own ongoing struggles for self-empowerment, they need a force that stands in the way of the self. And the more pervasive this force is, the more radical and categorical can the claim for self-expression and self-empowerment be articulated. Thus, it is very likely that revisionist critics will continue to tell 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 110 Winfried Fluck only one side of the story, although this version of American literary and cultural history cannot explain the emergence of their own critical culture and its farreaching cultural impact. Works Cited Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Bellah, Robert N. et. al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth- Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Brumm, Ursula. Geschichte und Wildnis in der amerikanischen Literatur. Berlin: Schmidt, 1980. Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. Dekker, George. The American Historical Romance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Fiedler, Leslie. What Was Literature? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Fluck, Winfried. “Cultures of Criticism: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: Expressive Indi‐ vidualism, and the New Historicism.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 11. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübigen: Narr, 1995. 207-228. Green, Martin. “Cooper, Nationalism and Imperialism.” Journal of American Studies 12.2 (1978): 161-168. Green, Martin. The Great American Adventure. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Ickstadt, Heinz. “The Novel and the People: Aspects of Democratic Fiction in Late 19th Century American Literature.” Proceedings of a Symposium on American Literature. Ed. Marta Sienicka. Poznan, 1979. 89-106. Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. ---. The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. McIntosh, James. “The Mariner’s Multiple Quest.” New Essays on ‘Moby-Dick; or, The Whale’. Ed. Richard Brodhead. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 23-52. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Romance and Real Estate.” The American Renaissance Reconsid‐ ered. Ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 156-182. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature 111 Milder, Robert. “Herman Melville.” Columbia Literary History of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Peper, Jürgen. Bewußtseinslagen des Erzählens und erzählte Wirklichkeiten in amerikani‐ schen Romanen des 19. und 20. Jhs., insbesondere am Werk William Faulkners. Leiden: Brill, 1966. Porter, Carolyn. “Call Me Ishmael, or How to Make Double-Talk Speak.” New Essays on ‘Moby-Dick; or, The Whale’. Ed. Richard Brodhead. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 73-108. Sartre, Jean Paul. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination. London: Routledge, 2004. Schulz, Dieter. Suche und Abenteuer: Die ‘Quest’ in der englischen und amerikanischen Erzählkunst der Romantik. Heidelberg: Winter, 1981. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0007 112 Winfried Fluck From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies Susanne Rohr In his essay “Systemic Containment or Imaginary Self-Extension? A Theory of American Literature,” Winfried Fluck asks the question, “What is made possible by literature? ” (in this volume 95) and his essay “Why We Need Fiction” adds another dimension to this inquiry. This focus cuts to the core of what is also my main interest in fiction: its power. While, as Fluck himself states, this perspective has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the last decades, it remains well worth pursuing, as his numerous illuminating publications on the topic show. There have, of course, been endless attempts to find answers to the question of what literature can or cannot do and what may or may not be the source of its power and allure. Fluck, when trying to explain the power of fiction, places the imaginary center stage. This concept, which goes back to Wolfgang Iser’s work, Fluck has developed into a theory of American literature where fiction is seen as a fertile ground of imaginary self-extension. His approach hinges on the articulation of the imaginary, which is the interpretive expression of the meaning the text has for a reader. Here, different dimensions interweave, such as the subjective and the commonplace, the creative and the conventional, in dialogue with the historical and national situatedness of the act. It is the latter, the role of the national context, that I will investigate in particular in this essay. The key questions are the following: If the national context plays a decisive role in the interplay of fictional dimensions, what are the implications when this context is reconceptualized as a transnational one? Is there such a thing as a transnational imaginary? The intense debates on transnationalism and the “transnational turn” currently being held in almost all areas of literary and cultural studies indicate that there is an urge to reflect on the implications of this transnational shift. What I intend to do in the following is, first, to retrace Fluck’s argument on the status of the imaginary, and then to show, by examining Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel Intimacies, how the dynamic of a transnational imaginary is staged in this text. 1 Fluck has developed and refined his approach in a number of seminal publications, among them Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900. This eminent work is a history of the changing functions of the American novel in the 19 th century. Fluck here uses the term function as a heuristic category that rests on the assumption that the analysis of aesthetic experience can be linked with historical contexts of use. 2 In the field of political science and philosophy, the imaginary is conceptualized as “social imaginary,” as an imaginary system, defined along the lines of the social function of imagined ideas, practices, orientations and values that bind a society together. Or, in the words of Charles Taylor, one of the key thinkers in the field, the social imaginary is “what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (2). Cf. also the work of Benedict Anderson, especially his Imagined Communities, where he examines the origins of nationalism. So What Can Literature Do? In the last decades, discussions of the enabling capacities of literature have receded into the background, while an exploration of literature as an accomplice in practices of cooptation and containment has moved to the fore. In Fluck’s words regarding revisionist criticism, the “interpretive emphasis lies on what is cleverly and cunningly contained by the text” (272). Implying a shift in priorities, Fluck presents a theory in which literature is seen as a field of emanation, not containment. 1 His approach builds on the work of Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics and literary anthropology, where, for both Fluck and Iser, the concept of the imaginary plays a major role. If we ask the question what literature can do, what may constitute its power and attraction, and why we as readers keep returning to it, the underlying assumption of Fluck’s and Iser’s approach points towards an answer: It is that fiction enables the imaginary to emerge in a certain gestalt. Iser defines the imaginary in a phenomenological sense as that which underlies our ordinary experience as a flow of something diffuse: a current of feelings, desires and fleeting, often arbitrary impressions, to which he ascribes a protean potential. 2 In the act of fictionalizing, the reader taps into this realm and establishes a triadic relationship among the imaginary, the fictive, and the real. The latter element of the triangle is important, as for the imaginary to gain a certain gestalt and to be shared, it needs to relate to discourses of the real. And these in turn are historically specific, otherwise they would not be tangible. Iser describes this process as follows: [T]he fictionalizing act is a guided act. It aims at something that in turn endows the imaginary with an articulate gestalt (…) we pass from the diffuse to the precise. (…) [I]t enables the imaginary to take on an essential quality of the real, for determinacy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 114 Susanne Rohr is a minimal definition of reality. This is not, of course, to say that the imaginary is real, although it certainly assumes an appearance of reality in the way it intrudes into and acts upon the given world. (3; emphasis in original) The interplay between inside and outside in the fictionalizing act puts the person involved in an in-between position. It is an act of transgressing boundaries. The process of triangulation, of creating relations between the imaginary, the fictive, and the real is at the same time subjective and intersubjective, private and socially influenced, and it is immensely pleasurable as it allows the reader to experience the diffuse imaginary to be “lured into form” (3), as Iser puts it. What is more, Fluck argues that the act of articulating the imaginary, which he calls the “articulation effect” (“Containment,” 96), is not only enjoyable and thus one of the attractions that an immersion in fiction holds for the reader, but that the act also serves an important social function. For articulating the imaginary by means of fiction is, according to Fluck, an instrument of self-extension and self-fashioning for those performing the act as it facilitates the expression of what would otherwise be inexpressible or transgressive in a particular culture at a given time. As we can infer from Iser’s quotation above, the imaginary cannot be identical with the fictive; it is always both more and less at the same time. More, because it is the subjective product of a fictionalizing act, and less, because expressing the imaginary can never fully represent it. Hence our unceasing motivation to try again and do it justice. Expressing the imaginary simultaneously draws on discourses of the real and alters them because the articulated interpretations feed back into codes of the real and become part of these. Fluck ascribes a “paradoxical nature” to this process and explains it as follows: In the history of literature (and other fictions), we encounter this interplay of the imaginary and the real in ever new combinations. In this process, no side remains unaffected: While the imaginary aims to redefine reality, the codes of the real transform the imaginary into something that can be understood and experienced by others, thereby socializing subjective experience. (96-97) Literature, in this view, is a medium of self-empowerment and self-definition for the reader. In expressing the imaginary, fiction allows us to experience a version of oneself that, while related to discourses of the real, surpasses them and can venture into as yet uncharted territory. At the same time, however, as much of the research of the past decades has shown, literature is characterized by structures of ideological containment that exert control through disciplinary powers, so that, combining both perspectives, fiction must be a field of contra‐ dictory or antagonistic forces. The expression of the imaginary is thus on the one 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 115 hand an act of self-extension as it allows for the emergence of not-yet realized potentials, on the other hand the gestalt into which it was “lured” inevitably feeds back into the discursive regimes. Fiction thus serves a double function as it provides both disciplinary and enabling options that are negotiated in the act of expressing the imaginary, while the particular constellation of the conflicting forces as it manifests in the “articulation effect” is historically specific. In tracing the historical development of these constellations, the trajectory being one of a growing liberalization, Fluck’s cultural history of American literature is consequently one of a “continuous unfolding and increasing radicalization of expressive individualism” (103). This process is fueled by an interesting inter‐ dependence, as a growing realization of fiction’s affordance of self-extension leads at the same time to a heightened awareness of the antagonistic forces in society. The See-saw Effect Fluck highlights one particular example of this development in his discussion of the particular interplay of the conflicting currents in the historical romance of the nineteenth century. He describes a “precarious balance” (100) in these novels, which unleash fiction’s forces of self-extension as spectacularly as they control them in their narrative construction with the ultimate goal of reaffirming the legitimacy of social hierarchy. Fluck describes this underlying back-and-forth movement as follows: “the narrative produces something like an emotional see-saw effect, in which the imagination and the emotions of the reader are constantly refueled, but also never quite released from the need for self-restraint” (101). Following the logic of Fluck’s theory, this see-saw effect characterizes the reader’s interaction with fiction generally, not just that of a more sensationalist kind. The force of the movement may vary, but it is present nonetheless. What I want to explore in the following is the surprising impression that, as it appears to me, some examples of recent American fiction seem to want to bring the agitating forces to a standstill, and, moreover, that the standstill is a systemic implication in what might be called the transnational imaginary. Ramón Saldívar, among others, has also considered the history and format of the transnational imaginary. While I share with Saldívar the assessment that a new generation of ethnic writers has contributed to bringing American fiction in the global context of the twenty-first century to a new stage, I hesitate to fully follow his diagnosis of the “post-postmodern, post-borderlands, and neohistorical transnational turn in what one could call postethnic fiction in the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 116 Susanne Rohr postrace era of American literature” (“Imagining Cultures” 4). The underlying paradigm here, as Saldívar maintains, is what he calls “historical fantasy” (3). Considering the novel that Saldívar uses to illustrate his argument, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), this generic attribution seems convincing. Yet regarding the novel that I want to consider in the following, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, the air of exuberance in Saldívar’s descriptions seems somehow unfitting. To be sure, what Intimacies shares with Díaz’s novel and others of its kind is its interest in the relationship between race and identity in the twenty-first century and the ensuing need “to invent a new ‘imaginary’ for thinking about the nature of a just society” (3). Unlike Díaz’s text, though, Intimacies is not about “attempting to ‘stitch together’ the lost histories and isolated communities (…) in both the homelands and the diasporic communities in the United States” (5) but, on the contrary, about consciously choosing a transnational life in a globalized meta-community - and about witnessing stitches and seams come apart internally in the process. Intimacies unfolds this kind of transnational existence. We accompany the narrator-protagonist, a woman of indistinct race, age, and nationality, as she moves from the U.S. to the Netherlands to work on a one-year contract as a staff interpreter for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. She settles into the cosmopolitan community of the Court, and the reader follows her wanderings through the city, her ways of taking in the new language and of establishing her personal life in the new surroundings. She begins a relationship with a Dutch man, Adriaan, who is married with children and ostensibly in the process of divorcing his wife. He leaves the protagonist for what turns out to be an extended period of time to settle things with his wife, who lives in Portugal, during which time the communication between him and the protagonist dwindles. Adriaan’s absence and increasing silence begin to unsettle the narrator, as do acts of street violence that enter the narrator’s radius as well as a difficult task at the Court, where the narrator is called upon as an interpreter in the genocide trial of a former African president. Lending her voice to both the horrifying testimonies of victims and to the cool statements of the perpetrator undermines the ethical stance of the narrator to such a degree that she decides not to accept the offer of a permanent position at the Court. The narrator decides to leave The Hague and her ambiguous personal and professional situation only to find this decision challenged when Adriaan returns, his marital situation resolved, and ready to continue the relationship with her. The ending is left somewhat open but suggests that the narrator will decide to stay in The Hague. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 117 3 I would like to thank Lili von Stengel for drawing my attention to this interview and for inspiration. Hide and See This story of a transnational existence is presented to us in a narrative style that, in a peculiar double move, is extremely subjective, forcing the reader into uncomfortable intimacy with the first-person narrator, while at the same time keeping her or him at arm’s length. The narrator is a woman whose name the reader never learns, and in an interview with Steph Cha, Kitamura comments on her play with anonymity as follows: “I’m always interested in characters who are a little bit on the margins of the dominant culture, whatever that culture might be, or observers who occupy this liminal space (…) Once you’re named, you are part of the system in some way, and you’re recognized. You have been named and seen” (np). 3 The undercover position of the narrator, this hiding from being recognized while simultaneously closely observing from outside the system, creates a fictional universe that oscillates between being inviting and uninviting in equal measure. The narrative voice is, on the one hand, quite forthcoming and thus somehow trustworthy in her precise observations, yet on the other hand these reality constructions are hermetically closed due to their extreme subjectivity. The perplexing reader position that ensues is one of being denied entrance while already having been admitted. This narrative technique is functional in another way as well, as Cha and Kitamura establish in the interview: by leaving the narrator’s features indistinct and by establishing her Japanese American background only indirectly, the protagonist (and the author, for that matter) can circumvent expectations to construct the story around race and to “perform that identity for the presumed white readership” (np). The reader’s experience of being held at arm’s length is thus not established along the known lines of cultural and racial difference, but is an effect of ethical problems and failures that evolve in and through the quicksand of the transnational setting of the novel. The latter, it seems to me, is instrumental in bringing the see-saw effect to a momentary standstill. For what might be the gestalt into which the imaginary is lured, as Iser put it, if the articulation effect cannot readily feed back into the discursive regimes of the real when these are blurred in a radically transnational setting that offers a multitude of possibilities? Intimacies in my reading stages this transnational standstill through a number of strategies, one being the blurring of identities. For the narrator’s identity is not only obscured with regard to race, but the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 118 Susanne Rohr 4 On 22 November, 2022, the municipality of The Hague officially apologized for its role in the Dutch history of colonialism and slavery (NL Times). national and cultural indeterminacy is also established from the outset. The opening paragraph reads as follows: It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorienting to me, after my father’s death and my mother’s sudden retreat to Singapore. For the first time, I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from. (…) I realized that I had no intention of returning to New York, I no longer knew how to be at home there. (1) As a matter of fact, the narrator seems not to know how to be at home anywhere in the world as her childhood experience was one of continuously moving around. Her identity is linked to her linguistic capabilities, she has “native fluency in English and Japanese from [her] parents, and in French from a childhood in Paris” and speaks “Spanish and German to the point of professional proficiency” (13). In the new surroundings, in encountering a new language in a place that is “not yet worn down by acquaintance or distorted by memory,” the narrator feels that “a new space [has] opened up” for her (2). However, the image of a blank page is subtly undermined right away as the concealed side of the promising new territory, its history of colonialism and slavery, is revealed to the narrator in the course of her urban flânerie. She perceives the dark side as expressed in the “heritage aesthetic” (11) of the Old Town, the historic city center, which dismantles the idea of an innocent place not yet distorted by memory as an illusion. The Hague’s legacy of profiting from the transatlantic slave trade as a hub of colonialism functions like a dark undercurrent of the story. 4 It contributes to the ethical dilemma surrounding the genocide trial of the former African president that fundamentally unsettles the narrator in the end as the trial is held in a court that “had primarily investigated and made arrests in African countries, even as crimes against humanity proliferated around the world” (57). One of the first new acquaintances the narrator admits to the “new” space that appears to have “opened up” (2) is another person with a transnational identity, Jana, a Black woman of Serbian-Ethiopian descent who went to school in France and then lived in London before she moved to The Hague. Jana does not live in the historic city center and the text subtly indicates that this is still a matter of residential segregation, of historical continuity, as is the exploitation of immigrant workers that the narrator observes during her flâneries. The city’s “veneer of civility was constantly giving way” (12), she concludes, true to the role 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 119 of “archaeologist of the culture” that the author ascribes to her protagonist (Cha np). In taking the reader along on these urban wanderings that make the narrator feel more and more uneasy, the novel refers to the genre of detective fiction without ever fully adopting it. Still, the motif of looking for clues structures the narrative, although the search is frustrated on both the level of story and in the reception process as the object to be found remains a mystery. In this narrative setup, the novel bears resemblance to a whole generation of texts beginning with Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987), yet there is no postmodern playfulness involved in Intimacies. Here, there is only a cool yet not uninvolved registration of disintegrating facades behind which past and present constellations of guilt, injustice and crime are revealed. The reader is made to share the protagonist’s growing uneasiness that accompanies the process, a narrator who in all her perceptive precision remains curiously elusive. Strangely enough, this leads to the experience of simultaneous intimacy and perplexity on the part of the reader. As Leland Cheuk, one of the reviewers of Intimacies, puts it: “She’s so circumspect that I started to wonder: What exactly did Adriaan and others find alluring about her? ” (np). This statement is a telling example of an “articulation effect” as Fluck would call it and which I would describe as the expression of a transnational imaginary in a particular gestalt. It is the statement of a certain helplessness vis-à-vis an almost featureless yet powerful protagonist bereft of an identity constructed through the specificities of name, age, ethnicity, nationality and the cultural universe of a mother tongue. The emotional see-saw movement that Fluck describes in the reception process comes to a standstill as the text offers no interplay between self-assertion and self-restraint or wish-fulfillment and control with which the reader could engage; nor is there the authority of a national context that would initiate the move and countermove of the antagonistic forces. Before dealing with the question of what this implies for Fluck’s attempt to trace “the transformations which the imaginary undergoes in the development of American literature” (“Containment,” 104), I would first like to consider how Intimacies sets the scene for the transnational imaginary to gain its gestalt in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The Ambiguous Universe The Court is described as a genuinely transnational universe where the people working for the Court, and those who are brought to trial there, form a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and multilingual group. The narrator goes to great lengths to explain the nature of her work as an interpreter in this cosmos. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 120 Susanne Rohr There are no traces of snooty postmodern nonchalance when she ponders the relationship between words and meaning, no whimsical sense of play between difference and différance: “there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning. As interpreters it was our job to throw down planks across these gaps” (13). Thus, although the narrator is fully aware that verbatim translation is ultimately an impossible act, she still struggles for it as a whole life can depend on facilitating communication in legal proceedings. Yet it seems to me that it is the power of these chasms that structure plot and story in this novel and in the end affect the narrator’s life, corrode the trial against the former African president and in all of this provide the context for the transnational imaginary yet to be formed. The whole act of translation in this context is a deeply ambiguous endeavor: translating testimony from one language into another in real time requires extreme accuracy, yet the translator of whom this exactitude is demanded and who is thus cast in the role of mere instrument has to transmit the nuances of the testimony as well in order to establish authenticity. Different translators may emphasize these nuances differently, making witnesses seem more or less reliable. The status of the translators is thus always in danger of being compromised, and while they facilitate the legal proceedings, the whole process turns the Court into a theater where dramas of real-life suffering are performed. As the narrator concludes: “The Court was run according the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity” (14). The scenario is like a Roman arena where the dimensions of individual pain and public entertainment intermingle in the performances that decide matters of life and death, guilt and genocide while it is unclear who is directing the show. What is more, in these hearings it is the duty of the interpreters to breach taboos, to say the unsayable, to express “matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision” (16). This, then, is the hybrid universe emerging from the chasm between languages: at the same time real and unreal, there and not there, authentic in its inauthenticity. It is a universe where the unspeakable is spoken, but one that none of the persons involved can fully apprehend as all players are from a different linguistic, cultural, and national background. And that, it seems to me, is exactly the gestalt of the emerging transnational imaginary as it is tentatively staged in the novel: ungraspable, multi-voiced, im‐ personal, only provisionally existent. By definition, the transnational imaginary develops beyond the confines of national demands and sensitivities and beyond the interplay of self-extension and control described by Fluck. It is not generated 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 121 by an emotional see-saw movement but develops in a universe without clear-cut ethical norms or, rather, a space where these norms are constantly blurred in the act of translation. Which “discursive regimes,” in Fluck’s words (“Containment,” 107), would the reader have to internalize to see his or her individual liberation stimulated by going against them? For it seems to me, with Intimacies we have reached a stage in American literature where “the force which stands in the way of the self ” and that, in opposing it, would make articulating “the claim for self-expression and self-extension” (110) in the imaginary all the more potent for the individual, is unceremoniously dethroned. This happens neither because the novel undermines or coopts these antagonistic forces, nor are the powers dismantled as chimera, as revisionist accounts would have it. Rather, they are dissolved in the need for constant translation in a transnational context that grants the individual power and takes it away at the same time and where the positions of the controlling forces change continuously. So there is no self-empowerment on the part of the readers as they have to follow a narrator who, as already established, is left almost featureless: It is almost as if she dissolves when faced with this ambiguous universe. Greg Chase opens an interesting frame of interpretation when, placing the novel in the historical context of the looming Brexit and American elections, he reads the indistinctness of the narrator as a new take on the relationship between the personal and the political. He comes to the conclusion that “In Kitamura’s hands, the narrator’s cosmopolitanism shades into moral relativism, a constitutional inability to make strong judgments or take decisive action” (np). This moral relativism, if we go along with this description, develops over the weeks when the narrator has to translate in the trial against a former African president who is accused of ethnic cleansing after a contested election. Over the duration of the proceedings, she has the unpleasant sensation of a growing intimacy and familiarity with the defendant whose perspective she is made to share. The narrator states: “It was disquieting in the extreme, like being placed inside a body I had no desire to occupy” (177). The climax of the trial - and the novel - is the testimony of a victim, a young woman, who had to witness the murder of her entire family by the former president’s henchmen. The testimony has to pass through a number of languages until it is finally translated by the narrator for the court. And it is here, in these passages, that the narrator decomposes and that the position of the “I” gets blurred to a point where it is difficult for the reader to discern who is speaking. Performing the move from the accused to the victim and now having to lend her voice to the witness becomes unsettling to the narrator as it makes her former uncomfortable nearness to the defendant all the more palpable: “As I 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 122 Susanne Rohr 5 The editors of the volume Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World, Hans Alma and Guido Vanheeswijck also consider this problem. In their discussion of the concept of Taylor’s “immanent frame,” meaning that traditional sources of the social imaginary have vanished from a community’s view, they write that “this immanent frame is not related to one single social imaginary, but can only be understood by reference to social imaginaries in the plural, since contemporary Western culture showcases a superdiversity which does not allow for one single picture or social imaginary” (3). looked down at the witness, it prickled through me, the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious” (185; emphasis in original). It is as if in this transnational, multilingual and multicultural universe, the ethical demarcation between right and wrong becomes blurred, and the moral and legal perspectives become uncertain, but not only for the narrator with her indistinct characteristics and her fleeting identity. The whole trial collapses causing public outcry, and the hope of the victim who had given her testimony for the promise of justice is betrayed. It seems to me that at this point the question of the “social imaginary” enters the aesthetic realm of Fluck’s “articulation effect.” The philosopher Charles Taylor defines the social imaginary as “the ways people imagine their social existence (…) the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23). The ideal of justice is part of this set of imagined ideas that bind a society together, and Taylor defines its place as follows: “the image of order carries a definition not only of what is right, but of the context in which it makes sense to strive for and hope to realize the right (at least partially)” (9). But what happens to the ideal of justice, Intimacies asks, when the context is such that the points of reference are blurred? The breakdown of the trial, in my reading, illustrates the problem of a “social imaginary” seen in a transnational dimension, and it translates into an empty “articulation effect” on the part of protagonist and reader alike as there might not (yet) be a transnational “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s term. 5 As such, it may well provide a rather bleak answer to the questions that the editors of the volume The Imaginary and Its Worlds raise: “How do the centrifugal forces of globalization affect the cultural and social productivity of the imaginary? (…) How does the transnational framework alter the imaginary’s work of interlacing interiority and exterior conditions? ” (Bieger, Saldívar, Voelz xi-xii). In a private discussion at their final meeting, the former president, now acquitted of the charges against him, turns the tables and accuses the narrator of complicity in the power play of the institution she serves and, pointing out her Japanese American background, of ignoring the historical burden of this 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 123 twofold heritage. He ends with the accusation “You are no better than me” (212), which the narrator feels is true and to which she thus has no answer. In a state of complete agitation and feeling of utterly powerless, the narrator leaves the scene and calls her mother who tells her that, as a small child, she had already been to The Hague, and that she then had always enjoyed the flavor of a particular food. Upon hearing this, the narrator records a strong bodily feeling of recognition. So it is that which remains in the end: a return to the body as a last refuge which can be anchored to a place through corporeal sensations. The narrator’s experience of powerlessness, it seems to me, can also be read along the lines of Sianne Ngai’s investigation of obstructed agency in “ugly feelings,” which she understands as “allegories for an autonomous or bourgeois art’s increasingly resigned and pessimistic understanding of its own relationship to political action” (3). And that, in my view, is the situation that Intimacies explores in great detail, where the see-saw movement comes to a standstill - for the protagonist, but also for the reader. Work Cited Alma, Hans, and Guido Vanheeswijck, ed. Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World. Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bieger, Laura, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz, Ed. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013. Cha, Steph. “Katie Kitamura complicates the narrative.” Los Angeles Times 20 July 2021. Web. 9 May 2023. <https: / / www.latimes.com/ entertainment-arts/ books/ story/ 2021-0 7-20/ katie-kitamura-interprets-the-world>. Chase, Greg. “Intimacies.” Harvard Review Online 16 October 2021. Web. 9 May 2023. <h ttps: / / www.harvardreview.org/ book-review/ intimacies/ >. Cheuk, Leland. “Fascinating, Mysterious ‘Intimacies’ Doesn’t Let Readers Get Close Enough.” NPR 22 July 2021. Web. 9 May 2023. <https: / / www.npr.org/ 2021/ 07/ 22/ 1018 978359/ fascinating-mysterious-intimacies-doesnt-let-readers-get-close-enough>. Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. ---. “Fiction and Justice.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2009. 385-408. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 124 Susanne Rohr ---. “Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsge‐ schichte.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 365-384. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Kitamura, Katie. Intimacies. New York: Riverhead Books, 2021. “Mayor of The Hague Apologizes for the City’s Past History with Slavery.” NL Times 20 Nov. 2022. Web. 9 May 2023. <https: / / nltimes.nl/ 2022/ 11/ 20/ mayor-hague-apologizes -citys-past-history-slavery>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Saldívar, Ramón. “Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America.” The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn. Ed. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College P, 2013. 3-22. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0008 From Seesaw to Standstill? The Transnational Imaginary in Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies 125 First published in Siting America/ Sighting Modernity: Essays in Honor of Sonja Bašić. Ed. Jelena Šesnić. Zagreb: FF press, 2010. 25-42. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions Winfried Fluck I. Like other key concepts in literary and cultural studies, realism is an extremely unstable term. When we have seen a movie, for example a Hollywood produc‐ tion, and criticize it afterwards for being “unrealistic,” we seem to be pretty sure of what we mean, namely that the movie does not tell us the truth about reality. Indeed, claims that the task of literature ought to be the truthful depiction of reality abounded in American realism of the 19 th century, the so-called Gilded Age, and a promise of truthful representation of reality became the central, most frequently used form of authorization for a new school of fiction later called realism. “Realism,” Howells writes in his essay collection Criticism and Fiction, “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material(…)” (38). Similarly, Henry James, in his programmatic essay “The Art of Fiction,” argues that the novelist must speak with the assurance of the historian, because, like the historian, he is looking for truth: The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. (…) The only effectual way to lay it [apologies for fiction] to rest is to emphasise the (…) fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel. (…) The subjectmatter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian. (166-67) From his perspective, Trollope’s admission “that the events he narrates have not really happened” strikes James as “a terrible crime”: “(…)it shocks me every 1 Cf. Howells: “The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past - they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present. The new school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others; but it studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not really less vital motives. The moving accident is certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes. It is largely influenced by French fiction in form; but it is the realism of Daudet rather than the realism of Zola that prevails with it, and it has a soul of its own which is above the business or recording the rather brutish pursuit of woman by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the French novelist” (“Henry James, Jr.” 70). whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth (…) than the historian (…)” (167). On the other hand, it has been one of the common convictions of intellectual life since the 19 th century that truth is relative and subject to interpretation, so that one person’s reality can be another person’s illusion about reality. Literary history has many instances where one generation criticized a prior generation for not being realist enough, only in turn to be criticized by the next generation for exactly the same reason. In Criticism and Fiction, William Dean Howells, the dean of American letters in the 19 th century and the leading American realist of his generation, did not hesitate to criticize a long list of writers and texts for their lack of realism. 1 Howells’ caustic remarks about what he later called “pernicious fiction” focused on the romance and started the so-called realism war in which the romance and realist writing were contrasted in stark terms: for Howells, realism embodied what literature should be and the romance what it shouldn’t be, while some of his opponents saw it exactly the other way round. Only a few years later, Frank Norris, one of the leading voices of a new generation of writers, asked: “Why should it be that so soon as the novelist addresses himself - seriously - to the consideration of temporary life he must abandon Romance and take up the harsh, loveless, colorless, blunt tool called Realism? ” (“A Plea” 279-80). Norris made fun of Howells’ realism and called his novels “teacup tragedies”: Realism is minute; it is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner. It is the visit to my neighbor’s house, a formal visit, from which I may draw no conclusions. I see my neighbor - and that is all. Realism bows upon the doormat and goes away and says to me, as we link arms on the sidewalk: ‘That is life.’ And I say it is not. It 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 128 Winfried Fluck 2 See also Norris’s essay on “Zola as a Romantic Writer”: “Observe the methods employed by the novelists who profess and call themselves ‘realists’ - Mr. Howells, for instance. (…) It is the smaller details of every-day life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception room, tragedies of an afternoon, crises involving cups of tea” (71-72). 3 On this view of realism as a discourse convention see also Jakobson, Hamon, Fowler, and Lodge. is not, as you would very well see if you took Romance with you to call upon your neighbor. (280) 2 Ironically enough, Norris voiced his criticism of an insufficient realism in the name of what he called romance which, he claimed, was closer to reality than any of Howells’ timid novels of manners: Let Realism do the entertainment with its meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall-paper and haircloth sofas, stopping with these, going no deeper than it sees, choosing the ordinary, the untroubled, the commonplace. But to Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man. (“A Plea” 282) Realism, we may conclude from this exchange, is an unstable and relative term, and that is why a definition by Jürgen Peper from his book Bewußtseinslagen des Erzählens, which departs from a normative definition, still provides the best access to the problem: “Wenn Realismus stets ein relativer Begriff bleiben muß, der sich mit des Autors Wirklichkeitssicht wandelt, dann gilt es eben, diese Wirklichkeitssicht zu erfassen” (65). Freely translated, one may quote Peper as saying: “If realism must always remain a relative term, reflecting changing views of reality, then the starting point for every discussion of literary realism must be to identify the view of reality on which a text or critical comment is based.” Consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, we always already have a tacit assumption about what constitutes reality, and, thus, when we characterize a fictional text - literature, film, or television series - as realistic or unrealistic, we measure it against this underlying idea. What we call realistic at different times is thus really more fittingly called a reality effect (in the words of Roland Barthes), that is, the conviction that a text reflects reality as it is conceived at a particular time. 3 In order to demonstrate the semantic instability of the concept of realism, one could go through the history of literary criticism on realism and list the different, often contradictory definitions offered at various times. Instead, I propose to approach the issue in a more biographical manner. One of the first 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 129 novels that caught my imagination as a boy was Leo Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, a story of adultery and melodramatic defeat that I found very exciting, and emotionally highly agitating. I must have consumed it like a Hollywood movie at the time and probably imagined Anna Karenina to look like Liz Taylor. Later, as a student of literature, I learned that this was one of the great realist novels of the 19 th century, but this happened at a time when views of realism changed. During the heyday of the student movement in the 1960s, Marxist perspectives had a renaissance in the West and, in an often trivializing reduction of a Marxist epistemology, realism was now (again) a truthful reflection of social conditions. This view of realism favored hard-hitting novels of social criticism like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but could do little with the honorable tradition of 19 th century bourgeois realism, of which Anna Karenina was such a supreme example, or, in American literature, with the novels of Henry James, which usually focus on a small circle of privileged upper-class characters. If realism was supposed to be a reflection of economic and social conditions, how could a novel like James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the story of an American heiress in an Old World aristocratic milieu, containing no workers and no labor struggle, ever be considered a realist novel? This question provoked me to write my own interpretation of American realism, Inszenierte Wirklichkeit, which takes its point of departure from Peper’s epistemological perspective. If realism is a relative term, depending on changing views of what constitutes reality, then we have to look more closely at the underlying premises about reality on which American realism of the 19 th century was based. Peper defines theses premises as a post-metaphysical form of rationalism. It insists that because reality is constituted by causal laws that can be studied in quasi-empirical fashion, we can arrive at something like a correct and truthful interpretation of reality by observation and experience. In American literary realism of the Gilded Age, such premises explain the central role of experience. In the view of writers like Twain or Howells, we are trained to accept seemingly self-evident cultural traditions that are the source of all kinds of illusion about reality, and the only way in which we can liberate ourselves from the tenacious grasp of these illusions is by experiences which make us realize that things are really different from what we have been taught to think. Huck Finn provides a classic example: Only by the experience of living together with Jim on a raft can Huck liberate himself from the racist cultural prejudices that initially determine his views of his Black companion. From this point of view, the characteristic formal choices of 19 th century realism make good sense, because they all have the function of taking away the privileged guardianship of the narrator in order to allow the reader to make his or her own 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 130 Winfried Fluck 4 One of the best-known versions of this argument is by Leo Bersani in “Realism and the Fear of Desire.” experiences with the text. I am thinking specifically of characteristic features such as the so-called “dramatic method,” in which the third-person narrator retreats, sometimes to invisibility, or of aesthetic concepts such as verisimilitude, or of a commonplace, de-poeticized language. Taken together, these features combine to provide an impression of familiarity, called an “air of reality” by James. An air of reality, in turn, is a precondition for the reader to consider the novel as a possible source of experience. One might call this the “communicative” view of realism, in which a string of disillusionments, stemming from experience, provide the basis for an enhanced understanding of reality. This growth of knowledge results from a slow learning process modeled on the ideal of a dialogic exchange in which the nature of reality is constantly reassessed. Yet again, at about the time when this new view of literary realism had been formulated, another perspective was opened up by poststructuralism which described realism as a discourse that is not at all undermining illusions but creating the biggest illusion of all, namely the illusion that reality can be understood on experiential grounds. From the perspective of poststructuralism, such rationalist premises tacitly confirm the ideological assumption of a causally ordered, logocentric world in which rational control promises progress. Instead of drawing on the deconstructive potential of the play of signifiers, realist literature aims at closure: its main characters, such as Anna Karenina or Effi Briest or Isabel Archer, live in illusions, make a fatal mistake because of these illusions, eventually gain insight into reality through their disillusioning experiences, but only at the price of the defeat of their desire. 4 For poststructuralism, realism is hostile to desire, to the power of the imaginary, and to the subversive force of strong emotions - which, for poststruc‐ turalists, also explains why realist novels often follow a rather commonplace plot and can be experienced as boring by melodrama-nourished readers in search of, as Howells calls it in his essay on Henry James, “dire catastrophes” (70). Especially the early novels by Howells and James feature non-heroic characters, describe everyday events and contemporary settings, give priority to character analysis over plot, proudly emphasize the unspectacular eventlessness of the narrative, and even toy with the elimination of the traditional happy ending. Such bold reorientations led critics to dismiss the new realist school in fiction as a dreary literature of dissection, a critique also to be found in one of many hostile caricatures of the new American school of fiction showing Howells and James looking at the plot of the realist novel “in which nothing happens.” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 131 5 For Howells, lack of emotional self-control means that a human being is still in the “barbarian” stage of human development. Thus, in his criticism of “Pernicious Fiction,” he says about the stock hero of the popular historical romances of the time that he “is really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions, and his delusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of a savage(…)” (19). Consequently, there exists a simple criterion for judging literature: “The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous” (19). To support his claim, Howells begins his essay with a letter from a worried reader of novels: “Whatever in my mental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. Worse than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or everyday, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine” (18). In a way, the letter reads like a response to Norris: it is precisely the sensationalism of the romance that prevents somebody like Norris to see the drama in everyday life and consequently also undermines any basis for sympathy and support. Howells and James nourished such views. Usually, the major events in their novels are conversations because this is an exemplary moment in the processing of experience: characters make unexpected, often disturbing experiences, they feel a need to talk about them to others, others introduce a new and different perspective, so that differing interpretations have to be weighed against each other and have to be reconciled. In consequence, “reality” emerges as the result of an ongoing dialogue on the meaning of everyday experiences, in which experience is transformed into social experience. A dinner can thus be a favorite plot device for Howells and James. On the one hand, it provides a superb occasion for bringing different people together, on the other hand, it can produce so many new views and interpretations of experience that an ongoing dialogue about the nature of reality is kept going. Thus, often the dinner scene itself is followed by several chapters of after-dinner conversations in order to clarify what happened at the dinner. It is characteristic of such encounters that they are (or hold the ideal of being) “mannered” in the sense of being civilized, so that self-restraint and self-control become crucial for a liberation from illusions. 5 II. Is realism hostile, then, to the expression of strong emotions, which it appears to associate with the romance? One may think of the last scene in The Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel feels the strong attraction of Caspar Goodwood, like a flush of lightning, but then decides to fight against it and to go back to her unpleasant life with Osmond. One of Howells’s most explicit discussions of foolish emotions is 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 132 Winfried Fluck linked to the love story in The Rise of Silas Lapham, in which the Reverend Sewell develops his so-called economy of pain. “Economy of pain” in this case does not mean that one should not express and follow one’s own emotions but, on the contrary, that one should not sacrifice one’s own emotional fulfilment for others: “One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame? That’s sense and that’s justice. It’s the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality” (222). Realist novels thus do not reject emotions or their open articulation. What they do reject is a particular mode of expression inspired by the cultural codes of sentimentality and sensationalism, in which characters become the prey of their feelings and passions. Indeed, if realist texts were unable to strongly stir the emotions, the attraction Anna Karenina had on me already at an early age could hardly be explained. What happens in realism, then, is not a repression of emotions but their reconfiguration. Indeed, one challenge for 19 th century realism was to develop new representational modes for the description and expression of emotions. My naïve, completely un-theoretical interest in Anna Karenina can provide us with a first clue here. Obviously, it was based on curiosity, a curiosity that, in turn, was stirred by the extraordinary dimension of the events described. Indeed, contrary to the image of a tame tea-hour world, 19 th century realism offers a world of extraordinary and often spectacular events: adultery, the rise and fall of businessmen, seduction, desertion and suicide, violent labor conflicts, painful divorce, the cunning manipulation of innocent people. To think only of James’s novels, there are fatal mistakes like Daisy Miller’s, tragic deaths like Milly Theale’s, or the cruel humiliation of the heroine of Washington Square by both her father and her lover. The basic narrative (and emotional drama) in realism remains that of rise and fall, success and defeat, of struggles against misrecognition or cruel contempt. Manipulation and deception remain crucial elements in this struggle, but, in contrast to earlier melodramas, they have now become more subtle and therefore emotionally perhaps even more agitating, because in contrast to the sensationalism of popular literature, they have an “air of reality.” What is of interest here is how these emotional dramas are actually repre‐ sented in the novel. In the well-known dinner scene of The Rise of Silas Lapham, Irene triumphantly registers Corey’s attention, whereas in reality Corey misses her sister Penelope. Howells faces the representational challenge of telling us something about the strong emotions of the characters, although, typical of the novel of manners and its code of civilized behavior, these cannot be openly expressed by the characters themselves. This is an excellent example of what 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 133 Norris dismissively calls “dramas of the reception room,” although one has to add that the drama consists precisely in what he thinks is absent in realism, namely “the unplumbed depths of the human heart” (“Plea” 280, 282). In principle, an omniscient third-person narrator could provide insight into the emotional life of his characters, but in 19 th century American realism adherence to the dramatic method prevents the narrator from doing so. Howells thus only faintly indicates what may be going on emotionally underneath the façade of polished manners. But precisely because his suggestions remain so scarce, the reader is challenged (in effect, she can do little else) to fill the gap with imaginary additions by drawing on her own emotional world. The goal of the realist text must be to strengthen the independence of the reader, for example, by taking back the authorial voice while at the same time keeping the main characters at a distance from the reader. Thus, although there is a lot going on inside the characters, it is not presented in a way in which we can easily empathize; and although the realist novel often tells heart-breaking, potentially melodramatic stories of individual pain, it presents these (melo)dramas in such a way that we always keep a certain distance and have to come up with our own judgments on the basis of a shared world. “Economy” of pain here also assumes the meaning of not being overwhelmed as a reader, of being economical and measured about one’s own emotional involvement. This observation can help us to arrive at two important conclusions about the expression of emotions in 19 th century American realism: 1) The representation of emotions is often moved from the overt conspicuousness of the sentimental and melodramatic mode, with its ostentatious hand-wringing, its cries of despairs and its frequent fainting spells, to the interiority of characters - where it is hidden from our sight so that we can only guess what is going on inside the characters on the basis of small hints and sometimes the faintest of suggestions. 2) However, this should not be seen as a denial or a repression of emotions but as a different strategy to express them. What realists were the first to realize was the stimulating power of what Wolfgang Iser has described as a blank (Leerstelle), which stimulates us to fill out the empty, indeterminate textual space. To be sure, this can only be done on cues provided by the text but, on the other hand, we have to draw on our own imagination in order to give these cues a concrete Gestalt and meaning. Neither is it incidental that Iser illustrates his theory in The Act of Reading by drawing on the work of Henry James “in place of an introduction,” nor that James wrote one of the most popular horror stories ever, The Turn of the Screw, because the horror genre crucially depends on the stimulation of our imagination. Because emotions are amorphous and diffuse by nature, they need to attach themselves to a sign of the real in order 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 134 Winfried Fluck 6 One of the essays that stirred my early interest in James was Sonja Bašić’s superb interpretation of The Wings of the Dove, in her essay “Henry James Between Old and New: An Interpretation of ‘The Wings of the Dove’.” Sonja Bašić’s interpretations of various writers of international modernism belong to the best that European Americanists have produced on that matter. to become representable. What James discovered, on the other hand, was that if the reference remains diffuse or “empty,” literary representation may be even more effective. A strategy of identification is thus replaced by the strategy of a discrete emotional transfer. 6 III. The work of James can provide us with a good example of this representational strategy of expressing emotions by not describing them explicitly. In James’s sadly underestimated novel Washington Square, a retelling of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, there is a scene in which the weak, and up to this point, painfully obedient daughter Catherine Sloper stages a first rebellion against her father. It is of special interest to see how James represents this process on the narrative level. In keeping with the dramatic method, the third-person narrator of Washington Square initially approaches Catherine from a neutral and distant outside view, which prevents us from getting to know her own thoughts and feelings. For a long time, she possesses no inner life for us. James’s narrative strategy creates the impression of an “empty mind” that hardly seems to have a consciousness worth describing. Such an authorial stance is well-suited to create the impression of a lack of personality. But it is ill-suited to present the inner turmoil of the heroine in a process of social apprenticeship in which the developing subject gradually acquires an identity of her own. James solves the problem by a skillful transition, from a melodramatic mode, manifesting itself in tears and a cry, to a forceful representation of interiority as blank, through which he forces the reader to imagine Catherine’s inner life. The scene of Catherine’s first real rebellion against an overpowering father provides a case in point. Both literally and metaphorically, James has his heroine cross the threshold from the domestic to the realist novel: This was more than the poor girl could bear; her tears overflowed, and she moved toward her grimly consistent parent with a pitiful cry. Her hands were raised in supplication, but he sternly evaded this appeal. Instead of letting her sob out her misery on his shoulder, he simply took her by the arm and directed her course across the threshold, closing the door gently but firmly behind her. After he had done so, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 135 he remained listening. For a long time there was no sound; he knew that she was standing outside. He was sorry for her, as I have said; but he was so sure he was right. At last he heard her move away, and then her footstep creaked faintly upon the stairs. (126) In the following passage, the authorial perspective remains with the father, while Catherine’s pain and emotional agitation are only faintly echoed in the sound of her retreating steps. While, in the first part of the novel, the reader may not even be interested in her thoughts and feelings because they are supposedly trite, there exists at this point a great curiosity about her inner state. And precisely because we do not get any insight into Catherine’s feelings at this point, the strong impact of the scene depends on our imagining how terrible (but perhaps also how stubborn and proud) she must feel. More is broken here than a teacup! Washington Square provides an early example of James’s skillful use of blanks, which involves the reader actively in the process of meaning-making. In James’s enigmatic tales of the 1890s, such as The Turn of the Screw or The Figure in the Carpet, these blanks are instrumental in creating the text’s rich texture of ambiguity. They are the bait that lures the reader into ever new interpretations of the text and thus undermines any easy identification. In Washington Square, on the other hand, they provide the plain, unprepossessing Catherine, who, up to this point, could not be considered a real heroine, with a dimension of unexpected strength and emotional depth. This is the result not so much of her behavior but of a narrative strategy of representation in which her interiority retains an indeterminate dimension. Since her feelings are not represented explicitly, there is no danger that they are reduced to linguistic convention and considered inauthentic. On the contrary, James manages to reauthenticize her emotional response and her painful experiences, successfully working against the fact that these have a tendency to become inauthentic in textual representation because they are so much a part of the sentimental and melodramatic mode. Moreover, while an explicit representation of Catherine’s awakening strength would be in danger of straining credibility, a “gestural,” or performative expression can be much more effective. Although none of Catherine’s feelings and thoughts are described at the moment of her emotional separation, we nevertheless think that we understand what she must feel, because we supply our own experiences and emotions to give meaning to her gesture. Modernist realists, such as Ernest Hemingway and Edward Hopper, later brought this principle to perfection. This reminds us that realism is not the opposite of modernism but, as the avant-garde of its time, its logical predecessor. James’s narrative strategy has an ironic, but very welcome consequence. Far from functioning as a restraint or repression of emotions, this strategy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 136 Winfried Fluck 7 In my essay “Declaration of Dependence,” I have traced the changing relationship between the guardian figure and the developing subject through the major stages of the work of James. actually functions as an effective form of stimulating them in the reader. Because Catherine’s inner life remains inaccessible, she can appear strong to us, for we cannot help but project our own wishes for defiance and resistance onto her. This strategy can only work, however, because the novel is still based on a common consensus about what constitutes positive or negative character traits. The model here is that of the inner-directed character, who derives her selfesteem from a capacity for self-discipline, which enables her to gain control over her own fate. This strength to stay true to one’s own inner compass even in moments of extreme adversity is called “character” in the 19th century. An individual acquires “character” when she is able to establish independence and self-control by means of psychic and emotional self-regulation, that is, by the ability not only to assert herself against unreasonable claims of others but also to protect herself against her own emotional weakness. In American realism this is seen as the true source of independence. In effect, the various stages of American women’s fiction in the 19 th century can be distinguished by the way in which the different genres deal with this issue of self-control. The vulnerability of the heroine of the sentimental novel derives from the fact that she is in constant danger of being overpowered by her feelings and incapable of exerting self-control because she cannot overcome her longing for fusion and her fear of separation. In the domestic novel of the mid-19 th century, the heroine’s capacity for self-control has notably increased. However, although she eventually learns to discipline herself and her own impulses in a long-drawn, often painful process of development, she disciplines herself only because such self-control pleases the guardian figure, whose recognition she seeks. She can no longer be easily manipulated by stimulating her desire for union. But she can be “guided” by stimulating her longing for recognition by a superior father figure. James’s Washington Square, which can be seen as a key text in the transition from domestic to realist novel, takes this “ur-scene” of the domestic novel as its point of departure, only to transform it effectively. The heroine of the realist novel Washington Square is “orphaned” like the typical heroine of the domestic novel, but in contrast to the genre out of which the realism of Howells and James emerged in the 1870s, she can no longer count on recognition from the outside. 7 In fact, in the scene quoted she learns to live with separation, the central threat (and fear) of both sentimental and domestic novel. In making Catherine cross the threshold, James highlights the moment of separation as crucial turning point. As a consequence, Catherine has to learn 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 137 to derive her sense of self from another source. This other source is her own inner strength of character. She no longer depends on her father for recognition and self-esteem. Instead, psychic self-regulation becomes the precondition for selfhood, because it helps Catherine to liberate herself from the reach of the two men who have been struggling to gain possession over her. At the end of the novel, when she rejects her suitor, despite the fact that Morris regrets what he has been trying to do, the chain of dependence typical of the domestic novel, in which the heroine moves from father to lover, has been broken, and the power relations between Cinderella and her prince have been inverted. The example of Washington Square can problematize the charge of emotional repression in realism also in another respect. The novel describes the cruel humiliation of the heroine Catherine first by her father and then by her suitor, who promises to rescue her from her father and to recognize her as a person in her own right - until she finds out that he has cold-bloodedly deceived and manipulated her in order to get at her money. As we have seen, James does not describe the emotional turmoil in Catherine that must result from this cruel disappointment. He only evokes it by arresting Catherine in a tableau undisturbed by movement and completely engulfed in silence: She said to herself that perhaps he would come back to tell her he had not meant what he said; and she listened for his ring at the door, trying to believe that this was probable. A long time passed, but Morris remained absent; the shadows gathered; the evening settled down on the meagre elegance of the light, clear-colored room; the fire went out. When it had grown dark, Catherine went to the window and looked out; she stood there for half an hour, on the mere chance that he would come up the steps. (185) She moved quickly away, and went to the other window, which stood open to the balcony; and here, in the embrasure concealed from her aunt by the white curtains, she remained a long time, looking out into the warm darkness. She had had a great shock; it was as if the gulf of the past had suddenly opened, and a spectral figure had risen out of it. (…) Then, suddenly, while she waited for a return of her calmness, she burst into tears. But her tears flowed very silently, so that Mrs. Penniman had no observation of them. (212-213) To be sure, Catherine cries, but her tears remain “invisible” to others, and thus remain self-contained. At first sight, this may confirm a suspicion of repression. But, at a closer look, her tears function differently: they do not remain invisible after all, because we see them. And yet, what we see no longer conforms to the sentimental mode. It retains a skillful balance between empathy and distance, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 138 Winfried Fluck 8 See the major studies by Martha Banta, Imagining American Women, and David Lubin, Acts of Portrayal. because her tears remain an “empty” outward sign of an interiority that still is not accessible to us. Catherine here does not repress her emotions but for the first time looks at them and sees them for what they are. We are reminded of a similar scene in chapter 42 of a Lady. In both cases, emotions are seen to be a source of selfdeception. To manage them, then, is not an act of repression, but an act of protection against being manipulated by others. Realism’s approach towards emotions, including such feelings as desire, is inspired by the attempt to develop an inner strength that could become a source of independence for the individual - which, in turn, is a precondition for the ability to learn from one’s experience and to develop as a person. At first sight, this strategy seems to continue a tradition of internalization in which the individual transforms social control into self-control and thereby enforces her own subjection. Such a model of self-control has been given special prominence in American culture by the example of Benjamin Franklin. But whereas self-regulation in Franklin means to transform emotions into regular habits, so that one can control their unpredictability, gaining emotional control in realism means exactly the opposite, namely to gain inner independence in order not to be governed by, and trapped in, habitual responses. To follow the habitual responses instilled in her by her father would mean that Catherine would continue to be obedient. Self-control is thus not a sufficient end in itself. Catherine also has to learn to manage her behavior and emotional responses. Only then can she hope to be able to draw conclusions of her own from her experiences and observations. In Franklin, to acquire emotional control by regular habits means to give emotional response regularity and reliability. In the case of James, it means to gain freedom from the deception of, and manipulation by, others. IV. Let me push this point a bit further by moving on to an example taken from American painting, Thomas Eakins’s portrait, Miss Amelia Van Buren. I have chosen this particular painting in order to stick to the genre of individual portraits (in fact, there are two major studies focusing on the similarity of portraits in James and Eakins). 8 The portrait, in novels as well as in painting, aims at the representation of individuality, and in this function it could become 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 139 of interest for a realist painter like Eakins (while it was of no use for romanticism and its focus on grand historical or landscape panoramas). At the same time, the genre is also of interest for another reason, because, as depiction of an individual, it can illustrate the changing principles on which an individual is recognized as a person who deserves attention or respect. In early portraits of colonial America and the early republic, the main criterion is still that of social status and, corresponding to status and expressing it, the degree of how civilized the person is. The actual personality - and thus the individuality - of the person portrayed is thus hidden behind an official mask of distinction. Thomas Eakins, Miss Amelia Van Buren, 1886-1890 John Singer Sargent, Madame X, 1883-1884 Miss Amelia Van Buren is still linked to these traditional sources of recognition by intertextual reference, for example in the stately-looking chair. However, the whole point of the painting is to reveal that such elements do not determine per‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 140 Winfried Fluck 9 See, for example, The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton) (1900); Portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1902); The Artist’s Wife with His Setter Dog; Portrait of Mrs. Edith Mahon (1904). sonality and therefore also cannot characterize the individual who is portrayed. On the contrary, the intense individuality of Miss Van Buren finds expression in those aspects and parts of the painting where the portrait convention is quoted but also subtly subverted - for example, in the negligent, almost sloppy posture of the sitter, her apron, her graying hair, her obvious reluctance of being portrayed, as well as her refusal to face the painter and through him, our gaze. Eakins’s portrait shows us the echoes of the classical genre convention, but it also reveals how an individual can find ways to withdraw from it with dignity and can assert herself against these conventions in subtle, but effective gestures of rebellion. Eakins leaves no doubt that the interest he has in Miss Van Buren is not her social standing, nor her elegance, but the individuality expressed by her rejection of conventional roles. Together with Winslow Homer and, to a lesser degree, his student Thomas Anschutz, Thomas Eakins is today considered the most important American realist painter of the 19 th century, strongly influenced by European painters like Courbet and Velasquez. Both Homer and Eakins had started out with pictures of outdoor life, filled with self-confident common people of quiet heroism, sometimes exhibiting the exuberance of a young nation on the go. These characters, for example the rowers in Eakins’s early paintings, are already individualized in appearance, but they do not yet interest us as individuals. One of these people is as good as another, and it doesn’t really matter which one we are going to see. The significant aspect about most of these figures is still what they are doing, namely taking possession of outdoor spaces and performing daring and unusual skills in public. If there is one common meaning in these paintings, it is the message that these common people do not have to - and should not - hide themselves, because they represent the energy, skills, and selfconfidence of a vigorous nation. But, then, for a number of personal reasons that need not concern us here, portraits of the Miss Amelia Van Buren-type became more important for Eakins, and with those portraits he becomes an interesting case study for my discussion of the expression of emotions in American realism. One aspect that stands out in these portraits in comparison with earlier paintings by Eakins, is the fact that the persons portrayed have become introspective and passive. 9 Outdoor activities have disappeared and so has the self-confident presentation of oneself and one’s own skills. Instead, the characters appear self-absorbed and brooding; the actual drama no longer takes place on the outside but inside the characters themselves. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 141 Individuals are now of interest, not because of what they do, and also not, as in early paintings by Homer and Eakins, because of how they interact with others, but because they have developed a complex and highly interesting interiority. This leads us back to our guiding question, namely how such inner emotions can be expressed. If Eakins defines individuality by a complex, but submerged, perhaps even suppressed, interiority, how can he express that interiority without violating realist principles? On the one hand, the departure from type and the shift to the appearance of individuality, as for example, in the case of Miss Amelia Van Buren, marks his painting as typically realist. On the other hand, this individuality seems to have become even more elusive now. It is interesting to see how Eakins solves the problem. In an essay with the title “Africans, Indians, and Martyrs: Discourse of Defeat and Unmanliness in the Late Portraits of Thomas Eakins,” David Lubin provides a helpful suggestion when he points out that Eakins turned to “the visual discourse long employed for the depiction of defeated others - social outcasts, subalterns, history’s losers” (79) in an attempt to find a more expressive pictorial representation of interiority. Lubin telescopes his argument by considering a single work, the third-century Ludovisi Sarcophogus, in order to make his point. The Roman soldiers in the scenes of violent conflict “appear devoid of interiority. Whether stern or placid, their faces betray no emotion. As representatives of the imperial state, they embody abstract, impersonal, unemotional authority. The barbarians, however, are subject to the buffetings of private mood and individualized passion” (79). Because of their primitive stage of development and their ensuing lack of self-control, the barbarians openly express their despair - and thereby help to heighten the expressivity of the work of art. The persons Eakins depicted in his late portraits are realistic characters in the sense that they do not openly express their feelings, but they are nevertheless different in the sense that they are now represented in a “visual language of sadness, alienation and despair,” and, one should add, brooding inwardness (Lubin 95). This is the moment where hidden interiority is indeed approaching repression, but the important point here is that the realist painter Eakins is not hiding this under a realist surface but has found a way to express this inner state within realist conventions. In Miss Amelia van Buren, the realist Eakins does not show us the individual’s interiority, including her inner feelings. The only thing he can do within the realist code is to draw on an arsenal of signs that signals a certain condition of inner turmoil and increased sensitivity. On the one hand, he thus preserves the impression of an individuality that is self-reflexive and not carried away by inner feelings; on the other hand, Eakins also manages to give us an idea of the nature of these inner emotions. Moreover, Eakins gives us a fair measure, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 142 Winfried Fluck pretty much like James in Washington Square, of what constitutes individuality in this particular case and in realism in general. In this respect, we have arrived at an interesting point of development: whereas in Silas Lapham or Washington Square, control of emotions obviously provides a source of inner strength, and while in the case of Eakins’s Miss Amelia Van Buren, a certain dimension of inaccessibility still expresses a very desirable inner independence, many of Eakins’s portraits of the period begin to make sensitivity, if not vulnerability, the mark of individuality. All of the persons portrayed seem to share experiences of (quiet) suffering. But it is precisely the suffering that distinguishes them from others and provides them with a sense of being “deeper” and hence “better” beings. V. However, at about the same time, American culture also began to go in an altogether different direction. The dramatic shift can be illustrated by a novel like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. In chapter 7 of the book, Carrie has finally decided to leave her sister and her husband and to follow Drouet into a morally dubious future: After dinner she went into the bathroom, where they could not disturb her, and wrote a little note. ‘Good-bye, Minnie,’ it read. ‘I’m going to stay in Chicago a little while and look for work. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.’ In the front room Hanson was reading his paper. As usual, she helped Minnie clear away the dishes and straightened up. Then she said: ‘I guess I’ll stand down at the door a little while.’ She could scarcely prevent her voice from trembling. Minnie remembered Hanson’s remonstrance. ‘Sven doesn’t think it looks good to stand down there,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t he? ’ said Carrie. ‘I wont do it any more after this.’ She put on her hat and fidgeted around the table in the little bedroom, wondering where to slip the note. Finally she put it under Minnie’s hairbrush. When she had closed the hall-door, she paused a moment and wondered what they would think. (69) Like James, Dreiser uses the metaphors of the threshold and of the closing door to highlight a moment of separation. And like James, he has his heroine pause behind the door to dramatize the extraordinariness of the moment. But in contrast to James, Dreiser does not leave us in the dark about Carrie’s thoughts and feelings: Some thought of the queerness of her deed affected her. She went slowly down the stairs. She looked back up the lighted step, and then affected to stroll up the street. When she reached the corner she quickened her pace. As she was hurrying away, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 143 Hanson came back to his wife. ‘Is Carrie down at the door again? ’ he said. ‘Yes,’ said Minnie; ‘she said she wasn’t going to do it any more.’ He went over to the baby where it was playing on the floor and began to poke his finger at it: Drouet was on the corner waiting, in good spirits. ‘Hello, Carrie,’ he said, as a sprightly figure of a girl drew near him. ‘Got here safe, did you? Well, we’ll take a car.’ (69-70) The remarkable thing here is no longer that we cannot fathom the depth of the heroine’s feelings but that, quite on the contrary, there is no longer any depth to fathom. Momentarily, Carrie has a sense that something out of the ordinary is happening. But, then, the incessant movement of life carries her quickly away to new encounters (whereas Catherine Sloper remains standing behind the door “for a long time”). Since, as Dreiser puts it at the beginning of the next chapter, man is “a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retire by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other” (70-71), “incalculable variability” is the rule, and not the exception. And since the unpredictable and the unexpected are the rule, waiting at any moment of life, emotional responses can no longer be (melo)dramatic and climactic. For Carrie, there is too much incalculable variability in her life to develop deep feelings. Similarly, Dreiser no longer has to think about the best ways to express such feelings in a nonformulaic, authentic manner. On the contrary, even though her sister implies in the following passage that Carrie has now entered a life of shame, there is not really much to say about the feelings that Carrie has at the same time: ‘Where do you suppose she’s gone to? ’ said Minnie, thoroughly aroused. ‘I don’t know,’ a touch of cynicism lightening his eye. ‘Now she has gone and done it.’ Minnie moved her head in a puzzled way. ‘Oh, oh,’ she said, ‘she doesn’t know what she has done.’ ‘Well,’ said Hanson, after a while, sticking his hands out before him, ‘what can you do? ’ Minnie’s womanly nature was higher than this. She figured the possibilities in such cases. ‘Oh,’ she said at last, ‘poor Sister Carrie! ’ At the time of this particular conversation, which occurred at 5 A.M., that little soldier of fortune was sleeping a rather troubled sleep in her new room, alone. (71) Today, in following Dreiser’s lead, the markers of individuality have moved from interiority to exteriority. John Singer Sargent’s painting Madame X is of special interest in that respect, because it highlights the fact that in this development feelings must also change their function: They are now no longer restrained in order to gain independence, but performed explicitly in almost exhibitionist fashion. Seeing no longer leads to knowing, but to an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of the surface. What gains attention is the pose, not the person. In this context of externalization, the actual challenge (as far as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 144 Winfried Fluck the expression of emotions is concerned) is no longer how emotions can be articulated but how they can be staged effectively. Human beings do not possess something like an inner core, and if there is no longer an inner core (where the person’s true character resides), then reality becomes a surface phenomenon and emotions become moods or stylized gestures embedded into these surfaces. Indeed, this is the direction realism took in the 20 th century, as, for example in the paintings by Edward Hopper or a photo-realist like Richard Estes. But that is an altogether different chapter in the tenuous relation between realism and the expression of emotions. Works Cited Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Barthes, Roland. “L’Effet de Réel.” Communications 11 (1968): 84-89. Bašić, Sonja. “Henry James Between Old and New: An Interpretation of ‘The Wings of the Dove’.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 41.2 (1976): 333-75. Bersani, Leo. “Realism and the Fear of Desire.” A Future for Astyanax. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1970. Fluck, Winfried. Inszenierte Wirklichkeit: Der amerikanische Realismus 1865-1900. Mün‐ chen: Fink, 1992. ---. “Declarations of Dependence: Revising Our View of American Realism.” Victorianism in the United States: Its Era and Its Legacy. Ed. Steve Ickingrill and Stephen Mills. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1992. 19-34. ---. “Emotional Structures in American Fiction.” American Vistas and Beyond: A Festschrift for Roland Hagenbüchle. Ed. Marietta Messmer and Josef Raab. Trier: Wissenschaft‐ licher Vg., 2002. 65-93. ---. “Morality, Modernity, and ‘Malarial Restlessness’: American Realism in its Anglo- European Contexts.” A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914. Ed. Robert Paul Lamb and G.R. Thompson. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 77-95. Fowler, Roger. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen, 1977. Hamon, Philippe. “Un discours constraint.” Poétique 16 (1973): 411-445. Howells, William Dean. “Henry James, Jr.” W.D. Howells as Critic. Ed. Edwin Cady. London: Routledge, 1973. 59-72. ---. “Pernicious Fiction.” 1887; repr. in: The American Intellectual Tradition. Vol. 2. Ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 18-20. ---. Criticism and Fiction. 1891; repr.: New York: Hill & Wang, 1962. ---. The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Signet, 1963. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 Crossing the Threshold: Realism and the Expression of Emotions 145 Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Jakobson, Roman. “On Realism in Art.” Readings in Russian Poetics. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1978. 38-46. James, Henry, “The Art of Fiction.” The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction. Ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 165-183. ---. Washington Square. London: Penguin, 1984. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. Lubin, David M. Acts of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1985. ---. “Africans, Indians and Martyrs: Discourses of Defeat and Unmanliness in the late Portraits of Thomas Eakins.” Thomas Eakins. Painting and Masculinity. Giverny: Musée d’art américain, 2003. 75-97. Norris, Frank. “Zola as a Romantic Writer.” The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Ed. Donald Pizer. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1964. 71-72. ---. “A Plea for Romantic Fiction.” The Responsibilities of the Novelist. 1903; repr.: New York: Hill & Wang, 1962. Peper, Jürgen. Bewusstseinslagen des Erzählens und erzählte Wirklichkeiten. Leiden: Brill, 1966. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0009 146 Winfried Fluck 1 See my Bilder der Erfahrung and “Cognitive Style and Perceptual Skill in the Realism of Thomas Eakins.” A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck Peter Schneck Observing Emotions Even after several - and increasingly edifying - re-readings of Winfried Fluck’s essay on “Realism and the Expression of Emotions” (2006), I still cannot help but feeling most affected and indeed, both exquisitely intrigued and inspired, by two peculiar passages which may at first glance appear completely inconspicuous for most readers. Inconspicuous certainly, but mostly so, I would presume, because the main argument of the piece is so convincing and profound. And, incidentally, the passages that I have in mind mark the very opening and closing moves within the larger argument and thus they are even more salient almost as a kind of framing device. I do not mean to suggest, though, that there is some hidden motive to be revealed by focusing on these passages, the reason I felt so affected by them maybe due to their resonating with some long lost (and only recently revived) occupations of my own involvement with the question of emotion and cognition in literature and the visual arts. 1 Re-reading the article thus had an immediate, if slightly subconscious, effect of re-experiencing both the tremendous impact of Fluck’s observations and arguments on my own thinking, and re-experiencing the equally tremendous challenge of answering his observations and arguments with one’s own, always feeling to be asked to rise to the occasion - the occasion, that is, to expand and develop the shared thoughts further. So, this is what I am also trying to do in the following - once again. And I am rather grateful for the opportunity! I shall come back to what was called the opening and closing moves of the article in due time, but first I may need to sketch out what I see as the central argument, in order to get a better grasp of what I think are the wider implications of Fluck’s discussion of realism and the expression of emotion. I should add that my aim here is not to present a counter argument of sorts or enter into a review or even critique of the piece at hand. On the contrary, the objective here is to ponder in a more or less associative manner on some of its central observations and insights, since I think that Fluck’s observations have a far wider significance and resonance than one would initially gather from the claims made by the article itself. So, it is a bit of a case of chasing for the “more than meets the eye” - which is also a convenient reminder of the essential visual dimension which the experience of emotional states of others and their expression to others appear to share. This is why, I think, both the comparison and the contrast of literary and visual expressions of emotions is no accidental strategy here - the visual might indeed be taken as the most inevitable strategic plane of representation. As the full title of the article proclaims, we are invited or maybe even challenged to “cross the threshold” between different models or concepts of emotional identification. On the one hand, there is a model of emotional affectedness which links literary realism to, but also sets it apart from, preceding genres and models, i.e. romanticism and the sentimental novel. On the other hand, the threshold marks or positions realism as such as a transitional period, and thus as a kind of enabling and preparing stage for another model of emo‐ tional identification, which eventually was to be fully realized in modernism. In other words, realism - and this includes both literary realism and realism in the visual arts - as a particular period and style in U.S.-American culture of the 19th century is being discussed as a distinct and decisive moment within a larger history, i.e. the history of the expression of emotions in the arts. This statement, of course, could be translated and rephrased in different ways, either as a history of aesthetic expressions of emotion in the arts or the history of aesthetic responses to the changes of emotional expressiveness in cultural contexts - or even the artistic and aesthetic negotiation of the role and function of emotions and their expression in specific social and cultural contexts. The difference between these options lies, among other things, in the level of critical energy which one would concede to artistic practices of representation. That is, concepts of realism which insist on the pursuit for objective, factual and observational truth in representation would most likely tone down or underestimate the critical charge or objective of realism as a politico-ethical endeavor - scientific realism is not the same as social realism. But nevertheless, they are both realisms. So, the real question is, what do emotions mean for realism as a critical and an affirmative project? 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 148 Peter Schneck If I appear to be oversimplifying at this point, it may be due to the sheer force of the argument and its extremely convincing combination of a choice selection and surprisingly detailed discussions of individual literary texts and visual artworks (about which more below). Moreover, this is made to support an extremely generalized and radical synthetical historical argument about the demise or decline of realist assumptions about psychological depth and emotional involvement and the emergence and dominance of modern(ist) assumptions in regard to the mere performativity and superficiality of emotional expressiveness. Indeed, if looked at as a narrative, the main argument of the essay could be described as a tale of increasing loss and lack. Realism came into its own by questioning the somewhat uninhibited, melodramatic expression of emotion and emotional states in the sentimental modes of representation which governed romantic genres in literary and visual arts. Realism, thus, was not disinterested when it comes to emotions. Quite the contrary, realism had strong opinions about emotions. One could say then that realism, however defined, comes into its own by establishing a counter discourse on emotions, emotional states and the expression of emotions which sets it apart from its literary predecessors in the most distinctive manner. This counter position, however, is deeply ambivalent because while realism wants to discredit the particular investment of sentimental literature in the (melo-)dramatic expression of emotions within social contexts, it cannot simply neglect or disavow emotions as an undeniable fact of individual subjective experience. On the contrary, as Henry James famously attested in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, the richness of emotional struggle within his subjects was all as interesting and exciting as a pirate adventure, if not more so. As Fluck argues, it is the interior struggles, not the outward display of emotions which give depth to realist characters, at least in Howells and in James. For their readers, in turn, it meant to develop a different response to the emotions felt and negotiated by the protagonists, no longer an empathic identification with the feelings of others but rather a participant’s observation of the way in which emotions were being processed and assessed by the respective characters themselves. With James, in particular, this process of assessment is what binds the reader’s experience to the experience of his subjects, as we are asked to struggle with them and their emotional experience in order to better understand ourselves and others. Social cognition from the perspective of realists like James, Howells and, in painting, one may add Eakins, demands a form of emotional involvement which always contains the seed of cognitive expansion; the emotional quality and ‘charge’ of experience is invested both in its cognitive negotiation and the transcendence of mere conventional affirmation. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 149 Emotions are inner intensities, they belong to the individual, and only a rich, acknowledged and grasped inner life will result in the form of experience which can be invested and translated into social competence. Yet, as the article’s cautionary tale suggests, this presupposes a depth of character which apparently gets lost in the transition from realism to modernism: the modern subject merely manages its sociality by the careful curation of a shallow emotionality, a certain coolness or unaffectedness, presented most exemplary by Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X. Real Feeling This brings me to one of the two passages which I found so intriguing, and in a somewhat confusing way, it was the closing sentence which actually initiated the re-reading and re-thinking of the ‘narrative’ in general, but in particular, the central ‘problem’ of the expression of emotions in literature and the visual arts. At the end of the essay, the assessment of modern individuality clearly states the lack and loss: “Human beings do not possess something like an inner core, and if there is no longer an inner core (where the person’s true character resides) then reality becomes a surface phenomenon and emotions become moods or stylized gestures embedded into these surfaces” (Fluck, “Threshold,” in this volume 145). But this is not a concluding statement since in the final two remarks this assessment is used to mark the further historical trajectory of realist art by pointing out that visual artists like Edward Hopper and later Richard Estes continued to exemplify a realism of the pose and of surfaces. The continuity is affirmed and also relativized in the final statement that Hopper’s and Estes’ art might be considered an “altogether different chapter in the tenuous relation between realism and the expression of emotions” (145). What I found startling and stumbled over was not the simple suggestion that there was and continues to be a specific “relation” between realism and the expression of emotions, but rather that this relation was a “tenuous” one. It was, of course, one of these moments where one finishes thinking before the argument is over, thus I had already distilled a particular synthesis from the narrative which made me somehow expect the last sentence (obviously also based on Fluck’s work on Hopper and the photorealists and on surface realism), but the “tenuous” somehow flew into the face of expectations. At least into the face of my expectations, and I do not claim this to be more than a rather subjective response - a response, however, that made me re-read and re-think Fluck’s argument and also my own thoughts about it. As a term which is meant to describe a relation, “tenuous” has a number of slightly overlapping, but also 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 150 Peter Schneck slightly divergent meanings, ranging from “weak” to “questionable” to “fragile” and “unsubstantiated” - and maybe this is what somehow jarred with my own feeling about the relation between realism and the expression of emotions which made me expect a different characterization, closer to “intense” or “invested” or maybe (a bit closer, but still different) “ambivalent.” This is not an argument about semantic precision - I am absolutely sure that tenuous is the best and most precise term for the perspective on the relation which the article wants us to assume, and it may indeed have been that “jarring” precision which positively challenged me to rethink my own perspective. Which opened another view on the problem at hand, namely, the function which the expression of emotions may (or even must) assume for the objectives of realist fiction and visual art and their respective aesthetic forms and effects. In this respect, the article reaches way beyond the formulation and discussion of period specific constellations and oppositions, say, between depth and surface, between true emotions and performative moods. As is described at the outset, if realism’s objective is to tell “the truth about reality,” what counts as truth and reality in a representation is itself dependent on the “tacit assumptions of what constitutes reality” which readers, viewers, and spectators bring to bear on their readings and viewing of specific representations. Arguably then, the challenge for realists like Howells, James, and also Eakins, was twofold, aiming at two different, at times also conflicting, effects. On the one hand, a strategy of affirmative representation, claiming that realism only represents what is already there, does not invent, create, or construct; rather, it records, documents, observes, and analyzes. On the other hand, however, there is a strategy of disruption, disillusion, and even denial of affirmation, a strategy which targets precisely some (if not all) of the tacit assumptions about reality and truth to allow for a more direct and unmediated view and experience the material. This obviously must create a tension within or even a rift running right through the model of representation which realism in general is based on. The model both assumes and acknowledges the social construction of reality, at least the social struggle over reality as the sphere of action but also the sphere of ideas. Both the construction and the struggle over it are dependent on performative strategies; what unites the distinct practices of realist disillusion in Howells, James, and Eakins is the common attempt to move beyond the performative, to reveal its strategic character or, in a complementary move, concentrate on and present moments of individual articulation in reaction to the demands of social performativity. In all cases, these moments of individual articulation result from a struggle, that is, their realism does not, indeed, cannot rely on the fortunate coincidence of objective observation and the revelation of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 151 true character. Individual resilience in face of social demands for behaving or performing are thus not the effect of a natural disposition (a depth of character which is already formed before it becomes contested in social settings and struggles). Rather, as the insistence on experience as a process of development in realist plots indicates, depth of character is the result of an ongoing negotiation, a balancing act, a form of adaptation and self-positioning which comes to accept the fundamentally social constructedness of reality but, at the same time, carves out a sphere of individual autonomy (if not of action, than at least of thinking). From this perspective, the role of emotions becomes even more complex - in fact, they present the most powerful and also the most ambivalent aspect of this process of emergent autonomy. As an exemplary case, we may take the conclusion of The Portrait of a Lady as a confirmation of the learning process of its major protagonist Isabel Archer, even while we might debate whether the result is a completely autonomous and ‘rich’ character. The least we can say - if we acknowledge that realism asks for an assessment of character in light of our own response to its performance - is that at the end of the novel Isabel is not an individual whose experience is defined by her emotions, but rather a character whose depth is dependent as much on her emotional experience as it is on her cognitive processing of that experience. In a curious, but also disturbingly plausible, even consequential way, the Jamesian disillusion of character involves a revision and realignment of expe‐ rience that acknowledges the necessity of affect and emotional involvement while at the same time rejecting any mode of melodramatic display. Yet, that does not mean that there is no melodrama. In fact, experience in James is full of melodramatic aspects and scenes which are, however, fully contained within the experiencing consciousness. James’s famous “imagination of disaster” provides for a rich and often highly affective drama within his characters’ visions of themselves and their social interactions. Thus, the example from Washington Square, while extremely effective, is rather special in the sense that highlights the focalizing position - the participant observer - as well as the solitary emotional struggle of the main protagonist. This does indeed underline that for James, as well as for realism in general, genuine emotions are a rather private and intimate affair. And as such, they illustrate the affective investment necessitated by the norms of composure and control, in fact, the self-discipline expected to be achieved (and performed) by social actors in full possession of their respective character. Yet arguably, the act of affective observation in Washington Square appears rather subdued in comparison to the much more intrusive and expansive modes of the melodramatic staging of consciousness in other novels by James 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 152 Peter Schneck (Howells is a different case). Of course, even the extensive display of inner turmoil and struggle as, for instance, in Isabel’s night of assaulting visions, or Maggie Verver’s emotional and imaginative negotiation of her husband’s affair in The Golden Bowl, are clear demonstrations of the main thesis about realism’s attempt to build character on affective control. But that does not mean that the display of emotions is relegated to the sphere of irrelevant excess. Rather, the strategies revolving around the expression of emotion in American realism - and this includes Eakins in rather obvious ways - are (also) geared towards a reorientation and redirection of the aesthetic response by the reader to the expression of emotion in literature. Feeling Real Crossing the threshold: For one final round of comments, I take inspiration from the title of Fluck’s article and, moreover, from the subsequent anecdotal and biographical passages in the first part. What connects the title with the said passages is that while they appear rather unobtrusive, they are also highly suggestive. Thus, the short remarks on our generic response to the failed realism of a Hollywood movie at the beginning of the article, as well as the biographical reminiscence about reading Anna Karenina as a boy, are salient reminders of the unique perspective on American realism which, as Fluck states at the beginning, emerged as a ‘reaction’ to dominant models of realist literature in the 1960s (both in German scholarship and beyond) which ‘provoked’ him, in his words, to “write my own interpretation of American realism” (130). At the core of this interpretation, as the title of his prominent study Inszenierte Wirklichkeit suggests, one finds a more or less explicit notion of staging or directing or even composing a scene - precisely, composing reality (Wirklichkeit) as a scene and within a scene. More or less explicit simply means that the staging at the heart of the cultural project of American realism, as Fluck understands it, cannot be and should not be reduced to an explicit constructivist strategy. This I always took to be an important, even essential proviso which marks the difference between American realism in its own context and the realisms which succeeded it. It might even be taken as the difference within in the sense of the “threshold,” since 19thcentury American realism can be looked at from two directions, and it points in two opposite directions at once. The staging, then, is less the construction of a reality which defies or declines representation in any form. Rather, the staging is meant to provoke a particular form of attention and involvement on the side of the reader. The reality of the social environment, the major concern 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 153 of American Realism, is less marked by the affirmation of objective or material reality based on observation, but much more in the relatability of the experience of its protagonists while they are negotiating conflicting claims about what counts as “real” in specific social settings and struggles. For the literary representation of this experience, emotional investment is an important indicator of the negotiation on the level of character building and action, but also a central instrument for modulating the response of the reader. Thus, the staging of emotions happens in two ways. On the one hand, emotions have to be managed by the characters as part of their investment in the social construction of reality. On the other hand, from the reader’s perspective, the emotional qualities of the social experience of the fictional characters has to be regarded - and indeed processed - as an important aspect of the social construction of reality actualized in the process of reception, i.e. reading (and, to a certain extent looking at or, better, observing) character aims at the reintegration of affective charges into the experience of a developed consciousness. This then, ideally, is when character is acknowledged as a “type of self” one may identify with. That form of identification, while it is not devoid of emotional qualities, cannot be reduced to the forms of empathy based on affective mobilization alone. When James carefully stages the emotions of his heroine in Washington Square by giving us an unacknowledged and thus privileged position as a silent witness, we are asked to identify with Catherine Sloper exactly on grounds of the social situatedness of her emotions and the processes of interiorization and cognitive integration which become legible in the very act of staging the character as a self. The process of acknowledging one’s self within its social confinements is indeed central in Washington Square (as it is in all of James’s novels) and it is to a great extent a process of emotional discovery and development, made explicit in the novel itself: She had an entirely new feeling which may be described as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions. She watched herself as she would have watched another person and wondered what she would do. It was as if this other person, who was both herself and not herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural curiosity as to the performance of untested functions. (71) The sense of richness and depth of personal self, then, is to a great extent the result of the struggle to negotiate the tension between the emotional charge of individual experience and the demands for its integration in socially situated forms of experience. This also aligns the reading of fictional experience with the process of negotiation described, because in the act of reading we have to reintegrate our selves with a fictional other, which is both ourselves and not ourselves. If, for a moment, this can stand as an acceptable reinterpretation of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 154 Peter Schneck the major concept of the “rich self ” at the heart of the article’s argument, it may help to reveal yet another threshold reading of American realism’s peculiar and indeed “tenuous” relation to emotions and modernity. So, my final inspiration encourages me to respond to the particular position which John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X holds in the specific argument of the article, and maybe also in a more general argument about the represen‐ tation of emotion and character (or self) on the threshold between realism and modernism in American culture. Read from a realist perspective as an attempt to come to terms with the complexity and depth of personal experience and selfformation, the portrait may indeed be taken as a result of a deep frustration, both in regard to its artistic and epistemological objectives. That frustration is rather convincingly documented in Sargent’s preparatory sketches and his personal statements about his difficulties to get the subject into a productive pose. The eccentric and capricious socialite thus appeared to be rather resistant to Sargent’s ideas about adequate and effective forms of self-posing. From this perspective it is certainly not altogether wrong to read that resistance back into the picture as a kind of emotional defense or even denial of sympathy (which would include the painter - encouraging an even more tempting and complex route of reading the painting). My question here concerns the degree of generalization we should accept for the reading of this particular portrait by Sargent as exemplary and thus symptomatic for the modern emotional subject. Again, from a realist perspective, the portrait just shows what is there - or better, what is lacking. Madame X is all performance and no personality and thus regarded not as a subject but as an object exclusively. In other words, Sargent’s realism is defied by its human subject precisely because the subject does not comply with - indeed does not exist due to - the protocols of representation which demand and afford the assumption and thus the projection of depth. A specific projection, to be sure, because it relies on the assumption of a very particular constellation of practice, experience and self-constitution - all of which is somehow, and frustratingly so, missing from the portrait. Yet the frustration may be affected by the attempt to read Sargent’s portraits according to the logic of “constrained emotion” (Eakins) or “interiorized, priva‐ tized emotion” (James), i.e. a practice of portrayal which uses a specific repertoire of social cues to indicate implicit emotional states as a form of communication with “the other self,” that is, the reader or the spectator. This may be the reason be why in Eakins’ most intense portraits his subjects appear both as private and as social subjects, so that whatever emotional or cognitive interior processes are implied, they are not fully contained or even denied by the act of observation. There is a tacit understanding on both sides of the canvas, as it were, that the act 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 155 of portrayal is an act of communication which is both private, intimate even, and public at the same time. Yet that tacit understanding is indeed a mutual affirmation of the specific social codes of signification which make the implicit signs of (rich) interiority readable on the outside. There is no such controlled privacy or intimacy implied in the portrait of Madame X, in fact, the portrait appears to be almost scandalously explicit in its denial of direct communication with its subject - an object on display more than a subject with a constrained or rich inner life. Yet that does not mean that the “object” presented in this way cannot be read as a subject at all, indeed, Madame X may be seen as “threshold” subject which if looked at from the realist perspective informed by a Jamesian social sensibility would be as much a revelation of character as James’s careful staging of his own female subjects in Washington Square or The Portrait of A Lady. Only that which is being revealed is not an intimate interiority of emotional struggle or depth, but the opposite: “looking disdainfully away from the viewer’s gaze (…) gave her an air of the femme fatale (…) part self-made work of art, part indifferent sexual predator both converging in the image of an idol. Her air is that of an affected, strained, slightly poisonous (…)” (Hughes 252, 253). These descriptions, made by Robert Hughes, are a fair sample of contemporary reactions to the painting and to the subject, and they indicate how much Sargent’s strategies of presenting his subject in a specific mode of “self-staging” were read back into the subject by interpreting the particular features of the painted pose merely as (rather explicit) character traits of the sitter. Whether this was the intended effect of a complicitous “pact between two pushy Americans anxious to make their mark in Paris with a succès de scandale” (Hughes 252) or Sargent’s reaction to his sitters’ unwillingness to comply with more conventional and less controversial codes of posing for a portrait is open to debate, but does Madame X thus stand for the new “modern” subject of emotion? Or, to put it more directly, does Sargent’s staging merely reveal the hollowness and artificiality of his sitter or is he presenting a type of the modern subject, all surface and no depth? And, finally, does that mean that Sargent has crossed the threshold from realism to modernism by discarding realism’s interest in individuality and character in favor of an aestheticism of selfperformance, of surfaces and the play of forms? This brings me back to the question of the representation of emotion, and the double perspective which Fluck’s article suggests with the concept of the threshold. The answer to the questions above very much depends on the specific historical reconstruction and assessment of the strategies and practices of repre‐ sentation which are categorized under the rubric of realism. Seen from a long historical trajectory which runs from Eakins, James, and Howells to Sargent, Norris, and Dreiser and then on to Hopper and the photorealists of the 1970s, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 156 Peter Schneck Sargent is crossing the threshold - or at least he is marking it with Madame X - between the rich and deep emotional subject of American realism and the emotionally hollow or at least inscrutable modern subject of emotion. From the perspective of this historical trajectory the view is indeed one of loss and increasing lack: If one of the objectives of realism was to find an authentic and plausible, that is, a both evidentially substantiated and ethically viable way of representing emotions, the transition to a modernist aesthetic of “surface realism” appears to be a surrender, indeed, an acknowledgement of the general failure of the original realist model of representation. The reason for this failure, however, is not to be seen in the increasing lack of genuine subjects with genuine emotions, however suggestive this line of reasoning may appear. Rather, it is the result of a waning presupposition, indeed the conviction that the progress of civilizing processes and the increasing socialization of the subject will result in ever more complex, enriching, and individualized forms of subjectivity. Instead, what the realism(s) of Sargent, Dreiser, Hopper and the more contemporary forms of surface realism suggest is a general lack of emotional and intellectual depth in the subject of representation. It would be a severe mistake, however, to take the critical thrust of Fluck’s article on the emotional threshold between realism and modernism as a final assessment of the failure of American realism based on a history of the decline of realism as a mode of self-inspection and self-criticism. What is at stake in realism’s “tenuous relation to the representation of emotions” (Fluck, “Threshold,” 145) is more than just an aesthetic program or a practice of evidentiary documentation of emotional states. What is at stake is the general leading hypothesis of an emotionally grounded form of subjectivity, the presupposition, in fact, that there is a subject which may only be realized and articulated most fully through art and fiction if they find adequate and just forms of expressing and articulating the subject. If art and fiction would give up on this presupposition, the resulting representations would and could no longer serve as forms of self-reflection or self-affirmation. Maybe what ultimately defines realism’s tenuous relation to the representation of emotions is exactly the tension between the presupposition of full subjectivity and the awareness of the limits of its representation to adequately come to terms with what it nevertheless has to continue to presuppose. A general definition of realism thus may have to include both an affirmation and a denial: While it may insist that its mode of representation will do more justice to the subject and its experience than any other form of representation, it also will have to admit and acknowledge that it can never do full justice to the subject and the experience it wants to represent. It is no accident - at least for me - that one can actually 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 157 find such a definition of a general form of realism in another essay of Fluck’s: “Fiction and Justice.” In his description of the “articulation effect” he talks about the actual gratification which fiction provides yet which also works as a “source of a never-ending dissatisfaction”: “The reason lies in the inherent inadequacy of representation. We can only speak through the linguistic codes and signs that are available for expression, but these will never fully express our interiority.” Yet this dissatisfaction, “this discrepancy” does not stop us in our attempts to find adequate forms for expressing our full interiority: it “keeps communication going; it is the ever-renewed source of our search for articulation” (Fluck, “Fiction and Justice” 26). As ever so often, Fluck’s salient observation of this fundamental and productive tension at the heart of our search for adequate self-representation finds its most poignant and plausible expression in the accompanying footnote where he writes: “When we have the sense, as we almost always have, that we have not managed to express everything we meant, this discrepancy becomes obvious. The phrase “I love you” may be the supreme example of a discrepancy between interiority and representation” (Fluck, “Fiction and Justice” 38n20). This then may be the reason why realism’s relation to the representation of emotions was and must remain tenuous since, at the end, we may have to admit that while we try to do justice to what we love by finding adequate forms of expression we will never fully succeed. But at the same time, this will only make us want to continue the conversation. Works Cited Fluck, Winfried. “Fiction and Justice.” New Literary History 34.1 (2003): 19-42. Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York: Knopf, 1997. James, Henry. Washington Square. The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. Ed. Gert Buelens and Susan M. Griffin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022. Schneck, Peter. Bilder der Erfahrung: Kulturelle Erfahrung im Amerikanischen Realismus. Frankfurt: Campus, 1999. ---. “Cognitive Style and Perceptual Skill in the Realism of Thomas Eakins: Pragmatism, Cognitive Science and Art.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 58.2 (2013): 213-234. ---. “Henry James and the Creative Process: The Stewpot of the Imagination.” Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal. Ed. Suzanne Nalbantian and Paul M. Matthews. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. 239-258. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 158 Peter Schneck First published in Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. Ed. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 225-68. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 In most cases, and especially in traditional approaches, discussions of the early American novel do not contain explicit or fully worked-out theories of the genre. However, consciously or unwittingly, they cannot but base their argument on an underlying theory, that is, a body of assumptions about why we should study this material, what its significance is, what methods should be used in order to understand its meaning and so on. For example, statements about the early American novel cannot be made without certain presuppositions about the nature of American society, the role of literature, and the specific potential of the novel. From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel Winfried Fluck The “Infancy” Thesis For a long time, critical discussions of the early American novel were charac‐ terized by an almost habitual dismissal. 1 Although the influence of modernist aesthetics intensified this dismissive attitude, the low esteem in which critics held the novel of the early republic can be traced back to Romanticism and its cult of originality. Already in 1907, Lillie Loshe had described early American novels as hopelessly bad, because they lacked originality: “Not one of these early novels, with the possible exception of Modern Chivalry, whether intended for edification or for amusement, can claim any enduring literary merit, or any real originality” (25-26). The early American novelists “discovered no new or characteristic type of novel but sought their novels in the very British fiction whose influence they were trying to destroy. Unfortunately, they followed the methods of British fiction in its most uninspired and uninspiring period” (27). Since the early American novel showed no artistic distinction, the only question remaining was how bad it really was. In 1940, Herbert Ross Brown begins his study of the sentimental novel in America by saying: “Many of the titles of these faded favorites, it is charitable to remark at the threshold of this book, deserve to appear on any list of the world’s worst fiction” (vii). Even Henri Petter, whose 2 This kind of thinking explains the one exception that is usually made in the contempt shown for the early American novel, a respectful nod to Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (in a few cases, also to Tyler’s The Algerine Captive). In both cases, the satirical mode is the saving ingredient because it already indicates distance to childish naiveté. survey of the early American novel introduced a new seriousness into the study of the topic, still refers to the “poverty” (399) and “widespread mediocrity” (3) of most of the early novels and readily concedes a “lack of distinction, originality, and productivity” (3). The narrative model on which such views of the early American novel are based is that of the “rise of the novel.” The concept gained prominence with Ian Watt’s seminal book on the rise of the English novel in which the term is used as a sociological category. For Watt, the rise of the novel is the equivalent of the rise of the middle class, for which the novel provides effective forms of self-definition. In contrast, Loshe and other American critics take their point of departure from the Romantic idea of organic growth in which each organism has to pass through childhood and youthful immaturity before it can hope to reach maturity: “Like all literary forms, the novel and the short story are the fruition of a long course of development and, in the childhood of the race as in the childhood of the individual, the events rather than the characters enchain the attention” (Quinn 3). The early American novel’s first steps are therefore that of the infant toddler who is still learning to walk: “For the dearth of good American literature during the first 150 or 200 years of the white history of the country, apology is needed less than explanation. A new nation, like a new-born baby, requires time before its special characteristics become discernible” (Cowie l). The “immaturity” of the early American novel is thus not surprising at all. A national literature has to begin somewhere, and its first efforts will most likely be awkward. 2 In spite of the work of Charles Brockden Brown, the period before the Jacksonian era is therefore treated as prelude to the actual beginnings of the American novel around 1830: “The period covered - that from 1789 to 1830 - opens with the publication of the first tentative and amateurish American novels and at its close leaves the novel an established form in American literature” (Loshe v). From a literary point of view, these early novels “do not have great importance as evidence of an incipient literary culture.” Why should we study this body of works then? The reason Loshe provides draws on the ethos of the literary scholar who fearlessly explores all unknown territories of the literary map, even at the cost of painful self-sacrifice in the form of much boredom. To be sure, the task may not always be dreary, because their “very amateurishness” gives many 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 160 Winfried Fluck of the early novels “a naively amusing quality (…)” (26). Still, the chief reward is not amusement but historical insight: Yet inconsiderable as was their accomplishment from the point of view of literary merit they have a certain interest as documents in the history of taste. For their authors, and presumably their readers, were of a cultivated class, of the class which would consciously seek what it supposed to be the best. (28) For Herbert Ross Brown, too, many of the early novels may appear on any list of the world’s worst fiction; “collectively, however, they represent a wide level of taste, and they have had an enormous influence upon the lives of the American people” (vii). Similarly, for Quinn the primary justification for dealing with the early American novel lies in the possible insight gained into a cultural history of taste: The novels of domestic life which followed The Power of Sympathy are of interest historically as an example of the depths from which the American novel arose, and as an illustration of the taste of that time. (…) It is easy to dismiss these novels as unreal and unrepresentative of actual life. But to the social historian who reads between the lines they are not negligible, and to those possessed of a sense of humor, their perusal will not be without reward. (13-14) In the context of the “infancy” premise it makes sense to justify the study of the early American novel by what could be called the “cultural document” argument. If early American novels are not artistically valuable, they can at least offer some insights into the culture of their time. The “cultural document” argument therefore remained the dominant strategy of legitimation in almost all discussions of the early American novel until roughly 1970. But what is it that novels can actually tell us about a culture? The promise to gain some kind of insight into the taste of the times is easily made, but it remains hollow as long as the question is not pursued in the larger context of a social history of taste. For such a history, however, the comparatively small number of early American novels seems to constitute a rather arbitrary selection of evidence, especially in view of “the omnipresence of European fiction” in the colonies and in the early republic (Davidson, Revolution 11). Moreover, how do fictional texts reflect taste? The problem with the “cultural document” argument is that both fiction in general, and the early American novel in particular, are poor, unreliable documents. The historical insight they provide can be gained much more effectively in other ways. In fact, whether and to what extent a novel can be regarded as a document can only be determined on the basis of a prior historical study based on other, more reliable documents. Finally, by justifying 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 161 the study of the early American novel as part of intellectual and cultural history, instead of literary history, the argument confirms the very suspicion it seeks to dispel. In contrast to the vague promise of a social or cultural history of taste, Terence Martin offers a more ambitious version of the “cultural document” approach in his essay on “Social Institutions in the Early American Novel.” He, too, takes his point of departure from the assumption of a “largely subliterary quality of the early American novel” and does not even try to make claims for its literary merits: “It is a body of fiction for the most part trite, undistinguished, conventionalized, ridden with formula, thematically uninspired.” However, “such a body of fiction (…) can tell us many things about the culture in which it was written,” because it “reflects the attitudes and assumptions of its society. (…) A study of the early American novel may thus provide insights into the quality and texture of American life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (…)” (72). The insight Martin gains is not one into historical reality, however, but into “a desiderated - believed-in - reality,” namely, an “unquestioned belief in certain institutions” (73). One of these institutions is the nation, the other the family: The institutions of the nation and the family are therefore in the most precise sense functional in this fiction. They allow the writer to order, to form, to judge his material, they allow the characters in the stories to act as members of recognized social (or political) units, and to assert themselves by identification with these units, and finally they allow the reader to identify himself as American or member of a family group. (75) Those characters that deviate from family loyalty or willfully violate it are the villains and must be punished. However, why are they deviant in the first place? The most amazing thing about the villain is that it is difficult if not impossible to discover why he perfonns his villainous acts. More than any other figure in the early American novel he is unmotivated. Apparently he seduces women because he is a villain and because a villain seduces women. At times he may appear to be in pursuit of money, but the stakes are never very large, and he is not truly interested; at no time does he appear to seduce out of sexual desire. It would seem that he acts evilly because he is incapable of acting otherwise. (80) This, in fact, is where the early American novel provides insight into “a fundamental attitude of the American mind” (80): American society has no real concept of evil in the sense that it cannot “conceive of evil as native” (81). The 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 162 Winfried Fluck 3 Martin’s argument presents the flip side of the dominant theories of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s in which rebellion against that official American ideology manifests itself in an indirect, ambiguous mode of literary representation. Since the early American novel is still far removed from that symbolic mode, it cannot, by definition, belong to the camp of nonconformist “nay-sayers” and provides an example of the other side, a culture of conformism. “flaws” of the early American novel are therefore those of the American mind: “this was the new, unspoiled, virgin country; this was the land of hope and promise; how could evil be indigenous to such a country? ” (81). To understand the early American novel thus means “to understand what made us what we are” (84). Martin’s “cultural document” approach, it turns out, is only another version of the “infancy” thesis which is now extended to American society at large. American society is governed by a naive optimism, and the tame conventionality of the early American novel merely reproduces this official ideology. 3 In the history of discussions of the early American novel, the monographs by Henri Petter, The Early American Novel, and Michael Lowenstein, The Art of Improvement: Fonn and Function in the American Novel, 1789-1801, published in 1971, signal a departure from traditional theories. Although Petter’s book has become the better-known of the two studies, because it provides a diligent doc‐ umentation of plots and recurring motifs, Lowenstein’s challenge to traditional theories of the early American novel is actually the more ambitious one. In contrast to Lowenstein, Petter continues to consider most of the early American novels as “failures” (xii), calls the period not a distinguished epoch in the history of American writing and complains about a widespread lack of distinction, originality and productivity (3). Why should we study this literature, then? For the simple reason that these novels are part of American literary history and hence in need of analysis: “We must attempt a balanced view of the individual significance and the historical importance of any work of literature; neither must be emphasized at the cost of the other” (xii). To be sure, this task may be dreary. Throughout his study, Petter’s tone is that of a brave man who has taken on a thankless task others have shunned. And yet, somebody’s got to do it! The attempt to do “justice” to the up to then ugly duckling of American literary history is put on a more theoretical level by Lowenstein. In contrast to Petter, Lowenstein insists on a “historical view,” in which contemporary standards are not simply projected into the past: “What they do deserve, however, is a critical point of view more pertinent to minor literature, for most of their modern commentators have looked back at them from the taste of today, a taste (…) nurtured by major and enduring works” (3-4). For Lowenstein, these novelists did not aim at “art,” but at improvement, or, more precisely, at “the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 163 4 For a comparable approach, see Terence Martin’s book The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction. 5 In typical formalist fashion, the book’s meaning is provided by its structure in this essay: “If Brown’s book finally means anything, promotes any ultimate moral vision, it is one which derives from the structure and conclusion of his novel. Life’s too complex for didactic lessons, too painful for self-flattering sensitivity. Neither suffices” (27). Davidson’s argument has the purpose of liberating Brown from the stigma of inartistic moralism and sentimentality: “The Power of Sympathy is not so unremittingly moralistic as it at first might appear. And just as Brown undercuts his seeming didacticism, so too does he temper his seeming sentimentality” (18). In an essay on The Power of Sympathy, published in 1973, Robert Amer had already tried to show that “the novel is considerably more complex than is commonly thought” and had claimed that “in specific ways - its ambivalent response to passion, its representation of the ‘sins of the fathers’ theme and the problem of evil, and its Edenic imaginary - it looks forward to the later works of art of improvement.” It was “fiction’s true purpose (…) to provide educational experience” (23). The early novelists saw themselves as educators: “Like any educator, the novelist was especially interested in improving the minds of youth, in helping to form good men and useful citizens” (41). In keeping with his promise to take the early American novel seriously, Lowenstein provides an extended and useful description of its theory of effect in which he pays special attention to the role of the imagination and the debates of philosophers and novelists of the early republic on how fiction could function as a positive mode of instruction. However, at a closer look, the “novel-as-educator” argument turns out to be only another, actualized version of the “novel-as-cultural document” argument. What is documented is no longer a vague history of taste, nor a particular set of American beliefs, but the educational philosophy of the time. 4 In his attempt to describe the early American novel as a socially and culturally “respectable” project, Lowenstein talks only about one of its aspects and disregards the tension between education and “fiction” which provided the new medium with such provocative effects. The price for making the early American novel respectable by tying it to an educational function is to move the genre away from literature. It was tempting, then, to find more specifically literary justifications. There is a (relatively brief) moment when critics seemed intent on rejecting the negative literary judgment accepted so far and to justify the study of early American novels on formalist grounds. For example, in her essay “The Power of Sympathy Reconsidered: William Hill Brown as Literary Craftsman,” published in 1975, Cathy Davidson speaks of “Brown’s artistry” (25) and claims: “Our ‘first American novelist’ thus shows himself to be something of a conscious and conscientious craftsman; The Power of Sympathy proves to be more than an example of ‘the first and worst’ in American fiction” (14). 5 But eleven years later, in Davidson’s major 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 164 Winfried Fluck Nathaniel Hawthorne.” For Amer, The Power of Sympathy “deserves to be linked with Hawthorne’s novels as a book that, in testifying to the power of sympathy, also testifies to the even greater power of blackness” (131). study Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, the main reason for studying early American fiction has become a political one: “The early novel also constituted a definition of America different from the official one that was being worked out after the end of the Revolutionary War” (vii). In the unstable post-revolutionary period, the new and heavily criticized genre of the novel functioned as a threat to established authority and empowered those marginalized voices “not always heard - women, minorities, the poor, political radicals” (ix): For many average and even underprivileged Americans. and especially for women, this reading revolution conferred an independence as profound as that negotiated in Independence Hall. (…) The revolution that did not occur for many Americans on the level of the political and the legal system did occur, to a greater or lesser extent, within a fictive world of words. (vii) From this political point of view, the early American novel gains an altogether new importance: Differing from (…) more traditional literary forms such as the biography, the history, the religious or the social or political manifesto, the early novel spoke to those not included in the established power structures of the early Republic and welcomed into the republic of letters citizens who had previously been invited, implicitly and explicitly, to stay out. (79) Where former critics only saw formulaic escapism, Davidson, writing as “a feminist and a sociological critic” (12), sees the truthful depiction of a sad reality: “Thus, if many early novels end unhappily, it may be because they acknowledge the sad reality of marriage for many women” (123). The category of the “early American novel” is already an abstraction. At a closer look, we have at least three major subgenres, the sentimental novel, the picaresque novel, and the Gothic novel. It is interesting, therefore, to see to what extent and in what way this differentiation is taken into account. Until the political turn, discussions are dominated by a clear hierarchy, expressed in exemplary fashion by a text like Marcus Cunliffe’s history of The Literature of the United States. Because he is restricted in space, he does not deal with the genre of the sentimental novel at all. Only The Power of Sympathy is mentioned because it is most likely the first “American novel.” Other than that, however, it does not have anything to recommend it. In contrast, Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 165 6 The whole passage is worth quoting: “One reason for the ineffectiveness of many early American novels is their ceaseless dissection of the emotions of immature persons who seem to have no mental life whatever. Novelists wrote as if their whole vocation were endless agitation. Incredible situations were set up by crude and arbitrary methods in order that the ‘heart’ of the heroine might be studied with cardiographical exactness. Understanding such ‘lessons’ as they administered called for no greater cerebration than reading the New England Primer. Before the novel could grow up it badly needed some development of its intellectual content. This it received particularly at the hands of three writers during the first decade of its growth, Gilbert Imlay, Royall Tyler, and Hugh H. Brackenridge” (Cowie 38). 7 Such views can still be found in Ferguson’s study Law and Letters in American Culture, which describes Trumbull, Tyler, and Brackenridge as “the first realists in American literature” and praises their “sardonic brand” of social criticism: “If their the best-known example of the picaresque novel, is a “more solid contribution to American fiction” (64) on which Cunliffe spends a whole paragraph before he moves on to the work of a writer with “a more subtle imagination” (65), Charles Brockden Brown. This view already informs Loshe’s pioneer study of 1907 in which she deplores the lack of “enduring literary merit” and “real originality” in the early American novel, “with the possible exception of Modern Chivalry” (25-26), a book “which displays more ability than any other American tales before those of Charles Brockden Brown” (22). This hierarchy is the logical consequence of the “infancy” thesis. In its strong emotionality, the sentimental novel seems to be closest to the child. The satirical picaresque novel places itself at a distance from any form of emotional excess. However, for Loshe, this is achieved at the price of “satirical moralizings” and leads to an almost complete dominance of the book’s “educational intention” (23), while Charles Brockden Brown is “the first really gifted American novelwriter” who brings the “period of amiable amateurishness” (29) to a close. For Cowie, the sentimental novel remains “in many ways inferior” (17) in its “ceaseless dissection of the emotions of immature persons who seem to have no mental life whatever” (38). Thus, before “the novel could grow up it badly needed some development of its intellectual content.” This intellectual interest is provided by writers like Imlay, Tyler and Brackenridge who “all discussed problems of interest to adult readers” (38). 6 With these writers the American novel “begins to evince signs of coming maturity. (…) Hysterical girls and handsome lifeless young men are replaced by persons capable of pondering problems relating to government, economics, ‘professional’ life. Satire, a token of intellectual growth, (…) replaces whimsy” (68). Unfortunately, however, “all three of these men were a little cavalier with respect to the principles - loose though they were - of narrative writing: they allowed their stories to get cold while they followed intellectual trails” (68). 7 This flaw is (almost) overcome by 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 166 Winfried Fluck works stood virtually alone at the end of the eighteenth century, it was because all three writers resisted the prevailing ‘school of sensibility.’ Novels like Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry and Tyler’s The Algerine Captive ran counter to the popular story of feeling and susceptibility dominating early American fiction. The lawyer-writer wanted to control passions, not to stimulate them. Moreover, ‘diligent observation of all that is passing’ encouraged descriptive narrative and anecdotal reportage rather than emotional intricacy or stock romance. In tying his craft so closely to social realities, the lawyer-writer often sacrificed aesthetic considerations, but the same priority made him rummaging through experience with peculiar intensity” (97-98). In the following chapter, Charles Brockden Brown is depicted in the heroic struggle between social respectability and the search for creative expression. 8 Cf. Hansen’s criticism of Davidson’s argument: “Davidson’s view of his [Worthy’s] advice as exaggerated and ineffective does not derive from the novel but from the value system of a twentieth-century interpreter who simply cannot imagine people being that square” (43). Charles Brockden Brown whose novels are marked by an “undeniable spell” and, at the same time, a “high seriousness” (69). Brown may not have produced any novel that “remained unblemished by glaring faults of structure or expression” (69). And yet, his “innate power was so great, his prose so interladen with (…) beauty, that he has survived defects which would have wrecked an average writer” (69). Consequently, with Brown the early American novel approaches “the threshold of (…) fictional art” (69). From Aesthetics to Political Criticism It is interesting to see what happens to the hierarchy which the “infancy” thesis of the early American novel had established in the new revisionist literary history. Clearly, feminist criticism could not accept a view of the sentimental novel as nothing but an illustration “of the depths from which the American novel arose” (Quinn 13-14). How, then, can one make the sentimental novel “respectable”? In her 1975 essay on The Power of Sympathy, Davidson still relies on new critical terminology and arguments. Instead of being the “first and worst in American fiction,” The Power of Sympathy is “surprisingly sophisticated in technique, structure, and theme” (28). But this argument rests on the questionable transformation of structural inconsistencies into deliberate, even “sophisticated,” acts of ironic foregrounding, in which the claim of “ironic subversion” often reflects nothing but the modern reader’s historical distance to the text: “It is difficult for the reader to take seriously any character who takes himself so seriously with so little justification” (15). 8 However, in an essay on “Mothers and Daughters in the Fiction of the New Republic,” published in 1980, the argument has changed: “The horrors of childbirth, the stigma of illegitimacy, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 167 9 There is one problem, though, which Davidson never addresses: if the sentimental novel reflected the reality of women’s lives so accurately, why did it disappear so quickly after 1800? and the economic helplessness of the unwed mother were all overworked plot devices in sentimental fiction. Such bugaboos, however, were not foreign to the lives of women during America’s first century as a nation” (119). Thus, as “implausible as these books may seem to the modern reader, they were realistic enough to ring true for the majority of readers of the time” (123). The theme of the fallen woman, for example, was “so prevalent in America’s first popular fiction precisely because it was so true” (125). The sentimental novel “in its bleaker aspects could suggest the dark possibilities of life for America’s potential mothers. But these same novels also reflected the new romantic obsession with motherhood” (119). In the essay “Flirting with Destiny: Ambivalence and Form in the Early American Sentimental Novel,” published in 1982, this ambivalence moves to the center. Its strong presence in American sentimental fiction is now hardly surprising, because “the truths of life in the new republic, especially for women (…) were often contradictory and confusing” (19). 9 Davidson’s shift from “ironic foregrounding” to a mimesis of social contra‐ dictions allows her to come up with a new reason why the sentimental novel deserves critical attention: from “craftsmanship” and “artistry” she moves to “realism” and “truth.” Consequently, in Revolution and the Word the importance of the sentimental novel lies in its critical commentary on American reality. The Power of Sympathy is now read as indictment of “a grossly inequal distribution of social power and social worth, imbalances that should be corrected in a country purporting to be a republic” (107-08). To be sure, the novel is about seduction, but the theme functions as a form of social criticism: One main implication is that seduction is a social disease which will not be fully cured until men such as the elder Harrington and Martin are forced to surrender much of their inauthentic status or are shamed into exercising it more responsibly. Another is that women can learn to take preventative measures, be taught to appreciate the high price that must be paid for seduction given the time and place within which they live. (108) Seduction is seen as metaphor “not just of women’s status in the Republic but of a range of problems,” so that the novel, in the final analysis, is really one about “the instituted inequality of the society itself ” (108). In order to make her point that the sentimental novel is realistic and not sentimental in our modern sense of “self-indulgent fantasies bearing little relationship to real life” (122), 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 168 Winfried Fluck 10 See, for example, the following characterization of the importance of The Power of Sympathy: “The self-dramatized apologia of men like the Honorable Mr. Harrington who grieve over past failures is juxtaposed with the melodrama of young men and women deranged by grief. We have the whole paraphernalia of sentimental fiction - women who die in health, self-inflicted or mere self-willed death, insanity. This is the focus of the fiction, and it is also precisely what was happening around the corner at one of the best addresses in Boston. That countergrounding in ‘truth’ makes all the difference. It should make any reader - especially the modern one conditioned by the so-called sexual revolution - question the usual condescending tone with which critics typically deal with seduction novels. The Power of Sympathy is not a tale of seduction telling the women that they should have been more careful. It is more a condemnation of men like Martin/ Morton and the Honorable Mr. Harrington and also of those such as Mrs. Holmes or the Reverend Holmes who supported the authority of a Martin or a Mr. Harrington and defended their acts - the low-level Adamses and Bowdoins of the novel” (Revolution 105). 11 In her reading of Charlotte Temple, Eva Cherniavsky. whose main inspiration is Derrida. puts the emphasis on the melodramatic element and suggests “that melodrama’s essentialization of the maternal as origin needs to be read. not only for its contribution to the emergent ideology of the bourgeois nuclear family. but also as the contestation of a specific refusal of history that grounds this liberal order. Thus I propose that Charlotte Temple inscribes on Charlotte’s material body. (retroactively) conceived as pre-text, as embodied origin(al). the historical contingency that the emergent political order disavows” (36). As Cherniavsky makes clear in several critical comments on Davidson’s work. this should not be seen as successful subversion. however. but as reenactment of a systemic limitation that has inscribed itself into Rowson’s novel: “Charlotte Temple at once assumes and contests a portion of the history that renders women unrepresentative of ‘the general interest’ by (re)constituting them as a political body - which is to say. by retracing the limits of the representable” (37). Davidson adds a chapter on the lives and legal status of women in the early republic and points out a contiguity between the sociology of the early American family and the plots of the sentimental novel that is easily overlooked by the contemporary reader. (…) Given the political and legal realities of the time, the lack of birth control, the high fertility rate, and the substantial chances of death at an early age. many of the readers fared no better than did their most unfortunate fictional sisters. (122) Thus, the “sentimental novel spoke far more directly to the fears and expecta‐ tions of its original readers than our retrospective readings generally acknowl‐ edge” (122). 10 It is for this and other reasons that Davidson does not even shrink away from applying the historically charged term “social realism” to the sentimental novel. 11 For the Davidson of Revolution and the Word, who has replaced aesthetic criteria by political ones, the justification of the genre of the sentimental novel in the early republic can thus be put on new grounds: 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 169 12 Mobility is an important precondition for this turn toward the political: “As we have seen. the circumscription of the female character within the domestic sphere constitutes a defining feature of sentimental fiction. In contrast. the picaresque novel defines itself by its own mobilities - formalistic and on the level of plot and characters, too. The picaresque hero can comment upon slavery. class disturbances. party politics. and different immigrant groups precisely because his travels carry him into encounters with diverse segments of the population and across those dividing lines that mark out the contours of the society” (Davidson, Revolution 179). A number of novelists of the early national period turned the essentially conservative subgenre of the sentimental novel (with its fetishization of female virginity) to a subversive purpose by valorizing precisely those women whom the society had either overtly condemned (the fallen woman) or implicitly rendered invisible (woman as feme covert). (151) Yet the subversion has its limits. Even “the most progressive sentimental novels still focused primarily on women’s restricted familial role” (151). In contrast, politics is a central issue in the picaresque novel. It confronts political contro‐ versy directly. 12 Since it takes on a whole range of often conflicting political opinions, it may remain contradictory in its political position. However, in its rambunctious heterogeneity and inherent duplicity it troubles “the mainstreams (either Federalist or Republican) with different, discordant, marginal thought” (173). Even Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism reveals an unexpected political dimension: In contrast to these female picaresque fantasies, Tabitha Tenney’s book provides a hard core of realism - and it does not paint a very pretty picture of women’s lives. Dorcasina retreats to fiction at the end of her life because, first, her education has been so elementary that she simply cannot read anything more challenging than popular fiction, and, second, because fiction itself is finally far more satisfactory than anything she has found in the world at large. She prefers, not unreasonably, a happy fantasy life to an unhappy actual one. (190) In the “infancy” thesis, there is no way in which the early American novel can win. It is, by definition, infantile. Now, in Davidson’s “social realism” thesis, there is no way in which the early American novel can fail. Even escapism is really, at bottom, a form of realism and subversion. If there is a problem remaining in the early American novel, it is its lack of an agenda of political change: Like the sentimental novel, which provided the nation’s single most telling critique of patriarchy without offering specific agendas for eliminating institutionalized sexual 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 170 Winfried Fluck discrimination, the picaresque novel pointed out what was rotten in the American polis but stopped short of outlining a project of political change. (210) The same is true for the third genre, the Gothic novel, which “focuses on the systemic possibilities and problems of postrevolutionary American society and of the postrevolutionary self in action in that society” (215). In their examination of the problematics of individualism, these novels “are all concerned with the very way in which evil can be rooted in the concept of individualism” (235). Again, the political critique has one shortcoming, however: “The same novels which provide a salient, systemic critique of America’s early maladies do not, however, abound with suggested remedies, although the villain’s final discomfiture may innoculate [sic] the reader against following his course” (236). Nevertheless, as Davidson tries to show in her interpretation of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Arthur Mervyn, this does not necessarily undermine the political significance of the early American novel. It simply has to be sought somewhere else, namely in what, at first sight, appears to be the text’s weakness, its “irresoluteness,” or, as in the case of Arthur Mervyn, its undissolvable ambiguity: It did not. in short, take the twentieth century to invent Derrida or Bakhtin. Anhur Mervyn, I would finally suggest, might best be seen as an early American version of Bakhtin’ s “dialogical” text, a carnivalesque performance in which the author resolutely refuses to delimit his intentions while also allowing his characters their own ambiguities and even spirit of “revolt” against any constraining proprieties the text might threaten to impose. In Bakhtin’s view, the dialogical text is particularly subversive since it challenges complacency, forces the reader’s active participation in the text, and resolutely refuses to assuage uncertainty with comforting, final solutions. (253) Inevitably, a primarily political argument must shift the terms of valorization. For the “infancy” thesis, literary form provides a test of maturity, for political criticism it is a manifestation of politics. To Davidson’s credit, one has to point out that she does not evade the question of how the literary text achieves its political goals through its form. The reason why we should study the early American novel lies in its “social realism” which provides insight into the “class, gender, and racist inequities in the new land and even explicitly advocated an end to these inequities” (258). These political pleas for justice may not always have been sufficiently explicit or unequivocal, but the irresoluteness or inner contradictions of the early American novel do not undermine its political function, since they provide the text with a carnivalesque, dialogical, and hence subversive dimension that gives it a poststructuralist, even postmodern quality 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 171 13 See the following key passage: “Although the American novel would soon become respectable (and perhaps lose some of its oppositional edge with age and respectability), its original, lowly status virtually assured that it would early speak for those also marginalized by American society as a whole” (Revolution 258). 14 Rubin-Dorsky, on the other hand, criticizes Davidson’s concept of marginalized voices as not radical, that is. multicultural enough: “And the American novel would not truly become ‘American’ until the politically disenfranchised and culturally dispossessed of American society were finally heard in the pages of our literature” (25). avant la lettre. Not only does Davidson draw on (the authority of) Derrida and Bakhtin, she also claims that “Brown, soon after the inception of the novel in America, wrote metafiction” (253). Altogether, Davidson aims at an “[o]ppositional or dialogical history” (255) based on Bakhtin’s concept of the subversive power of the carnivalesque. Consequently, it is the purpose of her book to make a case for the overlooked subversive qualities of early American novels. And since she wants to make a case for the genre as a whole, because her reason for its importance is that it is the voice of the “marginalized,” 13 it is hardly surprising that she discovers subversive elements in all major subgenres of the early American novel. With her shift from aesthetics to politics, Davidson has put the critical assessment of the early American novel on new grounds. The focus of the debate is no longer the question of literary merit (or its lack). Differences in interpretation and evaluation can now be traced back almost exclusively to disagreements about what political function early American novels really have. For example, in Cynthia Jordan’s interpretation of Modern Chivalry in her book Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions, the fact that Brackenridge opted for the genre of the picaresque novel (although it is certainly open to dispute how far he actually managed to write one) seems to be irrelevant. What counts is the novel’s exertion of cultural power through its “linguistic politics.” Although Jordan’s view of the novel’s lack of structural unity is not that far apart from Davidson, her explanation of its political meaning is quite different: where Davidson sees a rambunctious heterogeneity at work, Jordan registers an increasing loss of aesthetic control that signals the gradual breakdown of Brackenridge’s trust in paternalistic leadership and a “patriarchal linguistic politics that tried to silence other views - ‘otherness’ itself - in American culture (…)” (x). For Jordan, Brackenridge’s failure is instructive. His novel highlights a “discrepancy between the mode of sociopolitical authority Brackenridge intended to promote at the outset of his novel and the picture of failed authority that has emerged by its end” (76). The contrast to Davidson is striking. Instead of being the voice of the marginalized, the novel functions as an instrument of patriarchal authority; 14 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 172 Winfried Fluck 15 Several feminist critics make similar points. Wendy Martin, for example, claims that early novels “conditioned women to accept this economic reality [their dependence on the husband] by encouraging them to lead the kind of lives which would enable them to make a good marriage - that is, a financially respectable match. (…) The domestic novel, as Watt indicates, provided women with a strong supporting ideology in their new roles as helpmates and culture-bearers” (6). For Jan Lewis, “tales such as Charlotte Temple and The Coquette may be considered as not very subtle warnings to young women without dowries that their value lay in their virginity; if they would be sought after on the marriage market, they must keep that commodity intact. The sentimental tale of seduction thus has been seen as an instrument of bourgeois respectability and middle-class conformity” (715). 16 This view leads to an interesting disagreement between Davidson and Rubin-Dorsky in the reading of a novel like The Power of Sympathy. In contrast to Davidson, Rubin- Dorsky insists that, “as much as Brown may have wanted to defend the victimized, helpless woman, virtually powerless in a society where she was viewed as another form far from being subversive, it merely reveals a failed attempt at social control that can tell us a lot about the dominant ideology of the time: “More specifically, Franklin, Brackenridge, and Brown, writing in the wake of the Revolution, which granted authority to new Fathers, believed with varying degrees of optimism that language could be used to maintain a patriarchal social order in the new nation” (x). If literature provides subversion, then only with the beginning of the following period: In the romantic period that followed, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville repeatedly criticized the patriarchal linguistics that tried to silence other views - “otherness” itself - in American culture, and their own experiments with narrative form reflect their attempts to unmask the fraud perpetrated by their cultural fathers and to recover the lost second story. (x) Similary, Rubin-Dorsky, in his introductory chapter to The Columbia History of the American Novel, argues against Davidson’s main thesis of a covert or even overt critique of the existing social order and claims “that such a glorious scenario never really took place” (14), because “the novelists themselves were too conservative in their relation to the state, too ambivalent about the location of legitimate authority, and too uncertain about where their loyalties ultimately lay to have become genuine ‘cultural voices’ and to have written powerful social critiques.” Rather, “these writers remained wedded to the rhetoric of the Revolution, and thus were still intent upon educating an American readership to be good citizens of the Republic” (14). The result are “didactic textbooklike texts that tried to freeze values that were even then in flux” (14). 15 What we get is “not the novel as reflection of its society (…) but a sham sermon to hold change at bay, mere imitations of older British forms” (15). 16 In a neo-historicist 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 173 of property, he leaves too many unanswered questions about her possible complicity in the unsavory event of seduction. Ophelia may be innocent, even virtuous, yet she is seduced by her sister’s husband and in her sister’s house. There are no psychological clues to this puzzle. (…) Seduction may well be a subject that points toward the gross abuse of social power by men of privilege and position, but it is also a titillating one, and Brown has not found a way to negotiate this dangerous issue satisfactorily” (16). 17 “Demonstrate” is an ambiguous term in this context because it leaves open the possibility that sentimental and domestic fiction, with which Samuels is primarily concerned, “reveal” this complicity openly and are thus very much aware of it. But the remainder of the essay leaves no doubt that the novel merely reenacts larger discursive changes: “In a brief essay on the history of government and the family, Michel Foucault argues that the eighteenth century witnessed a major shift from a concept of family as a ‘model’ or analogue of government to a concept of the family as an ‘instrument’ of government. The shift from model to instrument, or rather to model as instrument, means that the family as separate and private becomes an instrument of governmental measures of social control even as the separateness of the family from these measures is insisted upon. In other words, it is the very difference between public and private, the difference maintained between the institution and the family, that enables the family to function as part of the institution” (388). Consequently, the description of the family as a ‘haven’ in sentimental and domestic fiction “assists the functioning of the family as a relay of the very social and economic values the family is defined ‘against’” (388). See also Samuels’s introductory statement: “I want particularly to consider here how the very difference maintained between ‘the home’ and ‘the world’ in early nineteenthcentury domestic fiction might make the home a functioning part of that sphere to which it seems to be opposed” (381). In order to support such sweeping claims, the categories “domestic fiction” and “sentimental novel” are used almost interchangeably in this essay. 18 For a more detailed analysis of these two basic options of current political criticism, cf. my essay on “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism.” reinterpretation of the place of the early novel “in the various forms of discourse and practice in the early republic,” Shirley Samuels, in her essay “The Family, the State, and the Novel in the Early Republic,” goes even further and claims that “[t]hese novels, which frequently depict the family as a model for the nation, also demonstrate the ways in which it has become an instrument of social control” (386-87). 17 In shifting from literary value to the question of political function, a new criterion of legitimation is established. The question is no longer whether there are any literary grounds on which the early American novel can be salvaged, for example, by distinguishing a period-specific “art of improvement” from “modern” aesthetic criteria such as originality or conventionality. In consequence of the shift to politics, the primary question is now whether the early American novel is liberating or not, or, more specifically, whether it is subversive or complicit. 18 For Davidson, the early American novel gives a voice to marginalized groups and thus functions as a form of political 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 174 Winfried Fluck empowerment. For Rubin-Dorsky, early American novelists did not distance themselves radically enough from existing social and literary conventions: The Power of Sympathy leaves too many unanswered questions, The Coquette “only reinforces the codes that Foster has in other ways tried to subvert” (18), Charlotte Temple still does not resist “the pieties and homilies of the culture it has been vilifying. (…) In the end it winds up promoting the values that cloak forms of (male) oppression; it authorizes the very authorities it has previously sought to displace” (19). Altogether, the sentimental novel failed “because it could not sustain a coherent critique of American society” (19), while the picaresque novel, although engaging more openly in political argument and debate, also has the “inherent weakness” of “an inconsistency in its point of view”: “It was often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell where its author stood on the vital political issues he (and it almost always was ‘he’) was discussing” (19-20). In contrast, the Gothic novel’s, and especially Brown’s, problematization of reason, the self, and the clear distinction between appearance and reality, can be seen as radical and unequivocal critique of American society: The gothic thus became the perfect form for expressing the fears that American society, with its concomitant ideologies of liberalism and individualism, not only had continued the abuses of a hierarchical social structure but also had actually opened the way to even greater treacheries: self-made, self-improved, self-confident, and selfdetermined men abusing power, subverting authority, undermining order. (21-22) Again, the difference to prior political interpretations could not be greater: while Davidson’s and Jordan’s arguments rest on something like a teleology of indi‐ vidual liberation (from patriarchy), for Rubin-Dorsky the age of liberalism and individualism actually seems to be represented as worse than the “hierarchical social structure” preceding it. Recently, the argument that the early American novel, despite hopeful tendencies, is, in the final analysis, not yet radical enough and remains complicit with the social and ideological system has won the day. This has not brought an end to interpretive disagreements, however, since the nature of the complicity (active/ passive? ) and its degree remain disputed. In this debate, the arguments by Larzer Ziff, in his book Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States, and Michael Gilmore, in his contribution to the new Cambridge History of American Literature, present another step away from the “subversion” theory. In contrast to Davidson and Rubin-Dorsky, Ziff sees the early American novel neither as subversive self-empowerment, nor as documentation of a lack of forceful opposition. For him, the early American novel enacts a systemic logic and, in doing so, provides insight into “the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 175 19 For Ziff, this division “made authorship as profession possible, but it also signaled a turn away from revolutionary, republican idealism” (xi). unarticulated anxieties of American society” (71). This view is based on the assumption that literary representation parallels political representation. Both are generated by “a shift in the economic sphere from real to personal - or represented - property” (x). Thus, “print culture and American political culture were twins born from the same conditions and dependent upon another for their well-being” (x). Both are characterized by a drift from immanence to representation, “from a common belief that reality resided in a region beneath appearance and beyond manipulation to the belief that it could be constructed and so made identical with appearance.” 19 The sentimental novel of seduction, for example, strikingly embodies society’s pervasive suspicion that deceit is latent in every relationship. (…) Beneath its detailing of the threat to traditional standards of female conduct another concern was at stake, one for which sexual misconduct served as an attractive dramatic vehicle. This was a concern with the destructive consequences of a discrepancy between what another represented himself as and the self he truly was, an anxiety about the ease with which persons could be separated from property in a mobile society in which traditional guides to an individual’s worth were unavailable or inapplicable so that self-representation had to be accepted as the self. (56) For Ziff, this explains the frequency of the victimization pattern in the senti‐ mental tale of seduction through which women are cast in the role of lost immanence (…) by a society that yearned for an absolute behind the appearances that seemed to have replaced it in all transactions. Women were put in the position of embodying the quality of a fixed reality that had disappeared from the everyday world of getting a living; their chastity figured in the plot as a determinate value in a world in which the worth of most things was indeterminate. (72) Not surprisingly, the author who registers this “social shift” (75) most clearly is Charles Brockden Brown: The society constituted by Brown’s novels is one in which the difference between appearance and reality is uncertain. Commercial, political, and literary representa‐ tions amplified its power but they also made its members uneasy. Representing and misrepresenting were dangerously alike and the individual’s capacity to become other 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 176 Winfried Fluck 20 This claim is illustrated by a reading of Arthur Mervyn which has become the major text of Brown in the new revisionism because of its obvious usefulness for social analysis and social commentary: “Arthur Mervyn (1799) is that novel of Brown’s in which the issue of the truth of self-representation most fully absorbs both the manner and matter of the work” (Ziff 77). than what he had been was not clearly distinguishable from his capacity to deceive. (82) 20 For Gilmore, the issue is more complex than a mere homology between economic structure and literary representation suggests. His approach is one of the few in recent criticism which acknowledges an inner tension in early American fiction. The early American novel is seen as the site of a struggle between republicanism and individualism, between modernizing tendencies and a discomfort with individualism. These novels were not “preordained to assume an individualistic cast. In its formal and rhetorical emphases, the genre was often more in sympathy with republicanism than with the liberal and private values of the nineteenth century” (625). However, if the novel drew upon an understanding of narrative as common inheritance, it also contributed to the disintegration of that perspective. It transformed stories into marketable commodities and displaced the collectivity with the individual voice. (…) For every sign of communal, republican culture, one can adduce an apparently antithetical sign betokening the novel’s growing commitment to individualism. (628) Letter-writing in epistolary novels provides an example: It was suggested earlier that the novel of letters (…) reproduces as technique the era’s communal ideals. (…) But epistolary fictions also signal a transition toward modern commodity culture, for the letters composing such texts are addressed as much to strangers as they are to their fictional recipients. (628-29) Similarly, Tyler’s The Algerine Captive and Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, “two of the stronger fictions of the period (…) embrace the primacy of the civic sphere” but “simultaneously sanction centrifugal modern forces” (637). However, the “early novel’s ability to hold together premodern and individual‐ istic urges” soon began to unravel. Brown’s work is already “saturated with the ideology of an ascendant print culture” (647) which “also links his fiction to the rise of commerce” (649). This rise of commerce and individualism finds its strongest expression in Arthur Mervyn, which is seen as “Brown’s most substantial achievement and arguably the finest novel written by an American during the formative period. It is a prescient book, a harbinger of the triumph of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 177 individualism in society and of subjectivity in the novel” (652). Brown was “in advance of republican culture, a proponent of liberalism and the market ethos” (658-59). Print culture and novels, which “have a special relation to print” (657), replace an oral tradition, communality is displaced by individualism and by modern commodity culture with its anonymity of social relations. In Gilmore’s view, the novel may not have been the primary agent of this transition - on the contrary, there are elements of resistance - but ultimately “a strong case can be made that it was complicit from its origin with the ethos of the marketplace” (620). For the feminist critic Davidson, the issue of women’s disenfranchisement functions as a model for society as a whole. For critics like Gilmore or Watts, the woman question is part of a larger historical development, the emergence of liberal capitalism and its cultural hegemony of individualism. In the intro‐ ductory chapter to his book on Charles Brockden Brown, ‘The Novel and the Market in the Early Republic,” Steven Watts acknowledges the existence of those subversive elements in the early American novel on which Davidson focuses her attention. But these elements of resistance are skillfully integrated into the needs of the new social order: Sentimental novels particularly served this cultural purpose. (…) Such sentimental texts, as scholars have pointed out, frequently deployed socially displaced figures like orphans, adventurers, or prostitutes as protagonists. By either showing their destruction or integrating them into a larger community, these narratives tried to harness a “socially unstabilized energy” that threatened society. Gothic novels often moved in a parallel direction by depicting individuals whose aberrant processing of the physical world led them into dissipation and doom. (18) Thus, “by sublimating social distress and public criticism into the language and structure of the novel, writers steered them into a relatively harmless channel” (18). What is perceived as political empowerment by Davidson presents a case of depoliticization for Watts: A potential discourse of political perception and power became depoliticized as it was translated into a literary discourse of imaginative, privatized communication. Collective issues of social class, gender relations, and cultural authority translated into dramas of individual confrontation and adjustment. and over the whole there descended a didactic or sentimental blanket that provided the reassuring warmth of human decency and conflict resolution. (18-19) Even the dramatization of internal tensions or dark, hidden dimensions of the self, e.g. in Brown’s novels, only helped to create a new psychological type, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 178 Winfried Fluck 21 See the following key passage of the book: “Through the new constitutionalism, the metapolitics of print discourse became entrenched as an ideology of legitimate power. If this is a way of saying that the modern state commits a kind of fraud in claiming to represent the people and their law, it is no simple fraud. For the fraud is only the pretense that representational democracy derives its legitimacy from the people and their law, when in fact it performs what it claims to describe. A way of representing the people constructs the people” (Warner xiv). the ‘persona,’ a kind of pluralistic, fragmented self which became the “‘modal personality type’ of capitalist society” (24). The early American novel, in other words, “played a major role from 1790 to 1820 in creating American liberal society, the liberal culture that sustained it, and the ‘liberal ego’ that inhabited it” (25). It “played a key role in the hegemonic shift toward liberal capitalism in the era 1790-1820” (16). Even where they “clearly criticized social and political tenets of the ascending liberal order (…) these fictional efforts worked indirectly, perhaps even unconsciously, to diffuse and neutralize dissent” (18). In contrast to Watts, Michael Warner’s context for an understanding of the early American novel in his study The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America is that of modernity. Warner sees the novel as manifestation of a distinctly modern structure of power in which power is now exerted by print and its “publication” of a democratic rhetoric, because “print discourse” constitutes the political subject. 21 In this discursive system, novels play a crucial role. They help to usher in the transition from eighteenth-century republicanism to the modern nation-state of the nineteenth century. Even though American novel writers “consistently regard their writing as belonging to the civic arena” and “write novels that are answerable to the standards of virtue,” the novel’s generic conditions required that any public identification found there be an imaginary one. The reader of a novel might have a virtuous orientation, but his or her virtue would be experienced privately rather than in the context of civic action. So the novel, despite the most rigorous intentions of its authors, developed a nationalist imaginary of the modern type. (150) Actual political participation is replaced by imaginary identification: This imaginary participation in the public order is (…) a precondition for modern nationalism, though it is anathema to pure republicanism. The modern nation does not have citizens in the same way that the republic does. You can be a member of the nation, attributing its agency to yourself in imaginary identification, without being a freeholder or exercising any agency in the public sphere. Nationalism makes 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 179 22 Arguing with another view (unless it is criticized as complicit political position) has gone out of fashion in recent American criticism. There are usually a few polite or moderately critical references in order to signal that one is aware of the other critic’s existence, but beyond that there is no attempt to integrate or refute other arguments. I have two explanations for this development: one is that in the current academic system influence and power are essentially established by professional networks, so that being too critical can have far-reaching consequences (and is only in order in the power struggle between networks). On the other hand, the decontextualization of one’s own argument can make that argument stand out as more “original” and unique. no distinction between such imaginary participation and the active participation of citizens. (173) In a lengthy interpretation of Arthur Mervyn, Warner seeks to demonstrate that Charles Brockden Brown still struggles with this conflict, whereas sentimental fiction-note the reversed order-fully unfolds and furthers the historical transfor‐ mation, although, at first sight, it seems to hold the promise of democratization. Again, Davidson’s theory about the sentimental novel is turned on its head. 22 If there is a subjective experience of empowerment, then this fulfills a larger development of political disenfranchisement: “For the public of which women were now said to be members was no longer a public in the rigorous sense of republicanism, and membership in it no longer connoted civil action” (173). Women may have gained symbolic access and recognition, but the sphere to which they gained access and in which they received recognition was already a depoliticized one. Altogether, the historical role of the early American novel has to be seen in its contribution to a cultural construction of the nation, albeit indirectly. In his book on The Transformation of Authorship in America, Grantland Rice, too, is concerned with the relation between the novel and print culture. But again, Warner’s argument is almost reversed when Rice describes the early American novel as “the literary means of last resort for a tradition of civic authorship facing the vicissitudes posed by the dawning of the age of economic liberalism and mechanical reproduction” (155). The book begins by questioning “a tradition of scholarship which has emphasized the liberating characteristics of print culture, especially in relation to the development of the free press and the constitution of a ‘Fourth Estate’ and other institutions Haberrnas argues derived from a ‘bourgeois public sphere’” (4). Actually, the celebration of a free press reflected the move from a “positive” classical republican and civic humanist notion of liberty as a corporate body’s right of self-determination and the individual’s right to share in the power of the state by participating in the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 180 Winfried Fluck life of the polis to a Lockean idea of liberty as the “negative” right of self-interested individuals to act and to secure possession of property without undue restraint. (11) Thus, while the lapse of censorship and the explosion of print culture in the last half of the eighteenth century may have freed writers from the threat of persecution from church and state, they did so only by transforming printed texts from a practical means for assertive sociopolitical commentary into the more inert medium of property and commodity. (4) The early American novel, however, does not simply reenact this development. It is seen as an endeavor to preserve “a tradition of civic writing attempting to persist in a commercial print culture.” Brackenridge, who feared the power of a democratic print culture to consolidate a coercive public opinion, does this best. The discontinuous narrative of Modern Chivalry undermines a widespread belief in the rationality of print. Brackenridge does this so successfully, in fact, that the book cannot yet be considered a novel. Only after Brackenridge’s death, his “sustained critique of republican print culture” was turned into a representative American novel by the industries of print culture. Brackenridge, however, remained an exception. As writers in the early republic “were increasingly forced by social, political, and economic changes to address the problems of maintaining civic virtue by the indirect means of inculcating domestic or private virtue” (Rice 159), they “turned to the site where the disposition toward virtue was thought to be instilled - the republican household - and addressed the audience on whom their writing could make the biggest difference - the impressionable Columbian daughter” (159). In the view of Rice, this turn to the sentimental novel created a problem: “But the novel as an indirect means of inculcating civic virtue and the novel as seducer of readers were at odds; and nowhere was this contradiction more apparent than in the prose fiction of the early Republic” (161). Following Gilmore’s suggestion, Rice sees Hannah Foster’s image of the coquette - “a young , flirt who entices an audience but does not follow through with the promise, who simultaneously surrenders and withdraws herself from the object of her attention, and who, in an indecisive erotic play, leads her partner to an end he cannot fathom” - as a “wonderful analog to what I am suggesting was the structural nature of the early American novel. The coquette neither consummates the seduction nor wholly repudiates it either; instead, she suspends allure and rejection in one mesmerizing dance” (161). However, in becoming “literature” in the modern sense of a separate aesthetic sphere, the early American novel betrayed its 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 181 23 Cf. the following passage: “After all, the republican novel-ambiguous in its emphasis on sentiment, sensation, and anarchy-seemed to have no overt didactic purpose; yet its constitutive parts appeared to be so important and inextricably related that they intimated a moral intent nevertheless. What better precursor for what William Charvat has described as the transformation in critical thought brought about the development of the autonomous category of the ‘literary’ in the early years of the nineteenth century, whereby injunctions that narrative in print be didactic and political gave way to the more individualistic prescriptions for ambiguity and symbolism made by the proponents of romanticism” (Rice 172). 24 In the case of Rice, this premise is carried to its absurdity when Brackenridge emerges as one of America’s greatest social critics, a predecessor, in fact, of Adorno! political potential by compromising its “overt didactic purpose,” “moral intent,” and political goals (172). 23 Professionally, the new political readings have solved the problem of legiti‐ mizing the study of the early American novel, because artistic shortcomings or cultural orthodoxies do no longer matter. Politics provides a new source of relevance and a far better one than the “cultural document” argument could ever hope to present. In this context, the renewed interest in the early American novel reflects a growing perception of the early republic as a crucial historical moment of transition from republican ideas of civic and political participation to a triumph of economic liberalism with its laissez-faire ideology of the market. There are different ways of describing this transition, but in all cases discussed here, the story is one of loss. Critics like Ziff, Gilmore, Watts, Warner, and Rice posit something like a golden age of social criticism and/ or political participation that came to an end with the arrival of a liberal market capitalism that commodifies everything in its reach. 24 The crucial question for a political criticism, then, must be: what is the relation of the novel to this historical watershed? The answer that has emerged in the revisionist criticism of the last twenty years is that the novel must be seen as a crucial instrument, if not an “important agent” (Watts 19), of this social transformation. Whatever its aesthetic shortcomings may be, politically it plays a crucial role, because it presents a new type of literature, one that is no longer based on political dispute (with the exception of a writer like Brackenridge), but on imaginary identification and private indulgence. Rice even draws an analogy to Adorno’s critique of mass culture. From a form of social criticism, literature turns into fiction, which is a depoliticized form by definition, either because it implies a private mode of reception or because it constitutes a separate sphere of the “literary” or the “aesthetic.” This view reverses Davidson’s radically. Rather than articulating the dissent of the marginalized, the early American novel illustrates what happens to dissent in the American system (figuring variously as liberal 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 182 Winfried Fluck 25 The problem with this premise does not lie in the assumption that literary texts provide meaning through their form but in the narrow description of formal aspects in terms of contextualist notions of wholeness and organic unity. 26 Several recent critics have pointed out that Davidson’s “new perception of the social relevance of the sentimental novel as a way for women to deal with their own reality is a decisive methodological step” (Hansen 40). But surely, the sentimental novel also offers a specific mode of dealing with these realities. The term “sentimental novel,” after all, points to a particular mode of experience. How do these two aspects affect ideology, marketplace capitalism, or the nation-state). In some versions, the novel struggles (and dramatizes anxieties), in others, it becomes almost an agent of ideological seduction, but in all cases it functions as allegory for the fate of social criticism and political radicalism in America. Textual Politics How, by what means, do literary texts mean in current theories of the early American novel? How do they represent their politics? By criticizing the early American novel for its artistic shortcomings, ‘traditional’ critics such as Loshe, Cowie, or Petter also implied that the early American novel failed to reach the level of ‘meaningful’ communication, because it merely circulated outworn cliches or was formally too incoherent to be meaningful. Thus, the fact that traditional critics dismissed the early American novel on formal grounds was not just the whim of an aesthetic elite. It was based on the premise that these early novels cannot mean much, if they have not developed the specific means of signification that characterize literature and the novel. 25 In recent theories of the early American novel, on the other hand, there is hardly any consideration left of whether novels have any specific modes and forms of signification. For example, in the discussion of Modern Chivalry by Rice, for him the exemplary case study of the period, the satirical mode of the novel plays no significant role. The Brackenridge Rice presents stands in a tradition of social criticism in which social commentary is all and form, obviously, nothing. It seems inexplicable to him, therefore, that Modern Chivalry “attracted surprisingly little attention” (143). To even consider the element of aesthetic experience would mean to succumb to exactly those forces of privatization against which Brackenridge (or rather: Rice’s interpretation of his work) is directed. This opposition between critical content, as the site of the political, and “literary” aspects, as mere vehicles of escape from politics, creates a theoretical dilemma, however, for clearly the way in which a novel reaches and influences a reader must be considered part of its politics and possible political function. 26 There is a politics of form, and 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 183 one another? Does the social relevance cancel the sentimentality? Does the sentimental model reinforce the social relevance? 27 I am using the term “textual inconsistencies” here as shorthand for a variety of terms such as inner tension, inner division, contradiction, incongruity, irresoluteness, disjunction, discrepancies, ruptures, or formal flaws that have all been used to describe shortcomings in the communication of meaning in the early American novel. 28 For Fiedler, this degraded Richardsonianism is to blame for the major shortcoming of American literature, namely the fact “that in the United States, well up into the twentieth century, no novelists, however committed and talented, could treat the the interesting question is how the more recent theories of the early American novel address this aspect. The first challenge for any revisionist approach is to come to terms with the often noted “contradictions, inconsistencies, and instabilities” (Rubin-Dorsky 25) of the early American novel. One possible response is to deny them, as Arner and the “early” Davidson do by claiming that apparent incoherence is really a cunning ironic design and thus a token of craftsmanship. Such claims did not gain wide acceptance, however, and were soon dropped. The shift from aesthetic to political criteria solved the problem because it now became possible to reinterpret textual inconsistencies as politically meaningful or instructive symptoms. 27 What was considered a flaw before now became a source of insight. But what insight can be gained from textual inconsistencies and contradictions? Or, to put it differently: what is the political meaning of textual inconsistencies and contradictions? Basically, there are two answers. One is to consider discrepancies, ruptures, or inner tensions as a source of resistance through which the text undermines norms of order, coherence, rationality etc. The other is to see them as inner contradiction that reflects the strain of ideological adjustment. In keeping with general developments, the first view is gradually replaced by the second in recent theories of the early American novel. The first sustained consideration of the subversive power of textual inconsis‐ tencies in the early American novel and, in that sense, the earliest “revisionist” approach to it, is Leslie Fiedler’s idiosyncratic and willfully iconoclastic theory of American literature in his Love and Death in the American Novel. Although the book is directed against the new critical orthodoxy, it still stands in a tradition of literary criticism in which “great” literature is the only authentic source of social rebellion. What distinguishes Fiedler’ s argument from other versions of this argument, however, is his version of what makes literature “great,” namely the power of expressing unconscious, anti-bourgeois urges. From this point of view, sentimental novels like Charlotte Temple and, even more so, The Coquette provide examples of a tame, degraded Richardsonianism. 28 The 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 184 Winfried Fluck relations of the sexes without falling prey to (…) sentimentality and falsehood.” Only by bypassing the depiction of “normal heterosexual love as a subject” could American writers escape this unfortunate influence. For Fiedler, as for other critics of the post- War period, this state of things is a symptom of the continuous immaturity of American society. 29 Cf. the characterization of Fiedler’s reading of The Power of Sympathy by Hansen: “In contrast to the happy world where feeling and reason were in harmony. (…) Brown posited an ambiguous and threatening concept of nature which also contained the destructive magnetism of incest. In Brown’s novel as Fiedler sees it, the spiritual desire for order is destroyed by physical drives, and the anarchist Fiedler is thrilled” (42-43). 30 A tamer version of this argument is provided by William Spengemann in The Adven‐ turous Muse, in which he discusses some early American novels in terms of subversive “antidomestic forces” at work in them and attributes the inner tension of the texts to a variety of sources, above all, however, to an indecisiveness toward the domestic ethos on the part of the writers. Power of Sympathy, on the other hand, makes “a serious bid to enter the lists of literature” (116), because, in introducing the subject of incest, Brown’s book “studies the strange, sometimes fatal attractions which move us beyond the power of will” (123). 29 Ultimately, the book is divided, it “finally equivocates in a way not untypical of the later American novel, hanging onto not the best but the worst of two possible worlds: the smugness of liberal gentility and the factitious sensationalism of anti-bourgeois sentimentality” (124). Its inner division is a sign of an inner struggle and thus of an opening to unconscious drives which, for Fiedler, is the mark of true literature. Hence the - from today’s point of view - amazing fact that he dismisses The Coquette in a few sentences and spends almost ten pages on an interpretation of The Power of Sympathy. Fiedler’s cultural reading of inner tensions of the early American novel is not a “formal” one. But it appeals to the authority of our experience with the text. Textual contradictions are attributed to a culturally instructive indecisiveness in which the paralyzing effects of a degraded, “genteel” sentimentalism manifest themselves. 30 However, this inner tension provides a novel like The Power of Sympathy with a dimension of experience that other novels in the same tradition lack. In this sense, inner tensions make literature interesting, even potentially subversive. For Fiedler, this subversive power derives from the liberation of the unconscious which literature makes possible. Edgar Huntly “is a charmingly, a maddeningly disorganized book, not so much written as dreamed, but it convinces the reader, once he has been caught up in the fable, of its most utter improbabilities; for its magic is not the hocus-pocus of make-believe, but the irrational reality of the id” (157). Beneath its inconsistencies, then, the novel has a principle of organization; the inconsistencies are, in fact, the price for giving expression to psychic and mythic needs that must otherwise remain hidden and 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 185 repressed. In this sense, the novel’s lack of organization is “meaningful”: the meaning is provided by a subtext to which the “disorganized” surface draws our attention. Recently, Ann Douglas has extended this argument to Charlotte Temple: But the greatest works of American fiction, whether verbally complex or crude, would swerve, as Charlotte Temple swerved, into the realm of “subliterate myth.” One thinks of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Retribution (1849), Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) - texts that, like Charlotte, strain and swell and crack with their inability to escape from incestuous symbiosis into adult individuation, an inability to break a family paradigm that strangles and seduces maturation from its goal. (xlii) Fiedler and Douglas describe the early American novel as being (fortunately) in the grip of dark, unconscious forces which the authors themselves cannot grasp. Where any of these early novels stand out, a subliterary myth has successfully broken through the thin genteel veneer. This cannot satisfy Davidson, who wants to describe the early American novel, and especially the much-maligned sentimental tale of seduction, as politically progressive, not only on the level of content but also on that of its textual organization. Davidson’s Revolution and the Word is therefore the by far most text-oriented of all recent theories and large-scale assessments of the early American novel. In a chapter with the title “A Novel Divided Against Itself,” she approaches the problem of “obvious incongruities and disjunctions” in a novel like The Power of Sympathy and attempts to describe these not as effect of a textual unconscious but as the result of a struggle between two conflicting goals. On the one hand, there is the novel’s obvious didactic purpose, on the other, “far from adhering to this worthy program,” subplots and digressions “center on subjects ranging from rape to slavery and become progressively more morally complicated and morally obscure” (99). In fact, at a closer look, the “moral discourse” and “novel discourse” are not the only “types or models of discourse” in the novel, so that, in the end, “the opening disharmonious duet has picked up a whole cacophonous chorus” (101). In a “characteristically American tone” (101), the author has become a bricoleur, trying his hand at this and that. However, to read the novel as mere bricolage or cacophony of voices cannot be in the interest of Davidson’s larger argument. Thus, in the following chapter she goes back to the political meaning of the novel and finds it surprisingly unequivocal: 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 186 Winfried Fluck 31 In this context, Davidson’s interpretation of The Coquette is of special interest to determine the exact nature of the relationship between “realism” and “textual contra‐ diction.” In her attempt to claim a politically progressive dimension for the sentimental novel, Davidson argues, as we have seen, for the “social realism” of the genre in which the social situation is represented with surprising accuracy. In the recent critical climate, realism, however, is not automatically equated with subversion. Davidson thus compares the novel’s version of the “fall” of Elizabeth Whitman to newspaper versions and praises the novel for being far more complex and non-reductionist. It is one of the merits of the novel, in other words, that it is closer to reality than other sources and discourses: “The Coquette, then, is not simply an allegory of seduction. The generic shift from sermon to novel in the Whitman/ Wharton narrative entails a concomitant transformation of focus and philosophy. Set within a specific context of limiting marriage laws and restrictive social mores, the novel is less a story of the wages of sin than a study of the wages of marriage. In the realistic world of this fictional account, virtue and virtuous women are not always rewarded” (Revolution 143-44). Even Mrs. Richman, “the epitome of republican motherhood in the novel, cannot be permanently happy within her familial sphere. ‘I grudge every moment that calls me from the pleasing scenes of domestic life’ she writes. soon after the birth of her daughterwho soon afterwards dies, a realistic tempering of the proclaimed cult of domesticity” (144). Yet the term “realistic” is slippery. The novel may present striking cases of “female powerlessness and female constraint” (148) but not always support the interpretation Davidson gives to this fact. Rather, as Davidson has to admit, in its own interpretation the novel is “jumbled” and ultimately conservative. Mrs. Richman. for example. its “progressive.” Wollstonecraftian character, advocates Eliza’s marriage to Boyer. But it is precisely in this “irresoluteness” that Davidson sees the difference to sermons and tracts. What they prescribe must break down in the novel. This disjunction is the ‘opening’ that provides the possibility of distance and insight. In its own failure to convincingly represent a conservative message, the novel unwittingly undermines its own ideology and teases the reader “into thought” (148). The novel is also a surprisingly subtle anatomy of seduction and insists upon the relevance of seduction to the whole moral fiber of the new American nation. More particularly, The Power of Sympathy attests that the very mechanism of seduction signifies a grossly inequal distribution of social power and social worth, imbalances that should be corrected in a country purporting to be a republic. (107-08) For Davidson, the inner division of The Power of Sympathy “runs so deep that at times it almost seems as if we have two distinct and even contradictory discourses, a didactic essay and a novel, shuffled together and bound as one book” (99). In Davidson’s reading, the novel discourse articulates the claims of the individual against official moral doctrine. 31 For Gilmore, too, it is The Coquette’s “undeniable sympathy for the heroine” (632) that creates a tension in the novel: “Foster’s anti-individualistic message is at variance with her book’s openness to subjectivity and desire. The novel as coquette struggles against the novel as teacher” (633). In contrast to Davidson, however, this articulation of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 187 32 It seems to be Gilmore’s view that this holds especially true for the more daring books of the period, such as The Coquette. Thus, “what makes The Coquette a compelling reading experience” (632) must also be seen as a token of its politically problematic move toward individualism. 33 In contrast, Cynthia Jordan describes the gradual intrusion of a second level of meaning in Modern Chivalry as a breakdown of aesthetic control and, thus, of ideology: “By the end of Modern Chivalry, the ‘inconvenient data’ that were so confidently ridiculed in the opening pages have overridden hero, author, and text alike: the language of social control has failed in its job, and a second story has established itself as an everpresent and ever-growing threat to the revolutionary generation’s promotion of a new patriarchal world view” (77). individual needs presents not a political promise but a political problem, because it supports “the novel’s growing commitment to individualism” (628) and thus contributes to the novel’s move away from communal republican culture. 32 lnnertextual tensions are thus no longer a sign of resistance but of possible cooptation and surrender. Consequently, Rice, in taking up Gilmore’s suggestion, reads the image of the coquette as metaphor for the fate of public, civic-minded writing in the early republic. For him, “the idea of the republican novel as a ‘coquette’ is a powerful insight into the peculiar structure of early American prose fiction,” because the coquette is a young flirt who entices an audience but does not follow through with the promise. (…) What better trope to describe the efforts of early American authors who found they had to identify with bourgeois readers at the same time they lectured to and chastised them? And what better description of the divided nature of the early American novel, which both wanted to teach, and was compelled to seduce, its readership? (161-62) In this reading, the image of the coquette points to a conflict within the American writer who faces the pressures of an advancing market capitalism and its tendency toward co-optation. Because Gilmore and Rice see the idea of individual liberation as sell-out to a liberal illusion, the political meaning of innertextual tensions is now completely reversed: they no longer keep the possibility of subversion open; rather, they represent a struggle to neutralize the issue by evading it: In short, the novel suspended allure and rejection, flattery and repudiation, in one erotic and apparently indecisive dance. The deportment of the modern author was to be, from the early Republic on, that of the playful but serious coquette, and even Kant’s liberal claim about the nature of modern art - that it is “purposiveness without purpose” - would appear to have some of its origins in this sociological dynamic. (Rice 171-72) Innertextual tensions do not indicate resistance. They signal compromise and adjustment. 33 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 188 Winfried Fluck 34 See also the essay on The Power of Sympathy by Elizabeth Barnes (“Affecting Relations: Pedagogy, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Sympathy”') in which she claims that the novel “locates the conflicts of a newly emerging political body in the individual bodies of its middle-class characters. (…) Thus, put in a cultural context, ‘the power of sympathy’ refers The more critics agree - as they do in recent, “post-Davidson” discussions - that, politically speaking, the importance of the early American novel lies in illustrating (or even advancing) a loss of republican values, the more they tend to interpret innertextual tensions mimetically. As supporting actor in a grand historical drama, the novel is part of a discursive system and not primarily of interest as an individual text. This does not mean that critics cease to see several levels and sources of meanings in the text. Since the early American novel is seldom explicitly political, it is still necessary to refer to a second level which carries the actual political meaning. But the relation between textual surface and political subtext is no longer one of tension or contradiction. It is now homologous. Since literary representation parallels political representation for Ziff, the early American novel can “embody” politically significant meanings. If one knows the political subtext, one also knows the “true” meaning of the textual surface which functions as mere “vehicle” of the political meaning. It is easy to see, then, that seduction really stands for something else, namely the possibility of deception in market relations. For Rice, the “story of Eliza Wharton is the tale of what happens to the interpersonal behavior of individuals when human relations begin to take on the characteristics of commodity exchange” (165). For Gilmore, the new post-republican “aesthetic paradigm” is “congruent with liberal ideology and economic individualism” (555). For Watts, an inchoate yet pervasive crisis of representation accompanied the rise of market society in early modern Anglo-America . (…) This liquid cultural world, where meanings were there for the making, was clearly reflected in an equally fluid new literary form. (…) As cultural journals of growing social and epistemological fluidity, early American novels “comprised a ‘liminoid genre (…) enacting the liminal experience of the boundaryless market’” (20-22). Similarly, in Warner’s reading of Arthur Mervyn, the inner tensions of the text are now interpreted in terms of homology: (…) I do not claim that Arthur Mervyn is a text unified by the context of republican discourse. What seems most interesting is the way its internal shifts reproduce the contradictions between republican print discourse and a liberal-national imaginary. These contradictions are just what make Brown’s novel illustrative of its contempo‐ raries. The novel as a genre articulated a troubled divide in the culture. (l70) 34 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 189 not only to the power of personal feeling but to the importance of interpersonal relations as necessary for the perpetuation of liberal social and political systems” (597-98). 35 See also the following summary by Davidson of her argument: “The ambivalence in the structure and resolution of the early American sentimental novel is not simply a fumbling towards moral and psychological subtlety. These works express a general uncertainty in the larger society of the time” (“Flirting” 24). 36 What seems completely lost in many of these readings is an awareness of the fact that the reading experience of a novel is not identical with its plot outline. Despite different political positions, recent political criticism is amazingly alike methodologically. The difference lies in the politics, not in the ways it is repre‐ sented in literature. Generally speaking, there is a strong tendency toward mimetic readings. For Davidson, even a quixotic satire like Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism has “a hard core of realism - and it does not paint a very pretty picture of women’s lives” (Revolution 190). 35 For Rubin-Dorsky, who wants to prove the insufficiency of the political critique of the early American novel, the inconsistencies of the sentimental novel stand for the lack of a coherent critique of American society, so that literary structure (or rather the lack of it) becomes a form of social analysis. Plots become the main carrier of meaning: “Eliza passively giving herself to her seducer, falling into sin, and, inevitably, death, only reinforces the codes that Foster has in other ways tried to subvert” (18). 36 Endings are read literally: “Thus, if many early novels end unhappily, it may be because they acknowledge the sad reality of marriage for many women” (Davidson, Revolution 123). In short, novels are now seen (and judged) as models of right or wrong political behavior. Thus, “the villain’s final discomfiture may innoculate [sic] the reader against following his course” (Davidson, Revolution 236). Consequently, Rubin-Dorsky asks: “If, after everything Montraville has done to disgrace and humiliate Charlotte, she can still declare her love for him, what kind of model has Rowson provided those readers whom she had previously roused to anger and indignation? ” (19). Davidson’s justification for such mimetic readings is that “the reader of the early national period read mimetically” (Revolution 262). Where does this leave later readers? Should they read these novels as nothing but historical documents? Davidson’s answer - to claim these novels’ “perpetual present” (262) - highlights the premise that underlies all political criticism of the early American novel: the assumption of a systemic link between past and present. Because we still live in the same social system, the early American novel’s mode of signification is still meaningful to us today. The most important methodological consequence of this assumption is that one can take any theme, motif or narrative element at will and declare it to be the signifier of a hidden political subtext. Since literary and political representation are shaped by one systemic logic, one element is sufficient to represent the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 190 Winfried Fluck 37 Susan Harris, e.g., sees only an ideology of “obedience to legitimate authority, female passivity, and self-denial” at work in early didactic women’s novels such as Charlotte Temple. Thus, the formal structures of these novels are not dialogical but “part and parcel of their shifting ideological makeup” (59). Similarly, for McGrath, Rowson, in Charlotte Temple, only “reinforces the social status quo” (25). system as a whole. But the problem with an approach that attempts to justify a novel as truthful representation of reality is that different elements of the novel may present different realities: a female heroine may signal empowerment, her “fall” may confirm the triumph of middle-class conformity, but it may also be read as an indictment of middle-class conformity and so on. 37 In this way, any textual aspect can become a metonymy of “reality,” depending on the interpreter’s political views and convictions. This, in fact, is the reason why political readings can vary so widely in their interpretations. Since the textual surface is considered only as vehicle for the political subtext, detailed innertextual contextualization is theoretically irrelevant. The characteristic mode of substantiation is metonymic. A chosen textual element “stands for” reality. However, this mode of authorization can work either way. It can be used to make a claim for the subversive function of the early American novel and its “realism,” but also for the opposite claim: “A point is soon reached at which almost anything can be praised for its subversiveness or damned for its vulnerability to cooptation, for there is always some discursive frame of reference that will support either description” (Carton and Graff 435). If there seems to be no way to distinguish between more and less plausible versions, however, the consequence is a political voluntarism in which critics project those political meanings into the early American novel that best suit their needs. Different politics produce different interpretive needs and narratives. While the feminist Davidson wants to affirm a belief in the possibility of political empowerment, the - often vaguely Marxist - co-optation-and-containment critics want to stress the all-pervasive power of the capitalist system by emphasizing that it is always stronger (and more cunning) than any of its individual dissenters, for only in this way can a forceful case be made for the futility of reform and the necessity of fundamental political change. The two approaches stand for the two major options current political criticism has: either to start from an oppressed or marginalized group and to discuss its potential for dissent and empowerment, or to start with an analysis of the power effect of the system in order to point out how it disenfranchises certain groups and co-opts, contains and neutralizes their dissent. The first option is ideally suited to argue for a subversive and empowering function of culture, the second for pointing out the all-embracing power of the system. The first provides a political justification 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 191 38 The interesting political conflict that opens up at this point is that between feminism on the one hand and tendentially Marxist positions on the other. For the latter, republicanism is a cultural system that is still communal, for the former it is the embodiment of a patriarchal system. See, e.g., Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic.” of movement-politics, the second provides reasons why radical political dissent in America has found so little response in the larger political arena. There is no possibility of arriving at an informed choice between the two positions on the basis of their actual interpretations of the early American novel, because these interpretations are hardly more than the projection of a prior political conviction, so that one and the same phenomenon can stand for entirely different political meanings, depending on the political goals of the interpreter. For Davidson, the sorry fate of the sentimental heroine represents a certain degree of realism, for Watts, this “realism” is nothing but a clever instrument for neutralizing dissent. For Jordan, a genre like the picaresque novel is conser‐ vative, for Davidson it is subversive, for Rubin-Dorsky it hangs somewhere in between and is by far not radical enough, for Rice the prescient Brackenridge is a predecessor of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry. For one group, the early novel’s adherence to republican values is its ideological problem, because these values are considered “conservative”; for the other group, this adherence to republicanism is the saving element in a genre suspected of being in collusion with liberal individualism. 38 But even where critics share similar models of political change, difference is all that counts. Jordan and Davidson, for example, both argue on the basis of a model of individual liberation and should thus be able to agree on the role of a writer like Brackenridge. However, for Jordan real liberation only begins in the Romantic period, while for Davidson, the whole point is that it already manifests itself in the early American novel. It seems that in the current critical climate nobody is interested in solving these disputes. The main interest is in finding yet another opening for another strong claim about the political meaning of the early American novel. Wherever, in discussions of recent theories of the early American novel, one searches for an answer to the question which one of the theories and interpretations is the more plausible, one is referred back to the different political analyses and politics underlying these approaches. Thus, the solution would seem to be to extend these discussions to the question of how convincing these politics and their political analyses are. At present, this poses a problem, however, since politically speaking, the political analyses anchoring current theories of the early American novel are sketchy at best. They are characterized by rather sweeping claims, operating with broad terms such as republicanism, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 192 Winfried Fluck 39 For a more serious discussion of the political premises of recent revisionist theories of the early American novel, it would also be of importance to show an awareness of the pros and cons of the political ideal underlying all analyses of the narrative of loss, that of “participatory democracy.” 40 For example, the - unacknowledged - philosophical premises underlying the narrative of loss, the assumption of an “authentic” state before alienation, is, in fact, hard to maintain after the linguistic turn of philosophy and social theory. Another curious consequence of this nostalgia is a sweeping characterization of virtually all postrepublican literature as “discourse of imaginative, privatized communication” (Watts 18) which parallels social and economic trends toward individualism, privatization, market ethos, commodification, and the nationstate in its emphasis on imaginary seduction and identification. In view of this di vision of literary history into periods before and after the “fall,” one would like to get a clarification whether the critic really thinks that we have been exposed to nothing but a systemically deformed literature ever since. In striking contrast, Davidson extends the idea of a subversive potential of literature to even “the most ‘commoditized’ best-seller” at the end of Revolution and the Word: “In the intensely personal, secluded world of the imagination even the most ‘commoditized’ best-seller can assume a special, even intimate, possibly subversive shape” (260). liberalism, individualism, privatization, market capitalism, bourgeoisie and the nation-state which remain on the level of shorthand assertions about the true nature of American society. There are sweeping theories about the transition of American society to “modernity” implied here, but they are never spelled out. There is no reference to existing theories of modernity (with the exception of an occasional reference to Lukács, Adorno/ Horkheimer and, of course, the Habermas of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). There is no attempt to explain the paradox that a whole society has so willingly accepted modernity, although its meaning and net result seems to be political disenfranchisement. 39 Without such a context of discussion, however, it is hard to compare an analysis resting on the term “patriarchy” with one resting on concepts of the market. However, it is also clear that there is presently no interest in such comparisons of political claims and their integration into a more comprehensive theory of social development which would be able to account for the gains and losses of the historical transition to “modernity.” The reason, I think, is that such a frame of reference would complicate the grand narrative of loss that underlies current criticism of the early American novel. 40 Recent theories of the early American novel have created a democratic Eden before the fall into capitalism in order to account for the painful obsolescence of their own political views and to explain their lack of resonance. In this sense, these theories have become hibernating places for a politics of leftist nostalgia. Current political theories of the early American novel raise an interesting methodological question. For in response to my plea for a theory of modernity 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 193 as indispensable context for a political criticism of early American literature, one could argue that such a theory of the “whole” is no longer possible under postmodern conditions. There are two possible answers to this “postmodern” objection: 1) The issue of a comprehensive theory may not be openly addressed in recent political theories of the early American novel. But such a theory is nevertheless always implied. Key concepts such as patriarchy or the market‐ place are supposed to describe fundamental structural characteristics that shape all aspects of American society in the early republic and beyond. 2) Even if a theory of “the whole” is no longer possible, it would still be necessary to compare one’s own political analysis with other claims about the same period in order to evaluate these competing claims in comparison. At present, the two dominant positions, a feminist and an openly or tacitly Marxist one, contradict each other. Because they remain unrelated, however, they can still imply that they provide an analysis of American society as a whole. Thus, current political criticism lives in the best of possible worlds: it can authorize itself by the tacit claim that it provides a representative analysis of American society without actually having to demonstrate this. There comes a point, however, where a political criticism should justify itself by more than just being the antithesis of aesthetics, where it needs to take its own challenge seriously and go beyond the mere sketch of a political analysis. However, perhaps it is not really the goal of current political criticism to be political. Perhaps, it just wants to be critical of the system, and the word “politics” is only a new term for a familiar anti-bourgeois attitude. At present, at least, it is hardly more. Works Cited Arner, Robert D. “Sentiment and Sensibility: The Role of Emotion and William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy.” Studies in American Fiction 1 (1973): 121-132. Barnes, Elizabeth. “Affecting Relations: Pedagogy, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Sym‐ pathy.” American Literary History 8 (1996): 597-619. Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America 1789-1860. 1940; Repr.: New York: Octagon, 1975. Carton, Evan, and Gerald Graff. “Criticism Since 1940.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 8. Poetry and Criticism 1940-1995. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 261- 471. Cherniavsky, Eva. “Charlotte Temple’s Remains.” Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture. Ed. Christoph K. Lohmann. Bloomington: Indiana Uni‐ versity Press, 1993. 35-47. Cowie, Alexander. The Rise of the American Novel. New York: American Book Co., 1951. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 194 Winfried Fluck Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. 4th. Ed. New York: Penguin, 1986. Davidson, Cathy N. “The Power of Sympathy Reconsidered: William Hill Brown as Literary Craftsman.” Early American Literature 10 (1975): 15-29. ---. “Mothers and Daughters in the Fiction of the New Republic.” The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Ed. Cathy Davidson and E.M. Broner. New York: Ungar, 1980. 115-127. ---. “Flirting with Destiny: Ambivalence and Form in the Early American Sentimental Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 10 (1982): 17-39. ---. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Douglas, Ann. “Introduction” to Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple. Repr.: New York: Penguin, 1991. vii-xliii. Ferguson, Robert A. Law and Letters in American Culture. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Dell, 1960; Rev. Ed.: 1966. Fluck, Winfried. “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism.” Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Ed. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 211-34. Gilmore, Michael T. “The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods.” The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I: 1590-1820. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 539-694. Hansen, Klaus P. “The Sentimental Novel and Its Feminist Critique.” Early American Literature 26 (1991): 39-54. Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women’s Novels. Interpretative Strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Jordan, Cynthia S. Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Lewis, Jan. “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic.” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689-721. Lewis, Paul. “Charles Brockden Brown and the Gendered Canon of Early American Fiction.” Early American Literature 31 (1996): 167-88. Loshe, Lillie Deming. The Early American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1907. Lowenstein, Michael. The Art of Improvement: Form and Function in the American Novel, 1789-1801. Washington Univ, PhD., 1971; Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. Microfilms International, 1976. Martin, Terence. “Social Institutions in the Early American Novel.” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 72-84. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel 195 ---. The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. Martin, Wendy. “Profile: Susanna Rowson, Early American Novelist.” Women’s Studies 2 (1974): 1-9. McGrath, Kathleen Conway. “Popular Literature as Social Reinforcement: The Case of Charlotte Temple.” Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. 21-27. Petter, Henri. The Early American Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey. New York: Appleton, 1936. Rice, Grantland S. The Transformation of Authorship in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple. repr.: New York: Penguin, 1991. Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. “The Early American Novel.” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 6-25. Samuels, Shirley. “The Family, the State, and the Novel in the Early Republic.” American Quarterly 38.3 (1986): 381-395. Spengemann, William C. The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic. Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Watts, Steven. “The Novel and the Market in the Early Republic.” The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 1-26. Ziff, Larzer. Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0011 196 Winfried Fluck 1 This essay draws and expands on Beautiful Deceptions, parts of which have been published earlier in Amerikastudien/ American Studies under the title “Early American Studies Now: A Polemic from Literary Studies” (2014). I would like to thank Kathrin Eckerth for her diligent proofreading. Fluck and the Early American Novel Philipp Schweighauser When writing my second book, Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (2016), one article by Winfried Fluck proved to be particularly valuable. 1 In “From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel” (2000), Fluck expertly traces the development of criticism on the first American novels from the early 1940s to the 1990s. In his account, the earliest contributions until the early 1970s were preoccupied with judging the aesthetic qualities of novels and found them wanting. For critics like Herbert Ross Brown, Alexander Cowie, Henri Petter, and Michael Lowenstein, these early fictions were imperfect imitations of their British precursors. These critics subscribed to what Fluck calls the ‘infancy thesis,’ the idea that the inconsistencies and faults of novels published in the early republic are due to the genre’s fledgling status. In this context, the sentimental novel comes up for especially severe censure. In these readings, the aesthetic deficiencies of early novels - in particular their lack of originality and ‘immaturity’ - bear witness to the colonial lag and are fueled by “Romanticism and its cult of originality” (“From Aesthetics,” in this volume 159). For these literary critics, these novels’ interest lies primarily in the insights they give us into “a cultural history of taste” (161). Such texts are interesting, then, first and foremost as “cultural document[s]” (161), with the possible exception of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, which, for some critics in the ‘infancy thesis’ camp, come closest to being mature fictions. Things took a decisive turn in the 1980s, when Emory Elliott’s Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810 (1982), Jay Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (1982), and Cathy N. Davidson’s seminal Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) shifted the focus from aesthetics to politics. For these critics, tensions, inconsistencies, and faults in early Amer‐ ican novels are no aesthetic flaws; instead, they reflect and comment on the political tensions and inconsistencies that emerged during the transition from community-oriented republicanism to individualist liberalism as a hegemonic ideology. Formal tensions in literary texts reflect social tensions in empirical reality. In Fliegelman’s, Elliott’s, and Davidson’s hands, early American novels’ politics of representation were evaluated positively as the shift toward liberalism that they registered was seen as embracing a progressive, most notably, in the case of the sentimental novel, feminist, politics. For them, formal inconsistencies and contradictions in early American fictions subvert rigid patriarchal social structures in dialogical, carnivalesque fashion. Against earlier critics, who scrutinized sentimental novels particularly harshly, Davidson argues that these texts are ‘realist’ and ‘true,’ portraying the fates of fallen and married women while giving a voice to the marginalized. It is in this sense that early American novels more generally function as a form of “political empowerment” (Fluck, “Aesthetics,” 178). Critics of the 1990s such as Larzer Ziff, Grantland S. Rice, and Michael T. Gilmore remained within the textual politics framework and also produced mimetic readings but judged the politics of early American novels in much less favorable terms. For these roughly neo-Marxist critics, the shift from republicanism and its communitarian ethos to liberalism is unwelcome since it brought into being the individualist culture of modern capitalism. For Ziff, Rice, and Gilmore, early American novels’ negotiation or even embrace of this ideological shift makes them complicit with the rise to dominance of a capitalist worldview. For them, formal tensions in literary texts signal their individualizing depoliticization, their uneasy adjustments to ideological strains in the new republic, and, ultimately, their collusion with an emerging liberalcapitalist order. In these critics’ hands, the novel becomes “almost an agent of ideological seduction” (Fluck, “Aesthetics,” 183). For Fluck, the main difference between most criticism of the 1980s and that of the 1990s is that they attribute different political meanings to textual contradictions and inconsistencies: Basically, there are two answers. One is to consider discrepancies, ruptures, or inner tensions as a source of resistance through which the text undermines norms of order, coherence, rationality etc. The other is to see them as inner contradiction that reflects the strain of ideological adjustment. In keeping with general developments, the first 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 198 Philipp Schweighauser view is gradually replaced by the second in recent theories of the early American novel. (184) The value of Fluck’s essay lies primarily in providing a splendid, poised survey of criticism on the early American novel from its beginnings in the 1940s to the 1990s. He masterfully synthesizes the extant criticism on the novel, arranging critics into groups (‘infancy thesis/ cultural document’; ‘political criticism/ subversion theory’; ‘political criticism/ cooptation-and-containment theory’), without losing sight of internal differences within groups. For instance, in discussing Petter’s The Early American Novel and Lowenstein’s The Art of Improvement: Form and Function in the American Novel, 1789-1801 (1971), Fluck groups both into the ‘infancy thesis/ cultural document’ camp while stressing that whereas Petter justifies his turn to early American novels simply because they are part of American literary history, Lowenstein insists on the genre’s educational purpose. Similarly, Fluck notes that while many critics of the 1980s - most prominently Davidson, Fliegelman, and Elliott - embraced the early American novel for its emancipatory politics, others - most notably Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Cynthia Jordan - critiqued these texts for their less than progressive, often patriarchal stances. Likewise, Fluck points out that while both Ziff and Gilmore belong in the neo-Marxist camp that values republicanism over liberalism, Ziff argues that there is a homology between literary representation and economic subtext (the shift toward liberalism) whereas Gilmore argues that the early novel is characterized by inner tensions because it is “the site of a struggle between republicanism and individualism, between modernizing tendencies and a discomfort with individualism” (177). Fluck not only synthesizes criticism on the early American novel but also stakes out his own claims, primarily by way of a critique of earlier scholars’ positions. Thus, he notes that from within the ‘textual politics’ paradigm that unites the critics of the 1980s and 1990s, “one can take any theme, motif or narrative element at will and declare it to be the signifier of a hidden political subtext. (…) In this way, any textual aspect can become a metonymy of ‘reality,’ depending on the interpreter’s political views and convictions. (…) [T]he consequence is a political voluntarism in which critics project those political meanings into the early American novel that best suit their needs” (191). Though he does not state this explicitly, this critique takes the American critics to task for a presentism that projects late-twentieth-century ideological convictions onto late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century literary texts. Fluck does not go as far as calling the critics he discusses ahistorical but his critique tends in that direction. Fluck’s second critique is closely related to the first: While American critics obviously traffic in political criticism, the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 199 terms they use - “republicanism, liberalism, individualism, privatization, market capitalism, bourgeoisie and the nation-state” (255) - are sweeping and remain underdeveloped, as they are not tied to theories of modernity. Taking aim at the critics of the 1990s, Fluck adds his third, sharp critique as he argues that “[r]ecent theories of the early American novel have created a democratic Eden before the fall into capitalism in order to account for the painful obsolescence of their own political views and to explain their lack of resonance. In this sense, these theories have become hibernating places for a politics of leftist nostalgia” (193). The “democratic Eden” Fluck refers to here is a world structured and dominated by the communitarian ethos of republicanism. Again, presentism rears its head. Fluck gives his critique of recent theories of the early American novel one final twist when, in the essay’s last paragraph, he notes that the two major camps - the feminist one represented by Davidson and others and the neo-Marxist one represented by Gilmore and others - exist side by side rather than engaging with one another. This enables “current political criticism” to “liv[e] in the best of possible worlds: it can authorize itself by the tacit claim that it provides a representative analysis of American society without actually having to demonstrate this” (194). In the end, Fluck reasons, the current political criticism is not really political as it uses ‘politics’ as a shorthand “for a familiar anti-bourgeois attitude. At present, at least, it is hardly more” (194). What we can see at work in Fluck’s essay is a quintessentially European Americanist dissection of U.S. Americanist literary-critical discourse. Arguably, such a European stance is more hesitant in attributing political meanings to literary texts - and, I argue below, aesthetic treatises - and more attuned to divergences (instead of homologies or mimetic reflections) between literary forms and ideological subtexts. European Americanists also tend to pay greater attention than their American colleagues to the “politics of form” (183), which is at the heart of Fluck’s concerns. By way of contrast, Fluck admonishes, major U.S. critics of the early American novel consider “textual surface (…) only as vehicle for the political subtext” (191). Fluck published his essay in 2000. How can we update his account almost a quarter of a century later? Generally speaking, while the political orientation of literary criticism remains key, the focus has shifted from the liberalismrepublicanism debate to incorporating transnational frameworks. Yet there are other developments that already started in decades covered by Fluck’s article. A major input came from a book briefly discussed by Fluck: Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth- Century America (1990). Informed by Habermasian principles, Warner’s research spurred a wave of subsequent contributions that explored the interplay between 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 200 Philipp Schweighauser oral and print culture in shaping the American public sphere. Works such as Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (1993), David S. Shields’s Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997), Sandra Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America (2000), and Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (2007) collectively expanded the scope of investigation beyond Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere, delving into a plurality of smaller public spheres and shedding light on the significant role of women in the creation of public spheres. In Dena Goodman’s words in her introduction to a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies (1996), During the last six years there has been substantial debate about the validity of Habermas’s theory: about the importance and significance of his Marxism, for example, and about the existence or sociological meaning of such central features of his theory as public opinion and even the public sphere itself. Questions have been raised about the possibility of multiple publics beyond the literate, ‘bourgeois’ one privileged by Habermas, about women’s role in the public sphere, and about the way in which the national cultures of England, France, and Germany figure in Habermas’s basically Marxist chronology, which sees England as in the lead and Germany pulling up the rear. (1-2) Furthermore, since the mid-1980s, a group of scholars has shifted their attention away from the prevailing New England-centric focus, as advocated by Philip F. Gura in his influential companion essays “The Study of Colonial American Literature, 1966-1987” and “Early American Literature at the New Century.” Exemplified by Jack P. Greene’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988), Greene and J. R. Pole’s Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (1984), Philip D. Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998), and Carla Mulford’s Teaching the Literatures of Early America (1999), these revisionist accounts have significantly expanded their focus to encompass regions beyond New England such as Nouvelle France, Spanish America, the Caribbean, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake, and the Lower South. Moreover, since the 1990s, another group of scholars has deliberately shifted the narrative away from a nation-state-centered understanding of early America. This trajectory aligns with broader developments within American Studies, encompassing the ‘hemispheric,’ ‘post-nationalist,’ ‘transnational,’ or 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 201 2 For two brief accounts of the transnational turn, see Fishkin and Rowe. 3 I am seconded in this assessment by Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, who postulate three reasons why early American studies has not witnessed an aesthetic turn: “antiaesthetic stigma” (which is due to the disparagement of aesthetic concerns as elitist and/ or trivial), “conceptual ambiguity” (which plagues philosophical inquiry into aesthetics), and “material conditions” (since scholarships in early American studies tend to go to research projects that have a historicist bent) (239-41). ‘New American Studies’ paradigm. 2 Drawing on concepts from post-colonial studies, this body of work situates American literary and cultural production within a broader geographical context, embracing Africa, Europe, South and Central America, and the West Indies. Inspired by the scholarship of William Spengemann, Paul Gilroy, Ralph Bauer, and others, this younger generation of critics challenges the exceptionalist approach of earlier American Studies, reexamining the transatlantic and other contextual factors that shape American literature. Notable contributions in this vein include Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould’s Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (2001), Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2002), Nancy Shoemaker’s A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (2004), Sean X. Goudie’s Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), Eric Slauter’s “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World” (2008), and Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti’s Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (2009). Is there a common denominator to the developments I sketch in the preceding paragraphs? Yes, there is, in the sense that all the scholars discussed above practice political-historical forms of criticism. In fact, over the past twenty-five years, the field has increasingly shifted away from studying the relationship between literary forms and ideological subtexts. 3 Instead, recent criticism of the early American novel views literary texts as ‘expressions’ or ‘symptoms’ of transnational phenomena. This approach is evident in the rise of new economic criticism, as exemplified by Eric Wertheimer’s Underwriting: The Poetics of In‐ surance in America, 1722-1872 (2006) and Stephen Shapiro’s splendid The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (2008). Additionally, scholars like Martin Brückner have introduced cultural geography into early American studies, as seen in The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006). Collectively, these studies contextualize literary production and reception within vast geopolitical and socioeconomic frameworks that are said to profoundly influence the form and social function of literary works. Consequently, literary texts are viewed as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 202 Philipp Schweighauser products shaped primarily by extraliterary forces, and works of the imagination are examined as historical evidence, with literary and social forms seen as homologous. In Beautiful Deceptions, I make the case that it may be time to return to questions of aesthetics in the study of the early American novel (and contemporaneous illusionist art such as Patience Wright’s wax sculptures and Charles Willson Peale’s and his son Raphaelle Peale’s trompe l’oeil paintings). Such a return to aesthetics, however, does not mean a return to the concerns of the novel’s first critics from the 1940s to the 1970s, for whom aesthetics first and foremost meant judgments of taste. For me, ‘aesthetics’ first and foremost (though not exclusively) denotes two things: the theory of natural and artistic beauty; the science of sensuous cognition. The latter meaning of the term was introduced by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735 when he coined ‘aesthetics’ in Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus. Baumgarten theorized aesthetics as “a science which might direct the lower cognitive faculty in knowing things sensately” (§115, 78) and defined it as “the science of perception” (§116, 78). It is in the opening paragraph of his two-volume masterpiece Aesthetica (1750/ 1758) where Baumgarten provides the most commonly cited original definition of aesthetics: “AESTHETICA (the‐ oria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulchre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae” (§1, I: 60). In Jeffrey Barnouw’s translation, which includes helpful annotations in square brackets, “Aesthetics, as the theory of the liberal arts, lower-level epistemology [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking finely [literally, beautifully, ars pulchre cogitandi], and the art of the analogy of reason [i.e., the associative or natural-sign-based capacity of empirical inference common to man and higher animals], is the science of sensuous cognition” (324). In anglophone literary scholarship, Baumgarten is rarely referenced and if he is, he is often relegated to a footnote or two. This might have to do with the fact that his opus magnum, Aesthetica, is written in Latin and has not been translated into English. (It has been translated into German.) Notwithstanding, several late twentiethand early twenty-first-century attempts to define ‘aesthetics’ do acknowledge that it is concerned with sensuous perception and cognition. Consider Terry Eagleton’s definition at the beginning of The Ideology of the Aesthetic: Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body. (…) That territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together - the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 203 the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world. (13) In a more recent essay, Susan Buck-Morss seconds Eagleton: “The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality - corporeal material nature. (…) It is a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell - the whole corporeal sensorium” (6). While Eagleton diligently works himself through the history of aesthetics and seeks to do justice to the thinkers he discusses, the net effect of his book has been a disparagement of aesthetic discourse, in particular its focus on taste, as elitist and exclusionary. Since Eagleton published his book in 1991, two handfuls of critics have called for a return to questions of aesthetics. Among them are Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein, who give a “heuristic” (as opposed to a philosophical) definition of the term in the introduction to their edited volume American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (2012): The play of imagination, the exploration of fantasy, the recognition and description of literary form, the materiality of literary inscription and publication, the pleasure of the text, sensuous experience in general, the appreciation of beauty, the adjudication and expression of taste, the broad domain of feeling or affect, or some particular combination of several of these elements. (4) Looby and Weinstein base their definition on the meanings attributed to ‘aesthetics’ by the contributors to their essay collection. Here too, the inclusion of “sensuous experience in general” refers back to the beginning of aesthetics in Baumgarten even if he is mentioned only in passing. The original, Baumgartian understanding of aesthetics is also evoked by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon in her splendid essay “Atlantic Aesthesis: Books and Sensus Communis in the New World” (2016), though she references Kant rather than Baumgarten. I take the aesthetic to concern the formation of communities of sense - communities in which consensus about the value of sensory information (such as judgments regarding beauty) binds people together. This definition of the aesthetic draws on but departs from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who describes the aesthetic in terms of ‘sensus communis’ or common sense. By ‘sensus communis’ Kant does not mean common sense in its vernacular meaning so much as sensing in common - or shared sensation and, importantly, shared judgment regarding that sensation. For Kant, such judgments have universal validity: on my reading, however, the shared terrain of aesthetic value is one that creates community (as well as exclusions from it) rather than one that emerges from it. For this reason, the formation of a sensus communis should be understood as an ongoing process (rather than a singular event) and aesthetic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 204 Philipp Schweighauser judgment, in turn, must be understood as far from universal. This account of the procedural force of the aesthetic is one that leads me to choose the term aesthesis over aesthetic in my title: I use the term aesthesis to signal an activity (of judgment, of shared sensation and meaning making, of community formation) rather than to remark upon the quality of an object or experience. (367; emphases in original) Designed to explore the materiality and representational power of books and how ‘communities of sense’ are created in the exchange of books in the Atlantic world, ‘aesthesis’ is a felicitous coinage though I would like to learn more about how it differs from ‘aisthesis.’ By binding aesthetics to communal practices, Dillon moves the term into the realm of politics understood as the emergence and government of poleis, of communities. This is exemplary of a more general trend in early American studies, where turns toward the aesthetic are embedded in a primary political-historical project. In Looby and Weinstein’s words, the “history” of aesthetics “preserves the conviction that social and political life always has a sensory and perceptual dimension” (8). In her powerful unpublished dissertation “Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812” (2014), Katherine Anne Webster, who lists a number of contributions that initiated a return to aesthetics in the study of early American literary culture (Weinstein and Looby; Shields; Slauter; Cahill), argues along similar lines: This dissertation recovers the intellectual history that accorded historical, national, and political relevance to concepts like beauty, taste, and literary pleasure in the early national period and reveals the ways in which America’s first novelists interrogated the central notion that a love of literature could be the cornerstone of a democratic society. (ii-iii) As Webster argues persuasively, “taste was a matter of national concern” (20) and “the bedrock upon which virtuous society was built” (96). Early American novelists, Webster adds, “saw literary discourse (…) as the structuring rationale behind an entire social order” (249). This intertwinement of the aesthetic and the political - which Webster traces back to two influential neoclassical rhetorical works, Charles Rollin’s Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres (1734) and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) - also informs the monograph that I consider the most accomplished return to aesthetics in recent early American studies. In his book Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (2012), Edward Cahill devotes individual chapters to genres of revolutionary and early national writing. These genres include poetry, landscape writing, political treatises, novels, and literary criti‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 205 4 See also my review of Cahill’s book. cism. Cahill’s astute comprehension of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and his exceptional close reading skills shine through as he presents compelling new interpretations. Cahill intelligently observes that, similar to early American political discourse, early aesthetic theory is influenced by a “dialectic of liberty” (36) that celebrates the freedom of the imagination while simultaneously emphasizing the necessity of restraining that freedom to prevent it from deteriorating into “license.” Expounding upon this dialectic forms the core of Cahill’s splendid work, as he delves into the politics inherent within aesthetics - the interplay between liberty and constraint - before intertwining the aesthetic with realpolitik. What distinguishes Cahill’s scholarship from much of the existing research in early American studies is not so much his recognition of the subversive power of the aesthetic, but rather his commitment to honoring the intricacy and contradictions of its inherent political nuances. Furthermore, while Cahill acknowledges his indebtedness to prominent theorists of ‘the ideology of the aesthetic’ camp such as Eagleton and Pierre Bourdieu and more recent explorations of aesthetics by scholars like Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, he traverses the social and political implications of early American writers’ utilization of aesthetic categories in all their complexity. In doing this, Cahill resists the temptation to align himself strictly with either Eagleton’s and Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetic ideology or Armstrong’s and Scarry’s postulation of the democratic or emancipatory potential of beauty. 4 Elizabeth Dill’s Erotic Citizens: Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel (2019) is less attuned to aesthetics in its own right but develops the valuable concept of ‘aesthetic work.’ Dill analyzes the ‘ruin narratives’ of sentimental novels such as William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Hanna Webster Foster’s The Coquette (but also, amongst others, Samuel Richardson’s earlier Clarissa and Harriet Jacobs’s later Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) to add to scholarly accounts of sympathy as a democratizing force. Dill suggests that illicit sex in these novels provides a model of extracontractual, non-individual relationship between self and other that functions as a metonym for citizenship in the new nation. What comes into being in ruin narratives is not the “sovereign individual” but the “sympathetic subject” (17). It is in this context and in a dialogue with both eighteenth-century moral sense philosophy and Jane Tompkins’s understanding of the ‘cultural work’ popular fictions perform that Dill defines the ‘aesthetic work’ that early American novels do as “somatic work”: Thus aesthetic work is somatic work, and its inclination toward community inflects it with a fundamentally political valence. As the ruin narrative sees it, the pleasure 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 206 Philipp Schweighauser experienced by the congress among extra-contractual bodies is thus not an act of sin at all but a moral corrective, the body remedying the political error of yoking bodies together by contract. (11) Based on this understanding of ‘aesthetic work,’ Dill attributes political meaning to the representation of illicit, i.e., extramarital sex in the new nation’s first novels: The stuff of nations is the stuff of bodies: this is the guiding principle of the ruin genre. The aesthetic work of the illicitly sexed body functions as a prevalent model for nationbuilding unions in the Atlantic Enlightenment; the novels of ruin that proliferated as the new American republic was taking shape demonstrate that the authors who wrestled with what it means to form a democratic union saw the sexually ruined body as the best means of imagining one. (216) In performing their aesthetic work, then, ruin narratives position themselves with moral sense philosophers such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury; David Hume; and Adam Smith instead of social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, for early American novelists, it is not merely an innate moral sense, our ‘nature,’ that binds society together but also the somatic experience, the emotional and physical bonds, of illicit sexual desire: “If the body forges social bonds through the laws of attraction, the idea that we need a social contract to do the same work is absurd” (Dill 65). It is in this vein that the ruin narrative “us[es] sex to illustrate the sympathetic subject’s sociability” (Dill 71). For the purpose of this essay, Dill’s engagement with Jane Tompkins’s notion of ‘cultural work’ is most interesting: Instead of looking at what Jane Tompkins so famously called the ‘cultural work’ of the novel, in Erotic Citizens, I am proposing that we look to what I am calling the aesthetic work these texts produce. For the purposes of this book, the aesthetic can be defined as the mutually generative, indivisible worlds of sensate and sentient experience. The term aesthetic in fact come from the Greek aisthetikos, which means perception by way of the senses. Though aesthetics is commonly understood to convey ideas about discernment and beauty emerging out of the mid-eighteenth-century study of art, another branch of Enlightenment thinkers saw it rather as the examination of the sensory life and its attendant emotional impact. These were philosophers who were interested in the political power of feeling and who began to consider the influence of the body’s pleasures within the realm of virtue. Indeed, they saw the body as predisposed by providential design to experience the good as the pleasurable. Our attractions, they argued, are moral things, and direct us toward not just the good but the common good: we form 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 207 bonds with one another and do what is best for others because it gives us pleasure to do so. Pleasure works on and through the body to produce attractions, and our most fundamental attraction is toward one another. toward the formation of community. Thus aesthetic work is somatic work, and its inclination toward community inflects it with a fundamentally political valence. As the ruin narrative sees it, the pleasure experienced by the congress among extra-contractual bodies is thus not an act of sin at all but a moral corrective, the body remedying the political error of yoking bodies together by contract. (11; emphases in original) While Dill confines Baumgarten to one footnote (222n. 9), her reflections on “the mutually generative, indivisible worlds of sensate and sentient experience” takes us back to the earliest meaning of aesthetics. As we read Dill’s valuable book, we can also witness an intertwining of aesthetics and politics that is characteristic of recent explorations of the aesthetic in early American studies. I welcome these various returns to the original meaning of ‘aesthetics’ but wish to point out that Baumgarten is misunderstood when he is credited with being the first to “employ the term aesthetics to apply to matters of taste rather than mere sensation” (Klein 444n. 1) or when he is said to be concerned with “philosophical questions of taste” (Cahill 3). Dill is likewise mistaken when she writes, in the footnote referenced above, that “[i]n terms of the former understanding of aesthetics, one thinks of William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753) and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, both of which are more about matters of taste and the class values imbued within them” (222n. 9). Baumgarten is important first and foremost for establishing aesthetics as the “science of sensuous cognition,” a discipline that reaches far beyond matters of taste. Moreover, an engagement with the foundational text of aesthetics (or any other treatise on aesthetics if read on its own terms) cautions us against conflating aesthetics and politics and thus succumbing to what Fluck calls “political voluntarism” (254). In making these observations, I am inspired by Fluck’s “From Aesthetics to Political Criticism: Theories of the Early American Novel.” Not only does he urge his readers not to neglect questions of aesthetics - he does that elsewhere, for instance in his splendid essay “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory” (2000), but his writing also encourages me to develop an appreciative yet critical attitude toward recent trends in U.S. (Early) American studies. And for that, I am grateful. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 208 Philipp Schweighauser Works Cited Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Barnouw, Jeffrey. “Feeling in Enlightenment Aesthetics.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1988): 323-42. Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Ästhetik [Aesthetica]. Trans. Dagmar Mirbach. Hilde‐ sheim: Felix Meiner, 2007. ---. Reflections on Poetry / Meditationes Philosophicae De Nonnullis Ad Poema Pertinen‐ tibus. Trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1940. Brückner, Martin. The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (1992): 3-41. Cahill, Edward. Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Cahill, Edward, and Edward Larkin. “Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies.” Early American Literature 51.2 (2016): 235-54. Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, ed. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Cooper, Anthony Ashley (Third Earl of Shaftesbury). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Ed. Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cowie, Alexander. The Rise of the American Novel. New York: The American Book Company, 1948. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. 2nd exp. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Dill, Elizabeth. Erotic Citizens: Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2019. ---. “That Damned Mob of Scribbling Siblings: The American Romance as Anti-Novel in the Power of Sympathy and Pierre.” American Literature 80.4 (2008): 707-38. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “Atlantic Aesthesis: Books and Sensus Communis in the New World.” Early American Literature 51.2 (2016): 367-95. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 209 Elliott, Emory. Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association.” American Quar‐ terly 57.1 (2005): 17-57. Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. ---. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Fluck, Winfried. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175-210. Gilmore, Michael T. “The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Cyrus R. K. Patell. Vol. 1: 1590-1820. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 541-693. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Goodman, Dena. “Introduction: The Public and the Nation.” Spec. issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Ed. Bernadette Fort, Mary Sheriff and James Thompson. 29.1 (1996): 1-4. Goudie, Sean X. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006. Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Greene, Jack P., and J. R. Pole. Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Modern Early Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Gura, Philip F. “Early American Literature at the New Century.” William and Mary Quarterly 57.3 (2000): 599-620. ---. “The Study of Colonial American Literature, 1966-1987.” William and Mary Quarterly 45.2 (1988): 305-41. Gustafson, Sandra. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Jordan, Cynthia S. Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fiction. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Klein, Lauren F. “Speculative Aesthetics.” Early American Literature 51.2 (2016): 437-45. Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Lowenstein, Michael. The Art of Improvement: Form and Function in the American Novel, 1789-1801. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1976. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 210 Philipp Schweighauser Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Mulford, Carla, ed. Teaching the Literatures of Early America. New York: MLA, 1999. Petter, Henri. The Early American Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Rice, Grantland S. The Transformation of Authorship in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Rowe, John Carlos. “Transnationalism and American Studies.” Encyclopedia of American Studies. Ed. Miles Orvell. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. “The Early American Novel.” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 7-25. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Schweighauser, Philipp. Rev. of Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States. By Edward Cahill. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 58.2 (2013): 305-08. ---. Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016. ---. “Early American Studies Now: A Polemic from Literary Studies.” Amerikastu‐ dien/ American Studies 58.3 (2014): 500-05. Shapiro, Stephen. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Shields, David S. Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Shoemaker, Nancy. A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Slauter, Eric. “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World.” Early American Literature 43.1 (2008): 153-86. Spengemann, William C. A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Webster, Katherine Anne. “Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812.” Diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 2014. Weinstein, Cindy, and Christopher Looby, Ed. American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 Fluck and the Early American Novel 211 Wertheimer, Eric. Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722-1872. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Ziff, Larzer. Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0012 212 Philipp Schweighauser First published in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton and Jeffrey Rhyne. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 79-103. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. Aesthetics and Cultural Studies Winfried Fluck It has become one of the starting moves of recent revisionist scholarship in literary and cultural studies to emphasize the historical relativity of all aesthetic judgments and to stress their function not only as cultural but also as political acts. This argument can be traced back to one of the founding texts, if not the founding text, of cultural studies, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society. In order to defend his own extension of literary studies to cultural studies against the then dominant views in British and American English departments, Williams introduced an astute argument about the historical situatedness of cultural and aesthetic values that had appeared self-evident and universal up to this point: “The organizing principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution” (ix). Williams then applies this perspective to the idea of art and describes the emergence of the term aesthetic as a response to an alienating division of labor between artist and artisan. In Marxism and Literature, he goes one step further and characterizes aesthetic theory as a form of evasion, that is, as an instrument of obfuscation: “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” (154-56). The passage shows Williams both at his best and his worst. On the one hand, he illustrates the typical strength of his approach by discussing aesthetics not merely as a philosophical problem but also as a cultural practice. On the other hand, this shift of focus also has its price: seen from a preindustrial, artisanal, and idealized vision of practice, in which different activities and faculties are still united, aesthetics appears to have no other function than that of evasion. A long philosophical tradition and a rich cultural history in which aesthetics has taken on entirely different forms, including the task of philosophically grounding emancipated art, is thus ignored. The reason for Williams’s neglect of this tradition lies in certain unacknowledged premises of his own position. In arguing against the separation of art and life, the case Williams makes is, in the final analysis, not necessarily one against aesthetics per se but against its separation from other forms of social practice. He is not arguing against the theoretical description and justification of art or aesthetic experience (in fact, he is engaging in it himself), but against a conceptualization of the aesthetic as a separate sphere. His position is “anti-aesthetic” only in rejecting a particular historical manifestation of aesthetics, namely one in which, according to his view, the division of labor is uncritically reproduced. Consequently, his argument is made in support of another role of the aesthetic, elaborated more fully in books like The Long Revolution, in which culture and reality are reunited as social practice in order to overcome capitalism’s division of labor - a version and variant of Marxist aesthetics based on a concept of Entfremdung that has its source in philosophical idealism. Thus, Williams’s case against the concept of aesthetics is really a case made in the name of a more meaningful role of art in life. This unacknowledged “conflation of aesthetics in toto with a discredited concept of aesthetic value” (Guillory 271) is one of the recurrent shortcomings of the present-day rejection of the concept of the aesthetic. As I shall argue in the following essay, there are, in fact, three basic reductions that make the current dismissal of the aesthetic possible: (1) the equation of the aesthetic with art or beauty and the reduction of the question of aesthetics to a philosophy of art or a philosophy of beauty; (2) the conflation, sometimes confusion, of aesthetic function and aesthetic value, so that the whole question of aesthetics is reduced to the problem of evaluation; (3) the recurring identification of aesthetics with a particular, discredited historical version of it, so that the question of aesthetics can be “abbreviated as the thesis of the transhistorical or transcendental value of the object, the work of art” (Guillory 275) and the dismissal of aesthetics as a discourse of “universal value” can be justified. However, as Guillory points out: “We should not expect that a critique of aesthetic discourse in its historical forms can proceed by ejecting the category of the aesthetic any more than a critique of political economy would have to deny the reality of specificity of the economic domain” (282). Nevertheless, Williams’s rejection of the term aesthetic as “an instrument of evasion” has become commonplace in the new revisionist literary and cultural studies after the linguistic turn. Since the social 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 214 Winfried Fluck 1 Two recently published handbooks illustrate the matter. The second edition of Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, contains 28 entries on such terms as representation, writing, discourse, unconscious, rhetoric, ideology, diversity, race, class, gender and ethics, but none on aesthetics. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, contains more than 450 entries but, again, none on aesthetics. In its stead, we find an entry on “Aesthetic Ideology.” In the same line, Donald Pease states categorically: “As Terry Eagleton has observed, the aesthetic should be understood as ideological in the Althusserian sense that it produces a subject for ideology” (144). As Eagleton himself makes clear, however, he only deals with a certain - idealist - tradition within aesthetics, just as he leaves no doubt on the other hand that he is also arguing against the reduction of the aesthetic to nothing but a bourgeois ideology. In this sense, the title of the German translation - Ästhetik: Die Geschichte ihrer Ideologie (Aesthetics: A History of its Ideology) - is more fitting than that of the English original, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Generally, the broadening of Eagleton’s argument to a generalized dismissal of “the aesthetic” must be seen as reductive even in the light of Eagleton’s own argument. and political functions of cultural practices are often obscured in the process of discussing their aesthetic dimension, so the argument goes, the “real” function of the aesthetic is that of an ideology, and the critic who still insists on the importance of the category must be seen as someone who is trying to turn back the clock for whatever sinister purposes. 1 Fittingly, a contemporary German critic starts an essay on the issue of aesthetic experience by saying: “Whoever deals with aesthetics nowadays, dissects a corpse” (Schödlbauer 33). The problematization of the unquestioned authority of the category of the aesthetic stands at the beginning of the new revisionism in literary and cultural studies. Explicitly or implicitly, Williams’s argument became one of the starting premises of revisionist approaches for which the discourse of aesthetics is merely a screen for unacknowledged ideological interests. In the struggle against the dominance of the New Criticism and its insistence that the literary critic should focus on intrinsic, specifically literary values (as against the socalled extraliterary or extrinsic values), it became almost commonplace to point out that the apparently innocent categories of the “literary” or the “aesthetic” are by no means exempt from history or politics. In fact, the New Criticism itself provides a good example, for its theory of literature and its definition of specifically literary values are “historical” in at least three ways. To start with, they do not reflect a superior insight into the true nature of literature that is gained by disciplined close reading; rather, their source is the elevation of the aesthetic premises of a certain historical period or school, for example the aesthetics of modernism, to the level of a general principle. Second, the idea of “intrinsically literary” values itself is historical in the sense that it has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 215 2 See, for example, Richard Brodhead’s excellent study of the redefinition of American literature through the idea of specifically literary values in the nineteenth century in his The School of Hawthorne. As Brodhead argues convincingly, this redefinition was actively supported by the publisher James T. Fields, who looked for an argument to sell American literature on the basis of new value assumptions. 3 The dissertation, submitted in 1972, has the title Ästhetische Theorie und literaturwis‐ senschaftliche Methode (Aesthetic Premises and Literary Interpretation). In the field of American Studies, it was one of the first books that questioned the seemingly selfemerged in specific historical contexts and reflects particular interests. 2 From this perspective, it is not just a certain canon that has specific historical origins but the idea of canonicity itself. Third, the new critical categories of the literary and the aesthetic were not, as was claimed, “disinterested” categories. They reflected the, in the broad sense of the word, political interests of a certain group by functioning as social and professional strategies of self-empowerment. Recently, Jonathan Arac has provided a fine example of this type of analysis by pointing out how Lionel Trilling’s hypercanonization of Huckleberry Finn as a literary masterpiece and especially his praise of Chapter 31 as a moral struggle for independence served the needs of Trilling’s anti-Stalinist agenda and his search for an independent stand against conformist pressures. Arac’s example confirms my own findings in an analysis of the history of Huck Finn criticism which was written at the height of the dominance of the New Criticism and directed against the seemingly self-evident authority of a strictly formalist approach to literature. At the time, Huckleberry Finn had finally been canonized as one of the masterpieces of American literature and was discussed almost exclusively in terms such as literary craftsmanship or organic unity. However, a critical analysis of the plausibility of these claims for formalist mastery or organic unity led to the result that these claims were mere rhetorical constructs which disregarded contradictory evidence almost at will, despite a claim to base critical assessments on a close reading of the literary text. In fact, it was striking to see how little resistance was offered to the absurd claim of Huck Finn’s organic unity by the methodological criterion of a “close reading”: at a closer look, a “specifically literary analysis” was what the critic wanted a literary analysis to be. Consequently, the assessment of the aesthetic value of the novel was not the result of a close reading but actually its starting premise, which was then to be confirmed in the act of interpretation. In order to justify the study of a book like Huckleberry Finn, it had to be classified as a literary masterpiece. For this, it had to meet criteria that were derived from certain literary models but then applied as norms to all literature indiscriminately, because only in this way could a literary text be described as possessing literary value. 3 Hence my conclusion, then, that in their effort to treat literature as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 216 Winfried Fluck evident authority of New Critical literary and aesthetic norms and drew attention to their historical relativity. 4 This raises the interesting question of the relation of current critical theory and a rich, sustained tradition of Marxist aesthetics. Rightly, John Guillory reminds us: “In the context of critical theory, however, it may be surprising to some that the concept of the aesthetic was never rejected within the Marxist tradition, the very body of theory which cultural conservatives are likely to blame for the current critique of aesthetics” (273). Thus, “the arguments for dismissing the aesthetic do not derive from Marxist theory” (274). However, since Guillory does not have a concept for distinguishing the politics of traditional Marxist theory from that of the current cultural radicalism, he can only register the fact “that the refusal of the aesthetic is an epistemic feature of current critical practice, constituting a consensus powerful enough to enlist in an alliance of ‘left’ critiques even the form of left critique - Marxist theory - historically sympathetic to aesthetics” (274). specifically literary, critics tended to confuse the literary with its definition by the New Critical contextualists. This definition, however, represents an unwarranted generalization of one type of literary structure and results in the interpretation of many texts according to principles by which they patently were not written. Its basic shortcoming is the identification of literary structure with the idea of organic unity or a coherent whole which is usually found in a dualistic pattern or metaphor. The “specifically literary” interpretation practiced by New Critics and those trained in their approach can thus be seen as a form of self-deception, for, given his or her tacit acceptance of New Critical premises, the critic is bound to discover exactly those gualities in the text which the theory has already codified as valuable. Ironically, the moment of the greatest influence of the New Criticism was thus also a moment in which the idea of the aesthetic was strongly discredited by its conventionalized and schematic application. The following problematization of the categories of the “intrinsically literary” and “the aesthetic” in the sense of New Critical formalism has gone through several stages. In the earliest stage, which was Marxist in Europe and vaguely leftist in the United States, it was not aesthetics per se but a special version of it that was attacked in order to replace it with a more relevant or “truthful” form of aesthetics. After all, Marxism had its own elaborate aesthetics influenced by the philosophy of German idealism. 4 The situation changed with the arrival of poststructuralism and its replacement of the idea of the specifically literary with concepts such as writing, rhetoric, textuality, discourse, or representation. The crucial theoretical move of this new cultural radicalism in contrast to older forms of political radicalism lies, as I have argued elsewhere, in a shift in the definition of political power from the repression thesis, in which power is still enacted through agents and institutions of the state, to cultural forms or discursive regimes as the actual source of power, because these cultural forms constitute 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 217 5 A note on terminology: In the following discussion, I shall use the term “new revi‐ sionism” as a broad umbrella term for the description of the movement toward a revision of literary and cultural history, including canon revision, whereas the term “cultural radicalism” refers to a radical analysis of Western societies, shared by various approaches from New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, to race, class, and gender studies and postcolonial studies in which the primary source of power is no longer seen as political institutions but cultural forms. For a more detailed analysis of cultural radicalism, see my essay “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism.” the very ways in which we make sense of the world before we are even aware of it. 5 Inevitably, this redefinition of power must also change the view of the aesthetic: as long as power is located in agents of the state or institutions of society, the realm of the aesthetic can still be conceptualized as a counterrealm, if only for the articulation of a utopian impulse or a negation of systemic closure. Where, on the other hand, power is “everywhere,” including in cultural forms, the claim of aesthetic transcendence or even a negative aesthetics in the manner of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School can no longer be upheld. In his discussion of the work of Henry James, Mark Seltzer has used a neat neohistoricist chiasm to describe this fundamental reorientation by transforming the New Critical trust in the power of art into “the art of power.” Aesthetics thus becomes only another power game, which is, by and large, its theoretical status in the current cultural radicalism. As a consequence, it appears no longer necessary to deal with the dimension of the aesthetic and to employ it as a point of reference in the analysis of cultural material. On the contrary, to do so carries the immediate suspicion of an attempt to distract from the real issues. The current dominance of cultural studies is one result of these developments. The emergence of cultural studies as a new version of the field that used to be called philology and then literary studies can be seen as the logical outcome of the story I have traced. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to define cultural studies, because cultural studies is what you get when some of the more traditional criteria for defining the field are taken away. However, even in its most diffuse form, cultural studies reflects two major changes: (1) If nothing else, cultural studies is a field of programmatic dehierarchization. It breaks down the barriers between high culture and popular or mass culture and says that both - that all cultural practices - are worth studying. What distinguished post- World War II literary studies from philology was that it was based on certain aesthetic norms. Not all works qualified for serious professional consideration, and a crucial, if not the crucial, task of the critic was to determine what works were legitimate objects of study. To be sure, literary studies also dealt with 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 218 Winfried Fluck 6 Thus, for a long time, to deal with film usually meant to compare the literary source and filmic version - a comparison that always led to the same result, namely the claim that the film failed to match the complexity of the literary text. Again, the result confirmed the starting premise. so-called inferior works but only in order to characterize them as such. This definition of the field as constituted by aesthetic norms, and more specifically, by the search for specifically literary values, explains why this form of literary studies had such a hard time extending the discipline to other cultural forms such as film or, even worse, television. There simply wasn’t any way in which the concept of specifically literary values could be convincingly applied to a medium like film. 6 In contrast, there are no real canon wars within cultural studies (although cultural studies is, of course, very much at the center of the canon debates), because there is no longer a canon. In principle, “anything” goes. Cultural hierarchies are rejected as the foundation of the field, though their historical and cultural sources may be studied in investigations such as Raymond Williams’s. (2) If the aesthetic dimension is no longer the explicit or implicit point of reference in cultural studies, then the definition of the object to be studied must change. In postwar literary studies this object was the form or structure of the literary work - although one has to add that these seemingly neutral “technical” terms were already value-laden in characteristic ways. Structure, for example, was not any kind of formal organization but only a gestalt with certain regular patterns. In the formalist approach of the New Criticism, the starting premise is that the literary work distinguishes itself by its artful, organic structure, because only such a type of structure can constitute an object that is ontologically different from other, everyday discourses. In current cultural studies, the starting premise is that the text is part of a discursive network or regime which should become the object of study, because it exerts power by means of classification, representation, and exclusion. Consequently, power resides in rhetoric, or, more broadly, in representation (in the broad semiotic sense of the word). When texts can no longer be distinguished by whether or how they transcend power effects, or whether they are good or bad according to certain aesthetic premises, they must be constituted as objects on the basis of a new premise about their relevance and function. This assumption is now political. What makes the literary text an important object of study is no longer its power of transcendence but the fact that it exerts power. This power is not exerted through a particular form or structure (so that only some texts would exert power) but through the one aspect all objects of cultural studies have in common, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 219 7 Other instances of such a confusion of the aesthetic with a particular historical manifestation of it include the equation of the aesthetic with taste or refinement, its reduction to aestheticism or the superficial equation of aesthetics with elitism - superficial, because, obviously, working-class culture or popular culture also have an aesthetic dimension and, hence, their own aesthetics. namely that they are all representations. Representation is the most neutral, the most “dehierarchized” term one can find to describe the form in which the object (and its ideology) appear, and it has thus become one of the key words of analysis in cultural studies. Yet, the important thing to note here is that, inevitably, the concept of representation has its own normative base and thus, in a way, functions like aesthetic premises did in the New Criticism, that is, as a premise that guides all subsequent interpretive acts. If I have an aesthetic premise, that is, a premise about what constitutes value in the object, then I will search out those qualities and characteristics in my textual description and interpretation. Similarly, if I have a premise about why representation should be studied, namely because it is a manifestation of systemic power effects, then I will pay attention to features of the text in which power manifests itself in exemplary fashion, for only in this way can I describe the text as relevant choice, for example, by arguing, that the text is complicit with the social system or not. This point - that there are premises and normative concepts at work in any interpretation of cultural material - may, in fact, be granted by a revisionist critic, who would then argue, however, that in the new revisionism, the founding premise has undergone a welcome transformation from aesthetic to politics. This seems to confirm the claim that it is no longer useful or necessary to deal with the concept of the aesthetic and to make it a point of reference for critical practice. However, I want to claim that the new revisionism has systematically misunderstood and misrepresented the issue of aesthetics, because it has conflated the New Critical version of aesthetic value with the issue of aesthetics in general. 7 One may suspect that this conflation has two reasons. First, the New Critical aesthetics was the only one the new revisionists ever encountered in their academic socialization (while Marxist aesthetics, for example, was subsumed under the rubric “Critical Theory”). And secondly, they have done so because they could not hope for a better version of aesthetics in order to justify their own project of an historical and political criticism. But in conflating the question of aesthetics with its New Critical version, the new revisionism has disregarded other and different conceptualizations of the aesthetic, much, as I want to show, to its own disad vantage. For it is one of the unfortunate consequences of th is connation that the new revisionists seem to act on the completely mistaken assumption that they have to choose between 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 220 Winfried Fluck 8 Cf. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s characterization of this tradition: “This special value, often referred to as the text’s ‘essential literary value, or its ‘value as a work of literature,’ is sometimes said to reside in the text’s purely ‘formal’ as opposed to ‘material’ qualities, or in its ‘structure’ as opposed to its ‘meaning,’ or in its ‘underlying meaning’ as opposed to any obvious ‘theme,’ ‘subject,’ or ostensible ‘message’” (“Value/ Evaluation” 179). either aesthetics or politics, while, in reality, I shall claim, the two are inseparable and, in fact, mutually constitutive. One of the striking and puzzling aspects of the revisionist’s rejection of the aesthetic is its ahistorical approach to the issue. Although Fredric Jameson’s dictum “Always historicize! ” ( Jameson 9) has become something like the first commandment of the new revisionism, Jameson’s advice seems to be entirely forgotten as soon as the question of aesthetics is addressed by the new revision‐ ists. Because of a crude opposition between the political and the historical on the one side and the aesthetic on the other, the aesthetic appears to have only one function, namely the evasion of political views and historical explanations. As such, it always remains the same and always functions in the same manner. While everything else is subject to historical change, the meaning of the word aesthetic seems to stay the same. However, the New Critical conceptualization of aesthetic value is still a traditional aesthetics in the sense that the aesthetic is considered a quality of the text or object itself. The aesthetic is identified with a specific formal aspect of the work, so that the analysis of the work’s structure can also determine the nature of aesthetic experience. With this approach, New Criticism gave a scholarly, professionalized version to a long philosophical tradition. 8 The names for the intrinsic qualities change - a change that is in itself an interesting part of cultural history - but the idea that the aesthetic experience resides in intrinsic qualities of the work of art remains the same. This approach is self-defeating, however, for if it can be shown that these aesthetic values are not universally valid but instead are particular historical manifestations of the aesthetic, and that, moreover, they are read into the text rather than residing in it, or, they are created, even “invented” by certain cultural discourses, then the idea of the aesthetic seems to be thoroughly discredited. This happened to New Criticism when its contextualist version of organic unity was questioned in its universal applicability by pointing out that many so-called masterpieces, from Hamlet to Huck Finn, did not meet the criterion of organic unity and had to be submitted to a rather violent reinterpretation in order to save them as so-called literary masterpieces. Clearly, as long as one identifies the aesthetic with the assumption of an intrinsic quality, such reinterpretations are essential, for only if the object possesses an inherent quality described as aesthetic, will it be able to qualify as a legitimate object for literary studies. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 221 9 The pragmatist premises of the concept of aesthetic attitude are clarified by Jerome Stolnitz: “An attitude is a way of directing and controlling our perception. We never see or hear everything in our environment indiscriminately. Rather, we ‘pay attention’ to some things, whereas we apprehend others only dimly or hardly at all. Thus attention is selective - it concentrates on some features of our surroundings and ignores others” (78). But the equation of the aesthetic with an inherent quality, structure, or gestalt is by no means plausible. It is certainly not the only way in which we can speak about the aesthetic dimension of cultural objects. In fact, it presents a profound misunderstanding. In contrast, a number of different approaches such as pragmatism, Czech structuralism, and the reception theory of the Constance School have argued, each in its own way and with different emphases, that the aesthetic is not an inherent property of a text or object, so that an object either possesses aesthetic qualities or does not. Instead, it is argued that the aesthetic is constituted by the attitude we take toward an object and that it is hence not a word for a particular formal quality but for a distinct communicative mode and function. 9 The point is illustrated in John Dewey’s Art as Experience where Dewey evokes the scene of a number of men approaching the Manhattan skyline on a ferry. Toward this object of perception the men on the ferry’s attitudes might range from practical matters of orientation or an assessment of the real estate value of the buildings to an aesthetic appreciation of the skyline: Some men regard it as simply a journey to get them where they want to be a means to be endured. So, perhaps, they read a newspaper. One who is idle may glance at this and that building identifying it as the Metropolitan Tower, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and so on. Another, impatient to arrive, may be on the lookout for landmarks by which to judge progress toward his destination. Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view. He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying. Another person, interested in real estate, may see, in looking at the skyline, evidence in the height of buildings, of the value of land. Or he may let his thoughts roam to the congestion of a great industrial and commercial centre. He may go on to think of the planlessness of arrangement as evidence of the chaos of a society organized on the basis of conflict rather than cooperation. Finally the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river. He is now seeing esthetically, as a painter might see. (140) 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 222 Winfried Fluck 10 It is hard to provide an adequate translation of the philosophical concept of “sinnliche Erkenntnis.” “Sensory” is too empiricist and downplays the aspect of a meaningful, transformative experience in which a synthesis of sense impressions leads to a form of knowledge not to be gained through reason; “sensuous” bears connotations of sensuality which are not intended at all, in fact, are considered a perversion of aesthetic experience. For a succinct summary of the emergence of the concept of the aesthetic see Jürgen Peper: “The history of this concept begins, as is well known, with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s book Aesthetika (1750). The Greek term aisthetike (téchne), which means the study of sensuous perception, designates for Baumgarten a newly planned branch of epistemology. Alongside the traditional cognitio intellectiva, he places a newly defined cognitio sensitiva. While maintaining its previous function of supplying the rational faculties of cognition with sensuous data, it now gains an intrinsic value as the source of a pre-rational grasp of reality, ascribed by Baumgarten especially to art and poetry. This emphasis on art and poetry determined today’s use of the term ‘aesthetic.’ It is important, however, to keep in mind the epistemological core” (294). “Baumgarten’s specification of cognitio sensitiva as aesthetic signals the disintegration of the Platonic ideal unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. In fact, poetry and the fine arts now preclude the intellectual grasp of reason (cognitio intellectiva). Kant’s three Critiques provide us, then, with a systematized expression of this division of classical Reason into the spheres of science, morality, and art” (295). 11 Consequently, it makes no sense to be “against” aesthetics, since the aesthetic attitude is part and parcel of daily life. Implicitly, Dewey’s pragmatist shift from a philosophy of art or beauty to a view of the aesthetic as everyday social practice also undermines the equation of the aesthetic with the idealist project of subjectivation which forms one of the bases of the current radical critique of the ideology of the aesthetic. If the aesthetic is part of everyday life, it is also part of a conflictual, open-ended negotiation and staging of identity-formation that is marked by inherent instability. 12 Raymond Williams therefore praises Mukařovský as “the best representative” (152) of an approach in which the aesthetic is seen as a function of practice. One of the reasons for the evasive nature of bourgeois aesthetics which Williams deplores The aesthetic, here, is not a word for the intrinsic property of an object. Nor is it identical with art. Hence aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, is not only and not necessarily a philosophy of art. Nor is it restricted to the study of beauty. Experiences of the sublime, the uncanny, the grotesque, even the ugly have produced their own powerful and influential aesthetics. As a branch of philosophy, aesthetics has a much broader range than the beautiful. Historically, it emerged as a “science of sensuous knowledge” (“sinnliche Erkenntnis”). 10 As Dewey implies, such a mode of perception is a part of daily experience and hence, potentially, an everyday occurrence. 11 Similarly, the Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský argues that any object of the life-world can, in principle, be viewed (and interpreted) from a number of different perspectives. A building or a dress serves a practical function, but we can also, at the same time, look at them as aesthetic objects and we may even reflect upon the possible relations between the two aspects. 12 An 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 223 (“Aesthetic Theory is the main instrument of this evasion”) is that the potential of Mukařovský’s approach has been disregarded: “Mukařovský’s important work is best seen as the penultimate stage of the critical dissolution of the specializing and controlling categories of bourgeois aesthetic theory. Almost all the original advantages of this theory have been quite properly, indeed necessarily, abandoned” (153). Williams calls this process “necessary,” because as a form of social practice, aesthetics is reenacting a growing division of labor. 13 In his essay on functions in architecture, Mukařovský claims that wherever other functions, for whatever reasons, are weakened, dropped, or changed, the aesthetic function may take on an increased importance; he then insists that, in principle, “there is not an object which cannot become its vehicle or, conversely, an object which necessarily has to be its vehicle. If certain objects are produced with the direct intention of aesthetic effectiveness and are adapted formally to this intention, it by no means follows necessarily that they cannot lose this function partially or entirely, for example, because of a change in time, space, or milieu” (“On the Problem of Functions in Architecture” 244). The passage demonstrates that Mukařovsky’s aesthetic theory, in contrast to other forms of aesthetics, has no problem in accounting for changes in the critical assessment and evaluation of an aesthetic object. 14 Cf. the summary of Mukařovský’s position by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature: “Art is not a special kind of object but one in which the aesthetic function, usually mixed with other functions is dominant. Art, with other things (landscapes and dress, most evidently), gives aesthetic pleasure, but this cannot be transliterated as a sense of beauty or a sense of perceived form, since while these are central in the aesthetic function they are historically and socially variable, and in all real instances aesthetic function is, in this view, not the property or inherent quality of a privileged object we can then call a masterpiece. 13 On the contrary, we can, in principle, look at any object of perception or experience as an aesthetic object (cf. Mukařovský, “Aesthetic Function” 18). Take a subway map of Berlin, for example. At one moment, we may regard it as purely referential and rely on its truth-value; at the next moment, we may bracket the referential function for the time being and look at the pattern of subway lines as an aesthetic object that reminds us of an Egyptian hieroglyph; in a third moment, we may reflect on what this strangely irregular pattern can tell us about the historical growth patterns of Berlin’s subway system, including the possibility that it may have been designed by an artist for the purpose of illustrating or dramatizing this fact. In other words: referential and aesthetic dimensions do not occupy ontologically different planes. They interact with and complement one another. In even more radical fashion than Dewey, for whom aesthetic experience marks a culminating moment in which fragmented elements of daily experience are successfully reintegrated, the aesthetic, for Mukařovský, is created by a temporary and, possibly, fleeting shift in a hierarchy of functions that is in constant flux, so that each of the functions remains present and can, at every moment, regain dominance. 14 Consequently, the aesthetic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 224 Winfried Fluck concrete. At the same time the aesthetic function is ‘not an epiphenomenon of other functions’ but a ‘codeterminant of human reaction to reality’” (153). 15 Cf. Mukařovský’s description: “The limits of the province of aesthetics, therefore, are not provided by reality itself, and are exceedingly changeable. (…) We have all encountered people for whom anything can acquire an aesthetic function and, conversely, people for whom the aesthetic function exists only to a minimal degree. Even from our own personal experience we know that the borderline between the aesthetic and the extraaesthetic (…)-fluctuates for each person according to his age, changes in health, and even momentary moods” (“Aesthetic Function” 3). In his essay on architecture, Mukařovský employs images of extreme plasticity in order to determine the shifting relations between aesthetic function and other functions. He describes the aesthetic function in terms of air and darkness which creep into a room and fill out the spaces that have been vacated by the taking away of an object or the turning off of the light. 16 Or, to draw on Mukařovský’s argument: as an - in comparison with other functions - “empty” function, the aesthetic function depends on other functions in order to manifest itself. 17 The recent exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which created such heated public debates, is only the latest illustration of this project of contemporary art to transform the conspicuously profane into art. However, without a sacred or other reference still implied, this “profanization” would make no sense and would be pointless. 18 Harold Rosenberg was one of the first critics to describe this development. Cf. his description of the movement toward the “de-aestheticization” of art in the 1960s: “Ideally, art povera strives to reach beyond art to the wonder-working object, place cannot be defined as separate sphere. 15 Neither does it present a counterworld, nor does it come into existence by an act of transcendence or a retreat from reality. While looking at the subway map as an aesthetic object, we cannot completely suppress our awareness that it is a subway map. In fact, only on this background does the hieroglyphic pattern take on significance as an aesthetic object. It is not that we find hieroglyphic patterns pleasant or interesting in themselves. On the contrary, without reference to that which has been turned (temporarily) into a hieroglyphic pattern, the transformation would be pointless. 16 In order to be able to bracket a referential function, we first have to have a referential function. Many forms of recent art, such as, for example, pop art, junk art, or abject art, therefore set out by declaring everyday objects or, increasingly, thoroughly “profane” objects to be art objects in order to dramatize the redefining power of shifting attitudes that can transform even the “lowest“ - the most vulgar, junkiest, or most repulsive - materials into aesthetic objects. 17 Similarly, to take another extreme example from literature, in Donald Barthelme’s experimental postmodern story “The Glass Mountain” the dogshit on the streets of Manhattan, in its subtle color shadings, can take on an almost sublime aesthetic quality. 18 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 225 (“environment”), or event. It extends the dada-surrealist quest for the revelatory found object into unlimited categories of strange responses. 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 constructed. Anything - breakfast food, a frozen lake, film footage - is art, either as is or tampered with, through being chosen as fetish” (37). As Rosenberg indicates, de-aestheticization paves the way for reaestheticization. It does not do away with aesthetics, it paves the way for a new aesthetics. 19 In his essay “Die Bedeutung der Ästhetik” (The Importance of Aesthetics), reprinted in the collection Kunst. Poetik, Semiotik, Mukařovský gives the example of gymnastics. As long as our perception of physical exercise is dominated by practical functions (gaining strength, strengthening certain muscles, etc.), we will focus on aspects that help achieve those goals and will judge the single exercise by how well it helps to realize the desired result. Once the aesthetic function becomes dominant, on the other hand, the exercise takes on interest in itself as a performance or spectacle. The various movements, the sequence of movements, and even the “useless” details of the periods between different exercise may now become objects of attention for their own sake. The significatory dimension of reality is foregrounded and the sign is of interest sui generis. Even the “wrong” movements may now be of interest as movements, not just as “wrong” movements. 20 Jürgen Peper therefore describes the aesthetic function as “experimental and experien‐ tial epistemology” (296). Thus, if an aesthetic object has a political function, then on communicative, “experimental” conditions of its own. This is an important point, because it helps to underline the fact that taking an aesthetic attitude toward an object does not mean, or, at least, does not necessarily mean, that we disengage the object or ourselves from reality. By conceding that the object may not be identical with reality, we do not have to assert that it is autonomous or that it has nothing to do with that reality. In changing our attitude toward an object, the aesthetic function may become dominant, but it is not becoming exclusive. What exactly does it mean, then, to take an aesthetic attitude? The concept refers to the capacity of any system of signification to draw attention to itself as a form of expression and to refer to itself as a sign, thus drawing our attention to the organizing and patterning principles by which the object is constituted. 19 For this purpose, the object is temporarily depragmatized and dereferentialized. We no longer insist that reality be truthfully represented by our subway map, because only in this way can we concentrate on the object itself. This temporary bracketing of reference is useful and often gives pleasure, not because it allows us to escape, if only temporarily, from reality but because it opens up the possibility of a new perspective on the object and, by implication, on reality. 20 We discover aspects of the object which we have missed in our exclusive concentration on the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 226 Winfried Fluck 21 In this sense, the aesthetic function becomes dominant when the referential function is bracketed. There are two main reasons why this may occur: (1) the gradual loss of other functions, such as, for example, in the gradual aestheticization of objects of material culture which have lost their practical function, and (2) at the other pole, the possibility that the referential function is still being explored, which can also result in the dominance of the aesthetic function. In his essay on architecture, Mukařovský describes these possible forms of relation with reference to the aesthetic and the practical function. The aesthetic function, he argues, not only becomes dominant where practical functions disappear. It accompanies a process of constant shifts in the hierarchy of practical functions and, thus, can also have the effect of anticipating future practical functions by providing a possibility of articulation before these functions are able to gain any cultural or political acceptance. (In Critical Theory, this would be called the utopian function of art.) In this way, the aesthetic function plays an important role in historical development and can be seen as one important manifestation of it. 22 From this perspective, claims for the autonomy of art are heuristic claims (e.g. for a temporary bracketing of the referential or practical function) in order to allow art to do its cultural work on conditions of its own. Often, discussions of the “autonomy” or “disinterestedness”-premise ignore this heuristic dimension, “mistaking the possibility of a specific experience called ‘aesthetic’ by a temporary bracketing of exoteric purposes for an ontological claim of autonomous existence” (Grabes, “Errant Specialisms” 160). In order to emphasize the heuristic dimension of the temporary bracketing of referential or other functions, Peper redefines autonomy as the “free play” of reason in a specific sense: “Thus, the pre-rational cognitive powers could not obtain free play (autonomy) except through the bracketing of reason (cognitio intellectiva)” (297). This “‘free play’ is an epoché [in the phenomenological sense of a temporary bracketing of cognition and knowledge] for a limited time, prompted by scepticism about the higher, generalizing faculties of cognition, and motivated heuristically” (299). It may be used for purposes of subjectivation and even subjection but, as many examples of contemporary art demonstrate, also to subvert such subjectivation. Cf., for example, Jon Simon’s chapter “Transgression and Aesthetics” in his book on Foucault, in which the aesthetic is discussed as a form that can promote new modes of subjectivity. This refutes the argument, employed by Pease and others, that the aesthetic is per se a mode of subjection or ideological subject formation: “Moreover Foucault’s support for the new social movements of marginal groups such as women, gays and radical ecologists is said to rest on ‘an aesthetic subject’ which highlights those aspects of subjectivity excluded by modernity, i.e. ‘pre-rational embodied otherness,’ as well as ‘spontaneity and expressiveness’” (79). referential function. 21 At the same time, the dominance of the aesthetic function does not mean that the reference is cancelled. On the contrary, the temporary change in perspective only makes sense (and is only meaningful) as long as the reference to reality is not lost. The referential and the aesthetic function always coexist. 22 The new perspective on the object can only be experienced in its various possibilities of revelation, criticism, intensification of experience or pleasure as long as the reference is kept in view, so that we are constantly moving back and forth between the newly created world and the reference that 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 227 23 Peper thus states that “aesthetic effects can only unfold against and into the nonaesthetic. (…) The aesthetic pleasure in the free play of cognitive powers is most intense where - far from empty arbitrariness - it has to be gained within a given conceptual structure, making us aware of this level of cognition as the reflexive play of forces” (314-15). 24 It should be added, however, that “new” interpretation does not necessarily mean politically advanced. It is part of the freedom opened up by art that the disagreement with reality can also come from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Thus, art is neither “progressive” by definition, nor reactionary. As Robert Hellenga points out in his essay “What Is A Literary Experience Like? ”, it merely opens up new possibilities of articulation. The term “aesthetic function” refers to a specific condition of communication (“Wirkungsbedingung”). It does not yet tell us anything about “real” functions art may have had in history (something only a detailed historical analysis can clarify), only about the specific communicative conditions for these functions. 25 When I first presented this paper in the United States, one of the defensive reactions was that Mukařovský has long been known and was now considered an “old hat.” Obviously, however, his significance and potential contribution to current debates has not been fully grasped by this form of “cutting edge” criticism, for otherwise it would not be understandable how the traditional conflation of aesthetic function and aesthetic value can continue. By disregarding the concept of aesthetic function and conflating it with aesthetic value, the current revisionism can claim that aesthetics, by concepts such as “disinterestedness,” denies that the aesthetic has a function. The absurd consequences are pointed out in Guillory’s discussion of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s counterargument in her Contingencies of Value: “For Smith the refutation of the traditional denial by aesthetics of the utility of the artwork is surprisingly simple: one only has to reassert the artwork’s purpose or ‘use’; but that use turns out be [sic] nothing less than all the uses to which the work may be put as an object not generically different - with respect to use - from any other object. And of course, one cannot predict or limit the uses to which any object has served as a point of departure for this reinterpretation. 23 In this sense, the aesthetic object can be described as repetition with a difference which links the real and the imaginary in a new constellation. The temporary bracketing of the referential and practical function of the object does not mean that the object’s relation to reality is erased. On the contrary, it is put on new grounds, and the clarification of this new relation is one of the major tasks of literary criticism and art criticism. The aesthetic mode opens up the possibility of a new interpretation of the world. 24 It draws attention to aspects that have been overlooked, ignored, or suppressed. We may not approve of this new interpretation and may criticize it, but in order to criticize it meaningfully, we first of all have to acknowledge it in its own right. Dewey’s and Mukařovský’s description of what it means to take an aesthetic attitude has a crucial theoretical advantage over traditional forms of aesthetics: it allows us to distinguish between two aspects that have been continuously conflated and confused in recent attacks on the concept of the aesthetic, namely the aspects of aesthetic function and aesthetic value. 25 Aisthesis means both the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 228 Winfried Fluck may be put” (291). Interestingly enough, Smith has a footnote in her Contingencies of Value in which she acknowledges Mukařovský only to dismiss him: “Monroe Beardsley’s ‘instrumentalist’ theory of aesthetic value in Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York, 1958), pp. 524-576, and Mukařovský’s otherwise quite subtle explorations of these questions in Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Prague, 1936), trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970), do not altogether escape the confinements and circularities of formalist conceptions of, respectively, ‘aesthetic experience’ and ‘aesthetic function’” (192n.). It would be interesting indeed to learn more about what aspects of Mukařovský’s argument Smith considers “subtle” and how this is related to Mukařovský’s concept of aesthetic function. 26 This, in fact, may provide a possible explanation for the striking absence of the term aesthetics in Frank Lentricchia’s representative handbook, Critical Terms for Literary Study. Most likely, the editors Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin assumed that the phenomenon of the aesthetic was covered by the entry “Value/ Evaluation.” Similarly, in his introduction to the volume Aesthetics and Ideology, George Levine undermines his own laudable project of - to quote the title of his introduction - “Reclaiming the Aesthetic” and regaining a sense of its “central importance” (17) by equating the aesthetic with “questions of literary value” and fighting contemporary criticism’s “reluctance to engage the question of literary value” (13). 27 To avoid a possible misunderstanding: these two descriptions - skyline as lighted and colored volumes; subway map as hieroglyphic pattern - are, of course, not the only possible ways in which the object can be seen aesthetically. Depending on different aesthetics, different aspects will be emphasized. Dewey’s description, for example, clearly reflects his own latently organicist aesthetics which I have analyzed in more detail in my essay on “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” ability to perceive and the power to judge. For most contemporary revisionist critics of the aesthetic, however, aesthetics appears to be synonymous with evaluation and, more specifically, with a suspect hierarchy of values. 26 In contrast, Dewey and Mukařovský claim that the taking of an aesthetic attitude only constitutes a different object by setting the aesthetic function dominant. When, in looking at the Manhattan skyline or the Berlin subway map, we take an aesthetic attitude, it opens up the possibility of perceiving these objects as, in Dewey’s words, a set of “colored and lighted volumes” or, in my example of the subway map, as a hieroglyphic pattern. 27 However, whether we consider these colored and lighted volumes or the hieroglyphic pattern of the subway pleasing or an especially impressive manifestation of its kind, is quite another matter and logically distinct from constituting the object of perception as an aesthetic object. Logically distinct, but not separate. Clearly, the two categories and aspects are interdependent. Inevitably, my consciously or unconsciously held values will influence my constitution of the aesthetic object, just as, on the other hand, my - often tacit - assumptions about the function of literature will shape my aesthetic value judgments. A critic may argue, for example, on the basis of certain premises of what constitutes a work of art, that objects in which 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 229 28 This tacit assumption about the function of the aesthetic will, in turn, be embedded in a specific view of society and interpretation of history. Every aesthetic judgement therefore implies overt or covert assumptions about society, and every aesthetics is at the same time also a philosophy of history in nuce. 29 For a detailed discussion of the logical dependence of every interpretation of an aesthetic object on underlying concepts of reality, society, and the specific role of literature within this concept, see my study of the constitutive role of aesthetic premises in Huck Finn criticism (Ästhetisches Vorverständnis und Methode). For a discussion of the theoretical dilemma produced by the unwillingness of the new revisionism to openly discuss the issues of aesthetic function and aesthetic value, see my review of Jonathan Arac’s otherwise excellent book, ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as Idol and Target, “‘Huckleberry Finn’: Liberating an American Classic from Hypercanonization.” 30 The canon debate which has brought the issue of aesthetics on the agenda again is really a debate about different concepts of what constitutes an aesthetic object. single parts blend harmoniously may be best suited to invite the observer to take an aesthetic attitude, just as, on the other hand, taking an aesthetic attitude may mean for a particular observer to focus on certain characteristic features that constitute aesthetic value for him or her. And yet, it is precisely because of this interdependence that it is necessary to keep the two aspects logically apart. We have to keep them apart in order to be able to grasp the ways in which these assumptions shape and determine our interpretations of literary texts and cultural practices. Before we can assess the aesthetic value of an object, we have to constitute it as an aesthetic object. Taking an aesthetic attitude means constructing an aesthetic object on the basis of a guiding assumption about the function of art or the aesthetic. 28 This founding assumption will in turn influence my judgment of the aesthetic value of the object. The reception history of many artistic works demonstrates that, even when critics agree that a literary text such as, for example, Huckleberry Finn, is a masterpiece, they will still disagree on the specific reasons why, because they hold different notions about the function of art and, consequently, different views about what constitutes aesthetic value. 29 Aesthetic evaluations thus have their often unacknowledged base and justification in their tacit premises about what constitutes an aesthetic function. This also means, however, that they are open to rational dispute at this point. 30 Let us go back for a moment to our subway map. In principle, I said, any object can become an aesthetic object if an aesthetic attitude is taken toward it and its aesthetic function is made dominant. The object itself, however, can also encourage us to take such an attitude. This is especially obvious in the case of fictional texts (in the broadest sense of the word as any form of “invented” representation). Once we classify a representation as fictional, we can no longer regard the object as predominantly referential. Because a fictional text does not merely replicate reality but embodies it in new shape and form, understanding a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 230 Winfried Fluck 31 Cf. Rachel Brownstein’s description of the doubleness of a novel heroine: “In one sense this doubleness of a novel heroine is perfectly obvious. Every good reader recognizes a heroine as a representation of an actual woman and, at the same time, as an element in a work of art. She does not regard a woman in a novel as if she were one of her acquaintances; she experiences how the context of the fiction limits a character’s freedom and determines her style. (…) The reader identifies with Elizabeth, and as she does so accepts the rules involved in being Elizabeth, and at the same time she sees how the rules determine that Elizabeth be as she is - not merely the rules of the society Jane Austen’s novel represents, but also the rules that govern the representation of it, the novel” (xxiii). 32 In his entry on “representation” in the critical handbook Critical Terms for Literary Study, W.J.T. Mitchell speaks of “the complex interaction between playful fantasy and serious reality in all forms of representation” (12). 33 In summarizing prior work on the psychology of reading, J.A. Appleyard speaks of “the double state of mind we experience by immersing ourselves in a work of literature; we are both ‘participants’ and ‘spectators’” (39) at the same time. fictional text cannot simply be a mimetic act of recognition. Rather, we have to create the object anew. Since we have never met a character named Huckleberry Finn and do, in fact, know that he never existed, we have to come up with our own mental representation of him. Inevitably, we invest our own emotions, draw on our own associations and form our own mental images in imagining characters like Huck Finn or Isabel Archer and make them come alive so that we can become interested in their fate. These imaginary elements can only gain a gestalt, however, if they are based on discourses of the real. 31 Thus, a character like Huck Finn emerges as a combination of a Victorian local-color discourse of a figure of the bad boy on the one hand, and our imaginary complementation of the figure on the other. 32 If it weren’t for the bad-boy discourse, there would be no reference and thus no common object of debate, while, on the other hand, the imaginary elements are the reason for the puzzling and often frustrating phenomenon that we can come up with ever new interpretations of one and the same book. Fictional forms of representation bring an object into our world but they are not identical with this object. They create an object that is never stable and identical with itself. Fictional representation is thus, to use Wolfgang Iser’s words, a performative mode: “Representation can only unfold itself in the recipient’s mind, and it is through his active imaginings alone that the intangible can become an image” (“Representation” 243). Taking an aesthetic attitude thus becomes the source of non-identity, and it is this non-identity, in turn, which can be seen as a source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us, for example, to be inside and outside of a character at the same time. 33 We can look at ourselves from the outside and, in doing so, create another, more expressive version of ourselves. Fiction is an especially potent and heightened means of taking the role of the other and of looking back at oneself from that perspective. As Wolfgang 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 231 34 On the complex and complicated processes of transfer that are set in motion by the perception or reconstitution of an object as aesthetic see my essay “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” Iser puts it: “In this respect the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not. In order to produce the determinate form of an unreal character, the actor must allow his own reality to fade out. At the same time, however, he does not know precisely who, say, Hamlet is, for one cannot properly identify with a character who has never existed. Thus role-playing endows a figment with a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies total determination. (…) Staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader” (244). Non-identity, in other words, is that element of an aesthetic experience which makes it possible to review and reexperience reality. If aesthetic representation is characterized by non-identity, however (which is something entirely different from “autonomy”), then interpretation is also always a transfer and a role-play, the creation of another self, the staging of a new identity, or the articulation of a socially otherwise stigmatized impulse. 34 In Trilling’s case it is clearly the first. Trilling, however, was not the last critic who described a moral struggle on the basis of his own experiences and needs, or, to put it in hermeneutical terms, in terms of his own horizon. To be sure, his interpretation of Huckleberry Finn was a role-play, with Huck cast in the role of nonconformist postwar liberal and the slave-holding South in the role of Stalinism, real or imagined. But if this is true for the past, then it must also be true for the present. The practice continues. There is a tendency in current revisionist criticism to imply that critics may have enacted such critical role-plays in the past for ideological reasons, but that the current historical and political criticism is no longer in need of such “disguises,” because it expresses its own interests and politics openly. In contrast, I have argued that such processes are inescapable because of the radicalized form of non-identity on which aesthetic representation is based. In other words: even political criticism cannot help but create an aesthetic object when it interprets a fictional text. Or, to put it differently, and in a sufficiently polemical manner: politics, if articulated via literary or cultural representations, becomes an aesthetic phenomenon. This appears to be most obvious to me in the current interest in the racially other, e.g. in the massive self-racialization or self-ethnicization which characterizes not only American and European culture at large, as, for example in the movies of Quentin Tarantino, but literary and cultural studies as well. Such role plays are not only at work in cultural crossovers, however. They are also at work in identity politics, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 232 Winfried Fluck 35 Such a history would have to include, especially in view of recent developments, instances of a homogenization, if not essentializing, of imaginary communities not only on the basis of “constructed” identities but, even more so, desired identities. for clearly the racial or ethnic identity a critic affirms through a literary text is also a creation, the construct of an imaginary identity which does not exist in this form in the real world. It is true that the nation is an imaginary community, but it is not the only one. This, in fact, is where cultural studies comes in again and where it can draw on the original insights of Raymond Williams. What I have described so far affects cultural studies in three ways: (1) For a number of reasons, cultural studies are especially tempted to use the concept of representation in a mimetic rather than a performative sense. However, the performative mode of cultural material is not restricted to deliberately self-referential works. It is a characteristic of all fictional texts and aesthetic objects. (2) The processes of transfer and critical role-playing which are inextricably linked to descriptions and interpretations of aesthetic objects do not only occur, of course, in literary studies. They may be even more prominent in cultural studies. In fact, one explanation for the popularity of cultural studies may be that it facilitates such processes, because its objects often invite role-play more easily than, let us say, experimental texts. Responding to popular culture, for example, one can shake off the burdensome role of the complex intellectual and go back to “immediate experience,” to use Robert Warshow’s words, that is, to a relatively direct, immediate expression of strong emotions. What may be even more important in this context is that cultural studies were generated by the crucial insight that critical analyses, including value judgments, are also always cultural acts of self-definition and self-empowerment in which readers, audiences, or critics make use of the non-identity of aesthetic objects in order to articulate their own needs and interests. The history of literary criticism is usually written as that of theoretical and methodological progress. It has yet to be written as a history of changing acts of self-fashioning. 35 I think that the current revisionism is wonderfully perceptive in analyzing critical role-plays of the past, but strangely disinterested in acknowledging the elements of transfer and role-play in its own critical practice. Perhaps, one reason for this omission is the belief that such an analysis would undermine its own politics. In contrast, I believe that it makes for a better politics, because it adds a needed dimension of self-awareness and self-reflexivity. The current rejection of the aesthetic and its displacement with the political is in itself a cultural act, that is, an act of self-definition and self-empowerment which can be seen in a larger historical context. The reason why Raymond Williams characterized the aesthetic as a form of evasion lay in what he saw as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 233 36 For a theoretical debate of this movement, see Hal Foster’s anthology “The Anti- Aesthetic.” 37 Fittingly, a recent German anthology of cutting-edge comments on aesthetics by leading poststructuralists and postmodern thinkers is called Aisthesis: Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik (Aisthesis: Perception Today, or, Perspectives of a Radically Different Aesthetics), emphasizing the purely physical and sensory dimension against the traditional idea of “sensuous knowledge.” 38 Cf. the introductory justification of his approach in his essay on Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Aesthetic Value: “Modern art, beginning with Naturalism does not ignore an area of reality when choosing its subject matter and, beginning with Cubism and similar movements in other branches of art, no restriction is placed on the choice of materials or technique. All of the foregoing provides sufficient evidence that even those items which, in the traditional aesthetic view, would not have been credited with aesthetic potential, can now become aesthetic facts” (Aesthetic Function 2). Reflecting the fact that Mukařovský’s approach was decisively influenced by the aesthetic revolution ushered in by the art of modernism, Raymond Williams writes, “Mukařovský’s important work is best seen as the penultimate stage of the critical dissolution of the specializing and controlling categories of bourgeois aesthetic theory” and then adds, “Mukařovský, from within this tradition, in effect destroyed it” (153-54). The close, inextricable link between the history of art, modernity, and the history of aesthetics is also the subject of Luc Ferry’s study Homo Aestheticus. its separation from social processes. His critique of the concept had the purpose of overcoming this separation: if, in a particular stage of the division of labor, “art and thinking about art have to separate themselves (…) from the social processes within which they are still contained,” then “we have to reject ‘the aesthetic’ both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function” (154-56). This project of overcoming the separation between the aesthetic and the social sphere is by no means new, however. It reenacts the avant-garde’s ongoing attempts, starting with dadaism and surrealism, to erase the separation of art and life by destroying the aura of the work of art. In reaction to idealist aesthetics, the modern avant-garde has authorized and defined itself by ever renewed attacks on the aesthetic as a realm of special, transcendent values. This has resulted in increasingly radical attempts to dissociate the practice of art from aesthetics, and has finally led to a programmatically antiaesthetic stance. 36 The development is analyzed in a number of “post-aesthetic” theories about an ongoing process of “de-aestheticization” (H. Rosenberg), the “delimitation of the aesthetic sphere” (D. Wellershoff), or the “disenfranchisement of art” (A. Danto). 37 In fact, Mukařovský’s revision of aesthetic theory can already be seen as an important stage in this development. 38 The search for a radical delimitation of the aesthetic sphere has had two major consequences. One is a far-reaching cultural dehierarchization; the other, surprising and unforeseen, consequence, is what could be called a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 234 Winfried Fluck 39 In fact, one might claim that, far from being discarded, the aesthetic, at present, has had something of a comeback in contemporary thought: “From the closeness of deconstruction’s affirmative ‘freeplay’ to the ‘free play of the imagination’ in tra‐ ditional aesthetics, to the aestheticization of the ethical in postmodern philosophy; from the revival of the sublime to the aestheticising of the ‘Lebenswelt’; from the recourse to modernist collage in New Historicism, and to modernist temporality in post-histoire anti-utopian visions, and from the poetic quality of pre-symbolic women’s writing to the recent notion of culture as a self-deconstructive text - postmodernism and anti-foundationalism has, wittingly or unwittingly, come extremely close to the sphere that traditionally bears its foundation within itself: the aesthetic” (Grabes, “New Developments in Literary Aesthetics” 297). 40 This can explain the, at first sight, puzzling and seemingly contradictory fact that a contemporary philosopher of art such as Richard Shusterman can, to quote the titles of two of his essays, speak of the “The End of Aesthetic Experience” and, at the same time, can draw attention to an “aesthetic turn” in contemporary thought in his essay “Postmodernism and the Aesthetic Turn.” 41 For a more detailed analysis of this process see my essay “Radical Aesthetics.” As Shusterman points out in his essay “Postmodernism and the Aesthetic Turn,” in contemporary philosophy aesthetics takes the place of reason. He then goes on to ask “whether aesthetics or politics will inherit the primacy that philosophy has lost” (620). Actually, however, this is not an either-or issue. As a result of the delimitation of the aesthetic, the two are converging in unforeseen ways. pan-aestheticization. 39 Both, seemingly contradictory, developments can be seen as two sides of the same coin. 40 If art and life no longer occupy different planes of cultural hierarchy, then art is no longer a transcendent realm but another social practice. As a result, it has to establish new sources of authority. This leads to an interesting trajectory: (1) because the aesthetic is said to mask power, the authority of the aesthetic has to be unmasked, deconstructed, or subverted; (2) to counter the potential loss of cultural distinction resulting from the radical dehierarchization, art (as well as the institutions of criticism and academic scholarship) need a new marker of significance; (3) this new marker of significance can only come from one of the remaining areas of cultural authority such as the realm of political commitment. 41 Ironically, however, this extension of the sphere of the political cannot leave the political unaffected. It is contaminated, so to speak, by the aesthetic and this, in turn, leads to an aestheticization of politics. Aestheticization of politics means that politics is no longer authorized by a systematic analysis of the political, social, or economic system but by privileged forms of cultural representation. The attempt to overcome the separation between aesthetics and politics thus has a paradoxical effect. Since both aesthetics and politics are delimited, the boundaries between them become permeable. The political extends into the aesthetic dimension 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 235 but the delimitation also works the other way round: the aesthetic dimension also extends into the sphere of the political and transforms it into cultural performance, that is, into an aesthetic object. The major reason for the new revisionism’s reluctance to consider questions of aesthetics is not merely a disagreement over aesthetic values. If it were, one only would have to replace one set of values with another. The actual disagreement is one about the function literary texts or other aesthetic objects have (or should have) in society. To accept aesthetics as a central term would mean to accept the premise of non-identity, while the whole point of the revisionist project is to erase the difference between politics and aesthetics, so that literary texts can have a direct political function and the profession of literary criticism can be redefined as political work. In contrast, I have argued (1) that the difference between the two realms cannot be erased and that attempts to do so only lead to exactly the opposite result: not to a politicization of aesthetics but to an aestheticization of politics, a restaging of politics through imaginary roleplays of self-empowerment, and (2) that it is a case of muddled thinking to assume that an object can only have “progressive” political functions, if it is “deaestheticized.” Instead, I would argue that the only meaningful way in which aesthetic objects can have social or political functions is as aesthetic objects that make use of the special communicative possibilities created by the taking of an aesthetic attitude. If the new revisionism is beginning to rediscover and reclaim aesthetics, as some recent developments seem to indicate, then I would therefore strongly support this attempt. Such a recovery is to be supported on professional grounds, because the concept of the aesthetic, as I have tried to argue in this essay, must be seen as an indispensable category for cultural studies. But, if one wants to, it is also to be supported on political grounds, for only in this way can the growing aestheticization of politics be grasped, which is one consequence of the current conflation of the political and the aesthetic. Works Cited Appleyard, J.A. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Arac, Jonathan. ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Barck Karlheinz et. al. Aisthesis: Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik. Leipzig: Reclam, 1990. Barthelme, Donald. “The Glass Mountain.” City Life. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. 67-74. Brodhead, Richard H. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 236 Winfried Fluck Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Penguin, 1982. Childers, Joseph, and Gary Hentzi, ed. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Danto, Arthur C. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Dewey, John. Art as Experience: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Vol. 10: 1934. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1987. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. London: Blackwell, 1990. ---. Ästhetik: Die Geschichte ihrer Ideologie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994. Ferry, Luc. Homo Aestheticus. Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquella, 1990. Fluck, Winfried. Ästhetische Theorie und literaturwissenschaftliche Methode: Eine Unter‐ suchung ihres Zusammenhangs am Beispiel der amerikanischen Huck Finn-Kritik. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975. ---. “Radical Aesthetics.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 10 Aesthetics and Contemporary Discourse. Ed. Herbert Grabes. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. 31-47. ---. “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism.” Cultural Critique 40 (1998): 49-71. ---. “‘Huckleberry Finn’: Liberating an American Classic from Hypercanonization.” Annals of Scholarship 13 (1999): 123-26. ---. “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 15 Pragmatism and Literary Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübingen: Narr, 1999. 227-242. Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Grabes, Herbert. “Errant Specialisms: The Recent Historicist Turn Away From Aes‐ thetics.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 11 The Historical and Political Turn in Literary Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübingen: Narr, 1995. 159-72. ---. “Introduction to New Developments in Literary Aesthetics.” Anglistentag 1994 Graz. Ed. Wolfgang Riehle and Hugo Keiper. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995. 297-98. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hellenga, Robert R. “What Is a Literary Experience Like? ” New Literary History 14 (1982-83): 105-115. Iser, Wolfgang. “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 236-48. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 237 Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Lentricchia, Frank, and Thomas McLaughlin, ed. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Levine, George. “Introduction: Reclaiming the Aesthetic.” Aesthetics and Ideology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 1-28. Mitchell, W.J.T. “Representation.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 11-22. Mukařovský, Jan. Kapitel aus der Ästhetik. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1966. ---. “Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts.” Michigan Slavic Contributions 3. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1970. Translated and edited by Mark E. Suino. ---. “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture.” Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukařovský. Translated and edited by John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. 236-250. ---. “Zum Problem der Funktionen in der Architektur.” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 5 (1983): 217-28. ---. Kunst, Poetik, Semiotik. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. Pease, Donald E. “Martin Eden and the Limits of the Aesthetic Experience.” boundary 2.25 (1988): 139-60. Peper, Jürgen. “The Aesthetic as a Democratizing Principle.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 10 Aesthetics and Contemporary Discourse. Ed. H. Grabes. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. 293-323. Rosenberg, Harold. “De-aestheticization.” The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks. New York: Horizon Press, 1972. Ross, Stephen David, ed. Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. 3rd ed. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. Schödlbauer, Ulrich. “Ästhetische Erfahrung.” Erkenntnis der Literatur: Theorien, Kon‐ zepte, Methoden der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Dietrich Harth and Peter Gebhardt. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982. 33-55. Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Shusterman, Richard. “The End of Aesthetic Experience.” Working Paper J.F. Kennedy- Institut für Nordamerikastudien No. 91. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 1996. ---. “Postmodernism and the Aesthetic Turn.” Poetics Today 10 (1989): 605-22. Simons, Jon. “Transgression and Aesthetics.” Foucault & the Political. London: Routledge, 1995. 68-80. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 238 Winfried Fluck ---. “Value/ Evaluation.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 177-185. Stolnitz, Jerome. “The Aesthetic Attitude.” Aesthetics: The Big Questions. Ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 78-83. Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience. New York: Doubleday, 1962. Wellershoff, Dieter. Die Auflösung des Kunstbegriffs. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1976. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. ---. “Aesthetic and other Situations.” Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford Univer‐ sity Press, 1977. 151-57. ---. Culture and Society, 1780—1950. New York: Harper, 1996. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 239 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited Rita Felski That I feel an affinity with the work of Winfried Fluck - that I think of him as not just a good friend but as an intellectual compatriot and comrade-in-arms - has much to do with our shared concerns and overlapping commitments. We’ve both queried the overreach of a suspicious hermeneutics that bores into texts for evidence of a political guilt that’s been presumed at the outset. We also, however, harbor reservations about an alternative stance that grounds the value of literature in the sole metric of resistance, subversion, and critique. Our discussions of aesthetic experience veer away from the established tenets of Kantian as well as Marxist thought, drawing on a pragmatist tradition running from Dewey to Schusterman. We agree that the question of reception is unavoidable in any reckoning with the social lives of literature, though Fluck has a stronger commitment to the work of Wolfgang Iser than I’ve been able to muster. And we’ve both written about the centrality and complexity of recognition processes as one aspect of such reception. Fluck’s “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” published in 2002, was an eye-opening essay for me in clearing away various misconceptions of the aesthetic. Its account of how “the aesthetic mode opens up the possibility of a new interpretation of the world” (in this volume 228) remains as essential now as it was two decades ago. Our views of cultural studies are not quite so perfectly aligned. As I reread David Scott’s letters to Stuart Hall in his Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017), I am struck by Scott’s case for clarification - rather than critique or even interpretation - as the most fitting register for the give-and-take between intellectual friends. Clarification, notably, is not concerned principally with the truth as such of another’s discourse. And consequently it doesn’t present itself in an adversarial or combative attitude. (…) Clarification is a way of approaching thinking - and learning - that aims to make us more aware of what we are saying or doing. (15-16) In the second half of my essay, I clarify some possible reasons for our differing takes on cultural studies. Even as Fluck’s body of work draws on an eclectic and expansive range of theoretical frameworks, including Gadamer, Honneth, Habermas, Bourdieu, G. H. Mead, Norbert Elias, Martha Nussbaum, and many others, he mainly writes to and about the field of American literature and American studies. A formative part of my own career, meanwhile, was spent in a school of communication working alongside key figures in British cultural studies such as Ien Ang and John Hartley. How might these locations - the places from which we see - affect our differing perspectives on cultural studies? The Aesthetic Function When I came across Fluck’s essay two decades ago, I was especially struck by his quotation of, and commentary on, a passage from Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). Dewey is describing a group of individuals on board a ferry as it approaches the Manhattan skyline; one person is idly identifying the buildings that are slowly filing past; another is searching for landmarks that will guide him toward his final destination; yet another is thinking about the commercial value of the buildings and the challenges of urban planning. “Finally,” writes Dewey, “the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to each other.” The person on the ferry who’s appreciating the skyline in this fashion is “seeing aesthetically, as a painter might” (Dewey qtd. in Fluck, “Aesthetics,” 222). Why does Fluck single out this passage? It captures, in a vivid tableau, a key premise of Dewey’s thought; that aesthetics is part of everyday life rather than being a disposition that is restricted to those equipped with education and cultural capital. “An aesthetic function,” Fluck writes in his commentary on this passage, “is, in this view, not the property or inherent quality of a privileged object we can then call a masterpiece. On the contrary, we can, in principle, look at any object of perception or experience as an aesthetic object” (“Aesthetics,” 224). Aesthetic theory, in other words, cannot be divorced from aesthetic experience, which is seen by Dewey as a distillation or condensation of life - characterized by its vividness and coherence - rather than being cut off from life. Taking issue with what he calls the museum conception of art, Dewey underscores the many continuities, as well as differences, between aesthetic and ordinary experience. From such a perspective, the rejection of aesthetics by literary scholars looks like a category mistake. What they are typically objecting to is the much nar‐ rower idea of formalism: the claim that a select group of works possess unique 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 242 Rita Felski formal properties that define an exemplary condition of “literariness.” The New Critics, for example, vetoed any engagement with social and philosophical topics, along with the intentions of authors and the feelings of readers, in favor of a painstaking attention to the words on the page. Interpretation became a matter of demonstrating how equal yet antithetical meanings were being held in delicate suspense within a single poem: of teasing out patterns of irony, ambiguity, and paradox as they came together to compose an organic whole. As Fluck remarks, such values were inspired by the tenets of modernist aesthetics as well as the perceived need to legitimate literary study by separating it sharply from lay reading as well as other disciplines, yet they were presented as universal and omnipresent features of literature. The technique of close reading, held up as a way of doing justice to the qualities of a specific work, had the opposite effect, projecting a narrow definition of literariness onto very different texts, including ones - Fluck cites the example of Huckleberry Finn - for which they were patently unsuited. The arguments of later, politically minded critics, Fluck contends, drew from this same intellectual source, echoing the narrow vision of aesthetics they had absorbed during their academic socialization. Even as they took issue with New Criticism, they retained some of its key premises. If, however, aesthetics is conceived as an experience and an attitude - one that can be taken up in ordinary life as well as the space of the art gallery and the seminar room - it can no longer be decried as inherently elitist. And if the aesthetic function of art does not transcend or negate its referential function, it is no longer possible to see aesthetics and politics as mutually exclusive - an article of faith not only among the New Critics but also among many of their opponents. In elaborating on the latter point, Fluck turns to aesthetic theorist Jan Mukařovský, who, like Dewey, does not see the aesthetic as a separate sphere but as an attitude that is taken up to objects of experience. By way of illustration, Fluck uses the example of a Berlin subway map; instead of looking at the map to work out the quickest route from Onkel Toms Hütte to Kottbusser Tor, we can contemplate it as an aesthetic object; akin, perhaps, to a modernist artwork in its brightly colored grid of geometrical patterns. In doing so, however, “we cannot completely suppress our awareness that it is a subway map” (225). The differing attitudes we take up toward phenomena are not rigidly segregated or mutually exclusive; the aesthetic and referential function co-exist. “The temporary change in perspective only makes sense (and is only meaningful) as long as the reference to reality is not lost” (227). This point remains crucial for any adjudicating of the relation between aesthetics and politics. Moreover, Fluck’s example is wellchosen; by using a subway map rather than, say, a realist novel, to illustrate 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 243 his point, he wards off the problems of certain theories of mimesis. No claim is being made that texts can mirror or reflect reality; the choice of the subway map underscores that any referential function will involve a degree of stylization. Stressing the defining role of experience in this manner does not require us to deny the part played by the object. Even though anything can in principle be viewed aesthetically, paintings and novels and movies encourage us to take up an aesthetic attitude, whether by drawing attention to their formal features or by advertising their status as fiction. In this way, our relationship to reality is put on new grounds; “the aesthetic mode opens up the possibility of a new interpretation of the world” (228). Here Fluck’s phrasing is reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur’s three-fold account of mimesis. The world appears before us prefigured, Ricoeur writes; our experiences of reality are filtered through a mélange of stories, images, and taken-for-granted forms of knowledge. Yet this welter of experiences can in turn be configured by literary texts that distance them from prior contexts and remake the work of culture, reshaping what is already shaped via narrative and other literary devices. And finally there is refiguration; how the world of the text impacts the world of the reader. Novels and poems and plays only exist in being actualized by audiences, whose beliefs and perceptions can be re-oriented - sometimes dramatically - via the act of reading. As Fluck writes, “fiction is an especially potent and heightened means of taking the role of the other and of looking back at oneself from that perspective” (231). Such a line of thought differs, in crucial respects, from the most influential approaches in Anglosphere literary studies. A literary text cannot be deciphered as just another instance of ideology at work; while shaped by the attitudes, beliefs, and values of its moment, it revises and refracts them to create something new. Yet this newness is not reducible to a single metric of resistance or critique - a second preferred option. By projecting such qualities onto works of art, Kinohi Nishikawa remarks, critics seek to align them with their own political commitments. And yet, he writes, “when art and aesthetic theory are instrumentalized to affirm an ideology of inherent resistance, we sunder the ethics of interpretation, which involves the recognition that the aesthetic object exists outside ourselves” (4). Engaging ethically with texts and images means reckoning with the possibility that they will fail to echo our agendas and being willing to change our minds. Deciphering hidden signs of resistance in novels or films is, moreover, a technique that is designed to showcase academic expertise but tells us nothing about the desires and motives that draw audiences to works of fiction. It is not that social factors do not affect audience response, but they manifest themselves in other ways, including, as Fluck argues, the desire for recognition. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 244 Rita Felski 1 Fluck and I both discuss questions of recognition in reading, though with somewhat different emphases. Fluck looks closely at recognition as a form of social acknowledg‐ ment; I am also interested in the relation between recognition and self-knowledge. Fluck is one of the few critics to connect political theories of recognition to literary criticism; he points to the “amazing centrality” (“Recognition,” in this volume 294) of the motif of recognition to diverse literary genres, ranging from adventure stories and Cinderella plots to the Bildungsroman to depictions of the pain and humiliation of social misrecognition, such as Invisible Man (1952). Yet recognition is not simply a theme in literature, Fluck argues, but is also implicated in the reading process; the political theories of recognition drafted by Honneth and Taylor need to be overhauled to account for the aesthetic aspects of identity formation. Identities, as Fluck points out, are not static entities but are created and revised through narratives. Such narratives are not just coercive scripts dictated by capitalist or heteronormative structures, nor is recognition just a codeword for subjection, as contended by Judith Butler and others. The role of narrative in shaping identity and struggles for recognition involves a complex and variable blend of social norms, personal experiences, and aesthetic models and influences. Moreover, aesthetic response does not hinge on a one-to-one correspondence between the social identities of characters and readers, but brings into play a wide range of formal and thematic elements as they connect to a reader’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and sensations. In this way, writes Fluck, “fictional texts and other aesthetic objects provide material that allow the reader to extend and rewrite the narrative of his own identity” (311). Fluck’s account of the relations between recognition and reading crystallizes how aesthetic and referential functions of literature remain distinct yet inter‐ woven. To read a novel is to enter into a fictional world, albeit one that is linked, via various correspondences, to an existing reality. Entering this world, I temporarily suspend the practical demands of daily life, yet without losing sight of possible analogies to my own experience. This awareness of both sameness and difference underwrites the process of what Fluck calls imaginary transfer; “the recognition gained in the act of reading is nevertheless an encounter with another world that has the potential to change the reader’s world” (313). Such a transfer is dynamic, dialectical, and ongoing; not only may I come to see myself differently, but this altered self-understanding can in turn inspire a different view of the literary text. The experience of readerly recognition, as I’ve argued, “is not repetition: it denotes not just the previously known, but the becoming known” (Uses of Literature 25). 1 Engaging the intricate phenomenology of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 245 2 See, for example, Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway? ” the “Introduction” to the influential volume Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler; and Nelson, “Two Conferences and a Manifesto.” Twenty of the most widely known definitions of aesthetic experience is thus a precondition for any adequate account of how literature relates to social life. The Vicissitudes of Cultural Studies How might such reflections on aesthetic experience relate to the field of cultural studies? And to what extent do answers to this question hinge on what one takes “cultural studies” to mean? Shortly after taking up a position at the University of Virginia in the 1990s, I wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education expressing my sense of confusion about American uses of the term. I had always taken cultural studies to denote an interdisciplinary field devoted to the semiotics and politics of contemporary popular culture and associated with such figures as Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Dick Hebdige, Angie McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Ien Ang, John Fiske, Meaghan Morris, Constance Penley, Kobena Mercer, and Jackie Stacey. In both England and Australia, cultural studies had flourished in newer, less prestigious universities that were striving to break down disciplinary silos by creating other ways of organizing knowledge, such as the school of communications in which I’d previously taught. In the United States, however, cultural studies evolved very differently; it was taken up mainly in English departments, where it was grafted onto the text-centered and periodbased frameworks of the field. As a result, its sociological and anthropological strands withered away, while new and (to me) weirdly counter-intuitive terms came into use such as Victorian cultural studies or medieval cultural studies. As I wrote in my Chronicle essay, cultural studies in the United States seemed to have morphed into a synonym for cultural history or political approaches to literature. In his essay, Fluck notes that cultural studies is notoriously difficult to define because of its amorphous nature; “it is what you get when some of the more traditional criteria for defining the field are taken away” (“Aesthetics,” 218). “Field” here is a reference to literary studies, as the antecedent framework to which cultural studies is supposedly reacting. Yet the key figures in cultural studies in the UK and Australia often worked in media studies, sociology, or interdisciplinary programs and had no particular interest or expertise in litera‐ ture. They saw themselves, rather, as the initiators of a new interdisciplinary - or antidisciplinary - field, whose defining features were spelled out in numerous essays, manifestos, and primers. 2 In a polemical essay, for example, Cary Nelson 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 246 Rita Felski the field are collected in What is Cultural Studies? ed. Story. I cite only those texts that appeared during the historical period that Fluck is referencing. bemoaned the 1980s repackaging of U.S. literary studies as cultural studies, deeming it a shallow, opportunistic, and ahistorical exercise and offering, by way of correction, his own sixteen-point definition. The political readings of literary scholars - even if such readings were now being applied to new objects like movies and sitcoms - had little to do, Nelson argued, with the methods of cultural studies. What were these methods? Perhaps the pre-eminent idea of the cultural studies tradition stemming from Birmingham is articulation, a term that rarely crops up in literary studies. Taken over from political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose Hegemony and Socialist Strategy had a major impact on Leftist thought in the U.K. and Europe, the idea of articulation sought to define social formations “without falling into the twin traps of reductionism and essentialism” (Slack 112). It offered a way of identifying connections between phenomena without relying on determinist arguments or assuming an essential political logic; the nature of such connections - say between ideologies of gender and TV dramas, or between class and religion - will fluctuate according to context and are unmade and remade over time. While drawing on Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist ideas, the method of articulation thus placed far greater stress on contingency, highlighting “the continual severing, realignment, and recombination of discourses, social groups, political interests, and structures of power in a society” (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 8). The consequences of this style of thought for interpretation were farreaching. Articulation pitted itself against the implicit Hegelianism that Fluck identifies, in another major essay called “Shadow Aesthetics,” as a feature of American studies. In this Hegelian framework, a work of art is assumed to stand in for, or represent, a social whole, such that its interpretation by the critic delivers insights into social and historical realities that are unavailable by other means. In the early days of American Studies, Fluck notes, this method was often harnessed to a myth of American exceptionalism; yet it could just as easily be deployed by later critics of such exceptionalism. It became possible to argue that the decoding of a single 1970s buddy movie exposed hidden American cultural anxieties about race, or that a Jonathan Franzen novel, if read correctly, would bring to light the pathologies of neo-liberalism. The cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg was an especially forceful critic of this method of reading, which he described scornfully as “seeing the world in a grain of sand” (107). Cultural studies, by contrast, sought to detotalize the social field 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 247 3 While I don’t have room to canvass the details here, this populist orientation did not go uncontested in cultural studies. See Morris, “The Banality of Cultural Studies” and Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. and thus rejected the belief that any novel or film or TV show could stand for and represent that field. Texts did not possess hidden political meanings that could be plumbed via ingenious acts of close reading. Rather, such meanings could only be discerned by analyzing how texts hooked up to specific audiences and constellations of interests at a given moment, calling for expertise in the empirical methods of history and sociology as well as textual analysis. The picture of society in the cultural studies tradition thus differs in key respects from American Studies where, Fluck suggests, Foucauldian theses about the ubiquity of power or structural Marxist analyses of an absent cause accentuated the reach and force of a suspicious hermeneutics. While British cultural studies was also concerned with power, it was equally committed to questions of agency. Influenced by sociologists such as Goffman and Garfinkel as well as by cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson, it took strong issue with critical theories that viewed ordinary persons as “cultural dopes,” steered unwittingly by forces beyond their control. It also questioned the dogma of the epistemological break: a sharp separation between the critical knowledge of the intellectual and the inherently benighted or beclouded perspective of everyone else. This populist orientation inspired a commitment to in-depth engagement with the motivations, self-understandings, and interpretations of ordinary persons that produced classic ethnographies of the field, such as Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour and Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas.  3 Ethnography thus emerged as a second cornerstone of cultural studies, in‐ spired by its strong commitment to decentering the perspectives of intellectuals. Soap opera audiences, rather than being interpellated by a dominant ideology, as disciples of Althusser and Lacan had decreed, responded to the shows they were watching in varied and often unpredictable ways. Rejecting the “hypodermic syringe” theory of meaning, in which passive audiences are injected with the messages of the culture industry, cultural studies insisted that consumption is a form of production: meaning is actively co-created by readers and viewers, who do not form a homogeneous and undifferentiated mass. The motives of multinational corporations or advertising agencies, however nefarious, thus could not provide a sufficient explanation of what popular culture is and does. Like the concept of articulation, however, ethnography, as a sociological method, did not survive the move of cultural studies into U.S. English departments. A third aspect of British cultural studies accords more closely with Fluck’s ac‐ count; what he calls the “programmatic dehierarchization” of culture (“Aesthetics,” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 248 Rita Felski 218). In Raymond Williams’ famous phrase, culture is ordinary; cultural studies scholars sought to rescue popular culture from the condescension of both Marxist and conservative intellectuals. This commitment called for aesthetic as well as political arguments. Dutch fans of Dallas were eager to apprise Ien Ang of their tastes, preferences, and emotional reactions, inspiring her to develop a theory of the “melodramatic imagination” to account for the show’s appeal. Jackie Stacey’s interviews with British women who had been avid moviegoers in the 1940s delved into the complexities of identification, the desire for aesthetic escape, and the visual dynamics of spectatorship. And Simon Frith’s analysis of popular music zeroed in on questions of aesthetic experience and value, highlighting music’s imaginative, emotional and sensual power. ‘‘We all hear the music we like as something special,” Frith, writes, “something that defies the mundane, takes us ‘out of ourselves,’ puts us somewhere else’’ (275). For these and many other critics, aesthetics and cultural studies were not opposed, but integrally related. In a 2004 essay I took issue with the one-sided equation of cultural studies with politics and ideology critique that had taken root in the United States, contending that cultural studies “did not seek to destroy aesthetics, but to broaden the definition of what counted as art by taking popular culture seriously. . . it made a much wider variety of objects aesthetically interesting” (“The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies” 32). Looking beyond narrow criteria of aesthetic value that held sway in literature departments - whether New Critical criteria of ambiguity and irony or poststructuralist motifs of dissonance and estrangement - cultural studies highlighted other equally salient aspects of aesthetic response, including escapism, identification, narrative suspense, and strong emotion. Rather than denying the aesthetic, it made a case for multiple aesthetics. Rather than abolishing value - a Sisyphean task - it highlighted the existence of what John Frow called differing “regimes of value.” It is a fundamental tenet of cultural studies, Frow writes, that no text has an intrinsic meaning or value, which can only be produced via specific and changing social relations and mechanisms of signification (145). Taking graffiti as his example, Frow shows how it took on very different meanings when slotted into the regimes of value of street artists, of public officials, and of art gallery curators. Fluck’s later essay “Shadow Aesthetics” (2015) offers an expansive survey of perspectives on aesthetics and politics that reckons more explicitly with the distinctive features of British cultural studies via a contrast between the arguments of Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson. As Fluck notes, there are some notable parallels between pragmatism and cultural studies in their shared rejection of formalism and their commitment to a more democratic vision of aesthetics. “In Cultural Studies,” he observes, “the conceptual separation 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 249 between the aesthetic and the political is overcome by dissolving the aesthetic into culture, so that it can be reinserted into a whole way of life” (“Shadow Aesthetics” 23). Yet “dissolving” is, to my mind, too strong a word. Like Dewey, cultural studies scholars see aesthetics as connected to the lifeworlds of readers and viewers. Frith, Ang, and Stacey also underscore, however, that the experience of being immersed in a TV show or a movie or a piece of music can serve as an escape from ordinary routines, offering a form of temporary transcendence. Meanwhile, the appeals to a “whole way of life” and a “common culture” that crop up in the writings of Raymond Williams would soon disappear from the rhetoric of cultural studies, thanks to genderand race-based critiques of such organic models of culture. Conclusion To reread “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” two decades later is to realize that the landscape of literary studies has changed dramatically in some ways, yet not in others. What Fluck calls “the present-day rejection of the concept of the aesthetic” (“Aesthetics,” 214) is no longer in force; as Michael Clune remarks, “among the most exciting critical developments of recent years has been the restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts” (9). Alongside Clune’s own defense of aesthetic judgment, some of the most widely discussed works of recent years include Timothy Aubry’s Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (2018), Joseph North’s defense of aesthetic education in his Literary Criticism: A Political History (2017), and Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories (2012). Twenty years ago, Fluck could argue that the espousal of Foucauldian theories of power left no room for the negative aesthetics of the Frankfurt School or for the attributing of a utopian function to art. In recent years, however, interest in Foucault has ebbed and there’s been a surge of interest in Adorno as well as a revival of the thought of Ernst Bloch; the language of utopia and the utopian, often inspired by José Estaban Muñoz’s later work, now seem to be everywhere. And yet this revival of aesthetics often runs along familiar grooves. It has been harnessed to what’s been called a “New Formalism,” inspiring a renewed focus on the literary work as an object characterized by certain linguistic or stylistic properties. Alternatively, it’s linked to a cultural radicalism that Fluck has incisively analyzed in several essays; critics extol the disruptive or subversive qualities of texts without ever clarifying the channels through which such qualities effect any material social change. By comparison, the thesis that Fluck identifies as central to Iser’s position - and that also defines his own 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 250 Rita Felski - still receives little attention: “the reader (…) is the agent who is needed to realize the potential of literature to provide an aesthetic experience” (Iser qtd. in Fluck, “Distance” 189). How are readers constituted as readers prior to as well as through the experience of reading? How does this experience blend the familiar and the strange, the ordinary and the not yet imagined? How does the act of reading separate the reader from everyday life, yet also spill back into life? The potential of literature to trigger aesthetic experiences arises, as Fluck observes, from a complex set of interactions: the phenomenology of reading, the affordances of texts, and the social conditions and expectations that affect reader response. In their remarkable ability to move with dexterity and ease between these differing vantage points, the writings of Winfried Fluck remain an essential reference point and an ongoing inspiration. Works Cited Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Routledge, 1985. Clune, Michael. A Defense of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Felski Rita. “Those Who Dismiss Cultural Studies Don’t Know What They Are Talking About.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 1999. ---. “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies.” The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Ed. Michael Bérubé. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. 28-43. ---. Uses of Literature. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Fluck, Winfried. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Aesthetic Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175-210. ---. “Shadow Aesthetics.” Reading Practices. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler. REAL 31 (2015): 11-44. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Frow, John. Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Grossberg, Lawrence. Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. “Cultural Studies: An Introduc‐ tion.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. London: Routledge, 1991. 1-22. Johnson, Richard. “What is Cultural Studies Anyway? ” Social Text 16.1 (1986-87): 38-80. Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” Discourse 10.2 (1988): 3-29. Nelson, Cary. “Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a Manifesto.” Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 52-76. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 251 Nishikawa, Kinohi. “Pedagogy of Description, Projective Reading and the Ethics of Interpretation.” on_education 1.9 (2020): 1-9. Dec. 2020 Web. 5 Dec. 2023. <https: / / ww w.oneducation.net/ no-09_december-2020/ pedagogy-of-description-projective-readin g-and-the-ethics-of-interpretation/ ? output=pdf>. Ricoeur, Paul. “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis.” Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 52-90. Scott, David. Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Slack, Jennifer Daryl. “The Theory and Method of Articulation.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. Stacey, Jackie. Stargazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Rout‐ ledge, 1993. Storey, John. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 252 Rita Felski First published in The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn. Ed. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, Johannes Voelz. Hanover: University of New England Press, 2013. 237-64. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 In this chapter, literature and the literary text are thus taken as paradigms for aesthetic objects. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer Winfried Fluck The Conflict of Interpretations One of the most puzzling aspects about literary criticism and literary scholarship is that critics and scholars never seem to be able to agree on the meaning and significance of a literary text. This strange phenomenon is by no means restricted to notoriously difficult, ambiguous, or enigmatic texts like Hamlet or The Turn of the Screw. It can be observed throughout literary studies, including such apparently transparent modes of representation as realism, naturalism, and even documentary texts. The same conflict of interpretations can also be observed in other fields of the humanities, such as, for example, cultural studies, film studies, or art history, where the interpretation of fictional texts and other aesthetic objects stands at the center. 1 These disagreements over meaning and value never seem to subside and are rekindled with every new interpretation. This is even more puzzling in view of the fact that the academic institutional‐ ization of literary studies promised to put the interpretation of literary texts and aesthetic objects on more professional and “objective” grounds. Yet the professionalization of literary and cultural studies has led not to a reduction of interpretive conflicts but, quite on the contrary, to their proliferation. One answer to the problem of never-ending interpretive conflicts has been surveys of competing approaches or “literary methods,” often in the form of an introduction to major theories and methods of the field. Until the arrival of poststructuralism, these surveys were based on the assumption that literary and cultural studies are still in need of more rigorous methods and that a comparison of approaches would lead to a distinction between true and false, better or worse. Recently a more pluralistic view has come to prevail in which every method has a potential of its own, so that different approaches can happily complement one another: formalist approaches focus on form, ideological analyses on the text’s ideology, gender studies on the role of gender in identity construction, and so on. Such a well-intentioned pluralism, however, merely obscures the problem. Two Marxist or two feminist critics may be in complete agreement about the desirability of a Marxist or a feminist approach, and they may even agree about what it consists of, and yet they may nevertheless offer different interpretations of one and the same text. Similarly, a reader’s views (and interpretations) of texts can change, although his or her theoretical position and methods are still the same. Another frequent response to the challenge of interpretive conflicts is the call for historical contextualization. Meaning undergoes changes in history, and thus it seems reasonable to argue that the best way of getting at the “true” meaning of a text is to reconstruct the historical context in which it was produced and by which it was shaped. This is the starting point of a variety of societyand history-focused approaches, ranging from Marxism and the sociology of art to (new) historicism and even systems theory. Indeed, it is reasonable to insist that we should know as much as possible about the historical context of a text and the social and political factors that shaped its meaning and form. In the final analysis, however, such historical reconstructions cannot be sufficient, because they cannot explain the fact that literary texts and aesthetic objects can continue to provide an aesthetic experience although the historical situation has changed. What historical contextualizations (of whatever kind) cannot explain is why texts like Huckleberry Finn can still affect us, although we live in different times and circumstances. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the way in which they affect or interest us today will influence our interpretation decisively. Thus, even if we may agree on the interpretation of the historical context itself (by no means a given), we have not yet explained the conflict of interpretations, because, depending on different views of the text, the historical context will also be interpreted differently. To “always historicize” thus cannot solve the problem of interpretive conflicts. One reason for never-ending disagreements about the interpretation of literary texts and other aesthetic objects is that critics hold different views about their political, social, and aesthetic functions and uses. At first sight, the term function may raise the suspicion of a throwback to sociological functionalism, or, if the term is narrowed down to political function, to a search for direct political consequences of literature. In this sense, the term appears ill-applied 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 254 Winfried Fluck 2 This argument has been developed in a number of my publications; see Das kulturelle Imaginäre; “The Role of the Reader and the Changing Functions of Literature: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte”; “Aesthetic Experience of the Image”; “Playing Indian: Media Reception as Transfer.” 3 The various approaches to literary interpretation are therefore based on different assumptions as to what provides the (minimum of) textual coherence that is the precondition for the possibility of interpretation. In New Criticism, for example, this coherence is provided by the text’s structure, understood, however, not merely as a set of rules for the production of texts but as an innertextual pattern that transforms everyday language into the language of art - and thereby creates the aesthetic experience of an object without “extrinsic” purpose. Inevitably, interpretations based on these premises will focus on the identification of this pattern. But even in poststructuralist approaches, in spite of the valorization of heterogeneity and difference, the single sign is of interest only if it can be shown to be part of a disseminative trace, for only in this way can its deconstructive function be demonstrated. Again, a hypothesis about what function literature has - in the case of American deconstruction, for example, to provide telling instances of rhetorical self-deconstruction - determines the direction interpretation will take. 4 Iser confirms the logical priority of function over structure, but on different grounds. In the literary text, he writes, “the order and the formation of structures depend on the function that the text has to fulfill” (“Current Situation” 11). Such a formulation still seems to imply that we can determine the “real” function first and then explain the text’s structure. Clearly, however, just as critics will differ on the text’s meaning, so will to literature, however, because it will hardly ever be possible to establish causal links between a literary text and concrete social or political effects. And yet I want to claim that the term function is useful nevertheless and, in effect, indispensable for literary and cultural studies. 2 Since any interpretation of a literary text or aesthetic object must go beyond a mere replication of the object, we must make decisions about what we consider important or unimportant in a text. But on what grounds do we decide what is important? The only way in which we can make sense of a text that has a “fictive” referent is to assume that texts are designed to do something and that their textual elements have been arranged in the way they are in order to achieve this goal. 3 In other words, we can make sense of the texts’ elements only by postulating that they are “functional” with regard to a particular effect we ascribe to them. Or to put it differently: it is our hypothesis about the text’s (political and/ or aesthetic) function that makes a text’s structure “readable.” A structure is meaningless if it is not seen as being created for a reason (or as following a certain logic, for example, that of language). As interpreters, we do not encounter a fictional text first and then try to determine its function. On the contrary, we cannot interpret a fictional text without already implying a function. To use the term function in this sense thus means to use it as a heuristic category, not as a word for directly traceable social or political effects. 4 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 255 they hold different hypotheses about the text’s function. To introduce the term function as a heuristic category of analysis is thus an attempt not to anchor interpretation on “real” grounds but to draw attention to underlying assumptions that guide and govern every interpretation. Even if the concept of function is used heuristically, however, and not in naïve sociological fashion, two objections may still be raised. Is it not reductive to work on the assumption of a single function when any literary text can obviously have several different functions at the same time? And even more pertinently, is literature, in its inherent referential ambiguity, rhetoricity of language, and imaginary surplus of meaning, not exactly the opposite of a text that is “functional” in its organization, so that any heuristic assumption of an implied function must unduly homogenize the text? The argument is valid, but it conflates two levels that should be kept apart logically. To employ the term function as a heuristic category does not yet determine whether my hypothesis entails homogenization or heterogenization. It all depends on the function implied. If I assume the function to be a deconstruction of logocentrism, then my attention will be drawn to those operations of the text that are “functional” for the purpose of deconstruction, such as constant slippages in signification, but this will by no means homogenize the text in the “functionalist” sense of one unifying principle. Similarly, the contrast between monoand multifunctionality confuses two levels. If we speak about historical functions of a particular text, then we may indeed encounter a variety of functions. But this is different from employing the term as a heuristic category, because in terms of interpretation, hypotheses about several functions will not work differently from hypotheses about a single function. They, too, will become the foundation for interpretive choices based on the hypothesis that certain textual features are designed to achieve certain effects. Even those approaches that position themselves in open opposition to “functionalism” and value literature as counter-realm to the iron grip of rationality cannot escape this logic. Formalists, for example, who insist that the special value of literature lies precisely in its potential to be “without function” can attribute special significance to this functionless dimension of Zweckfreiheit (disinterestedness) only because it promises to serve an important function on another level, namely, the liberation of culture from the alienating effects of materialism and instrumental reason. Similarly, the poststructuralist valorization of heterogeneity and difference is generated by a belief in their social, cultural, and political desirability. The disseminative power of language would not be considered important - so much so, in fact, that all interpretive energy is spent on demonstrating it - if it did not play a crucial role in the social 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 256 Winfried Fluck 5 For a detailed analysis and discussion of the development of Iser’s work, see my essay “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” 6 On this point, see my essay “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” theories of the Paris May by which deconstruction was strongly inspired. As a power analysis that no longer posits any “outside” from which the system could still be critiqued, deconstruction remains one of the few options of resistance. Again, it is precisely the resistance to being “functionalized” by invisible power effects that opens up a new function for literature and shapes all subsequent methodological decisions. No matter what we think of these claims, in each case a hypothesis about the function that literature has within a larger system will determine the interpretive choices the interpreter makes. A Theory of Aesthetic Experience Questions about the function of literature are posed in almost all of Wolfgang Iser’s work in literary studies, including his seminal contributions to reception theory, The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading. Doggedly he returns to the question why human beings expose themselves to fictional texts again and again, although as a rule they are well aware of the fact that these texts are invented and in most cases practically useless. Iser has coined the term Fiktionsbedürftigkeit (a need for fictions) to describe this phenomenon, and the development of his own work in three major stages - a modernist aesthetics of negation, reception aesthetics, and the project of a literary anthropology - can be seen as a renewed attempt to find a convincing explanation. 5 These three stages of his work are linked by a basic starting point: trying to find out why human beings need fiction means having to focus on the specific potential that fiction has as a form of communication. We search out fictional texts not primarily for information or documentation but for a special experience with the text or aesthetic object. We read not “for meaning” but in order to have the kind of experience we call an aesthetic experience. Seen this way, the aesthetic function of the text is the basis for the realization of other functions, because political or social functions of fictional texts can be realized only through an aesthetic experience. 6 How can we define aesthetic experience, however? When a text or an object is considered as fiction, we cannot regard the object as simply referential, because when we read a fictional text, even a realistic novel, reality is created anew. Since we have never met a character named Hamlet and in fact know that he never existed, we have to come up with our own mental image of him. Inevitably this mental construct will draw on our own feelings and associations, or, to use a broader, more comprehensive term, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 257 7 See also Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity, from which Iser may have taken his Hamlet example: “It would follow, then, that the character Hamlet is real just insofar as we constitute ourselves by experiencing ourselves and speaking about ourselves through him - both as stage actors and as audience, or life actors; that is, when we experience ourselves and speak about ourselves through the proxy of Hamlet. The character’s reality is a function of our own reality as playing, experimenting, selfknowing beings” (Wilshire 93). 8 On the role of images in this process, see Ellen Esrock’s study The Reader’s Eye. on our imaginary. These imaginary elements can gain a Gestalt, however, only if they are connected with discourses of the real. As Iser has argued, literary representation is thus not a form of mimesis but a performative act. The double reference of fiction creates an object that is never stable and identical with itself. And it is this non-identity that can be seen as an important source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us to do two things at the same time: to articulate imaginary elements and to look at them from the outside. As a result of the doubling structure of fictionality, we are, in Iser’s words, “both ourselves and someone else at the same time.” Iser writes: In this respect the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not. In order to produce the determinate form of an unreal character, the actor must allow his own reality to fade out. At the same time, however, he does not know precisely who, say, Hamlet is, for one cannot properly identify a character who has never existed. Thus roleplaying endows a figment with a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies total determination. (…) Staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader. (“Representation” 244) 7 It is important to note that this transfer is not to be confused with a mere projection of our own desire into the text. Our reading experience remains tied to the text and depends on what the text offers. When the text provides a characterization of Hamlet or Huck Finn, our imagining them will be shaped by the description. Critics do not disagree that Huck Finn is about twelve years old, illiterate, and speaks a colorful colloquial vernacular. Nevertheless, despite this factual basis, the Huck Finn imagined by Wolfgang Iser will be different from the Huck Finn imagined by Winfried Fluck, because both of these readers will draw on different imaginary resources in order to endow, as Iser puts it, “a figment with a sense of reality.” Or as Rita Felski reminds us, “The work only comes to life in being read, and what it signifies cannot be separated from what readers make of it” (87). 8 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 258 Winfried Fluck 9 This is the reason “why the identity constructed by the fictional text is actually more adequately described as a case of non-identity, since it puts the reader in a state inbetween two identities, with neither of whom she is entirely identical” (Fluck, “Playing Indian” 70). 10 As Carol J. Clover writes in her essay on horror movies, “We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, the horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story” (95). The argument that fictional texts can dramatize and enact inner conflicts, for example, between the open expression of a desire and its The basic point about fictional texts and aesthetic objects is, then, that in order to acquire significance and to provide an aesthetic experience, they have to be brought to life by means of an imaginary transfer on the side of the reader. When we start reading a book, we are confronted with abstract letters on a page. Structuralism has taught us that the words formed by these letters are arbitrary in their reference. Moreover, in the case of fictional material, the represented world is invented, at least in the particular form in which we encounter it in the text. Without any investment from our side, this invented world would not take on any degree of reality and would thus not make any sense. Bärbel Tischleder has provided a number of simple but helpful illustrations for the indispensability of such transfers when she says, “When a figure in a film rubs against a cat’s fur, or burns herself, or simply walks in the snow, or carries a heavy suitcase, this representation can take on meaning for us only if we draw on our own experiences and memories in order to imagine what it means to be in such a situation” (Tischleder 78; my translation). No matter how well crafted a literary text is, it cannot solely determine its meaning. It always needs a reader in order to become actualized (and thus “meaningful”); the reader, however, can actualize a literary text whose reference is “fictionalized” only by drawing on his or her own associations, mental images, and feelings as an analogue. Since, as a result of the doubling structure of fictionality, we are, in Iser’s words, “both ourselves and someone else at the same time,” we can be inside and outside a character at once. 9 On the one hand, the fictional text allows us to enter another character’s perspective and perhaps even his or her body; on the other hand, we cannot and do not want to give up our own identity completely. In reading, we thus create other, more expressive versions of ourselves. This is achieved, however, in a much more complex way than is suggested by the term identification. One may assume, for the sake of the argument, that it may be possible to “identify” with a character, but one cannot identify with a whole text. It is the text, however, that provides an aesthetic experience, not just single characters in it. Clearly, in actualizing the text in the act of reading, the reader has to bring all characters to life by means of a transfer, not merely the good or sympathetic ones. 10 The “more expressive 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 259 disciplining, finds support here. In this respect, too, Clover offers an interesting comment: “Observers unanimously stress the readiness of the ‘live’ audience to switch sympathies in midstream, siding now with the killer and now, and finally, with the Final Girl” (113). 11 See also on this point Wilshire: “Together with the actors we alienate ourselves as characters so that we can return to ourselves as persons. Hamlet is ourselves speaking to ourselves about our essential possibilities” (99). version of ourselves” is thus not a simple case of self-aggrandizement through wish fulfillment but an extension of our own interiority over a whole (madeup) world. Iser’s “performative” theory of aesthetic experience is supported by a number of works on the psychology of reading and the transaction between reader and text. In Becoming a Reader, J. A. Appleyard argues that in reading, we experience a double state of mind: “We both identify ourselves with the characters, incidents, and themes of the work, but also keep them at a safe distance.” We can simultaneously enact and observe certain experiences; we can indulge in a temporary “abandonment to the invented occurrences” and yet also take up “the evaluative attitude of the onlooker” (39; 53-54). We become observer and participant at the same time. In similar fashion, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt write in their Practicing New Historicism, “In a meaningful encounter with a text that reaches us powerfully, we feel at once pulled out of our own world and plunged back with redoubled force into it” (17). In her study Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century, Molly Travis conceives of reading as a process of going “in-and-out” and emphasizes the compulsive dimension of the act: “I conceive of agency in reading as compulsive, reiterative role-playing in which individuals attempt to find themselves by going outside the self, engaging in literary performance in the hope of fully and finally identifying the self through self-differentiation. Such finality is never achieved, for the self is perpetually in process” (6). And Gabriele Schwab, a student of Iser’s, has pointed out: “Literature requires a specific dynamic between familiarity and otherness, or closeness and distance, in order to affect readers. The old cliché that we ‘find ourselves’ in literature refers to the fact that unless literature resonates with us we remain cold to it. On the other hand, complete familiarity would never engage our interest but leave us equally indifferent” (10). Literature enables readers to enter other worlds that are different from their own but remain, strangely enough, their own worlds at the same time. 11 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 260 Winfried Fluck 12 For this term and a more detailed version of my argument, see my history of the American novel, Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans, 1790-1900. 13 Thus my concept of aesthetic experience differs significantly from two models that can be found in current debates: a concept of aesthetic experience as intensified experience, if not “epiphany” (Gumbrecht), and as a mode of experience that provides a liminal experience and can thus transform our perception (Fischer-Lichte). In both cases, aesthetic experience is rather conventionally equated with a modernist aesthetic. There are, however, many instances of aesthetic experience that do not have any dramatic effects of transformation; in fact our daily exposure to fictional texts and aesthetic objects (such as films or television series) that do not fit the transformative model is the rule and not the exception. But in this case, too, audiences seek these experiences again and again. 14 Famously, Ian Watt called Richardson’s novel Pamela “a work that could be praised from the pulpit and yet attacked as pornography, a work that gratified the reading public with the combined attractions of a sermon and a striptease” (173). The Articulation Effect of Fiction In aesthetic experience, then, the transfer needed to give meaning and signif‐ icance to the text in the act of reception allows us to give expression to associations, feelings, moods, impulses, desires, or corporeal sensations that otherwise have not yet found any satisfactory expression - either because of censorship, or social or cultural taboos, or simply because society has not been interested so far. I call this the “articulation effect” of fiction. 12 Because of fiction’s status as a made-up world that can transcend reality claims, fictional texts and aesthetic objects can employ “official” discourses of the real as a host for the expression of as yet unformulated and possibly “unsayable” things. The conceptualization of this articulation effect should not be restricted to narratives of transgression or negation, however, or to the idea of a liminal state (Schwellenerfahrung). 13 For example, the popularity of the sentimental novel in the mode of Richardson may be explained by its skillful evocation of the “guilty pleasures” of illicit affairs, and thus by the articulation of socially tabooed associations. 14 We could, in this case, apply categories such as desire or the unconscious for that which is articulated. Nevertheless, as a name for the flow of diffuse, decontextualized, and protean associations, sensations, and sentiments that are always a part of us, but at the same time “unrepresentable” because these elements possess no inherent structure, the phenomenological concept of the imaginary goes beyond definitions of the unformulated or unsayable as the culturally tabooed. The unformulated dimension that fictional texts articulate should thus be sought not primarily or even exclusively in a repressed, other side of ourselves, cut off from consciousness and self-awareness, but 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 261 in the more fundamental fact that there exists a dimension of interiority - ranging from psychic structures and diffuse affects to bodily sensations - that can never be fully represented and expressed. Because fictional texts require a transfer in order to be actualized, they can provide the gratification of articulating something radically subjective while at the same time representing this dimension in a “public” version that appears to provide recognition. Literature gives a determinate shape to imaginary dimensions, ranging from fantasy elements to affective dimensions, by linking these elements with a semblance of the real. The fictional text emerges out of the combination of the two. Without imaginary elements, the text would be a mere duplicate of discourses of the real; without semblance of the real, the imaginary would not have any form and thus would not be able to appear in representation. As Iser writes: The act of fictionalizing is therefore not identical to the imaginary with its protean potential. For the fictionalizing act is a guided act. It aims at something that in turn endows the imaginary with an articulate gestalt - a gestalt that differs from the fantasies, projections, daydreams, and other reveries that ordinarily give the imaginary expression in our day-to-day experience. (…) Just as the fictionalizing act outstrips the determinacy of the real, so it provides the imaginary with the determinacy that it would not otherwise possess. In so doing, it enables the imaginary to take on an essential quality of the real, for determinacy is a minimal definition of reality. This is not, of course, to say that the imaginary is real, although it certainly assumes an appearance of reality in the way it intrudes into and acts upon the given world (The Fictive and the Imaginary 3). As a representation of yet unformulated and indeterminate imaginary elements, the fictional text goes beyond discourses of the real; as a form of representation drawing on a semblance of the real, it is more than a mere fantasy or daydream; as a combination of the two elements, it places the reader in a position “in between.” This creates the need for a constant movement between the real and the imaginary elements of the text. Iser writes elsewhere: A piece of fiction devoid of any connection with known reality would be incompre‐ hensible. Consequently, if we are to attempt a description of what is fictional in fiction, the time-honored opposition between fiction and reality has to be discarded and replaced by a triad: the real, the fictional and the imaginary. It is out of this triadic relation that I see the literary text arising. Within this context, the act of fictionalizing is seen as a constant crossing of boundaries between the real and the imaginary. By transforming reality into something which is not part of the world reproduced, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 262 Winfried Fluck 15 See in this context Josué Harari’s reference to the “duplicity” constituted by the imaginary: “The imaginary world is always with us, as a parallel world to our world; there is not a single moment of our existence which is not imbued with the imaginary. (…) In like manner, the real cannot be separated from the imaginary or the imaginary from the real” (57). 16 The recently renewed interest in the concept of the imaginary has put special emphasis on the social imaginary. See, for example, Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries; and Paula Moya and Ramón Saldívar, who provide a “transnational” reconsideration of the concept: “The trans-American imaginary is ‘imaginary’ to the extent that it figures a very real but fundamentally different syntax of codes, images, and icons, as well as the tacit assumptions, convictions, and beliefs that seek to bind together the varieties of American national discourses” (2). Cornelius Castoriadis calls the social imaginary “the radical instituting imaginary” (“Radical Imagination” 136). It is important to note in this context that for Castoriadis the radical imaginary is the source of the self-creation of society ex nihilo and, hence, a counter-term to the idea of interpellation and subjection, whereas some recent uses of the term social imaginary seem to move the concept precisely in that direction. reality’s determinacy is outstripped; by endowing the imaginary with a determinate gestalt, its diffuseness is transformed (“Fictionalizing Acts” 5). This “duplicity” can explain fiction’s usefulness for an articulation of the imag‐ inary: “As an agglomerate of diffuse feelings, images, associations, and visions, the imaginary needs fiction to be translated into a coherent, comprehensible, and culturally meaningful expression” (Fluck, “The American Romance” 423). 15 Fictional texts are especially useful, for they can link the subjective and the social by means of an analogue. 16 Because readers have to draw on their own associations, feelings, and bodily sensations in the transfer process, the actualization of the text establishes analogies between elements that may be far apart historically but linked by unforeseen and often surprising resemblances. This articulation effect is, I think, one of the major gratifications that fictional texts and aesthetic objects provide, and it can be seen as one of the reasons for the increasing role that fictional texts and aesthetic experience have come to play in modern societies. For modern society, this articulation effect serves an important purpose, because it contributes new elements to the ongoing conversation of a culture and thus functions as a source of constant redescription and reconfiguration. For the individual, the articulation effect is welcome, because it can provide a cultural recognition of her own interiority. Again, however, this “empowerment” through fiction should not be falsely construed as self-aggrandizement, or as a fantasy of imaginary strength, but should be seen as a form of imaginary self-extension. Another way of describing this phenomenon is to say that literary texts or aesthetic objects function as a host for readers who use them in parasitical 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 263 17 This process must not take place consciously: “Our education, our upbringing, our social position predisposes us to certain cultural choices, yet there is often an unpredictability and surprise in the way that we feel ourselves claimed by some texts and left cold by others” (Felski 76). 18 As a basic form of literary representation, metaphor is already a form that works by analogy: “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 5). fashion. 17 After reunification in Germany, for example, there was a brief moment when some East Germans compared themselves to the American South after the Civil War. In both cases, a “better” world seemed to have been conquered by an inferior civilization with primarily materialistic values. Let us imagine for the sake of the argument that such an East German ran across the novel Gone with the Wind at the time. This East German had never been to the American South, in fact knew hardly anything about it, except that it was racist. Had she still read the novel in the communist German Democratic Republic, this might have been her major focus. All of a sudden, however, she sees something else in the book, namely, an analogy between what she considers the cruel fate of two superior civilizations. The imaginary and emotional elements she invests in the transfer that actualizes the novel may now be dominated no longer by feelings of superiority but by the theme of how to deal with humiliation and defeat. This potential of the fictional text to function as host for the articulation of hidden, perhaps only half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self provides the only plausible explanation for me of why we read fictive texts about people who never existed. The important point here is that the transfer between two worlds that are far apart - that of a southern belle of the nineteenth century and that of a latetwentieth-century reader in Leipzig - becomes possible by way of analogy: “In the image consciousness,” writes Jean Paul Sartre in his study of the imaginary, “we apprehend an object as an analogon for another object” (52). This analogy can be constituted by different points of reference, ranging from structural similarities to affective affinities. In principle, any element of the text - word, image, figure, scene, event, deictic references, descriptions of space, narrative perspective - can become a point of departure for establishing an analogy, often in entirely unexpected and unforeseen ways. 18 To acknowledge this key role of analogizing means to grasp an important aspect of the act of reading, namely, that as a rule, it takes place in segmented form. Although we may faithfully read every line of the text, we nevertheless read selectively by focusing on certain segments and skipping or disregarding others. The imaginary that seeks analogies for the purpose of articulation can take its point of departure from any 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 264 Winfried Fluck 19 As Richard Slotkin has pointed out in his analysis of a composite heroic type in nineteenth-century American dime novels, in combining detectives with the style of outlaws and vice versa, popular culture derives its effectiveness at cultivating a seemingly contradictory range of choices: “This consensus, which is national in its scope and in its concerns, finds its clearest and most pervasive expression in the mythology developed and purveyed by the media of mass culture. The commercial prosperity of those media depends on their power to incorporate a wide range of social and political referents and to entertain fantasies that express all sides of the public’s contradictory desires and beliefs” (154). 20 See my essay on the aesthetic experience of space, “Imaginary Space; or, Space as Aesthetic Object.” aspect of the text and zoom in on any segment without considering the larger context. For example, we can attach imaginary links to the heroic dimension of a gangster or outlaw figure (Bonnie and Clyde dying in slow motion) while ignoring the criminal context. This, in effect, is the reason why one and the same text can be praised as either subversive or ideologically affirmative, depending on the segment to which the imaginary is attached. Even in the ideologically most conformist text, such as, for example, a domestic novel of the American antebellum period, there may be rebellious acts by characters that the reader can activate for a transfer, although these characters may in the end submit to the patriarchal order. The effect of the novel may thus be the opposite of its ideological project. This can provide one of the explanations for the gratifications of popular culture and the striking, seemingly contradictory phenomenon that popular culture is regularly criticized for its ideological nature and at the same time praised for its subversive force. 19 The ongoing debate in feminist criticism about whether the domestic novel is deeply compromised by a Victorian gender ideology or whether it can be seen as a cunning form of female self-empowerment can be attributed to the fact that these arguments take different segments of the text as their point of departure for the establishment of analogies. The possibilities for discovering analogies in the act of reading are indeed unlimited. Analogies between text and reader can be established on every level of the text. They can be established between the recipient and potentially all characters in the text (not only the ego-ideal; villains can also offer aspects that invite a transfer, such as strength or stances of rebellion), between the reader and single traits of a character, between kinetic, haptic, and other sensuous dimensions of the text and the reader’s body schemata, and even between a setting and an inner mood of the reader. 20 Analogies can be established 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 265 21 Kuiken, Miall, and Sikora describe a case taken from their empirical reader research: “For example, one respondent reflecting on an orange colored patch was reminded of a medicine once taken and (…) was capable of fusing the emotional memory with the present color-impression. (…) In both cases, resonance occurs between explicitly recalled personal memories and some portion of the world of the aesthetic object” (181-82). 22 Rita Felski speaks of the possibility of an “emotional, even erotic cathexis onto the sound and surfaces of words” (63). A whole new field is opened up when we extend these considerations to images: “This brings me to the additional, novel claim that the visual arts are singularly suited to provide explanatory power for the nature and function of the analogical procedure” (Stafford 3). 23 On this point, see Stafford: “Since no form of organization, no matter how encyclopedic, can give complete access to the diversity of existing or imagined things, analogy provides opportunities to travel back into history, to spring forward in time, to leap across continents” (11). 24 See the criticism of “classical” empirical reception studies by Kuiken, Miall, and Sikora: “Studies of reader personality (…) and gender (…) have examined the activities of actual readers to show how their sense of self influences the course of reading. However, they have been primarily concerned with the influence of enduring character traits - and less with the influence of fluctuations in the sense of self that occur during adult life. Moreover, because of their concern with stable personality characteristics, investigators between parallel feelings or moods or sensations, 21 but they can also be based on associations created by language. 22 This potential of fictional texts and aesthetic objects to suggest ever new, potentially unlimited imaginary analogies can explain major aspects of literary and cultural studies to which I drew attention at the beginning of this essay. For one thing, it can provide an explanation for the fact that texts offer gratification for readers who live in worlds that are entirely different from the world of the text and its historical context. Taking into account the possibilities of segmen‐ tation and analogizing, we can understand not only why a text like Gone with the Wind is still popular in contemporary America, although this contemporary America is far removed from the plantation wonderland of the text, but also that it is popular in other countries where southern plantations have never been part of the cultural imaginary. 23 Second, the key role of imaginary analogies in the transfer process can provide an explanation for the fact that different readers can read one and the same text differently: at a closer look, it turns out that they take their point of departure from different segments of the text, so that their readings are based on different analogies. Finally, the fact that aesthetic experience is constituted by a transfer based on imaginary analogies that emerge in the act of reading can explain why we may read one and the same text differently at different times: simply put, the difference is produced by the discovery of new analogies in the transfer process. 24 Ambiguous or enigmatic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 266 Winfried Fluck in this tradition have seldom addressed changes in the sense of self (…) that may occur through literary reading” (174). 25 Lionel Trilling, introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For an analysis of Trilling’s reading, see Jonathan Arac’s study “Huckleberry Finn” as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. For Arac, the “hypercanonization” of Twain’s novel begins with Trilling’s introduction. texts produce a larger number of disagreements, because they also open up new, increased possibilities for analogizing. Moreover, since establishing analogies by means of a transfer often happens spontaneously and in unforeseen ways in the act of reading because of the diffuse and “creative” nature of the imaginary, aesthetic objects are often seen as exemplary models of creativity, for what is creativity other than finding unforeseen linkages? Seen this way, it is not only avant-garde texts that may be considered as manifestations of the experimental but also fictional texts and aesthetic objects in general, because their realization in the act of reception will have a “creative” dimension of unpredictability. By representing reality in a fictional mode, the literary text restructures reality. This doubling is repeated by the reader in the act of reading. In this reception, the reader produces a second narrative that constitutes, in fact, a second text. In the Gilded Age, Mark Twain faced the problem of racial relations, and one of his responses was to redefine the issue in terms of the moral struggle in chapter 31 of his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his famous interpretation of the novel, Lionel Trilling in turn experienced this scene as especially meaningful because he saw it in (and transformed it into) categories that reflected his own struggle for independence against a Stalinist Left. 25 Such a redescription should not be seen as solipsism. On the contrary, it is the beginning of an act of articulation that makes Trilling’s experiences intersubjectively accessible. The prospect that fictional texts can enable us to express and authorize our own need for articulation drives us back, again and again, to literature and other aesthetic phenomena. Interpellation, Identification, Transfer An analysis of aesthetic experience by means of a transfer may appear plausible in the case of reading, but it seems counterintuitive in the case of visual material in the media, because the characters we encounter there have an immediate physical presence. Before we can even begin to think about who Hamlet might be, we have already seen him in the shape of, say, Laurence Olivier. We no longer have to imagine him and need not come up with our own image of what Hamlet looked like. This does not free us, however, from the need to 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 267 26 Cf. Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie; Gottfried Boehm, ed., Was ist ein Bild? ; Gernot Böhme, Theorie des Bildes; W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation; Martin Schulz, Ordnungen der Bilder; Hans Belting, ed., Bilderfragen: Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch. bring this person to life by drawing on our own store of memories, feelings, bodily sensations, and bodily memory. If the person on the screen suffers, we can only imagine what suffering is and what it may mean for him on the basis of our own experiences and memories of suffering. Clearly, the perception of a picture involves an imaginary activity too. No less than literature, although with different modalities, the aesthetic experience of the image, including pictures and motion pictures, is one for which non-identity and doubleness are constitutive. One may claim, in fact, that the art of a movie consists of the way in which it manages to engage us sufficiently to draw on such imaginary associations. One of the reasons for the popularity of the modern mass media can be attributed to the fact that they have entirely new means at their disposal for engaging the viewer - for example, by fast editing, close-ups, montage, and by a combination of image and sound. Visual images are especially effective in drawing us into transfers without our even being aware of it. The development from print to the visual media and on to recorded music can be described as a story in which our involvement as recipients has become more and more direct, unmediated, body-centered, and sensuously intense. In this context it is important to recall again that the transfer through which we constitute an aesthetic object does not merely apply to characters. It pertains to every aspect of the text or object. We also have to bring to life the villains, emotional conflicts, spatial references, even the November fog, by means of our own imagination, our feelings, and our own bodily sensations. Since the visual image comes so quickly and so directly at us, this often happens without any awareness on our side, which in turn means that visual images are also especially effective in triggering imaginary transfers. A theory of aesthetic experience developed in the analysis of the reading process is thus not restricted to literary studies but can be useful for cultural studies at large. These considerations are confirmed by recent theoretical work on the image. 26 A photograph even in a documentary mode is not just a representation of an object but is crucially determined by the idea the photographer has about the object. In that sense it is also a representation of the interiority of the photographer. This picture collides with another interiority in the act of reception, that of the viewer whose interiority is in itself already defined by a whole range of images, because otherwise the self could not develop any sense 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 268 Winfried Fluck 27 This is Belting’s term (Bild-Anthropologie 21). of itself. We do not encounter an image “for the first time” in the act of reception, then. Rather we see it in the context of a cultural imaginary that plays a crucial part in determining what different viewers actually see in looking at one and the same picture. The image always already precedes the picture. It is the virtual background for the actualization of the meaning of the picture. Images are already there as part of the imagination before we “see” them in representation. Or, more precisely, what we actually see is shaped by our cultural imaginary, the storehouse of images in our imagination with which we approach the pictures. The transfer through which aesthetic experience is brought about thus entails a screening of the picture in terms of the images with which we approach it. In this process, we “de-corporealize” the image in order to be able to link it with new experiences and meanings, so that we can make it “our own.” 27 The result is the construction of an image we may all share as a picture on the pictorial surface, but which is nevertheless individualized in the act of reception because of the imaginary transfer it stimulates. What these observations all add up to is that a subject positioning by interpel‐ lation or a discursively produced reader or spectator position cannot determine the second narrative produced by the reader or spectator in the act of reception. In the transfer process that constitutes aesthetic experience, we can take up multiple identificatory positions. There is the possibility of “identification based on difference and identification based on similarity” (Stacey 171). While there are masculine and feminine spectator positions, viewers do not have to assume these positions according to their assigned genders. Moreover, we may identify with characters at one point but distance ourselves at the next when they act against our expectations. Filmic apparatus theory implies a far-ranging power of interpellation over the spectator, while the actual experience of watching movies is one of moving in and out of characters, switching sides and sympathies, getting angry or disappointed with characters or plots (which we usually express by calling a film “unrealistic”), of unexpected crossover identifications, and, altogether, a constant readjustment in response to the film and the way it affects us. As a result, we can be both object and subject of the act of seeing at the same time. The pleasure of the imagination, and also of the movies, is that we do not “necessarily identify in any fixed way with a character, a gaze, or a particular position, but rather with a series of oscillating positions” so that “the pleasures of watching a movie are also the pleasures of mobility, of moving around among a range of different desiring positions” (Williams 57). This is possible because in the transfer model our relation to the aesthetic object is established not by 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 269 28 The assumption of an insatiable longing for the undifferentiated wholeness of the womb is one of the most problematic premises of Castoriadis’s theory of the imaginary. 29 See Castoriadis’s characterization of the, as he calls it, radical imagination of the singular human being in his essay “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” where he writes: “This ‘inside’ is a perpetual, truly heraclitean, flux of representations cum affects cum intentions, in fact indissociable. (…) [F]or all we know, this stream of representations cum affects cum desires is absolutely singular for each singular human being” (“Radical Imagination” 143-44). identification with a particular figure but by analogies between a potentially wide range of textual elements and the recipient’s imaginary. If identification were the main mode of reception, then responses to fictional texts and aesthetic objects should be fairly predictable. Yet the history of reception of any fictional text reveals ever new possibilities for analogies. In consequence, there will always be new readings emerging. The Imaginary and the Inadequacy of Interpretation It is important in this context to be clear about the source and function of the fictional articulation effect. It should by no means be conceptualized as driven by a prediscursive, “authentic” residue of experience, nor should the transgressive potential of avant-garde texts be seen as its privileged manifestation. 28 The reason for a constantly renewed drive for articulation is not a prediscursive desire or unconscious drive but an inherent inadequacy of representation. We can speak only through the signs and cultural patterns that are available to us, but these will never completely express the full range of associations, feelings, and bodily sensations that seek articulation. Hence our imaginary perpetually exceeds the cultural script. We can articulate our interior states only through language, and yet we are constantly striving for new expressions of this interi‐ ority, because the imaginary that we articulate by attaching it to conventional signs is no longer identical with the imaginary that strove for expression. 29 On the one hand, the imaginary has found a possibility for articulation, but on the other hand, this articulation is possible only at the cost of reduction. We may articulate our desire by saying “I love you,” but by attaching our feeling to such a conventional formulation that seems “safe” from misunderstanding, we also reduce the imaginary and full emotional dimension that may be connected with the experience of love. Paradoxically, then, articulation by means of fiction constantly refuels our need for articulation; this, in effect, provides another reason why we return to fictional texts again and again, although we are well aware of their practical “uselessness.” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 270 Winfried Fluck Fictional texts are ideal means for the articulation of an interiority that seeks representation. What makes them so wonderfully effective for this purpose, however - their ability to link imaginary elements with a semblance of the real - is at the same time also the reason for the insufficiency of representation and, consequently, for ever newer attempts to fill the gap. Since articulation can be achieved only by analogy, it remains indirect, provisional, and temporary, and since it can never fully express an interior state, it must stimulate an ongoing search for analogies that promise a fuller expression. Thus one analogy will be quickly replaced by another, often from one sentence to the next or from one image to the next. Barbara Maria Stafford captures this inherently provisional dimension when she says: “Analogy, born of the human desire to achieve union with that which one does not possess, is also a passionate process marked by fluid oscillations. Perceiving the lack of something - whether physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual - inspires us to search for an approximating resemblance to fill its place” (2). And yet what may appear as weakness from the perspective of adequate representation is also something that can provide the act of reading with special interest. On the one hand, the reader is driven to a search for ever-newer analogies because of the failure of representation to articulate the imaginary fully. On the other hand, it is precisely this shortcoming that may lead to the discovery of surprising, unexpected new affinities. Reading can be an adventure because it always holds the promise of unexpected encounters and discoveries. This, in effect, may explain the phenomenon of a hunger for fiction (Lesehunger), including the amazing fact that we expose ourselves again and again to fictional texts although we are aware that the fictional world is “unreal.” The reason for our constant desire for articulation lies in the inability of representation to articulate our imaginary and express our interior states fully. Fictional texts and aesthetic objects can provide the illusion of fulfilling our wishes for articulation, but they can do so only by stimulating our desire for articulation ever anew. But why do we experience the limits of representation as frustrating and as a challenge to try again? Once more, Iser’s work can be taken as a point of departure. Ultimately, all hypotheses about the function of aesthetic experience must postulate an anthropological need. Iser’s phenomenological approach in The Act of Reading, developed to give an account of aesthetic experience that would not be restricted to an experimental, modernist mode, is insufficient to deal with this question. Thus it made sense for Iser to return to a reconsider‐ ation of the function of literature and, by doing so, to move from reception aesthetics to the project of a literary anthropology. Iser’s anthropological turn addresses two problems in particular: it helps to do away with a still lingering 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 271 30 The distinction between psychoanalytic and phenomenological definitions of the imag‐ inary is important. For Lacan, the imaginary is the source of the subject’s misrecognition and self-alienation; for Iser - as for Castoriadis in The Imaginary Institution of Society, a book that was influential in Iser’s anthropological turn - the imaginary is the source of a creative energy that escapes the control of systemic power effects and can therefore function as a source of cultural and social change. Although Castoriadis took his point of departure from a psychoanalytic position and was influenced by Lacan, he broke with him in the 1960s and “wrote several critiques of Lacanian theory and practice. (…) According to Castoriadis, if the subject-to-be (mis)recognizes its reflected image in the ‘mirror’ - or mirroring other - it must already possess certain imaginary capacities for representation and identification” (Elliott 153-54). Thus Castoriadis can claim: “The imaginary does not come from the image in the mirror or from the gaze of the other. Instead, the ‘mirror’ itself and its possibility, and the other as mirror, are the works of the imaginary, which is creation ex nihilo” (The Imaginary Institution 3). 31 Thus a shift of interpretive emphasis can be noted in Iser’s transition from reception aesthetics to literary anthropology. While the former deals primarily with the phenom‐ enology of text processing and highlights the role of textual blanks, the latter focuses on various manifestations of the text’s doubling structures and their interaction. This “play of the text,” however - exemplified, for instance, in Iser’s book Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy - can only lead to a typology of play movements, because any further concretization would undermine the conceptualization of the play of the text as a manifestation of negativity. This, however, leaves only one route open, namely, “to grasp different modes of negativity that are in play with one another” (Iser, “The Critical Turn” xiv). To me, this is the most sterile and disappointing aspect of Iser’s approach. modernist bias of reception aesthetics by shifting the point of emphasis, more consistently than before, from the category of literature to that of fictionality as a mode of representation characterized by doubleness. And it does this by reconceptualizing the basic interplay that constitutes the “in-between” state of aesthetic experience through a new set of concepts, the real and the imaginary, the latter defined not in psychoanalytical terms as the source of an illusion of wholeness, but phenomenologically, as an indeterminate, diffuse, and protean flow of impressions and sensations. 30 A significant problem remains, however. In Iser’s reception aesthetics, the doubling structures of literary fictionality can be described only as potential, that is, in terms of their various doubling operations, because any attribution of a more specific meaning or function would arrest the ceaseless play of negativity. 31 And although Iser’s anthropological turn promised to provide a more concrete description of the function of literary texts, it does not really enlarge the descriptive range, because the anthropological reason given for why we need fiction is another version of the experience of non-identity, namely, the “unknowability” of the self and the “inexperienceability” of the end (Iser, “Representation”). But do we really seek out fictional texts again and again in order to be confronted with the unknowability of the self ? Are all our aesthetic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 272 Winfried Fluck 32 See especially Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”; and Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Although varying in their philosophical premises and argumentative approaches, all three authors are primarily interested in the concept of recognition as a normative term in order to establish a new and more comprehensive criterion of justice than that of liberal rights or economic equality. All three are not interested in fictional texts and other aesthetic objects (although Honneth has referred to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man as an extreme case of misrecognition). For literary and cultural studies, these approaches therefore remain limited in their usefulness. experiences reenacting the same diffuse search for knowledge of an inaccessible origin or end? Even if this were the case, this diffuse longing for articulation and self-awareness is obviously articulated in historically, culturally, and psy‐ chologically different and diverse ways. Why so many different genres and media, then? Why comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama, historical novel and realistic novel, why literature, film, comics, and painting? The Search for Recognition I want to suggest a different explanation and postulate a different anthropolog‐ ical need that can link my argument with an important recent development in critical theory, namely, a shift in criteria of social justice from distribution to recognition. 32 For American studies, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is especially suggestive in this respect. What limited Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy, the Olympian perspective of a French aristo‐ crat, can also be regarded as a major strength of his analysis, because it allowed him to grasp a fundamental transformation that the new political system of democracy brought about, which he subsumes under the term “equality.” From the large-scale perspective of a comparison between aristocratic and democratic society, Tocqueville’s understanding of equality refers not to ideals of social or economic justice but to the (then revolutionary) idea of an equality of rank. Equality of rank means that in principle, nobody can claim to be better or more worthy than anybody else in a democratic society. This, however, puts social and cultural life on an entirely new basis, for it creates a need to find new sources of recognition. As Amy Gutman has summarized the challenge in her introduction to Charles Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition”: “In the ancient regime, when a minority could count on being honored (as ‘Ladies’ and ‘Lords’) and the majority could not realistically aspire to public recognition, the demand for recognition was unnecessary for the few and futile for the many. Only with the collapse of stable social hierarchies does the demand for public recognition become 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 273 commonplace, along with the idea of the dignity of all individuals. Everyone is an equal - a Mr., Mrs., or Ms. - and we all expect to be recognized as such” (6). In his own plea for a politics of recognition, Taylor uses this point of departure to argue for a multicultural politics of recognition. For Taylor, recognition means acknowledgment of the other person’s dignity and leads to a demand for mutual respect. My reading of Tocqueville (who actually does not use the term recognition) points in another direction and starts on a more basic level: since rank no longer indicates the worth of a person, the individual is forced to take it upon herself to demonstrate her worth to others, because nobody else will do it for her. This is especially true in a society of immigrants with great cultural diversity and great mobility, because this mobility will increase the frequency of encounters with strangers and will create a need on the side of the individual to develop commonly understandable forms of self-presentation. This new condition created by democracy must also affect the role of the aesthetic. One consequence of Tocqueville’s starting premise, in contrast to Taylor, is that the problem of recognition is discussed not as an issue of moral philosophy but as a problem of identity formation under new social conditions. If everybody is considered an equal, then the problem must arise for the individual how to distinguish oneself from all the others who are equally equal: “They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave away through the dense throng which surrounds and presses them” (Tocqueville 537). In an essay on changing perceptions of America in Europe, called “American Studies and the Romance with America,” I offer a new version of the history of American studies: no longer as the response to knowledge gaps but as a sequence of changing imaginary attachments to objects of desire that pose a special imaginary attraction. In literary American studies in Germany this sequence is easy to trace: the attraction first to American modernists (a strong alternative to a discredited German culture) and then postmodernists (for a while the new avantgarde in international literature). Then, earlier than in other disciplines in the humanities, popular culture and the media (above all film) became preferred objects of analysis and pushed American studies in the direction of an extension into cultural studies. Finally, and most important for understanding the present situation, it was ethnic and African American literature that proved especially attractive and, paradoxically enough, continued the romance with an America in which these groups are, or had been, marginalized. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 274 Winfried Fluck Why that special focus? What is the attraction that steers students and younger faculty in the direction of ethnic and African American studies? For most commentators, it seems that the phenomenon can be best explained, on the one hand, as a search for recognition on the part of the ethnic or racial groups themselves, and on the other hand, as a gesture of loyal political support on the part of those white middle-class Americanists who live in Bamberg or Braunschweig and may be far removed from the political struggles of ethnic or racial minorities in the United States. If, however, the main motive for focusing on this literature is a politics of recognition in Taylor’s sense, how can that motive explain the fascination (“desire”) of readers in Bamberg or Braunschweig who are not part of the group and thus cannot use this literature for their own search for recognition? Or can they? At this point it is useful to recall that aesthetic experience does not rest on direct identification but that it is based on a transfer that can open up a field of analogies. The question would then be what analogies ethnic and African American literature offer to white readers outside the group. If one looks at it from the perspective of reading as transfer, a major point is that this literature takes its departure from experiences of misrecognition or the denial of recognition (as in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) and that the ensuing narrative is that of a transformation of inferiority into (moral) superiority, of discrimination into empowerment. Or to put it differently, ethnic and African American literatures can be especially attractive because they dramatize exemplary scenes of misrecognition. And since, as we have seen, reading by means of a transfer is selective and therefore segmented, these scenes of misrecognition can be taken out of their context and can function as an analogy for readers who consider lack of attention and recognition the major injustice they are experiencing under democratic conditions. In this case the ethnic and/ or racial groups’ search for recognition would become the host for articulating the reader’s own imaginary longings for increased recognition in a politically correct manner. For a critical analysis of interpretations, such a reading would have consequences: it would mean having to look at competing interpretations in terms of the analogies on which these interpretations are based. Transfer as Narrative Reconfiguration But if it is one of the major functions of literary texts to provide individuals with an opportunity to inscribe themselves into cultural discourses in their own, highly subjective way, how can we say anything meaningful about this process at all? How is it possible to discuss a reading, if this reading acquires meaning 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 275 only by means of a transfer in which an “invisible” imaginary dimension is articulated? We can characterize the structure of the transfer that constitutes aesthetic experience, but we cannot come up with a ready-made formula to describe its content or psychic function. The whole point about aesthetic experience is that it goes beyond such formulas and particularizes them in entirely unpredictable ways. The obvious problem is, however, that we have no direct access to that which is added in transfer. Strictly speaking, aesthetic experience is untranslatable. The only “document” we have is the reader’s or interpreter’s redescription of the aesthetic object that has functioned as host. In this redescription, the interpreter produces a second narrative that provides clues for that reader’s encounter with the fictional text. For reasons discussed at the beginning of this essay, none of these readings or interpretations will ever be identical. But the difference can be instructive where certain patterns of reception emerge. The cultural history of literary texts thus cannot be separated from their varying uses in the act of reception; it is a history of second narratives. Literary history and the history of reception cannot be separated. As articulation of an imaginary that seeks articulation, the second narratives through which the literary text is actualized have their own historically distinct patterns, and a history of the second narratives through which literary texts are actualized and appropriated at different times is therefore one of the logical follow-up projects of any attempt to understand the changing functions of fiction. Seen from this perspective, the phenomenon of interpretive disagreement and conflict, which provided the point of departure for this essay, is no longer an irritating problem but, quite the contrary, an indispensable resource. Works Cited Adams, Suzi. “Interpreting Creation: Castoriadis and the Birth of Autonomy.” Thesis Eleven 83 (2005): 25-41. Appleyard, J.A. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Arac, Jonathan. ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Belting, Hans. Bild-Anthropologie. München: Fink, 2006. ---, ed. Bilderfragen: Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch. München: Fink, 2007. Boehm, Gottfried, ed. Was ist ein Bild? München: Fink, 1994. Böhme, Gernot. Theorie des Bildes. München: Fink, 1999. Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Penguin, 1982. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 276 Winfried Fluck Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. ---. “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary.” Rethinking Imagination. Ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell. London: Routledge, 1994. 136-154. Clover, Carol J. “Her Body. Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Fantasy and the Cinema. Ed. James Donald. London: BFI, 1989. 91-133. Elliott, Anthony. “The Social Imaginary: A Critical Assessment of Castoriadis’s Psycho‐ analytic Social Theory.” American Imago 59.2 (2002): 141-170. Esrock, Ellen J. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Ästhetische Erfahrung als Schwellenerfahrung.” Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung. Ed. Joachim Küpper and Christoph Menke. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. 138-161. Fluck, Winfried. “‘The American Romance’ and the Changing Functions of the Imagi‐ nary.” New Literary History 27.3 (1996): 415-457. ---. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans, 1790-1900. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. ---. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in the Literary Theory of Wolfgang Iser.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175-210. ---. “The Role of the Reader and the Changing Functions of Literature: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte.” European Journal of English Studies 6 (2002): 253-271. ---. “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 79-103. ---. “Aesthetic Experience of the Image.” Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation. Ed. Ulla Haselstein, Berndt Ostendorf, and Peter Schneck. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 11-41. ---. “Imaginary Space; or, Space as Aesthetic Object.” Space in America. Ed. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005. 25-40. ---. “Playing Indian: Media Reception as Transfer.” Figurationen 2 (2007): 67-86. ---. “American Studies and the Romance with America: Approaching America Through Its Ideals.“ Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 87-104. Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, 2003. Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 277 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “Epiphanien.” Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung. Ed. Joachim Küpper and Christoph Menke. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. 203-222. Gutman, Amy, ed. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Harari, Josué. Scenarios of the Imaginary. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. Munich: UTB, 1976. ---. “The Current Situation of Literary Theory.” New Literary History 11.1 (1979): 1-20. ---. “Fictionalizing Acts.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 31.1 (1986): 5-15. ---. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Munich, UTB, 1987. ---. “The Art of Failure: The Stifled Laugh in Beckett’s Theater.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 152-193. ---. “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 236-261. ---. “The Critical Turn: Toward ‘Negativity’ and the ‘Unsayable.’” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. xi-xx. ---. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Kuiken, Don, David S. Miall, and Shelley Sikora. “Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading.” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 171-203. Lakoff, George und Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1994. Moya, Paula M.L., and Ramon Saldivar. “Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary.” Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (2003): 1-18. Sartre, Jean Paul. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination. London: Routledge, 2004. Schulz, Martin. Ordnungen der Bilder. Munich: Fink, 2007. Schwab, Gabriele. The Mirror and the Killer-queen: Otherness in Literary Language. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Slotkin, Richard. “Mythologies of Resistance: Outlaws, Detectives, and Dime-Novel Populism, 1873-1903.” Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. 125-55. Stacey, Jackie. “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in Star-Audience Rela‐ tions.” Stardom: Industry of Desire. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: Routledge, 1991. 141-163. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting. Cam‐ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 278 Winfried Fluck Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 25-73. ---. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Tischleder, Bärbel. ‘Body Trouble’: Entkörperlichung, Whiteness und das amerikanische Gegenwartskino. Frankfurt/ M.: Strömfeld, 2000. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969. Travis, Molly. Reading Culture: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1998. Trilling, Lionel. “Introduction.” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Rinehart Edition. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1948. 310-320. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Williams, Linda. “Review of Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship.” Film Quarterly 48.2 (1994-95): 56-57. Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0015 The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer 279 1 See, “The Other Side of History” 156-67; and “Criticism on the Border.” Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” Ramón Saldívar In recent work elaborating the concept of “speculative realism” and its aesthetic work in relation to the social imaginary, I have found it productive to follow the always expansive and illuminating lead of Winfried Fluck. 1 This is especially so in relation to Fluck’s remarkable flair to offer lucid and plain-spoken explanations of methodological and theoretical work that seeks to pry open what he calls the “notoriously difficult, ambiguous, or enigmatic texts like Hamlet or The Turn of the Screw” (“Second Narrative,” in this volume 253). In the case of such texts, “disagreements over meaning and value never seem to subside and are rekindled with every new interpretation” (253). This “strange phenomenon” of the persistence of literary ambiguity and the never-ending task of interpretation pertains despite the increasing “professionalization of literary and cultural studies” that, as Fluck puts it, “promised to put the interpretation of literary texts and aesthetic objects on more professional and ‘objective’ grounds” (253). Dealing with the same tensions mined so eloquently in essays as early as his 2013 “Playing Indian” and a number of other important studies on reading and the imaginary, including the subject of my discussion here, “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative,” Fluck’s work still grips us today. By delineating precisely what is at issue in understanding the perpetual ambiguity of literary texts, Fluck lights up the everyday world of literary interpretation. These are matters that we normally don’t see as we literary scholars live and work it, particularly the undertaking of “role-play” (260) involved in the hermeneutical process. Fluck’s own objective professionalism comes into full display as he dissects this strange phenomenon and appraises the numerous “approaches or ‘literary methods’” (253) that emerged during the postwar era of the twentieth century. He is certainly correct in noting that with the advent of poststructuralism, “a more pluralistic view has come to prevail in which every method has a potential of its own, so that different approaches (and presumably their different understandings of the meaning and value of ambiguous texts) can happily complement one another” (254). Fluck laments, however, that the pluralistic view does not remove disagreement over textual interpretation but “merely obscures the problem” (254). How do we explain this phenomenon, then, and more importantly, what can we do about it? How may we reasonably approach a text with some confidence of “getting at the ‘true’ meaning” of it, beyond the chaos of multiple and conflicting interpretations? To help resolve this situation, Fluck assesses competing methods of interpretation and then offers his own alternative. He turns first to an area of criticism with which he has a great deal of sympathy, even if his own work is not fully invested in it, namely, “historical contextualization” (254). Historicisms, argues Fluck, hold the promise that as we learn more about the “historical context of a text and the social and political factors that shaped its meaning and form” the closer we come to the “true” (254) meaning of a text. For Fluck, the promises of historicisms old and new have regrettably not proven to be sufficient in eliminating differences of interpretation. In particular, he notes that such methods cannot explain why “texts like Huckleberry Finn can still affect us, although we live in different times and circumstances” (254). That is, historical reconstructions cannot suffice for interpreting true meanings of texts “because they cannot explain the fact that literary texts and aesthetic objects can continue to provide an aesthetic experience although the historical situation has changed” (254). Moreover, historical contexts are themselves not self-evidently uniquely interpretable. Fluck concludes that dictums such as “To ‘always historicize’ thus cannot solve the problem of interpretive conflicts” (254). Where does the failure of historical contextualization to solve the riddle of textual meaning leave us, then? This is where Fluck turns to his own preferred manner of dealing with the conundrum of the “never-ending disagreements about the interpretation of literary texts and other aesthetic objects” (254). His inclination is toward the method that he terms “A Theory of Aesthetic Experience” (257). That is, if we can agree that the only way to make sense of the inherently ambiguous nature of literary texts is by assuming that “texts are designed to do something and that their fictive elements have been arranged in the way they are in order to achieve this goal,” then “we can make sense of the texts’ elements only by postulating that they are ‘functional’ with regard to producing the particular effect we ascribe to them” (255). This is the first key to Fluck’s 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 282 Ramón Saldívar 2 Fluck makes this argument in numerous publications, including “The Role of the Reader; ” “Aesthetic Experience of the Image” in Romance with America? (2009); as well as in the previously mentioned “Playing Indian.” 3 Elaborated by Charles Taylor most centrally in Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), the shared assumptions of social imaginaries are the repositories of social meaning. See also, “What is the social imaginary? ” of the Social Imaginaries Project https: / / socialim aginaries.org/ the-imaginary-system-of-society/ . 4 See Nyström and Dahlberg, “Pre-understanding.” See also, Shionoya, “Hermeneutics.” response to the unending need for literary interpretation and re-interpretation. The concept of function serves as the fundamental element of his explanatory hypothesis concerning aesthetic experience. Fluck presses his claim further by noting that function “is useful (…) and, in effect, indispensable for literary and cultural studies” (255). 2 Sounding very much like a version of the Heideggerian and Gadamerian epistemological notion of pre-understanding from Being and Time (1927/ 1962) and Truth and Method (1960/ 1994) respectively, Fluck’s notion of function posits a reader’s pre-understanding that a text has a “political and/ or aesthetic function” as the conceptual requirement that makes them readable in the first place. As Fluck points out: “This potential of the fictional text to function as host for the articulation of hidden, perhaps only half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self provides the only plausible explanation for me of why we read fictive texts about people who have never existed” (264). These “half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self ” to which Fluck refers can be understood as constituted by a set of ideas, practices, orientations, values, fears, desires, and motives that bind societies together. They are the shared assumptions that allow individuals to aggregate as a society and which therefore carry social meaning. 3 That is, interpretation as the foundation of all human understanding, is not a direct reflection of the real world but is regulated by prestructures (vorhabe, vorsicht, vorgriff) in our internal world. These prestructures provide a prejudice or pre-understanding of entities in question. 4 For Fluck, the literary text functions as “host” for and to activate these “half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions” preunderstandings of human experience. Or, more fully stated, “This potential of fictional texts and aesthetic objects to suggest ever new, potentially unlimited imaginary analogies can explain major aspects of literary and cultural studies” (266). As reservoirs of “unlimited imaginary analogies,” texts activate in different ways for different readers the bounty of connections and correlations among motives, desires, fears, or aspirations that readers already hold as pre-under‐ standings of the shared private and social motives of the self, even if only as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 283 “half-conscious or unconscious imaginary dimensions of the self.” Moreover, this “finding of unforeseen linkages” (267) by readers between texts and their own imaginaries, “produces a second narrative that constitutes, in fact, a second text” (267). Through the unlimited imaginary analogies offered by texts, then, readers enact a transfer based on pre-understandings that are in effect “second narratives (…) through which literary texts are actualized and appropriated” (276). Hermeneutical pre-understanding is thus that set of assumptions and attitudes which a person brings to their apprehension and interpretation of reality or any aspect of it. It is also what makes texts readable because they conform to and enact a reader’s pre-understood expectations of what makes them understandable in the first place. In an article on Gadamer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jeff Malpas similarly explains that: Gadamer’s work, in conjunction with that of Heidegger, represents a radical re‐ working of the idea of hermeneutics. (…) The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, (…) was transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as expressing the way in which all understanding was ‘always already’ given over to that which is to be understood (to ‘the things themselves’—die Sachen selbst). (n.p.) Thus, according to Malpas: If we wish to understand some particular artwork, we must already have some prior understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paint marks on canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be understood. (…) All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in (…) a prior hermeneutical situatedness. (n.p.) Several key points emerge when we consider the affinities of Fluck’s notion of “functionality” to the Heideggerian and Gadamerian discussions of preunderstanding. First, the “necessity of pre-understanding means that knowledge development is not linear (i.e., we do not start developing understanding of a phenomenon from scratch), but rather circular in character” (Alvesson and Sandberg 396). Furthermore, this circularity implies that understanding is never complete but always only sets the ground for more complete understandings. This feature of pre-understanding is one partial response to Fluck’s initial con‐ cern with the multiplicity and repetitive necessity of interpretive possibilities of a text. Rather than serving as a problematic, the inherently incomplete nature of an interpretive investigation continuously adds to the pre-understanding that 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 284 Ramón Saldívar a reader brings to a text. The more we read Huckleberry Finn, the more we and others understand its complexities and densities. A deeper and more important implication of the necessity of hermeneutical pre-understanding is that it is “primarily social-historical rather than personalhistorical in character” (Alvesson and Sandberg 397). “This is because the continuous development (and revision) of our pre-understanding occurs against the background of the specific society, culture, religion and social practices in which we constantly participate, and which we have (largely unquestion‐ ingly) taken over from others through our upbringing, education and work” (Alvesson and Sandberg 397). It may be the case as Fluck claims that historical reconstructions “cannot explain the fact that literary texts and aesthetic objects can continue to provide an aesthetic experience although the historical situation has changed” (“Second Narrative,” 254). Yet it is also true that the structure of pre-understanding underlying Fluck’s hermeneutical method is deeply social historical and implicated in any interpretive move. That is, no matter how we understand the “functional” qualities of a text that make it a readable form, that function cannot be simply determined by a singular reader being of personalhistorical in character but of necessity must rather be seen as being of socialhistorical in nature. When Fluck concludes that because historical contexts are themselves not self-evidently uniquely interpretable and that consequently the imperative “To ‘always historicize’ thus cannot solve the problem of interpretive conflicts” (254), he is not taking fully into account the fact that the social-historical nature of pre-understanding precludes the exclusion of historicity from the interpretive act. Fluck’s description of the “potential of the fictional text to function as host for the articulation of hidden, perhaps only half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self ” (264) requires that we not forget that these emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self exist fully, only, in the social-historical dimension of the social imaginary. Seeking in the act of reading an explanation for the very human desire and need for fictional texts despite our recognition that such writings are not only not true, but “practically useless” (257), Fluck embraces Iser’s explanation that we read literature not “‘for meaning’ but to have the kind of experience we call an aesthetic experience” (257). Or, as Fluck summarizes concerning his notion of function: “As interpreters, we do not encounter a fictional text first and then try to determine its function. On the contrary, we cannot interpret a fictional text without already implying a function” (255). Iser, then, allows Fluck to maintain that, “As a representation of yet unfor‐ mulated and indeterminate imaginary elements, the fictional text goes beyond 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 285 discourses of the real; as a form of representation drawing on a semblance of the real, it is more than a mere fantasy or daydream; as a combination of the two elements, it places the reader in a position ‘in between’” (262). In the footnote accompanying a preceding quote, Fluck emphasizes that “To introduce the term function as a heuristic category of analysis is thus an attempt not to anchor interpretation on ‘real’ grounds but to draw attention to underlying assumptions that guide and govern every interpretation” (fn. 4, 256). These “underlying assumptions that guide and govern every interpretation” are the key for Fluck’s notion of what he describes as “experiential aesthetics” as the basis for a solution to the chaos of interpretive ambiguity. That is, the functionality of texts in this sense cannot be explained by referring to the anchoring grounds of historical, social, or even cultural realities. Always historicizing, for Fluck, unavoidably entails the failure of interpretation since the reading function can never be historically determined. Instead, the functionality of texts in drawing attention to the underlying assumptions that govern interpretation is to be explained with reference to a reader’s own hermeneutical pre-understanding that a text has a “political and/ or aesthetic function” as the conceptual requirement that makes them readable in the first place (255). Turning to Iser’s “performative” theory of aesthetic experience allows Fluck to elaborate this notion of literary hermeneutical preunderstanding. Fluck thus notes that we read literature “not for meaning” but “to have the kind of experience we call an aesthetic experience” (257), which experience it is the function of texts to guide readers to perform. “Inevitably,” argues Fluck, “this mental construct [shaped by literary/ cultural texts] will draw on our own feelings and associations, or, to use a broader, more comprehensive term, on our imaginary” (257). In turn, from a reader’s own singular feelings and associations (“our imaginary”) these imaginary elements acquire shape and purpose to the degree that they align with “discourses of the real” (258). For this reason, argues Fluck, literary representation is not at base “a form of mimesis” but constitutes fundamentally “a performative act” (258), which discursively enacts the alignment of the imaginary with the real. The reader’s performance of an unreal figure, say, Huckleberry Finn or Hamlet, entails endowing an unreal figment with “a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies determination” (258). This staging on the part of the reader of an unreal character requires the reader allowing their “own reality to fade out” and transferring to the fictive character with “a sense of reality” (258). Or, as Fluck puts it, “The basic point about fictional texts and aesthetic objects is, then, that in order to acquire significance and to provide an aesthetic experience, they have to be brought 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 286 Ramón Saldívar to life by means of an imaginary transfer on the side of the reader” (259). The reader actualizes the meaningfulness of a text “only by drawing on his or her own associations, mental images, and feelings as an analogue” (259). In this way, claims Fluck, “Literature enables readers to enter other worlds that are different from their own but remain, strangely enough, their own worlds at the same time” (260). “In aesthetic experience, then, the transfer needed to give meaning and significance to the text in the act of reception allows us to give expression to associations, feelings, moods, impulses, desires, or corporeal sensations that otherwise have not yet found any satisfactory expression” (261) by means of the imaginary transfer enacted by texts and performed by readers, literary texts serve as mediators between “indeterminate imaginary elements” on the one hand, and the determinately objective elements of the historically real on the other hand. “Consequently,” Fluck concludes, “the time-honored opposition between fiction and reality has to be discarded and replaced by a triad: the real, the fictional and the imaginary” (262). The literary text arises from this triadic relation. One particularly significant result for Fluck of this triadic relation from which the literary text emerges is that it explains how “literary texts or aesthetic objects function as a host for readers who use them in parasitical fashion” (263). In representing worlds fundamentally different from the one in which a reader may reside, a text can provide by analogy readerly transfers between worlds that are far apart. This potential of literary texts and other aesthetic forms to suggest to readers imaginary analogies explains for Fluck “the fact that texts offer gratification for readers who live in worlds that are entirely different from the world of the text and its historical context” (266). It can also explain why different readers can read the same text differently. Fluck’s emphasis has been on the role of the imaginary as a working phenomenological element of a singular consciousness. As he concludes his discussion, however, he turns to the topic that has always animated his thinking on the role of the reader in activating and performing the meaning of a text. Vividly present in essays such as the two that I mentioned earlier, “American Studies and the Romance with America” (2009) and “Playing Indian” (2013), and that now becomes the concluding crescendo of the present one is the question of what explains in the history of American studies “the attraction that steers students and younger faculty in the direction of ethnic and African American studies” (275). In addressing this “attraction,” Fluck contrasts two competing versions of American studies. The first version for Fluck is based on an original focus of American Studies as it drew inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 287 in America. Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy was based on his sense of a “fundamental transformation” it brought about concerning the notion of “equality,” not as a measure of ideals of social or economic justice, but of the “idea of an equality of rank.” The second is drawn from Charles Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition,” which posited the view that with the collapse of the stable social hierarchies of the ancien régime a new demand arose for public recognition and the idea of the dignity of the individual and thus for a multicultural politics of recognition (273). Interestingly, in this discussion of Taylor’s concept of the imaginary, Fluck sets aside Taylor’s comments on the particular type of imaginary that Taylor terms the “social imaginary” (Taylor, “Social Imaginary” 23-30). In work such as Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), he offers a different concept of the imaginary that leads in a different direction than the one that Fluck outlines. Departing from the notion of the imaginary as the province of the singular consciousness and the phenomenology of the sovereign singular subject, Taylor proposes a radically disseminated notion of the imaginary spread across consciousnesses that are mutually constituted across spaces and times and linked by systems of symbolic coherence. Against these versions of the imaginary, Fluck offers finally a third alterna‐ tive. In contrast to both an Enlightenment subject-centered version such as Tocqueville’s and Taylor’s trans-individual notion of a multicultural imaginary, Fluck proposes a history of American studies “as a sequence of changing imaginary attachments to objects of desire that pose a special imaginary attraction” (“Second Narrative,” 274). In the course of Fluck’s scholarly life, the sequence of these shifting imaginary attachments ranged from the allure of the American modernists, then postmodernists, followed by popular culture and media studies. “Finally, and most important for understanding the present situation, it was ethnic and African American literature that proved especially attractive” to European scholars of American studies: Why that special focus? What is the attraction that steers students and younger faculty in the direction of ethnic and African American studies? (…) If, however, the main motive for focusing on this literature is a politics of recognition in Taylor’s sense, how can that motive explain the fascination (“desire”) of readers in Bamberg or Braunschweig who are not part of the group and thus cannot use this literature for their own search for recognition? Or can they? (275) Recalling his earlier argument that the allure of literature rests on its ability to create transfer analogies between disparate worlds and their distinct imagina‐ ries, Fluck questions what analogies ethnic and African American literature can 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 288 Ramón Saldívar offer to European white readers. He settles on “experiences of misrecognition or the denial of recognition” and the “ensuing narrative (…) of a transformation of inferiority into (moral) superiority, of discrimination into empowerment” (275). That is, for readers outside the phenomenological world of American racism, scenes of misrecognition can function as analogies for the major injustices they are experiencing. For this reason, Fluck concludes, such scenes of misrecognition taken out of context “can function as an analogy for readers who consider lack of attention and recognition the major injustice they are experiencing under democratic conditions” (275). There are certainly other functional ways of conceiving the work of the imaginary than the ones that Fluck describes. We could consider, for instance, the transnational imaginary as a special instance of Taylor’s “social imaginary.” If in an American context we conceive of the syntax of codes, images, and icons, as well as the tacit assumptions, convictions, and beliefs that seek to bind together the varieties of national discourses as forming a social imaginary structure, then a transnational imaginary is the attempt to describe imaginary structures emerging from the social, cultural, and political intersections of multinational populations and poly-cultural meanings conveyed by persons across nation states. Inhabitants of the transnational spaces we see developing around the globe today exceed the bounds of nationally prescribed versions of culture, economics, and politics. Current debates on the meaning of citizenship as a right of national polities have ignored the ways in which processes of decolonization and migration as well as social identities based on ethnicity, race, and gender point to the existence of social imaginaries other than those formulating national identities as the basis for defining citizenship. Or, we could consider transnational imaginaries representing a reality that does not yet exist in fully realized form but serves instead to enable the utopian visions emerging from the works of a new generation of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) writers of the Americas. The works of these writers represent a post-magical realism, post-postmodern, post-borderlands, and neofantasy transnational turn in American studies. Fluck would likely see a work such as Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2009) as exemplary of texts by “ethnic and African American” writers that are “especially attractive” to “students and younger faculty” in Europe. In a work such as Diaz’s novel we see most vividly the limits of a critical view that posits literary functionality of texts “as hosts for the articulation of hidden, perhaps only half-conscious or unconscious emotional and imaginary dimensions of the self ” (283). Instead of allowing European bourgeois white readers to analogically experience by transfer American “ethnic and/ or racial groups’ search for recognition” and to 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 289 5 See, for example, “Criticism on the Border.” construe their writings as a “host for articulating the reader’s own imaginary longings for increased recognition in a politically correct manner” (275), works such as Diaz’s fiction do something else. Functioning within the ethos of a social rather than personal imaginary, works like Oscar Wao have practically nothing to do with “recognition.” Instead, they require readers to imagine the nature of nationand community-formation, the ethos of justice, and the crossing of symbolic borders and inhabiting the transnational imaginary, all in the mode of multicultural fantasy and romance, by emphasizing the limits of the personalized imaginary. All this not for recognition or to encourage roleplaying but to conceive, and thus activate, worlds of racial, political, social and economic justice that do not yet exist. To get at some of these issues having to do with the disjunctures as well as the intersections, overlaps, and contact points between the Global North and South, I turn in my work to a battery of terms to describe the epistemologies of the South and other shapes of knowledge that emerge on the borders between global North and South. 5 The writings of authors from this domain between North and South draw their power from subjection and, in turn, help to give form to conditions other than those that drive the imaginary transfers Fluck promotes. As one such writer, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, puts it, “The emancipatory transformations in the world may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory” (viii). Santos’ critique is a direct counter to Fluck’s position that: Class remains undertheorized and underanalyzed in American scholarship even when approaches call themselves ‘Race, Class, and Gender Studies’. As long as class is considered the main source of inequality, economic conditions would have to be changed in order to provide full recognition. On the other hand, if race and gender are considered the main sources of inequality, recognition can be envisioned by establishing diversity as a social and cultural norm. One need not change economic and social structures to achieve this, only cultural attitudes (“Playing Indian” 81). Under the domain of an American hemispheric critique that works within the paradigm of decolonial thought and theories of decolonization, Sousa offers an analysis that does not rely on the imaginary transfers Fluck describes which lead to scholars simply “playing Indian” rather than truly “engaging in politics” (83). Sousa expresses a critique like the one I have described as enacted in American vernacular poetics - an imagination of borderland experience in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 290 Ramón Saldívar 6 See also, “The Search for Distance.” 7 Fluck explains: “Every text consists of segments that are determinate, and of blanks between them that are indeterminate. In order to establish consistency between these segments, the reader has to become active in providing links for that which is missing (…) [setting] up relations between their own imaginary constructs and the text” (“The Role of the Reader” 258). which exclusion from the domain of rationality and history rules. If fictional texts represent made-up worlds, even when they claim to be realistic, how is it possible for fiction to reveal something meaningful about history? This is the place where fantasy and the imaginary intersect with history, in what we might call “negative aesthetics,” following an alternatively amenable argument posed by Fluck elsewhere (“The Role of the Reader” 255). 6 Negative aesthetics refers to the potential of literature to “expose the limitations and unacknowledged deficiencies of accepted systems of thought” (256). In the case of contemporary ethnic fiction, Fluck’s notion of “negative aesthetics” allows us to conceive how fantasy functions in relation to history to create an imaginary vision that goes beyond the formulations of realism, modernism, magical realism, and postmodern metafiction to articulate precisely what is absent in realism, magical realism, and metafiction. Formally, the role of the imaginary is thus crucial to the functioning of contemporary ethnic fiction, for in allowing the experience of something not literally represented, it compels readers to “provide links” across the “blanks” created by the intentional “suspension of relations” between meaningful segments of the text (“The Role of the Reader” 258). 7 For Fluck, then, the cultural history of literary texts cannot be separated from their varying uses in the act of reception; it is a history of “second narratives.” Literary history and the history of reception cannot be separated. As articulation of an imaginary that seeks articulation, the second narratives through which the literary text is actualized have their own historically distinct patterns, and a history of the second narratives through which literary texts are actualized and appropriated at different times is therefore one of the logical follow-up projects of any attempt to understand the changing functions of fiction. Seen from this perspective, the phenomenon of interpretive disagreement and conflict, which provided the point of departure for this essay, is no longer the irritating problem that Fluck identified at the outset of his essay but becomes now, quite the contrary, the indispensable resource for the aesthetic experience of the functionally productive and intellectually fruitful gratifying act of reading itself. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 Winfried Fluck and the Social Imaginary: Reading “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative” 291 Works Cited Alvesson, Mats and Jörgen Sandberg. “Pre-understanding: An interpretation-enhancer and horizon-expander in research.” Organization Studies 43.3 (2022): 395-412. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London and New York: Routledge, 2016/ 2014. ---. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Fluck, Winfried. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175-210. ---. “The Role of the Reader and the Changing Functions of Literature: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte.” European Journal of English Studies 6.3 (2002): 253-271. ---. “Aesthetic Experience of the Image.” Romance with America? Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 409-31. ---. “Playing Indian: Media Reception as Transfer.” Figurationen 8.2 (2013): 67-86. Malpas, Jeff. “Hans-Georg Gadamer.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. 22 Aug. 2022. Web. 9 Jan. 2023. <https: / / plato.stanford.ed u/ archives/ win2022/ entries/ gadamer/ >. Nyström, Maria and Karin Dahlberg. “Pre-understanding and Openness - A Relationship Without Hope? ” Scandanavian Journal of Caring Sciences 15.4 (2001): 339-346. Saldívar, Ramon. “The Other Side of History, the Other Side of Fiction: Form and Genre in Susshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex.” American Studies as Transnational Practice. Ed. Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth U Press, 2015. 156-166. ---. “Criticism on the Border and the Decolonization of Knowledge.” American Literary History 34.1 (2022): 327-341. Shionoya, Yuichi. “Hermeneutics and the Heidegger = Schumpeter Theses.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 69.1 (2010): 188-202. Taylor, Charles. “What is the Social Imaginary? ” Modern Social Imaginaries. Ed. Charles Taylor, Dilip Parmeshwar Gaonkar, Jane Kramer, Benjamin Lee and Michael Warner. New York: Duke University Press, 2004. 23-30. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0016 292 Ramón Saldívar First published in New Literary History 44.1 (2013): 45-67. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 See, for example, Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition; ” Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? ; Honneth and Margalit, “Recognition.” Even where recognition is seen as an identitarian imposition, recognition remains central as an analytical concept for explaining modern societies and their forms of governance. An excellent analysis of the different positions in the debate is provided by Bedorf, Verkennende Anerkennung. Bedorf distinguishes between intercultural theories of recognition (Taylor), intersubjective theories (Honneth), and theories of recognition as subjection or identitarian imposition (Butler). Fraser has been an important contributor to these debates, but in her focus on a “dual perspective” that includes both recognition and distribution, she has not offered a theory of recognition. 2 Honneth has referred to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man on several occasions, albeit briefly, as an illustration of the damaging consequences of a lack of recognition. See, Reading for Recognition Winfried Fluck In the past decades the topic of recognition has moved to the center of critical theories and philosophical debates. 1 Can these theories be of use for literary studies? Can they be applied to the interpretation of literary texts? It is notable that current theories of recognition have little to say about the relation between literature and recognition. One reason may be that these theories conceptualize recognition as an intersubjective relation; in order to gain recognition, I need another person who does the recognizing. But in reading, we do not encounter a living person who responds; many descriptions of the act of reading have described the pleasures of being completely absorbed in a book and forgetting about the rest of the world. In this one-directional account of the reading process, recognition cannot result from social interaction and thus seems to lack a reciprocal dimension. And yet, there are obvious relations between literature and recognition. As a matter of fact, the search for recognition is one of the central themes of literature. A majority of literary texts draw their (often powerful) impact from narratives either of successful recognition or painful misrecognition. 2 Are these literary versions of a search for recognition so widespread because reading allows the reader to replace for example, Honneth and Margalit, “Recognition,” (111), and Honneth, “Unsichtbar‐ keit.” genuine reciprocity with wish-fulfilling fantasies and easy self-confirmations? This would confirm a critique of recognition as an identitarian imposition. Or can the reading process be reconceptualized in terms of a reciprocal encounter? Discussions of the relation between recognition and literature would in this case not be restricted to the plot level of the text (although, as the organizing theme of a narrative, this level cannot be disregarded). They could describe recognition also as an effect of the reading process. Or, to put the question differently: can literature merely describe acts of recognition, or can it also provide recognition that goes beyond the level of representation and does not depend on identification? In the following essay, I will discuss these questions in five parts: first, a comparison of two different perspectives on recognition that, I think, are especially suggestive for possible uses of the concept in literary studies; second, a brief discussion of the question of identity, since, in current debates, recognition is inextricably linked with questions of identity formation; third, an overview of some of the dominant motifs and patterns in narratives of recognition in order to achieve two things: highlighting the amazing centrality of the theme in a wide range of literary texts and genres and regaining an awareness of an imaginary core of fictional texts that has often been forgotten or ignored in the professionalization of literary studies; fourth, a discussion of the extent to which recognition can also be understood and described as an effect of the reading experience (and of aesthetic experience more generally); and fifth, a return to my starting question of the relation between literature and recognition, focusing on the issue of reciprocity and on the challenge provided by normative theories of recognition. I. Let me start with a necessarily brief discussion of two approaches that open up different perspectives on possible uses of the concept of recognition for an analysis of modern society and culture. Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition” can provide a starting point here. Taylor’s point of departure is convincing and articulates a common consensus on the issue: misrecognition, either by discrimination or institutional exclusion, can be seen as a supreme form of social injustice that violates the democratic promise of equality. Society and the state therefore have a moral duty to eliminate forms of institutional 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 294 Winfried Fluck 3 Taylor’s argument poses several problems and has been subject to criticism from various positions. From a liberal perspective, Anthony Appiah objects to his monological view of identity. Asking “to be treated with equal dignity despite being Black (…) will require a concession that being Black counts naturally or to some degree against one’s dignity. And so one will end up asking to be respected as a Black” (149). From a feminist, social-movement perspective, Nicholson aims to show “how certain understandings of identity and recognition have emerged in the post-1960’s feminist and African American movements which take both of these concepts in directions beyond those which Taylor discusses. There have emerged demands within both of these struggles which extend the request that the distinguishing traits of both groups be acknowledged towards the request that the social practices through which the very activity of recognition takes place be changed” (2). Finally, from a perspective inspired by the recognition turn in critical theory (“anerkennungstheoretische Wende”), Bedorf argues: “For an equal recognition of different collective identities, a normative frame is needed, that cannot be provided by a politics of difference” (44, m.t.). exclusion and to create conditions that permit an equal recognition of all members of society. In the context of this argument, culture is an important category for Taylor and his politics of recognition: where the culture of social or ethnic groups is not sufficiently recognized or where it is considered inferior, this must have damaging effects on the identities of the members of this group. As W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and others have argued, the members of such groups cannot but internalize a sense of their own inferiority as self-image. Recognition is thus a normative term for Taylor. Society has to make sure that full equal recognition is provided, and it therefore has to institutionalize forms of recognition that go beyond the liberal guarantee of individual rights. However, in this argument, identity seems to be something that is already in place through membership in a group. Recognition then means to have one’s difference acknowledged and respected - which implies not only that the individual is defined by group affiliation but also that group affiliation is the crucial determinant of identity. Full equal recognition of one’s own cultural difference appears to constitute a full identity. 3 Another author can help to take the idea of recognition in a different direction, although he himself never used the term. I am referring to Alexis de Tocqueville, who already in the famous first sentence of his Democracy in America - “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions” (9) - made the elimination of a society of rank the key for understanding American society and culture. Societies of rank are based on a-priori systems of recognition, and for Tocqueville, it is the abolition of these institutionalized a-priori systems that shapes democracy in America decisively. In rank societies, everybody belongs to a particular social class or group and knows where he or she stands in the social hierarchy. In 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 295 4 This does not mean, of course, that social power relations disappear but that they take on new, more flexible and less visible forms described by several theorists of modernity. contrast, in a democracy nobody can claim to be better than others because of prerogatives of birth or rank. 4 The promise of equality puts the struggle for recognition on new grounds. This is one of the reasons why it could become a central ideological inspiration for modern political revolutions. As long as institutionalized social barriers are still in place, the individual may strive as hard as possible to gain equal recognition but will not succeed. European bourgeois culture is filled with bitter complaints about the visible or unseen social barriers that prevent individuals from being fully recognized in their worth as human beings. Where individuals are successful in crossing the barrier, on the other hand, these texts suggest a loss of moral integrity, resulting in harsh attacks on the immorality or corruption of a social and political system that makes recognition dependent on self-betrayal. Thus, equal recognition could become the battle cry of the bourgeois revolution. What else is the American Declaration of Independence (and the following American Revolution) than an enraged protest against the stubborn resistance of the English crown to recognizing the colonials as equals? However, for Tocqueville the successful American Revolution by no means provides a happy ending to the struggle for recognition, because liberation comes at a price. Where a-priori systems of recognition lose their validity, the new problem emerges of how to stand out from all the others who are equally equal: “They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the dense throng which surrounds and presses them” (537). Since rank is no longer officially accepted as a measure of personal worth, individuals are forced to take it upon themselves to demonstrate their worth to others. This must be especially true in a society of immigrants characterized by great cultural diversity and developing under conditions of great mobility, because this mobility will increase the frequency of encounters with strangers and thereby creates a need on the side of the individual to develop commonly understandable forms of self-presentation. And this challenge is further enhanced, because individuals can never be sure whether they are actually looking for recognition in the best possible place, since the sources and sites of recognition have multiplied, reflecting the functional differentiation of different spheres of action in a modern society. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 296 Winfried Fluck 5 Slowinska has provided an excellent description of the various forms that this new emphasis on performance has taken in American culture. See her essay “Consuming Illusion, Illusions of Consumability.” 6 In the introduction to Multiculturalism, Gutmann provides an apt summary: “In the ancien régime, when a minority could count on being honored (as ‘Ladies’ and ‘Lords’) and the majority could not realistically aspire to public recognition, the demand for recognition was unnecessary for the few and futile for the many. Only with the collapse of stable social hierarchies does the demand for public recognition become commonplace, along with the idea of the dignity of all individuals. Everyone is an equal - a Mr., Mrs., or Ms. - and we all expect to be recognized as such” (6). Two consequences are especially noteworthy in this context. For one, the need for self-fashioning can provide, as Tocqueville himself pointed out, an explanation for the growing role of performance in modern societies and, espe‐ cially, American society, leading to ever growing demands for self-expression. 5 And there is a second important consequence: when class is no longer a stable marker of worth within the status order (which is different from saying that it no longer exists), other markers of distinction such as race and gender grow in importance. Although Tocqueville tries to solve the explanatory challenge of the role of race in American democracy by relegating it to an appendix, he nevertheless provides a theoretical framework that can explain the central role race and racialization play in American society. However, he explains this central role differently: not by racism or by interpellation through the nationstate, but by a need for distinction that, ironically enough, is created by an egalitarian ideology, or, more precisely, by a post-rank society developing new ways of status distinction. Interestingly, Taylor’s politics of recognition takes its starting point from the same observation as Tocqueville. 6 But despite this common point of departure, Taylor then goes in a different direction that helps to mark the difference to Tocqueville. For Taylor, the struggle for recognition is necessary to reestablish a social balance, for Tocqueville it is one of the main sources for ever new imbal‐ ances, because the claim of equality and the search for distinction constantly get into each other’s way. In Taylor’s straightforward “respect constitutes identity” argument, recognition is an important step on the way to full equality, whereas for Tocqueville the race for distinction is one of the reasons for a constant transformation of equality into inequality. For Taylor’s politics of recognition, equality is the final goal, for Tocqueville it remains the ideological starting point that, ironically enough, creates a strong need for all members of society to emphasize their difference. Taylor’s equal recognition would thus merely create the conditions from which Tocqueville takes his point of departure - for him the search for recognition can never be fully satisfied, because we 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 297 7 Cf. in contrast the following passage from Fanon’s essay “The Black Man and Recog‐ nition: ” “An Antillean who meets a friend after an absence of five or six years will greet him aggressively. This is because in the past both of them had a predetermined position. The inferiorized one believes he has to enhance his standing, and the other is determined to keep his own superiority” (186). can never have enough of it, so that the struggle for recognition is constantly rekindled. From the perspective of Tocqueville, the struggle for recognition is therefore interminable, inherently unstable, always and inevitably marked by asymmetries. Among other things, this can explain an aspect that the identity politics of the new social movements hardly ever acknowledged or acknowledged only grudgingly and defensively, namely that the struggle for recognition also takes place within minority groups. For the most part, the status order of color has been one of the taboos of identity politics. 7 What Tocqueville realized was that democracy and equality do not simply go together but that they can also stand in conflict with one another, because the democratic pursuit of equal recognition will lead to new asymmetries in power relations and to reconfigurations of the status order. Literature and culture have played an increasingly important role in these reconfigurations. Tocqueville’s perspective can help zero in on one way in which literature and culture are shaped by the search for recognition in modern societies. Where apriori systems of recognition are replaced by new status orders and recognition regimes that are more open but also more volatile, constant struggle must be an essential element of the search for recognition. This struggle produces winners and losers, manipulators and victims, betrayers and betrayed, insiders and outsiders, all driven to establish a sense of distinction or moral superiority over others. This, one may claim, is the stuff of literature. Its leading genres, including tragedy and melodrama, satire and comedy, romance and adventure, have a widespread appeal, because they all tell stories about the place of humans in the moral and social status order. II. In the model of identity formation on which a politics of recognition is based, identity is created by images of the self. A more radical version is provided by theories in which identities are constructed within representations, including the illusion of a unified identity for which Lacan’s description of the mirror phase has become the model. In evading the prison house of a unified identity, the idea of a multiple, fragmented identity has become an important topic. But, as I have argued in a different context, a “multiple identity” only makes 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 298 Winfried Fluck 8 I have discussed this aspect in “Multiple Identities.” sense as yet another new identity construct of an “I” that provides continuity and coherence to a wide spectrum of experiences and roles. 8 The “I” does this through (self-) narration, which creates cultural and personal meaning by linking a diverse array of experiences in temporal sequence and providing them with meaningful connections. In this process, images play an important role, but they cannot impose unity on identity, because identity is the result of an ongoing process of narration that is put together by an “I” out of a range of choices drawn from the personal and the cultural imaginary. Although the claim may appear counterintuitive in view of the seemingly self-evident iconic facticity and strong immediate impact of images, they remain nevertheless subordinate to narrative, because they depend on a narrative context to become meaningful. As a decontextualized form, the image cannot speak “for its own sake” and “in its own terms.” In order to become meaningful in a person’s life, the image has to wait for “the invention of a ‘story’ in which each image has its say” (Trachtenberg 70). The meaning of the image is produced by the narrative context we bring to it. The same is true of bodily experiences. Although these may be “direct” and may thus appear as “unmediated,” they only become meaningful experiences as part of a self-narrative. Following Margaret Somers, we can characterize such an emphasis on nar‐ rative as a shift from representational to ontological narrativity. Her argument deserves an extensive quotation: Before this shift, philosophers of history had argued that narrative modes of repre‐ senting knowledge (telling historical stories) were representational forms imposed by historians on the chaos of lived experience. Recently, however, scholars are postulating something much more substantive about narrative: namely, that social life is itself storied and that narrative is an ontological condition of social life. Their research is showing us that stories guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that ‘experience’ is constituted through narratives; that people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives. (613-14) Narratives are not representations of identity, then, they constitute identity. To reconceptualize identity as narrative identity (Ricoeur speaks of “the narrative 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 299 9 See Ricoeur, “Life.” 10 Cf. Ricoeur’s remarks on the function of plot as synthesis: “it unifies components as widely divergent as circumstances encountered while unsought, agents of actions and those who passively undergo them, accidental confrontations or expected ones, interactions which place the actors in relations ranging from conflict to cooperation, means that are well-attuned to ends or less so, and, finally, results that were not willed; gathering up all those factors into a single story turns the plot into a unity which one could call both concordant and discordant (which is why I like to speak of discordant concord or concordant discord)” (426). Every work, every narrative is thus “an original production, a new being within the realm of discourse. The reverse, however, is no less true: innovation remains a strategy governed by rules” (430). 11 This also means that to tell an ongoing story about oneself should not be understood as setting us on a sure path to self-knowledge. 12 In theoretical discussions of the issue, two different explanations are given for this disruption. Phenomenological and pragmatist theorists refer to the discontinuity produced by the temporality of existence. See, for example, Ezzy’s reference to George Herbert Mead: “The past and, by implication, the future are continually reinterpreted because, according to Mead, the emergent present appears as continually novel and identity which constitutes us” 9 ) means to move away from theories of identity formation that have dominated literary and cultural studies in recent decades. On the one hand, identity is not simply established by recognition of one’s culture or one’s difference or one’s otherness, even if that recognition makes up for centuries of discrimination. Nor is identity merely the result of discursive subject formation by means of interpellation. The politics of recognition fails to take into account that the search for recognition is a struggle not only for equality but also for individual distinction. Identity formation through a recognition of cultural identity can thus at best describe a context in which identity formation takes place. The theory of discursive subject positioning by interpellation, on the other hand, fails to take the constitutive role into account that narrative plays in the formation of identity. From the perspective of narrative identity, the claim of subjection theories of recognition that identity is constituted through iteration remains unconvincing. Narration, including self-narration, is an interpretive activity that exceeds iteration, because it has to make sense of a constant flow of daily encounters and novel experiences, ranging from accidental encounters to unexpected com‐ plications, from personal conflicts to communal moments of togetherness, from rewards and pleasant surprises to the shock of disappointment. 10 In consequence of this constantly changing mix, the need for an ongoing reinterpretation and reconfiguration emerges. Thus, narrative identities are “very much in-process and unfinished, continuously made and remade as episodes happen” (Ezzy 247). 11 The narrative of identity is disrupted again and again and thus it also has to be rewritten again and again. 12 The “I” has to become the narrator of his or her life, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 300 Winfried Fluck discontinuous with that past” (242). The poststructuralist explanation lies in the opacity of the self, as argued, for example by Butler: “I am always recuperating, reconstructing, even as I produce myself differently in the very act of telling. My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I have no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account… There are reasons that course through me that I cannot fully recuperate, that remain enigmatic, that abide with me as my own, familiar alterity, my own private, or not so private, opacity. I speak as an ‘I,’ but to not make the mistake of thinking that I know precisely all that I am doing when I speak in that way” (27, 37). Butler’s emphasis on the (often frustrating) twists and turns of self-narration certainly exceed the standard account of interpellation. 13 See also the following passage: “But what is left out if we assume, as some do, that narrative gives us the life, or that life takes place in narrative form? What intervenes upon narration to make narration possible that is not, strictly speaking, subject to being if only for the simple reason that the various experiences and identity positions he or she encounters have to be coordinated. As has been pointed out by the new cultural politics of difference, for example, a person does not only have a gendered identity or a class identity or a national identity, but all of the above, and these identity positions have to be meaningfully connected in narrative in order to allow for at least a minimal degree of continuity and consistency. This is not to say that we may not be “interpellated” into a gendered or racialized identity, but that, in the final analysis, this subject position is only a point of departure for very different lives. There is an obvious objection to be made at this point. Not only can narrators of life stories not always be authors of their lives, but one may also have reasonable doubts about the degree of freedom they have as narrators. In order to be able to construct a meaningful self-narrative, they must draw on narratives handed down by culture, and in order to gain social and cultural recognition, they must inscribe themselves into culturally accepted plots. This may result in a form of identity formation aptly described by Margaret Somers: “We come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making” (606). Judith Butler makes a similar point in even stronger terms when she points out that the “norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not precisely mine” (26). Instead, recognition is dependent on “a set of norms that govern recognizability” (Butler 22). In seeking recognition, I submit to a recognition regime that establishes a cultural frame for recognition and, in doing so, puts constraints on the possibility of full recognition. Thus, “my account of myself is never fully mine.” Butler, in fact, speaks of a “dispossession of my perspective” that contests “the singularity of my story” (26). 13 But such 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 301 narrated? We might approach an answer to this question by noting that the ‘I’ who begins to tell its story can only tell it according to recognizable norms of life narration, we might say; to the extent that it agrees, from the start, to narrate itself through those norms, it agrees to circuit its narration through an externality, and so to disorient itself in the telling” (32). 14 Even Butler does not want to go that far and concludes rather lamely: “We can surely still tell our stories but we will not be able to be very authoritative when we try to give an account with a narrative structure” (26). 15 The limits of narratorship and narrative reinterpretation are reached, on the other hand, when narratives are culturally tabooed or suppressed or when they are institutionally scripted. Thus, drawing on studies by Goffman, Ezzy draws attention to “the role of institutionally located power in the construction and maintenance of narratives, including narrative identities” (250). Goffman’s studies of the asylum “demonstrate that conventionalized plotlines used to interpret narratives of incest rendered many victims of incest silent because there was no plausible, culturally acceptable plot within which they could recount their experiences” (249). an argument must presuppose a pre-existent, singular “I” that is dispossessed by narrative, instead of positing, as Somers does, that the self is always and inevitably a social being and that it therefore gains a sense of self only through narration. This would mean that we will have to look at the particular norm that is transported by narrative and the way this is done, instead of considering the existence of a norm itself as the problem. Otherwise, if identity is constituted by narrative, and narrative is always and inevitably providing plots that are dependent on “a set of norms that govern recognizability,” the only way to escape this constraint would be to give up narrative altogether. 14 But, although the narratives on which we draw may rarely be “of our own making,” they are nevertheless not identical with the social narratives in which we inscribe ourselves. These social narratives may provide cultural frames of interpretation and furnish genre and plot structures for self-narration, but we still have to turn these into the scripts of our own life. We do this by linking social narrative and personal experiences forged in contexts like family, peer group, subculture, intimate relations, encounters with friends or strangers, but also through formative aesthetic experiences and other influences. The social narrative may be familiar, but, in the search for recognition, it still requires a narrator. People are constrained by a limited repertoire of culturally available narratives, but they must still interpret them to fit their own lives and to adapt them to their self-narratives. As Paul Ricoeur has put it: “In this way, we learn to become the narrator of our own story without completely becoming the author of our life” (437). 15 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 302 Winfried Fluck 16 Cf. Ricoeur: “From this double analysis we learn that fiction, particularly narrative fiction, is an irreducible dimension of the understanding of the self ” (435). 17 See, for example, Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics, which focuses on “recognition plots” that depict a shift from ignorance to knowledge. Although Felski offers a more differentiated discussion in a chapter on “Recognition” in her book Uses of Literature, her main focus also lies on recognition in the sense of increased (self-) knowledge: “Suddenly and without warning, a flash of connection leaps across the gap between text and reader, an affinity or attunement is brought to light” (23). “Recognition, in the sense I’ve been using it so far, refers to a cognitive insight, a moment of knowing or knowing again” (28, 29) 18 This transformation from inferiority to superiority can be considered the main mani‐ festation of a search for recognition in fictional texts. It is by no means restricted to fairy tales or popular wish fulfillment fantasies, once we realize that superiority does III. If we accept that identity is narrative identity and “that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories” (Somers), then a logical next step to take is to look at those narratives that seem especially useful for a search for recognition. 16 In effect, if recognition is indeed as central for life in a modern societies as I am claiming, then such stories should play a key role in cultural activities - which also means that these stories will be told again and again. However, in trying to focus on those narratives that seem especially useful for linking literature and recognition, it seems too narrow to focus on narratives with “scenes of recognition,” as some critics have done in an attempt to introduce the term recognition into literary and cultural analysis. 17 Instead, one should begin at a far more elementary level and look at those narratives through which our hunger for fiction is stimulated in the first place. I am thinking of childhood and, more specifically, of forms like the fairy tale, and would like to focus for a moment on one of the most popular and influential of these tales, the story of Cinderella. The story is generally known and the reason for its popularity and strong impact is easy to identify: at its center stands the miraculous (often magical) transformation of an ugly duckling into a princess. Or, to use the vocabulary of recognition: an experience of painful misrecognition and humiliation is transformed into triumphant recognition of the special value of a person who had long been considered inferior. This imaginary transformation constitutes one of the master narratives of fiction and forms an imaginary core of the Western archive of stories. In many, if not most cases, fictional texts tell stories about a transformation of inferiority into superiority, of weakness into strength, of worthlessness into worth, or, more generally speaking, of misrecognition into recognition. 18 They stage 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 303 not have to be superiority of status or strength, but can also be moral superiority, intellectual superiority, superiority of character, subcultural claims of superiority, or the superiority of a presumably more authentic existence. 19 On this point, see my essay “Fiction and Justice.” emotional responses to experiences of inferiority in their forceful articulation of humiliation, shame, or rage, and they dramatize scenarios of resistance by depicting hair’s breadth escapes, glorious outsiderdom, successful rebellion, or even uncontrolled violence. This transformation of experiences of inferiority, weakness, worthlessness, and misrecognition has the function of restoring a sense of justice that has been violated and, by doing so, of reenvisioning a new, reconfigured status order. Indeed, one could call this the utopian core of fiction. Its working principle is the linkage of recognition and social critique, so that the fate of the individual can become the basis for a judgment on the state of society as a whole. 19 In fictional texts, calls for a better social order are thus often grounded in experiences of individual misrecognition, while the narrative drama arises from the question of how to overcome this misrecognition and how to turn it into an acknowledgment of this person’s special worth. The traditional stories of male and female socialization - the Cinderella story and the adventure story - illustrate the point by revealing that the initially smaller, weaker, less respected or less valued person proves to be superior after all. In literary studies especially, we have come to classify such narratives as children’s literature and therefore as almost unworthy subject matter. But this defensiveness obscures the extent to which they pervade modern and American culture. Our Cinderella example can be useful here again, for women’s literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is shaped widely and decisively by the motif. It forms the narrative core of the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, the novel of manners of a Jane Austen and the so-called domestic novel of the first half of the nineteenth century, it shapes the gothic female novel from Jane Eyre to Rebecca, and it still forms the basic pattern in the realistic novels of a Henry James, albeit in such a complex fashion that many readers and critics often are no longer aware of this imaginary core. But unmistakably, Jamesian novels like Watch and Ward, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, and even The Wings of the Dove tell artful versions of the Cinderella story. If we follow the innumerable variations of the motif, we can even draw a line from these eighteenth and nineteenth century texts to contemporary minority literature - I am thinking, for example, of a novel like The Color Purple by Alice Walker - and to contemporary popular culture where the motif continues to be central. All of this could yield rich material for a cultural history of recognition. It could tell us what forms of misrecognition dominated in particular periods, how people 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 304 Winfried Fluck 20 The adventure tale was an exemplary male genre for a long time. But recently, female adventuresses have become more frequent, just as there are now, on the other hand, movies on “Cinderella Man.” 21 It is striking to see how discussions of the adventure genre, including recent ones, fail to see this obvious dimension and, as a consequence, resort to the familiar thesis of a compensatory function when they try to explain the popularity of the genre: “It is only with the social, political, and cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century - industrialization, urbanization, population growth, failed political regimes - which stood in the way of individual agency that the model of the autonomous adventurer became attractive, serving a compensatory function in society” (Hügel 91, m.t.). Similarly, Petzold speaks of the obvious function “of giving to its readers simple and straight-forward pleasure that will neither need, nor bear, further analysis” (251). He then adds at another point: “For an ever-increasing reading public living in a thoroughly industrialized environment, the vicarious excitement of literary adventure may well have been the only escape from drudgery and boredom” (258). have responded to the asymmetries of structures of recognition, and how the means of transformation, in the fairy tale still the work of magic, was altered in several steps, until a credit card finally takes the place of magic in a movie like Pretty Woman. The male equivalent of the Cinderella story is the adventure story which can be told as action story, detective story, Western, war movie, pirate story, or classical journey into the unknown. No matter what the genre is, in its modern versions since Robinson Crusoe, this story of adventure usually follows the trajectory of a common man who is not yet sufficiently recognized in his worth at the start of the narrative, goes on a perilous journey, survives great hardships, overcomes many obstacles, triumphs over stronger enemies, kills the tyrant, rescues the damsel in distress, and finds the hidden treasure, exhibiting great courage and fortitude and thereby transforming initial inferiority into a hardwon sense of superiority, apparent weakness into strength, and powerlessness into power. Adventure, by definition, exceeds ordinary life and thus provides an ideal chance to solve the “Tocqueville problem” of how to distinguish oneself from other ordinary mortals. The hero has to undergo a series of challenging tests of his courage, skill, and strength, he has to face hardships and terrible dangers, and he has to defend himself successfully, although all the odds are against him. 20 The adventure story can thus also be seen as an exemplary narrative dramatization of a search for recognition. 21 Like Cinderella, the modern, postrank-society adventure hero rises from being a Nobody or a young fool to the level of supreme social recognition. In an article on popular TV series, Jane Espenson has pin-pointed the key promise of the adventure story. For her, the key to an explanation of the attraction of fantasy fare lies in the narrative pattern of a “Hero’s Journey”: “It’s told 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 305 over and over again, and it works, over and over again. Dorothy Gale, Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Charlie Bucket, Luke Skywalker, even Peter Parker, they all fit a very specific pattern. They’re living a life, sometimes a fine one, often a troubled one, but certainly one governed by ordinary rules, when suddenly the curtain is pulled back and a whole new world, or a new set of rules of this world, is revealed. And what’s more - and this is the important part - in that world, they are something special. They are the Chosen One” (Espenson). The Chosen One: one can hardly find a better description of the feeling of uniqueness and distinction that can result from successful adventure. Adventurers “love adventure because it means opportunities to prove one’s innate superior quali‐ ties” (Petzold 260). Adventurers are heroes and heroes are rare individuals who accomplish extraordinary things. An especially notable dramatization of this uniqueness that can be encountered in almost all genres and media is the David and Goliath narrative. This is probably one of the narrative patterns employed most frequently in all of Western culture, and it may be called the exemplary narrative of a transformation of inferiority into superiority, because inferiority already seems to manifest itself in bodily appearance and the transformation of weakness into strength can thus take on an especially triumphant note. No wonder this ur-narrative of a struggle for recognition has created a medium especially well-suited for itself, that of comics and cartoons. Over all, the adventure story has remained a basic, paradigmatic narrative pattern in Western culture, never outdated, it seems, from ancient myth to present day popular culture. And here, too, a line of development can be observed that has resulted in increasingly elaborate versions of the motif, from the historical novel and the novel of apprenticeship, the Bildungsroman, to the realistic novel and modern versions from The Great Gatsby to more contemporary novels of the 1950s and onward. However, the search for recognition in fictional texts does not always have to be successful. In certain social status groups - this could be a fascinating topic for a cultural sociology along the lines of Bourdieu - misrecognition is a recurrent topic and can even become a mark of distinction. This literature of misrecognition, too, has produced a wide spectrum of genres, ranging from tragedy and the melodrama of the nineteenth century to a tradition of social criticism focusing on the victim. In this context, feminist criticism, by drawing on the sentimental novel and the filmic melodrama, has outlined the paradoxical logic by which victimization can become a source of recognition and therefore, paradoxically, a form of empowerment. This narrative type has had a renaissance in ethnic literature that often takes its point of departure from extreme experiences of misrecognition. In one of the most powerful novels of this tradition, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 306 Winfried Fluck 22 See, for example, the chapter on “The Politics of Respectability” in Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. Man, the full extent of this misrecognition is already expressed in the title of the book. In fact, I think that the history of American minorities could be fruitfully rewritten from this perspective, because it consists, after all, of a fight against assumptions of inferiority that has its own instructive cultural history, from violent rebellion to the sentimental quadroon tale to racial uplift, 22 from the artistic cosmopolitanism of the Harlem Renaissance to the angry nationalism of the Black Arts Movement and a more recent rhetoric of trauma. Finally, within a typology of narratives of recognition and misrecognition, an especially interesting type is provided by stories of outsiders who, in American culture, are often elevated to the status of romantic outlaws. The figure of the outlaw is ideally suited to highlight another central paradox of fictional texts and of aesthetic experience: ironically, criminal figures, from whom we would shy away in reality, can obtain a model dimension of strength and superiority in fiction and can thereby gain our admiration. The same applies to the figure of the outsider who is pushed to the margins of respectability in real life. But it is precisely the lack of recognition associated with that marginality that can make outsiders exemplary figures in the struggle for recognition, because they, too, start out from a position of apparent inferiority, so that their resistance can become a model of successful self-assertion. In the past, outsiders and outlaws were often linked with the idea of reestablishing justice in Robin Hood fashion. But in contemporary culture, such figures no longer need this kind of moral justification. They are recognized for their own sake, as outsiders and outlaws, because in their defiance they can embody the strength and superiority of an independent actor. To look at American society and culture in terms of struggles for recognition that lead to constant reconfigurations of superiority and inferiority refers us back to the imaginary core of a wide array of fictional texts. At the same time, it also opens up new perspectives for textual interpretation, because, instead of reducing interpretation to an identification of a cultural identity or a political position, such an approach will read texts as dramas in which the struggle for recognition is acted out in all of its tensions, conflicts, complications, and emotional ups and downs. Political readings rarely capture the reading experience in which we are often moved back and forth between different perspectives and develop strong, often conflicting emotional responses to the “eventfulness” of the drama that is set in motion by the struggle for recognition. Revisionist approaches are hardly interested in this ebb and flow of responses and emotions, although these must be one of the main reasons 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 307 why we expose ourselves to a three-hundred-page novel or a two-hour movie. From a “Tocquevillian” postrank perspective, the constant twists and turns of such a novel are the reason to continue reading - because they enact ever new versions of a struggle that constantly produces new asymmetries. The struggle for recognition challenges dominant constellations of superiority and inferiority, and culture is the realm in which these conflicts and struggles are acted out on a symbolic level. Once we conceptualize the search for recognition as a drama in which ongoing attempts are made to reconfigure inferiority and superiority, then the constant turns of plot, changing character relations, often within single scenes, or narrator and reader positioning can take on new importance and can be better grasped as part of the emotional drama (and often trauma) created by the struggle for recognition. Looking at literature from the perspective of an ongoing struggle for recognition can help regain an important part of the drama that makes us read literature in the first place. IV. This necessarily brief and general outline of the central role of narratives of recognition in modern culture refers us back to the crucial question of what the specific contribution of fictional texts can be in this search and struggle for recognition. If their contribution consisted exclusively of stories of successful or failed recognition, we would have returned to a concept of literature that remains on the level of plot and that would seem to employ concepts of identi‐ fication as its main explanation of literature’s effect on its readers. And indeed, for many cultural critics, identification remains the dominant explanation of the powerful ideological effects of culture, because identification is considered a key mechanism for the production of identities. From this point of view, identification is the means by which a film, to give the most obvious example, manages to create (the illusion of) a unified identity in the spectator and thereby fixes identity in an ideologically charged subject position. However, in her essay “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in Star-Audience Relations,” Jackie Stacey argues convincingly that identification can take place in various forms: it can be based on similarity and difference, it can find expression in cinematic fantasies but also in extracinematic practices, and it can lead to quite 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 308 Winfried Fluck 23 See also the important distinction made by Felski: “Identification can denote a formal alignment with a character, as encouraged by techniques of focalization, point of view, or narrative structure, while also referencing an experiential allegiance with a character, as manifested in a felt sense of affinity or attachment. Critiques of identification tend to conflate these issues, assuming that readers formally aligned with a fictional persona cannot help but swallow the ideologies represented by that persona wholesale” (34). 24 See, for example, “Aesthetic Experience of the Image,” and “Playing Indian.” different modes of engagement. As a result, identification is usually partial and segmented. 23 Stacey’s differentiation of the concept of identification departs from the premise that identification results in one unified identity. Instead, she breaks down identification into a series of different and segmented activities. This allows her to complicate the identification model by emphasizing the diversity of possible forms of identification, and, as a consequence, the active engagement of the spectator in the creation of meaning. At this point, one might ask, however, to what extent the term identification is still useful. An alternative that might be even better suited to describe the full range of reader or spectator activities may be the transfer concept that I have outlined in a number of essays. 24 Its starting point is an observation Wolfgang Iser has made in his essay “Representation: A Performative Act,” where he provides the example of a reading of Hamlet: “In this respect the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not” (244). Since we have never met a character like Hamlet and know in fact that he never existed, we have to bring him to life by drawing on our own associations, feelings, and even bodily sensations. This imaginary recreation follows along textual lines, but it also has to draw on the reader’s own experiences and cultural codes in order to make sense of the text. An example is provided by the role of somatic empathy in the reception of fictional texts, about which Bärbel Tischleder writes: “Only on the basis of our own experiences can we know what it feels like to stroke a piece of fur, to cut ourselves, to run around naked in the snow or to carry heavy bags” (78). Thus, in the act of reception the fictional text (or aesthetic object) comes to represent two things at the same time: the world of the text and imaginary elements added to it by the reader in the act of actualizing the words on the page. In fact, it is this double positioning that can be seen as an important source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us to do two things at the same time: to articulate imaginary elements and to look at them from the outside. Aesthetic experience is thus a state “in-between” in which, as result of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 309 25 The adventurer is a perfect example for an easy transfer, because psychology and interiority remain secondary. See Früchtl, “Mythic heroes and psychology do not go together well” (75, m.t.) What counts are the corporeality of the hero, his athleticism, his talent for action, in short, his performance. 26 Using the term analogy to grasp the relations that can be set up between reader and text means to go beyond mimetic assumptions of direct likeness or resemblance, but even beyond metaphorical affinity. Thus, readers’ responses can be unpredictable: “Antigone has intrigued straight men and lesbians, Norwegians and South Africans; you do not need to be an Irishman to admire James Joyce.” Felski continues: “We all seek in various ways to have our particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us. The patent asymmetry and unevenness of structures of recognition ensure the doubling structure of fictionality, we are, in the words of Iser, “both ourselves and someone else at the same time” (244). Such a model of aesthetic experience moves away from the view that reading a fictional text results in the creation of a unified identity. What used to be called identification is really a series of different and segmented attachments. Because of this segmented use, the relation to the text is established, not by identification with a particular figure, but by analogues between a potentially wide range of textual elements and the recipient’s imaginary (including affects, feeling, moods, corporeal schemata, etc.). If identification were the main mode of reception, then responses to fictional texts and other aesthetic objects should be fairly predictable. However, the history of reception of any fictional text or aesthetic object is (almost) unpredictable and potentially interminable. There will always be new readings emerging, not only in different historical periods but also among readers or viewers of the same period, society, or class. The explanation lies in the fact that reading and reception work by means of structural analogy: “In the image consciousness,” writes Sartre in his study of the imaginary, “we apprehend an object as an analogon for another object” (52). 25 This, in fact, is one of the reasons why we can relate to an outlaw or outsider: we do not identify with him but establish analogies to those aspects of his persona that we want to incorporate. We take the heroism and ignore the criminal context. Even in the ideologically most conformist domestic novel, there may be rebellious stances on the part of characters that readers can activate for such a transfer, although the rebellious character in the novel may in the end conform to the patriarchal order. The actual experience and effect of the novel may thus be exactly the opposite of what its ideological project is supposed to be. This can provide one of the explanations for the attractiveness of popular culture and the striking, seemingly contradictory phenomenon that popular culture is regularly criticized for its ideological nature and at the same time praised for its subversive force. 26 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 310 Winfried Fluck that books will often function as lifelines for those deprived of other forms of public acknowledgment” (43). 27 Ricoeur therefore describes self-extension as reconfiguration: “Let us stay for a moment on the side of the narrative, i.e., the side of fiction, and let us see how it leads back to life. My thesis here is that the process of composition, of configuration, does not realize itself in the text but in the reader, and under this condition configuration makes possible reconfiguration of a life by the way of the narrative” (430). The fact that reading is based on analogizing can help us understand why we continue to be interested in texts from past centuries that describe entirely different living conditions. It can help explain why readers and critics will rarely agree on the meaning of a text, because, inevitably, these readers will be using different analogies for different self-narratives. And finally, it provides an explanation of why we may read one and the same text differently on different occasions, because we will continue to discover new analogies that suggest ways to rewrite our self-narrative. If the concept of identification is replaced by that of a transfer, and transfer points to a reading activity that makes sense of the text by segmented attachments and constant analogizing, then the usefulness of narrative fictions in the struggle for recognition can be more clearly grasped. In reading, we establish analogies to those aspects that fit into our own narrative of identity or are especially meaningful or moving from the perspective of this narrative. In this sense, narrative can be meaningfully linked to the concept of identity: fictional texts and other aesthetic objects provide material that allows the reader to rewrite and extend the narrative of his own identity. The encounter with an aesthetic object holds the promise of self-extension because I can attach imaginary elements of my own world to another world and become temporarily somebody else. This somebody else engages me, because, in bringing him or her to life by means of a transfer, I will draw on analogies (not always positive ones) to parts of myself. But these parts of myself are now placed in a new context and are thus reconfigured. 27 This is the reason why the transfer that takes place in aesthetic experience should not be confused with terms like projection or mere wish fulfillment. In reading, I enter another world on its own terms; however, as a rule I also resist being completely absorbed by that other world. On the one hand, I am experimenting with becoming somebody else; on the other hand, I do not want to give up my own identity altogether. I want to keep open the possibility of dissociation. Fictional texts can be provocative, irritating, at times even repulsive. They often provoke us to change our views and emotional attachments during the reading process. At one point, we may strongly sympathize with a character, at another point, we may be put off by his behavior. Frequently, we have secret sympathies 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 311 28 In his study Das unverschämte Ich, Früchtl offers a fine description of this state of inbetweenness when, in an analysis of John Ford’s movie The Searchers, he describes the situation of the film spectator as “double positioning”: “The Western, Ford makes abundantly clear, is a projection, the invention of a threeand four-dimensional world with the help of light sounds, and moving images. It is this staged aspect that creates an ambivalent attitude toward film: We want to be ‘inside’ the film, and yet not quite, thus, outside, but not quite” (64). for villains but then nevertheless expect them to be punished. At times, we confer sympathies, at other times, we withdraw them and switch loyalties. The common denominator in all of these cases lies in the challenge to negotiate and mediate between the double constituents of aesthetic experience, myself and someone or something else. In exposing myself to another world, I have to decide at any given moment of the reading process how far I want to go in entering this other world; in seeking self-extension, I have to decide how far I want to go in becoming somebody else. 28 Reading is a constant negotiation between these two possibilities. There is no recipe for the right kind of balance, and every new reading therefore is potentially a new adventure. V. If reading is not seen as a process of identification but, as I have argued in this essay, as a an imaginary transfer that opens up in two directions, then the act of reading can be reconceptualized: “Aesthetic reception can be described (…) as a process of imaginary transfer between the reader and the text, and this transfer itself shares many elements of an intersubjectively conceptualized process of recognition” (Voelz 134). This interaction may be described as a dialogue between two narratives: the narrative of the text and the narrative of the reader. Its result is a subject position of nonidentity: a double positioning in which we can be both ourselves and somebody else at the same time. In reading we move back and forth between the two positions, and the recognition provided in, and through, the act of reading is not tied exclusively to either one of these positions. It is the result of text and reader interacting. In this sense, reading goes beyond mere self-confirmation, just as a self-narrative goes beyond a mere monologue. Both are constituted by the need to account for encounters with another world; in this sense, the self does not merely project itself onto another. The other and the self-interact to extend, and potentially reconfigure, the self-narrative. As Ricoeur puts it: “More precisely, the meaning or the significance of a story wells up from the intersection of the world of text and the world of the reader” (430). This interaction may not qualify as “real” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 312 Winfried Fluck 29 Indeed, approaches that see the struggle for recognition as an encounter with alterity stress the unknowability of the other. In referring to the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, Butler states: “For her, the question most central to recognition is a direct one, and it is addressed to the Other: ‘who are you? ’ This question assumes that there is an Other before us, one we do not know, whom we cannot fully apprehend, one whose uniqueness and nonsubstitutability set a limit to the model of reciprocal recognition offered within the Hegelian scheme, and to the possibility of knowing another more generally” (24). reciprocity but the recognition gained in the act of reading is nevertheless an encounter with another world that has the potential to change the reader’s world - just as, on the other hand, one result of this encounter will be a new interpretation, even of well-known and often interpreted works. In the act of reading, both sides are affected and potentially transformed. Such a description of the reading process modifies a view in which recogni‐ tion can only be gained in an encounter with another person. In effect, the empirical promise of this encounter may be deceptive in the first place, because the other, even if present, must nevertheless also be mentally constructed. This is the reason why it is not only books that can be misinterpreted but also people with whom we interact. Since, strictly speaking, the other person is unknowable, we respond on the basis of a mental image - as George Herbert Mead was the first to emphasize when he described self-formation in social interaction as “taking the attitude of the other.” In this process, we construct others through images, often memory images, in an imaginary anticipation of their response, and the images to which we respond already present interpretations and not simply “real” encounters. 29 Similarly, when we are asked to recognize the cultural identity of a particular group, we are responding to a mental construct of that group. For a number of reasons, it may be more rewarding to gain recognition from “empirical” encounters. But epistemologically, reading literary texts is not a categorically different form of encountering otherness. Identity formation, then, cannot be exclusively linked to encounters with persons, and insofar as recognition plays a key role in identity formation, this also applies to recognition. One may argue that the conditions of modern life, above all in cities with their growing anonymity and an increasing number of encounters between strangers, have shifted social experience to such increasingly “imaginary” modes. One of the challenges in discussing the concept of recognition lies in the fact that it is used in at least two different meanings, as a search for attention and acknowledgment of one’s existence (Beachtung), and as full acceptance based on mutual respect (Achtung). The difference between Taylor and Tocqueville can also be described as a shift from one meaning to the other, a shift that the communitarian philosopher 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 313 30 See, for example, Honneth’s self-characterization of his approach to recognition as “a critical theory of society that seeks to locate its normative foundation in the act of reciprocal recognition” (“Recognition as Ideology” 324). As it turns out later in the essay, this is only half of the story, however, because, in trying to clarify what true reciprocity is, Honneth comes up with the criterion of “material fulfillment” (“Recognition” 347). On the other side of the spectrum stand those approaches that see the struggle for recognition in principle and by definition as an encounter with alterity. In contrast, Fraser stresses that “the justice account of recognition avoids the view that everyone has an equal right to social esteem. That view is patently untenable, because it renders meaningless the notion of esteem. The account of recognition proposed here, in contrast, entails no such reductio ad absurdum. What it does entail is that everyone has an equal right to pursue social esteem under fair conditions of equal opportunity” (4, m.t.). 31 I deal with this aspect extensively in “Fiction and Justice.” Taylor deplores and the liberal Tocqueville sees as an inevitable consequence of democracy. While the criterion of exchange does not disqualify literature as a source of recognition once we define the reading process as a transfer process, another aspect may be more problematic. Almost all recent debates about recognition in philosophy and social theory focus on the question whether and to what extent recognition can constitute a new and broadened criterion for a just society. These accounts are normatively oriented, and one of their main challenges consists in the task of integrating different claims for recognition into generally acceptable norms of equality, fairness, and justice. 30 The search for recognition in literature, on the other hand, may often be highly effective in dramatizing severe cases of social injustice, but their depiction represents the views of individuals or groups who want to call attention to their own, often highly subjective experiences of misrecognition. Literature articulates individual claims for recognition that need not necessarily be reconciled with other claims and need not be normatively justified. This, in effect, may explain the lack of interest in literary representations shown by philosophical and social theorists of recognition. One of the major differences between fictional texts and normative accounts is that fictional texts can base the legitimacy of their claims on the power of aesthetic experience and its seemingly self-evident authority. 31 Thus, while normative accounts try to integrate different claims in order to arrive at a convincing normative principle, the subjective accounts of literature go exactly in the other direction by producing an ever-expanding plurality of claims. In the discourse on recognition, then, we encounter normative accounts of recognition on the one side, and open, and often unashamedly subjective, calls for recognition on the other. It would be a mistake, however, to posit one against the other. Both operate on different levels and are, in the final analysis, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 314 Winfried Fluck 32 Recognition is thus one of the stabilizing forces of the social system, since it is based on certain norms of recognizability, but, at the same time, it is also a continuous threat to the stability of the system, because it constantly revives and refuels individual claims. complementary. As a form that encourages individual expression, often of a transgressive nature, literature is a social institution with a special potential and privilege to articulate individual claims for recognition. Philosophical and social theories, on the other hand, are involved in an ongoing debate about the legitimacy and normative implications of such claims. In a time of pluralization, fictional texts constantly introduce new claims; in doing so, they put pressure on philosophical and social theories to reconsider and, where necessary, to extend their normative accounts. 32 Thus, both discourses can be seen to nourish each other. Literature remains an important medium in which new claims for recognition can be articulated, just as, on the other hand, the concept of recognition provides a perspective on literature that can provide new and better explanations of its imaginary power. As we have seen, this power does not only derive from narratives of recognition or misrecognition, although these provide a central theme of literature. It also derives from the interactive mode of aesthetic experience that turns reading into a transfer and thereby opens up entirely new possibilities for a reconfiguration and an extension of the reader’s narrative identity. Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction.” Multiculturalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 149-64. Bedorf, Thomas. Verkennende Anerkennung. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 2010. Brooks Higginbotham, Evelyn. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993. Butler, Judith. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics 31.4 (2001): 22-40. Cave, Terence. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969. Espenson, Jane. “Fantasy Land.” tnr.com. The New Republic, 6 Aug. 2007. Web. 2013. <https: / / newrepublic.com/ article/ 62968/ fantasy-land>. Ezzy, Douglas. “Theorizing Narrative Identity: Symbolic Interactionism and Hermeneu‐ tics.” The Sociological Quarterly 39.2 (1998): 239-52. Fanon, Frantz. “The Black Man and Recognition.” Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World. New York: Grove, 1967. 185-97. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 315 Fraser, Nancy. “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, Participation.” Discussion Paper. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum, 1998. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, 2003. Fluck, Winfried. “Fiction and Justice.” New Literary History 34.1 (2003): 19-42. ---. “Aesthetic Experience of the Image” Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation. Ed. Ulla Haselstein, Berndt Ostendorf, and Peter Schneck. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 11-41. Honneth, Axel, and Avishai Margalit. “Recognition.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (2001): 127-39. ---. “Playing Indian: Aesthetic Experience, Recognition, Identity.” American Studies as Media Studies. Ed. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 73-92. ---. “Multiple Identities and the New Habitus: Figurational Sociology and American Studies.” Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: Figurational Approaches to American Culture. Ed. Christa Buschendorf, Astrid Franke and Johannes Voelz. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 305-29. Früchtl, Josef. Das unverschämte Ich: Eine Heldengeschichte der Moderne. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. Gutmann, Amy. “Introduction.” Multiculturalism. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 3-24. Honneth, Axel. “Unsichtbarkeit: Über die moralische Epistemologie von ‘Anerkennung.’” Unsichtbarkeit: Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. 10-15. ---. “Recognition as Ideology.” Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory. Ed. Bert van den Brink and David Owen. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. 323-47. Honneth, Axel, and Avishai Margalit. “Recognition.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (2001): 127-39. Hügel, Hans-Otto. “Abenteurer.” Handbuch Populäre Kultur: Begriffe, Theorien und Dis‐ kussionen. Ed. H.O. Hügel. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003. Iser, Wolfgang. “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989. Nicholson, Linda. “To Be or Not To Be: Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition.” Constellations 3.1 (1996): 1-16. Petzold, Dieter. “The Respectable Adventurers: Some Functions of Adventure Stories, Predominantly in the Nineteenth Century.” Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on his Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. Ulrich Broich et al.. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984. 251-68. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 316 Winfried Fluck Ricoeur, Paul. “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Ed. Mario J. Valdés. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991. 425-37. Sartre, Jean Paul. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. London: Routledge, 2004. Slowinska, Maria. “Consuming Illusion, Illusions of Consumability: American Movie Palaces of the 1920s.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 50.4 (2005): 575-601. Somers, Margaret. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23.5 (1994): 605-649. Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994. 25-73. Tischleder, Bärbel. Body Trouble: Entkörperlichung, Whiteness und das amerikanische Gegenwartskino. Frankfurt/ M.: Strömfeld, 2001. Trachtenberg, Alan. “From Image to Story: Reading the File.” Documenting America, 1935-1945. Ed. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988. 43-75. Voelz, Johannes. Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Chal‐ lenge. Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 2010. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 317 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition Johannes Voelz Winfried Fluck’s groundbreaking work on the aesthetic experience of recogni‐ tion - developed must fully in his essay “Reading for Recognition,” published in New Literary History in 2013 and reprinted in this volume - is marked by a productive tension. On the one hand, Fluck argues that aesthetic objects (literature, film, and even purportedly non-narrative art forms, such as painting) make available an imaginary experience of recognition in the sense that they enable us to undergo dramas of recognition characterized by continuous ebbs and flows as well as ups and downs. On the other hand, Fluck argues that recognition becomes imaginarily available in the act of reading (or viewing, listening, etc.) because the reader partakes of the experience represented in a widely shared plot pattern that leads from inferiority to superiority. These two observations do not necessarily contradict each other, but they place their emphasis on different aspects. Where “drama” is about a clash of starkly different experiences, the narrative “from inferiority to superiority” is about resolution and fulfillment. My reconstruction in the following pages is intended to show how Winfried Fluck resolves the tension of these two aspects of his approach: In an argumen‐ tative style that is at once sweeping, penetrating, and eye-opening, he drives home the point that over and over again we seek out fictions in popular and literary culture because they enable us to experience, within the realm of the imaginary, the transformation of frustrating hardship into vindicating gratifi‐ cation. However, I want to suggest that the other, somewhat less pronounced strand of Fluck’s theory of aesthetic recognition is at least as provocative. In thinking about recognition as a drama that is less about denouement than about unresolved conflict, Fluck opens the door to an understanding of the aesthetics and affects of recognition that can help explain what binds us to negative experiences and emotions, such as envy, resentment, hatred, contempt, and vindictiveness. Indeed, Fluck’s writings equip us with the tools necessary to explore the full range of the aesthetics and affects of recognition, so that recognition is to be imagined as a multilayered and temporally structured experience. The experience of recognition in this sense is far more, and more complicated, than a momentary feeling of affirmation. Moreover, Fluck anchors his exploration of the aesthetic experience of recognition in the dynamics of democratic culture. The ultimate aim I pursue in these remarks is to suggest that in building on Fluck’s work, we can begin to think about why the dramas of recognition characteristic of democratic culture are prone to turn against democracy. I. I think of Winfried Fluck’s expansive oeuvre as falling into two halves. There is Fluck the metacritic, who dissects the premises and narratives that have in‐ formed the developments in the field of American studies and in the humanities more generally (in this volume, Laura Bieger, Frank Kelleter, and Heinz Ickstadt explore different facets of this side of Fluck’s work). And there is Fluck the cultural and literary historian, who arranges the cultural output of the United States into a narrative of unfolding and accelerating modernity. His perspective in this second endeavor is trained on the act of reception. His guiding question fuses the aesthetic with the sociological and the philosophical: What does the engagement with cultural objects do for the individuals who make up modern society? It has been fascinating (to use one of Fluck’s favorite aesthetic categories) to observe the theoretical terms that have allowed him to tell, retell, and refine this story over the past decades. While he has largely stayed beholden to the basic outline of the aesthetic encounter elaborated by Wolfgang Iser and the Constance school of reception aesthetics, his conceptual apparatus for understanding modernity has continued to evolve. Recognition, I suggest, is a relative latecomer to this apparatus, but in many ways it is his master term. This is because recognition acts as a relay between the individual and society, or, more specifically, between aesthetic experience (which ultimately lies in the domain of the subject) and the dynamic structure of democratic society. For Fluck to come to see recognition as the key problem of modernity - democratic modernity, to be more exact - he first had to come to terms with the full import of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. By my estimate, this act of discovery must have taken place in the late 1990s, after the publication of his magisterial study, Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans (1997). I became Fluck’s student in the year 2000, and I remember distinctly how around this time he brought photocopies of the table 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 320 Johannes Voelz of contents of Tocqueville’s second volume to class. His excitement over his (re)discovery was palpable. It was clear that he had known Tocqueville’s book for decades (the state of his paperback alone gave it away), but it was also obvious (with the advantage of hindsight, at any rate) that in re-reading Tocqueville’s brazen interpretation of American culture, something had suddenly clicked for him. He was grappling at this time with how best to conceptualize the historical trajectory of American (and modern) culture, and the terms that seemed to suggest themselves at the time were “individualization” and (in a more limited sense) “expressive individualism.” Indeed, the story told in Das kulturelle Imaginäre is ultimately one of individualization. Yet, for those of us students at the Kennedy-Institute who kept up with his steady stream of publications and who sought to be part of the dramatic debates that seemed to be going on in his mind (to us, he was never easy to read as a person but stunningly clear in his teaching and writing), the problems that this term - “individualization” - posed were unmistakable and even troublesome. Was “individualization” a merely descriptive or a normative term? Did it suggest that we of the postmodern generation possessed any substantial degree of freedom (a distinctly unpopular idea among us students), that things were getting better (a suggestion that was anathema to us) or that in fact everyone was becoming burdened, if not overburdened, with having to manage their own lives (a much more palatable claim)? What precisely did “individualization” describe? And could it actually explain very much? The observation that modern cultures such as that of the United States are increasingly oriented toward the individual was what stood in need of theoretical explanation. “Individualization” provided a tautology rather than a proper theory. It seems to me that the theory of “individualization” left Fluck unsatisfied as well and that around the turn of the millennium, he found his way out of this fix by coming upon two sources of inspiration that hitherto had not been considered together: There was Tocqueville, and there was the moral-philosophical debate on recognition. Fluck first treated this nexus in “Fiction and Justice,” an essay published in New Literary History in 2003. The core features of his adaptation of recognition theory for a reception-oriented explanation of the function of fiction in democracies are already in place in this essay. In that sense, “Fiction and Justice” really may be the most important milestone in Fluck’s mature career (it is for this reason included in Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, the collection of his essays that Laura Bieger and I edited on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, in 2009). But while the link between recognition, fiction, and democracy is already established in “Fiction 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 321 and Justice,” Tocqueville merely gets one paragraph. Clearly there was more work to be done. In the following half-decade or so, Fluck convened an informal study group made up of PhD students and postdocs, many of them faculty in the Kennedy Institute’s Department of Culture (it never seems to even have entered his mind to write a third-party funding proposal for this purpose; those were the days). Together we read up on contemporary debates and theories of recognition as well as on related concepts relevant to our question, such as popular treatises on “the attention economy; ” not in order to contribute to normative moral philosophy, to be sure, but to be able to make the theoretical moves necessary for reading American cultural and literary history through the prism of recognition. In 2012, many years after the working group had ceased to exist and many of its members had left Berlin, Fluck edited a special issue for Amerikastudien/ American Studies that collected some of the results from these long afternoon sessions in room 305 of Lansstraße. The title of the issue makes clear that Tocqueville now takes center stage: “Tocqueville’s Legacy: Toward a Cultural History of Recognition in American Studies.” Several members of the working group are represented in that issue - Laura Bieger, Julian Hanich, Hannah Spahn, and myself - and the historical range of the contributions alone is rather expansive, moving from Hannah Spahn’s exploration of the tension, in the political discourse of the early republic, between ambition and the quest for esteem, to Laura Bieger’s reflections on fashioning the modern body, which hinged on the “conjunction of the actual and the imagined body” (663). Fluck’s own contribution, “Fiction and the Struggle for Recognition,” is an early version of his argument presented here, but whereas the early version has been cited a mere five times (according to GoogleScholar, as of January 2024), the more expansive and polished rendition of his argument, printed in the following year in New Literary History as “Reading for Recognition,” has received significant attention - not least, I suspect, because it may have resonated with the then emerging debate on critique and postcritique. That debate, however, did not - and could not - concern the Berlin group at all. Our collective had dispersed long before US-based Americanists ever started debating “the uses of literature.” II. In forging a nexus between Tocqueville’s guiding idea about democracy as a way of life, intersubjective recognition, and the act of reading, “Reading for Recognition” puts forth a theory that is stunning because of its simplicity and because of the reach of its implications. Put in a nutshell, the argument goes 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 322 Johannes Voelz like this: Once people live under conditions of nominal equality, recognition becomes a problem for every individual: We all have to forge our own identity and find ways of differentiating ourselves from all the rest. This is done not merely in direct social interaction, but crucially with the help of cultural texts. It is in reading - in relating ourselves to fictional materials - that we create a sense of who we are. And because we relate to texts by creating analogies between ourselves and what we read, we seek out fictional dramas of recognition. We are attracted to fictional recognition scenes not because fiction allows us to vicariously experience in our imagination what real life won’t grant us (this would be mere wish-fulfillment), but because in imaginarily experiencing recognition, we work on our narrative identity. And such work requires experiences of recognition, whether in reading or in social interaction. Fluck insists that his theory is not dependent on the mechanism of identifi‐ cation. In relating ourselves to fictional dramas of recognition (in acts of what Fluck calls “imaginary transfer”), we do not identify with a character, or at least we do not do so in any consistent manner. Fluck maintains that “[w]hat used to be called identification is really a series of different and segmented attachments. Because of this segmented use, the relation to the text is established, not by identification with a particular figure, but by analogues between a potentially wide range of textual elements and the recipient’s imaginary (including affects, feeling, moods, corporeal schemata, etc.)” (“Reading for Recognition,” in this volume 310). Thus, to use an example from the essay, we may engage in an imaginary transfer with a fictional outlaw figure and make use of that figure for our own purposes of building up our identity. But we do not therefore wholly identify with the outlaw. As Fluck puts it: “We take the heroism and ignore the criminal context” (310). In relating to fictional characters, our attitude may move from cheery to leery within the span of a sentence. And sometimes the recognition drama isn’t even tethered to a particular character, but rather to the social constellation represented, or to the atmosphere and mood, or perhaps quite simply to the energy transmitted by the language of the text. What Fluck here proposes is a “strong theory” in the technical sense that it covers a whole lot of ground. Indeed, it may come close to being a theory of everything. “In many, if not most cases,” he writes, “fictional texts tell stories about a transformation of inferiority into superiority, of weakness into strength, of worthlessness into worth, or, more generally speaking, of misrecognition into recognition” (303). What makes “Reading for Recognition” stunning is the scope of its claim (scope here amounts to strength), as well as the range and incisiveness of Fluck’s knowledge: not only has he mastered canon upon canon, from the popular to the avant-garde, but he also knows how to cut through the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 323 piles of material and to fully submit them to his guiding thesis. In his hands, virtually all of American cultural history - from Cinderella, Pretty Woman, and Horatio Alger to “the artistic cosmopolitanism of the Harlem Renaissance [, …] the angry nationalism of the Black Arts Movement and a more recent rhetoric of trauma” (307) - becomes legible as a sequence of recognition dramas. “Reading for Recognition” is a text designed to make you see the world differently. This is precisely the effect an early draft of the essay had on me when reading it during the days of our study group (somewhere around 2005). I told Fluck so one day as we were waiting in line at the lunch counter. He merely scoffed. Maybe he wondered if I was pulling his leg. At times our mentor-mentee relationship amounted to a recognition drama of its own. III. So, what does Fluck mean by dramas of recognition? And how do they relate to the narrative trajectory from inferiority to superiority that he recognizes “in many, if not most” fictional texts? Before zeroing in one these two questions, we would do well to take a step back and reflect on Fluck’s decision to create a link between readerly recognition and the emplotment of recognition. This link should not be taken for granted. Some might indeed consider it a conceptual misstep. In any case, it is striking that Rita Felski, who treats recognition as one of the four “uses of literature” discussed in her manifesto of the same title, does not draw a direct line from the particular type of textual engagement she calls recognition to any particular story line of the literary text. In a spirit and language very much attuned to Fluck’s, she writes, If our existence pivots around the drama of recognition, our aesthetic engagement cannot be quarantined from the desire to know and to be acknowledged. We all seek in various ways to have our particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us. The patent asymmetry and unevenness of structures of recognition ensure that books will often function as lifelines for those deprived of other forms of public acknowledgment. (43) Felski, in effect, suggests - very much like Fluck - that our quest for recognition spills over into our engagement with art. We desire to have our “particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us,” and we bring this desire to the encounter with literature, especially (but not only) if we have collective identities that get little social recognition. Like Fluck, Felski also argues against the explanatory power of the concept of identification: “The idiom of identification (…) is poorly equipped to distinguish between the variable 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 324 Johannes Voelz epistemic and experiential registers of reader involvement” (35). For Felski, these variable epistemic and experiential registers ultimately serve the same purpose they serve in Fluck’s account - the drama of recognition that finds its continuation in the act of reading is a “drama of self-formation” (33). In other words, reading is affective and cognitive work on our identity. This is what reading for recognition ultimately means. And yet, despite all of these echoes, there is that one crucial difference between the accounts provided by Felski and Fluck: For Felski, the encounter with a fictional text liberates the individual from a sense of loneliness and alienation. “I feel myself addressed, summoned, called to account: I cannot help seeing traces of myself in the pages I am reading” (30). Whereas we might feel unseen, unheard, misunderstood in much of our social existence, in the engagement with the literary text we find a sense of “affiliation” (the key term of Felski’s approach). “Through this experience of affiliation, I feel myself acknowledged; I am rescued from the fear of invisibility, from the terror of not being seen” (33). In Felski’s thinking, a text recognizes us - and thus relieves us from loneliness - when we find a way of recognizing ourselves in it, either by reflecting on ourselves, or by losing ourselves in the fictional world to the extent that we no longer know the boundaries between self and world. Hence recognition, in Felski’s version, retains the strong cognitive meaning of re-knowing: We experience a sense of acknowledgment if we find ourselves echoed in the literary text. How this act of finding ourselves in the text is textured varies widely and helps explain what Felski means by the “drama of recognition.” It is a drama generated by the clash of contravening forces that push and pull us inside and out of ourselves, inside and out of the fictional world. Reading for recognition consists, by turns, of the extension, intensification, and clarification of our sense of self. This drama is set in motion not by a particular plot pattern, but by a discovery of similarity between ourselves and any element of the text. Fluck, it seems to me, would agree with almost every aspect of Felski’s account. Yet in his version, readerly recognition is not about finding a sense of affiliation. The question of recognition, to him, is not whether we are all alone in this world. The question of recognition is about hierarchy and distinction: Are we inferior or superior, are we sufficiently different from the pack? Where Felski’s readers dread being alone, Fluck’s readers dread losing out in a competition for glory, or at least for sufficient attention. It is the ingredient of Tocqueville - of his idea that in a society of equals we are condemned to make ourselves stick out - that sets apart Fluck’s drama of recognition from Felski’s. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 325 This combative, competitive character of the drama of recognition, however, can hardly be found in our engagement with literature if we only look at the question to what extent we recognize ourselves in the fictional text. Who, after all, would we be competing against if we found ourselves by immersing ourselves in any given narrative situation? Fluck needs to tie the question of readerly engagement to the nearly archetypal plot pattern “from inferiority to superiority” in order to make the claim that our aesthetic experience is of use in a world of equals. The plot pattern, in other words, acts as a sort of engine for our imaginary: It channels our engagement with the literary text into the drama that is Fluck’s concern, namely, how to stake out a claim for ourselves in a democratic order in which everybody is a somebody - and thus in danger of remaining a nobody. It is no coincidence, then, that Fluck, in his essay for the special issue of Ame‐ rikastudien/ American Studies that directly preceded the publication of “Reading for Recognition,” chose a remarkably Hegelian title, “Fiction and the Struggle for Recognition.” Not only is he riffing on the title of Axel Honneth’s monograph, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, but, more crucially, in taking up the figure of the struggle, he also highlights the element of dramatic conflict that precedes the eventual triumph of superiority. In Fluck’s rendition, the drama of recognition consists of the fact that superiority and distinction have to be fought for. And while in our everyday lives, superiority, indeed even mere visibility and acknowledgment, often remain out of reach, in the plot pattern Fluck has identified as nearly all-pervasive, the struggle for recognition is usually won in the end. There is a degree of wish-fulfillment to Fluck’s version of the aesthetics of recognition after all. Indeed, without the telos of fulfillment (however provisional, ironic, or ambiguous it may turn out to be), the struggle for recognition literally would not make sense. IV. It would be a misunderstanding, however, to conclude that Fluck’s theory suggests that we seek out fictional scenarios of recognition merely for the happy ending of awarded affirmation. After all, as Fluck suggests in “Reading for Recognition,” if we keep on reading for hundreds of pages or keep on watching for hours on end, we do so because apparently we are captivated by “dramas in which the struggle for recognition is acted out in all of its tensions, conflicts, complications, and emotional ups and downs” (307). It stands to reason that as readers, we do not merely want the sense of recognition granted eventually, but we want the entire struggle. Properly speaking, the aesthetic experience 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 326 Johannes Voelz of recognition is the experience of struggle as well as the experience of its resolution. If this is the case, then recognition consists of an affective vocabulary that is strikingly ambivalent. In exposing ourselves to dramas of recognition, we expose ourselves not only to the eventual triumph of affirmation, but to a whole range negative affects that fall under the rubric of what Fluck calls inferiority. These affects and emotions include frustration, envy, resentment, hatred, vindictiveness, and many more. Tocqueville is a capable guide for making us see that these negative emotions are democratic emotions. They stem, he argues throughout both volumes of Democracy in America, from the fact that under conditions of equality, we (the citizens of post-rank societies) are prone to compare ourselves to others. And while we may develop a “bombastic style” and other performative habits that are designed to attract attention, the fact of the matter is that in the attempt to set ourselves apart from all the rest, most people fail (nothing illustrates this as clearly as the forms of sociality offered by the internet). In the democratic struggle for attention and recognition, frustration is the norm. I have explored elsewhere how Tocqueville develops this train of thought (Voelz, “Wendungen” and Voelz, “Aesthetics of Polarization”). Put briefly, ac‐ cording to Tocqueville, the most ordinary experience of democratic life consists of witnessing how other people excel, which is an experience doubly irritating. It irritates, first, because the democratic individual aspires to the very distinction achieved by the other; and second, because the act of observing how others advance contradicts the democratic individual’s love of equality, according to which no one should stand out in the first place. These two irritations are really at odds with one another (the first is a complaint about our not standing out enough, the second is about others not being equal enough), but they come together in the passion of envy. In the chapter “Of the Government of Democracy,” Tocqueville writes: The fact must not be concealed that democratic institutions develop the sentiment of envy in the human heart to a very high degree, not so much because they offer each person the means to become equal to others, but because these means constantly fail those who use them. Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. (316) The aim of envy is to counter the emergence of inequality by producing a leveling effect. In contrast to hatred, envy does not aim at the destruction of the other, but at leveling out the difference between self and other regarding some attribute. Envy presents one of two options to work towards leveling out 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 327 that difference. One option is upward leveling - this, for Tocqueville, is the expression of a legitimate passion for equality; in the case of the United States, we may associate it with a cultural history that leads from Transcendentalist notions of self-growth all the way to the human potential movement; the second option, associated with envy, is downward leveling, which Tocqueville describes as a “depraved taste for equality (…) that leads the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in liberty” (89). For Tocqueville, the downward leveling of envy is doubly pernicious. It drives citizens of democratic societies towards accepting equality in servitude - a politically disastrous state of despotic conformity. On the level of the individual’s emotional life, it moreover leads to systemic unhappiness and what we would call depression. The more successful the leveling efforts, the smaller the differences become; yet as equality increases, so does the sensitivity to remaining (or newly emerging) inequalities, however minute they may be. From this sharpened perception - which is echoed in the Latin word for envy, invidia, and its verb form, invidere, which in its most literal meaning translates as to look upon - follows a continuous experience of disappointment: “Every day,” Tocqueville writes, “at the moment when people believe they have grasped complete equality, it escapes from their hands and flees, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight” (316). The costs are not merely political unfreedom, but a collective malaise of the soul. “It is to these causes that you must attribute the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic countries often reveal amid their abundance, and this disgust for life that sometimes comes to seize them in the middle of a comfortable and tranquil existence” (946). Tocqueville was not the first to worry about the ramifications of the social logic of recognition. He inherits a good part of his skepticism from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in turn, as Axel Honneth has recently shown, is indebted to the seventeenth-century French moralists, such as François de La Rochefoucauld (Honneth, Recognition). In his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind (1755), Rousseau had begun to worry about what he terms amour propre - a pernicious longing for recognition that develops as a distinctly social trait, particularly when people have to put an effort into shaping their own social standing. For our purposes, we don’t have to bother reconstructing and assessing Rousseau’s historical sketch of human history told in this so-called Second Discourse; it suffices to turn to Rousseau’s description of the first signs of the emergence of amour propre amidst what he thinks of as the “golden age.” At this moment of human history, a healthy self-love (amour de soi), which is innocently invested in preserving natural survival and is wholly 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 328 Johannes Voelz unconcerned with others, gives way to a quest of recognition driven by the self ’s urge to favorably compare herself to others. Put in a more modern idiom, the inner-directed self becomes utterly other-directed. Here, then, is Rousseau’s historical ur-scene of amour propre (which, as Frederick Neuhouser [2] has noted, contains striking echoes of the Biblical fall from grace): It became customary to gather in front of the Huts or around a large Tree: song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle men and women gathered together. Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a price. The one who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step at once toward inequality and vice: from these first preferences arose vanity and contempt on the one hand, shame and envy on the other; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. (Rousseau 166) Where for Tocqueville, equality is instituted by the post-rank order, for Rousseau equality is the natural condition of humans (his version of the “state of nature,” after all, is the inversion of Hobbes’s: natural man has a unique proclivity for happiness; he takes equality for granted). What matters is that both thinkers tell a story in which inequality emerges from equality by way of a mechanism that grows out of particular social conditions. Equality lapses into inequality once humans live in a social constellation that asks them to compare themselves to each other. As they take stock of each other in comparative terms, the emotional landscape becomes poisoned. Those who deem themselves superior (read: recognized) develop a sense of vanity and contempt for their inferiors; and those who feel slighted (or misrecognized) bathe in shame and envy. Thus, in the culture of recognition - understood as a culture of comparison and competition - negative affects become predominant. V. This distinctly negative interpretation of recognition - which, according to Axel Honneth, is characteristic of the French tradition of thinking about recognition, probably for socio-historical reasons (Recognition 5) - isn’t merely of interest because it allows us to contextualize Tocqueville’s take on American democracy. Its real provocation, it seems to me, lies in its potential (or, put more cautiously, in its potential potential) to help explain the affective landscape that has come to structure our own times, particularly in the United States. Today, the politics 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 329 of anger, resentment, and vindictiveness have taken on the power to color the national mood; on the American right in particular (and among its international allies), it has become acceptable and indeed common to openly favor authoritar‐ ianism over democratic political rule. Thinkers in the line of La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, and Tocqueville might have an explanation for this development. Guided by their writings, we may argue that the prevalence of negative, spiteful affects that finds expression in calls for doing away with democracy is itself the ramification of a democratic social structure in which value, worth, and esteem are measured in purely comparative terms. Not for nothing was Tocqueville so intensely worried about how to protect democracy from certain of its inbuilt tendencies. The reversion of democracy into tyranny, to his mind, was the most likely course of future events, and he may yet be proven right. Why, however, is it so appealing to bind oneself to a range of negative emotions that swirl around misrecognition? Why is it promising to generate political energies out of the claim of inferiority? And why is it the case that authoritarian-populist movements around the world engage in symbolic selfvictimization, as if any minimal gain of social status by formerly excluded groups amounted to the total and complete loss of power by formerly dominant groups (cf. Voelz, “Reading Populism”)? Indeed, why do people cheer when their leaders tell them that they are victims and that they are losing their country? My sense is that Rousseau and Tocqueville are of great help in explaining why cultures of recognition produce a great deal of misrecognition, but that their ideas need to be developed further in order to explain how weakness, inferiority, and misrecognition gain something like a positive, binding charge. If we return to Fluck’s theory of recognition, we may see a path forward. Fluck, as we have seen, is concerned with the question of how our reading com‐ plements and intersects with our social existence, how the imaginary experience of recognition to be gained from literature fills a need for people who have to actively shape their sense of self. In this line of argument, narrativity exists on both sides of the equation: in our social existence (where come to a sense of self by way of telling stories about ourselves) as well as in our existence as readers (where we transfer elements from our imaginary to our mental and affective construction of the text). By slightly tweaking and expanding this insight, we can conclude that our engagement in collective political life likewise is structured in narrative terms. Indeed, it seems entirely plausible to argue that our politics are structured by narrative recognition dramas. It’s just that in political discourse and the affects it elicits, we don’t always get to hear the full story. While some pay lip service to triumph and affirmation (“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning”), mostly these parts of the narrative are relegated to a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 330 Johannes Voelz distant horizon. The drama of being threatened, of standing to lose, of being all but doomed, lends itself much more to trump up the affective intensity needed for political dramas of recognition. What’s more, it appears that democratic recognition dramas are prone to take on a melodramatic shape (cf. Anker). Few have argued more forcefully than Fluck that melodrama has the distinct narrative advantage of redefining weakness as moral superiority. Political melodrama thus has two sources of imaginary power: It generates a sense of urgency that inheres in proclamations of existential threat (on this level, we are dealing with a story that highlights inferiority), and it makes available a sense of moral self-satisfaction derived from weakness (here we’re dealing with a story highlighting superiority). What were once contravening forces of the drama of recognition here become reinforcing elements. VI. One of the questions opened up by these reflections concerns Fluck’s original project of coming to terms with the function of fiction (or, as we say today, the uses of literature). Does the textual engagement with fictions fulfill any function for the formation of our political identities? Do we read for political affiliation? If the answer is no, this does not necessarily have to surprise or worry us. It may well be that the formation of collective political identities draws on different media and genres - nonfictional public discourse, for instance - than does the formation of our individual identity. But maybe something more fundamental is going here as well. Could it be that political theater is taking over the function that fiction once held? In other words, might it be that in the course of the intense politicization of culture and the culturalization of politics that has marked our recent past, we increasingly build up our personal identities, not by drawing on fiction, but on the discourses and narratives of politics? If this seems likely to you, perhaps we have assembled the building blocks needed for a melodramatic recognition drama starring literary studies. - Works Cited Anker, Elisabeth R. Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Bieger, Laura. “’Freedom, Equality, Beauty for Everyone’ - Notes on Fantasizing the Modern Body.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 57.4 (2012): 663-688. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 Aesthetics and Affects of Recognition 331 Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans. Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp, 1997. ---. “Fiction and Justice.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 385-408. ---. “Fiction and the Struggle for Recognition.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 57.4 (2012): 689-709. ---, ed. Toqueville’s Legacy: Towards a Cultural History of Recognition in American Studies. Special issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies 57.4 (2012). Honneth, Axel. Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. ---. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, and Victor Gourevitch. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Historical-Critical Edition. Ed. Eduardo Nolla. Trans. James T. Schleifer. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010. Voelz, Johannes. “Reading Populism with Bourdieu and Elias.” Reading the Social in American Studies. Ed. Astrid Franke, Stefanie Müller, Katja Sarkowsky. New York: Palgrave, 2022. 233-258. ---. (with Tom Freischläger) “Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 35 (2019): 261-286. ---. “Wendungen des Neids: Tocqueville und Emerson zum Paradox einer demokratischen Leidenschaft.” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 01-2017: 141-154. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0018 332 Johannes Voelz First published in New Literary History 47 (2016): 109-134. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation Winfried Fluck I. Every literary and cultural theory must be based on certain explicit or implicit assumptions about the human condition, about what the human make-up is, what humans want, what they need, how society responds to these wants and needs, and what role literature and culture play in this context. Willingly or unwillingly, but always inevitably, such assumptions form the basis of every theoretical approach, although critics often do not want to acknowledge their premises or may not even be aware of them. As a rule, when we interpret a literary text or a cultural practice, we do not first ask ourselves what our underlying philosophical or anthropological premises are. We simply apply a perspective or a method that we know and prefer. We can do this because these approaches come with the authority of an established critical convention, and that is also the reason why we may not feel the need for an analysis and justification of the tacit assumptions on which they are based. However, these premises, whether consciously or unconsciously held, will decisively shape the focus and interpretive results of any approach. To be sure, a formalist may argue that she is only interested in describing formal features of a text in order to determine its aesthetic value, but such a project only makes sense in the context of certain assumptions about the role artistic forms or aesthetic objects play (or should play) in human life, or in social life under capitalism, or in processes of identity-formation, and so on. This, in fact, is my point. In the final analysis, critical disagreements are disagreements about premises, because these underlying assumptions shape all subsequent interpretive choices: the choice of my object of analysis, the research question with which I am approaching this object, and the interpretive method I will be using. If this is the case, however, 1 In most philosophical versions, alienation means to be cut off from man’s original or essential nature. In Marxist versions, alienation is attributed to the division of labor and to private ownership of the means of production “in which the worker loses both the product of his labour and his sense of his own productive activity” (Williams, “Alienation” 31). In consequence, the relation of the worker to his world is defined by the depersonalized logic of commodity relations and leads to a state of reification as a specific form of alienation. In postmodern and poststructuralist versions, in which the main project is to challenge the ideas of reason and the subject as foundational, alienation usually refers to the impossibility of the subject to know itself. then an important part of our work should not only be to offer judgments about how convincing we find a method, but how convincing we find the premises on which it is based. This may allow us to have a new and different look at literary and cultural theory and, more specifically, at some theoretical positions that have been especially influential in the field. This is the task I have set myself in the following essay, in which I want to focus on some key approaches in literary and cultural theory in order to demonstrate to what degree these well-known positions are shaped by a priori assumptions about the human condition. And since these premises do not always find expression in the form of philosophical claims or arguments, my analysis will also include the narrative forms that are used to give legitimacy to these claims and to make them convincing. Since literary and cultural critics are not philosophers, they will not always provide elaborate philosophical justifications of their choices. Often they import their premises in the form of narratives. These narratives are not necessarily very elaborate - in fact, in many cases, the word mini-narration seems more fitting here, so that a grand systematic analysis of different narrative genres in the mode of Hayden White’s MetaHistory is hardly possible. Nevertheless, there are characteristic story lines, lead characters, competing genres, and different dramatic conflicts; there are hostile forces, and there is resistance; there are villains and victims, success and failure, and, inevitably, crisis and solution. In fact, one of the surprising results of an analysis of this type is that there really aren’t that many different narratives to start with. Once one focuses on the question of underlying premises, it is striking to realize to what extent modern literary and cultural studies have been dominated and shaped by one theory of the subject in particular. I am referring here to narratives of self-alienation (Selbstentfremdung). These narratives see the subject in a state in which it is kept from fully knowing itself and determining its own fate, frequently with the result of a damaged sense of self or an inner division. 1 It is fitting to speak of these theories in the plural, because selfalienation, just like any other theoretical concept - such as, for a current 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 334 Winfried Fluck 2 See Rahel Jaeggi (2005), Entfremdung: zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Prob‐ lems and Peter Zima (2014), Entfremdung: Pathologien der postmodernen Gesellschaft. 3 A note on terminology: in discussions of Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, a major source of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; 2001) (hereafter cited as DE), the terms instrumental reason and instrumental rationality are often used interchangeably. I prefer the term instrumental reason, because it captures the sense of betrayal of the Enlightenment ideal of reason on which these theories are built more succinctly. Horkheimer and Adorno blended Marxist theories of alienation, focusing on an effect of reification, with Weber’s theory example, transnationalism or the other - is not a stable signifier but can be used in different contexts for different purposes. 2 In the following essay, I want to trace different uses of the idea of self-alienation in four especially influential approaches in literary and cultural studies: the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, as it manifests itself most forcefully and most influentially in the chapter on the culture industry in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment; British cultural studies as it has been envisioned by its founder Raymond Williams; Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory; and an exemplary poststructuralist position articulated by Judith Butler. These critics disagree about how this state of self-alienation can be described, what its sources are, and whether it can be overcome, but the premise of self-alienation nevertheless continues to stand at the center of their approaches and provides many, if not most, narratives in critical theory with their opening scene. II. Frankfurt School Critical Theory At first blush, it may come as a surprise that these very different approaches should all be grounded in the starting premise of self-alienation. But the common point of departure can be helpful in pinpointing the differences. One widely known version of the narrative of self-alienation is Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which may still be one of the most influential books in critical theory ever written. The book and especially its much-discussed chapter on the culture industry provide a good example for my claim that discussions of an approach make most sense when methodological or evaluative disagreements are seen in the larger context of premises on which the approach is based. Because cultural studies have often been practiced as popular culture studies in recent times, discussions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s chapter on the culture industry have focused on the high/ low divide and the question of to what extent it must be seen as an expression of their elitism. But this “elitism” has to be seen in the larger context of a critical theory of modernity in which reason, as the major value of the Enlightenment, has been reduced to instrumental reason, 3 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 335 of rationalization and its focus on a means-end rationality, a point later criticized by Jürgen Habermas. 4 In the 1969 reissue of the book, Horkheimer and Adorno write: “The development toward total integration recognized in this book is interrupted, but not abrogated.” A correction of their main thesis is thus not necessary. The major point still is that the development “threatens to advance beyond dictatorships and wars. The prognosis of the related conversion of enlightenment into positivism, the myth of things as they actually are, and finally the identification of intellect and that which is inimical to the spirit, has been overwhelmingly confirmed” (DE x). The book is notoriously difficult to translate, and it may therefore be helpful to also provide the German version: “Die in dem Buch erkannte Entwicklung zur totalen Integration ist unterbrochen, nicht abgebrochen: sie droht, über Diktaturen und Kriege sich zu vollziehen. Die Prognose des damit verbundenen Umschlags von Aufklärung in Positivismus, den Mythos dessen, was der Fall ist, schließlich die Identität von Intelligenz und Geistfeindschaft hat überwältigend sich bestätigt.” (Dialektik ix-x). As a reduction of reason, instrumental reason signals the “self-destruction of the Enlightenment” (xiii). 5 In this system, the source of “manipulation” is technology itself: “A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself ” (DE 121). 6 See, for example: “The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth” (DE 130). In later writings, Adorno has built an aesthetic theory on the premise of negation. and instrumental reason has gained an ever increasing hold over the subject - reaching, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, almost totalitarian dimensions in the American society they encountered in the 1940s. 4 This development must also affect literature and culture. In those philoso‐ phies of history in which the idea of a growing reach of instrumental reason has provided the central narrative, (high) culture has usually been considered one of the few remaining counter-realms in which instrumental reason had not yet taken hold. The exposure to culture, understood as the highest manifestation of the human mind, was thus seen as a crucial antidote, if not the only remaining one. The sense of shock pervading Horkheimer and Adorno’s chapter on the culture industry is caused by the fear that this last bastion of resistance may now also have been invaded by instrumental reason. 5 In the standardized and commodified form of American mass culture, culture has become merely another industry with standardized production processes in which even culture is now instrumentalized for profit purposes. In this situation, only an aesthetics of negation can still offer any hope for resistance. 6 If we start from the assumption that self-alienation is caused by a relentless progression of instrumental reason, then literature can hope to have a critical function only where it keeps the possibility of a non-instrumentalized counterrealm alive; literature can preserve a utopia of nonalienated existence only 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 336 Winfried Fluck 7 For an excellent comparison, revealing surprising similarities between Adorno and Foucault, see Axel Honneth, “Foucault und Adorno: Zwei Formen einer Kritik der Moderne” (127-44). 8 See also the following passages: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment” (DE 138). “The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance” (DE 140). where it is organized by certain aesthetic principles that negate instrumental‐ ization. It is thus crucial, in fact, that it should be the main responsibility of literary and cultural studies to distinguish between a literature of affirmation and an aesthetics of negation in order to identify the kind of literature that will be able to set up barriers against instrumental reason. The narrative here is one of invasion, retreat, and the need for a heroic last-stand defense. There is only a small piece of territory left on the other side of the river, called high modernism, but it is getting smaller all the time; in fact, critics of this retreat into a hermetic negative aesthetics have often taken up the territorial logic of this narrative when they have asked, “Where do we go from here? ” We may push the argument even further and say that the scenario of fighting an overpowering enemy called instrumental reason that seems to encroach from all sides and crops up in the most unexpected places goes beyond a narrative of heroic retreat and resistance and already takes on conspiratorial and paranoid overtones. This brings us back to the state of the subject, because the most terrifying aspect for Horkheimer and Adorno is that instrumental reason has not only invaded culture but, worse, the psyche as the site of ego-formation that is seen as the basis for mature subjectivity. 7 Thus, trying to explain the attraction of a cultural phenomenon such as jazz music - which for Adorno, a student of the classical symphonic tradition, belongs to the category of entertainment music - the culture industry chapter draws on the psychoanalytic concept of sadomasochism in order to explain that a seemingly rebellious gesture can really function as a form of voluntary subordination: “Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, which simultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule” (DE 153). 8 Modernity has reached a stage in which instrumental reason has also infiltrated psychic life and thus subjectivity. Hence Horkheimer and Adorno can praise, quite unexpectedly, Alexis de Tocqueville in a formulation that turns Toqueville into Foucault: “The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 337 in the meantime proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly, it is a fact that ‘tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attacks at the soul’” (DE 133). Subjects thus willingly enact their own subjection as “free choice”: “Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them” (DE 134). Anticipating Foucault, the argument is that modern societies no longer use repression to discipline their subjects. But there is one major and theoretically interesting difference. Both approaches want to highlight the all-embracing nature of cultural forms of control by focusing on those dimensions of human existence that seem to be the most private, intimate, and subjective, the psyche and the body. But whereas for Horkheimer and Adorno the psyche is the realm where the deformation brought about by modernity is most consequential, because instrumental reason has now also invaded the last possible source of unruliness, Foucault goes even further and considers psychic life itself as only an effect of the disciplinary regime of the body. This shift of emphasis is significant. The psyche, no matter how deformed and manipulated it may be under conditions of modernity, still retains a last potential for subversion, because from the Freudian perspective, the unconscious can never be completely controlled. Foucault, on the other hand, erases even this last, though already faint, prospect for resistance by eliminating interiority altogether, so that the body, in quasi-behavioristic fashion, becomes the passive object of disciplinary discursive regimes. Horkheimer and Adorno’s agitated narrative of invasion can now give way to a dry documentary report on a panoptic prison routine where there are no longer any resisting subjects and the drama of a struggle for resistance has disappeared, because nothing has been repressed. As Foucault and Foucauldians keep emphasizing, power is not merely constraining but also productive. Without it there would be no subject. III. Raymond Williams and Cultural Studies It may have been its apocalyptic overreach that finally undermined the long unquestioned status of Frankfurt School critical theory, because it offered hardly any prospect for resistance to the forces of self-alienation. Thus, in the German student movement, its greatest influence was in the early phase of the movement when the goal still was to analyze “late” capitalism and to unmask its “repressive tolerance.” However, when the question became pressing of what the consequences of such analysis should be for literary and cultural studies, interests began to shift to another tradition, that of British cultural studies and, at least initially, of Williams and his two highly influential books Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, which should be seen together as part of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 338 Winfried Fluck 9 In order to arrive at the possibility of common meanings in society - for Williams the precondition for overcoming social distance -, art has to be liberated from the grip of traditional forms of aesthetic theory and reintegrated into the common life of society. For this, it has to be redefined as the organization of common experience, “acting on and interacting with our whole personal and social organization” (Long Revolution 50). “To see art as a particular process in the general human process of creative discovery and communication is at once a redefinition of the status of art and the finding of means to link it with our ordinary social life.” (Ibid. 53). The first chapter of The Long Revolution, entitled “The Creative Mind,” offers a theory of everyday life as inherently creative that bears striking similarities to John Dewey’s Art as Experience. 10 Cf. Williams: “Many highly educated people have, in fact, been so driven in on their reading, as a stabilizing habit, that they fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative activity: Not only the cognate forms of theatre, concert and picture-gallery; but a whole range of general skills, from gardening, metalwork and carpentry to active politics. The contempt for many of these activities, which is always latent in the highly literate, is a mark of the observers’ limits, not those of the one project. In contrast to the uncompromising analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno, Williams is almost social democratic in his approach, but, somewhat surprisingly, he too takes his point of departure from a self-alienation of the subject and the question of what literary and cultural studies can do about it. In contrast to Dialectic of Enlightenment, for Williams it is not instrumental reason but industrialization that provides the key for understanding the selfalienation produced by modern society. The difference is significant. Industri‐ alization is not an entirely negative force for Williams. On the contrary, it has improved people’s lives, albeit at a price. It has led to class societies and thus to a social distance between members of society that threatens democracy and its promise of equality. Industrialization has produced a division of labor in all spheres of life, including culture, where it has separated cultural forms from their social contexts of use and created a separate sphere of value called aesthetic value that obscures literature’s social function. In Marxism and Literature, Williams characterizes aesthetic theory as a form of evasion that contributes to a separation of social spheres: “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” (154-56). 9 From this perspective, the high/ low divide poses a problem, because it is one of the devices for creating social distance. Williams’s narrative of self-alienation is thus far less agitated and (melo)dramatic than Horkheimer/ Adorno’s. His narrative genre is not that of a dystopian story of invasion but of a social novel in which separate classes are taught to overcome social distance by taking note of each other. 10 Unfortunately, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 339 activities themselves. Neglect of the extraordinary popularity of many of these activities as evidence of the quality of living in contemporary society, is the result of partisan selection for the reasons given”. To look “at the matter in this way helps us to keep a just sense of proportion” (Culture and Society 309). 11 Discussions about the relation between democracy and “mass society” stand at the center of sociological theories of the 1950s. Their main theme is the question whether the alienated subjects of mass society undermine the possibility for a functioning democracy. One of the most influential of these studies, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, argues that a shift has taken place in modern society from inner-directedness to other-directedness. Riesman’s key term ‘other-directed’ captures the sense of selfalienation that mass society is said to have produced. the bourgeoisie still looks down at the workers and regards them as a threat to culture and democracy. It is this institutionalization of social distance that leads to self-alienation. Its most obvious expression is the use of derogatory terms such as mass and mass society that misrepresent those not belonging to one’s own class: “I do not think of my relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses; we none of us can or do. The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know” (229). 11 If we understand self-alienation as the result of a process of industrialization that divides social worlds into classes and establishes new, commercially based status orders, then the challenge is how to reverse this development. The goal must be to prevent culture from replicating industrialization’s division of labor by becoming a separate sphere of its own. One way to do this is to extend literary studies into cultural studies. In treating literature not as a separate, autonomous sphere, but as part of a whole way of life, one will have to pay attention to the cultural practices of other classes and learn how to read these practices as manifestation of particular structures of feeling, so that the social distance that separates social classes in capitalist society can be overcome. This is the reason (and not some vague anthropological purpose) why Williams redefines culture as a whole way of life. In doing so, he wants to put cultural studies in a position to capture an otherwise elusive quality of social relations, what he calls structures of feeling or lived experience. If we draw conclusions from the cultural objects that the members of the working class consume - for example, Hollywood movies or TV soap operas - and read these objects, in the fashion of intellectual history or critical theory, as expressions of the mind or psyche of their users, we will fail to understand what working-class life is all about. Its actual substance and values lie in its social relations that are characterized by solidarity, and this is a quality that cultural studies can only capture by focusing on manifestations of lived experience, not by looking at the cultural consumption of mass culture. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 340 Winfried Fluck 12 See esp. chap. 1 of his second major book, The Long Revolution, in which he wants to set up an alternative to the positions he had critically discussed in Culture and Society. In other words: although society as a whole may be characterized by a division of labor that can lead to self-alienation, a closer look at working-class culture - something Horkheimer and Adorno were never interested in - reveals that there actually is no general condition of self-alienation. Self-alienation is the product of a historical process that may still be reversed by the development of a common culture. The impression of a permanent state of self-alienation can only be produced by bad cultural studies, that is, by reading popular cultural texts as expressions of the minds or the psyche of their users. Once we apply a better method - namely, focusing on structures of feeling and lived experience - there is not yet any self-alienation in the working class. On the contrary, workingclass culture may actually become a model for how to avoid self-alienation, because in its culture of solidarity and cooperation it provides the best possible manifestation of the anthropological premise on which Williams’s theory of cultural studies is based: namely, that human beings are at heart social beings and that self-alienation sets in whenever social cooperation is undermined or if - and this is a case that has made cultural studies necessary for him - classes are separated and social misrecognition threatens to become institutionalized. Despite his later attempts to revive Marxism, Williams is more of a pragmatist in his early work. It was the logic of his project - to derive the call for cultural studies from the fact that we are social beings and thus have to take note of the quality and character of social relations - that forced him to resort to pragmatism’s premise of the creative potential of all human action and social relations. 12 In pragmatism, the subject is redefined as a self and the self is the product of social interaction. It is thus by nature driven to social cooperation, for it is only in social cooperation that it can gain an identity. Again, a comparison is interesting here. For Horkheimer/ Adorno, the mass media are a crucial source of self-alienation, because they deform subjectivity. Williams evades the problem by claiming that the mass media cannot tell us anything about the state of its users, only about a cultural division of labor that may lead to self-alienation but does not have to, depending on the state of social relations. Ironically, it is the solidarity of the working class that provides a model of how social cooperation can be achieved and self-alienation can be overcome. The apparently selfalienated object of history can thus become its subject. Undoubtedly, it was this narrative of cultural empowerment that made British cultural studies such an attractive alternative to Frankfurt School critical theory in the 1960s and ’70s. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 341 13 To describe the activities of the reader in the act of reading is the central aim of Wolfgang Iser’s major studies The Implied Reader; The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic; Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology; and The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. IV. Wolfgang Iser and Reception Theory Every approach dealing with literary texts and aesthetic objects also needs a theory of effect - that is, a theory of whether and to what extent an object or text can reach and influence the recipient. The theory of effect in Dialectic of Enlightenment is that of identification: because the subject is self-alienated in the sense of being cut off from its own nature, it has little resistance to offer to a culture industry that skillfully exploits its weakness to create emotional and psychic dependencies. In contrast, the theory of effect held by Williams is one of recognition: art as an intensified organization of experience will have its best and strongest effect if we recognize “what we have always known” (Long Revolution 46). In both cases, it is still the literary text or aesthetic object that determines the meaning and significance the recipient takes from the text. In contrast, reception theory was the first approach to question this assumption and to offer a more complex theory of effect, worked out most systematically and convincingly in the work of Iser. Literary texts, however elaborate and aesthetically valuable they may be, remain dead letters on the page, if they are not brought to life by a reader in the act of reading. But since the reader cannot erase his own subjectivity in reception, the result of the reading process will not be identical with the original version from which it set out. Clarifying the activities of the reader thus became a key project of reception theory. 13 Somewhat surprisingly, in view of the active role assigned to the reader in reception theory, Iser’s work also has its starting point in the premise of selfalienation. In his case, however, this premise derives not from the narrative of a relentless progression of instrumental reason, or a Marxist analysis of the socially divisive consequences of industrialization, but from an anthropological claim about the human condition. The claim is taken from the work of the cultural anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, who famously pronounced: “Ich bin, aber ich habe mich nicht,” a sentence Iser liked to quote. In Iser’s study The Fictive and Imaginary, the English translation is: “Our existence is incontestable, but at the same time is inaccessible to us” (81). As human beings we are incomplete - we do not know anything about our beginnings and our end, for example - and because we are incomplete beings, we become interested in fiction in order to fill that lack. We need fictions to make up for what we are lacking (and can never fully recover). In this context, self-alienation, defined as an anthropological 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 342 Winfried Fluck 14 See, for example, “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer” and “Reading for Recognition.” condition, can, paradoxically, become a source of creativity, because our efforts to overcome our lack of self-knowledge can never be entirely successful and will thus stimulate ever new attempts. Iser’s anthropology of lack led him to the concept of the imaginary, but not in the sense of Lacan, where the imaginary is a source of permanent selfalienation, but in the sense of Lacan’s critic Cornelius Castoriadis, where the imaginary is a source of creativity - in fact, a counterterm and counterforce to the concept of interpellation. Castoriadis’s imaginary is uncontrollable and constantly undermines interpellation, because it consists of an unstructured flow of images, associations, affects, feelings, and desires that have no beginning and no end and constantly feed our self-images. As such the imaginary can provide an ongoing stimulation, and fiction, because of its openness of reference, is ideally suited to give this imaginary a form or gestalt and thus make its cultural articulation possible. This, in fact, can also explain why we never give up exposing ourselves to fictional texts, although we know that they are mere inventions. Fictional texts give a gestalt to the imaginary that drives us as human beings. To describe the ways in which this is achieved by an interaction between the imaginary and what Iser called the real became a main focus of Iser’s reception theory and opened up interesting perspectives for a redefinition of the process of reception as a transfer that I have further pursued in my own work. 14 But the important point here is what Iser’s anthropology of lack tells us about the state of the subject. Iser, in effect, realizes that he comes close to leftist conceptions of self-alienation in his own starting assumption and thus hastens to make sure that there is no confusion between his and a Marxist view of self-alienation: “Marxist self-alienation presupposes an idealist base in human beings through which a true self can be distinguished from the forms of its debasement” (Fictive 80). In contrast, for Iser, self-alienation is not a perversion of the human condition but rather its constituent. Iser’s subject is always and inevitably in a state of self-alienation, because it can never fully know itself and thus cannot reach a state of full self-knowledge and self-identity. But instead of trapping the subject in misrecognition, self-alienation becomes the source of a constant, never-ending drive of the subject to make up for the anthropological lack by which it is produced; this lack thus constitutes us as human beings who are, in different ways, untiringly productive and creative, never standing still. Ironically, Iser’s narrative of self-alienation is thus dominated by figures of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 343 15 See my analysis of the development of Iser’s work, “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory”. constant movement. His preferred vocabulary - Zuschuss (to insert something), Anzapfen (to tap into something), Antrieb (impetus), Überschuss (excess), Spiel (play) - communicates a sense of the unpredictable but continuous emergence of playful world encounters (and the excitement generated by them) that is evoked by this vision of self-alienation as a constantly refueled source of creativity. Again, this has consequences for literary and cultural studies. If we attribute the self-alienation of the subject to an anthropological lack that can, unexpect‐ edly, also stimulate human creativity, because it pushes the subject to engage in ever new attempts to overcome this lack, then literature can become a privileged medium for a transformation of self-alienation into creativity. From Iser’s point of view, this can be most effectively done by texts structured by blanks and suspended connectivities, that is, by modernist or protomodernist texts that use aesthetic strategies to defamiliarize or negate realistic modes of representation, because the latter prevent us from becoming aware of what we are lacking as human subjects. But modernism now has a function different from that in Frankfurt School critical theory, namely to keep the channels of creativity open, and Iser therefore replaces an aesthetics of negation by an aesthetics of negativity. 15 Reception aesthetics focuses on modernism, not because of its status as an avant-garde movement, but because its aesthetic strategies challenge readers to exercise their own creativity and thus help to make readers aware of their own creative potential. The distinction between high and low remains crucial, but not for the purpose of an elitist distinction: the only way to transform self-alienation into a productive force is by challenging the reader; thus, literary and cultural studies should see its main task in identifying those kinds of texts that are designed to stimulate the reader’s involvement by formal strategies that resist easy consumption. Tying literature’s power to transform self-alienation to certain formal strat‐ egies or aesthetic schools would mean limiting literature’s creative potential, however. Thus, the challenge emerged to broaden the argument and to link literature’s transformative potential not only to specific aesthetic strategies and positions but to literature in general. Iser’s exemplary “ur-scene” can be found in a passage on playing the part of Hamlet: “In this respect the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not. In order to produce the determinate form of an unreal character, the actor must allow his own reality to fade out. At the same 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 344 Winfried Fluck time, however, he does not know precisely who, say, Hamlet is, for one cannot properly identify a character who has never existed. Thus role-playing endows a figment with a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies total determination” (Representation 224). Again, the starting point is one of unknowability. Not only does the subject not know itself, it also cannot possibly know a Hamlet who never existed. In order to overcome this unbridgeable distance, the reader cannot but draw on his own associations and experiences to come up with his own mental image of Hamlet. This mental construct will follow textual guidance but, in the act of doing so, it will also have to draw on the reader’s own associations, feelings, and bodily sensations in order to bring the abstract letters on the page to life and to provide the text with meaning. In the act of reading, the literary text thus comes to represent two things at once: the world of the text and the imaginary elements added to it by the reader in the process of reading. Our characteristic mode of reading will therefore be a constant movement back and forth between the world of the text and our own world, since we continuously will have to reconcile our own construct of the figure of Hamlet with its representation in the text - and vice versa. This ongoing interaction puts us in a position “in between” two worlds. For the time of reading, we are not completely identical with Hamlet - because we cannot eliminate our own engagement in the construction of his character - but we also go beyond our own identity, by being “both ourselves and someone else” at the same time (Iser, Representation 244). The result is a complex interaction of perspectives in which we mentally construct another world by drawing on our own world, and then look at our own world through the perspective of our own imaginary construct. Iser’s model of reading is that of an actor who uses fiction to create a doppelgänger-subject and thus transforms self-alienation into self-extension, not as a permanent condition, but as a welcome temporary experiment. V. Giving an Account of Oneself in Poststructuralism Like Iser, poststructuralism, too, takes its point of departure from the assumption of a permanent self-alienation of the subject. This explains the key role Lacan has played in the formation of poststructuralist theory. For the leftist reform movements of the 1960s that based their hopes for political change on the raised consciousness of the electorate, Freudian and Freud-inspired psychoanalysis still held a promise of overcoming inner repressions that kept the subject from joining the revolution. With Lacan, this therapeutical hope is coming to an end: because identity is formed in an act of misrecognition, the subject is trapped in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 345 16 By emphasizing the central role of Lacan, I certainly do not want to claim that all poststructuralists followed Lacan. But he provided the most influential model for what links all poststructuralist theories of the subject, namely the claim that the subject is inaccessible in its “true” inner core. By eliminating the idea of interiority, Foucault made the same claim only in a different way. a permanent state of self-alienation, and this permanent self-alienation is more or less, with some variations, the state of the subject in poststructuralism. 16 Not dissimilar to Iser, the starting point is an anthropological lack, an incompleteness, but in contrast to Iser, this lack is not a source of creativity in which the subject tries to fill the gap but the source of a permanent illusionary state of misrecognition that prevents the subject from ever knowing itself. In poststructuralism, self-alienation has thus reached the point where the subject is alienated from itself, not merely by forces like industrialization or instrumental reason, but, much more fundamentally, as the paradoxical result of identity-formation. Without identity, the subject cannot know who it is, but the establishment of a false sense of identity in the mirror stage inevitably leads to misrecognition and, hence, perpetuates a state of self-alienation. Thus, in poststructuralism, the subject cannot really know itself and remains opaque to itself. This is the starting point, for example, of Butler’s essay “Giving an Account of Oneself,” which tackles the crucial question of what it is that the subject may still do, once we acknowledge that it is opaque to itself (22-40). Poststructuralist accounts have been happy to deconstruct the subject and to dismiss liberal illusions about it, but increasingly we also see a tendency to think about the consequences of this deconstruction - not only in poststructuralism, but in other forms of antifoundationalism as well. What can the subject still do, if it does not have the capacity to fully know itself ? One answer consists in the argument that even if we cannot arrive at full selfknowledge, we nevertheless must continue to provide accounts of ourselves. This makes sense but also creates a problem, for in liberal philosophy the idea of self-knowledge is crucial (and actually not so easily dismissed), because such self-knowledge is the basis for the possibility of moral responsibility. In a state of self-knowledge, I can realize and accept my own moral responsibility and cannot offer any excuses if I fail to do so. But what happens to moral responsibility if the subject is opaque even to itself ? Responsibility can only result from shared values and the only value that can still be shared is that of a recognition of difference and otherness. In this context, Butler touches on a crucial problem, namely to what degree this manifestation of responsibility, a recognition of difference and the other, should also be seen as a form of imposition by which a subject is positioned in a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 346 Winfried Fluck particular identity. By accepting - or should one say submitting - to recognition by others, I am also accepting or submitting to criteria of recognizability that position me in a discourse of recognizability and that thereby define me as a subject. Because my subjectivity is opaque, even to myself, discourses of recognizability take advantage of my opaqueness in order to redefine me as a subject. They can thus be seen as forms of interpellation. Precisely because the subject is, in the final analysis, unknowable and opaque, it can be open to this form of recognition as interpellation. The point is interesting because we can catch a glimpse of an underlying premise here. In order to define recognition as identity imposition, Butler must presuppose that there is something outside the act of recognition, a subject that is misrepresented in recognition, and, ironically, she can make that claim because she is starting from the premise that this subject is unknowable. We enter here a catch-22: because the subject is unknowable, we have to recognize it without any condition, but whenever we try to recognize it, we misrecognize it, because we cannot really know it. In this process, self-alienation is transformed in its meaning and function. In Frankfurt School critical theory, from which we took our point of departure, self-alienation is a word for the damage modernity does to the subject. In poststructuralism, it has now become the strongest - in fact, the only remaining - argument for moral responsibility toward the other. For if we cannot know ourselves, then we also cannot know who and what the other is, and on that basis we cannot make our acceptance conditional; it must be unconditional. One interesting point remains: if the subject is opaque, even to itself, how can we still say something about it? In view of its unknowability, every representation must be a misrepresentation. Nevertheless, we must assume something, some elementary human condition that we feel we have to defend or save, for otherwise terms such as misrecognition or misrepresentation or imposition by recognition (or, in other contexts, disciplining) would not make any sense. They all imply that something is constrained or damaged or excluded that is crucial for understanding the subject. Obviously, the opaque subject that is subjected by a discourse of recognizability must have something that is ignored or violated and should be saved. Or, to put it differently: is there a part of the unknowable, opaque subject that is in special need of protection? And if this is the case, how do we know about this part and how does it manifest itself ? Butler basically provides two answers: one is that self-knowledge is not entirely opaque. There are some things that we know after all - for example, pain. Thus, we know that we are vulnerable, and this, it seems, we can safely assume - in fact, should assume - in our encounters with others. A similar 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 347 17 In her critique of Foucault’s use of the term power, Nancy Fraser has pinpointed the basic normative quandary of poststructuralism: “Clearly, what Foucault needs, and needs desperately, are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power” (33). The same can be said about the various kinds of constraints that Butler and others identify. Are there any criteria for distinguishing between justified or unjustified, necessary or unnecessary, constraints on the subject? argument has been made by Richard Rorty, and its underlying rationale seems to be that this vulnerability is something like the lowest possible denominator on which we can still find an ethical consensus. But one may connect this argument with the second answer, and the second answer simply is that the subject is unknowable, but precisely because it is unknowable it should not be constrained, or, if it is constrained, as it inevitably must be by language, discourse, cultural identity, etc., then we should focus our analyses on the facts and mechanisms of this constraint, because these will lead us to what should not be constrained. The opaque, unknowable subject comes close here to a free, unfettered, unsocialized subject before the arrival of discursive subjectpositioning. Although poststructuralists would reject such a claim, one could nevertheless argue that it remains the tacit norm of their critical interventions. When Butler speaks of a subject that is deprived of its, as she puts it, singularity, the term must presuppose something that must have an existence apart from discursive self-positioning. But this singularity is unknowable; to claim to know it would be another imposition. The only solution is that knowledge of my own singularity can only be gained when I feel that it is violated; however, since it will be violated constantly, because we constantly encounter constraints and impositions, this singularity is literally produced by constraints. 17 Again, one may claim, although in entirely different ways, self-alienation is the driving force that does not lead to entrapment but to ever new attempts at resignification. For if a singularity that can never be fully expressed (and is therefore always misrecognized) is my tacit premise, it becomes even more important to keep that singularity alive by accounting for it through narratives (for example, in the form of life stories). These accounts will be incomplete and, in the final analysis, they will be failed accounts in terms of self-knowledge. But if a subject would give up accounting for itself, then it would be doomed to only exist in the form of cultural narratives that are imposed on its identity by others. Hence the emergence of a deeply paradoxical constellation. On the one hand, accounting for oneself will lead to misrecognition and contribute to its constant reinforcement. On the other hand, this situation of being trapped in an imposed identity can only get worse if I do not give any accounts of myself. Aesthetics 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 348 Winfried Fluck 18 Cf. Butler: “It may even be that to hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form is to require a falsification of that life in the name of a certain conception of ethics” (“Account” 34). is not of special importance in this context, although some poststructuralists would argue that certain formal features or aesthetic qualities are more effective in deconstructing an imposition of identity than others. However, Butler’s main reference is not to aesthetics but to narrative. The account of her attempt to connect her normative base of an unconstrained singularity with the claim of ethical responsibility has no characteristic, “dramatic” narrative form in itself. But the essay is centrally concerned with the question of narrative. If the subject is opaque to itself, there cannot be any fully accountable representation of the life of the subject. We may depend on narrative to give an account of ourselves, but inevitably narrative form will provide a falsification of that life. 18 How can we then still be accountable in ethical terms? By rejecting a totalizing narrative and giving an account that admits interruption and transference: in other words, a “psychoanalytic” narrative in the sense that the rambling first-person accounts of patients become the model of narrative self-accounting. They can become a model, because coherence and thus subjection to a norm of recognizability eludes them. There is an implicit response here to the argument put forward by Margaret Somers and other representatives of an ontological narratology, “that life already takes place in narrative form,” by arguing against such “recognizable norms of life narration” (Butler, “Account” 32). But Butler can only achieve this aim by opting for another narrative convention, another very “recognizable narrative,” that of psychoanalysis. For Iser it is fiction that helps us to positively transform the unknowability of the self; for Butler it is the fiction of psychoanalysis. What modernism does for Iser, psychoanalysis does for Butler. However, even these accounts of oneself cannot but create another misrecognition, and this process will continue ad infinitum. In fact, there is only one way out, and that would be to give up the founding premise of self-alienation altogether. And indeed, if we turn to another influential body of work in critical theory, this is precisely what has happened. VI. The Shift to Intersubjectivity in Critical Theory Narratives of self-alienation have been the dominant theory of the subject in critical theories and literary and cultural studies in the twentieth-century. It is therefore interesting to note that scholars of the second and third generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, such as Jürgen Habermas, and in the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 349 19 Cf. the German version: “An der Rezeption der Weberschen Theorie der Rationali‐ sierung von Lukács bis Adorno wird deutlich, dass gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung stets als Verdinglichung des Bewusstseins gedacht worden ist; die Paradoxien, zu denen diese Begriffsstrategie führt, zeigen, dass dieses Thema im begrifflichen Kontext der Bewußtseinsphilosophie nicht befriedigend bearbeitet werden kann” (Habermas 9). following generation, Axel Honneth, have taken their point of departure from a rejection of theories of self-alienation and have replaced them by a different theory of subject-constitution. Indeed, this repositioning is different to such a degree that the term paradigm shift may be appropriate here. For example, the second volume of Habermas’s Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Theory of Communicative Interaction) begins with an explicit rejection of the premise of self-alienation, here evoked in its Lukácsian version of reification: “A look at the reception of Weber’s theory of rationalization from Lucács to Adorno shows that the social consequences of rationalization are always conceptualized in terms of reification; the many paradoxes resulting from such a conceptualization indicate that the issue cannot be discussed satisfactorily in the context of a philosophy of consciousness [Bewusstseinsphilosophie]” (9). 19 Following this line of argument, Honneth has provided an in-depth discussion of the concept of reification in his Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. His goal, too, is “to reformulate a significant issue in Western Marxism” that, in the wake of Georg Lukács’s seminal study History and Class Consciousness, “moved an entire generation of philosophers and sociologists to analyze the forms of life under the then prevailing circumstances as being the result of social reification” (Reification 91-92). In both of these cases, Habermas as well as Honneth, a programmatic rejection of theories of self-alienation is designed to pave the way for an alternative theory of subject-formation: the shift is one from self-alienation to intersubjectivity, from a theoretical framework in which the subject is cut off from self-knowledge, either by forces of modernity or by an anthropological lack, to a theory of subject-formation in which the subject is constituted through intersubjective relations. From the perspective of such models of intersubjec‐ tivity, the theoretical gain is obvious. In a state of self-alienation we cannot fully know each other. In contrast, theories of intersubjectivity argue that we cannot not know each other, because we only learn who we are via interaction with others. Where a sense of self is formed in ongoing acts of communication and social interaction, subjects can no longer be seen as being helplessly exposed to outside forces. The social nature of subject-formation requires the subject to continually respond and act; it is, in other words, a source of quasi-inbuilt agency, however limited, because subjects have to define situations and adapt 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 350 Winfried Fluck 20 For an extended discussion of the concept of recognition, see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. 21 Cf. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”. 22 George Herbert Mead’s intersubjective model of self-formation became relevant for critical theory, because it promised to show a way out of the dead-end of Bewusstsein‐ sphilosophie. Interesting discussions of the challenges that poststructuralist thought poses to Mead’s theory can be found in Robert G. Dunn, “Self, Identity, and Difference: their definitions in an ongoing flow of interactions in order to be able to act. In following this pragmatist line of argumentation, Hans Joas, who played a crucial role in establishing the paradigm of intersubjectivity in German social theory, can thus speak of an inherent creativity of action and entitle one of his major studies Die Kreativität des Handelns (The Creativity of Action). Habermas links communicative exchange and action in programmatic fashion in the title of his study Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Honneth, offering still another version of a critical theory based on the premise of intersubjectivity, has moved to a theory of subject-formation in which the formation of a nonalienated sense of self is dependent on successfully achieved intersubjective relations, for which Honneth uses the term recognition. 20 Honneth’s position is thus classified as an intersubjective theory of recogni‐ tion, in contrast to an intercultural theory most influentially propagated in Charles Taylor’s multicultural politics of recognition. 21 From the point of view of an intercultural politics of recognition, we “know” the other as a member of an ethnic group or gender-based community, and since we postulate that this membership is a key constituent of identity formation, groups constituted by cultural difference have to be recognized in their difference in order to keep the subject from being damaged or humiliated. From the point of view of an intersubjective concept of recognition, this argument is valid but tells only half of the story, since membership in a group is not the only, and often not the main, constituent of subject-formation. Even if my cultural difference is fully acknowledged, I may still lack sufficient recognition as a subject. Groups constituted by cultural difference may present a united front to the outside world, but internally they are also characterized by status orders and struggles over status, that is, by struggles for a full recognition as a subject. An intercultural concept of recognition, important as it may be, thus refers us back to an intersubjective concept of recognition and hence to the crucial role intersubjectivity plays in the process of subject-formation. Here we have to return to the premise of intersubjectivity that Habermas and to a certain extent also Honneth derived from the work of George Herbert Mead. 22 Joas, who has played a crucial role in the rediscovery of Mead, has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 351 Mead and the Poststructuralists,” and Joas, “The Autonomy of the Self: The Meadian Heritage and Its Postmodern Challenge”. 23 Joas has entitled his own dissertation Praktische Intersubjektivität (Practical Intersubjec‐ tivity). 24 To describe the phases of the self ’s interaction with the other more precisely, Mead introduces the concepts of “I” and “Me” as two different components: “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitude of the others constitutes the organized ‘me,’ and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I.’” (Mead 175). called him “the most important theorist of intersubjectivity between Feuerbach and Habermas” (Mead 2). 23 Mead’s starting assumption is eminently plausible: without interaction with others, we could not possibly know who we are. In Mead’s theory, the subject can only be formed in social interaction. It can only gain a sense of self by looking at itself through the perspective of others. As an inherently social being, the self is not something that exists first (for example, in a state of self-alienation) and then enters (or fails to enter) into relationships with others. It is, on the contrary, only realized in relationship to others. It is important to note, however, that this interaction can take place on two different levels and that the term interaction can therefore refer to two different kinds of interaction. One level is that of the direct face-to-face encounter with others that can be conceptualized as an ongoing interactive process: “It is the social process of influencing others in a social act and then taking the attitude of the others aroused by the stimulus, and then reacting in turn to this response, which constitutes a self ” (Mead 171). As Habermas points out, the organism does not simply react to the other in behavioristic fashion. It acts in anticipation of what the reaction of the other will be (Habermas 13). This is most likely the type of interaction that we have in mind when we regard the subject as constituted by intersubjective relations. However, a comprehensive social theory cannot be based solely on faceto-face encounters. Mead therefore adds a second kind of interaction to his theory of self-formation, which he calls interaction with a generalized other. This generalized other is not a person but something like a social consensus; in this case, the self, in order to anticipate the other’s response, looks at itself through the perspective of society’s values and norms. Since the self cannot take a poll before it acts in order to find out what these values and norms are, it must have incorporated or internalized them. To be sure, the “I”-component of the self provides a spontaneous, often unpredictable response to the attitudes of others, including that of the generalized other. But the claims of the “I” are evaluated and channeled by the “me,” that is, the set of social and cultural attitudes that have been incorporated into the self. 24 This is the point where minorities may 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 352 Winfried Fluck ask the question whether an intersubjective theory of selfhood does not imply that identity is defined by a “repressive sameness” that may be used to justify exclusion. Habermas and Honneth have responded differently to the problem of how to keep intersubjectivity from leading the subject merely to another form of subjection - Habermas by the theoretical construct of an ideal speech situation characterized by symmetrical relations in the dialogue between participants, Honneth by concentrating almost exclusively on forms of empathetic personal interaction as the constitutive basis for selfhood. The self is constituted in in‐ tersubjective relations of recognition, and only personal encounters can provide an experience of genuine intersubjectivity. Moreover, these personal relations have to have a certain quality in order to be normatively significant. In his Tanner lectures on reification, Honneth speaks of an empathetic engagement, defined by affective sympathy and existential care towards other persons. This explains why almost all of the examples with which he wants to establish the constituent role of intersubjectivity for a nonalienated subject-formation are taken from studies of infant-parent relations, that is, from a phase in life in which close affective relations are indeed formative and indispensible. The fact that children soon afterward enter a phase where other influences, including cultural values, practices, and representations, become more and more important in the process of socialization and subject-formation seems to have been forgotten at this point. It is of course true that the small child needs recognition by parentfigures in order to develop a positive self-reference. But what sense of self it develops once it has grown older and begins to search for independence will depend on a whole array of social and cultural influences, including literary texts and cultural representations, that can play an increasingly important role as sources of self-definition and identity. This brings us to an important point: in the case of Honneth (but in the final analysis also Habermas), one price for exchanging a narrative of selfalienation for a narrative of intersubjectivity is to analytically disregard cultural representations and aesthetic objects as a sphere of subject-formation. In Honneth’s intersubjective theory of recognition, culture plays hardly any role at all. This is indeed a striking reversal in the development of critical theory. While culture is of central importance for Horkheimer and Adorno, both as a key source of self-alienation, but also as one of the few remaining realms that may still have the power to resist the forces of instrumental reason, literature and culture are now relegated to occasional footnote references. In a way, this is a logical consequence of Honneth’s starting premise. For if intersubjective relations are constitutive of the subject (so that they can keep the subject from 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 353 self-alienation), then it must be of central importance to focus on instances of fully achieved intersubjectivity and make them the normative basis of one’s social theory. And intersubjectivity is most successfully achieved when it is based on mutuality and relations are reciprocal. From the perspective of literary and cultural studies, this creates a major problem, however, since literature is regarded, by definition, as nonreciprocal. In reading literature, we do not encounter others who actively respond. Should literature then be left out of discussions of subject-formation? VII. The Persistence of Self-Alienation Recent critical theory may claim that intersubjectivity provides a more con‐ vincing theory of subject formation than classical theories of self-alienation. Why, then, has the concept found such limited resonance in literary and cultural studies? I see a number of reasons, all of them linked to the function of the concept in critical theories that looked for an alternative to narratives of self-alienation. The latter was ideally suited for a fundamental critique of capitalism or modernity. The second and third generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists wanted to move their social analysis away from such sweeping philosophies of history, but the concept of intersubjectivity could only be useful as a possible alternative, if it could still provide a normative basis for a social critique. Going beyond Mead, the concept of intersubjectivity was thus linked to social relations characterized by symmetry and genuine reciprocity - which had as one of its consequences that reading literature would not qualify. Moreover, the models of successfully achieved intersubjectivity provided by Habermas and Honneth, the ideal speech situation and an empathetic parent-child relation, did not exactly fire up the radical imaginary of revisionist literary and cultural studies and seemed to move away from present-day concerns (such as, to give but one example, race and gender). Critical theory thus lost its promise of a critical edge. Finally, if misrecognition and subjection stand at the beginning of subject-formation, as poststructuralism argues, then genuine reciprocity is a chimera anyway. For the most part, contemporary literary and cultural studies have thus continued to be based on the premise of self-alienation, although the concept is now narrowed in scope to a poststructuralist interpretation in which the subject is not simply alienated from its true nature but in which this true nature is unknowable and inaccessible. In view of the all-pervasive presence of power and discourse, the utopia of a nonalienated existence can no longer be upheld. Even Marxism, the last bastion of this utopia, metamorphosed into a version 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 354 Winfried Fluck 25 See the exemplary summary of the argument by Butler: “The desire to persist in one’s own being requires submitting to a world of others that is fundamentally not one’s own (…). Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s ‘own’ being. Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality” (Psychic Life 28). that subscribes - for example in the influential work of Louis Althusser - to the Lacanian premise of a permanent misrecognition that makes interpellation possible. Just as in the case of Foucault’s key term subjection, the argument is that the subject comes into existence only by an imposition of identity through normalizing discourses (for example of gender, race, or sexuality) or forms of interpellation that arrest the subject in a single, fixed identity. This provides a major difference to classical versions: alienation is no longer produced by overpowering social or economic forces that cut off the subject from its true nature; it is the result of identity-formation itself. The subject has no choice: if it wants to gain an identity, it has to agree to terms that are not its own. 25 Identity can do its work of positioning the subject in misrecognition because it provides the subject with a (false) sense of coherence. In a discussion of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Butler has summarized the argument pointedly: “If discourse produces identity through applying and enforcing a regulatory principle which thoroughly invades, totalizes and renders coherent the individual, then it seems that every ‘identity,’ insofar as it is totalizing, acts as precisely such a ‘soul that imprisons the body’” (Identity 231). But if selfalienation is produced in the act of identity-formation, are we then condemned to self-alienation? And if not, how can we still envision any kind of resistance to, or emancipation from, this fate? Is there any way out of subjection? This question has stood at the center of literary and cultural studies in the last decades. It has produced a number of responses that can be mentioned here only briefly: one way out, the argument goes, is to break the grip of a fixed identity by limit-experiences that may have an effect of disinterpellation; another one lies in the acknowledgment of multiple identities of the subject that create spaces “in-between” subject-positions; a third one lies in the possibility of performative resignification; and yet another option can be seen in an aesthetics of self-care, as propagated by Foucault in the last stage of his intellectual career. All of these answers have one goal in common: if a coherent identity is a source of self-alienation, then one way out must lie in undermining the coher‐ ence of identity, although such “nonidentity” can be achieved only temporarily at best. However, if the subject is alienated from itself by misrecognition to such a degree that it is not even aware of its own state of alienation, how is this 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 355 26 Cf. Foucault’s comment on Sartre: “I think that the only acceptable practical conse‐ quence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity - and not of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (351). 27 Cf. the full argument: “Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, but because a certain attachment to my existence is to be assumed, a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence. I am led to embrace the terms that injure me, precisely because they constitute me socially. One might understand the self-colonizing trajectory of certain forms of identity politics as symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious term. As a further paradox, then, it is only by occupying - being occupied by - that injurious term that I become enabled to resist and oppose that term, and the power that constitutes me is recast as the power I oppose. In this way, a certain place for psychoanalysis is secured, in the sense that any mobilization against subjection will take subjection itself as its resource, and that an attachment to an injurious interpellation by way of a necessarily alienated narcissism will become the move toward nonidentity motivated? Why do subjects feel a need to undermine the force of normalization? Where does a motivation for resistance come from? Poststructuralists such as Foucault or Butler stress again and again that being subjected or interpellated by cultural norms does not necessarily mean that the subject will be completely determined by these norms. For Foucault, antiquity, that is, a time before the establishment of reason as a normative regulatory ideal, provides a model for an alternative vision: “In antiquity, this work on the self with its attendant austerity is not imposed on the individual by means of civil law or religious obligation, but is a choice about existence made by the individual. People decide for themselves whether or not to care for themselves” (361). On what basis are these choices made, however, if there are no regulatory norms that point the way? The only possible answer lies in the power of conviction of the choice itself, that is, it lies in an ultimately aesthetic criterion. 26 Fittingly, Foucault describes the new subjectivity he envisions as an aesthetics of existence. This is an ingenious solution but still leaves open the question why the self should be motivated to create his life as a work of art. In her essay “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification,” intended as a critical rethinking of subjection and resistance, Butler points out that interpellation may be the goal but that it is not always the result, because interpellation may be misinterpreted by the subject. Moreover, a single act of hailing cannot fix identity; for this, iteration is needed and this opens up a possibility of gradual resignification. But, again, why does the subject feel a need to engage in resignification? The most convincing answer Butler gives is when she speaks of an “alienated narcissism” that “will become the condition by which a resignification of that interpellation becomes possible.” 27 Because the subject 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 356 Winfried Fluck condition by which a resignification of that interpellation becomes possible” (Subjection 245-46). 28 Cf. Winfried Fluck, “Reading for Recognition.” has no other choice than identifying even with an injurious term in order to gain some kind of social identity, it will be driven toward resignification by ultimately narcissist reasons. In other words: the same condition of self-alienation that makes the subject an easy prey for processes such as interpellation or subjection is also the driving force in the search for resignification. It seems to me that the various reasons given in poststructuralist narratives of self-alienation as possible sources of resistance, diverse as they may appear at first sight, nevertheless have one aspect in common: they are all motivated by a lack of recognition. A multiplication of subject positions seeks to attract attention to sides of the subject that have been neglected so far; resignification intends to change the basis for recognition and make renewed - and improved - recognition possible; an aesthetics of existence aspires to construct a new basis for self-recognition that creates independence from others. The search for recognition is the driving force in all of these cases of “resistance.” The lack at the center of the subject does not only enable identity impositions by others, it is also the source of a permanent dissatisfaction with these impositions - which, in turn, provides the impetus for a renewed search for recognition. Ironically, then, the drive for resistance or resignification or an aesthetics of existence emerges from the very phenomenon that poststructuralists use as their normative basis for criticizing the subjecting power of recognition, the singularity of the subject. Because this singularity can never be fully acknowledged by any kind of recognition, it also produces the motivation for pushing the subject toward ever newer attempts in the struggle for recognition. The reason is simple. One can live without resignification or the possibilities of an aesthetics of existence, but one cannot live without recognition, however alienated a form it may take, because recognition stands at the center of subject-formation: without it, we would not know who we are. One of the most important cultural spheres for a search for recognition are fictional texts, aesthetic objects, and cultural practices that constantly offer new doppelgänger (doubling) experiences and identity options to the subject. In another context I have described the role literature plays in this pursuit of recognition. 28 “Reading for recognition” is an important part of the search for recognition. This claim allows us to reintroduce a dimension of intersubjectivity that points beyond self-alienation - to be sure, not in the sense of a fully achieved personal reciprocity, but in the redescription of reading as an interactive mode. As Iser has pointed out, in reading we are constantly moving between two 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 357 worlds, the world of the text and our own world to which we have to relate the text in order to make sense of it. In reading, we are thus always “in between” two worlds, being both ourselves and somebody else at the same time, and this reconceptualization of the act of reading as an interactive activity points to the aesthetic construction of a nonidentity that is not dependent on heroic narratives of transgression or limit-experiences. Reading literature (or submitting to an aesthetic experience) is more than identifying with, and submitting to, a plot of recognizability. It is ongoing work on one’s own narrative identity, and thus it seems justified to embed narratives of self-alienation in narratives of recognition. Works Cited Butler, Judith. “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault.” The Identity in Question. Ed. John Rajchman. London: Routledge, 1995. ---. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ---. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics 31.4 (2001): 22-40. Dunn, Robert. “Self, Identity, and Difference: Mead and the Poststructuralists.” Sociolog‐ ical Quarterly 38.4 (1997): 687-705. Fluck, Winfried. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in the Literary Theory of Wolfgang Iser.” New Literary History 31.1 (2000): 175-210. ---. “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer.” The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn. Ed. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013. 237-64. ---. “Reading for Recognition.” New Literary History 44.1 (2013): 45-67. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Fraser, Nancy. “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confu‐ sions.” Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 17-34. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, 2003. Habermas, Jürgen. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Vol. 2. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhr‐ kamp, 1988. Honneth, Axel. “Foucault and Adorno: Zwei Formen einer Kritik der Moderne.” ‘Post‐ moderne’ oder Der Kampf um die Zukunft. Ed. Peter Kemper. Frankfurt/ M: Fischer, 1988. 127-44. ---. Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View. Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Berkley: University of California Press, 2005. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 358 Winfried Fluck Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947; repr.: New York: Continuum, 2002. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. ---. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ---. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. ---. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Jaeggi, Rahel. Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems. Frank‐ furt/ M.: Campus, 2005. Joas, Hans. Praktische Intersubjektivität. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1980. ---. Die Kreativität des Handelns. Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp, 1996. ---.. The Creativity of Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. ---. G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of His Thought. Trans. Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ---. “The Autonomy of the Self: The Meadian Heritage and Its Postmodern Challenge.” European Journal of Social Theory 1.1 (1998): 7-18. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist: Works of George Herbert Mead. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 25-73. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. ---. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. ---. “Alienation.” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. ---. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Zima, Peter. Entfremdung: Pathologien der postmodernen Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Francke, 2014. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 359 1 See, for instance, Fluck, “Reading for Recognition” and “Narratives of American Democratic Culture” as well as Johannes Voelz’s and Heinz Ickstadt’s responses to these essays (all in this volume). Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method Laura Bieger It is neither surprising nor an exaggeration to say that reading for premises is Winfried Fluck’s intellectual superpower. He developed this way of reading - for the underlying assumptions that both animate and structure any inter‐ pretative activity, giving it a normative grounding of which the interpreter is often unaware - into a critical practice in its own right. Indeed, reading this way became his default mode and signature style of academic engagement. For decades, it defined his thinking about the work of his peers, his field, its bordering disciplines, and its relation to the humanities at large. It is a reading for meaning that is not so much hidden than implied. Explicating this un(der)acknowledged layer of meaning involves showing how it conditions an inner logic of meaning-making that one had tacitly subscribed to when making or agreeing with an argument and aligning oneself with the field position it marks. Fluck’s uncanny mastery of reading this way was key to establishing him as one of the leading Americanists of his generation, as well as to formulating his vision of American Studies. At the core of that vision is a view of American culture as shaped by and giving shape to the social, economic, and political developments that define western modernity - the unholy trinity of individualism, capitalism, and democracy, if you will; and that is democratic in the sense of being structured by the tensions and contradictions engrained in the nation’s democratic founding ideals (i.e. the heightened demand for social distinction in a non-feudalistic society based on the idea of equality that marks a longstanding research interest of his). 1 These ideals gain their structuring power from being lived and experienced in a certain, culturally specific way - with experience always and inevitably being partly aesthetic, and aesthetics thus being fundamental to the creation of social reality. In other words, Fluck’s 2 I discuss these premises in my book Belonging and Narrative. For a concise version of my theoretical argument, see my essay “No Place Like Home.” 3 A shortened English version appeared in 1978 in Other Voices, Other Views: An International Collection of Essays from the Bicentennial, edited by Robin W. Winks. view of the reality shaping power of (American) (democratic) culture rests upon strong assumptions about the aesthetic. So does his critical method of reading for premises. These assumptions are rooted in the phenomenological hermeneutics that subtends Fluck’s universe of thought, especially its view of the always-already and fundamentally embodied (read: experiential) status of interpretation, and about interpretation as a condition of being in the world. 2 But rather than exploring this nexus, I want to use my re-reading of his essay “The Philosophical Premises of Literary and Cultural Studies: Narratives of Alienation” for this volume as a springboard for thinking about how Fluck’s field-shaping method evolved, how its concern with aesthetics has guided its course, and how they can be taken even further. I. This exercise necessitates going back to an earlier essay on the importance of premises and the significance of studying them: “Das ästhetische Vorverständnis der American Studies,” first published in German in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1973, and first appearing in a full-length English translation in 2009 in the volume Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, edited by Johannes Voelz and myself. 3 Both of us were assistant professors under Fluck at the Department of Culture of the John-F.-Kennedy Institute at the time. We were humbled and awed by his intellectual rigor and international standing, and we were especially humbled and awed by his firm and often seemingly clairvoyant grasp on emerging trends in literary and cultural studies and their impact on our own field. From countless Q&A sessions in our research colloquium we knew that this grasp was essentially a grasp on premises. So, when it came to deciding which text should open the collection of essays of his we were putting together for his sixty-fifth birthday, it was clear that it had to be the one that first introduced his concern with premises - which he described as follows: “By the use of concepts like ‘a priori assumptions’ or ‘tacit premises’ I am not referring to pre-existing prejudices or to a hermeneutical hypothesis about the meaning of a text of object. Rather, I want to focus on prior assumptions about the object in question and its function that form the basis for every subsequent interpretive step in literary and cultural analysis” (“Aesthetic Premises” 17). In other words, Fluck’s concern is not with 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 362 Laura Bieger 4 For an especially lucid discussion of the hermeneutic circle, see Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode 250-91. 5 See also Kelleter, in this volume 416. the judgments that one necessarily brings along when trying to make sense of the world (necessary in the sense of an imperative framing of the object at stake), and that get tried and refined in their course through the hermeneutic circle, with the effect of keeping knowledge production categorically open. This would be the hermeneutical concept of “Vorurteil,” which is also commonly translated as “premise” (a literal translation would be “prejudice” or “preliminary judgment”). 4 One might quarrel with translating “Vorverständnis” as “premise,” which Fluck uses interchangeably with “assumption,” yet puts forth as his master term, for instance by using it in his titles. 5 Maybe the more appealing sound of the term “premise” prompted this choice, maybe its greater semantic openness, maybe a combination of both. But it is confusing - which is why one must bear in mind that Fluck’s premises are premises of the gravest kind. They are pre-set ideas about the circle itself; about the modes and mechanics of knowledge production envisioned by this figure of thought. These ideas are prior not in the sense of being preliminary. To the contrary, they are prior in the sense of being foundational, with the special twist that these foundations are rarely acknowledged - and thus especially powerful. This is, indeed, the assumption on which the importance of reading for them is based. Fluck started his inquiry into this unacknowledged dimension of our schol‐ arly practice with examining aesthetic premises; or, more precisely, the aesthetic premises undergirding the field of American studies that he was entering in the late 60s and early 70s. It was a time when speaking of American studies and aesthetics in one breath was a provocation. The interdisciplinary project through which the field was positioning itself against more traditional forms of literary studies with the Myth and Symbol School was defined by a move “beyond a merely aesthetic perspective on literary and cultural texts.” But this move “beyond” went hand in hand with embracing an understanding of the aesthetic as being genuinely complicit with “ideological, political and social interests.” It is this narrow and reductive understanding that Fluck seeks to unsettle when contending that “scholarly interpretations of aesthetic objects or cultural artifacts” remain to be based on aesthetic assumptions - simply “because these interpretations must conform to standards of evidence and plausibility that disciplines hold at any given time.” In a discipline that primarily deals with aesthetic objects, the evidence and plausibility that interpreting these objects may yield will inevitably be conditioned by shared ideas - “standards” - about the specific objecthood of these artifacts (“Aesthetic Premises” 17). In 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 363 6 See my essay “No Place Like Home,” where I write in a section discussing the underlying assumptions of different narrative theories (and the echo of Fluck is unmistakable): “Whether acknowledged or not, assumptions about human being are at the bottom of any theorization of literature or culture—which is, even in the most radically formalist or antihumanist assessment of its subject matter, bound up with the yearnings and activities of those who use and produce it” (27). 7 See, for instance, Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense; ” James, “The Sentiment of Rationality.” this logic, reading for the ideological complicity or resistance of these artifacts is not enough. It needs to be grounded in a reading for the disciplinary codes and conventions that make these artifacts readable in the first place - because these codes and conventions determine the interpretative choices that we have when reading them. Fluck reiterates this point at the outset of the 2013 New Literary History essay on the philosophical premises of literary and cultural theory when he states that “critical disagreements are [quintessentially] disagreements about premises” because “these underlying assumptions shape all subsequent inter‐ pretive choices: the choice of my object of analysis, the research question with which I am approaching this object, and the interpretive method I will be using” (333). I fully agree with the critical thrust of this claim; I have, indeed, made similar claims myself. 6 It is certainly true that this method is founded in a “strong assumption about assumptions” (Kelleter, in this volume 416). But then again, how could it not without undermining its own purpose? And yes, there is a performative circularity at work in garnering impact for truth claims based on this anti-foundational method that, in turn, invites a “charismatic” endorsement of its own hermeneutic baseline of there being “no value-free act of sense-making” (416). Indeed, after having witnessed Fluck’s method in action so many times, I find charisma a useful term to think of its particular kind of forcefulness. But is such charismatic performativity not a staple of anti-foundational philosophical discourse, and self-consciously so, at least since thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and William James have exposed it as such? 7 The affective dimension of scholarly evidence that becomes tangible here is yet another vastly unacknowledged aspect of our work. Certain assumptions just feel “more right” than others, and that feeling is to no small degree a matter of personal preference - of taste, i.e., the aesthetic. Fluck explores this dimension of reading, including scholarly reading, in his essay “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer” (in this volume). But in terms of the inner logic of Fluck’s critical method something else strikes me as at least as important: its historical context. Fluck conceived his method in the spirit of challenging established doxa: “In order to become 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 364 Laura Bieger 8 In the words of Henry Nash Smith: “What is needed is a method of analysis that is at once literary (for one must begin with an analytical reading of the texts that takes into account structure, imagery, diction, and so on) and sociological (for many of the forces at work in the fiction are clearly of social origin)” (Smith, “Can American Studies Develop a Method? ” 201, qtd. in Fluck, “Aesthetic Premises” 18). 9 On the significance of reading for premises, he writes: “an interpretation is not primarily determined by the methods it uses. On the contrary, the choice of method is already a manifestation of underlying assumptions about the nature and value of the interpretive object. These prior assumptions guide the interpretive practice and pre-determine the results. They dictate and limit the direction of our critical interest and constitute the very object the critic sees. An interpreter’s a priori views of literature - for example, why it is worth studying, what its function and potential is, and wherein its value lies - will decisively shape the way in which he will proceed methodologically. The kinds of features we are looking for in a work, the aspects we notice - or fail to notice - will influential within a discipline, more general political or other interests have to be adapted to disciplinary rules and conventions. We have to learn to analyze these disciplinary uses and to resist their seemingly self-evident authority” (“Aesthetic Premises” 17). But the urge to resist that Fluck names as the rationale behind his method is more than merely intellectual. It emerged from a site where disciplinary doxa was (and remains to this day) by default defined by U.S.-based Americanists and the venues of publication to which they have privileged access. Approached through the lens of this power imbalance engrained in the field, sophisticated and forceful judgments of a theory or a method that was a current rage based on its underlying assumptions come into view as a field-political counter move; a way of claiming authority where field-shaping international authority was an oxymoron, if not a structural impossibility. II. Fluck made his first intervention of this kind when the field he was aspiring to be part of was seeking to renew itself by developing a shared method - a method unified by a push beyond aesthetic concern. In being both literary and sociological, it was to enhance the field’s capacity to assesses literature’s social significance. 8 The collective, disciplinary endorsement of a new method is nothing less than a paradigm shift. In this case, it redirected the interpretative effort constituting the field toward literature’s relation to society, with the consequence of reorganizing the field accordingly and redefining the value of literature along the same lines. It was against this promise of radical renewal that Fluck made his case about the importance of premises and the significance of “reading for them,” with the ultimate goal of showing that this agenda was conceptually half-baked and intellectually half-hearted at best. 9 The reason for 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 365 thus inevitably be governed by what we take to be self-evident truths about the nature and value of literature (“Aesthetic Premises” 16). 10 “The construct of a unified principle by means of an analogy” which was the implicit goal of the interpreter using this method “cannot be refuted, since the creation of analogies or unexpected associations is basically a poetic activity” (28). this, according to Fluck, is that the governing assumptions about what constitutes literature and defines its value were taken straight from the very tradition they were seeking to leave behind - the New Criticism. For what was needed to methodologically ground literature’s newly claimed capacity to elucidate social reality was a criterion to define what literature was. And this criterion remained based on ideas about the “literariness” of literature; in particular, it remained based on the idea that artistic success and value are determined by the degree to which a literary work achieves an organic formal unity. Fluck substantiates this point by turning to Henry Nash Smith’s introduction to a new edition of Huckleberry Finn, where Smith writes: “We must try to see the book integrally. How well has Mark Twain succeeded in organizing his material into a coherent and unified whole? And what does this whole mean? ” (Smith, “Introduction” v, quoted in Fluck, “Aesthetic Premises” 21). And if the lingering presence of a New Critical aesthetics in this program‐ matic statement is hard to deny, Fluck next shows that even though Smith’s work was crucial to challenging the very assumptions about the novel’s structural unity on which this endorsement is based, Smith “continued to insist on the presence of a unifying structural principle in order to save Huckleberry Finn not only as an American masterpiece but also as a privileged object of analysis for American Studies” (“Aesthetic Premises” 21). And if this alone would have been quite an intervention, in the choreography of Fluck’s critical methodology it is a mere steppingstone to much larger claims about the prevalence of aesthetic assumptions in American Studies, among them (and anticipating current concerns about symptomatic reading) what Fluck describes as “a shift in the conceptualization of the interpretive object from ‘overt structure’ to ‘covert structure’” (27) and the dovetailing “liberation from strict criteria of evidence or plausibility.” 10 Indeed, Fluck’s most forceful point about how tacit assumptions about the specific and specifically aesthetic objecthood of the very thing one is studying aims at the heart of the matter: the validity of a method that grounds “the privileged epistemological status of literature” in “an elusive organic principle” (36). The evidence and plausibility that one’s interpretative efforts were bound to produce in this critical paradigm were “poetic” (28), even “metaphysical” (36) - in short: unscientific. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 366 Laura Bieger The incidental prevalence of flawed and outmoded aesthetic assumptions diagnosed as a hazard to an entire scholarly enterprise - this was a bold and sweeping claim to make. And it was an especially bold and sweeping claim coming from a novice. Johannes Voelz and I ruminate about the significance of this intervention in the preface to our volume of republished Fluck essays that opens with “Aesthetic Premises,” going back to its pre-published form as a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the German Association of American Studies in Hamburg in 1972, which marks Fluck’s first decisive act of selfpositioning in the field. He was twenty-eight at the time and had just finished his dissertation, a young and ambitious man from a working-class family in West-Berlin, who was probably more comfortable in the old leather jacket that he wears in photographs of this time than in the suit in which he was most likely attending the conference. What never fails to strike me when imagining this moment is how firmly and completely the critical method that was to become the driving force of his career was already in place in this “primal scene.” There are no records of how the paper was received at the conference, but two of the founding figures of the field, who happened to be among Fluck’s main targets - no lesser figures than Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith - endorsed his challenge by way of an exchange of letters that later appeared in American Quarterly (and I cannot help but marvel at this mythical moment of two leading scholars of the field reading the work of a promising young colleague from Germany in German). Marx: “… curiously, I find his argument, so far as I can penetrate the language, pretty convincing.” Smith: “As to what I think about Fluck: he is of course a young man who is taking out after one of the Fathers and he certainly goes in for all he can get in the way of scoring points. But in my own case I must admit that he has touched a weak spot.” (Qtd. in Bieger and Voelz 9) III. The piercing analysis of the field that occasioned this exchange was driven by the methodological concerns of the time. It is thus only consequential that the next major realignment of the field - through the shift from a national to a transnational paradigm - yielded a follow-up: “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies),” first published in REAL in 2007. Yet where the Sturm-und-Drang Fluck had left things with clearing, or rather, declaring the grounds on which a real transformation of the field could take place, the height-of-his-career Fluck of thirty-four years later links 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 367 his inquiry into the assumptions undergirding this new transformation with spelling out his vision of the field and the place of a self-asserted European American studies within that field: “[I]f the project of transnational studies is to be taken seriously, it must also mean that scholars outside the U.S. do not just mimic the latest U.S.-American developments, but are self-confident and independent enough to develop their own perspective on them.” Unsurprisingly, this act of self-assertion/ resistance should involve “looking at the underlying premises which have guided work in transnational American Studies and on which most of the work in this new line of research is based (“Theories” 71). These premises, Fluck goes on to argue in a way that should by now be familiar even to those encountering his critical method for the first time, determine the interpretative choices regarding one’s object of study. In the case of American studies, this object is American culture; and throughout the history of the field, the underlying assumptions about this culture have yielded interpretations that “investigate [its] possibility for resistance” (74). So yes, Fluck’s main concern in this essay is the underlying assumptions that turn American culture into a possible site of resistance. But as it turns out, these assumptions are strikingly similar across the humanities. Indeed, what reading for them brings into view are the founding conditions of the humanities writ large: Without a tradition of theorizing culture that dates back to the birth of the modern subject, or, more concretely, without the “search for negation or resistance” that animates these theorizations, “the humanities as a field of study (…) might not exist today” (74-75). I have vivid memories of how struck I was when this thought hit me for the first time, and I see iterations of my response every time I teach this text. Fluck’s brief sketch of the genealogy of these theorizations - from the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School on to Michel Foucault and Judith Butler - reads like a blueprint of the “Philosophical Premises” essay. Indeed, his concern with what might more fittingly be called the anthropological premises of critical theory - assumptions about “what humans want, what they need, how society responds to these wants and needs” (“Philosophical Premises” 333) - finds a first and forceful articulation here. Even the link to self-alienation is already in place: “The founding idea of most influential critical theories of modernity lies in the writings of Rousseau and German idealism and their claim that the instrumental rationality of modernity, that is, rationality severed from reason, leads to human self-alienation,” he writes. And while later theoreticians of modernity, including Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Foucault, may disagree on “the extent to which instrumental rationality has already affected and 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 368 Laura Bieger invaded the subject, her psyche and her body,” they “all follow this line of argument” (“Theories” 75). At first sight, reading theories of modernity for their underlying assumptions about the formation of the modern subject is quite a stretch from Fluck’s initial concern with the aesthetic premises of American studies. But at a closer look this new objective becomes tangible as an extension of that initial concern that is bound up with a shift in cultural and literary theory: even further away from the aesthetic and toward subjectivity and subject formation. Methodologically, this extension involved a move beyond an understanding of the aesthetic as a way of thinking about the disciplinary codes and conventions that make art objects readable in a certain way, and toward philosophical and anthropological concerns with the social and cultural functions and uses of art and with the aesthetic as a matrix through which to approach their everchanging shape that is most fully captured in Das kulturelle Imaginäre and poignantly reflected in essays on the importance of Wolfgang Iser and reception aesthetics, especially “Why We Need Fiction.” While being mostly tacit in Fluck’s readings for premises that do not involve Iser’s reception aesthetics, this shift becomes explicit when Fluck contends that “philosophical analysis of human self-alienation led to emphatic claims for the saving powers of culture (and, eventually, to the institutionalization of the humanities as the place where we can study and cultivate culture).” Only now, these premises are no longer, or at least not primarily, assumptions about the formal properties of particular (art) objects. The reason for this is that theories of modernity are based on assumptions that make culture legible as a social realm that might not yet be entirely “pervaded by instrumental rationality and thus holds a potential for resistance against the self-alienating logic of modernity” (75) - with the potential for resistance becoming increasingly smaller in the evolution of critical theory. And this is precisely where the transnational turn in American studies comes back into play. It is through analyzing the underlying assumptions of critical theory that Fluck is able to show how the logic of resistance that is the critical DNA of the humanities persists in this paradigm shift, with the effect of expanding the search for culturally conditioned possibilities of resistance beyond the borders of the nation-state - and at the risk of losing sight of the persistent power of the nation-state. Against arguments common in the early 2000s that globalization had weakened the state as a political actor, and that national identity was therefore becoming porous along with national borders, Fluck holds that “no talk about the crisis of the nation-state can distract from the fact that there is enough nation-state left to affect all of us decisively” - adding 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 369 11 In response to these claims, one of the leading New Americanists, Donald Pease, concedes: “Have not scholars in transnational American studies overestimated the ways in which global civil society can mobilize the political energies needed to remedy the economic inequalities that globalization has engendered? Has not post-exceptionalist American studies also ignored the US state’s power to describe the US as a permanent state of exception? Transnational American studies cannot effect the democratizing transformations within the global order without explaining how the US state has impeded their accomplishment” (22). this is especially palpable “from abroad” (81). He then concludes that rather than “going outside the U.S., we have to go back inside,” and further concludes that we need stop searching for possibilities of resistance and start reckoning with the special type of power possessed by the U.S., insinuating again that an outsider perspective is helpful to grasp it. The reason for this is that a view from outside is better equipped to see that “concepts such as imperialism, capitalism, the state apparatus, even the term class, which were developed in the analysis of European societies, fail to grasp the historically unique constellations” that have turned the U.S. into “an empire that bases its power (…) not [primarily] on the occupation of territory” but “on unique (…) forms of international dominance,” among them a persistent empowerment “of business and social elites by way of democratic legitimation” and the cultural transformation of “an egalitarian dream into a relentless race for individual recognition” (82). IV. I am rehearsing this argument not only to reiterate its lucid account of what both “Old” and “New” Americanists are missing about their object of study due to their stern and antagonistic focus on possibilities of resistance. 11 I am also rehearsing it to point out that Fluck’s reading brings out different sets of political assumptions on which these claims about American culture are based - about how this culture is involved in regulating who gets to participate in negotiating the shape of the world and based on what codes and conventions these negotiations take place. For the old guard, it was through its ties to “institutions like progressive political parties, or the labor unions, or the student movement, or simply the institution of art, that [held] a promise for resistance or negation” that this culture could stipulate political action and function as a bulwark against totalitarianism. For the revisionist, “the actual source of power [did] not lie in particular institutions but in culture and its processes of subject formation” (74); in other words, culture (read: aesthetics) was conceived as opposed to politics, and democratic ideals as a mere cover-up for racist and imperial politics. Fluck counters both of these views with his own, Tocquevillian 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 370 Laura Bieger 12 Fluck explore this dynamic in various essays. See especially “Reading for Recognition” (in this volume). 13 See, for instance, Voelz, “Wendungen des Neids.” 14 Where and how they meet is conditioned by the “distribution of the sensible,” Rancière’s term for a collective, practice-based and historically dynamic world-making operation that “determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience” in prefiguring who can appear and what claims can be made. This operation is aesthetic in the sense of being based on “a system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.” And while aesthetic practices are thus fundamental to “the delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,” they are emancipatory when they seek to define “what is common to the community” theory of American culture, which is based on the assumption that culture is a lived reality, and that what “democracy in America” (82) is emerged from within this culture rather than being defined by a fixed set of ideas that did not even exist when the historically specific and socially dynamic constellation that gave rise to this culture came into place. One striking dynamic that emerges from within this culture is a race for recognition born out of the idea of nominal equality and breeding its own forms of inequality as well as a dazzling cultural productivity geared toward feeding the hunger for recognition which is conditioning it rather increasing or even promoting actual equality. 12 As Johannes Voelz has shown in his recent work on the affective dimension of this dynamic, which is based on the same Tocquevillian premises, the structural paradox of equality vs. inequality can become a hazard to, as well as a remedy for U.S. democracy. 13 So yes, Tocque‐ villian premises can help us to better understand the conflicted and potentially corrosive dynamics engrained in the very fabric of democratic culture made in America. But as useful and compelling as I find the thought that lived experience defines the social and political work that the idea of equality performs within a specific cultural setting, with resilience possibly coming from the same source than structural conflict and potential self-destruction, the present crisis of democracy has compelled me to endorse stronger political claims - about equality as a premise of emancipatory politics that is fundamentally aesthetic. Jacques Rancière and Christoph Menke have recently made such claims, and it is with a nod to them that I want to close. For Rancière, “[e]quality is not a goal to be reached, but a point of departure that needs to be posited and verified.” Consequently, “[e]mancipation is not an ensemble of means that are geared toward realizing a promised quality, but an ensemble of practices that attempt here and now to refuse inegalitarian premises, to concretely refute them wherever inequality and equality meet one another” (“Vorwort” 21; my translation). 14 Similarly, for Menke, equality is “not as an assertion of fact, but 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 371 (“Politics” 13) based on the principle of verifying the political premise of equality. Rancière explores the emancipatory dimension of the aesthetic in The Emancipated Spectator, but he mostly focuses on “aesthetic regimes” that support different forms of governmentality. 15 Sontag, “Against interpretation” 14. as a presuppositional act: equality is a supposition we must make in advance” (13). Aesthetics is key to these emancipatory politics. Like the performance of inequality which is deeply engrained in modern democratic cultures as a motor force in the race for recognition that Alexis de Tocqueville so lucidly observed when visiting the U.S. soon after its founding, the verification of equality is an aesthetic procedure. Indeed, Menke makes a compelling case that there is no other way of producing evidence for it. Yet unlike the former, the aesthetic verification of equality transgresses social codes and conventions in the form-giving and form-defining interplay of sensual perception and critical reflection of social roles with the result of inventing new forms of collective action. In the charismatic circularity of Menke’s concluding remark: “In aesthetically transgressing our social existence we experience that we are equal. Political equality is an aesthetic effect. We make ourselves aesthetically equal; aesthetically, we make ourselves equal” (16). Riffing on Susan Sontag’s closing words of “Against Interpretation” with Menke in mind, in place of a hermeneutics of aesthetic premises, what we need right now is an erotics of political art. 15 Works Cited Bieger, Laura. “No Place Like Home; or, Dwelling in Narrative.” New Literary History 46.1 (2015): 17-39. Bieger, Laura, and Johannes Voelz. “Preface of the Editors.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 9-10. Fluck, Winfried. “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies).” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 69-85. ---. “Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsge‐ schichte.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 165-184. ---. “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 15-38. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 372 Laura Bieger ---. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans, 1790-1900. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Herme‐ neutik. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1960. James, William. “The Sentiment of Rationality.” William James: The Essential Writings. Ed. Bruce W. Wilshire. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. 25-38. Menke, Christoph. Aesthetics of Equality / Ästhetik der Gleichheit. 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 010. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions. Ed. David Wood and José Medida. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 7-14. Pease, Donald. “Re-thinking ‘American Studies’ after US Exceptionalism.” American Literary History 21.1 (Spring 2009): 19-27. Rancière, Jacques. “Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe.” An den Rändern des Politischen. Wien: Passagen, 2019. 11-21. ---. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2008. ---. The Politics of the Aesthetic: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum 2004. Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador: 2001. 3-14. Voelz, Johannes. “Wendungen des Neids: Tocqueville und Emerson zum Paradox einer demokratischen Leidenschaft.” WestEnd 2017/ 01: 141-154. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0020 Reading for Premises: Some Thoughts on Winfried Fluck’s Field Shaping Method 373 1 From a European perspective, Frits van Holthoon even goes so far as to claim: “The study and teaching of American popular culture is the core of any program of American Studies” (61). Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media Winfried Fluck I. Few would deny that popular culture (including the mass media) is an important part of American culture, in fact, many argue that popular culture dominates and defines American culture to such an extent that it can be seen as the exemplary American culture. This is by no means a claim of the past. See, for example, Daniel Levin Becker who writes in his recent book, What’s Good, “Hip-Hop is ‘the thing that makes me most consistently proud to be American: our best export, the purest contribution we’ve made to the world in my lifetime’” (31). Thus, one would expect that the analysis of popular culture and the media would have played a central role in American studies, 1 a field that was established in the post-World War II period to analyze American culture and society and to provide a better and “deeper” understanding of it. In order to do this, the field had to find a consensus on what objects and texts could serve this purpose best. For the leading scholars of the first generation of American studies, the so-called myth and symbol school, popular culture did not qualify, however, because the America they wanted to highlight was an American culture that said “No! In Thunder” to the materialism and bland conformism often associated with American life at the time. For most intellectuals and for many scholars, popular culture was a supreme example of such unfortunate developments. Popular culture’s low status as an academic object of study was changed by two developments that emerged outside of American studies. One was post‐ modern theory; the other was the political turn in the wake of the Sixties and the influx of continental theory that gradually reached all fields in the humanities. 2 In view of the wide range of approaches covered in this essay, bibliographical references cannot be exhaustive and will be restricted to influential and representative texts. 3 For the Bowling Green group, American popular culture is the cultural manifestation of the anti-elitist egalitarian spirit of American society: “Popular culture is the voice of the people, and the voice is becoming louder and louder” (Browne, Challenges xv). Focusing on popular culture would be a democratic break-through, a transformation of the humanities: “To paraphrase Lincoln, the Elitists can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but they cannot fool all the people all the time” (Browne, “New Humanities” 9). A more ambitious argument is offered by the cultural historian Lawrence Levine in his study Highbrow/ Lowbrow in which he traces, among other examples, the gradual transformation of Shakespeare from a popular author to a high-brow icon that came to stand at the center of a newly established cultural hierarchy of high and low in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Levine regards this as a dispossession of the people’s culture by an elite, a development that should be reversed in the interest of democracy. 4 The difference in focus by Browne and Levine is reflected in two different views of popular culture. One is a liberal understanding of popular culture as the culture of the majority that should be acknowledged in a democracy (and in a field like American studies that claims to deal with American culture as a whole). Although one may not always be happy with it, this is the price one has to pay for democracy. In another, populist understanding, popular culture is an anti-elitist weapon of the common people that undermines the snobbery of elites and therefore deserves special recognition, if the idea of democracy is taken seriously. In the first definition, the word democracy stands for a plurality, in the second, democracy is a word for a populist anti-elitism. For postmodernism, popular culture was ideally suited to strengthen its case for aesthetic dehierarchization, for a newly emerging political criticism it seemed ideally suited to draw attention to the central role of ideology and power in cultural representations. The analysis of popular culture began to move from the margin to the center, and race, class, and gender studies, frequently using forms like Hip Hop or the postfeminist performances of an artist like Madonna as exemplary cases to make their point, gave added support to this trend. Popular culture could thus start to become a frequent interpretive object of High Theory, eventually even a key component of it, because political practices like medial forms of subject positioning, analyzed, for example by filmic apparatus theory, can be demonstrated more convincingly by drawing on classical Hollywood movies than on Ralph Waldo Emerson (where we do not find any continuity cutting). A brief survey can give a first idea of the variety and wealth of approaches one encounters when tracing the changing narratives that have been developed in the interpretation of American popular culture: 2 After the categorical critique and rejection of mass culture by the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt school (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno) and an uncritical populist celebration in Popular Culture Studies 3 (Ray B. Browne, Lawrence Levine), 4 the subsequently 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 376 Winfried Fluck 5 Underlying poststructuralist theories is a radicalized, “Nietzschean” view of power which is seen as a fundamental driving force of the human world, a “will to power.” This is basically the poststructuralist view of power, most prominently represented by Michel Foucault where power becomes every form of disciplinary constraint. In the Left trajectory of popular culture and media studies, which is a story of continuous radicalization, Marxism replaced Critical Theory and was then itself replaced by poststructuralism. 6 For Hebdige, “the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture - in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning” (2). What has to be kept in mind, however, is that “the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather, it is expressed obliquely, in style” (17). In one of the Working Papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, entitled “The Politics of Popular Culture: Cultures, and Subcultures,” John Clarke and Tony Jefferson describe “youth cultures as being involved in a struggle fundamental to the social order - that of the control of meaning. (…) It is significant that in this struggle for the control of meaning, one of the most frequent developed formula analysis (Will Wright, John Cawelti, Umberto Eco, Janice Radway), and social conflict models (Robert Warshow, Chuck Kleinhans, Kathy Peiss) provide influential early examples of increasingly more sophisticated approaches that argued against the then dominant view that narrative formulas signaled aesthetic inferiority and any lack of social significance. Auteur theory (Robin Wood) and the propagation of a “camp”-attitude (Susan Sontag, Richard Dyer, Pamela Robertson) introduced ingenious new ways to make a case for popular culture in aesthetic terms. More influential, however, was a shift to the politics of popular culture (Fredric Jameson, David Tetzlaff), and, more specifically, to the question whether and to what extent popular culture must be seen as a form of ideological manipulation. In some of these approaches - taking up, but also transforming - suggestions by Walter Benjamin, it is no longer the media content on which critics focus on their ideological analysis. The medium of representation that organizes our perception does the ideological work in a much more fundamental way, as, for example, in the so-called apparatus theory in film theory ( Jean-Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey) in which the camera positions viewers as subjects and positions them in transcendental position that provides a sense of mastery along gender lines. However, poststructuralist theories of power like apparatus theory created the problem whether and to what extent cultural subject formation still leaves any room for agency and resistance. 5 In British Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall), youth subcultures like Mods, Skinheads and Punks are still seen as models of resistance. They can have that function, because of their position outside of mainstream society that forced them to develop cultural practices and symbol systems of their own (Dick Hebdige, Paul Willis, Angela McRobbie). 6 In a way, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 377 adjectives used to describe disapproved behavior by the young is ‘meaningless’” (9). In response, Todd Gitlin, in an essay on “The Antipolitical Populism of Cultural Studies,” calls the “New Left symbiosis with popular culture (…) a surrogate politics” (93). In his essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” Stuart Hall, the spiritus rector of the Cultural Studies movement, also began to express his skepticism about a naively populist use of the term “popular.” Already in 1975, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber had complained: “Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings in general” (209). 7 In his book, Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins describes the circulation of media content across multiple media platforms. But the phenomenon I am describing goes beyond a mere flood of information produced by transmedial circulation. this sets a pattern. Social formations that define themselves by difference, such as the women’s movement ( Janice Radway, Angela McRobbie) and African American perspectives (Herman Gray, bell hooks, Racquel Gates) begin to shape popular culture studies at this point, soon gays are included (Richard Dyer). But the search for a site outside of discursive subject formation can also turn inward and focus on the body (Vivian Sobchak), on emotions (Carl Platinga), and on emotional excess (Linda Williams, Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer), and, finally, in yet another more radical attempt to escape the grip of discursive subject formation, on affect (Ann Koivunen), while, at the same time, gender studies began to branch out into queer and trans identities. II. In the meantime, unforeseen developments have emerged. The most obvious and consequential of these are technological. Digitalization and other techno‐ logical break-through features make more and more material available in easily accessible forms. One of the consequences is that the amount of content is exploding. “This year, 113 cable networks are programming 32 828 hours of content in prime time, up from 44 networks and 12 537 hours of content in the 1999-2000 season” (New York Times Jan. 20, 2015). The internet, computers, smart phones, and internet television have opened up a range of new viewing options. YouTube and other web-sites are making a staggering, unlimited number of clips and programs available. Within a week more material is added on YouTube than all world-wide TV produces within a year. 7 All of this has happened within a time span of about two decades. And it has reached a new dimension with the arrival of streaming services. In 2019, there were already 271 online video services available in the United States, serving all kinds of predilection, from telenovelas, aviation documentaries, horror movies (this particular channel is called “Shudder”) and the channel “Horse Lifestyle” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 378 Winfried Fluck for, as the New York Times put it, “equine-themed content.” (“Offerings include,” the Times continues, “a series called ‘Marvin the Tap Dancing Horse.’”) Then major companies like Disney, Warner Media (HBO Max), NBC (Peacock) got into a market that was originally dominated by Netflix and Amazon Prime. The Times article from which I have already quoted was written when Disney started its streaming service: “Disney Plus arrived in Nov. 12 and costs less ($ 6.99 a month) than a single tub of popcorn at big-city movie theaters. It allows anyone with a high-speed internet connection to instantly watch Disney, Pixar, ‘Star Wars’ and Marvel movies, along with original series and films, 30 seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ and 7500 episodes of old Disney-branded TV shows (NY Times, Nov. 23/ 24, 2019). Another new streaming service that started at about the same time was Peacock, a NBCUniversal service. It “will offer 15 000 hours of content: complete seasons of ‘The Office’ and ‘Frazier,’ Universal films like ‘The Fast and the Furious’ and ‘Despicable Me,’ Telemundo shows, every episode of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and a new reboot of ‘Battle Star Galactica’” (ibid). We have not yet mentioned Apple TV Plus, Paramount, the streaming service of Viacom CBS, and Hulu, an early service of Disney and NBC International. In the meantime, HBO Max and Discovery Plus have announced plans that they will merge. At present there are eight major media companies with streaming services that are in a fierce competition. Not all of them will survive, but so far none has a monopoly on interesting programs. The business model is that of monthly subscriptions. To keep viewers subscribed, companies like Netflix invest enor‐ mous sums in production. They need films that draw attention and stand out, but also series that cover different interests, from romance to crime and so on. Obviously, the last year in streaming saw 559 new series, after 493 in the year before. Altogether, this adds to an enormous volume of material and the obvious follow-up question must be: Who is watching all of this and who is providing some orientation about what to watch? Journalism can no longer cover the full range and offers only bits and pieces. In the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, we occasionally find articles like “the most interesting new programs in May” that mentions nine different series from seven different streaming services. An article in the Washington Post is entitled “10 hidden TV gems you might have missed. Now’s the time to finally catch up on ‘P-Valley,’ ‘We Own this City’ and eight other shows well worth your weekends.” This article is interesting because, apart from services like Peacock, Hulu and HBO Max, it also mentions two additional services which we could add to the eight already mentioned. And in a recent article “15 Under-the-Radar TV Shows that Deserve your Attention,” to give a last example, 15 “overlooked” series are mentioned and briefly characterized that are shown on 8 different streaming services. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 379 III. Who can possibly watch all of this and, even more importantly, who is paying for all of these services? At the moment, the American average seems to be 4 streaming services, but since services are beginning to raise their monthly subscription rates, this may change. My students have told me that it is a common practice among them to exchange passwords, and it might be a future development to choose your circle of friends on the basis of how many passwords they can bring into the relationship. But apart from the fact that streaming services seem to have become aware of the exchange practices and will try to prevent them, what about those poor souls who do not have a password-savvy circle of friends? In response, articles begin to emerge like the following: “From Netflix to Disney Plus, This Clever Trick Can Save You Money on Streaming.” As the author points out, subscribing even to only five streaming services could cost $50 Dollars per month. Hence, he proposes, among other tips, that one should rotate one’s streaming services, that one should cancel one’s subscription before getting charged, and that one should pause for a temporary break only instead of cancelling one’s subscription. This may develop into a full-time job! But what about the scholar who still attempts to interpret popular culture as a meaningful and significant expression of American society? In her article “Overloaded: is there simply too much culture? ” Ann Helen Peterson, a media studies professor, registers her frustration: “Soon, the definition and number of television shows that felt essential - all ‘quality’ are part of the larger conversation - began to grow. It wasn’t enough to have watched The Wire and The Sopranos and be caught up with Madmen and Breaking Bad. There was The Americans and The Good Wife, Outlander and The Nick, Game of Thrones and Homeland, Broadchurch and Happy Valley, plus all the ongoing seasons of shows that previously felt very important (see: House of Cards) but increasingly felt like a slog. - Maintaining my fluency was getting harder and harder: I was a media studies professor who was able to devote hours of my ostensible working day to the task of consuming media. I was still falling behind, and more so every day” (The Guardian, Nov. 24, 2021). As Peterson mentions, as a result of this overload there is no longer any shared conversation possible, neither with colleagues, friends, nor students, because they “all seemed to be embarking down different pathways” (ibid.). This observation is confirmed by official numbers. All the technological developments I have mentioned split up audiences into ever smaller segments. An increasing number of programs also means fewer people to watch any one of them. As the writer Kurt Andersen puts it in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review: “But ironies of ironies, after literature was evicted from mass 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 380 Winfried Fluck 8 However, pluralization should not automatically be equated with fragmentation, as Claude Fischer and Gregor Mattson point out in their essay “Is America Fragmenting? ” As they argue, the concept of clustering is more fitting in this case: “It is reasonable to conclude, based on the research by cultural sociologists, scholars of consumption, media analysts, and journalistic accounts, that the number of new, discrete, and separated social worlds increased between 1970 and 2005” (446). See also Michael J. Weiss, The Clustering of America. culture, pop culture itself began to fragment and lose its heretofore defining quality as the ubiquitous stuff that everybody consumed. In a typical week nowadays, fewer than 6 percent of Americans see the most popular scripted series on television” (23). Popular culture and mass media are thus no longer very popular or ‘mass’ either. Television, once a unifying cultural form especially after the demise of the classical Hollywood system, is exemplary in this respect. As has been pointed out, it has moved from its former function as raw material for cultural conversations towards fragmented niche-marketed programming that focuses on particular market segments in the audience. IV. Two consequences of this incessant, technology-driven process seem especially noteworthy. One is that as a result of the proliferation of media consumption devices, ever more differentiated audience segments are created that co-exist and do not have to take note of each other. There are only bits of shared experience left. Altogether, recent technological developments have thus led to an ever increasing cultural differentiation and, in consequence, to a separation of social worlds that make it more and more difficult to arrive at something like a common ground and a shared culture. 8 One may be tempted to argue that more voices also mean more opportunities for minorities whose voices have been drowned out by the majority in the past. But the same law of differentiation will also affect minorities who, in the end, will not simply be empowered but also segmented as voices. To quote Andersen again: “By and large, both entertainment and art now appeal to niches, cultural tribes that range in size from tiny to smallish” (23). Eventually, this will also happen - and is already happening - to minority cultures. I will get back to this at the end of the essay. One simple reason is that cultural differentiation increases the possibilities and range of self-expression. “On social media sites like Twitter, video distribu‐ tion sites like YouTube and fan fiction sites like fanfiction.net, we create our own kind of characters and new possibilities for who we want to be and share them with like-minded people” (Kaplan). (Now we have to add TikTok). Still taking her point of departure from television, Mary McNamara speaks of the “the biggest 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 381 shift in our relationship to television since television was invented - the shift from mass media, which brought the world into the living room, to self-serve media, through which viewers never see anything they don’t want to see.” She continues, “Mass media doesn’t exist anymore. (…) Instead, we have personal media. Increasingly, people fill their information space with only what they want to see - things that reinforce their worldview. Take away channel surfing, and you never have to see anything that you don’t choose to see” (McNamara). V. What does this mean for American studies and the study of popular culture? After all, it has been the starting assumption of the field that the cultural material we analyze and teach tells us something significant about American culture and society. But if there are eight major streaming services with more than a hundred new programs each year, on what basis can one still draw any meaningful conclusions on society and culture, since it is almost impossible to have access to all of the services and programs, and, even if one had access, to watch them all or, at least, a sufficiently large number. Objective ratings services do not yet monitor streaming services. Viewership numbers are largely unknown for most programs. And if we move on to YouTube or the social media, we get innumerable statements of self-expression. On what basis can one still make any meaningful generalizations, then? - The traditional answer to the question why we should study popular culture has been: Popular Culture is an important part of American culture, thus when you want to understand American culture, you also have to make an effort to understand its popular culture. This argument is based on the criterion of representativeness. Since American studies was never in a position to deal with everything, it had to develop criteria of selection. In early phases, dominated first by the history of ideas and then the myth and symbol school, representativeness resided in art works that supposedly transcend ideology or the intellectual mainstream, and, in doing so, can provide deeper insights into a society and culture. Even in ideological criticism, as it was propagated by leading American studies scholars of the next generation, like Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, the main focus still lies on art, because the point now is to argue that art does by no means transcend ideology and can, on the contrary, be seen as an especially powerful agent of it. It was one of the reasons of the initial harsh rejection of popular culture that it did away with the “art criterion” of representativeness and replaced it simply with the criterion of popularity. If a genre or text is popular, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 382 Winfried Fluck then this must mean that it stands for views, attitudes, and/ or emotions of the majority and can be seen as an expression of “the people.” In contrast to art, where the determination of artistic achievement is a matter of interpretation (which has been the rationale of literary studies or art history since the nineteenth-century), popularity is no longer a qualitative, but quantitative criterion for determining representativeness. This is the basis of the highbrow (= elite) vs. lowbrow (= common man) dichotomy and the populist claims to see popular culture as a form of democratic, anti-elitist culture. One irony of the current situation is that in the age of ever smaller audience segments, ranging, as Andersen puts it, from “tiny to smallish,” the logic of dehierarchization has reached a point where popularity also can no longer be a valid criterion for selections. Thus, selections appear arbitrary, but in reality they are based on the logic of the algorithm that knows a viewer’s profile. The choices, in other words, are representative of the taste of the individual consumer and eventually the only possible way to profile it would be - and will be - by artificial intelligence. However, at this point we should concede that, inevitably, scholarship in American studies and Popular Culture studies has always been selective - inevitably, for the simple reason that it has always been impossible to cover everything. These selections have not been arbitrary; as a rule, scholars have selected those objects that can be used in support of the story they want to tell. In the final analysis, then, the question is not really how representative the selected objects have been in general terms, the question is what stories have been told by scholars in popular culture and media studies. And indeed, when looking at the main narratives since World War II, it is striking to see that there are two major storylines that have dominated. One is the story of an ever increasing awareness of power constraints, the other one of an ever advancing differentiation in technology, media, programs, audiences and critical approaches. Both go in opposite directions (as they have also done in ‘High Theory’ in the humanities more generally) and it will be an interesting question at the end to see where we stand in this struggle of narratives. VI. The story of an increasing awareness of disciplinary and constraining power effects is a story about the role popular culture has played and continues to play in the systemic reproduction of capitalism. Before World War II, popular culture was a side show for intellectuals, now it moves to the center in debates about modern society. One starting point was Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its rejection of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 383 9 In contrast to other critics as, for example, the at the time often quoted Dwight McDonald, Horkheimer/ Adorno are not simply defenders of a classic hierarchy of taste. For them, the original sin is the industrialization of culture in assembly-line fashion that starts with the arrival of film and radio and ushers in a shift from active participation to passive exposure: “The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the role. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter (…) turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same” (121-22). With this shift from active engagement to passive consumption, capitalism had found a way to subject culture to industrial production and its regimes of standardization. If one considers culture the one sphere that still escapes the grip of instrumental rationality, then the emergence of the mass media is a devastating blow: it means that instrumental rationality is now also beginning to invade the sphere of culture, Adorno’s last hope. Hence, the term popular culture is considered entirely inappropriate, the fitting term is that of a culture industry. 10 For a superb discussion of the issue of fantasy in political criticism see Ian Ang’s essay “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure. On Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance.” 11 The essay appeared in the first issue of the new journal Social Text where Jameson writes about the blockbuster Jaws: “I will now indeed argue that we cannot fully do justice mass culture as an entry gate of industrialized rationality into the realm of culture (Horkheimer/ Adorno). 9 But the dominant form it took on in American criticism was that of an ideological criticism that had as its founding question one that has remained central in all of the following versions of the power narrative: How does a system like capitalism reproduce itself in the realm of culture? How does the system contain opposition or resistance? What forms of agency does it still allow? Before such questions could be addressed, however, another question had to be answered first, namely why popular culture was so popular in the first place, although it was constantly condemned for misrepresenting reality and working against the people’s real interests. It was therefore the major goal of ideological criticism to raise people’s consciousness about popular culture’s misrepresentation of reality. In a first stage this led to analyses of stereotypes in popular culture and the media in the so-called “images of” approaches (Haskell, Bogle, Lemons). But should popular culture merely be evaluated by how correct its representation of reality was? Was popular culture nothing but a monolithic reproduction of dominant ideology? What about the strong elements of fantasy in popular culture and the pleasures they seemed to provide to audiences? How to deal with fantasy and pleasure became a major challenge to political criticism. 10 A first answer was offered by Fredric Jameson in his influential essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” that went beyond a then dominant Marxist orthodoxy and its simplistic view of fantasy as merely an escape from reality. Instead, the essay acknowledges that the fantasy elements of fictional texts are not merely escapist but can be seen as reflections of real and legitimate needs, even though these may be presented in commodified forms. 11 But when 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 384 Winfried Fluck to the ideological function of works like these unless we are willing to concede the presence within them of a more positive function as well: of what I will call, following the Frankfurt School, their utopian or transcendental potential - that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs” (144). 12 As Allen puts it: “(…) experiential reality is structured through representation, as an illusion” (Allen, Projecting Illusion 141). Structures of representation are thus inherently ideological. As Suzanna Walters has pointed out, in feminist film theory this has led to a move from “Images of Women to Woman as Image.” Since the filmic illusion of a reality effect could only be produced by concealing the artifice of filmic representation through devices like continuity cutting, one consequence was that ideological analysis had to become formal analysis. 13 One argument in support of apparatus theory was that it seemed to be able to explain “the hypnotic power of mass culture” which, in turn, seemed to be able “to explain the seemingly irrational allegiance of the masses to a system that perpetuated their own subordination” (Allen, “Film Theory” 123). Thus, Mulvey can write in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (16). workers - or, more broadly speaking, the oppressed - did not honor this acknowledgment, a more radical explanation had to be found. In apparatus theory the problem is no longer that of ideologically distorted misrepresenta‐ tions but, in following Lacanian psychoanalysis, of the misrecognition through which the subject gains an identity. Ideology is no longer simply a case of false consciousness; it is now a closed system of representation that produces a complete illusion of reality whose ideological nature only manifests itself in unintended cracks and ruptures in the realistic surface. 12 For the cultural Left the description of subject positioning in apparatus theory became a welcome explanation of how the political system creates subjects that are not aware of what is happening to them, because the cinematic apparatus, which places the spectator in the illusory position of an all-seeing, transcendental subject, reenacts a crucial aspect of subject formation, the misrecognition of the mirror phase described by Lacan. Instead of opening up a space for resistance, negotiation, or, possibly, even transformation, film spectatorship becomes the site where the ideological effect takes hold almost imperceptively and, therefore, most effectively. Systemic reproduction is complete and popular culture does it more effectively than any other cultural form. Ideology is no longer transmitted by propaganda but by the pleasure the film can provide for the spectator. 13 But not for all spectators, because Mulvey’s transcendental subject is engen‐ dered. That created a problem, because it seemed not to leave any active viewer 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 385 14 Vivian Sobchak’s impatient intervention is exemplary: “In this regard, although what follows is not an overtly feminist work, it is written by a woman who has felt con‐ strained by contemporary theoretical analysis, who wants to speak of more possibility than either psychoanalytic or Marxist theory currently allows. Even - or, perhaps, especially - because it has grounded and circumscribed feminist film theory, neo- Freudian psychoanalysis has not exhausted my experience, although it has often exhausted my patience. I refuse to be completely contained within its structures and described by its terms. Psychoanalysis is fine, perhaps, for disclosing the ‘unconscious’ of patriarchal texts and the power and constitutive nature of an experienced ‘lack,’ but it is not so fine for describing the pleasure and plenitude of an experience that includes - but is also in excess of - sexual ‘difference’” (xv). 15 Cf. Christine Gledhill: “(…) feminists found a genre distinguished by the large space it opened to female protagonists, the domestic sphere and socially mandated ‘feminine’ concerns” (10). One of the strongest and influential critical voices within this radical reorientation, Linda Williams, began to build a whole new theory on this re-evaluation of melodrama, first by linking it to a group of other “body genres,” such as pornography and horror in her essay on “Gender, Genre and Excess,” and then, in her essay “Melodrama Revised,” by making melodrama the basis for a reconsideration of the classical Hollywood system as a whole. For Williams, it is a basic mode of storytelling that also informs so-called masculine genres like the Western or the Gangster movie, which long seemed to be its opposites. Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer have provided an overview of the changing attitudes toward melodrama in the introduction to their essay collection, Melodrama: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood. In her essay, “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today,” Jane Feuer also includes the serial form as an antidote to narrative closure. 16 A helpful summary is provided in Kristin Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess.” position for female viewers. 14 Thus, cultural radicalism had to find ways to grant a certain degree of deviation from the subject-positioning model, or, to put it differently, to grant a certain degree of deviation without putting the central theoretical claims of poststructuralism into question. One possible way had been pointed out by Roland Barthes, whose concept of a reality effect had been crucial in the redefinition of representational realistic illusion as a closed ideological system. But Barthes also acknowledged, almost in camp fashion, that the so-called reality effect can suffer from exaggeration and excess, so that an unintended distancing effect is created. For film criticism, this was an ideal argument to save genres like the women’s melodrama from contempt; what initially looked like an especially clear case of ideological gender construction could be reconceptualized as an almost progressive genre. 15 The theoretical significance of the excess narrative should be stressed. 16 If everything is (invisible) power, then it becomes a major challenge to identify those rare instances that still exist, if only temporarily, outside of power. Since power manifests itself in subject formation, the question of the subject is of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 386 Winfried Fluck 17 See Vivian Sobchak, various essays on the role of body in responding to popular culture, and, more recently, a shift to the level of affects, as, for example in Ann Koivunen’s essay, “The Promise of Touch: Turns to Affect in Feminist Film Theory”: “Bodies, not language or discourse, are conceptualized as a radical political force, since ‘along-side’ the inevitability of conforming to these pressures, there always lies the possibility that affective intensity may provide a line of escape - in Deleuze’s words, a line of flight. Affect, here, in this desubjectified model, is not a subjective quality or a psychological or social emotion to be named but a capacity or intelligence of the body beyond or prior to language, discourse, narrative, and cultural matrix” (107). Emotion and affect are separated in these arguments, for while emotion is still a subjective quality, affect is a dimension of the body that is not yet subject to cultural or social impositions. It is, in other words, the one remaining part of the body that cannot be ideologically interpellated. 18 This retreat has its price. Since bodily and affective responses cannot speak, they may be there, but we cannot hear what they say. Thus, we also cannot know what their meaning is. Their only function seems to be to assure the individual viewer (and the reader) that there is still a part of the subject that is not yet entirely subjected by disciplinary regimes. Ironically enough, although someone like Sobchak insists on the uniqueness of filmic experience, she can only tell the same story over and over again - namely that her body and all of its parts are very much alive in watching movies. 19 The following quote from the culture industry chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” is exemplary: Cartoons “hammer into every brain the old lesson that (…) the breaking down of all individual resistance is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their trashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment” (138). Ten years before, in the second version of his “Das Kunstwerk special interest in this context. To be sure, the subject’s understanding of the world is an effect of power, but is the subject completely determined by this interpellation or are there parts that may still be seen to exist outside its grasp? It is notable that in the aftermath of a growing critique of apparatus theory a retreat set in to dimensions of the subject that might still be out of reach of misrecognition because of sensory, somatic, or affective responses as they may be found in bodily experiences, emotions, and affects. 17 This, it seems, has currently become the last hope for critical analysis. The original promise of the invisible power narrative - to enlighten us about new manifestations of power - has become the story of an ongoing retreat. 18 VII. But there is also another story that can and has been told. It starts with the term mass culture. A key point of Critical Theory’s attempt to highlight the full extent of systemic reproduction is to argue that the subject is compulsively dependent on it. 19 There is no longer any subject capable of self-determination, and the so- 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 387 im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” translated - correctly - in the Harvard Edition as “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin had still put his hopes on Disney when he wrote about the therapeutic function of collective laughter: “American slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies” (38). 20 Criticism thus had to be careful not to be seen as a discrimination of the common man. In this type of “democratic,” anti-elitist popular culture studies, American popular culture becomes an endless catalogue in which everything co-exists. David Madden has described this catalogue scholarship fittingly when he says: “Popular Culture is a garish galaxy of bubble gum, rock music festivals, hoola-hoops, trading stamps, bingo, superman heroes, marathon dances, drive-in movies and restaurants, saloons, success worship, miracle cure medicines (Hadacol) (…).” And so on. Madden’s list, based on contributions to Bowling Green publications, covers a half page of unrelated items, many of them banal and ephemeral trivia. 21 Formula analysis provided a breakthrough in Popular Culture studies. For the first generation of American studies scholars, valuable cultural insights were dependent on the aesthetic quality of a cultural object. Popular culture, on the other hand, was considered aesthetically inferior. Under these circumstances, there were only two possibilities to make a case for the usefulness of popular culture for cultural analysis: one was a defense of popular culture as by no means aesthetically inferior, the other consisted in the claim that special insights into American culture could be gained precisely from those features that had been considered aesthetically inferior until now, namely its recurring narrative patterns. The point here is that narrative formulas are not emptied out of meaning by standardization but open up entirely new possibilities for the expression of hidden wishes and inner conflicts, as in Warshow’s example. 22 Cf. Umberto Eco on the amazing popularity of the movie Casablanca: “What then is the fascination of Casablanca? The question is a legitimate one, for aesthetically speaking (or by any strict critical standards), Casablanca is a very mediocre film. It is a comic strip, called mass culture with its standardized, formulaic forms seemed to confirm this in dramatic, shocking forms. The first attempts to defend popular culture in Bowling Green Popular Culture Studies countered this narrative simply with the populist belief in “the people,” who have made America great and know what they are doing. 20 But in the following stage, that of formula criticism, we already find a subject that uses popular culture for the disguised expression of hidden, often socially tabooed impulses, as in Robert Warshow’s statement, “He is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.” 21 We cannot know this subject, because its psychology is hidden behind genre conventions, but it is there and has an active imaginary dimension of its own. This active dimension is further enhanced in camp in which attitudes toward popular culture change completely. Forms that were singled out as proof of popular culture’s aesthetic inferiority are now praised as sources of aesthetic pleasure. Among other things, this means that the subject can change the meaning and significance of a popular culture product by taking another attitude, “a good taste of bad taste” (Sontag 292). 22 By doing so, the subject 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 388 Winfried Fluck a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects. And we know the reasons for this: the film was made up as the shooting went along, and it was not until the last moment that the director and scriptwriters knew whether Ilse would leave with Victor or with Rick” (35). 23 As Jack Barbucio points out, it was one of the main attractions of camp for gays that it drew attention to the constructedness of gender roles. “Bad taste” exaggerations can highlight the unnaturalness and artificiality of the construction. John Wayne, for example, is not just a representation of real masculinity, his persona also reveals what it takes to construct the image of a real man. As Richard Dyer puts it: “Gay camp can emphasize what a production number the Wayne image is - the lumbering gait, drawling voice and ever more craggy face are a deliberately constructed and manufactured image of virility” (145). 24 In his essay “It’s being so camp as keeps us going,” reprinted in his Only Entertainment, Richard Dyer provides a thoughtful discussion of the ambiguity of camp’s liberation. A more systematic problematization of the usefulness of the concept of identification is offered by Jackie Stacey in her book Star Gazing. See also Miriam Thaggart, “Divided Images: Black Spectatorship and John Stahl’s Imitation of Life” on divided identifications by Black viewers. In this context, see also bell hooks and her criticism of Manthia Diawara in “The Oppositional Gaze.” gains ironic distance, highlights the artificiality of the representation, 23 and thus undermines the basis of ideologization: identification. 24 Postmodern theory has extended this playful approach that challenges readers and viewers to consciously reflect on the constructedness of aesthetic forms. The result has been a far-reaching dehierarchization that undermines hierarchies between high and low and, in consequence, a further pluralization and differentiation of cultural forms, in which popular culture could now even become associated with avant-garde forms. The changing relation to modernism is exemplary: Analyses of early mass culture criticism had pointed out that, at a closer look, the dichotomy between high culture and popular culture was really an opposition between the experimental ambitions of modernism and an assumedly formulaic popular culture. But now, in the spirit of postmodern theory, we read in Kirk Varnedoe’s book Modern Art and Popular Culture that “the exchanges between modern art and lowbrow culture were a formative aspect in the history of modern art” (13), leading eventually, one might add, to Pop Art in painting. These arguments have been pushed further toward a major turn in popular culture studies: theories of reception and aesthetic effect. As Liebes and Katz point out in their essay, “On the Critical Abilities of Television Viewers: ” “The status of the viewer has been upgraded regularly during the course of communication research” (204). A whole field of study has emerged on what is now called “active audiences.” In camp, the spectator, by taking on another attitude than intended by the text, can turn its meaning on its head. According to British Cultural Studies, youth subcultures can give mundane everyday, such 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 389 as needles and pins, resistant meanings. And in popular culture, readers come to terms with their own situation in their own idiosyncratic ways. In the reception of Dallas, different ethnic groups look at one and the same program differently. In the critical discussion of apparatus theory, feminist critics reject the notion that the female spectator is arrested in her subject position. Instead, they begin to emphasize the freedom to enter different perspectives, including those of males (Linda Williams, Jackie Stacey). Altogether, there has been an unmistakable tendency to give the recipient ever more freedom by looking at the actual conditions of media use. An important point of departure was to reconsider the reception model postulated by apparatus theory, that of a central, omniscient position, made possible by the darkness of the film theatre, where viewers are “alone” vis-à-vis the screen and can have the illusion of being addressed directly. But what about watching television, in most cases in a living room together with family members, with constant interruptions and distractions, and often not in a darkened room? In retrospect, one realizes to what extent apparatus theory was still fixated on the classical Hollywood film; however, by the time criticism set in, television had begun to replace film as the leading medium. Popular culture studies in the 1970s and 80s were film studies, in the following decades, popular culture studies were television studies. (And this development has been continued by devices like the VCR, the DVD, the internet and video games) that have further extended the range of available media. Frank Kelleter’s emphasis on the impact seriality can have on processes of meaning making could be drawn upon here and linked with a body of texts that emphasizes the unlimited process of intertextuality in which every text or object is embedded in ever new associations (“Five Ways”). But where do we stop? The question has been most prominently provoked by John Fiske, who ties television reception to a subjectivity that roams freely through the continuous flow of images characteristic of television. TV for Fiske is not a text but a form of textuality, that is, an endless process of signification, which, in poststructuralist fashion, is semiotically “open” and therefore also open to ever new and different readings. What can we still say about these readings? Viewers watch television because they enjoy the polysemic play of television, no matter what the program is, so that the pleasure of watching television is the pleasure of producing ever new meanings out of a constant flow 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 390 Winfried Fluck 25 One might argue at this point that in their eagerness to reject the model of passive readers and to emphasize their active engagement, scholars have lost sight of the fact that their activities will most likely have something to do with the programs they are watching. Television viewers may sit in front of the TV set for hours, but they still like certain programs more than others, and the degree of their cognitive, psychic, emotional and affective involvement must have something to do with the program itself. Men do not watch soap operas to the same extent as women, although the semiotic play the program offers may be equally rewarding. 26 Cf. Fiske, “Popularity.” For my own phenomenological explanation of reception as a transfer process, see “The Aesthetic Experience of the Image” and my essay on “second narratives” reprinted in this volume. 27 Cf. Bennett, “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations.” 28 One way to do so is to link the reception of popular culture material to certain subcul‐ tural communities, including such groups as fan groups who “appropriate, rethink, and rework media materials as the basis for their own social interactions and cultural exchanges” ( Jenkins 175). For example, as Jenkins points out, where the sexuality of a character is not clearly determined, there is space for queer appropriations. In an essay in which he repeatedly refers to the movie Thelma and Louise, Jenkins also includes slash readings and readings by lesbian communities which, not unexpectedly, have another reading of Thelma and Louise than other groups. Fittingly, Jenkins now speaks of the viewer as a poacher. of signs. 25 From being a medium of mass manipulation, television has become a semiotic democracy that encourages viewers to become their own producers. 26 For example, in an essay on the television series Dynasty, Jane Feuer refers to fan magazines, ads, product tie-ins, public letters, and interviews as part of the sense-making process, and Tony Bennett, in another essay, even draws the conclusion that because of that variety of sense-making sources that readers or viewers use, the text only exists in its activations. 27 His methodological conclusion is that “as a consequence, to study the connection between literary phenomena and social processes requires that everything that has been said or written about a text, every context in which it has been inscribed, should in principle, be regarded as relevant to and assigned methodological parity within such a study” (qtd. in Feuer 279). Bennett does not seem to be concerned that this may be asking too much of any interpreter or that, as David Morley puts it, the text is simply dissolved into an endless chain of readings (Morley, “Populism” 287). 28 VIII. This is quite a different story from that of an ever increasing awareness of power constraints. In fact, the two narratives - which, in my opinion, are representative of the theoretical work done in literary and cultural studies since the 1980s - 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 391 29 In that respect, the title of a recent essay collection by Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers that wants to bring feminism up to date is telling: Feminisms. Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures. There is an unmistakable effort here not to miss out on any possible differentiation. 30 See, for instance, Julia Erhart, “Laura Mulvey Meets Catherine Tramell Meets the She- Man: Counter-History, Reclamation, and Incongruity in Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Film and Media Criticism,” in which she also quotes the following definition of queer provided by Harry Benshoff in his book Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film: “queer (…) includes people who might also self-identify as gay and/ or lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transvestite, drag queen, leather daddy, lipstick lesbian, pansy, fairy, dyke, butch femme, feminist, asexual, and so on - any people not explicitly defining themselves in ‘traditional’ heterosexual terms“ (5). 31 The pattern is always the same, in the case of Black identities it goes from Black Power to identity politics, which was then criticized as essentialist in Black Feminist Criticism, until Black Feminists, in turn, were criticized for their essentialism. Thus, Lisa Taylor criticizes bell hooks for contradicting herself by “claiming that black women have both turned away from Hollywood cinema and developed an ‘oppositional gaze.’ This sweeping claim, which would seem to speak on behalf of all black American women, risks essentializing black femininity. hooks remains silent on why black women would want to view Hollywood films, what they specifically watch, and how they watch it” (Taylor 155). go in opposite directions and appear to be irreconcilable. In the power narrative the last hope finally came to rest on the recipient’s affects as the only place left that has not yet been subjected to power. On the other hand, popular culture studies cannot ignore the fact of an ongoing differentiation. Gender studies provide a case in point, for example when a feminist like Angela McRobbie, in her well-known essay “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” complains about recent developments in feminism that are now summarily comprised under the heading of post-feminism. In a development for which the multi-million copy bestseller Bridget Jones’s Diary can be seen as a symbol, a younger generation, McRobbie argues, has welcomed the idea of political self-empowerment but then has left politics by the wayside, so that what remains is self-empowerment as self-fashioning. And the more versions of self-empowerment, the more differentiation you will get. 29 Recent developments in gender studies, where the number of gender identities have exploded, amply confirm this. 30 In his essay, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” the Black television scholar Herman Gray puts his finger on the source of this development - the change of the meaning and function of the politics of recognition - when he refers to the recognition “of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference as diversity rather than difference as group position or the basis of social inequality and economic subordination” (773). In the course of the changing narratives about popular culture traced here, difference has become differentiation. 31 For Gray, one of the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 392 Winfried Fluck consequences is: “Rather than struggle to rearticulate and restructure the social, economic, and cultural basis of a collective disadvantage, the cultural politics of diversity seeks recognition and visibility as an end in itself ” (772). Differentia‐ tion undermines political struggles. However, in contrast to the “old-fashioned” Gray, the Black television scholar Racquel J. Gates, in her well-received recent book Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, argues that Black scholars should move away from their calls for positive, empowering images, because negative images can function “as the repository for those identities, experiences, and feelings that have been discarded by respectable media” (16). For Gates, negative images are not necessarily distortions but representations that, although they may not be quite respectable, enlarge the range of Black identities. What worries Gray - the multiplication and differentiation of Black subject positions - is a welcome liberation for Gates, even if it means to include negative images of Blackness. However, this is not an essay about diversity but about two meta-narratives that have dominated not only popular culture studies over the last decades, but all fields of literary, cultural, and media studies in the humanities. And the stark contrast between them seems to suggest that we will have to take a stand in favor of one or the other: either the work we have been doing in our fields has been in the service of an ever more effective systemic reproduction by increasingly invisible power effects, or it has been one of the driving forces in a process of differentiation that has led to an increasing number of expressive forms of a self-serve culture. At this point, it may be useful to go back to the story with which we started, that of the consequences of recent technological developments. In a way, this process changes the role popular culture can have in systemic reproduction. In view of the overpowering abundance of programs, ideological analyses or the search for invisible power effects have become obsolete, because they are drowned in multitude. We can no longer know a significantly large part of the material and thus cannot make any meaningful selections of what is representative of a culture. Moreover, since much, if not most of the material is not known to us and we do not know anything about the forms of its reception, we have no clue about its effect on audiences, including ideological effects. To be sure, digitalization opens up an enormous range of selections for the viewer, so that her freedom of choice is dramatically enhanced, but since these choices are highly personal, it is almost impossible to attribute any larger social or cultural significance to them. Moreover, there are still all those other social media, YouTube, cable and other options that add up to Andersen’s “tiny to smallish” tribes. Even if we 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 393 32 See David Tetzlaff, “Divide and Control: Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism,” in which he raises objections against the ideology-as-closed-system view that has dominated the power narrative since poststructuralist Marxism began to dominate. Tetzlaff ’s argument is an eye-opener, because only in retrospect does it become clear that the approaches that put their political hopes on categories like conflict, tension, contradiction, ruptures, and gaps are all based on the tacit assumption of ideology as a closed totality. Their function lies in the fact that they disturb the tight closedness of the system and keep it from being a completely closed entity. In effect, one may even go one step further and claim that the fact that the term resistance has remained rather unspecific, if not empty, in many of these publications, can be explained by the fact that the disturbance of a closed entity is already seen as its actual political achievement. But as Tetzlaff argues, social and ideological control can be much more effective where differentiation or fragmentation prevail, because this means that it is hard to identify what the specific source of domination is. In consequence, there is no longer any common ground for resistance. The new forms of power are far more flexible and resilient, they can easily accommodate resistance and co-exist with other centers of power. could identify a body of texts that might look significant to us, the small size of the users would hardly allow any larger generalization. In other words: The system reproduces itself on the basis of a proliferation of cultural material, but the meaning and significance of this material becomes increasingly irrelevant. For its reproduction, the system does not need any particular content, the sheer numbers suffice. The result is an ever increasing array of individual choices and options - a narrative of ongoing differentiation - that happily co-exists with the narrative of systemic reproduction. In fact, it may provide a new dimension of unexpected support to this other narrative, because it reveals that the system does not do its work most effectively by the illusionary construct of a totality, but by precisely the opposite: by a multiplication of ever new options. 32 One understands in retrospect what the lure of the power narrative is: it puts critical interpreters in a position of superiority. They can claim to see something others have failed to see, and since society is conceived as a systemic totality, this means that critics are in a position of having the key for understanding society as a whole. On the other hand, the differentiation narrative leads to a loss of authority. Interpreters become one voice among many others in a plurality of views and “active” audiences. The power narrative can provide distinction, the differentiation narrative may be closer to contemporary reality, but it also leads to a loss of status of the intellectual. No wonder that the struggle between the two narratives is far from over. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 394 Winfried Fluck Works Cited Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ---. “Psychoanalytic Film Theory.” A Companion to Film Theory. Ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 123-145. Andersen, Kurt. “Pop Culture in the Age of Obama.” New York Times Book Review 9 Aug. 2009: 23. Ang, Ian. “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure: On Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance.” Camera Obscura 6.1 (1988): 180-191. Babuscio, Jack. “Camp and the Gay Sensibility.” Gays and Film. Ed. Richard Dyer. London: British Film Institute, 1977. 40-57. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Nar‐ rative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 286-98. Becker, Daniel Levin. What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2022. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.” 1935; repr.: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 19-42. Bennett, Tony. “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations.” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 16.1 (1983): 3-17. Benshoff, Harry. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mommies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Browne, Ray B. “Introduction.” Challenges in American Culture. Ed. Ray B. Browne, Larry Landrum, and William Bottorff. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1970. vii-xvi. ---. “Popular Culture as the New Humanities.” Journal of Popular Culture 17.4 (1984): 1-8. Cawelti, John. “Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture.” Critical Inquiry 1.3 (1975): 521-541. ---. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Clarke, John, and Tony Jefferson. “The Politics of Popular Culture: Cultures and Sub- Cultures.” Working Paper. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973. Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. London: Routledge, 1992. ---. ed. Gays and Film. London: British Film Institute, 1977. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 395 Erhart, Julia. “Laura Mulvey Meets Catherine Tramell Meets the She-Man: Counter- History: Reclamation, and Incongruity in Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Film and Media Criticism.” A Companion to Film Theory. Ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 165-181. Eco, Umberto. “The Narrative Structure in Fleming.” The Study of Popular Fiction: A Source Book. Ed. Bob Ashley. London: Pinter Publishers, 1989. 124-134. ---. “Casablanca, or the Clichés Are Having a Ball.” On Signs. Ed. Marshall Blonsky. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 35-38. Feuer, Jane. “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today.” Screen 25.1 (1984): 4-17. Fischer, Claude, and Gregor Mattson. “Is America Fragmenting? ” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 446. Fiske, John. “Television: Polysemy and Popularity.” Critical Studies in Mass Communica‐ tion 3.4 (1986): 391-408. ---. “Moments of Television: Neither the Text nor the Audience.” Remote Control. Ed. Ellen Seiter et.al. London: Routledge, 1989. 56-76. Fluck, Winfried. “Aesthetic Experience of the Image.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 409-431. Gates, Racquel. Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Gitlin, Todd. “The Antipolitical Populism of Cultural Studies.” The Intellectuals and the Flag. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. 87-101. Gledhill, Christine. Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film. London: British Film Institute, 1987. Gray, Herman. “Subject(ed) to Recognition.” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013): 771-798. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’.” Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019. 347-361. Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. New York: Penguin, 1973. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 307-320. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. (1944). New York: Continuum, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1.1 (1979): 130-148. Jenkins, Henry. “Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire’s Kiss.” Reinventing Film Studies. Ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 2000. 165-182. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 396 Winfried Fluck ---. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kaplan, Eric. “What role do you want to play? ” New York Times 27 Apr. 2015. Kelleter, Frank, Barbara Krah, and Ruth Mayer, eds. Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. ---. “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 7-34. Kleinhans, Chuck. “Contemporary Working Class Heroes.” Jump Cut 2 (1974): 11-14. Koivunen, Anu. “The Promise of Touch: Turns to Affect in Feminist Film Theory.” Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures. Ed. Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. 97-110. Lemons, J. Stanley. “Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880-1920.” American Quarterly 29.1 (1977): 102-116. Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Liebes, Tamar, and Elihu Katz. “On the Critical Abilities of Television Viewers.” Remote Control. Ed. Ellen Seiter et.al. London: Routledge, 1989. 204-222. ---. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of ‘Dallas’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1993. MacDonald, Dwight. “Masscult and Midcult.” Partisan Review 27 (1960): 203-233, 589-631. McNamara, Mary. “All alone, off the beaten wavelength.” Los Angeles Times 5 Sep. 2004. McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4.3 (2004): 255-264. ---., and Jenny Garber. “Girls and Subcultures.” Working Papers in Cultural Studies 7.8 (1975): 209-222. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. ---. “Television: Not so much a visual medium, more a visible object.” Visual Culture. Ed. Chris Jenks. London: Routledge, 1995. 170-189. ---. “Populism, Revisionism and the ‘New’ Audience Research.” Cultural Studies and Communications. Ed. James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine. London: Arnold, 1996. 279-293. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975; repr.: Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. 14-26. ---., and Anna Backman Rogers, eds. Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 397 Petersen, Anne Helen. “Overloaded: Is There Simply too Much Culture? ” The Guardian 20 Nov. 2021. Platinga, Carl, and Greg M. Smith, eds. Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Robertson, Pamela. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Seiter, Ellen, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth, eds. Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power. London: Routledge, 1989. Sobchak, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. ---. “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinematic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh.” Carnal Knowledge: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 53-84. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1961. 277-293. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Rout‐ ledge, 1994. Taylor, Lisa. “From Psychoanalytic Feminism to Popular Feminism.” Approaches to Popular Film. Ed. Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. 151-171. Tetzlaff, David. “Divide and Conquer: Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism.” Media, Culture and Society 13 (1991): 9-33. Thaggart, Miriam. “Divided Images: Black Spectatorship and John Stahl’s Imitation of Life.” African American Review 32.3 (1998): 481-491. Thompson, Kristin. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 130-142. Van Holthoon, Frits. “Modernization and Culture in Europe and the United States.” Through the Cultural Looking-Glass: American Studies in Transcultural Perspective. Ed. Hans Krabbendam and Jaap Verheul. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999. 53-67. Varnedoe, Kirk, and Adam Gopnik, eds. Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High & Low. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Material Girl: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Warshow, Robert. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” 1948; repr.: The Immediate Experience. New York: Doubleday, 1962. 127-133. Weiss, Michael J. The Clustering of America. New York: Harper Collins, 1988. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 398 Winfried Fluck Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 2-13. ---. “Review of Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship.” Film Quarterly 48.2 (1994-95): 56-57. ---. “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film Genres. Ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 42-88. Willis, Paul. “Symbolic Creativity.” Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan. London: Arnold, 1993. 206-216. Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 399 1 This essay takes as its point of departure Winfried Fluck’s “Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media” (2023). I would like to thank Heinrich-David Baumgart, Laura Bieger, Hannah Frank, Susanne Krugmann, Martin Lüthe, Ruth Mayer, Maxime McKenna, Annelot Prins, Simon Schleusener, Josie Schneider, Stephen Shapiro, Hannah Spahn, Alexander Starre, and Johannes Voelz for advice, comments, and critique. Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 1 Frank Kelleter Frustration Narratives Of making many books there is no end … - Ecclesiastes 12.12 In her book Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, cultural historian Ann Blair quotes René Descartes in 1684: “Even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself ” (5). Descartes famously proposed to counteract the information overload of his age with an innovative method for securing knowledge: not through the escalating production of books on ever new and increasingly specialized topics, but by identifying “first principles.” The philosophical attraction of this program resided not only in its promise of epistemological stability, but also in how it separated philosophy from philosophy’s media, reducing the number of potentially “useful” publications from infinite to, ultimately, one: Descartes’s own. Descartes was neither the first nor the last writer to wrestle with the frustrations brought on by communication technologies that transcend the bio-mental capacities of any single human life. As far as “narratives” go, the one about cultural inflation is an old and persistent one. Blair traces “the condemnation of overabundance” (15) back to the Bible verse from Ecclesiastes that serves as epigraph for this section. The history of technological media is a history of media anxieties. In this essay, I will follow Winfried Fluck’s prompt and consider some of the more recent stages of this history, relying pragmatically on research suggestions borrowed from seriality studies. These suggestions cannot take the place of actual research. But a theory of seriality that conceives of seriality as a defining practice of modern popular culture, not as a narrative formalism within it (cf. Kelleter, “Popular Seriality”), can help describe “modernity” (another topic of Fluck’s essay) as a historical process which produces incessant desires - and incessant techniques - for reducing its own complexity, while these reductions, or fictions of control, in turn keep mushrooming into second-order complexities. As Chad Wellmon has shown in Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Modern Research University, the very institution of scholar‐ ship as we know it is such a technique of media-historical contingency control. The eighteenth-century German research university and a new paradigm of Wissenschaft developed in direct response to pronounced feelings of cognitive exhaustion fueled by “too many books” (151). Countless are the calls, in the age of print, for “orientation” that shall be “provided” by “someone.” Or by something: new bibliographic practices, advanced systems of collecting, innovative archiving institutions, and, perhaps most crucially, ever competing methods of reading struggle to keep up with their own media conditions. To be sure, such methods were not yet artificially intelligent in the eighteenth century but always already remarkably self-confident, ranging from the “his‐ torical-critical” approach to Bible studies (which, via Feuerbach, would evolve into what Fluck summarizes as the Marxian “power narrative” [“Self-Serve Media,” in this volume 395]) to Fichte’s distinction in Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794) between the momentously singularized “scholar” and, well, all other readers. And so on, each master method feeding the process it hopes to settle, until no single scholar can any longer survey the productions of so many different hermeneutics, which are “suspicious” chiefly of each other. That all these differentiating epistemologies of print are really media practices becomes apparent in the fact that reading, for them, typically signifies writing: to produce “a reading,” in its professional sense, means to produce a text. Another one. Evidently, tales of information overload are more than just stories. They are themselves agents and drivers of cultural change, because they refer to - in fact, they organize - actual communicative emergencies: a “reproduction” of culture that is unpredictable precisely because it does not unfold according to 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 402 Frank Kelleter 2 On “media generations,” see Kathleen Loock’s current project “Hollywood Memories” at Leibniz-Universität Hannover (Germany) and her forthcoming book Hollywood Remaking. the programmatic principles of a philosophy of history, but in serial feedback with what it produces (its narratives, its images, its philosophies, its ideologies, its anxieties, its theories about itself). These reflexivities keep “changing,” as Fluck phrases it, because the “system” that generates them keeps transforming its own output into input. Put differently, accounts of information overload and media fatigue always register real asynchronicities in the ongoing co-evolution of technology and the human sensorium, made palpable, sometimes painfully so, at the level of generations (increasingly configured as media generations in our time) and individual lives (aging, now more than ever, means media frustration). 2 But let me focus on storytelling, taking my cue from Fluck’s long-standing interest in this matter. Cultural historians are well equipped to study how processes of technological change have been narrated, that is, how these processes have been plotted into “From … to …” sequences. Wellmon suggests that since early modern times, the experience of media proliferation has repeatedly nourished perceptions of epistemic fragmentation: “Knowledge, which for so many eighteenth-century figures was supposed to be a unified and coherent whole, had fragmented into distinct and often competing claims and truths” (41). In its most popular U.S.-American versions, the fragmentation narrative has frequently assumed the more specific form of a narrative of lost social consensus. The story that is being told is not simply about cognitive exhaustion (‘how can I possibly read all this stuff? ’), but about a dramatic present shift occurring at all levels of national life (‘citizens don’t agree anymore on which readings to disagree on’). In terms of personal overload it makes no difference if a scholar of literary realism cannot individually read a thousand novels or if a scholar of social media cannot individually read a billion posts. Both numbers are mere fractions of what is out there anyway. But in terms of social cohesion, it does make a difference if my own experience of media disorder reflects a larger transformation in which public communication is said to be atomizing into self-reinforcing enclaves which, by the sheer force of their number, crowd out any larger conversation that could still be called “cultural.” In our time, Mary McNamara’s journalistic coinage “self-serve media,” quoted by Fluck, joins a plethora of digital-age formulas for the perceived loss of a common, unifying culture: “media bubbles,” “polarization,” and “tribalization” are just a few of the catchphrases popularized in contemporary punditry. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 403 3 “Je crains même, qu’après avoir inutilement épuisé la curiosité sans tirer de nos recherches aucun profit considérable pour notre félicité, on ne se dégoute des sciences et que par un désespoir fatal les hommes ne retombent dans la barbarie. A quoi cette horrible masse de livres, qui va toujours augmentant pourroit contribuer beaucoup. Car enfin le désordre se rendra presque insurmontable, la multitude des auteurs qui deviendra infinie en peu de temps, les exposera tous ensemble au danger d’un oubli général, l’espérance de la gloire, qui anime bien des gens dans le travail des études, cessera tout d’un coup” (165). 4 See also: “The rhetoric of black power corrupted the white left and the black left alike, substituting a politics of the media for the civil rights struggles earlier waged in deadly earnest in the South” (83). This sentence is remarkable not only for its stridently categorical distinction between “deadly earnest” struggles and merely “rhetorical” ones, but also for its implied claim that the Civil Rights Movement did not engage in “a politics of the media,” which is quite misleading (not to mention how strongly the Many of these slogans come with narrative implications worth exploring. “Tribalization,” for example, suggests an often politically charged story of regression, not unlike Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s complaint in 1680 that the “horrible mass of books that keeps on growing” signals “a return to barbarism” (165). 3 The idea of a “self-serve” culture, in turn, recalls - both in plotting and word choice, including the striking reappraisal of the word “culture” (more on this below) - older American self-descriptions such as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979). There is a long-standing genre of postwar American sociological literature that keeps diagnosing, for each generation anew, a loss of communal democratic purpose (or “republican virtue,” in some of the story’s earliest predecessors dating back to the nation’s founding era). From David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) and beyond, the alleged evaporation of public meaning is typically linked to changing communicative practices, if it is not traced back directly, as in Lasch, to a larger media-driven shift toward “self-serving” tastes and concerns. In its canonized historiographic version, sometimes summarized as the decline of “the liberal consensus” (Boyer at al. 903), this popular American auto-narrative pinpoints the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s as prime causes for the nation’s political fragmentation - a key concern also in Lasch’s critique of the “culture of narcissism,” with its tirades against “cultural pluralism,” “the educational radicalism of the late 1960s” and “the fragmentizing impact of the mass media,” all of which are said to have turned “the university” into a self-serving “multiversity” (144-45; 91) that encourages not only cultural inflation, but also “moralistic inflation” (32) and “the ubiquitous inflation of grades” (145). 4 With such declarations, The Culture of Narcissism is an important source text for a plot pattern currently attractive to a wide spectrum of political 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 404 Frank Kelleter era’s embattled sense of liberal unity depended on media politics in the most basic connotation of the term). 5 “The recent trend toward calling any systemic groupthink behind real or imagined social problems ‘culture’ (…) has set the American culture concept on a darker course, one that is fully aligned with (…) the culture’s political situation” (Kelleter and Starre 14). positions in the U.S. (and not only there), stretching from the classically liberal to the resentful revanchist: the explanation of right-wing populism as something that has been caused by left-wing radicalism. It should be noted that this is also how right-wing populism explains itself. In the digital era, then, stories of media fragmentation are regularly pronounced in a register of political insistence that links them to seemingly contradictory stories about the rule of a powerful new mainstream: a main‐ stream of minorities. Cultural cohesion is fading, we are told, but that’s the culture now. In fact, the word “culture” itself is serialized and dramatized here, denoting what Alexander Starre has called “any systemic groupthink behind real or imagined social problems” (“cancel culture,” “woke culture,” etc.). 5 Many of the more recent charges of cultural narcissism thus come with a telling catch: they bemoan disintegration at the same time that they bemoan domination. The mental world in which this paradox makes sense is the world of a waning hegemony. Apparently, the “liberal consensus” is not so much declining in a digital media environment as it is getting frustrated, being ever more incapable of enforcing the illusion that its authority really is, or has ever been, consensual. (Claims of political consensus for the postwar period usually tell us more about the era’s reality machines than its actual spectrum of political articulation.) In (pop)cultural production, too, any sense of prior unity - of an accepted canon of works, tastes, or values subsequently exploding into chaotic special interests - indicates first and foremost the existence of historically specific canonization structures before the great decline. As Fluck writes, “the cultural history of (…) texts is the history of their varying uses” (“The Role of the Reader” 271). Speaking of narcissism, then, the true narcissistic shock provided by new media is perhaps felt by those who, being accustomed to other communicative roles, now find themselves demoted to the status of “one voice among many others.” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 405 Notes on the Clutter Industry By considering (…) how what we cannot expect and what we cannot ignore intersect, we can continue to explore the territories both old and new carved out by the most ambitious serials of our moment. - Sean O’ Sullivan, “The Inevitable, the Surprise, and Serial Television” Which narrative is it, then, in 2023? A story of expressive individualism finally reaching its tipping point and plunging U.S. popular culture into farcical disarray? A story of interactive media progressing resolutely on their march to dehierarchization, establishing an algorithmic culture devoid of axiological remains? Or do we, for the long haul, even have to choose between opposing narratives of modernity, one telling a tale of increasing - or increasingly sub‐ jectivized - articulation, the other a tale of ever more comprehensive - and ever more objectifying - social control? And how then should we factor in, if at all, the original Marxian insistence on the interdependence, rather than opposition, of freedom and unfreedom? If we decide to regard the history of capitalism as relevant background for our digital present - and there are good reasons to do so, even beyond storytelling - it may be helpful to remember that already Marx and Engels conceptualized industrial capitalism as a dynamic and disruptive force, not a settled and conservative one: as an ambivalent process, that is, which produced new liberties, bourgeois liberties, at the price of historically new forms of subjection. The strained rhetoric of early Marxism grapples with the dialectical notion of a “system” that reproduces no stable regime of suppression but a historical movement of escalating contradictions. Modernity, in this model, soon becomes the name for the social, psychological, and ecological costs of a remarkable human history of material improvement and emancipation. This concerns the revisionary Marxist understanding of colonialism as freedom at home through extraction abroad as much as it concerns the psychopathology of bourgeois life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which allowed for plausible theories of genuine individuation alongside complementary theories of instrumental reason and the commodification of personalities. Fluck’s interest in the narrative dimension of these modern self-descriptions is well taken, because storytelling is really where their compatibility - or their dialectical interdependence - has turned into incompatibility. This happened long before any poststructuralist ever obsessed over totality. The confrontation 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 406 Frank Kelleter 6 Marx, coincidentally, was an attentive reader not only of Hegel but also of Eugène Sue. 7 See especially Fluck’s thoughts on “cultural radicalism” as a driving force of methodo‐ logical differentiation at the time of the founding of The Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth in 1997 (“Humanities”). On one-upmanship as a practice of serialization, see Jahn-Sudmann and Kelleter, “Serielle Überbietung.” 8 For “the people versus the power bloc,” see Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies” (360). of theoretical choices identified by Fluck for classical narratives of modernity can be traced back to several moments of philosophical contingency control in the nineteenth century, or acts of emplotment, among them Marx and Engels’s translation of their empirically won notion of contradictory reproduction into a Hegelian agon of quasi-personified historical forces. The Marxist philosophy of history tells a story in the oldest - non-serial - sense of the term: imagining a beginning and an end for otherwise open-ended and recursive sequences of action. Significantly, however, this move toward closure has mobilized entire series of follow-up narratives, many of them no longer Marxist in name, but all of them attempting to realign theoretical requirements with the unpredictable sprawl of the empirically observable. 6 In terms of storytelling, what emerges can essentially be viewed as continuity management: after the puzzling failure of “the working class” to appear as a revolutionary agent, other idealistic subjects or other sentimental objects were called upon to act as characters, inspiring alternative plots within the same narrative universe, among them the competing narratives of control and expressiveness singled out by Fluck in his accounts of American Studies in the 1990s. 7 How does this history of narratives cast light upon U.S. popular culture in the early 2020s? One way of gauging the methodological provocation of this question, from the point of view of a theory of seriality, is to approach certain narratives about popular culture (consistent with their media conditions) as popular narratives themselves. Another way is to attend to feedback loops between these stories and stories of high-theoretical modernity. One and the same dramatic scenario in either field (say, “the people versus the power bloc”) can have - and usually does have - different cultural meanings and different political consequences in 1998 and 2023, precisely because its iteration unfolds against the reflective background of an entire series of previous variations. 8 In other words, seriality studies shifts our analytical focus from basic stories to multi-agential storyworlds. What this means for the history of our digital present becomes clear when we consider a third point: to call something a narrative - and to study its narrative actions - does not mean that its accounts are necessarily fictional or its explications necessarily false. Whether one sees the serial proliferation of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 407 9 Newcomb and Hirsch’s “cultural forum,” like the “liberal consensus,” of which it is the pop-cultural offshoot, is best understood as an auto-ideal of broadcasting rather than an empirical description of deliberative media realities. identities in the 2020s as a legitimate process of social articulation that makes the culture more inhabitable, or as some post-Fordist diversionary tactic, or as the absurd narcissism of miniscule differences (‘how many feminisms do we need? ’) probably depends to no small degree on one’s own interactions with a fledgling liberal media ecology. Two of the expert sources quoted by Fluck on the disappearance of the popular in the era of streaming platforms are, not coincidentally, professionals within a changing popular media landscape themselves. Mary McNamara is a TV and film columnist who came of age in the broadcasting era, a time of deep commitment to the “cultural forum” ideal of popular media. 9 Anne Helen Petersen, in turn, introduces herself as a “media studies professor,” which is correct in the sense that she taught classes at a liberal arts college (Whitman College) in the context of her PhD thesis on celebrity gossip, but she is probably better described as a digital pundit tasked with constantly processing new releases. (Hence her focus on keeping up with what’s coming out, rather than, say, questions of canonization and historicization; hence also her sudden turn to praising content diversity over cultural agreement at the end of her Guardian piece.) Both writers are buzz workers in the gig economy, Petersen literally working for BuzzFeed, with book publications on millennial burnout and stress management to her name. Put differently, McNamara’s diagnosis of “self-serve” culture and Petersen’s rhetorical worry that U.S. entertainment is turning into fragmented clutter are experientially grounded in very specific ways. That is what makes them so interesting: they are narratives within, not just about, digital popular culture. Having reached a point where “loss of popular cohesion” has become a popular scenario itself, we might want to ask (borrowing a criterion invoked at the end of Fluck’s piece): how “close to reality” is this often-told tale? I would suggest that the formula of “self-serve media” tells a story not only in the sense that it is plotted (from culture to clutter), but also in that it acts as an orienting fiction with interesting cultural and demographic affinities. In digital times, it responds to new causes for worry with established scenarios, turning frustrating developments into customary dramas. Not surprisingly, the story’s more scholarly uses tend to cluster around two epistemic modes which are inversely connected: para-academic opinion journalism (Petersen, Andersen) and sweeping big-concept sociological commentary with a certain mandarin indifference to actual digital-media research ( Jürgen Habermas’s otherwise instructive Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 408 Frank Kelleter Politik comes to mind, which offers a theory of social media largely based in Habermasian classification literatures rather than empirical case studies, let alone social media literacy). In other words, the theory of culture’s digital dissolution comes with methodological constraints that suggest the need for alternative accounts. Let me offer a few thoughts on these constraints in the remainder of this section before I will ask, in the next, how Fluck’s work on epistemic narrativity can aid the study of popular culture in the twenty-first century. Fragmentation is an unhelpful concept for grasping the reality of current media transformations because it already gets fundamental features of digital communication wrong. McNamara’s belief that viewers “never see anything they don’t want to see” - the topos of digital “bubbles” - can serve as a case in point. Increasing customization of media content (an obvious fact) and radical political polarization (a fact in need of a different terminology) are basically read here as narcissistic atomization (microscopic consumer groups ceaselessly mirroring themselves in their own taste preferences). While it could be asked how challenging or confrontational pre-digital broadcasting routines - or academic reading cultures, for that matter - ever were for their audiences by comparison, there are other problems with this claim as well. When differentiation is interpreted as disintegration, this certainly tells us something about the normative assumptions of the implied ideal of public communication, but the resulting verdict of subcultural self-absorption obscures noteworthy effects of permeability between digital communities. In fact, the metaphor of mutually indifferent “bubbles” clashes interestingly with the metaphor of bellig‐ erent “polarization” which so often accompanies it. Does digital differentiation primarily work as close-circuited reinforcement? The recent history of popular genres, which is largely a history of intensified genre crossovers, seems to paint a different picture. Socially, too, it is doubtful if the existence of micro-targeted genres isolates people into exclusive taste communities. Nothing prevents audience members from participating simultaneously in several different, even seemingly incompatible, subcultures. The “cultural omnivore,” while not an invention of the age of Twitter, has become a pervasive phenomenon only in digital times. Indeed, everyone who has spent some time on social media knows that it is not impossible - and actually quite likely - that pop-cultural discursive spaces cut across multiple social and political groupings. Thus, “equine-themed entertainment” possibly brings together Democrats and Republicans in a similar fashion as did Robert Putnam’s acclaimed sports clubs before “the collapse of American community” (though in both cases probably less amicably than one would like to assume for voluntary associations). Conversely, one of the most 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 409 10 In Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, Nick Seaver historicizes the complaint that there is simply “too much music” (22) for popularity to survive: he shows that this issue is as old as popular music itself. As a “problem,” it has been propagated primarily by the music industry and, today, digital tech companies which provide “recommender systems” (26) promising to relieve the very stress they posit and nourish. See: “What can we make of the long history of overload’s unrelenting novelty? If we treat these stories as instances of a myth and look for their shared structure, we might note that they are not just historical accounts of the state of media; they are stories about a scalar relationship between archives and individuals” (36). I am grateful to Annelot Prins for this reference. 11 There is a rich literature on these micro-histories of U.S. television, capable of aiding any more general theory of contemporary popular culture. I will engage a few selected contributions in the next section; for a brief overview of noteworthy developments before streaming platforms, see Kelleter, Serial Agencies. astonishing American television series of late, BoJack Horseman, did not stream on Horse Lifestyle but, rather predictably, on Netflix - which surely contributed to its considerable national and international popularity. The fragmentation hypothesis is evidently not well positioned to study the real effects of digital popularity. In fact, it is practically forced to downplay or dismiss their significance. Frustration about content excess aside, artists such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift (in pop music), or the MCU (in franchise cinema), or the Grand Theft Auto series (in digital gaming) are “popular” in any classical definition of the term. 10 Indeed if popularity is measured in numbers and revenue alone, digital-era hits and stars regularly surpass any old Hollywood blockbuster or traditional rock band. Television, in turn, would be an odd choice to exemplify one’s theory of digital culture, because, as the original broadcasting medium after radio, American television has undergone numerous institutional and aesthetic transitions to transmedia narrowcasting since the 1980s which have no direct equivalent in digital gaming or social-media memes (arguably the more typical manifestations of contemporary popular culture). This is why digital-era television provides such an instructive case to track shifting constellations of cultural spheres (formerly known as “high,” “low,” “mass,” etc.) and their changing modes of canonization, but the best studies in this vein insist on a careful notion of media specificity which places televisual developments relationally within a larger media ecology. 11 None of this is to say that popular culture has essentially remained the same in the twenty-first century or that no striking - or distressing - transformations have occurred. In fact, the opposite is true. But a strong fragmentation theory of digital culture will almost automatically read Beyoncé’s Lemonade transmedia releases or Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption franchise as epiphenomenal outliers - ephemeral clutter after all: interchangeable “content,” relatively meaningless 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 410 Frank Kelleter 12 To regard Beyoncé as nothing more than today’s version of Madonna would suggest a poor theory of popular seriality, but even more so a poor historical understanding of Madonna’s pop art - and possibly no aesthetic understanding of Beyoncé at all. It’s better to let our study of popular culture be guided by Fluck’s question from 1999: “Could it actually be that the success of American popular culture has something to do with the product itself ? ” (241). 13 The canon of television shows that have risen above the fray of ever new releases is surprisingly stable even in the narrowcasting era. While there are countless shows with only small or ephemeral audiences (though sizeable or fannish enough to warrant production), large-scale and long-lived cultural conversations still aggregate around a against the crucial backdrop of technological randomization. 12 If popular culture is a resonant field of “social and cultural self-understanding” (Fluck, Populäre Kultur vi, m.t.), this is not a promising theoretical option. To claim that the cultural relevance of pop is diluted by overabundance while each new Taylor Swift album mobilizes extensive, meticulous, and enduring interpretive debates in various cultural fields means to retreat from studying historical significance where it happens, in favor of either techno-determinism (whose method of choice would indeed be algorithmic) or retrenchment within the discipline’s conventionalized narratives (which may not be adequate to apprehend changing communicative realities). The challenge is to describe the outsized character of digital popularity, as it unfolds in the context of hyper-differentiated and hyper-customized offerings, both in terms of content (the national and international debates that cluster around successful titles, often with greater sophistication than in any pre-digital “cultural forum,” and more durably so, as the example of franchise cinema shows) and in terms of technological infrastructure (the media-ecological conditions, relations, and actions of self-aware commercial entertainments). Changing patterns of evaluation and canonization in media-specific fields can be identified, and their transmedia dealings, including what Annelot Prins has called “one-sided fan practices from … undesired audience[s]” (144), can be reconstructed without any one scholar having to survey all available produc‐ tions. As Fluck notes, “scholarship in American studies and Popular Culture studies has always been selective” (“Self-Serve Media,” 383). Thus, “meaningful selections” can be proposed on the basis of reasonable criteria (for instance, impact: the size, duration, or substance of cultural controversies as they accrue around specific texts or performances) much in the same way that scholars of literary realism have proposed “meaningful generalizations” (relying, for instance, on the field’s own canonization practices) without having had to study or even to consider all available nineteenth-century novels and magazines (394; 382). 13 As it happens, this type of work is being done in popular culture studies 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 411 manageable set of prominent series, such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Walking Dead etc. As always, some of these shows stand the test of time, others do not, and still others are reevaluated after a while - not unlike in pre-digital canonization cultures. 14 See Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. today, not by a single defining publication or a grand theory ostensibly looking in from the outside, but in numerous focused contributions dialogically engaged with each other - and with the reflexivities of their material. Many of these studies have taken note of digital culture’s entanglements with political populism, especially in its right-wing varieties. There is much to worry about indeed. The world that reaches us through our digital devices, day by day, second by second, is an alarming one. Utopian populism - a powerful disposition in many Anglophone modes of studying popular culture, as Fluck points out - collapses as a credible narrative the moment you go online. This may cause identity crises in certain quarters of American Studies, but more importantly does it underline the need for more realistic accounts (to the extent that our prime commitment is to adequate research and not to disciplinary positioning). The present essay cannot fulfill this task but let me list a few preliminary points. So much seems clear: large-scale national debates have not disappeared from U.S. culture in the age of digital media. On the contrary, national debates now invade local realities and private lives (inside and outside the United States) more pervasively and more vehemently than ever before. What distinguishes these “shared conversations” in the age of social media, apart from their ubiquity and their often negative affectivity, is that they are conducted overwhelmingly in the currency of popular culture (think of the potent effects of fictional worlds such as The Matrix or Game of Thrones on rival political imaginaries and iconographies: “red-pilling” and such). Memes and digital cosplay have become conventional idioms at the highest administrative levels (think of Donald Trump’s NFT trading cards). Trolling, once primarily practiced in rowdy online communities, has turned into a standard operating procedure of American public communication. 14 Political enmities are fueled more than ever by vicious contests about the meanings of commercial products (Bud Light, Barbie, Ron DeSantis’s fight with Disney, George Soros being compared to Magneto - to name just a few recent examples). Social media, far from shattering into tiny, isolated tribes, confront us with a massive agglomeration of storyworlds and gamingworlds commenting on each other, borrowing from each other, battling each other, continuing each other. In fact, this may not be a bad description of American popular culture at large right now. Increasing politicization of popular tastes and consumer choices produces almost visceral constellations of opposition, for which “polarization” appears 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 412 Frank Kelleter 15 See Strick, Rechte Gefühle. One important origin story of the international alt-right (in organizational, ideological, and aesthetic terms) is decidedly pop-cultural: in 2014, GamerGate sparked a powerful blitz of neofascist online activism worldwide - and not just in the manosphere. to be far too symmetric a term. Even before Elon Musk bought Twitter and Donald Trump founded Truth Social, digital populism had been trending to the right. This gives a different, if more accurate, meaning to Mary McNamara’s 2004 musings on “personal media.” But the proprietary structure of new media is only the most obvious expression of a much wider paradigm shift away from liberal communication ideals - a shift that is at the same time anchored in those very ideals, but serially so, that is, by readapting them, gamifying them, weaponizing them. Simon Strick has demonstrated how alt-right “meta-politics” operates as an intensely networked pop-cultural strategy of performative transgressions, resulting in a veritable issues-pipeline leading from multitudes of Reddit influencers to reputable bourgeois feuilletons. 15 In short, neofascism is not a “bubble” in the 2020s. It is an enormously dispersed, agenda-setting campaign across platforms, media, social classes, and national publics. In fact, the liberal press’s persistent obsession with “cancel culture” - closely related to the same newspapers’ fondness for the fragmentation story of digital media - has reached these venues through a vibrant maze of far-right-wing channels, as Adrian Daub has shown. What is more, the “cancel culture” diagnosis is literally a story: an affectively charged concoction of anecdotes, rumors, hyperbole, and disinformation. As such, it bears all the marks of a classically “popular” topic of interest: ceaselessly reproduced as an urgent issue of collectivity, excitedly adapted in ever new registers and genres (from tweets to bestselling books to professional organizations), all purportedly counterworking the dangers of identitarian disintegration while seeking to uphold rather special communica‐ tive prerogatives. When neofascist flame warriors in the 2020s re-process liberal critiques of cultural radicalism that pertained in the 1980s/ 90s and then feed these updated narratives back into their original media, we have reached a moment when it pays to think about storyworlds. Is it surprising that so many liberal scripts should perpetuate themselves in this situation as right-wing takes on “free speech”? Is it surprising in these revanchist times that so many public intellec‐ tuals should reinvent themselves as cultural warriors against an ideological plague of “moralizing” (Lasch’s bête noir already)? With faux oppositional relish, libertarian opinion leaders can now quote Marx, Bourdieu, and even the spirit of punk against environmental activists, whom they frame as bourgeois fools for 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 413 16 Case in point: read any op-ed of the German daily Die Welt from the last five years or so, then trace back its buzzwords and slogans to (usually U.S.-American) fascist memes subsequently re-sampled, in a kind of populist DJ spirit, by multipliers like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones etc. (Simon Strick has been doing some of this work in real time on social media; it is not restricted to overtly “conservative” news outlets.) distinction, ego-driven fanatics of some juste milieu. 16 Meanwhile in academia, generational memories reboot totalitarian anxieties from the 1960s/ 70s (all those far-left splinter groups! ) until every objection from the precarious margins feels like censorship and any appeal to an overarching perspective of social responsibility - in the face of global climate catastrophe no less - can be marked as moralistic zealotry. This remapping of our political storyworlds (the serial rebirth of ideology critique as pop-reactionary trolling) fundamentally changes the meaning of the plots and character constellations on which it draws, because awareness of a history of narrative outbidding now becomes, through deviously clever loopings, a radical outbidding strategy itself. In a subliminally dark essay analyzing John F. Kennedy as an empty media projection, Winfried Fluck spoke of “a terrible truth about democracy”: the possibility that “at the center of democracy (and democratic consent) stands a ‘void’ - a hero that does not exist” (“Fallen Hero” 493-94). Written in 2007, these words illuminate a great deal about the attrition of liberal reality filters in the 2020s. The mainstreaming of conspiracy theories (with their classically “popular” plots) that we get to witness every day in a wide variety of media for‐ mats - Telegram, Parler, Twitter/ X, Breitbart, Fox News; in Germany: Springer, Focus, Compact, Nius, etc. - feeds on a contradiction that has accompanied the liberal-democratic sensus communis for the entirety of its remarkably long run: its peculiar oscillation between inclusivity and exclusivity, permissiveness and compulsion, trust in factuality and reliance on fictionalization. Must every system of serial reproduction eventually reach a breaking point, its moment of madness, when output can no longer be reflectively distinguished from input? Endgame or not, it seems strangely symbolic for the state of U.S. popular culture in 2023 that the most recent variation of “the Kennedy legend” (475) is emblematized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bizarre presidential campaign - while a “sane” counter-version is provided by the social media posts and Netflix appearances of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Whether we look at Trumpian Kennedys, QAnon, militant Covid-19 denial, automotive self-defense, or the recreational terrorism of January 6, 2021: what we see is not fragmentation, but a swarm of fantastical counterpublics pushing in the same rough direction, a thousand frustrated mainstreams in frantic search of their oppression. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 414 Frank Kelleter 17 My translation. “Der Zugriff solcher Wiederbeschreibungen auf Beschreibungen kann sich dann nur noch zeitlich rechtfertigen als der heutigen Lage angemessen mit der Aussicht, daß er morgen als von gestern behandelt wird” (892-93). The Task of Research Re-descriptions can justify their interpretive stance toward descriptions only in temporal terms, as being appropriate for today’s state of things, even when we can expect that tomorrow they will be treated as yesterday’s descriptions. - Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft  17 An adequate history of our digital present cannot be written on disciplinary autopilot. It requires, among other things, precise analysis of the temporali‐ ties, affectivities, and infrastructural relations of new popular media together with a nuanced (practice-centered) conception of neoliberalism, a historically grounded understanding of fascist modernities, and a non-populist theory of populism. It also requires the kind of disciplinary self-reflection of which Winfried Fluck’s work on epistemic narratives is a model. Like many Americanists of my generation, I first read Fluck in the early 1990s, struggling to make sense of the disciplinary landscape that surrounded my PhD project. I learned from Fluck to read theories of American culture as theories of modernity. I learned to understand these theories as creative parts of the culture they professed to explain. Fluck also taught me how various American genres - from realist novels to film noir - revolve around a central topic of modernity: the conflict between structure and agency, reproduction and expression, instru‐ mentalization and individualization. In our current post-critical climate, the meta-perspective proposed by these essays is easily misconstrued as a stance of “superiority,” which claims “to see something others have failed to see” (as Fluck himself has phrased it now [“Self-Serve Media,” 395]). But you only have to read them to understand that their critical gain is thoroughly empirical, not attitudinal. Maybe we can call this Fluck’s Tocquevillean sensibility: the provision, not of a commanding view from nowhere, but of an illuminating view from elsewhere. I like to think of Fluck’s epistemic ethos as that of the intellectual visitor, who reflects on a culture in terms that are not quite its own but in which it can recognize itself. These writings excel at making intelligible 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 415 18 Or in the title of the most recent essay, “Unforeseen.” what is communicated without being made explicit. They develop a sensible vocabulary for what remains unspoken when a culture speaks to itself. Or in different terms: I have learned to appreciate Fluck’s theoretical writings as redescriptions. If they offer us a master class in meta-reading, they do so with a built-in understanding of their own conditions and constraints. Note, for instance, that many of Fluck’s essays (including the one I was invited to riff on here) conclude not with authoritative solutions, but with the identification of a problem. Hence the careful, step-by-step cartography of arguments; hence the non-rhetorical questions, the tentative qualifiers, the subjunctives. An important term - a favorite word really - in many of these texts is: “unexpected.” 18 The meta-narrative project consists in rendering stories visible as stories, but without resolving their contradictions, rather probing deeper into them. As a complex thinker, Fluck is no friend of easy syntheses and yet his writing provides exactly what it questions: the promise of orientation. Tellingly, the tale of two competing narratives, which is at the heart of Fluck’s many variations on the history of American Studies, offers no happy endings, no tragic endings, no endings at all. And yet it has helped generations of scholars to find their way around a confusing (unpredictably unfolding) field of explanatory options. If there is a drawback to this approach it may reside in the very strength of its own narrative about narratives. The original impact of Fluck’s 1973 essay “Das ästhetische Vorverständnis der American Studies” rested in no small measure on its strong assumption about assumptions. A term originating in the German hermeneutical tradition, “Vorverständnis” (innocuously translated as “premises”) refers to the fact that there is no unconditioned understanding of cultural objects, no value-free act of sense-making. This always-already status of interpretation can be narrated - and evaluated - in many different ways. A charismatic version, sanctioned by phenomenological modes of thought, will read the “Vor” (pre) of “Vorverständnis” as a philosophical apriority, which locates the meaning of an epistemological proposition in its “underlying” or “tacit” premises. But is this true for every act of research? Even “power narratives” are not necessarily powerful in this manner (especially not since some studies of neoliberalism have begun to question the disciplinary model of power). No doubt, philosophies of “capitalism” or “the aesthetic” - to name two widespread abstractions competing for the status of being pre - lend themselves to strong convictions, but it is perfectly possible to utilize their empirical affordances without staging dramatic conflicts. In good scholarship, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 416 Frank Kelleter output never equals input, and conclusions always modify assumptions. We have the flexibility of hypotheses; we have the corrective example - indeed the results - of other people’s research. So what should we do with articles that use Madonna as an „exemplary case[] to make their point“ (Fluck, “Self-Serve Media,” 376), as if that point preceded the case? I would ask, are these the best examples of the state of the field? Is this the most useful way of reading them? Does it follow that “in American studies and Popular Culture studies … scholars have selected those objects that can be used in support of the story they want to tell”? One would hope not - especially not “as a rule” (383). The stronger our narrative of narratives, the more we may be tempted to regard a particular type of scholarship as the rule of all scholarship. Some contributions, it is true, are more concerned with problems of conceptual arrangement than with problems of material knowledge, but both modes of inquiry usually inform each other. In any case - in all cases - narrativity is an inevitable feature of knowledge production, and unsurprisingly so, given that interpretations are necessarily entwined with previous interpretations, including the ways in which an object of analysis reads and interprets itself. But while preconceptions are always at work, the exact role they play in individual research contributions varies greatly. This is why the study of epistemic narrativity cannot be a gotcha exercise (uncovering that stories are being told, as if this revealed anything about the validity of the work being done, or as if the revealer of stories was not a storyteller in turn). What a meta-narrative approach can do, however, is ask which specific stories are being continued, which mediations are modifying them, and which consequences occur as a result. A meta-narrative approach can consider what the storied historicity of research findings means for further attempts at accurate description, including one’s own inquiries (a task usually performed by other readers: one’s collaborators, not competitors). As Fluck phrases it, some epistemic narratives are arguably “closer (…) to reality” than others (395). Or maybe we should say: more appropriate accounts will always be motivated more strongly by their shared interest in plausible historical reconstruction than by their desire to tell or safeguard a pre-formulated story. This, then, is the continued promise of the Fluckian approach as I see it: “changing narratives” demand attention, not to uncover something determinist behind the research of others - whose story commitments may be accidental, contradictory, provisional, or experimental, in any case not the most important or interesting aspects of their work - but to facilitate historical meta-reflection as a process of joint communicative adjustment. That no single meta-narrative emerges authoritative from this process does not mean that epistemic chaos 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 417 19 Compare John Durham Peters: “What if we took not two human beings trying to share thoughts as our model of communication, but a population evolving in intelligent interaction with its environment? ” (4). Different temporalities than the ones inherent in the print-cultural dyad of reader and work (the phenomenological scenario of a subject struggling to understand an idealized objective “otherness”) become visible when production and reception are no longer modeled as distinct sequential stages (primary and secondary) but as media-ecological reciprocities. 20 Think about the many U.S. television series of the early 2000s that directly addressed the mental and physical stress involved in watching them (Kelleter, “Serien als Stresstest” and “Whatever Happened, Happened”). The complicated capitalist self-reflexivity of these shows is not captured by delegating their aesthetics to some residual realm of non-economized recalcitrance - or, complementarily, subordinating their aesthetics to an overall diagnosis of neoliberal determination (aka “complicity”). rules. In fact, no narrative will ever be able to contain a stable sense of reality, or even a stable sense of itself, because narrative is by its nature a practice of proliferation, differentiation, and competition. Digital communication drives home this point when it irritates certain philosophical beliefs from the age of print, sometimes rendering them newly visible as the beliefs of a specific media constellation. 19 This involves, for instance, the changing historical use-value of modern self-descriptions (say, the narrative standoff between ideology critique and media populism, “mass culture” and “participatory culture,” Frankfurt and Birmingham). 20 It also involves the conviction that the task of authentic sensemaking falls to “the scholar” - as if there were only one, or as if each member of the scholarly crowd would have to work from such an outstanding selfconception. No single book can do it all. No single essay, no single mind, can do it all, for the simple but frustrating media-historical reason with which this essay started. But there’s good news in this: “one” doesn’t have to watch every American television series or read the entirety of Twitter/ X - and yet these media can be studied in meaningful ways. The challenge in doing so lies not in senseless fragmentation (“we … cannot make any meaningful selections of what is representative” [394]) but in the need to develop changing conceptual tools and changing work practices alongside our changing communicative realities. This concerns not only the constant flow of apps like TikTok and BeReal, which serially supplant each other, but also older media and their often-submerged serialities. “Paper” novels are media-ecological creatures too - and quite aware of it, as Alexander Starre has shown (2015). Our research objects come with self-observations that deserve to be taken seriously, because chances are that they will already have (been) swayed (by) the narratives we mean to “apply” to them. Any theory of U.S. popular culture in the digital age will therefore want to factor in, at some level, how scholarly and other reading modes have 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 418 Frank Kelleter 21 Compare Kelleter and Loock: “in the context of digital-age [popular culture,] (…) formerly academic modes of interpretation migrate in large numbers to the realm of consumer [and producer] practices” (131). 22 Specifying these paradigms in 2017, the quoted passage continues: “[T]his model is still far too schematic. While the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools are fairly well defined - one a neo-Marxist critique of ‘the culture industry’ that pits the negativity of avant-garde art against illusory freedoms produced by an all-encompassing ‘mass culture,’ the other centered on populist notions of reception that put their anticapitalist hopes in acts of ‘participation’ (understood as either countertotalitarian resistance or democratic meaning-making) - the field of ‘neo-vitalist’ approaches (…) is less distinct. (…) From their perspective, popular series are likely to be seen as expressions of utopian transgression or (media) philosophical conjecture, to be distinguished from the managerial, ‘practico-inert’ seriality depicted in neo-Marxist models like Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1960). Early manifestations of this argument described television series as the epitome of a postmodernist aesthetics of multiplicity (Nelson 1997, relying on Eco 1962). Following Deleuze (1968, 1969), poststructuralist and posthumanist approaches in particular have shown a strong affinity for neo-vitalist positions, portraying seriality as a fundamental life force of culture. Currently, there is an energetic intellectual market for diverse post-isms that value seriality as a transcendence-bound principle of nonlinear intensity or speculative temporality, sometimes with barely concealed metaphysical or religious associations” (10-11). come to shape the self-understanding and the production practice, indeed the serial continuation - the writing - of popular storyworlds. 21 Instead of bringing strongly pre-positioned narratives to “a text” (usually in order to reveal core assumptions already known to us but not to the object under investigation) we can reconstruct what the material knows about itself, about its contemporaneity, its scattered textualities, its infrastructural conditions, and how such knowledge interfaces with the knowledge we have learned to distinguish as “ours.” Another way of putting this is to ask: are current studies of popular culture really forced to state their allegiance to an established paradigm (“we will have to take a stand” [393]), so as to be fitted into a familiar narrative of narratives? The answer is demonstrably no. Many recent analyses of U.S. popular culture explicitly situate themselves “at a respectful remove from the battle lines established between critical theory (the Frankfurt School), cultural studies (in the wake of the Birmingham School), and cultural philosophy (following several master thinkers)” (Kelleter, “Popular Seriality” 10). Working under no special commitment to ideology-critical, media-populist, or vitalistphilosophical stories of popular culture - three paradigms in this model - such contributions nevertheless illuminate how the histories of these epistemic storyworlds have impacted commercial entertainment (studies). 22 Many of these investigations, and especially the German ones, are crucially informed by Fluckian modes of doing American Studies. A brief list of examples shall suffice. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 419 23 Compare Boltanski, Mysteries & Conspiracies on the interpenetration of crime fiction and modern sociology. Similar investigations could be launched for political economy and sentimental fiction, phenomenology and the romance, ontological metaphysics and the horror genre, network philosophies and the picaresque novel. Jared Gardner’s Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (2012) and Jason Mittell’s Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television (2015) provide thoroughly researched aesthetic-institutional analyses of American serial comics and post-broadcasting American television, respec‐ tively, without subscribing to hermeneutically-suspicious, agency-extolling, or media-ontological master plots. Christina Meyer’s Producing Mass Entertain‐ ment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid (2019) re-conceptualizes “modernity” from the media-historical vantage point of digital-age seriality studies, mapping a vast social aesthetic of proliferation in nineteenth-century newspaper comics. Ruth Mayer’s Serial Fu Manchu (2013) investigates processes of “spread” in early twentieth-century popular culture with the help of a non-symptomatic notion of ideology, tracing adaptive media operations without having to invoke a scenario of remote powers working behind the scenes. In fact, this scenario becomes visible now as a storytelling convention that the critique of “mass culture” has borrowed from popular culture itself. 23 Similarly, Ilka Brasch’s Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940 (2018) discusses silent and sound-era Hollywood serials as filmic forms that do not conceal their industrialcommercial conditions but derive from them their - characteristically modern - self-understanding as “narrative engines” of contingency management and meta-medial “detection.” Maria Sulimma’s landmark study Gender and Seriality (2020) explores affective practices of neoliberal gender and identity politics in early twenty-first-century cable television series, distinguishing discrete “feedback modes” (beyond Mittell’s primarily “forensic” definition of “the operational aesthetic”), among them a specific type of “thinkpiece seriality” which might also shed some light on the writings of columnists like McNamara and Petersen. Daniel Stein’s Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre (2021) offers a compelling concept of popular authorship that disturbs classical distinctions between production and reception, resulting in a model of genre evolution centered on “authorization conflicts” (Kelleter and Stein 2012). Felix Brinker’s Superhero Blockbusters (2022) asks how the interactive consumption practices of platform capitalism (consumption as immaterial and cognitive labor) interrelate with Jenkins-inspired theories of “participatory culture.” Identifying distinct evolutionary stages of “a politics of audience engagement” in the “hyper-referential style,” the “fan management,” and the “cinematic populism” of Marvel and DC franchises, this analysis of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 420 Frank Kelleter digital entertainment - not a culture of narcissism - registers transformations of popular and populist culture that are not reducible to a scheme of power and resistance. The same can be said about Sören Schoppmeier’s Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture (2023), which brings together perspectives from Game Studies and transnational American Studies, with crucial consequences for our understanding of digital worldbuilding. This book not only reconstructs how the contemporary gamification of popular culture remediates “American culture” in a database logic (modularizing iconographies, genres, “myths,” etc.), but it also demonstrates how digital gameworlds have been changing the nature of popular storytelling itself - and with it the atmospheric “ambience” of “America” as an imaginative space for play where “freedom” manifests concretely as “choice.” In a related vein, Shane Denson and Andreas Sudmann’s “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games” - a much quoted essay in Game Studies - maps the terms and conditions of “an experimental aesthetics of modern life” (282) that bridges the (alleged) conceptual opposition of narratological and ludological theories of gaming. Denson’s Discorrelated Images (2020), in turn, rethinks the phenomenological tradition for post-cinematic media ensembles, moving phenomenology away from the re-active transmission temporalities suggested by the dyadic model of spectator and film. In a more activist register, Madita Oeming’s Porno: Eine unverschämte Analyse (2023) turns to the most popular body genre of them all, probing its sensory, social, and political resonances and engaging for this purpose, among others, Sarah Schaschek’s pioneering Pornography and Seriality: The Culture of Producing Pleasure (2014). Simon Strick’s work on “reflexive fascism” (2021) employs praxeological methods of social media research, because the “mass culture” model of fascist manipulation is clearly out of touch with current media-political realities. Till Kadritzke’s forthcoming Losing Control: New Hollywood, Countercultural Whiteness, and the Politics of Expressivity examines the interplay between postmodern theories of emotion and the cinematic styles of the New Hollywood, thus offering “an alternative perspective on the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s” that elucidates the forgotten contributions of countercultural (affect) aesthetics and “existential hipness” to the formation of New Right sensibilities (“from the agency panic of midcentury to the panic about new agencies in the 1970s”). Kathleen Loock’s forthcoming Hollywood Remaking expressly refrains from casting commercialism and aesthetics as competing critical alternatives, recon‐ structing instead how changing remaking practices have shaped the culture’s “memory” systems - and how Hollywood’s special affinity for retrospective serialization has inflected American meanings of (media) history. There are 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 421 24 To quote Michael Bérubé’s quip (9) about what some might call the clutter studies industry. book-length studies about digital television’s impact on contemporary under‐ standings of intelligence and survival (Maxi Albrecht) and racial incarceration (Lee Flamand). Other projects include works-in-progress that analyze the media-ecological conditions of “celebrity feminism” in contemporary pop music (Annelot Prins), online “reactivity” as a televisual adaptation and remediation strategy (Maximilian Stobbe), the self-historicization of the sci-fi genre in times of climate change (Fabius Mayland), the complicated affective structures of right-wing feminisms - or “trad femininity” - on digital platforms (Alexandra Deem), military entertainment’s narratives of gender (Ali Tuzcu), serialization strategies of indigenous media activisms in Oklahoma (Esther Prause), the history of YouTube’s self-performances as a “new medium” (Maya Blumenfeld), narrative conventions in neoliberalized popular culture (Simon Schleusener), and the infrastructural imagination of post-1945 California noir (Maxime McKenna). There are also works on the media-aesthetic self-reflections of American literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, such as Alexander Starre’s Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (2015) and Martin Lüthe’s forthcoming Wire Writing: Media Change in the Culture of the Progressive Era. Is this all just “stuff about stuff ”? 24 I mention these particular projects because they have originated at, or have been produced in cooperation with, the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Win‐ fried Fluck’s home institution. They do not form a school. They are not unified by a shared methodology. They certainly do not propose a revolutionary counternarrative to whatever story constellation is thought in need of replacement. What they do have in common, however, is a present-day sense of shifting media-historical exigency which also reconfigures our understanding of the past. Like other recent contributions (from other contexts) they are engaged in a project of re-description, looking for plausible ways to conceptualize what confronts us as the “contemporary reality” of “American culture.” Fluck’s essay points to a potential risk involved in this undertaking: the deceptive belief in a stance of pure description. Given the culture’s current state of differentiation, it is not surprising that ontological relativism has emerged as a strong temptation in many of its academic self-considerations (especially in some, though not all, Latourian approaches). Going forward, twenty-first-century researchers will therefore want to continue reading Winfried Fluck, minding his call for critical meta-reflection. What is to be avoided, after all, is a study of (popular) culture 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 422 Frank Kelleter 25 The full quotation is about “the Scylla of a reductionism which must deny almost everything in order to explain something, and the Charybdis of a pluralism which is so mesmerized by ‘everything’ that it cannot explain anything” (ibid.). that finds itself, in the words of Stuart Hall, “so mesmerized by ‘everything’ that it cannot explain anything” (“Race, Articulation and Societies” 242). 25 Works Cited Albrecht, Maxi. “Speculative Subjects Surviving Somehow: Speculative Survival Narra‐ tive and Neoliberal Intelligence.” Dissertation. Freie Universität Berlin, 2021. Andersen, Kurt. “Pop Culture in the Age of Obama.” The New York Times. 5 Aug. 2009. Web. 25 Aug. 2023. <https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 08/ 09/ books/ review/ Andersen-t .html>. Bérubé, Michael. “Introduction: Engaging the Aesthetic.” The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Ed. Michael Bérubé. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 1-27. Blair, Ann. Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Boltanski, Luc. Mysteries & Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Boyer, Paul, and Clifford E. Clark, Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, Nancy Woloch, Ed. The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. 5 th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Brasch, Ilka. Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940: Operational Detection. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Brinker, Felix. Superhero Blockbusters: Seriality and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni‐ versity Press, 2022. Daub, Adrian. Cancel Culture Transfer: Wie eine moralische Panik die Welt erfasst. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2022. Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Denson, Shane, and Andreas Sudman. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 261-83. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmungen des Gelehrten. 1794. Web. 25 Aug. 2023. <https: / / www.projekt-gutenberg.org/ fichte/ gelehrte/ gelehrte.html>. Flamand, Lee. American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality Television: Capti‐ vating Aspirations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Fluck, Winfried. “Das ästhetische Vorverständnis der Amerikastudien.” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 18 (1973): 110-29. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 423 ---. Populäre Kultur: Ein Studienbuch zur Funktionsbestimmung und Interpretation popu‐ lärer Kultur. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979. ---. “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism.” Cultural Critique 40 (1998): 49-71. ---. “The Americanization of Modern Culture: A Cultural History of the Popular Media.” 1999. Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger, Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 239-67. ---. “The Role of the Reader and the Changing Functions of Literature: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte.” European Journal of English Studies 6 (2002): 253-71. ---. “The Fallen Hero: John F. Kennedy in Cultural Perspective.” 2007. Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger, Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 471-95. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Habermas, Jürgen. Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2022. Hall, Stuart. “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.” 1980. Selected Writings on Race and Difference. Ed. Paul Gilroy, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 195-245. ---. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’.” 1981. Essential Essays. Vol. 1. Ed. David Morley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 347-61. Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas, and Frank Kelleter. “Die Dynamik serieller Überbietung: Amerikanische Fernsehserien und das Konzept des Quality-TV.” Populäre Serialität: Narration - Evolution - Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19.-Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. 205-25. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Kadritzke, Till. “Losing Control: New Hollywood, Countercultural Whiteness, and the Politics of Expressivity.” Dissertation. Freie Universität Berlin, 2020. Kelleter, Frank. “Serien als Stresstest.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung-30 (4 Feb. 2012): 31. ---. Serial Agencies: “The Wire” and Its Readers. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014. ---. “‘Whatever Happened, Happened’: Serial Character Constellation as Problem and Solution in-Lost.”-Amerikanische Fernsehserien der Gegenwart.-Ed. Heike Paul, Chris‐ toph Ernst. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. 57-87. ---. “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 7-34. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 424 Frank Kelleter ---. “DISCIPLINE COOL: Notes, Quotes, Tweets, and Facebook Postings on the Study of American Self-Studies (LookingForward Remix).” Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and Practice. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018. 287-307. Kelleter, Frank, and Kathleen Loock. “Hollywood Remaking as Second-Order Seriali‐ zation.”-Media of Serial Narrative.-Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 125-147. Kelleter, Frank, and Alexander Starre. “Culture²: Entry.” Culture 2 : Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century. Vol. 1. Ed. Frank Kelleter, Alexander Starre. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. 11-16. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1979. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Préceptes pour avancer les sciences.” 1680. Opera Philo‐ sophica. Vol. 1. Ed. J.E. Erdmann. Berlin: G. Eichler, 1840. 165-171. Loock, Kathleen. Hollywood Remaking: How Film Remakes, Sequels, and Franchises Shape Industry and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. 2 vols. Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp, 1997. Lüthe, Martin. “Wire Writing: Media Change in the Culture of the Progressive Era.” Habilitationsschrift. Freie Universität Berlin, 2023. Mayer, Ruth. Serial Fu-Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. McNamara, Mary. “All Alone, Off the Beaten Wavelength.” The Los Angeles Times. 5 Sep. 2004. Web. 25 Aug. 2023. <https: / / www.latimes.com/ archives/ la-xpm-2004-sep-05-ca -mcnamara5-story.html>. Meyer, Christina. Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2019. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Newcomb, Horace, and Paul Hirsch. “Television as Cultural Forum.” 1983. Television: The Critical View. Ed. Horace Newcomb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 503-15. O’Sullivan, Sean. “The Inevitable, the Surprise, and Serial Television.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 204-21. Oeming, Madita. Porno: Eine unverschämte Analyse. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2023. Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Petersen, Anne Helen. “Overloaded: Is There Simply Too Much Culture? ” The Guardian. 20 Nov. 2021. Web. 25 Aug. 2023. <https: / / www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/ 2021/ nov/ 20/ overloaded-is-there-simply-too-much-culture>. Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Boston: MIT Press, 2016. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 Your Culture My Clutter: Popular Media and the History of Our Digital Present 425 Prins, Annelot. “From Awkward Teen Girl to Aryan Goddess Meme: Taylor Swift and the Hijacking of Star Texts.” Celebrity Studies 11.1 (2020): 144-48. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950. Schaschek, Sarah. Pornography and Seriality: The Culture of Producing Pleasure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Schoppmeier, Sören. Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023. Seaver, Nick. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Starre, Alexander. Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015. Stein, Daniel. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Strick, Simon. Rechte Gefühle: Affekte und Strategien des digitalen Faschismus. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021. Sulimma, Maria. Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Wellmon, Chad. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0022 426 Frank Kelleter First published in REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Democratic Cultures and Populist Imaginaries. Vol. 34. Ed. Donald E. Pease. Tübingen: Narr, 2018. 5-46. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 Cf. Wertheim: “Constance Rourke’s historical essays during the Depression were devoted to discovering the roots of American culture. The seven volumes she published between 1927 and 1942 are closely linked to the intellectual climate of the 1930s, specifically to the themes of regionalism and nationalism in the arts and related fields, and her interest in the relationship of folk and popular culture to regional traditions led to the discovery of neglected aspects of Americana” (50). The most important of Rourke’s books are Trumpets of Jubilee (1927); American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931); Davy Crockett (1934); Charles Sheeler. Artist in the American Tradition (1938); The Roots of American Culture (1942). As Robert Spiller wrote in a review of the latter, Rourke’s “theory provided an explanation of national character, which freed it from (…) a formal aesthetic tradition. (…) Her hope was to discover and define a distinctive American aesthetic, however crude, as the expression of an emerging American national character” (66). Narratives about American Democratic Culture Winfried Fluck I. When the pioneers of the American studies movement tried to develop an argument that would convince a hostile academic world of the need to study American literature and culture, they basically had two choices. One was to claim that American literature and culture merited special scholarly attention because, in contrast to the elitism of European culture, it could be seen as a manifestation of specifically American virtues, as a culture inspired and shaped by democratic conditions and ideals. For this argument, scholars like Constance Rourke had paved the way in the 1930s. Against those European as well as American critics who considered American culture inferior and who asked, often in exasperation, whether and when an authentic, uniquely American culture would finally emerge, Rourke answered that it had been there all the time, but that critics, in their erroneous equation of the idea of culture with European high culture, had failed to take any note of it. 1 In order to make up for this oversight, her work focused on a vernacular tradition in American culture, 2 It is still echoed in the central role that the term vernacular culture played in the work of critics like Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx in the Fifties. See Leo Marx, “The Vernacular Tradition in American Literature,” and Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. Twain played a key role for both, Smith and Marx, because, of all major American writers, he came closest to vernacular culture. - In his study The Beer Can By the Highway: What’s American About America, John Kouwenhoven develops a theory of American culture based on the idea of a vernacular culture. See also his study The Arts in Modern American Civilization in which he aims to identify the arts that are truly representative of American civilization and finds them, preferably, in “Stone, Steel, and Jazz,” as one of his main chapters is entitled. As he makes clear in the chapter “What is Vernacular? ” Kouwenhoven uses the term vernacular to draw attention above all to American technological design. For a discussion of the continuing importance of the concept of the vernacular for a theory of American literature see also Sieglinde Lemke’s study The Vernacular Matters of American Literature. 3 Matthiessen’s study marks a key moment of transition from the one narrative to the other. On the one hand, Matthiessen claims that the five authors he studies have one common denominator, their devotion to the possibilities of democracy. On the other hand, however, his own analyses hardly highlight this aspect: “My aim has been to follow these books through their implications, to observe them as the culmination of tracing, as Alan Trachtenberg has put it, “the intricate web of indebtedness of all the major writers from Emerson to Henry James, and contemporaries like Frost and even Eliot, to the bursting, lawless energies of everyday vernacular comedy in America” (4) - a vision of American culture as expression of common American values that found strong support in American culture of the Thirties and its focus on “the people.” 2 One way to create a culture of national selfrecognition that would give expression to America’s best values was to turn to American democracy as a way of life and to focus on vernacular forms of culture in which common people would recognize their own voice and their own values. As Philip Gleason has shown in his discussion of the founding years of American studies, World War II played an important role in strengthening that argument by putting the idea of democracy at the center of American national identity. So strong was this phase of a “democratic revival” (349) that “America as a practical instance of democracy came to be equated with the abstract ideal of democracy” (353). America was the exemplary democratic nation and hence, in order to fully understand and appreciate the power of its ideals and values, one had to focus on its democratic culture. However, in the attempts to legitimize a special focus on the study of Amer‐ ican literature and culture, the democratic culture-narrative was eventually displaced by another line of argumentation that may be called the American Renaissance-narrative. This narrative focused on a body of American authors of the Romantic period which F.O. Matthiessen had put at the center of American literary history in his study American Renaissance.  3 This shift from 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 428 Winfried Fluck their authors’ talents, to assess them in relation to one another and to the drift of our literature since, and, so far as possible, to evaluate them in accordance with the enduring requirements for great art. That last aim will seem to many only a pious phrase, but it describes the critic’s chief responsibility. His obligation is to examine an author’s resources of language and of genres, in a word, to be preoccupied with form” (xi). democratic culture to American romanticism raises the interesting question why the writers of the American Renaissance were considered more useful for the academic legitimization of American literary studies than the democratic tradition. I can think of two reasons. One is that a democratic culture defined as vernacular tradition was, aesthetically speaking, not a very imposing form of culture and hence, perhaps with the exception of Mark Twain, not very well suited to counter the reservations of skeptical Ivy League English-departments. The standards of cultural achievement and aesthetic value that had gained dominance in academia after World War II were those of formalism and aesthetic modernism, and vernacular culture of the Rourke-kind fell notably short of those standards. You probably have to live in a small town, as Rourke did, to counter high-brow reservations about American culture with Davy Crockett. The American Renaissance writers, on the other hand, were far better suited to meet the aesthetic criteria derived from modernism. At least this is the case, if one reads them from the point of view that D.H. Lawrence had introduced into the study of American literature in his book Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923. In his brief foreword, Lawrence turned all conventional wisdom about American literature and culture on its head by arguing that some American writers of the nineteenth-century are really the most radical of modern writers, true modernists avant la lettre. His bold claim is worth being quoted at length, because, unwittingly, it provided a key argument for post-World War II American studies: Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American. Russian and American. And by American I do not mean Sherwood Anderson, who is so Russian. I mean the old people, little thin volumes of Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman. These seem to me to have reached a verge, as the more voluminous Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov reached a limit on the other side. The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them to-day. The great difference between the extreme Russians and the extreme Americans lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit and hate eloquence and symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 429 4 Cushing Strout draws attention to an argument by W.H. Auden that influenced Lawrence strongly: “I first set out on literary studies very much under the influence of Tocqueville’s literary prophesies. I was led to them by W.H. Auden’s long poem New Year Letter. One of his notes strongly impressed me. ‘The American literary tradition,’ it ran, ‘Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, is much nearer to Dostoievsky than to Tolstoi. It is a literature of lonely people. Most American books might well start like Moby Dick, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Most American novels are parables, their settings even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomania” (144-145). The French may have transformed Hollywood movies into a “classical cinema” and elevated American hard-boiled fiction to pulp modernism, but some English writers proved amazingly perceptive about the future canon of American literature. 5 For a helpful discussion of the impact of D.H. Lawrence on American literary studies see Michael J. Colacurcio, “The Symbolic and the Symptomatic: D.H. Lawrence in Recent American Criticism.” 6 On the central role of the idea of a double structure in the study of American literature, see my analysis in “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies” and in Theorien amerikanischer Literatur. whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning (viii). 4 Matthiessen may have put American romanticism at the center of American literary studies, but he had not provided an interpretive model. Lawrence, on the other hand, suggested a method of reading that became dominant in the 1950s. 5 His argument is ingenious. What he manages to do with it is to redefine an American literature long considered provincial as a modern literature in the mode of a literature of subversion and negation. This claim depends on the premise of a double structure, and in effect, in retrospect, one may argue that almost all major studies written in the post-war founding period of American studies, characterized as myth and symbol school, are based on this methodological premise. 6 In each case, the interpretation of American literature and culture aims at the recovery of a covert level of meaning that undermines the surface level in a stance of negation, reenacting Melville’s famous “No! in Thunder” in defiance of a naively and uncritically optimistic view of “America.” Seen this way, what Lawrence calls classic American literature becomes almost an allegory of critical theories of modernity and an aesthetics of negation: One level, the textual surface seems to reflect, in its bland optimism and lack of a critical attitude, the instrumentalization of reason in modernity, while a second, underlying level of meaning provides a resource - in fact, the only remaining resource - for negating this naïve version of progress. The often forced ways in which this negating potential was established in interpretations by the myth and symbol school can then be seen as an almost willful act of resignification, saying in fact: If we want to make a strong case for the study of American 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 430 Winfried Fluck 7 This explains the openly hostile attitude toward American popular culture in that generation, which, in taking another cue from critical theories of modernity, was rejected as “mass culture.” This rejection created a problem, however, with regards to a third strategy of legitimation, that of presenting American studies as a new, interdisciplinary method of cultural analysis focusing on American culture as a whole. The first attacks on the myth and symbol school within American studies therefore were methodological and not political, focusing on the apparent contradiction of an approach that claims to study American culture comprehensively and yet continues to regard high art as key document for an understanding of this culture. This challenge led to a crisis of self-definition and, eventually, to a shift in legitimation from modernist to methodological arguments. The debate - and what is at stake in it - is well summarized in Leo Marx’s essay “American Studies - A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” which, despite the methodological emphasis of its title, is really a defense of, and a plea for, a continued focus of American studies on high art. 8 Important inspirations were provided by a number of influential “myth and symbol” studies like Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance; James Frazer, The Golden Bough; Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces; in philosophy Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms and Susanne Langer’s popularization Philosophy in a New Key. literature, then we have to find a way to describe it, not as democratic culture, but as modernist culture, that is, as an art of double-coding and subtle negation. As Leo Marx puts it in the afterword to a re-edition of The Machine in the Garden: “Nevertheless, The Machine in the Garden emphasizes a fundamental divide in American culture and society. It separates the popular affirmation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites, and the disaffected, often adversarial viewpoint of a minority of political radicals, writers, artists, clergymen, and independent intellectuals” (383). As Lawrence had suggested, the literary form that makes this double meaning possible is the symbol as a mode of representation that transcends any crude literalism. The symbol is inherently ambiguous, often an attempt to express the unsayable, perhaps even the unconscious. In reaction to the Thirties and its strong preference for realism, the symbol was rediscovered in the post- War period as a distinct feature of the language of literature, as something that provided literature with an aesthetic dimension of its own, complicated naively mimetic views of literary representation and prevented it from being instrumentalized as merely a political statement. 7 In their search for a source of value beneath a corrupt Western civilization, modernist texts like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses had emphasized myth and symbol as universal patterns of meaning, linking modern and pre-historic art. 8 In contrast to forms like realism or popular culture, this symbolism, transcending the limitations of Western rationalism, was “deep,” and an American literature that was organized along similar lines could thus gain the status of high art. Hawthorne and Melville moved to the center of the American canon, and 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 431 9 Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (1953); R.W.B. Lewis, The Amer‐ ican Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth-Century (1955); Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness. Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964); Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (1966). the genre of the metaphysical romance with its intricate ambiguities became the American genre par excellence, the supreme embodiment of an American modernism avant la lettre. This elevation of American literature to the level of modern art provided a much better ground for justifying a special focus on American literature than a democratic culture defined as vernacular culture. Thus American studies of the post-War period made the romance the core of an American tradition that was praised, not for its expression of the democratic principle, but for its artful, double-coded critique of American myths. The myth and symbol school’s tacit reliance on a critical theory of modernity implies a particular view of American society and the role culture is supposed to play in it. In the democratic culture-argument, America is a pioneer country of democracy and hence a world-wide leader of a democratization process that is far ahead of European developments. In the American Renaissance-narrative, the view of America is that of a materialistic civilization, exemplifying some of the worst tendencies of modernity, and therefore only an art of negation or a strategy of double-coding can offer some kind of resistance. Virgin Land, the founding text of American studies, is already on the way from the vernacular tradition to a reconceptualization of literature as myth, but the following books by Charles Feidelson, R.W. B. Lewis, Richard Chase, Harry Levin, Leslie Fiedler, Leo Marx and Richard Poirier, the most important studies of American literature in the Fifties and early Sixties, moved the study of American literature from the democratic to the American Renaissance-paradigm. 9 Politically, this position may be defined as left liberal. It criticizes the naïve, self-congratulatory dimension of American liberalism and its undisputed belief in progress, but hopes that an interpretive skepticism about American “myths” may have the potential for increasing national self-reflexivity. However, when the new social movements emerged in the Sixties, this left liberalism was criticized for still believing in the idea of “America,” despite its own critical claims. This is a moment when the political Left, including left liberals, for whom aesthetic negation is still a strategy of resistance, is displaced by a cultural Left that considers dissent part of a ritual of consensus that merely stabilizes the system. Accordingly, modernity takes on a different meaning. In aesthetic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 432 Winfried Fluck 10 A typical version of an argument that is presented in many variants is provided by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua who claims in his essay “Democracy and the Novel” that for Americans democracy is “the very skin of their body,” because “the United States is the only nation in the world whose national identity is almost genetically related to democracy. Its national independence was forged at birth within the world of democratic presuppositions (…) Democracy is the only undisputed trademark of the American heritage” (42-43). modernism, there are still two versions of modernity, that of instrumental rationality and that of its negation by modern art. Now there is only one modernity left and it is all-encompassing in its reach. In aesthetic modernism’s version of modernity, there are conformists and non-conforming nay-sayers; now, even the nay-sayers are not merely complicit but colonizers in their own subtle, cunning, and often powerful ways. In the hermeneutics of suspicion that has dominated American literary studies over the last decades, phenomena like racism or sexism are no longer a dark underside of modernity but describe its very nature. In the context of this radical redefinition of modernity, a justification of the study of American literature can no longer be based on the claim that it offers a unique, especially interesting version of aesthetic modernism that cunningly undermines American myths. What other options are there, however, if one does not want to follow the radicalism of the cultural Left and its hermeneutics of suspicion all the way? Would it make sense, under these circumstances, to go back to the concept that had been left behind, that of a democratic culture? After all, the United States has been the standard bearer of democratic values in world history. As the influential political theorist and founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, put it in 1909, the United States is thus seen as the land of democracy with good reason, as a nation “committed to the realization of the democratic ideal” (Keyssar ix). 10 Basing our understanding of American culture on a value that has historically distinguished the U.S. from other countries would hold the promise of getting closer to the principles and values that have shaped America decisively and have given it a unique, if not exceptional role in history. Can such a focus counter the critique of America that has taken hold in American literary studies in the aftermath of the Sixties? Judging from the persistent reemergence of the terms democracy and democratic culture in recent literary and cultural criticism, this is what some critics seem to have in mind; in fact, as we will see, the concept of a democratic culture and the claim that it is the representative American culture after all, has never gone away and has been kept alive by critics who do not see the unique potential of American culture in a culture of negation or a radical political critique but in an - not necessarily 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 433 11 See, for example, Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, a critique of the cultural Left drawing on Walt Whitman and John Dewey as the main inspiration. In his Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle, Heinz Ickstadt describes the democratic principle as the distinguishing trait of American society and makes it the theoretical basis of his view of America and American literature. uncritical - focus on the creativity of American democracy and its culture, often grounded in intellectual traditions like transcendentalism or pragmatism. 11 In the following essay I therefore want to take up the question again of how a democratic culture may be defined and whether - and to what extent - the concept can provide a conceptual basis for the study of American literature and culture. The argument will be presented in three main parts. The first part provides an overview of the many, often contradictory ways in which the concept of a democratic culture has been used in American literary and cultural criticism. Since this historical overview cannot provide a common ground for discussion, because of the very different uses made of the term ‘democratic,’ the second part will try to approach the problem in a more systematic fashion and focus on four influential theories and expressions of democratic culture. Responding to the limitations of these theoretical positions, the third part will propose a different perspective. In my conclusion the question of the relation between the concept of a democratic culture and the realities of American democracy will be one of the topics to be discussed. II. What exactly do critics mean when they use terms like democracy and demo‐ cratic culture? Often, these terms are used as if their meaning and value would be self-evident, so that no further clarification is needed. In fact, the assumption of a common consensus may be part of the usefulness of the terms in the current intellectual climate: the word democracy seems to be one of the few remaining terms on whose value critics can still agree in times of postmodern relativism and philosophical anti-foundationalism. Democracy is where liberals and radicals, even conservatives, can still meet. And since democratic conditions will inevitably shape culture, one can expect to find the democratic principle pervading American culture. Thus, one of the most promising prospects of the term democratic culture lies in its suggestion that in studying it we are getting closer to the real meaning of America. As Philip Gleason and Leila Zenderland have pointed out in surveys of the development of American studies in the post- World War II period, many universities therefore “explained their new postwar American studies programs in the very language of the democratic revival” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 434 Winfried Fluck 12 Cf. Gleason, “World War II and the Development of American Studies” and Zenderland, “Constructing American Studies. Culture, Identity, and the Expansion of the Humani‐ ties.” (Zenderland 277). 12 To study American democratic culture promised to provide a key to understanding America and to study America one of the best ways to engage in a support of democracy. But what exactly is democratic culture? Is it everything that is produced in a democracy as Tocqueville would have it? Or should we restrict the use of the term to those cultural forms that embody democratic values and ideals, as Walt Whitman would argue emphatically? And if the latter is the case, what is the contribution culture can make? A good starting point may be to take a look at what American cultural and literary criticism has highlighted as models or examples of American democratic culture. Even a quick, cursory glance reveals an amazing range of possibilities. On one end of the spectrum, the term is used for characterizing specific media in toto or entire taste cultures, no matter what their - possibly reactionary - content matter may be, for example when Garth Jowett calls film the democratic art or Jim Cullen entitles his survey of American popular culture “The Democratic Art.” Such sweeping definitions are not restricted to the mass media or popular culture, however. In his essay “Modern Democracy and the Novel,” A.B. Yehoshua describes the novel, starting with Don Quichote, as inherently democratic: “one finds the novel the most accommodating to a democratic perspective and reflecting in its flexibility and open structure some basic democratic principles. Perhaps, one can add, some‐ what boastfully, the novel, more than any other artistic form, has encouraged and supported the democratic revolutions of modern times” (Yehoshua 45). One of the reasons is a greater degree of reader participation that the novel makes possible, “hence the relation of the author to the reader is more democratic” (47). However, reader positioning can vary, depending on author, genre, and period. Heinz Ickstadt thus shifts claims of the novel’s democratic potential to American classical realism where the narrator, in contrast to the historical novel, retreats, and reader participation is encouraged. Not the novel in general, but the realistic novel can thus be seen to come closest to Howells’s hope “that the fruits of the Enlightenment would finally ripen to the genuine cultural expression of realized Democracy” (Ickstadt 1979, 82). In his influential book Culture and Democracy, Horace Kallen argues that democracy “involves, not the elimination of difference, but the perfection and conservation of differences” (61). This is not something that the culturally still fairly homogeneous classical American realism can deliver, however, but multiculturalism can: “It involves a give and take between radically different types, and a mutual respect and mutual 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 435 13 Ironically, “Hopper and his wife (the painter Josephine Nuvision Hopper) disliked President Franklin Roosevelt. Hopper disapproved of the New Deal relief programs, including the WPA, which he believed would only encourage mediocrity. (…) The Hoppers believed that President was trying to make the United States a dictatorship” (Levin 77). Other painters mentioned in this context are the precisionists Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler because of their paintings of mundane everyday objects. cooperation based on mutual understanding” (61) - not necessarily something America has already achieved but something that is one of its democratic promises. But it is in the 1930s that democratic art seems to have come into its own. For Ickstadt, the New Deal project of a public art brings to fruition “a concept of democratic art which runs through the history of American self-expression from Whitman to the democratic realism of William Dean Howells to the Progressive Era” (Ickstadt 1992, 277). At its heart was a populism that responded to the Depression with a narrative in which elites have usurped the power of the people and a regeneration of American society can only be achieved by the spirit of the people. Frank Capra’s 1930’s movies about small-town heroes in the Lincoln mold, played by James Stewart or Gary Cooper, can be seen as a forceful reassertion of democratic ideals from a populist perspective. Capra was a political conservative, however, as was a painter like Edward Hopper: “Hopper’s belief in freedom and self-expression links his work to the democratic tradition. (…) Although his work is not usually discussed from the standpoint of politics and democracy, his focus on the common man links him to the values of democracy” (Levin 75). 13 This is a focus he shared with regionalist painters of the period and photographers who put “the dignity of labour and of the workingman, the dignity of the common people” (Ickstadt 1987, 226) at the center of their visual representations. After World War II, views of Thirties-culture changed, and so did views of what constitutes democratic culture: what had been considered a forceful, authentic representation of the common man was now seen as sentimental populism that had tried to put culture in the service of a New Deal ideology. This - modernistically inspired - fear of a political instrumentalization of art led to a shift to an anti-representational aesthetic. Form and structure replaced content as the main source of meaning - which meant that the aesthetic value of art could no longer be determined by progressive political representations of the people. For narratives about American democratic culture this posed a challenge: they, too, had to locate the democratic principle of cultural forms in structural elements. This worked well in the case of jazz. For Stanley Crouch “jazz (…) reflects the very essence of our constitutional democracy,” because “there has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 436 Winfried Fluck 14 As others would argue this process of dehierarchization already begins in modernism with writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. never been a music in the Western world that allowed for so much improvisation on the part of so many” (7, 144). John Kouwenhoven agrees about the democratic qualities of jazz, but for different reasons. In his programmatically entitled book The Beer Can By the Highway, he focuses on objects that strike him as specifically American and that are, as Ralph Ellison puts it in a foreword, “democratically available to even the commonest of common citizens” (Ellison ii). The Manhattan skyline and the constitution, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Mark Twain’s writings, but also jazz and comic strips, and even assemblyline production and chewing gum are part of Kouwenhoven’s list - objects whose common denominator is not communal creativity but an open-ended, dehierarchized processual structure which for Kouwenhoven is also the idea that informs democracy - “the idea that there are no fixed or determinable limits to the capacities of any individual human being; and that all are entitled, by inalienable right, to equal opportunities to develop their potentialities” (Kouwenhoven 226). The shift from truthful representations of democratic conditions and ideals to “democratic structures” also proved immensely helpful in discussions of postmodernism. In an essay on “Postmodernism as a Democratic Aesthetic” Paul Cantor argues that at first blush “postmodern art seems to be elitist in nature, often obscure, esoteric, incomprehensible to the majority of people, seemingly out of touch with popular taste,” but that in fact it is a “democratic form of art” and that “it is therefore no accident that the movement has flourished most fully in the United States” (Cantor 173). 14 The more consistently the democratic principle is located in structure and not in politically progressive representations, the easier it is to argue that experimental avant-garde literature can become an exemplary version of American democratic culture: “Coming at the end of history, postmodernism is the democratic art form, for it denies that any form of art can truthfully represent reality, thereby making all aesthetic points of contention effectively moot and proclaiming the equality of all artistic styles” (Cantor 178). For Kouwenhoven and Crouch, democratic culture is constituted by openended processes, Cantor and other postmodernist critics think of a culture of radical dehierarchization. But Charles Hersch, who sees himself as member of a generation that grew up with Vietnam, brings the discussion back to a different definition of progressive politics, when, in his study Democratic Artworks, he defines democratic artworks as works “that support democracy” (2): “Through 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 437 my examination of art and criticism from the fifties and sixties I show that politically engaged artworks can embody complex political ideas and support democracy by educating citizens” (3). One example is jazz that provides models of an egalitarian community, another example is Bob Dylan who “used folk music to unmask political deception and celebrate authenticity” (9). Sixties’ culture is especially useful for Hersch, because “what gives artworks a unique capacity for democratic political education is their engagement of the senses” (11). Hersch’s book offers by no means a throwback to a naïve politicization in the mode of the Thirties. Rather, it draws attention to an interdependence that we have already emphasized at an earlier point: whatever a critic’s view of democratic culture is, will depend on what his understanding of democracy is. The view of democracy that shapes large parts of Thirties-culture is that of a sentimental populism, the postmodern view is that of a radical structural egalitarianism that comes close to libertarian views. In contrast, Hersch takes his point of departure from a commitment to the idea of a participatory democracy and from the perspective of this premise, his inclusion of a singer like Bob Dylan makes perfect sense, because music, including Dylan’s, “contributed to the participatory, experiential politics of the sixties” (11). “Because of its communal nature and its effect on the body and even the unconscious, then, music was more suited to the participatory nature of politics in the sixties” (12). At one time or another, it seems, terms like democratic culture or democratic aesthetics have been applied to almost every object or phenomenon in American culture - the mass media, film, popular culture, the novel, vernacular forms in writing and painting, Whitmanesque romanticism, realism, but also modernism, postmodernism, Thirties culture and Sixties culture, jazz, skyscrapers, multicul‐ turalism, literature, films, and photographs about “the people.” One could add populist melodramas like the sensationalist novels of George Lippard, but also an anti-intellectual culture of immediate corporeality like rap music. Is there any way of making sense of this sprawling abundance? One obvious explanation is that democracy means different things to different people. Consequently, they can hold very different views on what the distin‐ guishing marks are that make a cultural form “democratic.” The key terms here are access, structure, dehierarchization, and democratic ideals. For some critics, democratic culture is a matter of popular access, for others of democratic structures of representation, for still others of an aesthetic subversion of hierarchies, and for still others of democratic convictions. In each case different forms and practices become exemplary: 1) Access: some consider mass media like film or popular culture as exemplary forms of democratic culture, because 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 438 Winfried Fluck they facilitate the consumption and comprehension of culture. Eliminating elitist barriers in culture can be seen as a democratic breakthrough. 2) Structure: another approach focuses, not on the question of access, but on aesthetic form; it calls those forms democratic that are organized by dehierarchized, openended processual structures in which no single element is a privileged carrier of meaning, as, for example, in the experimental literature of postmodernism. What others see as another chapter in the history of avant-garde elitism, can thus be reconceptualized as democratic culture. 3) Dehierarchization: a broader version of this form-focused approach sees the concept of democratic culture in the larger context of an ongoing historical process, starting way before the arrival of modern democracies, in which claims of religious, political, social, intellectual, and aesthetic authorities have been undermined by ever new aesthetic challenges. 4) Democratic Ideals: some critics want to narrow down uses of the term democratic culture to those cultural forms that are openly supporting democratic values, as New Deal culture often did, for example. In each of these cases, democratic culture can mean something entirely different: undermining the authority of high culture, of oppressive forms of order, of the dominant symbolic system, and of elite rule. At this point one could argue that democratic culture can indeed be many things and that its many differences do not matter as long as they are all democratic. But these different views of democratic culture can easily collide. Defining democratic culture by access could mean, for example, to include forms of popular culture or the mass media such as the film The Birth of a Nation, and indeed, for a long time, critics focused on the film’s pioneer contributions to the development of film language that made movies easier to understand for a broad public. However, from the perspective of democratic ideals, the film is, above all, blatantly racist and anti-democratic in its depiction of Reconstruction. From the perspective of access, but also from that of democratic values, experimental postmodernism does not look democratic at all in its hard-to-understand avantgarde aesthetic, whereas, on the other hand, from the perspective of “structural” democratic culture realistic forms of representation or the New Deal culture of the Thirties impose artificial systems of order that undermine egalitarian goals. From the perspective of a history of dehierarchization, New Deal culture looks aesthetically retrograde and does not fit into a story of aesthetic democ‐ ratization, while from the democratic ideals perspective, forms of aesthetic dehierarchization can be conservative, if not reactionary, as modernism has shown repeatedly. To call a cultural object “democratic” is therefore not yet sufficient. Instead, critics should clarify what the democratic quality is that they have in mind. However, as a rule, they don’t, perhaps because it is more 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 439 convenient not to be associated with any particular version of democracy. In not clarifying which one is meant, the critic can embrace them all and remain above the fray. How is it possible that democracy as a word familiar to all of us and valued widely can lead to so many different narratives? The answer, quite simply, is that contrary to the intuition from which this section took its point of departure - that we all seem to know what democracy is and that we therefore all refer to the same thing in discussing it - there is not just one, but there are a number of very different concepts of democracy in circulation. To be sure, the central idea of democracy is a promise of equality. But even if we agree to see democracy’s common denominator in a politics of equality, the problem of conflicting meanings remains, because equality, too, is not a term with a stable, self-evident meaning; it, too, can take on very different meanings, ranging from equality of rights, of rank, of equal opportunity and equal recognition to communal values like cooperation, citizen participation and universal values like the dignity of all men. In fact, one may distinguish different versions of democracy by how they conceive of equality. Calling the mass media and popular culture democratic implies a view of democracy as a system of formalized rights to which everybody is equally entitled. Narratives of democratic culture that are based on criteria of equal access therefore imply a liberal democracy in which equality is guaranteed by constitutional rights. In populist versions, equality, although it may be formally guaranteed, has to be wrested from the elites and regained for the people; its standard narrative is that of a betrayal of the promise of equality and of a heroic struggle to regain it. Not access per se is what counts, only certain plots have democratic meaning. Where critics have described classical American realism as democratic, they draw on models of deliberative democracy: whereas populist forms see democracy as a realm of conflict and heroic struggle, realism wants to bridge the gulf between groups and classes through processes of communicative interaction. Deliberative democracy is still based on the authority of the better argument, however, it differentiates between reasonable and unreasonable argumentation, whereas in participatory democracy, evoked by Hersch in the version of Sixties-Culture, equality means that all groups should get their equal share of acceptance, as the new social movements argue. But even these movements can exclude groups, the most equal condition would thus be a state in which individuals and single elements of a text are freed from all arbitrary hierarchies and forms of order - which is a version to be found in postmodernism and other experimental forms that can go in the direction of libertarianism in their radical vision of a freedom unfettered by any rules. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 440 Winfried Fluck What explains the plurality of narratives about democratic culture, then, is that these narratives are grounded, though rarely explicitly, in a range of different concepts of democracy - liberal, populist, deliberative, participatory, libertarian, one might also add direct democracy - all of which have their own characteristic cultural manifestations. And again, these different concepts of democracy and democratic culture cannot easily be reconciled with each other. From the perspective of participatory democracy, a liberal democracy is not sufficiently democratic, in fact, it illustrates what is wrong with America: a promise of equality that remains abstract and protects established hierarchies of power. From the perspective of a deliberative democracy, the quasi libertarian views of structural democratic culture would be a threat to democracy, because they work against a spirit of cooperation and undermine community. Liberal democracy criticizes participatory democracy for creating new inequalities, as, for example, in calls for affirmative action. Populist democracy rejects high culture as elitist, while, on the other hand, the high-brow experiments of the avant-garde in structural democratic culture are boasting of their radical egalitarianism. I am sure that one could fill a whole book on these contrasting conceptualizations, their different cultural manifestations, and their many contradictions. The major problem with narratives about American democratic culture so far has been that they almost always evade the question what kind of democracy they have in mind and instead prefer to hide behind the authority of empty signifiers like the democratic principle or “the people.” Used this way, the term is wonderfully convenient: it evokes positive values like equality but does not have to say which one. What if we turn to theory instead, that is, look at more systematic conceptualizations of American democratic culture? I will call these conceptualizations narratives, because in their attempt to define American democracy and its manifestations in American culture, they are telling very different stories about democratic America. To make the topic manageable within the context of this essay, the discussion will have to restrict itself to what I consider some of the most important and influential descriptions and expressions of American democratic culture: Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Dewey. Taken together, these four different narratives represent four divergent ways in which American democratic culture has been discussed in the larger context of American studies. The question that emerges, then, is whether and to what extent these narratives can provide a basis and convincing legitimation for putting the study of American democratic culture at the center of American studies. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 441 III. Despite the fact that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is still widely consid‐ ered, as Harvey Mansfield puts it in his introduction to yet another recent edition, “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America,” (xvii) Tocqueville was a reluctant advocate of the new political system. He did not see himself as “an advocate of such form of government” (18), but he regarded the progress of democracy as irresistible, so that one had to come to terms with it and understand its advantages and disadvantages. As he says in the introduction: ”I admit that I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom” (19). As is well known, for Tocqueville the distinguishing feature of democracy is equality, as the famous first sentence of the book makes clear: “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay here than the equality of conditions” (11). But Tocqueville is by no means enthusiastic about the prospect of equality, because he sees it as a threat to what for him is a higher value, namely freedom. This explains the often referred-to chapter on the “tyranny of the majority” that became a favorite reference point for American cultural critics after World War II who voiced dire warnings about the dangers of conformity, mass society, and other-directedness. But it also explains the Foucault-like passage quoted by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment that in a democracy power no longer reaches its goals by punishing the body but by going directly at the soul: “Under the absolute government of one, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us” (244). Tocqueville considered the arrival of democracy as the result of an irresistible and inevitable historical process. Why inevitable? Tocqueville’s reasons are given in a section of the book to which readers usually do not pay much attention, the author’s introduction. The reason why the progress of democracy is inevitable, is explained by his philosophy of history, a grand narrative about the course of history, that may look, at first blush, as if it were inspired by enlightenment narratives about the progress of civilizations but, at a closer look, shows a significant departure. To be sure, the story Tocqueville tells 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 442 Winfried Fluck is one of a slow but steady advancement of equality, starting in the Middle Ages, but the forces that drive this process are by no means restricted to familiar enlightenment actors. It is not a gradual unfolding of reason, nor an ingrained longing for freedom, as the democratic narrative usually has it, that leads to a struggle for equality, but, paradoxically, often the very mechanisms of maintaining power: “In France,” Tocqueville writes for example, “the kings proved the most active and consistent of levelers” (10). Even adversaries of democracy cannot but contribute to its advancement: “As soon as citizens began to hold land otherwise than by feudal tenure, and the newly discovered possibilities of personal property could also lead to influence and power, every invention in the arts and every improvement in trade and industry created fresh elements tending toward equality among men. Henceforward every new invention, every new need occasioned thereby, and every new desire craving satisfaction were steps towards a general leveling. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the dominion of fashion, all the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart, seemed to work together to impoverish the rich and enrich the poor” (10-11). Seen this way, there is indeed, as Tocqueville argues, “hardly an important event in the last seven hundred years which has not turned out to be advantageous for equality” (11). In this history, America could become a pioneer nation of equality, not because of a hardy band of non-conformist freedom fighters who were driven by a vision to make America a shining city upon a hill, but, because “once discovered, (it) opened a thousand new roads to fortune and gave any obscure adventurer the chance of wealth and power” (11). This fits Tocqueville’s theory of the subject, which is, however, so elementary that the term theory may hardly seem fitting. Nevertheless, every grand narrative about history also has to give us an idea what it is that drives people and pushes the system forward towards equality (and, hence, democracy). Tocqueville’s actors are far removed from heroic freedom-fighting motivations. They are driven, pure and simple, by “the most superficial and profound passions of the human heart,” things like a taste for luxury, or the domain of fashion, or even, most shockingly, a love for war. What drives them, in other words, are ever new desires craving satisfaction, and this explains why the process is irreversible and unstoppable, because as soon as one desire is satisfied, another one will take its place: “Everywhere the diverse happenings in the lives of peoples have turned to democracy’s profit; all men’s efforts have aided it, both those who intended this and those who had no such intention, those who fought for democracy and those who were the declared enemies thereof; all have been driven pell-mell along the same road, and all have worked together, some against their will and some unconsciously, blind, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 443 instruments in the hands of God” (11-12). Therefore, Tocqueville concludes, “the gradual progress of equality is something fated. (…) every event and every man helps it along” (12). “The noble has gone down in the social scale, and the commoner gone up; as the one falls, the other rises. Each half century brings them closer, and soon they will touch” (11). In America they have touched and that makes democracy in America a fascinating test case. It is highly ironical indeed that the “best book on American democracy” radically undermines the founding myth on which many of the fol‐ lowing theories of American democracy were based: that of the innate goodness and superior common sense of the common man, that is, “the people.” There is no common sense in Tocqueville’s democratic subjects; rather, they are inherently weak and therefore easily swayed by public opinion. In fact, as Mansfield and others have argued, democracy is government by public opinion. Individualism, as a form of willful self-isolation, reinforces this weakness. Tocqueville sees a remedy in voluntary associations but these depend on communal experiences that are not always available. In larger contexts, public opinion takes their place and makes the weak individual dependent on the tyranny of the majority. How does that affect culture and the arts? In his essay “Tocqueville and American Literary Critics,” Cushing Strout focuses on Tocqueville’s expectation that democratic poets, finding nothing ideal in what is real and true, would reach at last for purely imaginary regions. But Tocqueville’s remarks on the general fate of culture are much more pertinent here. After all, the main story he tells about the emergence of democracy is one of leveling, and since democracy transforms all spheres of life, including culture, leveling must also provide the key perspective for understanding this new kind of democratic culture. It would be wrong, however, to take this as a critique of mass culture along the lines of the cultural criticism of the post-War period. Tocqueville sees the process as one of gains and losses. Some things are gained by the process of leveling but at the cost of others: “So it is not true that men living in democratic times are naturally indifferent to science, literature, and the arts; only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate them in their own fashion and bring their own peculiar qualities and defects to the task” (458). On the one hand, there is a process of democratization at work; leveling also means that access to books and reading is increased, even on the frontier: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin” (471). On the other hand, however, leveling can also mean loss of excellence: “When only the rich wore watches, they were almost all excellent. Now few are made that are more than mediocre but we all have one” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 444 Winfried Fluck 15 Among the many things Tocqueville foresaw was also mass culture: “With but short time to spend on books, they want it all to be profitable. They like books which are easily got and quickly read, requiring no learned researchers to understand them. They like facile forms of beauty, self-explanatory and immediately enjoyable; above all, they like things unexpected and new. Accustomed to the monotonous struggle of practical life, what they want is vivid, lively emotions, sudden revelations, brilliant truths, or errors able to rouse them and plunge them, almost by violence, into the middle of the subject. (…) Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste” (474). (467). Appearance is now more important than substance. When Tocqueville first arrives in New York by boat, he is impressed by a number of little white marble palaces, some of them in classical architectural style. But at a closer look, he realizes that they were “built of whitewashed brick and that the columns were of painted wood. All the buildings I had admired the day before were the same” (468). Aesthetically, it seems, the major challenge for democratic culture is how to present a house made of brick and plaster to look like a marble palace. Again, this should not be understood as an expression of aristocratic con‐ tempt. What Tocqueville is aiming at is an explanation of the logic that is at work in democracy’s transformation of cultural production: “In aristocratic societies, craftsmen work for a strictly limited number of customers who are very hard to please. Perfect workmanship gives the best hope of profit” (466). On the other hand, there is always in democracies “a crowd of citizens whose desire outrun their means and who gladly agree to put up with an imperfect substitute rather than do without the object of their desire altogether. The craftsman easily understands this feeling, for he shares it. In aristocracies he charged very high prices to a few. He sees that he can now get rich quicker by selling cheaply to all.” But there are only two ways of making a product cheaper: “The first is to find better, quicker, more skillful ways of making it. The second is to make a great number of objects which are more or less the same but not so good. In a democracy every workman applies his wits to both these points” (466). And the same principle is at work in literature: “Democracy not only gives the industrial classes a taste for letters but also brings an industrial spirit into literature” (475). An ever growing crowd of readers always craves for something new and “ensures the sale of books that nobody esteems highly” (475). Such a literature has little impact on mores, the beliefs, manners and attitudes of a society. The main way in which it gives expression to democracy is as an expression of its restlessness in which everybody is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities and new experiences. 15 To read these passages as a putdown of American culture is to miss the point. Tocqueville’s line of thinking is far more subtle: in a society characterized 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 445 16 Democratic Vistas was written in response to Thomas Carlyle’s essay “Shooting Niagara; and After? ” written against democratizing tendencies in England and the U.S. For the composition and publication history see Reynolds: “In September 1867, a month after Carlyle’s essay had appeared, Whitman wrote the first part of his response, an essay titled ‘Democracy,’ which appeared in the December issue of the New York Galaxy, edited by F.P. and W.C. Church. His second essay, ‘Personalism,’ appeared there the following May. The third, ‘Orbic Literature’ was rejected by the Churches. After many by an equality of rank, people have to find new ways of gaining recognition. The more “mobile” and accelerated the search, the weaker the identity that can result from any particular act of recognition or attachment to an object, and the weaker the identity, the greater the need for ever new options, finally leading to a transformation of culture into consumption, because consumption is best suited to deliver a sequence of quickly changing objects for attachment. Indeed, for this purpose an aristocratic culture of “quality” is no longer useful; the emergence of mass culture and its convergence with consumption is thus not the result of a deplorable drop in standards but a logical response to changing conditions of identity formation ushered in by democracy. As Tocqueville puts it: “In the confusion of classes each man wants to appear as something he is not and is prepared to take much trouble to produce this effect” (467). Tocqueville concedes that such feelings are not unique to democracy, but it is democracy that establishes entirely new status confusions and a newly intensified restlessness. And, as he points out perceptively, it is democracy that extends this frantic struggle for recognition also to culture, in production and distribution as well as - most prominently - in reception. IV. The story of a relentless process of leveling that Tocqueville tells about dem‐ ocratic culture is not exactly an inspirational one. For those in search of an American culture that would embody the best of America’s democratic values and ideals it could hardly be useful. Something more inspiring was needed. Walt Whitman met the demand by declaring from the outset of his book Democratic Vistas (1871) that he would use the words America and democracy as convertible terms (2). America would be seen as a “paradigmatic democracy” (Rorty 30). Accordingly, in Whitman’s proudly “speculative” book, written after the end of the Civil War, in which Whitman had made it his task to take care of wounded soldiers, democratic culture emerges as something that is completely different from Tocqueville’s version. It is no longer the end point of a leveling process but a word for its transcendence. 16 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 446 Winfried Fluck revisions and additions, the three essays were eventually combined and published in 1871 as a seventy-five-cent green-covered pamphlet, Democratic Vistas” (477). However, this transcendence is still a promise, not yet a reality. In its present state, American democracy is not in a condition to fulfil the promise: “Democracy at present is still in its embryo condition. Its justification lies in the future, in the production of perfect characters among the people” (33). Although Whitman has grand visions of America’s future greatness, he does not ignore the unashamed materialism of the Gilded Age: “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism” (10). Whitman welcomes business success as a source of America’s prosperity, but it is not sufficient to determine the success of “our New World democracy” (10). A great moral and religious civilization is the only justification of a great material one. Unfortunately, America “is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results” (11). To add this spiritual dimension and to activate the promise of American democracy is the task Whitman assigns to culture, more precisely to a yet nascent democratic culture. One reason why American has not yet fully realized its democratic promise is that its culture is still shaped by feudal “Old World” remnants. That is true even for a writer like Shakespeare: “The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy. The models of literature, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and basked and grown in a castle sunshine; all smell of princes’ favors” (28). A truly democratic culture can only emerge when these feudal elements are left behind: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past (…)” (4). This culture is urgently needed. But the sad truth is: “America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing” (35). So far, then, culture has failed America. That explains the gap between the ideal of American democracy and its current reality: “As now taught, accepted and carried out, are not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing? ” (36) As Alan Trachtenberg has put it: “America provided an actual polity founded on constitutional principles 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 447 of equality (for propertied white males, at least, in the founding formulation). Yet America remained blind or unknown to itself. Once culture awakened America to itself, to the fact that it had already realized the conditions culture needs to achieve the externalization of inner harmony, then the true America would appear” (Trachtenberg 14). The struggle for realizing the promise of American democracy is thus a struggle over the meaning and function of culture. Only a truly democratic culture can save a corrupt American democracy. Whitman’s faith in this democratic culture (which, in his case, means literature, and, even more specifically, poetry) can be grandiose at times: “I suggest, therefore, the possibility, should some two or three really original American poets (…) rise, mounting the horizon like planets, stars of the first magnitude, that, from their eminence, fusing contributions, races for localities, etc., together, they would give more compaction and more moral identity (the quality today most needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or materialistic experiences” (7-8). This culture would confirm and ensure what America promised, an egalitarian society, and even more importantly, an all-pervasive spirit of brotherhood. What are the characteristics of such a democratic culture? Echoing his hero Lincoln, Whitman’s recurring reference is to “the people,” for him the life-blood of democracy. As David Reynolds points out, Whitman had been confirmed in his belief in the people by his Civil War experiences. On the other hand, he did not willfully ignore reality and overlook the “crudeness, vices, caprices” (2) one can encounter in the people. The list of vices Whitman has seen in the city looks as if it were taken from a sensationalist novel in the mode of George Lippard. Flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity, abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, petty grotesques, malformations and a long list of other unpleasant attitudes and appearances do not exactly add up to an endearing picture of the common people (12). At the beginning and end of Democratic Vistas, Whitman even meets Carlyle half-way by questioning universal suffrage: “I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing” (2). How can Whitman criticize the lamentable moral condition of the people and nevertheless envision a new, transformative democratic culture based on the people? Whitman’s theory of the self has to be taken into account at this point. Just as American democracy has not yet realized its promise, the common people have not realized theirs. The reason is that they are not yet truly independent. It must therefore be the goal of a democratic culture to inspire and encourage that aspiration for independence and self-government that is inherent in all 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 448 Winfried Fluck human beings. Independence has to become an inner state. Only if the individual is free and autonomous, can we expect a genuine transformation, “a man (…) standing apart from all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state-safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty, or art” (14). This is how Whitman defines freedom: “The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American independence. What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds except those of one’s own being, controlled by the universal ones” (52). America remains incomplete as long as this transformation is not achieved, until the spirit of independence does not pervade all spheres, including that of individual being. Wouldn’t such a radical vision of individual independence lead to anarchy? No, because once the individual is in a state of freedom, his inner divine core that links him to universal and divine bonds, will guide him (52). The liberation of a divine core in individuals will transform them into new beings. Goodness, virtue, solidarity, good laws follow freedom. Whitman’s treatment of religion is telling. He acknowledges that religion provides the foundation of man’s moral condition. In this it is the core of democracy. But not in its institutionalized form, because that, too, is governed by rules and bonds designed to tell the individual what to do. Religion can thus fulfill its moral function only, if it is set free from any institutional context. Only “in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all (…) the soul emerges, and all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like vapors” (39). Only this self can reach divine levels and commune with the unutterable. This potential resides in all people: “I can see there, in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after hers, a true personality, developed, exercised proportionately in body, mind and spirit” (42). That is why Whitman can put his trust, not in the individual, but in the common people who, at this stage, are envisioned as an aggregate of independent individual beings. There can be no tyranny of the majority here. The one and the many cannot be separated, one depends upon the other. Poetry “operates both by permitting the one to dissolve into the many and the many to emerge into the distinction of the one” (Ziff 583). But how can the transformation to independence, from a state of dependence to a free, autonomous soul, be achieved? At this point, Whitman’s vision of a democratic culture deserves another look. What is needed in his view is “a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems” (67). That is the sole course of radical transformation open to American society. Literature has to achieve what 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 449 democracy promises: “The purpose of democracy (…) is (…) to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly trained in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself…” (15). But by what means can literature achieve this effect? Whitman remains vague: “At best, we can only offer suggestions, comparisons, circuits” (46). In fact, he has to remain vague, because he is talking about a future phenomenon. But the common link of his scattered hints is a literature that would lead Americans to a self-recognition of their divine potential - and that of America: “America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and cosmical, as she is herself ” (54). Self-recognition is the implied theory of effect of this version of democratic culture, and democratic culture is achieved when it provides a recognition of American exceptionalism. When Democratic Vistas appeared, the resonance was muted. Since then, the text has gained in importance and status, up to the point in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country in which Whitman and Dewey are credited to have forged a moral identity for America and to have given Americans “all the romance, and all the spiritual uplift” they need (97). Not everybody is an admirer, however: “Abstracted from his verse, Whitman’s democratic philosophy today appears naïve” (Ziff 590). The democratic culture Whitman talks about does not yet exist, it is only a vision that is put together in somewhat improvised fashion during the course of writing. However, there are two sets of assumptions that provided the basis for Whitman to present his vision with confidence. One is his assumption about the divine core of human beings that resemble Emersons’s who had already proclaimed in 1837: ‘A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (Trachtenberg 15). The other assumption is Whitman’s exceptionalist belief in America. Democratic Vistas is pervaded by his enthusiastic evocation of America’s greatness, of the prospect of a “nationality superior to any hither known” (4): “The Pacific will be ours and the Atlantic mainly ours. What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be? ” (55) To achieve this greatness and leadership among the nations, America has to pass through three stages. Two of them have already been mastered im‐ pressively: establishing a democratic Republic and becoming a successful, prosperous nation. What is still lacking is the third stage, establishing a truly democratic culture that would make independence also a state of being for the common people. But although this challenge has not yet been met, the fact that America’s evolution has already passed successfully through the other 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 450 Winfried Fluck two stages is taken as a confirmation of the Hegelian narrative of progress on which Whitman relies here. The first two stages have already shown that America is bound to be exceptional, and because America is an exceptional nation, Whitman can argue with confidence that it will also successfully realize the third stage and become the superior nation of all ages. If not, there will be a breakdown in historical progress, America “will prove the most tremendous failure of time” (2). The claim of exceptionalism is derived here not from the city-upon-a-hill corpus of texts but from a Hegelian narrative of progress in which an ongoing struggle for freedom is the driving force. With his exceptionalist enthusiasm, if not self-intoxication, Whitman draws attention to a key problem in debates about American democratic culture, the wide chasm between theorized and actual democracy. Whitman realizes and acknowledges the problem in several passages of Democratic Vistas, and some commentators claim that his skepticism about American society increased during the period in which the three parts of Democratic Vistas were written. But ultimately, his optimism prevailed. It could prevail, because he solved the problem in a manner that is characteristic also of other theorists of American democratic culture: the not-so-ideal present is readily acknowledged but taken as proof that it is more necessary than ever to insist on the ideal, for if one does not uphold the ideal, one will have to give up all hope for change. This formula is tailor-made for preserving the best of both worlds: to critically acknowledge American reality and yet to keep one’s faith in an American exceptionalism that can never be refuted, because its final realization still lies in the future. In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty provides a contemporary version of this kind of argumentation in his criticism of the cultural Left which, in his view, has given up any belief in America and its democratic potential. But what if the reality of a “Billionaire Democracy” undermines this belief so strongly that it can no longer be upheld? Whitman solved the problem by dividing his narrative into two parts, quite simply the presence and the future. But what does a philosopher like Richard Rorty do 150 years later who wants to revive Whitman’s equation of America and democracy to counter the pessimism of the cultural Left? The question is a crucial one for all narratives about American democracy and American democratic culture, namely how to deal with the disappointment that rhetoric and reality are often far apart from each other, in fact, may at present be drifting apart ever further. Rorty concedes that “Dewey and Whitman had to grant the possibility that the vanguard of humanity may lose its way, and perhaps lead our species over the cliff ” (23). But they decided to keep the question open “in order to make room for pure, joyous hope” (23). And so does Rorty: “But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 451 of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one in which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual” (Rorty 101). However, wouldn’t democracy as a political system provide a sufficient normative base for criticizing democratic deficits? What about critics of democratic deficits who do not live in dream countries like America? The actual convertibility here is not between America and democracy but between democracy and American exceptionalism. For Rorty, too, the disappointment about the chasm between theorized democracy and its reality version is overcome by a belief in American excep‐ tionalism: because we know that America is exceptional, we can also be sure that it will eventually bridge the chasm. It just has to be reminded (constantly) that it is exceptional. If the Left wants to bring about change, it will have to call for it by appealing to America’s greatness. That is the only way in which true democracy and democratic culture can be achieved: “As long as we have a functioning Left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman’s and Dewey’s dreams” (107). Whitman has shown the way. The source of his great influence on narratives about American democratic culture does not lie in his analysis of American society, but in the force of his rhapsodic, “orphic” rhetoric, his evocation of universal brotherhood, his insistence on the dignity of all beings, and above all, the promise of American exceptionalism. The literary models Whitman most often refers to are epics and tales of adventure, but in retrospect one wonders whether he is not another Don Quichote chasing, not dream countries but windmills. V. Tocqueville’s and Whitman’s versions of democratic culture could not stand further apart from one another. While Tocqueville approaches democracy as an irrepressible historical fact with which one has to learn to come to terms, Whitman elevates democracy to the level of a supreme historical promise, as the crowning touch and final confirmation of American greatness, and gives it a strong normative dimension: not everything produced in a democracy qualifies as democratic culture. A democratic culture is one in which independence is extended to the inner self of the common man by providing opportunities for self-recognition of a divine inner core in the individual and the nation. In his insistence on the common man as the key persona, Whitman evokes Mark Twain who published his travel-book manifesto The Innocents Abroad (1869) around the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 452 Winfried Fluck 17 For a more extended and detailed version of the following argument see my essay “The Restructuring of History and the Intrusion of Fantasy in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” time Democratic Vistas was written and published. As in the case of Whitman, it was Twain’s starting point that the historical achievement of American society consisted in the recognition of the common man to be as good and worthy as any nobility, in fact, just as noble and dignified. Like Whitman, Twain assumed at this point of his career that this potential of the common man had not been fully realized yet, because of an unfortunate persistence in American society of an obsolete reverence for European standards of culture. As Lionel Trilling has pointed out, chapter 31 of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the key scene for understanding the conflict that characterizes all of Twain’s work. Henry Nash Smith has captured the conflict by calling his chapter on Huckleberry Finn ‘A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience.’ By dramatizing Huck’s feeling of duty to hand the runaway slave Jim over to his pursuers, Twain demonstrates to what extent Huck has internalized Southern ideology and thereby deformed his own conscience. But eventually, Huck’s sound heart proves stronger. Deep down the common man possesses an innate goodness, and the problem of American democracy is that this goodness is still deformed by remnants of European culture and its American copy, Southern culture. Hence Twain’s project: to use his irreverent humor as a weapon against authority and, as in The Innocents Abroad, especially against the custodians of European culture in order to break their hold on Americans and to liberate and strengthen the democratic potential of American society. This project reaches its politically most ambitious version in Twain’s 1889-novel A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. What Whitman still projects into the future is tested by Twain in an ingenious utopia-in-reverse by sending a representative common man of nineteenth-century America, the foreman Hank Morgan from Connecticut, to the medieval England of King Arthur’s time. A true believer in progress (and in America as the exemplary land of progress), it is Hank’s noble democratic ambition to transform medieval society into a modern society “on the American plan.” Twain’s novel thus tries to address the problem that Whitman delegates to the future, namely how to achieve the transition from a still lingering, harmful legacy of Old World culture to a democracy and a truly democratic culture. Things go according to plan at the beginning. 17 Twain’s fictional set-up pro‐ vides an ideal opportunity to expose the inferiority, injustice and backwardness of (English) feudalism (clearly a placeholder for the “Old World”) by confronting 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 453 it with the common sense and moral idealism of the Yankee. But as the novel moves along - Twain is known for his spontaneous, unsystematic forms of composition -, the Connecticut Yankee begins to discover an unexpected bonus provided by his political mission, namely that he possesses a huge advantage in knowledge over the superstitious masses of the Middle Ages. As it turns out, the Yankee is by no means immune to the temptation of using this constellation to his own advantage. This leads to an amazing shift in focus as the novel progresses. Increasingly, the democratic reformer also turns into a successful businessman: “His career,” Henry Nash Smith points out, “resembles that of many industrial giants such as Carnegie and Rockefeller who were in the public eye in the 1880’s” (Smith 1964, 151). The Yankee’s choice of words betrays the extent of his economic and social aspirations: proudly he awards himself the title of “boss” of the whole country, and by doing so, draws attention to a partial displacement of the intended object-lesson in democracy by a highly gratifying personal success story in which the liberator has turned entrepreneur and has become a successful self-made man. One striking fictional complication is that the very people whom the Yankee intends to liberate on the level of the political discourse emerge as potential competitors on the level of the success story. To liberate them would imply to gradually give up the privileged position that enables the Yankee to “take advantage of such a state of things” (37) and that repeatedly appears as a source of ill concealed satisfaction in the text: “(…) and if on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all right (…) I would boss the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years” (16). In fact, so extensively is the Yankee’s success celebrated in the novel that it seems justified to speak of yet another level of discourse that is closely connected with the success story but clearly transcends it and approaches something like a fantasy of omnipotence. In the course of the novel, the Yankee does not only witness an extraordinary material and social success. In parts of the novel, he seems to move in a daydream world of absolute superiority and power - and, again, takes great delight in doing so. Even the role of successful businessman appears at a closer look to be just one example of a varying repertoire of roles and role changes, from Cowboy to star magician. Thus, while in principle the Yankee pays careful attention to social and political improvements, the actual narrative continuity and substance of the novel stems, in surprisingly large parts, from his focus on scenarios of selfaggrandizement and uniqueness. Whereas his involvement in the political and economic possibilities of his democratic mission is resumed more or less in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 454 Winfried Fluck 18 Twain’s common men have two major weaknesses. One is their hunger for fame, that is, for superior recognition, the other, the lure of money. In addition to The Connecticut Yankee, Twain returned to the promise of a sudden rise in status and the lure of money again and again, for example, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “The Stolen White Elephant,” “The £ 1 000 000 Bank-Note,” “The $ 30 000 Bequest,” and The Mysterious Stranger. The Prince and the Pauper and Puddn’head Wilson tell stories of a sudden rise in status and fortune made possible by the prototypically “fictitious” device of changed identities. passing, the Yankee becomes eloquent in describing scenes that affirm his uniqueness and gain the admiration of the native population. Such feelings of personal triumph are magnified in the course of the novel to extreme proportions, which suggest the idea of a fantasy of omnipotence: “Here I was, a giant among pygmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles” (66). In another striking paradox, the Yankee’s fantasy of grandeur depends on the very ignorance that makes him despair in his role as a democratically-minded liberator. For the champion of progress their enlightenment should be the primary goal; for the cultural hero, however, their naive superstition remains the basis of his unique status: “When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered and fell back reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind of a superior being - and I was” (218). The Yankee’s gradual shift from democratic reformer to successful self-made man and cultural celebrity must be seen in the larger context of democratic theory. If democracy is the political system that abolishes status hierarchies and empowers the common man, then how can we be sure that the common man will use this new status “democratically” and for the common good? In Whitman, this expectation rests on the metaphysical assumption of a divine inner core of the subject, in Huck Finn we already get a watered-down version in the form of a not yet culturally deformed “sound heart.” In The Connecticut Yankee and other of Twain’s later writings even the sound heart has disappeared. There is no sound heart that would protect the Yankee from his own craving for recognition and self-aggrandizement. For Whitman, to be a common man and to be part of a crowd of equally common people is all the recognition the common man needs. An independent individual, free and autonomous, is not in need of additional recognition. In contrast, although he shares the common man-rhetoric with Whitman, Twain’s subject comes closer to Tocqueville than Whitman. It is inherently weak and insecure, and in order to overcome this insecurity, Twain’s main characters - think of Col. Sellers in The Gilded Age or Tom Sawyer - are constantly indulging in day dreams of superior recognition. 18 After Col. Sellers has finally managed to establish a close relation with the American President, his imaginary self-aggrandizement knows no boundaries: 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 455 “If he respected himself before, he almost worshipped Beriah Sellers now, as a superior being” (271). There are, then, in Twain’s literary world two types of common man: those that are empowered by democracy to recover their inner sound heart, and those who discover the usefulness of democracy to pursue their own dreams and ambitions even at the expense of others. One can identify Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer as representatives of the two types, and the difference between them lies in the importance the search for recognition has for each. Tom’s behavior is driven by his constant imagining of what it would look like in the eyes of others. On Huck’s raft there are no others; it is an important part of the book’s pastoralism that the search for recognition can be put to rest on the raft. Only at the end of the book, in its often criticized concluding section, when Tom returns to Huck’s world, the story of liberation turns into a story of manipulation. Similarly, what drives the Yankee is a thirst for recognition of his superiority by the masses. Without thematizing this aspect, Twain, by following his instincts, reveals a complication in nineteenth-century narratives about democracy and the common man that apologists of the common man ignored: abolishing social hierarchies does not necessarily mean that equality and universal brotherhood will prevail from now on. On the contrary, because the liberated common man will continue to “crave satisfaction,” recognition foremost among them, new inequalities will emerge as the result of new opportunities but also the competition for them. American democracy is by no means immune to this danger; on the contrary, it is a pioneer society in liberating individuals, including common people, to discover entirely new ways for gaining recognition in their ongoing struggles for distinction. The Yankee could not resist the temptation of taking advantage of his superior knowledge, because, unexpectedly for the democratic reformer, the Middle Ages can provide something that nineteenth-century America could not, namely a superior form of recognition: “Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn’t a baby to me in acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all” (60). Tom Sawyer, Col. Sellers and the Connecticut Yankee are “weak” subjects who crave, not primarily satisfaction of their desires, but ever new forms of recognition of which they can never get enough, so that they are willing to use deception, manipulation, even destruction. In the end, the proud, selfconfident American democrat Mark Twain had to face a sobering truth. He did no longer trust an America that wants to bring democracy to the rest of the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 456 Winfried Fluck 19 As is well known, Twain would soon become a harsh critic of American imperialism. 20 In his book Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s ‘A Connecticut Yankee’ William Spanos extends this reading to the level of a national allegory. 21 Cf. Hook: “By human freedom Dewey meant the power to realize one’s natural potential of growth in a desirable direction” (223). world. 19 While Whitman happily celebrated himself, Twain had enough good sense not to trust the Tom Sawyer in himself - and, by implication, also not the common man. 20 VI. It was this problem that pragmatism wanted to overcome by finding a source of selfhood that would be strong and resilient enough to resist domination and manipulation by others. The name that comes to mind in this context is that of John Dewey whose work has been called a “philosophy of democracy” by Hans Joas. Dewey has gained this status by taking Tocqueville’s desires and transforming them into what is desirable. As Robert Westbrook puts it: for Dewey - he could have added: in contrast to Tocqueville - democracy is “an association in which individual members seek by means of deliberation to transform their individual ‘desires’ into a collective consensus about what is desirable” (138). How can this be done? The answer can be found in a pragmatist theory of the self. There are no subjects in this theory, only organisms that are stirred into action by problems - even on this elementary level theories of mass democracy based on the idea of passive individuals are already undermined. Problem solving is the basic condition of organic life and in order to solve problems organisms have to consider the best course for action. In this process, experiences are made that give the self more control, more ability to rethink its problems and thus the potential for making changes. This process ties us to others, for in order to make sense of our experiences and make sure that we are drawing the right conclusions from them, we need to communicate with others. Human beings are therefore inherently social beings and must have a shared interest in social arrangements that further communication and social interaction. This must be the interest of every self, for only in this way can we hope to achieve growth. Growth is the key concept and the key value in this narrative. 21 Every organism must strive towards growth in order to overcome immaturity (= a lack of fulfillment of growth), and democracy is a social arrangement that is preferable to other forms, because it provides the best conditions for growth and personal development. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 457 As in the case of Tocqueville, Dewey’s theory of democracy is constituted by a prior assumption about what constitutes human beings. If I assume that human beings are driven by passions and desires that crave satisfaction, I must focus on how these desires can be controlled and channeled. This is why Tocqueville takes up so much space in describing the division of power in American democracy. On the other hand, this is an aspect of democracy in which Dewey is not interested at all; as many observers have noted, Dewey is not really discussing democracy as a political system. The charm of his theory of democracy is that there is no need for finding answers for vexing problems like the division of power or voting rights or the fairness of political representation: “Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished” (Dewey 1939, 224). The common man, driven by Twain into destructive self-contradictions as the result of a conflicted personality, has an entirely unproblematic reappearance in Dewey’s argument. His democracy is based on “faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with common sense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication” (224). If society provides free assembly and free communication, the common man will do the rest and pave the way for democratic cooperation. He will do so in his own best interest, because cooperation is the best way to become more rational, more social, and finally more moral and thus the best way to achieve growth and individual selfdevelopment. Resorting to the common man (and his common sense) as the backbone of democracy may be a familiar move. But in the case of Dewey it rests on assumptions that are different from those of Whitman and Twain - neither on a metaphysical belief in a divine inner core of the common man, nor on a sentimental pastoralism that nourishes a sound heart. Instead, the case for democracy can simply rest on the need of the organism to grow. Since every human being, like other organisms, will be - in fact, must be - interested in achieving growth, it should also be interested in establishing the best possible conditions for growth, and these are clearly provided by democracy and the possibilities it opens up for participating in communication and exchange. Democratic cooperation can help human beings to develop their capacities for growth. As Paringer puts it: Dewey saw in American democracy “the conception of a social harmony of interests in which the achievement by each individual of his own freedom should contribute to a like perfecting of the powers of all, through a fraternally organized society” (Paringer 34). Dewey uses the term 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 458 Winfried Fluck 22 For an analysis of Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience and a comparison with other, competing concepts, see my essay on “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” democracy not for describing a political system of majority rule but as an ethical ideal, or as Dewey puts it in The Public and Its Problems: “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself. (…) Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community” (148-9). In other words, democracy is only a real democracy when it has reached a state of true community. Its cooperative spirit will develop the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment, “to participate in the design and testing of social policies, and to judge the results of its actions” (Putnam, quoted in Westbrook 137). Democracy, then, means social cooperation for Dewey. Social cooperation provides the best conditions for attaining growth through constructive and creative activity. Indeed, Dewey became of interest to literary scholars because he extended the idea of creativity to include everyday life and thereby to bridge the gap between life and art, as many modernists tried to do at about the same time. 22 One would expect him, then, to be open to aesthetic innovation; after all, his work is roughly coexistent with the rise of modernism and, more specifically, abstract art. But Dewey rejected abstract art: “In the light of this contribution to the question of form and substance, it is evident that Dewey would consider the treatment of form as illustrated in the poetry of Gertrude Stein, or other ‘abstract artists,’ spurious. Broken lines and fragments of curves when used ‘abstractly’ in graphic art are inadequate media for artistic expressiveness because (…) as fragmentary sensuous data they fail to arouse normal psychological responses” (Melvin 307). Abstract art rests upon a false atomistic psychology. It is the wrong kind of art for a democracy, because it is “expressive of the social atomism and natural rights doctrines of the seventeenth-century political thought” (308). This argument is not restricted to modernism. It applies to aesthetic experi‐ ence in general. In Art as Experience Dewey provides a by now classical example to demonstrate that any object can be constituted as an aesthetic object by taking an aesthetic attitude toward it. He illustrates the point by a group of people approaching the Manhattan skyline on a ferry. Some see the skyline merely in practical terms without attributing any significance to the shape of the skyline. Others look at it in terms of real estate values, still others in terms of a tourist attraction. “Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 459 23 Hence, the confirmation of wholeness must be the goal of interpretation: “analysis is disclosure of parts as parts of a whole” (Art as Experience 314). eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view. He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying.” In contrast, the object becomes an aesthetic object when the observer sees the single aspects in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river: “He is now seeing aesthetically, as a painter might see” (140). For this observer, the single parts cohere and form an image which provides the basis for an aesthetic experience. It is, in other words, the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience that it sees single elements, not as separate entities, but as part of a whole. This successful integration of parts can become a metaphor for the successful integration of the individual into society, and, hence, for a fully achieved democracy. Dewey’s pioneer achievement consisted in shifting the discussion of aes‐ thetics from the aesthetic object to the side of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience was the supreme form of experience for him, but only in a spe‐ cific sense: not because of the intensity of experiences but because aesthetic experience could best provide an experience of wholeness and integration, that is, because it could be seen as the equivalent of a basic epistemological premise of pragmatism, already formulated in Dewey’s essay on the reflex arc concept, namely that it is the whole - the organization of all single elements by an integrating principle - that makes the parts what they are. 23 Aesthetic experience can thus become a model of successful integration. Even if this integration has a processual dimension, so that we are not talking about a static organicist model, the process remains meaningless, if it does not reach its fulfillment at one point - for which aesthetic experience as a heightened, enhanced sense of ordinary experience provides the model. For Dewey, aesthetic experience is a word for the fulfillment to which living can and should lead. The same premise that made Dewey such a strong supporter of the idea of democracy also steers his aesthetic theory - and hence his view of democratic culture - into a particular direction that subsequently undermined its influence: if aesthetic experience is a supreme form of experience, then it must also be, by definition, an experience that supports growth and provides an experience of fulfillment - in contrast, for example, to aesthetic experiences of negation or de-familiarization and other aesthetic effects. The case is interesting because it marks the limitations of Dewey’s often praised open-endedness. His emphasis on process has been praised by Rorty and others as an exemplary anti-foundationalist position. But when Dewey 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 460 Winfried Fluck rejects modernist experimental art because it takes openness into the wrong, “atomistic” direction, his view of process reveals its tacit normative bias. Dewey’s openness is that of evolution, not of pluralism. There is a normative basis to open-endedness, then. For Dewey, it remains incomplete, or, more precisely, unfulfilled, if it does not reach a state of fulfillment at one point, even if only temporarily. Aesthetic experience is such a moment of fulfillment - which would exclude a vast array of cultural and artistic forms. What makes Dewey different from Tocqueville - that democracy is elevated to the level of a normative concept - also limits the usefulness of his theory for defining American democratic art and culture as a plurality, in fact, it raises it to an abstract level that is hardly applicable. For Tocqueville unsolvable conflicts are the driving force of (and constant threat to) democracy. For Dewey, democracy is the social form that helps us to overcome conflict through cooperation. A problematic situation sets a process of problem-solving in motion that can lead to growth, just as growth will eventually lead to cooperation. Despite a rhetoric of open-endedness, this remains the underlying evolutionary, almost behaviorist assumption of Dewey’s pragmatism and his faith in intelligent democratic action. In his essay “Creative Democracy,” Dewey writes: “To take as far as possible every conflict which arises - and they are bound to arise - out of the atmosphere and medium of force of violence as a means of settlement, into that of discussion and intelligence, is to treat those who disagree - even profoundly - with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far, as friends” (226). In a 1969-essay, Dewey’s student and long-time associate Sidney Hook writes in response: “Human beings will act in any event. To get them to act with intelligence, not out of blind passion and fear, especially in moments of crisis, if they have not already been habituated to think intelligently in moments that are not critical, is a vain hope. It is unintelligent to expect people suddenly to act intelligently” (231). This is why Dewey needs an evolutionary premise: it is not unintelligent to expect people act intelligently, if it is in the interest of the organism, both social and individual. Whatever the merits of Dewey’s approach to art and culture may be for aesthetic theory, his narrative about democratic culture can be of little use for American studies. The reason lies not only in the latent organicism of his definition of aesthetic experience which, if applied to an analysis of American culture, could have the consequence of having to exclude large parts of it. Dewey’s narrative focuses on culture and art in general; he is not interested in, and has little to say about, features that others may claim to be uniquely American. One might argue that his values - growth, cooperation, openendedness - reflect special promises, or even qualities, of American democracy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 461 and can therefore be seen as specifically American values. But Dewey’s key claim that the value of art does not lie in specific qualities of an aesthetic object, as, for example, beauty, but that it is the result of taking an aesthetic attitude towards an object, was also put forward by the Czech structuralist Jan Mukarovsky at about the same time, and I haven’t heard anybody claim yet that this can tell us something significant about Czech values. In the final analysis, Dewey’s aesthetic theory and his narrative about democratic culture are trapped in circularity: if art can be a metaphor for democracy but can only be experienced as art in a moment of fulfillment of everyday experience, then democracy and aesthetic experience become synonymous and define each other. Democracy is achieved by successful integration and as such modeled after, and realized by, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience, as a model of fully integrated parts, is exemplifying democratic values and hence the supreme manifestation of democratic culture. VII. Dewey highlights a recurring dilemma of definition in narratives about dem‐ ocratic art and culture: the narrower the normative content of the term democratic culture is, the greater the tendency for exclusion. If democratic culture is understood as a form of culture that gives expression, either on the formal level or on that of content, to democratic values and ideals, then media like film or the popular arts, or influential aesthetic movements like romanticism or modernism - to name a random sample - cannot be subsumed automatically under the category, because they are often anti-democratic. On the other hand, if we want to go beyond a normative conceptualization of democratic culture, should we broaden the term to include every form of culture produced under conditions of democracy - which would also have to include cheap sensationalist mass culture and The Birth of a Nation? If one looks at the uses that have been made of the term democratic culture in American studies, the latter practice is indeed the dominant one. However, such a broadening of the term makes it almost meaningless, not only as an analytical concept, but also as a value concept, and would thus undermine its usefulness for describing a supposedly unique and distinct trait of American culture. The same can be said about approaches in which democratic culture is defined by the criterion of access. Technology has continuously opened up an ever wider access to culture and has thus contributed to an ongoing democratization in the reception of culture. But this is a general phenomenon of modernity and has also happened 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 462 Winfried Fluck 24 See his essay “The Aesthetic as a Democratizing Principle.” Most of Peper’s work is in German, but this essay provides a good summary of his argument. in non-democratic countries and societies, for example when we think of the role radio and film have played in the Third Reich. What we encounter in trying to come up with a definition of American democratic culture are three very different narratives: it can be seen as expres‐ sion of democratic ideals, as in the populism of Thirties-culture, as a principle of form, as in the case of jazz or postmodernism, or as a product of modern conditions that have led to a reduction of the cultural barriers of access, as in the case of film and other popular forms. These are the three options one finds in American literary and cultural criticism. Are there still others? In several publications the German Americanist Jürgen Peper has offered a theory in which he suggests a shift in the terms of discussion by defining the aesthetic as a “democratizing principle.” 24 In Peper’s approach it is no longer democracy that produces a certain type of culture; rather, it is a particular potential of the aesthetic that has had a democratizing effect on culture and society. Peper’s starting point is Baumgarten’s definition of the aesthetic as sensuous perception, that is, as a new branch of epistemology. As such the aesthetic opens up access to levels of consciousness and experience that an insistence on reason as the only legitimate source of knowledge has to subordinate. This does not mean that the aesthetic is the handmaiden of the irrational. As a form of cognition that is not exclusively subject to the claims of reason and open to sensation, emotion, affect, and even corporeality as sources of knowledge, it can draw on the free play of the imagination and, in doing so, has the freedom to try out untested, utopian views of reality. Its starting premise is the question “what if ”: what if we assume that an American common man from Connecticut would get the chance to transform medieval society into a democracy on the American plan? In order to emphasize this utopian testing ground potential, Peper introduces the concept of an experimental epistemology. Experimental epistemology means that in order to stage his mental experiment, Twain temporarily put the reality principle in brackets - which is a freedom not restricted to utopias, but open to aesthetic objects in general. Such bracketing is the main mode of operation of the experimental epistemology of the aesthetic and it allows us to focus on aspects that may otherwise have been subordinated or ignored altogether. In an aesthetic mode of perception, we can see an object temporarily freed from other possible functions and can temporarily ignore the question of how real it is in order to open up different, often very subjective ways in which the world can be seen and experienced. This does not mean that these texts and 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 463 25 This argument stands at the opposite end of Dewey’s. To keep single elements in their integrated form as part of a whole would stand in the way of democratization for Peper. 26 See also Grabes: “In this respect, literature is ‘only literature’, but as the ‘suspension of reference’ renders the affirmative or negating statements in literary texts merely quasistatements from the point of view of epistemology, literature is also far less bound by the cogency of religious, moral, juridical and other collective norms. And this is, of course an important precondition for the ability of literature to make us aware of the limits of the culture of its origin and indirectly of the boundaries of every culture” (22-23). objects are removed from politics. It means that their political meaning and function is realized in their own detached, bracketed fashion as an experimental epistemology. For Peper, the history of literature and other aesthetic objects is that of ever new bracketings that aim to liberate dimensions of representation and experi‐ ence that have still been suppressed by the dominant symbolic order. This story of liberation has a strong formal dimension; in the history of art, bracketing has been used to liberate and foreground formal qualities of artistic representations such as language, forms and structures, color, lines, rhythm, sound, even noise that had hitherto been perceived only as integrated, subordinated elements of representation. 25 But the story also has a social dimension, moving from Hegel’s representative hero to ever more marginalized figures and groups that had not been considered “presentable” in prior stages. Taken together, the story is one of an ongoing emancipation, although one may not always like the political uses that have been made of these new possibilities. As in the case of Tocqueville, this story is not necessarily and inherently progressive. It follows a logic of dehierarchization - and has, in this sense, a democratizing effect. Starting with the bracketing of reason in romanticism, we observe a movement downward to ever ‘lower’ levels of the symbolic order that were originally firmly controlled by a hierarchy of values that is now considered repressive. 26 What drives this process? At times, Peper suggests a homology of social and mental hierarchies. The process of dehierarchization he traces in literary and cultural history “corresponds to the emancipation of subordinate social groups and, at the same time, to the liberation of lower levels of consciousness hitherto disciplined by reason: imagination, emotions, sensuousness, and its appetites” (294). The link between the two stories of dehierarchization is provided by actors in search of emancipation who use the dehierarchizing potential of the aesthetic to subvert the authority and disciplinary power of the dominant symbolic order. Individuals or groups who, at one point, did not want to submit to a regime of reason have used the strong aesthetic effects of art to subvert its authority and subsequent hierarchies of knowledge. The institutions of culture have helped 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 464 Winfried Fluck them to assert their claims and have provided them with a certain degree of institutional authority. But can dehierarchization be automatically equated with democratization? In this case, the term democratization would simply describe any increase in individual freedom and freedom of self-expression. Moreover, from Peper’s perspective this emancipation is driven by, and limited to, the exploratory front-line of aesthetic innovation. At this point it can be helpful to broaden Peper’s approach by adding an argument Caroline Levine presents in her study Provoking Democracy. Why We Need the Arts. The book also takes its point of departure from a “surprising relationship between art and democracy” (ix). Levine would not deny that art is often elitist. Thus, it would seem to disqualify itself for narratives about democratic culture. However, as Levine puts it: “This book argues that democratic states need the challenges to mainstream tastes and values launched by artists in the tradition of the avant-garde.” Art “represents a struggle for freedom from dominant norms and values” (x) and the avant-garde “performs a necessary structural function within democratic contexts” (9). It is true “that art’s relationship to democracy is vexed and often hostile” and “that the historical avant-gardes often expressed a deep antipathy to democracy” (11). But as a social institution that is grounded in culture’s promise to explore questions of freedom from dominant norms, art can have an important function in articulating difference and dissent. This view finds a surprising confirmation in trials about modern art often initiated by populist politicians in the U.S.: “Working against the tastes and preferences of a volatile electorate, the courts have taken seriously the task of protecting unpopular expression, often overturning repressive statutes passed by legislators in favor of rebels and dissenters” (31). In their focus on the democratizing potential of art, Peper and Levine present different, but complementary points of view. Peper describes an inneraesthetic logic of development, Levine does not deal with the avant-garde in aesthetic terms but offers a sociological interpretation by describing it as a social institution. As such, the avant-gardes use art to defy the bourgeoisie in celebration and defense of their own outsider status. Peper would not contradict, but not every defiant gesture against the bourgeoisie has had the same cultural impact and has found the same cultural recognition as aesthetically valuable. An exclusively sociological understanding can therefore not be sufficient; this is why Peper focuses on historical stages of aesthetic development and the experimental logic by which it is driven. But his theory is focused too narrowly on the inner logic of aesthetic innovation. Levine is right to remind us that culture also has a social and political dimension, what is liberated in ongoing processes of dehierarchization are often voices that have been ignored up to 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 465 27 For a discussion of how these aims can also become those of the reader, see my essay “Reading for Recognition.” now, elements that did not yet fit the social and symbolic order and were not yet recognized as worthy of recognition. In more general terms, one may bring Peper and Levine together by saying that literature and other aesthetic objects can play an important part in linking processes of aesthetic and social dehierarchization. As a social group, the avantgarde’s role is to contradict what is mainstream, for Peper, it contradicts because in its search for freedom of expression it has identified certain epistemological barriers that still stand in the way of free expression. But these different approaches complement each other in significant ways, because, taken together, they can connect what often falls apart - aesthetics and politics, form and content matter. Although the dehierarchizing process, as both, Peper and Levine, point out, is not restricted to democracies, it has nevertheless gained a new force and dynamic in Western societies, including American democracy, where more and more voices are being heard, more and more claims for recognition are being made, and more and more difference is acknowledged. VIII. What is the driving force of this process of dehierarchization and its democra‐ tizing effect? Both, Peper as well as Levine, postulate a search for individual freedom. But if we want to avoid idealistic assumptions about a supposedly ingrained hunger for freedom in human beings, we have to ask by what need this search for individual freedom is generated. As I have argued in other publications, I posit a struggle for recognition as the driving force. The search for recognition is an elementary anthropological need; without recognition by others we would not know who we are. In societies of rank, the conditions for recognition are institutionalized; in democracies in which status is no longer institutionally secured, the search for recognition poses entirely new challenges. The absence of status markers increases status anxiety. In this situation, the function of culture changes. It can become a space for individual self-assertion and self-presentation. As a form that encourages individual expression, often of a transgressive nature, literature, taken here as exemplary for art and aesthetic objects in general, is a social institution with a special potential and privilege to articulate individual claims for recognition. 27 As part of the public sphere, it has increasingly played a crucial role in introducing such claims into a culture. This process is not inherently progressive; often it is unrepentantly 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 466 Winfried Fluck self-centered - not because the modern world is populated with egotists, but because it lies in the nature of a struggle for recognition to aim at a positive self-reference, first and foremost for oneself. In literature, the starting points are often descriptions and experiences of misrecognition, of a sense of inferiority, weakness, or injustice. In order to overcome this experience it is necessary to defy those barriers and tear down boundaries that stand in the way of full recognition. The search for recognition in literature and other aesthetic objects can thus present the views of an individual or group that want to call attention to their own, often highly subjective experiences of misrecognition. In contrast to philosophical or social theories, literature can articulate individual claims for recognition that need not necessarily be reconciled with other claims and need not be normatively justified. Hence, one of the major differences between literary texts and normative accounts is that literary texts can base the legitimacy of their claims on the power of aesthetic experience and its seemingly self-evident authority. This unashamed and unrepentant partisanship is actually one of the strengths of literature, because literary texts can articulate aspects of individual experience that are erased by broad social classifications, so that new dimensions of subjectivity can be revealed and normative accounts of what deserves recognition can be broadened. This process, I want to claim, is a driving force in an ongoing process of democratization and culture’s most important contribution to this process. IX. This essay began by drawing attention to the historical moment in the history of American studies in which the field had to find a convincing narrative of legitimation and believed that it basically had two options to do this: on the one hand, a narrative about America as the land of democracy and, linked with it, a uniquely democratic culture, and, on the other hand, a narrative about American culture as shaped significantly by an aesthetic modernism avant la lettre that could give unexpected depth to American culture. Contrary to what one would have expected after the end of World War II, the second narrative prevailed and dominated American studies for several decades. Now that it has lost its dominance, the question has emerged again whether and to what extent a return to the democratic culture-narrative might provide an alternative for American studies programs. In search of an answer this essay has taken several steps. The first, a survey of cultural criticism on democratic culture, has revealed a wide-ranging plurality 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 467 28 Kouwenhoven withstands the temptation to put this argument into an exceptionalist context: “If, as I think American institutions have been shaped by the democratic ideal to a greater degree than those of some other nations, that is only because they were established at a time when the democratic ideal was in the ascendancy in the Western world; in a place where there were no already-established institutions which conflicted with or were hostile to democracy; and by people who, having been chiefly ‘the poor and down-trodden of Western Europe,’ had little reason to be attached to the nondemocratic or anti-democratic institutions still dominant in many areas of European life” (226-7). of different views of democratic culture. They reflect divergent possibilities to define the key terms of the debate, democracy and equality. However, interpretations rarely acknowledge on which of these definitions they are based and prefer to hide behind the consensus term democracy instead. In response, my second step was a discussion of the most influential theories of American democratic culture in American studies and the very different narratives they have produced: Tocqueville’s narrative of leveling, Whitman’s story of transcendence grounded in his belief in American exceptionalism, Twain’s failed sentimental populism, and Dewey’s narrative of cooperation and growth. This discussion has revealed a major problem of the debate: the more normative the concept of democracy, as in the case of Whitman and Dewey, the more limited the possibilities of using it for an analysis of American culture. On the other hand, where the concept of democracy is used in a comprehensive, non-normative fashion as description of the full plurality of cultural forms produced under democratic conditions, it begins to lose any precision as a description of supposedly unique qualities of American culture. This is an important point to make, because, as pointed out at the beginning, the promise of the concept of democracy for American studies was, after all, that we understand America better. Because the most important thing to know about America appeared to be that it is a democracy, an interpretive focus on the democratic dimension of American culture would bring us closer to the real meaning of America than any high-brow narrative about the American romance. But what is it that we might understand better? Certainly not the realities of America. In his essay “The Beer Can By the Highway,” John Kouwenhoven reminds us that the concept of democracy, as it is used in writings about American democratic culture, “is an ideal, not a political system and certainly not an actual state of affairs” (226). 28 But if studies of American democratic culture are only studies of an ideal, to what extent can this provide a basis for the field? Is American studies supposed to be the study of American ideals? 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 468 Winfried Fluck 29 In retrospect, this opens up a new perspective on the American Renaissance-narrative. Whatever its shortcomings, it was directed decidedly against American self-idealiza‐ tion. In fact, this may be one of the reasons why left liberal Americanists preferred it to the democratic culture-narrative. We are getting here to a core problem of the field. In the final analysis, the problem does not lie in the shortcomings of theories of American democratic culture. It lies in the starting assumption of American studies that a principle should and can be found that defines the uniqueness of America and its culture. Or to put it differently, the main problem lies in the unacknowledged Hegelian premises on which American studies relied since its beginnings. This Hege‐ lianism assumes that studying the literature or culture of a country can provide a key to understanding its mind or its national character or its distinct patterns of thought - a history-of-ideas terminology that was at one point replaced by more up-to-date terms like national identity. This starting assumption of the field was a legacy of intellectual history that formed an important part of American studies until the mid-Seventies and was still predominantly Hegelian in its interpretive approach. Its methodologically most problematic consequence is that it pushes the interpreter to look for a unifying principle that can define this national identity and provide a key for understanding its true nature. Thus, interpretation, within this theoretical frame, must focus on the identi‐ fication of a unifying principle. Democracy could be such a unifying principle, but only as an idea, not as a description of the realities of American life. This is why democracy entered American studies as the idea of democracy. And it almost goes without saying that this idea had to be a positive value, in effect, a virtue that could be used to distinguish American culture from other nations, moving many, if not most, theories and interpretations of American democratic culture from idea to ideal. The idea of democracy became an American ideal, and the conflation of democracy and America served to nourish an American exceptionalism that was part of the founding mythology of the field. In other words: due to its intellectual history origins, American studies may have been intended to be the study of American ideas, but because American exceptionalism was added to the mix, it became the study - and propagation - of American ideals. Where narratives about American democratic culture have been moved to the center, American studies has thus become an - often rhetorically effective - form of American self-idealization. 29 A growing number of critics would add: and of American self-deceptions. Neither the idea, nor the ideal of democracy, can provide a unifying principle that helps to distinguish American society and culture. Some parts of American culture will be democratic, others won’t (think of large parts of Southern 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 469 culture). All of it will be part of a plurality opened up by democracy, but what this plurality adds up to is by no means a uniquely democratic culture. To be sure, many American writers have been inspired by the democratic ideal, but many others have drawn attention to its constant violation in American reality. What good are democratic principles, even those voiced in wonderfully poetic fashion, if they are constantly violated up to the point where they seem to function only to obscure these realities? It is almost pointless, however, to point out the often glaring gaps between democratic ideal and the realities of American society. Narratives about American democratic culture never wanted to describe these realities. They wanted to tie the idea of America to the democratic ideal in order to be able to attribute unique virtues to America. Thus, they are not always what they claim to be. Often they are narratives about America in which the word America is replaced by the positive consensus term democracy in order to quell our increasing doubts about America. The narratives about American democratic culture discussed in this essay are least convincing where they are openly or tacitly exceptionalist, as in the case of the strongly normative accounts of Whitman and, inadvertently, Dewey. In putting this exceptionalism to the test, Twain has deconstructed its foundation, the idealization of the common man and “the people.” The author that offers the most convincing and useful story, however, is Tocqueville, if we do not misunderstand his narrative of leveling as lament about a loss of aesthetic qualities, but as description of a level field, in which entirely new conditions are created for the struggle for recognition. The only way in which democracy shapes this process is that it multiplies these claims for recognition, some of which will be democratic and others will not. Peper and Levine offer helpful explanations what the function of culture can be under such conditions in which new challenges, but also possibilities are opened up for the pursuit of recognition. In their work the meaning of democratization changes, however, from the establishment and extension of constitutional rights or participatory democracy to a history of ever new claims for recognition - a perspective in which American culture, both in its themes and forms, its dramatizations, performances and aesthetic effects, can gain new interest and relevance. Significantly, these authors do not specifically aim to explain American democratic culture, however. They describe the role of culture under democratic conditions. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 470 Winfried Fluck Works Cited Brustein, Robert. “Democracy and Culture.” Democracy and the Arts. Ed. Arthur Melzer et. al., 11-25. Cantor, Paul. “Waiting for Godot and the End of History: Postmodernism as a Democratic Aesthetic.” Democracy and the Arts. Ed. Arthur Melzer et. al., 172-192. Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957. Colacurcio, Michael J. “The Symbolic and the Symptomatic: D.H. Lawrence in Recent American Criticism.” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 486-501. Croly, Herbert. The Promise of American Life. 1909; repr.: Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Cullen, Jim. The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996. Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. 1927; repr.: Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1954. ---. Art as Experience: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Vol. 10. 1934; repr.: Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1987. ---. “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us.” 1939; repr.: The Philosopher of the Common Man: Essays in Honor of John Dewey. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. 220-228. Dickstein, Morris. “Frank Capra: Politics and Film.” The Artist and Political Vision. Ed. Benjamin Barber and Michael J. Gargas McGrath. London: Transaction Books, 1982. 317-333. Ewen, Stuart, and Elizabeth Ewen. “Images of Democracy.” Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. 169-182. Feidelson, Charles. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960; rev. ed.: New York: Dell, 1967. Fluck, Winfried. “The Restructuring of History and the Intrusion of Fantasy in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Forms and Functions of History in American Literature. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Jürgen Peper, and Willi Paul Adams. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1981. 134-148. ---. Theorien amerikanischer Literatur. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1987. ---. “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 15. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Tübingen: Narr, 1999. 227-242. ---. “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies.” Romance with America: Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 15-38. ---. “Reading for Recognition.” New Literary History 44: 1 (2013): 45-67. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 471 Gleason, Philip. “World War II and the Development of American Studies.” American Quarterly 36.3 (1984): 343-358. Grabes, Herbert. “From the Postmodern to the Pre-Modern: More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory.” Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions. Ed. Regina Rudaityté. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 11-27. Hersch, Charles. Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. Hook, Sidney. “John Dewey and the Crisis of American Liberalism.” Antioch Review 29.2 (1969): 218-232. Hornung, Alfred, Reinhard Doerries, and Gerhard Hoffmann, eds. Democracy and the Arts in the United States. München: Fink, 1996. Ickstadt, Heinz. “The Novel and the People: Democratic Fiction and Howells’s Idea of the Reading Public.” 1979; repr.: Faces of Fiction, 81-95. ---. “The Writing on the Wall: American Painting and the Federal Arts Project.” The Thirties: Politics and Culture in a Time of Broken Dreams. Ed. Heinz Ickstadt, Rob Kroes, and Brian Lee. Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1987. 221-245. ---. “Versions of Public Art: National Self-Representation in the Iconographies of Nazi Germany and The New Deal.” 1992; repr.: Faces of Fiction. 261-278. ---. Faces of Fiction: Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity. Ed. Susanne Rohr and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. ---. Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle: Essays on Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Fiction. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. Jensen, Joli. “The Problem of Democratic Art.” Redeeming Modernity. London: Sage, 1990. 117-124. Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. Rev. Ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Kouwenhoven, John. The Arts in Modern American Civilization. New York: Norton, 1948. ---. The Beer Can By the Highway: Essays on What’s American About America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961. Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Seltzer, 1923; repr.: New York: Viking Press. 1964. Lemke, Sieglinde. The Vernacular Matters of American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Levin, Gail. “Edward Hopper and the Democratic Tradition.” Democracy and the Arts in the United States. Ed. Alfred Hornung et. al. 75-87. Levin, Harry. The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. New York: Knopf, 1958. Levine, Caroline. Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts. Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2007. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 472 Winfried Fluck Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth- Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Mansfield, Harvey C., and Winthrop, Delba. “Editor’s Introduction” to Alexis de Tocque‐ ville, Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xvii-lxxxix. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. ---. “American Studies: A Defense of an Unscientific Method.” New Literary History 1 (1969): 75-90. ---. “The Vernacular Tradition in American Literature.” The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 3-17. ---. “Afterword.” The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 367-386. Matthiesen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Melvin, Georgina. “The Social Philosophy Underlying Dewey’s Theory of Art.” John Dewey: Critical Assessments. Ed. J.E. Tiles. London: Routledge, 1992. 302-311. Melzer, Arthur M., Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds. Democracy and the Arts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Paringer, William A. John Dewey and the Paradox of Liberal Reform. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990. Peper, Jürgen. “The Aesthetic as a Democratizing Principle.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Vol. 10. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Herbert Grabes, and Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen: Narr, 1994. 293-323. Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995. Richards, Jeffrey. “Frank Capra: The Classic Populist.” Visions of Yesterday. London: Routledge, 1973. 234-253. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Rourke, Constance. Trumpets of Jubilee. New York: Harcourt, 1927. ---. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1931. ---. Davy Crockett. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. ---. Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition. New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1938. ---. The Roots of American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Rubin, Joan Shelley. “A Convergence of Vision: Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler, and American Art.” American Quarterly 42.2 (1990): 191-222. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 Narratives about American Democratic Culture 473 Shusterman, Richard. “Dewey on Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction.” The Philo‐ sophical Forum 26.2 (1994): 127-148. Smith, Henry Nash. “An Object-Lesson in Democracy.” Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. New York: Atheneum, 1967. 138-170. ---. Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in ‘A Connecticut Yankee.’ New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964. Spanos, William. Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’ Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2013. Spiller, Robert. “The Roots of American Culture by Constance Rourke.” Milestones in American Literary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. 66-69. Strout, Cushing. “Tocqueville and American Literary Critics.” Liberty, Equality, Democ‐ racy. Ed. Eduardo Nolla. New York: New York University Press, 1992. 143-152. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Ed. J.P. Mayer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Trachtenberg, Alan. Between Quarrel and Gratitude: Culture, Democracy, America. Berlin: Working Papers John F. Kennedy-Institut, 1992. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Stormfield Edition. Vol. 14. New York: Harper, 1929. Wertheim, Arthur F. “Constance Rourke and the Discovery of American Culture in the 1930s.” The Study of American Culture: Contemporary Conflicts. Ed. Luther S. Luedtke. Deland, FL: Everett Edwards, 1977. 49-61. Westbrook, Robert. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas. 1871; repr.: Democratic Vistas and Other Papers. London: Routledge, n.d. Yehoshua, A.B. “Modern Democracy and the Novel.” Democracy and the Arts. Ed. Arthur Melzer et. al. 42-55. Zenderland, Leila. “Constructing American Studies: Culture, Identity, and the Expansion of the Humanities.” The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II. Ed. David Hollinger. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 273-313. Ziff, Larzer. “Whitman and the Crowd.” Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 579-591. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0023 474 Winfried Fluck Searching for “American Democratic Culture” Heinz Ickstadt It is hard to imagine that Winfried Fluck will be turning eighty in a few months. He has been a good friend for more than sixty years, and it was truly a privilege and a great intellectual benefit for me to know him - as a stimulating colleague, and an asset to Berlin’s John F. Kennedy-Institute where we both studied, where he wrote his dissertation as well as his habilitation, and to where he returned after a few years of professorship in Constance. As long as I remember, he seemed a young man to me. (Yes, dear Winny, we shall miss your youthful intellectual aggressiveness! ) Like all of Winfried Fluck’s writings, his recent essay “Narratives about American Democratic Culture,” is magisterial - an admirable challenge to established notions and a clarification of the issue under consideration. It seems to say: before I start my argument, let’s first clarify what it is we are talking about. This way, an attempt at finding a precise definition for a loosely used term (such as “democratic culture”) is turned into a major exploration of the concept in question when Fluck goes through its vague, if multiple, definitions, quietly discarding one by one. Thus, he makes clear where he stands in a chaos of terminological confusion - just as, in turn, the reader may become aware of his/ her own muddle-headedness when it comes to the matter of clear definitions. One cannot but admire his procedure: In patiently going through a broad variety of apparently established meanings, he stakes out the ground of discussion while establishing his intellectual authority by calmly putting his terminological cards on the table. His critical acumen comes especially to the fore when he deals with such heavily loaded concepts as “American democratic culture,” taken as the spe‐ cific expression of common American values. Fluck is averse to such general‐ izations/ idealizations which he easily identifies as part of the rhetoric of a somewhat naïve - if pervasive - American exceptionalism. “To call a cultural object ‘democratic’ is therefore not yet sufficient,” he argues. “Instead, critics should clarify what the democratic quality is that they have in mind. However, as a rule, they don’t, perhaps because it is more convenient not to be associated with any particular version of democracy. In not clarifying which one is meant, the critic can embrace them all and remain above the fray” (in this volume 440). Fluck’s essays, therefore, function as a kind of exorcism of the rhetoric of American exceptionalism - not only in the field of American studies (and its critical representatives), but in the rhetoric of his own/ old American-studies self. Thus, his interest is not only focused on the question of what this fascination with the idea of an American “democratic culture” might entail when it is seen as the cultural expression of an “exemplary democratic nation,” but what might be implied when it is made the focus of an academic discipline. Except that, as Fluck argues, American literature was not academically accepted in the name of democratic culture but - via the impact of D.H. Lawrence’s essays on American literature - in the name of “modernist culture, that is, as an art of double-coding and subtle negation.” As an example of modern literature, American literary texts were more academically acceptable than as part of “a democratic culture defined as vernacular culture. Thus[,] American studies of the post-War period made the romance the core of an American tradition that was praised, not for its expression of the democratic principle, but for its artful, double-coded critique of American myths” (432). But in the wake of a radical critique of modernism in the 1960s and after, the focus shifted once again from American literature as a modernist literature avant-la-lettre back to an emphasis on “the creativity of American democracy and its culture, often grounded in intellectual traditions like transcendentalism and pragmatism” (434). Nevertheless, the concept is used in confusingly dif‐ ferent ways since “democracy” means different things to different people. Fluck discusses several versions of the “democratic,” from Alexis de Tocqueville to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Dewey. Of these, he feels close to Tocqueville’s skepticism and, with some reser‐ vations, also to Mark Twain whose realism has affinity to his own critical temperament. In contrast, Walt Whitman’s intoxicated praise of self and de‐ mocracy as well as John Dewey’s democratic idealism are more foreign to him. Tocqueville understood that the arrival of democracy was historically inevitable (“the gradual progress of equality is something fated…”). He accepted its leveling effect but did so without enthusiasm. But if there is an acknowledged loss of individual freedom, there is also the gain of a broader leveling field where the craving for individual recognition can be more easily fulfilled. Here Tocqueville’s and Fluck’s notion of the inevitability of the leveling process and the opportunities it offers in “this frantic struggle for recognition” seem close. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 476 Heinz Ickstadt Yet it was, of course, Whitman who gave “democracy” a transcendent meaning - as a promise of fulfilment yet to be realized: The, at present, still unfulfilled state of American democracy will eventually give way to a glorious future. In fact, the greater the misery of present conditions, the greater the need for, and glory of, the coming fulfilment. This is the structure of a peculiarly American literary genre (that Sacvan Bercovitch called the “American Jeremiad” several decades ago) and whose archetype is Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, written against the materialist spirit of the Gilded Age to restore or maintain a spiritual vision of America. “With his exceptionalist enthusiasm, if not-selfintoxication, Whitman draws attention to a key problem in debates about American democratic culture, the wide chasm between theorized and actual democracy” (451). This double vision - of a dismal present and a glorious future - constitutes the core of American exceptionalism: the conviction that the essence of America is the promise of a more perfect democracy; a project, however, that still has to be realized collectively and whose very unfinishedness reenforces the promise. “[T]he disappointment about the chasm between theorized democracy and its reality version is overcome by a belief in American exceptionalism: because [if ? once? ] we know that America is exceptional, we can also be sure that it will eventually bridge the chasm” (452). Twain puts his trust in the common man to a test in his fictions, especially in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court - a test Twain’s hero fails since he cannot resist his “craving for recognition and self-aggrandizement” (455). “While Whitman happily celebrated himself,” Fluck argues, “Twain had enough good sense not to trust the Tom Sawyer in himself - and, by implication, also not the common man” (457). Whereas Fluck has some empathy for Twain’s disappointment with the state of American democracy, his sympathy for John Dewey, the “philosopher of democracy (Hans Joas),” is limited. “The charm of [Dewey’s] theory of democracy is that there is no need for finding answers for vexing problems like the division of power or voting right or the fairness of political representation.” Rather, it “is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished” (458). For Dewey, real democracy is achieved only when it has reached a state of “true community” and “social cooperation.” Accordingly, Fluck makes short shrift with Dewey’s essay “Creative Democracy,” which he seems to take as more evidence of Dewey’s exceptionalist interpretation of democracy (ignoring the fact Dewey’s argument pushes beyond national conditions, making democracy 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 Searching for “American Democratic Culture” 477 1 In fact, Dewey’s essay is directed against the complacent belief in “democracy” as a functioning political system. Democracy has to be more than that in order to survive. It has to be a faith, a personal way of life. The essay was written in 1939, at a moment of great political crisis when democracy was in danger in Germany and elsewhere. the personal task of those who care for it because they depend on it, especially during a time, when its very existence seems to be in danger). 1 Curiously, Fluck defines the limits of Dewey’s theory of democracy via his own somewhat limited view of modernism. It is true that Dewey rejects abstract art because it is, for him, a form of specialization that contradicts his concept of democracy as a state of community (aesthetically based on the concept of mimesis). But modernism is not, in essence, equivalent to abstraction as Fluck seems to imply. There is a broad spectrum of modernist painting of which abstract art is only the most extreme form. American modernism, especially, was still committed to forms of representation - until it shed its mimetic commitment with the shift towards Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Accordingly, modernist aesthetics is only in part identical with “aesthetic experiences of negation or de-familiarization” (460). For Dewey, Fluck argues, “[i]t is the distinguishing mark of aesthetic expe‐ rience that it sees single elements, not as separate entities, but as part of a whole. This successful [aesthetic] integration of parts can become a metaphor for the successful integration of the individual into society, and, hence, for a fully achieved democracy” (460). But Dewey might also have assumed - as had William Carlos Williams and other American modernists - that modernist innovation was not confined to a historical period, but, like democracy itself, a continuous, evolutionary process. The same premise that made Dewey such a strong supporter of the idea of democracy also steers his aesthetic theory - and hence his view of democratic culture - into a particular direction that subsequently undermined its influence: if aesthetic experience is a supreme form of experience, then it must also be, by definition, an experience that supports growth and provides an experience of fulfilment - in contrast, for example, to aesthetic experiences of negation or de-familiarization and other aesthetic effects. (460) Of course, it could also mean that Dewey embraces a concept of modernism that is different from the European version that Fluck seems to have in mind. Subsequently, more important to his argument than Dewey are Jürgen Peper’s and Caroline Levine’s quite different, yet complementary, links between aesthetic experience and democratization, when they explore the democratizing potential of art. “Peper describes an inner-aesthetic logic of development, Levine 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 478 Heinz Ickstadt does not deal with the avant-garde in aesthetic terms but offers a sociological interpretation by describing it as a social institution” (465). What is the driving force behind “this process of de-hierarchization and its democratizing effect”? Not surprisingly, it is “a struggle for recognition,” as Fluck has argued previously in many of his publications. “(…) literary texts can articulate aspects of individual experience that are erased by broad social classifications, so that new dimen‐ sions of subjectivity can be revealed and normative accounts of what deserves recognition can be broadened. This process (…) is a driving force in an ongoing process of democratization and culture’s most important contribution to this process” (467). The essay thus also deals with narratives of legitimation for the field of American studies. According to Fluck, there are two of them that marked the new academic discipline: “on the one hand a narrative about America as the land of democracy, and, linked with it, a uniquely democratic culture, and, on the other hand, a narrative about American culture as shaped significantly by an aesthetic modernism avant la lettre that could give unexpected depth to American culture” (467). Fluck believes that the second narrative dominated American studies for a long time but now the field seems to return to the “democratic culture -narrative” of an earlier phase. But if, according to John Kouwenhoven, American democratic culture “is an ideal, not a political system and certainly not an actual state of affairs” (Kouwenhoven qtd. in Fluck 468), then, thus Fluck asks very much to the point, “to what extent can this provide a basis for the field? Is American studies supposed to be the studies of American ideals? ” (Fluck 468) Here, Fluck points to the problem of the “Hegelian” (but isn’t it rather: the Herderian? ) premise of the field: the search for the unifying principle in a (national) culture and of an academic field dedicated to that search. “Democracy could be such a unifying principle, but only as an idea, not as a description of the realities of American life. (…) The idea of democracy became an American ideal, and the conflation of democracy and America served to nourish an American exceptionalism that was part of the founding mythology of the field (…) American studies has become a form of American self-idealization” (469). Instead, it should have increased an awareness of how democracy has opened up possibilities for the “pursuit of recognition” - which, for Fluck, is at once the essence and the driving force of his own idea of democracy. Accordingly, he argues, one should stop talking about “American democratic culture” - a concept idealized and promoted by the academic field of American studies - but rather “describe the role of culture under democratic conditions” (470). The critic’s role should therefore be that of the hard-nosed realist aiming at disentangling 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 Searching for “American Democratic Culture” 479 the field - as well as himself - from this rhetorical network of idealization, questioning its influence wherever possible. And yet, one might hesitate to accept his definition of “democracy” as a mere matter of “democratic conditions,” i.e. as a leveling field that allows people to assert themselves in “this frantic struggle for recognition.” To my mind, the appeal of the concept of “democracy” lies precisely in the subjective dimension that Dewey emphasizes, and Fluck tries to eliminate. For him, emphasizing the subjective, would allow idealization to enter back into a debate that should stick to the objective. But even if it does enter, isn’t there value in its also being an incentive to be democratic, or to act democratically? Fluck would probably not accept this as a valid argument, since “incentive” implies an element of idealization he rejects. Yet doesn’t the realistic flatness of his own definition leave out everything that gives Dewey’s position some persuasiveness, especially at a time when the objective conditions of democracy have become endangered and in doubt? In other words, “democracy” has always been a promise of better things to come and a reality of failure; it is impossible to have one without the other. To replace the idea(l) of “democracy” with the reality of “democratic conditions” isn’t a solution either, since where will then the ideal come from when we need it? For it may well be that the idea(l) will be important as a resource to ensure the realization, or even the mere maintenance, of “democratic conditions.” (Which is, precisely, the purpose of Dewey’s “Creative Democracy.”) However, Fluck’s eagerness to undermine the ideology of “democracy” and its rhetoric might only be the other side of his fear of being affected by it. His collection of essays, Romance with America? (2009), gives evidence of how attractive the idea of “America” had been for a postwar generation of Germans that, looking for a country with a less guilt-ridden history, admired “America” only to be eventually disappointed by it. Therefore, an English colleague called the first generation of German postwar Americanists “brainwashed,” and although I found this offensive, I was aware of the element of truth that his statement contained. Fluck, also reacting to the postwar spell exerted by “America,” eventually tried to extricate himself from the rhetoric of American democratic idealism/ exceptionalism. In other words, he is one of the leading representatives of an academic field whose legitimacy he questions since he has become ever more conscious of its idealizing/ ideological function. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0024 480 Heinz Ickstadt Contributors Jonathan Arac is Andrew Mellon Professor of English, Emeritus, at the Univer‐ sity of Pittsburgh, where he founded and directed the Humanities Center. Be‐ yond teaching and writing, collaborative-work has provided the great pleasure of his career, beginning in 1979, when he joined the masthead of boundary 2, where he remains on the Editorial Collective. Other long collaborations, now concluded, include the Successful Societies program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and The Keywords Project (supported by Pitt and Jesus College, Cambridge), as well as the Cambridge History of American Literature and the Oxford History of the Novel in English. In addition to writings mentioned in his contribution, his publications include many essays and The Emergence of American Literary Narrative (2005) and Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (2011). Laura Bieger-is Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She is the author of Belonging and Narrative (transcript 2018), which considers the need to belong as a driving force of literary production and the novel as a primary place and home-making agent. In another book, Ästhetik der Immersion (transcript 2007), she examines public spaces from Washington DC to Las Vegas that turn worldimage-relations into immersive spectacles. Her current work, to be collected in the volume Reading for Democracy (Metzler 2024), explores the relational aesthetics of socially committed art in and across different media, with a special focus on engaged literature and the reading public.- Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University. He is the General Editor of the Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011), whose contributors include Winfried Fluck. Cassuto’s most recent book (coauthored with Robert Weisbuch) is The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education-(2021), a product of his turn in recent years to the study of U.S. higher education. His next book, to be published in 2024, is titled Academic Writing as if Readers Matter. Rita Felski is John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia, former Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and the former editor of New Literary History. Her latest books are Uses of Liter‐ ature (2008), The Limits of Critique (2015) and Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020). She is currently finishing a book called-Reading with-the New Frankfurt School. Winfried Fluck, Professor em., is former chair of American Culture at the Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. He studied at FU Berlin, Harvard and UC Berkeley, taught at Konstanz, Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, Princeton, UC Irvine, Richmond and Dartmouth College, and was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center/ North Carolina, the Advanced Studies Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum in Vienna, and the Freiburg-Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a founding member and former director of the Graduate School for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Co-Director of the “Futures of American Studies” Institute at Dartmouth. His book publica‐ tions include Inszenierte Wirklichkeit. Der amerikanische Realismus 1865-1900; Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans; Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies; and, as editor, Re-Framing the Transnational Turn, and American Studies Today. New Research Agendas. Among the best-known of Stephen Greenblatt’s fifteen books are Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; and Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Holberg Prize, the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship (twice), and the James Russell Lowell Prize (twice). He is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and Italy’s Academia degli Arcadi. Greenblatt lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard. Heinz Ickstadt is Professor Emeritus (since 2003) of American Literature at the Kennedy-Institute for American Studies, Freie Univertät Berlin. He was Chairman of the German Association for American Studies from 1990-1993 and of the European Association for American Studies from 1996-2000. He has written studies on modern American poetry as well as on American fiction of the 20 th Century, and his essays are collected in Faces of Fiction and Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle. Frank Kelleter is Chair of the Department of Culture and Einstein Professor of North American Cultural History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for 482 Contributors North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His research centers on the American Enlightenment, cultural theory, and American media and popular culture since the nineteenth century. His most recent publications include Culture ² : Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century (ed. with Alexander Starre, 2022), Media of Serial Narrative (2017), David Bowie (2016), and Serial Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers (2014). Susanne Rohr is Chair of North American Literature and Culture at Univer‐ sität Hamburg. 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 Smith College, Stanford University, Fudan University, Shanghai, and at the University of Wyoming. Susanne Rohr has published widely in the fields of literary and cultural theory, semiotics, American pragmatism, epistemology, and on a broad range of topics in Amer‐ ican literature. Susanne Rohr was awarded an “opus magnum” stipend by the Volkswagen Foundation to finish her book on representations of the Holocaust in a comparative perspective in the US and Germany, Von Grauen und Glamour: Repräsentationen des Holocaust in den USA und Deutschland, which was published in 2021 by Winter Verlag. Ramón Saldívar is professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012 and serves on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, 19 th , 20 th and 21 st century literary studies, the history of the novel and other narrative forms, issues concerning transnationalism, globalization and decolonization, critical race theory, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, and U.S. Latinx Studies. He is the author and editor of four books and numerous other scholarly publications. In 2006, he was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize in US Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for his book, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke 2006). Peter Schneck is Professor and Chair of American Literature and Culture at Osnabrück University, and currently the director of the Institute for English and American Studies. Publications include The U.S. and the Questions of Rights (Heidelberg 2020; co-ed.); Rhetoric and Evidence: Legal Conflict and Literary Representation in American Culture (Berlin 2011), as well as articles on property and narrative, cognition and aesthetics, as well as cultural creativity in global copyright spheres. He is the founding director of the Osnabruck Summer Contributors 483 Institute for the Cultural Study of the Law (OSI) and has been leading a research group at Osnabrück University on the formation of literary property within the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1385) “Law and Literature,” hosted by the WWU Münster and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His current research and teaching is concerned with human rights, legal subjectivity and global literatures of migration, flight and dislocation. Philipp Schweighauser is Professor of North American and General Literature at the University of Basel. He is the author of three monographs: Boasian Verse: The Poetic and Ethnographic Work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (Routledge 2023), Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (U of Virginia P 2016), and The Noises of Amer‐ ican Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (UP Florida 2006). He has co-edited-Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology, a special issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies (2018) and seven additional essay collections. He is the creator of the Massive Open Online Course “Literature in the Digital Age.” His research interests include 18 th to 21 st c. American literature and culture; literary history, literary, cultural, and media theory; literature and science; literature and anthropology; life writing; sound studies; and aesthetics. Johannes Voelz is 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). He is the founding co-director of the research focus, “Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World,” at Frankfurt’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities - the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften - and of its public outreach platform, the “John McCloy Transatlantic Forum.” Currently he is at work on a study of the aesthetics of populism. 484 Contributors ISBN 978-3-381-10871-8 Celebrating the 80 th birthday of Winfried Fluck, this volume of REAL gathers leading US-American and European literary scholars from English and American Studies to engage some of his classic essays, covering topics that range from the aesthetics of early American literature to the history of our digital present and from the Americanization of literary studies to the search for American democratic culture. Each of the volume’s twelve dialogues consists of a republished essay by Fluck and a response by one of his interlocutors, written specifically for this occasion. Contributors include field-defining scholars, long-time companions, and colleagues whose intellectual trajectory has been impacted by Fluck’s incisive metacriticism and his reception-oriented approach to literary and cultural history. The twelve dialogues reassess debates that have shaped literary studies in the late twentieth century and they inquire into the paradigmatic shifts that are currently reorganizing the field.